11 Psychology Tricks From the World’s Best Brands - Richard Shotton

1. 0:00 – 7:43

   How Five Guys Manipulated the Market

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      What did you learn from Five Guys?

   2. RSRichard Shotton0:02

      So, Five Guys is the opening chapter, and we talk about something that they did very powerfully, which is when they launched, they were relentless at focusing on just doing burger and chips. So people like McDonald's had got seduced by the fact that they could launch filet-o-fish and, and chicken burgers. But Five Guys relentlessly honed down on just doing burgers. Now, some of the benefit of that is a, you know, ability just to get better at cooking, better at producing your core product. But psychologists argue there's something else on top of it. So there's an idea called the goal dilution effect, and the first studies were done by Zang and Fishbach back in two thousand and seven, and they did a very simple experiment: recruit a group of people, randomize them into two subgroups, and the first set of people are told, "If you eat tomatoes, it's very good for your heart health. Here are the reasons." And that group are asked to say whether they think eating tomatoes is worth doing for their heart health. Second group of people, they see exactly the same text, exactly the same reasons, and logic, and facts about why tomato eating is so good for cardiovascular health, but they are also told, "If you eat tomatoes, it will improve your eye health. It will reduce degenerative diseases." Now, when that second group are asked to say how good, um, eating tomatoes is for heart health, they come back with a twelve percent lower score. So even though they've seen the same facts, because in this second group, there was an additional reason thrown in, it reduced-- it diluted the believability in that, that core reason. So there's, there's a psychological as well as practical benefit about communicating that you do one thing well. Uh, people have a rule of thumb in their head that you can't be a jack of all trades, you know, or you-- if you are, you'll be a master of, of none of them. So there's, there's a sacrifice in credibility and believability if you claim to do multiple things.

   3. CWChris Williamson2:09

      What does that say about sort of underlying human psychology? Is it that we have a kind of a zero sum or a, a, a resource limitation on how much we think w-we should be able to distribute between the traits of a particular offer?

   4. RSRichard Shotton2:26

      I, I, I think a lot of these biases that behavioral scientists identify, that psychologists identify, they're generally true. I mean, all things being equal, you tend to beget better at a task if it is the sole focus of your attention. If you spend forty hours a week being a cyclist, you're gonna be a better cyclist than I, if I spent ten hours a week. So people have a sensible rule of thumb in their head, but then the danger is they overapply it in situations where it's not relevant. Like in the situation Zang set up, people got the same facts about cardiovascular health, but because they threw in this second benefit, it seemed to detract from it. So I think it's often the misapplication of a generally, generally sensible rule of thumb.

   5. CWChris Williamson3:12

      Is the rule or the lesson for brands here that you need to win one thing very well and be very cautious about trying to add additional offers, and features, and, uh, potential advantages that people can get by using it?

   6. RSRichard Shotton3:28

      That's a-- Yeah, that's a, that's a fair summary. It's essentially the argument that be very, very careful about adding extra reasons to believe, because what they will gradually do is undermine believability in the, the core reason to buy your product. So if you start saying, "You're all things to all people," over time, gradually, insidiously, that original reason to buy gradually disappears.

   7. CWChris Williamson3:54

      Uh, reasons to believe is a wonderful way to put it. The belie-the believability thing is really interesting. So, you know, selfishly, I've got, uh, Neutonic, I've got my, uh, [claps] productivity drink, and I'm shamelessly using yours and Sutherland's insights around behavioral science in an attempt to do this. And, uh, it does lots of things, um, but we could have talked about procrastination, we could have talked about, uh, alertness, we could have talked about energy, but we just tried to get one word, which was productivity, and we were just-- went for one single thing. I think the problem we have with productivity, the problem we're currently facing, and we may end up pivoting a little bit, is that-- and we've got-- we're using fuel your focus and productivity drinks. There's two things that are kind of synonymous with each other. I think the problem is it's too amorphous as an offering. I thi-- I don't think that people necessarily want to be focused or productive. I think they want to get their job done with limited effort. So we're trying to think now about what a pivot from a copy perspective would be to talk about the outcome, as opposed to the sort of mediator between you and the outcome. Like, you don't want focus, you want your work completed. You don't want productivity, you want to be efficient-- you want, like, efficiently to complete the, the task that's in front of you. So-

   8. RSRichard Shotton5:08

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson5:08

      Yeah.

   10. RSRichard Shotton5:08

       I-I think there, there's two bits there. Firstly, selling the outcome rather than the, the product makes sense. I think it was Levitt said, "You know, if you've got a drill, don't sell nine-inch, I don't know, drill bits, sell nine-inch holes." So I think there's an argument there. But, but the, um, the other bit that struck me when you're talking about things like productivity and focus, is that an awful lot of experimentation shows that people are pretty bad at remembering abstract data.

   11. CWChris Williamson5:39

       Mm.

   12. RSRichard Shotton5:39

       They're very good at remembering concrete, physical things. So the original study was by Ian Begg back in nineteen seventy-two, and he recruits a group of people, reads them twenty two-word phrases.

   13. CWChris Williamson5:55

       Mm.

   14. RSRichard Shotton5:55

       He doesn't mention it to the participants, but half of these two-word phrases are what he calls abstract concepts, so they're intangible ideas, like basic truth.... half of the phrases he reads out are what he calls concrete phrases. So they describe physical things, like a white horse. So he reads out this list, and then later on he asks people what they can remember, and his key finding is people can remember, on average, nine percent of the abstractions, but thirty-six percent of the concrete phrases. So you are four times more likely to remember the thing that you can visualize, and Begg's explanation applies just as much to twenty twenty-six. His argument is, vision's the most powerful of our senses, so if you use language people can visualize, it's very sticky. But if you stay in this realm of abstraction, like focus or productivity-

   15. CWChris Williamson6:45

       Mm.

   16. RSRichard Shotton6:45

       -people can understand what you're saying, but they'll struggle to remember it, you know, a minute or two after you've, you've mentioned it. So there could be something there.

   17. CWChris Williamson6:52

       What would be-- I was gonna say, what would be an equivalent way to visualize increased productivity or focus?

   18. RSRichard Shotton6:58

       Well, coming up with that on the fly would be very hard.

   19. CWChris Williamson7:01

       Freestyle rapping might be a little-

   20. RSRichard Shotton7:03

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. [chuckles] This could go disastrously wrong, but maybe concrete-- sorry, maybe specific examples of people doing it.

   21. CWChris Williamson7:10

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   22. RSRichard Shotton7:11

       Red Bull didn't say: "Red Bull gives you energy," which is abstract. They said: "Red Bull gives you wings."

   23. CWChris Williamson7:15

       Wings.

   24. RSRichard Shotton7:15

       That's something you can picture-

   25. CWChris Williamson7:17

       Mm

   26. RSRichard Shotton7:17

       ... and visualize. Uh, Apple didn't say, "You get a gigabyte of memory," when they first launched the iPod. They said, "A thousand songs in your pod- pocket." You know, you can picture a pocket, you can't picture a gigabyte or a megabyte. So I, I, I think what those businesses and copywriters did so successfully is translate that abstract objective into something that people could, could picture.

2. 7:43 – 18:51

   Is Price Relativity the Best Marketing Trick?

   1. CWChris Williamson7:43

      Talk to me about Red Bull, obviously, absolute giga brand. Uh, pretty fascinating, I'm gonna guess, from a consumer behavior standpoint. What have you learned about them?

   2. RSRichard Shotton7:55

      I think one of the most powerful things they've done, and you may have covered this with Rory Sutherland, was apply this principle of price relativity. So a core concept of behavioral science is when people are weighing up what a, um, a product is worth paying for, they don't look at the benefits that product brings and then try and translate that on a universal yardstick. So they don't think to themselves: "Okay, well, a can of Red Bull will give me one unit of happiness, and I will pay one dollar per unit of happiness," whether it's a pair of jeans or a, or a soft drink.

   3. CWChris Williamson8:31

      Mm.

   4. RSRichard Shotton8:32

      You know, people don't do that 'cause it's a complex question. And Daniel Kahneman argued, when people face complex questions, what they tend to do, even if they don't realize it, is replace the complex question with a simpler alternative. And the simpler alternative is, how much did I pay for something similar? So if a new item, like Red Bull, launches, uh, if it's more than a similar purchase, people think it's bad value. If it's less than a similar purchase, people think it's good value. Now, when you first hear that, it sounds bleeding obvious, but actually that's a very powerful insight for a marketer. Because if you accept that value is perceived relatively rather than absolutely, what it leads to is thinking, "If I can change my mental comparison set, I can change the willingness of my consumer-- you know, the willingness to pay."

   5. CWChris Williamson9:19

      Is this the Rolls-Royce thing?

   6. RSRichard Shotton9:21

      Well, this, I would say, is the Red Bull thing. I mean, it could be the Rolls-Royce. The Rolls-Royce example, um, would be, don't sell them at car shows, sell them at yacht shows or, um-

   7. CWChris Williamson9:29

      Yep, yep

   8. RSRichard Shotton9:29

      ... uh, air shows, because-

   9. CWChris Williamson9:31

      Yep

   10. RSRichard Shotton9:31

       -a Rolls-Royce is cheap compared to a private jet, not cheap compared-

   11. CWChris Williamson9:34

       Yep

   12. RSRichard Shotton9:34

       ... to an Audi or Mercedes. But think, think about Red Bull. When they launched, the standard soft drink was about half the price, and the standard soft drink, and I'll use the UK numbers, what, what Coke and Pepsi did was they sold in these squat, fat, three hundred and thirty mil cylinders.

   13. CWChris Williamson9:53

       Mm-hmm.

   14. RSRichard Shotton9:54

       If Red Bull had launched in exactly that same can, it would've been compared to those prices, and people might have paid a five or a ten percent premium because they knew it was highly caffeinated, had this extra functionality, but they wouldn't have paid twice as much. But paradoxically, you change the shape of the can, you make it smaller to two hundred and fifty mils, you make it tall and thin, and essentially you've broken this unhelpful comparison with cheap soft drinks. And, and if you look around, quite a few businesses have done that. It, it's a very powerful way of changing willingness to pay.

   15. CWChris Williamson10:28

       What are some of the other examples of businesses that have done that?

   16. RSRichard Shotton10:32

       So Seedlip, are you fa- are you familiar with that?

   17. CWChris Williamson10:34

       Is that a gin?

   18. RSRichard Shotton10:35

       Um, it-- Ah, well, very... I- it- it's a basically a fake gin, so it's a non-alcoholic gin.

   19. CWChris Williamson10:41

       Yep.

   20. RSRichard Shotton10:41

       And what they did, though, brilliantly, and they, they sold maybe two or three years ago, I think, tens of millions to Diageo. Um, this is phrased on the bottle, I think it's a distilled non-alcoholic spirit. It sells in the spirits aisle of Tescos and Sainsbury's, but the kind of non-alcoholic end. Uh, the imagery on the front is like, you know, beautiful drawings, looks like a craft gin, and it sells for about twenty pounds a bottle. Now, what people think is, well, you know, a fancy craft gin sells for about thirty pounds a bottle. This stuff hasn't got any alcohol in, so I'm not prepared to pay as much, but, you know, twenty pounds, a bit expensive, but it's ten pounds less. That seems, you know, reasonable. I'll buy it.

   21. CWChris Williamson11:24

       Mm.

   22. RSRichard Shotton11:24

       Now, think about an alternative universe where that brand was launched as a cordial, which is what it basically is.

   23. CWChris Williamson11:31

       Right.

   24. RSRichard Shotton11:31

       If it was launched in Day-Glo colors next to Ribena, [chuckles] next to the Robinson Squash, now, people might be prepared to pay, I don't know, double what you pay for Ribena or another fruit cordials, but they wouldn't pay five times or six times as much. Even if this stuff tasted like the nectar of the gods, people wouldn't pay that kind of premium. So i- it's about where you set your benchmark. Now, people will adjust from that comparative benchmark, but the general finding is people don't adjust as far as they should. So you throw out this super expensive benchmark through design or comparison set-

   25. CWChris Williamson12:07

       Mm

   26. RSRichard Shotton12:07

       ... and then as a business, you, you, you reap the benefits.

   27. CWChris Williamson12:10

       You know what's an interesting example of this in the UK?... they're a, a co-investor in Neutonic, which is what makes me think about it. Grenade bars, familiar with them and their story?

   28. RSRichard Shotton12:21

       Uh, I'm familiar with the brand, but not the story.

   29. CWChris Williamson12:24

       Well-

   30. RSRichard Shotton12:24

       So I know they're kind of protein bars and-
3. 18:51 – 25:00

   The Illusion of Effort

   1. CWChris Williamson18:51

      All right, talk to me about the genius of Guinness. I've been blown away by what's happened to Guinness over the last five years. It's fucking spectacular.

   2. RSRichard Shotton19:00

      Yeah, and, you know, the-- some of that power of Guinness has been phenomenal, you know, product, uh, creation, like the Zero product. Guinness Zero is phenomenal. It's, I think, probably the only alcoholic beer which tastes anything like its, um, parent brand. So there- there's some amazing product development going on. But in the book, Mike Lerner and I talk about a very specific campaign. So we talk about this idea of good things come to those who wait. And to me, that is an amazing example of what's known as the Pratfall Effect. So the Pratfall Effect is the argument that if you admit a flaw, if you're open about a weakness, you become more appealing. So the initial experiment was done all the way back in nineteen sixty-six by Elliot Aronson at Harvard. Simple study, recruits a colleague from his university, gets that colleague to take part in a quiz. Uh, he's given-- Aronson has given the contestant all the answers, so the guy does amazingly well, gets ninety-two percent of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles, you know, looks like an absolute genius. But then, as the quiz is coming to a close, he makes what someone in the nineteen sixties might have called a pratfall. He spills a cup of coffee down himself. Now, Aronson has recorded all of this, and he takes the recording and plays it to listeners. But sometimes he plays out the full version to listeners, so they get the spillage and the great performance. Other times, he edits out the spillage. What Aronson finds when he questions everyone as to how appealing the contestant is, is this slightly counterintuitive result. He finds that there is a greater preference amongst the group who heard the spillage compared to the group who just heard the amazing quiz performance. And it's not a small difference. The people that heard the spillage and the great performance, they rate the contestant forty-five percent better than the people who just heard the amazing quiz performance. So he calls this the Pratfall Effect. Essentially, this idea that people or products, and there are some nuances here, but people or products that exhibit a flaw become more appealing, and I think that's at the very heart of this Guinness line. "Good things come to those who wait." You don't try and sweep under the carpet. You don't try and airbrush out the irritation of the delay of Guinness. What you do instead is lean into it, because people assume if it has, you know, taken a lot of time to make, it must be higher quality. I think that's at the heart of the probably the best-ever Guinness campaign.

   3. CWChris Williamson21:36

      It seems like there's two things going on. One is identifying the flaw, the second is kind of an IKEA effect craft. It's taking a while to make thing. So if it wasn't for that... I mean, I guess you could-- I, I've heard rumors that websites like Skyscanner, they could load all of their results immediately. The reason that they have the loading bar is to do the "Look at how hard we are searching for you. We are getting you the best deals possible. It is taking so much time. Bing! There, it's done."

   4. RSRichard Shotton22:09

      Yeah. Well, I don't know whether Skyscanner artificially slow things down, but there are definitely experiments that show if they did, it would increase people's sense of the results being comprehensive. So Ryan Buell at Harvard Business School ran a study into this, and he randomizes people into two groups. Some people use a Skyscanner-style site, and they are given their results immediately. Other people, the site is slowed down, and on the results page, rather than the results popping up immediately, there's a little bar that appears that goes round and round, saying, "Searching Alitalia, searching United, searching British Airways." And that group have to wait a couple of extra seconds, and that group rate their results as, I don't know, it's something like ten or fifteen percent more comprehensive-

   5. CWChris Williamson22:59

      Mm-hmm

   6. RSRichard Shotton23:00

      ... than the first result, first group. You know, there's essentially a rule of thumb in our head, you know, often called the kind of labor illusion. The more effort we think someone else has gone to create a product, the higher quality we think that product will be. Even when people are getting exactly the same, uh, beer or exactly the same vacuum cleaner, if people know about the stories of effort behind it, it changes their, their perceptions.

   7. CWChris Williamson23:26

      I remember a short from some seminar that was given by a, an, an advertising guy. Maybe it was a designer or something like that, and he's sort of talking to a room, and he says, "If- how much would you pay for me to design the logo for your company?" And the guy gives a number, and he says, "What if I could do this in sixty minutes?" And the guy said, "I'll give you less."

   8. RSRichard Shotton23:44

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson23:45

      He says, "Well, hang on a second. Does that mean that you would pay me more if it took me longer?" And he just explains this effort illusion thing perfectly.

   10. RSRichard Shotton23:53

       Yeah, it, it, it's, um, I mean, it's-- i-i-in the, the book, the brand that I think really leans into this illusion of effort is Dyson. So across all their communications, you know, PR, advertising, the website, you know, even the very first line of James Dyson's autobiography, they keep on referencing this number. And James Dyson says, "I went four years. I went through five thousand one hundred and twenty-seven prototypes before I created the bagless vacuum." Now, logically, or at least from a very narrow-minded, logical perspective, how many prototypes he went through is irrelevant. What people should care about is the beautiful design or the quality of how well it sucks up dirt.

   11. CWChris Williamson24:38

       Mm-hmm.

   12. RSRichard Shotton24:39

       But what behavioral scientists have shown is again and again, if you show people the same product, sometimes you tell people the amount of prototypes or the amount of effort that went into it, sometimes you don't. You get these wildly different scores, wildly d- different perceptions of, of, of premiumness. So absolutely, emphasizing effort creates a perception of quality.

   13. CWChris Williamson24:59

       ...

4. 25:00 – 29:30

   Is AI About to Change the Market Forever?

   1. CWChris Williamson25:00

      What is the advent of AI doing to the advertising landscape in that case? Because what we're doing here is basically undercutting the illusion of effort.

   2. RSRichard Shotton25:09

      Yeah, abs- absolutely. So there is a Dutch psychologist called Cobi Millet, uh, VU Amsterdam, and he was interested in that. Back in twenty twenty-three, runs a simple experiment. He shows people products. So sometimes one of the products was a poster of a, a skull, and sometimes he labels it as hand-drawn, sometimes he labels it as created by, uh, an AI-powered robot.

   3. CWChris Williamson25:37

      Mm-hmm.

   4. RSRichard Shotton25:38

      And people are asked about the artistic merit of the poster, the creativity of the poster, and crucially, purchase intent. Now, for every single metric, he sees the same pattern. People who s- who saw the hand-drawn label, they rate that poster better than the group who saw the AI-powered label, and the scale is quite surprising. Now, when it comes to purchase intent, there is a sixty-one percent difference. Now, Millet's explanation for this is the illusion of effort. He says people's personal experience of Claude or ChatGPT is that they will spit out an answer in a few seconds, so therefore, we think it's low effort. So if we tell people our product has been created by AI-

   5. CWChris Williamson26:26

      Mm

   6. RSRichard Shotton26:27

      ... all things being equal, that product will be rated worse than if people are told that it was hand-drawn or, or made through human effort. So, so you've got to be really careful as a business when you're bringing AI into your products. Now, I'd be a Luddite to suggest, "Don't do that."

   7. CWChris Williamson26:45

      Mm.

   8. RSRichard Shotton26:45

      But what you have to do is be aware of the illusion of effort and therefore shift the conversation. You know, shift the conversation away from how quickly the product was delivered to how much effort you put into setting up the protocols and processes to get this, uh, AI system set up in the first place.

   9. CWChris Williamson27:02

      Mm, I think this is one of the reasons that people have an ick around AI music. There's a lot of that at the moment. Spotify has a bunch of charts that are being dominated by AI bands. And [clears throat] an interesting realization I had, so the illusion of effort idea that you were talking about, everybody knows-- everyone that's ever tried to sing or pick up a new instrument realizes just how difficult and inaccessible it is. That, I think, gives music a kind of protected class, that people... I- it's inaccessible to most people. I can't read music. I don't understand how it works. I know what I like, but I can't recreate it. If you gave me any of the instruments, including the one that I was born with, that's at the front of my face, I wouldn't be able to make the sounds of the songs that I like, and that, I think, makes it feel particularly egregious for someone to jump over it. I wonder whether there's an equivalent where it comes to art as well, if somebody's drawing something. So I, I'm not particularly good at drawing, but I can get an AI to do it. But the fact that I've skipped the queue of something that used to be a reliably costly signal of competence and effort, uh, the fact that I've circumvented that feels sort of additionally unfair.

   10. RSRichard Shotton28:22

       Yeah, I mean, that might well be true. I mean, what the experiments are very clear on is if you look at these metrics for, you know, how much you're prepared to pay or how good quality you think the item is, if people see exactly the same products, you change this labeling, and you get a, a, a different score. Um, and it does extend beyond music. So you've got Millet's work with, you know, art. Uh, I did something with Mike Lear and Flickr, just showing people a, a, a fake new brand. We didn't say it was a fake new brand, but we showed them these pictures of a brand called Black Sheep Vodka, and sometimes we said: Look, the designer went through a hundred and forty-three iterations. Other times, we just showed them the picture of the, the bottle. And the people that saw that story of effort, they thought the bottle design was more beautiful, significantly more beautiful than the people that, um, didn't hear that story of effort. So it, it certainly seems to extend beyond what we might think of as art into commercial design, all the way through to estate agent services, uh, have been shown to have a similar, similar effect.

5. 29:30 – 34:09

   The Genius Behind Splitting the G

   1. CWChris Williamson29:30

      On the Guinness thing, what do you make of Splitting the G? Have you seen this? You've seen-

   2. RSRichard Shotton29:38

      I have. My, um... I went to the Guinness storehouse, the giant, um, you know, kind of, uh, brewery tour you can do in Dublin. I went with my son.

   3. CWChris Williamson29:46

      Mm.

   4. RSRichard Shotton29:46

      I think it was last, uh, summer, and that's or maybe summer before. That's when I was introduced to this. He was trying to show me how to do it.

   5. CWChris Williamson29:53

      Mm.

   6. RSRichard Shotton29:53

      I mean, it's adding a bit of fun to the experience. I think Guinness themselves, um, try not to promote it because it's probably a little bit dubious in terms of-

   7. CWChris Williamson30:03

      Mm

   8. RSRichard Shotton30:03

      ... of kind of safe drinking, but I think it's an organic thing that, you know, gets the brand talked about, adds a bit of excitement and uncertainty, and, um-

   9. CWChris Williamson30:11

      I'm, I'm fascinated by these things that are bottom-up, almost anti-marketing campaigns. I think that it, it's a [clears throat] kind of like a perpetual motion machine for a brand. I think, uh, White Monster Energy has the equivalent at the moment as well. It's almost a meta meme. It's Americana. It's WWF from the '90s. It's Creed and nu metal. It's, it's heavy hits in the NFL. It's Linkin Park and Transformers, the early, the early movies. It, it's all of these things, and at no point, as far as I can see, has Monster Energy pushed this White Monster thing in the same way as Splitting the G from Guinness. Just, uh, they did not place the word "Guinness" on the side of that pint glass at the point that would be two-ish mouthfuls, two and a half mouthfuls deep. Hard enough to make it hard, not so hard that you have to drink it up. They- it's just the way it's done, and then this now has been pushed out so much-... I don't know whether you saw the stories from last summer in the UK. Some pubs made people buy two or three drinks before they could buy a Guinness. You weren't allowed to-

   10. RSRichard Shotton31:24

       [chuckles] No idea about that. No

   11. CWChris Williamson31:24

       ... You weren't allowed to, because they had Guinness shortages. They had such a Guinness shortage, they had to fucking titrate the supply to customers.

   12. RSRichard Shotton31:34

       Yeah. Yeah, so, so two things there. The first, I wonder if there's an element of, you know, that supposed, I think it's Arnold Palmer, the golfer's phrase, you know, um, "The harder I practice, the luckier I get." I wonder if there's something akin to that in the world of brands. In the- the bigger you get, the more enjoyable people find your kind of communications, the warmth of the brand, I think the more likely these spontaneous ideas are gonna spring up.

   13. CWChris Williamson32:03

       Mm.

   14. RSRichard Shotton32:03

       Now, more people, more chance a drinker comes up with the idea. And also, I think if there's warmth towards the brand, they're more likely to do it. So I think that, that, that, you know, you might have this kind of Matthew effect of so the best brands, you get the best-

   15. CWChris Williamson32:16

       Yeah, yeah, yeah

   16. RSRichard Shotton32:16

       ... organic, um, ideas. But that second point you mentioned is around the, the, the shortage. Now, I'm not claiming in any way [chuckles] that Guinness actually did this, but I think if I was a brand, I would certainly be tempted occasionally to spread rumours of a, uh, a shortage.

   17. CWChris Williamson32:30

       Supply limitation.

   18. RSRichard Shotton32:30

       One of the most powerful ideas in behavioral science, the one that when psychologists try and do comparative ranking of some of these biases, the one that comes out towards the top again and again is scarcity. You know, we want what we can't have. Um, there's this amazing G.K. Chesterton phrase where he says, "The way to love anything is to realise it might be lost." And I think you get these stories in the press about there's gonna be a shortage, and then it will drive even greater demand, because that fear of missing out, that fear of, um, or that belief that lots of other people want this thing, you know, it, it, it powers, um, the desire for it.

   19. CWChris Williamson33:11

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6. 34:09 – 42:38

   Liquid Death's Killer Branding

   1. CWChris Williamson34:09

      Speaking of another pretty interesting brand, Red Bull, Guinness, Liquid Death, pretty disruptive, I think, for a water company. I know they're now moving into a lot of other products. How-- What, what, what's your perspective on Liquid Death?

   2. RSRichard Shotton34:22

      So, I mean, I think it's a, a fantastic, uh, marketing case study, um, [clears throat] because if there is one factor that captures attention, it's behaving distinctively. So the original studies into this were done all the way back in nineteen thirty-three by a German psychologist called Hedwig von Restorff, who was at the University of Berlin. And what she basically did, I mean, with a bit of, um, you know, changing, she, she kind of give people lists of, of words. So I might write down, let's say, ten words, give them to you. Nine of them would be items of furniture, one of them would be an animal, and then, uh, I would take those lists away, ask you what you could remember, and overwhelmingly, people were much more likely to remember the distinctive animal rather than the, um, uh, the kind of nine bit- bits of furniture. So her argument was, we are hardwired to notice what's distinctive. Now, that is a very, very well-known finding. It's been repeated over the last kind of ninety-odd years. But if you think about an awful lot of advertising, and brands end up aping the behavior of their competitors. You know, you look at watch ads, you know, they all follow the same formula. Or car ads, you know, in Britain, it's always a kind of seems to be a, a kind of Central European dusty, mountainous scene with them going round the, the, the corner. Now, again and again, these norms of behavior spring up, and when it comes to water, there were some, you know, traditions that every brand like, um, Perrier or, um, all the others seem to adhere to, which is, you know, you've got to have clear glass so people can see the purity of the product. You've got to have shots of nature, you've got to, um, you know, have alpine scenes and, and yoga mums. And I think what Liquid Death did so brilliantly is realise, you know, all this stuff is just there for tradition's sake. You don't need to communicate in that way. And actually, if we take the polar opposite approach, and we behave like a craft beer or an energy drink and have these outrageously gory ads and, you know, um, kind of, uh, out there humor, now, that will stand out. It'll get attention. And frankly, if you don't have attention, everything else you do in marketing communication i- is academic. So I think that relentless pursuit of, uh, being distinctive and then crucially being distinctive in a consistent way. They didn't have one ad that was out there in a certain direction and then a completely different one, uh, the next time. They all had this theme of kind of behaving like a heavy metal band or a craft beer brand. So, so they had this, um, recognisable way of breaking conventions. I think that is at the heart of, of their American success.

   3. CWChris Williamson37:16

      How important is humour?

   4. RSRichard Shotton37:19

      ... humor, yeah, ab- a- absolutely. So Mike Cesario, the founder of Liquid Death, uh, he, he talks about the fact that he found it strange that, uh, the, like, beers and crisps and candies, they had all the fun when it came to advertising, and the healthy, virtuous goods were all a bit hairshirt-ish in their communication. So they have definitely doubled down on being funny and humorous. And again, you know, it's a great way of attracting attention. Now, the, the, the etymology of advert is the Latin, I think, for turn towards. And what do people turn towards? They turn towards things that bring them pleasure and happiness. They turn away from dry, dusty information. So to get attention, one of the best things you can do is, is amuse people.

   5. CWChris Williamson38:15

      What about Häagen-Dazs? That's, uh, a brand that I kind of forgot about in the US-

   6. RSRichard Shotton38:20

      Yeah [chuckles]

   7. CWChris Williamson38:20

      ... because I d- I don't think that Distro is as big, quite as big over here. Ben & Jerry's, and there's sort of three buckets of ice cream. There's very, uh, sort of experimental stuff. The Ben & Jerry's would go into that. There's healthy craft, better-for-you Amy's ice cream-type stuff. Uh, and then there's the high-protein, good-for-you, uh, lower calorie. Uh, so Häagen-Dazs I forget about, but I know that they're a monster of a brand.

   8. RSRichard Shotton38:56

      Yeah. So the origin story of Häagen-Dazs is, I think, fascinating, and it is a little bit dubious. I'm not saying I would recommend exactly what they do to other people. But they were set up in the Bronx in the 1940s, maybe the very early '50s, and they were set up by a, a Jewish couple who had emigrated from, I think, Ukraine and Russia. And they had moved to New York, kind of gone into the family ice cream business, and they'd decided they wanted to launch this premium, sophisticated ice cream. They were gonna charge a, uh, a lot more for it than the, the competitors. And they thought, "Well, how do we create this image of sophistication? Well, why don't we essentially position this brand as being Danish?" Now, there's nothing at all Danish about Häagen-Dazs. It was created in the Bronx. Um, [chuckles] the couple had never, ever been to Denmark. I think they chose it because Denmark had a particularly, um, strong reputation, that it had, as- the populace during Second World War had done an, an awful lot to help Jews escape from, uh, the, the Nazis. So there was a lot of admiration, I think, for Denmark in particular. But basically, they wanted a, a kind of European country that felt a bit sophisticated. So even though they hadn't been to Denmark, they start generating names, and they come up with Häagen-Dazs. And [chuckles] if you go to a Dane, they'd be like, "This isn't Danish. This is- [chuckles] you know, we don't have, I think, umlauts over the, uh, A. We don't have Z-S in our name. It d-," you know-

   9. CWChris Williamson40:38

      Mm

   10. RSRichard Shotton40:38

       ... " Doesn't even make sense as a Danish thing." But to American ear, in the 1940s, it sounded Danish, and then the couple doubled down by putting a little map of Denmark on the, on the, on the tub. And what's so clever about this, albeit morally dubious, we can maybe talk about that, is people taste what they expect to taste. And if you wrap up a product in this aura of sophisticated provenance, people assume it tastes better, and then they go out and look for confirming evidence. So exactly the same ice cream tasted that little better, little bit better to an American palate because it had this, uh, set of associations of, of, of Danishness.

   11. CWChris Williamson41:20

       Why do you think-

   12. RSRichard Shotton41:22

       Now-

   13. CWChris Williamson41:22

       Well, well, you go ahead.

   14. RSRichard Shotton41:23

       Oh, no, all I was gonna say is I- the moral from this, [chuckles] and I, I'm, I'm aware of what is quite charming when it's a mom-and-dad brand, is one thing. When it's a [chuckles] multimillion-dollar brand, it's a little bit less charming.

   15. CWChris Williamson41:34

       Mm.

   16. RSRichard Shotton41:34

       But the, the, I think the lesson is, what we experience isn't just due to the physical product. It's not due to the, you know, the, just the milk and the fats and the, the sugars. It's also what we think we're gonna taste. So the, the color of the packaging, the weight of it, the story behind it, the provenance, you know, all these things are just as important, and, and you as a marketer need to create those positive perceptions to give your product the best chance of success.

   17. CWChris Williamson42:01

       What do you think it is about the Danes that suggest that they're good at ice cream?

   18. RSRichard Shotton42:05

       [inhales] I, I think it's the fact that it was a faraway country, that, you know, Europe, rightly or wrongly, probably had this aura of sophistication. It's where luxury brands came from. It's where, you know, renaissance figures came from. I think it was a sense of Europe having some of these values-

   19. CWChris Williamson42:21

       Mm

   20. RSRichard Shotton42:21

       ... and then doubling down on Denmark because for a Jewish couple, their, uh, like, history of, um, uh, the fight against antisemitism was something that would've appealed. I think that was the, the case of why Denmark in particular, is more a personal story to them.

   21. CWChris Williamson42:37

       Mm.

7. 42:38 – 48:54

   Why Reducing Frequency Increases Enjoyment

   1. CWChris Williamson42:38

      What about the pumpkin spice latte? I know that we're into spring now, but the Starbucks-

   2. RSRichard Shotton42:44

      Oh, autumn, autumn. Yeah, yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson42:45

      Yeah.

   4. RSRichard Shotton42:45

      Fall, or whatever it's called. Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson42:46

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're into, we're into-

   6. RSRichard Shotton42:48

      Oh, sorry! So like, yeah, [chuckles] no, no, we are. Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson42:50

      Spring shortly-

   8. RSRichard Shotton42:51

      Of course, course

   9. CWChris Williamson42:51

      ... so the pumpkin spice latte is very long gone.

   10. RSRichard Shotton42:53

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson42:53

       Uh, yeah, what did you learn about Starbucks?

   12. RSRichard Shotton42:57

       I think the, the point there is the time-specific nature of the pumpkin spice latte. So, you know, we've talked already about this idea of, of scarcity, that we want what we can't have. The brilliant thing about pumpkin spice latte is they launched this product. They have huge success. What 99% of businesses would have done is think, "Wow, we've got this cash machine of a brand. Let's just run it all year round, and let's maximize our profits."... and if a business had done that, it would've been super successful for a year or two, but probably over time, they would've lost the very kind of magic at the heart of that, that variant. So there's an idea called, uh, habituation, which is the idea that over time, we become a bit desensitized to enjoyment. So there's a study from Leif Nelson at NYU, which, you know, demonstrates this quite powerfully. He lets people experience a, a massage chair, and it's a very pleasurable massage chair, and some people just sit in the chair for three minutes, three minutes straight, and then they rate how much they enjoyed it out of nine, and the average rating is six point zero five. Other people, there's a one-minute twenty se- second session in the chair. They then turn the chair off for twenty seconds, and then there's another one-minute twenty seconds with the chair going. So lasts for three minutes, but there's no massaging going on for twenty of those seconds. Now, logically, you'd expect, well, surely this group will enjoy the experience less. They had less time with the, the enjoyable aspect, but actually, you see something quite different. The rating actually goes amongst this group to seven point zero five out of nine. So from six point zero five to seven point zero five, you get a seventeen percent improvement. What Nelson argues is a curse of human nature, is that when we experience something pleasurable, over time, the enjoyment level wanes because we stop comparing it to not having it. We c- we compare it to the last time of, of, of, of using the service. So over time, we habituate, we get used to these pleasant things.

   13. CWChris Williamson45:22

       Mm, mm.

   14. RSRichard Shotton45:23

       So I think with something that's very powerfully flavored, like the pumpkin spice latte, something that's a little bit strange. If they'd sold it all year, by the sixth pumpkin spice latte-

   15. CWChris Williamson45:34

       [laughing]

   16. RSRichard Shotton45:34

       - by the time you got to December, you'd be sick of the bloody stuff.

   17. CWChris Williamson45:37

       Yeah.

   18. RSRichard Shotton45:38

       But by stopping it before that happens, removing it from sale, what you allow is this appreciation, anticipation, and desire to grow back again.

   19. CWChris Williamson45:47

       Mm.

   20. RSRichard Shotton45:47

       So I think they turned something that would've lasted for a couple of years, if it had been permanently on sale, into something that's been going for about twenty years.

   21. CWChris Williamson45:54

       Wow! Yeah, the, uh, LTO, the limited time offer, the sort of drop model, as it's known, it's how Supreme, the clothing company-

   22. RSRichard Shotton46:04

       Yep

   23. CWChris Williamson46:04

       ... do their things. It's how a lot of clothing companies, independent and big, they build up, build up, build up. It's there, and then it's gone.

   24. RSRichard Shotton46:11

       Yeah. And, and, and, and actually, you, you can, you can actually spot this, um, if you look hard enough, um, in, i- in, in products where it's not immediately apparent. So, so one brilliant example is, do you remember Wordle?

   25. CWChris Williamson46:27

       Yes.

   26. RSRichard Shotton46:27

       So that, uh, game, I think you had, was it six goes to guess a five-letter word? You know, hugely popular. Uh, Josh Wardle, the designer, sold it for New York Times, I think, for about ten million dollars. Now, at the height, you had hundreds of millions of people playing this game, or tens of millions of people playing it. But what's interesting is, even though usage spiked during COVID, this, um, product had been around for ages. But when Josh Wardle first created it, the difference was you could do your Wordle game, and as soon as you finished, you could do another, and then you could do another, and then you could do another. And when it was set up like that, barely anyone played it. It, it was like dozens of people playing it a day. But then, during COVID, Wardle becomes slightly obsessed with the New York Times crossword, and he wonders to himself, "Do I love the crossword? Because once I've finished the cryptic crossword, I have to wait till tomorrow to get the next one." You know, and it builds this sense of anticipation. So he changes the programming of Wordle so that now you do one, you finish it, you can't do another. There are no more around. You have to wait till the next one's released-

   27. CWChris Williamson47:39

       Mm

   28. RSRichard Shotton47:39

       ... in twenty-four hours' time. And he attributes the success to kind of baking in this, this scarcity, baking into this limited time offer into the very, the very heart of the product.

   29. CWChris Williamson47:50

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8. 48:54 – 55:01

   Does Influencer Marketing Actually Work?

   1. CWChris Williamson48:54

      One thing that I think about when it comes to modern marketing: influencers, the, the, the world of influencer marketing. What do you think people are getting wrong with that? What, what are the areas that, that goes well, and what are the areas that, that fails from a behavioral science standpoint?

   2. RSRichard Shotton49:10

      I th- I think when it goes well, there is an idea called the messenger effect. So the original study was done back in 1953 by Hovland and Weiss. They were at Yale at the time. It's, it's, it's quite a nice study. They, um, they stop people in the street, and they ask them a topical matter of the day, like: "Can we-- can the US build a nuclear-powered submarine in the next twelve months?" People say yes or no.... and then once the psychologists have got the answer, they invite those people back to their lab in four days' time. And when the participants arrive at the lab, on a table, there is a A4 sheet of paper, and there is a very tightly argued, uh, bit of prose about why the participant is completely wrong. So if I said, "Yes, a submarine can be built," very powerful argument about why it's just not practical. Once people have read this argument, they have to say whether they've changed their opinion. Most people don't. But the twist in the [chuckles] experiment is sometimes the argument is attributed to a credible source. So in the case of the submarine, it was Oppenheimer, the physicist. Sometimes the argue was attributed to a low-credibility source, so Pravda, the Russian newspaper. And what the psychologists found is that if the argument was attributed to a low-credibility source, seven percent changed their mind; high-credibility source, twenty-three percent changed their mind. So even though everyone gets exactly the same logical argument, the same facts, the same figures, the same, um, uh, persuasive power of argument, you get this three-and-a-half-fold difference in influence dependent on who it came from.

   3. CWChris Williamson50:50

      Mm.

   4. RSRichard Shotton50:50

      So their argument was, who says something can be as important as what's said.

   5. CWChris Williamson50:56

      Mm-hmm.

   6. RSRichard Shotton50:57

      Now, that study was done, what? Seventy-three years ago. [chuckles] But yeah, but, but it's been repeated again and again. I'm just going back to the original one, 'cause I think it's the clearest, it's the, the simplest.

   7. CWChris Williamson51:06

      Yeah.

   8. RSRichard Shotton51:07

      But since they've done that, what people have started to look at is, well, what makes for an effective messenger? And many different variables, but three of the big ones are: the messenger is neutral. So if I tell you amazing, uh, my book's amazing, you might be skeptical. Even if I got my brother or my wife to tell you that, it's still-- even that tiny extra bit of neutrality will boost believability a bit.

   9. CWChris Williamson51:33

      Mm.

   10. RSRichard Shotton51:33

       So neutrality is important. Credibility is important, and that's why Oppenheimer is so powerful. But then the third bit that's really interesting is relatability. Now, I might be influenced by what my neighbor tells me about, you know, the best sports drink or the best supplements, even though my neighbor doesn't know anything particularly in that area. But the fact that I relate to them, the fact they're similar to me, it makes them more powerful. So I th- I think the argument with influence would be, you could get the neutrality, but ideally, if you can get credibility and relatability as well, you know, then you're onto someone that can, can change the, the behavior of others.

   11. CWChris Williamson52:08

       I was seeing some stories about experts expecting deeper creator partnerships, sort of these mega creators, they're called. So it's fewer long-term brand deals, and they extend into roles like co-branded product lines or internal leadership titles. So I'm not sure if you saw this, Virgin Voyages-

   12. RSRichard Shotton52:25

       Mm

   13. CWChris Williamson52:25

       ... named J.Lo as its chief entertainment officer.

   14. RSRichard Shotton52:29

       Okay.

   15. CWChris Williamson52:29

       So they've framed her as the co-architect of the sort of onboard experience rather than just a face in ads.

   16. RSRichard Shotton52:35

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson52:35

       Uh, Ridge Wallet just got Marques Brownlee. MKBHD, he's a big tech YouTuber. He's the chief creative partner, and then, uh, SoFi just appointed the Your Rich BFF person, Vivian Tu, as the chief of financial empowerment. So they're trying to give a sort of an internal-sounding role that legitimizes her as a, a, a financial educator inside of the company.

   18. RSRichard Shotton53:01

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson53:01

       I think we saw this with, uh, maybe to a lesser extent, Ryan Reynolds with Mint Mobile, but certainly Ryan Reynolds with the football team. Um, somebody, uh, smaller numbers of roles that, uh, with higher value individuals with a more legitimate-sounding position.

   20. RSRichard Shotton53:18

       Yeah. So once you start talking about the order of a, a, J.Lo, I think you start moving into kind of other behavioral biases. There's an idea called costly signaling. So the original work on this was done by biologists rather than, um, behavioral scientists, but it's essentially the believability of communications is in proportion to the expense of that communications. So if there is a brand that gets a celebrity like J.Lo, you know, the, the, the general person on the street won't know whether J.Lo costs... and I don't know whether she costs a hundred million or fifty million, but I know she's very, very expensive.

   21. CWChris Williamson54:00

       Mm.

   22. RSRichard Shotton54:01

       And that sends a credible signal about how much the brand believes in their offering. The argument being, extravagant advertising works in the long term. You know, if I, uh, hire J.Lo to advertise my terrible soft drink, you know, I might get people to try it once, but they're not gonna recommend it to their friends. They're not gonna come back. I'm gonna go bust. But if I have a brilliant soft drink, and I get J.Lo to be the face of it, well, then it works out for me because I know that people will try it, recommend it, and it will go on and on and on like that. So the fact that extravagant spend is an effective screening mechanism, only people who genuinely believe in their brand would do it, because if you thought your brand was awful, uh, adopting that largesse would, would, would make you bust. That's, I think, what makes it a, a, a credible and powerful and persuasive signal.

   23. CWChris Williamson54:59

       Mm.

9. 55:01 – 1:02:25

   KFC's Secret of Scarcity

   1. CWChris Williamson55:01

      What about KFC? We talked about Five Guys. What, what, what have you learned from KFC?

   2. RSRichard Shotton55:06

      So, so KFC, there's, there's a few different things there. There's, um, I think the power of a, a secret i- i- is quite interesting. But the other one that they did that I really loved was a bit more tactical, but it's, it's kind of one of the themes that we've, we've come back to again and again, which is, um, this power of scarcity. So they, they did a slightly different approach to the examples we've discussed so far, and there was a wonderful Australian campaign, I think it was back in first in 2016-... where they would promote one dollar chips. So you get these big, large fries for one dollar. It's a very, very good deal. And when they did it for the first few years, hidden in the tiny little, um, T's and C's at the bottom of the ads was the fact that you could only get four bags of chips per person. What the marketing team did was put that front and center of the messaging. So they tested loads of different behavioral science biases that could boost sales. The one that works best was saying, in big letters on the posters, "Maximum number of these bags of chips you can buy, or bags of fries, four per person."

   3. CWChris Williamson56:16

      Uh-huh.

   4. RSRichard Shotton56:17

      And, and what it did was provide a very credible signal that either these chips are gonna be so, um, enticing, they're worried about selling out, or that it's such a powerful and, uh, good value deal that they're actually losing money on each sale.

   5. CWChris Williamson56:36

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   6. RSRichard Shotton56:36

      And now, that's not speculation. Um, Michael Erin and I did a very simple test. We told people about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale being sold in America, twelve bottles of beer for $18.99, and I'm trying to remember, I think fourteen percent of people thought it was good value. And then [chuckles] other occasions, we told people, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, a twelve-pack of beer being sold for $18.99 in the supermarket, maximum number of cases you can buy is six. And the proportion of people who thought it was good value went up to twenty-two percent. So you're getting, I think, fifty-seven, fifty-nine percent, uh, improvement. Uh, people works on a rule of thumb, that if a business is not letting you take as much of a product as you want, it must be a good deal. It's either so good it's gonna sell out or so good it's actually hurting the bottom line. So that, to me, was a, like a wonderfully simple tactic that far more people could apply.

   7. CWChris Williamson57:41

      It's so funny because KFC's fries are actually the worst, as everybody knows. They're, they're the worst of all-

   8. RSRichard Shotton57:47

      I have heard people say this. I have.

   9. CWChris Williamson57:48

      Yeah, they're the worst of all of the fries, so I, I would not have leaned on the fries.

   10. RSRichard Shotton57:52

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson57:52

       I suppose what's interesting about doing it with the fries as well, is that, that is something which you are com-- Burger King has fries, and McDonald's has fries as well. You didn't pick something that only you make. If you'd picked the signature Zinger Burger, well, no one else, no one else can make that. So doing the scarcity on something which is in a non-competable good would probably change the framing of it, versus these you can get elsewhere, but not like this.

   12. RSRichard Shotton58:31

       Yeah, I, I, I think, um, I think it was a reasonably good deal. But there's-- whenever something's on offer, there's always a bit of suspicion as well. You know, have they cut corners? Is there some kind of trade-off for this low price?

   13. CWChris Williamson58:45

       So they're trying to, they're trying to counter-signal the discount.

   14. RSRichard Shotton58:47

       Yes. Yes. Yes, I think, um... And, and what differentiates it from just saying, you know, "limited time offer" or "exclusive," is it, is it's not just staying in this realm of statement and claim, and it's not just in this realm of talk being cheap; it's actually a physical restriction. You know, you go to the counter, they will not serve you more than four. You know, and I, I think it's this action rather than claim, that distinguishes it from the kind of more common use of, of, of scarcity.

   15. CWChris Williamson59:21

       I can't believe that Klarna and these companies... I, I thought, what, what are they called? Micropay later companies.

   16. RSRichard Shotton59:29

       Oh, buy- now, pay later.

   17. CWChris Williamson59:30

       Buy now, pay later-

   18. RSRichard Shotton59:31

       Yes

   19. CWChris Williamson59:31

       ... things.

   20. RSRichard Shotton59:32

       Yeah.

   21. CWChris Williamson59:32

       Um, and there was this joke that you could get your Chipotle order on Klarna, so you could get your burrito, buy it today, and pay for it tomorrow. Um, but the, these- just the same as the prediction markets, these things seem to be here to stay. So w- what's your perspective on the buy now, pay later industry?

   22. RSRichard Shotton59:58

       So there, there's a long-standing idea called the, the penny-a-day effect. So the original study was John Gourville at Harvard, and he did it with charities on a ti-- um, so essentially, you know, he, he found out, were people willing to donate to a charity? And sometimes the request was three hundred and sixty-five dollars a year, other times it was a dollar a day for a year. And what he found is, even though the sums worked out to be the same, people were much like, more likely to donate if you phrased it as a dollar a day. Now, what seems to be happening is, people give different weights to see two sides of the equation. You know, the, um, the dollars that are being discussed looms large in people's mind. The unit of time doesn't seem to be, um, given the weight it should be. So it's a bit like people think three times seven is different from seven times three.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:00:51

       Mm.

   24. RSRichard Shotton1:00:52

       So if you've got a time-based product, the more you can break, uh, or the more that you can discuss that product in the smallest unit of time, the better it works out for you. Now, exactly the same thing happens with physical items. So I mentioned that Sierra Nevada Pale Ale study Michael Erner and I did, and we did another version of it. So a key factor, if you say to people, "A twelve-pack of Sierra Nevada costs $18.99," you get fourteen percent thinking it's good value. If you say to people, "This is a different group, costs $18.99 for a twelve-pack," that's the same as $1.58 a bottle-

   25. CWChris Williamson1:01:34

       Mm-hmm

   26. RSRichard Shotton1:01:34

       ... the proportion jumps, I think, to twenty-nine or thirty percent, thinking it's a, a good deal.... So you break down a physical item into smaller subunits, and you create a perception it, it's better value. So one of the things Klarna offers is, now I go to a website, I wanna buy a jumper for sixty dollars. I don't pay sixty dollars in one go, I pay three lots of twenty. People treat three lots of twenty completely different from one hit of sixty, because they're focusing too much on the twenty. They're not doing the multiplying as much as they should. So, you know, brands put that on their website, retailers put Klarna or competitors on the website, they end up selling more. So there is a strong reason for businesses to start handing over a bit of commission to Klarna.

10. 1:02:25 – 1:08:21

    Positive vs Negative: Why Framing is Everything

    1. CWChris Williamson1:02:25

       I'm interested in the difference between framing things as negatives versus positives, and it, it, it seems like the, the direction that you come into this from can be pretty important.

    2. RSRichard Shotton1:02:39

       Yeah. So, so there's an idea called loss aversion. Um, the original studies were done by Kahneman and Tversky in the '70s, but they're a little bit bizarre and, um, just got a bit confusing. I think the much better study was done in 1988 by Elliot Aronson at Harvard. So what he does is go to homeowners, four hundred and four homeowners, nice big sample, knocks on the door, tries to sell them loft insulation. Sometimes he says, "Buy my loft insulation, and you'll save seventy-five cents a day." So a psychologist would say, "This is the gain frame. You're emphasizing what you benefit as a consumer by taking out loft insulation." But other homeowners, he gives them the same mathematical sum. He says, "Look, take out the loft insulation, because if you don't, you'll be wasting seventy-five cents a day." Now, even though it's the same amount of money, by emphasizing people could be losing out on that, they could be wasting that money, he got a fifty or sixty percent higher-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:03:35

       Mm.

    4. RSRichard Shotton1:03:35

       -uh, response rate. So absolutely, there is an argument that the mathematically equivalent loss affects us more than the, um, than someone getting that, that gain. You know, the way I'd put it is, if you and I go our separate ways today, you realize you have lost five dollars, I find that five dollars, your unhappiness will be larger than my happiness. So that's-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:04:04

       Certainly would be if I knew that you'd found my five dollars. [chuckles]

    6. RSRichard Shotton1:04:06

       Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, don't worry, I w- I wouldn't be telling you. I'd be keeping that secret.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:04:10

       Yeah, yeah.

    8. RSRichard Shotton1:04:10

       Yeah, yeah.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:04:11

       Uh-

    10. RSRichard Shotton1:04:11

        You'll just see me in a slightly fancier T-shirt next time we talk.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:04:13

        It makes me think about the, uh, anti-smoking ads, because it's not saying: If you stop smoking, you will live four years longer. It's: If you keep smoking, you will die four years sooner.

    12. RSRichard Shotton1:04:28

        Yes. The only caveat there is when it comes... You know, l- l- like the great thing, like behavioral science and psychology, it's not like maths, where there are, people are particles and, you know, exactly the same, um, occurrences happen. I think there's a, there's a bit of a complexity when it comes to humans, and, you know, co- context is hugely important. When it comes to going from a loss to engendering fear-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:04:58

        Mm

    14. RSRichard Shotton1:04:59

        ... then I think you've got to be quite careful.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:05:02

        Why?

    16. RSRichard Shotton1:05:02

        Um, there's an argument from people like George Loewenstein. Uh, he calls it the ostrich effect, and it's essentially the argument that if you make people feel ashamed or scared or, or too worried, rather than resolve the underlying issue, what they tend to do is behave like the metaphorical ostrich. They, they just start ignoring the ads. They stick their h- head in the sands. Now, his study, which was probably done about twenty years ago, uh, when he was at Carnegie Mellon, and he's given anonymized data from Vanguard in America, so this massive, um, fund provider, and he can see how often users are checking their stock portfolios. He then plots that against the movement in the American stock market, and what he finds is, as the stock market goes up, people check their, uh, wealth reasonably regularly.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:05:57

        Mm.

    18. RSRichard Shotton1:05:57

        When the stock market declines, people stop checking. It's not a small effect. I think it's for every one percent drop in the stock market, people check their portfolios five to six percent less regularly. And his argument is, from a narrow-minded, logical perspective, that's irrational. You know, the information about our wealth is equally valid, whether it's good news or bad news. But he says people have a rule of thumb, is if something causes them pleasure, they do it more. If something causes them immediate pain, they turn away from it. So the danger with smoking ads or anti-smoking ads that scare people is that often, unless the change you're asking is really easy, uh, you can cause people either to avoid paying any attention to the messaging or going through these kind of mental gymnastics to explain to themselves why that messaging doesn't, doesn't affect them.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:06:51

        Mm. Yeah, i- I mean, it makes complete sense that people wouldn't want to hear something that they really wouldn't want to hear.

    20. RSRichard Shotton1:06:58

        Yeah, yeah. A- and it, it's this, I think, problem with long versus short-term thinking. It's absolutely in our long-term interest to listen to things that are gonna keep us, uh, living longer, but in the immediate moment, it makes us feel unpleasant, and, and then too often we prioritize our immediate feelings ra- rather than what works for us over the medium or long term.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:07:22

        ... In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made a huge impact on my gains and enjoyment in the gym over the last two years now. It's designed by Dr. Mike Israetel, and comes with over forty-five pre-made training programs, two hundred and fifty technique videos. Takes all of the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon-feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout. It guides you on the exact sets, reps, and weight to use. Most importantly, how to perfect your form so every rep is optimized for maximum gains. It adjusts your weights each week based on your progress, and there's a thirty-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy it, train with it for twenty-nine days, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get up to fifty dollars off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, or heading to rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.

11. 1:08:21 – 1:20:25

    Hacking the Smart Consumer

    1. CWChris Williamson1:08:21

       I remember-- I can't remember whether it was you or Rory that taught me about when people needed to increase their contributions to their pension, rather than the money being taken out of their current pay-

    2. RSRichard Shotton1:08:37

       Yeah, yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson1:08:37

       ... when they got a pay increase, a portion of the new pay was put toward that, and people were more prepared to do-

    4. RSRichard Shotton1:08:47

       Yeah

    5. CWChris Williamson1:08:47

       ... the investing if it worked in that sort of a way.

    6. RSRichard Shotton1:08:50

       Yes. So this was an American scheme. I think it was Shlomo Benartzi that came up with the idea, and it was called Give More Tomorrow. And it's exactly as you say, if you [chuckles] ask someone to put more money into their pension today, what they focus on is the loss of that money, and they're re- re- remarkably resistant to doing it. They think, "Well, I can't afford to, you know, go on that extra holiday or, or buy a car." So what they started to do instead was say to people, "Look, don't put any more money into pensions today, but when you get your pay rise in nine months' time, are you okay if we automatically set up a system where we'll just take, you know, ten% of that, twenty% of that, and put it into your, your pension?" And because the conversation was about money being taken away long in the future-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:09:38

       Mm

    8. RSRichard Shotton1:09:38

       ... it felt attenuated to people. There's an idea called present bias, which is essentially people give too much weight to what's gonna happen now or in the near future, and we massively underweight pleasure or pain in the, in the distant future.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:09:53

       Mm.

    10. RSRichard Shotton1:09:53

        So often that's a big problem for pensions or insurance or savings, but Benartzi's clever design meant that he used human nature to encourage this very desirable behavior.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:10:06

        Is there a way that fast food companies would use this on the inverse? The sort of don't think about the tomorrow, do think about the today.

    12. RSRichard Shotton1:10:15

        Yes, yes, absolutely. Um, what might be one of my favorite experiments ever, I don't think we've ever chatted about this one. It's a 1998 study from, um, Daniel Read, who at the time was at University of Leeds, but I think he's at Warwick now. And he does this brilliant study where he goes round a Danish office, and he offers people a choice: so you can either have an apple or a chocolate bar. They're completely free, but you only get to pick one. Now, the first half of people, it's a very straight setup. He just says, "Pick which of these one snacks you want. Take it now, eat it now," and eighty-two% go for chocolate bar, eighteen% go apple. Next time he does this experiment, he twists it slightly, and he says to people, "You can have a chocolate bar or an apple. You pick now, but I will bring this snack to you in a week's time."

    13. CWChris Williamson1:11:07

        Oh!

    14. RSRichard Shotton1:11:07

        And suddenly, the apple becomes a lot more popular. It's not quite beating the chocolate bar. I think it's fifty-one% chocolate bar, forty-nine% apple.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:11:16

        Mm.

    16. RSRichard Shotton1:11:16

        But considering there was a massive skew towards the chocolate bar, uh, in the previous version, this is a, this is a big change. And the argument from Read is that when we are picking for immediate consumption, we're very much driven by what we want to do, what- what's in our-- what's gonna be tasty, what's our kind of base desire. But if we're picking for our future self, well, suddenly we are much more influenced by what we think we should do. And you, you, you, you take that experiment, and then you think about, well, how would you behave if you're a, a low-alcohol beer or a, um, you know, a, a healthy food versus fast food? And if you want people to do the right thing, they don't try and influence them when they're sitting down at a restaurant just about to eat-

    17. CWChris Williamson1:12:04

        Mm

    18. RSRichard Shotton1:12:04

        ... because they're gonna be driven by their, um, appetite. What you wanna do is reach them maybe when they're doing their online shop. Now, you're on tesco.com, and you're ordering your food that's gonna arrive in a week. Then, this is the chance to get them buying the low-fat meats or the vegetables or the low-alcohol lager. Now, th- this changing in time perspective definitely changes how we behave.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:12:28

        I would love to see what the straight-up impact of online shopping has done to the kind of baskets that people select from the same supermarket by simply not walking around, by not getting it immediately, by having this delay.

    20. RSRichard Shotton1:12:42

        Yeah, yeah, and I, I think that experiment suggests this ordering of healthy foods. I think the other one, the biggest principle behavioral science, is people do what's easy. So I wonder if you get a much narrower range of foods people buy week to week, 'cause once you've set up your basket, it's so easy just to repeat it. People are-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:13:04

        It's almost like a membership. There's a, there's a cost associated with picking something new, whereas there's a cost when you're going around the supermarket. There's a cost associated with picking something old or something new, 'cause you're already walking.

    22. RSRichard Shotton1:13:16

        Yeah, and it's, it's, it's a brilliant example of people aren't just influenced by the end product. They're interested in how the-... choices are, are structured. You know, what time the food's gonna be delivered, you know, what's, um, easy to spot, what's, what's, what's visible? You know, these things that should be peripheral have a, have a big impact.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:13:37

        Mm. I, I guess as well, this is also why bananas and pecans aren't put on the cashier shelves right at the very end, just as you're going out, because, uh, "Oh, yeah, I really, I- I'm really gonna just treat myself to that banana," that's not the way that we think.

    24. RSRichard Shotton1:13:54

        Yeah. There is an argument called moral licensing, that if we feel we've done something virtuous, we then overcompensate. So there's some quite scary studies done by-- I'm not 100% sure how to pronounce his name. I think it's Chiu. It's kind of C-H-I-U. Um, I think he might be from Taiwan. And he recruited a group of smokers, that's key, and then some... He gives everyone sugar pills. That's right, he gives everyone sugar pills, but some of them are told it's a course of vitamins, some are told they are sugar pills. Then he invites them, after doing this two-week course of, um, supplements, he invites them into his lab, and they fill out this very long, boring form, and they have to write down all the things they did over the two weeks. And they claim that, you know, the people who think they've taken the vitamins, they sta- they note down they've done more kind of binge drinking, more smoking, less exercise. So it kind of suggests this moral licensing point, because they think they've had the vitamins, they overcompensate elsewhere.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:15:03

        Mm.

    26. RSRichard Shotton1:15:04

        But that's still claim data. The clever bit is what Chiu does, is monitor people as they're filling in these very boring surveys, and he just, he just records whether or not the smokers light up a fag while they are filling in the survey. And the smokers who think they took the vitamins, they are fifty percent more likely to light up than the smokers who didn't. So that, to me, is the powerful bit of the study. You know, not just listening to claims, but looking at actual behavior, and that's quite a powerful overview of this idea that if we think we behave virtuously, we overcompensate elsewhere. Now, with a supermarket, think about the design. Now, what do you see as soon as you get into the, um, supermarket? You've got all your fresh fruit and veg. Now, from a practical perspective, it's the very worst place to have it, 'cause it's at the bottom of your, um, trolley now, and you're gonna put all your heavy items on top. But what it does is, you know, allow people to feel they're virtuous, and then they overcompensate with the crisps and the beer and, uh, the snacks later on. So, so I think you're right, that placing those treat items right at the end, which I think has been banned, actually, in Britain, I think, um, is a, i- is a, you know, use of one of these biases, maybe not for people's best interest, though.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:16:18

        It- so it's been banned to put fast food-

    28. RSRichard Shotton1:16:20

        I, I, so I thought, I thought, though-

    29. CWChris Williamson1:16:21

        -next to the items?

    30. RSRichard Shotton1:16:22

        - I might... I'm, I'm speculating. I thought I'd heard either a discussion of that happening, that you couldn't have, you know, the little bars now-
12. 1:20:25 – 1:24:57

    Why Taglines are So Effective

    1. CWChris Williamson1:20:25

       On the other side of the equation, what about Pringles?

    2. RSRichard Shotton1:20:29

       What, what's so good about them?

    3. CWChris Williamson1:20:30

       Yeah.

    4. RSRichard Shotton1:20:30

       Um, the Pringles, the genius of Pringles was their, their line. Um, "Once you pop, you can't stop," and it's one of the most bizarre studies in behavioral science. It's about this idea called the Keats heuristic. Um, I think there's some kind of Keats line where he says, "Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth," something, something like that. You know, he's a qui-- he's saying that we mistake beauty for, for truthfulness.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:20:57

       Mm-hmm.

    6. RSRichard Shotton1:20:57

       So there, there's two academics in the '90s called McGlone and Tawfik Bash, and they create some fake proverbs, and for every proverb, they create two versions. So the non-rhyming version might be, "Woes unite enemies." The rhyming version would be, "Woes unite foes." Now, you get, say, if we were both taking part in this experiment, you might read, "Woes unite foes," and you're asked to rate how believable this statement is. I would see, "Woes unite enemies," and I rate how believable I think, uh, the phrase is. Now, we've both received essentially the same information. All that's changed is the packaging. You get this nice rhyme; I get this, a non-rhyming version. What happens is the, uh, the people who hear the rhyming version, they rate the believability of the statement seventeen percent higher than the people that hear the non-rhyming version, and people are conflating ease of processing with truthfulness. Now, the interesting bit-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:21:57

       Mm

    8. RSRichard Shotton1:21:57

       ... is if you then go back to all the participants, and you say to them, "Now, why did you think this statement was believable? Uh, did, did the rhyme, uh, or absence of rhyme influence you?" Every single participant, bar one, denied that the, the kind of form, uh, the rhyme, the ease of processing affected them. They all said, "No, no, I was making a judgment based on the inherent information."

    9. CWChris Williamson1:22:20

       Mm.

    10. RSRichard Shotton1:22:20

        So it's one of these great examples of tiny little changes about the, you know, the kind of the fluency, the, the, the ease on our ear. Tiny little changes have a big effect, but people are really loathe to admit that's what, what influenced them.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:22:36

        Isn't this what happens with split-brain patients and where they, they stroke the hand of one side, and, "Why did you get up to go and do this thing?" And then they confabulate some sort of an idea. I'm aware that it's different in terms of the mechanism, but the point being, people are usually pretty good at coming up with a logical explanation for why they did the thing, even if they were manipulated to do the thing, because the [clears throat] sort of required discomfort at the admission of s- of deception or self-deception is, like, pretty costly socially.

    12. RSRichard Shotton1:23:11

        Yeah, so I'm not overly familiar with those studies. I know they're kind of headline results, but I think you're absolutely right, that they will be set up in such a way that the experimenter knows what generated the answer, but the patient will, um, just come up with this plausible, much more rational-sounding reason to maintain kind of a sense-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:23:32

        Mm

    14. RSRichard Shotton1:23:32

        ... of face and being a sensible, uh, person. And, and, and that's absolutely true with a whole swathe of behavioral science studies. A key theme of behavioral science is that if you ask people why they bought a particular protein bar or a, a pair of trainers, the problem is they'll give you loads of answers, but most of them are just plausible post-rationalizations. They're not a reflection of what actually motivated them. So there's this amazing psychologist called Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, and he has a brilliant book called Strangers to Ourselves, and essentially, the whole book is a series of studies showing that people don't know their own motivations.

    15. CWChris Williamson1:24:12

        Mm.

    16. RSRichard Shotton1:24:12

        So one of the worst things businesses can do, and it accounts for an awful lot of poor communications, is ask people what they want and then take those answers at face value.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:24:23

        People don't know what they want. What's that line from Henry Ford? "If I'd asked the customer what they wanted, I'd have given them a faster horse."

    18. RSRichard Shotton1:24:30

        Yeah, or, uh, more, slightly more modern one, that, well, nineteen sixties, there's a David Ogilvy line, who was this kind of amazing, um, ad guy, and he said, "Consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say." So I think-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:24:43

        [laughing]

    20. RSRichard Shotton1:24:45

        ... the best entrepreneurs, the best ad people have known this for a long while, but the problem is, the average advertiser finds it easy to run a survey, and then it sends them off, uh, in the wrong direction.

13. 1:24:57 – 1:31:54

    Are Marketers Still Fighting the Semmelweis Reflex?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:24:57

       Why'd you get interested in Ignaz Semmelweis? 'Cause I studied him for a, a talk that I gave a little while ago, and I thought he was fascinating, but I didn't immediately see the correlation between your world and-

    2. RSRichard Shotton1:25:11

       Yeah

    3. CWChris Williamson1:25:11

       ... Semmelweis.

    4. RSRichard Shotton1:25:13

       So I was-- well, I was-- my clear and I were looking at kind of ways to, to end the book, and I came across this story of, uh, Semmelweis, and so if people haven't heard of it, eighteen-forties, he is a doctor in Vienna, kind of reasonably recently trained in the eighteen-forties, and he's shocked when he arrives at the hospital-... at the proportion of women who die in childbirth. Now, it's, it's astronomical. You know, some of the wards, you would probably be better playing Russian roulette. You've got, like, ten, 15% of people dying, um, uh, uh, i- in labor. Spends an awful lot of time trying to work out why this is, and one of h- his findings is that the w- wards that are run by midwives tend to have a much better survival rate than the wards that are run by doctors. And one of the things that the doctors do differently from nurses is that they will do autopsies. So they will come straight from cutting up a body to then deliver a baby, and Semmelweis wonders if they are bringing what he calls cadaverous, cadaverous particles, um-

    5. CWChris Williamson1:26:31

       Mm

    6. RSRichard Shotton1:26:31

       ... to, to, to the, to the mom-to-be. So he starts getting doctors to wash their hands in chlorine. Now, they've got to scrub them, in his words, "till the stench of, uh, kind of putrid d- decay has gone." They have to scrub their hands clean, and then they can, uh, help with, with labor, and the death rate plummets. It goes from, you know, 10, 12% to 3%. So this is, in, uh, Semmelweis's eyes, you know, phenomenal. Surely everyone is going to adopt this behavior. But to his absolute horror, lots of doctors don't jump at the opportunity to save more of their patients.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:27:08

       Mm.

    8. RSRichard Shotton1:27:08

       They are amazingly resistant-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:27:11

       Mm

    10. RSRichard Shotton1:27:11

        ... to, um, accepting this new technology, and essentially, it drives Semmelweis basically mad. He-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:27:19

        He dies in an asylum, right?

    12. RSRichard Shotton1:27:20

        He does. His wife, I think, you know, probably for good many reasons, like, tricks him. Says they're going out on a day's, uh, escapade. She takes him to the asylum, and when he's being put in the asylum, this is the horror of it all, he, unsurprisingly, doesn't want to go. There is a struggle, there is a fight, and he gets injured. He gets cut, and he dies of a sepsis that his research had been showing how to, um, treat.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:27:45

        No way. I didn't know that.

    14. RSRichard Shotton1:27:46

        It's an-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:27:47

        Holy shit

    16. RSRichard Shotton1:27:47

        ... absolutely horrible story on so many reasons. But it became famous as not just- but it's probably the most extreme example. But again and again, there are all sorts of, um, discoveries that people, even though they have this amazing impact, um, existing practitioners won't, uh, accept. So es- essentially, the Semmelweis Reflex is the argument that, you know, there's a tendency to ignore new ideas if they challenge existing ones. Now, put yourself in the shoes of a doctor who Semmelweis is telling, "Now, for the last 10, 20 years, you've been killing lots of your patients by bringing disease to them."

    17. CWChris Williamson1:28:29

        Mm.

    18. RSRichard Shotton1:28:29

        You know, it's hellishly hard to accept that. So I th- we, we kind of thought this was a brilliant place to end the book because what we want to say to marketers was: all these principles aren't just about influencing consumers. You know, you need to use the very principles that successfully persuade consumers. You need to use those principles when you are trying to sell your ideas internally. Don't just think, "You have a great idea, everyone's gonna rush to accept it." Now, all these principles we discussed, like scarcity or social proof, you know, you can use them when you are trying to, you know, persuade people within your own organization. So it sound- it felt like a very good way of, uh, bringing the book to a close.

    19. CWChris Williamson1:29:14

        Mm, yeah, conceptual inertia is a term that I learned a, a few years ago from this guy who researches the historical progress of ideas. So this is exactly what he's looking at, and he was looking at, um, heliocentric model of the universe, for instance. So [clears throat] cool story on that. 100 years before Galileo proclaims his insight, you have Copernicus.

    20. RSRichard Shotton1:29:43

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:29:43

        Full, a full century before.

    22. RSRichard Shotton1:29:44

        Yeah.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:29:44

        But his great work, which is called De Revolutionibus, he kind of sort of squeaks it out, basically, on his deathbed. He's had this realization for most of his life, but he doesn't do it because he's afraid of the Church. He's afraid of retribution. He sort of leaks this thing out. A full century later-

    24. RSRichard Shotton1:30:00

        Yeah

    25. CWChris Williamson1:30:00

        ... they still haven't caught up, so Galileo sees the same thing, and he proclaims it from the rooftops. He's forced to recant under threat of torture, spends the rest of his life under house arrest. He, he, he's completely castigated, and the Cassandra complex, as it's known-

    26. RSRichard Shotton1:30:18

        Yeah

    27. CWChris Williamson1:30:18

        ... is justified. The fact that Copernicus didn't proclaim it is justified by the treatment of a guy a full century later-

    28. RSRichard Shotton1:30:27

        Mm

    29. CWChris Williamson1:30:27

        ... who did the exact same thing. So if you were to point a finger at Copernicus and call him a coward, he could point the finger at Galileo and say, "Or was I just prescient?"

    30. RSRichard Shotton1:30:36

        Y- yeah, it's, um, [sniffs] it's a worryingly regular occurrence, and the only thing I would say with the Copernicus/Galileo story is there could be a danger-- or, or my Semmelweis one, of thinking, "Oh, you know, this happened 500 years ago or 200 years ago. We are more sophisticated now. Surely, we are, we are better now." But there's recent-ish examples. I think it was, um, Barry Marshall in Australia, like a very junior doctor at this kind of, um, not very prestigious university. He works out that ulcers are not caused by stress. They are caused by a bacteria. I think it might be H. pylori or something like that.
14. 1:31:54 – 1:33:23

    Where to Find Richard

    1. RSRichard Shotton1:31:54

       yes.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:31:54

       Uh-

    3. RSRichard Shotton1:31:54

       Yes.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:31:55

       Richard Shotton, ladies and gentlemen. Richard, you're amazing, mate. I, I think you're fantastic. Have you got-- are you blogging? Have you got a Substack?

    5. RSRichard Shotton1:32:02

       I've, I've now kind of moved mainly to LinkedIn.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:32:06

       Great.

    7. RSRichard Shotton1:32:07

       So what I'll try and do is post, you know, not about, um, family or awards or that stuff. It'll always be about the application of behavioral science, so-

    8. CWChris Williamson1:32:14

       Have you considered-

    9. RSRichard Shotton1:32:15

       I do-

    10. CWChris Williamson1:32:16

        ... have you considered some, some sort of newsletter-y type thing, like a Substack?

    11. RSRichard Shotton1:32:20

        So newsletter, I have done, and I kind of quite reasonably regularly tell people where they can get that. So, um, on my company website, Astroten.co.uk, you can sign up for the newsletter, and then every fortnight, we'll send people a digest, a brief digest of an experiment, an example of people using it, and then the implications.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:32:42

        Unreal, and new book.

    13. RSRichard Shotton1:32:44

        A new book, yeah, so, um, co-authored with Michael Aaron Flicker. It's called Hacking the Human Mind. Seventeen brands, each chapter's about a brand, and then we look at two, maybe three behavioral science principles that brand has used to power its success.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:33:00

        You're great, dude. You're great.

    15. RSRichard Shotton1:33:01

        Oh, thanks, Chris.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:33:02

        I, I, I-

    17. RSRichard Shotton1:33:03

        Yeah

    18. CWChris Williamson1:33:03

        ... I look forward to whatever you do next, and, uh, let me know when you come over to, to Austin, 'cause I need to hang out.

    19. RSRichard Shotton1:33:07

        I will do. I will do.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:33:09

        Appreciate you, man.

    21. RSRichard Shotton1:33:09

        Thank you very much.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:33:10

        [upbeat music] Congratulations, you made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.

Episode duration: 1:33:23