Decoding Decisions: Navigating the messy middle, across the globe
Our initial Decoding Decisions work with client Google, based solely in the UK, explored how consumers make online purchase decisions, the role of behavioural science in this decision-making, and how these dynamics differ across a number of categories. Following the success of this initial work, Google decided to roll out the approach further, across 12 more countries and 47 categories.
TBA Approach.
Qualitative deep dive into consumer decision-making using live screen recording and consumer narration of shopping journeys in each category.
The outputs from the qualitative research were used to design purchase simulations for each category, leveraging a choice-based conjoint methodology. The approach was tailored for each country and category.
A total of 135,000 respondents took part in the simulated purchase scenarios, to test and validate the role of 7 behavioural science concepts at scale. Over a million simulations were run.
Each behavioural science principle was analysed to give us a score of importance, comparing them across countries and categories.
Behavioural Insights, Interventions & Impact.
The behavioural conjoint purchase simulations again powerfully demonstrated the role of behavioural science executions in transferring brand preference within a category.
Social Norms, Category Heuristics, and Power of Free were the most important principles globally. Other principles such as Authority Bias, Power of Now, and Scarcity Bias have a significant but lesser impact.
The importance of brand for swaying purchasing decisions varied across both markets and categories, and this meant that the extent of influence behavioural science had on purchase decisions also varied.
Local Google clients are publishing the results and activating the findings across their sales teams.