Many of the young men we spoke with had already spent months (or even years!) thinking about hair loss before they expected to do anything about it. They had noticed changes in friends or family members' hair, wondered whether it might happen to them, read articles, watched videos, or started forming opinions about different treatment options.

Most marketing and product strategies are built around two familiar moments: acquisition and retention. It's a useful model, but also an incomplete one. A lot of real-world behavior doesn't fit neatly into either category. It happens somewhere between, in moments where people return to something they've done before, but under different conditions. "Re-entry" is when someone comes back to a behavior, a category, or a decision they've already experienced - but not quite in

The marketing research world traditionally avoids a lot of fieldwork during the holidays. The logic is that December is "not representative" of normal behavior. But, if the only time we gather data is in months where people feel steady, rested, and regulated, we end up modeling behavior that exists only in ideal conditions. Most people don't make decisions in ideal conditions.