Scientific Marketing: Winning with Behavioral Economics

Scientific Marketing: Winning with Behavioral Economics:from Wide Angle by Anna Bird
Register here for the webinar with Intuit (October 4^th at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm GMT)

• Does your team regularly find ways to generate $0.5 million in incremental revenue with less than two weeks of development time?
• Do you – and everyone on your team – have a solid understanding of the latest and most actionable findings from customer psychology?
• Do you take a hypothesis-based (test-and-learn) approach to marketing?  And are your hypotheses always grounded in powerful psychological principles?

If you answered ‘no’ to any of these, check out Intuit’s super-simple process for systematizing use of behavioral economics — the study of how we make purchase decisions in all sorts of surprising ways.
By taking our natural decision-making techniques into account, Marketing can dramatically boost sales – without expensive product updates.  Often, a small change in how an offer is positioned or framed can make a huge difference (as Marketing has long known).  You never see anyone advertise “10% fat”; it’s always “90% lean”, for example.  But though Marketing has haphazardly used these principles forever and great marketers intuitively “get” decision-making psychology, few companies have been systematic about applying behavioral economics.  But that’s all changing…
In recent years, a slew of studies and books on behavioral economics (Thinking Fast and Slow, Predictably Irrational, How We Decide, etc.) have raised the discipline’s profile and got marketers to take notice.  These studies coincided with a greater push for Marketing to become more scientific: to rely less on gut when making decisions and be less swayed by cool, flashy ideas or novelty.  In response, we’ve seen a range of behavioral economics applications at member companies.
We’ve heard of marketers teaching sales reps to use behavioral economics, as one example.  Instead of providing the typical soft skills training on how to adapt your language based on who you’re talking to, these companies teach reps how to use language to frame offers more compellingly.  It’s simpler (since it requires minimal personalization) and far more powerful.  The same techniques work well in call centers too.  In a series of experiments, CEB has found that customers respond very differently to the same service outcome if the call center rep phrases it differently.
Intuit is one company that’s been particularly successful in this area.  With help from behavioral economics experts, Intuit has created the ultimate psychology cheat sheet: a one-page reminder of the most actionable aspects of decision-making psychology, including how we process information, how we assess value, and how emotions and social norms influence our decisions. They’ve also put processes in place to encourage, routinize, and simplify use of the principles.  And it’s paid off.  Intuit has already run tons of behavioral economics experiments and seen stellar results.
Members, to learn more about how Intuit applies behavioral economics and see examples of the principles in action, please join us next week when Lisa Marco-Pritchard, Leader of Central Marketing Excellence and Innovation at Intuit, will share their work in more detail.