How we used behavioural economics to help RBS understand the consumer buying journey

Using Behavioural Economics to understand behaviour – and change it

The puzzle

The Royal Bank of Scotland needed to take its understanding of consumer buying decisions to another level.

• How could they avoid any assumptions that would cloud their thinking?
• How could they get the deepest possible understanding?

The pieces

As part of an extensive buying journey project, we asked 148 consumers to keep an online diary for up to 6 months.

• Consumers recorded their efforts to decide on a variety of financial products and providers.
• The diaries revealed contradictions and changes of direction that consumers were often unaware of.
• Post-diary interviews allowed us to explore this apparently irrational behaviour.

The picture

Our analysis revealed multiple biases across a range of financial services product categories.

• The biases uncovered included regret aversion, status quo bias and mental accounting.
• To identify strategies to help change behaviour, we ran co-creation workshops with the bank’s teams.
• We devised strategies to tackle key issues with our “Bypass/ Leverage/ Tackle” (BLT) approach.