How BMW leveraged the fresh start effect to win over new drivers

In this episode, we explore how BMW used behavioral science to grow consideration by targeting fresh starts like home buying, leveraging price relativity with luxury context, and exploiting proximity to boost brand perception. It's a clever use of timing, framing, and emotional influence.

Transcript

MichaelAaron Flicker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Behavioral Science for
Brands, a podcast where we bridge the gap between academics and practical
marketing. Every week we sit down and go deep behind some of the science of
America's most successful brands. I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And today we're driving in, we're driving into a brand
that defines luxury.
BMW. We're excited to talk all about it. Let's get into it. And if you find
today's episode interesting. Richard and I have gone even deeper into the
behavioral science powering BMW in our new masterclass, hacking The
Human Mind, the masterclass based on the book that we launched in
September. We also have a training series that we really are excited about.
42 different lectures Richard and I do, covering lots of different [00:01:00]
topics, all that you can find at the consumerbehaviorlab.com. So listen to today's
episode. Hopefully you'll, you've gotten the chance to grab our book and the
masterclass. Just another place to get more details about all the baby earth
science that powers some of these amazing brands.
Okay, Richard, we're talking about BMW. It's a luxury brand. It implies history,
it implies heritage, and it implies quite a high end feeling when you hear about
the brand as we like to do. I thought I might go a little bit back in history.
Fascinating history of this brand. Talk a little bit about its prominence today.
And then we're gonna center on one of their campaigns that we just thought was
chock full of behavioral science benefit for us. So BMW starts in 1916, but not
making cars, actually making airplane engines. And if you can think of that
[00:02:00] iconic blue and white logo, it's actually interpreted as the spinning
aircraft propeller against the blue sky.
So super cool story of the logo. And actually their first cars don't hit the road
until 1929, and it's not until after World War II that they pivot from making

motorcycles, pots and pans, and then start rebuilding their automobile factory
and start thinking about positioning themselves as the ultimate driving machine.
And that tagline, ultimate driving Machine, has been their tagline since 1975.
Longstanding, actually, as of this year will be the 50 year anniversary of them
using this. And BMW has grown into quite the powerhouse. They're sold in 140
countries. About 2.5 [00:03:00] million cars are sold globally each year. And so
when we thought about.
All the different aspects that we could go deep on in BMW. We really got
excited about a campaign they did called Stage Your Driveway. So let me, let
me paint the picture for everybody a little bit about stage your driveway, the
campaign, and then we can dive into some of the behavioral science behind it.
So. They partnered with local real estate agents to take pictures of the homes
that were going to be set up for sale. And when they were staging the pictures,
they also staged the BMWs in the driveways of homes that they were, that were
going for sale. And then during open houses. Not only did the real estate agents
put flowers on the tables and fresh linens in the [00:04:00] bathroom, they also
had a BMW parked in the driveway when people actually came by.
And the idea was to help people imagine not just their new home, but that new
life with A BMW in the driveway. And for us, you know, there's a lot more
details to the campaign, but a super interesting idea that they're. Bringing the
BMW into the home buying experience. A little unconventional, wouldn't you
say?
Richard Shotton: Unconventional, I think. So it's a danger of having a good
idea afterwards. It looks obvious, but I think this was very unconventional at the
time.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. And they're leaning on some pretty interesting
behavioral science that's driving why this worked. So maybe can you take us
through a little bit more of the details and and talk about the campaign,
Richard Shotton: all, all sorts of different biases at play, maybe the most
obvious one is about the timing of the the intervention. [00:05:00] So there's a.
A lot of work around an idea called life events, which is essentially the idea that
if we undergo a big life event, and, and by life event, I mean, you know, having
a baby, getting divorced changing jobs or more, most appropriately for this
discussion, moving house.

All sorts of unrelated behaviors become destabilized. Now that's important
because most of the time people are creatures of habit. They're not thinking
about alternative ways of behaving. They just do the same thing again and again
and again. So buy the same toothpaste, drink the same, lag a pub buy the same
car when you.
You are in market again, we are creatures of habit, but when people undergo
these disruptive life events, there's a rare situation in which these habits are
destabilize and people become open to change now as ever. That sounds like a
pretty plausible story that Well, [00:06:00] yeah, it sounds plausible. But.
Behavioral scientists never just rely on you know, rationale and, and reason.
Everything has to be proved. EE experimentally. So there are some studies that
support this argument. There's a great practical behavioral scientist called
Elsworth Kirkman who works with the British Behavioral Insights team, and
she did a project in 2019 in Portland, Oregon, and they are launching a new bike
sharing scheme.
And they monitor the proportion of people who use those bikes. And what they
find is that if people have been living. In the area for a long time, and they were
close to the bike sharing docking stations. 0.3% of people used them if they
were new residents and they live close to the docking schemes.
1.1400000000000001% of people used the, [00:07:00] the, the cycle scheme.
Now, a couple of things you can take from those numbers. First is. It is really
hard to get people to do things differently. You know, we're still talking about
the vast majority of people in both situations ignoring the new opportunity.
But the second point is people were four times more likely to try the scheme if
they were new to the area, if their transport habits weren't fully
MichaelAaron Flicker: Disrupted.
Richard Shotton: Oh, so Well, yeah, I said they weren't fully formed yet. They
were easier to disrupt. Yeah. Yeah.
MichaelAaron Flicker: There you go.
Richard Shotton: So that, that's the key point here.
BMW wanted people to consider their car for the first time. Reaching people
when they are in market for house, when they are disrupting their life in a major

way, meant they were much more likely to consider alternative cars. Much
what, what they previously had.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. And, you know, changing homes in America
often comes with.
A ton of [00:08:00] mailings. Junk mail comes to your home. Here's new thick
magazines with with new furniture to buy. Here's new broadband offers. You
know, there's lots of there's lots of insight already that, that certain categories
have that where you're in a new home, so you have a new. Practical need for
new furniture or for new broadband.
BMW innovatively says, well, you're more open to buying and trying new
things. So what about a new car as well?
Richard Shotton: Yeah. That, that, that's, that's a really important distinction to
make. I think everyone knows if you, if you move into a new area, well, you're
gonna have to buy new furniture. You're gonna have to get your broadband
sorted out again.
But the experiment from Kirkman and others, like it shows something else and
it's the A disruptive. Occurrence, like a life event doesn't just increase the
probability of trying new brands in relevant car [00:09:00] categories, even
completely irrelevant categories. People are still more likely to change their, the
brands they use because.
They are no longer on this habitual path of, of behaving the, the, the shock of a
house move radically destabilizes all sorts of other behaviors. So I think it was
BMW's insight that you could go beyond the, the, the categories that are
relevant to home moving to look. Broader. That's so interesting.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So it opens an opportunity and they take advantage of
it.
Richard Shotton: Absolutely.
MichaelAaron Flicker: This feels close to a bias we've spoke about before
called the Fresh Start Effect, episode 49. We used it to, to really understand how
New Year's is this Very Every year, new Year new you, there's a, a change.
That people are more willing to take at the beginning of a time [00:10:00]
period. I think we also talked about it in Spotify where their new music
Mondays takes advantage of a start of a new week.

We got the fresh start effect at the start of a new year. This feels related, doesn't
it?
Richard Shotton: Ab absolutely. They, they're definitely related. So the fresh
start effect is essentially an argument from Catherine Milkman that when people
enter new time periods, their behavior is destabilized and they're more open to
change.
So she looks at smaller. Calendar changes than than life events. So she looks at
things like start of the year, start of the month, start of a week when people
come back from holidays after a birthday. And the findings aren't as dramatic as
the kind of fourfold increase in behavior change that we talked about with
Kirkman study, but they're still meaningful.
And we, in those previous episodes, talked about the experiments milkman did
around exercise and, and, and savings. [00:11:00] But actually since we did that
episode, I've, I've come across an, an even better study I wish we talked about at
the time which shows even the most. Difficult to change audiences and more
open to changing their behavior at fresh starts.
Oh, tell, tell us the study was run across 20 17 20 18 by the West Midlands
Police. So outside of London, the biggest kind of conation in, in England is
Birmingham and the West Midlands covers that and a few cities. That's
essentially blend. And they wanted to get well-known criminals away from their
life of crime.
So the police force come up with a new offering. Essentially they're gonna help
criminals move out of the area break out of their kind of social circles, get
accommodation elsewhere, get a new job in a different environment to try and
start a fresh life. Now they send out this offer. To 2077 [00:12:00] criminals
who are known to them, and they essentially say, look, we know who you are.
We have got you on our radar, but if you are open to changing, here's a
confidential helpline that you could ring and we'll sort out all these other areas
like accommodation and new employment. Now, what they found is that if they
sent that message out at random time, they got a very low level. Of uptake as
you might expect.
But if they sent out these messages after the criminal's birthday, there was a
56% improvement in response rate. So it went from, I think 2.6% to 4.5%. What
they're showing here is. Even in a behavior that is as hardwired difficult to

change as crime, if you communicate at these fresh start moments, you have a
better chance of success, a much better chance of success.
Doesn't mean everyone's gonna change. You know, life isn't that easy, but you
[00:13:00] are, you know, stacking the odds a bit more in your favor. So
whatever audience. People who are listening have, my argument today is I bet
they're not as hard to change as criminals, so don't dismiss life events and the
fresh start effects.
'cause it feels too trivial, shaped, tri too trivial, an intervention. And even these
very, very hard to influence audiences have been affected.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. And it, it, it, it's so lovely the way you put that
because we often think as brand marketers, our job is to. Find the interest in
audiences and get them to act.
And this is saying, well, humans have moments in their life where they are more
open to change. And there, there, there are things that happen in their life
completely separate from your agenda as a brand marketer. That would make
them, you know, in the example with BMW and the Kirkman study [00:14:00]
you know, life events or in this example with the West Midlands police the
fresh start effect, both times the actual people have things happening in their life
that makes them more receptive to doing something new.
And it's about finding a way to insert your brand in those moments rather than
just telling them to consume your product.
Richard Shotton: I, I like the way that you, you put that because it's an
argument for a bit more humility on the marketers part. It's not all about what
we say, it's reaching people at these receptive moments.
Most of the time, people are deaf to our pleas, even if those pleas are very
eloquent and very powerful, most of the time people are ignoring them. But you
have these rare windows of opportunity to make sure you are focusing on
messages on those, and BMW did that brilliantly because they reach people. At
a time of this major change in their life moving house
MichaelAaron Flicker: and getting third party data to know when [00:15:00]
these types of life moments happen is very available.
And of course, first party data. If you have a relationship management program,
a loyalty program, knowing somebody's birthday is a very attainable piece of

data. If you structure a program to go and get it, and then it becomes actionable
for you.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. And, and once you start talking about your own
dataset, you can think about this inside one of two ways.
Maybe you are a big supermarket, you know, someone's birthday. This is the
time to suggest new products that ne people have never tried before. Or you
could think of it defensively if habits become destabilized at these moments. Be
very aware. Your loyal customer or your, your habitual customer, your
MichaelAaron Flicker: repeat buyer
Richard Shotton: might well.
Try a new alternative at these moments. So this is when you wanna probably
double down on being maybe a bit more generous or making sure you are
emphasizing your [00:16:00] strengths. This is the time that people's behavior
might start to stray and look at other brands.
MichaelAaron Flicker: It's a funny conversation because when you think about
how marketing has changed over decades.
For those of us that were doing marketing in the two thousands and early 2010s
birthday, messages from brands were pretty common actually. And today I
think they're very rare. And it's funny, we've talked in other things like how
rhyming used to be used a lot and now is fallen outta favor. We've used humor.
You and I have looked at studies where humor has really dropped out of favor
amongst many advertisers over decades. And this is another example, at least in
my own experience of marketing, where brands used to be very aware of your
birthday or, or life moments and now they kind of stay out of it.
Richard Shotton: That's interesting.
'cause I wonder if this might be a, a distinction between the US [00:17:00] and
the uk. I don't ever remember brands making much of a birthday, so I think it's
always been a missed opportunity. The interesting thing there is maybe. Britain
should learn from America and America should learn from its history and try
and reinvigorate some of these target opportunities.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, I mean this is a sample size of just my own
experience, but I would say in 2006 I would've gotten six to 10 brand messages
on my birthday. And today I'm a little bit older, but I would say I get none.
That's a very, yeah, just a interesting thought there. So, to, to summarize this
part of the section.
Rather than assuming your brand message should just be blasted to the person
that you know is interested. Thinking more about where the buyer is in their life
stage, in their life moment, and trying to meet them where there might be an
opportunity either to win or to defend against loss. That's kind of the summary
of this part.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, I, I, I think that would be fair, and I think the only
thing I'd double down on [00:18:00] is. It's not just life stage targeting. It's these
kind of be trying to be close to a life transition moment. So rather maybe
targeting retired people, it's people who have just retired rather than target
people who own a house.
It's who've just bought a house. That, that's the only element that I would
emphasize of, of that
MichaelAaron Flicker: because it is that transition that may, that resets their
ha habituated activities and opens it up.
Richard Shotton: Yeah.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Lovely, lovely. Okay, so let's get to our next bias that
was used in the original BMW campaign we opened the episode with.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, so, so the other bias I think they use is, is, is one of
price relativity. So often people think the consumers are calculate machines and
they're looking around all the different brands they could buy and thinking,
well, how much of a benefit am I gonna get? And does that benefit? Loom
larger than the the cost, but that isn't how most people behave [00:19:00]
because it's a really complex calculation.
And there's this amazing phrase from Daniel Carman that says, when people
face complex calculations, what they tend to do without really realizing is they
tend to replace the complex calculation with a simpler one that gives them an
almost as good answer. So rather than doing the mental gymnastics of
comparing potential value, potential utility with price, what people tend to do is
think.

How much have I paid for something similar? And if this item is less than that
similar basket of goods, it's good value. If it's worse than it's bad, bad value.
That's the principle of price. Relativity. A hundred dollars is neither good nor
bad value. It always depends what it's being compared to. Now, if you think
about BMW.
They're applying that brilliantly because normally A BMW is an expensive
motor car compared to almost everything. Yeah. Yes, compared to everything.
Compared to your weekly shop, your [00:20:00] family holiday, your stereo,
other cars, it always looks expensive, but if you're comparing it to the house
purchase, suddenly it feels like a much, much smaller number, and that's a
massive opportunity.
Now that might all feel a bit speculative. But I did, I've done these studies quite
a few times, but I did one in 2018 with car brands. And it was coincidentally
with BMW, this isn't their data, it's just happened to use them as an example. So
recruit a group of people. And I said to them, Ford Moderno costs roughly
20,000 pounds.
A BMW five series costs roughly 30,000 pounds. And then I said to people,
how good value is the BMW? And 33% of people thought the BMW was good
or great value, then got a completely fresh group of people, gave them the same
image of a BMW five series, quoted exactly the same price. Just over 30,000
pounds.
But this time I [00:21:00] compared the BMW to a Bentley Flying Spur, which
at the time was 119,000 pounds. And I asked them again, how good value is the
BMW. Now that figure goes up to 47%. So it was 33% in the first version. Now
it's 47% of people think it's good value. That's a 42% improvement. Now if you
think about the core of the study, what it is essentially showing is exactly the
same item, exactly the same price will be evaluated very differently dependent
on what comparison set is put in front of people.
So if you compare it with a Ford Mon, BMW doesn't look great value. You
compare it with a Bentley flying Spur, it looks amazing value. That's an
example of people substituting the right question, which is what benefits are
you gonna get and does that justify the price? That's the right question from a
logical point of view.
They're substituting that, right, but complex question with a simpler one, which
is what comparison set can I [00:22:00] quickly grasp onto to compare with this,
this BMW cost. So what I think. BMW do so well with the stage your driveway

is by placing the car next to a luxury house. Then they make whatever cost
they're asking for feel, and that's the important bit.
The initial emotional reaction. The feeling is it's just that little bit better value.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, it's it's something that when you hear it
explained, it makes sense when you hear your study, if you can have confidence
in it. And one of our good friends and supporters of the podcast, Rory
Sutherland is, can say that set.
He sometimes has a magical way of just simplifying the idea down as, as cut
tight as possible. He talks about Rolls Royce's that are showcasing their cars at
Jet and Yacht exhibition. And he said, if you're looking at Lear Jets all
afternoon, a 300,000 [00:23:00] car is an impulse buy at that point. I mean,
right. I mean, like, and, and it, and it all kind of adds up when you, if, if what
we do as humans is.
Look at the relative price between things. It makes sense to make your relative
price something much higher than than what you might otherwise compare it to.
Richard Shotton: Yes. 'cause there is, there's no fixed mental comparison set.
You as a marketer can change that. So yeah, by putting it on the drive of a, a
luxury house.
It's never gonna make a A BMW field inconsequential, but it's enough to
change that initial emotional reaction. And what often happens is we have an
intuitive reaction to a price or to a situation, and then we use all our powers of
logic to justify the intuitive reaction to ourselves. So if our initial reaction is it's
reasonable value, we will then use our logic to, you know, remind ourselves of
all the benefits maybe that, that, that, that make that.
Initial [00:24:00] feeling are reasonable. But it's the initial impulse, emotional
reaction that comes first is the logic that comes afterwards. So do yourself favor
as a brand, and by changing comparison there, give yourself the best chance to
have the positive emotional reaction.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So we're talking right now about pretty big priced
things.
We're talking about houses and BMWs, and these are once in a, you know,
multiple year purchase. You and I have talked about in the past when Nespresso
first launched their Nespresso machines, they had a tricky challenge if you

compared a cup of Nespresso that it made to drip coffee. It was a very
expensive proposition.
And nespresso pod, I forget if it was 25 cents or 50 cents, but compared to drip
coffee, that cost a few cents a cup. Too expensive. But if you compare an
espresso to going and buying a $5 Starbucks [00:25:00] or any barista coffee,
man, it seems like a great deal. And so by changing the comparison set, when
Ne Espresso launched its machine to to barista made coffee houses, you
changed the comparison set and changed the relative price that you were
comparing it again.
So there's ways to do this not at once in a decade purchase or once in a multi-
year purchase. You could do this same approach in everyday items by changing
what the relative prices compared to.
Richard Shotton: Absolutely. I, I think it was really interesting is the same
principle price relativity can be applied to something that costs $1 or a hundred
thousand dollars.
Now, it, it's the sense of relativity that's important. How you then express that
and who you decide to compare against might vary if your roles or BMW or,
OR, or Nespresso. But the principle stays the same. Absolutely.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Okay, [00:26:00] so
we've got this second idea that pricing is relative and be really thoughtful about
what you, what you are, what you're comparing your price to.
We have a third. Idea that we wanted to bring up for everybody.
Richard Shotton: So this is called the mere Proximity Effect, and it's
essentially what you are surrounded by the values of those surrounding items
rubs off on you as a brand. Now first. Hearing that sounds remarkably similar to
price relativity, but this is slightly different.
You know what BMW could have done is, I don't know, park the cars next to a,
a lot of a, a plot of land that cost a million pounds an empty derelict garage.
You'd have still had the price relativity element, but some of those values
would've not been very helpful. By placing it next to placing the BMW next to a
luxury house that looks gorgeous as beautifully designed, some of that will
[00:27:00] affect people's more qualitative feelings about, about your brand.

So that's the idea of the, the, the mere prox proximity effect. Now, as ever, we
always wanna talk about studies, not just. Speculative arguments. And there's a
lovely study from Kim at Cornell University, a 2022 study where they, they put
this to, to test, so recruit over a thousand participants and they show them a
magazine.
And within that magazine, there's an ad for a clothing brand. Now, sometimes
this fake clothing brand is surrounded by. Editorial. Other times it's surrounded
by ads for luxury brands like Chanel or Dior or Hermes. And the psychologists
then ask people to rate the quality of this, this fake fashion brand.
And what they find is, even though the ad is exactly the same amongst both
groups, [00:28:00] their rating varies dependent on what that ad is surrounded
by. So when it's surrounded by tutorial. Average rating is 3.2 in terms of quality,
high number equals, et cetera, high quality, low number, et cetera, of low
quality.
When it's surrounded by those luxury brands, that rate goes to 3.75, so 3.2 to
3.75. Now, there is a 17% improvement in perception of quality if the brand is
surrounded by high-end luxury goods. Now that's interesting because
remember, everyone sees exactly the same product, the same design of the ad,
the same argument for why the product's amazing, but the reaction is partly
formed by what surrounds the ad, not just what's within the,
MichaelAaron Flicker: and so we're using this example born out of BMW,
putting their cars next to luxury homes.
But it strikes me that [00:29:00] brands. For many decades, put their advertising
in high-end magazines or high-end newspapers to get that credibility. To rub off
of that, you know, high-end magazine, the lifestyle of that magazine. And in our
digital age, there's so much talk about targeting the individual fi, the
personalization, and the targeting individual.
Sometimes we for, you know, we might put less priority on, well, what are the
run of site ads we're running on? What is the programmatic buy across? And no
matter how great your brand ad is showing up at the weather channel or
showing up at nothing, nothing bad about the weather channel at all, but it may
not be the right.
Environment for some brands to be in.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. And it might be a trap that we've got
ourselves caught in, as you say, in the kind of digital era when immediate
[00:30:00] responses and immediate short-term sounds are very easy to
measure. And because they're easy to measure, we optimize those. What's
trickier to measure is the long-term impact of where you are running on, on
brand perception and because it's trickier to measure it often.
Doesn't factor in people's calculations. So the, yeah, the, to me, I think you are
absolutely right is a reminder that if you just look at cost per thousands and you
just look at immediate metrics, you are going to be led into surroundings that
don't rub off positively on your brand. I think that is an absolute fair point.
This is a bigger issue in the digital world than it certainly was 20, 30 years ago.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And when we, if you look at like a, a Bennet and
Fields, long and short of it, if we are talking about digital advertising, lower
funnel, much more likely to be short form advertising. Okay? But [00:31:00]
long advertising meant to generate an emotional response where you show that
ad.
Can have a real effect. The Kim study shows where it's shown, not just that it
reached the right person that was in your demographic and your targeting, but if
it was shown in the middle of a high you know, of a HBO or a Netflix premium
viewing experience or if it was on a run of show CTV by somewhere else, it can
make a difference to how it's perceived.
Richard Shotton: Absolutely. And it's, I think you, as you are alluding to, it's
not that every brand should pay a premium to be amongst those higher end
surroundings, but if you're not gonna do it, you've got to be aware that there is
some sacrifice. So as long as you are calculating whether or not the premium's
worth it, feel free to.
Do it or don't do it. But I think the, the thing that worries me is people aren't
making that [00:32:00] calculation and they think that they're costlessly
generating efficiencies when actually there is a, a hidden detrimental effect on
their brand.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And as you started to speak about, it's about the
metrics you track.

And so you know, if you are, if you are trying to have emotional response, if
you are trying to do long, long advertising and the long and the short of it, that
requires different metrics than short response driven. Click and advertise.
Richard Shotton: Yeah.
Yes, yes, absolutely. It requires different metrics and I think there is a, a mantra
of, you know, don't just rely on the metrics that are easy to capture.
Make sure the metrics you are using are ones that reflect what you're trying to
achieve. And too often. We get things the wrong way round, and I think over-
optimize to what's easy to capture rather than what's effectively an effective
measurement.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Well said. You know, and it strikes me that we've
talked about you know.
About [00:33:00] how this was maybe more common with magazines and
newspaper advertising, but another area that this has been known, this is like
basic marketing 1 0 1 is store where you place your physical stores. If you look
at any strategy for like where you would put a store in a mall, you're always
asking, what are the brands that I can place my brand next to across from, you
know, and what's the proximity?
Did they. To the key stores in a, in a shopping area, in a mall, in a, in any area.
So some of those like things we've, that have been developed so often by the
practitioners on the ground, this proves why that, that, that that's what they
found.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's absolutely fair.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Lovely. So three different things that we focused on.
Richard, would you remind us of the three big items we're today?
Richard Shotton: So we started by talking about life events and the fresh start
[00:34:00] effect, and the experiments here essentially show that for an awful
lot of time people are unthinkingly repeated, repeating their behavior from a
past similar situation.
However, there are predictable moments when those habits are disrupted, when
people enter new time periods at the start of a year or a new. But just after a

birthday or when they undergo a big life event like moving house, their
behaviors are destabilized and they're much more open to consider considering
alternative ways of behavior.
So what BMW did brilliantly is try and save people to pick their new cars just
after people had have moved house or, or very close to the house, moved
moment. So that was the first principle, using and targeting life events. The
second principle BMW used was price relativity. This is the idea that a hundred
dollars is neither good nor bad value.
It always depends what that product for a hundred dollars is being compared
against. And by placing their cars on [00:35:00] the driveways it super
expensive luxury houses they made the cost that they were asking for their
higher vehicle look much more, more palatable. So they changed the mental
comparison set and that created a more positive emotional reaction to the price,
and that led to people being more comfortable spending money.
And then the third principle they applied was what we've just been discussing,
the mere proximity effect, which is essentially the surroundings you are in as a
brand or an ad will rub off on people's perception of your brand. So if you're in
a magazine, you surround yourself by high-end brands, you company will be
treated differently than if you are in a more mass market environment.
BMW applied that brilliantly by placing their cars in luxury houses. So it's not
just that this was an expensive environment, it wasn't, you know, $250,000
sewage factory they were putting there cars outside. These were luxury
[00:36:00] houses. And it's that luxury element that kind of bleeds from one
item to another.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Lovely, lovely. And as we said in the opening we went
deeper on this topic in our masterclass. So for those that are interested in
learning even more about this case study and what we took away from it, feel
free to go to the consumer behavior lab.com and check out the masterclass. And
as we come to today's wrap up, Richard.
Richard Shotton: Yeah,
MichaelAaron Flicker: we're talking cars. We're talking BMW. But the road
trip is a very American idea. Getting behind the steering wheel of a car and
driving is, at least us Americans would feel ownership over the freedom that
that brings. Yeah. Have you done a long road trip? Where'd you go? What you
do? What, what, what would you, so

Richard Shotton: I'm not a great fan of driving myself.
So my memories of road trips where I've been [00:37:00] driving are generally
quite negative. However, I do have an amazing memory of hitchhiking when I
was about 19, maybe 18, from Botswana. All the way straight down through
South Africa. I think it was about 1995, like '96 maybe. And then once it got to
the coast all the way along from, I think there about roughly central of the coast
all the way along to Cape Town.
And that over about three or four days was one of the, the best road trips I've
ever done, even though I didn't do a single minute of driving. So that would be
my, my best memory in that area.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And 1995, 1996, how hard was it to get a ride from
one spot to the next? Su,
Richard Shotton: super easy. I think there was a real culture of, you know,
picking people up in the middle of nowhere sometimes asking for little.
Cash payment, but it was, it was, it was much easier. I think if you're trying to
do hitchhiking in, in Britain, you're just gonna get people throwing things out of
a, the car window at you and insulting your your, your character.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Not as, not as easy. Not as easy. And maybe not as
[00:38:00] easy today. Even may, may,
Richard Shotton: may. Well, I mean, yeah. That's 30 years ago now. Yeah.
Yeah. That's
MichaelAaron Flicker: funny. That's funny. And for me, I would say before
my wife Eric and I got married, we did a road trip. In New Zealand, in the south
island, all of it. And we drove all around the south island. Maybe it was eight
days every day in the car to a new spot.
And you know, just that sense that you're exploring on your own was yeah, was
a pretty freeing and special time for us. So, oh, I've never been case. Not the
memories in the cars, right? Yeah.
Richard Shotton: Sounds lovely. Sounds lovely.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. If you like today's episode,
please give us a, like follow us on our social media channels and as we always
ask if this was helpful to you, share it with other marketers and other brands.
Our whole mission is to make sure people learn about these principles and
improve the effectiveness of their marketing. [00:39:00] Until next time. I'm
MichaelAaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: All of today's transcript and episode show notes are
available on our website, the consumer behavior lab.com.
Happy listening.
Advertisement: Behavioral Science for Brands is brought to you by Method
One, recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in America for the
third year in a row. Featured on Ink's, 5,000 list. Method One is a proudly
independent, creative, and media agency grounded in behavioral science. They
exist to make brands irresistible, helping people discover products, services, and
experiences that bring moments of joy to their lives As behavior change experts
Method one creates emotional connections that drive true brand value for their
clients.
Focusing primarily with indulgence brands in the CPG space. Find out
more@methodone.com.