Modern Wisdom - #163 - Richard Shotton - Psychology, Advertising & Human Behaviour

Episode Date: April 27, 2020

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, Founder of Astroten and an author. One of my favourite guests returns today as we discuss mental models, psychology, consumer behaviour, principles for advertising, social change and much more. Expect to learn how you can tell someone's mood by the movement of their mouse, why the end of an experience is the most important, what makes the perfect advert, how you can increase workplace safety with skeleton gloves and much more. Get Surfshark VPN - https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter Promo Code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off & One Extra Month Free) Extra Stuff: Follow Richard on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rshotton Buy Richard's Book - https://amzn.to/2YCQfdt Buy Richard's Online Course - https://www.42courses.com/courses/behavioural-science-for-brands Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello friends in podcast land. Welcome back. My guest today is Richard Shoton. Long time, modern wisdom favorite, and we're talking about one of my most delightful topics, which is behavioural economics, consumer behaviour, advertising, psychology, and all that good stuff. So today, expect to learn how you can tell somebody's mood by the movement of their mouse, why the end of an experience is the most important, what Richard thinks makes the perfect advert, how you can increase workplace safety

with skeleton gloves, why the British press might have got social change messages wrong with what they've been publishing and so much more. This is one of my favorite ever episodes that I've recorded. And that is a big shout now two and a half years in. You're going to absolutely love it. I would love to hear what you think. So you know where to get at me. Chris will X on all social media, Instagram, Twitter, wherever you follow me. In more news, I'm doing three episodes a week. Usually it's just Monday and Thursday,

but I'm recording so much during quarantine lockdown that I'm just getting backed up. So you lucky, lucky devils, you're going to get three episodes this week. Dave Ruben is coming on this Thursday to discuss his new book, Don't Burn This Book. And Saturday, I haven't decided to do it yet, but I have a huge library of episodes to dig into, so you will get Monday, Thursday and Saturday for the next couple of weeks until

we work through this backlog. Final thing, please hit the subscribe button. You already know that it makes me very happy indeed. So if you're new here, if you're a long time subscriber and you haven't done it, go ahead and hit it. You don't want to miss any of the episodes that we've got coming up. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Richard Chotten

My mum still does my washing. I pay her every week to do my washing. But the problem is obviously with the new essential travel only lockdown. I can't see her. So the first thing that she said after Boris' announcement wasn't, are you okay? What's business going to be like? It's do you know how to work the washing machine? So look ladies and gentlemen welcome back the crowd goes crazy for Richard shot and return to modern wisdom. How are you mate? Very good, thanks very good. Pleasure to have you on. I cannot wait for today. First things first, Richard, did you know that sex toy sales have increased by 71% in Italy? No, I did not. That's amazing. For every crisis, someone's winning. That's it. Everyone's talking about what's going to happen to the price of oil, what's

going to happen to the price of gold. No one's talking about what's happening to the price of silicon. are they? So, tradeable commodity. As I said, I was going to tell you as well about gangs and Rio de Janeiro. Oh, yes, yes. So, to the listeners, this is not going to be COVID-19 focused. I promise you, we're going to give you some awesome insights into advertising and marketing, but it's too topical not to drop this. So gangs in the favelas in Rio, in forced lockdown from 8 p.m. every night, and they put statement out on a website. I don't know if it's their website. And the statement reads, if the government won't do the right thing, organized crime

will. I just thought how amazing that you've got a place where typically the gangs are the people that have more control than the police on the negative side. And now they're just stepping into enforce a lockdown. Yes, I mean, I mentioned this. Yes, I'm still interested there of what if something spreads in a favela, presumably it goes like wildfire and so close together. But that's, yeah, I hadn't seen that at all, miss that completely. Yeah, no, so look, we're talking today, we're

going to talk advertising, we're going to talk a lot of this stuff. My first question I've got for you is, how do you create the perfect advert? No small question. No small question. Well, on one hand, you could say that it's something that's impossible to create a formula for. Now, that's not just a complete evasion of the question. It's the idea that probably the biggest task an advert has

is to be noticed. And because if you haven't noticed everything else is irrelevant. And one of the things we know from psychology is that what is distinctive is far more likely to be noticed. We're hardwired to notice what is distinctive. Now with all of psychology, that's not just speculation on my part. There is a lovely set of experiments, there's a lovely set of experiments under the name of the Isolation Effect or the Von Restorff Effect. So it's called the Von Restorff Effect because there was a P-Jetrition psychologist in the 1930s called Hedvik Von Restorff.

And in 1933 she has a classic experiment, She gives people long list of information. Sometimes there might be, so in every line there's three digits. Sometimes that might be letters, A, B, Y, next line, SJ, Q, third line, C, B, Y, and then every time she throws in three numbers, 164, and then she goes back to her letters again. She gives people five minutes to look at this long list of information, try to get them to remember as much as possible, takes that list away, and then sees what people can recall. And her key finding is that if you give people long lists of letters, they're most likely to remember the rare numbers, if you give people long list of numbers, they're most likely to remember the rare letters. So why I say you can't really have a formula is if you have a formula and everyone adopts it, that formula becomes defunct. What you actually need to do is find out

what is the formula wrong or right that everyone in your category is using, what are the category norms and virtual categories will have some quite specific norms of behaviour, find out what those norms are and then what you probably want to list out all those norms, which ones do you have to adhere to because there's a very good reason, which ones are there for tradition sake alone and those are the ones that you want to break. I love it. Yeah, and if you look through a lot of categories, you see these very specific ways of behaviour. So there's a wonderful Twitter handle called, I think, like Perth, you've added for sale.

And it's just these increasingly surreal scripts about David Beckham being in a court, a leg of ham falling through the sky and he shouts out guilty. And they only work because everyone knows that's the kind of ridiculous overblown, most heaths that happen in perfect beds. Or you've got the car rides where they beautiful car going around the corner. Lots and lots of categories have very fixed ways of behaving. The best thing to do is probably understand what those norms are and then break them. Yeah, I remember seeing you tweet an article that you did for marketing week, 9% of digital ads are looked at for more than a second, so 91% of digital ads are looked at for less than a second. Yes, I think that data, I remember that was a wonderful eye tracking company that Mike

Follett runs called Lumen. So it's a lovely data in the, they've created this great technology that gets embedded in people's computers and it essentially tracks where their eyes look. So it's quite a robust finding, the average time people look at ads is a fraction. So I think from that, you've got a couple of points, you've got, well, distinctiveness is a tactic to be noticed. Secondly, placement is usually important, and it's a metric that a lot of programmatic trading doesn't take into account. What's that mean? a programmatic is just automated trading. So you go and look at a website and this is an M. Myaris specialty, but if you're looking at a website, the site has certain data on you. You might know that you're a blog, it might know you're in your 20s or 30s and then it will auction

the ads that you see to various parties and programatics essentially people just bidding for how much they think you're worth. But that takes into account a lot of data about you, what that study by Lumen shows, is that actually where the ad appears is very important. The longer someone spends reading an article, the longer they end up looking at the ads for.

Not a factor of the ad itself, but a factor of your own, the site is a greater probability the ad will catch your attention. So actually, there's quite a powerful argument to things like news websites where people will spend, you know, a minute on an article, a much more valuable than eBay, where it might just be speculating, I can't remember if it was even good or bad, actually. But sites where people were just on for a second or two. So yeah, there's some lovely research about that. Yeah, it's much more important.

Much more transient, isn't it? Some websites, you know, you flicking through stuff. I imagine, I always think how terrible the conversions must be on Tinder adverts. You know, everyone's just swiping as fast as they can in any case. Like, don't give me an advert that's going to be up there. Like, that's not going to be on screen. That's a bad thing.

The stats for Tinder ads are pretty brutal. Well, this also, I mean, it depends what the kind of experience is like. Well, there's a lovely body of work all around mood. And I guess it depends how successful you are in Tinder. But if people are unsuccessful in their own bad mood, there's an awful lot of evidence showing that again, going back to noticeability, people are much less likely to notice ads. So there was a study done by Fred Bronner at the University of Amsterdam.

And he got more than a thousand people gets them to flick through a newspaper and after they've done so we asked them if they're in a good mood or they're in bad mood they were relaxed or stressed and then he gets them to try and recall as many ads as they can and what he found was that people were much more likely to notice the ads when they were in a good mood rather than the bad mood. Now, what I love about behavioral science is that you don't have to take his work on faith alone. You don't just have to believe it and you know, either believe it or you don't. The great thing about all these studies is all the researches

in the public domain. So you can take his idea with a few tweaks, rerun it for yourself to see if it works for your brand or your particular problem. So a colleague and I rerun his study, but not interested in noticeability, we not interested in noticeability. We were interested in likability. So we did exactly the same thing. We showed people loads of car and taxiads, got them to rate how much they liked the creative, and then we cut the data by people's mood.

And we saw huge swings. People were rating the ads as more likable. So I think it was about 50% swing. They were rating as more likable when they could move around the bad. And it sounds a bit bizarre at first. I think there's a couple of explanations. There's an argue from Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner, back in 2002. He says, for most of, there's an evolutionary point, he says, that for most of our evolutionary history, if we were in a good mood, it's signalled an absence of danger and therefore it mitigated the need to think critically. So if you're an advertiser having an uncritical

accepting audience, it's probably a pretty important thing. And then I think there's a second part of, you know, if you're in a bad mood and you see an ad with the price and the benefits, well, you probably put a bit more weight on the downside and the price and the opportunity cost. Whereas if you're in a good mood and you're optimistic, you're very focused on the more positive parts. And it's again, it's something that just never really gets discussed at the amongst brands and media agencies. But there's a whole body of work that suggests this targeting by mood

or at least waiting of mood. It should be far more important. Yeah, we've all been there, right? You've all been in a car where you've had a crap morning, you spilled your coffee down yourself, you rushed, you're late for work, someone cuts you off. And that person on a Sunday afternoon, as you were just chilling out coming back from a stroke with the kids, you know, you wouldn't have thought twice about it, but they are your worst enemy on the planet.

On that Tuesday, grey-choose-day morning with coffee down your shirt. So what's the implication there for brands and advertising campaigns? Is it that they need to be hyper conscious of the medium of delivery, the timing of delivery stuff like that? Because you can write the best by your argument there. You can write the best, copy, beautiful, advert, wonderful idea. And if you get it wrong timing wise people's mood you fucked 50% of the time maybe. So I think there's pretty two implications. The great thing with behavioral science, and this is an analogy that Roy Southern's made, it's not like physics, he says, it's not that in physics the opposite of a good idea is a bad idea. What Rory Sudden says is that in behavioral science and psychology, people are so complex

and nuanced that the opposite of a good idea could be another good idea. So what's interesting about that mood point, I think you can take that in two very different ways. One implication, and this is where I default, it's my background in this area, is as you say, well, you put more emphasis on reaching people in a positive mood. Now with existing technology, you can do that to the degree. It's a bit crude, but you can do it. There are a lot of studies like the IPA touchpoints, diaries and time diaries, which show that people are much more like it's been a good mood in the

evenings and in the mornings on Fridays and Saturdays than they are on Mondays and Tuesdays. So you've got some crude ways of reaching people by time of day. You've probably got some slightly more accurate ways you could reach people during comedy shows or in the cinema rather than on the tube. There are potential much more accurate ways of targeting mood coming down the line. There was a study done by, because name escapes me, is it, Brigham Young University. I'll think of it, half way through the show. And then this study looks at people's mouse movement. So it's on their computer.

And what he showed was that you can tell someone's mood by the smoothness of their mouth. Oh, wait. So it was the curse is moving very smoothly and evenly, people tend to be, it's a signify that people have problem in good mood. If it's moving in a more jagged hurried way, signify that they're in a bad mood.

So if he's correct, I think might have been Jeff Jenkins, but I've double checked that one. If he's correct, well, it's not too hard, therefore, technologically, to start serving as dependent on how the mouse is moving across the page. So rather than reaching people with the propensity to be in a good mood, I think that might be a much more accurate way. That's so cool. But then the other angle could be, you could forget about the medium and prioritize the creative, you could say, well, we have the ability to put people in a good mood through likeable characters, like the meagre, humorous jokes like the economist ads, you know, they're on ways for the creative to put people in that, that positive mood.

And then we can harness the benefit. And let's create your own environment. You become the precursor to your own message. Yes. And you've probably got, that's probably got greater potential than the medium argument. Because the problem with a lot of these media arguments is you might squeeze out an extra 5% or 10% efficiency from

mood targeting, but most sites, well you'd either have to pay a technology provider to get that data to do the targeting, or you're asking for a specific subset of a medium-owned audience and they'll probably charge you for that. So you've got to make sure they're uplifting your performance from the cycle genocide outweighs the increase in cost. The great thing about the creative argument is this far easier to make it work financially. So to make a good advert, we need to get noticed first and foremost. If we're not noticed, everything is pointless. And you had a great point about this where you said a lot of advertisers and marketers

focus on the second step, optimization of perfecting the ad rather than just getting noticed. Yes. There's a lovely quote from Dave Trock, so wonderful blogger and advertising, amazing creative. And he says something like the most important line that should appear on every brief never does. And that is, this advert must be noticed and remembered. And he says the fact that he's never seen that on a brief in his life suggests that marketers take noticeability for granted. And I think he's right. I mean, I've never, no one's ever fixedates on that problem. It's always about the conveyance of the attributes of a brand. There should be more focus

on noticeability. there should be more focus on note spilling. Okay, so we've got ourselves noticed. Yes, we bypassed that first. What are we doing next? Yeah. Well, this is a kind of a hybrid because the great thing about the solution to be noticed also has implications for what people think about your brand. So we've said one of the ways to get into it, it's there are others, you know, personalization and things,

but distinct to nurses is a really powerful one. The brilliant thing with that is there's an idea called the Red Sneaker effects by Francesca Gino and some other colleagues that suggest that, and it begins with her work, I think, was originally with people. It suggests that people who break social norms are seen as higher status. So her original experiment was run at academic conferences. So I think this was early 2000,

when there was a very strong norm, what people were expected to do was turn up in kind of business attire shirts and jacket for blokes. So what she does is as people attend these conferences she's sitting there and she's noting down how well dressed they are from very scruffy to very smart. Once she's got all this data she then goes and finds the people whose dress coach is allocated on her little chart. She then goes and asks them how many citations they've got. So, a citation is an academic kind of quantification. It's a bit of a crude one,

but a quantification for how successful they are. How many times is their work being quoted by other people? And what she finds is that there is a inverse correlation between smartness of dress and number of citations. So it is the very successful academics who are turning up very scruffily, who are breaking all the norms about dress. And once you start thinking about it, it becomes, you know, very believable that, you know that if you're the intern and you turn up to work and you're dressed very scruffily, you'll get told to send home. If you're the CEO or if you're the rock star academic and you turn up looking like a

mess, well everyone will just put it down to you. That's what it's all about. And where would everyone? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, well, yes, exactly. I mean, he's, he's dressed as Kravatt and what's going on? Suddenly, they're sitting in an ad agency. Absolutely.

Where is it? Even with, well, 20 years I'll do that. Might be able to might just think, you know, it's lunatic. Yeah, they're wonderful example. And what she argues is firstly that it's only people who have high status that can do this. And then she argues is firstly that it's only people who have high status that can do this. And then she shows in other experiments that people are remarkably attuned to it. So if they see you breaking a norm, they then take out higher status from it. So, and this is then a bit of a

leap. Her stuff is about people. So I'm maybe a bit of a leap. That's, her stuff is about people. So I'm a bit of a leap to brands, and I'm doing some research at the moment to try and see if this works, but arguably, if consumers are aware of the category norms and you radically deviate from them, perhaps in the same way as people will get perceived higher status, so will the brands. So I love distinctiveness, one, because it gets around the noticeability problem,

but it's also conveying some of the positive attributes of a brand. Signalling. Yes, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, so that was a little bit of a fudge, a little bit of a hybrid, I don't want to miss that out. But then, so that's a little bit of a fudge, a little bit of a hybrid. I don't want to miss that out.

So let's take a look. You've got attention. The next thing you want to be achieving is memorability. And there are some lovely studies from academics around this as well. One of my favourites is this idea called the generation effect. So do you remember the cancer research ad, either the end of 2018, maybe mid 2019? So it was talking about the second biggest cause of cancer

is OB, blank S, blank TY. Yes, yes I do, yes I do. Yes, I do. Now there was a big who-hawar about that and there was debate about whether it's fact shame or not and unfortunately because of that significant debate what got lost was they were using a really clever tactic to get people to remember their core point and that tactic is the generation effects. So the agency, and I think it might have been

unnormally, I'm not 100% sure, they used an experiment from 1978 by Graffin Slamekka, called the generation effect. And what they essentially did, it's not quite this, but very similar, they would give people lists of words. So let's say you get a list of, or one group gets a list of animals, fish, dog, weasel, cat, elephant.

They try and remember as, they're given this list with Von Restor or people have to remember as much as they can. Next group, get the same list of animals, but rather than being written out in full just like that cancer research ad, you don't see fish, F-I-S-H, you see F, blank, S-H. People are given the same map time with that list of words, they get the list of words taken away from them, and then they have to record as much as they can. And people were 14, they remembered 14% more words in that second condition when they had to generate the answers themselves.

And what Graff and Sulemeka argued was that if you just give people a list of information, they process it too quickly, too easily, that it just kind of washes over them. If you put in a tiny little bit of friction, if you make them generate the answer, the brain has to process some of that information, it becomes more memorable. Maybe teachers push this more than advertise, don't just read your textbooks, write stuff down, don't just read your textbooks, write stuff down, quiche, or something, all that sort of stuff. So you've got this interesting technique for generating better record, the generation effects.

There are some examples like cancer research, like J&B, whiskey, of very literal interpretations that add, having blanks in the copy to make you remember it. All well and good, but you can probably only do it once, twice without it looking a bit weird, becomes a new norm as well, then right? Yeah, well, well, potentially there is that as well. But what I think with all these biases that we discuss

is that where they are most powerful is when people don't think of behavioral science as the end in itself. Where you get the best strength is applying the creativity of, you know, Mark's mind and the insights from behavioral science. And if people interpret these findings much more laterally, I think that's when you get the bigger impact. So by laterally, I would argue some of the best bits of copy apply the generation effect, not by removing letters, but by giving people small puzzles.

So the famous economist ad by David Abbott, AMV, I don't really economist Manchment Training age 42. I think that's the economist, management trainee age 42. I think that's a lateral interpretation of the generation of X. He didn't go out and say, people who read, people who don't read the economist are unsuccessful. They gave you a little bit of a puzzle, you had to work that out for yourself,

therefore it becomes a bit more memorable. So that would be one tactic for a little bit of a. I love that. I had Robin Drake, a negotiator for the FBI. I had him on the podcast a little while ago. Okay. And what he said was that one tool which is used by FBI agents who are trying to recruit assets if they want to try and get information out of them is rather than, so let's say I want to get your date of birth, I might say to you, I can tell what horoscope, you're Pisces, right? And you go, no, no, I'm not, I'm Aries. You go, oh, okay, yeah, what, 1985, no, 1984. And you're like like, you have this desire to fill in the gap, right? So there's part of that, which it's playing on, also Philip C. Brown, the guy who wrote, I'm going

to get this wrong, I think it's make it stick. I had him on the podcast about two years ago now. And his synopsis of an entire lifetime learning how people learn is it doesn't matter about repeated exposure. It matters about repeated recall. So the Feynman technique uses this right. It's learn your thing, then teach it to a four-year-old. It doesn't matter how many times you get exposed to something. It's how many times you're forced to recall that from memory. And if you think about the obesity advert, you've got kind of the edges of both of those things, those mechanisms going on there that someone thinks, I want to complete that because the Zaganec effect says we want to close the loop. I don't like the fact that this word is uncompleted up

there. And then there's also this side of it that is you touched on having to force people to pull some cognitive power out, they've had to deploy, you know, that's more work than some people will have done speaking to their spouse in the morning. Hi, darling, how are you? Yes, good bye, thanks. Like, that's just the classic morning orange juice chat. And yeah, by doing that, I think you'll have the repeated recall, I think you'll have

got that as well. So I'm slightly put in to your two examples were teaching and negotiation. And I wonder if sometimes advertising is in danger of looking to inspiration always from other advertisers, you know, flicking through awards journals. And actually, maybe people like teachers who are all about the past information, getting people to remember things, you could probably get a very different set of inspiration. Again, back to the point of distinctiveness, you don't want to be learning the same things as your competitors.

Yeah, agree. Okay, so we've got distinctiveness. We've talked about some different ideas for that. How can I work on my creativity and not just rehash new versions of my old ideas? What's some ways for me to kind of bolster my creativity when I'm looking for new things in my adverts and new ways to come up with ideas?

Well, this is moving away from my speciality because I don't write ads, so move away from my specialty. But I would argue there's one sense of having a different set of inspiration from other people. One area that I have done research on is maybe the danger of who we're trying to appeal to when we're creating adverts. So we've talked about the generation effect as being a way to create memories, improve the probability of recall. Another tactic that does that is something called the key churistic.

So it's an idea from Matthew Maglone and Jessica, and I'm sorry, I don't have to pronounce a certain topic bash, I think. And what they did, so they called the keychuristic because it's the idea that we find phrases that rhyme more believable than non-rhyming phrases. And so yeah, I wasn't particularly a strong believer in this one at first ready, but they have a lovely experiment. So what they do is they get two groups of people. First group are given a list of kind of fake proverbs and it was

something like, you know, what the first word might be, the first proverb might be, woes unite foes. And there'd be another proverb. The other group see the same proverb but written in an unrhyming way. So woes unite enemies. So they'll have this list of 10 proverbs, say some rhymes and don't rhyme. And then the other group have the mirror image. They then say to people, how true do you think this, these Proverbs are, they rate them on a scale. And what they find is that when people have seen the rhyming version, if they go and compare at the results of the group with the non rhyming version, the rhyming version, if they go and compare it to the results of the group with the non rhyming version, the rhyming proverbs are seen as significantly more believable. Now, interestingly, at the end, they ask people directly, why did you believe this proverb or not?

Does it have anything to do with the rhyme? Everyone swears blocked and it's the content that they think it's nothing to do with it. Everyone says there's nothing to do with the rhyme. So swears blocked and it's the content that they think nothing to do with everyone says there's nothing to do with the rhyme. So if you ask people directly they send you off completely the wrong direction but if you do this wonderful test and control approach you start to see the the power of rhymes and they argue I think that we often confuse mental fluency with truthfulness. Now I then took that again, this lovely way of with behavioral science, you can take these experiments and rerun them for your own ends. We did exactly the same study, but this time we gave people the lists of proverbs

in the morning, and then rather than ask them where they believe them or what, we got them to try and remember them in the afternoon. And this was amongst colleagues, so you know, dubious robustness, but I think our memory is probably saying that is true for at agency staff as much as anyone else. And what we found is that people were, I think it's at two times more likely to remember the rhyming phrase than the non rhyming version.

Now what's interesting with this is that does believeability and noticeability to massively important things for adverts, having a rhyming strap line. But if you go to look at historic collections of adverts, and I went and did this, I went to the news international archives so with a colleague we went all the way back to the 70s looked at hundreds and hundreds of newspapers and ads and what we saw was a really clear pattern whereas in the 1970s loads of ads had a rhyming strapline

by the naughties in the 2010s it was down down to a handful, it was five or 10%. All those great things like once you pop, you can't stop Pringles, Don't Bevade, Adora Cura. These are all 20, 30, 40, 70 years old. They're completely foreign out of fashion. Now, we've got that fascinating in that you've got all this recent evidence that rhyming for a visor memorable and believable, yet they are used less and less and less. And I think that can only be explained by the mixed motivations of marketers and creatives. Now, I would argue that their rhymes aren't used as much as they should because they have

fallen out of fashion in the marketing. They're on cool, aren't they? Yeah. Exactly. But they're on cool to your fellow professional and who cares what your fellow professional thinks in terms of sales? Apparently, everybody. Yeah, exactly that.

But, well, so, you, they shouldn't care for absolutely right, they do. Because if you, yeah, exactly, if you want to signal your professional expertise, a rhyme does not do that. You know, use of cutting edge techniques does that or or something that is probably very abstract does that. But that's not our, you know, as marketers are core role. So I think one big, going back to the original point, one big pitfall of is to advertise to our peers, rather than advertise to our customers. And that, I think, happens far more than people admit. Yeah, I got a sense of this during our last conversation, and I also got this when speaking

to Rory's big proponent of the fact that people in advertising agencies a lot of the time would sooner come up with an advert which failed but was not risk taking and liked by their superiors than one which sometimes actually was more successful with the market but ads risk on to their back. Because if you decide to forge the new path with your adventurous advert, and it doesn't go well, you never have the, but it's just like, look at the lineage of things that we've got behind us, it was always gonna work.

How did it not work? We followed the formula. Absolutely. So it's this wonderful thing of like risk. If you say is being distinctive and risky for a brand, no, it's not because it gives you the greatest probability of success, is it risky for the individual involved? Absolutely. You know, your point spot on about this lineage, you know, if you are a beer brand and you decide to sponsor a table to this team and it goes horribly wrong.

All ads and all sponsorships can, then you'll end up getting fired because you haven't got that body of work to show it's a sensible decision. If you decide to sponsor a football team like every other football beer brand does, when it goes wrong, you can say, oh, it wasn't a stupid idea, bud do it, carling do it, so and so do it. So I think you're absolutely right. There is a misalignment of motivations between the, what's often called the agent, the employee or the marketer, and the principal, that is the brand or the shareholders. And that principal agent problem explains an awful lot of bizarre decision-making in the part of

brands. Why so fewer distinctive? Why so few admit flaws part of brands. Why so few are distinctive? Why so few admit flaws and platform mistakes? Why so few adopt rhymes? Yeah, this mismatch of motivations, I think, explains an awful lot. I love it, man. I think there's some really good, a real good framework there for people to begin to look at how they're planning their advertising campaigns. We are going to do a new section, which I'm very excited for, which is called What Frazes Do You Hate Most in Marketing. I'm going to go first. Number one phrase that I hate in marketing is pivot.

Pivot. Yeah. You know, we're just going to pivot. We're just going to pivot. We're just going to, yeah, we're going to pivot the brand direction. When you, we've really thought recently we sat down, we had a bow, wow, and we realized that we're actually going to pivot a little bit on the, oh, man, wow, it really, really really gets me. So, I think that is, Symptomac, I've all, a lot of marketing languages, these over complex.

I mean, as far as I'm a pivotus means, we're gonna change direction. There's a wonderful study done by a guy called Daniel Oppenheimer, at Princeton, and it's got the best ever title for his research paper. It's something like the utilization of every diet vernacular irrespective of necessity. Or using long words needlessly.

Yeah. Yeah. And what he does, because that's the full diet, oh, yeah, it's the both parts. And what he does is he gets abstracts of other academic papers. And these are often thick with jargon, like marketing, writing. He shows those abstracts to people and then he says how intelligent using the author of this abstract is. And then in his other version he shows another group of people in the test version, the same abstracts, but he has changed the complex language

for simpler language. And when those people rate the intelligence of the author, they think the author is more intelligent. So, you've got this bizarre situation in which marketers and academics are using this overblown language in the hope of appearing intelligent, but actually what the listener takes out is a lack of intelligence. So it's far, far better to speak plainly and simple. What's that Einstein quote? It is the mark of a genius to explain a complex thing in a simple way. It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple thing in a complex way. Oh, go on. Say that again. It is the mark of a genius to explain a complex thing in a complex way. Oh go on, say that again. It is the mark of a genius to explain a complex thing in a simple way. It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a, we're recording

you don't need to write your down reach at the whole. Oh, okay, I'm really, really recorded. And the only thing I'm doing is about that quote is the attribution. Oh, there's no way that Einstein said that. What was he doing thinking about? He's bleeding shit, he's doing quantum physics. Right, what phrase do you hate most? Well, before we start talking about last one, there's a lovely face called Churchillian Drift. So it's this idea that someone who isn't very famous

says saying amazing. And then it gradually just gets attributed to more and more of the same as you. It ends up with Churchill Einstein, which is much more trained. So if people are interested in the gender attribution, there's an amazing website called Quote Investigator. You put the quote in, and it has this lovely half a page on who first said it where it came from.

It's like ancestry.com, but for a quote. Oh, for a quote, yeah, yeah. That's similar to, I think it's, we all want to repeatedly do excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit. And everyone attributes that to Aristotle. Oh, yeah, okay, okay. So Aristotle, but it's just not him at all.

And this huge medium post, which is on the same thing, which is, I don't know, would you call it, what's that word when you see where words have come from? What's the body of work? Oh, etymology? Yeah, etymology. It's like that, but What's the body of a workbook? It's etymology. Yeah, etymology. It's like that, but it's the movement of a quote. Okay, so let's give us a phrase that you hate.

Please, so the one at the moment, I most hate, and there's quite a few in Marxie that hate, is trust crisis. So, stillness more and more again, article after article. You can very respected titles and bodies where they're talking about the crisis in trust that people trust brands less than they ever have ever done. The problem with this is although it gets repeated again and again in

articles and presentations, there is no evidence for it. It is amazing. It's how a piece of fake information can just spread. So, I was going to have a little bit of time looking at this. There are three long-term trackers of how much people trust organizations. So there's Adelman data. Now, if you just read the Adelman reports into trust, you could often come away with the impression that we are in a trust crisis. If you print out the data tables from every one of their 30 reports and you print them out and you plot them,

what you see is the trust in brands or businesses, you know, bounces around from year to year, but it's essentially flat or slightly rising. The other one is, I think it's an Ipsosmory. They've got something called the, it's the, I think the veracity index and it looks at trust in professions and they've studied 20 or 30 professions over the, it's back to the early 1980s. And again, they are trust in professions is either flat or rising. I think the only profession that is in massive decline is the church and that has very specific reasons.

And then the third body of evidence that people use to this truss crisis is the AA, so the advertising association. And what they've done is this weird slight of hand in that the evidence that they have is that favorability towards advertising is dropping and they show that over about, I think about 20 years. So you see this kind of long drop in favorability towards advertising and then like last eight or 10 years, it's flattened out. When they show trust, which they've only measured for about 10 years, they say, well, trust data, which is pretty flat, maybe a very small decline, that correlates with favorability,

and because favorability is down over 20 years, well, there must be a trust crisis. So you've either got A to one's data, which shows trust is increasing, but often the reporting around it suggests that there's a crisis, because what often happens is, because those numbers are bouncing around, if you would just select certain time periods by picking which data set you compare, you can create a drop. So you've got that data being misused, then you've got the Ipsosm moridate, which is brilliant, but when journalists report it, they'll often pick the one profession that that year happens to have dropped. And then you've got this AA data, which really shows a very different story about

favorability towards adds declining. So there's no evidence that trust is dropping. And that creates a problem because it ends up with the wrong solutions. If you think trust is in crisis as in it's lower than it's ever been, you need a new solution to solve it. If you think trust in brands and advertisers low but it's always been low, which is what the evidence suggests, well then you can turn to tried and trusted techniques that brands have used in the past. And again, there are lots of ideas from psychology

about how you can build trust in a brand. Make big public pronouncements. Don't do digital target advertising. The more public a statement, the more believable it is. And I've done some research on that. Make people feel that you've put a huge amount of money behind your campaign. There's an idea called costy-sigling

that the believability of a message rises with its perceived expense. So extravagant advertising, unnecessary white space, long second links, great creative feats, or boost the believability of an ad. Even the media context, running in the times has a very different feel from running in the start. So, I hate that phrase because it's not true.

Yet it mindlessly gets passed from one person to another. And it has a danger. This phrase leads us to the wrong solution. The solutions, the triad and trust solutions are out there, but we're ignoring them because we think we're in this kind of a unique period of lack of trust. That's so good. Some other ones, which I hate, some other words. It's actually I hate. I hate content. I hate the term content. I'm so sick of content. I can't wait for it to be something else.

Are we creating content? Are we driving content? I mean, this is how bad it was that even when I was on Love Island, and I walked through the doors of a season one of Love Island, and the producers were in the villa talking about, right guys, I know that you all just want to chill out and have a chat about the day, but we just haven't driven quite enough content for the day. So I'm thinking,

this, I'm not recording fucking Instagram stories here, like this is just supposed to be my life. Like if I want to go and talk about my day, that is the content, the fact that as far as you're concerned, and maybe everybody else as well, actually, is concerned that it's fucking boring content. It's not my problem. That is your problem, my friend. So content, not a fan of, scale, I'm fucking sick of scale, I'm sick of higher order, and I'm sick of meta.

Oh, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So content, pivot, scale, higher order, and meta, they can all get in the sea. Yes, we need, what was it? That was that wonderful show, RUMO 101, where people kind of shock their hated things. All going in room 101. Yeah. And one thing that you touched on just there, which is talking about some of the power

that advertising and marketing has, and I've been thinking about this, about how central marketing is to the public's good, right? So I think marketing can sometimes be seen as a bit of a dirty word, capitalist, capitalizing businesses, trying to make a profit, blah, blah. But during the coronavirus outbreak that we've got at the moment, industries deemed non-essential have been shutting down. And so people have been noticing a refocusing of public attention to important areas of life, like health, and family, and connectedness and stuff.

But the way that I see it, market is able to affect behavior change, in a way that brute force, operational optimizing, and well-meaning emotions can't on their own. So perfect example, the NHS has, I think, this stat, nearly a half a million people have signed up to this volunteer to help, which is amazing, right? Great campaign. But how much more could that effect have been amplified if every ounce

of behavioral science and understanding, a beautiful advertising, great copywriting and all the rest of it was harnessed. And that's, I think, this, the fact that you're able to catalyze what is effective with a non-essential business. You know, no one's looking at advertisers or marketers, behavioral science guys and say, oh, for fuck's sake, we better keep the lights on there as set. They don't let them stop going to work. And I think that this really ties back to what Rory said about alchemy to describe marketing's ability to literally create value and create change out of nothing.

Yeah, so I think there's, you've got a couple of points that the boys there, there's the idea that if you want to reduce life threateningthreatening behaviour, tactics from behavioural science or psychology or advertising can be used, one that I'm interested in at the moment is this idea of negative social proof. So it goes back to an idea of Robert Childeening, where he says, if you make a transgressive behavior seem commonplace or an antisocial behavior seem commonplace, you remove a sense of transgression and it becomes more common still. Now like all psychological experiments, he doesn't just argue this, like a philosopher,

he just takes a piece of logic and creates this smooth argument, what he does is go out and run tests to prove it. So the test is, goes to the Arizona Petrifiedwood National Park, rigs up CCTV camera by a path, and sprinkles bits of petrified wood on the long path. Now, the reason he's done that is there is a problem in that park with lots of tourists stealing bits of petrified wood. So he wants to know how you can reduce that and where you might by accident increase that theft rate. So three scenarios, first scenario, no sign.

So he's getting a kind of a base level of theft and it's about 3%. Second scenario, he puts up a sign saying don't steal it's wrong and theft rates dropped by half to about 1.5%. And then in the third scenario, which I will come back to, this is what I'm worrying is happening now, he puts up a sign saying 14 tons of wood have been stolen every year and it's ruining the look of this park. Now he then said, he says, the Theprates go from, remember 3% was the baseline, they jumped to 7.9%. So in his words's worse. It's the worst campaign in history. Absolutely. Because he says that if you tell people that everyone else is doing this, what

people think is, well, it can't be that bad. I'm a bit of a mug, not to be doing it. You know, you remove this sense of transgression, it becomes more common still. If you then look at government advertising and sometimes charity advertising or lots of social advertising, you see how regularly this happens. So, Chilgini says it's a big mistake of government. When there are behaviors they don't want, they often inadvertently use no-clusive social proof.

They say loads of students get drunk, loads of people are carrying knives, lots of people don't attend up to their doctor's appointment all of Childini's work suggests that will exacerbate the situation not solve it so the danger is if you fixate on people not social distancing or fixate on people who are stockpiling the message that people take out is not oh oh they're very bad, I'm definitely not going to do it, they take out well, if everyone else is ignoring the rules, they can't be that important. We are a species that copy people. So I absolutely believe

that application of Avalon science can solve or help solve some very important problems absolutely. And the misapplication of it as well can potentially make it worse. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's completely true. Yeah. There was that brilliant study that you put up about, was it Peru? Was it the Peruvian tax,

where they created a lottery on the bottom of the receipts? Oh, Taiwan, I think. Yes, Taiwanese tax. So they wanted people to submit receipts and didn't they wanted to make sure they kept a hold of them. So they created a lottery and the numbers were printed on people to submit receipts and didn't they wanted to make sure they kept a hold of them So they created a lottery and the numbers were printed on the bottom of receipts So everyone obviously kept them and they forced the supermarkets to give them to them and yeah, and this sort of stuff

And you think the whole population into it to you know Policemen they were essentially in force for their own receipts Yeah, for something that it was would have previously been costly and all the other different ways that you could have gone about that. And it is by far the cheapest, you know, it requires a printer. I mean, they were giving away, they were giving away money for the lottery,

so it requires them on a lottery. But, you know, in real terms, nothing. Compare that with having to pay an entire division of people to enforce the fucking the receipt collection. Yes, absolutely. Whatever it is. Yeah, I think that's great. I love that time and these examples. I think I read about that first on a Dave Trop block. So, yeah, it's a brilliant example. And there are other examples of lotteries being used of lottery being used by government. So I think the Swedish have a system

where speed cameras both fine drivers who are breaking the speed limit. But people who go past the speed camera below the recommended level, they are entered into a draw. No way. That is so good. Do you know Koon Smeats, do you know who that is? Yes, he's a Belgian guy into an asexual psychology.

Yeah, lovely chap. Yeah, fantastic, guys. I had him on last year. Did you know about the Estonian police service and what they've been doing? Is this where people get, is this where they, I think I might have read about this in a Rory Sutherland post, where do you get pulled over and yeah, go into business. Yeah, I have to say that.

Yeah, I have to say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They give people the choice between a very expensive fine. I think it's 300 euros or something. If you get caught speeding or a half an hour wait. Yes, so it just showed the whole podcast that I did with him was about the valuing of time, the how we perceive time from a behavioural economic standpoint. And almost 50% of people elected to pay this fine rather than wait half an hour. And that's so it's

so interesting because obviously, presumably, if you are caught speeding, it's probably because you have somewhere to be and you could do with them there quickly, which means if I said, hey, mate, would you sit by the side of this road for 300 euros? I don't think, David Beckham would probably do that, you know, it doesn't know amount of money that someone's got. There's too much to not sit by the side of the road for 300 euros. But if you are running 20 minutes late to your daughter's dance recital or to a gym class or to get to a meeting or something like that, you're prepared to do it. I was wondering if they take people's phones away because there's a lot of research into

the idea that unoccupied weights are painful. Occ, occupied weights are, you know, people don't seem to mind. So what I mean by that is there was a report in the New York Times about, I think it was one of the, it might have been Houston Airport and they were having lots of complaints about how long people had to wait to get their bags at the airport baggage carousel. So what was happening was people would go through possible control or whatever, they'd walk a minute and then they'd wait seven minutes to get their bag. So the first thing they did was spend loads of money just trying to make the system more efficient, you know hiring more baggage handlers, speeding up the machines, whatever they did, and they managed to

shave a minute off the time. But they saw very little reduction in complaints. The next thing they did was rather than try this kind of engineering technique, they tried a psychological technique, which was all around occupying people's time. So now what happened was as people left pass ball control, they were sent on this kind of securitus jerk walk around the airport for six minutes. So you know, they use all those kind of guides to make sure people can vote for their carousel. So yeah, they walk for six minutes, get to the carousel, then wait a minute, bag turns

up, and off they go. And when they did that, people's complaint level plummets. Because what people didn't like was standing staring at a carousel with nothing to do. What they didn't mind was a little walk around them. And some blind effort to make it feel like. So I think about this all the time when I'm driving. I realize, I know for an absolute fact

that at a time when there's traffic, I will tend to take a route which may potentially be both longer and longer, but both in terms of time and in terms of distance, but one which will be less likely to be knows to tail, even accounting for all of that. Yeah, I'm knows to tail, even accounting for all of that. Yeah, yeah. Because I'm cognizant of the level of discomfort that I have when being in knows to tail traffic. There's a little bit of effort involved, especially if you drive an automatic car, you know, if you're with cruise control, automatic cars, basically a go-car,

you just sit on the motorway and go, whereas I've got to use my foot, I've got to think how far is that guy away from me? Oh, fuck, this is boring, sat in traffic, this sucks. Like, you know, I have that, but that's the same thing. I just, I wanna feel like I'm doing something. Even if I arrive 15 minutes later. Well, I wonder if there's also an element of, yet one of the other theories about time is that

people find an uncertain way. Like I don't know whether I'm gonna have to wait zero minutes or 10 minutes. They find that much more irritating than someone saying, you will wait eight minutes. That's certainty. Was it Rory? Was it Rory that did the...

He talks about Heva. No, was it not the one for Heva? Which, so people waiting to get into Heva, the audience will know, I use this, I must drop this all the time. So if it's Miss accredited to Rory, like one of those quotes that's come through the wrong way, get the Churchill slide or whatever it's called. Two years, yeah, exactly.

Everything that's cool gets eventually attributed to Rory or Dave Trock. Waiting to get into the security scanners at Heathrow, they were struggling, they looked at operational fixes for it. And instead of that, they just put up signs saying 45 minutes from this point, 30 minutes from this point, 15 minutes from this point. And it, the number of complaints permitted. Let's link this back to coronavirus. So Boris Johnson, his announcement, when he said, we are going to be under quarantine, we are going to be under lockdown. You are not to leave the house except for these things. And I'm thinking to myself, he are going to be under quarantine, we are going to be under lockdown, you are not to leave the house except for these things.

And I'm thinking to myself, he's going to have to say a timeframe. He has to give a timeframe. Because if he just has an open-ended, there is no timeframe in this. And it was really cleverly worded the way that he said it. He said that we will review this after three weeks. So in that case, probably the people to learn from a Disney. So firstly, they do, when I hadn't heard about Heathrow, so I don't know who that to be true to better, but what Disney do is not only do they give you, you know, on a

like Disneyland Paris, wherever, as you go to the ride, it says 45 minute wait or hour wait. So they make the wait certain and therefore less painful. The second thing that they do very cleverly is they overestimate the wait time. So if they put up, they think it's an hour, what they really think is it's 50 minutes. So when you get to the end, you're like, oh, it only took 50 minutes. I've saved, I've saved 10 minutes. On an amount of time that they made you wait. Yeah, which is a, no one was if they said, oh, it's going to be 40 minutes, you'd have been really annoyed. So maybe there is a technique there.

And it's the end that's particularly important. There's a whole body of ideas called the peak end rule, which is the two moments we're disproportionately likely to remember from experience, are they height of, the worst thing on the bass thing, the peak and the end, the final moment? So ending the cue on that positive realization that this was quicker than you'd expected,

again, is another very, very positive thing. That's a big, generous, simple call. There could be a cool, yeah. Oh, so it's a wonderful application to it. You know, you start seeing restaurants, particular hotels coming up with ways of making those final moments of the experience. Very positive. So rock as normally, if you just leave it as per the norm, the end of the meal,

the end of the stays, normally the worst part, you know, you get the bill and shuffle out into the cold world. There are restaurants like Flat Island where they give you this tiny little pair of steak knives as you get your bill. And then as you wander out, you're going to hand those steak knives in and they give you a little free ice cream. So, you know, people end on a higher and unexpected benefit. So, yeah, there's lots of applications that P Ken rule to anyone who's trying to make custom experience, because most people making custom experience are fixated on making a good impression at the beginning, important. But what you should also do is give as much time and

an effort into thinking, how do you end on a high? Wasn't there a study done on people having endoscopies? Oh, that's the original experiment for Carnaman and Radomugh who came up with the idea of the peak and wrong. Do you know that? Yes, so can you tell me because I've been misquoting this for the last two and a half years and I'd really like to get it straightened out.

Well, or I've been misquoting it. I went for about a year with the wrong, I was talking about the Prince of Legion, I've probably shouldn't admit this, the Prince of Legion problem and had a picture of Stephen Ross who came up with the idea and it was only after about a year that I found out it was I'm just lazy, I'm sorry, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm just lazy, I'm standing there blathering on. Anyway, sorry, the yeah, I think what happened in that kind of an array of my experiment, they get 600 odd genuine colonoscopy patients. So a 15-minute painful medical procedure. And all those patients are given a handheld monitor and this monitor buzzes every 15 minutes. And when it buzzes, there's a dial on the monitor, oh sorry, the little handheld thingy.

There's a dial that the patients have to turn, saying zero, no pain at all, to 10, excruciating pain. So the psychologists get 15 experiencing self ratings and by experiencing as they self, they mean in moment ratings, 15 ratings. Then after the operation, as the patient is leaving the hospital, they stop the patient and ask them to reflect back on the operation, it's an entirety and say how bad it was, same scale, zero to 10. They then go and find those patients a month later, same question, rate the operation.

So now they've got 15 ratings from the experiencing cell, those in-moment ratings, and two, remembering cell for ratings. So you have post-operation reflections. The expectation before they did the experiment was the numbers should correlate reasonably well, but that's not what they found. There was only a kind of loose correlation. What correlated far better were two moments in particular in the operation. So the peak experience, so for Coneospe, the moment of most pain, and then the final moment of that colonoscopy. So what they argued was

that it's the peak and the end moment that disproportionately likely to be remembered. And then in their follow-up study, what they do is they get more patients going for colonoscubes, randomise them into two groups, some get the standard 15 minute operation, which is really painful because this probe is being moved around inside them. The other group, exactly the same 15 minutes, and then the surgeon is instructed to leave his probe, her probe in the patient perfectly still. So it's, there's minor discomfort for that extra two minutes, not the significant pain. Now, from a logical point of view, they've just added on in that second version two extra minutes of mild pain.

It should be worse, it's got 50 minutes of bad pain, two minutes of minor pain. But just as the peak end rules, Jess, because the final moment is less painful, people when they reflected back, remembered that operation is less painful. People, when they reflected back, remembered that operation is less painful. And most importantly, they were about 10% more likely to turn up for follow-up appointments. So, yeah, absolutely. That colosomy study, very controlled circumstances, is in life or death circumstances, potentially,

show how important it is to shape people's final moment of the experience. That is literally life- changing, you know, for some people. The power of understanding our motivations and also it shows as well and reading a lot of evolutionary psychology. Most of it to do with sort of

mating and dating at the moment, but even with that, the fact that we are so at the mercy of the ways that our brains work, our cognitive biases, our predispositions, our prejudices against ourselves and others, our existing thought-pants, all of this stuff. And I think it's why I find it just endlessly interesting, the bottomlessly fascinating stuff to be able to look under the hood and actually see what's going on. And then, then you can go actually, we can do this thing, which is completely counter-intuitive to make this colonoscopy two minutes longer.

I remember reading, I think someone had interpreted that, and had quoted it with something to the effect of the most altruistic and caring thing you can do for your child if they're going through a pediatric surgery is to ask the surgeon to extend the length of the surgery just a little bit to bring them back down to do this exact. So the final moment, so yeah, especially when that person's got, you know, they have some kind of choice about going back again. It could be hugely important. But if the kid doesn't want to be scared for hospital for the rest of their life,

you know, imagine you got this first very traumatic experience at the dentists or something like that. You know, if you can use this peak end experience module and you can plug that in, you can shape a child's behavior towards dentist and or doctor for the remaining 70, 80, 90 years of the life. Yes. Brilliant thing. I'm going back to the bit about, I love about behavioral science, is it's not argued

from first principles people on ever, though they should never be saying this definitely works, this is definitely true, but they've given you first of all a bit of robust evidence through their testing control. But every situation is different. The great thing is if you're a dentist, well, you can recreate that experiment. Why not test it for your set of patients in your specific area? And see if it works. And you can make a huge difference. Absolutely. I want to talk about the Ogle V gloves. Yes, sing. Yes, great idea.

So I think goes back to that idea we had earlier on, which is behavioral science in and of itself is great. But where it gets brilliant is when you combine brilliant behavioral insight with the wonderful piece of creative thinking. So OgreV, Consultor, Overchange were working with a factory where people were dealing with dangerous equipment. And there's an idea called, slightly controversial idea called risk homeostasis. And I think it's controversial, because it was slightly exaggerated.

I think there's evidence that maybe it would exaggerate the impact, but it's still there. And the initial studies were done on, I think it was anti-ABS breaks or anti-lock breaks. And when taxi drivers, thinking Germany had these improved breaks added. What they saw was a much lower decrease in accents

than they expected. The argument being, when someone is given a safety mechanism, they could take all the benefit of that safety mechanism as in lower injury, but actually people sometimes take the benefit as given injury level the same and then driving faster. So often safety measures don't have the impact you would want. So that's a problem with people going to work with sores, you know, giant metal sores every day because they might become a bit blasey about them. And if even if you add in safety equipment, they might then become a bit blasey about them. And if even if you add in safety equipment,

they might then become a bit more reckless. So what Ogreve did was take this idea of risk home in Stasis, and with a wonderful leap of imagination, they gave the workers their gloves, black gloves, and then it would have a skeleton painted on the glove. And it was a constant reminder of their vulnerability.

And when in the tracking, they showed that people do indeed feel more vulnerable when they're wearing these gloves. So that, to me, has been one of the nicest applications of behavioural science, because it's this fusion of great behavioural science insight, but on the top of it, it, a wonderful leap of creative imagination. It's a perfect example as well of the alchemy analogy that I alluded to earlier on, where it is creating behavior change, slash value, slash pick geometric of what the end goal is,

out of nothing. Imagine them having to go back to the people that make industrial bandsours and saying, right guys, I need you to come up with a special system that can drop the saw away, immediately release the mechanism if a myster's and finger gets put in. Can we have some special electrodes that run through the blade to feel if it touches flesh and if it gets wet or so? You just say, oh my god, like because there are systems, I know that there are systems fail safe systems in place like that. But you think how much is, it probably pound land. They've probably got, if you stock up around about Halloween,

you'll be able to get loads of those glutes. Yes, and there's a lovely argument from Rory Sutherland that it's this different in this difference in cost is typical because his argument is because businesses normally have this kind of engineering, logical, rational mindset, they've been using that for years and years, all the easy cheap wins have been found already. And now it's getting diminishing returns and it's getting harder and more expensive to come up with those improvements. Because businesses have tended

to ignore the psychological wins, there are loads of them, like that glove example that you can do at very, very low cost to have a remarkable return. So I think his's book out, it's wonderful, title because it captures this sense of creating value from no or very little expenditure. Yeah, it really is. I think as well the thing that I keep coming back to and talk about this is the effort which is required by companies to do the hard thing. You know,

what one of the things that have been a common theme in both our conversations that we've had, and if you haven't already gone and heard my first episode with Richard, it's just as good as this. So go back and listen, it'll be linked in the show notes below. When people have to go do the hard thing and create this novelty, create these new ideas. It is the hard thing in the same way as changing your habit as a normal person is a hard thing. So you can continue to maybe try and eat a little bit less junk food, but beginning a gym program is real hard, right?

That's outside of the box thinking, we've greased this groove of our standard operating procedures. We spoke about the lineage, the existing adverts that the companies always gone for, the norms that are within and even take that out further within an industry, we've got norms that are industry wide as well. All these different ways that people have greased existing grooves. And yet, the low hanging fruit has already been picked up off the ground, you're getting diminishing returns with rinsing existing marketing plans, always trying to further optimize the logistics of your lean, kaisen, productions, things, whatever it is. You know, like all the different things.

And it does it requires somebody to come in and really reframe everything, right? It's, look, we've tried you eating a little bit less chocolate. There's now no chocolate left in the house and you go into the gym at six o'clock every morning. That's what's happening. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I don't think, I don't know. I think it's a, the whole hour coming up actually a lovely analogy for behavioral science

and it's strengths. Cool. I want to know before we finish up, I don't want to use the C word too much of the new C word, which is COVID. Oh, yeah. But I wanted to talk about some innovative strategies or some interesting adverts that you've seen over the last couple of

weeks. Obviously, it's been a time where people have been increasingly releasing stuff. So I've got a couple of things that I like that have come out of. You know, it's a terrible global pandemic, which is ravaging health and economy in equal measure. But we have to focus on the positives because it's pointless for us. And then I get it. And some of the best things for me that have come out of COVID-19 so far has been WhatsApp

group chats have never been as anti-fragile as right now. Like the quality, everyone's got nothing to do with it and search for memes and take a look out of each other. So that's been fantastic. PornHub giving everybody in Italy and now I think the UK free access to premium, which is low key from PornHub, them saying we are a public service, which from a signaling perspective is unbelievable. We are so important that we're gonna give you during a time of crisis, we know that you need this, which is just like it's so clever,

it's beyond clever, right? Patrick Stewart reading a sonnet a day, have you seen this? No, I'm Patrick Stewart. Patrick Stewart from Star Trek, reading a sonnet a day. Have you seen this? Patrick Stewart from Star Trek reads a sonnet a day on his Twitter. That's fantastic. It's encapsulated in the title. Home workouts, I think the number of people that have been given away. I've got somebody's built up north, a prop and fitness, a Ryan Fisher from CrossFit Chalk in America, all been just throwing out like top level, top top top level programming for free.

I mean, yeah, you can get bored of doing burpees in your living room, but like this is keeping it as exciting as you can get, and I think that's been really good. And I've noticed a massive, great, a sense of social unity as well, like even just in my house, so two housemates, I don't think we've ever

asked each other how they're doing as much. And it's not got anything at all to do with, I'm not worried about either of them. They're both in the young 20s, so they're essentially made of rubber and magic. You could throw it all in there, be fine. But, hey man, how are you? How's your house work? Oh, this is a good, this podcast. That's not, oh, how well, you know, it's

just like everything investment in everyone's been turned up by, by sort of 20, 30%. I think, you know, walking past my neighbors during my one, my one allocated outdoor trip of the day, walking past my neighbors, hey, how are you? Some old gentleman the other day said, as I walked past in short, he said, all right, sonner, I'll be wearing shorts. Two if I had legs like yours and I was like, thank you, strange man.

But yeah, that's some of the things that I've enjoyed that have come out of it. But I wondered if you'd seen any campaigns or any changes or anything you've enjoyed. That Guinness Adverts won. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, the Guinness Ad's beautiful, absolutely beautiful. He's wonderfully designed, very, very clever, and I think we'll bring a lot of amusement to people, whether it changes behaviors, a very different thing. But that's a separate point, maybe.

I think your point of, what's interesting is there's a lovely GK Chesson phrase that along the idea of the way to love everything is to realize it might be lost. And perhaps when you have social contacts or most of social contacts taken away, you realize how precious it is. So yeah, I think that's's I think a key point.

The one I was going to mention, and I think is the flip side of all those positive, or as you've said, is in the Sunday times there was talk about one of the supermarkets raising their prices. And I think brands have got to be very, very careful about transgressing what I've seen as fairness norms. So there is a study done by a guy called Werner Gooth back in 1982 called the Ultimatum Game. And Gooth was at the University of Cologne. It comes up with this wonderfully simple tell.

Two people, never meet each other, they don't know each other. One is the composer, one is the receiver. They're given a small amount of money, or the proposal is given a small amount of money, say a tenor, and the proposal is told, split that money between you and the receiver as you think fit, and they get to split the money, so it could be 50-50, it could be 80, 20 in their favor. And then the receiver has two options. Except the splits as has been given. There's no negotiation. Except the split or refuse it and both parties get nothing.

Now before Goethe of these experiments, the standard economic belief was that a receiver would accept pretty much anything. You know, you've been given a tenor, you only offer me one pound, you keep nine, logically I should just keep the pound because I'm worse off if I don't. But what happens is if the offer is a blow about 20% more than half of people will refuse it. They would rather both people got nothing and the unfair behaviour was punished than the small amount of cash. So it's an argument that people will go to quite big lengths,

even at a cost themselves, to punish unfair behaviour. Now, there's other experiments by Kahneman, where he shows that people taking advantage to push up their prices in times of crisis are definitely seen as unfair. So, simple thought experiment, he says, imagine there's a hardware store that sells snow shovels for $15, $15, it would be as Canada.

There's a big snow storm, they push up to the price to $20. Is that fair? And I think it's 82% of people say that's not fair, not fair. So what I would caution to brands is don't try and make a quick buck out of people's desperation and need. If you are caught pushing up your prices, even if it's justifiable as well, managing demand or supposedly justifiable from standard economics, don't do that because it will be seen as unfair

and people will go to quite big lengths to punishing. I've noticed a severe uplift in brands leveraging social goodwill over the, you know, the amount of this is, the pay walls are being removed. I don't know whether the spectator like that. Free coffees got reared. Oh, they talked about it, didn't they? Yeah, the free coffees to the NH. Oh, I don't know. I saw Roy Tothas tweet about they should do it and phrase a Nelson's response. Maybe that was, maybe that was all that I saw as well.

Yeah, yeah. I think the goodwill that do. The NHS I think scaffing near on prayer originally we're giving them free copies were there. My, my, Remar, yeah wonderful. My best friend Yusef he he is a first year doctor now working in intensive care, the immediate missions and he said that he felt really good that after working like two Doctor now working in intensive care, the immediate missions. And he said that he felt really good that after working like two days on, two nights on of 14 hours each, he was told that NHS staff were gonna get 20% off at Peter Express, which is not first.

Yeah, I mean, 20% off is just basically a kind of sales promotion. It's short, it's short now, you've got of sales promotion. That's it. It should. No, you can't go in. It's 80% to 20%. So you can cut your coupon out and keep it for after. Yeah, the um, I had a point here about brands weaponizing good will at the moment, which it definitely feels to me like there is a little bit of going on at the moment. The bottom line, the company, go ahead. I was going to say, will you be

mentioned that word that you hate? And I might have said a year ago, brand purpose. And one of the reasons I always hate that phrase was it was if we wanted the prodits for moral ethical behavior without the hard work of actually doing moral ethical behavior. We just want to look like we're doing more electrical behavior, okay? We can add which talks about our virtue. At least we're now in a situation where there is a cost being attached, you know, giving everyone free coffee or Facebook giving $100 million of ads away. At least they are putting their money where their mouth is.

So yes, there might be, you know, positively, we could call it in light and self-interest. I would much rather that than the previous situation of, you know, Gillette ads where it's just posturing, not action. I love it. Look, Richard, I literally keep this going on all afternoon. So I'm going to, I'm going to hassle you to come back on the choice factory. Your book will be linked in the show notes below. Astro 10, your company will also be linked. What else should people check out other than your amazing Twitter? Actually, what you want to.

At our shorten. So shorten is SHO TT. I mean, and what I'm going to say with the only other thing is keep an eye out. So, I've started doing some of the research for the, hasn't got a name yet, but, you know, choice factory too. So, hopefully, early next year, I have a second book out. Well, I mean, you've got nothing else to do at the moment, right? I know. That's it. Yeah. Business, yeah. Well, is it getting better now? Yeah. Yes, last week, it was a a bit very, very bleak.

Yeah, you said before we started, in nine months time, a lot of babies and a lot of books happening in your area. Yeah, not for me. Yes, exactly. If you get pregnant in the next nine months, Ritchie, it's going to be very straight. Look, it's phenomenal to have on.

I really, really love having you here, and I can't wait to get you back. Choice Factory, Richard's Instagram, it is Twitter and the link to Astro10. His company will be in the show notes below. If you've got any questions, comments off feedback, you know where to go, get at me, at Chris will X, wherever you follow me. Like, share and subscribe if you're new here. Thank you for tuning in, but for now now Richard, thank you so much, man. Fantastic, thanks a lot. Thank you very much for tuning in.

If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all social media. But for now, goodbye friends.