Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy

Voted #1 in the BBH World Cup of Advertising Books, 2018
Winner of the Sales and Marketing Category at the 2019 Business Book Awards

Before you can influence decisions, you need to understand what drives them. The Choice Factory is an essential read for anyone who wants to learn.

By observing a typical day of decision-making, from trivial food choices to significant work-place moves, he investigates how our behaviour is shaped by psychological shortcuts. With a clear focus on the marketing potential of knowing what makes us tick, Richard Shotton has drawn on evidence from academia, real-life ad campaigns and his own original research.

The Choice Factory is written in an entertaining and highly-accessible format, with 25 short chapters, each addressing a cognitive bias and outlining simple ways to apply it to your own marketing challenges. Supporting his discussion, Shotton adds insights from new interviews with some of the smartest thinkers in advertising, including Rory Sutherland, Lucy Jameson and Mark Earls.

From priming to the pratfall effect, charm pricing to the curse of knowledge, the science of behavioural economics has never been easier to apply to marketing.

The Choice Factory is the new advertising essential.

Richard is the Founder of Astroten, a consultancy that applies findings from behavioural science to marketing.

Richard was Deputy Head of Evidence at Manning Gottlieb OMD, the most awarded media agency in the history of the IPA Effectiveness awards.

He started his career as a media planner 17 years ago, working on accounts such as Coke, 118 118 and comparethemarket.com, before moving into research.

Richard is interested in how findings from behavioural science can be applied to advertising. He writes about the behavioural experiments he runs for titles such as The Drum, Campaign, WARC, Admap and Mediatel. He tweets about the latest social psychology findings from the handle @rshotton.