Apply Behavioral Insights playfully in marketing

What goes on in customers' minds when you make a decision? A continuing education course at the ZHAW provides answers.The interest of marketers in the new topics of behavioral economics, behavioral insights and nudging is growing steadily. Behind this interest lies the marketers' need to better understand and predict the decision-making behavior of customers - thanks, for example, to psychological principles. Thus, interested marketers have a variety of information sources at their disposal, both analog and digital. In Zurich, for example, interested parties from various industries meet once a month as part of the Zurich Behavioral Economics Network and exchange information about various fields of application of behavioral economics. Or you can stay up to date on Twitter under keywords like #BehavioralEconomics, #Nudge and #BehavioralInsights.Acquiring knowledge is one thing. However, the big challenge for marketers is often how to apply this knowledge in practice, e.g. when implementing marketing and communication measures. An example: In the last decades, followers of decision psychology or behavioral economics have compiled a long list of heuristics and cognitive errors (so-called "biases") that influence human decision behavior under certain conditions. Wikipedia currently lists nearly 200 examples of such heuristics and biases under the keyword "cognitive biases," starting with A for the "anchoring" heuristic and ending with Z for the Zeigarnik effect. But with such a flood of psychological effects, how can one find out which ones might be relevant for marketing one's own offer? In order to ensure the link between theory and practice, marketers therefore need tools that are as simple as possible to analyze the decision-making behavior of their own customers and to derive implementation ideas for practice. The Institute of Marketing Management at the ZHAW has developed the "Nudging Toolbox" for this purpose: a simple method construction kit consisting of various elements that is intended to playfully help marketing practitioners answer questions such as the following: At which point in the customer journey should the customer's decision be influenced? Which decision-making system in the customer is worth addressing, the intuitive or the rational? Which heuristics and biases hinder or promote the customer's decisions? The "Nudging Toolbox" is one of the didactic tools used in the Institute of Marketing Management's continuing education course to give marketing practitioners a lively understanding of the benefits of behavioral psychological insights. The 3-day course will be held for the second time in May 2016 on the Winterthur campus of the ZHAW. Further information about the course is available here.Author: Dr. Linda Miesler, Lecturer at the Institute of Marketing Management, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)