Some Very Important Effects In Advertising | Richard Shotton

Richard Shotton is a behavioural scientist, the Founder of Astroten and an author. What is the reason that restaurants don't put £ signs in front of their prices? Why do marketing campaigns with huge flaws end up winning the market over? How does increasing wait times on comparison sites improve customer buy-in? And why do budget airlines reduce quality of experience to improve trust? We're talking all things behavioural science today. One of my favourite topic areas with a fascinating guest, this episode is absolute gold and packed with great concepts and hilarious real world examples. Do not sleep on this one. 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 Listen to Rory Sutherland on Modern Wisdom - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/049-rory-sutherland-psychology-in-the-world-of-advertising/id1347973549?i=1000428600578 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - 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 - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.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?

  The big interest for me is I think that advertising is undergoing a bit of a change at the moment, and this might be wishful thinking, but there was such euphoria a few years ago about how the rise of data and the opportunities of targeting was going to change advertising, that I think there was so much overclaim, I think brands got very excited and then a lot of those benefits didn't materialise. What I think we're now seeing is the pendulum swinging back from a fascination with technology, and it's not going to disappear completely, of course not, but swinging more towards some of those eternal truths that psychology identifies. So I think that to me is an exciting area

• 0:45Richard Shotton?

  at the moment, that more and more advertisers are thinking, well, how can we unearth insights into our audience by harnessing this field of psychology or behavioural science?

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by Richard Shotton, founder of Astro10 and author of The Choice Factory. Richard, welcome to the show.

• 1:09Richard Shotton?

  Hi, good to meet you, Chris.

• 1:10Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic to have you on. Just before we started, you told me that Astro10, your company, is actually the wrong name for itself. Can you explain what's happened there?

• 1:21Richard Shotton?

  It is the wrong name. So I set it up last August and I was on a holiday and it was getting to the stage where I just needed a name. And I thought, you know, Richard Shotton Consulting would just be a bit naff. So I was flicking through a pretty much a textbook on psychology experiments, and I came across this experiment back in the 60s, which was all about the pernicious effects of authority. And in the experiment, what the psychologist did was ring up hospitals, said to nurses, "Quick, quick, you've got to go and find patient Jones and give them 100mg of Astro10."

• 2:03Richard Shotton?

  And they shouldn't have accepted the order over the phone. And when they got to the medicine cupboard, there was the fake medicine Astro 10. And it said in big letters, don't give anyone more than 10 milligrams. Yet despite these two facts, 95% of the nurses tried to administer the fake drug.

• 2:21Chris Williamson?

  Did someone step in and go, what are you doing? No, no, no, no.

• 2:23Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I'm guessing there was a, there was someone, you know, hiding in a cupboard or something. I don't know. Yeah, that part. But the, so I thought, yeah, this is brilliant. Relevant name for the company. It's part of a psychology experiment. And I also kind of liked the anti-thought, anti-authoritarian vibe that, you know, it was one of the reasons for setting them up on my own. So I registered the name, got the website, registered at Companies House, did all that stuff. And then about a month or two later, I thought, well, if I'm going to call myself Astro 10, I should probably read the original paper. And I went and found this paper. And I was halfway through, I suddenly realized to my horror, that the textbook had had a typo. So the, the, the drug in the real experiment

• 3:07Richard Shotton?

  back in the 60s was not Astro 10, it was Astro Gen. So my company is, it is a mistake.

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  Your company's a typo.

• 3:16Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, my company's a typo. But I thought after that time, one, I couldn't be bothered to re, uh, get another website. And, yeah, I kind of, I kind of like the fact that

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  You've got a typo behind it. Yeah. Which is like, again, it's human behavior, right?

• 3:30Richard Shotton?

  Well, yes. Well, I mean, my favorite, one of my favorite biases is this idea, have you heard of a book called the pratfall effect?

• 3:38Chris Williamson?

  Nope.

• 3:39Richard Shotton?

  So the pratfall effect, experiment back in, done by Elliot Aronson, who was this professor at Harvard, in the 1960s. And in 1966, he runs his classic experiment where he gets a colleague of his to take part in a quiz. He has given his colleague all the answers. So the guy does amazingly well, gets 92% of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles, looks like a genius. But then as the quiz is finishing, the guy makes what America would call a pratfall, a small blunder. As he's standing up, he spills a cup of coffee down himself. So Aronson's recorded this entire incident, great quiz performance and then the blunder.

• 4:20Richard Shotton?

  He plays it to people, but he edits the clip. So there are two versions. One has everything and the other version edits out the mistake. And when he asks listeners how appealing they find the contestant, the contestant is seen as significantly more appealing if people have heard the mistake as well as the amazing performance. And Aronson calls this the pratfall effect, this idea that we prefer people or relevantly for advertisers, products who exhibit a flaw. And I love it because I think, one, it runs very counter to what people

• 5:04Richard Shotton?

  assume. And then second, if you look at the greatest ads through history, it's interesting quite how many of them have had this insight at their very heart.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 5:16Richard Shotton?

  So you go all the way back to probably the earliest was 1959 VW, the classic campaign ad age said was the greatest campaign in the 20th century, where they had flaws at their very heart, ugly as only skin deep. You've got more moving more recent, well, a little bit more recently was Avis, we're number two, so we try harder, essentially.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  [laughing]

• 5:37Richard Shotton?

  Guinness, admitting they're slow, good things come to those who wait. Stella, reassuring and expensive. And more recently, KFC tweeting that their fries are damn awful.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  Our fries suck. You told us they suck. So give us, give us six months, we'll come back with a better recipe.

• 5:56Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. Yeah. So it's a, I think what those advertisers have realised is that probably the biggest hurdle you have as advertiser, well, probably the biggest hurdle is being noticed. And actually, the pratfall effect's good for that because if everyone else is bragging, if you are distinctive, you're much more likely to be noticed. And there's lots of evidence about that. There's a wonderful experiment called the Von Restorff effect, which, which proves that. So it gets you noticed. The next biggest hurdle as an advertiser is their believability. You know, most people assume advertisers, well, you know, the cynics assume they lie, which is not true, but.

• 6:38Richard Shotton?

  Most people assume that advertisers are at least putting a positive spin on the truth. The amazing thing with the pratfall effect is if you admit a flaw, you've tangibly demonstrated your honesty, and then all your other claims become that much more believable.

• 6:55Richard Shotton?

  And then I think the final thing it does, which is excellent, is those brilliant advertisers don't admit a flaw randomly. They go to great lengths to think, well, what's our core strength? And then they think about a flaw that is the mirror image of that strength. Because in many cultures, flaws and strengths are two sides of the same coin. You know, so Stella say they're expensive, but that's because they know people assume that expensive things are better quality. Or VW go out and say, yes, we're ugly. But then they follow up by saying, well, that's because we don't care about aesthetic fripperies. We care about engineering excellence. So it's this fascinating approach.

• 7:38Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I find it so interesting because even though it's got all this evidence, and there's so much more than just the Aaronson experiment, advertisers very, very rarely use it. You know, if you pick up, if you watch a few hours of TV tonight, you'll see, you probably won't see a single advertiser admitting a weakness. It's all very well and good saying the best ones use it, but they are in the minority.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Is it a way to humanize brands?

• 8:05Richard Shotton?

  I think that's one of the other things that it does. As you say, if you admit a weakness, then you, I think, are changing that kind of power dynamics.

• 8:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, looking at some of the biggest memes and things that come out of TV, apart from the fact that it's funny moments, but if you look at the stuff that comes off Love Island, or it's like Dancing on Ice, Celebrity Dancing on Ice and stuff like that, it's always someone pulling an awkward face or tripping up a step or doing something like that. Like, no one ever loves the person who's flawless, because I don't think that they're able to relate. And I think that that's the same with the businesses as well. And obviously, you don't want Boeing, well, this is probably quite timely, like, given how many issues they've had recently with that three, five, seven Max or whatever it's called.

• 9:02Chris Williamson?

  You don't want Boeing to be admitting like... Our planes aren't that safe, but they'll get you there fast. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't, don't talk about that weakness, Mr Boeing. Like, let's not bring that one up. Talk about the fact that that Harley Davidson one that you posted on your Twitter the other day.

• 9:16Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. So there's a Harley Davidson advert guy on a bike on big, open road. And it says at the bottom, somewhere 35,000 feet in the air, a man is trying to open a small packet of peanuts. Fucking genius, like absolute genius. But yeah, you're totally right. Humanizing the brands and being strategic about it.

• 9:37Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yes. I think you're spot on with that. And two things, you say, humanizing the brand. And Aaron Sonor, it may have been one of the follow experiments, talks about if someone seems perfect, then people want, see them as a threat and want to knock them down a peg or two. If someone's flawed, then, you know, they're not, they're not a threat and you can,

• 10:00Richard Shotton?

  you're much more likely to warm to them. But the other part you mentioned, I think you're spot on of you don't just pick a flaw randomly. You know, Stella didn't say it tasted awful, as you say, you know, VW wouldn't say.

• 10:13Chris Williamson?

  You didn't say that we're lying about our emissions, which they were.

• 10:18Chris Williamson?

  Strategically pick your weaknesses.

• 10:20Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yeah. And you never invent one, you know, there are all of those things like Guinness. I'm sure we're told in research group after research group, how annoying it was that people had to wait for them. But rather than just brush that under the carpet as most brands would do, you know, you thought, well, people know this. It's true. Might as well try and get some mileage out of it.

• 10:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How can we play off the back of it? And definitely using some of those things as an indicator of quality. That's what's happening, isn't it? It's price is an indicator of quality. The wait time is an indicator of quality. It's what is a characteristic people want? And how can we make our weakness be some sort of a signal that that is an important part of it? I was talking about Guinness. I was recently in America and I was at the United States National Whitewater Rafting Centre, which is like, anyone who's ever worn Patagonia, like that's where they will, that's, that's their heaven. That's where they die and go to. It's like mountain biking and hill climbing and whitewater rafting and all this stuff. And at this, they, they don't have a bar that serves alcohol, but they have a bar which has numerous cold brew coffees on tap.

• 11:24Chris Williamson?

  And I was like, oh God, I'm going to take this. And sure enough, they have one which takes the same time as Guinness to pour. And that's its advertising strategy.

• 11:34Richard Shotton?

  Oh, okay.

• 11:35Chris Williamson?

  It's like a pint of, just under a pint of cold brew coffee, but it settles the same way. It gets poured the same way. They have to tilt the cup in the same way. They serve it with the logo turned towards you and push it across. I was like, this is cool.

• 11:50Richard Shotton?

  That is fascinating because I'm not quite linked the two, but there is another bias called the Ikea effect by Dan Ariely and Norton. And what they talk about is generally removing friction, making things easier is a massively underrated approach for marketers and people who want behaviour change. So that however, they argue there are rare occasions when you should try and make things harder. And at the beginning of the paper, they talk about a famous story from General Mills and Betty Crocker. I don't know if you've heard about this one. So it's back in the 1950s.

• 12:33Richard Shotton?

  You've got more households where both men and women are working. So there's less time to cook cakes for the kids.

• 12:43Richard Shotton?

  So the General Mills think, well, you know, how do we tap into this changing behaviour? Well, let's make a super simple cake mix, a cake mix. All you have to do, tear the top of the packet open, pour it in a tin, add some water, chuck in the oven and you've got your lovely cake half an hour later. They launch this and despite it seemingly being absolutely spot on for the era, cake sales are awful. They then ponder why this is for a while and they begin to think, well, we've made this too easy. Because a cake isn't just about providing calories for your family. It's about showing your love. And if you've made something really, really easy, it doesn't show love.

• 13:28Richard Shotton?

  Because you know, part of that is going through a bit of rigmarole. So they then follow up with a new cake mix in which they artificially make the cake mix more complicated. They make it harder to bake. So now you've got still what your cake mix in your packet, still tear it open, you still pour it in the tin. This time you have to crack an egg into it.

• 13:51Richard Shotton?

  And now by making it harder, once they've done that, that's when the cake mix sales start to take off.

• 13:58Chris Williamson?

  Cost of signalling.

• 14:00Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I think, well, maybe the cost has time there. I mean, Norton and I really call it the IKEA effect that the more effort we put into something, the more we appreciate it. And I think there's an element that in in your cold brew coffee story. And I've heard, I've heard a few of them, actually. Someone else told me, and so this would be interesting if any listeners know if this is, um, this is true or not. But someone said to me, and it's been two separate web designers, so reason, Matt, trust it. They said, look, you know, when you go on those travel comparison sites, they said, aren't you suspicious about the amount of time it takes for them to search the sites? They said, look, they could do that much quicker, but they just add this second or two of friction in to make the search for those

• 14:45Richard Shotton?

  hotels or airplanes. It feels like it's been far more authoritative, far more comprehensive.

• 14:51Chris Williamson?

  This is how hard we've got to scrape the data to get you a deal. So I'm not going, I'm going to make sure that I keep this sufficiently anonymous that it won't rumble him. I know a person who knows a person and this person is currently working in a city doing some financial stuff. As a part of this thing, he provides spreadsheets, very advanced spreadsheets with V lookups and all sorts of other things to do. Projections and forecasting that take into account a lot of very complicated variables. And what he's added into this spreadsheet is a macro that runs a loading bar. Now, you'll never know because I've managed to keep him sufficiently anonymous. But if you are the person that's being served this Excel sheet, let me tell you that that loading bar is always three and a half seconds long.

• 15:37Chris Williamson?

  No matter how much data goes through, because it's just, it's just an animation. It's just an animation that you thought, well, if I had this in, it looks like I'm really fucking doing somewhere. They're crunching the numbers behind here. Meanwhile, his computer's like having a tab. It's out the back. His processor's out the back, just having a cigarette going, ah, we fucking finished three and a half minutes ago, three and a half seconds ago. Yeah, that you're totally right. I think Rory Sutherland talks about the difference between.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries.

• 16:07Richard Shotton?

  Oh, okay, go on.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  So you can imagine the same thing that if price is an indicator of quality, but if price is offset with some cost that you have to incur in the creation of the product, you can sell strawberries for half the price of everybody else's strawberries. If no one is suspicious about the fact, hang on, why the fuck are these strawberries so cheap? So you've got to go pick them yourself. The same is with Ikea. Why, why is, why is Ikea furniture so cheap? Oh, I don't need to worry about the quality. It's because I've got to put it together myself. That's why I've got to do it.

• 16:40Richard Shotton?

  I think you're absolutely right there. And if there is one category of brands that should always be thinking about using the pratfall effect, I think it is low cost brands because if they do nothing, people will assume their, yeah, their products are shit. Seen it again and again, working with brands that have maybe had a revolutionary way of bringing their products to market. They've done something really clever, which means they're much cheaper. And then they'll get their tracking back and that, and they often come back with very low quality scores because people work to rule of thumb, as you say, if it's cheap, it must be shit. And I think it was, I'm sure it was Rory who had this brilliant explanation for the success of budget airlines.

• 17:21Richard Shotton?

  His argument is, look, what they had to do when they launched, because they were such a strange thing, you know, one day you were flying across Europe for a hundred quid and now it only costs a fiver. They had to go out and say their service was awful. If they hadn't, people would assume the cost savings might have been at something like fuel safely. Yeah, or second hand Aeroflot jets. So they'd have never set foot in them. Go out and say, well, actually our service is awful. And, you know, think back to Michael O'Leary about how much he kind of pushed that, that message. If you do that, people think, well, that's a fair enough trade off and they're happy to, to set foot on the planes. Yes, I think you're right. If you, if you ever have a low cost product.

• 18:04Richard Shotton?

  You've got to be thinking about, well, how can we explain this price to people? And if we can't try and explain it with a bit of a humble brag, people will assume that's too good to be true. Needs go and find an inconsequential weakness.

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Richard Shotton?

  You know, like TK Maxx admit that their stores are shambolic.

• 18:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my God. It is chaos.

• 18:23Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, better to admit that than people go away thinking it's the quality of the product that's awful.

• 18:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, TK Maxx, anybody, I have some friends who shop in TK Maxx and it is, to me, it is what, if an anxiety attack manifested itself as a store. That's what TK Maxx would be. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's no logic to it. You've got the scented candles next to the flip flops and beef hair. Are you like, who on earth does, it's like a drunk child designed this store? Unbelievable.

• 18:55Richard Shotton?

  Well, I think they're, I don't know if they're still running, but certainly they had a, a wave of advertising about six months ago, which said something along the lines of the small prices you pay for the small prices you pay.

• 19:07Chris Williamson?

  Ah, that's very clever.

• 19:10Richard Shotton?

  It might be scented candles next to a flip flop, but if you put that bit of effort in, you'll unearth, you'll unearth a bargain.

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  So when, when someone works in an ad agency, right? And they're coming up with the marketing communications for this, that small prices you pay for the small prices you pay, for instance, as a tagline, has probably, has probably come by one person, perhaps. It's not multiple people that have come up with small prices you pay. It'll just be some guy. Because I've done advertising for a long time for my own stuff, the idea of being the guy that comes up with that, no matter whether it makes any difference to my paycheck, gives me such a figurative stiffy, like to think I could be the guy that did the small prices you pay for the small prices you pay. You're like, fuck, yes. Yes, that's my month made, like, because you just come up with this awesome, awesome tagline.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  Do you get that sense sometimes when you kind of, you finally hit upon the right brand message, the right trigger, the right caption, the right everything, and it just comes together like that?

• 20:10Richard Shotton?

  So my speciality is slightly different. Mine is around, well, how you apply behavioural science to marketing. There's definitely a link, but I'm sure that's, yeah, that's absolutely. Yeah. If I, if I tried to, to write that line, it'd have been about a paragraph long with six spelling mistakes in.

• 20:29Chris Williamson?

  So what else have you seen recently? Has anything else caught your eye recently that you've been looking at in terms of advertising?

• 20:35Richard Shotton?

  I think, I mean, the interest, the big interest for me is I think that advertising is undergoing a bit of a change at the moment. And this might be wishful thinking, but there was such euphoria a few years ago about how the rise of data and the opportunities of targeting was going to change advertising that I think

• 21:00Richard Shotton?

  there was so much overclaim, I think brands got very excited and then a lot of those benefits didn't materialise. What I think we're now seeing is an, is the pendulum swinging back from a fascination with technology and it's not going to disappear completely, of course not, but swinging more towards some of those eternal truths of, that psychology identifies. So I, I think that's, that to me is an exciting area at the moment that more and more advertisers are thinking, well, how can we unearth insights into our audience by harnessing this field of psychology or behavioural science?

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Rory said on the podcast I did with him, Silicon Valley sees everything as an optimisation problem.

• 21:48Richard Shotton?

  So, well, that's, sorry, I thought you were going to go, because what I think Rory's brilliant often talking about is sometimes when you talk about Silicon Valley or, or, or big tech is the

• 22:01Richard Shotton?

  Their success is often attributed solely to their technological brilliance. But often, and I don't know if he covered it because I know you did a great podcast with him, I can't remember whether you you covered this or not. But often their success has some quite clever psychological insights at their heart as well. So Uber, for example, of course, you know, the functionality behind that, you know, i- is amazing. But there are some really clever psychological points there as well. That there is research, and I can't remember the the name of the psychologist, but there's quite a lot of research that shows that

• 22:43Richard Shotton?

  specific waits, as in I know I've got to wait five minutes, is much less painful than an unspecified wait that ends up being five minutes.

• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 22:53Richard Shotton?

  It's one of the great things that Disney do, they, when you get to that ridiculous.

• 22:56Chris Williamson?

  Twenty minutes from this point.

• 22:58Richard Shotton?

  Yes, exactly. So people can quit worrying about whether they're getting it to the front or not, and they could do something else for 20 minutes and have a chat and then. So it removes the pain. So they were brilliant on that. But the other bit that I think they're amazing at, and I think this is key to their success, is the means of payment. Now, there is lots of evidence that the the more distance you put between someone getting your product and them handing over cash, the cheaper it feels. So, you know, when you go to a casino, they don't expect you to be putting down 10 pound notes on the table. They get you to turn that cash into chips. So people become less price sensitive. When people have credit cards, they've become less price sensitive than cash.

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to guess that'll be when when you're abroad as well, and you're using just plastic. This is, everyone makes the same joke, eh, it looks like plastic money.

• 23:50Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Chris Williamson?

  Fucking not, mate. It's worth just as much as your money.

• 23:54Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you're not quite sure on the conversion rate. Yeah, yeah. I think I've never seen any studders in that, but I bet you, I bet you're right. The one I've done, which was, it might have been the first ever experiment I ran with a lovely researcher called Claire Linford. And it was about contactless payment.

• 24:13Richard Shotton?

  So we waited until people came out from coffee shops, mini-marts, little delis. And then we stopped and said, can you answer three questions?

• 24:25Richard Shotton?

  And we said, how much have you paid? Can we see your receipt? And, no, sorry, sorry. How much have you paid? What was your means of payment? And then can we see your receipt? And so we compared what they thought they'd paid with their receipt was what they'd actually paid. And then we cut the data by means of payment. So people pay with cash. Three quarters ish, I think, uh, knew exactly what they paid. Those who don't overestimate their spend by about, I think it was about 10%. Credit cards, two thirds knew exactly what they'd spent. And when they didn't, they was likely to underestimate as overestimate. Contactless, less than half remember. They verbally underestimated their spend.

• 25:08Richard Shotton?

  So you had this swing of about 15% in memory of spend between cash, overestimating, contactless, underestimating. So that to me, you know, in Uber, I would say is more extreme than even contactless. People treat it as free because there is, is so little friction, there's so little, um, pain of payment, the people treat it like, as you say, monopoly, it's like monopoly money.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  Buy it now on Amazon.

• 25:33Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, but yeah.

• 25:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, the, uh, one, one click, one click ordering, sorry. Um, it's the fact that you can swipe to the right. All you need to do is press a button on Amazon, swipe to the right, and then two goose down pillows arrive in your house the next day. You're like, oh my God, this is like the year 3000 shit.

• 25:50Richard Shotton?

  Yes. There's even studies, I mean, it goes as far as, um, I think, yes, it's Sybil Yang. Sybil Yang did a study on restaurant menus where she showed if you take off the, it would be, well, she's American, so it'd be dollar signs. If you take off the dollar signs, people become 8% less price sensitive. And it can be tiny, tiny, uh, tweaks that will affect that degree of price sensitivity. And price sensitivity is hugely important to brands. Now, cause if you're operating, and hopefully I'm getting my maths right here. But if you're operating at 20% margin. Getting an extra 1% on the price is worth 5% extra in terms of sales.

• 26:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, if you are a restaurant owner, actually, if you're going out for dinner tonight, have a look at the menu, see if there is or is not a pound sign on that, and that will tell you how well versed the restaurant owner is in behavioural economics and behavioural science. And then give us a tweet and tell us, because I want to find out.

• 26:47Richard Shotton?

  Although maybe in the, because it's fascinating in the, looking afar from some of these brands, there is often a question, well, were they applying behavioural science? Well, I think in the menu case, a lot of it is, maybe some people originally did it because they'd read about this Sybil Yang experimentation. But it looks cleaner as well, and I wonder if other people just copied it. Oh, that looks quite pretty, it looks a bit smarter. So it's hard to know, one, has someone applied it because of their knowledge of behavioural science? Two, it might be they've never studied the subject matter, but they are keen students of human nature. Like going back to the Pratt-Faul effect, Elliot Aronson did that study in 1966.

• 27:32Richard Shotton?

  In 1959, it was seven years earlier that Bill Bernbach, you know, one of the great advertising creatives, that's when he had run that VW campaign that admitted the flaws. Now, he came out with a phrase, a small admission gains a large acceptance. You know, before the academics had actually done the studying. So sometimes I think people are getting these ideas, you know, they're working day in, day out with customers, you know, if then they're watching how people behave, then I think they pick them up through, you know, osmosis rather than academic study.

• 28:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you are right, there's this trickle down effect of that. We find that in the industry I work in, which is nightlife promotion. You only have a good idea for about a month. Because after a month, if it's that good of an idea, it's just been emancipated by everybody else. And you're like, oh. That was good until everyone else found out. Because the the unique thing about the nightlife industry is no, no one's protecting their intellectual property. No one's got contracts in place. It's the most, I actually believe it's the most Wild West industry, probably outside of the drug trade, that's still, that's still allowed to exist because no one, everything

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  is up for grabs all the time. From night names to taglines to intellectual property, to staff, to events, to everything. Everything's up for grabs. And it's a ruthlessly interesting sort of experiment to see what happens when people try and hold on to ideas that they've come up with.

• 29:12Richard Shotton?

  Yes. For nightlife, because I didn't know that was your, your area. Maybe the bias that's most regularly applied by nightclubs is the famous kind of attempts at building social proof. Now, build up, so social proof is idea of, we don't make our decisions fully individually. We look around to what others doing and things that are popular become more popular still. So the classic nightclub trick of that was always, you know, don't let people in straight away. Build up the queue outside so it feels like it's appealing.

• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  You're giving away all of our secrets here.

• 29:50Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Richard Shotton?

  People are on to. But that's, I think that is a fascinating idea because it's one of the most proven biases in social psychology. Childini's show link with towel reuse, Christakis with smoking, HMRC with tax repayment rates, Fang with restaurant menus, again and again. The, if you tell people what the popular course of behaviour is, it becomes more popular still. But why I think it's really interesting is the

• 30:26Richard Shotton?

  A lot of advertisers are very literal in their interpretation of that insight. Now, so you go out and you see beer brands saying they're Britain's most popular, or you know, Tonics chocolate bar selling five million a week, or Oracle that 97% of CEOs use them. And I think that's all very well and good, but what marketers should aspire to is not seeing the behavioural science experiments as the endpoint. I think what they should aspire to is thinking of them just as stimulus for good ideas. And then if they apply their strengths of creative thinking, that's when the best ideas happen.

• 31:11Richard Shotton?

  So seeing that you've got your white earbuds on, that's probably my, the white earbuds are probably my favourite example of a brand taking social proof and using it laterally. Think back to when iPod launched, what, 2001-ish? When they launched, they were not the market leader. You know, lots of other brands had got out there first. There's no way they could honestly go out and say, you know, we're the most popular brand bias. But the other brands made a error of not being very visible. So if you were, when people had Sony MP3 players, no one knew, you know, if you saw

• 31:52Richard Shotton?

  someone on the tube or on the train, all you would see is their indistinctual black earphones. You know, the MP3 pair itself was in the person's pocket. You had no idea if it was Sony or Motorola. What Apple did so brilliantly was making a massive play of all their advertising, focus on the bright white earphones, all the charred advertising, focus on that. Very, very distinctive, only person who did it. So as soon as you saw white earphones, you knew someone was listening to Apple. They looked like they were the market leader long before they were. And that set in this virtuous cir, set in train, this virtuous circle of social proof.

• 32:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Richard Shotton?

  So it's those natural.

• 32:31Richard Shotton?

  Harnessing, the lateral harnessing of these biases, I think, becomes really exciting when it's through the design or through the insinuation.

• 32:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so you're stranded on an island.

• 32:41Richard Shotton?

  Yep.

• 32:42Chris Williamson?

  And you're allowed to take five biases with you, or you're allowed to be aware of five biases. So I'm going to ask you to choose your five favourite children.

• 32:51Richard Shotton?

  Okay, okay. Well, we've had the pratfall effect.

• 32:53Chris Williamson?

  Is that one of your top five?

• 32:55Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, I'd be live. It's the pratfall, I think. I love it.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  Okay, who's going to be, who's going to be number two and why? And let's go through it.

• 33:01Richard Shotton?

  Okay, so the second one, I probably have something like price relativity. So this is the idea that consumers don't have a fixed conception of value, of what's good value. You know, so I think it's always said in those words, there's no one walking around the shops thinking they're prepared to pay one pound per unit of happiness, whether it's a coat or a pair of trainers, just be too complex.

• 33:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Richard Shotton?

  So what Daniel Kahneman talks about often, he says, look, when people have a complex problem, like, is this thing good value, rather than try and weigh that up in a very complex way, they replace the complex calculation with a much simpler calculation. A calculation's almost as good, but much simpler. And the simpler calculation is, what did I pay for something similar in the past? If I'm now being asked to pay more, this new thing is bad value. If I'm now being asked to pay less, this new thing is great value. Now, that should interest marketers, because it means that people's conception

• 34:11Richard Shotton?

  of value is not an absolute thing, it's a relative thing, it depends what your comparison set is. So if you can change the comparison set for your product, then you can change people's willingness to pay by orders of magnitude.

• 34:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, have you got an example?

• 34:30Richard Shotton?

  A recent. Probably not the biggest one, but a recent one would be, have you seen this like Seedlip non-alcoholic gin?

• 34:38Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 34:39Richard Shotton?

  And when it's not an offer, it's 25 quid.

• 34:42Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 34:44Richard Shotton?

  And everything they do about it is, you know, the brand, the imagery, the bottle it comes in, the fact they call it a non-alcoholic spirit, it compares it to other alcoholic drinks. So when you're comparing it with a gin, you know, 25 quid's expensive, but it's in line with an artisan gin. And it sells reasonably well. But if you think about what that product is, it's essentially an adult cordial. If you stuck next to Ribena, if that sold not on the gin aisle, but in the Ribena aisle, and there's no way on earth any right-minded consumer would pay more than a fiver. But because people would suddenly

• 35:25Richard Shotton?

  be saying, well, okay, it's a bit fancier than Ribena, but the two pounds would be their comparison set. They might pay double, they're not going to pay 10 as much. By changing the comparison set to gins, they change consumers' willingness to pay by orders of magnitude. You know, the more, the famous example, probably, you know, the example that's made billions of pounds, though, along the Rory Sutherland often talks about is an espresso. Now, his argument there is what they have brilliantly done by selling in pods is changed the comparison set because a pod gives you a cup-sized serving. And as soon as people think of cups of coffee, the comparison set with an espresso is Starbucks and a flat white. So the 50 pence that an espresso want for a lungo pot of coffee looks

• 36:10Richard Shotton?

  great value, it's two pound five for a Starbucks flat white. If, and I reckon 99.9% of marketers would have done this, if they had launched in bags of coffee, if they'd sold the Nespresso powder in like a big bag of coffee like Dow Egbert's or Cafe Direct, how much do you reckon a four, standard 474 gram bag of coffee would have cost?

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, you're going to be able to get a little bit over the top of what it is already, right? You're not going to be talking Starbucks prices.

• 36:39Richard Shotton?

  Well, if you, if they sold 474 gram bags of coffee, that would cost 60 pounds. Now there is no way on earth, again, any would go into Sainsbury's, push aside a 10 pound bag of Dow Egbert's away and take home a 60 pound bag of Nespresso. That'd feel like so wasteful, feel morally wrong.

• 36:59Richard Shotton?

  Now, but that's not what they did. You know, the 50 pence for a pod feels like a great value compared to Starbucks. The 60 pound for a bag, which is exactly the same per gram price, that would have felt a rip off because it would have been compared to a different collection of items. So that to me is one of the most fascinating biases because you can change people's willingness to pay. I mean, those examples are pretty, but you've changed people's willingness to pay by orders of magnitude of about 10.

• 37:26Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 37:27Richard Shotton?

  You know, that's phenomenally.

• 37:28Chris Williamson?

  So this is where, this is where I, I'd never heard it before, but the first ever podcast that I heard Rory Sutherland on. Rory, you may be listening, so I'm going to send this to you. I apologize for your ears just like burning so, so hard that they're coming off. But if you are listening and you haven't heard episode 49 with Rory Sutherland, it was at the start of the year and it was a force of nature. You've got to go watch it. It'll be in the show notes below. Um, I remember that he was discussing about so many of these different elements. And I think that the fact there was nothing analogous in the two situations you've got, there's nothing that someone can use. What's analogous to alcohol free gin? Well, when it's in the gin aisle, nothing. And what's analogous to Nespresso pod?

• 38:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, I, I can't work it out. No one probably actually knows how many grams are in a teaspoon of coffee that's instant coffee, da, da, da, da, like.

• 38:17Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, you'd, you'd go insane if you, I mean, people often use the word irrationality about some of these biases, but it's, it's a strange word to use because it would be insane to go into the supermarket and try and make all these calculations, weigh up all these things and not just compare it to what's in front of you. You know, you'd spend your whole, you'd spend a whole day in a supermarket if you, if you try to make all these calculations.

• 38:40Chris Williamson?

  An existential crisis.

• 38:41Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yeah.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  You would, which I, which I often have in Asda. Um, but yeah, the Rory Sutherland point is the fact he talks, he says alchemy, right? And I think.

• 38:50Richard Shotton?

  Oh, yes.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  The alchemy relation that he pulls out, the first ever time that I heard this used, and remembering I've done, I did a masters in international marketing at Newcastle University. I've been at uni for five years. I've done advertising my entire life. Um, I, I'd never thought of it like this, but what he says is that. Advertising is a kind of alchemy because it allows you to create value creation literally out of nothing. So the Nespresso change in price by the way that they have pitched themselves and the style in which they've put the product across, there's no carbon footprint, there's no increased labour, there's no, there's no cost of any kind outside of its ability to simply be a unique kind of offering.

• 39:32Chris Williamson?

  So you're able to create value from nothing and that's where he gets the alchemy idea from, I think.

• 39:37Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, I think absolutely brilliant book. I think you're absolutely right. And there's also a value in the what people taste is not necessarily just the product itself. So if you're talking about Nespresso or beer or food, people taste what they expect to taste. So there's a whole series of experiments done by a slightly controversial professor called Brian Wansink, where a different story before or a different label to a product, to a food creates a very different taste. So if you tell someone a wine is 50 quid, and I think this was Dan Arrell actually, rather than Wansink, if you tell them a wine's 50 quid, they'll like it much more than the exactly the same wine

• 40:22Richard Shotton?

  if they're told it's a fiver. Wansink did stuff around labelling. So you tell people a wine, exactly again, exactly say everyone served the same wine, if they're told it's from Dakota, North Dakota, they'll tell you it's awful if it's from California, it's lovely. If they describe a soup with loads of fancy adjectives, then it's rated higher and people will pay more. And I think it tastes better than if it's just described in very plain terms. So, you know, yes, people, you know, adding that thought and effort to the design, the advertising, the labelling, the packaging, it creates value in people's heads.

• 41:01Richard Shotton?

  And why is that any less valuable than the enjoyment that's created by playing around with the chemical and the physical physical makeup?

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I agree. So we've got the pratfall effect. We've got, what was the second cost relativity?

• 41:17Richard Shotton?

  Price relativity.

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  Price relativity. Who else? So we're on the, we're on the island.

• 41:21Richard Shotton?

  Okay, we're on third.

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  We know how to trip over and we know to spill coffee on ourselves. We know to make things unanalogous to other products so that the customers don't know what's going on. What else is happening?

• 41:30Richard Shotton?

  For different reasons, I would probably have nine enders.

• 41:38Richard Shotton?

  Just, okay. Yeah, okay. So, how old are you, by any chance? Thirty-one. Ah, damn. We should have done this podcast, we should have done it in eight years' time. So, nine enders is the idea that, from Adam Alter and Hal Hirschfield, that people whose age ends in nine are particularly likely to make big, major lifestyle decisions.

• 42:02Richard Shotton?

  So, I mean, exactly, my reaction when I first read this was, this sounds hokum. And at first, I wasn't persuaded by their initial, well, what he initially talks about is, well, we proved this by running a huge global survey, I think it's forty-odd thousand people, and people were much more likely to agree with this statement, I've made a big lifestyle change in the last twelve months if their age ends in nine. But there's all sorts of problems with claimed data, so that's a little bit weak. But what they then did was brilliant. They looked at loads of observed data sets to try and test their hypothesis. So, they look at first-time marathon runners, and they're forty-eight percent more likely to do a marathon the first time when their age ends in nine.

• 42:47Richard Shotton?

  They look at, I guess, they look at affairs websites, they look at Ashley Madison. I mean, it's not a great affairs website. They gave their eight million database of men to these researchers, and they found that men were eighteen percent more likely to join this website when their age ends in nine. They even looked, and this gets a bit more depressing, they looked at American suicide data, and there is a small but statistically significant uplift in suicides when people's age ends in nine. Now, what they then argued, it's a robust study because they're prioritizing observed data over claimed data.

• 43:28Richard Shotton?

  They argue that this happens because people put, they don't treat all time as equal. Some moments are given disproportionate importance. So when people are approaching the turn of a decade, that has big cultural significance. So in that 12 months before, people are at least thinking, well, how's my life going? And loads of people think, well, it's absolutely fine, don't make any changes. But there's a large enough proportion who think things are going poorly. They make these big radical changes. Now, part of the reason I take this, this island is, I like this because it's practical. You know, 10 years ago, knowing that as an advertiser, well, what the hell would you do with it? Now it is very, very simple.

• 44:11Richard Shotton?

  Now, loads of digital media owners, Catchable's birthday is very, very easy to target people by. But the other reason, and this is probably why it makes it on the top five, I love it, is there's a really strong economic reason for using this bias. Like if you're a, if you're the government trying to get people to stop smoking, if you're a diet brand, if you're a gym brand, if you're a seller of luxury convertibles, you know, targeting people whose age ends in nine when they are, you know, mulling over the direction of life, it's probably a very, very personal time. But the reason I love it from the economics of it is media, when advertisers buy media space, it's increasingly bought through an auction.

• 44:56Richard Shotton?

  So in the milliseconds before you see an ad, an auction's gone on and the winner gets to serve their ad. There, if you are in an, if you are using the same data signals as every other brand, and most brands will default to income, you know, 1834s, ABC ones. If you're just buying on the same metrics as everyone else, well, when you're in a busy auction, you tend to overpay. What you need to do is isolate a fact that no one else is using, like Night Enders, bid on that and you're much more likely to get a bargain. So I think Nine Enders makes it because at first I was very doubtful. I love the creativity that Alter and Hirschfield showed to test this point.

• 45:39Richard Shotton?

  And then I love the fact that it's both practical and there's some economics behind it.

• 45:46Chris Williamson?

  I can't get over the name.

• 45:48Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  I can't get over the fact it's called Nine Enders.

• 45:51Richard Shotton?

  Well, it was discovered by academics, not marketers.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the thing. They just need to rebrand. Like, they're around other markets. Like, mate, we've come up with this thing. What do you think of, what do you, just hear me out, hear me out, just wait. What do we think of as a name? Nine Enders. He'd be like, right, love the idea, great, just change the title out. And we're, and we're sweet. We're sweet. Yeah, I mean.

• 46:14Richard Shotton?

  Remember back to our very first chat, I've got no right to talk to anyone about naming.

• 46:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true. That's very true. You got that wrong. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't called like Astro Tenders though, was it?

• 46:23Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we've got those. We've got Nine Enders. We've got a price, a cost relativity. And we've got the pratfall effect. What else is, what else is in on the, on the island?

• 46:38Richard Shotton?

  The island, well, I would have, and this is, it's related to the danger of claimed data. I think, you know, and touching on that with Nine Enders. There is a lovely experiment by Adrian North, who was at the University of Leicester. And, and his experiment was around playing different music in the wine aisle of a supermarket. So some occasions he plays, you know, stereotypically French music, accordion stuff. Sometimes he plays stereotypically German music, brass bands and things. And then he monitors the proportion of wine sales. So ignores all the other nations, just looks at French and German wine sales.

• 47:23Richard Shotton?

  When the French music plays, 77% of the wine from those two countries is French, 27% German. When the German music plays, 73% is German, 27%, 27% French. So the nationality being bought sways massively because of this small environmental queue. So part of it, you know, he's, he's, he's experiment is mainly about the music and the importance of these environmental queues. But what's interesting from another perspective is what he does next. As people are leaving the supermarket, he stops them.

• 48:03Richard Shotton?

  And he says, uh, did you buy any wine? Did you buy any French or German wine? And then if they've said yes to both those questions, he says, well, why did you buy that wine? And only two percent of people say they bought the wine because of the music. And even when he asked them directly, even when he says, look, did the music influence you? Eighty six percent of people deny flat out the music had any effects at all. Now that, I think if you're a marketer, if you take, actually, if you change one thing from this podcast, it should be based on that experiment, which is be very, very careful about taking customers' claims at face value.

• 48:45Richard Shotton?

  You know, because if you run that test and then, you know, or you were thinking about running that test and did what most marketers do, which is survey people and then, you know, listen to the survey results. If you went and said, would the music, changing the music influence you? Everyone says, no, you don't bother doing it. So if you're a marketer, be very skeptical about survey results, focus groups, directly asking people, and certainly be skeptical about taking those claims at face value. And instead, I would say the thing to learn from psychology is this methodology of not listening to claims, but setting up these test and control experiments. A naturalistic, um, uh, experiment, you know, in the wine aisle, for example, if you're a wine brand,

• 49:31Richard Shotton?

  keep everything the same except for one variable, the music. And then any difference in sales or whatever behavior you want, you attribute back to that changed variable. That's a far better way to unearthing genuine motivations.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Daniel Kahneman talks about this a lot, that we don't, we don't know our own biases, right? We haven't got a clue about our own motivations for doing particular things.

• 49:56Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned about alcohol in supermarkets. I haven't seen this in the UK, but I was recently in America. And in America, they have bars from like a pub.

• 50:08Chris Williamson?

  Not that far behind the fruit and veg aisle. So you hit fruit and veg, then you hit a bar and then you hit like bread.

• 50:16Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  The number of dads that I'd seen that were there, who'd obviously said to their partners, right, don't worry, don't worry darling, I'll, I'll, I'll take the kids, I'll take the kids for this one. Are you sure? Are you sure? You've worked all week? No, no, no, no, no. Don't worry, don't worry. And then one of the, one of the trolleys, oh my God, this trolley, right? And it's double child seat thing at the front, cup holder at the back.

• 50:42Richard Shotton?

  Nice, nice.

• 50:43Chris Williamson?

  This is dad just going around with an IPA. He's got like a lovely brew dog or like a blue moon or something like that. And he's just sipping away, obviously throwing loads of stuff in. He doesn't need, like, he's just loosened his spending muscles a little bit.

• 50:57Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Chris Williamson?

  He's, he's got like, like loads of fajita mix and things he's never going to use.

• 51:02Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, yeah, he's great.

• 51:03Richard Shotton?

  Yeah. So, sod removing the, uh, the, the pound signs, the dollar signs from a menu.

• 51:07Chris Williamson?

  Just get them a bit pissed.

• 51:09Richard Shotton?

  Two pints of IPA, that'll get them pricing sensitive.

• 51:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Richard Shotton?

  You know, the other bit, and I can't, I think it was a Paco Underhill, I think that might be his name. Apologies, I've got, I've got that wrong. But he wrote a book and I think it's there that I first read, and it might be worth double checking this one to make sure it's true. But the reason why supermarkets have, because you mentioned even in that example, that the fruit and veg comes first. Which is completely impractical if you think about it. If you go, if the first thing you see is delicate, soft, squidgy fruit and veg. The last place you want that is the bottom of your trolley, when all the heavy stuff's going to go in front. But there is an idea in psychology called moral licensing, which is if we do something good, you know, ethically right, virtuous. Like going to the gym, having some vitamins, we often overcompensate.

• 51:59Richard Shotton?

  So you get people feeling like they've been very healthy with a fruit veg. That might be the reason for having that right at the beginning. So then compensate with biscuits and treats and whatever else.

• 52:12Chris Williamson?

  So there's an awful lot of psychology that goes into the design of supermarkets, right? With shelf height and the different ways that prices are displayed. I seem to remember one of the very few things that I can remember from my degree, which I paid 27 grand for is a map about how customers typically walk down aisles. And it's similar to if you were to take a ping pong ball or a bowling ball, put the guardrails up and throw it at an angle. You would see just this angle that's almost the angle of attack is the angle of exit. And people think, think, think, and they just go the way, all the way up.

• 52:56Chris Williamson?

  I remember seeing that now. It was first off, it was at Newcastle University's marketing department and I'm unsure how many accolades they've got, so it might've been wrong. But that I'm fascinated with the design of supermarkets and I often try and find myself like catching like, oh, what are they doing this week? I bought, I bought, recently purchased a 867 gram bag of Crave cereal. Just because I was like, that's the largest bag of Crave cereal I've ever seen in my life. I've got to buy it. Inside of that bag, inside of that bag of Crave cereal is just multiples of smaller bags of Crave cereal that I've had before. There's nothing unique in that. I don't even think it was that cheap.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  Like I just like, oh, look at that.

• 53:43Richard Shotton?

  I mean, I have heard people arguing that one of the reasons, it's easier to change the size of your products than put the price up. So if you reduce the size of your crisps or your sweets, people are less likely to stop buying than if you put up the price for, say, or if it's a massive bag. Well, then again, what do you compare it to? You know, I know, you know, for me, crisp is my weakness. A hundred grand bag, you know, I'm reckoning that should be about a pound, pound 50. If it's 150, 75, you know, suddenly my benchmark's out, out the window.

• 54:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I guess when Red Bull first launched, right? There, this weird can, oddly sized can, is it a 200?

• 54:27Richard Shotton?

  Hundred and fifty, yeah, but it's thin, cylindrical, again, it's breaking that link with Coca-Cola.

• 54:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you've got the three thirty, which is the Coca-Cola stubby. And then you'd have like a Monster equivalent, which is like a pint or something. That's like, no, like a four, six, seven or something like that.

• 54:42Richard Shotton?

  But I think Monster came much later. It was, yeah. So, once that link with comparing it with soft drinks is broken, then you can gradually drift into it. It's like craft beer. When craft beer launched, you never, ever saw, or I certainly never saw, a craft beer selling in a four hundred and forty mil can. Because the link, it would have been too obvious that, what, like, they want four pounds, I can get a John's. Six pence. So they, so paradoxically, they make it smaller to be able to sell for more. Now, very occasionally, you do see four forty mil cans, but that's because I think they've set up craft beer as being a different category, different price expectations than from real ale.

• 55:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I do, I get that completely. One of the interesting things, I wonder about, you were talking about how you can manipulate your GP on a product by lowering the price, which means, sorry, lowering the volume, which means you've got less product inside of that. Now, a number of bar and club owners from around the country will know this problem, which is that something like Carlsberg, sorry, Carlsberg, but Carlsberg's about the cheapest main beer that you can buy from, from a brewery with this reputable name. And more than fifty percent of the cost of the beer comes from the bottle that it arrived in, I think.

• 56:02Richard Shotton?

  Bloody hell.

• 56:03Chris Williamson?

  So if you were to reduce the size of the bottle, all that you would be concerned with is using, or you would be equally concerned with using less glass.

• 56:11Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  As you would be for using less beer.

• 56:14Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 56:14Chris Williamson?

  Which is hilarious. Also, on a side point, I have managed to, Carlsberg, like, I get, I get spat on for drinking Carlsberg, right? Like, when I don't drink at the moment, but when I do drink, I tend to drink Carlsberg. And this is this weird artifact of years of working in student club nights, where if I wanted to get, the cheapest beer would always be Carlsberg. And if the, if the club manager was going to give us a couple. A couple of beers while we were cashing up at the end, he'd always bring in obviously the stuff that it doesn't really like it's 47 pence a unit or something plus that. I don't care about giving, giving you like two quid's worth of Carlsberg for you and the couple of the lads that are cashing the till at the end of the night.

• 56:51Chris Williamson?

  But oddly, over time, I've actually developed like a weird like Pavlov's dog type thing. I'm like, end of the night, need a Carlsberg. And now that's even expanded itself out to the point where it's like, I'm out on a night, want a Carlsberg. And everyone else will be like getting a Corona or getting something like Copperberg or something. I'm like, have you got any Carlsberg at the back, please? And like, what are you drinking that for? I don't know. I've been promoting for like 13 years. Leave me alone.

• 57:18Richard Shotton?

  Well, if anyone takes the mick, and people can be strangely snobby about, I think coffee and beer at the moment. I did a, we did a taste test and I think the main reason we did the taste test, I think we were testing the effect of like the serving on the taste. So headline figure was for, you know, if you get it in a plastic glass, you think it's awful, unbranded, it's a bit better. Same, this is the same liquid, branded glass, it rates nicer. But one of the things we did was we gave, we kind of found blokes between 18 and 30, gave them, found out whether they were Foster's Carlsberg or Carling drinkers.

• 57:59Richard Shotton?

  And some people would be quite, you know, passionate about one of them and talk very dismissive about the other two. And then we gave them a blind taste test of the three beers. And people were worse than chance at picking out their supposedly favoured beer. So yeah, so maybe put some cash on that. Next time, one of your Corona drinking friends mocks Carlsberg. See if he can pick it out of a, a, a, a liner.

• 58:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  So did we get, did we get number four? Did we get number four?

• 58:30Richard Shotton?

  That's number four, I think. Four was claim data.

• 58:33Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 58:33Richard Shotton?

  Number five, the final one.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 58:35Richard Shotton?

  And this is more for, it's my favourite story for how psychologists came up with the idea. And it's the, if you had the Dunning Kruger effect. Okay, so.

• 58:47Chris Williamson?

  For the listeners, it'll be worth explaining it.

• 58:49Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah. So David Dunning, Justin Kruger, yeah, two, I think psychologists, Cornell.

• 58:57Richard Shotton?

  They're reading a local paper and they come across the story of MacArthur Wheeler. So MacArthur Wheeler has just been jailed for twenty years for committing two bank robberies. So in a single day, he'd robbed two banks. The time he drove home, the police are waiting for him and they arrest him. And the reason that they caught him so quickly was that unlike most burglar, uh, bank robbers, he didn't bother covering his face with a balaclava. He turned up at the bank and the only precaution he'd taken was he'd smeared his face with lemon juice. Because his mate had told him that lemon juice is what's, you know, you make invisible ink out of.

• 59:41Richard Shotton?

  So therefore, if you put the juice on your face, uh, the security cameras won't be able to pick you up. And supposedly, he tried, you know, to, because he's not a complete idiot. He tries a bit, uh, he tried, he, he tests this theory. He takes a selfie of himself, but he manages to kind of shoot the wall behind him because he's not angled right. He's got fucking lemon in his eyes, that's why. He's covered his face in lemon. So they, uh, Dolly and Kruger read about this and they think, well, wait a minute. There is a massive vested interest in this person knowing their abilities accurately. So how can they be so deluded about their ability to rob a bank and get away with it?

• 1:00:24Richard Shotton?

  And they began to wonder, is this, although that of course is a very, very extreme aversion, is that typical of other people? So they begin by testing people, they give them grammar tests, I think logic tests, maths tests. Get them to do these tests. Note down where they've appeared from, you know, in, you know, let's say they get a hundred people to do it. What, uh, percentage they've, uh, you know, they're ranked as. And then they get the people to estimate where they've appeared. Now, in general, people are overconfident. They think they're better than average. And now everyone can't be better than average. But the key why it became known as the Dunning Kruger

• 1:01:05Richard Shotton?

  effect, rather than just the bias of overconfidence, was they noted that people who were experts sometimes underestimate their abilities. When people were novices and pretty darn awful, they were more like, there was a bigger kind of overestimate of their abilities. So it's kind of idea that when you're really bad at something, you really do overestimate how good you are. So it became known as the Dunning Kruger effect. Now, I think there's loads of fascinating implications for marketers about overconfidence, that too often, great campaigns are jettisoned too early. Because people believe, well, I did a brilliant campaign, you know, 10 years ago, that's running out of juice. Now I'm going to do another great one. They

• 1:01:50Richard Shotton?

  overestimate their ability. But I think the main reason that makes it the desert island is the MacArthur Wheeler story for me, I think is the

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  I didn't know about the lemon juice thing. It's so good. So we're going to finish up shortly, Richard. Have you got any any bits that you've seen recently? Have you got one more little anecdote or one more little thing that you've got jotted down that you think would be a good way to finish finish off the episode today?

• 1:02:15Richard Shotton?

  Um, the, I think, I think the best example I've seen recently, and maybe we'll have to stick an image up here because my description is not going to be

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  Video guy, Dean, will

• 1:02:26Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, video, yeah. I can't remember who did it, unfortunately. And I do like to try and credit people because it's not fair to not mention. But there was a wonderful tweet recently, where someone had taken a photo of a sign in a in a in a little corner shop.

• 1:02:45Richard Shotton?

  And it essentially said, Jurex condoms, $5. Sorry, Trojan condoms, $5. Huggies, $22. And I think that's the

• 1:02:59Richard Shotton?

  Usage of price relativity I've ever seen. Don't compare yourself to Jurex, compare yourself to Huggers and suddenly you look much cheaper.

• 1:03:08Chris Williamson?

  You've got the downstream implications.

• 1:03:10Richard Shotton?

  I'll take that one out.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  That's good. There's a, I saw recently on your Twitter, the one about, beware pickpockets operate in this area.

• 1:03:20Richard Shotton?

  So Paul Craven does this wonderful talk at Nudge stock where he said, look, people assume communications work rationally. So you put up a sign saying, beware pickpockets operate in this area. Surely we've now communicated the information. This is a danger area. Pickpocketing rates should drop. What he says is that that actually tends to backfire because when people see that sign, their automatic response is without thinking to straight away, you know, tap their pockets to make sure.

• 1:03:51Chris Williamson?

  All of the valuable areas of their body.

• 1:03:54Richard Shotton?

  You're a pickpocket. What are you going to do? You're going to stand by that sign, hit that sign. Oh, thank you very much. You've just identified where your wallet is. I'll be having that. Yeah.

• 1:04:02Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Well, I recently went to Barcelona and one of the guys that I was with fell asleep in Barcelona train station after a bit of a heavy night. Now Barcelona is the pickpocket capital of Europe. Apparently, I didn't know, but he found that out when he woke up to notice his phone, wallet and shoes had been taken. Shoes taken from his feet.

• 1:04:24Richard Shotton?

  That's just a master pickpocket.

• 1:04:29Richard Shotton?

  It's just too easy. On that, actually another great advert or nudge I saw, this one was from Ogilvy. They ran a campaign, warning people about pickpockets where they used ex pickpockets who'd kind of seen the light. And they had a campaign called Put Pockets. So they got the pickpocket to drop a little flyer in people's pockets saying, well, it was easy enough for me to put this in your pocket. I could have helped myself if I wanted to be much more careful. And I love that as a way of. Tell people they are in danger, you know, kind of show them that's much, much more powerful. Because we're, you know, going back to Dunning Kruger, we're all, you know, all the other that kind of

• 1:05:15Richard Shotton?

  generalised finding of overconfidence. If you say, you know, this area is dangerous for pickpockets, or, or, you know, you need to be more careful with your valuables. Most people think, well, it's not going to happen to me, it'll happen to those other idiots.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  It's one of those, uh, it's one of those things like the ethical hackers, you know, they get the ethical hackers to come on board and hack into a company on behalf of the company. And it's, oh, well, we've identified the hole in your particular system. This is the way that we go in. I want to know what a ethical pickpocketer gets paid? And does he get paid based on the number of flyers that he gives out? Because that really should be, and it's like, oh, well, I gave, I gave this to a really rich guy. And I know for a fact that that Rolex is worth five grand. So I re, I need, I need big money for him. And I need big money for that woman with the Le Vuitton purse and.

• 1:06:06Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yes, yeah. Uh, I don't know.

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  Performance based pay for the ethical pickpocketers.

• 1:06:12Richard Shotton?

  Ethical pickpockets.

• 1:06:13Chris Williamson?

  They'll have a union soon. They'll have a union. Well, Richard, today's been awesome, man. Thank you so much. Um, where can everyone find you online? I absolutely love your Twitter. What, what should they follow you at?

• 1:06:24Richard Shotton?

  So at R. Shotton, R. S. H. O. I've forgotten my bloody surname. R. S. H. O. T. T. O. N. And the book I wrote, which is all about applying behavioural science to advertising is called The Choice Factory.

• 1:06:39Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:06:39Richard Shotton?

  And then the third thing I've done, which might be of interest is I've just created a online training course.

• 1:06:47Chris Williamson?

  With 42 courses?

• 1:06:48Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, that's exactly, yeah, exactly. So Rory Southern's done one about applying behavioural science, or about behavioural science in general. I've done one specifically on applying behavioural science to advertising.

• 1:06:58Chris Williamson?

  Wow. So links to all of that will be in the show notes below. If you want to follow Richard on Twitter. He's very active and it's just like when I log on now, I've been following you maybe for a week, just over a week, something like that. When I log on, it's just at the top of my feed. I only followed 68 people. So it's like, it's a good chunk. You know, it's a real mark of something for you to get in there. And I just go on and I'm like, it's always media based. There was a recent story about Julius Caesar about, I'll tell you what, why don't we finish with the story about Julius Caesar? Can you remember that?

• 1:07:28Richard Shotton?

  Yes, yes. So this is from a brilliant book by actually an amazing advertiser, kind of in his heyday, seventies, eighties, nineties called Dave Trot. And he's written a lovely book called Creative Blindness. And he talks about Julius Caesar. So age 23, Julius Caesar is captured by some pirates and they want to ask for 20 units of silver. And Julius Caesar says, no, no, no, hang on, don't ask for 20. I'm worth far more than that. Ask for 50. And this is the highest amount that any, you know, politician, general, whatever, has been ransomed for.

• 1:08:10Richard Shotton?

  So all of a sudden people are like, God, this Caesar man must be amazing. You know, if he's being asked for, you know, the pirates reckon he's worth that much. And in this blog that I kind of photoed a snippet from, from Dave Trot, he essentially argues that Caesar invented the idea, you know, a thousand years before of the Veblen effect. And that's the idea we touched on with Stella, that people assume something that is expensive must be high quality. So Caesar was working on the idea that, well, you know, if I go out and can say that I had, you know, the highest ransom ever. And people are going to assume I must be an amazing general and that's going to set off my political career.

• 1:08:51Chris Williamson?

  Despite the fact that he came up with the price.

• 1:08:54Richard Shotton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure he kind of, he didn't bother mentioning that.

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Richard Shotton?

  The other story, this is someone, when I, I love the thing about Twitter is someone, and actually I had came, came back and sent me a link to a longer article about Caesar. And it mentioned that when Caesar was released.

• 1:09:12Richard Shotton?

  He then raised a, you know, a kind of armed party, went back and found the pirates who were still sitting around on the same islands, caught them and then had them all executed. So, I mean, you know, you want to be...

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:09:26Richard Shotton?

  He was a man that, yeah, he probably shouldn't have messed with for a few reasons, not just his marketing now.

• 1:09:31Chris Williamson?

  Julius Caesar's a bad motherfucker, isn't he? Like, he's gonna, he's gonna...

• 1:09:35Richard Shotton?

  His autobiography.

• 1:09:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's gonna shaft you with behavioural science, then, then he's gonna make himself really well-known and super-popular, then he's gonna come back, he's gonna kill you.

• 1:09:46Richard Shotton?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Chris Williamson?

  You do not mess with Julius Caesar. Richard, today's been fantastic, man. Everybody who is listening, please go and follow Richard on Twitter, he's absolutely fascinating. Any of the points that have come up that you've been interested in, feel free to give me a message wherever you follow me, at Chris Will X or Richard on Twitter, and we'll be more than happy to start the discussion yet again over the interwebs. Richard, thanks so much for your time, man.

• 1:10:09Richard Shotton?

  Cheers, Chris. Thanks a lot. Bye.