Mental Models for Marketers

a UCL Behavioural Insights Hub course - other training / workshops.

• Structure / dates: 9th September 2026, 9:30am - 4:30pm.
• Price: £775pp, with further discounts available (see full price list further down). Bookings available soon.
• Location: In Person - @UCL, London.

Contact us to enquire or book your place. Prefer a chat? Schedule a call.

Overview:

Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger were famous for their ‘latticework’ of mental models they would apply to investing decisions, which helped them become the most successful investors of the 20th century. Leading modern marketers such as Rory Sutherland have claimed that marketing has become stale and conformist, often obsessing over a single metric, and we need to expand our mental model toolkit.

In this one-day workshop, the UCL Behavioural Insights Hub is teaming up with digital marketer David Lloydd to provide a deep dive into the world of mental models.

Delegates are expected to come to the workshop with a marketing problem they are working on.

The course will start with a deep dive on the cognitive psychology of mental models: how our mind builds them, how we can maximise their accuracy and how not to get locked into one mental model (confirmation bias). Delegates will learn the key skill of metacognition: of being able to step back from a single mental model, scrutinise it from afar, and try out another to compare results.

Alongside this delegates will be given a range of mental models, some they may be familiar with, and some they won’t. They will be encouraged to try these out on the problem they bring to the workshop to see what fits. Every situation is different, and, like Buffet and Munger, you need a whole latticework to be able to handle a large number of situations.

Key takeaways:

• Understand the cognitive psychology of mental models, metacognition, and confirmation bias.
• Learn to apply a range of mental models from different disciplines.
• Develop a solution to a problem you are working on right now.

The workshop 

Part 1 - Mental Models, Confirmation Bias and Metacognition

In opposition to current popular narratives, the human intuitive mind is not a crude collection of heuristics and biases, but an unfathomably sophisticated inference engine capable of generating highly detailed simulations (mental models) of situations. It’s sophistication and capabilities far surpass any modern computing system or AI, and any marketer should learn to use their greatest asset well if they want to succeed.

However, the one true great potential failing of the human mind, that one must always be aware of, is its tendency to get locked into a single vision of a situation. We can call this tunnel vision or not seeing the wood for the trees, but it is also part of an umbrella of processes that come under the term ‘confirmation bias’. Confirmation bias, and it’s social version, groupthink, where we becoming increasingly confident in an illusion, are thought to be behind some of the most disastrous decisions in history. The key to good thinking in any domain is to instill a deep metacognitive habit and ability of stepping back from our current vision, examining it from afar, and applying other mental models to compare results.

Part 2 - The Latticework

With this vision in mind, in the second part of this session delegates will be given actual thinking tools and frameworks from across psychology, behavioural science, marketing and even some of Buffet and Munger’s. They will apply these to the problems they bring to the workshop, exploring how they change the way they look at the situation, and noticing how and why new ideas emerge. They will be given physical copies of these as they are introduced as well as physical binders, to take away, as these are well known to remain more salient and act as reminders to engage with the toolkit compared to a list in some digital space.