Interesting Snippets from 2012-04-12

• Social habits and marketing: Getting to know you | The Economist

  Hopkins’s greatest achievement was to persuade ordinary people to start cleaning their teeth. He landed the job of selling a new brand of toothpaste called Pepsodent. Hopkins realised that the biggest barrier to selling it was that only a few people bothered to clean their teeth. So he set about changing the habits of a nation—giving people a trigger to justify daily brushing (a “cloudy film” forms on your teeth if you don’t) and promising a reward if you stick to your new habit (a beautiful smile). Before Pepsodent’s launch, only 7% of Americans owned a tube of toothpaste; a decade later, 65% did.

  Hopkins is one of dozens of flamboyant characters who parade through the pages of Charles Duhigg’s “The Power of Habit”. Mr Duhigg, a New York Times reporter and broadcaster, takes as his starting point William James’s observation, in 1892, that “all our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.” We like to think of our daily choices as the result of reason and will. But for the most part they are the products of unconscious habits: habits that at best make our lives more efficient (imagine if you really did have to agonise about everything) and at worse trap us in self-destructive behaviour.

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