The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers’ Instincts

13. Same and Different; Nature and Nurture

Both nature and nurture drive people’s choices, so marketers need to factor both into their thinking.

Let’s go back, for a minute, to Professor Louis Levy, Woody Allen’s fictional psychologist and philosopher from the film Crime and Misdemeanors whom I introduced in Part I of this book. Levy tells us how our lives are shaped by our choices, how we are “the sum total” of them.

But what shapes our choices? Universal aspects of behavior? Our individual biological differences? The effect of our cultural context? Our personal experiences?

The answer is, of course, all the above.

So, conveniently, we don’t need to get into a debate about whether our choices are driven by nature or nurture. The answer is both. ...