Marketing Psychology & Mental Models

: ## What it does

It diagnoses a marketing problem through a behavioral-science lens and produces an actionable persuasion-architecture document. First it reduces the problem to first principles (First Principles + 5 Whys) and locates the real bottleneck (Theory of Constraints) — when you say "conversion is low" it separates whether the issue is traffic, offer, or friction. Then it selects the fitting models from a library of 80+ mental models and delivers three layers for each: (1) the underlying psychology, (2) a concrete marketing application, (3) an ethical-use note.

The frameworks it uses are named and real: Cialdini's 7 principles of persuasion (reciprocity, commitment-consistency, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, unity); Kahneman & Tversky Prospect Theory and loss aversion (losses hurt ~2–2.5x more than equivalent gains); JTBD (people "hire" the job, not the product); pricing psychology (anchoring, decoy/asymmetric dominance, charm pricing, mental accounting); behavior engineering (BJ Fogg B=MAP, EAST, COM-B, nudge/choice architecture); and experience design (peak-end rule, goal-gradient, Zeigarnik). Recommendations are prioritized by funnel stage and the customer's current belief — aligning with the belief rather than fighting it head-on (confirmation bias).

When to use it

When you face low conversion, price objections, a stalled trial→paid step, churn, choice paralysis, or a trust gap. When you want to psychologically diagnose why a landing page, pricing table, onboarding flow, or campaign message isn't working — and redesign it. When building a new offer/funnel and want to plan which triggers belong where from the start.

Method / frameworks

A diagnosis layer (First Principles, Theory of Constraints, Local vs Global Optima, Pareto), a buyer-psychology layer (loss aversion, endowment, IKEA effect, zero-price, status-quo bias, paradox of choice, social proof), a persuasion layer (Cialdini 7, foot-in-the-door, door-in-the-face, anchoring, decoy, framing, contrast), a pricing-psychology layer (charm/left-digit, rounded-fluency, Rule of 100, good-better-best), and a behavior-design layer (Hick's Law, AIDA, Rule of 7, BJ Fogg, EAST, COM-B, activation energy, nudge). Every recommendation passes an "only if genuine" ethics filter — fake scarcity, dark patterns, and manipulative defaults are excluded.