Dan Ariely is a professor and behavioral economist whose work studying decision making has taken him from MIT to Duke University. Dan’s work highlights the irrational (rather than rational) nature of human cognition, and how with an understanding of our limitations, we can design systems that work to help people make better decisions. Thursday evening he was invited to speak at the Deutsch offices in New York, where PSFK was able to take part in a conversation around what insights marketers and advertisers can glean from Dan’s learnings.
A couple of key ideas stood out, captured below:
Data vs Experimentation
Ariely noted that he is always surprised how little experimentation is done in the marketing world. Much of the industry prides itself on the insightful intuition of strategists and creatives – and of course Dan spends much time warning about the fallibility of intuition. The other half of the industry heralds the availability of data and metrics from digital or interactive work, or the foundation of decisions in primary and secondary research.
Dan says there’s a couple of problems here. First, research is often conducted with methods that themselves are based on intuitions – it’s assumed that focus groups provide direct insight into consumer preferences when they are in fact very removed from the real context in which people make decisions. More importantly, Dan stresses that there’s a difference between data and experimentation- and the two are often confused. The availability of data is helpful, and can guide hypothesis, but it’s not the same as a robust method of experimentation in which researchers have a crystalized idea of exactly what limited variables they are testing.
Designing Environments For Healthy Living
Dan notes that wine is something that our physical bodies are biological conditioned to abhor, and yet interestingly enough it has long weaved itself deeply into the social fabric of many cultures. Dan’s current work is looking at the social consumption vocabulary we have developed around wine to differentiate it amongst ourselves – we talk about tannins and acidity and nose and body, all as part wine’s complex role in our social interactions.
Dan’s team is wondering: what if we could develop the same kind of vocabulary around vegetables? How would that impact they way people think about and consume something that contributes to their long-term well-being? Dan’s work has long been rooted in understanding the way that we can architect environments that help us make better decisions – his latest hypothesis is that a consumption vocabulary which creates social value in discussing vegetables would be a part of a social environment that fosters healthy eating.
Watch video of Dan sharing other thoughts from the gathering below:
On how increasing numbers of choices can confound actual purchase decisions:
On how we make comparisons only based on the options intuitively available to us, and how similar options impact decisions in unexpected ways:
image via Boston.com
