How to make your product a habit

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