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To appreciate why understanding customer habits is essential for pharmaceutical marketers launching a new treatment or striving to optimize the performance of an in-line brand, consider the daily reality of today's healthcare provider (HCP).
In a typical day, HCPs manage dozens of patient visits, with appointments lasting just 10–15 minutes—barely enough time to address immediate health concerns, let alone delve into new treatment options. The pace is relentless and often frustrating: diabetes management, hypertension checkups, a quick discussion of a new diagnosis, a patient scolded for not taking his medication. And so on. Between appointments, HCPs contend with non-stop administrative demands, from electronic health records to insurance disputes, and/or telemedicine consultations to fill the gaps. It's no wonder that physician burnout is spiraling.
In this time-pressured environment, HCP decisions often naturally default to familiar and efficient patterns and cognitive shortcuts. Like any human being navigating complexity in a time-constrained context, HCPs rely on ingrained habits—automatic routines—to maintain momentum. This was one of the points in Jerome Groopman's 2007 book, How Doctors Think: doctors' clinical judgment around diagnosis and forming treatment plans can be impacted by their cognitive biases as well as the context of time limitation, emotions and even institutional pressures.
For pharmaceutical marketers, deeply understanding HCP habits and the systems and structures that reinforce them is crucial when developing marketing strategy for new or in-line brands. Without this insight, even groundbreaking new treatments supported by compelling evidence may fail to gain traction.
At its essence, a habit is an automatic behavior within a stable context, triggered by a specific cue, and reinforced over time through repetition and reward. Habits are the brain’s way of conserving energy, enabling any human to operate efficiently without deliberate thought when performing oft-repeated tasks. For HCPs, habits are a necessity to managing the complexity and time constraints of their daily workflow. However, these same habits can counteract HCPs' willingness and initiative in adopting new treatments, even when the science and evidence would indicate that new option is somehow superior.
In the fast-paced environment of a medical practice, habits manifest as deeply ingrained patterns that streamline decision-making. For example, an HCP in the midst of a busy day is more likely to reach for a trusted, well-known medication rather than pausing to consider a newer alternative. This behavior isn’t laziness or resistance; it’s a logical response to the constraints of time, cognitive load, and the need to minimize disruptions. It might also be risk avoidance. Prescribing patterns often become routinized as HCPs rely on what has worked well in the past or what aligns with established treatment protocols - or what allows them to dodge a battle with an insurance company. Even subtle elements, such as the placement of medications on an EHR drop-down menu or the default settings in clinical management software, can reinforce these habits.
What makes these habits particularly challenging to change is the fact that they are reinforced on multiple levels. As a habitual behavior often is performed in an unconscious, unthinking manner, HCPs can be unaware that they are operating on autopilot. For instance, a doctor may favor a specific medication because of familiarity from years of prescribing it, due to having been taught to use it by a respected mentor, or even as a result of its fitting seamlessly into the customary routines and flow of the medical practice. They may say they are open to an advantageous new medication in the setting of a marketing research interview, but often do not consider all of the impediments, among them their own natural behavioral inertia, that hamper them from adopting that new treatment.
Understanding these deeply ingrained patterns of behavior - at both the individual and the practice level - is essential for today's pharmaceutical marketers. By analyzing the context, cues and reinforcements that govern actual HCP actions in the real world—whether it’s the convenience of a dosing schedule, a trusted colleague’s recommendation, avoidance of upsetting a practice colleague, or even the influence of formulary placement—marketers can develop strategies that address and leverage these underlying dynamics when introducing new treatment options.
Indeed, we would challenge any marketer developing their GTM strategy: how is your product going to disrupt existing habits, and how will it become a customer habit?
Recognizing and addressing the habitual nature of HCPs' behavior starts with a thoughtful, insights-driven approach that should include specialized qualitative and quantitative marketing research methods. Importantly, habits are often invisible to those performing them. In the setting of a marketing research interview, HCPs may characterize their prescribing patterns or clinical workflows as individual, deliberate choices rather than automatic routines. When has a doctor in a research interview bluntly admitted, "yeah, that treatment decision is on cruise control." This makes it challenging to study, surface and eventually disrupt habitual behaviors. To overcome this, researchers must employ techniques that illuminate the underlying mechanisms of habit while simultaneously respecting HCPs’ inherent dedication to their patients and their intent, as medical professionals, to render evidence-based decisions.
Qualitative methods, such as direct ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, can be useful in identifying the contextual cues and environmental reinforcements that shape HCP habits. For instance, shadowing and scrutinizing HCPs in their "natural habitat," their daily routines, can reveal how inputs like symptom presentation, patient preference, caregiver presence, EHR interfaces, as well as formulary constraints influence decision-making. An "open-mic" interview approach, which we have written about previously, can further explore how HCPs perceive their behaviors and identify moments where automaticity might override conscious deliberation - and vice versa. By authentically capturing the true, lived experiences of HCPs, these methods provide rich insights into the range of emotional, cognitive, and practical dimensions of habitual behavior.
Quantitative tools complement these insights by identifying patterns of behavior and measuring the prevalence and strength of specific habits across larger populations. Quant surveys and secondary behavioral data analysis can evaluate prescribing trends, treatment adherence rates, and other measurable actions. Advanced analytics, such as machine learning tools applied to prescribing data, can reveal correlations between external factors (e.g., drug availability, formulary status) and HCP decision-making. Blended with qualitative insights, these learnings can help pharma marketers pinpoint which habits are most entrenched and which might be more susceptible to change. Combining results from different modalities of data collection can ensure that marketing strategies are both evidence-based and contextually relevant.
Crucially, any research that looks at HCP habits must account for the ethical complexities of addressing habitual behavior. HCPs strive to do the best for their patients, and any suggestion that their choices are routine or automatic can feel dismissive or disrespectful of their expertise. Successful engagement requires positioning insights about habit as tools for improving—not undermining—patient care. For example, framing the conversation around efficiency and effectiveness can resonate with HCPs who are already overburdened and eager for solutions that align with their goal of optimal patient outcomes. By grounding strategies in respect for HCPs’ intentions and leveraging robust research, pharma marketers can help HCPs recognize and adjust habitual behaviors in a way that feels empowering rather than overbearing and intrusive.
Over the past half decade, researchers at ThinkGen have developed a behavioral science model specifically for commercial teams in the pharmaceutical industry called Habit Lens. Habit Lens is a framework that teams can use to more deeply examine - and deconstruct - the mechanics of customer habitual behavior and to identify ways to compliantly impact those behaviors -- strategically and tactically. Several of our clients have integrated this framework as part of their commercial planning process. These companies recognize that understanding habits and leveraging the resulting neuroscience-driven insights are critical to the success of their brands.
The core of Habit Lens analysis is the Habit Cycle, which defines several essential components of any habitual behavior. Our team developed this construct based upon the progressive, modern academic and popular literature on human habit dynamics, assimilating the writings of Nir Eyal, Charles Duhigg, and Neale Martin, Ph.D.
Here is how we define the specific components of the Habit Cycle based upon the way in which human habits have been shown to be formed, maintained - and changed
These elements interact dynamically, shaping the process of habit formation and influencing the ease or difficulty of establishing durable habits.
With these Habit Lens / Habit Cycle learnings in hand, a pharmaceutical marketing team should start by identifying the key patterns and triggers that drive habitual behavior. This involves examining the learnings about the context, cues, behaviors, behavioral beliefs, and rewards that most strongly (and implicitly) govern HCPs' decision-making. Oftentimes, it is seen that while HCPs say efficacy is the most important stated factor, it is ultimately ease of use or lack of perceived safety issues that might drive their regular usage - their behavioral investment. On the flip side, difficulty in dosing or required safety assessments - or unknown long-term safety risks - can be an impediment to developing a habit despite a stellar efficacy profile. Teams need to figure out how to streamline processes and ease concerns since behavioral simplicity and cognitive ease are among the factors that facilitate a behavior eventually becoming habitual.
To dislodge an existing habit, the brand team needs to think about how it bring customers’ conscious attention to the existing behavior, triggering a deliberative process that fosters the opportunity for a new behavioral routine to be intentionally considered. Once this new behavioral routine is trialed by customers, it is critical that this behavior is associated with a direct and distinct feeling of reward that reinforces repetition. Customers must go through a process of experiencing what they perceive to be a rewarding product trial several times before they start to change their behavioral patterns such that the new behavior can become their default – and eventually their unconscious preference.
Following are several historical examples of pharmaceutical companies effectively recognizing and leveraging customer habits in marketing their medications.
Insight into Healthcare Provider (HCP) Habits: Merck recognized that HCPs managing type-2 diabetes (T2D) often follow established prescribing patterns and rely heavily on medications they perceive as simple to prescribe, well-tolerated, and effective across a broad patient population. HCPs are also habitually drawn to medications that streamline patient management, reduce side effects, and facilitate adherence.
Marketing Strategy to Leverage HCP Habits:
Impact: Merck’s strategy of aligning Januvia’s marketing with HCP habits helped the medication become a top-prescribed drug in T2D. By understanding and leveraging HCP preferences for simplicity, safety, and streamlined patient management, Merck effectively influenced prescribing behaviors and drove widespread adoption of Januvia.
Insight into Health Care Consumer (HCC) Habits: Pfizer recognized and capitalized on the importance of daily routine in managing chronic conditions, especially in cardiovascular health. The company saw that patient adherence to daily medication was essential for lowering "bad" cholesterol levels and preventing heart disease. By positioning Lipitor as an essential component of a "daily health routine," the company synchronized it with habits already associated with maintaining well-being, such as morning or evening rituals.
Marketing Strategy:
Impact: The habit-focused approach contributed to Lipitor becoming one of the best-selling drugs globally, as patients adopted it as a regular part of their healthcare routine.
Insight into Health Care Consumer (HCC) Habits:Through its marketing research efforts, GSK came to understand that many allergy sufferers experience symptoms in predictable patterns, such as during specific seasons or times of the day. By identifying the cyclical and habitual nature of allergy management, GSK focused on integrating Flonase into patients' daily routines.
Marketing Strategy:
Impact: By orienting Flonase with customers’ seasonal habits and leveraging consistent use as a preventive measure, GSK built brand loyalty and drove sustained sales, even within an increasingly crowded market for allergy treatments.
Behavioral automaticity—better known as habit—plays a profound role in shaping the decisions of HCPs. Habits, by their nature, are deeply ingrained and difficult to disrupt. For HCPs, they manifest as clinical routines, established prescribing patterns, and preferred workflows—behavioral shortcuts that simplify decision-making in a high-pressure and time-limited setting. Similarly, patients often adhere to habitual preferences for certain medications, dosing schedules, or even preferred pharmacies. These automatic behaviors are not the result of active resistance to new products but rather the outcome of cognitive efficiency: the brain’s programmed tendency to conserve effort by following familiar patterns.
For marketers, this means that even the most compelling clinical data or promotional messaging can struggle to penetrate the inertia of existing habits unless those habits are strategically addressed.
As this essay has shown, understanding and leveraging habits is a critical component of effective pharmaceutical marketing. By recognizing the patterns and routines that drive HCPs' prescribing behaviors, pharmaceutical brand teams can formulate strategies that align with these habits, making their products more accessible, trusted, and seamlessly integrated into daily medical practice. Habit-centric marketing not only facilitates the adoption of medications but also presages long-term engagement, ensuring that HCPs consistently see value in the product and its role in improving patient care. The same goes for patients.
As the healthcare landscape evolves, marketers who prioritize insights into habitual behavior will be better equipped to navigate challenges, foster loyalty, and achieve sustained commercial success.
