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Matthew Willcox    

Author of "The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumers' Instincts"; Winner of Marketing Book of the Year 2016 & American Marketing Association Prize for Best Books in Marketing

Matthew Willcox focuses on how insights from behavioral science can help organizations be more successful at influencing the choices they need people to make. In 2007, he founded the Institute of Decision Making, the first think tank that bought behavioral scientists and marketing practitioners together.

He has more than 25 years marketing strategy and human insights experience, working with clients including Levi Strauss, GSK, Novartis, and Unilever. He has provided marketing consultancy for energy efficiency programs with Pacific Gas & Electric and the California Public Utilities Commission. Willcox has spoken at major marketing events in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America and has run well over 100 workshops round the world on behavioral marketing and choice architecture to help organizations bring a deeper understanding of how humans make choices to their work.

Willcox’s first book, "The Business of Choice" was published by Pearson in 2015 and was named “Marketing Book of The Year” by M&SB, and co-winner of the American Marketing Association’s prestigious Berry Book Prize. The updated second edition was a prizewinner in the 2021 Axiom Business Book Awards.

Speech Topics

How to get your brand chosen: the business of choice

Whatever your marketing or behavioral objective, you’ll be far more successful if you know how humans choose. Human intuitions and cognitive mechanisms have evolved over millions of years, but only now are practitioners beginning to understand them. The Business of Choice helps you apply new scientific insights to make your brand or behavior the easiest, most instinctive choice. Matthew Willcox integrates the latest research advances with his own extensive enterprise marketing experience at FCB’s Institute of Decision Making. Willcox explains why we humans often seem so irrational, how marketers can leverage the same evolutionary factors that helped humans prosper as a species, how to make decisions simpler for your consumers, and how to make them feel good about their choices, so they keep coming back for more!

Format: Keynote (40 mins); Workshop (20-40 people; 1 day)

How to AIign Innovation with Human Nature

We tend to think about innovation from the perspective of the future. What's new? What's coming down the pipeline? But, paradoxical as it sounds, innovations don't succeed because of their modernity, but because of how well they work with a 6 million year old operating system -- the human mind.

In this session Matthew Willcox, author of "The Business of Choice: Marketing to Consumer's Instincts", a book that explores how what we've learnt from evolutionary psychology reveals how people make choices, applies the same thinking to what makes innovations successful. How do innovations tap into human nature?

Willcox will give examples of innovations that do just this, and explain why. He'll also show how as technology and innovation evolves that surprisingly, it connects better with our more primal, ancient selves.

Format: Keynote (40 mins); Workshop (20-40 people; 1 day)

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