The psychology of marketing disasters to be explored at Mumbrella360

Rob Pyne, chief strategy officer of media agency Initiative, will explore the common human errors that lead to marketing disasters, how bad decisions get made in business and how we can learn to avoid making them at June’s Mumbrella360 conference.

Pyne, who specialised in human rationality as part of his psychology degree, is to present marketing case studies that demonstrate systematic biases and errors in judgement, such as the “sunk-cost effect”. By examining what went wrong in prominent marketing snafu’s, Pyne will show that because humans are inherently irrational, these blunders can happen to anyone, but being aware of this could help marketers avoid making similar mistakes.

The session, entitled, “Dumb Ways to Decide”, will look at group dynamics and how phenomena like framing and group think mean that groups often make worse decisions than individuals.