Ever since the Conservatives discovered Nudge, a book by the American writers Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, people in business, and especially in communications, have got excited about behavioural economics. Seasoned marketers are leaving their jobs to set up behavioural insights consultancies, a bit like a previous generation of marketers went off to create web-based businesses at the turn of this century. Most of those marketers, and many of those businesses, Read More

If you’ve ever said to a child, “Everyone else is going” then you’ve used behavioural economics. Lots of it is common sense, and you’ll see ways in which we do it all the time, but it’s useful to separate out and name the various concepts and levers. The basic model from Downing Street’s Nudge unit uses the acronym MINDSPACE:

Messenger – think who should deliver the message. For example, people whom the target will see as peers, Read More

It’s easy to take a swipe at banks, and tempting to think it was all about the good old days, when the bank manager knew his (mostly, his) customers personally. Dave Fishwick of Burnley Savings and Loans seems to think so. Frustrated at seeing loan applications from apparently credit-worthy local businesses refused by faceless administrators, or even computers, located far away from honest Burnley – probably in the wicked South – he set up his own bank, Read More

“A problem well stated is a problem half solved”

John Dewey, American philosopher Read More