How do Companies Get People Hooked to Their Products?

Customer engagement is the holy grail of marketing. Once you have spent a considerable amount acquiring customers, keeping them engaged so that they become lifelong fans is what creates value for a company. Nir Eyal’s Hook model is a powerful tool to help us achieve this goal.

What is the Hook Model?

Nir Eyal, who has taught applied consumer psychology at Stanford, has designed a four-step process based on extensive research that, when incorporated into the design of a product subtly engages and helps convert curiosity into a habit.

Step 1: Trigger

What gets the user to the product? For a new product the triggers are all external. Deliberate attempts to entice someone to click on a notification, a message, a link in an email to come to the product.

For a news junkie like me, my external triggers are usually notifications on my phones from my trusted news apps. Over a period, I have developed a liking for a few news brands and those I visit on my own a few times a day. These visits are now internally triggered, and I no longer need marketing to be bombarding me with alerts.

This would be true for different demographics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord. Driving a user to your product via external triggers to their coming on their own by an internal impulse (habit) is what the Hook model helps us seed into product design.

Step 2: Action

The point of triggers is to drive action. If the user doesn’t do anything, the trigger is useless. The crux here is the doing must be easier than thinking. If you think about it, what is a habit? Something you don’t think about, you just do it.

Here we encounter the Fogg Behavior Model. B J Fogg is a behaviour scientist at Stanford. He suggests that there are three factors that affect behaviour: Motivation, Ability and a Trigger (he calls it Prompt). His model is represented by the formula: B = MAT.

Fogg postulates that only if all the three elements, Motivation, Ability and Trigger are present in sufficient force will the user cross the ‘action line’.

Fogg uses a simple example to explain. Your phone rings and you fail to answer. Perhaps, it was buried in your bag and difficult to reach. Your ability to take the call was limited.

Imagine you had the phone in front of you and you could see an unknown number and you suspected it was a pesky tele-caller. Your motivation to take the call was low and you didn’t.

Now, imagine the call was an important one, say from a head-hunter you had been conversing with. The phone was within reach. Your motivation was high, so was your ability to take the call. But the ringer was off. No trigger. And you missed the call.

If you think about it, motivation is the toughest to influence. However, designing products to make it super easy for the user to act with well-designed triggers is far easier. Understanding consumer motivations as related to your product category is the starting point. After all, your offering has little hope if it doesn’t appeal at all to your target. But what Fogg’s model suggests is that even for certain categories which may not be critical to people, well designed products that are high on ability and thoughtful triggers can make your target act.

Step 3. Variable Rewards

There are feedback loops all around us. What sets the Hook model apart if the concept of ‘variable reward’. An example in Nir Eyal’s book explains this well:

The unsurprising response of your fridge light turning on when you open the door doesn’t drive you to keep opening it again and again. However, add some variability to the mix-suppose a different treat magically appears in your fridge every time you open it-and voila, intrigue is created.

Research shows that dopamine levels spike when the brain is expecting a reward. The levels multiply when variability is introduced. To the extent that they suppress judgement and reason. The important point to grasp here is more than the reward creating the expectation of a reward is the key challenge for the designer.

Step 4. Investment

The last phase of the Hook model is when the user does some work, invests something. This doesn’t have to be only money. It could be time, data, effort. While a lot of us are getting bored with Facebook, we haven’t left because of the social capital we have invested over the years and, yes, all those pictures! These commitments can be used to make the trigger more engaging. Apple presenting me with thoughtful collections of my photos in video format appeals to me. I change the music and share with the relevant people, and it makes me feel good. The videos pop up with no pattern (variable rewards) and makes me invest in them.

Summary

To summarise, the Hook model helps us design an experience that connects with a user’s needs or problems frequently enough to convert his usage of our products from being trigger-driven into a habit. Creating the most desirable asset that a product can own: the user’s engagement.