m-cause

Habits are powerful…this weekend I was directed to an interesting article in the New York Times called Warning, Habits May be Good for You.  This article was almost a mini-case study on the power of habits to drive personal change.  In the article, Charles Duhigg details how a few years ago Val Curtis decided that she wanted to save millions of kids in the developing world from death & disease. So, Dr. Curtis contacted companies like P&G, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive etc. and asked them to teach her how to change consumer soap washing habits…eventually, the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing With Soap was born. The group’s goal was to double the hand-washing rate in Ghana, where only 4 percent of adults regularly wash up after using the toilet.

After a few years of experimentation & trial, it appears that Ghana experiment has worked quite well with a big % increase in the hand washing rate.  So, the public/private partnership was an excellent case study in changing habits for good (despite initial skepticism about the public/private partnership).

I think this case study offers a great example of how MNCs can play a big role in helping to nudge people toward better “habits” as we enter an era of scarcity and eco-consciousness.  As I discussed in earlier posts on m-cause…though we have seen a flood of new products from companies making it easier to “go green”, consumers aren’t yet fully changing their habits.  I hope that we are on the cusp of big change in this area, however, as powerful companies (who may have been slow to start) enter the “eco-fray” and bring their marketing muscle and know-how to bear

As Charles Duhigg puts in his NYT article…”saving the world may be as easy as hawking chewing gum”.   Not sure if it will be that easy, but certainly things are moving in the right direction.