Top 10 marketing and behavioural science insights with Nudge host, Phill Agnew

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, hopefully you enjoy listening to this podcast, but if you were to listen to another marketing podcast, then maybe I'd recommend Nudge by Phil Agnew. Now, the reason for that is Phil is a master of behavioural science and in particular, applying behavioural science techniques to marketing to help you deliver better results. And I thought it'd be a lot of fun to get Phil on this podcast to ask him what are the top five things he's learnt about behavioural science that you can use in your marketing. And in return, I thought I'd have a think through all the episodes that I've done, all the experts that I've met, and try and pull out the five most important things I've learned as well.

0:45This episode was a lot of fun, and I know you're going to enjoy it. So, Phil, welcome to the show. Thank you, John. I should say, welcome to each other's shows. Yes, correct. Shouldn't I, actually? Because I'll probably put this on my show as well. That'll be fun. We'll get a bit more listeners to it, which will be nice. Why not? Yeah, no, I think that was a very nice welcome. but I feel the same about you. I love your show. I'm really excited to be on here. Yeah, it's good. I've been looking forward to this a lot, actually. And we're going to talk about the biggest nudges that you've discovered as a course of your show.

1:16And I'll try and bring the biggest marketing theories to the table as well. So it'd be quite exciting. But just to introduce you, if anyone's not listened, how did you get into podcasting and why? Yeah. So I did, like most idiots, I decided to study marketing at university. One of the worst decisions that I've made. I spent£50 ,000 is what I spent on that degree. And it was kind of hilarious because I spent, I did that. I did that for four years, went into my first marketing job, was given the most basic tasks, write a blog, write an email subject line, found myself absolutely inept at that task and was unable to do it at a successful point.

1:55None of the theory you'd studied was like, they didn't tell me how to do this. Turns out four Ps doesn't actually help you in any tactical marketing role. And I basically had this period of my marketing life, maybe two, three years, where I just had no idea what I was doing. I felt quite frustrated because in most other degrees, what you study are these laws and these principles that then you hold and you apply throughout your career. And the opposite felt true in marketing. I felt like I'd studied very vague strategy that I'd instantly forgotten and then had no application throughout my career.

2:25And eventually, after about three years, I discovered the world of behavioural science, psychology and consumer psychology and realized that these things I wanted these principles these laws I could apply to my work did exist but in this totally different field of psychology and since then I've sort of spent every bit of moments every moment I could in my marketing career learning about this field and then in 2019 decided I want to learn even more so did the cliche thing of thinking I'll just start a podcast on it so I can interview people about it and so interview experts in the behavioral science space, marketing pioneers who apply this stuff and have been doing that show for about four years, applying a lot of this stuff myself as well, which has helped the show grow to one of the leading marketing podcasts in the UK.

3:10I mean, one of the leading is maybe an understatement actually, because you've exceeded 1 million downloads, I believe, haven't you? Yeah, that's right. We're on for a million this year, actually, which is quite exciting. Million in one year. Yeah. I don't know if we'll get there if we conclude YouTube, but yeah, I don't know if quite get there but almost there. That's very impressive. What's the highest ranking you've achieved in business as well because you sort of mix it with some pretty well-known figures don't you? Yeah I've been up in the top 10 quite a few times. It's an interesting metric because a lot of it is based on the acceleration of growth so you can get above you know big names Tim Ferriss you know a lot of the others in the space they're a lot bigger than me but if you have this acceleration of growth you can sort of shoot up there so I've got in the top 10 before.

3:51And I was saying to you before as well very impressed with the way you shared that news as well because you you did a video scroll didn't you showing you know here's Stephen Bartlett oh look there I am just below so you're keeping some very good company well that is that is a pure nudge there that is a psychological hack because there's this principle known as the halo effect which you'll know John which is when you're in the sort of company of others you can benefit from just being in that company it's actually comes from a study which I didn't believe it was a study done with luxury retailers and they looked at if you set up a shop a new luxury shop with an unknown brand but you placed it next to other luxury retailers like Gucci and Chanel that shop will do better when you're next to those stores simply from the halo effect simply being near other luxury stores will make your shop perform better and this study I think it was done in the labs it wasn't in real world but they predicted huge increases of revenue and I just thought this has to be BS like there's nothing different about this store why should more people go to it just because it's next to a Gucci so I thought I'd test it and I ran this test on Google survey it went out to about 100 ,000 people and all of the people were asked would you listen to this podcast both showed an image of my logo half though were shown just the image on its own of my logo podcast logo the others half saw my logo but dimly in the background there was the logos of very other popular shows so diary of a CEO, off-menu, Desert Island Discs.

5:19And I wanted to see if just merely being in the presence of those others made my show more likely, people more likely to listen. And it 3X'd the amount of people that would listen. So the control was about 6.4 % said, yeah, I'll try to show. With the variant, which had the halo effect, 15.8%, I think, said they would listen. So when you tell people that you're a top show, picture the other shows you're around, because that will make it even more impactful. That's amazing. That's amazing. and and look you know again it's it's referencing a much bigger category in business as well isn't it so you know reaching more people much broader audience as well than than i say just marketing obviously you know we're here to do a marketing podcast but it also means you probably draw in a bigger audience don't you because more people see it than would have seen it before exactly that's exactly it exactly yeah well congratulations on that that's um very very impressive and long may it continue um let's get into the top five nudges so what we thought we'd do just for fun listeners and viewers.

6:13I've come up with five lessons I've learned since doing this podcast. Phil's come up with five of the most powerful nudges to transform business. And we're going to do a bit of nudge marketing tennis between us and see how we get on. So give us your number five. Why did you pick it? And what is it? And what can we learn from it? The first one I wanted to talk about is a very powerful one that I've used a lot in my shows. I think you'd probably use it as well. It's known as the labour illusion. And this is the idea that if we see the effort that has gone into creating something, we will value it more highly.

6:44And the most, I think, famous person who applied this was Steve Jobs. Whenever he started a keynote presentation at Apple, he would start by saying, we've been working on this feature for years. We've built something which will revolutionize the industry. There was one where I think he came back to Apple as the CEO and he said, if you'd been around the car parks of the Apple offices in the weekend, you would have seen they were full of people. Really making the point consistently across multiple keynotes to emphasize the work that went into something he knew what he was doing because there's a lot of evidence that backs this up so there's a start study by someone called moreles who essentially showed participants um lists these participants were people who were looking to buy a house and he showed them lists of these these houses um the lists were identical but some people were told oh the real estate agent has spent all night preparing this list of houses for you do you think there's any house on here that suits your needs whereas the others were told the real estate agent used a computer to generate this list in 30 minutes is there any that you think you'd need turns out unsurprisingly of course but something that's important for us to know the one that people thought took more effort was valued much higher so people are far more likely to say oh my god i love this house in the list that the real estate agent spent a long time preparing and so you can apply this to marketing you can apply this to podcasts one of the best ways i applied this was in a reddit ad and i did two ads identical ads links to my show one said learn the six best things i've heard from marketers this year the other said i've spent 480 minutes listening to marketing experts this year here's what i learned lo and behold the one that suggested that i had spent 480 minutes that was true by the way yeah that one performed far better i think it was 2x the number of clicks so this labor illusion yeah yeah i love that i love that a lot um in In fact, I've listened to Stephen Bartlett talk about how he made his podcast successful.

8:34I don't know whether I entirely believe what he says, but the amount of work he claims goes into it. I mean, for example, he talks about the team have 120 KPIs. And I'm like, really? Now, I don't know whether it's an exaggeration or not, but I mean, it just signals the amount of effort and work and quality control that goes into making the show. And like you say, that just means, well, it must be good. I mean, if they care that much about 120 things, surely it's good. And you should apply this in lots of ways. So you're applying this right now with this beautiful studio setup that's showcasing to people.

9:06And it really is, to everyone watching or listening, this is very impressive. You put a lot of effort into this. People can see that. They'll value it more. And there's other ways you can do it. If you go on a brewery tour, studies have shown that if you go on a brewery tour at Guinness, you will value the beer that you'll serve at the end much higher because you've seen the effort that goes into it. Any company should be showcasing the work they're doing, showcasing the effort they put in, showcasing the money invested. all of that will make them value the product more very good well i might use your beer analogy to pivot to my number five right so here we go here's here's a here's a little pivot so um in a number five um it might be surprising but the power of getting fired yeah so in fact i was at an event last night and i was talking about the backgrounds the podcast and how i set it up and the fact that actually the only reason i set the podcast up actually because i i got fired from my job at Brewdog and I found myself freelancing.

9:57And one of the questions that people kept asking me, I was working for a number of different agencies helping on business development. And they all asked me the same thing. They said, John, can you introduce me to your CMO mates? I'm like, well, funnily enough, I don't have a long list of CMO mates that I, you know, hang out on Friday afternoon with kind of thing. It's not how it works. I'm usually pretty busy, you know, doing the job sort of thing. And I thought, well, actually setting up a podcast would be a pretty cool thing to do because a bit like you in terms of what you're doing with behavioural science is it allows me to meet the right kind of people and find out from them, learn from them and make some content they might kind of like.

10:31And it's a great networking tool. So anyway, so I was at this networking thing last night and said, you know, I told the story about how I got fired from Brewdog and how that's actually why I ended up being a kind of podcaster. And anyway, someone answered me and said, congratulations on getting fired. Oh, geez, thank you. You know, but anyway, but reflecting more seriously on it, actually, And being fired or failing is something that people find hard to talk about. And, you know, it's funny. It's a bit of an English thing as well, I think. You know, we couldn't possibly mention the things that have gone wrong.

11:04But actually, in my experience, you learn so much when things go wrong, don't you? And I think it's something that we can all benefit from because, you know, when things go wrong, that's when you learn and that's when you can improve. And any biography I've read of a really successful person, like half the book will be about all the startups that failed and how they went again and all this kind of thing. So the first thing I thought in terms of getting fired is see it as an opportunity to learn and see it as fuel. Because the other thing that happened to me as well, in fact, I got fired twice.

11:33So my claim to fame is in one year I got fired twice. You know, so I'm thinking of inventing the fired twice club just to kind of, you know, hey, you haven't tried. if you haven't been fired more than once, you're not trying hard enough sort of thing. But the second thing I learned about being fired was actually there's a lot of people out there that are very generous with their time. So when I suddenly found myself unemployed, the amount of businesses that were keen to give me a job or consult or whatever was amazing. But I did this thing where I basically had a 100-day plan to meet 100 people in 100 days.

12:05And I thought, I think I started with about 30. And the idea was every time I met someone, I'd go, introduce me to someone that you think might be quite useful for what I'm trying to do. And what I discovered is the generosity of the network. When you're out on your own and you're trying to find a job, people will be so generous. But when you're in a corporate role, in all the muck and bullets of the job, you forget that people are more likely to try and sort of, you know, criticise you or make you fail, but actually out there in the real world, particularly with start-ups. I found with start-ups and scale-ups and VCs, everyone wants you to succeed.

12:39And it was a really powerful thing. So that was my next learning. And then my next learning after being fired, something I felt very profoundly is it's more important who you work with than what you do. Because I think actually we like to talk about purpose and, you know, working for the right type of company, that kind of thing. But actually, it's the people that you are working with that determine your success, I think, more than what you exactly do. Do they inspire you? Do they have you back? You know, have you got the right kind of team? Are you all going in the same direction? And so I kind of reflected that actually I wish if I did my career again, I thought much more about the people I was working with and whether our values were aligned and whether we were kind of had the same vision than necessarily the brand above the door, which can be quite easy to go for.

13:25I think that's I've got a theory actually John about you I've got a theory that the way how open you are about that period of your life directly correlates to your success now and I think it's a really important thing actually it's one of the things I wanted to talk about anyway so it's a nice link to one of my nudges because you being so open about the fact that you were fired from Brewdog I think only benefits you yeah which is irrational because most people would think I should not tell people I've been fired because they will associate me with being poor at my job and why would they listen to my podcast if I'm poor at my job but the opposite is true there's something called the pratfall effect which I'm sure you'll know I love that the fact that is that if I had to pick a favorite I'm owning this by the way ladies and gentlemen well rightly so because it works so the pratfall effect is this idea for those of for those listening who don't know that if you showcase your flaws you you flaunt your flaws you're actually appear you appear to be more likable not only more likable potentially even more charismatic more intelligent all these amazing things and that comes from revealing a weakness there's a great study by joe sylvester from cardiff university and she um she got people to apply to a bunch of different jobs sending in cvs and then going through the interview rounds but the research assistants who are applying for these jobs would do one of two things half of them would only share strengths during the interview process they would make sure that their education their their experience was identical to try and keep it as identical as possible but some would only show strength like the opposite of what you're doing but some would show their weaknesses as well so like you're doing being really frank and transparent and she found conversely which we wouldn't expect the people who showed their weaknesses were more likely to get the job that shouldn't happen why should that shouldn't happen at all because by showing a weakness you you are revealing a flaw but it does work and it makes you more like i think it's believability so The one thing I hate in interviews, I'm interviewing somebody and I go, give me an example of a weakness.

15:22And they'll say something like, I'm a perfectionist. Yeah. You know what I mean? And I just go, come on. Like that's a strength, right? So that's not really a weakness. But it's also, I think the importance of it is that it's how well you know yourself. And if you know yourself and you know your weaknesses, you can compensate for them. And the people that I found most difficult to work with are those that don't recognize the things they're not good at. because we're not perfect, are we? It's interesting, actually, I've probably told the story a bit too much already, but I was in Tel Aviv a few years ago and I met the founder of the biggest venture capital company in Tel Aviv, in Israel, I think.

16:00And he was just amazing to listen to. But when he vetted potential people to invest in, he says, and I'm paraphrasing, not necessarily quite right, but the essence of what he said is, if you haven't failed, I won't invest in you. And the reason he said is he said that it's so important that I want people that can deal with failure because it's going to happen. Right. And anyone who's failed and picked themselves up and learned and rebuilt, that's the kind of character I want. If you've been lucky enough never to have any challenges, you're probably not going to be well equipped for when it does happen.

16:33And I thought, man, but it's interesting. He did say he struggles when he goes to the UK because at a dinner party, he'll, you know, happily chat about, oh yeah, this business went under and we, you know, we face this and people look at him a bit like, you did what? Why would you say that? You know, so as it goes, it is a cultural thing, but well, it also makes you memorable as well. That's the other thing. Hence the girl last night who said, oh yeah, congratulations on being fired. So it, it, it creates a story that people can. it makes you memorable and it makes it gives people a reason to engage with you and i think it's one of the strengths of your podcast is that's people remember you and they think oh i have to listen to that i would love to know that guy that got fired yeah i ran it i mean you're going to hear me say this way too often on this show but i did run a test on the practical effect which i think showcased this again reddit ads reddit it's really easy to test with and quite cheap which is what i like but i did two ads and they were so simple one said five reasons why you should listen to nudge and then some reasons you know i've interviewed rory sutherland it's all these different things it's a bunch of rubbish really and then the other said five reasons why you shouldn't listen to nudge just telling people not to listen the five reasons were a bit tongue in cheek like um you'll get so much knowledge about marketing you'll piss off your colleagues or something like that but they were still i was still actively telling people don't listen to this show so trying to really focus on a flaw a weakness and you'll have guessed the answer that version where i said people don't listen to the show was far more popular now why is that why did more people click on that it's because it it it goes against your expectations it's far more memorable it's far more eye-catching it's different from what people usually hear because like you say in britain people hide hide their flaws rather than flaunting them and it captures attention and made that ad far more popular so this is a long-winded way of saying embracing your flaws is a definite way to help your podcast and linked to that isn't there also um is it the mean tweets idea that richard also got that if you can do a negative review by somebody that your audience don't associate with it it can all is almost a kind of reverse psychology so if you're a guardian reader and the daily mail gave it a one star actually you'd promote the one star review in the guardian from what the mail said and if you go to the mail you go oh rated one star by the guardian sort of thing and it's it's the kind of you know yeah very another another kind of similar away have you seen that same kind of nudge it's the classic snowbird ski resort ad and they're they're a very technical ski resort with some really steep slopes i don't ski but apparently that's that's what it's like and they did a full page ad in a magazine which read one star too technical couldn't ski it and they just put that out and that ad i think the impressions they must have got from that because the amount it's been shared online is unbelievable in the millions for probably a 500 ad spend and it's it's a great example that's really clever i really really like But so should we move on to your number four?

19:22Yeah, well, I did Prattful. Oh, Prattful is number four. I'm giving that as well. So I'm happy for you to go next. Are you bouncing back? Okay, cool. All right. So number four lesson, I think, for the last three or four years, the power of purpose and backing yourself. If I look at where I get the most energy doing this podcast from, it's been talking to startup founders. And the thing that startup founders have is this such clear idea of what they want to do in the world. and it's just so inspiring um whether it's like tony's chocolate lonely wanting to you know position themselves as slave free chocolate i'm like that's freaking genius i didn't know slavery was involved in chocolate production some say you know and then suddenly you reposition the entire category around well is your chocolate stay free in fact i've been to trade shows where the tony's reps are going around all the other chocolates go oh quick interview are you slave free as if they were kind of reporting for the news or something i'm like whoa what a way to disrupt the kind of whole market um or i had luke from lucky saint on recently and um he got very obsessed about creating the alcohol-free beer category because he'd traveled around europe and discovered that in most markets up to 10 percent of beer sales are non-alcoholic and it's just perfectly normal and acceptable and the quality of beer is the same you know whereas here i think it was half a percent and they were always like this is might there might be some behavioral science in this because um they were like the 0 version of full alcohol beers and so you had this compact side by side comparison where you could go oh yeah it's peroni but without the alcohol so it looks a bit less whereas he wanted to create a dedicated brand that only did alcohol free firstly because well back to your effort point so much effort went into finding the perfect alcohol free and that's all you do so it becomes you know becomes bit but there's no reference you can't have lucky saint full alcohol um but but what i loved about that as another example is just the the clarity of purpose that founders have i really admire and i think as i reflected on the kind of three or four years doing this that's what i want i want i want to you know any brand that you manage or you as a person how clear are you about the difference you want to make in the world and probably my one of my favorite guests actually has been Niels Leonard from Uncommon.

21:33Although he does say that his wife told him off because he was talking about purpose one day and his wife said, firemen have purpose, you sell cheese. Which is a bit of a comedown. But you look at what he and the team at Uncommon have done amazingly is they've left the WPP kind of super network of agencies, created an independent agency and been phenomenally successful. And they're really passionate about wanting to work with brands that want to see a change in the world and it's really clear and you feel that and so anyway so i thought for me looking back i think the power of your purpose i mean not necessarily social purpose and all have to save the planet but the power of your own purpose and then backing yourself because only i admire anyone who jumps from the kind of safety of a corporate role into you know into a startup and backs themselves i think that's just incredibly inspiring yeah it's a really good point i think the interesting thing with purpose probably is because you've got two camps.

22:30You've got people that really do purpose. Like, we were founded to solve this problem, right? And then you've got people that will make up some statistic, like 75 % of Gen Z care that their coffee is sourced from an ethical plantation or whatever. You know what I mean? And you look at it and you just go, well, of course you tick the box. I mean, like, who wouldn't want that? You know what I mean? It's just sort of slightly fabricated, you know, as a communication message sort of thing. But I'm all in on the authentic purpose and what are you here to do? What difference do you want to make? and is it legitimately what you can do?

23:00Like Tony's Chocolonely, you look at their annual report, their annual report focuses on the change they're making in the supply chain, not the profit they're making. It's really clear in terms of, even if something as boring as the financial statement talks about that, and you think, right, okay, you've nailed it. I think a lot of that is down to skin in the game as well. So there's one thing in having a purpose and claiming that you care about slavery. Patagonia is an example that I often think about. claiming that you care about the environment but Patagonia put skin in the game where they actively turn down opportunities in order to showcase their care towards this purpose so they will not sell Patagonia gilets and jumpers to companies that they think are disrupting the environment and ruining the environment so if you work at a big mining company and you want to get your staff these beautiful Patagonia gilets with your brand on them you will not be allowed to they will not sell to you which is kind of irrational because they're turning down money and that money could be used reinvested by patagonia to help the environment but it showcases skin in the game they clearly care about this purpose and they're making active choices to care about this purpose and that makes us believe them more well it's that's the reason to about being fired as well it's the believability because you then go i i actually believe what they're saying because they're they're telling me something that costs them because everyone can say we're for the environment but you know purpose isn't purpose unless until it's cost you something and so what that speaks and probably they get a million more fans off the back of making that you know taking that position than the thousand they might have lost through the the corporate deal yeah brilliant love it okay bring us your uh we're on number three i think yeah and we're gonna go from one of probably your brilliant high level no this is good this is really strategic and i'm gonna go to one of the most basic no this is what i love about you because it's evidence-based and it's just really like you can go and implement it tomorrow yeah so i want to talk about the curiosity gap which is essentially cliffhangers and the idea of how you pique someone's interest because i think it's i mean it is important at all levels of marketing but especially at a tactical level so this sort of was first discovered by a social psychologist called zygonik and she was i think down the pub with some mates or basically at a restaurant and she was with fellow psychologists and they were ordering food from a waiter.

25:18And the waiter wasn't taking any notes on a notepad to write down the orders, but he still remembered the order absolutely perfectly. And they were shocked by how good this waiter's memory was because he was going around to multiple tables doing the same thing. And being social psychologists, which they were, they thought, well, let's test a theory. Their theory was the brain is better at remembering things when the task isn't finished. So when the task still needs to be completed. So she basically was thinking, wow, this guy not only remembers all our orders, but remembers to bring us the right plates and put the chicken at my table and the fish at yours, whatever it is.

25:56And that's incredible. And so what she did is she let the waiter serve this meal and then they all got out their tablecloths and covered what they had ordered. And then just as the waiter was walking away, they said, hold on, hold on. Can you just try and remember what our orders were again? Because he just perfectly put them down in front of their table. and as soon as he tried to remember once the order had been completed once they'd all been given their food he totally forgot he wasn't able to remember i had the chicken his brain was geared up just just until the the the job had been done and then the brain kind of then goes into relax mode goes okay i don't need to be in that state of focus and that is a very very small application of a much wider thing that the brain does which is when information is unknown or incomplete we have a desire to fill that information.

26:43When our curiosity is piqued, we have a desire to satisfy that curiosity. And this is the story of clickbait and cliffhangers. And you think, oh, clickbait is a new thing invented by BuzzFeed. It's not. It's been around for millennia almost. Arabian Nights, that story was written with cliffhangers and released in parts. All of Charles Dickens' work, at least when he was publishing in newspapers, would have cliffhangers at the end. The reason behind Shakespeare's success is arguably down to this curiosity gap. So Hamlet as a story was known before Shakespeare. He didn't write that story. He adapted it.

27:16And the difference he made was usually at the start of these stories, the information about the character was given up front. So they would say Hamlet is a madman and this is his story. Whereas Shakespeare hid that. He hid that information and he sparked curiosity. You didn't know whether Hamlet was insane or not, whether he'd lost his mind or not. And that made me people more likely to watch it. So this is not a new thing. and it's something that I think is a bit of an ancient storytelling technique, but we're very quick to discredit it these days. We sort of throw it under that category of, well, that's just a nasty tactic BuzzFeed uses.

27:46It's not. It's a really important psychological bias. Yeah. And as I will mention constantly throughout this interview, it's something I have tested, and I thought I want to, I've never done TikTok before. I still don't really do it. I don't really understand it. But I thought I want to test this ancient storytelling technique on TikTok. I want to see if it works. So I created 20 videos for TikTok. half of them had a curiosity gap inspired intro so they would say something like i've just discovered the best persuasion tactic i've ever found and i'll share it in a bit or something like that probably a little bit better than that and then the other half would just get right into it and say this is the best persuasion tactic in the world or something compared them both put them both up looked at the amount of followers they drove the amount of clicks the amount of viewers and the difference was genuinely 10x the ones that had the curiosity gap inspired opening got far more views, far more comments, far more likes, led to eventually getting around 11 ,000 followers on TikTok, whereas the ones that didn't were largely unknown, didn't get the same engagement whatsoever.

28:44And it just shows that this tactic, which is as old as time, it's been used by everyone from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, still works and still is arguably the most important thing you can use if you're trying to gain attention in your marketing, still works today on the most modern platforms on the planet. It probably explains Stephen Bartlett's title as well. Because he plays that curiosity gap a lot, doesn't he, in terms of like, I mean, he's got very click-bait recently, hasn't he, in terms of his content. And apparently he also A-B tests all his titles as well, you know, and puts them out there to see what the response they get.

29:16But thank you, because you've explained why. And I never knew why at restaurants, like, someone would come around, and I feel like I'm going to say, like, excuse me, are you writing this down? Because have you got my kind of, you know, specific requirements here? You know, amazing that. And you'll notice it as work as well. As soon as you finish a project at work, you completely forget it. As soon as you've done an exam at school, you can forget it. I remember that. I did an economics and finance degree. And in my first job, someone actually, I don't know why, asked me about the capital asset pricing model, which is well known in econometrics.

29:46and i was like i i couldn't tell you and and that was the core part of one of my modules that i could have literally like written a thesis on at the time and like no brain has scrubbed that one so that's not your next tip then is it no it's not my next tip exactly exactly um although this does my next tip does link to memory and i was thinking actually i've reflected a lot on this that if I were to start a brand today, or the podcast being a bit of a brand itself, the power of distinctiveness as well. So, I mean, most marketing students will have read Byron Sharpe's How Brands Grow and Distinctive Brand Assets and Ehrenberg Bass Institute and the importance they put on being distinctive, standing out in the crowd.

30:30And then my colleague Orlando Woods has written a lot of things. He calls them fluent devices. I mean, his focus on advertising and what he means by fluent device This is a repeatable character like Kevin the Carrot in Audi or a repeatable scenario. Should have gone spec savers or you're not you and you're hungry, that sort of thing. But something that is unique to you that stands out and creates a relationship with the audience. And if I were to invent a brand today, I would obsess about those things. Because what we've seen in the research on our system one is over the last 10, 15 years, the use of those things has been in rapid decline, actually.

31:06And we've lost the ability to stand out, be distinctive and create consistent characters over time. Meerkats is a great example, actually. I mean, you think, why on earth would you have a Russian sounding meerkat? But what you do in a very clever way is you entertain the audience because it's surprising. So you go, oh, why is there a Russian meerkat? The joke on the compare the market, compare the meerkat. I mean, the first out they did is, I think it's still the best, where you've got Alexander going, basically saying, oh, we failed to drive any traffic to compare the meerkat. They've all gone to compare the market.

31:40This is really annoying. What are we going to do about it? I want to compare the meerkats. Anyway, but it's just like an inversion of the joke, but it's really, really cleverly done. But it sticks in your memory, doesn't it? Because it's distinctive. We argue about difference versus distinctiveness, but being distinctive, I think, is so important. In fact, I'm going to piggyback off that, and that's going to be one of mine as well, because I think distinctiveness is so well proven in the world of behavioural science in terms of the effect it has. This goes right back to von Resterhoff's studies in the 1930s.

32:08She ran tests where she showed people lists of letters that they needed to remember, different combinations of letters like Z, W, X, D, another set of letters, another set of letters, another set of letters. She needed to see how many they would remember. but within that list she would put a combination of four numbers one seven two three whatever it might be and then at the end she would say write down as many of these combinations as you would remember the numbers because they were the distinct thing within the list were 30 times more likely to be remembered than the letters she would switch it to prove that it wasn't just that numbers were more memorable where numbers would be the common thing to remember and then there would be a set of letters and then the letters were more 30 times more memorable and it's this finding basically that being distinct it boosts recall boosts memorability and Richard Shorten he updated this in 2018 did it with brands and I think this is a really interesting application that people need to remember because he did a study where he showed people 10 brands from the same category so 10 automotive brands Ford Chrysler whatever else it is and then showed them one brand from a different category so fast food so showed them Burger King did the same test as restaurant got them to look at it spent some time doing something else oh which which brands do you remember the distinct brand within that group the fast food brand was four times more likely to be remembered so being distinct within your environment is more memorable and this brings us back to the meerkat because what was really impressive about compare the meerkat was not just that they were doing something different it's that they were doing something which was totally distinct within their industry confused.com what's the up one money supermarket all of them were doing the same very utilitarian ads where they were saying, we're cheaper, we're faster, we've got better customer service.

33:53And Compare the Meerkat said, no, we're going to do something completely different. And what's hilarious, and this is really where us marketers need to hang our heads in shame, is what the competitors then did. Because every single competitor in that set copied Compare the Meerkat and started to do these really weird, radical ads. They had opera singing, people talking about car insurance, or men dressed in high heels dancing because they got such a good deal and they haven't learned anything from compare the milk or richard stotten or von westerhoff because the learning there is be distinct within your space do something that the others aren't doing because that'll make that will boost your recall but by copying compare the milk they're actually lessening their recall they're getting less so it's a really important really that's really really important i've presented alongside richard a few times actually and i do love and use this as well i love that we were talking about the an environmental study we were both taking part in the other day at the Festival of Marketing.

34:44And there's a really difficult question from the audience, which I sort of slightly blag my way through. And then Richard goes, well, it connects nicely to Van Restroff effect in the 1952, where, you know, this study proved that... I was just like, dude, man, that is just like Jedi martial tricks, mate. Like, how can anyone argue with you when you've quoted someone who sounds clever? He's dead. You know, I'm like... Prosecuted by the Nazis. I mean, you just owned the answer there, mate. It made me look really thick. But I mean, part of the reason I love behavioral science is you've got these fascinating experiments done over time, which kind of tell you.