Using Implementation Intentions to Increase New Product Consumption : A Field Experiment

People often form good intentions that never reach fruition. New Year's resolutions, promises, and assurances are often quickly forgotten before they have a chance to influence behavior. Intentions are particularly ineffective when forgetting, procrastination, or distraction from other goals or activities increase the difficulty of self-regulation. One way to overcome these obstacles is to form implementation intentions, or intentions that are supplemented with detailed plans and contextual cues that serve as reminders to perform intention-relevant activities (Gollwitzer, 1999). In addition to specifying a desired end state, implementation intentions link goals to situations by taking the form, "I intend to do y whenever situation z is encountered." If sufficiently strong action-situation associations are formed in memory, the action is performed automatically whenever the relevant situation is encountered. When this occurs, behavioral control shifts from the individual to the situation