Pod Insights Change Wired Changing your life and business overnight: just one insight can do that. Phill Agnew the host of UK's #1 marketing podcast will tell you how. Changing your life and business overnight: just one insight can do that. Phill Agnew the host of UK's #1 marketing podcast will tell you how. Change Wired
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About this episode If you’ve ever wondered why people do the strange things we do, this episode is your new favourite rabbit hole! Today we have Phill Agnew on the show, the mind behind Nudge — the UK’s #1 marketing podcast, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But today? You get Phill unplugged — telling stories, breaking down psychology, and showing you how a few behavioral science principles can transform your business, your life, your TikTok following and even your marathon time. 🎧 What you’ll hear ...
Transcript 10,491 words · 2 speakers
0:09 Speaker 00 Welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. I'm Angela Sharina, your host, your partner in collective and personal transformation, and just someone who is obsessed with human potential, doing our best, creating the world where all of us are growing consistently, creating amazing world all around us. Today buckle up, because this conversation might just change the way you see people, decisions, marketing, what's happening in the world around you, customer behavior, business, and so many more things.
0:54 Speaker 00 You're about to hear from someone who might have cracked the code of why humans do what they do. My guest today is Phil Agnew, the host of Nudge, the number one marketing podcast in the UK, downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, featuring world-class behavior thinkers. And what Phil does brilliantly, and you'll hear this instantly, is he takes complex behavioral science and makes it practical, usable, fun, and very much applicable to
1:36 Speaker 00 almost every area of our life, business, influence, and leadership. Here is why I'm super excited for you to hear this episode. Inside this conversation, Phil breaks down stories and psychological principles that almost feel like cheats for understanding and influencing human behavior. We'll start with a chocolate bar wrapper that hooked Phil into marketing as a kid, and the behavioral science behind why marketing works so well on all of us. We're going to talk about why a badly but self-made IKEA wardrobe is a lot more valuable
2:19 Speaker 00 to you than a perfect but bought one, the one you get at the store. We're going to talk about why Uber's real competitive advantage has nothing to do with price or speed or even comfort. We're going to talk about why the end of any experience matters more than the entire thing and how you can use that to make your customers or your family happier. We also talk about one small behavior trick that Phil used to help him finish second an ultra marathon.
3:02 Speaker 00 Also, Phil will share how he got 10,000 TikTok followers in just one week. We also talk about why a handwritten note, literally a scribble on paper, can change your business, your relationships and your leadership and influence on people. This episode is packed. It's fun, it's practical and you'll walk away seeing everyday life and people's behavior through a completely different lens. If you're a leader, a founder, a marketer, a coach, or simply someone who wants to understand
3:42 Speaker 00 how people work, why we do what we do, and also perhaps you want to change and influence that personally and with people around you, this episode is a must-listen. So, let's get into it. Here is my conversation with Phil Agnew. Phil Agnew, welcome to Change Wired Podcast. So excited to have you here.
4:06 Speaker 01 Oh, well, thank you so much for having me on.
4:08 Speaker 00 Yes, when I was going through your bio and all the guests that you've interviewed for your show and all the things that you did, I was just so excited to bring you on because I know that your knowledge, your tips and strategies can bring so much value into pretty much every area of our listeners' lives, business, relationships, like whatever they want to work on, right? You get the lessons, the wisdom, the strategies, the tips you have will help them. So, welcome to the show and.
4:43 Speaker 00 Let's begin. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, where it all started.
4:47 Speaker 01 Thanks Angela. Well, like you said, I've been very lucky to interview people far, far smarter than me on my podcast. It's been a real, real prayer of starting a podcast. You get to speak to people who are smarter than yourself. And for me, that was a, a lot of people, but that really came about kind of serendipitously about six years, six and a half years ago, I started Nudge. And I really started Nudge because a few years prior to that, I really became exposed to the world of behavioural science. By exposed, it means I read a few books about it and really fell in love with it. Not fell in love with it because I thought the books were very interesting, but because as a marketer, I've, I've worked for a decade in, in tech marketing companies and product marketing.
5:27 Speaker 01 As a marketer, I started to apply some of the principles I was reading about behavioural science and found them to be far more effective and far more successful at driving the change that I needed to drive within the teams and businesses I was working in than any other principle I had learnt about at, so university when I was studying marketing. So I really became fascinated about this idea of behavioural science and thought, I would love to learn more. And being that sort of self-obsessed idiot that I am, thought, I'll start a podcast to learn more. So that's sort of how Nudge came about. Been running it for six and a half years now. It is now the UK's number one marketing podcast.
6:03 Speaker 00 Oh, congratulations.
6:04 Speaker 01 Really fantastic because it's niche. Behavioural science is a niche. It is not everything about marketing and yet it seems to really resonate with people. People, it seems like a lot of people are like me, that they have struggled with marketing in the past, that they look for tactics and evidence-backed insights that are reliable and not based on gut instinct. And it also seems like people have applied it and got the same results I've had, which is wonderful to see.
6:27 Speaker 00 Yes. Well, again, congratulations on the success of your podcast. And what I can say from my exposure to your podcast is that yeah, you say it's a number one marketing podcast, but it's so much wider in a sense that you don't just apply the insights to your marketing, but also you talk with people in leadership and in just so many different arenas of human performance and in business again.
6:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, just fascinating. When I'm listening right now on my podcast, there is a, an episode about leadership and so behavioral science works everywhere, right? Because it is a science about our human psychology and how we can apply different principles of it into different arenas of human performance, business, again, relationships, et cetera. I think, where do I want to start with? Maybe I, I would like to start with a little bit more of a pure background. How did you grow up and how did you develop this certain passion for marketing and improving, I guess, outcomes of our communication or business? Was it something in your childhood or was it a chance?
7:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I was, I was a bit of a weird child, I think, in that I had a lot of questions as I was growing up. For example, I loved a chocolate bar called Tuna's and it has like a caramel wafer bar. I don't even know if I pronounce it right. I just absolutely adored this caramel wafer bar and it tasted pretty good. But one of the reasons I think I was so obsessed with it is because every time I'd open a packet, on the back, they would write this line, which says, over seven million of these bars have been sold this week. And there was something just about my childhood brain that knew that I was being sold to there, but couldn't help but be convinced by it. So I had, you know, that was an example of, as a bit of a kid, I was sort of obsessed by that. And then when I was a teenager, I became obsessed with a coffee shop in the UK called Cafe Nero, which is a, which is
8:19 Speaker 01 really bad coffee, not particularly good. But when I was 18, 19, I would just go back and back and back. And looking back on it now, I realized what was going on is it's it sort of hooked me into this loyalty scheme. And the way that they did it, because obviously every company was doing loyalty schemes back then, the way that they did it is, is when they would give me the card, the loyalty card, they would, the barista would hand over the card and the card would require you to buy nine coffees in order to get your 10th for free. But the barista, every time she gave me this, this card would plug in two stamps for free. Suddenly I felt like the luckiest person on the planet. I felt like I was a VIP. I felt like I was getting something incredibly good value. Like, wow, I've got
8:59 Speaker 01 two stamps on my card for free. Not realizing, of course, that that was just company policy and absolutely every purdy in the store was getting those stamps. But it just made, you know, I never went to another coffee shop. So those are two questions I sort of had as a child growing up. And I realized both of those questions were not answered in my 50,000 pound marketing degree that I did. They were answered in my. My exposure to behavioural science, so if we go back to the Tunics, seven million people buy this bar every week, I eventually learned that is of course social proof. That is the idea that we follow the actions of others. So social proof, it's evolutionary traits. We would have evolved as cavemen to learn this trait. If we saw a load of other cavemen eating berries from a bush, we will do the same.
9:43 Speaker 01 If we saw one caveman eating a berry from a bush and dying, we won't copy them. And that's, it's really useful. And then we all survived as we were growing up. But now it means when we're on holiday in Italy and we're walking past a number of different gelato stores and one gelato store has a guy outside pleading for customers to come in, but nobody's in there. And another gelato store has a queue out the door. I can guarantee you and everybody listening to this, I can predict exactly which store you're going to go into. It's the one with the queue out the door. We still today follow the actions of others. And eventually, eventually explained to me, oh, that's why Tunics would take the time to write seven million people buy this bar on their, on their, on their chocolate wrapping paper. And you realise that lots of other companies have been doing the same thing.
10:26 Speaker 01 In fact, you could argue that McDonald's success is partly down to this. They had a counter which they would update on their McDonald's stores when they first launched, explaining exactly how many Big Macs they had sold. You know, they've updated it when it got to a million, 52 million, 100 million, and then it got to a billion. And now obviously it's such a ridiculously high number that they can't update it anymore. So they don't bother. But this is social proof in action. When we see others taking an action, we're likely to follow that action. You see it with all types of marketing. But that coffee example, let me explain that one because that's interesting as well. So what was it about? What was it about that coffee card that made me want to keep going back? Well, there was actually, I didn't know this at the time, but there was a study run in 2006 by Nunes, which looked at this exact topic.
11:10 Speaker 01 It looked at the exact behaviour that happens when you give people free, and I'm putting, for people listening to podcasts, I'm putting sort of quotation marks here, free stamps on their loyalty card. Well, what actually happened? And I should say this study was done with car wash sales, but it's essentially the same. You had to buy seven car washes in order to get your last one for free. Anyway, Nunes in this study, and this is important about all behavioural studies, important lesson here. There is a control and a variant. So the control in this study is a card where you need to buy seven coffees in order to get your eighth one for free. The variant in this, in this study, so the, the one change they make is that the loyalty card has nine stamps you need to collect in order to get your tenth stamp for free.
11:52 Speaker 01 But just like in my scenario, the barista plugs in the first two stamps for free. Now, every economist would look at this and say, well, these, you know, these are identical. You still need to buy seven coffees in order to get your, your eighth one for free in both scenarios. However, from a behavioral science point of view, you look at this and you say, no, it's not quite identical, isn't it? There is something that happens in our mind when we are given something for free. There's, there's a few biases at play here. There's the reciprocity bias, which is that we want to return the favors of others. So when that barista does that kind thing for me, I think, I can't go to any other store now. They're being too nice to me. Uh, there's also the endowment effect. This is what the, the authors of this paper, they actually called the paper, the endowment effect or the progress effect. And this is the idea that once we have started a task, we feel
12:35 Speaker 01 more compelled to finish it. Ernest Hemingway famously ended each day of writing with a sentence half. Yeah. And he found it easier to start the next day. And this is exactly what happens when you create any profile on any app online. It will say, you're 15% through the way of finishing your profile, usually if you haven't even done anything, because they know that if you make it seem like the, the task has already begun, you're more likely to finish it. And so anyway, the endowment effect, the reciprocity effect, it plays in, it made poor little 18 year old me absolutely addicted to these loyalty cards. But it wasn't just affecting me because Nunes found that in, in their study where they compared having the control with the variant, having those two stamps put in for free made people 82% more likely to keep going back, buying seven coffees and finishing that loyalty card.
13:18 Speaker 01 So it's incredible finding. It's backed by evidence. It's really applicable. So many companies do loyalty schemes. So many companies have things that they want their customers to finish. Well, get your customers started on the, on the journey right when they begin. Give them two stamps for free. It will make them more likely to convert. So yeah, to sum up the answer to your question, I was an inquisitive kid, had lots of these strange questions, and I found the answers really in behavioral science.
13:43 Speaker 00 Yes, you know, I find it still fascinating that how a lot of our passions later in life like develop that early, one or two questions, one or two things that we are curious about. And then they, you know, as we adults, they lead to this like full blown passion. And especially if we engage in it and do something with it, and it basically defines the rest of our life. Well, this makes me wonder, is it like from the beginning, there was a seed in us somehow that was destined to sprout into that direction?
14:10 Speaker 01 There was something. I went to, I took my sister to a Build-A-Bear store. Do you know Build-A-Bear?
14:16 Speaker 00 No.
14:17 Speaker 01 This is bonkers. You need to go into one of these just to see the most incredible application of psychology into marketing that you'll probably ever witness, except they're doing it on kids. It's shocking. So Build-A-Bear is a company, a retail store where children go in and they build a teddy bear. It's really sweet. You go in, you pick the type of bear you want, you pick the stuffing, you decide how you want their face to look, the color, even the smell in some stores. And then at the end, I witnessed this when I was in the store with my little sister, the Build-A-Bear assistant has this plastic heart, which they pick up and they do this very strange ritual where they ask you to rub the heart on your knee to make sure the bear never falls over and hurts himself.
15:01 Speaker 01 They ask you to rub the heart between your hands to keep the heart warm. A number of other things they ask you to do. And then they ask the child to shove that heart into the teddy bear, into stuffing, never to be seen again because it's sewed up. And this, this is bizarre to watch. You're sort of thinking, Build-A-Bear, you know, they're not a religious, they're not a religious organization.
15:23 Speaker 00 Yeah.
15:24 Speaker 01 They are, they are a company that fundamentally needs to hit their bottom line, needs to secure sales. Why are they asking their staff to go through this strange ritual and why the customers seem to enjoy it? Years and years and years later, speaking on the podcast to the author and researcher Mike Norton from Harvard University, he explained this to me. He said, Phil, this is down to something called the IKEA effect. And Mike Norton had done studies on the IKEA effect back in 2011. And the IKEA effect is a wonderful study, which reveals exactly why Build-A-Bear staff are trained to do this. Again, in the study, there's a control and a variable. The participants are either given, and this is the control, an expert-built, completed Malm White wardrobe from IKEA. Very, everyone's seen this wardrobe.
16:08 Speaker 01 You've been to any Airbnb in Europe, you've probably seen a dozen of them. Expert-built, though, so it works really nicely. Another group of people are given the flat pack version. So this is the one where you have to get out of the cardboard, painstakingly put it together, probably scratch it a load of times, which is what I do. Start swearing at yourself because you can't do it very well. Get angry at your partner. Put it on back to front, have to take it apart again. This is all the stuff that I go through when I try and create Ikea wardrobe. Anyway, after they've created the wardrobe, suddenly you've got two groups, both with wardrobes. Michael Norton then asks both groups, how much would you be willing to pay to keep this wardrobe? And now, again, you would imagine that those who have received the expert-built wardrobe would pay more, or at least they would pay the same. And yet, that is not true.
16:52 Speaker 01 And this is consistent, not just with Ikea products, but all sorts of different products he tested it on. In fact, he replicated it every single time. People are willing to pay 63% more for items they have created than the expert-built alternatives. And of course, this explains what Builder Bear are doing. They are involving the customer in this ritual, involving the customer in the creation of this project product, giving meaning to the product and affinity to the product. Because doing that, doing that little ritual with the plastic heart, even though you're shoving it into the bear and never seeing it again, will make the customer value the product more, make them love the product more, make it more likely, you give it a five-star review and make it more likely that you come back as well. So it's very interesting. These are the things of, I think, when you talk about little triggers
17:35 Speaker 01 that make you sort of fascinated about this stuff. I look back on a lot of my childhood and think, oh, okay. It now makes sense why Builder Bear asked me to rub my hands together and warm up my sister's teddy bear heart.
17:48 Speaker 00 And I'm curious, how do they plug in that into their revenue model? Like, do they, when you get into the store, do you pay for building a bear process? Or like, how do they then charge? Or maybe affect your willingness to pay higher price because of this process?
18:07 Speaker 01 I don't think they are. What Builder Bear are doing there, and I think this is what every good company that applies psychology does, is not attaching it specifically to a revenue line to measure the revenue impact. They rely on the fact that this stuff has been proven in literature. It's been replicated by. Scientists and academics and then they apply it to their work with the assumption that applying this will make the experience better for customers because that's what it has proven to do. We don't need to, for example, charge customers more to do this process. We just know it will work. What's a better example of this? A better example of this is Uber. Uber, Rory Sutherland, fantastic behavioral scientist, would say that the
18:50 Speaker 01 benefit Uber has over traditional taxis is not price, it's not UI, it is the ability to tell you exactly where the taxi is when you order it.
18:59 Speaker 00 I was so blown away by when I learned about that. I'm like, yeah, that is so true.
19:04 Speaker 01 Because we all have, and this is the same thing, like if you're waiting for a train to arrive, you will feel infinitely worse if it just says delayed and you will feel infinitely better if it just says delayed by five minutes. If you have some sort of certainty, this is known within psychology as the illusion of control. If you have a feeling of control, even if that feeling is essentially the same, knowing where the taxi is in London versus not knowing, doesn't really make a difference. Taxi will probably still get there at the same time. But if you have that illusion of control, you will enjoy the process a lot more. Lots of studies that back this up. One of the most famous is just literally with Stuart Sutherland, also named Sutherland, not related. Stuart Sutherland, his book of rationality, gave people lottery tickets, found that when they could control the numbers in the lottery tickets, i.e. put their number in, they loved
19:48 Speaker 01 the lottery ticket, valued it far more than when the numbers were plugged in and for them. So we have this illusion of control. We love to feel in control. And Uber put this in their product. They don't price that in. They don't charge you more to be able to see where the taxi is in London coming towards you. They just know that adding that in will make their product more addictive. In the same way that TikTok know that showing you a totally variable algorithm worth of infinite interesting information, they don't need to charge for it. They just sort of know it will keep you hooked on the platform. So I think that's how some of the companies that really apply behavioral science look to do it. Obviously, there are others like Amazon who test everything, but there is still some that just apply and are convinced it will work.
20:31 Speaker 00 But we do very also rate because now traditional taxis just.
20:36 Speaker 00 For me, seem so not, they're almost unreliable because they don't do that. I'm like, how am I supposed to rely if I don't do it? Like, how it's gonna get there from where? Also, I think, I feel, well, that can, a lot of these insights can be applied to different areas of life. Like, I use that in any, to resolve any tricky situations around when I need to delay something, or I need to tell people bad news that it might take longer than we expected. So what I do is, after I tell the news, I say, exactly expectation.
21:18 Speaker 00 So we're gonna finish and we're gonna get it that, at that moment, in that many days, in that many hours. And a lot of people have no problem then whatsoever with whatever solution you propose, as soon as they understand how long it's gonna take, how it's gonna happen, et cetera, and they have this certainty of how the whole thing gonna, gonna go.
21:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, interesting. I like that example. There's a lot of evidence that suggests that if you show your, if you reveal the amount of time something will take to do and the effort you'll put into it, people tend to value that thing more. It's the best example of this. It's actually Michael Norton as well, with his collaborator, Ryan Burell. He ran this incredible studies with Kayak. So Kayak is like Booking.com, Expedia.com. You go on there to book holidays, becoming less popular now with ChatGPT. Anyway, back in 2011, he did these studies called on operational transparency. And operational transparency is a fancy way of saying, show the work you're putting into something. And so again, there's a control and a variant. The control saw this typical kayak loading wheel. This is back in 2011, so things took a bit of time to load.
22:24 Speaker 01 You would search for holiday trips to Rome, and it would take 15 seconds to come back with the results. And all that would happen is the loading wheel would go around in a circle, as normal, what we're used to expect. Burell and Norton then said, well, why don't we create a variant of this loading wheel, which takes the same amount of time, but shows the working? So the loading wheel would then say, we're searching through all of the hotels in Rome. We're now searching through all of the airlines. We've found a good offer from BA. We'll now compare this offer with one from EasyJet. We're finding great restaurants. They find that when people have a loading wheel which reveals what the machine is doing, is transparent about the operations that are happening. People not only stick around during the wait, they actually value the results that
23:07 Speaker 01 they see afterwards far more, even though the results are identical to those that are seen with the normal loading wheel. So if you show, if like you're saying, if you tell people, oh, this is going to take this amount of time because I have to do X, Y and Z, people will end up valuing the thing you then do far more. One final, very interesting part of the study is sometimes they made the wait even longer. So when the loading wheel was going through all of those different options, saying, we're looking at flights, we're looking at BA, we're looking at easy, all of these things, even if it took twice as long as a standard loading wheel, they still, the participants still ended up preferring the results from the one that took twice as long. Fascinating idea that we think speed is everything. Well, perhaps not quite, if you believe that there's effort going on behind the scenes.
23:46 Speaker 00 It reminds me also of, you know, what chat GPT is doing right now. I don't know if they're doing that on purpose, but it's like.
23:52 Speaker 01 I'm sure they are.
23:53 Speaker 00 Thinking or like when you have your agent mode, it's, I'm researching this, I'm going to this website and you're like, okay.
24:01 Speaker 01 Imagine the opposite there. Imagine you and I have done agent mode and it is, if you have a chat GPT account, go and do this because this is a perfect example of this. And agent mode literally can take 10 minutes to bring you back a result. So imagine if it took 10 minutes and just had a loading wheel. I would honestly suggest that nobody would end up seeing the results. I think all of us would have exited the page, we'd be like, well, this just isn't working. This is the equivalent of what we were talking about earlier, of that illusion of control. But you know, oh, my train just says delayed. I don't, this is awful. Or I don't know when the taxi is coming or where it is. This is awful. If chat GPT just had a loading wheel, it wouldn't work at all. So of course, what they do is they apply Ryan Burell's study, which is they show you exactly what
24:46 Speaker 01 it's doing at all times. Shows you exactly what pages it's looking for. And that will take more time. That will make the process take longer. It will take longer for chat GPT to not only search through BA's flight deals, it'll also take longer to show you an iframe of what it's doing, much longer. So the prediction there is these searches take 10 minutes. They probably take two minutes longer than they need to, but it's necessary in order to keep people hanging around. Because if it took far less, if it took the same amount of time, but just had a loading wheel, people wouldn't value it as much. And I would argue. If it just took thirty seconds, rather than ten minutes, people wouldn't value it as much as well, even though it's the same result. And this is, I like to call this the barber shop dilemma, which is if you go to a barber's and you always get your haircut the same
25:31 Speaker 01 way, and they always take half an hour, and one week you go and they don't take half an hour, but they take two minutes, but your hair is still identical, you will not like that haircut, even if it looks exactly the same, because you'll be thinking to yourself, how, there's something not right here. The barber usually takes thirty minutes, they've only taken two minutes. Even though my haircut looks the same, I'm not happy with that. It doesn't seem right. Same would happen if a plumber comes around your house and tries to fix them. If they're out in thirty seconds, you think, did they really do a good enough job? And this is the same thing. If sometimes things look too quick, we don't value them as much. The best real world example of this, of a brand struggling with this is Starbucks. Starbucks in 2011, they had taught their baristas how to do this thing called parallel pouring.
26:13 Speaker 01 And this is where a single barista was taught exactly how to make four lattes at once. So you could put two espressos on the go, double espresso coming out of each, four cups underneath, big jug of milk, big jug of alternative milk, blitzing it all up, steaming the milk, and create four lattes in about, I don't know, forty-five seconds or something like that. They introduced this, and the team behind Starbucks thought, well, this is fantastic. We're going to serve more people far faster than we did before. Those people will be served faster, they'll be happier. If we can serve more people, we'll get a better cash flow. Fewer people who see a longer queue out the door will be turned away and turned off. So they thought everything would be fantastic if we make the process faster. What actually happened was the exact opposite. They started getting really negative reviews
26:56 Speaker 01 about their coffee. Loyal customers stopped coming back. And they tested it, said the coffee tastes identical. The baristas weren't doing anything different, they were just doing it in parallel. And the team at Starbucks, I think, eventually realized, well, it's not the quality of the coffee that's changing, it's the perception of the coffee. Because we are serving coffee far faster than we were before, people are perceiving us to be cutting corners. They assume that the quality has dropped, just like I said with that barber example, and then they're less likely to come back. So they banned Starbucks. Baristas from serving four coffees at once, which is why every time you go to Starbucks now, they have to serve two coffees at once. They're arguably hiring more baristas than they need just to give this illusion of effort.
27:39 Speaker 01 But that illusion of effort makes us far more likely to spend five dollars on a coffee. Because we believe that actual effort has gone into the creation of the product we're buying.
27:49 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's such fascinating. Think about our psychology, how we value different things depending on how things are presented. Right. And I think like a lot behavioral science is a lot about that, like working with psychology. Instead of trying to fundamentally change something about the experience or the product or the service. But you know what? I'd like to jump into a few of them, mind into more practical stuff like, for example, take you, if you don't mind. How do you apply everything that you've learned about behavioral science, like all these different insights? Well, maybe not all of them you're applying into your life, but how did it change your life? Whether that's personal health or business or relationships, knowing that.
28:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, maybe examples of how you applied some of that stuff to create specific results.
28:39 Speaker 01 I mean, I'm a nerd, so I just like to read about these studies and then apply them. I've built something called the Nudge Vaults, which is my database of four hundred and fifty different insights that I think really works. And I've tried to test as many of them as possible, but you know, as an example, I read a study from twenty twenty two. Which was done on South Korean e-commerce stores, really interesting study. And because some studies are done in laboratories, some studies are done in the real world. This is a real world study, so the results I think are even more applicable. And in this study, they sent, they had one thousand two hundred and thirty two customers in their group. And then some were in a control group, so they bought something with the South Korean e-commerce store. And nothing happened afterwards. Well, they got their products, of course, but nothing else happened.
29:25 Speaker 01 Another group got a thank you note and the thank you note was written up, typed up and printed out on a leaflet and it just said, thank you so much for purchasing with us. We're really grateful, yada, yada, yada, printed this note off and sent it to the customer with their product. So some people get nothing, some people get a thank you note. And then a third group got the same thank you note, the exact same copy, but this time it was handwritten. So the, the copy was written by hand. Yeah. And then they measured exactly how much each customer on average would spend with the store in the future. And they find something really interesting. Sending a thank you note, which is typed up and printed out, increased spending by thirty dollars, twenty nine dollars, to be specific, but around thirty dollars.
30:09 Speaker 01 And this is again reciprocity in action, right? We like to return favors, companies do something nice for us, shows that they're really, makes a bit of an effort to say that really grateful, we'll be more likely to return the favor. Same thing happened, we bought our first house recently, which was really lovely. The estate agent, who I would say was not good, estate agents in the UK can be quite difficult. But they gave us a cat, a four pack of beer when we moved in and then asked for a five star review. I was like, yeah, of course. If they hadn't given me that four pack of beer, I think it would have been a three star review. But even though something as small as that, just here's a four pack of beer, here's a thank you note, increased sales for the South Korean store by thirty dollars. But the handwritten variant was far more effective. It increased sales by fifty two dollars.
30:52 Speaker 01 And the idea here is partly to use something called costly signaling, which is the more effort we put into, to, to, to writing or communicating our message, the more effective that message will be. And so you ask how I apply this, well, I just try and test this out in any way I can. For my little test, I ran, I wanted to get a few more positive reviews on my podcast. Wanted to get a few more five star reviews, don't we all? And so I gathered a random group of forty people who had recently subscribed to my newsletter and I split them randomly into two groups. One group got an email from me saying, thank you for recently subscribing. I hope you're enjoying the show, please leave me a review if you have the time. And another group got that exact same message, but I'd written it by hand and
31:34 Speaker 01 taken a picture of that message and sent it to them. So very similar, very similar to the study. And I had a control and a variant, so I could test it. And the test proved pretty conclusive because what happened with the handwritten version, also what happened with the version I just typed up in an email is I think only two people clicked my link to leave a review and one nice person did actually leave me a review out of 20, which isn't actually that bad, 5% conversion. However, with the handwritten variant, nine people clicked the link to leave me a review and I got four reviews in total. These are very small numbers, but it proved to me that it worked. And now whenever I want reviews for the show, I make the effort to actually handwrite a response because it's far more effective.
32:16 Speaker 01 It'll get a far larger number of reviews. And probably, like I said, with that real estate agent, probably means people are going to give me a nicer review because they see that I've made an effort with my ask, which is that costly signaling bias at play. So that's how I use it. I like to test these things out. I like to read about them and apply them really as much as possible.
32:33 Speaker 00 Yes. You also mentioned in, when I asked you to propose some things to talk about, you mentioned that behavioral science help you to finish, which is second in an ultra marathon. So I was curious, like, how did that happen? Who did you have to write there?
32:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, take this with a pinch of salt, everyone. But I read about a principle called the peak end effect. Peak end effect is really interesting. It was discovered by the Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman. And in Kahneman's studies, he actually originally did these studies with colonoscopies, which are very unenjoyable medical procedures. I don't probably have to go into detail as to why. Anyway, did this study with colonoscopies. In the study, and these are real world studies where people are getting actual colonoscopies. In the study,
33:25 Speaker 01 There's one group of participants who get the colonoscopy as normal. So it takes about 15 minutes. It's very painful. It's not enjoyable. And then the procedure finishes. Another group of people get the same procedure that lasts 15 minutes. But then there was an extra five minutes added at the end. Actually, it might have been more like two minutes. There was an extra two minutes added at the end where the procedure continues, but it is far less painful because essentially they just leave the instrument in, but don't move it at all. And the final moments of the experiment are just far less painful than the average before. Now, the two versions that we're looking at here, one is 15 minutes and painful.
34:09 Speaker 01 One is 17 minutes and painful, but with two minutes, which is slightly less painful. Objectively, if you look at both, you would say the 15-minute version is obviously better. It is shorter. And yet, that's not what Kahneman found. When he asked people after the experiment, how painful was that? How much did you enjoy it or hate it? How likely would you be to do it? Again, how likely would you be to recommend it to a friend? Those who had the longer, just as painful procedure, but with a more pleasant finish, rated the colonoscopy as far less painful overall. He proved this again in studies with icy water, where people are asked to leave their hands in icy water for about 10 minutes, which is really unpleasant. But then another group had to leave it in for 10 minutes.
34:53 Speaker 01 And then for the last two minutes, he increased the temperature of the icy water by about two degrees, which is very subtle, still painful, but slightly better. Those who had the slightly nicer finish said they enjoyed it. The procedure was far better, far outweighed the difference. So how did I apply this? Well, whilst training for this ultra marathon where I ran from, it was London to Crawley in the UK, I kind of had this idea that I had to do lots and lots of long runs in my training. And lots of lots of interval training where you sort of sprint for quite a bit. You you push yourself these tempo runs where you're running at pace for for a long period of time. And I thought, well, the peak end rule suggests that my perception of these sessions will be outweighed by those final moments rather than the session as a whole.
35:39 Speaker 01 So I could do a really difficult session where I'm running right at my peak ability, getting the heart rate up. But if I have two minutes at the end, where I just run really easily, try and enjoy it, try and take it really slow. I should enjoy it more. And I did this little experiment where half of my runs, I didn't have the nice two minutes at the end, where I sort of slowed down, let my heart rate start to slow and really relax into it and just enjoy the end of the run. Half of them, I did do that, half of them, I just sort of finished straight after. And I rated the runs, I found the ones where I finished straight away, I enjoyed it far less. I was also far less likely to actually go on a run the next day, I figured out as well. And then it applied, I did this for about three months. And I did eventually, I mean, I didn't, I still have no idea how I did this because I'm not particularly fast runner.
36:24 Speaker 01 But I did eventually finish second in this in this race. I don't think many people must have entered it, that could be the only reason why. And there's a whole, there's a whole episode, which if you search for Nudge Podcast and peak end rule, you'll find this whole episode where I talk about this. But that was just a sort of cheeky way where I where I applied this finding. Obviously, the way you should apply this finding if you're a business is not necessarily to try and win an ultra marathon. It's to make sure that the final experience your customers have with your brand is a positive one, an outsized positive one. So so restaurants that, there's a fantastic book by Will Gidara called Unreasonable Hospitality. He talks about how he made 11 Madison Square Restaurant, the most successful restaurant in the world.
37:06 Speaker 01 And one of the things they obsessed on over was what they gave people as they left the restaurant. This is something I don't, I can't actually think, I I've been to a lot of restaurants. I can't think of any restaurant that is really obsessed over what happens when I leave. So what happens when you leave most restaurants is. Most of the time you pay your bill, go. Maybe you get a mint. Maybe if you're in an Indian restaurant in the UK, you get a handshake. That's quite common. Someone stands at the door, shakes your hand as you leave. That's quite nice. In Leveson Madison Square, and I've been to really swanky restaurants in London as well. Restaurants that would have 11, sample menu with 11 different dishes. You spend a lot of money. Still, when you leave, I wouldn't get anything. And yeah, 11 Madison Square Gardens would give people gifts as they left the store.
37:51 Speaker 01 And they tried all these different gifts to try and make people value their experience even more. The one that they settled on was some handmade roasted in-store granola. With the idea being that you just had a fantastic evening meal of us. We want to make sure your next meal is just as nice. Have this granola when you wake up tomorrow morning. And they would literally give that to people as they were leaving. And what a wonderful way to end experience, because then the end of your experience is not, oh god, that was good, but $300. And we haven't even got wine. That felt a bit harsh. It's not that. Suddenly your end experience is, oh, granola, that would be nice. We didn't have any breakfast in for tomorrow. We can try that. And then obviously you also, that experience continues into the next day and it's positive as well.
38:36 Speaker 01 Really what they're applying there is that peak end rule, that idea that the final experience we have of a company, an organisation, a service outweighs, has an asymmetric impact on the rest of the experience. You could spend thousands of pounds improving the whole experience, or you could spend £50 probably providing a really great experience for everyone in your store at the end. And that, providing that great experience at the end, will be more effective than trying to improve everything.
39:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, you know, it makes me wonder if that's the success why my clients stay with me for sometimes two, three years. I have this rule. No matter what happens during our coaching sessions, the person has to leave with a smile. Like I have to figure out something to make them feel good about their day, their life themselves. And so yeah, maybe that's why people don't like. Yeah. Another thing that I wanted to ask you, again, something that you mentioned, that you managed to get 10,000 TikTok fours in, what is it, one week?
39:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was another silly. Again, there's another episode which goes into detail about this. So if you search for how I got 10,000 TikTok subscribers, nice podcast, you'll find it. But I was here, I was fascinated by principle known as the curiosity gap. Curiosity gap is an idea which all of you will know. It's this idea that if a piece of information is shared with you, you'll be less interested. If part of the information is shared with you, but part of it is hidden, you'll be intrigued. And that intrigue will trigger a behaviour. What's a great example of this? Well, there's so many. This is clickbait. So this is why here's the 25 best things about going to Portugal. Number seven will
40:24 Speaker 01 surprise you. It's exactly why that works so well. This is cliffhangers. So this is why Stranger Things is releasing a new series. I guarantee you at the end of that first episode, there will be an unresolved question because that will make you more likely to watch the second one. This explains Shakespeare's popularity. So Shakespeare, many of Shakespeare's plays were not written by him. There were stories that had been around for dozens of dozens of years. The change he made was typically at the start of these plays, the narrator, because there was always narrators in these plays, would explain exactly what each character's internal monologue was. So here is Macbeth, here is how they're feeling, play commences. Shakespeare did the opposite. He hid that. He concealed the inner emotions. And obviously
41:09 Speaker 01 that made it far more interesting. You're far more interested in a play if you don't know what's going to happen. If you don't, if you want to learn what's going to happen with the characters. Charles Dickens is another example. He was a writer in a periodical newspaper, and he would finish every single one of his short stories. And these short stories went on to become Great Expectations, or Tale of Two Cities, all these era defining books. He would finish each story with a cliffhanger. He wouldn't explain exactly what was going to happen. And that made people want to keep coming back. So this isn't something that BuzzFeed invented. This is something that was used by Shakespeare and Dickens. And it works for Dickens, and it worked for me as well, because I tested this. I created, I think it was something like forty different TikTok videos, each with sixty second little clips, sort of like how I'm talking about now.
41:53 Speaker 01 Here's a fast way to increase the number of sales you get from repeat customers by writing a handwritten note. And I'll do a little sixty second video on that. Except for twenty of the videos, I did, I shared all the information upfront. So I'd say pretty much what I just said. Here's how you can double your customers by writing a handwritten thank you note. For the other twenty videos, I concealed some of the information. So I said, there's an incredibly simple tactic that can help you double your sales. Pause. So one, you get the information upfront, it's a handwritten note, one, it's hidden.
42:30 Speaker 00 Yeah.
42:31 Speaker 01 I spent, I think it was a thousand pounds or thousand dollars advertising these, because I had no TikTok followers, obviously. So I needed visibility in order to make this test worthwhile. So spent the same amount on every single one of these videos, boosted them, so to speak, and then could measure how long people watched, how likely they were to click on my profile, how likely they were to subscribe. And every single metric, I wasn't surprised about this because I knew it would work, but it's still fascinating to see it. Every single metric where the video didn't reveal everything upfront, where it kept in that curiosity, people, when they saw those videos, were far more likely to click on my profile, far more likely to subscribe, far more likely to watch the video for longer, far more likely to like and send it to friends.
43:13 Speaker 01 And it's a great reminder for anybody creating content that we should leave something slightly unlearned. We should give our audience the benefit of the doubt and the respect they deserve. They do not need to be told everything upfront. These are smart people who can figure things out. You don't have to reveal if Hamlet is mad or not. You can keep it obscure because it will make your story more engaging. And it works for Shakespeare and it works on TikTok.
43:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, and it's gonna create this thirst for knowledge, for figuring things out, for finding things out, which boosts learning and obviously then benefits people from that learning. One other, I wanted to ask you, what would you?
43:57 Speaker 00 Maybe what is one interesting either insight or learning or a strategy that you feel is very applicable in many different domains and very useful that you'd like like every listener to know to apply it in as many scenarios as possible like what's what would be your one thing?
44:18 Speaker 01 So my one thing and I'll I'll share one because it's it's annoyed me recently and and I think everybody can get on board with how annoying this is. There is a better alternative. So I buy coffee from a really good independent roasters in Bristol called Wogan Coffee, really great coffee company. And I subscribe to their product and they send me coffee each month, kilo of coffee a month. Coffee around the world has been going up in price for multiple different reasons. Anyway, they sent me an email and they say coffee costs are going up across the board. We're feeling these costs. You pay us for a subscription. We're going to have to increase the price of the subscription. Your price is going up immediately by two pounds, two pounds fifty, whatever it was.
44:59 Speaker 01 Total wrong way to do that message. Why is it the wrong way? Evidence suggests that people are more likely to commit to something if it is in the future than if it is in the present. So if you read a brilliant book by Wharton professor Katie Milkman, she has done dozens of studies on commitment. And she has asked people, for example, will you be a student in her class? Would you be willing to tutor somebody in a year below you? Give them some tips on how to how to improve tutor them. And she asks one group, will you be willing them to tutor? Will you be willing to tutor them this term? And she asked another group, will you be willing to tutor them next term? Pretty much the same ask, still for the same amount of time, because it was done right at
45:43 Speaker 01 the start of the term. So it was the same amount of time. And she asked, will you be willing? And if so, how long will you be willing to tutor them for? And she finds that when you ask for commitment in that current term, people only to commit to 23 hours on average. If you ask for a commitment in the next term, people commit to 85 hours on average. People commit to far more in the future. The future seems further away. We have a positivity bias where we believe things will get better. So when we're asked about the Future, we think we'll be able to do far more. This is the classic new year's resolution dilemma. Oh, I'll run a marathon in April, in January. That'll be no problem because I'll do loads of training in March and February. It doesn't quite work out that way, but we're far more likely to commit to it. This is why marathon companies always try and sell their marathon slots nine months in advance.
46:26 Speaker 01 You never see a marathon company trying to sell you a marathon slot a couple of days before, even to people who are prepared. So what could Wogan Coffee have done differently with me? Well, they should increase their prices, of course, but they know that the price of coffee will increase. Everybody knows that the price of coffee is going up and we have known for months. We've known for years that this is coming and will continue to come. And so what they should say to me is not your price is going up immediately. They should say, are you happy with a price increase? If so, your price will increase in three months' time. That would totally change the feeling. Suddenly I wouldn't feel like something hard done by is happening to me. I'd suddenly feel like that, one, I'm committing something in the future.
47:10 Speaker 01 So it doesn't feel as painful, but two, I'm actually committing to something. There's a whole other plethora of studies which reveals that if you get people to say that they're okay with something, to commit to something, they'll be more likely to actually do that action. Like the study which is famous, run by Steve Martin in dentists in the UK, is when people are leaving the dentist, if you get them to actually write down the time of their next appointment and commit to going. So yeah, I'll be here at this time, I'll write it down. They'll be more likely to actually going than if you just tell them when their next appointment is. If you get the individual to make a commitment, they'll be more likely to do it. So if Wogan's email had said, it's happening in three months, are you okay with that? They would have probably had far fewer people unsubscribe. And every company struggles with this. Netflix do this, they increase prices immediately.
47:53 Speaker 01 Spotify sent me an email this weekend saying the cost of your family plan is going up by two pounds immediately. And that just shocks me every time because there's so much evidence that suggests if you just push that increase off into the future, if you say it's coming, it's happening. People will be happier, they'll be more likely to stick around. And yet, no one seems to do it. So, please, if somebody listening to this will be about to send an email to their customers saying costs are going up, please do, but just tell them it'll happen in three months' time, not today.
48:23 Speaker 00 Yes, and perhaps also, you know, the same principle we can apply on ourselves to pre-commit ourselves to that marathon or whatever it is we are trying to do and have been troubled, have had troubles making ourselves doing, pre-committing in advance for the future might be the answer. But I guess here, like personally, you really have to pre-commit because we also like when the moment comes, if we have no commitment, that we might not follow through. But let's say if you ask your customers or yourself pre-commit, then make them, I don't know, sign something or pay for it. So, I don't know if the payment, well, pay for it in advance, agreeing to pay in advance. So that actually works for the future as well, right? There is also the studies on saving, like if you tell people, I don't know, save for
49:07 Speaker 00 retirement later or increase it later, people agree a lot more than if you ask to do that in the moment. Yes, I know that we are short on time, Phil, and I know you have a lot of other really cool people to interview, so we have a lot more amazing stuff to listen to on your podcast. I guess the last question is, well, maybe a couple. What would you like listeners to do, if anything, in terms of behavioral science in their life, in their business? And then the second, where would you like people to go, what to check out, whether that's your podcast or something else? So those sorts of things.
49:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, what would I like people to do? I'd love them to test out some of these things and let me know how they go. I think all of us try and send messages, we all send messages every day, don't we? It's either to customers or to clients, to family members. And I think, I really think there's a lot of power in handwritten messages, just based on these studies. As I said, I've just bought a house recently. And one of the, there's an amazing story I read about in a newspaper where there was a customer, there was a, there was a family who had triplets. So suddenly dramatic change in family size. Family goes from, I think they had one child before, now they have four. And when you have triplets, you sort of desperately need a bigger house pretty quickly.
50:25 Speaker 01 But they loved the, this road that they lived near. They wanted to stay on that road. There was houses on, on this specific road, which had the right amount of bedrooms for them. Problem was, there was only 20 houses on this road and nobody was selling their house. Just as a real example, there's an article about it on Telegraph. And what do you do if no one's selling a house on the road? Well, most people think, I can't buy a house on that road. There is no houses for sale. This family didn't believe that. Instead, they wrote every single house on that road. They wrote to them a letter explaining their situation. We've just had triplets. We love this road. Is anybody looking to sell their property or interested in selling their property? Now, none of these houses were for sale.
51:08 Speaker 01 Remember this, none of these people were even talking to estate agents. They had eight people respond, say, oh, okay, that's interesting. Four people invite them around for a viewing. They made offers on two of the houses and had one of the offers accepted. So of these 20 houses. And, and I think this is important because you think, yeah, I can write a handwritten thank you note to a customer of a South Korean e-commerce store and it might increase their sales. But it's small, it's small, it's not a major impact. What that reveals is that these, because we're all humans and psychology affects us all, these things scale. So these things are effective at just changing behaviour and decisions. And that behaviour could be encouraging someone to spend more with a company next time they purchase,
51:52 Speaker 01 or it could be encouraging them to sell their home. They affect, they have the same effect and they scale in the same way. Because it'd be so difficult to encourage someone to sell their home. And yet they managed to do it just by writing a handwritten note. And so that was one thing I'd love people to do. I'd love people to try this out. And maybe that could just be why I'm writing a handwritten note, especially if you're looking to buy a house, because that seems to be particularly effective. And if you want to learn more from Nigel, read more. You can search for Nudge wherever you get your podcasts, it's the orange logo. And I do also have a free reading list. I've spoken a lot about books I recommend. I mentioned Katie Milkman's, Rory Sutherland's, Richard Shotten's. We can put a link to my free reading list, maybe in the show.
52:31 Speaker 00 Yes, we will do so and to the Nudge podcast as well.
52:36 Speaker 01 If you want to read more, they can go there.
52:38 Speaker 00 Thank you so much, Phil, for all your work, all the insights. Yes, just so much practical value that improves people's lives and businesses. So thank you so much for coming to today's show, to Change Wired, and looking forward to seeing what you come up with next.
52:54 Speaker 01 Thanks, Angela. Cheers.
52:56 Speaker 00 Thank you.
Previous Master Body-Mind Attention Shifting: to beat food cravings, impulsive shopping and become better communicator. Next 3 coaching questions to restart fading motivation. Page updated November 10, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
