Thread by @FinEklavya

The Science Behind Habit Formation

How Pepsodent taught the world to brush their teeth daily and in the process, became one of the most celebrated toothpaste brands ever.

Decoded!🕵️

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Back in the early 1900s, toothpastes were not a household commodity in America. Less than 7% of Americans brushed their teeth everyday and as apparent as it is, the market size of the toothpaste industry was almost negligible.

It wasn’t that toothpaste companies weren’t trying as much but despite all their efforts, the habit of brushing just wouldn’t stick.

It wasn’t until the advent of Pepsodent that toothpastes became a norm.

Within a decade, Pepsodent became a behemoth in the US and completely transformed the toothpaste industry. Americans brushing their teeth went from 7 to a whopping 65%.

There was something that Pepsodent did that the rest missed out on, something that upended the history of brushing in Americans. It’s success wasn’t a fluke but was built out of a powerful science.

The science of habits.

While habits appear to be too oversimplified in an individual’s life, they play an instrumental role in the evolution of the entire human race.

If it wasn’t for humans’ abilities to create habits, we would have gotten long lost in the race to fit into the Charles Darwin theory.

Habits emerge because of the incredible energy saving mechanism of human brains. Once left to its own devices, the brain tries to convert every little routine into a habit so that it saves itself the effort to think and make a deliberate decision.

In their everyday routines, humans rely on several behavioral activities & to think before every trivial act will drain them out leaving no room for innovation.

Imagine how awful it would be for the brain to relearn how to brush every morning or how to drive after every holiday.

Deep inside the human brain, there exists a secret weapon - a golf-sized lump of tissue called Basal Ganglia.

It's the most ancient part of the brain, responsible for our automatic behaviors from breathing to everything that doesn’t require conscious thinking just like habits.

THE HABIT LOOP

To better understand the working pattern of habit formation, scientists conducted an experiment on rats. The idea was to study the rats’ brain activities while they were put into a T-shaped maze with a chocolate at one end.

The maze was designed in a way that the rat would be placed behind a partition that opened with a ‘click’ sound. On the click, the rat would wander around, pause to smell & then continue wandering.

After a whole lot of energy exhaustion, the rat finally reaches to the chocolate.

During this stage, it was noticed that the rat’s brain activity was extremely high- especially in the basal ganglia - as it tried to process every little information.

After going through the same process over and over, the rats got accustomed to the maze resulting in lesser mental activity and even less time to reach the chocolate with each repetition going forward.

Interestingly, irrespective of how many times the rat was placed in the maze, its brain activity unusually spiked the most in two sections- one on hearing the click sound and the other, on finding the chocolate.

This gave scientists the real key to understanding habits.

What happens is that the brain spends a lot of effort at the beginning of the habit looking for —a cue—that offers a hint as to which pattern to use.

From behind a partition, if the rat hears a click, it serves as a signal to filter out the maze habit from a myriad of other habits.

Here, ‘click' is a cue, an indication, to act in a predetermined way.

Next, the rat follows the pattern also called the routine and rushes towards the chocolate. Since it is already accustomed to the directions, the spikes in the brain are the lowest.

At the end of the activity, when the reward appears (chocolate), the brain shakes itself and awes at the brilliance of how everything unfolded as it expected.

This completes the 3-step process of habit formation: cue-routine-reward, also known as the Habit Loop.

From brushing the teeth to sleeping at a particular time in the night, all our habits run on this loop alone.

This was the habit loop Pepsodent used to its advantage and in turn, revolutionized the toothpaste industry.

In the early 1900s, Claude Hopkins, a pioneer in the field of advertising, was approached by an old friend to market Pepsodent, then a newbie in the industry.

As he was best known for his ingenuity to create new habits among consumers, he knew all he had to do was create a simple cue, state a routine and set a reward to get the habit loop spinning.

On researching, Hopkins found a perfect cue for the ads- ‘tooth film’, which is nothing but a thin layer of white grime on one’s teeth. He created the cue by asking people to ‘run their tongues across their teeth’ which would enable them to feel the film.

This simple yet a significant cue hit Hopkins to associate Pepsodent with beauty, as a sign of reward in the loop.

Within a span of 5 years, Pepsodent was minting money in the market. More than half the Americans were using Pepsodent every morning every day.

But here’s a twist, before Pepsodent entered the market, a lot of toothpastes claimed to give people the same beautiful teeth as a reward but that didn’t work for them.

So, what differentiated Pepsodent?
Craving.

A neurological craving for the reward. Studies have shown that a cue & a reward aren’t enough for a new habit to last. Only when the brain starts expecting the reward— a sense of accomplishment, will it kick start the habit loop.

The recipe for making Pepsodent revealed something fascinating: its ingredients contained citric acid and a few doses of mint oil.

This essentially made the toothpaste taste fresh and the irritants created a cool sensation on the tongue and gums of people.

Eventually the craving became so strong that not brushing their teeth for a single day made Americans miss the tingling sensations and thus, forced them to run back to the product.

It wasn’t beauty but the sensations that made people succumb into using Pepsodent.

Too often the world convinces itself that the success of a company comes from great products but it is not the product rather the ability of a company to seamlessly instill the product into our daily lives that makes it truly successful.

Habits are all around us, in whatever we do, wherever we go, habits always cling on to us like an invisible cloak.

An analogy given by the writer David Foster beautifully explains habits.

Two young fishes were swimming along when an old fish passed by and asked them, “Morning boys, how’s the water today?”. One of them looked over at the other and went “What the hell is water?”.

The water is habits, the unthinking choices and invisible decisions that surround us every day - and which just by looking at them become visible again.