Well, we've reached the end of this module on consumer decision making. So you know what's next, let's just review some of the major important ideas that we talked about in this section of the course. We started out by noting that every purchase decision your customer makes is a response to a problem. It's important to think about buying behavior as a problem solving exercise, because then it's easier to put yourself in the role of a facilitator, someone who's going to help the consumer solve that problem. We know that we reward people who help us. And so your reward could be years of loyalty.
However, we also know that realistically, problems are big and small. They come in many sizes. And there's going to be a lot of variability in terms of how much effort Your customer is motivated to expend in order to solve a problem. So we started first by noting that for important or complex decisions, we usually see that the customer follows a series of methodical steps. If you understand how those steps occur, and what information your customer considers at each step, you really have a leg up on the competition. Because you have the ability to control that conversation.
You can play an active role in structuring the decision situation to guide your customers toward the correct choice. However, we also acknowledged that many if not most, consumer decisions probably aren't made with this amount of cognitive effort. So we have to recognize that many consumer decisions are made out of habit or with the help of well learned rules of thumb That we called heuristics. Furthermore, your customers decisions often are responses to subtle prompts in the purchase environment. We know that consumers respond to Prime's that is to various clues in the environment that, get them thinking one way or the other. And if you're on top of that process, it can really make a big difference.
And finally, we took a quick look at how new advances in neuro marketing help us to understand what really drives consumers decisions. I wanted to end this first course with a focus on neuro marketing. Because one of the takeaways here is very important, and it really comes full circle to what we started with at the beginning of this course. And that is that it's not enough to know what people do. We need to know why they do it. And so some of these files findings from neuro marketing, essentially are reinforcing the idea that consumers responses to products and services are not necessarily driven by conscious rational factors.
And in fact, the consumer himself isn't always necessarily able to articulate exactly why he made the choice he did. So it's very important for us to dig beneath the surface, and not to take consumers behaviors at face value.