Ian Birkett, Creative Director at Corporate Culture, explores what creative teams can take from behavioural science to better understand how people think, and use it to improve their design.
Behavioural science shows that 95% of human decisions are made subconsciously and intuitively, guided by innate biases and emotions. Yet traditional creative communications and marketing are too often designed for conscious, rational thought, and fail to effectively influence behaviour.
Behavioural creative uses the latest behavioural science insights to shape the creative process, and design outputs so they are in tune with how people think, process information and make decisions.
Tech and digital businesses constantly monitor and experiment with how people react with their products and services to see what is working best. But what can creative teams take from behavioural science to better understand how people think and how can they use it to improve their design?
The difficulties of decisionmaking
The common view of behaviours is based around long-held assumptions of people behaving rationally. But that assumes when we’re about to make a decision we all do things like:
- Consciously weigh up all the available information
- Calculate all of the pros and cons of our various options
- Make a reasoned decision that’s in our own best interest
- And then act decisively.
That’s asking a lot: perfect knowledge, strong memory, self-control, and unlimited mental energy, time and attention. Then throw in the fact that we all make something like 35,000 decisions every day, and it’s clear our brains need a little help.
