OPINION6 June 2012

The Apprentice final: BE at work

The TV series ‘The Apprentice’ may or may not be your sort of thing but Sunday’s final was a must-see for anyone with an interest in behavioural economics.

Consider, for example, Nick Holzherr – one of Lord Sugar’s three finalists. He proposed a software app that would do away with the need for the family cook to work out the ingredients they need for the weekly supermarket shop. They would just select the recipes they intended cooking and the number of people they were cooking for and the app would do the rest, ordering up the ingredients and delivering them to your door. In short, the chore of writing up a weekly shopping list would be done away with.

“The first factor in creating (market) domination is the role of convenience,” notes the behavioural economist Neale Martin in his book Habit. “Starbucks is willing to open a store across the street from an existing Starbucks if traffic justifies it. The typical logic of not wanting to cannibalize existing store sales is replaced by the knowledge that you sell a lot more coffee if you don’t make customers cross the street to get it.”

This is re-enforced in the findings of a study by Johnson & Goldstein, which showed how in countries where we have to ‘opt in’ to be organ donors around 20% of people are registered, but in countries where we have to ‘opt out’ of being organ donors around 80% are signed up. Principle or rational thought has little to do with it; people will always take the easy option.

Holzherr’s “recipe idea” plays to this human tendency perfectly. Personally I’d take it a step further, adding a pop-up reminder for the start of cooking time and loading the recipe to my calendar.

But Lord Sugar didn’t go for it. Maybe he doesn’t do the shopping and cooking in his house and so wouldn’t have the detailed knowledge of current behaviour to see how Holzherr’s idea could make life easier. Or maybe he had concerns over how to monetise it in the long term. But I suspect if he conducted detailed observational research to understand the “bumps” in the online shopping journey he would see what an opportunity this could be.

Lord Sugar certainly displayed his own behavioral tendencies in the final decision, which was between the “safe option” of a tried-and-tested recruitment agency and a “dangerous gamble” – a fine wine hedge fund.

A behavioural economist would have known instantly who would win. Just like the vast majority of humans, Lord Sugar’s decision was determined by an in-built and overwhelming desire to avoid risk. The recruitment agency triumphed.

@RESEARCH LIVE

1 Comment

12 years ago

This is a really interesting concept and would be ground breaking if it were not for the fact that there are already suppliers out there doing just this. It is not a new concept and any quick check on the web will find suppliers of this type popping up all over the UK. But what I think we need to be careful about is this. I like the next one, gets excited at the prospect of a new company with its job creating opportunities, but Whisk already exists. In fact not only does it already exist it has been trading for a number of years and is owned and run by one of the UK's rising stars in cookery - James McIntosh. Not only that but he has a series of cookery books on the market called guess what - Whisk - and his own app. Check out Whiskapp.com.

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