The report – produced jointly with the British Brands Group and Mountainview Learning – assesses how consumers make decisions about items they purchase. The study -- ‘Confusion, heuristics and the consumer’ -- found that purchasers rely on mental shortcuts, or heuristics, which allow them to make judgements quickly and effectively.

Heuristic responses

The report suggests that the ‘expensive, unreliable and unpredictable’ nature of traditional infringement cases could be made much more effective by assessing heuristic responses, perhaps in a ‘virtual store’.
Alexander Carter-Silk, the partner head of the intellectual property, technology and data department at Speechly Bircham, commented: ‘These advances in behavioural science allow us to use robust techniques to assess empirically whether a competing, similarly packaged product is unfairly free-riding on those heuristics and misleading shoppers.’