[MUSIC] >> Welcome back everyone to behavioral science for brands, a podcast where we bridge the gap between academics and marketing. Every other week we sit down and decode the science behind some of America's most successful brands. I'm Michael Aaron Flickr. >> And I'm Rich and Shulton. Today, we're doing candy, comedy, and the power of a cue. Let's get into it. So, Richard, today we're just having plenty of fun. We're talking candy bars. Your favorite candy bar growing up as a kid? >> A wham bar. >> A wham bar. Describe for our American audience, our mostly American audience. What a wham bar is. >> It was a very, very chewy sweet, got in a bar. And it had these little sprinkles in the middle that kind of popped on your tongue. >> Like literally popped as you as they sat on your tongue. >> And you're thinking still getting it now. But I remember them as being like the size of your head almost. A couple of pennies you buy them. And now they've just, they got it shrinked and they're getting a little smaller. >> You've got a size of half your thumb now. >> I was trying to think of the word pop rocks in America would be those, those that you put on your tongue and they snack crack or pop. >> Sounds like this at pop rocks. >> Too funny. >> And today's candy bar of much interest is the Snickers bar. One of the most popular candy bars in the world. Accounting for over $2 billion worth of annual sales for the M&M Mars Company. Sold in over 80 countries, enjoyed by millions of people each year. But before we go deep on Snickers, I was surprised to learn that Snickers was not snickers in your homeland of the United Kingdom. >> That's right. For most of my childhood, it was called a marathon. And then to much consternation, probably it was about 15 or 16, they changed the name to Snickers, but we hated it too much. Now that's a distant memory. But quite a lot of candy bars did this where there would be different names in different countries. And eventually they rational, rationalized them. >> Rationalized. >> rationalized them. >> Yeah. >> Starburst, I think you call them. >> Yes. >> They were open fruits originally. >> Can you spell that for the listeners at home? >> Oh, so Opal is like the gem, OPIS. >> Yeah. >> And then fruits, which I will guess is the same as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Opal fruits were Starbursts, marathon bars were Snickers, and you call them, and I call them Pop Rocks. >> Pop Rocks? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I think you had a name for them. >> Okay, so let's do a little history on the brand, the Snickers brand. Snickers bar, for any of you who have not had this delicious candy is peanuts, nugget, and caramel. The chocolate coating was not there when they started the brand, it was added in 1937. >> I was an agency who had a biscuit brand, and I remember them seriously discussing whether one of their messages should be, and now with real chocolate. >> I think they eventually realized that people would start to think, well, what the hell are you thinking? It's the last 20 years. This is in about 2005. >> Yeah. >> You can't get away with that. >> You say, you know what? Let's not. Let's leave the new out. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Let's leave it out. >> Snickers famously used in movies, TV shows. It's been on the Simpsons. It's been in Seinfeld. It was featured in the Hangover movie. A fun fact. The largest Snickers bar's richer was made in 2012, weighed over 1,000 pounds, and had 10,000 peanuts, which made me think, how many peanuts are in a regular Snickers bar? >> I was going to say that's quite a mean ratio with that workout, like 10 peanuts a pound for that big one. So I'm trying to be a bit more generous normally. >> A little bit more, 16 peanuts in every Snickers bar, 16 peanuts in every Snickers bar. I don't know what to do with that. >> So, delicious candy bar, best selling candy bar today, obviously the product itself is excellent, but a lot of the success attributable to this epic marketing campaign, you're not you when you're hungry. You're not you when you're hungry. Created by BBDO, first year that they launched this campaign, 15.9 percent increase in global sales. >> That's hellishly impressive for such a big brand. >> Absolutely. >> When you're already one of the world's biggest. >> And really built on an insight that came to life through the creative. >> Yeah. One like about this campaign is they use a very simple idea from psychology. But even though it's simple, most brands do not do it. So the experiment I want to talk about, which gives us a bit of evidence of this, is an experiment by Sarah Milne, who's at the University of Bath. >> Mm-hmm. >> We've used her before. >> Yeah, I think we have. Yeah. So a couple of which episode we used it in, but she ran a study back in 2002, very simple. She invites 228 people into a lab, randomizes them into three groups, first group the control are just invited in, given a diary, and then told to record all the exercise they do over the next two weeks. Now when they come back two weeks later, 35 percent of them have exercised at least once a week for 15 minutes. >> That's the benchmark. Got it. Next two groups, she then tries to boost that number. So second group, she brings them in, gives them the diary, and then plays them a motivational video about the wonders of exercise. And even though this group come out of the video, say they are enthused, pumped up, exciting about exercising, when they come back two weeks later, there's barely any increase in exercise levels. So 38 percent of them have exercised at least once a week. She calls this the intention to action gap, which is essentially the idea that if you motivate people to want to do something, high intention, high intention, doesn't necessarily confer to behavior change. Now, that, I would say, is a repeated mistake of empathize, what they focus on is boosting appeal and boosting motivation, but Milleen says that's not enough. Motivation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for behavior change. So final group, she tries to unearth that missing ingredient. She invites that group into the lab, give them the diary, plays them the video, but then she says to them, "Tell me when, and with whom you're going to exercise." That group comes back two weeks later and you get a massive change, 91% of them have exercised at least once. Wow. So you've jumped from 38% with the motivated group to 91% with this group. What Milleen argues is that by getting people to stay, when and where they're going to exercise. So I might say, "Okay, I'm going to exercise at the Dalits gym on a Thursday evening." When that moment comes round, when Thursday evening comes round, I'm reminded of this vague aspiration to exercise and by being reminded, I move to action. That cue or trigger moment acts as a catalyst to convert intention to action. Now, her argument is loads of people forget to do that. They create the motivation, but they don't create this cue or trigger moment. What's so brilliant about Snickers is they are very clear on the trigger moment. They are very clear about what moment you should consume their products when you're hungry. They associate this feeling of hangry nurse or tiredness or confusion through hunger with purchasing a Snickers. It's very simple, but it's a very powerful way of converting intention to action. We even see in the sales data at airports, Snickers bars are the number one candy sold over a Milky Way because Milky Way is seen as an indulgence. Snickers is seen as a meal replacement. We even see in their own data that insight is born from data that they have about where their sales are successful. You've associated purchasing your product with a particular time, place or mood. What other brands need to do is think, "Okay, we've made our candy bar or our trainers or our gym membership appealing. How do we create this time, place or mood that people are so shameless?" It's not enough to just make it appealing. We need a trigger to actually get people to use the product by the thing, use it again. If you look at some of the best-ever campaigns, you see this happening again and again, so KitKat for probably 60 or 70 years, it just runs exactly. All my favourite example, Champagne, so you think about wines. There are loads of beautiful tasting wines, but none of them sell half as much as Champagne. Champagne is a multi-billion pound industry because they have brilliantly fused the products with a particular feeling, celebrations, my mum hates drinking. She doesn't even like Champagne, but New Year's Eve, she will go out and buy a bottle because it's the thing to do. That's right. It is so welded in people's mind that even if they don't like the product, they end up purchasing it. That, I think, is a huge-scale example of a brand very successfully, identifying very clearly and concretely a particular mood that they're associated with. We're going to dig deeper into this, actually, in a future episode coming up on diamonds and the moment of when you should buy a diamond as an engagement ring. That was a major success of that campaign as well. Yeah. It's brilliant. Snickers clearly excellent at drawing this connection between hunger and using sneakers to satiate that hunger. What other behavioral science has Snickers employed in their campaigns? The thing the way you can differentiate them from all those other brands we mentioned, KitKat or Champagne, is they haven't created just a dry trigger to purchase. Everything about you and your hungry is about comedy. It's trying to be as amusing and witty as possible. It's not just a protein bar. It's not just exactly. That's interesting because it's quite different from how most brands are behaving. There's an awful lot of evidence that brands are moving away from the humour. You know, Cantor have done an amazing bit of analysis, 200,000 plus global ads. And back in 1990, 53 of them aims to amuse people. By 2020, it was down to 34%. So, advertisers are moving away from humour as a tactic to sell. Now, that Cantor data should concern us all because humour isn't a nice to have. There is an awful lot of evidence that shows that you can boost recall and other benefits by behaving humorously. So one of my favourite studies in the area is by Bains back in 2014. Just with group of old people tests their memory, so they give a list of information. And then they are asked how many of the words they can remember. Half the group then go off and watch a humourous video, half the group watch a less funny video. He then gives the list of words again, asked them to recall as many as they can. And he finds that there is a much greater uplift on that second attempt at doing the task amongst people who have been primed with the humourous video. So I think it's a 44% uplift amongst them versus a 20% uplift amongst the non-humourous group. So you have many studies like Bains' study that show this benefit humour. But maybe what's most powerful is it's not just one-off studies. There's a wonderful meta-analysis by Isent, who I think is an Austrian psychologist. So he looks at 38 different papers and experiments on humour. And finds the repeated result that if you use humour, you boost recall of the product, you boost recall of the brand, you boost positivity and probably most importantly, you boost perched intent. So there is a really powerful robust dataset that suggests humour is one of the best tactics a brand can use to increase positivity. Why do we think that humour has been less used over the last 30 years? Why has it been on such a decline? I think that is a great question. I think one reason why it's dropped so much is that we've obviously had quite a lot of events happening over the last 15 years to say it mildly. We've had financial crashes, we've had Covid, we've had pandemics. And I think the reaction of the ad industry has been well at times of trouble we need to show empathy. Yeah, but what people want is not fake empathy from their bank or their car, it's just not believable. I think what people actually want at times of trouble is a little bit of light relief. A respite? Yes, exactly. That's a reasonable thing to expect from an ad. Yeah, empathy is not believable. And actually, if you look at Hollywood's reaction to Bleak Times, that's exactly what you see. There was a wonderful bit of analysis of the IMDB database. Yes, this is the other people that look at all the movies in it globally, I think. Yeah, exactly. It says thousands of movies on this. And I think it was called Bo McCready looked over the last 100 years what proportion of films have been companies. And what you see is at real times of global problems, great depression, start world war two, you see spikes in the proportion of companies. During bad times, more comedy. Exactly. Because what do you want? You want a bit of right relief to take your mind off all the rubbish that's happening in the world. So Hollywood recognized the role of humor. I think advertisers are making a mistake by following a different path and thinking that it's seriousness and empathy that this was designed. And you know, I think the type of humor that's used is also really instructive because, you know, yeah, Snickers is using almost a self-deprecating humor. You're not you when you're hungry, it's about you. It's about the person you become versus so much of the advertising, especially in 2020 and 2021, with its serious, important issues of racial justice and social inequality, brands almost felt like I think they couldn't bring humor to the table because they would be off key to what the world was going through. But to me that's a mistake about human nature. Even in the most bleak times, you don't spend all your time thinking about that event. Yeah, we're thinking about much more mundane, trivial personal issues most of the time. Yes. And that's the area I think adverts you're playing. You've got a reasonable role of a bit of light relief. I think that will always be be appropriate. You don't have to reference the dark things that are happening at the time. You I think are just present at those moments. And especially being aware of your category, a candy bar plays a role of indulgence and relief. You know, it doesn't have to play the role of a moral entity all the time. Yeah, absolutely. And there is a lot of evidence that if you put people in good mood, they then are more like to notice your ads, they're more like to believe them, and they're also less price sensitive. So people need to move away from thinking the humor is something that's flippant and not appropriate for a serious business and recognize that a humor can be a way, obliquely, of generating your underlying sales needs. You know, what strikes me about humor Richard is that it really is such a straight shot way to change the mood of the person receiving the humor, right? It immediately either draws you to laughter, it immediately draws you to change your perspective. And that change of mood is critical. Yes, it might well be a fleeting change, but even that is enough for a commercial advantage. So there's a lovely set of studies from 2007 by Fred Bronner, so he's at the University of Amsterdam. And he got 1,2008 seven people to flick through a newspaper. And then after they'd read the newspaper, he asked them whether they were in a good mood or bad mood. And then he asked them to recall as many ads as they could. And if people are in a bad mood, they remembered about 35% of ads. If they're in a good mood, it was about 50% of ads. So you have an almost 50% improvement in recall based on someone's mood. Now that's probably because the fowler are temperament, the more our field of vision, the interest narrows, what he showed was that in the reverse, if someone's feeling positive, they're much more open, they're much more likely to notice you. So that's one big benefit the mood brings. The second big benefit is around believability of message. So I reran Bronner's study a couple of years ago, about five years ago. And rather than ask people whether they record the ads or ask them whether they believe the ads. And I saw an even bigger uplift about the order of 60% improvement. So people who are happy believe ads about 60% more than those who are unhappy. Now Daniel Kahneman argues there is an evolutionary rationale for this. That if we were in a foul mood, it's signified danger and the need to think critically. If we're in a good mood, it's signified in an absence danger and mitigated the need to think critically. So if you want people to interpret your message without skepticism, either targeting them in a good mood or as you say put them in a good mood. Now lots of very practical benefits to the use of something that seems as trivial as human. I don't know if this is a divergence from what we're talking about here, but it often strikes me in pharmaceutical ads that, you know, they show people laughing and smiling and rowing boats on the link or riding bikes in the mountains while they're describing some pretty serious side effects. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the difference. I think that's a confusion of telling rather than showing. Yeah. Just because you show someone that's laughing doesn't mean the view is going to laugh. That's right. The point is you should tell them a joke and then they'll they'll be positive and then they're more like to believe what you what you say. But there is it might might feel a lot that really serious subjects. I've got to be careful in this area, but I think people go too far in the other direction. There's an amazing set of studies called the ostrich effect. It's a George Lowenstein who's a Carnegie Mellon brand these studies and he works with Vanguard, an American thumb provider and a Swedish equivalent. And what he shows is that when the stock market is rising, people check their portfolios reasonably regularly. But when the stock market declines, they don't want to allow you now. Exactly. They don't want to check. They don't want to find out the bad news. So his argument is look, this is illogical. The information is equally valuable whether you're in a good or bad mood. But what he says happens is most people, if they're faced with an uncomfortable situation, they have two choices. They can either resolve the issue, but that's often hard work, or they can just ignore it. And the ostrich effect is the finding that we often would rather stick our heads in the sand metaphorically than go to the hard effort of resolving the problem. So if you deal with a serious subject and try and scare people into interest or make them, yeah, fearful, head goes in the ground, head goes in the ground, they'll ignore the messaging. But if you can treat it with a little bit more humor, then you've got an opportunity to suicide. So one of the most successful public service campaigns ever in Australia was called Dumb Ways to Die. And it essentially talks about all the ridiculous ways someone could end their life. You know, you can electrouse LB eating by crocodiles. It's this wonderful song. And the point of the song is at the end of it, the dumbest way to die is to go across the tracks on a metro and get hit by a subway. Horrible subjects, but they actually encourage engagement by dealing with in a light-hearted way. I mean, what most campaigns do is the complete opposite. They try and scare people. They try and shock them. This is your brand-on drugs. I don't know if you know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My win-out awards, but it's often not the most effective change in paper. So we've been talking candy bars. We've been talking comedy. We've been talking the power of triggers and cues. Let's wrap up today's episode with some light-hearted humor. All right, I'm going to get to start it, Richard. Why do behavioral scientists have such bad teeth? I have no idea. Floss aversion. Oh my god. All right, see if you can beat it. Go ahead. Oh, okay. I don't know any more behavioral science jokes. You rub me on me out there, but my favorite kind of academic joke is a classics professor walks into a Taylor's. And the Taylor says, "You repeat these." And he says, "Umenides." I think we might okay that. I think we might just go for the lost emotional. No. You repeat these. And then you said, "What?" "Umenides." I think I might. I think it's funny. I don't know that one. Yeah, two Greek Taylor. Exactly. So Richard, as we'd like to do, let's wrap it up for our listeners today. There are two big takeaways from today's podcast. The first is the principle of craying a keyword trigger moment. So that's based on the Sarah Milner work that we discussed. And it's the idea that motivation alone isn't enough. And what you need to do is combine desire for your product with a very clear time, place, or mood that people associate with consumption or purchase of your product. Access a trigger. Exactly. Second key learning, I think from today's podcast, is the humor and jokes and fun in us are not nice to have. Even if you work in a very serious business, think about how you can be a bit more lighthearted. There is an awful lot of behavioral science work that suggests it will boost recall, it will boost attention, boost positive feelings towards the brand and probably most importantly purchase intent. Thanks for tuning in today to behavioral science for brands podcast. I'm Michael Aaron Flicker and I'm Richard Schulton. And as always, please come to us with ideas for new topics, new things for us to cover. Visit us at theconsumerbehaviorlab.com, connect with us on social media or drop us an email at
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