The behavioural hacks that create $Billion brands - Richard Shotton

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. Now I've got a treat for you in this episode, I've got guest number one, the very, very first person I ever interviewed on this podcast coming back, Richard Shotton. Now, Richard, as many of you know, is the author of many books. He's a behavioral science expert. He has a new book out called Hacking the Human Mind. Now, what I love about this book in particular is the fact that he starts with the brand and works back to uncover the behavioral science insights that made the brand a success. So if you wonder why Guinness became Britain's number one pint or why liquid death succeeded in the water category or why Red Bull tastes awful but somehow has become majorly successful, Richard uncovers the behavioural science tricks that those brands used and you can learn from them too.

0:53So we're catching up with Richard in this episode to find out all about them. Here it is. But congratulations on book number three. So we started out talking about obviously Choice Factory and then Illusion to Choice and here we are with book number three which is just about to hit the shelves isn't it yeah uh week tuesday it'll hit the shelves and it's slightly different from previous ones partly it's co-authored and then secondly with a brilliant guy called michael erin flicker and then secondly i flipped the book on its head slightly so with the choice factor and the illusion of choice every chapter starts with a bias the evidence of that bias the experiments i've done and then the implications this one it starts with a brand so one chapter about guinness one chapter about liquid death little potted history of the brand and then we talk about the one or two principles that they've used that have partly powered their success so it's brand first this time around gotta say you made my job really easy right because like the last two times i've been going right understand the behavioral science get my head around it and then make the jump to what does it mean for marketers this one you've done all the hard work for me i'm like oh there you go like start with start with like the thing everyone knows it's famous for and then work back to the behavioral science absolutely and it's removing that leap i get frustrated that i think behavioral science is this amazing repository this amazing catalog of insights that can help improve marketing but if you just talk about the experiments sometimes people feel it's complicated or hard to use if you start with a well-known brand using this idea i think it makes it easier for people to see how they can apply on their on their products so well i'm glad you glad you like that absolutely now um maybe it's salience that's doing this but having read your book i did feel like a pint of guinness so um anyone watching this will be able to see um i brought some guinness i thought we'd celebrate your new book yeah feel free to jump on in and then maybe we can talk a bit about Guinness.

2:52There we go. Everyone heard that, didn't they? And you mentioned in your book the famous notion that Guinness takes a long time to serve. And I was intrigued by how long does a pint of Guinness take to serve? Oh, good question. Is that what you're asking me? Yeah. Just under two minutes. There is a specific number, but I would struggle to tell you exactly the number. Well, I mean, James and I actually ended up over at the Guinness Storehouse. We recorded an episode uh this must have been about 18 months ago we actually met a guy called colin who is like like this world famous expert on how to pour a guinness he's done you know he's poured david beckham a pint he's poured rihanna a pint and honestly it's amazing what he can tell you um but i thought i would find out from google actually whether there's actually uh a precise answer to how long it actually takes um let me see if we can find out hey google i want to know how long does it take to pour the perfect pint of guinness oh there we go all right here we go the perfect pint of guinness takes precisely 119.5 seconds to pour including a two-stage process that allows the beer to settle and form its signature creamy head there you go and apparently you should pour uh to about three quarters at a 45 degree angle waiting for the surge to settle and then you top it off from there to create the perfect edge.

4:18Okay. There you go. Well, so Guinness is one of the chapters. We don't talk about precision in the chapter, but I think that argument or their discussion of being 119.5 seconds rather than roughly two minutes, they're onto something there as well. There's a brilliant study from Schindler at Rutgers University and he shows people ads for a deodorant and sometimes he says, it reduces perspiration by 50%. Sometimes he says it reduces perspiration by 47 % or 53%. Half people see 47%, half 53%. And when he asks people as to how accurate they think this claim is and how credible they think the claim is, people who see the precise number, they rate the claim 10 % more accurate, 5 % more credible than the people who saw the round number.

5:10And Schindler's argument is essentially, over time people learn that those who know what they're talking about they tend to speak specifically they tend to speak precisely those who are just you know thinking up on the hoof who are just wildly speculating they give you a round answer and this association has become so wet in people's minds it's taken on a life of its own so you say to someone it takes 119 seconds to pour a guinness and they think oh gosh that must be for a very specific reason if you say it just takes two minutes it feels like an unimportant piece of trivia so even on that little element i like what they're doing there now now i know that i know this rather personally because when you came on the podcast last time yeah for the first time rather i was really desperate for five star reviews yeah right and so i was kind of like you're messaging everybody listening oh i'd love to get a review you know because everyone who starts out wants a social proof yeah of five star reviews when i spoke to you about this i actually thought oh maybe a 4.9 is better so someone messaged me and said how much they enjoyed the episode and i said i love a review can you not give me a five-star review yeah and they went and put a four-star review i instantly regretted it after that because i dragged my average down to 4.7 i was like oh damn it you know but anyway but there's something about a non-precise number that doesn't make it so there this leads into the practical effect a bit um there is a study by northwestern university where they looked at 100 ,000-odd product reviews.

6:39And these are all quantifications, so they're all, I think, one to five. And what they find is that as the score of the product gets better, as you'd expect, purchasing becomes more likely. But then for every product, every category, they look at 25, 26 categories, there is a turning point. So it's something like between 4.2 and 4.8 for FMCG products. you start getting higher than that and you begin to see a downturn in terms of purchase. And the argument from the psychologist was perfection is too good to be true. What's more likely? There's this brand that's absolutely perfect without flaw or the marketer has been airbrushing out the negative comments.

7:26So you see five-star reviews and often people will think it's spurious. I think there is an argument that a 4.9 would be better. It's more believable. Now, where that line is, is it 4.2, is it 4.9? I think that's very category dependent. And if most podcasts are very high, you might see that that threshold is at 4.95, not 4.7. Yeah. Now, I say pratfall is my favorite behavioral science thing. I try and think of any time I do a presentation, is there a little pratfall I could bring in at the beginning of my presentation just to get the audience on my side? isn't it because people kind of like a stumble a bit of imperfection because it just make it makes you human doesn't it absolutely so you say people haven't heard this phrase before it's the idea that a product or a person that exhibits a flaw becomes more more appealing and that the classic study was 1966 this amazing harvard psychologist called elliot aronson and he gets a colleague to take part in a quiz.

8:27He gives the colleague all the answers. So this guy goes to the quiz, gets 92 % of the questions right, wins it by miles, looks like a complete genius. But then as the quiz is finishing, he makes what an American in the 60s would have called a pratfall. So what we would just call a small blunder. He spills a cup of coffee down himself. Aronson takes this recording and then he plays it to listeners. But sometimes he plays the entire incident other times he plays an edited version so people just hear the amazing quiz performance and then aronson asks all those listeners to rate the likability of the contestant and the core finding and there are nuances and there are variations but the core finding is people who hear the floor as well as the great performance they rate the contestant 45 more likable than those who just heard the amazing quiz performance so yeah it's this argument that often if you exhibit a floor you become more human you become more likable you look like less of a threat and i think that's something that yes guinness have emphasized you know they talked about good things come to those who wait they've talked about the slowness of the poor i think that more brands could use this principle because it's a very powerful one now there is a major caveats this isn't there yes huge caveat yes that you need to be competent in the first place that you can't just make a series of blunders and that you know you've got to have some competence yeah so so in that example quiz contestant gets 92 aaronson did a variation of the study new group of people and he tells the contestant to look like a dunce he looked like an idiot and he tells him to get 35 the questions right now in that scenario if listeners heard the really poor quiz performance and the spillage, they liked that person less than if they heard just the poor performance.

10:25So it seems to have this magnifying effect. I think what we can be certain of is if you've got perceived competence, Pratt Fall effect works for you. If you are perceived to be incompetent, it can make the situation worse. So if you're a brand like Guinness, you've been around since 1759, you're respected in the world of stouts and lagers, this is definitely something you can use. if you are, I don't know, let's say VW the day after there's been the emissions scandal. Maybe, you know, you don't want to be admitting flaws or extra flaws on top of that. You want to be doing it from a position of strength.

11:01Now, sticking on the drink theme as well, one of the drinks that is just like everywhere now is Aperol Spritz. And I find it curious because Aperol goes back to like the 1920s or something, doesn't it? Yes, yes. It's around 100 years old as a brand, but it seemed to have exploded in the last 10 years. And why did something that, I mean, let's be honest, it doesn't really taste very good. It's quite a challenging drink. How did they end up turning, you know, what is a very niche bitter into something that you just see everywhere? So I think what happened here is they have a little success. And, you know, I'm not 100 % sure why this happens.

11:40They have a little success. Maybe there's a bit more of a marketing spend. Maybe there's just an element of randomness that an influencer picks it up. But once they've got a little bit of success, that's when the behavioural science principle kicks in. Because that success becomes self-sustaining. And I think the reason for that is Aperol's distinctiveness. You go to a bar and you order a gin and tonic. 99 times that 100, no one knows what you're drinking once you've walked away from the bar. It's a transparent, clear liquid. Gordon's, Tanqueray, in the glass, they're all interchangeable. Aperol has a very distinctive colour.

12:19It has a very distinctive serve in those balloon glasses. You only have to have a couple of people drinking Aperol, and it looks like it's a popular choice because they are so noticeable, so distinctive. Now, that might feel like wild speculation, but there's a brilliant study by um case kaiser um at the university do you have any dutch listeners yeah yeah no very popular in holland yeah damn because i don't know how to pronounce this uh if you'd said no i'd have said okay but perfectly pronounced i think it's the university of crinningen but uh i expect some some criticism will be picked up on that but anyway 2008 he finds an alleyway in the netherlands loads of people park their bikes in this alleyway and crucially for the experiment there's no bin.

13:05So he goes down in the morning and he puts flyers for a fictitious sports shop on the handlebars of the bikes and then he wanders off a few yards and stealthily monitors what do those returning cyclists do with the flyer? There's no bin remember so they have a choice they either chuck them on the floor or like good citizens they take them home with them. Kaiser sets up the study one of two ways sometimes he has gone down very early and he has cleaned up the alleyway he's made it absolutely spotless zero litter no graffiti and in that setting 33 % of people litter other occasions he's gone down to the same alleyway does all the same things with a with a flyer on the handlebars but this time he makes the alleyway a complete tip he spray paints it with graffiti chucks loads of litter around.

13:58Now what he's doing here is he's making it look like the social norm is to litter. Now the first setup it looks like most people take their litter home. In this second setup it looks like most people litter. And when he does that there is a more than doubling of littering rates we're up to 69 % of people littering. Now this is a really powerful application of social proof. So social proof is the argument that if you tell people you're popular, you become more popular still, you become more appealing. We're deeply influenced by what others are doing. But if you tell people directly, I sell, you know, you could say I've got 100 ,000 listeners, or four could say they've got the best-selling car in the world.

14:41If you directly say it, you invite scepticism. But if people think they've come to their own conclusions, you know, frankly, who do they trust more than themselves? That's what happens in the littering study, and I think it's what's benefiting Aperol as well. They don't necessarily go out and say they're a super popular spirit, but you notice. It's so distinctive. You see this trend ballooning, blossoming in front of you. And that, I think, is something that far more brands can apply. What brands need to do is think to themselves, is the consumption of my product or the purchasing of my product visible or invisible, private or public?

15:20and if it's private and invisible, you need to think to yourself, how do I make it as public and noticeable as possible? And if you do that, you're applying one of the most powerful biases in one of the most powerful ways. I learned this actually very early in my career. So I started out at Britvig and this is probably 20 years ago now, but we launched a juice in pubs called J2O. Yeah. And if you wind back - My mother is a big purchaser. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. it's one of those actually a sight aside but it's one of those amusing ones where you are not the customer as the brand team the brand team are all kind of trendy people in their 20s and they do all this advertising to people in their 20s and then someone actually bothered to look at who consumes it under 18s and over 60s it's basically if you're driving or if you're not legal to have an alcoholic drink because basically for anyone who doesn't know it's a very British thing but it's like a juice in a beer bottle in effect however that wasn't what I was going to say the reason it links to this is quite fascinating because at the time um you know soft drinks were seen as you know they were number three on the list so you'd have like food where people make the most money alcohol would be number two soft drinks and distant number three so the objective of every bar was to serve soft drinks as efficiently as possible so you either have drafts so literally it comes from the gun or you have no more than 200 ml in a glass bottle it gets served and then the glass bottle was thrown away when j2o launched they launched in a 275 mil the bottle was very slightly too big and it caused a massive backlash from the publicans the publicans that were like well you know we're going to have to serve the we're going to get a tiny little bit of juice left after we poured it into the drink with the ice but it forced them to hand over the bottle yes yes it did what you said about aporos brits because everyone's seeing what everyone else is drinking before then you didn't know even because you wouldn't know if the bottle was 25 milliliters smaller they'd have turned around chucked it in the precisely in the bin and everyone would have thought they're just drinking all these complaints in the in the development process people going this bottle's a bit too big you know for you know from the publican's point of view but actually not giving in to what the publican wanted actually did the right thing for the brand i didn't know that i knew about magners who had done something similar where back in the what do we late 90s early 2000s most pint glasses weren't branded so you ordered a pint of cider normally and no one knew what you're drinking but magnus did the uh i don't want to say the word revolutionary because to anyone who doesn't work in marketing puts some ice in a glass it's not revolutionary but for us this revolutionary act of putting ice in the pint glass which meant when you got your 500 milliliter bottle it wouldn't there you go you know you wouldn't have enough space to pull it all away so people would take their magnus bottle away with their pint glass so that that product became distinctive noticeable and yet again you get this vicious sorry virtual circle of social proof yeah exactly lovely example yeah the win there wasn't the ice calling it the drink the win there was forcing the bottle onto the table yeah exactly yes fascinating um sticking with drinks as well one of the chapters i enjoyed a lot because i've had the founder of the podcast mike cesario was liquid death yeah i mean i'd love to talk about liquid death because a lot of people don't understand why it works because in theory the dumbest thing you could do is take a take take a water brand and literally call it the antithesis of why you drink water literally liquid death and then you put it in a can it's not in a bottle it's priced at four or five times the price of a bottle of water it it doesn't make any sense what behavioral science can help unpick why liquid death has been and splitting our body there but there are quite a few different elements there but i think the one that is most striking about what they did would be the von restorf effect so this is the idea that stretches back to 1933 that we notice what's distinctive so the original study was done by this brilliant german psychologist called hedwig von restorf who's at the university of berlin and a super simple study reads out lists of words and twisting it slightly but is basically 10 items, 9 animals, say, and 1 bit of furniture.

19:34So you go cat, dog, table, elephant, giraffe, so on and so forth. She reads these lists out, and then she asks people what they can remember. And again and again and again, it is the distinctive item that really stings in people's minds. If you give people a long list of animals with 1 bit of furniture, it'll be the furniture they remember, or vice versa. If you gave them a long list of furniture with 1 animal in they'd remember the animal. So that became known as the von Restorff effect or the isolation effect and it is one of the most well-proven long-standing ways of capturing attention. Now what I think Liquid Death did so brilliantly is they thought to themselves well what are all the different category conventions in the water market and then they thought well which ones do we'd have to adhere to maybe there's a very good reason we'll leave those well alone and then which ones are there just for convention's sake and it was those unnecessary conventions that everyone else was adopting that's what they smashed to smithereens you know every other brand had pictures of you know alpine scenes um idyllic bucolic nature you know they they have um you know cartoon characters chopping each other's heads off you know it was the complete antithesis of what the category stood for.

20:53And for a small brand with minimal marketing spend, that supercharged their impact. You know, you're getting over the first hurdle of advertising. If you behave distinctively, you are much, much more likely to be noticed. Yeah. Now, every now and then, you see a big brand try and pretend to be liquid death, right? So often brands will do some big stunt and then they'll get caught out. But there's something about the consistency with which they do it, which is critical here, isn't it so anyone listening thinking i'm going to do something crazy on my traditional laundry detergent brand that's dated back 100 years you know think before you go crazy yeah absolutely so you've got this first principle of unrest effect the second one and this might be another opportunity for me to butcher a pronunciation there's an idea called the mere exposure effect so mere as in m e r e not n e a r and it's essentially the idea that familiarity breeds contentment not contempt so the original study was Robert Zionch I think that's how you say it back in the 1950s, 1960s University of Michigan and he gets Americans who only speak English that's a kind of key thing and he shows them words from Turkish and he gives them this big book and essentially open a page and there'll be a word you'll flick a page and there's another word you flick the page and there's another word they then get to the end and all the words are listed out and people have to guess what those words mean.

22:24Now the twist in the experiment was some of the words were shown once, some twice, some three, some four, some up to 15 or 20 times. And what Zion shows is that the positivity that people give the words, it increases with repetition. So if you saw the word once, you might give it a neutral meaning. If you saw a different word 10 times, you're more likely to give it a positive one. Now what's interesting here is think about that experiment. It's flicking through a book. It's being exposed to the words. There's no information being given with extra frequency. It's just repetition. That's why he calls it the mere exposure effect.

23:06And it's this idea that the more we see something, the warmer we become to it. Now you could argue about what reason underlies this. I would be tempted to take an evolutionary one that for most of our evolutionary history if you've seen or been exposed to a stimuli and it hasn't killed you then you know it's safe then you you warm to it then you're you're you're drawn towards it i think there's something in that evolutionary explanation but regardless of the underlying explanation it's definitely something marketers could apply now you've got to be very very careful about cutting and changing creative style cutting and changing direction because what the mere exposure effect suggests is if you've built up this heritage, this warmth to a character or a visual style, even if you're changing something that is objectively better, it will probably perform worse because it isn't benefiting from that mere exposure effect.

24:02So stick to things unless there is a very good reason to change. Got some amazing data on this, actually. So in System 1, we did a collaboration with the EFES data. So we took the EFES Worldwide Database, hundreds of thousands of data points in there. System 1 database, which is measuring emotion to predict outcomes. We crashed them together to work out, you know, how does a System 1 emotional measure link to the business results seen by the brands that won Effie's? And there were some expected insights, right? So, for example, expected insight is that if you use emotion, that does better than rational persuasion, right?

24:38So that, you know, kind of thing, that's great. If you are highly branded, you know, you did better. And ideally, if you used emotion and good branding, you do better than the ones that are forgettable and not branded. The real interesting insight that proves exactly your point is then when you extrapolate those over years, the gap between the well-branded strong emotion campaigns versus the dull not-branded campaigns, the gap just got wider and wider and wider. So there's this incredible compounding effect of the consistent execution of campaigns. So the longer you ran a campaign that works, key point, if it didn't work, it stayed not working.

25:13If it did work, the longer you ran the campaign for, the gap between the non-working and the working just got bigger and bigger. And we only looked at it over three years. I'd guess that probably continues and gets even bigger after 5. So what I like about the combination of those two things is you've got the academic experiment where they keep all things equal and they kind of prove a point. and then you've got the real world kind of replication of that with ads and a data set but I think it's the two coming together that's powerful because previously when I've heard people say oh um ads that run a long time tend to perform better I originally was quite skeptical about that because I thought well this is just survivorship bias if an ad's bloody awful people will stop running it of course things that have run for 50 years are going to be amazing because they've had so many chances of being killed.

26:03But I think you put the two things together and the only plausible explanation is some of the strength, some of the success is consistency. Some of it is repetition. Yeah, in the mere exposure effect, exactly. Yeah. And it's one that, you know, you think all these biases, I think it's one that most marketers rail against. Because if there is a characteristic to marketers, it's generally that, you know, we're interested in novelty, we're excited by different things so it's a finding that probably runs counter to most of our characters so we've really got to think try doubly hard to appreciate the the experiment and try and apply it more i did a couple of posts actually on consistency and impacts and in fact what someone commented and said why do i think that is and the list goes on forever i mean i started thinking about it i think you know incentives uh financial incentives of agencies to make new work annual planning cycles the very fact that every year we rewrite a plan again yeah we take you know the the turnover of marketeers the fact that you know that probably last most junior marketers are in role 18 months two years you know the desire to prove yourself and make something and personal motivation winning awards the entire entire awards like there's no award for running the same campaign twice yes yeah so but everything is set up to encourage change to encourage you to change it rather than actually rerun the same thing.

27:26I imagine you're at a job interviewer and someone says, so what did you do? They said, well, I took over the KitKat advertising and I kept it exactly the same. They'd be like, oh my God, get rid of this man and get someone else in. Whereas, you know, that's irrelevant. What you should be thinking about is, well, was that the right decision to maximise profit in that situation? Yeah, I think there are an awful lot of personal and industry incentives to ignore this principle. Exactly. Now, sticking to the drink theme, The drink theme was very fruitful. You'll have to say there's some really good drink examples.

27:57One of the brands, certainly when I started my career in soft drinks, was a phenomenon, was Red Bull. And again, Red Bull is another one that does not make any sense because it's ridiculously expensive. At the time, it was in a small can. It was like half the size of a normal syrup. It broke the number one rule of a drink, which is you must taste good. I mean, I've got so much research that says you only sell if you taste good. It has a very tight correlation between the better it tastes and the more it sells. They absolutely broke that. And the only brand I've come across that fundamentally breaks Byron Sharp's double jeopardy law in that they've got a lot of very loyal buyers.

28:35You know, everything else is a distribution curve. What's it called? A reverse binomial. I can't remember. A reverse binomial. Whatever. It's like a ski slope downhill. So you've got a very few buyers that drink a lot. That's a far better description than a reverse binomial. I now know what you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. Let's impress, but I understand. like a reverse ski jump um the reverse ski jump curve we'll rebrand it there you go barry you have that on for free um but you know but basically very few number of buyers drink a lot and a lot of buyers drink a little and that's the only brand i've seen where actually most consumption is from heavy buyers and it really bucks the trend red bull is very interesting because it does do a lot of things that go against convention yes so i think i first heard rory sutherland talking about this uh i think he was a british brands lecture and it's I might actually try and re-download it because it was a brilliant speech.

29:26And it was available online for completely free. And what he talks about is you go back to that era when Red Bull launched. And most soft drinks came in 330ml squat cans. What Red Bull did is shrink the serving, so it was 250ml. And it was in that tall, thin can. Now, why that's so important is most people, when they think about what is a fair price to pay, think about that question relatively, not absolutely. So what I mean by that is rather than, let's say with this Guinness, me thinking how much happiness am I going to get and then having my own kind of internal willingness to pay per unit of happiness, people don't think of questions like that in that absolute sense because they're ludicrously complex.

30:17What people do instead is think, okay well how much would i pay for a carling or a fosters and then if i like guinness more i'll just adjust up a bit or i'll adjust down a bit so we have this mental comparison set that we have for every product that we allow to shape our willingness to pay now go back to well firstly let's let's kind of prove that i did i've done this five or six times um the one that i can remember the data on was probably about seven or eight years ago i showed people a box of pg tips and I said I'll make the costs up let's say it's two pounds for a 250 grand box and next to it was a one pound box of Tesco same size and I said to people how good value is the PG tips and 31 % of people say it's good value new group of people get rid of the Tesco leave the PG tips there and then put a box of twinings next to it for say three pound 50 ask the people again how good value this is a new group people ask them how good value the pg tips is and the number jumps to 65 so you've got a more than doubling now that simple experiment is interesting because what it shows is it's not just the inherent quality of pg tips that is driving valuation because if it was the numbers would be roughly the same what people are doing is just latching onto a benchmark, and that is influencing their thoughts.

31:44So if they see something very expensive next to the PG tips, it looks good value. If they see something very cheap, it looks bad value. So there's definite experimental proof into this idea of price relativity. But now you think about Red Bull, going back to the can design. If they had sold their products in 330ml cans, it would never have taken off, because you would have compared the, I don't know,£1.50 that Red Bull charged with 50 pence for Coke. And people would have thought, well, that's three times the price. That's a pound more. That's ridiculous. I could get three Cokes. I'm not going to buy that.

32:18But by putting into this completely different style of can, you broke the comparison with Coke. Now Red Bull is its own special kind of universe of product. And you allow this free-foting of value to occur. so I think one of the biggest things Red Bull did was in that serving style and that the lesson for advertisers is if you want people to pay a lot of money for your product you've got to think to yourself how do I change the mental comparison set and there are dozens upon dozens of examples of brands far beyond Red Bull that have done that but don't just think I will get people to pay more if I give them more benefits you've got to think I'll get them to pay more if I can change the mental comparison set.

33:04Yeah, love that. One of the best repositionings I think I've ever seen in my career was a few years after Red Bull launched that a competitor, it was actually a kind of a skunk works from Coke actually called Relentless. Okay. I don't know if you remember this because they ended up getting taken over by a monster. on the casting? It was like a, it was a bit, actually it was a bit like Liquid Death. It was very kind of, it looks like a tattoo. It's kind of very heavy metal kind of thing. Anyway, it was a little kind of team, a Coke, a team of Coke employees who were given freedom him to invent a brand and basically take on red bull yeah and they decided it was inspired by monster in the us so it was a 500 mil can yeah it went the opposite way right so what they did is like three you're right 330 mil cans are the default red bull had gone smaller they went 500 mil which was that because everyone thought you wouldn't have a can that big because you can't drink 500 million one go but they exaggerated value and the positioning on it was no half measures which suddenly made Red Bull appear.

33:59So they repositioned Red Bull. They took Red Bull's advantage and actually flipped it on his head and made them look as if they were really stingy. Interesting, interesting. And then I think in the end what happens to that one is Coke did a deal with Monster globally and then they changed Relentless for Monster, which is basically the same model. Ah, okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, it connects you to what I actually, one of the questions that I thought about after reading your book was the labor illusion because obviously one of the things you've taught me about very well is signalling effort, right?

34:28So, you know, I've spent 10 ,500 hours, and actually signalling effort has an effect. But AI is the opposite. AI is signalling laziness, right? Absolutely. So how does that play out? So chapter that I probably enjoyed writing most with Michael Aaron was the Dyson chapter. And one of the reasons I really liked it, ironically, was laziness. So I probably shouldn't tell this story. we did quite a lot of research on all the the brands and often you would read you know days of information get nothing interesting dyson was the complete opposite got the um autobiography of james dyson opened the first page and the very first line says i went through 5 127 prototypes before i came up with the bagless vacuum and that was like okay this is brilliant that is a behavioural science masterpiece in itself because what he's doing exactly as you say is he is describing the amount of effort that it took to get to that bagless vacuum now a logician if that's a thing would say that's irrelevant what you should care about is the quality how well the vacuum sucks dirt up how beautiful it looks you know this effort story is irrelevant but behavioural scientists would say well it doesn't matter what we ought to do behavioural scientists are just interest in what actually influences us and these stories of effort have been proven to make exactly the same product feel higher quality so the classic study is by andrea morales who's at the university of southern california really simple study she recruits a group of people who are in market for a house and she shows them 10 houses that meet their requirements and some people are told the estate agent took one hour to generate the list and they used a computer the other half of people are told the estate agent took nine hours and they did it manually now everyone receives exactly the same list of houses they have the same service from the real estate agent but when Morales asks those people to rate the quality of service from the estate agent you get this very different pattern on a score of zero to 100 the low effort group rate the estate agent at 50 the high effort group rate the estate agent at 68 so you get this 36 swing in quality now the argument from morale is is judging the quality of a product is a complex question and she argues like daniel karn before her the when we are faced with complex questions what we often do is replace them with simpler ones that give them an almost as good answer.

37:15So the complex question is, how good is this thing? We can't be bothered to engage with that. So we turn to the simple question, which is how much effort do I think the brand or the service provider went to? So we use effort as a proxy for quality. So what Dyson is doing brilliantly, you talk about this story of prototypes and years of labor and you imbue this bagless vacuum with a lot more uh quality and prestige i think i i loved the dyson example talking about design yeah there's a brilliant uh almost opposite extreme of this paula share i think she's designing a logo for a bank or something isn't she it's the merger of travelers and city bank yeah and she comes up with the design on a post-it note in about five seconds flat legend has it a napkin so the legend is she is being briefed uh her agency pentagram and they have been paid 1.5 million dollars to come up with a logo for this newly merged financial behemoth in the very meeting she's getting the brief she is sketching out you can find pictures of it online maybe stick at the show notes uh she sketches out the now famous umbrella logo now when months later they present back this work to to city bank city group wherever it is now you know and they give them pentagram give this 1.5 million dollar bill legend has it that the you know clients are gas like how in all good faith can you charge us 1.5 million for something we saw you sketch out in the in the briefing meeting and her supposed response was yes it took me 30 seconds but it took me 34 years to learn how to do it in 30 seconds so to me that is an example of the labour illusion the client wasn't responding on is this the right imagery for our bank will it help what they were responding on is it is unfair for you to ask for this much money for this short amount of work and what Pella Cher did so brilliantly was through a sleight of hand she moved attention not from the speed of delivery but to the amount of time it took to get into the position to deliver that work and I think you're right about AI in this area totally that people think and there are experiments by Kobe Millett that back this up this isn't just my supposition if you label a product as AI generated it'll be rated as lower quality than if you say it's hand-drawn so the the thing that Millett did was on a poster.

39:48So what I think you need to do is if you are introducing speeded up services powered by AI, you need, like Paula Shair did, to emphasize the experience, the number of people, the amount of time you've taken to set up the protocols and processes to get this system in place. Maybe listeners can help me out on this one, but I think there's a very similar story, of a very famous ad. Isn't there a very famous ad agency founder who maybe it's in Cannes. The client asks him for an idea, comes up with it instantly and the client, same thing. I hope you're not going to charge me for that. He said, it took me 27 years to come up with this idea.

40:28Do you know who that is? I haven't heard that. I've heard a story of an engineer as well, a giant manufacturer. Maybe there's lots of versions of this story. Digging, it seems like the Paula Sher one sounds true and you know from from the digging that i've done but this is something i've heard attributed in multiple places and therefore for me i think of often that type of story that's not a peer-reviewed experiment the paul ish story it's a parable that makes it easier to understand the idea and i think we can learn as much from those types of parables uh as from you know strict historical truths i want to move us on to chocolate and snickers um which is a lovely yeah a lovely one and they're now iconic you're not you when you're hungry campaign and that's that's a really good example because i think snickers have become i believe the number one chocolate line in the us yes but it wasn't always the case and they hit i think they might be and these things obviously fluctuate but there is certainly a stage when they were the number one chocolate bar in the world yeah and there's something about the um so what is it about that particular strap line yeah that works there's there's two elements here so the first is the use of a cue or a trigger so psychologists have this phrase the intention to action gap and it's the argument that if you create desire for a product it doesn't necessarily translate into action you know you can increase interest or perceive taste and it might not translate into people buying something the argument for people like Sarah Milne at the University of Bath is that motivation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for change what you need to do is yes build that motivation but combine it with a very clear cure trigger so this is a time a place or a mood that people associate with your products now Snickers you're not you and you're hungry does a brilliant job of associating consumption with a very clear trigger moment.

42:32You know, that feeling of confusion that comes from hunger, that feeling of grumpiness. And it's not talking about how amazing the product tastes. It's associating it brilliantly with a very clearly defined moment. And I think that is something that far more brands could do. Now, it's not like you never see brands doing it. Have a break, have a Kit Kat, Taco Tuesdays, Meat Free Mondays. You know, brands do it, but I think it could be applied far more regularly. Too many marketers focus on motivation, not enough on that trigger. Another really, really simple lesson, actually, I think, that comes from Snickers that every marketer could learn from is the use of humour.

43:10Absolutely. And this is, I mean, there's so much data on this, but the amount of advertising that uses humour has been going down and down and down and down. Equally, I mean, bringing some system one data, we've looked at not only the role of happiness, but we've broken happiness into its constituent parts. actually funnily enough um there are 15 different types of happenings measured you know what the number one is oh no idea number one schadenfreude okay is this british yeah number two number two is amusement right yeah so the second most effective well they're both humor in a way they're both obviously humor at someone else's you know um unfortunate yeah circumstances but humor despite humor being very effective as a communication tool it's used less and less I think that is an absolute tragedy Firstly there are so many studies into the effect of humour that academics are being able to run meta-analyses and a meta-analysis is rather than just taking one paper and extrapolating that out you look at 50 or 60 or 100 papers and you see what the themes are and Martin Eisen's done this amazing overview of dozens and dozens of papers and shown that humour consistently in advertising has positive effects.

44:27There's also studies that I've done which show if you reach people in a good mood, they're more likely to believe your claims, they're more likely to like your advertising, they're less likely to be price sensitive. So you've got this huge body of work that suggests that humour would be effective, but at the same time we've got this big downturn. I think if we were doing this podcast in the 1990s, making a statement that making your brand likeable and amusing, people would roll their eyes and think it's a statement of the bleeding obvious. Somehow we've forgotten some of the well-proven lessons of the past because I think of our infatuation with the latest new thing, whether it's purpose or data.