What is Context Architecture?

The yin to Behavioural Science’s yang.
Yes, Jim. People truly are strange.

They refuse to experience product journeys differently.
They are fascinated with new products whose journeys are different. They are brand loyalists who believe that they buy the same products, at home. And who flirt with new brands at the store.

Users.
Consumers.

A strange gumbo of rationale and irrational decisioning.

Behavioural Economics makes it its business to understand this irrationality. It understands that reducing the time and mental effort it takes to make simple decisions every time we encounter a forked action-path, once was - and still is - imperative to our survival.

Enter, centuries of evolutionary training that taught us our ‘reason’. In the form of biases and heuristics, they make up our mental map and aid our navigation through everyday life. If you look closely, you’ll see that it is rationality that is abnormal. Irrationality is really our standard programming.

Whether
rational
or irrational,
behaviour
is always
just a reaction
to context.
Context triggers habit. Context triggers new behaviour.

A way to nudge behaviour, is to create the appropriate context that allows for people to behave differently.

Eg.: Blind spots and dark, dimly lit areas make perfect dumping grounds for garbage on the street. Providing dustbins might sound like a logical solution, but it doesn’t always work. What works though, is to clean and then brightly light up the place. Solve for the blind spot, not for litterers.
Context doesn’t just give us the whole story.
It is the whole story.

Problems have an uncanny way of being slightly untruthful. Without the whole truth, even the most sound scientific solutions fail, because the context of the problem is not fully mapped.

Without context, a man in a portrait wearing knee socks and a powdered wig is feeling awfully chilly. Context tells you that he belongs to a different era, class and culture. Context. It paints a completely different picture.

Context
ArchitectureTM

is the science of mapping the elements that stimulate reactions out of us. It is the marriage of many disciplines, distilled into one lens.

Context has many interwoven primary and secondary facets. Once mapped, they reveal unseen triggers and uncover the motivation behind non-conscious decisions.

Here is a look at some of them.

PRIMARY FACETS OF CONTEXT

Collective Memory

Associations and Meaning of the Behaviour

Linguistics

All about the Spectrum of Meaning, Labels and Cultural Memes

Social Norms

Expectations, Customs, Signalling & Other Societal Contexts

Call of the Era

Evolution of User Behaviour

Trigger States

Context in Hot state vs Cold State

It is a unique lens to map associations of products, brands and experiences with their consumers. Context ArchitectureTM allows for a whole new perspective on problems and opportunities and lets us design contextual, measurable solutions for products, brands and services.

Whether you’re looking to understand your brand from a consumer lens or solve for market, people or products, Context Architecture is a powerful lens to look through.

Take a look at some case studies here.

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