Chris Norton: 0:52

Welcome to Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the podcast that helps you hit record revenue and double your marketing ROI by learning from the glorious mistakes of the world's top marketers. I'm Chris Norton, your host, and my mission is to help you, the senior marketer, grow your brand by avoiding costly missteps and leveraging the lessons learned from marketing's biggest failures. Today, we're diving into a powerful conversation with Phil Agnew, the brilliant mind behind Nudge Podcast. Phil is a powerful marketing expert and behavioral science enthusiast who has dedicated his career to studying why we make the decisions we do, whether that's buying the latest trainers or choosing a salad over a steak. He's here to share how subtle nudges in consumer behavior can influence marketing outcomes and, more importantly, how to avoid the marketing mistakes that brands overlook. Phil's insights will give you actionable tools for your marketing toolkit. Whether it's leveraging psychological principles like FOMO or refining your messaging to drive higher engagement, Phil's advice could help you turn your next campaign into a massive success. He is brilliant.

Chris Norton: 1:56

This is a great episode. You are going to love it, Trust me. This is one of my favorites. So, as always, sit back, relax and let's hear how you can use behavioral science to avoid marketing mistakes and increase your ROI.

Will Ockenden: 2:09

marketing mistakes and increase your ROI.

Chris Norton: 2:15

Phil Agnew. Welcome to the show.

Phill Agnew: 2:17

Well, hello Chris, hello Will. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Chris Norton: 2:27

I mean thanks, the fact that you're and we were just discussing off air that you're the UK's number one marketing podcast, nudge in the UK, which, which is amazing, and the fact that your demographic is mainly marketing people, but you do have some vickers that listen to your show. Um, can you explain how you got into behavioral science? Because it's that's why I listen. It's fast, you've got a fascinating show. It's very different to what we cover on here, but I'd like that's what I want you to give us an insight into why you decided to do nudge and behavioral science yeah, well, I went to university and studied marketing, which, if anybody's about to go to university and study marketing, good luck to you.

Phill Agnew: 3:04

It's good fun, but, I don't know, maybe not the best use of your time. I don't know. I'm kind of critical about my university degree, which is a shame because all my professors were really lovely. But I'm critical because when I started my first job um, it's a tech company down down in brighton, the I've just done four years worth of studying and I understood all these strategies and tactics and knew about the four p's and all this sort of stuff. And then I went into the job and I was asked very early on to write an email that people would click on, to create a one-pager that would convert, to create a pricing plan for a new service that would sell, to get everybody onto our webinar. And I had no idea how to do these things. I had no idea how to write in a persuasive way how people made decisions, how to get people to alter their behavior, and I kind of struggled in the first couple of years of marketing. And then I became aware after a while of the world of behavioral science. What behavioral science basically is is it's a marketer's dream.

Phill Agnew: 4:03

Us marketers spend most of our time acting as if there's no rules. We just go of our gut instinct. What do you want to put in the email subject line? Well, I don't know, maybe an emoji. That might be fun. And it's really difficult for us. Like we sort of wish we were in a profession like cooking or law or doctors. You know, where you have a law book where you can follow, where you have rules you can follow. Marketing doesn't have that, except if you understand behavioral science. Because when you understand behavioral science you realize that there are laws and principles that pretty much the majority of people follow when they make a decision. If you understand those laws and principles, you'll be able to influence their behaviour and create better marketing. So that's how I stumbled into it, created the podcast five years ago. It's been growing slowly since then, went full-time on the podcast in January and it's now the UK's number one marketing podcast and did you?

Chris Norton: 4:52

did you? I mean, one of the things that I love about it, and what? Because, obviously, when I started our podcast, like a year and a half ago or something, your show and another John Evans's show are two of the ones that I listen to, and but yours in particular I love the title, because I was like I knew exactly what it was about. It was about the nudge theory. There was a book about nudge theory. Right, I don't want to start proclaiming that I've read every book on nudge theory and behavioral science, because I've heard your show and you read all these academic reports, was it? You read that one book and then you were inspired to create just, oh right, I'll do it in nudge. Here we go, wait what.

Phill Agnew: 5:32

Off we go. Wait what off we go. I actually wasn't even. I mean I had I had read that book, but it wasn't that book that inspired the podcast. The book that inspired the podcast was choice factory by richard shotten, which was released back in 2018 and I think is the best book at applying or was, at the time, the best book at applying behavioral science to marketing. Close close with um robert cialdini's influence, of course, um, but I called it nudge.

Phill Agnew: 5:51

Nudge for a reason that every marketer will know familiarity, associations and framing. When people see and a bit of halo effect as well when people see the word nudge, a bunch of associations will pop up in their mind. They'll think of nudge theory, they'll think of that book. They'll think of nudge stock the conference. They'll probably think of someone like Rory Sutherland who runs NudgeStock. They'll think of all of the different examples in their mind. Where they've heard about this idea of nudging, those associations are already there. I can benefit from those associations by calling my podcast Nudge. You know there's a really great example of this. For an upcoming episode, I spent four hours watching 300 ads in a row.

Chris Norton: 6:33

Don't do that, it's not fun, um but I actually do that as well, don't you? You actually commit to this, like like watching or read. I've seen you read lots and lots of different. You, you fully commit to each episode, don't you?

Phill Agnew: 6:46

yeah. So I've watched these 300 ads. One of my favorite ones was from 2007. The brits listening will love this one. It it was with Fern Britain, remember her? And it was for Ravita. And the ad just said Britain loves Ravita. And it's great because you immediately think, oh my God, Britain loves Ravita. Ravita must be really popular. No, they're just saying Fern Britain one person loves Ravita, not the whole country. But we have these associations with the word britain, which makes us think of popularity, and nudge was sort of the same thing.

Will Ockenden: 7:14

That's why I went for that name so for for me, kind of um you know I'm not going to profess to be an expert in behavioral science and I think a number of our listeners will will maybe share my view on this to me it seems like a big, scary topic that needs loads of specialist knowledge. You, you know, from a marketer's perspective, is it kind of complex? Or you know where do we start when it comes to behavioral science? I mean, and just looking at the topics you cover on the podcast, I mean you speak with a mind reader, you speak with an FBI negotiator, you talk about the persuasive power of profanity. There's so many fascinating topics, topics all of which have got really kind of practical applications to what we do in our day-to-day roles. Where do we start? You know how can somebody start in behavioral science? Big question, yeah thanks.

Phill Agnew: 8:01

Well, no, it's a good question all behavioral science. Well, there's two parts of behavioral science. One, it's behavioral, it's analyzing the behavior people make, and as marketers we are trying to influence people's behaviour. So this is really right up our street. The second important part of behavioural science is it's a science. So this is what I think marketers will love about this.

Phill Agnew: 8:25

It's not based on survivorship bias, it's not based on the gut instincts of Nike's CEO. It's not based on the wisdom from a stoic philosopher. It's based on science. When I say science, I mean peer-reviewed studies that have been published in reputable journals, that have hopefully been proven in the lab under randomized control trial, which means you can sort of rely on it and then actually been proven by other people. Now, of course, with all science, there are examples where studies are proven and then disproven. There's also studies where people have fabricated data, but in the whole, science is more reliable than the gut instinct, wisdom from nike ceo, however good that is. Because, let's face it, usually wisdom from one individual, from one sector, from one company, will not apply to all of us. So behavioral science is stuff that is more universal. It's stuff we can apply and then we can test ourselves. So, to start, I think the only thing that marketers have to be willing to do is run a few tests. Really, what behavioral science is about is giving you an idea and letting you test it for yourself to see if it works.

Phill Agnew: 9:31

Classic example social proof People are more likely to follow the actions of others. When we go on holiday in Greece and we're walking down the seafront and we see a giant queue outside of one restaurant, we'll cancel our plans and go and queue for that restaurant because it must be good, right, everybody's queuing there. Classic social proof. Richard Shotton, who I mentioned at the start, did this wonderful study in a London pub in East London where he went to the barman and said what's your most popular beer? What's the beer that people buy the most of? It's London Pride. And he said just for one week, can I put a sign in front of London Pride that says this is our most popular beer? So it inspires a bit of social proof.

Phill Agnew: 10:11

What happens? Sales of London Pride go up by 2.5 times. So 250% increase, really, really impressive. But sales of other beer doesn't even drop. People just buy more of London Pride because they're following the actions of others. So look, I'm not saying if you put on your website this is our most popular product, it'll get a 2.5 times increase. That's not what behavioural science will say. What it will give you is an idea that you can then test for yourself. So that's how you get started. You learn about one of these studies, learn about one of these examples, then you test it for yourself and see if it works for you and in your industry so you touched on a really interesting point there about you know behavioral science, um, you know it almost replaces this idea of intuition or gut instinct.

Will Ockenden: 10:49

Are you saying behavioral science, um, or you know, would you argue, behavioral science replaces, um so-called creativity, or would it augment creativity? You know, is there still a role for that creative director with a brilliant idea that just intuitively knows what's going to work?

Phill Agnew: 11:08

definitely, definitely, definitely doesn't replace creativity. All it does is gives you a guide map upon which you can then make some decisions. So you know, we mentioned at the start chefs. Chefs have laws. They have principles to follow. Marketers don't. In general, a chef knows that starting a meal by slow cooking onion and garlic is a way to get something to taste really nice. Creating a fresh broth and stock is much better than buying a shop bought one. There are principles, laws we can follow. A chef also knows that too much salt isn't nice, that mixing salt and sugar can work, but in different ways. And, you know, don't ever add bubblegum flavor to anything. That's what a chef knows.

Phill Agnew: 11:51

What I think behavioral science does is it gives marketers those same guidelines. It says Phil, look, social proof works. Showcasing that people follow the actions of others might be really successful. Okay, well, let's find some creative ways we can apply this. A really creative lateral way of applying social proof is e-cars. In the UK, how do you make electronic cars seem more commonplace? Because the problem with electronic cars is they're all designed to look like diesel and petrol cars. That's how they're designed. You don't want them to look more different. So what the UK government have done is, they said, on the number plates of e-cars, electric cars, there's a little green icon, little green slip, and all that does it just implies social proof. People think, oh, this is common behavior, people are buying these cars, I can see them in the world. Great example of social proof. But that's very creative. You have to think creatively to get there. There's all sorts of examples of creative ways of applying things. There's the idea of framing. Just saying, for example, oh, somebody has a lot of experience will make people more likely to go with that person.

Phill Agnew: 12:54

If you're talking to a salesperson or something, ok, well, how do you apply that? Steve Martin, who I spoke to this morning on an episode of Nitro, was telling me how he went into a real estate company who get calls from customers every single day and a receptionist picks up the phone and then transfers them to the real estate agent. That's just it. That's you know, that's just how they do it. Now, if you know about behavioural science, you can think of some really creative ways to improve that whole interaction.

Phill Agnew: 13:20

He said what we should do is, when the caller is transferred, highlight the experience of the person you're being transferred to. So the receptionist in this scenario was told to say I'm going to pass you over to Pete. Pete has 20 years of experience in real estate. I think he'll be perfect for your inquiry. That was in half of the calls. For the other half of the calls it was just normal control and they found that not only did there was a 20% increase in the amount of evaluations, that the real estate agent book sales increased by 20% as well. Just from that one example. So an example of something that's quite creative you know you wouldn't really think of, you have to be creative in order to think of that example has fairly big impact.

Will Ockenden: 14:05

I love your examples Fascinating, absolutely fascinating, isn't it? The more a brand or a marketer employs behavioral science techniques, the the better performance they'll get. Presumably you know it. It feels like, um, it's a no-brainer to improve marketing performance is. Is that oversimplifying it?

Phill Agnew: 14:25

well, I don't. I don't want that to be the takeaway. I don't want people to listen to me and think this guy thinks marketing can't be done without behavioral science. What maybe I'd say is I personally am not a good enough marketer to rely on my gut instinct. I studied marketing for four years. I got a first, so I did all right.

Phill Agnew: 14:45

But I went into my first job and I wasn't very good. It didn't intuitively come to me. I didn't really know how to achieve the things I was asked to achieve to persuade people, to get people to buy, to get people to think and recall the product I was selling. I wasn't very good at it. When I discovered behavioral science, it really worked for me. I'm not saying that'll be the case for everybody, but I think it's a quite reliable thing to lean on.

Phill Agnew: 15:46

And the difficulty, of course, is well, what happens if you're the only person in your organization that knows about behavioral science? How do you then bring these things into the conversation? Because you can't go into a meeting with your boss saying, okay, I really want to change our pricing, so it takes into account mental accounting and unit asking if your boss has got no idea what those things are. So that can be quite difficult and as a marketer you know it's not as easy as just saying oh, we just need to apply behavioral science and things will work. There's a lot of things to think through, but for me and in my experience it definitely has worked what I like about your content that you share, phil, is like you share.

Chris Norton: 16:20

You do all your own tests as well, don't you? So you'll say, like I tested this against this and this was the difference. It's usually just one picture of one ad one way and one picture of an ad another way. What are the biggest? Obviously, my show is called Embracing Marketing Mistakes. What are the biggest mistakes you see marketers making in your area? Do you spot them a lot?

Phill Agnew: 16:44

The classic one. The really funny one is because we've spoken about social proof already. There's this concept of negative social proof. So social proof is very powerful. We do follow the actions of other people, but sometimes marketers get confused and they share that lots of people are doing an action which the marketer would consider undesirable and they put that in their campaign and that actually influences the wrong behavior. So let me give an example.

Phill Agnew: 17:08

This was a study in universities. I think it was a european university that wanted to reduce the amount of binge drinking on campus. In fact, if it was binge drinking, it must have been a british university, so let's assume it was a British one. They wanted to reduce the amount of binge drinking and so they said the average student drinks eight pints a week. This is way above the suggested amount. You need to reduce the amount you're drinking. Actually, if you understand social proof, you realise by saying the average student drinks eight pints a week will make everybody who drinks less think oh my God, I need to drink more, I'm such a loser. And maybe those who drink more think oh yeah, cool, I'm above average here. God, that's quite cool, isn't it? So you're encouraging the wrong behavior. And then that study, they actually found that drinking increased when they showed that this is another example as well, yeah, I know, I know it's hilarious.

Phill Agnew: 18:02

And there's another example from an arizona park where people were stealing this petrified wood, which is a crystallized wood, really, really precious, and people were stealing it. And robert cialdini, who's the author behind the book influence, he went into this park and he looked at the signs. And the signs say people who enter this park steal one point or something like 100 tons of this wood every year on average. Please don't. This is a really bad thing to say, and so, in other words, my piece doesn't matter yeah, oh, exactly.

Phill Agnew: 18:31

So if I just take a little one for my daughter that weighs about two grams, it won't even make a difference yeah when, and then when he changed the signs that said just please don't steal the petrified wood, the amount of people who stole actually decreased, and I see this all the time. If you go on wikipedia today, probably you will see a message that says something along the lines of only one percent of people reading this message will donate. Please donate to keep wikipedia running as we. The studies suggest that shouldn't work, because what people will think when they read that is oh, nobody really gives anyway, and wikipedia is quite successful. It's not going to go anywhere soon. They probably don't need my help, whereas if they said something like if they want to do social proof, um, I'm in bristol. If they said something like 4 000 wikipedia lovers in bristol donate on a basis, could you join them? That should, according to the science, be much more effective and I'd love to see Wikipedia testing that. So negative social proof is definitely a mistake.

Chris Norton: 19:28

I see a lot of companies make so do you use so obviously to be the number one marketing podcast in the UK? Have you used these tactics all the time to just little tests, to make mistakes and learn from them to grow? Your part is that is that how you do you do that week. Is that just what you do as part of your marketing every week?

Phill Agnew: 19:48

that's all I'm doing. I'm constantly testing it. I mean, it's not, it's not far off. I do run loads of tests, like last week I there's this idea called the input bias. The more effort you put into something, the more people will value input bias. The more effort you put into something, the more people will value the output. The more effort you put into your communication, the more people will pay attention and listen to that communication. So this is an example of, again, a lot of this stuff people intuitively know. If you propose to your girlfriend in McDonald's after sharing a Big Mac meal, she will almost certainly say no, because you haven't put much effort into that piece of communication.

Chris Norton: 20:28

I've got her a chocolate shake. She'll be delighted Well a chocolate shake.

Phill Agnew: 20:31

I mean, that would clinch it, wouldn't it? I think, especially if you put the ring maybe around the straw.

Phill Agnew: 20:38

But if you take your girlfriend to a three-star Michelin restaurant, you drive there in a chauffeured Rolls Royce, you go get cocktails on the top floor of the Shard and then on the way home, after giving her a bunch of roses, you get down on one knee in a beautiful, softly lit London park. The chances of her saying yes are much higher. The communication is the same In both scenarios. You are asking the same question, but the effort you put into your communication will dramatically change the likelihood that somebody will act. We intuitively know this. This is why nobody I hope listening proposes to their partner at McDonald's. And there's a way you can test this. So Rory Sutherland, in his Nudge Stock talk this summer, shared this wonderful example of a couple who had triplets who really wanted to buy a four or five bedroom house on a very specific street I think it was the same street they were on. They didn't want to move. Problem is there was only, I think, 24 bedroom houses on the street. None of them were for sale. So what do you do if you want to buy a house on a street where none of the houses are for sale? Well, will? This is where you have to start thinking creatively. They knew, I guess intuitively, about the input bias that if they put more effort into their ask, more people will say yes. So rather than just sending an email to everyone on the street and saying is there any chance you're going to sell your house? The, I think, father wrote a handwritten letter to every single house on the street, handwritten for each one. So say you know, each house got its own personal letter that he had handwritten. He went round, popped them through the letterbox. Eight of the 20 houses invited him round for a viewing. I think five actually had a discussion about selling the house and said they would be open to it. Three gave him an offer and then the family bought one of those houses. Rory says this is an incredible change in behaviour. These are people who did not or were not selling their house. Just a creative use of the input bias made them likely to sell a house.

Phill Agnew: 22:40

And to get back to your point, chris, I've tested this. So I spent the past two weeks responding to everybody who signed up to the Nudge newsletter and then I send a welcome email which I encourage people to respond to. When they responded to that said hello, phil, something like that. I spent two weeks writing handwritten responses to each of those emails asking them to review my podcast. So I did that for 20 of the people who who sent me an email and then for another 20, I sent them the exact same content. I sent them the exact same measures. I'd written in the handwritten um email, um, which just said and the ask in both of them was can you leave a review for Nudge? And I had a link to rate this podcast where you can measure the amount of reviews you actually get. For those who received the handwritten variant, by the way, this was me writing something by hand, taking a picture of it and then putting that picture in the email.

Phill Agnew: 23:35

So pretty backwards you wouldn't get any carrier pigeon to carry it to you because I really would have gone above and beyond getting a carrier pigeon to carry it to you, because I really would have gone above and beyond.

Phill Agnew: 23:44

So it's not like a massive input, but obviously there's a bit of effort there. Well, first of all, the people who received just the normal email saying, hey, can you leave a review for this podcast Out of the 20, only two people left reviews, so not very many 10%. Well, I guess you could say that's okay. And then, out of the group who received the handwritten variant, my handwritten message, nine out of 20 people so almost half went and left me a review, and I think that's just a wonderful example of how we can test these things out ourselves. We can see if they work. If I really need reviews if, let's say, sometimes I've spoken badly about American politicians on my podcast, I've got a number of one-star reviews from some very angry Americans, and if that happens again, I've got a great solution to be able to sort of push those one-star reviews to the bottom it's just send a few handwritten notes, because it really does work.

Will Ockenden: 24:33

Or turn up on their doorstep with the handwritten note to get a hundred percent reviews, although there's a fine line, isn't there? You don't want to go too far because it gets into slightly uncomfortable territory. It does. Yeah, so, um, you've spoken to so many fascinating people on on on your nudge podcast and so many kind of amazing lessons, and anyone just going on to your kind of landing page of the podcast would, I'm sure would, just be fascinated by some of these topics you talk about. Are there any kind of um guests you've had on your show or or behavioral science lessons that have that have really kind of stuck in your mind or you think are just of incredible value to your listeners, or indeed to our listeners?

Phill Agnew: 25:14

yeah, there's a few and they're quite general, so these aren't. I mean, there are some very good marketing bits of marketing wisdom, but the ones that really stick in my mind are a bit more high level. I had Dan Pink on the show, author of Drive, the Power of Regrets To Sell is Human, really great author and he had done a study on regrets where he'd asked 100,000 people what regrets they have or something like that, and his takeaway was really interesting and that was that people regret inaction far more likely than they are to regret action. So in life, if you were deciding whether to message that woman that you quite fancy or to take that career change that you've always thought about but never quite wanted to, to live in France for a year, whatever it might be to live in France for a year, whatever it might be, dan Pink's sort of research suggests that you will be more likely to regret inaction not moving to France for a year than you will regret action. That, I think, is a really wonderful piece of advice. I spoke to Adam Alter One of the episodes has come out, there's another one to come out and I spoke to him about creativity and Adam Alter, new York Stern business professor, another one to come out and speak to him about creativity.

Phill Agnew: 26:21

Um, and adam alter, new york stern business. Uh, professor, he he talked to me about the creative cliff. This this is really interesting. So we all have this perception, and he's proved this in studies, that our best ideas come from flashes of brilliance. So in studies, when people are, when do you think you'll come up with your best ideas when you're working, they say sort of in my initial bit of effort. So when I first start thinking about something, I have all this energy. That's when I'll get my best creative ideas. Later on, after an hour or two hours, when I start getting tired, I don't think I'll come up with much better. And then he runs these studies where he asks people to come up with creative solutions to things and actually what happens is and and the studies are kind of weird. So he'll say, like, think of as many creative meals you can have for thanksgiving. Or think of as many creative uses you can use a brick for it's a kind of basic stuff. Or, and there's even studies with comedians come up with as many jokes as you have you can. And then independently, people will rate the jokes at the end what they find the comedians is a great example of this. The funniest jokes are not the first ones they come up with, they're not the 10th ones they come up with, they're not the 20th, the 30th. The funniest jokes are the 100th joke, the 150th joke, the 200th joke.

Phill Agnew: 27:43

We have this illusion that our creativity falls on a off a cliff after we've spent a bit of time working on something that we just sort of flatline, after we've spent 20 minutes on a task and we should just go and do something else. The opposite is true. Hard work pays off. The more use time you spend doing something, the more creative you get. And if you read like Stephen King talks about this a lot in his autobiography how, when, when he's writing, he just needs to write. He writes on Christmas day. He needs to write every day, nine till three. Doesn't matter if it's rubbish, because eventually he'll get to the good stuff. And I think that's a lesson I've I really like we. We need to get over this creativity cliff. Keep pushing through. Your best ideas will come after a sustained period of hard work.

Will Ockenden: 28:24

Yeah, that plays to quite an interesting I mean I'm digressing slightly here the idea of kind of incubation that you know, you think deeply about a creative problem and then don't think about it ever. You know, don't think about it again and that's. It's through that period of incubation, which can be two or three days, then you get the flash of inspiration. But actually it's from all that hard work that leads up to it. And even in I mean even Don Draper in Mad Men talks about this he says you know, think about it deeply, then don't think about it at all.

Will Ockenden: 28:52

And it's quite an interesting concept actually.

Phill Agnew: 28:54

Can I say something there though? Yeah, chris, and that's what I thought as well, and I think there is there is evidence that suggests that works. There's a variant of this study and if people really want to know about it, do you go and listen to those podcasts, because I'm going to butcher it now. There's a variant of that study where they ask people physicists and physicists and, I think, poets two people, two very different people and they were asking them when do you come up with your most creative ideas? So they had a mobile app on their phone and they would put in the time and what they were doing when they came up with a creative idea.

Phill Agnew: 29:27

The expectation was that 50% of their good ideas would come while working and 50% of their good ideas would come while mindlessly or letting their mind wander. The reality was that just 10% of their most creative ideas came from mindless thoughts. We predict that just letting our mind run free and going on a walk or going on a run and thinking about something else, that will give us a flash of brilliance. I think we predict that because those are the stories that stick in our mind the apple falling on Newton's hour and thinking about gravity. Those are the stories that stick in our mind but in reality, nine times out of ten the best idea we have is through working on the actual thing that is related to the idea. If you want to have the best ever idea that you'll have about writing a novel, spend two hours writing a novel. I guarantee you'll have a good idea in the middle of those two hours.

Chris Norton: 30:25

Well, you've raised something there that's interesting because you covered in an episode a while ago about brainstorming and whether it works or not. I mean, I remember when I don't know why, but brainstorming became an offensive term at one point and I think it's gone back again. They tried to someone, somewhere tried to introduce thought shower, but nobody, and it's back to brainstorm, unless I'm going to get told off for saying that. But what did you find out on brainstorming then? Because there'll be a lot of people listening to this who do brainstorm their ideas, their campaigns. Does it work? Does it not work?

Phill Agnew: 31:00

no, it doesn't work. Um, and I don't think this will be a surprise to many people who have been in brainstorming sessions the researcher I had on my show I'm gonna forget her name, no, sheena I inger is the researcher. She's famous because she did the very, very notorious studies with jam in us grocery stores. Behavioral science fans will know that, but her most recent book and her recent studies have all been about brainstorming and she's. She has reviewed the studies and run her own studies and she finds that creative ideas, or sheer volume, or quantity of ideas, quality and quantity decreases when you do a brainstorm. And and there's lots of reasons why I won't get into all of it because you start getting into a whole field of psychology. And there's lots of reasons why I won't get into all of it because you start getting into a whole field of psychology here. But there's the authority bias, so we really do follow whoever is the highest paid, most important person in the room. If they share a preference for an idea early on, we'll just get on the bandwagon. There's prejudice and discrimination. There is a bias for it can depend, sometimes a bias for novelty. We get tired, we get bored Coming up with ideas on the spot. Like we were saying earlier, chris is just not very good way to think of ideas.

Phill Agnew: 32:13

What she found what Sheena Iyengar found was a much more effective way to run a brainstorming session is have everybody learn about the problem beforehand. So let's say the problem is our conversion rate on our website is plummeting. That's the problem. Send out an email explaining the problem and then say to six people who are attending that meeting can you spend half an hour this week coming up with a solution and then present it for five minutes during the meeting? Everybody thinks about the problem, comes to the meeting, spends five minutes presenting it.

Phill Agnew: 32:44

In peer-reviewed studies, the quality of the output of that type of meeting, where people come prepared and present their ideas, is much higher. You get a higher quantity and higher quality of potential solutions to that problem than you would if you just had a meeting and said oh, our website conversions are falling, let's all come up with some ideas on the spot and people are petrified and nobody wants to do it, so brainstorming doesn't seem to work. This, uh, prepared brainstorming is, I think, what you would call it seems to work a lot better that is fascinating, that I yeah, we try to do that and we try to email.

Chris Norton: 33:22

We do do brainstorms, obviously, because you have to, but we'll we'll email our team beforehand with the brief and say we're doing this brainstorm tomorrow. This is the brief, read it. Think about it and then you usually have a day so they can think about it. And let to go back to will's point about um, what was the what's the term? Well, incubation incubation.

Chris Norton: 33:41

Yeah, so you thought about it. And then to add to your point, phil, that you thought about it and then you're hoping that when you're in the shower in the morning the next day, oh, I've got the idea. Like you say, you've had time to think about it, but it actually all makes sense. That's what I love about behavioral science a lot of it makes sense. That said, the one episode that I have listened to that I thought was was weird, because you you true, you know that I know that you spend a lot of time doing this and I know because you write about, write about it on social media. I spent 50 hours right doing this and and then you put it on social media, because that's the proof that you were talking about earlier.

Chris Norton: 34:16

Um, but there was the person who falsified all their reports, their science and research. That must be a nightmare, because they had an amazing claim, didn't they? It's quite a recent episode, this, and they made a big claim that something worked and it turned out this scientist had just made it all up and published it. Does that cause you a problem in that area or not?

Phill Agnew: 34:40

I think it causes science a problem in general because it's a problem falsifying data as a science problem. There's a. There's a. There's a website called retraction leaderboard or retraction watch, which lists the worst offenders in science who have the highest majority of papers retracted, and I did an episode on uh, derek steppel, who is a, was a behavioral psychologist who was, I think, sixth or seventh on that list. Everybody else on that list is different parts of science, not in behavioral science and psychology. So it really is a problem. You know across the board people, you know everybody. There are incentives behind creating data that seems really or studies that seems really noteworthy and eye-catching and press worthy and will perhaps get you a book deal and will perhaps make you a fantastic ted speaker. There's a sort of incentive behind coming up with really noteworthy stuff and that will encourage a proportion of scientists to potentially falsify data.

Phill Agnew: 35:35

But this chap, diederik Stapel he was interesting because all of his studies were on something called metaphorical priming and that whole field this is why I think it's important to talk about him has since really been disproven. This is the idea that his most famous study and the one that he got caught on was an idea that if you sit. If a train station contains lots of litter, people will subconsciously think white people will subconsciously link the litter to racist thoughts, and thus, he claimed, he proved that people would be less likely to sit next to a black person when answering a survey. That's what he claimed in in his paper. Problem was the paper was set in utrecht train station in the netherlands and that train station didn't have any seats which matched his description. So he'd completely made it up. He hadn't even been to the station and you know it's a really horrible thing to make up because it's quite a sensitive topic.

Phill Agnew: 36:33

But really the takeaway here is this idea of metaphorical priming. This idea that a very small, subtle intervention, something as small as how, how much litter there is in this in the station, will have a major impact on behavior, should always be questioned. Another cracking example is from about 30 years ago, um example of the mozart effect. Back 30 years ago there were a bunch of studies that came out which suggested that if you listened to mozart, especially at a young age, your iq could rise by seven points. This is what the research claims I heard that.

Chris Norton: 37:06

I remember hearing that it's.

Will Ockenden: 37:07

It was really famous. Is that why you've always got classical music on in the office?

Chris Norton: 37:10

yeah, yes, it's why I'm classical stuff. I'm not down with the oasis revival.

Phill Agnew: 37:15

I'm waiting for beethoven to come back yeah, um, yeah, I wonder how many, uh, how many sales he would get on ticketmaster anyway. But he this, this finding, was it really influenced people? Governors in the? U? The US issued and this shows its age, issued cassettes to every baby born for three years with Mozart music because he believed that if a baby listens to Mozart they'll get more intelligent. A bunch of companies were set up. There was a baseball team, I believe, who would end every single session by listening to Mozart because they believed in this study.

Phill Agnew: 37:47

Problem was is the study is bogus. In fact it was a bbc study with 8 450 odd school children where they were asked to listen or in different control groups, they either listened to a scientific discussion, a bit of mozart or country house by blur, and they then performed a cognitive task and they saw okay, do any of these musics, um, any of these in discussions, or a bit of audio change people's behavior? All of the audio actually increased their cognitive ability. So the finding actually is that listening to a bit of music will stimulate your brain and will make you perform a bit better. Mozart and the scientific discussion had the same impact tiny sort of small percentage increase. Country House by Blur had the biggest impact. So this researcher cheekily dubbed it the Blur effect. So it's not the Mozart effect anymore, it's the Blur effect.

Phill Agnew: 38:41

But actually the finding is this stuff is bogus. Nothing that small could ever increase intelligence or IQ by seven points. So always question when somebody's saying that a really small implementation will have a really big impact. And that's one of the things I try and do on Nudge. I try and say you know, a lot of these stuff can seem really impressive in specific contexts, but actually it's much better if we do a bigger implementation, because that will have more of an effect.

Chris Norton: 39:08

We need to ask you about your what, what the show? Our show is all about marketing mistakes and mistakes we've made. You've obviously built a career on making mistakes and learning from them. What's the what's it? What's the most interesting um mistake that you've made in your career and what did you learn from it?

Phill Agnew: 39:25

I made one really recently. So I ran an experiment on reciprocity, and reciprocity is the idea that we return favours. When somebody does us a favour, we return the favour. This is again you said it, chris like this stuff is intuitive. We know this stuff, we're brought up with it and it's because it's so intuitive and it's so effective. So all sorts of studies that show that reciprocity works. As I said, I just spoke to Steve Martin this morning. He told me about a study he did in Colombia outside of McDonald's restaurants, where all they did was simply hand out a balloon to families entering the restaurant. Just handing a balloon increased sales by 20%. They handed the balloon to the children and yet sales of coffee increased. Kids't buying children. The family feels the need to reciprocate. Um.

Phill Agnew: 40:12

The classic example is cheat is um free samples. If you get a free sample, you'll reciprocate and you'll be more likely to buy something. This you do use. This didn't used to be a thing. Cheese samples was oh sorry, free samples was first used by an indiana supermarket, I think 50, 60 years ago. It was documented in Vance Packard's book and it was so effective the first time they did free samples, because this wasn't a thing. It wasn't done before. The first time the supermarket gave out free samples, they sold something like 30 tons of cheese in one day just because they were giving out free samples of cheese. So we reciprocate anyway.

Phill Agnew: 40:49

I thought I could use this because I had created a free course called the science of persuasion course, where if people gave me their email address, they would get three days worth of training in persuasion. This is this is what I created and I thought well, that's a really nice favor I've done for a thousand people signed up to that course. That's a really nice favor I've done for a thousand people signed up to that course. That's a really nice favor I've done for a thousand people. I can probably ask them to return the favor now and ask them to pay for my science of marketing course, which costs around 250 quid. So I sent them all an email saying, talking about the massive favor I've done for them, giving them this free course, would they be willing to return the favor and buy my paid course? And out of the thousand people I emailed, I think only six actually went and paid. So really quite a bad conversion rate for a very engaged audience.

Phill Agnew: 41:40

And I spoke to Bas Wouters about this on my podcast. He's the CEO of the Cialdini Institute, cialdini being the person who came up or first really documented this reciprocity rule in this book Influence. And Bass said reciprocity doesn't work if you are giving something, if you're asking for something in return. So he was basically saying, because you are asking for people's email address and giving them something in return, they don't feel like they're getting something as a favor. They feel like they're getting a reward for their action because they've given you your email address.

Phill Agnew: 42:15

They feel like that transaction has already happened. They don't need to return the favor anymore. They've given you your email address, which is true. It's what people have done. If I'd given that course away completely for free and people have been able to access it without having to give me anything and then I'd somehow find a way to contact them and said you've had this completely for free, would you buy my course? I probably would have got a higher conversion rate. So an example there of a mistake. I don't know if that's my biggest mistake, but it's probably the most recent one I've made okay, interesting, yeah, good.

Will Ockenden: 42:47

Bringing it back to when we started chatting with you. We're sort of talking about okay, how can marketers listening to this start getting involved in in the world of behavioral science? And it sounds like doing your own studies is really important. It sounds like kind of being a student, becoming a student of behavioral science is really important as well, and whether that means listening to the nudge podcast, reading literature and studies and things like that is. Is that what you'd recommend marketers to do?

Phill Agnew: 43:14

it sounds like there's a whole world out there that people need to start informing themselves around yeah I think, look, I'm not going to be on this podcast, so everybody needs to start reading behavioral science books. I don't think that's that's the takeaway. I think it's. Rory suverland puts it quite nicely. He said, as marketers, we can be too focused on what's measurable. So we think, oh, we can measure the amount of facebook fans we have. We should really focus on increasing that. Or we can measure the amount of clicks we get on our google ads. We should really work on improving that. Whereas I think what behavioral science can start to reveal is that marketing is actually a lot more complex and just focusing on what's measurable won't be very effective.

Phill Agnew: 44:00

Like there's an example known as the mere exposure effect, which is the idea that the more you're exposed to something, the more you'll like it. This was proved by Robert Zionks. He was in, I think, a university in the South of America and he showed students Chinese Mandarin characters. None of the students recognized these characters. Obviously, it's like they don't speak Mandarin, especially back in the 60s when he conducted that study. But for some students he would show one character more often in the big list of characters that they were seeing. At the end he asked them to say how much do you like these characters and how much do you remember them? The one that they were exposed to more was perceived not only as having a higher recall, they remembered it more, but they also preferred it as well. So seeing things lots of times can make us prefer something, and I think this can be really interesting when it comes to marketing, because we have this idea that every time a customer engages with us, we have to be thinking about selling to them. So we have to, if they're on our site, convert them as quickly as possible. If they see our ad, all we need to be doing is monitoring how effective that ad is. What the mere exposure effect maybe says is well, no, maybe not. Maybe actually just being exposed to the brand as much as possible will increase their likeliness to buy potentially, and I think that's sort of an interesting takeaway of like.

Phill Agnew: 45:27

We don't always have to to improve what's measurable. We don't always have to get focused on that sort of thing. If we look at the world of psychology, we can see that changing behavior is a really wide spectrum and there's lots of different things you can do which isn't just a b testing a subject line on an email or running five different facebook ads to see which one's more effective. There might be some really irrational ways, like examples If you had asked Coca-Cola drinkers 20 years ago, would you pay more for a soft drink that tastes much worse than Coca-Cola and is smaller? Not a single one of them would have said yes. And today red bull is coca-cola's biggest competitor. It's smaller, it tastes awful and in your opinion, yet it's effective. In my opinion, I think. Actually it's not in my opinion, because there were studies when it first launched, of normal people that most people said this tastes worse.

Phill Agnew: 46:23

So why do people buy it? Well, because they built this whole idea a bit of input bias here that that sort of medicinal flavor will stimulate caffeine in you and will make you really alert in a way that the sweet caramel flavor of coca-cola won't, because that doesn't taste like medicine enough. If you had asked people 20 years ago, will you spend 800 pounds on a dyson hoover? Nobody would have said yes. If you just if you'd spent 800 pounds on any vacuum, none Hoover, nobody would have said yes. If you ask them if you'd spent 800 pounds on any vacuum, none of them would have said yes. And yet today they do.

Phill Agnew: 46:53

So there are these irrational things that we do that you wouldn't be able to see in market research, you wouldn't be able to see in marketing textbooks. That only actually start to make sense when you understand psychology. We will value a Hoover much more if we know it's been through 5178 innovations. That's one of the first claims Dyson did. They said we've made this 5178 times and so this final version is really effective. And if you brand it in a way where it looks like a luxury product, if you even there's studies which say if you charge more for something people will value. More. Verbalen effect is what this is called. Sometimes jewelers who run sales find their sales drop. Reducing the price actually makes the product less appealing. So I don't know.

Chris Norton: 47:37

It's a long-winded answer there Will, but I guess what I would say is that, sorry, go on, chris. I was just going to say that whether you reduce the price is quite interesting because I remember being from the pr world and stunts. I remember when banksy was in new york and he created a, he had, he had a banksy market stall giving away bank original banksy sketches for ten dollars each on his and he obviously it was him selling them on whoever they are. Obviously you're from, you live in bristol, so you might, you might, know them. Uh and uh, yeah, it was ten dollars each for a scale and they didn't sell any and it showed a video, showed all these people walking past because they just, they just didn't value a ten dollar bank. So it's not going to be real, is it? And you would have got something that was worth thousands and thousands of pounds. It's fascinating, fascinating the psychology behind it all.

Phill Agnew: 48:27

People don't expect the unexpected. Yeah, we don't expect. We have a natural aversion to the unexpected. This is a fantastic study called the Invisible Gorilla Study, where a lot of your listeners will have watched this study. You watch a video and you're asked to count the people wearing white to pass a basketball and while you're counting, a gorilla walks into the scene, looks directly at the camera. It's not a real gorilla, it's some student dressed as a gorilla, looks quite convincing, they thumps their chest and then walks off the screen. After watching that, 50 of people don't even say they don't even notice the gorilla, which is amazing because it's walking right in front of the camera. It's on screen for ages, um, and they've run this same study with eye trackers and they've seen that people actually do look at the gorilla. So we don't. When we're not looking for the unexpected, we don't see it, and I think that's an example. The bank's example is a good one.

Phill Agnew: 49:16

There's another one of joshua bell, the, the probably the best violinist in the states. Um, he was selling tickets in washington to his show for hundreds of dollars a piece. They ran this little experiment with the Washington Times where the day after his show, which was sold out I think 1000, 2000, 3000 people had all spent collectively, you know, $200 each on their ticket. And then the morning after he goes to the Washington subway station and starts busking and the idea is okay, how many, how much? How many donations will Joshua Bell, this very, very famous violinist, get? Will he get anywhere near the amount that he made at the concert? No, only six people stopped to listen to him out of the thousands who went past. I think he made $20 in contributions over the course of an hour. We don't expect the unexpected. And so Banksy, if he's going to go and sell his own artwork for £10 a piece, will sell less, because people expect Banksy to not be a public figure and they expect Banksy's to cost thousands and thousands of pounds. So that's why that won't work.

Will Ockenden: 50:20

I mean, this is fascinating. This is, you know, we could talk for hours and hours and hours on this, couldn't we? And it's a fascinating topic and I would urge anyone listening to this who's interested to to check out your podcast, because I mean, even scrolling through some of the episodes, um, every one of them, I think, is just fascinating and and interesting and valuable. Um, so, yeah, absolutely brilliant to hear about some of this stuff, and my my mind is now whirring with thoughts and ideas, having spoken to you for an hour yeah, thanks for coming on the show, phil.

Chris Norton: 50:50

I really appreciate it. How can? How can people get hold of you if they want to? Um, you know well, obviously they can find your podcast, but how can they get hold of you if they want to speak to you?

Phill Agnew: 50:59

yeah. So after you've finished listening to this wonderful podcast, make sure you hit subscribe on this podcast and leave these lovely people a five-star review, or they will send you a handwritten letter. So nobody wants to receive that. So just leave the five-star review now, guys, and then you can get all of that over and done with there's some black hat behavioral science going on here, isn't there?

Phill Agnew: 51:22

Once you've done all that, you're on a podcast player already. You can search for Nudge N-U-D-G-E. There, a podcast player already. You can search for nudge n-u-d-g-e. There will be a nice orange logo, um, which is my logo and my name, phil agnew, underneath. Go and, as will said, go, scroll through the episodes, find one that you like the look of, give it a listen and and just do that. Don't do anything. Don't go and connect to me on linkedin, don't subscribe to my newsletter, don't buy my course, because you know the content might not be for you. So just just find an episode you like, listen to it and then, if you like it, at the end of the episodes I give more information about how you can get in touch with me and connect with me. So just do that. If you want to learn more, go listen to an episode and then, if you like it, you can follow up there.

Chris Norton: 52:01

Thanks for that. So, phil, you've been on the show now you know the sorts of stuff we cover, and we're always asking people about the mistakes. If you were us you've interviewed loads of people. Who's the guest you think we would benefit from the most getting on this show to hear about their mistake?

Phill Agnew: 52:22

such a good question, um, whose mistakes would be most worth listening to? I mean, this is a bit of a harsh question, isn't it? Because whoever I recommend, I'm basically saying this person makes a bunch of mistakes, so you should listen to them.

Chris Norton: 52:37

Well, no, maybe they've got a fascinating, maybe not, they just make mistakes, but they've got some fascinating insights and takes on the world, I suppose.

Phill Agnew: 52:44

Well, I don't know if you've we mentioned John Evans at the start. He's got some great stories about some of the mistakes he made at BrewDog when he was there. That could be interesting. My recommendations in terms of behavioural science I always recommend people to go and listen to or read Richard Shotton's work, tali Sherratt's work, jonah Berger, rory Sutherland as well. There's so many names, so many people. Utherland as well. There's so many names, so many people. Um, I loved interviewing chris voss. If you can get him on, that would be amazing. He talks, he's the fbi lead fbi negotiator for the um, for the fbi, and he shares some of his mistakes and they could be really interesting. Um, so there's a lot of people there. I think it would be very interesting for you to speak to some of them. Yeah, fantastic.

Phill Agnew: 53:29

Or just maybe have me back on in a month. I will have made a bunch more mistakes in between that time, so you can always do that as well.