The Opportunity for Marketing “Simplification”

Joel Rubinson, chief research officer of the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), uses behavioral economics to demonstrate how recent history has refocused marketing, in some cases, in the wrong direction.

The Opportunity for Marketing “Simplification”

Joel RubinsonThe Advertising Research Foundation

It's in our nature to simplify. Social scientists have learned that it's the way people make choices. And marketers can find great opportunities if they learn from the same lessons.

The essential concept: Traditional economic approaches that assume that people make decisions by trading off all features of allalternatives to maximize utility are wrong. Instead, people use simplifying heuristics to get through complex decision making. For example, people naturally classify alternatives into categories and then eliminate broad sets of alternatives. They consider alternatives in succession...

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