Marketing Secrets for Global Brainwashing - Richard Shotton

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, founder of Astroten and an author. How do billion-dollar brands actually do it? From genius marketing tactics that make them instantly memorable to some of the funniest mistakes you’ve ever seen, there’s a psychology behind why certain brands stick. What are the principles top brands use, and how do they create content that people remember long after they’ve seen it? Expect to learn what Richard learned from studying Five Guys burger and fries, what makes Guinness a genius at their craft, what the future of marketing and branding will look like with the advent of AI, the genius marketing tactics from the world's most famous brands like Pringles, Apple, KFC, Amazon Prime and much more… - 0:00 How Five Guys Manipulated the Market 7:43 Is Price Relativity the Best Marketing Trick? 18:51 The Illusion of Effort in Marketing Psychology 25:00 Is AI About to Change the Market Forever? 29:30 The Genius Behind Splitting the G 34:09 How Liquid Death Built Killer Branding 42:38 Why Reducing Frequency Increases Enjoyment 48:54 Does Influencer Marketing Actually Work? 55:01 KFC's Secret of Scarcity 01:02:25 Positive vs Negative: Why Framing is Everything 01:08:21 Hacking the Smart Consumer 01:20:25 Why Taglines are So Effective 01:24:57 Are Marketers Still Fighting the Semmelweis Reflex? 01:31:54 Where to Find Richard - Get a free sample or 30% off a one-month supply of Timeline at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom30 Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Good news, I'm going back on tour with a brand new live show in Australia, New Zealand and Bali. If you are interested in learning how to overcome imposter syndrome, reach your goals while not missing your entire life, my perspective on where true confidence comes from, everything I've ever discovered about discipline, plus brand new insights that I've never spoken about on the podcast, then join me on stage as I explore all of these topics with you. And you can get involved during an extensive Q and A where we work through the biggest questions that you have right now. Perth and Brisbane are completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali. And you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to chriswilliamson.live. What did you learn from Five Guys?

• 0:44Richard Shotton?

  So Five Guys is the opening chapter and we talk about something that they did very powerfully, which is when they launched, they were relentless at focusing on just doing burger and chips. So people like McDonald's have got seduced by the fact that they could launch fillet, fish and chicken burgers. But Five Guys relentlessly honed down on just doing burgers. Now, some of the benefit of that is a ability just to get better at cooking, better at producing your core product. But psychologists argue there's something else on top of it. So there's an idea called the gold dilution effect. And the first studies

• 1:26Richard Shotton?

  were done by Zhang and Fishback back in 2007. And they did a very simple experiment. Recruit a group of people, randomize them into two subgroups. And the first set of people are told, if you eat tomatoes, it's very good for your heart health. Here are the reasons. And that group are asked to say whether they think eating tomatoes is worth doing for their heart health. Second group of people, they see exactly the same text, exactly the same reasons and logic and facts about why tomato eating is so good for cardiovascular health. But they are also told if you eat tomatoes, it will improve your eye health. It will reduce degenerative diseases.

• 2:08Richard Shotton?

  Now, when that second group are asked to say how good eating tomatoes is for heart health, they come back with a 12% lower score. So even though they've seen the same facts, because in this second group, there was an additional reason thrown in, it reduced, it diluted the believability in that core reason. So there's a psychological as well as practical benefit about communicating that you do one thing well. People have a rule of thumb in their head that you can't be a jack of all trades, you know, or if you are, you'll be a master of none of them. So there's a sacrifice in credibility and believability if you claim to do multiple things.

• 2:51Chris Williamson?

  What does that say about sort of underlying human psychology? Is it that we have a kind of a zero sum or a resource limitation on how much we think we should be able to distribute between the traits of a particular offer?

• 3:08Richard Shotton?

  I think a lot of these biases that behavioral scientists identify, that psychologists identify, they're generally true. I mean, all things being equal, you tend to get better at a task if it is the sole focus of your attention. If you spend 40 hours a week being a cyclist, you're going to be a better cyclist than if I spent 10 hours a week. So people have a sensible rule of thumb in their head, but then the danger is they overapply it in situations where it's not relevant. Like in the situation Zhang set up, people got the same facts about cardiovascular health, but because they threw in this second benefit, it seemed to detract from it. So I think it's often the misapplication of a generally sensible rule of thumb.

• 3:54Chris Williamson?

  Is the rule or the lesson for brands here that you need to win one thing very well and be very cautious about trying to add additional offers and features and potential advantages that people can get by using it?

• 4:10Richard Shotton?

  That's a, yeah, that's a, that's a fair summary. It's essentially the argument that be very, very careful about adding extra reasons to believe because what they will gradually do is undermine believability in the, the core reason to buy your product. So if you start saying you're all things to all people, over time, gradually, insidiously, that original reason to buy gradually disappears.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  Uh, reasons to believe is a wonderful way to put it. The believability thing is really interesting. So, you know, selfishly, I've got uh, new tonic. I've got my uh, productivity drink and I'm shamelessly using yours and Sutherland's insights around behavioral science in an attempt to do this. And uh, it does lots of things. Um, but we could have talked about procrastination. We could have talked about uh, alertness. We could have talked about energy, but we just tried to get one word, which was productivity. And we were just went for one single thing. And I think the problem we have with productivity, the problem we're currently facing, we may end up pivoting a little bit, is that, and we've got, we're using fuel your focus and productivity drinks. There's two things that kind of synonymous

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  with each other. I think the problem is it's two-way morphous as an offering. I think, I don't think that people necessarily want to be focused or productive. I think they want to get their job done with limited effort. So we're trying to think now about what a pivot from a copy perspective would be to talk about the outcome as opposed to the sort of mediator between you and the outcome. Like you don't want focus. You want your work completed. You don't want productivity. You want to be efficient. You want like efficiently to complete the, the task that's in front of you. So.

• 5:50Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I think there's two bits there. Firstly, selling the outcome rather than the, the product makes sense. I think it was Levitt said, you know, if you've got a drill, don't sell nine inch, I don't know, drill bits, sell nine inch holes. So I think there's an argument there. But, but the um, the other bit that struck me when you're talking about things like productivity and focus is the.

• 6:13Richard Shotton?

  A long, awful lot of experimentation shows that people are pretty bad at remembering abstract data. They're very good at remembering concrete, physical things. So the original study was by Ian Beg back in nineteen seventy two, and he recruits a group of people, reads them twenty-two word phrases. He doesn't mention it to the participants, but half of these two-word phrases are what he calls abstract concepts. So they're intangible ideas like basic truth. Half of the phrases he reads out are what he calls concrete phrases. So they described physical things like a white horse. So he reads out this list,

• 6:55Richard Shotton?

  and then later on he asks people what they can remember. And his key finding is people can remember on average nine percent of the abstractions, but thirty-six percent of the concrete phrases. So you are four times more likely to remember the thing that you can visualize. And Beg's explanation applies just as much to twenty twenty-six. His argument is vision's the most powerful of our senses. So if you use language we can visualize, it's very sticky. But if you stay in this realm of abstraction, like focus or productivity, people can understand what you're saying, but they'll struggle to remember it, you know, a minute or two after you've you've mentioned it. So there could be something

• 7:33Chris Williamson?

  there. I was gonna say, what would be an equivalent way to visualize increased productivity or focus?

• 7:40Richard Shotton?

  Well, coming up with that on the fly would be very hard.

• 7:43Chris Williamson?

  Freestyle rapping might be a little.

• 7:45Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This could go disastrously wrong, but maybe concrete, sorry, maybe specific examples of people doing it.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 7:52Richard Shotton?

  Red Bull didn't say Red Bull gives you energy, which is abstract. They said Red Bull gives you wings. That's something you can picture and visualize. Apple didn't say you get a gigabyte of memory when they first launched the iPod. They said a thousand songs in your pod pocket. You can picture a pocket, can't picture a gigabyte or a megabyte. So I I think what those businesses and copyrighters did so successfully is translate that abstract objective into something that people could could picture.

• 8:24Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about Red Bull. Obviously, absolute giga brand.

• 8:32Chris Williamson?

  Pretty fascinating, I'm going to guess, from a consumer behaviour standpoint. What have you learned about them?

• 8:37Richard Shotton?

  I think one of the most powerful things they've done, and you may have covered this with Rory Sutherland, was apply this principle of price relativity. So a core concept of behavioural science is when people are weighing up what a product is worth paying for, they don't look at the benefits that product brings and then try and translate that on a universal yardstick. So they don't think to themselves, okay, well, a can of Red Bull will give me one unit of happiness and I will pay one dollar per unit of happiness, whether it's a pair of jeans or a soft drink. You know, people don't do that because it's a complex question. And Daniel Kahneman argued when people face complex questions,

• 9:20Richard Shotton?

  what they tend to do, even if they don't realise it, is replace the complex question with a simpler alternative. And the simpler alternative is how much did I pay for something similar? So if a new item like Red Bull launches, if it's more than a similar purchase, people think it's bad value. If it's less than a similar purchase, people think it's good value. Now, when you first hear that, it sounds bleeding obvious. But actually, that's a very powerful insight for a marketer. Because if you accept that value is perceived relatively rather than absolutely, what it leads to is thinking, if I can change my mental comparison set, I can change the willingness of my consumer, you know, the willingness to pay.

• 10:01Chris Williamson?

  Is this the Rolls Royce thing?

• 10:03Richard Shotton?

  Well, this, I would say, is the Red Bull thing. I mean, it could be the Rolls Royce, the Rolls Royce example would be, don't sell them at car shows, sell them at yacht shows or air shows, because a Rolls Royce is cheap compared to a private jet, not cheap compared to a Audi Mercedes. But think, think about Red Bull. When they launched, the standard soft drink was about half the price.

• 10:25Richard Shotton?

  And the standard soft drink, and I'll use the UK numbers, what Coke and Pepsi did was they sold in these squat fat three hundred and thirty mil cylinders. If Red Bull had launched in exactly that same can, it would have been compared to those prices. And people might have paid a five or a 10% premium because they knew it was highly caffeinated, had this extra functionality, but they wouldn't have paid twice as much. But paradoxically, you change the shape of the can, you make it smaller to two fifty mils, you make it tall and thin. And essentially, you've broken this unhelpful comparison with cheap soft drinks. And if you look around, quite a few businesses have done that. It's a very powerful way of changing willingness to pay.

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the other examples of businesses that have done that?

• 11:14Richard Shotton?

  So Seedlip, are you familiar with that?

• 11:18Richard Shotton?

  It, ah, well, very, it's basically a fake gin, so it's a non-alcoholic gin.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 11:23Richard Shotton?

  And what they did though brilliantly, they sold maybe two or three years ago, I think tens of millions to Diageo. This is phrased on the bottle, I think it's a distilled non-alcoholic spirit. It sells in the spirits aisle of Tesco's and Sainsbury's, but the kind of non-alcoholic end. The imagery on the front is like, you know, beautiful drawings, looks like a craft gin. And it sells for about twenty pounds a bottle. Now, what people think is, well, you know, a fancy craft gin sells for about thirty pounds a bottle. This stuff hasn't got any alcohol in it, I'm not prepared to pay as much. But, you know, twenty pounds, a bit expensive, but it's ten pounds less, that seems, you know, reasonable, I'll buy it.

• 12:07Richard Shotton?

  Now, think about an alternative universe where that brand was launched as a cordial, which is what it basically is. If it was launched in Dayglow colours, next to the Ribeen, and next to the Robinson squash, now, people might. Be prepared to pay, I don't know, double what you pay for rye bean or another fruit cordials. But they wouldn't pay five times or six times as much. Even if this stuff tasted like the net of the gods, people wouldn't pay that kind of premium. So it's about where you set your benchmark. People will adjust from that comparative benchmark. But the general finding is people don't adjust as far as they should. So you throw out this super expensive benchmark through design or comparison set. And then as a business, you reap the benefits.

• 12:52Chris Williamson?

  You know, it's an interesting example of this. In the UK, there are a co-investor in Nutonic, which is what makes me think about it. Grenade bars, familiar with them and their story?

• 13:03Richard Shotton?

  I'm familiar with the brand, but not the story. So I know they're kind of protein bars and.

• 13:08Chris Williamson?

  Correct. What are you looking at for the next one? Look at the numbers, look at the price difference between them and a chocolate bar. They outsell Cadbury's on the forecourt. And they've got pride of place. Well, why? It's because they're probably more than double the price, maybe triple, maybe quadruple the price. And it's because they moved themselves out of the category of, look at you, there you go, writing it down. No, no, get it down, get it down. Alan Barrett, who's the founder of Grenade and Nutonic investor is just, it was such a genius insight that there was an upper bound of how much people were prepared to play for a chocolate bar. But when it's, oh, it's protein, this is good for me, it's a better for you treat.

• 13:52Chris Williamson?

  It still tastes sort of comparable, but I have way less guilt. And it's got all of this added advantage of it hitting my protein target for the day. And yeah, they, they now are more expensive and do higher volume.

• 14:07Richard Shotton?

  Now, there's a double benefit there, which is people have another rule of thumb in their head, which is price equals quality. So high price is a badge of quality. There's a study from Baba Shib, who's at Stanford. It's a really nice, slightly kind of duplicitous study with a bit of subterfuge. He gets a group of people. He serves them five different bottles of wine. And each of these wines has a very prominent price label. But the twist in the experiment is there are only four different liquids. So one of the wines is repeated. So people get to sample each of the wines, they have a tiny little sip from each of the bottles. And they will drink, say, a Cabernet Sauvignon, thinking it comes out of a $5 bottle. And they'll rate it as kind of mediocre.

• 14:53Richard Shotton?

  Few minutes later, they're drinking exactly the same wine. But it comes out this fancy wine bottle, it's got this big $45 price label. And when people rate it, not only do the qualitative adjectives get a lot better. When they come to the quantitative scoring, people give it a 70%, seven zero, 70% higher score. So according to Shiv, people, to a degree, not completely, but to a degree, they experience what they expect to experience. And one of the best guides to what thinks is going to be great is what a brand's charging. Cause we have a rule and a thumb in our head which says, look, if a brand is brilliant, it's created an amazing product.

• 15:36Richard Shotton?

  Surely they're going to maximize their profit. Surely it's going to be at a high price. Now, only someone who has a bit of a mediocre product would sell it at a cheap price. So the actual high price also then will support the Grenade Bar perceptions of quality. And those perceptions will translate into actual experience.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly around that, we are currently the most expensive energy drink category product available on the Morrison's local meal deal. So if you get a Sainsbury's or a Morrison's local meal deal, and this is going to be fascinating to see what happens. So I think we're launching in Sainsbury's, I probably shouldn't say this, fuck it, whatever, I've said it now. But I think we're launching in Sainsbury's at some point within the next month or so. And on the meal deal, I don't, do people, I don't think people in America have meal deals. This is a, this is a big problem in America. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, it is absolute sacrilege. America sucks at sandwiches. America absolutely sucks at sandwiches.

• 16:36Chris Williamson?

  What I want is a high quality brown bread, slice of brown bread, two of them, cut into triangles, want them cut diagonally, and I want them filled with some salad and some chicken and a bit of mayonnaise. And I cannot buy that in America. I can go to Subway or I can go to like Mikey's Subs or whatever, but I can't, I can't get that. Anyway, in the UK, this is kind of everybody's lunch in one form or another. It's probably quite on brand for what Americans think about British people too, that they get a lot of sandwiches. You can get a sandwich, some sort of main, some sort of side thing and a drink. And it's usually five, between four and five pounds, something like that. Now, you're able by bundling these together with a bottle of water and a saurine and

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  something else, you're able to get a discount. What we are, because of how high we've priced ourselves, but because we still sit in the premium meal deal category, what we're going to be fascinated to see is whether or not people think, I want to maximize my buying utility. Oh, I got an even bigger discount because I got that really expensive productivity drink with all of the additional stuff in, and I got that as a part of the meal deal. And I'm going to be really interested to see if that grenade effect is going to, is going to happen to us too.

• 17:51Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I think that'd be, that'd be fascinating. I think there's maybe two bits going on. You've got this sense of getting a bigger discount, but I wonder if there's another part, which is it won't damage perceptions of quality because maybe it's seen as gaming the system and getting a little, you know, you've kind of caught.

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  They haven't even noticed this.

• 18:15Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, and I think that hopefully will maybe protect you from some of that degradation of perception otherwise.

• 18:21Chris Williamson?

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• 19:02Chris Williamson?

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• 19:41Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, and you know, the, some of that power of Guinness has been phenomenal, you know, product creation, the Zero products, Guinness Zero is phenomenal. So I think probably the only alcoholic beer which tastes anything like its parent brand. So there's some amazing product development going on. But in the book, Michaela and I talk about a very specific campaign. So we talk about this idea of good things come to those who wait. And to me, that is an amazing example of what's known as the pratfall effect. So the pratfall effect is the argument that if you admit a flaw, if you're open about a weakness, you become more appealing.

• 20:24Richard Shotton?

  So the initial experiment was done all the way back in 1966 by Elliot Aronson at Harvard. Simple study, recruits a colleague from his university, gets that colleague to take part in a quiz. Aaronson has given the contestant all the answers. So the guy does amazingly well, gets 92% of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles, now looks like an absolute genius. But then as the quiz is coming to a close, he makes what someone in the 1960s might have called a pratfall. He spills a cup of coffee down himself. Now, Aaronson has recorded all of this, and he takes the recording and plays it to listeners. But sometimes, he plays out the full version to listeners, so they get the spillage and

• 21:08Richard Shotton?

  the great performance. Other times, he edits out the spillage. What Aaronson finds when he questions everyone as to how appealing the contestant is, is this slightly counterintuitive result. He finds that there is a greater preference amongst the group who heard the spillage compared to the group who just heard the amazing quiz performance. And it's not a small difference. The people that heard the spillage and the great performance, they rate the contestant 45% better than the people who just heard the amazing quiz performance. So he calls this the pratfall effect. Essentially, this idea that people or products, and there are some nuances here, but people or products that exhibit a flaw become more appealing.

• 21:52Richard Shotton?

  And I think that's at the very heart of this Guinness line. Good things come to those who wait. You don't try and sweep under the carpet. You don't try and airbrush out the irritation of the delay of Guinness. What you do instead is lean into it. Because people assume if it has, you know, taken a lot of time to make, it must be higher quality. I think that's at the heart of probably the best ever Guinness campaign.

• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  It seems like there's two things going on. One is identifying the flaw. The second is kind of an Ikea effect craft, it's taking a while to make thing. So if it wasn't for that, I mean, I guess you could, I've heard rumours that websites like Skyscanner, they could load all of their results immediately. The reason that they have the loading bar is to do the look at how hard we are searching for you. We are getting you the best deals possible. It is taking so much time. Bing, there it's done.

• 22:51Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, well, I don't know whether Skyscanner artificially slowed things down, but there are definitely experiments that show if they did, it would increase people's sense of the results being comprehensive. So Ryan Buel at Harvard Business School ran a study into this and he randomizes people into two groups. Some people use a Skyscanner style site and they are given their results immediately. Other people, the site is slowed down and on the results page, rather than the results popping up immediately, there's a little bar that appears that goes round and round saying, "Searching Alitalia, searching United, searching British Airways." And that group have to wait a couple of extra seconds

• 23:36Richard Shotton?

  and that group rate their results, as I don't know, it's something like 10 or 15% more comprehensive than the first result, first group. There's essentially a rule of thumb in our head, you know, often called the kind of labour illusion. The more effort we think someone else has gone to create a product, the higher quality we think that product will be, even when people are getting exactly the same beer or exactly the same vacuum cleaner. If people know about the stories of effort behind it, it changes their perceptions.

• 24:08Chris Williamson?

  I remember a short from some seminar that was given by an advertising guy, maybe it was a designer or something like that. And he's sort of talking to a room and he says, "If, how much would you pay for me to design the logo for your company?" And the guy gives a number. He says, "What if I can do this in 60 minutes?" And the guy said, "I'll give you less."

• 24:26Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Chris Williamson?

  Says, "Well, hang on a second. Does that mean that you would pay me more if it took me longer?" And he just explains this effort illusion thing perfectly.

• 24:35Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, in the book, the brand that I think really leans into this illusion of effort is Dyson. So across all their communications, you know, PR, advertising, the website, you know, even the very first line of James Dyson's autobiography, they keep on referencing this number. Now, James Dyson says, I went four years, I went through 5,127 prototypes before I created the bagless vacuum. Now logically, or at least from a very narrow minded logical perspective, how many prototypes he went through is irrelevant. What people should

• 25:14Richard Shotton?

  care about is the beautiful design or the quality of how well it sucks up dirt. But what behavioural scientists have shown is again and again, if you show people the same product, sometimes you tell people the amount of prototypes or the amount of effort that went into it, sometimes you don't, you get these wildly different scores, wildly different perceptions of premiumness. So absolutely emphasizing effort creates a perception of quality.

• 25:42Chris Williamson?

  What is the advent of AI doing to the advertising landscape in that case? Because what we're doing here is basically undercutting the illusion of effort.

• 25:51Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, absolutely. So there is a Dutch psychologist called Kobe Millet, VU Amsterdam, and he was interested in that. Back in 2023, runs a simple experiment. He shows people products. So sometimes one of the products was a poster of a skull. And sometimes he labels it as hand drawn, sometimes he labels it as created by an AI powered robot. And people are asked about the artistic merit of the poster, the creativity of the poster, and crucially, purchase intent. Now, for every single metric, he sees the same pattern.

• 26:32Richard Shotton?

  People who saw the hand drawn label, they rate that poster better than the group who saw the AI powered label. And the scale is quite surprising. Now, when it comes to purchase intent, there is a 61% difference. Now Millet's explanation for this is the illusion of effort. He says people's personal experience of Claude or ChatGPT is that they will spit out an answer in a few seconds. So therefore, we think it's low effort. So if we tell people our product has been created by AI, all things being equal, that product will be rated worse than if people are told that it was hand drawn or or made through human effort.

• 27:18Richard Shotton?

  So you've got to be really careful as a business when you're bringing AI into your products. Now, I'd be a Luddite to suggest don't do that. But what you have to do is be aware of the illusion of effort and therefore shift the conversation. You know, shift the conversation away from how quickly the product was delivered to how much effort you put into setting up the process calls and processes to get this AI system set up in the first place.

• 27:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, I think this is one of the reasons that people have an ick around AI music. There's a lot of that at the moment. Spotify has a bunch of charts that are being dominated by AI bands. And an interesting realisation I had, so the illusion of effort idea that you were talking about. Everybody knows, everyone that's ever tried to sing or pick up a new instrument realises just how difficult and inaccessible it is. That, I think, gives music a kind of protected class. That people, it's inaccessible to most people. I can't read music, I don't understand how it works, I know what I like, but I can't recreate it.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  If you gave me any of the instruments, including the one that I was born with that's at the front of my face, I wouldn't be able to make the sounds of the songs that I like. And that, I think, makes it feel particularly egregious for someone to jump over it. I wonder whether there's an equivalent where it comes to art as well. If somebody's drawing something, so I I'm not particularly good at drawing, but I can get an AI to do it. But the fact that I've skipped the queue of something that used to be a reliably costly signal of competence and effort. Uh, the fact that I've circumvented that feels sort of additionally unfair.

• 29:03Richard Shotton?

  I mean, that might well be true. I mean, what the experiments are very clear on is if you look at these metrics for, you know, how much you're prepared to pay or how good quality you think the item is. If people see exactly the same products, you change this labelling and you get a different score. And it does extend beyond music. So you've got Millet's work with, you know, art. I did something with Michael Aaron Flicker, just showing people a fake new brand. We didn't say it was a fake new brand, but we showed them these pictures of a brand called Black Sheep Vodka. And sometimes we said, look, the designer went through 143 iterations. Other times, we just showed them the picture

• 29:48Richard Shotton?

  of the bottle. And the people that saw that story of effort, they thought the bottle design was more beautiful, significantly more beautiful than the people that didn't hear that story of effort. So it certainly seems to extend beyond what we might think of as art into commercial design, all the way through to estate agent services have been shown to have a similar effect.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  On the Guinness thing, what do you make of splitting the G? Have you seen this?

• 30:20Richard Shotton?

  I have. I went to the Guinness storehouse, the giant, you know, kind of brewery tour you can do in Dublin. I went with my son. I think it was last summer and that's, or maybe summer before, that's when I was introduced to this. He was trying to show me how to do it. I mean, it's adding a bit of fun to the experience. I think Guinness themselves try not to promote it because it's probably a little bit dubious in terms of kind of safe drinking. But I think it's an organic thing that gets the brand talked about, adds a bit of excitement and uncertainty and.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  I'm fascinated by these things that are bottom up, almost anti-marketing campaigns. I think that it's a. Kind of like a perpetual motion machine for a brand. I think white monster energy has the equivalent at the moment as well. It's almost a meta meme. It's Americana. It's WWF from the 90s. It's Creed and nu metal. It's it's heavy hits in the NFL. It's Linkin Park and Transformers, the early the early movies. It's all of these things. And at no point, as far as I can see, has Monster Energy pushed this white monster

• 31:33Chris Williamson?

  thing in the same way as splitting the G from Guinness. Just they did not place the word Guinness on the side of that pint glass at the point that would be two-ish mouthfuls, two and a half mouthfuls deep, hard enough to make it hard, not so hard that you have to drink it. It's just the way it's done. And then this now has been pushed out so much. I don't know whether you saw the stories from last summer in the UK. Some pubs made people buy two or three drinks before they could buy a Guinness. You weren't allowed. You weren't allowed to because they had Guinness shortages. They had such a Guinness shortage, they had to fucking titrate the supply to customers.

• 32:16Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. So two things there. The first, I wonder if there's an element of, you know, that supposed, I think it's Arnold Palmer, the golfer's phrase, you know, the harder I practice, the luckier I get. I wonder if there's something akin to that in the world of brands. In the the bigger you get, the more enjoyable people find your kind of communications, the warmth of the brand, I think the more likely these spontaneous ideas are going to spring up. Now, more people, more chance a drinker comes up with the idea. And also, I think if there's warmth towards the brand, they're more likely to do it. So I think that, you know, you might have this kind of Matthew effect of to the best brands, you get the best organic ideas.

• 33:00Richard Shotton?

  But that second point you mentioned is around the shortage. Now, I'm not claiming in any way that Guinness actually did this. Well, I think if I was a brand, I would certainly be tempted occasionally to spread rumors of a shortage.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  Supply limitation.

• 33:13Richard Shotton?

  The most powerful ideas in valuable science, the one that when psychologists try and do comparative ranking of some of these biases, the one that comes out towards the top again and again is scarcity. You know, we want what we can't have. There's this amazing G K Chesterton phrase where he says, the way to love anything is to realise it might be lost. And I think you get these stories in the press about they're going to be a shortage. And then it will drive even greater demand because that fear of missing out, that fear of, or that belief that lots of other people want this thing, you know, it powers the desire for it.

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

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• 34:34Chris Williamson?

  or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavours shipped right to your door. Right now, you can get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom. That's athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom. Speaking of another pretty interesting brand, Red Bull, Guinness, Liquid Death, pretty disruptive, I think, for a water company. I know they're now moving into a lot of other products. What's your perspective on Liquid Death?

• 35:03Richard Shotton?

  So, I mean, I think it's a fantastic marketing case study.

• 35:10Richard Shotton?

  Because if there is one factor that captures attention, it's behaving distinctively. So the original studies into this were done all the way back in nineteen thirty three by a German psychologist called Hedwig von Restorf. It was the University of Berlin. And what she basically did, I mean, with a bit of changing, she'd kind of give people lists of words. So I might write down, let's say, ten words, give them to you. Nine of them would be items of furniture, one of them would be an animal. And then I would take those lists away, ask you what you could remember. And overwhelmingly, people were much more likely to remember the distinctive animal rather than the

• 35:56Richard Shotton?

  the kind of nine bits of furniture. So her argument was we are hardwired to notice what's distinctive. Now, that is a very, very well-known finding. It's been repeated over the last kind of ninety odd years. But if you think about an awful lot of advertising, brands end up aping the behaviour of their competitors. You know, you look at watch ads, you know, they all follow the same formula or car ads, you know. In Britain, it's always a kind of seems to be a kind of Central European dusty mountainous scene with them going round the corner. Again and again, these norms of behaviour spring up.

• 36:39Richard Shotton?

  And when it comes to water, there were some traditions that every brand like Perrier or all the others seem to adhere to, which is, you've got to have clear glass so people can see the purity of products, you've got to have shots of nature, you've got to

• 36:59Richard Shotton?

  have alpine scenes and yoga moms. And I think what Liquid Death did so brilliantly is realise, you know, all this stuff is just there for tradition's sake. You don't need to communicate in that way. And actually, if we take the polar opposite approach and we behave like a craft beer or an energy drink and have these outrageously gory ads and, you know, out there humour, that will stand out, it'll get attention. And frankly, if you don't have attention, everything else you do in marketing communication is academic. So I think that relentless pursuit of being distinctive.

• 37:35Richard Shotton?

  And then crucially, being distinctive in a consistent way. They didn't have one ad that was out there in a certain direction and then a completely different one the next time. They all had this theme of kind of behaving like a heavy metal band or a craft beer brand. So they had this recognizable way of breaking conventions. I think that is at the heart of their American success.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  How important's humour?

• 38:01Richard Shotton?

  Humour? Yeah, absolutely. So Mike Cesario, the founder of Liquid Death, he talks about the fact that he found it strange that the beers and crisps and candies, they had all the fun when it came to advertising and the healthy virtuous goods were all a bit hair shirted in their communication. So they have definitely doubled down on being funny and humorous. And again, it's a great way of attracting attention. The etymology of advert is the Latin, I think, for turn towards. And what do people turn towards? They turn

• 38:46Richard Shotton?

  towards things that bring them pleasure and happiness. They turn away from dry dusty information. So to get attention, one of the best things you can do is amuse people.

• 38:57Chris Williamson?

  What about Haagen Dazs? That's a brand that I kind of forgot about in the US because I don't think that distro is as big, quite as big over here. Ben and Jerry's and there's sort of three buckets of ice cream. There's very sort of experimental stuff. The Ben and Jerry's, we're going to that. There's healthy craft better for you Amy's ice cream type stuff. And then there's the high protein good for you, lower calorie. So Haagen Dazs, I forget about, but I know that they're a monster of a brand.

• 39:37Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. So the origin story of Haagen Dazs is, I think, fascinating.

• 39:44Richard Shotton?

  And it is a little bit dubious. I'm not saying I would recommend exactly what they do to other people, but they were set up in the Bronx in the 1940s, maybe the very early 50s. And they were set up by a Jewish couple who had emigrated from, I think, Ukraine and Russia. And they had moved to New York, kind of gone into the family ice cream business. And they decided they wanted to launch this premium sophisticated ice cream. They wanted to charge a lot more for it than the competitors. And they thought, well, how do we create this image of sophistication?

• 40:24Richard Shotton?

  Well, why don't we essentially position this brand as being Danish? Now, there's nothing at all Danish about Haagen Dazs. It was created in the Bronx. The couple had never ever been to Denmark. I think they chose it because Denmark had a particularly strong reputation that it had, the populace during Second World War had done an awful lot to help Jews escape from the Nazis. So there was a lot of admiration, I think, for Denmark in particular. But basically, they wanted a kind of European country that felt a bit sophisticated. So even though they hadn't been to Denmark, they start generating

• 41:08Richard Shotton?

  names and they come up with Haagen Dazs. And if you go to a Dane, they'd be like, this isn't Danish. This is, you know, we don't have, I think, umlauts over the A. We don't have Z S in our name. It doesn't even make sense as a Danish thing. But to American ear in the 1940s, it sounded Danish. And then the couple doubled down by putting a little map of Denmark on the tub. And what's so clever about this?

• 41:35Richard Shotton?

  Albeit morally dubious, we can maybe talk about that, is people taste what they expect to taste. And if you wrap up a product in this aura of sophisticated provenance, people assume it tastes better and then they go out and look for confirming evidence. So exactly the same ice cream tasted that little better, little bit better to an American palate because it had this set of associations of Danishness.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think, what, what, go ahead.

• 42:05Richard Shotton?

  I know, all I was gonna say is I, the moral from this, that I'm, I'm aware of what is quite charming when it's a mum and dad brand is one thing. When it's a multi-million dollar brand, it's a little bit less charming. But the, I think the lesson is what we experience isn't just due to the physical product. It's not due to the, you know, the, just the milk and the fats and the sugars. It's also what we think we're gonna taste. So the, the colour of the packaging, the weight of it, the story behind it, the provenance, you know, all these things are just as important. And you as a marketer need to create those positive perceptions to give your product the best chance of success.

• 42:43Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it is about the Danes that suggests that they're good at ice cream?

• 42:48Richard Shotton?

  I, I think it's the fact that it was a far away country that, you know, Europe rightly or wrongly probably had this aura of sophistication. It's where luxury brands came from. It's where, you know, Renaissance figures came from. I think it was a sense of Europe having some of these values and then doubling down on Denmark because for a Jewish couple, their like history of fighting against antisemitism was something that would have appealed. I think that was the, the case of why Denmark in particular is more a personal story to them.

• 43:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about the pumpkin spice latte? I know that we're into spring now, but the Starbucks.

• 43:26Richard Shotton?

  Autumn. Yeah, yeah. Fall or whatever it's called. Yeah.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we're into, we're into.

• 43:30Richard Shotton?

  Oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah, no, no, we are.

• 43:32Chris Williamson?

  Spring shortly. So the pumpkin spice latte is very long on. Yeah. What did you learn about Starbucks?

• 43:39Richard Shotton?

  I think the point there is the time specific nature of the pumpkin spice latte. So, you know, we've talked already about this idea of scarcity, that we want what we can't have. The brilliant thing about pumpkin spice latte is they launched this product. They have huge success. What 99% of businesses would have done is think, wow, we've got this cash machine of a brand. Let's just run it all year round and let's maximize our profits. And if a business had done that, it would have been super successful for a year or two. But probably over time, they would have lost the very kind of magic at the heart of that, that variant.

• 44:22Richard Shotton?

  So there's an idea called habituation, which is the idea that over time we become a bit desensitized to enjoyment. So there's a study from Leif Nelson at NYU, which demonstrates this quite powerfully. He lets people experience a massage chair and it's a very pleasurable massage chair. And some people just sit in the chair for three minutes, three minutes straight. And then they rate how much they enjoyed it out of nine and the average rating is 6.05. Other people, there's a one minute 20 seconds session in the chair.

• 45:05Richard Shotton?

  They then turn the chair off for 20 seconds and then there's another one minute 20 seconds with the chair going. So last for three minutes, but there's no massaging going on for 20 of those seconds. Now logically, you'd expect, well, surely this group will enjoy the experience less. They had less time with the enjoyable aspect. But actually you see something quite different. The rating actually goes amongst this group to 7.05 out of nine. So from 6.05 to 7.05, you get a 17% improvement. What Nelson argues is a curse of human nature is that when we experience saying

• 45:46Richard Shotton?

  pleasurable, over time, the enjoyment level wanes because we stop comparing it to not having it. We compare it to the last time of using the service. So over time, we habituate, we get used to these pleasant things. So I think with something that's very powerfully flavoured, like the pumpkin spice latte, something's a little bit strange. They'd sold it all year. And by the sixth pumpkin spice latte, by the time it got to December, you'd be sick of the bloody stuff.

• 46:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Richard Shotton?

  But by stopping it before that happens, removing it from sale, what you allow is this appreciation, anticipation and desire to grow back again. So I think they turned something that would have lasted for a couple of years if it'd been permanently on sale, into something that's been going for about 20 years.

• 46:36Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Yeah, the LTO, the limited time offer, the sort of drop model as it's known. It's how Supreme, the clothing company, do their things. It's how a lot of clothing companies, independent and big, build up, build up, build up. It's there and then it's gone.

• 46:53Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. And actually, you can actually spot this if you look hard enough in products where it's not immediately apparent. So one brilliant example is, do you remember Wordle? So that game, I think you had, was it six goes to guess a five letter word? You know, hugely popular, Josh Wardle, the designer, sold it for New York Times, I think for about $10 million. Now, at the height, you had hundreds of millions of people playing this game, or tens of millions of people playing it. But what's interesting is even though usage spiked during Covid, this product had been around for ages. But when Josh Wardle

• 47:38Richard Shotton?

  first created it, the difference was you could do your Wordle game, and as soon as you finished, you could do another, and then you could do another, and then you could do another. And when it was set up like that, barely anyone played it. It was like dozens of people playing it a day. But then during COVID, Wordle becomes slightly obsessed with the new Atoms crossword. And he wonders to himself, do I love the crossword? Because once I've finished the cryptic crossword, I have to wait till tomorrow to get the next one. Now, and it builds this sense of anticipation. So he changes the programming of Wordle so that now you do one, you finish it, you can't do another. There are no more around. You have to wait till the next one's released in 24 hours' time.

• 48:23Richard Shotton?

  And he attributes the success to kind of baking in this scarcity, baking into this limited time offer into the very, the very heart of the product.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

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• 49:36Chris Williamson?

  One thing that I think about when it comes to modern marketing influences the world of influencer marketing. What do you think people are getting wrong with that? What are the areas that that goes well and what are the areas that that fails from a behavioural science standpoint?

• 49:52Richard Shotton?

  I think when it goes well, there is an idea called the messenger effect. So the original study was done back in nineteen fifty three by Hovland and Weiss. They were at Yale at the time. It's quite a nice study. They they stop people in the street. And they asked them a topical matter of the day, like, can we can the US build a nuclear powered submarine in the next twelve months? People say yes or no. And then, once the psychologists have got the answer, they invite those people back to their lab in four days' time. And when the participants arrive at the lab, on a table, there is a A four sheet of paper. And there is a very tightly argued bit of prose about why the participant is completely wrong.

• 50:37Richard Shotton?

  So if I said, yes, a submarine can be built, very powerful argument about why it's just not practical. Once people have read this argument, they have to say whether they've changed their opinion. Most people don't. But the twist in the experiment is sometimes the argument is attributed to a credible source. So in the case of the submarine, it was Oppenheimer, the physicist. Sometimes the argue was attributed to a low credibility source, so Pravda, the Russian newspaper. And what the psychologists found is that if the argument was attributed to a low credibility source, seven percent changed their mind. High credibility source, twenty three percent changed their mind. So even though everyone gets exactly the same logical argument, the same facts, the same figures, the same

• 51:24Richard Shotton?

  persuasive power of argument, you get this three and a half fold difference in influence dependent on who it came from. So their argument was, who says something can be as important as what's said? Now, that study was done, what, seventy three years ago? But yeah, but but it's been repeated again and again. I'm just going back to the original one because I think it's the clearest. It's the the simplest. But since they've done that, what people have started to look at is, well, what makes for an effective messenger? And many different variables. Three of the big ones are the messenger is neutral. So if I tell you amazing, uh, my book's amazing, you might be skeptical.

• 52:07Richard Shotton?

  Even if I got my brother or my wife to tell you that, it's still even that tiny extra bit of neutrality will boost believability a bit. So neutrality is important. Credibility is important, and that's why Oppenheimer was so powerful. But then the third bit that's really interesting is relatability. Now, I might be influenced by what my neighbor tells me about, you know, the best sports drink or the best supplements, even though my neighbor doesn't know anything particularly in that area. But the fact that I relate to them, they're they're similar to me, it makes them more powerful. So I think the argument with influence would be you could get the neutrality, but ideally, if you get credibility and relatability as well, you know, then you're on to someone that can can change the the behavior of others.

• 52:50Chris Williamson?

  I was seeing some stories about experts expecting deeper creator partnerships, sort of these mega creators, they're called. So it's fewer long term brand deals and they extend into roles like co branded product lines or internal leadership titles. So I'm not sure if you saw this Virgin Voyages named J Lo as its chief entertainment officer.

• 53:11Richard Shotton?

  Okay.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  So they framed her as the co architect of the sort of onboard experience rather than just a face in ads. Uh, Ridge Wallet just got Marques Brownlee, MKBHD, he's a big tech YouTuber. He's the chief creative partner. And then SoFi just appointed the your rich BFF person, Vivian Two, as the chief of financial empowerment. So they're trying to give us sort of an internal sounding role that legitimizes her as a a financial educator inside of the company. I think we saw this with, uh, maybe to a lesser extent, Ryan Reynolds with Mint Mobile, but certainly Ryan Reynolds with the football team. Um,

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  it's somebody, smaller numbers of roles that are with higher value individuals with a more legitimate sounding position.

• 54:00Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. So once you start talking about the order of a J Lo, I think you start moving into kind of other behavioral biases. There's an idea called costly signalling. So the original work on this was done by biologists rather than behavioural scientists. But it's essentially the believability of communications is in proportion to the expense of that communications. So if there is a brand that gets a celebrity like J Lo, you know, the, the, the general person in the street won't know whether J Lo costs, and I don't know whether she costs a hundred million or fifty million, but I know she's very, very expensive.

• 54:43Richard Shotton?

  And that sends a credible signal about how much the brand believes in their offering. The argument being extravagant advertising works in the long term. You know, if I uh hire J Lo to advertise my terrible soft drink, you know, I might get people to try it once, but they're not going to recommend it to their friends, they're not going to come back, I'm going to go bust. But if I have a brilliant soft drink and I get J Lo to be the face of it, well, then it works out for me because I know that people will try it, recommend it, and it will go on and on and on like that. So the fact that extravagant spend is an effective screening mechanism.

• 55:26Richard Shotton?

  Only people who genuinely believe in their brand would do it because if you thought your brand was awful, uh adopting that largesse would, would, would make you bust. That's, I think, what makes it a, a credible and powerful and persuasive signal.

• 55:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about KFC? We talked about Five Guys. What, what have you learned from KFC?

• 55:48Richard Shotton?

  So KFC, there's, there's a few different things there. There's um, I think the power of a, a secret i- i- is quite interesting. But the other one that they did that I really loved was a bit more tactical, but it's, it's kind of one of the themes that we've, we've come back to again and again, which is um. This power of scarcity. So they did a slightly different approach to the examples we've discussed so far. And there was a wonderful Australian campaign, I think it was back in, first in 2016, where they would promote one dollar chips. So you get these big large fries for one dollars, very, very good deal. And when they did it for the first few years, hidden in the tiny little

• 56:33Richard Shotton?

  Ts and Cs at the bottom of the ads was the fact that you could only get four bags of chips per person. What the marketing team did was put that front and centre of the messaging. So they tested loads of different behavioural science biases that could boost sales. The one that works best was saying in big letters on the posters, maximum number of these bags of chips you can buy, bags of fries, four per person. And what it did was provide a very credible signal that either these chips are going to be so enticing, they're worried about selling out, or that it's such a powerful and good value deal that they're actually losing money on each sale.

• 57:19Richard Shotton?

  Now, that's not speculation. Michael Aaron and I did a very simple test. We told people about Sierra Nevada Palau being sold in America, 12 bottles of beer for 18.99. And I'm trying to remember, I think 14% of people thought it was good value. And then other occasions, we told people Sierra Nevada Palau, 12 pack of beer being sold for 18.99 in the supermarket, maximum number of cases you can buy is six. And the proportion of people who thought it was good value went up to 22%. So you get this, I think, 57, 59% improvement.

• 58:02Richard Shotton?

  People worked a rule of thumb that if a business is not letting you take as much of a product as you want, it must be a good deal. It's either so good it's going to sell out or so good it's actually hurting the bottom line. So that to me was a wonderfully simple tactic that far more people could apply.

• 58:23Chris Williamson?

  So funny because KFC's fries are actually the worst, as everybody knows.

• 58:28Richard Shotton?

  I have heard people say this.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they're the worst of all of the fries. So I would not have leaned on the fried. I suppose what's interesting about doing it with the fries as well

• 58:39Chris Williamson?

  is that that is something which you are Burger King has fries and McDonald's has fries as well. You didn't pick something that only you make. If you'd picked the signature Zinger burger, well, no one else, no one else can make that. So doing the scarcity on something which is a non-competable good would probably change the framing of it versus these you can get elsewhere, but not like this.

• 59:13Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I think, I think it was a reasonably good deal. But there's, whenever something's on offer, there's always a bit of suspicion as well, you know, have they cut corners? Is there some kind of trade off for this low price?

• 59:27Chris Williamson?

  They're trying to counter signal the discount.

• 59:29Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yes.

• 59:32Richard Shotton?

  Yes, I think, and what differentiates it from just saying, you know, limited time offer or exclusive is it is it's not just staying in this realm of statement and claim. It's not just in this realm of talk being cheap. It's actually a physical restriction, you know, you go to the counter, they will not serve you more than four. And I think it's this action rather than claim that distinguishes it from the kind of more common use of scarcity.

• 1:00:03Chris Williamson?

  I can't believe that Klarna and these companies, I thought, what are they called? Micro pay later companies?

• 1:00:11Richard Shotton?

  Oh, buy now, pay later.

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  Buy now, pay later things. Yeah. And there was this joke that you could get your Chipotle order on Klarna. So you could get your burrito, buy it today and pay for it tomorrow.

• 1:00:27Chris Williamson?

  But these, just the same as the prediction markets, these things seem to be here to stay. So what's your perspective on the buy now, pay later industry?

• 1:00:40Richard Shotton?

  So there's a longstanding idea called that the penny's a day effect. So the original study was John Golwell at Harvard and he did it with charities on a tight. So essentially, you know, he found out were people willing to donate to a charity? And sometimes the request was $365 a year. Other times it was a dollar a day for a year. And what he found is even though the sums worked out to be the same, people were much like more likely to donate if you phrased it as a dollar a day. Now, what seems to be happening is people give different weights to two sides of the equation. You know, the the dollars that are being discussed looms larger bill's mind.

• 1:01:25Richard Shotton?

  The unit of time doesn't seem to be given the weight it should be. So it's a bit like people think three times seven is different from seven times three.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:34Richard Shotton?

  So if you've got a time based product, the more you can break. Or the more that you can discuss that product in the smallest unit of time, the better it works out for you. Now, exactly the same thing happens with physical items. So I mentioned that Sierra Nevada parallel study Michael and I did. And we did another version of it. So key factor, if you say to people, a 12 pack of Sierra Nevada costs 18.99, you get 14% thinking it's good value. If you say to people, this is a different group, costs 18.99 for a 12 pack. That's the same as $1.58 a bottle.

• 1:02:16Richard Shotton?

  The proportion jumps, I think, to 29 or 30% thinking it's a good deal. So you break down a physical item into smaller subunits and you create a perception, it's better value. So one of the things Klarna offers is now I go to a website, I want to buy a jumper for $60. I don't pay $60 in one go, I pay three lots of 20. People treat three lots of 20 completely different from one hit of 60 because they're focusing too much on the 20, they're not doing the multiplying as much as they should. So, you know, brands put that on their website, retailers put Klarna or competitor on the website, they end up selling more. So

• 1:02:59Richard Shotton?

  there is a strong reason for businesses to start handing over a bit of commission to Klarna.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested in the difference between framing things as negatives versus positives. And i- it seems like the the direction that you come into this from can be pretty important.

• 1:03:21Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, so there's an idea called loss aversion. The original studies were done by Kahneman Tversky in the 70s, but they're a little bit bizarre and just got a bit confusing. I think the much better study was done in 1988 by Elliot Aronson at Harvard. So what he does is go to homeowners, 404 homeowners, nice big sample, knocks on the door, tries to sell them loft insulation. Sometimes, he says, buy my loft insulation and you'll save 75 cents a day. So psychologists would say this is the gain frame, you're emphasizing what you benefit as a consumer by taking out loft insulation. But other homeowners, he gives them the same mathematical sum, he says, look,

• 1:04:01Richard Shotton?

  take out the loft insulation, because if you don't, you'll be wasting 75 cents a day. Now, even though it's the same amount of money, by emphasizing people could be losing out on that, they could be wasting that money, he got a 50 or 60% higher response rate. So absolutely, there is an argument that the mathematically equivalent loss affects us more than the than someone getting that that gain. The way I'd put it is if you and I go our separate ways today, you realise you have lost five dollars, I find that five dollars, your unhappiness will be larger than my happiness.

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  So it would be if I knew that you'd found my five dollars.

• 1:04:48Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, don't worry. I wouldn't be telling you. I'd be keeping that secret. Yeah, yeah. You'll just see me in a slightly fancier T-shirt next time we talk.

• 1:04:55Chris Williamson?

  It makes me think about the anti-smoking ads, because it's not saying if you stop smoking, you will live four years longer. It's if you keep smoking, you will die four years sooner.

• 1:05:09Richard Shotton?

  Yes, the only caveat there is when it comes, you know, the great thing, like behavioural science and psychology, it's not like maths where there are people are particles and, you know, exactly the same occurrences happen. I think there's a, there's a bit of a complexity when it comes to humans and, you know, context is hugely important. When it comes to going from a loss to engendering fear, then I think you've got to be quite careful.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:05:46Richard Shotton?

  There's an argument from people like George Lowenstein. He calls it the ostrich effect. And it's essentially the argument that if you make people feel ashamed or scared or too worried, rather than resolve the underlying issue, what they tend to do is behave like the metaphorical ostrich. They just start ignoring the ads. They stick their head in the sands. Now, his study was already done about 20 years ago, when he was at Carnegie Mellon. And he's given anonymised data from Vanguard in America, so this massive fund provider. And he can see how often users are checking their stock portfolios. He then

• 1:06:25Richard Shotton?

  plots that against the movement in the American stock market. And what he finds is, as the stock market goes up, people check their wealth reasonably regularly. When the stock market declines, people stop checking.

• 1:06:43Richard Shotton?

  It's not a small effect. I think it's for every 1% drop in the stock market, people check their portfolios 5% to 6% less regularly. And his argument is, from a narrow-minded logical perspective, that's irrational. You know, the information about our wealth is equally valid, whether it's good news or bad news. But he says people have a rule of thumb, is if something causes them pleasure, they do it more. If something causes them immediate pain, they turn away from it. So the danger with smoking ads or anti-smoking ads that scare people is that often unless the change you're asking is really easy, you can cause people either to avoid paying any attention to the messaging

• 1:07:27Richard Shotton?

  or going through these kind of mental gymnastics to explain to themselves why that messaging doesn't affect them.

• 1:07:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it makes complete sense that people wouldn't want to hear something that they really wouldn't want to hear.

• 1:07:40Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's this, I think, problem with long versus short-term thinking. It's absolutely in our long-term interest to listen to things that are gonna keep us living longer. But in the immediate moment, it makes us feel unpleasant. And too often we prioritize our immediate feelings rather than what works for us over the medium or long term.

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

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• 1:08:47Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNDWISDOM at checkout. That's rpstrength.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNDWISDOM at checkout. I remember, I can't remember if it was you or Rory that taught me about when people needed to increase their contributions to their pension.

• 1:09:13Chris Williamson?

  Rather than the money being taken out of their current pay.

• 1:09:19Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:19Chris Williamson?

  When they got a pay increase, a portion of the new pay was put toward that. And people were more prepared to do the investing if it worked in that sort of a way.

• 1:09:32Richard Shotton?

  Yes, so this was an American scheme. I think it was Schlomo Benati that came up with the idea. And it was called Give More Tomorrow. And it's exactly as you say, if you ask someone to put more money into their pension today. What they focus on is the loss of that money and they're remarkably resistant to doing it. They think, well, I can't afford to go on that extra holiday or buy a car. So what they started to do instead was say to people, look, don't put any more money into pensions today. But when you get your pay rise in nine months' time, are you okay if we automatically set up a system where we'll just take, you know, 10% of that, 20% of that?

• 1:10:11Richard Shotton?

  And put it into your pension. And because the conversation was about money being taken away long in the future. It felt attenuated to people. There's an idea called present bias, which is essentially. People give too much weight to what's going to happen now in the near future. And we massively underweight pleasure or pain in the distant future. So often that's a big problem for pensions or insurance or savings. But Benati's clever design meant that he used human nature to encourage this very desirable behaviour.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  Is there a way that fast food companies would use this on the inverse? They sort of don't think about the tomorrow, do think about the today.

• 1:10:57Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yes, absolutely. Um, what might be one of my favourite experiments ever. I don't think we've ever chatted about this one. It's a 1998 study from Daniel Reid, who at the time was at University of Leeds, I think he's at Warwick now. And he does this brilliant study where he goes around a Danish office and he offers people a choice. So you can either have an apple or a chocolate bar. They're completely free, but you only get to pick one. The first half of people, it's a very straight setup. He just says, pick which of these one snacks you want. Take it now, eat it now. And 82% go for chocolate bar, 18% go apple.

• 1:11:38Richard Shotton?

  Next time he does this experiment, he twists it slightly. And he says to people, you can have a chocolate bar or an apple. You pick now, but I will bring this snack to you in a week's time.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 1:11:49Richard Shotton?

  And suddenly the apple becomes a lot more populated. It's not quite beating the chocolate bar. I think it's fifty one percent chocolate bar, forty nine percent apple. But considering there was a massive skew towards the chocolate bar in the previous version, this is a, this is a big change. And the argument from Reid is that when we are picking for immediate consumption, we're very much driven by what we want to do, what's in our, what's going to be tasty, what's our kind of base desire. But if we're picking for our future self, well, suddenly we are much more influenced by what we think we should do. And you, you, you, you, you take that experiment and then you think about, well, how would you behave if you're a

• 1:12:32Richard Shotton?

  a low alcohol beer or a, um, you know, a, a healthy food versus fast food. And if you want people to do the right thing, they don't try and influence them when they're sitting down at a restaurant just about to eat. Because they're gonna be driven by their, um, appetite. What you wanna do is reach them maybe when they're doing their online shop. Now that you're on Tesco dot com and you're ordering your food that's gonna arrive in a week. Then this is the chance to get them buying the low fat meats or the vegetables or the low alcohol lager. Now, this changing in time perspective definitely changes how we behave.

• 1:13:10Chris Williamson?

  I would love to see what the straight up impact of online shopping has done to the kind of baskets that people select from the same supermarket by simply not walking around, by not getting it immediately, by having this delay.

• 1:13:24Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, and I, I think that experiment suggests this ordering of healthy food. I think the other one, the biggest principle for an impact science is people do what's easy. So I wonder if you get a much narrower range of foods people buy week to week. Cause once you've set up your basket, it's so easy just to repeat it.

• 1:13:45Chris Williamson?

  It's almost like a membership. There's a, there's a cost associated with picking something new. Whereas there's a cost when you're going around the supermarket, there's a cost associated with picking something old or something new. Cause you're already walking.

• 1:13:58Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, and it's, it's, it's a brilliant example of people.

• 1:14:03Richard Shotton?

  Aren't just influenced by the end product, they're interested in how the choices are structured. You know, what time the food's going to be delivered, you know, what's easy to spot, what's, what's, what's visible, you know? These things that should be peripheral have a, have a big impact.

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I, I guess as well, this is also why bananas and pecans aren't put on the cashier shelves right at the very end, just as you're going out because oh yeah, I really, I really, I'm really going to just treat myself to that banana. That's not the way that we think.

• 1:14:36Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, there is an argument called moral licensing, that if we feel we've done something virtuous, we then overcompensate. So there's some quite scary studies done by, I'm not a hundred percent sure how to pronounce his name. I think it's Chu, it's kind of C H I O U. Um, I think he might be from Taiwan and he recruited a group of smokers, that's key. And then some, he gives everyone sugar pills, that's right. He gives everyone sugar pills, but some of them are told it's a course of vitamins, some are told they are sugar pills. Then he invites them after doing this two week course of supplements, he invites them into his lab

• 1:15:22Richard Shotton?

  and they fill out this very long, boring form and they have to write down all the things they did over the two weeks. And they claim that, you know, the people who think they've taken the vitamins, they stay, they note down they've done more kind of binge drinking, more smoking, less exercise. So it kind of suggests this moral licensing point because they think they've had the vitamins, they overcompensate elsewhere.

• 1:15:45Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:46Richard Shotton?

  But that's still claimed data. The clever bit is what Chu does is monitor people as they're filling in these very boring surveys. And he just, he just records whether or not the smokers light up a fag while they are filling in the survey. And the smokers who think they took the vitamins, they are fifty percent more likely to light up than the smokers who didn't. So that to me is the powerful bit of the study, you know, not just listening to claims, but looking at actual behaviour. And that's quite a powerful overview of this idea that if we think we behave virtuously, we overcompensate elsewhere. Now with a supermarket, think about the design. Now, what do you see as soon as you get into the supermarket? You've got all your fresh fruit and veg.

• 1:16:29Richard Shotton?

  Now, from a practical perspective, it's the very worst place to have it because it's at the bottom of your trolley now and you're going to put all your heavy items on top. But what it does is allow people to feel they're virtuous and then they overcompensate with the crisps and the beer and the snacks later on. So I think you're right that placing those treat items right at the end, which I think has been banned actually in Britain, I think, is a, is a, you know, use of one of these biases, maybe not for people's best interest though.

• 1:17:00Chris Williamson?

  It's been banned to put fast food.

• 1:17:02Richard Shotton?

  So I thought, I thought though, I might, I'm speculating, I thought I'd heard either a discussion of that happening, that you couldn't have, you know, the little bars now by the, the checkouts full of, you know, high fat, high salt, high sugar items.

• 1:17:15Chris Williamson?

  I think in an attempt to try and make people healthier.

• 1:17:18Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, a tiny little nudge.

• 1:17:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, isn't it interesting because there's no way, if you were to put granola bars or fruits or whatever, your total market cap for that, well, your total sales for that organisation is going to go down. You're simply going to be able to convert people less effectively with that type. So you, I understand what you're doing and sometimes interventions are needed in order to be able to sort of help people make the right choices and stuff. But this is a, that's a, a big hammer blow to the supermarkets. It's a big hammer blow. We've already found the way to make this work. We found the most effective, we split tested, do you not think we'd be putting apples out there if we couldn't get, we'd get people to sell more apples than we could to, to do the chocolate bars?

• 1:18:07Richard Shotton?

  I mean, the only thing I would say, you say, I, I, I'm, I'm realising now, I've kind of straightened. I think that's what happened. We should probably check as well. But you certainly could use a lot of the principles we've been discussing to sell more apples. What I find fascinating is the tactics that are currently used are almost the complete opposite of what the experimental data suggests should be done. So there's an amazing study by Bradley Turnbull in a cafeteria over, I don't know, six or seven weeks. And he randomises the labels on the vegetables. So sometimes he will try and push the health benefit. So you might see something like carrots in low calorie citrus glaze.

• 1:18:50Richard Shotton?

  And I think something like 150 units of the vegetable are sold each day. Other days, same recipe, same vegetable, but he emphasises the indulgent benefits. That's something like, you know, sizzling citrus, tangy carrot. And what he finds there is sales go up to about 230 units a day. It's a 41% increase. So, so his argument is just because something is healthier, it doesn't mean the message you should lead with is its healthiness. Now, that I think is a massive problem with a lot of communications for virtuous goods. People keep on banging about the health benefits and the, um, the ethics behind these things.

• 1:19:34Richard Shotton?

  But actually, if you want to actually change behaviour, the better thing to do, certainly with food, is to focus on.

• 1:19:40Chris Williamson?

  Make it sound indulgent. Well, this is.

• 1:19:41Richard Shotton?

  It takes it down to a very tasty, make it sound enjoyable.

• 1:19:43Chris Williamson?

  This is what grenade bars did. Grenade bars didn't, I, I, I don't know what they did when they first, first, first launched. But certainly now, looking at them, at no point are they saying better for you bar. That's communicated through the macronutrients. That's the fact that it's got protein in. I guess the sort of broader brand messaging contributes to that. What they're saying is this is a collaboration with Cream Egg, or this is a collaboration with Oreo or Jaffa Cake or whatever. And, uh, they're exclusively competing on the, the luxury and the indulgence.

• 1:20:15Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, and that is, you go from, um, you go into saying like. Uh beers with low levels of alcohol. What they tend to do is talk about being non-alcoholic beers. They are emphasizing the absence of the fun bit.

• 1:20:30Richard Shotton?

  Where they're emphasizing the kind of deprivation. There's a, there's a few examples where they've lent into the appeal. It didn't succeed, but I think that was because of the formulation, not the branding. But I loved it when Budweiser did prohibition brew. And it made it sound like kind of exciting and fun and glamorous. Um. There's a beer in Britain called Infinite Session, emphasizing, you know, how you can stay in the pub with your mates longer with this uh zero percent lager. So I, so I think moving away from a kind of hair shirt is advertising for healthy foods and, and less damaging drinks. That, that, that's something we've got to be thinking about more.

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  On the other side of the equation, what about Pringles?

• 1:21:11Richard Shotton?

  What, what's so good about them? Um. The Pringles, the genius of Pringles was their, their line. Um. Once you pop, you can't stop. And it's one of the most bizarre studies in behavioral science. It's about this idea called the Keats heuristic. Um. I think there's some kind of Keats line where he says, truth is beauty and beauty is truth, something, something like that. You know, he's a, he's saying that we mistake beauty for, for truthfulness. So that there's two academics in the nineties called McGlon and Toffick Bash. And they create some fake proverbs. And for every proverb, they create two versions. So the non-rhyming version might be woes unite enemies.

• 1:21:55Richard Shotton?

  The rhyming version would be woes unite foes. Now, you get, say, if we were both taking part in this experiment, you might read woes unite foes. And you're asked to rate how believable this statement is. I would see woes unite enemies and I rate how believable, I think, uh, the phrases. Now, we've both received essentially the same information. All that's changed is the packaging. You get this nice rhyme, I get this, you know, non-rhyming version. What happens is that the people who hear the rhyming version, they rate the believability of the statement seventeen percent higher than the people that hear the non-rhyming version. And people are conflating ease of processing with truthfulness.

• 1:22:38Richard Shotton?

  Now, the interesting bit is if you then go back to all the participants and you say to them, now, why did you think this statement was believable? Uh, did, did the rhyme, uh, or absence of rhyme influence you? Every single participant bar one denied that the, the kind of form, uh, the rhyme, the ease of processing affected them. They all said, no, no, I was making a judgment based on the inherent information. So it's one of these great examples of tiny little changes about the, you know, the kind of the fluency, the, the, the ease on our ear. Tiny little changes have a big effect, but people are really loathe to admit that's what, what influenced them.

• 1:23:18Chris Williamson?

  Isn't this what happens with split-brain patients and where they, they stroke the hand of one side, and why did you get up to go and do this thing? And then they confabulate some sort of an idea. I'm aware that it's different in terms of the mechanism, but the point being, people are usually pretty good at coming up with a logical explanation for why they did the thing, even if they were manipulated to do the thing, because the sort of required discomfort at the admission of deception or self-deception is pretty costly socially.

• 1:23:52Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, so I'm not overly familiar with those studies. I know they're kind of headline results, but I think you're absolutely right that they will be set up in such a way that the experimenter knows what generated the answer, but the patient will, um, just come up with this plausible, much more rational sounding reason to maintain kind of a sense of face and being a sensible, uh, person. And, and, and that's absolutely true with a whole swathe of behavioral science studies. A key theme of behavioral science is that if you ask people why they bought a particular protein bar or a pair of trainers.

• 1:24:33Richard Shotton?

  The problem is they'll give you loads of answers, but most of them are just plausible post rationalisations. They're not a reflection of what actually motivated them. So there's this amazing psychologist called Timothy Wilson at the University of Virginia, and he has a brilliant book called Strangers to Ourselves. And essentially, the whole book is a series of studies showing that people don't know their own motivations. So one of the worst things businesses can do, and it accounts for an awful lot of poor communications, is ask people what they want and then take those answers at face value.

• 1:25:05Chris Williamson?

  People don't know what they want. What's that line from Henry Ford? If I'd asked the customer what they wanted, I'd have given them a faster horse?

• 1:25:11Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, or slightly more modern one that, well, nineteen sixties, there's a David Ogilvy line, who was this kind of amazing ad guy. And he said, consumers don't think how they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say. So I think entrepreneurs, the best ad people have known this for a long while. But the problem is, the average advertiser finds it easy to run a survey, and then it sends them off in the wrong direction.

• 1:25:39Chris Williamson?

  Why did you get interested in Ignace Samuelwise? Because I studied him for a talk that I gave a little while ago, and I thought he was fascinating, but I didn't immediately see the correlation between your world and Samuelwise.

• 1:25:55Richard Shotton?

  I was, well, Mike Claire and I were looking at kind of ways to to end the book, and I came across this story of Samuelwise. And so if people haven't heard of it, eighteen forties, he is a doctor in Vienna, kind of reasonably recently trained in the eighteen forties. And he's shocked when he arrives at the hospital at the proportion of women who die in childbirth. Now, it's astronomical, you know, some of the wards, you would probably be better playing Russian roulette. You've got like ten, fifteen percent of people dying in labour.

• 1:26:38Richard Shotton?

  Spends an awful lot of time trying to work out why this is. And one of his findings is that the wards that are run by midwives tend to have a much better survival rate than the wards that are run by doctors. And one of the things that the doctors do differently from nurses is that they will do autopsies. They will come straight from cutting up a body to then deliver a baby. And Semmelweis wonders if they are bringing what he calls cadaverous, cadaverous particles to, to, to the, to the mum to be. So he starts getting doctors to wash their hands in chlorine.

• 1:27:20Richard Shotton?

  Now they've got to scrub them, in his words, till the stench of, uh, kind of putrid decay has gone. They have to scrub their hands clean and then they can, uh, help with, with labour. And the death rate plummets. It goes from ten, 12% to 3%. So this is, in Semmelweis's eyes, you know, phenomenal. Surely everyone is going to adopt this behaviour. But to his absolute horror, lots of doctors don't jump at the opportunity to save more of their patients. They are amazingly resistant to, um, accepting this new technology. And essentially, it drives Semmelweis basically mad.

• 1:28:01Chris Williamson?

  Dies in an asylum, right?

• 1:28:02Richard Shotton?

  He does. His wife, I think, you know, probably for good many reasons, like tricks him, says they're going out on a day's escapade. She takes him to the asylum and when he's been put in the asylum, this is the Horroville, he unsurprisingly doesn't want to go. There is a struggle, there is a fight and he gets injured, he gets cut and he dies of a sepsis that his research had been showing how to.

• 1:28:26Chris Williamson?

  No way, I didn't know that.

• 1:28:29Richard Shotton?

  It's absolutely horrible story in so many reasons, but it became famous as.

• 1:28:36Richard Shotton?

  Not just, but it's probably the most extreme example, but again and again, there are all sorts of discoveries that people, even though they have this amazing impact, existing practitioners won't accept. So essentially, the Semmelweis reflex is the argument that, you know, there's a tendency to ignore new ideas if they challenge existing ones. Now, put yourself in the shoes of a doctor who Semmelweis is telling, now for the last 10, 20 years, you've been killing lots of your patients by bringing disease to them. It's hellishly hard to accept that. So we kind

• 1:29:16Richard Shotton?

  of thought this was a brilliant place to end the book because what we want to say to marketers was all these principles aren't just about influencing consumers. You know, you need to use the very principles that successfully persuade consumers. You need to use those principles when you are trying to sell your ideas internally. Don't just think you have a great idea, everyone's going to rush to accept it. Now, all these principles are discussed like scarcity or social proof. Now, you can use them when you are trying to, you know, persuade people within your own organisation. So it felt like a very good way of bringing the book to a close.

• 1:29:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, conceptual inertia is a term that I learned a few years ago from this guy who researches the historical progress of ideas. So this is exactly what he's looking at. And he was looking at heliocentric model of the universe, for instance. So, cool story on that.

• 1:30:17Chris Williamson?

  A hundred years before Galileo proclaims his insight, you have Copernicus, a full century before, but his great work, which is called De Revolutionibus, he kind of sort of squeaks it out basically on his deathbed. He's had this realisation for most of his life, but he doesn't do it because he's afraid of the church. He's afraid of retribution. He sort of leaks this thing out. A full century later, he's still having caught up. So Galileo sees the same thing. And he proclaims it from the rooftops. He's forced to recant, under threat of torture, spends the rest of his life under house arrest. He he he's completely castigated and the Cassandra complex, as it's known,

• 1:31:00Chris Williamson?

  is justified. The fact that Copernicus didn't proclaim it is justified by the treatment of a guy a full century later, who did the exact same thing. So if you were to point a finger at Copernicus and call him a coward, he could point the finger at Galileo and say, or was I just prescient?

• 1:31:18Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, it's um, it's a worryingly regular occurrence. And the only thing I would say with the Copernicus Galileo story is there could be a danger, or my Semmelweis one of thinking, oh, you know, this happened 500 years ago, 200 years ago. We are more sophisticated now. Surely we are, we are better now. But there's recent ish examples. I think it was um, Barry Marshall in Australia, like a very junior doctor at this kind of not very prestigious university. He works out that ulcers are not caused by stress. They are caused by a bacteria. I think it might be H. pylori or something like that.

• 1:32:04Richard Shotton?

  No one will listen to it because surely, you know, if if a massive discovery like this was going to take place, it'd be at Harvard or Oxford. So what Marshall does is the most dramatic demonstration he can to prove his theory. He drinks loads of this bacteria, then gets an ulcer almost immediately, and then he cures himself by taking antibiotics. And it took that kind of theater, you know, putting his own life on the line to persuade people this was a

• 1:32:32Chris Williamson?

  Well, that is putting your something where your mouth is, I suppose.

• 1:32:35Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:32:37Chris Williamson?

  Richard Shotton, ladies and gentlemen, Richard, you're amazing, mate. I I think you're fantastic. Have you got, are you blogging? Have you got a Substack?

• 1:32:44Richard Shotton?

  I've I've now kind of moved mainly to LinkedIn. So what I'll try and do is post, you know, not about family or awards or that stuff. It'll always be about the application of behavioral science.

• 1:32:56Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered, have you considered some, some sort of newsletter-y type thing like a Substack?

• 1:33:02Richard Shotton?

  So newsletter I have done and I kind of quite reasonably regularly tell people where they can get that. So on my company website, astro10.co.uk, you can sign up for newsletter. And then every fortnight we'll send people a digest, a brief digest of an experiment, an example of people using it and then the implications.

• 1:33:24Chris Williamson?

  Unreal and new book.

• 1:33:26Richard Shotton?

  A new book, yeah. So co-authored with Michael Aaron Flicker, it's called Hackin' the Human Mind. Seventeen brands, each chapter about a brand. And then we look at two, maybe three behavioral science principles that brand has used to power its success.

• 1:33:42Chris Williamson?

  You're great, dude. You're great. I I look forward to whatever you do next and let me know when you come over to to Austin because I need to hang out.

• 1:33:50Richard Shotton?

  I will do, I will do.

• 1:33:51Chris Williamson?

  Appreciate you.

• 1:33:51Richard Shotton?

  Thank you very much.

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