Institute of Decision Making

“Luxury brands will always need to appeal to the senses and to have the hand of an artist not far away. But to make the most of their brand in the modern world, perhaps that artist should have two new bedfellows: the digital technologist and the behavioral scientist.”

Read Matthew Willcox, Executive Director of the Institute of Decision Making’s piece on a cognitive approach to luxury, published recently on Luxury Daily

Great video of a recent presentation at Advertising Week UK by Simon White, Draftfcb Chief Planning Officer and IDM lead in Europe and Phil Barden, Managing Director of Decode UK, and author of “Decoded”.

View it here

Draftfcb set up the Institute of Decision Making, part of our Global Capabilities group, to

bring greater understanding of how consumers make decisions to our network and our

clients. In pursuit of this goal, we have been working closely with our holding company,

IPG, on the third wave of New Realities – Consumer Decision Making in Today’s New

Information World, a major piece of research involving over 3,000 consumers across five

of the world’s most important economies. The Institute played an important role in

bringing our understanding of cognitive mechanisms and expert views on the data from

acclaimed authors and professors of neuroeconomics and marketing from leading universities.

We will shortly be posting the full white paper on the research and our conclusions.

Executive Director Matthew Willcox is interviewed in Adweek’s Six Questions series.

When Steve Jobs was asked if Apple had used consumer research to help design and launch the iPad, he replied “No.” And when asked why not, he said, “It’s not the consumer’s job to know what they want.”

While many us might not want, or might not be well advised to trust our guts to the extent that Jobs did, we could learn from his skepticism of asking people what they think and feel and taking their answers as definitive information to drive our marketing to them.

Actually, a better answer for Jobs to give would have been “The consumer isn’t very good at telling you what they want.” Yet most marketing research is based on asking them what they think about products, brands or ideas, whether it does this by questioning them in focus groups or having them answer direct questions in quantitative research.

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