8 Psychology Hacks Behind The World’s Biggest Businesses - Richard Shotton

one of my favorite studies that isn't very well known he gets a large group of people shows them an e-commerce site and for every purchaser one of the items they're trying to buy just isn't there now sometimes on the site it's labeled as unavailable other people see sold out when he questions those groups as to how irritate they are with the website he sees a swing of 15 with the people who see unavailable being the most irritated people who see sold out the least irritated if the website emphasizes unavailable they're emphasizing their logistical attitude if the website emphasizes sold out they're emphasizing how popular this product is people do not experience events they experience the description of events and if you just change that description you can radically change people's reaction so the last episode that we did we managed to get through eight out of 16 and a half psychological biases from your fantastic new book which is now out and people should go and buy right now I like that as a bit of advice yep yes the First new this is half of a half of an Insight base value neglect what's that um so it's an idea here that people when they are weighing up numbers essentially respond to them naively so if you um show people a you know a bowl of jelly beans for example and one of the ten beans is a is a red bean and you tell people that um they will get a cash reward for picking a red bee you give them the option of picking from either a 10 bean jar with one red or a hundred bean jar with eight Reds you find that people will mistakenly want to pick from the larger number so even though the absolute chance of winning drops the fact that there are literally more beans uh perverts the their decision making so so people react to the number rather than what the number represents I think that's where we're getting to with this idea uh because eight sounds like more than one but it's eight out of a hundred as opposed to one out of ten exactly exactly so if you're a marketer you can start to harness that idea to your to your benefit so there's a lovely study from Gonzalez who's at a gay business school and she came up with a study where she shows some people a uh pack of balloons for 48 pesos some people see a 12 peso discount some CA 25 discount and in that scenario people prefer the 25 discount even though they are mathematically the same other set of people she shows a jacket for 480 pesos some people see a 120 peso discount some people see a 25 discount now the group that see the 120 peso discount rate it as a better deal than the group that saw the 25 percent discount so once again people are reacting to the size of the number rather than what that number represents so Jonah Berger heard about this study and he has a wonderful pithy Turner phrase he said that there is a rule of a hundred if you're selling a product that costs more than a hundred pounds or 100 or 100 euros you should talk about your absolute discounts if you're selling a product that costs less than 100 you should talk about the percentage discount you know that way you're always tapping into this this insight didn't you find something to do with why bonuses are more effective than discounts as well yes so really similar set of ideas here so there is a lovely rail study from 2012 where they sell hand lotion in a pharmacy for 16 weeks sometimes they refer to it as a 35 discount sometimes they refer to it as 50 more and what they find is that on the weeks that they talk about it being 50 more there are 81 more sales now even though these two things are mathematically the same people cannot help to react to the scale of the number rather than what that number represents so it's interesting there because most brands most advertisers are fixated with talking about discounts what rail study suggests is you should contemplate talk about value-added you know Bonus Pack you're getting more because that will always be a larger absolute number it sounds like it sounds like this is it's it's how the discounts make people feel it's like what what does this mean for me yeah that's a really nice way of putting I think that's a better way of putting it in fact because what it gets to is a fundamental insight about how people make small commercial decisions that they don't weigh up these purchases in a fully considered way they don't spend you know minutes upon minutes weighing up their shampoo purchase um working out whether this is an amazing deal because frankly if you spent that long on every purchase you would grind to a hole in life so instead what people do is they make faster snap decisions now some people call those emotional decisions but really they're just about it's about speed it's about an immediate response and what people respond to is that number rather than or they should mathematically do which is respond to what the number number represents one of the pieces of advice that you have for YouTube YouTube thumbnail writing is to write at an eighth grade level and then make it like more dumb than that because as people are scrolling through YouTube every millisecond of attention that you can potentially get from somebody is very precious and if you can convey what this particular video is about in a quicker more easily understood way than the next video you're going to improve your click-through rate oh yeah no lovely Point um I mean I think one of the broad things we talked about last time was this idea that small bits of friction have an outsized effect it might feel like oh surely I've made such amazing videos people are going to give me the benefit of doubt they're going to work through some of these small barriers that I put in the way but most studies suggest that is is not the case so if people wanted a practical tip one of the things that I've discovered reasonably recently is there is a wonderful app called Hemingway so it's completely free you take your copy you put it into the website or the app and it gives you a reading age immediately and you can sit there playing with your copy and it will tell you in real time as you make those tweaks as you make those adjustments how you're dropping down the the reading no way yeah it's brilliant it'll tell you you've got too many use of the passive you've got too many long sentences too many complex sentences and it's lovely because it reacts in real time so you can see your score improving and I would say in terms of copywriting you're absolutely right on the simplest things you can do do is pitch a much lower reading age than you expect it will it will help extremeness aversion ah extreme subversion so um lovely set of studies from originally a psychology called amosfersky so he was the pop research partner for years and years of Daniel Kahneman Conor went on to win the Nobel Prize in 2002 unfortunately to first get died by that stage and you can't give a Nobel posthumously so he probably would have won the Nobel if it lived long enough but back in 1993 he runs a a famous study recruits group of people and shows them two cameras so you've got this basic and cheap camera let's say I can't remember what it was 139 and then a fancy expensive camera for say 200. and he asked people which would you pick which would you prefer and you get a rough 50 50 split he then gets another group of people shows them those same two cameras but he also offers this new group a third camera for say 400 with loads of bells and whistles loads of functionality and what he finds is that only a small proportion of people is 21 of people I think pick that really high-end camera but what's of interest to us is the proportion of people in those original two cameras shifts dramatically it's no no longer one-to-one it's now three to one in favor of the fancy camera now he calls this finding and it has been repeated with beer popcorn coffee all sorts of different products he calls this idea extremist aversion he says one of these quick rules of thumb that we use to decide um how to behave is to pick the middle option we fear that the cheapest option will be tacky and will look a bit mean we fear that the most expensive option will be over engineered and will look like a show-off so the the interesting thing here is you can shift people's willingness to pay by introducing a super expensive item that you never expect anyone to purchase so let's say you are selling a subscription to your gym program and you offer people well you can have a monthly price or you can sign up for annual and let's say as a gym you are going to benefit by getting the loadable to sign up for your annual run your monthly offering what most people would do is just think of well I'll reduce the annual price I'll give people more benefits but if you know about extremist aversion what you would do is think well let's offer a two-year subscription a three-year subscription you don't expect many people to sign up for that but it's very presence makes the annual option look better in comparison and it's that comparative bit that is so important in pricing are you familiar with sub stack do you subscribe to any sub stacks I don't know what sub stack it's a Blog platform it's kind of like what medium used to be but okay yeah yeah it's very it's very very good it's super super popular at the moment and they have they are using extremeness aversion they're using the exact strategy that you're talking about you can sign up monthly you can sign up yearly and then in almost every single person's or creators profile there is a founding member option and the founding member option is usually the equivalent of maybe three or four or five years so let's say it's um ten dollars a month it's a hundred dollars a year or it's 500 for the founding member yeah the founding member gets I I don't know commemorative pin or something that's basically pointless and and a logo but what you're actually doing here is anchoring people to think well that that middle middle price is not so bad I'll go for the I'll go for the hundred dollars one so anchoring has to be a key bias that extremist aversion is is LinkedIn absolutely and there is a lovely um lesser known study by suckling Liechtenstein that that suggests that the way that most brands use Extreme as a version could be improved on so imagine I'm sure it's probably the same as sub stack but most things Netflix Spotify you go to their site and there's the basic option the mid option the premium option left to right the suckling Liechtenstein experiment says that is not the perfect approach what you should do is show people the most expensive option first so their argument and it's based on a lovely study and a fancy craft beer bar in America uh their argument is it's the first price that you see that is the most powerful anchor so yes you want an expensive thing to make everything else look better value but it's the first thing that people see that set that expectation so if people need read left to right you should go high medium low rather than what most brands do which is low medium that's the same I'm pretty sure I learned this from you on one of our last conversations the same reason why restaurants should start their menu with some incredibly expensive platter six person tasting menu yeah yeah 350 pounds which makes the overpriced focaccia bread at the first start of the aperitifes yeah into a sweat when you see that 850 thing oh my God I'm gonna be I'm gonna be bankrupt so by the time you get to the other 10 pound for capture you think wow phew yeah yeah look at how brilliant value this for catcher is the same thing goes for wines as well right like just pitch something nice and expensive at the top anchor everything down off that have you ever seen is there such a thing as making that too too big would it ever scare people away no that's a very good point so I think you've got to the the nub of them out of there in the suddenly Lichtenstein experiment it's it's running a craft beer bottle so people come and sit down and they're given this menu of I think it's 13 beers either they see the cheapest beer I think four dollars at the top most expensive ten dollars at the bottom or they see the ten dollar beer at the top cheapest at the bottom and what suckling Lichtenstein find is there is a four percent increase in average spend when the most expensive beer is at the top um now that's brilliant if you run a bar or I think a restaurant because it suggests you should definitely be making sure the first thing people experience is expensive but I think if someone has gone to a bar they're not going to pick up a menu see one item drop the menu and walk out without lowering their eyes you know a millimeter they're slightly committed they've spent at least five or ten minutes to get there if you're on a website you're probably not as committed there's a greater risk of someone coming to the website seeing a high price and bouncing so if you run this test you've got to monitor both average spend and conversion rate so I think you're right that there is a danger that you take a finding in one setting you use it elsewhere and you don't see the results you expect so e-commerce and bars are are different things but what I think so valuable about this study is it at least suggests a test you might never consider otherwise and the brilliant thing with these tests is if they work you run them forever massive upside they don't work you run them for a week turn them off limited downside so absolutely agree there are situations in which the experiment might not have the same result if you change the context and then secondly that's yeah it's a really interesting point about could you push this too far I know there was a Italian restaurant in Britain called Carluccio's and they pushed it to ridiculous extremes they had a Vespa for sale on the menu so three thousand pound Vespa now I think that's a brilliant way of using a radical really expensive anchor because you see that and you're not gonna suddenly fear that you're going to end up with a really really expensive meal you're not going to feel like these people are exploiting you but you've put out this massive number and you make comparative everything else look a bit cheaper so I think in that circumstance the way that car Loop shows did it you could have a really extreme number and not transgress fairness norms however I know there is an argument from negotiators that if you try this on a one-to-one basis uh Chris Foss talks about this more from experience I think than experiment but he says if you go into negotiation in the pay review and you say I want a million pounds well it's such a ridiculous number that you are seen as acting in bad faith and therefore you discredit yourself so I kind of think that I've always got that Chris Voss voice in the back of my head uh when you're thinking about these these anchors so yeah don't probably push it too far I wonder whether there is something going on here to do with the categories of the products and which ones are particularly susceptible to what we're talking about I get the sense that it would be more effective when you are looking at a menu or a list of items that are very easily comparable but if Barker and Stonehouse were to put an incredibly expensive lamp up top I wonder how much that crosses over when you're in there to shop for a sofa or for a rug or for something else the same thing goes I find it very difficult um to gauge the quality off the price of supplement brands for instance because you go in and you go well they've got this really expensive protein but I'm not here for protein I'm here to buy a new gym bag or I'm here to get whatever um so I wonder whether the the breadth of the product range allows that anchor to almost decay in some way yeah I mean that's I think that's a really interesting hypothesis I think you're right in the people are probably you know there are so many numbers around us this people are going to create their own mental comparison set so ideally you want to be setting a um a high anchor within that mental comparison so I think that makes yeah that that seems fair enough I think there you're probably getting to the degree of complexity where it gets the stage of the experiments that exist take you so far and then each individual brand probably needs to be thinking well how can I re-run these studies in my particular store to see what works best for me denominator neglect denominate neglect um now I think I might sorry in my um uh in my idiocy at the beginning I think I've Blended together um base rate neglect which was the ciao hand lotion experiment and I think I raced straight into denominator neglect so when I was talking about jelly beans I realized about halfway through I might have been um very similar though yeah yeah I mean they they do they um I think it's that underlying point of the naive reaction to numbers which is key so you want to think how can I it's got to be honest how can I honestly quote the largest possible um discount so you know uh base rate neglect you're talking about uh maybe thinking about added bonus rather than discount to nominate and neglect well that's when you move to areas like Gonzalez and the rule of Android you had this thing about stacking discounts in ascending order if you're going to if anyone in the UK that's ever shopped in TK Maxx I don't know if they have TK Maxes over here in America but that's the sort of store where you would see 40 off plus 10 off plus an extra five percent off yeah you like I I don't have the computing power to be able to work out what the price of this item is well what people do is they say Okay 40 10 5 that's 55 off but it's not actually because if you take off 40 your 10 is then off a smaller number and then your five is off an even smaller number still so I'd have to would have to go back and do the maths and please set 17 attempts but you end up it's actually like a 51 discount so again it's stacking discounts is a way of making people as you said emotionally respond and feel like they're getting a a better offering than they perhaps are you said as well about adjusting the font size to get people to focus on either the sale price or on the original price and you can sort of adjust how much waiting people have there yeah this is an interesting one I think that this one from the the Coulter Brothers um what they show is they recruit a group of people and half the people say see a original price of a hundred pounds in small font and then new price 60 pounds in big form other people see original price 100 pounds in big form uh new price 60 pounds in small font and what they show is the second group the people who see the end discounted price in the smaller font they think there's been a larger reduction in price so they argue that people conflate physical size of the number with what it represents so here you want to be a bit careful because it is a one-off study so is it has it got the same probability of working for your brand as something like scarcity or social proof um or fairness where they've read meta-analyzes and hundreds upon hundreds of studies in these areas probably not but another example of a potential experiment that you can apply to your pricing at no cost to yourself and in potentially increase your your margins so I think that it's a really interesting one as a an Aries test that if you hadn't heard of their study you might never ever think of experimenting on it the need to experiment ah well that that runs over brilliantly um so what we've been discussing so far is sometimes the results you will get from a study will vary by context and sometimes you will find a study that sounds interesting but it's only ever been one runs one run once now in those scenarios so if you're either applying a studying a different place or there's not a huge body of evidence for it you can't be certain it will work so you need to set up your own experiments as a brand as a business to rerun the study but in your category your specific brand your specific circumstances now if you're going to do that you've firstly got a great opportunity because all these studies I'm mentioning are in the the public domain so you can re-run the methodology quite easily just with those few tweaks that we talked about and if you do them though what you've got to be really careful of is how you test these ideas so you don't want to be directly asking consumers what motivates them if you say to your consumers okay well I'm thinking about say extremist version I'm thinking about not just offering you basic and premium I'm now going to offer you basic premium super premium would that change how you behaved your customer will properly laugh at you swear at you they'll say well I'm not a bloody idiot of course that wouldn't affect me I will weigh up the amount you're charging versus the benefits you give me so if you're interested in experimenting you cannot ask people directly what you have to do is this simple approach of you know what we call a magnetic test half the audience has seen one of the offerings so that's basic versus premium half of the audience is a basic premium super premium and if you split things out in that way if you get a representative sample you give them randomize them into one of these two groups you keep everything in the two settings the same apart from one variable any difference in performance any difference in people's reaction to those offerings you could attribute back to that single change variable so yes you need to experiment but make sure the way that you experiment is sophisticated enough in that you don't take people's claims at face value okay so don't rely on stated preferences wait for the revealed ones and monadic is that just change one variable don't [ __ ] about with anything else it yeah it's it's uh it's it's a slightly pompous way that I think that that's the danger with academics that's a dangerous psychologist hey take a basic principle they give it a fancy name and they confuse the hell out of people so all men addict means I think monad is kind of Greek for one or something people are not comparing side by side you're randomizing people into groups and then you as the with the bird's eye view you the experimenter give both those groups the reasonably same offering but you change one variable between the two groups and yeah absolutely any difference in performance attributes that that single change variable I really enjoyed the story that you told you had seven biases that Ogilvy tested I think it was maybe charity yeah yeah yeah that's yeah yeah absolutely oh so that's yeah the lovely example so um what Ogilvy change to or over the console I think they're called now is they create an annual report and one of the wonderful things they do is they include things that didn't work as well as things that that did and they ran a test for Christian Aid I think it was in 2018. so 1.2 million envelopes go out for Christian Aid and they put a little envelope through your door which basically asks you to donate money into it you put money into the envelope and then they'll come around say a few days later and collect it they tested seven different messages so some of those envelopes that went through people's door might have said you know please donate the government will add on another donation on top gift aid some of the messages said for example you've only got one week to donate they're trying to move people to action exactly exactly and then another one of those seven was using heavier more expensive paper you know thicker paper stop for the envelope now that thicker paper generated twice the level of donations I think it was 39 Pence on average per person versus 18 Pence for the gift aid offering I don't think many people would predict that it might be easy to post-rationalize afterwards you could say okay well it's all about costly signaling you subtly infer that people are a bit mean if they only give a pound and it makes them want to stick a bit more money into they don't feel guilty themselves you know very easy to post-rationalize it but to say that was going to happen beforehand I think is is unlikely so to me it's a lovely example firstly of a company admitting what worked as well as what didn't and then secondly showing them you know it's often very hard you know people are complex it's very hard to know will work so if you're in a complex situation you should be running uh experiments to prove something like these ideas that I'm I'm saying work in generality they really sort of spread the strategies there as well one of them was there was a special stamp that looked like it had been hand stamped and they said this has been delivered and and prepared by hand which was what's that labor illusion yeah so people call Labor illusion illusion of effort yeah I mean that that's often um works very well you know Karma if we talked about that last time but there's a lovely study by Morales I think at the University of Southern California where she goes out and recruits people and um gives them a list of say 10 houses that meets their their requirements some people are told that the estate agent generated this list automatically with a computer in an hour others are told the state agent took nine hours and they created the list manually when people rate the quality of this day agent afterwards the group who here the estate agent went to that extra effort they rate the estate agent their ability at 36 percent higher than the other group oh we did no we did we did talk about this we talked about it in um uh the example was sky scanner and it was oh yeah loading bar of Skyscanner which is yeah yeah yeah technologically totally arbitrary and exclusively performative yes absolutely we might have to talk about dice as well they're my favorite example they talk about the 5127 prototypes they they got went through to create the vacuumless bag now you could argue well doesn't bloody matter how many failures there were what matters is how high quality the final product is but what Morales would say is look does it matter if it should logically be ineffective well behavioral scientists are interested in what does have an effect and people use efforts expended as an easy way of making a decision about the the quality of a product okay so you would normally expect yeah that emphasis of you know hand delivered uh efforts going uh in in into collect money to have an impact so you know the fact it doesn't I think is something that it's very good that this agency admits uh occurred now if you don't want people just to talk about their successes we can learn just as much from people's failures well you know looking at the changes in donation that those people had coming back it was 50 of them were below the control or a good chunk of them were below the control so there was some things I think the scarcity which most people that come from an internet marketing world this is a one-time offer the countdown timer begins as you hit the page you have 45 minutes to claim this once in a lifetime deal but when you said Christian Aid needs all donations by the end of the week what you actually saw was a decrease compared to the control so yeah you know and who would have guessed that especially coming from a world that's bereft of absolutely and if someone Works in e-commerce they're probably right to think that for their own brand there's a lovely um huge comparative study run by swarbrick Jones I think they look like 2 600 e-commerce studies a lot of them in travel and there's 28 different levers that are used across these different campaigns and they rank the various different biases or levers on their average sales effect and of the 28 they look at the most effective overall is volume scarcity there aren't many of these hotel rooms left next is social proof lots of people have bought this type of hotel room third is what I would call time scarcity what they call urgency you haven't got long to act so you're absolutely right for e-commerce people I think scarcity is probably one of the first biases time or volume that you would think about testing for your product but I guess going back to that point we made earlier around context is important what you're probably starting to see here is well commercial and charity what works for the two you know they're they're varied enough that maybe you can't translate some of the findings from commercial settings into charity and vice versa I'm thinking about my booking.com experience which I use pretty regularly and I'm thinking uh X many people have booked this room today uh like hurry these rooms are going fast there's only this many left that we've got in our allocation and all this stuff so it's every single Bing there's taking all of the boxes that you've spoken about there so the next one which I think is very important and it's important not only for marketing but I think for personal life too which is framing oh yeah yeah very good one um so it's essentially the idea that the same fact can have a market Leaf to different effects dependent on the the language that's used so the study that I discussed is a 1974 one from Loftus and Palmer uh the University of Washington and they play a video and you can get this if you people Google um Loftus and Palmer experimental video car crash you will see a 15 second video of two cars crashing into each other so have a look at that and then what the psychologist did was get a large group of people and they said to some people how fast those cars going were they smashed together other people how fast those cars going when they contacted other people how fast were they going when they collided so are you six or seven different words and then they asked people to estimate the speed of the two cars in miles per hour and when the group who heard the word smashed when they estimate the speed they think it's 40 miles 0.8 per hour the group that heard the verb contacted they think it's 31.8 miles per hour so even though everyone is seeing exactly the same footage there is a variance of 27 in terms of their speed estimate now the psychologists were interested in um police witness statements how people could be influenced by a skilled interviewer and so they were kind of concerned with how a a dubious police person could manipulate findings but I think if you're in marketing what you can take from this is the language that they use to sell your products can be varied to huge impact so for example one of my favorite studies that isn't very well known is one from a Texan cycle or a University of Texas psychologist called Peterson and he gets a large group of people shows them an e-commerce site and for every purchaser one of the items they're trying to buy just isn't there now sometimes on the site it's labeled as unavailable some people see out of stock other people see sold out when he questions those groups as to how irritate they are with the website he sees a swing of 15 with the people who see unavailable being the most irritated people who see sold out the least irritated now everyone is is essentially like the Lotus and Palmer study they are experiencing the same thing on an objective level it's just the language that's used to describe that situation varies and if the website emphasizes unavailable they're emphasizing their logistical attitude if the website emphasizes sold out they're emphasizing how popular this product is uh they're harnessing social proof so the argument here is people do not experience events they experience the um the description of events and if you just change that description you can radically change people's reaction to the same situation one of my favorite examples of this was from Sam Harris and he says that everybody knows what it's like to finish a workout you are sweating and panting on the floor and you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and your heart and your heart rate's through the roof this is a situation which oddly despite being kind of objectively uncomfortable at the time is actually oddly enjoyable exclusively because of the framing that you place around it now if you were to spontaneously feel that while you were sat in traffic on your way to work yeah yeah yeah ring the hospital you would think that there is something terrible with me so our story of what we tell ourselves around an experience very much is the determinant of the experience as well like the story that we tell ourselves largely influences what the experience feels like to us yeah so that that's a I've not thought about it that way that's a lovely exam never really often don't think about these uh experiments in a personal setting I'm always think about them from a commercial setting but I um I came back from a stanky once and the flight land very badly and I'd always been not particularly keen on flying but that freaked me out and I developed a fear of flying so I'd have to fly for work yet I spent the entire flight thinking what would it be like to fall for five minutes from this plane that's bound to um explode in the air now I tried all sorts of things to distract myself you know having a drink um getting into a book doing a crossword whatever it was all these different things to try and get over this none of them worked the thing that worked was listening to heavy metal rap music anything that has a you know a adrenaline fuel reaction in normality so I'd listen to it as we were taking off and I think it over time changed my response from thinking this is a signal that my adrenaline signal this is a very dangerous situation we're gonna die to the adrenaline flooding my body well that's just how I normally react to this particular song oh wow so I'd never put the two and two together but I think you're actually right that's an example of reframing exactly the same decision by a different lens on it yeah you'd you'd used this isn't like a cue that people would play car music in order to be calm this is a cue from your body I'm full of adrenaline so I will play music which is associated with adrenaline that's funny yeah so I always listen to exactly the same song I'm not particularly into rap but what is it I have a workout playlist and one of them is um Kanye West um uh school spirit so it's something he's canceled now okay well I can't talk I know you can still listen to him you just can't can't take his views on the Jews too seriously well yes I use music so you there was another thing to do with um and everybody's aware of this when you buy mints or ground beef as it's called out here do you want to call it 75 lean or 25 fat framing yeah yeah absolutely so there's a I think that is a Levin study I might get the name wrong but essentially it's describing the same situation but if you say 75 lean people will think the meat will be tastier uh they think it'll be less greasy if you emphasize 25 in fact by drawing people's attention to that particular element you get a very different different reaction um so you you also had the thing about um using the benefit of using nouns rather than verbs oh yes so there is the idea that if you remind people that they are a voter they're more likely to follow through and and vote on the actual election day then if you say to them will you vote so will you be a vote they agree yeah will you vote and they agree they are more likely to follow through if they have described themselves as a voter probably because the voter that noun describes who we are you know it's part of our identity nature if you're just referring to an action that's something that's fleeting and not particularly hypocritical so yeah that's the idea so so we've tried yeah so we've tried to do um we've tried to apply this commercially and I haven't seen any results yet but reminding people that they had been a subscriber to a magazine and therefore should renew rather than saying to people um you know you want subscribed you should renew so yeah I haven't got any data back on that but that that's I think it's something that could probably be applied a bit a bit more that's really interesting I wonder how you get somebody from not being a thing to being a thing my point being that what we're talking about here is the noun allows somebody to have that identity become attached and what you're looking to do is for what the identity becomes attached to to be the action that you want them to take if you want people to vote you tell them that they are a voter but if there was a world in which it was really difficult to be a voter or the only people that voted were people that earned over a hundred thousand dollars I wonder how you get someone to believe in the new noun identity if they don't do you know what I mean yeah that's a very good point um I mean the tactic I think we might have talked about this last time one tactic in this area is What's called the foot in the door technique which is if you want people to adopt a new Behavior try and make the first request ridiculously easy so there's a 1966 study where sometimes the experimenters Friedman Fraser asks people to put a giant sign saying drive carefully in their front garden and no barely anyone does it other times they do a two-step process where first of all they are supposed to put up a tiny little sticker saying drive carefully loads of people do it uh the cycle will just leave wait two weeks and then they come up with a giant sign and in that second scenario three or four times more people put up the big sign and their argument is well you make the first request really easy so people feel like they have to do it because it would be churlish not to you know such an important thing as Road Safety once they've put up that sign now you can then use that um and the principle of consistency once they've put up the sign you then go back with your genuine ask and people will remember their past Behavior they'll want to be consistent with that past Behavior they'll think themselves off put up the sticker and must be interested in Road Safety to be consistent with that I better put up the giant sign so I wonder if that if you want to kick start this identity start small would be it would be the big thing ironically yeah fairness oh yes this is one of the most interesting areas I think when I was researching the book um and it's the idea that people's reaction even in commercial situations is remarkably driven by fairness we're not just interested in a good deal in an absolute sense we are interested in being treated fairly compared to others so the study that that caught my eye was I think it's a 1996 that it's quite an old study it is with students so you know take it with the picture soul but it's a blouse and Baseline study and when people arrive for the first day at campus they are asked whether they would help the psychologist the next day with a um an experiment they can have to turn up the psychologists lab do 40 minutes of math puzzles and they will be paid seven dollars now the people who are after that 72 of them agree to take part next group of people um they are given the same basic request come to our lab tomorrow do 40 minutes of maths puzzles but this group are told you will be paid eight dollars however they then follow up with a little white lie they are then told that um other people earlier were paid ten dollars but unfortunately they've spent all their cash and they can only offer it now now in that scenario there is a 25 drop in what people are prepared to uh to accept so you get 54 of people agreeing to take part now this is fascinating because what a classical Economist would say is well it doesn't matter what other people are paid or you should focus on is whether or not eight dollars is worth 40 minutes of your time so you should have this increase but if you think about the principle of fairness people are enraged by this idea that others have got a a better deal now that study I think is fascinating because you could apply this in big and small ways if you're a brand you can apply in a big strategic way and think how do I reframe my competition as treating their customers unfairly and if you can do that you can tap into this pool of anger that will motivate people to want to switch come to your brand or if we're getting super tactical you could apply this on your e-commerce site so think about what virtually every e-commerce site does now you're shopping for a pair of trainers you've picked these trainers uh 100 you love them they look amazing you're completely happy you put them in your basket you go to checkout and then above the checkout button what is there normally normally there is a giant box you know throbbing giant white box that says you know add your discount code now that transgress fairness Norm is essentially what you've done there is told your customer you told these people who are completely happy to hand over the money that other people are getting a better deal that will enragement and they will go off and look for a discount code most of them will probably probably never come back so yeah fairness I think is a interesting area that too many Brands ignore too many Brands think that people are cold calculating machines but actually an awful lot of behavior is driven by you know not the absolute benefit of the offer it's am I get relatively getting good deal compared to other people Shopify interestingly if you're on mobile it's not the same if you're on desktop but I would guess that probably at least 50 maybe 70 or more of shopping is done on Shopify and mobile yeah their discount field is hidden behind a drop down toggle yeah great yeah yeah that's that's a really nice idea because I think what that's working on and I think Uber do something similar with like a um you know if you've got a promo code it's a very recessive little link you can add and I think they're working on the principle that people who have a code will be really looking for the way to put it people who haven't won so that's one by default by default given the fact that probably fewer people will be shopping with a code than without a code why defaults to make the code and this big advert that you're paying more than you probably should do and more than other people potentially are yes yeah but I think absolutely you could have a um you could only show the discount box for example for people you've driven there fire Affiliates uh you could put up your prices by a percent and then populate the box with a one percent off code and then anyone else who has an actual code could overwrite it you know there's loads of different ways did you see um talking about fairness I think this has stopped over the last few years but there was a period especially when Black Friday first became big in the UK where fast fashion companies and jewelry companies were slowly creep the price of their product up throughout October into November or they would just switch it over one week and then the discount and people were using way back machine and internet archive and stuff to go back and look at what the old price of this product was what they realized was that with the discount the price of the product was the same as it was when you could have purchased it at the start of October yes so I mean I think there is an opportunity there potentially for competitor Brands to shine a light on that um I think there is also a self-interested doubt that you should have at the back of your mind about some of these tactics which is the difference in the short and the long term in the short term you will generate extra cash by some slightly nefarious tactics the danger you have is p if people ever feel they have been manipulated too far then you get this this kind of um uh retribution so you've got always got a bit of a balance of how much you should push some of these pricing tactics and there's a lovely idea from I think it said American floss called John Rawls who talks about the things the publicity principle and he basically talks about morality as if someone knew you're applying this tactic would they be angry with you and if they are then it should set off some alarm Bells at least you can should consider whether it's worth doing you know it's a debate I think of the the Richard daler goes back and forth on the beginning of his book Nudge are you familiar with good Hearts law yes I uh isn't it something along the lines of once a metric is used as a Target that metric loses all validity correct yeah so um you know it yeah it's when a let's say that your outcome that you wanted to get um that the metric that you were optimizing for was email subscribers so you say I want as many email subscribers as possible so that's a Target what you're actually looking for the outcome that you're looking for is something more like I want lots of people that care about what I say to be interested and receiving my emails in a warm and welcoming way on a weekly basis like that's what you're actually optimizing for but the measure that you're using is the outcome proxy is email subscribers but if you start to optimize exclusively for that what you could see is a world in which you said sign up to my mailing list and every person that does will be given a million pounds a free pair of shoes and when people sign up and they find out that that isn't the promise that they're going to get on the other side of that you go well look I achieved the target which was get lots of email subscribers but it wasn't the actual outcome that I was looking for the measure ceases to be a good Target yes if there is a sliver of difference between what you're incentivizing and what you actually want you generate some pretty dangerous um repercussions uh I think you had an apology is it getting easy I don't know how to pronounce it it's really easy yeah easy Sneezy sorry uh wonderful book mixed signals and he talks there's a there's a chapter in the middle and it's a wonderful um coverage of some responses to ill-set incentives so one of them he talks about I think it might have been British archaeologists in in China where they this is not a 19th century they reward um peasants there for bringing them pieces of fossil and they get a set amount of cash per piece so what happens is those people are you know very uh uh interested in maximizing their income so rather than bring a complete fossil bone they find those fossil bones They smash them into 20 pieces then they take each piece uh one at a time to the the archaeologist to maximize their their income so yeah you've got to be very careful about uh what incentive you set talking about fairness covered toilet roll prices in the UK oh yes so um gosh that was a study I ran back uh in the midst of covid when people were hoarding toilet roll and what I asked was I set people a little thought experiment I said imagine your local supermarket was charging a pound for toilet roll they've put up the price to say two pounds I can't remember what it was during that shortage do you think this is fair and it was a phenomenal proportion of people who said it was very unfair or unfair it was saying of the order of like 90 percent most economists would say this is just a reaction of supply and demand but people don't treat prices in that manner they feel that the exploitation of a surge in demand with excess pricing is unfair and there's a danger that they will punish that that that that that supplier you also spoke about how you could use righteous indignation to compel people to do stuff yes I kind of think this is something that isn't really used enough I'm I'm interested in fairness because we've talked about the Blount basement study now people would rather have a smaller fee that everyone's getting than a large fee but let Which is less than than others now you also see that in animals there is an amazing video online I would strongly recommend people Google afterwards if you put in France dewal capture monkeys fairness video what you will see is a pair of monkeys happily performing all sorts of tasks for a slice of cucumber but if one of those monkeys is paid in grapes which they rate as a better treat and one is paid in cucumber the monkey that is now being paid in cucumber will lose their rag they will not perform for this uh this this payment so again it's it's a bias that you can see in humans and something we shared a common ancestor with three million years ago when you see these drives of behavior straddling the species you'll know you're on so powerful so if I was a brand I would look at ways of reframing my competition as behaving unfairly so if I was launching a um a competitive taxi brand to Uber surge pricing I think is their Achilles seal uh most banks if I was trying to compete with them if I was new fintech startup I would be talking about uh or reaching people when they have just been hit by a fine they've gone you know two pounds over their overdraft limit they've just been hit with the 20 pound fine that's a rare moment when people are so enraged they're probably open to to switching so how do you reframe what your um competition are doing as a as a fairness transgression very nice freedom of choice hmm so this is an interesting area there's um and my pronunciation is isn't very good I was always horrendous at languages at school so uh it is a French psychologist I think called The Game and he came up with an idea called the but you are free principle so one of many bizarre psychology experiments where it involves the psychologist dressing up as a beggar uh there's another one by a guy called Santos called the um the peak effect all around how surprising requests generate more num more donations but on this one again goes up to people at a or near a bus stop and he says can you give me some coins so I can get a bus and I think it's 10 of people give him some coins next group of people who goes up exactly the same request to begin with but then at the end he says but you are free to accept or refuse and the proportion of people who give them money jumps to I think 48 . that's a huge swinging Behavior what's so interesting is of course everyone in both of those settings always had the ability to say no all that's changed is the requester has drawn attention to the other person's ability to say no so the argument here is one of the things that we love is to retain a sense of agency a sense of control in the situation so if you are trying to persuade someone to take out a subscription to give you a rise what you should be doing is drawing their attention to the fact they can say no what could gain study suggests is that will increase the probability slightly paradoxly of them agreeing to your demands so you want to involve people in the decision process in a way yes but I think remind them of their right to say no so it's not just um involving them I think it's give reminding their sense of control uh it is the key thing and of course uh you know situations with Beggars are a little bit bizarre that five-fold increase is a very very large one so it's not just that situation where this but you're free principle Works um I think it was Carpenter who ran a analysis about 15 studies I think where he looked at lots of different people had run experiments where they had emphasized the other person's freedom to refuse and there is a consistent increase in compliance now it might not be as high as the gate and study but it's a consistent consistency very reliable what so something else that seems to make sense here is if you were overly assertive when communicating with customers and there was a uh place in Austin a recovery uh Center that had some internal strife and it it was going to change and all of the management was going to drop and they also decided to along with that so there was sort of a how would you say a foundation a baseline of ambient sort of discontent because there was some social murmurings in gossip about what was going on behind the scenes and then one Saturday morning every single member of this Recovery Place got an email that said prices are going up and it was going up by maybe 2X or two and a half X and you will be billed and the new prices kick in in 48 hours reply if you want to if you if you want to cancel or something like that and the number of people that I know who were really really sort of upset put off by that and one one of the main things that happened there was it was the kind of language that was used it was basically like prices going up uh like it Olympic you know if you reply if you want to cancel type thing and that native language I think didn't do them very many things yeah I mean it seems like they've got a Kind of Perfect Storm of problems there I think the one thing they did a couple of other things they did they said that the price rise was going to be immediate there's a lovely set of studies um by people like Liam Delaney at the universe he was the University of Sterling into What's called the present preference bias so I think in one of his his studies says to people do you want to pay me 13 pounds now or 16 pounds in a month's time and that's of the order of 60 of people would rather pay the larger amount in a month's time now if you turn that into a monthly interest rate I think it's 23 if you turn it into an annualized interest rate some it's over a thousand percent a year it's a phenomenal interest rate but people would prefer to pay it than give over the money in that instant so what he argues is what he calls present preference bias we overweight pleasure and the pain in the now and we discount Pleasure and Pain in the future far far too much so if I was going to push that price rise through I would give people loads of notice and tell them it's happening in two or three months time because spending an extra 10 pounds a month in that distant time period won't affect me knowing I've got hand over 10 pounds tomorrow that's aggravating so give me the the justification for Charming versus cajoling uh an audience member it seems like charm is always going to work yeah I mean they were always with all these there are a few nuances one of the interesting ones is um the original kind of experiments are far earlier than uh gagane was a guy called brem I think it's Jack brem and he came up with an idea called reactants so um uh it's the argument if you feel your freedom is being curtailed you can often push out against this and the one of the early studies was by a guy called pennebaker at the University of Texas and and um so he puts up signs in a men's washroom that's either says please don't graffiti or do not graffiti exclamation mark exclamation mark and he sees I think of the order of twice the amount of graffiti on the authoritarian side but what's interesting so that's the same basic finding as you know you're discussing we've got with again that if you're overly authoritarian it can backfire but one of the interesting nuances is the extent of that backfire effect depended on the authority level of the communicator so if the sign was positioned as coming from the head of security it really aggravate people if the sign came from the groundsman it didn't have much of a negative reaction in the in the authoritarian manner so the point being here is reactance is far more likely to occur if the message comes from someone in a position of power so if you are doing peer-to-peer Communications of equal people it might not be too much of an issue if it is a letter coming from the tax office and they are um behaving authoritarily it's much more likely to create this this negative reaction so thinking about who the message comes from uh is it is an important one I'm trying to work out why this effect would exist you know fairness makes a lot of sense it's reciprocal altruism it's not being taken for a ride we could see how that would be adaptive having I don't know this this pushback against a tyrannical leader almost even if the tyrannical leader happens to be a badly worded poster or a poor email or 48 hours ago it's about a price rise yeah um I find it fascinating that it seems like embedded in our psychology is a way that we react to the local ecology in terms of how tyrannical it is uh how authoritarian it is it's mediated by the person that is giving that request in a way which also suggests that we have some kind of softness bias toward people that are lower down the totem pole I think the implications of this are really interesting yeah I I that's an interesting question about why it happens and I wonder if you often look to some of these biases is could there be an evolutionary explanation and maybe it's a sense of well if we fear that we are losing control that you know reduces our life chances potentially if if someone else is in charge they're probably going to look after themselves rather than us maybe maybe we are queued up to respond in that way but that's slightly speculative there is uh some good evidence that talks about two different types of leaders that would have happened ancestrally so one that rises due to prestige and another Rises due to dominance the one that rises due to dominance is preferred during times of warfare times of strife chaos because you need the strong no-nonsense we are going to go and do this we charge forward you don't listen to anybody else like let's just get this done those leaders don't perform anywhere near as well during times of Peace in fact they're often killed homicide was the one of the most common forms of death from within the tribe not from outside of the tribe it was within homicide and um yeah I wonder whether there's I don't know would we have been at war or at peace most of the time ancestrally perhaps we would have been in times of Peace which means that we have almost this kind of um uh authoritarian radar or like a tyranist radar that means oh if the way that I feel at the moment is if I'm in a bathroom and I'm just trying to take a piss in in peace yeah this isn't the environment in which I will respond particularly well to someone that is using dominance to try and get me to do something um that's interesting so the next one which I learned from Rory Sutherland the first time actually was The Red Sneakers effect yeah um so a lovely set of studies from Francesca Gino at the the Harvard Business School and the basic idea is if we see people breaking conventions we assume they are higher status so my favorite part of her study is a pilot study she did so when she's testing out the basic idea she goes out to academic conferences and this is early 2000s and the norm of behavior at these conferences the convention is you stress smartly so if you're a bloke you'd be expected to wear a shirt jacket so as people arrive at the conference she monitors uh their Smart's address and she notes it down she then goes and finds those people and says them how many Publications you got how many uh citations have you got so citation is one review of your one mention of your work your academic work in a peer review paper so more citations the more successful you're you know crude metric but you're pretty accurate when she crosses the two bits of data she sees a very clear inverse correlation so the super successful academics you know the people who go and talk shows uh you know write newspaper columns they're the ones who are most likely to be breaking the convention and dressing really scruffily whereas if you go down to the other end the people with barely any citations the people who've barely published anything you know people haven't got tenure people are just starting out in their career they are much much more likely to abide by the conventions now Geno's argument is that you need status to break a convention so imagine a situation in which um you're at work the CEO turns up wearing Bermuda shorts well in that scenario no one is going to send that person home no one's going to criticize them but if the intern does it they get sent home they get pillared so what Geno argues is you need a degree of Social Capital to to afford or to be able to break intervention you can ignore some of the punishments and what or they won't be applied to you and what she says is that people and this is what our latest studies show is people are remarkably well achieved this so we see people breaking inventions we assume they must be higher status so I love this because many advertisers have heard the argument that if you behave distinctively you're more likely to be noticed what genoads is another layer which is if you behave distinctively if you break convention you're more likely to be seen as high higher status too so it's a bit more kind of new news to most brands to most businesses to most communicators how would you apply this so I think for most brands they're an awful lot of conventions in their category if you think about how watch ads behave how perfumes how car has behave most of them uh abide by the same conventions you know think about a press ad for a car at nine times out of ten it shows a beautiful mountain of sea in bendy Road and then there's the the car in a kind of profile shop what Geno would say is if you unthinkingly just repeat this convention in your advertising you'll be seen as low status what you should do is think of your category think of all the different conventions split those conventions into two groups some of which are there for a very good reason leave those well alone others are just there for tradition's sake if you break those conventions firstly the Von rest office effect says you'll be noticed but also the red stickers effect says you're likely to be um believed to be higher status admired more and this is mediated at least a little bit by the um existing awareness the positioning of the brand if yeah Kia decides to break convention it's different to if Audi decides to break convention yeah absolutely so yeah you're absolutely right with all these studies there are nuances and and Gino looks a few I think one of them is you need to be or the audience needs to know you're breaking this on purpose if they think you're breaking a convention through ignorance it can backfire and then secondly yes if someone is already perceived Behind status and they break invention the rewards are much much greater if you get down to someone who is perceived or ready to be low status and Daybreak convention it can again backfire so yeah there is a variance on those two those two criteria the halo effect uh the halo effect so this is an interesting one it's essentially the idea that people's do not evaluate each element of another person discreetly if they feel that someone is Superior in one respect it ripples out to all their other attributes so the classic study well there are Classics those going back to the 1920s but the one I really liked the 1977 study by Nisbet recruits 118 people and they all see a video of a Belgian academic giving a lecture now half the people see a video same content but the academics a little rude and comes across as a bit cold the other half of people see the academic uh being more friendly and warm now as you'd expect when the two groups rate the likability of academic the group who see the warm friendly academic rates them as 72 more likely so you just as you expect you behave in a nice way you're more likable what's interesting though is Nisbet also asks about loads of other attributes of the the lecturer you know what's their appearance like how irritates their accent and he finds the when the lecturer was behaving in that friendly manner people are twice as likely to enjoy the acts and think that he's good looking as in the other scenarios behaving like a bit of an idiot so the argument is here if you have one dominant uh positive or negative characteristic that will affect how your other unrelated characteristics are are interpreted so what's interesting here is if you are a business and you're trying to communicate how amazing you are how trustworthy you want to be how high quality you are you don't have to just communicate those things you could pick another area which is easier to impress people on and then the expectation with all of your attributes and your metrics would would improve so it's almost a different way of thinking about what you should communicate don't necessarily communicate what matters communicate what is easy to impress people on and I think one area here for Brands is think about well coming across as witty and Charming you could actually do that in advert you can actually be funny how you convince someone you are trustworthy or high quality well that's a nebulous thing that it's harder to do in an advert so work with the limitations of the kind of communication medium uh and try and emphasize the metric that you can move not necessarily the metric you think matters that's very interesting I like the fact that um with the halo effect which in pop psychology is traditionally to do with pretty privilege basically that you have good looking people and everybody produces everything that they do is better what you're saying here is that there are a number of different vectors upon which you could win if you were Charming if you were funny if you were polite if you were good looking if you were tall if you were reputable if you were whatever whatever like educated well-informed so on and so forth you can use whichever of these you can win at to trickle down and try and Cascade all the rest of them and I would imagine as well that there are some that are longer levers than others I would imagine wit humor personability sort of charm uh politeness pleasantness generally from an interpersonal perspective are going to be things that will trickle Downstream uh more effectively because they're much more Universal yeah I mean from a Communications perspective I think and this is where it's we're going to move into speculative territory so it would be interesting in challenges on this one but I wonder if something like behaving wittily you you can do that in an advert you can make a joke you don't just have to claim that you're funny the problem with when it comes to attributes like trustworthiness or premiumness it's very hard to absolutely demonstrate you have to make a a claim and the problem with claims is why would anyone believe them because if you are low quality or high quality you're both going to say you're amazing quality you know a claim is is completely empty much more powerful to focus on things that can be demonstrated rather than claims and I wonder if that's why you're right on on areas like wit it's something you can demonstrate rather than just State what about being too clever it must be such a thing as that that's interesting so I mean the Wonder the the closest study I've seen there is the the platform effect the original 1966 study by Elliot Aronson so he recruits a uh a colleague of his taking part in a quiz and the guy is given secretly the questions and the answers by Aaronson so does amazingly well I think gets 90 or 92 of the questions right wins the quiz by Miles now when people are played a recording of that Amazing Quiz performance he and they're asked how much they like the conquest contestant the listeners give a so-so rating next group of people they're played the same recording of the Amazing Quiz performance but there is an additional 30 seconds and in the final moments the quiz the contestant makes a [ __ ] up he spills a cup of coffee down himself in that scenario the listeners who get that recording rate the contestant there's 40 or 45 more appealing so I think you're right there it can be this thing of perfection can be irritating if someone comes across as this amazing um genius well uh you know our reaction is maybe to hate them somewhat because we feel worse in comparison if they spill a cup of coffee themselves they're no longer seen as maybe quite so much of a threat and therefore they can come across as a bit more appealing so I think there is there might be yeah I think there is something in what you say um in the world of online content creation there's a number of people who are really struggling at the moment because they never show vulnerability people know that they've got vulnerability people know that they their self-righteousness or the fact that they are you know unperturbed by whatever criticisms come from the internet and a lot of these people are like quite worthy of criticism but that has galvanized huge Reddit threads there's hundreds of thousands of people in certain sub corners of the internet that basically are trying to find the vector on which they can finally get this person to show that something is actually bothering them and I think that it's almost that sort of two perfect concern that we've got here yeah if someone never shows any um weakness vulnerability we become skeptical of that because we see it for ourselves the you know first off we're skeptical because we think everybody has this secondly we are um untrusting of them because we presume that they must be hiding what it is they've got behind it thirdly we would say well I'm going to continue to poke and poke and poke because this is a fun game to see how much this person can take before they do end up breaking uh yeah it kind of creates a perfect storm to Galvanize people to try and take someone down I've seen this multiple times and it's basically the same formula yeah I think um there's a I think you're absolutely right there is a um there's a lovely study by Northwestern University where they look at likelihood to purchase products after reading a product review so it's all numeric product reviews zero to five five being perfect zero being crap and what they show is as the review gets better people become more like to purchase they look at a hundred thousand different um you know offerings that's a huge sample but what they find for every of the 2025 categories that they look at for every every one of those categories the highest rate of purchases is not a five out of five reviews it's uh somewhere between I think 4.2 and 4.5 now that's where purchasing Peaks if the reviews get any better purchase rates decline their argument is exactly as you say which is that Perfection is too good to be true if you find a kind of a random supplement brand that you've never heard of and it gets ten thousand or five star reviews what's more likely that it's actually perfect or something's being manipulated people if they see 4.7 or 4.8 therefore they're more likely to believe these are honest and give it the um the the the Credence it deserves so I think you're right there are some studies commercially that show Perfection can be can be off-putting Peak endral which a lot of people listening will be familiar with the original study that was done with endoscopies colonoscopies I think it was colonoscopies not a fun procedure not a fun thing not not something that normally gets experimented upon yeah there's a lovely um corner and radomire study they recruit a group of people and these are genuine patients going in for colonoscopies every patient is given a handheld device that buzzes every minute and when it buzzes the patients have to turn a dial to say how much pain they're in zero none at all 10 excruciating so average time must be last 15 minutes so they get 15 ratings from what they call the experiencing self these are in moment ratings next they get a rating from the patient as they're leaving the hospital and then two months after the operation and that is another rating reflect on how painful overall the operation was the expectation before the study was the the average ratings from the remembering self those reflective ratings should be roughly the same as the average rating from the experiencing self but that is not what happens the average amount of pain people experienced is only a poor guide to what people remember what's a much better guide are two moments in particular the peak moment the single worst moment of that operation is disproportionately important and the final moments so you could for example have a low level of pain for 13 minutes and then a medium level of pain for two minutes and that person would remember the experience worse than someone who had a medium level of pain for 30 minutes and a low level of pain for for two minutes at the end It's the final moments that disproportionately important it's the single worst moment that's disproportionately important in shaping memory now that's fascinating because that can be applied by Brands you might think Colossus are far too different a a world but that idea that some moments matter more than others can be applied to any brand experience so a couple of examples I love a restaurant in London called flat iron steak restaurant reasonably priced like 15 pounds for estate 20 dollars you have your steak well after they've given you the bill they give you this tiny little pair of miniature steak knives and they say I'll just hand these in as you leave it you hand them into the person the cloak room by the door and in return they give you a salty caramel ice cream now most restaurants end on the worst moment they end on the bill the paying the faffing around for splitting the the cash all that kind of stuff what Flat Iron do so cleverly is they create a high for that final moment you leave and I bet you most people who remember uh who mostly visit the Flatline will remember that single instance is the same thing to do with the effort of it not just being everybody on the way out gets a salted caramel ice cream it's that you have to take the thing get the thing give it in oh that's interesting so I was thinking I wonder if some of the appeal is it's unexpected and it's surprising it's also done after the bill it doesn't feel like it's some kind of commercial transaction well if you come into my restaurant I'll give you an ice cream for free that's just a negotiation this seemingly is done out of the largest uh uh uh you know the you know it's done out of the kind of beauty of their soul as it were or whatever they don't seem to have an obvious Financial benefit I wonder if that makes it so so positive have I told you about the thing we did with lollipops at nightclubs oh I don't think so go on okay so I learned about the peak end rule six or seven years ago yeah and we were encountering a number of challenges one of them being that a lot of nightclubs are in high built up city-centered neighborhood places yeah noise abatement orders come not only from the sound of the speakers but also from the sound of egress when people leave and if you dump a thousand eighteen-year-olds on the street at three in the morning they start chanting things around and scream and laugh and fight and kick each other so we needed to come up with a solution and I tried my best to come up with a peak end rule that did both of the things that we needed so what we did was as people were leaving we had two good looking girls stood with buckets of lollipops like just little sweet lollies giving them a lolly meant that they had something in their mouth which meant they were much less likely to start chanting and singing yeah the sugar high seemed to have a reduction in the number of people that hung around afterward because it gave them enough of a little bit of energy to get them into a taxi and home it meant that they didn't hang around the takeaways and do that stuff for quite so long and hopefully it gave them a oh that was wasn't that nice you remember that lollipop that we gave or whatever sometimes we give people um uh pound coins that had stickers on and the sticker was a flyer for our uh club night and if they came back with just the one pound coin they could get in for a pound with that one pound coin but they had to hold on to it that was something else we tried doing but yeah that lollipop thing that was pure Peak Andrew that's a lovely idea do you know that remind me who you should talk to um there is an amazing guy called Stephen Colgan uh I might have I've got that pronunciation slightly wrong again um and he was at the the met I think for 20 years and he was became fascinated with Behavioral Science and he used all sorts of Behavioral Science tactics to reduce crime and I I yeah so the lollipop idea reminds me of saying that that he wants uh talks about this whole idea if you give someone a lollipop coming out of a nightclub it also makes them feel a bit like childish and optimistic they're less likely to punch someone else in the face ever had a fight whilst they've got a lollipop yeah yeah what about uh someone that's doing something that's less experiential than a flat iron or a club night in terms of peak Andrew um I mean the other one that I've seen uh apply and it's not all about kind of sweets I feel like we've come to ice creams lollies and uh Haribo um uh wiggle so they're a cycle brand in in the UK and one of the things they do you've ordered your fancy helmet and Lycra they'll put into the order without telling you you know five pence bag of Haribo now it's an unexpected delightful thing at the end of the the journey now what I think is interesting about this is most brands think about how do we make a brilliant first impression what uh wiggle what your nightclub example flat iron what they're doing is saying well yeah maybe first impression is important but actually if we want people to come back to our restaurant on nightclub in a few months time if we end on a high then much more likely to remember it so I think it reorders people's prioritization where they put their efforts and the second thing it does is in some organizations this is the peak part what they do is they think we've got these hundred different areas of our experience a hotel or a restaurant let's try and make them all a little bit better what the peak end rule would suggest is well you'll Fritter away your budget and it won't have much of an impact what you should do instead is think about well let's put all our budget for our creative budget into the lollies at the end or all our budget rather than slightly better uniforms for the people at flower and slightly fancy Cutlery let's put it into the Salted Caramel idea you know you pick one moment of Excellence rather than trying to do everything a little bit better very interesting I think there are some broad implications I imagine that both the peak and the end could be the same thing as well oh yeah absolutely I mean you ideally could argue well that if you're going to create a peak moment best it's at the first because you get two you two multipliers on that yeah yeah um there's a restaurant called Tiki tatsuya out here in Austin and it's a sort of tiki Hawaiian themed thing and every I think it's every hour or every 30 minutes all of the lights shut off and this huge show occurs where light projection runs across the ceiling and this Tiki head bursts into flames and all sorts of stuff yeah and it's actually quite intrusive if you're in the middle of an interesting but it's done in a really Charming way and it's kind of fun yeah yeah and I I want to say it's maybe every half an hour to 45 minutes so it maybe happens twice during a typical meal uh and Frankenstein's in Edinburgh which is on I want to say it's it's just at the top next to the Vodka revolution um they have every hour every 90 minutes uh automatronic Frankenstein gets lowered from the ceiling and electric fire lightning sounds come and then he sits up and all that [ __ ] happens and it's kind of cheesy and kind of a bit [ __ ] but at the same time you go that was nice that was you I know I've I've remembered it you know what I mean I've remembered both of those things to you if you told me when I went to Dean's Italian what the peak part of it was it's like oh well the mashed potato was pretty nice I guess or whatever there's nothing there yes you can argue whether or not you want the main memory to be the uh Frankenstein quite coming down from the ceiling but what you've certainly shown is you know that that is something that is at least memorable so the pecan rule I think suggests the tactic of doing one thing excellently rather than Lots things well and May and ideally putting that at the final part of your experience how you then uh create that uh kind of highlight moment well that then I think is a little bit of a subjectivity beautiful Richard shortton again ladies and gentlemen where should people go if they want to keep up to date with all the stuff that you're doing at the moment oh well I've just released the book so a book called The Illusion of choice so you can get that on Amazon or any of the big retailers have a look there and then on Twitter at our shopping whenever I see an interesting article or experiment about psychology or Behavioral Science and how it can be applied in marketing or advertising I'll post it up there so either of those places are good you have one of the coveted 99 follower spots on my Instagram very well very well deserved uh mate I really appreciate you I love the stuff that you do I can't wait to see what you do next and when it is ready you will be coming back on and we will talk about it again fantastic thank you very much Chris much appreciated what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace