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Psychology, Advertising & Human Behaviour | Richard Shotton | Modern Wisdom Podcast 163

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, Founder of Astroten and an author. One of my favourite guests returns today as we discuss mental models, psychology, consumer behaviour, principles for advertising, social change and much more. Expect to learn how you can tell someone's mood by the movement of their mouse, why the end of an experience is the most important, what makes the perfect advert, how you can increase workplace safety with skeleton gloves and much more. Get Surfshark VPN - https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter Promo Code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off & One Extra Month Free) Extra Stuff: Follow Richard on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rshotton Buy Richard's Book - https://amzn.to/2YCQfdt Buy Richard's Online Course - https://www.42courses.com/courses/behavioural-science-for-brands Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #psychology #advertising #humanbehaviour - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Richard ShottonguestChris Williamsonhost
Apr 27, 20201h 23mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 3:18

    Red Sneaker Effects

    1. RS

      There's an idea called the red sneaker effect by Francesca Gino that suggests that people who break social norms are seen as higher status. So, her original experiment was run at academic conferences. So I think this was early 2000 when there was a very strong norm, what people were expected to do was turn up in business attire. So what she does is, as people attend these conferences, she's noting down how well dressed they are, from very scruffy, to very smart. Once she's got all this data, she then goes and finds the people whose dress code she's allocated on her little chart, and asks them how many citations they've got, how many times has their work been quoted by other people? And what she finds is that there is a inverse correlation between smartness of dress and number of citations. So it is the very successful academics who are breaking all the norms about dress. And once you start thinking about it, it becomes very believable that, you know, if you're the intern and you turn up to work and you're dressed very scruffily, you'll get sent home. If you're the CEO and you turn up looking like a mess-

    2. CW

      Rory Sutherland can wear whatever he wants, can't he?

    3. RS

      (laughs) Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.

    4. CW

      My mum still does my washing, I pay her every week to do my washing.

    5. RS

      Oh. (laughs) Yeah.

    6. CW

      Um, uh, but the problem is, obviously with the new essential travel only lockdown, I can't see her. So, the first thing that she said after Boris's announcement wasn't, "Are you okay? What's business gonna be like?" It's, "Do you know how to work the washing machine?"

    7. RS

      (laughs) .

    8. CW

      (laughs) So, look, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. The crowd goes crazy for Richard Shotton's return to Modern Wisdom. How are you, mate?

    9. RS

      Very good, thanks. Very good.

    10. CW

      Pleasure to have you on. I cannot wait for today. First things first, Richard, did you know that sex toy sales have increased by 71% in Italy?

    11. RS

      (laughs) No, I did not. That's amazing. For- for every crisis, someone's- someone's winning.

    12. CW

      That's it. Everyone's talking about what's going to happen to the price of oil, what's going to happen to the price of gold. No one's talking about what's happening to the price of silicon, are they?

    13. RS

      No. (laughs)

    14. CW

      (laughs) It's a tradable commodity. Um, I- I said I was going to tell you as well about, uh, gangs in Rio de Janeiro.

    15. RS

      Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yes.

    16. CW

      So, to the listeners, uh, this is not going to be COVID-19 focused, I promise you. We're gonna give you some awesome insights into advertising and marketing, but it's too topical not to drop this. So, gangs in the favelas in Rio, uh-

    17. RS

      Yeah.

    18. CW

      ...in forced lockdown from 8:00 PM every night, and they put a statement out on a website, don't know if it's their website, uh, and the statement reads, "If the government won't do the right thing, organized crime will."

    19. RS

      (laughs) I haven't seen that.

    20. CW

      I just thought, how amazing that you've got a place where typically the- the gangs are the people that have more control than the police on the negative side, and now they're just stepping in to enforce a lockdown.

    21. RS

      Yes. I mean, imagine there's, yeah, some self-interest there of what if, uh, something spreads in a favela, presumably it goes like wildfire when so close together, but that's, uh-

    22. CW

      Absolutely.

    23. RS

      Yeah, I hadn't seen that at all, missed that completely. Mm-hmm.

    24. CW

      Yeah, no. So look, we're- we're talking today, we're gonna talk advertising, we're gonna talk a lot of other stuff. My first question

  2. 3:18 – 4:09

    How Do You Create the Perfect Advert

    1. CW

      I've got for you is, how do you create the perfect advert? No small question.

    2. RS

      No small question. Um... Well, on one hand, you could say that it's something that's impossible to create a formula for. Now, that's not just a complete evasion of the question, it's the idea that probably the biggest task an advert has is to be noticed, and... 'Cause if you haven't noticed, everything else is- is irrelevant. And one of the things we know from psychology is that what is distinctive is far more likely to be noticed. We're hardwired to notice what is- what is distinctive. Now, with all of psychology, that's not just speculation on my part. There is a lovely set of experiments, there's a lovely set of experiments, uh, under the name of the isolation

  3. 4:09 – 17:54

    The Von Restorff Effect

    1. RS

      effect or the Von Restorff effect. So it's called the Von Restorff effect because there was a pediatrician psychologist in the 1930s called Hedwig Von Restorff. Uh, in 1933, she does a classic experiment, she gives people a long list of information, sometimes they might be, um... So on every line there's three digits, sometimes that might be letters, A, B, Y, uh, next line S, J, Q, third line C, B, Y. And then every so often she throws in three numbers, one, six, four, and then she goes back to her letters again. She gives people five minutes to look at this long list of information, tries to get them to remember as much as possible, takes that list away, and then sees what people can recall. And her key finding is that if you give people long lists of letters, they're most likely to remember the rare numbers, if you give people long lists of numbers, they're most like to remember the rare letters. So, why I say you can't really have a formula is if you have a formula and everyone adopts it, that formula becomes defunct. What you actually need to do is find out what is the formula, wrong or right, that everyone in your category is using, what are the category norms, and virtual categories will have, uh, some- some quite specific norms of behavior. Find out what those norms are, and then... Well, you probably want to list out all those norms, which ones do you have to adhere to, because there's a very good reason, which ones are there for tradition's sake alone, and those are the ones that you want to- to break.

    2. CW

      I love it.

    3. RS

      Yeah, and if- well, if- and also, if you look through a lot of categories, you see these very specific, uh, ways of behavior. So, uh, there's a wonderful Twitter ad- uh, Twitter handle called, I think it's something like Perfume Ads for Sale. And it's just these increasingly surreal scripts-... you know, about David Beckham being in a court, a leg of ham falling through the sky and he shouts out-

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      "... guilty." And they only work 'cause everyone knows that's the kind of, uh, ridiculous overblown, uh, motifs that happen in perfume ads. Or you've got the car ads where they, you know, beautiful car going round the corner. Lots and lots of categories have very fixed ways of behaving. The best thing to do is probably understand what those norms are and then, and then break them.

    6. CW

      Yeah. I, I remember seeing you tweet an article that you did for Marketing Week. 9% of digital ads are looked at for more than a second, so 91% of digital ads are looked at for less than a second.

    7. RS

      Yes, I think that data, trying to remember... That was, uh, a wonderful eye tracking company, uh, that Mike Follett runs called Lumen. So it's lovely data in that, uh, they've created this great technology that gets embedded in people's computers, and it essentially tracks where their eyes look. So it's quite a robust finding that the average time people look at ads is a, is a, is a fraction. So I think from that y- you've got a couple of points. You've got, well, distinctiveness is a tactic to be noticed. Secondly, placement is hugely important, and it's a metric that a lot of programmatic trading doesn't take into account.

    8. CW

      What's that mean?

    9. RS

      Uh, so, s- so, well programmatic is just a, um, automated trading. So you go and look at a website, and this isn't, um, my area of spec- speciality, but if you're looking at a website, um, the site has certain data on you. You know, it might know that you're a bloke, it might know you're in your twenties or your thirties, and then it will auction the ads that you see to various parties. And programmatic is essentially people just bidding for how much they think you're worth.

    10. CW

      Mm.

    11. RS

      Um, but that takes into account a lot of data about you. What that study by Lumen shows is that actually where the ad appears is very important. The longer someone spends reading an article, the longer they end up looking at the ads for. Uh, not a fact of the ad itself, but it's a fact that if you're on the site there's a greater probability the ad will catch your attention. So actually, there's quite a powerful argument that things like news websites where people will spend, you know, I don't know, a minute on an article are much more valuable than eBay, where we might just be... Better speculating, I can't remember if it was eBay which was good or bad actually, but you might... Sites where people will, will just jump for a, for a second or two. So yeah, there's some, there's some lovely, lovely research about that.

    12. CW

      Yeah, it's much more tr-

    13. RS

      But important to s-

    14. CW

      ... much more transient, isn't it? Some websites, you know, you're flicking through stuff. I imagine... I always think, uh, how terrible the conversions must be on Tinder adverts. You know, everyone's just swiping as fast as they can in any case. Like, don't give me an advert that's gonna be up there, like, that's not gonna be on screen. That's... I bet the, the stats for, for Tinder ads are pretty, pretty brutal.

    15. RS

      Well, there's also, uh, I mean, look, it depends what the kind of, the experience is like as well. There's, there's a lovely body of work all around mood, and I guess it depends how successful you are on Tinder, but, uh, if people are unsuccessful and they're in a bad mood, there's an awful lot of evidence showing that, again, going back to noticeability, people are much less likely to notice ads. So there was a study done by Fred Bronner at the University of Amsterdam, and he got more than 1,000 people, gets them to flick through a, a newspaper, and after they've done so, he asked them whether they were in a good mood or whether in a bad mood, they were relaxed or stressed, and then he gets them to try and recall as many ads as they can. And what he found was that people were, uh, much more likely to notice the ads when they were in a good mood rather than a bad mood. Now, what I love about behavioral science is that you don't have to, you know, th- You don't have to take his work on faith alone. You know, you don't just have to believe it and, you know, you either believe it or you don't. The great thing about all these studies is all the research is in the public domain, so you can take his idea with a few tweaks, rerun it for yourself to see if it works for your brand or your particular problem. So a colleague and I reran his study, but not interested in noticeability. We were interested in likeability. So we did exactly the same thing, we showed people loads of car and taxi ads, got them to rate how much they liked the creative, and then we cut the data by people's mood, and we saw huge swings, you know, people were rating the ads as more likeable. So I think it was about a 50% swing. They were rating it as more likeable when they're in a good mood rather than bad. Um, and it sounds a bit bizarre at first, but I think there, there's a couple of explanations. There's, um, uh, an- There's an argument from Daniel Kahneman, so N- Nobel Prize winner back in 2002. He says that for most of... There's an evolutionary point, he says, that for most of our evolutionary history, uh, if we were in a good mood, it signaled an absence of danger, and therefore it mitigated the need to think critically. So if you're an advertiser, having an uncritical accepting audience is probably a pretty important thing. And I think there's a, there's a, there's a second part of, you know, if you're in a bad mood and you see an ad with a price and the benefits, well, you probably put a bit more weight on the, the downside and the price and the opportunity cost. Whereas if you're in a good mood and you're optimistic, you'll probably focus on the, the, the more positive parts. And it's, again, it's something that just never really gets discussed a- amongst brands and media agencies. But there's a whole body of work that suggests this.... targeting by mood, or at least, um, weighting of mood should, should, should be far more important.

    16. CW

      Yeah. We've all been there, right? You've all been in a car where you've had a crap morning, you spilled your coffee down yourself, you rushed, you're late for work, someone cuts you off, and that person on a Sunday afternoon as you were just chilling out coming back from-

    17. RS

      Yeah. (laughs)

    18. CW

      ... a stroll with the kids, you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't have thought twice about it. But they are your worst enemy on the planet on that Tuesday, gray Tuesday morning with coffee down your shirt. Um, so what's the implication there-

    19. RS

      Hmm.

    20. CW

      ... for brands and advertising campaigns? Is it that they need to be hyper-conscious of the medium of delivery, the timing of delivery, stuff like that? Because-

    21. RS

      (sighs)

    22. CW

      ... you can write the best... By, by your argument there, you can write the best copy, beautiful advert, wonderful idea, and if you get it wrong timing-wise, people's-

    23. RS

      Yeah.

    24. CW

      ... mood, you've fucked 50% of their time maybe.

    25. RS

      So, uh, well, I think there's probably two implications. You, you could... The great thing with, uh, behavioral science, I think that, uh... And this is an analogy that Rory Suthern's made, is, is it's not like physics, he says. It's not that... You know, in physics, the opposite of a good idea is a bad idea. What Rory Suthern says is that in behavioral science, in psychology, people are so complex and nuanced that the opposite of a good idea (laughs) could be another good idea. So, what's interesting about that mood point, I think you could take that in two very different ways. One implication, and this is where I default to 'cause my background is in, in these areas, i- i- is as you say, well, you should put more emphasis on reaching people in a positive mood. Now, with existing technology, you can, uh, do that to a degree. It's a bit crude, but you can do it. There are a lot of studies like the IPA Touchpoints, um, diaries and time diaries which show that people are much more likely to be in a good mood in the evenings than in the mornings on Fridays and Saturdays than they are on Mondays and Tuesdays. So, you've, you've got some crude ways of reaching people by time of day. You've probably got some slightly more accurate ways you could reach people during comedy shows or in the cinema rather than on the Tube. Um, there are potential much more accurate ways of targeting mood coming, uh, down the line. There was a study done by, um... God, his name escapes me. It was at Brigham Young University. Um, I'll think of it, uh, halfway through the show. Um, uh, there's... Th- and this study looked at people's, um, uh, mouse movement, uh, sorry, so on their computer, and, and what he showed was that you can tell someone's mood by the smoothness of their mouse movement.

    26. CW

      No way.

    27. RS

      So if, well, if the cursor is moving very smoothly and evenly, people tend to... You know, it's a signifier that people are probably in a good mood. If it's moving in a more jagged, hurried way, signify that they're in a, in a bad mood. So, if he's correct, I think it might've been Geoff Jenkins, but I have to double-check that one. Um, if he's correct, well, it's not too hard, therefore, technologically, to start serving ads dependent on, on how the mouse is moving across, across, across the page.

    28. CW

      Wow.

    29. RS

      So, rather than reaching people with a propensity to be in a good mood, I think that might be a much more accurate way.

    30. CW

      That's so cool.

  4. 17:54 – 21:21

    The Red Sneaker Effect

    1. RS

      an idea called the red sneaker effect, um, by Francesca Gino and, and some other colleagues, that suggests that-... and it begins with... Her work, I think was originally with people. It suggests that people who break social norms are seen as higher status. So her original experiment, um, was run at academic conferences. So I think this was early 2000 when there was a very strong norm, what people were expected to do was turn up in kind of business attire, uh, shirts and jacket for, for blokes. So what she does is as people attend these conferences, she's sitting there and she's noting down how well-dressed they are from very scruffy to very smart. Once she's got all this, all this data, she then goes and finds the people whose dress code she's allocated on her little chart. She then goes and asks them how many citations they've got.

    2. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RS

      So a citation is an academic's kind of quantification. It's a bit of a crude one, but a quantification for how successful they are. How many times has their work been quoted by other people? And what she finds is that there is a inverse correlation between smartness of dress and number of citations. So it is the very successful academics who are turning up very scruffily, who are breaking all the norms about dress. And once you start thinking about it, it becomes, you know, I think qu- very believable that, you know, if you're the intern and you turn up to work and you're dressed very scruffily, you'll get told, sent home. If you're the CEO or if you're the, you know, rockstar academic and you turn up looking like a mess, well everyone will just put it down to your kind of-

    4. CW

      Nasser Taleb can wear whatever he wants.

    5. RS

      ... quirk or eccentricity.

    6. CW

      Rory Sutherland can wear whatever he wants, can't he?

    7. RS

      Yes. Yes. (laughs) Yeah. Rory, I mean, well, yes, exactly. Uh, oh, he's, he's dressed of cravats and west coats -

    8. CW

      (laughs) Yeah. Yeah.

    9. RS

      ... and he's absolutely distinctiveness in an, in an ad agency.

    10. CW

      Yeah.

    11. RS

      Absolutely. Whereas if even, well, 20 year old doing that, might be, we might just think, you know, he's a lunatic. Um, yeah, no, no, wonderful example. And, and, and what she argues is firstly that it's only people of high status that can do this. And then she shows in other experiments that people were remarkably attuned to it. So if they see you breaking a norm, they then take out higher status from it. So, and this is then a bit of a leap, but that's, her stuff is about people. So I'm making a bit of a leap to brands and I'm doing some research at the moment to try and see if this, this works. But arguably, if consumers are aware of the category norms and you radically deviate from them, perhaps in the same way as people will get, um, perceived higher status, so will, so will the brands. So I think l- I love distinctiveness, one, because it gets around the noticeability problem, but it's also, uh, conveying some of the, the positive, um, attributes of a brand.

    12. CW

      Signaling.

    13. RS

      Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, sorry. So that, that was a little bit of a, a fudge, a little bit of a high ground. Don't, don't wanna miss that bit out. But the, so that second part, so you've got attention.

    14. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    15. RS

      The next thing you want to be, uh, achieving is memorability and there are some lovely studies from academics around this as well. Um, one of my favorites is this

  5. 21:21 – 29:08

    The Generation Effect

    1. RS

      idea called the generation effect. So do you remember the cancer research ad? Either the end of 2018, maybe mid-2019. So it was talking about the second biggest cause of cancer is O-B-blank-S-blank-T-Y.

    2. CW

      Yes. Yes, I do. Yes.

    3. RS

      Obstinate. Now there was a big hoo-ha about that, and there was debate about whether it's fat shaming or not and unfortunately because of that, uh, significant debate, what got lost was they were using a really clever tactic to get people to remember their core point and that tactic is the generation effect. So the agency, and I think it might have been an anomaly, I'm not 100% sure, they used an experiment from 1978 by Graff and Slamecka, um, called the generation effect. And, and, and w- what they essentially did, it's not quite this, but, uh, very similar, they would give people lists of words. So let's say you get a list of, well one group gets a list of animals, fish, dog, weasel, cat-

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. RS

      ... elephant.

    6. CW

      Yep.

    7. RS

      They try and re- remember as m- uh, they're given this list with von Restorff, people have to remember as much as they can. Next group get the same list of animals but rather than being written out in full, just like that cancer research ad, you don't see fish, F-I-S-H, you see F-blank-S-H. People are given the same amount of time with that list of words, they get the list of words taken away from them and then they have to recall as much as they can and people were 14... They remembered 14% more words in that second condition when they had to, uh, generate the answers themselves. And what, uh, Graff and Slamecka argued was that if you just give people a list of information, they process it too quickly, too easily, that it just kind of washes over them. If you put in a tiny little bit of friction, if you make them generate the answer, the brain has to process some of that information, it becomes more memorable. You know, I think maybe teachers push this more than advertise, you know, don't just read your textbooks-

    8. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    9. RS

      ... write stuff down, uh, quiz yourself and all that sorts of stuff. So you've got this interesting technique for, uh, generating better recall, the generation effect. You, there are some examples like cancer research, like J&B, um, whiskey of very literal interpretations to that ad.

    10. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    11. RS

      You know, having blanks in the copy to make people remember it. All well and good-... but you can probably only do it once or twice without it, uh, looking a bit weird.

    12. CW

      It becomes a new norm, as well-

    13. RS

      Or-

    14. CW

      ... then, right?

    15. RS

      Yeah, well- well- well, potentially there is that as well.

    16. CW

      (laughs)

    17. RS

      Um, but what I think with all these biases that we discuss is that where they are most powerful is in when people don't think of behavioural science as the end in itself. Where you get- where you get the best strength is applying the creativity of, you know, a marketer's mind and the insights from behavioural science. And if people interpret these findings much more laterally, I think that's when you get the bigger impact. So by laterally, I would argue some of the best bits of copy apply the generation effect, not by removing letters, but by giving people small puzzles. So the famous Economist ad by David Abbott, AMV, uh, "I don't read The Economist." Uh, "Management trainee, age 42." I think that's a lateral interpretation of the generation effect. He didn't go out and say, "People who read- people who don't read The Economist are unsuccessful." They gave- they gave you a little bit of a puzzle, you had to work that out for yourself, therefore it becomes a bit more memorable. So that would be one, uh, tactic for- for memorability.

    18. CW

      I- I love the- I love that... I had, um, Robin Dreeke, a, uh, negotiator for the FBI, I had him on the podcast-

    19. RS

      Ooh.

    20. CW

      ... a little while ago.

    21. RS

      Okay.

    22. CW

      And what he said was that one tool which is used by, um, uh, FBI agents who are trying to recruit assets if they want to try and get information out of them is, rather than... So let's say I wanna get your date of birth. I might say to you, "I bet I can tell what horoscope. You're- you're- you're P- Pisces, right?" And you go, "No, no, no, I'm not, I'm Aries."

    23. RS

      Yeah.

    24. CW

      And you go, "Oh, okay, yeah, what, 1985? No, 1984." And you're like, uh, w- do you have-

    25. RS

      (laughs) Yeah.

    26. CW

      ... this desire to fill in the gap, right? So there's part of that, which it's playing on.

    27. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    28. CW

      Uh, also, Philip C. Brown, the guy who wrote, uh... Oh, I'm gonna get this wrong, I think it's Make It Stick, I had him on the podcast about two years ago now. Uh, and his synopsis of an entire lifetime learning how people learn is it doesn't matter about repeated exposure, it matters about repeated recall. So the Feynman technique uses this, right? It's learn your thing, then teach it to a four-year-old. It doesn't matter how many times you get exposed to something, it's how many times you are forced to recall that from memory. And if you think about-

    29. RS

      Ah.

    30. CW

      ... the obesity advert, you've got-

  6. 29:08 – 40:37

    The Key Turistic

    1. RS

      what they did... So they... It's called the Keats heuristic because it's the... And it's the idea that we find phrases that rhyme more believable than non-rhyming phrases.

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. RS

      And what they... So, yeah. Uh, I wasn't particularly, uh, a strong believer in this when I first read it, but they have a lovely experiment. So what they do is they get two groups of people. Uh, first group are given a list of kind of fake proverbs, and it was something like, you know, "What y-" The first word might be... Or the first proverb might be, "Woes unite foes." And there'd be a- another proverb. The other group see, uh, the same proverb but written in an unrhyming m- way. So, "Woes unite enemies." So they'll- they'll have this, you know, list of ten proverbs, say. Some rhyme, some don't rhyme. And then the other group have the- the- the mirror image. They then say to people, "How true do you think this, um, this, uh, th- th- these proverbs are," and they rate them on a- on a scale.... and, er, what they find is that when people have seen the rhyming version, if they go and compare it, the results, the group with the non-rhyming version, the rhyming proverbs are seen as significantly more believable. Now interesting- interestingly, at the end, they asked people directly, "Why did you believe this proverb or not? Does it have anything to do with the rhyme?"

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      Everyone swears blind that it's the content, that they think it's- nothing to do with- everyone says it's nothing to do with the rhyme. So if you ask people directly, they send you off completely in the wrong, er, direction. But if you do this wonderful test and control approach, you, you start to see, er, the, the power of, er, rhymes. And they argue, I think, that we of- we often confuse, er, mental fluency, y- er, with- with truthfulness. Now, I then took that... Again, this lovely way of- with behavioral science, you can take these experiments and rerun them for your own ends. We did exactly the same study, but this time, we gave people the lists of proverbs in the morning, and then rather than ask them whether they believed them or whatnot, we got them to try and remember them in the afternoon.

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. RS

      And this was amongst, er, colleagues, so, m- you know, dubious robustness, but I think our memory is probably something that is true for, uh, ad agency staff as much as anyone else. And what we found is that people were, I think about tw- two times more likely to remember the rhyming phrase than the non-rhyming version. Now what's interesting with this is that does believability and noticeability, two massively important things for adverts, having a rhyming strapline. But if you go to, um, look at historic collections of adverts, and I went and did this, I went to the News International, er, archives. So with a colleague, we went all the way back to the '70s, looked at hundreds and hundreds of newspapers and ads, and what we saw was a really clear pattern, whereas in the 1970s, loads of ads had a rhyming strapline. By the noughties and the 2010s, it was down to a handful. It was five or 10%. You know, all those great things like, "Once you pop, you can't stop." Pringles. "Don't be vague." The Hague. "Adore, Cura." You know, these are all 20, 30, 40, 70 years old. They've completely fallen out of fashion. Now, we've got... That's fascinating in that you've got all this recent evidence that rhyming phrases are memorable and believable, yet they are used less and less and less. And I think that can only be explained by the, um, the mixed motivations of marketers and creatives. You know, I would argue that they're... Rhymes aren't used as much as they should, because they have fallen out of fashion in the marketing circle.

    8. CW

      They're uncool, aren't they? Yeah.

    9. RS

      Ex- exactly. But they're uncool to your fellow professional, and who cares what your fellow professional thinks in terms of sales?

    10. CW

      Currently, everyone.

    11. RS

      E- yeah, exactly that.

    12. CW

      (laughs)

    13. RS

      But- well, sorry. You think they shouldn't care-

    14. CW

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

    15. RS

      ... but absolutely right, they do. Uh, because if you... Yeah, exactly. If you want to signal your professional expertise, a rhyme does not do that. You know, use of cutting-edge techniques does that, or- or something that is probably very abstruse does that. But that's not our, as marketers, our core role. So I think one big, going back to the original point, one big pitfall of... is to advertise to our peers rather than advertise to our, our customers. And that, I think, happens far more than p- than people admit.

    16. CW

      Yeah, I- I got a sense of this during our last conversation, and I also got this when speaking to Rory, who's a big proponent of the fact that people in advertising agencies, a lot of the time, would sooner come up with, uh, an advert which failed but was r- not risk-taking and liked by their superiors than one which sometimes actually was more successful with the market, but ha- adds risk onto their back, because if you decide to forge the new path-

    17. RS

      Yes.

    18. CW

      ... with, with your-

    19. RS

      Yeah.

    20. CW

      ... adventurous advert, and it doesn't go well, you never have the... But it's, it- it's just like... Look at the, look at the, the-

    21. RS

      Absolutely.

    22. CW

      ... lineage of, of things that we've got behind us.

    23. RS

      Yes.

    24. CW

      It was, it was always gonna work.

    25. RS

      Yeah.

    26. CW

      How did it not work? We followed the formula.

    27. RS

      Absolutely. So it's this wonderful thing of, um, like risk. If you say, "Is being distinctive, uh, risky for a brand?" No, it's not, because it gives you the greatest probability of success. Is it risky for the individual involved? Absolutely.

    28. CW

      (laughs)

    29. RS

      You know, your point, spot-on about this lineage. You know, if you are a beer brand and you decide to sponsor a table tennis team, and it goes horribly wrong, like all ads and all sponsorships can, then you'll end up getting fired, because you haven't got that body of work to show it's a sensible decision. If you decide to sponsor a football team like every other football, uh, bra- uh, beer brand does, when it goes wrong, you can say, "Ah, well, it wasn't a stupid idea. Bud do it, Carling do it, so-and-so do it." So I thi- I think you're absolutely right. There is a com- there's a misalignment of motivations between the what's often called the agent, the employee or the marketer, and the principal, that is the brand or the shareholders. And that principal-agent problem explains an awful lot of bizarre decision-making on the part of brands. Why so few are distinctive. Why so few, um, admit flaws and pratfall mistake. Why so few, uh, adopt rhymes Yeah, thi- this mismatch of motivations I think explains an awful lot.

    30. CW

      I love it, man. I think it does some really good, a real good framework there for people to begin to look at how they're, how they're planning their advertising campaigns. We are going to do a new section, which I'm very excited for, which is called What Phrases-

  7. 40:37 – 41:51

    Long-Term Trackers of How Much People Trust Organizations

    1. RS

      um, longterm trackers of how much people, uh, trust organizations. So there's Edelman data. Now, if you just read the Edelman reports into trust, you could often come away with the impression that we are in a trust crisis. If you print out the data tables from every one of their 30 reports, and you print them out and you plot them, what you see is that trust in brands or businesses, you know, bounces around, uh, from year to year, but it's essentially flat or slightly rising. Um, the other one is, I think it's, um, Ipsos MORI. They've got something called the, it's the veracity, I think the Veracity Index, and it looks at trust in professions, and they've studied 20 or 30 professions over the, I think back to the early 1980s. And again, it, they, uh, trust in professions is either flat or rising. Uh, I think the only profession that is in massive decline is the Church, and that has very specific reasons. And then the third body of evidence that people use for this trust crisis is the

  8. 41:51 – 44:07

    The Advertising Association

    1. RS

      AA, so the Advertising Association. And what they've done is, is this weird sleight of hand in that the evidence that they have is that favorability i- towards advertising is dropping, and they show that over about tw- I think it's about 20 years. So you see, see this kind of long drop in, uh, favorability towards advertising, and then, like last eight or 10 years, it's flattened out. When they show trust, which they've only measured for about 10 years, they say, "Well-"... trust data, which is pretty flat, maybe a very small decline. That correlates with favorability, and it's because favorability is down over 20 years, well, there must be a trust crisis. So you've either got Edelman's data which shows trust is increasing, but often the reporting around it suggests that there's a crisis. Because what often happens is, because those numbers are bouncing around, if you were just select certain time periods by picking which dataset you compare, you can create a- a- a drop. So you've got th- that data being misused, then you've got the Ipsos Mori data, which is brilliant, but when journalists report it, they'll often pick the one profession that that year happens to have dropped.

    2. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    3. RS

      And then you've got this AA data which really shows a very different story about favorability towards ads declining. So there's no evidence that trust is dropping, and that creates a problem, because it ends up with the wrong solutions. Um, if you think trust is in crisis, as in it's lower than it's ever been, you need a new solution to solve it. If you think trust in brands and advertising is low, but it's always been low, which is what the evidence suggests, well, then you can turn to tried and trusted techniques that brands have used in the past. And again, there are lots of ideas in psychology about how you can build trust in a brand. You know, make big public pronouncements, don't do digital target advertising. The more public a statement, the more believable it is, and I've done some research on that. Um, make people feel that you've put a huge amount of money behind your campaign.

  9. 44:07 – 48:13

    Costly Signaling

    1. RS

      There's an idea called costly signaling that, uh, the believability of a message rises with its perceived expense. So extravagant advertising, unnecessary white space, long second links, um, great creative feats all boost the believability of an ad. Um, even th- you know, the- the media context, you know, a bit running in The- The Times has a very different feel from running in The Star. So, hate that phrase, because it's not true-

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. RS

      ... yet it mindlessly gets passed from one person to another, and it- it has a danger, um, we- it leads us, this phrase leads us to the wrong solution. The solutions, the tried and true solutions are out there, but we're ignoring them because we think we're in this kind of unique period of a lack of trust.

    4. CW

      (sighs) That's so good. Uh, some other ones which I hate-

    5. RS

      Yeah, it's okay.

    6. CW

      Some other words which I hate. Uh, I hate content. I just hate the term content. I'm so sick of content, I can't wait for it to be something else. Uh, are we creating content? Are we driving content? I mean, this is how bad it was, that even when I was on Love Island, and I walked through the doors of- of season one of Love Island, and the producers were in the villa talking about, "Right guys, I know that you all just want to chill out and have a chat about the day-"

    7. RS

      Yeah.

    8. CW

      "... but we- we just haven't, we haven't driven quite enough content for the day, so we just..." I'm thinking, "This, I- I'm not recording fucking Instagram stories here." Like, this is just supposed to be my life.

    9. RS

      (laughs)

    10. CW

      Like, if I want to go and talk about my day, that is the content. The fact that as far as you're concerned-

    11. RS

      Yeah.

    12. CW

      ... and maybe everybody else as well, actually, is concerned that it's fucking boring content is not my problem. That is your problem, my friend.

    13. RS

      (laughs)

    14. CW

      So content, not a fan of. Scale, I'm fucking sick of scale. I'm sick of higher order, and I'm sick of meta. I'm s-

    15. RS

      Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    16. CW

      So, content, pivot, scale, higher order, and meta, they can all get in the sea.

    17. RS

      Yes, we need a, what was it, there was that wonderful, uh, show, Room 101 where people-

    18. CW

      Oh, sh-

    19. RS

      ... uh, sort of shoved their hated things, yeah-

    20. CW

      All going in Room 101, yeah.

    21. RS

      Yeah, yeah.

    22. CW

      Um, one thing that you touched on just there which was talking about some of the power that advertising and marketing has, and I've been thinking about this, uh, about how central marketing is to the public's good, right? So, I think marketing can sometimes be seen as a bit of a dirty word, capitalist, capitalizing businesses trying to make a profit, blah blah. But during the coronavirus outbreak that we've got at the moment, industries deemed nonessential have been shutting down, so people have been noticing a refocusing of public attention to important areas of life like health and family and connectedness and stuff. The way that I see it, marketers are able to affect behavior change-

    23. RS

      Mm-hmm.

    24. CW

      ... in a way that brute force operational optimizing and well-meaning emotions can't on their own. So, perfect example, the NHS has a, I think the stat's nearly a half a million people have signed up to this volunteer to-

    25. RS

      Yeah, oh yes, yeah.

    26. CW

      ... to help them, which is amazing, right?

    27. RS

      Amazing, yeah.

    28. CW

      Great campaign. But how much more could that effect have been amplified if every ounce of behavioral science and understanding, uh, uh, beautiful advertising and great copywriting and all the rest of it was harnessed? And that's, I think, this, the fact that y- you're able to catalyze what is effective with, uh, nonessential business. You know, no one's looking at advertisers or marketers, behavioral science guys and saying, "Oh, for fuck's sake, we better keep the lights on. They're es- they, like, don't let them stop going to work." Um, and I think that this really ties back to what Rory said about alchemy to describe marketing's ability to literally create value and create change out of nothing.

    29. RS

      Y- um, yeah, so- so I think there's... You've got a couple of points, of points there. There's the idea that if you want, um, to reduce life-threatening behavior, tactics from behavioral science or psychology or advertising can be used. Um, one that I'm interested in at the moment

  10. 48:13 – 50:02

    Negative Social Proof

    1. RS

      is this idea of negative social proof. So it goes back to an idea of Robert Cialdini where he says, "If you make a transgressive behavior seem commonplace, or an antisocial behavior seem commonplace, you remove a sense of transgression and it becomes more common still."... now, like all psychology experiments, he doesn't just argue this like a philosopher, he just takes a piece of logic and creates this smooth argument. What he does is go out and run tests to prove it. So the test is, goes to the Arizona Petrified Wood National Park, s- rigs up CCTV camera by a path and sprinkles bits of petrified wood on along the path. Now, the reason he's done that is there is a problem in that park with lots of tourists stealing bits of petrified wood. So he wants to know how you can reduce that, and where you might, by accident, increase that theft rate. So three scenarios. First scenario, no sign, so he's getting a kind of a, a base level of theft, and it's about 3%. Second scenario, he puts up a sign saying, "Don't steal, it's wrong," and theft rates drop by half, to about 1.5%. And then in the third scenario, which I will come back to, this is what I'm worrying is happening now, he puts up a sign saying, "14 tonnes of wood are being stolen every year-

    2. CW

      (laughs)

    3. RS

      ... and it's ruining the look of this park."

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. RS

      Now, he then said, he goes, "The theft rates go from," remember 3% was the baseline, they jumped to 7.9%, so in his words-

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. RS

      ... a, a client promotion strategy.

    8. CW

      It's the worst, it's the worst campaign in history. (laughs)

    9. RS

      Absolutely. Um-

    10. CW

      (laughs)

    11. RS

      ... because he says like, if you tell i- people that everyone else is doing this, what people think is, "Well, it can't be that bad. I'm a bit of a mug not to be doing it." You know, you remove this sense of transgression, it becomes more common still.

  11. 50:02 – 52:55

    Government Advertising

    1. RS

      If you then look at government advertising, and then sometimes charity advertising, y- or a lot of social advertising, you see how regularly this happens. So Cialdini says it's a big mistake of government. When there are behaviors they don't want, they often inadvertently use negative social proof. They say, you know, loads of youths get, students get drunk. Loads of people are carrying knives. Lots of people don't turn up for their doctor's appointment. All of Cialdini's work suggests that will exacerbate the situation, not solve it. So the danger is if you fixate on, um, people not social distancing, or, uh, fixate on people who are stockpiling, the message that people take out is not, "Oh, they're very bad. I'm definitely not gonna do it." They take out, "Well, if everyone else is ignoring the rules, they can't be that important." You know, we-

    2. CW

      Yeah.

    3. RS

      ... we are a species that copy people. So, I absolutely believe the application of behavioral science can solve, or help solve, some very important problems. Absolutely.

    4. CW

      And the misapplication of it as well can potentially make it worse.

    5. RS

      Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolu- uh, yeah, that, that's completely true. Um-

    6. CW

      Yeah. There was that, um, that brilliant study that you put up about... Was it, was it Peru? Was it the Peruvian tax, where they created a lottery on the bottom of the receipts?

    7. RS

      Oh, uh, Taiwan, I think. Yes.

    8. CW

      Taiwan, Taiwanese, Taiwanese tax. So they wanted people to submit receipts in, didn't they? Wanted to make sure they kept ahold of them, so they-

    9. RS

      Yes.

    10. CW

      ... c- created a lottery, and the numbers were printed on the bottom of, of receipts. So everyone obviously kept them, and they forced the supermarkets to give them to them, and, and-

    11. RS

      Yeah, yeah.

    12. CW

      ... this sort of stuff. And you think, okay-

    13. RS

      And turned the whole population into, in- into, uh, you know, policemen. They were essentially enforcing the law.

    14. CW

      For their own receipts. Yeah, for something that they, it was, would've previously been costly, and all the other different ways that you could've gone about that. And it is by far the, the cheapest. You know, it, it requires-

    15. RS

      (laughs)

    16. CW

      ... it requires a printer. I mean, they were giving away, they were giving away money for the lottery, so it requires the money for the lottery-

    17. RS

      Yeah.

    18. CW

      ... but, uh, you know, in real terms, nothing. Compare that with having to, uh, pay an entire division of people to enforce the fucking, the receipt collection-

    19. RS

      Yes. Oh, absolutely.

    20. CW

      ... uh, thing, whatever it is. Um, uh, yeah, I, I think that's great.

    21. RS

      I, no, yeah, I, I love that Taiwanese example. I think, um, I read about that first on a Dave Trott blog. So yeah, it's a brilliant example. And there are other examples of lotteries being used, um, by governments. So I think the Swedish have a system where speed cameras both fine, uh, drivers who are breaking the speed limit, but people who go past the speed camera below the, uh, recommended level, they are entered into a draw again.

    22. CW

      No way.

    23. RS

      Yeah. (laughs)

    24. CW

      That is so good. Do you know, um, Koen Smets? Do you know who that is?

    25. RS

      Yes. Um, he, he's mor- a Belgian guy-

    26. CW

      Yep.

    27. RS

      ... into organizational psychology. Yeah, lovely chap.

    28. CW

      Yeah, fantastic guy. So I had him on, had

  12. 52:55 – 1:06:43

    The Estonian Police Service

    1. CW

      him on last year. Did you know about the Estonian Police Service and what they've been doing?

    2. RS

      Is this where people get... Is this where they, I think I might have read about this in a Rory Sutherland post, where you get pulled over and, yeah, go on too busy, kind of thing, yeah, yeah, yep, yep.

    3. CW

      You have to stay at the side of the road, so they, they give people the choice between a very expensive fine, I think it's 300 euros or something, if you get caught speeding, or a half-an-hour wait.

    4. RS

      Yes. So it's the-

    5. CW

      And, um, uh, it, it just showed the, the whole podcast that I did with him is about, um, the, the valuing of time, the, how we perceive time from a behavioral economic standpoint. And, um-

    6. RS

      Ah!

    7. CW

      ... almo- almost 50% of people elected to pay this fine rather than wait half an hour.

    8. RS

      Yeah.

    9. CW

      And that's so, it's so interesting because obviously, presumably, if you are caught speeding, it's probably because you have somewhere to be and you could do with being there quickly.

    10. RS

      Yeah.

    11. CW

      Which means if I said, "Hey, mate, would you sit by the side of this road for 300 euros?" I, I don't think, I mean, David Beckham would probably do that, you know? There's no amount of money-

    12. RS

      (laughs)

    13. CW

      ... that someone's got that's too much to not sit by the side of the road for 300 euros.

    14. RS

      Yeah.

    15. CW

      But if you are running 20 minutes late to your daughter's dance recital, or to a gym class, or to get to a meeting, or something like that-

    16. RS

      Yeah.

    17. CW

      ... you're prepared to do it.

    18. RS

      I, I, I also wonder there if, um... I wonder if they take, take people's phones away. 'Cause there's a lot of research into the idea that unoccupied waits are painful, occupied waits are, you know, people don't seem to mind. So, um, what I mean by that is, uh, there was a report in the New York Times about-... I think it was one of the, it might have been Houston airport, and they were having lots of complaints about how long people had to wait to get their bags at the airport baggage carousel. So what was happening was people would go through passport control or whatever, uh, they'd, they'd walk a minute, and then they'd wait seven minutes to get their bag. So the first thing they did was spend loads of money just trying to make the system more efficient, you know, hiring more baggage handlers, speeding up the machines, whatever they did, and they managed to shave a minute off the time.

    19. CW

      (laughs)

    20. RS

      But they saw very little reduction in complaints. The next thing they did was rather than try this kind of engineering technique, they tried a, a psychological technique, which was all around occupying people's time. So now what happened was as people en- left passport control, they were sent on this kind of circuitous jerk walk around the airport for six minutes-

    21. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    22. RS

      ... so, you know, they used all those kind of, uh, guides to make sure people couldn't-

    23. CW

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    24. RS

      ... go down the wrong ways to the carousel. So, yeah, they walk for six minutes, get to the carousel, then wait a minute, bag turns up and off they go. And when they did that, people's complaint level plummets. 'Cause what people didn't like was standing, staring at a carousel with nothing to do. What they didn't mind was, you know, a little walk round the-

    25. CW

      Putting in some blind effort to make it feel like-

    26. RS

      Yeah.

    27. CW

      ... you're... So I think about this all the time when I'm driving. I realize, I know for an absolute fact that at a time when there's traffic, I will tend to take a route which may potentially be both longer and, um, longer, b- both in terms of time and in terms of distance-

    28. RS

      Yeah.

    29. CW

      ... but one which will be less likely to be nose to tail. Even accounting for all of that-

    30. RS

      Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes.

  13. 1:06:43 – 1:07:20

    Ogilvie Gloves

    1. CW

      talk about the, uh, Ogilvy gloves-

    2. RS

      Ah, yes.

    3. CW

      ... thing.

    4. RS

      Yes. Great idea. Um, so-This, I think, goes back to that idea we had earlier on, which is behavioral science, in and of itself, is, is great, but where it gets brilliant is when you combine brilliant behavioral insight with a wonderful piece of creative thinking. So Ogilvy Consult, or Ogilvy Change, um, were working with a factory where people were dealing with dangerous equipment, and there's an idea

  14. 1:07:20 – 1:15:48

    Risk Homeostasis

    1. RS

      called, slightly controversial idea called risk homeostasis, and I think it's controversial 'cause it was, it was slightly exag- I think it has- there's evidence that maybe people exaggerated the impact, but it's still, still there. Um, and i- the initial studies were done on, I think it was anti- Was it ABS brakes or anti-lock brakes?

    2. CW

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    3. RS

      And when taxi drivers, I think in Germany, had, um, these improved brakes added, what they saw was a much lower decrease in s- in accidents than they expected, the argument being when someone is given a safety mechanism, they could take all the benefit of that safety mechanism as in lower, uh, injury-

    4. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    5. RS

      ... but actually people sometimes take the benefit as keeping the injury level the same and then driving faster.

    6. CW

      (laughs)

    7. RS

      So often safety measures don't have the impact you would want. So that's a problem with people going to work with saws ev- you know, giant metal saws every day, because they might become a bit blasé about them, and if even if you add in safety, um, equipment, they might then become a bit more, um, reckless. So what Ogilvy did was take this idea of risk homeostasis, and with a wonderful leap of imagination, they gave the, uh, workers their gloves, you know, black gloves, and then it would have a, you know, a skeleton painted on the, on the glove, and it was a constant reminder of their, their vulnerability, and when in the tracking, they showed that people do indeed feel more vulnerable when they're, when they're wearing these gloves. So that to me has been one of the nicest, uh, applications of behavioral science because it's this fusion of great behavioral science insight, but on top of it, a wonderful leap of creative efort- ima- imagination.

    8. CW

      It's a perfect example as well of the alchemy analogy that I alluded to-

    9. RS

      Mm. Mm.

    10. CW

      ... earlier on, where it is creating behavior change slash value slash w- pick your metric of what the end goal is out of nothing. You know, imagine-

    11. RS

      Yes.

    12. CW

      (clears throat) Imagine them having to go back to the people that make industrial band saws and saying, "Right, guys, I need you to come up with a special system that can drop the s- the saw away, uh, uh, immediately release the mechanism if a-

    13. RS

      Yes.

    14. CW

      ... mad person's finger gets put in. Can we have some special electrodes that run through the blade to feel if it touches flesh and if it gets wet or s-" You're just like, oh my God. Like, 'cause there are systems. I know that there are systems, fail-safe systems in place like that, but you think how much is, i- uh, probably Poundland, they've probably got-

    15. RS

      (laughs)

    16. CW

      If you stock up, uh, around about-

    17. RS

      Yeah.

    18. CW

      ... Halloween, you'll be able to get loads of those-

    19. RS

      Yes.

    20. CW

      ... of those gloves.

    21. RS

      And, and, and, and, uh, there's a lovely argument from Rory Sutherland that it's, it's typ- this differential in, this difference in cost is typical because his argument is because businesses normally have this kind of engineering, logical, rational mindset. They've been using that for years and years. All the easy, cheap wins have been found already, and now it's getting, you know, diminishing returns and it's getting harder and more expensive to come up with those improvements. Because businesses have tended to ignore these psychological wins, there are loads of them, like that glove example, that you can do at very, very low cost to have a remarkable return. So I think his book Alchemy is wonderful ly titled because it, it captures this sense of creating value from no or very little expenditure.

    22. CW

      Yeah. It, it really is. I think as well the, um, the thing that I- I keep coming back to when we talk about this is the effort which is required by companies to do the hard thing. You know, one, o- one of the things that has been a common theme in both our conversations that we've had, and if you haven't already gone and heard my first episode with Richard, it's, it's just as good as this. So go back and listen, it'll be linked in the show notes below. Um, i- i- when people have to go do the hard thing and create this novelty, create th- these new ideas, it is the hard thing in the same way as changing your habit as a normal person is a hard thing. So you can continue to maybe try and eat a little bit less junk food, but beginning a gym program is real hard, right? That outside of the box thinking, we've greased-

    23. RS

      Yep.

    24. CW

      ... this groove of our standard operating procedures. We spoke about the lineage, the existing adverts that the company's always gone for, the norms that are within, and even take that out further within an industry, we've got norms that are industry wide as well. All these different ways that people have greased existing grooves, and yet the low hanging fruit has been... has already been picked up off the ground, you're getting diminishing returns with rinsing existing marketing plans or with trying to further optimize the logistics of your lean kaizen production thing-

    25. RS

      Yeah. (laughs)

    26. CW

      ... whatever it is.

    27. RS

      Yeah.

    28. CW

      You know, like all the different things. Uh, and it does, it requires somebody to come in and really reframe everything, right? It's, look, we've tried you eating a little bit less chocolate. There's now no chocolate left in the house and you're going to the gym at 6:00 every morning. That's, that's what's happening.

    29. RS

      Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's, um... Oh, I don't know. I think, uh, it's, uh... The, the whole alchemy practice is a lovely analogy for behavioral science and, and its strengths.

    30. CW

      Cool. I, I wonder-

  15. 1:15:48 – 1:21:38

    Guinness Adverts

    1. CW

      or anything that you've enjoyed.

    2. RS

      Yeah.

    3. CW

      Uh, that Guinness advert's one.

    4. RS

      Oh, yeah, so I mean, the Guinness ad's beautiful. Uh, absolutely beautiful. It's wonderfully designed, very, very clever, and I think will bring a lot of amusement to people. Whether it changes behavior is a very different thing. Uh, but that's kind of a separate point maybe. Um, I think your point of... What's interesting is there's a lovely G.K. Chesterton phrase along the idea of, uh, the way to love every- anything is to realize it might be lost. And perhaps when you have, you know, social contacts or most of social contacts taken away, you realize how precious it is. So yeah-

    5. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    6. RS

      ... I think that, that, that, that's, uh, I think a key point. The one I was gonna mention, and I think is the flip side of all those positive st- stories you've said, is in the Sunday Times there was talk about, um, one of the supermarkets raising their, their prices. And I think brands have got to be very, very careful about transgressing what are seen as fairness norms. So there was a study done by a guy called Werner Guth back in 1982, um, called the Ultimatum Game. And Guth, who was at the University of Cologne, comes up with this wonderfully simple setup. Two people, never meet each other, they don't know each other. One is the proposer, one is the receiver. They're given a small amount of money. Well, the proposer's given a small amount of money, say a tenner, and, uh, the proposer is told, "Split that money between you and the receiver as you think fit." And they get to split the money, so it could be 50/50, it could be 80/20 in their favor. And then the receiver has two options: accept the split as it's been given, there's no negotiation-

    7. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    8. RS

      ... accept the split, or refuse it and both parties get nothing. Now, before Guth did these experiments, the standard economic belief was that a receiver would accept pretty much anything. You know, you've been given a tenner, you only offer me one pound, you keep nine. Logically, I should just keep the pound because I'm worse off if I don't. But what happens is if the offer is below about 20%, more than half of people will refuse it. They would rather both people got nothing-

    9. CW

      (laughs)

    10. RS

      ... and the unfair behavior was punished than the small amount of cash. So it's an argument that people will go to quite big lengths, even at a cost to themselves, to punish unfair behavior. Now, there's other experiments by Kahneman where he shows that people taking advantage, uh, to push up their prices in times of crisis are definitely seen as unfair. So a simple thought experiment, he says imagine there's a, um, a hardware store that sells snow shovels for 15 quid-

    11. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    12. RS

      ... $15 it would be, it's Ca- Canada. Um, there's this big snowstorm. They push up to the price to $20. Is that fair? And I think it's 82% of people say that's not fair, not fair. So what I would caution to brands is don't try and make a quick buck out of people's desperation and need. If you are caught pushing up your prices, even if it's justifiable as a way of managing demand or supposedly justifiable from-... standard economics. Don't do that because it will be seen as unfair and people will go to quite big lengths to, to, to, to punish you.

    13. CW

      I've noticed a severe uplift in brands leveraging social goodwill over the l- you know, the amount of, this is, the pay, pay walls are being removed. I don't know whether the spectator -free coffees. ... got reaction.

    14. RS

      Oh, they talked about it, didn't they? Yeah, the-

    15. CW

      Did they do? I don't know.

    16. RS

      ... free coffees to the N- Oh, I, I don't know, I saw Roy Southern's tweet about they should do it, and, uh, Fraser Nelson's response.

    17. CW

      Maybe that was-

    18. RS

      Uh-

    19. CW

      Maybe that was all that I saw as well.

    20. RS

      (laughs) .

    21. CW

      Um-

    22. RS

      And again, the goodwill that do. Um, the NHS, uh, I think Caffè Nero and Pr- originally were giving them free coffees, weren't they?

    23. CW

      Free coffees, yeah. My, um-

    24. RS

      Free masks. Yeah, wonderful.

    25. CW

      My best friend, Yousef, he, uh, he is a, a first year, uh, doctor now working in intensive care. The, the immediate missions. And he said that he felt really good that after working like two days on, two nights on, of 14 hours each, he was, um, told that NHS staff were gonna get 20% off at Pizza Express, which is now shut.

    26. RS

      (laughs) .

    27. CW

      (laughs) .

    28. RS

      Yeah, I mean, 20% off is just basically a kind of sales promotion, but, uh, yeah. That's

    29. CW

      Shut. It's shut now-

    30. RS

      Yeah, yeah (laughs) .

Episode duration: 1:23:23

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