We would all love to create habit forming products. A solution that is so good, that users become addicted to it, and keep coming back for more.
At the same time we also know the dark side of habit forming products. Cigarettes, booze, drugs, eating junk food, etc, are all examples of habit formation that are good for the business’s pushing them, but not so much for the customer.
The mass of case material on solutions tend towards initiatives that straight out discourage use of these products. Like the “banner ads” on cigarette boxes warning for impotence, and hart disease. Do they work? Probably not.
But what about looking at this challenge in a different way? Rather than discouraging a habit, can we use the same principles that apply to forming habits, to actually unwind them?
I recently ran into a great example of such habit unwinding in the alcohol-awareness campaign by the French Addict Aide, called “Like my Addiction”.
Essentially it’s a mock Instagram account, dressed as the ideal life of a beautiful jet setting lady living it in each moment. Yet the Instagram feed as a whole reveals a disconcerning pattern of overt alcohol abuse. It subtly shows drinks in nearly each snap over the period of a month that the project took place. Monday mornings, Sunday nights, lunch, dinner; you name it. It makes you think about spotting alcohol abuse, the punchline being why we are all “liking” this tapestry of a life of concealed sadness (50.000 times!).
It’s impactful to see the principles of habitual behavior behind the use of Instagram employed to convey this message. A double whammy. As project director Stephane Xiberras explains:
“We rooted our craft into native Instagram content and user habits, building an acquisition strategy around four pillars: content, hashtags, bots and a KOL [key opinion leader] strategy.”
Smart!