The Best Brands Drive Purchase Decisions Using This System of Thinking

The best companies (AKA the largest, most profitable companies who have been around for a long time) have created a reality where an ever-increasing portion of the purchase decision making process is driven by System 1 thinking.

With System 1, there’s no need to convince the customer that your price per ounce is the lowest on the market, or that your shirt has slightly more stretch than your top 3 competitors.

When the customer determines that they are in-market for your category, when your brand has appealed to System 1 thinking, your brand is already chosen.

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How does this work?

Dan Kahneman is a Nobel prize winner and came up with this stuff.

He says:

“The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create.”

“When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions.”

✅ What are you doing today to increase the chance your brand is the conclusion your customer should be jumping to?

He calls it “WYSIATI”, or “what you see is all there is”.

WYSIATI reflects our natural inclination to create a narrative based solely on the information that is known to us and to ignore all that is unknown.

To help construct its narrative, System 1 may also employ heuristics – processing and decision-making shortcuts that save time by using intuitive algorithms to generate approximate answers that are ‘good enough’.

Examples of heuristics include:

Affect Heuristic – if a decision feels good, we will assume it must be the right one

Availability Heuristic – things we are able to remember are more relevant and important – and more likely to happen again

✅ What can we do today to make the decision to purchase from us feel awesome and be more easily remembered?

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When System 2 is called upon, it processes information consciously, logically and methodically

Kahneman says:

“When System 1 runs into difficulty, it calls on System 2 to support more detailed and specific processing that may solve the problem of the moment.”

“System 2 is mobilized when a question arises for which System 1 does not offer an answer… System 2 is activated when an event is detected that violates the model of the world that System 1 maintains.”

✅ What parts of our end to end brand experience (marketing, product, CX, etc) are leaving questions unanswered?


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Takeaways

💡 Be the no brainer choice - appeal to System 1 thinking.

💡 Create the narrative that is cohesive enough so you answer System 1’s question, and you’re “all there is”

💡 Check out Dan Kahneman for more