Have you noticed that when you have heard a song many times, the next time you listen to it, takes fewer opening notes to recognise it?  Why does this happen?  According to Neuroscience, recurring stimuli need less attention to be noticed and are faster and more accurately read or named, as the brain requires less information and uses less energy to identify them.

Since we use the same brain to listen to songs and to buy stuff, this also applies when we are shopping.  Every time that we choose a product or service it gains advantage over those that we didn’t select and with every repeated purchase, this advantage widens even more to such an extent that eventually can become a habit.

Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman in his best-selling book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” named the subconscious habit-driven decision making as “thinking fast” and the conscious decision making as “thinking slow”.  He also claims that the brain is lazy and is more comfortable with not spending its’ power, rather than being an analytic machine. 

Having the above in mind, it becomes evident that for all the companies out there, performance may be sustained by offering products/services that are easy to access and that strengthen buying habits rather than the opposite.  That is why tactics such as free product samples to gain trial is becoming more and more popular, as the goal is to make customers repeated buyers and to help them avoid making another choice.  Likewise, the majority of the big-scale internet success stories make their services free, so as to attract more users that will eventually grow and intensify their habits with them. 

On the other hand, businesses mainly through their marketing teams spend enormous amount of time and money to create novelty through new logos, packaging etc, as they aim to freshen up their brand and products.  Many times, these kinds of changes are necessary or inevitable, but it is also probable that they can cause confusion to the customers, therefore putting in danger the “habitual relationship” that it was built with them throughout the years.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that nowadays when rebranding, marketers tend to use the word “improved” instead of “new”, as it sounds more comfortable and less “frightening” to customers’ brains that love automaticity and hate to constantly make new choices.