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The Copywriter Club Podcast
TCC Podcast #467: Hacking the Human Mind with Michael Aaron Flicker
00:55:42
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- [00:00]
A
Want more responses, sales and customers let's Hack the Human Mind this is the Copywriter Club podcast.
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B
Several months ago, I was fortunate enough to get an advance copy of a.
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A
Book called Hacking the Human Mind.
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B
Now, if you have a book and you want me to read it, giving it a title like Hacking the Human Mind and including ideas and insights from.
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A
Behavioral science, neuromarketing, and psychology is pretty.
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B
Much guaranteed to get my attention.
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A
But this book goes one step farther by looking at marketing in the real world, then searching for the psychology that explains why something works. This approach basically flips the usual marketing tactic to do list from Here are a bunch of psychological triggers, things like exclusivity, scarcity, risk removal, curiosity, and so on.
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B
Make sure that you include all of.
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A
Those into your sales process and instead look for what works already and figure out why it works. It's a bit different from the usual approach, so I asked one of the authors, Michael Aaron Flicker, to talk with me about some of the concepts from the book. We talked about things like the pratfall or blemish effect and how to turn a product flaw into an asset. There are very few perfect products in the world, so understanding how to use this effect you in your copy is incredibly useful. We also talked about how to address product changes in a way that doesn't generate backlash. We've seen customers revolt against design and formulation changes over the past few years. Kraft Mac and Cheese did it the right way, and to hear that story, you'll have to keep listening to this episode. Another idea we talked about is offer simplicity. We're often tempted to stack feature on feature, then benefit upon benefit. We do this to pile on the good stuff and make our offers more valuable to our clients, but the actual effect may be the exact opposite. Again, to hear how that works, you're going to want to keep on listening. One thing Michael Aaron points out that it takes more than knowing about a particular psychological effect or persuasion trigger. Often you need to find new and innovative ways to use these triggers in order to make them work. We also talked a little bit about humor. Lots of stuff we covered here. You're going to want to stay tuned. Before we get to my discussion with.
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B
Michael Aaron, this episode is brought to.
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A
You by Research Mastery. Research Mastery is the one stop program or course that will change your writing for the better. Instead of just organizing words, you'll have the tools and strategies you need to truly understand your customer so they relate to your offer and buy more often. Research Mastery digs into the four critical areas of research and if you miss just one of them. Your research isn't complete and it includes the AI tools you need to do research faster, more effectively and more profitably. You can learn more about this unique program@thecopywriterclub.com researchmastery. And now my interview with Michael Aaron Flicker.
- [03:04]
B
Michael Aaron, welcome to the Copywriter Club podcast. I is just before we were starting to record I told you, your book is right up my alley. This is the stuff that I love thinking about talking about. We've had a few episodes already this year talking about similar concepts, but I think you've got a slightly different take on some of this stuff. So let our viewers listeners know. How did you get here? Business Advisor, author of this new book, Hacking the Human Mind. What's your story?
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C
Thanks so much, Rob, and so excited to be on. I've gotten to listen to quite a number of the podcasts that you all have done and it's such a great mission for copywriters and those that are trying to improve their craft, but it's just such a great you guys have covered so many different topics. It's really amazing. So thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me. I'll tell you a very short story of my history and then more importantly, how we got to the book that we have today. So I started my company when I was 14 years old as a freshman in high school. And we were computer programmers that did computer programming on the Internet. And back in the 1990s, that was very rare. Computer programming was meant only for mainframes and networks. And so for us as high school and college kids doing kind of a little avant garde computer programming, we always saw ourselves as trying to push the envelope and do new things. And throughout the 2000s and 2010s, we just always were trying to improve ourselves and improve our business. And so over those two almost three decades, we continued to grow and we created marketing and advertising agencies, a political consulting firm, and now Xenosci, the company I started 27 years ago, owns and operates nine different companies. But what connects so many of them has been a passion of mine for almost 12 years, which is in the, in the, in the realm of behavioral science. And how can you help affect people, what people believe and how they behave. And this is big academic work across American universities, across Europe, and in fact in the European market. Behavioral science is a well established part of how marketers do business, how brands are built. The United Kingdom even has a behavioral science nudge unit that helps their government be more effective at collecting taxes and at getting people to stop smoking. But here in America, it is much more of a, of a nascent field. And so my passion for bringing behavioral science to all of my companies got me excited to start my own podcast, which we did. And about two and a half years ago, the co host of the podcast and I, Richard Shotten, said, what if we took the idea from our podcast and made it into a book? And that's where Hacking the Human mind comes from. And unlike other books on behavioral science, Hacking the human mind does not start with like, what's the academic study and what can you learn from it? It instead starts with, let's look in the real world and see brands that are doing things that understand human psychology or understand motivations in a unique way. And then let's decode what's the science that is making this work. So we look at brands like Apple, Amazon, Guinness, and we say they're doing something really unique. Let's look at the behavioral science that powers it. And so we do that on our podcast, and now we've done it with this book. And we think it's a way to better understand the concepts and better remember them. Because, of course, that's the whole point. We want people to use the concepts in their own work and in, and in the things they do each day.
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B
I love this approach. You know, as I was saying, I'm really intrigued by all of these concepts, but I almost always come from the other direction where, you know, I read the news report about the paper, you know, so, so let me give you an example. And maybe, you know, this will make sense for a lot of listeners, but everybody knows the famous jam study. That is the, you know, where shoppers were presented with six jams, and then two weeks later in the same store, they were presented with 24 jams. And then, you know, the, the researchers, you know, decided that, you know, more jams was more interaction but fewer purchases, and there's all these takeaways and, and this study gets quoted all the time as if it was a real world experience. But my first, my first thought here is, that's not how people shop. And so while there may still be valuable lessons there and maybe some of those takeaways are correct, it always makes me wonder, you know, like, you know, is this a real thing that's that we're looking at, or is it just this interesting idea that a researcher has that a newspaper picked up and now we're talking about it as if it always happens? And so your approach, where we, where we look at companies we look at things that are actually happening and then go back and try to figure out why. Is it working, seems to me.
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C
Right.
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B
I mean, bang on.
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C
Yeah. And I, and I think what we would say is a question we asked ourselves, asked ourselves was, did all these companies, Apple, Amazon, Guinness, know the behavioral science that we're applying to it? And I think our answer is they didn't. There are few great leaders, great thinkers, great strategists, great creative directors that just have access to human insight and they could just feel that this is going to work. A famous example is, is the ad agency that came up with the Avis strap line in the, in the 1960s. We're number two, so we try harder. Great insight. Did they know that was proven by academics, scientists later as the pratfall effect? No. In fact, they did it before the pratfall effect was even ever studied and tested. But by understanding the behavioral science behind these great insights, it makes it more accessible for the rest of us and it should give us as copywriters or us as brand owners more confidence that if we use this behavioral science insight, it has a more higher likelihood of working. So it's about having more confidence in your writing, having more confidence in your work, because, you know, some of the science that backs it up.
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B
Yeah. Since you mentioned the profile effect, let's talk about that a little bit because again, before we started recording, I mentioned it's really helpful to contextualize this stuff for copywriters, content writers, into how we would use it in our own businesses or for our clients. And this is one of the ideas in your book, to me, that seems the most useful for copywriters. And that's because almost all of our clients have flawed products. Now, you know, maybe it doesn't work as well as they say, or maybe there's something about them, you know, it doesn't taste great or, you know, there's. There's some blemish that, you know, the product has. And yet the profile effect, the blemish effect, basically shows us that leading with that can actually increase trust in the product and increase sales and all that. So share some of those ideas around the blemish effect that you shared in your book.
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C
Absolutely. So first let's explain the brand example because it will help contextualize it. And then I'll tell you a little bit more about the science behind it. So the brand that we use to explain the pratfall effect is the beer brand, Guinness. And Guinness is this. If you are not familiar, it's a 9,000 year old. I'm sorry, it's a. It's a 350-year-old brand that is just an amazing beer brand storied in the United Kingdom. Dublin, Ireland is where they start. And something very unique. If you've ever been in a bar, when you order a Guinness, is that as you pour the Guinness, it forms a very thick and full head. And so the bartender has to stop the draft and wait for the head to go down to then continue pouring the beer. So if you order a Guinness and your mates at the table order other beers, their beers come first. And this is a real problem for bars that want to move product quickly. Guinness knows this. And so when they look to make a ad campaign in the 1990s, they even say in the ad campaign, you can pitch us on any idea, but don't pitch us on the length of time it takes to create the beer. AMV creative Walter Campbell hears this and he says, what if we can turn this fault into a positive? And he comes up with the line, guinness, good things come to those who wait. And it's a great insight that instead of looking at the negative, that it takes so long for the head to go down, you can talk about the quality of the product in the time it takes to wait to get it. And that really one Guinness falls in love with that insight, and it becomes one of their most popular ad campaigns. And for those that love ads like Richer than I Do, there's an amazing 1999 ad where the surfer, where you see a surfer in the ocean and he's just bobbing in the waves, and the entire ad is talking about, like, how he's searching for the perfect wave to hit and it ends. Good things come to those who wait. So it's showing you that, like that, that. That there is goodness that comes out of that. So that's all done by Walter Campbell, AMV and the Guinness brand marketing team. But the science behind it has been coined the pratfall effect. And the pratfall effect was originally termed by a Harvard psychologist, Elliot Aronson. And he set up a test in 1966. And so here's how the test goes. First, he records an actor answering a series of quiz questions. And in the initial experiment, the actor had been prepped with the correct answers, so he was able to score 92% on the quiz. And then after the quiz, the actor pretended to spill a cup of coffee over himself. Over himself. A small blunder, a pratfall. And so that audio recording of the quiz was then played to study Participants and they were asked to rate how much they liked the contestants. And while they were split into two groups, one group heard the entire recording with the spill and all, and the other group heard the entire recording, but with the blunder edited out. And they found that the clumsy contestant was 45% more likable. So there's something beautiful in showing the fallibility of a thing, and there's something more believable about the brand if they're willing to show something that may not be perfect. Because in general, in commercial marketing, you're a little skeptical of whatever the brand's telling you, because obviously they want you to buy their product. So the brands that can let a little fault show gives them more credibility with everything else they're saying. We talked about Amos line. When you're number two, you tried harder. But we also have a famous VW line, Ugly is Only Skin Deep or America's Slowest Fastback. These are all acknowledging that the VW Bug was both a little ugly and maybe not the, you know, not the most beautiful muscle sports car of the time. So really very interesting how you can use this insight to be a better communicator and to be a better copywriter and to be more believable.
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B
Yeah. Another example I've seen of this, products on Amazon that are rated 4.7 or 4.8 stars outsell those rated 5 stars. And you would think the perfect product ought to sell better.
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C
But.
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B
And I'm not, I mean, part of me thinks, well, yeah, we want that humanness. We want a little vulnerability. We like something that's not quite perfect. But also I think leading with the thing that's maybe not quite perfect about it just, it makes us feel like somebody's being honest with us. And when, when somebody's being honest with us, then we know we can trust them. Right. And so maybe there's a couple of things going on psychologically that make this, you know, leading with a blemish really work.
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C
I think that's right. And I think there's also a superpower if you can connect that blemish to something that is a positive of your brand. You've almost. You've double dipped. You've gotten the credit for being honest about something that the buyer knew anyway. And you get, well, I hadn't considered that. That's why we thought the Guinness example was so brilliant. Because they not only admit it takes a long time, everybody who ever ordered a Guinness knew that, but they also get the benefit of saying, well, that's because it's quality. Another example is Listerine. Their tagline is the taste people hate twice a day. But the insight there is, well, you hate it because it's so effective, it must be so powerful that the taste is so strong. I think they're using their blemish, they're using their pratfall to also reinforce a positive.
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B
Yeah. So as I'm thinking how copywriters might apply this, you know, some of the applications to our clients businesses are pretty obvious. You know, if you're, if you're writing for a course creator and you know, the production values on their videos aren't stellar, you know, you can lead with that, but then tie it to the quality of the information that they're learning. It's not really about how they show up on camera. It's the thing that you learn. And in their, in our own businesses, you know, all of us can identify things that maybe aren't perfect. You know, maybe I write a little slower than some of the other writers that somebody might talk to. And so how do I tie that to a benefit for my client? You know, that means that, you know, I'm spending more time thinking or strategizing so that, you know, what you're getting is original or different. So there's so many ways to apply this in our own businesses to again help engender trust with the people that we're working with.
- [18:23]
C
Yeah. And the build on that is if it works in brand marketing, it works in brand marketing in this book because humans are buying the brands that, that marketers are selling it, then absolutely will work. In B2B, if you are selling your copywriting services to a buyer, those same in human instincts, those same behavioral science biases are at play. We just have to find a creative way to apply them. Good for us. Copywriters are creative folk. And so we just got to find that right way to apply that to get to good outcomes.
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B
Another of the ideas in your book that I was really taken by, I was trying to think, you know, how do I use this in my own business? Is this idea of expectation assimilation. So this is, you know, in the book you give the example of Kraft Maca and cheese, I'll let you tell the story. But as I was reading through the various examples you have in the book, I was thinking there are again so many expectations that our own clients come to our businesses with or our clients customers come with. And you know, if, if we're not meeting those expectations for doing something slightly different or something that they might perceive as negative as, you know, what happened with the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese story? You know, we are going to lose sales, but also we flip that on its head and get ahead of it. So. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that?
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C
So craft. So we'll start again with the brand story and then let's talk about the science behind it. The brand story is a beautiful example of taking a risk, but also using the confidence of what will happen as, as cover for how they, they got into, into this situation. So it's the mid 2010s, Kraft Mac and Cheese has decided they are going to change the formulation of, of their product. And specifically they have a plan to remove some of the, some of the artificial ingredients that make it. Its bright orange color. And they're concerned that with a, with a, with an ingredient change that it might affect sales.
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B
So we've seen that happen all, you know, dozens of times. Right. I mean, New Coke is probably the best example of throwing a surprise out there for, yeah. For our customers.
- [20:53]
C
So faced with options of a new ad campaign, slapping new on the, on the, on the box, doing press release and a tour about how they're making their product healthier, they choose an unconventional path. And they say, what if we don't tell anyone at all? And instead we announce this change after people have already been buying and liking the new product formulation. So of course they do the legal things like they change on the back of the box that the ingredients have changed, but they make no news of it at all. And after, I think it's three or four months, they run a massive PR and ad blitz. And they say, we have sold 50 million boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. And to all of our customers, thank you. You've been part of the world's best, biggest blind taste test. And we would have invited you to try it, but you already have. It's a great, it's a great concept. They use the social hashtag, you know, hashtag didn't notice. And they run this campaign to say, we can change our formulation. And you, and you didn't even notice that we changed it. And what's really nice about this is that they were defending against the fear that healthier ingredients would lead to folks feeling that the taste would go down. And there's quite a bit of science that backs this up. The one that Richard and I chose that we thought really explained this well was a 2006 study by Leonard Lee of Columbia University. And he is specifically looking at how does expectations influence people's preference? So he gets 388 bar goers to taste two drinks a regular beer, which was Budweiser, and one they called MIT Brew. It's a regular beer with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. And so they split the drinkers into three groups. The first group tastes the beer without knowing that there's a secret ingredient. And when questioned, 59% of them prefer the MIT brew. The second group were told that the MIT brew contained vinegar before they tasted it. And consistent with other experiments that we've seen out in the world, hearing about that off putting ingredient affected their taste perception. And only 30% found MIT brew to be tasty. Half of what the first group did. But then the third group that they broke out were told that the beer contained vinegar too, but only after tasting it. In that group, 52% of drinkers preferred the MIT brew. So you have almost a 73% increase of people liking the taste if they find out about the vinegar after tasting it rather than before. That's the center of expectation assimilation. It's that if I think I know what's going to happen, if I think I know what it's going to taste like, it actually changes my sense of taste or my perception of how much I like it.
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B
Yeah, this is again, as I was thinking about how this applies to, you know, my own businesses. You know, this is one of those things where, okay, there's an argument for setting expectations correctly, but also there's, you know, this, you know, if, if we know something's going to impact it negatively, you know, talking about that after delivery, after the experience may help you. But there's probably a caveat here because let's say, you know, the negative thing is you're going to deliver something late or you're going to, you know, go over budget. Those aren't the kinds of positive experiences that, that lend to, you know, preferences afterwards. So, you know, in this experiment, the beer still tasted good. In fact, maybe it even tasted better. And so, yeah, we have to be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from expectation assimilation.
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C
Yeah, I think what, I think the key thing we want folks to pull, especially in copywriting, is that what you tell someone before, before they see your work could have a, a bigger impact than you would have wanted on the way they review the work. So if I'm a copywriter and I'm presenting a piece and I get on the phone and I say, you know what, I think this is like at 70% and I'm hoping to workshop it, we've already downgraded the expectation, whereas I've been working on this for weeks. I feel I knocked it out of the park and. And I. But if we can make it even better together, let's do that. Those two different setups will dramatically change the way that the reader then approaches that work. Of course, we don't want to do things that are outside of what you know, the MIT brew is still got vinegar in it. So we got to be realistic. But the way that you set up the. The expectation those that are receiving it are overly biased to what you say. And so I think when to deciding what to say before and what to say after they've read your stimulus after they've read your work. That's really what we're focusing folks on here.
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B
Yeah. Okay, so there's tons of ideas in the book that apply. I'm curious, what are some of your favorites?
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C
Yeah, we started the book with a story about five guys. That is a simple idea that I was thinking for copywriters and for those that are in the business of making creative for commercial purposes was really interesting. So the story of Five Guys, for those that don't know it, Five Guys is one of America's better burger concepts. It's taking off globally. They have 1800 stores worldwide. But it's 1986, and Jerry Morrell and his four sons. These are the five guys want to start a business. And they're on a family vacation at the Maryland beachfront boardwalk. And they're struck as they walk down the boardwalk, that only one food stand has a massive line piled up in front of it. And it's a. It's a food stand that only sells french fries. It was named Thrasher's Fries. And that got Jerry and his sons thinking. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, what if we just do burgers and fries? And still to this day, they don't do milkshakes, they don't do chicken, they don't do salads. All they make is burgers and fries. And what he tapped into without knowing it was this behavioral insight called the gold dilution effect. And it's this psychological tendency to rate a single focused offering at higher quality than one with multiple benefits. So I'll tell the study and I'll tell you how I think it applies to our. To our listeners here. The study comes from Yin Zhang and Ayelet Fishback at the University of Chicago. It's 2007, and they want to see if they can prove that this psychological phenomenon is academically provable. So they gave people information describing how eating A tomato could help achieve a health benefit. So if you eat tomatoes, goal one, it can help prevent cancer. Or in the second case, eating tomatoes has two health benefits. It can help prevent cancer and it can help stop eye degeneration. So those are the two groups. Participants were then asked to rate how effective it was eating tomatoes were at preventing cancer, and the group that only heard one benefit were 12, thought it was 12% more effective at preventing cancer when it was the only benefit, rather than when we enlisted two benefits. That doesn't really make sense. It's not really logical. You would think the more benefits you show, the more believable it would be. But actually, humans are more biased towards simple information. And when you only present one advantage, it's more believable. That's really helpful for copywriters or anybody doing commercial advertising because you'll see many ads where they stack RTBs. They say, this is good at cleaning and it smells good. And oh, by the way, it lasts on the shelf for three years. That's a lot for your brain to process. Where if you just say it is great at cleaning, that will be more believable. If I'm selling my services as a copywriter and I say I work alone, I'm really fast and I'm an expert in your field, that may be information overload. If you just say I'm an expert in your field of writing, that may be more believable. And it may. And, and it would. And this study shows it will be more effective.
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B
Yeah, I think there's also another thing going on here, parallel that's related. You know, again, speaking of a copywriter's business, if I go out into the world, my website says, hey, I write blog posts and I write emails and I write website copy and I write sales pages and I can do anything that you want me to write at that point. We're now asking our potential clients to do some work and figure out how do I get this person into my business or how can they effectively help me the most? And I love this quote that was in your book from Daniel Kahneman, that thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats. They can do it, but they prefer not to. And when we are asking our clients to apply their brains to figure out how can they use us or how can we help them, we are requiring them to do something that whether we like it or not, is hard. And yeah, so simple is almost always going to get a better result.
- [31:20]
C
Yeah. And, you know, behavioral scientists like us often think about, like, where does this all come from? Why are humans incentivized to think less or why we can do it, but we'd prefer not to. And there's a lot of evolutionary biology at point this base of all this, you know, when we were for much longer periods of time living in subsistence, in subsistence farming and in dangerous situations, the quickest answer was often the easiest answer. The air, you know. And so even though the last hundred years looks very different, post Industrial Revolution 150 years looks very different, our bodies and our minds are taking time to catch up. And so a lot of the things Kahneman writes about which we love, putting him at the front of the book, or a lot of things a lot of these academic studies are trying to reveal are not modern preferences. They're actually evolutionary or biological biases that you can then understand and use to help support your goals. But they are much more deeply seeded than something that may change when AI is more prevalent than search or when technology changes. Again. These biases we believe, are here for a long time and will stay for a long time.
- [32:41]
B
Yeah, I think there's another part in your book where you quote Jeff Bezos, who's talking about the kinds of business that you can build. I think he mentions I often get asked what's going to change in the next 10 years? And he says the question I'm not asked is what's not going to change? Because you can build a business around what's not going to change. And when it comes right down to it, human behavior psychology, it has not changed in 10,000 years. And it's a pretty safe bet that 10 years from now or 100 years from now, it's going to be just about the same as it is today.
- [33:16]
C
Yeah, I think it's a lovely argument for not being so obsessed with newness and what's the newest hack or the newest trick, the newest ability to take advantage of something and to and to say there's much more steadfast, durable insights that we can apply new thinking to that we can bring modern, that likely will have a bigger effect. You know, I think there's a lot of focus on arbitrage right now when actually there's really stable insights that you can make good hay out of. And I think that's Bezos point in his quote. And I think it's a good thing for copywriters to think about as they, as they bring ideas to the table and they get pushed from their clients. So what's new? What can you tell me that I don't already know? There's a lot more looking back than maybe we're going to find immediately looking forward.
- [34:11]
B
Yeah, and this is one of the challenges the writers have. We're always trying to catch attention, and there's something about newness that does catch attention. But if you're too new, you know, we, we push that away. We, we don't like things that are too different. But also you can't be too. The same. You know, you can't be the. Because you become boring and easy to ignore. There's like this middle place that great copywriters figure out how to navigate between. It's. It's recognizable enough that I feel safe, but it's new enough that it catches my attention.
- [34:45]
C
We talk about this exact challenge in our chapter on Apple. And it's a. And I won't go through the whole scientific back study, but we call it, it is called in our industry optimal newness, meaning it's new enough that it feels noteworthy, but it is not so new that it's foreign and unbelievable. And there's a great example of how the iPhone does this. If you think back, I think the iPhone is now 12 years old, something like that, maybe a little bit more.
- [35:16]
B
I think it came out in 2007 or so. Right.
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C
So we've gotten up on 20 years. And in the first iPhone, when it launches, they use, they use. The question is how will they get people to leave BlackBerry typing with your thumbs to using a full glass screen? And they use a principle called skeuomorphism to show a notepad. The notes app was actually a yellow lined icon with a spiral top. The. The, the. The. What's another example from that? The, the music app was actually like ear font. And what they wanted to do, they made the buttons rounded. They made them look like you could click on them. They had depth. Modern iPhones, everything's flat, flat and nice and shiny. But in the original iPhone, they make them look like actual clickable buttons. And the concept was if it looks too futuristic, nobody will understand how to use it. And so this idea of optimal newness, how do we break it, make it new, but not make it so new nobody understands it is a big study in behavioral science and it's a great point you raise.
- [36:28]
B
This is a little off topic, but my favorite example of skeuomorphism is the save icon that we have on our computers now. Anybody who isn't, you know, maybe 35 plus years old won't remember the floppy disks we had to put into the drives to save work on. And that's the save icon now. But again, if you hadn't seen those, you kind of look at it, you might know it's a save icon, but you don't know the history or, you know, why it looks like that little disk thing.
- [36:59]
C
So, yeah, yeah, 100%. And so, you know, you really, you start to learn that there is a middle ground. And one day that save icon, I think you already start to see, it now looks just like a down arrow or just a, you know, a box. It will, it will, it will fall away. The floppy dis icon, and things evolve. But making sure that you hit the right level of newness is really critical when you pitch ideas and when you bring things to the table because you don't want to, you want to get credit for being new, but not credit for being unbelievable. So that's always the question.
- [37:35]
B
Yeah, for sure. And very applicable when writing hooks and headlines, you know, in the work that we do. Another of my favorite chapters in the book is all about humor. I don't know if this is one that you chose as one of your favorites, but it's interesting. But the thing that actually caught my attention was almost a throwaway example at the end of the chapter where you started talking about how humor affects price sensitivity. And, you know, that just kind of made my eyebrows go up and, you know, it rings true. But putting people in a good mood when you're talking about price obviously has a very big impact on, you know, how we sell products, even how we sell our own services to our clients. So, yeah, let's talk about humor a little bit.
- [38:21]
C
So we picked humor as a topic, and we chose Snickers as our brand case study. Snickers is just an amazing brand for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is one of the most successful candy bars in history. But the way that they use humor is, is, is, is a cracking open people's consideration in a way that others may not expect. So first, Snicker starts with, how can we get people to want to buy our candy bar? More, more. And Snickers always has had a layer of peanuts high in protein, good at giving you energy and satiating your hunger. And so they use that insight, a product truth that unlike Milky Way, which is a Snickers bar without peanuts made by the same parent company, they say, how can we use that product differentiation of peanuts to open it, open an opportunity. So they come up with the tagline, you're not you when you're hungry. And what they're looking to do with that line is to Say, whenever you feel hungry, grab a Snickers bar. Let it be your. Let it satiate you when you're hungry. So that would have been good enough, but they then tie it to humor. And the campaign launches in 2010 with a super bowl spot with beloved Golden Girl actress Betty White, who is coming on, and she acts as herself, and then she turns into a football player when she's hungry, and then she's back to Betty White when she's not hungry. And the ad closes with, you're not you when you're hungry. Snickers satisfies. And it really just played on this idea that when you're hungry, when you're hangry, you're not who you want to be. And I think they use this. They use this idea of humor as a way to disarm people, to think, oh, they made me laugh. And now more endeared to the brand as it relates to price. What we know about humor is that if I feel more endeared to you, I'm more sense. I'm more desensitized to all other factors, not just price, but also, you know, effectiveness of the product or anything else. And so we know that if we can. We can make people laugh if we can bring humor into it. Your other. Your other decision criteria become less important.
- [41:07]
B
Yeah, again, this is one of those things that's. That can be hard because not all products are ripe for humor. Certainly there are somewhere it's inappropriate, but there's this vast middle ground where it could be appropriate if you get it right. But hitting the right note can be a real challenge. And so for writers, content writers, or copywriters who are attempting this, it's not as easy as it sounds. You know, it helps to have a product like Snickers that can be a little bit more fun. You can play around with it, but, you know, if you're. If you're writing for, you know, a SaaS product or whatever, there are. There are places where you can add some fun, some elements of humor, but you still have to keep the product trustworthy. You know, it still has to, you know, come across as functional, you know, very believable, real, you know, all those things. And sometimes humor can get at cross purposes with some of those other brand elements.
- [42:08]
C
Yeah. And of course, we've all been in the situation where humor backfires and people don't think it's funny.
- [42:15]
B
And so, story of my life, Michael.
- [42:18]
C
All of us, for aspiring comedians, and we talk about at the end of the chapter, something called the Vampire Effect, which is that jokes unrelated to the brand can actually backfire. Just making someone laugh, to laugh and then slapping your product at the end of it is very different than them laughing because the product was the main agent in the humor. And so, as you say, it's a tricky balancing act, but one that could be used. Well, I don't remember if we have this in the book or if we have it in one of our podcasts, but generally I believe it's System one. And a research agency out of the United Kingdom has shown that use of humor in ads has been in major decline in the last 20 years. That generally, you know, humor in ads is, is, is, is, is much less used, but it can be very effective. So when others run away from it, it might be something our listeners might try to walk more to. There's a bigger area of opportunity there.
- [43:21]
B
Yeah, I agree. I think there's a huge opportunity to have a little more fun if everybody else is being dour and sad. And yeah, there's, It's a great way to stand out and go back to that idea of being new enough to. And different enough to get attention. Let's do another, Another of your favorite chapters.
- [43:41]
C
So the Apple chapter is one of my favorites. And we specifically talk in the Apple chapter about the concept of concreteness. And as I was thinking about our listeners, I thought I actually inverted this time. Let me tell you the study. First we talk about how it, how it applies. So this is 1972. Ian Bagg is a professor at the University of Western Ontario. He recruits 25 students and he brings them in and he reads them 22 word phrases. Impossible amount, rusty engine, better excuse, white horse, subtle fault. So he lists 20 of these two word phrases, and he asked the group to remember as many as they could. In the study, participants recalled an average of 23% of the terms, about 1 in 5. But the insight, the striking observation that Begg makes is that people remember just 9% of the abstract phrases like impossible amount or common fate, but they remember 36% of the concrete terms like white horse or rusty engine. That's a fourfold difference of 20 random phrases. And Beg argues that vision is the most powerful of our senses. So when you can picture something in your head as it's said out loud, like white horse, you will find it much easier to hang on to that thought for longer. And if you think about some of the most successful marketing advertising campaigns, many take advantage of this. Red Bull. It gives you wings. Eminem melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Skittles Taste the Rainbow, Maxwell House, Good to the Last Drop. All of those lines you can imagine in your head, and that will give it just a little bit more staying power. And in an industry where we are trying to not just get a client to buy our copywriting, but we are trying to get buyers to remember and come back to our brand, using concrete phrases and concrete ideas rather than abstract ones is a big lesson from the Apple chapter.
- [45:59]
B
Yeah. Hopefully copywriters understand this. You know, we talk all the time about, you know, using, using numbers where, you know, saying a round number like 500 or thousand is less believable than 497 or 1022. Right. So, so exactness matters when it, when it comes, but also when we talk about framing and the way that we frame the ideas that we're talking about, when we make comparisons, comparing to things that already in people's lives that they can see, they can relate, they, you know, you know, they, you know, understand the size of something, you know, so when talking about the national debt, you know, 30, I don't know what it is today, it's going to be a trillion dollars more by the time this goes live. 36, $37 trillion. That number is so huge that no one can actually picture what that really means. But if you can say, hey, you know, stack a dollar bill and that will go to the moon 22 times and back, you know, back to and forth, you know, right now we start to understand, oh, it's not just a big number, you know, and in fact, that that number already may even be, you know, beyond that concreteness. So this is one of those superpowers for copywriters. The more specific, the more concrete you can get, the better your copy will be.
- [47:16]
C
Yeah. And it's, it feels related to, to a second behavioral insight that we have about Dyson. Dyson. When they launched their bagless vacuum, James Dyson famously says, it took me 5,000, 127 prototypes to get to the perfect bagless vacuum. It's in the first ad they ever did. It's the first line of his autobiography. I believe it was true for James Tyson. Like, I believe that that's how it was. But it gives the illusion of effort. And so that specificity on top of it being concrete, which is the first part of our conversation, specificity really helps sell the believability of the thing, which is, I think, what you're focusing on.
- [48:04]
B
Yeah, labor elution is another one of those cognitive biases that we can tap into. We don't have a lot of time left. But I want to mention one other one and then relate it to the release of your book. But you talk about choice restriction and you talk a little bit about Starbucks pumpkin spice latte. It's only available during the season, which makes fans happy. But I noted and I wrote this down in my notes, you talked about expiration dates and offering a coupon with an expiration date that was 60 days out, two months out had a redemption of 6%. Offering a coupon with an expiration date of three weeks out had a redemption rate of 33%. And this is even something I've seen, you know, in, in my own business. And copywriters who do launches will see this, you know, webinar show up rates, if you are scheduling them two or three weeks out are abysmally low. Or sales call show up lates, if you're scheduling next week instead of this week, you're reducing the show up rate by 50% or more. And so this relationship between when something is happening or needs to happen and the amount of time that we have to think about it or to ignore it and forget about it really matters when it comes to a lot of the things that we're promoting as copywriters.
- [49:28]
C
Yeah. And it's interesting because I think the category, the vertical you're working in does matter. So for example, if you are selling healthier for you food, you are much more likely to make a healthy choice about a food that you are not buying right now, but that you are buying in the future. So if I am to, if I'm selling you indulgent product, I want you to make the choice right now at the checkout line. I'm going to put my candy bars and my snacks and treats right there because it's a grab and go purchase. But if I'm asking you to choose your meals for next week on the flight, you see this increase of people choosing healthier options. If you've ever been to a wedding and you chose the dinner three months in advance for that wedding, you can see the people that get the steak and potatoes. You longingly look at them because you chose the steamed fish and vegetable option. And so there is a difference in what you are choosing at what verticals and what categories. But I think your insight is so spot on when it comes to getting a action that you want to see. The closer in to the immediacy of the message that you can make it, the more likely you are to going to see that action. So we see, as you said, coupon rates. If you limit the number of time they have to redeem the coupon, redemption goes way up. If you limit the number of cans. There's a famous study of Campbell's Soup that you can buy at the grocery store. If you give a limit, you say this is a great deal, but we can only offer it up to 12 cans. You see more redemption of the can. So now we're not playing with time, we're playing with quantity. But you have these opportunities where you provide a restriction of some type and you see that implied value be received by the buyers and they, and they generally will react.
- [51:21]
B
The reason I mentioned this is because we are recording here middle of August, beginning of August actually, and the book doesn't come out until September 30th, I think. And so holding off on releasing the episode. So it's a little closer to that September 30th deadline because I think that there are a lot of copywriters, content writers and marketers who really ought to be perusing the pages of this book and just looking for ideas that they can test in their own businesses. So yeah, tell us just, you know, a one or two minute clip about the rest of the book and where we can get it.
- [51:59]
C
Absolutely. Thanks Michael, for that endorsement and for us. We, my co author, Richard Schotten and I just really believe that these principles in this book can make better work. And so we are passionate about taking the ideas, taking the examples and bringing them to as many marketers, brand owners, copywriters, creatives as we can to help give you practical evidence based insights that will help you create better work and better creative. So we're proud of Hacking the Human Mind. It will be available on September 30th wherever books are sold. If we are out before we're accepting pre orders on Amazon and if you visit our website, the consumer behaviorlab.com in addition to the book, we have a video masterclass where we teach these concepts from the book and more. And of course we have our podcast Behavioral Science for Brands that we'd love for anybody to take a listen. After you listen to the Copywriter Club.
- [53:00]
B
Podcast, there's you have an interview there with Rory Sutherland. Yeah, he is my dream guest for this podcast. Someday maybe episode 500 I can get Rory to to pop on but I really enjoy the book. Michael Aaron Again we'll, we'll share the link in the show notes so that people can find it. And again, this is the kind of stuff that if you want to be great at not just writing but at strategy and thinking through how do you make your writing more effective? This is the kind of stuff you need to be studying. So thanks again for your time.
- [53:37]
C
Thanks so much for having me on.
- [53:45]
A
Thanks Michael Aaron, for sharing some of the ideas from your book Hacking the Human Mind. That book just went on sale last week. You can get it now at Amazon and other bookstores. I've linked to it in the Show Notes. If you want to just grab your own copy, simply open up your podcast app and it should be near the top of the description. There's a link there that you can click on and buy from Amazon. I mentioned this quote from Daniel Kahneman during the interview Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats, and they can do it, but they prefer not to. As copywriters, we need to be aware of how much our potential clients are programmed not to use their brains. It's not that they don't want to, but evolution has ensured that our bodies conserve energy so it's available when we need it. Thinking burns energy, and if we do things in our marketing that require our readers to figure things out, they spend energy trying to understand what we want them to do. They'll shut down. If it's difficult, readers won't do it. We're pretty much asking cats to swim. Okay, don't forget to check out Research Mastery, the proven research program that will help you write better copy and sell more. If you want to use some of the ideas that we talked about in this episode, Research Mastery is a really good place to start. It's going to help you connect your conversion tactics with the deeply felt worldview that your potential clients are experiencing. You can find out more about it@thecopywriterclub.com research mastery that's the end of this episode of the Copywriter Club podcast. If you like what you've heard, please share it with someone you know. Or if you don't know another writer or freelancer who you can share it with, visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever it is you listen to your favorite podcasts and leave a review. If you haven't left a review before, now's the time. I promise when you share the Copywriter Club podcast, your friends will thank you. I definitely thank you and I hope.
- [55:28]
B
To see you next week.
- [55:35]
C
Sam.