How To Transform The Fitness Of Your Fashion Brand?
Like human fitness, the fitness of your fashion brand depends on building a healthy habit.
As leaders, one of the biggest challenges you would be facing is effecting change. It is not having great ideas that matter but adopting them. It is not about having new tools, software, but adopting them. Adoption is the key to transformation.
In this edit, we bring our experience of creating adoption and science-backed insights on how to change anything. We start with research-backed insights from Katy Milkman, professor at the Wharton School. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good initiative.
Obstacles And Drivers Of Change
Google provides a lot of facilities on their campus and learning opportunities. What they realized many were not using the facilities for learning. It included free skill-building classes, personal trainers, etc. They asked the question of what prevents people to adopt good habits.
Many public health campaigns to influence our eating (eg. by providing calorie facts on the packaging), smoking or vaccination habits have not worked. These kinds of initiatives catch us in the middle of our busy lives. We are entrenched with routines limiting our openness to change.
What is causing this?
The Power Of A Clean Slate
For decades, the medical establishment was at a loss about what to do about SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Each year tens of thousands of babies died suddenly while sleeping. For years, SIDS was one of the leading causes of infant mortality in the United States. In the early 1990s, researchers made a major breakthrough. They discovered that infants put to sleep on their backs died of SIDs at half the rate of babies put to sleep on their stomachs. The U.S government launched a “Back To Sleep” campaign to educate new parents about the importance of placing babies to sleep on their backs. This campaign was very successful in creating awareness and mortality rates.
Why did this campaign work while many others like diet, smoking, etc did not?
The big difference is “The Fresh Start Effect”. As a new parent, you do not have any new old habits to break. Of course, you want your baby to be safe.
This is also a reflection of many hit gyms during the fresh start of the year.
True blank slates are rare. It is not that change is not feasible otherwise, it is hard.
Make Use Of Impulsivity or Present Bias
Here is another interesting way of creating adoption. This experiment is in Stockholm’s Odenplan metro station. A team of technicians funded by Volkswagen did the experiment to make people try stairs instead of escalators. Watch this fun experiment!
The result. 66% more adoption of stairs over the escalator.
Build In Anti-Forgetfulness Triggers
Being forgetful is human. Research has shown that the average human forgets 3-4 things a day. A good system to counter the effect of forgetfulness is reminders. It is not reminders alone but their timing. In research of creating awareness of wearing safety belts to drivers, researchers observed giving the instruction to wear a belt just when they get into the car is a 25% improvement in adoption over instruction delivered a few minutes before driving. We forget in minutes and timing is supercritical.
Build In Pro-Laziness Ways
Laziness is natural. We resort to default in many areas. Look at how we shop, the first few pages of listing on a website get most of the clicks. We prefer the nearest, easiest, fastest in most of our adoption.
How can we make use of the natural tendencies in creating the adoption of healthy habits?
Set your default as a healthy habit. For eg organ donation option in many countries is by default “yes”. If one wishes to change, they need to make a deliberate effort to toggle to “No”. This small change alone has exponentially changed organ donors.
These are some of the habit-changing methods which are scientifically proven to work. Hope you find them useful in your transformation initiatives.
In Conclusion,
As you venture into your transformation of the fitness of your fashion brand, you will be enabling change or being a part of it. It is not the idea that matters but adoption. We at Stylumia are conscious of this and implement using the scientific approaches to change. We do not sell software, or a method, or a system. We partner with our clients in making adoption happen. Adoption leads to the change for good and business results.
While adoption is good for good habits, you need to do the reverse for no-so-good habits. Just because we are comfortable with an old way of doing things, the old software many are using does not make them good habits like the food we eat. We need to adopt the right, healthy business habits.
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.
John Maynard Keynes
