Institute of Decision Making

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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On June 20th, following an introduction from Draftfcb’s worldwide CEO and President, the Institute’s Executive Director Matthew Willcox took the stage at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity with Jonah Lehrer, author of ‘How We Decide’ and his upcoming book, ‘Imagine: The Science of Creativity.’ In this video, Jonah addresses the intersection of strategic problem solving, artistic creativity, and consumer decision-making, helping us better understand how we must leverage science and creativity in tandem to create communications that will help consumers see things in a new way and move them to a decision. In concert with IDM’s aim to better understand the instinctual triggers that motivate decision-making, Lehrer shares his investigations around the science behind encouraging and fostering creativity and how we can apply these fundamentals as individuals and in our organizations.

Exploring the Science of Creativity from Draftfcb on Vimeo.

Dan Ariely spoke with the Institute of Decision Making at the Society for Judgement and Decision Making Conference in St. Louis, Missouri about how to influence people to do the right thing. From looking at principles such as the identifiable victim bias to influential reward systems, Ariely walks us through how we, as marketers, should be working alongside behavioral economists to discover how we can influence people to make the right decisions.

Matthew Willcox interviews Dr. Robert Cialdini, Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” at the 2010 Behavior Energy and Climate Change conference. The conversation covered the importance of behavioral studies to marketers, and what rules of “Influence” may be the most instinctual.

The Institute had the opportunity to chat with Adam Alter, a psychologist at New York University Stern School and Institute collaborator, about how context can influence decision making. Alter’s work challenges us to think about how situational factors – from broad environmental shifts in weather to minor manipulations of fonts and layout – can alter people’s judgments.

A common theme across his work is understanding the extent to which easily processed content (or cognitive fluency) guides thinking. People instinctually prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. Marketers who focus on simplifying the cognitive process needed to make a decision by delivering “digestible” solutions can gain competitive advantage in a world of choice.