Hacking Physicians’ Habits
We often implicitly think of habits as “bad habits”: destructive tendencies that make our lives worse. But most habits are beneficial, even essential. Habits are the shortcut keys in our lives, saving us from having to think through each step of a repetitive task.
So when a marketer sets out to disrupt a habit, the goal should not be to fix a problem (often the lens of someone who believes their product is intrinsically better) but rather to understand what reason a certain habit has for existing, and how to propose an alternative that not only makes sense, but is sufficiently attractive and disruptive to break the status quo.
In the healthcare world, physicians are increasingly pressed for time, with more demands on their attention every year. The only way they can manage the growing demands is by falling back on habit to manage the tasks that they think are relatively routine. When they feel that their current treatment approach is successful, they’re not very likely to actively consider the potential incremental benefits of new approaches. Should brands offering incremental benefits just give up? Of course not, but if you’re in that situation a different approach is required.
Diagnosing and altering a habit requires understanding the basics of the habit loop. Simply put, a cue initiates a habit, the routine is the group of behaviors that constitute the habit, and the reward is the payoff that results when the habit is complete. The more that the three steps are followed, the deeper the habit becomes and the harder it is to break. In the case of physicians, the typical cue is a diagnosis, the routine is the default treatment they use for that diagnosis (or, increasingly, “follow the guidelines” as a substitute for personal experience) and the reward is a healthier, satisfied patient.
A savvy marketer sees opportunity to disrupt the habit at each of these three steps. The easiest, perhaps, is to create a new cue. In oncology, the increasing proliferation of biomarkers has broken up the monolithic view that all tumors of a given type can be treated similarly. You no longer diagnose breast cancer, you diagnose HER2+, HR+, or triple-negative breast cancer, and even those categories are being further subdivided. Brands no longer have to directly challenge the incumbent if they can convince their audience that the incumbent is irrelevant given the new cue.
The reward stage, too, is ripe for disruption. Often physicians believe their patients are satisfied with treatment merely because they don’t hear complaints, or the burdens of therapy are not readily apparent to them. Demonstrating that these issues exist, and offering a cleaner reward without the drawbacks, can inspire behavior change.
The routine is the hardest for a marketer to change directly, which is why many make a mistake by focusing on it. For example, I’ve worked on several brands where the marketing team saw that there were risk factors that many physicians ignored. “If only we could get physicians to test their patients for these warning signs!” They would say, and would put significant resources into awareness campaigns that didn’t significantly change physician behavior. That’s because these patients did not have any obvious issues, and asking physicians to disrupt a generally successful routine because there might be a problem lurking beneath the surface cuts against human nature. In this situation, it is better to try to create a new cue: for example, if a complaint of fatigue is a potential sign that a treatment’s effectiveness is waning, define this vague symptom as a sign of “breakthrough disease” and use that as a cue for a new routine, a problem your drug can solve.
In short, the key to leveraging habits is to think of them not as a failure of the physician, but as a natural cognitive shortcut that talented and successful people use to maximize their ability to perform. When those habits are no longer optimal, it is possible to guide your target audience towards new ones, habits that include your brand. Don’t fight human nature; make it work in your favor.