Warning: Habits May Be Good for You

This article describes the work of Dr. Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap in order to prevent diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands - like diarrhoea. Dr. Curtis worked with three top consumer goods companies to find out how to sell hand-washing through consumer marketing.

The three private corporations had worked on creating automatic behaviours - habits - among consumers by finding the subtle cues in consumers' lives that the corporations could use to introduce new routines. According to the article, through experiments and observation, social scientists have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviours to habitual cues through advertising. To teach hand washing, about seven years ago Dr. Curtis persuaded Procter and Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Unilever to join an initiative called the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap. The group's goal was bring the benefits of hand-washing to the developing world. The first target was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, a West African nation where, according to research, almost every home contains a bar of soap.

In order to move the hand washing campaign forward, the companies applied research exploring how habits are formed. "Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods," found Dr. Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. These findings, as stated here, implied that marketers had to look for more regular or "habitual" cues on which they could capitalise.

In the case of Ghana, "[a]lmost half of its people were accustomed to washing their hands with water after using the restroom or before eating. And local markets were filled with cheap, colorful soap bars. But only about 4 percent of Ghanaians used soap as part of their post-restroom hand-washing regime, studies showed...However, the studies also revealed an interesting paradox: Ghanaians used soap when they felt that their hands were dirty - after cooking with grease, for example, or after traveling into the city. This hand-washing habit, studies showed, was prompted by feelings of disgust. And surveys also showed that parents felt deep concerns about exposing their children to anything disgusting."

The solution, as stated here, was to create a habit wherein people felt a sense of disgust that was cued by the toilet and, thus, turned habitually to hand washing. It was necessary to create advertising in which the "toilet cues worries of contamination, and that disgust, in turn, cues" a use of soap. Post-marketing research showed the following results: "Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis's team reported a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet. Another measure showed even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent..." leading to the conclusion that advertising helped to develop new habits.