Nudge

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

instagram is easily one of the most successful apps in history it was only six and a half years ago that kevin and mike launched instagram last week the platform crossed seven hundred million active monthly users theirs is a familiar startup success story two smart guys get together with an idea and and end up changing the world it makes billions of dollars in ad revenue each month total revenue for twenty eighteen was fifty five point eight billion dollars it has fundamentally changed the way millions of people behave lavender feels like this have boomed recently a big part of it is because of social media people come from all over the world best what's the the the number one thing you want to do in the lavender field today take a follow yes but of course take a order and for us it on a deal day without one start with the upset and it keeps billions of us hooked on our phones to instagram marking a new milestone two billion active monthly users but it wasn't always this way instagram founder kevin sis didn't find immediate success his original idea was a check app inspired by four square called bourbon bourbon was a checking app that led people you know share their location but also allowed you to post videos and photos you probably haven't heard of bourbon because hardly anyone used it kevin s was ready to abandon the app until he attended bj fox stanford persuasive technology lab bj folk is a stanford university professor is also the founder day of the behavioral lab that's bass he's an expert in the field of persuasion and behavioral design i am author of the book online influence and i'm also the c founder and ceo of geraldine institute ba has written extensively about bj fox model and its influence on instagram one of the two founders was actually a student of him and they previously built a similar app but it worked differently it wasn't a big success and then be a fox start helping coaching them and then it became well quite of a success right if you sell it for within a year for a billion dollars to that time facebook fog taught sis his model for human behavior this model enables sis to redesign bourbon into a much more addictive product the model that bj fog taught is surprisingly simple bj fog is known to be able to make very complicated behavioral science easy to explain and his behavior for behavioral model shows there are three components that make behavior occur and the first one we probably are all aware of that's motivation so if i ask you something phil how much you want to do it humans only take action if there is sufficient motivation initially be was cluttered with features users could check in at a location share a plan with friends upload photos and also earn points it sounds okay but most users were not motivated to share their plans or share their location motivation was low so action didn't occur at the stanford persuasive technology lab sis drum land that humans are highly motivated by social approval it's so built features that there other users like and comment on photos but motivation alone usually isn't enough the second component and that's it for me the most interesting one actually is ability how easy it is to do what has been asked the original app bourbon was cumbersome and as we've heard overloaded with features it was difficult to use so ability was low fog taught sis to simplify the app around just photo sharing they stripped away everything else and boosted ability by adding easy to use photo filters this increased motivation and ability but there was one more important component to consider and then he draws an action line and the third component is a prompt and a prompt is something that asked for the behavior bj four claims a human being doesn't do anything automatically so he says well this a glass that prompts you to drink water from it your alarm clock prompts you to wake up but also thoughts are prompting us sis built lots of prompts into the app stuff like notifications whenever a friend likes or comments on your photo but the prompt that truly propelled instagram to success wasn't external it was intrinsic when users experienced something noteworthy in their life they felt an internal prompt to use the app go on holiday well share out on instagram enjoy ice meal well post it on instagram sea sunset well added to your instagram feed this intrinsic prompt combined with high motivation and easy ability made instagram far far more successful than its predecessor bourbon however instagram original success back in twenty ten came from the ability side of the fog equation they made sharing cool looking photos with nice filters easier than ever making a behavior even one with low motivation incredibly easy to do can be a very powerful way to promote behavior if we don't really want to do it but it's super easy the ability is high motivation low we also do it i always give an example when i was a student i had to go by train to the university and i make always a slight joke i was a pretty lazy student so i like to sleep in the train and not and to read but every morning they were handing out a physical newspaper i'm an old man back then we still have physical newspapers and they've almost shoved it in your hands so it was harder to refuse the newspaper than just to take it so every morning i ended up having a newspaper in my end in the trade what i do i start reading the newspaper most people probably don't want to spend hours scrolling instagram but the endless scroll in algorithm content makes it incredibly easy instagram success it wasn't random they closely followed the bj fog behavior model to create an app that was easy to use motivated users to engage and had powerful prompts to keep people coming back all of us can use these same principles to improve our work we can use them to make people buy our product encourage someone to use our service or simply persuade someone we know to take action today on nudge bass and i will show you how 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 shawn 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 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 or nigel will be there as well and if her talks anything to go by this conference will have no fluff it'll will 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 bj fog behavior model states that most people need sufficient motivation ability and a prompt to take action the prompt is probably the most interesting component of the free because it's something that we as marketers or or behavioral scientists well we can design the prompts i can prompt you to sign up to my newsletter while you listen you might not do it of course but i can create that prompt of course i can try and increase your motivation and ability but that's much harder than creating a prompt the prompt will have the highest chance of anything i can do to persuade you so prompts are important that's what we're gonna focus on today but what exactly is a prompt and how is it different from a message i asked bass and i like to give this example so imagine you're driving on the highway and you see a billboard let's say from mcdonald's but there's no exit where what you can take right away to buy a burger well now you have a message mcdonald's is telling you we have lovely burgers a prompt ask you to do behavior now what is a prompt if you thriving on the highway you see that billboard but now the message is take the net next exit to visit our restaurant and combine a burger bass told me that to apply fog behavior model to your business you need to think carefully about what you want your customers to do you don't just need to think about the general behavior you want but also what he calls micro behaviors if you want people to do something simple as download an ebook what are the micro behaviors probably somebody needs to click on an ad the next step they have to reach your header on your landing page then they have to fill in the form then they have to give consent with the privacy button and then they have to press the button download the ebook so something simple as downloading an ebook already contains five micro behaviors and then what we teach per micro behavior you should look at how can you design the winning prompt increase ability and boost motivation instagram didn't become successful by purely thinking about the fog model they applied it to every part of their app from logging in to liking a photo take liking a photo instagram increased ability by making liking incredibly easy to do you just have to double tap you don't even have to find a button anymore just press on the photo twice instagram from prompts users by showing them that many other friends like them have also liked that photo that makes them more likely to like it too and instagram increases your motivation by telling you that a friend has already liked your photo making you feel that you need to reciprocate it's a micro behavior but instagram has ensured sufficient motivation ability and the right prompt to encourage likes on photos but how do we apply this how can we create a good prompt we first of all need to use simple language as little words as possible make it visual we can process images much quicker than words and use emotions make it happy important dangerous exciting and the next step is we need to grab the attention you can do that like movement motion or salient use emotions and then comes the real magic so let's say people really con they perceive our ads we have their attention now we need something that we call stopping power and it sounds like a fancy term but it's literally what it's says we need people to stop doing what they are doing for example back they are scrolling to instagram to that timeline now we they need to stop doing that click on our ad and continue the journey that we designed for them for the remainder of today's episode bass will teach you his four principles to create stopping power these four principles are each supported by reliable behavioral science and they will help your ad or your landing page your website your email or your social based whatever prompts you're creating these four things will help you stand out amongst the thousands of other prompts your customers will see each day the four principles are curiosity exceptional benefit simple question and unfinished journey let's start with an example a public park in stockholm had a problem with litter swedes weren't bin their trash and the council was spending thousands on additional bin man ba says that using a curiosity inspired prompt helped change that behavior it was done in sweden by volkswagen fun theory project what they studied was an average trash can how many pounds of leather it collects and there was sixty five pounds now they made a trash scan the world's deepest trash can and when you throw something in it also had a sound like it wasn't super deep but i created that feeling the fun thing is it attracts curiosity wow is this the world's deepest trash gap so people on purpose start throwing in more later well the outcome was instead of sixty five on average this trash scan collected hunger fifty pounds of letter so it's approximately almost fifty percent more more bad for one message on your trash cab now you don't need to build the world's deepest bin to use the curiosity bias and a fun thing about curiosity is basically every message you can reframe in a curiosity way to make people more curious and i have one example where we did a test and it was for a blog site and the header was the way of working is changing drastically oh it's a fine header you would say when we changed it to this is what work will look like in the future the amount of clicks increased with home eighty percent and maybe the list is now thinking what why that triggers us my curiosity well let me give them a tip how can you reframe basically any message in a simple way to make people more curious so you can use a how title how to improve your design skills in one day all the surprising statistics you only use five percent of your brain a wide title why all people should learn behavioral psychology the fourth one use the word dis at the beginning of your sentence and that's exactly what we did this is what work will look like in the future and the last step is lists it drives curiosity five ways to stand out three ways to right away increase your conversions well these types of framing let people move forward and that's what curiosity does when we are curious we move forward to satisfy that curiosity how titles why titles surprising statistics and lists all of these tactics help inspire curiosity but the one i was most interested in is ba own tests tweaking his title to this is what work will look like in the future that tweak drove a hundred and eighty percent more clicks than the control that is remarkable the word this well it makes the title seem specific and concrete it suggests that there's a clear visible answer waiting if you just click on the article i hear this is what work will look like and i really can't resist the urge to learn what this is so inspired i wanted to test this myself i wrote a newsletter about the effect a publisher one a few weeks back many of you on my newsletter list will have received it and to test bass effect i wrote two subject lines my control was a pointless change that boosts sales by ten percent it's good i liked it but bass thought i could do better so i created a variance which changed just one word this pointless change boosted sales by ten percent the newsletter was sent to two thousand seven hundred and sixty four people with each half receiving one of the two subject lines i honestly wasn't sure it would work i didn't think there would be a real difference i was only changing one word and it was a fairly unimportant word i changed the word a for the word this and yet this tiny change did work the email with the subject line this pointless change boosted sales by ten percent had a four point five percent higher open rate a four point five percent improvement from changing just one word curiosity it does seem to work but what about bass following prompt principle exceptional benefits an exceptional benefit is something that you normally cannot get anywhere else so it could be a huge discount and that's often what people think this also has a little bit to do of course with scarcity if something is exceptional knowledge it's unique or it's not common it becomes scarce and there's a lot of value to gauge so it works on boats and lots of value and i cannot get it anywhere else for example let's think of an example well netflix netflix could say you get a free trial they also could say watch unlimited book blockbuster for free for an entire month now it's the same thing they offer but by the framing of it it feels like a much more exceptional benefit the most persuasive exceptional benefit i've encountered is beer fifty two beer fifty two is the uk's most popular craft beer club it's the most popular but it's not necessarily widely loved search for b fifty two one youtube in the top videos you'll see a titled not happy with b fifty two and b fifty two rant so how did this widely disliked beer subscription become so popular well they offer every new customer an exceptional benefit now this is their free trial that i'm doing that was beer monster he is a beer reviewer well i believe you get eight craft beers and two snacks a free trial although they say it's free is technically free but you do have to pay for the postage which is six pound ninety five so it's less than a quid a beer in it really it's not bad a free case of beer is a pretty exceptional benefit it has encouraged over two hundred thousand people to sign up but the exceptional benefit comes with a catch after the free trial is over it's twenty four pounds a month though it seems quite a lot to me and canceling is hard you have to fill out an online form and then actually call their customer service team while their their phone lines are open go for a number of different questions and then finally you can only cancel over the phone after talking to them for about ten minutes yet this exceptional benefit has propelled be a fifty two's grave despite the poor reviews it's the largest company of its kind were fifty million in yearly revenue exceptional benefits and curiosity are two principles that companies use to create irresistible prompts but there are two more that bass share after this short break the hustle daily show is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the daily show is a fantastic show i the pleasure of watching the hassle 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 you are listening to nudge with me phil ag i hope you are enjoying today's show or perhaps i should say are you enjoying today's show a simple question like that might prompt you to take action here's ba to explain the power of simple questions so a simple question technique every child in every culture all around the world is started a certain thing if an adult ask you a question what do you need to do as a child you need to answer that question so ask something simple and simple question wants people to answer that question it's also a presentation technique sure keynote speaker and people are a little bit talking to each other you just throw a question in that area and they are suddenly paying attention simple questions aren't just used for capturing attention during a presentation they can be used online as well what my cohort yours did and he won the first cro award with this case in the netherlands was for bull dot com and bo dot com is basically the dutch amazon they do think approximately eight billion dollars in revenue here and like any other webs shop they wanted to collect reviews for their product so in one case was you bought something you get an automated meal do you want to leave a review button right review then they changed that email and they started with a simple question and the question was how did you like it and then they gave three answers better than expected as expected not as expected and this is an important element in the simple question if you ask a simple question make it also simple to answer anyhow they changed it and then something interesting happened there were two hundred percent more clicks to the actual survey of the review asking a simple question so how did you find ordering with bo well that simple question increased clicks on their surveys by two times but that wasn't an all so in the end they collected four hundred percent more reviews because also more people finished the survey four times as many people left a review compared to the control this is the the foot in the door technique ask a simple question that's easy to answer first before making a a larger request rather than trying to sell a package holiday to someone as soon as they click on your website you should first ask what does your ideal holiday look like marvel than immediately trying to sell a new smartphone when someone walks into your store a sale assistant should ask what features are you looking for on a smartphone these simple questions can increase the likelihood that people will eventually take action organic was a russian scientist and she proved that we don't like unfinished things while sitting in a cafe in vienna z noticed that waiters remembered complex orders very accurately but forgot them as soon as the orders were completed intrigued she ran studies in her experiments she gave participants a series of simple tasks such as solving puzzles or string beads for some of the tasks she allowed participants to finish them but for others she deliberately interrupted them before they could complete the task later she tested the participant memory of the task so you know what was your calculation for the puzzle or how many beads had do strong at this point the results showed that people were about twice as likely to accurately remember the interrupted tasks compared to the completed tasks this is interesting because they spent more time on the completed tasks than the interrupted ones this is why ba calls the principle the unfinished journey principle bass has a great example of an online company that uses this principle for example ab airbnb if you book something you had your holiday so you think well it's finished they prompt you in a way well one last thing to complete your holiday write something about the house all about your host and they prompt you with a z iconic fact and they use curiosity often them because if the host writes a review first then they also prompt you find out what a whole said about you airbnb don't say please write your review they say one last step to complete your holiday that feeling of an unfinished journey prompts the holiday go to take action another example that i could give let's say people opt in for a webinar they gave you the email you also want their phone number you could suggest well your last step to have the best way of communicating or stay up to date filling your phone number here we tested this actually this case and we saw a huge increase to other prompts because it was simply suggested it belongs to what you already did but this is the last step and otherwise you didn't complete the journey so don't ask for someone's phone number after they've signed up for your webinar instead ask them as part of the signing up process curiosity exceptional benefits simple questions and an unfinished journey can all help create prompts that make people stop and consider them rather than being ignored these prompts stand out in our minds and they force us to pay attention they can help you successfully apply bj fox behavior model that can ensure you create the right motivation offer the right ability and deliver the right prompt to drive behavior following these steps closely could transform your business i won't guarantee it'll help you create a billion dollar photo sharing app but it will prevent you from creating a cumbersome overloaded product like bourbon that is all for this week folks thank you so much for listening and thank you to the wonderful bass walters coming back on the show if you'd like to learn more from bass and get many more tips on how to improve your website you can sign up for his brilliant online influencer academy i'm part of the online influencer academy it's a great place to learn about behavioral science and how to apply it to websites for on the online influence academy you'll find lessons that teach you how to boost motivation designer a winning prompt and increase ability there's a community forum a great weekly q and a you get to learn a lot from bass and ask him any questions you have and so if you're interested in signing up go and click the link in the show notes just click that link and you'll be able to sign up immediately that way as well you can tell bass that i've sent you and that'll help the podcast out too so if you are interested in signing up make sure to click that link in the show notes that is all folks i'll be back next monday for another episode of nudge thank you so much for listening cheers

i gave a marketing expert one hour to create an unforgettable ad i showed his ad to thirty brits and measured exactly how memorable it was does his marketing advice work or is it a waste of time all of that coming up 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 poe da o sean evans from the hot ones youtube channel i'm i'm big fan of that plus marquez brown glenn 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 it's delivered by people who shape the future of business and practitioners i know nancy har former guest on nudge will be there as well and if her talks is anything to go by this conference will have no fluff 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 today on nudge ivan by today genuine marketing expert back on the show it is louie gran now louie many of you all know from previous podcast episode appearances but if you need a reminder louie is a no nonsense marketing expert who ran one of my favorite podcasts everyone hates marketers and he also runs the brilliant newsletter s t f o for those of you who know louie who have heard him before you won't be surprised to hear that this episode contains some explicit language right from the start and this allows me to tell you that louie has also written a fantastic book it is titled stand the fuck out many of you reached out to say you loved louise last appearance on nudge that was back on april fourteenth that episode was very different from a typical episode of nudge usually i neatly edit the show into a a very coherent narrative i record my own script but instead in this show louis and i just recorded a fairly una edited conversation and put that up so for today's episode we've done a bit of a mixture of the both a bit of una editing conversation and a bit more of the sort of coherent narrative stuff and at the end of the show i do put louis on the spot i do ask him to create an ad in an hour and i test his expert advice and see if it really works but to start with i asked him if it really is necessary for marketing teams and companies to differentiate or die okay let's shift gears let's talk about differentiation the famous marketing saying about differentiation is to differentiate or die do you believe that no and that's not just because of needs again that's the wrong thing to say let's kind of try to break it down why first of all the term differentiate and differentiation i think we need to be very pedantic and in all about the terms that we use differentiation is not the same as distinctive for example two the two of them are needed the bigger brand the less differentiation they i have in fact the bigger brand the more they have no differentiation left and the only lever they can pull is distinctive and reach i'm i'm making that that distinction because it's incredibly important and that's how i've understood the concept of standing out in way better light so differentiation is the ability to say we are the only one in that category that offers those things that solve those struggles that alternatives can't solve very well or not at all for that particular group of people and your essentially giving people a compelling reason to pick you compared to direct competitors or direct competitors there is a distinction to be made between differentiation for the sake of it where you say you're different but it doesn't matter because you're not solving struggles that matter to people and actually meaningfully differentiation which is the true form of differentiation where you offer something that is solving struggles that others are are not doing and so that's a generous act and that's the true sense of differentiation so to go back to what you're saying no you don't have it's not differentiated or die because we have coca cola and mcdonald's those are evidence that they're not differentiated and yet they are the biggest in there in that category yet they don't offer anything of true value that others are not offering mh yeah a good bit of advice because i think it's easy to fall into the trap of just assuming that we just have to be different in order to gain our sales and stand out but it is more nuanced than that one of the well one of the things you talk about in your book is how what seth go go and taught you about differentiation in one of your sort of first interviews on your podcast you interviewed him and he you asked him a question and he told you you're asking that exactly the wrong way i love this story could you share with listeners that was eight years ago man you were still in in your diapers you're seeing nap piece mh while i was podcasting so yep you owe me so much so i had cigarette on and instead of saying hi seth how are you and and and i wanna talk a bit about you tell me about your books rob i went in straight away and i asked the question like if you had one thousand dollars you couldn't use your name and you had like thirty days to make to generate x amount what would you do right like a a real kind of life scenario that threw email because he he was expecting that yet he answered it but then what i interviewed him a second time he told me explicitly do not do that again i firstly love that fact so do not do those scenario again right because he clearly was just like thrown bait and he had to answer at the moment he realized it was a good stuff but you didn't wanna do it again so anyway throughout the interview i was just talking about internet provider as an example saying like they are all the same so how would you start a company that the same as them but not make it like the others essentially to rephrase it in in all in his own where they said you can't begin by asking how do we make it just like the others and make it remarkable you have to ask how do we make it different from the others so that it is remarkable which is textbook book definition of like meaningful differentiation right you make it different for the right reason and it becomes remarkable for that and now i feel like you're you've manifested this not just in the book but just in your whole life and you sort of push everyone you know to come up with something more meaningfully different and the an example of this is is the forward for your book i love this story most people get someone they admire to write them a forward and then they just absolutely praise them to the high heavens oh thank you so much for writing this you are someone new to from you admire to write your forward and basically told them it was a piece of piss with me yeah they've wrote it back to you right could you share that story so i i asked joe to to write the forward from me he the author of a few books he's the one canal who who became the face of content marketing as a new discipline so i asked him to write it forward and he sent me one was just like some sort of a soup of thoughts on differentiation just didn't you make much sense to me and i was like oh shit this is like i'm sure you can back it up with sub psychology the psychology here but it's less we were and we were into this like friend relationship and every gram of my being was fighting against sending what i would stand to anyone if it wasn't for joe right so status maybe almost stop challenge him but yeah it was a soup of just completely was just didn't fit whatsoever with the book and the way i was talking about stuff like you just got in fact i think he contradicted contracted a few things i was saying in the books it was just like it was just nonsense and i was like oh shit so i didn't reply his first forward and then eight days after he asked did this did this work for you and i basically replied okay he's asking again he cares about this i was trying to like maybe ask someone else that he didn't know what to do and i was like you know what let me just answer the way i answer anyone let's forget about his status and his is business suit and is that is compared to mine so i said this forward should be would be perfect for the most marketing books but does it stand the account right i i i know it might sound cheeky coming from someone who on accomplished one percent of what you have but one i didn't feel your personality come through two you need to slap more maybe with a story how can you come how how did you come across my staff or something else entirely and three i never read forwards and i suspect most of my readers wants either unless we make it so good they have to read it and he answered that like tough hours with like this very raw response to it essentially saying you know fuck you for challenging me but actually you're kind of right and it may it made him think about all the times they were it was asked for something and people say it was good when in fact wasn't now the forward with really harsh on me right like he's almost insulting me now it's all together right he loves me he love him maybe we still talk it's it's all the other but yeah i i'm glad you i connected that to this it's it's i just can't help it i just cannot help it like i just can't what i think the learning there is and more i take is that playing it safe you know is a recipe for marketing for forget books for yeah just it's just a a worthless relationship and and an unhappy marriage i it's always i think it's a real fact of life that if you play things safe and go a bland option and follow your competitors and don't do something sort of spicy as you would put it you you will end up with results that aren't impressive and your forward is fantastic it's one of my favorite parts of the book and it almost tells me as enough about your approach to differentiation without even needing to read the book in the first place is that good you do though then go on to give some wonderful examples in the book of companies and brands who embody this idea that playing it safe it's not worth it they've you've got this wonderful idea of the i think it's pronounced the dan trash yep and they approach the brand and marketing and how different and it is from their competitors could you share that one with the listeners yeah before i do that just to double down on what you said about taking re score or planning in i know it it sounds like mt advice and it's very difficult to like materialize that for people in their head what is it look like for them that's why i keep repeating likes so one way to do that is to do things light you up right that make your laugh and whatever even if the norm doesn't do that which connects the second point is like you do need to try to like listen to your gut feeling and again the scientific studies behind it we have neurons in our dr system there's a reason why like our system two system one thinking like five for percent of the time which is like auto autopilot type thing we have thoughts that we don't know right there's so many things happening in the background so you need to try to lean on those cues that the system one leaves you one of them being like butterfly your stomach or feeling excited or getting goosebumps i i tend to get goosebumps when i hear good ideas i don't know it's just i just to learn to lean on it so it's very difficult to explicitly say how to do that but it's like try it try to follow that a bit more and then you'll see how it feels and then you do more of it so to go back to your question about the dan trash so i saw that example in a netflix documentary called untold crimes and penalties i'm sorry it was an episode on a minor league hockey team called the dan trash dan is a small town in connecticut it's it's it's a team that got bought out by fu who owned trash companies in the in the in that part of of the world in the us and he gave the reign to a seventeen year old guy who's his son to run the team and do you know the meme about you know the iq level and like the normal distribution like you know in the middle the overthink stuff and then when you're fucking so brilliant you just just do marketing and the other side your stupid to just do marketing so it's exactly this he this guy had no training in marketing no training and branding or anything and yet i would argue is probably one of the best example of a challenger brands that i've ever seen because he went all in in what he believed and he wasn't polluted by norms and what he's supposed to do and whatever because it was just seventeen so i think there's two things that stand out first what they said and what they deeds was almost the same meaning mean like they didn't talk to talk they also walk the work so they believe that they were like the bad boys of the league they believed that they were there to fight the the the commissioner of the league who was like this person who was very keeping the sport noble and making sure that protected the interest of the league and keeping the the hockey clean and they just they just point the finger at this person as the kind of the manifestation of establishment and and and this just did everything they could to go against that and one of the ways was to yes switch hot water in a locker room of their competitor of the opposite team will come to them they would literally hire players that were fighters more than h players they could some one of them could barely stand on the skate i don't remember his name was like this huge tall black dude who would knocked the fuck out of people playing against into it's just so funny to watch it's crazy how far they would go and that's what i like about it now there's a lot of stuff i don't like about it obviously like mafia and whatever like that's but there's maxing lessons there to have is that they went all in in one direction right this kind of they were not just talking the talk they were actually went above and beyond pushing the limit of okay if we wanna be bad guys what does that mean well let's we need to behave like like a true true true bad people and they were so there's yeah there's other example in documentary but there's other the two that i that i remember it feels also like this i mean it's ser maybe this example because like you said it didn't plan it and it they've got these results but you there are other examples of more traditional marketing companies that have planned these things and seen real success with it of of of of purposely not going with the trend and not following the competition coming up with a unique angle you you give this example in your book of the dark horse seo agency and the way they brand themselves could you share that yeah so the the dark horse is a is a seo ppc agency based in manchester and i interviewed them on my podcast when it was still alive and i just i just fell in love with them right away and again it's this manifestation of they they say that they are like not like their competitors they say that they don't chase words they say that it's not bad result but they manifest it as well they do it and they do it by applying this kind of detective board aesthetic to everything detective board you know like if you watch the later batman you know exactly what i mean like this very dark like black red like very very dark somber atmosphere with those you know those those post know that connects to each other like the on a board is like you're trying to solve a crime so they've went all in with that aesthetic and everything on their website like the copy the the image is everything is just completely left field compared to any other agencies it's so they went all in on that you can you can tell if you're rear engineer dates that they didn't go twenty percent fifty percent intense they went hundred percent but they they i don't think they could go further to be honest and you can tell that you can see that they've clearly thought about it this way so everything about it i would recommend you to just google like duck horse mount to make sure you find them and you'll see what i mean the copy everything now what is interesting and i think this is where i get challenged back a bit when they i share those examples is that they they they went all in into that direction but they still apply conventions of the category they're in so that people understand who they are and what they are so they still call themselves an seo ppc agency you will still see a lot of pages that explain their product on the services you will still see like google accreditation at the bottom of the footer and whatever so they're are able to blend one direction of like super enhanced going far into like detective ball type energy but then also using the common category conventions of an seo ppc agency where have they still rank for a lot of the services they still competes head to head against other agents agencies they don't go they don't stand the focus in every dimension because else you would lose people because they don't know what you are then then it just goes too far so i like that example for that because it's it shows you how you can go super intense in one attribute and then yet still ground yourself in the category you're in in a world of ppc agencies that are all navy blue websites with bullet points on why you should pick us and reasons why we're faster being able to say we help companies parade the bodies of their competitors while swimming in money is a wonderful way to stand up while still bringing it back and i i think yeah somebody of the advice i think about there is think about what you're compared to what your competitor set and find ways to tell the same story in a more interesting way i guess demo diva which is another example of your book is someone who does that almost in the opposite direction of like applies a lighter colorful way of this approach yeah to to a competitor which is quite different so that that exe exercise is i call it the like exploring the negative space so it's essentially listing down what is typically done in your category and just try to change one of those things so demo diva it's actually a demolition company based in new orleans that was started after katrina and the founder the one direction she went in that is completely from the negative space was that instead of having all over her machinery yellow like any other like black which is a traditional way of of of of of those machines they are all pink and there the t shirt of the people wearing like the the the crew would have pink t shirts and their were websites would be around pink and stuff now anything else is pretty much category convention for demolition company it's still demo in the world in the term the still columns have demolition company the still offer service like any other demolition companies but that's just going all into that direction and i would argue argue she could go further but at least what she's doing is already super super advance i would say is yeah the color pink and that's it and and this is the to go back to your initial question about the differentiation versus distinctive this is the difference so louis we don't have long left and i've got one more activity for you you famously put seth god on the spot told him to do marketing in the moment and he was fantastic at and it sort of grew your career but he also said i never wanna do that again because he didn't enjoy it well he did it to you i would like to do it he did you did it to him i would like to do it to you i would like to put you on the spot and apply these things i would love for you and and i will test this after this so we can get the results we can get the results to see if it works and we will share them i would like you to think about recall and think how can you make a bit of advertising or marketing that people will recall and and remember and maybe we could apply it to to a coffee brand so lots of my ads that i would see on facebook instagram reddit whatever people selling coffee to be delivered to my door and maybe trying to talk about how wonderfully smelling and tasty and caffeine inducing that coffee is you've told us a lot today that if you break with the conventional forms if you disrupt patterns you might be able to create an ad that would stand out in someone's mind can we come up with one on the spot can you come up with a slogan a bit of imagery something forms that would make for a compelling ad that if i showed it to fifty people after the show they would say that is more memorable than all of the other ads that are online you all hear exactly what louie we came up with and the results right after this ad 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 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 you are listening to nudge with me phil ag before the break i challenged marketing expert that we grew any to create an advertisement that people wouldn't forget i gave him a few hours to come up with the ad and i said that the ad needed to be for a coffee brand and i said that it needed to stand out so that viewers would be able to recall it recall was the main thing we were after not purchases or anything like that it just needed to be a static ad not video so the sort of thing you might see if you're just scrolling through instagram or facebook i then planned to test his work i planned to show his ad to thirty people and then i would get them to do some unrelated tasks and after some time had passed i would ask all of those thirty people what they were remembered of louise had so let's see what louie came up with okay thanks phil i'm gonna cheat a bit i'm gonna cheat because one i'm not gonna take an hour or two to think about it instead i'm gonna take wear and i explain why in a second and two because i'm gonna use an example i've used in my book so the reason why i don't wanna take one or two hour is because i don't want to show the final product meaning the this challenge as a as an ads that is like looks and res that feels like you know i'm a genius and i just come up stuff on the fly or very easily instead i wanna just show you my thought process i think it's a bit easier to think about it this way so i'm just gonna be very open here about my thought process so when you share this challenge the first thing i ask myself and gave me permission to is to play with the product itself so you talk about a coffee brand but one of the first thing about marketing is that it's product is part of it so thinking about what is it that we are offering and for whom is kind of one of the basics that i think a lot of markets forget because they tend to associated with communications so in the book i mentioned this cv poop coffee which is this kind of coffee that is partially digested by the common palm sieve which is a teeny winning doctor nocturnal mammal in native to southeast asia so they would peak those animals that pick the best beans the most you for them digested did it partially and then poop it out the rationale behind it is that those beans that they get put out add flavor and add this kind of extra whatever to the taste and then they turn into coffee and it's a super expensive and it's a it's a deli delicacy in some sort so that's my first thought it's like okay you're asking me about a coffee run you didn't say it is to be this very specific product so i'm gonna play with that to add to my advantage so i want to advertise si coffee at the second thing is people don't buy this coffee for rational reasons even though producers and what i've seen online and about it is they they tend to talk about the the flavor and they tend to talk about how dp compared to normal coffee etcetera etcetera i do feel that i think they are missing out a big portion of why people buy i argue that it's probably for irrational reasons right to use as a party trick to impress guests to give to a coffee to set satisfy people curiosity right by trying the world's most expensive coffee to relieve memories from the past stuff like and so for this reason i would double down on probably one of the the one that gives me the most energy the one that i feel is the funniest to deal with which is the the peep satisfy people's curiosity i do like the the contrast the contrast being between this animal that looks super cute and a cup of coffee i do like the the surprise that comes with i do like the feeling that hey this is something completely unexpected completely left field and i like to play with those elements everyone so i will probably go deep into that what type of arts could rerun to really double down on this curiosity bias so instead saying oh this coffee is the taste like most like most brand i'm just gonna read out actually a couple of so the actual name of the coffee copy lu also known as si coffee so if i look at typical ads they would say stuff like copy work is the most expensive and very and very best premium tasting coffee in our shop top quality cup coffee beans are roasted and leg packaged ideal as a luxurious gift smooth a beautiful dark and rich cup not bitter with a complex forrest aroma hints of chocolate caramel as it reduced by lactic acid bacteria fermentation in lower cats fill here just cutting in the ad louis read out just then is the one we will use as our control we will compare this ad which is the very standard ad for copy lack to his ad alright back to larry so you can see the they they they really double lot on the rational side of stuff really about the taste but what i do like the fact that talk about like luxurious gift done premium and all of that so i would probably go down the the the the the curiosity routes because the challenge is about recall but they remember this you're not asking me to make them bite necessarily right now and so my hypothesis is what is it that they are more likely to remember and recall is it like a cup of coffee basic ad or is it like a cv si cat staring at you saying something on the the lines of can you believe i put coffee out that's a that's a terrible thing but again i wanted to share this too so i in progress because that's what i would think about but i i know the angle i know roughly where it's gonna go what is the exact copy for this ads what is the exact thing i i think the the hero there is the is the si as the animal i i feel like the recall will be much higher if it's like an animal or some sort of a mascot something looking at us with a cheeky message also showing the coffee so i don't wanna go too i feel where like they don't even know it's for coffee so it needs to be shown but yes instead of showing a cup of coffee like ninety nine percent of ads on on coffee and talk about the luxurious stuff i would go really to the opposite direction and lead with curiosity and a bit of fun with the to see if a staring out you maybe having a poop something like can you believe this anymore helps create this coffee or something on this line and bad is exactly what louie came up with you can now see louise ad if you want to in the show notes if you wanna go click on the show notes and have a look there there is an image of it but i will also explain the ad for you as many people are just listening they don't have a chance to even look at the or perhaps they don't want to so the top of the ad features header stating you won't believe where this coffee comes from in the middle you can see the si which looks a bit like a raccoon or a kind of wildcat cat it is staring directly at the camera next to the si is a cup of coffee and two words no shit for the control we created a slight variant on that typical copy lu ad that louie read out earlier it said discover the world's rarest brew copy lu not your average cup of joe then beneath that there was a picture of the coffee packaging and a cup of coffee and finally we added some detail about where the coffee came from below as i mentioned if you want you can view both ads by clicking the links in the show notes to run my test i used the fantastic marketing research tool v pop me v pop me helps brands and agencies learn from customers using video surveys brands and agencies ask questions and over five million people have responded to their questions with videos explaining their thoughts you'll get very good example of what these thoughts are like in a bit v pop me is a incredibly fast way to ask these questions irc these and got results within basically a week and you can use them if you want to get really informative qualitative results so using box me i showed this ad to thirty british people after i asked him a set of five unrelated questions this took around ten minutes that just gave a bit of time between seeing the ads and then when i wanted them to recall it because then at the end i asked them exactly what they remembered about both ads i asked them to give as much detail as possible now they had only briefly looked at these ads at the start so i wasn't expecting a super high recall and for the control ad the one that louis didn't create that was certainly the case only two people remembered what the coffee was actually called in the control ad and remember that was the main title in that ad well the check ad had more details like the name is ko lo i think it was something like ko something that was jimmy and thomas the other twenty eight couldn't remember the name which is interesting because that was easily the biggest bed of copy on the ad but what about the slogan discover the world's rarest brew well only two of the participants to remember that as well and then the second was just advertising and how incredibly rare the second one was rare coffee i think it was about rare coffee something i've never a i heard of before or seen before so it wouldn't really grab me attention like the first ad did definitely like the first add better that was dawn and sharon they remembered that it was a rare coffee but the other twenty eight participants did not and finally what about the sub header the sub header said not your average cup of joe did anyone remember that and it's not your average cup of joe that was meghan thirty one from london she was the only participant to remember the line not your average cup of joe so not great recall only two people remembered the header two remembered the slogan and only one remembered the subtitle but what about louise version how many people remembered his ad well i first wanted to know how many people remembered the actual image on the ad the civic looking at the camera that was a core component of louise ad how many of our thirty participants remembered that there was a picture of a raccoon as well there was a picture of the animal looks a bit like a raccoon picture of a coffee cup with coffee beans what i believe is a raccoon with a little animal and coffee cup the ad i saw at the beginning of this was a raccoon over some coffee beans and said there no shit seventeen out of the thirty participants remembered the image of the civic looking at the camera some called it cat called it but they all remembered the image it stood out in people's minds just as louis predicted but remembering an image is a fairly straightforward thing to do it's it's not exactly hard it's much harder to remember text to remember words so let's see how many participants remembered louise no shit slogan and i remember something saying no no shit one of them i thought it was quite a bold advert as it had a swear and it said no shit or something like that something about no shit that had to caption no cup no shit it said something like like best coffee in the world or best coffee you'll ever have any big word being let has no shit and then the bonds of no shit both about coffee but one with no shit written i and one my look luxurious brand instead ten out of thirty remember the no shit slogan that's pretty good remember only two people remembered any of the copy on the previous ad finally let's see how remembered the curiosity statement at the top the statement which said you won't believe where this coffee comes from first i'd had like a tag of you won't believe where this coffee comes from no shirt i absolutely love the first advert it's my type of humor but i've it doubt i loved it it looked like a at first and it says you'll never guess where this coffee comes from and then the no shit and the words you'll never guess through the coffee comes from no shit or you won't believe why they came from four out of the thirty participants remembered that slogan louis ad wasn't just a bit more memorable it was considerably more memorable seventeen out of thirty remembered the image of the civic ten remembered the slogan four remembered the question but only five people in total remembered anything significant about the control at and i think this neatly proves louise point breaking from conventional norms will help you stand out sparking curiosity gets people engaged and sharing something surprising will stick in the mind i'm not really surprised luis ad one he he is an expert after all he knows what he's talking about but i was a bit surprised by how much it won these brits were only showing the ads for a few seconds yet the majority could remember something about louie at while the exact same people forgot almost everything about the control ad it shows i think that it does pay to stand the fuck out for alright folks that is all from louie and i today as you know louie has written a fantastic book i advise you to buy the book and if you do louie is a special offer for you phil thank you so much pleasure always to talk to you so i've put together a an offer because i'm a marketer for your listeners so something very specific just to them here's what they can do so if they buy the book anywhere so it could be on amazon could be on amazon nobles could be anywhere forward the receipt to nudge at s t f o dot i o so nudge at s cfo dot i owe and in return i'll send you a lot of extra stuff including the book in ep version so you can have it to read on any of your device on pdf as well the one page canvas of the standard methodology that you can feel for video tutorials on advanced use cases add a bunch of other little stuff and a video of me singing obviously the full wikipedia page of the copy lu the see put coffee in a very key tune because i cannot sing and this is exclusive to nudge listeners i'm not gonna send that to anyone else so again step one by the book stand of account just google it wherever you buy your books step two forward the receipt to nudge at s t dot io step three enjoy me singing this through this weekly wikipedia page and obviously all the other goodies is related to the book so to take advantage of that offer by stan fuck out and send louis an email at nudge at s t f o dot io that's nudge at s t f o dot io send him an email saying i just bought your book came from phil podcast and you will get a lot of goodies including his acc bell singing which i personally can vouch for as being utterly awful and absolutely necessary for you to watch alongside that you will get a load of other freebie b's that i think you'll really get a lot of value from as well stuff that will help you create ads to the really unforgettable too so thank you louie but before i go i wanted to say also a big thank you to v pop me for running the video survey for me with v spot me you can quickly run qualitative research using video surveys and live interview solutions you can invite participants from their enormous panel and use them for video surveys and you'll see the results within just a few hours it's a fantastic tool not just because it's fast and informative but also because it's analysis tools are excellent as well so if you want to try me go to the link in the show notes and click that okay thank you so much for listening folks i'll be back next monday with another episode of nudge cheers

my guest on nudge today has spent the past year completing a pretty bizarre challenge i committed myself to doing one new thing for every week of the year some of them quite small things like i watched my first sunrise i wrote to a serial killer he didn't write me back whereas some of them were larger i went to the middle east for the first time i went to a my little pony convention i did all sorts of things this year long experiment in happiness involved doing one new thing every single week but did it make him happier and can we apply his findings ourselves not just for our own happiness but perhaps in our life and in our work keep listening to find out cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hub hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow today's guest on nudge is a renowned expert in behavioral science psychology and marketing hi i'm patrick sometimes i ask people to call me pat please don't do that i don't like it but the reason i ask people sometimes is because our research shows that a short name or nickname can make you more likable which i think is where i could do some help in his books hooked and free your mind patrick explains how you can apply behavioral science not just in your work but also in your general day to day life and that's the kind of thing i do is apply behavioral scientist is take psychological theory and think about how to actually use it in the real world like yes optimizing your own name but also websites adverts and so on he's worked with dozens of companies like google and warner records helping them apply behavioral science i was also at cambridge but not in the political department i will say and for his latest project he wanted to apply behavioral science in his life so i'm doing a project called just do stuff you can read it just do stuff dot c dot uk where i committed myself to doing one new thing for every week of the year it's not just sunrise and little pony conventions some weeks this challenge had a fairly major impact on patrick's life i explore my relationship with technology a bit as well for example going a week without tv twenty four hours without any screens i let ai control my day for a whole day but why what inspired patrick to do this i did it because i wasn't in the happiest place i was going through some life changes just had a a new baby buying a house these kinds of things were just coming out of lockdown and i realized a few experiences taught me just how powerful important experiences are to to your your your well being and happiness and just life in general patrick realized how important an experiences are to him after a fairly strange experience a few years earlier after researching my last book that i covered with journalist laura dun about how to not be influenced if you don't want to be i joined a couple of coats she really kind of forced me into it going into this retreat in the woods for a weekend that really wasn't looking forward to it but actually it's one the best things that i had done for a long time i was kind of a wake up call that oh i loved doing stuff i loved doing stuff and so i committed myself to like doing more of that as a project and was really transformative clearly patrick isn't taking the easy option here joining cults is hardly an easy way to gain new experiences it's probably a lot easier to just join a running club or acquire and logistically patrick's project was a pretty hard one to undertake it sounds quite simple one new thing for every week of the of actually was quite difficult to make the list to find things some things i thought would be quite easy actually words so i thought it it'd be quite easy to find a psychic for example but was actually they never replied to my emails maybe i should have just put the request out on the ether it's actually as i said logistically quite difficult and it was also quite expensive me at least i spent about twelve thousand pounds across the year although i will say the mode was zero pounds so most of them were free spending twelve thousand pounds on a project that just might make you happy is a is a fairly risky undertaking but patrick was confident it would work because he has some evidence to back it up evidence that proves that experiences can provide more happiness than material gets there was a diary study where they had people measure their happiness after purchases and they found that after a it's experiential purchase rather than a material one people were happier i think about six percent happier a statistically significant difference a similar two thousand and three study titled to do or to have that is the question great title it asked ninety seven british columbia are undergraduate students to recall a recent purchase half were asked to recall their most recent purchase over a hundred dollars and that purchase had to be made with the intention of gaining a life experience so this is stuff like concert tickets and travel and dining out the other half were also asked to recall their most recent purchase over a hundred dollars but this time made with the intention of acquiring a tangible object so clothing electronics jewelry that type of thing the participants then rated the purchases on a scale from one to nine they rated how happy the purchase made them how much the purchase contributed to their overall happiness and a bunch of different other measures as well the researchers found that those who purchase experiences rated those purchases as more happiness inducing than the material purchases in fact they said the experiences made them thirteen point four percent happier this was conducted back in two thousand and three but patrick says the results would probably have been even more pronounced today it's also particularly true in our current context i think those two things are generally making people a bit miserable so certainly were making me miserable one is screens so there's some research showing that screen time is linked to unhappiness and mental health outcomes i think jean twin did a study showing this correlation between screen time an unhappiness it's not just unhappiness a recent study titled time distortion for short form video users split sixty two college students into two groups the first group was the tiktok group they watched tiktok for fifteen minutes the other group was the reading group they read for fifteen minutes after both groups completed an academic task and then they were asked to estimate the duration of both activities so both the reading or the tick tiktok depending on the group and then the academic task as well the findings i think of rather eye opening but perhaps they're not surprising the tiktok group significantly overestimate the time spent on both tiktok and the academic task afterwards the reading group they had no over estimation in fact they had no time distortion at all they estimated the time accurately the tiktok usage caused what the researchers called upward time distortion they made people believe the activities last longer than they actually do this means tedious activities like chores and exercise and studying all of these things will feel significantly longer if you spend a lot of your day scrolling through tiktok looking at videos on there there's this book called the shallow about how the internet that kind of internet based information is not processed in a deep way it's quite superficial shallow it's not really encoded to memory there's a mean that you never see a smartphone in your dreams and i certainly can't think of that happening and that's if that work to be true it's probably because again you're not encoding it deeply into memory and so it doesn't surface your dreams so screens make us unhappy they're not really purposeful for meaningful and also being stuck indoors especially post lockdown can make us stressed and miserable as well one lockdown study in israel found that lockdown being indoors from lockdown cause people's of mig delhi to groups that grow which is of course the direct processing part of the brain it's just makes people stressed really being indoors not going out in the sun and the fresh air and getting exercise so just getting out and doing stuff is is really important for your physical mental and finally enough the least enjoyable activity patrick experienced was something he could only do by looking at his phone the worst activity by far was day trading i wanted to see if i could make a hundred pounds day trading in plus five hundred because i thought that would be life changing you know i can just sit on a beach use my phone for an hour a day and make a living and i did make a hundred hundred pounds in that first day the next day i got a little bit cocky and i lost two and a half thousand pounds and that was the most expensive activity and i was pretty distraught mostly because it's just such a waste of money i didn't have anything to show for it i said to my wife i lost two and a half thousand pounds and she goes well you made a hundred pounds yesterday so it's only two thousand four hundred if that helps which you didn't so what about some of patrick's more enjoyable experiences well i asked him to share one well i can tell you haven't lived until you've helped a strange man's g face between your hands and have to stare his eyes for four minute this is patrick's experience at a cuddle workshop a cuddle workshop is where people go along to have physical touch with with other people it was certainly a memorable experience it was the one i was looking forward to the least i was dread it i also hated it at the time but it was also kind of the most memorable it was i would say transformative i have a great story from it as well but there are a couple of psychological behavioral principles that made it so meaningful the first being the importance of socializing the bonding social element as i said social experiences tend to be more memorable and enjoyable there was a study that found that even chocolate tastes twenty eight percent more chocolate when it's eaten with someone else good news for malt teaser i guess in this twenty fourteen study twenty three female undergraduates at yale university were asked to taste a dark chocolate bar sometimes they ate the bar in the company of others at the same time as someone else other times they ate it alone without anybody else there and they had to eat it while doing another task so in this experiment it was looking at a piece of artwork what they found was that the women rated the taste of the exact same chocolate box it was the same chocolate bar in both scenarios well they rated it twenty eight percent worse twenty eight percent less tasty when they ate it alone rather than when they ate it in a group so this for me explains why meals taste a hell of a lot better at a restaurant rather than when i ordered that exact same meal and eats it at home on my sofa there's something about being in a social environment about being with other people about being in a restaurant with other people as well that makes food taste better so socializing is born i mean i did experiment where i went bungee jumping and there were no people involved and to be honest it's kind boring i was just pushed off a ledge with a with the rope whereas cuddle workshop or the my little pony convention or the the bd m cloud this which i only went to us an observer by the way i'll be very clear it was the people already which made these experiences and the second principle for the cuddle workshop is the principal struggle so we not kind of tech obsessed age technological providers and suppliers and brands that always trying to make our lives easier and reduce friction and there's a lot to be set for that obviously but it kind of makes us miserable not having friction we actually need some kind of effort and purpose and struggle if you like to feel like we have meaning and to to be happy in our lives and we've value these things more if we put effort in there's apron principle will call the effort justification effect where participants who are made to go through a harder more effort for ritual to join a discussion so with no ritual they just joined the discussion with mild ritual they've read out i think some words or statements which are kind of a bit embarrassing and for severe ritual they've read out some words or statements that were very awkward and embarrassing and then they engaged in the discussion and after it's rated the quality of it and if they put a lot of effort in a very severe initiation they rated the quality of discussion better this is a nineteen fifty nine study by the legendary researcher elliott ar if you've listened to nudge before you'll have heard me cite him an awful lot and also his colleague jan mills in the study sixty three female college students were asked to read aloud some explicit sexual words and two graphic passages from a novel before joining the group that is the high deal group if you were wondering they had to read all these sexual words and two graphic passengers something nobody would want to read in front of strangers it was under a pretext that they were joining a discussion on the psychology sex so it sort of made sense as to why they had to read this stuff those who were in that high ordeal initiation rated the group so the people in the group as seventy percent more intelligent and they rated the discussion so the actual discussion that they would then have as twenty two percent more interesting than those who joined the discussion without having to do an initiation at all remember the researchers had set it up so the other participants in the group shared the exact same insights they spoke in the same way they had the exact same discussion they showed the exact same level of intelligence the only difference was the initiation and when people put that effort into join the group they valued that discussion far higher there's also things like the ikea effect if you assemble something yourself as you know of course you evaluate it more than if it comes pre assembled so having that kind of commitment investment effort is that she's quite important for while being i think you know happiness comes from two things broadly speaking pleasure and purpose i think today we're very much focused on pleasure in our day to day lives but probably quite lacking in purpose so having experiences which actually add a little friction is not always a bad thing and i think there's an important takeaway there for brands as well that it's not always about making things as easy as possible but actually adding a bit of experiential friction like i heard of a insurance company and they really streamlined their claims process to the point where customers didn't trust it anymore it was too easy it was too quick and actually put them off so a little bit of experience friction not always a bad thing but the activity that really taught patrick about the effort paradox wasn't the cut workshop it was a dance class yeah so i went to a dance class with my wife for valentine's day it was hosted by ot m from strictly come dancing which my wife love so strictly come dancing fantasy came true if my fantasy mean awkward shuffling around a warehouse off hanger lane and they had mirrors up on the wall everywhere so you could see yourself dancing which you might not believe this feel terrible at dancing it's not really in my nature and so it was very very awkward and uncomfortable for me however that awkward and lack of comfort actually bonded me and my wife it was a very fun memory that we've made together and that we talk about together other so again it had it was social it was something my wife and i did together which bonded us you know back in my dating days i just have a rule that always take your date to a second location so you go from the first bar to another one or better yet the an arcade or something because then it feels like an adventure going into together and it's kind of bonding and secondly of course there's all struggle there's was a lot of effort involved not just the physical effort of dancing but overcoming that barrier pushing myself out of my comfort zone to do something i really didn't want to do surrounded by strangers and mirrors and the celebrity was hard but it was that's what made it meaningful patrick's proving something that i've spoken about a lot before on the show effort increases enjoyment this is true not only for the individual experiencing the effort but also those witnessing the effort patrick's partner i believe would have felt a more profound love for him when she noticed how hard it was for him to attend the dance class how much effort he was putting in to overcoming in anxiety all of those things would have made her appreciate him even more effort it leads to enjoyment social activities beat isolated ones screens reduce our enjoyment and they walk our sense of time and experiences are perceived as more enjoyable than material purchases but what happened when patrick did this i did infiltrate just the world meet up find out after the break marketing against the grain hosted by kip and kieran fan is brought you by what podcast network the audio destination for business professionals if you want to know what's happening right now in marketing what's coming ahead and how you can leave the way this podcast is perfect for you if you want an episode to get you started i would suggest you search for my episode on marketing against the grain just search for phil ag on the marketing against the grain feed and you'll hear me talk about the peril of using ai for marketing so go and listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts welcome back to you are listening to nudge with me phil ag i'm chatting with patrick fa who spent the past fifty two weeks doing fifty two new experiences here's one of his more peculiar experiences i did infiltrate a just world meet infiltrate just a fancy word for saying i've found a meet and went to it i was probably the only non kind of activists there and it was really eye opening in that it made me empathize with them in the past i had this view of them that was kind of quite abstract and take it from the the media really clips online these are really annoying people hate them why are they doing this so they were just kind of two dimensional monsters i guess in my head and then going along and meeting them and interacting with them was very that i've felt that these are real people of course rationally rationally you know i can say that human beings progress to us but going along actually could feel it i could hear their concerns and i can understand why they were doing this stuff and it really made them into flesh and blood people so that was a big pillar that i learned from some of these experiences with sympathy empathy like my little pony convention going to that i thought they'd will be weirdo but leaving it i realized that only most of them were weirdo but again it made them into like flash and blood real people and now was also an interesting moment at the just a wall meeting where another person who i guess you could say it infiltrated stood up about five minutes in and he went your all matters and stormed out and he was calling them nuts they were calling him a science deny and they weren't having any dialogue they're not talking to each other so it's kind of sad that these two worlds of bubbles exist and neither of them are gonna get anywhere if they don't talk to each other so that really was the key thing i learned from that experience was was empty empathy and the power of experiences to make you see things from another perspective it's clear patrick lent quite a lot from that experience but he doesn't rank it as his best experience in fact patrick's best experience well it it really surprised me i think funny enough the best experience i did was letting myself be a slave to ai for the day so i was on holiday to be fair so i suppose that bias a bit but you know when you're on holiday and you have that anxiety of you're not using the time well enough should i be lying by the pools shall i go sightseeing and so i thought you know what for this day i'll just let chat gp tell me what to it and it sending me to this little island where the man in the iron mask was imprisoned it controlled my food i ended up eating three cheese pizzas that day which was enjoyable at first but soon soon less so but are a couple of things really stood out first of all it may be less frightened about chat gp at least at that point it was a couple of years of ago but at least at that point it didn't really understand content so for example i arrived on the island and when i stepped foot off the island asked it what i should do and it said make sure you pack water and a sun hat i'm already i'm already here so that was a bit annoying and it was very hot and i did get very thirsty also obviously it maybe three pizzas so it wasn't that kind of contextual aware and also it didn't have a will of his own i was always kind of pushing it to tell me what to do it it didn't kind of have its own will or ideas for what they should do but the second thing that taught me is a really key principle support thailand and other experiences is escape that with an experience and this can obviously be a brand or marketing experience as well it's not always what you're going into that's important but rather what people are running away from and i think letting ai decide my day it was so enjoyable because it freed me from the burden of choice and responsibility and risk and so if people want to go into your fantastical marketing experience or your vr world or whatever is probably because they're trying to get away from anxieties or stress or boredom in their daily life and that came through in a few other experiments like the flotation tank i couldn't distract myself with twitter or linkedin or whatever like i usually do so was forced to face up to some anxieties that i had actually doing that was really nice it was like a massage for my brain i resolved that stress i had but mostly i and i think most people don't do that we just distract ourselves instead but that's one of the reasons i think experiences can be so powerful patrick became a slave to ai for a day it was his best experience and yet he was quick to tell me that he wouldn't want that experience to last any longer he wouldn't want it to last a week in fact he said many of its experiences were fantastic not because he loved the experience themselves or because he wanted them to last for a long time but because he learned something from it and he was glad that it didn't take over his life he was glad that it was a novel different experience yeah i had that feeling with the casino as well because in the casino i did actually double my money so i wanted to take out a thousand euros wife insisted they take out a hundred and i doubled that and then i was quite annoyed with my wife because this is my kind of mindset which is probably why i can't gamble i wasn't happy to one hundred euros i was upset that i haven't one more and i was starting to think what if i had taken out all of my life savings and doubled that so i probably won't do that again probably for the best but it did it was a transformative experience it did change my life i mean one of the main things that i'm taking forward now is kind of clearer boundaries with work and making sure that every weekend i do something it doesn't have to be a big thing but the weekend just gone we all went to crazy golf for example and then to hernandez which doesn't sound like a big deal but beforehand i probably wouldn't have done that you know we would have just stayed indoors all weekend now honestly listening to all of this i was fairly inspired by patrick's project so i wondered if he had any tips for people listening who wanted to do something similar getting started you have to do one new thing for every week you could do one new thing for every month you know twelve new things in a year and there are these small things you can do like as i said i saw my first sunrise i ate my first donna kebab it doesn't have to be to have to be huge things although i would like to go to north korea which is now open so if anyone's up for that for free to get in touch patrick spent an hour in a flotation tank he visited the middle east he went on a stag to sober he avoided tv for a week he had a colon cleanse a psychic reading and he ate his first donna kebab but before ending i wondered if he thinks all of these experiences and the twelve thousand pound spent well if all of this was worthwhile i think so i think it's made me more empathetic more i would say it's maybe be happier than my my wife might not say that but i think so and so i improve my health for example not just from talking to the act but just getting out of the house it's been really really good for my mental health of physical health i wasn't as i said all that happy beforehand because of being indoors and screens and everything but now endeavor to actually get out and do things more made me happier for sure patrick documents all of his experiences at just do stuff dot c dot u uk there you can read about his vr r theater experience his experience drinking breast milk which really did not go well but is a is a hilarious read and his experience trying to make a new friend it's a very very funny newsletter but it also has lots of behavioral science in there so i think many of you listening will really enjoy reading it i signed up to it myself i love getting his emails every week and you can to for free by just going to just do stuff dot c dot u k that is just do stuff dot c dot u k and you can get patrick's newsletter for free on there but patrick and i did not stop our chat here i went on to ask patrick about another one of his previous experiments his previous projects see patrick had spent a year not last year but a few years before trying to deliberately change his personality so it first started with me working out what do i want to change and really i got it down to i want to be more extroverted and less neuro this experiment started to go wrong in many weird and interesting ways yeah i was exactly the same and i read that i should walk with slower longer strides to be more confident i was doing it and all my friends were pointing at me and laughing saying what are you doing it's another very very interesting chat i've never spoken to someone who actively tried to change their personality i wasn't even sure it was actually possible but patrick assured me he was and he's got some great examples of what he learned along the way if you wanna hear patrick's attempt to alter his personality for a year then you can listen to the bonus episode for free we recorded it we put it on youtube it's very easy to get access all you have to do is click the link in the show notes enter your email address and you'll be taken straight to that bonus episode if you are already an email newsletter subscriber for nudge then you just have to click the link in today's email you'll find the bonus episode there otherwise just click the link in the show notes add your email you'll be taken straight to youtube straight to that bonus episode it will subscribe you to the newsletter but you can unsubscribe immediately if you like and you'll get to hear how patrick attempted to change his personality for a year patrick's genuinely hilarious this chat is is possibly even funnier other than what we had today so i really hope some of you can go and listen to that thank you so much for listening i've really enjoyed putting this episode together and i hope you enjoyed listening to it bye bye

and what i think is the most valuable tip i can give about social proof is the following that is bass w he is an expert in the field of persuasion and behavioral design and today i have asked him to share seven scientifically backed tips to improve your marketing to start with he shared a study involving the beauty brand ny x cosmetics they had a buy button so they sell makeup the webs shop and they had a buy button and then they added one sentence small sentence underneath by button which says seventy one beauties have viewed this product today why would they say seventy one beauties have viewed this product well to leverage social proof social proof is the principle that suggests we follow the actions of others adding a most popular title to an option on a menu is proven to boost the sales of that item by thirteen to twenty percent so did ny x increase sales with their seventy one beauties copy well yes the amount of purchases increased with thirty three percent but ny x found that they could tweak this social proof to make that line even more persuasive now they changed one word and the plus thirty three percent became plus honda or in other words another increase of three hundred percent if you go from plus thirty three two plus hundred the work change was viewed and the sentence became seventy one beauties have purchased this product today we follow the actions of others when we learned that seventy one others have bought the product we will be far more likely to buy it ourselves and now my tip for everybody is how can you create such simple and powerful sentence we have this data what people doing on a product page or a landing page like i said it's often in google analytics and we can even automate it to show it how do you create those sentences three criteria one people like me on ny they named them beauties because if you buy makeup probably you want to be beautiful then the second criteria is named the desired behavior literally so what ny wondered was not people viewing their product but purchasing that product so when they changed that word they saw a huge increase and the third criteria exact numbers boost trust so they didn't have seventy beauties but seventy one that's something funny in our brain if we see seventy then we think maybe you made that up seventy one we think wow that's cannot be made up but it's completely true show your audience what people like them do name the desired behavior literally and use exact numbers to boost trust i wanted to test this specifically i wanted to test the people like me part of social proof ny x refer to their customers as beauties because that's how their customers want to be perceived but my audience wants to be perceived as great marketers so for my experiment i created two subject lines for my email newsletter the control read why these four ads stick in your mind and then i created a variant a variant which leverage this people like you social proof this variant said why the best marketers study these for ads so one was why these four ads stick in your mind the other the variant was why the best marketers study these for ads by saying the best marketers i hoped to benefit from the people like me tactic and i did each email went to one thousand three hundred and seventy nine marketers and the second version inspired by bass had a six point four percent higher open rate you can click the link in the show notes to view the full stats on that study but that is just one tip after this break bass will cover six more scientifically backed marketing tips that you can use online cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow today i'm joined by the fantastic bass i am order of the book online influence and i'm also the c founder and ceo of cha din institute where i partner with the godfather of influence doctor robert cha din now let's face it many of you have probably heard of that social proof example before i've shared examples like that plenty of times on the show so bass was very quick to give me a tip that he thought some of you would not have heard of before for me this is a very interesting principle that often not so many people are aware has to do with dopamine release and most people know dopamine is a neurotransmitter but it's associated that we are feeling good feeling happy but dopamine does something else it gives us power to take action now there's an interesting study because previously we scientists assumed that dopamine is released when we have the reward but like i said dopamine is also giving us power and you need power to get the reward nasa suggesting that dopamine is released not once a reward has been received but when we're anticipating that reward he is a study to prove it so what a study done and don't ask me about pain about animal testing but it was started with a monkey and the monkey saw images and when a banana showed up if he pressed the button the monkey guards banana juice which the monkey light this is a twenty fifteen study which is always cited in the show notes and then they saw when the dopamine actually was released the dopamine was released when he saw the image of the banana not when he got the banana juice actually then dopamine was reduced when we see a future re reward dopamine is release it makes us feel good and we create power to move forward this is known in the literature as participatory enthusiasm our dopamine levels increase when we anticipate a reward and they actually decrease when that reward is gained but the researchers in that twenty fifteen study found a way to double the amount of dopamine the monkey experienced it wasn't by offering more banana juice or showing more banana images in fact it was doing the opposite but maybe then a very interesting thing in that study than what they did the monkey got only fifty percent of the time it got banana so the reward became uncertain then the amount of dopamine what was released doubled this also explained why gambling is addictive it's an uncertain reward and people keep on pressing buttons or keep on going on because all the time dopamine is actually released on the gambling itself not on winning the price uncertain rewards are incredibly motivating i have experienced this myself at a cafe i was sitting in the cafe i was enjoying my coffee and i saw a sign on the table the sign said do you want to receive a surprise it went on to say here's what you've got to do one scan the qr code two give us a review and three ask the staff for your surprise now i i really hardly ever leave reviews but i just couldn't help myself the dopamine i experienced just anticipating what this surprise reward could have been it motivated me to act i did i left my review i went to the staff and i got an energy bar as a gift now if the cafe had said leave a review and will give you an energy bar there was absolutely no way i would have left a review i don't even like energy bars but it was the unexpected surprise that drove me to act so two lessons from bass one is to try and offer uncertain rewards and two make sure customers can visualize those rewards and benefits i have one example here it was from a company that sold custom license plates and they first had a pretty generic image and then they had a porsche with a cool license plate on it the amount of conversions was two hundred ten percent more only changing the image showing what people actually got they could visualize what they would get if they would buy it doesn't just work with benefits it works with punishments as well the behavioral insight team helped redesigned the dv letter to encourage british drivers to pay their tax on time now many drivers ignore these letters and in the past it costs the dv for forty million pounds in yearly lost revenue the behavioral insights team ran an experiment where some drivers received an image of themselves in the vehicle driving the vehicle and that image was added to the letter the hypothesis was that the image might help drivers to visualize the punishment you know you're losing this car this car you're driving which we've got a picture of in the letter if you don't pay your tax the trial involved two hundred and fifty thousand unlicensed vehicles and the new letter visualizing the punishment was twenty percent more effective than the original which of course when you're losing forty million pounds a year is an awful lot alright let's move on to another tip this one was used to increase job applications what the example is was a company that wanted to get more people to opt in to acquire the job the company was a job vacancy platform that allowed people to apply for jobs via video messages but they had quite a tough flows so to say with what we call hot stat not baby steps big steps applying for these jobs was difficult you clicked on the ads then you were asked to download an app when you download the app you were asked to record a video so these are quite big steps for people or an app now i need to download an app that's not common or to need to do and then you needed to record a video of your sir ba and his team implemented a change that increased video applications by twenty five percent here's what they did so what happened what we did was click on the ad come through explanation page no you got a message great you're here you can go to the next round to go to the next round download the app so one step one message in between and one step in between they add it a step they didn't immediately ask the applicant to download the app they first asked them to do a short written application shortly after they finish this application the applicant would get a message saying congratulations to your through to the next round download the app to complete your next video round application then if people download the app they were not right away off record a video we add a step there and say well here are some tips how you can present yourself and make the best recording and then they were asked to record or that led to about twenty five percent more job applications in his book ba rates how big steps such as downloading a white paper buying a product or signing up for a training course or they can be off putting by paving the way with small steps your visitors commitment is likely to grow and the chance that they will eventually take a much bigger step increases that previous example boosted downloads by twenty percent but bass next example reduced customer cancellations by ninety percent he did so by using the principle of loss of aversion so in general loss of version says we are double more motivated to avoid laws than to gain something the big takeaway that is we shouldn't tell people what is to win if they say yes we should tell them if they say no to us what they stand to lose or what they are missing out on and an example of an ad the message was relief from back back pain that's the win frame or and that's maybe a tough one but this is the the example that they use avoid open back surgery so now the back surgery is lost maybe maybe a bit exaggerated but click through rates was increased by forty six percent what shows this think if you create a message not what has to win but what's said to lose and then a really funny one was from for dutch lottery and people unsubscribe so they want people to not do that so they tried many messages and they tried also many laws of version messages so they was tried you will long longer enjoy the benefits of this pro product you will not longer support our charities you will not enjoy new features that are coming but the winner was and this is shows also irrational of people you will lose your loyalty points on that message ninety percent of the customer state but i don't believe a single customer was aware of having royalty points who wakes up in the morning and take you know what i have i have royalty point from bit laundry but that message losing actually something that day hat was a who was the big winner in another experiment by the famous researcher elliott arr who i've cited plenty of times on the show women were shown one of two messages encouraging them to book a breast cancer screening the first message said with early detection survival rate is a hundred percent get screened with early detection survival rate is a hundred percent get screened it's a really good message but they created a second message which focused on potential loss it was inspired by loss of aversion it read only fifteen percent of women live five years or more with late detection get screened so that's only fifteen percent of women live five years of more with late detection that second loss of aversion message led to a hundred and twenty five percent more screenings the next example bass for me is inspired by a nineteen seventy eight study that some of you may know it's a very famous as well known study where people are waiting in line for a copy machine and somebody asked can i skip the line and people probably were a bit friendly about sixty percent back debt but sixty percent said yes you can skip the line but then they did another pewds can i skip the line because i'm running late and i really need these copies ninety four percent said yes they now got a reason for the most interesting part is yet had to come now they did the approach can i skip the line because i need to make copies what is everybody else needs to do it as waiting in line to make copy for a copy machine we'll probably making copies but ninety three percent said yes so what this research shows and later on other researchers if we get a reason why we should do something our motivation heavily increase even if the reason is not really valid can i cut in line because i need to make copies works ninety three percent of the time while just saying can i cut in line only works sixty percent of the time giving a reason boosts action and bass says we can apply this principle online as well a away where this is used is for in belgium at b post they had up service when people move houses i think in every country they have their service you can go to the government postal office and say well if i still get meal or my old address forwarded to my new address that was this service and they had a certain type of landing page then we redesigned it to something very simple was redesigned to a header three checkboxes boxes with the reason why a good image with and enthusiasm the and one single button one single prompt forty one percent more sales the reason why combined with the image simple design and a good prompt helped increase conversions by forty one percent alright we've covered how social proof boosted sales for ny x makeup our enthusiasm increased reviews for the cafe was sitting in how smaller steps increased job applicants by twenty five percent and how loss of evasion messaging increased breast cancer screenings by a hundred and twenty five percent but we are not done after this quick break bass will share two more tips including how one company increased the number of meetings its sales team booked by reducing the choice it offered its customers all of that coming up marketing against the grain hosted by kip bard and kieran fan is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals if you want to know what's happening right now in marketing what's coming ahead and how you can lead the way this podcast is perfect for you if you want an episode to get you started i would suggest you search for my episode on marketing against the grain just search for phil ag on the marketing against the grain feed and you'll hear me talk about the peril of using ai for marketing so go and listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts imagine you are a salesperson person you are emailing potential customers asking them to book in a meeting with you they say yes and you now need to offer them time for a call now conventional wisdom suggests that you should offer them as many times as possible you should say here all the times i'm free over the next few weeks that makes the most sense it gives the customers the most amount of time to pick and decreases the chances that there'll be a clash it makes conventional sense but perhaps it's not the best message see ba has evidence to suggest that offering less availability can actually increase the number of sign ups here's why what we think is that we love to have choices what actually we are not so good in making choices what actually happens if we get too many choices we choose not to choose what we always say maximum five more than five people choose not to choose ideally three in his book ba shares a real world example from the software company un bounce what happened with un bounds they had a page to join a free demo and they gave you four time slots that sounds rationally well then i can pick four time slots it's easier to to match what in your calendar actually when they reduced it to three time slots conversions increased with sixteen percent reducing the number of cool slots increased conversions this same principle can be applied to online sales as well now what is interesting is also applies to filters and i think there's a big lesson especially for listeners that have a web let's say yourself shoes and you have all types of shoes we like to show them all but maybe you want first filter some of shoes winter shoes or maybe sneakers boots and then a nashville filter and a next because much more people will continue to flow and find much quicker what they're looking for and actually we have such a case in a shop that's sold boots and by changing the options in the filter menu we were able to increase sales with twenty five percent simply reducing the number of filters helped increase sales but bass encourages you to remember the rule minimum three choices maximum five it's always important to offer some choice because offering no choice at all will backfire as well to explain why i'll need bass to explain the h plus one rule thomas h was actually somebody that left in the uk and he had a post delivery service in the seventeen honda so it was weird horses and because he not always was delivering post he also rendered out his horses so people could make a right but he didn't want that people all the time choose the best and the quickest horse because it would wear him out and he could not easily deliver the mail anymore so what he did when people came out to rent a horse he showed you all around all the stable and then he said you can only pick this horse so you got one choice that became known as the hops and choice now online in this in this situation the seventeen all almost people traveled to him and they were standing there so they really wanted to horse and they had no other way than accepting the hops choice the only choice he gave them online we always have another choice and that choice is somewhere in the right top of our desktop and it's a red cross go away so we always have two choices now what we say the hops and plus one means add an additional choice bass has tested this himself he worked with a dutch bank that wanted to increase its survey responses the email the bank sent out to customers said dear customer name can you help us improve our website and then they included a button saying yes i want to help click that button in you get the survey bass knew this would backfire only offering one choice causes react and it stops people from acting so he added a second button alongside yes i want to help he added a button that said maybe later offering that second option that hobbs plus one choice doubled the number of survey responses that the dutch bank received bass has also tested this with an insurance company here's what he did and they had a call to action create your insurance package then we added button create your insurance package text links share this on linkedin who in their right mind wants to share on linkedin they going to create an insurance package you would say nobody but it was also we could test this the click through rate to start creating your insurance package was increased by two home forty four point seven percent only because reducing the option making the option of doing nothing going away less available today we have covered seven tips that you can apply to your online marketing the first is that you can use social proof that's personalized to your audience and it works it improved my email open rate by six point four percent second offer variable rewards it helped one cafe generate one thousand two hundred five star reviews the third breakdown big asks into smaller commitments it increased job applicants by twenty percent the fourth used loss of version messaging it can reduce customer cancellations by ninety percent the fifth give a reason even if it's an invalid one it can help increase conversions by forty one percent the sixth offer fewer than five choices it boosted un bounce sales meetings by sixteen percent and finally always offer more than one choice that insurance company increased conversions by two x with this tip these seven tips are all backed by reliable behavioral science whenever i've referenced a paper or a study i've cited it in today's show notes so you can go and check them out there if you'd like to but before you go let me please tell you that nine hundred and seventy six smart marketers like you have left a five star review for na john's spotify or apple could you leave nadia review if you do you can send me an email to let me know i'd be more than happy to send you a surprise to say thank you but of course if you don't want to you can always just share the show on linkedin instead that helps as well so can you leave nadia review because let's face it all podcasts need podcast reviews alright that is all for this week folks thank you so much for listening and thank you for the wonderful bass for coming back on the show he was on about a year ago now i really enjoyed that episode he asked to come back on and i and really couldn't wait to get him back on he's a fantastic guess and if you'd like to learn more from bass and get many many more tips about how to improve your website you can sign up to his online influence academy on this academy which is all hosted online he has lessons teaching you how to boost most motivation designer winning prompt to create a fantastic website increase the ability customers need to take action all these wonderful things that can genuinely improve your conversions online there is a community forum there's a great weekly q and a i'm part of this community as well i really enjoy learning from bass so if you are interested in signing up just click the link that i have left in the show notes to access that offer and sign up but make sure to click that link in the show notes alright that's all for me this week you might have had that last week i hiked over fifty kilometers to give a talk at a conference it was a pretty bizarre day and ended up being a pretty bizarre talk at a conference if you would like to hear why i did that and what that talk was about and please do go sign up to the nudge newsletter i'm gonna write a newsletter this friday explaining why i walked fifty two kilometers to give a conference talk so just go to nudge podcast dot com click newsletter in the menu to sign up there alright that's all for this week massive thank you to bass for coming on i'll be back next monday for another episode of nacho cheers sign

ten years ago today's guest on nudge had an idea that would eventually transform the lives of thousands of people it there was a moment in between meetings sat in a coffee shopping in cove garden and there was a homeless guy out at the front just saw numerous people walking past tap in their pockets pretend they had no change and then walking straight into the coffee shop i was sat and spending three four quid on a skinny latte and a cross on seeing this sparked an idea there's something a bit wrong with this journey and there might be aware of us using the money that spent on coffee to tackle the problem of homelessness training formerly homeless people as barista given them a skill and change police was born my i guest on nudge today as an award winning advertiser a social change strategist and a serial founder i'm chris baker i have just written a book called obsolete how change brands are changing the world before doing that i've spent around twenty years working in ad agencies in strategy creative behavioral science all of that kind of thing and i've been involved in launching two brands one of them a coffee business called change please which i was c cofounder of and more recently serious tissues which is a toilet roll business chris is coffee brand change please aims not to solve homelessness by providing homes but by providing jobs we find people from local homeless shelters and partners with charities and councils we train them as barista they get paid london living wage and then they work on our carts they work with our partners let we work they either stay with change police for a period of time or they move on into on on with employment in that space it's a business that's change the lives of thousands of homeless people you go from being a person asking for change and people ignoring you to people coming up to you every single day and asking for something they value and yet change please wasn't an overnight success in the early days the charities struggled to generate sales they found it hard to convince businesses to partner with them like most charities people recognize recognized that homelessness was a problem but they struggled to persuade people to change their deeply ingrained habits that was until chris and his team applied a genius bit of behavioral science we really wanted to break down where your money was going from a cup of coffee okay every cup is three quid three fifty so we created this infographic with two cups side by side one of them being a change please coffee and one of them being a an average high street coffee fifty four percent of the spend with a change please coffee would go to changing lives so big big chunk you know over over fifty percent we then called out the cost of the cup the coffee the milk the stir the napkin all the other things that come with it the right hand side of this image shows the change please cost breakdown with fifty four percent of their sales going towards homelessness with eleven percent going towards carts costs twenty percent towards tax and fifteen percent towards the coffee and then we compared that to the average high street coffee so you can see the money going to tax to profit to staff employment all of those things that went that went with it on the left of the image you see the high street coffee twenty one percent of their costs to sent to staff fourteen percent is profit thirty percent shop costs twenty percent tax and fifteen percent to the coffee this one visual dramatically helps change please so the side by side comparison was a was a game changer but why why would an infographic be more persuasive than simply telling customers that they're helping homelessness why did businesses like we work need to be persuaded with stats like this well it's due to some fairly interesting behavioral science and one specific harvard study that reveals why showing your costs can be very persuasive all of that coming up after this short break cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hub hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow four five weeks in early twenty eighteen three researchers set up a real world experiment at an american university cafeteria every weekday lunch the cafeteria sold a chicken noodle soup priced at four dollars and ninety five cents the researchers created a bit of a marketing sign to promote the soup one sign said what goes into our chicken noodle soup then it listed all the ingredients chicken breast broth noodles and so on the second sign of variant that they would show on alternate days showed the ingredients and their cost so it said chicken breast it costs us twenty one cents broth twelve cents noodles twenty six cents plus labor costs of three dollars and twenty three cents it finished by saying the total cost for us to create this soup is four dollars twelve cents now over the course of this five weeks nine thousand two hundred and twenty seven customers bought soup over fifty different lunch breaks but which of these two signs drove the most sales now you might think that showing the costs would make people less likely to buy after all they're learning that the ingredients are cheap and that the cafeteria makes a pretty healthy profit but this didn't put people off those who saw the costs were actually twenty one point one percent more likely to buy it was a statistically significant difference the researchers moa be and john replicated this same finding in five separate experiments and found consistently that sharing costs increases purchase intent online participants in another experiment who were shown two backpacks were seventy point eight percent more likely to pick the backpack when shown a cost breakdown shoppers who saw chocolate bar packaging with the costs included were more willing to buy and holiday goers rated tour packages as better value when they saw cost transparency the researchers concluded that transparent showing cost increases trust and purchase intent chris and his team had achieved the same thing the infographic made businesses and customers trust the brand it revealed the value of the work in just an image and not through lengthy messages and ultimately it made londoners far more likely to buy their coffee so change please it's in twenty three countries at the last time accounting revenue wise it's north of thirty maybe close to forty million so it's the coffee you would drink on delta airlines virgin atlantic a lot of the trains around here at brent football club but brighton it's in we works it's in david lloyd gyms and on and on and not revealing cost is one small behavioral science tactic that helped grow this sustainable business but chris has many more examples just like this in his book he'll share how oakley eco and tony's and dozens of other brands use psychology achieved to grow but before that chris first wanted to explain what he means when he says change brand so what is a change brand at its simplest it is a brand or a product that is an improvement on the status quo in that particular category generally we look up almost every product category out there it's not perfect there is some sort of category issue whether that's plastic packaging formulation something in the supply chain a change brand is a positive move forward in that regard they tend to fall into the areas of health sustainability and social impact in terms of the difference they make it's a really broad mix of brands these brands don't need to persuade everyone to buy them even a small shift in behavior can have a major impact consumer spend is a huge huge amount i think in the uk it's one point four trillion in the us it's into like fourteen fifteen trillion globally it's over seventy trillion so if you move one percent of that money in a year to brands that part of the solution rather than part of the problem you're moving seven hundred billion dollars every single year and one classic change brand that's done just this is oat the oat milk brand now valued at three hundred million dollars but only success didn't come immediately what what a lot people don't know is that it's a product that emerged from a swedish university in the mid nineties as an alternative to dairy brilliant product oatmeal much like you'd see today obviously there's there's more variance today but the the original packaging i think the the chief great officer at the time who came in john's john sc described it as looking like a dutch multinational it looks like and indistinguishable from any other competitor just looks like something you'd find in a health food shop i've included an image of this old oat packaging in the show notes the packaging states how is enriched with calcium and vitamins naturally low in saturated fat and that it contains healthy oat fiber that's good for your heart like chris says this really looks like a very niche health drink and when the packaging was like this oakley sales were tiny that is until they changed their packaging the first thing that did was they rebranded so they did a big rebranded piece taking it from being something that really old school logo through to something that is iconic and just had a huge huge stand on shelf it wasn't without resistance internally when they presented it to the the team internally they were like what you're doing you're j the business it's really child like but the moment it got on shelf people were in their hands and they saw that within eighteen months sales have doubled so made a really big difference it's not a surprise that oakley staff resisted this re brand their new packaging had no mention of the drinks healthy elements it didn't mention vitamins calcium the low saturated fat instead it was playful it called its ingredients the boring side of the package and rather than listing health benefits which it didn't it simply said it's swedish now there is one two thousand and six paper called the unhealthy tasty intuition that explains why this may have worked so well for only the researchers served one hundred and ten students three fictitious cracker brands each cracker was nutritional identical but the researchers had altered the label so that some supposedly had higher levels of saturated fat now remember saturated fat is very bad for you we don't want it in our diet however it turns out that crackers labeled as being high in saturated fat we're third to taste far better then their healthy alternatives even though those two types of crackers were identical in taste in a follow up experiment with thirty nine participants people rated a smoothie as fifty five percent tastier when it was described as unhealthy rather than unhealthy the researchers concluded that most people will pick an unhealthy option over a healthy one most people say that the unhealthy version tastes better and this works even on people who typically eat and claim to enjoy healthy food calling oat a health drink significantly reduced their audience not just amongst the general public but amongst healthy eaters as well removing that messaging open them up to a much wider market and only achieve sales they could have never imagined as a health drink brand you would see that that iconic blue packaging next to the coffee machine you'd have very cool people asking for milk in their coffee and the term oat flat white just became the coffee to drink ref framing helped out succeed and one chewing gum brand is trying to follow in their footsteps i suppose what you wouldn't think of when you chew a piece of chewing gum is that it's actually made of plastic so when you look on the back of it you'll see that it has an ingredient called gum base but gum base is actually made from plastic a piece of chewing gum has the same amount of plastic in it as a plastic straw a brand called nude is out to change this that that was really the problem that that nude set out to to solve they created a product that is made from basically tree sap an ingredient called chick it can go back to the same tree year after year after year so it's totally regenerative and it's totally bio part of nude success has come from some very smart messaging mean they're taking a little bit out of the only playbook so when you look at their packaging it says tube plants not plastic you're seeing that call to action the facts in in a shorter way as possible of describing it these two slogan chew plants not plastic and some gum has the same amount of plastic as a plastic straw well those two slogan are very powerful specifically because they are very easy to visualize i shared this on nudge before but for marketing messages to be call they need to use concrete language and not abstract terms the study i love to share about this is one by richard shot mike t and leo burnett they showed four hundred and twenty five participants phrases that typically appear in commercial comm some were concrete phrases like cashew nut happy hen skinny jeans other phrases were abstract like wholesome nutrition innovative quality central purpose participants were told to wait five minutes and they were then asked which slogan they remembered turns out they remembered six point seven percent of the concrete phrases but just zero point seven percent of the abstract ones a ten fold improvement nude don't say our central purpose to rid the industry of plastics while providing an alternative nutrition they say something concrete chew plants not plastic that concrete makes it far more memorable and they're not the only change brand using concrete phrases another one i really love from the book is meat consumption so dogs and cats eat twenty percent of the world's meat and fish if they were a country they'd be the fifth biggest meat consumer on the planet after us china brazil and russia dog tokyo is the fifth biggest meat eater on the planet concrete phrases like this help brands like gru club stand out against their much larger peers because a gru club have created this product this new pet foods that is made from insect protein in fourteen days you can grow our shipping containers worth of insect protein it's it's meal worm and and and gru it would take months and require hectares and on hectares of land to grow the same in meat and fish so that sort of one killer that that opened up their whole world in terms of how they bring the brand to life the solution it just all runs through it beautifully change please used a cost down to persuade customers oakley stopped framing their product as healthy while new and gru club used concrete phrases to stick in the mind but tony's chocolate one of the world's fastest growing chocolate brands do something quite different something that's pissed a lot of people off find out what it is after this quick break marketing against the grain hosted by kip bo and kieran fan is brought you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals if you want to know what's happening right now in marketing what's coming ahead and how you can lead the way this podcast is perfect for you if you want an episode to get you started i would suggest you search for my episode on marketing against the grain just search for phil ag on the marketing against the grain feed and you'll hear me talk about the peril of using ai for marketing so go and listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts one change brand you've probably heard of at least if you live in the uk or europe is tony's choco a chocolate company committed to rid the chocolate supply chain of slavery rather than raising the issue of slavery and lengthy press releases and long blogs they've done it in their packaging tony's choco when you look at the chocolate bar itself the way it's broken into une squares creates a bit of stickiness and and distinctive in the experience but it also communicates the story of how much inequality there is in the chocolate industry but some have claimed tony's stance go too far specifically their stunt with their christmas advent calendars so obviously tony's is all about addressing child's slavery and exploitation in the supply chain at an advent calendar if something kids love every single year so to illustrate the inequality in the sector they remove the chocolate from day eight of an advent calendar you can imagine the scene in you know breakfast at breakfast time around the country december the eighth lots of kids going mommy where's my chocolate it caused a proper first people posting on social media the daily mail obviously covered it and well like tony's have gone too far this time and they can't believe they're stealing the chocolate from the nation's youth you know not and they're not not putting the aside to the fact that if these kids were living in west africa they'd probably be working in a field holding in machete so it's a really interesting teachable moment but then the other brilliant part part of it was on day nine they had two chocolates in there so the the sense of inequality and and distribution of of the kind of wealth that comes out of it it was a really really landed in a powerful way what i think is so smart about this stunt is that it builds on a very robust psychological finding the finding was first discovered by b skinner and followed up in the nineteen seventies by m asked participants to press buttons to earn small points or monetary rewards what he found is that humans become more persistent and engaged in this game if the button doesn't always offer a reward when the button offered variable rewards rather than fixed rewards participants became more engaged it's why we love slot machines lotte and scratch carts there's a chance of winning not a guarantee and it's also why tony stunt works so well kids will vividly remember missing the chocolate for one day and then getting a variable reward of two on the following day because that reward is a variable and not consistent according to this principle it should also make them more likely to buy tony's calendar the following year but it's not the only way to get customers hooked on your product eco coli do something very different but first what is eco coli basically it is an alternative search engine it takes the search engine model which is hugely advertising funded ninety five percent of google's revenue is advertising and that's an absolutely staggering amount every single year eco uses exactly the same model but instead of that advertising money going to their profits and to line their pockets it goes into treat planting programs so every single time you search you are planting a tree just by doing what you would have done anyway i started using eco here back in twenty nineteen back then the search engine wasn't actually the best it often gave me quite a few bad results it's got a lot better since then i should say however there's one thing c did that stopped me from uni uninstall stopped me from switching to google or whatever else i would use there was one thing that kept me using their service in the top right hand corner of the screen whenever i went to search a little icon told me exactly how many trees i had planted yes every time you jump back into an indonesia window you're seeing the the figure at total level and you get reports i think you get regular weekly or monthly emails that talk about your own browsing history and the the difference you've made by you know spending time online and planning trees as you browse the website has a a live tracker that's constantly updating talking about the the number of trees that are planted the where they're planted the the the amount of projects they're funding the amount of money that's gone into tree planting this is a classic application of the it ikea effect for those who don't know the ikea effect suggests that we prefer things that we have created naught twenty eleven studies revealed that people were willing to pay sixty three percent more for ikea cabinets they had created versus the exact same cabinet but built by someone else wasn't the best search engine but knowing that i had contributed to planting dozens of trees kept me using that platform change please used cost transparency to persuade coffee drinkers only stopped referring to their product as healthy nude and gru club use concrete phrases to stick in the mind tony's used variable rewards to create a memorable stunt and eco c added the ikea effect to keep me hooked on their search engine now it should go without saying that these six change brands need much more than just behavioral science to become successful but i'm sure that each of these behavioral science applications have helped the brands along the way it is impossible to know by how much that i'm fairly certain that if oakley was still framed as a healthy oat drink most of us wouldn't be drinking oat flat whites today huge huge thank you to chris baker for coming on the show he is a pleasure to talk to and his book was a a real delight to read obsolete covers much more than just these six brands had explains why we need change brands how they work and chris own experiences launching change please and serious tissues if you'd would like a copy then click the link in the show notes it will take you to a blooms page and on that page you can use the coupon code obsolete twenty five to get twenty five percent off that's obsolete twenty five to get twenty five percent off this coming wednesday i am hiking fifty kilometers across the south of england to give a talk at a conference called create a day in paul i'm doing it to test some psychological principles and behavioral science perhaps some of you can guess what i'm testing and i'm really hoping i'll still be able to stand for my presentation on thursday i'm hoping won't have any debilitating blisters if you are coming to create a day in paul please do come along and say hi if you're thinking about coming then go to create a day dot u uk for more info and two by tickets to come along but if you just wanna follow along with my hike with my journey then do follow me on linkedin i'll share my pro progress on there just search for phil ag that's phil ag g n ew on linkedin and your family there and i will probably also write a newsletter explaining my journey and what i learned about behavioral science along the way so if you would like to read that go to nudge podcast dot com click newsletter in the header and sign up to my newsletter the header it is totally free that is all for this week folks i really hope you enjoyed this episode and i hope i'll be able to walk by the time i record next monday's episode alright thank you so much for listening i'll see you again next monday cheers and

the three to four hour rule is is just a reflection of the fact that like if you look back over the routines and daily rituals of so many different figures in history artists authors scholars composer you find again and again and again that the amount of time that they attempt to dedicate each day is very rarely more than about three or four hours this rule can be seen repeatedly throughout history us presidents literary greats and world renowned scientists follow it yet today on nudge my guest explains why this rule works and why it's almost impossible for you or i to follow it all of that coming up cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible even with the best behavioral science but that is exactly what sandler training did with hubspot they use breeze hubspot ai powered tools to tailor every customer interaction without the interaction sounding robotic or predictable and the results were pretty incredible click through rates jumped by twenty five percent qualified leads quadrupled and people spent three times longer on their landing pages go to hubspot dot com to see how breeze can help your business grow today on night i'm joined by the offer of one of the best selling books on time management and happiness my name is oliver berg i'm the author of books four thousand weeks and meditations for mortals in his latest book meditation for mortals oliver made an interesting finding if you look back over the routines and daily rituals of so many different figures in history artists authors scholars composer just so many people you find again and again and again that the amount of time that they attempt to dedicate each day to the sort of meat of their work to kind of deep focus thought or creative production is very rarely more than about three or four hours oliver writes how charles darwin working on the theory of natural selection concentrated for just two ninety minute periods and then one more one hour period each day celebrated offer virginia wolf wrote for just three and a half hours after a leisure breakfast and she produced nine novels fifty short stories three book length essays and scores of shorter works despite ending her own life aged just fifty nine the mathematician henry po focused intensely from ten to twelve in the morning and then from five to seven in the evening and then he called it a day and this specific amount just occurs with so much regular it's kind of it's kind of spooky oliver writes that charles dickens thomas jefferson alice mon monroe and g day ballard all engaged in focused work in a similar stretch of time as did anthony troll who claimed that he managed to write two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes during the three hour stint he put in each morning before heading to his job at the post office three hours a day troll observed will produce as much as a man ought to write and i look at some of the reasons for why that should be why it's very helpful to have lots of time in a creative career when you're not focused on the creative task because of what's going on in your unconscious and all the rest of it specifically oliver references alex pan research in the book rest pan found that it's more effective to focus intensely during only your peak hours rather than half hearted all day this is because creativity appears to depend partly on the process of taking place in your brain while you're not focusing limiting the time allocated to high stakes work also reduces the feeling of being intimidated or oppressed by the work itself which can cause some people to procrastinate but the sort of takeaway that i draw from that is is not that we can all necessarily afford to just four hours work a day because a lot of those people had the many servants to handle the business of of life but just that like if you're in a sort of fairly autonomous professional situation where you get to schedule your day to some extent it's a really good idea a to try to ring fence three or four hours in the course of the day if you can to be free from interruption and be not stress too hard about ring fencing any other time oliver quotes leonard wolff who writes that his wife as if moved by a law of un unreasonable nature went off and worked until lunch at one it is surprising how much one can produce in a year whether of guns or books or pots or pictures if one works hard and professionally for three and a half hours every day for three hundred and thirty days a year that was why despite her disabilities virginia was able to produce so much ring fencing three to four hours of solid work is deeply important but most people go about it entirely the wrong way later oliver will explain why most of us fail to follow this rule but first we need to cover why the rule is important this rule is important because our life is finite we have far less time than we typically expect and oliver has anecdotal evidence to prove it when he asked one of his friends to guess how many weeks the average human lives for he got a fairly hilarious response no one of my friends guessed hundred fifty thousand weeks which i always like as an example because if you double it you get all human civilization since the ancient of mesopotamia we really don't have a one hundred fifty thousand weeks for anything approaching it i think that just speaks to this sense that the amount of time we have left in our lives is functionally equivalent to sort of forever even though of course we all know intellectually that that's ridiculous the scholars offers conductors and presidents who implemented the three to four hour rule realized that they needed to ring fence time to get things done simply hoping it would done wouldn't work there aren't enough hours in the day or or weeks in our lives to accomplish things without diligent attention i think that what i'm trying to suggest is that we are so finite as against the space of things that we could in principle do or task that we could useful complete demands we could feel could could feel imposed upon us all the rest of it things to read places to go we're so finite that actually there's something very powerful about just realizing that getting anywhere close to getting your arms around it all getting on top of everything is just completely off the table yet some of us attempt the opposite of the three four hour they attempt to spend every waking hour trying to achieve their goals there's a way of half approaching the topic of of the of life that you sometimes see where people think that because life is short that means they've got to really pack every day with amazing extraordinary experiences there's they've got to sort of put a lot of effort and honestly a kind of anxious stress even into really like sucking the the the most out of of life i tend to think that comes from not having quite follow this argument all the way to the end right because it's still a kind of an attempt to win in the fight against fin and you're never going to do that right like no matter how much you pack into a life the number of things you could in principle of done didn't it's always going to be vastly greater and i think that is the point as i say when you can then let go of this futile quest to do everything and please everybody and fulfill every ambition that you can possibly think of and then it's much easier to sort of fully pour your time attention and focus into doing a few things and actually doing them and making an impact with them i love oliver his point but i wondered what do i do with my email inbox there are an endless number of emails that i have coming in how do i keep on top of them by doing less the idea that if you have an overwhelming incoming supply anything that you're gonna get on top of it by making yourself more and more efficient and optimized being being able to process more of it in the same amount of time that's the floor what happens very obviously in the case of the email is you decide to get much better at answering email you answer to email at a much quicker tempo so you're replying more quickly to more replies you're getting people reply to your replies you get a reputation for being responsible on email the the end result is is more email as they say the reward for good time management is more work in his book four thousand hours oliver shares the ancient greek myth where a gods punish king sis for his arrogance by sentencing him to push an enormous boulder up a hill only to see it roll down again an action that he is condemned to repeat for all of eternity oliver says that in the contemporary version says first would empty his inbox lean back take a deep breath before hearing the familiar ping you have new messages i think the general sort of abstract point here is just that if you take any system including yourself and all you do is make it more efficient at processing things then in a world of effectively infinite inputs to that system all else being equal all that's gonna happen is just that more and more and more inputs into the system and need dealing with yeah there's nothing wrong with efficiency in the sense that like the example i've given before if it takes an hour and a half to find your clothes in the morning there's something in your daily routines that could use a bit of improvement the fallacy is thinking that ever more efficiency is ever gonna get you to this place of total control feeling effortlessly on top of everything in the driver's seat of life that i think we are often being sort of seduced towards by a certain kind of productivity advice that we never get to never achieve the three to four hour rule is very inefficient most people can work for around eight hours a day five days a week and many can work for far longer but by limiting our core hours of work we genuinely might achieve more oliver of her explains why in his book saying the rule acknowledges the reality that most of us don't the capacity for more than a few daily hours of intense concentration it also respects the limitation in another critical way it frees you from the futile perfection is struggled to try and make the whole day unfold in accordance with your desires in other words it respects the fact that your work demands focus but at the same time it spares you from having to spend most of your hours in a defensive posture oliver writes that you don't have to be brace against each new email phone call or ser encounter in the hallway because you've made time to focus so much of life is unpredictable so much benefit comes from ser parts of life it's such a sort of losing battle to try to impose your will over twelve hours a day of any sort of normal life the alternative that is not just to give up trying to do that at all the alternative to that is to be sort of quite devoted and beautiful about trying to protect three maybe four hours and then cut yourself some slack everyone else from slack two and they interrupt you in all the rest of that time following this rule means doing two things the first is to try and ring fence a three or four hour period each day which is free from appointments and interruptions an equally important second part is not to worry about imposing too much order on the rest of the day to accept that the usual fragment chaos of life will probably characterize your other hours and this is what i try to do in in my work you know if i've managed to spend two or three hours usually first thing in the working day moving my main current project forward then it's not only okay that the rest of the day is gonna be much more scattered and and some sense unpredictable it's a good thing because then you get like have interesting conversations with people and follow lines of thought that you hadn't planned to do or above you know the other thing is to like be able you can do some things that you feel like doing rather than having to sort of beautifully complete a sort of strict running order for the day so you can harness the energy of like oh actually you know what i'd quite like to deal with that issue right now so why don't i so it's that balance between discipline and structure and and the opposite i'm talking about that now oliver doesn't share many rules he doesn't think there are many universal principles that apply to everyone the three to four hour rule is an exception and there are two other rules that he follows as well he'll share both of those after this quick break marketing against the grain hosted by kip and kieran fan is brought to you by hub what podcast network the audio destination for business professionals if you want to know what's happening right now in marketing what's coming ahead and how you can lead the way this podcast is perfect for you if you want an episode to get you started i would suggest you search for my episode on marketing against the grain just search for phil ag on the marketing against the grain feed and you'll hear me talk about the peril of using ai for marketing so go and listen to marketing against the grain wherever you get your podcasts i've tried to implement the three four hour rule since reading about it in oliver of his book meditation for mortals i get to my desk at seven each morning and i try and work until ten or eleven and i always focus on my most important task without any distractions or meetings during those first three hours it's hard and i regularly get distracted but i do find it works i get better work done than if i sporadically squeeze in an hour or two of work before or after a meeting or lunch but there is one problem i have with the rule sometimes i just don't know how to get started currently i'm in the process of buying my first home it's a painful experience with a near endless number of documents to sign and check recently i was sent a dozen or documents by my solicit to read for in these documents i've been sitting in my inbox for a week i and i just couldn't face opening them i didn't know where to start so i kept putting it off but then i read some advice in oliver of his book we don't easily recognize how much energy we invest in our lives in avoiding doing things right if you if there's projects that you haven't got around to launching or relationships that you're neglecting or all sorts of things like it may be because you just don't have time but it might be because there's some the some aspect of it that is daunting or intimidating or difficult and you just sort of don't wanna go there and the sort of classic examples that are so counterproductive are like you're worried you don't have enough money in the bank out so you just don't check your bank balance when you go to the atm or you're worried that some pain in your stomach might be something serious so you just kind of never get around to making doctor's appointment because it will be terrifying if it was something really serious so it's often specifically the things that we ought to act upon that we don't act upon or you know you've got some great idea for a a business you wanna start but but precisely because it's such a great idea you wanna make sure that you're completely ready before you start like going off down that avenue and calling in those favors or spending that money or whatever it is this was exactly the problem i was facing with those documents i'd received from the solicit semester i was bit anxious about what would be in those documents so i open the email and i put it off indefinitely however oliver has a rule in his book that could help he calls the rule just go to the shed and the idea of just going to the shed which says phrasing i get from dutch zen monk called paul lu is simply and he's it's to do with the example of somebody who's become terrified of clearing out there junk filled shed the the point is that like all you need to do to start moving on this kind of thing you've been avoiding is the tiniest possible move that brings it into your reality or to be more specific helps you accept that it already is a part of your reality so if it was clearing out of shed it could be just going and standing in that shed if it was you know making a particular phone call as he points out it could just literally be picturing yourself picking up the phone and making that phone call i'm usually pretty skeptical of the benefits of visualization but this is one of the areas where i think it can really help you just literally take yourself through the mental steps that would be involved in just accepting that this was something that you had to contend with you imagine yourself checking your bank balance you know that can be all that you need to sort of unplug the the flow of of of action because when you do that you're sort of no longer by definition you're no longer investing mental energy and trying to pretend that it isn't part of your reality so that's what i did drinking a coffee before i started my day i mentally pictured what i do which documents i'd look at first how i use google and a bit of ai to help me understand what on earth they meant and how i'd create a list of questions based on what i found it sounds so small so insignificant just to just to think about something in advance but it genuinely made a difference that short bit of time mentally thinking through the task turned it from something that was causing me low level anxiety for a week into something that i felt ready to challenge and it's an interesting distinction as against something you do see in the sort of self help world but like what you should do in this kind of context is just sort of you know muscle through and make yourself do these things not not that's not what i'm talking about because that just tends to just turn into a in a fight with yourself i'm talking specifically about just being completely gentle completely ridiculously kind of incremental no one else needs to know that you're picturing these things in your mind right so if you're embarrassed by this but just just making the first step that acknowledges the reality of this challenge instead of continuing to put a lot of emotional energy into trying to feel like it it doesn't exist at all in his book oliver quotes c young who said we cannot change anything unless we accept it or in my case i cannot answer an email from my semester unless i spend some time mentally preparing for it going to the shed isn't the final rule that oliver suggests he has one more for me that i'd never heard of before he suggests that instead or in addition to your to do list you should also keep a done list i think it done list which as it sounds is just a a a a list of the activities that you complete during the day as you complete them i think the most important reason for that is that just we are completely conditioned to compare what we've done in the day to the sort of infinite number of things that we could useful have done that day you'll always end up sort of comparing your output to a an impossible infinite quantity and guess what you always end up thinking pretty negatively about how much you've you've got through there's a mary c quote in oliver book that summarizes this nicely she wrote one never notices what has been done one can only see what remains to be done the done list helps combat that so i think a done list there are ways of doing this people familiar with like kanban methods of work organization can it's another way of sort of visualizing what has been completed it's satisfying it's good for your self esteem but more than that it's actually a kind of a there's something about it that gives you more sort of purchase on your work life it's it's to do with sort of making somewhat wiser choices i think perhaps about what you do because you're thinking yourself okay i'm only gonna move a few items from the infinite world of could be done through to the list of has been done today what is genuinely worth my my time and focus in that respect what would be deeply satisfying to see on that on that list and i just find it to be a really sort of a really great addition to my working day because yeah you go home at the end of the day or whatever and you can see you can see that you did not do almost nothing a done list helps you recognize and remember your great work the acknowledgement of progression can give you the motivation to do more just going to the shed can help you tackle the anxiety inducing tasks with relative ease but the rule i want you to take away is the three to four hour focusing for just three to four hours a day on major important tasks with as little distraction as possible is a great way to genuinely get big projects done without feeling burnt out and if you feel like three to four hours isn't enough consider this quote from a new mexico monk who starts his day at nine forty am and finishes three hours later at twelve forty pm he was asked what do you do if you get to twelve forty pm and you still feel like you've got lots of work to do the monk replied saying you get over it massive thank you to oliver berg for coming back on nudge this is his second appearance on the show and if you haven't heard his first episode then do go back and check it out on that episode he persuaded me to stare at a picasso painting for three hours to learn about patients i did it was incredibly tedious and brain numbing but still fairly enlighten if you liked either of oliver episodes then you were in luck because he and i recorded a third bonus at for the bonus show oliver shares how social media keeps him hooked how he we himself off social media platforms he explains that we shouldn't live inside the news cycle and he advocates for people to spend less time worrying about global news and policies that they can't control he gave me some great advice on how i can help with social issues i care about as well i think based off today's show but also the last one i really can listen to oliver talk for hours on end his points are fantastic so if you have also enjoyed today's show i think you'll love the bonus episode as well to get access to that bonus episode just click the link in the show notes enter your email and you'll be taken straight to the bonus episode if you are already a nudge newsletter subscriber then just check the email i sent you announcing this episode and you'll have a link to the bonus episode in there in the show notes you'll also find a link to oliver book meditation for mortals it's superb written and thoroughly thought provoking i would really recommend you read it and finally thank you so much for listening i wish these episodes took me just three to four hours to produce they don't they take much longer but it is all worthwhile because of the wonderful support i receive from you the show is nearing one thousand five star reviews across apple and spotify that means an awful lot thank you so much for your support i'll be back next monday for another episode of nudge bye bye course