4 ½ Psychological Biases Every Marketer Needs to Know

The precision effect and why specific numbers build trust

Richard Shotton: When you know what you’re talking about, you tend to talk. Precisely when you don’t, you tend to talk generally. And over time, people fuse those two things together. So I think you’re right in specificity, certainly in terms of numbers. Precise numbers have an aura of believability in a way that round ones don’t.

Louis: Bonjour, Bonjour and welcome to another episode of everyone hates marketers.com, the only actionable podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I’m your host Louis Gonier. In today’s episode you will learn 4.5 little known facts about human behavior that you can apply in your daily or in your business. So yes, four and a half. Not. Not four, not five. You’ll know why in a few minutes. My guest today has been on the podcast before. In fact, he’s been on the podcast five years ago, which isn’t. Which is crazy. It’s one of the my favorite episodes of all time. I remember reading it and rereading it the transcript to learn more about it. I wrote a couple of blog posts about it. Anyway, we talked about the pratfall effect, confirmation bias, habits, a brand purpose, personalization, and today we’re going to talk about 5 or at least 4.5 or maybe 4 other ones. Anyway, he’s the author of the book the Choice Factory. He has a new book, the Illusion of Choice, which is equally good, if not better. He specializes in applying behavioral science to marketing in a way that stupid people like me Understand? So anyway, Richard Shotten, welcome back.

Richard Shotton: Very nice to see you again.

Louis: Do you mean this?

Richard Shotton: I do indeed, Yeah. I like the suspicion, though. I like the situation.

Louis: That’s like, that’s my standard. I’m suspicious by default, you know, being French and knowing what the British are like. I’m always suspicious of people like you.

Richard Shotton: Fair enough.

Louis: So as we said last time, we talked about those very core behavioral biases, the things that humans are kind of born to do because we evolved this way, right, As a survival mechanism or anything like that. Before we get into the 4.5 ones that I want to talk about today, I just have a thought, which is when you look at things from a very granular point of view, so every individual their own biases and why, for example, I tend to trust someone more if they are more transparent with me or they admit a fault or stuff like that. But then if we apply that to the 8 billion people on earth in terms of we are all programmed to behave roughly the same way in those situations. It feels like all of the societal problems, climate change and everything we need to deal with all of that is linked to one or two or three or even more behavioral biases. Do you agree or disagree with this and do you understand what I mean?

Behavioral biases and societal problems

Richard Shotton: I understand what you mean. And I certainly think a lot of those big problems like climate change or our lack of reaction to it have some behavioral science underpinnings. Whether it’s everything is a matter of debate, but you’re absolutely right. I mean, two biases that spring to mind. There’s an idea called present bias that we are much more concerned about benefits and problems in the now than in the future. That’s a problem with climate change. We’re asking people to make sacrifices now for benefit in the future. And then the second bias is around concreteness, which is we are much more likely to remember and be moved by concrete, visualizable, tangible things than abstract ideas. I think yes, you can apply behavioral science to those big problems and it’s more than just describing the problem. Because once you’ve identified saying like present bias is an issue, you could think, well, who else suffers from that problem? The pensions industry, the savings industry, health and fitness. And then you think, well, what have they done to successfully evade that problem? And could we take any of those approaches and apply them to the climate challenge? So I think yes, behavioral science can explain maybe the reasons why we have some of these problems, but also practically suggest some potential solutions.

Louis: Well, now I’m curious. You’ve just used the curiosity Bias gap against me. You tell me something interesting, you don’t say everything and now I want to know more. How, for example, did the pension industry or those industries have solved this kind of long term thing like putting money aside for 35 years until you’re old enough to get it?

Richard Shotton: One of the most practical approaches in America comes from Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago for economics and Shlomo Benazi and they came up with an idea called Save More Tomorrow. So, so normally in pension companies you are asking people to put more money in. And so what’s very apparent is there is pain now. You know you’re going to get less money in your salary straight away and you’re not going to see the benefit for 34 years. What Bernazi and Thaler did was create a new program where people weren’t asked to give up anything now they were asked to increase or start the pension contribution when they next got a pay rise. So what you’ve brilliantly done there is shoved the cost, the pain to an equally far distant future as the benefit. So you’ve started not to try and ignore the bias or overcome it. You’ve essentially tried to work with that nuance of human nature. So Save More Tomorrow is a brilliant, I think, very practical tactic the pensions industries started to use.

Louis: Omar, that begs the question, if we were in charge of the world, which is a very bad idea, don’t let me in particular you, you’d be fine. But don’t let me how we would use this principle then for climate change and maybe we can dive maybe to something more specific than just climate change.

Richard Shotton: But yeah, so if you were a climate change charity, you could take that principle and apply it to your donations. So it’s not Save More Tomorrow, it’s Give More Tomorrow Now. And there’s some lovely work by Anna Breynan, I think Brennan Brennan, the University of Stockholm, where she’s shown for charities that if you do essentially the same thing, ring people up and rather than asking to increase their donations then and there, agree to increase them in a couple of months you get a significant increase in people’s generosity. So you could apply it in that way if you’re Greenpeace or wherever, campaign on these issues or you could think about, well, changes that the government are trying to introduce, well, maybe the closest proxy is rather than introducing changes that impact straight away, give people a lot more warning. So there’s a big backlash at the moment in London, not necessarily against climate change policies, but about clean air policies. Because they’ve introduced a ultra low emission zone. Now the argument might have been if you had told people that was coming with more notice, then you’ve pushed the pain so far into the future you get people to agree and it will soften the introduction a little bit more. So I think you could apply it maybe if you find a lateral industry that’s kind of dealing with the same problems. I don’t think you could apply every solution, but it at least gives you an easy few ideas to start with.

Louis: I love that. Interesting thing is when you compare two massive life changing events that happened recently Covid with climate change, right, in terms of threats to humanity, just to put them next to each other, one was extremely, it was something that happened. There was a before and after. There was like, shit, this thing is spreading to the world and now we need to do something now. While the other one has been something that we’ve been warned about for decades. Right. On one hand you see the reaction that the countries had, which was almost immediate. I mean, you can debate that, but they did so much very, very fast. On the other were still trying to agree on what the fuck to do. So is that also linked to a cognitive bias of some sort?

Richard Shotton: We talked about present bias. The other bias I kind of skirted over is this idea of concreteness. So there’s an amazing study by Ian Begg just to show that it’s not just like plucked out the air. So he did this study back in 1972 where he recruits a group of people, not a very big group, but I’ve replicated this study in a much larger group, recruits a group of people, reads out 22 word phrases, half of which are what he calls concrete phrases squared or white horse. You can picture these words, they’re tangible. The other half of the words are things like basic facts, subtle truth. And what he finds is that when he asks people to recall those words later, on Average people remember 9% of the abstract phrases, 36% of the concrete phrases. So there’s a massive fourfold swing in memorability. And his argument is the strongest of our senses is vision. So if you can picture something like a white horse, it’s sticky. If you can’t picture something like a basic fact, it’s very, very forgettable. Bring that back to climate change and many of the problems Certainly, you know, five, 10 years ago, maybe you’re starting to see something now. But many of the problems people were talking about were very abstract. And I think there is a problem in that abstraction, in that people Struggle to remember it. They struggle to move them. So maybe the argument with COVID is wave of people coming towards you, dying, country and country getting closer and closer. That’s far, far more concrete and therefore much more motivating.

Louis: And this is why, if you go back to a lighter subject like copywriting, this is why specificity is so important, right? I mean, I have a few rules in my head that I kind of cycle through when I write and when I try to come up with angles for episodes or whatever, the number one that we’ll never get away from is specificity. How can I make it more specific? Specific specific, because specificity means that it gets easier to visualize today. I just want to give you an example. And then I literally sent an email today where I made a point about everyone’s being so nice to each other in the marketing industry and being so fake about it, right? Like, it’s like, oh, thanks for having me, blah, blah, blah, I love your work. Well, no one has ever checked their work. And I took an example of an influencer doing an ad, and I just imagine a scenario where they would say, okay, this product is amazing. I’ve used it for a week now, and I can already see the changes on my scrotum. Could have kept it a bit more generic. Such as, this project is amazing if used for a week now, and it’s great, but I made it. I genuinely, in my head, cycled through that and say, okay, how can I be more specific and a bit funny? And scrotum is. Why not? So it’s just a very, very small example, but it’s genuinely ingrained in me now. It’s been years that I’ve learned that. And, yeah, specificity, you can’t go wrong with it.

Richard Shotton: Yes, I think there’s three very similar points that overlap but aren’t exactly the same. So you’ve got specificity, you’ve got concreteness, which is, I can visualize this thing. And then I think the scrotum part is what a psychologist might call. I never thought I’d be putting those words together is what they.

Louis: I knew. I knew.

Richard Shotton: It’s called the peak effect. So it’s an amazing mid-90s study. It’s a bit bizarre, but bear with it. Michael, I think Michael Santos was one of the Californian universities, gets his graduate students to go out onto the street and beg for money. Sometimes they ask for some spare change or a quarter. Other times they ask for 17 cents or 37 cents. And what he finds is that they raise significantly more money. With the precise request rather than the general request. It’s not that you can visualize 17 better than 25, but 25, a quarter is something that. Well, he argues that people always ask for a quarter. That’s the standard thing people do. And therefore, in this begging situation, he says people have scripts, like a film script, but a script. He says, if you are going through life and weighing up every decision, you’ll just be overwhelmed. So what tends to happen is when people meet a familiar circumstance, they’ve developed a script. So thing A happens, beggar asks for money. Well, then I turn on my script, just say, no, beggar’s not weighed up on his individual merits. But if you ask for something out of the blue, something surprising, like the 17 cents or the 32 cents, there is no script. And therefore, at least you get considered on your individual merits. So I think the thing with the scrotum there is that it wasn’t what I was expecting you to say, and therefore it captures my attention, at least gets me to consider your argument.

Louis: It’s also something you can visualize pretty well. I’m not going to be here to argue scientists who’ve actually done research while I’m here in my shed complaining about it. But to me, it feels like there’s a few biases that play in the same experiment. Right? Like a quarter is one step removed from 25. That’s the first thing. Yes, a quarter is the norm, but 17 and 27 are so specific that they don’t feel random. And I think it connects to another one. There’s so many, it’s difficult to extract just one. Right.

Richard Shotton: I think that’s a fair point. And I often use the very first study someone did because they kind of came up with the idea, and it feels fairest to quote them. But I think. I think you’re right that there’s almost here blurring precision and surprise. But there are certainly studies that particularly look at precision. There’s a wonderful study by Schindler at Rutgers University where shows people ads for a deodorant. And people get the same basic ad. So it has the facts around what it looks like and things. And then at the bottom of the ad, sometimes it says, reduces perspiration by 50%. Other times it says either 47 or 53%. And Schindler finds that trust goes up by 5%, perceived accuracy goes up by 10%. And I’m talking about the group who hear the precise number are the ones that are more positive about the product. And his argument is this. Is essentially generally in life, if someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about, they will resort to generalities. So if you said to me, how old is my neighbor who lives, you know, six doors down? I’d say, well, he’s in his 60s. If you said, how old’s my brother? I’d say 51. When you know what you’re talking about, you tend to talk. Precisely. When you don’t, you tend to talk generally. And over time, people fuse those two things together. So I think you’re right in specificity, certainly in terms of numbers. Precise numbers have an aura of believability in a way that round ones don’t.

Louis: Is this something that we’ve learned in our life or is it something that we are born with? That association between those two.

Richard Shotton: Good questions. I mean, this is not my expertise and I think evolutionary explanations are fascinating, but they’re hard to falsify. So I much, much prefer experiments where you get a kind of simple A B condition and you get a learning and a reading afterwards because you’re exposed to it all the time.

Louis: Yeah, I feel that’s something that we’re born with because, like, we are born with storytelling stories being so entertaining to us. We are born with this social group element. We are born with so many things that are kind of the foundation of our society, like the way we behave and all of that. Why not this one? That feels like I can trust this guy because he doesn’t seem to be talking with his ass or his croton.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. But I think the reason why we’ve fused precise numbers with trust is because over time we’ve learned that people who know what they’re talking about use those things. I mean, I guess you might be able to test it if you could, you know, maybe run experiments around primary school children and then see if it still works there. Although if it still worked, I’d then say, oh, they must have learned it by the time they were 10. But if, yeah, if we could test it on 4 year olds, then it would do. It would keep on going.

Louis: Is there a way? Like there are experiments. Someone gifted me a book when my daughter was born two years ago about a scientific experiment you can do on a toddler or even lower. Like, you know, stuff to test stuff. I’m sure we could find a way to test that in toddlers. Like, you know, did they tend to more towards someone who’s holding. I don’t know. Yeah, I’m just, you know, maybe there is something.

Richard Shotton: Yeah.

Louis: All right, moving on. So I Wanted to touch on, before we go on to this, the reason why I say 4.5 and I guess we started to talk about it a bit, but we didn’t say everything there is to say. Let’s talk about this red sneakers effect. And the reason why I want to ask you about this one first is because the whole mantra that I’m trying to talk about more is standing the fuck out, right? Which is like you need to take some risk in some way, shape or form. You need to be, to go specific, you need to go narrow, you need to stand the fuck out in some way.

Red sneakers effect: Breaking conventions signals status

Richard Shotton: Anyway, what is that about long standing idea in behavioral science that we notice what’s distinctive? That study goes back to 1933 in the work of Hedvig von Restorf, who’s at the University of Berlin. So her idea is you give people long lists of, let’s say, animals. There’s 10 animals on this list, cat, dog, weasel, and one clothing item, swimming trunks. People remember the swimming trunks more than the animals or vice versa. You give them loads of items of clothes and one animal, and it’s the animal they remember. So that idea very, very well proven. One of the easiest ways to grab attention, that’s reasonably well known amongst marketers. But what’s interesting is a series of follow up experiments by Francesca Gino by. We might want to talk about some of the controversy around her as well, potentially. She ran a study probably about 15 years ago and in the original pilot study she goes to academic conferences and when people arrive at the conference, she notes down on a continuum from very scruffy to very smart how they’re dressed. After she’s done that, she goes and finds them again and she asks them how many citations they have. So citations being the number of peer reviewed articles your works appeared in. And she finds an inverse correlation between smartness of dress and number of citations. So it’s the super successful academics who are breaking the convention because at this stage the norm is to dress very smartly. That’s what you’re expected to do. But the people who’ve got New York Times bestseller books, the ones who go on the talk shows, they’re the ones who just ignore the conventions and turn up scruffily. It’s the junior academics, the people who haven’t got tenure, they’re the ones that very closely abide and cling to those conventions. Now Gino’s argument, which he proves in a number of other studies, is it takes a degree of status to break a convention because if you have no Status at all. You tend to get punished for convention breaking and people bit like that precision point. They kind of learn that over time you have to have status to break a convention and then the two things they take on a life of their own. So when we see people who break convention, we assume they must have high status.

Louis: Correlation is not causation. Right. I mean I wanted to place that in the interview to seem smart. The contrarian thinker in east would say, okay, that makes sense. But isn’t it because those people in the first place were more inclined to take some risk or to be a bit contrarian that they ended up having more citations and therefore.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, so as you say, this is her, she does this as basically a pilot study. So what she then will do is create various different scenarios. Imagine you’re going to a golf club’s annual dinner and you see John wearing a black tie and you get a description of John and then they rate how good a golfer he is or whatever. Other people see the same description of John but he’s shunned the black tie that everyone else is wearing and he’s wearing a bright red tie. So she takes the correlation that she finds in that pilot study and then she runs it in these various different thought experiments.

Louis: So.

Richard Shotton: Absolutely right. I think the first study was proof of concept. She then tests it in more rigorous areas. Now the reason though I mentioned she was controversial and I want to be careful not to lie with anyone because I think this is all allegations. Since the publication the illusion of choice, one of her studies, a different study, has been accused of data manipulation. It’s an interesting area. So let’s say she’s found guilty. You’ve then got a decision. Well, you could strike out that specific study or you could ignore all her work. Now I would probably err towards the size of just ignoring the work that has been disproved. But I know other people take a slightly more stringent view. But when it comes to red sneak effect, I’ve essentially run studies that I cover in the book which support her evidence. So what did I do? I found beer brand, in fact I found two beer brands who had a design theme so all their beers look reasonably similar, all their kind of iterations on a theme. And sometimes I showed people five beers, four of which were from the first brand, all of the same design. And then you had one brand which was standing out in effect. Next group of people I showed them, I flipped it essentially so the standout brand was now surrounded by lots of similar brands from their family and they had one of distinctive brands that previously been the majority. And what I showed was that rating of the design of exactly the same item went up, I think about 7% when it was distinctive, rather than when it was blending in with its surroundings. Without seeing the visuals, it’s a little bit harder to explain, but I hope that makes rough sense.

Louis: When it’s grouped with things that don’t look exactly like that, then it tends to be more seen as more distinctive.

Richard Shotton: The effect we saw was much smaller than Gino’s and I’d put that down to it being a more realistic commercial situation rather than thought experiments.

Louis: So what is the implication there? If we had to pick the single one specific thing you would recommend, folks listening who tend to be like business owners and people who want to get shit done to apply that effect. What does that mean for them?

Richard Shotton: If you look at a remarkable range of business categories, whether it’s perfumes, cars, banks, what they tend to do is identify the category conventions and then stick to them. But von Restorff would say that’s a bad idea because you’ll become invisible. And the red sneaker effect would say that’s a bad idea because you’ll be seen as lower status. What you should do is think about all the conventions of the category, split them into two different groups, ones that you think are there for a very good reason, leave them well alone, but that will still leave you loads of conventions that are just there for tradition’s sake. And it’s those that you should break, you’ll be more noticed and you’ll be seen as higher status. So an example of someone doing that, not such a big brand yet in the uk, but in America, I think it’s now over a billion dollars in terms of its valuation. Liquid death. What they’ve done is enter the water market and they very consciously ignored pretty much all the conventions of the water market and instead behave like they were a beer brand. And it gives them wonderful standout and boosts that admirability.

Louis: The challenge here is to, as you said, select the right conventions and not go too far. And it’s not that easy, right? So it’s like, which one do I challenge, which one do I not challenge? And sometimes you go too far. And the other thing that is important here is conventions help people decide, right? With the category heuristics, when they see certain conventions mixed together, they’ll know what it is. If it’s a metallic can, it looks green and you can open it and it’s all at a festival, then it Must be a beer. So how do you then strike the balance between the need for people to see things so they understand them and understanding it?

Richard Shotton: I mean, this is, I think, where it probably varies by category because a convention that is necessary in one might not be necessary in another. But let’s think about banking. You might say, well, look, this is something that requires deep levels of trust to open a current account. Some degree of presence is important, some degree of taking things sensibly. So you could say, well, that’s something we don’t want to muck around with. But then you could think, well, okay, where can we afford to play a bit fast and loose around the rules? Well, I’d argue something Monzo did brilliantly was the category convention for debit cards in the UK was to be bland and unnoticeable. What they went and did is turn theirs bright hot coral, bright pink, I would say. Now the amazing thing about that is, paradoxically, by breaking that convention, they are providing the reassurance that we’re saying is a category necessity. So Barclays and Lloyds get reassurance by having a thousand branches built out of brick that are going nowhere. Monzo have created that category reassurance by looking like they’re much more popular than they are. Because if you go to a coffee shop, you’re standing in the queue, 10 people in front of you each gets a debit card out. You don’t notice the HSBC one, you don’t notice the box, you don’t notice the Lloyds because they’re bland pastels. Someone gets out that hot coral card, you definitely notice it because you’re noticing it loads. You assume this is a massively popular card. And you assume, well, if everyone else has got these things, they’re not going to disappear overnight. My money’s reasonably safe.

Louis: Yeah. So you’re sending signals, right? You’re sending signals of like, you can trust me the long term, just like putting ads.

Richard Shotton: But you’ve done that by breaking unnecessary conventions to have these debit cards as indistinguishable.

Louis: Another type of breaking convention in that specific convention in that specific category is the metallic cards. So I have revolut business, right? For my business, they sent me a heavy metallic card, credit card. And it’s heavy. It’s like you can really feel the difference and you place a lot of value into this. Like it definitely feels something for your little, you know, for my own little status and for my own little self love about feeling like I’m valued by them and I don’t get yet another plastic card. Those little things so important. And people tend to forget about those little conventions that you play with.

Richard Shotton: Absolutely. I mean the, the one that springs to mind as well is car ads. I mean they are interchangeable. It is a side on shot of a car going down a nondescript Central European mountainous landscape, bendy road. I don’t think that is a necessary convention to identify the product. If my car was triangular shaped, I think you’re right. People might think that’s gone too far or not even know it’s a car. But you don’t need to buy that very specific kind of stylistic approach to ads in the car category. I think you are right to sound a note of caution. If you’re in a supermarket and you don’t look like the product your category, there’s a danger of like inattentional blindness and there’s some lovely experiments that show that. But I think there are so many conventions for most categories, there’s still plenty to play with.

Louis: Oh, absolutely. Very selfishly, seven years ago when I started that podcast, I didn’t have that much knowledge. I just did it almost on a whim. But I knew there was one thing that pissed me off was the, the quality of the conversations that I was listening to on other marketing podcasts was suboptimal to be nice. This kind of, the logo, the red and black, the title, all of that were conventions I purposely chose to fuck with a bit, but I didn’t know it would go anywhere. Like to be honest, it was just conversations on Skype, on people admired. And yeah, I’m very proud of that because you mentioned example of supermarkets and whatever. But you can, if you’re listening to that, you can do that on your side projects. You can play with that in your own small company. It’s not just for big companies.

Richard Shotton: Absolutely. And arguably that Von Restor effect, the boost to noticeability, is more important for a small company than a big one, because a big one can maintain success through its sheer volume and wealth and advertising spend. Generally, small company doesn’t have that luxury, so you need to punch above your weight. So if anything, these opportunities are even more important for smaller launch brands.

Louis: Let’s move on because if we want to actually finish, close the gap, the curiosity gap, we have a few more to talk about. So the other thing, a few minutes ago, when I gave you this example of specificity about the scrotum, you laughed.

Richard Shotton: I did. I’m a child at heart.

Louis: My wife doesn’t find me funny. But you do. So that’s great, but humor is another thing that connects with all of this. It makes things more memorable. Now everyone would say, duh, it’s obvious, but is it?

The decline of humor in advertising despite proven effectiveness

Richard Shotton: I mean, if you look at the data of how many ads are using humour, what is, I don’t think disputable is the volume of ads that are using humor is declining. So there’s some wonderful work by Kantar. I think it might be Don Boyd who first published it. They looked over 200,000 ads and they showed 1990 maybe, I think 55, 60% of ads were aiming to amuse. 2015, it’s about 45%. So you’ve seen this long term decline in the proportion of ads that use humor. So when people say it’s obvious, it’s like, well, it’s not obvious to a significant proportion of marketers because we’re moving

Louis: away from it, but we are moving away from it. Not because people don’t know, because they can pick up your book. They can pick up like it’s not that difficult to know that humor makes it memorable, but because there are other biases at play that prevents them from using humor.

Richard Shotton: So there are an awful lot of studies around humor. So you’re more likely to notice an ad that’s funny, you’re more likely to remember it, you’re more likely to. There’s a lovely meta analysis by, I think it’s an Austrian psychologist called Isand who’s shown that on pretty much every metric you get a positive boost if you use humour. And there’s a number of experiments to back up each of those ones. So yet there is evidence. But I think a remarkable amount market decisions are evidence free. They’re based more on the mood music of the department or the trade press than on peer reviewed observed studies.

Louis: And the conventions.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, and the conventions. And I think people make what sounds like a logical argument. Well, times are crap. People would find it inappropriate if we were humorous. That’s one that comes up.

Louis: They would listen to one person in the room that says, oh, I don’t find that funny. And that’s it, right? That’s it.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. If you have a committee of people, it’s harder to defend humour, seemingly because people are often running very serious business. They might think it’s, yeah, there’s a clash with the humour. But you’re trying to use humour as a way of getting attention and then converting that attention into memory. So it’s like a Trojan horse. Did you use that phrase earlier on, like a Trojan horse for getting your message in advertisers? Are ignoring that point. But I think what’s really interesting, and BBH Labs first drew this to people’s attention, there was a wonderful analysis of the IMDb database by a man called Bo Macready. And what they showed was that if you look at the proportion of Hollywood films going back about 100 years, over time, when culture’s at its bleakest, you know, start the Great depression, World War II, you see a spike in the number of comedies that Hollywood make. Now, I think what Hollywood are realizing much more astutely, is if things are bleak, people don’t want fake empathy because really, what does your bank account or your trainer, manufacturer care about you? What they don’t want is fake empathy. They want light relief. That’s what Hollywood delivers. And I think advertising would do a hell of a lot better to follow that model.

Louis: Fuck yeah. The little thing you said about they are in a boring industry, a serious industry, and therefore they can’t use humor. Do you have an example of a company in a serious industry, or even a solo business in a serious industry that use humor successfully?

Compare the Market: Humor in serious industries

Richard Shotton: That’s a great question. The one that springs to mind would be compare the market.

Louis: Compare the market, yes, exactly.

Richard Shotton: People might say, oh, but no, but it’s different. The whole industry uses humor or quirkiness. But if you go back to when they introduced Alexander Meerkat, every brand had the same approach. They all were, use our platform and you will save 120 pounds. Now, people would say, well, car insurance is a dry category. All people care about is saving money. That would have felt a sensible description of the category. I think what Compare the Meerkat showed was actually it was just a game about being the most memorable brand. That’s what was going to win it. And they used humor to stand out and then to convert that attention to memory. So I would argue that’s a reasonably.

Louis: It’s a really good example. I love that example. For folks who are not aware of it, it’s a brilliant campaign. They started that campaign, but then they used different ways to use the same characters by compare the market. And it came up by. So it’s two people working in an ad agency that, that were a bit drunk in a pub, who came up with that because they realized that when you say Marquette with a Russian accent, it ended up sounding like Meerkat. I read that somewhere. I didn’t make it up.

Richard Shotton: VCCP was the agency. They also, I think, might have been inspired. And I don’t know this, but there’s. I think Geico Gecko in the US does something quite similar. I’ve never seen the Geico geckos, but I understand it’s a reasonably similar concept.

Louis: Yeah, yeah. I mean they didn’t come up with it from scratch. Obviously there’s always things that you’ve learned that you’ve come up with and whatever.

Richard Shotton: But yeah, it’s a brilliant campaign and amazingly executed. Having that idea, well, that wouldn’t be enough. That’s just 1%, isn’t it? I mean it’s the execution and the constant humor. Yeah.

Louis: The fact that they went for it is what I admire the most because it takes guts and courage. Because I can guess how many people would have said this is a terrible idea. You know, this is a serious industry. Why the fuck are you showing a meerkat with a Russian accent? It makes no sense. It doesn’t connect with anything related to what we sell. Why would you use it? I can picture that, the discussions in those boardrooms, but yet they did it and they showed. They broke a massive convention or a couple of conventions and then they became the leader. And I think there are still market share wise and then others like go compare with this fat opera singer singing, Go compare, go compare in crazy situations.

Richard Shotton: We discussed earlier climate change, we talked about the importance of concreteness. And I wonder again if that’s another reason why the compare the market’s so successful. They have what System 1 would call a fluent device. System 1 defined a fluent device as a kind of mascot that is central to the drama. It’s not just a logo at the end, it is a mascot that goes all the way through the story. Their evidence, and they’re a research company, is the, and I think they’ve analyzed the IPA data bank, is that campaigns, long term campaigns that have a fluent device tend to be much more successful. I wonder if the reason for that is concreteness. It’s hard to remember good value. That’s a very abstract concept. But I can remember a Russian meerkat and if you can imbue that Russian meerkat with these values of price saving, well, suddenly I think you’re onto something very powerful.

Characters as underused distinctive brand assets

Louis: In fact, in the book Building Deceptive Brand Assets by Ginny Romano from the Herndberg Bass Institute Institute of Marketing Science, she says that the most underused and powerful distinctive brand asset is a character. And this is one of the most underused by Longman, especially in those B2B serious, boring industries. I’m looking at my notes here on the book. I’m just going to try to find the Exact number, but they make also the point about the human face. So the fact that it’s a character that has somewhat of a human look to it, not fully.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, anthropomorphic. It’s not a realistic meerkat either.

Louis: There’s a. Yeah, so that helps as well. I think there’s a bunch of biases that just play together to make this one of the best distinctive assets to use.

Richard Shotton: So I hadn’t seen her data, but the Orlando Wood book, and he’s at System One, I think it might be Lemon has similar data. Not only do they look at the IP affectance, date of bang can show that long term campaigns that have a fluent device are more powerful than those who don’t, more likely to hit their market share or significant market share growth. The number that are being used has plummeted over time. You go back, start thinking of some of the great fluent devices. Tony the Tiger, the Green Giant, Many of them are very, very old. You know, the 118 runners, whatever, is probably 35 years old now. So again, how we’re behaving is at odds often with the evidence around effectiveness as an industry. Yeah.

Louis: Just like how we are behaving against massive, massive things happening in the world against the evidence that are all there to show. There was two books where she mentioned it. There was that book where it’s all about the assets. The other one was in How Brands Grow part two. I think she talks about it more. I think they were mentioning the dog in Dulux, the character. I mean a real thing. I have data about the Compare de Meerket. So they say it’s achieved its 12 month objectives in nine weeks. The campaign achieved all 12 months objectives in just nine weeks. Became the number one brand for spontaneous awareness and consideration. Quote volumes rose by 83%. Cost per visit fell by 73. Alexander became the first UK advertising property to have his own highly successful Twitter account. And apparently his 2010 autobiography generated more pre orders than Tony Blair’s memoirs.

Richard Shotton: Tony Bears memoirs weren’t very popular.

Louis: Yeah, I’m not going to find the data around the underused stuff, but they use two metrics, so I think it’s fame and uniqueness. So do they know it and do they perceive it as to be linked to that brand or does it feel like they don’t really know which brand it’s. Well, so those two things together, like the character asset, is something that just works really well. So moving on, I would say we cut our 2.5 of the biases because we talked briefly about the precision thing. But we back to that a bit. We talked about red sneakers effect. We talked about humor being more memorable. Let’s maybe talk about a bit because I know a lot of marketers are familiar with this, about this kind of framing, the gains over losses. Something I’m trying to use every day as well. Avoidance of loss is more powerful than our willingness. How do you say it? Avoidance of loss versus best way to

Loss aversion: Why avoiding losses beats potential gains

Richard Shotton: explain it is not the original study. Normally I like going back to the original studies because it seems fair. But the original studies back in the 70s were by Tversky Kahneman and they involved small gambles and they were a little bit abstract as studies. So I think the best study for showing loss aversion is an Elliot Aronson 1. So he was actually the person that came up with the idea about the pratfall effect. But this is a much later study came up with this. In 1988, he went around to 404 homes in America, knocked on the door and tries to get them to buy insulation, give some details about the insulation. Some occasions says if you take out the insulation, you will save 75 cents. Other occasions he says if you don’t take out the insulation, you will lose 75 cents a day, gain 75 cents a day or lose 75 cents a day. And I think there’s a 55% increase in people who want to find out more information in that loss framing. So the argument is that equivalent loss motivates us more than the equivalent gain. So if I find five pounds quite happy, if I lose a fiverr, I am significantly more unhappy. They’re not equal in terms of scale. And what Aronson shows is you can take that as a marker and apply it to your work. Stop saying to people how much money you’ll save by switching. Talk about how much the consumer will lose if they don’t come to you.

Louis: It feels very small and subtle, but it’s not. Definitely not. And again, I’m sorry to talk about evolutionary biology and psychology. I know it’s not your expertise, but maybe there is a cleaner link here. Why as humans, have we evolved to having avoidance of loss more powerful?

Richard Shotton: That one I can see more plausible explanation potentially, which is there is a cap to an upside. You know, if you kill 50 giraffe in a day, you can only eat so much, whereas not eating for five days is. You’re out of the game, you’re dead. So for most of our evolutionary history, when you’re in those life and death situations, the ultimate loss far Far outweighs any upside you could ever have. So that kind of lifestyle, that scenario made absolute sense to be very attuned to losses and try and avoid them. Now, in situations where we’re dealing with far more trivial circumstances, it might not follow to take that same principle to small commercial purposes. I think that evolutionary explanation.

Louis: Absolutely. I mean, in fact, if you take two toddlers and measure the emotional response when you take away a toy or give them a toy, you’ll see the difference. Mine is the keyword here. So, yes. I mean, avoidance of loss, definitely this kind of feeling of ownership as well. Right. Like, it is also a bit of that feeling that it’s yours, and therefore, because it’s yours, you put more value into it. Right?

Richard Shotton: Yeah. You made me think when you were talking around, you mentioned saying earlier around, there are kind of subtle ways of applying it. One of the best ways I’ve seen of applying it, and it’s very, very rare, actually, is on, I think it’s the Wall Street Journal. So they have a basic package and then a premium package. And obviously they’re trying to encourage people to pick the premium package. Maybe that’s digital and costs a hell of a lot more. What most people do in that situation is say, well, okay, if you get the basic package, you have these three things. You get access to the Internet, our email newsletter, and a free tote bag. And then on the premium package, they would say you have those three things and you have exclusive dinners and you get the print review. You know, you have six or seven positives. So what they would hope is, well, showing people six positives sounds better than three, and hope people can be won over. What the Wall Street Journal do is both the basic and the premium package have six lines, as it were. You have three green ticks next to the basic package. And then you have written out what you don’t get. There’s a cross through it and a big red cross next to it. Now, that feels like a very, very subtle twist. But I think what they’re doing there is really emphasizing what you’re missing out on by getting that basic package. Most people don’t do that. They try and sell the premium package by talking about what extra you get. That was a really nice way of showing what you emphasizing what you don’t get on the lower margin product.

Louis: Look at what’s not there, which is looking at the white space and all of that. So we talked about red sneakers effect, the humor being more memorable, framing how it’s so important to frame in terms of potential losses and stuff. Precision is the reason why we mentioned 4.5 instead of 5. I could have come up with a way better idea, but Filenue from the podcast Nudge already came up with something way better when he said, listen to exactly 17 minutes and 42 seconds of this episode, which was an interview with you that I found fascinating. So we talked about it a bit. But if we had to summarize that

Richard Shotton: one, so what Most brands do. Because we talked about the Schindler study, didn’t we? And the argument was we assume a precise claim. Like I say in my book, there’s 16 and a half chapters. We assume it’s more believable and more accurate. That’s an interesting finding because it runs counter to what most advertisers do. They will say they have a million customers or 90% of people say they’re amazing. But actually the argument from Schindler would be, say you’ve got 89% or 91% of people that are happy or 1,3 million customers. We often round numbers for our own ease as a brand. Schindler says you should add in that extra degree of precision to come across as more believable.

Louis: And lastly, we’ll finish that episode with the pick and rule. Why did I pick this one?

The peak-end rule for memorable experiences

Richard Shotton: You picked it because it is the argument from Daniel Kahneman and Donald Rademeyer that all moments are not equal. When it comes to memory, we are most likely to remember two particular elements of an experience, the peak moment. So in something positive, it should be the single most enjoyable moment that’s disproportionately important in shaping memory. And then the final thing, the very last part of an experience is also disproportionately important. Now, that’s interesting to advertisers because most people focus on making a brilliant first impression. What the peak end rule would say is, yes, that’s important, but actually you should put more attention, more effort, more budget into ending your product’s experience on a high. When people come back into market, that’s what they’re going to remember.

Louis: Fantastic. We’ll end this podcast by me summarizing briefly what we’ve learned today. Going to butcher everything. And hopefully we end up in a high where you live listening. So the red Snickers effect tells us that when we break some conventions inside a category, we tend to be more trusted or tend to be more. Higher status is probably the better word. Humor is more memorable, and that’s proven time and time again. Yet many folks don’t tend to use humor that much because they are afraid of, you know, those AWS is coming into play. Like, you know, making sure that they follow the norm and making sure that Sally from accounting is not mad at the potential message we could put there. Framing is also another one we said so due to our evolution and our drive to survive, it’s way more important to survive to have five days to avoid fucking starving after five days than to get extra food that you can store for later. So that’s all about avoidance of loss and focusing on that instead. There are subtle ways you can do that. It’s not just big ways. It’s like small details can count a lot. Precision, specificity, all of those concepts we talked about. This is why 4.5 biases I mentioned in the intro. So try to be more specific. Try to make people visualize things. Try to be precise in your pricing and other stuff so that people believe it more. And finally pay attention to the end of an experience like this one right now.

Richard Shotton: Fantastic.

Louis: I know I’m really freaking good at this. All right, Richard, you’ve been a pleasure. Thanks so much for your time.

Richard Shotton: Oh brilliant. Well, thank you very much. Good to chat again.

Louis: And that’s it for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Fuck Out Daily. I send very short, hopefully interesting, surprising, short, entertaining content to help you Stand the Fuck Out. It’s at everyone hatesmarketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just gonna read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed a couple days before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna said, I just realized this morning that my email habit is now to 1. Skim through the list. 2. Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly skim yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content that’s coming from you. It feels really lovely. Kendall said, I like your writing a lot. It really resonate. There’s so much out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button brilliant. I hope you subscribe. You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other.