Such advice came from Charles Duhigg, The New York Times investigative reporter, who gave a talk from his latest book, The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Looking very much like a professor, Duhigg recounted the considerable time and millions of dollars that consumer products giant, Proctor and Gamble spent to develop their billion dollar product line, Febreeze.

The story involves a scientist who discovered an odor killing chemical and the P&G marketers who tried, and nearly failed, to turn that innovation into a successful home cleaning product. It turns out you can’t sell stuff to people by telling them their houses stink! P&G’s fortunes turned, as Duhigg illustrated with both scientific rigor and humorous anecdotes, on the fact that we have formed habits controlling nearly half of our daily actions and that Febreeze was a perfect reward for people who take great satisfaction in cleaning.

The habit loop, as Duhigg described it – Cue, Routine, Reward – is a simple yet powerful reminder to marketers that we need to plug into consumers’ existing rituals in order to create experiences that will surprise and delight…the keys to customer obsession. And as Duhigg’s examples illustrate, the consumer insight necessary to understand those habits is derived from careful consideration of consumer attitudes and behaviors.

One of the top generic terms to the real estate category is ‘houses for sale’, which when trended over time to compare search activity by Hispanics to the online population, reveals significantly more search volume from Hispanics during the first part of 2012. The peaks in search activity by Hispanics are also far more prominent, particularly during January through March and May. Surprisingly, various Spanish language equivalents of search queries did not yield significant volume and English-language queries were more common within the Real Estate category, possibly due to fewer options available in Spanish.

The websites visited after a search for ‘houses for sale’ also revealed different preferences in terms of destinations. Trulia.com captured the highest share of clicks from Hispanics based upon a rolling average of 12 weeks ending May 26, 2012. The volume of search clicks from Hispanics was nearly 4.5 larger than the online population. Hispanics also showed a much higher propensity to visit Google Maps, suggesting a preference for mapping functionality while shopping for homes online.