By Nancy Harhut
The marketing schools teach it. The marketing gurus preach it. And if you work in the business, you hope to reach it. I’m talking about the formula for marketing success: get the right message to the right person at the right time.
That’s the Holy Grail we all chase. And as an industry, we’ve made major strides. We’ve developed incredible apps, created powerful platforms, and drilled down into big data. In fact, this Thursday at BostInno’s 50 on Fire celebration, some of the very people and companies behind accomplishments like these will be honored as “innovators, disrupters, luminaries, newsmakers and game changers driving innovation in Boston and beyond.”
But as an industry, there’s also one thing we’ve overlooked. And it’s the thing that can make all those other achievements that much more effective. It’s HOW people make decisions.
Social scientists and behavioral economists have done considerable research into the subject. And what they’ve found is amazing. It turns out human beings have developed decision making shortcuts – automatic, instinctive, reflexive behaviors in response to certain situations and stimuli. We’ve developed them as a way to conserve mental energy, because we couldn’t possibly weigh every bit of data before making a decision or we’d never make any. So we cruise along on auto-pilot, defaulting to these hardwired behaviors without even thinking about it.
And it’s these automatic, hardwired responses marketers need to know about – and use.
For example, people are more likely to choose a middle option, more motivated to avoid pain than to achieve pleasure, more apt to look at pictures of faces, and more desirous of things that are scarce. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
It’s also why I’ll be at the 50 on Fire awards on Thursday, representing Wilde Agency and the pioneering work we do infusing decision science into marketing. Work that generates double and triple digit lifts in response. Work that’s proving to be game-changing in the industry.
Because today it’s no longer enough to get the right message to the right person at the right time. Today marketing success depends on getting the right message to the right person at the right time and in the right way – the way that makes it most likely they’ll engage with and respond to it. And that means developing strategies and executions that leverage the science of human behavior.
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