Behavioural Economics: Why People Don’t Always Act Rationally
Behavioural Economics reveals the emotional and subconscious drivers of consumer decisions, enabling brands to shape behaviour.
Using our proprietary three-step process - Decode, Decide, Do, we turn psychological insights into practical strategies that build preference and loyalty.
Why That Matters to You?
Decode: Uncovers stimuli that drive consumer emotions, this is the contextual factors behind choices, moving beyond what people say to why they act.
Decide: Decide what matters, the strength of the response, the positives and negatives - the levers to behaviour!
Do: Translates insights into effective business strategies, from product development, product positioning, to communications that emotionally engage consumers.
To truly understand consumers, you have to go beyond what they say—and uncover why they behave the way they do. That’s where behavioural economics becomes relevant.
Behavioural economivs sits at the intersection of psychology and economics, revealing how real people make real decisions—often irrational, emotional, and deeply influenced by context. It explains why we’ll pay more for coffee in one café over another, why too much choice can paralyse us, and why we stay loyal to brands that make us feel something—even if they’re not the cheapest or most logical option.
Behavioural economics shows us that humans don’t just buy products—they buy experiences, emotions, and stories. And when you understand the unconscious drivers behind those choices, you unlock the ability to shape behaviour, not just observe it.
This isn’t theory. It’s commercial insight. And it’s changing the game for brands that want to stay relevant in an increasingly complex market.
Consumer and shopper focused psychological techniques and tools are deployed to discover how people feel and map their emotional journey. This usable understanding enables you to shape behaviour, preference and loyalty.
What: Decode the consumer interaction - the stimuli, the emotions, subconscious and cues in the experience that influence decision making.
So What: We Decide what matters - filtering the important from the background, the rhythm from the melody, the priority and sequence of what is happening and also, crucially, the shortfalls. The ability to see what’s missing, hear the silences because we don’t only look for what’s there but for what isn’t because our mapping and decoding process allows us to score what is not chosen as well as what is. A key advantage of our technique is the ability to understand the importance of what’s missing as the words consumers don’t select are really important.
What Next: Do The actions that come from the above analysis. This requires interpretation, creativity and use of our EP library which we call ‘Alan’. An opportunity to look broadly across many different categories/occasions/consumers and also real world project experience for application within the commercial environment. The activation and agency actions - the retail brief, the comms brief, the product brief, the brand pyramid, the positioning, the naming strategy, the negotiation brief … All these come from the first 2Ds but without the third dimension then it has less chance of pure implementation.
To achieve the results you are looking for you require a 3D answer for the real world not a 2D answer which is nice in theory. 3D = Decode, Decide & Do.
