Habit Building Playbook

Description

Design habits that drive goals

People sign up, attend, download or complete once, and then disappear. Your content is good but behaviour does not change. Your process only works when someone is watching. If that sounds familiar, the problem is rarely the tool. It is the habit design underneath it.

The Habit Building Playbook is the full working method I use with clients to design habits that serve both the person and the business. It is 101 pages, written for people who have to design, launch, measure and defend behaviour change in a real organisation, with real people, real budgets and real constraints.

Start with their goal, not yours

Most engagement work starts with the business objective: more daily active users, higher course completion, better process compliance. Those are fine objectives. They are yours, not the person’s. The playbook starts one step earlier, with what the person is trying to achieve, and builds the habit around that. Engagement follows because the habit gets them somewhere.

Why habits beat one-off interactions

A campaign creates a spike. A habit creates a rhythm of return. A reward system buys activity. A habit system earns motivation and trust. The research behind this is in the book: a 5% increase in customer retention produces a 25 to 95% increase in profit (Bain and Co.), and products where users form a habit in the first week retain at around three times the rate of those that do not (Mixpanel benchmarks).

Two frameworks you can use straight away

EARN (Engage, Attract, Retain, Nudge) is the engagement cycle that powers the playbook. It helps you find which part of the loop is broken: are people not emotionally hooked, not taking the first step, not seeing progress, or not getting the right cue to come back?

PROOF builds confidence. Engaged people still drift away when they cannot tell whether their effort is working. PROOF gives you a structured way to take someone from first experiment to full competence, starting with their WHY.

What is inside

• Goals first: your customer has a goal, and how habits actually work (cue, routine, reward and automaticity)
• The method: the EARN engagement cycle and the PROOF framework in full
• Five applied contexts: customer engagement, products, operations, courses and learning, and onboarding, each with loop design and practical metrics
• The people side: safety, leadership, peers and resistance, plus a full chapter on inclusive habit design
• Measuring what matters: a measurement approach that looks past vanity engagement
• Ethics and sustainability: how to change behaviour without manipulating people, and how to make habits last
• 13 appendices of tools: the Habit Design Canvas, EARN and PROOF diagnostics, an inclusive design checklist, a resistance conversation template, a measurement plan, an ethics self-check, a sustainability canvas, a product habit audit, a stakeholder conversation guide, a case study template and a workshop flow

Who it is for

Product managers, marketing and customer engagement leaders, HR, L&D and learning designers, operations leaders, founders and consultants. You do not need to be a behavioural scientist. You do need to be willing to ask the harder question: what behaviour helps this person reach their goal?

The book tells each reader where to start, so a product leader and an HR leader can both get to what they need quickly.

What it is not

It is not a catalogue of points, badges and leaderboards. Those are tools, not the strategy. And it is not permission to manipulate people into behaviour that serves only your metrics.

About the author

I am An Coppens, founder and Chief Game Changer at Gamification Nation. I have been designing gamification and behaviour change for businesses since 2012, across recruitment, marketing, learning and product. This playbook is the method behind that work, written down so your team can use it without me in the room.

What you get

• The Habit Building Playbook, expanded paid edition (version 4), 101-page PDF
• Instant download after payment

Prices exclude VAT. UK businesses pay 20% UK VAT. EU businesses with a valid VAT number are reverse charged.

Want help applying it?

If the stakes are high, the behaviour crosses departments, or the old fixes are not working, book a strategy brainstorm and we will work through your habit design together.