Decision-Making Motivations and Mindsets
Powerful audience insights that help organizations go beyond demographics to gain valuable insights into their customers’ deep motivations.
DM3s – Heuristics That Influence Our Decision Making
DM3s (Decision-Making Motivations and Mindsets) are heuristics – interpretive tools – that frame our decisions. Together, Environics Research Social Values and DM3s offer a powerful way of understanding and targeting customer groups, delivering meaningful insights, actionable recommendations, and powerful enhancements for strategic marketing plans and tactics.
Decision-Making Motivations and Mindsets (DM3s) report
We have applied these two analytical frameworks – Social Values and Decision-making Mindsets and Motivations, inspired by the field of behavioural economics – to an existing segmentation of the Canadian population that’s grounded in their financial attitudes and behaviours: the Financial Fitness Index (FFI).
What are DM3s
Consumer insights can come from a range of sources, including behaviours, attitudes, and psychographics. DM3s focus specifically on the hidden influences that inform consumer decisions. Neither opinions nor rational calculations, DM3s are the almost unconscious motivations and mindsets that shape how a customer will respond to their environment and to other people. DM3s surface the frictions and challenges that cause people to delay or avoid action (e.g., procrastinating about a purchase) because of a challenge they might not even be consciously aware of. Understanding these decision-making motivations and mindsets helps to identify the mental shortcuts and biases consumers may rely on (again, often unconsciously) when making decisions and taking action. This insight provides a valuable lens onto the levers that can prompt and/or influence actions and engagement.
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How we developed DM3s
Environics Research’s DM3s are based on principles derived from behavioural economics and cognitive science – harnessing in particular these disciplines’ insights into the unconscious and automatic decision-making processes that drive many customer actions. We measure fifteen key DM3s spanning the range of behavioural influences and biases that are most relevant to our clients’ marketing needs and target audiences. The DM3s are constructed using a series of questions on decision-making styles, attitudes, and motivations – all posed to a large sample of Canadians and Americans via online survey. Almost all fifteen DM3s use at least two or three questions/items, supporting robust measurement and rich interpretation.
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How to use DM3s
DM3s help to illuminate your market and competitive context, showing how your audiences engage (or don’t) and how their decisions are made. These insights round out target customer understanding, and provide meaningful brand marketing, concept and product development direction – helping you focus your strategic efforts more effectively.
Determining the DM3s that are most prevalent in your market space, along with how different target customers make decisions and act, are key to unlocking the product, support, and marketing activities that will most effectively prompt stronger engagement and interactions with your brand.
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Practical applications
There are several ways to incorporate DM3s into your research and implementation efforts. You can cherry-pick specific metrics based on a specific objective or measure the entire range of DM3s, developing a holistic view of the market and areas of potential opportunity. DM3s can also be used to profile and differentiate target groups, adding a layer of customer understanding or helping to optimize marketing and communications activities – for instance, by supporting the testing and comparison of creative concepts.
