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Small marketing tweaks can lead to big changes in customer behavior if you understand the psychology behind them. Behavioral science expert Richard Shotton shares real-world examples of how principles like scarcity, social proof, and goal dilution can transform your marketing results. Whether you’re selling coffee or consulting services, you’ll walk away with practical, low-cost tactics you can put to work immediately.
Better Marketing Through Psychological Insights
Your customers are lying to you. Not intentionally, but they’re lying nonetheless.
When they tell you they want “more information” before making a decision, or that they need to “think about it,” they’re not describing what’s actually happening in their brains. What’s really happening is a complex web of psychological shortcuts, unconscious biases, and mental rules they don’t even know they’re following.
I’ve been studying this stuff for years (probably because I’m fascinated by how predictably irrational we all are), and recently had neuromarketing expert Richard Shotton back on the podcast. He has spent over two decades turning psychological research into marketing gold, and he shared some insights that you can put in action immediately for better results.
Here’s the issue: most of us are approaching marketing like it’s a logical exercise. We list features, compare benefits, and assume people will make rational decisions. But psychology research tells us something completely different—and it’s costing us business.
Why Your Laundry List of Benefits Is Actually Hurting You
Let’s start with something that sounds completely backwards: having more reasons for people to choose you can make them less likely to buy.
Richard shared research from the University of Chicago that proves this. They showed people information about tomatoes preventing cancer. One group got that single benefit. Another group got the exact same cancer information PLUS a note about tomatoes preventing eye disease.
The result? The group that heard about both benefits was 12% less likely to believe tomatoes would help with cancer.
Our brains have this weird rule that says “if you claim to be great at everything, you’re probably not good at anything.” It’s called the goal dilution effect, and it explains why Five Guys doesn’t try to be a health food restaurant AND a burger joint AND a coffee shop.
The fix is simple: Stop listing every possible reason someone should choose you. Pick your strongest one or two benefits and hammer those home.
I see this mistake constantly with small businesses. Their website homepage reads like a desperate plea: “We’re fast AND affordable AND experienced AND local AND we have great customer service AND…” By the time you’re done reading, you’re not convinced they’re exceptional at anything.
The Scarcity Trick That Works (Without Being Sleazy)
Most businesses think scarcity means countdown timers and “ONLY 3 LEFT!” messages. And honestly, most of those feel gimmicky because they usually are.
But there’s a different approach that works, and it won’t cost you any additional marketing spend.
Richard ran an experiment with Sierra Nevada beer. He showed people the same product at the same price, but with one group he added: “Maximum 6 cases per customer.”
That tiny addition—literally just a purchase limit—increased perceived value by 59%.
Think about what’s happening psychologically here. When a store won’t let you buy as much as you want, your brain assumes either: (a) this deal is so good they’re losing money, or (b) this product is so popular they’re worried about running out.
The beauty of this approach? It costs nothing. You’re not creating artificial scarcity or misleading anyone. You’re just adding a reasonable purchase limit that makes people pay attention to the value you’re already offering.
Real-world application: Next time you run a sale, try adding “Limit 2 per customer” or “Maximum 5 per business.” Watch what happens to both perceived value and actual conversions.
You Don’t Need Millions of Customers for Social Proof
Every marketing article tells you to show off your customer numbers, testimonials, and reviews. Great advice if you’re Amazon. Less helpful if you’re a three-person accounting firm trying to compete with the “10 million satisfied customers” crowd.
But here’s what us small guys miss: the most powerful social proof is implied, not stated.
Richard shared research about littering behavior that illustrates this. When an alleyway was kept completely clean, only 33% of people littered. When the same alleyway was covered in trash, 69% of people littered. Nobody posted signs saying “everyone litters here” or “most people take their trash home.” The environment itself communicated the norm.
The marketing lesson: Instead of telling people you’re popular, show them.
Real estate agents figured this out decades ago. They don’t run ads saying “we sell the most houses.” They put their signs on every lawn. When you drive through a neighborhood and see the same agent’s name on five different “SOLD” signs, your brain automatically assumes they must be the most popular choice.
For small businesses, this might mean:
- Making your work more visible (branded materials at job sites)
- Strategic placement of customer logos or project photos
- Distinctive packaging that makes your product stand out when people use it
- Creating signature elements that signal your involvement
The goal isn’t to fake popularity—it’s to make your actual success more visible so people can draw their own conclusions.
Why “Healthy” Might Be Killing Your Sales
Here’s something that’ll mess with your head: telling people your product is healthy can actually make them enjoy it less.
Research shows that when people think food is “healthy,” they automatically assume it tastes worse. Not just rate it as less tasty—they literally experience it as less enjoyable. We’re so conditioned to believe that anything good for us must taste terrible that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This creates a fascinating dilemma for businesses with genuinely beneficial products. You want people to know about the benefits, but leading with those benefits can backfire.
The solution: Let people experience your product before you tell them why it’s good for them. Or focus on appeal first, virtue second.
Nike doesn’t lead their ads with “our shoes are durable and provide excellent arch support.” They lead with emotion, performance, and identity. The technical benefits are there, but they’re not the hook.
Get Rid of Any Friction
When I asked Richard to provide one piece of advice that we could put into action immediately he had a ready answer: make it easier.
Two Nobel Prize winners in economics—Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler—both say the same thing when asked about their biggest finding: make it easy.
This isn’t a “duh” moment. We all know easier is better. But most businesses dramatically underestimate how much small barriers affect behavior.
Before you try to convince people to buy from you, go through your entire customer journey and ruthlessly eliminate friction:
- How many clicks to get pricing?
- How many form fields do you really need?
- How clear are your next steps?
- Can people contact you without playing phone tag?
- Is your checkout process optimized for mobile?
The psychology here is crucial: our brains interpret difficulty as a signal of value, but they interpret friction as a reason to quit. There’s a difference between challenging (which can increase perceived value) and annoying (which kills conversions).
Making This Actually Work for Your Business
The beautiful thing about behavioral science is that these principles scale. Whether you’re a solo consultant or running a 50-person company, you can use the same psychological triggers that power billion-dollar brands.
Start small. Pick one principle and test it properly:
- Try the goal dilution fix on your homepage
- Add purchase limits to your next promotion
- Find one way to make your success more visible
- Audit your customer journey for unnecessary friction
The research behind these tactics has been replicated hundreds of times across different industries and cultures. They work because they’re based on how human brains actually function, not how we think they should function.
Your customers aren’t making rational decisions based on careful analysis of your features and benefits. They’re using mental shortcuts, following social cues, and responding to psychological triggers they don’t even realize exist.
Once you understand that, everything about marketing starts to make more sense. And your results start to improve in ways that feel almost unfair.
Because while your competitors are still trying to win the logical argument, you’ll be speaking directly to how people make decisions.
Psychology Hacks for Better Marketing Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today specializes in applying behavioral science to marketing. He’s the author of two existing books on the topic, The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice. The Choice Factory is available in 16 languages and won best sales and marketing book at the Business Book Awards back in 2019. His third book, co-authored with MichaelAaron Flicker is called, Hacking the Human Mind, and it comes out September 2025.
In 2018, he founded Astroten, an agency that applies behavioral science to solve marketing problems. In 2021, he was made an honorary fellow of the IPA and an associate of the Mahler Institute, Churchill College, Cambridge University.
I’m very excited to welcome back to the podcast, Richard Shotton. Richard, nice to see you again.
Richard: Very good to see you again. It’s always nice to come back. Can’t have done too badly the first-time round.
Rich: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I still want to make it out to London so you and I can have a pint together. I’m looking forward to that.
Richard: I’d like that, yeah.
Rich: Alright, now you studied how subtle psychological cues can dramatically change how people think and act. I’m curious to know what first drew you into exploring the connection between behavioral science and marketing.
Richard: So marketing came first. I didn’t know anything about behavioral science or psychology when I started my career. So when I was working at an agency, one of our clients was the Department of Health. And in Britain, it various by country, the Department of Health tried and get people to donate blood through altruism. There’s no cash payment. And I can remember reading Malcolm Gladwell’s, The Tipping Point. This is about 2004, a time when we had a big brief coming in to encourage people to give blood.
And right at the back of that book there was a really brief discussion of a psychology behavioral science experiment by an American called Latané and Darley. And they came up with this idea called, The Bystander Effect. Which is essentially if you ask loads of people for help, there is an increased probability people ignore you. There’s a diffusion of responsibility. Everyone leaves it up to everyone else.
And I thought to myself, wait a minute. We’ve got these campaigns at the moment where ads are going out saying “blood stocks are low in England, please donate”. And I thought, this is classic bystander effect. We’re asking everyone to help, so everyone’s leaving it up to their neighbor. So I thought why don’t we take this psychology experiment, apply it to the creative.
And I went and spoke to a brilliant guy called Charlie Snow down at the creative agency, and I said to him, why don’t we stop saying “blood stocks low in England”, and why don’t we try and create a sense of personal responsibility? Let’s just tailor the messages a bit more tightly to a geographical area. So he started saying, “blood stocks low in Birmingham or East London or Glasgow”.
And that is a pretty rude application of bias. There’s nothing particularly fancy about what we did. But that little tweak, using this insight from psychology, avoiding the Bystander Effect, now the results were impressive. I think it was 10% or 15% improvement in people donating when we did our next bit of tracking. So that was the first experiment that got me excited.
And then what really blew my mind was I thought there were just one or two of these studies. When I started looking into it, there were literally thousands of studies run by psychologists. And it seemed to me a very sensible idea to improve your marketing, to try and identify a relevant study, then match it back to the challenge at hand.
And basically for the last 21 years, that’s what I’ve been doing. Either taking existing findings or running my own experiments, then applying them to marketing to increase its effectiveness.
Rich: Awesome. Alright. Now I want to talk a little bit about your forthcoming book, Hacking the Human Mind. How is this different than your previous books? And out of curiosity, why did you choose to use a co-author this time around?
Richard: So the main difference is the first two books, each different chapter in those two books, it starts with a behavioral science principle like social proof, or scarcity, or the Pratfall Effect. And then we talk about the existing evidence, then experiments I’ve run, and then we talk about the practical implications of markers.
With this book, we really tried to make it even more practical. So we start with each chapter a little history of an individual brand. So there’s a chapter on Dyson, there’s chapter on Five Guys, there’s a chapter on Liquid Death. A little history of that brand. And then we look at their success and we think what one or two behavioral science principles helped power that success. Now, don’t completely explain the success. Life’s never that simple. But were really important for their success. And then we talk about the implications for marketers. And I think that brand-first approach makes it much, much simpler for people to apply the principles. It’s always easier for people to grasp an idea when we are using concrete examples.
And the reason we did it with MichaelAaron Flicker, who’s the co-author, is we’d started with a podcast where we’d identify brands and then talk about some of the behavioral science principles. And this just felt like a natural build on that approach.
Rich: Nice. Alright. What I want to do is talk about some of the chapters in the book, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about how… because obviously when we’re talking about brands like Five Guys. You know what, maybe the guys from Five guys are listening right now, but a lot of the people who listen to this podcast work for small companies or their agency’s work.
So let’s see what we can do to take some of those big brand ideas and narrow it down to something that any one of our listeners could accomplish, or even I could accomplish, on a good day.
So let’s start with Five Guys. You share the story of them and the Goal Dilution Effect. Can you just briefly explain what is this, and why is doing fewer things really well often smarter than trying to be everything to everyone?
Richard: Yeah. So the Goal Dilution Effect is an idea from behavioral science that was first experimented by Zang at the University of Chicago back in 2007. She does a super simple study, recruits a group of people, and some of them she says, “eating tomatoes will reduce your risk of cancer”. And then she asks them how much they think tomatoes will reduce your risk of cancer.
She gets another group of people, and she gives them that exact same paragraph of information all about why tomatoes are going to reduce your risks of cancer. But she also says, “eating tomatoes will reduce the risk of a degenerative eye disease”.
She then questions that second group as to how good they think tomatoes will be at reducing cancer. What she sees is even though people have seen the same initial information, she sees a 12% production in believability, in kind of belief that tomatoes are super useful for cancer. And her argument is essentially that people have this rule of thumb in their heads that you can’t be a master of all trades. That if you claim to do multiple things very well, what tends to happen is those additional reasons are averaging rather than additive.
So what I mean by that, is if you say you are a brilliant marketer, I might believe that quite strongly. But if you say you are a brilliant marketer and you’re quite punctual, well even though logically that should make you a more appealing character, because punctuality is less of an important reason, it actually detracts from that super strong individual reason.
So the argument here is when you are pitching to clients, when you are trying to persuade people of your merits, it’s better to stick to one or two reasons rather than giving people this long laundry list of reasons to believe in yourself. Because if you give them that super long list, you’ll weaken believability in the core reason, and you’ll reduce credibility in that area.
Rich: That’s interesting. It’s almost like what I call the “portfolio effect”, where it’s like you don’t want to show all your work. You only want to show the best, most representative, most successful work. The more you show, actually, it seems to dilute everything that you’re showing them. And the people tend to look at either the medium or the lower end of your work rather than the things that you want to draw their most attention to.
And I don’t know if this is the same thing, but I remember reading something, I want to say it was Kraft Mac and Cheese. And when they got rid of the artificial flavors, they actually didn’t advertise that for two years because they were sure that once people found out that they had stopped using the glow in the dark cheese additive, that they wouldn’t like the taste as much. So they purposely didn’t mention it when they actually switched over to the new formula that was healthier. Because if something’s healthy, it can’t taste as good.
Richard: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think that they’re certainly linked in this idea that people’s expectation of a product will actually affect the experience. So if you think a food like Mac and Cheese or a wine is going to taste amazing, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And unfortunately, especially among Americans and Brits, there is a belief that health food tastes bad.
Now, this isn’t speculation. There’s an amazing psychologist at one of the Texas universities, and he does this brilliant experiment where he lays out a buffet of Indian foods. He gets people to sample all the foods and then rate them. He ignores all the ratings apart from the ones about the yogurt drink, the mango lassie. And the twist in the experiment is some people, he told them that the mango lassi was a health drink. Others, he say it’s an unhealthy drink. And what he finds is the people that hear it’s unhealthy, they rate this yogurt drink 45% better than the people who thought it was a health drink.
We assume healthy foods are going to taste bad because frankly, often they do, but that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So even exactly the same product, if it’s labeled as healthy, it sets up these negative expectations and then they affect our actual experience.
So yeah, if anyone’s a food and drink marketer, be very careful about leading with health messages. Because what you’ll tend to see is yes, people might increase the ratings in terms of healthiness for your food, but there’ll be this equal and opposite detraction in how much they think they’ll enjoy your food.
Rich: This was not the direction of the conversation I was planning on, but let’s play this a little bit further. Go down this rabbit hole a little bit more.
So if I have a product that’s healthy, and I believe in my heart of hearts that it actually tastes delicious, I wonder what the psychological trick I could pull to get people to be like, “oh, it could be both”. And I wonder if I ran experiments, recorded them, turned them into a video where I showed how people think that if something is healthy, it tastes bad, if that would be one way to nullify that effect. And all of a sudden we’d be laughing at these people who say, “Oh my God, it must be terrible because it’s healthy for you.” And then we discover, no, actually it tastes great. If that might be a way to help people overcome that psychological bias and actually try my product.
Richard: I think that would be a great one. I think almost leaning into this bizarre finding that reported taste is wildly different depending on the story that goes around a brand.
The other thing you could do is, let’s say, I don’t know, top of my head, vegan cheese. Let’s say it’s a vegan cheese you’re trying to sell. What often people would do is tell people, “Oh, it’s got lower saturated fat.” Now maybe this is in Costco and we’re sampling it. They give you a story about how healthy it is, and then they let you taste the food. What this experiment suggests is, get people to taste it first and then tell them about the health benefits. You want people to first experience your product without any of these negative associations. Or if you are selling a health food, you don’t have to mention it’s healthy. You could lead on taste.
Nike don’t talk about the durability of their trainers in their above the line advertising. They talk about the kind of emotions that go with it, how it’s going to make you a superstar. How it taps this whole idea of ‘just do it’. Just because a product is virtuous doesn’t mean that should be the thing that you lead with.
There’s some wonderful studies run in cafeterias by Bradley Turnwald. I think he might be at Stanford, but I might get that wrong. He did a study back in 2017 where seven weeks he works at this cafeteria, and he changes the labels of the food one day to another. And what he found is if you labeled the let’s say the green beans, I don’t know if you call them saying different America. Or the zucchini. If you labeled it as “sweet and sizzling”, you’d sell far more than if you labeled it “low calorie” and focus on appeal before you focus on virtue.
Rich: Alright. And getting back to your original point, or where this story started with the Five Guys, is if we’re out there marketing our services and we’ve got 27 reasons why people should choose us, choose our solution, that’s not going to work. What we need to find is the two or three that are going to most resonate – maybe just one – and really narrowly focus on that one. Or perhaps we run 27 different ads, each one just focusing on one area of why our product is the best. And we’re going to likely, based on this research you’ve done or seen, we’re likely going to have more success that way.
Richard: Absolutely. And I think everyone who’s listening should recognize that if they are in a company of bigger than one, once you get multiple decision makers, often to keep the peace, marketers will take everyone’s opinion and often an ad will become stuffed full of reasons to believe.
This study by Zang from the University of Chicago suggests you’ve got to really push against that bureaucratic pressure to keep on adding more reasons. Try and be as single-minded as you can and you’ve got the best chance of success.
Rich: Absolutely. Alright, so we talked about focus, that’s one thing. Scarcity somehow seems similar, but it’s different. In the book you talk about Starbucks. And in my personal opinion, the god-awful pumpkin spice movement here in the US, and probably elsewhere, they turned it into this marketing phenomenon by limiting its availability. And here in Maine, we see something similar with pumpkin flavored beers, that at least used to only come out around Halloween. Now it’s actually like from summer into winter, but we’ll get to that point at some other point.
For those of us who may want to leverage this scarcity, but we do not have a cult product to speak of, how can we create genuine urgency without it feeling like it’s a gimmick?
Richard: Yeah, absolutely. The great thing with these principles is it’s not just giant iconic brands that use them. Everyone can use these principles. And I think with scarcity, probably the simplest tactic is next time someone’s running a sale, think about purchase limits. So put an artificial cap on how much people can buy. So whether you are selling soup or soap or beer, if you don’t let people take as much as they want, you will boost the appeal and you’ll boost sales.
So I ran a simple experiment. So MichaelAaron and I recruited 282 Americans, and we told them about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. And some people we said, look, imagine it’s on sale at your local superstore for $18.99. How good a value do you think it is? And 13.7% of people thought it was good value or great value.
We then got a completely fresh group of people. We showed them exactly the same brand, exactly the same volume of beer. It was a 12 pack. We gave them the same price and message, but we said, maximum number of cases you can buy is six. And what we saw was that there was this 59% improvement in evaluation, and now we’re up to 22% of people thinking this product is good or great value. Now this is exactly the same product, the same price, but whether people think it’s worth spending their money on depends on whether you put this limit.
And what I think is happening here is people are paying attention to the body language of the retailer. They’re thinking, if the retailer won’t let me buy as much as I want, either this product is such a steep discount they’re losing money, or it’s so good a deal they’re worried about selling out and they don’t want to irritate their other buyers.
It’s a completely costless tactic that anyone can apply to the next time they’re running a product on promotion. And that’s a common theme with behavioral science. These principles don’t have to cost you money. A one- or two-man band can apply these principles as well as Starbucks or Coke.
Rich: Keeping with the beer theme. I remember there’s a popular brand here in Portland, Maine called, Bissell Brothers. You should totally check it out if you come to the States. And I remember that when they first started, they basically didn’t even have a tasting room. But it would be like, I forget if it was Friday or Sundays, they released new beers. Because they were really, it was a micro-brewery. You were only allowed to get a six pack, and people would line up for a quarter mile waiting for them to open the doors just so they could buy a six pack of this beer. And their Substance is fantastic.
But it’s that idea of, if you had made it and it was as popular or is available as Budweiser, there’s something that’s lost there. So there is that idea where I have something special, I have something that there’s a limited amount, because there would be mass appeal otherwise.
And I’m also reminded of that awful day early on in COVID where I had to get up at 6:00 AM and go to the supermarket and wait in line to get toilet paper. And I’m like, whatever I do, I’m not going to run. I’m not going to run. Once I get in there, I have to. And then I started seeing every other adult neighbor running. And I said, dammit, I have to run. And I literally had to run to get toilet paper. Not my finest moment. Anyway. But that definitely shows how scarcity, and that was obviously not imposed by the store, that was in false scarcity that there was just not enough to go around, or at least people were hoarding.
So let’s talk about one of my favorite topics also covered in the book, Social Proof. So for those of us who maybe don’t have millions of fans, followers, and customers, beyond using testimonials and reviews, can you think of or suggest any creative ways that we can demonstrate that we’re the trusted or popular choice?
Richard: So social proof is the idea that if a brand is perceived as popular, it’ll become more appealing, and more people will buy it. Now, as you say, this is one of those principles that’s used quite regularly. We’ve got 10 million customers, or we’ve got 73 customers, talking about the scale of your brand is using social proof. But this is an interesting bias because actually, the most powerful way to use this principle isn’t to directly state your popularity. It’s to imply it.
So there’s an amazing study from 2008 by a Dutch psychologist called Kees Keizer at University of England. And for his experiment, he finds an alleyway. This is in the Netherlands. Loads of people park their bikes in this alleyway. And crucially for the study, there is no trash can. Kaiser goes down to this alleyway early in the morning and he puts ads for a fictitious sport shop on the handlebars for the bikes. He then wanders off 10 yards or so, and he really stealthily monitors, what do the returning cyclists do? Because remember, there’s no trash can, they can’t just chuck the flyer away the outer way. They have to either take it home with them or chuck it on the floor.
Now Kaiser sets up this study in one of two ways. Sometimes he goes down to the alleyway super early in the morning and he cleans it up. He makes it spotless. He picks up every single bit of litter. He essentially is making it look like most people take their litter home. And when he does that, just a third of people chuck their litter on the floor, 33%. The other condition, he goes down to the same alleyway on a different day. He goes down really early in the morning, and this time he makes it like a complete tip. He chucks litter on the floor, spray paints the walls of the graffiti, makes it look like the norm of behavior is to throw your trash around. And when he does that, there is a more than doubling of littering rates than the returning cyclists, or up to 69% of people dropping their rubbish on the floor.
Kaiser’s argument is social proof is most powerful if it’s implied. Because if you go out and tell people that you are popular, people might be skeptical. But if people think they’ve come to their own conclusion, now frankly, who do we trust more than ourselves? So what you want to do as a brand is think to yourself, is my consumption or usership or purchase of the product, is that visible? Because if it is, brilliant, you are harnessing social proof. But if you are invisible, that is a massive opportunity to change.
Now, if that all sounds a bit abstract, I’ll give you a couple of examples. Think about gin. Now, normally you go to a bar, you order gin and tonic. Once you’ve walked away from the bar, no one knows what you’re drinking because some consumption of your brand is invisible. So what Hendricks did brilliantly is they made a serve where rather than being over lime or lemon like everyone else, it was over cucumber. So you walk away from the bar and because your brand is so distinctive and visible, because it’s got this cucumber reminding everyone that you’re drinking Hendricks, people feel like this is a much, much more popular drink than it is.
So the argument here is, if your brand is invisible, you need to make it visible. If it’s private, you need to make it public. And if you can do that, then I think you are onto one of the most powerful tactics and behavioral sites.
Rich: Alright, so if we’re a small, I’m just thinking about we put on some small local events. Can you, off the top of your head, and I know I’m putting you on the spot, can you think of some ways in which we could imply this social proof or use this to make it look like the events we’re putting on are the best that marketers or owners could go to, or the most popular that marketers and owners are drawn to? What are some of the ways that we could imply this without coming right out and saying it?
Richard: Yeah let’s say you’re a small estate agent or you are sponsoring a local fair. What the estate agents do around me is they’ll put up lots of boards saying that this house has been sold by them or they’re sponsoring the fair. It’s not that they’ve gone out and told you it’s popular, but because I’m seeing those boards regularly, my assumption is that estate agent must be the most popular in the area.
It’s if you are ever in a situation where people wouldn’t naturally know that the house next door is being sold by a particular agent, if you can make that sale much more visible, then I think you are hacking people’s perceptions of popularity.
Rich: So this is really interesting. Because lately, with these AI overviews that have been taking over Google and destroying traffic to business’s websites, one of the kind of like underlying currents from some of the thought leaders in the industry have been about getting citations everywhere so the AI sees you and thinks you’re a big deal. But the other thing is getting cited in the AI overviews.
Even if people aren’t clicking through, sometimes they don’t, that having your brand show up regularly when people are doing searches on your area of expertise, whether it’s marketing, woodworking, gardening, what have you, that starts to build trust. And I wonder if that’s something similar to real estate agents, as we call them here in the states, putting their signs up around places.
So that’s very interesting. And it just continues to reinforce that in this age of AI, that a company’s brand and being recognizable, standing out, being remarkable – as I like to say – is becoming more and more important. Just like it used to be, it’s coming back into vogue. This is what we need to be focused on.
Richard: Yes. And maybe my example of the state agent’s a bit naff. But maybe a small scale one that would maybe work though. Because you mentioned COVID and toilet roll, the idea that sparked was when people got their vaccinations, like some vaccination centers you would go in, you’d get your injection, you’d walk out, and no one would know you’d been vaccinated.
What other countries did, and I think France was very good at this, they’ve certainly done it for the flu, is you go into some vaccination centers, and they get you to wear a badge. So as soon as you’re out onto the street, everyone knows your vaccination status and suddenly it makes it look like everyone’s getting vaccinated. And the idea of social proof is we copy what others are doing. So I think that’s maybe a better example to explain the principle.
Rich: Absolutely. Vaccination status here in the United is hidden away. And here in the United States, and probably elsewhere in the world, is you get stickers that when you vote. So you go in to vote, you get the sticker, and it’s the same thing. And as people walk out, everybody’s like, “Oh, I need to go vote today, too, as well.
Richard: So we don’t do that in Britain. So it’s interesting that some of these ideas are commonplace in one country, not in another. If we in Britain want to encourage people to vote, that would be a brilliant thing to mimic.
Rich: Although I do remember when I studied in England for a semester, Red Nose Day, which now I see in the U.S. too, but was such a big thing as a way of raising awareness. Although now I’m blanking. Was it homelessness, comedy, hunger?
Richard: Red Nose Day comic relief. It was started by comedians, and there’d be a TV show with lots of jokes, but the money goes to a whole range things. Sometimes homelessness, sometimes third world countries. So yeah, it’s quite a broad, diverse thing.
Rich: And I remember being there and they literally were handing out red noses, which we literally would walk around in, because we were college students and whatever.
I only got to about half the questions, so we’re going to have to have you come back, Richard. But I want to ask two more questions before I let you go. These will be fairly short. The first one is, if a listener wanted to take advantage of some of what we talked about today, what is one action item that they could do that they could start working into their marketing today?
Richard: So if you’re going to do one thing from behavioral science, I think it’s this principle of make it easy. So in the last 25 years, there have been two behavioral scientists who’ve won the Nobel Prize for economics, Kahneman in 2002, and Richard Thaler in 2017. And interestingly, both of them have been asked to reflect back on their career and they’ve been asked to say, “what is the single biggest finding from all their experiments?” They say the same thing, “make it easy”.
Now, when they argue this, it’s not a statement the obvious. Everyone knows that if you make a behavior easier, it’s going to happen more often. But what kind of a failure argue is most people misunderstand, or they underestimate the importance of removing friction. We know removing little barriers will have some effect, but they tend to have an outsized, a much bigger effect.
So I would argue to anyone who wants to change the behavior of someone else, before you think how can I motivate that person to change their behavior, think to yourself, “How can I make it easier?”
So go through the customer journey, identify even the smallest barriers, and put more effort into resolving them, and it will tend to have a larger expected effect. So I think of all the experiments, it’s not the most exciting one, but it often has the largest effect. Make it easy.
Rich: Awesome. And when I do have you back in the near future, we’re going to talk about the reverse of that, and why sometimes making things more difficult and adding friction, can actually enhance your offering. But people will have to subscribe to the podcast and stick around for that friction.
Richard: A little nuance there.
Rich: Richard, if people want to learn more about you, check out your work, where can we send them?
Richard: So go to any good bookshop, or any bad bookshop, frankly. The latest book is, Hacking the Human Mind. And then other than that, Rich Shotton on LinkedIn or at @RShotton on Twitter. Any of those areas I’m posting about behavioral science. You won’t have to listen to my thoughts on the world in general, it’ll always be about behavioral science.
Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links in the show notes. Richard, fantastic, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming by.
Richard: Thanks, Rich. Cheers.
Show Notes:
Richard Shotton is a leading expert in applying behavioral science to marketing and the author of 3 books on the topic. He is the founder of Astroten, a consultancy that helps brands solve marketing challenges using proven psychological principles. Richard is known for translating complex behavioral research into practical strategies any business can use.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.