Awarded Campaigns: How Procell reframed the true cost of cheap batteries to win B2B buyers

MichaelAaron Flicker and Richard Shotton analyze Procell’s award-winning B2B campaign that reframed the “cheap battery” decision by highlighting the hidden labor cost of replacing them. Using humor and behavioral science, the campaign shifted procurement thinking from purchase price to true cost.

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 the science that powers
great marketing today. I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And today we're continuing our mini series where we
explore effective campaigns.
Today we wear your battery charger by Procell. Let's get into it. So Richard, for
anyone who doesn't know the brand Pro Sell, it's Duracell's brand for trade
buyers, and today we've selected a B2B campaign that you and I learned about
and fell in love with because of how creative it is and how smart they take an
insight and really look to turn it on its end.
So in this B2B campaign, the goal was to drive [00:01:00] sales and share of its
US market for supplying batteries to companies that have more than a thousand
employees. So if Duracell is the consumer brand. Pro sell is the corporate
enterprise brand, and the problem that they were trying to solve was a tricky
one.
Procurement departments often default to buying the cheapest batteries of all of
their things they need to choose from, and they're focusing on purchase price
rather than what Procel wanted to highlight, which was the hidden expense of
Repla repeatedly replacing. Batteries. And so the insight was that the real cost
isn't the price of the battery alone, but rather the price of the battery, plus the
cost of the interruptions and labor when a device stops working.
And so to bring this to life, the UK arm of VML and [00:02:00] Duracell
created. A humorous character. They call him the full-time battery changer to
personify wasted labor. And Richard, not all of the effective campaigns and
work that we're featuring in this miniseries have such an easy to reference
commercial. So we thought, let's play the 32nd spot.

If you're watching this. Podcast over video. You'll get to see in here if you're
just listening at home, the audio does more than enough of the work for you to
get a flavor for the campaign. Then let's come back and talk a little bit about
what they were doing here and what else they did in the campaign.
Procell Ad: Great news boss.
We could save money. If we switch to long lasting pro cell batteries, then we
won't have to pay for a full-time battery changer.
Procell Ad Manager: Back up. We pay for a full-time battery changer.
[00:03:00]
Procell Ad: We do ma'am and his assistant
Procell Battery changer: double A,
Procell Ad: I believe we have for 25 years.
MichaelAaron Flicker: The spot ends with the lined pro cell. Replace less,
save more. Richard, just a funny spot in and of itself, right?
Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. There's a big difference between having a
great. Idea, identifying a brilliant psychological PR principle and then executing
on it. And I think this is both a brilliant insight, but also a brilliant piece of craft.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And you know what, to me, one of the things that gets
so great in the creative exchange of the back and forth of the executive and the
manager that the executive's talking to is, you know that there's wasted costs
within the system. You know that like [00:04:00] when you hear these ideas for
how you're gonna beat out.
Expense without losing anything of value. And then you get to these moments
where you're like, how did we be how could we have done this for 25 years? Of
course there's a battery changer and an assistant to the battery changer, and you
cut to that. That those two guys one on the ladder, it's just a ma.
It's just got a lot of humor because I think it strikes a lot of chords of human
truth there's, that happens in companies.

Richard Shotton: A a. Absolutely. And it's an extreme of a, it's ex an extreme
version of the fact that there are no boring categories. There are just boring ads.
This is a brilliant example of someone taking what a first glance would look
like.
Very dry brief and showing even in the world of batteries that you can make
this humorous. So I think they're well done to the agency.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And a plus one to that because even in the world of
B2B where the argument is how rational the decision [00:05:00] making ought
to be we shave a quarter of a cent off each bulk purchase and it saves millions
of dollars.
Actually there's something very humorous in emotional that can cut through
and we're gonna talk more about that later. But that makes a big difference.
Richard Shotton: Ab, absolutely. It can sometimes feel like. Humor is just a
nice to have, and it's there for awards and things, but actually it is a very
powerful way of communicating.
It gets attention and crucially, it changes people's impression of the brand across
a whole variety of metrics.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So they lead with this spot as the distillation of the
message, but beyond the spot, they used a number of different tactics to reach
their target audience. Procurement. Departments one, they sent this playful
battery changer figurine.
These the, these little mo [00:06:00] models of the gentleman in the spot. And
they sent those and fake cheap battery packs to procurement teams to illustrate
how silly it is to employ someone who spends all day swapping dead batteries.
So they made a joke out of it. They had a. Physical touchpoint. They also ran
paid search ads so that anyone Googling the term false economy saw a pro sales
message above the dictionary definition, reinforcing the idea that buying cheap
data batteries is a false savings.
And to me, they tie it all together. With this replace less, save more, they're
reframing a purchase decision around the hidden cost rather than just a unit
price.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. Yeah, it, I think that is the big psychological insight,
the power of reframing, because there is a tendency amongst decision makers,

whether it's a consumer or a professional, to focus solely on the information in
front of them.[00:07:00]
Actually what people should do is draw on all the information that is relevant to
a decision, but that's not what happens. People are steered by what is easy to
think about and unfortunately it's the cost of something. The pounds or the
dollars you have to pay that most people gravitate towards do because it's easy
to quantify.
What they forget about is all those other metrics. So there's some amazing
studies here. Like one of the real classics of the area is from Irvin Levin. So it's
a 1988 study done when he was at the University of Iowa. And he cooks up a
batch of what in Britain we would call MIT beef, but you would call ground
beef.
I think he cooks up a batch of this food and then he. Shows it to people and just
before they're gonna we it. Some people, he says it's 25% fat. Other [00:08:00]
people, he says it's 75% lean. Now those statistics, those numbers are essentially
the same thing. Now, a mathematician would say it's exactly the same thing. A
psychologist would say you're emphasizing different bits of the product.
If you talk about 25% fat, you're emphasizing that it's high fats can be maybe
greasy. If you talk about it being 75% lean by emphasizing the leanness, you are
drawing attention a away from that. Now the interesting bit of the study is after
Levin has given people this preamble, he asks them to say, what kind of quality
do you think this beef is?
How lean do you think it'll be? How greasy do you think it'll be? And he sees
this very clear pattern. If people have been told it's 75% lead, they expect it to
be less greasy to the order of 17%. They expect it to be leaner. They rate it 31%
leaner and [00:09:00] they rate the quality at 19% higher. Now remember, this
is exactly the same beef.
It looks exactly the same. The statistic to all logical purposes is giving you the
same number. But when it's talked about 75% lean, when it's the leanness that,
that he emphasizes. Rather than 25% fat, you get these very different results.
That's the power of reframing. What you as a communicator draw attention to
will affect people's interpretation of the events.
MichaelAaron Flicker: It to me, it's such an empowering concept because so
often we talk about how advertising is a weak force. You put something into
market, people are distracted, they're not very receptive, they're suspicious of

your message. There's a lot of reasons to believe that what you say is only
gonna have a light effect on the buyer.
But we own the frame. We own how we get compared to, because it's our
communication. [00:10:00] And I think that's easy to allow other influences to
narrow that too much. We get to present any argument we want in our
marketing message. We get to set up any frame that we believe will be
compelling, and this study really shows that just choosing.
Is it what percent lean it is or what percent fat it is can dramatically change the
experience of what you taste.
Richard Shotton: There's this amazing phrase from Daniel Carne wti. So it was
written as W-Y-S-I-A-T-I, and it stands for what is all there is, and it does what
it says on the tin, essentially if you are given.
A certain frame if you are posed some data in a particular way, what most
people do is just follow that path. They don't recut the numbers or the argument
all the different ways they could. So [00:11:00] absolutely, how you present
something is very important.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Not only is this our analysis, we have a quote from
Steve Pilsner, global brand director at Duracell, the parent company of Procell,
who says, this new campaign aims to cut through a cluttered media landscape
with an idea that is different, unexpected and will get people talking. He has the
strategy of the campaign is to.
Do something unexpected. And I love that he says with an idea, this is a bigger
than any one ad execution. I love that he naturally goes to, this is a big idea for
pro sell it. It's such a lovely way to think about how you can communicate a big
idea this way.
Richard Shotton: Yes. 'cause he begins by saying it's unexpected and that's
definitely true.
Most. B2B advertising, it's very dry, very rational, very [00:12:00] logical. So
first of all, by being unexpected, by taking this humorous approach it's far more
likely to be noticed. We've talked about it often. There's an idea called the von
Rests off effect, a very old idea in psychology. Essentially humans are
hardwired to notice what's different.

So by breaking those category conventions, by behaving unexpectedly, he gets.
For his brand, this notability. But of course, that's just the first task of a bit of
communication. It's no good. It's very important to be noticed, but it's no good if
you send off the wrong message. But the great thing is everything is of value.
This big idea that you need to switch from cost to buy. Which will benefit the
cheap and cheerful players in the market to cost a replace, which shifts the
understanding or the thinking to matters of quality and will benefit a premium
player like pro sale. So it's unexpectedness with a purpose, with an
idea.[00:13:00]
MichaelAaron Flicker: Richard, when we said we wanted to make this mini
series about effectiveness and effective work, we set a pretty high standard for
ourselves. We didn't want to just look at work we saw in market and thought
was using a behavioral science insight. We said, where can we go to find the.
Work and the effect it had on the business.
So this Battery Changer campaign from Procell, we sourced from the IPA,
which is the Institute of Practitioners in advertising, a UK based group that
really is in our minds, one of the global leaders in evaluating if the advertising
itself drove the. Result in market. So they have econometricians on the judging
board.
They require not just the creative but the sales data to be submitted. They
require a lot of rigor in order to [00:14:00] claim whether or not it was the
advertising that drove the results. And in this case, pro sales revenues were
increased by 12% and their market share went up 10% because of this
campaign. So we.
We not only want to bring you the behavioral science behind it, but we're, we
want to teach everyone. There are global bodies, there are institutes that look at
the effectiveness of advertising. This one, in this case, it's the IPA, and really
great to see the business results that Duracell and Procel got because of this
campaign.
Richard Shotton: Yeah I'd argue that the IP effectiveness awards that this did
so well in got it. Silver, it is one of the real gold standards of effectiveness
measurement that they really do probe and tease the data. You can't, as an c just
cherry pick a few statistics, chuck them in and hope people are seduced by your
glossy case study video.

They really do interrogate the [00:15:00] data. Yeah and a brilliant behavioral
science insight. Creatively executed and then there's the results to, to support it.
Success.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So let's discuss other ways of practically applying this
principle. And one of them is this idea of reframing a loss rather than a gain.
And this signpost to something we've spoken about in an earlier episode 22.
Scot milk, and this is a classic idea that we that we wanted to bring up here.
Classic example of loss aversion is this idea in Got milk that rather than
promoting the benefits of milk, the campaign focused on the negative
experience of running out what it was like to have dry cereal without milk, or a
great plate of cookies, but then no [00:16:00] milk.
And that absence was so tragic in that moment. And so by reframing milk as
something you'd regret. Not having the brand made its inaction feel you could
feel if you didn't have the product at that moment.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, and I know most people listening do not work for milk
processing boards.
And it's, in some respects it feels like a very different category, but the insight
from Got milk can definitely be applied by listeners, whatever business area
they're working in. So this idea of loss aversion, one of my favorite study
supporting it. It's another coincidentally 1988 study.
It comes from Elliot Aronson, so brilliant psychologist at Harvard, and he goes
around a neighborhood knocks on the door of these houses. There's 404 houses.
This is a nice big sample, and he tries to sell people locked insulation. Now the
twist in the experiment is sometimes he says to people that take out the loft
[00:17:00] insulation and you'll save 75 cents a day.
So he's emphasizing what people will benefit what the gain will be if they take
out the product. But other households, he has a slightly different story. He says,
take out the loft insulation or you'll be wasting 75 cents a day. So same
mathematical sum, 75 cents in both scenarios, but sometimes he emphasizes
what you'll gain.
Other times what you'll lose if you don't take out the product. And what he finds
is that roughly. People are 50% more likely to take out the loft insulation if he
emphasizes what they could be missing out on, what they could be losing out

on. So he calls this idea loss aversion, and it's something that has been
experimented on more broadly, but it's essentially the idea that.
The mathematically equivalent loss influencers more than the flip side gain.
And that's something I think yes, got milk does [00:18:00] it amazingly, but on
really mundane levels you could apply it. Most brands when they are trying to
do a discount or approach, they'll talk about come to us and you could save $50
versus a competitor.
What Aaron would say, what the got milk example would say is reframe it.
Don't talk about what you'll gain. Talk about if you don't switch to us, you will
be losing $50 by staying with the competitor that takes the same mathematical
sum, puts a different frame on it and makes it more effective.
MichaelAaron Flicker: You and I have talked about on the show in the past a
study about how much money. Would you have to win to to give that to, to
offset an equivalent loss? And tell me if I've got this right. If you get, if you're
willing to give someone $10, [00:19:00] they would have to have the equivalent
of $20 of loss help, help remind us of this
Richard Shotton: disconnect
MichaelAaron Flicker: it.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, ab, absolutely. So I always like talking about the
Aaronson study 'cause it's in a very realistic setting. I think it's very simple. The
study you are talking about, I think is the original 1973 study by Daniel
Kahneman and Amos Ky, and it was essentially giving people bets on the flick
of a coin.
So it's a 50 50 chance heads I win, tails I lose. And the economist tried to work
out well. What would I need to be rewarded if I would lose $5 on a tail coming
up with a coin. And what roughly happens for the average person is the gain
needs to be about twice the loss for them to once take part.
So
MichaelAaron Flicker: I have to be willing to get a $10 in a win in order to be
willing to pay $5 as a loss.
Richard Shotton: [00:20:00] Yeah. Whereas mathematically. You should be, if
it's $5 in the cent, that is the upside versus $5 on the downside, you should be

fighting my arm off to, to take that bet. 'cause you'll, you do it enough times and
you'll win.
But that's not how people behave. Yeah, Kahneman Anderski did it in this
slightly abstract setting of asking people about gambles. But it's exactly the
same principle as Aaronson does it in the with the homeowners.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And we brought this all up because Procell is trying to
focus on the loss of replace less, save more.
We're bringing this up because it connects to this concept that they're bringing.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. And I think on a, on another level. What the Aronson
Anderski experiments are showing are you will get different impacts from a
situation depending on whether you emphasize. [00:21:00] The frame of gain or
the frame of loss.
So I think it is another way of showing that people do not behave desiccated,
calculating machines who draw in all the information that they should. They are
very responsive to what you put in front of them. And if you put in front of
them the losses from not adopting a behavior, they will behave differently.
And if you talk about the gains that they could achieve by adopting a behavior,
so I think it's a another version of reframing, and it's a specific one. The
probably most listeners could go through their communications and find an
instance where they could switch the, gain, the savings that they're offering into
losses if people don't switch.
MichaelAaron Flicker: I love that idea. And we brought another study today
that talks about the power of reframing [00:22:00] specifically around product
outages, but this again talks about this power of language and changing the
frame. Is that right?
Richard Shotton: That, that's actually right. It's again. People respond to the
same situation very differently depending on the language that you use.
So we've talked about the leaven study, changing the labels of the ground beef.
We've talked about the Aronson study, changing the gain or loss frame. The
final study that that, that might be useful in this area is one boy Robert Peterson.
So it's a bit more up to date than the others.

It's a 2019 study. It's by Robert Peterson at UT Austin, and for his study he gets
1,117 people and he gets them to go through a product journey. So they're on a
e-commerce website and they are trying to buy an item and. Unfortunately, it's
just not there. It's unable to be [00:23:00] purchased on, on, on this occasion.
And I'm picking my words carefully for a good reason. Yeah. And after people
have finished their e-commerce journey, he asked them how irritated they are
with the website. The twist in the experiment is some of the participants saw
that item labeled, app stock. Some saw it labeled, unavailable, some saw it
labeled, sold out.
Difference in irritation is very apparent. When you cut the data by the label,
people saw, people are least annoyed if they see it as sold out. They're most
annoyed if they see it as unavailable or outta stock. And we're talking about a
kind of 11 to 15% variation in, in, in irritation levels. Now, the reason this
happens according to Peterson is if you label a product sold out.
You are [00:24:00] drawing attention to the fact that it was very popular. Lots
of people wanted it. You are harnessing social proof. To the benefit of your
product. If you labeled a product though as out of stock or unavailable, what
you are drawing attention to is the mistakes that you as a business have made.
You haven't got your logistics right, you haven't managed to get enough product
into stock. You're drawing attention to your ineptitude. So Peterson says exactly
the same situation will be interpreted very differently dependent on the
language that people use. And again, I love this study 'cause it's such a simple
thing.
Every business pretty much every business is gonna have an occasion where
they just can't fulfill an order, doesn't cost you anything. You've got to label it a
certain way. Why not label it in the way that works with human nature rather
than against it?
MichaelAaron Flicker: And what I love about adding this to today's discussion
is of course understanding that the power that you choose of the words can
affect people's [00:25:00] reaction.
Something we talk about a lot and it's a great example, but we talked before
about how do you signal a loss instead of a gain. How to hear, do you signal
certain words versus other words. It creates more creative marketers. In my
mind. When we're really nitpicking at all of the touch points, we are not
satisfied by just saying out of stock.

We're saying, what else could we say? Or in? In this case, we're not satisfied
with just saying Unavailable outta stock might give us a little bit of a boost, but
I think it creates this. Twofold benefit. One, we feel empowered as marketers to
continue to test and put new things in market to see how they perform.
And two, it shows that slight changes, inexpensive, maybe costless changes can
drive performance for our for our campaigns.
Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. And at the very heart of it. [00:26:00] Is
people have to have, also, the marketers have to have the right model of human
behavior in their mind to take advantage of some of these experiments we're
talking about.
Because if as a marketer you believe that humans just neutrally interpret the
event in front of them. What's the point of muck around with the language it
doesn't matter that people are gonna judge your product based on its inherent
qualities. So you'd ignore all these opportunities.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Yeah.
Richard Shotton: But if you follow the behavioral science evidence, if you
follow this principle of what is all there is and framing and that changing
people's attention from one aspect of the product to another can radically change
their interpretation of that product. If you bind into that mental model of how
people behave, suddenly everything's up for play.
Tweaking the wording, thinking about what frame benefits your product,
suddenly these are massive opportunities. I think it all comes back to having the
right mental [00:27:00] model of human behavior to start with.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So I love this point. I think we've double underscored
it. It's really an empowerment message for everyone listening.
I. Something that we started the podcast with kind of comes to mind to me here,
which is we watched the commercial and we laughed. We enjoyed the spot that
VML put together that Duracell and VML put together, and there's something
about humor. That really can break through. And we've touched on this from
time to time, but in this whole empowerment message and thinking about how
folks receive messages, maybe we should talk a little bit more about humor and
maybe the power it has to signal a strong quality.

Richard Shotton: Yeah, absolutely. I think when we were talking with Mark
Ritson, he mentioned. John [00:28:00] DOS has talks about this 95 5 rule that
applies to both business, to business and consumer marketing. Most of the time,
people are not in market for your product. Now,
MichaelAaron Flicker: that would be the 95% in his example.
Richard Shotton: Yeah. 95% are not in market for your product, if you just
advertise in a straight manner with logic about why your product is amazing,
most people, you are giving them information that will be useful in the future.
Now, that sounds as if it's a great thing to do, but there is a fundamental
principle of behavioral science called present bias, which is.
We are very interested about what is happening to us now. We give that great
weight and importance. What is gonna happen to us in the future we don't really
care about. It's too far away. It's any benefit in the future, we will discount very
steeply. So if you do a dry message with all this useful information about the
something that's gonna happen in a month or a year's time, people don't really
care.
What they care [00:29:00] about is how they feel at the moment, and that's why
humor is so powerful, because it makes us laugh. It's enjoyable in the here and
now, and the present bias suggests that's what. People are influenced by, we turn
towards things that give us pleasure in the moment we turn away from things
that bore us or don't give us pleasure in the moment, even if they have great
benefits in the future, and humor is about giving that immediate benefit.
MichaelAaron Flicker: It gives us something to really think about how we add
that to the toolbox. I think there's sometimes a big fear amongst marketers that
humor specifically am I gonna be off color? Is there is there reasons why my
humor may make us look childish? Or is there getting humor right? Is I think on
the list of marketers worries?
Is it fair to say I,
Richard Shotton: I think that's [00:30:00] absolutely fair to say. But it's worth
working at it. It's worth giving your creative agency lots of time to get it right
not maybe accepting the first version of the ad. But just because something is
hard doesn't mean that we shouldn't try and deliver on it.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try and use that tactic.

MichaelAaron Flicker: Good life advice, good market advice.
Richard Shotton: Yes.
MichaelAaron Flicker: So we've talked about a number of topics today.
Richard, would you mind to go through and just bring back the biggest points
from today's conversation?
Richard Shotton: So we've covered, I think, three big areas. We've talked
about the power of framing that Daniel Kahneman has this idea of w what is all
there is.
So the how you frame the information. Is super important because people,
[00:31:00] although they probably should from a logical perspective, people
won't go out and get all the information that's relevant to making a decision.
They will give disproportionate emphasis in their deliberations to the
information that is easiest to access.
So changing this frame of reference can have a big effect. We then talked about.
All sorts of ways of doing that. So more kind of tactical approaches. And one of
the examples we talked about was Elliot Aronson, that he talks about this idea
in 1988 of loss aversion, the argument that losses influences us more than the
equivalent gains.
So the simple example is don't tell people what they would gain by taking out
your product. Tell them what they are missing out on if they don't take out your
products. And then the final part we talked about. Was present bias. So this idea
that humans are very driven [00:32:00] by what is happening to them in the
immediate moment or the near future.
Don't ignore that in your communications. Work with that bias by sugaring.
The pill of your communications make them enjoyable to engage with and
people will lean in and listen. Whereas if you just tell people about future
benefits, and remember, most people are not in market any one time, so most of
the genuine reasons to buy their future benefits, they will be discounted.
Very heavily in people's minds. So three big things, w loss aversion and present
bias we've discussed today.
MichaelAaron Flicker: And with that, we brought you to the end of our
analysis on Procell, replace Less, save More. If you found this episode
enjoyable, please share it with those that have passion for great marketing and if

you would like, [00:33:00] comment or share. Try it one more time. I'll start at
the beginning. And that brings us to the end of our episode today on Pro Sell.
Replace Less, save More. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with
another marketer that you think would find it interesting and if you would like,
comment or follow our pages, it helps us find more. Listeners just like you so
that we can reach them and share this thought leadership with them.
Until next time, I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.
Richard Shotton: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron Flicker: Thanks so much for listening.
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