Making Important Decisions the Marketer’s Way
So I’ve been researching some pretty important data to make what I feel is a life-changing decision. The words of respected marketing scholar Bill Swinyard ran through my head and I remembered a lecture he gave about consumer behavior. Using what he called the “behavior matrix,” he went through a graphical approach to practical problem solving situations. Applying it to my current circumstances proved wonderfully effective.
I also sat down with my brother-in-law who is considering what to study in college and we discussed which major to choose. Like I had done, he was simply weighing the possibilities in his mind and trying to form a decision based on his gut feelings. We tried out using the behavior matrix, and it provided so much direction that he now feels like he has identified the major that will satisfy him the most.
Here’s a walkthrough of that encounter, and hopefully your application of it in your own business decisions may prove useful.
First of all, we listed all the factors that were important to my brother-in-law of the decision itself, namely:
- Ease of comprehending content
- Interest in subject material
- Future job possibilities
- Hands-on experience
Second, he figured a relative value for each factor on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being essential to the decision and 1 being absolutely unimportant. Then, it was a matter of researching each option and assigning a value representing how well the option fulfilled the factor. The result was a matrix like so:
| Factor | Importance | Communications | Biology | Business Marketing |
| Ease of Content | 7 | 7 | 3 | 5 |
| Interest | 9 | 8 | 4 | 7 |
| Future Jobs | 10 | 7 | 5 | 9 |
| Hands-On | 6 | 7 | 10 | 7 |
Finally, we multipled the importance factor by each major and added them up:
- Communications: 233 total points
- Biology: 167
- Business Marketing: 216
Based on these figures, and the research we did, it appears that Communications would be the major that most closely matches up with my brother-in-law’s interests. Again, it doesn’t necessarily take into account everything, but it sure helped him identify what was important and which decision gets closest. In a marketing sense, one could apply this behavior matrix to factors of a website to try to align the site to what is important to the user. But that, in detail, is for another day. :)
