Prelims
The Business of Choice: How Human Instinct Influences Everyone’s Decisions
ISBN: 978-1-83982-071-7, eISBN: 978-1-83982-070-0
Publication date: 28 September 2020
Citation
Willcox, M. (2020), "Prelims", The Business of Choice: How Human Instinct Influences Everyone’s Decisions, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. i-xxiii. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83982-070-020202001
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020 Matthew Willcox
Half Title
The Business of Choice
Title Page
The Business of Choice: How Human Instinct Influences Everyone’s Decision
By
Matthew Willcox
Revised and Updated Edition
United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China
Copyright Page
Emerald Publishing Limited
Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK
First edition 2020
© 2020 Matthew Willcox.
Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. This book was previously published by Pearson Education, Inc
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ISBN: 978-1-83982-071-7 (Print)
ISBN: 978-1-83982-070-0 (Online)
ISBN: 978-1-83982-072-4 (Epub)
Endorsements
To Patrizia, who using a cognitive process yet to be revealed by science, chose me
Praise for The Business of Choice, 1st edition:
‘The insights that Matthew brings about how we really make choices are interesting and relevant to anyone working in marketing or selling, but are even more astonishing and invaluable to anyone with the curiosity about the human condition.’
Alan Jope, CEO, Unilever
‘Understanding how it is that human beings make choices—the complexity of inputs, the evolutionary success factors, and the cognitive processes—makes for fascinating subject matter. Matthew’s experience in advertising and his understanding of the science of decision making come together here to make for an insightful and incredibly useful tool.’
Jennifer Sey, CMO Global Brands at Levi’s, and one of Forbes’ “World’s Most Influential CMOs 2019”
‘Matthew Willcox bridges the practical and academic worlds of marketing better than anyone I know. In The Business of Choice, he lucidly explains what marketing practitioners can learn from marketing academics—and vice-versa and makes an excellent case for strengthening the ties between the two disciplines. The result is a fascinating and charming read.’
Adam Alter, Associate Professor of Marketing.
NYU Stern School of Business, and New York Times best-selling author of Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
‘The Business of Choice shines a light on the deep human truths that have drivenbehavior for millions of years. Incorporate these into your marketing, and the chancesare you will be tapping into something truly fundamental for your brand.’
James Hallatt, Senior Vice President, Vemedia Consumer Health Group
‘The Business of Choice is revolutionary. Informed by psychology and neuroscience, and infused with wit, it challenges the very foundations of rationality on which modern marketing is built and invites us to see people as they are – complex, emotional, irrational, human.’
Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, VP of Marketing, DoorDash
‘The Business of Choice is a brilliant tour of human behaviour that is of interestway beyond marketing. It has helped me as a Physician - with patients and colleagues alike - particularly in my role driving the behaviour change needed for transition to models of digital health.’
Nicholas Peters, Professor of Cardiology at Imperial College and head of DASH (Devices, Apps, Sensors in Health)
‘I found The Business of Choice to be afresh illuminating and entertaining read that helped me reframe how I think about solving my business objectives. As a marketer, the more I understand how and why people make the choices they do, the better chance I have of creating offers or communications that respect people’s natural tendencies and desires. Matthew’s book is insightful, humorous and actionable.’
Rebecca Van Dyck, Chief Marketing Officer, AR/VR at Facebook
‘There are many great reasons to choose this book, all of which you’ll understand better by the time you get to the end of it.’
Mark Barden, Partner, eatbigfish, and author of A Beautiful Constraint
‘How we human beings make decisions is complex and fascinating, and nobody brings that to life quite like Matthew Willcox. His deep knowledge and practical insights are invaluable, not just for marketers, but for anyone in the business of understanding and influencing decisions. And that’s everyone in business.’
Matt Williams, Managing Partner at Brand Federation, Visiting Clinical Professor at William & Mary Raymond A. Mason School of Business
Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank Kimberlee D’Ardenne. Kim is a neuroscientist who just happens to be a fine writer and editor, who helped me write about complex matters, and made sure that I didn’t misrepresent the science, with both the original edition and this updated one. Really her name should be on the cover as well. I’m grateful to Peter Comber who came up with the subtitle for the revised edition. I’d also like to thank the team at Emerald Publishing, particularly Charlotte Maiorana who suggested that a book like this one might be interesting back in 2014 and supported the idea of a revision five years later. Thank you, Charlotte, for your confidence!
This book would have also not been possible were it not for the thousands of people who investigate behavior and delve into the whys and hows of human decision making, so my thanks to all of you. I have had many enlightening conversations with this community, be they éminences grises or students presenting a poster of their research. In particular, I’d like to thank those in academia who have kindly given me time, advice, and encouragement and shown great patience explaining their work to an outsider. So, personal thanks to Sam McClure, Baba Shiv, Ming Hsu, Adam Alter, Vlad Griskevicius, Robert Cialdini, Dan Ariely, Richard Nisbett, David Gal, Carrie Armel, Barry Schwartz, Jonathan Baron, Andrea Weihrauch, Simona Botti, David Faro, Jonathan Zinman, Ben Hilbig, Sam Bond, Ishani Banerji, Christopher Hydock, Maya Shankar, Angela Leung, Chris Chabris, Neil Bendle, Justin Pomerance, Nick Light, David Comerford, Tomasz Zaleskiewicz, Giovanni Burro, Renato Frey, Rachel Rosenberg and Gizem Yalcin. Some of you may not remember helping me, but you did.
Friends, practitioners, and colleagues past and present who have inspired or supported me and contributed in some way to this book include Michael Fassnacht, Mark Barden, James Hallatt, Ralph Kugler, Yumi Prentice, Andrew Levy, Nick Peters, David Thomason, John Kenny, Simon White, Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, Dominic Whittles, Mike Guarino, Auro Trini Castelli, Neil Adler, Ryan Riley, Lucy Farey Jones, Kim Lundgren, Barb Murrer, Elina Halonen, Leigh Caldwell, Elys Roberts, Mike Daniels, John Lowell, Curt Munk, Curt Detweiler, Pam Scott, Di Tompkins, Rebecca Caldwell, Vikki Garrod, Tom O’Keefe, James Coghlan, Jenn Munsie, Cynthia Flowers, Bernadette Miller, Bob Mason, John Eichberger, Brooke Sadowsky Tully, Maria van Lieshout, Tom de Blasis, Yuko Furuichi, Ari Nave, Mimi Cook, Ramona Lyons, Franco Ricchuiti, Emanuela Calderoni, Naomi Sparks Grewal, and Julieta Collart. Thanks to all of you.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables | xi |
Preface | xiii |
Part I The Business, Science, and Nature of Choice | |
1 The Business of Choice | 3 |
2 The Ever-advancing Science of Choice | 15 |
3 The Natural History of Choice | 29 |
Part II Getting Practical Today | |
4 Shortcuts versus Analysis – Ignoring Is Decisional Bliss | 43 |
5 Getting Familiar | 51 |
6 Thanks for Sharing (Whether You Meant To or Not) | 65 |
7 Now, and the Future – Different Places with Different Rules | 85 |
8 Loss and Ownership | 101 |
9 Make People Feel Smart, Attractive – or Even Lucky | 123 |
10 Make It Easy – For the Mind and the Body | 135 |
11 Never Be Above Comparison | 151 |
12 If Content Is King, Context Is Queen | 167 |
13 Same and Different; Nature and Nurture | 189 |
14 The Power of Affirmation and Sparking Joy | 211 |
Part III Looking Forward | |
15 Think Differently about Market Research | 221 |
16 Think Differently about How You Work | 245 |
17 Choosing Without Choosing – Artificial Intelligence and Choice | 257 |
Conclusion | 273 |
Index | 277 |
List of Figures and Tables
7 Fig. 7.1. Feels Good/Does Good/Present/Future Grid. Created by the author. | 96 |
8 Fig. 8.1. Percentage of Customers Using a Reusable Bag. Bar chart recreated by the author, based on data from: Homonoff, T. A. (2018). Can small incentives have large effects? The impact of taxes versus bonuses on disposable bag use. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 10(4), 177–210. | 105 |
Fig. 8.2. “What Might People Lose.” Selected Output From Workshops Conducted by the Author. Created by the author. | 115 |
10 Fig. 10.1. Effective Organ Donation Consent Rates Across Neighboring European Countries. Bar chart recreated by author based on data from: Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. G. (2004, December). Defaults and donation decisions. Transplantation, 78(12), 1713–1716. Retrieved from SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1323508. | 138 |
Table 10.1. Attention to Ad and Size of Donation. Created by the author. | 147 |
Table 10.2. Attention to Ad, Size of Donation, and Attention While Donating. Created by the author. | 148 |
13–Figure 13.1. Universal/Individual and Innate/Absorbed (UIIA) Map. Created by the author. | 194 |
Preface
The decision to revise a book is a bit like the decision to remodel your home. If bringing your home up to date requires a lot of work, then you might think of moving, or rebuilding it completely. If all the home requires is a lick of paint, then you might forgive yourself for leaving it untouched for a few more years. Likewise, if there has been a wholesale change in the area a book covers, then you’ll find yourself abandoning so much of the original that you really should be writing a new book or at least a sequel. And if it is simply a question of updating a few references, then your time might be better spent on other things.
I think The Business of Choice is in the “Goldilocks Zone” for a revision.1 The overall premise, many of the ideas (and the research that informed them) are as relevant to marketers and practitioners as they were when the original was written in 2014. That said, in the past five years, a lot has changed. The context in which people make choices has changed – for example, back in 2014 Alexa and Google Assistant didn’t exist. A 2019 Edison Research2 report in conjunction with National Public Radio (NPR) estimates that 60 million Americans over the age of 18 own at least one smart speaker (up from 53 million one year earlier), and that households with smart speakers own an average of 2.6. In December 2017, Edison Research estimates there were 67 million smart speakers in US households. That number two years later is now 157 million. In this revised edition, you will find a chapter that covers how artificial intelligence (AI) can affect people’s choices and behavior, and how practitioners can use it to create individualized and time-sensitive programs that can lead to sustained changes in behavior.
In the past five years, much new research has been published – some of which sparks new ideas for practical application, and other new studies that build on and add specificity to research that featured in the previous edition. But scientific research isn’t all about building on existing work – it is as important (some would say more important) to see if previous studies still hold water as well as it was believed they did when they were published. Often, they don’t – for reasons that range from an effect being more context sensitive and less generalizable than the original researchers recognized; to errors or a lack of rigor in methodology and analysis; and even, very occasionally, to an unfortunate lack of ethics or honesty on the part of the researchers. We’ll talk about this more later in the chapter, but rest assured we have removed, or added a warning flag to, any research about which the scientific community has expressed concerns.
Perhaps the biggest single area of change from 2014 to 2019 is the degree to which insights from behavioral science are being used by practitioners. An emblematic example is the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT). When I was writing the previous version of The Business of Choice, I referenced a government program in the United Kingdom that a group called the BIT had profoundly changed through the application of behavioral insights. At that time, the BIT was an exciting three-year-old experiment, comprised of a small team within the UK Government’s Cabinet Office, that brought behavioral scientists and policymakers together. In February 2014, it was partially privatized, and by the end of 2019 had spawned seven offices, employing more than 200 people.
The BIT’s growth (both in size and influence) isn’t a one-off. Governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world have built similar units, often in consultation with the BIT. A 2019 report from the World Bank Group’s Mind Behavior and Development Unit (eMBeD) by Zeina Afif3 profiles the impressive rise of the application of behavioral science in public health and public policy across 10 countries that are leading the charge. Afif quotes Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data suggesting, that as of November 2018, there are at least 202 public entities around the world applying behavioral insights to their policies.
In October 2017, Richard Thaler, an economist whose fingerprints are all over much of the early work in Behavioral Economics was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics,4 which followed the 2002 award of the same prize to Daniel Kahneman. As well as being a pioneer in experimental work, Thaler has been an untiring force in demonstrating how behavioral insights and the rigor of evidence-based approaches can help lead to positive and sustained changes at a population level. He has also provided a huge service to the field, and the population at large by hunting down and exposing examples where behavioral insights are being used to encourage people to make choices that aren’t in their best interests or to discourage them from taking actions that are.
All of this activity and recognition has led to an increased interest in behavioral insights. A decade ago, the only places where findings from behavioral science experiments were really presented and discussed were academic conferences, such as those organized by the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Consumer Psychology, Psychonomic Society, and European Association for Decision Making. At these conferences, you could count the practitioners like myself on one hand. In 2013, a new society, the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, held their first conference, bridging the gap between academics and policymakers and practitioners. In the same year, Ogilvy Consulting launched Nudgestock, which has a reputation as being the most entertaining event that champions insights from behavioral science and has been growing in popularity every year since. For those more focused on market research, IIEX Behavior, debuted in 2015. Samuel Salzer’s excellent Habit Weekly 5 newsletter gives a list of 48 conferences that will happen around the world in 2020 that relate to behavioral design (a term increasingly used to refer to applied behavioral science).
As a practitioner, I have also learned a lot since 2014. In the intervening years, I’ve worked on projects, run workshops, and given talks in more than 20 countries. Some areas of insight that I believed had great potential, that might even be game changers, haven’t really delivered, at least as yet. At the same time, there are areas that I have come to believe are even more important than I thought when writing the first edition.
One thing that has become even more apparent to me since then is that behavioral insights are not silver bullets that will enable you to unlock the secrets of human behavior and change it at your behest. Dr Robert Cialdini, author of the excellent and justifiably best-selling book Influence – The Psychology of Persuasion, told me about a colleague who had spent 16 years trying to identify the single most effective persuasive appeal, the golden rule of persuasion, if you will. His conclusion? The golden rule is that there isn’t one. You have to size up every situation from a behavioral perspective and ascertain which tendencies are most active in those circumstances.
Every situation is different, and context has a profound effect on how we make choices. A behavioral principle that works in one scenario may fall flat in another scenario that seems, on the surface, to be very similar (as we will see in Chapter 6, “Thanks for Sharing (Whether You Meant to or Not)”). So, it’s best to think of The Business of Choice as a selection of useful starting points to consider, experiment with, and adapt to the unique circumstances of the behavior you are trying to change and the choices you are trying to influence.
Finally, as a nonscientist immersing myself in decision science, I learned two lessons about the intersection of science and marketing. The first lesson is that rather than providing certainty, science is about advancing ideas. It is tempting for marketers, from the legendary Claude Hopkins6 onward, to see the potential of science as proof that one approach will work better than another. This way of thinking misses the point of science – rather than thinking about it as validation, think of science as inspiration. Most of the revelations about human choice I refer to in this book come from scientists devising and conducting highly creative experiments that dig deep into human nature. Scientists’ ingenuity in looking at things in different ways, and in creating decision experiments that reveal effects of nonconscious cognitive mechanisms, has led to breakthroughs in understanding how people arrive at their decisions. Science, it turns out, is surprisingly creative, and if anyone can appreciate the effect of creativity to change the game, it should be those of us in marketing and advertising.
The second lesson I learned after immersing myself in the science of choice is that science is much more fluid than I had thought. Ideas that seemed immutable 10 or 20 years ago are now up for debate.
For example, what scientists know about the function of the amygdala – an important brain area for marketing – has changed greatly in the past two decades. The amygdala is involved in translating what we sense and perceive into emotions, and it plays an important role in recognizing emotions in social interactions and facial expressions. Just over 10 years ago, the amygdala was still considered to be absolutely essential for recognizing and experiencing fear. Today, its exact role is much less defined, but it is not essential for fear. The hypothesis of the amygdala being essential for recognizing and experiencing fear was based on studying a rare brain lesion patient called S.M., who has damage specific only to the amygdala. S.M. has abnormal behavioral responses to fear and also abnormal social interactions; additionally, lots of experiments with S.M. showed that she could not identify fearful-looking human faces.7 But the same researchers who first uncovered S.M.’s inability to recognize fearful faces realized something fascinating 10 years after the first experiments: When S.M. viewed faces, she did not look at the eyes. Viewing the eyes is necessary to discriminate emotions from facial expressions, and when specifically instructed to look at the eyes, it turns out that S.M. could indeed recognize fear just like people with intact amygdala regions.8 The function of the amygdala has since been refined to include being an important influence on the visual system. Recognizing fear involves more brain areas than just the amygdala, but one specific role the amygdala may play is in directing our eyes to where we will see signs of fear – such as people’s eyes.
I want to make two points here. The first is that we are still learning, especially when it comes to understanding the human brain. To use a cliché, science is not a destination, but a journey. Marketers might do well to remember this cliché when being presented with research (I elaborate on this caution in Chapter 15, “Think Differently about Market Research”). Research based on the “latest from science” probably won’t remain the latest for very long. And, as the amygdala story demonstrates, science self-corrects, so research might not even be considered science for very long. Or, as Christian Jarrett says in his book Great Myths of the Brain:
Anyone who spends time researching brain myths soon discovers today’s myths were yesterday’s facts.
In experimental psychology and other disciplines, this self-correcting is increasingly helped along by other scientists attempting to replicate the original research. But experiments don’t always replicate,9 and the reasons why are numerous. The most common reason is simple statistics; the world is noisy. For example, if you sample a group of 20 males and 20 females, sometimes the group of females will be taller than the men, but this result will not hold up with repetition. Another reason why an experiment might not replicate is context (something I cover extensively in Chapter 12, “If Content Is King, Context Is Queen”). Sometimes, as I mentioned earlier, the effects shown in a particular study are exquisitely sensitive to the specific context of the experiment. One example of this is a famous study from Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, published in 2000.10 The researchers presented shoppers at Draeger’s Grocery Store in Menlo Park, California, with different displays at which they could sample a range of Wilkin & Sons jams. One display had 6 different jams, the other had 24, and these displays were rotated hourly. The researchers tracked how many people stopped at each display. All shoppers who stopped at either display were given a $1 coupon off the purchase of any Wilkin & Sons preserve. The finding that made this study so famous was that while the 24-item display had more stopping power with shoppers than the 6-item display (60% stopping for the larger selection; 40% at the smaller selection), only 3% of those who stopped at the larger selection redeemed their coupon to buy jam. In a staggering contrast, 30% of the shoppers who stopped at the smaller display went on to use their coupons to buy jam.
While classical economics suggests that more choice is better, we have all experienced choice overload (described in detail in Barry Schwartz’s 2004 book The Paradox of Choice Why More Is Less) at some time or other. Iyengar and Lepper’s study created a mini media storm and the findings were widely reported (I call findings like these plausibly counterintuitive which are the attributes I believe make them news and conversation worthy). Companies went about reducing their range of brands and varieties,11 and I know that I advised at least two clients to reduce the options they offered shoppers.
However, my advice may not have been as solid as I thought it was at the time. Many attempts have since been made to replicate Iyengar and Lepper’s study, and none, as far as I know, have shown such a dramatic effect. A meta-analysis of experiments reviewing 63 conditions from 50 experiments12 – a number of which attempted to replicate Iyengar and Lepper’s study with goods such as jam, jellybeans, and chocolate – showed a mean effect size across studies as “virtually zero” with “considerable variance between studies.” Personally, I don’t think the meta-analysis shows Iyengar and Lepper’s experiment to be flawed – the issue for me is the conclusion (as much, if not more, by those reading about the research than by the researchers themselves) that the study is widely generalizable beyond the specific conditions of the experiment. There is a huge lesson for practitioners in this. Before Iyengar and Lepper’s experiment was published, the consensus was that offering more choices led to happier choosers. After the plausibly counterintuitive findings of Iyengar and Lepper’s study were published, expert opinion shifted to believing that smaller selections had a more positive effect on choice. The meta-analysis suggests that it is not an either or. In some cases, less is better, and in other cases more is better. This depends on what is being chosen, who is choosing it, their goals at the time, and the conditions under which the choice is being made. Before adding to, or trimming their range of offerings, marketers should consider the effect of all of these things on the choice they want people to make and ideally conduct experiments using different sized choice sets. What they shouldn’t do is assume that a finding from research has external validity, that is that the effects will transfer from the specific context and conditions of the research design, to the decision or behaviors they would like people to make.
Another, much less common, reason why experiments might not replicate is scientific fraud. Uri Simonsohn, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, has a reputation as a “data vigilante,”13 which he acquired by identifying practices that generate results that seem too good to be true. Simonsohn showed that continuing to collect data only until a sought-after result is confirmed is not good practice. In science, this is called “p-hacking”14 (for collecting data until the desired statistic, or p-value, is reached), but it happens outside of the laboratory, too. It’s human nature and something I discuss in Chapter 14, “The Power of Affirmation,” under the scaffold of the confirmation bias.
One of the themes of this book is that marketers don’t embrace the findings of behavioral science and neuroscience as much as they could and should. At the same time, I also urge that marketers be cautious against basing a strategy or an idea on the latest scientific study to be written up yesterday in the popular press – be it a blog or a respected newspaper.
The second point I want to make about the fluidity of decision science is somewhat of an understatement: The brain is complex. Neuroscience experiments might single out individual brain areas – and elegantly relate regional responses to a specific behavior – but brain areas work together. Remember that two decades ago, neuroscience was convinced that the amygdala specially processed fear. But today, the amygdala is just one part, albeit an important one, of a fear-processing network.
Neuroscience has also provided the evidence to demolish some popular myths about the brain.15 One is the belief that “we only use 10% of our brains,” the premise of the 2014 movie Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson and Morgan Freeman, and directed by Luc Besson. Neuroimaging shows that this clearly isn’t the case. Another myth is that there are “left brain” people and “right brain” people. Certain functions are reliant on one side of the brain – speech is generally centered in the left hemisphere for right-handed people. But creative or (their supposed opposite) analytical tasks, nor the people who excel in either of these areas are more dependent on one side of the brain than the other.
In an interview with LiveScience,16 Dr Jeff Anderson, Director of the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service at the University of Utah, said:
It is not the case that the left hemisphere is associated with logic or reasoning more than the right. Also, creativity is no more processed in the right hemisphere than the left.
So, we will just have to find some other language to describe our colleagues who seem either more creative or more analytical.
I also want to address some of the language and terms that you will come across in this book. The broad academic field from which I have drawn most of the material included in the book is judgment and decision making (JDM). I am aware that the term decision making often leads people to think of planned decisions, of the carefully considered steps that people may go through to make a choice. “To make a decision” does, after all, sound active and rather deliberative. One of the pioneers in JDM, the late Hillel Einhorn, was described as someone who specialized in studying how people reach decisions. Although a subtle distinction, the difference between making and reaching is, to me, a significant one. It suggests the importance of nonconscious factors of which the decisionmaker (or reacher) is unaware. When you read the term decision making in this book, think of people reaching or arriving at their decisions as much as, or more than, deliberatively making them.
Research on how humans reach decisions shows that many of the processes leading to decisions are outside the realm of conscious awareness. Sometimes people (including myself until some friendly academics suggested I use an alternative) refer to these processes as being in the “subconscious.” With all respect to Freud and Jung, that word now connotes a mysterious and vaguely sinister approach to studying cognition, like a black box that needs to be “unlocked.” Psychology and neuroscience abandoned the term subconscious in favor of the terms unconscious, nonconscious, and preconscious.17 Although these three terms can mean different things in spite of often being used interchangeably, I tend to use the last two. The term unconscious makes me think of people who are not just unaware of their cognitive processes, but pretty much unaware of anything. When it comes to how people reach decisions, nonconscious and preconscious seem to describe better what actually happens, so those are the words I use in this book.
I would also like to suggest that we in marketing are more careful with our own language, particularly with words that describe people to whom we market. In a March 2013 interview,18 Keith Weed, who was Unilever’s Global Chief Marketing Officer for over a decade, described how the marketing lexicon is problematic:
Marketers need to … engage with consumers as people, not as consumers. I think the term “consumers” doesn’t help. Once you start looking at people’s lives, they are not a pair of armpits in search of deodorant or a head of hair in search of hair benefits. They are people with full lives and a lot of challenges in a rapidly changing world.
Weed’s concern is the practice of defining people through the lens of consumption in an age when all of us (from governments, companies, to individuals) need to focus on sustainability. This has gained some traction. An excellent 2015 article by Neil Parker, Chief Strategy Officer of Co:Collective gives five good reasons to abandon the word “consumer,” explaining that at his agency they prefer the word “participant.”19 My particular beef with the word consumer is more about how we marketers label the people we want to choose our products. For example, we talk about them as “targets.” In most aspects of life beyond marketing, things don’t turn out so well for actual targets.
Another example. I’ve often heard marketers say that a marketing tactic “should drive the consumer to retail.”
Unfortunately, the meaning here isn’t literally that the brand will drive the shopper to retail by laying on a car service to pick them up at 10 a.m. on a Saturday to drop them off at the mall (which would be nice), but somehow that the marketing will herd them in droves, like cattle to the abattoir. Not only is this a ridiculous exaggeration of the likely effect of any marketing, but it also disrespects the people whose decisions to buy our products pay our salaries and finance our lifestyles.
I will try to use the word target as little as possible in this book, but I have not yet come up with an alternative I am happy with. Any suggestions are very welcome.
Instead of consumer, while I like Parker’s suggestion of “participant,” I use another option. In her excellent book The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar (whose jam experiment we covered earlier) frequently refers to people who are making, or have made a choice, as choosers. I like this word for two reasons. First, it reflects and respects the importance of the “consumer” in that purchasing/buying/consuming is their choice. Second, the word chooser aligns with something I believe in deeply and that is also a major theme of this book. Marketing should be about making it intuitive and easy for people to choose your brand, your product, your service, or your cause. To buy a product in the first place is a choice, to use a product is a choice, to continue buying a product and keep using it are further choices. And recommending a product to others (should we be so lucky) is yet another choice. Marketing is more about choice than consumption.
While I may sometimes use consumer in this book (it was actually in the subtitle of the previous edition – The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers’ Instincts), I use chooser or potential chooser whenever it makes sense. And, of course, eschewing jargon, and just using the word people works pretty well, too. With that, I’d like to thank you for choosing to read The Business of Choice!
In astrobiology, the Goldilocks Zone refers to the habitable zone around a star where conditions for life are “just right.”
Edison Research/National Public Media Winter 2019 Smart Audio Report.
Afif, Z., Islan, W. W., Calvo-Gonzalez, O., & Dalton, A. G. (2018). Behavioral science around the world: Profiles of 10 countries (English). eMBeD brief. Washington, D.C.: World Bank Group.
The prize’s formal name is The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
If you could subscribe to only two online newsletters that cover practical behavioral science, I would recommend Habit Weekly and The Behavioral Scientist.
Claude Hopkins was a creative director at the agency Lord & Thomas; his reputation was such that he commanded a salary of $185,000 in 1907 (which is equivalent to approximately $5 million in 2019). He published Scientific Advertising in 1923, a book that influenced industry giants such as David Ogilvy.
Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (1994). Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions following bilateral damage to the human amygdala. Nature, 372, 669–672.
Adolphs, R., Gosselin, F., Buchanan, T. W., Tranel, D., Schyns, P., & Damasio, A. (2005). A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage. Nature, 433, 68–72.
The exact number of experiments that do not replicate is unknown, in large part because it requires publishing a null result. Just as with apps, there is pretty much a journal for everything – and there is one dedicated to null results: The Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis (www.jasnh.com).
Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995.
In 2014, P&G CEO A. G. Laffley ended the company’s decade old practice of giving its shoppers more and more choice with plans to divest or discontinue up to 100 of its brands. Laffley told analysts “There is a lot of evidence in a number of our business categories that the shopper and the consumer really don’t want more assortment and more choice.”
Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R., Todd, P. M. (2010, October). Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), 409–425, https://doi.org/10.1086/651235.
Simonsohn’s investigations have led to scientists resigning from their posts and to a number of papers being retracted. An article by Christopher Shea in the December 2012 edition of The Atlantic covers Simonsohn’s efforts in more detail.
A November 2019 article in Wired “We’re All ‘P-Hacking’ Now: An insiders’ term for scientific malpractice has worked its way into pop culture. Is that a good thing?” tells how the term “p-hacking” has featured on TV shows and gets a nod in a recent edition Cards Against Humanity, https://www.wired.com/story/were-all-p-hacking-now/.
Christian Jarrett covers these two examples and more in Great Myths of the Brain. Jarrett is also author of The Rough Guide to Psychology, an excellent introduction to the subject.
Wanjek, C. (2013, September 3). Left brain vs. right: It’s a myth, research finds. Retrieved from http://www.livescience.com/39373-left-brain-right-brain-myth.html.
Although the people who advise me on such matters tell me that the new favored word among psychologists and neuroscientists for reactions that are not conscious is reflexive. This creates a nice pairing with reflective, a term that can be used for conscious thinking.
Unilever logic. Keith Weed wants Unilever to be the trust mark of sustainable living. Hub Magazine, March/April 2013.
Five Reasons to kill the word ‘consumer’ right now, Forbes, December 2015. https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2015/12/08/five-reasons-to-kill-the-word-consumer-right-now/#58d7e54a41f5. The word “participant” is now used as description for someone taking part in psychology experiments. Ten years ago the less human term “subject” was prevalent.
- Prelims
- Part I The Business, Science, and Nature of Choice
- 1: The Business of Choice
- 2: The Ever-Advancing Science of Choice
- 3: The Natural History of Choice
- Part II Getting Practical Today
- 4: Shortcuts versus Analysis –Ignoring is Decisional Bliss
- 5: Getting Familiar
- 6: Thanks for Sharing (Whether You Meant to or Not)
- 7: Now, and the Future – Different Places with Different Rules
- 8: Loss and Ownership
- 9: Make People Feel Smart, Attractive – or Even Lucky
- 10: Make It Easy – For the Mind and the Body
- 11: Never Be Above Comparison
- 12: If Content is King, Context is Queen
- 13: Same and Different; Nature and Nurture
- 14: The Power of Affirmation and Sparking Joy
- Part III Looking Forward
- 15: Think Differently about Market Research
- 16: Think Differently about How You Work
- 17: Choosing without Choosing – Artificial Intelligence and Choice
- Conclusion
- Index