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Phil Agnew
Ten years ago, today's guest on Nudge had an idea that would eventually transform the lives of thousands of people.
Chris Baker
It was a moment in between meetings, sat in a coffee shop in Covent Garden and there was a homeless guy sat out the front, just saw numerous people walking past, tapping their pockets, pretending they had no change and then walking straight into the coffee shop I was sat in and spending 3, 4 quid on a skinny latte and a croissant.
Phil Agnew
Seeing this sparked an idea.
Chris Baker
There's something a bit wrong with this journey and there might be a way of us using the money that's spent on coffee to tackle the problem of homelessness. Training formerly homeless people as baristas, giving them a skill, and Change Please was born.
Phil Agnew
My guest on Nudge today is an award winning advertiser, a social change strategist and a serial founder.
Chris Baker
I'm Chris Baker. I have just written a book called Obsolete How Change Brands Are Changing the World. Before doing that, I've spent around 20 years working in ad agencies in strategy, creative, behavioral, science, all of that kind of thing. And I've been involved in launching two brands. One of them a coffee business called ChangePlease, which I was co founder of, and more recently Serious Tissues, which is a toilet roll business.
Phil Agnew
Chris's coffee brand, Change Please aims not to solve homelessness by providing homes, but by providing jobs.
Chris Baker
We find people from local homeless shelters and partners with charities and councils. We train them as baristas, they get paid London living wage and then they work on our carts. They work with our partners like we work. They either stay with change police for a period of time or they move on onward employment in that space.
Phil Agnew
It's a business that's changed the lives of thousands of homeless people.
Chris Baker
You go from being a person asking for change and people ignoring you to people coming up to you every single day and asking for something they value.
Phil Agnew
And yet, Change Please wasn't an overnight success. In the early days, the charity struggled to generate sales. They found it hard to convince businesses to partner with them. Like most charities, people recognized that homelessness was a problem. But they struggled to persuade people to change their their deeply ingrained habits. That was until Chris and his team applied a genius bit of behavioral science.
Chris Baker
We really wanted to break down where your money was going from a cup of coffee. Okay, every cup is three quid, £3.50. So we created this infographic with two cups side by side. One of them being a Change Please coffee and one of them being an average high street coffee. 54% of the spend With a Change Please Coffee would go to changing lives. So a big, big chunk over 50%. We then called out the cost of the cup, the coffee, the milk, the stirrer, the napkin, all the other things that come with it.
Phil Agnew
The right hand side of this image shows the Change Please cost breakdown. With 54% of their sales going towards homelessness, with 11% going towards cart costs, 20% towards tax and 15% towards the coffee.
Chris Baker
And then we compared that to the average high street coffee. So you can see the money going to tax, to profit, to staff, employment, all of those things that went, that went with.
Phil Agnew
On the left of the image you see the high street coffee. 21% of their costs are sent to staff, 14% is profit, 30% shop costs, 20% tax and 15% to the coffee. This one visual dramatically helped Change Please.
Chris Baker
So the side by side comparison was a game changer.
Phil Agnew
But why? Why would an infographic be more persuasive than simply telling customers that they're helping homelessness? Why did businesses like WeWork need to be persuaded with stats like, well, it's due to some fairly interesting behavioural science and one specific Harvard study that reveals why showing your costs can be very persuasive. All of that coming up after this short break. 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 for five weeks. In early 2018, three researchers set up a real world experiment at an American university cafeteria. Every weekday lunch, the cafeteria sold a chicken noodle Soup priced at $4.95. The researchers created a bit of a marketing sign to promote the soup. One sign said, what goes into our chicken noodle soup? Then it listed all the ingredients, chicken breast, broth, noodles and so on. The second sign, a variant that they would show on alternate days, showed the ingredients and their cost. So it said, chicken breast, it costs us 21 cents, broth 12 cents, noodles 26 cents, plus labour costs of $3.23. It finished by saying, the total cost for us to create this soup is $4.12. Now, over the course of this five weeks, 9,227 customers bought soup over 50 different lunch breaks. But which of these two drove the most sales? Now, you might think that showing the costs would make people less likely to buy. After all, they're learning that the ingredients are cheap and that the cafeteria makes a pretty healthy profit. But this didn't put people off. Those who saw the costs were actually 21.1% more likely to buy. It was a statistically significant difference. The researchers, Moanne, Bruell and John replicated this same finding in five separate experiments and found consistently that sharing costs increases purchase intent online. Participants in another experiment who were shown two backpacks were 70.8% more likely to pick the backpack when shown a cost breakdown. Shoppers who saw chocolate bar packaging with the costs included were more willing to buy. And holiday goers rated tour packages as better value when they saw cost transparency. The researchers concluded that transparently showing cost increases trust and purchase intent. Chris and his team had achieved the same thing. The infographic made businesses and customers trust the brand. It revealed the value of the work in just an image and not through lengthy messages. And ultimately, it made Londoners far more likely to buy their coffee.
Chris Baker
So ChangePlease, it's in 23 countries at the last time. Accounting revenue wise, it's north of 30, maybe close to 40 million. So it's the coffee you would drink on Delta Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, a lot of the trains around here, Brentford Football Club at Brighton, it's in Weworks, it's in David Lloyd Gyms, and on and on and on.
Phil Agnew
Revealing costs is one small behavioral science tactic that helped grow this sustainable business. But Chris has many more examples just like this. In his book, he'll share how Oatly, Ecosio and Tony's and dozens of other brands use psychology to grow. But before that, Chris first wanted to explain what he means when he says change brand.
Chris Baker
So what is a change brand? At its simplest, it is a brand or a product that is an improvement on the status quo in that particular category. Generally, we look at almost every product category out there. It's not perfect. There is some sort of category issue, whether that's plastic, packaging, formulation, something in the supply chain. A change brand is a positive move forward in that regard. They tend to fall into the areas of health, sustainability and social impact in terms of the difference they make. It's a really broad mix of brands.
Phil Agnew
These brands don't need to persuade everyone to buy them. Even a small shift in behavior can have a major impact.
Chris Baker
Consumer spend is a huge, huge amount. I think in the UK it's 1.4 trillion. In the US it's into like 14, 15 trillion. Globally, it's over 70 trillion. So if you move 1% of that money in a year to brands that are part of the solution rather than part of the problem, you're moving $700 billion every single year.
Phil Agnew
And one classic change brand that's done just this is Oatly, the oat milk brand now valued at $300 million. But Oatly's success didn't come immediately.
Chris Baker
What a lot of people don't know is that it's a product that emerged from a Swedish university in the mid-90s as an alternative to dairy. A brilliant product, oat milk, much like you'd see today. Obviously, there's more variants today, but the original packaging, I think the chief grave officer at the time who came in, John Schoolcraft, described it as looking like a Dutch multinational. It looks like indistinguishable from any other competitor. Just looks like something you'd find in a health food shop.
Phil Agnew
I've included an image of this old Oatly packaging in the show notes. The packaging states how Oatly is enriched with calcium and vitamins, naturally low in saturated fat, and that it contains healthy oat fibre that's good for your heart. Like Chris says, this really looks like a very niche health drink. And when the packaging was like this, Oatly's sales were tiny. That is, until they changed their packaging.
Chris Baker
First thing they did was they rebranded. So they did a big rebrand piece, taking it from being something that really old school logo through to something that is iconic and just had huge, huge standout on shelf. It wasn't without resistance. Internally. When they presented it to the team, internally, they were like, what are you doing? You're jeopardizing the business. It's really childlike, but the moment it got on shelf, people got it in their hands and they saw that within 18 months, sales had doubled. So it made a really big difference.
Phil Agnew
It's not a surprise that Oatley's staff resisted this rebrand. Their new packaging had no mention of the drink's healthy elements. It didn't mention vitamins, calcium, the low saturated fat. Instead, it was playful. It called its ingredients the boring side of the package. And rather than listing health benefits, which it didn't, it simply said, it's Swedish now. There is one 2006 paper called the Unhealthy Tasty Intuition that explains why this may have worked so well for Oatly. The researchers served 110 students, three fictitious cracker brands. Each cracker was nutritionally identical. But the researchers had altered the label so that some supposedly had higher levels of saturated fat. Now remember, saturated fat is very bad for you. We don't want it in our diet. However, it turns out that crackers labeled as being high in saturated fat were inferred to taste far better than their healthy alternatives, even though those two types of crackers were identical in taste. In a follow UP experiment with 39 participants, people rated a smoothie as 55% tastier when it was described as unhealthy rather than healthy. The researchers concluded that most people will pick an unhealthy option over a healthy one. Most people say that the unhealthy version tastes better, and this works even on people who typically eat and claim to enjoy healthy, healthy food. Calling Oatly a health drink significantly reduced their audience, not just amongst the general public, but amongst healthy eaters as well. Removing that messaging opened them up to a much wider market and Oatly achieved sales they could have never imagined. As a health drink brand, you would.
Chris Baker
See that iconic blue packaging next to the coffee machine. You'd have very cool people asking for oat milk in their coffee. And the term oat flat white just became the coffee to drink.
Phil Agnew
Reframing helped Oatly succeed and one chewing gum brand is trying to follow in their footsteps.
Chris Baker
I suppose what you wouldn't think of when you chew a piece of chewing gum is that it's actually made of plastic. So when you look on the back of it, you'll see that it has an ingredient called gum base. But gum base is actually made from plastic. A piece of chewing gum has the same amount of plastic in it as a plastic straw.
Phil Agnew
A brand called Nude is out to change this.
Chris Baker
That was really the problem that Nude set out to solve. They created a product that is made from basically tree SAP. An ingredient called it can go back to the same tree year after year after year. So it's totally regenerative and it's totally biodegradable.
Phil Agnew
Part of Nude's success has come from some very smart messaging.
Chris Baker
I mean, they're taking a little bit out of the Oatly playbook. So when you look at their packaging, it says chew plants, not plastic. You're seeing that call to action. The facts, in as short a way as possible of describing it.
Phil Agnew
These two slogans chew plants, not plastic. And some gum has the same amount of plastic as a plastic straw. Well, those two slogans are very powerful specifically because they are very easy to visualize. I shared this on Nudge before, but for marketing messages to be recalled. They need to use concrete language and not abstract terms. The study I love to share about this is one by Richard Shotten, Mike Trehearn and Leo Burnett. They showed 425 participants phrases that typically appear in commercial comms. Some were concrete phrases like cashew nut, happy hens, skinny jeans. Other phrases were abstract like wholesome nutrition, innovative quality, central purpose. Participants were told to wait five minutes and they were then asked which slogans they remembered. Turns out they remembered 6.7% of the concrete phrases but just 0.7% of the abstract ones. A tenfold improvement. Nude don't say. Our central purpose is to rid the industry of plastics while providing an alternative nutrition. They say something concrete. Chew plants, not plastic. That concreteness makes it far more memorable. And they're not the only changed brand using concrete phrases.
Chris Baker
Another one I really love from the book is meat consumption. So dogs and cats eat 20% of the world's meat and fish. If they were a country, they'd be the fifth biggest meat consumer on the planet after us, China, Brazil and Russia. Dogtopia is the fifth biggest meat eater on the planet.
Phil Agnew
Concrete phrases like this help brands like Grubclub stand out against their much larger peers.
Chris Baker
So Grubclub have created this product, this new pet food that is made from insect protein. In 14 days, you can grow a shipping container's worth of insect protein. It's mealworm and grubs. It would take months and require hectares on hectares of land to grow the same in meat and fish. So that sort of one kilostat that opened up their whole world in terms of how they bring the brand to life. Their solution, it just all runs through it beautifully.
Phil Agnew
Change Please used a cost breakdown to persuade customers Oatly stopped framing their product as healthy, while Nude and Grubclub used concrete phrases to stick in the mind. But Tony's Chocolate, one of the world's fastest growing chocolate brands, do something quite different, something that's pissed a lot of people off. Find out what it is after this quick break. Marketing against the Grain, hosted by Kip Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. If you want to know what's happening right now in marketing, what's coming ahead and how you can lead the way, this podcast is perfect for you. If you want an episode to get you started, I would suggest you search for my episode on Marketing against the Grain. Just search for Phil Agnew on the Marketing against the Grain Feed, and you'll hear me talk about the perils of using AI for marketing. So go and listen to marketing against the Grain, wherever you get your podcasts. One change brand you've probably heard of, at least if you live in the UK or Europe, is Tony's Chocolone, a chocolate company committed to ridding the chocolate supply chain of slavery. Rather than raising the issue of slavery in lengthy press releases and long blogs, they've done it in their packaging.
Chris Baker
Tony's Chocolone. When you look at the chocolate bar itself, the way it's broken into unequal squares creates a bit of stickiness and distinctiveness in the experience, but it also communicates the story of how much inequality there is in the chocolate industry.
Phil Agnew
But some have claimed Tony's stunts go too far, specifically their stunts with their Christmas Advent calendars.
Chris Baker
So obviously, Tony's is all about addressing child slavery and exploitation in the supply chain. An Advent calendar is something kids love every single year. So to illustrate the inequality in the sector, they removed the chocolate from day eight of an Advent calendar. You can imagine the scene in, you know, at breakfast time around the country, December 8th, lots of kids going, mummy, where's my chocolate? It caused a proper fuss. People posting on social media, the Daily Mail obviously covered it and like Tony's, have gone too far this time. And they can't believe they're stealing the chocolate from the nation's youth. They're not knocking putting aside to the fact that if these kids were living in West Africa, they'd probably be working in a field holding a machete. So it's a really interesting teachable moment. But then the other brilliant part of it was on day nine, they had two chocolates in there. So the sense of inequality and distribution, of the kind of wealth that comes out of it, really landed in a powerful way.
Phil Agnew
What I think is so smart about this stunt is that it builds on a very robust psychological finding. The finding was first discovered by B.F. skinner and followed up in the 1970s by Mazur. Mazur asked participants to press buttons to earn small points or monetary rewards. What he found is that humans become more persistent and engaged in this game if the button doesn't always offer a reward. When the button offered variable rewards rather than fixed rewards, participants became more engaged. It's why we love slot machines, lotteries and scratch cards. There's a chance of winning, not a guarantee. And it's also why Tony's stunt works so well. Kids will vividly remember missing the chocolate for one day and then getting a variable reward of 2 on the following day. Because that reward is variable and not consistent according to this principle, it should also make them more likely to buy Tony's calendar the following year. But it's not the only way to get customers hooked on your product, Ecosia do something very different. But first, what is Ecosia?
Chris Baker
Basically, it is an alternative search engine. It takes the search engine model, which is hugely advertising funded. 95% of all Google's revenue is advertising, and that's an absolutely staggering amount. Every single year, Ecosia uses exactly the same model. But instead of that advertising money going to their profits and to line their pockets, it goes into tree planting programs. So every single time you search, you are planting a tree just by doing what you would have done anyway.
Phil Agnew
I started using ecosia back in 2019. Back then, the search engine wasn't actually the best. It often gave me quite a few bad results. It's got a lot better since then, I should say. However, there's one thing Encosia did that stopped me from uninstalling, stopped me from switching to Google or whatever else I would use. There was one thing that kept me using their service. In the top right hand corner of the screen whenever I went to search, a little icon told me exactly how many trees I had planted.
Chris Baker
Yes, every time you jump back into an Ecosia window, you're seeing the figure at a total level. You get reports. I think you get regular, weekly or monthly emails that talk about your own browsing history and the difference you've made by spending time online and planting trees. As you browse, the website has a live tracker that's constantly updating, talking about the number of trees that are planted, where they're planted, the amount of projects they're funding, the amount of money that's gone into tree planting.
Phil Agnew
This is a classic application of the IKEA effect. For those who don't know, the Ikea effect suggests that we prefer things that we have created. Norton's 2011 studies revealed that people were willing to pay 63% more for IKEA cabinets they had created, versus the exact same cabinet but built by someone else. Ecosia wasn't the best search engine, but knowing that I had contributed to planting dozens of trees kept me using that platform. ChangePlease used cost transparency to persuade coffee drinkers oatly stopped referring to their product as healthy. Nude and Grubclub used concrete phrases to stick in the mind. Tony's used variable rewards to create a memorable stunt. An Ecosia added the IKEA effect to keep me hooked on their search engine. Now, it should go without saying that these six change brands need much more than just behavioural science to become successful, but I'm sure that each of these behavioral science applications have helped the brands along the way. It is impossible to know by how much, but I'm fairly certain that if oatly was still framed as a healthy oat drink, most of us wouldn't be drinking oat flat whites today. Huge, huge thank you to Chris Baker for coming on the show. He is a pleasure to talk to and his book was a real delight to read. Obsolete covers much more than just these six brands. It explains why we need change brands, how they work, and Chris's own experiences launching Change Please and serious Tissues. If you'd like a copy, then click the link in the show notes. It will take you to a Bloomsbury page and on that page you can use the coupon code obsolete 25 to get 25% off that's obsolete 25 to get 25% off this coming Wednesday I am hiking 50 kilometers across the south of England to give a talk at a conference called Creator Day in Poole. I'm doing it to test some psychological principles and behavioural science. Perhaps some of you can guess what I'm testing and I'm really hoping I'll still be able to stand for my presentation on Thursday. I'm hoping I won't have any debilitating blisters. If you are coming to Create A Day in Poole, please do come along and say hi. If you're thinking about coming, then go to Create a Day for more info and to buy tickets to come along. But if you just want to follow along with my hike, with my journey, then do follow me on LinkedIn. I'll share my progress on there. Just search for Philagnew. That's Philagnew on LinkedIn and you'll find me there. And I will probably also write a newsletter explaining my journey and what I learned about behavioural science along the way. So if you would like to read that, go to nudgepodcast.com, click newsletter in the header and sign up to my newsletter there. It is. Totally free. That is all for this week folks. I really hope you enjoyed this episode and I hope I'll be able to walk by the time I record next Monday's episode. Alright, thank you so much for listening. I'll see you again next Monday. Cheers.
Podcast Summary: Nudge – Episode "Six Eco-Brands Using Psychology to Sell"
Release Date: May 12, 2025
Host: Phil Agnew
Guest: Chris Baker – Award-Winning Advertiser, Social Change Strategist, and Serial Founder
In this compelling episode of Nudge, host Phil Agnew welcomes Chris Baker, an illustrious figure in advertising and social change strategy. Chris shares his journey of founding impactful brands and delves into how behavioral science has been pivotal in transforming eco-friendly businesses into market successes. The episode meticulously explores six eco-brands that ingeniously leverage psychological principles to drive sales and foster social impact.
[00:00 – 01:12]
Chris Baker recounts the inception of Change Please, a coffee brand designed to tackle homelessness not by providing shelters, but by offering employment opportunities. Inspired by observing a homeless individual repeatedly attempting to receive change while he purchased a latte, Chris conceptualized a solution that channels the money spent on coffee towards training homeless individuals as baristas.
Key Quote:
"We find people from local homeless shelters and partner with charities and councils. We train them as baristas, they get paid the London living wage and then they work on our carts." – Chris Baker [01:19]
Behavioral Strategy:
Change Please implemented a cost transparency infographic comparing their coffee's cost breakdown with that of a typical high street coffee. This visual demonstration revealed that 54% of their sales directly support homeless individuals, contrasting sharply with the traditional café where only 21% goes to staff. This transparency not only built trust but also persuaded both customers and businesses to support the brand.
Impact:
The transparency infographic was a game-changer, enabling Change Please to expand to 23 countries with revenues nearing £40 million and partnerships with prominent entities like Delta Airlines and WeWork.
[07:32 – 11:54]
Chris Baker discusses Oatly, the well-known oat milk brand. Initially perceived as a niche health product with packaging emphasizing its nutritional benefits, Oatly faced limited market traction. The brand underwent a significant rebranding effort, shifting away from highlighting health aspects to creating a distinctive and playful visual identity.
Key Quote:
"The moment it got on shelf, people got it in their hands and they saw that within 18 months, sales had doubled." – Chris Baker [09:32]
Behavioral Strategy:
Oatly employed reframing by removing health-centric messaging, which unintentionally limited their audience to health enthusiasts. By adopting a more visually appealing and iconic packaging that didn't overtly emphasize health benefits, Oatly broadened its appeal, making it a trendy choice among a wider demographic.
Supporting Study:
Chris references the "Unhealthy Tasty Intuition" study, which found that consumers often perceive healthier options as less tasty. By removing health labels, Oatly circumvented this bias, enhancing consumer delight and sales.
Outcome:
Post-rebranding, Oatly's sales surged, and terms like "oat flat white" became mainstream, solidifying Oatly's position in the market.
[12:00 – 14:55]
The discussion shifts to Nude, a chewing gum brand striving to eliminate plastic in its products, and Grubclub, a pet food company utilizing insect protein.
Key Quotes:
Behavioral Strategy:
Both brands excel in using concrete language to make their messages memorable and impactful. Nude’s slogan "Chew plants, not plastic" replaces abstract terminology with tangible, easy-to-visualize statements, enhancing recall and consumer engagement. Similarly, Grubclub leverages concrete statistics to highlight the environmental benefits of insect-based pet food.
Supporting Study:
A study by Richard Shotten, Mike Trehearn, and Leo Burnett demonstrated that consumers remember concrete phrases ten times better than abstract ones (6.7% vs. 0.7%). This evidences the effectiveness of Nude and Grubclub's messaging strategies.
Impact:
These strategies have enabled Nude and Grubclub to differentiate themselves in crowded markets, fostering brand loyalty and expanding their customer base.
[16:00 – 20:00]
Tony's Chocolone is spotlighted for its innovative and controversial marketing tactics aimed at combating slavery in the chocolate supply chain.
Key Quotes:
"Kids will vividly remember missing the chocolate for one day and then getting a variable reward of 2 on the following day." – Phil Agnew [17:32]
Behavioral Strategy:
Tony's Chocolone employs the variable rewards principle, rooted in B.F. Skinner’s research on reinforcement. By intermittently removing chocolate from their Advent calendars and then compensating with additional pieces the next day, they create a memorable and engaging consumer experience. This unpredictability enhances consumer attachment and encourages repeat purchases.
Outcome:
Despite mixed reactions, the stunt effectively raised awareness about child slavery and reinforced the brand’s commitment to social responsibility, making the campaign both talked-about and impactful.
[18:34 – 20:00]
Ecosia, an alternative search engine, integrates behavioral principles to retain users and promote tree planting.
Key Quotes:
"Knowing that I had contributed to planting dozens of trees kept me using that platform." – Phil Agnew [19:02]
Behavioral Strategy:
Ecosia taps into the IKEA effect, where individuals value products more when they feel a sense of ownership or contribution. By displaying a live tracker of trees planted and providing regular reports on personal contributions, Ecosia fosters a connection between user actions and environmental impact, enhancing user loyalty despite a less robust search engine compared to giants like Google.
Impact:
This strategy not only retains users but also aligns their daily habits with environmental sustainability, driving substantial tree-planting initiatives globally.
Throughout the episode, Chris Baker elucidates how behavioral science is intricately woven into the strategies of these six eco-brands, enabling them to resonate deeply with consumers and achieve remarkable success. From cost transparency and reframing to concrete language, variable rewards, and the IKEA effect, these psychological principles have been instrumental in transforming brands into agents of positive social and environmental change.
Final Thoughts:
Chris emphasizes that while behavioral science provides a powerful toolkit, the core of these brands lies in their commitment to creating meaningful solutions. The combination of innovative strategies and genuine social impact sets these change brands apart in today's competitive marketplace.
Additional Resources:
Listeners are encouraged to explore Chris Baker's book, Obsolete: How Change Brands Are Changing the World, for a more comprehensive understanding of these strategies and additional case studies.
Notable Quotes with Timestamps:
"We find people from local homeless shelters and partner with charities and councils. We train them as baristas, they get paid the London living wage and then they work on our carts." – Chris Baker [01:19]
"The side by side comparison was a game changer." – Phil Agnew [03:24]
"Consumers remember 6.7% of concrete phrases but just 0.7% of the abstract ones." – Phil Agnew [13:32]
"Knowing that I had contributed to planting dozens of trees kept me using that platform." – Phil Agnew [19:02]
This episode of Nudge offers invaluable insights into the intersection of behavioral science and sustainable business practices, providing listeners with actionable strategies to implement in their own ventures.