Oliver Atkinson sits down with behavioral-science heavy hitter Richard Shotton to unpack the simple nudges, concreteness, distinctiveness, and smart pricing frames that help your ideas get noticed, remembered, and bought in B2B and consumer campaigns alike.

We dig into Richard’s new book, Hacking the Human Mind: The Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World's Best Brand, referencing well-known brands as living case studies to show why distinctiveness beats differentiation and how context reshapes value, what you place next to an offer matters as much as the offer itself.

In a world of crowded feeds and content fatigue, the teams who apply behavioral science gain an unfair edge, earning attention, improving completion, and nudging real behavior change.

 

• 09:20 Red Bull's Genius Can Design: How a distinctive tall, thin can broke price comparisons with soft drinks and let Red Bull charge premium prices without resistance
  
  
• 20:39 Concrete Beats Abstract: Why Apple's "1000 songs in your pocket" crushed "256 megabytes"—visualizable language is 4x more memorable than abstract specs
  
  
• 27:15 The Fluent Device Problem: Character-driven campaigns outperform across all metrics, yet usage dropped from 30% to 12% because marketers think they're outdated
  
  
• 42:15 Distinctiveness Is Your Biggest Asset: We're hardwired to notice what's different—the real risk isn't being bold, it's being bland and forgettable
  
  
• 53:31 Repetition Breeds Success: Familiarity increases positive perception, but marketers change things too frequently and lose the cumulative benefits of consistency

 

Oliver (00:01)

Hello and welcome back to the audience connection. Today's guest is Richard Shotten, a leading voice in behavioral science for marketing and comms. So if you've ever argued over evidence or over opinion, you've probably quoted Richard. His first two books, The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice became behavior science bibles. And then his new one, recently Hacking the Human Mind, turns brand stories backed by behavioral science studies into practical experiments you can try out.

I'm really excited to have him here and dig into some of these studies. So Richard, welcome to the show.

 

Richard (00:33)

very good to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

 

Oliver (00:36)

No worries. And so the book's been out for about a month now. So it launched in September. I've been Yeah, yeah, pretty to the day almost. Yeah. And I've been reading. I've been reading it this month and quite good month to actually read it because there's a nice set chapter in there on Starbucks and the spice pumpkin latte, which I had while I was reading that section, which was great. And yeah, there's there's loads in there to take away. And we're to dive into some of those chapters today. And there was another just another bit that really stuck out for me, which was

 

Richard (00:42)

Pretty much exactly.

Yes, yes.

 

Oliver (01:05)

It's in the Kraft cheese, mac and cheese chapter where you're talking about now. I'm going to pronounce this wrong, but paridolia. Is it the way you see faces?

 

Richard (01:12)

Yeah, yeah. tendency to see patterns and give random objects meaning that isn't there, especially we're prone to see faces in clouds or trees, which is a little very small bias that the Kraft Mac and cheese use in their packaging.

 

Oliver (01:29)

Yeah, and that that for me as a filmmaker as well. And like we do often talk about faces and the importance of seeing people and not keeping it too abstract and that connection that really resonated with me, but then also near where I live, there's an estate agent, and there's this like eyes lights and then a huge bushy eyebrows of like the lanterns over the top and a gigantic mouth and every time I see it now, I'm like, that's takeaways.

 

Richard (01:49)

it's a nice variety of brands you pick there because ⁓ Starbucks and Pumpkin Spice Latte in particular was the focus of a chapter. And it's very much around scarcity and avoiding habituation. It's at the very heart of what Pumpkin Spice Latte is. So it's a big macro use of some of these behavioral science principles. And then the other end, really tactical, tiny little tweak to the packaging is Kraft Mac and Cheese where they have a

 

Oliver (02:04)

Mm.

 

Richard (02:16)

a macaroni piece of pasta that's shaped in the packaging like a smile. And it's a really good way of getting people's attention in the crowded environment that is the supermarket aisle. So those two examples, I think show quite nicely the sheer breadth of use of behavioral science. It can be fundamental to what the product is and the strategy of that product, its fundamental designs all the way through to the most tactical of tweaks.

 

Oliver (02:43)

Yeah. And Casual, we're starting to apply more of this and I'm starting to see that as well. It's like there is from the very idea of your creative, there can be a kind of behavioral science application there or to down to like, you know, just the labor illusion and how much you're putting into, know, the proposal that's going over. We can come into all of that later on, but just, yeah, the book is slightly different from your last two. So I was just wondering, you know, what I thought was really strong is like you've gone to the brand story. And then into the application of the science where that comes from and then how you can then apply that yourself in your own work. Why was it a departure from your last two books?

 

Richard (03:21)

So two things differently. Firstly, it was co-authored. So I wrote it with an American entrepreneur called Michael Aaron Flicker. So that's the first difference. But then the second bit is, as you say, a flip to the kind of model of the choice factor and the illusion of choice on its head. So with those two books, each chapter is about a behavioral science bias, a behavioral science principle, and it follows the same pattern. Here's the academic evidence. Here's the evidence that...

or research I've run to show those biases work today. And then I talk about practical ways that marketers can use it. With Hacking the Human Mind, every chapter revolves around a brand. So one chapter's on Kraft mac and cheese, one's on Haagen-Dazs, one's on Facebook, one's on Amazon Prime, so on and so forth. We start with a little part of history of the brand, and then identify two, probably three behavioral science principles that that brand has used that has helped power the success. And that was the approach for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the more I talk to people about behavioural science, do presentations, training, whatnot, the more I see that if you just stay in the realm of the experiments, it's often too abstract for people to see how to use the ideas. But if you ground everything in a very practical example of what a brand has done, suddenly it makes it far more easy to understand. And I think it's an absolute travesty if this amazing body of work is behavioral science, if it just stays as something we discuss the academics experiment on, but it never gets used, it's an absolute waste.

So that was kind of one reason. And then the second reason why it's brand focused was it's a bit of a twist on maybe a more standard approach. know, this, this, if you go to any creative agency or media agency or market department,

When people are looking for inspiration, what they often do is think, well, which brands have done amazing things? Who's booming in our category or an adjacent category? And then they think, well, let's copy some of the things they've done. And it sounds like a really sensible approach, but if you think about it for a second, there's a bit of a flaw, which is for a brand like Amazon Prime or Starbucks, they are complex entities. They are doing hundreds of things concurrently. So...

You don't really know if you just randomly copy some of their behaviors, whether the thing you're copying is crucial to that brand success, or it was just incidental. was, or it might have even been a negative drag on their effectiveness. So what we've done with this book is yes, identify 70 very successful brands. We then look at all the types of tactics they undertook.

And then we apply a behavioral science lens. So we say of the things that pumpkin spice latte did or ⁓ liquid death, what are the ones that have also been proved to work in peer reviewed controlled experimental conditions? And that way, I think you're moving from a random piece of copying, which might just be copying noise and intonational detail. This way you can copy

 

Oliver (06:23)

Mm.

 

Richard (06:43)

practical techniques that are proven to work in multiple different scenarios. So I think you've got a better chance of success by this type of copying than something done a bit more blindly.

 

Oliver (06:55)

And it helps with that selling that idea in as well if you've got a practical case study there and that narrative story is so important when you're trying to convince someone of something as well. So yeah, to be able to attach the two together.

 

Richard (07:04)

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe, maybe you could argue too important in some respects. You know, I actually think there could be a great book written about 17 brands that have kind of been a bit crap, but they've got interesting things that just overwhelmed with other ideas. I think they could be a really good book there. I'm not sure if there is a marketplace. Like, for example, think premium bonds. I think there's an amazing idea there.

which is essentially getting people to save money is really hard. And if you're offering a 5 % interest rate, it's too abstract. The benefits are too far away to interest people. Premium bonds have got this amazing idea of get people to save by offering an immediate and potentially very large but variable reward. Now that taps into two massive behavioral science principles of present bias. We care about what happens to us now, far, far less interested in what's going to happen to us in the future.

And this idea that we're more interested in variable than fixed rewards. But because premium bonds aren't very sexy, because it's not a hugely booming brand, I think people unfairly castigate one of its approaches. And I think that's something that I reckon if we were to meet in 10 years time, there will be a brand, savings brand that has applied that with a bit more creativity, theatricality, and done it brilliantly and everyone will start copying it.

So don't know, I think there could be a fourth book in the pipeline, which will sell five copies.

 

Oliver (08:38)

Yeah. Cool. Well, let's dive into some of these ⁓ case studies then. So I think, you know, one of them that really stood out for me is Red Bull because we often talk about Red Bull as being a brilliant example of a brand who has used video content, used content to become a broadcaster. And there's such a great effect off the back of that. But then, you know, reading your book around

 

Richard (08:42)

Yes.

 

Oliver (09:06)

The origins of the story of Red Bull, the way it tastes and the size and the pricing, it's just so fascinating how it actually became such a distinct brand in itself. So could you take us through a little bit around that chapter and why it was so effective?

 

Richard (09:20)

Yeah, there's, there's, there's a few interesting bits that Red Bull have done. ⁓ I think one of the least appreciated though revolves around the, the can size. So you go back to when Red Bull launched, they were charging a very significant premium to other soft drinks. And I think it would have been stillborn as a brand if they had put their very expensive drink in exactly the same can size as.

Pepsi or Coke. And this is something that Rory Southerns talks about brilliantly in his book Alchemy. Because the can size of a Coke Cola is 330 mils. It's like a squat fat can. And if Red Bull had put their drink in a similarly sized can, you would have immediately compared prices. Pound for Red Bull, 50 pence for Coke. Red Bull would have looked expensive.

But by putting it in this tall cylindrical smaller can, I think turn 50 or turn to 75 mils, because it's visually different, you break the comparison set with other soft drinks and people's willingness to pay becomes free floating. Now that, I think if that insight about the different shaped cans taps into this idea that psychologists call price relativity. So essentially it's the argument that when people are thinking about what is a fair price to pay. What they don't do, because it's too complicated, is think to themselves, well, how much happiness, how much utility am I going to get from drinking this kind of Red Bull? Then they think back to their willingness to pay per unit of utility. They do the maths and that's their estimated value. Now, people don't do that because it's a ludicrously complex calculation.

And a theme of behavioral science is that people are cognitive misers. So that's a phrase from Susan Fisk at Princeton. And it's essentially the argument that we have evolutionary, we've evolved essentially to ration deep considered thought, because from an evolutionary sense, energy is a scarce resource and thinking is energy intensive and it's effortful. So we've evolved to avoid deep reflective thought most of the time.

And instead make quick snap decisions. So weighing up the absolute value of the product is a complex calculation. And what we do when we're with complex calculations to save energy is essentially replace them with simpler ones that give us an almost as good answer. And when it comes to price, the simple question is what have I paid for something similar? And if this new item is more, it's bad value. If this new item is less, it's good value. So fundamental piece of Red Bull success was managing to break this comparison with the far cheaper world of soft drinks. Now, that one, I can imagine a lot of are rolling their eyes and thinking, well, that's a reasonable argument, but I'm sure people could put lots of other plausible ideas together. But the great thing with behavioral science is nothing is ever based on logic or rationality alone. Everyone has to prove their ideas and experiments.

So what Michael and I did, I think it was 2022 we did this one. We tried to test the concepts of price relativity with Ben and Jerry's ice cream. So we got a group of people together and everyone was shown a tub of Ben and Jerry's ice cream for 3.99 and everyone was asked how good value it was. The twist though is that some people saw it compared with Walmart ice cream for 1.99, other people... saw the Ben & Jerry's compared with Halo Top, a very expensive premium brand for £4.99. Now, when people were asked how good value the Ben & Jerry's was, you saw a wildly different pattern. The group that saw the Ben & Jerry's compared to the cheap Walmart, 27 % thought it was good value. The group who saw it compared to the expensive Halo Top, you go up to 41 % of people think it's good value. So you get this 52 % swing in the proportion of people who think the brand is good value, even though everyone is seeing exactly the same brand, exact same price, exact same size. That finding corroborates this idea of our perception of value being relative rather than absolute. And if people buy into that as an idea, then suddenly as businesses, as brands, as marketers, you've got this amazing opportunity.

Because what it suggests is you can radically increase people's willingness to pay if you change their mental comparison set. So go back to Red Bull. What 99.9 % of marketers have done is launch in cans that are shaped and sized exactly like standard soft drinks. It would have weighed down willingness to pay. The genius of Red Bull, think, was around this completely distinctive can shape that it broke.

 

Oliver (14:32)

Hmm.

 

Richard (14:38)

These unhelpful price comparisons and let people's willingness to pay float free. So yeah, that's, think for all the things that Red Bull did, that's the least discussed, but probably the most beneficial.

 

Oliver (14:49)

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's really interesting you talk about that because we've been on a bit of a journey recently around how many ideas we'd send over to clients. and we initially were like, you know, if you send too many ideas over that they just get overwhelmed by choice and they can't really make a decision. So let's just send two. And then I think we, it's a few years ago, watched a conference where you were talking to the IPA, I think around, and you were talking about price anchoring and price relativity with, with, yeah. And you were talking about how nice the test goes, beer.

 

Richard (15:13)

yeah, that was a while ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Oliver (15:17)

tasted if it was, you know, nice and cool in the fridge was only 99 P. but that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not shaming you on here. Like, yeah, by the way, Richard, he's really, really cheap here. But, yeah, we, we then started going into this kind of more value based pricing and, actually that's been a bit of a journey. And on one hand, it's kind of worked for us. There've been some quite fiery conversations with CMOs where they've been like, how dare you put an idea in that's that large.

 

Richard (15:19)

I may have been stretching credibility there with that one, but yes.

 

Oliver (15:47)

But then they kind of say, but this middle middle route actually looks really reasonable. And it's still double what they gave us the budget for. But I think that point around the comparison sets and the differentiation is key, isn't it? Because if you kind of are still the same as all your competitors, and then you're going in with this value pricing, and you're up here, it doesn't it doesn't work as well.

 

Richard (16:08)

Yeah, I think so price relativity is this kind of broad concept we come up with an idea of what we're prepared to pay by creating this mental comparison of products. It's a relative judgment on an absolute one. That's the kind of broad idea. What you're talking about is a kind of a subset of this idea, often known as extremism version. So it's the idea that as an agency, let's say you take two prices to people, you've got them. The bronze package and the silver package. Well, that silver package looks a bit expensive. Let's say it's 200 pounds and the bronze one's 100 pounds. Well, it looks like it's a hundred pound premium. But if you go to the same client, but with three options, bronze at 100, silver at 200, gold at a thousand, suddenly you have reframed how people approach silver. Even though it's the same cost because you have this comparison with that super premium gold package. Now people can think to themselves, well, I'm saving 800 pounds by taking out this, this silver package. It's a really, really simple technique, but never go with one price. Give people three prices, three different offerings of different quality and different, ⁓ strengths, but don't expect to sell the most expensive one regularly.

The role of it is to make them that super premium one is just to make everything else look a bit better value. Now that idea of extremist version, it's not speculation again. There was 1993 work by Amos Tversky. He did it with electrical goods, cameras. Richard Thaler has done it with popcorn in cinemas. ⁓ Dilip Soman has done it with coffee. I've done experiments recently with transmission where we looked at professional services and every single time.

 

Oliver (17:38)

Hmm.

 

Richard (18:04)

you see the same result. If you offer people bronze and silver, you get a small proportion going silver. If you go bronze, silver, gold, the proportion picking silver over bronze jumps up. It's a great way to get people to pay a bit more.

 

Oliver (18:21)

And then thinking about like, you know, talking about professional services, that's definitely the type of client that we work with as well. And, and, you know, in a lot of these principles, they do apply across, it's not just marketing, it's not just products, is it you can actually apply a lot of these nudges, it's all moving behavior, right. So in terms of that comparison set, thinking about that in a B2B environment. Have you like, have you done a study where you've really seen a B2B brand or professional services brand, something that's kind of financial brand really change how they're they're seen compared to their competitors?

 

Richard (18:55)

Yes. So, so with that, the experimentation I've done has been around extremism version and you see just the same results amongst professionals as you do

 

Oliver (19:01)

Mm-hmm.

 

Richard (19:06)

that I think is a pretty standard finding. So whether it's the illusion of effort, distinctiveness, simple language, I've done lots of experiments where I've taken an existing academic insight that's been run on the nationally representative groups. And I've rerun them with often with transmission for this yes advantage report we did. We rerun them with a professional audience. And generally nine times out of 10, maybe eight times out of 10, you see the same results. Just cause you walk through an office door and the biases in your head don't suddenly change. Now, if anything, could argue, I think you could argue the professionals are more prone.

 

Oliver (19:45)

Mm.

 

Richard (19:50)

to some of these behavioral science findings. Because there is often an argument that people are prone to being influenced by behavioral science principles in situations of uncertainty. Now, if you think about some consumer products where behavioral science is well proven, like ⁓ FMCG goods, cans of Coke, bags of crisps, these things you buy every single day, or you buy regular a couple of times a week, and people know their preferences and yet the biases still work.

But then compare it to a professional decision. Now, professional decisions tend to be far more bespoke. They're far less cookie cutter commodity. Generally, what you're seeing in front of you is different from the offering you saw like six months prior. So for anything, I think these principles are more likely to work in professional settings.

 

Oliver (20:39)

Okay, so let's talk a little bit around the Apple chapter because I mean, Apple are a great brand to have a look at anyway, but I think, know, what I really liked about that chapter was it's taking a really complex product and this is talking around when they were launching the iPod and really simplifying it and making it relatable. And you talk about concreteness in that, right? So can you take us through that principle and that study and see why that's so powerful?

 

Richard (21:04)

Yeah. So this was one of my favorite chapters and it's quite a wide ranging one, the bit that you're referencing talks about the launch of the iPod. And then if you go back to that kind of era, what was it about 25 years ago? People were trying to lots of tech brands were trying to launch completely new bits of MP3 players, and they all wanted to convey the benefit of memory and storage.

The great thing with MP3 player, which you can fit your whole CD collection essentially on it, can fit all your music onto this tiny device. But what most brands did, whether this was Sony or Philips, is they talked in very abstract terms. They said, you know, we've got these wonderful new machines, they have got 256 megabytes of memory. Now, the problem with that is it is very, very abstract language and a consistent finding of behavioral science is people are bloody awful at remembering abstract concepts. For something to become easily understandable and very memorable, it's much better to use language that people can visualize, what psychology called concrete language, things, physical items, anything that people can picture in their minds, it's a lot, lot more sticky.

So you think about Apple back in that era. Yes, they wanted to convey the same objective of memory and storage. But what they did is translate those abstract objectives into concrete visualizable language. The strapline they used so brilliantly was a thousand songs in your pocket. And because you can picture the iPod being nestled in your pocket, it makes that message lodging people's minds. Now, again, this is not speculation. There's a classic study from 1972 by Ian Begg. So he was this great.

Canadian psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. And he recruits a group of people, reads out a long list of two word phrases, and he sees what people can remember later on. And the twist in the experiment is that half of the phrases he reads out are abstract. So things like ⁓ subtle fault, impossible amount. These are concepts that it's hard to visualize. The other half of the phrases he reads out are concrete ones white horse square door, physical things you can picture. And what Begg finds is that on average, people remember 9 % of the abstractions, but 36 % of the concrete phrases. Now that is a massive difference. know, business can flourish on a little one or 2 % improvement. This is a four-fold difference in memorability. It's one of the biggest impacts I've seen in a memory study. And according to Begg, the reason's very simple. know, vision's the most powerful of our senses.

And so if you use language, people can visualize it's very, sticky. If you use abstract language, it's completely forgettable. So I think that is a simple technique that could be used far more regularly. Now for each of our chapters, we picked different biases to use because, you know, it's not going to be a great reading experience if every chapter we repeated the same biases, but you could go back to Red Bull.

 

Oliver (24:16)

Yeah

 

Richard (24:29)

We didn't in the book, but you could go back to Red Bull and say another brilliant thing they did was exactly the same principle of concreteness. And what would most marketers have done launching Red Bull, this energy drink? Most people would say Red Bull gives you energy, but that would have been very abstract. It would have been forgettable. But of course, what Red Bull actually did so brilliantly was say Red Bull gives you wings. And that's very, very different. It's got the same underlying meaning, but because it uses visualizable language, it's really sticky.

You can imagine the wings, can imagine a person flapping them and flying around. That is a very powerful piece of communication. ⁓ yeah, concreteness is I think a theme of some of the best brands, the best copywriters, they use it regularly.

 

Oliver (25:14)

Yeah, and I think, you know, when when reading about that, that Apple example, it does just spring back to your mind completely. And, know, you talk about those other brands, don't, and I don't know whether that's because Apple has a serious amount of real estate in my head, because they've become omnipresent. But it does it, you can just recall these really clear examples and characters immediately when when they're referred to that they just that's that sticky, right?

 

Richard (25:37)

Yeah. Yeah. And this is why we didn't just do a potted history of a brand and then say, here are six things you can learn from the brand. Because you're absolutely right. From afar, if you just saw a thousand songs in your pocket, you knew it was a successful campaign, but was it the la was it that phrase? Was it the beautiful photography? Was it the weight of media they use? Was it the aura of the brand? It'd be very hard to be clear that it was that particular element.

 

Oliver (25:55)

Hmm.

 

Richard (26:07)

that drove success. But if you see Apple behaving amazingly and experiments, peer review controlled experiments where they just test the principle of concreteness, I think then you can learn from ⁓ Apple. You can identify using behavioral science, the kind of magic ingredients they're using to pass success.

 

Oliver (26:28)

Because when you start to understand the principles, you start to see it threaded through all of their work, don't you? Like, know, when you have a look at the Apple ad about deleting the text and you've got the lizard coming back to life, I think Orlando talked about that, you know, that being a fluent device and it's just, it's funny, it sticks in your head, it's got characters. Can you talk a bit about the fluent device as well? We did touch on it with Orlando, but I'd love to go a bit deeper on it and just understand why that's really effective and crucially how...

 

Richard (26:44)

Yeah.

 

Oliver (26:55)

service, you know, the service industry B2B, how they can because character characters, it can, you know, and we'll come on to rhyme in a bit, but it can, it can seem a little bit salesy at times. And so it's like, how do we start to put that in? Or how do we suggest clients go with that, without them saying, like, that's not really what we want to do, because we don't, we're not we're not in that realm.

 

Richard (27:15)

Yeah, so, so fluent device is a phrase that Orlando and Wooden System One came up with. And they describe it as a character or mascot who is central to the drama and ad that is used repeatedly on a long-term campaign. Now they probably say it far more eloquently that, but that's basically the point. It's a character used repeatedly and it's central to the drama. Now they've done some brilliant work.

They've looked at, think, 300 long-term campaigns from the IPA effectiveness database going all the way back to 1998. And then on four metrics, they have compared the campaigns that had a fluent device and the campaigns that didn't. And it's things like market share, profitability, big important metrics. And for every one of them, there is a significant difference. The campaigns with the fluent device work better.

 

Oliver (28:07)

Hmm.

 

Richard (28:15)

And there are some brilliant reports that are worth downloading if you want that kind of data. Now, I would explain this and ⁓ Orlando might well disagree, but I think the reason why these fluent devices work is concreteness. So have a think about fluent devices, the really successful ones, the 118 runner, maybe Howard from the Halifax, the ⁓ characters, the Geico Gecko.

Alexander the meerkat. These are all visualizable things that embody certain values. Now think about bank's experiment and think about compare the market. If you'll compare the market, it is very hard just to convey value for money by talking about this concept in abstract terms. It doesn't work. It doesn't stick in people's minds. But what does stick in people's minds is a talking Russian accented meerkat.

And that physical thing embodies those values. So brands, think are, have certainly been very astute in their communications when they've used fluent devices. But unfortunately, you know, I kind of try to emphasize their, the past tense. It used to be a very regularly used advertising technique. We'd have to go and look at the system one data, but I'm pretty sure the latest data they've reported on is that 12 % of campaigns use a fluent device. It's certainly of that ilk, it might be a bit lower. And I think you go back 30 years and it's more like 25, 30%. So there's this technique that there's a very strong behavioral science principle that shows it works, concreteness. There's some lovely data from system one that shows it works. Yet what brands are doing are moving completely opposite direction. They are ignoring a powerful memory technique because I think they feel it's a bit old-fashioned. But frankly, I don't think that's what the audience are believing. And what we're, think, sometimes bad at as an industry is assuming certain facts. People assume

 

Oliver (30:21)

Mmm.

 

Richard (30:40)

these characters and mascots are outdated. But there's no evidence to show that. The evidence shows something very different, that they're great memory techniques and they improve a lot of business metrics. So I think there's this phrase from Richard Feynman, the physicist, he says, it might be Bertrand Russell, doesn't really matter. He says, every so often it's quite good to hang a question mark on the end of things that we sincerely believe. And for me, the industry should be thinking far more about some of these techniques that work so well in the past that we seem to be dismissing.

 

Oliver (31:16)

Yeah. And I think Orlando would argue that it's because of that narrow beam sort of culture we've ended up in that means we're less likely to take a risk or go back to doing some of those things.

 

Richard (31:28)

Yeah, but my argument would be, mean, risk is an interesting word. I mean, I think that, know, if you're really looking at the risk to the brand, and we can come back and discuss risk to the marketer, but the risk of the brand is not being noticed. know, most advertising doesn't even get through to people. won't be recalled, know, five minutes after being seen. Your biggest risk as an advertiser is not being noticed and not being remembered.

 

Oliver (31:31)

Hmm.

 

Richard (31:55)

Fluent devices are a brilliant way of avoiding that risk. So the risk to me is not having a fluent device, not communicating concretely. I think we sometimes get risk the wrong way around.

 

Oliver (32:10)

Yeah, yeah, and combined with that use of, of humor as well, like that's, that's a really powerful tool to use. And then in definitely in our world, like it's, it's really not used as much as it should be.

 

Richard (32:22)

Yeah, most definitely. don't get it. I think actually I went to see Orlando speak and he was talking about the etymology of advertising and it's from the Latin, turn towards. And there's a bloody big clue in the name of advertising as what we need to get people to do. We need to attract people to turn towards whatever we're talking about. And when you think of it like that, humor, of course, is a very powerful tactic. People want to be amused. They want to engage with something that makes them feel better. They don't want to be brow beaten and made to feel crap. So humor again is another technique. The advertisers are going in the wrong direction. There's Cantar data. They've published it. It's very easy to find if you Google it. John Boyd's done some lovely work on it recently and they have looked at the proportion of ads that try and amuse people. I'm emphasizing the word try. You go back to the early 2000s, late 90s, it's more than 50%. Now I think we're down to 32%. Again, advertisers doing the opposite of what is effective. Now the standard riposte of this is, okay, well, fair enough. You can make people laugh and you get their attention, but...

I want to show that my brand is value for money. I want to show that we're sophisticated or trustworthy. I want to communicate a completely different metric. But behavioral scientists would say people are being far too literal. The communications don't work in these discreet buckets. There's an idea called the halo effect, which essentially suggests if you manage to imbue your product with one powerful positive metric. All the others will follow. So if that sounds a bit vague, I'll go back to some of the original studies.

I jumped to the 1970s when probably the first decent study was done. So it's 1977, think, Richard Nisbet, Timothy Wilson, and they get a colleague of theirs. So this is all done in America. And it's a professor who is Belgian and who has quite a strong accent and they get this professor to record a lecture. So half an hour talk and know, sunflowers or something. So he gives this lecture and they record two versions. So first version, he is coming across as kind of warm and enthusiastic. Second version, he comes across as cold and mean. So he's just changing his kind of demeanor, but he's not changing the underlying content. Words are the same.

Logic's the same, but it's just whether he's friendly or unfriendly. The psychologists get a group of people and then they randomly pick one film to play to the participants. So some people see the friendly professor, some see the unfriendly. Psychologists then question all those participants as to their feelings towards the professor. Now, the first bit of data is bleeding obvious. The people who see the unfriendly professor rate him as a mean-spirited and nasty.

 

Oliver (35:15)

Mm.

 

Richard (35:43)

The people who see the friendly professor rate him as kind and warm. So far, very obvious. The clever bit of the experiment is they then start picking completely unrelated attributes. So they say to the participants, what did you think of his looks? Was he good looking or bad looking? What do think of his accent? What do you think of his mannerisms? And these are things completely unrelated to whether he's friendly or unfriendly. But what you see is this same pattern. Friendly professor is rated as better looking, nicer accent, better demeanor. The argument from the psychologist is what they call the halo effect, which is essentially if you have one dominant characteristic, so in this case, friendliness, people then use that dominant characteristic to rate you on all your other attributes even if those attributes are unrelated. So if you come across as friendly, you'll also be seen as more trustworthy, more intelligent. If you come across as really beautiful, you'll be seen as more intelligent and trustworthy. It's probably an energy saving technique again. It's complicated to rate people independently on all the different aspects. What's easy is fixate on one thing and then use that as a broad guide. Now that's the kind of 1970s experimentation.

 

Oliver (36:37)

Hmm.

 

Richard (37:05)

But take that now to the world of marketing. And what this suggests is businesses should think very differently about communications. Don't think about the metric that you want to communicate. Think about what is easy to communicate. So what I mean by that is proving trustworthiness in a 30 second TV ad or a poster. It's very hard. You have to make claims. You have to go out and say,

I am trustworthy. And frankly, claims are skeptically received. But now think about humor. It is something you could actually do in a poster or a TV ad. And we are always, as viewers, going to give more weight to actual performance and actual behavior in the ad, rather than claims. So I think there's an argument that you try and communicate in a humorous, likable way.

And then what you would expect is all those metrics that are unrelated that you do want to improve, they will follow. So I think you're absolutely right. it's criminally ignored in advertising at the moment.

 

Oliver (38:18)

Yeah. And I think, know, there's something like, speaking of comedy, like I tie it back to it. So I've ran a comedy club for a few years down in the French Riviera, which is quite an interesting kind of like before my time. And you can tie so many of these principles back to in fact, actually about concreteness, we called it the Riviera comedy club, because it needed to do exactly, you know, what what we were doing. Yeah, yeah.

 

Richard (38:36)

lovely, yeah, you can picture that, yeah.

 

Oliver (38:41)

But when I think about, you know, the humor side of it, watching all these different comedians and how they came on with these different personas and their acts, which obviously they repeat, rinse and repeat night after night and seeing how the different audiences warm to them or some of them came on very kind of like strong and they would need to build up from there. And then there's kind of practical effect where they sort of take the piss out themselves to begin with. And there's a very common, you know, thing in comedy when you get up, you say like, I'm a cross between McFly and someone else. And that gets your first laugh but you then need to be really good to kind of pull it off afterwards because you can die if you don't do it. it's really interesting connecting a lot of these principles and thinking about those comedians and how they're interacting because that's all quite similar stuff, right?

 

Richard (39:23)

Yeah. the piece I'm fixing on from what you said, it was your very first comment about this variety of comedians, because I think that's absolutely crucial. Comedy and humor are very, very broad. So when people say, well, comedy works for FMCG brands, but it doesn't work for business. It doesn't work for serious things. Surely the response should be, well, what type of comedy are we talking about? Maybe Mr. Bean's slapstick works in a

 

Oliver (39:33)

Hmm.

 

Richard (39:53)

Snickers ad and it's not gonna work for McKinsey, but that doesn't mean the entire breadth of comedy can't work for a professional services company. Think about the Economist ads. Those were comic, but they were witty, intelligent, clever wordplay. So not only did they increase people's willingness to engage, not only did they boost all these unrelated metrics from humor because of the halo effect, what they also did I think is double down and

 

Oliver (39:56)

Mmm.

 

Richard (40:23)

additionally emphasise the intelligence of economist because the wordplay itself was so clever. And in fact, I think if we were going to write the book again, I'd be tempted to stick an 18th chapter. Now we're talking about it. And I think we should have done the economist, was it white out of red, white of white, white out of red campaign.

 

Oliver (40:42)

Well, yeah, let's do it. Let's add it. So let's move on to liquid death. I mean, obviously, like an incredible brand story of this sort of completely standing out in the drinks category. And that distinctive story applies so well in in that kind of the beverages area. Tell us a bit around that story because it was a it was a designer writer at a gig.

 

Richard (40:46)

Yeah. A guy called Mike Cesario. He'd worked at various different agencies and he had this idea that if you want people to be more environmentally friendly, so not having plastic, if you want people to ⁓ water rather than soft drinks, I think it's healthy for them. He said, why does everyone always assume you have to focus on the kind of duty and the ethics? Why not? Focus on appeal and desirability. So he's kind of first argument was, well, why don't we learn from candies and crisps and soft drinks? Why should the devil have all the best tunes essentially? And when launching the brand, he completely ignored the category conventions at the time. So if you think of your Evian's and your Perrier's and all sorts like that, they tend to be ⁓ clear bottles, you can see the liquid, ads full of alpine imagery or yoga mums, beautiful green scenes. Cesario ignores all that liquid death and instead he behaves more like a heavy metal band or a craft beer. So the ads are outrageously over the top. They're very dark, ⁓ bloody humor.

They really push the boundaries. And it's a phenomenal technique. Very, very successful in America. I know there's been problems in the UK, but in America, Cesario says it's the fastest ever growing non-alcoholic brand. And I think this idea of identifying category conventions and then splitting them into two buckets, ones which are there for a very good reason, leave those alone, but most are there just for tradition sake.

 

Oliver (42:46)

Well, for water.

 

Richard (42:59)

if you break them, you are much, much more likely to be noticed. So that's again not speculation. original research actually went back to 1933. So there was a German psychologist called Hedwig von Restorf, wonderful name. And she does a simple experiment. Well, it's basically like this, I'm bastardizing it slightly, but she gives people lists of words.

So you might get this A4 bit of paper with 10 phrases on. Nine will be from one category. Let's say it's animals, dog, weasel, elephant, kangaroo. And then one of the words, or maybe two of the words will be from a completely different category, like furniture. So it could be chair or table. She gives people a few minutes to read through these lists. She then takes the lists away and then she asks people what they can recall. And she sees a very clear pattern.

If you are given a list that is mainly composed of animals with a couple of bits of furniture, people will remember the furniture. Whereas if you give people lists that are mainly composed of furniture items with a couple of animals thrown in, in that setting, it will be the animals they remember. Her argument is we are hardwired to notice what is distinctive. So this became known as the von Restorff effect or the isolation effect. And now bring this back to liquid death. This is a... challenger brand, it's a launch brand, budgets that are trivial compared to Evian and Perrier. But what they managed to do is to make every one of their dollars count far, far more by being much more likely to be noticed, much more likely to be remembered because they broke so many category conventions. So that to me, I think if you look at one thing that liquid death had done, I think that's probably the key principle.

 

Oliver (44:37)

Mm.

And if you're a Fortune 500 brand, do you, I mean, obviously if you're Fortune 500, you're standing out in the market because of your depth of experience and number of years doing it, but it does make sense. The distinctiveness side of things does make sense from a startup point of view, or if you're trying to disrupt. If you're a large corporate, would you then need to create a fighter brand to try and disrupt yourself? does distinctiveness still work if you're trying to kind of stand out once you're one of the big boys?

 

Richard (45:18)

Yeah, so the point is, if you want to be noticed, it's more likely to happen if you're distinctive. Now, that is a fundamental trait of human nature. It doesn't matter if it's a professional services, it doesn't matter if it's FMCG, it doesn't matter if it's alcohol. And we are fundamentally more likely to notice something if it's distinctive to its surroundings. Now that doesn't have to mean it's disruptive.

It doesn't have to be copying liquid death with these very outrageous approaches. It could be something about using a different color palette or a different ⁓ tone of voice. It's more around...

It's standing out from whatever surrounds you. Now you certainly could say that that principle is equally valid, whatever category we're discussing. But I think there is a slight difference if you're a Fortune 500 company. If you have advertising budgets 10 times the size of your competition or 50 % larger, you can get away with behaving like the market because you're just going to steam roller them through sheer repetition and weight of exposure. Now it will work because you've got this luxury of larger budgets, but it doesn't mean it's the most efficient and effective thing to do. So Von Restel effect is valid for every situation, but I think when it comes to mother being sorry, necessity being the mother of invention. It's more likely to occur on challenger brands because of the pressures of them. They don't have enough budget to ⁓ do the more standard route, but it doesn't mean it can't be used by those large brands. think there's a distinction.

 

Oliver (47:04)

Yeah. And I think when you apply it to kind of, ⁓ you know, offering and the, the agency landscape, there's a lot of production companies out there. It's a very fragmented market. I think a lot of them are all saying the same thing. And so we've been trying really hard for years actually to try and be distinct and trying to separate ourselves out from it. So it doesn't, I mean, it does seem to me that the bolder that chain bolder that. That difference is the better, right? So you've got to be quite brave with how you try and stand out from, from your competitors.

 

Richard (47:42)

But again, it comes back to this use of the word bravery or risk. And I think there's a danger with positioning this way. So I would always say, well, brave for who? Now we'll come to the marketer themselves. I think you might be right there, but for the brand, it's not brave to be distinctive. You know, you're more likely to be noticed. This is an absolute fundamental of communication. You cannot change people's beliefs in your brand if you aren't noticed.

 

Oliver (48:03)

Mmm.

 

Richard (48:12)

The risky thing for most people, unless they have this luxury of ridiculously large budgets, the risky thing is that you put out a bland piece of messaging that apes the category conventions and that you don't get notes. That's the genuine risk. So I disagree with the use of ⁓ the word risk or bravery when it comes to the brand perspective, where I think I would agree with you is unfortunately as things currently stand,

 

Oliver (48:28)

Mm.

 

Richard (48:41)

There might be an element of bravery and risk taking on the individual marketers behalf, because unfortunately, if you ape category conventions and your brand launch, let's say is a failure. You know, let's say you are launching a beer brand and you do a massive football sponsorship. If that's your decision as the marketer. Now, if the brand fails, you, people turn around and have an inquest into why it went wrong. You can say, well, look, all these other massive.

successful brands have used a football sponsorship, know, surely this was the right thing. Failure must lay elsewhere. So it gives you a plausible alibi. Imagine that situation, you're launching your new beer and you do something wildly different. Like you sponsor a table tennis brand, even if in reality, it was a great thing to do. When it comes to the inquest, it's harder to defend because there's no examples of other people doing it. You don't have the same internal defensive,

 

Oliver (49:35)

Mm.

 

Richard (49:42)

logic that you can use. So I would always discriminate between what is risky for a brand. And I would argue being undistinctive is very risky for a brand. What is risky for a marketer? think, unfortunately, you're right. And it actually sometimes is doing the right thing because then it's harder sometimes to defend if things go wrong. And there's always a chance things go wrong.

 

Oliver (50:04)

And how does that tie in with the consistency element? Because you talk about that in that chapter as well. And I love that there's a system one study on compound creativity, which I roll out all the time at the moment, because I think it's brilliant. But obviously, you you need to find something that's working, you need that fluent device. And once you double down on that, and then you can iterate on it. So I think about like, go compare the opera singer. And then, you know, eventually, we've now got ads where he's out of the twirly mustache. And he's just a Welsh bloke talking, you know, about something going wrong in his house. So like,

 

Richard (50:29)

Yeah.

 

Oliver (50:33)

You know, that idea though of sticking with it, I mean, we are guilty of chasing shiny new creative or doing different things. And I'm sure like it's part of human nature to seek novelty, isn't it? So I think there's an element of that, of trying to kind of pull ourselves in line and trying to stick with an idea. But what would your advice be for how to create that consistency and iterating on a creative idea? Cause it can feed, that can feel again, like a risk, but maybe it's not a risk, I don't know that sticking with something seems to be quite hard.

 

Richard (51:01)

Yeah. So firstly, I think that some people think there's this contradiction between ⁓ consistency and distinctiveness, but actually distinctiveness doesn't mean you are constantly evolving and being distinctive within your brand. means distinctive versus what everyone else is doing. So Geico Gecko, massive insurance brand that inspired compare the market, I think. And Geico is big insurance brand. have a fluent device, the Geico Gecko. Now they have had the Geico Gecko for I think about 30 years. So they are consistent in the use of the Gecko, but it's completely different from what everyone else has. Everyone else has talking lizards. So it's distinctive versus the competition, but they use it consistently. So these two things, I think, go together very well. And in the liquid death argument, this tone of voice they have.

 

Oliver (51:39)

Wow.

 

Richard (51:59)

being an outrageous heavy metal style communicator that is consistent ever since they've launched. But that style is very different from an Ervian or a Perrier. So consistently distinctive, I think is the, the argument. And we're talking about tone of voice and style. It's not that Geico Gecko runs exactly the same ad for 30 years. They have the consistent part of the Gecko, but of course in different situations, different scenarios, different areas. So you've got this theme of repetition, but with kind of some ⁓ variance within it. So I think that's the kind of the first bit.

Compound creativity is really interesting. think the system one reports are brilliant. That one, when I first heard about it, I was a little skeptical because to me, there's a survivorship bias. you, and you know, this is just from a cursory reading. So I don't know the study as well as I probably should. But if you say a campaign that's run for 10 years, or campaigns that run from 10 years tend to be more successful than campaigns that only run for a year. The most logical explanation for that is survivorship bias. If you launch a campaign and it's amazing, you keep on running it. If you launch a campaign and it's bloody awful, you turn it off. So just saying longer running campaigns are more effective than short ones, I don't think actually proves anything. However, put that argument to one side for a second.

 

Oliver (53:19)

Yeah.

 

Richard (53:31)

you then look at experiments and you can start to see this repetition does have benefits. the guy that came up with this idea was called Robert Zioncz and I'm pausing there because I don't know how to bloody pronounce his name. It's like a Polish-American super famous psychologist book called Zioncz, think essentially. And he came up with this idea of the mere exposure effect.

So back in 1968, he's working at University of Michigan and he recruits a of people and he gives them like books and they people have to flick through these books. And on the first variant of the study, every page, there is a picture of a face and people put a few minutes, 15 minutes to flip through the book. They get to the end and then there is a list of all the faces that appeared and people have to say how good looking the faces are.

Now the twist in the experiment is some of the faces were shown just once, some of the faces twice, some three, some five, some 20 times. And what Zion shows is that there is this consistent pattern. The ratings of the faces are seen as more beautiful, more attractive if people have seen them multiple times. Now he calls this the mere exposure effect because he's saying they are becoming more beautiful, not because people are getting more information about them but simply through the act of repetition. That was a one-off study. He then repeats it with Turkish words. So he's doing this with an American audience. don't know what these Turkish words mean. It does the same thing. People flick through these books. Sometimes they say a word once, sometimes 15, sometimes 20 times. Again, when they are asked to say what they think that word means, there is this pattern that the more they're exposed to words, the more positive a meaning they tend to give it.

He does these experiments in lots of different variants. I Chinese characters was the other one. And it keeps on seeing the same pattern. And he argues that there might well be an evolutionary angle to this. That if we are exposed to a stimuli, sorry, if we're exposed to a stimulus and it doesn't hurt us, then we over time become warmer to it. You know, we see it as safe and not being a threat. So he argues that over time,

 

Oliver (55:56)

Hmm.

 

Richard (55:59)

Familiarity breeds contentment rather than contempt. That the, you know, the proverb's got it the wrong way around. So I think if you look at the great work system one have done, and you think of Zioanch's work, then I think together, it's a more compelling case. The repetition is an undervalued element of a brand success. Marketers chop and change things far, far too regularly.

And what they should realize is that you should be sticking to the same approach unless there is a very, very good reason not to, because by doing something radically different, you will lose this benefit of the mere exposure effect. So unless there is a massive upside from your kind of strategic pivot or your creative pivot, you are not going to benefit. ⁓ If you are just gonna replace it with a similarly powerful approach in... kind of abstracting, you will actually see a loss because you haven't got this benefit of the mirror exposure effect.

 

Oliver (57:04)

Challenging for a ADHD brain like myself, but yeah, I can see the value in it.

 

Richard (57:09)

again, it goes back to this point of look at some of the greatest brands, look at Kit Kat. ⁓ I think that phrase, have a break, have a Kit Kat, I think that might be the 1930s, 1940s, maybe 1950s. It is a phenomenal ⁓ line that they've used again and again and again. It's one of the world's most successful chocolate bars. But they haven't just gone out with black and white posters for 70 years.

 

Oliver (57:13)

Hmm. I haven't found it back as that.

 

Richard (57:36)

that they've shown wonderful variations and creativity, but it's all on this same clear theme. And that's what I think you want to be thinking about with the mere exposure effect. Don't laboriously stick to the Zion study. Now, I think the way of interpreting this in a commercial business setting is have a very, very clear underlying

 

Oliver (57:45)

Hmm.

 

Richard (58:04)

principle and expression, but then there you've got this bandwidth to vary on it and KitKat would be a classic example of someone doing that.

 

Oliver (58:11)

creativity flourishes within boundaries, right? So if you've got that kind of you're working within that you can come up with really good whereas if it's completely open, it's much harder to be creative. And the other thing I love about that study is they say stick to the same agency, which is music to my ears, because they say, you if you stick to the same agency, you're more likely to see large business effects stick to casual.

 

Richard (58:18)

Yeah. Well, again, I'm dangerously close to speculating on a report I don't know very well. But I would question that again, because if you say, oh, agencies that have been around for 50 years with a client tend to outperform those who have been around a year, well, isn't it the same argument as most likely? If an agency is putting, they're continually putting their best people on it, they're doing a brilliant job, you don't get rid of them. If they do a bloody awful job, you get rid of them after the year. So there is a danger of, I think, survivorship bias. But that said,

 

Oliver (58:44)

Hmm. You can of course stay with them.

 

Richard (58:58)

think the point of you need the output to be have this element of consistency and repetition and the dangerous if you bring in a new agency, then I think they will feel a pressure to do something differently.

 

Oliver (59:06)

Mm. you can the world that's the that's the thing isn't it they could come in there's the yeah exactly they're saying like we have to go in a different direction to prove their worth once they come in so yeah you're probably gonna

 

Richard (59:16)

Yeah, yeah. It's the same problem with bringing in new marketing directors. They feel a personal pressure to change things because they're thinking about their next job. if you take over KitKat and you say, I just did the same thing as the last person. ⁓ Your next employer might look poorly on that, but just because that next employer is mistaken doesn't mean that's justification.

 

Oliver (59:32)

Yeah, it doesn't look great on the resume.

 

Richard (59:46)

to change everything up from the brand's perspective.

 

Oliver (59:49)

Let's talk a bit about Pringles because I think this ties in again with the fluent device and doing something, you know, the rhyme of once you pop you can't stop is really effective and the idea of sonic identity and designing for the senses of love. if you could talk a bit around that chapter and then we can get into the kind of layering.

 

Richard (1:00:08)

Yeah. So I quite often write about brands that I, categories that I enjoy. So there's quite a lot of booze in there and then you've got Pringles for the, for the crisps. And if I have a dietary weakness, it is crisps. So to put this into perspective, when it was my 40th birthday, one of my best friends knew how much I love crisps and she bought me this giant box and I opened it up and within it, there were 40

 

Oliver (1:00:20)

It's just a good night in.

 

Richard (1:00:38)

individually wrapped bags of crisps, different brands, different flavors. And I still think it is, it is the single best present I've ever received. And my 50th birthday is in a couple of days. My good friend can't make it. Unfortunately, I think it's a dad's 85th birthday on the same day, but she's come around to the house and she's given me an even bigger box and all my dreams will come true if, and I'll let you know what happens if I've got 50 individually wrapped bags of crisps this time.

So sorry, that might be the slightly biased reason why Pringles appear. But the more serious reason and the more important reason for marketers is the slogan that they use for so long. Once you pop, can't stop. Now, what that uses very obviously is a rhyme. And there is some fascinating work that suggests that if you use a rhyming phrase, it's more believable than a non-rhyming one. mid nineties, ⁓ Matthew McGlone does this lovely experiment with Jessica Toffig-Bash and they recruit a group of people and they give them a list of fake proverbs and everyone gets a slightly varied list. The lists are always randomised to make it a decent experiment. Some people though, will get a rhyming version of a proverb.

Woes unite foes. Some people will get a non-rhyming proverb, woes unite enemies. Now the important thing is the logic, the underlying statement is exactly the same. All that changes is expressed as a rhyme or as a non-rhyme. What the psychologists do is get people to rate the credibility, the kind of insightfulness of all these problems, you are they true? Are they a fair reflection of humanity? So people write the proverbs and then the psychologists take all this data and they compare what the scores are for the non-rhyming and rhyming versions. And I think from memory, it's a 17%. It's something of that order, a 17 % variance in believability. The argument from the psychologists is people are conflating two things mistakenly.

They're conflating ease of processing with truthfulness. So because rhymes are very easy to process, people assume they are true. Interestingly, as a little follow up to the study, the psychologists go back to each of the participants and say, okay, well look, some of these phrases you looked at rhymed, some didn't. Did the rhyme influence your evaluation of the credibility of the phrase? Now think of.

All the participants they asked, only one person said, yeah, the rhyme had a bit of an effect. Everyone else said, no, no, no, these rhymes don't affect me. I am just interested in the kind of content and the, the sensibility of the underlying statement. So there's a, there's a part here about rhymes boost believability, but there's also another interesting bit, which is people are bloody awful at understanding what actually influences them. So you should have deep, deep disquiet about what a focus group says or what a standard survey tells you. Because if you kind of naively and directly question people about why they buy Red Bull, Apple, Liquid Death or Pringles, they'll give you loads of answers, but most of them will send you in the wrong direction. So I think there's an interesting conundrum here of whether on balance market research helps or hinders the industry.

It can be absolutely bloody amazing, but you need a really good researcher to think to kind of go to quite strong methods to counterbalance this tendency for people to mislead. So it can be absolutely brilliant. And you work with great agencies you've mentioned, brilliant people like Orlando Wood, and I think you'll get to amazing answers. But if you just send out a survey and take it face value, you'll end up in a very bad place.

 

Oliver (1:04:50)

Mmm. Yeah, it's full of self reports, isn't it? And then you've got the kind of thoughts bubbling up through a cognitive layer cake where biases where they suddenly start saying what they think you want them to say and

 

Richard (1:05:03)

Yeah, so there's active lying, that's definitely true. But there's also this phrase from psychologists called confabulating. And a confabulation is when people try and tell you the truth, because they don't know their own motivations, they end up giving you a misleading answer. I'm sure most of those people were honestly feeling bad, they didn't think the rhyme had influenced them. It's too subtle an influence. But just because they didn't think it influenced them, doesn't negate the action.

 

Oliver (1:05:06)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

 

Richard (1:05:31)

But with that study, I think we probably wouldn't have done a chapter on increasing believability due to rhyme because it's not that big a swing in impact. But when I read that original study, I thought to myself, well, this is interesting. So if you go back to the 1970s, the 1990s, you can remember a hell of a lot of ads that had rhyming strap lines. And was it? Let's bother with a hover. Don't be vague, ask the hay, that's a 1930s ones, it pringles up to the 90s, once you pop, can't stop. There's an awful lot of these phrases that have been discontinued, but that's still sticking people's minds. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases. I think the original American one was from like 1917. think it was the, you know, the Spanish flu, the Spanish influenza that was trying to help prevent. It came out in Britain post-World War II. And people can still remember these phrases, even though they might have been born after they were originally wrong. So I re-ran McGlone and Topic Bash's study a few years ago with completely unrepresentative audience. We gave them the phrases in the morning and then we asked them what they could remember in the evening. So kind of an eight hour difference. And people were twice as likely to remember the phrases that rhymed as the non-rhyming ones.

So yes, this has a boost in believability, but I think the much bigger impact is for brands when it is so hard to get people to remember what you're telling them. There is a much, much bigger impact in memory. And then what we did in hacking the human mind, working with a great team at Cantor. So Nikki Morley, John Paulson and a few others, we reran that rhyme study with a ⁓ proper representative audience and we saw similar results. So again, it's one of these techniques that is proven to work in terms of memorability. Yet again, the advertising industry is moving away from it. I did a study and I'm desperately trying remember who I did this with. we should probably put it in the show notes. I don't claim full credit, was two of us. But we went to the News UK of this giant repository of all the papers going, all the times the sun's going back for like 50, 60 years.

And we just took random copies throughout the years. And what we saw was this really clear decline in the use of rhyme. Now you go back to the 1970s, I think it was like 20 or 30 % that were using rhyme as a strap line. Now I think it's more like five or 10%. Humor, fluent devices and rhyme. These are three really powerful techniques that the industries stopped using. It's crazy.

 

Oliver (1:08:07)

Mmm. Yeah, it could be so much more fun

 

Richard (1:08:28)

rhyming fluent devices.

 

Oliver (1:08:28)

Well, actually, my WhatsApp groups were that that's the WhatsApp group that has been the most successful was thirsty Thursdays when we all met to go to the pub. That's the one that stuck. But like, it's like, the the, it doesn't work with a sort of half rhyme. Does it work with is it okay for it to be subtle? Or does it need to be full rhyme?

 

Richard (1:08:37)

okay. so good question. yeah, because Thursday, Thursday, and now I'm not an English graduate. that, so my wife will be, ⁓ she'll be recoiling in horror if she hears this. So she's a copywriter. is it an alliteration? Okay. Fantastic. Fantastic. So Joanna Stanley and I did, we reran the McGlone and Toffik bash study, but rather than giving people proverbs that rhymed, we gave them fake proverbs that are literated.

 

Oliver (1:08:50)

That's not obviously you. This is an iteration, yeah, it's not a rhyme there, yeah.

 

Richard (1:09:15)

And these actually were alliterations because my wife was, I think, involved in checking off our English. And you do see an impact. Alliterating phrases more likely to be believed, more likely to be remembered, but it is a much smaller swing. it was double boost to memorability if you used a rhyming phrase. Alliteration, I think you're talking a 15 or 20 % improvement. So yes, it has an impact, but it's just not as powerful as rhyme.

And it's an interesting one here because I'm conscious that if copyrighters are listening, they might roll their eyes and think, well, this is bloody obvious. People have known this for thousands of years. Go back to Homer's poems. They are full of concrete imagery. Was it the wine, Red Sea or whatever they kind of talk about, things like that. It's full of concrete imagery. So two great writers have always known this.

But my counter would be, okay, look, maybe great writers know this, but if you open a newspaper or you look at your emails that come from brands, the actual product, the end creation often ignores these principles. So something is going wrong between the copywriters and the end product. And I think what often happens is the experts, the copyrights know these principles, but they're failing to persuade the gatekeepers, the marketing team.

 

Oliver (1:10:30)

Hmm.

 

Richard (1:10:44)

Because the marketing team aren't interested in, know, George Orwell's 10 rules of writing. That feels completely uncommercial. But if you can take them through the experiments in the book, you know, take them through ⁓ the peer reviewed, observed work of McGlennan Tothigbash, you you can move away from this slightly woolly subjective conversation to very clear proven data.

That backs up what you were probably always wanting to do. So I think there is a real use of behavioral science to get the ideas that the experts are suggesting actually into the wild by giving them this neutral support to persuade others.

 

Oliver (1:11:30)

Do think this, the obsession with data has hampered the success of some of these principles? Is that why we're in the state we're in?

 

Richard (1:11:37)

It always depends what data mean, running an experiment is data. The numbers that you get from an experiment is data. So it's like having an opinion on humor. Having an opinion on data, it's too broad a category to say something definitive about it. The argument should be, what is the data that we need to create to actually improve campaigns? And I would argue the data that comes maybe from a focus group that is

 

Oliver (1:11:45)

Hmm.

 

Richard (1:12:06)

poorly run or the direct questioning in a survey. That data is really dangerous. It can send brands off in completely the wrong direction. But the data that comes from an observed experiment, now that can have huge positive impact.

 

Oliver (1:12:24)

do you think behavior science can be applied in learning and development specifically to make it more effective?

 

Richard (1:12:24)

Yeah. So it's a great question. So the great thing is the brands that are in the book, yes, they are all commercial, but they're often examples of brilliant bits of communication. Those underlying themes can be used in all sorts of different ways. Now, this wasn't a brand in the book, but we touched on it earlier, which is The Economist. So we talked about how they used wit and humor to get more engagement, to ⁓ improve how they were viewed in all sorts of areas. But the other thing they do with a particular type of humor they had is use a technique called the generation effect. So this is the idea from to University of Toronto psychologists. I think it was Graf and Slameka. So it's either Peter Graf and Norman Slameka or Norman Graf and Peter Slameka. And back in the late seventies, they did a simple study or I will maybe I'll simplify it very slightly but give you the directionally right thing. They give people lists of words and some people see the full word. So you might get a list of 10 animals, dog, cat, weasel, elephant. Other people get basically the same lists, but there's a little change. The psychologists have removed one, maybe two letters. So you'd get D O blank C A T sorry. No, no, sorry. C blank T. Yeah.

 

Oliver (1:13:53)

Let's cut.

 

Richard (1:13:56)

And all these groups are asked to later on recall the information. And what the psychologists find is that the group who had to generate the answer, the group who saw the words with a missing letter or two, they remember 15 % more. And essentially their argument is if you put a little bit of effort, a little bit of processing power into ⁓ interacting with the list, if you have to generate the answer yourself, then that becomes stickier. So they call this the generation effect. Now you think about the economist and what they could have done is just say, if you don't read the economist, you're a failure. Well, firstly, that would have been offensive. But secondly, it would have left no room for the audience. It would have just told people what to think. But what they of course actually did was pose a little puzzle.

I don't read the economist was the classic ad, big posters said, I don't read the economist management trainee age 42. They set a little puzzle that needs to be interpreted. There is an active role for the audience and that element of active engagement that lodges the message in people's mind. So you come back to learning and development and where it goes wrong, I think is where people think.

If they just transmit information, that information will be received. I think actually that might be the fundamental flaw in bad marketing. We assume what we say and what people hear are the same thing. ⁓ What you need to do is leave, I think, a role for the audience. Rather than telling people what they should believe, know, get them... ⁓ actively coming up with a solution themselves. That I think would be a ⁓ great way of translating some of these commercial tactics that use behavioral science biases into learning development. Absolutely you could do that.

 

Oliver (1:16:03)

Yeah, yeah, it goes back to that idea of leaving enough space in the trap for the mouse. Solving that puzzle. Yeah. So just quickly, I just want before we wrap up, I just want to touch on the conclusion in the book I found really helpful because that in itself, it really starts to talk about, oh, who was that doctor, Dr. Semmelweis, Semmelweis, the doctor who said that you need to wash your hands to stop, you know, these germs killing people.

 

Richard (1:16:07)

Yes, Sarky, yes, Sarky, Sarky, yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Oliver (1:16:29)

mean, tragic story, but I thought that was a fascinating part of the book because it really talks about how, how to talk to clients about this, how to start selling it in. And I think you talk about using the studies, right. And how, how to actually convince people is to go back to the studies.

 

Richard (1:16:44)

Yeah, I mean, it's a genuinely is a tragic story. mean, cutting it very short. Semmelweis essentially manages to reduce infant mortality ⁓ phenomenally in a maternity ward by getting people to wash their hands. Previously, doctors have been coming from the morgue, cutting up bodies, coming straight to delivering babies. And unsurprisingly, many of those

 

Oliver (1:16:49)

It's pretty good.

 

Richard (1:17:13)

babies died. There's something shocking. It was about the same odds of surviving in some of the Vienna maternity wards as playing Russian roulette. Now Semmelweis, he has slightly weird kind of theories to explain this, but he gets right to the core point, which is some disease is being spread. Everyone needs to wash their hands. Manages to absolutely collapse the rate of infant mortality, you know, reduces it phenomenally. But the tragedy is he can't then persuade anyone else to adopt this technique. He eventually goes basically mad. His wife puts him into a mental institute because of the kind of sheer horror of solving when the world's great crisis and not being believed. And in the, the nastiest of all ironies, when he's put into the men's institute, he doesn't want to go willingly, unsurprisingly, there is a fight with the guards and he ends up dying from a sepsis that essentially he'd shown how you could avoid. So it's this horrible story of basically having an idea is not enough. If you want to persuade people and you try and argue something from authority, you're not often... going to succeed.

So these biases have a, or these experiments have a phenomenal use. You know, rather than going and trying to persuade a client to become distinctive based on your personal beliefs and your charisma, go to that client, take them through the von Restorff effects, take them through the methodology, take them through the results. And because you're using this robust peer-reviewed observed experiment, it is much, much more persuasive.

What I've found is that generally it switches the conversation from should we be distinctive to how can we be distinctive? There is an amazing opportunity, I think, for agencies and people within marketing departments to use these experiments to more successfully translate the ideas they have into action.

 

Oliver (1:19:28)

Yeah. Yeah. And just like having those conversations with clients, it's also a really interesting thing to talk about as well. And then you see them lighting up and then as you say, trying to figure out how to apply it. So yeah, really useful ⁓ to use that to try and sell it in if you're going to go down this direction. I highly advise that people read Hacking the Human Mind. It's been been great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time. We'd love to have you back on again in the future when you've written that ⁓ next book.

 

Richard (1:19:50)

right, two coins.

I mean, all jokes aside, I've been, because my wife is a copyright, we have actually been talking about a fourth book and we're not going to go down the world's best brands and what you can learn from them. What I am thinking is a book about how you can apply these principles at a more micro scale. So if you've got a side hustle, if you've got a cafe, if you've got a yoga studio you're trying to sell, because I've always thought about the application of these ideas for massive brands. think there's an opportunity to apply this, you know,

 

Oliver (1:19:56)

thank you very much for joining us. Yeah, that's interesting.

 

Richard (1:20:24)

When you've got a marketing budget of 15 pounds or you haven't got anything. So I think that actually might be the next one.

 

Oliver (1:20:28)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that'd be really interesting. did also want to ask one last question. It's our audience of one question that we ask every single episode. So when you're writing a book or when you're communicating, know, they say it's quite useful to have one person in your mind and picturing that person who you're communicating to. Who is that person for you and how does that change your process or how you write?

 

Richard (1:20:52)

So I have heard people say that. I've heard Warren Buffett say it. think Bob Levinson, who did some of the classic VW ads, you know, they would think, I think Warren Buffett writes his annual report. He addresses it to his sisters, very intelligent women, but they don't work in finance. And he writes his report and then kind of crosses the name out. And Bob Levinson, one of the VW copyrights said the same thing.

 

Oliver (1:21:13)

Hmm.

 

Richard (1:21:21)

I probably don't apply it as they should. I try and write in a colloquial style that I think ⁓ someone would ⁓ find enjoyable even if they didn't work in the industry. That's the aim, not saying always achieve it. not so I have a single person, but I often think about, ⁓ one of my best friends, Chris, if he was reading, what would he think?

But the person probably changes from session to session. So I agree with the principle, but I probably haven't applied it as methodically as Bob Levenson or Warren Buffett or you would recommend.

 

Oliver (1:21:57)

Yeah, yeah. Has Chris read the book?

 

Richard (1:22:03)

I don't know. Hopefully I'm going to see him on my 50th birthday so I'll ask him. Maybe I'll get his bloody shit off.

 

Oliver (1:22:07)

So you give them a copy then.

Brilliant. All right. Thanks, Richard. And yeah, we'll be in touch soon. We'll put all the information in the show notes. And yeah, we'll see you next time. Cheers.

 

Richard (1:22:15)

Fantastic. Thank you very much.