Summary

• Why Most Marketers Feel Like They’re Failing: Phill Agnew built the UK’s number one marketing podcast because he felt like a failed marketer himself. The irony? That instinct to question everything is exactly what behavioural science is built on. Are most marketers solving the wrong problem from the start?
• The Death of the Scroll: Most brands approach live commerce by interrupting audiences who aren’t ready to buy. The Impulse Lab found that live shopping works because it creates a fundamentally different buying environment. But are brands still building for traditional e-commerce when the rules have completely changed?
• Why Countdown Timers Are Killing Your Conversions: Urgency and scarcity are the go-to tools for live shopping. But the Impulse Lab found countdown timers ranked dead last as a purchase trigger, while confidence and engagement ranked first. Are brands pressuring audiences out of buying?
• The Mere Exposure Effect: The more people see your brand, the more they like it. Phill explains why the brands winning right now aren’t converting on first contact, they’re showing up consistently until the moment a buyer is ready. So why are so many brands still optimising for immediate conversion?
• Why Story-First Buyers Feel Better 48 Hours Later: 74% of people who bought based on a compelling story still felt positive two days later, compared to 55% of discount hunters. Phill and Ed break down why price-led strategies are a race to the bottom and what brands should be doing instead.
• The Behaviour Shift Nobody Is Talking About: Live shopping is growing, but Western audiences still don’t think of it as normal. Phill explains why the biggest opportunity isn’t convincing people to buy your product, it’s convincing them that buying this way is what everyone is doing. Is that the real challenge brands need to solve first?

Show Notes

• The Impulse Lab
• How to manufacture impulse in live shopping

Transcription

Ed (00:01.164)

Hello and welcome to the attention shift this week. Today I’m joined by a very special guest, Phil Agnew, marketeer and host of the UK’s number one marketing podcast, Nudge. How are doing today, Phil?

Phill (00:13.018)

a bit tired, I ran a half marathon yesterday. I’m a bit knackered and this is, we’re recording at 9 a.m. So Ed, I mean, what were you thinking mate? But no, I’m very good. I’m really excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Ed (00:25.502)

I didn’t quite do a half marathon, but I did do a 20 mile trek across the Peak District at the weekend. But you’ve already one-upped me right from the start there, so I feel a little bit disappointed now. Brilliant.

Phill (00:29.514)

legend, did you?

20 miles is more than half my average, so I don’t know if I have actually. yeah, fair enough.

Ed (00:39.018)

Yeah, but I was walking, I wasn’t running. So it’s not quite, you So on today’s episode, we’re looking at a major shift of how people buy during live digital moments. We recently completed a flagship report, a display called the Impulse Lab, which I know you inputted on. And our goal was to move past the assumptions that brands often make about live shopping and actually look at consumer behavior in general.

So we surveyed over 500 consumers to identify the psychological triggers that actually drive conversation. And obviously you joining us here and being the host of your podcast Nudge. It’d be interesting to get a little bit of your background, obviously, why you’re here, your experience, and why you wanted to get involved with this research that we conducted.

Phill (01:25.742)

Yeah, so Ed, how did you describe yourself as a marketer when we just joined the call beforehand to me? You said such a good phrase.

Ed (01:31.182)

I said a failed marketer that I dabbled in it in the past and then realized that that… I’m more of a generalist than a specialist, I would say.

Phill (01:40.931)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel like so what made me love that phrase is that’s how I think every marketer feels. Definitely how I felt for a lot of my marketing career. Failed marketing training, I think is what you said. And I thought, that’s so good. That’s how I am. Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s my career. I was, I actually studied marketing at university. And I say actually, because I think the majority of the smartest marketers I’ve ever worked with, worked with

Ed (01:52.834)

You’re only as good as your last result as the saying goes.

Phill (02:08.282)

have never studied at university, they become chefs or work to salespeople or done totally different things and then come into the profession and been fantastic at it. But I studied it, I went into my first job and was asked to do things like create a webpage that will get people to convert or write an email that will get people to click on it and open it. And I was awful at these things. I was just rubbish. I had no ability to alter the decisions of the people I was trying to talk to.

Ed (02:14.168)

Yeah.

Phill (02:36.826)

to convince because in my degree, I’m learning all those things about SWOT analysis and profit and loss statements, all these things. And they weren’t, yeah, I couldn’t apply them. I couldn’t apply them. And it wasn’t until I… Go on Ed.

Ed (02:42.978)

Been there, done that,

Yeah. You naturally do it though, don’t you? Like, if you’re thinking about, like you say, we’re not gonna get, just for anyone listening to this, we’re not gonna get deep on SWOT analysis and the Boston consulting groups, Matrix and things like that. But there’s some of the themes you take from it that you just naturally then do in your day-to-day working life without sitting down and drawing a diagram.

Phill (02:56.226)

Absolutely not.

Phill (03:02.447)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And that strategy, that high level strategy stuff is very, very useful, but it’s missing a step before that, which is we are in the, what Richard Chotton would call the decision making industry as marketers. We have to alter the decisions or tweak or nudge the decisions of the people we’re talking to. That could be as simple as trying to convince a fan of Nottingham Forest.

to go to their Europa League game as well as their Premier League game. Slight subtle tweak of their decision. It could be to convince a park runner to volunteer for one weekend. It could be to convince a rugby fan to go to the Twickenham Doubleheader. We’re altering their decisions and we’ve summed this up as calling it marketing, but really it’s just subtle decision-making. And there is a whole world, psychologists has spent…

hundreds of years understanding how humans make decisions. And they have categorized these things we do to make our decisions, these heuristics, these shortcuts we follow, and have really explained how this all works. And I can say, you know, the majority of people will make this decision if they’re presented with X, they will do Y if they’re presented with this. And it’s been quite, it’s not common for marketers to apply this, but it’s started to become more more commonplace. So there’s the amazing Robert Cialdini, who sort of talked about this in 1984, he’s amazing.

realm of behavioral scientists who have applied this stuff to marketing, modern day practitioners who are doing it. And with the with my podcast, which I started seven years ago, my goal was, I just want to talk to these these experts in the space, because I want to learn more about it. And it turned out that thousands of other people want to learn from them as well. Because in the seven years of running the show, it’s slowly, slowly growing. And now it’s one of the UK’s number one marketing podcast. And I think that is because a lot of people feel how we feel it, which is that marketing is really hard.

Phill (04:57.188)

We often feel like we’re failing at it. And yet behavioural science provides some laws of marketing which allow us to make decisions which are reliable rather than based on gut feel or based on data which perhaps isn’t relevant to the actual situation we’re working in.

Ed (05:11.95)

Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny because I remember, again, I didn’t go to university, but I did do the CIM post-grad diploma at sort of two years of night school because it was something that I, again, fell into in my day-to-day job. then, you know, my boss at the time said, look, you know, you’re quite good at this stuff. Do you want to go and study? I was like, yeah, yeah, why not? So I did two years of night school. But again, when I did it, was, even then, it didn’t feel like it majored massively on the psychology of what…

marketing is and it was funny like fast forward when I worked at Nike years later and they didn’t even call it marketing, they just called it demand creation and then when you sort of bog down to demand creation, kind like yeah, we are there to create a demand as marketing is, but ultimately everything is a psychological play. You are always trying to think about how do you lean into the psychology of the buyer or user, right? Because sometimes the end user is not necessarily the buyer and then you do start to get quite…

complicated with it all and then it’s not as easy as when you thought it was when you first started on that journey.

Phill (06:14.596)

Yeah, yeah. If you can understand this psychology behind how people experience products and services, you can make that service and product so much better.

Ed (06:23.542)

Absolutely. So we’ve got a few few themes in this report as well. And sort of the first thing we’re going to look at is the death of the scroll, why interruption is failing. So most brands approach live commerce by trying to interrupt a user’s scroll and get them to do something that that user in that particular moment is not necessarily looking to do. And it’s a strategy built for, I guess, for traditional e-commerce, but in a live environment.

It can be expensive because it often trains customers to only buy when there’s a deal. And the research in the Impulse Lab found that live shopping works because it creates a fundamentally different buying environment where the audience is engaged and ready to give their attention if the content can take them there. How do you unpack?

Phill (07:12.238)

Yeah, the definite scroll is a really interesting one. I’ll tell you bit of a story. Actually, in my podcast, I try to not only share information about psychology, marketing psychology, I try to actually test it myself. So I’ve read lots of books which reference a particular sort of psychological bias called the curiosity gap. And this is the idea that if something sparks our curiosity, but doesn’t give us all the answers,

we’re more likely to engage. Now, everybody knows this because we’ve all seen a cliffhanger. The unknown, yeah, or the Zyganik effect. It’s originally, Zyganik is this amazing Soviet researcher in the early 1900s, was at a cafe. She orders a load of things with all of her colleagues. The waiter remembers all of these things without writing a list, delivers it to them perfectly.

Ed (07:47.18)

Almost like, what? It’s almost like the unknown gap.

Phill (08:10.712)

She leaves the cafe, leaves her scarf at the cafe, runs back and then says to that waiter who’s remembered everything perfectly, you know, where’s my scarf? And the waiter doesn’t recognise who she is, which is this idea. So this is called a Zygarnik effect, which is idea that when you’re working on something, when you’re trying to remember something, you remember it all really well. But then when that task is finished, you’ll forget it all. And it builds up to this curiosity gap, which is essentially this idea is if something is left incomplete, like,

the waiter hasn’t done the order, more likely to engage with it, our brains are more likely to engage, which is of course how cliffhangers work, which is of course why Buzzfeed articles work. The idea that if you see an article which says, let’s say you live in Swansea, here are the top 10 restaurants in Swansea, and then the title says all 10. If it says here are the top 10 restaurants in Swansea, you won’t believe the one they’ve missed out. You’re so much more likely to click on that because it sparks your curiosity. So I ran this experiment.

on TikTok. Now I’m going to level with you here. I am rubbish at social media. I don’t really get it. I kind of hate it as part of me that wishes it didn’t exist. But I’m a solopreneur who’s trying to grow a basically a media company. So I know I have to be on these channels. I have to be on LinkedIn. I have to be on YouTube. And so I ran this experiment on TikTok where I thought, well, let me test out this curiosity gap. Let me create 40 videos. 20 of them can have a

Ed (09:28.238)

Yeah, of course.

Phill (09:38.491)

curiosity hook at the start. So for example, I’ll talk about productivity and I’ll say something like, I’ve spoken to experts about productivity, you won’t believe the tip that I heard, something like that. It’s a bit tongue in cheek, it’s a bit cheesy, it’s a bit, it’s not the smartest, almost creative way to apply it. But I needed something obvious to test the effect. Now I another 20 videos, which were saying the same thing, basically. Here, this productivity tip around…

What would it be? Temptation coupling is fantastic because of this. Why I just talk for it. Don’t do a curiosity gap. Anyway, I published both of these videos, all of these videos, all 40 videos, put some paid spend behind them. The videos that had the curiosity gap opener was something like four times more effective. They got four times as many views. More importantly, the views stayed on watching for longer. So they actually watched the videos and of those people who stayed watching for longer, they were like eight times more likely to want to follow me. Those videos alone.

got the channel, I think 11,000 followers, whereas the other videos, I think, contributed like 500 followers. So it really does work. If you can hook people in, you can get them to watch. Now, the interesting thing it links to your stop at the scroll, death of the scroll, is I then tried with all these followers to get them to go and listen to my podcast, take them away from TikTok. You know, I thought, I’ve nailed this. I’m great at social media. Now let’s get them to go listen to the podcast. That’s impossible.

I got 2 million views on a video promoting an episode I’d done with Rory Sutherland. And I promoted that video. I here’s a podcast. Here’s how you go and listen to the podcast. Very few people did. And this is, think, the interesting, this is the game we’re playing with social media. It’s zero click content. People will engage with your content. They will never click. And they are incentivized to keep people on their platform, which means they de-incentivize videos and users that take people away.

And so you have to think about when you’re thinking about publishing on social, you can’t really think how can we activate this viewer and convert them. You’re simply playing within that ecosystem. The only game you can play is how can we get them to watch more of our TikTok videos versus another TikTok video? How can we get them to read more of our X posts or Facebook posts than otherwise? Because it’s really hard to get people away. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable because we can cover that, you know, the valuable of showing up multiple times. It can be really, really valuable.

Phill (11:59.639)

But getting people away is really hard.

Ed (12:02.008)

Yeah, and the different platforms are built to work in different kinds of ways. So we spoke, we interviewed Tony Pastro a while ago from Goalhanger podcasts. And I know that when he was thinking about, when they were just podcasting at first, they were thinking about how do we…

I they were a little bit worried at first about like, if we start putting this content on TikTok and other places and away from the Spotify’s place, are we going to cannibalise? And I was like, no, they are distinct environments in their own right. And actually they are, they’re multipliers. They’re not cannibalisers of where you’re doing what you’re doing. And I think, you know, how do we bring that back then, I guess, to live commerce? So I guess the question there is in this…

Phill (12:36.037)

Yes.

Ed (12:48.866)

Like you said, this conversion environment, how do you get those people to go where you want them to go?

Phill (12:54.735)

Yeah, well, let’s stay on the goalhanger one, because I think this is what a lot of businesses have the same problem with, right? It’s like, we’re, we want to promote ourselves on TikTok, but we also want people to buy our reusable cup, whatever it is. Goalhanger have the same thing. We want to promote ourselves on TikTok, but really we want people to listen to these amazing podcasts. So they’ve got this, they’ve got this debate. Should we publish clips from rest is history on TikTok, because that could, like you say, cannibalize what people are watching. Well,

If you look at the world of behavioral science, you’ll learn about this amazing principle, this amazing idea, which is known as the mere exposure effect. I think it’s one of these principles that every marketer should know. So you should have a post it note of it on your, on your computer and think about it regularly. Because the mere exposure effect is, it’s really, really simple. Studied by Robert Zionik back in the 1960s, 1970s. He’s at, I think it’s Stanford University. And he gets a load of university students together.

and asks them questions about Turkish words and Mandarin words that they have never seen before because none of them speak Turkish or Mandarin. However, over the previous six weeks, he has taken out a one page ad in this university newspaper, which this is 1670s, everybody reads this newspaper. It’s like 100 % adoption because it’s the way you get the news. A one page ad where he has just put an image of this unfamiliar Turkish word or unfamiliar Mandarin word. So he knew that the man on campus that he was interviewing

will have had some familiarity with some of these words and no familiarity with other ones. But they probably, because they don’t speak the language, wouldn’t conceptually be aware of this. if you see a random Mandarin character today, if I show you a random Mandarin character, and then ask you, do you know this character in two weeks time, you won’t really remember it. However, he was measuring whether just this mere exposure to these characters would make people like it more. And so he does this experiment and what he finds consistently across the board.

is characters, Turkish words, Mandarin characters, that the students had seen multiple times before, even if they weren’t aware that they’d seen it. They preferred, they liked more, they claimed had more meaning, they claimed would be related to words that are far more interesting. It wouldn’t mean goat, it would mean cerebral or something like that. They had this huge preference to it. And this created this idea of mirror exposure, which has now been studied repeatedly in so many different worlds.

Ed (15:14.21)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phill (15:22.297)

which is basically this idea that the more you see something, the more you become attracted to it, the more likable you find it. It’s been repeated in romantic partners with brands, it’s been repeated on social media, all these different things. The more we get our message, people exposed to our message, the more people will appreciate that message. And so to take it back to Goalhanger, to take it back to a podcast, take it back to a business who’s trying to promote, it is far better for them to have their content visible in multiple places.

That does not mean that you’re going to get somebody who sees a Rest is History post on Facebook to immediately go and listen to Rest is History. However, it does mean that when they decide to go on holiday to Tenerife and they’re looking at their podcast player trying to think, I should download something for the plane and they see a Rest is History podcast, because they have been exposed to it before, they’re far more likely to click in and download it at that point. So that’s how mere exposure is really important. And it’s so under thought.

Too often as brands we think as soon as they see us we need to convert because one we can track it on Facebook and two we might we might not ever get them again and yet all that actually suggests is you’re gonna limit your exposure because if you just go for conversion based posts they’re not gonna go viral they’re not gonna get the attention they deserve and it’s gonna be harder to get any exposure.

Ed (16:34.99)

So I guess that, yeah, so I guess what you’re saying that ultimately is like every platform you’re on ultimately, well, you know this, right, has its different ways of engaging the audience and finding some means to convert. Cause ultimately they do want to do that on platform. So it’s ensuring that ultimately you are, I guess, you’re building the audience, you’re taking them on a journey, you’re storytelling with them over a period of time. It’s like the reason that interruption is failing, cause most people pile in very, very early in that journey and try to sell immediately instead of.

trying to give them something first so then you start to build a value exchange and when they start to receive more and more from you and if you know could just be content as the perceived value then they are more likely to resonate with that content and then if you are selling whatever that may be there’s probably more opportunity that’s gained from that because you’ve given them advanced value as it were.

Phill (17:29.22)

think so. I mean, it’s cliche to talk about very old marketing campaigns. But the best example of this is still this, the famous food blitzer example from like the mid 2000s. This company selling a food blender, they think how can we get more food blender sales? And they come up with this ridiculous idea, get the CEO dressed up in a lab coat, and get them to put iPhones in the food blender, film it, put it on YouTube.

And now that is just thinking about content from the audience’s point of view, rather than they could, of course, have done endless pieces of content talking about the amazing functionality of the food blender, all the recipes you can make. Instead, they just made something that would be really interesting for the platform they were on. A YouTube video titled, Will It Blend iPhone is something I just, I have to click on. I can’t resist it. It’s made for that platform. It’s made with the audience of that platform in mind. It will not mean that somebody will buy straight away. Maybe they will.

Ed (18:17.292)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phill (18:25.594)

Maybe they will, but it’s not made for that. Made for this idea of let’s get eyeballs on it. And then when somebody does need to buy a food blender, that exposure will make it far easier for them to actually buy.

Ed (18:33.858)

Yeah, it’s top of mind. If they’re thinking food blender, then thinking that’s the blend I need to go and get because that resonated with me and it stuck in your mind because it entertained you, somehow grabbed you. And I guess that is the point of, I guess why you would do that kind of content because you want that recall at the moment that that person thinks I need that thing. That’s the go-to memory.

Phill (18:56.996)

Can I take it to a sports example just because I’ve already chimed in and did a half marathon yesterday and trying to make myself seem like I’m not that great, but I’m a big Strava user and Strava is really similar to that. It’s like it is a social media platform that also doesn’t want you to leave. Well, one of the most amazing brand, and I think they’ve actually bought this company, so it’s not a surprise that it’s worked, but the most amazing brand activations on Strava probably ever, but at least in the last couple of years is Runner.

Ed (18:59.114)

Absolutely.

Ed (19:04.374)

Hahaha!

Phill (19:25.988)

So runner is an AI powered training assistant company. And Strava could have done all sorts of things to promote runner in their app. They could have given people discounts. They could have sent push notifications. Once you had done say 20K in a week, they could have sent you a notification saying, Hey, do you want to upgrade your runner? They didn’t bother with any of that. They simply went for mere exposure in the content that people already see. So all they do is that when somebody else in your feed has done a run using runner,

it tells you that immediately. it says, Ed’s just done a 5k. He’s doing runners 10k sub 45 minute plan. He’s just hit all his targets. And so it doesn’t feel like an ad. It’s in the feed. It’s content relevant. still, I still want to look at your run and see how you did. And there’s social proof element in there, but more importantly, there’s more exposure. So I’m now exposed to basically an ad to run it every time I open Strava, but I’m not even against it because it’s just part of the

content there and then if I ever have this feeling of, really want to push myself running, I know where I’m going to go because of all that exposure.

Ed (20:34.112)

It’s the constant drip, drip, right? And like I said, and it gets weaved into, even though runner is not the story, it gets weaved into your story, whatever that story is. And I think that’s the elevation that you’re looking for, that it’s never about price or product, it’s about the story. And then you naturally then seek that out. Because you see, often you see people like brands will lead with…

Phill (20:54.436)

Yes.

Ed (21:00.78)

discounts, right? And then the problem with that is this, they end up setting this low anchor. Cause when you start leading with discounts, then what happens next? Well, your competitors do the same too. And it’s just a race to the bottom. But the ones that ultimately are, if you look at like brands like On, right? With Federer, they have decided we’re going to go, ultimately we’re going to go premium. Like it’s rare to find On trainers discounted. And it’s only because like the end of the line, right? You want the latest pair.

And you know you’re going to have to probably pay full whack for them, right? Because ultimately by the time they do get discounted, they’ve come out with the next best. But the way they’ve done their stuff with Federer, they have been very much, they’ve almost come from nowhere and now are worth billions. In such a crowded marketplace, they’ve managed to find ways to ultimately tell stories around their brand.

Phill (21:42.404)

Yeah.

Phill (21:48.347)

And I think this important part of On’s example there is this mere exposure principle, what it tells you is that if you change your strategy, if you change your message regularly, it backfires. One of the reasons if you do early testing with your messaging that people might not like it is simply because they haven’t seen it enough. I’m sure if you asked KFC customers when they first introduced Finger-Licking Good, you know, what do you think of this? thought it’s a bit rank actually. I don’t really, I don’t like that.

Ed (22:16.364)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. the Budweiser one, the What’s Up, which was irritating as hell, but they’d obviously tested it, right, but they stuck at it and then they started to expand it. It still the same thing. All the recent Domino… I’m gonna do it, Domino woohoo.

Phill (22:17.772)

or I’m loving it, it’s a bit cliche, or…

Yeah. Yeah.

They stick with it.

Phill (22:31.354)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The more you do it, the more it becomes likeable. yeah.

Ed (22:37.44)

It becomes culturally resonant as well because other people start doing it too and then you know.

Phill (22:42.084)

Yeah, and I’m a Chelsea fan and Chelsea’s had an interesting, yeah thanks, interesting sort of six years in terms of the ownership change. One of the interesting things as a fan is there’s a lot of discontent within the fan group and I think a lot of that is because things are changing. It’s because we’ve become, all these things, we’ve become exposed to and that could be as simple. They don’t love it. Well, they don’t love it because they get the things they get used to, they really like.

Ed (22:46.402)

Sorry.

Ed (23:04.718)

Humans don’t like change, it’s just a natural…

Ed (23:11.16)

Yeah, yeah,

Phill (23:11.17)

So as a season ticket holder, having a card for your season ticket and an actual physical ticket people love. then now suddenly it’s all digital. People don’t like that. People really loved hearing the liquidator before the game and stuff like that. And changing that makes people really unhappy. But something as simple as just like the slogans that they’re using to talk about the club. So, you know, it used to just say, I don’t know, it probably used to say either True Blue or Pride of London. And now they’re going to all these different slogans and it’s like changing the message that much.

seeds discontent because you’re ignoring the fact that people become exposed to something, the fact that people really like it. And at a very high level, just thinking about player recruitment, this is probably another reason if you’ve got a club which has basically filled its staff and its squad with players that are essentially unknown or have barely been at the club for more than five years, I think other than Reese James, you basically got a team which has only been there for two years.

Ed (24:06.966)

It’s hard to have the emotional attachment and that’s matter that matters certainly in sport, right? Yeah, yeah. We’ve we’ve had the same in my team, Burnley, and you can you’re welcome to say sorry. Yes. Yeah, thank you. We you know, we we we’ve had a bit of that over the last four or five years that we had new ownership that came in. So I always have to get a mention for Burnley as well, as everyone knows, new ownership that came in and what we have it because we’ve sort of gone up and down in the leagues as well. The squad has changed quite a lot and it’s it’s

Phill (24:08.064)

It’s hard to get, it’s hard to get people, exactly.

Phill (24:15.01)

you’re Burnley fan? I love Burnley as well. My partner’s a big Burnley fan, so…

Ed (24:36.482)

becomes really, really hard to develop an emotional attachment to the players because you feel like, well, they’re not going to be around long and yeah, you want them scoring goals and look, yeah, we’re to get relegated, right? So we’re not having a great season. But last year we did have a great season. But also now there’s an element of the fan base and probably me included that’s finding it really, hard for that constant change, which is ultimately what’s happening really, because we’re going back and forth. And it’s not that we get relegated or we win the league, right? Because we…

To say I know our place in the hierarchies, I don’t want to be defeated in that sense, but we are the type of club that we are, and we want to punch above our weight, and we already are, but ultimately, the thing that makes us as a club is about intensity, is about pride, is about working hard. It’s not necessarily about what Chelsea are trying to be, right? Because we’re at different ends of the market, and it’s…

Everyone has to find their place. worked there a long, time ago. I believe you can find your place and have relative success, which is, for us, we’re being brutally honest, is never going to be about trophies.

Phill (25:44.975)

Yeah, yeah. But that’s why I love Ashley Barnes for you guys. Cause I think Ashley Barnes is an example of like, that’s a mere exposure signing. Get somebody who embodies the tenacity, the love, the care of the community, who’s been through it all. Get them involved in the club and you’ve got something, you’ve got a linchpin to hang. say, well, know, Burnley’s not having a great season, but we still got characters in there that are trying really hard for us. Whereas if you, if you look at maybe Wolves, they haven’t had that this season. There’s a lot of discontent in there.

Ed (26:11.052)

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Phill (26:11.48)

I’ve also got a theory, mate, that it’s these double board advertising boards, know, Turf Moor, double digital advertising boards, Molyneux, double digital advertising boards. You put double advertising boards up, the players are too distracted. They can’t concentrate on the game. City having a rubbish season, they’ve got them.

Ed (26:20.258)

Yeah, it’s a good point, I’ll thought about that.

and you struggle, yeah, yeah, he could. God, yeah, we really are going off on a tangent now. Will’s not very happy with this. I can see a raft of messages, like move on guys. So interestingly though, I think we can sort of get to sort of the next stages, which is context responders. And I think Ashley Barnes was a good sort of segue to a context responder because who would have ever thought that Ashley Barnes would be a context responder? Because ultimately you look at him, right? I’m gonna try and bring this back around now and I’m probably gonna struggle with this.

Phill (26:52.289)

Yeah, good luck.

Ed (26:54.03)

In the ImpulseLab survey, we found that 47 % of people respond to Context, right? Which is not about discounts, it’s more about giving you a compelling reason to care about that product. Ashley Barnes has given us compelling reasons to care about Burley because of some of the things he’s done in the period of time that he’s played for us. Now, how do you do that from a…

brand perspective you want people to ultimately buy your product. How do you create context responders?

Phill (27:26.938)

There’s a thousand ways to do it. I think there’s a couple of things to think about. An important principle to remember is Byron Sharp’s work around brand associations. So what marketing essentially allows you to do in the long term is build associations that people connect with your product. So Coca-Cola basically spend all their time building associations between refreshment, between fast food, between hot summer days.

and their product so that when, and Christmas as well, yeah, they basically try football. Guinness is a better example with their rugby activation of like, Guinness built this association that when you went to the rugby, you had a pint of Guinness. They’re trying to do it with football now. Pims have built this association that when you go to Wimbledon, when you’re watching Wimbledon, you have Pims. And there’s so many brands who build these associations. And this is what all branding is supposed to do. You’re meant to build these associations.

Ed (27:57.155)

And Christmas.

Yeah. Yes.

Phill (28:23.638)

And if you can do that consistently, you’ll get a lot of engagement. Now, one other question about how you do that is that, well, how do I do that and stand out because every company is trying to do this? Well, this is where more psychology comes into play, which is this idea of distinctiveness. This is amazing research back in the 1930s called Hedwig von Rastroff. She was a researcher who was interested in memory and if distinct items could become more memorable. So really simple study to remember here, which is that she gave people

combinations of sort of four random letters to remember like Y-I-O-P and loads of different of these combination of letters like 20, 40, 60. And within this list, she would include one combination of numbers of digits, four, seven, two, And then she would wait 30 minutes, say, remember as many as you can, come back in 30 minutes and tell me how many you can remember. Turns out the digits, which were sort of distinct with a comparison set,

were 30 times more memorable than the letters. She repeats the experiment again. This time there’s only one set of letters and then 60 sets of digits. Now the letters are 30 times more memorable. Richard Chotton in his brilliant book, The Choice Factory, repeats this with brands. He gives people a list of 25 brands from one category, all are automotive brands, and then one fast food brand, Burger King. Gives them time to look at the list and then asks them in 30 minutes, which do you remember? They all remember Burger King.

repeats it, suddenly it’s all fast food brands and now they all remember Nissan. So the comparative set which within your, comparisons set you’re in, if you’re distinct within that comparison set, you’re more likely to stand out. Now, this is my issue with so many brands is we copy our competitors. We feel this urge to do the things our competitors are doing, to take it back to football, look at the front of shirt sponsors, not just in the Premier League, but across the football pyramid.

Ed (29:54.68)

interesting.

Ed (30:08.6)

Yes.

Phill (30:19.49)

It’s all gambling companies. It’s all gambling companies and what you, which is about to change. Yeah. Yeah. But I guarantee there’ll be another industry that, that shoes into this idea of football sponsorship is good for them. And suddenly they will all be there. And yet what the evidence suggests is if you’re a gambling firm, the worst place you could spend your money is probably on a front of shirt sponsorship because, because it’s so crowded. What should you do instead?

Ed (30:21.304)

Yeah. Which is about to change next season. They’ll find a way with the gambling without a doubt, but it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.

Ed (30:42.904)

Being so crowded.

Phill (30:46.766)

take a leaf out of T-Mobile’s play in Bayern Munich. this, what T-Mobile did in Bayern Munich, it’s amazing, right? So they were their front of shirt sponsor for years in the early noughties and I think until 2010. They had all of their brand all over the Alliance Arena. You couldn’t look at a different part of Alliance Arena. T-Mobile, all of the ad boards were for them. And yet, for every single Bundesliga game for…

Ed (31:08.044)

The arena was the colour of T-Mobile as well at certain times.

Phill (31:16.502)

many many seasons, I think they’re still doing it today, they would pay for 60 people to dress up in all white with a white cap on and sit in a sort of the front rows of the stadium, the opposite side to where the camera was, to spell out the T-Mobile logo. So whenever you’re watching the game, you can look at this up now. It’s amazing. There were 60 people. I mean, they’re just fans.

Ed (31:34.958)

I didn’t know that nice.

Phill (31:39.547)

but they’ve been paid probably quite a lot of money to dress up in this logo and buy a Munich allow. Now, why would T-Mobile go through all of the effort of doing that? Because they’re already in the stadium. They’ve already got their ad boards up everywhere. Why would they bother to do that? But potentially spending tens of thousands of pounds more. Well, why they would do that is because that is the only marketing message a football fan will see which stands out. It achieves what Von Restorf taught us a hundred years ago, which is if you stand out, you’re 30 times more memorable. And that ad…

Ed (31:39.832)

Yeah, yeah,

Phill (32:08.888)

campaign will stand out far more than all of the front of spurts shirt gambling sponsors. Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

Ed (32:11.374)

Yeah. It’s the unexpected message because you don’t expect to see that. So like I it stands out. It’s interesting as well. Another one that sort of came to me as well is obviously Peter Hutt and Fulham as well for a few years as well. Like I said, when everyone else was doing other things, they had a very different brand on their shirt as well, which ultimately then you do remember and it does stand out because like I say, everyone else is doing the same things and they’re not.

Phill (32:24.558)

Yeah, yeah.

Phill (32:34.874)

Yeah, exactly. I think it’s front of search sponsors is a bit of a wild way to go about this. But I think there’s benefit and football clubs can apply this at a really high level. that what’s a good example, Forest Green Rovers has become the greenest football club in the world, tiny club near Stroud. And I think the one of the things with them, might not be case anymore, but at least in the Duncan Ferguson years, know, when they were sort of they had Rob Edwards, and they got up to leave to

They become the greenest football club in the world, which basically just means they built a bunch of solar panels. They serve, I think, a lot of vegan and vegetarian food in the stadium. And they get a higher per capita, they get higher attendance for the area in which they’re in than any other team in the league. that’s quite a low density area, Stroud, but basically very few people live there. And yet they pretty much sell out every single game. And the idea there is that you’re a football club that stands for something. What would be great is if Burnley…

Ed (33:04.334)

Vegan food, yeah, yeah.

Ed (33:17.346)

Yes.

Phill (33:26.97)

really try to craft a message around something their fans feel very passionate about. Probably I went to Chelsea Burnley with my father-in-law, who’s a big Burnley fan and his mate. We ended up at a pub, was like Lancashire pub. It was great. I mean, it was a bit awkward for me and my mates, but anyway, it was good fun. I was chatting with a lot of them and they’re like, you know, they really like the idea of like traditional football club, community values, been around for a while.

What if Burnley just made their whole identity around football done the right way, football done the historic way, big campaigners for Antivar, could be. They could remove all the digital advertising boards and have the old fashioned boards. They could serve really good quality homemade food in the stadium, really good quality locally made ale in the stadium. They could have really traditional football shirts that really stand out from the rest. They could even bring this into recruitment, sign players that are a bit more, less of the newer craft you play.

Ed (34:19.97)

More of the Ashley Barnes.

Phill (34:21.122)

More of the Ashley Barnes, more of the Ashley Barnes or Josh Brownhill. know, they sort of got a history of this. Sean Dyches is a great embodiment of it. It wouldn’t be too hard for them to change things. you know, Burnley, football done the right way. If they went down that route, came up with something actually distinctive, mere exposure, talked about it all the time. I guarantee you Turf Moor would be sold out every week because what you would then be doing is you’d be attracting fans that are disillusioned from watching United play every week and get frustrated with it. Disillusioned from…

Ed (34:24.93)

Yes, yeah, yeah, course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phill (34:47.066)

all the financial problems at Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United and they get attracted, they go to Burnley. I think it’s great to think about this in football terms because it’s fun, but these are really timeless business lessons that every brand can apply.

Ed (35:00.942)

So how would we bring this to live shopping then, guess, right? Because everyone’s, I guess, everyone’s thinking about it or trying to do it right now. And we’ve seen what’s gone on, the unbelievable growth of it in Asia, probably predominantly China, right? And everyone’s seen the photos of all these mobile phones on Iraq and how they’re doing what they’re doing. And I’m not sure we’re necessarily doing that kind of thing here in Europe. How do you apply that to live shopping experience for a brand? How do they, wait, who went?

You know, often most of these brands, right, they are probably distributing their product through a retailer that’s not their own. But more and more now are thinking about even thinking about like advertising, thinking about what they’re bringing things in house now and they’re going that next step of going direct to consumer. How do they start? How do they think about doing that?

Phill (35:48.1)

think the first thing and this is probably something that all brands need to get on board with at the moment is to make the behaviour of live shopping seem normal and commonplace. Because I still think at the moment you’ve got this issue where this especially in Western society, especially in England, probably in some extent the States, more so than China and Japan and South Korea, is you’ve got this idea that that behaviour is, is, is not familiar to us. We, we’re used to

buying things online, having thought about it, but not used to just buying things right off the back of sort of an Instagram ad. And so what I would imagine these brands could get benefits from it at the start is probably grouping together and trying to make that behaviour seem more commonplace. So doing ads which show the rise of it. So the best way to probably think about this is, it’s this amazing idea of social proof, right? Which is this idea that we tend to

to follow the actions of people like us. So this is a hereditary trait. We’ve evolved to do this. If we’re hunter gatherers and we see a bunch of our hunter gatherer mates eating berries off a tree and not dying, we’ll copy their behaviour that we’ve evolved to do that. And the same thing happens today. If I’m walking down a street in London and I see people queued out the door at a coffee place, I just get in that queue.

Ed (37:02.198)

Absolutely, yeah.

Phill (37:13.913)

I don’t really think about it. Like, oh, I could do with a coffee. I’ll just copy what they’re doing.

Ed (37:16.888)

Well, you remember the film, The Commitments, when basically everyone’s queuing outside the door. I mean, it’s going back a few years. And basically it’s city, like Basin Island, obviously, and everyone’s queuing outside this door. And it’s actually for to basically get picked to be in a band, right? And this guy gets the door and he said, all right, look, are you next for one of the auditions? went, no, no, no, I just saw a massive queue and I just thought, I thought you were selling drugs.

Phill (37:20.503)

Not gone. Yeah.

Ed (37:42.19)

He just joined the queue. But he’d used that exact same analogy there and it was a bit of a joke in the end. But it is that thing like, in certain parts of certainly Britain, Ireland, we are are queueers, right? We see a queue and we think, yeah, that must be pretty good. We’ll just do it. In other parts of the world, it’s not quite the same.

Phill (37:52.787)

it’s amazing.

Phill (37:59.81)

Yeah, there’s this big thing in pubs at the moment where barmen are getting really pissed off about people. We’re starting queues at a bar now and it’s like driving people crazy because the whole idea of a bar is you can all get to the front and we’ll figure out who was first and people are coming. And that’s social proof as well. is like candid. You do what other people are doing. Yeah. If you stand in a train, if you stand in Liverpool street station in London and point at the ceiling within about four seconds, there’ll be about

Ed (38:09.18)

yeah.

Ed (38:13.046)

Yes. It’s just a social, yeah, they were before me, they were before me and yeah.

Ed (38:26.101)

yeah.

Phill (38:27.671)

hundred people around you all looking at the ceiling just because we follow the actions of others. Anyway, live shopping feels hard to commit to because many people feel like the majority of people wouldn’t do this. So it’s hard to buy something on live shopping at the moment because you think, I don’t know if other people are doing this. Is this risky? So one of the things brands need to think about is how can we make this behaviour seem more complex? How can we show that other people are doing this?

Now the issue they have, the almost obvious way is to say this is the most popular way to shop because that will make people more likely to do it, except you can’t say that because it is not the most popular way to shop. So the way to get around this is an amazing study in the US. It’s around something called dynamic social proof, which is how do you make behaviours which are in the minority seem more commonplace? So this study, I love it, it was conducted on people who were queuing for a restaurant in Texas and the researchers…

Ed (39:03.288)

Yes.

Phill (39:21.017)

set out a goal to try and get the people queuing for the restaurant to eat more plant-based vegan options when they go into the restaurant, which is not a common behaviour in America. It’s definitely not a common behaviour in Texas. This is a hard thing to do. For half of the people they spoke to, they said, I think it was something like 30 % of Americans eat some plant-based food. Maybe you consider doing it, which sort of sounds like it’d work in your head. think, well, okay, that’s quite a lot of Americans.

Ed (39:33.292)

Yeah, yeah.

Ed (39:50.019)

Yeah.

Phill (39:50.213)

but it’s not the majority. And they said that had no effect. You hear that, you go in, you just order what you want. You order your surf and turf. For the other half, they said, they used the same stat, but they framed it in a different way. They said more Americans than ever are trying plant-based food. Same stat, still 30%, but it is more than ever. It’s suggesting there’s a trend. It’s actually correct. It’s suggesting it’s growing. For that group, it was something like…

Ed (40:09.41)

Yeah. Yeah. He’s factually correct. Yeah.

Phill (40:19.268)

three times the amount of people then went in and tried plant-based food versus those who heard the other message. So if you’re in live shopping, that’s the sort of angle you should be looking at. More people than ever are using live shopping to decide what to buy. More people than ever have bought our products using live shopping. More people than ever doing this. Show the trend and that could start to shift buying behavior.

Ed (40:42.658)

Yeah, interesting. So we’re going to get on to our third point now. Why, you know, why confidence or the urgency trap? Why confidence beats panic? So every live commerce player, but you can, you could find, can go on Google now and you find it. We’ll, tell you that, you know, it’s about countdown timers. It’s about selling out fast. However, the research that we did, like countdown time has ranked dead last in terms of a purchase trigger that people really, really wanted to lean into. And interestingly, when we asked how people felt during that purchase,

you know, when we talked about the sort of confidence and engagement were top ranked while rushed and pressured ranked last. Like people didn’t want to feel pressurized into that person. It’s only the same, right? If you walk into a shop and suddenly someone walks up to you, can I help you? Like literally, but I’ve just walked in and kind of just sort of browse a little bit. They want to have that time to, I guess, take it in, understand it and see if whatever it is that’s being…

and Salton essentially is for them.

Phill (41:44.163)

Yeah, well, this is the this is the concept of scarcity. It don’t I don’t have to harp on about this to the marketers listening, we all understand scarcity. Scarce items are considered more valuable than items that are in abundance. Again, hereditary trait is you know, if we come across a mango, as hunter gatherers, we’re in heaven because it’s a scarce item high quantity of sugar, you try and get as much of it as possible. With this urge to get as much of it possible. That’s why when we encounter scarce things, now it’s modern day.

homo sapiens, we really value them. Best example of this, comes from Robert Cialdini’s book is Sales of Concord. So Concord, supersonic flight between New York and London was running. They announced in early 2000, we will stop flying Concord forever in three years time. Now, nothing about Concord’s price, its service, its speed had changed when they made that announcement. And they still had

sales on for three years, so it was still quite an abundance. yet when, yeah, off the back of his ass, so people shouldn’t want to do it, would have plummeted. They make that announcement, we’re stopping it in three years. Every single sale for every single concourse, right, for the next three years was sold out within 48 hours. The only thing that changed was as an abundant resource, a resource that was seemingly available forever, became a scarce resource. Now, what marketers today are

Ed (42:46.126)

And it was off the back of a disaster as well, that had happened as well, which you’d imagine that confidence would have plummeted at that point.

Ed (43:01.485)

I remember, yeah.

Phill (43:12.532)

are struggling with is they know that scarcity works. So they try to make everything they sell seem scarce, but consumers are smarter than that. We understand when we’re being played. The reason the Concord scarcity application worked is because it’s real. It’s like Concord genuinely is stopping. They’re not trying to win one over here. This is not booking.com saying 20 other people are looking at, there’s proof.

Ed (43:31.372)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ed (43:37.432)

There’s a proof to it. Yeah, you know it’s about to end. Yeah, yeah.

Phill (43:41.473)

Exactly. what marketers need to do is, unfortunately, we need to make more effort to make scarcity work. We need to actually make our products scarce. My favourite example of this is KFC Australia. They were selling chips for a dollar. They still do. In fact, they’ve had to raise the price because of inflation, but they’ve still got this amazing deal, which is chips for a dollar. It’s now $2. And

Yum food brands who own KFC, spend billions of dollars a year on marketing. They got all their marketers to submit the best slogans they could possibly think of to sell KFC chips for a dollar. Came up with all these amazing slogans. The Colonel’s never been so generous, loved from Perth to Brisbane, more popular than ever before, all this stuff. And they did a big AB test on Facebook where they compared all of these different slogans and messages. The message that won was really simple. It said chips for a dollar limited to four per customer.

Now, why does that work? Well, one, it’s because of scarcity in there. Suddenly you’ve made an abundance resource seem scarce. And two, that is a real limit you can place. And that’s also a limit that causes you as a brand, a bit of pain, right? Like if you’re technically reducing the amount of sales you could get by limiting the amount of sales. And yet that slogan one, it encouraged more people to bid.

And still today, if you Google chips for $2, just four per peeps is how they call it now. They still do in-store promotions saying this, and they really do limit you if you try and order five, which let’s face it, nobody ever does. But if you try to order five, they won’t let you. So the important thing with scarcity and countdown time is like, well, how can you make it more believable? One thing to do, one really simple thing to do is to link it to a real event. So Black Friday deals work better because Black Friday is a universally regarded concept that everybody knows ends at a certain day.

Ed (45:05.582)

Yeah.

Phill (45:27.556)

Christmas deals are the same. But also you should be trying, really trying to showcase to your consumer these discounts are genuine, that they won’t last much longer. That the limited edition stuff is really valuable because it’s like, well, you can actually prove that these stuff is limited edition. You can find other ways to make your product limited edition as well, whether that’s getting it signed by an influencer or whatever else it might be. The important thing here is that scarcity really does work.

However, if you overuse it and don’t link it to a real concept, customers will know and actually they’ll probably feel this reactance and feel less urged to buy your brand. But if you find smart ways to link it to real scarcity, whether that’s Concord announcing that the flights are ending or KFC limiting it to four per customer, you will achieve really fantastic results because you’ll actually apply this principle of scarcity.

Ed (46:17.07)

Yeah, and you’ve seen, mean, Nike at their hair day, would do releases of sneakers, right, that would, you’d know that they’d be gone relatively fast. But at the same time Nike were doing that, they were also going big on their own DTC, and they started opening up outlets all over the world, and their own stores all over the world. And then in the outlets, you’d go and find discounted product. And then what you started to find more and more, because I do like buying lots of, I’m gonna call them trainers rather than sneakers, I don’t know why I sneakers. There’s certain ones I’ve been keeping my eye on.

Phill (46:26.651)

Yeah.

Phill (46:41.677)

you

Ed (46:44.46)

I’d then start to find them in the outlet or discounted. So ultimately that scarcity there doesn’t exist anymore. And ultimately what is that? It’s kind like, well, you’re trying to do both. And it’s kind of like, well, are you one or are you the other? And I think that’s part of the reason that Nike went down from where it was. And ultimately, look, they’re trying to come back now and look and add it out to the ones who were on the up. And I think these things are cyclical too, but it’s like, you can’t chase both sides of it. You can’t do, like you said, the scarcity part of it, but also the mass.

Phill (46:52.24)

Yeah.

Phill (47:01.925)

Yeah.

Ed (47:10.688)

and discount at the same time. You’re trying to play too many things. And I think ultimately consumers are savvy, right? They’ll go and just, and it’s easier than ever now because of obviously what we can do with search that you can go and find out if this is truthful or not.

Phill (47:10.917)

Yeah.

Phill (47:25.657)

Yeah, I think with the big brands, they can try, they just try all the hands they can play, can’t they? Nike can try that and get some success. know, ASICs running shoes are the big one at the moment. Try and buy pair of ASICs Superblast or Mega Blast, it’s really hard to get. What frustrates me though is they often don’t give a reason why. I would love it for ASICs to do a campaign saying, the foam we put in our running shoes is so difficult to make, so hard to make. And that’s why we have a scarcity of products.

Ed (47:31.394)

Yeah.

Ed (47:49.421)

Yeah.

Phill (47:53.5)

because we can’t just 3D print this stuff. We have to get this material, which is really hard to find. We have to get these expert weavers, which are really hard to get. And we have to pay all these tariffs to get them to your country of your choice. And if they do that, they can make it more valuable. But I think this is something that challenge a brand, smaller brands, brands that starting up are probably more effective at applying. Like there’s a Cornish surfing company called Finistair who are like, they…

they can apply scarcity much better because they say, look, we’re premium, we only get real sustainable sources, we only get the best sort of locally made stuff. That is why this stuff is scarce and that allows you to believe that the scarcity is real rather than hyped up.

Ed (48:38.766)

I think it comes back to that storyteller, doesn’t it? Where, you know, it allows people to build powerful connections because then those kind of things start to resonate with you. And it might be, you know, we make sure that there’s no waste in the supply, whatever. There could be a multitude of things where, because you see more and more of these brands now that are rising up where people do care about how they’re making their product, where they’re making their product, are they paying people the right salary to make their product? All these things that, you know, that Patagonia…

have been very, very famous for, which is around like, you know, we don’t discount our products, but also we don’t do the kind of sponsorships that other people do. So we, you know, we don’t feel like we need to because of that. Ultimately, we have all this and, or you know, if you buy a Patagonia product, you can take it back there to get it, get it fixed if something goes wrong with it and all those kinds of things. They do it, they stick to it. And like you said earlier, you know, they really, really stick to it. they…

Phill (49:33.756)

They really, really stick to it. And I think like the best example of why they really, really stick to this is if Patagonia did all of the same things and they sell the exact same product and they did the same in commitment to the environment, they rejected private equity in the same way, all of these things, but they sold their t-shirts for five pounds rather than 50 pounds, it wouldn’t work. and I mean, partly because they can’t, because they wouldn’t believe it, but.

Ed (49:57.772)

Yeah.

Phill (50:02.969)

The whole thing has to connect. And part of the reason it works for Patagonia is because it costs more. If it didn’t cost more, people wouldn’t believe it and the cycle wouldn’t continue. There’s amazing studies with Red Bull energy drinks or equivalent energy drinks, where they get people to drink an energy drink and then perform on a mental task where they have to sort of think really, really quickly. Think of a hundred different uses for a brick. Go.

Ed (50:26.243)

Yeah.

Phill (50:30.145)

Some are told that the energy drink costs three pounds 99. Some are told it costs 39 pence. Those who are told it costs less perform worse. Same with painkillers. You get given a 50 pence paracetamol. It’s not gonna cure your headache. You get given the same paracetamol, but you’re it costs five pounds. You’ll feel great. the world, placebo effect perception, this Patagonia benefit from the same thing. You put on a Patagonia t-shirt.

Ed (50:50.636)

It’s the placebo effect, right? It’s again the psychology of it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Phill (50:58.075)

Economics can’t ever factor this in, but behavioral science can. You genuinely feel better if it costs more. That is why the whole luxury brand world exists. It’s like this is called the verbale in effect, this idea that we pay more for something, we value it more. And you can’t half ass this, I think is the point we’re trying to get across here. You can’t, same with a scarcity point. You can’t just apply a bit of scarcity at one point and then be done with it. You either build it in as an actual part of your business. You know, if we take it back to football clubs,

You can imagine a football club with, we say, look, we only sell 500 seats that are standing because they are for our real altruists, our hardcore fans. You have to work for these seats. That will make those seats, and if you’re accurate about that, that’ll make them more popular than if you just do normal scarcity. And the same thing is true for Patagonia. If you want to play this idea that you’re this amazing eco warrior brand and you give back to your community, you have to charge a lot for all that because otherwise people won’t believe it.

Ed (51:34.755)

Yes.

Ed (51:54.031)

Yeah, yeah. It’s actually a good segue into the regret gap as well, right? Because, know, 74 % of people who were storey first buyers, which is obviously a lot of these brands we just talked about, said they still felt positive 48 hours later compared to 55 % of discount hunters, even though they probably paid a premium. I’m not going to mention any brems that are not at the premium of Patagonia, right? They felt like, because there’s a whole…

Not just a story behind it as well, it’s almost like a wave that takes you along, you’re buying into something, you’re partying something bigger than just buying a raincoat.

Phill (52:34.043)

Yeah, this is, mean, we’re talking about this as this idea of sunk costs, and we all know this. If you’ve spent a ton of money on, if, Ed, if you go on a, if you go on a holiday and it’s, and you’ve been saving up for ages for it’s cost you three grand for this week, week long holiday. And it’s, it’s, it’s a bit shit. You’re still, your brain is still going to try and try and get you to find the positives. Cause you’d be saying to yourself, I’ve spent so much on this. I’ve got to enjoy it.

you know, the pool might not be as warm as you thought, you think you’ll say to yourself, actually, a cold pool is what I need, because it’s really refreshing. I think they’ve done this on purpose. Or like the, you know, the egg is hard boiled and it’s not soft. You say, well, actually, I think in Norway, which where we are, I think that’s cultural norms, actually, I think there’s actually better you find is sunk cost fallacy, right, you find ways to justify your find the positives. Same thing the Patagonia t-shirt isn’t very soft.

Ed (53:23.278)

Yeah, find the positives.

Phill (53:29.907)

no, no, that’ll be on purpose because it’s really high quality cotton. Our bodies aren’t used to this high quality. So, so, so, and we find ways to justify these big expenses. And if you get a big discount off something, if instead your holiday costs, it was half price and you got it on a really good deal. And then it’s a bit rubbish. You say, well, this is just a bit, no wonder it’s rubbish. It’s like, this is why they’re discounting it. This, this airline must be going out of business. This holiday, this place must be not be doing too well, but it’s, you know, it’s,

Ed (53:33.212)

Hard wearing. Yeah, yeah.

Phill (53:58.908)

It’s a really powerful concept. Some brands apply this really well. Like if you try and leave Amazon Prime, they use sunk cost to lure you in. They don’t say, oh, Phil, we’re really sorry to see you go. They’ll say, do you know you’ve actually saved 313 quid over the last two years using Amazon Prime? If you leave, you’ll lose these savings, assuming if you keep on buying at the same rate. And suddenly you feel like, oh, God, no, I’ve got to stick around. Gym memberships as well. It really interesting studying gym memberships,

buy a gym membership on an annual basis. So you spend, let’s say, what would it be? 800 quid and you get access to David Lloyd’s for a whole year. You’re less likely to go to David Lloyd’s than if you pay by month or by week. Why is that? Because if you pay by month or by week, especially by week, every single week on your month, you’re seeing money going out and you’re thinking about the sunk cost. Like, my God, I’m I’m not, I’m not going, I’m spending so much as I’m not going. So tip for anyone.

Ed (54:53.752)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Phill (54:57.531)

who goes to the gym wants to go more, ask if you can pay per week rather than per month, because some cost fallacy will kick in and it will make you think, well, I’ve really got to go to the gym. Whereas if you spent once, exactly, exactly.

Ed (55:02.029)

Yeah.

Ed (55:07.286)

It’ll motivate you more. Yeah, absolutely. No, I get that. get that. Cool. This has been really, really interesting. I think what we wanted to do as well. So obviously the impulse lab report people can download at display.com. That’s D-A-I-Z-P-L-A-I. And Will will put that in the show notes when we get the pod live in the next few weeks. So we looked at it and we obviously we came up with you that it’s got there’s a framework.

Other frameworks are available. There’s plenty of them out there in terms of how you would look at this kind of process. But we looked at it as in terms of emotional intensity, i.e. does your audience care about what’s happening right now? Scarcity and clarity, which obviously we’ve touched on quite a bit. Is the limitation real? Is it visible? Is it tied to a moment? It’s about the exclusivity of being when it happens. There’s a narrative depth to it. Have you given people reason to care?

beyond the price, which obviously we’ve just touched on there with Patagonia as an example. Social proof, can people see others actively participating, actively buying into that brand? And then ease of action. When that moment arises, can people buy without thinking about it actually? See, just a natural occurrence then for them to go that one step further because all the things before it has made them lean into that.

I mean, what are your final thoughts on obviously what we’ve discussed today and ultimately that sort of framework that we’ve worked through?

Phill (56:36.432)

do think the final thought is, I’m just thinking about this live shopping concept and I think brands probably all face this idea of how do we as a brand convince people to buy our product? And I think my takeaway is there’s a bit of a wider question here, which is how can we as an industry make this type of behavior seem commonplace? I think probably a lot of these companies could learn more from Amazon trying to convince people to buy shop online or Visa trying to convince people to.

tap and go, or Uber trying to convince people to order a taxi on mobile rather than bringing one up. I think these are sort of, these are big behavior shifts that are done at a sort of industry level rather than brand level. And if you can do it, the profits could be massive. So that’s my probably takeaway from today.

Ed (57:28.782)

Brilliant, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for joining us, Phil, on this week’s episode of The Attention Shift. If you want to learn more about live commerce and why live shopping is essential to your content mix, you can download the Impulse Lab from display.com and you can check that out in the show notes. You definitely need to subscribe and listen to Phil’s podcast. If there’s anything you want to say on that now, Phil, now is your chance.

Phill (57:31.708)

Cheers man, thank you.

Phill (57:52.7)

yeah, if you’ve liked this podcast, so this makes my point really simple. It’s way easier to convince podcast listeners, which is you guys, to go and listen to another podcast than it would be to convince someone who doesn’t listen to podcasts. So you’ve just listened to this great podcast. If you want a slightly less good podcast to listen to, because mine’s nothing compared to Adam Will’s wonderful show, it’s a podcast called Nudge. Search for Nudge. You’ll see an orange logo with big Nudge letters on it. Today we just released an episode with

Ed (57:54.604)

Where can people find it?

Ed (58:04.675)

Absolutely.

Phill (58:20.762)

Will Godara, who created the world’s best restaurant by applying these psychological principles. It’s really interesting. That could be a first good one for you to listen to if you want something to listen to after this.

Ed (58:31.726)

Perfect, I’ll look forward to that. So don’t forget to like, subscribe, also the attention shift. Thank you again, once again. If you’ve got any questions for us, you can email us at helloattentionshift.media, but that’s been me and Phil, goodbye.

Phill (58:46.161)

Bye, thanks for having me.