The Marketing Psychology Secrets Behind the World’s Best Brands with Richard Shotton | Ep. 375

Summary

The Marketing Millennials: "The Marketing Psychology Secrets Behind the World’s Best Brands"

Host: Daniel Murray
Guest: Richard Shotton (Author, Behavioral Science Expert)
Episode 375 | December 17, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Daniel Murray sits down with behavioral science expert Richard Shotton, author of "The Choice Factory," "The Illusion of Choice," and "Hacking Human Mind," to dive deep into the psychology behind the world’s top brands. Shotton unpacks actionable, research-backed insights into how marketers can leverage behavioral science—from social proof and the labor illusion, to the critical role of humor and the art of building trust. The conversation brims with stories, experiments, and practical tactics for marketers looking to elevate their craft.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Social Proof: The Gold Standard Bias in Marketing (02:07–11:12)

• Why Social Proof Works:
  Shotton highlights social proof as arguably the single most effective behavioral bias marketers should use—even if they don't know the exact challenge they’re facing. “Humans are a herd species. So we are deeply influenced by what we think others are doing.” (02:12, Richard Shotton)
• Levels of Sophistication:
  • Basic: Displaying customer logos or total user count.
  • Better: Specificity (e.g., "3,100 people in Miami bought this").
  • Best: Letting customers discover popularity themselves, which increases its persuasiveness.
• Memorable Experiment:
  Kaiser’s Netherlands alleyway study shows people are more likely to litter if the alley looks dirty versus clean—without ever stating what's "normal", people infer behavior from their environment. (04:20–06:45)
• Tactical Application:
  • Product sold out vs. out of stock (implies high demand, not poor logistics).
  • “If you label your product sold out, you’re drawing attention to the fact that there was this deep demand for it, that there was an unexpected kind of surge of interest.” (08:25, Richard Shotton)

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2. Humor & The Halo Effect: The Overlooked Brand Superpower (11:12–17:54)

• Data on Declining Humor:
  Only ~35% of ads use humor today, down from over 50% in the 90s. “From a behavioral science perspective, that is a big mistake.” (11:51, Richard Shotton)
• The Halo Effect:
  Warm, funny behavior in ads makes brands more likeable—and boosts unrelated perceptions like quality and trustworthiness (citing Wilson & Nisbet studies).
• Why Humor Wins:
  • Easier to demonstrate convincingly in ads, compared to traits like trust.
  • Humor influences all other metrics through the halo effect.
    “If you can score on one metric very well, all your other metrics will follow.” (15:04, Richard Shotton)

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3. Labor Illusion: Artificial Intelligence & Perceived Quality (17:54–24:44)

• The Problem with AI Perception:
  “People often conflate the effort a brand’s gone to with its quality.” (18:31, Richard Shotton)
• Research Rundown:
  • Kobe Millet study: Same art, lower purchase intent if labeled as AI-generated (“3.2” vs. “4.85” on a 7-point scale).
• Counteracting the Bias:
  • Stress the human effort in developing the AI, or the expertise behind the prompt.
  • In interfaces, show the “work” being done—like flight search sites visually “checking” airline databases—which increases perceived thoroughness.
  • “Slowing down the results and telling people what's happening will improve the user happiness with what they get.” (22:49, Richard Shotton)
• Marketer’s Action:
  Don’t simply tout AI; reveal the work that underpins the outputs.

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4. Building Trust Through Stolen Thunder (Admitting Flaws) (25:04–31:46)

• The Stolen Thunder Effect:
  • Origin: Legal research; cases are more persuasive when the defense admits to minor weaknesses first. “If you admit any weakness...then you have proven your honesty and then everything else you claim is that bit more believable.” (26:42, Richard Shotton)
• Practical Examples:
  • Waiters openly admitting what’s not good on the menu.
  • Brands like Avis (“We’re No. 2, so we try harder”), Guinness (“Good things come to those who wait”), Buckley’s (“It tastes awful. And it works.”)
• Framework for Application:
  1. Admit a minor flaw, never a critical one.
  2. Ideally, pick a weakness that underscores your core strength (e.g., “takes longer because it’s made fresh.”)
• Expert Credo:
  • Bill Bernbach: “A small admission gains a large acceptance.”
  • David Abbott: “Confession is good for the soul—and it’s good for copy, too.”

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5. Direct Questioning vs. Behavioral Experiments (33:12–34:44)

• Marketing “Hill to Die On”:
  Don’t rely on surveys or focus groups alone; people are poor at explaining why they do things (citing Timothy Wilson, “Strangers to Ourselves”). Instead:
  “Stop direct questioning in surveys, stop relying so much on focus groups, and instead set up simple testing, control experiments to get to the truth.” (33:38, Richard Shotton)

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6. Stickiness Through Concreteness: Apple’s Thousand Songs (34:44–39:39)

• The Power of Visual Language:
  • People remember things they can visualize (“white horse”) four times better than abstract phrases (“subtle truth”).
  • Apple’s genius: Marketing an iPod as “1,000 songs in your pocket” versus tech specs like “256MB”.
  • “What you need to do is be more like Apple. Translate those abstract ideals into things that people can visualize.” (37:17, Richard Shotton)
• Other Memorable Slogans:
  • Red Bull: “Gives you wings”
  • Maxwell House: “Good to the last drop”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Social Proof Nuance:
  “We are most influenced by people like ourselves.” (03:33, Richard Shotton)
• On Humor:
  “Humor is a massively underestimated tactic for a huge variety of brands.” (16:36, Richard Shotton)
• On AI Outputs:
  “People assume AI equals quick and low effort, therefore they downgrade the perceived quality.” (19:32, Richard Shotton)
• On Admitting Weakness:
  “Pick a weakness that is the mirror image of your strength.” (29:14, Richard Shotton)
• On Research:
  “People are four times more likely to remember the things they can visualize.” (36:02, Richard Shotton)

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Actionable Takeaways for Marketers

• Use social proof strategically—tailor it to mirror your audience, and let them infer popularity whenever possible.
• Incorporate humor; it builds a halo that lifts all other perceptions of your brand.
• When using AI, focus on communicating the effort, expertise, and process behind the result—not just the speed or automation.
• Admit a carefully chosen, minor flaw to increase your believability and trustworthiness.
• Replace vague, abstract brand promises with visual, concrete language clients can picture in use.
• Prioritize behavioral experiments over reliance on self-reported surveys and focus groups.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:07] — Social Proof: The Most Universal Bias
• [04:20] — Alleyway Experiment & Inferring Behavior
• [07:57] — Sold Out vs. Out of Stock
• [11:42] — Humor’s Role in Branding & The Halo Effect
• [17:54] — AI, Labor Illusion, and Perceived Quality
• [25:04] — Building Trust by Admitting Flaws (“Stolen Thunder”)
• [33:12] — The Limits of Surveys: You Don’t Even Know Yourself
• [34:44] — Apple’s “1000 Songs”: The Power of Concreteness

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Where to Find Richard Shotton

• Books: Amazon, Waterstones, WH Smith and other major bookstores
• LinkedIn: Richard Shotton
• Twitter/X: @rshotton

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Richard Shotton distills the science behind legendary marketing—proving that applying concrete, well-researched psychological principles can give any brand an edge. This episode is a must-listen for marketers hungry to upgrade their strategies with proven, inspiring tactics.

Transcript

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[Daniel Murray]

Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up.

We are back with another episode of the Market Millennials podcast. Today I round to Richard Shot and if you don't haven't read his books, you need to go grab them right now. He's going to tell you about them, but he is one of the best in the world at behavioral science and we're going to talk about that today. And I know you all love marketing psychology as much as I do. So excited to dive in. But I would let Richard give his little spiel of like who he is and what's going on in his life right now.

[Richard Shotton]

Well, after that very kind introduction, I feel it's only one way, it's only down from there. So I probably should say nothing but so I am very much interested in how you take findings from psychology, behavioral science and apply them to marketing. And I've written three books on the topic. Choice Factory was the first one, Illusion of Choice the second. And then I have a third that's just come out, co authored Michael Aaron Flicker called Hacking Human Mind. So hopefully we can dive into some of those findings and practical implications.

[Daniel Murray]

I think let's get off the bat this get tactical off the bat and say like what is one behavioral science bias? Every market should start using tomorrow. I know there's a bunch, but what is one that someone could apply? Right?

[Richard Shotton]

I mean that's fair. I mean there are thousands. But if there was, if you had to go to one, like if I didn't know what the client challenge was, what the brief was, but my life depended on helping them resolve it, I would say, look, you've got to be considering social proof to social proof is the idea that humans are a herd species. So we are deeply influenced by what we think others are doing. So the idea for a marketer is one of the key challenges is you've got to try and make whatever you're selling, whatever you're trying to encourage people to do, make it appear like it's popular now, that sounds super simple, and certainly some people do it, but any of these biases, once you get under the skin, there are all sorts of different nuances and applications that most people aren't applying as much as they should.

[Daniel Murray]

Okay, I mean, social proof, I think some people know what it is. Some people put logos on the website. Some people say, how many people have bought in the last, let's say, day? But I think some people do it because people say you should put logos and say, but how could you strategically think about putting social producer on your website or landing page or on ads? How do you think about it?

[Richard Shotton]

So those examples you mentioned, I would say, are as good as far as they go. But that's quite an explicit, direct use of social proof. So one finding from studies by people like Chill D and Ian, but also the British Behavioral Insights team, is we are most influenced by people like ourselves. So if you tell clients that you've got this really impressive roster of people who've picked you, or if you say to a user, you know, 10,000 other people have bought this product, those are basic uses of social proof. But the argument is we're not influenced by other people equally. We are most influenced by people like ourselves. So what you really want to do is tailor those messages to the audience. So if I know that you live in Florida or you live in Texas, far better to tell you how many other customers there are in those states rather than as America as a whole. That would be one little nuance you could. You could add to social proof. But then you start going further, and then the next big thing with social proof is it's all very well and good to tell the audience that you're popular, but what you really want to do is let them come to their own conclusions. Because an audience might be skeptical about a claim of popularity, but if they think they've come to their own conclusion, they will give that belief far more weight. Now, that's not speculation. There's a 2008 study from Kaes Kaiser at the University of Koningen in the Netherlands, and what he does is he finds an alleyway where loads of Dutch people park their bikes. And crucially, there is no trash can. He goes down to the alleyway reasonably early in the morning and he puts flyers on the handlebar of the bike for a fictitious sport shop. Now, remember, there is no bin. So when Kaiser wanders off 20 yards and stealthily monitors what the returning cyclists do, they essentially have two options. They either chuck the rubbish on the floor or they take it home. With them. Now, Kaiser sets up this study in one of two ways. So first way, he goes down to the alleyway very early in the morning and he cleans it up. So he picks up every bit of litter, paints over every bit of graffiti. He makes it look like most people take their litter home with them. And when he does that, just 33% of the returning cyclists chuck their litter on the floor. Other days, same alleyway, same setup with one little twist. He goes down to the alleyway really early in the morning, and on these occasions, he makes it a complete tip. Throws trash on the floor, paints graffiti on the walls. He makes it look like most people are litter bugs. Most people chuck their rubbish on the floor. And when he does that, there is a more than doubling of littering rates. So now you're up to 69% of people littering. And the argument here from Kaiser is this is about social proof. If you create the impression that most people litter, then you will encourage that behavior. If you create the impression that most people take the litter home with them, you'll encourage that positive behavior. And he says it's a particularly powerful determinant of behavior because you've never directly stated it. You don't invite skepticism, but you let people come to their own conclusions. And then that is super influential. And that is something that I think far more brands could do. And it doesn't have to be complicated.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I think, I think one of the things you said that is very important with social proof is coming to the buyer needs to come in their own conclusion of popularity versus you forcing popularity.

[Richard Shotton]

Or it's better to. I mean, I still think it can work having those logos and statements, but it's better to.

[Daniel Murray]

Like you said, there's levels to this. The basic level is just putting logos on your side and then saying 300,000 people bought. Then the next thing is like 3100 being specific. Then the next level is like, you name people in Miami who also love this bought, and then this levels to it that you can go down to get the social proof better and better.

[Richard Shotton]

Yeah, exactly. And I think almost the pinnacle is allowing people to come to their own conclusions. Now, this can be done in so many different ways. So probably the simplest way is if any listeners have an E commerce site, they need to think about how they label products that aren't available. There's an amazing study by Peterson at the University of Texas, and he gets 1,117 people to go through a web journey and they're trying to buy an item and One of the items on their shopping list just isn't there. I'm trying to pick my words very carefully. And sometimes the product is labeled unavailable and sometimes it's labeled sold out. And what Peterson finds when he later questions people as to irritation levels, when people have seen or the group that have seen sold out, they are 15% less irritated than the group that saw the product labeled out of stock. And his argument is it's all about implied social proof. If you say your products is out of stock, you're drawing attention to your ineptitude, the fact you can't get your logistics right. But if you've labeled your product sold out, you're drawing attention to the fact that there was this deep demand for it, that there was an unexpected kind of surge of interest. So that's a lovely example. Even though it's very, very tactical, it's a lovely example of behavioral sites in action because one, it's a little bit unexpected. I don't think many people think about the exact language they use. Secondly, it's costless. You have to label your product one way or another. Why not do it in the way that works with human nature? And then thirdly, going to this whole point of social proof, if people have found a bias that already works for them in some respects, don't just stop there with the most basic uses of social proof. Keep on thinking what are all the other even higher level ways that I can use? Use this principle.

[Daniel Murray]

I love that because I think even leaving the sold out on your site isn't like social proof that maybe I need to go buy another product because the other product might sell out versus saying unavailable. It feels less like there's less demand for the product. It's just I didn't buy enough inventory. Like when I go into sites and I see oh this product sold out, this 3 inventory of this is left and it feels, oh my goodness, there's so much demand. I just should just buy one of them because I, I might need it right now. It's like loss.

[Richard Shotton]

That's not a silly reaction on your part. I think about it from the consumer's perspective. How do you work out of a product is half decent? You know, if you listen to the advertisers claims, you know, everyone, every, it doesn't help at all because every advertiser says, every brand says they're amazing. But if you copy what similar people are doing, while the assumption is those similar people have already weighed up cost versus benefits of these items and the assumption is that this crowd has A wisdom that maybe helps us guide our decisions. So it's a reasonably accurate decision on the shopper's part, but it's something that if a brand knows about, they can then harness.

[Daniel Murray]

I want to go into, I think, talking about, because we do this a lot at the market, Millennials and I know brands do this, but like humor from a behavioral science point of view, like, how could you explain why humor works when people should use humor and how, how to think about it? Because it obviously works with some brands. Some brands definitely, and some people miss the mark. So how, how do you think about it from a behavior science point of view?

[Richard Shotton]

So I think humor is a massively underused tactic by brands. So there's work from the big research agency, Kantar. I think the scale is about 200,000 global ads they've looked at and I won't get the data exactly right, but it's something along the lines of 1990s, 55, 60% of ads tried to amuse. 20, 23, it was down to about 30%, 35%. So you've seen this long term, pretty consistent decline in humor. From a behavioral science perspective, that is a big mistake. And I think humor is something that advertisers should think about because if you can behave wittily, if you can amuse people, it doesn't just make your brand likeable, it affects all your brand metrics. So there's an idea called the halo effect. The original studies go all the way back to the 1930s and work by people like Edward Thorndike. But the idea kind of really started taking off in the 1970s with work by people like Richard Nisbet. And was it Timothy? No, Richard Nisbet, Timothy Wilson. And what they did was they got a colleague. So this is a Belgian guy who worked at an American university. And they get this colleague to give a lecture. And he gives the same content twice. But one occasion he behaves in a friendly, warm manner. The other occasion he's a bit cold and grumpy. So they have two recordings, same content, but different warmth levels. Get a group of people, randomize them, and half the people see the warm lecturer, half see the cold lecturer. Watch the video. And then Nisbet and Wolsten start to question the viewers. And the first bits of data are very obvious when people are asked, did they like the lecturer, how warm was he? People far, far higher scores when they saw that friendly lecturer. So far, so obvious. But the really interesting bit is Wilson and Nisbet continue their questioning, but then they start asking about completely unrelated matters. So they say things like, how good looking was the lecturer, what was the, the factual content, like how intelligent was he? All sorts of unrelated metrics. And what they see is the same pattern. The warm lecturer is rated much, much better than the cold lecturer. And we're talking up to kind of a doubling on some of the metrics. Now, their argument, and this is what they call, along with Thorndike, the halo effect. They say people are always looking for shortcuts. Life is complex. There's a lot of decisions. We can't weigh them all up. We're always looking to make quick, snap decisions. Now, what people should do when they are evaluating the looks and the intelligence of a lecturer is they should weigh up all those different attributes independently. But that is a complex, time consuming task. What Nisbet and Wilson say that most people do instead is they latch onto one standout metric, like warmth, and then they use that as a guide to all their other characteristics. So for people or for products or for brands, if you can score on one metric very well, all your other metrics will follow. Now go back to this point of humour. Why, of all the metrics you could shift, why think about humor? Well, fundamentally, humor is something you can do in an ad. Being trustworthy or high quality is much harder. You can make claims about trustworthiness and high quality, but we know that people are very skeptical about those claims. But in an ad you can actually be funny. So the power of doing something rather than claiming or something is not to be sniffed at. And if you communicate that humor, all your other metrics will follow. So I think too many brands approach problem solving literally and narrow mindedly. So they think to themselves, okay, well, I need to be trusted more, I need to get across quality. And then they very directly communicate those attributes, but they are very hard to actually prove in an ad. Whereas if you approach the problem more obliquely, you recognize all you need to do is score well on one metric, everything else will follow. What you do instead is you pick something that ads can demonstrate very powerfully. You pick humor as the lever you pull. So for me, I think humor is a massively underestimated tactic for a huge variety of brands.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I think, I mean, like you said, the literal problem of I need to add trust, let me just add words to make me more trusted versus let me figure, like when people are more trusted, what are they like? Are they more humorous, are they more, are they nicer? The qualities of what a human would be if they were more trustworthy. And then Apply that to your marketing versus I need to be this, I need to add this into my marketing.

[Richard Shotton]

Yeah, I think it's, think what can I easily communicate and powerfully communicate. Focus on that, on your advertising and other metrics will follow. And a 30 second TV sport, a poster, a little bit of online content that is brilliantly set up to allow someone to be funny. It's really bad to allow you to prove in a short space of time that you're genuinely trustworthy. So use media for what it's designed for rather than what you are directly trying to solve. Because the halo effect means people will not judge every one of your attributes independently. If you score amazingly well on one of them, all your other attributes will follow.

[Daniel Murray]

I, I want to go down the rabbit hole of trustworthiness perception. And one of the biggest things that are happening right now, and I know you've talked about it, is the perception of AI and using AI and being low quality if outputs come out fast. So what is your tactical advice for people who want to use AI but also want to maintain that aspect of I'm doing quality work or my product's quality or my marketing's qual party?

[Richard Shotton]

So the issue with AI is there is an idea known as the labor illusion or the illusion of effort, which is essentially that people often conflate the effort a brand's gone to with its quality. And the original studies by people like Morales show that exactly the same product, if it's given this kind of story about having taken a long time to create, a lot of effort's gone into it, exactly the same product will be rated better than an identical one where people think it was put together quickly. So people use effort as a proxy for quality. Now there are studies that show this blights AI output. So there's a bit of work done in 2023 by Kobe Millet, who's at VR University, a big university in Amsterdam. And he shows people products. So for example, one of the products is a poster of a skull and he asks the audience to rate the creativity, the artistic merits, but most importantly for us, things like the purchase intent. The twist in the experiment is that some people see that product labeled as hand drawn, others see it as labeled created by a AI powered robot. Post is exactly the same in all these different scenarios. It's just the label that changes. And what Millet finds is when it comes to something like purchase intent, I think if it's the AI, this is a seven point scale. If it's the AI generator poster or supposedly AI generated there's a 3.2 rating, whereas I think it's 4.85 if it's hand drawn. So you got this. I think it's 61% variance in purchase intent for exactly the same product. Now Millet's argument is this is a factor of the labor illusion. People assume AI equals quick and low effort, therefore they downgrade the perceived quality of that of that output. So even exactly the same item, if it's labeled as AI generated, we think it's put together quickly and therefore we rate it lower. So you have a fundamental problem here. Now, I would be a Luddite, I would be crazy if I said to people that don't use AI, that would be a ridiculous outtake from the Millet paper. But what people have got to recognize is that the same product will be judged worse if people think it's been created by AI unless they go to counterbalancing measures. Now the counterbalancing measure is to stress the effort that went into the creation of the AI or what you've the expertise or the years that set up the protocols and systems draw attention to those rather than the speed of output.

[Daniel Murray]

I love that. I think that also the addition that AI models have added where it takes time for the output when they probably could spit it out pretty fast, but now they show all the articles, it's looking at all the things it's researching and then it spits out shows that labor of effort. So it looks like the information is more legit than if I set a prompt and it came out in two seconds.

[Richard Shotton]

Absolutely. And I've not seen a study to put that very specific use to a test with AI, but it has been done with flight comparison sites. So there's a really nice study from. I think it's either Boo Ellen Norton or Bo Ellen Kim. But Ryan Burwell's at Harvard Business School and he showed people a travel comparison site. And some people saw it in its natural form. You know, they put in where they wanted to fly and the results came out immediately. Other people, he does this sneaky thing where they get the results a few seconds slower. But while they're waiting for the results, a little bar goes round and round saying, searching United Airlines, searching Delta, certain, British Airways, searching Qantas, and the group that saw that slow down version, which was transparent about the efforts going on behind the scenes, they rated the output something like 8 to 15% more comprehensive than the people that got quick service. So I think what you're saying there are proxies in related Worlds which suggest. Yes, absolutely. Slowing down the results and telling people what's happening will improve the user happiness with what they get.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah. And I think what's that quote where they say it took me 10 years to create this 20 minute drawing or something like that? It's sometimes the prompting it takes. If you want to go prompt about behavioral science and let it help you write an article based on your knowledge versus me prompting your results were probably going to be better than mine. But if we put the same article and said it created by AI, the trustworthiness probably could be the exact same. Because I didn't say that I put my years of experience in the AI to be like I fed it all my life's work. And that may be more trustworthy than saying that I just created this with AI.

[Richard Shotton]

Yeah. And it's very easy for people to fall into this narrow minded, logical opinion which is, you know, the quality of the report or the quality of the essay should stand on its own two legs. But what the experiments suggest is maybe that's how people should behave, but it's not how they actually behave. Again and again, people use effort as a proxy for quality. So it's not that you can't create and be open about an AI generated essay. And people absolutely love it. It's not as clear cut as that. The point is if you create two essays of absolutely equal quality, you label one as AI generated and one as handwritten, even though they're the same, people will write that hand written, manually resourced one as the better. So unless you counteract this, then you're not doing the brilliant work you've created, you're not doing it justice.

[Daniel Murray]

I want to. Okay, so we talk about social proof, we talk about delusion of effort or what are some things that people can do now in their marketing that could uplevel their trustworthiness based on behavior.

[Richard Shotton]

So untrustworthiness, there's a few different things. There's the Stolen Thunder effects, probably the one that's worth thinking about most. So this is a technique lawyers use. And I think the work was done by Kipling Williams at University of Toledo. And essentially what he does is give people some scripts to read. So you get a defense case and a prosecution case and the readers have to say, is the defendant guilty or not? And one version, there's a defence case that's quite powerful, and then the prosecution comes and follows it and they pick on one particular hole in the defence argument, the other version. So that's the first group of people read that they see exactly the same defense argument to begin with, but there's one sentence at the end, two sentences maybe, where the defence lawyer draws attention to the weakness in their case. They don't try and dispel it, they don't try and refute it, but they are open and honest about the weakness in their case. And then this second group get exactly the same penetrating argument from the prosecution in which they kind of double down on why that weakness is so important. Now, what Williams finds is that in that second set of people, they are much more likely to think the defendant was innocent. Now, the crucial point here is the facts in the case have not changed the relative strength of the defence versus the prosecution argument. The facts haven't changed. All the defence does is admit there's a weakness. But what seems to happen is if you admit that there's a flaw in your argument or your product or your service, it is a very tangible proof point for honesty. And then everything else you've claimed just gets that little boost to its believability. So what I would stress to most marketers is most people who hear what you're selling are going to be deeply skeptical. It's not a new problem. It's a problem that's befallen commercial advertising forever. Essentially, your audience know you have a very strong vested interest to spin the truth. It's in your financial interest to say you're amazing. So they are deeply skeptical. But if you admit any weakness in your product, then you have proven your honesty and then everything else you claim is that bit more believable. So I would suggest if you want to build trust, one of the best things you can do is identify a weakness in your product or a weakness in your argument and be very, very open about it. And then there are nuances to that, of course.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, I think this happens all the time without people realizing when they go to restaurants and the people say that, hey, we're amazing at chicken, we're amazing at steak, but don't eat the. I wouldn't recommend the fish because it's not my favorite. And then you trust that waiter way more. The other two dishes are really good because if he's. And he's telling me some versus someone coming up to you and saying, oh, I love one thing, like I love all these things on the menu. You can't go wrong. It's way more. Trust me to steer one to one example. Yeah, yeah, Avis did it too. And all these.

[Richard Shotton]

Yes, that's the. That's the. That as you said, you Talked about the levels of social proof. You get the same thing with the, with the stolen thunder effect. So the base level is admit a flaw. Obviously pick a flaw that isn't fundamental to your argument. You know, when people sit down you don't say oh my gosh, just be careful about eating here. I hope you're all, you know, healthy because we've had a few problems with food poisoning. Now you wouldn't want to admit a fundamental problem. So the base level is admitting a reasonably minor flaw and then you get the benefits in believability. The super smart way of doing it is picking a weakness very carefully. What you ideally want to do is, is pick a weakness that is the mirror image of your strength. So you mentioned Davis. Their famous line was we're number two so we try harder. Other people who've done this would be Guinness. Good things come to those who wait. Bruckley's cough syrup in Canada it tastes awful and it works. Now what's so clever about those three brands is they are picking their weakness very carefully. So Buckley's this cough syrup, they admit that it's foul tasting because actually if you think a medicine is foul tasting it kind of insinuates that it must be pretty potent or Guinness you admit that it takes a long time for you to be served because people assume well if it's slow it's probably high quality. Now there's an awful lot of weaknesses that have a mirror strength. And I think the best brands are very, very careful in the flaw that they admit.

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[Daniel Murray]

Yeah I mean I, I, I've seen some rest I like I'm going back to restaurants but I saw this restaurant that says basically was said that like good food takes patience and so like to to warn people like their flaw is it takes a lot of time but that means we're actually cooking the food yeah fresh right now and it's just you want your food to be fresh and you're willing to wait if it's supposed to be great food. So if you're actually great, but your only weakness takes a long time or takes a little bit of a wait, you're more than likely to ignore that wait time in order to get the good food. But if you just don't admit that and just say everything's good and then it takes 45 minutes, everybody's getting pissed because you didn't say your flow up front or you didn't, you didn't state the obvious up front, that it could ruin the experience because you've. I've been in so many places where it took a long time, you weren't told, and then you just get angrier and angry. And then the food taste works because the experience is bad.

[Richard Shotton]

So the danger is what the restaurant learn is slowness creates unhappy customers. But I think what the marketer should learn, the best marketer, is, well, okay, if we're always going to be slow, people are going to find this out sooner or later. So let's benefit by being upfront about it so we're trusted elsewhere and be upfront about it by linking that slowness to high quality. And it's an interesting one in that if you think about maybe the most respected creative directors in America and Britain over the last hundred years, in America, I would argue it's Bill Bernbach, and maybe in Britain it's David Abbott. And what Bill Bernback famously said in the late 50s was, a small admission gains a large acceptance. And what David Abbott said in the 1980s in Britain was, confession is good for the soul, and it's good for copy, too. And I think when you start seeing experimental evidence that shows the power of admitting a flaw, and then you see the best practitioners talking about the power of admitting a flaw, you know, when you see it from both academic and practical exploitation, then I think, you know, you're on something really powerful.

[Daniel Murray]

I want to, I ask everybody in this podcast this question, but I want to ask you what is a marketing hill you would die on?

[Richard Shotton]

Oh, I. Okay, okay. So maybe something that I think is super important and at the heart of a lot of problems is that consumers don't necessarily know why the things they. Why they do the things they do. There's a brilliant psychologist at the University of Virginia called Timothy Wilson, and he wrote a book which sums up his thinking, and it's called Strangers to Ourselves. And it's this idea that people don't know their motivations. They don't have full introspective insight. So if you just send them a survey or if you sit them down in a focus group when they explain why they bought your trainers or your mobile phone or your pint of beer, they're speculating. They don't really know. They send you off in the wrong direction. So one hill I would die on is stop direct questioning in surveys, stop relying so much on focus groups, and instead set up simple testing, control experiments to get to the truth. That's a far, far more accurate way of understanding the real drivers of behavior.

[Daniel Murray]

Last question I have for you is your new book, what is one of the takeaways people can get from it? I know there's a lot, but they can read the rest of the takeaways. But what is one that you. They'll absolutely get take away from it if they start reading today.

[Richard Shotton]

So book is broken into 17 chapters. Each chapter is about a brand and then we explain the success of that brand by looking at the behavioral science tactics they use. So each chapter probably has two or three core insights. One of the ones I absolutely love is the chapter about Apple. And we talk about a few different areas of Apple. But the particular study that I think is really simple for people to copy but has massive results is the idea of concreteness. So it's the argument that humans are amazing at remembering information they can visualize. They are bloody awful at remembering abstract, non visualizable things. So that the original work was done by Ian begg back in 1972 at the University of Western Ontario. Super simple study. Reads out A list of 22 word phrases to the audience, and he then asks people later on to recall as much as they can. Now, half of the words he reads out are what he calls a concrete phrase. So it could be white horse or square door. These are tangible things that you can visualize. And half of the words are abstract phrases, intangible concepts like subtle truth or basic fact. And what Begg finds is that on average, people remember 36% of the concrete phrases but only 9% of the abstractions. So there's this massive, genuinely massive difference in memorability. People are four times more likely to remember the things they can visualize. His explanation is essentially that vision is the most powerful of our senses. It's a language you can visualize. That's sticky language. You can't visualize. Very forgettable. You now think about Apple's success in the world of MP3 players. And I think a lot of it is down to the concrete language they use in their advertising. Now, all those other brands like Philips and Motorola, they used to talk about things like 256 megabytes. They try to convey the benefit of a MP3 player by talking about storage in terms of megabytes. But because you can't remember a megabyte, completely forgettable. What Apple did, they still have exactly that same objective of conveying memory and storage, but they translated it into language. People could visualize a thousand songs in your pocket. And because you can picture a pocket, you can imagine a song, it becomes much, much stickier. Now that is not only a massive memorability variation, much, much more likely, four times more likely to remember the concrete. It's also something that most advertisers transgress and most advertisers talk about quality or premiumness or trustworthiness. These are simple concepts an audience can understand, but because they're so intangible, because they can't be pitched in people's mind's eye, they are completely forgettable. What you need to do is be more like Apple. Translate those abstract ideals into, into things that people can visualize.

[Daniel Murray]

Yeah, and I think the, the next step of that is visualize in their day to day life of like how it's going to improve. The thousand songs in my pocket. Oh, right now I've. My problem is I can only have a CD of back in the day, a CD player with 12 songs. I, I couldn't pick my songs. They were one CD versus I can have a thousand different songs on a player that I can listen to while I walk. And now they can create a story in their head around that. It's hard to create a story About Trust and 30 megabytes. There's no storytelling in your head when you say those things.

[Richard Shotton]

Yeah, I think when we talk about storytelling, especially for a small business, it can feel slightly vague or hard for them to achieve. What I like about this study is it's very clear. It's like just try and think of a visualizable alternative for the abstract language you're using. And once you think about that as a goal, you can start looking at some of the greatest ever slogans and seeing it being applied again and again. The obvious thing for Red Bull to have done would have been to say Red Bull gives you energy, but they say Red Bull gives you wings. You know, wings are something you can picture. Maxwell House didn't say, you know, we're great tasting all the way through. They said good to the last drop. You know, it's turning what could have so easily been a bland abstract ideal into something that's much more tangible, much more visualizable and if you start thinking about it that way, you can very easily harness one of the most powerful memory techniques.

[Daniel Murray]

And lastly, where can people find your books you etc.

[Richard Shotton]

So books you know, Amazon in Britain, WH Smith or Waterstones, all you know, major bookstores and then me I'm on LinkedIn so R. Shotten, Richard Shotton are generally post about how you take financial behavioral science to and you can apply them to marketing and then yeah on Twitter at rshotten. So any of those means people please do drop me a line and or follow me and hopefully there's some more stuff that people can use.

[Daniel Murray]

Well, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

[Richard Shotton]

Yeah, cheers Daniel.

[Daniel Murray]

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.