This is how you make people addicted to your digital products…but should you?

Instructive guide on how to build the right incentives, feedback loops and variable rewards. A go-to-guide for developers, and marketeers alike.

Below picture summarizes the premise of the book quite well.

What do customers really want, which pain do you promise to solve? That’s the internal trigger the product (e.g. platform) is offering. The external trigger is a function of the benefit the product generates – e.g. doing as your peers.
The next step a customer needs to take is ‘action’ – preferably the simplest of actions, made as easy as possible. Like liking a post.
The variable reward (e.g. a mention) makes us want more of it, making the customer want to ‘invest’ more and thus creating value for both customer and product (user feedback helps to improve the flow).
By then, you’ll be hooked.

Fascinating to read how easy we are manipulated into all kinds of behavior, but it also raises some ethical and moral questions. This is a big step up from traditional marketing- to what extent do we want products to be addictive? Especially since technology makes it all the easier to get to scale.
The book, of course, doesn’t pose these questions; the author has limited himself to writing the Silicon Valley handbook to understanding how habit-forming products drive customer engagement.

Nir Eyal – Hooked, 2014