B (3:06)

Oh, good question. Is that you're asking me? Yeah, just under two minutes. There is a specific number, but I would struggle to tell you exactly the number.

A (3:15)

Well, I mean, James and I actually ended up over at the Guinness storehouse. We recorded an episode, this must have been about 18 months ago. We actually met a guy called Colm who is like this world famous expert on how to pour a Guinness. He's poured David Beckham a pint. He's poured Rihanna a pint. And honestly, it's amazing what he can tell you. But I thought I would find out from Google actually whether there's actually a precise answer to how long it actually takes. Let me see if we can find out. Hey, Google, I want to know how long does it take to pour the perfect pint of Guinness? Oh, there we go. All right, here we go. The perfect pint of Guinness takes precisely 119.5 seconds to pour, including a two stage process that allows the beer to settle and form its signature creamy head. There you go. And apparently you should pour to about 3/4 at a 45 degree angle, waiting for the surge to settle. And then you top it, top it off from there to create the perfect edit. Okay, there you go.

B (4:19)

Well, so Guinness is one of the chapters. We don't talk about precision in the chapter, but I think that argument or their discussion of being 119.5 seconds rather than roughly two minutes, they're onto something there as well. There's that there's a brilliant study from Schindler at Rutgers University and he shows people ads for a deodorant. And sometimes he says it reduces perspiration by 50%. Sometimes he says it reduces perspiration by 47% or 53%. Half people see 47, half 53. And when he asks people as to how accurate they think this claim is and how credible they think the claim is people who see the precise number, they rate the claim 10% more accurate, 5% more credible than the people who saw the round number. And Schindler's argument is essentially, over time, people learn that those who know what they're talking about, they tend to speak specifically, they tend to speak precisely those who are just, you know, thinking it up on the hoof, who are just wildly speculating, they give you a round answer. And this association has become so wedding in people's minds, it's taken on a life of its own. So you say to someone, it takes 119 seconds to pour a Guinness. And they think, oh gosh, that must be a very, very specific reason if you say it just takes two minutes. It feels like an unimportant piece of trivia. So even on that little element, I like what they're doing there.

A (5:47)

Now, I know this rather personally because when you came on the podcast last time, yeah, for the first time, rather, I was really desperate for five star reviews. And so I was kind of like, you're messaging everybody listening, oh, I'd love to get a review. Because everyone starts out wants social proof of 5 star reviews. When I spoke to you about this, I actually thought, oh, maybe a 4.9 is better. So someone messaged me and said how much they'd enjoyed the episode and I said, I'd love a review. Can you not give me a five star review? And they went and put a four star review. I instantly regretted it after that because it dragged my average down to 4.7. I was like, oh, damn it. But anyway, there's something about a non precise number that does make it more believeable. So there.

B (6:29)

This leads into the pratfall effect of it. There is a study by Northwestern University where they looked at 100,000 odd product reviews and these are all quantifications. So they're all, I think, one to five. And what they find is that as the score of the product gets better, as you'd expect, purchasing becomes more likely. But then for every product, every category, they look at 25, 26 categories, there is a turning point. So it's something like between 4.2 and 4.8 for FMCG products, you start getting higher than that and you begin to see a downturn in terms of purchase. And the argument from the psychologist was perfection is too good to be true. What's more likely, there's this brand that's absolutely perfect without flaw, or the marketer has been airbrushing out the negative comments. So you see five star reviews and Often people will think it's spurious. I think there is an argument that a 4.9 would be better. It's more believable. Now where that line is, is it 4.2, is it 4.9? I think that's very category dependent. And if most podcasts are very high, you might see that that Threshold is at 4.95, not 4.7.

A (7:50)

Yeah. Now say pratful is my favorite behavioral science thing. I try and think of any time I do a presentation. Is there a little pratful I could bring in at the beginning of my presentation just to get the audience on my side? Isn't it because people kind of like a stumble, a bit of imperfection, because it just makes you human, doesn't it?

B (8:07)

Absolutely. So people haven't heard this phrase before. It's the idea that a product or a person that exhibits a flaw becomes more. More appealing. And the classic study was 1966, this amazing Harvard psychologist called Elliot Aronson, and he gets a colleague to take part in a quiz. He gives the colleague all the answers. So this guy goes to the quiz, gets 92% of the questions, right, wins it by miles, looks like a complete genius. But then as the quiz is finishing, he makes what an American in the 60s would have called a pratful. So what we would just call a small blunder. He spills a cup of coffee down himself. Aronson takes this recording and then he plays it to listeners. But sometimes he plays the entire incident, other times he plays an edited version. So people just hear the amazing quiz performance. And then Aronson asks all those listeners to rate the likeability of the contestant and the core finding. And there are nuances and there are variations, but the core finding is, is people who hear the floor as well as the great performance, they rate the contestant 45% more likable than those who just heard the amazing quiz performance. So, yeah, it's this argument that often if you in exhibit a flaw, you become more human, you become more likable, you look like less of a threat. And I think that's something that, yes, Guinness have emphasized. You know, they talked about good things come to those who wait. They've talked about the slowness of the poor. I think the more brands could use this principle because it's a very powerful one.

A (9:46)

Now, there is a major caveat to this, isn't there a huge caveat that you need to be competent in the first place? You can't just make a series of blunders and that you've Got to have some competence.

B (9:58)

So in that example, quiz contestant gets 92%. Aronson did a variation of the study, new group of people, and he tells the contestant to look like a dunce. He looked like an idiot.

A (10:09)

And.

B (10:09)

And he tells him to get 35% of the questions right. Now, in that scenario, if listeners heard the really poor quiz performance and the spillage, they like that person less than if they heard just the poor performance. So it seems to have this magnifying effect. I think what we can be certain of is if you've got perceived competence, pratfall effect works for you. If you are perceived to be incompetent, it can make the situation worse. So if you're a brand like Guinness, you know, you've been around since 1759, you're respected in the world of stouts and lagers. This is definitely something you can use if you are, I don't know, let's say VW the day after there's been the emissions scandal. Maybe, you know, you don't want to be admitting flaws or extra flaws on top of that you want to be doing from a position of strength.

A (11:01)

Now, sticking on the drink theme as well, One of the drinks that is just like everywhere now is Aperol Spritz.

B (11:09)

Yeah.

A (11:09)

And I think I find it curious because Aperol goes back to like the 1920s or something. Yes, yes. It's around 100 years old as a brand, but it seemed to have exploded in the last 10 years. Like. And why did something that, I mean, let's be honest, it doesn't really taste very good. It's quite a challenging drink. How did they end up turning what is a very niche bitter into something that you just see everywhere?

B (11:31)

So I think what happened here is, is they have a little success. And, you know, I'm not 100% sure why this happens. They have a little success, you know, maybe there's a bit more of a marketing spend. Maybe, you know, there's just an element of randomness that an influencer picks it up. But once they've got a little bit of success, that's when the behavioral science principle kicks in because that success becomes self sustaining. And I think the reason for that is apparel's distinctiveness. You go to a bar and you order a gin and tonic, 99 tams at hand. No one knows what you're drinking once you've walked away from the bar. It's a transparent, clear liquid, Gordon's Tanqueray in the glass. They're all interchangeable. Aperol has a very Distinctive colour. It has a very distinctive serve in those balloon glasses. You only have to have a couple of people drinking Aperol and it looks like it's a popular choice because they are so noticeable, so distinctive. Now, that might feel like wild speculation, but there's a brilliant study by Kais Kaiser at the university. Do you have any Dutch listeners?

A (12:41)

Yeah, yeah, no. Very popular in Holland. Damn.

B (12:44)

Because I don't know how to pronounce this. If you'd said no, I'd have said okay, but perfectly pronounced. I think it's the University of Koningen, but I expect some criticism will be picked up on that. But anyway, 2008, he finds an alleyway in the Netherlands. Loads of people park their bikes in this alleyway. And crucially for the experiment, there's no bin. So he goes down in the morning and he puts flyers for a fictitious sport shop on the handlebars of the bikes. And then he wanders off a few yards and stealthily monitors. What do those returning cyclists do with the flyer? There's no bin, remember, so they have a choice. They either chuck them on the floor or, like good citizens, they take them home with them. Kaiser sets up the study one of two ways. Sometimes he has gone down very early and he has cleaned up the alleyway. He's made it absolutely spotless. Zero litter, no graffiti. And in that setting, 33% of people litter. Other occasions he's going down to the same alleyway, does all the same things with the flyer on the handlebars. But this time he makes the alleyway a complete tip, spray paints it with graffiti, chucks loads of litter around. Now what he's doing here is he's making it look like the social norm is to litter. The first setup, it looks like most people take their litter home. In this second setup, it looks like most people litter. And when he does that, there is a more than doubling of littering rates. We're up to 69% of people littering. Now. This is a really powerful application of social proof. So social proof is the argument that if you tell people you're popular, you become more popular still, you become more appealing. We're deeply influenced by what others are doing. But if you tell people directly I sell, you could say I've got 100,000 listeners, or four could say they've got the best selling car in the world. If you directly say it, you invite skepticism. But if people think they've come to their own conclusions, frankly, who do they trust more than themselves? That's what happens in the littering study. And I think it's what's benefiting apparel as well. They don't necessarily go out and say they're a super popular spirit, but you notice, you know, it's so distinctive. You see this trend ballooning, blossoming in front of you. And that, I think is something that far more brands could apply. What brands need to do is think to themselves in is the consumption of my product or the purchasing of my product visible or invisible, private or public? And if it's private and invisible, you need to think to yourself, how do I make it as public and noticeable as possible? And if you do that, you're applying one of the most powerful biases and one of the most powerful ways.

A (15:34)

I learned this actually very early on in my career. So I started out at Britvic and this is probably 20 years ago now, but we launched a juice in pubs called J2O.

B (15:45)

If you wind back, my mother is a big purchase.

A (15:47)

Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. It's one of those slight aside, but it's one of those amusing ones where you are not the customer as the brand team. The brand team are all kind of trendy people in their 20s and they do all this advertising to people in their 20s and then someone actually bothered to look at who consumes it under 18s and over, 60s. It's basically if you're driving or if you're not legal to have an alcoholic drink, because basically, for anyone who doesn't know, is a very British thing, but it's like a juice in a beer bottle, in effect. However, that wasn't what I was going to say. The. The reason it links to this is quite fascinating because at the time, you know, soft drinks were seen as, you know, they were number three on the list. So you'd have like, food where people make the most money, alcohol would be number two. Soft drinks decent number three. So the objective of every bar was to serve soft drinks as efficiently as possible. So you either have drafts, so literally it comes from the gun, or you have no more than 200 mil in a glass bottle. It gets served and then the glass bottle is thrown away. When J2O launched, they launched in a 275mil. The bottle was very slightly too big and it caused a massive backlash from the publicans. The publicans were like, well, you know, we're going to have to serve the. We're going to get a tiny little bit of juice left after we poured it into the drink with the ice. But it forced them to hand over the bottle.

B (17:05)

Yes.

A (17:05)

And it did what you said about Aperol Spritz because everyone's seeing what everyone else is drinking. Before then, you didn't know even Pepsi wouldn't have.

B (17:12)

If the bottle was 25ml smaller, they'd have turned round, chucked it in the. Precisely in the bin and everyone would have thought they're just drinking orange.

A (17:19)

Can you imagine all the complaints in the development process? People going, this bottle's a bit too big from Publican's point of view, but actually not giving in to what the publican wanted actually did the right thing for the brand.

B (17:30)

I didn't know that. I knew about Magna's, who had done something similar, where back in the late 90s, early 2000s, most pint glasses weren't branded, so you ordered a pint of cider normally and no one knew what you were drinking. But Magnus did the. I don't want to say the word revolutionary, because to anyone who doesn't work in marketing, put some ice in a glass, it's not revolutionary. But for us, this revolutionary act of putting ice in the pint glass, which meant when you got your 500 milliliter bottle, it wouldn't.

A (18:00)

There you go.

B (18:01)

You know, you wouldn't have enough space to pull it all away. So people would take their Magnus bottle away with their pint glass so that that product became distinctive, noticeable, and yet again you get this vicious, sorry, virtuous circle of social proof.

A (18:13)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The wind there wasn't the ice calling it the drink. The wind there was forcing the bottle onto the table. Exactly. Fascinating. Sticking with drinks as well. One of the chapters I enjoyed a lot because I've had the founder of the podcast, Mike Cesario, was liquid Death. I mean, I'd love to talk about liquid death, because a lot of people don't understand why it works. Because in theory, the dumbest thing you could do is take a water brand and literally call it the antithesis of why you drink water. Literally, liquid death. And then you put it in a can. It's not in a bottle, it's priced at four or five times the price of a bottle of water. It doesn't make any sense. What behavioral science can help unpick why.

B (18:54)

Liquid death has been splitting out, by the way, there are quite a few different elements there, but I think the one that is most striking about what they did would be the von Restorff effect. So this is the idea that stretches back to 1933, that we notice what's distinctive. So the original study was done by this brilliant German psychologist called Hedwig von Restorff, who's at the University of Berlin and a super simple study reads out lists of words and twisting it slightly, but it's basically 10 items, nine animals, say, and one bit of furniture. So you go cat, dog, table, elephant, giraffe, so on and so forth. She reads these lists out and then she asks people what they can remember. And again and again and again, it is the distinctive item that really stinks in people's minds. If you give people a long list of animals with one bit of furniture, it'll be the furniture they remember, or vice versa. If you gave them a long list of furniture with one animal in there, they'd remember the animal. So that became known as the von Restorff effect or the isolation effect. And it is one of the most well proven, long standing ways of capturing attention. Now what I think Liquid Death did so brilliantly is they thought to themselves, well, what are all the different category conventions in the water market? And then they thought, well, which ones do we have to adhere to? Maybe there's a very good reason, we'll leave those well alone. And then which ones are there just for convention's sake? And it was those unnecessary conventions that everyone else was adopting, that's what they smashed to smithereens. Every other brand had pictures of alpine scenes, idyllic, bucolic nature. You know, they, they have, you know, cartoon characters chopping each other's heads off. You know, it was the complete antithesis of what the category stood for. And for a small brand with minimal marketing spend that supercharged their, their impact. You know, you're getting over the first hurdle of advertising. If you behave distinctively, you're much, much more likely to be noticed.

A (21:07)

Yeah. Every now and then you see a big brand try and pretend to be Liquid Death. Right. So often brands will do some big stunt and then they'll get caught out. But there's something about the consistency with which they do it which is critical here, isn't it? Is anyone listening, thinking, I'm going to do something crazy on my traditional laundry detergent brand that's dated back 100 years. You know, think before you go crazy.

B (21:29)

Yeah, absolutely. So you've got this first principle of von Restaurant, the second one, and this might be another opportunity for me to butcher a pronunciation. There's an idea called the mere exposure effect. So meere as in M e r e, not N e a r. And it's essentially the idea that familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt. So the original study was Robert Zajon. I think that's how you say it back in the 1950s, 1960s, University of Michigan. And he gets Americans who only speak English, that's a kind of key thing. And he shows them what words from Turkish. And he gives me this big book and essentially open a page and there'll be a word. You'll flick a page and there's another word. You flick the page and another word. They then get to the end and all the words are listed out and people have to guess what those words mean. Now, the twist in the experiment was some of the words were shown once, some twice, some three, some four, some up to 15 or 20 times. And what Zion shows is that the positivity that people give the words, it increases with repetition. So if you saw the word once, you might give it a neutral meaning. If you saw a different word 10 times, you're more likely to give it a positive one. Now, what's interesting here is think about that experiment. It's flicking through a book, it's just, it's being exposed to the words. There's no information being given with extra frequency. It's just repetition. That's why he calls it the mere exposure effect. And it's this idea that the more we see something, the warmer we become to it. Now, you could argue about what reason underlies this. I would be tempted to take an evolutionary one that for most of our evolutionary history, if you've seen or been exposed to a stimuli and it hasn't killed you, then you know it's safe. Then you, you warm to it, then you're drawn towards it. I think there's something in that evolutionary explanation. But regardless of the underlying explanation, it is definitely something marketers could apply. You've got to be very, very careful about cutting and changing creative style, cutting and changing direction. Because what the mere exposure effect suggests is if you've built up this heritage, this warmth to a character or a visual style, even if you're changing something that is objectively better, it will probably perform worse because it isn't benefiting from that mere exposure effect. So stick to things unless there is a very good reason to change.

A (24:06)

Got some amazing data on this, actually. So in system one, we did a collaboration with the EFFIES data. So we took the EFFIES worldwide database, hundreds of thousands of data points in there, System one database, which is measuring emotion to predict outcomes. We crashed them together to work out how does a System one emotional measure link to the business results seen by the brands that won Fes. And there were some expected insights. Right. So for Example expected insight is that if you use emotion, that does better than rational persuasion. Right. So you kind of think that's great. If you are highly branded, you did better. And ideally if you used emotion and good branding, you do better than the ones that are forgettable and not branded. The real interesting insight that proves exactly your point is then when you extrapolate those over years, the gap between the well branded strong emotion campaigns versus the dull not branded campaigns, the gap just got wider and wider and wider. So this is incredible compounding effect of the consistent execution of campaigns. So the longer you ran a campaign that works, key point, if it didn't work, it stayed not working. If it did work, the longer you ran the campaign for the gap between the non working and the working just got bigger and bigger. And this is only we only looked at it over three years. I'd guess that probably continues and gets even bigger after five or six.

B (25:25)

So what I like about the combination of those two things is you've got the academic experiment where they keep all things equal and they kind of prove a point and then you've got the real world kind of replication of that with ads and a data set. But I think it's the two coming together that's powerful because previously when I've heard people say, oh, ads that run a long time tend to perform better, I originally was quite sceptical about that because I thought, well, this is just survivorship bias. If an ad's bloody awful, people will stop running it. Of course, things that have run for 50 years are going to be amazing because they've had so many chances of being killed. But I think you put the two things together and the only plausible explanation is some of the strength, some of the success is consistency, some of it is repetition.

A (26:13)

Yeah, in the mere exposure effect.

B (26:14)

Exactly. And it's one that you think all these biases, I think it's one that most marketers rail against because if there is a characteristic to marketers, it's generally that, you know, we're interested in novelty, we're excited by different things. So it's a finding that pro runs counter to most of our characters. So we've really got to, I think, try doubly hard to appreciate the experiment and try and apply it more.

A (26:44)

I did a couple of posts actually on consistency and impact and in fact someone commented and said, why do I think that is? And the list goes on forever. I mean, I started thinking about it, I think, you know, incentives, financial incentives of agencies to make new work, annual planning cycles, the very Fact that every year we rewrite a plan. Again, the turnover of marketeers, the fact that that probably last. Most junior marketers are in role 18 months, two years. You know, the desire to prove yourself and make something.

B (27:12)

And personal motivation, winning awards.

A (27:14)

The entire, entire awards. Like there's no award for running the same campaign twice.

B (27:18)

Yes.

A (27:19)

But everything is set up to encourage change, to encourage you to change it rather than actually rerun the same thing.

B (27:26)

Absolutely. I imagine you're at a job interviewer and someone said, so what did you do? I said, well, I took over the KitKat advertising. I kept it exactly the same. They'd be like, oh, my God, get rid of this man and get someone else in. Whereas, you know what? That's irrelevant. What you should be thinking about is, well, was that the right decision to maximize profit in that situation? Yeah. I think there are an awful lot of personal and industry incentives to ignore this principle.

A (27:51)

Exactly. Now, sticking to the drink theme. The drink theme was very fruitful, I have to say. There's some really good drink examples. One of the brands, certainly when I started my career in soft drinks was a phenomenon, was Red Bull. And again, Red Bull is another one that does not make any sense because it's ridiculously expensive. At the time, it was in a small can. It was like half the size of a normal soap. It broke the number one rule of a drink, which is you must taste good. I mean, I've got so much research that says you only sell if you taste good.

B (28:22)

Yeah.

A (28:23)

There's a very tight correlation between the better it tastes and what it sells. They absolutely broke that. And the only brand that I've come across that fundamentally breaks Byron Sharpe's double jeopardy law in that they've got a lot of very loyal buyers. You know, everything else is a distribution curve. What's it called? A reverse bin? I can't remember. Reverse binomial. Whatever. It's like a ski sled downhill. So you've got a very few buyers.

B (28:45)

That drink a lot and you've got a better description than a reverse binomial. I now know what you're talking about.

A (28:50)

Exactly.

B (28:51)

It's less impressed.

A (28:52)

It's like a reverse ski jump. The reverse ski jump curve. We'll rebrand it. There you go, buyer. And you can have that one for free. But, you know. But basically, very few number of buyers drink a lot and a lot of buyers drink a little. And that's the only brand I've seen where actually most consumption is from heavy buyers. And it really bucks the trend. Red Bull's very interesting because it does do a lot of things that go against convention.

B (29:13)

Yes. So I think I first heard Rory Sutherland talking about this. I think it was a British brands lecture and I might actually try and redownload it because it was a brilliant speech and it's still available. It was available online for completely free. And what he talks about is you go back to that era when Red Bull launched and most soft drinks came in 330 mil squat cans. What Red Bull did is shrink the serving so it's 250 mil and it was in that tall thin can. Now why that's so important is most people, when they think about what is a fair price to pay, think about that question relatively not absolutely. So what I mean by that is rather than, let's say with this Guinness me thinking how much happiness am I going to get? And then having my own kind of internal willingness to pay per unit of happiness, people don't think of questions like that in that absolute sense because they're ludicrously complex. What people do instead is think, okay, well how much would I pay for a Carling or a Fosters? And then if I like Guinness more, I'll just adjust up a bit or I'll adjust down a bit. So we have this mental comparison set that we have for every product that we allow to shape our willingness to pay. Now go back to. Well, first let's, let's kind of prove that I've done this five or six times. The one that I can remember the data on was probably about seven or eight years ago. I show people a box of PG Tips and I said, I'll make the costs up. Let's say it's £2 for a 250 gram box and next to it was a 1 pound box of Tesco, same size. And I said to people, how good's value is the PG tips? And 31% of people say it's good value. New group of people get rid of the Tesco, leave the PG Tips there and then put a box of Twinings next to it for say £3.50. Ask the people again how good value this is. A new group of people ask them how good value the PG Tips is and the number jumps to 65%. So you've got a more than doubling. Now that simple experiment is interesting because what it shows is it's not just the inherent quality of PG Tips that is driving valuation, because if it was, the numbers would be roughly the same. What people are doing is just latching onto a benchmark, and that is influencing their thoughts. So if they see something very expensive next to the PG tips, it looks good value. If they see something very cheap, it looks bad value. So there's definite experimental proof into this idea of price relativity. But now you think about Red Bull going back to the can design. If they had sold their products in 330 mil cans, it would never have taken off because you would have compared the, I don't know, 1 pound, 1 pound 50 that Red Bull charged with 50 pence for Coke. And people thought, well, that's three times the price. That's a pound more. That's ridiculous. I could get three Cokes. I'm not going to buy that. But by putting into this completely different style of can, you broke the comparison with Coke. It's its own now, Red Bull is its own special kind of of products and you allow this free floating of value to occur. So I think one of the biggest things Red Bull did was in that serving style. And the lesson for advertisers is if you want people to pay a lot of money for your product, you've got to think to yourself, how do I change the mental comparison set? And there are dozens upon dozens of examples of brands far beyond Red Bull that have done that. But don't just think, I will get people to pay more if I give them more benefits. You've got to think, I'll get them to pay more if I can change the mental comparison set.

A (33:03)

Yeah, love that. Well, one of the best repositionings I think I've ever seen in my career was a few years after Red Bull launched a competitor. It was actually a kind of a skunk works from Coke, actually called Relentless. I don't know if you remember this because they ended up getting taken over. It was a bit, actually, it's a bit like liquid death. It was very kind of tattoo. It looks like a tattoo. It's kind of very heavy metal. Anyway, it was a little kind of team of Coke employees who were given freedom to invent a brand and basically take on Red Bull. And they decided it was inspired by monster in the US. So it was a 500 mil can. It went the opposite way. So what they did is 330mil cans are the default. Red Bull had gone smaller. They went 500 mil, which was because everyone thought you wouldn't have a can that big because you can't drink 500 milliliters in one go. But they exaggerated value. And the positioning on it was no half measures, which suddenly made Red Bull appear so they repositioned Red Bull. They took Red Bull's advantage and actually flipped it on his head and made them look as if they were really stingy.

B (34:06)

Interesting, interesting.

A (34:07)

And then in the end, I think in the end what happens. That one is Coke did a deal with Monster globally and then they changed relentless for Monster, which is basically the same. Same.

B (34:15)

Okay, I didn't know that.

A (34:16)

Yeah, well, it connected to a. Actually, one of the questions that I thought about after reading your book was the labor illusion. Because obviously one of the things you taught me about very well is signaling effort. Right. So, you know, I've spent ten and a half thousand hours, you know, and actually signaling efforts, you know, has an effect. But AI is the opposite. AI is signaling laziness.

B (34:38)

Absolutely.

A (34:39)

So how does that play out?

B (34:41)

So chapter that I probably enjoyed writing most with Michael Aaron was, was the Dyson chapter. And one of the reasons I really liked it, ironically, was laziness. So I probably shouldn't tell this story. We did quite a lot of research on all the brands and often you would read, you know, Days of Information and get nothing interesting. Dyson was the complete opposite. Got the autobiography of James Dyson, opened the first page and the very first line says, I went through 5,000, 127 prototypes before I came up with the bagless vacuum. And that was like, okay, this is brilliant. That is a behavioral science masterpiece in itself. Because what he's doing, exactly as you say, is he is describing the amount of effort that it took to get that bagless vacuum. Now, a logician, if that's a thing, would say, that's irrelevant. What you should care about is the quality, how well the vacuum sucks dirt up, how beautiful it looks. This effort story is irrelevant, but behavioural scientists would say, well, it doesn't matter what we ought to do. Behavioural scientists are just interested in what actually influences us. And these stories of effort have been proven to make exactly the same product feel higher quality. So the classic study is by Andrea Morales, who's at the University of Southern California. Really simple study. She recruits a group of people who are in market for a house, and she shows them 10 houses that meet their requirements. And some people are told the estate agent took one hour to generate the list and they used a computer. The other half, people are told the estate agent took nine hours and they did it manually. Now everyone receives exactly the same list of houses. They have the same service from the real estate agent. But when Morales asks those people to rate the quality of service from the estate agent, you get this Very different pattern. On a score of 0 to 100, the low effort group rate the estate agent at 50. The high effort group rate, the estate agent at 68. So you get this 36% swing in quality. Now, the argument from Morales is judging the quality of a product is a complex question. And she argues, like Daniel Kahn before her, that when we are faced with complex questions, what we often do is replace them with simpler ones that give them an almost as good answer. So the complex question is, how good is this thing? We can't be bothered to engage with that. So we turn to the simple question, which, how much effort do I think the brand or the service provider went to? So we use effort as a proxy for quality. So what Dyson is doing brilliantly. You talk about this story of prototypes and years of labor and you imbue this bagless vacuum with a lot more quality and prestige. I think I loved the Dyson example.

A (37:47)

Talking about design, there's a brilliant, almost opposite extreme of this. Paula Sher. I think she's designing a logo for a bank or something, isn't she?

B (37:57)

It's the merger of Travelers and Citibank. Yeah.

A (38:00)

And she comes up with the design on a post it Note in about 5 seconds flat.

B (38:04)

Legend has it, a napkin. So the legend is she is being briefed, her agency, Pentagram, and they have been paid $1.5 million to come up with a logo for this newly merged financial behemoth. In the very meeting she's getting the brief she is sketching out. You can find pictures of it online. Stick at the show notes, she sketches out the now famous umbrella logo. Now, when months later, they present back this work to Citibank, Citigroup, wherever it is now, and they give them pentagram, give this $1.5 million bill. Legend has it that the clients aghast. Like how in awkward faith, can you charge us 1.5 million for something we saw you sketch out in the briefing meeting? And her supposed response was, yes, it took me 30 seconds, but it took me 34 years to learn how to do it in 30 seconds. So to me, that is an example of the labor illusion the client wasn't responding on. Is this the right imagery for our bank? Will it help? What they were responding on is, it is unfair for you to ask for this much money for this short amount of work. And what Paola Share did so brilliantly was through a sleight of hand, she moved attention not from the speed of delivery, but to the amount of time it took to get into the position to deliver that work. And I think you're right about AI in this area totally that people think. And there are experiments by Kobe Millet that back this up. This isn't just my supposition. If you label a product as AI generated, it'll be rated as lower quality than if you say it's hand drawn. So the thing that Millet did was on a poster. So what I think you need to do is if you are introducing speeded up services powered by AI, you need, like Paula Sher did, to emphasize the experience, the number of people, the amount of time you've taken to set up the protocols and processes to get this system in place.

A (40:09)

Maybe listeners can help me out on this one, but I think there's a very similar story. A very famous ad, isn't there a very famous ad agency founder who maybe it's in Cannes. A client asks him for an idea, comes up with instantly. And the client same thing. I hope you're not going to charge, you know, charge me for that. He said it took me 27 years.

B (40:27)

To come up with this idea.

A (40:28)

Do you know who that is?

B (40:29)

I haven't heard that. I've heard, I've heard a story of an engineer as well, a giant manufacturer maybe.

A (40:36)

There's lots of versions of this Smash. Yeah.

B (40:38)

And you know, digging, it seems like the Paula Share one sounds true and you know, from the digging that I've done, but this is something I've heard attributed in multiple places and therefore for me, I think I've written that type of story that's not a peer reviewed experiment, the Paula Share story It's a parable that makes it easier to understand the idea and I think we can learn as much from those types of parables as from, you know, strict historical truths.

A (41:06)

Now I want to move us on to chocolate and Snickers, which is a lovely, lovely one. And they're now iconic. You're not you when you're hungry campaign. And that's, that's a really good example because I think Snickers have become, I believe, the number one chocolate line in the US now.

B (41:21)

Yes.

A (41:21)

But it wasn't always the case. And they hit, I think they might be.

B (41:24)

And these things obviously fluctuate. But there was certainly a stage when they were the number one chocolate bar in the world.

A (41:29)

Yeah. And there's something about the. So what is it about that particular strap line that works?

B (41:36)

There's two elements here. So the first is the use of a cue or a trigger. So psychologists have this phrase the intention to action gap and it's the argument that if you create desire for a product, it doesn't necessarily translate into action. You know, you can increase interest or perceived taste, and it might not translate into people buying something. The argument for people like Sarah Milne at the University of Bath is the motivation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for change. What you need to do is, yes, build that motivation, but combine it with a very clear cure trigger. So this is a time, a place or a mood that people associate with your products. Now, Snickers, you're not you when you're hungry, does a brilliant job of associating consumption with a very clear trigger moment. You know, that feeling of confusion that comes from hunger, that feeling of grumpiness, it's not talking about how amazing the product tastes, it's associating it brilliantly with a very clearly defined moment. And I think that is something that far more brands could do. It's not like you never see brands doing it. Have a break, have a Kit Kat, Taco Tuesdays, Meat Free Mondays, brands do it. But I think it could be applied far more regularly. Too many marketers focus on motivation, not enough on that trigger.

A (43:04)

Another really, really simple lesson, actually, I think that comes from Snickers that every marketer could learn from is the use of humor.

B (43:10)

Absolutely.

A (43:11)

There's so much data on this, but the amount of humor advertising that uses humour has been going down and down and down and down equally. I mean, bringing some System one data, we've looked at not only the role of happiness, we've broken happiness into its constituent parts. Actually, funnily enough, there are 15 different types of happiness. Do you know what the number one is?

B (43:30)

Oh, no, I did.

A (43:31)

Number one, schadenfreude.

B (43:33)

Okay. This British.

A (43:36)

Number two is amusement, right?

B (43:37)

Yeah.

A (43:38)

So the second, the second most effective. Well, they're both humor in a way. They're both obviously humour at someone else's, you know, unfortunate circumstances. But humour, despite humour being very effective as a communication tool, it's used less and less.

B (43:54)

I think that is an absolute tragedy. Firstly, there are so many studies into the effect of humor that academics being able to run meta analyses. And a meta analysis is rather than just taking one paper and extrapolating that out. You look at 50 or 60 or 100 papers and you see what the themes are. And Martin Eisen's done this amazing overview of dozens and dozens of papers and shown that humor consistently in advertising has positive effects. There's also studies that I've done which show if you reach people in a good mood, they are more likely to believe your claims, they're more likely to like your advertising, they're less likely to be price sensitive. So you've got this huge body of work that suggests that humour would be effective, but at the same time we've got this big downturn. I think if we were doing this podcast in the 1990s, making a statement that making your brand likeable and amusing, people would roll their eyes and think it's a statement of the bleeding obvious. Somehow we've forgotten some of the well proven lessons of the past because I think of our infatuation with the latest new thing, whether it's purpose or data.

A (45:15)

Yeah, quite right. We should move on and talk about fried chicken. Right. There are very, very many fried chicken brands and outlets in the world. There's one that dominates them. All right, obviously kfc. Why is it that KFC has dominated the fried chicken market in what is a fairly commoditized category?

B (45:34)

So one of the things that I think they do really well is this sense of secrecy. You know, the blend of herbs and spices that supposedly no one knows the recipe, or there's two people in the world, they're not allowed to travel on the same plane, they're manufacturers, one does half of the spices, the other one does the other. And then KFC mix it up. And I think there's something amazing about having a secret, this kind of information gap that you never quite resolve. And it means that the story or the brand sticks in people's minds. So there's an amazing study by a Soviet psychologist called Bluma Zeigarnik. And actually maybe the best way to talk about her insight is not necessarily the experiment comes, experiment later. But what got her to come up with the idea? And back in the 1920s, she goes to a cafe with her mentor Kurt Lewin and a few other students. They sit down, waiter comes out, no pen or paper, takes the order. Quite a complicated order there. Probably wasn't like soy and oat milk, but there were pastries and espressos and double espressos. And three or four minutes later he comes back, gives the order out. Everyone gets the right mix of drinks and food. She's quite impressed. They finish their drinks, they wander off, and as she is leaving, she's only about five or ten minutes away from the cafe, she realized she's left a scarf. She goes back to the cafe, spots the waiter with the amazing memory and she goes up to him and says, oh, have you spotted my scarf? And the guy looks at her blankly and she quickly realizes this guy has no idea who she is. And she begins to wonder to herself, how can his memory be really good that he can take this order perfectly, but so bad he cannot remember me half an hour later? And what she begins to think is, we are much better at remembering uncompleted tasks than completed tasks. And from there, when she has that hypothesis, she then runs a few simple studies. She brings people into a lab, gets them to fulfill a task like building a cardboard box or some such thing. Some people are given the instructions and then they build the box. Other people are given the instructions and then they start building the box and then she stops them and takes them away. When those groups are later on asked to repeat the instructions back, the people that were interrupted can remember far more details. It's about 90% improvement in detail level. So she has this anecdote that inspires her and then she proves it experimentally. Now you bring that back to kfc and I think some of the enduring fascination is their maintenance of this secret. You know, really what herbs and spices are in KFC is completely trivial and, you know, unimportant. But the fact that you've left this kind of itch, you haven't told people, you've got this itch that you haven't ever scratched, you know, that makes it stick in people's mind, even very trivial information. If you leave an element of uncertainty, an element of secrecy, it will be more memorable and more motivating. So many things I talk about in the book about KFC along with Michael Aaron, but that is the one that kind of sticks with me.

A (49:00)

Yeah, love that, love that a lot.

B (49:01)

In fact, what we should have done is finish the podcast halfway through that explanation.

A (49:06)

We should have done. I know, exactly. Well, we have to come up with something else to half finish at the end of the podcast. It also explains why the moment I finished my economics degree. Yes, I couldn't tell you anything. I remember in my first job at Britvic, a few, a few months after leaving, leaving my degree, someone asked me for to explain the capital asset pricing model. And I literally looked blankly. I could have written that in detail three months ago. Now I'm like, what is that again?

B (49:32)

But also from an evolutionary basis, this makes sense. If the task has been completed, it's less valuable than something we're in the midst of. It kind of. It makes absolute sense why we would have adopted this particular bias.

A (49:45)

Another interesting thing I think is going to broad applicability to marketers is you talk about Pringles and Pringles of course, is a rather unusual shape.

B (49:54)

Yes, Saddleback.

A (49:55)

I think it's.

B (49:56)

I think that's an issue.

A (49:56)

Yeah, Official term. And comes in a tube rather than a packet. So why did Pringles end up being how they are? But also what role did the kind of now famous slogan play?

B (50:07)

The reason they are in that strange tube is one of the irritations post war people had was getting packets and they were buying packets of crisps and a lot of them would be crushed and in little pieces. So the tube was meant to be a solution to that. In terms of the chapter is quite fun as well, because there's quite a lot of idiosyncratic little stories about Pringles. But the bias that I think is super interesting is this idea of the Keats Heuristic. So the strap line for a long time with Pringles was, once you pop, you can't stop. Now that's interesting for two reasons. The believability of the statement is boosted by rhyme and then so is the memorability. So the first statement is an idea called the Keatsuristic. So back in the late 90s, Jessica Toffigbash, I might have pronounced that wrong. And Matthew McGlone run a really clever study. They make fake proverbs like woes unite foes, and then they create two versions. You read woes unite foes, and I read the non rhyming version, woes unite enemies. And we see a kind of jumbled up list. You might get half a dozen that rhyme and half a dozen that don't. And I'll get, you know, the different pairs. And what would happen is again and again, the people that saw the rhyming phrase, they believed that statement more than the people saw the non rhyming phrase. According to the psychologists, there is a fluency and ease of processing to rhyme. And people conflate ease of processing with truth. Now what's fascinating about that study is when people were later asked, why did you think this proverb was, you know, a fair reflection of the world? Why did you think it was truthful? Was it because of the rhyme? Only one person in the whole of their experiment attributed believability to rhyme. Everyone else said, no, no, I just solely judged believability on the inherent information that you would give me. The rhyme was, was totally irrelevant. Again and again. What people say motivates them. And what actually motivates them, completely different things. Now, the scale of the impact of that study isn't huge. It's like 15 or 17% swing in believability and when I read it, I thought, that's super interesting. But actually, I always think the big thing about rhyme is not just that it's believable, but it's memorable. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases Less bother with a hover Once you pop, you can't stop. Some of these rhymes, you know, they go back 20 years, they still stick in our mind. Don't be vague, ask for Hague. It's 100 years old, but they stick in our mind. And I wanted to test whether that was a genuine thing. So reran. Originally, for the illusion of choice, I reran Maglone and Topik Bash's study. But I used a non representative audience. And what I did was, I think it was Alex Thompson. I did this. We showed people the Proverbs in the morning and everyone would have a slightly different mix of proverbs, sometimes rhyming, sometimes not. And what we found is if we regrouped those people in the afternoon and we asked them to remember the Proverbs, people were twice as likely to remember the rhyming ones as the non rhyming ones. And I thought that's a massive impact, but never really talked about it hugely because it was an unrepresented audience. So what we did for this book with Michael Aaron and also Nicky Morley and John Paulston, was we reran that study. It's a few different little tweaks, but reran that rhyme study to show, yes, it is much, much more memorable. So a very well known tactic, but one that has completely fallen out of fashion that I think again, we could learn far more from Prinkles.

A (54:01)

It really has a link to that in terms of going out fashion actually jingles. So we did a study with TikTok at System 1 and we looked at different types of brand device, right? So like slogans, logos, jingles, all that kind of. All those kind of things, and looked at the use of them in the first 2 1/2 seconds, which is what you've got to get your point across, and linked it to a brand awareness and indexed it. And the number one thing, which is something like a 200% over performance versus the average Sonic devices. Incredible. Like what? You know, those unique sounds that we associate with brands? Again, they're things that aren't, aren't used very often, but can be incredibly powerful.

B (54:43)

And in any book, I think every book's been about 40, 50,000 words. There's probably 200,000 words that you just relentlessly cut back, cut, cut, cut, cut. I'm a Big believer. There's this wonderful phrase from Quilla Couch, murder your darlings. You know, the biggest thing about writing is what you leave out, not what you kind of put down. Just relentless editing. And I think one of the very early studies we had, but dropped because it was kind of a bit of a cul de sac, was a study around Alzheimer's patients. And even when people had lost memory of hugely important, meaningful things, a lot of the time they could still remember and sing ditties and essentially jingles. There's something, you know, very persistent about that form of communication.

A (55:32)

I saw it really, really funny. So you might. I don't know if you've seen it, but I think it was itv, maybe. ITV and thinkbox. It was basically a bit like Gogglebox, you know, when they film people watching the ads.

B (55:43)

Yeah, yeah.

A (55:43)

And the exam question was, how many people are actually watching TV ads during the ad break? Right. And then what? So it probably told you what you'd imagine, Right. Something, I think after, I'm guessing slightly around a third of people were actually paying attention to the ads. Right. What they discovered is something like 70% of people were listening.

B (56:04)

Yeah.

A (56:04)

So more than twice the number. And this is very, very funny thing in the debrief, because they show you these clips of people and you've got this kind of couple lounging on the sofa and the conversation they're having is like, seriously, does anyone watch ads these days? I mean, come on, this is ridiculous. The Just Eat ad comes on. He turns to his missus and goes, did somebody say. And then they literally go, should we get a takeaway? And there's no hint of irony. Literally, they haven't even realized. In the same sentence, they've completely contradicted themselves. But what's interesting, the interesting thing about that is they weren't looking at the television.

B (56:40)

Yeah.

A (56:40)

They heard. Did somebody say so they literally heard the. The jingle or the, you know, the strap line in song. And that was the trigger to them. And I think this is something that. I mean, we did another study actually, where not only does music sonic devices create awareness, but it changes meaning. So we did this. Did this test a few years ago now, actually, with Werther's original, and they were testing. They were testing different soundtracks on the same advert. Ooh, really interesting. So in these three different soundtracks, and it went from a three star to a five star. So firstly, the emotional response was dramatically different. But the real kicker for me was that in the three star, it was a dad and his daughter and they were sort of playing in a park. In the three star with the music, the association was, he must be divorced and it must be a visitation day. Right?

B (57:33)

Yeah.

A (57:33)

In the five star, they interpreted as it must be her birthday and they must be celebrating. And the visuals are the same, but the music completely changed how people felt. And also the association.

B (57:45)

Oh, that's brilliant. One of the stats that sticks in my mind from the brilliant how not to Plan by Sarah Carter and Les Bonet is they look at the kind of walk database and this might have changed because the book was five years old, but what proportion of papers on there are about music? And it is absolutely vanishing small, something like 0.1%. It's absolutely tiny. It's such a powerful tool. Yeah. I think it gets far less status and respect than it should.

A (58:17)

You can almost write a book on unfashionable but highly effective things you can do. Yeah.

B (58:22)

So I'll see you back here in 2029 for podcast four.

A (58:26)

We'll do that podcast for sure. Yeah, that'd be brilliant. Well, maybe to wrap up, let's. We haven't talked about tech very much and maybe we'll kind of end on Apple. I thought this was a very, very classic example of the idea of concreteness as well, which I thought was interesting. How did Apple use the idea of concrete expressions to change?

B (58:48)

So concrete expressions are things that we can visualize. So classic study 1972 by Ian Begg reads out a list of phrases. Sometimes they are concrete, like white horse or squared, or these are tangible, visualizable items. And people are very good at remembering those. 36% of the concrete words are remembered later on. But the other half of the words he reads out are abstract phrases, intangible concepts like basic truth or impossible amount, things that you cannot visualize. And when people are asked to remember, Those, a mere 9% are remembered. So you got this massive fourfold difference in memorability. According to Begg, vision's the most powerful of our senses. So if you use language, people can visualize, it's very sticky. If you use language, people can't visualize, it's very forgettable. Now, that is a very, very powerful memory tool. But if you think about most communications, they break that rule. Brands are talking about quality, refreshment, trustworthiness, premiumness. They're too often resorting to abstract ideas that are very hard for people to remember. Now, the Apple example is quite an old one, but it proves the point. And it's back in the days when all those MP3 players were coming out. Now, what most MP3 players did was try and convey storage and memory by talking about megabytes. So, like 512 megabytes of memory. The problem with that is you cannot picture a megabyte. You can't imagine 512. So it's a very poor piece of communication. It's forgettable. But if you think about what Apple did, exactly the same challenge. They still wanted to convey memory and storage, but this time they converted that abstract idea into something you could picture a thousand songs in your pocket. And because you can picture a pocket, you can imagine a song, it's much, much stickier. So one of the things that Apple do. So brilliant. There are others, but one of the things they do brilliantly is this use of concrete, visualizable language. And I think the point to stress here is, yes, simple language is good. There's other studies that back that up. But simple and concrete are not the same thing. Concrete is. You can visualize it. Not just that, it's easy to understand.

A (61:11)

I think you've destroyed pretty much every car advertising strap line.

B (61:16)

I think we've criticized them on every word jumble. There's a giant, I don't know, tombola of words that someone's churning out.

A (61:26)

Yeah, exactly. I know it's a lot of that. And the other thing, actually talking about technology, which, which we use a lot@System1, actually, is this concept of most advanced yet acceptable? I mean, we took a. We took a System one take on it, actually, which is quite interesting, which is the. We call it the 8020 rule. But the right blend of familiarity to novelty is 80 20. So if you have. So basically happiness versus surprise as the motivating factor, if you have too much surprise in a concept, it's got too much novelty, then it gets rejected. If it's too familiar, then it doesn't have enough novelty to pique your interest. So there's this sort of roughly 8020 balance that we've kind of worked out. I mean, John Kieran, our founder, just went through tens of thousands of successful innovations, looked at the emotion it created, and this seems to be the sort of magic number that gets it right.

B (62:17)

So, you know, the other part of the Apple chapter is about this idea of most advanced. Yeah, acceptable. So I hadn't heard about the 8020 work you've done, which I think sounds brilliant. But the other thing Apple did when they launched the iPhone is apply that principle. So radical new technology, therefore, they want to make it a little bit more familiar. And what they did with all the icons was use kind of 3D imagery. You know, the buttons look like you could press them and they used real world kind of analogies and metaphors. Not sure the right term there, but the notepad would be a yellow legal notepad. I think the podcast button was a reel to reel tape recorder. You know, even when you went to the notepad, it wasn't just that it was a notepad. You, you know, deleted a page and there were little tears left on the font that was used. Looked like a kind of pen had drawn it. Again and again they try and make this radical technology a little bit more familiar. But then of course as the and they call this skeuomorphism, as the iPhone becomes more accepted, all those real world analogies disappear, the 3D ness changes, all becomes flat. It's a lovely example of someone recognizing that the communication approach, the product design approach isn't the right thing at all times. You want to make, and this is Derek Thompson's phrase, if you're trying to sell something surprising, make it familiar. And if you want to sell something familiar, make it surprising. And I think Apple on the iPhone did that brilliantly.

A (63:54)

They absolutely did. Now I was going to talk to you about how social media are using the behavioral science biases of gambling. But given the unfinished rule that I think leaves people wanting more, I think we'll end it here.

B (64:06)

Fantastic.

A (64:06)

I love that. So if you want to find out how social media resembles gambling, you'll need to get hold of this amazing book, Hacking the Human Mind, which is out now. So yeah, get online, Google it and you can get a copy. It's amazing as all your books are really. And I love how you bridge the gap between the kind of academic behavioral science and real world practicality, which is fantastic.

B (64:31)

That's definitely the aim. Keep it simple. And there's no point knowing about these biases if they're just little interesting tales. The point is to apply them and that's what we're trying to make it really super practical.

A (64:44)

Well, you've delivered my number one behavioral bias desire, which is make it easy. Excellent. Good to see you again, mate.

B (64:50)

Very good to see you.

A (64:52)

Thank you very much for listening or watching uncensored cmo. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me. You can do. I'm over on Xensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.