Dilip Soman’s The Last Mile is an excellent book. It reiterates fascinating points that are commonly found in behavioral (economics) books. What sets the book apart? The effective structure put to the insights. There are plenty of classifications and tables. These help us better understand the vast number of behavioral insights that the book contains.
Test Your Ideas
Other interesting points are when he talks about the need for organizations to become “experimental organizations”. That is “…one that is committed to the use of controlled trials to test the effectiveness of potential interventions”. (Soman, 2015, page 223). Critically, it isn’t good enough to just have lots of cool ideas. You need to test them and see what actually works in the real world.
He talks about the idea of decision points. These are where the consumer (or other decision-maker) is confronted by the need to make a decision. A useful example he gives is partitioning popcorn into smaller bags. Have one big bag and you might just mindlessly eat the lot. What happens to popcorn partitioned into smaller bags? The consumer is more likely to see the active choice? Do they open a new bag? There is a decision point. Of course, a consumer can just eat on through. Still, a consumer is more likely to be able to exercise self-control when they meet a decision point. This presents them with an active choice — do they really want to open a new bag and eat more?
The Last Mile Matters
Soman’s theme is that The Last Mile matters. This is his analogy of behavioral interventions to the critical problem of delivering services, i.e. cable, to the consumer’s house. He suggests that businesses typically spend a lot of time thinking about the beginning of a process. This it the grand business strategy. Soman suggests that we need to think a bit more about the end of the process. This is where we actually impact someone’s behavior. It is here where he gives excellent advice and here where subtle changes can make a big difference.
For more on behavioral economics see here, here, and here.
Read: Dilip Soman, (2015) The Last Mile: Creating Social and Economic Value from Behavioral Insights, Rotman-UTP Publishing
