Everyone Hates Marketers | No-BS Marketing & Brand Strategy Podcast

Swell AI Transcript: S3003 - Nancy Harhut.wav
00:00 Louis Hello and welcome to another episode of Everyone Hates Marketers.com, the no-fluff, actionable marketing podcast for people sick of marketing bullshit. I'm your host, Louis Grenier. In today's episode, you will learn how marketers can trigger hardwire behaviors using behavioral science principles that are both ethical and responsible. My guest today is the co-founder and chief creative officer of HBT Marketing. It's a consultancy that specializes in making marketing more effective, as you guessed, by applying those principles. My guest held senior creative management positions in agencies like IPG or the Publicist Network. She knows her stuff. She's been on the speaking circuit for a long time as well. Her clients include massive brands like Dell or Bank of America.

00:54 Nancy Nancy Harhut, welcome aboard. Thank you very much, Louis.

00:59 Louis Good to be here. So, I keep hearing that marketing is all about the right message to the right person at the right time, right? That's probably been something I've heard the first time when I studied marketing for a year in business school decades ago at this stage.

01:14 Nancy Is that true? Well, it's partially true. It's only part of the story. So, the right message, right person, right time, that's going to get you so far, but only so far. What you really need to do is you need to make sure that you deliver the message in the right way. So, it's the right person, right time, in the right way. When I say the right way, I mean in a brain-friendly way because behavioral scientists have found that people don't really make decisions. What they do instead is they default to certain hardwired, automatic, instinctive, reflexive behaviors. It's almost like they cruise along through life on autopilot. They encounter a certain situation and they just default to these hardwired behaviors, giving them little or no thought. And we as marketers need to take advantage of this. We need to serve up our messages in a way that is going to make people just automatically read and respond, automatically engage. And if we don't do that, we're leaving money on the table. We're only going so far, but we're not really optimizing our message. So, for example, behavioral scientists have found that people are twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss as they are to achieve the pleasure of gain. So, if people are twice as motivated to avoid the pain of loss as they are to achieve the pleasure of gain, what does that say to marketers? It means that we shouldn't be completely focused on the gains, the benefits, the advantages, but we should also add in a little bit of loss aversion, right? So instead of maybe saying, take advantage of, we should say, don't miss. Instead of saying, save today, we might want to say, you'll pay more tomorrow. But just adding a little bit of that loss aversion is going to make our message more effective. And that's what I mean by saying it's not just the right message to the right person at the right time.

02:56 Louis It has to be served up in the right way. Great. Well, you've answered the question I didn't ask, which is, can you give me an example of this? But to backtrack a bit, so you talked about this default behavior, which is kind of this system one thinking, right? Yes. Which is the autopilot 95% of the time kind of thing, right? Can you give us an example of this kind of default behavior, right? Like a specific example of people going through life, as you said.

03:27 Nancy What are the things that they tend to do as a default behavior? Sure. So one of them is something that behavioral scientists talk about called the principle of reciprocity. And what they mean when they say that is when someone does something for us, we have a tendency to want to return the favor. We want to answer in kind. We want to even the score, right? Whether we asked for the favor or whether someone just did it and we didn't ask for it. But once someone does something for us, we kind of feel indebted to them. We feel obligated and we want to somehow get out from under that obligation. So that's just a natural hardwired tendency. Behavioral scientists think that it's hardwired in us from back in our early days, back in the days of our ancestors, where you had to cooperate with each other or you would be cast out and you wouldn't be part of the clan or the tribe or the group or whatever and you would most likely die. Like you had to stay as part of the group. In order to stay as part of the group, you needed to be civil. You need to be cooperative. You know, you needed to reciprocate. And so there was a researcher at Brigham Young University. His name is Phil Kuntz. He was running this experiment and what he did is he selected a bunch of strangers and he mailed them a Christmas card. People he had no idea who they were. He just arbitrarily sent them a Christmas card and over 20 percent of the people sent him a card back. So imagine what happens. You get a card. You have no idea who Phil Kuntz is. You say to your spouse, you know, honey, do we know the Kuntz family? No, we don't know. So what do you do? You know, well, I don't know. They sent us a card. We should send one back. So, you know, you pull out your card, you send a card back, you know, stamp it, put it in the mail and off it goes, even though you have no idea who he is. And that's the thing about reciprocity. When someone does something for us, we want to return the favor. So I had a client. The client came to us and they said, you know, look, we're a financial services firm and We have, you know, financial advisors that can sell our products, but they can also sell the products of our competitors. That's just the way it works in this case. And they used to sell our products, but about a year ago they stopped. And we've been trying to reengage them, calling them and emailing them and trying to get them reengaged. And we're, you know, we're not getting any traction. So we want you to help us. And so we said, all right, we're going to use the reciprocity principle. What we're going to do is we're going to send these people a gift. And you know, you might say to me, well, gee, Nancy, that doesn't make sense. Why would you send a gift rewarding the wrong behavior? If you're going to spend money sending a gift, why wouldn't you send the gift to the financial advisors that are selling your product, you know, reinforce the good behavior? But we said, all right, this is what we're going to do. We're going to send a gift to the people who would stop doing business with us. So we sent them an email saying, watch your mailbox. This gift is coming. We picked it out, especially for you. A few days later, the postal service, you know, delivers this white box and inside the box is a short letter from the, our client's wholesaler. And a framed New Yorker cartoon. So it's a funny cartoon. It was relevant to financial services. And in the caption of the cartoon was the individual recipients name. So Louis, yours would have your name in it. Mine would have my name in it. So here's this very cool cartoon. It's framed. It's relevant. It has your name in it. And then there's just a quick note from the wholesaler saying, we've been trying to get in touch. We'd love to connect. You know, please give us a call. If I don't hear from you, I'll give you a call back. It generated $68 million in incremental revenue. So, you know, kind of, you know, kind of counterintuitive, but a great example of the reciprocity principle that people had decided not to do business with this company, but then the gift arrives. And what happens? You know, you just feel like, you know, I, I should reengage with them. I owe them something. I should send them a little something back. I didn't ask for the gift. I didn't tell them to send it to me, but it's here now. It's mine. And as a result, I'm just going to, I'm just going to give something back. And that might've been a very deliberate thought process, or it might've been a very intuitive and a very automatic, you know, instinctive reflexive one. But it's a great example of the reciprocity principle. And you know, it's a bigger example, a $68 million one, but it happens in small ways all the time.

07:20 Louis We're just hardwired to respond to it, to reciprocate. There's a great book about gifting called Giftology by John Rulin, which lays out like the specific gifts you could be sending, how to make them random, seemingly random for the person receiving them. Like you don't want to send swags, for example, of your company with your logo on it at the same time every year, right? You want to send something that is personalized, that they can keep on their desk, for example, forever. If possible, something that their kids can use without your logo, something that is really like there's no perceived benefit from the sender to do this. And I'm just going to add an example of this. So in the book, I'm going to bastardize it. Anyway, in the book, the guy says that he discovered the power of gifting by he really wanted to get his client and he knew he was a big fan of a very kind of expensive brand of clothes. And in order to impress him, he figured out that he was staying in a particular hotel and he basically bought an entire wardrobe of that brand. And he had it so that when the guy would open the closet in his hotel room, he would see all of this. And there was apparently somebody who was trying to get for years at this stage. And he said, OK, you got it. We can have a meeting now. So it's another example, I think, of a sort of reciprocity to an extreme. I love the reciprocity principle because, as you said, it's where they were everywhere, right? So we have the free newsletter, like don't know the free thing, and then you're more likely then to get the next thing. There is people asking, what time is it in the street to stop you? And then you're more likely to have to answer their question next.

09:09 Nancy It's just a crazy thing, right, when you're aware of it. It absolutely is. And you say when you're aware of it. And I think that's a good point because sometimes we're not. Very often we're not. We're just cruising along on autopilot. We don't stop to think about why we're doing what we're doing. If somebody asks us why we've done what we've done, we give them an answer that we believe is the truth. Very often people are influenced by factors that they're not even aware of. So that means that for your listeners, they're customers and prospects. They may tell you, I'm doing this for this reason, or I did this for this reason, but very often they're not even in touch with the real motives behind their behaviors and

09:49 Louis their actions. Yeah, and that's the conundrum. That's the tough part of marketing. This is why so many people say it's an art and a science. The science will tell you all of these things, but the art comes from the intuition of the marketer, of the creator, of the entrepreneur to fill the gaps, to understand those irrational needs being met by some behavioral things that have been hardwired in our DNA for millions of years. So in this episode, what I would love to do is basically continue what you're doing already very well, which is to lay out those principles, explain them very clearly, give a story, an example. But I'm going to challenge you a bit. The reason why I say this is because I actually did talk to people on the podcast who were also behavioral scientists. I had Richard Chotton, who wrote a great book, and I had someone else, I'm going to forget their name. But anyway, we talk a lot about principles, I would say the classic ones. I know the listeners are very well-tuned to Los Aversions and stuff like that. What I'm going to challenge you to do is maybe let's try to find some that are mostly unknown, or at least that are more likely that listeners have maybe never heard of them or at least they don't understand them. So it's a bit of a challenge. We'll improvise a bit, hopefully, but let's then face the situation of we are a small business owner or in-house marketer in a small enough company and we understand the power of behavioral science, but we need to apply it.

11:23 Nancy So maybe let's try this scenario. Sure. So a few of them spring to mind, actually. One of them is the idea of autonomy bias. Autonomy bias is this deep-seated, innate need that people have to exert some kind of control over themselves and their environment. So essentially, what behavioral scientists have found is people don't like to be told what to do. We like to have some agency, some autonomy, some choice. There was a study that was done in a nursing home. It was a very simple study. They had a control group and the control group was comprised of residents who were at the nursing home and they had been given a plant to take care of and they'd be given a movie to watch every evening. And then in the test group, people were given a choice of which plant that they wanted to have in their room and which movie they wanted to watch. And at the end of 18 months, twice as many people in the control group had died. The only variable, they adjusted for everything, the only variable was the amount of autonomy they had. And it was something simple. It was like, which plant am I going to have in my room? Which movie am I going to watch tonight? But autonomy can be very, very powerful. It's really a strong urge. When I read about this, it made me think about a piece of marketing that one of my old bosses did. So this is going back some time, but it's a brilliant example, I think. It was a letter that he was writing trying to get people to choose AT&T as a long-distance company. I know AT&T is big. It's not a small company, but the example is going to transfer if you just go with me for a second here. So he'd been trying all these different ways to get people to choose AT&T. So you go to the logical places. You give them a discount. You talk about the quality of the service. You talk about the history of the company and how long they've been in business. You talk about perhaps the prior relationship that you had and do you not want to continue with it? Do you want to try something new which could be risky? All of the different things you can do. And he was trying and trying and trying, but they still needed to get more customers. And he finally ended up using something that turned out to be autonomy buys, although at the time I don't think he realized that's what it was. But what he said was the opening to the letter that he wrote said you have an important decision to make and if you don't make it, someone will make it for you. And this was a B2B environment and the situation was that if people didn't choose, yes I want to stay with AT&T or I want to leave AT&T, if people didn't make that choice, the government was going to make it for them. And he wrestled with it and wrestled with it and he finally landed on that lead, that to the letter and it got just under a 40% response rate, like a 38.4% response rate. It was incredible. And I talked to him about it later and I was like how did you arrive at that? And he said, you know what, we knew we were talking to businesses, businesses who had previously had AT&T as a long distance carrier, but we didn't know if they were big, if they were small, we didn't know what industry they were in, like we didn't know anything about them. But the one commonality, he said to me, that I could think of was that when you're running a business, you're running the business and you don't want someone else telling you what to do. And so he said, I thought that would grab people's attention. And it did. So, you know, reminding people that they're in control, giving people choices, whether you're a small company or a big company, giving people choices, telling them that they're

14:52 Louis the ones that are in control can be very, very powerful and very effective. And sometimes it's about the illusion of control. So a small example with children, right? If you want your daughter to get dressed pretty quickly, you don't say get dressed now, you say, when do you want to get dressed? In one minute or in five minutes, right? So you give them this illusion of choice and it's as powerful, right? Another example, and I think I heard you say that, but I had noticed it on a few newsletters. There's a lot of newsletters that are doing this at the minute in their PS to introduce their services and stuff. They would say, whenever you're ready, I have a few things for you, right? And just those little words, whenever you're ready or whenever you have free time or whatever, it places the emphasis on, you know, it's up to you. You're in control. I'm not in control.

15:41 Nancy Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. There was a study that came out of Tulane University and what they found was you could almost quadruple the likelihood someone would make a buying decision in the moment if you gave them a choice. So going back to, you know, do you want to get dressed now or later? Do you want the green dress or the red dress? You know, giving people that illusion of choice, that choice, but, you know, saying, all right, would you like package A or package B? Would you like service level one or service level two? It nearly quadrupled the likelihood people would make a buying decision in the moment. And then, you know, speaking of like a few little words that can make a difference, there's the BYAF technique where BYAF stands for but you are free. And that when you tell someone what you want them to do, you describe your product or service, you know, and then you tell them you'd like them to buy it, but then you finish by saying but you are free or but it's up to you or you're free to choose, the choice is yours, you know, words to that effect where you're reminding people that, you know, they're the ones who have the power. Research has shown that that can actually double the likelihood that people will do what you're asking them to. So, you know, just like saying when you have the time, you know, similar is, you know, but it's up to you but the choice is yours, but reminding people that they're in control can make a big, big difference. And so when I think about doing business, when I talk to my clients, I'm like, you know, if there's a way to put two flavors of a proposal in front of someone, if there's a way to offer them two service levels or two versions of a product, you know, it's going to be a lot better for you. Your people are going to feel more empowered, they're going to feel that autonomy and you're

17:08 Louis much more likely to close the deal. And if we forcefully go against them, that will trigger this aversion bias or something like that. I'm going to forget the name of it. What's this name? The name of this bias where the reactance bias. So it actually creates this negative reaction, which makes them even more likely to stick their ground and not do what you're planning to do, right? So when we're trying to persuade people, and maybe that's when we can deep dive a bit, when we're trying to persuade customers and people to like take an action, traditionally inexperienced marketers will basically describe what you said, which is like, you know, trying to like tell them what to do. But a more powerful way is to really like just letting them feel like they're in control, giving them the options, giving them time to think, and then it's more likely to result in something interesting. I'm just going to dig into an experiment. I need to find the data. But maybe while I do that, let's think of, you know, as you said, like the small business

18:10 Nancy owner, the freelancer, what else can they do to use this autonomy bias into their advantage? Yeah, yeah. So you were talking about psychological reactance theory, and I just want to add to that and say, yeah, if we try to argue people into making a decision or browbeat them into making a decision, what happens is they just dig their feet in and they don't want to. Whereas if we tell them the choice is theirs, we're much more likely to get that choice or get that decision. So there's something called rhyme is reason bias that I think freelancers can use, small businesses can use, large businesses can use it, you know. But it's this idea that not only are rhyming phrases easier to remember, but they're also judged to be more truthful and more credible. When you think about taglines or strap lines or mottos or campaign theme lines, the ones that rhyme are they're just easier to remember. Pringles, you know, once you pop, you can't stop. So when you think about going to buy crisps or potato chips, when you think of that, you're like, I'm not going to get a bag that I can open, I'm going to look for that cylindrical can with the pop top. Or Nationwide is on your side, very famous insurance slogan that's been around since I think the 1960s. But you know, having a rhyming tagline or a rhyming headline or a rhyming subject line could be, or a rhyming called action, could be very, very powerful because not only is it easier to remember, but studies have shown that people judge phrases that rhyme to be more truthful, more accurate, more credible, and as a result, more believable. And the reason for this is it's easier for the human brain to process phrases that rhyme. When something is easier to process, it just feels right. And if something feels right, it's not a big leap to assume that it is right. So when you think about our headlines, you know, maybe eight out of ten people will read a headline, but only two out of the ten are going to actually read the body copy. It puts a lot of, you know, onus on the headline, like we want that headline to work hard for us, so consider a rhyming headline. It will be easier for people to remember and, you know, people will find it more credible. Or think about your taglines. Don't delay, register today. Now you could say, don't wait, register today, or don't delay, register now, but arguably don't delay, register today is going to buy you more in terms of memorability and credibility and as a result, you know, the idea of persuading people. So I would say that it's a very simple thing to do. When you think about emails, people make the decision to open an email based on the sender line and the subject line, right, because they haven't seen the email yet. They haven't opened it. So you can use that subject line to, you know, encourage people to open by using a rhyming phrase that primes you. I got one that said, you know, get out of debt, no sweat. I saw another one that said get ready to spaghetti, and it was from a restaurant that had a new spaghetti dish. But, you know, you read that subject line and, you know, it rhymes and, you know, it's memorable and it's priming you for what's coming next. So I would say that, you know, any opportunity to inject some rhyme, and, you know, obviously we're not going to write everything as rhyme, you know, no freelance copywriter would, you know, turn in every assignment so that it was, you know, a poem, but some well-placed rhymes, whether they're subject lines or crossheads, subheads, content titles, calls to action, I think, you know, there's a lot of untapped value there. We used to see a lot more of them, you know, in the 60s and 70s, and we see a little bit, a lot less actually these days, and I think it's an untapped area for us in terms of trying

21:47 Louis to motivate people. Yeah, that's a fantastic example. And definitely something that is not very well known even by copywriters. Like I love what you said there, you know, if it feels right, it's not a big leap to think that it is right, which is also the reason why when the more we see something, the more we tend to like it and therefore trust it, right? Absolutely, yes. It's a similar thing, right? It feels like, you know, we've seen it, so it must be trustworthy. So before, so I'm doing something new, by the way, in this new season, right, of the podcast. I used to try to remember things that guests would tell me, and then, you know, listeners would like me to like when I would kind of repeat things at the end and just, you know, always kind of go back to what we said and just to like to help them memorize. And then I'm making a crazy new addition to my thing, to my process. I'm actually taking notes, believe it or not, Nancy. So I can actually go back to the first one, which is the autonomy bias. I want to dig in slightly more on this because it's such an important one and so overlooked because we're so selfish as humans. We want something out of customers and we just do it backwards. So you already shared a lot of examples, I know, but I'm going to, you know, ask you

23:04 Nancy some more if we can think of like more stuff to do with this with this control stuff. So more examples on autonomy bias or more behavioral science examples? So more examples on the autonomy bias. On autonomy bias. Yeah, so I, well, I remember receiving a solicitation from a fundraiser and they wanted me to renew my pledge and, you know, they said, hey, you know, any amount would be helpful. The choice is yours. And I thought that was interesting for two reasons, because sometimes when we're trying to make a decision about whether or not to donate, we think, you know, I don't have a lot of money. So what could my little donation possibly do? Would it really help them? So you know, they said, hey, look, any amount would do. And then they freed me up. They wanted me to, you know, to pledge again, but they freed me from having that same commitment the previous year if I didn't want to. But then they also said, you know, the choice is yours. So it's like, I could do what I did last year. I could do any amount, you know, any amount would be helpful. The choice is yours. And I thought that that was a really smart execution. I didn't write this, but I thought it was a very smart execution because it just, you know, really made it more likely that people would do what they wanted to do. I remember seeing another another example. It was an email. And in the subject line, they talked about, you know, the idea that education provides options for you. And if you think about it, you know, Louis, options equal control, right? If I have options, that means I have choices and choices mean, you know, that I'm the one who's making the decision. I'm the one who's in control. And I thought that was interesting, you know, just in the subject line, you know, education brings you options. And I was like, that's a good example. So I think there are, you know, there are a number of different ways to do it, you know, very simple ones where we said earlier, we give you two choices because that's going to be better than a single choice to, you know, to language where we remind people the choice is yours or we, you know, we talk about options or we talk about, you know, the fact that you're the one who's making the decision. I did a piece for one client where we reminded them that we're reminded of their customers, I should say, that they were supposed to set up an appointment to talk to their insurance representative. And, you know, so we said, hey, you know, you've got an appointment this month. And so right away you see that, oh my gosh, I totally forgot about this appointment. You know, I better I better pay attention to this. And then what we said is, well, you know, you're the one who needs to choose when this month you're going to have the appointment. So don't worry, you didn't miss it. You know, it's it's not missing from your calendar. But you know, we had talked about the fact that we would, you know, have an appointment this month. So now you're the one who should choose when it is that you, you know, you want to make the appointment. And that did very, very well for them. I did. I actually wrote that or my team wrote that. Maybe 10 years ago with a client still talking about how successful it was. So I think there are definitely ways that you can just remind people that the power is in their hands and you can do it while you're still asking them to do what you want them to do. You know, it's not like we're completely backing off and, you know, not trying to make a sale. We are trying to make the sale, but we're reminding people, you

26:03 Louis know, you're you're the one who's making the decision. Yeah, that's a fantastic example. So, like, one thing that I do when I consult or I help clients or just talk about it, or write content is I would split the needs that we're trying to solve with our products into like the rational versus the irrational needs. Right. And what I tend to see a lot is that marketers or folks who are doing marketing tend to really emphasize on the rational thing. Right. We use our system to thinking, to think through about campaigns. And we just like try really to like to be very rational and about everything. But in the irrational needs, I have the control stuff. So improving sense of control and clarity is there. And usually sometimes it goes against the rational needs. Right. That goes against saving time, reducing effort and stuff like that, because people would actually go towards like biggest commitment just to have more control. Right. Or at least the feeling that they have more control. So those two stuff I feel are always in almost fighting this rational versus irrational. I'm finding it hard to convince people to use the I mean, it's their choice if they want to use the rational or the irrational.

27:14 Nancy It's the use of the autonomy bias there. It's their choice. Yes.

27:19 Louis Exactly. It's their choice. You do what you want. If you're listening to this podcast, you do what you want. Be my guest. You can use rational needs all you want. OK. So going back to the rhyming thing that you mentioned, which is the second one that you mentioned, right. If it feels right, it's not a big leap to set it. It is right. So, what's the thing about rhyming?

27:42 Nancy Anything related to that that you want to go through? So there's I think rhyming is maybe a subcategory of priming. And priming is interesting. It's when you're you know, when exposure to one stimulus automatically impacts your behavior to to another stimulus. And so the thing about rhyming words is the human brain kind of categorizes them in a similar spot. The same that began with the same sound or the same letter that, you know, that end in a similar way. In other words, they rhyme. The brain kind of groups those in the same area. And as a result, the brain can retrieve them more quickly. And that's, I think, another reason why rhyming phrases are so important to marketers, because not only are they more memorable, but people have a tendency to quickly call them to mind. So you're you know, maybe you're standing at the supermarket and you need to buy paper towels and suddenly you think Bounty is the quicker picker upper. And you know, oh, that pops into your mind because you're looking at all of these paper towel options. You see Bounty, you think quicker picker upper and you're like, all right, that's you know, that's what I want to buy. So just this idea of being, you know, the brain being able to more quickly retrieve some of these rhyming phrases is a huge bonus for us as marketers. It just means that, you know, if you can associate your brand name with one of these rhyming phrases, it's going to bubble to the top more quickly. There's a there's a German candy company called Haribo and they're tagline in German, which I do not know rhymes. But I am told that it rhymes when they translated it to English. They took care to make sure that it rhymed. It was children and grownups love it. So the happy world of Haribo. And then I was reading more and more about it. They make sure that it rhymes in every language in every country where they roll out their product. Chinese, it could be Greek, you know. And I just think that's so smart because they, you know, they know that it's buying them that, you know, that memorability, that credibility, that easy accessibility. So it's, you know, for taglines, I think it's a no brainer. But as we said earlier, headlines or content titles, you know, or initiative names, you know, really, really smart thing to do.

29:46 Louis So in French, Haribo, I'm going to say it in French, they say, Haribo, c'est bon la vie pour les grands et les petits. So it rhymes as well. So it rhymes as well. So Haribo, it's a nice life for grownups and kids alike or something like that. So yes, this is absolutely spot on because I was starting to Google the German one, but actually nowadays one in France is much easier for me to say. I was also looking at, so my friend Harry Dry, who runs the newsletter marketing examples with like Phenomenon newsletter, he shared actually something around the rhyming stuff, but not just rhyming. So he talks about, for example, the parallelism, which is the repetition of a grammatical form. So once coupe, once a day, every day, for example, or an adjective, instant everything, great prices, big hearts. So this kind of like this rhythm, this rule of three, there's so much around this, like this feeling of it feels right. I think I love what you said there because that's exactly what I did. It feels right. You don't exactly know why. Why three things is better than two. Why? It's just such a great thing. So it goes back to mental availability then, right? It goes back to like the bubbling up at the top of the mind, right?

30:59 Nancy Standing top of mind, which is such a hard thing to do. Yeah, there's a phrase that people scientists use called cognitive fluency, which is kind of a mouthful of a phrase. But really what it means is people prefer things that are easier to think about and easier to understand. Not only do they prefer things that are easier to think about and easier to understand, they judge them to be more truthful and more accurate, and they feel more confident in their ability to make a decision about them, which is of course something that we care about in marketing, right? Because if somebody doesn't feel confident making the decision, they're going to back away from it. They're going to postpone it. Maybe they're not going to make it at all. Maybe they'll go someplace else where they're feeling more confident. So, you know, making something rhyme is a way to make it more cognitively fluent. Having phrases that all start with the same sound or the same letter, alliteration, right? Better than barefoot, for example, someone was introducing a new shoe. These are better than barefoot. You know, having that alliteration. Having the repetition. Geico, 15 minutes can save you 15% or more. The example you were using about repeating certain words or certain key phrases, the rhythm that comes with the idea of three. That's like the magic number. It's this, this, and this. This, this, and this. You know, there's like a rhythm and a lyricism. And all of this kind of fits under this notion of cognitive fluency. And it helps us as marketers make information, you know, easier to remember, more accessible, and more easily acted upon. You know, another one is the idea of similes. Similes are comparisons using like or as. And what a simile does is it allows us to take something that might be a more abstract concept and make it more concrete. And it also can help us create a mental picture. There's an insurance company here in the States called State Farm. And they say, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. And if you're talking about insurance, it's hard to kind of create a mental picture of insurance. It's a service. It's not a tangible concrete product. But we understand what a good neighbor is. We can envision a good neighbor. We can create a mental picture of a good neighbor. And there's a certain amount of emotion that surrounds the idea of a good neighbor. And that's one of the reasons why similes can be a form of, you know, a form of writing that makes things more cognitively fluent. So I think, you know, many of these things that we're talking about, the alliteration, the reputation, the rhyme, and now simile are all examples of making something that, you know, cognitively fluent, something that's easier to remember, something that's easier to process, something that doesn't require a lot of effort. Because if it doesn't require a lot of effort, it feels right. And if it feels right, it probably is. Right?

33:36 Louis That's just a mental shortcut we take. Nancy, this is good. Well, thank you. This is really good. I'm having lots of fun. It reminds me of stuff. It teaches me new stuff. And I'm sure that listeners get a ton of it as well. And about this cognitive fluency stuff, it's then very clear that a lot of folks, especially founders, you know, really struggle to talk about their product and what they tend to do specifically in quote unquote boring industries is to just use jargon and stuff that only them, you know, they understand and just complicate stuff so that they sound smarter, which is kind of the irrational need of like feeling like they can, you know, they are superior and keeping their status.

34:18 Nancy But clearly this cognitive fluency is very, you know, it goes against that, right? Definitely. And I think you raise a good point, you know, particularly in a B2B environment, but even in an environment where people think, well, my customers are educated, they're, you know, universally educated, they're, you know, or they're wealthier, you know, we have to sound impressive. So we want to use these big words and we want to use jargon and, you know, we want to use language that communicates. We're all part of the, you know, the same inner circle. And, you know, there are times when that can work, but there are many more times when it can backfire. You know, if you're trying to signal, hey, we're part of the same circle, okay, a little well-placed acronym or, you know, piece of jargon here and there is fine, but you run the risk of alienating people. And there have been some studies that have been run that actually show this, that people do prefer, regardless of whether it's B2B, regardless of whether it's highly educated, people prefer more easily accessible language. So there was one study where they took research abstracts and they took any word of nine letters or more and they replaced it with a shorter synonym. And then they had people read the original and they had other people read the revised with the shorter words. And people not only found that they preferred the, you know, the more simply written abstracts better, they judged the author to be more intelligent. So, you know, here we are trying to use the big words and the big phrases and the, you know, thick paragraphs and the run on sentences and the jargon and the acronyms. And because we think it's doing something for us, it's buying us credibility and it's connecting us with our audiences. And it turns out that it's backfiring on us that, you know, even really intelligent people, even, you know, professional people, even people in a business context, you know, everyone wants that easy to absorb information. There was another study that found that research reports that had, you know, a lot of jargon in the titles got cited fewer times by, you know, academic peers than research titles that were just easier to understand, that were simpler to grasp. So, I always say like, be careful, don't use the 75 cent word when a 25 cent word will do, you know, use that simpler expression. You know, it's not going to cost you anything.

36:40 Louis It's actually going to buy you something. Yeah, this is this phenomenal example on research. I was just looking at another thing that I had saved, which talks about the length of sentences. So, for example, the longer the sentences, the less comprehensible for people. So, for example, a sentence of eight words was 100% comprehended and remembered, but a sentence of 43 was only comprehended and remembered by 9% of people. So, it's a massive, massive difference, right? Not only the words themselves need to be short, clear, without any ambiguity, but the sentence themselves and then the flow also, you know, we need to consider length. So, yeah, this is all very, very good. And I think that gives you some munition for marketers to try to convince their boss to just come on, you know, simplify stuff. But as you said, if your target customers understand the jargon, right, if it's easy for them to understand because they've been living in that space for so long, then of course you can use it. But, you know, we're talking about the vast majority of cases where there's no need for

37:48 Nancy it. Yeah. And, you know, I'm a big fan of testing, too, Louis. So, it's like, you know, if you say, hey, look, you know, I'm going to use this jargon in this language because it is going to communicate to the target market that I'm one of you, that this is where you belong with me. Test it, you know, and you may be right. It may accomplish that. And if you have a very, you know, clearly defined group of people that you're trying to connect with, it might be perfect. But what you might find is that even though you think it's going to work, it ends up backfiring on you. So I think the things that we're talking about today are just great things to put out in the market to test. And, you know, as marketers, we should always be testing. And I like to think that this gives us a leg up because it gives us an informed perspective

38:30 Louis on what we should be testing. You mentioned priming before, right? When we were talking about cognitive fluency and rhyming and stuff like that. So if I understood correctly, you said that priming was kind of the parent behavioral bias, right? Or whatever you want to call it. So is there any sub element of priming that we haven't mentioned yet?

38:53 Nancy So, Al, that's interesting. There's been a lot of research that shows that priming can impact behavior. And as I started to dig into it myself, I found that from a marketing perspective, there are a couple of interesting things. Priming can start to influence our preferences and priming can also start to influence the amount of money that we spend. So there was a study with a lemonade stand. And it was a lemonade stand. It was a study that was done by Stanford University. And they set up a lemonade stand on a busy footpath in a park. And there were going to be one of three signs that people would see as they walked by. Some people who walked by saw a sign that said, spend a little time and enjoy some lemonade. And other people, when they walked by, saw a different sign. The sign would then say, spend a little money and enjoy some lemonade. And then there was a third sign. And sometimes when people walked by, the third sign would be up. And it simply said, enjoy some lemonade. And what the researchers found was more people stopped when the sign said, spend a little time and enjoy some lemonade. In all cases, when people stopped, they were told that a glass of lemonade was anywhere between $1 and $3. Pay what you want. Pay what you want between $1 and $3. And what the researchers found was when the sign said, spend a little time and enjoy some lemonade, people spent more for a glass of lemonade. And again, in all cases, people were asked to complete a customer satisfaction survey after they purchased their lemonade. And as you might imagine, when the sign said, spend a little time and enjoy some lemonade, people reported greater customer satisfaction. And what the researchers concluded was if you prime people in terms of time versus money, it focuses them more on the experience. They're spending the time. They're spending the time. They're having an experience. Very often when we experience something, there are emotions involved. And behavioral scientists have found that people make buying decisions for emotional reasons. And then they later justify them with the rational reasons. So there's emotion, there's experience that's happening when you're spending time. And as a result, you're willing to spend more. You're less focused on the price. The price is less salient, less top of mind. You're more focused on the experience you're going to have with the product or the service. And consequently, you'll spend a little bit more time. I'm sorry, consequently, you'll spend a little more money for that product or that service. So priming people in terms of experience and time versus priming them in terms of money and cost can be very helpful and very useful. And then if we start to move down the rabbit hole a little bit, priming people in terms of cash or credit can also make a difference. So behavioral scientists have identified something called the pain of paying. So if I need to reach into my purse or my wallet and pull out my hard-earned cash and hand it over to someone, that actually activates the same part of my brain that lights up when I'm in physical pain. If I stub my toe, if I cut my finger, right? So the same part of your brain that reacts when you're in physical pain reacts when you have to part with your money. So if you can have someone use credit versus cash, it puts distance between acquiring the product and actually having to pay for it. And so people have a tendency to spend more when they can use credit as opposed to cash. So further research has shown that if you prime people with either the idea of cash, like say a cash machine, an ATM machine, or the idea of credit, maybe a MasterCard or Visa logo, what happens is when they're primed with credit, they focus more on the features of the product and less about the price. So there was a study that was done with, I think, MP3 players. People could choose one of two. One of them was expensive and had all these features. The other one was less expensive but had fewer features. When people were primed with the idea of cash, more of those people chose the less expensive MP3 player. When people were primed with the idea of credit, more people chose the more expensive, pricier, but more feature-rich MP3 player. So how we prime people can affect how much money they spend, can affect the products that they prefer, can affect even the features and benefits that they find to be most important to themselves. It's kind of interesting when you think about it. You could literally, just by asking someone a question, get them to focus on the particular feature or benefit that makes your product or service stand out, which is a handy trick

43:19 Louis for a marketer or a freelance writer or really anyone in business. So there is another research on priming that I read recently. So it said that there was an experiment in which people show nonsense characters that look like Chinese symbols. So they meant absolutely nothing, those symbols. With a task to guess the meaning, the meanings were more positive after people had been shown the same symbols several times because subconsciously people became more familiar with these symbols. Yeah. So just to back up what you said. So it's really, really strong. And this is why it's important to stay, you know, the buzzwords are like staying top of mind and salience and mental availability. To simplify it and be as cognitively fluent as we can is like be seen, be noticed over and over again, continuously try to reach as many people as you can, repeating the same thing over and over again. People will never be bored out of it unless your accountant says, you know, Jesus, I see you everywhere. Will you stop? Never stop.

44:22 Nancy I think that's a fair summary. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. The notion of saying it over and over again and saying the same thing. Like stick to that, you know, those one or two or three points that you want to focus on, that kind of embody your brand or your message and just repeat them and repeat them and repeat them and have people encounter you in different places. But the message is always consistent.

44:46 Louis OK. So we've covered autonomy bias, the rhythm, the cognitive frenzy, all this of our repetitions, similarities. We talked about priming, what else do you have? Before I, I'll give you a bit of time to think about, and I can talk a bit specifically something that is likely to be more unknown than, you know, the ones that have been made popular by like, let's say, inference by Childenny, like which is the one that, you know, everyone kind of seem to know in the industry.

45:12 Nancy So how about something that's referred to as the pull of the magnetic middle or sometimes called the Goldilocks effect. And it's this idea that for the most part, people don't like to be out on the bleeding edge, nor do they like to feel like they're lagging behind. We feel pretty comfortable in the middle. Right. So, you know, imagine I go to a really nice restaurant and they hand me the wine list and I don't know much about wine. I know that I like wine, but I don't know a lot about wine. And so I'm looking at the wine list and I look at the really expensive ones and I think I'm going to overpay and I look at the really inexpensive ones and I think it's going to taste like vinegar. So I kind of go for that middle. It's like it's going to feel safe there. Right. So there seems to be that like that sense of safety in the middle when we're not sure. We just gravitate towards the middle. So this has, you know, interesting applications. You know, I mentioned fundraising earlier, but if you're doing fundraising, you can make a $20 donation, a $30 donation or a $40 donation and more people are going to gravitate towards that $30 one. So you might want to think about not saying 20, 30, 40. You might want to think about saying 25, 35, 45. And that gets an extra $5. We did some work for a small company that ensured dentists, that offered dentists life insurance. And the problem with life insurance is no one likes to think about dying. So they don't like to think about buying life insurance. And if you can convince someone to buy it once, they've checked it off the list. They do not want to revisit it. But the thing about life insurance is as you continue to get older, as you continue to grow and prosper and your career, you know, takes off, you probably need more. You know, you've maybe you've gotten married and had a family. Maybe your business is worth more. It just makes sense that every few years you should re-examine how much life insurance you have and probably increase it. But again, it's hard to get people to buy it in the first place. Once they buy it, they don't want to hear from you again. They're like, no, we already did that, you know. So this particular client tried many, many, many different ways to get people to take a second look and maybe add on more. And we found something that actually worked very well for them. We sent a graph and at one end of the graph was $0, least amount of insurance you could have, right? And at the other end was $3 million. That was the most that this particular company sold. And then we showed on the graph where the individual person was. And it was always left of center, right? It was always going to be less than $1.5 million. And you just at a glance, you didn't have to read any of the copy. Just at a glance, you look at that graph and you see yourself left of center and you have this visceral reaction. It just feels wrong that you're on the left side of that center. And, you know, then of course we provided the, you know, the copy that explained, you know, it's always good to re-evaluate and, you know, take a look and here's where you are. And we didn't expect that people were going to right away say, oh, increase me to $3 million. But what we did think was it would move people closer to the center. And that's exactly what it did. We got a triple digit lift in purchase response with dentists adding more to their insurance. So this idea of the magnetic middle or the, you know, the Goldilocks effect, like that center position can be really very, very valuable. And I don't necessarily think it's something that we as marketers take advantage of as much as we should.

48:08 Louis That is very true. I never heard of it in that context. I had heard of the Goldilocks zone, which talks about the water temperature in planets and how, you know, it needs to be just right so that life can happen. But I didn't hear this one, which is also a very good one. So you shared already quite a lot of examples, stories backed up by research. This is very good and actionable. Now I'm going to challenge you with another question. Obviously you're sharing the successes, right? You're sharing the case studies of things that worked. Can you share with us the biggest disappointment you had in your career trying to improve your career, trying to apply behavioral principles at a company where it actually didn't work? It backfired. It was really bad.

48:47 Nancy That's a good question. I think I've blocked those from my memory. I mean, it's interesting because you're right. These aren't, they're not all going to work. They're not, they're not all going to work for everyone. What works for one person may not work for another. What worked at one time may not work in the future. What didn't work at one point may subsequently work because of context, because of different audiences, because of different applications. I can't think of like a colossal, you know, disappointment. And I'm sure it's not that I haven't had them. I'm sure it's because I've blocked them. But we did do, we did a test for one particular client where we tried something with loss aversion and we tried something with social proof, the idea that lots of people like you do this, therefore you should too. And then we tried something with scarcity. And in this case, the idea of scarcity was not everyone has access to this information, not everyone knows this information, but you know, you can tap into it. And it was, it was interesting because I was thinking in this particular context rather, the social proof was going to be a strong contender. And while it did well, what really outperformed it was the idea of loss aversion. And it was a very simple execution about, you know, do you make these common money mistakes? And those weren't quite the words, but that was the essence of it. And I just, I thought we were going to do better with the social proof of the three that we were testing. And I was surprised to see the one that did do the best turned out to be the loss aversion one. I know it's not quite the answer to your question. I know you wanted a raging failure and I just can't call to mind one of them. I'm sorry.

50:18 Louis You're just too good. No, it's not that.

50:20 Nancy It's not that. I just, I think I've blocked them all.

50:23 Louis Yeah, which it has to be a, that has to be a cognitive bias, by the way. I'm going to tell you mine. I was working for a client years ago, a SaaS company on the redids. We spent three or four months doing research. So we looked at their websites, we interviewed their clients, we set up surveys, we did everything, right? We spent, yeah, easily three to four months and we identified all of those gaps, right? And we presented that to the client and they said, that's wonderful. Let's redesign the website based on those findings. That took us another three or four months, right? That was my first, my first business. And the game was basically that if we managed to increase conversion rate by a certain percentage, we would get a huge kind of bonus in the company. And at the time cashflow was tight. So that was the project for me. Either I make it or I don't. I was so certain that it would work out, right? So certain based on all the research and stuff like that. But it turns out it was basically a house of cards, right? Which is like too easy to stack things on top of things. And then you start making an assumption and then because you see it so often, you think it's true and it moves up. So it turns out that it generated less leads, the conversion rate was less, everything was less, you know? Even though their website, existing website was quite bad from my perspective, from my understanding. And we had this kind of clean website and trying to have everything. And that actually made me stop that company. Like that was the project.

51:44 Nancy So, yeah, I just wanted to share that as an aside because I think it's important to share failures as well. Actually, I did think of, I thought of one that it didn't quite make it to market, but it might answer your question. We were doing some work for a credit card company. And I talk about this in the book as a matter of fact. And so we looked at all the other competition and we're like, oh my gosh, this all looks the same. They all talk about the same thing, cover up the logo. They're interchangeable. We're going to do something that stands out. We're going to do something wrapped around the von Restorff effect. Things that stand out, get noticed and remembered, right? If it looks different than everything else around it, we're going to pay attention to it. We're going to remember this. And it gets hardwired into us again back to our ancestors where if we scan the horizon and everything looked good and looked the way it did the day before, we're in a good place. If we scan the horizon and things look different, something was missing or something was added, it could be a threat. So that's hardwired into us all these years later. If something stands out, we notice it, we pay attention to it. So fast forward, we're in the credit card zone. We're looking at all the competition. Everything looks the same. It's the same message over and over and over again. Cover the logo and interchangeable. So we're like, we're going to do something that stands out. And we create this bright yellow envelope with a picture of this guy shot through a fish angle lens. So it was kind of distorted and he was looking very curious. It didn't look like anything that was going to show up that day, that week, that month. And we were so sure that this was going to be a success. And we proudly walked into the client meeting and we displayed it. And they were like, you're crazy. There were three things that drive credit card marketing. It's the intro APR, the go-to APR, and whether or not there's an annual fee. And that's why you see that on any solicitation, any email, any direct mail, any digital ad, because those are the things that drive it. And you've got none of that on here. And I thought I was going to lose my job. I really thought I was going to lose my job. And fortunately, the clients were kind and they were understanding. Look, it was your first time out of the gate, go back and come back with something. We subsequently developed seven different controls for this particular company. So we caught the hang of it. But I think that was an example where I was focused on this behavioral science principle that I thought was going to work. I thought it was going to work for all the right reasons. And I just didn't know enough about the particular category to realize I'd made a colossal mistake.

54:06 Louis Thanks for sharing. Yeah, I can imagine. What do you think marketers and folks interested in marketing should learn today that will help them the next 10, 20, 50 years?

54:16 Nancy Well, I think what we've been talking about is something that they need to start to embrace and start to utilize. And that is this idea that behavioral science should inform their communications. If used properly, behavioral science can help make your message get noticed. It can help make it better understood. It can help make it remembered and it can help make it get acted upon. And I think in each of those four scenarios, there's a role for behavioral science to play that will help marketers make their communications more effective. And so it's the type of thing that I think we need to embrace, that we need to start to use, and we need to start building on it. So any individual using it needs to start to track. How is this working? How does this work for my product, for my market? What seems to work the best? What doesn't work quite as well? All right, why didn't this work well? Can I tweak it to make it work better? What is working well? Well, how high is high? Can I make that work even better? But now is the time to start. And that's going to, I think, serve us well over the next five, 10, 15 years because it's going to help us create more effective marketing.

55:28 Louis What are the top three resources you'd recommend listeners today? And you have to start with your book. You have to check that for that.

55:36 Nancy Well, I was actually going to start with Robert Cialdini's Influence of Science and Practice. And I know you said that your audience is probably quite familiar with this book. He updated it recently, just a few months ago, and great, great stuff in there. He was kind enough to endorse my book. So read Robert Cialdini's book and certainly read Using Behavioral Science and Marketing by me. I think those are two great contenders. I think that your podcast is a wonderful place for people to be. I think if they're looking for another podcast, they could check out the Brainy Biz podcast by Melina Palmer. And then there is Brain Fluence by Roger Dooley, which is a book. But Roger also has the occasional podcast and e-newsletter that goes out. And I think those are all great resources.

56:23 Louis There are so many others, honestly, but if I had to combine it to just a few, those come to mind quickly. Great stuff. And thanks for the kind words about the podcast. Okay, so Nancy, you've been fabulous, shared so many stories, examples, research. I'm just going to summarize briefly what we said. You talked about the autonomy bias, this idea that humans like to be in control, this idea that rhythms play a big role in being remembered, concept being remembered. We talked about cognitive fluency and how you need to keep things simple for people to understand them and feel like they are being understood. We talked about priming, your examples of cash versus credit, for example, the pain of paying as well. And the Goldilocks effect, which is the fact that we tend to pick something in the middle. We don't really like to go to be the outliers. Is that a good summary? That's a great summary, yes. See, I've really improved my craft in taking notes. I feel like a professional podcaster. Where can listeners connect with you?

57:20 Nancy Well, Louis, they can find me on LinkedIn, they can find me on Twitter, they can find me on Facebook, and they can find me at my agency's website. I co-founded an agency called HBT Marketing, and you can find us online at HBTMKTG.com. We've kind of abbreviated the word marketing. And we've got some interviews and white papers, case studies on the site that people might find interesting. But I'd love to hear from many of your listeners or any of your viewers. Like I said, Twitter, LinkedIn, I'm out there and would love to connect. Great stuff. Once again, Nancy, thank you so much for your time. Sure, thank you very much. And of course, my book, Using Behavioral Science and Marketing, is available on Amazon and Kogan Page, which is the publisher. So I want to get that in too in case people want to find that. And again, Louis, thank you so much. This has been great.