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Preface

What this book is about

The Behaviour Business is about practically applying behavioural science in business.

It is intended to be an illuminating guide to how behavioural science can help us answer the key challenges facing business today – and why every business, big or small, needs to truly understand behaviour to succeed.

If you are looking for a comprehensive academic guide to behavioural science theory, this book is not it.

Aside from a brief part of chapter 1, this book will not explain in detail concepts and theories from behavioural science, nor will it give a list of the different heuristics, biases and fallacies that seek to explain the curiosities of human behaviour. Fascinating though these are, you do not need a MSc in psychology to read this book.

Who this book is for

My intention is that this book can be used by anyone who wants to understand how to apply the powerful insights of behavioural science to help them in business. It’s an exciting new discipline which can help you overcome challenges in a huge number of areas: customer experience, marketing, consumer research, retention, recruitment, performance, artificial intelligence or automation, and more.

I have learnt a lot from a wide range of experts – through interview, working with them directly, and exploring their key works – to bring you the latest and best insights.

Whether you are a manager, marketer, consultant, entrepreneur, student or salesperson, if you are in business (or have ambitions to be) and are curious about being more successful at influencing the behaviour of yourself and others for business success, then this book is for you.

How this book is structured

Each part of the book seeks to address a different challenge facing modern businesses. These parts are broken down into four chapters, three that explore a different aspect of the challenge, before a conclusion with key recommendations on what to do now to benefit from these insights. Fascinating theories, experiments and concepts from behavioural science are used throughout – these are taken both from my own work and leading academics and practitioners.

Where these concepts are particularly important, they are explained in separate sections with examples. If you want to learn more about the science, references and suggestions for further reading are included throughout the book.

Part one introduces the key concepts of behavioural science, how they have been used to change the behaviour of citizens and how they can (and should) be applied in business. Part two examines how the most successful businesses of the 21st century have used behavioural science to deliver digital products and services. Next, part three looks at how behavioural science can help businesses successfully use the concomitant advances in technology to make business work for humans, as well as robots. Part four looks at how to use behavioural science to recruit, retain and motivate the humans that work in your business. Part five shows how a deeper understanding of human behaviour helps you know what your customers want – and don’t want. And finally, part six explores how to successfully influence the behaviour of those customers – the goal of marketing – before a brief conclusion to reflect on the key themes, and the future.

A final note: I have made extensive use of footnotes. These are intended as asides, additional explanations, trivia and references for those who wish to read more.1 Should you wish, you can happily ignore them.

1 They also stop me from rambling or going off on unnecessary tangents. Like this one.