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- [00:01]
Michael Stelzner
I've got some very exciting news. We've been secretly planning four months, and it's finally here. Introducing AI Business World 2026. It's Social Media Examiner's first ever dedicated AI conference. Get trained by top AI marketing practitioners on April 29th and 30th at the Anaheim Convention Center. Learn which tools actually work for your business, master workflows that save you hours daily, and connect with thousands of marketers serious about AI. And here's the best part. It's included at no added cost with your Social Media Marketing World 2026 ticket. Or get standalone early bird tickets for just $597. But that pricing ends really soon. Head to AI BusinessWorld Live right now to get your tickets. Finally, practical AI marketing training that makes you confident and irreplaceable.
- [01:03]
Richard Shotten
Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner.
- [01:13]
Michael Stelzner
Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. This is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, more leads, and more sales. Today, we're going to explore how to apply behavioral science to your marketing so that you increase your sales, increase your revenues, increase all the objectives that you want. And we're going to explore it with an author who's done a lot of behavioral science research. His name is Richard Shotten, and I think you're going to absolutely love today's episode. By the way, if you are new to this show, be sure to follow us on whatever podcast you're listening to. Let's now transition over to this week's interview with Richard Shotten, helping you to.
- [02:02]
Richard Shotten
Simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.
- [02:09]
Michael Stelzner
Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Richard Shotten. If you don't know who Richard is, he's the author of multiple books, including the Choice Factory and the Illusion of Choice. His newest book is Hacking the Human Mind. The behavioral secrets behind 17 of the world's best brands. He's also the founder of astroten, a consultancy that helps marketers use behavioral science to improve their results. His podcast is Behavioral Science for Brands. Richard, welcome back to the show. How you doing today?
- [02:37]
Richard Shotten
It's really good to be here. Thanks for having me back.
- [02:39]
Michael Stelzner
I'm super excited to have you. Today, Richard and I are going to explore how to apply behavioral science for increased conversions. So first of all, let's just talk about, like, behavioral Science and why it is so important for marketers. Said another way, if people pay close attention to what we're going to talk about today, what's the upside that could be there for them?
- [02:59]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, so I think there's a massive upside for marketers because frankly, if you work in marketing, if you work in advertising, you really are in the business of behavior change. Are the absolutely fundamental questions that you're grappling with are things like how do we get people to pay more for our products? How do we get them to switch from a competitive brand? How do we get them to buy more of our products? Now, every one of those questions involves the audience changing its behavior. So the question really is why wouldn't you draw on a field like behavioral science? All behavioral sciences is the experimentally based, robust study of what effectively influences people's behavior. Not what they claim influences their behavior, but what actually influences their behavior. So I think this is as relevant a topic as you can get for any aspect of marketing.
- [03:47]
Michael Stelzner
Just out of curiosity, is behavioral science a field predominantly for business or is it mostly consumer behavior or is it kind of all of it? I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that.
- [03:56]
Richard Shotten
Any time that you want to change behavior, you can draw on a behavioral science experiment. So a lot of the academics actually are interested in how to get people to diet or how to get people to exercise more. It's often questions of social good. But many of those same insights can be taken from the world of academia, taken from the world of personal behavior change, and be applied just as effectively in the commercial world.
- [04:20]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Okay, so what do marketers need to consider before they apply what they're learning with behavioral science in general? Because as you know and I know there are people writing articles and journals, scientific studies that have been done all the time. Does it always apply to directly over to their marketing? Like, what's your thoughts on behavioral science when it comes to marketing?
- [04:42]
Richard Shotten
So there's two broad areas. There's, I think like what behavioural science involves specifically, because I think that steers us to a few decisions and then matching the right behavioural science principle to the right problem. So that first part of what's the broad theme of behavioral science, the thing that marketers need to know in 30 seconds or one minute is essentially that the core idea of behavioral science is, is that when people are making decisions, they tend not to do that in a deeply thought, well considered way. So there's this amazing phrase from Susan Fisk at Princeton, she says people are cognitive misers. So what she's trying to capture there is the idea that we try and ration deep, considered thought. And for most decisions, we make them in a very quick, intuitive way. Now she says that in a slightly academic way. Her former colleague Daniel Kahneman puts a bit more wittily. He says, thinkies to humans as swimming is to cats. We can do it, but we prefer not to. Now, neither of those academics is trying to be rude about people. They worked at Princeton, they deal with some of the most intelligent people in the world. But what they recognize is that from an evolutionary perspective, energy is a very scarce resource. And frankly, we've evolved to ration energy usage. And because thinking is energy intensive and effortful, we don't deeply consider problems. Most of them, we're trying to ration energy, we make them in a snap, quick, intuitive way. Now the way that we make those snap decisions is to use what psychologists call heuristics, what we would just call rules of thumb. And for marketers, those rules of thumb are very, very interesting people because they're prone to biases. And essentially, if you know what the biases are when you are designing a ad, when you're creating a product, whatever campaign you have, if you, if you know about the biases, you can essentially work with human nature rather than against it. And my argument is always that it is much more effective to work with human nature than against it.
- [06:47]
Michael Stelzner
Just real quick, when we talk about rules of thumb and biases, a lot of times I think in the marketing world biases might mean something different than what you mean here. So why don't you describe what that means?
- [06:58]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, that's a fair point. Sometimes it's the same bit of terminology used differently by different specialists. Right? So when I'm talking about a bias, I'm not talking about like a negative misogynistic behavior or racist behavior. It's not that type of bias. It's the argument that people deviate from a purely logical purchasing behavior. So one bias might be social proof. That is the argument that rather than humans weighing up a purchase decision just based on their own preferences, what people tend to do because it's quicker and easier is think, what are other people doing? So one of the most fail safe ways of making your product more appealing is creating the impression that lots of other people are buying it. Because if we believe lots of other people are doing it, that product becomes more appealing. We're more likely to pick it. That's what I mean by a bias. So, yeah, very good point of clarification. Absolutely different from, you know, some of the more social uses of that word.
- [07:59]
Michael Stelzner
So when we understand, first of all, what you're talking about, which is humans require a lot of energy to deeply consider something, and they're going to ration that energy only for the things that require deep consideration. Therefore, they're going to default to what you refer to as rules of thumb that they've established probably through culture or through upbringing or through experience, I would imagine. Right. And this leads to cognitive biases. Is that really what we're talking about here?
- [08:32]
Richard Shotten
That's a lovely way of putting it, because I wouldn't want to argue people cannot make considered decisions, Abbey. Ludicrous. But it's not our default. Just as you say, we save those for matters where, you know, we've. We've chosen that we're going to apply that deliberative energy, but most of the time, we don't do that. Imagine you're in the shampoo aisle in the supermarket. Right. You know, it'd be ridiculous to behave like a. A perfect, rational decision maker. You know, imagine picking up every single shampoo bottle, thinking what utility or what benefit you'll get from that product, and then compare it to the price. To do that properly, you would take, I don't know, two hours to pick your shampoo. That isn't how people want to behave. They would rather make quick, fast decisions that give them a quite good answer than laborious, considered decisions that maybe give them the supposedly perfect answer. So what people will think about is, oh, I'll pick the one that I saw on tv, or I'll pick the one that I think is the market leader. I'll pick the middle price one. You know, those are those quick rules of thumb that if marketers know about, they can essentially hack and apply to their own benefits.
- [09:42]
Michael Stelzner
It's fascinating. And now it kind of helps us understand why some businesses spend so much money on commercials. Right? Because if the perception of the audience is that I hear about this a lot, I see it everywhere. Right. That kind of might signal that I'm familiar with it, therefore, maybe I should give it a try. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say?
- [10:00]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, it could be that. It could be an ad goes out and says, you know, we. We're America's most popular shampoo. You know, that would be applying social proof, right? It could be the. A product decides to be ridiculously expensive because they know that many people have a rule of thumb, high price equals high quality. Now, not everyone will follow through on that, but there's Certainly studies that, that back that up. There's a brilliant study by Babashiv where he's at Stanford, and he serves a group of people five different bottles of wine. And each of these wine bottles has a very prominent price label. The twist in the experiment is sometimes people drink a Merlot and they think it comes from a $5 bottle and they say it tastes bloody awful. Then later on they think they're drinking a different merlot from a $45 bottle, but actually it's exactly the same liquid. Now, even though physically it is the same wine, you get completely different ratings. The adjectives people use are different, but the quantitative ratings, they are 70% different. People rate that supposedly expensive wine 70% better. And his argument is we experience what we expect to experience. And one of the things that sets an expectation for a product is its price. We have a rule of thumb that high price equals high quality. So some of the, you know, things that we purchase will be based on their inherent qualities, but some will be using these simple rules of thumb.
- [11:33]
Michael Stelzner
Love it. Perfect transition into pricing, which is where I wanted to go next. So talk to us about pricing because, I mean, there's a lot there. You've already shared a fascinating story about perception, right, which is hard for people to grasp in their brain. Like you would think in this example you just shared with the wine that they would have a pallet which actually can discern the difference between cheap wine and expensive wine. But in reality, what I'm hearing you say is that in the wine example, this is not just a taste experiment, it is a complete experience experiment. Right? So the presupposition is that someone pays more money for something. The, the expectation is that it's of higher quality and even if it tastes exactly the same, they're not going to be able to discern it. I find that crazy.
- [12:25]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, it becomes almost a self fulfilling prophecy. Like if you go into a situation with a set of expectations, you go and look for confirming evidence. So generally in rife, high price does lead to high quality, but it becomes kind of a few set of ideas that then take a life of their own. So in the Shiv study, where people are getting exactly the same product, the people that are expecting it to taste brilliantly, they will interpret some of those subjective feelings like maybe, you know, a bit of tannin in the mouth. Now if you think it's for a $5 bottle, you say it's because it's unrefined and cheap. If you get an expensive bottle, you say, oh, it's A it's evidence that it's got, you know, proper body and it's been, I don't know, I know nothing about wine.
- [13:08]
Michael Stelzner
I don't either. I don't drink wine either.
- [13:10]
Richard Shotten
It's been, I know. Sat in the cast for years or something. Yeah, yeah.
- [13:14]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, well, let's keep going with some of these other techniques that we can employ for pricing.
- [13:18]
Richard Shotten
The only thing to sound that expense is perceived as high quality. What it does is open up opportunities for brands. So if you're not selling as much as you want before you discount your price, what behavioral science says, you might as well test increasing it because you might be lucky enough that that increased perception of quality leads to greater demand. So it opens up opportunities you might not otherwise consider. But yeah, you mentioned other pricing experiments. One of my favorites is this idea of the pen is a day effect. And it's a whole raft of studies which are useful for marketers because it says once you've set your price, how do you make that price as appealing as possible? And one tactic is to break the price into the smallest possible unit. So the original guy that studied this was John Gorven at Harvard and back in 1998, works with some charities and basically gets a group of people, randomizes them into different subgroups and some people are asked, will you donate $365 a year? And you get a very low uptake. Other people are asked, will you donate $1 a day for the rest of the year? And you get a much higher uptake. Now most people listening probably don't work for charities. So it's very easy to think, you know, that's an old experiment 27 years ago, non commercial category. It's not going to apply on my car or my pack of beer. But most of these studies, they can be translated across category. So I re ran the Goreville study, what back in 2015. But I did it with cars. It's a kind of car rental. And some people were shown picture of a car, a description of a car and then the annual price. So I think it was $1668 or putting it in pounds. And then other people were shown the same car, the same description, and then the daily price, 4 pound 57. Now when I asked people how good value they thought the car was, I saw this wildly different pattern. People who saw the annual price, 11% thought it was good value. People that saw the daily price, 51% thought it was good value. So you get this massive, you know, almost five fold swing in valuation, exactly the same product but people respond to it very differently, dependent on the unit of price that you use.
- [15:50]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah. Why is that? I'm very curious because, like, in my mind, I see this a lot, Richard. With software products, for example, you know, they have their monthly and their annual prices, but they don't actually tell you what the total annual price is when you switch to annual, they just tell you what the monthly price is. So, like, they start on the higher monthly price and then they have a tab that says annual. And when you move to the annual, you see the monthly dollar amount drop, but they don't actually do the calculation on what the actual annual price is. So let's say it's $29, and then it goes to like, $23 or something like that. And I've seen that a lot lately. And I'm imagining, because it's creating this perception that you're getting a better deal. But they've determined that if they position it in a monthly fee, even though they're asking for the entire amount up front, they'll get people to take a yes sooner. Is it because when this is broken down into units that are easier for people to process, that they can, again, using the brain. Right. Like, they're not going to use their deep thinking here. They're going to use their squirrel brain. Are they just like, oh, here we go. Yeah, that seems like a good price? I mean, I don't know. Talk to me a little bit about this.
- [16:56]
Richard Shotten
So what is always very clear with the studies is the result.
- [16:59]
Michael Stelzner
Yeah.
- [17:00]
Richard Shotten
Then when you think about the explanation, it becomes a bit more speculative. But the one that stands up to scrutiny the best is the argument that people are very good at understanding concrete things. They're very bad at understanding and reacting to abstract ideas. Because you could argue for most of our evolutionary history we dealt with concrete dangers like a tiger or a lion. We didn't grapple with abstract ideas like compound interest. The argument here would be, when you hear a dollar a day, what springs to mind is maybe I. A cup of coffee. When you hear $365 a year, what springs to mind is a. A mini break. What people don't do is when they hear about the dollar a day, think, well, that's 365 coffees, and amalgamate it up. That they turn the units that's being discussed into a kind of simple proxy, single proxy. And what they don't do very well is they multiply up the necessary number of times. So the opportunity here is if you want people to respond as positively as possible to the price you put in front of them. Don't say your software costs 365 pounds a year. Say it costs 365 pounds a year. That's the same as $1 a day. Or even better, don't say it costs in total $365 a year. Say it costs, you know, per user, $30 a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Break, break it down whether it's by unit or by time.
- [18:33]
Michael Stelzner
Now you had mentioned we were prepping for this. Klarna was an example that you wanted to share. If you could share that, that'd be cool.
- [18:40]
Richard Shotten
Yeah. So I think the whole market of people like Planner and Afterpay is fascinating.
- [18:46]
Michael Stelzner
Explain what it is for people that don't know.
- [18:47]
Richard Shotten
Oh, okay. So people might have seen there's a number of different brands obviously vary in terms of their popularity by country. But if you go to a, let's say a fashion retailer these days, you can either say spend a hundred dollars in a jumper or it will say three payments of $33 with Klarna.
- [19:05]
Michael Stelzner
Oh, okay.
- [19:06]
Richard Shotten
Now what that's doing is essentially applying this pennies a day effectively. People respond completely differently to $100 to 3 lots of 33. Now some of this is we're splitting it into smaller units, as I've discussed. The other thing that it's doing though is it's pushing later payments into the future. And there is a series of studies, a lot and a lot of studies which are into an idea called present bias. And the argument behind present bias is that we are deeply influenced by pleasure or pain that's affecting us now or is going to affect us very soonly. We discount very strongly. We don't care much about pleasure or pain that's going to affect us in the midterm or the long term. Now essentially we treat future problems as almost as if they're going to affect an entirely different person, which is why.
- [19:58]
Michael Stelzner
People go into debt. That's why credit card companies do so well. Right.
- [20:01]
Richard Shotten
It's why we don't save enough for our pensions. What do you call them, 411ks or 401ks? Yeah, yeah, yeah, 401ks. Okay. Yeah, we don't have that terminology in Britain. It's exactly that. It's why we eat too much junk food. It tastes pleasant in the moment. That's what we fixate on. We don't care about those longer term effects as much. That is something the businesses can apply. So if you want to get people to buy things, you want to be doing stepped pricing. The introductory rate should be nice and low, and then you make your profit by the jump in price that comes from three or six months. The argument for behavioral science is people will give disproportionate emphasis to what is going to be coming out of their account this very second.
- [20:46]
Michael Stelzner
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- [23:11]
Richard Shotten
That'S the great thing. What the psychologists have done is identify an insight into human nature. So we've got this pen is day effect. We seem to give too much emphasis to the headline cost, not enough to the unit of time. Now if for business reasons you really want people on annual plans, you don't want them monthly. What you can do instead is reframe that annual price. Stop referring to it as $365 a year. Say it's $365 a year. That's the same as $1 a day. Don't expect people to slice and dice your price in a way that benefits you. You've got to make that daily price as salient as possible. So you can still push the annual price but by using this pen as a day effect. Now the other thing that you could do now your example was you've got this site which offers a monthly offering and an annual offering. While you mentioned earlier extremely subversion and, and that could definitely be applied. So extreme subversion is this idea that if you give people three prices, they tend to opt for the middle one. So the initial study was Amos TVansky back in 1993, shows people two cameras, basic camera, $169, fancy camera with more features, $239. And when people come to pick which one they're going to buy, you get this exact 50, 50 split. So the key thing to remember for us, because it's going to be a lot of numbers, is there is a one to one ratio between these cameras. He then gets rid of those people, gets a completely fresh group of people, shows them the same two original cameras, same price, same benefits. But he introduces a super premium $469 camera. Now a few people do pick that super premium camera, but not many. It's 21%. But we can almost. Let's ignore them for, for now. What interested us is those remaining two numbers because we were seeing those original two cameras at a one to one premium one to one ratio. But when he introduces this super premium camera, it now goes in a ratio of one to three. So the very basic camera, they're getting 22% of sales. The premium camera, the now middle camera, 57% of sales. So it's gone from a one to one ratio to a one to three ratio. What Tversky showing here is that people don't just pick based on the price, quality and inherent attributes of a product. They are also deeply influenced by what that product is surrounded by. And the rule of thumb in this situation is I don't want to go for the cheapest because it might be low quality and that'll look a bit mean. But I don't want to go for the most expensive because it's probably over engineered, overpriced and I'll look like a show off. So people have a simple rule of thumb which is to gravitate to the middle. The other way of thinking about it is the middle price. That $269 is approached very differently depending on whether there are two options or three options. If it's just compared with the $169 camera, it looks $100 more expensive and the consumer thinks themselves well, I'm being a bit wasteful splashing out all this money. But if you've also added this super premium $469 camera, people can now reframe that $269 cost as a $200 saving. It's exactly the same thing, but people approach it as a saving now rather than additional cost. So going back to your example, if you've got a monthly offering and an annual offering and you want people to pick the annual one, what I would do is add like a two year purchase option or a four year purchase option. Hardly anyone will pick it. Its role isn't to be picked. Its role is to reframe what the annual option looks like. Now it doesn't look like much of an inconvenience, too long a time period because it's a year or two years less than the really, really long one. Love it. Think about the contrasts.
- [27:17]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so we've talked a lot about pricing. Yeah, let's talk about quality because you've got some interesting research also that goes into quality side of things, right?
- [27:27]
Richard Shotten
Yes, yes. So what we said at the beginning, any challenge, there are so many of these studies, there's always going to be a study that you can link back to the very specific challenge you have. So when it comes to creating a perception of quality, one of my favorite sets of studies is the labor illusion. So this is the idea that when people are judging a product, they are influenced by how much effort they think went into the creation of that product. So what I did for Hacking the Human Mind. So this is the latest book I wrote with my Clarence Flickr. We recruited 282 people, and we showed them this beautifully designed bottle of vodka. So it was a fake brand that we put together, so we called it Black Sheet Vodka. And some people just saw the beautiful bottle, and they were asked how gorgeous they thought it was, and 17% thought it was amazing. Then we got another group of people, showed them exactly the same imagery. But we said the designer had gone through 143 iterations before getting to this design. Now, the proportion of people who thought it was beautiful goes up to 23%. So you've got this 35% improvement in ratings. Exactly the same product, exactly the same image is judged differently depending on whether people think lots of effort has gone into it. Now, the academic who first looked into this kind of idea, Andrew Morales at University of Southern California, her explanation for this is. Judging quality is a complex question. And just as we talked about right at the beginning, people are lazy. They're cognitive misers. They're looking for shortcuts. So what people do is when they're faced with a complex question, they replace that complex question with a simpler one that gives them an almost as good answer. So if actually judging beauty or quality is the complex question, the simpler one is, how much effort do I think this designer went to? So we use effort as a proxy for quality. So the outtake for businesses is don't think the service that you create or the product that you generate will be judged just on its own merits. Of course that's important. But if you want to get the best possible reception, you need to let the potential buyer know the amount of prototypes you went through, the years of experience you've put into it, the different designs you made. Be transparent about those efforts and you'll reap the rewards.
- [30:01]
Michael Stelzner
It's really interesting because the way that we convey this, obviously, in a study, is very controlled, right? Because you're actually telling them, you know, like, hey, this is what went into this design. It was 157 iterations or whatever the heck it is. But when we're in a world where people don't have the attention span to pay attention to these kinds of things, does this mean we're putting the story on the front of the bottle? Does it mean on our sales pages we're including some language that indicates some of the backstory behind some of these creative processes? I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that.
- [30:40]
Richard Shotten
Again, the insight comes from these experiments. How you then apply that. Right. Look at the world is your oyster. You can apply them in many different Ways. So my favorite brand example of someone applying this is Dyson. So this is an amazing product. They've created a whole new market. Premium vacuum cleaners. Now, when you think about whether it's worth spending $300 in a vacuum, what you should really care about is does it suck up the dust? Well, but Morales would say that's the complex question. Now, the simpler question is to think how much effort went into it. And what Dyson are absolutely brilliant at doing is constantly reiterating that they went through 5,127 prototypes to get to the bagness. Thank you. It's on their original ads. The website has all these stories of effort. It's the story the PR team keep on reiterating. It's even the very first line of James Dyson's autobiography. So what they've done is use this principle of the labor illusion through copy, through repeated reiteration of the amount of prototypes. But then you can apply this much more subtly as well. So you could apply it through design. And then Dyson do this brilliantly as well. They apply the labor illusion by being physically transparent. You buy a Dyson and you can see into its inner workings. You can see the dust being sucked up. Most vacuums before it had a beige opaque casing. You couldn't see what was going on. And that's the application, the labor illusion. Knowing the work going on makes us appreciate it more. That might sound a bit of a leap from my black sheet vodka study, but there's some lovely work by Buell and Kim. So Bowell's a Harvard. And what they did was ask diners to rate the quality of their meals. And sometimes the diners could see into the kitchen, the open plan kitchen, see the chefs at work. Other times they were sitting around the corner and couldn't see the chefs at work. And there was a significant difference. People who could see the kitchens rated their dishes higher, even though it was the same food from the same batch, because they. The effort was made salient, it was rated higher. So whether it's copywriting and stressing prototypes, physical design, or there's even stuff you can do on websites, you know, the same principle can be applied in lots of different ways.
- [33:05]
Michael Stelzner
You know, I think about, I think about movies and I think about the behind the scenes stories of these movies. Like, for example, Star Wars. You know, my daughter is a Star wars fanatic. I love Star Wars. And one thing that Lucas has always done really well is showing all the crazy stuff that they did in development behind the scenes of making These films, which almost makes you want to advocate for the film even more when you realize, for example, the original Star wars film about Alex, how they came in to destroy the Death Star and how they had to get super innovative because they didn't have all the technology that they wanted. I mean, I feel like telling the story of how the movie is made is part of this. Right. Because they're really. This case isn't. It's not a labor illusion in this case. It's a real labor of love that these. These artists go into this stuff. And I feel like there is something there. I don't know if there's any studies that convey whether this kind of stuff works or not, but what's your thoughts on this?
- [34:05]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, I think you're saying, like, that example isn't the labor illusion, and there might be a concern there that this all sounds a bit unethical and it's, you know, suggesting to marketers they should make up things that wouldn't be, I think Morales or my recommendation. Morales is quite clear. She says, look, this isn't a plea to create fictitious stories. She says most brands go to great lengths, but they have this a mistaken belief that if the product is good enough, they don't need to tell people the product will be judged on its own merits. She just says that isn't the case. We see it from study after study after study. What you need to do is be much more transparent about the efforts that have gone on. So I think that could be the George Lucas stories of the efforts they did to create the kind of realism. It could be the 5127 prototypes. It could be letting people see into your kitchens. So if.
- [34:58]
Michael Stelzner
If you were to actually consult with someone on how to discern which stories to tell, because there's so many to tell. Like, do you have any. I'm going to call them rules of thumb. Richard Shotten, rules of thumb as to discerning which stories you should tell. If you choose to tell some of.
- [35:15]
Richard Shotten
These stories, I think they probably vary by the kind of history of the brand. I mean, what you'd really want to do is get to know what the brand's been doing and then find, I think, a genuine and authentic story. I think it's got to be something that is true to that kind of brand's DNA. I think that would probably be the ideal. I think it would be quite bespoke to each different brand.
- [35:38]
Michael Stelzner
Okay, so is there any other quality stuff that's in the top of your mind that we have not Already addressed. I know we talked about how important it is to convey the effort that went into creating Product X in the least verbose way, like prototype 1000, and showing it in such a way that people can actually see the innovation side of it. But I'm just curious if there's anything else popping into your mind.
- [36:05]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, so. So the, I mean, the other quality one was around price. We talked about the Baba Shiv, that a high price will create sections of quality. The one that's maybe a bit more surprising for people. There is this study around the. The pratfall effect, which is essentially, if you admit a flaw, you become more appealing. Now, some of the original academic work by people like Elliot Aronson was very much about appeal. You as a human became more warm and likable if you exhibited a flaw. But I think what the breast brands have done is very carefully identify what their core strength is and then admit a weakness that emphasizes that core strength. So if that all sounds a bit weird and abstract, there is an absolutely amazing campaign in Canada. I think it started in 1986. This was Buckley's cough syrup. So 1986, family owned brand, ninth biggest cough syrup in the market. Tiny, inconsequential. What they then do is start a new creator campaign. And the line is it tastes awful and it works. And for the last 39 years, they have gone to increasingly crude, creative, funny ways of stressing how foul this cough syrup tastes. So, for example, there's one ad which says the largest bowl we sell is 200 milliliters. You know, anything larger would be cruel. Now, what's so good about this is they're not just admitting that there is a flaw in their product. Foul taste. What they're doing is thinking, well, what we really want to convey is efficacy, potency. And then once they've made that their badge of quality, then they think, well, what is the weakness? That is almost like a mirror to the strength that we have. And frankly, if you tell people you are foul tasting, they. There is an assumption that, well, the trade off is probably that it's really, really potent. So I think that is a massively underused tactic for boosting quality. Think about what is your core strength and then what is the weakness that you could admit that might emphasize that strength. So maybe you emphasize price, you're expensive. That's the flaw. Maybe you emphasize that you're really slow, like Guinness. It's, you know, good things come to those who wait. Or maybe you emphasize that you're foul tasting to get the potency Benefit. That's, I think, a fascinating one.
- [38:36]
Michael Stelzner
Interesting. Okay, so we've talked about, like you talked about pricing, we talked about quality. Let's talk about conversions. You've got some interesting research that you can share on how we can maybe increase our conversions.
- [38:47]
Richard Shotten
Yeah, there's a lovely set of ideas into this problem called the intention to acronym gap, which is essentially the argument that you can boost someone's motivation to act in a particular way or buy a particular product, but it doesn't always convert very well to actual behavior change, you know, sales or behaving differently. So the classic study is a. Is a 2002 one comes from Sarah Milne at the University of Bath. And she was interested in how to get people to exercise. So she goes out, recruits 248 people, splits them into three groups. First group, they come to a lab. She gives them a diary. And then she says, look, next two weeks, fill in the diary. Write down every time you exercise. Now, when those people come back two weeks later, 35% of them have exercised at least once a week. So that's the control. Milne then wants to see, how do you boost this number? So her next group of people come into the lab, give them the diary, and then they played this motivational film about why exercise is amazing. What's going to change their life, make them feel energetic, increase their longevity. People watch the film, and then they say they are enthused and motivated to exercise. But when they come back two weeks later, the numbers have barely changed. You've got 38% of people exercising. So we've gone from 35% exercising to 38, even though they said they were going to exercise, even though they said they were really key. So that's the intention to action Gap. Motivation, according to Milne, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for behavior change. You need to add something else. That's where it gets interesting for marketers. Final group of people, she invites them to the lab, she gives them the diary, she plays the motivational film, and then she gets those people to make what a psychologist would call an implementation intention. She asked the people to say, when, where, and with whom are they going to exercise? So I might say, I'm going to exercise Tuesdays mornings when I've dropped my daughter off at school. That would be an implementation intention. Essentially, you are creating a trigger to remind you to exercise. Now, when that group comes back, 91% of people exercise at least once a week. That is a massive, massive difference. Now, Milne's argument, in my case, when Tuesday morning comes around, essentially I've associated this particular behavior to that moment. So that moment of Tuesday morning after dropping my daughter off at school, that acts as a catalyst to convert intention to action. Milne's argument is many people interested in behavior change, they do the hard work of generating motivation, but they fall down because they don't do the simpler task of attaching a behavior to a very clear time or place or mood. Now, you could apply that principle commercially. If you think about Snickers, you're not you when you're hungry. They are associating consumption with that feeling of hangriness. The ads don't talk about the product and how tasty it is. They associate very clearly with a particular moment. You know, Taco Tuesdays, Champagne and celebration. In Britain, we have KitKat and the line, have a break, have a KitKat. Now, all of these are associating a product with a very clear time or place. So rather than asking people I know to take your vitamins twice a day, you should say to them, whether it's pharmacologically needed or not, say, take them after breakfast, take them before dinner. If you want people to fill in their timesheets of work, don't just say, do it once a week, say, do it on a Friday morning. You've got to give people that trigger moment. That's the key thing.
- [42:41]
Michael Stelzner
It's interesting because this all comes back to how lazy we are as humans, right? If we just say, here is this thing vitamins, or here is this whatever the heck it is that you're going to do every day, this desire to exercise, but. But you don't actually give them the small little suggestion you might want to do it after lunch, for example, would be a good one, right? Because you've just eaten a lot of food and it's a good way to work off your lunch or whatever, right? It's a good time to go for a walk. And just by actually suggesting either subliminally, like, you're not yourself when you're hungry, right? Which implies, take this when you're hungry. You know what I mean? In the case of Snickers, you can somehow some way increase the likelihood that they take the action you want them to take. Is that what I'm hearing you say?
- [43:28]
Richard Shotten
That's exactly right. You know, a motivation is this kind of condition that you need to set in place. You know, you need to make your product desirable. But if you stop there, you've wasted all those efforts, you've wasted all those emails or TV ads that have generated that motivation. It's only when it's combined with the clearance trigger, the clear time, place or mood. That's when you get the best conversion from intention to action.
- [43:55]
Michael Stelzner
Do you feel like this is only relevant for products and services that are like daily, weekly, monthly kind of experiences? The reason I'm asking is because not every product has something you purchase frequently and replenish, you know what I'm saying?
- [44:09]
Richard Shotten
I think a lot of the best examples are in the kind of food category, but I think you could apply this really broadly. Like, let's say you're selling luxury watches now, if you've been promoted, that's the time to buy a Rolex. I think you could do it. But what I often see with these biases is marketers. We like to mimic our close competition. So KitKat wrote that ad. I'm not sure if this ever came to America, but in Britain it's have a break, have a KitKat. I think they wrote that in 1947. So because a food brands does it, it's much easier for the ad agency or the marketer at Snickers say, well, it's worked really well for KitKat, we should do it. It's harder for Rolex to turn around and say, well, you know, I saw this chocolate bar and it looked brilliant and it had an amazing ad. Why don't we copy that? So I think often a bias or a psychological principle gets applied by one brilliant marketer and then lots of people in the similar field mimic it and that leads us to believe it only works in that field. But I don't think the experiments suggest that at all. It's more the our kind of lack of imagination sometimes as marketers.
- [45:13]
Michael Stelzner
Fascinating. Richard, your new book is Hacking the Human Mind. Where can people discover the book and what will they discover inside the book?
- [45:22]
Richard Shotten
So book was written jointly, so it's myself and Michael Aaron Flickr, and in the book we take 17 brands. Each chapter is about a brand, short little history about the brand. And then what are the two or three psychological principles that that brand used to power its success? And the key thing is we're not just kind of describing the tactics, we are giving you the evidence they work from the psychological experiments and then being very clear about what you can do differently, what you can learn from these brands. So we look at people like Liquid Death, Haagen Dazs, Amazon Prime, Facebook, Apple, some of the most successful brands in the world and identify not just the things that they do because they may or may not work, it's the things that those are successful brands do that are also proven in peer reviewed observed by peer reviewed observed experiments. So I think that gives people a better chance of taking the elements that actually drove the success rather than just happening at the same time.
- [46:23]
Michael Stelzner
Richard, if people want to connect with you on the socials, do you have a preferred platform and if they potentially want to do business with you, where do you want to send them?
- [46:30]
Richard Shotten
Definitely reach out LinkedIn Richard shot on Twitter at rshotten or the company is astroten.co.uk. so yeah, please, please if people are interested in this field, it's what I love to talk about, what I love to consult and what I love to train on. So definitely, definitely look me up.
- [46:49]
Michael Stelzner
Thank you Richard for coming on and sharing all your insights with us today.
- [46:52]
Richard Shotten
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
- [46:53]
Michael Stelzner
Michael hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at social mediaexaminer.com/689. If you're new to the show, follow us. If you've been a listener for a while, I would love it if you would share this with your friends. And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored Podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk Show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving.
- [47:22]
Richard Shotten
The Social Media Marketing Podcast Podcast is.
- [47:25]
Michael Stelzner
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