Every Shortcut Is A Promise
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
And a Cognitive Bias Cuts Both Ways.
If you were to look up Cognitive Bias in the dictionary you’d likely see it described as a noun, a systematic deviation from rational judgement, a predictable error in the way the mind processes information. It’s a super clean description of course, nice and tidy, clinical, and almost useless to anybody running a business because it files the whole thing under an error when it actually isn’t an error at all.
It’s actually the way our mind works and it’s how every purchase decision in your business already gets made, including those ones you’re proud of.
The brain isn’t being lazy. It’s being efficient in the wrong environment.
Thinking properly is expensive for any human, our brain is about two per cent of your body weight and it burns close to twenty per cent of your energy, so deliberate reasoning always gets rationed, and the default setting is fast pattern matching instead so we save energy. We recognise, not calculate. It’s a human budget, not a weakness, and for most of human history it’s been the correct trade to save valuable energy.
There are four things that fall out of that budget and they explain nearly every behaviour you see in your store.
Our brain naturally guesses when information is missing, and it doesn’t announce that it just guessed. Our customers don't know what a jacket is worth, nobody does, so she grabs the first number she sees and treats it as the real one. That’s what we call anchoring, and it’s also why a well-dressed salesperson in luxury reads as competent (the halo effect) and why the last thing that happened feels more important than the six months before it (recency bias). One mechanism, three names.
Then there is losing. Losing also hurts about twice as much as gaining feels good (loss aversion). Kahneman and Tversky put numbers on that decades ago and nothing since has really moved it much. It’s why she keeps that jacket she only half wanted once it’s been in her house for a week (the endowment effect), and it’s why one bad returns experience outweighs ten good transactions (negativity bias) on your P&L in ways your NPS just won't show you.
She protects her self-image before she protects the truth (self-serving bias). Evidence that flatters often gets waved through but evidence that stings gets interrogated (confirmation bias) and when she is genuinely unsure, she just copies whoever else is in the room (the bandwagon effect), because for most of human history watching what everyone else did was the cheapest way not to die.
The room is just a lot bigger now. It’s in her feed, her group chat, and a review section full of people she will never ever meet.
None of this is her being irrational by the way, what this tells us is that she is filling in blanks, and the blanks are the ones we left out and never gave her answers to.
Retail didn’t discover any of this. We industrialised it.
Every one of those shortcuts has a fixture in your business built specifically to feed it.
The old price crossed out next to the new one is an anchor and we put it there on purpose. The limited run is scarcity, costed and dropped to the week. The queue outside a store is social proof and somebody in that business decided how long it needed to be. The door that can’t buy the product is exclusivity, and it took a segmentation deck and three months of account arguments to build. We didn’t stumble into any of it, we have intentionally been engineering this for about a hundred years and I have to say we’ve got extremely good at it.
However, here's the uncomfortable part. It worked.
It worked so well that most of the levers you have on a Monday morning are shortcut levers, and often the ones you are proudest of are usually the ones you engineered hardest.
We often talk about the customer journey like it’s a considered thing, like she weighs up the options and reads the details before arriving at a decision, and in most categories in retail that’s not what happens at all. She actually decides in just a few short seconds and by using whatever information is closest to hand, and then builds the reasoning afterwards so the decision feels like it was her own.
That's not a flaw in her. That’s her brain doing its job properly.
And we have spent a good century building for it.
During my time at Sneakerboy one of the most valuable things we owned was never on the shelves, it was the line created outside, and we got that line almost by default many times because of what the name Sneakerboy did.
There was one time we put a Jordan 11 in front of it and I remember it well.
It wasn’t a shoe that was right for our customer or one they were asking for, it belonged in streetwear or basketball doors and everybody in our office knew it belonged in there, and then we ran it anyway simply because we knew the line meant it would likely move regardless. I was the Buying Director at the time and I clearly remember arguing against it before the owner made the final call, I naturally fell in line, and it sold, which is the part that makes this hard to talk about honestly.
The queue was never evidence that anybody wanted that shoe. It was evidence that people wanted us.
And we spent that brand equity as a result.
The shortcuts still work. What has changed is that nothing behind them can be checked.
Edelman’s 2026 barometer found seven out of ten people are now unwilling or hesitant to trust anyone whose values, background or information sources differ from their own, and it’s even worse in developed markets, not better.
What this means is that your customer has to decide what they think about your brand without being able to take your word for anything, so she judges you on whatever she can check instead. That review count, a queue out the door, the old price crossed out next to the new one, your packaging or the fact that three people she follows already have it.
That’s a cognitive bias now answering a question your brand left open.
But the number is the measurement and not the reason, and the reason matters more to you than the number does.
So here it is. The cost of producing a convincing signal fell to almost nothing. A five star average, a founder story, a sustainability claim, a sold-out badge, a queue, a wall of glowing reviews, every one of those can now be manufactured in an afternoon by somebody with no product and no intention of making one. So the normal equipment your customer would use to check you with has stopped working, and it stopped working on all channels at roughly the same time.
And then there’s the part that we did to ourselves. Fifty-one weeks of sale a year taught her that our prices aren’t information anymore. Years of urgency banners that were never urgent just taught her that our claims aren’t information meaning anything.
So she isn’t more cynical than she was five years ago. She has just lost the instruments.
Which leaves with exactly one thing that can’t be manufactured in an afternoon anymore, and it’s the only competitive advantage you have left.
What your brand or business actually does, repeatedly and when nobody is watching.
The audit is being run by a machine that only reads behaviour.
Here’s the bit almost nobody in retail has costed up yet. Increasingly your customer is not the first one to look you up. An LLM is. Omniscient Digital analysed just over twenty-three thousand AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, and found that when somebody asks about a specific brand, only twenty-three per cent of what the model draws on comes from the brand’s own pages and what they say.
What this means is that roughly three quarters of the answer about your brand is being written totally by other people. Editorial, forums, review sites, the returns complaint somebody posted two years ago and forgot about.
And here’s why that should stop you in your tracks. You cannot charm it. It has no halo effect. It doesn’t feel the weight of your packaging or warm to your founder story or notice that your store smells expensive simply because it will never experience any of it. It reads what happened, and what other people said happened.
Every shortcut we’ve ever engineered was built for a human brain running on that energy budget we spoke about earlier. The machine just isn’t running on one.
So it’s auditing your brand and business behaviour and skipping your narrative or statement entirely, at scale and before your customer has formed a single impression of you.
That’s the whole argument here, you are being judged before she has even arrived.
Your shortcut is either compressing something true, or covering for something that isn’t there.
Here’s where it's going to get uncomfortable for some of us.
A style that sells through in two weeks because the product is genuinely good is accurate information delivered efficiently. Good packaging on a well-made product is a true signal, compressed. She can’t evaluate everything from first principles and she shouldn’t have to either, so the shortcut is doing honest work and it’s brand behaviour arriving faster than brand language could deliver it.
On the flip side though, a style that sells through because you only bought twelve is the identical mechanism used to stand in for quality that isn’t there.
Same psychology but opposite consequences and she can’t tell which one she is looking at while she is standing in front of it, that’s the entire reason the shortcut exists in the first place.
But let me be very clear here, she always finds out afterwards. Always.
It's just now she finds out in a comment thread, in about four seconds and in front of everybody.
The discount ladder is a shortcut that stopped pointing at anything.
Nothing dishonest has to happen for this to break. The RRP is real, the sale is real, it just runs fifty-one weeks a year, and eventually she learns that your prices aren’t information anymore. She also doesn’t get angry about it. She just stops reading them cause they don’t have the impact that you wanted anymore.
Now you need a deeper discount to move the same unit, and next season deeper again, and somewhere in that ladder a merchant is sitting in a Monday meeting explaining a margin line that has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with a signal that got spent down to zero.
That’s the part nobody costs up. We treat scarcity claims, discount pricing and urgency banners as levers, when they’re often actually withdrawals, and there is no line in the P&L that shows the balance running down.
Here's three things you could run from next week and let me know what you find.
Take your last twelve months of promotional pricing and count the weeks the product sat at full price. If it’s under twenty, your RRP is just decoration and your customer has worked that out long before you did.
Pull every urgency and scarcity claim and message that’s currently live across your site and store, and for each one ask whether it would still be true if we removed the claim. Not whether it converts but whether it’s actually true.
Then take your top-selling line and ask your team, really honestly, whether it sells because of what it is or because of where it sits and who else bought it. If nobody can answer that then you don’t have a hero product or silhouette, you just have a shortcut with good placement.
Narrative can build the shortcut, but it can’t make it true.
The obvious villain here is often the marketer, I don’t think that’s right. Every one of these levers works and that’s the problem, they work straight away and they work measurably and the person who pulls them gets rewarded this quarter while the cost always lands two years down the track and often on somebody else’s watch.
Which is why I’ve really stopped treating this as a messaging question.
You can write the urgency, I think we all get that. You can design the anchor, you can engineer the queue, but what you cannot do, with any amount of narrative, is make the thing she used or inferred from it turn out to be accurate, that’s something only behaviour can do.
So she isn’t being manipulated by your shortcuts, if I’m honest. She is reading your behaviour at speed and taking a shortcut to save herself the work and mental energy.
And so is the machine answering for you.
Every shortcut you offer is a promise about what she’ll find when she gets there.
Some of them are keeping it.
Nick Gray
About the author: Nick Gray is the founder of IGU Global, a Sydney brand strategy and retail consultancy, and was named a Top Retail Expert 2026 by Rethink Retail. With 25+ years across Nike, Adidas, Diesel, Sneakerboy and Westfield, he works with startups, mid-size brands and enterprise clients on emotionally intelligent brand strategy, consumer psychology and AI's role in retail.
Work with Nick at iguglobal.com.