Imagine having to genuinely decide how to make coffee tomorrow morning.
Not just whether you want coffee. I mean everything.
Which cup should you use? How much water? Which coffee? Should you drink it before showering or after? Is coffee even the right decision today? Maybe tea is healthier. Perhaps you should investigate that first or ask a friend.
That would drive people nuts, especially myself being an espresso man.
Then you need clothes.
You could wear the black shirt. Or the white one. But which trousers work better? What’s the weather going to be like? What meetings do you have? What impression are you trying to create at work or at the mall?
You haven’t even left the house yet and apparently being alive has become a management consultancy project.
Thankfully, your brain doesn’t work like this. It cheats. And I mean that as a compliment lol.
Our minds have developed ways of reaching decisions without carefully analysing every piece of available information. Psychologists usually call these heuristics, which is a rather academic word for something we all do constantly: use a shortcut.
The interesting part is that without these shortcuts, we’d probably spend half a day getting dressed.
Being perfectly rational would be exhausting
Economics once had a rather clean idea of how people make decisions.
We examine the available options, calculate the costs and benefits, consider the probabilities and choose whatever maximises our interests.
Very tidy. Humans ruined it.
Herbert Simon, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, argued that real people operate under bounded rationality. We don’t have unlimited information, unlimited time or unlimited mental processing power. Instead of searching forever for the perfect answer, we frequently stop once we find something that’s good enough. Simon called this satisficing.
Which sounds remarkably similar to how I choose restaurants.
I don’t inspect every restaurant in Dubai, build a spreadsheet comparing cuisine, distance, price, parking, Google reviews and probability of food poisoning.
I see somewhere familiar. It looks decent. The reviews aren’t horrifying. Done.
That isn’t necessarily stupidity. It’s efficiency.
Gerd Gigerenzer and other researchers have spent decades making an important argument about heuristics: simple rules aren’t merely defects in human thinking. In the right environment, they can be extremely effective because they let us make useful decisions quickly using limited information.
Your brain isn’t always trying to find the mathematically perfect answer. Sometimes it just needs an answer before the tiger eats you.
The shortcut becomes the decision
Take familiarity.
You’re standing inside a Carrefour in another country looking for toothpaste. There are fifteen brands. Fourteen mean absolutely nothing to you. Then you see Colgate. You reach for it.
Did you conduct a comparative analysis of fluoride concentrations? Probably not. You recognised something.
Recognition itself became information.
This is one reason established brands have such an enormous advantage. Familiarity reduces uncertainty. When we’re missing information, things we’ve seen before can feel easier to process and safer to choose.
This doesn’t mean familiar automatically equals better. It means the brain has something to work with.
And suddenly branding starts to look less like putting logos everywhere and more like building little mental shortcuts.
See the red can. Think Coca-Cola. See the swoosh. Think Nike. See the bitten apple. You already know what comes next.
The marketer doesn’t have to rebuild the entire meaning of the brand every time you encounter it. Your brain stored some of it for them.
That’s why the most expensive real estate in the world is the human mind.
We’re doing more on autopilot than we realise
There’s another shortcut that might be even more powerful. Habit.
Researchers estimated that 65% of the behaviours they observed were habitually initiated, while 88% showed some habitual execution once the behaviour had started. Interestingly, 76% were also aligned with what participants consciously intended to do.
That last number matters.
Habit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a zombie being controlled by your subconscious. Often your habits are doing exactly what you want.
You decided months ago that coffee happens after waking up. You decided years ago which route you normally take to work. You probably have a side of the bed you sleep on without holding a strategic planning session every night.
Your brain has essentially said: We’ve solved this already. Use the previous answer.
That’s enormously useful. It can also explain a surprising amount of consumer behaviour.
If I order the same coffee every morning, use the same toothpaste, open the same food delivery app and automatically check the same three websites when I’m researching something, competitors aren’t merely fighting my preference.
They’re fighting my default. Which is Talabat, Costa and Colgate.
Then there are shortcuts that fool us
This is where Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky changed the conversation.
Their research showed that when people make judgments under uncertainty, we often rely on shortcuts such as availability, representativeness and anchoring.
Suppose you’re considering buying an electric car and last night you watched a dramatic video of an EV battery catching fire. Today someone asks: “Are electric cars safe?”
That vivid example may become unusually easy to retrieve from memory. And because it’s easy to remember, it can feel more common or probable than it actually is. That’s roughly the problem behind the availability heuristic.
Or consider representativeness.
You meet a founder wearing a hoodie, talking about AI and working from a coffee shop. Your brain already has a little Silicon Valley template waiting.
Maybe he’s building the next billion-dollar company. Maybe he’s trying to connect to the café Wi-Fi lol.
Your mind doesn’t wait for the investigation. It starts filling gaps.
That’s what makes shortcuts so fascinating for marketers. They aren’t necessarily irrational mistakes. They’re methods of making a decision when reality hasn’t kindly supplied us with every piece of information we could possibly need.
Marketing is full of missing information
Think about what buying actually requires.
Is this company trustworthy? Will this product work? Is this price fair? Will these shoes last? Will I regret buying this apartment? Does this restaurant actually taste good? Will this consultant waste my money?
The customer almost never knows for certain. So they look for clues.
1,400 reviews. A brand they’ve heard of. “Most popular.” A recommendation from a friend. A queue outside a restaurant. An expensive-looking website. A doctor in a white coat. A client logo they recognise. A product marked “bestseller.”
None of these things necessarily proves the product is right for them. But each can make the decision easier.
That’s an important distinction.
Marketers often think persuasion means giving customers more information. More features. More paragraphs. More reasons. More buttons. More proof.
Sometimes the customer’s problem isn’t a lack of information. It’s that you’ve given them so much information their brain no longer knows which information matters.
Good marketing can act like a useful heuristic. It says: Pay attention to this.
The best shortcut wins
This also changes how I think about brands.
Maybe one of the greatest achievements in marketing is becoming the shortcut.
Someone says search, people think Google or ChatGPT. Someone says tissues, people think Masafi. Someone wants a quick coffee before work and doesn’t want to investigate seventeen independent cafés. Arabica or Costa Coffee.
Not necessarily because each option is objectively the best product on Earth. Because thinking has a cost. Time has a cost. Uncertainty has a cost. And familiarity can remove some of it.
The mistake is thinking that because humans use shortcuts, humans are stupid. The opposite might be closer to the truth.
A brain that analysed every breakfast, shirt, route, toothpaste, coffee, email and purchase from first principles would barely make it through Tuesday.
We use shortcuts because the world gives us incomplete information and still expects an answer. Marketing works inside that reality.
So perhaps the question isn’t: How do I make someone analyse my product more carefully?
Sometimes the more useful question is: How do I make the right decision easier to make?
Because your customer has a lot to think about today. And their brain would really prefer not to start from scratch.
