We all have right to make the best choice once.

When did we get the chance to make choices and how can we be one of the best choices in life?

Life is based on choices as so many people agreed years ago. We make the choices, experience the path and celebrate or regret the consequences. We have to make choices almost in every moment of our lives. I am not talking about only the major decisions we make for schools, job or wife/husband. We make choices even while deciding for which basin to use in the public toilet every day. Under these circumstances, our choices determine what and how we experience our life.

What is choice?

The opportunity or power to choose between two or more possibilities; the opportunity or power to make a decision.

Glasser Approach: “Choices are made to satisfy five needs: survival, love & belonging, freedom, fun and power.”

Rational Choice Theory: “We choose whichever option will maximize our interests and provide us with the greatest utility, or benefit.”

But what happens when two options provide you with equal amounts of fun or benefit? It’s all about preference. Or bias; “an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment”?

Bias and Choice

Bias is a tendency to favour one person, group, thing or point of view over another, often in an unfair way. Bias can be personal or more public and only represents one point of view. In psychology, “bias” refers to behavioural tendencies that affect how we reach conclusions and make choices.

To break bias and help people make decisions easier or in the way that the system favours, priming has been used as a method by marketers or even ordinary people to manipulate our decisions. It has been also used to ease the decision-making process for us and reduce the number of choices we make in a day.

Decision-Making and Branding

In ancient Babylon, to entice buyers to purchase goods that had arrived on ships, barkers solicited customers with a verbal sales pitch describing goods. To explain their offerings and goods to a mostly illiterate mass — as early as ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome — merchants hung pictorial signs (using symbols and pictures) and painted their storefronts. So people could make choices easier and perceive the benefit of their choices clearly before making the decision.

In other words, branding has come to our lives to make decision making easier. Not only while shopping but also socialising with people.

Simply, the names branded (burned) on products gave people the chance of making choices instead of the obligation of using a single type of product or service. Although branding has been perceived as the strongest weapon of marketing activity, it is bringing a character to the efforts of humankind beyond promoting commercial interests.

Today, we make more and more choices than people lived in ancient times. We even start our day by making choice; snooze the alarm or not? That’s why it may not seem very impressive to be able to have multiple choices to make for a better experience. But be sure that branding has changed not only the way we make choices, but also give us the power of directing the market with our demands and make commercial structures keep their promises regarding quality and sustainability. Because brands evolved to characters beyond visual signatures.

From the business perspective

Branding help companies build trust and offer multiple choices which can be personalised easily. Branding also gave small businesses the most powerful weapon to differ their products / services from mature companies and position their value offerings precisely. Today, small businesses with tighter budgets can build a relationship with their audiences without investing millions thanks to the power of branding and storytelling.

For larger companies, implementing branding with today’s point of view, has never been easy. They needed to:

• understand the perception of their name as a brand and product as a value among society
• compare the perception with the intention (reality with target)
• balance the perception with commercial target to achieve growth

All across the world, scientists and academicians have spent thousands of hours to be able to understand how we make decision and how priming works to clarify the choices. While it helped global market players manipulate our decision-making process during purchase, it reduced the choices we should make in a single day. And thanks to the big data and open sources provided by companies like IBM, the builders and rising stars of new economy, startups, took the opportunity of benefiting from data produced in years.

The power of making choice gave people to create new choices and become the best choice today.

From the personal perspective

Besides commercial and business centric point of view, today, we all have our very own personal brands; ourselves. We share our thoughts, defend our beliefs on small screens every day we connect to the new world and get reaction from other people, even from people we don’t know yet.

As being the owner of our own personal brands, we are offering our talents, experiences and strengths to others as a value. Today, we became just one of millions of choices on earth, especially in the business scene. And our names are our brand, our look is our logo…So we have to manage it carefully if we want to succeed and differ ourselves from other by enhancing our uniqueness.

The new world and changing relationship models give us opportunities and more choices more than ever. Today, we all have the right to make the best choice. Today, we all have the right to be the best choice.

Here is your next decision to make:

You may choose benefiting from the changing world and converting this change to be successful in what we are doing or passionate about.

Or you may choose stay perfectly still while the world around us is changing to offer more choices and opportunities to humanity.