While I agree with Alan Mitchell's contention that behavioural economics (BE) 'will shake marketing to the core' (Marketing, 12 May), I must disagree that BE suggests reasons for brand choice have little to do with marketers' brand strategies. BE essentially supports the notion that emotions drive decisions and that finding distinctive emotional benefits is key to marketing success. For example, one BE effect - 'status quo bias' - is a powerful driver of behaviour because maintaining the status quo delivers subconscious emotional end benefits.

These are either positive, such as contentment or satisfaction, or they help us avoid potential negative emotional outcomes, such as disappointment if an unfamiliar brand performs unsatisfactorily. Another BE effect - 'loss aversion', whereby avoiding a loss is preferable to making a gain - is driven by the emotional desire to avoid the feelings of sadness induced by loss. An experiment conducted at Iowa University's Cognitive Nueroscience Division - the 'Iowa gambling task' - found that our emotional brain 'knows' which decision is best long before our rational brain has ever woken up. Once we've learned wither a positive or negative emotional outcome, we 'mark' it and this acts as a rule of thumb to make quick decisions in the future. Having learned that buying Brand X results in a positive emotional outcome, we are predisposed to select it again. However, this 'status quo bias' only develops for brands if a marketing strategy has initially been built in part around a distinctive emotional benefit.