How behavioral science helps brands overcome fragmented insights

Steve Phillips [00:00:00]: Welcome to Inside Insight, where marketing strategy meets consumer truth with your host, Steve Phillips. Many consumers say they'll buy a product, but never do. That's the say-do gap. It's one of the biggest challenges facing insights and brands today. Human decisions are messy. They're shaped by emotion, context, habit, and bias as much as by logic.

Steve Phillips [00:00:27]: For marketers and insight teams, it's about turning intention into action and focusing on what people actually do, not what they say they'll do. That's where behavioral science comes in. It helps brands decode how people really make decisions and close the gap between intention and behavior. I'm Steve Phillips, and this is Inside Insights. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Richard Shotton, behavioral science expert and founder at Astro 10, which helps brands like Google, Diageo, and Meta use psychology to market more effectively.

Steve Phillips [00:01:00]: In his excellent new book, Hacking the Human Mind, Richard shows how 17 leading brands, including the likes of Apple, Dyson, and Starbucks, are using behavioral science to move consumers from awareness to action. Today, we'll explore how we can make your brand the one people reach for, often without even realizing why. And before we dive in, we're excited to be giving away 20 copies of Richard's new book. So check out the show notes or shoot me a DM to enter for your chance to win. So, Richard, welcome to Inside Insights.

Richard Shotton [00:01:33]: It's delightful be chatting with you today. Maybe start with the foundation. What exactly is behavioral science, and why do you think it's so important for Mark?

Steve Phillips [00:01:42]: Okay, sure. So behavioral science sometimes has this kind of complicated name, but it's nothing complicated. It's essentially what we used to call social psychology. So behavioral science is the study of what actually influences people rather than what they claim influences them. And these things can often be quite different. So a broad theme to the field is summed up very well by a Princeton psychologist called Susan Fisk. And she came up with this amazing phrase of "cognitive misers."

Steve Phillips [00:02:11]: So, like an academic, does she essentially turn something that's reasonably simple into quite a strong bit of jargon? But her former colleague, Daniel Kahneman, put it a lot more simply. He said, "Thinking is to humans, swimming is to cats. They can do it, but they'd rather not." Now, neither of these academics is trying to be rude about people.

Steve Phillips [00:02:35]: They worked at Princeton, dealt with some of the most intelligent people in the world. They are very, very well aware that people are capable of amazing flights of logic. But they're also very well aware that from an evolutionary perspective, energy is a scarce resource and thinking is energy intensive and effortful. So as a species, we have evolved to ration deep, considered thought, and instead most of our decisions, whether it's what shampoo to buy in a supermarket, what lager to buy in a pub—most decisions are made in a quick, snap, reflexive way.

Steve Phillips [00:03:10]: Now, the way that we make these quick decisions as humans is to use what psychologists call heuristics, what you and I just might call rules of thumb. And those rules of thumb are prone to biases. And essentially, that's the bit that I think should interest marketers. Because if you know what the rules of thumb are, if you know how they're biased, when you're designing comms, when you're creating communications, when you're setting your prices, you can work with human nature rather than against it. And my argument would be it is always, always more effective to work with human nature rather than against it.

Steve Phillips [00:03:52]: That's great. And can you give us some examples in sort of real life how these things manifest themselves, how they impact human behavior and how they impact, particularly, brand choice?

Richard Shotton [00:04:03]: Yeah. So there are literally thousands of experiments, but maybe one of the most important is an idea called "social proof." So it's essentially the argument that when people make decisions, they don't behave as discrete individuals, but instead they look around to what others are doing. And if a product looks like it's popular, then it will become more appealing and people are more likely to pick it up.

Richard Shotton [00:04:26]: So this idea that stretches back to the 1930s, hundreds of experiments proving it in lots of different situations, whether it's tax repayment rates, what doctors prescribe, what people pick at restaurants. This sets up a very clear task for a marketer. What you need to be doing is thinking, how can I make my product appear like it's popular? And that might be in direct claims. You might go out and say that you're the world's most popular gin.

Richard Shotton [00:04:55]: Or it might be more subtle ways. It might be making sure that when your product is used, it's very noticeable. I always thought one of the best things that Monzo did as a bank is create these bright—well, they call it hot coral. I'm not sure if it's pink or orange.

Richard Shotton [00:05:12]: I'm not sure which side people come down on there. But they created these debit cards that were this luminous color. Now, that's a brilliant bit of implying popularity, because what happened before Monzo is all the banks had pretty bland pastel colors. Didn't really notice that they'd been used. What Monzo did so brilliantly is stand out so starkly.

Richard Shotton [00:05:33]: So if you were in a pub or a café and you saw someone using one of these cards, you couldn't help but notice it. You know, it was this bright pink color and that made them look popular. Because, of course, people's understanding of the popularity of a bank is not based on pouring over a Mintel report. It's based on how easy an example of that product being used springs to mind. So making your usership or consumption distinctive and therefore noticeable, that would be a way of, I think, more subtly, more laterally applying this principle.

Steve Phillips [00:06:04]: I remember being at Cannes for the advertising festival and seeing an example of this which I thought was fabulous. And it was, it was coat hooks. So I think it was in Brazil. It was coat hooks and there was a digital screen on it which just showed how many of that coat have been purchased.

Richard Shotton [00:06:21]: Oh, oh wow.

Steve Phillips [00:06:22]: Which is a fabulous idea. I was like, oh God. So you could just look along the gate and go, oh, well, that one's clearly really popular. So that's the really nice example.

Steve Phillips [00:06:30]: Because I think sometimes people hear a well-known bias, like social proof, and they think, oh well, because we've got on our website 5,000 accountants use our services, they think that's the bias done and dusted. But actually when you get a bias that is very regularly used, what you need to be doing is using it either in a kind of slightly novel way so it gets noticed, like you mentioned, or thinking about these kind of more lateral ways of applying it. So another one that is often ignored is how you label products that aren't available. So if you imagine your clothes shop, let's say there's a pair of jeans that just aren't there, there's no stock left. Well, what a behavioral scientist would say, and there's a lovely experiment by Peterson that tested this.

Steve Phillips [00:07:11]: What they would say is label that sold out, don't label it out of stock. Because what Peterson found was when he did an e-commerce test, people were about 15% less irritated with the brand and the product if it had been labeled sold out rather than out of stock. Because he argues, out of stock insinuates a logistical supply chain issue just looks like the business is incompetent. Sold out—well, that draws attention to the popularity of the product.

Steve Phillips [00:07:36]: And suddenly you're using that high demand as a way of making the product more appealing. So there's so many ways that with a bit of imagination you can apply these principles. And obviously I remember talking about heuristics a while ago and there are lots of these. I mean, there can be long lists of them, can you give some other examples of heuristics that are out there that brands are using?

Richard Shotton [00:07:57]: So, yes, on both points. So you're absolutely right. There are hundreds. And I think that can both be a strength and a weakness of behavioral science. It's a strength in that, whatever challenge a marketer has, there will be an experiment out there that can help them. The downside of the variety is it can make the field complex and confusing. So if people are keen to use these principles more regularly, I would strongly recommend they started applying a framework, something to give this huge mess of biases a bit of order. So one of the ones I favor is one called EAST.

Richard Shotton [00:08:32]: It's created by the Behavioral Insights team and I think they did it in 2014 or 2015 and they essentially distill behavioral science down into four key principles. So EAST is an acronym and it stands for E: Make it easy, A: Make it attractive, S: Make it social, and T: Make it timely. And that's quite useful because it essentially segments this huge array of experiments into four simpler themes and then you can almost use those themes as a reminder of the types of principle that can be used.

Richard Shotton [00:09:02]: So, yeah, sorry, the other question was, you know, another example. There's a brilliant set of studies by Elliot Aronson into an idea called the Pratfall Effect. So he came up with this idea back in 1966 that if you exhibit or draw attention to a flaw, then you become more appealing. Now, that can be true for both businesses and it can be true for people. You see that being used by some of the world's best brands.

Richard Shotton [00:09:32]: So if you think about Guinness, "Good things come to those who wait." What they are doing with that message is drawing attention to the flaw of slowness. Now, Aronson's work shows that that makes the brand feel a bit more human, a bit more authentic, a bit more appealing. Other work then suggests an additional benefit. There's a psychologist at the University of Toledo called Kipling Williams and he said if you admit that there is an issue or a problem with your product, what you do is prove your honesty and therefore all your other claims become a little bit more believable.

Richard Shotton [00:10:10]: So this is a tactic that can be used by lawyers rather than the defence, letting the prosecution draw attention to a weakness. In their case, what Williams shows, it's more effective to draw attention to that problem yourself. And even if you're in this very extreme circumstance where you don't even refute that problem, simply the act of admitting to it makes your other claims more believable and your clients are more likely to get off. So you get this kind of double benefit of appeal, believability. And then maybe when you move away from the experiments into the art of applying this principle, the best brands, the best, like Guinness, they don't pick a flaw randomly.

Richard Shotton [00:10:48]: They identify a flaw with a mirror image. So many cultures, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. So if you admit that you're slow, well, the assumption is, if it's slow, they took time over it, it must be high quality. So what the best brands do is, I think, spend an awful lot of time working out what their core strength is and then identifying whether there's a mirror weakness. So that's...

Richard Shotton [00:11:09]: Yeah, that's a lovely set of experiments that I think could be applied far more regularly in marketing.

Steve Phillips [00:11:14]: Yeah, that's great. And famously, these principles have been used by governments across the world. There was the Nudge Unit, obviously, in the UK, and using these experiments to do anything from, you know, getting people to eat better to, you know, fill in their pensions. You've got some examples here of how, and some of the controversies around it, of pushing people's behavior.

Richard Shotton [00:11:34]: Yes. So you're absolutely right. I think they're probably back in the early days of behavioral science. Most experiments that people discussed were in the governmental world.

Richard Shotton [00:11:45]: So famously, the Behavioral Insights Team, known as the Nudge Unit, they ran a study back in 2011 where they worked with HMRC. 110,000 letters were sent out, various different messages on them. And what they found was if you threatened people with a big fine, you got some uplift in tax repayment rates. But if you created the impression that most other people were doing so, then you were far more successful. And the interesting nuance there was they found that we are not equally influenced by other people, we are most influenced by people like ourselves.

Richard Shotton [00:12:23]: So it's all very well and good to say nine out of ten Brits pay their tax on time and there was a nice, you know, five or six percentage point bump in repayment rates. But if you said, and you'd have to tailor this, obviously, "9 out of 10 people in Herne Hill" or "9 out of 10 people in Harrogate pay their tax on time," that was much, much more effective. And interestingly, the jump in repayment rates was bigger between standard social proof and tailored social proof than between no use of social proof and the basic social proof. So it's not just a nice to have—tailoring this message, making it feel personalized, making it feel like it's popular amongst people like ourselves.

Richard Shotton [00:13:01]: That's a crucial bit. So that was one of the more famous areas. But probably the biggest impact they've had is in pensions, where they apply this principle of "make it easy." Now there's an argument from psychologists that we tend as people to think the way to change behaviour is to motivate people to want to do something. But an awful lot of experiments say that we overestimate that role and that we underestimate the other half of the equation, which is making it easier.

Richard Shotton [00:13:34]: So one of the things the Behavioral Insights Team pushed for was pensions going from opt-in for employees to opt-out. And even though it's a token bit of effort, phenomenal effects, you know, 20 percentage point change within about six months in terms of enrolment rates of big companies. So, yeah, lots of really effective interventions from the Behavioral Insights Team.

Steve Phillips [00:13:56]: It's scary that our decisions change if we have to tick a box or not tick a box. Stupid.

Richard Shotton [00:14:00]: It's a breadth of itself.

Steve Phillips [00:14:03]: Yeah. And I think marketers are really averse to taking that finding on board. It's much more exciting as a professional to think about clever, creative ways of exciting and enthusing the audience. Of course that's important, but people like Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, both Nobel Prize winners, they've gone as far as to say the single biggest thing that they have learned from all their studies is the importance of making something easy.

Steve Phillips [00:14:29]: This repeated underestimation of the impact of a very small barrier. So if you're a company, yeah, go through your customer journey, eradicate even tiny barriers. I remember being on a panel discussing exactly this and someone said at the end—there was a researcher who's behaving with a commoner and a marketer. Someone said at the end, the thing we all agree on is more gondola ends, more end of aisle.

Steve Phillips [00:14:56]: Just put your product at the end of the aisle so people, when they walk past it, it's just easier to pick up. That certainly could be one way. I mean the other one that I think could be applied far more regularly and especially in serious categories like pharma advertising or finance or business to business advertising. One of the ways to apply this principle of make it easy is in the language that's used. Those categories are guilty of real overcomplexity, a lot of use of jargon.

Steve Phillips [00:15:25]: And there's this amazing study from Daniel Oppenheimer back in 2006 when he was at Princeton, where he shows people like chunks of text. And the original text has lots of overcomplicated words. It's from an academic journal. And he gets people to read that and then rate the intelligence of the author. And then the twist in the experiment is he gives another group of people, and that's a key part, fresh group of people.

Steve Phillips [00:15:52]: They see the same basic text, but he has replaced the complex words with simpler alternatives. And what he finds is when that group read the text, they rate the author as 13% more intelligent than the original group. So often marketers assume you can impress people with complexity. But what the experiments show is that actually complexity confuses the audience. The audience becomes irritated, they blame the communicator.

Steve Phillips [00:16:21]: So what's often much, much better is to speak far more simply, far more plainly, simple idea, but could be applied far, far more widely in those categories we mentioned.

Richard Shotton [00:16:34]: It's so much more difficult to make the complex simple than to make it complex.

Steve Phillips [00:16:39]: Absolutely. There's that lovely quote attributed to hundreds of different people. Apologies for the long letter.

Richard Shotton [00:16:45]: I didn't have time to write a short one.

Steve Phillips [00:16:47]: And I think it's exactly the same idea. Apologies for the jargon. I didn't have time to think of—a 53-page PowerPoint report.

Richard Shotton [00:16:56]: I couldn't—I didn't have time to make it 10 pages.

Steve Phillips [00:16:58]: Yeah, yeah. That's so fascinating. We know that these heuristics, these biases, this human behavior impacts the real world. We know it impacts marketing. How do we—you know you're talking to a consumer insights specialist. How do we use consumer insights to get to the bottom of this? Is there a problem with the way consumer insights is used that ignores these biases? Can we understand them from a research perspective?

Richard Shotton [00:17:26]: From a research perspective, there are two angles. There's a methodology one and an interpretation one. And I think for the methodology part, the biggest theme of the behavioral science experiments is a skepticism towards claimed data. So there is a brilliant University of Virginia psychologist called Timothy Wilson and he says people are strangers to themselves. So he argues people don't have full introspective insight into their motivations.

Richard Shotton [00:17:54]: So if you put them on the spot, ask them to explain directly what they've done, and then interpret that information at face value, he says it can be misleading. So there's a couple of ideas you could take from that. You could firstly think that, well, we have to be more sophisticated than just direct questioning. I always get the academic wrong. I think it's Nicholas Epley that did this, but he was interested in understanding people's likelihoods to donate money at a university drive.

Richard Shotton [00:18:23]: So it's a bit like Poppy Day, but in America, I think this university sold like little daffodils you'd wear and then that would raise money for a charity. And what he recognized was that people are not going to be honest. So it's an even bigger problem than just not knowing. You're probably not going to be honest about what you donate because it reflects so much on you. So he did this really nice test where before the charity drive, he asked people how much they'd donate and whether they were going to give anything at all.

Richard Shotton [00:18:53]: He asked other people a similar question that he said, how much do you think the average student will give? Both in terms of percentage likelihood and actual amount. And then once the charity drive had occurred, he found out what had actually happened. And the findings were interesting. What people said they would do was a massive overestimate of their generosity.

Richard Shotton [00:19:13]: What was much closer was when people were trying to guess what others did. So Epley said in this circumstance, a way around this problem of people being poor witnesses was not to get them to talk about themselves. And then there was this vested interest to spit a story. He said, people are very good actually being able to judge others accurately. So twisting the question from what you're going to do to what others do was one way in this very particular circumstance to do it.

Richard Shotton [00:19:44]: So that I think is one area in the methodology. The other area in the methodology would be more experiments, I think. So if you, you know the take—take that Oppenheimer study I went through, he didn't ask people, would you be influenced by the reading age grade of the text. He didn't say, does complexity affect you?

Richard Shotton [00:20:02]: One group get a complex piece. And then he asked them what they think of the authority. So this subterfuge, they don't know why they're being asked to judge the author. Separate group, they get a simple text and they're asked to judge the author. And it's this test and control methodology that is far more regularly used in behavioral science experiments.

Richard Shotton [00:20:23]: And I think that is a really good way of unearthing some of the impacts that affect people that they don't quite realize.

Steve Phillips [00:20:32]: Yeah, I think from a consumer insights perspective, we've known things like the say for years. We've known that. And we have weighting schemes to try and reduce the level of bias and we try and correlate it with real-world behavior. I think one of the things when I started looking at behavioral economics and thinking about it with the consumer insight lens is you realize that we do recognize it, but we often forget about it.

Steve Phillips [00:20:56]: And so when you're designing a questionnaire, you may—you just have to stop, think about what the biases are likely to be and how you can mitigate against them. And one of the other examples is context. Right. So we stop thinking about the context we're doing this insight work in.

Steve Phillips [00:21:14]: So I remember doing, you know, focus groups in the evening for a breakfast cereal.

Richard Shotton [00:21:18]: Yeah, yeah.

Steve Phillips [00:21:19]: And you—and it's just, you can ask the questions and they'll give you an answer, but it's such a thoughtful answer because there's nothing. They're not hungry, they haven't just woken up, they're not trying to get the kids to school.

Steve Phillips [00:21:32]: That's the context that breakfast cereal is consumed in. And unless you're asking questions or observing that context, you miss so much of the inside.

Richard Shotton [00:21:43]: Yeah, absolutely. So on the first point of researchers knowing about the unreliable witness, I mean, yeah, you can go back to classic kind of David Ogilvy quotes talking about the, the difference between what people say and what they do, what they think and they feel back to, you know, what would that be? Probably the 1950s.

Richard Shotton [00:22:02]: So I think you're absolutely right. It can often be the, the marketers or the people using the research where I think there's this tendency to take, take, take statement to face value because it makes life easy. So I think. I think you're right on that first bit. And then your second point about context now.

Richard Shotton [00:22:20]: Absolutely. There is a whole series of experiments that became known as the fundamental attribution error. So it's essentially the argument that we overestimate the fixedness of people's personality, whereas actually it varies from moment to moment. So the argument from psychologists would be you should be as concerned with identifying a target context as a target audience. I've done some work around how people's behavior and their reaction to advertising changes by their existing mood.

Richard Shotton [00:22:50]: So, for example, you ask people how good value a promotion is, and then you ask them what mood they're in. And when you cut the data, I did this with Dentsu and News UK. What we found was if people came in a good mood, they were 26% more likely to think the same promotional ad was good value than people who turned up in a, in a, in a bad mood. They should have judged the offer on the quality of the product and the price. But what they were confusing it with was how the ad made them feel.

Richard Shotton [00:23:23]: And a lot of those feelings were more about the preceding few hours than the stimulus in front of them, which—

Steve Phillips [00:23:30]: Is a great example, I think. Actually, again, to come back to my experience as a moderator running focus groups about advertising with a group of eight strangers. I mean, there's a context when you watch advertising, you watch either on your own or with your family. And the idea that you can test an advertising campaign with a group of strangers when you're sort of found to be more literal, more logical about your response to it.

Steve Phillips [00:23:54]: And so, and again, we understand these biases. We can, I think, consumer insight can help marketers make these smart decisions, but we have to think carefully about tough questions, the approach, the biases that our audience has, as well as the context that we do to research it.

Richard Shotton [00:24:13]: Yeah, I think you're right in both respects. Firstly, if we accept context is important and people will vary from one context to another, one of the best things we can do is make sure the context in which we do the research is as close as possible to the context of decision making or consumption. So I think that's absolutely, absolutely true.

Richard Shotton [00:24:32]: And then you said we know many of these ideas, but sometimes I think we segment them. You know, we've got this block of knowledge in one area of our life and then we, we forget to apply it across all the things you do.

Steve Phillips [00:24:51]: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. One of the most interesting things in behavioral science is that FMCG brands, you know, consumer brands, I think, are very open to applying these principles to their marketing. The behavioral science principles, who are much less willing to apply them are people in B2B.

Steve Phillips [00:25:12]: But all the evidence experimentally suggests professionals are just as influenced as consumers. And we've talked about a few social proof experiments. Well, there are studies amongst doctors. There's a lovely 2018 study from the Behavioral Insights Team which shows that if you want to change the way doctors prescribe, like reduce the number of antibiotics they give out, educating them has a very, very minimal effect. But if you tell people they are giving out more antibiotics than other doctors in their town, then you see a much, much bigger effect.

Steve Phillips [00:25:44]: So, yeah, even these people who define themselves as being logical, they're influenced by these biases. So professionals is a key part.

Richard Shotton [00:25:54]: I remember I get some comfort talking about exactly this bias and someone asked, what's the difference with these types of biases between consumers and businesses? And I, my response, I didn't really know, but my, my automatic response was to say that I think the biases are exactly the same. It's just that in B2B the post rationalization is written up.

Steve Phillips [00:26:12]: Yes, yeah, exactly. Because you just say you document what your biases. Yeah it's one, it's one thing to say that you were, you were swayed by what other people were doing or the kind of imagery of when you're buying a bag of crisps if you admit that you did that when you make a life saving decision I mean that's very, very hard for someone to, to accept and not be judged by others by. So yeah they're much more likely to post rationalize as a, as a professional I think. Yeah.

Steve Phillips [00:26:37]: And you know you never, you never get fired for buying IBM. I mean the greatest sort of post rationalization in one of, one of the greatest phrases in marketing that absolutely accepts this bias.

Richard Shotton [00:26:48]: Yes. That is a lovely way of thinking about it that people call this defensive decision making that individuals in companies are not just interested in what is the best course of action for the brand, they're also deeply interested in what is the best course of action for themselves. And there is this danger that you can justify a decision for example by saying you did 10,000 surveys and people told you the reason they bought the car was just about the price and then reacting to that, that's—even if it goes wrong—is justifiable afterwards.

Richard Shotton [00:27:19]: The danger is unless the whole organization is immersed in behavioral science, if you admit there's a flaw in your car and then the sale goes awfully, the individual, unless they are in a very behavioral science literate organisation, they're likely to get fired. So I think sometimes why these biases don't get applied more often even though there is so much evidence for their impact is they are often about what's best for the bias, but that's not the driver of decision making for the individual.

Steve Phillips [00:27:47]: So let's step back a bit and maybe try and give marketers some practical help. How would they go about changing what they're doing on a day to day basis next week when they're—or maybe not next week but in the next planning cycle—how would they go about integrating this type of thinking?

Richard Shotton [00:28:05]: Yeah. So highlights your challenge of next week. I've found if I'm dealing with an organization that has never used behavioral science before, what I try and get them to do is focus on an easily quantifiable metric like, let's look at the website and sales and then look at some behavioral science principles that can have a very quick effect. Because even though behavioral science could be used in the brand strategy, we've talked about the Pratfall effect and many brands have used that very well.

Richard Shotton [00:28:36]: That could take years to come to fruition. And a lot of the impact will be the creative interpretation of the idea, not just the underlying bias. But if you get to the nuts and bolts performance side of marketing, how do we adapt the website so more people will buy our products? You get the data back very quickly and essentially you just take the experimental evidence and you put it on your website. There's no kind of slippage or interpretation.

Richard Shotton [00:29:02]: So I love working in those areas with a new client because there's nowhere to hide. And you can very clearly attribute the changes back to behavioral science. Now if that all sounded a bit abstract, what I mean by applying some of these principles to pricing and the website, it could be things like there's an idea called the pennies a day effect. Gourville at Harvard came up with this in the 90s. And what he showed in the world of charities, and I've replicated his work in commercial settings, is people will respond to a £365 a year price very differently to a pound a day for the rest of a year price.

Richard Shotton [00:29:40]: So people will put a lot of emphasis on the headline number, very little on the unit of time. So if you're a broadband provider, don't say that you cost £60 a month, say you cost £6 a week, that's the same as £2 a day, you could put that on your website. And if you're a big brand, one of the huge mobile carriers, you'll probably know within an hour whether that worked with a simple little A-B test. And it's an amazing one showing people very, very quickly that behavioral science can be valuable and then that gives them the confidence to try some of these longer-term ideas.

Steve Phillips [00:30:16]: Let's move on to our lightning round.

Richard Shotton [00:30:18]: Excellent.

Steve Phillips [00:30:19]: Where I'm going to ask you a series of questions, quick hitting consumer insights related questions. So first of all, what's one behavioral bias every marketer should understand?

Richard Shotton [00:30:30]: Okay, so we've talked about make it easy and social proof. I think those, if I hadn't mentioned them, I'd have put those up very high. Another slightly different one that is super important for marketing is the mere exposure effect. And it's this idea from Robert Zajonc back in the 1960s where he shows repeated exposure to a stimulus actually creates greater liking of that stimulus. So even if you give people no information—so you show them a picture of a face, for example—if you show them the face once, there might be mild warmth towards it. If you repeatedly show that face, people start to think it's better looking so he said this is the mere exposure effect. Just repetition breeds contentment and liking.

Richard Shotton [00:31:13]: That I think is an absolutely fundamental one for marketing. We chop and change our approaches far too regularly. Whereas actually it's the consistency and repetition that builds a lot of the appeal of a brand. So I think the mere exposure effect is one that could be applied much more regularly. Stop chopping and changing unless there is a very, very good reason. Stick with a tried and trusted approach.

Steve Phillips [00:31:44]: Yeah, well, all the research I've seen into advertising wear out, which marketers are always scared about wear out but the reality is it's wearing out with them, not the consumer most.

Richard Shotton [00:31:56]: Yeah.

Steve Phillips [00:31:57]: Because they have a completely different experience, the consumer.

Richard Shotton [00:32:00]: Yeah.

Steve Phillips [00:32:01]: Next, what's the biggest misconception about how consumers make decisions?

Richard Shotton [00:32:05]: Probably the biggest one is the myth that consumers make most of their decisions in a thoughtful, considered, rational manner. Whereas far more decisions are made in a super quick, reflexive way using a bias. Now, if you go to a shampoo aisle, if you actually weighed up cost and benefit of every product, you'd be there for like three hours, that would be ludicrous. But of course what people do is they just use quick rules of thumb like oh, I'll pick the one that had the beautiful model advertising, I'll pick the one that is the middle price of three, I'll pick the one that is the market leader. They just use this quick rule of thumb that gets them a quite good decision and they have traded off accuracy of decision for speed of decision making because it makes life easier. So I think that is at the nub of a lot of behavioral science, the speed of decision making.

Steve Phillips [00:32:56]: I'll pick the one I'd picked before.

Richard Shotton [00:32:58]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve Phillips [00:32:59]: Yes.

Richard Shotton [00:33:00]: Yeah, that's the, that's even...

Steve Phillips [00:33:01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Shotton [00:33:02]: Pick the one that has a big red starburst on because it's, you know, it's on—it's on offer.

Steve Phillips [00:33:07]: You know, you just—everyone might have a different set of rules of thumb but they'll certainly be using something to make that decision in a low effort way.

Steve Phillips [00:33:16]: Which brand do you think is doing the best job applying behavioral science today?

Richard Shotton [00:33:21]: Well, I won't go through all 17 because Hacking the Human Mind looked at 17 of the world's best brands and what they were using. But of those 17, I think you've probably got to come somewhere between probably Red Bull, Amazon, Apple... Probably Apple. I would—I would go for, you know, they... The setup journey of an iPhone being so easy, you don't need instructions. The concreteness of the communications, that's a brilliant tactic they use. You know, you can visualize what they're saying.

Richard Shotton [00:33:51]: They don’t just realm of abstractions, they apply this idea of optimal newness to their product design. They are one of the brands that just apply these principles again and again and again to great success.

Steve Phillips [00:34:03]: And what's optimal newness?

Richard Shotton [00:34:05]: So optimal newness is this idea that people have a competing desire. So there's a love of the new—neophilia—but we've also got this neophobia where we think the new might, from an evolutionary perspective, kill us and damage us. So there's some brilliant studies about product design which show if it is too radical, people are scared and ignore it. If it's too familiar, they, you know, are bored by it and don't pay attention. So trying to balance newness and familiarity is a skill that you've seen with things like the iPhone design and the use of the icons within it.

Steve Phillips [00:34:37]: Brilliant. Can you share one small behavioral tweak that can really boost marketing effect?

Richard Shotton [00:34:43]: Well, maybe going back to Apple. So I went through a few things they did very quickly. One of the best things they do is apply this idea of concreteness. So the original studies were done back by Ian Begg, 1972, and he's at University of West Ontario. And what he did was give people long lists of information and on every line there was a two word phrase.

Richard Shotton [00:35:06]: And he didn't tell this to the reader, but some of those words were what he called abstract phrases. So things like "basic truth," some of them were concrete phrases like "white horse." And what Begg found was when he took the lists away, people were asked what they could remember. And he found that people were four times more likely to remember the concrete phrases rather than the abstract ones. So his argument is vision is the most powerful of our senses.

Richard Shotton [00:35:34]: So if you hear a word like "white horse," a picture springs into your mind and that makes it sticky. But if you hear an abstract phrase like "basic truth," there's no mental image that goes with that and therefore it's very, very forgettable. Now, you go back to Apple and you look at many of their great campaigns and they've used that principle. When they were trying to launch the iPod, they didn't like all the other competitors talk about storage in terms of megabytes, this abstract idea you can't picture.

Richard Shotton [00:36:03]: What they did instead was talk about "a thousand songs in your pocket." Because you can picture a pocket, because it's concrete, because it's visualizable. That is a much, much stickier way of communicating that idea of using language. You can visualize massive scale of impact. And it is very, very simple to do if you know about the experiment and you know that's something to strive for.

Richard Shotton [00:36:26]: So, yeah, concreteness would be one that I would be trying to apply far more if I was a marketer.

Steve Phillips [00:36:33]: That's great. And then finally, in one sentence, why is understanding human psychology important for marketers ultimately?

Richard Shotton [00:36:41]: Because we're in the business of behavior change, whether it's getting people to buy more products, switch from a competitor brand, pay a premium. These big, big questions of marketing are ones of behavior change. So why not draw on 130 years of experiments into what makes for effective behavior change?

Steve Phillips [00:36:58]: Brilliant. Okay, so that wraps up the episode of Inside Insight podcast. Thanks to Richard Shotton, founder and authority at Astro 10, for joining us. Don't forget, 20 free copies of his excellent new book, Hacking the Human Mind, are up for grabs.

Steve Phillips [00:37:15]: Check out the details in our show Notes or shoot me a DM or on LinkedIn to enter for your chance to win. If you haven't subscribed yet and want a regular stream of insight and research knowledge in your podcast feed, hit that subscribe button in your podcast app or follow us on YouTube. Okay, that's all for today, but until next time, remember, your customers always have the answers, but you have to be careful about the context in which you ask for them. Thank you very much.