What is a Behavioral Barrier? Behavioral barriers are the psychological, emotional, or cognitive challenges that can stop customers from doing what we want them to do (whether that’s engaging with our app, buying our product, and more). When we’re applying behavioral science and marketing psychology to an experience, it’s critical that we start to figure…

In 1997, a marketing genius named Sidney Frank built a brand that went from $0 in sales to being sold for $2 billion in an all-cash deal to Bacardi. In only eight years. Unsurprisingly, Frank used psychology and behavioral science to do it (whether he knew it or not)… Prefer…

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve heard that Meta just released its Twitter knock-off called Threads. We’re witnessing a fascinating marketing case study in real-time. Here’s why this time, we’ve finally found our Twitter killer. Why Threads Will Succeed Where Others Have Failed The big challenge with any new social media platform is getting a critical mass…

Psychological pricing is a technique that leverages the flawed human decision-making process to create prices for products. Basically, research says that people don’t really know how much something should cost. We use our environment and context clues to try and figure out if a price is “fair.” A “good price”…

Part One of the ultimate guide to Duolingo’s use of behavioral science and design — Duolingo is one of the world’s most successful learning-based businesses. In 2022, it made nearly half a billion dollars in revenue (a 46% increase from the year prior) and had 16.3M daily active users. Maybe its success isn’t surprising — there are lots of reasons to want to learn a…

One of the biggest challenges in design marketing is empathy — feeling what your customers feel. Why is it so important to have empathy for your customers? It’s down to a cognitive bias called the False Consensus Effect. What is the False Consensus Effect? This principle describes peoples’ tendency to think that our own beliefs, behaviors…

Have you ever worked for a company where all your new ideas were shot down? It probably wasn’t because people didn’t like your ideas. They were fearful of these new ideas — knowingly or not. They were used to the way things were — the status quo — and didn’t…

Behavioral Science is a hot topic — but according to Choice Hacking research, more than 50% of agencies in the US and the UK don’t know where it fits, how it can help them, or — most importantly — how to hire for it inside an agency environment. Most folks…

I recently asked US and UK-based advertising professionals if/how they use Behavioral Science in their businesses. And the vast majority (53%) said “we see the potential but aren’t sure how to action it.” To help creative agencies get started applying Behavioral Science, I put together these 27 thought-starter questions (…