Despite the ever-increasing amounts of money companies spend to promote their brands, results often fall far short of expectations. The reason isn’t a lack of creativity; it’s a failure to understand how people actually make decisions, according to BHG Founder and CEO Jim Cobb, brand strategist Ann Wilson and Dalibor Šumiga, behavioral marketing specialist and founder of BHG strategic partner Promosapiens, a Zagreb-based behavioral marketing firm.
Cobb, Šumiga and Wilson discussed the challenge facing CMOs and CEOs in a recent interview for an article in International 
Business Times, a leading digital publication that provides business and financial news from the U.S. and around the world.
Marketers today must navigate a media landscape that is highly fragmented, leading them to spend growing amounts without clear insight into how their campaigns affect the target audience on an emotional level. “Most marketing teams are focused on conscious decision-making frameworks. But that’s not how we behave in the real world,” Cobb explains in the article. “We need to stop assuming that more exposure equals more engagement and start asking the real question: does this make people feel something?”
BHG and Promosapiens help clients identify what will resonate emotionally before they waste their budget, by tapping into technological tools that measure how people feel and behave, not just what they say. These include cutting-edge behavioral tracking software that detects unconscious reactions. The results are much more accurate than standard surveys or focus groups, Šumiga notes.
“More than 90 percent of purchasing decisions are made emotionally, not rationally,” he says. “That’s why behavioral diagnostics are so powerful. You can’t fix what you don’t measure, and traditional tools don’t measure what matters.”
The approach is equally effective in physical environments, such as retail stores, airports, museums and malls. Promosapiens uses GDPR-compliant eye-tracking and spatial analytics software to map and measure customer movement, revealing what catches attention and what drives purchases. The resulting insights help develop a better, more intuitive customer experience.
The goal is not only to improve brand performance but also to improve financial decisions, Wilson adds. “CMOs are under enormous pressure to prove ROI,” she says. “But without behavioral insights, they’re making bets, not strategies.”
Ultimately, the process provides actionable data that connects the dots between behavior modification and financial performance. “We don’t just make people feel good; we help our clients make better decisions based on deeper, more emotionally intelligent insights that can more accurately predict outcomes,” Cobb says.