Interview with Phil Barden: author of Decoded, Apple branding & advertising, Innovation podcast

Episode 48 Interview with Phil Barden: author of Decoded

In this episode MichaelAaron and Richard sit down with Phil Barden, author of Decoded and Managing Director at DECODE Marketing. His excellent book was one of the earliest to look at how ideas from neuroscience and behavioral economics could be used to improve marketing. Phil covers how best in class brands like Apple apply these principles but also how he has personally used behavioral science in his work at T-Mobile.

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Episode Transcript

MichaelAaron: Welcome back to Behavioral Science for Brands, a podcast where we seek to connect academics and practical marketing. Every other week we go deep into behavioral science and see how those tactics and those insights are powering some of America's most popular brands.
MichaelAaron I'm MichaelAaron Flicker.
Richard: And I'm Richard Shotton.
MichaelAaron: And today we're very excited to welcome Phil Barden to the program. Phil, you're the managing director at Decode, author of Decoded. We're going to go deep into talking to you today about your views on behavioral science and marketing. Welcome to the show.
Phil Barden: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
MichaelAaron: Wonderful. Let's get into it. So, Phil, welcome to behavioral science for brands. As you heard, we'd like to talk about Academics, marketing, we like to go deep on the behavioral science that powers brands and advertising and marketing, but we always like to start with an opening question for our guests.
MichaelAaron: And the question is, how did you come to learn about behavioral science? When were you first introduced to it? How did you get into behavioral science?
Phil Barden: Um, to be honest, it was a moment of panic, and it was panic because it was in my last client role. I was VP for the T-Mobile brand in Europe, and I had to relaunch and reposition the brand in 12 European countries.
Phil Barden: And I’d commissioned a very expensive, very time-consuming piece of research from a very well-known global vendor who shall remain nameless. And we started to get the results back from countries and to be honest, they just weren't making any sense. So it was a moment of panic. Cause I realized that my personal equity was on the line as well as me committing a lot of company money to this.
Phil Barden: And, just serendipitously, I was talking to someone who said you should, you should speak to the guys at Decode. I'd never heard of Decode. Um, so he got them in and I met them and the two founders of Decode, one is a neuroscientist and the other is a cognitive psychologist. And I tried them out just with a few teasing questions about an advert.
Phil Barden: You know, why didn't this work when people said it would or why did this work when people said it wouldn't work? And they looked at it for a few minutes and gave me some very cogent explanations and using language I could understand, but with a perspective that I'd never, ever encountered before.
Phil Barden: And when I quizzed them and said, how come you guys know all this stuff? They look quite blankly at me and said, but how come you don't know this stuff? Because what we're using are concepts and studies that have been around for decades in in science and academia and the penny dropped at that moment that you have this group this whole body that exists outside of the commercial world that have been dedicated to understanding human behavior and marketing ultimately is about behavior change - so I started to listen to them and I commissioned them on a bit of work and the results came back, again, very powerful.
Phil Barden: So I ended up, out of my moment of panic, and this introduction to behavioral science, scrapping the research that I'd commissioned, and then commissioning DECODE to use their approach. And I'm going to talk a bit later about what happened, but that was how I got into it. And the more I talked to them, the more fascinated I got.
Phil Barden: They gave me some easy to read materials because as you'll know, if you try and read academic and scientific papers, they are impenetrable to the layman. But these guys had a very good skill, which was translating stuff into layman's terms. So they gave me the more popular psychology books to read.
Phil Barden: And the more I read, the more convinced I was that this is so important and so fundamental, and I want to be part of it. So I approached them and said, have you ever thought of having a UK office? Because I'd like to be it. And they said yeah, go for it. We'll, we'll help.
MichaelAaron: Well from panic to learner, to believer, then to entrepreneur.
Phil Barden: With a complete evangelism. Having had the experience and seeing the commercial effects of the impact the approach had. So yeah, I was just fueled with this powerful conviction that this is right. This - everyone needs to do this stuffl, It's too important.
MichaelAaron: A hundred percent. And where in this journey did writing your book fall into the arc?
MichaelAaron: Did you join decode before you wrote the book decoded? Is that the – yeah, okay. And so just, if you would, cause I - our audience - is always interested in the stories behind the people that are here, what was the motivation? How did you get to authoring your book?
Phil Barden: Well, again, it was, it was a bit of panic because I'd fueled with this conviction, I'd been back to see some of my former colleagues at Unilever and they gave me an audience and said, yeah, okay, we'll listen to what Phil has to say. And I'd do my pitch and show them the T-Mobile results. And they'd look at me like rabbits caught in headlights and say, wow, this is interesting, but it's a bit too difficult right now.
Phil Barden: And move it to one side. And what I've realized, the irony of this is, it's all about behavior change and change management. You know, and we have these inbuilt status quo biases, and default to what we know, what we're secure, what we're confident with, because to change is inherently risky. And so I was getting in to see people, but they just weren't buying and I couldn't understand it because I'd had the experience
MichaelAaron: You’d been evangelized
Phil Barden: Yeah, so when I talked to the guys at decode they said, you know what you need to write a book that and in fact that's exactly what they'd done at the start of their commercial careers because it gives you a completely different platform. So when I tried to get onto the conference circuit, so for example, not as a client, but now as a vendor, much harder, exactly
Phil Barden: I was met with, yeah, you can speak and, and here's the speaking fee or here's the sponsorship fee if you want to get a speaking slot, right? When you've got a book and you are a published author, it reframes you - and suddenly you get the invitations, come and speak at our conference because you know, we've got the author of Decoded.
Phil Barden: So it was actually - It served two purposes. One was quite a cathartic process of me getting what I'd learned out into the world.
MichaelAaron: Yes
Phil Barden: Uh, and the other was purely business development.
MichaelAaron: Sure. As is the case for so many that want to not just sell a professional service, but want to teach and educate and engage their clients.
MichaelAaron: Having a thought leadership platform like a book is a great way to do it. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. We're going to ask more about the business, uh, in a little bit, but maybe Richard, you want to guide us on our journey?
Richard: Yeah. So. One of the things that we're really interested in the podcast is the practical application of behavioral science.
Richard: As you say, there's too often a split between the abstract world of academia and then the practical world of business. So to try and bridge that, it'd be brilliant if you could let us know maybe an example of a brand that have very practically, very tangibly used behavioral science to great effect. So what's one of these examples that you might wanna share?
Phil Barden: Sure. And I think some of the examples I'm going to talk about didn't set out to engineer behavioral science into what they were doing. It happened that their success was down to behavioral science principles. And now with the benefit of hindsight, we can unpack it if you like. So the first example I'd share is Apple.
Phil Barden: But a particular aspect of Apple - it's their packaging. And the reason I picked this is I read a biography of Steve Jobs and I was fascinated that in there he talks about the couple of guys he calls engineers. They're not packaging designers. They are engineers, and they are locked in a room for months on end, opening and closing boxes.
Phil Barden: That's all they do. Right? Ones that they've designed themselves, ones from other categories, ones from other competitors because they want to design an experience. And I think one of the things that marketers focus on when it comes to packaging is surface graphics and the design. But what Apple realized was that whilst that's important, it's only part of the overall thing.
Phil Barden: And so they spend a lot of time engineering the opening, the feel, the tactility of the materials that they use, how things are laid out inside. And that all becomes part of brand equity. So what do they do? Firstly, there's the, there is the surface design. It's, it uses a lot of white, which is very minimalist.
Phil Barden: It's uncluttered. And when the brain perceives any stimulus, it automatically pattern matches, you know, where do I know this from in my associative memory? Where have I come across this? What does it mean? What does it represent and we know that style from high end fashion from premium products? So already the graphics and the overall appearance are telling us one thing that creates an expectation then for when we physically interact with it and we open it - and if you've opened an Apple box of iPhone - It is a snug fit yes that that degree of resistance has been deliberately engineered to heighten your expectation as the lid comes off the box.
Phil Barden: It's almost theatrical. It's almost dramatic. You get this, this expectation and anticipation of the reveal. And Steve Jobs talked about revealing the treasure within. It's like you're finding jewelry or something precious within the box. And that activates the psychological goal of novelty-seeking and curiosity, and then surprise as well, which is very, very rewarding for the brain.
Phil Barden: And then once we've opened the box, then you've got an internal layout, which again is very minimalist. It's uncluttered. It's designed very intuitively as well. You don't have to look for things. They are there within, you know, they create, what the psychologists call affordance, which is, it makes it easy to grab.
Phil Barden: And the overall effect triggers what the behavioral science knows is the endowment effect. So this is the psychological sense of ownership that we get when we touch something - just merely touch it, not just sense of ownership. It increases the sense of valuation of the product when we touch that.
Phil Barden: And that whole experience becomes, if you've bought more than one Apple product, it becomes a ritual. You know what it is. It heightens your expectation, your experience of opening the next one. And we know from studies that ritualistic behavior, particularly with product consumption or unwrapping increases and enhances our assessment of the product quality and increases willingness to pay as well.
Phil Barden: And of course that is just, you know, you think packaging, well, that's only one small bit before you get to your iPhone. But it creates a halo effect and contributes to our perception of the brand in domains other than the packaging as well. So I think it's a wonderful example of different principles.
Richard: The one I really love from the three steps you mentioned was that middle one of the resistance when you open the package, cause that feels very unique to Apple. Different area, but there's a study by Charles Spencer, Oxford University into wine and what he's shown is people's perception of exactly the same liquid is different, whether they go to the effort of opening it with a corkscrew versus whether they open in two seconds on a, on a screw cap, he's trying to disentangle that from just the quality perceptions of those two types of wine, because if someone opens a cork for you versus opens a screw cap for you, you don't get quite the same uplift in quality perceptions if you do it yourself. So yes, we see it in Apple, but I think marketers can have some degree of confidence that this addition of a little bit of friction, a little bit of effort can change people's quality perceptions in areas beyond, beyond tech. So I love that part of the experience.
MichaelAaron: One other build that comes to mind is that, you know, the areas that a brand decides to put focus on are almost as important as the areas that they don't put focus on. I was thinking to myself, is there an ad where Apple shows you opening the box? Is there any - and I don't think there is, meaning they know that it adds to the brand experience and they're intentionally silent on it.
MichaelAaron: So it's a moment of discovery. It's a moment of a connection. But when you said unboxing, we all know that it's going to be minimalistic and beautiful, but that resistance is a signature part of opening that, that packaging. So it's super compelling to hear.
Phil Barden: And they get it just right as well. I mean, how long, they spend months and months just getting that degree of resistance.
MichaelAaron: It's amazing. It's amazing. And so what do you think that does for Apple overall? Like if you were to say what the emotional benefits are, I mean, what does that yield in your mind for Apple?
Phil Barden: Well, it all contributes to brand equity. And I think key to that are attributes to do with premium expertise, which of course is mirrored in the technology.
Phil Barden: Uh, ease of use as well. So, intuitive. So we don't have to learn difficult stuff. It's there for us and kind of easily laid out. And just becomes part of the whole ecosystem, you know, the plug and play, uh, how things translate from one device to another is just this seamless brand experience.
MichaelAaron: Makes total sense. Makes total sense.
Richard: Yeah, brilliant example. We've recorded an episode previously on Apple, but we talked very much about the language that they use, their use of concrete words that you can visualize rather than most of their competitors using abstractions. We've never touched on the packaging.
Phil Barden: And what I love about it is, normally marketeers would just say it's, it's just a box, right? It has a functional job to do and we need to do some pretty graphics on it, but you can see it's so much more than just a box. Part of the overall brand experience.
MichaelAaron: Yeah, and it's interesting because it also was- we talk about where to make your product different and where when making your product different makes you out of category convention. Most electronics have the gigabytes and the technical specifications and it may catch on fire, you know, all over the box.
MichaelAaron: And so to have the graphic design, as you say, be so simple and then the tactile experience match that, it stands out in the category convention in a way that helps build its distinctiveness. Yeah.
Richard: So Apple's a brilliant example. Anyone else that you think is an exemplar in terms of the practical use of behavioral science?
Phil Barden: Yeah. So my second example is Marks & Spencers in the UK, which is an upscale, uh, retailer. And this is to do specifically with their food advertising, which has become quite iconic. So back in 2005, they showed a TV commercial for a chocolate pudding. It was one of these puddings that you - a sponge pudding that you bake and when you cut into it, the chocolate is molten inside and it oozes out.
MichaelAaron: The whole thing is very British and not American. I love, I love everything about this so far. Go ahead, please.
Phil Barden: What made it unique really was it was done very slowly, so slow motion, there was gentle music and a voiceover, all of which contributed to salivation.
Phil Barden: So we were engaged immediately the way they described the product, the slow motion of opening, cutting into this chocolate pudding. And once that molten chocolate started oozing out, that had an enormous impact on the nation. In fact, sales went up three and a half thousand percent just after that ad.
Phil Barden: And it was, it coined a phrase that's gone into sort of common parlance in the UK, which is, this is not just food, this is M& S food, or this is not just chocolate pudding, this is an M& S chocolate pudding. So people use this in other examples and other fields now. By 2014 All of the food that they showed in their advertising was shown in motion.
Phil Barden: Now why is that? And this has become known as food porn. And Professor Charles Spencer, you mentioned, is probably the key protagonist here, the professor at Oxford, who specializes in, in the senses and the interplay and interaction of the senses. And he wrote a book called Gastrophysics, which is all, which is all about this.
Phil Barden: He advised Heston Blumenthal with the Fat Duck, the three Michelin star restaurant that he has, where they, Yeah, they even change the lighting of the table, they change the sounds of the play, they change the crockery, size, shape and color on which your food is served, because they know that that interplay of different senses will heighten the experience.
Phil Barden: But what Spence talked about specifically, I think it's really interesting because it goes back to our ancestors - that food in motion, even if it was implied motion, it doesn't have to even be real motion, but food in motion, in particular, protein. in motion or energy dense, energy rich food in motion, trigger this ‘food porn’ effect in, in the brain.
Phil Barden: The reason is it's the kind of stimulus that our brains have evolved to detect, track and concentrate on visually. Why? Because it's fresh and it's good for us. And therefore we can eat it.
MichaelAaron: Clarifying - So this is a turkey coming out of an oven or a plate of food being put on the table, is that what you mean by in motion?
Phil Barden: Yeah Yeah, exactly or in the case of M& S apart from the chocolate pudding with a chocolate oozing, they also did it with burgers where you cut into a burger and you see the fat dripping down I see in slow motion as well. So, you know that triggers something millennia old in our brains that this is good to eat because it's a, it's a source of energy.
Phil Barden: It's a source of protein and it's recently alive as well, rather than something that is static, which is, you know, could actually kill us because it might have toxins in. So yeah, that's a really interesting one.
Richard: And that one it's, it feels completely logical. There's a, you know, wonderful evolutionary explanation of why it might be true. Have you seen any studies that support that empirically? Have you heard of anyone testing the motion part with food?
Phil Barden: Well, Spence, Spence has. Yeah, there are studies on so called food porn. Yeah. But there's also studies on what the academics call multi-sensory super additivity, which is a wonderful way of saying.
Phil Barden: It's a big word. Yeah, it is. Trust the academics come up with highfalutin phrases. It's simply put, it is, the more senses you can engage in a particular thing or stim, responding to a stimulus, you get this sort of synergistic super additive effect in the brain. So we are more likely to remember stuff, more likely to engage with stuff.
Phil Barden: And so there are studies and I've, if I can just quote from Balaji et al in 2011, looking at the role of visual and tactile inputs. And if you study people just on a visual input or just on a tactile input or task and then also people on a multi sensory task, you get the super additive effect in terms of More positive attitudes towards a product, the certainty with which people hold those attitudes, the importance that people place on those attitudes, and then finally their willingness to pay and their purchase intention as well.
Phil Barden: So that, that speaks back to M& S. So you've got the oral sense and the visual sense, obviously with other, with other channels and mediums, you can engage other senses as well.
Richard: So on the media point - Would they argue that there are media that both have sight and sound tend to be more effective in terms of, did you say, believability? Yeah. Interesting.
MichaelAaron: Yeah. And, you know, it strikes me that this can be applied to more than food. I was at a, I was at a talk with the CMO of MasterCard and he has the five senses of MasterCard and he's done a long work over multiple years to develop the scent of MasterCard, the sound of MasterCard, the touch of MasterCard.
MichaelAaron: It's really a fascinating - his goal is to have all five senses be very unique. Even now, when you pay using MasterCard at some point of sale terminals in America, it makes a different sound than when, than when you pay with American Express or Visa. It's really a very compelling idea to give your brand dimension and relevance, distinction to have these.
Phil Barden: You find this on Singapore Airlines is, is a good example as well. They have a they have very characteristic costume for their, for their cabin crew. They have three different soundtracks that they play boarding, um, during landing and then disembarkment, uh, disembarkation, and they have a signature scent that they pipe through the aircraft as well. So all of that is part of the Singapore Airlines experience.
Richard: That's interesting as well, because if you start thinking about all the different scents, you're probably going to be distinctive from your competitors. While everyone might think about their visual identity, how many other people think of sound?
Richard: And then I guess of them, only a small subset think of of smell and other senses beyond that. So even if it's just being distinctive, you're on a hell of a good starting place.
Phil Barden: Yeah. And I did a bit of work with the mail service in, in the UK because their big competitor was digital email.
Phil Barden: Of course. So they were, they were saying, well, what advantages can, can physical mail bring. And it, and it has huge advantages. 'cause you've got, you've got that tactility, you've got the fact that that paper can feel very different. The weight of the paper, the, the surface finished matte or gloss, whether it's embossed or not.
Phil Barden: And you know, even down to the, going back to the weight of the paper, we talk about a weighty matter or something having gravitas. So there's mental recoding of the stiffness of a paper, the gauge of a piece of board, the weight of it and how high quality it is or premium it is, or how important it is.
Phil Barden: Yeah, sure. And then of course, you've got the possibility of scent as well. You can micro-encapsulate when you open a meal. So, mail. So when you open it, you get that scent.
MichaelAaron: And nothing is more - connects so easily as you receive a letter that's supposed to be on a very important matter and it's on flimsy paper and it, and this is clearly a scam, you know, so the opposite proves it too, that, you know, things of importance are going to get that extra investment are going to come across in a polished, finished way and things that are not are going to feel that way.
Richard: There was a great Royal Mail ad last Mother's Day. I think it was something on lines, you know, How are you going to thank your mother by SMS or by, uh, card?
Richard: And it's we know that matters of importance require effort and spend and moving away from the simple easy thing.
MichaelAaron: Yeah. Lovely. Lovely. Well, let's go to a break. And when we come back, we have Phil that's got a third example that we're going to dive into and we'll see where the conversation takes us.
MichaelAaron: Welcome back to Behavioral Science for Brands. Today Richard Shotten and I are interviewing Phil Barden. Phil, welcome to the show again. Excited to have you with us. Bwe went to break, we heard two really exciting examples of behavioral science and you had one more that you were going to share with us now.
Phil Barden: Yeah. Well, I thought the third example would be me personally speaking about my experience and how I got into this, so, elaborating a bit more on my time at T Mobile.
Phil Barden: After my moment of panic, I commissioned Decode to work on the relaunch of the brand. And they taught me some fundamental principles. And one was based on a neuroscientific study at Stanford by Professor Brian Knutson and his colleagues, which looked at what goes on in the brain when we make a purchase decision.
Phil Barden: And essentially what happens is a trade-off between activation in the so-called reward center, this is the orbitofrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain that ascribes a value to different choices that we face and the valuation is based on associations that we've built with those choices over time.
Phil Barden: So that exists in our daily lives as well as in brand purchase. And then the flip side of that is that we have to part with something we value highly, which is money to acquire something that is rewarding, or the brain expects to be rewarding. And that triggers activation in the so-called pain center. So the net value of a purchase decision is simply reward minus pain. And once they’d talked to me about this, so what is rewarding for the brain? That's the key thing we need to understand.
Phil Barden: And I put my hand up and I said, well, it's brand equity, isn't it? So, yeah, yeah - But, but what's brand equity? Brand equity we've always talked about as a sort of intangible, fluffy thing that you can't really grasp or measure precisely. And from a neuropsychological point of view, it's really quite straightforward. And it goes back to the origins of motivation. And this is a mixture of cognitive and affective neuroscience, as well as social and evolutionary psychology, that we are, as human beings, we are motivated to achieve goals.
Phil Barden: And there's a huge body of science that pervades different disciplines that is aligned around this. A guy at Stanford says goals are the system units of human functioning, whether we're aware of them or not. Now, we may be aware of, and are aware of a lot of goals because they are things that we feel, they're explicit.
Phil Barden: So I'm thirsty or I need transportation. Those are more sort of functional goals. And they're, they're super critical for any brand in any category. You have to deliver against that level or you won't have a business. But in many categories, particularly those that are more, that are more mature, it's very difficult to get a product advantage or a real perceived difference in performance.
Phil Barden: And this is where a different level of goals comes in. And these are more implicit. They're more socially, emotional and psychological goals. And they have been defined by science and academia. They've been tested universally and that's what's so interesting about them because you can use these goals across any category, across any demography and across any country.
Phil Barden: And there are three primary goals in human behavior. There's security, excitement, and autonomy. Security is about goals to do with protection, reassurance, trust, tradition, warmth, closeness, belonging, caring for ourselves, caring for other people, it's very much inner-directed energy, what the academics call a prevention mindset.
Phil Barden: The other two goal fields, as we call them autonomy and excitement are more outer-directed in contrast. They're what the academics call a promotive mindset. So the distinction between these, these sets of goal-seeking is if I'm playing a game, do I play to win? Or do I play not to lose? So playing not to lose is the more preventive mindset.
Phil Barden: Playing to win is the more promotive mindset. Excitement's about novelty-seeking, change, variety, stimulation. And autonomy is about power and superiority and self-esteem. So those are the three primary drivers. Between those three, there are hybrid areas, which are a mixture of the adjacent areas. So if I'm climbing a mountain, I achieve goals that are a mixture of autonomy, because I feel great and powerful and superior having climbed the mountain and excitement because it's exciting to climb a mountain. It's different. It's stimulating.
Phil Barden: So the, as I said, these goals have been defined. Decode had created a six field, two-dimensional model, which is in the book. And this was what they suggested to me that we use to measure the mobile phone category, T-Mobile and its competitors. Uh, and that's what we did.
Phil Barden: So in terms of the approach, it was a quantitative study. What we measured were these goals as well as the more functional goals, as well as features and characteristics of the service and the occasions on which the service was used, but also the more implicit goals as well. And the key difference was really how we measured, and I'd never come across this before in my entire career. It's using a method known as implicit testing, which is more reaction-time based so you get responses in less than a second. And the beauty of that is, you're getting the pure intuitive spontaneous gut response that you might equate with so-called system one processes, mental processes, compared to the more rationalized, reflective tasks that so called traditional research had measured.
MichaelAaron: System one being the emotional immediate response, system two being the rationalized afterthought of what happened. Is that close? That's close. Get it, yeah, please, please help us.
Phil Barden: It’s more about the distinction. We always draw is that system one is about automaticity, and that can be both affective, i.e. emotional, but it can also be cognitive. So if I learn a skill like walking, that's system one, but walking is not emotional. So it's automatic mental processes. In contrast, System 2 is about controlled mental processes. And again, that can be both affective as well as cognitive.
MichaelAaron: Very clear. Thank you for that
Phil Barden: So, so the beauty of this approach, which academia had developed probably 30 years prior, because they knew, particularly in social psychology, that there was a big difference between what people said and what people did. You know,it’s all about social bias, gender bias, race bias, whatever it might be. So to use these reaction time based tasks circumvents the control mechanism in the brain.
Phil Barden: So you get that pure system one automatic response. So we deployed this approach. We were able to measure the category and the brands and find out why and how the brands had the shares that they did, what made them relevant in the category, what made them distinctive from each other. And the net result of that was spotting a bit of a gap for T-Mobile that we then developed into a brand proposition and positioning statement and a brief to Saatchi, the agency.
Phil Barden: Now Saatchi's wove their magic and out of the brief came the first relaunch ad in the UK. Which you can find on YouTube, it's called T-Mobile Dance.
MichaelAaron: We'll put it in the show notes for everybody, yeah, yeah.
Phil Barden: It was, it was a flash mob at London's Liverpool Street Station. And the response to that ad, it went out on a Friday night in the UK.
Phil Barden: That weekend. footfall into the T Mobile stores in the UK doubled. And the sales team said to the marketing team, why didn't you tell us you got all this local activity scheduled? And we said, well, we didn't cause there wasn't any. Well, why are you asking? And then they explained why. And we'd never seen an effect like that.
Phil Barden: And that, it won an IPA effectiveness award. It grew sales by 49%. Um, it has 43 million YouTube views, which is pretty darn good, back in that era as well. Yeah. Cause this, this was before Instagram. Twitter was only in its early days as well. So, so Facebook had 72 Facebook groups, and then YouTube and we rolled the same approach out across European markets with similar success and then the clever thing was to translate that across other brand touchpoints because we, we realized that brand comms could fulfill a certain role, but it couldn't do everything, right? Similarly, customer service could fulfill a different role, but it couldn't do the role that brand comms could do.
Phil Barden: And then the look and feel of the, of the stores as well, we changed. So we had a company-wide program that was taking the essence of this new brand positioning and translating it into look and feel and tonality and right down to even things like what customer service agents could do functionally on their own systems, the scripts that they had to work with customers.
Phil Barden: And the content of that, the content of that brand proposition was a set of goals. I can't tell you what they are, but because we still work with Deutsche Telekom, but the also the very thing that I'm proud of is that the CMO stuck with that strategy consistently. So even today they still measure all of their comms against those goals, every activity, every sponsorship, promotion, whatever, even new product development, they measure it against the ability to activate those goals because they know that's the winning formula.
Phil Barden: And the CMO has attested to the growth in brand equity being down to this approach. In fact, they've gone from being, I think, the fourth biggest telco in Europe to being number one, and they're now number two worldwide in terms of revenues. Wow. So it's a lovely story, uh, of, of really taking those behavioral science principles and applying them in practice and showing that consistent application works. You know, going back to the Liverpool street TV ad.
Phil Barden: So I called the guys from decode after we got the UK results. And I said, everyone is amazed. We've never seen this cause and effect. And they sort of smiled and said, well, why are you surprised? Because we have deliberately encoded motivators of behavior, i. e. goal achievement, into that ad. So why are you surprised that people are motivated by it?
Phil Barden: And again, that was a sort of slap to the forehead moment. Wow, this stuff works.
Richard: Oh, I love the bit you mentioned earlier around that equation of purchasing is reward minus pain. And you very much focused on how you can use psychological principles to boost the scale as a reward. Could you apply psychological principles to minimize the perceived sense of pain as well as anything that people could learn in that area?
Phil Barden: Absolutely. Yeah. There's, there's many things you can do because, because the brain has to make a choice before we make the decision. It's all about expectation. So the expectation of the pain. So we can minimize that, for example, by how we visualize the price. So one of the examples that I have in the book is removing the currency symbol.
Phil Barden: Yes. And there was, there was a, an academic study where that showed on a restaurant, menu that that boosted sales. Oh, yeah. What was really interesting was that after Decoded was published, I was doing some work with Carlsberg and their insight manager loved these studies and went back to the business and said, we need to replicate this.
Phil Barden: And she just got knocked back and the business said, Oh yeah, but they're academic studies. Yeah. It'll never work. So bless her, she set out to test them. So she replicated the studies in real life, within Carlsberg, and found so we're talking…
Richard: pubs and bars.
Phil Barden: Yea, so for example, they they took the danish kroner symbol off their drinks menus in pubs and bars And they got something like an 11 percent revenue increase test versus control.
Phil Barden: Yeah, just by taking the currency symbol off because hey reduce the pain. Yeah, and she went back to the business and said, Look, you know, you asked me to test, I have here the results, and so they stuck with it. It's fantastic.
Richard: I think that's a brilliant example because if you think academic studies are otherworldly, why not put that view to the test?
Richard: There are thousands of these studies. Every brand essentially has a giant laboratory in its pump network, or its shop network, or its e-commerce site. It's very easy to set up test and control experiments. And if you test something like the Sibley Yang experiment, taking the chronosigns off and it doesn't work, well, the downside's minimal, you just stop doing it.
Richard: If you take off the chronosigns and there's an 11 percent uplift, well, you can run that forever more and there's a massive upside. So everything is skewed in favor of the marketeer and the tester. So I love that as a principle.
Phil Barden: Yeah, exactly.
MichaelAaron: The other thing that we always like to encourage the listeners of the podcast, is that these are things you can test tomorrow from hearing this story.
MichaelAaron: You know what I mean? This is something that, as Richard said, has very low downside and much upside, but it's also something that you could test in whatever size and scale makes sense for your brand or your business. Yeah.
Phil Barden: Another example of changing price expectation is. Is the actual visualization. So we did a study in Germany where we showed the same price depicted several different ways.
Phil Barden: It's “four ninety nine”, “four euros, 99 cents”, And one of them was embellished with a starburst and an embossed effect and a silver background. Others were colored red and yellow, ones in the middle were like just black and white. And we found that people had a significant difference in the way they perceived how expensive or cheap the same price was, depending on how it was visualized.
Phil Barden: So the one with the starburst and the embossing, we know those codes from other premium areas. The ones that were red and yellow, we've learned those from discounters. That's those are promotional prices. The ones in the middle, a little bit more minimalist, but a little bit more premium than discount. But it's the same price, but you can just, you can leverage that price expectation by how you visualize.
Phil Barden: So often how you do stuff is. as important, if not more important, than actually what you do.
Richard: Yeah, because if you've got a jar of jalapenos that you're putting on at 1.99, for a shopper to work out whether 1. 99 is good value or bad value is a phenomenally complex thing. How can they remember what you normally charge for jalapenos?
Richard: But if it's got a giant red and yellow starburst on it, which they associate with other discounts, that body language is very easy to interpret. And I think, you know, you went back to that point of system one being intuitive and reflexive and automatic, you're tapping into an automatic reaction. Whereas the numeric 199 is a complex thing to calculate and it's the automatic that trumps the
Phil Barden: Always always. And when you look at, I mean I was looking at the results of about six years of in store eye tracking when it comes down to prices and POS and signage, it's, it's less than 5 percent of an entire shopping trip is spent looking at that stuff. So you've just got to communicate and process like that in a brain friendly way.
Phil Barden: It's got to be instantaneous.
MichaelAaron: Fascinating. Fascinating. Do you think that, if you were to highlight from the T Mobile experience, the two, one, two, three things that you most took away, you know, in your mind, the biggest learning from there, could you just recount them again for us? I think that it's such a compelling story.
MichaelAaron: I want to make sure folks get the biggest takeaways.
Phil Barden: Yeah. The biggest for me, and this was, you know, one of those - if I had my time over again, starting out as a marketeer, would be the whole approach around goals and understanding that well enough, because that is the essence of what brands do, they help us achieve a job to be done is another way of looking at it.
Phil Barden: The job is a combination of functional and then there's Social emotional psychological level so that that's my number one take away. The second thing is as marketeers, we spend our entire careers, waking hours, etc, devoted to analyzing, debating, discussing collateral. And that person out there doesn't care.
Phil Barden: They don't know what you're doing. They've never read your strategy paper. Why would they? And so you've got, like we just said, a split second to communicate and the brain will help you because it's brilliant at decoding stuff, but recognize that when you are a marketeer, you and, and agency side as well, you get very close to stuff, you know, what it's supposed to do, you know, what the brief is, you have to have an objective way of looking at that saying prototypically, what does this signal, how is this signal decoded in the brain? What does it stand for? What does it mean?
Phil Barden: There's none, there's none of this, uh, debate around, well I like this and I think that. No, the brain doesn't do that, the brain will just get to a response like that. So finding a way to make the decision more objective and often that could be just taking a bit of material and showing it to friends or family, not no one else in the business and no one in your, in your agency either, because they all know what you're trying to do.
Phil Barden: And there's too many brain cycles and they're hypersensitized to it as well. You know, they know what the brand is, they know what the message is, et cetera, but show it to someone who's not familiar. And even down to things like - we often blur advertising and just show it, show it to a friend. So quickly, like in two seconds, what was that?
Phil Barden: And if they can get it, so what, it's such and such a brand, or there's a promotion. Good. Okay. You've got a chance of that cutting through in a very cluttered and busy environment. If they can't, then maybe you need to rework it. So the thing that, that idea of, try and step away, try and make the, the decision objective.
Phil Barden: So prototypically, what does this stand for? What does it mean? And I'll give you a great example of that with, with the guys at Decode. One of the little tests I gave them early on was looking at a, at a print ad for a new tariff, which was flexible. So instead of having a finite number of minutes and a finite number of texts, this is going back sometime, this was a tariff that flexed between the two.
Phil Barden: So if you overran your minutes, you could take from your, from your texts and vice versa. And the manifestation of that was to make things in the real world appear flexible. So this print ad had a guy leaning on a brick wall and it was bending under his weight. And he was looking at a bunch of people in a, in a field away, they were all socializing and having fun together.
Phil Barden: And this was about, you know, this guy who's got the flexible tariff, and it really bombed everywhere we went and we couldn't understand. It's like, well, we know that it's bending because the tariff is flexible and you can see it. It's obvious, isn't it? But what the regular Joe was taking out of that was this guy's a loner.
Phil Barden: He's standing behind a wall and a very poorly built wall, and a bunch of people over there, they're the ones having fun. And he's, he's looking jealously at them, like, oh, can't I be part of your group? Fascinating. So, you know, we had over intellectualized and over-examined this. It made perfect logical sense to us, but to the person in the street, just had a completely different meaning.
MichaelAaron: Fascinating. Fascinating. Amazing. Uh, this has been wonderful, Phil, really to, to learn from you and to hear your perspective. Richard, can I put you on the spot for the listeners to hear some big takeaways from, from Phil's talk today?
Richard: Oh, so I think, super useful. I think the three things that I've taken out. From the first discussion we had, there was the Apple packaging. And I really liked the point around adding a little bit of friction in can create a perception of quality. Now, often as marketers, we talk about removing friction, making things frictionless, but I think there are rare occasions when you might want to add a bit of friction to make something be perceived as higher quality.
Richard: So I love that discussion from Apple. Uh, when we talked about M& S, the new point that I hadn't really ever considered was this argument about trying to draw on multiple senses. Was it Banjali or Balaji? Balaji, proving that use of multiple senses, um, had a super additive effect.
Richard: And then I think the final part from T Mobile experience, the bit I really liked was the comment you made, uh, early on of having this equation in your head of maybe purchasing is reward minus pain. I think that's so simple, but something that lots of lots of brands could think about using.
MichaelAaron: Amazing.
MichaelAaron: Amazing. As we come to a close, Phil, we always like to ask, something you're reading, watching, consuming right now that's provocative, interesting, making you think, is there a topic that you're particularly engaged in, behavioral science related or not?
Phil Barden: Well, it's totally not behavioral science related. I've actually just created my bucket list of books to read. So I'm starting to work my way through that. Some of them are sort of quite old classics, you know. Charles Dickens, uh, some of them are more modern, but so I've just, yeah, I've just started on that with David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
MichaelAaron: Oh, very cool. Will you give yourself a commitment of how many over a period of time or you'll take your time and enjoy them as you go?
Phil Barden: I'll take my time, I think. But the list so far is about 25 long. So just finding the time to read those. Quite apart from business and reading all the other good stuff around behavioral science, is quite taxing.
MichaelAaron: Yeah, yeah, and exciting.
Phil Barden: Oh, yeah, for sure.
MichaelAaron: Well, thank you for being with us today. Thanks for sharing your insights. And we'll drop, uh, everything you talked about in the show notes below. And if it's okay by you, Decode is an agency open to helping brands and being available to help think through these types of topics and others. And the URL for Decode's website is decodemarketing.com. Got it. Perfect. Until next time I'm MichaelAaron Flicker
Richard: and I'm Richard Shotton
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