Marketing Psychology — behavioural science, prioritised
A skill that treats behavioural science as an operating tool rather than a reading list. You bring it a specific stuck behaviour — nobody finishes the form, nobody upgrades, nobody opens the second email — and it comes back with three to five principles worth applying, in priority order, with what to test for each.
How it works
It runs the same four steps every time, and the order matters.
Define the behaviour. What action should the person take, where in the journey does it sit — awareness, decision, retention — and what is currently blocking it. Nothing else happens until this is concrete.
Shortlist candidates. Five to eight principles that could plausibly apply, then eliminate anything that doesn’t map directly onto the behaviour you named.
Score what’s left. Each survivor is rated on psychological leverage — how strongly it moves this specific behaviour — and on feasibility, meaning whether you could actually implement it given what you control.
Translate into action. The top three to five come back with why the principle works, where in your flow to apply it, what to test, and an ethical guardrail.
Why the scoring is the useful part
There is no shortage of places to read about anchoring or loss aversion. The gap is that a list of forty biases is useless at the moment you have to change one page, because every one of them sounds applicable and none of them tells you what to do on Tuesday.
The feasibility half of the score is what makes it practical. A principle with enormous leverage that needs a pricing change, a new onboarding flow and legal sign-off is not a recommendation, it’s a daydream — and the skill will rank a smaller, shippable intervention above it. That ordering is the actual output.
The ethical guardrail attached to each recommendation is not decoration either. Most of these principles work in both directions, and the difference between reducing friction and manufacturing anxiety is often a single copy decision. The skill is explicit about refusing the manipulative version rather than leaving you to notice.
How to use it well
Bring it a real artefact and a real blocker. “Make my marketing more persuasive” produces a lecture; “people reach step three of this form and 60% abandon, here is the page” produces something you can ship.
Tell it what you can actually change. If pricing is fixed and the signup flow is owned by another team, say so — that information goes straight into the feasibility score and changes the ranking.
Where it falls short
It reasons about people in general, not about your customers in particular. Every recommendation it makes is a hypothesis, and the honest way to use it is as a way of generating well-founded tests rather than a source of answers. If your audience behaves unusually — highly technical buyers, regulated purchases, long committee sales — the general principles will sometimes point the wrong way, and only your data will tell you that.
It also cannot tell you whether the underlying offer is any good. Behavioural science makes a fair offer easier to say yes to. It does not rescue a bad one, and a page that converts better on a product people regret buying is not a win.