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Marketers need to study how consumers make decisions

By Yolande D’Mello

Marketers need to study how consumers make decisions small size

Customers are continually making decisions: Should I buy this? Should I click here? Should I sign up? Understanding what actually drives these decisions is key to shaping them.

Richard Shotton, Founder of Astroten, a behavioral science consultancy and author of The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice, will deliver the keynote on how human decision-making remains remarkably constant in an evolving technology landscape in his session titled The Enduring Power of Behavioural Science at VMF.

We spoke to Richard about how bias creeps into market research, how to better understand how consumers make decisions, and get a sneak peek into his upcoming book Hacking The Human Mind: The behavioral science secrets behind 17 of the world’s best brands which will hit the shelves later in September this year.

Excerpts from the interview;

Is consumer psychology a common consideration for most brands, or is it still a new concept?

It’s increasingly common to see brands and agencies incorporate consumer psychology as part of their process, although it’s not often systematically applied. There’s still an over-reliance on intuition, or when research happens, it’s based on claimed data. For example, creative routes are tested by asking people which ads they think would make them purchase.

But, as per that famous David Ogilvy quote, ‘The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.’

It’s not that respondents deliberately mislead researchers, just that nobody is aware of all the elements that influence their decisions. When asked, people don’t — in fact, can’t — tell you what motivates them. So, findings from a lot of market research can never uncover the whole truth.

There’s still more headroom to align research with genuine motivation through the application of behavioural science.

What kind of data do brands need to collect to understand customers on a deeper level?

So, to carry out behaviourally-aligned research, a good place to start is with observed data rather than claims. There’s some interesting evidence that illustrates why.

In a 1999 study by Adrian North and colleagues at the University of Leicester, different types of supermarket music were seen to influence wine selection. French music inspired French purchases, and German music, German wine. You can see the results here:

 

French music

German music

French wine

40

12

German wine

8

22

Bottles sold within each music condition

But when questioned afterwards, only 2% of shoppers acknowledged that the ambient music had inspired them. Even when prompted, 86% still claimed that it had played no part in their decision. It’s not that they were lying — simply that they were unaware.

I think this study highlights why brands should be sceptical about customer claims and instead set up simple test and control experiments, like North’s, to get closer to the truth

What kind of brand challenges can behavioural science help with?

One of the reasons why I love behavioural science is that it can help with almost any challenge. It’s the study of decision making, and what could be more relevant to marketing, or indeed any area of communication?  Customers are continually making decisions: Should I buy this? Should I click here? Should I sign up? Understanding what actually drives these decisions is key to shaping them.

Second, behavioral science offers a robust approach. It’s based on scientific evidence drawn from experiments, including those conducted by Nobel Laureates, Daniel Kahneman, Richard Thaler and Herbert Simon. Supporting your marketing strategies with experimental evidence can give you more confidence in their likely effectiveness than when you apply intuition or opinion alone.

Third, behavioral science has identified such a range of biases that whatever the challenge, there’s an evidence-based behavioural bias that will help you solve it.

How do behavioural science principles change or remain the same across generations and cultures?

There’s an evolutionary explanation to so many influential behavioural biases — so they tend to remain constant across time and culture. Consider one of the most influential, social proof, which is the observation that we are highly motivated by what other people around us are doing.

It’s one of the most researched areas of human behaviour, and was first demonstrated experimentally back in 1935 by Muzafer Sherif at Columbia University. Participants were shown a light projected in a dark room and asked to say whether it was moving. Respondents were first tested individually. And then they were placed in groups of three, with two who were in agreement and one outlier. When the researchers showed the same light again, the outlier tended to change their response to agree with the other two.

This is one of many such studies. It’s a US-based one, as many are, but the same effect has been found in Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, UK, Netherlands, Russia, Australia, India, Singapore, and China — and probably many more.

It makes evolutionary sense. In an uncertain world, hundreds of thousands of years ago, where the next action could put us in harm’s way — Should we eat this berry? Is that cave safe to enter? — it seems wise to copy what our peers have done and lived to tell the tale. If you’re in a shopping centre and a screaming crowd runs for the exit, you’re going to follow.

This is just one example. Many other biases seem to have logical roots in the survival of the species. Which is why aligning with them is so effective. There are cultural nuances, so that different influences may hold somewhat greater or lesser sway, but they still hold power across a general population.

What can readers can expect from your latest book Hacking The Human Mind: The behavioral science secrets behind 17 of the world's best brands

With this new book — written in partnership with MichaelAaron Flicker — we’re giving you behavioural science lessons from the best.

Of course, all marketers aim to learn from the best. But how do you identify the tactics responsible for a company’s success? A stab in the dark? This is where behavioral science can help — it has a solid evidence base, unlike much of marketing theory. So if you can spot the behavioral biases, you can understand why a tactic works.

Some brands are mystifyingly successful. Why are customers happy to pay a premium for things that should be free, like water; things that should be cheap, like milk; and things that would do the same job at half the price, like vacuum cleaners? 

Hacking The Human Mind answers these questions, identifying the behavioral-based approaches that helped take 17 leading brands to the top. So brands can learn from the winners and power-up their marketing.

The book is due to be published in English in September 2025. My earlier books, The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice, which give a grounding in key biases and how to use them in your marketing, are coming out in Arabic, hopefully the next one will too.

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