Heuristics

Marketing and psychology are intertwined in ways we can scarcely imagine. Since marketing psychology goes hand in hand with?what drives consumer behavior, we can borrow insights from behavioral sciences such as neuroscience and?cognitive science?to better grasp how a consumer’s feelings and perceptions may influence their buying choices.?

Do we make rational, well-thought-out decisions all day, every day? We’d like to think so, but our brains constantly receive a massive amount of input. In order to keep from becoming overwhelmed by all the potential decisions presented to us daily, our brains have developed shortcuts to help us make faster decisions. These shortcuts are called heuristics.

For example, instead of thinking about which product is actually best a consumer might just think about which?brand?they like most. This mental substitution is a type of heuristic.

Understanding heuristics and how they will affect your customer is a crucial step of the marketing research process. It will ultimately influence your methodology to garner the most actionable insights from your research.

We can better understand shopper behavior through a deeper understanding of heuristics. Getting a firm grasp of the “how” and “why” shoppers make shopping decisions is crucial to include in your marketing research process.

One heuristic that frequently comes into play in the realm of advertising is the scarcity heuristic. When assessing the value of something, we often fall back on this heuristic, leading us to believe that the more rare the object in question, the more valuable it is.

A 2011 study by Praveen Aggarwal, Sung Yul Jun, and Jong Ho Huh evaluated the impact of “scarcity messages” on consumer behavior. They found that both “limited quantity” and “limited time” advertisements influence consumers’ intentions to purchase, but “limited quantity” messages are more effective. This explains why people get so excited over the one-day-only Black Friday sales.