The Power of Forgetting by Mike Byster

enormous impacts on our health, productivity, financial security, and happiness.” He then cites a study from Duke University in 2006 that found that more than 40 percent of the actions we perform each day are not actual decisions—they are habits.
    I couldn’t agree more with Duhigg, but I will also add that, in my view, the actions we perform daily are also the product of “forgetfulness.” The mere act of engaging in a habit means we’re utilizing and repeating old information in our brains. None of this activity necessitates decision making. The ingrained habit takes over and our actions become based on the ability to forget more than on the ability to decide.
    In his book Duhigg shows us how to harness habits for the better—from improving our willpower to turning failing products in business to runaway successes. In one particularlyinteresting case study, Duhigg tells the story of Procter & Gamble’s crusade in the mid-1990s to make an odor-killing spray that people could use on furniture and fabrics. Prior to launching its marketing campaign, P&G assembled a team of experts, including a former Wall Street mathematician and several so-called habit specialists. Their job was to make sure the ads for the product—Febreze—worked and could generate strong sales. But after several false starts, including ads that highlighted the product’s power over smoky, stinky clothes and couches that reeked of the family dog, Febreze was on the path to becoming a total dud. It wasn’t speaking to consumers.
    Not until a panicked marketing team visited the home of a neat freak who also lived with nine cats did it dawn on them where they had gone wrong. The cat lover could not smell her home’s stench anymore, so she didn’t know she needed a product like Febreze. And this scenario played out in numerous other homes that P&G’s marketing team visited. At this point, P&G hired another gun, this time a professor from Harvard Business School who was charged with finding patterns in people’s daily habits that could inform the marketing of Febreze. After spending hours conducting interviews and reviewing footage of people cleaning their homes, the aha moment finally came when the team met a mother of four in suburban Scottsdale, Arizona, who kept a clean and tidy home and said she used Febreze as part of her normal cleaning routine even though she didn’t have to deal with smoke or pets. For her, spraying a room that she’d just finished cleaning was like “a little minicelebration.”
    No sooner had the P&G team taken note of this “little” habit than they realized that they’d discovered the biggestmissing piece to the marketing campaign. Rather than trying to instill a whole new habit in people by adding the use of Febreze to their cleaning rituals, they simply needed to piggyback on the habits that were already established. In other words, P&G needed to position its product as something that finished the cleaning process and was part of the entire routine. Soon thereafter, the company rejiggered its ad strategy and added more perfume to the product’s formula. TV ads featured women using Febreze to christen their freshly made beds, clutter-free rooms, and newly laundered clothes. The ads implied that Febreze finished the job and conferred a reward—a reminder that you’d done well and that your home was a pleasant place, not a stink joint. So rather than being sold as the ultimate antiodor spray, Febreze became an air freshener and symbol of a clean environment. It was used once things were already clean as the icing on the cake. Two months after P&G changed its marketing strategy, sales doubled. Today Febreze is one of the top-selling products in the world and has generated numerous spin-offs (and knockoffs).
    I bring Duhigg’s story of Febreze up for two good reasons: For one, it points to the power of habits in ways we often don’t think about. And if we were to break this particular case study down further,