Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

5. Marketing from a Habitual Perspective

So far I’ve been picking on marketing, which is really not my intent. I believe that marketing is the soul of the company, the link between an organization and the customers it serves. Our marketing leadership produced much of the United States’ global success. The advent of marketing in the early twentieth century is inexorably tied to that era’s growth and burgeoning prosperity.

Yet when we look at the current standard of marketing productivity, the discipline clearly needs a jump-start. Chapter 1, “How Habits Undermine Marketing,” listed a few of marketing’s problems, such as high new product failure rate, vast sums of wasted advertising dollars, and an inability to hold on to customers in spite of ...