Culture, social choices and a kick up the backside: what marketers can learn from behavioural economics

This event report explores how behavioural economics should look outside of the individual in order to understand the social influences that affect people as well as the discipline of behavioural economics itself.

"Culture shapes all of our behaviour all of the time," according to Mark Earls. Speaking at Behavioural Economics in Advertising, a London event organised by WARC in March 2017, Earls, a marketing and behaviour change consultant, told the discipline to step outside the lab, and to look outside the brain.

Marketers are missing out the most important elements of behavioural economics "if we only focus on what goes on between an individual's ears", he said. That's because humans find thinking quite difficult, and don't like to bear a large cognitive load. Instead, we take shortcuts.

Quoting Daniel Kahneman, Earls pointed...

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