(p41) User habits are a kind of corporate competitiveness
User habits can be called a kind of corporate competitiveness. (...)
Above all, you have to break the long-standing habits consumers have practiced, and all the more so if most users have continuously been using a competitor's product.
And through this book I learned about Professor John Gourville of Harvard Business School, who teaches marketing, and looked into related materials. Among them, the most famous sentence was the one below, which the book also introduces.
"Many innovative products fail in the market because
consumers irrationally overvalue existing products,
and companies irrationally overvalue their new products."
And there is a post that introduces his theory in detail — that for new entrants to seize a chance at success, they must show not a merely better product, but one about 9x more outstanding. That theory is The 9X Effect.
https://www.intercom.com/blog/overcoming-customer-inertia/
Overcoming customer inertia
Customers do not hate progress, they just prefer inertia. This stops them from buying your product even when it is the logical choice.
www.intercom.com
Additionally, I also share his 2006 Harvard Business Review post, which introduces an understanding of the psychology of new-product adoption, and specifically presents a behavioral framework for overcoming it.
https://hbr.org/2006/06/eager-sellers-and-stony-buyers-understanding-the-psychology-of-new-product-adoption
Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption
Companies that introduce new innovations are the most likely to flourish, so they spend billions making better products. But studies show that new innovations fail at a staggering rate.
hbr.org
(p49)
Two factors that create user habits
When a company judges the potential of its product to form user habits, it can use two factors. One is frequency (how often that behavior occurs), the other is perceived utility (the degree to which users perceive its utility over other companies' products).
Behaviors that occur with sufficient frequency and whose utility is perceived enter the "zone of habit" and become default actions. If either factor is lacking and the behavior stays below the threshold, no matter how desired, the behavior is unlikely to become a habit.
(52)
Products that correspond to painkillers reduce specific pain, address clearly surfaced needs, and are characterized by having a quantifiable market. Think of Tylenol. Tylenol is a perfect solution focused on a problem people are willing to pay for.
Conversely, products that correspond to vitamins do not necessarily solve a clearly surfaced problem. So they often appeal to users' psychological aspects more than functional ones. We take a multivitamin every morning, but we cannot be sure it actually makes us healthier. Some studies have even shown that taking multivitamins may do more harm than good.
"If you feel a little pain when you do not perform some behavior, that behavior can be considered a habit."
