How to make your product a habit

This post reminds me of internet applications that have become habits: twitter, youtube, etc

But of all Google has been the best habit. :) anything I want, there's Google. From search apps to office suite to hosting, they have it all.

The toothpaste example doesn't apply to software. Because a new toothpaste may claim that it does X or Y or Z as we see in the ads. We ofcourse don't have time to test it. So most only 'believe' it. Incase of software, example: if someone claims to be better than Google, you can easily notice the difference. I once read on TC about megavideo and watched a video on Megavideo and found that its faster than youtube. That's not yet made a habit, since there's no community there like on youtube.

Toothpaste and Google still have something in common - if I find it good, I'll surely tell my friends.

Classic marketing stuff. Definitely applies to the web but i do think the rules are changing with behaviour evolving so rapidly. Back when I was a brand consultant we often encountered situations with clients trying to launch new products (or innovations, as we referred to them in marketing breeze!), with the objective of changing the category.

The general learning was that changing a category or changing consumers' behaviour in a category can be done but it's important to maintain "hooks" in the existing category norms.

Having already read the article on soap, I didn't find this follow-up worthwhile.