Some Very Important Effects In Advertising - Richard Shotton - #091
Guests: Richard Shotton
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Hello people of podcast land. Welcome back to modern wisdom. I guess today is Richard Shoton He's a behavioral science expert and the founder of astroten Behavioral science is one of those really interesting That's the end of my pomodoro. I'm gonna keep going. Thank you. Be focus pro Behavioral science is one of those fascinating areas that I absolutely love to talk about. All of us are completely at the mercy of our own biases on a daily basis, so learning about them, even if you can't stop them from happening, is just a hilarious insight into the way that our minds work. So, today, expect to learn.
What is the reason that restaurants don't put pound signs in front of their prices? Why do marketing campaigns with huge floors end up winning the market over? How does increasing wait times, on comparison sites, actually improve customer buy-in, and why the budget airlines reduce quality of experience to improve trust? Also, you're going to get to find out what the word What the word nine enders means in a marketing sense. That's a real, a real term, nine enders. This episode is fantastic. I absolutely loved it. Richard, you're a legend and a gentleman.
Thank you so much for coming on. Rory Sutherland's Psychology in the World of Advertising, episode 49 is a perfect complement to this. If you enjoy it, but for now please welcome the wise and wonderful Mr Richard Shotten. I am joined by Richard Shotten, founder of Astro10 and author of the Choice Factory, Richard to welcome the show. Hi, good to meet you, Chris.
Fantastic to have you on. Just before we started, you told me that Astro10, your company, is actually the wrong name for itself. Can you explain what's happened there? It is the wrong name. So I set it up last August and I was on a holiday and it was getting to the stage where I just needed a name. And I thought Richard Schotton would just be a bit naff. So I was flicking through a textbook and psychology experiments
and I came across this experiment back in the 60s, which was all about the panaceous effect of authority. And in the experiment, what the psychologist did was ring up hospitals, set a nurses, quick quick, you've got to go and find patient Jones and give them 100 milligrams of Astro 10. And they shouldn't have accepted the order over the phone patient, Jones and give them 100 milligrams of astroten. They shouldn't have accepted the order over the phone.
When they got to the medicine cupboard, there was the fake medicine astroten and it said in big letters, don't give anyone more than 10 milligrams. Despite these two facts, 95% of the nurses tried to administer the fake drug. Did someone step in and go, what are you doing? No, no, no, no. Yeah, I'm guessing there was someone hiding in a cupboard or something. I don't know, yeah, that part.
But the, so I thought, yeah, this is brilliant. Relevant name for the company, part of an ex-psychologic experiment, and also kind of like the anti-authoritarian vibe that it was one of the reasons for setting them up on my own. So I registered the name, got the website, registered at companies house, did all that stuff. And then about a month or two later I thought well I'm going to call myself AstroTown, I should probably read the original paper. And I went
and found this paper and I was also halfway through, I suddenly realised by horror that the textbook had a typo. So the the drug in the real experiment back in the 60s was not Astro 10. It was Astro Gen. So my company is a mistake. I mean, your company is a typo. Yeah, my company is a typo. But I thought after that time, one, I couldn't be bothered to re get another website and yeah, I another website. And I kind of like the fact that they've got a type of a hard, which is like, again, it's human behaviour, right? Well, yes, one of my favourite biases is this idea of how to go with the Prattfall effect. So the Prattfall effect is the experiment back in done by Elliot Aronson, who was this
professor at Harvard in the 1960s, and in 1966 he runs his classic experiment where he gets a colleague of his to take part in a quiz, he has given his colleague all the answers. So the guy does amazingly well, gets 90% of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles, looks like a genius. But then as the quiz is finishing, the guy makes one American call a pretful, a small blunder. As he's standing up, he spills a cup of coffee down himself. So Aronsons recorded this entire incident, great quiz performance, and then the blunder. He plays it to people, but he edits the clips, so there are two versions.
One has everything, and the other version edits out the mistake. And when he asks listeners how appealing they find the contestant, the contestant has seen a significantly more appealing if people have heard the mistake as well as the amazing performance. And Aaron some calls this the the pratfall effect, this idea that we prefer people or relevantly for advertisers products who exhibit a flaw. And I love it because I think one, it runs very counsel to what people assume. And then secondly, if you look at the greatest addict ads through history, it's interesting quite how many of them have had this insight at the very heart.
What like? So you go all the way back to the early, it was 1959, the classic campaign adage said it was the greatest campaign of the 20th century, where they had flaws at the very heart, ugly as only skin deep, you've got more, moving more recent, well, a little bit more recently was Avis, we're number two, so we try harder, essentially. Guinness, admitting they're slow, good things come to those who wait, stellar, reassuring, expensive, and more recently KFC tweeting that their fries are damn awful. Our fries sold us this, so give us six months or come back with a better recipe.
Yeah. I think what those advertisers have realised is that probably the biggest hurdle you have as an advertiser, well probably the biggest hurdle is being noticed. And actually the practical effect's good for that because if everyone else is bragging, if you are distinctive, you're much more likely to be noticed. And there's lots of evidence about that. There's a wonderful experiment called the Von Restorf Effect,
which proves that. So it gets you noticed, the next biggest hurdle as an advertiser is their believability. Most people assume advertisers, the cynics assume they lie, which is not true, but most people assume that advertisers are at least putting a positive spin on the truth.
So the amazing thing with the practical effects is if you admit a flaw, you've tangibly demonstrated your honesty, and then all your other claims become that much more believable. And then I think the final thing it does, which is excellent, is those brilliant advertisers don't admit a flaw randomly, they go to great lengths to think, well, what's our core strength? And then they think about a flaw, it's the mirror image of that strength. Because in many cultures, flaws and strengths are two sides of the same coin. So, Stella say they're expensive, but that's because they know people assume that expensive things are better quality. Or VW go out and say yes, we're ugly, but then
they follow up by saying, well, that's because we don't care about aesthetic fripperies, we care about engineering excellence. So it's this fascinating approach. Yet I find it so interesting because even though it's got all this evidence and there's so much more than just the arrogance and experiment. Advertisers very, very rarely use it, you know, if you pick up if you watch a. Few hours of TV tonight you'll see you're pretty won't say single advertiser and meeting a weakness. All very well and good saying the best ones use it but they are in the they are in minor. Is it a way to humanize brands? Is it a thing of the things? Yeah, I think that's one of the other things
that it does. As you say, if you admit a weakness, then I think I've changed in that kind of power. Dynamic. Yeah, definitely. Well, I mean, looking at some of the biggest memes and things that come out of TV, apart from the fact that it's funny moments, but if you look
at the stuff that comes off love island or dancing on ice, celebrity dancing on ice and stuff like that, it's always someone pulling an awkward face or tripping up a step or doing something like that. Like, no one ever loves the person who's flawless because I don't think that they're able to relate and I think that that's the same with the businesses as well. And obviously, you don't want Boeing,
well, this is probably quite timely, like given how many issues they've had recently with that 357 Macs or whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't want Boeing to be admitting like, our planes aren't that safe, but they'll get you there fast. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't talk about that weakness, Mr. Boeing. Like, let's not bring that one up.
Talk about the fact that that Harley Davidson one that you posted on your Twitter the other day. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing. So there's a Harley Davidson advert guy on a bike on Big Open Road and it says at the bottom, somewhere 35,000 feet in the air, Charlie Davidson advert guy on a bike on big open road and it says at the bottom somewhere 35,000 feet in the air and man is trying to open a small packet of peanuts. Fucking genius, that absolute genius.
But yeah, you're totally right, humanizing the brands and being strategic about it. Yes, yes. I think you spot on with that and two things, you say humanizing the brand. And at Aronson, it may have been one of the follow-up experiments talks about if someone seems perfect, then people want to see them as a threat and want to knock them down, a peg or two. If someone's flawed, then they're not a threat and you can, you're much more likely to warm to them. But the other part, you mentioned, I think your spot on of,
you don't just pick a floor randomly. Stella didn't say it tasted awful, as you say, you know, VWs and say, I mean, you didn't say that we're lying about our emissions, which they were. At the T.A. Strategic weaknesses. Yes.
And they're definitely a vent one. They were all of those things like Guinness, I'm sure we're told in research group after research group, how annoying it was that people had to wait for them. But rather than just brush that into the carpet as most brands would do, you know, they thought, well, people know this, it's true. Might as well try and get some mileage out of it.
Yeah, how can we play off the back of it? And definitely using some of those things as an indicator of quality, that's what's happening, isn't it? It's prices and indicator of quality. The wait time is an indicator of quality. It's what is a characteristic people want and how can we make our weakness be some sort of a signal that that is an important part of it.
I was talking about Guinness. I was recently in America and I was at the United States National Whitewater Rafting Centre, which is anyone who's ever won Patagonia, like that's where they will, that's their heaven, that's where they die and go to. It's like mountain biking and hill climbing and whitewater rafting and all this stuff. And they don't have a bar that serves alcohol,
but they have a bar which has numerous cold brew coffees on tap, and I was like, oh, God, I'm gonna take this. And sure enough, they have one which takes the same time as Guinness to pour, and that's its advertising strategy. Oh, okay, yeah. Pined of just under a pint of cold brew coffee, but it settles the same way, it gets poured the same way,
they have to tilt the cup in the same way, they circuit with the logo turns towards you and push it across. I was like, this is cool. That is fascinating because I'm not quite linked to it, but there is another bias called the IKEA Effect by Dan Ariely and Norton. What they talk about is generally removing friction, making things easier is a massively underrated approach for marketers and people who want behaviour change. However, they argue there are rare occasions when you should try and make things harder. At the beginning of the paper, they talk about a famous story from General Mills and Betty Crocker, and if you've heard about this one, it's back in the 1950s. You've got more households with both men and women working, so there's less time to cook
cakes for the kids. So the general meals think, well, how do we tap into this changing behaviour? Well let's make a super simple cake mix. A cake mix, all you have to do, tear the top of the packet open, pour it in a tin, add some water, chuck it in the oven, and you'll lovely cake half an hour later. They launch this and despite it seeming being absolutely spot on for the era, cakes house are awful. They then ponder why this is for a while and they begin to think, well we've made this too easy, because a cake isn't just about providing calories for your family, it's about showing your love.
And if you've made something really, really easy, it doesn't show love because part of that is going through a bit of a rigmarole. So they then follow up with a new cake mix in which they artificially make the cake mix more complicated. They make it harder to bake. So now you've got still with your cake mix in your packet, still tear it harder to bake. So now you've got still with your cake mix in your packet, still tear it open, you still pour it
in the tin, this time you have to crack an egg into it. And now by making it harder, once they've done that, that's when the cake's out, mix now starts to take off. Cost of signaling. Yeah, I think, well, maybe the cost is time there. I mean, the N, I really call it the Ikea effect, the more effort we put into something, the more we appreciate it. I think there's an element that in your cold brew, coffee story, and I've heard a few of them actually.
Someone else told me, and so this one, it'd be interesting if any listeners know if this is true or not. But someone said to me, and it's been two separate web designers, they reasoned Matt Truss here, they said, look, you know when you go on those travel comparison sites, they said, aren't you suspicious about the amount of time
it takes for them to search the sites? They said, look, they could do that much quicker, but they just add this second or two of friction in, to make the search for those hotels or airplanes feels like it's been far more authoritative far more comprehensive. This is how hard we've got to scrape the data to get you a deal. So I'm not going to make sure that I keep this sufficiently anonymous that it won't rumble in.
I know a person who knows a person and this person is currently working in a city doing some financial stuff. As a part of this thing, he provides spreadsheet, very advanced spreadsheets with VLOOKUPs and all sorts of other things to do, projections and forecasting that take into account a lot of very complicated variables. And what he's added into this spreadsheet is a macro that runs a loading bar. Now, you'll never know because I've managed to keep him sufficiently anonymous, but if you are the person that's being served this Excel sheet,
let me tell you that loading bar is always three and a half seconds long. No matter how much data goes through, because it's just an animation. It's just an animation that you thought if I had this in, it looks like I'm really fucking doing to my crunch in the numbers behind here. Meanwhile, his compute is like having a tab. It's like, this process is out,
the back just having a cigarette going out. We fucking finished three and a half minutes ago, three and a half seconds ago. Yeah, that you're totally right. I think Rory Suddland talks about the difference between pick your own strawberries and cheap strawberries. Oh, okay, gone.
So you can imagine the same thing. If price is an indicator of quality, but if price is offset with some cost that you have to incur in the creation of the product, you can sell strawberries for half the price of everybody else's strawberries if no one is suspicious about the fact, hang on, why the fuck are these strawberries so cheap? So I'm going to go pick them yourself, the same as with IKEA. Why is IKEA furniture so cheap? Oh, I don't need to worry about the quality. It's because I've got to put it together myself. That's why I have to do it. I think you're absolutely right there. And if there is one category of brands
that should always be thinking about using the prepful effect, I think it is low cost brands. Because if they do nothing, people will assume. Shit. Yeah, they're product-of-ship. Seeing it again, again, working with brands that have maybe had a revolutionary way of being their product or market, they've
done something really clever, which means they're much cheaper, and then they'll get their tracking back and that, and off they often come back with very low quality scores, because people work to rule the thumb, as you say, if it's cheap, it must be shipped. And I think it was something, well it was Rory who had this brilliant explanation for the success of budget airlines, you know, his argument is look what they had to do when they launched because they were such a strange thing. One day you were flying across Europe for 100 quid and now it only cost a five. They had to go out and say their service was awful. If they hadn't, people would assume the cost savings might have been at something like
safety. Second hand, air flow objects. So they have never set foot in them. You go out and say, well, actually our service is awful. And you know, I think about put Michael O'Leary about how much you can push that message. If you do that, people think, well, that's a fair enough trade-off. And they're happy to set foot in the planes. Yes, I think you're right. If you ever have a low cost product, to be to set foot on the planes. Yes, I think you're right. If you ever have a low cost product, you've got to be thinking about,
well, how can we explain this price to people? And if we can't try and explain it with a bit of a humble brag, people assume that's too good to be true. Need can find an inconsequential weakness. Like TK Max admit that their stores are shambolic. Oh my God, it is. Bet it's a chaos. Bet it's when when it's that, then people go away thinking
it's the quality of the product that's awful. Yeah, I mean, TK Max, anybody have some friends who shop in TK Max, and it is, to me, it is what, if an anxiety attack manifested itself as a store, that's what TK Max would be. Jeremy, like there's no logic to it, you've got the scented candles next to the flip flops and be there. Are you like, who on earth is it? It's like a drunk child to design this store. Unbelievable. Well, I don't know if they're still running, but certainly they had a wave of
advertising about six months ago, which said something long lines of the small prices you pay for the small prices you pay. That's very clear. Of course, check on the mic. Yeah, it might be a Senate chemical, it makes the flip flop, but if you put that bet of effort in, you'll earn a, you'll earn a half the bargain. So when, when someone works in an ad agency, right, and they're coming up with the market and communications for this.
That small price as you pay for the small prices you pay, for instance, as a tagline, has probably, has probably come by one person, perhaps. It's not multiple people that have come up with small prices you pay. It'll just be some guy because I've done advertising for a long time for my own stuff. The idea of being the guy that comes up with that, no matter whether it makes any difference to my paycheck, gives me such a figurative stiffy, like to think I could be the guy that did the small price as you pay for the small price as you pay, you're like, yes, yes, that's my month made.
Cause you just come up with this awesome, awesome tagline. Do you get that sense sometimes when you kind of, you finally hit upon the right, brand message, the right trigger, the right caption, the right everything, and it just comes together like that. So, so my speciality is slightly different more in these around, well, how you apply, uh, behavioral science to my, there's definitely a link, but I'm sure that's, yeah If I tried to write that line it would have been about a paragraph long with six questions.
So what else have you seen recently? Is anything else caught your eye recently that you've been looking at in terms of advertising? I mean the interest, the big interest for me is I think the advertising is undergoing a bit of a change at the moment, and this might be wishful thinking. But there was such euphoria a few years ago about how the rise of data and the opportunities of targeting was going to change advertising that I think there was so much over claim. I think Brands got very excited and then a lot of those benefits didn't materialize.
What I think we're now seeing is the kind of penjune swinging back from a fascination with technology and it's not going to disappear completely, of course not. But swinging more towards some of those eternal truths of that psychology identifies. So I think that's that to me is an an exciting area at the moment that more and more advertisers are thinking, well, how can we unerth insights into our audience by harnessing this field of psychology, behavioral science? Yeah, Rory said on the podcast that I did with him, silicon value sees everything as an optimization problem. So that's a, sorry, I thought you were going to get to, because
what I think Rory's brilliant often at talking about is sometimes when you talk about silicon value or, or, or big tech, it's the their success is often attributed solely to their technological brilliance. But often, and I don't know if he covered it because I needed a great podcast with him, I can't remember whether you covered this or not, but often their success has some quite clever psychological insights to their heart as well. So Uber, for example, of course, you know, the functional like behind that, you know, it is amazing. But there are some really clever psychological points there as well. That there is research, and I can't remember the name of the psychologist, but there's quite
a lot of research that shows that specific weights, as in I know I've got to weight five minutes, is much less painful than an unspecified weight that ends up being five minutes. It's one of the great things that Disney do. When you get to that, it's from this point. Yes, exactly. So people can quite worrying about whether they're getting it to the front or not, and they could do something else for 20 minutes and have a chat, and then it removes the pain, so that they were brilliant on that. But the other bit that I think they're amazing at,
and I think this is key to their success, is the means of payment. There is lots of evidence that the most distance you put between someone getting your products and then handing over cash, the cheaper it feels. So, you know, when you go to a casino, they don't expect you to be putting down £10 notes in the table. They get you to turn that cash into chips. So people come less price sensitive. When people have credit cards, they've come less price sensitive than cash. I'm going to guess that when you're abroad as well and you're using just plastic, this is, everyone makes the same joke. It looks like plastic. Yeah, it's working not me, it's worth
just as much as you're on money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're not quite sure on the conversion rate. I've never seen any stuttles in that, but I bet you are right. The one I've done, which is, it might have been the first ever experiment I ran with, a lovely such-called Claire Lindford. And it was about contactless payment. So we waited until people came out from coffee shops, mini-marts, little delis, and then we stopped and said, can you answer three questions? And we said, how much of you paid? Can we see your receipt?
And, no sorry, sorry, how much of you paid? What was your means of payment? And then can we see your receipt? And so we compared what they thought they'd paid with their receipt, what they'd actually paid. And then we cut the data by means of payment. So people pay with cash, three quarters of this, I think, and you exactly what they paid.
Those who don't overestimated their spend, by about, I think it was about 10%. Credit cards, two thirds knew exactly what they'd spent. And when they did, and they was like to underestimate their overestimated contactless, less than half remember, they've very, they were delighted to underestimate, it's overestimate, contactless, less than half, remember, and they're very, very underestimated, they spend. So you had this swing of about 15% in memory of spend
between cash overestimating, contactless underestimating. So that, to me, in Uber, I would say, is more extreme than even contactless. People treat it as free because there is, is so little friction, there's so little pain of pain. The people treat it like, as you say, monopoly, it's like monopoly money. Buy it now on Amazon.
Yeah, buy it. Oh, one click, one click, ordering, sorry. It's the fact that you can swipe to the right. All you need to do is press a button on Amazon, swipe to the right and then two goose down pillows arriving in your house the next day. You're like, oh my God, this is not the year 3000 shit. There's even studies, I mean it goes as far as, I think it, yes, it's a civil yang.
Civil yang did a study on restaurant menus where she said, if you take off the, it would be, well she's American so I've been dollar signs, if you take off the dollar signs, people can make percent less price sensitive. Now it can be tiny, tiny tweaks that will affect that degree of price sensitivity and price sensitivity is hugely important to brands. Now because if you're operating,
I don't know if I'm getting my maths right here, but if you're operating at 20% margin, getting an extra 1% on the price is worth five percent extra in terms of the sales. Yeah, well, I mean, if you are a restaurant owner, actually, if you're going out for dinner tonight, have a look at the menu, see if there is or is not a pound sign on that, and that will tell you how well versed the restaurant owner is in behavioral economics and behavioral science and then give us a tweet and tell us because I want to find out.
Or maybe in that because it's fascinating in the looking far from some of these brands, there is often a question, well, were they applying behavioral science? Like I think in the menu case, a lot of it is maybe some people originally did it because they'd read about this civil-yang experimentation, but it looks cleaner as well. And I wonder if other people just copied it. Oh, that looks quite pretty, it looks a bit smarter. So it's hard to know one has someone applied it because of their knowledge of behavioral science.
Two, it might be, they've never studied the subject matter but they are keen students of human nature. And like going back to the practical effect, Elliot Aronson did that study in 1966. In 1959, it was 70 years earlier that Bill Burmbat, one of the great avatars of inventive inventives, that's when he had run that VW campaign that had admitted the flaws. He came out with a phrase, a smaller mission gains a large acceptance before the academics had actually done the studying. So sometimes I think people are getting these ideas, they're working day in day out with
customers, you know, if they're watching how people behave then I think they pick them up through osmosis rather than academic study. Yeah, you are right, there's this trickle down effect of that, we find that in the industry I work in which is nightlife promotion. You only have a good idea for about a month because after a, if it's that good of an idea, it's just been emancipated by everybody else. And then you're like, oh, that was good until everyone else found out. And because the unique thing about the nightlife industry is no one's protecting their intellectual property, no one's got contracts in place. It's the most, I actually believe it's the most wild west
industry probably outside of the drug trade that's still allowed to exist because no one, everything is up for grabs all the time. From night names to taglines, to intellectual property, to staff, to event, to everything, everything's up for grabs. And it's a ruthlessly interesting sort of experiment to see what happens when people try and hold onto ideas that they've come up with. Yes. For Nightlife, that's why I didn't know that was your area. Maybe the bias that's most regularly applied by nightclubs is the famous attempts at building
social proof. So social proof is the idea of we don't make our decisions fully individually. We look around to what others are doing and things that are popular become more popular still. So the classic nightclub trick of that was always, you know, don't let people in straightaway build up the queue outside so it feels like it's appealing. You're giving away all of our secrets here. Yeah, but that's I think that is a fascinating idea because it's one of the most proven biases in social psychology. Chilledine is showing it with towel reuse,
Chris Stakis with smoking, HMRC with tax repayment rates, fang with restaurant menus, again, again. If you tell people what the popular course of behavior is, it becomes more popular still. But why I think it's really interesting is that a lot of advertisers are very literal in their interpretation of that inside. So you go out and you see beer brands saying they're Britain's most popular, or tonics chocolate bar selling five million a week, or what are call that, 97% of CEOs use them. And I think that's all very well and good.
But what martyrs should aspire to is not seeing the behavioral science experiments as the endpoint. I think what they should aspire to is thinking of them just as stimulus for good ideas. And then if they apply their strengths of creative thinking, that's when the best ideas happen. So seeing that you've got your white earbuds on, that's probably my, the white earbuds
are probably my favorite example of a brand taking social proof and using it, actually. Think back to when I put launch what, for 2001-ish, when they launched, they were not the market leader. Lots of other brands have got out there first. There's no way they could honestly go out and say, you know, we're the most popular brand bias. But the other brands made a error of not being very visible. So when people had Sony MP3 players, no one knew, if you saw someone on the tube or on the train, all you would see is their interesting black earphones. The MP3 pair itself was in the person's pocket. No idea if it was Sony or Motorola. What Apple did so brilliantly was
making a massive play of all their advertising, focusing on the bright white earphones, all the child advertising, focusing on that, very, very distinctive, only person who did it. So soon as you saw white earphones, you knew someone was listening to Apple, they looked like they were the market leader long before they were, and that's set in this virtual circle, set in train, this virtual circle of social proof. So those lateral harnessing, the lateral harnessing of these biases, I think, becomes really exciting when it's through the design or through the incituation. Yeah. So you're stranded on an island, and you're allowed to take five biases with you. Are you allowed to be aware of five biases?
So I'm going to ask you to choose your five favorite children. Okay. Okay. Well, we've had the practical effects. Is that one of your top five? I'd be live. It's a practical. I love it.
Okay. Who's going to be number two and why and let's go through it? Okay. So the second one, I probably have saying like price relativity. So this is the idea that consumers don't have a fixed conception of value. What's good value? So I think it's always sevens words. There's no one walking around the shops thinking they're prepared to pay one pound per unit of happiness when for it's a cut or a pair of trainers. It's just be two complex. So what Daniel Coneman talks about often, he says, look, when people have a complex problem, like, is this thing good value,
rather than try and weigh that up in a very complex way, they replace the complex calculation with a much simpler calculation. A calculation that's almost as good but much simpler. And the simpler calculation is what did I pay for something similar in the past? If I'm now being asked to pay more, this new thing is bad value. If I'm now being asked to pay less, this new thing is great value. Now that should interest Marcus because it means that people's conception of value is not an absolute thing. It's a relative thing. It depends what your comparison says. So if you can change the comparison set for your products, then you can change people's willingness to pay
by all the sub magnitudes. Have you got an example? I've been considering a number of that. A recent, probably not the biggest one, but a recent one would be, have you seen this, like seedlip, non-alcoholic gin? No. And when it's not on offer, it's 25 quid. And everything they do about it is the brand, the imagery, the bottle it comes in, the fact they call it a non-alcoholic spirit, compares it to other alcoholic drinks. So when you compare it with a gin, 25 quid's expensive, but it's in the line with an artisan gin.
And it sells reasonably well. But if you think about what that product is, it's essentially an adult cordial. Now if you start thanks to ribina, if that sold not on the gin arm in the ribina aisle, and there's no way on earth any right-minded consumer would pay more than a five. Because people would suddenly be saying, well, okay, it's a bit fenced than Rye Beena,
but the two pounds would be their comparison set. They might pay double. They're not going to pay tens as much. By changing the comparison set to jeans, they change consumers' willingness to pay by orders of magnitude. The more famous example, the example that's made billions of pounds though, along the Roy Southern often talks about, is in espresso. Now, his argument there is what they have brilliantly done by selling in pods is change the comparison set because
a pod gives you a cup-size serving and as soon as people think of cups of coffee, the comparison set in the espresso is Starbucks and a of cups of coffee, the comparison set in the espresso is Starbucks and a flat white. So the 50 pence that the espresso want for a lingo put off coffee looks great value. It's two pounds five for Starbucks flat white. If, and I reckon 99.9 cent of marketers would have done this, if they had launched in bags of coffee, if they'd sold in a prittness presso powder in like a big bag of coffee like Dow Egg Burts or Cafe Direct, how much do you reckon
a standard 470-4 gram bag of coffee would have cost? Well, you're gonna be able to get a little bit over the top of what it is already, right? You're not gonna be talking Starbucks prices. Well, if they sold 470-4 gram bag of coffee, that would cost 60 pounds. Now, there is no way on earth again. Any, what? It's, we would go into Sainsbury's, push a side, a 10 pound bag of Dowag, but it's a way and take over 60 pound bag of
the Express said, feel like so wastefully, feel morally wrong. Now, but that's not what they did. You know, the 50 pence for a pod feels like a great value compared to Starbucks, the 60 pound for a bag which is exactly the same per grand price. That would have felt a rip off because it would have been compared to a different collection of items. So that to me is one of the most fascinating biases because you can change people's willingness to pay, I mean those examples are pretty, but you've changed people's willingness to pay. I mean, those examples of, but you've changed people's willingness to pay
by orders of magnitude about 10. Wow. That's phenomenally proper. So this is where I, I'd never heard it before, but the first ever podcast that I heard, Rory Siddler, and Rory, you may be listening, so I'm gonna send this to, I apologize for your ears, just like burning some, so hard that they're coming off.
But if you are listening and you haven't heard episode 49 with Rory Siddler, it was at the start of the year and it was a force of nature. You gotta go watch it, it'll be in the show notes below. I remember that he was discussing about so many of these different elements and I think that the fact there was nothing analogous in the two situations you've got.
There's nothing that someone can use. What's analogous to alcohol-free gin? Well, when it's in the gin situations you've got, there's nothing that someone can use. What's analogous to alcohol-free gin? Well, when it's in the gin aisle, nothing. And what's analogous to Nespresso pod? Well, I can't work it out, no one probably actually knows how many grams are in a teaspoon of coffee that's instant coffee, like.
Yeah, you go insane. If you, I mean, people often use the word irrationality about some of these biases, but it's a strange word to use because it would be insane to go into the supermarket and try and make all these calculations way up all these things and not just compare it to what's in front of you. You know, you spend a whole day in a supermarket if you try to make all these calculations. You have an existential crisis.
Yes, you would, which I often have in Azte. But yeah, the Rory Sullen point is the fact he talks, he says alchemy, right? And I think the alchemy relation that he pulls out, the first ever time that I heard this used. And remembering I've done, I did masters in international marketing at Newcastle University, I've been at uni for five years,
I've done advertising my entire life. I'd never thought of it like this. But what he says is that advertising is a kind of alchemy because it allows you to create value creation literally out of nothing. So the Nespresso change in price by the way that they have pitched themselves and the style in which they've put the product across. There's no carbon footprint, there's no increased labor, there's no cost of any kind outside of its ability to simply be a unique kind of offering. So you're able to create value from nothing. And that's where it gets the alchemy idea from, I think. Yeah. I think it's actually brilliant book. I think you're absolutely right. There's also a value in that what people taste
is not necessarily just the products itself. So if you're talking about the espresso or beer or food, people taste what they expect to taste. So there's a whole series of experiments done by a slightly controversial professor called Brian Wonsink, where a different story before or a different label to a food creates a very different taste.
So if you tell someone a wine is 50 quid and I think this is Dana Ray, actually rather than Wonsink, if you tell them a wine is 50 quid, they'll like it much more than the exactly the same wine if they're told it's a fiver. One sink did stuff around labelling so you tell people a wine exactly again exactly they say everyone served the same wine if they're told it's from Dakota North Dakota they'll tell you it's all full of the toilets from California that it's lovely. If they describe us a soup with loads of fancy adjectives then it's rated higher and people will pay more and think it tastes better than if it's just describing very plain terms. So, you know, yes people, you know, adding that thought and effort to the design, the advertising,
the labeling, the packaging, it creates value in people's heads and why is that any less valuable than the enjoyment that's created by playing around with the chemical and the physical makeup? Yeah, I agree. So we've got the Prattfall effect. We've got what was the second cost-reli- Relativity? Price-relativity.
Price-relativity. Who else? So we're on the island. We know that we're on third. We know how to trip over and we know it's spill coffee on ourselves. Yeah. We know to make things unanalogous to other products so that the customers don't know what's going on.
What else is happening? Yeah. For different reasons, I would probably have nine enders. I don't know. Just. Okay. Okay. Okay.
So how do you, but in terms of anyone. Ah, damn. We should have done this podcast. We should have done it in eight years time. It's a nine-enders is the idea that from Adam Alter and How Herschfield, that people whose agents in nine are particularly likely to make big, major lifestyle decisions. So it's sound, well, I've exactly my reaction when I first read this, this sounds ho come. And at first I wasn't persuaded by their initial, well what he initially talks about is, well we proved this by running a huge global survey. I think it's 40 or 1000 people and people were much more likely to agree with a statement.
I've made a big lifestyle change in the last 12 months if they're agents in a nine. But there's all sorts of problems with clean data. So that's a little bit weak. But what they then did was brilliant. They looked at loads of observed data sets to try and test their hypothesis. So they look at first time marathon runners
and they're 48% more likely to do a marathon the first time when they're agents in nine They look at I guess they look at affairs Websites they look at Ashley Madison I mean this this is not great affairs website. They gave their 8 million Database of men to these researchers and they found that men were 18% more likely to join this website when they're agents in nine. They even looked and this gets a bit more depressing, they looked American suicide data and there is a small but statistically significant uplift in suicides when people's agents in nine. Now what are they then? Obviously, so robust study because they're
prioritising observed data over claim data. They argue that this happens because people put they don't treat all time as equal. Some moments are given disproportionate importance. So when people are approaching the turn of a decade, that has big cultural significance. So that's 12 months before, people are at least thinking, well, how's my life going? And loads of people think, well, it's actually fine, don't make any changes, but there's a large enough proportion who think things are going poorly. They make these big radical changes.
Now part of the reason I take this to this island is, I like this because it's practical. You know, 10 years ago, knowing that as an advertiser, well, what the hell would you do with it? Now, it is very, very simple. Now, loads of digital media owners, catchables, birth dates, very, very easy to target people, but the other reason, this is very why it makes it on the top five, I love it, is there's a really strong economic reason for using this bias. If you're a, if you're the government trying to get people to stop smoking, if you're a diet brand, if you're a gym brand, if you're a press seller of luxury, uh, convertibles,
you know, target people whose agents in nine when they are, you know, mulling over the direction of life, it's very, very personal time. But the reason I love it from the economics of it is media. When advertisers buy media space, it's increasingly bought through an auction. So in the mid seconds, voice in ad, an auction has gone on and the winner gets to serve their ad. options going on and the winner gets to serve their ad. If you are using the same data signals as every other brand, and most brands will default to income, you know, 1834s, ABC ones, if you're just buying on the same metric as everyone else, well, when you're
in a busy auction, you tend to have a pay. What you need to do is isolate a fact that no one else is using like night enders, bid on that, and you're much more likely to get a bargain. So I think nine enders makes it, because at first I was very doubtful. I love the creativity that Aldrin Hirschfeld showed to test this point, and then I love the fact that it's both practical
and there's some economic expo hindered. I can't get over the name. I can't get over the fact it's called nine enders. Well, it was discovered by academics, not marketers. Well, that's the thing. Maybe it's a rebrand, like they're around the market. Right. We've come up with this thing.
What do you think of, what do you just, hear me out, hear me out, just wait. What do we think of as a name, as, hear me out, hear me out, just wait. What do we think of as a name, nine enders, you'd be like, right, love the energy, great, just change the title out and we're sweet, we're sweet. Yeah, I mean, I remember back to our very first chat, I've got no right to talk to anyone about naming. Yeah, that's true. That's very true. You got that wrong. Yeah, exactly. It wasn't called like Astro tenders though, was it? Yeah. Yeah. OK, so we've got those.
We've got nine enders. We've got price, cost, relativity. We've got the platform effect. What else is on the island? The island, well, I would have. And this is related to the danger of claim data, I think, and touching on that with nine inters. There is a lovely experiment by Adrian North, who was at the University of Leicester, and his experiment was around playing different music in the wine aisle of a supermarket. So some occasions he plays in a stereotypically French music accordion stuff, some to play stereotypically German music,
brass bands and things. And then he monitors the proportion of wine sales. Ignores all the other nations just looks at French and German wine sales. When the French music plays, 77% of the wine from those two countries is French, 27% German. When the German music plays, 73% is German, 27% French. So the nationality being bought swades, massive leaks of this small environmental queue. So part of it, you know, he's, he's, he's expected it's mainly about the music and the importance of these environmental cues. But what's interesting from another perspective is what he does next, as people are leaving the supermarket, he stops them and he says Did you buy me wine? Did you buy me French or German wine and then if they've said yes to both those questions he says well
Why did you buy that wine and? only 2% of people say they bought the wine because of the music. And even when he asked them directly, even when he says, look, did the music influence you? 86% of people deny flat out the music had any effects at all. Now that, I think if you're a marketer, if you change one thing from this podcast, it should be based on that experiment,
which is be very, very careful about taking customers' claims at face value. Because if you run that test and then all you were thinking about that running that test and did what most marketers do, which is survey people and then listen to the survey results, if you went and said, would the music change in the music influence you? Everyone says no, you don't bother doing it. So if you're a mark to be very skeptical about survey results, focus groups, directly asking people, and certainly be skeptical about taking those claims at face value, and instead, I would say the thing
to them from psychology is this methodology of not listening to claims but setting up these testing control experiments. If you're a naturalistic experiment, you know, in the Y and R, for example, if you're a Y brand, keep everything the same except for one variable, the music, and then actually difference in sales or whatever behavior you want, you would trip you back to that change variable. That's a far better way to unearthing genuine motivations. Daniel Kahneman talks about this a lot that we don't know our own biases, right? We haven't got a clue about our own motivations for doing particular things.
You mentioned about alcohol in supermarkets. I haven't seen this in the UK, but I was recently in America. And in America, in America they have bars from like a pub Not that far behind the fruit and veg aisle. So you hit fruit and veg Then you hit a bar and then you hit like bread Yeah, the number of dads that had seen that were there who'd obviously said to their
Partners right don't worry. Don't read worry, darling. I'll take the kids for this one. Are you sure you've worked all week? No, no, no, no, don't worry. And then one of the trolley's, oh my god, it's trolley, right? And it's double child seat thing at the front, cup holder at the back. No, it's dad just going around with an IPA. thing at the front, cup holder at the back. Nice, nice. That's it, dad, just going around with an IPA. Got like a lovely brew dog or like a blue moon or something like that and he's just seven away, obviously throwing loads of stuff in, he doesn't need.
Like, he's just loosened his spending muscles a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's got like loads of fajita mix and things he's never going to use. Yeah. Yeah, great. So, so, so, removing the, the pound signs, the dollar signs are a menu. It's getting a bit of a, yeah, giving people two-pine-sive IPA. That'll get the price incentive. Yeah. Yeah, the other bit, and I can't, I think it was a Paco under hill.
I think that might be his name and project. I've got that wrong, but he wrote a book, and I think it's there that I first read. And it might be worth double checking this one to make sure it's true, but the reason why supermarkets have, because you mentioned, even in that example, that the fruit and veg comes first, which is completely impractical if you think about it. If you go, if the first thing you see is Delica Soft Squidgy Fruit and Veg, the last pace you want that is the bottom of your trolley, when all the heavy stuff's going to go in front. But there is an idea in psychology called moral licensing, which is if we do something good, ethically right, virtuous, like going to the
gym, having some vitamins, we often overcompensate. So you get people feeling like they've been very healthy with a free and veg. That might be the reason for having that right in the beginning. So then compensate with biscuits and treats and whatever else. So what? There's an awful lot of psychology that goes into the design of supermarkets right with shelf height and the different ways that prices are displayed. I seem to remember one of the very few things that I can remember from my degree, which I've paid 27 grand for,
is a map about how customers typically walk down aisles. And it's similar to if you were to take a ping pong ball or a bowling ball, put the guard rails up and throw it at an angle. That's right. Yeah. You would see just this angle that's almost the angle of attack is the angle of exit and people think, think, think and they just go the way all the way up. I remember seeing that now. It was first off, it was at Newcastle University's marketing department and I'm unsure how many accolades they've got, so it might have been wrong. But I'm fascinated with the design of supermarkets
and I often try and find myself like catching, like, what are they doing this week? Like I bought, I bought recently purchased a 867 gram bag of Crave cereal just because it was like, that's the largest bag of crave cereal I've ever seen in my life. God, I'm right. Inside of that bag of crave cereal is just multiples of smaller bags of crave cereal that I've had before. There's nothing you can know. I don't even think it was that cheap. Like, just like, oh, look at that. I mean, I have heard people arguing that one of the reasons,
it's easier to change the size of your product than put the price up. So if you reduce the size of your crisps or your suites, people are less likely to stop buying it and if you put up the price, they're kind of same. Or if it's a massive bag, well then again, what do you compare it to? You know, I know, you know, for me, Christ is my weakness. And a hundred grand bag, you know, I'm reckon that should be about a pound pound 50.
If it's 150, 75, you know, suddenly my benchmark out of the window. Yeah, well I guess when Red Bull first launched, there this weird Oddly sized cat is it a 200 Yeah, but it's thin since it's breaking that link with code Yeah, you've got the 330 which is the Coca-Cola stubby. Yeah, and then you'd have like a Monster equivalent which is like a pint or something that's like it no like a 4 6 7 or something like that I think monster came much later. Yeah. So once that link with comparing it with soft drinks is broken,
then you can gradually drift into it. It's like craft beer. When craft beer launched, you never ever saw, or I certainly never saw a craft beer selling in a 440 mil can, because the link, it would have been too obvious that what, they want four pounds, I can get it, six cents. So, so paradoxically they make it smaller to be able to sell for more. Now, very occasionally, you do see four 40 mil cans, but that's because I think they've set up craft beer as being a different category, different price expectations
than for real life. Yeah, I do, I get that completely. One of the interesting things I wonder about you are talking about how you can manipulate your GP on a product by lowering the price, which means, sorry, lowering the volume, which means you've got less product inside of that. Now, a number of bar and club owners from around the country will know this problem, which is that something like
Karlsberg, sorry Karlsberg, but Karlsberg is about the cheapest main beer that you can buy from from a brewery with this reputable name and more than 50% of the cost of the beer comes from the bottle that it arrived in. So if you were to reduce the size of the bottle, all that you would be concerned with is using, or you would be equally concerned with using less glass as you would be for using less beer, which is hilarious. Also, on a side point, I have managed up Carlsburg, like I get spat on for drinking Carlsburg, right? Like when I don't drink at the moment, but when I do drink, I tend to drink Karlsburg.
And this is this weird artifact of years of working in student club nights, where if I wanted to get the cheapest beer would always be Karlsburg. And if the club manager was going to give us a couple of beers while we were caching up at the end, he'd always bring in obviously the stuff that it doesn't really, like it's 47 Pents a unit or something plus that. So I don't care about giving you like two quids worth of Karlsburg for you and a couple of the lads that are caching until at the end of the night. But oddly over time, I've actually developed like a weird like Pavlov's dog type thing. I'm like, end of the night, need a Karlsburg. And now that's even expanded itself out to the point where it's like,
I'm out on a night, want a Karlsburg. And everyone else will be like getting a corona or getting something like copperberg or some iron. I can, you got any Karlsburg at the back, please? And I'm like, what are you drinking that for? I'm like, I don't know. I've been promoting for like 13 years, for me alone. Well, if anyone takes the mic,
and people can be strangely snobby about, I think coffee and beer at the moment, I did a taste test. And I think the main reason we did the taste test, I think we were testing the effects of the serving on the taste. So headline figure was, if you get in a plastic glass, you think it's all for unbranded, it's a bit better.
Save this is the same liquid. Brandy glass, it rates nicer. But one of the things we did was we gave, kind of found bloats between 18 and 30, gave them, found out whether they were Foster's Karlsburg or Karl Lingerinkers. And some people would be, you know, passionate about one of them and talk
very dismissive about the other two. And then we gave them a blind taste test of the three beers. And people were worse than chance at picking out their supposedly favoured beer. So, yes, so maybe put some cash on that next time, one of your corona drinking friends, Mox Carlsberg. So, if you can pick it out of a line. I'm taste. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So did we get, did we get number four? Did we get number four? That's number four, I think. Four was claim data. Yes. Number four, the final one. Yep. And this is more for, it's my favorite story for how psychologists came up with the idea. And it the if you're of the Dunning Kruger. Yes, I
Okay, so for the list it'll be worth explaining it. Yeah, yeah, so David Dunning Justin Kruger, yeah to I think so I call just Cornell they're reading a local paper and they come across the story of MacArthur Wheeler. So MacArthur Wheeler has just been jailed for 20 years for committing two bank robbers. So in a single day he'd rob two banks, the time he drove home, the police are waiting for him and they arrest him. And the reason that they caught him so quickly was that, unlike most burglar, uh, bank robbers,
he didn't bother covering his face with the balaclava. He turned up at the bank and the only precaution he had taken was he'd smeared his face with lemon juice because his mate had told him that lemon juice is what's, you know, you make invisible account of. So therefore, if you put the juice on your face, the security cameras won't be able to pick you up. And supposedly he tried, you know, to cause he's not completely yet. He's a bit, he tried, he test this theory, he takes a selfie of himself, but he manages to kind of shoot the wall behind him. He's like angled right. And so he's got fucking lemon in his eyes.
That's why he's like, I'm angled right. And so he's got fucking lemon in his eyes, that's why. He's chasing lemon. So, don't even crew a read about this. And they think, well wait a minute, there is a massive vested interest in this person knowing their abilities accurately. So how can they be so deluded about their ability to rob a bank and get away with it? And they began to wonder, is this, although that of course is a very, very extreme version, is that typical of other people.
So they begin by testing people, they give them grammar tests, I think the logic tests, maths tests, get them to do these tests, note down where they've appeared from, you know, let's say they get 100 people to do it, what percentage they've, you know, they're ranked as, and then they get the people to estimate where they've appeared. Now, in general, people are overconfident. They think they're better than average, and however, and can't be better than average. But the key thing I became known as the Dunning Crew effect rather than just the bias of over confidence was they noted that people who were experts sometimes underestimate their abilities when people were
novices and pretty darn awful, they were more they, there was a bigger kind of overestimate of their abilities. So it's kind of idea that when you're really bad at something, you really do overestimate how good you are. So coming known as the Dunning Crue Grifx. Now I think there's loads of fascinating indications of martyrs about overconfidence that too often great campaigns are jettisoned too early because people believe well I did a brilliant campaign you know 10 years ago that's running out of juice now I'm going to do another great one they are overestimate their ability but I think the main reason that I'm making this for desert island is the MacArthur wheeler story for me I think is the thing. I didn't know about the lemon juice
thing. It's so good yeah it's weird isn't, isn't it? Because it's like the more you know, the more you know, you don't know. What is it? The valley of the valley of ignorance or something, and then the climb of learnings. Yeah. There's a back to nine enders. That doesn't sound like a terminology. Some academics came up. Maybe that's been the, yeah. You know, you see those. The whole thing doesn't sound like that. So we're going to finish up shortly, Richard. Have you got any bits that you've seen recently? Have you got one more little anecdote or one more little thing that you've got jotted down
that you think would be a good way to finish off the episode today? The, I think the best example I've seen recently, and maybe we'll have to stick an image up here because my description is not going to be ideal. See a video there. I can't remember who did it unfortunately and I do like strong credit bills, it's not fair to not mention. But there was a wonderful tweet recently where someone had taken a photo of a sign in a little corner
shop and it essentially said, duerex condoms, five dollars. That's, say, Trojan condoms, five dollars. Hug is $22. I think that's the... You're right, relativelyivity I've ever seen. Don't compare yourself to Jurek's. Compare yourself to Huggies. Instead of, you look much cheaper.
You got the dance room notifications. I'll take that one out. That's good. There's a, there's a, I saw recently on your Twitter that one about, um, beware, pickpockets operating this area. So Paul Craven, um, does this wonderful talkunchdock, where he said, look, people assume communications work rationally. So you put up a sign saying, but where pick pockets operate in this area, surely we've now communicated the information, this is a danger at this area, pick-poking
rates drop. What he says is that that actually tends to backfire because when people see that sign, they're automatic responses without thinking straight away, you know, tap their pockets to make it. All of the valuable areas of their body. You're in pickpocket, what are you gonna do? You're gonna step by that side, get that side. Oh, thank you very much.
You've just identified where you're while it is. I'll be having that. So, oh, thank you very much. You've just identified where your wallet is. I'll be having that. Yeah. Well, I recently went to Barcelona and one of the guys that I was with fell asleep in Barcelona train station after a bit of a heavy night. Now, Barcelona is the pickpocket capital of Europe. Apparently I didn't know, but he found that out when he woke up to notice his phone, wallet, and shoes had been taken. Shoes taken from his feet. That's just a master pick pocket. It's just too easy. On that, actually, another great advert or not just saw, this one was from Oglevy. They ran a campaign warning people about pick pockets where they used X pick pockets,
who'd kind of seen the light, and they had a campaign called Putt Pockets. So they got the pick pocket to drop a little flyer in people's pockets saying, well, it was easy enough for me to put this in your pocket. I could have helped myself, but I want it to be much more careful. And I love that as a way of telling people they are in danger.
You know, kind of show them, and that's much, much more powerful. Because we're going back to Dunning Cruecker. Or the other kind of generalised finding of overconfidence. If you say, you know, this area is dangerous for pickpockets, or you need to be more careful with your valuables. Most people think, well, it's not going to happen to me or happen to those other idiots. It's one of those things like the ethical hackers, you know, they get the ethical hackers to come on board and hack into a company, on behalf of the company, and it's like, oh, well, we've identified the whole in your particular system. This is the way that we're going. I want to know what a ethical
pickpocket it gets paid. And does he get paid based on the number of flyers that he gives out? Because that really should be, and it's like, oh well, I gave this to a really rich guy. And I know for a fact that that Rolex is worth five grand. So I need and a big money for him and a big money for that woman with a levuton purse and a year. Yes. Yeah. I don't know. Foreman space pay for the ethical pickpocket.
There's no big pockets. They'll have a union soon. They'll have a union. Well, Richard, today's been awesome, man. Thank you so much. Where can everyone find you online? I absolutely love your Twitter. What should they follow you up? So at our shot in, our S H O T T O N and the book I wrote, which is all about applying behavioral science to advertising, it's called the choice factory.
Fantastic. And then the third thing I've done, might be of interest is I've just created an online training course. With 402 sources. Yeah, that's exactly one. So Rory Southern's done one about applying behavioral science or about behavioral science in general. I've done one specifically on applying behavioral science to advertising. Wow.
So links to all of that will be in the show now. To below if you want to follow Richard on Twitter. He's very active and it's just like when I log on now, I've been following you maybe for a week, just over a week, something like that. When I log on, it's just at the top of my feet, I only followed 68 people, so it's like it's a good chunk,
you know, it's a real mark of something for you to get in there. And I just go on and I'm like, it's always media based. There was a recent story about Julius Caesar. About, I tell you what, why don't we finish with the story about Julius Caesar? Can you remember that? Yes, yes.
So this is from a brilliant book, foreign action, an amazing advertiser, kind of in his heyday, 780s, nice, called Dave Schroding. He's written a lovely book called Creative Blindness. And he talks about Julius Caesar. So age 23, Julius Caesar is captured by some pirates, and they want to ask for 20 units of silver.
And Julius Caesar says, no, no, no, hang on, don't ask for 20. I'm worth far more than that, ask for 50. And this is the highest amount that any politician, general, whatever has been ransom for. So all of a sudden, people like, God, this sees a man must be amazing. You know, if he's being asked for, you know, the pirates reckoning's worth that much. And in this blog that I kind of photoed a snippet from from Dave Trock, he essentially argues that Caesar invented the idea,
a thousand years before the veblin effect. And that's the idea we touched on with Stella that people assume something that is expensive must be high quality. So Caesar's working on the idea that, well, you know, if I go out and can say that I had, you know, the highest rants and ever, you know, people are going to see him, I must be an amazing general and that's going to set off my political career. Despite the fact that he came up with the prize.
I'm sure he kind of, he didn't bother mentioning that. Yeah. The other story, this is someone, when I love the thing about Twitter, is someone, and actually, they came back and sent me a link to a longer article about Caesar. And it mentioned that when Caesar was released, he then raised, you know, a kind of armed party. When back and found the pirates,
who were still sitting around the same island, caught them and then had them all executed. So, I mean, you know, you want to be... He was a man that probably shouldn't have messed with a few reasons. Not just his marketing now. Do you, the asses, as a bad motherfucker, isn't he? Like, he's going to... He's autobiography.
Yeah, he's going to shaft you with behavioral science. Then he's going to you with behavioral science. Then he's gonna make himself really well-known and super popular. Then he's gonna come back, he's gonna kill you. You do not mess with Julius Caesar. Richard, today's been fantastic, man. Everybody who is listening, please go and follow Richard
on Twitter, he's absolutely fascinating. Any of the points that have come up that you've been interested in, feel free to give me a message wherever you follow me at Chris Willex or Richard on Twitter and we'll be more than happy to start the discussion yet again over the interwebs. Richard, thanks so much for your time, man. Cheers Chris, thanks a lot. you