Over the years, I’ve often been asked why consumers do or don’t do something. Why are they panic buying toilet roll? Why don’t they switch bank accounts? Why do they eat unhealthily?

Yes, there are usually subtle nuances involved that are specific to the particular context, but frequently there are three common, underlying factors that consumers are unconsciously trading off. Considering these can help better define a marketing challenge or evaluate the prospects of new activity being effective, because it can enable you to quickly decode existing consumer behaviour.

The three dimensions involved are ease, reward and loss aversion. Ease is important both physically and cognitively. The easiest thing for a consumer to do is to purchase from somewhere nearby, somewhere extremely familiar, and to buy the same product every time, using contactless payment. The purchase is not so much about what the consumer thinks about the item as about avoiding the need to burn glucose thinking about anything.

Of course, the reward they get from the product is motivating the purchase. But the easier it is, the less rewarding it needs to be. When we’re creating a new product or trying to alert consumers to the merits of an existing one, it’s easy to convince ourselves that conveying its objective superiority will be sufficient. In practice, this can be almost irrelevant: the challenge may be defined by existing purchase behaviour.

The other aspect to consider is loss aversion. This is well documented as a more powerful influence on behaviour than the prospect of an equivalent gain. Again, it’s easy to underestimate how consumers perceive risk in any given context. Loss aversion is shaped by the consequences of a bad decision, not just its probability.

In a nutshell, most consumer behaviour gravitates towards the easiest option, where the perceived risk is low and the reward is just good enough,

Marketing activity is usually aiming to bring about some element of behaviour change. Understanding these three dimensions helps reveal the real challenge: do we need to make the behaviour easier, increase the perceived reward, or reduce the fear of getting it wrong?