Interview: Mark Earls, author of Herd, on how to use behavioral economics in business and beyond

In this episode we chat with award-winning author Mark 
 Earls about concepts such as loss aversion, the false consensus 
 effect, and behavioral science's impact on economics.

Transcript

MichaelAaron Flicker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Behavioral Science for Brands, a podcast where Richard Schotten and I go deep on behavioral science, thinking about how we can make real connections between academics and practical marketing. Today, we are very excited to have our guest Mark Earls with us. Mark, welcome to the podcast. Hi, how you doing?

MichaelAaron Flicker: Very good. Very good. Now, if you don't mind, Mark. I'm going to shower you with a little bit of history, and we're going to ask for you to, yeah, yes, see no evil, hear no evil. Uh, Mark, friends, is a pioneer and award winning author, writer, consultant on human behavior, on contemporary communications and behavior change.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Much of our industry, the marketing and advertising industry's work with behavioral economics has been pioneered by Mark. And he has ran major departments in ad agencies, both large and small, from St. Luke's to Ogilvy. Uh, Mark's latest project, which we're going to hear [00:01:00] more about today, all pulls on how we think about time.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Both how we can make good decisions in uncertain times, how we can feel less caught off guard during times of uncertainty like pandemics and war. Uh, and how we can escape unhelpful stories of our past, uh, in order to choose better and develop memories of the future. Uh, his previous books have included Welcome to the Creative Age, Heard, which is everyone's favorite, I'll Have What She's Having.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And copy, copy, copy. Uh, Mark, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here with us. Uh, we're very excited to have you here today. So let's take a step back. What brought you to the industry? How did you get involved in this, in the marketing, advertising, brand

Mark Earls: building world? So I've got to say I blame my friend Jamie.

Mark Earls: Okay. So I was at college, I had no idea what I was going to do. No idea. And Jamie was really organized and he and I used to [00:02:00] drink together. Um, and, uh, but he was really organized, got himself a job in an advertising agency. Very fancy. And I had no idea what to do. I was taking American, uh, students and, and college kids around Europe in a big bus.

Mark Earls: Right. And thought, oh God, what am I going to do afterwards? I don't know. I can't do this when I'm 30. Imagine still doing this when you're 30. So I then, uh, uh, one day I got a call from him. He said, listen, I've decided advertising is really superficial. Okay. But you'd like it. I'm going to go and be an investment banker, right?

Mark Earls: So that's what he's been off to do. And I then wrote lots of letters and blagged away somehow. And I found within about six months, the thing I was really interested in was the people bit. Not the people bit in terms of HR and all of that, but the people bit in terms of why people do what they do. And I was, I had some really good mentors and, uh, one of them in particular, Paul Felbeck, who is a giant of that advertising strategy world, uh, was a DDP for many years.

Mark Earls: He, um, he said to me, listen, if you're going to try and argue with people like research companies or [00:03:00] marketing people, you've got to know the basis of their models better than they do. So you gotta go and read it. So I then got set off on a journey, which I'm still now, reading everything that I can get my hands on about that.

Mark Earls: And then that, you know, quite at the time, the thing that was really exciting for people, and it still is, I think, a bit too exciting, is how the brain works, and the brain is related to behaviour. So Damasio and people like that were really exciting, but I was already reading other stuff. I was already reading Durkheim as a, you know, as a great French sociologist.

Mark Earls: I was reading Irving Goffman, a social psychologist who did stuff around, you know, how we present ourselves in a social context or stigma. That's another one of his great ones. And so I'd already had a broader view. And just it's about brains, which the advertising would love brains. Cause right. You can point at them and show pictures of them, you know, it makes sense.

Mark Earls: Totally. Totally. So that's how I got there. And I was, I was, you know, applying it as I went and building up a set of knowledge and I started writing it. Well, I started [00:04:00] talking about it in public, um, and, um, started putting it to work, uh, in the businesses that I was involved in running. And then, uh, I came to a point when I realized, no, you've really got to.

Mark Earls: You've really got to go and make this work separately. You can't stay in. It can't be a side hustle. It can't be a side hustle and it's a nice thing to have. If it's going to take off, you've got to really put your shoulder to this. And so I took a walk, um, and wrote a book called Herd. That was the, that was the start of it.

Mark Earls: I'll tell you just a brief, a brief story. I do, most I do writing and talking and consulting now, and I've done a lot of stuff around the world. I am, uh, in places like Central America, in India, in Sub Saharan Africa, and these are really, it's for me, it's a joy because I get to meet people under different ways of seeing the world.

Mark Earls: Also, here's the thing, I was once doing a thing in, in Mumbai, in India, and, uh, Indian executives tend to be, in most, most Indian companies, tend to be from the [00:05:00] higher castes. India is a very caste ridden society, and these people don't see people who are below them. You just don't see them. You know, that kind of gets my goat a bit.

Mark Earls: But, you know, that's how you have to survive in that culture. So you don't see them. And what I did is rather than have a week long in a darkened room with flip charts and post its and all that kind of stuff, getting a new consumer strategy, reading the decks that they'd all prepared, I lined a row of tuk tuks up outside and said, Alright, listen guys.

Mark Earls: Your job today is going to live with a tuk tuk drive in their family, find out what really matters to them, find out what their lives are like. And one of them, you know, the, the, the CMO came back and he was in tears. He said, I've never seen these people. I've never seen them. And I said, well, how can you run a business that serves them?

Mark Earls: If for me, it's an extreme version. It's a nice, colorful, exotic, but at the same point, it's true that we don't care enough in the marketing and advertising world about the people that we serve. And we don't serve the clients. We don't serve the brands. We serve the people out there.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, ultimately the buyers of the [00:06:00] products in the real world are the people that we need to understand

Richard Shotton: and connect with.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, there's a, there's an amazing, uh, 1977 study by Lee Ross. Yes. And, uh, it's a thought experiment, so it has its weaknesses, but he says to people, uh, imagine you get. a speeding ticket. Uh, you've been doing 35 miles an hour in a 30 mile an hour zone and the policeman catches you, gives you a ticket, gives you a fine.

Richard Shotton: When you get home though, you realize this ticket is riddled with errors, wrong car make, wrong number play, all sorts of problems. And he asks the participants to say, would you accept the fine or would you contest it? And people give an answer. And then the real experiment starts. Where he says to them, and now what do you think other people would do?

Richard Shotton: And what he finds is if a participant would have accepted the fine, they think most other people would have accepted it. Whereas if they contest the fine, they think most other people would contest it. So he

Mark Earls: called this the

false

Richard Shotton: consensus effect. The fact that whatever behaviours, attitudes or beliefs [00:07:00] we have, we assume more people have those beliefs than actually do.

Richard Shotton: So if you're a marketer and you are selling to the public, you cannot assume what you think and believe is representative. Go out and challenge those beliefs, whether it's through experimentation or through, um, meeting people, discussing with them,

Mark Earls: anything. I'd go further than that. I think you're absolutely right.

Mark Earls: It's a great, great, great example, a great experiment. Um, I think that people, marketers need to like their customers. That seems like a really weird thing to say, but it's really important. You've got to like these people. You've got to find something about them you like. And I know I've had clients over the years, whether it's an ad agency world or whether it's a consultant, you go, who are these?

Mark Earls: Yeah, but you've got to find something because if you don't have a thing that you like about them, you're going to treat them badly. And you're not going to listen to them. And I think that's a really, it's a really big lesson. And, you know, I still haven't seen any [00:08:00] business that sets out to like their customers,

MichaelAaron Flicker: especially in 2023.

MichaelAaron Flicker: I think the, uh, culture is attuned to you're not. Authentic, you know, and being authentic means finding something to like or love about your buyers, about the people that are going to use your brand, and I, and especially because social media allows us to move ideas much faster, I think that that, um, That flag that this is inauthentic happens to generate much more steam.

MichaelAaron Flicker: It's what the

Mark Earls: psychotherapists would call leakage. Okay. So your bad intent, it leaks out in your behavior in between your words, you know, and, and, and people read it really quickly. Yeah.

Richard Shotton: So fascinating. Something you said earlier, you mentioned around too much advertising and marketing. being focused on creating beautiful things rather than changing behavior.

Richard Shotton: But I think you've come with three brands who maybe do things differently. Yes. So did you want to take us [00:09:00] through one of those? What brand do you think has applied insights about human nature really effectively?

Mark Earls: So the first one, this is a kind of a sell for the work that I did with professors Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien.

Mark Earls: And it's some work we did to understand, to map if you like, how people choose and a really simple Really simple, uh, two by two, a four box on the left hand side is. Independent choice, people choosing on their own, which is how we like to believe in the Anglo Saxon cultures in North America, in Northern Europe, we say that's how people choose because that's how people are.

Mark Earls: Ultimately, people are individuals who live on their own.

MichaelAaron Flicker: I sense your skepticism

Mark Earls: Mark. Word to the wise. Virtually every other culture says no, we are social creatures who are connected with each other. Ubuntu, the sub Saharan African idea that Mandela and, and, um, Tutu used to to pull that country together, uh, South Africa after, after the end of apartheid.

Mark Earls: That's essentially, we're a mutual species. We depend on each other, and we have, you know, we're a social primate. It's now become common for [00:10:00] people to say that, you know, after all, we are a social creature. Yes, we are. Not just a bit of a social creature, not just after the fact, but fundamentally. So that means it's, that's a dimension we don't take into account.

Mark Earls: So independent on one hand. And then social on the other. Okay. Right. So let's just leave it with that. And I won't do the other dimension because it just makes the point. So you can tell from patterns, um, this is from diffusion science, you can tell from patterns you've got in behavior, behavioral data, like sales or clicks or searches or whatever you can tell.

Mark Earls: Where you live on that, on that dimension from, from independent choice, choosing my own, to social choice. And the reason why that's important is not because I'm right and you're wrong. It's important because a socially shaped behavior needs different kinds of interventions than an independent behavior.

Mark Earls: We imagine in the Anglo Saxon world that people need to get told how good this product is, how much better it is. We need to find an insight maybe about them and their individual needs. I just think that casts it very often in the wrong way. This is the [00:11:00] side where people do what they do because of what other people do.

Mark Earls: Yeah. As you were saying, that experiment, social proof is one, uh, but we underestimate it, you know, the framework, the East framework that behavioral science is very, uses now, um, has only one dimension, which is social, one of four, the mind space. thing that the UK, um, government's behavioral insights team created has one of nine.

Mark Earls: So it's just, we don't, we don't value underestimate the importance of it. So my case study is of Sony electronics, and we did be Alex and Alex professor expansion. I did this analysis of sales data in, I think we've done it in lots of other categories outside. consumer electronics. We did this in, I think we had about a dozen European markets and, um, we did it across about 12 categories.

Mark Earls: Okay. So everything from, you know, from, uh, mobile phones, smartphones, to laptops, to cameras, to, uh, loads, loads of shit. And We imagine, or [00:12:00] Sony imagine, because they produce, used to produce, these really thick booklets with instructions in, right? Imagine that you have to tell individuals about the speeds and feeds, as they're called in electronics.

Mark Earls: In other words, the detailed product features, and why they were better than another. And they endlessly struggle to find the differentiation, um, of themselves in any way to talk about it interestingly. But they bang on about this, and that's what the brochure was for. Turns out that virtually all of those categories are bought on a social basis.

Mark Earls: Either by looking what the expert use. The Canon and Nikon both have huge user communities in which even the experts look at other experts professional photographers Look at what other people use and you want to know about it And of course you want to protect your status by having seem to be an expert But you still check out what other people are doing the same with guitars It's exactly the same people will tell you that it's all about the quality of the thing but it's not and if it's not not based on the quality of the thing then then Don't try and persuade people.

Mark Earls: Don't sell on that. Sell on the other stuff. Make [00:13:00] the other stuff work. There are a number of ways to do it. You don't just have to say, and everyone else is buying, buying it this way. You can also choose your media. And this is what we did with Sony. So they, Sony were very good on broadcast media and targeted media.

Mark Earls: But it was always about selling to you, the target, individual and the target. So we said, no, let's shift the mix. Let's shift the mix. Go from this side, from independent choice, independent media, independent messaging, to this side. And it was a fundamental shift in their use of, across Europe, their use of, and their sales went up 25 percent in the first year and a half.

Mark Earls: So, look, it's, that's, you know, that's not a full advertising effectiveness in Effie's case. Yeah. But it is really significant. Once you decide on the basis of the, how people choose to alter your intervention strategy, then you're likely to be more effective than you would be otherwise.

Richard Shotton: And, and did you find, you mentioned there were 12.

Richard Shotton: Markets. Yeah. Was there a variant? So, not really. Anglo Saxons claim

Mark Earls: they're individuals. Yeah, yeah. So, we tell ourselves we're [00:14:00] individuals, but we're not. You know, the first thing when, in the U. S., when things get difficult, and I was working with Ogilvy around, started working with Ogilvy around the time of 9 11.

Mark Earls: What happens? You pull the quaggans in a circle, to use the cliche. Get together. U. S. is an individualist culture, but it's based on small town. Yes. Based on community, it's based on mutuality, and yes, a lot of competition, and, but that's the basic unit, and, but we tell ourselves otherwise. Mm hmm. And I think that's really important to remember, and to check your assumption, whenever you go anywhere, go into a market, see, are people buying it as you say, like I think I buy it?

Mark Earls: Yeah. Or how do they buy it? And then to use that as your framing thing to then lead to potential strategies that you can test. So

Richard Shotton: if there's so much evidence around, uh, the power of emphasizing popularity, emphasizing the social nature of a product, why don't all

Mark Earls: brands do it? Because we, culturally, we much prefer the stuff about individual things.

Mark Earls: Also, I think it doesn't [00:15:00] feature the brain stuff. Yeah. You know, neuroscientists have had an absolute bonanza in the last ten years. There are loads of them. If you look at the online groups about behavioural science, every bloody where. It's neuroscience and, you know, and nobody seems to realize quite what we're dealing with and we have those fMRI scans, you know, because the fMRI scans were, um, uh, basically showing that re they're taking data.

Mark Earls: There's not a picture. It's not a film. It's not a camera. It's taking feeds from your brain. From, from that part of your, your body, uh, just where the, uh, haemoglobin, the iron in your blood approaching a certain part of the brain responds to the, uh, to the radiation that's put in. That's what it is. It's not a picture.

Mark Earls: Taking the feet out and then reconstructing it as if it was a brain. Yeah. We imagine that it looks like a brain, right? But it isn't. It's just a bunch of feeds, a bunch of electronic feedback. And that's all it is. But we imagine it is, and so [00:16:00] therefore it's this pretence of reality. And it's very hard not to say, oh, it's in that part of the brain.

Mark Earls: And, and people who want to, neuroscientists like to, like to tell us really simple stories about the brain, and we like to hear them, like the left, the left and right brain. Yes, it's a nonsense. It's an absolute nonsense. And the brain is not a geographically split thing. It's a system. And it's also connected to the body as well.

Mark Earls: You know, if you want to look at emotions, I was made very, I made myself very unpopular a few years ago with neuroscientists by saying, um, actually, why don't we, instead of doing neuromarketing, gastromarketing? Because we know that we know that actually our emotions are much more readily available in our gastric area.

Mark Earls: And it's frankly, it's much easier to access and much safer. Okay, messier, but yeah, but the point of point being is I think that I think we culturally we are culturally biased Yeah And we like things that are we live in a North America and Northern Europe are positivist We like to have things to point to [00:17:00] we like to have concrete stuff We like to believe there's a root reductionist a root physical thing that explains all this stuff and we like to have simple answers That's why And there's lots of money around brain science.

Mark Earls: Lots of people wanting to sell us brain science. Do

Richard Shotton: you think that will change over time? If, um, people adopt some of these principles around, uh, the social animal that we are, they see the success. And surely they'll return to the more and more Yeah,

Mark Earls: it's not as exciting though. It really is. And it's exciting.

Mark Earls: And, um, you know, funding both in, in research terms for, uh, for the basic research in, in, um, academia, but also funding from clients wanting to fund stuff. Can you get me something that shows really the brain, how it really works and how we really touch people's emotions? Can you really show me that and something I can put on a, on a chart and show the investors or?

Mark Earls: Yeah. You know, that's what I really want, something dramatic. Not, hmm, people seem to really like this, and other people seem to too. That seems to have, seems to have, I'd like to get micro.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, to draw [00:18:00] for the listeners that are following at home, can you go back to the work with Sony, and specifically the change that you made, from being more individualistic to being more social.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, yeah. What was the, what changed in the work that drove that? So the fundamental

Mark Earls: thing is the change in the channels. Okay. So instead of trying to find ways that we could target people. Yes. We find ways that people, we can get between people. So it was early days in the social platforms, but it was still, that was still really important.

Mark Earls: Trying to find ways that we were viewing opportunities where people will be together rather than doing an eyeball count. I see. So that kind of thing. So you change the channels, uh, you can change the messaging as well. And the messaging is, is good, but, but quite often, you know, if, if everyone tells me that something's really popular, I'm the kind of person that goes, Hmm, I want to do something else.

Mark Earls: So I think we all have that in different ways at different times. Right. Sure. Um, uh, so you have to be careful with the messaging piece. Yeah. But, but the, the channels, how we use these channels, because the channels [00:19:00] have, have assumptions baked into them. that we can use. We need to be aware of them in order to make a good decision about them.

Mark Earls: So that's the big change. Thank you. Change the channels, not change the messaging. Got it. Okay, so we've got

Richard Shotton: first example, Sony. Yep. And the power of recognizing we're a social species, not an individual one. Yep. Second brand that you're interested in?

Mark Earls: Second brand. I'm going to talk about something that's at the, uh, this is right at the heart of, um, the UK's interest in behavioural science.

Mark Earls: Yes. And this is a case from the UK Treasury. So that's, uh, uh, they collect our taxes and manage us. So that's what they do. And this was, this case study was about, it was very simple and I love the simplicity of it. Very simple piece of medium. It wasn't a grand piece of theatre. It was the letter that they send to people to remind them to fill in their and file their tax return.

Mark Earls: Okay, so that's

Richard Shotton: that's

MichaelAaron Flicker: the an important letter. Yeah,

Mark Earls: how do you improve the response rate? How do you get people to do it more [00:20:00] and it was a great opportunity because you can do an experiment, right? Yeah, have lots of different examples. The winning thing was had two features and it would really important I remember the first of which is you actually personalize it.

Mark Earls: Dear

MichaelAaron Flicker: Mark. Dear Mark. Got it. Secondly,

Mark Earls: you put you in the context of your peers and their behavior. Most people like you have. Mm already. So you set a social norm and express it through a social norm, and that significantly improved the response rate.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. So this is the campaign where they said nine out of 10 people pay a tax on time or nine out 10 people in

Mark Earls: Birmingham or burn.

Mark Earls: Absolutely. And you can, you can tailor it in different ways you want, but the underlying mechanic, um, is a social mechanic. Yeah. A social norms that they're exploiting. Um, and I, I, uh, I, I, this is still , this is still the behavioral. The Nudge unit is there called the Behavioural Insights Team's number one case and it's the thing that made them famous and it's the thing that got them a lot of funding and I think it's really good because it's really low, it's low tech, right?

Richard Shotton: Yes, I've seen one of those pictures of the letters and it's [00:21:00] a black and white, uh, letter, looks like it's printed on paper that's been through the printer six times.

Mark Earls: It's been through my printer. Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. So it looks, it's really low tech and it's really not, it's not fancy or anything and it's the kind of thing that you could do.

Mark Earls: Yeah, any business could do this. Any organization could try this kind of stuff and experiment with different, different solutions and you can get the results yourself. And I love it for that. And I love it because it's social, clearly. And that's the insight that they're using. And, and, and I think that it's really important to remember that that is.

Mark Earls: That, that number one case that they, they have made their reputation on. They've done lots of other good things, right, but that's the number one thing. In the UK it worked. It didn't work so well when they tried it in the US, interestingly. But that's for other reasons, I suspect. They didn't get to the bottom of that.

Mark Earls: Let's drive

MichaelAaron Flicker: to that. What would your take be on why it would be different?

Mark Earls: I, I, I think, I don't know who they was, who were they were writing to in the UK compared to the US. I don't know the underlying, uh, connection with, uh, paying tax [00:22:00] in the UK and the US. And I don't, uh, we have a very different system here and you know, uh, we have the very little way of tax credits, for example, and there's no incentivization, philanthropy or giving or anything, none of that stuff.

Mark Earls: So, so it's all, it's interesting that, uh, I don't, I haven't seen, I don't think they've published, they might have done, correct me if I'm wrong. So I haven't

Richard Shotton: seen it in America and I know they have published data, I think it was Guatemala where they'd applied that similar principle of telling Guatemalans that most people pay their tax and that had a positive effect.

Richard Shotton: So

Mark Earls: it doesn't work everywhere and that's, and that's really interesting, right? It is. Culture is really important. Yeah, and culture is something we share with each other. It's not something that just lives in my head. And that's, uh, so again, I'm going to social. Yes. Well, that's hand really hard, right? It's

MichaelAaron Flicker: a, it's an important hand to play.

Richard Shotton: And, and, but that the interesting development, which is this variability. And sometimes there are critics of behavioral science or critics of, uh, this field who say, well, I [00:23:00] didn't work in America. Therefore the whole thing's bogus. Whereas it might just be a recognition. Behavioural science findings aren't laws, we're not particles that are influenced by forces, we have, you know, our own free will.

Richard Shotton: And all a behavioural science insight does is increase the probability that it will eventually work. So, testing it, making sure the context hasn't changed wildly from the original experiment is a super important

Mark Earls: thing. That's right, I use the metaphor of maps, so we have better maps to, to navigate where we want to go to.

Mark Earls: Yeah. The map is not the, not the landscape. The map, the lamp is not the, the, the, the grand itself. The map is a representation. The map can be inaccurate, but a bad map is really unhelpful. And a bad map is often the stuff we carry around in our heads, assuming that's how people behave. Right. And, and I, and that's what I aim to do is to give people not rules of thumb, if you like.

Mark Earls: Yeah. But you can test them. Yeah. In particular contexts. And, you know, I've, I've worked a lot with Experian, a fantastic, a US based [00:24:00] company, um, who, you know, who managed credits, credit scores. Um, and the idea of a credit score is really interesting. It's a very Anglo Saxon thing, except it's not Saxon, so the Germans don't get it at all.

Mark Earls: Cause the Germans don't borrow like we do. Like Americans do. Oh, just over the border in Holland. They love it. Yeah. They love personal lending. Yeah. They absolutely love it. And they love the credit score, but the Germans don't. They just don't. They won't use a credit card inside the country. So, so actually trying to sell, you'd think they were really similar, but they're not.

Mark Earls: So you always, and I've worked with, worked with them a lot and, and each time we go to another country, we go, let's just check our assumptions here and then see what the data says. Yeah. Mark,

MichaelAaron Flicker: maybe I can ask you to spend a little time on this point because I think it's very interesting for everybody listening.

MichaelAaron Flicker: If you want to teach folks how to check your assumptions and how to make sure it's right for the culture that you're serving, that you have to find somebody to love in, how do you do that? What would be your guidance for marketing?

Mark Earls: So I think there are two [00:25:00] things, one of which is, which you can't beat, which is the qualitative way of doing it, which is actually listen to people, get them to tell you how they do what they do and find out what lies behind that.

Mark Earls: Uh, there's a, there's a very good book, uh, by an English anthropologist written for our American friends, largely called watching the English and it's, it's, uh, she, this fantastic anthropologist, she goes around and does experiments, which, and as, as an American, you, you know, I'm sure you appreciate this.

Mark Earls: She deliberately walks, bumps into people on public transport, on the tube train, the Metro, whatever. And, um, And then she watches what they do. Oh, how interesting. And, you know, we're so caught up with, with, um, politeness in the UK and so caught up with it. And, uh, and she identified something called the, um, uh, this, the self reflexive apology.

Mark Earls: So you apologize for something other someone has already done to you. They bump into you. I'm so sorry. Yeah. So you wouldn't see that if you swam in the culture, and this is the thing about culture, is you swim in it like fish in water. You [00:26:00] don't see culture, you

MichaelAaron Flicker: don't. You swim in it by doing qualitative

Mark Earls: You swim in it by also then trying, so what's the, where's the point where we're going to see whether this particular assumption we've got holds or not?

Mark Earls: Yeah. Let's find that pressure point and test it. Got it, got it. Um,

Richard Shotton: interestingly, everything we've discussed up to now has been around the Uh, experiments varying in their impact across country. Of course, cross country is America versus Guatemala versus UK. Interestingly with that HMRC tax study. Even within Britain, there was a variance by group, so they found one group where telling them that 9 people had paid their tax on time actually backfired.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, yeah. And it was the super wealthy. Yeah, yeah. So if you were a top 5 percent debtor, knowing that Everyone else had paid made you less likely to pay because there was a fundamental belief that they weren't like

Mark Earls: and I'm not a sucker Right.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, right. That's the that's the inevitable feeling.

Mark Earls: Yeah,

Richard Shotton: but I wouldn't argue that they are individuals I think what would have been an interesting follow up study [00:27:00] would have been to tell you the message, you know, nine out of 10 successful business people pay their tax on time.

Totally.

Mark Earls: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Exactly. But then it becomes an iterative thing. So you go, actually, we got this result. Let's test again. Yeah. Either we've got this, we've got this slightly wrong. Yeah. Or there's something else going on there. And to be fair, they did

Richard Shotton: run a follow up test. And I think the winning I don't think it involved that tailoring that I mentioned, but the winning example was when the very wealthy business people were told if you don't pay your 50 grand tax bill, we cannot afford one or two teaching assistants.

Richard Shotton: So making the loss of the exchequer concrete, affected people's behavior when

Mark Earls: a more abstract example. I think that's exactly right. That's exactly the kind of thing that you would do if you got that result back. And, and you know, when you're dealing with letters, there's no cost in the experiment. That's right.

Mark Earls: Absolutely.

Richard Shotton: Really.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Um, so why don't we take a break and when we come back, we're going to learn more from Mark on other, on another example of how behavioral science is really driving important [00:28:00] outcomes. Behavioral

Mark Earls: Science for Brands is brought to you by MethodOne. MethodOne builds. Digital first marketing systems that help brands grow.

Mark Earls: They are behavior change experts who solve business challenges by creating meaningful connections with consumers with deep disciplines in many brand categories. Reach out to them. If you'd like to be leveraging behavioral science in your marketing or advertising.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And welcome back to Behavioural Science for Brands, Richard Shotton, Mark Earls and I are talking all things behavioural science, effectiveness in marketing, and um, let's turn our attention to a third example, Mark.

MichaelAaron Flicker: So this is

Mark Earls: very topical this week in, in the UK, uh, but it represents a larger thing, I think. It's, it's the opposition Labour Party has just had its conference this week and they've launched a new slogan, which is, Give Britain back its future. Give Britain back its future, which I think is super smart.

Mark Earls: It's different from the other two examples. So the first one we talked about was, you know, large patterns in [00:29:00] data and how that might change your deployment of activity or focus. Second one we talked about was, was letters. and how the messaging might change. And you could test that with lots of experiments.

Mark Earls: This is very different. This is an insight, one of your rules of thumb about how people, it's an abiding truth. I think it's one of, I would say one of the top three, uh, behavioral, um, science biases that we talk about is loss avoidance. Oh, yes. It's like, it's just, just, just everywhere. And it's really important to everybody.

Mark Earls: And if you evoke it can be really big. Now, give Britain back its future has let's just pass that, take it apart. So. Uh, first of all, um, give the role of the people who are saying this, the role of the Labour Party. We're going to give it back to you. So we're not going to, um, make you. We're going to find this thing.

Mark Earls: Yeah. And give it to you. We're going to give it back to you. It was yours originally, but it's, someone's stolen it. Um, and then it's the future. And so it's very positive. It's a positive spin to it. I think the future is the least important bit in this, [00:30:00] those three elements. To give Britain back its future.

Mark Earls: Um, and give it back to you, I think, is that's the, that's the, the nub of it. And we've seen that in other political campaigns. So in, we saw, um,

Richard Shotton: Maybe the first, well the first example I can think of was actually, I think a Reagan didn't he do, Make American Great Again? Yeah, we've got Dominic Cummings, who was the mastermind behind the Brexit vote and Originally the slogan was supposedly take control.

Richard Shotton: Yep He put in take back control because if we've lost something it makes us more, more motivated. And then of course Trump make America

Mark Earls: great again. Yeah. So I think it's a really, real powerful thing that they've, they've done there. And it's, it sounds really cynical, but I happen to know none of the people involved.

Mark Earls: And they're far from, you know, the Deb Maxson, who's the head of strategy that in that team is amazing. And she is, she wouldn't have let any cynical stuff through. It's amazing. I think that's a really interesting. example of, um, something where you say, I've seen this [00:31:00] problem before. And that's part of my methodology, is what kind of problem, let's triage the problem.

Mark Earls: I've seen this somewhere before. What kind of solutions are there to this kind of problem? Let's go see with those and play with them. So as a process to get to using behavioral science, I think that's a really useful one. The danger is that you end up If you don't do that, you boil the ocean. Uh, and, you know, you know, there's that chart.

Mark Earls: It was 140 cognitive biases. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple of years ago. It's lovely. It's beautiful. It hurts my eyes and gives me a migraine. But that's, you know, aside. I just think that, where do you start? I'm interested in application. I'm interested in making a difference with this stuff rather than being absolutely right.

Mark Earls: And, um, if you triage, you clear the ground a bit and go, it's this kind of thing. It also allows you to do something that my book Copy Copy Copy advises people to do, which is to steal from elsewhere. Yes. And so steal from elsewhere, and there's, you know, it's a fairly, [00:32:00] fairly safe steal. Yeah. Because other politicians have used it, but

Richard Shotton: I love that as an example.

Richard Shotton: I think it's something that could definitely be applied more in advertising. I've heard other industries are much more, uh, adept at taking examples from elsewhere. That consultants, when they, uh, promote an idea will be skeptical if it hasn't worked elsewhere. Totally. Whereas in advertising, we are, it's anathema to us to be told, oh, somebody did that in Hong Kong.

Mark Earls: No, I think that's right. I think there's an originality. Yeah, issue, which is just a, I think a complete, um, there's some of it. There's a, there's a, there's a ripoff copying kind of, kind of, uh, kind of, uh, originality question, which I think we park that and go, yes, that's drop. And there's always something in the advertising creative awards about that, which I, and, and, you know, nobody wants to stand up and go, I stole this from somewhere else, but.

Mark Earls: I think the idea that you can open yourself out is really important. I, in Copy Copy Copy, I tell this story about, um, [00:33:00] Professor Martin Elliott, who's a professor of cardiac, uh, paediatric cardiology. So he's a heart surgeon for kids at the Great Ormond Street Hospital, which is one of the three great hospitals in the world, uh, children's hospitals in the world.

Mark Earls: He's just, he's just amazing. And he changed the protocol they use in heart surgery. And these kids, little kids are two, three weeks old. They're like this big. And The operations last 12 hours, and there's a team of people around with lots of wires and tubes and, you know, and he, there was error count that, how can we reduce the error count?

Mark Earls: How can we do that? And you'd normally do that by some kind of engineering solution. Right. But instead, he said, he sat down one Sunday afternoon, and was, uh, watching the highlights of Formula One. And went, uh, pit stops. They're brilliant at doing that. Because when I was a kid, and he was a kid, I think it took longer, but when I was a kid, pit stops lasted a minute or so.

Mark Earls: And it'd be once every couple of races, there's some terrible accident, the wheel would fall off afterwards. Or there'd be some fuel line, you know, and it'd just, it'd just be awful. But, but it hasn't [00:34:00] happened for years. And pit stops now take three seconds, three and a half seconds if they're doing badly.

Mark Earls: It says take the protocol. What do they know? Get the guys in from McLaren and then Ferrari. Get them to review our process. And we will then practice that and, you know, within, within, within, uh, months, it was a significant 142 percent reduction. It's just ridiculous, an error count. It's just fantastic. So, I, I think that we should do more of that.

Mark Earls: I'm really happy. That's why we, we do this behavioral science, right? Because we haven't actually done the core, the base experiments. We haven't established. We go, okay, so that's an interesting thing. Let's see if we can test that, if that applies over here. Rather than, rather than think I've got to go into a darkened room for three days with black coffee and, and you know, a cold towel.

Mark Earls: Um, I

Richard Shotton: remember reading a, a study by, I think it was Goreville into this pennies a day effect. If you ask them for a donation of a dollar a day, they're more likely to do it than 350 a year. And trying to persuade clients to [00:35:00] change their marketing, to stop saying as a broadband provider we cost 30 a month and start saying 1 a day.

Richard Shotton: Many of those people responded by saying well. Charity is too different a world. It has no relevance to us. So then thinking, well, there's a halfway house of rerunning the Gaulville study, uh, but changing the brand that's used to get rid of the charity and replace it with a commercial category. And absolutely taking an idea from one field.

Richard Shotton: And so, re running it with a few different tweaks to make it relevant to another, I think is a really fertile way of organizing a

Mark Earls: research program. Yeah, totally, and bringing the science in. Because that's what we're really about. It's not about being absolutely right. None of us is going to win the Nobel Prize.

Mark Earls: Yeah. Well, you might, but I won't. Um, and none of us is going to win the Nobel Prize. We're debating about changing the world, making it better, and helping our clients and the organizations that we serve do better stuff by bringing science in.

MichaelAaron Flicker: So, Mark. Maybe you can share with the listeners, how do you help a brand or help a [00:36:00] agency get those tests sold in?

MichaelAaron Flicker: How do we get people to say, well, we may not change everything today, but how do you make folks comfortable with starting to test this? Well, what's things that you've seen?

Mark Earls: I think you use the same, the same kind of approach that you use in product design, right? So in innovation, what you don't do is go build the.

Mark Earls: Build the new thing, build the new business straight off the bat. What you do is do a paper version and test it. And when I say test it, you don't have to have any researchers doing it. You just, Richard tells some great stories in your first book about, about you going and designing experiment and running it yourself.

Mark Earls: Yeah. You can do this. Yeah. I've made clients do this. Write the paper thing, go out in the streets, find people, show them it, see if it works. Get reactions. Get reactions. And you do it. Don't wait for the research on Insights Team. You do it. If you're a creative guy or an account woman, you just go and do it.

Mark Earls: Make it happen. I think there's a hell of a lot to be said

Richard Shotton: for that, that actually running it yourself shows you a huge amount of things. Even if the experiment is a complete [00:37:00] debacle, that interaction with your product in a

Mark Earls: realistic situation. Totally. I mean, that's sort of a lot of my work now in consulting.

Mark Earls: It's not about me going away and having a good idea, frankly. You know, I've long ago accepted that there are better people at doing that than me, but it's helping other people have really good ideas and helping them do it simply. Yeah. So make the simple thing, make, you know, if you've got seven ideas about, uh, possible propositions.

Mark Earls: Write them on a card, show them to people, go and do it, and then come back and tell me this afternoon what happened. You know, and rather than having the insights team or some very expensive research agency go off and do, let's tell me about the lives of tuk tuk drivers and their aspirations and so on.

Mark Earls: You, leadership team, off you go. Yeah, yeah. And then come back and we're going to debrief them. By process of going to do it, focusing on the thing, meeting the people, having some reality, you talked about before, some personal connection with it, and then also processing it together. You then learn an awful lot.

Mark Earls: And you go much faster than you would do otherwise, and it's much cheaper, and therefore much less risk. Yeah, that's right. It's [00:38:00] like

Richard Shotton: being a tennis player, you can't learn an amazing serve by someone writing down 50 things that you have to do. You have to generate the muscle memory and do it again and again and again.

Richard Shotton: Maybe research is the same thing.

Mark Earls: I think, I think so. I think, I think it just says so much in, in the contemporary corporation. We've specialized. and siloized things that we shouldn't have. And again, most of my work is breaking down silos, bringing people together and doing stuff together. You know, I ran this huge 18 month program of innovation and for a particular client this last year, and they, um, and between them, people who'd never, never done anything like this before created six new businesses ready for MVP testing.

Mark Earls: Six new businesses with full validation, quantitative validation of the propositions and the, and the base experience. Now let's build, and they've got a business case to do each of those. So that's, you have to do it that way. You can't go, we're going to have this brilliant strategy, which is going to reach the moon.

Mark Earls: You have to build stuff. Yeah. And then, and build some more stuff and you don't get the billion dollars now. You get it on the basis of the [00:39:00] repeated attempts to learn and the learning that flows back and how you as a team get it, apart from anything else. And we, and we, we, I think you and I both come from this, this advertising background where it seems to be about the message.

Mark Earls: I think somehow about the message or that stuff. I think the, the really big deal here is that we need to get people used to things. Experiences, products, and how they change people's lives, how they interact with people's lives, rather than, you know, it's easy, it's always easy to go, let's just say something that's cute.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, I think it's very empowering to younger listeners to hear it's not so, uh, sacred. It's not so special, and I think what you learn later in your career, is that no decision is so, so grave that you cannot make another decision to change it down the road. So what you're encouraging our listeners to do, Mark, is to say, get your hands dirty, be with the [00:40:00] buyers, learn what they need and what they want.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Understand

Mark Earls: their lives and like them, you know, be part of them. It's no point. The cynicism we talked about before that comes easily leaks out into people's, into people's view of you and you'll just be another marketing brand. Yeah. In the marketing stick.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And I can tell you in America, there's really, um, uh, to build on a second concept that you said.

MichaelAaron Flicker: There's a real thought that marketing is just advertising. It's just the message where there's so much more to building a brand than just what the creative is. And so that's really what you're

Mark Earls: talking about here. Absolutely. And you can, you know, we, we can influence the product. I mean, in fact, we can make products.

Mark Earls: We can with people who know how to do that stuff. But what we can't do is do it on our own. And we, we, so one is at one extreme, we do it on our own. The other extreme is that we just do pictures and words. Not those things are acceptable anymore. Yeah, the biggest challenge most organizations have is that they don't speak to each other So if we could find a way to [00:41:00] link them up imagine that

MichaelAaron Flicker: amazing, uh, I don't want to end our conversation here without asking you to talk just for a few minutes on your View of the future and specifically the work you're doing now we were talking about it before in the green room and It's just, it's an empowering, fascinating topic.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Would you be willing to

Mark Earls: share a little? Yeah, no, sure, sure. The book would probably be called Time Travel for Beginners, right? Because I think that our ability to do mental time travel is the greatest gift that we've been given, apart from being a social species, right? It's a provocative,

MichaelAaron Flicker: it's a provocative statement, Mark.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, no, okay.

Mark Earls: So let me give you, um, the reason why it's important. Yes. We live in an age where. The global population are more affluent than ever before, but with that growth in affluence has come a growth in time poverty. Everybody. is less, has less time than they thought. And the one thing we know about, about [00:42:00] decision making under pressure of time is that it worsens.

Mark Earls: The more you do it, the worse it gets. I mean, time poverty has a number of other things like it affects your, your health, your relationships, your, um, ability to, to, uh, to get to the healthcare you need. It affects your, um, uh, it affects your, body in all kinds of horrible ways, heart and, uh, and, uh, and your brain as well.

Mark Earls: It's just horrible. So, but time pressure is time. Poverty is really, is really, um, a bad way to make context to make any good decision. The answer is not more productivity apps. The U S spent 39 billion last year on productivity software and the U S GDP growth boat was two and a bit percent, right? We all know I've got calendars coming out my ears.

Mark Earls: I've got ways of booking meetings. I've got you know, I've got all of that I've got things that I diarize myself. I check in and I didn't know moments of mindfulness and just you know, we've got it All right That's not the answer. It's not the answer. The answer is that actually [00:43:00] between the tick and the tock of this clock time world that's pressuring us.

Mark Earls: Actually, if you, if you use this skill that we were given as, as we had it as kids, you can imagine lots of different futures. Use it. Use it. Make them. Make those futures really real and ask yourself, what, what do I need to do today to prepare for that future, that future, that future, that future, that future?

Mark Earls: If you're thinking it's going to be a re org at work, right? Because we all know where that happens. So think about it ahead of time. Don't wait for the worst thing to happen or the best thing. Look at the whole range of stuff and prepare yourself and start doing today a portfolio of actions that start to prohibit you.

Mark Earls: If you're a business, that's the way to avoid being blindsided because normally businesses think about the future and think about future scenarios. They go, the one we want, which is us ruling the universe, then the one we don't want, instead of that's somewhere away from that, which is a scary thing. And we'll be adobists.

Mark Earls: We don't want that. We don't want those two things. So let's go for the middling one. Or we go, you know, small, medium, large budgets. It's the same, same sort of rough [00:44:00] thing. Do lots of them. Similarly, looking at your past. We're all enslaved by our pasts. With ideas about ourselves that we grew up with.

Mark Earls: Businesses have this all the time. Where we think we come from. What we can do because that's who we are. And often those memories are just as unhelpful as the ones we have as individuals. So you can remake those and find out, find, create different parts of yourselves. You can look side to side. You know, as a kid, I was able to read books and go into different worlds where they had hobbits and shit.

Mark Earls: And, uh, and, uh, through that wall over there, there's, there's Narnia and all of that. And so you can, we can, well, we can do this, right? The, the, um, uh, great Terry Pratchett, science fiction writer, sadly departed, wrote a book called The Long Earth, where he actually has a series of Earths that exist exactly in parallel and evolved in tightly different ways.

Mark Earls: Just because one thing leads to another and somebody discovers they can jump between them. We can do that. We can all do it if you just focus on it and you make these things tangible and practical, as you were saying before, really real. And you think, what do I have to [00:45:00] do to prepare for that? Not all the solution, not like a risk register mitigation, you go.

Mark Earls: Let's just, what's the simple thing I can do today, this week, this month, this quarter, to actually be a bit closer friend? You can do that. And then you think about that, you know, all of us one day are going to be, going to be out of here. We're all going to make our final presentation. We're all going to be, we're all going to be gone.

Mark Earls: Um, there's lots of good, interesting research about what, thinking about your own mortality. Thinking about the end does to you and it can make you bitter and twisted it can make you tribal and you know That's the surprising thing I thought was gonna make people nicer, but it doesn't but if you actually start at the end and work your way back and go I've got say three years on this in this job that I'm doing you might say My condition to leave that happily is to have achieved this So if that's what I have to achieve, I have to work back from that, what I have to do today, in order to take enough steps to get to there.

Mark Earls: So that's the kind of thing, that's time travel, right? And we all do it, we all do it all the time, and we can [00:46:00] get trapped with time, but if we actually use these abilities in a structured way, and there are lots of good examples from other cultures, from forgotten bits of research, from some guy inventing memories of the future, Um, so you can, um, you can make much more of the space between the tick and the tock.

Mark Earls: The tick and the tock. This pressure of time poverty. Ladies and gentlemen,

MichaelAaron Flicker: Mark Earls. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Uh, as we come to a close, Mark, thank you for sharing and, and for, uh, and for giving us access to, to these ideas. Um, we always close with a fun, lighthearted question. The thing that you're reading that's most provocative right now, the thing that you've watched or that's got you thinking.

MichaelAaron Flicker: in a different way.

Mark Earls: Ted Lasso. Yeah. Ted Lasso is the best thing on telly for years. Yes. And, and for two reasons, one of which is, isn't it nice to see people being decent to each other? Isn't that, is that just, isn't that lovely? And isn't [00:47:00] it nice to see people learning to live with each other, um, properly and learning to respect each other.

Mark Earls: Um, for me, that's really important. It's something we're missing gravely in the world and also in many of the organizations I work with. So more Ted Lasso, please be more like Ted. Thank

MichaelAaron Flicker: you to Mark for spending time with us today. Uh, as you come to, as we come to a close, if you'd like to leave a comment, reach out, leave a review.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Uh, we're always looking for the next topics to cover, the next things for us to dive deep on until then, this is behavioral science for brands. Have a great day.