Why Behavioral Science is a CMO's Best Bet

Countless CPG brands have a complicated relationship with consumer psychology. The belief persists that even the best advertising ultimately presents a rational case: a persuasive argument for why your product is best.

The problem? That’s not how people make decisions.

Decades of research in behavioral science (Be Sci) tell us that around 80% of people’s choices—including what we buy—are emotionally-driven. Instinctive. Made instantaneously. The reason a brand provides for choosing a product becomes the consumer’s rationalization after they’ve chosen.

Most CMOs understand this. They know consumers don't always act rationally. But driven by internal pressures to keep campaigns running and avoid unnecessary risk, they’re confined to marketing frameworks built on outdated assumptions. They're measuring brand awareness, ad recall, and other metrics that are easy to track but disconnected from how people actually make choices.

When your methods and metrics don't align with real consumer behavior, the most impressive GTM plan feels like a sophisticated guessing game, even a gamble.

This creates an understandable crisis of confidence. When you can't connect your decisions to the business impacts that matter most, it's incredibly hard to propose new strategies for your brand, even when you know the old ones leave opportunity on the table.

The CMO Confidence Gap

Whether trying to put a challenger brand on the map or bring new life to an established portfolio, any CMO can feel uncertain or conflicted when directing spend. Even the most experienced can hesitate to champion breakthrough approaches when:

• Every budget is being scrutinized
• Making significant changes to marketing strategy or familiar campaign approaches is considered too risky, even if current investments are underperforming
• CMOs lack tools to measure the impact of their strategic choices

The primary obstacle? The intense short-term demands that CMOs face. Boardrooms want fast proof that marketing is working in the form of immediate ROI. The conversation is marked by questions like, “What positive signs do we see from the last campaign, and how fast will we see returns?”

But brand-building doesn't work on a quarterly timeline.

The real value of marketing—creating mental availability, shaping consumer perceptions and building emotional connections—pays off over time. Yet long-term brand-building frequently gets sacrificed for short-term tactics that deliver quick but fleeting results.

This creates any number of challenges depending on where your brand sits:

• For challenger brands, the pressure to show immediate ROI can derail critical foundation-building just when distinctiveness matters most
• For established brands, the push for quarterly wins can lock companies into diminishing returns while competitors innovate their way into consumers' consideration sets
• For legacy brands, the fear of alienating core consumers can create resistance to any reinvention—often the best way to reignite growth

Making matters worse? The measurement problem.

Traditional metrics track what happened. They can tell you awareness increased. But they can't tell you whether that awareness created the emotional connections that actually drive consumer choice. And without understanding the "why" behind consumer behavior, even data-driven decisions are partially blind.

This is where Be Sci offers relief, along with a true competitive advantage CMOs can believe in.

By aligning marketing and measurement with how people make decisions, Be Sci helps you target the exact mental shortcuts that are proven to drive preference and purchase.

It transforms marketing from art to science. It makes your brand irresistible—while identifying the metrics that actually correlate with future sales growth, not just short-term spikes.

How Be Sci Makes Your Brand the Irresistible Choice

The behavioral research behind consumer decision-making is surprisingly clear and actionable.

Behavioral scientists like Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman have identified two systems at work in our brains:

• System 1 (fast, automatic, emotion-driven)
• System 2 (slower, deliberate, rational)

We like to think we're always making careful, considered choices using System 2. But the reality is that System 1—intuitive, unconscious, based on mental shortcuts—is what drives most decisions. (We even named our agency Method1 out of respect for its power.)

This is where new approaches come into focus and CMO confidence can start to grow. You don't just want people to like or even love your brand, you want them to purchase it. Be Sci creates the irresistibility to drive that behavior.

Irresistible brands embed behavioral triggers in their packaging, their messages and their ads, removing friction from decisions and making product choice second nature. When someone grabs Oreos instead of a store-brand cookie or goes straight for Pringles, it’s rarely a conscious choice—it's a mental shortcut at work.

Be Sci calls its mental shortcuts "heuristics" or "biases"—rules of thumb our brains use to make quick decisions with minimal effort. These aren't rational calculations, but remarkably predictable patterns. And when you work with them, you can confidently design campaigns and brand-building that align with how people actually choose.

What makes these shortcuts even more valuable to CMOs is that, thanks to Be Sci, we know exactly how they simplify consumer decision-making.

The most effective heuristics and biases are often the simplest:

• The Fluency Heuristic is the reason brands that are instantly recognizable get chosen more often. When shoppers scan a crowded supermarket aisle, they instinctively reach for familiar shapes and distinctive label colors because the familiar is easier to process.
• The Status Quo Bias is our tendency to stick with what we're already doing rather than switch to something new. When your brand becomes part of a consumer's daily routine—whether it's their morning coffee or snack choice—it forms a habit they'll resist changing.
• The Affect Heuristic is the tendency for emotions to influence decisions more than rational analysis. When brands offer experiences that resonate emotionally—like nostalgia for a childhood treat or anticipation of a first sip—consumers need fewer justifications to buy.

These defined, proven principles give CMOs what they need: greater certainty.

When your strategy aligns with proven behavioral patterns, you're not gambling—you're significantly bettering your odds of success from an informed and empowered position.

That shift alone transforms boardroom debates. When you can explain precisely how a campaign will trigger cognitive shortcuts to drive choice, the conversation shifts from "Why should we spend on this?" to "How quickly can we implement?"

Getting Confidently Predictive using Behavioral Metrics that Matter

Once you understand the behavioral principles driving consumer choice, everything changes—including how you'll propose to measure your new strategies.

Typical marketing metrics tell you where you've been, not where you're headed. Be Sci changes the game, giving CMOs forward-looking metrics that forecast business growth.

Take "Share of Search," a brand performance metric formalized and championed by marketing experts Les Binet and James Hankins.

At the IPA-led EffWorks Global Conference, Binet presented research demonstrating that when consumers actively search for your brand, they're revealing behaviors traditional metrics miss—like early-stage curiosity, the very first step toward purchase. He established a strong correlation between a brand's share of category searches and its market share, transforming a straightforward concept into a predictive tool for CMOs who need to see around corners.

Unlike vague measures like "brand health," Share of Search directly reflects how firmly your brand sits in consumers' consideration sets. It tracks whether your marketing has created the mental shortcuts that make your brand an instinctive choice—serving as one of the most reliable leading indicators of future market share growth.

Method1 uses a proprietary Share of Search tool that’s useful for measuring progress across brands and product lifecycles:

• For challenger brands, early gains in Share of Search can validate investment in distinctive assets long before sales data catches up, giving you the confidence to keep building your foundation when short-term pressures are most intense
• For established brands, comparing Share of Search against actual market share reveals whether you're underperforming your mental availability (signaling opportunity) or overperforming through unsustainable promotions (representing a red flag)
• For legacy brands, tracking specific search terms can distinguish between nostalgic interest and genuine purchase intent, offering clarity on whether your reinvention efforts are connecting with new consumers

With behavior-based metrics in hand, CMOs can demonstrate how proposed campaigns create the mental triggers that reliably drive purchase, create price premiums, etc.—while showing how current trends correlate with future market share.

Now you're no longer pitching possibilities to a board skeptical of the untested. You're forecasting growth with Be Sci as your compass, which transforms how your strategy gets received—and valued.

Becoming a Be Sci-backed Brand

Introducing Be Sci into your marketing means navigating away from traditional methods and metrics that have familiarity in their favor. So instead of pushing for wholesale reinvention, we recommend starting with targeted applications that demonstrate Be Sci's value quickly.

1. Run controlled test-and-learns
Pick a single behavioral principle (like the Fluency Heuristic) and put it up against your current approach in A/B tests. For CPG brands, this might mean testing distinctive packaging elements at shelf or digital split tests of product imagery based on recognition speed.

2. Set dual-metric scorecards
Establish behavioral metrics alongside traditional KPIs from day one. Pair standard metrics (awareness, conversion) with behavioral indicators (Share of Search, consideration-to-purchase ratio) to demonstrate correlation and start building the business case for bigger changes.

3. Benchmark against category leaders behaviorally
You can learn a lot by comparing your brand against category leaders using Be Sci metrics like Share of Search, which reveals how top-of-mind you both are. You won't need to hard-sell Be Sci if you can point to competitors winning the battle for instinctive preference.

4. Accelerate learning cycles
Implement rapid testing schedules with 4-6 week evaluation periods—long enough to see behavioral shifts but short enough to iterate quickly as needed. This pace builds momentum while aligning nicely with typical retail reset windows.

Irresistible Brands Make Confident CMOs

By shifting the conversation from "Where are the immediate returns?" to "How are we shaping future demand?" CMOs can fundamentally change their situation. Through Be Sci, they build fresh credibility for strategies that build brand equity and sustained pricing power over time.

The brands that thrive in the boardroom don't just generate passive awareness; they're the ones that drive instinctive, habitual action. This is Be Sci's superpower. It's the closest strategy marketing has to a "sure thing."

While competitors battle for consumer attention through increasingly crowded channels, irresistible brands built with Be Sci bypass the noise and drive action without hesitation. They don't always need to compete on price, features or even emotional appeals. They've engineered themselves to be the instinctive choice by aligning with how humans make decisions.

The consumer experience becomes delightful; it feels effortless to choose the CPG indulgences that bring them moments of joy. Board satisfaction and buy-in increases as campaign performance and market share reliably improve. And along with their approval and trust, CMO confidence grows.

It’s a different experience—with a very different set of results—when your strategy isn't based on hunches or conventions but proven principles of human behavior.

You also get to look forward to a better question: "How can we build on what's working so well?"

To see Be Sci principles in action building irresistible brands, explore Method1’s work.

About the Author

Paul Nelson, Managing Director at Method1, brings three decades of marketing and brand-building experience to building irresistible brands. A true champion of behavioral science and bringing moments of joy to people’s lives, he has played a role in driving success for notable CPG brands like Elijah Craig and Evan Williams bourbons, Ocean Spray, Hershey’s, Lunazul Tequila, Cape Tide Hard Tea, Jack Daniel’s and Sam Adams.