 "We tend to stick with brands that have served us well: Phil Barden")
Decision science can help to understand the signals that our brands send and how these are decoded by the consumer's brain, Barden tells Ankita Rai
What are the key areas in which decision science can help marketing?
The findings from decision science will challenge some long-held beliefs and models of marketing and communication. People should be prepared to be presented with information that will contradict their existing paradigms - and I predict that they will reject that information. Why? Because decision science already tells us that humans do this, it's called the Semmelweiss Reflex and is a cognitive bias that avoids us having to think and use our reflective cognitive processing.
Marketing is all about meeting customer needs. Decision science offers a way to better understand those needs because they're mostly implicit and non-conscious.
The first step is to understand these needs, termed neuro-psychological 'goals', that drive customers and how to make our brands be perceived as instrumental in achieving those goals.
Second, decision science can help to understand the signals that brands send (via touchpoints) and how these are decoded by the brain. Most of the gaps between strategy and execution are due to ambiguity in these two areas.
Third, it can help to understand the 'decision interfaces' that our brand could have because, often, behaviour can be triggered by a trivial change to an interface.
Your book says 90 per cent of the buying decisions are autopilot decisions. Isn't this against conventional marketing wisdom? Why would marketers then spend crores to understand consumer needs and behaviour?
Habits are hallmark of autopilot decisions. The autopilot has evolved over thousands of years. Conscious reflective thought is energy-consuming, which is a risk to our survival and is something that the brain prefers not to do. If we had to process all incoming data using the pilot system, we'd have been killed off by wild animals years ago! If every purchase decision relied on reflective, deliberate cognitive processing, we'd starve to death.
The pilot system operates at c.40 bits per second so doesn't have the processing capacity to handle everything whereas the autopilot, with its 11 million bits per second of processing power, is virtually unlimited. The pilot defaults to the autopilot for decision-making particularly under any one of four conditions; when it's overloaded with tasks, when it faces complexity, when it's under time pressure and when the motivation to process the information is low. That's how habits form. We tend to default to what we know, to the status quo and stick with brands that have served us well in the past.
What are the key areas in which decision science can help marketing?
The findings from decision science will challenge some long-held beliefs and models of marketing and communication. People should be prepared to be presented with information that will contradict their existing paradigms - and I predict that they will reject that information. Why? Because decision science already tells us that humans do this, it's called the Semmelweiss Reflex and is a cognitive bias that avoids us having to think and use our reflective cognitive processing.
Marketing is all about meeting customer needs. Decision science offers a way to better understand those needs because they're mostly implicit and non-conscious.
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The first step is to understand these needs, termed neuro-psychological 'goals', that drive customers and how to make our brands be perceived as instrumental in achieving those goals.
Second, decision science can help to understand the signals that brands send (via touchpoints) and how these are decoded by the brain. Most of the gaps between strategy and execution are due to ambiguity in these two areas.
Third, it can help to understand the 'decision interfaces' that our brand could have because, often, behaviour can be triggered by a trivial change to an interface.
Your book says 90 per cent of the buying decisions are autopilot decisions. Isn't this against conventional marketing wisdom? Why would marketers then spend crores to understand consumer needs and behaviour?
Habits are hallmark of autopilot decisions. The autopilot has evolved over thousands of years. Conscious reflective thought is energy-consuming, which is a risk to our survival and is something that the brain prefers not to do. If we had to process all incoming data using the pilot system, we'd have been killed off by wild animals years ago! If every purchase decision relied on reflective, deliberate cognitive processing, we'd starve to death.
The pilot system operates at c.40 bits per second so doesn't have the processing capacity to handle everything whereas the autopilot, with its 11 million bits per second of processing power, is virtually unlimited. The pilot defaults to the autopilot for decision-making particularly under any one of four conditions; when it's overloaded with tasks, when it faces complexity, when it's under time pressure and when the motivation to process the information is low. That's how habits form. We tend to default to what we know, to the status quo and stick with brands that have served us well in the past.