Marketing Psychology: 5 Little Known Facts About Consumer Behavior in Advertising

Why behavioral science matters for marketers

Richard Shotton: Okay, so I think there’s three big reasons. The first is relevance. Everything we are trying to do on a day to day basis as marketers is persuade people. So we’re trying to persuade them to buy our product more often, pay a premium switch from a competitive brand. So frankly, what could be more relevant than the science, the study of why people make decisions. So I think the first big reason is relevance. The second big reason is range or variety. There’s a really worrying trend in marketing at the moment that people are increasingly trying to find a single way of answering briefs. Now, because the problems that your listeners will face or different brand marks face or owners face, because those problems are so varied, it’s frankly ridiculous to try and have one solution. What you end up doing is force fitting the problem you have at hand to the tool that you believe in and you end up with the wrong approach.

Louis: Can you give me an example on that? Before you go to the third part,

Richard Shotton: I would say brand purpose. Brand purpose. This idea that has been first suggesting Stengel’s growing, the company should have a higher order, a purpose beyond the profit. That would be one of those theories that it may be right in certain circumstances, but it’s not right all the time. And if you approach every brief with that as your key theory, I think you end up going wrong.

Louis: Can you give me an example of a company that went wrong with this purpose? Or an example of maybe not a real example, a fictional example of where you probably shouldn’t use a purpose driven marketing campaign, for example.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, so I mean there are lots that have gone wrong. I’d argue in the UK McDonald’s, where they try to create an ad all around the death of a boy’s father and try and use, I think it was a fillet of Fish as the way they were linked. There’s obviously the very famous Pepsi example. But my attack on brand post would never be on individual case studies because I think there are always there’s hundreds of thousands of brands in the world. There are always case studies you can find to support what dismiss a theory. What I would look at is more some of these larger, broader analyses like Stengel’s grow which try and prove that there is a predictable value of using this and those tend to be overblown. And the contrast of behavioral science is stark. Behavioral science isn’t really one big grand theory. It’s a collection of lots of biases on occasion, seemingly contradictory, messy biases. But the brilliance is that whatever brief you have there will be a useful bias. But it does put the onus on the marketer. It’s not a simple tool which you can just apply randomly. You have to use your now so you have to use your intelligence to pick the right bias for the particular problem you face and then the third element away. I’d forgotten about the third. The third is robustness. So again another dangerous marketing. We’ve all been in these meetings where people defer to the most eloquent person in the room or normally the most highly paid person in the room. That is not a good basis for making multi million pound decisions. Someone’s gut feeling. What is far better is paper science which is based on the peer reviewed evidence of some of the leading scientists around the world. People like Kahneman and thaler acting today, B.F. skinner and Aarons in the past. Best of all, it’s not a case of, you know, we just have to defer to these famous academics. All their research is in the public domain. We can take that research, we can rerun it and make sure it works for our particular brand in our particular market.

Louis: So I’m going to ask a very leading question. I’m sure as a behavioral scientist you’ll appreciate it. So do you think behavioral science would make marketers better or at least practice like what I would call the good marketing. So not the aggressive shady type.

Richard Shotton: Yes, absolutely. Two reasons. Firstly, you’ve got that science behind it, that robustness. But secondly, and I think the strength of that is not that it will talked about there’s this range that is relevant to all the different problems you face. It’s not that taking a bias or psychological quirk from behavioral science will solve all your problems but it will often give you a different angle to solving a problem. It gives you a different place to start. And I think the Second part is often those approaches can be really counterintuitive. They can allow you the luxury of considering things that I think just logic or rational thought alone might cause you to reject.

Louis: So you and I had a brief email chat before going on this interview, and I’ve asked you to basically pick out of the 25 behavioral facts from your book, to pick your favorite, your three favorites, and drill down. So I’m very happy because the first one, I never heard of it, and I feel ashamed, but I feel super interested as well. So I’m literally a beginner for this one. But I have a few examples right away that I read. But anyway, what we’re going to do together for this episode, we’re going to run through those three habits, those three behavioral facts. Yeah, biases. And we’re going to try to not only look at the theory, but also the practice. How can you actually use this bias at your advantage as a good marketer? And how can you be aware of it in the future? So, without further ado, what is the first of the three you’d like to talk about first?

The pratfall effect: Why admitting flaws makes you more appealing

Richard Shotton: Okay. Well, one I think that you mentioned is less well known is the pratfall effect, which is a fascinating one. So the pratfall effect was an idea that was first discussed by Elliot Aronson, so professor of psychology at Harvard in the 60s. And it’s the idea that if you admit a weakness or you exhibit a flaw, you become more appealing. So it’s quite a counterintuitive one. And what Aronson did in 1966 with his colleague, I think it was Floyd and Williman, his colleagues, he recruited someone to take part in a quiz. He gave that contestant the answers to the quiz. So the guy does amazingly well, gets 92% of the questions right, and wins the quiz by miles. But then as the contestant is finishing, he makes what Americans would call a pratfall, a small blunder. He stands up and he spills a cup of coffee down himself. So Aronson takes that recording and he plays it to participants in his experiment in one of two ways. Either they hear the entire episode, or they just hear the great quiz performance. And then Aronson asks everyone, how appealing do you find this guy? And people find the contestant when they’ve heard the mistake, significantly more appealing. So, as I said, Aronson calls it the pratfall effect and argues that people and products who exhibit a flaw become more appealing.

Louis: So this is fascinating. So many levels, I don’t even know where to start at this stage. So there’s a few things. First, I work for a company called Hotjar. And one of the core things that, that we are very proud of is the transparency. And so what we would do from time to time is publish a blog post with all the mistakes we’ve made in the last 12 months about a certain topic and what we learned from them. Or our CEO will go speak at conferences and meet mistakes and being very transparent about it. Right. And that alone brought us a lot of brand equity. People really appreciated the fact that we share stuff that people wouldn’t share and that I feel very strongly that falls really into this effect, right?

Richard Shotton: Absolutely, absolutely. And just a small side kind of relevant tangent, if you like that approach, I would recommend. There’s a paper by Paul Feldwick about Barclaycard, so hugely successful ad campaign in the 1980s. And what he says is, look, I hate all these award entries. They’re a post rationalized version of the truth. Here’s what actually happened. And he mentions all the luck and the mistakes and the serendipity. And the other blog that regularly does that is a wonderful one called Stuff from the Loft by Dave Dye. So I think in marketing, they’re the two ones that I think exhibit that brilliantly and I think they work really well for a couple of reasons. I think if you admit a flaw, so let’s say as a brand, it’s a vw, they announced it. Ugly is only skin deep. So they admit they’re ugly. Listerine, the taste you hate twice a day, they admit they taste awful. Guinness. Good things come to those who wait. They admit they were slow. Once you’ve admitted a flaw, it’s a tangible demonstration of your honesty and all your other claims become that much more believable. Now, considering one of the biggest issues we face as brands is that people probably quite rightly, don’t trust brands. That alone gets you, I think, a hell of a lot of benefits.

Louis: So how can you, let’s say someone listening right now wondering, how can I apply that to my daily job? They might not manage brand brands that are massive. Some of them do, but some of them don’t. So what can they start right now, today, to use this effect to their advantage and potentially bring more people to

How to apply the pratfall effect in marketing

Richard Shotton: them so you don’t have to be a massive brand. One of the very well studied areas by Northwestern University was about applying this tactic on your reviews. So Northwestern University did say in 2015 they scraped 111,000 product reviews and they graphed them up showing the likelihood, the number of the review, the Kind of rating of you from one to five, five being brilliant, one being awful, and then the likelier to purchase. And what they found was that for every one of the 22 categories they looked at, as the product review gets better, likelihood of purchase increases until it hits a tipping point. So somewhere between 4.2 and 4.4 out of 5, and then after that point, if the review gets any better, then likely to purchase declines. So they argued perfection was not trusted. It was seen as too good to be true. So consumers didn’t trust perfection. So if you are running a brand, whatever size is, if you have negative reviews, don’t be ashamed of them. Don’t be one of these websites that just put up the perfect reviews. Put some of the poor ones up and explain, answer them, explain why maybe they had a poor service in that very rare individual case.

Louis: It also reminds me of a book about leadership. I think the 22 irrefutable laws of leadership. Or maybe I’m missing it up, but I remember reading about this concept in leadership that it’s if you want to be a good leader, you also need to be showing your weaknesses and being able to admit them. Right?

The red sneaker effect and breaking norms

Richard Shotton: Yeah. Because paradoxically, you don’t come across as weak, you come across as strong. There’s a lovely study, I don’t mention this in the book. I think I might have read it afterwards, called the Red Sneaker Effect. And it’s by, I think it’s either Francesca or Francesco Gino. And what the psychologist did was go to academic conferences in the early 2000s when there was a very strong norm for wearing formal clothes. So most people would wear suit and a shirt. What Gino did was categorize how well dressed they were from formal to informal. And then once he’d done that, categorized individuals, he would go and ask them how many citations they had. So citations are a good quantitative measure of how successful you are as an academic. And what he found is there was an inverse correlation between formality of dress and number of citations. So what he then argued is this idea called the red Sneaker effect, which is essentially, it is only people who have high status or a confidence in their abilities that can break a norm. One of the biggest norms you have is pretending to be perfect. So the argument from that would be, don’t try and hide your flaws. If you tell people about them, if you admit a weakness, people will find you more appealing and higher status.

Louis: Probably one thing that I do, obviously I don’t have a choice. My accent is my accent, right?

Richard Shotton: Yeah.

Louis: But one thing That I play on now is I’ve decided a few years ago, you know, I’m not going to try to remove it. I’m just going to try to make sure that people understand me a bit like Schostenegger. I mean, he’s been living in the US for like 40, 50 years at this stage, but. And I’ve understood now that admitting that, yeah, I do have a French accent and I’m not gonna remove it actually is something that is kind of a sort of a weakness. Because, yeah, I could be a podcaster with like the perfect American accent like everyone else, but I’m not happy with

Richard Shotton: my French one and the other bit there because debatable. I would not argue a French accent was a weakness, but what it probably is is distinctive. And that’s the other massive benefit of the Prattful effect. All your competition will be going out and bragging. So the great thing is, if you go out and admit a flaw, you become distinctive. And if there’s one thing we know about advertising, it’s that what is distinctive is memorable. I saw a great example of this in the pub a few days ago. So I went to a brewdog pub, and on the back of their T shirts, they have comments from customers who came in and thought the overpriced tosh or tasted awful. They’ve got comments from people who hated their product. And to me, that shows an amazing confidence in what you have. You’re not trying to appeal to everyone. And the other bit is, could you ever imagine an industrialized lager like Molten Cores or Fosters or whoever making that same call? It’s amazing.

Louis: It’s really amazing to see that. It also connects very well with the fact that when you take risk, when you show who you are, you said very well that you don’t appeal to anyone anymore. And I think one of the key reasons for marketing to be successful is to make sure that you don’t appeal to everyone, because then you appeal to no one. Right. So admitting your flaws and also you will probably. There will probably be some people that won’t like that, but the ones who will will probably love it more and therefore be a promoter of your business and be more willing to buy from you.

Richard Shotton: Absolutely. I think that’s. Yeah, it’s a potentially great advantage. There’s some lovely ones. I saw a American ski resort where they had taken a bad customer review and put it on their double page ad. And it was something along the lines of. I think it was called Snowbird Greg from California. And what he’d written was these slopes are frankly dangerous. People should not be al loud on them. And they ran that and said, look, it’s not for everyone. This is for the hardcore skier.

Louis: So I could talk about the pratfall effect for ages with you, but we have two other biases to go through and I’m mindful of your time as well. And I know that listeners are eager to know the two others. So I think we’ve cornered this one pretty well. I think people are quite convinced now they should probably try it out a bit more, admitting their mistakes a bit more, and that’s very beneficial. So now what’s the second bias you’d like to go through?

Confirmation bias: Why people resist new information

Richard Shotton: So the second bias is confirmation bias. And it’s the idea that people are very good at maintaining their existing point of view. So for example, if you dislike a brand and you hear a message them, your brain can generate counter argument after counter argument which maintains that its existing point of view it just doesn’t agree with the new information. Now what’s interesting here is that behavioral science just doesn’t identify a problem, it also identifies the solution. So there’s a wonderful Stanford psychologist called Festinger. And what Festinger did was look at moments when people were more open to persuasion, more open to changing their point of view about a deeply held belief. So what he does in 1964, he recruits people who are members of college fraternities and he plays them an audio argument. An audio argument why college fraternities are morally wrong. Now half of them just listen to the audio argument, the other half also listen to a silent film or sorry, have to watch a silent film. Then after they’ve done this, they answer questions about how much their beliefs have changed. And what Festinger found was that if people were also watching the silent film, they were more likely to have changed their views. Now this is, I think, a fascinating experiment because the argument would be, look, if you want to persuade someone who dislikes your brand that it’s actually decent, what you shouldn’t do is the strategy that 99.9% of media planners would advise you to do, which is put your ad in a high attention environment, things like the cinema or appointment to view programming. What Festinger argues is if you do that, you’re just drawing, the brain will just create these counter arguments and nothing will change. What you should do is reach people at moments of distraction because at least they’re potentially persuadable. So it might be you run on an auxiliary medium that people are doing something else while they’re listening to like radio or you forget about the media argument and you take this as a creative suggestion. And therefore for creative what you should consider is not making just factual arguments. Don’t just listen. A long group of reasons about why your brand’s great. What you need to do is think about the body language and the tone of your ads. And perhaps the best example of this is back in the late 80s, British Airways were struggling with perceptions of quality. What they didn’t just do was talk about how they had amazing stewards and stewardesses, great big seats. What they did was always accompany their ads with dlieb’s Claudulo to write this wonderful evocative piece of classical music. Now there is no logical argument about quality. So therefore the brain doesn’t come up with a list of counter arguments. So I think that’s an interesting one.

Louis: It brings me straight away, I wanted to talk about that because as soon as you mentioned this, I thought of Facebook and their recent shit show of an event. It’s just insanely. It’s insane to me that these billion multibillion dollar companies have failed so badly at communicating about their flows and failed so badly as understanding the exact principle you just mentioned. So I’m talking about the privacy issues. The fact that they had so many security breaches and the way they communicated about it was not in moments of distraction whatsoever. I feel they’ve just blasted their message of saying, yeah, we’re sorry we fucked up, but we didn’t really fuck up everywhere they could. Right?

Richard Shotton: Yeah, yeah.

Louis: How would you have approached this strategy? Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they did it well, I mean,

Richard Shotton: so there are two things there. There is the first point which I think is fascinating about the first scandal with Facebook was around the Russian advertising the American elections. I would actually hold a slightly different viewpoint about that. And unfortunately I think whichever way you argue, I think from that the biggest beneficiary will actually be Facebook. There’s a lovely analogy back in the. Oh God. I say 1920s, but I might be getting my decades wrong of doing a story about Orson Welles and War of the Worlds. He did a program about H.G. wells Novel War of the Worlds and he ran it as a. He made it look like it was a news program. So supposedly all the newspapers, supposedly there had been riots that people got so scared about this story of alien invasion that was said a news story that they panicked in the streets. Yeah, have you heard of that one?

Louis: No, I remember.

Richard Shotton: Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, fine. So what’s interesting is that when people have looked into this since, you know, there was no panic. You know, there’s no evidence of any of these panics. It was a story concocted by the newspapers of the day to try and crush an embryonic medium. I actually think what’s happened with the Russian election story is the same thing has happened. You see traditional news organizations repeatedly talking about how Facebook swung the US election. Now, I’ve no idea about the rights and the wrongs of this, but what it certainly seems is that many of those new organizations are jumping on this chance to tarnish Facebook. What’s fascinating, though, is if you go back to the 1920s, what happened with radio and Orson Wellesley, those newspapers tried to make a scandalous event. It caused a massive hoo ha for a few months. But after those few months died down, after the kind of news story died down, what advertisers were left with was the memory that radio was an amazingly powerful medium, that it had the ability to cause panic in the streets and therefore it could probably sell their dishwasher powder. I think exactly the same mistake is being made by news brands and Facebook. They’ve gone out and told everyone that it’s this amazingly powerful medium that is swinging elections. Once the hoo ha has died down, what advertisers will remember is that it can swing elections and therefore it will shift their yogurts and soap powders. So unfortunately, it depends which argument side you want to go for. But unfortunately for newspapers, I think they are digging their own graves by following that tactic.

Louis: Yeah. You just showed with your argument that you’re much smarter than me and shouldn’t attempt to talk about behavioral science too much.

Richard Shotton: Well, I’m not sure if that has anything to do with behavioral science, but I love it as a. I just love the awesome Welles story. It’s one of my favorites.

Louis: It’s about the same. I interviewed Mark Ritson a few months ago about brand and he was dismissing busting this myth about the fact that, oh, your reputation as a brand can be destroyed in one second. It takes only one thing.

Richard Shotton: Yes, yes.

Louis: And he was making the opponent. That’s completely bullshit. Giving the example of Volkswagen, for example, had a massive scandal and yet. And yet they’re still selling and they’re still going well. So I think that connects with your point. Right?

Richard Shotton: Yeah. I mean, I love listening to Mark Ritson. I think he’s brilliant to listen to. And the data backs his point up exactly that. YouGov do a brand index, a poll of various different branding measures after the emissions scandal, VW’s scores plummet within a few weeks. They’re gradually building back up again. You know, I don’t think they’ve quite hit the same branding scores as they were at, but it’s kind of marginal now. So even in that huge scandal, probably because they’d had 50 years of amazing advertising, I think they were given a second chance because they had a really strong brand. In other instances where people haven’t had such a strong brand, it’s been a bit more commoditized. They’ve traded on price. Things like Ratner’s. I mean, Ratner’s literally did destroy itself almost overnight.

Louis: What happened?

Richard Shotton: So it was a family jewelry. It started off as a family jewelry that grew to be a really big chain of jewellers in the uk. And Gerald Rattan, I think his name was, he was the founder owner at a fancy bigwigs dinner, said his products were crap, basically said it was cheap crap. They had a massive margin on. And one of the journalists at the back couldn’t believe that this guy was saying it. So next day printed this in full and he destroyed his family brand very, very quickly. But I still don’t think that necessarily contradicts Mark Ritson’s point. It was that I don’t think Ratners hadn’t had that great investment in advertising, in building any sort of brand warmth. So therefore, when that problem came along, they saw horrendous difficulties from it. Interestingly, people sometimes say, look, isn’t that a contradiction to what you just said about the pratfall effect? But with all these biases, there’s lots of nuances and there’s a couple which are relevant there, which is the pratfall effect. Some of Aronson’s work showed that it only works if you’ve already got a degree of competency. If you admit a flaw and you’re already seen as a bit shoddy, it makes it worse. And then secondly, don’t just pick a weakness randomly. The quality of your product is your core competence. The best brands don’t admit a weakness around their core competence. They admit something not only that isn’t core, but also has a positive mirror image. So think of Guinness. They don’t say their beer tastes awful, they say it’s slow. And actually, well, what people know through bitter experience is if it takes time to make, it’s probably higher quality. So it’s a weakness that has a mirror strength.

Louis: And I would say the third point is actually if you have to admit a mistake after someone else proved that it was a mistake, Then that doesn’t work, right? You can’t ask Facebook or Volkswagen. You can’t say after the fact, well, yeah, we fucked up, but it’s much better if you say that you fucked up from the start, right?

Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. I certainly not sure if it’s the pratfall effect if you are caught out when I think you’re absolutely right. Ratner was caught slagging off his customers. The only instance I’ve seen recently, well, not the only instance, but one of the recent instances I’ve seen brilliantly of dealing with a problem is probably things like KFC where you don’t hide in weaselly language. You, you make a mistake and I think you are completely forthright about it. So they turned KFC into fck and I think that was a very smart move.

Louis: I just got it, I just understood, okay, for listeners, the fck, you add the U between the F and the C and there you go.

Richard Shotton: British customers would get there very quickly because French Connection for a while was fcuk.

Louis: That’s true. So how can people apply this confirmation bias in their day to day? Like in practical terms, what would you advise people to do?

Targeting distracted audiences and using associations

Richard Shotton: There’s always, there’s always three things. We touched two of them, which is maybe targeting moments of distraction in your creative thinking about associations rather than direct arguments. I’m interested in the third point though, which is it might lead you to a targeting approach and the targeting approach might be this one of triage. So break your customer, break a potential target audience. Three, you’ve got detractors, dislikes of the brand, broadly ambivalent and let’s call them loyal and fans is a bit extreme, but know where I’m going with that one. This argument around confirmation bias would say you should focus resolutely on the middle group, should say, look, confirmation bias exists, it’s hard to get around. There are tactics we’ve talked about, but frankly ignore the detractors because it’s a hard thing to do and you’ll probably spend a lot of money and make little difference. Similarly, I think there’s a. Or there’s also an argument that you should ignore the people who really like your brand because if they’re regular buyers, there isn’t much headroom and most of the information or feelings they’ll get about your brand will come from product usage and experience. Therefore target people who are either lapsed light or ambivalent towards your brand. So I think there’s a targeting angle that comes from confirmation bias as well and I kind of enjoy it. Because it’s an admission of the weak power of advertising on an individual basis. Advertising has quite a weak effect. Yes, because it goes out to millions of people, it aggregates up to a big effect. But maybe sometimes we should have less grandiose objectives. Ignore and sod brand love. I think it’s far more realistic to get people to buy a little bit more often or return to a brand a little bit quicker than they may have done.

Louis: And can you talk just a bit more in details about what you just briefly mentioned? I think is very powerful instead of going heads on in an argument like using associations. So what do you mean exactly here?

Richard Shotton: Oh, sorry. So this is. Oh, and I should say Robert Heath talks about this brilliantly in seducing the subconscious. And that’s where I got that argument from. Festing is initialized kind of central idea is, look, the brain is brilliant at coming up at counter arguments if you approach it directly, if you make a logical assault on its existing beliefs. So instead of giving logical, rational reasons about why someone should change their behavior, what you do is surround yourself with kind of associations. You make an oblique approach. And in the case of ba, the oblique approach was by always using classical music. There are very strong associations with quality in classical music. Therefore it conveyed you were a high quality, a premium brand, a luxurious brand, because you never state it, you don’t generate all these counterarguments.

Louis: How can you find those associations? Because that’s classical music, that gives this feeling of excellence and all of that. That’s obvious now that you say it, but in hindsight I would never have thought of that. So how do you find those associations? What typical methods would you use?

Richard Shotton: Yeah, I mean the other way, costly signalling could be one other argument around this area, that the value of a massive sponsorship or a 90 second TV ad or a seemingly frivolous double page spread, you could argue the associations there are very much around a perceived expense of the advertising. And there’s a number of academics, economists, people like John Kay and Evan Davis, I think, who have argued that advertising works because of its perceived expense. People think well only when they see an expensive ad or advertising in general. They think only a brand who had confidence in their products would bother to advertise for the long term because they won’t recoup the benefit quickly or take a long time. And that is particularly extreme with high expense advertising. So one way to convey quality, genuine belief in your brand is to invest in those approaches that are perceived to

Louis: be extravagant in the long term as well. Right.

Richard Shotton: Only someone with genuine strong faith in the long term robustness of their brand, that people are going to come back again and again and again would advertise in that way. And because it acts as a screening mechanism, the only type of brands that do those things exhibit those characteristics.

Louis: Right, let’s go through the last biases of the day because I’m mindful that I’d like to go into it in detail as well. So what is the third one?

Life events and habit destabilization

Richard Shotton: The third one is habit or kind of more specifically, what are the moments when people’s habits become destabilized? And therefore, as an advertiser, you can persuade them because there’s an argument that there’s a huge amount of complexity in life. One of the ways that consumers get around that is just to buy the last thing they bought. That’s one tactic. Now, that’s a problem for lots of brands because how do you persuade someone to buy your product or encourage them to buy your product? That’s why it’s a bit too strong, maybe when they’re not even considering it. Now, one of the tactics that I’ve investigated with a colleague called Laura Weston is how people’s habits become destabilized just after they undergo a life event. So what I mean by that life event is getting married, divorced, retired, moving house. And the research we did was we got 2,370 people and we asked them two questions. First one was, which of these life events have you Undergone the last six months, 12 months? Take the ones that apply. And then the second question was, well, actually we asked some filler questions in between to throw people off the scent. And then the final question was, in which of these categories have you tried a new brand? Tick the ones that apply. And we did a few different ways. We also asked a favorite brand and where have you changed? You tried a new brand or got new favorite brand? And what we found was that on pretty much every life event and every product, we looked at people between two and three times more likely to try a new brand in that short window after they had undergone a life event.

Louis: One thing I’m thinking about straight away, sorry to cut you there, is the when I go on holidays or when I go away to France, I know that I’m very susceptible to change because I know when I come back my habits are distorted and I would have more tendency to buy new stuff.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. Do you know what? That is a brilliant one. I’ve never researched that. But. But the great thing about doing life events is we’ve got this proof that people’s habits are destabilized. They become more open to some of those Life events are pretty rare. It’s practical to target them. Lots of digital data providers have that data. Facebook track your relationship status. But the interesting thing I think about Holiday is that it’s a far more regular thing. So yeah, that’d be a fascinating one to research.

Louis: There you go. Let’s do it together.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, well that’ll be in the second book.

Louis: There you go. The 25 other biases.

Richard Shotton: You should know about the 25 biases that didn’t make in the first book

Louis: with the subtitle and admitting that you fucked up, you should have added those 25 in the first book.

Richard Shotton: Yeah.

Louis: Apart from those examples you show, what are some practical ways one can use this? So you mentioned something briefly. In Facebook you can know whether someone becomes single and stuff. It’s nice from an advertiser point of view. From a person point of view, I feel it’s a bit shady. I mean I’m not a big fan of this type of targeting. I think it’s very. A bit gray hat. So let’s try to find an example that is less gray hat. Right. A bit more white hat, a bit more good marketing style. So how else could you take advantage of this?

Richard Shotton: I think there’s probably three applications. The central idea is changing people’s behavior is very hard. So you want to pinpoint these moments of flux. Now could be these life events. The second one could be doing it before habits harden. There’s some lovely experiments by a guy called, I think it’s David Olds and he analyzed some of the. Some governmental communications and what he investigated was called the nurse family partnership where they identified families who were. Who were perceived to be at risk or the children perceived to be at risk. And they spent a lot of money trying to make an intervention. So they would get nurses to go around very regularly. And it was one of the famous kind of public health campaigns that had a huge return, positive return. But when they analyzed the data, they found that it was people. All the effect was people having their first child. There was a massive effect amongst people who had their first child when they were having their second or third child. It had no impact at all. So people were again, they felt they knew what to do and therefore were impervious to messages. So the second bit there would be about putting a disproportionate influence on people when they are entering your category, when they have limited experience of buying holidays, getting bank accounts. That is the moment. Or eating healthily when you’re starting to make food decisions, cooking for your first time yourself.

The dangers of over-personalization

Louis: Another one I’m thinking about. Sorry to cut you again, but the other one that I’m thinking about is the changing job. Right. That could be very powerful as well.

Richard Shotton: Sorry, sorry. If you go back to the life events, I mean, it’s not just relationship status. Yeah. Changing jobs is a hugely important one. Moving house, starting university. These are all moments of retiring when habits are in flux. So I think you’re right though, to say a note of caution. On one hand, these are very tailored moments to get someone actually to the point of action. But with all these things, if you take them too far, there are huge implications. There’s a wonderful argument from a guy called Kevin Simler about the dangers of kind of personalized and targeted advertising. What Simler argues, and he uses this lovely analogy of beer. He says the value of a brand is in its kind of shared cultural meaning. So he takes an example. I think you might use Red Stripe. He says, look, red Stripe has a value because if I go to a party and I want to suggest I’m laid back, I bring red Stripe. We all know what it means and it helps in me project my identity. However, if that beer brand gets greedy and tells me that it’s laid back, you, that it’s all about its high quality provenance, someone else, that it’s a beer that sponsors comedy. If it tries to target different messages to different people to begin with, that will look amazing, it’ll have great effect. But sooner or later we will overhear those messages and therefore we’ll know that it stands for nothing or that it can stand for many different things. So it’s value as a signal to other people about what we believe in no longer stands.

Louis: This is very tricky, right? I mean, for marketers are probably like, it makes me think already in terms of those personalization software allowing you to change your landing pages based on behavior. And yes, it all makes sense in the short term, but when you think of the long term brand building exercise, that makes complete sense. And actually we have a lot of back and forth with my CEO of Hoja when we talk about the brand and he makes always a good point about no, we know who our ideal customers are, let’s build the right product for them, but let’s not antagonize the others too much or tailor something different to others because exactly of this reason, I mean, he’s not mentioning all of the data and the fact and science behind it, but in terms of the thinking, I think this is what he has in mind, always is like making sure that you don’t dilute your message, your core value proposition. So it’s tricky, right?

Richard Shotton: Yeah, I suppose that is, I suppose the art. I think it’s got to accept that if you just look at things in the short term, you will optimize to a suboptimal position. You will, as you say, optimize the short term, but then over time you will be creating problems. So, yes, apply some of these moments of personalization, but don’t do it to such a degree that you lose kind of what the essence of your brand is, because then you’re going to be. That’s a serious problem coming over the horizon.

Louis: So, Richard, it’s been absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for going through all of those biases with me. I have three other questions I always ask at the end of the podcast that I like you to answer. So the first one being, what do you think marketers should learn today? And I think I know the answer. What do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next five, 10, 50 years?

Why human nature doesn’t change

Richard Shotton: I love that question. I am a big advocate for the idea that people don’t essentially change. There’s this wonderful burnback quote of and I’m not sure about his kind of historical knowledge, but, you know, the guy was a creative genius. But essentially he says it’s taken millions of years for human nature to evolve. It’ll take millions of years for it even varies. It’s fashionable for communicators to talk about the changing man. So it’s fashionable to talk about the changing man, but we should be concerned as communicators about the unchanging man. So my strong belief is we should be focusing more on the fundamentals of marketing. We should be focusing on how people make decisions, and that’s learnings from psychology and behavioral science. Not on the flavor of the month. That seems to take up far too much people’s time and effort.

Louis: I’m so happy you answered that because I’ve been following you on LinkedIn since we got in touch, and you’re sharing a lot of facts like this, and I’ve been sharing a few, actually, people like that. And this is something that I try to repeat over and over on this podcast. Is that as you said, and I don’t want to just repeat what you said, but basically, yes, people don’t change. Technology do change, but we don’t change. We adapt to certain new circumstances. But the way we think, the way it’s ingrained in our DNA is not going to change. So this is why Growth hacking, I don’t know if you heard that like growth hacking and those kind of short term thinking, flavor of the month marketing, I just can’t stick it because it just makes you think that there is something new under the sun every day. It’s not the case.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. And I wonder there, you know, maybe it’s an ego thing. There’s a lovely argument from Anatomy of Humbug by Paul Feldwick that I think he says, look, we all want to think that we are at the hardest time for marketers because it makes us feel so important, but frankly, it’s always been tough. And the reason I love the folks from psychology is if you learn this stuff when you retire, on the day you retire it will be just as relevant if you learn about some fad that’s fleetingly of interest. Well, you’ve got to relearn a whole new load of stuff in five years time. There’s great rewards I think to learn about psychology and paper science.

Louis: What are the top three resources you would recommend our listeners? Could be a book, could be a podcast, could be an event, anything.

Richard Shotton: So in terms of books, I am a big fan of Decoded by Phil Baden, which is another book about behavioral science and he’s very good at making the leaps about how Marx should apply it. I’m a big fan of anything Rory Sutherland does, whether it’s his book the Wiki man, it’s his Spectator columns, it’s his TED talks because he is frankly a genius. He’s a wonderful left field imagination. He’ll take the same biases, same psychological insights that we can all read about, but his mind is so fertile he’ll leap off in completely different directions. And then the third one, another book that I’ve read quite reasonably recently is Everybody Lies by Seth Stevens Davidovits. So he’s an ex Google data scientist and it’s a wonderful argument with some brilliant, brilliant examples about how if you ask people why they behave the way they do, they will give you misleading answers. And he is a huge advocate for looking at the terms they use use when they’re searching. He compares Google to a 21st century confessional that you can see what people think when they think no one’s watching.

Louis: You’ve been too nice not to mention your book. So the choice or a bad salesman,

Richard Shotton: which should make you question anything I then say about sales, but the fact

Louis: that you admit that you’re being a bad salesman makes you feel even Better. So The Choice Factory. 25 behavioral biases that influence what we buy. I haven’t bought it yet. I will, I promise. I definitely recommend. Absolutely. Public Commitment. There you go. So I have to do it now. I absolutely recommend every listener to buy it as well. Based on the small conversation we had together, this interview, I know that people will get a lot of value from it. And I’m super impressed by the number of followers you have on LinkedIn. I don’t give a shit about numbers normally, but that just threw me off like 200,000 people. How did that happen?

Richard Shotton: It’s quite weird as well. I absolutely love Twitter and use it loads. I don’t use LinkedIn as much.

Louis: Nobody follows your link on Twitter.

Richard Shotton: I normally just tend to post articles I’ve written. And then what I’ve started doing recently is if I see something interesting in a book, I will take a photo of it and post it on LinkedIn. And when I say a book, not a novel, not a crime fiction book, anything around psychology or advertising.

Louis: Yeah, I think people would have guessed that. Yeah.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. Last time I read a novel was about three years ago.

Louis: Apart from LinkedIn and Twitter, where can listeners connect with you?

Richard Shotton: Those are probably the best two places. Or they can always send me an email. Rshotten189mail.com but frankly, actually, Twitter’s. Twitter’s probably the best place because I think people can. I leave my messages on so people can DM me.

Louis: So what’s your Twitter handle?

Richard Shotton: Shotten. S H O T T O N. Brilliant.

Louis: Well, Richard, once again, you’ve been an absolute pleasure. I could talk to you for hours. Fantastic.

Richard Shotton: Thank you very much.

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