an [unmet] need or ... a habit?

This is my contribution for the celebration of the upcoming Black Friday & also International Buy Nothing Day  (Saturday, November 29). I accidentally came across Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path founder) blog post, where he says: "it's important to recognize that successful innovations do not create needs - they satisfy unmet needs. The trick is figuring out what needs are going unmet." While this is a fundamental truth in people-centered research and design (and also there are really a number of discussion paths to be taken from this sentence), I am trying to focus here on needs-habits relation. Example: P&G hires psychologists (among other professionals) to help them develop and market their products [yep, they are serious about their business].  So, the story goes: "about a decade ago, we realized we needed to create new products. So we began thinking about how to create habits for products that had never existed before." Hm: there are [people's] needs (met and unmet) and then there are their habits [around products] - products existent and also those yet to be invented. It really seems way to easy to confuse the two. BUT inventing a product - or anything new, for that matter - does not necessarily entails meeting an [unmet] need. As P&G business (and many other brands' businesses) really prove. Many products, in fact, fail because there is - initially - no need for them. What brands then invent is not a new need, but a new angle by which to market the product. And - poof - people start to use it. Out of an [unmet] need or ... out of a habit? Apparently, habits are much easier to create & manage. NYT article titled "Warning: Habits May  Be Good for You" writes: "Is black friday a collective experiment? For example, the urge to check e-mail or to grab a cookie is likely a habit with a specific prompt. Researchers found that most cues fall into four broad categories: a specific location or time of day, a certain series of actions, particular moods, or the company of specific people. The e-mail urge, for instance, probably occurs after you’ve finished reading a document or completed a certain kind of task. The cookie grab probably occurs when you’re walking out of the cafeteria, or feeling sluggish or blue." This sounds scary to me: "habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods... If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.” (from the same article). Something to think about before tomorrow - do we really need things that we are about to buy tomorrow? Or - does the day after Thanksgiving habitually prompt us to run to shop? More importantly: how much of our (consumption and other) behavior is habitual - and thus created by brands?  Sociological determinism alert. Still an interesting question, tho.