Business A question of bias An experiment from Google and The Behavioural Architects sought to establish how online shoppers make purchase decisions. Liam Kay reports R eleasing a new product is always fraught with risk. Will consumers buy it? Will it challenge competitors? And will it be able to maintain its market share in the long term? Traditionally, the purchase funnel has been used to explain how people shop: awareness of a product or service; interest in the type of product; desire for a particular brand; and taking action to purchase it. But does this model fit online shopping? Google and The Behavioural Architects worked to update this business model for the 21st century, to understand what consumers considered when they searched for a new product. The aim was to see how those decisions could be influenced and what techniques companies should consider using to help consumers make the right decision. Alistair Rennie, research lead at Google, who helped lead the project, says the tech giant has seen search data identifying changes in how people shop online. The internet is no longer a tool for comparing prices it has become this tool for comparing everything, as people no longer want cheap, they want the best, he says. That inspired us to think about what best means to someone it might mean best performance, value, quality, most popular or all of those things. To explore these changes further, Google and The Behavioural Architects decided to investigate shoppers behaviour in real life. They collected screen-capture video and audio of shoppers in action, with participants asked to provide a stream of consciousness of their thoughts and emotions over video, which was then analysed by The Behavioural Architects. This led to the creation of a model of how people 38 make a purchasing decision what Rennie calls the messy middle. The model starts with a trigger for a purchase and ends with the acquisition of a product. In between, an infinity loop swirls constantly between two concepts: evaluation and exploration. Its symbolic of the infinite potential of the choice, but also a nice way of representing the cyclical relationship between the two mental functions, says Rennie. It was an elegant solution to the issue of how you demonstrate the non-linear complexity of decision-making without making a complex model. Once Google built the model, the team prioritised six key biases that influenced shopping decisions the most: 1) Category heuristics mental shortcuts that help us to make a quick and satisfactory decision within a particular category. For example, when buying a camera, people will focus on the number of megapixels it has to help streamline their decision and reduce the amount of information influencing the purchase. 2) Authority bias the tendency to alter opinions or behaviour to match someone considered to be an expert in the subject, such as an economist or a scientist. 3) Social proof copying the behaviour and actions of other people in ambiguous or uncertain situations, such as following reviews or four- or five-star ratings. 4) Power of now people want to have things immediately, rather than waiting for them. For example, instant downloads or 24-hour delivery. 5) Scarcity bias the rarer the item, the more desirable it becomes. This could be either time