This year’s Habit Summit, organized by Nir Eyal (author of the best-selling Hooked), proved to be one of the more interesting conferences I’ve attended or spoken at. The focus was on building habit-forming products, and the speakers were carefully selected to provide a unique perspective on that process.
The venue was the Stanford University Faculty Club in Palo Alto, and the audience was a mix of startups and big brands, all focused on how to make their products become an integral part of their customers’ lives.
The single-topic focus of the Habit Summit made for an interesting challenge in preparing my presentation. A focus on persuasion psychology would have overlapped too much with other speakers, so instead I began with a brief explanation of the importance of focusing on non-conscious motivation and behavior, a 30-second description of my Persuasion Slide™ model, followed by a high speed look at current and near-future neuromarketing technologies.
I was able to report on the new ARF/Temple comparison of neuromarketing techniques and describe both the findings and limitations of that study. Here’s my deck:
As usual, my slides don’t have a lot of text and won’t be totally understandable without the actual speech. Feel free to contact me if there’s something that interests you that doesn’t make complete sense.
Is Meerkat Habit-Forming?
The runaway hit of SXSW a week earlier was Meerkat, a live-streaming video app that uses Twitter to notify followers when you are broadcasting. Many of the sessions at the Habit Summit were streamed using Meerkat. Here, Nir Eyal is sharing the knowledge of Instagram’s Bo Ren.
Surprise Takeaway
There was an amazing amount of knowledge crammed into one day of sessions at the Habit Summit. One surprise takeaway, though, came from the reception at the Yelp offices the night before. The buffet featured disposable plates (eco-friendly, I assume) with a hole for inserting your drink cup. This clever design was sturdy and minimized the problem of juggling a plate of food and a tipsy beverage glass. I kept hearing, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
I’m not sure of the exact model or brand, but the plates looked a lot like this. I didn’t see a single keg cup of Big Daddy IPA hit the floor, so apparently they work.
