How do consumers build up their habits?

Today I am going to discuss consumers’ habit, especially how consumers build up their habits. Before answering this question, I think we need to talk about why people have habits. Having a habit means people doing something repeatedly without too much thinking, this can help people save time and efforts and give themselves the results they can at least accept. Habits are usually built based on people’s experiences, so they can have good predictions about the outcomes from following their habits. People may have some bad habits, but even bad habits give people some short-term pleasure (these bad habits can be drinking, smoking and etc.).

Because they have habits to make their life easier and less risky, these habits are generally built based on positive previous experiences. Once they have some good experiences with a certain product or service, they start to stick to this particular product or service without considering other alternatives. Of course, to build up a habit requires repeated practices, each successful practice accumulates consumers’ confidence, and a habit is successfully built up when confidence is accumulated to a certain level where people believe their purchase decisions do not have much risk. Of course, there are other factors which help people build up their habits faster. For example, first impression may help people like or dislike something easier, thus building up their habits faster (continuously avoiding something can also be seen as a habit). Any factor which help people to build up knowledge about a particular thing that interests them is helpful for building up habits.

Overall, from people building up habits, we may be able to conclude that people build up habits to mitigate the complexity of facing too many options.