Behavioural science gives marketers simple, tested ways to change behaviour. Richard Shotton shared the biases that move results, from pricing tricks to the labour illusion.
I have wanted Richard Shotton on the podcast for ages. He has written two of the books that sit on my desk and get pulled apart with a highlighter, The Choice Factory and The Illusion of Choice, with a third now out called Hacking the Human Mind.
What I like about him is that he doesn’t hide behind the academic stuff. He takes a peer-reviewed experiment, then tells you exactly what to do with it on Monday morning. Here are the parts of our chat I keep thinking about.
What is behavioural science in marketing?
It is the study of what actually influences people, rather than what they say influences them. Those two things are usually very different.
Richard’s point is that if you work in marketing, you are already in the business of behaviour change. You want people to buy more, pay a premium, switch from a rival. Behavioural science is just the evidence base for what actually shifts those decisions.
The roots are academic, but the lessons are simple. Social proof is a good example. Emphasise that something is popular and it becomes more popular still. The paper proving it might be dense. The application is not.
What are some real behavioural science examples I can use?
Start with pricing and small wording changes. They cost nothing, you can test them in a week, and the effect is often bigger than you expect.
Richard gave me one I now can’t unsee. A 2017 study found that shoppers were about 15% less irritated by a missing product when it was labelled ‘sold out’ rather than ‘out of stock’. Same empty shelf. One version flags your incompetence, the other flags the item’s popularity. You have to label it something, so why not pick the version that works with human nature.
Pricing is where he says most people should begin. I told him about my old Virgin Media bills creeping from £70 to £130 a month until I finally binned the lot. His fix was the pennies-a-day effect, from John Gourville’s 1998 Harvard research. People fixate on the cash figure and ignore the unit of time. So £365 a year sounds painful, while ‘a pound a day’ barely registers.
“You can make exactly the same price appear larger or smaller by applying some of these ideas.” Richard Shotton
The other pricing lever is fairness. Thaler and Kahneman showed people will accept a price rise they would otherwise reject if you explain it is passing on a genuine cost. Raise prices in silence and people feel gouged. Show your reasoning and the same rise feels fair.
Why does the end of an experience matter so much?
Because of the peak-end rule. People judge an experience on its most intense moment and how it finishes, not the average.
This comes from Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier’s work on medical procedures. Twelve minutes of low pain followed by three minutes of medium pain is remembered as worse than the reverse. The ending sticks.
Richard reckons Five Guys apply this with the extra scoop of fries tipped into the bag at the very end. I realised I had fallen for it too. My kids barely remember the steak at Flat Iron, but they remember the free ice cream on the way out, which is almost certainly built into the price of the steak anyway.
What is the one principle most marketers overlook?
Make it easy. Removing small bits of friction has a bigger effect than adding more persuasion.
The two behavioural economists who won Nobel prizes, Kahneman in 2002 and Richard Thaler in 2017, were both asked for their single biggest lesson. Both said the same thing: make it easy. Their real argument is sharper than it sounds. We overestimate the power of boosting appeal and underestimate the power of removing friction.
Flip the question. Instead of ‘how do I motivate someone’, ask ‘what is stopping them’. Amazon’s one-click ordering is the obvious version. The interesting flip is that friction works in reverse too. Keith Hawton’s research at Oxford found that limiting paracetamol pack sizes, a tiny barrier, was linked to hundreds of fewer overdose deaths over time. A small bit of friction in a decision that matters enormously.
How do you communicate quality without just claiming it?
Show the effort and let one strong trait carry the rest. People use effort and single standout qualities as shortcuts for everything else.
Two studies stuck with me here. Andrea Morales found in 2005 that people rated an estate agent 36% higher when told the property list took nine manual hours rather than one hour by computer. Same list. We read effort as a proxy for quality, which is why open kitchens, Dyson’s ‘5,127 prototypes’ and ’57 varieties’ all work.
Then there is the halo effect, first identified by Edward Thorndike. We latch onto one standout trait and let it colour our view of everything else. Richard Nisbett showed the same lecturer rated as better looking when he came across as warm. So if you want to be trusted, being likeable or funny in an ad may get you there faster than claiming ‘trustworthy’, because you can demonstrate humour but you can’t really demonstrate trust in thirty seconds.
“What convinces people far more is actual demonstrations rather than claims.” Richard Shotton
How should you test all this?
Never ask people if a bias affects them. They will deny it. Randomise instead and watch what they actually do.
This was the sharpest takeaway. Ask someone directly whether ‘a pound a day’ would sway them and they will tell you not to be silly. Richard calls back to the psychologist Timothy Wilson’s idea that we are ‘strangers to ourselves’. People aren’t lying when they explain their choices, they just don’t know, so they make up a plausible reason after the fact.
The answer is monadic testing. Split your sample, change one thing, and compare the groups rather than asking anyone to compare the options themselves. That goes for qualitative work too. Tell one group a wine costs £100 and another that it costs £5, and the tasting notes diverge wildly, because we use price as a badge of quality.
The rules worth stealing
If you want a quick list to take into your next planning session, here is what I noted down:
- Label gaps ‘sold out’, not ‘out of stock’
- Reframe prices as pennies a day, not a lump sum
- Explain the reason behind a price rise to make it feel fair
- End every experience on a high, because that is what people remember
- Remove friction before you add persuasion
- Show the effort behind your product instead of claiming quality
- Win one likeable trait and let the halo carry the rest
- Test by randomising, never by asking people what sways them
Listen to the full episode
Watch it on YouTube or listen via embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. Richard’s books The Choice Factory, The Illusion of Choice and Hacking the Human Mind are all worth your time, and he is easy to find on LinkedIn or as @rshotton.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where senior marketers share the screw-ups that taught them the most. It is part marketing lesson, part therapy.
Richard left me with one daft thought I keep coming back to. Be funny enough and people will think you are better looking. I’ll let you know how that one works out for me.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
