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- [00:00]
Phil Agnew
In November 2011, Coca Cola changed the color of the can. They removed the distinctive red, and to raise awareness for polar bear conservation, they made the can white. But this packaging change, it didn't go down well.
- [00:15]
Narrator/Reporter
Coca Cola is canning its new white cans for the holidays. The new design was supposed to raise money to help polar bears.
- [00:21]
Phil Agnew
The drink inside wasn't changed at all. But the new color of the can changed how consumers perceived the taste.
- [00:29]
Narrator/Reporter
Some even claim the new can changed the taste of the Coke inside.
- [00:32]
Phil Agnew
To some, this seemed ridiculous.
- [00:34]
Narrator/Reporter
Just drink it. Jeez. So they're going back to the red cans next week.
- [00:38]
Phil Agnew
But today on Nudge, we'll learn how sights, smells and sounds alter not only what we buy, but how we taste, perceive and remember. All of that coming up. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, even with the best behavioural science. But that is exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They use breeze, HubSpot's AI powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped by 25%, qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow. In 1929, the German psychologist Wolfgang Kohler devised a simple experiment on the island of Tenerife. He showed the Spanish speaking population two abstract shapes. One was a spiky, jagged shape and the other was a smooth, round shape. Although the names have altered over the years, they've come to be known as the Kiki and Bouba shapes. These shapes are are very well known. They've even been featured on an episode of qi.
- [01:57]
Charles Spence
Now, look at these two shapes. They have names all right. Yeah.
- [02:02]
Adrian North
Powell.
- [02:03]
Charles Spence
One is the Kiki and the other is the Bouba. Tell me which is which?
- [02:08]
Phil Agnew
Wolfgang found that almost everybody matched the word booba with the rounded shape and Kiki with the angular shape. Booba's on the right, clearly.
- [02:18]
Charles Spence
Bouba's on the right.
- [02:19]
Phil Agnew
Would you agree with that?
- [02:19]
Guest Expert
Oh, definitely. Kiki, that's the spiky one.
- [02:21]
Charles Spence
Kiki's the spiky one. And what would you say, Johnny? God, I hate to think.
- [02:27]
Adrian North
I would.
- [02:27]
Phil Agnew
Say they should go back to their dating agency. In 2001, two neuroscientists updated this experiment, testing it on speakers of many different languages, and found that the finding holds. No matter where you're from, Kiki sounds spiky and booba sounds. Rounded sounds shape our perception. And Charles Spence, the Oxford University researcher and author of the book Sense Hacking used this finding to advise dairy milk. He found that the words don't just seem more angular around it. He found that tastes can be altered too. Here he is sharing his work at the most recent Nudge stock conference, that.
- [03:06]
Adrian North
Bitterness is more angular and is kiki instead. And so he came out in 2012 suggesting that if you know about these synesthetic connections between the senses, if you want to make your chocolate taste sweeter, make it rounder, but probably reduce some of the sugar as well. The same taste percept, but a little bit less unhealthy. And the following year, Cadbury's came out and indeed do that. They rounded off their chocolate bar to cut the weight by 3 point something grams. But they didn't change the formula. And what the response was of readers of the Daily Mail, there was a revolt, saying, what are your mandelines doing to our chocolate? You've changed the taste, you've made it more creamy and more sweet. That was exactly what we predicted would happen the year or two before. By knowing these surprising, almost synesthetic connection.
- [03:53]
Phil Agnew
The new rounded chocolate bar made dairy milk seem sweeter, even though the chocolate itself hadn't changed the look of a word. Chocolate or can of coke can change our perception, but it's not just sights, it's music too. Back on the very first episode of Nudge, I interviewed Adrian North, a professor of psychology at the Curtin University, and I asked him about one of his best known experiments.
- [04:17]
Guest Expert
So we just borrowed the island display of literally our local supermarket in the wines and spirits section, and on the end there, we just had a shelf. Oh, sorry, four shelves, which showed on one side of the shelf, French wines and on the other side of the shelf, German wines.
- [04:36]
Phil Agnew
Adrian wanted to see if music could alter the wine shoppers picked on each shelf.
- [04:40]
Guest Expert
The two wines were basically the same price. The supermarket in question had a scale that it used to put on by the price ticket, which showed shoppers just how sweet versus dry the wine was. So we tried to hold that constant and so on. And then on the top deck of all the top shelf of this display, we had just a little music player which played either very stereotypically French music or very stereotypically German music. We were keen to avoid people being exposed to any sort of marketing message and any confusing impact that would have. So for our stereotypically French music, we had, for example, the French national anthem played on an accordion. You know, almost anyone exposed to British culture at that time would have spotted, yeah, that's French similarly, our German music was basically beerkeller songs. You know, we had one about, literally, it was about drinking Weisswein and then Rhine.
- [05:38]
Phil Agnew
I froze it, I froze it. Reggae music.
- [05:47]
Guest Expert
Night. You know, it's really stereotypically German, at least if you're brought up in Britain around about that time. And what we did then was this display was essentially facing the checkouts. It was only about maybe 10 meters from the back end of the checkouts. So we sat there by a little free taxi phone, you know, with bags stuffed with shopping, inviting people to draw the assumption that we were not psychologists observing what they're doing. In fact, we're just shoppers waiting for our taxi to arrive. And literally we were just counting the number of bottles of wine sold. And, yeah, what we found was when we played the very stereotypically German music, then German wine outsold French by five bottles to one. So in other words, it averaged out at about three and a third bottles to one in favour of whichever country's music was playing there.
- [06:34]
Phil Agnew
And then when French music played, 40 bottles of French wine were sold versus just 12 bottles of German wine. But when German music played, 30 bottles of German wine sold versus just 22 bottles of French. What's more, 86% of the customers surveyed after said the music had absolutely no effect on their choice. I've mentioned this on Nudge before, but the same finding holds true for food sales. In 2017, Deborah Zelina and her colleagues from the Montclair State University in New Jersey found that playing flamenco music in a North American university canteen led to increases in sales of paella, while playing Italian music led to increases of the sales of chicken parmesan. Adrian north went on to find that picking the right music for an ad can make the ad's claims more memorable.
- [07:24]
Guest Expert
So, for example, not long after that study with wine cells in the supermarket, we then said, okay, well, if the music is activating the thoughts of certain things and making people think in a certain way, what that should mean is that if the music that's playing in the background to an advert is very clearly linked to some feature of the product, it ought to make it easier to recall those features of the product itself. And so that's the next thing we did. We set up basically five dummy adverts with different musical backgrounds. In some cases, the music was clearly promoting a particular aspect of the product, and in some cases it wasn't. And what we found is that when the music fits a particular aspect of the product, people are more likely to recall that specific feature of the product itself.
- [08:07]
Phil Agnew
So if you want your service to appear more luxurious, you might play this. Or if you want your tech product to seem higher quality, you might play this.
- [08:29]
Guest Expert
All of a sudden you go from this rather facile statement that, you know, play French music in a shop, people buy French stuff, big deal. So what? Who'd have thought it to all of a sudden say, okay, so now we've got a direct tool that's theoretically driven. It tells us exactly how we should be using music and advertising.
- [08:45]
Phil Agnew
But that's just music. Charles Spence in Sense Hacking writes that smells alter our purchases too. According to the results of a preliminary study by Dr. Alan Hirsch from Chicago, participants in the laboratory were willing to pay $10 more for a pair of sneakers with the scent of flowers hanging heavy in the air while their self reported purchase intent increased too. What's more, a new car smell will make that car appear to run smoother. Spence writes that his all time favourite example of smell influencing percept comes from anecdotal reports of Rolls Royce owners in the UK who would send their car off for a service or a repair. More often than not, the car owners would get the car back and say, wow, this car is just like being brand new. It had had a good tune up, it had probably had a polish. But Charles writes that the key change was the new car smell, an aromatic mixture of leather and wood designed to capture the distinctive scent of a vintage 1965 Silver Cloud. This new car smell is sprayed into the cabin just before the car returned to the customer, according to Hugh Hadland, managing director of SC Gordon, the coach builders of Rolls Royce cars. He said, people say they don't understand what we've done, but that their cars come back different and better. In fact, it's not just the smell of your car which is precisely engineered to alter your perception. Spence writes how some supercar manufacturers alter the volume of the engine to make it appear louder than normal. There was good reason behind this. In 2008, researchers Horsch will and Ploy altered the levels of realistic Inc noise. Some heard this and some heard the same car, but with the volume decreased by 5 decimals. The quiet car made those who were watching a video of it driving underestimate the actual speed it was traveling at by 10%. This doesn't just affect cars. Research cited in the Wall Street Journal found that it's very difficult to convince people that a silent vacuum cleaner is picking up anywhere near as much dirt as a noisier model. The quieter the vacuum, the less powerful, it's perceived. Indeed, increasing volume could solve all types of issues, including long but environmentally bad hot showers. In one 2015 study, shower users experienced an artificially noisier shower head. This subtle change convinced people that the flow was higher, thus potentially helping remind them of all the water they were using. Now listen to this clip from a 2011 tennis match and try to estimate how hard each of the players are hitting the ball. In 2018, Spence and his colleagues ran a similar experiment on a number of participants. They showed participants a tennis game which was paused as a player was just about to hit the ball. They asked a participant to estimate where the ball would end up, but here's the twist. Spence artificially made the noise of hitting the ball louder for some participants, but quieter for others. When the loudness of the noise made by the racket contacting the ball was amplified, people were convinced that the ball would bounce further into the opponent's side of the court than if the contact sound was made a little quieter. It's important to note that the participants could clearly see the ball being struck, and all they were asked to do was indicate on a drawing of the court where they thought the ball would land. The sound of the ball's contact with the racquet was technically irrelevant to the task, but it changed where they perceived it to be hit. I imagine that if a player grunts like Zalova did in that earlier clip, it'll only enhance that perceived power of the shot. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why so many players grunt. Sights, sounds, and smells really do influence what we buy, but we're only just scratching the surface. After the break, you'll hear professor north explain why slow music makes customers buy more and why this jingle increased sales by 29%.
- [12:54]
Guest Expert
Everybody loves a donut.
- [12:57]
Phil Agnew
All of that coming up. The podcast I'd like to recommend Today is the DTCpod, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The DTC Pod is a pod that is all about direct to consumer companies and products. If you're in E commerce, if you create sites where you sell stuff direct to consumers, this is a podcast that you definitely should listen to. If you're interested in learning the stories behind your favorite D2C brands, then this is a podcast where you'll be able to find and understand those success stories. So go and listen to the DTC Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. If your job is measured by the effectiveness of the content you create, then you have to check out the audience connection podcast hosted by Ollie Atkinson and Lydia Chan. They've got over 30 years of real world experience between them, helping brands connect better with the people that matter. Each week they are joined by marketing and communication leaders from the world's largest brands, as well as behavioral scientists to reveal how great content sparks action and builds lasting connections. And I was one of their guest on one of their most recent episodes. So if you need your content to stick, go and subscribe to the audience connection wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You were listening to Nudge with me Phil Agnew. At the start of the episode we heard how a white Coke can decreased sales because it altered the taste. Only when turning back to the distinctive red did Coke start to taste normal again. But that doesn't mean that red is always best, because that colour has connotations with speed. The colour red might therefore be a bad choice for your car. Research cited again in the book Sense Hacking suggests that red cars are perceived to go faster and make more noise than cars of any other colour, which might be nice if you're trying to impress someone, but not good if you're trying to avoid a speeding ticket. If you want to avoid being pulled over by the police, perhaps a white car would be a better pick. And if you're serving a meal, think about how you're serving that meal and what you're serving it on, according to the results of a study published in 2018. In 2020, diners rated a bowl of tomato soup as tasting significantly better when it was served on a white tablecloth compared to when that tablecloth was removed. The four researchers found that the same simple tomato soup tasted 10% better with the tablecloth. But above all, make sure your dining room smells nice. Smells seem to have a major impact on our behaviour. Dutch researchers in 2019 documented a 15% increase in sales when they diffused a synthetic melo sent throughout the supermarket, and Spence writes in Sense Hacking that according to one industry report, coffee sales at a service station can be more than tripled by simply spritzing drivers with the synthetic aroma of freshly ground coffee while they're filling up at the pumps. Although Charles does go on to clarify that such industry sponsored findings should probably be taken with a hefty grain of salt, given that independent research rarely shows such large effects. That said, some of the industry results are quite interesting, especially the prize winning flavour radio campaign executed by Dunkin Donuts in Seoul, South Korea. Here, intelligent scent dispensers were installed on a number of the city's buses and These dispensers would recognise when the Dunkin Donuts jingle was played on the in vehicle radio. When that was played, the dispensers would release a coffee aroma. So when hearing something like this, everybody loves a donut, commuters would also smell coffee. The idea was that after stepping off the bus, the passengers would soon stumble across one of the chain stores and hopefully make a purchase. The evidence suggests that this multi sensory marketing strategy did really work with a 16% increase in the number of visitors to Dunkin Donut branches situated close to a bus stop, as well as a 29% increase in the sales of coffee. Jingles combined with scents made Koreans buy more coffee. But Professor Adrian north has more evidence for me that music alone can alter behavior.
- [17:17]
Guest Expert
It was done by a guy in the States called Ronald Milliman. And what he did in two studies in 1982 and 1986 was look at the effects of music in first of all a supermarket and then a restaurant. And he found that when he played the fast music, people took less time to get from point A to point B in the supermarket. Nearly the he effectively timed them like it was a running race. Plays fast music, they go around quicker. Whereas he found that when they played slow music, people take longer to go around the store. But because they take longer to go around the store, they're browsing more. And because they're browsing more, they spent more. And it was significantly more for memory, it was around about a third more when he played slow music versus the fast music.
- [17:55]
Phil Agnew
It's a classic study by Ronald E. Millman, a marketing professor from New Orleans. He monitored the flow of people in a supermarket in an unnamed southwestern US city and analyzed the till receipts. In one of the biggest studies of its kind, extending over a period of nine weeks, shoppers were shown to spend 38% more when slow music just like this was played. That is compared to faster music like this. In the study, the slow music was at 60 beats per minute while the fast music was at 108 beats per minute. And Adrian north says the same finding was seen in restaurants.
- [18:43]
Guest Expert
Then this follow up study in the restaurant just basically did the same thing again. They found in that case when you played fast music, people finished their meals more quickly. I happen to remember that the groups in the fast music condition took only 46 minutes at the table, whereas when he played slow music, groups took well over 50 minutes. I think it's about 55 minutes to, you know, get away from the table. And again, crucially, in the slow music condition, not Only did they sit there for longer, but they ended up spending more money on drinks from the bar.
- [19:13]
Phil Agnew
This is because music can alter our perception of time.
- [19:16]
Guest Expert
Further from that, what another wonderful bit of research has done, and this isn't me, this is a guy called James Calaris in Cincinnati. What he did was he used another one of these tricks which we these so called discrete event models of time, which say if after the event you're trying to reconstruct how much time has passed, what you do is because you can't quite remember accurately how many minutes have gone by. Instead what you do is your default position then is say, okay, I don't know exactly how much time has passed, but three things have happened or four things have happened. And so if four things have happened, more time must have gone by than if instead I only recall two things having happened. So with regard to James Caleris stuff, what he did was he just got people. This was admittedly in the laboratory, but he got people in there for 16 minutes and while they were waiting in there, he played them either two types of music. One group of people hear four pieces of music, each of which is four minutes long. So 4x4 is 16. Another group of people though hear eight pieces of music, each of which Is only two minutes long. So 8x2 still 16. But the crucial difference is the first group of people only four events that happened four songs, whereas the second group of people eight events had happened eight songs. You then ask people afterwards, how long have you been in here for? And the people who have heard eight songs think they've been there for longer because eight things have happened. Whereas the people who heard four songs, they after the event say, oh, only four things happened. So, yeah, probably not as long as those other people.
- [20:46]
Phil Agnew
I've heard anecdotally that this works for this very podcast. On the show, I cut up my interviews with guests into short clips. This allows me to make the shows around 20 to 30 minutes in length, but with lots of different cuts. Some listeners have told me that this fast cutting, slightly different from some podcasts, makes the show seem longer than just the 20 minutes it really is. All of this happens because our decisions are shaped heavily by the sights, the sounds and the smells we see, hear and smell. Your car will seem faster if it's louder and red. It'll drive smoother if it's got that new car smell. A tennis player seems more powerful if they grunt a little louder. And a white cola bottle will put you off your favourite can of Coke. The smell of melon makes supermarket shoppers spend more, as does slower music, and a French accordion song might just persuade you to buy a Sauvignon blanc over that's all for today folks. Thank you so much for listening. The episode would not have been possible without Charles Spencer's fantastic book Sense Hacking. It's one of the best books I've read this year and I highly recommend you check it out. The book encouraged me to go back and listen to the very first episode of Nudge with Professor Adrian North. I've used clips from that show in today's episode. His insights are still very relevant even though they are now six years old. So thank you Adrian again for agreeing to come onto the show all those years ago. There are two big updates from Nudge coming up over the next weeks and months. I plan to launch two different things. The first is Nudge Vaults. It is a database containing 400 insights into consumer behavior. It will contain all of the different studies I've shared today, but all of those studies will be stored and cataloged in a way that you will be able to search through them and research them when you're working on your own marketing. So if you're interested in learning about Nudge Vaults, please do go to the website. Just go to nudgepodcast.com and click nudgevault in the menu that is nudgepodcast.com click nudgevault in the venue. There you'll be able to sign up to the waiting list where I can send you more information about what we're doing. The other thing I'm working on is another cohort of the Nudge Unit. That is my one month training course where I teach 20 business professionals exactly how to improve their brand, product or service using behavioral science. If you're interested in that, go to the link in the show notes where you can sign up for the Nudge Unit waiting list. I'm planning on launching that course in November. Alright, that is all for this week folks. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Cheers.