Page 12 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

12 CHAPTER 2 IDENTIFYING THE MESSY MIDDLE

It is this transition from simple to complex modifiers that offers the first
significant clue to how consumer behaviour and decision-making have
changed. As the internet has grown, it has transformed from a tool for
comparing prices to a tool for comparing everything.

Enter behavioural science

To go beyond describing what consumers are doing on the internet to
understanding why that behaviour has changed, we needed to take a
different approach, grounded in cognitive science. Our partner from the
beginning of this project has been The Behavioural Architects, a global
consultancy specialising in the application of behavioural science to
marketing challenges.

We’re certainly not claiming to be the first to apply behavioural science to

marketing. Influential marketers have long emphasised the importance
of using mental shortcuts to build brand salience and create messages
that generate a response, so the use of behavioural insights will not be a
new concept for advanced practitioners. However, with the help of The
Behavioural Architects we’ve been able to comprehensively review a
significant proportion of the available scientific and marketing-related
literature, and to use it as the foundation of a series of large-scale
experiments exploring the impact of behavioural biases that we’ll review in
Chapter Four.

As the internet has grown, it has

transformed from a tool for

comparing prices to a tool for

comparing everything.