Five Things We Learned About... How Humans Decide

In an era obsessed with growth, KPIs, and sales, the marketing industry is losing touch with its most fundamental purpose: influencing human decisions. That's according to research from WPP Media and University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School that looks into the root. And its findings should make the industry sit up straight in their seats.

“Ultimately, we’re all in the decision-making business,” begins Stuart Bowden, global president, strategy and capabilities at WPP Media, talking at its NextM 2025 event. “Whether we’re strategists, creatives, academics, or performance specialists, our shared purpose is to change a human’s decision in favour of our brand.

“There’s so much data, so many thought leaders, so many talks like this all focusing on what humans have done. They look backward at historic data, KPIs, and performance metrics. But it’s rare to ask the prior question: why did humans make those decisions in the first place?”

The research looks into over 1.2 million purchase journeys from WPP’s database and explores the specific factors that drive consumer choices, in turn, suggesting how brands can act to influence those decisions, particularly in three specific areas, according to co-author Professor Felipe Thomaz, speaking at NextM.

Those three areas are:

• Brand priming - the increase in favourability for a brand, effectively reordering how someone perceives it

• Receptivity - how likely someone is to accept a message

• Influence - the power a given channel has to move someone along those dimensions.

Brand affinity is the key factor identified to drive purchases with 84 per cent of consumer choices being influenced by long-lasting brand affinity. 

“Only 16 per cent of purchases do consumers surprise themselves and buy something unexpected,” explains Bowden. “Brand priming is king. If you cannot achieve prior preference in a consumer’s mind before they actively start evaluating their decisions on a particular purchase journey or a category, you’re just not at the races.”

Despite consumers having affinities to particular brands, their openness to marketing varies; influencing a customer is heavily dependent on how receptive they are to your brand. However, receptivity is an extreme variant, the report found.

“We analysed over a million people and found a spectrum: about 10 per cent are highly receptive, 10 per cent are highly resistant, and the rest fall in between,” continues Bowden.

This difference in receptivity mirrors thorough touchpoints in marketing, which, according to the study have “unequal power” due to context, category and consumer, i.e. a TV spot versus a personalised email. 

“If you pick channels at random to talk to your clients, you're going to get about a 20 per cent likelihood that they're going to react to that stimulus and update their decision-making on that basis,” details Thomaz. To shape purchase decisions, he continues, earned, shared and owned (ESO) touchpoints are considerably better at shaping purchase decisions.

Both Bowden and Thomaz emphasise that marketers need to rethink their current strategies for their brands to go from being a surprising, off-the-cuff purchase for consumers, become their regular go-to and develop lasting loyalty.

“Prioritise long-term brand priming,” advises Bowden. “If you're not building brand priming, you're wasting your time trying to affect it with paid advertising. Think beyond reach. Think beyond attention.” 

He adds L’Oreal as an example of a company “that knows” the art of brand priming. “They have organised their own research and their own thinking to build individual payments to a sub-brand level, to understand what type of reach produces outcomes right across the pace of the spectrum. Sooner or later, we're all going to have to go on the L'Oreal journey to find a degree of complexity that we can make our organisation comfortable in order to be able to get outcomes that are not average to our category.”

Understanding what works on which channel and how audiences interact with that content is imperative to make this change; “If you know how a channel interacts with the receptivity in your category, you get a 47 per cent chance of a change in decision-making,” explains Thomaz. 

This receptivity is always changing, he adds, noting that the evolution is something all marketers and brands need to keep track of; “Why are suddenly influencers everywhere? Why is there suddenly all this change?”

While it seems obvious that marketers should aim to understand which channels work best, researchers note it takes time. 

“It took L’Oreal three or four years to rewire how they budgeted and  planned and measured,” says Bowden. “It's only when you do that that you can genuinely start to make decisions like, ‘Should we be building a beauty tech app? Should we be sponsoring a TV show? Should we be building an influencer network? Should we be getting into gaming?’, which all comes down to knowing the subcategory, influence, ability, and receptivity.

Here are five additional insights from the How Humans Decide report: 

• While receptivity certainly varies amongst individuals, this is mostly shaped by individual traits, not demographics. “Age explains only 21 per cent of the [study’s] variance; gender just 3 per cent. The rest is human individuality,” explains Bowden. 

• On average, ESO touchpoints are nearly three times more powerful than paid media channels when converting someone from bias to purchase. 

• While understanding channel receptivity is key for brands, this can still vary within a brand, i.e. a beauty company would need to consider that what works for their skincare department won’t necessarily work for hair care. 

• Many brands have the same behaviour: buy the same media, use similar messaging, having an almost mirrored look. Being a part of a homogenised sector weakens the ability to influence human decision. Stand out. 

• The percentage of shoppers buying from a brand with a priming bias in the dataset never went below 70 per cent - suggesting consumers aren’t as likely to look to competing brands lower down the funnel.