The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers’ Instincts

1. The Business of Choice

For a brand or business to be successful, it needs people to choose it, so it is important to understand how people choose.

We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Moral choices. Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But! We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices.

—Professor Louis Levy

Before you go looking for the “Collected Works of Professor Louis Levy,” I should explain that Levy is a character in Woody Allen’s film Crime and Misdemeanors, and this quote is part of a monologue about human destiny, love, and our choices that draws the movie to a close.

It might seem almost insultingly obvious that we are in ...