America loves its addictions, from binge-watching Netflix to spending hours on Pinterest creating dream weddings. According to video game and advertising expert Nir Eyal, this doesn't happen by accident. Rather, brands learned how to effectively leverage what Eyal calls, "behavioral design."
According to his blog, this concept is a combination of user experience, behavioral economics, and neuroscience. Eyal elaborates on this topic further in his book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. His unique strategy for making a product that consumers need rather than just want turned Hooked into one of the best marketing books available.
Learn more about how Eyal's ideas became one of the most-read online marketing books. Keep reading for:
- A summary and book review of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- Key takeaways from the best-seller
Summary and Book Review of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
- Trigger: Many books on marketing talk about roping consumers in, but no one articulates the process quite like Eyal. He explains the important transition from external to internal trigger. Forbes likens the process to hearing a song on the radio (external trigger) and then involuntarily singing along (internal trigger).
- Action: In its own book review, Marketing Journal explained that the hook model calls for brands to encourage users to perform an action by increasing motivation and making that action easy to complete.
- Variable reward: It is not enough to simply reward users for taking the desired action. In order to keep users engaged, these rewards have to be varied.
- Investment: If you truly need something, you invest in it, and a habit-forming product requires users to do just that. This could occur in the form of posting pictures, as with Instagram, or building social connections, as with LinkedIn.
Key Takeaways from One of the Best Marketing Books
So, book review time. To sum up: Eyal's Hooked is perhaps one of the top marketing books to date. With new technologies and innovations being born every day, businesses have no choice but to market their products in a way that makes them "sticky." Otherwise their products get drowned in a sea of competitors.
As Forbes explains, other marketing strategy books and psychology experts like BJ Fogg, Charles Duhigg, and Dan Ariely have built a solid foundation that Eyal builds on. The difference is that Eyal places more focus on the actions that drive a customer's motivation, rather than the ones that don't. His guidance on how to build habit-forming products provides a one-way ticket to marketing success, making this an essential addition to your library of digital marketing books.
Here's a great example from an article by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Eyal walks readers through all aspects of the hook model using YouVersion CEO Bobby Gruenewald's experience with his Bible verse app. Their secret to getting users hooked? Reading plans that parsed Biblical passages into digestible chunks, and used app notifications as triggers. These real-life examples help readers apply Eyal's concepts with greater success.
Get Your Team Up to Speed with Hooked Marketing
To truly integrate Eyal's ideas into your own marketing, you need tools that let you share ideas and collaborate. You'll also need to increase visibility into everyday happenings and successfully launch new marketing campaigns. When it's time to apply the knowledge you've gleaned from your books on marketing, use Wrike for Marketers to help you.
Sources: Amazon.com, Nirandfar.com, Forbes.com, Marketingjournal.org, GSB.Stanford.edu
