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14th August, 2024 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Phill Agnew - how to convert more prospects into clients using behavioural science

Phil Bray 

Good morning everybody and welcome to today’s webinar. We’ve had some great guests on so far this year, and today is no exception. I’m thrilled that we’re joined by Phill Agnew of Nudge, the UK’s number one marketing podcast and to talk to us about the fascinating topic of nudges, and how we can all use them in our businesses to turn more prospects into clients. So Phill, welcome and thank you for being here today.

Phill Agnew 

Thanks so much for having me very excited to talk about my favourite topic, nudges.

Phil Bray 

Excellent. So to keep us all in order, we’ve got Dan. Dan, do you want to do your housekeeping section if that’s okay? Explain to anybody that’s new here how we do things.

Dan Campbell 

Of course! Wow, if I’m keeping everybody in order, I think we’re all doomed. So yes, I’m Dan, the Head of Branding and Design here at Yardstick. What do we all need to know? Looking through the list of attendees on the webinar today, it looks like we’ve got a number of newbies in the crowd so, welcome to your first Yardstick webinar. The familiar faces among you will know that we encourage as many questions and comments as possible, so, get stuck in. Of course, we have a special guest with us, so Phil with one L will lead with his own questions today, but I’ll be picking up plenty of your questions to ask Phill with two L’s – It’s the only way I can tell them apart. it’s a safe space. The usual rules apply so ask that daft question, disagree with us, you can of course ask sensible questions and agree with us, that’s also allowed, but this is your session. Let’s get the most out of the hour, and you can do that by using the Q&A box or the chat function. I’ll be monitoring both today and reading them out at regular intervals as we go along. Of course, to assist that effort, our Client Engagement Manager, Abi, will be answering a few of the questions directly in the chat and providing links to any resources we mention as we go. Of course, you’re going to want to re-watch this; there’s going to be tons of great stuff, so you’ll absolutely want to binge it and re-watch it as many times as possible. Abi is going to be making sure that a recording of the session, and any show notes will be arriving in your inbox later today, and at the end of the session, she’ll be telling us about our upcoming webinars, and a LinkedIn session that she’ll be running in early September. So, stick around for that. I think that’s it for housekeeping. I’m not sure what the collective noun for multiple Phils is, is it Phul rather than Phil? Put your suggestions in the comments anyway. Phil, Phul, over to you.

Phil Bray 

Cheers Dan, thank you for that introduction. Right, Phill, welcome! You’re a behavioural science expert, and as I’ve said, you’ve founded and host the UK’s number one marketing podcast, Nudge. Just tell us a bit about your history and the history of Nudge, if you would.

Phill Agnew 

About 10 years ago, I graduated from university with a marketing degree, which unfortunately cost me close to £50,000, which is a lot of debt, and I went into my first job as a Junior Community Manager. It’s a very low-level marketing role. I was given things like social media accounts to manage and blogs to write and I realised so many of the things I was being asked to do, the tactics I was being asked to put out, I had no idea how to do them; I was basically clueless. This was very upsetting for someone who’d spent four years at university and £50,000 for it because I thought I should be a lot better at marketing but it turns out I’d learnt a lot of high level strategy stuff. I knew a lot about SWOT and the four Ps, good strategy, bad strategy, I’d read Blue Ocean, but I didn’t know how to write copy that was compelling, I didn’t know how to write email subject lines that would convert, I didn’t know how to create pricing that would nudge people towards spending more, and I really struggled. It wasn’t until maybe two or three years into my job when I discovered the world of behavioural science. I read Influenced by Robert Cialdini, and eventually The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton and I realised that when you’re in marketing you can sometimes feel that you don’t have a set of laws and principles to guide you, unlike, say, finance or accounting professions where there are laws and principles you can use to do your work. In marketing it sometimes feels like you are just throwing a dart at a dartboard blind; you’re just trying anything to see if it works but, what behavioural science, psychology and nudge theory can do is actually give you some laws and principles to follow which will make your work more effective. I realised that, learned more about behavioural science and started to apply it to my work, and actually did get a fair bit better at my job. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with the world of behavioural science. I decided I wanted to speak to these wonderful experts, authors and practitioners who apply these things. The best way to do that, secret tip for everyone, is create a podcast and invite people on, because people love to talk on a podcast whereas they don’t love to just get a coffee over Zoom. So, I did that, and I managed to interview some of the people I really adored, and five years on, it’s the UK’s number one marketing podcast, my full-time job, and what I spend pretty much every waking minute thinking about.

Phil Bray

Adored is a lovely word there; I love that word. I think it applies to podcasts and I think Abi would say it applies to webinars as well, given her success at getting certain guests on this year, including your good self. That was the first time that you’ve mentioned nudge theory in today’s webinar Phill. I do want to get practical later on but let’s start with a bit of theory. Define nudge theory and define nudges for us, if you would.

Phill Agnew 

Nudges, first of all, are a smaller tactic within the wider world of behavioural science and psychology. So I’ll start with nudges. A nudge is essentially altering someone’s behaviour without forbidding them from doing something or changing their economic incentives. It is nudging somebody without actually forcing them, without shoving them. Thaler and Sunstein who wrote the book called Nudge, said, to count as a nudge, it must be cheap, it must be easy to avoid, it can’t be a mandate. The very best example of this, which is again from Thaler’s book, is a study that Google ran in their canteens. Google decided that they wanted their staff to eat a little bit healthier – they offer free food in their canteens – and so they decided to tweak where they placed things in the canteen; rather than having the chocolate at eye level when you walk in, they put the fruit at eye level, rather than having the still water behind opaque glass and the fizzy drinks behind clear glass, they swapped it around; suddenly the Coca Cola was sort of hidden from view, it was still there but it wasn’t purely visible, whereas the still water was. They did a few other things too such as reducing the size of the plates and a few other tweaks, and it changed what people ate. People ate far healthier, they consumed better quality calories, less fat, and all these things, but nobody was forced. They weren’t given an economic incentive, they weren’t told to stop eating chocolate, their options hadn’t changed, they were just nudged in that direction. So that is a nudge. A nudge is also part of a much wider field of psychology and behavioural science, which is essentially the study of human behaviour. So behavioural science is the study of how humans behave, and it is a science, this is the important thing here. Everything I’m talking about today has been tested in a lab, run by a scientist, put in a peer reviewed journal and has hopefully been replicated. There was a bit of a replication crisis in science and psychology, but nevertheless, most of these things have been tested, and that makes it more reliable than, say, the latest Richard Branson book where he shares all of the wonderful things he did, or wisdom from a productivity guru, where she shares all of the amazing things she does in her day to be more efficient. The point with with behavioural science is it’s a science and it’s more reliable, you can apply these things to your work and there should be evidence that suggests it works. It won’t always, but it should be more reliable than something hearsay.

Phil Bray 

One of your podcasts recently talked about being able to test outcomes. You were talking particularly about subject lines and there was the subject line with American veterans claiming cash benefits that they’re entitled to. Then, you used some of that knowledge to change some of your email subject lines, and saw an increase in open rates, click to open rates, etc.

Phill Agnew 

This is quite an interesting one Phil, the veterans email is an example of a nudge known as the endowment effect and this is an effect which was actually first approved, I think, by Daniel Kahneman, and he gave people mugs. Mugs like this, not with hot tea like I have, but a mug like this and he said, “This mug is yours, we’re giving it to you for free. It’s your mug. You can maybe have a cup of tea or coffee from it, so it feels a bit more like it’s yours.” then he asked people at the end, “How much would you be willing to give that mug away for, if I paid you for it? How much would you be willing to sell it for?” those who had been given the mug and felt ownership over it asked for far more money for the mug than those who were just buying a mug that they didn’t own, or perhaps selling a mug that they didn’t feel ownership over. So, when we feel ownership over something we value it far higher. There is a very famous example of this, by Nunes and Nunes in 2005 where they tested coffee loyalty cards with customers. All of us know about these loyalty cards. We go to a coffee shop, I think it’s a lovely thing businesses can do, we get a loyalty card and if we go 10 times, we get 10 stamps and a free coffee at the end. It’s essentially 10% off for loyal customers, a really wonderful idea, except there’s a way you can make it far more effective. What Nunes and Nunes did is they gave customers two types of loyalty cards over the sets of two weeks. This is an important thing I’m talking about here, this is called a randomised controlled trial. Some portion of people in the real world, these are real customers, get a card with 10 stamps that are needed to collect, so they need to buy 10 coffees. Another portion of people, this is a different population so they don’t cross over, get a card with eight stamps that they need to collect, so two fewer, except those who got the 10 stamp variant had the first two stamps plugged in by the barista. An economist would look at this and they would say, “Both loyalty cards are identical. Both sets of customers need to buy eight coffees to get a free coffee.” The endowment effect showcases that that’s not the case. When you get two free coffees plugged in for you, you feel that sense of ownership. You feel like, “Oh, this card is really mine, because I’ve been given that, it’s something to do with me.” There are also other biases at play here, like reciprocity; you want to return the favour, there’s the gold gradient effect, which is, when you’ve started a task it’s easier to continue doing the task and finish it. If you really don’t want to write an email and you just start writing the email it’s actually much easier to finish the email, rather than if you don’t bother starting it at all. It turns out, those who received the coffee card with two stamps plugged in were, I think it was something like 56% more likely to complete the loyalty card and actually get their free coffee. So that’s the endowment effect, and then you asked me about an email subject line, so this was a wonderful application of that study. That study was shared in a peer reviewed journal, and somebody thought, “Let’s apply this study” and this is Maya Shankar’s application. Maya worked with the Department of Veterans in the US and when a veteran leaves the army, they get entitled to a lot of benefits which the US government provides, but they found that very few people actually enrolled in these benefits. What Maya did is she didn’t try and change the economic outcomes, she didn’t try and force people to enroll, she didn’t make it default opt-i, she just changed the subject line of the email. The subject line had read before she got involved, “You are eligible for the program.” Very standard subject that’s the kind of subject line that all of us would think to write, that’s the subject line that AI would write; it’s correct, you are a veteran, and you are eligible for the programme. But Maya knew about the endowment effect and she knew that people value things more when they feel ownership over them, so she tweaked one of the words to make that feeling of ownership present. She said, “You have earned this program” beneath that, you had the options to sign up, and just by telling veterans that they had earned the program, rather than that they were eligible for the program, increased the amount of veterans who enrolled by 9%. That nudge was so successful from Maya that it actually landed her a job at the White House for Barack Obama, so this stuff can be really successful. It’s wonderful example of how just understanding a little bit of psychology and making quite a small tweak can have quite an incredible impact on your career and your business.

Phil Bray 

I can think of, and Abi can probably think of one tweak that she about two and a half years ago along those lines. When Abi applied for The Yardstick Agency, she won’t mind me saying, she added Yardstick’s, branding, logos, color palette, etc, to her covering letter, CV, and supporting documents. In a sea of other applications, it really stood out and nudged me in that direction. Okay, so there were a couple of examples there of nudges but give us a couple more of your favourite nudges, Phill, or the ones that you think have been most effective and then we’ll start getting really practical for the financial advisers and financial planners on this call.

Phill Agnew 

I want to just explain Abi’s one because I love that. It’s something I’ve done before Abi, I’ve done that when I was applying for jobs, I’d put the logo and there are two nudges at play there. There’s one which is known as input bias, or the effort bias. When you showcase or when you put more effort into your – Rory Sutherland talks about all the time – when you put more effort into the communication, people value the communication more. If I propose to my partner in a McDonald’s, it’s unlikely that she’ll say yes but if I propose in a four-star Michelin, a three-star Michelin restaurant, even better if it’s a four star, I don’t even know if they exist, it’s far more likely that she’ll say yes. If Yardstick, want to advertise their business, they should put it on a billboard in an expensive area, that will be more effective, even if they just take a picture of that and then share it on socials and it’s only up for one day, than if they do a Facebook ad because the the communication takes more effort. So, what you’re doing with the cover letter and the CV, is you’re putting in more effort. There’s a really interesting example of this at Starbucks back in 2010 and I just learned about this recently, where Starbucks baristas started getting really good at pouring coffee fast. They could do this thing called Parallel pouring where a single barista could make four lattes at once. This sounds fantastic, an economist would say, “This is brilliant, we’re going to save so much money because we can process customers more quickly, and customers like time saved.” Except it wasn’t; Starbucks realised that customers were enjoying the experience far less because the coffee was taking so little time to make. Rather than feeling like a highly skilled thing or care-laden thing, instead, receiving a coffee just felt purely transactional and almost like it’s being made by a machine. They valued the coffee less because it took less time to create. This is the same thing with a CV, if you take more time to create a wonderful CV, it will be more effective. There’s another bias at play here, which is really interesting, known as the halo effect and this is a broad bias. The Halo effect was founded by, or discovered by a researcher called Thorndike in the 1930s. He researched soldiers in the army, and asked generals or their superiors for their opinions on the soldiers and he found direct correlations between a soldier’s basically attractiveness, general appearance, height and other skills. If somebody was tall, dark, and handsome, they were far more likely to be rated as a fantastic leader or even have better physical ability than somebody who wasn’t. Thorndike found this and basically said, “Well, this is a bias. People are basically assuming they have all these other skills because they have a very noticeable good skill.” and there are modern day applications of this. There’s a really cool study where stores next to Gucci stores, even if they’re not luxury stores, so even if you put a Poundland next door, this hasn’t been tested, but basically, if you put a Poundland next to a Gucci store, the amount of money people will spend at the Poundland will increase because of that halo effect. You’re near something of high quality so you assume it. I tested this for my podcast. I asked about 1000 people on Google Surveys, “Will you listen to Nudge? and for half of them, this is another randomised control trial, for half them, I just showed them my logo, 6.4% said “Yes” that’s probably normal, a lot of people hadn’t heard of the show before, they were just basing it off what the logo looked like and 6.4% of people said, “Yes, I would listen to this if I saw it.” But for the other half of the people, I asked them the exact same question, “Would you listen to my podcast?” I showed them my logo that was the main part of the image, but just faded behind my podcast logo, slightly faded and a bit blurred were the podcast logos of very famous shows like Desert Island Discs, Diary of a CEO, Off-menu and whatever the other popular shows were at the time. They were just faded in the background and I was testing out this halo effect again and it turns out, when I said, “Would you listen to this podcast?” and had other popular shows behind mine, 15.9% said they would listen. I thought “Hmm that’s increased the amount of people who said they would listen just because I’m near other popular podcasts.” I think, in a way, Abi, you’ve benefited from the same thing. Phil values the Yardstick logo, sees it as a very good company, and one that exudes things like confidence, trust, and competence as well and just by being near that logo on your CV, you’re probably benefiting from that halo effect as well. It’s a really good nudge to apply and, yeah, there are two nudges you’ve included there which I think are really effective. Phil, you asked for more practical examples, so I’ll do a couple more. Social proof; this is one that a lot of people listening in will know about. It’s the idea that we follow the actions of others, so we are more likely to do something if we know other people are doing something. If we’re on holiday in Greece and we walk past the Taverna, which has a massive queue out the door, we’re probably going to want to get in that queue. If we hear that Barbie has had record sales at the box office and that everybody is going to see it, we will be far more likely to want to go and see that film. Marketers can take advantage of this by simply signaling which of your products are most popular or what people are buying, you can increase your sales. There’s a wonderfully simple example of this from Richard Shotton. It’s a study he did in a pub in London. He simply went to the pub and asked the bartender, “What is your most popular beer?” They said it was London Pride. London Pride gets the most sales in this this pub. And Richard said, “Well, I want to run an experiment. On one week, I want you to put a small sign in front of that beer saying, this is our most popular beer and on the other week, I want you to take it away, and I want you to compare the sales for all of your beers during that period.” what happened when the most popular sign was there is sales for London pride went up by 2.5 times. So, this already popular beer gets a dramatic increase in the amount of sales. What was most interesting is it wasn’t like the sales for that one beer went up and the rest went down, it was actually that sales for that one beer went up and the rest stayed more or less the same, people were just buying more of that beer. Just by showcasing that other people purchasing a lot of that beer, it encouraged other people, other customers, to do the same thing. So it’s a wonderful example of social proof in practice.  I’ll share one more if we’ve got time, Phil? Whilst I’m rattling through these practical examples. That was social proof. There’s another bias a lot of you will know, which is loss aversion. Loss aversion is the idea that we feel that losses are more painful than equivalent gains. If you find, if you walk down the street later today and you find £10 lying on the ground, very unlikely seeing as no one carries cash anymore but let’s imagine, try and picture what that note looks like. I know it’s a long time since you’ve seen one but try to picture one, it’s on the ground and you see £10, you pick it up and put it in your pocket, you’re going to feel good. But what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found is that if you lose £10, not the £10 you just gained but in another scenario, if you lose £10, let’s say you’re you’re mugged and someone takes £10 off you, or you had it in your pocket and it’s gone, the pain you feel, the negative feeling you feel of losing that £10 is twice as strong as the positive feeling you would have felt from gaining it. So, the losses feel are worse than equivalent gains. The £10 example is a bit of a different one, but we know this. Maybe we don’t value our partners as much until they go on holiday, or they go away, or they break up with us, and we really feel that pain. We don’t enjoy the holiday until they get back, and then we can’t have that experience anymore. We hate the job while we’re in it but when we leave or we get unemployed, we think “It really wasn’t that bad.” Losses feel worse than the equivalent gains, and you can use this as a marketer. In fact, Amazon use this brilliantly. I’ve tried to limit my use of Amazon for different reasons and back a few years ago, I did eventually manage to unsubscribe from Amazon Prime, but it’s really hard because they laden that whole experiences with very powerful nudges. The best is when you’re going through the process, they say, “Phill, just to let you know you’ve saved…” and it’s some astronomical number. It’s like, “Phill, by the way, you’ve saved £542.57 over the last five years using Amazon Prime. Are you sure you want to lose those savings?” and it’s incredibly effective because suddenly I’m not thinking that I’m only losing free delivery or something like that, I’m thinking, “Well, I’m actually going to lose this amount of money over the next five years if I keep using Amazon.” Richard Chataway in his book, Behavioural Business researched that with Amazon, they found that just having that message saying “You will lose all these savings.” reduced churn by 42% for Amazon. So, 42% of people who would have churned, would have left Amazon Prime, decided to stay because they saw all of the savings they would have lost if they had quit. Another wonderful example. So we gone through a few there, halo effect, the bit of input bias we talked about with Abi and then social proof and loss version, powerful nudges you can use to improve your business.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, Phill. I want to take that theory and get really practical now for the audience that we’ve got here, which is mostly financial advisers, financial planners and mortgage brokers and then a few suppliers into those organisations and those people. I think you’ve already given us, perhaps unwittingly, a good example of nudge theory and some of these biases in action. Financial services awards are quite a big thing and I’ve judged awards, and I was chatting to another judge of awards earlier on this week and we were comparing a few scars, war stories, and that sort of stuff. One of the things we were talking about is the fact that there might be a 1500 word limit and how we feel as judges if someone’s only submitted 800 words for example, we don’t feel they’ve made a huge effort. The same, you can often include supporting evidence, PDFs of supporting evidence against your awards, and if the entrant doesn’t include that, or they’ve rushed it, it isn’t particularly impressive. Again, you don’t feel positively disposed to them as judges, so perhaps unwittingly, Phill, you talked about a practical example, or you gat me thinking about a practical example that people on this call who are entering awards can actually use to show that they’ve made an effort with their entry.

Phill Agnew 

Absolutely. I think, Phil, what you’re actually talking about is a part of behavioural science, nudge theory, and psychology that I feel is almost the pillar. Effort does seem to directly correlate with the output that you’re after. If you put more effort into something, you get more back. There are nudges that amplify that such as social proof. If you manage to showcase your social proof with more effort, you’ll get more benefits from that. You can amplify loss aversion in the same way, but the effort is so crucially important. I actually learned this as a service talk at my university course, and maybe this shows how poor quality my university course was but I learned very quickly I was getting quite low grades for my coursework and I thought, oh, this isn’t good I’ve spent a lot of money on this. This was back before you sent an email to your lecturer with your with your essay, instead, you printed it off and you handed it to them in person. I didn’t know anything about effort and input bias, but I thought, “Can I add a bit more effort?” I started to laminate my papers and do a nice binding as well, and showcase it. I put a bit more time and effort into it and I’m not kidding, my grades changed overnight. I went from getting 2:2s to 2:1s to 1:1s just by putting in more effort. That’s probably in a bad indictment of me and my course, but anyway, enough about that. It showcases that effort is really valuable, and there are so many other examples of this. There’s a wonderful study in HBR run by Michael Norton, or at least Michael Norton’s colleagues, which was done in a really interesting restaurant. This restaurant had a view through to the kitchen, a very easy way for the diners at the restaurant to see the chefs and for the chefs to see the diners as well. The only thing blocking them was a glass wall and the researchers wanted to figure out if there’s something about seeing a chef create your meal that changes your enjoyment and so on alternate weeks, they would either keep that grass wall clear or frost over the glass wall, and then ask people to rate the enjoyment of their meal. They found out that people who could see the chef making their meal would enjoy the meal more, would pay more for the meal, and would be more likely to come back. What’s really interesting is it works both ways. When the chefs could see the diners enjoy their meal, they actually also created better food. So there’s something incredible about seeing effort and also seeing the output of your effort that clearly motivates people a lot. There was a study with real estate agents which I’ve always found quite funny, and it’s probably one that your listeners could apply very easily. This is, again, a study where scientists went and worked with real estate agents. They had a lot of customers who would come to the real estate agents and say, “Can you give me a list of 10 houses in this area that I would be looking to buy?” Maybe this is before Rightmove and stuff, it’s a bit of an old study, the real estate agents would typically just give 10 houses. The scientists said, “Let’s test this, hold on. Is there some way you can explain how you’re giving them this bit of research that you’ve done that will change their their appreciation of the houses.” So they said, “For some people, just tell them that it took you 30 minutes to put together this list with the help of of your database online, and you were able to do it quite quickly. For the other people, can you tell them it took you eight hours to put together?” the eight hour variant was true so we can maybe talk about ethics in a bit, but the the important thing here is the eight hour variant was true. That’s very important, you shouldn’t lie about these things and I think people are getting very good at noticing when people are lying. So, the eight hour variant was true, it had actually taken eight hours. So you’re told it takes eight hours, and you’re looking at the sheet and thinking “Oh yeah. This is everything I asked for, this does have the room for the grand piano that I wanted in my fourth bedroom. Fantastic.” They then measured what people think about the houses, how likely are they to buy, how many people actually buy. It turns out, when you showcase your effort – these are the same houses by the way, they’re getting the same list that they would have done anyway – when they said “This took me eight hours to prepare”, people were far more likely to rate the houses as better quality, far more likely to go and visit, and far more likely to buy. A very simple way for real estate agents to improve their time was just to showcase the effort they were putting in. Finally, just to talk about this one last time, you can tell I love this bias, I’ve tested it myself. Like any business I run a fair few ads to drive people to my podcast and I’ve always liked running ads on Reddit because it’s very easy to run tests, very easy to run AB tests to compare, say, different pieces of copy. I think it was two years ago, at the end of the year I created an episode which had the six best marketing lessons I’ve learned over the course of that year. For half of the audience I used the copy that I’d used for the episode for this ad. I said, “Learn the six best marketing lessons I’ve learned over the course of this year, in this end of year special of Nudge.” and then an image of the podcast episode; for the variant, I decided to showcase my effort. I said “I’ve spent 480 minutes speaking to marketing experts this year. Here are the six lessons I’ve learned.” So the content is pretty much the same, you’re still selling the same benefit of “I want to share the best lessons I’ve learned this year.” But for one of them, I’ve said “I’ve spent 480 minutes talking.” That’s not even that long over the course of the year I should say, that’s really not much time, but that one effort ladened post got a 45% higher click through rate. People were far more likely to click on that post, and then I was able to measure they were far more likely to actually go and listen to the episode. So it was a really simple way of encouraging people to act just by showcasing my effort. We’ve gone for quite simple examples there, literally telling people the amount of time you put into something, but Abi’s example is far better, because you can showcase your effort by putting on the logo of Yardstick on a CV, or maybe binding your essay before you hand it into your lecturer, and it will trigger the same bias. It will cause people to think it’s higher quality without having to maybe be quite so crude and un-British about it by saying, “I’ve spent loads of time working on this.” So there are some really smart ways you can use this bias to do all these wonderful things and like you say, Phil, applying for awards is a classic version. If you showcase that you’ve put more effort into that application, you will be more likely to be picked for that award.

Phil Bray 

So it sounds as though any of the people on this webinar today, advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers who are maybe having some difficult conversations with clients about price and value, showing their effort, either in the way you suggested, or the way Abi did, or showing them the amount of time something takes, actually, might help solve some of those value conversations.

Phill Agnew 

Absolutely. There’s another interesting example of this which Rory Sutherland shared at Ogilvy’s Nudgestock talk a few weeks back. It’s really interesting. It’s a newspaper article, I think it’s in the Telegraph or The Guardian, I can’t remember. There was a couple who really wanted to buy a house on this one street. There are about 20 houses on the street, and they really wanted to buy one of these houses. That’s very difficult to do because none of these houses were for sale. So imagine all of us, if we wanted to buy one of these houses, what would we do? Maybe go speak to a real estate agent. They would say, “Sorry, none of them are for sale” and you think “Well there’s nothing I can do. This is impossible.” But they decided to use a bit of effort. They wrote a letter to every single one of the houses on the street and posted it through the letterbox. Something like nine people invited them round, five said they were willing to consider an offer, two said, “Okay, here’s my price.” and one person sold them the house. So out of 20 houses, they got an incredible conversion rate. Incredible. The most interesting thing they did, and what Rory Sutherland points out, is they didn’t type the letter and print it off; they didn’t do that because that’s easy and you can do one letter for 20 households, print them all off, it would take maybe 20 minutes. They hand wrote each individual letter and if you hand write a letter for someone, especially today, because when was the last time we were using handwriting? – it showcases that you’re putting in a lot of effort, and everybody who receives that handwritten letter is, one, triggered by a distinctiveness because they think, “Well, I never see handwritten letters anymore. So that’s that stands out in my mind.” But two, immediately acknowledges that there’s a lot of effort that has been put into this communication and they’re far more likely to read it and far more likely to take action. So there’s something really powerful in the effort you put into how you communicate as well. I’m not telling you that you should be writing letters to people, but I am saying, if you’ve got a client you want to stay on very good terms with, just putting more effort into that relationship will really help, sending them a handwritten Christmas card will really help, remembering when their birthday is and messaging them about it will really help. This sounds cliche. It sounds like 1990s advice, but there is science and evidence that backs up that it actually works, so we shouldn’t throw it away because we think it sounds like something the Mad Men would do. We should utilise it because it works.

Phil Bray 

That takes us to what I want to be the practical section of this webinar. One of the things we talk to financial advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers about is ways they can get more referrals and recommendations from existing clients because they’re always the best type of new enquiry. They’ve got the lowest cost of acquisition and the highest conversion rate. One of the things we’ve preached for a few years now is that when you receive a referral from an existing client, you don’t say thank you by picking the phone up or by email, you hand write a card, you hand write the envelope, you lick the stamp, if that’s a thing these days, and go and put it in the post box yourself. Because, like you say, when it lands the next day, or seven days later if the Royal mail’s not working as well as it should, and they get a bit of junk, a bill, and a card, they’re going to open that card first, aren’t they? It shows the effort that you’ve gone to. I remember sitting in a referral workshop that we’re doing, and one of the advisers said, “I don’t have time to do that, I’m going to get my PA to do it for me.” and for me, the effect of doing it dropped massively. So I’m delighted that you said that, because it has backed up something that we’ve been saying for years. In terms of nudges, what other nudges can you think about Phill, apart from that idea about the card, that advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers can use to encourage their clients to recommend them to more people?

Phill Agnew 

One is social proof. There are some wonderful studies into social proof which showcase that it can really shift people’s behaviour. The oldest example of this is from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence. He worked with hotels in Arizona and he wanted to encourage guests to reuse their hotel towels. The thing that every single hotel room does is put a card on the bed saying, “Help us save the environment by reusing your towel.” A funny thing to say for a hotel, which is a pretty gas-guzzling corporation that doesn’t seem to have any climate conscious values whatsoever, and is and is printing off these single use cards every single time. But anyway, they print off those cards because they help us save the environment but Robert Cialdini says, “Let’s try something else. Let’s try using social proof. Change the message.” He says change the message to say, “Most guests in this hotel reuse their towel. Please join them.” That increased the amount of people who reuse their towel by I think 32%. Then he said something even more specific. Social proof gets more impactful when you make it more specific. He said, “Most guests in this hotel room (he gives the name of the room), reuse their towel…” that made people 48% more likely to reuse their towel than the control. We follow the actions of others, and we follow the actions of those who are similar to us, in this case, those who have stayed in our room. A really smart thing to do, if you wanted your customers to refer other customers is truthfully, and this is important, if it’s true, say, “Most customers of IQ do tend to refer another customer.” Or “Here are some examples of customers similar to you who are also referring others and they’ve received X, Y, Z benefits.” Showing most people are doing this can be a really powerful way to shift behaviour. Some of you might say, “Only 1% of our customers ever do referrals. It’s a really small amount. How do I use social proof?” You can still benefit from it if you use dynamic social proof. This is a study cited in Richard Shotton’s book The Illusion of Choice, where there were a separate set of researchers who went to restaurants in the US who wanted to encourage more people to eat vegetarian or vegan food. They couldn’t say most customers eat vegetarian, vegan food, because it’s not true; most customers don’t. Most customers order the steak so they had to find a different approach because they still wanted to test social proof. Rather than saying “16% of customers order vegan food, maybe you should try it.” That wouldn’t be effective, because it’s saying the majority of people don’t take this action, so it would backfire. They said “The amount of customers who are ordering vegan food and vegetarian food in this restaurant has increased (and this was correct) by 72% over the last few months. Would you like to join them?” They’re showcasing that there’s a big majority of people who are changing their behaviour, it’s not the majority of people ordering that food but in terms of a change, it seems like a much bigger number. That’s something you could use as well. Maybe it’s only 2% of your customers who do referrals, but you could say “The number of customers who have done referrals over the last six months have gone up by 52% learn why.” or another CTA, whatever that might be. That’s for quite broad stroke things. If it is a real one-to-one relationship, definitely think about reciprocity. This, again, is one of Cialdini’s principles. If you read his book, Influence, he talks about social proof, reciprocity, liking, and he talks about a few others. Reciprocity is a bias that all of us know inside out because we’ve been taught it since we were a kid. When you do someone a favour, they return the favour. This feels so childish to talk about on a webinar, because it’s just so obvious but there are so many studies that prove it works. The most famous is Dennis Reagan’s study in an art gallery. He set up two different variants of the study, one where two people walked around an art gallery, looked at the pictures, and then one of them was actually his research assistant but the real participant didn’t know this. The research assistant, who was undercover as a fellow art gazer, said, “Oh, by the way, I’m selling charity raffle tickets. Could you buy some?” Not many people buy them or maybe they buy a couple just because they don’t want to feel awkward. In another example using different people but the same quantity, so they can measure the two side by side, the research assistant earlier in the in the walk around the art gallery, pops out, buys two cans of Coke from the vending machine and gives one to their other participant looking at the art. He says, “I went to get a Coke, I thought I’d get you one as well.” 30 minutes later the research assistant who’s undercover, says, “Can I sell you some charity raffle tickets?” The number of raffle tickets sold increased by two times. Two times increase in the amount, that’s huge. There are so few interventions that are that small that would get that result and it’s far outweighing the cost of the Coca Cola as well, which is another important thing, they’re getting a dramatic increase. People really like to return a favour. If you go to a restaurant and the waiter tells you, “Oh, don’t order the lobster today, it’s actually not very fresh.” The waiter, who says that will get a far larger tip, and also probably a much bigger order size because people want to return a favour, they think, “Oh, they’re going out of their way.” So that’s a really wonderful thing to do. There’s a comment about bribery there with the Coca-Cola, you don’t have to do that, the last example, is an example of somebody giving a bit of information which can be a favour as well. Phillip Kunz famously sent 600 Christmas cards to random strangers and 200 people replied, even though they were completely random strangers, people like to return a favour. And there are ways you can utilise this. We talked earlier abouts sending someone a birthday card or doing someone a favour, these sorts of small things can be really valuable. I haven’t released this episode yet that I have done, but I’ve created an episode that will come out, not next week but the week after next, where I wanted to test reciprocity. So, I did random favours for 10 of the biggest influences in my network. These are people like Rory Sutherland and Richard Shotton and others, Jay Klaus. Random favours, where I just said, “Can I promote your podcast in my newsletter, or can I give you a shout out on LinkedIn? I really like your work.” They didn’t know it, but they were part of a little experiment of mine where I wanted to see how effective this would be. In a normal working month or normal six months, not many very famous people, not many big influencers would promote my show; It’s unlikely to happen. But I gave 10 random favours to 10 influencers, and then asked them after I’d done the favour, “By the way, would you mind returning the favour and promoting my show?” Eight of them did. Which really shocked me. It really, really shocked me, and it was incredible. For this one week, I had eight of the biggest influencers in my space promoting my podcast, simply because I did them a favour and simply because I asked. So, reciprocity is very powerful. It’s a very easy way to change actions and if you are working one-on-one with a client, that could be a really useful one to use.

Phil Bray 

Wow. That’s fascinating. Just to deal with the bribery point. excuse me. I might be wrong, but I don’t know of any FCA rule that says you can’t send a client a small gift to say thank you for a referral received. A personalised gift, a book or a bottle of wine, something like that. I’ve not seen any rules that says you can’t do that. Happy to be corrected. I want to touch on ethics, if that’s okay? Because you’ve mentioned it a few times and there is a line here, isn’t there with nudges where you can go to the wrong side of it, into an unethical place. Just talk about how ethics play a part in this. You’ve already talked about it a little bit, but just expand on that and then Dan will come to you for some questions.

Phill Agnew 

It’s a really important thing all of us have to consider when we’re using nudges, which is, well, first of all, are we lying? Never lie. I think that’s just the most obvious thing. This isn’t something that’s to do with behavioural science or nudges, It’s something to do with common human decency; don’t lie; don’t put something on your website which is made up because more often than not, people will spot it and if they spot it, your trust is ruined, and it’s just unethical. You shouldn’t do that. The bigger question here is – let’s go back to that Google canteen example, because it’s such a good example to think about ethics. I’m running Google, I want my staff, or I know my staff want to eat healthier, I’m going to change where I put things in the canteen and they will be nudged towards healthier items. Is that ethical? Some people will say, “I don’t think it is because people should have the freedom to pick pizza.” Well, you’re not removing that freedom but then they might say, “People were picking pizza before.” There are a couple of things at play here, one is that people are always being nudged. In the Google example, before they make any changes, people are being nudged towards the chocolate bars at eye level because they are at eye level. We can’t help being nudged in one direction. We can’t create a canteen where everything is behind a Deal or No Deal box and you have to open them all randomly to see what it is. They have to be on show, therefore people will always be nudged towards something. If you give someone a slightly bigger plate, they will fill it with more. So. we’ve got to understand that the baseline is that people are being nudged anyway. A nudge does not necessarily mean that you are doing something new, but they are being nudged anyway. The difference is, of course, is that the nudge previously in the Google canteen may well have just been random and by chance, and there’s no individual behind it saying, “I want people to act this behaviour.” whereas once the Google canteen changes, there is an individual who’s trying to alter behaviour. Then you have to do something which Nir Eyal, who’s written the books, Hooked and Indistractible, two very good books, he calls the regret test. You can actually run this on people. So what Google should do in that scenario is they should gather a portion of the people who go to the canteen, if they’re worried about it they should gather a portion of people who go to the canteen and say, “If you walked into this canteen today and you ate a lunch that consisted of really healthy options, still water, fruit, vegetables, and maybe a slightly smaller amount of calories than you typically do, would you regret that?” you should measure the amount of people who say, “Yes, I would regret that.” If 20% of Google employees said “Yeah, I would regret that, because I really only want to eat pizza every day. That’s really why I work at Google, that’s what I want to do.” Then you should probably think about not doing that, people would regret following the nudge, then you should think about not doing that. More often than not with these nudges people would say, “No, of course, I wouldn’t regret eating more healthy food; that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.” and so Google would be okay to put in an implementation like that. In the same way with the UK organ donation is going from an opt-in to an opt-out. That’s because if you asked the majority, and I’m sure the government has done this, if you asked the majority of the UK Government, “Would you regret if when you’ve passed your organs are used to help save someone’s life?” very few people would say, “Oh, I actually regret that.” so that makes a tactic like that work a bit better. You could say the exact same for your customers in the example we were talking about with Yardstick, if you referred a customer to Yardstick, or a client referred a customer to one of your other clients, would you regret that? Very few people say, “Oh yeah, I’d really regret it if I told a mate about using this financial service agency.” unless they really hated the agency, but in which case they’re not going to do it anyway. So, you’ve just got to think about the regrets and you can ask customers, “Would you regret this thing?” Or you can just play them through, play the game in your head and think. What Nir Eyal says, is to imagine that the people being nudged are your family, your mum, sister, partner, whoever it might be, imagine they’re being nudged; would you regret if their behaviours were changed in that way? If it’s a yes, then don’t do it. You can instantly see the nudges that are unethical when you put this lens over it, you can see how people who are convinced or persuaded into buying flight tickets immediately because they feel that the price is going to go up in the next 10 minutes would regret that if they later knew that the price didn’t actually go up. You can see that that’s an unethical use of nudging. You could also say that somebody who decides to go ahead and book their dream holiday because they hear that the price is genuinely going up in the next few weeks wouldn’t regret that if they haven’t been forced. So thinking about the regret test is a really good way to overcome the ethics problem.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Phill. Well, I don’t want anyone to regret not being able to ask you a question so we’re going to check that in a little bit. Abi, you’re going to talk for a couple of minutes about where you can learn more about Phill and future sessions and then Dan, we’re going to come back to you and close with the questions. If I share my screen, everyone should be able to see that. Abi, do you want to talk about, if you would, the workshop that we’ve got coming up on LinkedIn?

Abi Robinson 

Of course. Phill, there was a bit of effort bias, a bit of the halo effect with the job application. There was also a bit of gin and tonic bias that afternoon as well, which always helps. I haven’t heard you talk about that one but I’m sure it’s somewhere. There are two events to tell you about, and a tiny favour from us as well. We’ve got our workshop on Tuesday 3 September. Anybody on our newsletter database will have received that yesterday. It’s 10am to 1pm so it’s a pretty mega one, but it’s going to be really interactive and practical. We got loads of good feedback for the one that we ran last year, and we’re going to cover the four big things that you need to know about using LinkedIn effectively. From having a great profile, both personal and company, writing really value-added engaging posts, connecting with more ideal clients and professional connections, and how best to engage with other people in your feed, and why that’s so important. So, if you do want to use LinkedIn more effectively, if you want to build your brand, if you want to attract prospects, then I really think this session will be of value. I will put the link in the chat, I’ll put it in the follow-up. It’s £95 plus VAT for that one. That’s good timing Phil, very nice. A couple of weeks after that, we’ll be doing our standard – standard, that makes it sound sub-service but no, our usual free monthly webinar. We’re running solo next month, because it’s a topic that we really think deserves an hour of both our and your undivided attention and that’s client testimonial videos. We’ve talked about social proof today, like Phill said earlier, we follow the actions of those who are similar to us, and it’s exactly the same here. One of the easiest, most powerful ways to explain the benefits of working with you to potential clients is to collect client testimonial videos. We found that 94% of advice planning firms don’t have them on their website, if you do, you will massively stand out from the crowd. So, we’d like an hour of your time next month to talk about all things testimonials. That will be another link in the chat, and it will be in the follow-up. Really looking forward to that one. Lastly, a small favour, we don’t charge for these webinars, as you know, and we never will, but we do love receiving your feedback so that we can keep improving them in months to come. So an honest Google review, this is not a nudge, I’m not asking you for five stars but we would very much like that, would be much appreciated and it should only take you a couple of minutes. So again, it’ll be in the chat and in the follow-up. Thank you kindly.

Abi Robinson 

Thank you, Abi. There are Phill’s details if you want to go and look at the podcast, and you can sign up for Phill’s newsletter on nudgepodcast.com and then Phill, I’ve put your LinkedIn profile link there as well. We’ll put these in the follow-up email that will come out later on this afternoon. I’ll leave that screen up for a minute. Over to you, Dan, to pose some questions to Phill, if that’s all right with you Phill, to finish off?

Dan Campbell 

Alright, let’s see what we have. Earlier, we were talking about the halo effect, Phill, and you mentioned putting your podcast against the backdrop of competitors which raised the level of people that said they’d listen. Amanda asks a question around that, and she says “Your podcast example, would you relate that to keeping close to competitors? I.e. should you be talking about competitors in the same breath as yourself?”

Phill Agnew 

I think it depends on the competitors. In my example, they were very clearly bigger shows than mine, they were shows that me as a podcast could aspire to be and if the customer or listener associated that podcast with me, then it would be a benefit for me. But if you’re the biggest player in the industry, then perhaps you shouldn’t do that, because you might end up being compared with somebody who’s a lot smaller than you. If you are the biggest player, perhaps you would then want to, instead of comparing yourself to competitors, compare yourself to some of your clients who are really well know so you can benefit from halo effect that way. Putting all those amazing logos of the companies who use you on your website. Do be careful about using the halo effect if you’re linking yourself to an individual, a company or an organisation that is not viewed in the same high status as you are.

Dan Campbell 

Thank you. Next question we’ll ask is Celeste’s question. Celeste asks “In the age of automation, do you think people recognise the amount of effort that goes into the comms that they receive?”

Phill Agnew 

No, definitely not. I think most people don’t and I think that’s only going to increase with AI and things like that, and I think that’s partly because a lot of the comms we receive are low effort. I think if you imagine all of the ways that you could receive communications from someone, there are so many different, varied and interesting ways you could send comms, and yet, most people just send an email without even putting the name of the recipient on the email itself. So, I do think there are easy to increase that. Obviously, a lot of it has to be done on smaller scale communications. We get these incredible benefits from sending to large email banks, we can send an email to a million people, but that means you can’t get very personalised, you can’t do things that showcase your effort, and it means that the recipient will very quickly be able to figure out that that email or that piece of communication is sort of low effort, not maybe tailored for them. What we should never do as marketers is assume, because that’s how we send emails to the masses, we should do that on a small scale as well. If you’re ever sending an email to a small amount of people who you really want to convince, you should laden it with effort. You should create a video maybe to introduce the email. Just say, “I’m just putting this together for you” or you should- there’s a test I’m going to run which I’ll see if it actually works, but I think there’s a really interesting idea you could do, where you could hand write a message and then take a picture of it and send it via an email as another way you could increase the effort. Taking time to actually craft a bit of comms which is is relevant for them, really makes a difference. I’ve encouraged Tom Goodwin, who’s quite a big marketing influencer to come on the show, and I sent him an email to pitch the podcast, and he said that is the best pitch I’ve ever received for a podcast. This guy goes on a lot of podcasts, so I felt pretty good about that. So I thought, and I do think “Okay, what have I done in my email which made him made it feel so effortful?” I took a picture of myself reading his book and included that in the image. So a picture of me looking really goofy as well, but it was to showcase that I’m actually reading your book, a lot of people don’t, I’m going to show that I do. I suggested episode titles which would be relevant to him, that I know there are topics that are relevant. I then had another picture which showcased all of the other guests on my show, of people I knew he would recognise like Chris Voss, Bruce Daisley, Dan Pink, Rory Sutherland and put them below, with me talking next to them. So a bit of halo effect there as well. This is a nudge I haven’t even talked about today, but it’s one about reactants; at the bottom I said, “Of course, you’re free to refuse.” there’s something extremely powerful in telling someone, “Just so you know, you’re free to refuse.” because we always feel we’re being sold to and whenever we feel we’re being sold to, reactants kicks in, and we don’t want to take that action. We don’t like it when people tell us what to do. There are amazing studies with children where if you put a toy beneath a perplex glass and have 100 other toys around it, all the kids want to play with is the one that they can’t touch. We really don’t like being told what to do. So I finished the email by saying, “Of course, you’re free to refuse. It’s easy either way.” He said that’s the best pitch and he’s agreed to come on the show. I do end up getting quite good quality guests on my show, and I think that’s just by finding interesting ways to tailor these comms, and you can scale that up if you’re smart about it, or you can scale down and find more effective ways to do your communications as well.

Dan Campbell 

Thank you. On the subject of effort as well, Matt asks a great question. Matt says, “More of what we do now, reports etc. are online or via email, which takes away from the high quality report / key features document that may have been printed and used in the past. How can an adviser showcase quality or perceived effort online? Or are the old techniques of high quality paper and nice reports still the best?” And of course, that goes against some people’s direction of sustainability and a paperless approach is kind of their end goal.

Phill Agnew 

Yeah, the companies I’ve seen who do reports that I feel I have to read, are ones that innately are created by a lot of effort. There’s one that the Product Marketing Association does. The report is called The State of Product Marketing, but they start by saying we’ve interviewed 1000 product marketers and their insights are in the report. It’s digital, it’s online and it’s very difficult not to want to click that report, isn’t it? When you know that they’ve interviewed or surveyed 1000 people, you think, “There must be something really valuable in there.” A similar example, could be of a report that lists the 100 best practices as voted for by you, that could be a really interesting angle. I think there are ways, and this is hard for me, to do without knowing the topic of the report you’re creating but there are ways you can showcase the effort that has gone into creating the report that alters the content of the report itself. That could be by design; you could create something that’s really beautifully crafted, and that will do that but it can also be by content as well. You should be thinking to yourself, “How can we write a report that nobody else could write?” it’s probably by doing something extremely effortful. An example of a marketing report from a marketer, if they wanted to create a report that  would do really well on socials, I would go around London for three days and take a picture of every advert I saw, and then I’d ask 1000 people to rate them. I’d say, “Right now in London, here are the top billboards according to the general public.” That would be really difficult for a marketer not to want to click that, and that’s because it’s laden with effort, and you can showcase that while you’re talking about it as well. So I think you can find angles. It depends on your context of course, but there are always angles to add more effort into your work.

Dan Campbell 

That’s great. One of the contexts that Matt will be speaking about is an annual report that they give to their clients. Speaking from my experience, many default reports will just be a Word document with Times New Roman or Calibri or whatever the new font is that Microsoft are trying to get you to use and that doesn’t have any effort attached to it. But when you do start to put together bespoke documents that link with the website, are consistent with everything else, it’s hard not to think that some effort went into it, isn’t it? And that’s something that we can absolutely help with, so, from a personal experience point of view, it’s quite an easy win. It’s something you can do quite easily by having nice templates. Let’s see what other questions we’ve got. I think the next question I’ll ask is Adam’s question. Adam asked this quite a while ago, “Hi, are you aware of any systems that we can use to nudge customers in the UK?” and Adam mentions in the US, they’ve got a system called Knudge with a K, that seems to be a follow-up system that gives people prompts for things that they might need for an onboarding process or whatever, etc. So, what systems exist that we can utilise?

Phill Agnew 

Yeah, good question. Depending on what customer resource management platform or email provider you’re using, you can definitely build sequences or segments, Intercom is good for this, where you can nudge customers consistently or send them follow-up messages.  There definitely are some, HubSpot I imagine would help with that as well. I would say,  though it’s not my area of expertise, crafting a fantastic email sequence is not something I’d say I’m particularly good at and it will be so industry-dependant and company-dependant. Whatever you use for your CRM should have something in it which allows you to send follow-up messages to people based on the actions they take or don’t take. So I wouldn’t know what the system is in the UK, but I’m sure there are some.

Phil Bray 

I’d like to add a bit to that Dan, if that’s okay? There are a lot of systems that we will use for trigger campaigns, sequence campaigns, MailChimp will do it, DotDigital will do it, HubSpot will do it and a shameless plug, we spend quite a bit of time writing those as well.

Dan Campbell 

I think we’ve got one question left. So anybody that wants a last minute question, all you need to do is ask Phill if he’ll refuse to answer it, and from what he just said, he’ll say “No.” and answer it. But right now the last question goes to Joe, who says, “We started making coffee from beans in the office for meetings and put out some biscuits. It’s very low effort compared to our advice and all the work we put in, but in our most recent survey, it was the coffee and biscuits that made repeated appearances. Trying to understand what clients actually value and care about is a difficult task, and we make assumptions that rarely turn out to be true. Short of asking the clients, what’s the best way to get this info?”

Phill Agnew 

It’s such a good example because it encapsulates almost everything we’ve talked about today, which is that often the action or tactic that is most effective is the one that seems most irrational. If you try to imagine, how to get your customer satisfaction score up by 10 points, the last thing you would suggest is, let’s make coffee with beans and serve biscuits rather than let’s increase our service but often the irrational output is more effective. The opposite of a good idea can be a good idea as well. Rory Sutherland had a brilliant example of you can increase a train time by 10 minutes by spending £2 billion. The HS2 line, Eurostar, we could put in high speed rail and it costs £2 billion to decrease the journey time by 10 minutes. But you could also use that money to serve champagne to every customer on board, to have them served by super models, put in lie-flat beds and offer a lifelong subscription to Sky TV for every single person that went on board they would have a much better time than getting to Paris 10 minutes earlier. There are other things you can do that might seem irrational that would increase value. The question you had is, how do we find these irrational approaches and it’s a shameless plug but I really do think a lot of them come from the world of behavioural science. What’s wonderful about the world of behavioural science is it’s often sharing ideas that counter our conventional way of thinking that have also been tested and proven in a peer review paper, and usually in a lab. The newer ones won’t have been replicated so you should replicate them yourselves and test them, but there is evidence that they work and what I love so much about them is they are these counter-intuitive ideas that you might not think of, but have also been tested. You’re actually basing your next tactic or strategy on some hard, solid evidence, rather than something loose and weak. So, shameless plug, go and listen to Nudge, you’ll get a lot of ideas there or just read some of the books I’ve talked about, or listen to some of the authors that I’ve mentioned. Reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence will give you dozens of ideas, reading Richard Shotton’s The Illusion of Choice will do the same and read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. These will help you with ideas and you might find that hand grinding the beans while the customer is sitting in front of you and pouring their coffee for them, that might even make the experience more enjoyable for them as well.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. I promise you, this webinar isn’t brought to you by Nescafe, but if you do go out and get some coffee beans and some biscuits, apparently you’ll have some very happy clients. Brilliant. That’s it for the questions today so unless there are any final ones sneaking in, which it doesn’t look like there are, let’s wrap up.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Dan. Phill, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for the podcast, thank you for everything you do for fellow marketers. It’s incredibly appreciated. Everybody go and listen to Phill’s podcast and go and sign up the newsletter. One thing we didn’t get to talk about Phill, is the podcast is a really sensible length. What are they? 20 minutes, 25 minutes or 40 minutes? Not an hour and a half, or two hours that you get from some people. The podcast is, is absolutely brilliant. Go and listen to it guys, go and sign up for Phill. A massive thank you Phill for being here today.

Phill Agnew 

Thanks very much and thank you so much for having me.

Phil Bray 

Cheers guys, see you next month. Bye, Bye.

Dan Campbell 

Take care, guys. Bye.