The top 9 tips from 55 Nudge episodes in 2025

Once a year I sit down and listen back through the episodes published in 2025 and this year has been fantastic. Nudge has consistently topped the marketing charts in the UK. 275,000 of you have listened to the podcast. The newsletter has hit 10,000 subscribers and Nudge YouTube has 30,000 subscribers. I'm very, very grateful. Thank you and a lot of it is down to the Insight stories and behavioral science examples that guests have shared on the show. So today I will share the top insights these guests have shared in 2025. You will hear from world renowned professors, best selling offers and award-winning behavioral science practitioners. All of that coming up. Many of you in marketing will know that moment when the strategy is sorted, the brief is done, everyone's nodding along and then you realise someone actually has to make all of the content you've agreed on. And usually that someone is you and usually it is needed by tomorrow. Now fortunately there is software to help. Breeze Assistant lives inside HubSpot. It drafts campaign copy, blog post emails all in your brand's tone of voice and it's all grounded in actual customer data. With Breeze Assistant you don't just create content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Back in early 2025 I spoke with Ava Vanderbrook and Tim Denhaya, who wrote the fantastic book, The Housefly Effect. In the book Ava and Tim write how pineapples were extremely rare. Because of this rarity, these pineapples became a status symbol. Their scarcity made them more sought after and expensive. Those who weren't in the position to buy their own pineapple would actually hire one and they wouldn't hire one for consumption but just to display at the dinner table. People literally rented pineapples not to eat but to prove their status. And yet today pineapple on my kitchen table wouldn't impress anyone. It is the scarcity, not the pineapple that made the fruit so impressive. When an item is scarce we value it more. And Ava and Tim say that smart marketers can use this principle to ethically increase their sales. It's very interesting when you just announce in the supermarket no more than four or no more than six bottles of pecs of Vapokana per customer. People will buy a little bit more. They won't buy four but if they were playing to buy one they will buy two. In a lot of cases you see like these housefly effects sort of accumulate. So there is the anchoring point. Apparently people are buying a lot of this stuff. Apparently it's normal to buy several pecs rather than one pec. Then there's the loss of version. Well why are they limiting this? It might be scarce. It may be running out so I better get a little bit more. I think reactants may come into it where it's like oh I'm not supposed to buy too much of this. Well I'll be the judge of that and I'll buy as much as I want to buy. Thank you very much. In many cases just making clear that something is an option and that is an option that other people are choosing will lead to people in a certain direction. Limiting the amount you sell can counterintuitively boost your sales. It's a great insight but it's not the only insight Tim shared on the show. He also explained why IKEA sell cheap ice cream right as you leave the furniture store. The other thing is at the end of IKEA's customer journey. Some time ago this used to be a very bad ending of customer journey because we know something called the peak end rule. Part of which rule is that the very end of an experience will really influence your recollection of it and will also really influence your intonation to repeat that experience. IKEA had a problem that right at the end of the customer journey there were some very unpleasant experiences because you have to pick your own stuff out of the big cupboards for what you want to quote. Then you have to pay and then you have to find your car and get out there. Your kids are getting so annoying. Your kids are very annoying and maybe you're probably because they're very good at upselling or cross-selling. You probably bought some more stuff than you want and sort of were a scattered price or a startup at the price. So what they could have done was re-engineered that complete journey. Not have you picked out your own furniture. Do something about the price. Lose a lot of money. Hire more people that would have been huge transformation. Instead they offer you a very very cheap ice cream or a sausage hot dog at the end. So now you have fat and sugar and a discount which is like the best you can offer a consumer, I suppose. And people leave happily because of that little order effect that they engineered a high point at the end. What fascinates me about this is this has been known for 20 or 30 years. Even look, this is the old Kanaman colonoscopy study. I'm not sure I can read about colonoscopy. And retailers and many people know this example or they understand why the ice cream is there because it's really weird you don't buy furniture at an ice cream store. So why should you buy ice cream at a furniture store? But okay we accept it. And still very few retailers are actively trying to influence those last minutes of a visit. Where there are so many opportunities there to have people return and have a better recollection of their visit. Kanaman's colonoscopy study is really worth re-sharing. I know some of you all have had it before, but it is such a good one. So for the study patients were divided into two groups. One underwent a standard colonoscopy while the other experienced an extended procedure with the colonoscopy scope left in place for an additional three minutes without movement, which caused significant discomfort but not a significant amount of pain. So one group of patients underwent a normal procedure which was slightly shorter. Another group of patients went underwent the same normal procedure but slightly extended by three minutes. Patients who underwent the longer procedure actually rated their experience as less unpleasant and were more willing to return for future procedures compared to those who had the shorter procedure. Why was this? Well those who had the longer procedure had a final three minutes which were just slightly less uncomfortable than the rest of it. And this was the peak end rule in play. The final experience outweighs the overall experience. In a follow-up study, Kanaman and Ziv Karmann examined patient satisfaction while waiting to be served by a computer program. They discovered that participants who experienced dissatisfaction during most of the wait but had a satisfying final few seconds rated the overall experience far more positively than those who waited for less time overall but didn't have a satisfying end. Ikea do the same. They end their experience with cheap ice cream and that changes the perception of Ikea. It makes Ikea not seem overwhelming, expensive, and tiring but cheap and fun. So that was over in Tim. Now let's move on to Professor Gert Gergerenza. His episode on Nudge was all about intuition and on the show he shared that if you're in a highly skilled job you shouldn't take your time. Here's why. There are a number of psychological experiments done for instance with golf players where you have two groups experienced golf players and amateurs. If you ask both groups pay attention to your movements when doing a put what happens? Are the beginners getting better? Yes. Are the experienced players getting better? No, it disturbs their intuitive play. Another experiment gave them only three or so seconds to do the put. What happens? If the beginners have only three seconds or are getting better or worse they are getting worse. If the experts only have three seconds they are getting better. It's like in the experiment with the hateful players if they have too much time on average they get worse. The famous 2004 study found that accuracy for experts dropped by almost 10% when they had more time. The researchers conclude their paper with a compelling quote. For real time execution by experts there may be truth in the night motto just do it. Now let's move on to a tip that almost all of us can apply. There's about simple questions. Back in spring Dutch behavioral scientist Bass Valtus explained how a simple question can trigger your audience to pay attention. So the simple question technique. Every child in every culture all around the world is started a certain thing. If an adult asks you a question what do you need to do as a child? You need to answer that question. So ask something simple and simple question once people to answer that question. It's also a presentation technique. Sharkinoid speaker and people are a little bit talking to each other. You just throw a question in that area and they are suddenly paying attention. Simple questions aren't just for capturing attention during a presentation. They can be used online as well. What my co-author yours did and he won the first CRO award with this case. In the Netherlands was for bull.com and bull.com is basically the Dutch Amazon. They do think approximately eight billion dollars in revenue here and like any other web shop they wanted to collect reviews for their product. So in one case, once you bought something you get an automated meal. Do you want to leave a review button right review? Then they changed that email and they started with a simple question. The question was how did you like it and then they gave three answers better than expected as expected not as expected and this is an important element. in the simple question. If you ask a simple question, make it also simple to answer. Anyhow, they changed it and then something interesting happened. There were 200% more clicks to the actual survey of the review. Asking a simple question like how do you find ordering with bowl increased clicks on their surveys by two times. But that wasn't all. So in the end they collected 400% more reviews because also more people finished the survey. Four times as many people left a review compared to the control. This is the foot in the door technique. Ask a simple question first before you make your larger request. Instead of pitching your gym membership straight away, first ask, "What is your ideal workout routine?" Instead of immediately offering a new car model, first ask, "What features matter most to you in a car?" These simple questions increased the likelihood that people will take action. That is the foot in the door technique. Now let's go on to Nile Daily of the Behavioral Insights team and hear about the endowment effect. In particular, framing a vaccine as being reserved for someone or reserved for a person in New York care has been found to be particularly effective in high income countries. And I think we were excited to try and test that in a country where this kind of literature hadn't necessarily a lot of coverage. In this episode, Nile and Julia referred to the research conducted by behavioral scientists Katie Milkman, Angela Duckworth, Matish Prattell, and 17 others. Before the pandemic, this big group of behavioral scientists ran a study testing 19 different text messages aimed at increasing flu vaccination rates. One message shared a simple joke about the flu. Another said the flu shot makes you more healthy. A different version said getting the vaccine helps protect your loved ones. However, the most effective message, the one that was most persuasive out of all 19, simply said, "This vaccine is reserved for you." Just adding that line, reserved for you, boosted vaccination rates by 4.6 percentage points compared to the controlled group. So why did it work? Well, the researchers believed that the word reserved made people feel that the vaccine already belonged to them. It triggered a sense of ownership and a reluctance to miss out on their dose. Nile and his team tested this same tactic in Georgia. They sent thousands of young girls a text message saying their vaccine was reserved for them. And it made those girls 45% more likely to get vaccinated. On a different episode of Nile, I'd just expect one of Nile's colleagues at the behavioral insights team. This was Toby Park. Toby showed a really interesting example on how the language you use to communicate your product or service can change the way that product or service is perceived. Language, as you say, can do a lot. Language can evoke different values that may resonate more or less. For example, there's a famous case study of anti-litering campaigns in Texas based on the slogan, "Don't mess with Texas." Which has been credited as a very successful in large part because it didn't rely on the lefty green environmental messages, but on this image of state pride, toughness, civic respect and so on. Language can also infer a lot about the choice you're trying to encourage. So for instance, we've done some work promoting sustainable diets and found that simply changing the names of the dishes can have large effects. So calling a vegetarian breakfast field grown rather than meat-free, roughly double the number of people who said they would choose it from the menu. This 2018 study was conducted with 727 Brits who already ate meat. Reframing meat-free breakfast to field grown breakfast made diners 200% more likely to pick the plant-based option, similarly renaming meat-free sausage and mash to field grown sausage and mash made it twice as popular. The paper makes it clear that this was still clearly labeled as a vegan option. It wasn't that people thought it was meat. It was simply the change in the words to describe the product which made it more popular. The paper went on to find that a veggie burger would be more popular if it's called a loaded burger, and nocky is 31% more popular if it's renamed to melt in the mouth, nocky. I think what's particularly interesting about that, not just the size of the effect, but the term meat-free is kind of very lossy in its framing. We know people are loss of verse, so we're sensitive to things we will lose out on or miss more than we are positively affected by things we gain. And to say something as meat-free, you're just highlighting what is missing, not highlighting anything that's positive about the meal, so that's not a good term. The same is true for healthy foods, a 2018 study which renamed Carrots with sugar-free citrus dressing to twisted citrus glazed carrots, found that the sales for the carrots increased dramatically when you switched to that twisted citrus glazed carrots variant. Now what's important about this study and the others we've covered so far is they are randomised controlled trials. In each of these studies there are at least two different populations and they see two different variants and you're able to compare the results between those variants. This allows researchers to see how effective their variant is. For example, they can see if it is really effective to call sausages feel grown rather than meat-free because you're comparing like for like. This is different. From simply asking customers, would you eat field-grown sausages? If you ask customers that, you probably wouldn't get reliable results. At least not according to Philip Graves, the author of the brilliant book, Consumerology. Timothy Wilson, who is a psychiatrist in America, set up a study where he had four pairs of tight A to D, got shoppers in a store to come in and just evaluate them, touch them, feel them, say which ones they thought were best. As it happened, D1 got 40%, so statistically, clearly the best performing pair of tights. When he asked people what it was, they liked about them. It was their sheer nurse, the elasticity, the niche, very tangible qualities that these tights had. All well and good, apart from the fact they were all the same. A lot of people would look at that and say, well that's fine because we randomise the order when we do testing and we can negate that and they would all come out the same if we randomise the order. But that's missing the point. The point is people make up reasons and those reasons are not driven by what really drove their preference because the only thing that could have driven a preference was the order effect in which they experience them or maybe something to do with their own pressure in touching them or something. But the reality is what they then do is make up what seemed like highly plausible justifications for the preferences, but those justifications cannot be true because they were the same thing. So again, you've got this problem that exists where we are brilliant post-nationalisers, we're brilliant storytellers, but we've got no connection to, and this is why technically it's right to call it the unconscious mind, we've got no connection to the parts of our brain that can be hugely significant in determining how we're making decisions and what we're ultimately doing. We're awful at explaining exactly why we behave the way we do. For example, if you ask me, if I like AI art, I'll probably give you a very detailed answer which sounds highly believable. But if you actually watch my behaviour, you'll probably notice something completely different. That's not because I'm lying, it's because we're all very bad at vocalising exactly why we behave the way we do. And you'll hear why after the break. The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today after listening to today's episode of Nudge is Success Story hosted by Scott D. Clarion. This is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q&A sessions with successful business leaders in marketing sales and it covers everything from big businesses to start-ups and entrepreneurship. His recent episode with Mark Manson is fantastic, do not miss it. So go and listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to Nudge. Now in September 2025, Professor Matt Johnson, author of Blindsight and Branding that Means Business, came on the show and announced the AI art probably won't move you. He shared a study from Duke University to explain why. Yeah, it's a fantastic study which was done a few years ago at Duke University where they really tried to investigate the perception of AI-generated arts relative to human art. So there was two different studies here within this published paper. So the first is that they just had human participants evaluate pieces of art that didn't tell them where these pieces of art came from or how they're created, whether it was human or AI. Just do you like the piece of art? Do you think it's beautiful? Do you think it's valuable? And what they found there in this kind of simple study was that people actually preferred AI art to human-generated art without knowing anything about it. Just on the paint in a loan, people actually preferred AI-generated art. But what was interesting was how the reaction changed once the research has revealed that the content was AI-made. The interesting result here is that when you think it's created by a human, you think it's gorgeous, you think it's beautiful, you think it's a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. But if you're led to believe it's created by an AI, these rankings go down and half. So you think it's maybe a five out of six, you think it's maybe not so beautiful, you know, maybe notice flaws here and there. But this is not having anything to do with the actual art itself, but to do with the perception of AI. So the same piece of art looks much more beautiful when we think it's created by a human than when we think it's created by an AI. So for example, participant John sees a painting of a bridge and he's told it's a human. creation. While participant Jane sees the same painting of that bridge, but is told it's an AI creation. The interesting result here is that when you think it's created by a human, you think it's scourges, you think it's beautiful, you think it's a 9 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10. So you think it's maybe a five out of six, you think it's maybe not so beautiful, you know, maybe notice flaws here and there, but this is not having anything to do with the actual art itself, but to do with the perception of AI. So the same piece of art looks much more beautiful when we think it's created by a human, then we think it's created by an AI. When participants read that the art was AI generated, they didn't like it as much, fascinating. All right, let's go on to the final insight of this episode. And the final insight of the year, it is one of my favorite guests, Richard Shotton, Richard is author of two of my favorite books, The Choice Factory and the Illusion of Choice. But this year, Richard has published his latest book with co-author Michael Aaron Flicker, titled Hacking the Human Mind. The book details how some of the world's most successful brands have applied behavioral science to succeed. The book starts covering the history of the fast food restaurant, Five Guys. Richard writes, "How Five Guys Built Its Business on Focusing on Fewer Products, but Delivering Higher Quality." He writes and I quote, "Five Guys Prides itself on offering the best burger in fries." When they first opened, there was no vegan or fish option, no chicken, no salads, no ice cream. The focus was squarely on high quality beef patties served with a generous portion of top-notch fries. This specialisation worked. The first store thrived, CEO and founder Jerry Marl quit his day job and in 2002, as the brand grew, they began offering different franchises. Since then, Five Guys has grown to become one of America's favourites in the Better Burger category, and the brand is taking off globally, with 1,800 stores worldwide, and 1,500 more on the way. Richard says that keeping it simple really did help Five Guys grow. Now, from a, kind of, no economic or logistical point of view, there are benefits to doing that, but what's really interesting is there is also a psychological benefit. Now, let's say there's an alternate universe where there's Five Guys and there's Six Guys and their competitors, and Five Guys do brilliant burgers, and Nine out of Ten, and Six Guys do brilliant burgers, and they scored Nine out of Ten in terms of taste. Well, if Six Guys offer pizza and chicken and Chinese, even if the physical quality of their offering is just as amazing as Five Guys, people will not perceive it that way. We have this idea, we have this assumption that those who specialise are higher quality, and Richard has a study to prove it. Now, that's not speculation. You mentioned this idea of the Gold dilution effect. So that's a study back from 2007 by Zhang and Fishback, the University of Chicago, and they did this beautifully simple study. They recruit a group of people, and then they split them into two subgroups, and half the people here about the benefits of tomatoes. So you eat tomatoes and you have a reduced cancer risk, and those people are then asked how good is tomato consumption at reducing cancer? They get their answer, they then get a new group, the second subgroup, they give them the same paragraph about cancer prevention, but then at the end, they add on a bit about tomatoes being good for stopping the generation of the eye. So group one is told one benefit to eating tomatoes, while group two is told about two benefits to eating tomatoes. That second group are then asked about how good a tomato is preventing cancer, and even though they have exactly the same information regarding cancer, they score it about 12-13% lower. This is irrational. People rated eating tomatoes as 12% more effective at preventing cancer when this was given as the only benefit compared to being listed alongside another goal. It's not logical, but we are more confident when just one advantage is presented. To Zhang and Fishback, this suggested that conveying one clear benefit is more persuasive. Adding multiple benefits seems to dilute credibility. So the point here is if you add on extra reasons about why a vegetable is super healthy or a burger joint is really tasty, if you give people multiple reasons, rather than those additional reasons adding to the appeal or the believability of the offering, they actually reduce it because people have a rule of thumb that we can't be all things to all people, that a jack of a trade, a jack of all traitors and master of none, and once we have this rule in our head, we apply it even in situations where it's probably not appropriate. To be brutally honest, I'm not sure that these are objectively the best insights shared on Nudge this year. There were hundreds of insights shared, and I'm sure that I've missed many many that I really liked, and I'm sure that you liked during this quick roundup. But when I listen back to these insights did stick in the mind, Tim shared that limiting the amount of customer can buy can increase sales. He said that IKEA offered cheap ice cream at the end, to benefit from the peak end rule and dramatically improve the perception customers have of their experience. Professor Giger-Enzer explained how experts shouldn't overthink and how spending too much time can worsen your decision. Bass vouchers used a simple question to increase reviews on an online site by 400%. And Nile Daly said the vaccine is reserved for you to boost uptake by 45%. Writing field grown rather than meat free doubled sales of veggie sausages. Othelop Graves explained how market research isn't always reliable. Professor Mack Johnson detailed how AIR went movie and Richard Shotten showcased that companies that offered too much will seem worse quality than those who focus. We covered nine insights in this episode, but there were 452 in the Nudge Vaults, my subscription product, that lets you apply behavioral science to your work. The most popular feature of Nudge Vaults according to current subscribers is Vaults GPT. This is a chatbot AI-powered assistant that can take all of the insights in the vaults and show you how to apply them to your work. I've got Vaults GPT open now and I can explain how it works so I can ask Vaults GPT how can I use the peak end rule to improve the end of my podcast episode. When I enter that it will analyse the dozens of peak end insights in the vaults and give me a number of ideas. So for example, it has said, "deliver your sharpest insight or summary right at the end." I'm not sure I did that today, but that was a good example. It says, "use a storybeat or emotional twist or punchline at the closing moment." Again, good, maybe not right for this episode, but good. "Provide a bonus resource linked to in the episode ending." I really like that one. And send listeners a follow-up note or email or social paste tied to this episode. Again, I like that one as well. So pretty good insights. I think eagle-eyed listeners of Nudge will know that I've tested at least a bonus resource one quite a bit over the past 12 months. And I can give it more context to give me better suggestions as well. Anyway, if you listen to Nudge and you think you'd like to apply some of the insights I talk about on the show, then Nudge Vaults is really built for you. To check it out, go to nudgepodcast.com/voltz. That's nudgepodcast.com/voltz. You can find vaults in the menu if you just go to nudgepodcast.com as well. And you can even preview your first 50 insights for free. That is all from me today folks, and it's all from me this year. Thank you so much for listening to Nudge, supporting the show and enabling me to do a job that I absolutely love. I'll be back on January 5th with a fantastic episode. It is with Cornell University's Cineta Sare and her best-selling book Defi. You might have seen Cineta Sare on a number of BBC podcasts and news articles. She's gone quite viral over the last year with her fantastic book Defi, and she's agreed to come on Nudge as well. We've recorded a cracking episode. It's a great one to start off the year. I've spent the past month working on it, so I really hope you do like it. That is all from me. Cheers for listening, and I'll be back next Monday. Bye bye.