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on the twenty third of june i released a podcast titled i told id debunked psychology greatest myth in this episode i took five of the priming studies cited in daniel kahn book thinking fast and slow and i tried to debunk them for example i recreated one two thousand and eight study on creativity that suggested that merely looking at the apple logo would make participants more creative the original study found that those looking at the apple logo even very briefly rather than the ibm logo well those people who looked at the apple logo they came up with more creative uses for a brick the idea being that merely seeing a creative companies logo go will make someone more creative i repeated this study with sixty british people you can obviously use bricks to create garden paths a brick could be used as a weight for exercising i use it for fire pit in the in the garden it did not work in fact those primed with the ibm logo in my study actually came up with more uses for a brick than those who saw the apple logo i also replicated the famous florida effect study this study found that participants primed with words relating to old age walked slower out of the room where the experiment finished simply reading florida forgetful bold grey or wrinkle those old age style words well reading those words literally changed how fast people walk to at least stated in this study i replicated this test in a slightly different way i asked sixty four brits to read out a set of words associated with aging and decay forgetful bold great s faded s and i asked a totally separate group of sixty four brits to read out words relating to you for energy playful loud bright kind swift vivid i measured the actual time it took to say those words see the actual total number of syllables for the whole list of words in both cases were the same so i expected those reading words relating to old age to slow down a bit but they did not they read the words at pretty much the exact same pace as those who read words relating to you for energy there was no priming effect here either over five mini experiments i claimed that i had debunked priming and i'm hardly the first person to do this shortly after thinking fast and slow was released back in twenty eleven researcher dorian failed to replicate a prominent study featured in the chapter on priming and then there was a larger study by three researchers for the site replica index which analyzed twelve studies in condiments chapter on priming and found that eleven were unreliable and then kahn himself quickly published an open email addressing the issues he wrote that while he was a general believer in priming he feared it was a train wreck waiting to happen and yet today's guest on nudge thinks i have missed something he thinks that in some cases priming can work so let's reopen the debate on priming is it a reliable behavioral science principle or is it over overblown all of that coming up hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this help them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com today's guest on nudge the leading consumer behavior expert phil graves i'm a consumer psychologist author through of the book consumer and founder of shift consultancy phil has spent his career studying consumers and understanding their behavior he's not only read most of the studies on priming he's repeated many of them himself and he thinks some are more reliable than others so let's start with one of the reliable ones a study or a couple of studies in fact wine for whatever reason we can only speculate a lot of research in in the field of psychology is done wine and fair enough so there was a study that was done that was again using fm mri imaging to look at people's reaction to wines of different prices and what it showed was that the reward centers of the brain lit up more when the wine was positioned as being more expensive course as with all these things same wine this two thousand and eight study found that the regions of the brain believed to be responsible for encoding pleasure relating to taste and o showed increased activity when the participants believed the prices were higher what's interesting about that is that you know it's easy to observe that we have a price quality heuristic you know we're faced with a range of product it's difficult to make a decision okay well you know do we go for the cheap one where it's probably cheap for a reason do we wanna go for the really expensive one well you know do is that more than we need to pay but it's probably the best because that's why it's expensive and we develop those heuristic over time because they broadly work yeah we develop these heuristic and what's interesting about them you know is that they kind of work in reverse that when when we've spent more this study on wine shows is we actually get more pleasure so you know are we del diluting ourselves are we not when it doesn't really matter you know we believe it to the point that actually what we experience is better as a result of just knowing that we've spent more and then in another study and they manipulated the perception of the wine they gave people in a restaurant by using labels that look fancier and more premium and i'm sure we can all imagine kind of what that might look like and then another one that looked like a cheaper bottle of wine same wine and not only did people think the wine in the fancier bottle was better they also rated the meal that they'd eaten as being superior here diners at a restaurant in illinois were given a free glass of wine to accompany their meal in each case the actual wine used was the same it was a cheap bottle however different bottles were used to signal different wine qualities when the wine was perceived purely from the label as being better quality people rated both the wine and the food as tasting better and they ate more of the meal as well in a second study also cited in phil book people were given a wine they believed from the packaging again that was from a superior region so an old world superior region versus a new world cheaper region and they rated the wine at eighty five percent higher for taste and the food at fifty percent higher for taste as well this reminds me of a twenty seventeen study by charles spence from oxford where a hundred and forty people rated a m wine as ten percent higher in quality when they open that wine in a cork top bottle rather than a screw top the association with cork tops and high quality literally increased enjoyment we're processing all of this but it's happening outside a conscious awareness and what we end up deciding and acting and the decisions we make are influenced by lots and lots of things that are peripheral but how we account for what we found ourselves doing is driven by our own need to post rationalize a narrative that makes us feel like conscious agents even though it largely points the fact that we're not phil says that these quick opinions we form on why aren't you to rational reasoning but instead due to quick heuristic these shortcuts that our brains use to make sense of the world and he has another great example of heuristic that i think everybody listening to this podcast has followed before a classic one is you know reading terms and conditions you know you come up onto a website you're trying to buy something whatever so we agree to our terms and conditions no right thinking human would actually read the terms and conditions because by now you've done that probably a thousand times in your life and nothing bad has ever happened to you so it makes no sense from a human brain point of view to invest the energy in reading what can sometimes be the length of a book of legal speak you know when nothing bad is likely to happen to you and that's not a conscious decision although we can post rationalize it because you click that button in a fraction of a second so that's showing us this is an unconscious response but all of these studies are they actually about priming part of me would argue that the price of the wine is more to do with the verbatim effect that the labeling is maybe down to the halo effect or that opening a cork is input bias is it really the same as having participants read words relating to old age and then watching them walk slower this is a a kind of controversial topic you get into and i would argue there are lots of things going on here so that are elements of anchoring or priming there are implicit associations that people have from past experiences and then mis which we've talked about a fair amount but coming back to the the priming anchoring point as i say this is i know controversial i know it's something you've talked about in your podcast before a lot of the studies that have identified priming or anchoring effects a kind of like par games you know they're sort of giving people little things to do and then you know they walk more slowly or they act more creatively and they're come coming back to the point i made about you know how so much is going on contextual there might be other contextual factors that are influencing them in that particular moment there might be researcher effects all the rest of it forget about all of that i would say i have demonstrated priming effects on numerous occasions particularly numerically so i think this might have been one of kahn and ver but you give people a multiplication of one times two up to eight and then other people eight times seven down to one mathematically it's the same but you get a guest answer when you say people like okay quickly guess the answer to this when it starts with a one you get a lower guess and you get an app appreciable higher one when it starts with the eight i've also done that how many countries in africa where you prime people with an initial number say some school children have thought there were ten countries in africa they didn't know how many their were you think it's more or less big your they it might be more and then other people you say the school from thought there were seventy do you think it's more or less i think would be less than that and what you see is people working from the number they've been given and it's again in some of the experiments even random numbers have been shown to influence that i don't disagree with phil at all i think all of those studies and examples are reliable i also believe the same is true with words in his book phil shares how participants can be asked to consider two people and quickly they need to decide who they think they would like more so for example john is intelligent ind impulsive critical stubborn and jealous mark is jealous stubborn critical impulsive ind and intelligent now it should make a difference since the descriptions contain the exact same words about both john and mark and yet most people unconsciously attach more weight to the words they hear first and thus they say they prefer john over mark richard shot has proven the same as true with product descriptions vodka described as award winning vinegar and weak is preferred to the same vodka described as weak vinegar and award winning but you know if you think about things like the wine example we were talking about where people are getting a perception from in this case how the wine looks when they're having their meal or what they've been told about the price of it well that's opening up this is the way i think about it particular neural paths it's starting their mental journey in a particular place and that makes it easier for the brain to go in that direction and that i have found routinely in marketing situations is a really important thing to consider so where are people starting their mental journey because it can subject to them not having a strong belief about whatever it is and subject to them being involved in one of these sort of more unconscious decisions lead to them feeling very different or acting very differently i don't disagree agree if anything phil has shared here but i did want him to share enough for example perhaps one outside of the lab and in the real world so there was a project i was involved in a few years ago where innocent the smoothie company we're trying to launch a fruit and veggies juice and when we were testing it that i mean and the first thing to say is you know the last thing i would ever do testing product is stick it in front of people and say what do you think about this because wrong part of their brain so we use different techniques purchase simulations to get them reacting in the way they would as shoppers and we had different packs that expressed this proposition in different ways and one of the things that they did was they listed the ingredients on the front of the pack quite prominently good obviously if you're buying a fruit juice you need to know what the fruit is likewise if you're buying a fruit and veggies you need to know what the fruit and veg but what became very apparent in our testing was that if you led with the veg ingredients which in many ways makes sense rationally because that's the point of difference people wouldn't buy them and if you lead with the fruit ingredients they will now you're still listing the same ingredients you're not listing the proportions of them although people are used to seeing the most prominent significant ingredient at first but but it was to do with a priming effect that you know if you see this juice and you see that it's a kale cucumber an apple juice and forgive me i can't remember the flavors now you're starting your mental journey at kale and that's quite a challenge a challenging taste for a drink you've quite challenging taste for a vegetable frank is good for it so we supposed to eat it whereas conversely if you're starting with the apple and then you're getting into the kale it kind of feels alright and that a huge difference you know that was the difference between i'm sure it's very good for you but the only people were ever gonna buy it were absolute health luna and where this product needed to sit which was well you know give people something that's a bit healthier a bit you know can satisfy that health desire they've got without them thinking oh god am i gonna buy this and then feel like i can't even drink it because of course with anything new there's a lot of loss aversion you know i'm gonna buy one thing and me i will have a a strong unconscious fear that i'm gonna get it sit down with my sandwich and just not be able to drink it and that at that point is a massive loss versus the potential upside of well you know i might have something that's new and i like or something that's got some healthier ingredients in it potentially what's going on here why is priming working for phil and not for me what let's break down the differences in the studies it debunked and the examples phil has given phil found that listing the vegetables first on a package for a health drink lowered the likelihood that people would buy compared to listing the fruit first in my studies i found that showing people the apple logo wouldn't make them any more creative than showing them the ibm logo you can make the case that both of these studies are exploring priming after all the stimulus the ibm logo or ingredient list is only briefly paid attention to by the participant however i think there is another big difference about these two studies and that is context you see it is contextual important to know what ingredients there are in a health drink your enjoyment of that drink will directly link to the ingredients inside so being primed by a nice sounding ingredient an apple rather than one which you probably wouldn't say is typically nice kale well that will change your perception not because priming always works but because the prime is contextual important in my studies the contextual relevance either wasn't there at all or it just wasn't strong enough there is no strong contextual link between looking at a company logo and then coming up with uses for a brick there is not a strong contextual link between reading words relating to old age and then walking down a hallway so here's what i think is important about priming and possibly about many other behavioral science biases as well it is the context flashing the color green when i'm looking at a website won't make me more likely to buy because green is the color of money that contextual link is far too weak but smelling fresh bread when i'm walking around the supermarket will make me buy a loaf of sourdough both you could argue are priming but one is far more contextual relevant the smell of bread it triggers hunger it suggests pretty reliably that the bread is fresh it'll attract my attention as well while the color green on a website is just largely irrelevant to a buying journey so that's what i would advise marketers to consider before applying priming is the prime contextual relevant the price of a wine will influence enjoyment because it is contextual important we have a price quality heuristic the bottle of wine will do so too but if i ask people to read words relating to taste before drinking wine i'm not sure that would make them enjoy the wine more it's just not contextual relevant later on in the show phil goes on to give more examples that highlight how context is important including a study that found how art in a restaurant increases enjoyment and how adverts are perceived differently based on the other ads nearby all of that coming up after this short break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tom boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brand explores how storyteller are building brand online from the mindset to the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators of brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me feel ag today we are revisiting priming and looking at how in some scenarios where the context is right priming may work so listing a tasty fruit instead of a healthy veg first on an ingredient list will prime someone to enjoy the fruit drink more seeing a expensive price on a bottle of wine will do the same that works because the price and the fruit a really relevant to the enjoyment of the product here's an another example it's a sort of fairly simple study that was conducted looking at people's evaluations of cutlery in this case as they do in a lot of behavioral or science experiments and i think it's really the gift that behavioral or science has given the world are these ab b tests where we change something without telling people and see what happens and it gives us the opportunity to focus on behavior and get away from asking people what they think because as we keep finding out what people think they think isn't necessarily really what they think and they don't think how they think so they're not great people to ask so in this case looked at some evaluations of as it happened cutlery and the thing they varied was whether or not there was some artwork work next to it so they put a piece of artwork next to it and when they did people thought that the cutlery was more luxurious same cutlery obviously but again this example of we're processing all the information around us with you know there is a framing effect from what we're seeing around the object that we're focused on and you get this mis sense of superiority which actually is coming about by the implicit associations that have been triggered by the artwork which we associate with kind of excellence and sophistication and culture and all those things so all those paths are kind of firing in the brain at the point that we're looking at these shapes bits of metal and the way we feel about them end up being influenced as a result i think the context works here because art implicitly suggests that the cutlery belongs in an art gallery thus improving the ratings there is a good contextual link there now people also like funny jokes they like to laugh but i don't think if you had a very talented comedian telling jokes while the participant rated cutlery that you would see improvement in the ratings of cutlery because comedy just isn't contextual relevant to how you would view a spoon for example here's another contextual relevant priming example shoes and smell the smell of shoes is important to us we've all got old pairs of shoes that just smell a little bit well researchers has found that the smell of a shoe can influence perception in the study researchers put one new pair of night running shoes in a room with a light floral smell and another identical pair in an un uncensored room afterwards eighty four percent of people said they were more likely to buy the pair from the room that smelled of flowers rather than the un uncensored room i imagine this works because there is a subconscious link between smell and shoes i don't think participants will be more likely to buy the night trainers if they're just tasted a particularly nice cookie for example because there is no contextual link between taste and trainers but there is a link between smell and trainers and that's why it works we evaluate products not just on the product alone but also what's around it whether that's to smell or another product phil had a great two thousand and eight study by and yu which proved this so the penn study was looking at product comparisons where what what information people had when they were making a comparison about a product or making a decision about the product and what they found was that where you had a sort of a small competitive set and there was a clearly inferior product then people found it much easier they've they valued the other product more highly so although in theory we would probably tell ourselves that if we were evaluating product we would do it on an objective basis so either this is good or it isn't in fact what they found out was that it's not objective it's driven by what's around in the context and so one of the things i was speculating on was well you know how do how might that apply in advertising say no you've got your product and you're advertising it well if you've just been on air after a product that's pretty mediocre and s you may very well shine more than if you've been up against someone else competitive phil writes that when simmons and immune compared how people evaluated the attractiveness of a series of products including lawn mower food processes and cars the researchers found that the strength for a preference of a product was influenced by the context of choices presented at the time so for example when a pen was selected from a set where it was significantly better than the other it says three pens do a really bad and one is significantly better people would pay more for it and think it actually wrote better than the exact same pen when it was from a more balanced set of options a really good pen next to two okay pence for example we are influenced by all sorts of contextual information even if we struggle to explain exactly what information influences us it's just highlighting this you know the the objective and the rational is so frequently not what matters that there are other contextual and framing effects that are going on that shape our decisions but we're are oblivious to them i get i guess the the kind of the the thing that marketers should know is that consumers are devious lying cheating voices so don't believe everything a customer says all of us struggle to explain how we make decisions i think the studies i ran on priming a few months back i think may hold up of the five studies i replicated they'd had all been diff proven not just by me but by multiple follow ups from actual scientists to a lot more clever than i am but i think there was a mistake i made because i always assumed that priming didn't work because of the the inputs the stimulus i assumed that a small subtle stimulus would never be enough to nudge a a a a person to buy so the color of a website for example wouldn't make me more likely to buy or a company logo wouldn't make me more creative because the stimulus is too small but i think i got that wrong i now believe that subtle inputs subtle stimulus can nudge just like how smelling fresh bread or seeing the price of a wine will influence my decision both of those things are very small very subtle i might not even be conscious that i'm taking them into my decision making process but they will still change my decision so now i don't think it's down to the size of the stimulus that nudge people but rather the contextual relevance it is contextual relevant to look at the price of a wine in the bottle it's in and the location where the wine is from and the year it was made because all of those small things are very subtle they are relevant contextual relevant to your enjoyment of that wine but irrelevant stimulus i don't think will prime you in a strong way and i think that's where priming went wrong too many studies try to prove that largely a relevant stimulants would still trigger a behavior and i just don't think that's true i don't think a green website will make you more likely to buy and i don't think florida or saying florida are out loud will make you walk a bit slower so i still questioned the validity of many many priming studies but i have altered my view it is not down to the size of the stimulus that you should look out for when reviewing a priming study but rather if the stimulus is contextual relevant that is all for today folks thank you so much for listening and a massive massive thank you to phil grace for joining me once again on na was on last week if you guys haven't listened to that episode please do go back and tune in it's a fantastic episode one of the most popular actually of the summer which was lovely to see and phil will actually be on one more time probably in a few weeks to do an episode on social proof and heard mentality his book consumer is an absolutely brilliant read i don't know how i missed it for the decade it's been out said this last week but it really is just an absolutely seven book one that i should have read an awful for a long time ago very relevant to all of the content i create on the show and if you like this show i think you all love that book so if you'd like a copy i have left a link as always in the show notes but also just search for phil graves or consumer wherever you get your books and i'm sure you will find it if you want more for nudge the two things you can do as always is sign up to the three nudge newsletter which comes out every friday just go to nudge podcast dot com click newsletter in the menu and you can sign up you'll also find all of my past essays there so if you just wanna read them before you commit to giving me your email address to see if it's worth it you can do so just go to nudge podcast dot com click news newsletter in the menu and youtube is probably the other way you can get more content from me i do often add videos to youtube which are slightly different from the shows they're edited down snap versions obviously have a lot of visuals on and a lot of those videos tend to do quite well so if you want more from nudge you wanna learn more about behavioral science just search for nudge podcast on youtube or click the link in the show notes one final thing i was on a podcast recently that i just greatly enjoyed it was the indie business club with mel and ben the three of us chatted mainly about behavioral science about how all these different biases affect us really got into a lot of good detail about how small businesses can apply those nudge and it was just a genuinely very lovely talk so if you've got forty minutes after this and you want to listen to something else go in search for the indie business club i think you really like it okay thanks that is all for this week thank you so much for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode of nacho cheers

death and taxes and the picture of george washington and the dollar bill those are among with few constant in a changing world but now another of those constant may be changing coca cola is about to announce what it calls the most significant development in its history this development was rather surprising back in the nineteen eighties coca cola had the dominant market share was leading the soda industry and sales and its overall sales were growing and yet despite all of this coca cola changed its flavor in a better taste there's never been a better coat in producing the greatest case of discovery in a hundred year but why why changed the taste of one of the world's best selling products so new coke was born out of what i guess you could call the coke wars of the seventies and eighties that is phil graves my guest on today's episode of i'm a consumer psychologist author through of the book consumer and founder of shift consultancy phil explained that the coke wars started after an infamous ad by its main competitor pepsi in the us coca cola had the dominant share i think they were about sixty five percent of the market and pepsi was very much a number two and what pepsi came up with with was the pepsi challenge where they went round giving people a sip taste test of blind test of two liquids to see which one they prefer coca cola says it's the real thing what pepsi cola believes that when it comes to cola the only real thing is taste that's why the pepsi challenge has been asking thousands of people across the country to let their own taste decide through their taste test results they came up with the suggestion that actually more people preferred pepsi over and the fact is nationwide more people the taste pepsi over coca i think of something like fifty seven percent preferred pepsi pepsi pepsi and the rational consequences of this weren't lost on the big weeks at ko who started to panic that's a challenge let taste design but this story isn't really about what soda tastes better it's a much more complex story about the effects of branding the problems with market research and ultimately our inability to truly understand what goes on inside our heads all of that coming up in today's episode of notch hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this help them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com back in the nineteen eighties pepsi were creating punchy ads that were gaining a lot of attention ads like this from nineteen eighty one you're about to take the pepsi challenge you know i have two bottles of callback here and you don't know which is which no i don't we have never met before that's correct okay now gonna pick this up and tell you me which way it showed pepsi you know in test like these nationwide more people prefer to taste the pepsi over coca cola pepsi these much better what's delicious because a down nice and smooth the taste is good that's great take a pepsi challenge let you a taste decide right guys right these ads convince coca cola to do something drastic something they had not done in their entire ninety nine year history the people coke decided oh no this is terrible we don't taste nice enough so we need to reform they then did a whole load of work reform coke and came up with a reform reformation or recipe that was preferred by seven percentage points to pepsi in their blind taste tests this product change was a very big deal this has gotta be the bold consumer product move of any kind of any stripe since eve started to hand out apples that was jesse myers the public assist at beverage digest coca cola is ready to launch a nationwide advertising blitz in the company already has sent its bottle of video pep rally in the war of the cola so let's let a rip let's land on the beaches and go all the way and that was coax american president with some inspiring words but did his churchill es motivational speech work and so they julie launched new coke and consumers went nuts but not in a good way there was this massive backlash against it campaign group who were sprung up to say we want old coke brought back you like to sign a station get that fuel quote karen wilson a die for the past week she's been standing on street corners in palo alto california asking people to taste new coke no i like the coke what'd you sign and collecting signatures trying to convince coca cola that the new coke is not it it just goes down your stomach like a a dead glass of water whereas the old coke just for bites including entertaining led by one guy who i think worked in p who then did was asked to do the blind test himself chose pepsi as being preferable but still would say i don't care i still want coke back and in seattle the old cola drinkers of america have set up a hotline hoping to get enough support to file a class action lawsuit against coke charging without old coke they're distressed and injured after ninety nine years it's a national institution and they hit there it's a fraud part of the fabric of the united states and and when they when when they when they don't make it and then prohibit me from getting it by keeping the secret formula then that's not american the backlash to coax new flavor was rather surprising because coca cola had spent a lot of time and money creating this better product they also spent thirty five million dollars on advertising it that's eighty eight million dollars today and they spent that in just over two months they created ads that directly called out the pepsi challenge recently an independent research firm ran a taste test between coke and pepsi and the taste more people chose was the taste of coca cola yes more people call across the country when comparing coke to pepsi chose the taste of coke as the better taste let's look at it this way we gave america choice and more people said coke is in but new coke really wasn't it in fact the thing people really wanted it was old coke at a wine boutique in beverly hills old coke has been c it goes thirty dollars a case right next to the bo and cha and in arlington virginia john hayden his hoarding old coke he's got twenty five cases so far and within three months after all of that development all of that research all of that asking consumers what they thought in blind tests and new coke was withdrawn from the market coca cola is bringing back the real thing its original formula too many cola drinkers had complained the new coke wasn't it so what went wrong well in phil book he writes how many assumed that the problem was with new hoax market research for example tasting a sip of a soda is nothing like drinking a full can that first hit of sweetness might be pleasant but if you're drinking a full can it can become cl just as the first chocolate in a box feels indulge while the tenth in quick succession can leave you feeling a bit que removing the drink from its packaging only compounded this issue with without the can you strip away the branding the influence of that branding and you leave nothing but this anonymous brown fizzy liquid this is all true but phil says there's a point that most analysts missed and that was that the problem wasn't just with coke research process it was that no research of this type could have ever delivered a reliable accurate answer even if the tests had been redesigned say giving participants full branded cans or asking them to drink a month's worth at home the results might have been different but there's no guarantee that they would have matched what would have happened in the real world because rather than asking people what they think phil says you should just observe how they behave behavior is truth so what were people doing well you already had a sixty five percent market share and okay you can say well is there a massive difference in distribution and cut this distribution change that but but people were exhibiting a behavioral preference in lots of stores around the us and it wasn't that well when pepsi was present sixty percent of people were choosing it over coke coke was winning everywhere that both brands were so you've got that going on so you gotta say well hang on a second what's this taste test actually telling us but more fundamentally than that if you spend probably five minutes watching people go and buy soda to use the american poll or fizzy drinks as we would call it you will see them spending almost no time on the decision it will happen in a fraction of a second and as soon as they see coke they'll pick it up and they're gone so in that situation that's a very good example that the unconscious mind is what's driving that it's habits it's a repeated behavior it's probably under underlined by a belief but that belief is a rationalization because i keep doing the same thing i will tell myself i must believe this is better and then you can trash that with what research is doing research is this sort of implicit relationship to make things conscious and so i'm about to ask you to one do an ab b test that you could do yourself easily for the car the price of two cans drink consumers never do or virtually never do that's not the way they make purchase decisions when you are making that decision you are using your brain in a completely different way you're asking yourself question yourself question or you're being asked questions and that not surprisingly me triggers completely different processes in the mind to the one when you're floating through live making accidental incidental decision with minimal thought about what is going to satisfy your thirst or give you a caffeine sugar but sugar buzz you know what you're doing is so to artificial it's like you're asking the wrong people well actually what you're doing is you're asking the wrong part of their brain and you're asking and you shouldn't be you know you should be observing please don't save the face of coal where you wanna fix it in april the real lesson from the new coke debacle isn't just that a major brand can make a mistake it's that coca cola relied on a rational model the consumer behavior that doesn't reflect how people actually think or act and that's a mistake that companies continue to repeat wasting money backing flawed ideas and killing off promising new ideas the story reveals a lot branding shapes perception a sip isn't the same as drinking a full can people resist losing what they love and we're all influenced by first impressions and social proof no market research could have fully captured these unconscious forces yet research remains a default in big companies not because it always works but because it feels like a safeguard but to truly explain why so much market research is flawed we need to look beyond a atlanta beyond new coke and beyond this eighties backlash and instead look inside our heads so after the break phil will explain the psychology behind mis redistribution and why all of us are so bad at describing what we really think don't change taste please don't change taste the code the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tomboy boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brands explores how storyteller are building brand online from the mindset to the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work one of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators as a brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello welcome back you're listening to nigel with me phil ag new coke was an ab object failure within seventy nine days coke could pull the new flavor and wasted eighty million dollars worth of advertising spend but why was their market research so wrong well phil says it's because they didn't really consider what actually happens when someone buys a coke so maybe to start off it's worth just being aware of what the brain is doing fundamentally and this comes down to the fact that we're able to process massive amounts of information through our senses you know visually what we hear what we're feeling all the rest of it something like ten million bits of information per second it's been suggested and estimated consciously we can process about forty bits per second so there's this massive discrepancy see but what the unconscious mind is doing is you know in order to protect us in order to aid our survival it's processing all of that and try to work out well is does this need to be passed into conscious attention or not but in the course of processing it it can still affect how we feel and what we think so we get this phenomenon of mis redistribution where because something is present in the broader environment but isn't isn't related to the focus of our attention we will mis it and think well i must be feeling that way because of what i'm looking at we might think we prefer coke because of its taste that might be what we say in market research questionnaires when we're looking at the can but there could be a whole host of unconscious reasons influencing us the branding a history the mere exposure the social proof and this affects all types of products not just coca cola and that can happen with you know putting sense into retail environments playing music when people are shopping all these things but because we're consciously so limited in our ability to process it what we do is we get the feeling we assume it's entirely down to the focus our attention and then and this is the really scary part for research if we're asked about it we will tell these absolutely convincing stories that rationalize and justify what we found ourselves doing but the everything we see in behavioral science where we do it these ab experiments shows that's not the reason that the purchase ultimately happened we know there was something else there that wasn't talked about phil has a great study to explain just this now it is a study i have recently shared on the show it's one that i took from phil book and honestly phil much better at explaining it than i so i thought i'd keep it in and let him explain this great study timothy wilson who is a psychologist in america set up a study where he had four pairs of types a to d got shoppers in a store to come in and just evaluate them touch them feel and say which ones they thought were best and as it happened d one got forty percent so statistically clearly the best performing pair of tights and when he asked people what it was they liked about them it was their sheer nurse the elasticity the niche you know very tangible qualities that these types had all well and good apart from the fact they were all the same so a lot of people would look at that and say well that's fine because we randomized the order when we do testing and we can negate that and they would all come out the same if we randomize the order it's like but that missing the point the point is people make up reasons and those reasons are not driven by what really drove their preference because the only thing that could have driven a preference was the order effect in which they experienced them or you know maybe something me to do with their own pressure in touching them or something but the fact the reality is what they then do is make up what's seemed like highly plausible justification for the preferences but but those justification cannot be true because they were the same thing so again you've got this this problem that exists where we are brilliant post rationalize with brilliant storyteller but we've got no connection too and this is why technically it's right to call it the unconscious mind we got no connection to the parts of our brain that can be hugely significant in determining how we're making decisions and what we're ultimately doing timothy wilson went on to run a second study on mis attribution in this study college students were asked to watch a film while someone outside the room intermittently operated a power saw part way through the experiment the worker outside was asked to overt stop making that noise thereby bringing it to the conscious attention of everyone present that there was a horrible noise taking place outside the students then rated their enjoyment of the film as did a totally different group who had watched the same film without any outside noise it would be reasonable to suppose that the group who had watched the film with the loud power saw going off outside would have enjoyed the film much less indeed that's what those taking part claimed would be the case when they were asked before you know if you're watching a film with a loud noise outside would you enjoy it less then in a normal film they all said yes however their actual ratings of the enjoyment of the film were no different from those who experienced the film without any outside noise people predicted that the noise would changed their enjoyment they said that is what would happen but their ratings were no different from those who didn't hear the power in other words people's predictions were totally wrong the founding principle of the work that i do in consumer insight is is not to believe anything that consumers say and to avoid asking them questions wherever possible phil this during some market research he conducted in an electronic store in this instance i was observing people in an electrical department to the store and there was an ipod it a few years ago an ipod speaker system that this was before days of bluetooth that was bla out music in the store and impossible not to have have your attention drawn to it lots of people then went up and started engaging with it it seemed very clear to me that these people have been attracted by the sound and not for any other reason but then when i was talking to them i was say to them you know is this something that you would plan to buy as people were picking one up and taking it to the till and they were all say oh yeah yeah absolutely this this was this was on my list of things to get it's men please and then i changed the subject we talked about some other the things and eventually i said well when was the first time you saw this ipod speaker systems because i knew it was pretty much brand new i haven't seen a lot of coverage of it in the magazines or advertisements or anything people said oh yeah seen it's the first time that day all of us do this we make up reasons why we bought something we imagine that it's due to some rational reasons when in reality it might just be because the loudspeaker speaker is playing a song we like or just because it was in our eye while we were queuing and similarly with lottery tickets behavioral i could see this difference in terms of whether or whether or not people bought a lottery scratch card seemed to me to be from what i was observing very dependent on whether or not they were in a queue at the counter or whether or not they went straight to the front of the desk and i realized that when they went straight to the front of the desk they were much less likely to buy a lottery scratch card because the per housing that promoted the cards was orientated to kind of past you if you were looking from the side all you saw was the spool of the tickets it wasn't kind of showing you the prizes and the silver and the gold and all the themes that would draw you in so although people said they were deciding because they were feeling lucky or they wanted to treat or you know this was an impulsive decision of theirs in reality it was driven by whether or not they had their attention drawn to lottery cards and it needed that trigger before that that impulse associated response could be elicit in his book phil quotes daniel van who writes much of what we do seems to surface from unconscious causes and such coordination provides a major challenge to our ideal of conscious agency when life creates all the inevitable situations in which we find ourselves acting without appropriate prior conscious thoughts we must protect the illusion of conscious will by trying to make sense of our actions people simply don't have the capacity to be accurate about what it is that's driven their decision making and in fact my favorite academics study on this is the most known the love on the bridge study where they used an attractive female researcher to interview male students and ostensibly this was about creativity in the environment and they were doing it out in this country park they set it up so that the female researcher gave all the people who were being interviewed her phone number because you know if you've got any more thoughts on this then let me know but what they really wanted to track was how many people asked out on a date and the answer to that was either sixty percent or thirty percent the difference being where people had had the interview conducted on a bridge that was somewhat unstable they were much more likely to ask her out on a date and so what they surmise from this was that people standing on that shaky platform were feeling a sense of you know they've got the adrenaline in their system they're feeling a little bit on edge but they're not assigning those gi feelings to what they're standing on they're as describing it to the attractive person in front of them and therefore thinking well i must be very attractive to you because i can feel it in my body so you know again a great example even with something as fundamental as human attraction where mis redistribution can play a massive part in what people ultimately do but mis misinformation isn't just a problem for coca ko market researchers or blokes looking for a date on a bridge it is a far more serious problem that could ultimately determine whether or not someone goes to prison so in the us where they looked at miscarriage of justice cases which have been overturned by dna evidence so you know you've got clear evidence that this person who's been convicted was not the the person responsible in seventy five percent of cases there was eye witness testimony that had been a key factor in the prosecution which you know self evidently could not have been right but you know we are so used to telling ourselves these stories and believing our feelings that whether it's the fact that you know sort of an element of suggestion from the police during the interview whether it's just as you know our own biases and our own prejudices a whole raft of different things that can be going on mis redistribution the setting that we find ourselves in you know people end up saying things which simply are not true one study set out to test this in a in a really fairly incredible way psychologists at iowa university faked a crime that took place in front of participants of students the students who weren't expecting to see any crime taking place suddenly saw a thief run up to a fellow student and steal their bag this happened right in front of the participants and the thief face was clearly visible when the researchers asked the participant to identify the perpetrator from five suspects none of whom were the actual thief eighty four percent of the participants were willing to point the finger at one of the innocent suspects our memories are fall and our ability to recall our behavior accurately is just as bad we come up with purely rational reasons for behaviors that are largely unconscious whether that's picking coco over pepsi rating a film or picking out a criminal from a line of suspects and yet our actual behavior is often driven by the unconscious mind especially when it comes to coke see coca cola made a massive mistake with new coke the mistake was to assume that customers only picked soda based on the flavor they were told by customers that flavor was the most important element of the drink and they were told that people preferred the taste of pepsi but taste isn't the most important thing the color the branding the icon and the look of the can is is arguably far more important than the taste and there's evidence to prove it in two thousand and three a group of researchers has repeated the pepsi challenge except this time they show the participant the actual coke and pepsi cans they were drinking from well yeah when they when they revealed the brand then they got a completely different response and they were looking at using fm mri to look at which areas of the brain were active when the branding was shown so they could see how the packaging was activating what i think they called cultural influences and emotions when subjects were showing the familiar design of a coke can before they tasted the coke a different area of the brain became involved and the results changed significantly more people preferred coke when they'd seen the brand more than both pepsi and an unlabeled sample even though in that unlabeled sample they were serving coke as well you're probably quite familiar with the new coke story it is one of the most shared case studies on a failed new product launch out there and yet i wanted to talk about it today because what new coke teaches us isn't that market research can sometimes backfire no it reveals that all of us apply rational reasoning to irrational decisions i think i like a certain soda because of firm solid rational reasons but that is not the case my likes and dislikes are largely driven by unconscious factors and if i'm ever asked to explain these unconscious reasons the reason why i prefer a coke over a pepsi i'll probably give a totally unreliable abs the real thing all teach the world to say please don't change the taste of that is all for today folks thank you so much for listening and a massive massive thank you to the brilliant fill graves for joining me on today's show his book consumer isn't an absolutely fantastic read i have no idea how i missed it all this years it's been out for over a decade but it's still a cracking reader still really holds up the examples are very relevant i learned a hell of a lot reading that book if you would like a copy and if you like the books i tend to suggest on this show then i really think you'll like consumer well if you would like a copy go and click the link in the show notes and you'll find a link to buy the book there or just search for consumer wherever you get your books i think you'll be happy to hear that i've invited phil back on the show we are creating another episode on how our unconscious mind dictates exactly what we buy few more tactics that marketers is listening to and apply there as well to make sure you don't miss that episode do go sign up for my nudge newsletter if you do you get a email reminder as soon as the new episodes goes live you get all of my bonus episode straight to your inbox and you get the best behavioral science tip i have found over the course of that week in my friday roundup up newsletter to subscribe just go to nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter in the menu it is totally free and do not worry i will not ask you for any rational reasons as to why you subscribe to that newsletter because i know i won't get any alright thanks that is all for this week thank you for listening i'll be back next monday with another episode of nudge cheers please don't change the taste of coke thought of it just makes me wanna a crow each time i taste a real thing i wanna teach the world see please don't change the taste of

today's guest on nudge can predict how likely someone is to buy a product after seeing an ad without even having to ask them a question we predicted a hundred percent perfectly the best ad in each category to make his predictions my guest doesn't have to speak to customers he doesn't have to ask them any questions no instead he measures their heart rate along with a few other biological measures with that information he can make these predictions and find out how he makes these incredible forecasts and predictions in today's episode of nudge hubspot makes impossible growth seem easy for some of their customers and there is a perfect example it is more house college this is a college in atlanta in america and like most organizations that have been around for you know decades they had a huge amount of content on their website nine hundred different pages and even the tiniest of updates took thirty minutes for them to publish and yet they needed to reach new students with fresh engaging content so they use breeze hubspot collection of ai tools this helped them write new content optimize their content in a fraction of time and essentially create results that really worked they got thirty percent more page views and their visitors now spend twenty seven percent more time on their site because they are creating content that people really care about so if you feel like growth is impossible it might be worth reaching out to hubspot go to hubspot dot com i'm paul zac i'm a professor at claire graduate university in california i read a lot of books for this podcast but paul zac book really stands out in my mind it stands out because it made a claim that i almost couldn't believe pool shares a study where he sprayed a hormone up participants noses and that spray increased the participants charitable donations by fifty six percent so how did paul discover this so starting the early two thousands i began to run experiments try understand why people are ever good are the bad behavior gets all the press actually very easy to study experimentally why are people nice to each other why do they help each other why do they cooperate why they trustworthy based on research and animals identified this neuro chemical oxytocin as a key signal neuro chemical signal that i should cooperate with another human oxytocin is a hormone that signals that the person is safe to be around pool calls oxytocin the you seem trustworthy signal and so we develop a protocol to measure which had never really been done before measure the brain's acute release of oxytocin and then how do we prove that that oxytocin is actually causing a behavior developed a way to safely shoot synthetic doesn't into the brain via the nose specifically paul and his team's spray oxytocin into the sinuses and after about forty five minutes enough oxytocin crosses the blood brain barrier to bathe the brain in oxytocin he's quick to add that the team has done this hundreds of times throughout any adverse effects on participants we looked at whether oxytocin administration would in fact increase donations charity participants watched a short video about heart disease and were then anonymously asked if they wanted to donate to the charity one group was sprayed with this synthetic oxytocin before watching the videos while they can control group had a placebo substance squirt up their noses we showed that if we give people sent out of oxytocin they've donated substantially more money they were more likely to donate that is more people donated when prompted average donations were fifty six percent higher than those who received the placebo and the oxytocin receiving participants donated to fifty percent more of the featured charities but why so why is that in subsequent research we show that oxytocin is part of a larger network which i've called immersion which is how the brain values social emotional experiences so if i can communicate to you in a way that's sufficiently valuable to your brain the brain goes oh holy crap apparently the humans care about kids with cancer i'm a human again this is all unconscious therefore i should help kids with cancer and oxytocin is essentially the fuel that feeds empathy paul writes how oxytocin increases and when empathy is rev up people nearly always treat others with care and kindness so spraying synthetic oxytocin does increase donations but you don't need a nasal spray and a lab codes to create oxytocin the brain will create it naturally if it sees the right type of message this is why marketing can work so let's get to the bottom line because we actually if you if you're marketing or your advertising convince me that this thing's important somehow again for me neurological then i'm gonna act on that one way marketing does this is through emotion paul and his colleague jorge hey wanted to test if an emotionally charged message would increase oxytocin in the brain and thus increase charitable donations they showed one group of participants an emotionally hard hitting video of a father talking to the camera while his two year old son ben who whose terminal cancer plays in the background my son has a great tumor we know that ben's tumor is very aggressive and we know there's very little known about it this video is highly emotional who writes how he showed it at a law conference and a number of hardened lawyers cried after watching it pool and jorge thought this video emotional might provoke an oxytocin response for comparison they found another video showing the same and son but this time at the zoo this video does not mention cancer or death but one would probably notice that the boy is bold and the voice over calls him a miracle boy however this video lacks the narrative structure and emotional of the first video there is no crisis there is no emotional turmoil but it has the same characters and it's the same length as the original emotional video one hundred and forty five adults were asked to watch one of these two videos all adults were given the chance to donate money to the hospital at saint jude and paul and jorge processed five hundred eighty tubes of their blood to measure the levels of oxytocin after watching the videos the data showed that one third of participants overall donated money to saint jude and that nearly all of those people who donated had watched the emotional video the emotional video caused the brain to create oxytocin and the high levels of oxytocin typically meant the participant donated the behavior follows from the evaluation by the brain that this is sufficiently important this feeling of importance doesn't just come from oxytocin however it is created by a range of neuro signals to combine to cause what pool calls immersion right so again i'm using immersion with a capitalize a term of art for a combination of neuro electrical signals that we've traced to changes in neuro chemicals that is part of a network through which the brain values social emotional experiences so just to be clear this is a network that took us twenty years to to really discover and clarify you know how it works so two main components to have a neurological immersion which is again a continuous variable can be more or less neurological immersed and experience first is i have to be present or attentive right if i'm looking over here and i'm not looking at you and paying attention to what you're saying it's not gonna be a a valuable experience for me because i'm i'm involved in doing something else and the second is that experience has to generate what to call emotional resonance right it's emotions are how the brain tags experiences with value right it's gotta be important enough to me so the the present part is driven by the frontal binding of a chemical dopamine and the the emotional resonance is associated with the binding of oxytocin so dopamine oxytocin interact with each other in fairly complex ways that induce electrical activity that we can measure every second with technology we've developed so by mapping over the course of marketing or customer experience or whatever you're you're doing that immersion which is generally kind of a sign wave when i see that big peak in immersion the brain again unconsciously this is from the brain old parts of the brain out of conscious awareness so like oh holy crap i really love this thing this is this is sufficiently valuable to you and it didn't take long for big businesses to want to test paul's claims they wanted to use a immersion to try and forecast and predict advertisers wanted to see if their ads generated immersion and for the twenty fourteen super bowl that's exactly what paul decided to test this study came about because the stuff i do gets in the media and once we were doing work the laboratory companies started coming to my lab saying hey we wanna create better advertising more effective marketing can you help us at the time we had these very expensive machines and you know lots of phd students in my lab i said sure you know let's we'll we'll do some work for you and and we would analyze mark materials so they were developing or had released and then show them the neurologic conversion once we start doing more of this commercially i started getting this feeling like gosh you know should you really pay me for this like maybe i've been lucky in the lab and lab is a very controlled setting right so it was coming up to the super bowl which is generally in early february and i'm like oh this is great let's just test our technology against super bowl ads because for thirty forty years they are ranked by how much people like them paul set out to predict which of the twenty fourteen super bowl ads viewers would like the most but he didn't find the results that he expected we ran this and we find the worst result you can ever get which is a zero relationship between these you know hundreds of thousands people that rank super bowl ads for how much they like them and neurologic immersion paul measured a immersion while thirty five people watched the twenty fourteen ads in a random order and then he compared the results to those of the usa today ratings he found zero correlation between neurological immersion and how much the usa today raiders said they liked the ads so then you go home and you go well i suck i gotta get a different job because clearly i don't know what i'm doing and then literally i woke up like three in the morning like having a panic attack and going wait hold on maybe the machines weren't calibrated maybe the thirty five people we measured were insane i mean who knows all kind of things so so let's go back and get all the super bowl commercials from the year before get fresh people calibrate them machines rerun the study we found the same thing as zero correlation between these rankings of super bowl commercials and what we found neurological was had the highest immersion paul found no link between the consciously reported enjoyment and the brain's immersion but paul realized he may have made a mistake he was asking participants what they thought not measuring how they acted in general humans are very bad at explaining how they feel perhaps the immersive ads we're encouraging people to act in unconscious ways so paul set out to measure participants behavior instead let's get some some objective measure of the impact of these ads we what we have is youtube views and youtube comments and we found was that that liking measure self report measure had a negative relationship between youtube views and youtube youtube comments and yet neurologic immersion had a positive correlation so in other words in in human language the more people said they like to add the less buzz it created but the higher their neurologic immersion the more buzz it created so buzz again is our proxy here for sales paul found a link between immersion and youtube views not just for the twenty fourteen super bowl but for every super bowl they measured the values for the twenty eighteen super bowl are typical the correlation between a immersion and youtube views is zero point two seven and the correlation between immersion and youtube comments is zero point two five this means that the commercials with higher immersion receive more views and more comments immersion causes people to take action compare this to how well the usa today ratings predicted actions here you will find a negative relationship between youtube views and comments the correlations for the twenty eighteen super bowl a minus zero point three three for views and minus zero point three eight for comments so what causes this mismatch why do participants say they like ads that don't generate any buzz i also next time you're watching tv or youtube look how many babies and puppies you see in commercials have nothing to do with babies and puppies commercials for toilet paper or i don't know travel to gibraltar why because if you put a baby or puppy in your commercial and you test market it yeah so do you like the well sure puppies who's like a commercial puppies so i think we are living in this what i call the freudian hangover from this whack job freud we think that somehow if i just poke you the right way i can make the unconscious conscious the brain does not work that way just doesn't work like asking your liver how much it enjoyed your lunch feel today and you're like that's just a dumb question well because our brain creates language doesn't mean we have any insight into its inner workings and so by having technology to measure what is most valued and again what is valued is what is acted on then we break that dilemma between what i think and what's really happening in my brain participants in a focus group will say that ad with puppies are always preferred but unconsciously that tends not to be the case the most immersive ad from the twenty eighteen super bowl didn't have any puppies the most immersive commercial neurological immersive commercial from the twenty eighteen super bowl was a diet coke ad for twisted mango diet coke twisted mango because so this is a very weird add of this super tall woman dressed weirdly who's kind of dancing in this weird way it's talking about this new flavor diet coke and diet coke had had had flat sales for about three years they ran this ad their sales went up q one when this ad came out now they had introduced these new flavored diet coke but also had a big ad campaign so again i can't tell you for sure it's the ad that drove the sales but at least they run in the right direction it's a weird commercial so what we've learned from measuring now thousands of thousands commercials measuring immersion is that the brain likes this novelty so it's not a likable commercial i use a lot when i speak to marketers this is not a likable commercial out of the sixty five ads from that year's super bowl diet coke mango twist was the most immersive ad paul tested and yet usa today readers ranked it dead last for l my reply to that is i don't care i don't care if you like it i care that it moves the markets and as listeners know it's emotions that move market so i've gotta capture you emotionally but this case it's like this is a freaking train wreck this woman is weird the music's weird it's got a yellow wall behind it's film based symmetrical the whole thing is like a weird train wreck but it's very valuable neurological but if i ask someone do you like this i i'm not even sure again liking to me is the dumbest question i don't care about liking i care that it shakes up your brain so much go holy crap diet a coke now makes twisted mango flavor i'm gonna try that right that's what i really want from a behavioral perspective right how the woman and the filming are so odd that is kinda hard not to look away from this at the ad is so novel it forces us to pay attention this of course has behavioral science backing novelty might not increase liking but it does boost awareness rogers and newborn in their nineteen seventy six study found that commercials about driver safety are much more effective when they show vivid images of bloody victims rather than of test dummies for instance vivid images of car crashes if far more novel to see in a tv ad you're not likely to see them in an advertisement and they will not make the ad more likable people when they see ads of these vivid images won't say they prefer that ad but it will make the ad more effective perhaps this weird yet quite novel diet coke ad benefited from the same principle when we look at some of the most quote liked commercials this in twenty eighteen a lot of these are beautifully produced they have movie stars in them they have lush scenery they often run too long we find is shorter better amazon in twenty eighteen had a ninety second commercial called alexa lucid her voice in austin it's sixty degrees with its two alexa amazon's alexa lost her voice this morning like the oscar boys how is that even possible in which you had these stars filling in for alexa whatever very funny commercial alexa show me a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich pathetic you're thirty two years of age and you don't know how to make a grilled cheese sandwich its name is the recipe but you it ran ninety seconds that year it was five point three million dollars for thirty second spots they paid seventeen million dollars to fill miss plus triple that for you know these famous stars anthony hopkins it know famous people afraid brandon is already dried up but do let me know if there's anything i can help you with jessica was too long if they had run that for thirty seconds it would have been a great commercial so again for listeners practically i hit me hard hit me fast have a call to action alexa loses voice was kind of like brand awareness but we all aware of alexa why you why are you doing brand awareness give me something to do diet coke twisted mango was like a holy crap this is this is a brand new thing you might wanna try this but let's face it youtube views and buzz isn't really what companies want the reason coke and amazon spend millions on super bowl ads is for sales so does immersion predict sales well paul thinks so in fact he claims immersion is able to accurately predict the sales and ad will generate before it has been released and he has evidence to prove it we predicted a hundred percent perfectly the best add in each category find out how paul made these predictions after this short break the podcast i'd like to recommend today is creators are brands that is hosted by tomboy boyd and is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals creators our brands explores how storyteller are building brands online from the mindset to the tactics to the business side they break down what's working so you can apply that to your own work one of the recent episodes i listen to tackled how some creators are being paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to promote brand which i think is a kind of incredible thing that happens in this day and age so if you want to listen to that episode or any of the brilliant creators as a brand episode go and listen to creators our brands wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me feel ag so far paul has explained that a immersion can increase youtube views but can it lead to something a little bit more tangible can immersion immersion for example predict whether or not a customer will give you their email address well paul ran a study to figure that out this is a study in which was sponsored by a large american life insurance company the sort of question there was for people who let their life insurance lapse which often happens when you are between jobs what might influence them to get life insurance again what kind of ad and the behavioral measure was we just wanna get your email so what we found is that neurologic increased radically the number of people who gave their life insurance so very strong positive correlation between neurologic immersion and sharing your life how your emails so life insurance agent could call you paul's team collected neurological data from a hundred and seventy eight people who viewed un branded rough cuts of video and print advertising for life insurance their analysis shows that those who shared their email addresses were almost always more immersed in the commercials so you have to tell a good story and i think what was interesting in that study was that quote good story was quite quite different for different demographics one of the untapped markets for this company was young males and so they don't buy a lot of life insurance and so the only test ad that influence young males to give their email was one of a guy who's talking on road you see his motorcycle underneath the car and he's talking about his girlfriend and their baby and whatever and then you kinda realize that oh he's talk he's killed he's talking beyond the grave and so it's like really in your face like you're a stupid young male you're gonna kill yourself and if anyone depends on you you probably should have life insurance young males didn't report liking this ad but paul's neurological study show that they were immersed in it everything paul's shared so far has convince me that asking people if they like an ad is probably a waste of time if you ask what they like it sure they're all nice they're like and what are you gonna say what what kind of human being were like oh you're having testing some new ads you got oh yeah sure they're awesome they're sure what what are you gonna say and what's your incentive to go that's a piece of crap why would you actually show me that no it just humans just basically don't do that or most humans don't do that so he have to get around that biased self report because we're asking people this impossible question and one way around this biased self reporting is to measure a immersion which is exactly what paul did when he correctly predicted future sales for eighteen different ads when we first started doing this the global edit just see bb a contact to me that's seen the media and they said hey we really wanna pre test some some ads and i said great awesome here's the software and they said oh we are very skeptical of what you're doing and so what we like to do is test these ads have you walks through how to do it measure them on whatever sixty people and our clients these are as have been released now our clients have ranked each of those ads for the sales bump that they induced we want you to predict blind which ads produced the largest sales bump so they send us eighteen ads three from guinness three from visa three from bud light again different companies these are you know six different companies so each company uses a different ranking system on on assigning sales which is already kind a noisy data because depends on weather and prices and advertising by their people and anyway so we there's an ad up there saying from a the head of strategy at p saying that we predicted a hundred percent perfectly the best ad in each category so we did that for five of the six ads they sent us one red herring which was for bud light bud light sales were also driven by concerts stay sponsored and swag giveaways at bars and pubs and and so that was actually in their sales bump data and so we when we picked up the highest immersion ad for bud light it was not the highest sales that because the was the data we're were messy anyway even in five six is eight three percent accuracy which is pretty darn good paul's team correctly forecast which of those ads drug the most sales by measuring a immersion and they measured a immersion not through mri scanners or big complex tools they did it for an app on a smartwatch so we show that we can actually capture these emerging signals from the cra nerves this like the brain's output file some of these cra nerves pass to the heart so what we showed using drug studies so i can use drugs to to manipulate the system that if i get a time series on heart rate i can transform that into this dopamine oxytocin effect that i've called immersion and i can get that from low cost fitness wearables or smartwatch watches apple watch samsung galaxy watch again because the brain and body are talking to each other once we trace out these pathways then we can do this conversion to find these very subtle changes in the rhythms of the heart because paul can measure a immersion for a smartwatch he's been able to run studies out of the lab and in the real world so we had a very high end luxury retailer french company that i won't mention because i might be nda but a brand that people would know they were very interested in solving that eighty twenty problem why are eighty percent of their sales attributed to twenty percent of their sales staff what are the sales staff doing the problem with luxury retail is even if i give you a nice wearable i can't interrupt that sales process say high shopping customer we wanna have you put on a apple watch while you shop but because emotional states are contagious that's how humans learn to coordinate with each other we said hey put the wearable on your salespeople now every store every retail store has cameras everywhere big because of theft issues so you walk into retail store you've consented to be video taped so let's just film every customer in action and measure the neurologic immersion of the salesperson which should be a reflection of the immersion of the customer and what they found was they could predict which customers would buy based on the immersion of the salesperson with eighty percent accuracy and there was a linear positive linear relationship between the salesperson immersion and them amount of money that the person spent the customer spent bull writes in his book that the amount customers spent increased in line with the sale associates immersion the model showed that for an average customer a fifty percent increase in immersion would result in an an additional forty three dollars of purchases now that won't necessarily explain how these salespeople generate this immersion but it did help the store identify their best sales reps immersion does seem to link with sales buzz and engagement i imagine it's exceedingly hard to consistently create campaigns that generate that this is why marketing is so difficult but if there's one important thing to take away from all of paul's work it's that what customers say and how they act are two very very different things i think the punchline for me here what i've learned is that people lie and they lie not because they're malicious but because we ask them this impossible question is this persuasive safety do you like it would would you watch this again it's so easy to say yes and any normal human who wants to be nice so like man you're awesome do i like a or b better i don't it seems great i mean they're both really nice what are you gonna say you gonna say this is all every of the six ads you show me they're all pieces of crap i hate them all what the hell are you wasting my time for most socially adept to humans are gonna be like oh sure they're much i don't know they're great alright so again i think we're asking too much of the conscious part of the brain to inform the underlying under conscious emotional states that really drive sales i'll finish with a study which i quite like is from consumer and it proves this nicely professor timothy wilson from the university of virginia conducted a study with richard knees bet in which they set up a consumer evaluation of four pairs of tights or panty holes for those of you listening in the states respondents were asked to say which they thought was the best quality and to explain why they had chosen the pair they did they were shown these panty holes or tight in order see one first and a second then a third than a fourth and the results showed what the psychologists expected a statistically significant position effect that meant only twelve percent of people picked the first pair they saw only seventeen percent picked the second thirty percent for the third and forty percent for the fourth in other words participants always rated the third and fourth pair of tights as significantly better than the first two now this had nothing to do with quality because the four pair of were identical in this test people preferred the preferred and fourth options due to the serial position effect the choices we review later on tend to be perceived as better quality as we can compare them to something else however when asked nobody said they preferred those versions they saw later on because of their position instead they all invented reasons as we all would people talked about the sheer of the pair type the elasticity the knit no one noticed that the tights were identical and all participants invented reasons why they preferred one pair over another so next time you attempted to ask a customer why they brought to your product maybe hold back asking a customer what they think won't actually help you understand what's going on in their brain that is all for today's episode of nudge folks i do hope you enjoyed it and if you did i think you'll love paul's book in immersion here's paul sharing a little bit more about his book so the reason i wrote the book phil is that i'm a member of a very strange religion called cl customer lifetime value so it's a lot cheaper to wow that customer have him or herb loyal and be a raving fan and market for me then to pay to acquire a new customer so every customer every time i want to wow them and by measuring objectively the brain responses to customer service experiences then we can create that wow experience i've left the link to the book in the show notes also in the show notes you'll find a link to sign up to my friday newsletter about nine thousand four hundred of you read that newsletter every week and each week i share basically the best behavioral science tip i found in all of my reading from that week it's really quick and easy to read you can actually go back and read all of the previous versions just click the link in the show notes to find those it's totally free to sign up so if you want to sign up click the link in the show notes or go to nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter to sign up for free also in the show notes you'll find a link to the nudge youtube channel the latest video i have done with oliver be it is on the three to four hour rule which some of you may have heard about a previous episode but this youtube video is slightly different we go into a little bit more detail about it and it's starting to garner quite a few more views it's clearly being picked up by the algorithm and it's a really great summary of the rule so if you haven't heard all of her talk about why so many famous scholars like darwin and dickens and virginia wolfe worked for just four hours a day and go to nudge podcast on youtube to check out that video you can just search for nudge podcast on youtube and you will find it that is all for me this week folks thank you so much for listening thank you to paul zach for coming on and i'll will be back next monday for another episode of nacho cheers

in two thousand jennifer ryan and neil cohen at the university of illinois published a fairly smart study that proved a classic bit of business advice ryan and cohen used an eye tracker to study people's eye movements while they repeatedly looked at a series of photographs as the photos became increasingly familiar the volunteers didn't move their eyes around to explore as much in other words they were less interested but when ryan and cohen altered a picture for instance a photo of a child with a kitten in the background might be repeated but the actual kitten would be photo photoshopped out in this altered version or when they saw that altered image the volunteers eyes linger on the spaces in the picture that had changed and they kept returning to the same spot over several seconds those altered images captured attention for far longer than the familiar images the researchers found that our eyes fix sight on things that change items that seem different from what we expect grab our attention this idea is used as a tactic by businesses products and as we'll here today even indie movies to capture attention and beat the competition today on nudge we are looking at distinctive and how one low budget underdog british film used the psychology of distinctive to outperform hollywood blockbuster the world famous blogging site tumblr had a problem to succeed in marketing they needed to move quickly they needed to create content that was trending but their marketing team was stuck waiting for engineers to build out every email campaign that was until they switched to hubspot customer platform to send trending content to millions instantly rather than waiting for the engineers they could use hubspot to send all their email comm as efficiently and as effectively as possible and the result while they have tripled their engagement while doubling the output they produce if you want to move faster like tumblr than head to hubspot dot com my guest on today's episode of nudge deeply understands how important being distinct is i'm paul miller i'm the managing director of mallory and smith we are an ad agency that specialize in one thing and one thing only and that is getting underdog noticed paul has helped underdog brands and movies get noticed i am an exec producer on their film the feature film boiling point boiling point is a gripping single shot drama that follows a head chef through a chaotic night in a high pressure london restaurant so the film follows a chef who's played by stephen graham you follow essentially like one night service you like the the opening sort of the opening scene is him walking to work at like sort of six seven o'clock six o'clock in the evening really stressed well i'm kelly i'm really sorry i missed it and i've just had someone more chi on you know what i mean i'm brought i'm i'm devastated and i'm really really really sorry you tell him tell him my phone and we before go to break okay alright sorry said fine and then he comes into like it's actually like what could be described as like the worst night service in a restaurant okay which thing and no hang on ka no sally wait a minute look he's charlie this is fucking basic tc fucking coop first week so it's my responsibility not a first week in any fucking kitchen no is it you know like everything goes wrong on top out here's around sir what's that it's the land that we've not that that if you what i can take a back i'll take a get your dirty fingerprint off me plate this massive compound effect fucking can know it back and because of this type of actor that he is he brings all of himself this is your fucking for man because you don't turn up what time you don't do the orders you don't do a prep you don't give a fuck about us you fucking come thinking of booze you're fucking ass but the intensity that they're one shot take but it sort of brings you into and be and almost like behind the curtain of what it's like to work in a professional kitchen boiling point has been incredibly successful it has a ninety nine percent rotten tomato score and earned over one point one four million dollars worldwide it was a huge success it was in cinemas in i think twenty five countries around the world there was over three hundred cinemas ran it in the uk alone it was nominated for four ba and those but and the people were fighting against was james bond you know it was daniel craig last james bond it was will smith it was you know the the who's who of kind of hollywood royalty and we up against those guys and then of course the the the crew and the team and a lot of the producers have then since gone on to make adolescence biggest netflix series i wanna say of all time i mean a market would probably put some massive claim like that on it but like a must a huge hit boiling point was nominated for four ba and eleven bi including a win for best supporting actress but but hardly anyone when this movie was being produced expected it to be such a big hit after all ninety seven percent of indie movies like boiling point lose money howard is an underdog film with a budget of five hundred thousand pounds which is absolutely fuck all when it comes to hollywood movies really in this grand scheme of things you know james bond is spending millions of millions of millions tens hundreds of millions of pounds we've got five hundred grand how do we get that film noticed and how can it compete against the goliath well paul reckon there's a few reasons why it employed a number of sort of or pull the number of levers to try and generate sort of sort of self generate its own momentum so obviously stephen graham being the lead but then the the emotion the intensity the the grit and the raw was unfiltered something very rare in cinema now and then it used a one shot take so it is a true one shot the one shot take is an important element here firstly it's distinct from how almost every other tv show and feature film records most use fast cuts yet boiling point didn't cut at all as a production we recorded five that was it and we chose the third one and that's the one that ran no editing sort of to split scenes together sort splice scenes together it was a one true shot a one shot take is distinct and the distinctive captures attention in one very famous psychological experiment cited in page sixty eight of how not to plan people were asked to select a loaf of bread the lobes were all identical except one had a random alphabet ladder stamped on it so normal loaf of bread and then you see one with the letter h on it for example it made no sense for participants to choose one loaf over the other except they all pretty much picked the one with the random alphabet letter stamped they were drawn to the visually distinct product and boiling points one shot take makes it distinct from almost all of its competitors tactically a one shot take that i mean it's not as if it's never been done before it's been done a handful of times and there are some fake one shot takes you know like what is it nineteen twelve and and others like the the war film where it's like actually six twenty minute bits their slice together but like in terms like true one shot takes that's a tactic you know if you're a marketer that's a akin to a a campaign or a tactic that you can pull or increasing your seo spend whatever it is like you know it is a is a tactic but ultimately it comes back down to the thing that i talk about all day every day underdog have to do the thing that the biggest brand in their category can't won't or dare do most hollywood films won't even attempt to one shot take because it extremely hard to do but that's ultimately that's the reason why it's gonna work because nobody else does it in your category of all of the underdog you think about the biggest brands in your category first second and third in market sort of market share first second and third they've got an easy mate just maintain the status quo maybe sw between those three places but literally anyone between fourth and tenth place they've got to do the thing the the big three can't vote nor when we encounter a message that is genuinely distinct we will pay attention former nudge guests ava and tim write about this in their book the house fly effect ten years ago the dutch tax service sent out blue envelopes so kind of distinct there but also containing a very distinctive handwritten a note on the front of the envelope which read could you manage this in the next ten days question mark after receiving this incredibly unique working letter i've never received a letter of a handwritten written note on the front of the envelope the taxpayers players on average submitted their tax returns five days earlier than the control group that distinctive saved the tax service a great deal of work in follow up phone calls and for boiling point it became the trait that elevated the movie above most other feature films well once because what's remarkable is that it's filmed as one shot and and at this time i look so carefully i thought i'm gonna see a camera reflect and i'm gonna see someone mess up a line i couldn't see anything i mean in the stress of filming it must be incredible that's the presenter jeremy by talking about the movie he interviewed the boiling point director philip bar about how hard it is to film in just one shot to be honest with the third take wasn't perfect and i thought let's do the last let's do the last one it's gonna be perfect after the fair take i then went around everybody gave all my notes to everyone and you know i was like run around the place like the luna trying to give notes to actors and not only actors to you know map the cinematographer both to the sound team i was like rather got this one now this is it and then we did the forte take and technically it was flawless it was perfect however the performance were will were bit flat just because everyone was exhausted and it just didn't have the energy that the that raw organic energy that the fed they have so when we come to watch it as like we have to go with the performance we always have uploaded reforms because if the audience are are watching the one take and watching you know the technical side of it then we've completely lost them with it's i was that that's a gimmick that we've made a gimmick gimmicky film the reason why most hollywood directors avoid one shot is that you have to accept that the movie will contain dozens of small imperfections and sometimes fairly large imperfections the one big thing was to the the clock in the kitchen on the wall was the long time and if they say everyone's gonna see the clock and everyone's gonna go it's four o'clock in the afternoon it's dark outside the restaurant is so busy four o'clock in afternoon it's not available and so we have to change the clock and and that cost us a lot of money money to change it in the effect it's stressful it's costly emotionally draining to record in one shot so very few movies do it but by doing something so distinct from the competition boiling point became incredibly popular i wanna share one more study that just amplifies how impactful distinctive nurses researchers at northwestern university gave online participant information about a pair of sofa two different sofa in his book geraldine refers to the two sofa as dream and tighten the two sofa manufactured by different furniture companies were comparable in pretty much all respects except for their cushions so similar price similar design just different cushions the dreams cushions were softer but the titans cushions were more durable in this one on one comparison the potential customers tended to prefer titan sturdier cushions to dream softer cushions fifty eight percent picked titan only forty two percent picked dream but that changed when the researchers sent out the same information to another sample of online participants but included extra information about the features of three other sofa models so don't compare tubes sofa models you're gonna compare five now on geraldine writes that the new sofa that were introduced these were not strong competitors at all they were weak on a variety of dimensions however they all had durable cushions like the titan so suddenly titan unique point it's durable cushions became far more commonplace within that set of comparisons the dream sofa vaulted over all the other models this time being picked seventy seven percent at the time compared to all the other sofa it's really astonishing finding you would assume that adding competitors to the mix of options would reduce the number of people who pick dream if for no other reasons than simple probabilities and now five choices rather than two but instead dream became distinct from its rivals it was the only safer that had soft cushions and because it was distinct it was preferred to all of those sturdy cushion competitors it is a niche study but i really like it because i think it has much broader implications if you were noticeably distinct from your peers from the people your customers are comparing you to you will be preferred buyers didn't care about dream soft cushions until that softness became distinct in many ways boiling point is following this same playbook the storyline certain cinematography score actors they were quite familiar but the one shot take separated it from all of its movie peers and as we know being distinct from your peers increases both attention and also like ability but that is just one hollywood movie pool has used these techniques to help dozens of underdog brands challenge market leaders after this quick break we'll hear how content is profit hosted by louise and fo is part of the hubspot podcast network the home of business shows that don't ramble on and give you insights as quickly as possible content profit is one of those real pratt call listen you'll get tips on selling things that actually work you'll hear frameworks tactics and you'll learn from guests who have done it all before i would suggest if you wanna get started listen to the how to get your first five hundred email subscribers it's a great example of how wonderful this show is a good mix of insights and ideas so go and listen to content is profit wherever you get your podcasts hello you are listening to nudge with me phil ag today's guest on nudge paul miller helps underdog brands succeed but what is an underdog brand so they are between fourth intense place in their market share category first second and third are the biggest brands they are not underdog they are maintaining the status quo and anyone below tenth is too small it doesn't have the critical mass doesn't have the budget to actually kinda make a difference one of our clients is brooks running shoes they're a billion dollar business they're still an underdog they're still fighting nike and adidas and essex as the biggest brands in their category paul shared how he helped boiling point and under underdog movie succeed but i wondered what brands he's worked with so we've worked with mango bikes so they're these what's seventh largest bike brand in the uk we created their positioning bikes for non cyclists where we work with fat light at the back and another cycling brands so they make cycling in jersey for fat people they don't make them for racing snakes like raf we we work with sort of a whole host of tech companies so we work with we've work with k we work with go we've work with fintech brands like remit one of the things paul advises all the brands he works with to do is to really consider distinctive this he tells each of them to never copy what the largest brands in the category do because if you do that you will struggle to stand out well the biggest brands the one two three brands in a category they don't i talk you oh yeah we wanna grow they might have a share price they need to maintain but like that is it they are maintaining the status quo they have they have climbed their everest they have so little to fight for their whole res is to maintain their position copying these large brands is is kinda useless it's often too expensive to even do and the underdog brands would never be able to compete boiling point could have never stood out if it copied the cinematography style of the standard hollywood blockbuster instead under underdog branch should try to steal customers and attention off the leading brands by being distinct and stealing these customers is probably a little bit easier than you might think because most customers are incredibly dis humans are illogical fe or four people let's get this cut straight to the chest like there this idea that everyone's lovely no like if you put a sign up that says don't walk on a grass we're gonna walk on a grass because we're a bunch of ourselves and the idea you know you work you're walk to you know tuesday at nine am into the you know you know meeting room thirty two hours and you're like right here we go we're gonna start talking about like loyalty of our customers and you forget how how you actually behave in your own life you know the idea that it's sunday at three o'clock in the uk and is suddenly we're we're cooking a sunday lunch you know we are we're are a tesco customer and we're i gotta drive because i've gotta put the roast on at four o'clock to have it by you know done by six i gotta drive twenty minutes to tesco or a could drive ten minutes to sai probably go sai like the idea that we are loyal is ludicrous coca cola for example i think the the most recent study i saw was to the average person i think globally buys coke the four times a year so the idea that you you as an underdog are gonna get someone to buy you know your bar soap or whatever it is that you sell more than four times a year you're smoking somewhat really strong if you think that's be the case paul tells the brands he works with to pretty much ignore loyalty because most customers are dis loyal instead these brands need to constantly think about attracting new customers and the easiest way to do that is to be distinct it's gonna doing the thing that the biggest brand can't won't or dent now that can boil down into the two things that marketers love debating but actually a very bad implementing which is differentiation and distinction it'd be like if all the brands in the world actually focused on either their differentiation or their distinction or both then the world will be full of brands that were shit up i think it was a study with ka and w i think that showed brands tend to sort of heard around these category norms and a brand that is able to be meaningfully distinct outside of those category norms increases their chances of been noticed by twenty one percent twenty one percent i've like i've got clients there are there are marketers all over the world that would sell their grandma for a twenty one percent increase in in attention brands that are meaningfully distinct inside of their category norms increase their chances of being noticed by twenty one percent i know these things sound really throw away and they sound so easy they're like quite lofty a lot of his common sense a lot of it like gets overly intellectual and get sort of overly bogged down in the sort of the theory and really like it's like go and do the thing that nobody else is doing just do that and put some money into it see what happens i really enjoyed this conversation with paul and it reminded me of one of my favorite dave chart stories this one is from his brilliant book creative blindness and as all of his stories it's a real world story he writes how warwick sheer wildlife sanctuary was at first a very peaceful place but that was until the mayor's wife met barney the parrot the parents colorful feathers she leaned in and barney sq you can fuck off everyone hoped this was a one off but the next day when the local vic visited barney looked at his stock collar and said you can fuck off an all this bad mouth parrot was reported to the authorities two policeman arrived to investigate and barney gave them a once over and said fuck off wan deemed a threat to public decency barney was moved away from the children and the elderly this worked until a group of brownie ease which for those of you outside the uk is group of kids part of a youth club while this group of brownie they passed by and they were ent by barney colors they came close barney saw their uniforms and yelled bo repeating it over and over again until the brownie ran off barney was moved to solitary confinement and visitors now had to be eighteen or over to visit him barney had been donated by a lorry driver who kept him in a room with the tv the driver hated authority and whenever a uniform appeared on screen he shouted what he thought of them which is how barney learned to talk jeff gru who runs the sanctuary tried to reform barney by introducing two well behaved african gray parrot sam and charlie but instead of civil civilized barney he corrupted them now jeff says that the pen sounds like a builder yard with all three shouting fuck and bo barney has done everything wrong naughty loud inappropriate and yet he is the only bird in the sanctuary and probably one of the only birds in the uk to make national headlines the guardian the telegraph the times the bbc have all featured this bird visitor numbers at the sanctuary soared because everybody wants to see the bird who breaks the rules not the one who behaves like every other bird in the sanctuary because in a world full of well behaved pirates it will be the distinct parrot who swear that gets remembered that is all for today's episode of nudge massive massive thank you to paul miller for joining me on today's show pool has written a fantastic guide for underdog brands it contains thirteen point five tactics you could use to grow i've linked to it in the show notes it's well worth for read today we covered distinctive and dis customers but he has many many more tips in his guide for you to follow so do go and check out that guide now today we've have covered lots of studies and lots of insights we've covered research by northwestern examples from cha din that story at the end from dave t and if you like me you probably want to wait to refer back to these studies and insights the next time you're doing marketing work the next time you're actually working and thinking oh i really want apply this stuff it'd be great to go and just quickly remind myself what phil said well to help i'm building a database of every single insight i have ever shared on nudge that is all the studies research papers and examples i've shared on the show currently the database has a four hundred and forty four different insights i've categorized them by the behavioral principle they refer to so social proof scarcity in this case lots about distinctive and i've listed different ways they can be applied to emails to direct mail advertising that sort of thing my idea is to create a database of simple low cost ideas that can lift your conversions boost your engagement and just drive more sales to improve your business i'm calling this the nudge vault for long time listeners of the show you'll i've worked on this for a while and it'll give you proven ready to use ideas to improve your work now i plan to launch this later this year it's not ready yet but if you're interested in learning more getting an early sneak peek and even getting exclusive offers when i launch then you might wanna sign up to the nudge volts waiting list it's free to do so you just go to nudge podcast dot com forward slash volts to sign up that is nudge podcast dot com forward slash volts to sign up and that way i can get in touch with you to tell you more about it and give you an offer when we finally launch please do do that if you're interested but if not february worry i won't be mentioning again at least for a couple of weeks alright that is all for this week thank you for listening i'll be back next monday for another episode of nacho cheers

so for instance we've done some work promoting sustainable diets and found that simply changing the names of the dishes can have a large effects so calling a vegetarian breakfast field grown rather than meat free roughly double the number of people who said they would choose it from the menu a field grown breakfast is picked twice as often as the same breakfast labeled as meat free but why well that's what today's guest our nudge is here to explain my name is toby park i'm the director of climate energy and sustainability at the behavioral insights team k the original nudge unit created in the prime minister's office in the uk but now we operate as a global social purpose consultancy toby spent over a decade at the behavioral insights team working on sustainability and today on nudge he'll share the dozens of ways psychology has been used to nudge citizens to be more sustainable including one project that made americans four times more likely to cycle all of that coming up the world famous blogging site tumblr had a problem to succeed in marketing they needed to move quickly they needed to create content that was trending but their marketing team was stuck waiting for engineers to build out every email campaign that was until they switched to hubspot customer platform to send trending content to millions instantly rather than waiting for the engineers they could use hubspot to send all their email comm as efficiently and as effectively as possible in the result while they have tripled their engagement while doubling the output they produce if you want to move faster like tumblr than head to hubspot dot com toby parker spent his career helping organizations and public bodies create programs tactics and strategies that encourage people to pick the sustainable option but why why do we need to be more sustainable i've sometimes thought that the changes i may aren't important isn't it down to big corporations and government bodies to tackle climate change well no sixty two percent of the emissions cuts we need to hit net zero depend directly on changes in the public's behavior that's data from the uk's climate change committee the lion's share of that about fifty three percent comes from technology adoption behaviors so we need households to adopt pumps and move away from fossil fuel boilers for instance we need people to get out of petrol and diesel cars and start adopting electric cars smarter home energy systems smart meters and so on solar smart batteries that kind of thing to reach net zero the public needs to be persuaded to make technological changes moving away from unsustainable energy sources to sustainable ones but that's not all the other nine percent is what we would think of as most sort of lifestyle changes or habit change so that includes for instance eating a bit less meat and dairy engaging more a sort of circular economy practices reusing recycling and so on a little bit less flying a little bit less driving in general in favor of active and public travel but what about the remaining thirty eight percent the changes that are out of the public's control and actually the other thirty eight percent of d colonization so called supply side stuff it's still not free from this challenge of behavior and psychology because of course it still depends you know whether you talking about increasing capacity from off wind and onshore wind solar farms nuclear and so on changes to industry it still depends on public acceptance and support advocacy getting the politics right developing enough what big public investment and so on so really the whole picture is is absolutely behaved it's very much en mesh in the entire challenge toby sees net zero is not purely an engineering or economic challenge he sees it as a behavioral challenge to reach net zero we need to change the behavior of billions of people and to do that effectively and cheaply he uses human psychology here's why we have a whole series of sort of cognitive quirks biases we're very much habit creatures very much sort of influenced and constrained by our social environment we find that small aspects of the choice environment such as small points of friction or hassle can often be disproportionately impactful we're habit bitches we're influenced by those around us we are susceptible to multiple biases so i asked toby for a concrete example of how he's changed the public's behavior using behavioral science so we did some work in the city of portland and the us who were aiming to promote a new cycle share scheme and working with our partners there they developed an incentive leaflet basically that that were using for marketing material the leaflet sent out was short it said bike town that was the name of the cycle share scheme haven't met bike town yet take a spin on us and at the bottom of the leaflet that there was a discount code which was available for all residents to use we ran a fairly simple study where we tested the impact of that leaflet campaign on people who already lived in the area and compared to them in people who just moved to the area and what we found was that the new movers were roughly four times as likely to trial the scheme in response the campaign as the existing residents so you know at four hundred percent effect size more or less that's obviously a huge additional bank for buck the intervention is the same or we're changing is just the time at which we're delivering it residents were four times more likely to trial the bike scheme if they received the message right after they'd moved to portland this is because behavior is far easy to change before habits form richard sc and laura west proved this in a twenty eighteen study cited in the choice factory shot and western surveyed two thousand three hundred and seventy customers and they asked firstly had they recently experienced a life event a life event change and then secondly whether they had changed brands in ten popular but specified categories the results were conclusive in every single category consumers were more likely to switch brands when they had recently undergone a life event on average just eight percent of consumers switched brands in those categories when they hadn't undergone a life event that rose to twenty one percent of consumers for those who had undergone a major life event and this sort of timely moments concept it's a concept that you can apply to all manner of interventions really there will be moments in people's lives when habits are disrupted where they'll be more receptive to change in their behavior another live moment that can alter habits is a birthday specifically a nine ending birthday researchers adam malta and hal hi found that when someone's age ends in nine they're more likely to re rephrase their lives adam and hal analyzed the data from forty two thousand respondents to the world value survey and found that nine end were more likely to question the meaningful of their lives shot and writes how this life event can be used to change behavior data from the sports website a links dot com showed that nine were forty eight percent more likely to enter marathons for the first time than any other age group struggling running events that are looking for more participants should target nine en they'll be far more likely to sign up that's that's a nice example of tiny moments it's obviously not just when people move home and people move jobs that's a really important one different behaviors might have different timely moments so let's imagine you want to encourage people to shift towards more sustainable diets perhaps when somebody has a baby and they are under new constraints in the kitchen and they're looking for new recipes perhaps when somebody goes to university and they're cooking and grocery shopping for themselves for the first time ever perhaps and that's a nice moment and still good habits etcetera so yeah think about those moments when habits are disrupted it can be really powerful way of getting more bang for buck with your interventions or your communications one nineteen ninety four study cited in katie milk book how to change found that thirty six percent of successful life changes like career shifts or starting new diets or they occurred after moving home compared to just thirteen percent of successful changes for people who hadn't moved home it really does seem like targeting life changes can be an incredibly effective way to create a new habit but why do portland residents need persuading the vast majority of us know about the problems with climate change we know we need to act more sustainably do we really need nudge to persuade us well toby thinks we do because there's a difference between understanding sustainability and behaving sustainably people are actually mostly up for it so in the uk we see the over eight in ten do care deeply about the climate they want to live more sustainable lives and support strong leadership on climate actually un data shows that's a fairly universal case around the world the lowest levels of support we see are in the us and russia but it's still about sixty five sixty six percent who want their governments to take strong rational on climate and across europe it's like in the eighties across many african and pacific island nations it's well into the nineties but of course there's a big difference between caring about climate and being willing specifically to adopt a range of behaviors visiting incur significant personal cost hassle inconvenience perhaps some confusion and so on and sometimes even when people have the motivation to change their behavior they don't pick the correct behavior to change turning off lights is is an action that's quite salient it's sort of notes a you know if you kids leave the lights on around the house and so on it's something we're aware of but with modern led technology it's you know i'm not saying it's it's not useful as a as a green choice in the home but it's it's certainly not the biggest impact thing we can do whereas other actions like for instance optimizing the flow temperature of your boiler will say far more energy but it's a bit more tech a bit more niche people don't really know what that's about this isn't hearsay say toby ran a twenty twenty one study which shows that we often over underestimate how climate friendly some of our lifestyle changes are and we actually found a negative correlation between perceived impact and real impact of those actions which is to say that people's knowledge was worse than random guessing there are still some pretty persistent mis misconceptions out there and as you say the example with lighting is a good one we also find that for instance when it comes to sustainable diets people's attention is mainly focused on plastic packaging and food miles again important but not as important as the main issue which people tend to recognize which is for fundamentally what are you're choosing to eat is it beef is it lentils is it chicken is it you know potatoes which will have you know radically different carbon footprints often one or two orders of magnitude difference between sort of subs ingredients and yet to change behaviors around diet for example you don't need to make lengthy logical pleas about carbon emissions sustainable sources and methane fame no sometimes you just need to tweak the language you use language as you say you can do a lot language can evo different values that may resonate more or less for example there's a famous case study of anti litter campaigns in texas based on the slogan don't mess with texas which has been credited is very successful in large part because it didn't rely on the sort of lefty green environmental messages but on this image of state pride tough civic respect and so on the language can also infer a lot about the choice you're trying to encourage so for instance we've done some work promoting sustainable diets and found that simply changing the names of the dishes can have large effects so calling a vegetarian breakfast field grown rather than meat free roughly doubled the number of people who said they would choose it from the menu this twenty eighteen study was conducted with seven hundred and twenty seven brits who already ate meat ref framing the meat free breakfast to field grown breakfast made diners two hundred percent more likely to pick the plant based option similarly ren meat free sausage and mash as field grown sausage and mash made it twice as popular as well the paper went on to find that a veggie burger will be more popular if it's called a loaded burger and nokia is one percent more popular if it's renamed as melt in the mouth nokia i think what's particularly interesting about that you know i'm not the size of the effect but the term meat free is kind of very loss in its framing right and we we know people are loss of earth who we're sensitive to things we will lose out on or or miss more than where our positively affected by things we gain and to say something is me free you're just highlighting is missing not highlighting anything that's positive about the meal so that's that's not a good term and the same is true for healthy foods a twenty eighteen study which renamed carrots with sugar free citrus dressing to twisted citrus glazed carrots found that the sales for the carrot increased dramatically when they made that claim removing the sugar free claim and instead saying twisted citrus g that made it more popular the words we pick will drastically alter behavior even making some people purchase more expensive but more sustainable appliances for their kitchens this example comes from our work on energy efficiency so what we did we run an online experiment several thousand people where we simply ask them to make a choice between a couple of appliances the sort of option a and an option b at two different price points fridge freezes light bulbs space heaters and induction hubs the only difference was that we tweak the label design some people saw the conventional a to g and efficiency label this is the color coded label you'll be very familiar with this if you're in the uk you'll see it on all appliances where products are ranked from a which is in bright green right down to e which is in bright red for their energy rating some people saw that same label but with a addition of a lifetime running costs in pounds so rather than just making the judgment based on the kilowatt hour figure which is what's on the normal label you're making that judgment based on a figure of running costs in pounds the previous labels had the total price and the kilowatts per hour the new label replaced kilowatts per hour with the total lifetime running cost which of course made the more expensive yet more sustainable appliance appear to be cheaper overall and we found that by introducing that additional pound information across all of the appliance types that we tested this on the people who saw that label was significantly more likely to choose the more efficient good when presented with that choice and i should say that more efficient good came in a price penalty like it it's more expensive upfront to choose the efficient one but of course it saves money over time and having that additional information on the label convey the fact that it saved money over time that created a sort of motivating factor to that for fridge freezes we found about forty eight percent of people selected the more efficient product with the standard label and that jumped up to fifty eight percent with light bulbs it went from sixty three to seventy seven percent space heaters from fifty six to sixty three percent and induction holds from fifty nine to sixty five percent and that was all statistically significant cooling a meat free sausage field grown doubles its popularity calling veggie no melt the mouth increases sales adding the lifetime cost to a fridge makes buyers more likely to pick the sustainable option and contacting americans after a house move made them four times as likely to take up cycling sustainable behaviors don't have to be the result of long logical rational arguments instead smart labeling and targeting can be far more effective and nothing tends to be more effective at changing behavior than the principal toby shares after this quick break content is profit hosted by louise and fo is part of the hubspot podcast network the home of business shows that don't ramble on and give you insights as quickly as possible contact profit is one of those real practical listen you'll get tips on selling things that actually work you'll hear frameworks tactics and you'll learn from guests who have done it all before i would suggest if you wanna get started listen to the how to get your first five hundred email subscribers as a great example of how wonderful this show is a good mix of insights and ideas so go and listen to content as profit wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me phil acne timely moments and re framing appear to be two very effective ways to encourage sustainable behaviors but toby recommends says a third principle that's even more reliable it's social norms we've done quite a lot with social norms i think the use of social norms and social norm messaging is probably one of the most well evidence sort of nudge communications techniques we have in the door toolbox and i guess it taps into the fact that you know we are deeply social creatures we like to belong we like to fit in we like to like to be approved of and so on just in case anyone's not aware in terms of what social norms are social norms are simply the informal rules expectations or accepted behaviors of a society or group and they influence this in a number of different ways so one of those ways is what we call social proof so if the majority of people are making a particular choice for example choosing to buy an electric car rather than an petrol diesel car we will infer valuable information from that observation so we're more likely to okay i guess electrical electric cars must be getting good or maybe they're less expensive than i remember them or maybe i should be doing a bit more for the environment as well because everyone else is so you know it's a bit like when you're buying something on amazon if you've got two kind of subs or seemingly identical options let's say they're both rated four point five stars but one of them has eleven reviews and the others got and thousand reviews you're gonna go for the latter right there's a a degree of safety and reassurance and information value within the fact that lots of other people have made this choice there is a lot of evidence for this in fact one twenty twenty one study found that simply listing the amount of sales next to a product on an e commerce website so for example going on the site and seeing a little line which says something like five people have already bought this brand of trainer while adding a line like that made people in this study fifty eight percent more likely to buy but of course that all depends on us realizing and noticing that lots of other people are making in this case the green choice so the electric car example is noticing interesting one because actually the the green number plates that we now have in the uk electric cars so that was one of our suggestions and proposals to department transport several years ago and obviously the idea there is that it just makes the existence of these electric cars a bit more noticeable on salient to other drivers to sort of increase the social norm effect there it was also designed originally by the way to be a bit of an incentive because the idea was that local authorities and so on could use it as a very easy way to manage things like free parking for electric cars and so on but we haven't seen quite as much of that perhaps as we might hoped there's no study i could find which proved the green number plates definitely worked however it follows a rather famous marketing case study which is apple's white ipod headphones apple famously made their ipod headphones white which was the total opposite from the industry norm most other freeze in fact probably all other n mp freeze that were popular at the time had black headphones by visually looking distinct apple made their ipod appear far more popular than it actually was people would see dozens of others wearing black headphones and not really notice it because it wasn't distinct however as soon as they saw someone wearing white headphones which were visibly distinct from the norm it would stick in their mind and it would make the ipod seem far more widespread and popular than it probably ever was so anyway social norms have been used in a variety of contexts we know that solar panels for instance are literally contagious and that if you live on a street where more houses around you have solar panels and they're visible you're more likely to get them yourselves lots of organizations including bid have have used social norms in letters and bills and things if on your energy bill you show people how much energy they're using relative to their neighbors and they show that they're using more than their neighbors and people shift towards that norm that's been tested many times and seems to fairly reliably achieve sort of two and a half to three and a half percent reductions in energy consumption which is not to be sniffed at given that the intervention is essentially cost less and we can also deliver them in lots of different ways so you can simply say something like nine out of ten people are paying their tax on time and as we found if you send that to late taxpayers then you can bring forward hundreds of millions of pounds into the treasury but even if that's not the case so you can't say that you can leverage a sort of bandwagon wagon effect or what we call dynamic norms so you can say things like more and more people are doing x or y a two thousand and seventeen study by spark men and water showcases this very nicely three hundred and twenty two customers were waiting in line at a cafe in stanford campus and they took part in this study all were shown one of two messages one message said recent research has shown that thirty percent of americans make an effort to limit their meat consumption the other message shown to the other half of the diners said recent research has shown that over the last five years thirty percent of americans have started to make an effort to limit their meat consumption the second message suggested the bandwagon effect it suggested that more people than before had begun to eat meat free now only twenty percent of those who saw that first message went on to actually order a meat free lunch while thirty four percent so a fourteen point difference or thirty four percent of those who saw the dynamic social norm message while they went on to eat amy free lunch even if the option you want to promote isn't popular isn't the most popular choice you can still persuade people with dynamic social norms but you can also show it you know giving out badges that say i voted for example or introducing as our colleagues in nest are doing show networks for heat pops so that people can go look at one and it's more sort of apparent people in your neighborhood are getting them and in a sense that can be a sort of a double nudge you know if you can really show the behavior in the real world because the person who has done it benefits by getting the kudos whereas those who haven't done it get the observation of others doing it and therefore start to perceive that it's more normal so yeah social norms really powerful and very versatile i know i harp on about it on this podcast but it's all too easy to assume that we can change behavior through logic and reason we assume that persuasion is simply the case of making a better argument if toby examples have taught us anything it's that the illogical ideas work just as well rename your meat free bang as field grown tell households they use more energy than their neighbors send cycling coupon codes to new movers and make electric car number plates green none of these implementations mention the peril of climate change the carbon removed from the environment or the contributions to net zero no they ignore that stuff entirely because often to persuade someone to make a change we don't need to be rational and more often than not the irrational ideas well just as well now toby and i didn't finish there in fact we went on to record a very special bonus episode for my nudge news newsletter of subscribers in the bonus episode you'll hear toby share this interesting idea to encourage brits to recycle glass bottles a lot of governments are thinking about deposit return schemes for things like plastic bottles and drinks cans and so the normal way of doing that will be you pay say ten pence deposit when you get a drink and then you get that ten pence back when you dispose of the bottle back at a a recycling center i'd be interested to test a version where it's a lottery so you pay your ten pence when you get a plastic bottle with a drink when you return that bottle you don't get your ten pence back what you get is entered into a lottery where there's say a one and a million chance of winning a hundred thousand pounds so it's it's still cost list there's no there's no net cost you know in that policy but of course now that bottle is essentially a lottery ticket and my argument would be that who would throw a lottery ticket in the bin listen into the bonus episode and you'll hear more about toby interesting bottle lottery i really liked that idea plus we'll talk about why handwritten notes work so well a smart challenge that really dramatically reduced the uk's carbon footprint and why the ten p charge on plastic bags was so effective to listen all you need to do is click the link in the show notes enter your email address and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode so scroll find the link in the show notes click on that enter your email and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode if you are already a nudge news newsletter subscriber then thank you you already have access to that episode all you have to do is open the email i sent you this morning announcing this episode and you will find the link straight to the bonus episode in the email thank you to toby for coming on his work at the behavioral insights team is absolutely fascinating if you've enjoyed today's show you'll love the report he wrote on net zero it has fascinating ways you can apply behavioral science to tackle probably the biggest challenge we're facing as a society at the moment i've left a link to that report in the show notes so please do go and check it out that is all for me today i do hope you're going this to that bonus episode mainly because i talk about one of my favorite linkedin posts of the year in that bonus episode anyway that is all from me thank you so much for listening i'll be back next monday for another episode of nudge goodbye

super mario bros is one of the best selling video games of all time over forty million copies have been sold since its launch in nineteen eighty five it's included in the world video game hall of fame and times all time one hundred video games it's ranked by ig as the best nintendo game ever made in yet the game at least by today's standards is remarkably simple the actual size of the game is forty kilobytes bytes that's less than a single high resolution image on your phone so how did this simple two d platform game becomes so iconic well it's partly due to this fantastic theme tune but it's also due to some very smart use of psychology and it's really well taught out like the the designer of super mario bros like they real they really thought that there's an articles about how they broke it down that's today's guest on nudge ram lead john everyone my name is ram john i am the founder of delight pilot i consultant to see helping b b companies improve their onboarding i'm also best bestselling author of product and onboarding and my new one coming out is eureka today ram and i will break down the behavioral science used by super mario will cover how these subtle principles are used by this forty year old game and still used today by modern day companies to hook customers in all of that coming up the world famous blogging site tumblr had a problem to succeed in marketing they needed to move quickly they needed to create content that was trending but their marketing team was stuck waiting for engineers to build out every email campaign that was until they switched to hubspot customer platform to send trending content to millions instantly rather than waiting for the engineers they could use hubspot to send all their email comm as efficiently and as effectively as possible and the result while they have tripled their engagement while doubling the output they produce if you want to move faster like tumblr than head to hubspot dot com alright in front of me i have the nineteen eighty five super mario bros games and i'm ashamed to say that i've never actually played this game before i enjoy mario games but i've never actually sat down to play the original which is why i'm a little surprised by start of this game the game is pretty much already laid all i have to do is press player one and i'm i've dropped right in and literally as i was recording this slowly and angry looking enemy was walking towards and it's called a gun and if i didn't move and jump which may have heard earlier it would have killed me and i would have lost a life that happened when i was just recording this intro before this minimalist part of the game is partly due to the limited amount of memory space that's actually available for the game but it's also a master class according to ram in onboarding if you wanna look for an example i think the best onboarding experience look at video games this gun this enemy is walking towards me and it will keep walking towards me and will keep killing me unless i do something i'm not told what to do i'm not told how to jump or how to kill it but it kind of seems obvious you know goo soft looking head just makes it feel like mario should be able to jump and and and and kill it jump right on it and and destroy the enemy and that's that's what i'm able to do you come out you're a little mario your scroll to your right and the first thing you see is one small little koopa or enemy coming at you and it's one just one not three not two and it's moving slowly it's like call what would happen if i stomp on this and turn off it it passes away and once i squash the gun which i'll do now i'm rewarded with a hundred points and now to the right of me are four post square boxes on that side too there's four coins like it's blinking at you just wanna hit it and that all happens within the first five seconds these four boxes which if i jump to i can unlock well they reward me with coins and a mushroom which i've just eaten which mario eats to double his size so immediately within five seconds of starting the game i feel accomplishment i've killed my first enemy i've started collecting coins and i've even improved my character now this might seem simple but this opening sequence is built on some important psychological principles feeling like the user or the person the player just one something within their first few seconds is very motivating one of the reasons why this is motivating is due to the gold gradient effect it's the goal gradient effect we increase our effort and desire to complete something once we've achieve our a goal and and seeing the next in line and we even run faster this is the reason why runners when they see the finish line they push harder them seeing the possibility of them winning can really help ram right being near a goal is motivating researchers in the twenty seventeen study found that marathon runners are fifty one point four percent more likely to finish in the minute before the three hour mark than the minute after super mario brings lead designer shi guillermo mia mo new players are motivated by the chance to achieve goals so he didn't only offer rewards and points at the end of the level he gave users as plenty within the first five seconds we are always more motivated to act if a goal seems close previous guest on nudge il fish back shares an example of this in her book get it done she cites to study where ran k ole o and y wang shu partnered with new york cafe in the experiment all of the cafe customers received a reward card offering one free coffee after they had bought ten half of the customers received the card with ten open slots the other half got a card with two more slots so twelve open slots versus ten however two of the twelve slots were pre filled with these bonus stamps so strictly speaking these were identical reward programs back rights how every customer who got a card needed to make ten coffee purchases at the cafe to collect the ten stamps to get their free coffee that was the same for everyone however the all alert of those three stamps those bonus stamps was extremely high people who thought they had got in that head start came back to the cafe far more and were far more likely to fill up their reward card than the others the result was fairly impressive those with the bonus card completed their ten purchases within twelve point seven days on average versus those who didn't have the bonus head start only finished them on average within fifteen point six days so that's twenty percent faster for those who feel that they had already started the process the coins gun and the mushroom in super mario bros are these quick wins that trigger the gold gradient effect they give the player the feeling that they have already begun their adventure and that they are on their way to bigger rewards just like those bonus stamps in that study it is a smart nudge but it's just one of the many that mario applied they really teach you through doing they position mario on the very far left of the screen and that already positioned you to think about what's next your brain is like i need i need to go to right because there's a a lot of empty space there there is no on screen instructions no pointers no walk throughs in mario you can only learn through playing rather than pointing out here's the bad guy kill it here here's here's the coins like move your head on it they tap into that whole curiosity something's moving something's things blinking and by design now they're like oh what should i do so they're really teaching by doing and not saying this idea of teaching food doing is proven to accelerate the learning process they're really talking into a psychology principle around mirror neuron square the brain lights up when you're actually showing or doing something rather than explaining it the best video games tend to teach through doing as do some products a lot of companies do this so i mentioned duo already a b to b example is fresh desk where as soon as you sign a fresh desk because of support tool they get you to actually open a ticket a fake ticket and don't meet ticket respond to it and then close it and it all feels very safe because they tell you upfront that this is what it look like but this is not your customer mario forces its user to learn through doing if you don't move in mario you will die within ten seconds of starting the game it's only through playing that you survive and thus by playing you start to learn the game mechanics it'd be easy to have the first enemy behind a block unable to attack you straight away but that wouldn't force the player into action if you don't move you die and yet this first world in mario is still very easy almost every player can complete it without dying at least the first level of the first world and and that ease it's on purpose any great video game does this they start off the first level is easy like they obviously want you to get hooked on it and starting off in hard mode gets people frustrated and when they're frustrated they leave right they it's like i can't beat this boss so you if you recall super mario world where world one it's easy you jump around you might fail the second world is you're underground and now there's like flowers biting at you and there's bats and and the it it gets progressively harder you're now swimming so they're progressively making it harder over and over again ramping up difficulty slowly stops players from feeling overwhelmed by the challenge because if a goal seems unreachable it'll demo motivate users in a study cited an adam alters anatomy of a breakthrough people who visited a music rating website were offered a twenty five dollar amazon voucher for rating fifty one different songs writers were forty times more likely to quit earlier in the task than those who are closer to the goal those who were closer to the goal rated more songs than those who were earlier on slowly leveling you that's a principle called progressive overload where you start small to build habits like this is what you know like atomic habits by james clear talks about where don't don't set a goal to run a marathon right you you first of all you'll hurt yourself but you you'll feel overwhelmed like start off with i'm gonna wake up tomorrow run a kilometer in other words we gain motivation if the reward seems closer successful games like super mario ramp difficulty up slowly so users never feel like the ultimate goal will be too difficult to achieve it keeps players hooked and many companies apply this exact same principle if you look at shopify what they do is they progressively disclose certain fields so they hide fields and when you respond that yes i'm switching tools they show another field which stories which do so users still feel overall give players a quick win teach them through doing and ramp up the difficulties slowly all of these tactics help trigger the goal gradient effect motivating players to keep playing but super mario bros had other tricks that they used to keep players hooked we'll cover all of those after this short break content is profit hosted by louise and fo is part of the hub spot podcast network the home of business shows that don't ramble on and give you insights as quickly as possible contact profit is one of those real practical listen you'll get tips on selling things that actually work you'll hear frameworks tactics and you'll learn from guests who have done it all before i would suggest if you wanna get started listen to the how to get your first five hundred email subscribers that's a great example of how wonderful this show is a good mix of insights and ideas so go and listen to content as profit wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back to you are listening to nudge with me phil ag remember how i told you i was surprised by how simple to start to mario bros was you simply click player one and you immediately dropped into the game with no choices and no instructions well ram says this lack of choice was on purpose rather than showing different things and different gaps and things to climb it was one bad guy koopa and four flashing coins and that really exe simplifies the whole law where the idea is that the more choices there are on the screen or anywhere else the longer it takes for somebody to make a decision and the longer the decision time it takes the more likely they they leave i've just finished reading consumer a great book on consumer psychology and the author philip graves will actually join me on na in a few weeks time anyway in his book grave shares a real world example of hicks law a diet and exercising tracking website daily byrne tested alternative designs for its homepage the web team found reducing the number of options that visitors could click on on the homepage from twenty five which was the original to five which was in their test while reducing those options improved conversions by twenty percent limiting the number of choices actually encourages action mario won't ask you to pick your outfit your starting world what hat you would like to wear within in the first five seconds because that additional choice decreases motivation another the great example is can can thousands of the templates and if they just dropped you in there to show all of their templates it would feel overwhelming in hicks law pies here what can does is they ask you who are you are you a teacher are you a small business are you a big brand are your a student and based on your choice they're like oh based on your choice here at the top templates if you said that you're a teacher here are some presentations that would engage your students if you're a small biz business here are some instagram templates that you can use to post upon your social if you're a big brand here are some brand guidelines that you can use what's interesting about hicks law is that it contradicts what we as players and consumers expect if you'd ask me if i'd like to choose the character i'd like to pay it in super mario bro i'd probably say yes and yet in reality that choice might demo motivate me graves shares a great example of this in his twenty ten book he writes how google made the mistake of asking customers how many results they would want to see on each page after using the search engine people responded to the rational question in a rational way if you're searching for something you would assume that more choices always better they said don't show me ten results on the page show me thirty results however when google tripled the number of results it provided after a search from ten to thirty it found that traffic actually declined more choice wasn't better but super mario bros limited the number of choice they gave players not just because of hicks law but also according to ram due to another law miller law in its office the idea that you can could only process seven pieces of information once beyond that we start to forget things of course mario applies this brilliantly and you know that applies in in mario first of all when how they kind of progressively walk you through that experience where it starts off easy so you don't have to remember a lot of things there's only five things and then the next level is slightly harder and then you have to remember slightly more and then now you're in the next level it's was like oh okay i remember this i need to jump over it and oh my goodness that flower will bite me the enemy's change as you progress through the levels platforms start moving and falling there are invisible blocks to discover and new power up opportunities these additional elements appear slowly they don't appear all at once and this is to overcome miller law when presented with seven items or more at once will start to forget things by only introducing a couple of elements in each level mario is able to keep players hooked but there's one psychological principle that super mario bros didn't apply a key effect for people doing what it is there's been studies they've shown that people who built something feel more emotional connection than buying something that's already pre assembled and there's a lot of places where this can be applied first of all i talk about video games in things like super mario card which is another game that i'm obsessed with you can at some point you can choose and customize your car that you can customize your player and really it's all about the customization now when you're building this it's not just donkey kong or super mario it is you it's your character now you have customized it to that point where it is something that is part of something you built and you value more than something that is already pre selected a pre built for you the nineteen eighty five super mario bros didn't apply this likely because the game had so little memory that it wouldn't be able to customize based on each user however other nintendo games from a similar time did manage to apply it it's zelda you get get a chance to name your character i we played this this game recently on my game boy flashback back to anybody used to have one and it would the first question to ask you is what is your name and now your your character isn't linked oh which is the guy with the sword you're now phil this is phil heath phil how's he going so every composition you have in the game is now using your name and ram has a great example of a company that applied this exact same principle to boost their sign ups a great example i can think of in the b2b world which they've have done they've nailed this they have data that shows it qualitatively is wave we've have apps is an easy way to create beautiful invoices for entrepreneurs and a lot of these entrepreneurs are switching from microsoft word in excel for sending invoices and one of the first things they ask you is what is your website and as soon as should they get your website they actually pick off your brand colors and then they show on the right of this queen and as soon as soon as you upload your your website what your invoice skin look like wave and it's picked up your logo it's picked up your brand colors super mario bros is a rather simple game yet it is clearly made with an impressive understanding of consumer psychology the lead game designer shi mia moto knew the game shouldn't overload the player with more than seven bits of information at once he knew to reduce the amount of choice he offered new players but above all he understood the gold gradient effect he knew that players are demo if a reward seems too far away so he always kept the next coin the next flashing box or kilo enemy with insight on the right of the screen this simple game dynamic has kept players hooked for years over forty million people have spent hours playing the game over the last forty years and millions of them have completed it multiple times and i could see why i was hooked even when i was supposed to be preparing for this podcast i got hooked on the game and ended up playing far more than i thought i would oh yes i've saved the princess how great is that what a wonderful game so i've finished the first world mario and you know what i really enjoyed that and yeah it started the next twelve and the goo is still walking towards me what a fantastic game is taking me far along to actually play that game and it's interesting that a game this old you know forty years old now and with a memory the size of a high resolution image can still be addictive and i think that's testament it's to all of the wonderful behavioral sites they use that is all for today folks thank you so much for listening and thank you to ram for joining me on the show if you've enjoyed today's share your love ram latest book here's what the book is about it's all about helping b b companies onboard their customers and users traditionally b b onboarding is quite challenging but also quite terrible ton data shows if you onboard a customer right b to b or b stick around longer they pay longer and they pay more and as well as they upgrade that book eureka shares a playbook that i put together and working with different b companies including zapier here and app queues and lead pages improve their onboarding experience i've left a link to ram website and the book in the show notes if you'd like to check it out in the show notes you'll also find links to follow me on linkedin to subscribe to my free nudge weekly newsletter that goes out to nine thousand five hundred of you every week with the best behavioral science tip i have found that week and if you do go to nudge podcast dot com to sign up to the newsletter you'll also find my newly redesigned website i've spent the last couple of weeks redesigning the site so do you go and check it out get a quick preview of it and let me know what you think you'll be able to contact me through to contact form on my new website so just go to nudge podcast dot com to check out the new site and bonus points for anyone who notices any of the nudge i've have applied on my very own website well that is all for today folks i really hope you've enjoyed today's episode and i'll be back next monday for another episode of nudge cheers

my partner and i have just bought our first home we'd seen dozens of houses but none of them felt right then we viewed a free bed modest house with some ga paint in a botched extension it wasn't perfect but it seemed like a good option assuming me we didn't over pay after the second viewing something interesting happened i mentally started to imagine moving in i pictured the slow sunday mornings drinking coffee bed summer barbecue in the garden i mentally designed the podcast studio in the garage i spent so long imagining living there that i started to feel like i already owned the house now the sale price was well within our budget and we were able to bid five percent over that price but when the estate agent said it was going to best in final offers we panicked and we offered ten percent more we got the house but i think we also learnt a lesson after the first viewing we'd set our limit of how much we'd pay but over time we imagine that house is ours and that feeling of ownership it walked our perception this is the endowment effect the moment we feel something is ours we start valuing it higher than we did before sutherland describes this clearly with a study cited in his book irrational in the study employees were sold one dollar lottery tickets some got to pick their own lottery ticket numbers others were given a lottery ticket with random numbers already filled in the researchers offered to buy those tickets back before the draw for the lottery would be made those who didn't pick their numbers were willing to sell it back but for one dollars ninety six cents showing that we value things more when we own them however those who did pick their numbers wanted eight dollars and sixty seven cents to give up the ticket it was the same ticket the same odds but a huge difference in how much they were valued why because we over value things we own and we over value things we've created and that feeling of ownership can change all sorts of things from the homework our kids complete to the vaccines we give them but can i use this principle the endowment principle to increase sales for my business can i use it to nudge you find out in today's episode of nudge the world famous blogging site tumblr had a problem to succeed in marketing they needed to move quickly they needed to create content that was trending but their marketing team was stuck waiting for engineers to build out every email campaign that was until they switched to hubspot customer platform to send trending content to millions instantly rather than waiting for the engineers they could use hubspot to send all their email comm as efficiently and as effectively as possible and the result while they have tripled their engagement while doubling the output they produce if you want to move faster like tumblr than head to hubspot dot com the endowment effect encouraged me to bid over my limit for our house it makes lottery players value their tickets irrational high auction is like christie and sub thrive on this bidder is often over pay as the auction goes on as the bidder has start to feel like the item is theirs job seekers who fail at the final interview feel a similar sting getting close to a job offer makes the rejection hurt much more than never getting an interview in the first place but can this effect be used to tackle a nationwide behavioral challenge could it be used to solve a problem like this the overwhelming majority of cervical cancer so over ninety five percent of cervical cancer is caused by hpv infection that's my first guest on today's episode of nudge i phil my name is julia tele i am the head of evaluation i actually work across bit and nas julia is joined by her coworker at the behavioral insights team nia my name is nia davy and i am a quantitative research adviser at the behavioral insights team uk the behavioral insights team often dubbed the nudge unit was set up inside the british government in twenty ten to improve policy and public services with behavioral signs they've since grown left government and now function as an international organization tackling global behavioral challenges just like this cervical cancer is the third leading cause of female cancer deaths in georgia so it's quite an acute issue in the country adequate vaccination coverage could eliminate the cervical cancer the vaccines were available to girls in georgia but an astonishing low number of girls were being vaccinated coverage for this vaccine is very low in georgia it's the lowest among the the the ones paid by the states so it's a it's a free vaccination and nevertheless especially after the pandemic of vaccination rates plummeted to like about fourteen percent that's like a decrease of more than sixty percent but nile and julia and the behavioral insights team were confident that they could use behavioral science to help in general we know that's behavioral science can help us to address a lot of those barriers and so we've seen that nudge that offer incentives to parents and healthcare care workers can be effective notice that make information more salient and use trusted messengers to deliver information can be very effective and there's growing evidence from the us and other high income countries that's this can be a a kind of cost effective method of encouraging vaccination and attendance at appointments as well offering incentives certainly encourages people to get vaccinated using trusted messengers works as well but n was more interested in an even more cost effective method one that plays on the endowment effect in particular framing of vaccine is being reserved for someone or reserve for a person in your care has been found to be particularly effective in high income countries and i think we were excited to try and test that in a country where this kind of literature hadn't necessarily a lot of coverage nile referring to research conducted by behavioral scientists katie milk angela duck mites patel and seventeen others before the pandemic this big group of behavioral scientist ran a study testing nineteen different messages aimed at increasing flu vaccination rates one message shed a joke about the flu that one didn't do particularly well another said the flu shot makes you more healthy a different version said that getting the vaccine would help you and your loved ones however the most effective message out of all nineteen was one that simply said that the vaccine was reserved for you just adding that line reserved for you boosted vaccination rates by four point six percent compared to the control group so why did this work well the researchers believe that the word reserved makes people feel like the vaccine already belongs to them triggering that sense of ownership and a reluctance to miss out on their dose so the behavioral insights team set about testing this exact principle in their own experiment this time using text messages the sms reminders were chosen in collaboration with uni georgia and the national center for disease control in the country and cdc because it allows for easier variations variation so the testing of variance of the intervention so in the end we tested for versions of the intervention alongside of control it's also a very cost effective each individual sms costs less than one us sent to send so very effective way of direct mass communication rather than a more passive form of intervention like a notice board or an advert on another a bus on the radio in september twenty twenty two nia julia and their team put their ideas to the test the trial was a nationwide trial in georgia which was very exciting we had the full support and cooperation of the national center for disease control along with uni georgia which meant ultimately we had access to all girls aged ten to twelve who had not yet received any dose of the hpv vaccine and with caveat that they had at least one caregiver contact number in the nc data system ultimately with these stipulation in place this met a sample of over fifty five thousand girls which represented over sixty percent of the girls in this age group in the country at the time this is a very large scale trial it would provide the team with some very conclusive results does the reserved messaging work well to find out they needed to create several messages they couldn't just send the reserved for you message to everyone they needed variance to compare the results in total they created full variants of the text message there was a short sms with no additional information that just notified the caregiver that their daughter was due for a free hpv vaccine which will protect against cervical cancer and encouraged them to contact their local clinic or health center to arrange appointment there was a second one which builds on this which had the same information and then also linked to the national center for disease controls website and the relevant web pages on hpv and and the vaccination so this incorporated a little bit more of a a messenger effect as well because it referenced the nc there was a a third version which we call the reserve for her version in the paper that used a framing of the vaccine the vaccine was reserved at the specific clinic we didn't say it's basically they were just reserved at your clinic and that they should the caregiver to contact the clinic to arrange an appointment and then also linked to the nc website as well and then the fourth version part of the intervention was the same sms as the original one not with the framing of the vaccine being reserved for her but with some safety information i would mention that vaccine had been safely administered to more than a hundred million girls worldwide so maybe some kind of social normal sort social proofing going on there so the four versions are at first a short sms encouraging people to get the vaccine the second was that same short sms but this time with a website link which triggered that messenger effect as nia said the third version was the reserved for her version and this featured all the information and links from the previous version but specifically added that her vaccine is reserved for her at the clinic and finally the fourth version was the social proof version it was identical to the previous text but instead of that reserved for her line it said a hundred and eighteen million girls worldwide have safely been given this vaccine so a bit of social proof the results from all four of these texts would be compared against the control so alongside these four intervention arms the control group did not receive any sms reminder and in late twenty twenty two the texts were sent the national center for disease control in the country essentially sent out all of the sms reminders to the four treatment groups at the same time and then the payroll insights team started to measure the results broadly speaking we tracked two things track the dosage so whether each sms that was sent was actually delivered to the phone number in the database the local healthcare care system database overall we had ninety nine point five percent delivery which is great then we also tracked the outcome which was each girl's vaccination status for h hpv at the end of the trial period and that trial period was exactly sixty two days so sixty two days about two months after the text was sent how many of the girls had got the vaccine and did one of those messages work better than the others so the third version of the sms reminder which i mentioned being the reserve for her turned out to be have a higher rate of vaccination so the control group had a rate of two point four percent of vaccine uptake across the period so in absolute magnitude these numbers will seem quite low but it's important to remember that ultimately this is a very low costs low invasive prompt to begin with then the time period of the trial is only two months so it's not an extended tracking of vaccination over a year and furthermore the more these were the girls for whom a reminder was necessary because they weren't vaccinated already so while student magnitude the tube might seem a bit low any increase is certainly very valuable and very promising for for a scale up so the control group had a vaccination rate of two and two point four percent after the trial and then the four treatment groups had ranges is between three point nine and four point seven percent and the highest of these was the reserve for her framing so version three of our sms reminder which had four point seven percent we find that this reserve for her framing had approximately sixty five percent greater odds in terms of a girl receiving the vaccine relative to the control group nia and julia found that the reserved for her message worked just like the katie milk study from twenty twenty one if you hear that a vaccine is reserved for you you will be more likely to get vaccinated but why before they knew about the vaccine being reserved for their daughter or that the daughter was due to the vaccine we didn't particularly value it they didn't it had no importance to them but didn't feel possession of it but once we view that sense of possession or reservation for you or a family member our brains value things more once you have a sense of possession you'll value things more it's what i experienced with my house but also what three researchers found in a great twenty ten study in the study by patel cooper and when some high school students were given a choice over which homework assignments they could complete they were given this choice what homework do you wanna do while another group of students were simply told this is the homework you need to complete that very simple act letting some of the students choose their homework gave those students a sense of ownership over the task the results from this test were striking students who choose their own homework reported enjoying the work more they felt more confident in the material they completed more assignments and even scored higher on the related exams and it doesn't just apply for homework people will like your product more and be more likely to choose it when they're physically holding the product in one set of experiments researchers has found that people were forty eight percent more likely to choose a chocolate when holding it and nearly forty percent more people were likely to choose a fan when holding a can so it's a house a homework assignment or a can a fan the principal holds the closest something feels to being yours the more you want it but will it work for me can i use the reserve for you framing to increase my sales or find out after this break and genuinely the results surprised me content is profit hosted by louise and fo is part of the hubspot podcast network the home of business shows that don't ramble on and give you insights as quickly as possible content profit is one of those real pratt call listen to you'll get the tips on selling things that actually work you'll hear frameworks tactics and you'll learn from guests who have done it all before i would suggest if you wanna get started listen to the how to get your first five hundred email subscribers that's a great example of how wonderful this show is a good mix of insights and ideas so go and listen to content is profit wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you're listening to nudge with me phil ag today nile and julia have shared how writing that the vaccine is reserved made girls sixty five percent more likely to get vaccinated it's an incredible finding one that's backed up with multiple studies and proves how perceived ownership motivates people to act but can i use this principle to increase my sales can i use this principle on some of you listening well i ran a test to find out i've got an online course which is admittedly rather old now but it covers the science behind marketing take the course and you will learn how to apply behavioral science across the marketing funnel most of you listening will have probably heard of this course many of you have bought it but my most recent newsletter subscribers they probably haven't heard of it because i haven't promoted it in over a year so i decided to run a test on my most recent one thousand nudge newsletter subscribers so these were all the people who signed up over the past one hundred and eighty days i split that group of a thousand people into two separate groups now both of the groups received a message with a fifty percent discount code to the course very generous but it's an old course so fifty percent made sense for five hundred of my subscribers i emailed them the coupon code half off for me with a subject line that said a thank you fifty percent off the other five hundred received almost the exact same email same copy same design same fifty percent discount but with a few subtle changes their subject line read a thank you fifty percent off reserved for you instead of a generic discount code their code was reserved for me and instead of saying here's fifty percent off i wrote i've reserved you a fifty percent discount i mentioned the word reserved four times in my variant and not at all in my control so what happened did the reserved for you framing perform better that even encourage more people to go and use the coupon and by the course well no the reserved version of the email received a slightly lower open rate at zero point one percent but i think that's that's fine that's not statistically significant however the click rate was fourteen percent lower clicks on the email to go and look at the course and applied a discount were fourteen percent lower that's very significant and what's even worse is the reserved framing led to zero sales so no one who received that email went on to buy the course while the control version the one that didn't say the coupon was reserved for you that actually did generate two sales now look i'll be the first to admit that this isn't a massive test it's only a thousand subscribers a lot of them have been following me for a while so would be very unlikely to buy something from me and obviously it was just two sales overall but that fourteen percent drop in click free rate i think that was quite significant it really surprised me i was wondering how did i get this so wrong and then listening back to the conversation with nile and julia i think i discovered my mistake if you think of kind of the reserved for you message like if if we make people believe that something is specifically meant for them and might be not available to others or to themselves later on than they are more likely to act quickly to secure it julia mentioned that the reserved for her framing works best if the message feels like it's specifically tailored to an audience member if it's not available to other people and finally if it's not gonna be available later on if it expires over time that's how the girls in the vaccine trial felt the message made out that they had reserved a specific vaccine for them at their local clinic that vaccine was only for them it wasn't for anyone else and the line about the vaccine being due made it seem like the girls needed to act immediately so there was that bit of scarcity there as well my message missed all three of these components readers had no reason to think that the discount was just for them they were aware it was available to others as the email wasn't personalized at all it was quite clearly mass male and there was no time limit it on when you could use it i should have personalized the email i should have made it clear why i'd reserved that specific person a coupon code and i should have limited the time frame they could have used it that's probably would have beaten the control but then again maybe it wouldn't maybe this reserved for you for framing aiming works beautifully for vaccines but fails miserably for coupon codes perhaps reserved for you only works with tangible concrete items a vaccine dinner reservation one on one coaching call maybe my coupon code was just too abstract now i should point out that i'm very certain that the reserved for you framing does work in many cases nia and julia proved it in georgia katie milk has proved it in america we know that the endowment effect that feeling of ownership really does encourage people to pay more and behave differently my test didn't work i think i know why and i'm glad i ran it i've learned much more about the principle by applying it and also it's a reminder that behavioral science isn't a law book that's guaranteed to work the world is far too chaotic for that to be the case instead behavioral science provides guidance that has been proven to work elsewhere so might work for you applying behavioral science isn't a full proof way to get results it simply helps you take an informed action rather than a random one and of course occasionally it won't work the way you expect that is all for today folks thank you so much for listening to today's episode of nudge if you want to see those two emails that i sent for my experiments and the results of the study you can click the link in the show notes i've shared all of the data there massive massive thank you to nia and julia for coming on they are fantastic guests and they both work at the brilliant behavioral insights team a wonderful organization that not only applies behavioral science to meaty challenges like the one we talked through today but also shares all of their work with the public they have these wonderful papers which you can go and read which share not just their successes like we talked about today but also some of their failures as well that georgia and sms experiment which we're spoken about today it has written up in a great working paper that i've linked to in the show notes it's well worth reading if you want more details on that study but i do also encourage you just to visit the behavioral insights team website and read more of their papers i am interviewing another researcher at the team in a couple of weeks because he's written a fantastic paper on how to use behavioral science to create persuasive comm around net zero so do you go and check that out now if you've enjoyed today's episode i do think you'll love my newsletter if you sign up to the newsletter you get a reminder every monday when a new show goes out that's quite useful but you also get my weekly friday newsletter which highlights the best behavioral science insight i have discovered that week think those are really interesting emails they tend to be about more current stuff and maybe some of the books and papers i'm reading that very week i'd i do try and make them as as interesting to read and as easy to read as possible and of course if you do sign up you will probably end up being part of one of these experiments like i've shared today so if you wanna be part of some of these experiments the best place to get go is to sign up to the nice news newsletter to sign up just click the link to the show notes you'll see all of my previous newsletters there as well so you can get a taste of what the content is like or if you can't find that link in the show notes just search for nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter in the menu to sign up that is all for this week i'm your host for like and you've been listening to nudge

in the early nineteen nineties south africa was on the brink of transformation the apartheid regime an oppressive system of racial segregation was collapsing but the transition to democracy was far from guaranteed violence political instability and the threat of civil war loom large one of the most serious threats came from general cons fu a retired chief of the south african defense force and a revered figure among right wing african he led the african vol front a hard line movement with his own militia of about thirty thousand armed men foley had been called the ultimate enforce of apartheid and if that wasn't enough also the ultimate racist many feared fo would lead a violent uprising to prevent the end of white minority rule amid this tension nelson mandela then the leader of the african national congress took a bold and strategic step in october nineteen ninety three mandela secretly met with fully young to diffuse the threat the general considered mandela a criminal and a terrorist expecting the meeting to be tense and formal the general was stunned when mandela greeted him warm and spoke in his own language of a mandela didn't highlight their differences instead he greeted his foe like a friend and crucially he spoke to him in a the language of the appraiser this act wasn't just symbolic it was a master strike the civil war didn't happen and full young would one day describe his former enemy as the greatest of men man mandela retired in nineteen ninety and when full paid tribute to him in parliament he did so in mandela native language of ko perhaps unknowingly mandela used one of the most reliable persuasion tools there is to diffuse the tension he used mimic he acted like the general he greeted him in his own language he mimic his warm demeanor it worked for man mandela and it has been proven to work in hundreds of psychological studies since then today on nudge best selling offer and storytelling expert will store shares how mimic can be used to persuade all of that coming up if you're in marketing sales or leadership and you're serious about staying ahead mark your calendar for inbound twenty twenty five happening september third to fifth at the moscow center in san francisco inbound is genuinely i think one of the best major marketing sales leadership events i went last year and i thought it was absolutely fantastic but this year looks even better the speaker lineup is genuinely world class they've got amy poe da o sean evans from the hot ones youtube channel i'm i'm big fan of that plus marquez brown glen and doyle dominic cr and mike den the cmo of cbs an incredible lineup up and over three days you'll get evidence backed strategies for marketing leadership and growth if it's delivered by people who shape the future of business and practitioners i know nancy har former guest or will be there as well and if her talks anything to go by this conference will have no fluff it it'll have no filler it'll just have insights that you can actually use to improve your work and it's in san francisco you got the scene as the backdrop it's the ideal place to explore how ai and behavioral science of reshaping the industry so if you want to be part of it if you wanna head along go to inbound dot com forward slash register to secure your spot today on nudge i'm talking to an award winning and best selling writer who has spent nearly two decades exploring the importance of stories and their power over us my name is will s i'm a former journalist an author who has a specialist interest in the science of storytelling in his latest book a story as a deal will talks about the power of mimic he explains why it works and how great persuade like mandela use it to lead others i asked will how mimic it crew works human beings are constantly on what i call this detecting connect mode because we're cooperate and we need to we need to survive we're constantly looking for other people to cooperate with so friends lovers colleagues whoever it might be you know a a friendship is a cooperative of arrangement you know the point is that you bond you care about each other and then you are there to help each other over life problems a marriage is a cooperative relationship evolutionary the purpose of it being to be close enough and strong enough to sustain in the you know the the the the the the the the raising of children you you know a tribe is a culture relationship that that helps overcome the the the basic problems of survival you know that that's that's how it works but but we don't just seek to cooperate with anybody it only makes sense for us to cooperate with people who see the world a bit like we do you know human beings can be very different and and so so we're constantly looking out for similarity with you know we can't looking at for people like us that's what we do you know for good and for ill in one study cited on page eighty of wills book research assistants were instructed to have long conversations with participants the assistants were told to rub their faces and shake their feet during the conversations this was kind of abnormal behavior people wouldn't usually rub their faces this much or shake their feet this much but when the research assistants did this the participants unknowingly started to mimic their gestures they rubbed their faces they shook their feet usually right after the assistant had done so we mimic the actions of others often unknowingly in a lab based follow ups study participant who watched a video of someone eating a particular snack in this case it was animal crackers or goldfish crackers well they were more likely to eat the same snack and rate it more positively than those who hadn't watched others eating it importantly they believed their choices were they're own they believe that they weren't influenced by the video this shows how mimic creek can shape our preferences without our awareness this is now unconscious tendency to mimic others behaviors in social interactions it builds rapport increases liking and increases social cohesion so that's why people are so get so concerned about their appearance for example you know it's because subconsciously we're very interested in attracting similar people to us and repel people who aren't similar to us kind of what we do with like a magnet for for like minded people you know that's why we humans care so much about their hair and their car in their house and there and but and that's also why i things like accent matter and choice of words matter and you know the school tie humans were obsessed with this stuff for for for for a sound evolutionary reasons it's because we are just because we are we we we we're always in the business for trying to attract like minded people and repel people who aren't like minded in a massive study of four hundred and twenty one million potential romantic matches from an online dating site the factor that best predicted the favor ability towards partner was similarity the researchers levy markle and ser stated for nearly all characteristics the more similar the individuals were the higher the likelihood that they would find each a desirable and opt to meet in person similarity could predict the likelihood of a match with sixty percent accuracy a different field experiment examined how a petition is clothing affected how willing a peace demons would be to sign an anti war petition two female experiment one dressed in what they called hip clothing and the other dressed in what they called straight clothing solicit signatures at a nineteen seventy one anti war demonstration the study found that the demonstrators were more likely to sign the petition when they were approached with someone who's attire matched their own this indicated that similarity in clothing does influence persuasion so that's why you know if one of the kind of basic rules of marketing is that you've got to speak in the language of your audience because your audience has got to subconsciously see you is that's people like me as people like us it's a lot of advertising that's what is excellent doing in in in basically showing a mirror to the audience and saying this is who you are this is who we are too the world's best known ad david og knew all too well he wrote if you're trying to persuade people to do something or buy something seems to me you should use their language the language they use every day the language in which they think an apple used this principle to advertise their products that's what i think different campaign was you know just like nineteen eighty four had no information whatsoever at the product zero not even a picture of the bloody product nothing it was just a picture of a bunch of in a creative icons here's for the crazy ones john lennon missed it you know manhattan gandhi the mother teresa you know you know all these kinds of people martin luther the king could you change the world basically and and and as what it's saying it's like by you know our our computers aren't for these kind of boring office drones like the pcs and the ibm i can do for the for the for the people who want to change the world and of course change the world begins to cliche after they in silicon valley because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do but that's what it's doing and it would works so so it that that if you if you see your identity in the ad campaign then you you you sort of sort of by it's kind of magic power become automatically compelled to kinda wanna use that product because it's it's part of your cloud of social information that's showing other people who who who you think you are one nineteen ninety four study from cha book influence shows how mimic creek can be used to sell in the study research assistance were sent out across a college campus they were told to interrupt students and solicit a donation for a charitable cause some were told to make a a sort of straightforward request for a donation without any additional commentary this was the control group however the others were asked to use mimic specifically they were told to emphasize a shared identity they were told to start their request by saying hi nice to meet you by the way i'm a student here too i'm a student here too they were told to say that before making their donation request and the results are really quite astonishing only nine point eight percent of the students in the control group donated while forty one point seven percent donated when the assistant said i am a student here too that is a three times increase in donations by just adding five words to the request this effect is proven to make people spend more i mean is there's a less well known example but but but but just as effective in canada malt beer had had a really excellent campaign where the that that they were number one and they slipped to number two and and and so they they can't so they're asian with this idea of doing an out about how annoying it was because americans always people always think kent canadians are americans and it obviously annoys canadians when people think they're that they're they're american so they come up with this ad which is got it it became known as the rant but it all is is just an ordinary guy and a plaid shirt and jeans on a stage listing things that are canadian hey i'm i'm not a lumber jack or a fur trader and i i don't live in any igloo or eat blu or on a dog sled and i don't know jimmy sally or susie from canada although i'm certain there really really nice you know all the things that people get wrong about canada all the things that are particularly about canada versus america and it was just immediately hugely successful they did a genius thing and broadcast it for the first time in the ad in the oscars just after south bak before blame canada then on came this thing and again you know with the rant it it it it's it it has no information of that mo beer there's no advert there's no part of that we're just saying it's a delicious crisp low calorie whatever it might be you know whatever the benefits of this beer nothing whatsoever it was just it was just the expression of an identity and enormously successfully put tens of millions of dollars onto the the value of the company within natural weeks thank you so so so that's the power of this stuff it's much more powerful to appeal to people's identity than it is to list the benefits of your product usually but mimic cr can backfire especially if it's not authentic i think people are very alert to authenticity that's the the one thing about the storytelling it has to feel authentic politicians that like like that the the worst example of this is when politicians try to appeal to the kids by these talk tiktok videos and and and and and so when this stuff when they try and do this stuff is ina authentic it's beyond cringe just unbelievably oh it just makes you just wanna strip it up and die on the run of it feels like a simple trick but it isn't simple it's you've you've got to really really know how your audience sees the world you've got to understand their identity there that that the the the their perception of the story world who they heroes as i who live or how they talk how they think and if you get it even slightly wrong the whole thing is wrong so so it's actually not that easy i i would argue and yet if you get it right it can be incredibly effective when they've done psychological experiments trying to figure out what the most persuasive behavior change kind of models what they find is just simply expressing this is the thing that most people are doing most people are recycling most people are saving energy by using energy saving barrels light bulbs that the they they tend to be the most successful because you know you you kinda wanna fit in and and you wanna be the kind outlier like i've noticed around where i live on the on the side of the the trucks it says i can't i don't think there's even a number it says most people are recycling so yeah that that works really well we want to follow the actions of others we want to follow people like us this is why mimic creek can work joe berger in his two thousand and thirteen book contagious shares a real world campaign to cut binge drinking amongst students instead of public sizing the health implications of alcohol use or pointing out the horrific dangerous trouble that being blackout drunk can cause the university of arizona corinne johansson ran ads in a student paper that countered the widespread belief that binge drinking was the norm instead the researcher simply shared in the ads that most students only consume a couple of drinks when they're out and sixty nine percent of them have four drinks or less this message more than any other any mother message about the health benefits or anything like that this message cut binge drinking by nearly thirty percent you shouldn't tell students that drinking is bad you should tell them that sixty nine percent of other students only have four drinks or less it'll be far more persuasive especially if you're specific if you're using that specific detail it just feels real so it's i think that's know one of these sort of basic storytelling things where yeah specificity is really important and you know vague is always that the enemy of storytelling whether it's a marketing campaign or if it's a novel or a screen screen play you know that specificity is is crucial we follow others especially people like us that's why mimic works so well at persuading but this idea doesn't just influence what we buy or how much we drink it can determine who we pick as a leader yeah so so it's a so there's a kind of kind of a historic idea of what a leader is which is this distance powerful figure on the mountain top issuing demands and rewards depending on how good a player you've been or or not and and those leaders aren't so successful you know the most successful leaders are what they call pro so they are you know walking talking emblem of the ideal of the group and that they're very much at the center of the group rather than at the mountain top distant from the group and so so so so these are the most successful ceos and politicians that the the ones that thinking you know we rather than i and indeed when academics look at politicians speeches and see sit ceo speeches they find the most successful leaders are the ones that use we rather than i more when they're talking about the group in the group's future one twenty twenty analysis of election speeches in australia found that the winning candidates were far more likely to use the pronouns we and us in this analysis they found that the winners say we or us every seventy nine words on average and the losers said we or us every hundred and thirty six words on average and this was measured before the elections from the complete run so they were just using these words far more often and and they also got elected correlation or c correlation we're not sure but it seems like really good leaders just aren't too different from us they are one of us and wills got a great example of a leader who's just like this yeah and yeah it's so so i mean he's obviously just just passed away recently old pope francis but but he but he he was a great that was a really good example i thought because his predecessor wasn't pro you know benedict he was very divisive figure and then pope francis came along he named himself after francis cc who's sort sort of big thing was that poverty and humility and so quite funny that what you know what after he got made the pope one of the first things he did was shock horror who was staying in a hotel and he actually went downstairs by himself and paid the hotel bill but you know himself and and this was such an unusual thing that it made sort of headlines around the world especially in the catholic press barely pope for a day pope francis is already setting his papacy apart from the pump of his predecessor before delivering his first mass at the sis chapel on thursday he stopped by vatican hotel and paid his own bill he also picked up his luggage and personally thanked each member of the staff and people were praising him for this thing this amazing active humility that that he would do this and and so that that's you know that's a that that's being pro typical and then he you know he he he he enacted a lot of reforms there there was one particular guy in germany who's nickname was the bishop of bling who had who kind of you know kinda had an extraordinary spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars doing up his doing up his digs but like i i can't remember the the numbers but like a like a a ridiculously expensive toilet and ridiculous expensive fish tank and our collection and he fired him he fired the bishop of bling you know he's got rid of him so so so that's what i mean by being pretty difficult and and and as a result pro francis was far more popular than benedict it was you know he was packing out his massive that the in in vatican far more than benedict ever was so so that's what i mean you know that that is a successful leader you are you you you you are a walking talking ideal hero that represents the group that that that that's what you need to try to be for pope benedict two point three million catholics attended his papa events on average the first year of francis tenure saw this number surge to six point six million we like leaders when they appear to be just like us we will copy the actions of those we admire but we won't mimic people who we perceive to have low status will has personal experience of this when i was doing my promotion from my previous but the status game because in the america they say status you know and so so so i'd find often in podcasts i would be saying status they will be saying status and then there was they would start saying status as well sometimes but but other times if it was a really a high status podcast like sam harris or something like that they wouldn't change you know so you can see you know people are constantly wanting to adjust and it tends to be who's perceived to be the highest status person in the conversation you know we'll adjust so the so that that kind of stuff is constantly going on i mean there there there was one study which says that we was flashing images of people in kind of rich and poor clothing and it was something like a hundred and twenty nine milliseconds was enough for a person to to see that thing so you're barely consciously seeing it but or but but you are instantly making judgments about the status of that person not only how wealthy they are but also how competent they are which is you know which which is a much deeper on a judgment to make about somebody based on just their clothing will has an example of just how motivating status can be right after this break the hustle daily show is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals at the daily show is a fantastic show i the pleasure of watching the hustle daily show live at the last inbound conference in boston and i loved it the wonderful host share these really informative takes on business and tech but it's in a fairly laid back style it's really easy to listen to it's quite conversational i think it's fantastic they've recently done a fantastic episode on why tequila brands a failing and how you can turn greenhouse gases into butter both of those are excellent i really recommend you go and give that show a listen so go and listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcasts hello you were listening to nigel with me phil ag now here's a question for you say you were tasked with motivating doctors at a hospital to wash their hands how would you motivate them when i think about this question i'm inclined to think of things like financial incentives or perhaps penalties if you don't wash their hands that's probably what i'd go for just find the doctors if they don't wash their hands but will says that kind of thinking is a bit antiquated you know we we still have this very industrial revolution ear mindset that the way you motivate people is by throwing money at them and of course you know money's is essential it and people need to be paid a fair wage of course that that that hopefully goes to that saying but actually money isn't doesn't motivate us fundamentally i mean most of us listening to this podcast would have had a pay rise at some point in our lives and i and you know my experience is getting pay rights you're were delighted for at three days and you just sort of forget about it and and you yeah all fair enough i i i i deserved it and then you know and then that's it you know the so so so so so money motivates us in the short term but it's not a good motivator in the long term so how can you convince doctors to wash their hands well you can motivate them with status yeah so hospital was awfully struggle getting their medical staff to wash their hands properly and and and this is particularly important in icu use in intensive of care units that that then there's a particular rule that you've got to wash your hands after you enter and after you leave i don't know within thirty seconds or something like this but they had really stunning low percentage of compliance with this and she said they they tried all kinds of things to motivate people but what motivated people was it was was a very explicit status game so they they they put cameras up and then they had people watching the behavior of people and then the results were put in a big kind of led score that shows this shift has has achieved this much you know this this level of compliance and this team has has achieved this level of compliance and that and that and that's what solved the problem you know rates of compliance shot up because people getting competitive about it and we didn't wanna let the team down and wanted oh yeah we've we've you know we've beaten in the we've beaten in the morning shift yeah so it's so that's how it worked and nothing else worked but but but but making it a stay this game you know worked each time someone wash their hands their score would go up and they would receive an encouraging message such as great shift or keep it up immediately following this implementation the compliance rose by more than eighty percent over the course of the next seventy five weeks this is a long study compliance averaged eighty seven point nine percent which was up from just six percent it was averaging originally you can see the power of these these kinds of dynamics in social media of course all the time that's that's that's the story of social media kinda became huge when they when they found a way of turning twitter and facebook into status games you know facebook re took off after two thousand seven when they you know put the like button on there and and gave people a way of awarding and and and experiencing basic status rewards and mean that's that's how twitter works i mean twitter enormously successful because it twitter was really the master of the status again because because it wasn't just the light button it was also the blue boutique they invented you know re tweets follow accounts so twitter's is just this kind of machine for manufacturing status and gambling with status and that that's why twitter became so incredibly successful we're driven to again more and more status and yeah all too often we just like people who have status when somebody comes swag into the room the big i am sucking in all the attention it gets our backs up it's annoying you know and and and and and there's a you know of a a very common cultural you know rule in hunter gather groups forage groups in which people who do that are punished by the group wouldn't and i kept chatting he went on to explain why we dislike those with high status and how there are still some quite obvious exceptions he explained how some politicians and influences who who really flo their status are still able to garner such large following he also shared a study where charity fundraiser dramatically increased their donations simply by telling donors this is the last time we'll contact you i think that's a really interesting experiment i think it's got great applications for for wider marketing so if you want to learn about that study and learn more about status just go and listen to the bonus episode that will and i record it to get access all you have to do is click the link in today's show notes enter your email and you'll be taken straight to today's bonus episode it's hosted on youtube and there's a lovely video of both of us chatting on there as well if you're already on my email on these newsletter list thank you all you have to do is click the link in today's email and you'll find the bonus episode there otherwise if you can't find that link just click that link in the show notes drop in your email and you'd be taken straight to the bonus episode where will explains why telling someone that they can refuse might make them more likely to act that is all for today folks big big thank you to will for coming back on nudge he is a really fantastic guess his book a story as a deal is one of my favorite books of the year i highly recommend you read it i've left the link through it in the show notes if you'd like a copy thank you so much for listening today's show i hope you don't spend the next week mimicking everyone you see just to try persuade them but i also hope that when an a estate agent or a used car salesman starts mimicking you well you'll know why

in front of me i've got possibly the best known book on business psychology and behavioral science it's written by a nobel prize winner the late great daniel kahn this book many of you probably guess what it is it is fantastic it sparked really global interest in behavioral science it motivated hundreds of researchers authors and and even me to create this very podcast and yet just a few chapters into this seminal book you will find a chapter called the marvel of priming at thirty five points in this book kahn explains how effective priming is how this subtle tactic can influence how people walk how creative they are and even how guilty they feel when i first read about priming i was i was quite go these findings they sound so incredible i learned that just seeing the color green on a website can make people spend more i read that just looking at the apple logo can make someone more creative how thinking about a salad can make a cheesecake seem healthier these findings were incredible but they were also a bit hard to believe and that was for good reason shortly after releasing the book thinking fast and slow researcher at dorian failed to replicate one of the most prominent studies featured in kahn chapter on priming a follow up largest study by three researchers for the site replica index analyzed all twelve studies in kahn chapter on priming and found eleven were unreliable kahn himself quickly published an open email addressing the issues he wrote that while he was a general believer in the psychology of priming he feared it was a train wreck waiting to happen and he was right these original studies on priming have been widely disprove and yet today and yet today i think there's still a near endless number of marketing guru promoting it hi everyone it's jan here and in this video we will explore what is priming and how we can take advantage of it some videos like the following call priming the most powerful tool to influence anyone it only takes a small trigger a word a concept a sensory stimulus to suddenly influence our behavior at an unconscious level and some guru train their followers to use priming to manipulate others in this video i'm gonna explain how you can use psychological priming to manipulate other people priming remains an incredibly popular concept in business marketing and persuasion but i wanted to figure out if any of these principles actually work rather than relying on theoretical papers or lab based studies i wanted to run my own test with brits i got in touch with my friends at v pop me and we ran experiments on sixty random british people does priming actually work or is it pure myth find out in today's episode of nudge if you're in marketing sales or leadership and you're serious about staying ahead mark your calendar for inbound twenty twenty five happening september third to fifth at the moscow center in san francisco inbound is genuinely i think one of the best major marketing sales leadership events i went last year and i thought it was absolutely fantastic but this year looks even better the speaker lineup is genuinely world class they've got amy polar da o sean evans from the hot ones youtube channel i'm i'm big fan of that plus marquez brown glen and doyle dominic cr and mike benson the cmo of cbs an incredible lineup up and over three days you'll get evidence backed strategies for marketing the leadership and growth if it's delivered by people who shape the future of business and practitioners i know nancy har former guest or nudge you'll be there as well and if her talks is anything to go by this conference will have no fluff it it'll have no filler it'll just have insights that you can actually use to improve your work and it's in san francisco you got the tech scene as the backdrop it's the ideal place to explore how ai and behavioral science are reshaping the industry so if you want to be part of it if you wanna head along go to inbound dot com forward slash register to secure your spot to put priming to the test i got in touch with tom at v pop me fox pop me helps brands and agencies learn from customers using video surveys it's really an incredibly fast and easy way to ask thousands of people a question and get informative qualitative results so using v pop me i recruited sixty random and british people i tested five different priming principles on them and i recorded the results now i should caveat that this this test it isn't scientifically validated or peer reviewed i'm not a professional researcher but i am a suspicious behavioral science fan and i'm pretty desperate to put these primary studies to the test my studies aren't as robust as i could possibly make them they're not the same as what you would read in a scientific paper and yet that said i think you'll find the results fairly interesting i think you'll find it interesting to see how i've set up these studies and the sort of results i got back for the first part of my experiment i tested a nineteen ninety six study by bog shen and burrows this study was on priming and politeness they found in their paper that exposing participants to words about politeness words like respect honor and authenticity well these words if you were just exposed to them it would change participants behavior and perception when the participants heard those words in the introduction to the study they apparently waited significantly longer before interrupting the researcher see the researcher in this task would talk at length after the experiment was over at a time when the researchers knew the participant needed to leave however those who were primed to think about politeness who who were told these words like respect and honor and authenticity while they were apparently far less likely to interrupt the researcher and say i need to leave instead they calmly sat in the lab and waited while the researcher harp on those not primed stood up immediately apologized and they left much earlier this sounds like a fantastic study doesn't it if you want someone to be polite just prime them with polite words tell someone to be authentic and and perhaps they'll perceive themselves as more authentic so i wanted to put this to the test i couldn't replicate this study entirely as i'd be conducting all of my research online so rather than seeing if someone would interrupt me i asked sixty british people how accurately do you present your life on social media half in my control group saw just this question the other half were first primed with the following message before we move on i should mention that most people try to present themselves authentically even on social media where things are often curated if buying worked using that word using the word authentically should prime them to view their social media usages accurately portraying their life but did it well no not at all those primed with the word authentically actually said they were less authentic online they said they were nine percent less likely to present their life is extremely accurate on social media and ten percent more likely to say their social media usage is not very authentic you can see the full results to this study in the shown notes that one word it didn't change perception at all which goes against what bug chen and burrows found in that nineteen ninety six study on politeness but that is just one test it's hardly enough to debunk priming and honestly i really wasn't happy with that test it didn't closely match the nineteen ninety six study so i'm not sure how much you can take away from it the single word prime didn't make a difference but that's hardly conclusive so i wanted to test an even more surprising finding this finding suggests that looking at a brand logo can make you more creative researchers in a two thousand and eight study titled apple makes you think different subliminal primed people with either the apple logo a famously creative company or the ibm logo a famously at least according to the researchers a famously non creative company these logos were only displayed in their study for thirteen milliseconds so people weren't even consciously aware of being exposed to those logos however the people who were flashed the apple logo exhibited higher creativity than those who were exposed to the ibm logo to measure creativity they ask people to come up with as many novel uses for a brick as possible this is actually quite a normal way to measure creativity in these studies anyway apparently those primed with the apple logo came up with significantly more uses for bricks than nose primed with the ibm logo i think this is one of those studies that just sound a little fishy and it was a study that i felt i could replicate quite easily so for my test i showed twenty nine participants the ibm logo and another twenty nine the apple logo i asked them to keep that brand logo in their mind as well i showed them the logo for much longer than just a few minutes seconds too you i i kept it on screen for a while so you'd think it'd be even more effective at priming them i even told them to keep it in their mind for as long as possible after that i asked him to come up with as many uses for a brick that you can think of for example a brick could be used to build a house you've got thirty seconds sarah thirty seven from leicester year was shown the ibm logo and said this so a brick could be used to build a house a brick could be used as a step for exercising up and down on a brick could be used as a weight for exercising you can lift it up and down imo imaging twenty three from london was also showing the ibm logo and she said this a break could be used to yeah build a house build a building could help build a wall it could help break other objects and here's nigel thirty eight from red you can obviously use bricks to create garden paths you can use bricks to build a house you can use bricks to create a wall you can use bricks to create a fire pit sarah came up with fourteen uses imaging were four and nigel with nine now here are some of the participants primed with the apple logo you could create a fire pit you could use it to build a brick wall you could use it build a bad you could do it do a pathway that's danielle from har she came up with ten uses you could build a shed you could build a a house you could build dog shelter to animal shelter that's na thirty eight from west midlands he came up with six uses and here's richard forty from w a brick one wait question i so yeah i'd use it for a house i use it for brick walls like a fire pit in the in the garden in total richard came up with ten uses now i won't make you listen to all fifty eight respondents i will tally up the results for you those primed with the apple logo remember that's the logo that the researchers said would make people more creative they came up with a hundred and fifty eight uses for a brick in total averaging five point four five uses per person those primed with the ibm logo they're apparently non creative logo well they actually came up with two hundred and twenty nine uses for a brick in total so they averaged seven point nine uses per participant in my test those primed of the ibm logo actually came up with forty five percent more uses than those primed with the apple logo this result was statistically significant but it was the exact opposite of the fit simon two thousand and eight paper does it mean that ibm actually makes people more creative no of course not it just means that priming people of a logo is far too small of a factor to actually influence their creativity staring at a logo won't make you more or less creative just like saying one word like authentic won't change your perception but i wasn't done i wanted to test an even stranger priming study this one was conducted by gold kim show and da back in twenty twelve the study exposed participants to words relating to guilt words like guilty remorse and sin it found that those exposed to words about guilt were more likely to purchase candy due to a feeling of guilty pleasure again i struggled to believe it surely just thinking about guilt can't make people binge on fast food so i tested it i asked half of my participants to recall a time in their life where they felt guilty and another half to recall the time in their life where they felt happy i then ask both how likely they were to buy fast food today this was a quantitative question and the participants had to rank their likelihood of buy fast food on a five point scale so either very unlikely unlikely neutral likely very likely with those primed with guilt desire fast food more well yes sixty six percent of those who were told to think guilty thoughts said they were very likely or likely to buy fast food only fifty seven percent of those told to think about happy thoughts said they were very likely or likely to buy fast food however although the guilt primed group appears to be more likely to want fast food sixty six percent of be rather versus fifty seven percent this difference is not statistically significant the p value is zero point five seven three and that means the observed difference is is probably just due to pure chance not to priming we can't confidently say that guilt increases fast food desire more than happiness based on this data maybe if i'd done it with a much bigger group we would have seen something statistically significant but but this result is inconclusive and it's another example of me just not being able to replicate what these researchers in twenty twelve published so far we've seen that guilt priming doesn't seem to make people desire fast food more the apple logo won't make people more creative and the word authentic doesn't change participants perceptions it's a fairly damning indictment of priming at the moment but i had two more tests to run one covering priming and anchoring and the other covering perhaps the most controversial priming result of all time all of that after this quick break the hustle daily show is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals at the daily show shows is a fantastic show i the pleasure of watching the hustle daily show live at the last inbound conference in boston and i loved it the wonderful hosts share these really informative takes on business and tech but it's in a fairly laid back style it's really easy to listen to it's quite conversational i think it's fantastic they've recently done a fantastic episode on why tequila brands are failing and how you can turn greenhouse gases into butter both of those are excellent i really recommend you go and give that show a listen so go and listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back to listening to nigel with me phil ag today i'm trying to debunk perhaps psychology greatest myth priming we've had three results so far two of which proved the opposite of what the priming papers claimed and one that wasn't statistically significant but there's another aspect of priming i wanted to test in twenty eleven the researcher at c conducted a study that suggested priming can anchor a person's expectations in his study participants were asked to imagine a delicious cheesecake and then estimate calories in an organic salad others were asked to imagine an organic salad and then estimate the calories in a delicious cheesecake he found that those primed with the salad so who imagine the salad first they estimated lower calories for the cheesecake so keeping in mind a healthy salad makes you think a cheesecake isn't as unhealthy however those primed with the cheesecake estimated higher calories for the salads so keeping in mind an unhealthy cheesecake makes you think the salad might be slightly more unhealthy this is a combination of anchoring a relatively reliable nudge and priming which i think is a much less reliable nudge so i really wanted to test it this time i got a hundred and fifty two british participants and i split them into two groups both were asked to estimate the calories in an organic salad and the delicious cheesecake however half were asked to first estimate the cheesecake calories while the other half were asked to first estimate the salads calories would thinking about the salad first make the cheesecake seem healthier like the study suggested well no in my study those who gave the salad estimate first actually predicted that the cheesecake would have sixty more calories than those in the non primed group again priming didn't work i wasn't able to replicate this finding but what about the other group with those primed to think about a delicious cheesecake assume that a salad has more calories one there again in fact those primed with the cheesecake fought the salad had twenty one fewer calories priming it just doesn't seem to work for me in test after test i can't replicate any of these findings i know my studies aren't perfect i know my conditions aren't identical to the researchers but i'm not finding any of the effects that they shared in these famous studies but there is still one final test i wanted to run it is one of the first priming examples that kahn shares in his book and it's called the florida effect here's what kahn says about the effect in his book in an experiment that became an instant classic the psychologist john park and his collaborators asked students at new york university most age between eighteen and twenty two to assemble four word sentences from a set of five words for example find he it yellow instantly for one group of students half of the scrambled sentences contained words associated with the elderly such as florida forgetful bold gray or wrinkle when they completed that task the young participants were sent to do another experiment in the office down the hall that short walk the walk from the first experiment to the office down the hall that short walk was what the experiment was about the researchers un unexpectedly measured the time it took for people to get from one end of the corridor to the other as barr had predicted the young people who had fashioned a sentence from words with an elderly theme walked down the hallway significantly slower than the others it sounds incredible right just show people the words gray forgetful bold or wrinkle and they'll walk slowly what a fantastic finding if you run a retail store just write wrinkle in big letters over the racks of products and people will peru produce your store a little slower or will they to test it i asked sixty four brits to read out loud a set of words i asked half the brits to read out words associated with aging and decay forget bold right s faded s shaky slow brittle quiet and i asked a totally separate group to read out words relating to youth and energy playful loud bright tangled swift vivid daring clever brave operate the aging words were forgetful bold gray wrinkled s faded brittle quiet s pale shaky frail slow weather hollow old that is sixteen words with twenty six syllables the energetic youthful words were playful loud bright tangled swift vivid daring clever upright bold steady brave sharp glowing mellow new that list also had sixteen words with twenty six syllables both of the lists should take roughly the same amount of time to read out loud give or take a few seconds they both have the same amount of words in the same amount of syllables but i wanted to see if reading those aging frail words would make participants read significantly slower surely if it's proven to make people actually walk slower then it should also slow their reading speed so would those saying this forgetful full gray old spooked wrinkled faded quiet take any longer than no saying this steady brave glowing mellow sharp zwift well yes those who read the words about age and decay they did take two thirds of a second longer the agent decay group took seventeen point seven three seconds on average while the youthful and energetic group took seventeen point ten seconds on average but this isn't a win for priming that difference is far too small to be statistically significant it's less than a second it's clear that this method of priming doesn't work or at least it doesn't work to the extent at which the researchers in that original study claimed they claimed that just thinking about old words would make people walk significantly slower whereas i got people to actually read those words and it didn't change their reading speed to any significant degree and i'll be honest this shouldn't have surprised me because in january twenty twelve a study called behavioral priming its all in the mind but whose mind also debunked this effect they replicated the original florida effect study using a much larger sample size and failed to show any of the same results being primed did not make people walk slower i replicated five priming experiments with over a hundred different british people none of the experiments replicated the priming results priming people a word like authentic wasn't able to change their perception showing an apple logo didn't make brits more creative feelings of guilt didn't make participants more likely to buy fast food thoughts about salad didn't make a cheesecake seem healthier and reading words about old age didn't slow down the readers but my informal experiments shouldn't be what convince you hundreds of professional researchers have also failed to replicate these priming studies and it appears that priming is one of the least reliable principles in behavioral science and i'm not surprised these tiny subtle subliminal messages will rarely change behavior on a noticeable scale the world's most successful companies aren't just using tiny prime to persuade you because they know they don't work on mass instead they use reliable behavioral science stuff like loss aversion anchoring scarcity the ikea effect these principles have been proven to work not in a one off study but time and time again while priming hasn't it my tests weren't informal they weren't full foolproof and i'm sure many of you listening will pick holes in them but they did satisfy my curiosity for years i've read that a tiny prime could shift behavior i've read books like malcolm glad wells blink and genuinely believed that a green website might make americans spend more apparently because green is the color of money all of that is bogus and none of it should be used if you want to influence and persuade use reliable behavioral science principles and avoid anyone who tells you that they can manipulate others with just priming that is all for today folks i really hope you enjoyed today's episode i have been pretty desperate to test out some of these priming studies on real people so i'm glad i've finally been able to scratch that itch as you can imagine creating an episode like this takes an awful lot of time actually first came up with a concept for this episode back in march twenty twenty four it has taken a long time for me to get it done so if you enjoyed today's show and you'd like more just like this please do share this episode post it on social media email it to a friend or just talk about it at your next meeting sharing it however like really does help the show grow and it will help me create more episodes just like this big thank you to v pop me for running those video surveys for me with v pop me you can quickly run qualitative and quantitative research using video surveys and live interview solutions you can invite participants from their enormous panel for the video surveys and you'll see results within just a few hours it's a fantastic tool not just because it's really fast to get the actual research but they've also got amazing ai analysis tools that were very very useful for me when i was analyzing all those the verbatim results if you want to try box pop me just go and click on the link in the shane notes and if you want more from nudge please do go check out nudge on youtube there's much more content on there just such for nudge podcast on youtube and i'll pop up and if you haven't already please do subscribe to the nudge newsletter every week i spent around eighteen hours researching behavioral signs a lot of that is spent reading and then the rest of it is spent actually translating what i've read what i founded to the newsletter so i publish every friday in that newsletter you get the best tip that i found that week to subscribe go to nudge podcast dot com and click newsletter in the menu it is free to subscribe and you can unsubscribe at any time all of the results from today's experiments that i ran are in the show notes if you want to dig into the data you can find it there that is all for today i've been your host for like and i'll be back next week for another episode of nacho cheers

the glorious information in early nineteen eighty four apple released an ad which is widely regarded as one of the greatest advertisements ever made advertising age named it the greatest commercial of all time in nineteen ninety five tv guide ranked it as the number one greatest commercial of all time in nineteen ninety nine at it one the grand prix at the nineteen eighty four cans lines international advertising festival and was included in the cli award hall of fame in nineteen ninety five more importantly immediately following the ads airing apple report sold a record three point five million dollars worth of macintosh computers they couldn't keep up with the sales but today's guest on nudge says the ad success was a fairly shocking surprise because just the year before apple created a very similar ad that was a dramatic failure in nineteen eighty three apple created an ad of a hollywood director a celebrity movie star a beautiful aesthetic and yet it flopped in nineteen eighty four apple did the same thing with the same agency but created what today's guest says is one of the greatest kind of ants ever ever made so how did apple go from failure to success in just twelve months find out in today's episode of match if you're in marketing sales or leadership and you're serious about staying ahead mark your calendar for inbound twenty twenty five happening september third to fifth at the moscow center in san francisco inbound is genuinely i think one of the best major marketing sales leadership events i went last year and i thought it was absolutely fantastic but this year looks even better the speaker lineup is genuinely world class they've got amy poe da o shawn evans from the hot ones youtube channel i'm big fan of that plus marquez brown glen and doyle dominic cr and mike den the cmo of cbs an incredible lineup and over three days you'll get evidence backed strategies for marketing leadership and growth it's delivered by people who shape the future of business and practitioners i know nancy har former guest on you'll be there as well and if her talks anything to go by this conference will have no fluff it it'll have no filler it'll just have insights that you can actually use to improve your work and it's in san francisco you got the tech scene as the backdrop it's the ideal place to explore how ai and behavioral science are reshaping the industry so if you want to be part of it if you wanna head along go to inbound dot com forward slash register to secure your spot my guest on nudge today is an award winning author whose best selling books the science of storytelling selfie and the status game have earned wide a acclaim rory sutherland says today's guest is a genius and that his writing is so good he'd happily read one of his shopping lists my name is will store i'm a former journalist and author who has a specialist interest in the science of storytelling i spoken to all about his previous books on nudge before but i think his latest book is probably his best the new book is called a story is a deal and it's a look at the science of how people use storytelling heading to influence lead and persuade will start his book with the surprising story behind apple's famous ad i i was so slightly nervous about talking about apple in their book about business storytelling setting because everything about but then i i realized that not not was my apple was like not talking about shakespeare and book about conventional storytelling like there that so the steve jobs here of apple was like the greatest ever period of business storytelling it was you know he was he had a master instinct for this stuff and everybody i i suspect that the advert that you know about is nineteen eighty four because everybody knows that ad the first mac ad which was extraordinarily successful and you know what i didn't realize before i done my research was that it it also sold you know huge volumes of computers they they they could they couldn't supply you know enough computers to to fill the demand and this is when the macbook you know cost i think it was about seven and a half grand in today's maximum like that so extremely expensive but what i didn't realize and i think what i've would realized is that the year before that very famous nineteen four mac they also tried to do a business storytelling solution to sell the the the the four matt which was the lisa so kind of similar computer even more expensive than the mac but it's revolutionary you know a a a genuinely revolutionary device and that it was the first person computer to have a mouse windows expandable menus all the stuff that we take for granted these days in nineteen eighty three apple put together a bit demo to inform staff how impressive the lisa computer was that was a great presentation you made in there do know i put together that entire project including the presentation slides just this morning it's got your whole department working on it no i use my new lisa personal computer a personal computer at all of that that's right incredible the lisa computer is incredible in just a few moments that helped me adjust a schedule chart update an entire budget write a memo develop some graphics and create a distribution list and so they thought you know how how are we going to promote this thing well we're gonna tell the store where we're gonna do storytelling so they got there you know very flash at agency chart day they got hollywood director adrian lynn may so it's for flash dance to make a film with kevin ko and the film was called breakfast pepsi called breakfast and it's beautifully sharp thing you know the sun's coming up there's kevin costa right you know right his bike it he does feel very flash dance but there's lots of you from you you can he does a his computer work he's got a little job within him and then the phone rings there be just two kinds of people alright he tells us his wife he's gonna be back soon for breakfast thing i'll be home for breakfast and you know the idea being that that he these guys a super hard worker and and in order to be a super successful hard handsome worker you either you need a mac yeah know it was a total disaster that ad campaign nobody remembers it today it's completely lost at the in at the rabbit hole of history the other thing the you know the other ads for it were just big big ads in the new york times etcetera just listing or the there weren't even stories it was just listing or the benefits of the lease spreadsheet modeling charts and graphs list management text processing project management and presentation graphics and and then the next year they had this computer the mac didn't even really know what was gonna be yet because it had hadn't really finished inventing it when they when they launched this out at the super bowl but it was the same thing it was the same ad agency there's a hollywood director in this time ridley scott's to the story and and this very famous example it shows this kind of totalitarian hell scape the day celebrate the reversed this story barking hector kind of patriarch leader in in control these kind gray drone people and through the middle of this horrible so depressing scene comes this amazing empowered what multi multicultural you know woman in is sort of lovely apple top on with a hammer and she smash the hammer through the to the suit through the horrible totalitarian man on on january twenty four of apple computer will introduce mc macintosh and you'll see why nineteen eighty four won't be like nineteen eighty four on this ad was incredibly successful like just enormously successful like it was immediately what we would call today viral like the that that like the the evening after was broadcast new stations across america but we're making new stories about this incredible adverts and it's still considered one of the greatest kind of ads ever ever made and and and indeed you know what one expert that i read and quoted in the book and i agree with him it says it's didn't just redefine apple it redefined how we see personal computers into the silicon valley social media age you know we now see personal computers as this kind of individualistic creative thing that that that people use to make their own lives better you know in the book i asked was that you know what why did the one ad work and and not the other ad one of the fundamental things that they got wrong with breakfast was it wasn't telling a story it like it thought it was telling a story because it was by adrian and and had kevin costa and it doing some stuff but it if philip wasn't telling a story like you know one are the most fundamental properties of a story is that it's describes the overcoming of obstacle an obstacle pursuit of a goal like if you don't have a character or characters overcoming an obstacle pursuit of a goal you don't have a store you just have i don't know an event like you know all something a scene so so you know with without there's other there's no drama there's no motion there's nothing sticking in your head there's no no one to care about it was just a man on the phone telling his wife is gonna come home from breakfast you know it was rubbish so so that's the most fundamental thing but but but also there there was nothing for people to identify with they they thought by giving him a dog that that's actually what they thought i found this interview with with the guy made way by giving him a dog you were gonna identify because people like people with dogs which this is it's crazy but but the the but but the the the nineteen ninety four ad really did strike a chord with people at the time so so and to understand quite how you gotta go back to the nineteen eighties and people this is the year in which silicon valley wasn't the home of these kind of like flashy domestic products like facebook and google and apple and all these you know might you know michael microsoft isn't silicon value is it but you know linkedin all these other silicon valley companies it was it was the home of the military industrial complex so people were scared of computers in that they thought that computers were going to be something that we're gonna might maybe take over the world one day or it leaders in leaders in genuinely genuinely into a totalitarian future this was been before the berlin wall come down people were still scared of but the communist menace what you know a huge shield would been two thousand and one of space obviously which showed a computer taken it over spaceship in killing everybody onboard it the year before the ad there's been war games a massive hollywood blockbuster which showed a big mainframe computer almost starting world war three with soviet union and just destroying the world so that's what we will thought about computers and so apple was saying in that story we see your concerns we reflect your concerns but without you know if you put your support behind the apple it's not gonna be like that it's gonna be freedom and creativity and individuality and progress so it was a it was a really powerful set of ideas that they were directly tapping into and i think that that you know that those are the two reasons i think why it was so successful one is that it was actually a story and two it was a story that people could strongly identify with stories dramatically change our perception they don't just change how we view ads and products that they change how we view are in two thousand and thirteen several researchers asked a hundred and twenty participants to view paintings by cub artists like pablo picasso george bra and fern leisure first the researchers recorded people's reactions to the paintings alone and the first reactions well it weren't great cub paintings don't exactly grip the average person but then the scientists included the back stories behind each of the paintings meanings and brief histories of the paintings and brief histories of the painters themselves with these back stories the audience ratings improved dramatically these abstract works suddenly took on meaning in his book hit makers derek thompson writes that suddenly learning this story behind the piece made the viewers enjoy the art more and stories won't just alter our enjoyment but they can also alter our purchases in two thousand and nine researchers rob walker and joshua glen created the significant objects project an experiment that aimed to quantify the impact of storytelling for everyday items the researchers purchased inexpensive items from thrift stores and garage sales spending a total of a hundred and twenty eight dollars next they commissioned professional writers to create fictional stories about each object these items along with their stories were listed on ebay but i should say the ebay listing clearly said that the stories were fictional despite that the products gained an extraordinary demand they sold the objects for a combined total of three thousand six hundred and twelve dollars of profit of almost three and a half grand a ceramic horse purchased for just ninety nine cents sold for sixty two dollars after being paired with a compelling story about its past a pink plastic horse bought for one dollar sold for a hundred and four dollars when accompanied with an interesting backstory we have or behavioral scientists school a story bias a bias for objects paintings and ads that have a compelling story behind them but why why do we have this story bias this is kind of really the fundamental idea that drives the the whole book really in and in a nutshell if i can quickly talk talk through the entire history of life on earth if if you trace your if you trace your family tree back three point eight billion years you're gonna find this a single cell back bacteria like single cell bacteria is the the earliest form of life on earth it's it's you know it's where we all come from and a single cell bacteria is is this little machine for overcoming obstacles in pursuit of goals it's what that's what it does and it's very good at doing that but it's but it's behavior it's kind of if it's reflective so it's algorithm it's very rigid you know it's basically if the conditions outside my cell are x i'm going to do y you know if they're a i'm gonna do b so it's so you know that that that that that that can be very effective but the problem with that is that it's just not very good for coping with environments that are unpredictable and of course most environments are unpredictable so then hundreds of millions years your years after coming up with this reflex technology even if it comes up with the new technology to help living organisms overcome obstacles pursuit of goals and that new technology is the feeling emotion system you know feelings and emotions and so feelings feelings are amazing because they don't instruct their owner what to do they just advise their owner what to do if you're if you're a mouse in an alley way and you know there's someone's left half a great sausage job across the alley way your your your feeling of hunger it's gonna draw you towards the sort of role but then see a cat or you know on on a roof staring at you and then you've got a new which is fear and so you know by measuring those emotions fear versus hunger you can make a decision you're not slave to your kind of algorithm so you know incredibly successful technology obviously the feeding emotion system you know animals have this and you know insects to to some limited degree have this although insects are also quite algorithm and then between fifty and a hundred thousand years ago evo evolution comes up with a brand new technology to facilitate the overcoming sort of schools in pursuit of goals and that story and you know humans remain the only animal to have the ability to use storytelling and it's really the secret of our success you know he humans we're one of five existing species of great eight but we're obviously different to our other are our relatives and the difference is that we are we've become part a part ant that with that we're that that we overcome the obstacles in pursuit of goals partly like eight are partly in the form of ant like super organisms and what i be my super organism is the organism itself is that is the thing that solves problems and deals the problems and it's made up of you know numerous humans and each human is playing its individual role knows what no knows what it has to do in order to help the super organism win by super organism will means humans can group together in what he calls his super organism to accomplish that wouldn't be possible if we were just working alone we create these super through stories he writes that the core function of storytelling is to create a sense of a shared reality storytelling acts as a brain fusing device aligning individuals towards common goals and creating a unified understanding within groups and that's all of human life that's a that's a that's a company that's a political party that's a cold that's a religion that's a football team that's what we do as humans you know we solve the problems of existence cooperative we we we would die in days if we were the only person left on earth because we wouldn't be able to support ourselves research by the amp anthropologists doctor polly vest shows that stories are distinctly important to humans she spent her time with the yuan bush of the ka desert one of the oldest continuous cultures on earth with genetic lineages going back over a hundred thousand years the group is almost entirely isolated spanning namibia and botswana and it remains fairly disconnected from modern society in her studies poly found that each night around the campfire fire eighty one percent of the time was spent telling often highly entertaining stories about fellow tribe members she writes how the listeners are stunned with suspense rolling with laughter close to tears and emotions are synchronized because everybody is relating to one story stories are a fundamental part of human civilization how does that how how does that work how do you get you know all of our ant to ant all of our ape ancestors pursue other solve their problems as individuals so so how does how does how how do you get individual great eight brains to fuse together to come together and all work together in in the form of this super organism and the answer is with story that's what story does a story and of takes over your mind it tells you a a a a story about tomorrow you know the the thing that we're trying to achieve it tells you how we're gonna get there what you've got to do to achieve it and it tells you who you've got to be in order to achieve that thing so so that's what story it is is a device for fusing lots and lots of human brains together in order that we you know achieve goals i mean what one of the nice fundamental ways of thinking about this is that there's a very famous biologist steve bro got michael tomas marcelo who once wrote that it's impossible to imagine two chimpanzees picking up a log together and carrying it to another place in order to build something you know even that basic level of corporation would never happen with the chimpanzee our close is relative whereas of that's very basic to humans but in order to do that you gotta tell a story about the future hey dude if we pick up this log and we get a few logs to we chuck over there we can never i make a nice like base for a camp you know like or whatever it might be you know that that's a story about the future so so you so that's that's that that that's that's how it works and and as i said in the book you can feel that happening whenever you go to the cinema when you go to the cinema you know two hundred individuals we will sit down in front of the screen and then if the film is any good for the ninety minutes to hours of the film their consciousness vanish vanishing of their own life and they all experience the consciousness of the film of the story and and and experience the ups and downs and fortunes and mis fortunes of the character on the screen so they becomes as one in the in that in that cinema and that story you know working as it's supposed to that that that's what it's supposed to do is it takes over our brains and replaces our individual consciousness with the group consciousness and you know that's how a religion works that's how our cult works that's our dual party works it you know we we we absorb the story of the group and you know become a member of that group that's sort of existing at the center of its story apple's nineteen eighty four ad is largely considered the greatest add of all time their nineteen eighty three ad is almost entirely forgotten both had hollywood directors both had a huge production cost and both had prominent ad placements but it was the story that made the difference stories bind us together they are fundamental to our humanity they make us spend more on random ebay items and appreciate picasso more as well but that's not all after the break will shares how stories convinced brazilians to donate it their organs and i'll run a quick experiment to test the story bias on you all of that coming up the hustle daily show is brought to you by the spot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals at the daily show is a fantastic show i have the pleasure of watching the hustle daily show live at the last inbound conference in boston and i loved it the wonderful hosts shed really informative takes on business and tech but it's in a fairly laid back style it's really easy to listen to it's quite conversational i think it's fantastic they've recently done a fantastic episode on white tequila brands a failing and how you can turn greenhouse gases into butter both of those are excellent i really recommend you go and give that show a listen so go and listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me phil ag we've heard how stories help us collaborate encourage us to spend more and appreciate art more but stories also help us remember apple's nineteen eighty four ad is more memorable than its nineteen eighty three ad because it had a clear storyline to try and prove this i'm gonna run an experiment on you this experiment was first documented by the psychologist john bradford and marseille johnson and it involves memory i will read a passage and you must try and remember as much of the passage as possible don't take any notes just try to keep as much of the information as possible in your mind okay here we go the procedure is actually quite simple first arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup depending on how you've created one pile may be all there is to do if you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step otherwise you're pretty well set it is important not to overdo any particular endeavor that is it is better to do few things at once rather than too many in the short run this may not seem important but complications from doing too many can easily arise a mistake can be expensive as well the manipulation of the appropriate mechanisms should be self explanatory and we need not dwell on that here at first the whole procedure will seem complicated however soon it will become just another facet of life it is difficult to see any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future but then one can never tell the two researchers shared this deliberately ambiguous passage with dozens of participants who were asked to each remember as much of the passage as possible they found that very few of the participants remembered more than one or two of the sentences what can you remember have i think can you remember any of the steps can you remember any of the lines i said off by heart probably not the researchers then shared the same passage of another group but gave them a storyline they said this passage describes the process of washing clothes they then read the passage the procedure is actually quite simple first you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup depending on what you've created one pile may be all there is to do if you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step of otherwise you are pretty well set and so on now the participant comprehension and recall improved significantly they remembered most of the steps having that backstory helped the participants remember something that beforehand was entirely abstract just like the two apple ads the story helps the passage stick in the mind stories make things more memorable but they also persuade people to take actions that may seem extreme at first i asked will to share an example from brazil where football fans were persuaded to carry organ donor cards and and that example you mentioned sports club received you know anyone that would like a a brazilian football team very passionate set of supporters and the the task was to increase organ donations so you heart's kidneys eyeballs that kind of thing and so they this sort mad advertising campaign that that that was basically saying if you you know get get one of that's simon one of our organ donation cards which is you know em with the the colors of sports club receive you will help a sports club receive fans see you know bit be a fan even after you die your heart is gonna go on beating even after you die in the body of a sports fan your eyes are gonna help another sports cut sub firm watch their team even after you die the ad is kind of bizarre you have one man who's in need of an eye transplant promising fans that their eyes will keep on watching sport club receive a younger man says your lungs will keep breathing for the club and this woman who needs a heart transplant says your heart will forever ever beat for sports club receive and it was just incredibly successful i mean that that you know that like yeah we it would just know everybody wanted this card organizations of figures went through the roof say you know it's it it saved lives it it it transformed lives and and and and yeah it's just to it's a pure appeal identity in the year following the campaigns launch fifty one thousand cards were distributed and organ donations rose by fifty four percent for the first time in history the waiting list for both heart and corn transplants fell to zero fernando fig the director of heart transplants at the institute of integrated medicine told the bbc we used to perform five or seven heart transplants a year but last year we achieved twenty eight it was an incredible increase the persuasion attempt work so well because it connected people with a shared identity even if it was achieved in a fairly bizarre way i know i did say in the book is a weird is a weird idea it's really odd like is it's really creepy but but the thing is it worked i you know it was it was hugely successful stories bind us together stories about our favorite football teams might encourage us to donate our lungs stories about washing up procedures boost our recall stories about picasso makes staring at his artwork work more enjoyable stories even fake ones about everyday objects make themself a more on ebay and it was a story a good story that turned apple's nineteen eighty four ad into one of the greatest of all time that is all for today folks a big big thank you for world for coming back on now she's a fantastic guest and i think he's an even better offer his book a story is a deal is absolutely brilliant i've left a link to it in the show notes if you would like a copy but will and i didn't finish our discussion there in fact we did go on to record a bonus episode on the bonus episode will told me about a study where charity fund dramatically increase their donations by simply telling donors this is the last time we'll contact you to learn why that is it's really genuinely quite interesting and to hear how you could apply that at your company or as a marketer just go and listen to the bonus episode to get access just click the link in the show notes you have to enter your email but then you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode it's on youtube you'll be able to see a video both of us as well if you are already on my email newsletter list and just click the link in today's email you'll find the bonus episode there otherwise just click the link in the show notes drop your email in and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode and will will explain why telling someone that they can refuse something might make them more likely to act that is all for now i do hope you go and tune into that bonus episode and i'll see the rest of you next monday cheers