Modern Wisdom - #1053 - Richard Shotton - 11 Psychology Tricks From the World’s Best Brands

Episode Date: January 31, 2026

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, founder of Astroten and an author. How do billion-dollar brands actually do it? From genius marketing tactics that make them instantly memorable to some of the funniest mistakes you’ve ever seen, there’s a psychology behind why certain brands stick. What are the principles top brands use, and how do they create content that people remember long after they’ve seen it? Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get a free sample or 30% off a one-month supply of Timeline at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom30 Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good news. I'm going back on tour with a brand new live show in Australia, New Zealand and Bali. If you are interested in learning how to overcome imposter syndrome, reach your goals while not missing your entire life, my perspective on where true confidence comes from, everything I've ever discovered about discipline plus brand new insights that I've never spoken about on the podcast, then join me on stage as I explore all of these topics with you. And you can get involved during an extensive Q&A where we work through the biggest questions that you have right now. and Brisbane are completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali, and you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to chris Williamson.com. What did you learn from five guys? So five guys is the opening chapter and we talk about something that they did very powerfully, which is when they launched, they were relentless at focusing on just doing burger and chips. so people like McDonald's have got seduced by the fact that they could launch filet of fish and

chicken burgers. But the five guys relentlessly honed down on just doing burgers. Now, some of the benefit of that is a ability just to get better at cooking, better at producing your core product. But psychologists argue there's something else on top of it. So there's an idea called the gold dilution effect. And the first studies were done by Zhang and fishpillars. back in 2007, and they did a very simple experiment, recruit a group of people,

randomize them into two subgroups, and the first set of people are told, if you eat tomatoes, it's very good for your heart health, here are the reasons. And that group are asked to say whether they think eating tomatoes is worth doing for their heart health. Second group of people, they see exactly the same text, exactly the same reasons and logic and facts about why tomato eating is so good for cardiovascular health. But they are also told, if you eat tomatoes, it will improve your eye health. It will reduce degenerative diseases. Now, when that second group are asked to say how good eating tomatoes is for heart health,

they come back with a 12% lower score. So even though they've seen the same facts, because in this second group, there was an additional reason thrown in, it reduced, it dilute, diluted the believability in that that core reason. So there's a psychological as well as practical benefit about communicating that you do one thing well. People have a rule of thumb in their head that you can't be a jack of all trades, you know, if you are, you'll be a master of none of them. So there's a sacrifice and credibility and believeably if you claim to do multiple things. What does that say about sort of underlying human psychology? Is it that we have a kind of a zero sum or a resource limitation on how much we think we should be able to distribute between the traits of a particular offer?

I think a lot of these biases that behavioral scientists identify, the psychologists identify, they're generally true. I mean, all things being equal, you tend to get better at a task if it is the sole focus of your attention. If you spend 40 hours a week being a cyclist, you're going to be a better cyclist, and I've I spent 10 hours a week. So people have a sensible rule of thumb in their head, but then the danger is they over apply it in situations where it's not relevant. Like in a situation Zhang set up, people got the same facts about cardiovascular health, but because they threw in this second benefit, it seemed to detract from it. I think it's often the misapplication of a generally, generally sensible rule of thumb. Is the rule or the lesson for brands here that you need to win one thing very well and be very cautious about trying to add additional offers and features and potential advantages

that people can get by using it? Yeah, that's a fair semi-up. It's essentially the argument that be very, very careful about adding extra reason. to believe because what they will gradually do is undermine believability in the core reason to buy your product. So if you start saying you're all things to all people, over time, gradually insiduously, that original reason to buy gradually disappears. Reasons to believe is a wonderful way to put it. The believability thing is really interesting. So, you know, selfishly, I've got new tonic. I've got my productivity drink.

I'm shamelessly using yours and Sutherland's insights around behavioral science and an attempt to do this. And it does lots of things. But we could have talked about procrastination. We could have talked about alertness. We could have talked about energy. But we just tried to get one word, which was productivity. And we just went for one single thing. I think the problem we have with productivity, the problem we're currently facing, we may end up pivoting a little bit. And we're using fuel your focus and productivity drinks. There's two things that kind of synonymous with each other. I think the problem is it's two amorphous as an offering. I don't think that people necessarily want to be focused or productive. I think they want to get their job done with

limited effort. So we're trying to think now about what a pivot from a copy perspective would be to talk about the outcome as opposed to the sort of mediator between you and the outcome. Like you don't want focus. You want your work completed. You don't want productivity. You want to be efficiently you want efficiently to complete the task that's in front of you. Yeah, I think there's two bits there. Firstly, selling the outcome rather than the product makes sense. I think it was Levitt said, you know, if you've got a drill, don't sell nine inch, drill bits, sell nine inch holes.

So I think there's an argument there. But the other bit that struck me when you're talking about things like productivity and focus is that a awful lot of experimentation shows that people, People are pretty bad at remembering abstract data. They're very good at remembering concrete physical things. So the original study was by Ian Begg back in 1972, and he recruits a group of people, reads them 22-word phrases.

He doesn't mention it to the participants, but half of these two-word phrases are what he calls abstract concepts. So they're intangible ideas like basic truth. Half of the phrases he reads out are what he calls concrete phrases. So they described physical things like a white horse. So he reads out this list. And then later on he asks people what they can remember. And his key finding is people can remember on average 9% of the abstractions,

but 36% of the concrete phrases. So you are four times more likely to remember the thing that you can visualize. And Begg's explanation, a problem. applies just as much to 2026. His argument is vision's the most powerful of our sentences. So if you use language, we'll can visualize, it's very sticky. But if you stay in this realm of abstraction, like focus or productivity, people can understand what you're saying, but they'll struggle to remember it, you know, a minute or two after you've mentioned it. So there could be something that. I was going to say, what would be an equivalent way to visualize increased productivity

or focus? Well, coming out with that on the fly would be very hard. Freestyle rapping might be a little. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This could go disastrously wrong. But maybe concrete, sorry, maybe specific examples of people doing it. Red Bull didn't say Red Bull gives you energy, which is abstract. They said Red Bull gives you wings. That's something you can picture and visualize.

Apple didn't say you get a gigabyte of memory when they first launched the iPod. They said, a thousand songs in your pocket. You can picture a pocket. You can't picture a gigabyte or a megabyte. So I think what those businesses and copyrights did so successfully is translate that abstract objective into something that people could picture. Talk to me about Red Bull. Obviously, absolute gigabrand. Pretty fascinating, I'm going to guess, from a consumer behavior standpoint. What do you learn about them? I think one of the most powerful things they've done, and you may have covered this with, Rory Sutherland was apply this principle of price relativity. So a core concept of behavioural

science is when people are weighing up what a product is worth paying for, they don't look at the benefits that product brings and then try and translate that on a universal yardstick. So they don't think to themselves, okay, well, a can of Red Bull will give me one unit of happiness and I will pay one dollar per unit of happiness, whether it's a pair of jeans, or a soft drink. People don't do that because it's a complex question. And Daniel Kahneman argued, when people face complex questions, what they tend to do, even if they don't realize it,

is replace the complex question with a simpler alternative. And the simpler alternative is how much did I pay for something similar? So if a new item like Red Ball launches, if it's more than a similar purchase, people think it's bad value. If it's less than a similar purchase, people think it's good value. Now, when you first hear that, it sounds bleeding obvious. But actually, that's a very powerful insight for a marketer. Because if you accept the value is perceived relatively rather than absolutely, what it leads

to is thinking, if I can change my mental comparison set, I can change the willingness of my consumer, you know, the willingness to pay. Is this the Rolls-Royce thing? Well, this, I would say, is the Red Bull thing. I mean, it could be the Rolls-Royce example would be don't sell them at car shows, sell them at yacht shows or air shows because a Rolls Royce is cheap compared to a private jet, not cheap compared to an Audi or Mercedes. But think about Red Bull. When they launched, the standard soft drink was about half the price. And the standard soft drink, and I use the UK numbers,

what Coke and Pepsi did was they sold in these squat fat 330 mill cylinders. If Red Bull had launched in exactly that same can, it would have been compared to those prices. And people might have paid a five or a 10% premium because they knew it was highly caffeinated, had this extra functionality, but they wouldn't have paid twice as much. But paradoxically, you change the shape of the can. You make it smaller to 250 mils. You make it tall and thin. And essentially, you've broken this unhelpful comparison with cheap soft drinks.

And if you look around quite a few businesses have done that. It's a very powerful way of changing willingness to pay. What are some of the other examples of businesses that have done that? So seed lip. Have you familiar with that? It's basically a fake gin. So it's a non-alcoholic gin. And what they did, though, brilliant.

They sold maybe two or three years ago, I think tens of millions to Diageo. This is phrased on the bottle, I think it's a dismayed. still non-alcoholic spirit. It sells in the spirit's aisle of Tesco's in Sainsbury's, but the kind of non-alcoholic end. The imagery on the front is like, you know, beautiful drawings, looks like a craft chip. And it sells for about £20 a bottle. Now, what people think is, well, you know, a fancy craft gin sells for about £30 a bottle. This stuff hasn't got any alcohol in, so I'm not prepared to pay as much.

But, you know, £20, a bit expensive, but it's £10 or less. That seems, you know, reasonable what I buy it. Now, think about an alternative universe where that brand was launched as a cordial, which is what it basically is. If it was launched in day glow colours next to the rye bean and next to the Robinson squash, people might be prepared to pay. I don't know, double what you pay for rye bean or another fruit cordials, but they wouldn't pay five times or six times as much.

Even if this stuff tasted like the nature of the gods, people wouldn't pay that kind of premium. So it's about where you set your benchmark. People will adjust from that comparative benchmark, but the general finding is people don't adjust as far as they should. So you throw out this super expensive benchmark through design or comparison set, and then as a business, you reap the benefits. You know, it's an interesting example of this in the UK. There are a co-investor in Newtonic, which is what makes me think about it,

grenade bars. You familiar with them and their story? I'm familiar with the brand, but not the story. So I know they're kind of protein bars and... Correct. What are you looking at for the next one? Look at the numbers. Look at the price difference between them and a chocolate bar. They outsell Cadbury's on the forecourt and they've got pride of place. Well, why? It's because they're probably more than double the price, maybe triple, maybe quadruple the price. And it's because they moved themselves out of the category of, look at you, there you go, writing it down. Yeah, sorry, I thought to sneak that in. No, no, no, get it down, get it down. Alan Barrett, who's the founder of Grenade and Newtonic investor is just, it was such a genius

insight that there was an upper bound of how much people were prepared to play for a chocolate bar, but when it's, oh, it's protein, this is good for me, it's a better for you treat. It still tastes sort of comparable, but I have way less guilt, and it's got all of this added advantage of it hitting my protein target for the day. And yeah, they now are more expensive and do higher volume. Now, there's a double benefit there, which is people have another rule of thumb in their head, which is price equals quality. So high price is a badge of quality.

There's a study from Babashib, who's at Stanford. It's a really nice, slightly duplicitous study with a bit of subterfuge. he gets a group of people. He serves them five different bottles of wine and each of these wines has a very prominent price label. But the twist in the experiment is there are only four different liquids. So one of the wines is repeated. So people get to sample each of the wines.

They have a tiny little sip from each of the bottles and they will drink, say, a cabernet souvenir, thinking it comes out of a $5 bottle and they'll rate it as kind of mediocre. A few minutes later, they're drinking exactly the same wine, but it comes out this fancy wine bottle. It's got this big $45 price label. And when people rate it, not only do the qualitative adjectives get a lot better, when they come to the quantitative scoring, people give it a 70, 70% higher score. So according to Shiv, people, to a degree, not completely, but to a degree, they experience what they expect to

experience. And one of the best guides to what we think's going to be great is what a brand's charging. Because we have a raw little thumb in our head which says, look, if a brand is brilliant, it's created an amazing product, surely they're going to maximize their profit. Surely it's going to be at high price. Only someone who has a bit of a mediocre product would sell it at a cheap price. So the actual high price also then will support the grenade bar perceptions of quality. And those perceptions will translate into actual experience. Interestingly around that, we are currently the most expensive energy drink category product available on the Morrison's local meal deal. So if you get a Sainsbury's or a Morrison's local meal deal, and this is going to be

fascinating to see what happens. So I think we're launching in Sainsbury. I probably shouldn't say this. Fuck it. Whatever. I've said it now. But I think we're launching in Sainsbury's at some point within the next month or so. And on the meal deal. I don't think people in America have meal deals. This is a big problem with America. I'm going to, I'm going to, it is absolute sacrilege. America sucks at sandwiches. America absolutely sucks at sandwiches. What I want is a high quality brown bread, slice of brown bread. two of them cut into triangles, I want them cut diagonally, and I want them filled with some salads and some chicken and a bit of mayonnaise. And I cannot buy that in America. I can go to Subway or I can

go to like Mikey's subs or whatever, but I can't get that. Anyway, in the UK, this is kind of everybody's lunch in one former. It's probably quite on brand what Americans think about British people too. They've got a lot of sandwiches. You can get a sandwich, some sort of main, some sort of side thing and a drink. And it's usually five, between four and five pounds, something like that. Now, you're able by bundling these together with a bottle of water and a sorin and something else, you're able to get a discount. What we are, because of how high we've priced ourselves, but because we still sit in the premium meal deal category, what we're going to be fascinated to see is whether or not people think, I want to maximize my buying utility, oh, I got an even

bigger discount because I got that really expensive productivity drink with all of the additional stuff in and I got that as a part of the meal deal and I'm going to be really interested to see if that grenade effect is going to happen to us too. Yeah, I think that'd be fascinating. I think there's maybe two bits going on. You've got this sense of getting a bigger discount. But I wonder if there's another part which is it won't damage perceptions of quality because maybe it's seen as gaming the system and getting a little, you know, you've kind of caught and they haven't even noticed this. They didn't even, yeah, and I think that hopefully will maybe protect you from some of that degradation of perception otherwise. A quick aside,

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Mitapure is backed by over 15 years of research, over 50 patterns and nearly a dozen human clinical trials. It was recommended to me by my doctor and that is why I've used it for so long since way before I knew who even made the product. And best of all, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. Until the end of January, you can get 30% off a one-month supply by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.com slash modern wisdom 30. That's timeline.com slash modern wisdom. 30. All right, talk to me about the genius of Guinness. I've been blown away by what's happened to Guinness over the last five years. It's fucking spectacular. Yeah, and some of that power of Guinness has been phenomenal, you know, products creation, but the zero products, Guinness

is phenomenal. It's, I think, pretty only alcoholic beer, which tastes anything like its parent brand. So there's some amazing product development going on. But in the book, Michael and I talk about a very specific campaign. So we talk about this idea of good things come to those who wait. And to me, that is an amazing example of what's known as the Pratfall Effect. So the Pratful effect is the argument that if you admit a flaw, if you're open about a weakness, you become more appealing. So the initial experiment was done all the way back in 1966 by Elliot Aronson at Harvard. Simple study. Recruit's a call. colleague from his university, gets that colleague to take part in a quiz. He's given,

Aronson has given the contestant all the answers. So the guide does amazingly well, gets 92% the question's right, wins the quiz by Miles, looks like an absolute genius. But then as the quiz is coming to a close, he makes what someone in the 1960s might have called a prat for. He spills a cup of coffee down himself. Now Aronson has recorded all of this and he takes the recording and plays it to listeners. But sometimes he plays out the full version to listeners, so they get the spillage and the great performance. Other times, he edits out the spillage.

What Aronson finds when he questions everyone as to how appealing the contestant is, is this slightly counterintuitive result. He finds that there is a greater preference amongst the group who heard the spillage compared to the group who just heard the amazing, quiz performance. And it's not a small difference. The people that heard the spillage and the great performance, they rate the contestant 45% better than the people who just heard the amazing quiz performance. So he calls this the practical effect, essentially this idea that people or products, and there are some nuances here, but people or products that exhibit a flaw become

more appealing. And I think that's at the very heart of this Guinness line. Good things come to those who wait. You don't try and sweep under the car, but you're don't try and airbrush out the irritation of the delay of Guinness, what you do instead is lean into it because people assume if it has, you know, taken a lot of time to make, it must be higher quality. I think that's at the heart of the probably the best ever Guinness campaign. It seems like there's two things going on. One is identifying the flaw. The second is kind of an IKEA effect craft. It's taking a while to make. thing. So if it wasn't for that, I mean, I guess you could, I've heard rumors that websites like

SkyScanner, they could load all of their results immediately. The reason that they have the loading bar is to do the look at how hard we are searching for you. We are getting you the best deals possible. It is taking so much time. Bink, there it's done. Yeah. Well, I don't know whether SkyScanner artificially slow things down, but there are definitely experiments that show if they did, it would increase people's sense of the results being comprehensive. So Ryan Buell at Harvard Business School ran a study into this. And he randomizes people into two groups. Some people use a SkyScanter style site,

and they are given their results immediately. Other people, the site is slowed down. And on the results page, rather than the results popping up immediately, there's a little bar that appears that goes round and round saying, searching out of Italia, are searching United, searching British Airways. And that group have to wait a couple of extra seconds.

And that group rate their results, as I don't know, it's something like 10 or 15% more comprehensive than the first result, first group. There's essentially a rule of thumb in our head, often called the kind of labor illusion. The more effort we think someone else has gone to create a product, the higher quality we think that product will be, even when people are getting exactly the same,

beer or exactly the same vacuum cleaner. If people know about the stories of effort behind it, it changes their perceptions. I remember a short from some seminar that was given by an advertising guy. Maybe it was a designer or something like that. And he's sort of talking to a room and he says, how much would you pay for me to design the logo for your company? And the guy gives a number. He says, what if I can do this in 60 minutes? And the guy says, well, hang in a second. Does that mean you would pay me more if it took me longer and he just explains this effort illusion thing perfectly yeah it's um i mean it's in the the book the brand that i think really leans into this illusion of effort is dyson so across all their communications you know PR advertising the website

you know even the very first line of james dyson's autobiography they keep on referencing this number. James Dyson says I went four years, I went through 5,127 prototypes before I created the bagless vacuum. Now logically, or at least from a very narrow-minded logical perspective, how many prototypes he went through is irrelevant. What people should care about is the beautiful design or the quality of how well it sucks up dirt. But what behavioral scientists have shown is again and again, if you show people the same product, sometimes you tell people the amount prototypes or the amount of effort that went into it, sometimes you don't, you get these wildly different scores, wildly different perceptions of premiumness. So absolutely, emphasizing effort

creates a perception of quality. What is the advent of AI doing to the advertising landscape in that case? Because what we're doing here is basically undercutting the illusion of effort. Yeah, absolutely. So there is a Dutch psychologist called Kobe Millett, VU, Amsterdam. And he was interested in that. Back in 2023, runs a simple experiment. He shows people products. So sometimes one of the products was a poster of a skull.

And sometimes he labels it as hand-drawn. Sometimes he labels it as created by an AI-powered robot. And people are asked about the artistic merit of the poster, the creativity of the poster, and crucially, purchased intent. Now, for every single metric, he sees the same pattern. People who saw the hand-drawn label, they rate that poster better than the group who saw the AI-powered label. And the scale is quite surprising.

Now, when it comes to purchase intent, there is a 61% difference. Now, Millett's explanation for this is the illusion of effort. He says, people's personal experience of Claude or Chat GPT, is that they will spit out an answer in a few seconds. So therefore we think it's low effort. So if we tell people our product has been created by AI, all things being equal, that product will be rated worse

than if people are told that it was hand-drawn or made through human effort. So you've got to be really careful as a business when you're bringing AI into your products. Now, I'd be a Luddite to suggest don't do that, but what you have to do is be aware of the illusion of effort and therefore shift the conversation. Shift the conversation away from how quickly the product was delivered to how much effort you put into setting up the process calls and processes to get this AI system set up in the first place.

I think this is one of the reasons that people have an ick around AI music. There's a lot of that at the moment. Spotify has a bunch of charts that are being dominated by AI bands. and an interesting realization I had. So the illusion of effort idea that you were talking about, everybody knows, everyone that's ever tried to sing or pick up a new instrument realizes just how difficult and inaccessible it is. That, I think, gives music a kind of protected class.

It's inaccessible to most people. I can't read music. I don't understand how it works. I know what I like, but I can't recreate it. if you gave me any of the instruments, including the one that I was born with that's at the front of my face, I wouldn't be able to make the sounds of the songs that I like. And that, I think, makes it feel particularly egregious for someone to jump over it. I wonder whether there's an equivalent where it comes to art as well, if somebody's drawing

something. I'm not particularly good at drawing, but I can get an AI to do it. But the fact that I've skipped the cue of something that used to be a reliably costly signal of competence and effort, the fact that I've circumvented that feels sort of additionally unfair. I mean, that might well be true. I mean, what the experiments are very clear on

is if you look at these metrics for how much you're prepared to pay or how good quality you think the item is, if people see exactly the same products, you change this labelling and you get a different score. And it does extend beyond music. So you've got Millets, work with, you know, art. I did something with Michael Aaron Flickr, just showing people a fake new brand. We didn't say it was a fake new brand, but we showed them these pictures of a brand called Blacksheet vodka.

And sometimes we said, look, the designer went through 143 iterations. Other times we just showed them the picture of the bottle. And the people that saw that story of effort, they thought the bottle design was more. more beautiful, significantly more beautiful than the people that didn't hear that story of effort. So it certainly seems to extend beyond what we might think of as art into commercial design, all the way through to estate agent services have been shown to have a similar effect. On the Guinness thing, what do you make of splitting the G? Have you seen this?

I have my, I went to the Guinness storehouse, the giant. a kind of brewery tour you can do in Dublin. I went with my son. I think it was last summer, and that's, or maybe summer before, that's when I was introduced to this. He was trying to show me how to do it. I mean, it's adding a bit of fun to the experience.

I think Guinness themselves try not to promote it because it's probably a little bit dubious in terms of kind of safe drinking. But I think it's an organic thing that gets the brand talked about, adds a bit of excitement and uncertainty. I'm fascinated by. these things that are bottom-up, almost anti-marketing campaigns. I think that it's kind of like a perpetual motion machine for a brand. I think white Monster Energy has the equivalent at the moment as well.

It's almost a meta-meam. It's Americana. It's WWF from the 90s. It's Creed and New Metal. It's heavy hits in the NFL. It's Lincoln Park and Transformers, the early movies. it's all of these things and at no point as far as I can see has monster energy pushed this white monster thing in the same way as splitting the G from Guinness just they did not place

the word Guinness on the side of that pint glass at the point that would be two ish mouthfuls two and a half mouthfuls deep hard enough to make it hard not so hard that you have to drink it up it's just the way it's done and then this now has been pushing out so much, I don't know whether you saw the stories from last summer in the UK, some pubs made people buy two or three drinks before they could buy a Guinness. You weren't allowed to, you weren't allowed to, because they had Guinness shortages. They had such a Guinness shortage. They had to fucking titrate the supply to customers.

Yeah. So two things there. The first, I wonder if there's an element of, you know, that supposed, I think it's Arnold Palmer, where the golfer's phrase, you know, the harder I practice, the luckier I get. I wonder if there's something akin to that in the world of brands. In the bigger you get, the more enjoyable people find your kind of communications, the warmth that of the brand, I think the more likely these spontaneous ideas are going to spring up. More people, more chance a drink, it comes up with the idea.

And also, I think if there's warmth towards the brand, they're more likely to do it. So I think that, you know, you might have this kind of Matthew effect of to the best brands. You get the best organic ideas. But that second point you mentioned is around the shortage. Now, I'm not claiming in any way that Guinness actually did this. Well, I think if I was a brand, I would certainly be tempted occasionally to spread rumors of a shortage. Supply limitation. The most powerful ideas in behavioral science, the one that, when psychologists try and do comparative ranking of some of these biases,

The one that comes out towards the top again and again is scarcity. You know, we want what we can't have. There's this amazing G.K. Chesterston phrase where he says, the way to love anything is to realize it might be lost. And I think you get these stories in the press about they're going to be a shortage. And then it will drive even greater demand be because that fear of missing out, that fear of or that belief that lots of other people want this thing. It powers the desire for it.

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liquid death, pretty disruptive, I think for a water company. I know they're now moving into a lot of other products. What's your perspective on liquid death? So, I mean, I think it's a fantastic marketing case study. Because if there is one factor that captures attention, it's behaving distinctively. So the original studies into this

were done all the way back in 1933 by a German psychologist called Hedwig von Restorff. It was the University of Berlin. And what she basically did, I mean, with a bit of changing, she'd kind of give people lists of words. So I might write down, let's say,

10 words, give them to you. Nine of them would be items of furniture. One of them would be an animal. and then I would take those lists away, ask you what you could remember, and overwhelmingly people were much more likely to remember the distinctive animal rather than the kind of nine bits of furniture. So her argument was we are hardwired to notice what's distinctive. Now that is a very, very well-known finding. It's been repeated over the last kind of 90-odd years. But if you think about an awful lot of advertising, brands end up aping the behavior of their competitors. You know, you look at watch ads.

They all follow the same formula or car ads. You know, in Britain it's always kind of seems to be a kind of central European, dusty mountainous scene with them going around the corner. Again and again, these norms of behavior spring up. And when it comes to water, there were some traditions that every brand like Perrier or all the others seem to adhere to, which is, you know, you've got to have clear glass that people can see the purity of products. You've got to have shots of nature. You've got to have alpine scenes and yoga mums. And I think what Liquid Death did so brilliantly is realize, you know, all this stuff is just there for tradition's sake. You don't need to communicate in that way.

And actually, if we take the polar opposite approach and we behave like a craft beer or an energy drink and have these outrageously gory ads and, you know, kind of out there humor, that will stand out. It'll get attention. And frankly, if you don't have attention, everything else you do in marketing is academic. So I think that relentless pursuit of being distinctive and then crucially being. distinctive in a consistent way. They didn't have one ad that was out there in a certain direction and then a completely different one the next time. They all had this theme of kind of behaving like a heavy metal band or a craft beer brand. So they had this recognizable way of breaking

conventions. I think that is at the heart of their American success. How important is humor? Humor, yeah, absolutely. So Mike Cesario, the founder of Liquid Death, He talks about the fact that he found it strange that the beers and crisps and candies. They had all the fun when it came to advertising and the healthy, virtuous goods were all a bit hair-shirties in their communication. So they have definitely doubled down on being funny and humorous. And again, you know, it's a great way of attracting attention. The etymology of advert is the Latin, I think, for turn towards. And what do people turn towards?

They turn towards things that bring them pleasure and happiness. They turn away from dry, dusty information. So to get attention, one of the best things you can do is amuse people. What about Hagen does? That's a brand that I kind of forgot about in the US, because I don't think that distro is as big, quite as big over here, Ben and jerry's and there's sort of three buckets of ice cream. There's very sort of experimental stuff. The Ben and Jerry's were going to that. There's healthy, craft better for you,

Amy's ice cream type stuff. And then there's the high protein good for you, lower calorie. So Hagen does, I forget about, but I know that they're a monster of a brand. Yeah, so the origin story of Hargandas is, I think, fascinating. And it is a little bit dubious. I'm not saying I would recommend exactly what they do to other people. But they were set up in the Bronx in the 1940s, maybe the very early 50s. And they were set up by a Jewish couple who had emigrated from, I think, Ukraine and Russia. and they had moved to New York, kind of gone into the family ice cream business,

and they decided they wanted to launch this premium sophisticated ice cream. They weren't going to charge a lot more for it than the competitors. And they thought, well, how do we create this image of sophistication? Well, why don't we essentially position this brand as being Danish? Now, there's nothing at all Danish about Hargandars. It was created in the Bronx. The couple had never, ever been to Denmark. I think they chose it because Denmark had a particularly strong reputation that it had,

the populace during Second World War had done an awful lot to help Jews escape from the Nazis. So there was a lot of admiration, I think, for Denmark in particular. but basically they wanted a kind of European country that felt a bit sophisticated. So even though they hadn't been to Denmark, they start generating names and they come up with Hagen-Dars. And if you go to a day, they'd be like, this isn't Danish. This is, you know, we don't have, I think, umlats over the A, we don't have Z-S in our name. It doesn't even make sense as a Danish thing. But to American ear in the 1940s, it sounded Danish.

And then the couple double down by putting a little map of Denmark. on the tub. And what's so clever about this, albeit morally dubious, we can maybe talk about that, is people taste what they expect to taste. And if you wrap up a product in this aura of sophisticated provenance, people assume it tastes better, and then they go out and look for confirming evidence.

So exactly the same ice cream tasted that little better, a little bit better to an American palate it because it had this set of associations of Danishness. Why do you think, go ahead. I know, all is going to say is the moral from this. I'm aware of what is quite charming when it's a mum and dad brand is one thing. When it's a multi-million dollar brand, it's a little bit less charming. But I think the lesson is what we experience isn't just due to the physical products.

It's not due to just the milk and the fats and the sugars. it's also what we think we're going to taste. So the colour of the packaging, the weight of it, the story behind it, the provenance. All these things are just as important. And you as a market need to create those positive perceptions to give your product the best chance of success. What do you think it is about the Danes that suggest that they're good at ice cream? I think it's the fact that it was a far away country that Europe rightly or wrongly probably had this aura of sophisticated It's where luxury brands came from.

It's where, you know, Renaissance figures came from. I think it was a sense of Europe having some of these values and then doubling down on Denmark because for a Jewish couple, their history of fighting against anti-Semitism was something that would have appealed. I think that was the case of why Denmark in particular

is more a personal story to them. What about the pumpkin-spiced latte? I know that we're in the spring now, but the Starbucks. Autumn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But we're into, we're into spring shortly. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Spring shortly. So the pumpkin spice latte is very long gone. Yeah. What did you learn about Starbucks?

I think the point there is the time-specific nature of the pumpkin spice latte. So, you know, we've talked already about this idea of scarcity that we want what we can't have. The brilliant thing about. pumpkin spice latte is they launched this product. They have huge success. What 99% of businesses would have done is think, wow, we've got this cash machine of a brand. Let's just run it all year round and let's maximize our profits. And if a business had done that, it would have been super

successful for a year or two, but probably over time they would have lost the very kind of magic at the heart of that variant. So there's an idea called habituation, which is the idea that over time we become a bit desensitized to enjoyment. So there's a study from Leif Nelson at NYU, which demonstrates this quite powerfully. He lets people experience a massage chair, and it's a very pleasurable massage chair. And some people just sit in the chair for three minutes, three minutes straight, and then they rate how much they enjoyed it out of nine, and the average rating is 6.05.

Other people, there's a one minute, 20 seconds session in the chair. They then turn the chair off for 20 seconds, and then there's another one minute, 20 seconds with the chair going. So last for three minutes, but there's no massaging going on for 20 of those seconds. Now, logically, you'd expect, well, surely, this group will enjoy the experience less, they had less time with the enjoyable aspect. But actually, you see saying quite different, the rating actually goes amongst this group to

7.05 out of nine. So from 6.05 to 7.05, got the 17% improvement. What Nelson argues is a curse of human nature, is that when we experience saying pleasurable, over time, the enjoyment level wanes because we see. stop comparing it to not having it. We compare it to the last time of using the service. So over time, we habitual we get used to these pleasant things. So I think with something that's very powerfully flavored like the pumpkin spice latte, something's a little bit strange.

They'd sold it all year. By the sixth pumpkin spice latte, but at the December, you'd be sick of the bloody stuff. But by stopping it before that happens, removing it from it. from sale, what you allow is this appreciation, anticipation, and desire to grow back again. So I think they turned something that would have lasted for a couple of years, if you've been permanently on sale, into something that's been going for about 20 years. Wow. Yeah, the LTO, the limited time offer, the sort of dropped model, as it's known.

It's how supreme the clothing company do their things. It's how a lot of clothing companies independent and big. Build up, build up, build up, build up. It's there, and then it's gone. Yeah. And actually, you can actually spot this if you look hard enough in products where it's not immediately apparent. So one brilliant example is, do you remember Wordle? So that game, I think you had six goes to guess a five-letter word. In a hugely popular, Josh Wardle, the designer sold it for New York Times, I think for about $10 million. Now, at the height, you had hundreds of millions of people playing this game, or tens of millions of people playing it. But what's interesting is even though usage spiked during COVID, this product had been around for ages. But when Josh Wardle first created it, the difference was you could do your Wordle game, and as soon as you finished, you could do another, and then you could do another, and then you could do another. And when it was set up like that, barely anyone played it.

It was like dozens of people playing it a day. But then during COVID, Wardle becomes slightly obsessed with the New York Times crossword. And he wonders to himself, do I love the crossword? Because once I finish the cryptic crossword, I have to wait till tomorrow to get the next one. And it builds this sense of anticipation. So he changes the programming of Wordle so that now you do one, you finish it, you can't do another. There are no more around. You have to wait until the next one's released.

24 hours time. And he attributes the success to kind of baking in this scarcity, baking into this limited time offer into the very heart of the product. Well, get back to talking in just one second, but first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, focus, and performance. But most people have no idea what there's are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with function because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening. inside of my body twice a year. There run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your

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influencer marketing, what do you think people are getting wrong with that? What are the areas that that goes well and what are the areas that that fails from a behavior? Gabriel Science standpoint. I think when it goes well, there is an idea called the Messenger effect. So the original study was done back in 1953 by Hovland and Weiss. They were at Yale at the time. It's quite a nice study. They stop people in the street and they ask them a topical matter of the day.

Like, can the US build a nuclear power submarine in the next 12 months? People say yes or no. And then once the psychologists have got the answer, they invite those. people back to their lab in four days time. And when the participants arrive at the lab, on a table there is a four sheet of paper and there is a very tightly argued bit of prose about why the participant is completely wrong. So if I said yes, a submarine can be built, very powerful argument about why it's just not practical. Once people have read this argument, they have to say whether they've changed their opinion. Most people,

don't. But the twist in the experiment is sometimes the argument is attributed to a credible source. So in the case of the submarine, it was Oppenheim of the physicist. Sometimes the argue was attributed to a low credibility source. So Pravda, the Russian newspaper. And what the psychologist found is that if the argument was attributed to a low credibility source, 7% changed their mind, high credibility source, 23% changed their mind. So even though everyone gets exactly the same logical argument, the same facts, the same figures, the same persuasive power of argument, you get this three and a half-fold difference in influence dependent on who it came from. So their argument was who says something can be as important as what said.

Now that study was done what, 73 years ago. But it's been repeated again and again. I'm just going back to the original one because I think it's the clearest, it's the simplest. But since they've done that, what people have started to look at is, well, what makes for an effective messenger? And many different variables. Three of the big ones are the messenger is neutral. So if I tell you amazing, my book's amazing, you might be skeptical. Even if I got my brother or my wife to tell you that, it's still, even that tiny extra bit of neutrality will boost believability bit.

So neutrality is important. credibility is important and that's why Okunheim was so powerful. But then the third bit that's really interesting is relatability. Now I might be influenced by what my neighbour tells me about the best sports drink or the best supplements, even though my neighbour doesn't know

anything particularly in that area. But the fact that I relate to them, they're similar to me, it makes them more powerful. So I think the argument where the influence would be you could get the neutrality but ideally if you can get credibility and relatability as well, you know, then you're

to someone that can change the behavior of others. I was seeing some stories about experts expecting deeper creative partnerships, sort of these mega creators they're called. So it's fewer long-term brand deals and they extend into roles like co-branded product lines or internal leadership titles. So I'm not sure if you saw this, Virgin Voyages named J-Lo as its chief entertainment officer. Okay.

So they framed her as the co-architect of the sort of onboard experience rather than just a face in ads. Ridge Wallet just got Marquez Brownlee, MKBHD, he's a big tech YouTuber, he's the chief creative partner. And then SoFi just appointed the, your rich BFF person, Vivian II, as the chief of financial empowerment.

So they're trying to give us sort of an internal sounding role that legitimizes her as a financial educator inside of the company. I think we saw this with, maybe to a lesser extent Ryan Reynolds with Mint Mobile, but certainly Ryan Reynolds

with the football team. Somebody, smaller numbers of roles that are with higher value individuals with a more legitimate sounding position. Yeah, so once you start talking about the order of a

J-Lo, I think you start moving into kind of other behavioral biases. There's an idea called costly signaling. So the original work on this was done by biologists rather than behavioral scientists. But it's essentially the believability of communications is in proportion to the expense of that communications. So if there is a brand that gets a celebrity like J-Lo, you know, the general person in the street won't know whether J-Lo costs,

and I don't know whether she costs 100 million or 50 million, but I know she's very, very expensive. and that sends a credible signal about how much the brand believes in their offering. The argument being, extravagant advertising works in the long term. You know, if I hire J-Lo to advertise my terrible soft drink, you know, I might get people to try it once, but they're not going to recommend it to the friends, they're not going to come back, I'm going to go bust. But if I have a brilliant soft drink and I get J-Lo to be the face of it, well, then it works out for me because I know that people will try it, recommend it, and it will go on and on and on like that. So the fact that extravagant spend is an effective screening mechanism.

Only people who genuinely believe in their brand would do it because if you thought your brand was awful, adopting that large S would make you bust. That's, I think, what makes it a credible and powerful and persuasive signal. What about KFC? We talked about five guys. What have you learned from KFC? So KFC, there's a few different things there. There's, I think the power of a secret is quite interesting.

But the other one that they did that I really loved was a bit more tactical. But it's kind of one of the themes that we've come back to again and again, which is this power of scarcity. So they did a slightly different approach. to the examples we've discussed so far. And there was a wonderful Australian campaign. I think it was back in, first in 2016, where they would promote $1 chips.

So you get these big, large fries of $1, a very, very good deal. And when they did it for the first few years, hidden in the tiny little teas and seas at the bottom of the ads was the fact that you could only get four bags of chips per person. what the marketing team did was put that front and center of the messaging. So they tested loads of different behavioral science biases that could boost sales. The one that works best was saying big letters on the posters, maximum number of these bags of chips you can buy bags of fries for per person.

And what it did was provide a very credible signal that either these chips are going to be so in time. pricing they're worried about selling out or that it's such a powerful and good value deal that they're actually losing money on it instead. Now, that's not speculation. Michael Aaron and I did a very simple test. We told people about Sierra Nevada Palau being sold in America, 12 bottles of beer for 1899. and I'm trying to remember, I think 14% of people thought it was good value. And then other occasions, we told people Sierra Nevada Paleo, 12 pack of beer being sold for 18.9 to 9 in the supermarket. Maximum of a number of cases you can buy is six.

And the proportion of people who thought it was good value went up to 22%. So you get this, I think, 57, 59% improvement. People works are a rule of thumb that if a business business, business is not letting you take as much for a product as you want. It must be a good deal. It's either so good it's going to sell out or so good it's actually hurting the bottom line. So that to me was like a wonderfully simple tactic that far more people could apply. It's so funny because KFC's fries are actually the worst, as everybody knows. I have heard people say this.

Yeah, they're the worst of all of the fries. So I would not have leaned on the fried. I suppose what's interesting about doing it with the fries as well is that that is something which you are, Burger King has fries and McDonald's has fries as well. You didn't pick something that only you make. If you picked the signature Zinger burger, well, no one else can make that. So doing the scarcity on something

which is a non-competable good would probably change the framing of it versus these you can get elsewhere, but not like this. Yeah, I think it was a reasonably good deal. But there's, whenever something's on offer, there's always a bit of suspicion as well, you know, have they cut corners?

Is there some kind of trade-off for this low price? They're trying to counter-signal the discount. Yes, yes. Yes. I think and what differentiates it from just saying, you know, limited time offer or exclusive, is it not just staying in this realm of statement and claim. It's not just in this realm of talk being cheap. It's actually a physical restriction.

You know, you go to the counter, they will not serve you more than four. And I think it's this action rather than claim that distinguishes it from the kind of more common use of scarce. I can't believe that Clana and these companies, I thought, what are they called, micro-pay-later companies? Oh, buy now pay later. Buy now pay-later things.

And there was this joke that you could get your Chipotle order on Clana, so you could get your burrito buy it today and pay for it tomorrow. But just the same as the prediction markets, these things seem to be here to stay. So what's your perspective on the buy now, pay later industry?

So there's a longstanding idea called the Penn is a Day Effect. So the original study was John Gauvel at Harvard, and he did it with charities on a time. So essentially, you know, he found out were people willing to donate to a charity? And sometimes the request was $365 a year. other times it was a dollar a day for a year. And what he found is even though the sums works out to be the same,

people were much more likely to donate if you phrased it as a dollar a day. Now, what seems to be happening is people give different weights to two sides of the equation. You know, the dollars that are being discussed looms larger bills mind. The unit of time doesn't seem to be given the weight it should be. So it's a bit like people think three times seven is different from seven times through. So if you've got a time-based product, the more you can break, or the more that you can discuss that product in the smallest unit of time, the better it works out for you. Now, exactly the same thing happens with physical items. So I mentioned that Sierra Nevada parallel study Michael Lerner and I did.

And we did another version of it. So key factor, if you say to people, a 12-pack of Sierra Nevada costs 1899, you get 14% thinking it's good value. If you say to people, this is a different group, costs 1899 for a 12-pack, that's the same as $1.58 a bottle. The proportion jumps, I think, to 29 or 30% thinking it's a good deal. So you break down a physical item into smaller subunits and you create down. create a perception, it's better value. So one of the things Klanar offers is, now, I go to a website, I want to buy a jumper for $60. I don't pay $60 in one go. I pay three lots of 20. People treat three lots of 20 completely different from one hit of 60 because they're focusing

too much on the 20. They're not doing the multiplying as much as they should. So, you know, brands put that on their website. Retail's put Klanar or competitor on the website. site, they end up selling more. So there is a strong reason for businesses to start handing over a bit of commissions, Clarena. I'm interested in the difference between framing things as negatives versus positives. And it seems like the direction that you come into this from can be pretty important. Yeah, so there's an idea called loss aversion. The original studies were done by Carneman Tversk in the 70s, but they're a little bit bizarre and just got a bit confusing. I think the much better study was done in 1988 by Elliot Aronson at Harvard.

So what he does is go to homeowners, 404 homeowners, nice big sample, knocks on the door, tries to sell them loft insulation. Sometimes he says, buy my loft insulation and you'll save 75 cents a day. So a psychologist would say this is the gain frame. You're emphasising what you benefit as a consumer by taking out lock. insulation. But other homeowners, he gives them the same mathematical sum. He says, look, take out the loft insulation. Because if you don't, you'll be wasting 75 cents a day. Now, even though it's the same amount of money, by emphasizing people could be losing out on that, they could be wasting

that money. He got a 50 or 60% higher response rate. So absolutely, there is an argument that the mathematically equivalent loss affects us more than the than someone getting that that gain. The way I'd put it is if you and I go our separate ways today, you realize you have lost $5, I find that $5,

your unhappiness will be larger than my happiness. So it would be if I knew that you'd found my $5. Oh, don't worry, I wouldn't be telling you. I'd be keeping that. secret. Yeah, yeah. You just see me in a slightly fancier t-shirt next time. It makes me think about the anti-smoking ads because it's not saying if you stop smoking, you will live four years longer.

It's if you keep smoking, you will die four years sooner. Yes, the only caveat there is when it comes, you know, like the great thing, behavioral science and psychology, it's not like maths where there are people of particles and, you know, exactly the same, um, occurrences happen. I think there's a, there's a bit of a complexity when it comes to humans and, you know, context is hugely important. When it comes to going from a loss to engendering fear, then I think you've got to be quite careful. Why? There's an argument from people like George Lowenstein.

He calls it the ostrich effect. And it's essentially the argument that if you make people feel ashamed or scared or too worried, rather than resolve the underlying issue, what they tend to do is behave like the metaphorical ostrich. They just start ignoring the ads. They stick their head in the sands. Now, his study was already done about 20 years ago when he was at Carnegie Mellon. And he is given anonymized data from Vanguard in America, so this massive fund provider. and he can see how often users are checking their stock portfolios. He then plots that against the movement in the American stock market. And what he finds is as the stock market goes up, people check their wealth reasonably regularly.

When the stock market declines, people stop checking. It's not a small effect. I think it's for every 1% drop in the stock market, people check. their portfolio is 5 to 6% less regular. And his argument is, from a narrow-minded, logical perspective, that's irrational. You know, the information about our wealth is equally valid, whether it's good news or bad news. But he says people have a rule of thumb is if something causes them pleasure, they do it more. If something causes them immediate pain, they turn away from it. So the danger with smoking ads or anti-smoking ads that scare people is that often, unless the change,

change you're asking is really easy. You can cause people either to avoid paying any attention to the messaging or going through these kind of mental gymnastics to explain to themselves why that messaging doesn't affect them. Yeah. I mean, it makes complete sense that people wouldn't want to hear something that they really wouldn't want to hear. Yeah. Yeah. And it's this, I think, problem with long versus short term thinking is absolutely, in a long, interest to listen to things that are going to keep us living longer. But in the immediate moment, it makes us feel unpleasant. And too often we prioritise our immediate feelings rather than what works for us over the medium or long term. In other news, this episode is brought to you by

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to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to RPstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r pstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I remember, I can't remember if it was you or Rory that taught me about when people needed to increase their contributions to their pension, rather than the money being taken out of their current pay. Yeah, yeah. When they got a pay increase, a portion of the new pay was put toward that

and people were more prepared to do the investing if it worked in that sort of a way. Yes, so this was an American scheme. I think it was Shlomo Bernanxi that came up with the idea. It was called Give More Tomorrow. And it's exactly, as you say, If you ask someone to put more money into their pension today, what they focus on is the loss of that money

and they're remarkably resistant to doing it. I think, well, I can't afford to go on that extra holiday or buy a car. So what they started to do instead was say to people, look, don't put any more money into pensions day. But when you get your pay rise in nine months' time, are you okay if we automatically set up a system where we'll just take 10% of that, 20% of that, and put it into your pension.

And because the conversation was about money being taken away long in the future, it felt attenuated to people. There's an idea called present bias, which is essentially people give too much weight to what's going to happen now and the near future. And we massively underweight pleasure or pain in the distant future. So often that's a big problem for pensions or insurance or savings. But Banerzi's clever design meant that he used human nature to encourage this very desirable behavior. Is there a way that fast food companies would use this on the inverse?

They sort of don't think about the tomorrow, do think about the today? Yes, yes, absolutely. What might be one of my favorite experiments ever? I don't think we've ever chatted about this one. It's a 1998 study from Daniel Reed, who at the Times at University Leeds, I think it's at Warwick now. And he does this brilliant study where he goes around a Danish office and he offers people a choice. So you can either have an apple or a chocolate bar. They're completely free, but you only get to pick one.

The first half of people, it's a very straight set up. He just says, pick which of these one snacks you want. Take it now, eat it now. And 82% go for chocolate bar, 18% go apple. Next time he does this experiment, he tries. twists it slightly, and he says to people, you can have a chocolate bar on Apple, you pick now, but I will bring this snack to you in a week's time. And suddenly the Apple becomes a lot more popular.

It's not quite being in a chocolate bar. I think it's 51% chocolate bar, 49% Apple. But considering there was a massive skew towards the chocolate bar in the previous version, this is a big change. And the argument from Reid is that when we are picking for immediate consumption, we're very much driven by what we want to do, what's in our, what's going to be tasty, what's our kind of base desire. But if we're picking for our future self, well, suddenly we are much more influenced by what we think we should do. And you take that experiment and then you think about,

well, how would you behave if you're a low-alcohol beer or a healthy food versus fast food? And if you want people to do the right thing, they don't try and influence them when they're sitting down at a restaurant just about to eat because they're going to be driven by their appetite. What you want to do is reach them maybe when they're doing their online shop. Now, you're on Tesco.com and you're ordering your food that's going to arrive in a week. Then this is the chance to get them buying the low fat meats or the vegetables or the low alcohol lager. Now, this changing in time perspective definitely changes how we behave. I would love to see what the straight up impact of online shopping has done to the kind of baskets that people select from the same supermarket by simply not walking around, by not getting it immediately, by having this delay. Yeah, yeah.

And I think that experiment would suggest this ordering of healthy food. I think the other one, the biggest principle of brain and behavior of science is people do what's easy. So I wonder if you get a much narrower range of foods, people buy week to week. Because once you've set up your basket, it's so easy just to repeat it. It's almost like a membership. There's a cost associated with picking something new, whereas there's a cost when you're going around the supermarket, there's a cost associated with picking something old or something new

because you're already walking. Yeah. And it's a brilliant example of people aren't just influenced, by the end product. They're interested in how the choices are structured. You know, what time the food's going to be delivered, you know, what's easy to spot, what's visible. These things that should be peripheral have a big impact. I guess as well, this is also why bananas and pecans aren't put on the cashier shelves right at the very end just as you're going out because it's, oh yeah, I really, I'm really going to just treat myself to that banana. That's not the way that we

think? Yeah, there is an argument called moral licensing that if we feel we've done something virtuous, we then overcompensate. So there's some quite scary studies done by, I'm not 100% sure how to pronounce his name. I think it's Chu, it's kind of C-H-I-O-U. I think he might be from Taiwan. And he recruited a group of smokers, that's key. And then he gives everyone sugar pills, that's right, he gives everyone sugar pills, but some of them are told it's a course of vitamins, some are told they are sugar pills. Then he invites them, after doing this two-week course of supplements, he invites them into his lab and they fill out this very long, boring form, and they have to write down all the things they did over the two weeks.

And they claim the people who think they've taken the vitamins, they note down. They note down, They've done more kind of binge drinking, more smoking, less exercise. So it kind of suggests this moral licensing point because they think they've had the vitamins they overcompensate elsewhere. But that's still claim data. The clever bit is what Chou does is monitor people as they're filling in these very boring surveys. And he just records whether or not the smokers light up a fag while they are filling in the survey. and the smokers who think they took the vitamins, they are 50% more likely to light up

than the smokers who didn't. So that to me is the powerful bit of the study. You know, not just listening to claims, but looking at actual behaviour. And that's quite a powerful overview of this idea that if we think we behave virtually, we overcompensate elsewhere. Now, with a supermarket, think about the design.

Now, what do you see as soon as you get into the supermarket? You've got all your fresh fruit and veg. Now, from a practical perspective, It's the very worst place to have it because it's at the bottom of your trolley now and you're going to put all your heavy items on top. But what it does is allow people to feel their virtuous and then they overcompensate with the crisps and the beer and the snacks later on. So I think you're right that placing those treat items right at the end, which I think has been banned actually in Britain, I think, is a use of one of these biases. Maybe not for people's best interest, though. it's so it's been banned to put fast food so i thought i thought i thought i thought i'd heard either

a discussion of that happening that you couldn't have you know the little bars now by the um the checkouts full of you know high fat high salt high sugar items i think in an attempt to try and make people healthier yeah yeah a tiny little nudge well isn't it interesting because there's no way if you were to put granola bars or fruits or whatever, your total market cap for that, total sales for that organisation is going to go down. You're simply going to be able to convert people less effectively with that type. So I understand what you're doing and sometimes interventions are needed in order to be able to sort of help people make the right choices and stuff. But this is a that's a big hammer blow to the supermarkets.

It's a big hammer blow. We've already found the way to make this work. We've found the most effective. We split-tested. Do you not think we'd be putting apples out there if we couldn't get people to sell more apples than we could to do the chocolate bars? I mean, the only thing I would say, you say, I'm realizing now, I've kind of straight. I think that's what happened.

We should probably check as well. But you certainly could use a lot of the principles we've been discussing to sell more apples. What I find fascinating is the tactics that are currently used are almost the complete opposite of what the experimental data suggests should be done. So there's an amazing study by Bradley Turnmould in a cafeteria over six or seven weeks, and he randomizes the labels and the vegetables. So sometimes he will try and push the health benefit. So you might see something like carrots in low-calorie citrus glaze. And I think something like 150 units of the vegetable has sold each day.

Other days, same recipe, same vegetable, but he emphasises the indulgent benefits. That's like, you know, sizzling citrus, tangy carrot. And what he finds there is sales go up to about 230 units a day is that's a 41% increase. So, so here's an argument is just because something is healthier, it doesn't mean the message you should lead with is its healthiness. Now, that I think is a massive problem with a lot of communications for virtuous goods. People keep on banging about the health benefits and the ethics behind these things. But actually, if you want to actually change behaviour, the better thing to do certainly with food is to focus on. Make it sound indulgent.

It takes it down deliciously. and Van Tasty make it sound enjoyable. This is what Grenade bars did. Grenade bars didn't... I don't know what they did when they first, first, first launched. But certainly now, looking at them at no point, are they saying, better for you, bar? That's communicated through the macronutrients.

That's the fact that it's got protein in. I guess the sort of broader brand messaging contributes to that. What they're saying is, this is a collaboration with cream egg, or this is a collaboration with Oreo or Jaffer cake or whatever. and they're exclusively competing on the luxury and the indulgence. Yeah, and that is, you go from, you go into saying like beers with low levels of alcohol. What they tend to do is talk about being non-alcoholic beers. They are emphasizing the absence of the fumbit.

Where they're emphasizing the kind of deprivation. There's a few examples where they've lent into the appeal. It didn't succeed, but I think that was. of the formulation, not the branding. But I loved it when Budweiser did Prohibition Brew. It made it sound like kind of exciting and fun and glamorous. There's a beer in Britain called Infinite Session, emphasizing how you can stay in the pub with your mates longer

with this 0% larger. So I think moving away from that kind of hair shirtist advertising for healthy foods and less damaging drinks, that's something we've got to be thinking about more. On the other side of the equation, What about Pringles? What's so good about them? The fringles, the genus of Pringles, was their line.

Once you pop, you can't stop. And it's one of the most bizarre studies in behavioural science. It's about this idea called the Keats heuristic. I think there's some kind of Keats line where he says, truth is beauty and beauty is truth. There's something like that. He's saying that we mistake beauty for truth. So there's two academics in the 90s called McLone and Toffigbash, and they create some fake

proverbs. And for every proverb, they create two versions. So the non-rhyming version might be woes unite enemies. The rhyming version would be woes unite foes. Now, you get, say, if we were both taking part of this experiment, you might read woes unite foes and you're asked to rate how believable this statement is. I would see woes unite enemies and I rate how believable

I think the phrases now we've both received essentially the same information all that's changed is the packaging you get this nice rhyme I get this non-riving version what happens is the people who hear the rhyming version

they rate the believability of the statement 17% higher than the people that hear the non-rhyming version people are conflating ease of process with truthfulness. Now the interesting bit is if you then go back to all the participants

and you say to them, why did you think this statement was believable? Did the rhyme or absence of rhyme influence you? Every single participant, bar one, denied that the kind of form or the rhyme, the ease of practicing, affected them. They all said,

no, no, I was making a judgment based on the inherent information. So it's one of these great examples of tiny little changes about the the kind of the fluency, the ease on our rear. Tiny little changes have a big effect, but people are really low to admit that's what influenced them. Isn't this what happens with split brain patients

and where they stroke the hand of one side, why did you get up to go and do this thing, and then they can fabulate some sort of an idea? I'm aware that it's different in terms of the mechanism, but the point being people are usually pretty good, at coming up with a logical explanation for why they did the thing, even if they were manipulated to do the thing, because the sort of required discomfort at the admission of deception

or self-deception is pretty costly, socially. Yeah, so I'm not overly familiar with those studies. I know that kind of headline results, but I think you're absolutely right, that they will be set up in such a way that the experimenter knows what generated the answer, but the patient will just come up with this plausible, much more rational sounding reason

to maintain kind of a sense of face and being a sensible person. And that's absolutely true with the whole swath of behavioural science studies. A key theme of behavioural science is that if you ask people why they bought a particular protein bar or a pair of trainers,

the problem is they'll give you loads of answers but most of them are just plausible post-rationalizations. They're not a reflection of what actually motivated them. So there's this amazing psychologist called Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, and he has a brilliant book called Strangers to Ourselves. And essentially, the whole book is a series of studies showing that people don't know their own motivations.

So one of the worst things businesses can do, and it accounts for an awful lot of poor communications, is ask people what they want and then take those answers at face value. People don't know what they want. What's that line from Henry Ford? If I'd ask the customer what they wanted, I'd have given them a faster horse. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or slightly more modern one that was.

1960s, there's a David Ogilby line who's this kind of amazing ad guy. And he said, consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say. So I think entrepreneurs, the best and people have known this for a long while. But the problem is the average advertiser finds it easy to run a survey. and then it sends them off in the wrong direction. Why do you get interested in Ignais Samalwise? Because I studied him for a talk that I gave a little while ago, and I thought he was fascinating,

but I didn't immediately see the correlation between your world and Samalwise. I was, well, as Michael and I were looking at ways to end the book. And I came across this. story of Samuel Weiss and so if people haven't heard of it 1840s

he is a doctor in Vienna could have reasonably recently trained in the 1840s and he is shocked when he arrives at the hospital

at the proportion of women who die in childbirth now it's astronomical you know some of the wards you would probably be better playing

Russian roulette you've got 10 15% of people dying um in labour. Spends an awful lot of time trying to work out why this is. And one of his findings is that the wards that are run by midwives tend to have a much better survival rate than the wards that are run by doctors.

And one of the things that the doctors do differently from nurses is that they will do autopsies. So they will come straight from cutting up a body to then deliver a baby. And Semmelweis wonders if they are bringing what he calls cadaverous particles to the mum to be. So he starts getting doctors to wash their hands in chlorine. Now, they've got to scrub them in his words until the stench of kind of putrid decay has gone. They have to scrub their hands clean and then they can help with labor. And the death rate plummets.

It goes from 10, 12%, to 3%. So this is in Semmelweis' eyes, you know, phenomenal. Surely everyone is going to adopt this behaviour. But to his absolute horror, lots of doctors don't jump at the opportunity to save more of their patients. They are amazingly resistant to accepting this new technology. And essentially, it drives Semmelweis basically mad. He dies in an asylum, right? He does. His wife, I think, you know, probably for good many reasons, like tricks him.

Says they're going out on a day escapade. She takes him to the asylum. And when he's being put in the asylum, this is the horror of it all, he, unsurprisingly, doesn't want to go. There is a struggle. There is a fight. And he gets injured. He gets cut. And he dies of a sepsis that his research had been showing how to. No way. I didn't know that. Holy she is. Absolutely horrible story on so many reasons. But it became famous as not just, it's probably the most extreme example. But again and again, there are all sorts of discoveries that people, even though they have this amazing impact, existing practitioners won't accept. So essentially the Semmelweis reflex is the argument that, you know, there's a tendency to ignore new ideas if they challenge existing ones. put yourself in the shoes of a doctor who Semmel Weiss is telling, for the last 10, 20 years you've been killing lots of your patients by bringing disease to them.

It's hellishly hard to accept that. So we kind of thought this was a brilliant place to end the book because what we want to say to marketers was all these principles aren't just about influencing consumers. You know, you need to use the very principles that successfully persuade consumers. You need to use those principles when you are trying to sell your ideas internally. Don't just think you have a great idea. Everyone's going to rush to accept it.

All these principles are discussed like scarcity or social proof. You can use them when you are trying to, you know, persuade people within your own organization. So it felt like a very good way of bringing the book to a close. Yeah, conceptual inertia is a term that I learned. a few years ago from this guy who researches the historical progress of ideas. So this is exactly what he's looking at. And he was looking at heliocentric model of the universe, for instance. So cool story on that.

A hundred years before Galileo proclaims his insight, you have Copernicus. A full century before. But his great work, which is called de revolutionibus, he kind of sort of squeaks it out basically on his deathbed. He's had this realization for most of his life. But he doesn't do it because he's afraid of the church. He's afraid of retribution. He sort of leaks this thing out.

A full century later, he still haven't caught up. So Galileo sees the same thing and he proclaims it from the rooftops. He's forced to recant under threat of torture, spends the rest of his life under house arrest. He's completely castigated. And the Cassandra complex, as it's known, is justified the fact that Copernicus didn't proclaim it is justified by the treatment of a guy a full century later who did the exact same thing. So if you were to point a finger at Copernicus and call him a coward, he could point the finger at Galileo and say, or was I just prescient? Yeah, it's a worryingly regular occurrence. And the only thing I would say with the Copernicus Galileo story is there could be a danger, or my Semmelweis one, of thinking,

oh, you know, this happened 500 years ago or 200 years ago. We are more sophisticated now. Surely we are better now. But there's recent ish examples. I think it was Barry Marshall in Australia, like a very junior doctor at this kind of not very prestigious university. He works out that ulcers are not caused by stress. they are caused by a bacteria.

I think it might be H. Pylori or something like that. No one will listen to him. Because surely, you know, if a massive discovery like this was going to take place, it be it at Harvard or Oxford. So what Marshall does is the most dramatic demonstration he can to prove his theory. He drinks loads of this bacteria, then gets an ulcer almost immediately, and then he cures himself by taking antibiotics.

And it took that kind of theater, you know, putting his own life on the line to persuade people. This was a... Well, that is putting your something where your mouth is, I suppose. Yes, yeah. Richard Chorton, ladies and gentlemen, Richard, you're amazing, mate. I think you're fantastic. Have you got, are you blogging? Have you got a substack?

I've now kind of moved mainly to LinkedIn. So what I'll try and do is post, you know, not about family or awards or that stuff. It'll always be about the application of behavioral science. Have you considered some sort of newsletter-y type thing like a sub-stack? So newsletter I have done, and I kind of quite reasonably regularly tell people where they can get that. So on my company website astro10.com.com. You can sign up for newsletter, and then every fortnight we'll send people a digest, a brief digest of an experiment, an example of people using it, and then the implications. Unreal and new book.

A new book, yeah. So co-authored with Michael Aaron Flickr, it's called Hack in the Human Mind, 17 brands, each chapter is about a brand, and then we look at two, maybe three behavioral science principles that brand has used to power its success. You're great, dude.

You're great. I look forward to whatever you do next, and let me know when you come over to Austin because I need to hang out. I will do, I will do. Appreciate you, very much. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and

interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to Chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillex.com slash books.