On one of the first days of the semester in our sport marketing course, I ask students to lay their key rings on the desk in front of them. Walking around the room, admiring each one, I acknowledge the reward cards amassed on each ring. What I see displayed is probably typical for college students all over the country including grocery stores, fitness facilities, and sporting good stores. Of course, now even these small, plastic cards are becoming obsolete as the smartphone is now burdened with the task of tracking our habits. But the point to be made in this presentation is to engage students in thinking about their own personal habits and how consumer behavior drives a loop that marketing professionals are seeking to close. Expanding a little further, I share the methods one chain has utilized to close the loop in my personal shopping habits: earning points for food and gift card purchases, personalized coupons in the mail and even more points for prescriptions, all of which accumulate for discounts on my gasoline needs. Add in the free grocery pickup and the fact that each of these needs can be met between my home and work, they have the majority of my business.

Although I may be aware of how my habits are being manipulated, for the sake of convenience, I become compliant and even explore how we can mirror these techniques in our sporting environments. But when one hears the realities shared in video documentaries, books, and academic research, one can’t help but become a little paranoid! So, today I am going to share some examples from Duhigg’s The Power of Habit to make you paranoid too!

Since I have heard this particular story from several resources, I will share about a current retailer and how they knew a teenager was pregnant before her father did.  Duhigg shares how a retailer used data-mining in efforts to predict what items a guest will be interested in purchasing in the future and then market specific items to them. This eerie story demonstrates how our habits become predictors of future behavior. Using a pregnancy score based on data, this retailer would mail out coupons for baby items and one of the recipients happened to be a father who was angry that the store might be encouraging his teenage daughter to get pregnant. Guess what the store already knew that dad didn’t based on the purchasing habits connected to the teenager?

Moving away from sensitive issues such as predicting pregnancy, let’s examine the food industry. Duhigg’s cue and reward framework explains that “foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.” Once these loops are created in our brains, we return in order to experience the rewards. Many other retailers utilize our habits in choosing specific locations-Walgreens on corner lots, Cinnabon distanced from food courts so “the smell of cinnamon rolls wafts down hallways and around corners uninterrupted, so that shoppers will start subconsciously craving a roll. By the time a consumer turns a corner and sees the Cinnabon store, that craving is a roaring monster inside his head.”

Duhigg sketches what he has dubbed “keystone habits which influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. Keystone habits say that success doesn’t depend on getting every single thing right, but instead relies on identifying a few key priorities and fashioning them into powerful levers. Understanding keystone habits holds the answer to that question: The habits that matter most are the ones that, when they start to shift, dislodge and remake other patterns. Keystone habits explain how Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion and why some college students outperform their peers.”

As you begin to mull over your personal habits in efforts to begin the process of examining how your good habits fit within the Five Habits of a Flourishing Life, how might you duplicate the techniques mentioned above and mine your own data about specific changes that might be beneficial to move towards a flourishing life?