Q&A
How do you define ‘nudge marketing’?
Nudge marketing is all about structuring a consumer choice environment to get the consumer to do a certain thing. The issue is, we can think about ‘consumer behaviour’ as a series of single decisions or actions; or we can think about it as a constellation of behaviours that eventually lead to an outcome, down the road. Using the latter definition, nudge marketing is just one piece of the puzzle: It essentially focusses on the first step of consumer behaviour. If you think about consumer behaviour more broadly, you can do a lot more to influence positive long-term outcomes.
You have found that nudging has a dark side. Please explain.
The problem is, as a methodology, is one of the biggest retirement plan administrators in the U.S. In 2015, 61 per cent of the people who joined their retirement savings plan signed up for automatic enrollment — which is a classic nudge. These consumers basically said, ‘Take this amount of money from my paycheque every month’.
