← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
537. Unlocking Behavioral Secrets of Iconic Brands
00:48:21
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer welcomes Richard Shotton and MichaelAaron Flicker, co-authors of the enlightening book, Hacking the Human Mind. Together, they explore the psychological principles behind some of the...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to episode 537 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Richard Shotten and Michael Aaron Flicker, co authors of Hacking the Human Mind. Ready? Let's get started.
- [00:22]
B
You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
- [00:38]
A
Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast. What do Kraft Mac and Cheese, Liquid Death and Dyson have in common? No, this isn't the setup for a joke, but it is a curious question with a brainy answer. Today's episode is all about discussing what makes some of the world's most iconic brands so effective at getting and keeping our attention. And more importantly, what you can learn from them and apply in your business right away. So where can you learn these lessons? Well, there's a brand new book on the shelves called Hacking the Human Mind, co authored by today's guests, Richard Shotton and Michael Aaron Flicker. If you're a longtime listener, you probably remember Richard from when he was on the show a couple of years ago to discuss his book the Illusion of Choice. He and Michael Aaron also co host a podcast called the Consumer Behavior Lab and focus their work on making behavioral science accessible and actionable for marketers. Hacking the Human Mind breaks down the behavioral science behind 17 beloved brands. Each chapter focuses on one of them, from Snickers and Starbucks to Guinness and Klarna, unpacking the psychological principles that helped them break through the noise. So you can too, really quickly. Before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 537. Now let's jump right in. Richard, Michael Aaron, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.
- [02:16]
B
Thanks for having us.
- [02:17]
C
Yeah, good to see you.
- [02:19]
A
Yes. I'm so excited. And we are going to dig in into the book and all of that, of course. And we always like to start by having people introduce themselves for those who don't yet know them. Let's go ahead. Richard, as you said, good to see me again. We've had you on the show before. Can you, you can go first. You can introduce, tell a little about yourself and the Work you do.
- [02:40]
C
So, yeah, it was a while ago I came on and I was talking about my last book, the Illusion of Choice, and I essentially specialize in how to take findings for payroll science and apply them to marketing. So marketing its broadest sense, whether it's pricing, promotion, or product. I've written two books so far, Illusion of Choice and Choice Factory, and then Michael A. And I have just written a third called Hacking the Human Mind.
- [03:04]
A
Yes, yes, yes. Excited to hear more, of course, about the new book. And yeah, before we jump in, of course. Michael Aaron, can you share a little bit about yourself?
- [03:14]
B
Thanks so much, Melina. Yeah. I am co author of Hacking the Human Mind with Richard. I'm also founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab, which is dedicated to connecting academics to practical marketing. You've been a guest on our podcast and we'd loved having you there. And outside of that, I've launched and grown many different successful brands and businesses by using behavioral science and applying those principles across a number of different industries and categories. It's super excited to be here and chat with you today.
- [03:50]
A
Awesome. And I thank you for having me on your show, which, again, it's amazing how much time happens between these, like you said. So, Richard, it's been a while since you were here, and then we start to look back and go, my gosh, how many years has it been? Which does not seem. Does not seem right. But that's why we all have to just keep writing books, so that we have reasons to reconnect, I guess, is the way that that comes together. So I think, Richard, is this is your first time co authoring a book, right? Your other two books you wrote solo. I'm fascinated by this process and I always ask people when I know they've done some solo, and then they do a co author. What was. What's the difference from you in writing solo versus with a. With a co author?
- [04:37]
C
I think the big upside is getting around this problem of the curse of knowledge. So whoever's writing a part, you think what you're communicating is crystal clear, but when you have a second pair of eyes, then suddenly I think it picks up all those moments where you might have previously left the reader befuddled, but actually by having someone else take a critical on it, it makes it that much better. So I think. I think that worked in both directions very, very, very well.
- [05:09]
A
Yeah. Michael Aaron, what do you think about the process?
- [05:12]
B
I was thinking about it since it was my first time writing a book. Sometimes you're not sure what to ask or what is Appropriate, you know, Richard, you know, for all of us that have listened to him talking about so many times, he'll say something and I'm like, wait, do I actually understand that? And did I understand that in a way I could use it in the future? And so it's been a lot of fun. I think fun has been underscore of the whole experience and for those of the listeners that haven't written a book before, harder than I think most people would imagine. Even if you think it's hard, it's even harder than that.
- [05:51]
A
Yes, I can agree. The good thing is though, I think similar to as they say about like having children and whatnot, you do forget how bad it is in the midst of it. And it's good. There are lots of good things about it, but there are also a lot of struggles and frustrations and late nights and, and whatnot. But you, then you go, you know, that wasn't that bad. I bet I could do another one of those.
- [06:18]
C
I think some of that pain comes from the fact that if you give a presentation, you can often gloss over logical gaps with a bit of an erasmitaz or a nice picture on the, on the screen. It's remarkable how a presentation is a great way of entertaining people, but often it's not a great way of testing an argument. If you write something down, it is out there, you know, warts and all. So I think that process is painful because it exposes the argument to the strongest pressure test you could have.
- [06:54]
A
Yeah. And you get, I think, and there will be someone that will always follow up. People read books much more closely than like you said, they, they pay attention in presentations and, and whatnot. And it's gone by the time you said it. And someone goes, what did they say? And then they're like distracted and keep listening. You can't go back and reread it. I do like this idea though of we could just put inside, insert razzmatazz here in the books to fill the gap.
- [07:21]
C
Insert joke or witty cartoon in the background.
- [07:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, be smart. Next. Well, I think with this book in some ways it's similar to your other books, Richard, in the very specific chapters about a thing. But it's also completely flipped in that instead of being just about like a concept with the stories, this is a specific case study, a brand per chapter. And then we dig into some concepts that are coming into play there. Can you all share a little bit about what drove you to want to write the book? Like you said, your first Michael Aaron, your third Richard and then coming together to do this. Why did you feel like this book needed to exist? What are you hoping it's going to do for people? Why'd you approach it this way?
- [08:09]
C
I think the, the focus, as you say, is slightly different from choice. Factual illusion of choice. What we did this time is be led by the brands. So 17 brands, each brand is the focus of a chapter and there's a little part history about that brand. Reasonably short, but why it's been such a success. And then we say, well, here are one, maybe two, maybe even three behavioral science principles that they have used that have powered that success. Now of course, it's not entirely driven by those behavioral science biases, but they are a big determinant of some of the kind of power of that brand. And I think why that's, I think a really useful approach is by focusing everything on the brand, it makes it much more concrete. I think it makes the principles easier to understand because you start with the commercial product that everyone knows, whether that's Haagen Dazs or Liquid Death or Amazon Prime. And then you go on to the behavioral science principles.
- [09:13]
B
And having it be concrete and having it be understandable was like part one of our mission. And then making it apply to how you can use it in your business was part two. And so often we found in our work with clients and our work with talking to the public, people couldn't really remember the name of the bias, but they could remember the story that was with the bias. And so the concept for the book came when we were talking about how could we make everything more memorable? How could we get people to remember. Oh, it was Apple that had this example and that example. Oh yeah, yeah. It's called concreteness or it's Guinness. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the pratfall effect. And for us it was about trying to get a deeper, more permanent hook into folks minds and then they can remember. Then that's how I would use it in this business case or on this campaign that we're working on.
- [10:12]
A
Yeah. And we all know, right, that those stories are, are more memorable for people. And it's nice when it's a, it's a beloved brand, it's something that we know and like about them. And you can also, even if you haven't seen it, you could go look it up pretty easily. Right. If someone wasn't familiar with, like you said, Liquid Death, that they could go check that out and see what those cans actually look like. Or if they weren't as familiar with Red Bull, right? They can go look at that. And these days it's like, who doesn't know many of these brands? And that's the point. But you know, you get to learn a little something different in those stories. And what I really like about this too is that it shows how like as you pick one aspect of one piece of one story and it's like it's here are. And I know from doing similar work, right, where it's like these are just three of the many things happening just in this one singular moment in time that we've grabbed from like the box of macaroni and cheese. And you know that that brand has so much else going on. I think it helps to show just how complex and interwoven behavioral science can be for people. Right? Where you see like, here's a little bit of how you would use it and you can, it opens the door to see and wow, there's a lot going on that we couldn't even touch on here because it would have been a tome of a book.
- [11:38]
C
I think you're absolutely right on that. So for example, with Kraft, the, the bulk of the chapter about Kraft Mac and Cheese is around this idea of expectation assimilation. The idea that what we expect, what we expect to experience guides our experience. And then we follow up in that chapter with a kind of smaller little tactical bias that's applicable to many challenges. This idea of pareidolia. So the tendency people have to spot patterns that don't necessarily exist. So we often see faces in clouds or faces in the bark of a tree. Now we talk about that with relation chip to Kraft Mac and Cheese because they famously put a macaroni smile on the box. But actually you could have talked about that in the chapter for Amazon. They famously do the, the smile that linked, I think A to Z on, on their logo. But the point is, you know, there's no point in repeating these biases 10 times for a book. And really what we want is it to be a practical tool. People can take the learnings and then apply it to that work. So whether it's craft or Amazon, it's really a route into what these principles are. And then suggestions. And this is the key bit. Yeah, suggestions about how you can use them as a marketer.
- [12:52]
A
It was interesting for me having this start with the Kraft macaroni and Cheese. And I had just, just, just had an instance with my 3 year old, I'm gonna say the night before, it might have been a couple days, but it felt like it had just happened. And we said, we're gonna make him macaroni and cheese. He was being upset, saying he didn't want the macaroni and cheese. We had bought some Velveeta shells at one point and he was like, you know, not full fit or anything, was very adamant. He didn't want macaroni and cheese. I don't want it. And he said, just want the smiley one. I want the one with the smiles. I want the smile Mac and cheese. And I was like, oh, oh, this is the box we have. This is what you want? He's like, oh, yeah, good, I want that one. And then like went on his way. And I don't. I. We've never talked about the box being a smile on it. Like maybe at grandma's house or something. They have. But that my 3 year old very adamantly only wanted the smiling macaroni and cheese is shocking, ridiculous, whatever. But like, that, that's the thing that he was so stuck on from the box is pretty amazing. When it feels like it shouldn't matter. You just like show noodles on the box and you. And people would probably have said to craft, right? Like, no, you need the whole bowl to show, like all the things in a big heaping bowl of stuff versus a single upturned noodle. Right? Like, who cares about one noodle? But being able to show that simplicity and that smile and how that, you know, resonates with tiny baby children like mine.
- [14:30]
B
Yeah, that. You know, what your son's story, what your son's story does more than anything else is prove the idea that it's a mental shortcut. What we're doing is not selling how beautiful the macaroni and cheese elbow is. We're interrupting you in the aisle and saying, oh, like, notice us ahead of everybody else. And sometimes all the studies in the world, they can help give you confidence. You're making a smart choice. But the lived experience of someone remembering the smile that shouldn't even understand the advertising, it proves or it just gives more confidence. I'm not sure it proves it, but gives you more confidence that that's what's really happening here.
- [15:13]
A
Yeah, for sure.
- [15:14]
C
I think there's a combination. The example of craft makes it easy to understand and therefore apply. But then what we kind of felt before we were writing the book was there's an awful lot of books out there, like good to great, that take a brand that's been successful and then guess what's driven that success. And often they don't have a great record of continuing that overachievement so what we want to do here is not just say here are 17 brands that are super successful and these are some things that you could replicate. We also wanted to cross reference are those tactics backed up in more experimental settings? So for example, with Pareidolia, there's a series of studies from 2019 from Guido who gets a large group of people and keeps on showing them pairs of ads. And sometimes the ad will be kind of have a basic message, other times it'll be the basic message and a face like object. And what Guido shows is that 80% of time, 80% of the time people, when they're monitored via eye tracking, they will spend more time looking at the pareidolian image, that is with the face like image than the other one that is even more extreme when you get to short attention span areas. So if these images are flashed up for less than half a second, 92% of the time, the pareidolian image will get more of the attention than the non pareidolian one. So your child's behavior is not just an anecdotal single instance. There is a huge body of evidence that suggests we are much more likely to pay attention to pareidolian imagery. So I think, you know, it's that mix of case study and the behavioral science experiments behind it. Yeah.
- [17:04]
B
And back to Richard's point about a number of business books that explain why the brand was great. Our thesis is not that the behavioral science proves why they're going to be continue to be great in the future. It's about using the macaroni and cheese box as a vivid illustration of how behavioral science can be applied. Applied well. And we end each chapter saying, and here's some things you can try to do on your brand in your company to bring these to life. So we're really trying to design this as a handbook for those to take the academic research, take the brand example and use it in their business. It's our hope.
- [17:51]
A
Well, this is the audience for it because that's pretty much all I, I strive to do and talk about here as well at the Brainy Business. So I know people are going to love the book and the, the and the examples within. With that in mind, I'm going to prompt for each of you to pick a chapter, a story, a brand to like dig in on a little bit about why it was included. What a lesson is just to kind of show some of the examples. We of course talked about craft. So what would be another one that you each would want to share and whomever wants to go first, feel free. Sure.
- [18:28]
B
I can start with a chapter we did on Snickers. And Snickers has just got one of these iconic campaigns of the 21st century. They have a famous tagline, you're not you when you're hungry. What we really looked at was how they used the campaign to solve a very well known issue in behavioral science called the attention to action gap, which is, I can better get my product to be bought if we can close that intention to action gap that exists. And we can. We go through a study that shows how this gap exists and how brands can close it. And you know, famously, what Snickers does in this example is, is they connect the consumption of their brand with not just being hungry, but being hangry. That's being angry when you're hungry and how Snickers can satisfy that and return you to a less irritable state. So we look at the brand, we look at the campaign, we look at the academics behind it, and then we, and then we, we talk about how other brands can help close that intention to get your brand to actually getting into action. That, that was a chapter that I see. I start to apply it wherever I go. It's like one of those chapters that sticks with me.
- [20:05]
A
Yes. And it was fun to relive. I remember when those commercials first came out and the. So the late, great Betty White right out on the football field, um, and when you watch it and you go, what is happening? Like, what, what is this? Right. And then you get to like, laugh along with it. And knowing, you know, this great point of having too often the joke or something is not tied with the name of the brand. Right. So you don't have that where you have the, the memory of it, but it wasn't synced with the brand name, the logo, the point. And so people don't remember the right thing to be able to take the action. And so, yeah, Snickers definitely does really good job. Mars is. Has a lot of really smart branding that they do and have done throughout the years. I think they're, they're fun, they're good people. All right, Richard, you want to jump in on one?
- [21:03]
C
Yes, yes. Well, for me, and this is a bit like asking someone to pick between their children, but kind of social faux pas aside, I think that I really like the Dyson chapter because, you know, we start off with this idea of one of the key things Dyson do. If you look at the website, look at the ads, in fact, if you open James Dyson's autobiography. The very first lines are, I went through 5,127 prototypes before I got to the bagless vacuum. And that is a classic example of the illusion of effort. So logically, it shouldn't matter how many prototypes and variants the bag of vacuum went through, all that should matter is the quality of that piece of kit. But behavioural scientists aren't just interested in what people should do, they're interested in how they actually behave. And what we know from experiment after experiment is that if you can create this illusion of effort, if you can make it look like you've put lots of effort into your product, exactly the same thing will be rated as preferable. There's an amazing study that we cover in the book by Andrea Morales. So she's at the University of Southern California back in 2005, groups, group of people, and she shows them a list of 10 apartments that meet their requirements. Now, the twist in the experiment is sometimes people are told that the estate agent spent an hour generating this list and they used a computer. Other times they are told the estate agent took nine hours to generate the list and they did it manually. Apart from that tale of effort, everything else is exactly the same. When people rate the quality of the estate agent, though, you get this markedly different effect between the two groups. So the group who heard the high effort story, they will rate the quality of the estate agent 36% higher than the group who heard the low effort. Now, Morales argument here is that it is really hard to judge the quality of a service. And when we are faced with complex questions, we replace them with simpler ones that give us an almost as good answer. And the simple question here is, well, how much effort did the real estate agent go to? So we use effort as a proxy for quality. Now, that I think is super interesting. You know, great use by DICE and lots of other people. But I think it's super interesting at the moment because lots and lots of marketers are grabbing, grappling, grappling, grappling, grappling with words, grappling with the problem of AI. And what the illusion of effort suggests is you've got to be quite careful, especially if you're a service provider, if you speed up your output. Because if you give people objectively the same quality of product using AI but you do it quicker, people tend to rate that service as worse. And that's not just speculation. There's an amazing recent study from Kobe Millet at vru, some of the big Dutch universities, and he does something quite similar to Morales, but this time he doesn't mention the amount of hours put into a product. He shows people exactly the same poster, sometimes as it's hand drawn, sometimes it's created by AI. And what he finds is when you look at things like rents of creativity or purchase intent, it's about 50, 60% higher willingness to pay if people think it's hand drawn. And he attributes this back to the illusion of effort. If you churn out products quicker, even if there is no real deterioration in the product quality, people will assume that's been the case. So the argument here is not that you should ignore AI. I think that'd be a Luddite approach, sticking your head in the sand. But the argument here is if you speed out delivery of products, you have to draw your attention to the amount of effort you've put into creating the systems that allowed you to speed up the processes. And unless you do that, you'll actually be a victim of this idea of the illusion of effort. So I think that was one of the chapters that I thought was most interesting, especially with this link back to some of the current problems marketers are grappling with.
- [25:20]
B
And to the point Melina that we were talking about earlier in the conversation, that the book sometimes has so much more material than you can cover. We went looking for how can we use this example? And we found Japanese fast food restaurant Itsu who said, you know, 10,000 hours is what makes a master. Our family's been doing this for 77404600 hours. 80 years of making miso soup. And what was so lovely about the example is everyone can show this illusion of effort. It doesn't have to just be an inventor like Dyson or dealing with, you know, the estate agents making how long it took to make a list. Even family businesses can use their lineage to show how much effort's gone into something. So just a lot of nice examples to get people thinking.
- [26:20]
C
And the other bit I really liked about that chapter was that Morales study. It's a little bit different to most marketers experience. And real estate agents are not the biggest category in marketing. So what we also tried to do here is close the gap between the existing academic work and the situation small businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers will find themselves. So we re ran her study. But this time, rather than set it in the world of real estate agents, we show people a design for a bottle of vodka, a fictitious brand. And then sometimes we told people this has gone through 150 iterations of design. Other times we made no mention of the Number of iterations. And what we found is for that Volker brand. Absolutely. The Illusion of Effort affected people's rating of the design. And people were much more likely to think it was an amazing design if they heard about the story of effort behind it. So I think, yeah, the chapter is like a little microcosm for the. For the book, really.
- [27:25]
A
Yeah. And what I love about the Illusion of Effort, just in general, is where, like, it could be that it took umpteen zillion hours because you're really bad at it. It doesn't. It doesn't mean anything most of the time, but we perceive, like, whoa, so much dedication that, you know, that went into this. And so it must be good because I wouldn't have put that much time in or I wouldn't have been so dedicated or cared as whatever. All the reasons that go into our brain as to, like, why that matters. If I spent 10,000, however many, you know, 80 years on something, I bet I'd be pretty good at it. So they must be really good at it. Right? But, you know, all Those hours with 80 years, it could have been, you know, 700 people all spending a little bit of time. Right. All the things that we don't necessarily tie the logic in together. We know it wasn't in that case. Right. But it's such a fascinating thing. And as you said, in this space where AI is allowing us to do things faster, and in a lot of ways, it's one of these counterintuitive things, right? Where you want to almost, like, brag about, like, look, what I was able to do, I was able to do this so quickly, and it allowed me to create 15 reports for you instead of one. Like, well, I would have rather had one report you really put effort into. And, like, maybe not, but it feels different in that moment. But being able to say, you know, how much time you spent, like you said, in creating a custom GPT that allows you to do this. I invested however much time to be able to create this better output for you. And there's, you know, however many hundreds or thousands of hours into each report behind the scenes, even if it outputs quickly or something.
- [29:16]
C
And it doesn't have. I mean, it certainly can be. And I think the examples of the Millet experiment and the morale is one, are quite explicit statements of effort. But you can also imply effort. So one of the other studies we we discuss with and talk about the potential implications for people is a lovely one by Ryan Buell and Michael Norton. Norton's at Harvard, where they get people to look at a, a comparison site. So a bit like, it's a bit like Skyscanner. And some people just go through the process as per normal. Others go through the process, but the results are slowed down. And while people are waiting for their flight, there's a little bar that goes around saying searching Alitalia, searching Delta, searching United. And they delay it for a couple of seconds and what they find is that people will rate the, the comprehensiveness of the results about 10 or 15% higher if they were in that second group. So even though on an objective level they've got a worse service, it's been slowed down because the website was transparent about what was happening during that delay. They thought the end result that they received was much more comprehensive. So I love the idea of this bias because you can apply it very explicitly like itsu, like Dyson, but you can also now design your products to make the effort more transparent. So if you're a restaurant, make sure people can see into the kitchen. If you're an atm, make sure people can see the banknotes being, being counted for a graphic display. So there's, there's so many ways to apply this principle.
- [30:50]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, with websites too, if you sit and there's nothing and you're having these questions of like, is it doing something? Am I, am I making progress? Is this happening? It's so frustrating. We've all been in those moments, right? And even just if the thing is filling in a circle or it's got the bar that's doing something, but it's saying anything. And I've, I love them when they're kind of funny little like jokes along the way, right? Where it's got to do with where it's like checking this thing moving over here, lifting that whatever, and it's like it's not actually doing that, but it feels like, all right, we got something going on. You, you can kind of laugh along as it's doing the progress bar. It feels like it's, you know, quicker and, you know, it is. It's reassuring in that process. So lots of tips and things for people.
- [31:42]
C
I think you're right. It's interesting when you start looking at real world examples of great user experience, you can see that there are multiple principles being drawn on. So I think some of the benefit of being transparent about your efforts is increasing quality perceptions because of the illusion of effort. But I think also in those examples you mentioned, another positive upside is it removes ambiguity. There are all sorts of experiments. This idea of ambiguity aversion that small elements of doubt cause a disproportionate amount of pain. So if the screen. If nothing's changing on the screen, there's a little bit of your mind that's thinking, oh, my gosh, my credit card's been stolen. The thing's broken. It's all gone wrong. I have to fill all these forms in again. So just removing that small seed of doubt has a outsized. Outsized impact. So, yeah, I think there's a. It's an interesting example just. Just from that itself.
- [32:32]
B
Yeah. The other thing that comes to mind from the conversation is, Melina. You naturally went to examples where there was, like, personality being shown, jokes being thrown. I was originally thinking about how this is a close cousin of costly signaling, but I wonder what you both think. Like, there's something about the brand having confidence to not just respond with the technical action being occurring, you know, and we see a lot of SaaS services imbuing personality into the software as it's working. There's something happening there from a behavioral science lens that gives you not just removing friction and confidence. Something's not broken. But actually, you learn about the product in the moment of waiting, or you learn. You learn about. You get the sense that they have enough confidence in their product to have a little personality while you wait. I mean, that, to me, there's something about the. How it's done that makes an impact too. I don't know that brings up anything for you too. But that, to me, feels like there's something there.
- [33:32]
A
Yeah. I would say for me, it has to do with that kind of, you know, when you're tying into an identity and how people can become so intertwined with the brands that they really love, and when that brand has a consistent, consistent personality that you're able to see and that kind of reflects something you thought was a funny little joke or. Or whatnot. Right. It's like, oh, they. They get me. Right. And those moments of reassurance of, oh, I like them, I like that. That is always good in the continual buying process. Right. I talk about that in that way of, like, people buying in on you with. In between moments of buying. Right. That you have those little bits that are kind of fun. And I think, yeah, tying in with the identity is what comes up for me. What about you, Richard?
- [34:19]
C
Yeah, well, in the Snicker chapter that we were talking about earlier, we cover quite a lot about the power of humor. So not only that, there are individual studies that show, you know, you're a boost memorability if you add a dash of humor to your ads, even better than that, there are meta analyses done by people like Martin Eisenhower that have looked at multiple papers and seen consistently the purchase, intent, brand warmth, reduction, negative feelings are all associated with humorous campaigns. Now when you first say something like that, some people might think, well, that's a statement of the bleeding obvious. Every advertiser worth their salt knows this. But actually, if you look at the data and Kantar have done this, so they've looked at over 200,000 ads across the world over the last 30 or so years. What they've shown is that there is just this repeated long term decrease in the use of humor by mainstream advertisers. So it's gone from about 55% at 2000 down to about 35% of TV ads now. So it is a lesson that we are repeatingly ignoring as advertisers. Now I think why that's so effective is partly we lean into stimulus that bring us pleasure. So creating an ad that amuses encourages people to lean in. But also I think to Michael Aaron's point, there is a degree of costly signaling because a joke is a risk. If you try and make a joke and you fail, it creates reputational damage. So you only do this if you've got, I think, the kind of intellectual abilities to carry it through. So I think we often talk about costly signaling as a display of wealth on the advertiser's part. You know, I've got lots of advertising budget, I'm spending extravagantly. Actually. Creativity and humor, I think are other ways of costly signaling because you are exposing yourself to a genuine downside of falling flat on your face if you don't land that joke. So absolutely, I think that's another reason why this works so well.
- [36:24]
A
And it's a lot harder to be funny than people realize when they go to do the ad. And like you were saying in the process of writing the book and you're like, this makes complete sense and somebody hears it or sees it or you didn't think about something that you were sure was going to be funny, but they didn't have the background. I mean, there are a lot of ways that those can go wrong, to be sure. So potentially this kind of loops around. I've made the connection in my brain, but it's because I know what I'm going to ask and so potentially feels like a really long leap for the rest of the world. And we, we accept this because I'm not trying to be funny in it. I'm just Gonna make a connection and we're gonna go from there. Which is, as you said, you know, you. You didn't try to say, Here are the 10 brands that all do this exact same thing. And then your business can be like them in this way. Right. It's not like there's the summary chapter at the end that's saying, and so now do all these things in this way, and you, too, will be great like them. Right. Like, they all had these people pieces, but you do have one. I don't know if it's like a warning sort of a chapter, but this, like, conclusion and moving forward. And we. I don't believe in over 500 episodes, we've never actually, I think, talked about the Semmelweis reflex before. So it felt like a great opportunity to take this, to talk a little bit about what that is as we kind of wrap up and move forward as we. As we learn. So who wants to jump in and start on that?
- [37:51]
B
Richard, shall I set up the situation in 1840s Vienna and then you knock it down and tell everybody a little bit about what happens in the story?
- [38:03]
C
Yep. Yep.
- [38:04]
B
It's the 1840s in Vienna, and it is safer to give birth in your kitchen or your bedroom than in the city's best hospitals. And the question is, why do close to 12% of mothers die giving childbirth? And nobody has an answer. And so in comes Ignatius Semmelweis, who's fresh out of med school, and he has this idea. Maybe he's three years out. Richard. Something. He's only a few years out of his medical training, and he has this insight that maybe there's a reason that the midwives who only give birth have such dramatically lower rates of death amongst women giving birth than the surgeons who go from working on a patient who has just died and then going giving birth. Could they be carrying something from one place to another? And the idea of bacteria is not yet known in the medical field. So this is the situation that he sets up. Richard, why don't you take it from there? What happens when he tries to prove this?
- [39:16]
C
Yeah, so he's essentially quite successfully proves that the midwives are much more likely to save the lives of patients because they haven't been moving from cadavers to helping people go through labor. But unfortunately, once he runs his experiments, creates quite conclusive evidence, he falls on deaf ears. Now, even though he thinks he's discovered a way to save hundreds of thousands of lives across the globe, most of his colleagues ignore him because he doesn't have status and then he hasn't published any provable experimental data. So he eventually goes mad with the, the kind of stress of this, ironically, when he is put into a mental asylum, you know, the, the guards have to grapple with him and he ends up dying of the sepsis that he had been been researching. But this whole idea of inventions or innovations occurring and then the wider world ignoring them is a repeated thing through science. People don't just create an invention and then everyone merrily accepts it. They are ignored again and again and again. There are dozens of examples of this happening. So one of the things that we thought with the value I think of behavioral science is not just that it identifies the tactics that brands can use. If you are working in a marketing agency, if you are a consultant, it also gives you the evidence, the really powerful neutral evidence from respected academics that then you can use to persuade people to accept your recommendations. So you've got this one superpower of identifying what works. But then the other part, which you don't talk enough about enough, is because you've got this experimental evidence, you have also got an ability to far better persuade your colleagues, persuade your clients to accept these recommendations. So I think that's an underutilized value to behavioural science there.
- [41:27]
A
Absolutely. And having the story, like you said, of being able to say look, here is how Facebook did this or here is what liquid Death did and which is why I'm recommending we do this. And look, it was in a book, it's real, right? It exists here. I'm not coming up with this myself. And there's this academic research that's already been so nicely collected and packaged for me to help be able to make the case as I want to implement what I learned in those nice tidy little packages of wrap up tips after each chapter where you have just a couple things that people can be, can be doing there. And I think the summary piece that came in there on that semi wise reflex also being that those doctors didn't want to admit to themselves that they had been doing something to harm their patients. Right? And so it was easier to. And it's like backfire effect confirmation bias. Can't have that cognitive dissonance to say like that cannot be true because this can't be my fault, right? Is the mentality on it and similar for the people that are running the marketing or that are the CEO of the brand or at the agency that have been doing something for, for a really, really long time. And when you come in and say let me show you why, what you do is bad and this new thing is good. You're kind of setting that up to fail. So framing will really matter and learning about how to present that information can make all the difference of whether people buy in or not.
- [42:58]
C
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there. And I think that's the best way to think of paper science. That, you know, these experiments are not you ordering or mandating. That someone should change their multi behavior in a particular way. When they're best used is if you share the research with a client. If you take them through the experiment, the methodology, the results, well, suddenly it will shift the conversation from should we use expectation, assimilation to how do we use it. I think it gives you that shared bit of knowledge that you can both work together on to apply and that's a much better way of using it.
- [43:37]
A
Yeah.
- [43:38]
B
And of all the endings that we, all the final analogies we thought to use. One of the reasons Semmelweis became the final one was because it's also a story of what happens if your recommendations don't get followed. If you can't convince someone to use more academically backed up research to guide their marketing. Don't go mad. I mean there's always another day, there's always going to go and it's light hearted and serious. You know, like just because your ideas aren't the ones that guide that rule the day doesn't mean that there's not much more good work to do. Imagine if Semmelweis had had another 40 years of medical impact. I mean the world would be a better place for it. So for us, you know, it's, it kind of carried double meaning at the end.
- [44:33]
A
It very much had me thinking as we go to wrap this up. But like there's that Saturday Night Live skit where Ryan Gosling is so upset about the avatar logo and that it's just papyrus font and he's like sitting outside like I know it, I know. And it's, you know, he goes absolutely bonkers about this thing that he knows to be true but no one will listen to him. So that will link it in the show notes along with your of course to the book and to connect and everything. But for everyone who is now so excited to get their copy of Hacking the Human Mind and to be able to connect with you, what's their best path to be able to do so?
- [45:18]
B
So we have the consumer behaviorlab.com has all of our ways to get, to reach out to us and get connected and we have a landing page for the book. It's theconsumerbehaviorlab.com HTHM for hacking the Human Mind where you can get all the information on the web there.
- [45:40]
A
Awesome. And we'll connect to your LinkedIn profiles and whatnot to make it easy for people. So thank you again, Michael Aaron and Richard for joining me on the show. It was very delightful to chat with you today.
- [45:50]
C
Thank you for having us.
- [45:51]
B
Thanks for having us.
- [45:53]
A
Thank you again to Richard Shotton and Michael Aaron Flicker for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I always love the focus on small, thoughtful details that make a big difference, like that smiley macaroni on a box, or the statement about effort. Those can have surprisingly large impacts on perception and behavior when they're used effectively, whether it's pareidolia, the illusion of effort, or the intention action gap. This episode was full of practical tools and insights for anyone looking to build a brand people remember, love and actually buy. And these were just scratching the surface. Remember, there are 17 different brands featured in the book. I also appreciated that final chapter with the story of the Semmelweis Reflex. It's such a powerful reminder for how hard it can be to change minds, especially when pride or tradition are involved. But it's also a hopeful message that with the right evidence and a thoughtful, strategic, behaviorally informed approach, we can get people to embrace new ideas. That's something we can all get behind, regardless of role or industry. So I'm curious what brand, example or principle stood out most to you? Was it the hangry story from Snickers? Or maybe Dyson and the Illusion of Effort? Come share it with me on social media. You'll find me as the Brainy biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as for my top related past episodes and books, including Hacking the Human Mind, Ways to get in touch with Richard, Michael Aaron and myself, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthebrainybusiness.com 537 and thank you again to Richard Shotten and Michael Aaron Flicker for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
- [48:04]
B
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast, Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.