Free The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg Page B

smiled and left the room.

    “Did you see that?” the researcher asked excitedly.

    He put on another clip. A younger, brunette woman spread out acolorful bedspread, straightened a pillow, and then smiled at her handiwork. “There it is again!” the researcher said. The next clip showed a woman in workout clothes tidying her kitchen and wiping the counter before easing into a relaxing stretch.

    The researcher looked at his colleagues.

    “Do you see it?” he asked.

    “Each of them is doing something relaxing or happy when they finish cleaning,” he said. “We can build off that! What if Febreze was something that happened at the
end
of the cleaning routine, rather than the beginning? What if it was the fun part of making something cleaner?”

    Stimson’s team ran one more test. Previously, the product’s advertising had focused on eliminating bad smells. The company printed up new labels that showed open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the recipe, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, Febreze had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women spraying freshly made beds and spritzing just-laundered clothing. The tagline had been “Gets bad smells out of fabrics.” It was rewritten as “Cleans life’s smells.”

    Each change was designed to appeal to a specific, daily cue: Cleaning a room. Making a bed. Vacuuming a rug. In each one, Febreze was positioned as the reward: the nice smell that occurs at the end of a cleaning routine. Most important, each ad was calibrated to elicit a craving: that things will smell as nice as they look when the cleaning ritual is done. The irony is that a product manufactured to destroy odors was transformed into the opposite. Instead of eliminating scents on dirty fabrics, it became an air freshener used as the finishing touch, once things are already clean.

    When the researchers went back into consumers’ homes after the new ads aired and the redesigned bottles were given away, they found that some housewives in the test market had started expecting—craving—the Febreze scent. One woman said that when her bottle ran dry, she squirted diluted perfume on her laundry. “IfI don’t smell something nice at the end, it doesn’t really seem clean now,” she told them.

    “The park ranger with the skunk problem sent us in the wrong direction,” Stimson told me. “She made us think that Febreze would succeed by providing a solution to a problem. But who wants to admit their house stinks?

    “We were looking at it all wrong. No one craves scentlessness. On the other hand, lots of people crave a nice smell after they’ve spent thirty minutes cleaning.”

    THE FEBREZE HABIT LOOP

    The Febreze relaunch took place in the summer of 1998. Within two months, sales doubled.Within a year, customers had spent more than $230 million on the product. 2.30 Since then, Febreze has spawned dozens of spin-offs—air fresheners, candles, laundry detergents, and kitchen sprays—that, all told, now account for sales of more than $1 billion per year. Eventually, P&G began mentioning to customers that, in addition to smelling good, Febreze can also kill bad odors.

    Stimson was promoted and his team received their bonuses. The formula had worked. They had found simple and obvious cues. They had clearly defined the reward.

    But only once they created a sense of craving—the desire to make everything smell as nice as it looked—did Febreze become a hit. That craving is an essential part of the formula for creating new habits that Claude Hopkins, the Pepsodent ad man, never recognized.

V.

    In his final years of life, Hopkins took to the lecture circuit. His talks on the “Laws of Scientific Advertising” attracted thousands of people. From stages, he often compared himself to Thomas Edison and George Washington and spun out wild forecasts about the future (flying automobiles featured prominently). But he never mentioned cravings or the