NEW YORK – A new study by Ominicom’s BBDO Worldwide suggests that injecting brands into consumers’ rituals is critical to making them a fixture on their shopping lists, reports Marketing Daily.

Once the brands are a part of peoples’ ritual lives – brushing teeth, buying a beer or shaving, for example – people are unlikely to remove them. The study involved ethnographic research in 26 countries, 2,500 hours of documented and filmed behavior, quantitative feedback from more than 5,000 people, and interviews with psychologists, nutritionists and sociologists.

The study found that 89 percent of people resort to the same brands for these sequenced rituals, and three out of four people become disappointed or irritated when their sequence is disrupted or their brand of choice is not available.

When a ritual is “jammed” with various steps, there are more opportunities for marketers to find a niche for their brands. Tracy Lovatt, director of behavioral planning for BBDO New York and BBDO North America, told Marketing Daily such rituals also are hard to crack because consumers are rushed, and at such times, are already full of sequences of activities.

Lovatt said brands that succeed in becoming parts of people’s ritualistic behavior are those that create product, positioning, packaging, advertising and promotions that address both the specific ritual and the underlying function behind it, if there is one.

“If you can embed yourself – if you can be a useful element – in that particular behavior, it’s very hard to move you out of that, whether it’s a functional thing like brushing one’s teeth, or a completely emotional routine," Lovatt told the news source, adding, "The question for marketers is: ‘Can I own that, can I be part of that?’”