Products that have natural frequencies of more than once per month are within the "Habit Zone" because it is easier to build a recurring habit with the user. Products that are infrequent (less than quarterly) are in the "Forgettable Zone" because it is easy for the user to forget about your product due to the low frequency for the use case.

Most modern product and growth strategies originated in companies with frequent products (Zynga - Games, Facebook - Social, etc)

The ICED theory presents a mental model to help address the challenges faced by infrequent products and facilitates the crafting of a growth-oriented approach.

I = Degree of Infrequency

C = Degree of Control Over the User Experience

E = Degree of Engagement Before, After, and During The Transaction

D = Distinctiveness of The Product

The more infrequent the product, the poorer the product recall by the customer. Further, the degree of infrequency informs key business decisions, such as monetization and the cost of traffic acquisition.

In an infrequent product, higher engagement ensures customer loyalty in the form of retention or advocacy. Engagement is determined by three things:

How complex a transaction is

Degree of touch

Predictability of retention

In their well-researched book The Effortless Experience, authors Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi contend that decreasing a transaction's "perceived effort" could dissuade a customer from being disloyal. In other words, reducing the effort invested will reduce churn.

Failure to be distinctive and the infrequency of transactions can ultimately strain customer acquisition.

In the case of infrequent products, product–market fit is a function of market penetration because, unlike frequent products, the time gap between transactions is wider.

The more frequent a product is, the better equipped it will be to withstand economic cycles.

Take WhatsApp and Google Search as examples—these products are not affected by macroeconomic factors. Highly infrequent products have a high order value, and this increases the susceptibility to macroeconomic factors.