Psychology, Advertising & Human Behaviour | Richard Shotton | Modern Wisdom Podcast 163

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, Founder of Astroten and an author. One of my favourite guests returns today as we discuss mental models, psychology, consumer behaviour, principles for advertising, social change and much more. Expect to learn how you can tell someone's mood by the movement of their mouse, why the end of an experience is the most important, what makes the perfect advert, how you can increase workplace safety with skeleton gloves and much more. Get Surfshark VPN - https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter Promo Code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off & One Extra Month Free) Extra Stuff: Follow Richard on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rshotton Buy Richard's Book - https://amzn.to/2YCQfdt Buy Richard's Online Course - https://www.42courses.com/courses/behavioural-science-for-brands Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom #psychology #advertising #humanbehaviour - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Richard Shotton?

  There's an idea called the red sneaker effect by Francesca Gino that suggests that people who break social norms are seen as higher status. So her original experiment was run at academic conferences. I think this was early 2000 when there was a very strong norm. What people were expected to do was turn up in business attire. So what she does is as people tend these conferences is noting down how well dressed they are from very scruffy to very smart. Once she's got all this data, she then goes and finds people whose dress code is allocated on her little job, asks them how many citations they've got, how many times have their work been quoted by other people. And what she finds is that there is a inverse correlation between smartness of dress and number of

• 0:41Richard Shotton?

  citations. So it is the very successful academics who are breaking all the norms about dress. And once you start thinking about it, it becomes very believable that if you're the intern and you turn up to work, you're dressed very scruffily, you're sent home. If you're the CEO and you turn up looking like a mess.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  Rory Sutherland can wear whatever he wants.

• 0:59Richard Shotton?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  My mum still does my washing. I pay her every week to do my washing. But the problem is obviously with the new essential travel only lockdown, I can't see her. So the first thing that she said after Boris's announcement wasn't, are you okay? What's business going to be like? It's, do you know how to work the washing machine?

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  So look, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. The crowd goes crazy for Richard Shotton's return to modern wisdom. How are you, mate?

• 1:38Richard Shotton?

  Very good. Thanks. Very good.

• 1:40Chris Williamson?

  Pleasure to have you on. I cannot wait for today. First things first, Richard, did you know that sex toy sales have increased by 71% in Italy?

• 1:52Richard Shotton?

  No, I did not. That's amazing. For every crisis, someone, someone's winning.

• 1:56Chris Williamson?

  That's it. Everyone's talking about what's going to happen to the price of oil, what's going to happen to the price of gold. No one's talking about what's happening to the price of silicon, are they?

• 2:09Chris Williamson?

  It's a tradable commodity. I said I was going to tell you as well about gangs in Rio de Janeiro.

• 2:15Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  To the listeners, this is not going to be COVID-19 focused. I promise you, we're going to give you some awesome insights into advertising and marketing, but it's too topical not to drop this. So gangs in the favelas in Rio enforced a lockdown from 8pm every night and they put a statement out on a website, don't know if it's their website. And the statement reads, if the government won't do the right thing, organised crime will.

• 2:47Richard Shotton?

  Seen that.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  I just thought, how amazing that you've got a place where typically the gangs are the people that have more control than the police on the negative side. And now they're just stepping in to enforce a lockdown.

• 3:02Richard Shotton?

  Yes, I mean, I imagine there's, yeah, some self-interest there of if something spreads in a favela, presumably it goes like wildfire and so close together. But that's a, yeah, I hadn't seen that at all. Missed that completely.

• 3:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know. So look, we're talking today, we're going to talk advertising, we're going to talk a lot of other stuff. My first question I've got for you is, how do you create the perfect advert? No small question.

• 3:24Richard Shotton?

  No small question. Well, on one hand, you could say that it's something that's impossible to create a formula for. Now, that's not just a complete evasion of the question. It's the idea that probably the biggest task an advert has is to be noticed. And because if you haven't noticed, everything else is irrelevant. And one of the things we know from psychology is that what is distinctive is far more likely to be noticed. We are hardwired to notice what is distinctive. Now, with all of psychology, that's not just speculation on my part.

• 4:03Richard Shotton?

  There is a lovely set of experiments, there's a lovely set of experiments under the name of either isolation effect or the Von Restorff effect. So it's called the Von Restorf effect because there was a paediatrician psychologist in the 1930s called Hedwig Von Restorf. And in 1933, she has a classic experiment. She gives people a long list of information. Sometimes there might be, so on every line, there's three digits. Sometimes that might be letters, A, B, Y. Uh, next line, S, J, Q, third line, C, B, Y. And then every so often she throws in three numbers, one, six, four, and then she goes back to her letters again. She gives people five minutes to look at this long list of information, tries to get them to remember as much as possible.

• 4:49Richard Shotton?

  Takes that list away and then sees what people can recall. And her key finding is that if you give people long lists of letters, they're most likely to remember the rare numbers. If you give people long lists of numbers, they're most likely to remember the rare letters. So why I say you can't really have a formula is if you have a formula and everyone adopts it, that formula becomes defunct. What you actually need to do is find out what is the formula, wrong or right, that everyone in your category is using. What are the category norms? And virtual categories will have uh some, some quite specific norms of behaviour. Find out what those norms are and then, well, you probably want to list out all those norms.

• 5:32Richard Shotton?

  Which ones do you have to adhere to? Because there's a very good reason. Which ones are there for tradition's sake alone? And those are the ones that you want to, to break.

• 5:43Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 5:44Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. And if you, well, if you, and also if you look through a lot of categories, you see these very specific uh ways of behaviour. So uh there's a wonderful Twitter ad, a Twitter handle called, I think, something like Perfume Ads For Sale. And it's just these increasingly surreal scripts, you know, about David Beckham being in a court, a leg of ham falling through the sky and he shouts out guilty. And they only work because everyone knows that's the kind of ridiculous, overblown uh motifs that happen in perfume ads. Or you've got the car ads where they, you know, beautiful car going around the corner. Lots and lots of categories have very fixed ways of behaving. The best thing to do is probably understand what those norms are and then, and then break them.

• 6:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I remember seeing you tweet an article that you did for Marketing Week. Nine percent of digital ads are looked at for more than a second. So 91% of digital ads are looked at for less than a second.

• 6:40Richard Shotton?

  Yes, I think that data, I remember that was a wonderful eye tracking company that Mike Follett runs called Lumen. So it's lovely data in the, they've created this great technology that gets embedded in people's computers. And it essentially tracks where their eyes look. So it's quite a robust finding that the average time people look at ads is a fraction. So I think from that, you've got a couple of points. You've got, well, distinctiveness is a tactic to be noticed. Secondly, placement is hugely important and it's a metric that a lot of programmatic trading doesn't take into account.

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  What's that mean?

• 7:21Richard Shotton?

  Oh, so so programmatic is just automated trading. So you go and look at a website, and this is my area speciality. But if you're looking at a website, the site has certain data on you. It might know that you're a bloke, it might know you're in your twenties, your thirties. And then it will auction the ads that you see to various parties. And programmatic is essentially people just bidding for how much they think you're worth.

• 7:51Richard Shotton?

  But that takes into account a lot of data about you. What that study by Lumen shows is that actually where the ad appears is very important. The longer someone spends reading an article, the longer they end up looking at the ads for. Not a factor of the ad itself, but it's a factor if you're on the site, there's a greater probability the ad will catch your attention. So actually, there's quite a powerful argument that things like news websites where people will spend, you know, a minute on an article are much more valuable than eBay where it might just be speculating. I can't remember if it was eBay, it was good or bad actually, but it might be sites where people were just on for a second or two. So yeah, some lovely, lovely research about that.

• 8:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's much more transient, isn't it? Some websites, you know, you're flicking through stuff. I imagine, I always think how terrible the conversions must be on Tinder adverts. You know, everyone's just swiping as fast as they can in any case. Like, don't give me an advert that's going to be up there. Like, that's not going to be on screen. That's, I bet the stats for Tinder ads are pretty, pretty brutal.

• 8:55Richard Shotton?

  Well, there's also, uh, it depends what the kind of the experience is like as well. There's, there's a lovely body of work all around mood. And I guess it depends how successful you are on Tinder. But, uh, if people are unsuccessful and they're in a bad mood, there's an awful lot of evidence showing that, again, going back to noticeability, people are much less likely to notice ads. So there was a study done by Fred Bronner at the University of Amsterdam. And he got more than a thousand people, gets them to flick through a newspaper. And after they've done so, he asked them if they're in a good mood or they're in a bad mood. They were relaxed or stressed. And then he gets them to try and recall as many ads as they can.

• 9:41Richard Shotton?

  And what he found was that people were much more likely to notice the ads when they were in a good mood rather than a bad mood. Now, what I love about behavioural science is that you don't have to, you know, you don't have to take his work on faith alone. You know, you don't just have to believe it and, you know, you either believe it or you don't. The great thing about all these studies is all the research is in the public domain. So you can take his idea here, with a few tweaks, rerun it for yourself to see if it works for your brand or your particular problem. So a colleague and I reran his study, but not interested in noticeability.

• 10:25Richard Shotton?

  We were interested in likeability. So we did exactly the same thing. We showed people loads of car and taxi ads, got them to rate how much they liked the creative. And then we cut the data by people's mood. And we saw huge swings, you know, people were rating the ads as more likeable. It's about, I think it was about 50% swing and they were rating it as more likeable when they're in a good mood rather than a bad. And it sounds a bit bizarre at first, but I think there's a couple of explanations. There's an argument from Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner, back in 2002. He says that for most of, there's an evolutionary point, he says, that for most of our evolutionary

• 11:05Richard Shotton?

  history, if we were in a good mood, it signaled an absence of danger and therefore it mitigated the need to think critically. So if you're an advertiser, having an uncritical accepting audience is probably a pretty important thing. And then I think there's a second part of, if you're in a bad mood and you see an ad with the price and the benefits, well, you probably put a bit more weight on the downside and the price and the opportunity cost. Whereas if you're in a good mood and you're optimistic, you probably focus on the more positive parts. And it's again, it's something that just never really gets discussed amongst brands and media agencies.

• 11:49Richard Shotton?

  But there's a whole body of work that suggests this targeting by mood or at least weighting of mood should be far more important.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you've all been there, right? You've all been in a car where you've had a crap morning, you spilled your coffee down yourself, you rushed, you're late for work, someone cuts you off. And that person on a Sunday afternoon, as you were just chilling out, coming back from a stroke with the kids, you know, you wouldn't have thought twice about it, but they are your worst enemy on the planet on that Tuesday, grey Tuesday morning with coffee down your shirt. So what's the implication there for brands and advertising campaigns? Is it that they need to be hyper-conscious of the medium of delivery, the timing of delivery, stuff like that? Because you can write the best, by your argument there, you can write the best copy, beautiful

• 12:39Chris Williamson?

  advert, wonderful idea, and if you get it wrong, timing wise, people's mood, you've fucked 50% of the time maybe.

• 12:48Richard Shotton?

  So, well, I think there's probably two implications. The great thing with behavioural science, and this is an analogy that Rory Southern's made, is it's not like physics, he says, it's not that in physics, the opposite of a good idea is a bad idea. What Rory Southern says is that in behavioural science and psychology, people are so complex and nuanced that the opposite of a good idea could be another good idea. So what's interesting about that? Mood point, I think you could take that in two very different ways. One implication, and this is where I default to, because my background is in this area, is as you say, well, you should put more emphasis on reaching people in a positive mood. Now, with existing technology, you can do that to a degree. It's a bit crude, but you can do it.

• 13:33Richard Shotton?

  There are a lot of studies, like the IPA touchpoints, diaries and time diaries, which show that people are much more likely to be in a good mood in the evenings than in the mornings on Fridays and Saturdays than they are on Mondays and Tuesdays. So you've got some crude ways of reaching people by time of day. You've probably got some slightly more accurate ways. You could reach people during comedy shows or in the cinema rather than on the tube.

• 13:59Richard Shotton?

  There are potential, much more accurate ways of targeting mood coming down the line. There was a study done by, God, his name escapes me, is it Brigham Young University? I'll think of it halfway through the show.

• 14:18Richard Shotton?

  And then this study looks at people's mouse movement.

• 14:24Richard Shotton?

  So on their computer, and what he showed was that you can tell someone's mood by the smoothness of their mouse.

• 14:30Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 14:31Richard Shotton?

  So if the cursor is moving very smoothly and evenly, people tend to, you know, it's a signifier that people are probably in a good mood. If it's moving in a more jagged, hurried way, signify that they're in a, in a bad mood. So if he's correct, I think, might have been Jeff Jenkins, but I'll have to double check that one. If he's correct, well, it's not too hard, therefore, technologically, to start serving ads dependent on, on how the mouse is moving across, across, across the page. So rather than reaching people with the propensity to be in a good mood, I think that might be a much more accurate way.

• 15:03Chris Williamson?

  That's so cool.

• 15:04Richard Shotton?

  But then the other angle could be, you could forget about the medium and prioritize the creative. You could say, well, we have the ability, you know, to put people in a good mood through likeable characters like the Meek, humorous jokes like The Economist. You know, there are ways for the creative to put people in that, that positive mood. And then we can harness the benefit.

• 15:30Chris Williamson?

  You create your own environment. You become the precursor to your own message.

• 15:35Richard Shotton?

  Yes. And you've probably got, that's probably got.

• 15:40Richard Shotton?

  Greater potential than the medium argument because the problem with a lot of these media arguments is you might squeeze out an extra five or 10% efficiency from mood targeting. But most sites, well, you'd either have to pay a technology provider to get that data to do the targeting, or you're asking for a specific subset of a media owner's audience and they'll probably charge you for that. So you've got to make sure the uplift in your performance from the cycle to the inside outweighs the increasing cost. The great thing about the creative argument is it's far easier probably to make it work financially.

• 16:23Chris Williamson?

  So to make a good advert, we need to get noticed first and foremost. That was, if we're not noticed, everything's pointless. And you, you had a great point about this where you said, a lot of advertisers and marketers focus on the second step optimization of perfecting the ad rather than just getting noticed.

• 16:44Richard Shotton?

  Yes. There's a lovely quote from Dave Trop, so wonderful blogger on advertising, amazing creative. And he says something like, the most important line that should appear on every brief never does. And that is this advert must be noticed and remembered. And he says the fact that he's never seen that on a brief in his life suggests that marketers take noticeability for granted. And I think he's right. I mean, I've never, no one's ever fixates on that problem. It's always about the conveyance of the attributes of a brand. There should be more focus on noticeability.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've, we've got ourselves noticed. We've got, we've, we've bypassed that first. What are we doing next?

• 17:30Richard Shotton?

  Yep. Well, well, this is a kind of a hybrid because the great thing about the, about the solutions being noticed also has implications for what people think about your brand. So there's a, so we've said one of the ways to get noticed, and there are others, you know, personalisation and things, but distinctiveness is a really powerful one. The brilliant thing with that is there's an idea called the red sneaker effect by Francesca Gino and some other colleagues that suggests that, and it begins with, her work I think was originally with people, it suggests that people who break social norms are seen as higher status.

• 18:09Richard Shotton?

  So her original experiment was run at academic conferences. So I think this was early 2000 when there was a very strong norm, what people were expected to do was turn up in kind of business attire, shirts and jacket for blokes. So what she does is as people attend these conferences, she's sitting there and she's noting down how well dressed they are, from very scruffy to very smart. Once she's got all this, all this data, she then goes and finds the people whose dress coach is allocated on her little chart, she then goes and asks them how many citations they've got.

• 18:51Richard Shotton?

  So a citation is an academics kind of quantification, it's a bit of a crude one, but a quantification for how successful they are. How many times has their work been quoted by other people? And what she finds is that there is a inverse correlation between smartness of dress and number of citations. So it is the very successful academics who are turning up very scruffily, who are breaking all the norms of that dress. And once you start thinking about it, it becomes, you know, I think very believable that, you know, if you're the intern and you turn up to work, you're dressed very scruffily, you get told to send home. If you're the CEO or if you're the rock star academic and you turn up looking like a

• 19:35Richard Shotton?

  mess, well, everyone will just put it down to your.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  Nasser Talib can wear whatever he wants. Rory Sutherland can wear whatever he wants, can't he?

• 19:42Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I mean, well, yes, exactly. Uh, he's he's dressed as cravats and what's going on in an ad agency. Absolutely. Whereas if even well, twenty year old doing that might people might just think, you know, it's a lunatic. Um, yeah, they're a wonderful example. And and and what she argues is firstly that it's only people of high status that can do this. And then she shows in other experiments that people are remarkably attuned to it. So if they see you breaking a norm, they then take out higher status from it. So, and this is then a bit of a leap. That's her stuff is about people.

• 20:24Richard Shotton?

  So I'm making a bit of a leap to brands and I'm doing some research at the moment to try and see if this this works. But arguably, if consumers are aware of the category norms and you radically deviate from them, perhaps in the same way as people will get, um, perceived higher status, so will so will the brands. So I think I love distinctiveness, one, because it gets around the notoriety problem. But it's also, uh, conveying some of the the positive, um, attributes of a brand.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  Signaling.

• 20:59Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yeah, yeah. Um, sorry. So that that was a little bit of a fudge, a little bit of a high ground. I don't want to miss that out. But so that's the thing about you. You've got attention. The next thing you want to be achieving is memorability. And there are some lovely studies from academics around this as well. And one of my favourites is this idea called the generation effect. So, do you remember the cancer research ad? Either the end of twenty eighteen, maybe mid twenty nineteen. So it was talking about the second biggest cause of cancer is O B blank S blank T Y.

• 21:39Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, I do. Yes.

• 21:40Richard Shotton?

  A bit sick. Now, there was a big hoo-ha about that and there was debate about whether it's fat shaming or not. And unfortunately, because of that significant debate, what got lost was they were using a really clever tactic to get people to remember their core point. And that tactic is the generation effect. So the agency, and I think it might have been an anomaly, I'm not 100% sure. They used an experiment from 1978 by Graff and Slameka called the generation effect. And what they essentially did is not quite this, but very similar.

• 22:23Richard Shotton?

  They would give people lists of words. So let's say you get a list of, or one group gets a list of animals, fish, dog, weasel, cat, elephant. They try and remember, they're given this list with von Restor, people have to remember as much as they can.

• 22:41Richard Shotton?

  Next group get the same list of animals, but rather than being written out in full, just like that cancer research ad. You don't see fish, F I S H, you see F blank S H. People are given the same amount of time with that list of words. They get the list of words taken away from them and then they have to recall as much as they can. And people were 14, they remembered 14% more words in that second condition. When they had to generate the answers themselves. And what Graff and Slameka argued was that if you just give people a list of information. They process it too quickly, too easily, that it just kind of washes over them.

• 23:26Richard Shotton?

  If you put in a tiny little bit of friction, if you make them generate the answer, the brain has to process some of that information. It becomes more memorable. Yeah, I think maybe teachers push this more than advertisers, you know, don't just read your textbooks, write stuff down, quiz yourself and all that sorts of stuff. So you've got this interesting technique for generating better recall, the generation effect. You, there are some examples like cancer research, like J and B whiskey of very literal interpretations that add. Now having blanks in the copy to make people remember it.

• 24:06Richard Shotton?

  All well and good, but you can probably only do it once or twice without it looking a bit weird.

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  Becomes a new norm as well then, right?

• 24:16Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, well, well, potentially there is that as well. But what I think with all these biases that we discuss is that where they are most powerful is in when people don't think of behavioural science as the end in itself. Where you get the best strength is applying the creativity of marketer's mind and the insights from behavioural science. And if people interpret these findings much more laterally, I think that's when you get the bigger impact. So bilaterally, I would argue some of the best bits of copy apply the generation effect, not by removing letters, but by giving people small puzzles.

• 24:56Richard Shotton?

  So famous Economist ad by David Abbot, AMV, I don't read The Economist, management trainee, age 42. I think that's a lateral interpretation of the generation effect. He didn't go out and say, people who don't read The Economist are unsuccessful. They gave you a little bit of a puzzle, you had to work that out for yourself, therefore it becomes a bit more memorable. So that would be one tactic for.

• 25:28Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I love that. I had Robin Dreek, a negotiator for the FBI, I had him on the podcast a little while ago. And what he said was that one tool which is used by FBI agents who are trying to recruit assets if they want to try and get information out of them is rather than, so let's say I want to get your date of birth, I might say to you, I bet I can tell what horoscope, you're Pisces, right? And you go, no, no, I'm not, I'm Aries. Okay, yeah, 1985, no, 1984. And you're like, you have this desire to fill in the gap, right? So there's part of that which it's playing on. Also Philip C Brown, the guy who wrote, I'm going to get this wrong, I think it's Make

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  It Stick, I had him on the podcast about two years ago now. And his synopsis of an entire lifetime, learning how people learn is it doesn't matter about repeated exposure. It matters about repeated recall. So the Feynman technique uses this, right? It's learn your thing, then teach it to a four year old. It doesn't matter how many times you get exposed to something. It's how many times you're forced to recall that from memory. And if you think about the obesity advert, you've got

• 26:41Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  Kind of the edges of both of those things, those mechanisms going on there that someone thinks, I want to, I want to complete that because the Zygonic effect says we want to close the loop. I don't like the fact that this word is uncompleted up there. And then there's also this side of it that, as you touched on, having to force people to pull some cognitive power out. They've had to deploy, you know, that's more work than some people will have done speaking to their spouse in the morning. Hi darling, how are you? Yes, goodbye, thanks. Like that, you know, that's just the, the classic morning orange juice chat. And yeah, by, by doing that, I think you'll have the repeated recall. I think you'll have got that as well.

• 27:23Richard Shotton?

  So I applied the point of, your two examples were teaching and negotiation. And I wonder if sometimes advertising is in danger of looking to inspiration always from other advertisers. Now flicking through awards, journals. And actually, maybe people like teachers who are all about the past information, getting people to remember things. You could probably get a very different set of inspiration. Again, you know, going back to the point of distinctiveness. You don't want to be learning the same things as, as your competitors.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I agree. Okay. So we've got, we've got distinctiveness. We've talked about some different ideas for that. How can I work on my creativity and not just rehash new versions of my old ideas? What are some ways for me to kind of bolster my creativity when I'm looking for new things in my adverts? And new ways to, to come up with ideas?

• 28:17Richard Shotton?

  Well, this is moving away from my speciality because I don't write ads. So move away from my speciality. But I would argue there's that one sense of having a different set of, set of inspiration from other people.

• 28:32Richard Shotton?

  One area that I have done research on is

• 28:37Richard Shotton?

  Maybe the danger of who we're trying to appeal to when we're creating adverts. So we've had, we've talked about the generation effect as being a way to

• 28:50Richard Shotton?

  create memories, improve the probability of recall. Another tactic that does that is something called the the keeturistic. So it's an idea from, I think it's Matthew McGlon and Jessica, and I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce her surname, Tovik Bash, I think. And what they did, so it's called the keeturistic because it's, and it's the idea that we find phrases that rhyme more believable than non-rhyming phrases. And what, so, yeah, I wasn't particularly a strong believer in this when I first read it, but they have a lovely experiment. So what they do is they get two groups of people. First group are given a list of kind of fake proverbs.

• 29:36Richard Shotton?

  And it was something like, you know, what the first word might be, the first proverb might be woes unite foes. And there'd be another proverb. The other group see the same proverb, but written in an unrhyming way. So woes unite enemies. So they'll, they'll have this, you know, list of 10 proverbs, say some rhyme, some don't rhyme. And then the other group have the the mirror image. They then say to people, how true do you think this?

• 30:13Richard Shotton?

  This, the these proverbs are, and they rate them on a, on a scale.

• 30:18Richard Shotton?

  And what they find is that when people have seen the rhyming version, if they again compare it, the results, the group with the non-rhyming version, the rhyming proverbs are seen as significantly more believable.

• 30:31Richard Shotton?

  Now, interestingly, at the end, they ask people directly, why did you believe this proverb or not? Does it have anything to do with the rhyme? Everyone swears, but it's the content that they think it's nothing to do with. Everyone says there's nothing to do with the rhyme. So if you ask people directly, they send you off completely the wrong direction. But if you do this wonderful test and control approach, you start to see the power of rhymes. And they argue, I think, that we often confuse mental fluency with truthfulness. Now, I then took that, again, this lovely way with behavioural science, you can take these experiments and rerun them for your own ends. We did exactly the same study, but this time we gave people

• 31:16Richard Shotton?

  the lists of proverbs in the morning, and then rather than ask them whether they believe them or not, we got them to try and remember them in the afternoon. And this was amongst colleagues, so dubious robustness, but I think our memory is probably saying that is true for ad agency staff as much as anyone else. And what we found is that people were, I think, about two times more likely to remember the rhyming phrase than the non-rhyming version. Now, what's interesting with this is that does believability and noticeability, two massively important things for adverts, having a rhyming strapline. But if you go

• 31:58Richard Shotton?

  to look at historic collections of adverts, and I went and did this, I went to the News International Archives. So with a colleague, we went all the way back to the 70s, looked at hundreds and hundreds of newspapers and ads. And what we saw was a really clear pattern, whereas in the 1970s, loads of ads had a rhyming strapline. By the noughties and the 2010s, it was down to a handful. It was five or 10%. And all those great things like once you pop, you can't stop, Pringles, don't be vague, Adora Cura, these are all 20, 30, 40, 70 years old. They're completely fallen out of fashion.

• 32:39Richard Shotton?

  Now, we've got, that's fascinating in that you've got all this recent evidence that rhyming phrases are memorable and believable, yet they are used less and less and less. And I think that can only be explained by the the mixed motivations of marketers and creatives. Now, I would argue that their rhymes aren't used as much as they should because they have fallen out of fashion in the marketing.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  They're uncool, aren't they? Yeah.

• 33:09Richard Shotton?

  Exactly. But they're uncool to your fellow professional. And who cares what your fellow professional thinks in terms of sales?

• 33:15Chris Williamson?

  Apparently everyone.

• 33:15Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, exactly that. But, well, sorry, they shouldn't care, but absolutely right, they do.

• 33:22Richard Shotton?

  Because if you, yeah, exactly. If you want to signal your professional expertise, a rhyme does not do that. You know, use of cutting edge techniques does that, or something that is probably very abstruse does that. But that's not our, you know, as marketers, our core role. So I think one big, going back to the original point, one big pitfall of is to advertise to our peers rather than advertise to our, our customers. And that, I think, happens far more than people, than people admit.

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, I got a sense of this during our last conversation. And I also got this when speaking to Rory. He's a big proponent of the fact that people in advertising agencies, a lot of the time, would sooner come up with an advert which failed but was not risk-taking and liked by their superiors than one which sometimes actually was more successful with the market, but adds risk on to their back. Because if you decide to forge the new path with, with your adventurous advert and it doesn't go well, you never have the, but it's, it's just like, look at the, look at the lineage of, of things that we've got behind us. It was, it was always going to work. How did it not work? We followed the formula.

• 34:42Richard Shotton?

  So it's this wonderful thing of like risk. If you say, is being distinctive and risky for a brand, no, it's not because it gives you the greatest probability of success. Is it risky for the individual involved? Absolutely. You know, your point spot on about this lineage. You know, if you are a beer brand and you decide to sponsor a table tennis team and it goes horribly wrong, and all ads and all sponsorships can, then you'll end up getting fired because you haven't got that body of work to show it's a sensible decision. If you decide to sponsor a football team like every other football beer brand does, when it goes wrong, you can say, ah, well, it wasn't a stupid idea. Bud do it. Carling do

• 35:22Richard Shotton?

  it. So and so do it. So I think you're absolutely right. There is a misalignment of motivations between the, what's often called the agent, the employer, the marketer, and the principal, that is the brand or the shareholders. And that principal agent problem explains an awful lot of bizarre decision making on the part of brands. Why so few are distinctive? Why so few admit flaws and platform mistake? Why so few adopt rhymes? Yeah, this mismatch of motivations, I think, explains an awful lot.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. I think there's some really good, a real good framework there for people to begin to look at how they're, how they're planning their advertising campaigns. We are going to do a new section, which I'm very excited for, which is called, what phrases do you hate most in marketing? I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go first. Number one phrase that I hate in marketing is pivot.

• 36:19Richard Shotton?

  Pivot?

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You know, we're just gonna pivot. We're just gonna, yeah, we're gonna pivot the brand direction. We've really thought, recently we sat down, we had a bow wow, and we realized that we're actually gonna pivot a little bit on there. Oh, man. Wow, it really, really, really gets me.

• 36:37Richard Shotton?

  So I think that is symptomatic of a lot of marketing language that is over complex. I mean, as far as a pivot just means we're gonna change direction. There's a wonderful study done by a guy called Daniel Oppenheimer at Princeton, and it's got the best ever title for his research paper. It's something like, the utilization of erudite vernacular irrespective of necessity.

• 37:07Richard Shotton?

  Or using long words needlessly.

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:12Richard Shotton?

  And what he does, because that's the full title, you know, it's the both.

• 37:19Richard Shotton?

  And what he does is he gets abstracts of other academic papers and these are often thick with jargon, like marketing, writing. He shows those abstracts to people and then he says, how intelligent do you think the author of this abstract is?

• 37:35Richard Shotton?

  And then in his other version, he shows another group of people in the test version, the same abstracts, but he has changed the complex language for simpler language. And when those people rate the intelligence of the author, they think the author is more intelligent. So you've got this bizarre situation in which marketers and academics are using this overblown language in the hope of appearing intelligent, but actually what the listener takes out is a lack of intelligence. So it's far, far better to speak plainly and simply.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  What's that Einstein quote? It is the mark of a genius to explain a complex thing in a simple way. It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple thing in a complex way.

• 38:21Richard Shotton?

  Oh, go on, say that again.

• 38:22Chris Williamson?

  It is the mark of a genius to explain a complex thing in a simple way. It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a, we're recording, you don't need to write it down, Richard.

• 38:32Richard Shotton?

  Okay. And the only thing I'm dubious about that quote is the attribution.

• 38:38Chris Williamson?

  There's no way that Einstein said that. What was he doing thinking about explaining shit? He's doing quantum physics. Right, what phrase do you hate most?

• 38:47Richard Shotton?

  Well, before we start, there's a lovely phrase called Churchillian drift. So it's this idea that someone who isn't very famous says something amazing. And then it gradually just gets attributed to more and more famous people. It ends up with Churchill, Einstein, Mark Twain. So if people are interested in the genuine attribution, there's an amazing website called Quote Investigator. You put the quote in and it has this lovely like half a page on who first said it, where it came from.

• 39:13Chris Williamson?

  It's like ancestry.com but for a quote.

• 39:15Richard Shotton?

  Oh, for a quote, yeah.

• 39:17Chris Williamson?

  That's similar to, I think it's, we are what we repeatedly do, excellence therefore is not an act but a habit and everyone attributes that to Aristotle.

• 39:28Richard Shotton?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 39:29Chris Williamson?

  To Aristotle, but it's just not him at all. And there's this huge medium post, which is on the same thing, which is, I don't know, would you call it, what's that word when you see where words have come from? What's the body of work called?

• 39:43Richard Shotton?

  It's etymology?

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's etymology. It's like that, but it's the movement of a quote. Okay, so what, let's give us, give us a phrase that you hate.

• 39:51Richard Shotton?

  So the one at the moment I most hate, and there's quite a few in marketing that I hate, is trust crisis. So I've seen this more and more again, article after article, you know, some very respected titles and bodies where they're talking about the crisis in trust, that people trust brands less than they ever have ever done. The problem with this is although it gets repeated again and again in articles and presentations, there is no evidence for it. It is amazing. It's how a piece of fake information can just spread. So I'll spend

• 40:33Richard Shotton?

  a little bit of time looking at this. There are three long-term trackers of how much people trust organisations. So there's Edelman data. Now, if you just read the Edelman reports into trust, you could often come away with the impression that we are in a trust crisis. If you print out the data tables from every one of their 30 reports and you print them out and you plot them, what you see is the trust in brands or businesses, you know, bounces around from year to year, but it's essentially flat or slightly rising.

• 41:15Richard Shotton?

  The other one is, I think it's Ipsos Mori, they've got something called the, I think the Veracity Index, and it looks at trust in professions, and they've studied twenty or thirty professions over the, I think it's back to the early nineteen eighties. And again, they are, trust in professions is either flat or rising. I think the only profession that is in massive decline is the church, and that has very specific reasons. And then the third body of evidence that they will use for this trust crisis is the AA, so the Advertising Association. And what they've done is, is this weird sleight of hand in

• 41:57Richard Shotton?

  that the evidence that they have is that favorability towards advertising is dropping, and they show that over about, I think it's about twenty years. So you see, see this kind of long drop in favorability towards advertising, and then like last eight or ten years, it's flattened out. When they show trust, which they've only measured for about ten years, they say, well, trust data, which is pretty flat, maybe a very small decline, that correlates with favorability, and because favorability is down over twenty years, well, there must be a trust crisis. So you've either got AIDWAN's data which

• 42:41Richard Shotton?

  shows trust is increasing, but often the reporting around it suggests that there's a crisis. Because what often happens is, because those numbers are bouncing around, if you would just select certain time periods, by picking which data set you compare, you can create a, a drop. So you've got that data being misused, then you've got the Ipsos Mori data, which is brilliant, but when journalists report it, they'll often pick the one profession that that year happens to have dropped. And then you've got this AA data, which really shows a very different story about favorability towards ads declining. So there's no evidence that trust is dropping, and that creates a problem, because it ends

• 43:25Richard Shotton?

  up with the wrong solutions. If you think trust is in crisis, as in it's lower than it's ever been, you need a new solution to solve it. If you think trust in brands and advertising is low, but it's always been low, which is what the evidence suggests, well, then you can turn to tried and trusted techniques that brands have used in the past. And again, there are lots of ideas from psychology about how you can build trust in a brand. Now, make big public pronouncements. Don't do digital targeted advertising. The more public a statement, the more believable it is. And I've done some research on that. Um, make people feel that you've put a huge amount of money behind your

• 44:06Richard Shotton?

  campaign. There's an idea called costly signaling that uh, the believability of a message rises with its perceived expense. So extravagant advertising, unnecessary white space, long second links, um, great creative feats all boost the believability of an ad. Um, even the, you know, the, the media context, you know, but running in the, the times has a very different feel from running in the star. So I hate that phrase because it's not true, yet it mindlessly gets passed from one person to another. And it has a danger. Um, we, it leads us, this phrase leads us to the wrong solution. The solutions, the tried and trusted solutions are out there, but

• 44:50Richard Shotton?

  we're ignoring them because we think we're in this kind of unique period of a lack of trust.

• 44:55Chris Williamson?

  That's so good. Uh, some other ones which I hate, some other words which I hate. Uh, I hate content. I just hate the term content. I'm so sick of content. I can't wait for it to be something else. Uh, are we creating content? Are we driving content? I mean, this is how bad it was that even when I was on Love Island and I walked through the doors of, of season one of Love Island and the producers were in the villa talking about, right, guys, I know that you all just want to chill out and have a chat about the day, but we, we just haven't, we haven't driven quite enough content for the day. So we just, I'm thinking this, I'm, I'm not recording fucking Instagram stories here. Like this is just supposed to be my life. Like if I want to go and talk about my day, that is the content. The fact that as far as

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  you're concerned, and maybe everybody else as well actually is concerned that it's fucking boring content is not my problem. That is your problem, my friend. So content, not a fan of. Scale, I'm fucking sick of scale. I'm sick of higher order and I'm sick of meta.

• 45:57Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:59Chris Williamson?

  So content pivot, scale, higher order and meta, they can all get in the sea.

• 46:05Richard Shotton?

  Yes, we need a, what was it? There was that wonderful show Roomo 101 where people shove their hated things.

• 46:12Chris Williamson?

  All going in room 101. Yeah. One thing that you touched on just there, which is talking about some of the power that advertising and marketing has. And I've been thinking about this, about how central marketing is to the public's good. Right. So I think marketing can sometimes be seen as a bit of a dirty word capitalist, capitalizing businesses, trying to make a profit, blah, blah. But during the coronavirus outbreak that we've got at the moment, industries deemed non-essential have been shutting down. So people have been noticing a refocusing of public attention to important areas of life like health and family and connectedness and stuff. The way that I see it, marketers are able to affect behaviour change in a way that brute

• 46:56Chris Williamson?

  force, operational optimising and well-meaning emotions can't on their own. So, perfect example, the NHS has, I think this stat, nearly a half a million people have signed up to this volunteer to help them, which is amazing, right? Great campaign. But how much more could that effect have been amplified if every ounce of behavioural science and understanding, beautiful advertising and great copywriting and all the rest of it was harnessed? And that's, I think, this, the fact that you're able to catalyse what is effective with a non-essential business, you know, no one's looking at advertisers or marketers or behavioural science guys and say, oh, for fuck's sake, we'd better keep the lights on.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  They're a set, they don't let them stop going to work. And I think that this really ties back to what Rory said about alchemy to describe marketing's ability to literally create value and create change out of nothing.

• 47:55Richard Shotton?

  Yes, so I think you've got a couple of points there. There's the idea that if you want to reduce life-threatening behaviour, tactics from behavioural science or psychology or advertising can be used. One that I'm interested in at the moment is this idea of negative social proof. So it goes back to an idea of Robert Schildening, where he says if you make a transgressive behaviour seem commonplace, or an antisocial behaviour seem commonplace, you remove a sense of transgression and it becomes more common still. Now, like all psychology experiments, he doesn't just argue this like a philosopher, he just takes a piece of logic and creates this smooth argument. What he does is go out and run tests to prove

• 48:40Richard Shotton?

  it. So the test is goes to the Arizona Petrified Wood National Park, rigs up CCTV camera by a path and sprinkles bits of petrified wood along the path. Now, the reason he's done that is there is a problem in that park with lots of tourists stealing bits of petrified wood. So he wants to know how you can reduce that and where you might by accident increase that theft rate. So, three scenarios. First scenario, no sign. So he's getting a kind of a base level of theft, and it's about 3%. Second scenario, he puts up a sign saying, don't steal, it's wrong, and theft rates drop by half to about 1.5%. And then in the

• 49:23Richard Shotton?

  third scenario, which I will come back to, this is what I'm worrying is happening now, he puts up a sign saying 14 tonnes of wood have been stolen every year and it's ruining the look of this park. Now, he then says, the theft rates go from, remember 3% was the baseline, they jumped to 7.9%. So in his words, a client promotion strategy. It's the worst campaign in history. Absolutely. Because he says, if you tell people that everyone else is doing this, what people think is, well, it can't be that bad, I'm a bit of a mug not to be doing it. You know, you remove this sense of transgression, it becomes more common still.

• 50:02Richard Shotton?

  If you then look at government advertising and sometimes charity advertising or a lot of social advertising, you see how regularly this happens. So Childin says it's a big mistake of government. When there are behaviours they don't want, they often inadvertently use negative social proof. They say, you know, loads of youths get, students get drunk, loads of people are carrying knives, lots of people don't turn up for their doctor's appointment. All of Childin's work suggests that will exacerbate the situation, not solve it. So the danger is if you fixate on people not social distancing or fixate on people who are stockpiling, the message that people take out is not, oh, they're very bad, I'm

• 50:45Richard Shotton?

  definitely not going to do it. They take out, well, if everyone else is ignoring the rules, they can't be that important. You know, we, we are a species that copy people. So I absolutely believe the application of Ablis can solve or help solve some very important problems, absolutely.

• 50:59Chris Williamson?

  And the misapplication of it as well can potentially make it worse.

• 51:03Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's completely true.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there was that, that brilliant study that you put up about, was it, was it Peru? Was it the Peruvian tax where they created a lottery on the bottom of the receipts?

• 51:16Richard Shotton?

  Oh, Taiwan, I think.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  Taiwanese, Taiwanese tax. So they wanted people to submit receipts and didn't they? Wanted to make sure they kept a hold of them. So they created a lottery and the numbers were printed on the bottom of, of receipts. So everyone obviously kept them and they forced the supermarkets to give them to them and, and this sort of stuff. And you think what?

• 51:35Richard Shotton?

  Turn the whole population into, into, you know, policemen. They were essentially enforcing.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  For their own receipts. Yeah. For something that it was, would have previously been costly and all the other different ways that you could have gone about that. And it is by far the, the cheapest, you know, it requires, it requires a printer. I mean, they were giving away, they were giving away money for the lottery. So it requires the money for the lottery. But, you know, in real terms, nothing. Compare that with having to pay an entire division of people to enforce the fucking, the receipt collection.

• 52:06Richard Shotton?

  Yes.

• 52:07Chris Williamson?

  Thing, whatever it is. Um, yeah, I think that's great.

• 52:11Richard Shotton?

  I love that Taiwanese example. I think I'm, I read about that first on a Dave Trop blog. So yeah, it's a brilliant example. And there are other examples of lotteries being used by government. So I think the Swedish have a system where speed cameras, both fine. Drivers who are breaking the speed limit, but people who go past the speed camera below the recommended level, they are entered into a draw.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  No way, that is so good. Do you know Koon Smets? Do you know who that is?

• 52:47Richard Shotton?

  Yes, he is more a Belgian guy into a social psychology. Yeah, lovely chap.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fantastic guy. So I had him on, had him on last year. Did you know about the Estonian Police Service and what they've been doing?

• 52:59Richard Shotton?

  Is this where people get, is this where they, I think I might have read about this in a Rory Sutherland post, where do you get pulled over and yeah, go on.

• 53:08Chris Williamson?

  You have to stay on the side of the road. So they give people the choice between a very expensive fine, I think it's 300 euros or something, if you get caught speeding, or a half an hour wait.

• 53:21Richard Shotton?

  Yes.

• 53:21Chris Williamson?

  And it just showed, the whole podcast that I did with him was about the valuing of time, the, how we perceive time from a behavioural economics standpoint. And almost 50% of people elected to pay this fine rather than wait half an hour. And that's so, it's so interesting because obviously, presumably, if you are caught speeding, it's probably because you have somewhere to be and you can do with being there quickly. Which means, if I said, hey mate, would you sit by the side of this road for 300 euros? I don't think, David Beckham would probably do that, you know, there's no amount of money that someone's got that's too much to not sit by the side of the road for 300 euros. But

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  if you are running 20 minutes late to your daughter's dance recital, or to a gym class, or to get to a meeting or something like that, you're prepared to do it.

• 54:13Richard Shotton?

  I also wonder there if, I wonder if they take, take people's phones away? Because there's a lot of research into the idea that unoccupied waits are painful, occupied waits are, you know, people don't seem to mind. So what I mean by that, there's a, there was a report in the New York Times about, I think it was one of the, it might have been Houston Airport, and they were having lots of complaints about how long people had to wait to get their bags at the airport baggage carousel. So what was happening was people would go through passport control or whatever, they'd, they'd walk a minute, and then they'd wait seven minutes to get their bag.

• 54:57Richard Shotton?

  So the first thing they did was spend loads of money just trying to make the system more efficient, hiring more baggage handlers, speeding up the machines, whatever they did. And they managed to shave a minute off the time, but they saw very little reduction in complaints. The next thing they did was rather than try this kind of engineering technique, they tried a psychological technique, which was all around occupying people's time. So now what happened was as people left passport control, they were sent on this kind of circuitous jerk walk around the airport for six minutes. So, you know, they used all those kind of guides to make sure people can go back to the carousel.

• 55:36Richard Shotton?

  So, yeah, they walked for six minutes, get to the carousel, then wait a minute, bag turns up and off they go. And when they did that, people's complaint level plummets. Because what people didn't like was standing staring at a carousel with nothing to do. What they didn't mind was, you know, a little walk around.

• 55:54Chris Williamson?

  In some blind effort to make it feel like you're, so I think about this all the time when I'm driving. I realise, I know for an absolute fact that at a time when there's traffic, I will tend to take a route which may potentially be both longer and longer, both in terms of time and in terms of distance, but one which will be less likely to be nose to tail, even accounting for all of that.

• 56:22Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Chris Williamson?

  Because I'm cognisant of the level of discomfort that I have when being in nose to tail traffic. There's a little bit of effort involved, especially if you drive an automatic car.

• 56:34Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 56:35Chris Williamson?

  You know, if you're with cruise control, automatic car is basically a go kart. You just sit on the motorway and you go. Whereas I've got to use my foot, I've got to think how far is that guy away from me? Oh, fuck, this is boring, sat in traffic, this sucks. Like, you know, I have that, but that's the same thing. I just, I want to feel like I'm doing something, even if I arrive 15 minutes later.

• 56:55Richard Shotton?

  Well, I wonder, I wonder if there's also an element of, one of the other theories about time is that people find an uncertain wait, like I don't know whether I'm going to wait zero minutes or 10 minutes. They find that much more irritating than someone saying, you will wait eight minutes. That certainty.

• 57:11Chris Williamson?

  Was it Rory, was it Rory that did the?

• 57:14Richard Shotton?

  He talks about Uber.

• 57:15Chris Williamson?

  No, was it not the one, was it not the one for Heathrow? Which, so people waiting to get into Heathrow, the audience will know, I use this, I must drop this all the time. So if it's mis- misaccredited to Rory, like one of those quotes that's come through the wrong way, get the Churchill slide or whatever it's called.

• 57:29Richard Shotton?

  He is, yeah, exactly. Everything that's cool gets eventually attributed to Rory or Dave Trott.

• 57:38Chris Williamson?

  Waiting to get into the security scanners at Heathrow, they were struggling, they looked at operational fixes for it. And instead of that, they just put up signs saying 45 minutes from this point, 30 minutes from this point, 15 minutes from this point. And it, the number of complaints plummeted. Let's link this back to coronavirus. So Boris Johnson, his announcement, when he said, "We are going to be under quarantine, we are going to be under lockdown, you are not to leave the house except for these things." And I'm thinking to myself, he's gonna have to say a timeframe. He has to give a timeframe. Cause if he just has an open-ended, "There is no timeframe in this." And it was really cleverly worded, the way that he said it. He said that "We will review this after three weeks."

• 58:22Richard Shotton?

  So in that case, probably the people to learn from are Disney. So firstly, they do, well, I hadn't heard about Heathrow, so I don't know who that should be attributed to. But what Disney do is not only do they give you, you know, on like Disneyland Paris, wherever, as you go to the ride, it says 45 minute wait or hour wait. So they make the wait certain and therefore less painful. The second thing that they do very cleverly is they overestimate the wait time. So if they put up, they think it's an hour, what they really think is it's 50 minutes. So when you get to the end, you're like, "Oh, it only took 50 minutes. I've saved, I've saved 10 minutes."

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  On an amount of time that they made you wait.

• 59:01Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, which is, no one, whereas if it said, "Oh, it's gonna be 40 minutes," you'd have been really annoyed. So maybe there is a technique there. And it, cause it's the end that's particularly important. There's a, there's a whole body of ideas called the peak end rule, which is the two moments where disproportionately likely to remember from experience are the height of, either the worst thing or the best thing, the peak, and the end, the final moment. So ending the queue on that positive realisation that this was quicker than you'd expected, again, is another very, very positive thing. So there could be a- Oh, it's it's it's wonderful applications of it. You know, you start seeing um uh restaurants, particular hotels, coming up with ways of making those final moments of the experience

• 59:46Richard Shotton?

  very positive. So, right, because normally if you just leave it as per the norm, the end of the meal, the end of the stay is normally the the worst part. You know, you get the bill and shuffle out into the cold world. There are restaurants like Flatiron where they give you this tiny little pair of steak knives as your uh if you get your bill. And then as you wander out, you're going to hand those steak knives in and they give you a little free ice cream. So, you know, people end on a high and unexpected uh benefit. So, yeah, there there there's lots of applications, that peak end rule to anyone who's trying to make a customer experience, because most people making a customer experience are fixated on making a good impression at the beginning, important, but what you should also do is

• 1:00:30Richard Shotton?

  to give as much time management effort into thinking, how do you how do you end on a high?

• 1:00:34Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't there a study done on people having endoscopies?

• 1:00:40Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yeah, that's the that's the original experiment for Kahneman and Radomirov, who came up with the idea of the peak end rule.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  Do you know that?

• 1:00:47Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  Oh, can you tell me? Because I've been misquoting this for the last two and a half years, and I'd really like to get it straightened out.

• 1:00:53Richard Shotton?

  Uh, well, or I've been misquoting it. I I went for about a year with the wrong uh I was talking about the principle agent, I probably shouldn't admit this, uh, the principle agent problem, and I had a picture of Stephen Ross, who came up with the idea. And it was only after about a year, uh, that I found out it was completely the wrong Stephen Ross.

• 1:01:09Chris Williamson?

  Rory Sutherland, was it Rory Sutherland?

• 1:01:11Richard Shotton?

  No, no, it was someone called Stephen Ross, but I think he was like a.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  So you've just got some fellow like Stephen Ross, jazz singer in New York City or something?

• 1:01:20Richard Shotton?

  And I'm standing there blathering on. Um, anyway, uh, sorry, the, yeah, I think what happened in that Kahneman and Radomirov experiment, they get 600 odd genuine colonoscopy patients. So 15 minute painful medical procedure. And all those patients are given a handheld monitor. And this monitor buzzes every 15 minutes. And when it buzzes, there's a dial on the monitor. Oh, so they did the little handheld thingy. Uh, there's a dial that the patients have to turn, saying zero, no pain at all, to 10, excruciating pain.

• 1:01:56Richard Shotton?

  So the psychologists get fifteen experiencing self ratings. And by experiencing self, they mean in moment ratings, fifteen ratings. Then after the operation, as the patient is leaving the hospital, they stop the patient and ask them to reflect back on the operation, it's in entirety, and say how bad it was, same scale, zero to 10. They then go and find those patients a month later, same question, rate the operation. So now they've got fifteen ratings from the experiencing self, those in moment ratings, and two remembering self ratings, so you have post operation reflections.

• 1:02:39Richard Shotton?

  The expectation before they did the experiment was the number should correlate reasonably well. But that's not what they found, there was only a kind of a loose correlation. What correlated far better were two moments in particular in the operation. So the peak experience, so for colonoscopy, the moment of most pain, and then the final moment of that colonoscopy. So what they argued was that it's the peak and the end moment that disproportionately likely to be remembered. And then in their follow up study, what they do is they get more patients going for colonoscopies, randomise them into two groups, some get the standard fifteen minute operation,

• 1:03:24Richard Shotton?

  which is really painful because this probe is being moved around inside them. The other group, exactly the same fifteen minutes, and then the surgeon is instructed to leave his probe or her probe in the patient perfectly still. So it's, there's minor discomfort for that extra two minutes, not the significant pain.

• 1:03:47Richard Shotton?

  Now, from a logical point of view, they've just added on in that second version, two extra minutes of mild pain. It should be worse because you've got 15 minutes of bad pain, two minutes of minor pain. But just as the peak end rule suggests, because the final moment is less painful, people, when they reflected back, remembered that operation as less painful. And most importantly, they were about 10% more likely to turn up for follow-up appointments. So yeah, absolutely. That colonoscopy study in very controlled circumstances, in life or death circumstances potentially, show how important it is to shape people's final moment of the experience.

• 1:04:22Chris Williamson?

  That is, that's literally life-changing, you know, for some people. The power of understanding our motivations. And also, it shows as well, I'm reading a lot of evolutionary psychology, most of it to do with sort of mating and dating at the moment. But even with that, the fact that we are so at the mercy of the ways that our brains work, our cognitive biases, our predispositions, our prejudices against ourselves and others, our existing thought paths, all of this stuff. And I think it's why I find it just endlessly interesting, the bottomlessly fascinating stuff, to be able to look under the hood and actually see what's going on. And then, then you can go, actually, we can do this

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  thing, which is completely counterintuitive, to make this, this colonoscopy two minutes longer. I remember, I remember reading, I think someone had interpreted that and had quote tweeted it with something to the effect of, the most altruistic and caring thing you can do for your child if they're going through a pediatric surgery is to ask the surgeon to extend the length of the surgery just a little bit to bring them back down, to do this exactly.

• 1:05:37Richard Shotton?

  So the final moment, so yeah, especially when that person's, you know, that they have some kind of choice about going back again, it could be hugely important.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Well, if the kid doesn't want to be scared for hospital for the rest of their life, you know, imagine you've got this first very traumatic experience at the dentist's or something like that, you know, if you can use this peak end experience module and you can plug that in, you can shape a child's behaviour towards dentist and or doctor for the remaining 70, 80, 90 years of their life.

• 1:06:07Richard Shotton?

  Yes, and the brilliant thing, I can go back to the bit about I love about behavioural science is it's not argued from first principles. People aren't ever, though they should never be saying this definitely works, this is definitely true, but they've given you first of all a bit of robust evidence through their testing control. But every situation is different. The great thing is if you're a dentist, well, you can recreate that experiment. Why not test it for your, your, your set of patients in your specific area and see if it works? And you could make, as you say, you can make a huge difference.

• 1:06:41Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. I want to talk about the Ogilvy gloves.

• 1:06:45Richard Shotton?

  Ah, yes. Yes. Great idea. So this, I think, goes back to that idea we had earlier on, which is behavioural science in and of itself is, is great. But where it gets brilliant is when you combine brilliant behavioural insight with a wonderful piece of creative thinking. So Ogilvy, consultant Ogilvy Change, were working with a factory where people were dealing with dangerous equipment. And there's an idea called, slightly controversial idea, called risk homeostasis. And I think it's controversial because it was slightly exaggerated. I think it has, there's evidence that maybe people exaggerated the impact,

• 1:07:28Richard Shotton?

  but it's still, still there. And the initial studies were done on, I think it was anti-ABS brakes or anti-lock brakes. And when taxi drivers, I think in Germany, had these improved brakes added, what they saw was a much lower decrease in, in accidents than they expected. The argument being, when someone is given a safety mechanism, they could take all the benefit of that safety mechanism as in lower injury. But actually, people sometimes take the benefit as keeping the injury level the same and then driving faster. So often.

• 1:08:09Richard Shotton?

  Safety measures don't have the impact you would want. So that's a problem with people going to work with saws, you know, giant metal saws every day because they might become a bit blasé about them. And if even if you add in safety, um, equipment, they might then become a bit more reckless. So what Ogilvy did was take this idea of risk homeostasis, and with a wonderful leap of imagination, they gave the workers their gloves, you know, black gloves, and then it would have a, you know, a skeleton painted on the, on the glove. And it was a constant reminder of their, their vulnerability. And when in the tracking, they showed that people do indeed feel more vulnerable when they're, when they're wearing

• 1:08:53Richard Shotton?

  these gloves. So that to me has been one of the nicest applications of behavioural science, because it's this fusion of great behavioural science insight, but on top of it, a wonderful leap of creative imagination.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  It's a perfect example as well of the alchemy analogy that I leaded to earlier on, where it is creating behaviour change slash value slash pick your metric of what the end goal is out of nothing. You know, imagine, imagine them having to go back to the people that make industrial band saws and saying, right, guys, I need you to come up with a special system that can drop the, the saw away, immediately release the mechanism. If a person's finger gets put in, can we have some special electrodes that run through the blade to feel if it touches flesh and if it gets wet? Or you just say, oh my God, like, because there are systems, I know that there are systems, fail safe systems in

• 1:09:53Chris Williamson?

  place like that. But you think, how much is, probably Poundland, they've probably got, if you stock up around about Halloween, you'll be able to get loads of those, of those gloves.

• 1:10:05Richard Shotton?

  And there's a lovely argument from Roy Sutherland, that it's, it's tip, this differential in, this difference in cost is typical, because his argument is because businesses normally have this kind of engineering, logical, rational mindset.

• 1:10:20Richard Shotton?

  They've been using that for years and years. All the easy, cheap wins have been found already. And now it's getting diminishing returns and it's getting harder and more expensive to come up with those improvements. Because businesses have tended to ignore these psychological wins, there are loads of them. Like that glove example that you can do at very, very low cost to have a remarkable return. So I think his book Alchemy is wonderfully titled because it captures this sense of creating value from no or very little expenditure.

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it really is. I think as well, the thing that I keep coming back to when we talk about this is the effort which is required by companies to do the hard thing. You know, one of the things that have been a common theme in both our conversations that we've had. And if you haven't already gone and heard my first episode with Richard, it's just as good as this. So go back and listen, it'll be linked in the show notes below.

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  When people have to go do the hard thing and create this novelty, create these new ideas. It is the hard thing in the same way as changing your habit as a normal person is a hard thing. So you can continue to maybe try and eat a little bit less junk food, but beginning a gym program is real hard. Right? That's outside of the box thinking. We've greased this groove of our standard operating procedures. We spoke about the lineage, the existing adverts that the company's always gone for, the norms that are within and even take that out further within an industry. We've got norms that are industry wide as well. All these different ways that people have greased existing grooves. And yet the low hanging fruit has been, has already been picked up off the ground.

• 1:12:01Chris Williamson?

  You're getting diminishing returns with rinsing existing marketing plans or with trying to further optimize the logistics of your lean Kaizen production thing, whatever it is, you know, like all the different things. And it does, it requires somebody to come in and really reframe everything, right? It's, look, we've tried you eating a little bit less chocolate. There's now no chocolate left in the house and you go into the gym at six o'clock every morning. That's, that's what's happening.

• 1:12:33Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, I don't know. I think it's a, the whole outcome approach is a lovely analogy for behavioural science and its strengths.

• 1:12:42Chris Williamson?

  Cool. I want to, before we finish up, I don't want to use the C word too much, the new C word, which is COVID.

• 1:12:48Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:49Chris Williamson?

  But I wanted to talk about some innovative strategies or some interesting adverts that you've seen over the last couple of weeks. Obviously, it's been a time where people have been increasingly releasing stuff. So I've got a couple of things that I like that have come out of, you know, it's a terrible global pandemic, which is ravaging health and economy in equal measure. But we have to focus on the positives because it's pointless focusing on the negatives. And some of the best things for me that have come out of COVID-19 so far has been WhatsApp group chats have never been as anti-fragile as right now. Like the quality, because everyone's got nothing to do other than search for meme, search for memes and take a look out of each other. So that's been fantastic. Pornhub giving everybody

• 1:13:34Chris Williamson?

  in Italy and now I think the UK, free access to premium, which is low key from Pornhub, them saying we are a public service, which from a signalling perspective is unbelievable. We are so important that we're going to give you during a time of crisis, we know that you need this, which is just like, it's so clever. It's beyond, beyond clever, right? Patrick Stewart reading a sonnet a day. Have you seen this?

• 1:14:02Richard Shotton?

  No.

• 1:14:04Chris Williamson?

  Patrick Stewart, Patrick Stewart from Star Trek reads a sonnet a day on his Twitter.

• 1:14:12Richard Shotton?

  Fantastic.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  It's encapsulated in the title.

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

  Home workouts, I think the number of people that have been giving away, I've got some buddies, Built Up North, Propane Fitness, Ryan Fisher from CrossFit Chalk in America, all been just throwing out like top level, top, top, top level programming for free. The, I mean, yeah, there's, you're going to get bored of doing burpees in your living room, but like this is keeping it as exciting as you can get. And I think that's been really good. And I've noticed a massive Great sense of social unity as well, you know, like even just in my house, I had two, two housemates. I don't think we've ever asked each other how they're doing as much and it's not, it's not got anything at all to do with, I'm not worried about either of them. They're both like in their young twenties. So they're essentially made of rubber and magic. You could throw them

• 1:15:01Chris Williamson?

  off a wall and they'd be fine. But, hey, man, how are you? How's, yeah, how was work? Oh, this is a good, ah, I did this podcast last night. Oh, how was it? You know, it's just like, everything, investment in everyone's been turned up by, by sort of 20, 30%. I think, you know, I'm walking past my neighbours during my one, my one allocated outdoor trip of the day, walking past my neighbours and hey, how are you? Some old gentleman the other day, as I walked past in shorts, he said, aye, sonah, I'd be wearing shorts too if I had legs like yours. And I was like, ah,

• 1:15:37Chris Williamson?

  thank you, strange man. But yeah, that's, that's some of the things that I've enjoyed that have come out of it. But I wondered if you'd seen any campaigns or any changes or anything you've enjoyed. That Guinness adverts won.

• 1:15:51Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yeah. So I mean, the Guinness ads beautiful, absolutely beautiful. It's wonderfully designed, very, very clever. And I will bring a lot of amusement to people. Whether it changes behaviour is a very different thing. But that's a separate point maybe. I think your point of, what's interesting is there's a lovely G K Cheston phrase along the idea of the way to love every, anything is to realise it might be lost. And perhaps when you have, you know, social contacts or most of social contacts taken away, you realise how precious it is. So yeah, I think that, that, that's, I think, a key point. The one I was gonna mention, and I think is the flip side of all those positives, as you've said, is in the Sunday Times, there was

• 1:16:34Richard Shotton?

  talk about one of the supermarkets raising their, their prices. And I think brands have got to be very, very careful about transgressing what I've seen as fairness norms. So there is a study done by a guy called Werner Guth back in 1982, called the ultimatum game.

• 1:16:54Richard Shotton?

  And Guth, who was at the University of Cologne, comes up with this wonderfully simple setup. Two people never meet each other, they don't know each other. One is the proposer, one is the receiver. They're given a small amount of money, well, the proposer's given a small amount of money, say a tenner. And the proposer is told, split that money between you and the receiver as you think fit. And they get to split the money, so it could be fifty fifty, it could be eighty twenty in their favour. And then the receiver has two options. Accept the splits as has been given, there's no negotiation. Accept the split or refuse it and both parties get nothing.

• 1:17:37Richard Shotton?

  Now, before Guth did these experiments, the standard economic belief was that a receiver would accept pretty much anything. You know, you've been given a tenner, you only offer me one pound, you keep nine. Logically, I should just keep the pound because I'm worse off if I don't. But what happens is if the offer is a blow about twenty percent, more than half of people will refuse it. They would rather both people got nothing and the unfair behaviour was punished than a small amount of cash. So it's an argument that people will go to quite big lengths, even at a cost themselves, to punish unfair behaviour.

• 1:18:19Richard Shotton?

  Now, there's other experiments by Kahneman where he shows that people taking advantage to push up their prices in times of crises are definitely seen as unfair. So, simple thought experiment, he says, imagine there's a hardware store that sells snow shovels for fifteen quid, fifteen dollars, it would be as Canada. There's a big snowstorm, they push up to the price to twenty dollars, is that fair?

• 1:18:48Richard Shotton?

  And I think it's eighty two percent of people say that's not fair, not fair. So what I would caution to brands is don't try and make a quick buck out of people's desperation and need. If you are caught pushing up your prices, even if it's justifiable as well, managing demand or supposedly justifiable from standard economics, don't do that because it will be seen as unfair and people will go to quite big lengths to punish you.

• 1:19:19Chris Williamson?

  I've noticed a severe uplift in brands leveraging social goodwill over the, you know, the amount of this is the pay walls are being removed. I don't know whether the spectators.

• 1:19:32Richard Shotton?

  Free coffees. Oh, they talked about it, didn't they? Yeah, the free coffees to the NH. Oh, I don't know. I saw Rory Southern's tweet about they should do it and Fraser Nelson's response.

• 1:19:40Chris Williamson?

  Maybe that was, maybe that was all that I saw as well.

• 1:19:44Richard Shotton?

  The goodwill without doing, the NHS, I think Scafiero and Pret originally were giving them free coffees when they.

• 1:19:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Richard Shotton?

  Remask. Yeah, wonderful.

• 1:19:53Chris Williamson?

  My best friend, Youssef, he, he is a first year doctor now, working in intensive care, immediate missions. And he said that he felt really good that after working like two days on, two nights on of fourteen hours each, he was told that NHS staff were going to get twenty percent off at Pizza Express, which is not good.

• 1:20:19Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I mean, twenty percent off is just basically a kind of sales promotion.

• 1:20:22Chris Williamson?

  It's shut. It's shut now. You can't go in to take your twenty percent.

• 1:20:26Richard Shotton?

  Maybe you can cut your coupon out and keep it for afterwards.

• 1:20:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the, I had a point here about brands weaponizing goodwill at the moment, which, which it definitely feels to me like there is a little bit of going on at the moment.

• 1:20:42Chris Williamson?

  The bottom line, the company, go ahead.

• 1:20:45Richard Shotton?

  Oh, sorry. I was gonna say, when you mentioned that word that you hate, and I might have said a year ago, brand purpose. And one of the reasons I always hate that phrase was it, it was if people wanted the plaudits for moral ethical behaviour without the hard work of actually doing moral ethical.

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  You just want to look like we're doing moral ethical behaviour, okay?

• 1:21:07Richard Shotton?

  We can add which talks about our virtue. At least we're now in a situation where there is a cost being attached, you know, giving everyone free coffee or Facebook giving $100 million of ads away. At least they are putting their money where their mouth is. So, yes, there might be, positively, we could call it enlightened self-interest. I would much rather that than the previous situation of Gillette ads where it's just posturing, not action.

• 1:21:38Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Look, Richard, I literally keep this going on all afternoon. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna hassle you to come back on. The Choice Factory, your book will be linked in the show notes below. Astro 10, your company will also be linked. What else should people check out? Other than your amazing Twitter, actually, what are you on Twitter?

• 1:21:58Richard Shotton?

  At R. Shotton. So Shotton is S H O T T O N. And what I'm gonna say, the only other thing is keep an eye out. So I've started doing some of the research for the, hasn't got a name yet, but Choice Factory 2. So hopefully, early next year, have a second book out.

• 1:22:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you've got nothing else to do at the moment, right?

• 1:22:18Richard Shotton?

  I know. Exactly. Well, that's it. Yeah. Business. Yeah. Well, it's getting better now. Yeah. Yes. Last week, it was a bit very, very bleak.

• 1:22:25Chris Williamson?

  I get it. Yeah. You said before we started, in nine months' time, a lot of babies and a lot of books happening, you're right.

• 1:22:30Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. Not for me.

• 1:22:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. If you get, if you get pregnant in the next nine months, Richard, it's gonna be very strange. Look, it's, you're phenomenal to have on. I really, really love having you here, and I can't wait to get you back. Choice Factory, Richard's Instagram, it is Twitter, and the link to Astro 10, his company, will be in the show notes below. If you've got any questions, comments or feedback, you know where to go. Get at me at Chris Will X, wherever you follow me. Like, share and subscribe if you're new here. Thank you for tuning in. But for now, Richard, thank you so much, man.

• 1:23:06Richard Shotton?

  Fantastic. Thanks a lot.

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