Whether you want to win a colleague's support, attract a new client or persuade consumers to buy your products, a big part of your strategy will be to identify the factors that will influence your target's decision.
A common approach taken by businesses to figure out what makes people tick is just to ask them. Questionnaires, market research, phone surveys and focus groups can be useful but also problematic. As any behavioural scientist knows, asking people what persuades them to make decisions is not that helpful — primarily because they won't know.
In today's information overloaded world, evidence suggests that 95 per cent of our decisions are made without rational thought. So consciously asking people how they will behave unconsciously is at best naïve and, at worst, can be disastrous for a business.
A well-known example is the launch of New Coke in 1985. Coca-Cola invested in cutting-edge customer research to ensure that New Coke would be a big success. Taste tests with thousands of consumers clearly showed that people preferred it. The reality was somewhat different, however. Hardly anyone bought it.
Behavioural scientist Wesley Schultz has some compelling evidence of why asking people what they think influences their decisions is largely ineffective. In one set of studies, he asked hundreds of homeowners what messages would be most successful at persuading them to make certain changes, such as turning down the heating, recycling more and being more environmentally friendly. Most said that receiving information about their impact on the environment would make them change. However, this made very little difference at all. In another study, people who said that providing them with information about how much money they could save if they reduced consumption led to them to use even more!
Interestingly, the message that most successfully changed their behaviour (information about how neighbours were making changes) was pretty much dismissed as unlikely to have any effect on them at all.
Evidence such as this sends a message that new approaches are needed. Tools such as controlled field studies, which show what consumers actually do, will often be cheaper than traditional market research. And the insights they reveal could provide a real competitive advantage to the businesses that rise to the challenge.
Steve Martin is co-author of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion. Visit scienceofyes.com.
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