Wordle, health, learning and more: What is it about activity streaks that makes them so compelling?

Dick Coffee attended 781 consecutive University of Alabama football games. Meg Roh surfed through illness, storms and nightfall to maintain a seven-year daily surfing streak. Jon Sutherland ran at least 1 mile every day for over 52 years.

An activity streak has the power to compel behaviour, and marketers have taken note. Marketing researchers Jackie Silverman and Alixandra Barasch recently documented 101 unique instances, including Snapchat, Candy Crush Saga, Wordle and the Duolingo language learning platform, of apps that have incorporated streaks into their architecture by tracking the number of consecutive days users complete a task. There are even apps dedicated solely to tracking streaks.

What is it about streaks that makes them so compelling? I’m interested in consumer behavior and decision making. For insight into streaks and their motivating influence, I conducted research, recently published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, on the phenomenon.

What is a streak?

Because there’s no generally accepted definition of what a streak is, I started by trying to define the phenomenon. Based on input from people maintaining streaks and how streaks are described in the popular media, I suggest they have four underlying characteristics.

First, streaks require unchanging performance and temporal parameters. In other words, rules, established by the streaker or others, define what it means to successfully complete the...

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