The Importance of Behavioural Science in Product Development
Consumer behaviour does not always follow a logical or rational thought process. This unpredictability makes it difficult to ensure product success. By utilising behavioural science methodologies during product research, product teams can better understand and accommodate intuitive consumer behaviour.
Continue reading to discover the importance of behavioural science in making data-driven product development and marketing decisions.
What is Behavioural Science?
Behavioural science is a branch of research that focuses on understanding human behaviour and decision-making processes. It aims to investigate not just people’s intentions but their real-life actions and the reasons behind them.
Researchers have discovered that there are numerous factors that influence human behaviour, even seemingly irrational behaviour. Some common factors include context, social and cultural influences, emotions, biases and heuristics (also called rules of thumb).
Who Uses Behavioural Science and Why It Matters
Behavioural science can be applied to many different fields. This in-depth research is conducted by members of diverse social science backgrounds, including anthropologists, sociologists, behavioural economists and psychologists.
Particularly relevant to product development and marketing, behavioural economics offers critical insight into how product managers can make more accurate, consumer-led decisions. By relying on an interdisciplinary approach, behavioural science aims to better understand the psychology behind “irrational” economic decisions.
System 1 vs System 2 Thinking Explained
Behavioural researchers have discovered that humans generally rely upon quick, intuitive responses when making personal and professional decisions. Commonly referred to as System 1 responses, these tactics are easier and more efficient than deliberate System 2 responses.
Here is an overview of the main differences between System 1 and System 2 responses.
System 1 responses
- Used between 95% and 98% of the time
- Relies upon unconscious and intuitive thinking
- Provides fast responses
- Requires minimal mental effort
System 2 responses
- Used between 5% and 2% of the time
- Relies upon deliberate and rational thinking
- Provides slower responses
- Requires intense mental effort
Understanding these two systems helps teams design products that align with human nature rather than working against it.
How Behavioural Research Supports Product Development
Behavioural research helps improve product development by providing a comprehensive understanding of consumer behaviour. This process relies upon psychological principles, rooted in cognitive psychology, to explore how consumers interact with specific products and the reasons behind this.
Businesses can then apply this knowledge via behavioural product design and marketing processes. This involves using consumer behaviour data to optimise idea generation, the product design process, and marketing efforts.
Benefits of Behavioural Science for Product Development
You now have a greater understanding of what behavioural science is and how it can be used to enhance product intelligence solutions. However, it’s important to investigate the benefits of using behavioural science to inform your product development strategy and marketing techniques.
Here is an overview of some of the most common advantages.
Better Consumer and Market Insights
Conducting target audience research to gather initial feedback about a product concept is always useful. A product development team can use valuable insights from potential consumers to gauge interest in a specific product and inform development decisions.
However, unlike its traditional counterpart, behavioural research does not solely focus on customer feedback. Instead, it explores the factors which influence consumers’ behaviour and decision-making processes.
This comprehensive examination provides more robust consumer and market research data. These advanced insights are extremely valuable and can be used to guide product strategy, marketing and design. Implementing behavioural research methods leads to enhanced consumer data insights that help you take your product development process to the next level.
Data-Driven Product Design and Marketing
When it comes to gathering valuable research data to enhance your understanding, behavioural science provides unparalleled consumer and market insights. Functioning similarly to conventional business analysis solutions, this research process works to identify shortcomings and facilitate solutions to increase a product’s success.
With behavioural research, your product team no longer needs to rely on assumptions for product strategy and design. They can use behavioural consumer insights to make data-driven design and product development decisions. This informed process leverages behavioural insight as a driver of product innovation and success.
By combining behavioural science with agile tools and fast consumer insight, you create a systematic approach to product development. This helps design teams:
- Understand the psychological principles behind behaviour change
- Explore how consumers respond to product features, price points, or messaging
- Validate ideas early and iterate based on real behaviour, not assumptions
- Influence behaviour by designing for unconscious responses
- Align product strategy with actual behaviour patterns and build a behavioural map
Designing Solutions That Reflect Real Behaviour
By creating an appealing product-based solution rooted in real user behaviour, you can effectively engage potential buyers and target their pain points. This enables you to meet customer needs, which supports the creation of successful products.
For example, user interface (UI) and UX designers can use behavioural research as a practical guide to enhance their understanding of how consumers interact with a digital product and process information. A hotel booking site that isn’t user-friendly may feel clunky and confusing. If it doesn’t meet the needs of its target audience, consumers are unlikely to complete their booking or return.
They can then implement this knowledge to design products that are appealing, user-friendly and intuitive. This approach leverages UX design principles to create intuitive, appealing customer experiences based on how users actually think and interact. It also supports seamless user experience design and encourages more consumers to engage with and return to the product.
Marketing That Aligns with Consumer Thinking
Alongside product development, behavioural research is also extremely important for marketing. Most purchase decisions involve System 1 responses. By having a comprehensive understanding of the factors which influence these responses, you can tailor your marketing strategy to increase its effectiveness.
This process involves adjusting marketing tactics to appeal to customers’ System 1 intuition, often driven by key behaviour patterns like loss aversion or emotional triggers. Loss aversion is the tendency to avoid loss more than gain. Marketers use this bias to drive stronger consumer engagement.
Using Behavioural Science to Guide Strategic Product Decisions
Internal opinions, focus groups and outdated methods still drive many product decisions. But behavioural science helps teams build around consumers’ actual behaviour, not just what they say. When paired with agile tools and fast insights, behavioural science can accommodate a smarter, more evidence-based approach to product development.
This is important because most decisions are made using System 1 thinking. Consumers act quickly, guided by emotion, context and instinct. These are principles that are often explored in behavioural economics. If your development process does not reflect this, your product risks missing the mark.
Technology enables this process at scale. With the right platform, you can collect behavioural data quickly, run a controlled experiment (while addressing privacy concerns), test specific hypotheses, and adjust based on high-quality insights. This reduces guesswork, improves customer experience, and increases the likelihood of launching successful scientific product development strategies.
When behavioural science is embedded into every stage of the product journey through behavioural product management, teams gain a clearer path to confident, data-backed decisions.
Implementing Behavioural Design in Agile Product Development
Considering the value of behavioural data for product development, it makes sense to take maximum advantage of it with agile innovation. Based on agile software development principles, this methodology involves micro-testing your product at all stages of the product development process.
The Product Development Life Cycle Explained
Many product development cycles include the following steps.
- Ideation. Brainstorm concepts and conduct consumer and market research to facilitate idea generation.
- Validation. Conduct qualitative and quantitative research to test the consumer response to your product and conduct a feasibility analysis.
- Prototyping. Engage in concept development by creating and testing low-fidelity prototypes or wireframes.
- Marketing. Create a targeted marketing strategy and develop ways to measure the success of your advertising efforts.
- Development. Validate your design and test marketing strategies with a minimum viable product or a structured control group before building your actual product.
- Launch. Have a product launch to share your finished product with the public.
- Improvement. Track analytics and user feedback about your existing product and continue making improvements.
Benefits of Agile Innovation
When exploring an agile approach, it is important to note the following benefits and features.
- Save time. An agile approach allows you to validate your product during the early stages of the development process. This means you can make the necessary changes to develop a successful finished product as soon as possible.
- Save money. Agile product validation helps reduce the risk of having to make expensive changes towards the end stages of a new product development cycle. This increases ROI and helps facilitate a lean product development process.
- Continuous improvement. Especially useful for new product development, agile innovation involves the creation of a feedback loop. This enables you to continuously test a product with your target market and generate iterations based on the feedback you receive.
- Streamline focus. Behavioural product validation relies upon insights from actual users. This enables development teams to take a consumer-centric approach and create products that effectively target real-life pain points, while addressing users’ desired outcomes and offering greater user control.
- Ensure relevance. By gathering consumer feedback throughout the whole process of the product development cycle, you can keep up-to-date with changes in consumer behaviour and market trends. This helps you design better products that effectively meet consumer wants and needs.
Embedding a systematic approach into agile product development not only enables teams to influence and change behaviour but also ensures that products are designed around actual user behaviour, giving businesses a clearer path to long-term success.
Access Robust Scientific Data With Vypr’s Product Intelligence Platform
Vypr is the world’s leading product intelligence platform, allowing you to understand rapidly changing consumer behaviour through fast, cost-effective consumer insight.
The importance of behavioural science lies in its ability to help you better understand how consumers make decisions. This comprehensive knowledge enables you to enhance your product development and marketing strategy.
Want to see the benefits of scientific consumer insights for yourself? Try Vypr for free and unlock fast, actionable consumer insights to power your next product launch.