Habit-forming Products

How Supreme cultivated a purchase habit

You’ll not find Supreme’s goods on Amazon or in another store.

Trigger: Like clockwork, every Thursday at 11:00 am during the spring and fall season, Supreme drops a limited collection of merchandise on its website. This fixed time and location reinforce the habit. Customers know when to expect new merchandise.

Action: Hence, they keep coming back to the Supreme website every week. It also creates excitement, rumors, and conversations within the community.

Reward: Find out what’s new.

The Times of India’s Start Your Day With brought the newspaper’s funny pages online

Print newspapers have always had the back-of-the-page infotainment section page. This page typically includes comic strips, brainteasers, crosswords, horoscope, events listing. Traditionally, it has been one of the pages which has had high engagement and time-spent with newspaper readers.

Trigger: Before cell phones went mainstream, it was common to see people interacting with this page during their time off. While Page One was the morning trigger, the funny pages with cartoons, games and comic strips was the reason you picked up the paper later in the day or carried it around with you. It was also one of the early use-cases for young readers — many began their newspaper reading with the comic pages.

Action: Read or play for entertainment.

Reward: On reading this page, the reader got clear well-established rewards:

• The editorial cartoon informed and entertained
• The crossword and brain teasers gave a sense of challenge and achievement
• The listings and horoscope had straightforward utility

Axios

Everything about Axios was habit-forming:

• How: Axios’ Smart Brevity provided a consistent style of copy that sped up reading
• What and When: Newsletter that reach you at a pre-defined time
• Who: They gave away equity to their employees whom they nurtured into celebrities. For example, Sara Fischer’s reporting on media.