Behavioral Science For Agencies: Copywriting

In this episode, we explore how behavioral science can improve copywriting. From the power of concrete language to the surprising upside of shorter, simpler messages - and why framing things as losses can be more persuasive than gains - this episode is packed with practical tips for agencies and brands alike.

Transcript

MichaelAaron Flicker: [00:00:00] Welcome back to this week's episode

of 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 the science of some of America's most successful

brands. I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.

Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And today we're continuing a mini series that

we've started called Behavioral Science for Agencies, and specifically

we're diving into the topic of copywriting.

Let's get into it. But before we get into today's episode, Richard and I

wanted to share something that we've been working on for almost two

years.

Richard Shotton: It's our biggest project yet, and it's called Hacking the

Human Mind. And this is a book that came out this September.

MichaelAaron Flicker: It's got 17 brands, just like what we cover here

on the podcast and over 30 behavioral science principles that we go

deep on.

Richard Shotton: We wrote it to be practical, insight and hopeful,

enjoyable to read. [00:01:00] And we've had lots of praise so far. So

Robert Giulini has said he couldn't put it down

MichaelAaron Flicker: and Rory Sutherland said it was a book for the

ages. You could find it on Amazon. Just search Hacking the Human

Mind or wherever books are sold.

Thanks for your support. So Richard, we kicked off this miniseries

Behavioral Science for Agencies back in episode 72 with media

planning. And then a few episodes later we did pitching, and today we're

doing something that really is part of almost every marketing project.

And that's copywriting. And you know, copywriting great copy.

It shapes perception. It creates a motion. And it can also nudge behavior

when it's done in the right way. And for those of us who have spenthours in ad agencies. You know, debating this word versus that word.

What does premium mean? What does superior mean? We, we, we

have a [00:02:00] obsession with talking about what do words mean,

how will they be perceived?

And so we thought of all the areas where we can help agencies really

think more deeply about how behavioral science can help make your

copy more persuasive, more memorable. You know, more effective. We

thought this would be this would be a great episode. And so we'll go into

the biases that helps words, helps words in copywriting get even better.

And then we'll and then we'll, and we'll see where the conversation takes

us to today. Excellent. Sounds like a good plan. So Richard, we have a

few key biases that we thought we would talk about. And maybe before I

go through the bias, you can tell us a little bit about the idea between

concreteness and abstract terms.

Richard Shotton: Yes. I think this is a really simple but underused

principle that can [00:03:00] help. Brands in whatever category they're

in, make their messaging more memorable. And it's essentially the idea

that people are very, very good at remembering language. They can

visualize. They are very bad at remembering language that they can't

visualize.

So psychologists call language can visualize concrete terminology they

call language you can't visualize is abstract terminology. And there's an

awful lot of research that shows concrete language is much more

memorable than abstract language.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And we covered these types of theories in

previous episodes.

So if you want to see brand examples of this Geico, episode 65. Apple

episode 23, we went into the detail on how brands have used this, but

Richard and I thought, let's start with the study that really brings us to

life. And it's a study by Ian Bag out of the University of Western Ontario

in 1972, and he sets up 25 [00:04:00] students in a room and he reads

them a list of 22 word phrases, and some of the phrases are impossible

amount.

Better excuse, apparent fact. And others of them are words like Rusty

engine, flaming forest, white horse. And he asked the group toremember as many as they could. And what you found was that on

average they could recall about 23% of the terms. So that's kind of

interesting. And if you had tried to remember right now the list I just read,

you could say, did I get better than one out of five?

But what was really the striking observation that Bagg made? Was that

just 9% of the abstract words could be remembered like impossible

amount versus 36% of the concrete terms like Whitehorse. And that's a

fourfold difference. And so as Richard opened, [00:05:00] beg argued

that vision is the most powerful of our senses.

And so when you could see the two word phrase in your head, like white

horse or square door. It's much easier for you to hang onto that thought

for longer. And so while that's an interesting study that was done 60

years ago, Richard, you've taken that idea and you wanted to bring it

into even more modern commercial setting.

Richard Shotton: Yeah.

'cause there's a number of potential issues with

the study. So as you say. Done back in 1972. This is a very old study

and some people think people change, so maybe it's not so relevant. So

you've got this age as an issue. You've also got the facts. You

mentioned that the sample size was 25. It's very small.

Can we really base a big brand decision on 25 people? It was run on

students maybe not the most representative audiences. Perhaps you're

targeting business people or you know, those who weren't over a

hundred thousand dollars. And can you extrapolate from what worked

with some students to those other audiences?[00:06:00]

And then the other parts of the study that draw questions about its

validity are things like the bizarre phrases that Beg decided to use. You

know, some of the words were things like flaming forest or muscular

gentleman. They're not the normal thing. Most brands are selling. So

because of those concerns back in 2021 Mike Rahan and I reran.

With a few little twists. Firstly, we made it up to date, it was 2021. We

then got a much, much bigger audience, 400 plus people. We made

sure they were nationally representative, and we replaced the, frankly

bizarre word choice with more commercial words. Things like fast car,

skinny jeans ethical vision, wholesome nutrition, things that you might

see occurring in in an ad.And then the final thing we did to try and make it a bit more robust was

rather than ask people straight away what they remembered from our

[00:07:00] list, we waited for five minutes and then asked people what

they could remember. Because of course, advertisers aren't just

interested in immediate recall. They want, you know, more sustained

long-term recall.

And when we did that, not only did we find. Begs results held, yes,

concrete terms like fast car were much more likely to be remembered

than abstract ones, like wholesome nutrition. Not only did we find the

same basic data, we found it was much, much stronger. So we found

that people were almost 10 times more likely to remember the concrete

than the abstract.

So. If anyone was concerned about applying this principle because of

the flaws in beg study, hopefully the study Mike and I did should put their

mind at rest. This is such a big impact. It is something that every

copywriter out there should be thinking about if they want to increase

memorability.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And you know, as an [00:08:00] agency, when

you get a brief.

So often the brief is asking for you to bring to life RTBs, you know,

unique selling propositions that are really internal language from the

client to the strategist or from the strategist to the internal agency. And

so part of the copywriter's job is to take that and put it in external facing

language, but adding this extra lens of how can we make it concrete so

that it's memorable is really an additional.

A layer we're adding to their job.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. So it's fine for a client to put on their

brief an abstracts objective, you know, high quality, trusted premium.

The job of the copywriter is to take those ideas and then translate them

into language that is easily visualized for. And it's this visualiz bit that's

key.

I think sometimes people conflate concreteness with simplicity and that's

not quite right. The [00:09:00] argument is if you make a word easy to

picture in someone's mind eye, that's when it becomes sticky. Yeah.MichaelAaron Flicker: I think that, you know, in begs original study,

square door just always sticks with me because you could see a square

door when he, when he gives it, but to your point.

It's not, it's that you can visualize it in your mind's eye. And one of the

things you and I love to do is say, where in the real world do we see

brands that could have taken advantage of this? And there's just a so

many brand taglines that do this m and ms melts in your mouth. Not in

your hand. You know, you can see it melting in your mouth.

You can feel it. Maxwell House Coffee, good to the last drop. You can

visualize the drop of coffee and you can, you could see it. And so these

strap lines, these taglines help take things like the taste of chocolate or

the smell of coffee [00:10:00] and makes them much more concrete in

your mind.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. Good to the last drop could be consistent

quality.

Being able to imagine and visualize a drop makes it memorable.

Consistent quality. People can understand it, but 30 seconds after

putting the newspaper down where they'd read it, they'd, they'd have

forgotten it. The skill of the copywriter is to take those abstracts ideas

and make them visualize. It's not.

Easy, but knowing that's a big goal certainly makes it more likely to be

achieved.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. And I wonder how much of this is again

about helping insert the visual into the mind's eye, and that's giving

agency to the consumer, to the buyer. So the buyer hears Skittles taste

the rainbow. And they, they complete the thought.

They see the flavorful rainbow. And so in [00:11:00] completing the

visualization, they're, they're doing a little bit of effort to think about it, but

they're, they're not thinking, what does what does you know, wholesome

goodness mean? That's a concept. That's a, there's a lot of brain cycles

to figure out wholesome goodness.

But taste the rainbow. I think about a rainbow and all the colors, and

that infers the taste to me of how flavorful Skittles will be. We, you and I

hadn't talked about that, but there is something aboutRichard Shotton: that. I think you're right. I think it's. I think that can

explain part of the success. So there are definitely experiments out there

that make that exact argument.

So Graf and CCA at the University of Toronto did a famous study into

what they call the Generation Effect. And it's just, as you say, if people

have to put a little bit of effort into coming up with the answer

themselves, that message tends to be. Be stickier so that they did a a

study where some [00:12:00] people would be given synonyms like fast,

rapid, others were given the same synonyms, but there would be a, a

letter missing fast and then R blank, PID.

And it was the people who had the missing letters in, in their words, they

remembered about 15% more. And the argument was because people

had to generate the answer, it became. That much more, more

memorable. So I think part of Absolutely taste the rainbow or goods. The

last drop can be people go into the effort of generating the image, but

there's also something else going on, which is this visual.

Sense being the most important because in the graph and CCA one,

there's the generation, but not the vision, and we get this 15% bump with

beg, when you introduce this visual element into language, then you're

getting this four or tenfold increase. So I, I think you're absolutely right.

[00:13:00] An element of interaction, an element of generating the

answer yourself.

Boosts impact. But then if you also layer on that visual image, then

suddenly you're onto something really, really,

MichaelAaron Flicker: and it could be easy to say, well, this is very well

and good for consumer brands, that you can visualize candy in your

hand. Or you can visualize coffee in a cup. We're saying you can go

beyond that good to the last drop.

Taste the rainbow melt in your mouth, not in your hand. You could do

more than that. But some may push back and say, but this doesn't really

work in B2B. And you know, we went looking for a really clear example

in B2B copywriting, which is just more naturally prone to abstractions

and talking in business terms and just being a little less visually

concrete.And we found this campaign by IBM called Every Second Counts, and

[00:14:00] they designed this campaign specifically to help. Bring

attention to their products that help with data security. But the concrete

framing was they all the campaigns dramaticized, the actual data breach

itself, they have a countdown clock.

Of the, of every second that you're having a data breach and the

hundreds of thousands of dollars that are being spent during the data

breach, and then they share real stories you know, that, that make the

whole thing visceral, but making the second of a data breach concrete

by the, out, by the money that's wasted, or the money that's being used.

During that, to me it was an example of making it more visual. They

show the clock. What do you think is that an example of, of IBM using

visual, you know, some more visualization to make it more concrete in

people's minds? And I think [00:15:00] often with these experiments,

you've got almost families of, of, of, of studies that are all very

interrelated.

Richard Shotton: And the one that reminds me of there is the picture

superiority effect. So, oh what's his bloody name? I think it's university.

It's, it's either Daniel Marrow or Yaro. I always get it mixed up. I think it's

Marrow where he gives some people some very, very simple instructions

about how to take medication.

And sometimes they're, you know, they just get it as text. Other times

they're given the text with, they then have a simple visual of the times of

day they're meant to take these pills. And what he finds is that the

proportion of people. Who can't remember the instructions a little bit

later, it's 19% of people fail to remember them with the text only version.

It's 10% with the text plus visual. Now to me that is an example

essentially of concreteness coming to [00:16:00] action. You know, in,

there might be situations in the B2B setting where it's really, really hard

to use Visualiz language. Well, if you can't do that, maybe the next best

thing is, you know. Direct mail or your email making sure you

accompany your instructions or the data you are trying to communicate

with a very simple visual.

I, I think that is, is certainly in the, in the, in the same area.MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, that's very helpful to hear. Because again,

the purpose of all of this is to help remind, to help be more memorable

and more able to be recalled what we were talking about. So the, the

whole point is to increase salience and memorability.

Fair to say?

Richard Shotton: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Cool. So we've talked about our first big idea

here, concreteness, and then we have a second idea for copywriters and

agencies when they think about how to use behavioral science in their

copywriting. Yeah, so,

Richard Shotton: so this is one that I'm, I'm, I'm fascinated by.

[00:17:00] And it's the idea that if you want to convey competence and

intelligence, communicate as simple as possible.

Now, I think most copywriters would know that, but that doesn't make the

behavioral science experiments worthless. What it suggests.

'cause if

anyone's ever picked up a magazine or or red brand content, they know

that it often is very, very complex. What it suggests is the copywriter

knows this principle, but they struggle to persuade the client.

And here behavioral science fulfills a different role and maybe it's

persuading the client to adopt some of our, our, our copywriting

recommendations. So the experiment in question comes from 2006. It's

from a Princeton psychologist called Daniel Oppenheimer, and

Oppenheimer gives this experiment one of the best names ever.

So the paper title is Consequences of Erudite, vernacular Utilized,

irrespective of Necessity. [00:18:00] Colon, the problem with Using Long

Words Needlessly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So he's he's living up to

his own mantra and what he does in this study. Really simple. He gets

abstracts from academic journals.

So these are the ES of the studies, right at the, the top of the journal

article. It's a

MichaelAaron Flicker: one paragraph summary of what the entire

academic paper will be.Richard Shotton: Exactly. He then shows that to readers, and then the

readers rate the intelligence of the author. Author. Now, sometimes he

shows people the original abstract, which has jargon in their

unnecessary, complicated words.

But other times he shows people the same basic abstract, but he is

replaced the complex terminology with simpler alternatives. And what

Oppenheimer finds is that it's the second group who rate the author as

more intelligent than the first group. It's the second group rate the author

at 13% more intelligent than the first group.[00:19:00]

Now that contradicts. I think most marketers think, I know copywriters

often believe in the power of simplicity, but the people who are signing

off the work, they often think the way to signal their expertise, the

serious of their product, is to speak in a very, very complex way. They

think that signals intelligence, but what Oppenheimer suggests is if you

use complex words, you often confuse the reader.

And then that confusion, they won't blame themselves. They'll blame you

as the as the communicator. So the argument here is if you want to

convey a powerful positive image, speak simply as possible. Make sure

you are using easy to understand terminology. Make sure you're getting

that reading age grade down.

And if you do that, it will reflect very well on you.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And so often the job, as you said of the agency

is to not just do great work that will work in market, but to make sure

[00:20:00] that your clients, the brands, the marketers, have confidence

in why you're doing that. So sharing that there could be a 13% increase

in the simple version versus the more complex version.

Really gives the client a sense, okay, there's some data backing up.

Why we would choose to, to simplify maybe in their terms, overly

simplify.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, exactly.

'cause if you don't know if, if you have

this study, you can take it to the client. You can run very quickly through

the methodology. What did it take us two, three minutes to do?

And what I've tended to find is it switches the conversation from, you

know, should we communicate in a simple way to how do wecommunicate simply because you've taken this. Rigorous, independent,

crucially study that supports the argument. That is a very persuasive

way of getting towards simple copy.

What doesn't work so well is, you know, [00:21:00] drawing on a quote

from George Orwell or relating back to your own level of experience.

Because if you talk about Orwell's rules for writing, people are gonna

think you are. Otherworldly And

MichaelAaron Flicker: you belong as an English graduate. Yeah, yeah.

Yes, exactly.

Richard Shotton: You wanna be writing, you know, poetry and modern

verse, not, not sell stuff.

But the other part is it just invites some to say, well, in my experience,

that doesn't work. You know, my experience is we need complex

terminology. You just get this trapped and this spiral of going round and

round and round with different subjective opinions. But if you take the

study itself, suddenly it, it, it, I think unlocks a willingness to to, to listen

because of that rigor and that independence of the underlying.

MichaelAaron Flicker: So the first benefit is that. Using simple words

boost perception of competence. But this has knock on benefit here, that

it also makes it easier for the receiver to take action [00:22:00] and, you

know, make it easy, would be at the base level. Behavioral science

teaching one oh ones, you know, the E method. The E is easy, right?

Making it easy is of huge importance in a lot of behavioral science

insight work.

Richard Shotton: Absolutely. And you've got some of the real giants of

the field, Nobel Prize winners like Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman

talking about this principles. They say it's the single most important

principle of all the behavioral science experiments out there.

You've also got amazing figures like Todd Rogers, who we had on the

show a while back. Talk about when it comes to language, make it easy,

is a very important principle. And actually he's not just a commentator in

this area. A lot of Todd Rogers' work proves this point and his argument

is, look, you can make something easy by reducing the reading age of

the, of the words that you use.The other way you can make something easy [00:23:00] is to reduce the

volume of words you use. And he said, you should be doing both of

these things. So he did a lovely study with Jessica Lasky Fink, who's at

Harvard. And in 2020, they sent out 7,002 emails to American School

Board governors members, and he asked them to fill out a quick survey.

Now, sometimes people received 127 word email, asked 'em to fill out

the survey. Other times they received an abbreviated version 49 word

email. Now. What Rogers and Lasky, Fink found was the people who

received the word email, 2.7% of them filled out the survey. People who

received the shorter version, that response rate went up to 4.8%, so it

got the 78% improvement in responses.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Massive, massive, yeah. Massive

Richard Shotton: increase. But [00:24:00] then the really interesting bit

is they then do a, a follow up. They go and find. Lots of people who did

or didn't fill out the survey, they keep on ask them to say why they, they

did or didn't. And one of the questions they ask those people is, how

long? Did you think it would take to fill out the survey?

And what's interesting is people who received the word email, 29% of

them thought the survey was gonna take more than five minutes.

Whereas that figure almost halves with the brief email, it's down to 15%.

So the argument here is in a situation of uncertainty. It's like, you know,

how long is the survey gonna take?

People use the effort of reading the request as a proxy for the effort that

the actual task will take. So if you make a really detailed, wordy

argument about all the amazing reasons you should fill out a survey, you

might increase motivation a bit. But what you are also doing is

increasing [00:25:00] the perceived effort of the task.

And often it's the effort, perceived effort of a task that really affects how

many people do it. Reducing the length of the request is one of the best

ways to make it feel like a very small

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. You know, my mind immediately as we,

as we were talking about this study, my mind immediately went to

government forms and how on the, on the instruction of any form in

America from the IRS, you might have an entire page of instructions.For a half page set of fields to fill in. So I was thinking about like how

much you could change compliance with government forms through,

through this you know, through this, this simple insight that if you can

give less instruction even upfront, even if all that information went in an

appendix, how much better it might be.

Absolutely.

Richard Shotton: Most people are busy. They've got lots of different

things they could be doing. [00:26:00] And a part of us, and I know I'm

guilty of this, is, is, is we are often lazy, you know, we have this long to-

do list and what we often do is put the easiest things to the top top

because we get this great sense of satisfaction from ticking them off.

So if you give people, you know, page of rubric about how to fill in the

survey, people are gonna think, oh my Lord, that's my whole afternoon.

Go on. I know I've got to do my RS. Forms, but it's gonna take ages.

Okay. I'll, I'll, I'll get a few quick jobs done and then I'll come to the IS. Of

course it keeps on getting supplanted.

And there's other stuff that comes at the top of the, the to-do list. So it's

not that people say to themselves, oh, I'm never gonna do it, but what

ends up happening, it goes to the bottom to list, and then it takes a long

time to have ever have surface. So make it simple. Make it a short

request, you are more likely to get the top do list.

You're more likely to get acted upon.

MichaelAaron Flicker: So we've shown this lovely study and we've

shown, and I raised an idea of how it might affect government forms.

[00:27:00] It occurs to me commercially, even when you sit in a

restaurant and you get a a, a book as your menu. Rather than a simpler

presentation, even if it's the same number of dishes, the idea of multiple

pages to flip through and lots of descriptive text on each one.

Versus something shorter may, maybe I'm just, my own experience is it

feels more daunting whether or not you flip through every page or not.

Still you're, you're in a high intention environment. You're sitting in a

restaurant, you're going to spend money on a meal. Maybe you're still

gonna get through it, but there does have feel that sense of, oh, this is a

daunting task to flip through all these pages.Richard Shotton: And there are real downsides. Even outside of the

ease part. There's a brilliant book. He's called the Paradox of Choice by

Barry Schwartz, and he talks a lot about the danger of giving people too

many options, and what he essentially says is, if you're [00:28:00] going

to a restaurant, you might have. One bottle of wine.

He might have a couple of glasses. So if you give people, let's say you're

just gonna have one glass. If you give people a menu with five glasses

on that there are four things they're not having, there are four things.

Those people might slightly. Miss, you know, through loss aversion. If

you give them a booklet with a hundred wine glasses, now there are 99

things they're not having.

And each of those absences, each of those things they're not having,

adds a little bit of of pain. So he says there is a downside in terms of

perception of effort, but there's also that kind FOMO that comes are

giving people too many options.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, yeah. It's really it's really helpful for.

Copywriters and agencies to say, so we know this is happening.

How do we bring this into every piece of work we're bringing to the, to

the world? And so making it easy, making it shorter is really a [00:29:00]

way to help drive better outcomes for their work. So, so do we have a

third and maybe final idea we can bring to copywriters that they, how

they can apply behavioral science?

Richard Shotton: Absolutely. And we've talked about some broad

principles but there are lots of studies that kind of go down to very

specific word choice. And one that I think is fascinating that more people

could apply is the idea of, of loss aversion. So this is essentially the idea

that the equivalent loss will affect us more than the equivalent gain.

So what I mean by that is if you are walking home tonight. And you

realize you have dropped $5, you will feel very bad. Someone else out

there will eventually stumble across that $5 and they will feel quite good.

The point is, their happiness [00:30:00] is smaller than your sense of

loss. Even though it's mathematically the same amount when it's from

the loss perspective, it affects us more than from the the game

perspective.Now, that's not just. Speculative argument. There is a lovely 1988 study

from Elliot Aronson. He wasn't the first person to experiment on loss

aversion, but I think he did the most practical study that I know. And he

goes round to 404 houses, knocks on the door and tries to tell, sell

people loft insulation.

Now, for half the owner homeowners, he says, if take out locked

insulation, you save 75 cents a day.

He says, if you don't take out loft insulation, you'll be wasting 75 cents a

day. So both circumstances, it's the same massive tical amount, 75

cents. And if people were completely logical, then the impact of those

statements should be roughly the same. Be the

Sound: same, [00:31:00] yeah.

Richard Shotton: But he finds saying quite different.

He finds that when he frames it as a gain, you'll gain 75 cents. If you do

this, 39% of people wanna find out more information. Whereas when he

frames it as a loss, that number jumps to 61%. So exactly the same sum

becomes 56% more powerful if it's framed as a loss rather than gain.

Now that is definitely something that copywriters can apply more and

most brands don't use that.

Most brands talk about a game frame rather than a loss frame,

MichaelAaron Flicker: and, and so whether it's don't waste, don't miss

out, don't lose in the example you gave where you can frame a message

that will make you think about what happens if you don't do this. And that

fear of loss is what can motivate people to be much more interested.

Than the same amount if it, if it was just a gain.

Richard Shotton: E Exactly. And, and that is a, a much rarer tactic. You

know, most brands say switch to [00:32:00] us and gain a hundred

pounds. They don't say, if you don't switch to us, you'll be wasting losing

out on a hundred, a hundred pounds or a hundred dollars. So

copywriters should think, look.In my specific circumstance, can I keep it simple, but frame it in that

negative lost way? Because if you can, you can still keep the simplicity,

then you are on something quite powerful.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, and I do think that there's a sense

generally from clients that we don't want to communicate negative things

to the world.

Like that would just generally, we wanna put our brand near happy.

Lighthearted positive things 'cause that will shed a positive light on our

brand. And I don't think we're really saying that they have to be negative.

I think what we're trying to do is, is gain attention and importance by

pointing out.

The other side of the coin that there's something, you know, smart

people [00:33:00] wouldn't waste this time. Smart people wouldn't waste

this money. So it doesn't have to be negative. It's more that we just need

to focus on the loss more than the gain. Is it, it, there's a, it feels like

they're close, but there, there's a distinction to be made here.

Richard Shotton: Yeah. I, I think that, I think that's absolutely fair.

Absolutely fair. Yeah.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah. So. We've gone through three key ideas

for our copywriters and agencies. You wanna give us a quick summary

of what they are?

Richard Shotton: So first thing we talked about was concreteness. This

is the idea that vision is the most powerful of our senses.

And if you want people to remember your copy, try and make it as visual

as possible. So if people can visualize language you are doing using. It'll

be much stickier than if it's too abstract. So that was the first principle.

The second principle was this overarching idea of Make it Easy which

talked about the Oppenheimer study, which was if you use simple

language, it will reflect well on you as a communicator.

[00:34:00] You'll look more intelligent, your brand will look higher quality.

And then we also talked about a related idea, which was the shorter your

request, the easier people will think that request is gonna be. Lots of text

makes people think the task is gonna be rous. So that was the Todd

Rogers and Lasky Fink experiment.And then the final more specific study was the Aronson one about loss

aversion. The idea that loss is motivate us more than gains, so. Don't

just tell people what they'll gain from taking out your product. Tell them

what they'll miss out on. What they'll lose out on if they don't take out

your product.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And then a sub-context that we spent a bit of

time in the middle of the conversation was thinking about how agencies

can use academic studies. To give their clients more confidence that this

is not just opinion or shared experience. This has got [00:35:00]

independent research that should give you confidence that this approach

is more likely to work in the real world.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. I think that affects people both in.

Copywriting department, but, but beyond, but it's an important, valuable

use of payroll site.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah, and if Richard and I were to say an

underlying motivation of the podcast overall, you know, we want to help

marketers become more effective brands and agencies be more

effective in their work and under, underneath that.

Is a belief that we have, that there's really a lot of academic work that

can inform that. Like we believe that if we can find the right connective

tissue and we can give you all those insights, then make use of that in

the world and it will make your agency more successful and it will make

your work more effective.

And that can bring us to the end of this week's episode. And as we like

to do, Richard, we always like to [00:36:00] do a, you know, a fun

question to wrap the episode. Your favorite tagline, strap line of all time.

Do you have one?

Richard Shotton: Whittling down to one is hard, but one that I might go

for, which features in hacking the human mind is a thousand songs in

your pocket.

So in the Apple chapter we talk about the benefit. Of concreteness. And

we also talk about some other really nice ideas like optimal newness, but

around copywriting, we talk about a thousand songs in your pocket and

how that exemplifies this idea of concreteness because you can picturea pocket in a way that you can't picture a claim about 5G five herb

gigabytes or a five megabytes.

So that's, that's one of my favorites. I think

MichaelAaron Flicker: you get two gold stars. Two gold stars.

Excellent. Two gold stars for an amazing strap line tagline. I

Richard Shotton: didn't come up with it, you know? Yeah, that's true.

MichaelAaron Flicker: And for tying it back to today's episode on

concreteness. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. Brilliant.

Richard Shotton: So what, what would you go [00:37:00] for?

You can't have that one ask a different, I'll take

MichaelAaron Flicker: inspiration from pulling from our book the

Guinness chapter. Oh, yeah, yeah. That has good things come to those

who wait. Is an example of the Pratt Fall fact. We've covered it as, I think

it might've been our first episode we ever did together back in episode

one, and we did it as a chapter in the book.

It just, there's so much for great marketers to learn about this and and,

and really it's a great bit of copywriting.

Richard Shotton: Yes. I think will stor, who we've got coming on soon

calls these atomic statements, you know, statements that have so much

packed into them and good things come to those way is certainly an

example of that.

MichaelAaron Flicker: It's a great one. It's a great one. Well, thank you

everyone for listening to today's episode. We were really excited to get

this one done. For those agencies where this can be helpful, as always,

we'd ask, leave us a comment. Like the, like the page. And if this was

[00:38:00] helpful to you, please share it with others that you think would

really find value in the topics of behavioral science and copywriting.

Until next time, I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.

Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.MichaelAaron Flicker: 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.