By now, it’s a story that’s been told plenty: Febreze, a brand that went from $0 to $230 million in two years (and hit $1 billion in annual sales in 13 years), almost got pulled from the shelves in its first year.
We’ll spare you most of the details here, as what’s relevant to this newsletter is one detail: the team at P&G, which had heavily researched how to market the product, had initially gotten its cues and rewards wrong.
If you’re interested in the story, it’s best told by Charles Duhigg in this 2012 New York Times article—or, alternatively, in his book, “The Power of Habit.”
A cue, according to Duhigg, is part of our habit formation process:
The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges.
We were reminded of this earlier in the week, when Apple announced at its developer conference that iOS15 will, essentially, obscure whether someone using Apple’s email client opened an email. This, of course, is the latest user-focused privacy move by Apple—and it set off marketers.
While there have been some reasoned responses, we think it’s worth taking a minute and drawing a lesson from those P&G marketers who almost inadvertently sunk a $1B brand before it got off the ground. Because it seems like a relevant lesson right now.
Somewhere along our shift to all things digital, we started to consider any traceable data point as data worth valuing.
The easiest way to answer that question is to assign a value to it. In this way, a metric—such as open rate—should be linked to a value much in the same way a cue is linked to a reward.
Once a metric is popularized, however, the value frequently becomes blurry. Folks no longer agree.
Open rates are a good example: Perhaps they’re a valuable proxy to deliverability. Perhaps they’re a valuable indicator of whether your customers still find you interesting. Perhaps it’s something else.
Clarifying this seems necessary. And, so, maybe the question is this: Is sending an email really a meaningful cue? And if it is, what is the routine and reward associated with it?
Duhigg, in his article, has an answer for us:
Our relationship to e-mail operates on the same principle. When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological “pleasure” (even if we don’t recognize it as such) that clicking on the e-mail and reading it provides. That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e-mail sitting there unread — even if you know, rationally, it’s most likely not important. On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you’ll find, over time, that you’re able to work productively for long stretches without checking your in-box.
Now, this reads as if the reward is clearing the notification. The routine associated with that, however, may not bring value to a brand. What if the open was only to clear the mark?
We’d benefit in these situations to catch our breath, challenge our assumptions, and then respond.