The Business of Choice

Book excerpt: Whether your objective is to grow a brand or promote healthy behaviors, you need a deep understanding of how humans intuitively make choices using cognitive mechanisms that have evolved over millions of years. Marketing is about influencing consumers' decisions, and the more you understand about human nature, the more successful you'll be. Fortunately, dramatic recent advances in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the behavioral and social sciences are revolutionizing the way we understand human decision-making. The Business of Choice doesn't just reveal what's been learned: it shows how to use these insights to make your brand or behavior the most instinctive, intuitive, and easiest choice. Authored by Matthew Willcox, founder and executive director of Draft FCB's pioneering Institute of Decision Making, The Business of Choice shows you: How choice has shaped the human species, leading to choices that often seem strange and irrational How marketers can leverage the same evolutionary factors that have made humans so successful What we copy from others, and what we don't copy: the power and limitations of "social" The huge cognitive biases associated with planning the future and remembering the past How to make decisions easy for consumers: building cognitive fluency, creating reference points, architecting information, and managing choice Convincing customers to feel intuitively good about the choices they've made - so they'll return for more