Force of habit: why past experience decides the purchase for your customer

A person reaches for the same brand of coffee they bought five years ago. They did not compare ingredients, did not read reviews, did not look at the price of the jar next to it. The hand moved on its own. Behind that movement sits what I call the mass of probability: the invisible weight of every previous purchase, quietly voting for the familiar and against the new. The more repetitions have piled up, the heavier that weight, and the harder it is to shift.

This is not weak will and it is not laziness. It is how choice works in any normal person, and it decides your fate on the market more than the quality of what you sell. For a foreign company entering Russia the point is sharper still: your customer already has a supplier, that supplier is local, and the weight of years is on their side of the scale.

Why the brain prefers a trodden path

Picture a path through a forest. The first time you cross untouched grass every step takes effort. By the hundredth time it is a packed trail. By the thousandth it is a wide path your feet follow on their own while your head thinks about something else.

Choice behaves the same way. Every repeated action makes the next identical action slightly easier. The brain once concluded that this coffee, this bank, this supplier will do, and since then it pulls the ready answer from memory instead of computing a new one. The trouble starts when you are the new player and you want the person to step off their packed trail onto your fresh grass.

The rock and the feather: two states of a customer

The customer who has bought five hundred times from one shop is like a rock. Their threshold for anything new is enormous: for them to even notice your offer, the signal has to be very strong. A five percent discount does not reach them.

The customer who has just moved into a new district and does not yet know where to buy groceries is like a feather. Low threshold, high sensitivity, every signal weighs a lot. They carry no accumulated mass, so they are easy to steer.

The conclusion for a marketer is simple. The cheapest person to win is the one who has no habit yet. Moving house, a new job, the birth of a child, a divorce, the launch of a business: at these moments the old paths collapse and the person searches afresh for where to buy. Whoever appears in front of them first without disappointing them gets a rock for years. Sensible targeting therefore aims at people at a point of habit change right now rather than at people who merely resemble a customer in general.

In Russia this has a practical shape. A newly registered company, a relocation between regions, a first mortgage, a child starting school: each of these moments resets a whole set of supplier choices at once. Yandex Direct and VK Ads both offer audience segments built on interests and behaviour, and Yandex Metrica lets you build your own segments from what visitors actually did on your site. It does not replace knowing which life events break habits in your category.

Loyalty is not love, it is mass

Marketers like the word loyalty and often confuse it with emotion, as if the customer were in love with the brand. Far more often, under the word loyalty hides the plain physics of accumulated experience.

A person uses the same bank year after year not because they adore it. Their salary lands there, every payment is linked to it, they know every button in the app, and the thought of moving brings weariness. A hundred interactions turned a thin trail into a highway, and pushing the person off it now takes a serious blow rather than a nudge.

That is why the market is repeatedly won by the familiar product rather than the best one. This is not stupidity on the customer’s part. It is mass. The newcomer compares itself with the competitor on facts and loses, because it forgot about the invisible weight already sitting on the other side of the scale.

For a foreign company this is where Russia differs most from Google’s home markets. In the West the habit you fight is usually one supplier in one category. In Russia daily life runs through a handful of large ecosystems: the same login covers banking, taxi, food delivery, a marketplace, a music subscription and a bonus programme that rewards staying inside. The habit you are up against is reinforced from several directions every day.

Mass works for you too, once the customer is yours: every kept promise adds weight to your side and makes leaving more expensive for the customer themselves. But it accumulates slowly, one repetition at a time, and cannot be bought with a single burst of advertising.

How to move someone else’s habit

If a person is already a rock on the competitor’s side, you have exactly two honest ways to move them.

The first is sharp contrast. Give a signal so strong that it breaks through the high threshold of the familiar. This is what happens when the old supplier fails badly one day: misses a deadline, is rude, doubles the price. The rock cracks and the person is ready, for the first time in years, to look around. You cannot schedule such a moment, but you can be nearby when it happens. This is the point of keeping warm contact with a competitor’s customers you have not yet won: to be first on the list when their habit cracks on its own.

The second way is softer and more reliable. Do not try to switch the person in one move. Lay a new path next to the old one. Let them try you in something small, where the risk to them is minimal. One order, one service, one modest step. After that you do not push. You let them repeat that step until your own trail grows alongside their old highway, and at some point the person catches themselves walking to you out of habit.

This is why samples, free first months and small cheap entry products work the way they do. Their job is to start the accumulation of mass on your side, not to earn immediately. One step decides nothing, but it is the first in a chain from which, a year later, grows a loyalty that a competitor can no longer break with a five percent discount.

Take food delivery. Someone has ordered through one app for years. Shouting “ours is better” at them is useless. Instead the newcomer offers the first order almost free, the second with a small bonus, and then simply delivers hot food on time. After a dozen orders the person opens the new app out of habit, and the old one sits unused for weeks. The same works in services for business: a contractor rarely wins a client with a loud offer, and usually wins with a first small project delivered without a single slip.

What local practice demands of the first step

For a company selling into Russia from another country, the first small step has an extra requirement: it has to be easy in local terms, not in yours. A first step that asks a Russian customer to pay with a card the local banks do not issue, to write to support in English, or to wait for delivery from abroad is not small. It is a full relocation to a foreign highway, and the habit mass on the other side wins without a fight.

What counts as easy here is well known. Payment through the local card system and the instant bank transfer system. Support that answers in Russian in Telegram, because that is where the conversation happens. A presence on the marketplaces where the person already shops, so that trying you does not require leaving the ecosystem they live in. Delivery through the pickup points they already use. A Russian-language site with an English checkout flow is the most common way I see foreign companies make the first step heavy while believing they have made it light.

What this means for your brand

First, count who is cheapest to win. People with no habit in your category cost you less and bring more, because they do not need to be prised off someone else’s highway. Find the moments when old paths collapse and get there first, instead of hammering for years at a rock that chose a competitor long ago.

Then look after those who have already grown used to you. Every kept promise adds mass on your side, every failure burns it. Retention here is not a points scheme. It is never once giving a reason to doubt.

Look at your advertising through this lens. A huge share of budgets burns on attempts to persuade a rock that chose someone else years ago. Money leaves, impressions run, and the person does not hear, because their threshold for the new is too high. Turn the same budget toward people at a point of habit change and toward people who have already tried you once, and the return changes visibly. In practice this means retargeting segments built on your own Metrica data for those who took the first step, and interest and event segments for those whose old path is breaking. That is how I structure Yandex Ads for clients whose customers already have a local supplier.

And stop believing that being better is enough. It is necessary, and it is still not enough while the weight of someone else’s past experience sits on the other side of the scale. Your advertising has to lower the price of the first step as well as prove superiority. A strong brand is born where recognition meets easy entry: not the one that shouts loudest, but the one people have built their own habit mass toward. That is the part of brand strategy that has nothing to do with a logo.

Test this on yourself. Think of the brand you have stayed with longest and ask what would have to happen for you to leave. Most likely it stopped being about price or specifications long ago. If you want to know what mass is holding your own customers in place and where it has cracks, that is where an honest review of your marketing should begin.

The best product sits on the shelf next door. The hand reaches for the familiar one.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Сила привычки: почему прошлый опыт решает за нас