Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

Closing Remarks

We have now come to the end of our journey. I started this book by saying that I’d been confronted with a fascinating and new mental model for marketing and consumer decision making, based on the latest scientific findings in the area of decision science. By now I’m sure that you share my view that we can now understand much previously unexplained consumer behaviour.

There are those in marketing who may have already suspected, or even have known, some of the findings contained herein, but the key thing is that we now have a more analytical, evidence-based framework to access consumer decision making. The core insight behind this is the importance of the implicit level of decision making. Integrating this implicit level into our day-to-day marketing practice results in a paradigm shift, giving us an entirely new perspective from which we can manage our products, services and brands. This new perspective offers us a great opportunity to generate superior net value for our customers, and hence to significantly increase our sales. It also helps us to close the implementation gap between strategy and execution and, in doing so, substantially reduces the risk of failure of new product developments and relaunches, and also makes our advertising budgets more effective.

This book also started with a major challenge to marketers: a study showing that CEOs do not think highly of marketing, in large part because of its intangibility – referring to it as ‘la la land’. This book ...