Category: Conversion

💎 On the magnetic middle (to reduce energy consumption)

We found that over the next several weeks, those who had been consuming more energy than their neighbours reduced their energy consumption, by 5.7 per cent. Not much of a surprise there. More interesting, however, was the finding that those who had been consuming less energy than their neighbours actually increased their energy consumption by 88.6 per cent. These results show that what most others are doing acts as something of a “magnetic middle”, meaning that people who deviate from the average tend to be drawn towards it – they change their actions to be more in line with the norm regardless of whether they were previously behaving in a socially desirable or undesirable way.

Excerpt from: Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini

💎 On why the mind is a lot like the human egg (confirmation bias)

The experiments prove that it’s hard to overturn negative opinions. Rejecters of your brand are difficult to convince because they interpret your message through a lens of negativity.

As the legendary stock market investor, Charlie Munger, said:

“The human mind is a lot like the human egg, in that the human egg has a shut-off device. One sperm gets in, and it shuts down so that the next one can’t get in. The human mind has a big tendency of the same sort.”

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory: 25 behavioural biases that influence what we buy by Richard Shotton

💎 On reaching people early before their habits harden (if you want to change behaviour)

In the policy world, a good example comes from a programme known as the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP), originally developed and tested by David Olds in the USA. The programme involves a nursing practitioner befriending and supporting a young at-risk mother from the pre-natal stage through the child’s second birthday. It is a well-validated programme that has been shown to reduce violence and abuse of the child, improve educational attainment and even reduce the child’s rate of offending at the age of 15 compared with children from a similar background who did not participate in the programme (at least in the USA).

A less well known but fascinating detail of the NFP is that Olds noted when we introduced it into the UK was that the programme worked much better with mothers having their first child. This isn’t a marginal detail. It is an expensive programme, and so it is incredibly important to make sure that is focuses on the right people, and at the right time, to whom it will make a difference – young, first time mothers.

In general, we might take as an opening mantra something like “learn it first, learn it right”

Excerpt from: Inside the Nudge Unit: How small changes can make a big difference by David Halpern

💎 On the power of aligning incentives (jumping out of a plane)

Here’s another example: in World War 2, US paratroopers had a problem with the fact that, allegedly, one in twenty chutes failed in some way. The soliton was to require the packers and inspectors to regularly jump out of airplanes using parachutes chosen at random from the store. The quality of packing then rose to 100 per cent and stayed there. “The packers are all jumpers,” explained on NCO to Stars and Stripes magazine: ” We try to have each man jump once a month. That’s a pretty food way to keep them honest on the tables.”

Excerpt from: One Step Ahead: Notes from the Problem Solving Unit

💎 On breaking sales records using the anchoring bias (selling Girl Scout cookies)

Years ago, when The Tonight Show rules late-night TV and when the all the guests weren’t celebrities promoting their latest book, movie, or TV show, host Johnny Carson interviewed the Girl Scout who sold the most cookies that year. This young lady, Markita Andrews, set a cookie sales record that was never broken. What was her technique? In addition to hard work, she used a framing strategy to make her customers view the purchase as a trivial expense.

Markita’s strategy was simple When she knocked on a door, she would firs ask for a $30,000 donation to the Girl Scouts. Naturally, she had no takers on that request. But then she’d ask if they would at least buy a box of Girl Scout cookies. and just about everyone would.

Excerpt from: Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing by Roger Dooley

💎 On the power of doing good to boost sales (organic cotton and Patagonia)

In the mid-1990s, there was a shortage of organic cotton—cotton that Patagonia relied on to make its products. While other companies might source non-organic alternatives in the interim, Chouinard’s’ response was “if we have to be in business using an evil product like traditionally grown cotton, we don’t deserve to be in business”.

The big ‘a-ha’ for Chouinard was that you could do something good for the environment that was also good for your business. Patagonia became California’s first B Corporation in January 2012. At the time, the company was turning over $600m in annual revenues and employed around 2000 people.

Patagonia continues to donate 10% of its profits to small-scale environmental campaigns where $10,000-$15,000 can make a real difference. Their Worn Wear initiative encourages the repair, recycling and resale of garments. The company once took a full-page advert in the New York Times with the tagline: “don’t buy this jacket, unless you really need it”.

Excerpt from: Product Gems 1: 101 Science Experiments That Demonstrate How to Build Products People Love by David Greenwood

💎 On the power of getting a commitment (watch my things)

Take, as proof, what happened when psychologist Thomas Moriarty staged thefts on a New York City beach to see if onlookers would risk personal harm to halt the crime. In the study, a research accomplice would put a beach blanket down five feet from the blanket of a randomly chosen individual – the experimental subject. After a couple of minutes on the blanked spent relaxing and listening to music from a portable radio, the accomplice would stand up and leave the blanket to stroll down the beach, A few minutes later, a second researcher, pretending to be a thief, would approach, grab the radio, and try to hurry away with it. As you might guess, under normal conditions, subjects were very reluctant to put themselves in harms way by challenging the thief – only four people did so in the twenty times that the theft was staged. But when the same procedure was tried another twenty times, with a slight twist, the results were drastically different. In these incidents before taking his stroll, the accomplice would simple ask the subject to please “watch my things,” which each of them agreed to do. Now, propelled by the rule for consistency, nineteen of the twenty subjects became virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief.

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On why clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first (the contrast principle)

Those who employ it can cash in on its influence without any appearance of having structured the situation in their favor. Retail clothiers are a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store and says that he wants to buy a three-piece suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money?

Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse: If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend very much more on the purchase of a sweater. But clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison. A man might bulk at the idea of spending $95 for a sweater, but if he has just bought a $495 suit, a $95 sweater does not seem excessive. The same principle applies to a man who wishes to buy the accessories (shirts, shoes, belt) to go along with his new suit.

Contrary to the commonsense view, the evidence supports the contrast-principle prediction. As sales motivation analysts Whitney, Hubin, and Murphy state, “The interesting thing is that even when a man enters a clothing stores with the express purpose of purchasing a suit, he will almost always pay more for whatever accessories he buys if he buys them after the suit purchase than before.”

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On our tendency to underestimate how much social proof affects our behaviour (increasing busking donations)

At a busy New York City subway station we hired researchers to count the number of commuters who donated to a street musician as they walked past.

After a short time a small change was made to the situation that had an immediate and impressive impact. Just before an approaching (and unsuspecting) commuter reached the musician, another person (who was in on the act) would drip a few coins into the musician’s hat in view of the approaching commuter. The result? An eight-fold increase in the number of commuters who chose to make a donations.

In a series of post-study interviews with commuters who did donate, every one of them failed to attribute their action to the fact that they had just seen someone else give money first. Instead they provided alliterative justifications: “I liked the song he was playing”; “I’m a generous person”; and “I felt sorry for the guy.”

Excerpt from: The Small BIG: Small Changes that Spark Big Influence by Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldstein, and Steve Martin

 

💎 The power of making it personal (think about how someone else might feel)

Emotions get people to change their behavior. In his show Crowd Control, Dan Pink tried to get people to stop illegally using handicapped parking spots. When Dan’s team changed the handicapped signs so they has a picture of a person in a wheelchair on them, illegal parking in the spots didn’t go down — it topped altogether. Seeing a person’s face, thinking about how someone else might feel, made all the difference.

Excerpt from: Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker

💎 On the unintended consequence of banning things making them more desirable (changing our perception of them)

The second reaction to the the law was more subtle and more general than the deliberate defiance of the smugglers and hoarders. Spurred by the tendency to want what they could no longer have, the majority of Miami consumers came to see phosphate cleaners as better products than before. Compared to Tampa residents, who were not affected by the Dade County ordinance, the citizens of Miami rated phosphates detergents as gentler, more effective in cold water, better whiteners and fresheners, more powerful on stains. Affect passage of the law, they had even come to believe that phosphate detergents poured more easily than did the Tampa consumers.

Excerpt from: Consumer Reaction to Restriction of Choice Alternatives by Michael Mazis and Robert Settle

💎 On how little shoppers notice when in store (sleep shopping)

One successful example was Sainsbury’s in 2004 who realised much supermarket shopping was done in a daze. “Sleep shopping” as they termed it. Shoppers were buying the same items week in, week out — restricting themselves to the same 150 items despite there being 30,000 on offer.

AMV BBDO, Sainsbury’s creative agency, went to great lengths to dramatise the extent of sleep shopping. They hired a man dressed in a gorilla suit and sent him to a Sainsbury’s to do his week’s shopping. They questioned shoppes as they were leaving the store and a surprisingly low percentage had noticed him. When shoppers are on autopilot it’s hard to grab their attention.

Excerpt from: The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton

💎 On second-order social intelligence (and the dangers of discounting)

The following is a perfect illustration of the tendency of modern business to pretend that economics is true, even when it isn’t. London’s West End theatres often send out emails to people who have attended their productions in the past, to encourage them to book tickets, and it was the job of an acquaintance of mine who worked as a marketing executive for a theatre company to send out these emails. Over time, she learned something that defied conventional economic rules; it seemed that if you send out an email promoting a play or musical, you sold fewer tickets with the email. Conversely, offering tickets at full price seemed to increase demand.

According to economic theory, this makes no sense at all, but in the real world it is perfectly plausible. After all, any theatre selling tickets t a discount clearly has plenty to spare, and from this it might be reasonable to infer that the entertainment on offer isn’t all that good. No one wants to spend £100-£200 on tickets, a mean, car-parking and babysitting, only to find that you would have had more fun watching television at home; in avoiding discounted theatre tickets, people are not being silly – they are showing a high degree of second-order social intelligence.

Excerpt from: Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense by Rory Sutherland

💎 On how scarcity of goods and exclusivity of information significantly increases sales (a double whammy)

After we talked in my office one day about scarcity and exclusivity of information, he decided to do a study using his sales staff. The company’s customers—buyers for supermarkets or other retail food outlets—were phoned as usual by a salesperson and asked for a purchase in one of three ways. One set of customers heard a standard sales presentation before being asked for their orders. Another set of customers heard the standard sales presentation plus information that the supply of imported beef was likely to be scarce in the upcoming months. A third group received the standard sales presentation and the information about a scarce supply of beef, too; however, they also learned that the scarce-supply news was not generally available information—it had come, they were told, from certain exclusive contacts that the company had. Thus the customers who received this last sales presentation learned that not only was the availability of the product limited, so also was the news concerning it—the scarcity double whammy.

The results of the experiment quickly become apparent when the company salespeople began to urge the owner to buy more beef because there wasn’t enough in the inventory to keep up with all the orders they were receiving. Compared to the customers who got only the standard sales appeal, those who were also told about the future scarcity of beef bought more than twice as much.

Excerpt from: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

💎 On prioritising tried and trusted findings (over the new and surprising)

But the problem is not just with journalists. The physician John Ioannidis scandalized his colleagues and anticipated the replicability crisis with his 2005 article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” A big problem is that many of the phenomena that bio. medical researchers hunt for are interesting and a priori unlikely to be true, requiring highly sensitive methods to avoid false positives, while many true findings, including successful replication attempts and null results, are considered too boring to publish.

This does not, of course, mean that scientific research is a waste of time. Superstition and folk belief have an even worse track record than less-than-perfect science, and in the long run an understanding emerges from the rough-and-tumble of scientific disputation. As the physicist John Ziman noted in 1978, “The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false.” It’s a reminder that Bayesian reasoning recommends against the common practice of using “textbook” as an insult and “scientific revolution” as a compliment.

A healthy respect for the boring would also improve the quality of political commentary.

Excerpt from: Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

💎 On quality over quantity (in copywriting)

After all, isn’t brevity important? Nobody sits down and reads a great big press ad or an eight-page sales letter. do they? Do they?

Er, turns out they do. And more orders come from the long letter than the short version. More enquiries from the long ad than the short one.

Perhaps the most famous example in press advertising is an ad for Merrill Lynch written by a partner, Louis Engel. Engel was the managing editor at Business Week until he was hired by Charles Merrill, the firm’s founder.

The ad occupied a full page in the New York Times. Seven columns. Tiny type. NO PICTURES. In total, 6,540 words.

It drew 10,000 requests for a booklet mentioned towards the end of the ad (which, incidentally, had no coupon or any other recognizable “response device”).

Excerpt from: Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide to Great Copywriting by Andy Maslen

💎 On the danger of poorly set targets

Metrics have even shaped literature. When Alexandre Dumas first wrote The Three Musketeers in serialised form, his publisher paid him by the line. Dumas therefore added the servant character Grimaud, who spoke in short sentences, to stretch out the text (then killed him off when the publisher said that short lines didn’t count).

Relying on measurements like clicks or likes can give a misleading impression of how people are truly behaving. During 2007–8, over 1.1 million people joined the “Save Darfur’ cause on Facebook, which aimed to raise money and attention in response to the conflict in Sudan. A few of the new members donated and recruited others, but most did nothing. Of the people who joined, only 28 per cent recruited someone else, and a mere 0.2 per cent donated.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models

The second kind of response is at the other extreme. Rather than ignore results, people may have too much faith in them. Opaque and difficult is seen as a good thing. I’ve often heard people suggest that a piece of maths is brilliant because nobody can understand it. In their view, complicated means clever. According to statistician George Box, it’s not just observers who can be seduced by mathematical analysis. “Statisticians, like artists, have the bad habit of falling in love with their models,’ he supposedly once said.

Excerpt from: The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread — And Why They Stop by Adam Kucharski

💎 How Smirnoff created the appearance of popularity at launch

PYOTR SMIRNOV came into this world on the eve of the birth of Russian capitalism and, in 1864, employed that capitalist spirit to make what would eventually be the world’s number one selling vodka brand, now known as Smirnoff. Pyotr was the first to use the charcoal filtering process that removes impurities from the grain-neutral spirit. He was also the first to “advertise.”

While organized publicity was still a vague concept, Smirnov shrewdly gathered a group of beggars, offered them a warm meal and plenty to drink at his home, then paid them to pop into Moscow’s major bars demanding Smirnoff. The man was a PR genius far ahead of his time. No wonder he became the official vodka supplier to the tsar in 1886.

Excerpt from: The 12 Bottle Bar: Make Hundreds of Cocktails with Just Twelve Bottles by David Solmonson and Lesley Jacobs Solmonson

💎 On safety measures causing people to take more risks

Economists call this excessive risk-taking when you know you’ll be bailed out ‘moral hazard’. To reduce moral hazard on the road, the economist Gordon Tullock once argued that instead of mandating seat belts, the government should require large spikes to be installed in the centre of steering wheels – known as Tullock spikes. These spikes would make drivers more aware of the danger of driving too fast. The Bank of England doesn’t quite do that.

Excerpt from: Can’t We Just Print More Money?: Economics in Ten Simple Questions by Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning

💎 On the benefit of willing yourself into a state of relative indifference when it comes to negotiations

This is connected with the art of negotiation. The game theorist John Nash demonstrated that protagonists bargain more effectively when they are less needy. The less you fear not getting what you want, the more likely you are to get what you want. The logical conclusion follows: in any negotiation, your best strategy is an internal as well as external question. Can you ‘will’ yourself into a state of relative indifference, and thereby negate anxiety-induced neediness?

Excerpt from: Making Decisions: Putting the human back in the machine by Ed Smith

💎 On the problem with teaser headline (we don’t care)

Which headlines work best?

When a big US advertising agency tested headlines for print ads, they ran the same ad with three different headlines. One delivering news, one promising a benefit and one arousing curiosity, Which do you think out-pulled the others? (The answer’s in the following text box.)

The benefits headline performed best.

When I ask delegates on a writing workshop to vote, they usually go for the teaser headline—the one arousing curiosity. I guess the thinking is, people are naturally curious so if you set them a puzzle, they’ll want to find out the answer. Here’s why that reasoning doesn’t stack up in the real world.

If you write a headline like this one:

Why are freelance copywriters like dried apricots?

Most people’s reaction is, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

You have to remember that for print advertising, your ad will be nestling among editorial, ie all that stuff your reader paid for and wants to mad. Why should they stop doing what they want to do—reading about cars or hi-fi, for example–just so they can solve your little puzzle? If people want puzzles, they do Sudoku.

If, on the other hand, you write a headline like this one:

How this freelance copywriter can help you double your sales

I think they’ll want to know more.

Excerpt from: Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide to Great Copywriting by Andy Maslen

💎 On how adding a little bit of effort into learning increases probability of remembering

In one study published in 2014, researchers from Princeton and UCLA examined the relationship between learning and disfluency by looking at the difference between students who took notes by hand while watching a lecture and those who used laptops. Recording a speaker’s comments via longhand is both harder and less efficient than typing on a keyboard. Fingers cramp. Writing is slower than typing, and so you can’t record as many words. Students who use laptops, in contrast, spend less time actively working during a lecture, and yet they still collect about twice as many notes as their handwriting peers. Put differently, writing is more disfluent than typing, because it requires more labor and captures fewer verbatim phrases. tale When the researchers looked at the test scores of those two groups, however, they found that the hand writers scored twice as well as the typists in remembering what a lecturer said.

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On how, once we decide upon a way of thinking, we struggle to see the other side

One important study of the power of such decision-frames was published in 1984, after a researcher from Northwestern asked a group of participants to list reasons why they should buy a VCR based on their own experiences. Volunteers generated dozens of justifications for such a purchase. Some said they felt a VCR would provide entertainment. Others saw it as an investment in their education or a way for their families to spend time together. Then those same volunteers were asked to generate reasons not to buy a VCR. They struggled to come up with arguments against the expenditure. The vast majority said they were likely to buy one sometime soon.

Next, the researcher asked a new group of volunteers to come up with a list of reasons against purchasing a VCR. No problem, they replied. Some said watching television distracted them from their families. Others said that movies were mindless, and they didn’t need the temptation. When those same people were then asked to list reasons for buying a VCR, they had trouble coming up with convincing reasons to make the purchase and said they were unlikely to ever buy one.

What interested the researcher was how much each group struggled to adopt an opposing viewpoint once they had an initial frame for making a decision. The two groups were demographically similar. They should have been equally interested in buying a VCR. At to very least, they should have generated equal numbers of reasons to buy or spurn the machines. But once a participant grabbed on to a decision-making frame—This is an investment in my education verses this is a distraction from my family

Excerpt from: Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

💎 On the power of loss aversion in healthcare (increased awareness)

For this reason, if you want to convince someone about something, don’t focus on the advantages; instead highlight how it helps them dodge the disadvantages. Here is an example from a campaign promotion breast self-examination (BSE): two different leaflets were handed out to women. Pamphlet A urged: “Research shows that women who do BSE have an increased change of finding a tumour in the early, non treatable stage of the disease”. Pamphlet B said: “Research shows that women who do not do BSE have a decreased chance of finding a tumour in the early, more treatable stage of the disease.: The study revealed that pamphlet B (written in a “loss-frame”) generated significantly more awareness and BSE behaviour than pamphlet A (written in “gain-frame”).

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On giving the story a face (statistics don’t stir us, people do)

In another experiment, psychologist Paul Slovic asked people for donations. One group was shown a photo of Rokia from Malawi, an emaciated child with pleading eyes. Afterward, people donated an average of $2.83 to the charity (out of $5 they were given to fill out a short survey). The second group was shown statistics about the famine in Malawi, including the fact that more than three million malnourished children were affected, The average donation dropped by 50%. This is illogical: you would think that people’s generosity would grow if they know the extent of the disaster. But we do not function like that. Statistics don’t stir us; people do.

The media have long known that factual reports and bar charts do not entice readers. Hence the guideline: give the story a face.

Excerpt from: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

💎 On the more we see a statement, the more likely we are to believe it’s true (illusion-of-truth effect)

Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before – whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in precious weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as trie, even if they swore they has never heard it before.

Excerpt from; Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

💎 On the power of accountability (to reduce littering)

A writer at out agency, Rob DeCleyn, found another great example of choice architecture in his local paper.

A village in Kent had a problem with litter.

Sweet wrappers, crisp packers, soft drink cans and bottles were strewn all over the streets.

But the local shopkeeper didn’t complain or nag the children.

He just wrote their name on the crisp and sweet packets when they bought them.

That’s all, just the child’s name.

And the litter problem cleared up almost immediately.

That’s choice architecture.

The children could still choose to throw their wrappers in the street.

They didn’t have to put them in the litter bin.

The only difference was that now everyone would know whose litter it was.

Excerpt from: One Plus One Equals Three: A Masterclass in Creative Thinking by Dave Trott