Page 90 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

90 CHAPTER 5 IMPLICATIONS OF THE MESSY MIDDLE

When shoppers visit your site, the user experience should
make the evaluation process as simple as possible, with
appropriate detail and functionality.

Use tactics such as retargeting and basket-abandonment
messaging to engage with evaluative shoppers who are in
danger of exiting back into explore mode.

Shoppers don’t engage with brands in a vacuum once they enter the messy
middle – the process of exploration and evaluation is inherently comparative.
With that in mind, it’s a good idea to regularly review how your offering and
messaging compare with that of the competition.

While many brands will audit their competitors for price and product feature
parity, the messy middle suggests that businesses now need to be aware of
the behavioural science being employed by their rivals.

To take the example of social proof – a bias that had significant impact on
choices across all the products we researched – how do your consumer
ratings and reviews match up to those of your competitors? Are you utilising
positive user feedback about your brand and products in your marketing
activity? Likewise, are you building your brand authority by seeking out and
promoting expert endorsements and industry awards?

Employing behavioural science responsibly

Economist Richard Thaler has written extensively about “nudges” – small
cues that direct people towards positive behavioural change but aren’t
bribes, and don’t prevent them from making an alternative choice if they want
to. More recently, Thaler has introduced the notion of “sludge” – behavioural
cues that, unlike nudges, don’t have the customer or end-user’s best
interests at heart. 21

As the name suggests, sludge serves only to obscure and distort the
decision-making process, making the middle even messier. It’s a foundational

principle of everything we do at Google that if you put the user first, all else will
follow. So it’s safe to say that we’re not big fans of sludge, and don’t want the
findings of our research to be misunderstood or misapplied.

21 Thaler, R. H. (2018). Nudge, not sludge. Science Vol. 361, Issue 6401, pp. 431.