Richard Shotton

In The Choice Factory, Richard Shotton explained the motivations and behaviours that drive people’s buying decisions. Richard began his career as a media planner almost two decades ago, working on accounts such as Halifax, Coke, 118 118, and on comparethemarket.com, before moving into research. Today Richard speaks about the impact and outcomes of the behavioural pyschology experiments he runs for titles such as Marketing Week, The Drum, Campaign, Admap and Mediatel.

The Choice Factory saw Richard observing one typical day of consumer decision-making, from food choices to work-place politics and investigates just how much our behaviour is shaped by our psychological shortcuts. He draws on evidence from academia, from real-life ad campaigns, and from his own contemporary research. Twenty-five short chapters each address a single cognitive bias and outline simple ways to apply the lessons learned to today’s most difficult marketing challenges. He adds insights from interviews with some of the finest thinkers in marketing and advertising, including Mark Earls, Lucy Jameson and Rory Sutherland.

In The Illusion of Choice published in 2023 Richard indentified sixteen and a half of ‘the most important psychological quirks that everyone in business needs to be aware of today’.’If you really want to understand your customers then this book is a must’ – James Watt founder of Brewdog

Richard tweets at X about his latest social psychology findings as @rshotton.