Yes, you heard it right: bad habits make for good business

Bad habits are good for business but detrimental for customers. But does the latter realise when they've fallen for it and it's too late to back out?

Do bad habits make good money? Yes, if you are in marketing. There is a lot of scope for you to make money from consumers’ bad habits. These habits are easiest to form and most comfortable to resume, even if you have managed to kick them away for a while. Bad habits are beneficial in business.

And I am not even talking about the hardcore bad habits that parents warn their kids against—drinking, smoking, gambling, etc. I am referring to simple stuff such as checking an online map even when you are familiar with the route, scrolling through social media at night instead of sleeping, or simply not evaluating a product yourself and instead relying on online reviews.

In each of these instances, the ‘bad habit’ gives you an additional emotional benefit – convenience, connection or reassurance, but it also opens you up for influence by the platform or service that is inculcating that bad habit in you.

Someone got you into the habit of checking a map so that they could collect data on your movements and perhaps offer you some product or service along the way. Someone persuaded you to forego sleep and remain glued to their platform in order to serve you with brand advertisements. Someone instilled in you the habit of checking online reviews to find a role in your purchase journey.

You may argue that these are not bad habits; these are conveniences made possible through the evolution of technology. They bring in a lot of good too. However, I refer to them as bad habits because, once ingrained, they become challenging to break. Without them, the world is no longer the same. Remember the old adage—you can tame a wild horse, but you can’t make a tame horse wild!

Let me illustrate with an example. My wife has been buying fresh meat from a famous D2C brand. For a while now, they have been delivering nice, fresh cut meat to our home in 90 minutes. But recently, the brand listed itself on a popular quick commerce platform, bringing down the delivery time to 10 minutes.

Not that we need the meat to be delivered so quickly; cooking is slightly more organised to have that urgent delivery. But our behaviour has changed to always order the brand from the quick commerce platform! 90 minutes seems too long to us now. To my mind, we are slowly moving towards the bad habit of ordering just before cooking!

She recently made another insightful observation: the popular brand frequently runs out of stock on the quick commerce platform. Immediately, she faces a barrage of alternative brands offering the same cut of meat. And if we do end up substituting our favourite brand of meat on a purchase occasion, the quick commerce platform has managed to convert brand loyalty to platform loyalty by inculcating a bad habit. Not terrible for their business, right?

So, net net, if you are a business, look out for bad habits that you can inculcate in consumers; they will give you good returns in the long run. But if you are a consumer, think twice: when a product or service is encouraging you to adopt a new behaviour, is it a bad habit?

The author is the chief growth officer, Cheil X, Delhi, an advertising agency.

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