The Business of Choice

How Human Instinct Influences Everyone's Decisions

Matthew Willcox

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781839820717
• eBook ISBN: 9781839820724
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Awarded Bronze Medal in the Advertising / Marketing / PR / Event Planning category of the 2021 Axiom Business Book Awards.

In this 2nd edition of award winning The Business of Choice, expert author and consultant Matthew Willcox explores the science of influencing choice, bringing together the work of thousands of behavioral scientists and practitioners. Cutting to the heart of the science, Willcox helps you apply this to your own marketing and brand strategies, allowing you to use an understanding of how humans naturally decide to make your brand or business a natural choice. 

The Business of Choice takes you through the story of how instinct affects our decisions, from its roots in our evolutionary history, to technology and artificial intelligence today. You'll discover how human nature affects how people decide, whether they are making choices for grocery shopping, or their retirement investments. 

The first edition of The Business of Choice was awarded the 2016 Berry – American Marketing Association Book Prize for Best Book in Marketing.

PART I

THE BUSINESS, SCIENCE, AND NATURE OF CHOICE

1

THE BUSINESS OF CHOICE

For a brand or business to be successful, it needs people to choose it, so it is important to understand how people choose.

We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Moral choices. Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But! We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices. (Professor Louis Levy)

Before you go looking for the “Collected Works of Professor Louis Levy,” I should explain that Levy is a character in Woody Allen’s film Crime and Misdemeanors, and this quote is part of a monologue about human destiny, love, and our choices that draws the movie to a close.

It might seem almost insultingly obvious that we are in fact the sum total of our choices, as Levy says. The course of our lives follows the choices we make. If I hadn’t chosen to accept a job with an advertising agency nearly 30 years ago, I wouldn’t have been in San Francisco 20 years later working on a new business pitch for a client that offered its customers a dizzying array of choices. If I hadn’t been working on that pitch, I wouldn’t have interviewed Barry Schwartz, Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. He wouldn’t have suggested I attend the Society for Judgment and Decision Making Conference, and I wouldn’t have had the experience outlined in the preface that led to my writing this book. Every day we all make choices and, just as in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, they take our lives in one direction rather than another.

Yet, if our choices define us, as the fictional Professor Levy suggests, if they determine to a large extent whether we will be happy, how comfortable our retirement will turn out, and even how healthy we will be, then it is amazing that while we spend huge amounts of time pondering the outcomes of our choices, we spend so little time thinking about how we make the choices we make. (Now don’t feel bad about that – there are very good reasons why we think so little about how we make our choices that we’ll explore in Chapter 4, “Shortcuts Versus Analysis – Ignoring is Decisional Bliss.”)

Choices don’t just have a profound effect on individuals’ lives – they also determine whether an organization will be successful. Whenever I do a workshop or keynote, one of the first slides I show is a definition of marketing that I have been using for a decade or more. It reads like this:

Marketing is the creation, management, and measurement of programs designed to influence the choices you need people to make to meet your objectives.

The point I make is that the success of any organization depends on ensuring people make the choices that can help the organization meet its goals, whether the choices are those of a procurement team in Chicago wrestling with the decision to spend tens of millions on cloud services with Amazon or Microsoft; a shopper in a supermarket in Milan choosing between Lavazza or Illy, or store brand coffee; a young woman in Dar Es Salam choosing to use an intrauterine device to avoid pregnancy so that she can stay in school for a year or two longer; or a commuter in Mexico City deciding whether to make the switch to an Electric Vehicle. The outcomes of these choices, and hundreds of billions like them every day, can edge organizations closer to or further away from their goals and lead companies to post a bullish or a bearish outlook for the next quarter. Every organization is dependent on how people choose, and marketing is simply how organizations influence the choices that will allow them to reach their objectives. Yes, you as a marketer may develop and implement the marketing, but ultimately your fate rests on the choices of others. I describe the role of marketing as being to make those choices easy, natural and rewarding.

Businesses only succeed when their products or services are chosen; and marketing is at the sharp end of this – it is the business of choice. Marketers spend a lot of time, effort, and money learning about things that may affect that choice – understanding purchase paths and decision journeys, where their brand sits in culture, how their brand is perceived, or how likely people say they are to purchase it. But I believe most marketers need to be more forensic in their efforts to reveal all of the important aspects that might help (or get in the way of) people making the choices that will enable the organization to make its objectives. I call this being decision-centric.

Let me explain this idea of being decision-centric a little. Marketers will often talk about being consumer-centric or even consumer-obsessed. But to my mind, the rock in the snowball of a consumer-centric approach needs to be a deep focus on understanding the human factors, the cultural factors, and the system factors that shape the choices that you need people to make. Being decision-centric means starting with what will make those choices easy and natural paths to take, or what may make them paths to avoid, and working out from there. Marketing that comes from insights about your consumer’s life, their cultural values and interests, and what they love, share and sing along to might be considered consumer-centric. But unless you start with the behavior you want people to adopt, and the choices you want people to make, your marketing might not have the effect on those choices that you require.

In June 2013, I was attending the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to give a talk with Adam Alter. Adam is an associate professor at New York University (NYU)’s Stern School of Business and one of the nicest and most intelligent people you could hope to meet. Adam’s first book, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave, had just been published. Our presentation at the conference covered how context affects choices and behavior, and in truth, the talk was about 90% Adam and 10% me. He did a fantastic job, and I was told afterward it was one of the top-rated talks at the conference.

But the real stars at the Cannes Lions aren’t the speakers, they are the winners of the eponymous Lions that are awarded for the creative work judged to be best by a jury of advertising and marketing luminaries (in career terms winning a Lion is a big deal,¹ and being invited to be a juror is a resumé item in itself). And that year, 2013, there was really only one star – a public service campaign from Australia for Metro Trains Melbourne, designed with the objective of keeping Melbourne citizens from getting hurt in and around Metro train service areas. Described as a “pop-culture phenomenon,” it has a range of animated characters who sing about their absurd and comic deaths (that include “using your private parts as piranha bait” and “dressing up as a moose in hunting season”) with a lilting and catchy song, “Dumb Ways to Die.” It became the most awarded campaign in the 60+-year history of the Cannes Lions, winning 5 Grand Prix, 18 Gold Lions, 3 Silver Lions, and 2 Bronze Lions. Campaign Brief reported that “ad legend Lee Clow said, ‘I wish I did Dumb Ways to Die,’ and fellow legend Dan Wieden said, ‘this is the campaign everyone here wishes they did.’”

While I’m sure there is little doubt that this loveable short film, which had racked up over 184 million views on YouTube as of December 2019, has contributed to overall human happiness, there are questions about whether it has done as much to “keep Melbourne citizens from getting hurt in and around Metro train service areas.” Beyond the creative awards, Cannes Lions has also introduced a “Creative Effectiveness Lion.” To win a Creative Effectiveness Lion, entrants have to demonstrate how work that has won a creative Lion in previous years achieved (or better, surpassed) its objectives. Despite cleaning up at the 2013 Creative Lions, Dumb Ways to Die was shortlisted, but didn’t win one of the seven Lions² awarded in 2014 for creative effectiveness. While the social media impact was unquestionably powerful, a number of articles suggest the effect on local, on the ground behavior change was not as marked.³ An article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review from Spring 2017 goes further, suggesting that the nature of the campaign may have an effect on increased suicide attempts by “normalizing death, suicide, and violence as something common, cool, or even charming, but most important, not permanent.”⁴ The authors also bring up an excellent general point about the importance of practitioners grounding their efforts in academic research:

Unfortunately, it is uncommon for practitioners to conduct a review of academic literature as part of the early stages of any effort. The gulf between scholarship that could help practitioners avoid harm, reduce risk, or increase the effectiveness of their efforts and practice is common and wide.

Three years later, in October 2016, I was talking at another conference, The Behavioral Marketing Summit in San Francisco. One of the other speakers was Ram Prasad, co-founder of FinalMile, which is a behavioral insights and marketing consultancy based in Mumbai. At the time, with an average of 10 fatalities a day, the largest cause of unnatural death in Mumbai was trains striking humans as they cross railway tracks.⁵ Trains laden with commuters race through densely populated areas of the city every couple of minutes, and as pedestrian bridges over the rails are few and far between, thousands of people simply walk or run across the tracks.

Prasad presented a range of interventions that FinalMile had designed and tested with Central Railways, the zone of Indian Railways that serves areas including Mumbai. FinalMile’s approach started with trying to understand the behavior and decision making of individuals who risked, and unfortunately too often lost their lives as a result of being struck by trains as they crossed railway tracks. One of the things they did to do this was to review footage from cameras that had recorded “near misses.” The team was struck by the apparent surprise on the faces of those who had narrowly avoided death. It was as if they hadn’t even seen the train coming.

Digging into this insight led the FinalMile team to the work of Hershfield Leibowitz, who was one of the pioneers in studying visual perception, particularly as it relates to size, distance, and motion. They realized that a key issue (and the reason for the stunned expressions of the rail-crossers immediately after they experienced near misses) was how the brain processes the speed of large, distant, and fast-moving objects. As Prasad writes in his blog:

There is a scientific backing to this misjudgment of speed. Our brain underestimates the speed of large objects, including trains. Often, while crossing tracks, even after spotting a train, we tend to attempt to cross because the train appears to be moving slower.

The challenge FinalMile faced wasn’t about educating Mumbians that trains are dangerous, or that they moved faster than people think. Nor did the problem lie with people’s knowledge, or about how they consciously calculated risk. The problem was that humans are not naturally good at estimating the speed of large, fast-moving objects (perhaps because large things traveling faster than 30 mph, like trains and trucks, have only been a threat for a tiny slither of human existence, we haven’t evolved that capacity), and that we make that assessment faster than the speed of conscious thought.

FinalMile understood that the decision to cross, or not to cross, the track was based on an inaccurate nonconscious perception of speed. Prasad continues:

If the problem, fundamentally is at a nonconscious level, the solutions should work at this nonconscious level for it to make a definite and quick impact. The solution should make the brain recalibrate the speed of the train in an “Auto” mode where it doesn’t need to deliberate and expend energy.

One of their solutions was to paint ties⁶ (the large slabs of wood or concrete that support the rails) bright yellow. As Prasad says:

As these yellow lines disappear under the train, the brain can instantly get the speed judgement right and take a decision not to cross the tracks. The beauty with this intervention is that it works at a nonconscious level, has an instant impact and is low cost. Most importantly, it is at the point of action.

FinalMile and Central Railways also did what is at the heart of evidence-based practice, but that marketers often lack patience for. They ran an experiment with the yellow lines and two other tactics⁷ at Wadala Road Station on Mumbai’s Harbour Line. An article in The Boston Globe reported⁸:

In the six months before the experiment went live in December 2009, Wadala had recorded 23 track-crossing deaths, said M. C. Chauhan, a manager with the Central Railway’s Mumbai division. Between January and June 2010, that number had dropped to nine; in the next eight months, up until February 2011, on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I. The Business, Science, and Nature of Choice
• Part II. Getting Practical Today
• Part III. Looking Forward
• Conclusion
• Index