Why Flaws Make You More Likable | Richard Shotton

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1:35Richard spent over two decades applying psychological research to marketing campaigns for major brands like Google, Facebook, and Nestle. But these same principles that move millions of consumers can actually be used by anyone to advance their career, win over clients, and just become more memorable in networking situations. Today, Richard shares why abstractness kills your first impression, how admitting weakness makes you more memorable, the scarcity hack for your calendar link, and why distinctive details make you unforgettable. Welcome to the show, Richard. Great to have you. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here.

2:09I'd love to hear a little bit about your personal journey into using behavioral science in marketing. Often with interests, people generally just drift into them. But for me, there was a very specific moment when I became interested in psychology. So in Britain, back in about 2004, I was working at a marketing agency and we're advising the government health department on how to get people to give blood. So in Britain, there's no cash payments. It's all through altruism. And I happen to be reading The Tipping Point. Do you remember that? The Malcolm Gladwell book? Oh, yeah. And almost in one of his little asides, he mentions this 1960s psychology experiment by Latine and Dali.

2:53and it's this idea of the bystander effect which is essentially if you ask loads of people to help most people will ignore you they'll leave it up to someone else there's a diffusion of responsibility i can remember reading it and thinking you know this is this is what's stopping our campaign working now we are going out and telling the entire country blood stocks are low please donate and everyone's leaving up to someone else just as those psychologists said 40 years earlier. So I went and spoke to the creative agency. There's a brilliant guy down there called Charlie Snow. I said, well, why don't we learn from this experiment?

3:27And why don't we try and create a sense of personal responsibility? So let's stop saying blood stocks are low in Britain. Let's start saying blood stocks are low in London or Glasgow or Brighton. Now, a very, very crude tweak wasn't my greatest moment, but trying to create a sense of a smaller group being asked and even though that was quite a crude tweak a couple of weeks later we got our results back in and there's this 10 15 improvement in in donation levels and that just got me hooked I began thinking well okay that was one psychology experiment what else is there out there and I was staggered to find out there are thousands of experiments and in ad agencies and media agencies across the country at the time they were being completely ignored so basically i've spent the last 21 years trying to use some of these existing studies or my own studies where there wasn't something suitable trying to use them to encourage people to change their behavior either let's give blood and help the government or working with google or facebook or or monday or nestle encourage them to change their commercial behavior?

4:36Well, I think what's really fascinating for us, and I would say probably a lot of our audience don't work in marketing, but we are marketing ourselves and we can leverage these same psychological influential effects to our personal advantage, to win people over, to find business, to grow our career and our network. So as we go through today, I'm really excited to hear how the big brands are using it. And maybe some of us are really invisible to or unaware of how they're hacking our mind and then how we can use it personally to our own advantage. You can use these principles on yourself. Like if you want to encourage yourself to exercise, many of the same principles will apply.

5:14Or when you are trying to persuade others, they work just as well in a one-to-one setting as a one-to-100 million setting. I know for Johnny and I, one of the biggest questions we get for our clients is, you know, how to pitch themselves in a networking fashion. And many of us, when we think about talking about ourselves, we default to generic language. Maybe we get really technical in the way we explain ourselves. And you have this great example in the book, how Apple actually use concreteness to win people over and attract them to this new device in your pocket that can carry music. That's a great one to start with.

5:50It's a really powerful effect in terms of memorability. So original studies go back to the 1970s, but I did a study back in 2021 with Mike Trahanna, Leo Burnett, a big ad agency. We recruit a group of people and we read out or gave them a list of words to read. And half the words were what we called abstract phrases. So things like ethical vision or good value. And half of the phrases were concrete. So these are things that you can easily visualize like skinny jeans or fast car. and after people have read through the list five minutes later we ask them what they can remember and people are 10 times more likely about 10 times more likely to remember the concrete phrases than the abstract ones now the reason that happens is simple it's because vision is the most powerful of our senses so if I use language that you can easily visualize it's very very memorable but if I use abstract language and I talk about intangible concepts then it's very forgettable.

6:53Now that principle was at the very heart of the iPod launch. If you remember back to those years, all the MP3 players, iPod and all the competitors, what they wanted to convey was the abstract benefit of storage. You could store lots of songs. And what most MP3 players said, what most tech brands said, was 256 megabytes or 512 megabytes of storage. But the problem with that is a megabyte and 512 are so abstract you can't visualize them they're completely forgettable but now if you think about apple what they did will still have that same objective of storage but they translated it into language people could picture in their mind a thousand songs in your pocket and because you can picture a pocket that becomes lodged in people's memory in a way that those abstract ideas don't so yeah one of the simplest memory techniques that you can do in a a print ad or a digital ad or when you are presenting to someone or talking to someone at a network event is make sure what you're using comes down from this high conceptual level and then becomes something that people can can picture comparatively how many people were working from home back then when the ipod came out to now now those numbers megabytes gigabytes are a little bit more understandable to people because it's something that they're running into on their own storage problems where back then maybe they were only emailing going on myspace and uh you know a few other chat sites but now everyone's working from home everyone's filming everybody uh is doing their own editing their own storage and they're seeing now what those numbers actually mean when they launched there were two benefits for a thousand songs in your pocket one was understandability oh okay i can get 10 albums on but one was memorability the understanding point is probably no longer relevant i've kind of got this conceptualization of what a gigabyte is i know what it can do but in terms of memory i think you still have the same benefit to how apple approached it because if you talk about being a hard worker or a brand talks about being high quality the the problem is someone can understand that, but because there's nothing for them to visualize, it's much harder to latch onto.

9:14A different example would be Red Bull. Now Red Bull say, Red Bull gives you wings. That's a concrete image because you can visualize it. They could have easily said Red Bull gives you energy. Now it's not that energy is a hard concept to understand, but it's not going to be remembered because it's too abstract. Many of us in a networking environment, we're so steeped in the jargon and the language and the technicality of our career that when we go to convey what we do, we tend to default to it. But if we're actually trying to share what we do and get more people interested and be memorable, we want to talk about things that are familiar to more people than just people who work in our industry.

9:53So who do you help and how you help them? If you say, oh, I'm a digital marketer, that's not really concrete to me. What are you marketing? Who are you marketing? But if you say, I help lawyers get five new clients a month. Immediately in that networking environment, I'm like, oh, I know a couple of lawyers. They're looking for clients. I can make an introduction. And that's the power of actually using concreteness to allow your message to be shared and referrals to come to you. You're absolutely right. If you move from the world of Apple to networking, the second big benefit of Apple is it's really simple.

10:28So concrete is I can visualize it simple is using words that a 12 year old will understand now especially in the world of networking networking and professional discussions many people have the wrong mental model in their head many people think i will impress my audience if i use really complex words but there's an amazing study by a brilliant psychologist called daniel oppenheimer at princeton and i'll give you the full title of the paper and you'll see why in a sec the paper is called consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity and then there's a colon and it says problems with using long words needlessly and what Oppenho does is he gets a group of people randomizes them into two subgroups half the people see an academic text with lots of complex words and the other half of people see a simpler version same ideas but they've replaced the complex words with simpler ones.

11:29He then asks everyone how intelligent the author is. And the results are that the people who see the simpler version, they think the author is 13 % more intelligent. Now, compare that finding with how most professionals behave. Most professionals think, I will impress you if I use complex words. But what that complexity does is confuse the audience. And the audience don't blame themselves for their confusion, they blame the communicator. So one of the simplest things you can do if you want to impress people at work is make sure your language is really easy to understand. It reflects well on us, not badly.

12:03It's counterintuitive, much in the way the pratfall effect is. You have a great story of how Guinness used it in the book, but many of us in these scenarios, we want to put our best foot forward. We want to talk about ourselves and big up all of our strengths and avoid our weaknesses, but it actually can be powerful to mention a weakness. there are a few brands that have done this guinness is probably the most famous but they had for a long time the slogan good things come to those who wait now what that's doing is admitting being open about a flaw and what's so interesting about that is not only was it very powerful on tv but the actual research that originally supported this was about interpersonal relationships so the original research was done back in 1966 by a Harvard academic called Elliot Aronson.

12:57Simple study, recruits a colleague, gets that colleague to take part in a quiz. Aronson has given the contestant all the answers. So he looks like a genius when he does the quiz, 92 % the question's right, wins it by miles. But then as the quiz is closing, he makes what someone in the 1960s would have called a pratfall, what we would just call a small blunder. so he spills a cup of coffee down himself Aronson has recorded all of this he then takes that recording and he plays it to listeners and sometimes he plays the entire incident spillage and great performance sometimes he edits out the spillage so people only hear the amazing performance and what he finds is it when he asks people how appealing the contestant is it's the group who hear the mistake that like the contestant more to the order of 45 percent they rate the contestant 45 better than the people that just hear the flawless performance so aronson calls this the pratfall effect and it's essentially the idea that if you admit a flaw you become more appealing now that i think it again runs completely counter to what people do in job interviews or when they're trying to impress a networking occasion.

14:09They think the way to impress is to brag. But what we say as communicators and what is received are very different things. Often a small flaw can unlock greater benefits.

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17:34Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Yeah, something like sharing, oh, I'm terrible with names when I'm meeting this many people at an event. You know, we can all relate to that. And again, it just sort of breaks the ice in a way that allows the other people to feel even more connected to you that i think would be very true to the original aaronson study um it's it's very good at making yourself more human and then the other thing it does that isn't really include the aaronson study but it's included in similar studies by kipling williams at the university of toledo he um it also makes you more believable so the problem with any communicator especially when kind of money or jobs are involved is if you say you're brilliant the the receiver of the information the person that's listening to you they're skeptical they think well you're going to say that because you want the job or you want saying off me but if you admit a weakness that's proof of honesty then everything else you say afterwards becomes more believable so it's a tactic that defense lawyers use they will often draw attention to a weakness in their case before the prosecution does because they know that it will make everything else they've been saying earlier that little bit more believable if you're trying to allow someone else to feel that you're brilliant using someone else the messenger effect and having them share your brilliance carries more weight than you saying hey i'm brilliant going back to this fundamental point of talk is often cheap if you say you're amazing the natural reaction is for people to be skeptical so what you really want to do is get someone else saying you're amazing now that is a very very old finding i think the first day was 1951 from hovland and vice at yale and although it's a very old study it kind of proves the point there are more recent studies that back it up but what they did was go up to people on the street and they asked them about a topical matter of the day so 1951 they said to people do you think a nuclear power submarine can be built in the next 12 months and people would say yes or no once the psychologists had the answer they invited the participants into their lab four or five days later and when those people arrived they sat down at a table and in front of them there was a sheet of a4 paper with a very powerful argument about why that participant was wrong so if i said yes a submarine could be built there'd be a very powerful argument why that just wasn't practical people were then questioned as to whether they changed their opinion and the twist in the experiment and these experiments always have a little for twist the twist was sometimes that argument was attributed to a high credibility source so Robert Oppenheimer the physicist sometimes a low credibility source Pravda the Russian newspaper and what the psychologists found is the the persuasive power of the argument depending on who it came from so only seven percent of people changed their mind if it came from a low credibility source, 23 % from a high credibility source.

20:36Now, that's actually quite interesting because probably what people should have done is just look at the logic of the argument. Now, the logic of the argument was the same in both settings, but what people actually did was pay as much attention to who said something as what was said. Now, that was the original study 72 years ago into the messenger effect. Since then, there have been loads of other studies and what they have tended to find is that there are predictable types of messenger that are powerful so messenger can be neutral relatable or credible and if it has one of those characteristics then it becomes a very persuasive voice so in the kind of job setting what you really want to be doing is getting someone else to sing your praises now Now, that would tap into neutrality.

21:30It doesn't even have to be someone that distant. So there's an amazing psychologist at Columbia University called Steve Martin, who does a lot of work in this area. And one of his experiments, he works with a real estate agency. And previously, what had been happening was people would ring up the receptionist. She would say, I'm going to put you through to Bob. And then Bob would say, I'm amazing. I've got 25 years experience. I'll come and help you get a house. What they tested doing was someone would ring the agency, the receptionist would say, I'm going to put you through to Bob. He has 25 years of experience.

22:06He's one of our best people. She would essentially say Bob's introduction, and then she'd put the caller through. And what they found was that there was a statistically significant increase in sales and contracts. now logically the receptionist is not exactly completely neutral but even that one step remove even that kind of veneer of neutrality made those claims more powerful so what you want to be thinking about is if you want to convey a certain attribute or benefit how can you get someone else singing your praises whether they are relatable credible or neutral well that also has to do culturally as well.

22:52Back then, we certainly didn't have the amount of info and ways of gaining info as we do now. We're probably living in the lowest trust societies that we have in probably the last hundred years. So for myself, immediately when somebody's like, let me do you a favor, I'm going to enter. I'm like, here I go. Or here you go. I'm immediately distrustful at this point. and I'm not the only one. I mean, I see it all around me. So culturally, it changes our perceptions of what's happening and what's going on. And we're living through that right now. In fact, I mean, we're looking at our news media at the lowest trust that it has ever been.

23:40We're seeing the rise in new personalities that we were discussing before this call, that an individual is able to reach certain people and gain that person's trust rather than the media blasting out broad messaging that is hitting maybe a certain group, but not everybody. And you see it with celebrity endorsements. Absolutely. A celebrity at one point would be really beneficial for a brand, but if that celebrity loses status with a group of people, all of a sudden having them as a celebrity spokesperson using their messenger effect if i use this product or i love this product can backfire two separate things there there's low trust environment and then there's the pros and cons of a celebrity low trust environment is interesting so my background is in commerce how do you get people to hand over their hard-earned cash to buy a beer or pair of trainers now in our setting there's always been low trust now you think about ancient greece if you went to the marketplace and a guy comes up to you and says, you know, I've got the world's best olive oil.

24:46Can I have 50 denarii or drachma or whatever it was? You're not going to trust him. You know that man on the other side of the deal has a reason to puff up his brilliance. So there's always been this skepticism in sales and marketing. So I think sometimes the tactics that have worked through history are still very relevant today. Admit a flaw, you'll become more trustworthy. gets a neutral person to shout your benefits you'll be more trustworthy speak in precise terms i mean there's some lovely recent studies about the power of precision for example so i think some of these uh tactics still work but arguably yes in a low trust environment they become more powerful many of us at this point are familiar with social proof and how it can be gamed how easy you can get a publication to sing your praises or write about you and then plaster it on your website and say, hey, the New York Times recommends my book or recommends my product.

25:47And we know, since we've been doing this for almost 20 years now, just the value of social proof in the very beginning, getting these institutions to write about you, publicize you, carried a lot of weight. Now we've kind of seen social proof plastered on every website and we kind of look at a little more skeptically? Firstly, what is social proof? It's essentially this idea that humans are a social animal, they're a herd species, and we are deeply attuned to what others think and feel. So if you can credibly, and let's emphasize that word credibly, if you can credibly make your product or you as a person look like you're popular, you will become more appealing and you're more like to be hired or more like to sell more of your products.

26:31But of course, there's a credibility stake and if everyone is saying top seller or new york times bestseller i think you're right it does minimize the impact so there are some interesting studies about ways of getting round skepticism it's a brilliant study from a dutch psychologist called case kaiser so he's at the university of kroningen in netherlands and finds this alleyway and he's picked this particular alleyway because loads of cyclists park there and there's no bin and he goes down to that alleyway early in the morning and he puts flyers over the handlebars of the bikes advertising a fictitious sport shop he then wanders off 10 15 yards and then he monitors what those returning cyclists do because remember there's no bin so basically they have a choice to take the flyer home with him or to chuck it on the floor and the twist in the experiment is sometimes he has gone down on some days very early in the morning and he's cleaned the alleyway up he has picked up every single bit of litter he has painted over the graffiti so it looks nice and clean crucially it looks like most people take their litter home with them and in that setting 33 percent of cyclist litter 33 other occasions same alleyway goes down very early in the morning again but this time he makes it a complete tip chucks litter on the floor chucks rubbish around spray paints graffiti on the walls now it looks like the normal behavior is to chuck the rubbish on the floor be a bad citizen and in that saying you get a more than doubling of littering rates you're up to 69 percent of people throwing their rubbish on the floor now i think the explanation for why that is such an extreme effect compared to more standard social proof experiments is your point about credibility if i say my small restaurant has 10 000 five-star reviews or I sell you know 100 yoga lessons a day you might be skeptical but if I come to my own conclusion about popularity and frankly who do I trust more than myself and it's in that setting of the alleyway where he implies popularity never states what most citizens do but implies it that's the most powerful and actually if you look around lots and lots of businesses are hacking that that game because you know think of aperol this bright orange spirit that has the illusion of popularity because if you're in a bar and loads of people are ordering gins and tonics you don't know whether it's gordon's or tanqueray or whatever they're drinking they're all transparent they're all served over lemons couple of people have a bright orange aperol in a balloon glass and you notice it it's visible and it's identifiable so it looks like it's got a large share of the kind of the drinks the key here is whatever behavior you want to encourage you need to make that visible and if it's normally hidden away and invisible that is a very very simple change to make for a small business to take advantage of what's interesting about aperol is i think many americans view it as the first spritz.

29:43And that's actually not even the case. The first spritz was actually just adding seltzer to wine because in Austria, they were concerned about the military drinking too much wine. So they wanted to water it down. And then in Venice, they added Select, which has a ton of herbs and has a much red color, but not nearly as bright as Aperol. And then Aperol took it, made it brighter, made a campaign around it. And now whenever you go out, you see that bright orange drink from across the bar yeah and my argument would be if it didn't have that bright orangeness if it was transparent you know maybe april's and good marty might have doubled its hours it wouldn't have gone up 100x you know social proof creates this kind of virtuous circle lots of people start doing saying and then lots of others become interested so it becomes a flywheel of success johnny remember we started this business i feel like i was drowning in decisions website design, payment processing, customer management.

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33:04That's rexmd.com slash charm. See full details and usage at rexmd.com. Prescription required. Results may vary. Many of us in our career now associate social proof with where you went to school, what institutions you had to go through their rigorous credentialing, or where you got your job. So we associate social proof with certain companies like, oh, it's hard to get in there. There's a lot of applicants. It's very challenging. Social proof is any situation in which people think a behavior is the norm. For most of our evolutionary history, staying on the good side of a group was essential for our survival.

33:47So ancient Greece had the punishment of ostracism. It's named after the broken shards, ostrac, broken shards of pottery that they voted on. If you commit certain sins like treason, you would be ostracized. You'd be sent out of the group. It was a death sentence. Humans aren't able to survive on their own. They're weak on their own, but we're powerful as groups. So for most of our evolution history, we've paid an awful lot of attention to what people think and feel. And we want to stay on the good side of people. so creating a aura of popularity is one of the most powerful ways certainly for a business that you can change other people's behavior another thing that aberral did and this ties into uh what we want to talk about next which is pumpkin spice and scarcity is the sensory cues that are tied into it.

34:38So as an American, when you're going to Europe, they make it appear, at least in all the touristy areas, that this is what Europeans drink. Outside, in the sun, is Aberral Spritz. And so Americans go over there and they see all the orange drinks. They're like, oh, we got to partake. You know, when in Rome. And I've seen hundreds of European videos making fun of Americans and their Aberral Spritz on tour. And those sensory cues are incredibly strong, which ties into the pumpkin spice. Because, yeah, sure, we can have pumpkin spice lattes all year round, but the trees changing colors, the temperature changing outside, those noticeable changes trigger those receptors.

35:40And then all of a sudden, people start seeing signs for pumpkin patches. So automatically, it's pumpkin spice time. so everything now becomes pumpkin spice the whole psychology of what we taste in any food or drink is absolutely fascinating and a big theme is basically people taste what they expect to taste they're not completely but there are all sorts of studies that you change the description of a wine or a beer or a food and the taste ratings will change wildly exactly the same dish is taste it It tastes very different depending on what people preconceptions are. So there's a Babashiv study, serves groups of people, five different bottles of wine.