Outthinkers #82—Nina Mažar: Employing Behavioral Science in Your Company's Strategy
Nina Mažar is Professor of Marketing at Questrom School of Business at Boston University and author of the book Behavioral Science in the Wild (with Dilip Soman).
Nina was the 2019 president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making and has been named one of "The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” (2014). With her focus on behavioral science she examines ways to help individuals and organizations make better decisions and increase societal welfare. Popular accounts of her work have appeared among others on NPR, BBC, Wired, and various NYTimes Bestsellers.
Nina is the co-founder of BEworks and former inaugural Senior Behavioral Scientist of the World Bank’s behavioral insights team (eMBeD) in Washington, DC. She has served as advisor on boards of various government (e.g, Austria and Canada) and organizations (e.g., Irrational Labs in San Francisco, CA). She holds a Dr. rer. pol. in Marketing from the University of Mainz in Germany.
In this podcast, she shares:
- Fascinating insights from her years of study about how morals, honesty and dishonesty guide our decisions.
- How an organization can impact a client or customer’s decisions at the moment they happen
- How pricing can be a powerful, and I would say overlooked, lever for affecting customer behavior
- How to design experiments to understand your customers’ underlying motives
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Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
00:59—Introducing Nina + The topic of today’s episode
2:21—If you really know me, you know that...
4:33—What is your definition of strategy?
5:46—What is an insight you can share when it comes to honesty?
8:29—Could you tell us about your work with the Ontario government on projects affecting human behavior?
11:03—Can you share an experience where the attempt to influence human behavior backfired?
12:42—How do you approach designing a behavioral science experiment as a company?
16:14—What do organizations get wrong when they are looking to scale behavioral science and shape behavior?
20:00—How can people follow you and keep learning from you?
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Additional Resources:
Personal Page: https://ninamazar.com/
Thinkers50 Profile: https://thinkers50.com/biographies/nina-mazar/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninamazar/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ninamazar
Thank you to our guest, our executive producer Zach Ness, our editor James Pearce, and the Outthinker team. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.
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