#Hooked - Revealing The Hidden Tricks of Me - Patrick Fagan PDF

Cover.
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PRAISE FOR #HOOKED
‘Transplanting an idea is a little like transplanting a human organ: the natural
human response is to reject it. Patrick Fagan’s book gives you access to the
psychological equivalent of immuno-suppressants - the creative techniques
and stories which allow a new idea or message to avoid automatic rejection.’
Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather
‘This book is essential reading for anyone wanting to bridge the gap between
the science and practice of influence. Packed with original, yet evidence-
based, suggestions, it digests the core findings of behavioural economics and
psychology to help readers make smarter decisions and increase their impact
on others. Highly recommended!’
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Professor of Business Psychology at UCL
and Columbia University, and CEO of Hogan Assessments
‘From bizarre psychological principles to testing approaches that actually work,

this book is a must-read for anyone wishing to understand the science behind
persuasive messages.’
Nathalie Nahai, web psychologist and author
‘Warning! Learnings from science will make your communications more effective.
Patrick makes the science accessible and shows how to apply it pragmatically.
A must-read for marketers and agencies.’
Phil Barden, author of Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy
‘Want more people to listen to what you have to say? This book provides a
handy toolkit to make anyone a better communicator.’
Jonah Berger, Wharton Professor and bestselling author of Contagious:
Why Things Catch On
A01_FAGA4429_01_SE_FM.indd 1 18/01/16 6:03 pm

#HOOKED

#HOOKED
Why cute sells ... and
other marketing
magic that we just
can’t resist
PATRICK FAGAN

PEARSON EDUCATION LIMITED
Edinburgh Gate
Harlow CM20 2JE
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1279 623623
Web: www.pearson.com/uk
First published 2016 (print and electronic)
© Patrick Fagan 2016 (print and electronic)
The right of Patrick Fagan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The print publication is protected by copyright. Prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a
retrieval system, distribution or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
recording or otherwise, permission should be obtained from the publisher or, where applicable, a
licence permitting restricted copying in the United Kingdom should be obtained from the Copyright
Licensing Agency Ltd, Barnard’s Inn, 86 Fetter Lane, London EC4 1EN.
The ePublication is protected by copyright and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred,
distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted
in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased,
or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text
may be a direct infringement of the author’s and the publisher’s rights and those responsible may be
liable in law accordingly.
All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. The use of any trademark in
this text does not vest in the author or publisher any trademark ownership rights in such trademarks,
nor does the use of such trademarks imply any affiliation with or endorsement of this book by such
owners. Pearson Education is not responsible for the content of third-party internet sites.
ISBN: 978–1-292–07442–9 (print)

978–1-292–07444–3 (PDF)
978–1-292–07445–0 (ePub)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for the print edition is available from the British Library
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Cover design by Two Associates

Dog image © Eric Isselee/Shutterstock.com
Hook and paper image © fikmik/123rf.com
Print edition typeset in 9.5/13.75 Helvetica Neue LT W1G by SPi Global
Print edition printed in Malaysia
NOTE THAT ANY PAGE CROSS REFERENCES REFER TO THE PRINT EDITION

CONTENTS

Note.........................................................................................................................ix
About the author.....................................................................................................x
Thanks and acknowledgements.........................................................................xi
Let's get #hooked................................................................................................xiii
PART 1 AN INTRODUCTION
1 The science of communication............................................................................ 6
2 The brain...............................................................................................................20
PART 2 SECTION 1 INVITE ATTENTION

3 Primal.....................................................................................................................30
4 Affective.................................................................................................................40
5 Self-relevant..........................................................................................................51
6 Surprising..............................................................................................................61
SECTION 2 IGNITE THINKING

7 Mystery..................................................................................................................79
8 Ease.......................................................................................................................90
9 Narrative................................................................................................................99
SECTION 3 INCITE ACTION

10 Memory................................................................................................................115
11 Autopilot...............................................................................................................123
12 Priming.................................................................................................................141
PART 3 PUTTING IT TO USE

13 Promotions..........................................................................................................152
14 The psych of like................................................................................................158
15 Direct mail...........................................................................................................165
16 In the office..........................................................................................................170
17 Test, test, test......................................................................................................176
Conclusion..........................................................................................................181
Index.....................................................................................................................183
viii

NOTE
This book is so scientific that the references list – at almost 20,000 words – is
too large to include! To view the citations, please go to:
http://www.brainchimp.co.uk/hooked/notes
ix

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Fagan is a consumer psychologist with both academic and

commercial credentials. He is currently an Associate Lecturer in Consumer
Behaviour and Psychology of Marketing and Advertising at Goldsmiths,
University of London, and a Lecturer in Consumer Psychology at London
College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. He has published a number of
papers on topics ranging from price psychology to Facebook psychology, and
has written for publications including The Guardian, AdMap and Psychology
Today. He is a frequent media contributor on consumer psychology and has
been interviewed for print, radio and TV by companies like the BBC, Evening
Standard and London Live.
Commercially, Patrick has been applying behavioural science to commer-
cial insights for over five years, both as an employee for agencies and on an
independent basis. He currently works for CrowdEmotion, a company pioneer-
ing multi-signal emotional capture and its meaningful application in the real
world; his consultancy brainchimp.co.uk has conducted controlled psychologi-
cal experiments, contributed to press releases and provided consultancy for
brands including eBay, RealD and Vodafone.
You can reach Patrick at [email protected]

THANKS AND
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to all who contributed to this book.
First and foremost, thanks to D. Many further thanks to Thomas Bayne and
the rest of Mountainview Learning, who introduced me to some of the great
case studies in this book, and to the business brain science way of thinking.
To find out if you could benefit from Mountainview’s fantastic brain science
insights, visit http://mountainview.co.uk/assumptions-quiz/
Thank you Nathalie for your support. Likewise, thank you Adrian, Dimitros,
Gorkan and Tomas at UCL.
And thank you to Eloise and her colleagues at Pearson for all of their hard
work on the book.
PUBLISHER’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:
Photos
Photo on pxi © Liliya Kulianionak/Shutterstock.com; photos on p12 ©
R. Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock.com (woman with rose) and © John Foxx
Collection/Imagestate (man with sunglasses); photos on p28 © 123rf.com (spider,
rock and rose) and © Andrey Starostin (mushroom); photo on p38 © Richard
Levine/Alamy Stock Photo; photo on p40 © Eric Isselee/Shutterstock.com;
photo on p42 © Simon_g; photo on p48 © Jack Hinds/Alamy Stock Photo;
photo on p53 © David Pearson/Alamy Stock Photo; photo on p61 © Guy Bell/
Alamy Stock Photo; photo on p63 © USBFCO/Shutterstock.com; photo on
p68 ‘Monkey Sparrow’ by Sarah DeRemer; photo on p70 © Ana Blazic Lav-
lovic; photo on p71 © Justin Kase Zninez/Alamy Stock Photo; photos on p76
from Sajjacholapunt, P. and Ball, L. J., ‘The influence of banner adverstise-
ments on attention and memory: human faces with averted gaze can enhance
advertising effectiveness’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 166, 2014; photo on p112
© razorpix/Alamy Stock Photo; photo on p123 © Chris Howes/Wild Places
xi

Photography/Alamy Stock Photo; photo on p124 © Krsmanovic; photos on
p144 © Baloncici (cushion), © Joe Gough (dinner plate), © Horiyan (table), ©
DJ Srki (chair) and © Joey Chan/Pearson Education Asia Ltd (stool); photo on
p155 © Newscast-online Limited/Alamy Stock Photo.
Figures
Figure on p14 adapted from Lavidge, R. J and Steiner, G. A. (1961). ‘A model
for predictive measures of advertising effectiveness’, Journal of Marketing,
25, 59–62; figure on p22 © 123rf.com; figure on p82 adapted from Huron, D.,
Sweet A nticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, MIT Press, 206;
figure on p90 adapted from Johnson, E. J. and Goldstein, D. G. (2003). ‘Do
defaults save lives?’, Science, 302, 1338–1339.
xii THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LET’S GET #HOOKED
Source: © Liliya Kulianionak/Shutterstock.com
Take a good look at this puppy.

Thanks to Mr Figglesnuff, you’ll pay closer attention to everything you’re
about to read; researchers have actually shown that pictures of cute animals
make people more attentive.1
It’s bizarre and counterintuitive, but science suggests it’s true – and that’s
the point. When it comes to communicating effectively – that is, making sticky
messages that get people hooked (and ‘messages’ in this book refer to cor-
porate communications including advertising, branding, direct mail, emails,
social media posts, editorial content and pitches and presentations) – a lot
of businesspeople are scrambling around in the dark and taking their best
guesses; often what they believe is right is wrong, and what they believe is
wrong is right.
xiii

Take the American insurance company Aflac.2 In 2003 the CEO, Daniel P.
Amos, had a strange idea for a new ad campaign: a duck that quacked the
brand name ‘Aflac’. That was it.
Nobody at the company expected it to work – why would it?
Amos recalled:
“
When I tried explaining to people what we were thinking about, no one got
it. ‘Well, there’s this duck’, I’d say. ‘And he quacks Aflac’. The response was
always the same: a silent stare. So I stopped telling people. I didn’t even tell
our board; I just said we were trying something very bold and creative for our
advertising campaign.
Just like the Aflac executives, you probably wouldn’t think that a bizarre,
semi-sentient duck would work, that it could actually influence people and help
the business; but it did. Amos reported the campaign helped to drive up rev-
enues by 44% over the following seven years.
So, how do messages work – and how don’t they work – and what does
psychology tell us about it?
Well, read on, dear reader, and find out! In the meantime though, an interest-
ing experiment will serve as an introductory appetiser.
The study in question investigated urban legends.3 Have you heard the one
about the man who bought a McDonald’s chicken burger, only to bite into a fat,
juicy tumour? What about the one that says if chocolate makes you sneeze, it’s
because of all the crushed up insects that fall into it during production? (That
one appears to be true4 – sorry!)
These examples give you a clue as to what kinds of urban legends are the
stickiest. The researchers asked participants to read some popular urban leg-
ends and rate them on a range of factors, such as the elicitation of emotions
and how likely they would be to pass the story on. The chart below shows the
predictive power of various factors for the pass-along variable.
Predictive power for sharing

Interest
Plausibility
Realistic characters
Disgust
Surprise
Rich plot
–30% –20% –10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%
xiv LET'S GET #HOOKED

This experiment emphasises the importance to stickiness of emotion
(disgust), surprise, curiosity (interest), narrative (realistic characters) and fluency
(a simple plot). These are just five of the ten psychological principles of getting
your messages hooked in this book:
1 Primal Our ‘chimp brains’ still have a huge effect on what we pay
attention to; for example, it’s not very sexy to say so, but sex does sell.
2 Affective We all have first-hand experience with the attention-grab-
bing power of emotion – most of us have wasted hours online looking
at videos of kittens and puppies.
3 Self-relevant Imagine you’re walking down the street, and a stranger
walks past wearing a T-shirt with a picture of your face on it; you would
notice it immediately.
4 Surprising When a waiter drops a tray of plates onto the floor, most
everyone will look (some will even applaud). It’s in our nature to pay
attention to anything surprising.
5 Mystery A whole industry of crosswords, codewords and sudokus
speaks to our innate desire to ‘close the gaps’ in our understanding
and solve mysteries.
6 Ease People generally have little time and motivation to attend to
messages – but mostly, people are just lazy. Which do you take more
often, the escalator or the stairs?
7 Narrative As a species, we have been structuring and sharing infor-
mation using narrative for eons – stories are part of our collective psy-
che; stories are relatable.
8 Memory There is typically a long break between the time a message
is read and the time it’s meant to have an effect on behaviour – so it’s
vital that it’s remembered.
9 Autopilot We have very limited brainpower, so we use non-conscious
shortcuts or rules-of-thumb – called heuristics – to guide our behav-
iour. These can be ‘hotwired’ via a message.
10 Priming Don’t think of a white bear. You will have invariably thought of
a white bear. Priming is influencing behaviour by bringing certain ideas
to the front of people’s minds.
With these insights, your messages will be seen, and your voice will be
heard!
LET'S GET #HOOKED xv

1
PART
AN
INTRODUCTION
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CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS WITH
EXAMPLES
“
HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead! HeadOn: Apply directly to the
forehead! HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead!
So goes perhaps one of the worst adverts of all time. HeadOn is a chapstick-
like product that, the brand claims, can be rubbed onto the forehead to relieve
headaches; unsurprisingly, there is no actual proof that it works (see http://
abcnews.go.com/GMA/Health/story?id=2695490).1 Accordingly, the brand was
perhaps a little limited in what it could say in its advertising, and ended up with
the very simple and literal copy you see quoted above.
It was basic and irritating, but guess what? It worked. Sales increased by
234% year on year after the ad’s launch.2
Let’s take another example. Most British readers will be all too familiar with
the price comparison site GoCompare.com – or more specifically, its infuriating
tenor mascot Gio Compario. For those lucky enough to be unaware, in 2009
the brand released an advert featuring a portly opera singer wearing a tuxedo
and sporting a ridiculous curtains haircut and an even more ridiculous twirly
moustache, and singing an extremely catchy song.3
The advert was weird, it was unique, and it was hated. It was so despised and
detested, in fact, that it was named the most irritating ad of the year in 20094 –
and 2010!5 It was hated so much that the brand followed up with a campaign in
which the tenor was killed by various means, including a bazooka; eventually, in
2014, the brand dropped him altogether.6 The brand’s Marketing Officer, Kevin
Hughes, said, ‘It was risky, but a brand has to listen to its customers’.7
But does it?
It seems intuitive that the mascot should be dropped – customers did hate
it, after all. But intuitions and assumptions can often be wrong; what really mat-
ters is the evidence.
Within three months of originally introducing the advert, GoCompare saw an
increase in customer count by 20%, quote volumes by 44%, and brand aware-
ness by a massive 450%.8 In other words, it worked. Dropping the mascot may
have been a mistake, and one based on false assumptions about how commu-
nication works (although it’s too early to tell from the data).
Examples like these highlight the need to take a fresh look at how communi-
cation works, and to challenge old ways of thinking.
2 PART 1 AN INTRODUCTION
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FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS
Clever Hans was a horse – a clever horse, by all accounts.9 At the start of the
twentieth century, Hans toured Germany with his owner Wilhelm von Osten,
and performed a range of amazing tricks for the crowds who gathered to see
him; Hans was capable of mathematical feats that would stump even some
humans. For example, von Osten would ask Hans a mathematical sum, and
Hans would tap the answer out with his hoof. Unfortunately, though, it was too
good to be true: believe it or not, horses are generally not capable of maths. An
investigation discovered that Hans would tap his foot and stop after his own-
er’s involuntary and almost imperceptible body language gave him the cue to
do so – a tasty treat for the right answer conditioned this response.
However, the case of Clever Hans raises a clever point. All animals are
hardwired to spot patterns in the environment; if they did not, they would not
discover, for example, that certain berries are poisonous.
From horses to humans, many experiments have long-since illustrated that
we innately detect patterns. For example, studies have shown that people are
able to guess the outcome from a sequence of cards with a certain p attern,
even if they cannot consciously describe that pattern or explain how they
guessed the next card correctly.10
This phenomenon can have its downsides. We sometimes spot patterns
where they do not actually exist – what is known as apophena.11
In Fooled by Randomness,12 Nassim Taleb explains:
“
. . . we are not made to view things as independent from each other. When
viewing two events A and B, it is hard not to assume that A causes B, B causes
A, or both cause each other. Our bias is immediately to establish a causal link.
SEEING PATTERNS THAT DON’T EXIST

Do you have £200 to spare? Why not visit GhostStop.com and pick up a Zoom
360° EVP Recorder to pick up the sounds of ghosts speaking their spooky
messages?13 Simply head over to a haunted house and record the silence, and
when you play the recording turn it up to maximum volume so you can hear the
spooky spectral whisperings among the static.
Well, because ghosts’ voices do not exist: they are simply an example of
people finding patterns that aren’t actually there.14 Other examples include
pareidolia, where we see faces such as ‘the man in the moon’,15 and the ‘hot
PART 1 AN INTRODUCTION 3
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hand’ fallacy, where gamblers believe they are on a winning streak and bet
accordingly, rather than at the mercy of chance.16
The point of all this is that many of us believe in our own patterns that may
not actually be true, and they can affect the power of our messages; it is vital
to be scientific.
For example, you probably believe that messages spelling out the dan-
gers of cigarettes will help stop people from smoking. In actual fact, research
shows that anti-smoking messages can have the opposite effect, because
the message makes the idea of smoking mentally salient and tempts people
to do it.17
We are living in what advertising executive Bob Hoffman calls ‘The Golden
Age of Bullshit’:19 the message-makers of our day, particularly marketers and
advertisers, are full of nonsense. Their ideas of what works are based on dec-
ades of theory, creative thinking and brainstorming – but very little evidence.
ACTION POINT
Imagine you work as Communications Manager at a grocery super-
market in the aftermath of the ‘horsemeat scandal’, when many of the
store’s meat products were found to contain horsemeat (when they
were not supposed to).
Craft a Tweet (maximum 140 characters) to send from the brand’s
Twitter account in response to the scandal.
Now spend five minutes thinking about why you wrote that Tweet.
What was your intended aim and how did you go about achieving it?
What principles were behind your thinking? Where did those principles
come from? Are you sure they are correct? What is the scientific evi-
dence for them?
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey outlines the
‘See, Do, Get’ model shown below.18 While many people spend time on
‘Do’ (i.e. putting their beliefs into action),
See
and ‘Get’ (i.e. reviewing and interpreting
the results of their actions), very few spend
time on ‘See’ – in other words, Covey
states that few people spend time think-
ing about and challenging their underlying
Do
beliefs, and that doing so is an important Get
factor for success.
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The authors of one paper went through the top marketing textbooks at the time
and found hundreds and hundreds of instructions – but guess how many were
supported by evidence?20
Zero.
Hoffman wrote:21
“
Medical practitioners, who were trained in the practice of bloodletting, never
questioned its efficacy. They just assumed it worked because they were taught
it worked and they credulously attributed the fact that some people got
well to the treatment . . . We are faced with a similar problem today . . . For
almost 20 years, advertising programs, marketing courses, and professional
development classes have taught these people principles that can now be
labelled either seriously flawed or outright baloney . . . never before in my
experience has a whole generation of marketing and advertising people been
taught an entire set of principles that is so lacking in a factual basis, and so
influenced by anecdotes and fantasies.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that surveys by consultancy The Fournaise

Group found that 70% of CEOs have lost trust in marketers’ ability to deliver
tangible business results,22 or that big brands around the world are slashing
their marketing departments.23
The truth is that most professional and business messages just don’t work.
They’re based on misinformation and hunches – and bad hunches, at that.
How about you – what are your beliefs when it comes to messages that
work? Try yourself on the quiz below.
Belief True False

A message must change attitudes in order to change behaviour
People have to like a message or its sender for it to work
Most of the time, responses to messages are well thought out
People consciously decide which messages to pay attention to
A message has to be processed consciously for it to have an effect
A message must be persuasive in order to have an effect
The most effective messages contain rational information
It’s more effective if a person reads a message than thinks it in their heads
The more information in a message, the better
Negative emotions should be avoided in messages
If you answered that any of the statements are true, then you may not be
communicating messages as effectively as you could be.
So what does the science say?
PART 1 AN INTRODUCTION 5
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THE SCIENCE OF
1 COMMUNICATION
Imagine, if you will, that you are a chimp. You are monkeying around in
Tanzania, when suddenly you come across a tasty-smelling fruit that’s entirely
new to you, and you can’t seem to get the nut open to access the juicy flesh
inside. One of your troop, however, knows what to do, and cracks and twists
the fruit in such a way that opens it.
You try to do the same thing and it doesn’t work straight away; what do you
do? Do you: (a) keep trying to open it the way your chimp friend did; or (b) give
up on that and try to figure it out yourself?
As a human, you probably went with option (a), following the lead of a peer;
an actual chimp, meanwhile, would have gone with option (b).
Vicky Horner and Andrew Whiten published the results of an experiment in
2005 that looked at this very question.1 They performed an experiment with
both chimpanzees and human children, in which the participants were shown
a technique to open a puzzle box in order to get to the tasty treat inside. How-
ever, in some cases the participants were tricked and shown a method to
open the box that didn’t actually succeed, although it appeared to when the
researcher did it.
The researchers found that the human children would persist with what
they had seen others do, while the chimps quickly ignored it and did their own
thing; the conclusion being that humans are uniquely social learners.
Importantly, primatologists have found that humans and primates share sev-
eral cognitive biases. For example, researchers at Yale University managed to
teach capuchin monkeys the value of money over a period of several months by
giving them round discs and teaching them that the discs could be exchanged
for food.2 The monkeys exhibited financial behaviours also seen in humans. For
one, the discs were observed being exchanged by the monkeys for sex (it really
is the oldest profession in the world); but also, the monkeys exhibited cogni-
tive biases like loss aversion, where an object’s selling price is higher than its
buying price due to an innate fear of loss. Likewise, while people will insult
their co-workers and slack off if they feel they are being treated unfairly by their
employer,3 a capuchin monkey will throw its cucumber treat back in its han-
dler’s face if it sees another monkey being given tasty grapes instead.4
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On the other hand, taking our cues from the messages of others is a
uniquely human bias. In addition to Horner and Whiten’s study, another illus-
tration comes from research showing that pointing is something unique to
humans – chimpanzees only learn to point when they are in captivity.5 Human
infants, meanwhile, will learn to point and gesture with social meaning within
the first 12 months of their lives.6
SOCIAL COGNITION
The massive influence of social information on human behaviour is illustrated
by a wealth of case studies from the field of social cognition.
Perhaps the most famous is Kitty Genovese.7 The story goes like this . . . Cath-
erine ‘Kitty’ Genovese was an attractive 28-year-old woman who was stabbed to
death near her home in Queens, New York, one evening in 1964. The important
detail is that Kitty allegedly screamed for help, and although dozens of people
living nearby heard her cries, none called the emergency services. The princi-
ple believed to be at play was ‘the diffusion of responsibility’ – people felt less
responsibility to help since they believed others would do so instead.
Recent investigations suggest that the Kitty Genovese example may be
rather apocryphal;8 however, psychological experiments since then have sup-
ported the principle. One fantastic piece of research involved participants left
sitting in a room to await the start of the experiment;9 as they were waiting,
smoke was released into the room through a vent. The subject was either sit-
ting in the room on their own, or sitting with two other people who were in
fact actors instructed to ignore the smoke and do nothing. On their own, three-
quarters of participants left the room and sought help; in the presence of pas-
sive others, only one in ten did so.
When it comes to messages that work, there are two important implications
from the points made previously. Firstly – and as we’ll cover in more detail later
in the book – messages can be made more effective through understanding
social biases.
MAKING MESSAGES SOCIAL

Have you, for example, ever sent an important request around the office via
email, and copied in all of your colleagues? Maybe you were asking people
to donate to your Just Giving marathon page; or perhaps you were asking for
volunteers. Whatever your aim, you could have had more luck.
1 The Science of Communication 7
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Liberal use of the CC field should generally be avoided when making requests
via email. This is not just because of the potential for awful social gaffes – as the
manager of a Massachusetts Five Guys restaurant who accidentally copied a cus-
tomer in on an email calling him a ‘douche’ will tell you.10 (http://www.dailymail
.co.uk/news/article-2564086/Five-Guys-manager-accidentally-includes-customer-
email-calling-douche.html) – but also because of diffusion of responsibility.
To illustrate, students at one university were sent an email from a fel-
low student with the subject line ‘Please Help’ and a message asking if the
university had a biology faculty. The email was either sent to a recipient directly,
or else to the recipient and another four students. Among those emailed
directly, 64% replied, compared to 50% of those emailed as part of a group.11
So, messages are their most effective when they take social principles into
account.
WHY MESSAGES MATTER

The second point, more broadly, is that sending messages is an important part
of who we are as a species – and as such, it’s vital we get it right.
The desire to communicate effectively has been a driving force behind some
of our greatest accomplishments. William Henry Fox Talbot was a British inven-
tor who pioneered highly influential photography techniques which are in use
to this day.12 In 1833, Talbot was on holiday at Lake Como in Italy; he was so
taken with the scenery that he sketched it in the hope that he could share it with
friends and family back home. Try as he might, however, he simply could not
capture the beauty of the scene in his sketchbook, and he was inspired to create
a machine that could sketch a scene accurately enough to share it with others.
Fast forward almost two hundred years to the present day. The latest sta-
tistics from Facebook state that 830 million people use it daily.13 Talbot’s urge
to share Lake Como with his friends and family has developed into Facebook,
Instagram, Vine, et al. Messages are a bigger part of our lives than ever.
Since the start of the decade, global internet penetration has increased
by an estimated 760%, such that 40% of the world’s population (that’s three
billion people) now have internet access.14 By 2018, it is predicted that there
will be 83,299 petabytes (that’s 83,299 quadrillion bytes) of internet traffic every
month;14 in concrete terms, that is the equivalent of about 34 trillion MP3s.15
In 2010 alone, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, ‘There were 5 exabytes of
information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that
much information is now created every 2 days.’16
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So, not only is there an innate, evolutionary urge to communicate well, but
technological forces mean that ineffective messages will simply get lost in the
noise. Every day, on average, people receive 88 emails,17 spend 40 minutes
on Facebook,18 and are exposed to up to 3,500 advertisements.19 There is an
increasing amount of static through which businesses’ messages have to cut:
if they don’t, they will simply be a waste of time and money.
So, how do you create messages which work? Let’s start with the accepted
view.
TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO GETTING READ

Perhaps the most well-known model of effective communication is the elabor
ation-likelihood model of persuasion, from Richard Petty and John Cacioppo.20
The model essentially states that communications are variably effective at
changing attitudes according to whether they use information in line with how
the receiver is processing the message.
If the message is processed through the central route, the receiver puts a
lot of conscious, deliberative thought (i.e. elaboration) into it; in which case, the
message should present rational information. For example, in this case, a toilet
paper brand (let’s call it Snuffles) putting out a press release about the fluffi-
ness and absorbance of its tissues might discuss how they performed in con-
trolled trials at mopping up oil and cola and the like. However, if the message is
processed through the peripheral route, the receiver puts little thought (elabo-
ration) into it, and the message should present subtle cues. In this instance,
the Snuffles brand might hint at fluffiness and absorption through the image of,
say, a labrador puppy.
The central route to persuasion The peripheral route to persuasion

The audience takes a direct and outright The audience takes a subtle and roundabout (or
(or central) approach to the information in a peripheral) approach to information. In this case,
message. Here, explicit information is most implicit or sensory information is most useful – it
useful – it will be processed consciously. will be processed non-consciously.
The model proposes that consumers process the message centrally or

peripherally according to motivation – putting more thought into a leaflet about
organ donation than, say, buying Girl Scout cookies – and ability – such as
intelligence or lack of distractions.
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EXERCISE
Central versus peripheral

First of all, think of a piece of advertising you have seen which takes
the central route to persuasion – that is, which persuades people with
rational information. What was the advert like, exactly?
Now, think of a piece of advertising which took the peripheral route –
that is, which didn’t contain much, or any, rational information and
instead communicated using emotions or the senses. Describe the ad.
How effective do you think each one was – that is, how good was it
at influencing behaviour?
Central: ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩ Peripheral: ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩ ✩
Why?
However, there are ostensibly three issues with this model, and the many
others like it in the communications literature.
The first potential problem is that this model focuses on attitude change as
paramount. The assumption behind this model, and more explicitly champi-
oned in Azjen’s theory of planned behaviour,21 is that changing attitudes will
lead to a change in behaviour.
But is this certainly the case?
SAY VERSUS DO
Going back to HeadOn and GoCompare, it seems irrelevant to an advert’s suc-
cess whether consumers have a positive or negative attitude towards it. In fact,
a large-scale review of advertising research found that the more an advert was
repeated, the worse consumers’ attitudes became towards it – but that sales
were maintained or even increased in line with repetition!22
In 1934, Richard LaPiere conducted a seminal study which questioned the
assumed attitude–behaviour relationship.23 LaPiere travelled around 1930s Amer-
ica with his student and his student’s wife, both of whom were Chinese; the three
patronised several hotels, motels and restaurants, only one of which (out of 251)
refused them service. Later, LaPiere sent a survey to all of the establishments
asking, ‘Will you accept members of the Chinese race in your establishment?’
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Among those who responded, over nine in ten said they would refuse ser-
vice to Chinese customers. The results were seen as evidence that behaviours
are often very different from attitudes.
Of course, there were a number of concerns with LaPiere’s methodology
(the Chinese couple were accompanied by a white professor in person, after
all), but more recent studies have supported the general principle. For exam-
ple, an experiment in 2012 asked a group of students to rate how admirable
they found a course of action to be compared to inaction; action was seen
as significantly more favourable. However, when asked if they would rather
take their exams soon, or put them off, significantly more of the students
opted for the latter. The researchers titled their paper ‘Do as I say (not as
I do)’.24
More explicitly, an early review of research found that the average correla-
tion between attitudes and behaviours was rarely above 0.30, and often nearer
to 0, with the researcher stating, ‘It is considerably more likely that attitudes will
be unrelated or only slightly related to overt behaviours.’25
More recent reviews have been more positive, finding average correlations
of 0.38 in 199526 and 0.52 in 200627 – but this is still far from a 1:1 relationship.
The reason for this is that people generally have very little awareness of the
subconscious drivers of their behaviour, and instead produce so-called ‘naïve
theories’ to post-rationalise or predict their actions. As behavioural scientist
Colin Camerer put it, ‘The human brain is like a monkey brain with a cortical
“press secretary” who is glib at concocting explanations for behaviour, and
who privileges deliberative explanations over cruder ones.’28
A seminal study conducted by Benjamin Libet and colleagues frankly
suggested that free will is an illusion.29 To put it simply, in the experiment
participants were asked to push a button at their leisure, and to indicate
when they had decided to push it. An EEG cap recorded each participant’s
brain activity in order to measure when the brain had set the button-push
action in motion.
And the time lag between deciding to push the button, and the brain ini-
tiating the action? It was −350ms on average. In other words, the brain had
initiated the button-push before the participant ‘decided’ to do it – the implica-
tion being that our ‘decisions’ are actually post-rationalisations. Attitudes can
be poor predictors of behaviour because they don’t determine actions, but are
actually interpretations of them.
Not only that, in fact, but it might actually be the case that behaviours
drive attitudes, rather than attitudes driving behaviours. In a fascinating
experiment on a principle called the facial feedback hypothesis, participants
were asked to hold a pen in their mouths – some were asked to hold it in
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Illustration of difference between holding a pen in the teeth, like a rose, or mouth, like a cigarette
Sources: © R. Gino Santa Maria/Shutterstock.com (woman with rose); © John Foxx Collection/Imagestate (man with sunglasses)
their teeth, like a rose, and the others in their mouth, like a cigarette. They
then watched some cartoons and rated them in terms of funniness. Those
made to smile by the pen rated the cartoons as funnier: in this experi-
ment, the behaviour (smiling) drove the attitude (a positive perception of the
cartoons).30
Average cartoon funniness rating

5.4
5.2
5.0
4.8
4.6
4.4
4.2
4.0
3.8
Pen in lips Pen in hand Pen in teeth
Another great study to illustrate this point asked participants to fill out a sur-
vey on a clipboard to indicate their personal opinions on Israel and Palestine.
When participants flipped the sheet to answer the rest of the survey, a sneaky
adhesive patch on the back of the clipboard peeled away the participant’s orig-
inal answers, leaving responses which completely opposed their actual beliefs.
Then, the participants were asked to explain their answers. Over half (53%) did
not notice any change and consequently argued in favour of opinions they did
not actually give.31
The takeaway is that attitudes are often poor predictors of behaviour; if the
goal of a message is to change behaviour, it is far more effective to do that
directly through psychological principles.
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‘THE CHIMP BRAIN’: PREPARE FOR IRRATIONALITY
A similar, second issue with the aforementioned model is that it places almost
too much emphasis on the rational side of an audience. As will be discussed,
only a minority of cognitive processing is conscious.32 The model claims that
people will use the peripheral processing route for messages when motivation
is high, yet studies have found that subtle, non-conscious principles have sig-
nificant effects when people read letters offering expensive pay-day loans,33
when people respond to pension plans,34 and even when doctors decide which
medicine to prescribe a patient.35
In fact, research has shown that advertising messages, for example, are the
most effective when they are entirely emotional and contain little or no rational
content at all.36 It appears that the best messages, therefore, may be those
that neglect the rational side of decision-making entirely; at least, to weight the
two systems equally is likely a mistake.
The third and final problem is that the model ostensibly does not transfer
to the real world, where there is little likelihood that a message will even be
noticed, and where there is usually a significant lag in time between a message
being seen and the desired behavioural effect.
Imagine you’re sending a memo around the office reminding people not
to steal other people’s sandwiches from the communal fridge (yeah, Gary!).
Firstly, that message may well remain unread and hidden in an inbox full of
more pressing emails; and if it is opened at all, it may well be simply skimmed
and forgotten. Secondly, the intended influence on behaviour is unlikely to be
for another few hours, at best.
It is for this reason that research has shown that messages which are highly
arousing (i.e. catch attention) are more likely to be successful, as are those
which are more memorable. For example, an experiment by neuroscientists at
UCL in conjunction with Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science and
the brand Mars investigated which metrics were best at predicting the in-market
sales performance of advertisements. Two of the top three most important
metrics were hippocampus activation in the brain (i.e. memory) and parietal
activation in the brain (i.e. attention).37
SO WHAT WORKS?
In summary, then, in contrast to standard models of communication, in order
to be effective, messages need to take more of a non-conscious approach
to their audience – using principles of psychology to get noticed and remem-
bered, and ‘nudging’ behaviour rather than trying to change attitudes.
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So what’s the alternative?
A popular framework for understanding advertising effects is what’s known
colloquially as the ‘path to purchase’ – from awareness to purchase – as
shown in the diagram below.38
The path to purchase

Purchase High level of consumer response/
Conative stage advertising effect
(i.e. Do)
Conviction
Preference
Affective stage
(i.e. Feel)
Liking
Knowledge
Cognitive stage
(i.e. Learn) Low level of consumer response/
Awareness advertising effect
Source: Adapted from Lavidge, R. J. and Steiner, G. A. (1961). ‘A model for predictive measures of
advertising effectiveness’, Journal of Marketing, 25, 59–62.
While there is a lot of support for the first two steps and the final step (i.e.
awareness, knowledge and purchase), which will be explored throughout this
book, the other three steps are perhaps less robust. These three phases – liking,
preference and conviction – form an attitude component and may actually play
little to no part in the process of an effective message – since, as discussed
before, the link between attitudes and behaviours is often weak or inconsistent,
and since the majority of behaviour is driven by non-conscious factors. What
matters isn’t whether people consciously profess to like or agree with a mes-
sage, but rather if that message is at the front of their minds when it counts.
So, this books suggests a three-step framework:
Attention Thinking Action
Primal Mystery Memory

Affective Ease Autopilot
Self-relevant Narrative Priming
Surprising
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A Invite attention
As will be discussed, we have extremely limited attention spans, and there is a
lot of information out there in the world; the first thing an effective message has
to do is to get noticed. No matter what the goal of a message, if it doesn’t even
get noticed all efforts are moot. That email will never reduce staff absenteeism
if it never gets read; that advert will never increase sales if people don’t look
up from their phones while it’s on TV; and that pitch will never win the bid if the
audience is chatting among themselves.
1 Primal Our attention is drawn to the primal – that is, faces, food and
f-. . . sex. If we hadn’t paid attention to these things throughout our evo-
lutionary history, we would have had trouble spotting hungry tigers, find-
ing scarce food, and propagating the species. Marks & Spencer’s sexy
‘food pornography’ adverts increased food sales by 8.4%, for example.39
2 Affective We immediately pay attention to emotional things, like Mr Fig-
glesnuff from before. Again, there are clear evolutionary reasons for pay-
ing attention to anything that looks like a baby, or anything which could
be threatening, like a snake or a spider. Why not use both? To promote
spawn-of-Satan flick Devil’s Due, viral agency Thinkmodo filmed reac-
tions to an unattended pram in New York – from which a demonic baby
would pop up, screeching. The video garnered 50 million views, making
it the eighth most popular video of the year.40
3 Self-relevant We automatically attend to anything self-relevant, or per-
sonal (like our name) – for obvious reasons. IKEA demonstrated this
when they sent postcards to loyalty club members, giving a personal-
ised weather forecast for the weekend following the postcard’s arrival.41
Compared to a non-personalised control group of recipients (i.e. a ‘normal’
campaign), the campaign increased sales by 7.5%.
4 Surprising We pay attention to anything which stands out from the
patterns we’re used to. We will, for example, always be fascinated with
kooky pop stars and their meat dresses. When Heineken stood out from
every other beer can on the shelf by turning theirs into a little keg, it
resulted in a $300 million increase in revenue; to put that into context,
the ‘surprise premium’ was such that the gross margin on the kegs was
17 to 20 percentage points greater than that on a typical six-pack.42
B Ignite thinking
Getting people to notice a message is the first step, but if they don’t process
the message, it will neither stick in their minds nor influence their thoughts and
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behaviours. Do students learn material better by reading a book, or by writing
out the book in their own words and completing exercises? The efficient men-
tal laundering of a message can be achieved with three techniques:
1 Mystery We are innately drawn to mysteries and puzzles because we

want to close the gap in our understanding and resolve unpleasant feel-
ings of tension. Jack the Ripper’s last murder was 124 years ago; and
there are still news stories speculating on his identity today.43 Google
posted a padlocked box to a group of 1,000 recipients, with instruc-
tions to search online for a specific phrase; when they did so, a Google
Adwords advert appeared in the results, which led to the lock’s combi-
nation and thus allowed recipients to open the box and read the materi-
als inside; 95% followed the treasure hunt to open the box, and Google
enjoyed a return on investment of 90 times its outlay.44
2 Ease Frankly, we are all very, very lazy. It’s in our nature to save energy
as much as possible, and it makes sense that it is so. For a message
to be taken on board, it needs to be as short, simple and concrete as
possible. Ingredients brand Knorr used the power of laziness in 2012
when they created recipe cards for meals using their products, as well
as introducing meal solutions in-store by placing all of the items needed
to make a particular recipe in the same location; compared to control
stores, the power of simply making life easier and telling shoppers what
to eat increased sales by 12% for their stock, for example.45
3 Narrative Social anthropologist Walter R. Fisher calls mankind homo
narrans, or ‘storytelling man’; indeed, storytelling is one of the oldest forms
of human communication. It’s how we make sense of the world.46 In 2012,
biscuity snack Twix produced an ad campaign which gave the brand a
narrative.47 Specifically, it created a backstory for the product, saying that
the two bars were each made by different, rival factories – one made the
‘left’ bars and one made the ‘right’ bars. The campaign was a smash: UK
sales volume grew by 37% and household penetration by 4.3%.
C Incite action
There is often a significant gap between the time a message is seen by an
audience, and the time it’s supposed to have its effect. What’s more, psycho-
logical ‘nudges’ can be used to influence behaviour directly.
1 Memory Your message has to be remembered if it’s going to impact

behaviour in the future. To put it simply, we see a lot of stuff, and very
little gets remembered. The Salvation Army conducted an appeal in
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Canadian cities in Christmas 2010 which used the power of repetition
to get itself remembered: specifically, their goal was that each person
should see their messaging seven times.48 This was achieved by com-
municating in the target cities via radio, newspaper, bus shelters and
cinemas; donations increased by 32% and new donors by 8%.
2 Autopilot We have limited brainpower, which means that we can’t
think through every decision in laborious detail; instead, we usually rely
on rules-of-thumb. Messages can utilise these to ‘nudge’ people into
behaving a certain way. The NHS reduced the proportion of people who
didn’t turn up to prearranged appointments by 11% using a heuristic
known as commitment: they simply asked patients to verbally repeat the
time and date of their appointment to an NHS staff member.49
3 Priming Subliminal suggestion may be more fantasy than reality, but
it is possible to influence behaviour by bringing certain ideas to the
front of people’s minds – for example, you can make people more self-
centred and less cooperative by showing them some Monopoly money
(it sounds just like Christmas).50 Rye whisky Canadian Club increased its
sales by 32% using priming: it used the phrase, ‘Over Beer?’ to make
the idea of being bored of beer mentally salient.51
Before understanding exactly how these ten principles are achieved, we

need to delve deeper into the brain.
THE MEME POOL

Let me tell you about Pepe the Frog.
Pepe is an anthropomorphic frog who has become a very popular mascot
on image board forums – particularly the infamous 4chan.
Pepe has become so valued that rare Pepe images are, it seems, highly
sought after. In March 2015, an eBay user set up an auction for over 1,200 rare
Pepe images; bids reached into the high tens of thousands of dollars before
eBay shut it down.52
What is it about Pepe that made him such a successful internet meme?
The word ‘meme’ was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his semi-
nal 1989 book The Selfish Gene;53 it means an idea or unit or thought, such
as a word, an ideology, a fashion, and so on. Dawkins proposed that just
as certain genetic traits excel in the gene pool through survival of the fit-
test, so do memes in the meme pool. Genes must survive and reproduce in
order to succeed – the genetic trait intelligence, for example, enables survival
M01_FAGA4429_01_SE_C01.indd 17 18/01/16 3:33 pm

(e.g. intelligent people are more likely to avoid dangerous situations, to exer-
cise, and so on), and it aids reproduction (i.e. it is a sexually attractive trait
since it is desirable to pass it on to one’s offspring).
In the same way, memes must also survive and reproduce in order to suc-
ceed. That is, they have to be noticed and remembered, and shared. Success-
ful memes have certain attributes which make this likely.
But what are these attributes? Memes like Pepe the Frog, Grumpy Cat,
Gangnam Style, and others, going all the way back to the Hamster Dance,
have certain things in common. They are weird, different and surprising. They
are emotional. They are simple.
One experiment looked at what made YouTube videos go viral.54 The most
important feature was found to be high arousal emotions – that is, being excit-
ing and attention-grabbing. Likewise, the aforementioned experiment on urban
legends indicates that emotion, surprise, curiosity, narrative and simplicity all
play a role in message success.55
We are starting to unravel the principles which help a message to get hooked
in people’s minds. Pepe is an example of a very successful internet meme – and
all successful internet memes are examples of effective messaging.
EXERCISE
The meme pool

Think of five viral videos, pictures or news articles that come to your
mind as very popular and/or memorable.
What themes do these pieces of viral have in common? Is there any-
thing in terms of form or content that is similar across any of them?
SUMMARY
The science of communication

Do
✓ Take notice of how decision-making is influenced by social

factors, and think about how that influences the effectiveness of
communications.
▲
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✓ Use the fact that people look to the crowd for guidance to understand
the building blocks of getting messages hooked in people’s minds.
✓ Harness the power of our innate desire to share things to make
messages go viral.
✓ Realise that there is a huge difference between what people say
and what they do, and recognise the massive implications of this for
getting read and for understanding consumers more broadly.
✓ Aim to influence behaviours rather than attitudes.
Don’t
✗ Take anything at face value, nor leave assumptions unchallenged.

✗ Treat people as entirely (or even mostly) rational: a huge chunk of the
choices they make will be influenced by factors they are unaware of
and which might not ‘logically’ make sense.
✗ Similarly approach effective messages as rational (the best messages
go the ‘peripheral’ route and use emotional, sensory or implicit cues
to influence behaviour).
✗ Speak to the mass rather than the individual; you need to speak
directly to people if you want them to take action.
✗ Underappreciate the amount of ‘noise’ people are bombarded with
every day! Think about how to cut through.
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2 THE BRAIN
EXERCISE
What stands out?

What are the first two messages you can think of from the last week?
They can be any type of message – an email, a letter, a leaflet, an
advert, a radio announcement, a poster, and so on. Write down the first
two that come into your head. For each one, write down why that one
came to your mind. What was special about it? What happened that
was different from other messages?
Traditionally, theories of communication have largely been dominated by homo

economicus – that is, the idea that people are rational actors who put careful
thought into their actions in order to maximise the benefit to themselves. Of
course, consumers do make rational choices. For example, in ultimatum games
like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people generally make reasoned decisions that
benefit both parties.1
However, to treat audiences as rational in this way is to only take into
account half of the full picture (at most). Psychologists have long understood
that there are essentially two systems in the brain: the irrational brain, and the
rational brain. This distinction has been explored from as early as Freud’s ‘id’
and ‘superego’,2 to as recently as Kahneman’s ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’.3 In
essence, the ‘rational’ brain is deliberative, conscious, slow and logical; the ‘irra-
tional’ brain, meanwhile, is intuitive, non-conscious, automatic and emotional.
The System 1 brain can be thought of as Captain Kirk – intuitive, emotional
and quick-witted – while System 2 is Mr Spock – rational, logical and delib-
erative. It’s important to remember though that it’s Captain Kirk and Mr Spock:
one is very clearly in charge over the other, and this is just as true of the brain
as it is of the Starship Enterprise.
20
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System 1 System 2
(Evolutionarily) Older (Evolutionarily) Newer
Tried and tested New and buggy
Non-conscious Conscious
Automatic Deliberate
Emotional Rational
Concrete Abstract
Implicit Explicit
Fast Slow
Since – as we will see – Spock plays a far lesser role than Kirk, simply look-
ing at a message’s audience in terms of the rational brain is insufficient. To give
an example, eye-tracking research has shown that 75% of prices are not even
looked at once in-store;4 similarly, one study found that consumers form last-
ing impressions of websites within just 50ms of exposure.5 It seems, therefore,
that conscious processes do not account for the entirety of attention and deci-
sion-making – much (if not most) occurs automatically and without conscious
thought.
THREE BRAINS
So how influential is the conscious brain compared to the non-conscious brain
in consumer behaviour?
The first thing to note is that the non-conscious mind typically takes prec-
edence over the conscious mind. As Carter and Frith stated, ‘Where thought
conflicts with emotion, the latter is designed by the neural circuitry in our brains
to win.’6
The reason for this is evolutionary. In the Triune Brain Theory,7 it was sug-
gested that the human brain is the result of the evolution of regions and their
functions from one evolutionary ancestor to the next. Indeed, three distinct
regions (i.e. reptilian, mammalian and human) are visible in the brain, as seen
in the diagram below. Although this model is somewhat simplistic and out-
dated, the general principle has subsequently been confirmed by brain imaging
research.8
2 THE BRAIN 21
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Cerebral cortex
The emotional
(‘mammalian’) brain
Cerebellum
Brain stem
Source: © 123rf.com
The oldest and innermost part of the brain, known as the reptilian region, is com-
prised of the brain stem and cerebellum. This region is responsible for reflexes and
maintaining homeostasis; it reacts to basic stimuli in our environment (such as a
wasp flying at our face), and urges us towards base desires such as food and sex.
Next, around this part of the brain developed the mammalian region, com-
prising areas including the amygdala and the limbic system. This area is
responsible for emotional, learning, reward and social processes.
Finally, the human brain – that is, the cerebral cortex – developed around the
outside of the brain, and brought with it functions like planning, reasoning and
language. The cerebral cortex is seen in the diagram above as the ‘wrinkled’
part of the brain. In fact, it is these wrinkles which give human beings their
intelligence and the advanced cognitive functions which set us apart from most
other animals;9 the cerebral cortex being so wrinkled and folded means that it
has a large ratio of surface area to volume – essentially, it means more brain
can be squeezed into the same space.
The upshot of this model is that the emotional, automatic parts of the
brain are evolutionarily older than the conscious cerebral cortex. Since the
non-conscious brain has ensured our evolutionary fitness for longer, and since
it is more deeply embedded in behavioural systems, it is more influential in
decision-making. It is for this reason that, just as one cannot consciously stop
oneself from sneezing or from flinching from sudden movement, the older brain
regions and their goals will take precedence over the rational brain. Therefore,
we cannot help but look at, say, pictures of a sexy topless model, despite,
sometimes, our conscious preference not to.
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COGNITIVE MISERS
The second thing to note is that the conscious mind is extremely limited in its
capacity. Psychologists Shiv and Fedorikhin conducted a fantastic experiment
in which participants were offered a snack of either fruit or cake.10 Most people
(59%) chose the fruit (which is somewhat surprising; I know what I would have
chosen). However, when a second group was instructed to remember (i.e. keep
in their minds) a seven-digit number, the majority (63%) chose the cake. Their
conscious minds’ capacities had been depleted by this relatively simple cogni-
tive task, and the emotional, impulsive brain took over.
The important thing to bear in mind is that people are typically distracted,
tired or busy when they receive any kind of message. Most people might
be eating their lunch when they read Twitter, playing with their phones while
watching TV, or working hard when receiving emails. Therefore it is the primal,
cake-demanding monkey brain which reacts to messages most of the time.
Although it is impossible to quantify the subconscious, researchers have
attempted to do so. Timothy Wilson looked at several perceptual experiments
and was able to estimate that humans process around 11,000,000 ‘bits’ of sen-
sory information every second, but only 40 of these are processed consciously.11
So, the vast majority of attention and decision-making is non-conscious.
Indeed, a great deal of research appears to support this theory. For instance,
an eye-tracking study discovered that the speed of finding a brand was influ-
enced twice as much by bottom-up factors (e.g. packaging, POS displays) as
by top-down factors (e.g. planning to buy).12
The takeaway, therefore, is that the majority of decision-making is not con-
scious: rather, it is influenced by environmental cues, or nudges, and the pri-
mal, emotional brain. Therefore, when designing a message, it is vital to bear in
mind that consumers rarely have the time or resources to carefully process it;
instead, they tend to be affected by what gets their attention and what implic-
itly influences their behaviour, rather than rational arguments and information.
NEGLECTING THE GORILLA

Indeed, the suggestion that only 0.0004% of sensory processing is estimated
to be conscious11 has important implications for attention. To put it simply, we
we don’t have the resources to pay attention to every single message we come
across; our attention is limited and we miss a lot.
You probably missed that the word ‘we’ was written twice in the previous
sentence, for example.
2 THE BRAIN 23
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A famous study by Simons and Chabris had participants viewing a video
clip of two teams – one in white shirts and one in black shirts – playing basket-
ball.13 Participants were asked to watch the clip and count how many times the
white team passed the ball to one another via bounces in addition to via direct
throws; in essence, the task had participants focusing all of their limited atten-
tion on those dressed in white.
Half of them failed to notice a man dressed in a gorilla costume walk across
the screen.
When participants in another study were asked to carefully observe a pic-
ture and extract all the important details from it, 42% of participants failed to
notice a woman committing suicide off a building in the centre of the image.14
In 1953, Colin Cherry conducted a series of auditory experiments and identi-
fied a phenomenon he called the ‘cocktail party effect’.15 Imagine, if you will,
that you are at a crowded cocktail party with your friends, and there’s lots of
noise around you: people are chatting, drinks are clinking, and Michael Bublé is
playing on the stereo. You are engrossed in conversation with a friend, and every
thing else is simply white noise to you. Suddenly, however, you hear someone
across the room say, ‘I hate Bob, he’s such a jerk.’ (Your name is Bob.) Although
you were not ‘listening’ to that conversation, and it was just part of the white
noise in the background, you instantly become aware that this happened.
This example illustrates the way in which we only process the vast majority
of information at a very low level; however, once something is deemed by the
brain to be important, it focuses all our conscious resources on that stimulus.
To this end, there is believed to be a network of regions in the old brain that act
as a kind of a nightclub ‘doorman’ or ‘gatekeeper’ who decides who can and can’t
‘come in’.16 This part of the brain processes everything in the environment – all
11,000,000 ‘bits’ of information – at a very low level, filtering out information that
is deemed to be unimportant. This is why a third of brands receive no attention in
store,4 and why a great deal of information on websites is ignored.17 Meanwhile,
the brain’s limited capacity to consciously attend to something – that allowance of
40 ‘bits’ – is directed to that which the ‘doorman’ deems to be important.
So what does the ‘doorman’ have on his ‘VIP list’, which gets instant atten-
tion from the conscious brain? You are unlikely to get very far if you try to logi-
cally debate with a bouncer – in the same way, the brain’s ‘bouncer’ prioritises
the emotional over the rational.
In Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene he proposes that all animals, includ-
ing humans, are nothing more than robots who exist simply to serve the goals
of their genes – to survive and to reproduce.18 Anything which helps achieve
this goal (e.g. sex) is therefore important to the older, emotional brain regions,
and will demand our attention.
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LAZY BONES
Another implication of consumers having a limited cognitive capacity is that
they tend to avoid a decision if it is too difficult. Energy (both physical and
mental) is a finite resource, and it makes evolutionary sense that we should be
hardwired to conserve it. This is why we have to ‘pay’ attention.
A famous study by Iyengar and Lepper set up a stall selling jams in
a supermarket; the stall either sold 24 different flavours of jam, or just six.
When there were 24 flavours, only 3% of browsers bought a jar; however,
when the range was reduced to six, this figure rose to 30%.19 When a deci-
sion is too difficult, people will often generally avoid it. Intriguingly, research
has likewise shown that even qualified doctors are 19% more likely to pre-
scribe medication if there is only one option available, rather than a choice
of two.20
The upshot is that messages should place as little decision-making burden
as possible on the shoulders of the audience: a message must be as easy
as possible to notice and process, and it should make its desired action as
simple as possible. Exactly how to do this will be explored in the rest of the
book.
HOW MEMORY WORKS

The final brain science principle to address is the Spreading Activation Theory
(ACT) of memory.21 Once a message has gained a viewer’s attention, it then
needs to be processed – and this involves the viewer’s existing memory struc-
tures. ACT proposes that memory is made up of a web of interconnecting
nodes of varying strengths. For instance, the memory of a chair is connected to
the memory of a table (which is, in turn, connected to a meal), and less so to a
cushion and a pouf.
As will be discussed later in the book, with respect to this theory, mes-
sages encourage processing in three ways: firstly, audiences are motivated to
process a message when the connection between two memory nodes is not
immediately apparent (curiosity); secondly, audiences can process and remem-
ber a message more easily when it fits into existing memory structures and
provides a meaningful connection between the parts (narrative); and thirdly,
audiences can process a message more easily when the nodes are concrete,
simple and frequently used (fluency).
Confused? This will be explained properly in Chapter 2.
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THREE MONKEYS
Firstly, our conscious brains are so limited in their capacity for attention and
decision-making, that 50% of the time they will completely miss a monkey
walking across the room if they are engrossed in another task. Because of this,
the vast majority of messages that get sent into the world will simply be ignored.
Secondly, we all have within our human brains a monkey brain, which, despite
what we might like to think, is generally running the show. As a result, messages
which appeal to the monkey brain using emotion and sex and so on are much
more likely to be noticed; similarly, messages which let the monkey brain do the
work, through being simple and utilising heuristic ‘nudges’, will be more influential.
Thirdly, those messages which adhere to these principles will be most suc-
cessful. The Cadbury gorilla, for example, increased sales of Cadbury’s choco-
late by 8% in the UK, by being emotional and surprising – in essence, it was
noticeable and memorable.22
SUMMARY
The brain
Do
✓ Be cognisant of the emotional and rational brains, and understand

that everyone has a ‘chimp brain’ making lots of their decisions.
✓ Create messages that target both ‘parts’ of the brain – both human/
rational (e.g. words), and mammalian/emotional (e.g. pictures).
✓ Make things as simple for recipients as possible.
✓ Design messages which take advantage of the ‘VIP list’ of the ‘brain’s
doorman’, so that people pay attention to them straight away.
Don’t
✗ Expect reason to win out over emotion.

✗ Overload message recipients, since they only have a very limited
amount of brainpower.
✗ Let your messages go unnoticed by time- and brainpower-limited
audiences, who will just as soon miss a gorilla as a leaflet, email or
presentation.
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2
PART
SECTION 1
INVITE ATTENTION
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Source: © 123rf.com (spider, rock, rose); © Andrey Starostin (mushroom)
Which picture did you look at first? Chances are it was the spider.
There are certain stimuli which will automatically catch our attention. There
are evolutionary reasons for this – if we didn’t look at spiders straight away, we
probably wouldn’t have survived as a species.
Recall that our brain’s ‘doorman’1 processes an estimated 11,000,000 ‘bits’
of sensory information every second, but our conscious brain only has the
capacity to attend to 40 of these,2 so the ‘doorman’ directs this limited atten-
tion to that which is most important – like deadly spiders.
Now recall that there is a tonne of information in the world. Taking Face-
book as just one example, over half of all users have more than 200 Face-
book friends, and the average number of friends is 338.3 That’s a lot of status
updates, photos and chats to process every day. Meanwhile, Ofcom reports
that people spend an average of eight hours and 41 minutes a day on all media
devices combined, and eight hours and 21 minutes a day asleep.4
These two points highlight why it’s so important that any message gets
noticed. Any message you send into the world is competing with two forces:
firstly, there are many messages competing for attention; and secondly, that
attention is extremely limited. Only a very select few messages make it.
28 PART 2, SECTION 1 INVITE ATTENTION
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A great deal of consumer research shows that simply being noticed is suffi-
cient to influence behaviour significantly. For example, studies have shown that
people are much more likely to buy a product if: it is placed in the centre of a
shelf where it’s easily noticeable;5 a salesperson verbally suggests the prod-
uct;6 or an unusual point-of-sale display directs attention towards the product.7
A fantastic eye-tracking study illustrated this point by asking participants
to make a series of choices between two brands in simulated shelf environ-
ments; however, sometimes one of the brands was made much lighter than
the products surrounding it so that it was much more noticeable than the other
brand. Before the study, participants ranked the brands in order of preference.
The researchers discovered that, when people are rushed or distracted (as they
typically are), how noticeable a brand is has a much stronger effect on choice
than how much they like it.8
Similarly, when it comes to effective communications, you often only need
to get your audience to notice or remember a message for it to have an effect
on behaviour. Remember, for example, that anti-smoking PSAs can in fact
increase the desire to smoke because they make the behaviour mentally sali-
ent;9 interestingly, ‘no smoking’ signs can have the same effect.10
So, how can you make sure that your message is one of the select few to be
noticed?
There are four types of stimulus that will get attended to automatically; audi-
ences could not ignore them even if they wanted to.11
PART 2, SECTION 1 INVITE ATTENTION 29
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3 PRIMAL
EXERCISE
Uncontrollable urges
Can you think of a time in your own personal life when you were
s eemingly unable to resist your baser urges – and perhaps acted
differently to how you might ‘normally’ act? How would you have acted
differently in hindsight? And what was it that caused you to act this
way originally?
I’m going to tell you a personal story – please try not to judge me. In my early
twenties, I was in a ‘hair metal’ band (think Mötley Crüe). I was sure I was
going to be famous – why wouldn’t people go crazy for 80s glam rock in 2008?
As such, and being a young psychology undergraduate, I spent my time trying
to understand the psychology behind successful bands.
The first lesson I learned was that successful bands and musicians gen-
erally had to get people’s attention. For example, one study of music vid-
eos found that physiological arousal was associated with positive emotions
and preference towards that band.1 Of course, being attention-grabbing is a
clear goal of popular music artists – whether it’s Elvis Presley wiggling his
hips salaciously or covering himself in sequins, Miley Cyrus licking a ham-
mer and rolling around naked on a wrecking ball, or Janet Jackson ‘acciden-
tally’ whipping out her pierced nipple at the Superbowl (which went on to be
named by Guinness World Records as the ‘Most Searched-For News Item’
and ostensibly helped her album, released the following month, go triple
platinum2).
The second, related lesson was that certain themes in songs and music vid-
eos help to catch that attention – specifically, sex and violence. Or as some like
30
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to call it, ‘sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll’. A content analysis of MTV music videos
found key themes to include sex, violence and crime;3 meanwhile, one review
found that 28% of music videos contained violence, while 44% contained sex-
ual content.4 A review of the most popular songs in 2005 found that just over a
third contained references to sex.5
The point of all this is that there are certain primal cues that have a high
potential to grab people’s attention. These cues are heavily related to the reptil-
ian brain and its inherent urge to simply survive and reproduce.
While it’s easy to dismiss the primal factors behind rock bands’ suc-
cess as little more than teenage hormones, there is plenty of other evidence
which illustrates the reptilian brain’s massive influence on society as a whole.
Specifically, there is one lesser-discussed aspect of life that has seemingly
been a driving force behind many of our greatest technological innovations:
pornography.6
One of the earliest printed bestsellers, and thus a significant driving factor
of the printing press’ success, was I Modi (The Ways), a series of mythologi-
cal engravings depicting a range of sexual acts – including sex aids and big
penises.7
More recently, pornography was responsible for the success of VHS: the
format was very expensive, but, people were willing to pay $100 or more for
sex tapes they could watch from the comfort of their own home, and through-
out the 1970s, ‘X-rated’ tapes accounted for half of all of Merrill Lynch’s sales.8
Since then, of course, pornography helped drive the popularity of the internet,
with porn being believed to be the first product to make money online,9 and
popularising the practice of streaming videos.10
In essence, the primal has been a massive force behind the technological,
and this state of affairs is nicely summarised by a quote from content aggre-
gation website Reddit.11 In January 2013, users of site were asked, ‘If some-
one from the 1950s suddenly appeared today, what would be the most difficult
thing to explain to them about life today?’
The top-rated answer was: ‘I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capa-
ble of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at
pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.’
Indeed, excluding music videos, the most popular YouTube clip of all time is
of a baby biting his toddler brother’s finger and laughing.12 Despite our haughty
aspirations and technological marvels, most of our behaviour remains driven by
the reptilian brain’s primal urges.
There are three such types of stimuli which will draw attention to a message:
sex, food and faces.
3 PRIMAL 31
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SEX
In 2014, a Russian media agency, AdvTruck.ru, had a fantastic idea for bringing
attention to its new advertising spaces on the sides of trucks.13 It used these
spaces to advertise the service itself; the advert was of a naked pair of breasts
accompanied by the company’s name and telephone number, and the copy
‘They attract’. There were 30 of these trucks driving around Moscow.
Within the first day, there were reported to be over 500 traffic accidents.
According to the Metro article, motorist Ildar Turiev explained, ‘I was on my
way to a business meeting when I saw this truck with a huge photo of breasts
on its side go by. Then I was hit by the car behind who said he had been dis-
tracted by the truck.’
This is reminiscent of Eva Herzigova’s famous ‘Hello Boys’ billboard for
WonderBra, which was reportedly responsible for traffic accidents as well.14
Both examples highlight the power of sex to completely captivate a person’s
attention and distract them from all other things.
In fact, beyond these anecdotal examples, a wide range of studies show that
this is indeed the case. For example, an experiment by researchers at Indiana
University demonstrated this with something called the ‘dot probe task’.15 In this
task, participants are firstly asked to focus on an x in the middle of a computer
screen for one second; this x is then followed for half a second by two images
(one on the right of where the x was, and one on the left), and finally these two
images are followed by a small dot where one of the images had been, on either
the right or the left of the screen. Upon presentation of the dot, participants had
to press a key on their keyboard to indicate whether the final dot had appeared
on the left or whether it had appeared on the right of the screen. Participants
could locate the dot more quickly when both of the images were neutral – in other
words, when one of the images was pornographic, participants were distracted
by it, and this interfered with their performance of the task. The pornographic
images automatically and involuntarily captured the attention of participants.
Interestingly, this finding was found for both males and females. It might be
tempting to dismiss the aforementioned examples as the results of simple-minded
men who allegedly think about sex once every eight seconds (how was that sta-
tistic even found?), but the research suggests sex sells for women as well as men.
The Diet Coke 11:30 ‘hunk’ was a major success for the brand, for starters, with
the 2015 gardener reboot enjoying social media sentiments that were 99% posi-
tive;16 Fifty Shades of Grey, meanwhile, is one of the best-selling book series of
all time.21 At any rate, both men and women exhibit higher purchase intentions
towards an advert if it contains an attractive model of the opposite sex.17
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MEN ARE FROM MARS . . .
There are key differences between successful sex messages for men
and women.
For example, one study used EEG (a measure of brain activ-
ity) to record levels of attention towards advertisements and found
that, among men, attention to ads featuring women increased as the
women went from clothed to semi-clothed to naked; however, among
women, attention to ads was significantly increased by the presence of
a man, whatever his state of dress.18
Other research has shown that sexual imagery in a print ad for a
watch was only effective among women when the watch was framed as
a gift being given from the male to the female; while the gift frame actu-
ally worsened the ad reaction among men.19 Meanwhile, another study
found that women had more positive reactions to a sexual advert when
the ad was selling an expensive watch, rather than a cheap watch;20
that is, sexual imagery was more effective among women when it was
presented in the context of a rare, scarce and valuable product.
These findings are ostensibly explained by evolutionary differences
in sexual desire between the genders.21 It is generally believed that
men are sexually attracted to good child-rearing properties like youth,
wide hips and large breasts; women, meanwhile, are more attracted to
resources that can provide for offspring, or traits that can be used to
obtain resources, such as social status, strength, aggression and intel-
ligence (inferred through creativity, wit, charm, humour, and so on).
Furthermore, mating is much more risky and resource-intensive for
women, meaning sexual attraction is more related to signals of commit-
ment for women than it is for men.
To illustrate, one paper reviewed research, pornography and
romance novels, and carried out a survey, to distinguish between male
and female sexual fantasies. In line with the above, the researchers
found that women’s fantasies were less visual than men’s and focused
more on nonphysical characteristics; women’s fantasies were more
likely to unfold more slowly and involve more build-up over time; and,
finally, women’s fantasies were more personal and emotional and were
more likely to focus on one partner, while men tended to fantasise
about several.22
▲
3 PRIMAL 33
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This is ostensibly why the previous studies showed that nudity is
more attention-grabbing for men, while symbols of plentiful resources,
and the demonstration of male commitment through gift-giving, made
sexual adverts more appealing for women.
Similarly, there is, of course, a strong evolutionary reason for why we pay
attention to sexual stimuli. Remember that Dawkins suggests we exist solely to
serve goals – to survive, and reproduce.23 If we did not pay attention to sex as a
species, we probably would not have done very well on the second front.
Pandas are a nice example. Pandas are currently categorised as an ‘endan-
gered species’, with potentially fewer than 2,500 left in the wild, and a few hun-
dred living in captivity in zoos.24 The fate of the species ostensibly lies on these
captive pandas’ shoulders – yet, they simply don’t want to breed, despite their
handlers best efforts with Viagra, pornography and ‘sexercise’.25 As British
conservationist Chris Packham suggested, perhaps it’s time we just let them
die out.26
Ultimately, sex is very good at getting attention, and thus helps to get
messages hooked in people’s minds. Incorporating sex into a message results
in: more attention paid to it;27 more thoughts about it;28 more interest in it;29
and better memory for it30 – a smorgasbord of effects!
Let’s take an example. During the 2013 Super Bowl, internet hosting pro-
vider GoDaddy.com aired an advert featuring an ungainly geek (apologies to
the actor) explicitly making out with supermodel Bar Rafaeli. The advert was
one of the best-remembered of the Super Bowl,31 and had significant business
effects for the company, increasing domain sales by 40% year on year the day
after the ad aired.32
FOOD
Pinterest is an image-based site where users can manage and share their own
projects, or discover other people’s. Can you guess what topic is interacted
with most on the site?
It’s food – with one survey discovering that 57% of users interact with food
content.33
If you use social media, you have probably not escaped the trend among
users to take artistic shots of their food and share them. The trend is popular
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enough that the online restaurant reservation service OpenTable bought the
Foodspotting app for $10 million in early 2013.34 In fact, the trend is so big that
French chef Alexandre Gauthier has had enough and banned food photography
in his restaurant La Grenouillère.35
Part of the reason for the trend’s popularity is ostensibly that food is very
effective at grabbing attention.
For example, in one experiment participants were shown an array on a
computer screen of either a food item, such as a strawberry, surrounded by
visually similar non-food items, or a non-food item surrounded by food items
(e.g. a red car surrounded by a strawberry and so on).36 Participants had to
find the location of the single food or non-food item surrounded by its distrac-
tors as quickly as possible. The researchers found that participants were sig-
nificantly quicker to correctly locate a food item (surrounded by non-food) than
they were a non-food item (surrounded by food). There is a strong attentional
bias towards food.
Similarly, an eye-tracking experiment found that, when people are shown
both a food and non-food image at the same time, their attention is much more
likely to be directed towards the food.37
BE CAREFUL OF ATTENTION-GRABBING THINGS

There’s an important point to be aware of in this part of the book. As
discussed, it is, of course, vital to get people’s attention or else a mes-
sage won’t stand a chance at all of being successful. However, it’s
important to use principles like food intelligently.
You do not want, for example, people to look at the tasty burger on
your leaflet and completely ignore the name of the company and what
it’s selling.
We tend to pay attention to – and remember (as will be explored later
on) – the most emotional thing at any one point; therefore, these prin-
ciples, if not used smartly, may outdo the message they are meant to
promote.
The key is to build the attention-grabbing stimulus into the message,
rather than it be a disparate element. As will be discussed later in the
book, faces are more effective in adverts when they look towards
the ad’s copy (i.e. grab attention and then direct that attention towards
the message) rather than directly at the reader.
3 PRIMAL 35
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An important point to consider at this juncture is that it’s not just images
alone which bias people’s attention; studies have shown, for example, that
participants exhibit an attentional bias towards food-related words as well.38
This point applies equally to the other principles discussed in this chapter:
so emails, Tweets and letters are just as capable of using these techniques as
presentations, adverts and displays!
Food is, of course, very important from an evolutionary perspective –
if we, as a species, did not pay attention to food we would have died out a
long time ago. One study estimated that just under one in ten thoughts are
food-related.39
Evolutionarily speaking, an attentional bias towards food becomes even
more important when considering that our ancestors used to exist in times
of resource scarcity and uncertainty; all and any food that was noticed would
have been eaten in order to stock up on fat and calories for when food may
be less avaialable. 40 For this reason, high-calorie foods have been found
to be more attention-grabbing than low-calorie foods. 41 Perhaps, there-
fore, it is no surprise that online food photographers are much more likely to
share pictures of cakes, donuts or bacon than they are grapes, avocados or
mushrooms.42
So, if you want to get your audience’s attention using food, make sure you
use a pizza or a hamburger – not a salad!
FACES
In 1994, Floridian Dian Duyser settled into her kitchen to eat a nice piece of
cheese on toast she had just removed from the grill.43 The 42-year-old took
one bite from the dish before looking down and realising she could eat no
more. She explained, ‘When I took a bite out of it, I saw a face looking up at
me – it was Virgin Mary staring back at me. I was in total shock.’
Duyser kept the sacred sandwich for ten years, during which it brought
her, she claimed, a lot of luck – including $70,000 of winnings from a nearby
casino. For reasons known only to herself, she decided, ten years later, to put
the magical mouthful up for auction on eBay. There, the auction received over
100,000 hits, and the holy toast eventually sold for $28,000.44
Of course – whether Dian Duyser truly believed it or not – the Virgin Mary
did not materialise in her toasted sandwich; rather, it was just a random pattern
of melted cheese and burnt toast, and an example of the phenomenon known
as ‘pareidolia’, where we see a face in what is actually a random pattern.45
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Again, there is a strong evolutionary component to this: if we were unable to
spot faces in the undergrowth from a distance, we, as a species, would regu-
larly have been eaten by panthers.
In fact, the perception of faces is so vital to our survival that there is a s pecific
area of the brain, the fusiform face area, which is specialised for just one func-
tion: the perception of faces.46 Similarly, research has found that even newborns
are predisposed to attend to faces; it found that nine out of ten newborns paid
attention to a simple face-like structure (a light bulb shape containing two dots
over one dot, like eyes and a mouth) but did not pay attention to the same
shape flipped upside down. The researchers explained, ‘There appears to be a
mechanism, likely subcortical, predisposing newborns to look toward faces.’47
Experiments have shown that we exhibit a strong attentional bias for faces.
For example, one study used the ‘dot probe’ task outlined above. It asked peo-
ple to press one of two keys to indicate whether a dot was shown on the left- or
right-hand side of the computer screen. Before the dot, however, two images
were shown on the screen – one on the left, and one on the right. One of the
images was of a face, and the other was of a non-face object. The research-
ers found that the dot was located significantly faster when it was on the same
side of the screen as the preceding face image, suggesting that our attention is
automatically drawn towards faces.48
When it comes to designing messages that get noticed, all this means that
putting a face in a message will draw attention to it; as one paper put it, ‘eyes
always attract attention’.49 In fact, if people are presented with a visual scene
that contains a face, there is more than an 80% chance that they will look at
the face within the first two eye fixations – that is, they will most likely look at a
face before anything else.50
Taking online banner advertisements as an example, two researchers used
eye-tracking and discovered that their participants spend around four times as
long looking at adverts which featured a face than they did adverts with no face.51
So, if you want to get your message noticed, you could do worse than slap
a face on it!
CEREAL MASCOTS
Have you ever noticed that children’s cereal brands very often seem to
have their mascot’s faces on the front of the box? And that they’re typi-
cally looking down from the box?
▲
3 PRIMAL 37
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Source: © Richard Levine/Alamy Stock Photo
Researchers at Cornell University conducted two studies looking at

faces on cereal boxes.52 In the first study, they examined cereal boxes
featuring 86 different mascots across ten different grocery stores in
New York and Connecticut; they used the angle of the mascots’ eyes
to determine the height their gaze fell at four feet away (the centre of the
aisle). It was discovered that the eyes of children’s cereal brand mascots
were looking at a spot, on average, 0.51m from the ground, while those
of adult brand were looking at a spot 1.37m from the ground. The mas-
cots are, ostensibly, making eye contact with their target customers.
In their second study, the researchers showed participants a box of
Trix cereal, which either had the rabbit mascot looking at the cereal or
making eye contact with the participant. Afterwards, participants were
asked if they would rather choose Trix or Fruity Pebbles.
Without eye contact, 48% of the respondents chose Trix; but with it,
this rose to 61%.
SUMMARY
Primal
Do
✓ Do absolutely everything in your power to stand out.

▲
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✓ Engage the basest parts of audience’s brains to make sure your
messages get noticed.
✓ Use sex, innuendo and attractive people to get attention paid to your
messages.
✓ Likewise use food – particularly high-calorie food – in messages to

get them noticed.
✓ Use faces too.
✓ Use both words and images when applying these principles.
Don’t
✗ Underestimate the simplicity of the factors that drive behaviour and

decision-making.
✗ Shy away from the fact that sex sells.
✗ Neglect gender differences in what is sexually attractive – it can make

or break a message’s efficacy.
✗ Use highly attention-grabbing stimuli at the detriment of the actual

message you want to convey – and bikini models, hamburgers, and
so on, should not crowd out the message itself.
3 PRIMAL 39
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4 AFFECTIVE
Let me tell you another personal story. Again, please try not to judge me for it.
Throughout my life, up until a few months ago, I had never given money to
charity. I had never donated a pound to PETA, a euro to the aged, nor a shekel
to tsunami relief. The point is, I never gave my cash away to any cause.
One cause in particular to which I never donated was The Big Issue. As a
Londoner, I encounter Big Issue sellers on almost a daily basis. Every single
time, however, I essentially ignored the seller; I said, ‘No thank you,’ but every
Big Issue seller failed to pass into that crucial 40 ‘bits’ of consciously pro-
cessed information, and I never bought a copy.
However, one day, I did pay attention. I noticed the seller and his magazine,
and I bought a copy. In fact, I even gave the seller £10 and told him to keep the
change, on a £2.50 magazine. (Watch out, Pride of Britain Awards.)
So, what happened?
Bob the Cat happened.1
Bob the Cat wouldn’t let me use his likeness, so here’s another cute cat instead.
Source: © Eric Isselee/Shutterstock.com
Thirty-six-year-old James Bowen had been a homeless heroin addict for over
a decade; by 2007, he was on a methadone programme and living in assisted
40
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housing, selling The Big Issue to earn enough money to eat and keep warm. One
day, James noticed a friendly ginger cat sitting near his home; after three days, it
became clear that nobody owned the puss and James ‘invited’ him up to his flat,
where James discovered he had an abscess in his leg. After James took the cat
to the RSPCA, nursed him back to health and – importantly – named him Bob, the
two were inseparable. Bob would hang around James as he busked, completely
of his own volition, and he even followed James onto the bus.
James explains, ‘Busking all of a sudden picked up, people were taking pic-
tures, it went crazy. People interacted with me differently.’
Eventually, James would write a book about Bob, which would go on to sell
over a million copies in the UK;2 now, there may even be a Bob the Cat movie
in the works.3 In fact, in emails with the author The Big Issue disclosed that the
magazine with Bob on the cover was one of their best-selling issues.
Bob is a fantastic example of the ability of emotion – or ‘affect’ – to have a
massive influence on behaviour; as he said, his busking picked up and p eople
acted completely differently towards him. This adorable little cat completely
turned someone’s life around through the power of cuteness alone.
And there’s more proof – if it were ever needed – that we as a species go
cuckoo for kitty cats. Cats were of course worshipped in ancient Egypt, it
seems that they still are today. Google statistics showed, in 2013, that there
were 368,000 searches a month on average for ‘funny cats’ and 673,000 for ‘cat
videos’; for ‘cats’, there were almost 40 million.4 To put that in perspective, there
were just over 11 million searches for Kim Kardashian. Advertising Age calcu-
lated that cat videos on YouTube generated over 1.6 billion views in 2012 alone.5
To consider some of the world’s favourites, Nyan Cat was the fifth most viral
video of 2011;6 Lil Bub’s YouTube channel has over 163,000 subscribers,7 while
Maru’s has almost 500,000;8 and Keyboard Cat was named the eleventh best
viral video of all time by Huffington Post.9 There is even the annual Internet Cat
Video Film Festival, named the Cannes of Cats.10 But perhaps the most outstand-
ing example is Grumpy Cat,11 who has not only featured on the covers on The
Wall Street Journal and New York magazine, but also starred in the movie Grumpy
Cat’s Worse Christmas Ever; Grumpy Cat Ltd is valued at one million dollars.
PUG POWER IN ADVERTISING

While it’s tempting to scoff at kittens and the rest as nothing more than
intangible feel-good opportunities, there is a lot of evidence which dem-
onstrates that, actually, cute animals (i.e. those exhibiting the baby
▲
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schema – large eyes, a high forehead, and so on) or emotional animals
can have significant concrete business effects.
The biscuit brand McVitie’s introduced their sweeet advertising
campaign in 2014. The adverts featured adorable kittens, puppies and
other baby animals tumbling out of the biscuit packaging when it was
opened. The campaign was credited with a sales increase of 3% and a
market share increase of 26% across the total biscuit market.12
However, perhaps the
most well-known example in
the UK comes from the price
comparison site Compare
The Market, whose Russian
meerkat Alexsandr Orlov and
his ‘simples’ catchphrase
took the country by storm.
The advertising campaign
resulted in brand aware-
ness tripling from 20% to
59%, traffic to the website
increasing by 400%, quotes
increasing by 80%, and
market share increasing by
76% while that of the brand’s
competitors fell by almost a
third.13
The branding’s so strong
even a single, unrelated
meerkat probably made you
think of the site. Source: © Simon_g
AFFECT: THE SCIENCE BIT

Let’s go back to Mr Figglesnuff, the pug from the start of the book – do you
remember him? Of course you do – that’s the point!
Researchers at the University of Hiroshima carried out an amazing experi-
ment looking at the effect of cute animals on attention.14 Participants were
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asked to play a game similar to the family favourite ‘Operation’, where players
use tweezers to remove small objects from holes without touching the holes’
edges and setting off the buzzer. On average, all of the participants success-
fully retrieved just over half of the pieces without touching the sides – that is,
just over seven, on average, out of 14.
After playing the game, participants viewed a number of images, which were
either of adult animals or baby animals. Then, they played the Operation-style
game again.
The second time around, people who were shown the adult animals spent
the same amount of time on the game; they achieved a slightly higher score,
successfully retrieving over eight of the fourteen pieces on average. This slight
improvement was probably due to the fact that the first game had given them
some practice.
The people who saw baby animals spent significantly longer on the game
this time – about 12 seconds more on average. What’s more, they also did sig-
nificantly better, successfully retrieving ten of the 14 pieces.
The researchers proposed that the cute, baby animals share many of the
same features of human babies, and that these features induce an innate care
giving response in humans; research has indeed shown that these baby-like
features induce caregiving motivations and behaviours.15 Baby schema cause
people to be highly attentive in order that they can fully attend to a baby’s well-
being and be vigilant for potential danger.16
Similarly, it should come as no surprise that there is a strong attentional
bias towards actual babies as well: for example, researchers at the University
of Geneva found that people are quicker to correctly locate the dot in the ‘dot
probe’ task (described previously) when the dot follows a baby’s face, rather
than an adult’s one.17
This is at least partly why Evian’s roller-skating babies advert was at one
point name by Guinness World Records as the most viral video advertisement
of all time.18 The follow-up advert ‘Baby&Me’, featuring adults viewing their baby
reflections in a mirror, broke records by garnering 20 million views in just two
days and significantly increased the brand’s market share in its key markets.19
Similarly, one of the most popular and well-known chocolate bars in Rus-
sia is Alenka; guess what it has on its packaging? A picture of a happy baby
dressed as a babushka (a baby-shka?). In fact, researchers at the University of
South Australia conducted an experiment looking at physiological responses
to chocolate packaging with a happy baby on it.20 Using facial electromyogra-
phy, where electrodes can detect activity in the muscles associated with smil-
ing and frowning, it was discovered that a chocolate bar with a happy baby on
it was more emotionally arousing than one with no image at all.
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In addition to a happy baby, the experiment also tried a barking dog. It, too,
was more emotionally arousing than the blank packaging. From an evolutionary
point of view, it is intuitive that we would instantly pay attention to threatening
stimuli like a barking dog in order to survive.
In their paper ‘Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the
grass’, 21 a team of three Swedish neuroscientists asked participants to,
essentially, find a snake among the grass. Subjects were shown a grid with
one randomly located fearful stimulus (a snake or a spider) surrounded by
neutral stimuli (flowers or mushrooms) – or vice-versa (e.g. one mushroom
surrounded by spiders). The data showed that participants were significantly
faster at spotting fear-related objects surrounded by neutral ones than the
other way round.
There is strong survival value in this – but sometimes it can backfire. Our
extreme sensitivity to threat cues came to the fore on a Birmingham patio one
spring day in 2012, when the RPSCA had been called out to a home to safely
deal with a dangerous king cobra.22
It turned out to be a rubber toy.
Interestingly, the results also showed that the location of the stimulus in
the grid did not have an effect on reaction times for snakes and spiders; how-
ever, neutral stimuli were located more quickly the closer they were located to
the point at which the participant was initially looking. This suggests that the
neutral stimuli were located using a laborious, deliberative process, while the
fear stimuli were located in a pre-attentive, parallel processing stage; that is,
the processing of emotional stimuli is automatic and non-conscious.
As an illustration of this point, one study used fMRI to measure regional
brain activity in response to particular stimuli – in this case, neutral faces ver-
sus faces expressing fear. However, the stimuli were presented subliminally
(i.e. for only 16.7ms) before being immediately ‘masked’ with a neutral image.
This procedure meant that participants had no explicit, or conscious, aware-
ness of the target faces – in other words, they couldn’t ‘see’ them.23
Despite this, there was a significant brain response: areas of the rep-
tilian and mammalian brain were activated in a region which the authors
describe as an ‘evolutionary adaptive neural “alarm” system’. A fantastic
review of emotion perception by neuroscientists Marco Tamietto and Bea-
trice de Gelder suggests that visual inputs travel from the eyes at the front
of the brain to emotional regions (such as the amygdala) located in the mid-
dle of the brain, before travelling to regions at the back of the brain associ-
ated with conscious visual perception.24 All this means that emotional objects
grab our attention before we can even begin to consciously appreciate what
is going on!
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VIOLENCE SELLS
Along the same lines as the prior studies, we are also hardwired to pay atten-
tion to violence – again, being very aware of any potentially impending danger
is vital to the survival of all species.
In a test of the effect of violence on attention – and thus memory – researchers
in Australia created four fake adverts for Coke Zero, which varied in how violent
they were and how extreme the consequences were.25 So, in a quarter of the
adverts, a man is working on his computer with a Coke Zero, when a second
man approaches him and puts a bin over his head (low violence) in order to steal
his Coke Zero, at which point he says, ‘Ouch’ (mild consequences).
In another quarter of the adverts, the man instead has his head stapled and
consequently falls to the ground screaming and clutching his head: this is the
version with high violence and severe consequences.
Two weeks later, participants were asked to give the name of the brand
in the advert. When the advert contained little violence – that is, a bin over
the head – around a quarter of participants could recall the right brand, irre-
spective of whether the consequences were mild or severe. With the violent
head-stapling advert, if the consequences was a simple, ‘Ouch’, 29% of par-
ticipants recalled the brand; however, a staple to the head followed by scream-
ing in agony on the floor meant the brand was recalled by a massive 56% of
participants!
Meanwhile, a different study of violence in ads found that violence ‘pro-
duced higher levels of excitement, attitude toward the story, attitude toward
the ad, and attitude toward the advertised product’.26
WHICH EMOTIONS?
Moving on, including fear, which we’ve discussed, there are believed to be
six basic, universal human emotions,27 all of which capture attention (whether
through faces, pictures, words, or whatever), and all of which have an evolu-
tionary explanation.
Emotion Detail
Fear Research34 with the ‘dot probe’ task showed an attentional bias towards fearful
pictures like sharks and guns over neutral ones like furniture. Fear is adaptive as it
helps us avoid harm.35
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4 AFFECTIVE 45
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Emotion Detail
Disgust Disgust is adaptive as it helps us avoid disease.36 Research with the Stroop task,
where people indicate the colour of a word, found slower response times for
disgusting words like ‘vomit’, as they catch attention and distract from the task.37
Surprise People are more likely to remember a fact if it is contrary to expectations.38
Surprise is adaptive because it helps us understand, and so predict and control, our
environment.39 Surprise will be covered in full later in the chapter.
Anger Anger is adaptive as it is protects against exploitation and helps to preserve
equitable social relationships.35 As discussed previously, people spot angry faces in
the crowd quicker than other faces.27
Happiness People can spot happy faces, presented very quickly, better than neutral ones.40
Evolutionarily, happiness acts as a tracker and motivator of fitness and life
success – e.g. being secure, having a partner, and so on.35
Sadness Sadness is adaptive as it is the converse of happiness, letting us know if we are lacking
something important, and motivating us to achieve it.35 There does exist an attentional
bias for sad stimuli, but it tends to be indicative of an affective disorder like depression.41
As well as these six basic emotions, there are other higher-order emo-
tions, like love, jealousy and awe, which can be used for message stickiness
as well. For example, researchers in France conducted an experiment in which
a moneybox, soliciting money for African children in need, was placed next
to a cash register in 14 bakeries. The moneybox contained one of three slo-
gans across different stores and different days: in some cases there was no
slogan; in others the slogan was ‘DONATING = HELPING’; and in the others
it was ‘DONATING = LOVING’. On average, those who donated gave €0.54 in
the control condition and €0.62 in the ‘helping’ condition. However, when the
slogan contained the word ‘loving’, the average donation per giver was €1.04.28
The takeaway is that there are several emotions across a range of media
which can be used to capture your audience’s attention – for example, feature
a picture of a shark in your PowerPoint when talking about your business’ com-
petitors, replace the word ‘like’ with ‘love’ in your Tweets, use emotional faces
in your adverts instead of neutral ones; and so on.
However, there is ostensibly one important remaining question: which
emotion should you use?
A study on The New York Times found that the only negative predictor of an
article’s popularity was sadness – a standard deviation increase reduced the
likelihood of the article being shared by 16%.29 Additionally, research suggests
that sad faces and images only capture attention over other faces among peo-
ple who are, for example, depressed.41 Sadness, it seems, should be avoided –
so are positive emotions more effective than negative ones?
While there is some evidence which shows, for example, that positive televi-
sion messages are more likely to be remembered than negative ones,30 there is
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a lot of other evidence supporting the power of negative emotions. For exam-
ple, the aforementioned New York Times paper found that anger and anxiety
were strong drivers of sharing, while another study found the same of disgust
for urban legends.31 Besides, one experiment found that, after viewing a list
of 280 words in sequence, people were more likely to recognise negatively
emotional words than neutral words: so even if positive stimuli are more effec-
tive than negative ones, the latter still have value over neutral ones.32
What’s more, fear appears to be incredibly powerful – perhaps the most impact-
ful emotion of all. A large review of almost 400 brain-scanning studies looked at the
odds ratio of different emotional stimuli, compared to neutral stimuli, for activat-
ing the amygdala – which is essentially the brain’s emotion centre.33 Fear was the
emotion most likely to have an effect, being almost seven times more likely than a
neutral stimulus to activate the amygdala; it was followed by disgust (1:6.2) and sex
(1:4.8). Fear is believed to be most basic and primal emotion.34 As master-of-horror
HP Lovecraft said, ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear . . . ’.
So what’s the answer?
One of the two fundamental properties of emotion 35 is valence – that is,
whether it’s positive or negative – and, as we’ve seen, both types of emo-
tion appear to catch attention. However, the other fundamental property is
arousal – that is, whether the emotion is calm or exciting. This factor appears
to be key in determining attention to an emotional stimulus; for example, words
are more likely to be remembered the more arousing they are.31 As a study of
viral videos found, ‘. . . high arousal emotions are the primary driver of video
sharing and while valance plays a role, it does so to a lesser extent’.36
How emotions vary by pleasure and arousal

Low Pleasure High Pleasure
Alarmed Astonished
Afraid Excited
High Arousal
Angry Happy
Tense Aroused
Frustrated Delighted
Annoyed Glad
Distressed Pleased
Miserable Contented
Sad Satisfied
Low Arousal
Depressed Serene
Gloomy At ease
Bored Calm
Droopy Relaxed
Sleepy / Tired
Source: Data from Russell, J. A. (1980) A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161.
4 AFFECTIVE 47
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Importantly, one study demonstrated that, in order to be remembered, an
emotional stimulus needs to be arousing (in which case it can be positive
or negative), or, if not arousing, it needs to be positively valenced.37 In other
words, non-arousing, negative emotions (e.g. boredom, tiredness or sadness)
should be avoided: they are quite literally depressing.
EMOTIONS AS MOTIVATORS
It is important to realise the powerful effect emotion can have, not just on
drawing attention, but on motivating behaviour.
Fear, for example, can be incredibly effective at driving decisions. There is
a fantastic sketch by the British comedy duo Mitchell and Webb in which a
boardroom of toothbrush company executives are debating how to increase
their profits – one suggests, to the others’ early disbelief, that they might
be able to convince people that they need to brush their tongues via raising
awareness of ‘microscopic antitongueanoids’ and ‘a gritty tongue surface’.
Similarly, antiperspirant is believed to have become popular in the early twen-
tieth century after advertising played on consumers’ fears that they smelled
bad. Messages can cleverly use fear – be it fear of death, loneliness, rejection,
failure, or anything else – to drive their audience’s behaviour in a certain direc-
tion. A meta-analytic review of almost 100 studies on fear appeals found that
such messages – on topics like, yes, persuading people to brush their teeth –
found that strong fear appeals are more effective at changing behaviour than
low or moderate levels of fear.38
The Corsodyl campaign below, for example, used the power of fear to moti-
vate people to use mouthwash if they suffered from bleeding gums – lest their
Source: © Jack Hinds/Alamy Stock Photo
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teeth fall out. The campaign argued that you wouldn’t ignore bleeding from
your eyes, so why ignore it from your gums? Of course, the former is osten-
sibly much more dangerous, but the comparison was a smart use of fear as a
motivator to buy. Corsodyl’s initiative resulted in a 31% sales increase and a
2.3% market share increase in the UK.39
Whether it’s drawing attention or motivating behaviour, the bottom line is
that emotion works to make messages super sticky.
A study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology had participants
watch a series of clips of TV shows, in which some advertisements were sand-
wiched. Five of these adverts had been rated as neutral in a pre-test (an exam-
ple being a voice-over discussing the merits of a new air freshener being shown
on-screen), while five had been rated as emotional (such as an advert about domes-
tic abuse featuring a Punch and Judy puppet show). Two months later, participants
were phoned and asked to recall as many adverts as they could – they remem-
bered two-thirds of the neutral ads, on average, but 95% of the emotional ones!40
On a final note, marketing consultant Orlando Wood published a fantastic
paper in 2012 which found that emotional adverts benefitted from tangible
business results.41 Low-scoring emotion ads achieved an average of 1.7 out of
the four business effects, while the high-scorers achieved 2.7.
Emotion is such an effective principle for getting read that it is evident in
concrete business metrics; more rational metrics like persuasion are poor
predictors of message performance. As a study by Les Binet and Peter Field
discovered, ‘The more emotions dominate over rational messaging, the bigger
the business effects. The most effective advertisements of all are those with
little or no rational content.’42
SUMMARY
Affective
Do
✓ Recognise the amazing power of cute animals to stop us in our

tracks.
✓ More broadly use baby schema – babies, puppies, kittens and so

on – to instantly catch people’s eyes.
✓ Keep an eye on internet trends (just like cat videos) to see what kind
of things catch attention and therefore are useful in messages.
▲
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✓ Use fear and violence to draw eyes on a biological level.
✓ Use emotion to motivate behaviour as well as catch attention.
Don’t
✗ Be afraid of using things like cute animals out of fear of audience’s

perceptions – it’s more important to be bought than liked.
✗ Feel that emotions have to be kept simple: higher-order emotions like

love and jealousy are also effective.
✗ Use emotions that are physiologically depressing (like sadness);

negative emotions are OK as long as they are excitatory.
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5 SELF-RELEVANT
It was autumn 2014, and professional sword-swallower Roderick Russell was,

despite the hardiness of his profession, starting to get a bit spooked.1 After
logging into Facebook, he would often notice that the adverts in the right-
hand side appeared to know rather too much about him, as if his very daily
movements were being monitored. For example, despite being a sword swal-
lower, Russell had problems with vitamin pills: they made him gag. One of the
Facebook banners, for vitamin pills, read, ‘Does it seem ironic that swallowing
swords is easy and then small pills make you gag?’
Russell started to go a bit cuckoo – he feared that his every digital move
was being tracked, and he even stopped using his mobile for fear of being
monitored.
It was at this point that Russell’s roommate, Brian Swichkow, admitted he
had been the victim of a cruel prank. Swichkow, a social marketer, had used
Facebook’s advertising platform to advertise directly to his roommate, by set-
ting very specific demographic parameters for the ads.
The reason why Brian Swichkow’s roommate noticed the Facebook ads so
sensitively is because we are innately hardwired to attend to personal – or ‘self-
relevant’ – information.
SELF-RELEVANCE: THE SCIENCE BIT

Earlier in the book we discussed the ‘cocktail party effect’ – where we can hear
someone say our name even though we were not consciously listening to their
conversation, nor most of the others in the crowded, noisy room.2
Since Colin Cherry’s experiment over sixty years ago, a plethora of studies
have supported the finding that we are hardwired to attend to personal stim-
uli. For example, it has been shown that: self-related information, more than
other kinds of information, distracts attention and interferes with task abilities;3
people are particularly good at detecting their name when it is flashed on a
51
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screen, compared to other people’s names;4 and that self-relevant informa-
tion is remembered much better than other information.5 To illustrate the latter
point, people are more likely to recognise objects from a list if they were asked
to imagine owning the objects.6
French researchers published a series of experiments demonstrating the
extent to which we are hardwired to attend to personal information.7 In the
first, participants sat in front of a screen and pressed one of four keys to indi-
cate the location of the letter ‘O’ among three ‘Q’s in a 2×2 grid. However,
before seeing the grid, a stimulus was flashed for 250ms; this stimulus was
located in one of the four quadrants. When the stimulus was in the same loca-
tion as the ‘O’, response times were faster, as one would expect, because
people’s eyes had been drawn there. However, this effect was enhanced when
the stimulus was the participant’s name, compared to someone else’s name,
suggesting that our attention is even more drawn to the former. A second
experiment repeated this procedure, but this time the orienting stimuli were
presented below conscious awareness: an attentional bias towards one’s own
name was still observed, even though the participants could not explicitly
‘see’ it.
Research in infants, meanwhile, has found that: infant babies instinctively
turn their heads towards noises that are familiar, such as the sound of their
parents’ voices; 8 11-month-old babies exhibit increased brain activity in
response to familiar words;9 and children show an attention bias for their own
name as early as five months old.10
THE SHARE A COKE STORY

The principle has been used to great effect recently by Coca-Cola,
using what was perhaps one the simplest ideas in marketing history –
putting first names on their cans and bottles. Coca-Cola reports that
the initiative quickly evolved into one of the most successful marketing
campaigns in the company’s history: there were almost a billion impres-
sions on Twitter and 235,000 #ShareaCoke Tweets, and over 150 million
personalised bottles were sold.11 The campaign has been credited with
reversing a ten-year sales decline in the US,12 and increasing Coca-
Cola’s sales in the UK by 4.93% when the cola market itself grew by
only 2.75% that year.13
▲
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Source: © David Pearson/Alamy Stock Photo
THE NAME-LETTER EFFECT

There is a fascinating principle in social psychology called ‘the name-letter
effect’, or ‘implicit egoism’, which appears to demonstrate that our names and
initials have a significant impact on our life decisions – with, for example, Holly
being more likely to prefer the brand Honda.14 While the robustness of the
effect has been called into question,15 results have been replicated reliably,16
and there appears to be an abundance of supporting research.
To elaborate, studies have variably found that: students whose names start
with A or B get better grades in school than those starting with C or D;17 there
is a tendency for people to be social media friends with others who share their
first name;18 there is an effect on employer choice of one’s own initial match-
ing the company’s initial;19 the principle affects the stock market such that
Susie is more likely to own shares in Starbucks20 (and, interestingly, actor
Arnie Hammer’s grandfather was called Armand Hammer and he owns a
great deal of stock in the company that produces – you’ve guessed it – Arm &
Hammer!); one’s name is linked to one’s career, with Dennis and Denise being
5 SELF-RELEVANT 53
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overrepresented among dentists;21 people are more likely to marry a partner
whose first or last name resembles their own;22 and much more!
The name-letter effect can be used to help craft effective messages; let’s
take charitable appeals as an example. Researchers at the University of Michi-
gan found that people are more likely to donate to relief for a hurricane if they
share its first initial, as shown with the Hurricane Katrina example below.23 Ulti-
mately, personalising messages with people’s names or initials is an effective
route to getting read.
Percentage of all donors with K initial

10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
Red Cross Red Cross Red Cross
before Katrina international Katrina appeal
after Katrina
PAYING ATTENTION TO OUR WORLD

Besides our names and initials, there are several other types of self-relevant
stimuli which can be used as an attention-grab.
Other personal things we pay attention to include our own possessions.
Researchers in Japan took photographs of umbrellas, shoes, bags and cups
which belonged either to the individual participant being tested or to an unknown
other (which were therefore unfamiliar).24 There was found to be increased brain
activity in certain regions in response to personally owned objects compared to
unfamiliar ones, suggesting the former are more attention-grabbing.
Interestingly, another related technique is to use personally relevant lan-
guage. Chinese psychologists conducted a test of brain activity while partici-
pants completed an object discrimination task – that is, pressing a key when
a stimulus appeared. The researchers measured the effect of certain pronouns
as stimuli: in particular, ta de (Chinese for ‘his’) and wo de (‘my/mine’). It was
found that, compared to the former, the latter produced a significantly larger
P300 response (associated with attentional processes).25
Therefore, messages which make a personal appeal, use personal language
like ‘I am’, and make their content personally relevant to their audience, are
much more likely to hook their audience.
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FAMILIARITY
We pay attention to things which are familiar to us, or ‘on our minds’. Have you
ever bought a new T-shirt or handbag, and then, walking through your daily life,
noticed that many other people now seemed to own it too?
Perhaps the most well-known illustration of the aforementioned prin-
ciple is the ‘mere-exposure effect’. In his seminal study, Robert Zajonc
exposed W estern participants to a series of Chinese ideographs which, to the
English-speaking participants, were essentially meaningless shapes. 26 Later,
the participants were shown some of the same Chinese characters and asked
to rate how familiar they were and how much they liked them. Exposure to the
characters did not influence familiarity – that is, people didn’t explicitly recog-
nise them; however, it had a significant effect on preference. People liked the
familiar shapes, even though they did not consciously remember them. Zajonc
argued that this was due to perceptual fluency – that is, familiar stimuli are
more easily processed, and this enhanced ‘noticing’ is mistaken by our con-
scious minds for preference. The most pertinent implication, though, is that
familiar objects stand out.
Since Zajonc, many other experiments have demonstrated attentional prim-
ing (i.e. the direction of attention towards familiar, or mentally salient, stimuli).
For example, one study found that priming participants to alcohol – by having
them drink some of it! – resulted in an attentional bias towards alcohol-related
stimuli.27 People who’d had a drink of alcohol (compared to those given a
placebo drink) performed worse on ‘the Stroop task’ of reading out the colour
of a written word when the word involved was something like ‘beer’ – as their
attention was drawn to the word, distracting them from the colour-naming task.
The effect has even been found in pigeons: they’ll recognise something more
quickly if shown a picture of it beforehand.28
Putting this principle into practice, research shows that we pay attention to
the faces of people we know29 and love,30 as well as familiar names.31 A great
case study comes from the pet insurance provider Affinity Petcare: they signifi-
cantly exceeded their acquisition goals in an email campaign advertising their
website simply by using each recipient’s pet’s name in the subject title.32
What’s also useful, under this heading, is to utilise stimuli that are personally
familiar to everyone. For example, there is evidence demonstrating an atten-
tional bias to celebrities’ faces;33 celebrities have long been recognised as an
effective route to message stickiness.34
Messages can also be made to grab people’s attention through a consid-
eration of what’s likely to be on people’s minds at the time the message is
sent out. Researchers Jennifer Coane and David Bolata conducted a lexical
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decision task, in which participants had to press a button to indicate as quickly
as possible whether the string of letters on screen was a word or not; test-
ing occurred throughout the year.35 The words on which participants were
tested fell into various categories, including Christmas (e.g. Nutcracker, Rein-
deer ), Easter (e.g. Bunny, Lent ), Valentine’s Day (e.g. Cupid, Flowers), and
so on. There was a significant effect of congruency between time of the year
and word type; in other words, people recognised words like Leprechaun, for
example, significantly faster around St Patrick’s Day. As a practical application
of this point, one in-store survey found that, when asked to name a candy or
soft drink, people were much more likely to mention orange brands like Sun
kist or Reece’s Pieces in the week preceding Halloween – because the orange
decorations had brought these products to the front of people’s minds.36
SEASONAL PERSONALISATION
Here are two great examples of brands using the principle of seasonal
personalisation to increase the chance of hooking your audience:
– In 2007, Guinness produced an email campaign that was so good

it won a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. 37 On their birthday, recipi-
ents were emailed a video of a pub landlord wishing them a happy
birthday and suggesting they celebrate with a Guinness and some
friends. The email was opened by 60% of recipients, among whom
95% completely interacted with the video; each month, 30,000
people used the email to invite friends for a pint.
– Audi personalised an email campaign in 2012 by sending consumers

emails around Christmas time featuring a Google Earth map showing
the route Santa Claus would be taking from Lapland to the recipient’s
own home.38 Audi reported that this email was the most effective out
of all 250 emails the brand sent that year; the email was also the
most cost-effective marketing action undertaken across the entire
brand plan for that Audi model.
A FUTURE OF MASS CUSTOMISATION

Although stimuli personal to everyone are useful, technological advances fortu-
nately mean that proper mass customisation is more feasible than ever.
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A creepy example comes in the form of the American retailer Target.39
The company made a sincere apology to an American consumer after his
teenaged daughter received sales promotions in the mail for baby clothes
and cribs; the father complained, ‘Are you trying to encourage her to get
pregnant?’ (http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-
target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/).
A few days later, Target phoned the man to apologise again – but this time,
he was a little sheepish. It turned out, his daughter was in fact pregnant.
Amazingly, Target’s in-house statistical software had automatically analysed
the girl’s in-store purchases, and calculated that there was a significant chance
she was pregnant. Certain vitamins and toiletries gave it away. So, with just
some simple sales data, and an intelligent use of statistics, Target was able to
predict the girl would have a baby – before her own father did so! And with the
information, Target lived up to its name with a highly personalised communi
cation which its recipient most certainly noticed and is unlikely to ever forget.
INNOVATIONS IN MASS CUSTOMISATION

Technological innovations are making it possible to produce dynamic
hyper-personalised messages with an enormous attention-grabbing
potential; we are, it seems, not too far off from a Minority Report-type
future. Here are a few examples.
British supermarket giant Tesco has announced plans to introduce
facial recognition technology in its petrol stations: the cameras will
assess a customer’s age and gender, and then play on-screen adverts
targeted at that demographic.40
Meanwhile, Marketing magazine reported that Starbucks and L’Oréal
both collaborated with O2 on location-based advertising: O2 users who
opted into the scheme received a promotional message on their phone
from Starbucks when they were near a branch of the franchise; likewise,
those near a cosmetics store received a buy-one-get-one-free message
from L’Oréal.41
However, perhaps the greatest tool available for mass customisation

today is social media. By simply asking customers to plug into their Face-
book account, companies can now extract an enormous amount of per-
sonal information – including personality, intelligence, happiness and more.
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A fantastic paper illustrating this was published by the Psychometrics Centre
at the University of Cambridge, who created a Facebook app for personality
tests, allowing them to correlate Facebook data with individual differences.42
Looking at ‘liking’ Facebook groups, they found, for example, the following
links between traits and ‘liking’ Facebook groups: extroversion and Michael
Jackson; introversion and anime; Indiana Jones and life satisfaction; The Col-
bert Report and intelligence; and the Big Momma’s House movies and drug
use (see Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D., and Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and
attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(15), 5802–5805).
This degree of personal information introduces a phenomenal potential for
personalisation, and thus persuasion. Consider, for example, that personality
traits are easily extracted from a person’s Facebook profile (not to mention a
wealth of other data points like their call logs); a paper published by Profes-
sor Jacob Hirsh showed just how useful this information is for producing mes-
sages that work.43 Firstly, participants filled in the Big Five personality test.
Then, they viewed five advertisements for mobile phones and rated them on
six items like purchase intentions and brand interest, which were aggregated to
form a measure of advert effectiveness.
Here’s the key part: each of the five adverts featured copy that ostensibly
appealed to each of the five personality types, such as ‘Stay safe and secure
with the XPhone’ for neuroticism, and ‘With XPhone, you’ll always be where
the excitement is’ for extraversion.
Significant correlations between personality traits and ad effectiveness
were only found when the two were congruent: in other words, the extroverted
ad was more effective for extroverts, the neurotic ad was more effective for
neurotics, and so on. This study is a fantastic illustration of how the ‘big data’
opportunities provided by advances in technology open up a huge degree of
potential for persuasion.
Meanwhile, there is a lot of evidence illustrating how other personal
information can be drawn from the internet and used to make messages more
effective. In one study from UCL, participants went through a fake website
for booking holidays, which featured web ads on some of the pages.44 One
advert, for an anti-ageing cream, featured either a photo of an anonymous
older person or an age-enhanced photo of the participant him- or herself. Eye-
tracking showed that people looked at the advert for almost twice as long, on
average, when it contained a photo of their own face.
There is an additional plethora of studies looking at the effect of person-
alisation on email response rates. One experiment, for example, shown in the
chart below, found that name data was a powerful route to effectiveness.45
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Email response rate
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Dear Student Dear John Smith Dear John
So, ultimately, in addition to the primal and the emotional, there is a third
category of stimuli that will draw attention to messages and help them hook
people – and this time it’s personal.
EXERCISE
Future billboard
Imagine there are no limitations on technology and money. Your job is
to create an interactive billboard to sit in the high street and communi-
cate the message that people should pay their road tax on time. Think
creatively and 5–10 years ahead, when there may well be an entirely
free flow of data from a person’s mobile device to devices around them.
What functionality would you include in the billboard to make sure it
grabbed people’s attention? What would the billboard do and say in
order to be as effective as possible?
SUMMARY
Self-relevant
Do
✓ Use personal information to catch attention – whether it’s someone’s

name, their face, their hobbies, etc.
✓ Use personal pronouns to the same effect.

▲
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✓ Keep abreast of the latest technologies as they offer amazing
opportunities for message personalisation.
Don’t
✗ Restrict yourself to only the things which are truly personal to

individuals: there are also effective stimuli which are ‘personal’ to
everyone, like seasonal decorations, celebrities, music, and so on.
✗ Forget people’s concerns about privacy and security when it comes

to personal data; they are also sometimes simply ‘put off’ by
initiatives they see as creepy or intrusive.
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6 SURPRISING
Source: © Guy Bell/Alamy Stock Photo
Damien Hirst’s art will almost certainly have grabbed your attention just now
because it’s surprising.
There are two types of surprise to look at: one is basic and reptilian, like
being surprised by a slap in the face; whereas the other is more cognitive, like
being surprised by a bisected cow in formaldehyde in an art gallery. Let’s take
the slap in the face first.
CONTRAST
I always wondered why Michael Bay’s Transformers films were so popular.
Transformers: Age of Extinction was the first film of 2014 to make $1 billion 1
and its $90 million opening-weekend takings in China were an industry record.2
While global audiences love the films, critics loathe them: Age of Extinc-
tion has earned a measly 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. The films generally lack
any plot, character development, narrative tension or intellectual interest; the
franchise appears to be nothing more than just a bunch of big, noisy robots
(sometimes grotesque racial stereotypes and sometimes featuring dangling
61
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robot testicles) smashing and clunking around and blowing stuff up. How can
films that are nothing more than, as one Quickflix reviewer put it, ‘an incoherent
mess of noise and movement’3 be so successful?
Well, actually, maybe that’s the point.
The pop culture blogger Kyle Vanhove has done something very painful for
the greater good: he has braved Michael Bay’s filmography (up until Transform-
ers: Dark of the Moon) and counted the number of explosions in each film. 4
This invaluable data, with a simple check of box office figures, gives us the
chart below. The correlation is 0.94: the more explosions in the film, the more
successful it is.
Explosions vs. box office for Michael Bay films

300 $1,200
200 $800
100 $400
0 $0
3
nd
ys
II
bo
er
oc
do
s
ys
Bo
la
er
er
ar
R
ed
Is
Bo
m
or
lH
d
e
ag
e
or
or
Ba
sf
Th
Th
ar
an
m
sf
sf
Ba
Pe
an
an
Ar
Tr
Tr
Tr
Box Office ($m) Explosions
This (admittedly rather unscientific) example is a nice illustration of the first

type of surprise – better known as ‘contrast’. We are hardwired to immediately
and uncontrollably pay attention to things that contrast with the environment in
a very basic way, whether it’s colour, movement or sound.
This phenomenon is known as ‘the orienting response’: the phrase was
coined by Pavlov (he also called it the ‘what is it?’ reflex), and refers to the
way in which we will react to sudden changes in movement or sound in our
environment (like an explosion) by paying involuntary attention to the event
before even consciously identifying what it is.5 EEG research has shown that
visual or audial contrast attracts attention involuntarily, and that it involves
regions associated with attentional processes (the same as those discussed
previously for personalisation and so on). 6 In fact, the orienting response
has been shown to result in sensory receptors (e.g. eyes and ears) being
directed towards the stimulus, a decrease in heart rate, increased skin tem-
perature, increased skin conductance (i.e. sweat), and increased blood flow to
the brain.7
Of course, such a response is, again, highly adaptive since it is useful in
directing our limited resources to events that demand our attention, since they
may be threatening, personally relevant, or otherwise beneficial to survival.8
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Source: © USBFCO/Shutterstock.com
For example, you will probably have looked at this illusion because it
appears to be moving.
Interestingly, on the point of Michael Bay’s explosion fetish, there is evi-
dence to suggest that the internet and television may be so addictive simply
because they involve a lot of movement and visual contrast.9 Several studies
have shown that introducing lots of contrast into a television message (such as
cuts and edits) results in increased attention towards that message.10
An experiment in the US selected a group of twenty one-minute-long tele
vision messages from adverts and TV shows; these messages were defined
as being either slow, medium, fast or very fast in terms of edits (0–7, 8–15,
16–23 and 24+ edits, respectively), which were defined as a change in one
camera shot to another within a visual scene. Arousal was measured using skin
conductance and self-report, while a reaction-time memory test of visual rec-
ognition for the clips was taken after viewing. As can be seen, the more visual
contrast or movement in a message, the more attention is paid towards it and
the better it is encoded in memory.11
Effect of TV message edits on memory and arousal

2.0 3.5
3.0
1.5 2.5
2.0
1.0
1.5
0.5 1.0
0.5
0.0 0.0
Slow edits Medium edits Fast edits Very fast edits
Memory metric (LHS) Arousal metric (RHS)
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, an article published in Biologist notes how drasti-
cally television has changed towards this trend in recent years: the article
reports that a study of Sesame Street over 26 years found that the number of
edits doubled during that time!9
An important implication of this principle is that, whenever possible, it is
better to use moving, rather than static, images and text.
Researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Leicester
sat participants at a computer to rate a series of 150 visual stimuli on distinc-
tiveness using a six-point scale (lucky them!); a third of the stimuli consisted
of static images, a third consisted of a ‘film’ of six static images arranged into
sequence for 0.5s per image, and a third consisted of actual three-second vid-
eos. Then, after a day and, later, a week, the same participants viewed 150
visual stimuli – half of each type were new and half were in the original rating
task – and pressed a button each time to indicate whether they recognised it
from the task or not. As can be seen below, memory was significantly better for
video.12
Effect of image movement on subsequent recall

2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
0.0
A day later A week later
Moving Multiple static Single static
As well as movement, attention is drawn to contrasts in colour13 and light,14

and, as well as visual changes, noise.15
So, imagine you need to create an ad for the radio, and there are cer-
tain key bits of information to which you want people to attend. What would
you do?
Hopefully you have some good ideas by now (!), but a paper published in
the Journal of Advertising found that noise contrast could be used to excellent
effect.16 Four radio advertisements were created with differing uses of back-
ground music: one had background music the whole way through; one had
background music throughout but with silence underscoring the first vital bit of
information; one was the same but for the third bit of information; and one had
silence throughout. Participants heard one of the ads and, later, an unaided
recall task asked them to write down everything they could remember about
the ad they heard.
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When silence underscored the entire ad, the average recall for a piece of
information was 21%; when music was played throughout, this was 10%.
However, when music was played throughout, except when silence cued the
piece of information, recall for that information was a massive 65%. A clever
use of contrast drew people’s attention towards the information deemed key.
Meanwhile a fantastic series of in-store experiments illustrated how to
use contrast in various ways to catch attention and enjoy tangible business
effects – as shown in the chart below.17
Effect of contrast techniques on attention and sales

4%
3%
2%
1%
0%
Music at shelf Brand arranged in TV POS display
(noise contrast) block (colour contrast) (movement contrast)
Increase in % stopping to look Increase in % buying
USING CONTRAST IN-STORE

Contrast is an excellent way to improve promotional materials and draw
shoppers’ attention to a product. Guinness simply introduced card-
board fins which jutted out into the aisle and created contrast: the result
was a 25% increase in sales during their use.18
As for communications more directly, a great example of contrast at play

comes from online banner advertising. Animated compared to static ads increased
recall from 24% to 48%, recognition from 56% to 76%, and click-through inten-
tions from 3.3 to 4.1 (on a one to seven scale) in one paper.19 And, while there’s
little doubt that we all absolutely despise them, banner ads with sound can
increase recall from 9% to 15% and click-through rates from 1% to 7%.20
So, the takeaway is that messages can obtain stickiness through atten-
tion by simply using things which contrast with the environment – like noises,
movement, or colours.
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As a final example, Network Rail introduced to London’s King’s Cross train
station a virtual assistant named Louise – a helpful, smiling woman who is
projected as a moving and talking hologram onto a cardboard background to
give verbal instructions to passengers to use the lift rather than the escalator if
they have heavy luggage, which can clog up the escalator and pose a danger
should it tumble down.21 The manufacturer reports that Louise increased pas-
senger numbers on the lifts by over 260%, and Network Rail has rolled the
virtual assistants out in other stations across the country.
SURPRISE
Moving on, the second type of surprise is similar, but more cognitive and less
banana in nature: this kind refers to the automatic attending to stimuli that are
unexpected, distinctive or new. Whereas ‘contrast’ is about stimuli being differ-
ent from the surround environment in some way, ‘surprise’ is more about being
different from mental representations of the world.
For example, your brain probably went into overdrive when you read the
word ‘banana’ just now, because the word didn’t fit your predictions of how
the sentence might have continued.
Researchers from the University of California published the results of a
study which looked at this very thing.22 Participants, wearing EEG caps to
measure their brain activity, read a series of sentences of which some con-
tained semantically incongruous words – like, for example, ‘Other well-known
reptiles are snakes, lizards, eyeballs and alligators,’ or, ‘Turtles are not as smart
as mammals like socks or dogs.’
The data showed a large spike in brain activity when participants read the
incongruous word in the sentence, suggesting these words resulted in a signifi-
cant degree of involuntary attention and processing; as the researchers said,
these words ‘do not go unnoticed’. Their previous experiments also showed
such words were well recognised and remembered, too.23
Essentially, the unexpected – or surprising – words resulted in attention. This
was echoed in the results of the paper An Experimental Analysis of Surprise,24
which presented participants with a pair of words on screen, one above the
other. After the words, a dot appeared on screen for 100ms, either below the
bottom word or above the top one, and participants pressed one of two but-
tons to indicate the dot’s location. Participants did this 29 times; on the 30th
trial, one of the words was written in white text on a black background, whereas
all other words had been written in black on white. This broke with people’s
expectations; it did not match the pattern to which they had habituated.
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When the dot was preceded by this surprising stimulus, people’s reac-
tion times locating the dot were significantly slowed, since their attentional
processes had been diverted to the surprise.
In a similar vein to the unexpected, we also pay attention to the
‘distinctive’ – that is, stimuli which are unusual or different. For example, ‘the
distinctiveness effect’ is a well-established phenomenon in psychology where
memory is enhanced for stimuli that stand out from their surroundings as dif-
ferent: recall for the word ‘diamond’ in a series of sentences is enhanced for
the phrase, ‘The boy found a huge diamond in the applesauce,’ over, ‘The boy
found a huge diamond in the jewellery store,’ for example.25 Similarly, another
well-established finding is ‘the isolation effect’, which posits that a stimulus is
more likely to be recalled if it is different from the other stimuli it is presented
with: a digit placed in the middle of a list of nonsense words in one study was
recalled in one experiment 71% of the time, while a digit placed in a list of
other digits was recalled 48% of the time.26 Likewise, ‘the oddball effect’ refers
to the jump in brain activity, particular that associated with attentional pro-
cesses, in response to a rarely repeated stimulus among frequently repeated
stimuli in a series.27
A third and final type of this kind of surprise is ‘novelty’: we pay attention to
stimuli which are unfamiliar or new in general, rather than just in a specific context.
A robust psychological principle relevant to this context is ‘the bizarreness effect’,
where attention and memory are much stronger for a bizarre, unfamiliar stimulus.
A neuroimaging study found that brain signals were stronger in reaction to bizarre
images (such as the head of a wrench grafted onto the body of a sheep).28 This
perhaps gives some indication as to what makes popular art successful!
Incidentally, the same effect has been found for verbal stimuli, too.29
THE POWER OF ORIGINALITY ONLINE

Californian artist – and one-time veterinarian – Sarah DeRemer has had
her work featured in The Guardian, the Daily Mail, The Telegraph and
beyond. What is it about her work that has been so successful and
attention-grabbing? She grafts the head of one animal onto the body
of another (in Photoshop!) to create what are now known online as
‘hybrid animals’. The popular phenomenon has its own subreddit with
over 30,000 subscribers and new images posted everyday – just one of
which is shown below. As with all good ideas from the internet, it has
since been ripped off by an advertising agency for Volkswagen.30
▲
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Source: ‘Monkey Sparrow’ by Sarah DeRemer.
One of the boards on 4chan is r9k, which utilises the ROBOT9000

bot created by popular webcomic xkcd: the attraction lies in the fact
that the bot only ever allows new posts to be added to the forum. The
bot’s creator explained:31
“
I was trying to decide what made a channel consistently enjoyable. A
common factor in my favorite hangouts seemed to be a focus on original
and unpredictable content on each line. It didn’t necessarily need to be
useful, just interesting . . . And then I had an idea – what if you were
only allowed to say sentences that had never been said before, ever?
Surprise is, in fact, probably the most important predictor of viral-

ity online. A paper published in the International Journal of Advertis-
ing measured over 100 adverts on various metrics, and then noted the
number of YouTube plays for each one: along with celebrities, distinc-
tiveness was an important determinant of virality.32 Similarly, the paper
‘Why pass on viral messages?’ asked participants to rate nine viral mar-
keting campaigns in terms of the six basic emotions, including surprise,
and found that surprise was the most dominant factor, being elicited by
every one of the nine campaigns.33
An example of a viral campaign to successfully use surprise is the
Mercedes-Benz ‘Chicken’ campaign, which was, simply, a video of a
chicken whose head stayed in exactly the same spot while its body was
being moved from left to right by a pair of hands.34 The distinctive and
▲
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unusual video clip had a huge effect on attention towards the brand:
the clip exceeded the campaign’s target by a factor of five by garner-
ing five million views on YouTube within the first three weeks alone; of
those who viewed the video, 8% shared it, making the video Mercedes-
Benz’s most successful online video ever; by the end of 2013, Mer-
cedes-Benz was the most popular car brand on the internet, globally;
the video had earned the brand 1.5 million new online fans.
Research by ‘babyologists’ has consistently demonstrated the power of the

new to grab attention. Experiments have shown – as illustrated below35 – that if
an infant is shown a pattern they haven’t seen before, even if it is as simple as
a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, their attention will be drawn to it and
they will spend a long time looking at it; however, over successive exposures
to the same pattern, the number of times the infants look at it and the duration
for which they look at it steadily decreases. Show them a new pattern, how-
ever, and their attention is piqued again! Another study, meanwhile, concluded
that ‘novel objects promoted exploratory interest at all ages’.36
Not only that, but developmental psychologists have given us key insights
into why we pay attention to these kinds of surprising stimuli. Again, as with all
traits (even, it is proposed, psychopathologies like autism37), there is an adap-
tive value to surprise – but what is it?
A recent study by two cognitive psychologists at John Hopkins University
found that, when 11-month-old babies are shown something surprising that
doesn’t fit with their expectations, not only does it catch their attention, but the
babies will focus on it and play with it until they have solved the mystery.38 For
example, babies shown a ball rolling down a ramp and then seeming to pass
through a wall were then much more interested in the ball – banging it on the
floor to test its solidity, for example – than those who seemingly saw the ball be
stopped by the wall.
One of the researchers, Lisa Feigenson, explained, ‘Our research suggests
that infants use what they already know about the world to form predictions.
When these predictions are shown to be wrong, infants use this as a special
opportunity for learning . . . When babies are surprised, they learn much bet-
ter, as though they are taking the occasion to try to figure something out about
their world.’39
This is very evident in the facial expression characterising surprise, the ‘sur-
prise brow’,40 which comprises two features: firstly, the eyes widen and the
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Source: © Ana Blazic Lavlovic
eyebrows lift, so that we can take in as much visual information as possible;

and secondly, our jaw drops and our face and body becomes paralysed as our
cognitive resources are diverted towards solving the puzzle at hand.
So, surprise is adaptive as it helps us to learn about the world such that we
might be better equipped to understand, predict and control it; surprise is the
driving force behind human knowledge and betterment.
Evolutionary psychologist Rainer Reisenzein summarised the literature on
the topic: ‘the feeling of surprise serves to inform the conscious self about
the occurrence of a schema-discrepancy and to provide an initial motivational
impetus for the analysis of the schema-discrepancy by eliciting curiosity about
its nature and causes.’41
Surprise is, therefore, the first step towards interest, or curiosity – where
surprise will catch an audience’s attention, curiosity (discussed in the next
chapter) is the following stage, where the audience cognitively processes the
stimulus in order to figure out the riddle.
But, before we get to that, there is a huge amount of research exhibiting
the practical value of surprise in crafting effective messages. Taking advertising
as an illustration, many studies have shown that the more creative an advert
is, the more likely it is to be paid attention to, deeply processed, recalled, or
recognised.42 For instance, echoing the distinctiveness effect outlined ear-
lier, a brand slogan placed in the middle of a list of other slogans was bet-
ter remembered when it stood out from the others.43 Another experiment had
participants watch TV shows with adverts sandwiched between clips; then,
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after a five-minute distractor task, they were asked to recall as many advertised
brands as they could.44 Control adverts’ brands were recalled 28% of the time,
while the brands in creative adverts (that is, those which had won awards for
creativity) were recalled 41% of the time.
Importantly, a survey of advertising agencies in China discovered that cam-
paign creativity was a strong, positive predictor of campaign success;45 in fact,
a series of interviews with American advertising executives concluded, ‘Crea-
tivity is identified as the singularly most important factor in effectiveness . . .’46
A nice example is the ‘Balls’ advert for Sony Bravia, featuring 250,000
brightly coloured rubber balls bouncing down a street in San Francisco in slow
motion;47 Sony went from fourth position to the world-leading seller of LCD
TVs in the wake of the ad, and increased its market share in Europe from 10%
to 14%.
Ultimately, surprise is a very effective way to make a message stand out
and be noticed – and it leads to deeper cognitive processing which is, as
will be discussed next, the second key step to effective communication after
attention.
CASE STUDY Jackpotjoy
In 2012, bingo website Jackpotjoy wanted to draw attention to its

‘FUNdation’, where people could submit their ideas for fun things to
do and potentially have it come true out of the campaign’s £250,000
bursary. The brand wanted to draw attention to the campaign in a fun
manner. The solution: a huge rubber duck floating down the Thames.
Source: © Justin Kase Zninez/Alamy Stock Photo

▲
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The rubber duck was featured in 65 media publications and inspired
over 20,000 hits to the ‘FUNdation’ website; what’s more, the stunt
increased unaided brand awareness for Jackpotjoy by 7% in the UK,
and 10% in London.48
What’s more creative than an enormous rubber duck?
EXERCISE
Create a web banner ad

Design a banner advert to be used on websites and advertise Dove’s new
facial cream, CreamEx2000. You need to make the banner advert surprising
and unexpected in order to catch people’s limited attention online. Don’t
just use movement and sound – be creative! In order to be surprising, first
think of three typical conventions for web browsing or banner advertise-
ments. What is the status quo for web pages or their banner adverts? Then,
for each convention, write a way that your banner ad could break it in order
to be surprising and unexpected. For example, one recent innovation has
been to have the advert contain the entire screen until it has been closed
by the user, breaking the convention of banner ads being at the top or side.
SUMMARY
Surprising
Do
✓ Use sudden movement and noises to get people to pay attention to

your messages.
✓ Use movement over static images and text wherever possible.
✓ Skilfully use contrast to make messages, or parts of messages, as

emphatic as possible (e.g. having loud noises except for the narration
of the key message, when there is silence).
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✓ Use cognitive surprise as well (i.e. unexpected, novel or bizarre
things).
✓ Be creative.
Don’t
✗ Underestimate the power of simple principles like contrast in colour,

light or movement to grab people’s attention – the reptilian brain is
very influential.
✗ Overdo it; again, you don’t want the movement or noise to distract
from or overcrowd the message itself.
✗ Annoy consumers too much as it can backfire in terms of message

efficacy: people love to punish perceived unfairness.
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2
PART
SECTION 2
IGNITE THINKING
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Getting attention is just the first step in hooking your audience; attention is
necessary but not always sufficient.
Consider how many faces you see each day, how many times you hear your
own name, or how many sexual images you see. Yet very few of these encoun-
ters will carry through into any sort of long-lasting effect on memory or behav-
iour, despite catching attention.
For example, one experiment tested the effect of faces on the success of
banner adverts, and found that – just like our cereal boxes from before – faces
drew more attention, causing people to look at the ad for around four times as
long; however, as can be seen in the chart below, recall for the ad’s message
was significantly higher when the face was looking at it.1 The model’s gaze
directed attention towards the words and encouraged their elaboration. So,
while a face did draw attention to the ad, it was ultimately much more effective
if it also enhanced the reading of the ad’s copy.
Source: Adapted from Sajjacholapunt, P. and Ball, L. J. (2014). ‘The influence of banner advertisements on attention and memory:
human faces with averted gaze can enhance advertising effectiveness’, Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 166.
Effect of face type on percentage of correct word fragment completions

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
No face Mutual gaze Averted gaze
76 PART 2, SECTION 2 IGNITE THINKING
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A series of interviews with senior advertising executives found that they
believed in a clear two-step process when it came to effective communi
cation: ‘break through’ and ‘engage’.2 Getting attention in a cluttered environ-
ment is part one; getting the audience to actually think about the message is
part two.
Firstly, both attention and cognitive processing play an important role in
memory;3 depth of processing enhances memory for a message (and a mes-
sage is more likely to influence subsequent behaviour if it is remembered, of
course).
As an illustration, researchers at the University of Toronto showed partici-
pants 40 words and asked them to answer a yes or no question for each one.4
There were five types of question, each increasing in the amount of cognitive
processing required to answer it (indicated by increasing response times); after
this task, participants were shown the 40 words, plus 40 new ones, and asked
to indicate which ones they recognised from earlier. As shown in the table
below, the greater the depth of processing, the more likely a word was to be
remembered.
Depth of Example question Example answer Average

processing recognised later
Yes No
Lowest Is there a word present? river Fkxmhh 22%
2 Is the word in capital letters? TABLE table 16%
3 Does the word rhyme with weight? crate market 57%
4 Is the word a type of fish? shark heaven 78%
Highest Would the word fit the sentence: friend cloud 90%
‘He met a ______ in the street’?
As for the why, the ‘Spreading Activation Theory’ of memory5 illustrates why
depth of processing is so important; a crude illustration is given below.
Smoking
Cancer
is bad
Low elaboration message: smoking is bad for you – it may cause cancer.
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Cough Wheeze
Illness
Lung
Smoking
Family Cancer
is bad
Mouth
Misery
High elaboration message: think about how bad smoking is for you. Imagine
the coughing and wheezing caused by lung cancer, mouth cancer – and what
else? What do you think passive smoke is doing to your family – and how will
they feel watching you die?
The elaborated-on message will be better remembered because the mes-
sage has been linked to a greater number of memory ‘nodes’, and the con-
nections are likelier to be stronger. Therefore the chance of the message being
triggered in memory is increased: for example, thinking about family might trig-
ger the memory of the elaborated message, but not the superficial one.
In addition, the elaborated-on message will be more persuasive because the
audience has processed the message and what it means to a greater extent,
therefore having a better understanding of it. For example, for the elaborated
message, the audience will have a much better understanding of the potentially
harmful effects of smoking, which will ostensibly better motivate their future
behaviour.
So how do you facilitate the processing of a message?
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7 MYSTERY
In autumn 2013, a YouTube channel called Webdriver Torso began to attract

a lot of attention. Every single one of its unique videos was 11 seconds long,
titled ‘aqua’, and comprised solely of red and blue moving triangles and a tone
fluctuating in pitch. In the following months, the channel uploaded almost
80,000 of these videos.
Naturally, online enthusiasts gave their all trying to work out what it meant –
as several media outlets, like the BBC, speculated, it may have been a secret
code for spies, a viral marketing campaign, or even attempts to contact
extra-terrestrials.1 Until the mystery was revealed, the videos went completely viral.
Before we get into why this case generated such buzz, here’s a brainteaser
for you – see if you can work it out:
If I have three, I have three; if I have two, I have two; but if I have one, I have
none. What are they?
Turn to page 237 for the answer.
Did you turn to page 237? How did it make you feel? Would you like to
know the answer? Would you like to know, also, what the mysterious YouTube
videos were for?
I bet you would!
We are all, as will be discussed, hardwired to solve mysteries and to close
the gaps in our understanding. Whereas new, unusual or unpredictable things
get our attention through surprise, curiosity subsequently causes us think
about this surprising event in order to understand how it fits into our under-
standing of the world – and it can be a very strong motivator to process a
message.
What, for example, would you do with a finished crossword at the back of a
newspaper? Would you treasure it and keep it forever, going back over its fac-
toids again and again?
No. You would throw it away.
A new crossword would sustain your interest since it contains p uzzles
to be solved – and gaps to be closed. In fact, there is a huge amount of
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research showing how puzzles like crosswords can be effective teaching
tools since they pique interest in a curriculum’s content by making it into
an engaging riddle. For example, one paper reported that students given
a crossword as a revision tool scored, on average, 76% on one sociol-
ogy exam, while those simply given the key points to learn scored 69% – a
significant difference.2
Similarly, another fascinating teaching tool is known as ‘the mystery motiva-
tor’. In one study, five students were told that, if they handed in their home-
work on time and got at least 20 questions correct, and if they did so on an
unknown and randomly assigned ‘mystery’ day, they would receive a closed
envelope with a mystery prize in it: three out of five students showed an
improvement in scores, with an average score increase among these students
of 19%.3 Another study found the mystery motivator technique to significantly
increase compliance with bedtime requests.4
But, once the crossword is all finished, or the mystery envelope opened, an
audience’s interest quickly evaporates and they move on.
This might be why relationships so often fall apart once they become stale
and predictable – there is nothing to hold the interest of one of the couple, and
they get bored and discard their partner in favour of someone more interesting.
Probably Chad the windsurfer with his sports car and talent management com-
pany (screw you, Chad ). Interviews with 19 married women found that two of
three key factors behind the passion waning in a marriage were the institution-
alisation of the partnership and overfamiliarity;5 and a series of experiments by
a doctoral student found that boredom was a strong predictor of relationship
dissatisfaction.6
THE CULTURAL POWER OF MYSTERY

The innate power of a mystery seems to be engraved into our collective con-
sciousness. If it wasn’t for Pandora opening that jar, we wouldn’t have poverty,
disease and death in the world (so it goes). Likewise, the power of curiosity
was too much for Lot’s wife and for Orpheus, both of whom couldn’t help but
turn around to have a quick peek, and ended up being turned into a pillar of
salt and seeing his love being dragged back to Hades, respectively.
And recently, the secret and the mysterious have had enduring appeal in the
stories we like to read and share. In 2014, there were, tragically, two air traffic
disasters involving Malaysian Airlines. Both disasters were within 131 days of
each other, both involved the same company, and both involved the total loss
of life of everyone on board, over two hundred people in both cases. Yet, one
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Relative google search data
2004 2005 2006 2008 2009 2010 2012 2013 2014

MH370 MH17
of the crashes received significantly more attention than the other; as can be
seen in the Google Trends chart of searches above.7
Why? MH370 ostensibly received so much more attention because it was,
and is, a mystery. There is no puzzle about MH17: we know it was shot down
over Ukraine, and we’ve seen the wreckage in the news. But MH370 disap-
peared without a trace; what happened to the plane is a complete enigma.
Researchers at the University of Michigan published the results of a fan-
tastic experiment in which participants were given thirty problems to solve,
comprising maths, logic and spatial reasoning; afterwards, they were asked
to recall as many of the problems as they could.8 On average, participants
recalled 33% of the problems they solved, but 45% of the unsolved problems.
It seems that mysteries stick in our heads.
A great example comes from the critically acclaimed television show The
Sopranos. The final episode was aired in 2007, and yet there continues to be
speculation in the media about the series.9 At the end of the series finale, right
before the expected denouement, the screen simply cut to black.
Many fans were outraged – they reportedly crashed HBO’s website in their
rush to complain10 – and, even eight years later, speculation is rife about what
the ending really meant, and what really happened to Tony Soprano.
Research suggests that shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, American
Horror Story and the rest, are, at least in part, so successful because of their
use of curiosity through techniques like narrative tension and cliff-hangers.
For example, in one study, participants read one of two versions of a
crime story, in which both suspects were equally likely to have committed
the crime and so uncertainty was high, or where uncertainty was low since it
was clear which of the two was the suspect; rated enjoyment of the story was
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significantly higher when the outcome was uncertain. More explicitly, the study
found that ratings of curiosity were a strong predictor of enjoyment.11 Similarly,
a different study found that suspense is a very strong predictor of enjoyment
when it comes to watching sports.12
In fact, I have another personal story to share on this topic. A few weeks
before writing this, on a Saturday, I woke up late in the morning ready to work –
I had an intense amount of work to get done (not least of all this book). Having
got ready for the day and eaten lunch, I decided, ‘Why not watch one episode
of The Sopranos; what harm can it do?’ I started watching at 1 pm. What time
do you think I stopped?
6 am.
And it seems I’m not the only one. A survey of American adults found that
61% of them regularly binge-watch TV shows – that is, watch between two and
six episodes in the same sitting;13 and when Netflix released all 15 episodes
of a new series of Arrested Development in 2013, it was reported that 10% of
viewers watched all 15 episodes within a day.14
CURIOSITY: FROM SURPRISE TO INTEREST

So what is going on? Why do mysteries suck us in so much?
In his book, Sweet Anticipation, music psychologist David Huron proposes
the ITPRA (Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction and Appraisal) model of
reactions to unexpected stimuli.15
The ITPRA model

Event
onset
Reaction
Imagination Appraisal
Tension
Prediction
Time
Source: Adapted from Huron, D.B. (2006). Sweet Anticipation, MIT Press.
Recall from the chapter on surprise that people show a significant increase
in brain activity to incongruous words in sentences, like, ‘Turtles are not as
smart as mammals like socks or dogs.’
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Let’s take this as an example. In Huron’s model, a person will initially listen
to a song, hear a joke, or read a story; as they do so, they begin to imagine what
the outcome will be, and they make a prediction. In our example, a person may
be predicting ‘mice’ or ‘hedgehogs’ as they read, ‘Turtles are not as smart as
mammals like . . .’
There is a feeling of physiological arousal, or tension, as the reader reads
onwards towards the outcome which may or may not match predictions.
Depending on the outcome, and whether or not it matches predictions, the
reader will have an immediate emotional or behavioural response. What’s more,
if the outcome doesn’t match predictions, there is a period of appraisal, in which
the brain invests resources in trying to understand the outcome and how it does
fit with expectations – in our case, how a sock can possibly be a mammal.
It is at this point that the reader will move from surprise, the immediate
response, to curiosity, the cognitive appraisal.
Noted psychologist George Loewenstein calls curiosity ‘a form of cognitively
induced deprivation that arises from the perception of a gap in knowledge or
understanding’.16 Indeed, curiosity is adaptive since it motivates knowledge-
acquisition and exploratory behaviour;17 it has long-since been identified as an
appetitive drive similar to hunger or thirst.18
It is Loewenstein’s ‘Gap Theory’ which explains this stage of cognitive
appraisal.16 When an outcome does not match a prediction, there is a gap
between these two nodes in memory; we are motivated by the unpleasant feel-
ing of cognitive dissonance to find the connection between these two seem-
ingly unrelated nodes, as illustrated below.
White
Fur?
socks?
Cat
GAP
Mammal Sock
Dog
In a practical sense, there are ostensibly two uses for curiosity when it
comes to crafting effective messages.
7 MYSTERY 83
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USING CURIOSITY TO MOTIVATE BEHAVIOUR
The first is to motivate behaviour – that is, to get an audience to actually read
or interact with a message, or to otherwise influence some desired behaviour.
For example, one published paper tested the effect of different email subject
lines on click-through rates and response rates for an email requesting participation
in a survey.19 The researchers found that both click-through rates and response
rates were higher when the subject line did not include the reason for emailing;
not only that, in fact, but both metrics were highest when the subject line was left
entirely blank. Among the recipient list of high school seniors who had expressed
an interest in the university, 17% clicked through when the subject line ‘liberal arts
university survey’ was used; for a blank subject, however, 24% clicked through.
USING CURIOSITY IN MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Secrecy and mystery also play an important role in marketing cam-
paigns, generating significant interest in messages and products: from
leaked copies of Harry Potter to speculating over the new Apple Watch.
A fantastic example of this comes from the marketing for the Batman
movie The Dark Knight.20
Warner Bros created an alternate reality for audiences to explore, com-
prised of websites like IBelieveInHarveyDent.com where visitors could
learn about the election campaign of fictional character Harvey Dent.
However, the viral campaign was so much more than this. At
IBelieveInHarveyDentToo.com, a Joker-vandalised picture of Harvey
Dent featured a submission form for people to enter their email address;
for every person who did so, a single pixel was removed from the site’s
picture, ultimately revealing Heath Ledger as The Joker. Beyond this,
the campaign led fans on a treasure hunt to learn new titbits of informa-
tion, including searching through websites for clues, campaigning for
Harvey Dent and giving out fliers, and rendezvousing at secret locations
to be given mobile phones with recordings of The Joker.
In all, the campaign intelligently used the very innate urge to solve
mysteries to generate significant interest in the film.
In terms of results, The Dark Knight’s website reached 1.5% of users on
the entire internet, and, on the day of the film’s launch alone, blog posts for
the film accounted for 1.3% of all blog posts online. Of course, there were
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other factors at play, but The Dark Knight was ultimately a hugely success-
ful film. It debuted on the largest number of cinema screens in American
history, and took in $155 million in the US in its opening weekend.
USING CURIOSITY TO MOTIVATE MESSAGE

PROCESSING
The second use of curiosity, however, is to encourage deeper cognitive pro-
cessing for the message, in order to make it better remembered and more
persuasive.
A key principle here is ‘the generation effect’ – that is, the finding that
a message is significantly better remembered if the audience actually thinks
it themselves, rather than just reading it superficially. Researchers at the
University of Toronto assigned participants to one of two conditions: half of
them read pairs of words that were associated in some way, such as rhyming
or being semantically linked, like rapid-fast; while the other half were shown
one word and the initial letter of its pair, like rapid-f___.21 Afterwards, par-
ticipants completed a test of recognition for the matched words. Those who
simply read the words scored an average of 69%, while those who mentally
generated the words scored 85%.
A wonderful application of the generation effect is illustrated by a study in
which participants were shown one of two advertisements: one containing an
instrumental version of the song The Long and Winding Road; and one con-
taining the lyrics.22 The participants were split into two groups according to
their prior familiarity with the song. The next day, the respondents were asked
to recall everything they could about the ad.
Hearing the vocal version of the song resulted in an average of just over one
lyric being recalled from the advert, whether the participants were familiar with
it or not. However, among high familiarity listeners, the instrumental version
resulted in much higher recall – 2.1 lyrics on average. Because this group knew
the lyrics, hearing the instrumental version caused them to generate the lyrics
in their minds, resulting in much better subsequent recall.
This gives an interesting insight into McDonald’s’ ‘Badadada-daaa, I’m
lovin’ it’ jingle. At first, the adverts contained the whole jingle; now, however,
the words are left off the end. The implication is that whenever a person hears
the jingle, they mentally produce the lyrics themselves. The jingle causes a
Pavlovian response of, essentially, thinking, ‘I love McDonald’s!’
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The campaign, incidentally, had a fantastic effect on sales.23
The goal, then, is to use curiosity in the form of riddles or puzzles to get an
audience to actually create the message in their own heads – what is known as
‘co-creation’. But how do you make it happen?
PUZZLES IN MESSAGES
On the one hand, of course, it’s possible to use very literal puzzles in a mes-
sage. For instance, using questions instead of statements has been shown to
increase message elaboration:24 recall of information in a presentation was sig-
nificantly enhanced by asking rhetorical questions rather than just presenting
information. Similarly, simply asking people to imagine a message rather than
read it has been shown to be effective.25
However, on a more subtle note, it is possible to engage curiosity and co-
creation through the use of metaphors.
Metaphors work by presenting a small riddle to the audience. The definition
of a metaphor is the application or juxtaposition of a word or phrase (the vehi-
cle) to an object which is not actually applicable or related (the target). Since
the two things are not literally related, the audience is presented with a puz-
zle to solve – that is, what is the connection between these two things? The
result, as researchers have suggested, is the semantic and evaluative mapping
of attributes from the vehicle to the target.26
Let’s take a famous metaphor from Romeo and Juliet: ‘Juliet is the sun’.
Presumably, Romeo wasn’t actually suggesting that Juliet is a massive sphere
of hot plasma; thus, with this juxtaposition of unrelated elements, an audi-
ence’s curiosity is piqued. How can Juliet be a sun? Loewenstein’s gap theory
tells us that the audience will seek to find the semantic connection between
these two things and close the gap, and in so doing, the attributes of the sun
are transferred to Juliet.
The sun
Life-giving? GAP Beautiful?
Juliet
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In this example, the audience subsequently ends up with an enhanced
appreciation for Juliet’s beauty. This is ostensibly why a meta-analytic review
found the correlation between the use of metaphors and persuasion to be,
overall, 0.07 – small but significant and positive – though this increased to 0.42
under optimal conditions.27
THE SIX TEMPLATES FOR PRODUCING

CURIOSITY IN ADS
In their paper, ‘The fundamental templates of quality ads’, Israeli
researchers analysed two hundred successful, high-quality adverts and
found that the majority of them, 89%, could be categorised into six
basic templates.28 These templates are essentially metaphors: they pre-
sent a small riddle which, when solved, transfers the attributes of one
thing onto the advertised product. The six templates are:
1 Pictorial analogy A visual metaphor is used by presenting the

product as something it’s actually not, in order to transfer the quali-
ties of that thing to the product. For example, a bottle of oil might
be shown inside a corn husk in order to associate the idea of nature
and freshness with the product.
2 Extreme situation In this metaphor, the product is shown in an
extreme situation in order to imply the product has certain qualities.
There are three kinds: the product has an extreme attribute; it has
extreme worth; or there is an extreme alternative to using the product
(e.g. moving to the North Pole instead of using a brand’s secure locks).
3 Consequences These adverts use a metaphor to imply at the con-

sequences of using, or not using, the product in order that certain
qualities are transferred to the product. A famous example is the
advert quoting, ‘I never read the Economist,’ by a 42-year-old man-
agement trainee.
4 Competition In these types of metaphorical adverts, the product is

seen in competition with something else, and winning, so that the
attributes the two things are competing for are transferred to the
product. For example, an advert for a bread brand showed a child
sleeping with her face on a slice of the bread, rather than a pillow,
to communicate that the bread is soft and fluffy.
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5 Dimensionality alteration In these adverts, some dimension, such
as time or space, is altered in order to highlight certain qualities of the
product. A nicotine gum advert, for instance, showed a very old woman
smoking in front of her birthday cake which put her age at just 42.
6 Interactive experiment These adverts are less metaphorical and

more interactive, transferring qualities to products through game-
based enhanced cognitive processing.
In summary, then, we are innately driven to explore anything that’s surpris-

ing and arouses curiosity, which gives communicators the chance to pose puz-
zles and metaphors as a tool to encourage the cognitive processing of their
message.
And, to put you out of your misery: the solution to the riddle is ‘choices’,
and the videos were created by Google as an automated test of YouTube video
quality. Hopefully(!), the frustration you felt at not knowing these answers until
now gave you a taste of the power of curiosity.
EXERCISE
Keeping information secret

For each of the three sentences below, reword it so that it becomes an
intriguing riddle or mystery. Below this reworded sentence, write the
missing information which you have removed from the original sentence,
and which people would find out by following or solving the mysterious
message.
Six out of ten teenagers admit to staring at their smartphone under the
covers at night.
Sources say Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton bicker regularly at the
White House.
Please keep the communal lunch area tidy today for the health and
safety inspectors.
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SUMMARY
Mystery
Do
✓ Make sure people process your messages at some cognitive level –

otherwise it may be unmemorable and unpersuasive.
✓ Use riddles and puzzles in messages to get people to really think

about what your message is saying.
✓ Use mystery to motivate behaviour (e.g. reading future messages).
✓ Use ‘gaps’ to easily create connections in recipients’ memories.
Don’t
✗ Be stale or predictable.
✗ Give everything to your recipients in one go or up front – they like to

be teased!
✗ Feel that the ‘puzzles’ need to be overt: metaphors can also be very
effective.
7 MYSTERY 89
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8 EASE
“
Human nature is above all things lazy’
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
Take the chart below; what do you think it shows?
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
k
en
nd
ce
ry
ria
ga
ar
an
nd
U
iu
ga
an
ed
la
st
rtu
m
rla
lg
Po
Au
un
Fr
en
Sw
Be
er
Po
he
H
D
et
N
Source: Adapted from Johnson, E. J. and Goldstein, D. G. (2003). Science, 302, 8–1339.
This is data for consent rates for organ donation: the countries on the left
are opt-in, and those on the right are opt-out.1 Even with something as affect-
ing as organ donation, people are generally happy to do whatever’s easiest – in
this case, sticking with things as they are rather than having to make an effort-
ful decision for oneself.
This is a cognitive bias known as ‘status quo bias’: essentially, people tend
to leave things as they are since change requires effort.
Recall that we are cognitive misers – we have very limited brainpower, not to
mention physical energy and time, to spend on making choices and following
up with them behaviourally. The upshot of this is that we tend to avoid deci-
sions that are too difficult, and we generally take the path of least resistance.
People are so lazy, for example, that they will eat less food if it is simply
placed out of their reach. Food psychologist Brian Wansink conducted an
experiment with secretaries in an office, who were given an open bowl of
Hershey’s Chocolate Kisses to munch on.2 The researchers counted how many
90
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chocolates the secretaries ate per day. However, there was a twist – the bowl
was either placed on the secretary’s desk, in her desk’s drawer, or on a cabinet
about six feet away.
The secretaries ate an average of nine, six and four chocolates per day,
respectively. The harder the chocolates were to reach, the fewer the secretaries
ate.
People are so lazy that they are more likely to buy a product if it’s sim-
ply easier to see and reach. One experiment varied the shelf height at which
a brand of crisps was sold in supermarkets in Reykjavic.3 Positioning the
crisps in the middle doubled the brand’s market share: on the bottom and top
shelves, the brand accounted for 4.0% and 3.3% of category sales respec-
tively, but on the middle shelf the figure was 7.5%. Another study found
that moving a brand from the least to the most accessible location in-store
increased sales by a massive 60% on average.4
And people are so lazy that, given the free choice between walking up the
stairs and taking the escalator in order to exit an underground train station,
only 8% of people will take the stairs.5 Interestingly, one study measured peo-
ple’s walking/running speeds from one point to another as they varied accord-
ing to how much time was available – the data showed that people’s instinctive
strategies perfectly matched that calculated by a computer to minimise the
amount of energy consumed.6 We are hardwired to be as idle – or rather, as
energy-efficient – as possible.
So – people are lazy! When it comes to crafting messages that will get
hooked in people’s minds, this fact of life has three implications.
SUGGESTION
The first implication is that people are highly susceptible to the power of sug-
gestion. In other words, people will often simply do what they are told – to do
otherwise might require effortful thought.
Going back to the study on people’s choice of the escalator over stairs,5
it was found that the proportion of people could be increased from 8% to
16% simply by introducing a sign saying, ‘Stay Healthy, Save Time, Use the
Stairs’.
One paper explained how a $5 intervention helped a small business owner
increase her turnover to a phenomenal degree, using just the power of sug-
gestion.7 The $5 was spent on a cardboard prompting card for use by the
business owner and her employees: the card served to remind the staff to
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ask customers, ‘Would you like to buy a [dog chew bone toy] or anything else
today?’
During a 12-month pre-experiment baseline period, when the custom-
ers were not prompted to buy anything, the shop sold an average of 6.4 pet
products each month; during a four-month period when all customers were
prompted with this suggestion, however, the shop sold a monthly average of
32.3 products. This small business owner’s sales were transformed simply by,
in essence, telling its customers what to do.
It could ostensibly be argued that the generalisability of this study, set in
one small pet store, is questionable. However, a large-scale study of the
South African credit market, involving over 50,000 recipients of a direct mail
campaign advertising payday loans, found the principle to hold true.8 In the
study, a selection of recipients received a letter which featured a particular
suggested use for the loan. This suggestion had an influence on loan usage;
for example, among the customers who reported taking out a loan to pay off
other debts, 3.6% more came from the pool of recipients receiving a letter sug-
gesting just such a thing than from the pool of other recipients.
The power of suggestion is, of course, also highly prevalent online –
e-commerce clicks are very much influenced by recommendations made to
shoppers.9
Ultimately, messages can be made more effective by using suggestion to
make it more likely that your audience absorbs the message you want them to
absorb.
SIMPLICITY
The second upshot of our tendency to be lazy is that messages should be sim-
ple if they are to succeed; the truth is that audiences typically lack both the
motivation and the resources to digest a long, complex message.
Remember – if something is too difficult, often people simply will not bother.
For example, leading behavioural scientist Sheena Iyengar and colleagues
looked at pension plans in the United States:10 specifically, does adding more
fund options – from, for example, a range of banks, insurers and investors –
increase enrolment? In actual fact, no; Iyengar found that participation rates
decreased as the number of funds offered increased, ostensibly since this
made the pension plan more complicated. With all other factors being held
equal, adding ten fund options resulted in a drop in participation rates between
1.5% and 2.0%; plans offering only two funds enjoyed a 75% participation
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rate, while those offering the maximum observed, 59, had a participation rate
of 60%.
Simpler messages are – simply – more effective. As an illustration, the afore-
mentioned South African payday loan study also tested the effect of letter
simplicity on the take-up of loans.8 Specifically, the letter presented the loan
information in either a large, complicated table containing examples of different
combinations of loan amount, duration and interest rates, or else a small, sim-
ple table containing just one example of a loan amount, duration and interest
rate.
The simpler table resulted in a 0.6% increase in the take-up of loans relative
to the more complicated table; this was equivalent to reducing the interest rate
by 2.3%.
Furthermore, not only does too much choice or information demotivate an
audience, but the longer a message is, the less able an audience is to properly
comprehend it, and therefore the less memorable and persuasive it will be.
In essence, people generally don’t read the fine print. A study by the United
States’ Federal Reserve Board in Washington found that most borrowers do
not know the finer points of the mortgages they have signed up to, and under-
estimate or have no knowledge of the degree to which their interest rates could
change.11
Returning to Timothy Wilson’s estimate that only 40 out of 11,000,000 ‘bits’
of sensory information are processed consciously, 12 it becomes clear that
the more information is included in a message, the less likely it is that the key
points will filter through.
A paper published in the Journal of Advertising describes how it selected
two adverts for the same brand – one low in complexity and one high in
complexity – by writing out the scripts for 88 television advertisements and
submitting them to a computerised test of readability.13 A sample of 81 stu-
dents were asked to read a booklet containing scripts for five adverts; each
participant’s booklet was randomly assigned to contain either the low- or the
high-complexity advert for the target brand. After a distractor task, the partici-
pants were asked if they had read an advert for pasta sauce and, if so, which
brand; then, they were asked to recall as many elements of the advert’s script
as they could.
When the advert was high in complexity, 75% of participants recalled
the brand name, and they recalled 1.43 script elements on average; for the
low-complexity script, however, 95% recalled the brand name, and the average
number of script elements recalled was 2.59.
The simpler, the better.
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As well as being short and simple, messages should make sure the most
important information is easily noticeable: don’t make it hard for your audi-
ence to comprehend your message. For example, when communicating online,
the most vital pieces of information should go above the fold (that is, users
shouldn’t have to scroll down to see it) – a UX study of browsing behaviour
found that users spend 80% of their time looking above the fold.14 Similarly,
whether online or offline, people tend to read from the top-left to bottom-right,
and for this reason the most important information should be placed in the top-
left, where attention is initially drawn.15 Messages should make sure to avoid
the so-called ‘corner of death’, the bottom-right.
CONCRETENESS
In a similar vein to simplicity, the third and final implication of the inherent lazi-
ness of our species is that messages should always be concrete over abstract.
Try, for example, to think of the word this definition is describing:
Noun. The rational investigation of the truths and principles of being,

knowledge, or conduct.
Now try this one:
Noun. A piece of furniture upon which a person sleeps.
The first definition was for philosophy, and the second was for bed. The
second word was probably much easier to name; this is ostensibly because
bed is a concrete concept while philosophy is abstract. Concrete words have
clearly defined, familiar meanings which are easily accessible, while abstract
words are less inherently meaningful to us.
Concreteness enhances memorability and persuasion because it makes
cognitive processing much easier: concrete concepts are retrieved and pro-
cessed much more efficiently, while abstract concepts are more logical and
less emotional, and are retrieved and processed slowly. Evidence suggests
that abstract words involve linguistic processes in the brain, while concrete
words more heavily involve nonverbal, semantic processes, although they acti-
vate linguistic processes as well.16 To put it simply, concrete stimuli are more
effective since they engage the ‘monkey brain’.
Putting it all together, as illustrated in the crude diagram below, concrete
messages will form quick and strong connections in memory, while abstract
messages will form slow and weak connections.
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Concrete message: ‘Bob is smart’.
New brain
String
theory
Old brain
Ball Smart Bob
Abstract message: ‘Bob likes string theory’.
New brain
String
theory
Old brain
Ball Smart Bob
In support of this contention, an experiment by researchers in Massachu-

setts asked participants to press a button to indicate whether each sentence
on screen – such as, ‘The letter x appears in the word dexterity’ – was true or
false, while their reaction times were being recorded.17 For each sentence,
the target word, such as ‘dexterity’ in this example, was either concrete (e.g.
‘bicycle’) or abstract (e.g. ‘honesty’). Reaction times were significantly quicker
for concrete words than for abstract ones.
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Similarly, another experiment read participants several lists of words, and
subsequently asked them to recall as many as they could from each list.18 On
average, participants recalled 20% of the abstract words and 32% of the con-
crete words.
Putting this into practice, which of the two promotional display signs below
do you think would be more effective?
MAKE A FISCAL
TRANSACTION WITH
THE UPMOST BUY NOW!
URGENCY!
A case study from nappy brand Pampers provides a real-world illustration.

For many years, Pampers has collaborated with UNICEF to divert a proportion
of profits from sales of the brand to children in need across the world; one of
these campaigns comprised vaccinating babies against tetanus. In some mar-
kets, the packs featured the slogan, ‘1 pack will help eradicate newborn tetanus
globally’. In other markets, however, a much more successful slogan was used:
‘1 Pack = 1 Vaccine’. This concrete copy has been credited by Pampers as being
one of their highest return-on-investment programs; and the campaign provided
vaccines that helped more than 100 million mothers and their babies worldwide.19
However, while concrete words are preferable to abstract words, images are
more preferable still.
There is, for example, a great deal of research (stretching back more than
a century20) demonstrating the existence of ‘the picture superiority effect’ –
that is, that images are remembered significantly better than words. One study
presented participants to 612 stimuli, of three different kinds, for six seconds
each, and then conducted a test of recognition: participants recognised 88%
of sentences and 90% of words, but they recognised 98% of images.21 Simi-
larly, research has shown that reactions when recognising images – measured
either by brain activity or behavioural response times – are significantly faster
than those when recognising words.22
Psychologists have suggested that this is because images are processed
by non-conscious, automatic systems in the brain, while words are processed
more consciously and deliberatively.23
To put it bluntly, while language may have developed as a human trait
millions of years ago,24 the ability to see has been with us since time immemorial;
it is little wonder that images are more effective as communication tools.
Ultimately, the important point is that messages will be better compre-
hended and remembered if they use images. A meta-analytical review found
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that adding pictures to instructions resulted in a 40% increase in the recall of
the verbal information.25 On the other hand, other studies have found that peo-
ple are quickest at solving problems when said problems are presented pic-
torially rather than verbally – and that mixing images with text doesn’t lead to
improvements over pictures alone.26
Perhaps, then, images should replace text in the most successful mes-
sages – at the very least, they should complement the text. However, one
final, circular, point is that the more concrete – that is, simple and immediately
meaningful – an image is, the more effective it is as a tool of communication.27
One final application of concreteness is tied up in the old adage, ‘The death
of one is a tragedy; the death of millions is just a statistic.’
Numbers, particularly large ones, are cognitively processed in an abstract,
detached way and therefore have less influence over behaviour compared to more
concrete concepts. Research has shown that emotional reactions are stronger
when information is presented in a way that fosters concrete mental images, com-
pared to a detached, abstract way.28 For example, ‘the identifiable victim effect’
is where donations are significantly higher to appeals that highlight a single victim
than those that focus on the large-scale problem at hand.29 Similarly, purchases
can be increased by reframing the price as a daily expense, like the number of
cups of coffee per week the equivalent cost of a repeat donation would be.30
Therefore, it may be more effective to present a high number as, for exam-
ple, the number of swimming pools it would fill!
Overall, messages can be made stickier by making the message as easy to
process as possible, via the power of suggestion, via keeping things short and
simple, and via using imagery and concrete words to get the point across.
EXERCISE
Putting ease into action

Turn the following statistic into something more concrete:
An estimated 10 million Brits suffer from depression.
Make this sentence more concrete:
Subsequent application of quantitative easing set to nullify recent
confidence slump.
Simplify or shorten this sentence:
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in supposed plans to move to outer
Hampstead Heath.
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SUMMARY
Ease
Do
✓ Whatever you want your recipients to do, simply use suggestion to

encourage them to do it.
✓ Make messages as short and simple as possible – the longer a

message is, the less likely it is to be read, and the smaller proportion
of it that will be taken on board.
✓ Use concreteness (e.g. short words over long words, or images over
words at all) to engage the emotional brain.
Don’t
✗ Underestimate how lazy people can be!
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9 NARRATIVE
One Saturday in April 2005, a rowdy group of spectators gathered at a

coliseum in the Cambodian city of Kâmpóng Chhnãng to cheer on the bizarre
fight unfolding before their eyes – the event was so hyped that tickets sold out
three weeks beforehand. Despite the enjoyment of the crowd, the outcome
was tragic. Within just 28 minutes, 12 midgets were dead and 14 were severely
injured, including lost limbs and broken bones.
As it turned out, the assertion of the Cambodian Midget Fighting League’s
president, Yang Sihamoni, that his entire league of 42 midget fighters could in
fact defeat a fully grown African lion, was incorrect.
An angry fan had taken umbrage with the league’s claim that the midgets
could ‘take on anything: man, beast or machine’, and brought his demand that
the midgets fight a lion to Sihamoni, who arranged the fight and subsequently
stated that, since the midgets outnumbered the beast 42 to 1, they would be able
to ‘out-wit and out-muscle’ it. An African lion was flown in to Kâmpóng Chhnãng
especially for the fight, which the Government allowed on the provisos that ticket
sales be taxed at 50% and that no cameras be allowed into the coliseum.
What a story! As you might expect, it went viral and was picked up by publi-
cations like the New York Post.1
The only problem: it wasn’t true. Two friends got into a heated discussion
about whether or not a group of midgets could defeat a lion using the power of
team work; one created a very realistic faux BBC News webpage, and the rest
is history.2
This man-versus-beast tale is a fantastic example that – to paraphrase Mark
Twain – often, we don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.
A lot of academic papers have been published illustrating the prevalence
and power of narrative journalism. Academics have, for example, demonstrated
how the US media played an important role in turning the senseless events of
September 11 into a narrative of resilience, progress and heroism, allowing the
nation to make sense of what happened and to follow a process of grieving.3
Experimentally, researchers at the University of Leipzig had a group of par-
ticipants watch an episode of a television news programme containing nine
99
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clips for different news stories, one of which was about air pollution in Düs-
seldorf.4 For the control group, this clip presented the information in a matter-
of-fact way; in the experimental group, however, a clear narrative presented a
protagonist who had been made ill by the air pollution, had a goal to reduce it,
and was taking action to achieve that goal by protesting to the Office of Envi-
ronmental Protection. Subsequent to watching the news, participants answered
questions about what they had seen. Both comprehension and recall for the
clip in question were significantly higher when it was presented as a story.
THE POWER OF STORIES

The fact is that information presented through narrative is much more affecting;
it has the power to capture readers’ imaginations, provoke fierce responses,
and even ignite social change. Indeed, there are countless examples of stories
rallying people and inspiring action, whether it’s: a tired Rosa Parks refusing to
give up her seat on the bus; Todd Beamer and his fellow passengers on Flight
93 who fought back against their hijackers; or the anonymous man who stood
on his own against the tanks in Tiananmen Square. In her paper ‘Contending
stories: narratives as social movements’, Professor of Sociology Francesca
Polletta explains how stories provide groups with a unified identity and purpose
and act as powerful motivators of collective action.5
It is little wonder that narratives are such a crucial social force: stories define
us as a species – which social anthropologist Walter R. Fisher calls ‘homo nar-
rans’, or ‘storytelling man’, since narrative is one of the oldest and most widely
used forms of human communication.6 From stories in Aboriginal cave paint-
ings dating back tens of thousands of years,7 to today, when spending on
entertainment and media is worth 2.3% of global GDP – or $1.6 trillion8 – sto-
ries are a major part of who we are. Simply put, we understand ourselves and
the world around us in terms of stories: they allow us to give meaning to the
world and to define our place in it.9
And, since they are so deeply engrained in our psyches, stories make very
effective communicative tools; there is indeed a huge amount of research
showing that stories make messages more memorable and more persuasive.
An amazing example of the power of stories comes from the Changing Lives
Through Literature campaign in the US, in which convicts are given the chance
to read, explore and discuss stories with one another, in the belief that stories
can motivate life-long change.10 Co-director of the programme, Robert Waxler,
explained how the readers would come away with new outlooks and changed
behaviours: one prisoner, for example, identified with the fisherman’s struggle with
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the fish in Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, and this gave him the strength
to resist the pull back into drug addiction.11 A very recent study tested the effects
of literature on 600 probationers compared to 600 control probationers who
weren’t part of the programme; the researchers counted the number of incidents
for which the participants were arrested in the 18 months prior to, and following,
the programme. For the control group, offending dropped by 26% over that time;
but for those engaged with stories, offending dropped by 60%. What’s more, the
seriousness of the crimes was decreased relative to the control group as well.12
When it comes to crafting sticky messages, there is a lot of evidence for the
power of ‘narrative persuasion’ – that is, presenting a message in a story format
will make it more persuasive. For example, one study strikingly found that peo-
ple could be persuaded to believe false statements like, ‘Eating chocolate makes
you lose weight’, simply by inserting these sentences into a narrative;13 similarly,
another study discovered that people were more likely to become organ donors if
they had watched a TV show in which organ donation was a featured storyline.14
In his book Tell to Win, Peter Guber uses the metaphor of a Trojan horse: stories
persuade because the audience readily accepts the gift of an entertaining story,
and so unknowingly absorbs the message the narrator has craftily hidden within.15
In a large-scale experiment,16 over a thousand students read 15 messages
designed to persuade on topics ranging from the validity of aptitude testing
to the use of cosmetics by women; for each message, participants rated how
persuasive it was by indicating their agreement with statements like ‘I agree
with the writer’s conclusion’. However, for each message, every participant
was randomly allocated to one of four conditions, where the message: con-
tained statistical information (e.g. ‘50% of crack users drop out of school’);
contained narrative information (e.g. ‘Joan was an A-grade student until she
started using crack’); contained a combination of both statistics and narrative;
or contained neither type of information. Ratings of persuasiveness varied sig-
nificantly across the groups; as shown below, statistical information was more
effective when presented in a narrative format.
Mean persuasiveness by message type

18.0
17.8
17.6
17.4
17.2
17.0
Statistics and Statistics Narrative Neither
narrative
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Not only do stories enhance persuasion, but they also make messages more
memorable.
The canonical form of a story consists of an introductory scene-setting, a begin-
ning, a character acting to achieve a goal, and a final outcome – and research
shows that people remember the outcome better when it is presented as the pin
nacle of a story compared to when it is simply presented as information on its own.17
Participants in one paper read a story about an old farmer who owned a stub-
born donkey.18 In fact, some of them read the story, while others were presented
with the same information, but not in a story format – it was simply a list of caus-
ally unconnected details. Having been asked to write down the passage verbatim
as they could recall it, the people who read the plain information recalled 45% of
the sentences, compared to a massive 84% for those who read the story.
So, stories work – but why?
Firstly, stories tend to be noticeable and memorable because they use many
of the principles covered so far – like emotion, surprise and curiosity. Recall,
for instance, that Made to Stick co-author Chip Heath discovered that disgust-
ing urban legends were more likely to be shared;19 and on the surprise and
curiosity side, a great experiment measured the success of fairy tales by the
Grimm brothers using the number of Google search results, finding that stories
were more likely to be successful if they contained counterintuitive elements
like talking mirrors or living gingerbread men.20
However, there’s a lot more to it than that: there exist particular attributes of
stories that encourage cognitive processing. Here are three reasons why sto-
ries make messages so sticky.
EMPATHY
When you hear a story, an amazing thing happens inside your brain.
To understand this, we first need to go back to the 1980s, when Italian
neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues conducted a series
of experiments which would go on to be extremely influential – although they
didn’t know it at the time. Rizzolatti et al. placed electrodes in the brains of
macaque monkeys in order to record neuronal activity when the monkeys
picked up pieces of food – but they discovered something amazing. The same
neurons that fired when the monkeys picked up the food also fired when they
simply saw a human researcher do the same thing.21
This was ultimately the first study of a great many in what was to be an exciting
and seminal field – mirror neurons. Essentially, when we see someone else doing
something, to some degree we experience it ourselves; when you see someone
get slapped in the face, in your mind you get slapped in the face as well.22
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Importantly, the same thing happens with stories. A meta-analysis of 86
brain-imaging studies found that the cognitive processes underlying social
empathy are also activated by narrative:23 when we read about a slap, we
experience it ourselves. Interestingly, research has shown that people who
read more books are more skilled at reading emotions in other people – that is,
they are more empathetic.24
Researchers at the University of Washington had 28 participants read nar-
ratives about a young boy, Raymond, while they lay in an fMRI machine. Every
clause in the story was categorised according to the presence or absence of
dimensions like time (e.g. ‘As soon as . . .’), space (e.g. ‘. . . returned to her
desk’) and objects (e.g. ‘. . . his English workbook’). Fascinatingly, reading a
clause activated the brain region associated with that particular dimension. For
example, reading about objects activated areas of the brain associated with
hand movements; and reading about character’s goals activated the prefrontal
cortex, a region involved in ordering and structuring daily activities.25
Indeed, studies have shown that the persuasiveness of narrative messages
is mediated by both transportability (i.e. imagining oneself in the story) and
emotional processing.26 In other words, stories are so effective because they
are so affective; they make you feel and personally experience the message
rather than just think it.
Pop culture comedy website Cracked has an interesting theory about this.27
Many of the highest-grossing films of all time have something in common: they
are animated, feature superheroes, or star wooden leading men. By using what
is known in theatre as ‘the neutral mask’ – be it through the bland CGI felines
in Avatar, the masked heroes in The Avengers, or the expressionless Keanu
Reeves in The Matrix – films are allowing the audience to better imagine them-
selves in the protagonist’s role. A simple, neutral face lets audiences transport
themselves into the action – which, as research has shown, is vital for narrative
to work.28
To sum up, the first reason stories are so effective is empathy – stories make
your audience live and breathe the message, rather than just think it at an
abstract level. When someone reads your PowerPoint bullet point, their rational
brain will analyse the information – but with a story, they will personally experi-
ence it themselves.
FAMILIARITY
Take a group of very young goslings – if you move a cut-out in the shape of a
hawk over their heads as if it were flying above, they will instinctively cheep,
9 NARRATIVE 103
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crouch and run for cover.29 However, if the cut-out is the wrong shape, or if it
is moved backwards rather than forwards, no such reaction is elicited from the
chicks. This instinctive fight-or-flight reaction occurs despite the fact that the
chicks have never seen a hawk themselves – and, in some cases, thanks to
migration or continental shifts, their species has not seen a hawk for gener
ations and generations.
The shape of a hawk, moving in the correct direction, is a key which unlocks
a specific, hardwired reaction in the geese.
In the same way, we humans share hardwired – and learned – responses to
specific stimuli. That is to say, we all, to some degree, share a common under-
standing of the world; we all use the same mental map. It is for this reason
that stories make information easier to digest: they can hijack existing mem-
ory structures in order to transfer a commonly understood meaning onto a
message.
Imagine, for example, that you wanted to communicate in a message that
people should be wary of riding motorbikes because, even though they are
beautiful, they can be deadly – and men should watch out that they don’t get
seduced into a dangerous situation. To communicate this message anew could
be difficult and hard to comprehend; but if you were to use narrative to com-
pare motorbikes to the legend of Medusa, the associations of the latter are
instantly transferred to the former.
Consider, for example, the proposition that all stories throughout human his-
tory fall into one of seven basic plots.30 These tales are part of our collective
consciousness, and can be used to evoke shared understandings and transfer
them onto a message.
Overcoming the Rags to riches The quest Voyage and return

monster A poor protagonist A protagonist and A protagonist goes
A protagonist sets acquires great wealth his companions set on a voyage and
out to overcome a before losing it – he out on an epic quest, returns a matured
monster or antagonist wins it back after with many trials on man (e.g. The
who threatens his having an epiphany the way (e.g. Finding Hobbit )
way of life (e.g. The (e.g. Cinderella) Nemo)
Avengers)
Comedy Tragedy Rebirth
A humorous A villainous A morally ambiguous
protagonist overcomes protagonist falls protagonist redeems
adversity to achieve a from grace – their himself over the
happy ending (e.g. Mr death or defeat is the course of the
Bean) happy ending (e.g. narrative (e.g. A
Breaking Bad ) Christmas Carol )
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Similarly, in The Hero and the Outlaw, it is suggested that there are 12
archetypes in fiction, such as the caregiver, the jester and the lover.31 Again,
these shared understandings can be hijacked through narrative to make a mes-
sage’s meaning easily understood – in the case of The Hero and the Outlaw,
the meanings can be transferred to a brand.
The innocent The explorer The sage The hero

(e.g. Innocent) (e.g. Land Rover) (e.g. The Economist ) (e.g. Nike)
The outlaw The magician The regular guy The lover
(e.g. Smirnoff) (e.g. Apple) (e.g. Tesco) (e.g. Wall’s Magnum)
The jester The caregiver The creator The ruler
(e.g. Ben & Jerry’s) (e.g. Heinz) (e.g. Lego) (e.g. BMW)
In an illustration of this principle, a researcher at Vanderbilt University

exposed participants to an advert in the form of either a vignette or a story, and
then measured how closely the participants associated themselves with the
brand with items like ‘I can identify with Brand X’. The data showed that nar-
rative adverts resulted in a significantly higher brand-self relationship, osten-
sibly because, as the author proposed, ‘narrative processing may create a link
between a brand and the self when consumers attempt to map incoming narra-
tive information onto stories in memory’.32
To sum up, the second reason stories make messages so sticky is that they
borrow from existing memory structures to make the message’s meaning easily,
instantly and universally understood. Stories implant a message’s meaning into
people’s minds by hooking it onto memory networks which already sit there.
MEANING
In a landmark study published in 1944, a group of college students were
shown a short film in which two triangles and a circle moved across the screen
in an abstract fashion – and the students were asked to describe what they
thought was happening.33
All but one of the students described the scene in terms of narrative –
that is, social actors setting out to achieve a goal. One example included the
explanation that the two triangles were men who were fighting over the woman
circle, who, herself, was trying to escape.
The implication is that stories are how we make sense of the world; we
interpret events in terms of cause and effect. This illustrates the third and final
9 NARRATIVE 105
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reason why stories make messages stickier – that is, they make information
easier to comprehend by providing a semantic link between the parts.
The ‘mnemonic link system’ is a technique where a list of stimuli is made
easier to remember by semantically associating each item with one another
in the form of a story. For example, the list of words ‘mouse, chair, sun, bus’
might be better remembered by turning it into a narrative: ‘The mouse sat in a
chair under the midday sun and waited for the bus’.
Experimentally, participants asked to remember a list of six words in the
correct order, could correctly recall 64% of the words when they were in the
same category (e.g. apple, banana, grape), and 60% when they were not; simi-
larly, they could recall 69% of the words when they were associated with one
another (e.g. honey, sugar, sour), and 59% when not.34 When disparate stimuli
are meaningfully linked, they are easier to remember.
A fantastic example of this principle comes from Chineasy, a new system
for learning Chinese from author ShaoLan Hsueh.35 The system makes learning
Chinese much easier by associating Chinese ideographs with pictures which
convey what they mean – as shown below. The system gives semantic mean-
ing to the unfamiliar characters, making them simpler to learn.
Fire Tree Sun Moon
Person Mouth Door Mountain
Similarly, research has shown that a set of stimuli is more easily remem-
bered if they are causally related. In one experiment, participants viewed 32
pairs of sentences and then, subsequently, were given one of the sentences
from each pair and asked to recall its match. The sentence pairs were of vary-
ing degrees of causal relatedness, as confirmed by a pre-study: for example,
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the lowest causal rating was given to ‘Cathy had begun working on a new pro-
ject’ and ‘She was carried unconscious to the hospital’, whereas the highest
rating was given to the pair which swapped the former sentence for ‘Cathy felt
very dizzy and fainted at her work’. Recall probability was about 10% higher for
the most- versus the least-related sentences.36
Another study took this principle further by applying it to an actual narrative.37
Participants read a story about pirates who were looking for treasure on an island;
within the story, assertions about the natural world – such as ‘Berry bushes are
thickest on the windward side’ – were inserted at either causal locations, where the
alleged fact had an effect on what happened in the plot, or a non-causal location,
where the alleged fact was mentioned but had no further part to play in the story.
Afterwards, the participants completed a test of cued recall – by, for exam-
ple, completing the phrase, ‘Berry bushes . . .’ – and then rated each of the
assertions on a seven-point scale of perceived truthfulness. As can be seen
below, assertions with a causal effect on the story are both better remembered
and better believed; the authors suggest this is because they are more deeply
integrated into existing memory structures.
Effect of plot causality on message recall and believability

50% 5.5
40% 5.3
30% 5.1
20% 4.9
10% 4.7
0% 4.5
Causal Non-causal
Cued recall Perceived truthfulness
To sum up, the final reason why stories are so effective is that they make
messages meaningful: by providing a link between the different parts of a mes-
sage, those parts become easier to process, comprehend and remember.
So, overall, narrative is effective because it makes an audience personally
experience information, and because it makes processing easier by hijacking
existing memory structures and providing a meaningful link between different
elements.
And as for the power of narrative in a business context, this was fantas-
tically demonstrated in a recent analysis of Super Bowl adverts.38 The five-
act model of narrative supposes that effective stories comprise five parts: the
9 NARRATIVE 107
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introductory exposition; a complication for the protagonist; a climax as the
conflict develops; a reversal resulting from the climax; and a final denoue-
ment, or resolution.39 Three expert judges rated the adverts shown during
the 2010 and 2011 Super Bowls according to how many of the five acts they
included; a measure of consumer reaction to the ads was taken from Spot-
Bowl.com, where over 30,000 people rated the adverts on a one-to-five scale
each year.
Ads without the full five-act structure received a mean rating of 2.4, while
those with the five acts received a 3.4 average score.
Adweek reported that the most effective advert of Q1 2014 was indeed
a Super Bowl advert – specifically, Budweiser’s ‘Puppy Love’.40 The ad fea-
tured the heart-warming story of a Labrador puppy who makes friends with the
horses on his home farm; when a man comes to adopt the pup, the horses
menacingly block his way, and the story closes on both the horses and puppy
triumphantly marching back to the farm to be welcomed back with hugs and
kisses by the owners.
It may sound saccharine – but remember, it worked. Ultimately, infusing nar-
rative into your message will make it very effective.
EXERCISE
Storytelling
You want to tell a story to engage and persuade audiences around
cycling more and driving less. Create a story by coming up with each of
the prerequisite parts, and then putting them together in a final narrative:
1 Setting
2 Character
3 Character’s goal
4 Character sets out to achieve the goal
5 Conflict and tension
6 Climax of story and resolution of tension
7 Epilogue
Put it all together . . .
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SUMMARY
Narrative
Do
✓ Recognise that humans have been using stories to understand and

share information since time immemorial.
✓ Use stories as ‘Trojan horses’ in which to feed information to

audiences.
✓ Utilise narrative to easily form connections in memory and to easily

communicate the intended meaning of a message.
✓ Make use of existing plots and archetypes to make understanding the

message very intuitive.
Don’t
✗ Focus on the importance of the story at the expense of the truth,

however.
✗ Forget every element that is needed for narrative – that is, with a
beginning, a character, a goal, an effort to achieve the goal, dramatic
tension, and a resolution.
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2
PART
SECTION 3
INCITE ACTION
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So far, we have addressed how to use attention to get people to notice a mes-
sage, and how to use cognitive processing to get them to absorb it. But what
should that message actually be?
Importantly, the way in which a message is put together can have a power-
ful effect on its ability to influence its audience.
To give an example, in the 1960s, the heartburn and indigestion relief tablet
Alka Seltzer managed to use an extremely intelligent message to increase its
sales significantly – not quite double their sales, but almost.1 How? The brand
introduced the slogan ‘Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz’, while plastering their packaging
and advertising with imagery of two tablets fizzing in water. The subtle sug-
gestion that two tablets were needed (when in reality one would suffice) had a
massive impact on their sales (see http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/
alka-seltzer.asp).
There are ostensibly two ways to influence behaviour via messages: one is
through heuristics, or ‘nudges’, as demonstrated in the above example; and the
other is through priming, which is, in essence, planting ideas in people’s heads.
Source: © razorpix/Alamy Stock Photo
112 PART 2, SECTION 3 INCITE ACTION
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Before we get to that, though, it’s important to remember that there is usu-
ally a significant lag between the time a person receives a message, and the
time that message needs to have its effect. Say, for instance, you see a Tweet
from Cancer Research UK encouraging you not to drink the next time you go
out with your friends, which won’t be until the next weekend; you may well
have forgotten it by then.
In fact, advertising research has identified something known as ‘advertising
adstock’, the memory ‘half-life’ of an advertisement – that is, the time it takes
for awareness or memory of an advert to decrease by half.2 Although this var-
ies between adverts, it’s typically believed to be somewhere between two and
five weeks.3 This means that if 60% of people are aware of an advert immedi-
ately after it’s been aired, this will reduce to 30% within just a few weeks.
And that figure is for adverts – which are usually designed to be emotive and
memorable! For the typical office email, Facebook update or company pitch,
the memory half-life is probably much shorter than two-to-five weeks. I can
think of a few PowerPoint presentations I’d forgotten before they were even
finished . . .
A review of early studies on memory decay produced the chart shown
below, showing recall over a logarithmic scale of minutes – for things less
engaging than adverts, the memory ‘half-life’ appears to be much shorter than
a few weeks, although for very engaging content, like poems, the ‘half-life’ is
much longer.4
The exponential rate of forgetting for different types of stimulus

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
10 months
2 months
12 hours
2 weeks
3 weeks
1 month
4 hours
8 hours
2 years
10 min
20 min
2 days
3 days
6 days
1 hour
2 hour
1 day
0%
1 2 3 4 5 6
Poems (Boreas, 1930) Syllables (Boreas, 1930) Words (Finkenbinder, 1913)
Words (Luh, 1922) Words (Ebbinghaus, 1885)
PART 2, SECTION 3 INCITE ACTION 113
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It is little wonder therefore that research demonstrates a positive relationship
between message memorability and behavioural effectiveness.5 No matter how
strong a ‘nudge’ a message gives, that ‘nudge’ generally needs to be remem-
bered in order to work.
So, the first way to make sure a message influences action, then, is to make
sure it gets remembered.
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10 MEMORY
To put it simply, an awful lot of stuff happens in the world every day, yet only a
very select few things are remembered on a large scale. Everybody can recall,
for example, where they were when Kennedy got shot, or when the Twin Tow-
ers came down – as the old cliché goes.
Why is it that certain things are much more memorable than others? More
importantly, does it matter?
Firstly, memorability does indeed matter. As discussed earlier, a message
has to be remembered if it is to have its desired effects after some time; not
only that, however, but the more mentally salient, or front-of-mind, a message
is, the more likely it is to influence behaviour.
Researchers illustrated this point with an experiment in which participants
were asked to look through twenty pictures and rate them;1 little did they real-
ise that some of the pictures subtly contained a bottle of Dasani-branded
water. After the picture task, participants were offered their choice of bottled
water from a selection of four brands. As illustrated in the chart below, simply
putting a thought to the front of people’s minds can be enough to influence
their behaviour in its favour.
Per cent choosing Dasani out of a choice of four bottled water brands
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
0 4 12
How many of the twenty pictures had a Dasani bottled water
As for why some stimuli are better remembered than others, there are four
basic principles.
115
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ATTENTION OR PROCESSING
Firstly, as shown through experiments cited earlier in the book, primal, emo-
tional, personal and surprising stimuli and more likely to be recalled. This is
not only because we are more likely to even notice these types of stimuli,
but also because we divert more attentional processes to them and endow
them with deeper cognitive processing. 2 Similarly, because, as shown ear-
lier, curiosity, narrative and fluency result in more efficient or enhanced
cognitive processing, these types of stimuli are also more likely to be
remembered.
Get a message attended to and thought about, and it will have a much bet-
ter chance of being remembered!
REPETITION
‘Education, education, education.’
This was Tony Blair’s slogan on, yes, education in the run up to the 1997
election. It was so successful that it has been named as Blair’s ‘winning gen-
eral election mantra’ by one commentator,3 with another speculating that it
should be inscribed in the Oxford Book of Quotations.4 The book The Elements
of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase is particularly laudatory,
noting that it received the biggest round of applause and the most headlines of
the Labour party conference.5
Part of the massive success of this mantra is ostensibly repetition: repetition
is key for memory.
There is a huge amount of research to suggest this, that repetition is key
for memory. To give just one illustration, American psychologist Benton Under-
wood presented his participants with a long list of two-syllable nouns, in which
specific words had been repeated one, two, three or four times throughout the
list; afterwards, participants wrote down as many words as they could recall.6
There was a strong positive correlation between repetition and recall: only 27%
of the words shown once were recalled, compared to 71% of the words shown
four times.
Every time a message is repeated, that message’s links in memory are
refreshed and strengthened – as shown in the crude illustration below – making
subsequent spontaneous remembering, or cue-based triggering, of a memory
much more likely.
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Effect on memory networks of exposures to the message that coke is fun
Coke Fun Coke Fun Coke Fun
First exposure Second exposure Third exposure
From a message perspective, research has shown that increasing the fre-
quency of message exposure enhances the likelihood of it being remembered
– as one might expect.
An experiment conducted in the 1980s asked its participants to watch two
half-hour TV shows with advertisements sandwiched in the ‘breaks’; a week later,
they did the same thing again and then completed various measures for each
advert that was shown to them.7 The adverts embedded in the total two-hour pro-
gramming varied according to how many times they were repeated. As can be seen
below, ad repetition had a positive impact on both recall and purchase intentions.
The impact of ad repetition on recall and purchase intentions

100% 0.5
80% 0.4
60% 0.3
40% 0.2
20% 0.1
0% 0
1 2 4
Ad frequency
Ad recall Purchase intentions
Similarly, a meta-analytic review looked at the effects of ad repetition and

found the more a single advert was repeated, the increasingly negative atti-
tudes towards the ad become; but ad repetition was still associated with an
increase in recall and sales every time the ad was repeated.8 Recall that the
advert for HeadOn increased sales by over 200% in the year it was released,
despite being very repetitive, and thus hated!9
The meta-analysis did, however, find a different pattern of results for repeat-
ing a series of ads rather than one specific ad; in this case, attitudes became
less positive but didn’t become negative, while for recall and sales there was
an exponential increase in line with repetition. It appears the combination of
the familiar and the new – or repetition and surprise – via a consistent series of
adverts is the best route.
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A great example of this comes from ALDI, who, Marketing magazine report,
was the best-performing brand in 2014 in terms of advertising recall.10 Not only
this, but the ad campaign propelled ALDI’s market share from a standstill to a
43% growth on the previous year, produced a return on investment of 15:1,
and delivered the biggest sales growth in ALDI’s history.11
This success is likely due, at least in part, to ALDI’s use of a highly repeated
series of adverts which used consistent, repetitive elements (since repetition
is key for memory) while continuing to be surprising and interesting. In every
ad, a character would say, ‘I like these . . . I also like these . . .’ with one prod-
uct being placed on the left of the screen and one on the right, with prices in
yellow overlaid on both – seemingly drawing attention to ALDI’s proposition of
offering the same quality at lower prices. This format was unchanged, but the
adverts featured everything from a topless hunk drinking two types of cham-
pagne to a squeaky-voiced muppet eating two types of Jaffa Cakes.
Interestingly, there is also evidence that the effects of repetition go beyond
just memory to influence attitudes and persuasion as well. The illusion-of-truth
effect refers to the finding that people are more likely to believe statements
are true the more times they hear them.12 One study showed participants a
five-minute video of two youths breaking into a house and leading police on
a car chase, and then participants were asked various questions about the
video. 13 However, some of these questions subtly contained information
that was not true: for example, ‘At the beginning of the scene, a young man
dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and gloves entered the house. Did he enter through
the door?’
False statements such as the assertion that the boy was wearing gloves
were inserted into the questioning a variable number of times, either zero,
once or thrice. Later, participants were asked if items, such as the boy wear-
ing gloves, were present in the video. When an item didn’t appear in the
questions at all, misattribution (i.e. those saying it was in the video) was at
10%. Meanwhile, 37% of the items mentioned once were wrongly thought
to have been in the video, compared to 56% when an item was mentioned
three times.
As Goebbels actually didn’t say (ironically), ‘Any lie told often enough
becomes the truth.’
Ultimately, the point is that repetition is key for memory. I’ll say it again: rep-
etition is key for memory.
When crafting messages that stick, it is important to make sure the message
is repeated as much as possible, and to make sure that they key points within
the message are repeated – for example, via the rhetorical rule of three used so
effectively by Tony Blair.
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PRIMACY AND RECENCY
Stimuli placed at the beginning and end of an experience are most likely to be
remembered.
This principle is known as ‘the primacy and recency effect’.
To take an example, one study gave people twelve lists containing six words
each, and, after each list, participants were asked to recall as many of the six
words as they could. As can be seen in the data below, there is a recall benefit
to being placed at the end of the list, and even more so at the beginning.14
Effect of position on recall

100%
80%
Recall probability
60%
40%
20%
0%
1 2 3 4 5 6
Location in word list
The primacy effect is believed to occur because people have more time
to absorb and rehearse the stimuli at the beginning than those which come
after; and they are better able to remember these before the following stimuli
becomes overwhelming and depletes their cognitive resources which would be
used to process and remember the rest of the stimuli. Meanwhile, the recency
effect is believed to occur because the last stimuli are still available in short-
term memory after the list. This does however mean that the recency effect
may not persist over time – that is to say, it’s often short lived.
In a great example of this point, and of applying the primacy principle to
message stickiness, social psychology pioneer Solomon Asch wrote two
descriptions of a person, which were identical in the traits they described,
except that the traits were in the reverse order.15 One group read about a chap
whose traits were described in order as intelligence, industry, impulsiveness,
criticism, stubbornness, and envy; the other group read a description with the
traits in the reverse order.
Among those who read the traits from intelligence to envy, 32% rated the
person as happy, 74% as good-looking and 64% as restrained, among other
things. Among those who read the traits in the opposite direction, 5% rated the
person as happy, 35% as good-looking and 9% as restrained.
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It seems that the perception of a message’s content can be heavily influ-
enced by what comes first!
However, there is in fact additional research supporting the existence of a
long-term recency effect – such as the peak-end rule, which will be discussed
next.
As well as carefully placing key content within a message, this principle can
also be used when deciding where the message itself should sit: the first Tweet
of a conference will probably be remembered better than all those which follow
it during the day. As an illustration, research on radio ads found that 14% of
people could correctly recognise an advert when it was played in a small block
of one or two ads, but only 4% could when it was played in the middle of a
large block of nine ads.16
This principle can be used to make messages stickier by placing the mes-
sage at the beginning or end of an experience (for example, presenting a pitch
at the beginning or end of a day’s workshop, rather than in the middle). Fur-
thermore, the principle can be used within messages, by making sure that the
most important points are placed at the beginning or end of the communique;
likewise, put the most important information at the start of sentences, slogans,
headers and so on, rather than the middle.
To recap: stimuli placed at the beginning and end of an experience are the
most likely to be remembered.
PEAK–END RULE
The final memory principle to consider here is ‘the peak–end rule’, which posits
that both the end of an experience and its emotional peak will define how it is
remembered.17
Celebrated behavioural scientist Daniel Kahneman co-authored some
papers looking at the sexy world of colonoscopies. One of the papers found
that patients’ ratings of procedure discomfort were positively predicted
by two factors: the maximum (peak) amount of pain the patients felt dur-
ing the procedure; and the pain they felt in the final (end) moments of the
procedure.18
Similar to the recency effect, the peak–end rule partly argues that people
remember the end of an experience. Another of Kahneman’s bum-camera
studies randomly split patients into two groups: those who underwent the
usual colonoscopy procedure; and those who underwent the normal proce-
dure, but with the tube left in place for an additional three minutes in a way
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that was uncomfortable, but not painful.19 The patients in the latter group retro-
spectively rated the experience as less unpleasant on the whole (so to speak),
and they were more likely to return for further procedures; this is ostensibly
because the end of the experience was less painful, despite the total proce-
dure being prolonged.
Likewise, asked to do one of the following again, people would rather
leave their hand in 14°C cold water for one minute followed by 15°C water for
another than leave it in 14°C water for one minute only.20 Of course, this is
completely irrational – but the first condition was favoured because the end
memory of the experience was less painful with the moderately cold water than
the freezing water.
Interestingly, there is evidence indicating that people’s voting behaviours are
based on the actions of political parties in the election year rather than a com-
prehensive retrospective assessment – in other words, the most recent, or end-
most, experience with politicians is what sways us.21
In terms of memory for the emotional peak of an event, we have already dis-
cussed at length why emotional things are well-remembered. A nice illustration
comes from research on holidays: specifically, people’s memories of holidays
are primarily influenced by the most surprising or memorable day. We always
look back on our holidays with fondness, generally forgetting the tedious plane
rides, family arguments and spot of food poisoning.
When it comes to messages, then, it’s important to make sure your key
points aren’t forgotten in favour or something more emotional or exciting in the
message – and likewise, that the message itself isn’t overwhelmed by more
emotional surrounding stimuli. For example, a recent paper looked at the effec-
tiveness of adverts sandwiched in between violent or sexual TV content.22 As
you can see, adverts are better remembered if they are surrounded by dull
content.
Effect of surrounding programme content on memory for ads

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
Immediate brand recognition Brand recognition after 24h
Neutral programme Violent programme Sexual programme
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So get remembered – it’s important! Make sure your messages are hooked
in people’s minds by using repetition (particularly by repeating certain elements
while refreshing others), by positioning your messages at the start or end of an
experience, and by making sure your messages are the emotional high-point of
an experience.
And remember: repetition is key for memory!
SUMMARY
Memory
Do
✓ Recognise that memory plays a hugely vital part in influencing

behaviour; ‘getting in people’s heads’ is more important than
influencing attitudes.
✓ Use emotion, personalisation, surprise, and so on to make messages

more memorable.
✓ Make use of repetition, repetition, repetition – both for the message at

a macro level and also within the message itself.
✓ Make sure the message (or, within the message, its key point) is the
emotional peak.
Don’t
✗ Forget (!) that people are exposed to countless messages each day,
and that only a select few stick in memory.
✗ Be inconsistent in repeated messaging.
✗ Put messages in the middle of a context (or put the key points within
the middle of the message itself); instead, use the beginning and the
end.
✗ Make sure messages aren’t crowded out by extreme emotions.
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11 AUTOPILOT
I recently conducted an experiment with Webs of Influence author Nathalie
Nahai, where we asked people to read a scenario and rate how likely they
would be to behave in a certain way.1 Imagine, for example . . .
“
You are in a different country for one evening on a business trip. For dinner, you
can order something simple at the hotel, but you are thinking of going out to a
restaurant. You are visiting a fairly small town in a developing country with a
poor reputation for food hygiene. Having walked around for 20 minutes, you are
thinking of giving up – but you then find two places where the food looks good.
A. One of the restaurants is empty. You decide to look the restaurant up on an
app on your smartphone, but you can’t find any reviews.
B. The other restaurant is extremely busy and there is a queue of people waiting
at the door. You decide to look the restaurant up on an app on your smartphone,
and you see that hundreds of people have visited the place and left reviews.
Which restaurant would you choose?
Source: © Chris Howes/Wild Places Photography/Alamy Stock Photo
123
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Source: © Krsmanovic
Almost certainly you will have plumped for the second one. Our experiment
found the same. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of two restaurants,
and then rated on a scale of one to five how likely they would be to eat there.
People were a third more likely to eat at the restaurant if it was popular.
This is one of the most popular examples of a heuristic (i.e. a rule-of-thumb
run on autopilot) – whether you would choose a busy, noisy restaurant to eat
your dinner, or an empty, quiet one. Nearly everybody chooses the busy res-
taurant straight away: the thinking is ostensibly that if the restaurant is busy,
the food must be good.
That is precisely what a heuristic is – a shortcut, or rule-of-thumb, that is
used without thinking to make quick decisions that work. The vast majority of
the time, the busy restaurant will be better and safer than the quiet restaurant;
using the number of people as an instant shorthand is much quicker and easier
than, for example, consciously and deliberatively reading the menu, looking for
the restaurant’s Food Standards Agency certificate, and looking at how clean
the place is inside.
Remember, we have very limited brainpower to spend on decisions: for
example, the best estimate (although it is still a crude estimate) is that we only
process 0.0004% of sensory information consciously.2 At the same time, there
is a huge amount of complexity in the world: we are faced with over 200 deci-
sions a day for food alone.3
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We use heuristics in order to cope with all of this information and all of
these decisions that need to be made, without having to expend limited time
and energy. There is a strong evolutionary bent to heuristics, as shown by their
existence in primates4 – and even honeybees.5
There is a fascinating implication to heuristics being innately hardwired: it is
very difficult, if not impossible, to ‘outsmart’ heuristics. In the same way that an
optical illusion cannot be unseen, the effect of a heuristic cannot be avoided.
One paper reports how students at a top university in the States were given
a 90-minute lecture on the bowl-size effect, where people eat more food from
bigger bowls.6 Six weeks later, they were invited to a Super Bowl party, where
they were invited to help themselves to Chex Mix to nibble on while they
watched the game. The Chex Mix was served from either two one-gallon bowls
or four half-gallon bowls. Those who took Chex Mix from the larger bowls ate
59% more of the snack by the end of the party.
Other experiments have found that, even if people are warned specifically
about a particular cognitive bias, the bias still occurs in subsequent tests!7
Since Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky ignited interest in heuristics in
the 1970s,8 and especially since Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge entered the
global consciousness,9 the wealth of information on using heuristics to influ-
ence people has exploded. There have now been dozens and dozens of heu-
ristics identified in research; however, the most appropriate framework for
message stickiness is ostensibly Robert Cialdini’s landmark book Influence,10
which proposed six principles for persuasion: scarcity, authority, social proof,
reciprocity, liking, and commitment and consistency.
SCARCITY
I’m going to tell you a secret (gents, don’t tell your missus): diamonds are
intrinsically worthless.
If you don’t believe me, listen to what former chairman of De Beers dia-
mond company, Nicky Oppenheimer, had to say:11 ‘Diamonds are intrinsically
worthless . . .’ (see http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/the-gem-trail-
diamonds-from-angolan-mine-to-third-finger-left-hand-1070530.html)
The truth is that De Beers, after essentially forming a diamond monopoly,
restricted global supply of the jewels,12 with the effect that the value of dia-
monds, and thus prices, rose significantly (see McConnell, C. R., and Brue,
S. L. (2005). Economics: Principles, Problems, and Policies (pp. 456)). This hap-
pened because we are hardwired to want something more if it is scarce.
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On the one hand, we value scarce things more because owning them trans-
fers qualities of uniqueness and individuality to the owner,13 and indicates
that the owner has wealth and prestige.14 On a much more fundamental level
than that, however, there is a strong evolutionary component to valuing scarce
goods, namely that it drives us to stockpile things that need to be stockpiled.
Research has shown, for example, that signals of food scarcity cause animals
to value food more and be more competitive with one another over it;15 simi-
larly, researchers have demonstrated a clear relationship between countries’
and regions’ levels of deprivation and their rates of violent behaviour.16
For one experiment, researchers invited their participants to sit down and
sample the goods placed in front of them – namely a pack of cigars, a can of
mints, and a glass jar of cookies – having been told that only a small number of
people were participating overall.17 Then, the participants rated each item on sev-
eral dimensions. Except, the twist is that the cookie jar was randomly assigned to
contain either two or ten cookies. The participants’ ratings of liking and attraction,
standardised to a percentage, and their estimates of the cookies cost per pound,
are shown in the chart below: all three are increased by perceived scarcity.
Effect of scarcity on perceptions of cookie quality

0.6 $0.60
0.5 $0.50
0.4 $0.40
0.3 $0.30
0.2 $0.20
Liking Attraction Cost (per lb)
2 Cookies 10 Cookies
In terms of making messages sticky, using scarcity to increase the per-

ceived urgency or value of a message’s desired behaviour can enhance the
likelihood of it being carried out.
txt2stop was a mobile-based smoking cessation programme which used
behavioural science ‘nudges’, sent via text message, to help people stop
smoking; an experiment showed that abstinence after six months was signifi-
cantly higher among people who participated in the programme than among
controls.18 But how could you get people to participate?
People were initially invited to register their interest in txt2stop by texting a
number found in adverts, GP surgeries, and so on; after doing so, these people
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are given information on the programme and then invited to consent to take
part. In June 2009, txt2stop had a database of almost 2,000 people who had
shown interest but had not followed up by consent to participate. Half of these
potential users were sent a text message reminding them that they could text
back to consent to join: 6.9% of them consented.19
The other half, however, were sent the same message with the following
addition: ‘Join txt2stop – only 300 places left!’
10.1% consented – or 1.5 times as many in the control group, a significant
difference.
(As a side note, with this principle, and others, it’s important to be cognisant
of local law – and ethical considerations. When using a scarcity claim for the
number of places left on a course, for example, you may need to make sure the
course places are actually restricted. The Competition and Marketing Author-
ity in the UK has been cracking down on sneaky psychological influences like
this.20 It’s fine to nudge, but be lawful and ethical.)
EXERCISE
Reframing with scarcity

Rewrite the following sentence, or add to it, in order to use scarcity to
make it more persuasive:
Sandals now on sale for half price.
SOCIAL PROOF
If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? Actually, you very
well might do.
Imagine you’re walking down the street, and you notice a group of people
standing there staring up at the sky; there doesn’t seem to be anything there
but a lot of people are looking. Would you stop to look?
Influential social psychologist Stanley Milgram published a paper in 1969
looking at this very thing.21 Milgram corralled a group of researchers onto a
New York street and had them nonchalantly mingle with the passing pedes-
trians; at a given, discreet signal, the group stood together and stared for a
minute at a building’s sixth-floor window – where nothing was actually happen-
ing. During this time the street was filmed, so that a pair of judges could count
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how many of the total 1,424 passers-by stopped and how many looked up at
the window.
The key to the study was that groups of different sizes were tested. When
one man alone was looking up, only 4% of people stopped – but with a group
of 15, this rose to 40% of people.
Effect of group size on joining in

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Stopping Looking
Source: Adapted from Milgram, S., Bickman, L. and Berkowitz, L. (1969). ‘An note on the drawing
power of crowds of different size’, Journal of Personality and Psychology, 13 (2), 78–82.
This is the social proof heuristic – the rule-of-thumb which says, ‘If everyone
else is doing it, it must be good.’
This is why, to give an example, you rarely see discarded newspapers
on their own around London Underground: instead, they seem to gather
together in certain places, like the bottom of the escalator. In fact, a study
was c o-authored by Cialdini in which unknowing participants were discretely
observed as they returned to their car, where researchers had placed a leaflet
on their windshield for half of the participants, a person walked past at that time
and picked up a piece of litter, while for the other half, the person walked past
but didn’t pick anything up. In the latter instance, 39% of people dropped the
leaflet on the floor; however, when the social norm of environmental responsibil-
ity was activated by a person picking up a piece of rubbish, only 18% littered.22
Social proof is adaptive. Not only does it aid social interactions and hierar-
chies, but it provides an instant barometer of what is good and safe to do: if
everybody eats the red berries, I can eat the red berries; if everyone avoids the
dark cave, I would do well to avoid it; and if everyone is running in the opposite
direction, I should probably run too.
For communications, social proof helps to make messages sticky by implic-
itly encouraging audiences that the target behaviour is the correct course of
action to take.
Imagine, for example, that you own a public radio station that depends on
fundraising to keep afloat. During an on-air fund drive, the DJ will play clips
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appealing for donations in between the pop songs and the witty banter. When
listeners phone in, one of the production staff answers with the following pre-
pared message: ‘Hello, CPN member line. Are you a new member or a renew-
ing member of CPN? How much would you like to pledge today?’
Researchers found that the addition of just seven words to this script
increased donations by 12%, with the average donation rising from $106.72 to
$119.70. What do you think these seven words might have been?23
‘We had another member, they contributed $300.’
Or imagine that you work at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and you
want to make sure everyone pays their taxes on time. If you want to increase
the proportion filing their tax return on time, what single sentence might you
add to the letters reminding people to do so?24
“9 out of 10 people in __________ pay their tax on time”

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
No sentence Recipient's Recipient's Recipient's
country town postcode
EXERCISE
Reframing with social proof

Rewrite the following sentence, or add to it, in order to use social proof
to make it more persuasive:
Come to Bognor Regis and enjoy the sunshine this Easter.
AUTHORITY
Stanley Milgram conducted another seminal experiment – you may be famil-
iar with it.25 Forty men participated in what they thought was a test of learn-
ing and memory: each was told to take the role of a ‘teacher’ while another
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participant, unseen and communicating over intercom, was to be the ‘learner’.
Adhering to the instructions of a researcher in a lab coat, the ‘teacher’ read out
questions to test the memory of the ‘learner’; if an answer was incorrect, the
‘teacher’ administered an electric shock. The first shock was 15v, and subse-
quent shocks increased by 15v each time.
Actually, the ‘learner’ was an actor who wasn’t being shocked and who
had rehearsed his reactions: 75v shocks (and up) elicited a grunt; from 120v to
345v, responses increased in intensity from complaints, to screams, to hysteri-
cally demanding to stop; he was silent from 345v onwards.
Milgram counted how many participants continued up to the highest shock
possible, 450v, despite the person’s screams and eerie silence (for reference,
100v can be fatal35): 65% did so.
Later, Milgram repeated this experiment with a twist: the researcher instruct-
ing the participants was not wearing a white lab coat, and the experiment was
held in a run-down office rather than a university. In this context, fewer people
(48%) administered the full 450v.
The conclusion is that we often instinctively obey authority figures. The
white lab coat and the university setting acted as signals of legitimacy and
authority, which increased compliance with what was clearly an abhorrent
request.
Authority is the rule-of-thumb which says, ‘If an expert has told me, it must
be true’.
Since Milgram’s studies, a lot of research has shown how authority sig-
nals can influence social compliance. One experiment featured: a blue-
collar worker who was unshaven and wearing dirty old work clothes and
a baseball hat; a businessman who was clean shaven with a suit and tie;
or a fireman who wore, among other things, a blue shirt with a fire depart-
ment patch on the sleeve.26 The three types of men approached people on
a street in Salt Lake City, pointed at another actor, and demanded, ‘This
fellow is over-parked at the meter but doesn’t have any change. Give him
a dime!’
44% of people complied with the blue-collar worker, and 50% with the busi-
nessman. However, an enormous 82% complied with the fireman, suggesting
that a uniform is more persuasive than signals of high social status.
But what does this mean for messages?
Firstly, the perceived authority of a message’s sender has a profound effect
on persuasiveness. In fact, a meta-analysis found credibility to be the most
important source characteristic for persuasion.27 A single expert’s publication
in The New York Times,28 or broadcast on national TV,29 can change public
opinion on policy issues by up to 4%.
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Ergo, subtle cues like title and profession can be used in messages to make
them more effective. For example, mothers bringing their child to a school psy-
chologist for a test were informed of a relevant book on child development;
when the psychologist introduced himself as ‘Mr’, none of the parents sent off
for the book, but 17% did so when he introduced himself as a doctor.30 Simi-
larly, sending off to receive a free booklet on dental care was influenced by the
job title of the person suggesting it:31
Effect of job title on return rates

60%
40%
20%
0%
Dentist Dental assistant Secretary
If, however, as a sender you are personally lacking in authority, it’s always
possible to borrow some from someone else. One experiment discovered
that accompanying a picture of an object with a picture of a relevant celebrity
expert – such as a sports shoe with Andre Agassi – increased favourable atti-
tudes towards the object by 12% and recognition memory by 10%.32
Furthermore, persuasiveness can be increased through authoritative com-
municating. For example, a salesperson trying to sell a cleaning device for
an eight-track tape player (it was the 1970s . . .) was successful 22% of the
time when their spiel included, ‘Here is a thing we have on special that they
tell me will keep your tape player clean,’ and 67% of the time when it included
‘Here is a device we have on special that will clean the dirt and tape oxide from
the guides, the head, and especially the drive wheels of your tape player.’33
Though making messages authoritative can be more subtle than this. A
study used real court transcripts to simulate a witness being questioned, in
which the witness’ language made them out to be either powerful or power-
less.34 Powerful speech contained more intensifiers (e.g. ‘definitely’), hedges
(e.g. ‘kind of’), questions, gestures, uses of ‘sir’, and dropped consonants (e.g.
‘jus’ now’), and fewer one-word answers. Participant ratings showed that wit-
nesses using powerful language were rated as more credible; and a different
paper found the same thing for ads.35
In the end, adding authority to your message can increase compliance by
making the request appear to be the sensible thing to do – even if that request
is to murder with electricity!
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EXERCISE
Reframing with authority

Rewrite the following sentence, or add to it, in order to use authority to
Toast on jam tastes better with Lurpak butter.
RECIPROCITY
Think back to last Christmas. Did you receive any presents which ended up
in the cupboard, down the charity shop, in the bin, or rewrapped for someone
else? Perhaps a pair of goofy Simpsons socks, a head-massager, or cheap
perfume?
To put it kindly, we tend to buy a lot of pointless, worthless tat at Christ-
mas. A popular gift of recent years has been ‘The Useless Box’ – a nondescript
black box with a single switch, which, when pushed on, activates a robotic arm
which pops out of the box and pushes the switch back off.
These gifts might seem fun and harmless, but the situation goes from ‘ho,
ho, ho’ to ‘bah humbug’ when we actually look at the figures: one report esti-
mated that Brits waste over £2 billion on unwanted Christmas gifts every year.36
So why do we act so irrationally at Christmas? Why do we buy presents that
we know people don’t want?
To answer this, we need to first turn to a Christmas-themed experiment
published in 1976.37 Sociologists Phillip Kunz and Michael Woolcott bought
almost 600 Christmas cards and sent them to inhabitants of Midwestern Amer-
ica selected at random from Polk Directories. To emphasise, these recipients
were chosen completely at random and had no relation to the researcher who
signed and sent the card.
One in five people sent a Christmas card back.
The principle at play here is reciprocity – a deeply hardwired heuristic which
says, ‘If somebody has helped me, I will help them in return.’
Reciprocity is a powerful motivator because it’s so key to who we are as a
species. Humans are very social animals who have evolved to live in groups
and survive by cooperating with one another; if all (or most) of a group’s mem-
bers were freeloaders, taking from the group without giving back, the social
group could not function.38
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As with other principles, the innate nature of reciprocity is demonstrated by
its existence in our primate relatives. Researchers conducted a meta-analysis
of social grooming among primates and found that reciprocity explained 20%
of why monkeys groom, while familial relatedness explained only 3%.39 To put
it another way, when it comes to primate nit-picking, ‘I’ll scratch your back if
you scratch mine’ is more important than ‘being a monkey’s uncle’.
In fact, reciprocity is so hardwired that it’s even practiced by a species of
dance fly known as Rhamphomyia sulcata.40 In their experiment, researchers
at the University of St Andrews intercepted some male fruit flies and replaced
the food they were carrying with a piece of cotton. The male flies were using
the food as a form of gift-exchange with females: they would offer the food and
get some hot fly-on-fly action in return. But interestingly, the flies copulated
for the same amount of time even if the gift was the inedible fluff; it was the
gift exchange, not the gift itself, which was important and resulted in reciprocal
copulation.
Incidentally, 88% of men buy their partner gifts for Valentine’s Day,41 and
the most popular gifts include plush toys, chocolates, cards and flowers 42
(worthless fluff, then); and a quarter of men explicitly expect a bit of you-know-
what in exchange for their gift.43 Fortunately for them, one study found that
women rated a higher likelihood of giving their number to a man, going on a
date with him, and having sex with him, if he bought her a drink.44
More generally though, many, many papers have been published demon-
strating the power of reciprocity on compliance. To give one example, one
such paper describes a study in which a participant is seated in a room with
another participant (who is actually a stooge) to complete a survey.45 At one
point the stooge left the room to visit a vending machine, and returned with
two Coca-Colas – one for himself, and one as a gift for the participant. After
the surveys were finished, the stooge asked the participant for a favour: he had
to rush somewhere now, but he also had to deliver this important letter to the
Controller’s Office within the next 20 minutes; the office is only five minutes
away, so perhaps the participant wouldn’t mind taking it for him?
The soda gift increased compliance from 66% to a massive 94%.
In terms of communication, the insight is clear: give people a gift and they’ll
be more likely to comply with the message’s request.
For example, the likelihood that a person will fill out and return a survey has
been found to be increased from 10% to 30% by giving him or her a free bottle
of water;46 and research suggests that people will be 50% more likely to help
with answering a survey if a $1 bill is included.47
Reciprocity doesn’t have to be costly, though. An online study, for example,
found that website visitors were more likely to give away their contact details if
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the website gave them a free download beforehand;48 and research on tipping
in service industries has found that tips can be increased through reciprocity
using gifts as simple as a puzzle,49 a compliment50 or a drawing of a smiley
face.51
Ultimately, we feel a strong urge to repay social debts, no matter how small,
and this can be a powerful technique for message stickiness.
EXERCISE
Reframing with reciprocity

Rewrite the following sentence, or add to it, in order to use reciprocity to
Your local authority needs your help volunteering to help the elderly.
LIKING
One sunny June evening in 1994, a nondescript white Ford Bronco was cruis-
ing through the streets of Los Angeles at a leisurely 35 miles per hour. Several
police cars trailed behind with their sirens blaring, as news helicopters thun-
dered above. This was of course OJ Simpson’s nationally televised slow-speed
chase before his trial for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend
Ronald Goldman.
To state some facts of the case (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
O.J.Simpson_murder_case):52 Simpson owned a pair of gloves holding his
DNA, with one of the pair being found at the crime scene and the other testing
positive for Goldman’s blood and being found in a bush on Simpson’s estate,
near where a house guest reported hearing movements around the time of the
murder; before his car chase, Simpson wrote what was most likely a suicide
letter, signing off, ‘Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve had a great life, great friends.
Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person’.
Whatever did happen that day, one would infer that the evidence, rightly or
wrongly, would be against Simpson and that he would be found guilty; yet, he
was acquitted. Why?
In 1920, noted psychologist Edward Thorndike published a paper in which
he first coined the term ‘the halo effect’ to refer to his finding that percep-
tions of individuals’ different traits were strongly connected.53 Thorndike asked
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military officers to rate their subordinate soldiers on a range of physical, cog-
nitive and personal traits, and he showed that the ratings were strongly and
positively correlated. For example, ratings of physique correlated with those
of intellect at 0.31, leadership at 0.39 and character at 0.28. The halo effect
essentially posits that a person viewed favourably in one sense is likely to have
a halo around them, in that they are also viewed favourably in most every other
sense.
In other words, if a person is rich, famous and beautiful, they are more likely
to be perceived as trustworthy, honest and innocent. Indeed, there is research
showing that attractive criminal defendants are more likely to be found not
guilty and receive lighter punishments.54
In fact, attractive people have it very easy in life. The most attractive people
enjoy an earnings premium of 5%, while the homeliest people suffer from an
earnings penalty of 7–9%, for instance;55 attractive people are more likely to be
successful in job interviews as well.56 In fact, beautiful people are just happier57
and healthier58 in general.
Similarly, with respect to compliance, a study on charitable giving found that
blondes have more funds – that is, brunette women fundraisers raised an aver-
age of $1.31 from the passers-by they interacted with, while blondes raised an
average of $2.42.59
Liking is not all about attractiveness, though. For instance, when an experi-
menter in one study mimicked the body language of the subject, the subject
was 36% more likely to help pick up pens which were ‘dropped’, and 34%
more likely to donate to the experimenter’s charity.60 Other studies have found
that people are more likely to give someone a dime for the phone box if the two
are dressed similarly,61 and that people are 22% more likely to agree to read
someone’s eight-page essay and write a page of feedback on it if the two have
simply small-talked for two minutes!62
Overall, the essence of the liking heuristic is ‘If I like it, or if it’s good, it must
be good’. That is, if a message or its sender are attractive, similar, familiar, or
otherwise positively evaluated, it is more likely to be persuasive.
Imagine, for example, that you have a survey you would like people to fill
in – oh, and, the survey is eight pages long and comprises 150 questions.
What might you do to make people more likely to complete it?
Professor of Behavioural Sciences Randy Garner was faced with this very
problem.63 Some of the intended recipients of the survey were simply given an
envelope stuffed with the questionnaire; while others were given the envelope
with a Post-it note on top containing the handwritten message ‘Please take a
few minutes to complete this for us’, with the personalised message ostensibly
being a nice route to liking.
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A third group, however, received the same Post-it note message, but
signed, ‘Thank you! R.G.’
Effect of personalisation on survey completion

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
No note Post-it Signed Post-it
As can be seen in the chart, a more likeable message resulted in signifi-

cantly higher compliance. Similarly, the South African payday loan paper men-
tioned earlier in this book found that, for male recipients of the letters, including
a picture of a smiling woman increased loan take-up to the same degree as
slashing the loan’s interest rate by 4.5%;64 and the click-through rates for char-
ity emails were increased in one study from 4% to 22% simply by having the
email sender’s first name match that of the recipient.65
In sum, the efficacy of a message can be enhanced by making the mes-
sage, its content or its sender more likeable.
EXERCISE
Reframing with liking

Rewrite the following sentence, or add to it, in order to use liking to
A vote for David Cameron is a vote for a Great Britain.
COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY

In May 2010, Conservative Party leader David Cameron formed a coalition gov-
ernment with the Liberal Democrats, headed by Nick Clegg. The Liberal Demo-
crats won 23% of the vote in the general election, which, for the third party in
a two-party system, was rather impressive, considering Labour won 29% of
the vote.66
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Overall, Nick Clegg was a funky, likeable guy who stood up for issues peo-
ple cared about – for instance, he pledged that, should his party get into Gov-
ernment, they would abolish university tuition fees 67 (see http://news.bbc.
co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8421092.stm).
When his party got into Government, they tripled tuition fees68 (see http://
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11803719).
While the Liberal Democrats won 24% of the vote in May 2010, this fell by a
factor of three (ironically) to 8% of the vote in May 2015.69
People hate inconsistency. Psychological research has shown, for example,
that people will feel giddy with schadenfreude if they catch someone doing an
immoral act which that person had previously criticised others for doing.70 As
social animals we feel a strong urge to be seen to be consistent and reliable.
More than that, however, a principle called ‘cognitive dissonance’ is at play.
Social psychologist Leon Festinger proposed cognitive dissonance as the
unpleasant sense of tension or dissatisfaction created internally when two con-
trasting points are held to be true – and this internal discord works as a motiva-
tor to act in a way as to resolve the tension.71
For example, one experiment presented students with ten scenarios where
people had cheated, such as secretly copying answers from a book during a
test, and asked them to rate how severely the cheater should be punished.72
Then, the students completed some tests – but some of them had the oppor-
tunity to cheat by, for example, marking their own answers. Afterwards, they
completed another survey of attitudes towards cheating. Those who had
cheated in the test subsequently had lower perceptions of punishment severity
for cheaters. In this case, the cheaters’ previous attitudes, that cheating should
be punished severely, were inconsistent with their behaviours, that is, cheating;
as a result, their attitudes had to change in order to match their actions and
restore internal harmony.
The takeaway is that it is important for people to maintain a coherent sense
of self and identity, and therefore they will act in a way that is consistent with
their beliefs, behaviours and prior commitments. This is the ‘commitment and
consistency’ heuristic: ‘If I have committed to something, or it is consistent
with who I am, I will do it.’
Therefore, messages’ stickiness can be enhanced by either inferring that the
message’s desired action is consistent with the audience’s identity, or by get-
ting the audience to commit to the message’s desired action in some way.
On the first point, one study found that, when people received manipu-
lated feedback that they were the type of person who made environmentally
friendly purchase decisions, they were consequently more likely to choose the
more environmental product out of a choice of two.73 Therefore, a message
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can encourage people to behave a certain way by implying that it is how they
would normally behave.
On the second point, a piece of research in the States had Boy Scouts
travel from door to door as part of a recycling awareness campaign.74 In order
to induce a commitment, some of the households were given an ‘I Recycle to
Win the War on Waste’ sticker, and asked to sign a pledge on a piece of card
that read, ‘I, ________, pledge support for Claremont’s Recycling Program. I will
help win the war on waste!’
Every week for the following six weeks, a researcher noted for each house-
hold whether they had placed their recyclables at the front of their house.
Among those in the control group, who didn’t make a commitment to recycling,
11% began recycling in the six-week period. However, 42% of those who had
made a commitment were ultimately recognised as recyclers.
The perception of commitment can also be artificially engineered. Two Ameri-
can researchers collaborated with a car wash in a major conurbation, where 300
customers were given a loyalty card that allowed them to enjoy a free car wash
if they collected enough stamps.75 Half of these customers were given a loyalty
card requiring eight stamps to be filled in; the other half were given a loyalty
card requiring ten stamps, but the first two had already been filled in, meaning
that, again, only eight were actually needed. The second type of card, however,
induced feelings of commitment by suggesting that 20% of the card had already
been completed; as can be seen below, this was significantly more effective.
Effect of artifical commitment on redeeming a free car wash

50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Eight stamps Ten stamps with two
already completed
A powerful technique that uses both commitment and consistency is some-

thing known as ‘the foot-in-the-door technique’, where people are more likely
to agree to a large request if they agreed to a smaller one beforehand: for
instance, people are more inclined to host a charitable cause’s big, ugly sign
on their lawn if they had previously agreed to take a small bumper sticker.76
Similarly, survey completion rates are higher for people who are called before
being sent the survey.77
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Finally, another wonderful, but somewhat sneaky, principle is ‘the mere
agreement effect’, where simply having people agree to a series of unrelated
questions (i.e. ‘Yes, yes, yes . . .’) makes them significantly more likely to
agree to a subsequent request for, say, a donation.78 Therefore, people can be
encouraged to act a certain way by having them just say, ‘Yes’, to preceding –
even unrelated – questions.
In the end, if you want your audience to be more likely to act as a message
intended, a useful tool can be to imply that acting in this way is in line with the
audience’s prior beliefs or behaviours.
EXERCISE
Reframing with commitment and consistency

Rewrite the following sentence, or add to it, in order to use commitment
and consistency to make it more persuasive:
We are hosting a BBQ this weekend and would like you to come.
SUMMARY
Autopilot
Do
✓ Realise that most decisions are made on the basis of quick shortcuts.
✓ Use an intelligent understanding of heuristics to ‘nudge’ the

behaviour of message recipients.
✓ Use scarcity signals to make a desired behaviour seem more urgent.
✓ Be liked, whether this is through attractiveness or similarity.
✓ Ask recipients to commit, or signal that they have committed, so they

are more likely to act in a way that is consistent with the commitment.
✓ Give small (or even free) gifts to recipients.

▲
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✓ Use authority signals to make messages seem more credible and
proper.
✓ Imply that everyone else is doing the behaviour you wish your
recipients to do.
Don’t
✗ Think that people can ‘outsmart’ heuristics: they are just like optical
illusions which cannot be ‘unseen’.
✗ Be unlawful or unethical in your use of influence tactics.
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12 PRIMING
There is a significant proportion of the population who have rather large
suspicions that Disney is trying to sneak subliminal messages about sex
into their children’s movies – if it’s anything to go by, the video ‘D isney
Subliminal Messages’ (uploaded by TheKilluminati786, no less) has, as
of writing, almost 1.7 million views 1 (see https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=meHsuA0b1uE).
The topic has received so much attention that even major media agencies
have addressed it,2 finding that Disney has a rational explanation for every
thing (although, I suppose they would . . .): no, the magic dust in The Lion
King doesn’t spell ‘SEX’, it spells ‘SFX’; no, the bishop in The Little Mermaid
doesn’t have an erection, it’s just his knees; but yes, Jessica Rabbit was with-
out underwear for a few frames in Who Killed Roger Rabbit?.
This is perhaps more of an indication of our hardwired tendency to look
for patterns than any real sex-kitten mind-programming global conspiracy
(perhaps), but it does raise an interesting point about the general public’s fear
of corporate subliminal manipulation. One survey, for example, found that 62%
of respondents believed that advertisers were using subliminal manipulation on
them.3
In 1957, a private market researcher named James Vicary caused outrage
when he claimed to have increased a cinema’s popcorn sales by over 50%,
and its Coca-Cola sales by 18%, by subliminally flashing messages such as
‘Eat Popcorn’ throughout the cinema’s films.4 The study was cited in Packard’s
The Hidden Persuaders – a book which, at the height of the Cold War, claimed
that consumers were powerless to marketers’ nefarious techniques.5 The idea
that consumers could be so easily controlled and manipulated has proved
abhorrent to a society which believes in free will and personal responsibility –
so much so, that subliminal advertising was banned in countries like the UK
and the US.
However, subsequent research has found that Vicary’s study appears to
have been a hoax for publicity; the experiment he claimed to have conducted
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has never been successfully replicated and subliminal advertising’s effects
have been found to be weak.6
So, is subliminal mind control possible? Are we living in an Orwellian dysto-
pia, or is it all a load of old nonsense?
Well, there is some experimental evidence in favour of Vicary’s ‘Eat Pop-
corn’ claim to at least some degree. Researchers from Lancaster University
got 112 children aged between 6 and 12 to sit down at school and watch
a bit of TV: specifically, they were shown a two-minute clip from the chil-
dren’s classic Home Alone.7 Afterwards, the children were randomly taken
one-by-one into a room separate from the classroom, where the researcher
asked them a few simple questions. Before the questioning though,
the children were each offered a free drink of their choice between Coke
and Pepsi.
Half of the children watched a segment from Home Alone in which the fam-
ily was shown eating dinner, with Pepsi featuring quite heavily; the other half
saw a clip which was similar in theme and content, but featured milk instead
of Pepsi. 42% of the children who saw the milk clip chose Pepsi over Coke,
whereas, among the viewers of the Pepsi clip, 62% chose Pepsi. Interestingly,
whether or not the children could recall having seen Pepsi did not affect their
choice.
Exposure to a Pepsi stimulus did in fact increase the consumption of Pepsi,
giving credence to Vicary’s assertion that ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ would increase
Coca-Cola sales.
Another experiment addressed Vicary’s claim more explicitly. In ‘Beyond
Vicary’s fantasies: the impact of subliminal priming and brand choice’, Dutch
psychologists asked their participants to complete a timed word task.8 In this
task, subjects were shown a string of nine Bs (i.e. BBBBBBBBB) for 300ms,
several times, except the strings sometimes contained a small B at a random
point (e.g. BBbBBBBBB); subjects had to count how many of the strings con-
tained a small B.
The sneaky part is that some words were flashed for just 23ms – that is,
below conscious perception – before each B-string. For half of the partici-
pants, this non-conscious word stimulus was ‘Lipton Ice’; for others it was
a nonsense phrase using the same letters, like ‘Npeic Tol’. A second key
point is that half of the participants in each of these groups had to chew
on a very salty sweet for a minute before the experiment began, ostensibly
making them thirsty. Finally, participants were asked how likely they would
be to select Lipton Ice over Coca-Cola or Spa Rood if they were offered the
choice.
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The effect of priming on proportion choosing Lipton Ice Tea over competitors
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
Control prime Lipton ice prime
Thirsty Not thirsty
The results, shown in the above chart, tell us two things. Firstly, choosing
Lipton Ice could only be significantly subliminally influenced when participants
were thirsty; the authors concluded that goals cannot be subliminally manipu-
lated, but the solutions to those goals can. This is an important point which will
be addressed later – namely, subliminal persuasion may only work in certain
conditions. The second implication is that there is, again, support for Vicary’s
idea that brand purchases can be subliminally influenced.
Looking at these two studies alone, it is clear that subliminal advertising
may actually work. Specifically, what these studies show is that making some-
thing mentally salient – that is, essentially reminding people of something, or
putting it into their minds – can subsequently influence behaviour. This has
been demonstrated earlier in the book where, for example, seeing orange Hal-
loween decorations makes people more likely to think of orange brands like
Sunkist,9 or seeing chocolates on your work desk makes you more likely to eat
them.10
This principle is known as ‘priming’, which refers to the process wherein
exposure to a stimulus activates that stimulus’ memory node in the brain, and
consequently those memory nodes attached to it. To illustrate, the word ‘prim-
ing’ was first used in its contemporary meaning to explain why people who
were given a list of words to memorise, and then asked to think up a spontane-
ous list of words, tended to include those words they had memorised, indicat-
ing those words were still active in memory from earlier.11
In the diagram below, as a very crude illustration, seeing a chair con-
sequently activates, or ‘primes’, the construct of a chair in memory. To a
lesser extent, this also activates memory nodes connected to the chair
node, such as a table, or the behaviour of sitting down. It might therefore
be hypothesised from this crude example that flashing images of a chair
below conscious awareness could make people more likely to sit down than
stand up.
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Sources: © Baloncici (cushion); © Joe Gough (dinner plate); © Horiyan (table); © DJ Srki (chair); © Joey Chan (stool)
There have been some fantastic papers published demonstrating how

priming can influence behaviour in surprising ways. In perhaps the most well-
known example, social psychologist John Bargh and colleagues instructed
participants to solve 30 scrambled five-word sentences by turning them into
coherent four-word sentences.12 For example, ‘they her send see usually’
becomes ‘they usually see her’. For half of the participants, the sentences were
all relatively neutral; for the other half however, half of the sentences contained
words related to the elderly, like ‘wrinkled’, ‘grey’ and ‘Florida’. Once they were
finished, the participants left – but, sneakily, a researcher used a stopwatch to
time them as they walked away down a 9.75m corridor.
The participants who read words related to the elderly took, on average,
13% longer to walk away!
Another nice example comes from an experiment where participants
answered a general knowledge quiz made up of 42 Trivial Pursuit ques-
tions.13 Some of the participants dived straight into the quiz – others, how-
ever, had to spend five minutes beforehand imagining a typical professor and
writing down all the attributes, appearances and behaviours that came into
their minds, while the remaining third did the same for secretaries. The con-
trol group scored an average of 50%, while those who thought of professors
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scored 60% – something as seemingly unmalleable as crystallised intelligence
appeared to be susceptible to priming.
There are many, many other cool and sexy examples of priming – like, for
example, the finding that seeing Apple’s logo, compared to IBM’s, makes you
better at creative thinking.14 However, there has been a big question mark
hanging over priming research recently. Researchers have failed to replicate
key experiments,15 priming was found to be one of the least reliable of several
psychological principles,16 and a meta-analysis found the size of the effect of
subliminal advertising on choice (r=0.0585) to be about the same as the size of
the effect of aspirin consumption on heart attacks.17
As discussed earlier, part of this may be to do with moderating variables.
Perhaps the largest factor is the difference between subliminal and supralim-
inal priming: the latter involves more careful conscious processing of primes
through, for example, unscrambling sentences or spending five minutes think-
ing about something; subliminal priming, meanwhile, involves incidental or
non-conscious exposure to a stimulus. While supraliminal priming is more likely
to achieve a result18 (since it results in more cognitive processing), it is often
infeasible in the real world.
Having said that, there are many studies which demonstrate that priming
may be usable within messages for driving audience behaviour. For example,
one experiment created a mock e-commerce website selling sofas;19 however,
what visitors to the site didn’t realise was that the site’s background was ran-
domly assigned to be either pennies on green, or clouds on blue. The former
ostensibly primes thoughts of money, while the latter primes quality for sofas
(i.e. comfort). With the clouds, 39% of visitors bought the cheapest sofa, com-
pared to 49% for the pennies.
One last piece of research created an advert for a restaurant comprising a
picture of the venue and a piece of text copy beneath it; then they estimated
how much they would be willing to pay for dinner for two, including drinks and
dessert.20 Half of the participants read the following copy, and estimated they
would be willing to pay $46.45 on average: ‘Enjoy tonight. Say so long to every
thing else.’
However, when ‘so long’ was replaced with ‘goodbye’, this amount jumped
to $56.29, because the homonym ‘buy’ had ostensibly primed them to spend
more money.
Ultimately, a well-placed word, phrase or image in a message can influence
behaviour by priming relevant thoughts, feelings or behaviours: if you want to
create a poster to keep the office kitchen tidy, for example, putting a pair of
eyes on the poster will make people behave more responsibly!21
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EXERCISE
Priming people
You are presenting a PowerPoint deck to a group of potential clients.
Think of a way you can prime them – either supraliminally through, say,
a conscious exercise, or subliminally through, say, a subtly placed pic-
ture – in order to achieve each of the results below.
1 Get them to be more talkative and open

2 Get them to be more generous
3 Get them to be more creative in a group task
SUMMARY
Priming
Do
✓ Know that, contrary to belief, a certain level of subliminal influence is

accessible via particular methods.
✓ Use an intelligent understanding of environmental cues to prime

useful thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
✓ Use supraliminal priming (e.g. reading several words) over subliminal

priming (e.g. quickly seeing a picture) wherever possible, as the
former is stronger.
Don’t
✗ Overestimate the power of priming, as its effects are often weak and
unreliable.
✗ Use the power of subliminal priming for ‘evil’; also, it is important to

be transparent.
✗ Simply throw any messages together ‘willy-nilly’; as we have seen,

the slightest change to a message can have a big effect on behaviour.
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3
PART
PUTTING IT TO USE
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I was once told a great story from the annals of workshop lore. At a workshop
for a major FMCG brand on influencing consumer behaviour with heuristics,
the following example ‘nudge’, taken, in fact, from Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge
was presented:1
“
Gents, is there anything worse than going into a lavatory and coming out with
wet shoes? Whether you accidentally marked yourself as your own territory,
or whether you had to slosh through the mess made by others, it’s not a nice
experience. Fortunately, there is a clever – and now extremely popular –
‘nudge’ which reduces splashback at urinals: a fly sticker. There is a certain
point in a urinal where the potential for splashback is at its lowest; if you put
a small sticker or etching of a fly there, mess is significantly reduced simply
because men have an innate urge to aim for it. It’s an amazing application of
the principle of ‘monkey see, monkey do’.
However, back at the workshop, one of the attendees raised his hand.
‘That’s great . . . But how does it help me sell yoghurts?’
The point is – to paraphrase a popular saying – knowledge without a practi-
cal application is useless.
So, in this final section of the book, we’ll take the scientific principles out-
lined previously and explain how to use them in specific contexts – namely
promotion, social media, direct mail and the workplace. We will give concrete,
practical advice on how to hook people with these messages.
But first, the insights are recapped in a handy-reference toolkit for creating a
sticky message.
YOUR KIT FOR CRAFTING THE PERFECT

COMMUNICATION
Although it’s something of a cliché, research suggests that men really don’t like
asking for help: for example, men are less likely to go to the doctor,2 and when
they do, they ask fewer questions,3 a pattern which has serious repercussions
for male health.4 Likewise, although men are more likely to have substance
abuse problems, they are less likely to seek help for it.5
The point of all this is that the following pneumonic acronym can be pre-
sented without it sounding a bit like Jerry Seinfeld:
148 PART 3 PUTTING IT TO USE
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Primal Mystery Memory
Affective Ease Autopilot
Self-relevant Narrative Priming
Surprising
Every time you are crafting a message, just remember that, when you’re
lost, rather than asking them to ask for directions you should pass men a map.
Here is your communication toolkit for crafting the perfect communication;
simply make sure you follow this process every time you want to create a
sticky message.
1 INVITING ATTENTION
People are usually busy and distracted, and they have relatively limited
attention spans; yet, there is an awful lot of information out there in the
world. Will people even notice your message?
Make sure your message includes at least one of the items for the
following checklist so that it can cut through the noise:
– Primal Does your message contain: images or words which relate

to food, especially that which is high in calorific content; images or
words which explicitly reference sex or which imply it through innu-
endo, or an image of a physically attractive person; or a face, no
matter how simple and even including emoticons?
– Affective Does your message contain: words relating to emo-
tion like ‘love’; images of emotional faces; high-arousal words like
swear words; baby-schema congruent stimuli like puppies, kittens
or babies themselves; biologically threatening stimuli like snakes,
spiders or sharks; or violence or the threat of violence; or any other
stimuli which are emotionally arousing, whether good or bad?
– Self-relevant Does your message contain: information which is per-
sonal to the recipient, whether it’s their face, their name, or even their
first initial; first-person singular pronouns like ‘me’; stimuli which are
not personal but which will be at the front of many people’s minds,
like celebrities or seasonal references; or information which has been
personalised to the recipient’s personality or tastes?
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– Surprising Does your message contain: noises, particularly loud
noises; moving images, particularly with lots of movement or scene
changes; stimuli that contrast with the surrounding environment in
terms of colour, movement or sound; a stimulus that breaks estab-
lished patterns or does not fit with mental predictions; something
never seen before; or something that would not be expected in the
message’s context?
2 IGNITING THINKING
Getting noticed is just the first step: if people do not ‘absorb’ your mes-
sage then they won’t remember it and it won’t influence their thoughts
and behaviours.
In order to be cognitively processed, and thus have an effect in the
minds of recipients, your message must use at least one of the follow-
ing checklist items:
– Mystery Does your message contain: a puzzle or riddle for recipi-

ents to solve; something which does not immediately make sense
or which does not have an immediately clear answer; just enough
missing information to leave people wanting more; a question; or an
engaging metaphor?
– Ease Does your message: keep itself as short as possible; use
simple, concrete words; use images wherever possible; use smart
design to make the key points as easy to realise as possible; demand
very little of its audience; or make things as easy as possible for peo-
ple by suggesting what to do?
– Narrative Does your message contain a story comprising a clear
protagonist who has a goal and sets out to achieve it along a clear
narrative arc comprising an initial exposition, a beginning where
a tension is introduced, a middle where the character sets out to
resolve the tension, and an end where the tension is somehow
resolved?
▲
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3 INCITING ACTION
A message being noticed and processed will be more effective than
others – however, its ability, once absorbed, to influence behaviour can
be enhanced.
Make sure your message uses memory in order to influence behav-
iour further down the line:
– Memory Does your message: use repetition to emphasise key

points within the message; place the key points of the message at
either the beginning or the end; or make sure the message’s key
points are more emotionally arousing than its other content? And
does your message use the previous three principles overall to make
it more memorable relative to other messages?
In addition, make sure your message uses at least one of the follow-
ing techniques to enhance its persuasiveness:
– Autopilot Does your message contain: scarcity signals to make the

desired behaviour more urgent; perceived social proof to make the
desired behaviour seem more popular; cues of authority to make the
desired behaviour seem more acceptable; reciprocity to encourage
people to do the desired behaviour in return for a gift; liking to make
the message and its target behaviour more accepted among recipi-
ents; or commitment and consistency to make recipients bind them-
selves to the desired behaviour.
– Priming Does your message use appropriate stimuli to plant ideas
in recipients’ heads in order to influence their behaviour – such as
superhero imagery to encourage prosocial actions?
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13 PROMOTIONS
The Friday following Thanksgiving is known as ‘Black Friday’ in the US; it is
the day when stores open their doors earlier and entice customers in with pre-
Christmas sales. In 2008, a crowd of 2,000 eager shoppers burst through the
doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart so that they could get into the store early and
snap up the bargains before the rest of the throng; in their stampede, one Wal-
Mart employee was knocked to the floor and trampled to death.1
Black Friday appears to generally be an orgy of greed-driven mayhem; since
2006, there have been 89 injuries attributable to the event, there have been
41 reports of customers using pepper spray on one another, and in 2012 two
people were shot.2
Consumers are not rational – contrary to the traditional approach.
Rather than trying to inform or persuade, the goal for successful advertising is
typically memory3 – that is, advertising essentially makes a brand self-relevant
so that it is more likely to catch a consumer’s attention.
An excellent illustration of this comes from the Dasani experiment men-
tioned previously:4 when participants weren’t exposed to any pictures subtly
containing the Dasani brand, 17% chose the brand to drink; after exposure to
twelve such pictures, the proportion rose to 40%. Ultimately, advertisements
put a brand inside consumers’ heads in order to influence choice.
The formula for effective adverts

Break through + Get absorbed + Stay absorbed
Use emotion, surprise, sex, Make sure your ad, or series of Use a reach strategy: repetition
food or faces to make sure ads, tells a story; alternatively, is key. Use consistent elements
your advert gets the attention pique the curiosity of viewers in the adverts to make them
of busy consumers sticky
The story is very similar for other promotions beyond advertising, as well.
Approximately 50% of all fast-moving consumer goods in the UK are bought
on price promotion, with a 26% average discount.5 This is an awful lot of
money to brands, and the problem is they just don’t work. While discounts may
produce a short-term sales increase, in the long-run they are ineffectual for a
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range of reasons, including the brand becoming devalued, consumers refusing
to pay a higher price, consumers stock-piling when prices are low, and so on.6
The issue here is ostensibly that brands are using promotions as a tool to
rationally influence consumer choice. However, research suggests that shop-
pers do not actually use discounts in a rational way: in-store research has
shown that less than 15% of shoppers are able to remember the prices of
goods they had just recently placed in their basket, for example.7
Instead, promotional materials ought to increase physical availability7 – that
is, they should make a brand easy to see or find. In this sense, the most impor-
tant function for promotions is to draw attention to a brand. As an illustration,
a large-scale study of panel data found that just being on promotion, irrespec-
tive of the size of the discount, increases sales:8 perhaps promotions have their
sales effects simply because they draw attention to products. In-store signage
can result in a 142% sales increase.9
In this vein, the effectiveness of price promotions can be greatly enhanced
simply by grabbing attention.
What’s more, promotions can also be made more effective through an intel-
ligent use of heuristics. These can be used to nudge behaviour – for example,
people will buy more ice-cream sandwiches if a sign simply saying, ‘Buy 18 for
your freezer’, is added to the promotion.10
The formula for effective promotions

Get product seen + Get product bought
Use any of the following techniques to get Use heuristics to: increase the perceived
people to see the product: colour contrast; benefits of buying (e.g. scarcity to increase
movement; sound; emotion; faces; food; sex; its value); and reduce the perceived costs
surprise; personalisation (i.e. price psychology)
On the whole, consumers are cognitive misers who spend very little time
thinking or caring about brands; the most important thing for a brand is to get
inside people’s heads and to be easy to buy. The principles outlined in this
book for getting people hooked can be applied to promotions as follows.
Invite attention
– Be creative or emotional to succeed. Rational arguments are an added
bonus: they can be nice, but they are by no means necessary. Likewise,
sex sells; it’s a cliché but it’s absolutely true. Plus, cute animals and babies
are a sure-fire winner, as are threatening things like spiders and snakes.
13 PROMOTIONS 153
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– Forget about attitudes – don’t worry whether people like your advert
(most of them will not care enough) – what’s more important is that they
remember it. Is it more important to be liked or bought?
– Use images where possible, particularly moving ones. Similarly, noises
are good for getting attention, particularly loud ones.
– Take advantage of new technology to make adverts as attention-
grabbing and engaging as possible – whether this is using ‘big data’ to
personalise banner ads, using TV screen billboards instead of traditional
posters, or even using technology like facial coding to make adverts
which respond to people’s smiles.
– Personalise adverts wherever possible; customisation is not entirely fea-
sible yet for mass communications, so a better route may be to use com-
monly familiar stimuli like celebrities or holiday festivals.
– Get products seen in-store using promotional materials – attention
should be the priority, not communicating a discount. Often we like what
we see more than we see what we like.
– Use the principles of emotion, primality, personalisation and surprise to
make in-store promotional materials as attention-grabbing as possible.
For example, make signage an unusual colour, or slap a picture of a kitten
on it.
– Distinctive assets (outlined below) are vital for advertising – they make
it easier for consumers to notice, find and remember brands, and, if done
right, they can also be very good at getting attention.
DISTINCTIVE ASSETS
There is a branding principle which can help to bring all of these ele-
ments together and enhance the efficacy of advertising. ‘Distinctive
assets’ are perceptual elements unique to a brand like a logo, colour,
font, jingle, celebrity, mascot, and so on; they are vital to brand growth.11
One example in particular comes from the Felix brand of cat food in
the UK.12 In 1998, Felix accounted for just 5% of the market in single-
serve wet cat food pouches; the market leader, Whiskas, had actually pio-
neered the product. However, over the next five years, Felix actually came
to overtake Whiskas as the market leader, all while consistently spending
less than half the amount that Whiskas was spending on advertising.
▲
M03_FAGA4429_01_SE_C03.indd 154 18/01/16 4:00 pm

Source: © Newscast-online Limited/Alamy Stock Photo
Share of single serve cat food

50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Apr-01
Jul-01
Apr-02
Jul-02
Apr-03
Jul-03
Apr-04
Jul-04
Apr-05
Jul-05
Jan-01
Oct-01
Jan-02
Oct-02
Jan-03
Oct-03
Jan-04
Oct-04
Jan-05
Oct-05
Whiskas Felix
While Whiskas tried a variety of different (and, importantly, inconsist-

ent) advertising campaigns over the years, Felix used the same series of
ads with different permutations, enjoying the benefits of both repeated
exposure and novelty.
▲
13 PROMOTIONS 155
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Adspend (£m)
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
2002 2003 2004 2005
Whiskas Felix
Ignite thinking
– Build narrative into advertisements: those which use stories are more
effective than those without.
– Adverts should be simple – as simple as possible in fact, as research
has shown script complexity is negatively related to effectiveness. Like-
wise, the shorter the sweeter when it comes to slogans and ad copy.
– Prioritise images over words, for both advertisements and promotions.
– Use curiosity and mystery in adverts to pique your audience’s interest –
give your audience puzzles or riddles to solve. Metaphors are particularly
useful.
– Fluency is paramount in promotions – make the product as easy to find
and buy as possible (i.e. utilise physical availability to the maximum).
Incite action
– Use a reach strategy for advertising, if it is to work: reach as many peo-
ple as possible as many times as possible.
– Be the emotional peak of the context in which the advert sits – for
example, do not advertise during highly arousing sex or violence content.
– Do not crowd out your message in your advert by over-the-top emotion
which may be remembered instead.
M03_FAGA4429_01_SE_C03.indd 156 18/01/16 4:00 pm

– Credibility is important for the persuasiveness of adverts: using celebri-
ties, personal accounts, and statistics can all act as credibility-enhancing
heuristics.
– Prime The general goal of advertising should be priming – that is, making
a brand mentally salient in order to influence choice.
– Don’t worry if an advert is not consciously remembered: it does not
need to be explicitly recalled in order have an effect on behaviour (implicit
memory is important, too).
– Price psychology heuristics are vital for promotions: they are a cost-
effective and powerful way to make discounts less expensive for a brand.
Some examples are given in the table below.
Key price psychology principles
Principle Explanation
Yellow background13 A price/discount will be perceived as better value if written on a yellow
background, since yellow is associated with discounts.
Reference price14 A reference price (e.g. ‘Was £2, now £1’) makes the sale price appear to
be better value by comparison.
Font size15 A sale price in a smaller font than the reference price causes the buyer to
perceive the sale price as, literally, smaller.
Phonemes16 Prices with phonemes associated with smallness (e.g. ‘teeny tiny’) are seen
as smaller – which may be why 99 works well.
Product descriptors17 Accompanying the price with, say, ‘Low Maintenance’ (versus ‘High
Reliability’) results in the price being seen as lower.
Charm prices18 Certain price endings, especially 99, are associated with value; raising a
price to a 99 end can actually increase sales.
Precise prices19 Large numbers are usually rounded up, so prices with 00s are perceived as
high, and precise prices (e.g. £1.26) as low.
Bundling20 Bundling products/prices together increases product evaluations and sales,
as discounts are inferred.
Drip pricing21 ‘Dripping’ the full price through stages is effective because consumers
commit to the product at the first, cheaper price.
Product options22 Consumers pay more options when starting with ‘the full Monty’ and then
removing features, due to being loss averse.
Price length23 The more digits a number has, the larger it is seen to be; so dropping the
pennies, or having them small (e.g. £1.26) is best.
Price obfuscation24 Prices are associated with a painful loss, so hiding the fact a price is a
price (e.g. by losing the £) can be beneficial.
Time limit25 Making a promotion time-limited or saying ‘While Supplies Last’ increases
sales efficacy.
13 PROMOTIONS 157
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14 THE PSYCH OF LIKE
Jean Twenge has discovered something that may not be a surprise to most of
us: we are becoming more narcissistic.1 For example, one of the studies found
that the narcissism score for recent survey respondents was 30% higher than
those in the 1980s.2 Another experiment gives a clue as to why this might be:
participants completed a standard measure of narcissism after either editing
their MySpace profile or using Google Maps, and, as you may have guessed,
the former group scored higher on narcissism.3
The fact is that social media (and the internet) is becoming such a huge part
of our lives that it is changing who we are: in fact, it is literally rewiring our
brains.4 An estimated 500 million Tweets are sent every day,5 by consumers
who spend almost a third of each full day staring at screens.6
While this is ostensibly a fantastic opportunity when it comes to getting
messages seen, it is important to realise that people are just as much cognitive
misers online as they are offline: one study determined that the average online
user’s attention span is just eight seconds.7 It is for this reason that many stud-
ies have demonstrated the efficacy of the principles outlined so far in this book
for making online messages work.
The authors of one fantastic paper used a computer program to analyse
three months of articles on The New York Times’ website: each article under-
went sentiment analysis, in which the article’s words were analysed for certain
Impact of article elements on virality

Anger
+1 standard deviation in . . .
Practical value
Awe
Interest
Anxiety
Time at top of home page
General emotionality
Surprise
Positivity
Sadness
–20% –10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40%
Chance of making ‘Most Shared’ list
158
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themes.8 The researchers also had data on whether or not the article appeared
on the site’s ‘Most emailed’ list (i.e. was viral). As can be seen in the chart
above, a standard deviation increase in the emotionality of an article made it
18% more likely to be viral.
An analysis of Buzzfeed article headlines provides further evidence for
the power of these principles to get online content read.9 A software engi-
neer in San Francisco analysed Buzzfeed headlines by splitting them into
three-word phrases and then recording the number of Facebook shares for
each; as can be seen in the chart below, certain phrases are more popular
than others.
Impact of Buzzfeed headline on Facebook shares

character are you
[x] things only
before you die
is this the
you probably didn't
are the most
in your life
[x] things that
things you probably
3-word Buzzfeed headline phrase
reasons you should

probably didn't know
[x] most important
[x] signs you
[x] reasons you
didn't know about
of all time
photos that prove
blow your mind
game of thrones
things that happened
in real life
will blow your
things that happen
[x] dogs who
of the most
[x] things you
[x] signs you're
you should be
[x] reasons why
things you didn't
0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 120,000
Average number of Facebook shares
Source: Adapted from boingboing.net
Personalisation emerged as a dominant theme, with many of the most pop-

ular articles telling readers something about themselves; curiosity was also a
major factor, with the classic link bait phrase ‘. . . you probably didn’t know’
appearing to be popular.
14 THE PSYCH OF LIKE 159
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PSYCH OF LIKE CASE STUDY
By taking fluent phrases like #wonderfilled, repeating them on a regular
basis, and incorporating them into fun, emotional and engaging activi-
ties around the same time as the 2014 Winter Olympics in Canada,
Oreo was able to win a 2.5% increase in its penetration in the market
and a 16.3% increase in market share.10
In the end, online content ostensibly follows the same rules of effectiveness
as other messages, except that memory is perhaps of less importance since
online content is typically more urgent. Other than that, online content needs to
get attention and incite an action; the formula for an affective online message
is presented below.
The formula for effective online content
Be simple + Excite + Inspire action

Use fluency (numbered lists Use a phrase which: uses Include a phrase which uses
are especially effective), be a high-arousal emotion; is either curiosity to encourage
short and simple, and send surprising or unexpected; people to click through, or
the message out at the time of presents brand new heuristics to encourage them
highest exposure. information. Alternatively, to act.
include an emoticon.
On the whole, people are cognitive misers online too – they react to web-
sites in just a twentieth of a second, for example. If anything, attention spans
may be even more fractured on the internet. Practical applications for ‘the
psych of like’ are as follows.
INVITE ATTENTION
– Emotion is the most important factor in social updates and online con-
tent like articles and videos according to research: specifically, it should be
highly arousing, and negative emotions tend to do better than bad ones.
– Know what people want online and use it to entice them. As a great
illustration, a strong predictor of success of Kickstarter campaigns was
found by one study to be the use of the word ‘cats’ in the pitch!11
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– Emoticons can capture attention in a similar fashion to faces. Research
shows that the brain responds to emoticons in much the same way as
faces,12 and that Tweets are more likely to be shared if they contain
emoticons.13
– Faces alone are powerful online as well as offline; have a clear facial pic-
ture in your profile picture or avatar, for example, to get people’s attention
(and to endear them to you).
– Personalisation is very easy to do online and it is extremely effective:
include people’s names, locations, or other personal information in online
content when possible – and make the most of new ‘big data’ opportuni-
ties to understand what makes your audience tick.
– Make content self-relevant as well; personal discovery content and
quizzes (e.g. ‘What kind of potato are you?’) are extremely popular.
IGNITE THINKING
– Use questions to engage potential readers through the principle of curi-
osity. One piece of research discovered that Tweets containing question
marks are more likely to be retweeted.14
– Make content surprising – bizarre, unintuitive or new information will
make readers curious and encourage them to turn that link from blue to
purple. There is a lot of ‘noise’ online and people are very thirsty for any-
thing new or engaging.
– Keep things short and simple, and don’t overload the message
with content. What is the one key thing you want it to communicate?
While a large study showed that more useful information, such as
hashtags or links) increases the virality of a Tweet, it also showed that
too much information is damaging; the optimum length is 100–120
characters.15
– Post content at the optimum time to maximise its digital ‘physical avail-
ability’: submit it at the highest-traffic days and times for your audience
(typically weekends, and lunch and evenings in the week). Facebook and
Twitter engagement rates are 32% and 17% higher, respectively, at the
weekend; and during the week, Twitter engagement is highest around 12
pm and 6 pm.15
– Attach images to your posts, as they are always effective at both catch-
ing attention and communicating a message.
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– Use infographics (or at least charts and diagrams) wherever possible –
they are very good at communicating information, and people not only
love to read them, but share them as well.
– Narrative itself is of limited use in the world of the 140-character Tweet;
however, the individual use of empathy, archetypes and meaning-making
can all make online messages more impactful.
– Build stories in the long term through your content: rather than dispa-
rate series of posts, link things together with meaning, mystery and dra-
matic tension so that your audience is kept eagerly waiting for the next
update.
INCITE ACTION
– Post each message multiple times: reminder posts have been shown to
increase the effectiveness of online campaigns. In fact, one of the strong-
est predictors of a Kickstarter campaign’s success is how many reminder
emails are sent out.16
– Be the emotional peak in your audience’s newsfeed. Your post is likely
to get ignored and forgotten if it’s posted at the same time a celebrity
scandal breaks.
– Heuristics will make social content more behaviourally persuasive. To
illustrate, Kickstarter campaigns can be made more likely to be success-
ful by using heuristics like scarcity (e.g. writing phrases like, ‘You are
being given the chance to . . .’).11
– Give readers something for free in order to encourage reciprocity – a
low-cost giveaway like a free download, or even a joke, weather forecast
or interesting fact, will do the trick.
– Don’t exploit your audience by spamming them with messages
or constantly asking for help. On the Reddit forum ‘Random Acts of
Pizza’, where people ask strangers to buy them a pizza delivery for
free, a strong predictor of success is reciprocity – paying back the
favour.17
– Be trustworthy and credible (i.e. use the authority heuristic) when com-
municating online as trust is low and scepticism is high: use the correct
signals to do this. On ‘Random Acts of Pizza’, the number of ‘karma’
points a user has when asking for pizza is a strong predictor of success
as well.17
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– Engage recipients on a first-name basis if possible, in order to encour-
age liking. Building emotional relationships with recipients is similarly
effective for influencing behaviour – for example, build a conversation
about the products they have bought from you in the past (e.g. ‘Hi John, I
hope you’re enjoying the toaster you bought in January!’).
– Show or imply that many others are reading your posts: the inferred
social proof will increase engagement. The number of retweets a post has
is a significant influence on whether or not a person will read it,18 and that
the time spent reading a news article is positively predicted by the aver-
age five-star rating it has been given.19
EXERCISE
An effective Tweet
Rewrite the following three Tweets using the formula outlined above:
1 Prostate cancer Tweet

Please click here to donate to the prostate cancer fund and help the
14% of men who will be diagnosed #canceruk.
How would you write part of a new and improved Tweet that would:
be simple;
excite;
inspire action.
Now put it all together.
2 Cinema press release Tweet

Click here to have a look at what our 3D SCREENS will be able to do
next year!
be simple;
excite;
inspire action.
▲
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3 Fast-food menu Tweet
NEW Chicken fillet – made of all natural ingredients.
be simple;
excite;
inspire action.
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15 DIRECT MAIL
A January 2014 Daily Mail article reported on an American cat who hated junk
mail – every time the postman tried to deliver some, he’d get such a ferocious
mauling that he once lost a glove.1
Well, actually the cat attacked anything that came through the letterbox –
and it was probably acting out its catty instincts rather than expressing a dis-
taste for the occasional unwanted SkyMall brochure. However, the spin given
to the story highlights a salient point: we love to hate direct mail.
In fact, a 2004 BBC documentary, Brassed-Off Britain, conducted a poll
and found that junk mail was deemed the number one most irritating thing in
the country – supported by a survey finding that two-thirds of Brits objected
to direct mail and just under a third found it intrusive.2 Given the choice, the
majority of people (77%) will opt-out of receiving direct mail from companies
they don’t deal with.3
However, here’s the thing: direct mail is actually very effective. People might
hate it, but – just like the adverts by HeadOn and Go Compare – it still works.
One survey of marketers found it to be the channel with the highest return
on investment for customer acquisition. 4 Researchers at the University of
Sydney even managed to put a figure on it:5 after observing three weeks of
baseline sales in a major Australian retailer, a leaflet advertising current promo-
tions was posted to consumers living in the local area of each store. This had
a significant effect on sales for all product categories tested in the leaflet, with
average units sold per week increasing by figures ranging from 68% for liquid
detergent to a massive 1,167% for sandwich toasters.
So, direct marketing is a powerful tool for any company – how can you
make it work for you?
Using the two most widespread forms of direct marketing in the UK – post
and email 6 – this chapter will explain how the previous psychological principles
apply to increasing their effectiveness. Specifically, there are three steps.
Again, the first thing any letter or email needs to do is get noticed. In 2014,
British consumers received approximately 3.2 billion unaddressed pieces of
junk mail.7 If each piece was as thick as regular A4 paper, the stack would be
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18 times as high as Mount Everest – and that excludes direct mail addressed
to the recipient. In digital terms, over 100 billion spam emails are sent every
day worldwide.8 With our limited attention spans, a lot of this will simply be
ignored. The Direct Marketing Association reported that 20% and 54% of peo-
ple open, respectively, emails and letters straight away whoever they may be
from, meaning a good many people are more selective.9
Once a piece of direct mail is noticed, the next step is to be opened and
read. To illustrate, if an email appears to be marketing something, 17% of peo-
ple will delete it without reading, and 9% will do so for letters.9 Therefore it is
important that the message not only get attention but also be designed in such
a way as to actually hook audiences.
Finally, the third step is of course to get recipients to act on the message
they have read, using simplicity and intelligent ‘nudges’.
The formula for effective direct mail
Get seen + Get opened + Inspire action

Use personalisation and/or Use authority, curiosity and/ Once the message has been
surprise at the point of contact or narrative to encourage opened, use heuristics to
with the recipient; use recipients to actually read make the letter or email
multiple exposures to make the message. effective at influencing
the message salient. behaviour.
On the whole, despite there being a lot of it, and consumer perceptions gen-
erally being unfavourable, direct mail is relatively effective; it can be made more
so using psychological principles.
INVITING ATTENTION
– Personalise the message at the point of contact (e.g. on the front of
the envelope or in the subject line) to catch your recipient’s attention.
Researchers at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine conducted an exper-
iment in which 1,000 households were posted information about cervical
cancer and given the chance to enter a prize draw by returning a postage-
paid postcard:10 envelopes which included the recipient’s name saw a
response rate of 21%, compared to 13% for those which read ‘resident’.
– Use memory/priming to make the message more self-relevant,
so that it gets noticed. In other words, prime the recipient to recognise
the message by making it front-of-mind. A review of almost 300 studies
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found that the likelihood of a survey being completed was increased by
54% through contacting participants before sending them the mail.11
– Use multiple, different touchpoints In essence, the more points of con-
tact the better; for example, send an email, a text message and a letter, if
it is feasible.
– Surprise is also a good means to catch attention at this point – provid-
ing it is cost-effective, make the envelope (or, if possible, email) different
so that the recipient will hold off from throwing it away just to find out
what it is. Initiatives that have increased response rates include writing
the address in green ink,12 putting a sticker on the envelope,13 and using
a larger-than-normal envelope.14
– Use unusual materials as well. The Royal Mail used biometric and neu-
rometric methods and found that more interesting mail – e.g., cut into an
unusual shape, incorporating holograms, or made of heavyweight card –
were better at getting attention and resulted in more favourable percep-
tions and behaviours.15
– However, avoid ostentatiousness with charity appeals: such enve-
lopes can backfire because they imply that the charity is wasting money
they could be spending on their cause.16
EXAMPLES OF INVITING ATTENTION FOR

DIRECT MAIL
Fiskar scissors demonstrated the power of using a surprising piece
of direct mail to grab recipients’ attention and engage them in the
message.17 Recipients received an intricate silhouette in place of a let-
ter; the company enjoyed a 53% response rate and a 19% increase in
order volumes compared to the previous month.
Next, the British-American cruise line Carnival showed how personalisa-
tion could increase direct mail effectiveness by grabbing attention, engag-
ing recipients, and causing recipients to like what they had received.18
Recipients received a letter which was totally customised to their own
holiday-related interests – information the brand had gathered previously.
For example, some recipients’ letters spoke to the fact that their children
love cruises, while others focused on gaming like blackjack and slots.
Compared to the non-personalised campaign in the previous year, this initi-
ative had an 80% higher response rate and generated 37% more bookings.
15 DIRECT MAIL 167
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IGNITE THINKING
– Use materials which encourage touching, when it comes to physical
direct mail, so that people will pick up the message. Once people touch
something, they feel a greater sense of ownership, meaning the recipient
may be less likely to bin, and more likely to open, the letter.
– Make the message tangible One paper sent a request for survey par-
ticipation to 500 British university staff, finding that 72% responded to the
posted surveys, and 34% to emails.19
– Send letters by recorded delivery as a study found that doing so made
posted questionnaires almost twice as likely to be filled in.11 Do anything,
like this, which makes the message more noticeable or mentally salient.
– Send messages at the best time and day There is, for instance, evi-
dence that response rates to posted direct mail are highest just before
or just after the weekend,20 while email open and click rates are highest
on weekends and, during weekdays, highest during the morning.21 Physi-
cal direct mail is better than digital direct mail; although the materials
involved suggest the latter may be more cost-effective.
– Use curiosity, such as a blank email subject line, which creates a
mystery which can only be solved by opening it and reading the letter. An
in-field study found that including a teaser in the form of a question on
the envelope made direct mail significantly more effective.14
– Build a story over the course of the messages: recipients will open them
to find out how the narrative arc is progressing. A study found that chari-
table donations were increased by consistently telling a story showing
recipients how their donations are making a difference.22
– Be simple Make the message as short as possible, and include pictures
over text where feasible, in order to make things easy for recipients. The
likelihood of a response has been shown to increase by 86% when a
shorter questionnaire is used and by 121% when a stamped return enve-
lope is included;11 and, a survey of email marketing experts found that
direct mail emails were thought to be more effective when they included
fewer scroll-downs (i.e. less content) and more images.23
INCITE ACTION
– Signal authority at the point of contact in order to encourage recipients
to trust, and therefore open, the message. A review found that surveys
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from official institutions like universities had a 31% higher chance of a
response than those from commercial organisations, and surveys had a
12% higher chance of response when sent via first class.11
– Use authority to motivate action, as well as to motivate opening the
message. People are more likely to complete a survey, for example, if it is
accompanied by a cover letter signed by an appropriate expert.24
– Be personable with the recipient and make it clear who the message
is coming from, or else their trust is likely to be low. Sending an email
from an impersonal address (e.g. [email protected]) received a lower
response rate than from a personal address (e.g. [email protected]).25
– Make sure the recipients like the sender, inasmuch as this is possible.
One study found that direct mail advertisements were much more effec-
tive if they included a picture of an attractive woman.26
– Include a small, free gift to encourage action via reciprocity – again,
even an interesting fact will do.
– Be creative with using heuristics: there are endless possibilities. To give
just one example, ‘future discounting’ is where people value money less
in the future than they do in the present27 – asking donors to increase
their donations ‘two months from now’ was shown to increase donations
by 32% compared to ‘today’, in one experiment.28
EXERCISE
Creating effective direct mail

You are creating a piece of direct mail – a letter to send to all of the
customers of your small locksmith business. Currently, you send people
a letter typed on A4 and posted to recipients inside a standard brown
envelope with the recipient’s name typed on the front. How might you
change each of the following to make it more effective? Assume money
is no object.
What would you do to the shape and format of the envelope?

What would you write on the front of the envelope?
What one single sentence might you add to the letter?
15 DIRECT MAIL 169
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16 IN THE OFFICE
British workers spend an average of 42.7 hours a week at work.1 Excluding weekends
and holidays (although many of us spend most of those working as well), that means
we spend a third of our adult lives working – that’s over half of our waking adult lives.
It’s little wonder, then, that the workplace has a significant, causal impact on
our happiness2 and wellbeing;3 clearly there is a lot of value to doing well in the
workplace.
Unsurprisingly, psychological factors have a significant effect on work-
place success. To give just one example as an illustration, one study of public-
company CEOs found that a 22.1Hz decrease in voice pitch was associated
with an increase in the size of the firm managed to the tune of $440 million, and
a related $187,000 increase in pay.4
Indeed, the first part of effective messages in the workplace involves inter-
personal influence. Whether it’s an interview, presentation or pitch, the evi-
dence suggests you will be much more successful if you exercise social
influence. As American investment banker Ziad K. Abdelnour once said, ‘Seek
respect, not attention. It lasts longer.’5
Having said that, the second key point for effective workplace communica-
tion is to be engaging – that is, to get your audience to pay attention to what
you’re saying, and process it cognitively. As in all message contexts, business-
people have limited attention spans: it is estimated that people begin to zone
out of presentations after 10–15 minutes, at the most.6
The third point is that heuristics and priming can be used to influence deci-
sions in your favour during workplace communications. Experts in interper-
sonal influence excel in the workplace.
The formula for effective workplace communication
Be liked + Engage + ‘Nudge’

Use your clothing, body Spice up your content Get the upper hand in
language, speech and with the principles business meetings and
actions to be a charismatic outlined in this book – pitches by incorporating
speaker: use authority and including narrative, heuristics and priming.
liking extensively. curiosity and surprise.
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On the whole, succeeding at work is vital for our happiness and wellbeing –
but do we put enough thought into it? Psychology can help pitches, presenta-
tions and meetings go more smoothly.
INVITE ATTENTION
– Use images and animations in your slides to get attention – sounds are
useful as well, but don’t overdo it as they can be distracting. Research
has shown they enhance comprehension.7 Always incorporate videos into
presentations where feasible – at any rate, avoid reams of dull, monoto-
nous text or speech.
– Be creative in using contrast to get attention – such as punctuating
important points with a loud clap.
– Incorporate emotional stimuli – and include images and words – that
will get your audience’s attention; examples might be pictures of babies,
pictures of faces, swear words, and so on.
– Have a sense of humour when meeting people or giving presentations
– humour is very good at activating the amygdala (i.e. engaging people
emotionally).8
– Don’t be afraid of the unusual Including emotional images, telling jokes,
clapping, and so on, will all captivate your audience, but you may be
concerned about how people will perceive you. Well, remember that atti-
tudes are far less important than behaviours. Do you want the client to
buy what you’re selling, or to like you?
– Be personally distinctive – you don’t have to wear a polka-dotted bow
tie everywhere, but unique, noticeable earrings or cufflinks will earn you
attention personally in your career without being crass.
IGNITE THINKING
– Present interesting and new content Make sure your audience has not
heard everything before – if that is unavoidable, find a way to present it in
a new light.
– Don’t be dry In other words, don’t present statistics and bullet points
one after another – remember that we are dominated by our ‘monkey
brain’. Keep things light and fun.
16 IN THE OFFICE 171
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– Tell stories: presentations are more effective when the information is pre-
sented as a narrative.9
– Use narrative case studies and examples as well as statistics in order to
make the information more persuasive and memorable.10
– Ask questions of your audience – both rhetorical and actual – to get them
thinking. Research shows this enhances presentations’ effectiveness.11
– Use mystery to pique the curiosity of your audience – make facts a secret
to be revealed over time, rather than just giving them away up-front.
– Incorporate puzzles and exercises into your presentation to make them
interesting, too. When the audience has a problem to solve, they better
remember the content.12
– Hold meetings face-to-face rather than digitally or over the phone – or,
at least, use video conferencing. This will make the communication more
concrete and tangible, and therefore more persuasive.
INCITE ACTION
– Repeat key points throughout the presentation to make them memor
able; also make sure to repeat them at the beginning and the end of the
presentation.
– Be likeable in order to be persuasive. One study videotaped a clip of a
manager – who was actually an actor – interacting with employees, and
participants rated how competent he was;13 when the manager was seen
displaying liking signals (such as asking, ‘How are you doing?’) he was
rated as significantly more competent.
– Use similarity as a route to liking. As an example, Americans were asked
to listen to an audio clip of a candidate applying for a job and rate how
likely they would be to give the candidate the role; however, the appli-
cant’s accent varied.14 These American participants were much more
favourable towards the American-accented candidate.
– Use body language to be liked – for example, mirror people’s stances,
expressions and gestures (known as ‘mimicking’),15 physically touching
them,16 and smiling at them.17
– Be as attractive as you can! Attractive job candidates are more likely to
be hired,18 while obese candidates fare poorly in job interviews.19
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– Disclose personal information by, for example, telling a personal story
about yourself to illustrate a point. A large meta-analysis found a clear
link between self-disclosure and liking, such that people who told stories
about their own lives were liked more.20
– Don’t be too likable as authority is also a powerful influencer and it is
often the antitheses of liking. Personality researchers have shown that
nice guys really do finish last: among men, being agreeable – that is,
warm, friendly and trusting – is linked to a significantly lower salary.21
Smiling and nodding too much are harmful for workplace authority and
persuasion.22
– Use clothes to communicate authority. One study found that job appli-
cants, both male and female, who wore masculine clothing were seen as
more competent, and were more likely to be hired;23 and studies have
shown for many years that people who wear glasses are rated as more
intelligent, honest, hard-working and reliable.24
– Maintain good eye contact to signal authority as well. Interviewees who
avert their gaze are rated by interviewers as less credible, and are less
likely to be hired.25 However, total, unrelenting gaze can have the oppo-
site effect26 – don’t overdo it!
– A firm handshake is good – it has been positively linked to an interview-
er’s likelihood of recommending someone for the role.27
– Speak with authority; speaking faster and with fewer pauses, a constant
volume, a lower pitch and more variability in pitch is positively linked to
better workplace outcomes.28
– Be creative with heuristics to ‘nudge’ your attendees, clients or
colleagues in the direction you desire. To give an example, it is possible
to influence the negotiating behaviours of a client during a pitch, or an
employer during a salary review – that is, if you start the negotiating by
suggesting a very high (even ludicrously high) sum, you will end up get-
ting more than if you did otherwise.29
– Be creative with priming to likewise influence the behaviour and
decisions of your peers. For instance, negotiators will be more coopera-
tive and give greater concessions if you call them a partner rather than
an opponent;30 and they will be more likely to accept unfair offers if
they are primed with sad stimuli like a depressing video clip;31 but if you
mention money too often, they could become more individualistic and
unempathetic.32
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YOUR PRESENTATION CHECKLIST
You are putting together a presentation for an important prospective
client. Make sure you have each of the following elements:
– Narrative i Does your presentation tell a story from start to finish?

– Narrative ii Does your presentation include small stories as illustra-
tive case studies? Stories from your own personal life are better.
– Questions Do you ask interactive questions of your audience
through the presentation?
– Exercises As well as the questions, do you have engaging puzzles
or exercises throughout the presentation to keep people engaged?
– Mystery Do you tease the audience at some point by alluding to
some interesting information but keeping it secret until later?
– Images Is your presentation more image than text?
– Simplicity Is your presentation as short, simple and concrete as
possible? Make sure not to bore people with stats and bullet points,
and make sure any points you make could be easily understood by a
child.
– Contrast Do you use movement and/or sound in your presentation?
Videos are particularly good.
– Interest Does your presentation contain new, interesting and excit-
ing content – if not the whole way through, at least in select places?
– Liking Are you relaxed and charismatic before presenting, making
sure to smile and make eye contact?
– Authority Have you dressed smartly, and practiced your slow, delib-
erate body language and speech? Rehearsing and knowing what you
are going to say is absolutely key.
A power booster
Before you enter a meeting or go on stage to present, improve your per-
ceived authority by simply spending a couple of minutes in a ‘power
stance’ – for example, lean back in a chair with your feet on the desk
and your hands folded behind your head. A ‘power stance’ involves tak-
ing up lots of space and having open arms and legs.
▲
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Researchers from Colombia University and Harvard recently carried
out a study in which participants used a ‘power stance’ for two minutes
before completing a barrage of psychological and behavioural tests of
dominance.33 Compared to people who sat or stood in stances associ-
ated with low status, the participants were, by all measures, higher in
power. For instance, the ‘power stance’ resulted in higher feelings of
power, higher risk-taking and higher levels of testosterone.
It’s a case, then, of ‘fake it ’til you make it’. Stand in a confidence
pose for two minutes before your meeting or presentation, and you will
likely present more authoritatively and confidently.
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17 TEST, TEST, TEST
‘Life, uh, finds a way.’
So said Jeff Goldblum’s sexy mathematician (!) character Ian Malcolm in
Jurassic Park. There is a fantastic scene where Goldblum’s character explains
chaos theory to the trip’s paleobotanist using water from a plastic cup: every
time a drop falls on her hand, it rolls down a different route due to tiny, unpre-
dictable variations in the environment. A major theme in Jurassic Park is how
life is chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable.
The next time Goldblum’s plastic cup of water is seen, it vibrates ominously
to announce the arrival of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Despite the best efforts of the
park’s owner, the beast could not be contained, due to a confluence of unpre-
dictable forces like the park’s security measures being shut down by a greedy
employee with thieving intentions.
Outside the world of blockbuster entertainment, the infamous Murphy’s
Law – ‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’ – was allegedly coined by aero
space engineer Edward Murphy in response to finding inconsistent or u nusual
results across scientific tests, due to factors which were hard to control.1
The point is that the world is a chaotic and unpredictable place. What we
expect to work, or what has worked elsewhere, might not work for us in our
own specific context.
This has important implications for designing sticky messages.
I was once told about a consultancy who advised a big British brand on
their direct mail – specifically, how to change a promotional letter to make it
more effective. The brand’s existing letter was put through a psychological
meat grinder: it was rearranged and updated to include emotion, fluency and
heuristics, among other things. In theory, it was perfect.
In practice, it resulted in the worst response rate the company had ever
seen.
Everything discussed in this book is based on science, and, to be blunt,
is vastly more effective than the use of hunches and assumptions generally
involved with designing messages. However, it is important to test these princi-
ples for yourself within your own, personal context.
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So how should you do this?
The ideal would be to measure a behaviour. Whatever your message, the
ultimate goal will almost always be to affect some kind of action – whether it’s
visiting a website, buying a product or eating more fruit and vegetables.
This should be done through a randomised control trial, where – to put it
simply – one group of participants is a control group, and another group of
participants, matched on important variables like demographics – is the experi-
mental group. For example, as a test of curiosity, the control group might be
sent a Tweet saying, ‘Our website will make you smile,’ while the experimental
group receives, ‘Will our website make you smile?’
There are certain instances where measuring the outcome behaviour is very
simple: split-testing can be easily carried out in the digital world, where, for
example, recipients randomly receive one of two types of email and you simply
see which type results in the most clicks. Online services like Mailchimp and
Optimizely make this extremely easy.
However, sometimes measuring the outcome behaviour is not always feas
ible or desirable. You may, for example, want to test the effectiveness of a new
leaflet, advert or package before spending money producing it and taking a
risk releasing it into the world. Alternatively, you may want to understand why
exactly one message is more effective than another.
In these instances, it’s tempting to just ask people. For instance, if you want
to know if people would buy your product after seeing your pitch, why not
show the pitch to a test group and ask them, ‘Would this make you buy the
product?’
Unfortunately, traditional survey methodologies are extremely flawed.
Imagine, for example, that you work as a digital strategy manager at Blacks,
the outdoor clothing and supplies retailer. You are creating a new website and
you want to know what influences people’s choices of tent purchases online.
How would you measure this?
One study did indeed set up a mock online site where people were shown
a range of different tents varying in price, colour, size, and so on.2 After par-
ticipants had chosen their favourite one, they were asked why they picked
it over the others. Attributes like weatherproofing and insect repelling were
deemed most important – but the most important factor was presenta-
tion order, with the first-presented tent being picked 2.5 times more than
any other.
The major problem with explicitly asking people for their responses is that
they have little to no awareness of the subconscious drivers of their behav-
iour; they cannot report on why they behaved a certain way, or how they would
respond to a message, because they simply do not know.
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Remember: ‘The human brain is like a monkey brain with a cortical “press
secretary” who is glib at concocting explanations for behaviour, and who privi-
leges deliberative explanations over cruder ones.’3
What’s more, survey methodologies are subject to a range of cognitive
biases which invalidate people’s answers – like the fact that people will rate
Tony Blair as more honest if asked to do so on a −5 to +5 scale than a 0 to 11
scale,4 or that 30% of respondents in one study gave their opinion on The Agri-
cultural Trades Act of 1978, which, actually, didn’t even exist.5
Other explicit methodologies can be equally unreliable, often because people
feel pressured to respond a certain way;6 New Coke tested well in focus groups.7
So explicitly asking people is not always a fantastic method for testing.
Alternatively, research has shown that implicit – that is, indirect or non-con-
scious – methodologies are often better at predicting behaviour.8 A small over-
view of these methodologies follows.
For example, ‘implicit testing’ is the use of reaction times to measure non-
conscious associations in memory. The method was originally, and most
famously, used to measure non-conscious racial prejudice among partici-
pants.9 For example, if they hesitated to press a button to group good words
like ‘pleasant’ into the category ‘Black Faces/Good Words’, but did not hesi-
tate to group bad words like ‘unpleasant’ into ‘Black Faces/Bad Words’ then
the association between black people and the idea of ‘bad’ was strong in their
minds.
Implicit testing can be used to measure people’s cognitive reactions to mes-
sages. For example, are they quicker to associate ‘sugar’ with ‘bad’ after an
anti-sugar message? Alternatively, it could be used to measure how memor
able a message is by, for instance, measuring reaction times for recognising
elements of the message a week after seeing it.
There are, in theory, almost unlimited uses for implicit testing, which is one
of its advantages. Additionally, it is very cheap and easy to carry out, with the
price being comparable to surveys and the test being administrable online;
despite its ease of use, implicit testing is also extremely robust, with one
study finding its ability to predict subsequent behaviour being second only
to fMRI.10
Meanwhile, ‘eye-tracking’ involves a camera used to monitor participants’
eye movements, which are measured as a reliable proxy for visual attention.11
Eye-tracking is a particularly useful tool for messages as it can measure
whether or not a message is getting attention, which, as discussed, is vital for
a message to work. It can also be used to measure what elements in a mes-
sage are being attended to: for example, if you create a poster advertising a
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price reduction, do people even see that piece of information? Thirdly, eye-
tracking can be used in conjunction with other methods to understanding what
about a message is causing a particular reaction: for example, implicit testing
may tell you that a message is being remembered, while eye-tracking can tell
you this is because of the picture of a cat in a propeller hat.
Eye-tracking is ostensibly the only way to directly measure what people are
paying attention to – that is, to see if people actually look at your message, or
alternatively, what it is within your message they are looking at. However, the
method can be relatively difficult and expensive to implement.
There is also a range of other – more advanced – psychological methodolo-
gies like the measurement of physiological arousal or brain activity. Although
these can produce some unique and fascinating insights – with incredible
power when it comes to predicting real-world behaviour10 – they are generally
costly and difficult to carry out. It is certainly advisable, however, that the seri-
ous comms professional start to test these methods and integrate them into his
or her arsenal.
While non-conscious methodologies are more reliable than traditional
methods like surveys or focus groups, since the latter neglect non-conscious
processes, decision-making does in fact involve both conscious and non-con-
scious thinking, and for this reason, research suggests that the best predictive
power actually comes from combining both types of measure.12
Ultimately though, it’s about choosing the best tool for the job from the
whole toolkit.
FOUR STEPS TO FOLLOW WHEN TESTING A

MESSAGE
1 What is my goal?
Firstly, you need to think about what your desired outcome is for
the message. Most of the time it will be some sort of behaviour,
like an increase in sales or donations, an increase in website traffic,
or a reduction in the number of people littering. However, some-
times the goal may be more abstract, like inducing more positive
perceptions of salad. What change do you want your message to
achieve?
▲
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2 How can I achieve it?
Next, you must consider how this goal is to be achieved using the
principles outlined in this book. For example, if you want to make
an email more effective, you may want to test the effect of putting
the word ‘damn’ in the subject line; alternatively, you might want
to see if putting a kitten in your dating profile picture gets it more
views. What change do you want to make to affect the outcome
chosen previously? This is your independent variable.
3 What method captures this?
Now you need to decide which methodology to use in order to test

that changing your independent variable does in fact impact your
dependent variable. How can you measure the latter? It may be as
simple as product sales, website hits, or number of pieces of litter
dropped per hour. For more abstract outcomes, like perceptions or
emotions, it is vital to use a reliable method – this is likely some-
thing other than survey testing, which is limited.
4 How do I keep things scientific?
Finally, now that you have designed your test, you need to make
sure it is scientific. For example, depending on the experimen-
tal design, you may need a control group which is identical to the
experimental group except for the thing being tested. Also, you
must subject the data to statistical analysis and check for statisti-
cal significance; additionally, your sample must be sufficiently big
in every group. Overall, your test must be robust if the results are to
mean anything.
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CONCLUSION
Have a look at this chart:1
Measles cases per year in the USMeasles cases per year in the US
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
Many parents in America refuse to have their child vaccinated against mea-
sles out of fear that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) causes autism.
It doesn’t. There has been tonnes and tonnes of reliable research showing
this;2 besides which, the original paper suggesting a link has been discredited
and withdrawn, and the authoring doctor has even lost his medical licence.3
But here’s the thing: these are very rational arguments.
The anti-MMR lobby, on the other hand, has the power of stickiness on
its side: fear is both attention-grabbing and a very strong motivator of behav-
iour; the ‘needles equal bad’ message is a very simple one to comprehend;
the lobby parades apparent case studies of autistic children who had the jab,
using the power of narrative; and parents are ostensibly following the lead of
their friends as well as liked and trusted celebrities like Jenny McCarthy. Dry
double-blind studies have nothing on these techniques.
‘We’re half a chromosome away from chimpanzees and it shows.’ The late
majestic misanthrope Christopher Hitchens once said this,4 and it is vital to
keep in mind. The truth is, we are barely evolved monkeys: despite what we
might think, our behaviour is influenced by basic and hardwired principles,
which are often far more simplistic than we like to admit.
Did you know, for example, that in the month of a suicide highly publicised
in the news, the national suicide rate sees a 3% increase?5
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So, when you craft a message, you’ll only get so far if you focus on persua-
sion and rationality. A reasoned argument for potential financial savings won’t
sell a price comparison site: but a meerkat with a funny accent will. If you want
your message to be sticky, you’ll have much more luck with ‘monkey see,
monkey do’ than with homo economicus.
Now you yourself can wield the awesome power of the puppy, along with
the primal, the personal and the surprising, to immediately and uncontrollably
capture people’s attention; you can use stories, simplicity and curiosity to get
people to take on board what you’re saying; and you can use memory, priming
and an understanding of the human autopilot to influence people’s behaviour.
In short, you have everything you need to put together a message that works.
So go out there – and get people hooked!
EXERCISE
Supporting MMR vaccines
The anti-MMR lobby has a very sticky message, and has had a signifi-
cant influence on behaviour as a result.
So far, the responses from governments have tended to target
rational thinking. For example, Australian prime minister Tony Abbot
announced that parents who don’t immunise their children could be lia-
ble to stop receiving childcare benefits from the state6 – though a lot
of research suggests financial incentives can be poor motivators for
behaviour.7
Using everything you’ve learned in this book, what would you advise
the Australian government to do instead?
Firstly, design a poster advocating the MMR vaccine: what should it
look like, what should be on it, and what should the copy (i.e. headline)
say? Remember, you need to capture attention, get the message ‘taken
on board’, and influencing recipients’ behaviours.
Next, imagine the government is sending out letters to Australian
households encouraging parents to get their children vaccinated. What
one sentence could you add to the letter to make it more effective?
182 CONCLUSION
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INDEX
Abbot, Tony 182 limits on 23–5, 26, 28

Abdelnour, Ziad K. 170 and memory 77, 116
abstract concepts 94–7 non-conscious 21, 23
action, inciting see influencing behaviour online messages 160–1
advertisements 152–7 promotions 153–6
banner advertising workplace communications 171
37, 65, 72, 76 see also emotions; primal stimuli; self-
direct mail 165–9 relevance; surprise
path to purchase framework 14 attentional priming 55
producing curiosity in 87–8 attitude–behaviour relationship 10–12, 14
series of 117–18 attitude change 9–10
subliminal 141–3, 145 attractiveness 135, 172
advertising adstock 113 Audi 56
AdvTruck.ru 32 Australia 182
Adweek 108 authority heuristic 129–32, 157, 162,
affective see emotions 168–9, 173
Affinity Petcare 55 autism 181
Aflac xii autopilot see heuristics
air traffic disasters 80–1 babies 37, 43, 52, 69–70
Ajzen, Icek 10 banner advertising 37, 65, 72, 76
ALDI 118
Alka Seltzer 112 Bargh, John 144
Amos, Daniel P. xii Bay, Michael 61–2
amygdala 22, 44, 47, 171 Beamer, Todd 100
anger 46, 47 behaviour
animals and attention 29
cats 40–1, 165 attitude–behaviour relationship 10–12,
cute 40–3 14
giant pandas 34 measuring outcome 177–80
hybrid 67–8 see also influencing behaviour;
primates 6–7, 102, 133 motivating behaviour
animations 171 big data 58
anti-smoking messages 4, 29, 77–8, 88 Big Issue, The 40–1
apophena 3 Binet, Les 49
arousal 18, 47–8, 63 Biologist 64
Arrested Development (TV series) 82 bizarreness effect 67
Asch, Solomon 119 Black Friday 152
attention 15, 28–9, 76–7, 149–50 Blair, Tony 116, 118, 178
direct mail 166–7 body language 135, 172
183
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Bolata, David 55–6 Clever Hans (horse) 3
boredom 80 cliff-hangers 81
bottled water 115, 152 clothing 173
Bowen, James 40–1 co-creation 85–8
bowl-size effect 125 Coane, Jennifer 55–6
Bowman Gray School of Medicine 166 Coca-Cola 52–3, 142
brain 13, 20–6 cocktail party effect 24, 51
conscious 20–4, 28 cognitive appraisal 83
fusiform face area 37 see also curiosity
mammalian 22, 23, 24, 26, 44, 94 cognitive biases 6–7, 90, 125, 178
non-conscious 20–4, 96 cognitive dissonance 83, 137
reptilian 22, 31, 44 cognitive processing 15–16, 76–8, 150
Triune Brain Theory 21–2 direct mail 168
brain-imaging studies 103 elaboration-likelihood model of
see also EEG research persuasion 9–10, 13
brain stem 22 limited capacity 23–5, 26, 28, 90
Brassed-Off Britain (documentary) 165 and memory 77, 116
Budweiser 108 online messages 161–2
bundling products 157 promotions 156
Buzzfeed 159 workplace communications 171–2
see also curiosity; ease; narrative
Cacioppo, John 9 Colombia University 175
Cadbury 26 colonoscopies 120–1
Cambodian lion fighting story 99 colour-naming tasks 55
Camerer, Colin 11 commitment and consistency heuristic 17,
Canadian Club 17 136–9
Carnival cruise line 167 communication toolkit 148–51
cat food 154–6 Compare The Market 42
cats 40–1, 165 Competition and Marketing Authority, UK
causal relatedness 106–7 127
celebrities 55, 131, 181 competition metaphors 87
central route to persuasion 9–10 concreteness 94–7, 168
cereal box mascots 37–8 conscious brain 20–4, 28
cerebellum 22 consequences metaphors 87
cerebral cortex 22 consistency see commitment and
Chabris, Christopher 24 consistency heuristic
Changing Lives Through Literature contrast 61–6, 171
campaign 100–1 Cornell University 38
chaos theory 176 Corsodyl 48–9
charity appeals 167 Covey, Steven 4
charm prices 157 Cracked website 103
cheating 137 creativity 70–2, 153
Cherry, Colin 24, 51 credibility see authority heuristic
chimpanzees 6, 7 crossword puzzles 79–80
Chineasy 106 curiosity 16, 25, 79–89, 150
Chinese ideographs 55, 106 cultural power of 80–2
chocolate 26, 43, 90–1 direct mail 168
Christmas 132 and generation effect 85–6
Cialdini, Robert 125, 128 in marketing campaigns 84–5
Clegg, Nick 136–7 metaphors in messages 86–8
184 INDEX

motivating behaviour 84–5 EEG research 11, 33, 62, 66
online messages 159 Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing
promotions 156 Science 13
and surprise 70, 82–3 elaboration-likelihood model of persuasion
workplace communications 172 9–10, 13
customer acquisition 165 electric shock experiment 129–30
customisation, mass 56–9 emails
cute animals 40–3 direct mail 165–9
and liking heuristic 136
Dark Knight, The (film) 84–5 from personal addresses 169
Dasani bottled water 115, 152 personalisation 55, 56, 58–9
Dawkins, Richard 17, 24, 34 spam 166
De Beers 125 use of CC field 7–8
de Gelder, Beatrice 44 emoticons 161
decision-making emotional brain regions 22, 23, 24, 26,
avoiding difficult 25, 90 44, 94
non-conscious 21, 23 emotional peak 120, 121, 156, 162
rational 9–10, 13, 20, 181, 182 emotions 15, 45–8, 149
see also heuristics arousal 18, 47–8
DeRemer, Sarah 67–8 babies 43
diamonds 125 concrete vs abstract concepts 97
Diet Coke 32 cute animals 40–3
diffusion of responsibility 7–8 identifiable victim effect 97
dimensionality alteration metaphors 88 as motivators 48–9
direct mail 165–9 and narrative 103
discounts 152–3, 157 online messages 160
disgust 46, 47 promotions 153
Disney 141 science of affect 42–4
distinctive assets 154–6 threatening stimuli 28, 44
distinctiveness effect 67, 70–1, 171 valence 47–8
donations and violence 45
and emotions 46 workplace communications 171
future discounting 169 empathy 102–3, 162
and identifiable victim effect 97 ethical considerations 127
and liking heuristic 135 Evian 43
and narrative 168 evolution
organ 90, 101 attention to food 36
and repetition 17 attention to threatening stimuli 28, 44
and social proof heuristic 128–9 emotions 45–6
dot probe tasks 32, 37 reciprocity 132–3
drip pricing 157 sexual desire 33, 34
Duyser, Dian 36 surprise 70
Triune Brain Theory 21–2
ease 16, 90–8, 150 valuing scarcity 126
concreteness 94–7, 168 exercises, in presentations 172
direct mail 168 Experimental Analysis of Surprise, An 66–7
images 96–7, 154, 156, 161, 171 extreme situation metaphors 87
simplicity 92–4, 156, 161, 168 eye contact 38, 173
suggestion 91–2 eye-tracking research 21, 23, 29, 35, 37,
edits, television 63–4 58, 178–9
INDEX 185

face-to-face meetings 172 Goldblum, Jeff 176
Facebook 8, 28, 51, 57–8, 159, 161 Google 16, 88
faces 36–8, 76, 161 gorilla experiment 24
facial expressions, surprise 69–70 grooming, primates 133
facial feedback hypothesis 11–12 Grumpy Cat 41
facial recognition technology 57 Guber, Peter 101
fairy tales 102 Guinness 56, 65
familiarity
narrative 103–5 half-life, memory 113
self-relevance 55–6 halo effect 134–5
fear 44, 45, 47, 48–9, 181 handshakes 173
Federal Reserve Board, USA 93 happiness 46
Fedorikhin, Alexander 23 Harvard University 175
Feigenson, Lisa 69 HeadOn 2, 117
Felix cat food 154–6 Heath, Chip 102
Festinger, Leon 137 Heineken 15
Field, Peter 49 Herzigova, Eva 32
films 61–2, 84–5, 103, 176 heuristics 17, 23, 26, 112, 123–40, 148,
first names 52, 53, 136, 163 151
Fisher, Walter R. 16, 100 authority 129–32, 157, 162, 168–9, 173
Fiskar 167 commitment and consistency 17, 136–9
flies 133 direct mail 168–9
fluency 25, 55, 156 liking 134–6, 163, 169, 172–3
focus groups 178 online messages 162–3
font sizes 157 price psychology 157
food 34–6 promotions 153, 157
Foodspotting app 35 reciprocity 132–4, 162, 169
foot-in-the-door technique 138 scarcity 125–7
Fournaise Group 5 social proof 127–9, 163
free gifts 133–4, 162, 169 workplace communications 172–3
free will 11, 141 hippocampus 13
Freud, Sigmund 20 Hirsh, Jacob 58
fruit flies 133 Hitchens, Christopher 181
fusiform face area 37 Hoffman, Bob 4–5
future discounting 169 Horner, Vicky 6
hot hand fallacy 3–4
gap theory 83, 86 Hsueh, ShaoLan 106
Garner, Randy 135–6 human brain 22
Gauthier, Alexandre 35 humour 171
gaze direction 38, 76, 173 Huron, David 82–3
geese 103–4 hybrid animals 67–8
gender differences 33–4
generation effect 85–6 I Modi (The Ways) 31
genes 17–18, 24 identifiable victim effect 97
Genovese, Kitty 7 IKEA 15
giant pandas 34 illusion-of-truth effect 118
gifts 132–4, 162, 169 illusions 63
glasses 173 images 96–7, 154, 156, 161, 171
GoCompare.com 2 implicit egoism 53–4
GoDaddy.com 34 implicit testing 178
186 INDEX

in-store promotional materials 65, 153, laziness see ease
154 legal considerations 127
Indiana University 32 Lepper, Mark 25
infants 37, 43, 52, 69–70 Liberal Democrats 136–7
influencing behaviour 16–17, 112–14, 151 Libet, Benjamin 11
direct mail 168–9 liking heuristic 134–6, 163, 169, 172–3
online messages 162–3 limbic system 22
promotions 156–7 litter 128
workplace communications 172–3 Loewenstein, George 83, 86
see also heuristics; memory; motivating L’Oréal 57
behaviour; priming loss aversion 6
infographics 162 loyalty cards 138
instinct 103–4
interactive experiment 88 McDonald’s 85
International Journal of Advertising 68 McVitie 42
internet Mailchimp 177
banner advertising 37, 65, 72, 76 Malaysian Airlines 80–1
browsing behaviour 94 mammalian brain 22, 23, 24, 26, 44, 94
cat videos 41 Marketing magazine 57, 118
food photography 34–5, 36 Marks & Spencer 15
global penetration 8 Mars 13
memes 17–18 mass customisation 56–9
mock sites 177 meaning, narrative 105–7
novelty 67–9 measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR)
online messages 158–64 181, 182
pornography 31 measuring outcome behaviour 177–80
split-testing 177 meerkats 42
virality 18, 41, 68–9 memes 17–18
see also social media memory 16–17, 115–22, 151
interpersonal influence 170 and attention 77, 116
irrational brain 20–1 and cognitive processing 77, 116
isolation effect 67 half-life 113
ITPRA (Imagination, Tension, Prediction, mnemonic link system 106
Reaction and Appraisal) model 82–3 and narrative 102, 104–5, 106–7
Iyengar, Sheena 25, 92–3 online messages 162
peak-end rule 120–1
Jackpotjoy 71–2 primacy and recency 119–20
John Hopkins University 69 promotions 156
Journal of Advertising 64–5, 93 repetition 17, 116–18, 172
Journal of Consumer Psychology 49 Spreading Activation Theory 25, 77–8
Jurassic Park (film) 176 Mercedes-Benz 68–9
mere agreement effect 139
Kahneman, Daniel 20, 120–1, 125 mere-exposure effect 55
Kickstarter campaigns 160, 162 message processing see cognitive
King’s Cross station, London 65 processing
Knorr 16 metaphors 86–8
Kunz, Phillip 132 Milgram, Stanley 127–8, 129–30
mirror neurons 102
Lancaster University 142 MMR see measles-mumps-rubella vaccine
LaPiere, Richard 10–11 (MMR)
INDEX 187

mnemonic link system 106 New York Times 46, 47, 158–9
mock online sites 177 NHS 17
monkey brain see mammalian brain noise contrast 64–5
monkeys 6, 102 non-conscious brain 20–4, 96
mortgages 93 non-conscious processes 9–10, 13, 14
motivating behaviour non-conscious testing methodologies
curiosity 84–5 178–9
emotions 48–9 novelty 67–9, 171
mystery motivator technique 80 nudges see heuristics
see also influencing behaviour
mouthwash 48–9 O2 57
movement contrast 63–4, 65 object discrimination tasks 53
Murphy’s Law 176 oddball effect 67
music videos 30–1 Ofcom 28
mystery 16, 25, 79–89, 150 office communications 170–5
cultural power of 80–2 online messages 158–64
curiosity and surprise 70, 82–3 OpenTable 34
direct mail 168 Oppenheimer, Nicky 125
and generation effect 85–6 Optimizely 177
in marketing campaigns 84–5 Oreo 160
metaphors in messages 86–8 organ donations 90, 101
motivating behaviour 84–5 orienting response 62
online messages 159 originality 67–9
promotions 156 overfamiliarity 80
workplace communications 172
mystery motivator technique 80 Packard, Vance 141
Packham, Chris 34
Nahai, Nathalie 123 Pampers 96
name-letter effect 53–4 pareidolia 3, 36–7
narcissism 158 parietal activation 13
narrative 16, 25, 99–109, 150 Parks, Rosa 100
archetypes 105 path to purchase framework 14
basic plots 104 patterns 3–4, 36–7, 141
direct mail 168 Pavlov, Ivan 62
empathy 102–3, 162 payday loans 92, 93, 136
familiarity 103–5 peak-end rule 120–1
five-act structure 107–8 pension plans 92–3
meaning 105–7 Pepe the Frog 17
memorability 102, 106–7 Pepsi 142
online messages 162 peripheral route to persuasion 9–10, 13
persuasiveness 101, 103 personal language 53
power of 100–2 personalisation
promotions 156 direct mail 166, 167
workplace communications 172 emails 55, 56, 58–9
narrative case studies 172 mass 56–9
narrative journalism 99–100 online messages 159, 161
narrative tension 81 promotions 154
negative emotions 46–8 seasonal 56
Netflix 82 personality traits 58
Network Rail 65 persuasion
188 INDEX

elaboration-likelihood model questions, using 161, 172
of 9–10, 13
narrative 101, 103 racial prejudice 178
see also heuristics; priming random patterns 3–4, 36–7
Petty, Richard 9 randomised control trials 176
phonemes 157 rational brain 20–1
photography 8 rational decision-making 9–10, 13, 20,
food 34–5, 36 181, 182
pictorial analogy 87 reach strategy 156
picture superiority effect 96–7 reaction times 44, 67, 95, 178
pigeons 55 recency effect 119–20
Pinterest 34 reciprocity heuristic 132–4, 162, 169
planned behaviour theory 10 recorded delivery 168
pointing 7 recycling 138
Polletta, Francesca 100 Reddit 31, 162
pornography 31, 32, 33 reference prices 157
post-rationalisation 11 Reisenzein, Rainer 70
power stance 174–5 relationship dissatisfaction 80
precise prices 157 reminders 162
presentations 170–5 repetition 17, 116–18, 172
price length 157 reptilian brain 22, 31, 44
price obfuscation 157 responsibility, diffusion of 7–8
price promotions 152–3 restaurants 123–4, 145
price psychology heuristics 157 rhetorical rule of three 116, 118
primacy effect 119–20 Rizzolatti, Giacomo 102
primal stimuli 15, 30–9, 149 Romeo and Juliet 86–7
faces 36–8, 76, 161 Royal Mail 167
food 34–6 rules-of-thumb see heuristics
sex 30–1, 32–4 Russell, Roderick 51
using with care 35
primates 6–7, 102, 133 sadness 46
priming 17, 112, 141–6, 151 Salvation Army 16–17
attentional 55 scarcity heuristic 125–7
direct mail 166–7 schema-discrepancy 70
promotions 157 Schmidt, Eric 8
subliminal suggestion 17, 141–3, 145 science of communication 6–18
workplace communications 173 affect 42–4
printing press 31 attitude–behaviour relationship 10–12,
prisoners, and literature 100–1 14
Prisoner’s Dilemma 20 cognitive biases 6–7
processing messages see cognitive elaboration-likelihood model of
processing persuasion 9–10, 13
product descriptors 157 facial feedback hypothesis
product options 157 11–12
promotional materials, in-store 65, 153, self-relevance 51–2
154 social cognition 7–8
promotions 152–7 surprise 69–70
psychological testing methodologies seasonal personalisation 56
178–9 ‘See, Do, Get’ model 4
puzzles 79–80, 86–8, 172 self-disclosure 173
INDEX 189

self-relevance 15, 51–60, 149 Sunstein, Cass 125, 148
cocktail party effect 24, 51 Super Bowl 34, 107–8
direct mail 166–7 supraliminal priming 145
familiarity 55–6 surprise 15, 46, 61–73, 150
mass customisation 56–9 bizarreness effect 67
name-letter effect 53–4 contrast 61–6, 171
online messages 161 and curiosity 70, 82–3
science of 51–2 direct mail 167
seasonal personalisation 56 distinctiveness effect 67, 70–1, 171
see also personalisation isolation effect 67
Selfish Gene, The (Dawkins) 17, 24 novelty 67–9, 171
semantic connections 86–7 oddball effect 67
series of advertisements 117–18 online messages 161
Sesame Street (TV series) 64 orienting response 62
sex 30–1, 32–4 and repetition 117–18
Shiv, Baba 23 science of 69–70
similarity 172 unexpected stimuli 66–7
Simons, Daniel 24 surprise brow 69–70
simplicity 92–4, 156, 161, 168 survey methodologies 177–8
Simpson, O.J. 134 Swichkow, Brian 51
smoking 4, 29, 77–8, 88, 126–7 System 1 brain 20–1
snakes 44 System 2 brain 20–1
social cognition 7–8
social influence 170 Talbot, William Henry Fox 8
social learning 6 Taleb, Nassim 3
social media 8, 28, 51, 52, 158–64 Tamietto, Marco 44
food photography 34–5, 36 Target 57
mass customisation 57–8 technology
virality 18, 41, 68–9 mass customisation 56–8
social movements 100 and pornography 31
social proof heuristic 127–9, 163 promotions 154
songs, popular 30–1 television 63–4, 81, 82
Sony 71 Tesco 57
Sopranos, The (TV series) 81, 82 testing messages 176–80
South Africa 92, 93, 136 tetanus vaccines 96
spam emails 166 text messages 126–7
speaking 173 Thaler, Richard 125, 148
spiders 28, 44 theory of planned behaviour 10
split-testing 177 thinking see cognitive processing
Spreading Activation Theory of memory Thinkmodo 15
25, 77–8 Thorndike, Edward 134–5
Starbucks 57 threatening stimuli 28, 44
statistical analysis 180 Tiananmen Square 100
status quo bias 90 time limits 157
storytelling see narrative timing
Stroop task 55 direct mail 168
subliminal suggestion 17, 141–3, 145 online messages 161
suggestion 91–2 traffic accidents 32
see also subliminal suggestion Transformers (films) 61–2
suicide 181 transportability of narrative 103
190 INDEX

Triune Brain Theory 21–2 Valentine’s Day 133
trust see authority heuristic Vanderbilt University 105
Tversky, Amos 125 Vanhove, Kyle 62
Twenge, Jean 158 VHS 31
Twitter 4, 52, 158, 161, 162, 163–4 Vicary, James 141–2
Twix 16 video conferencing 172
txt2stop programme 126–7 violence 30–1, 45
virality 18, 41, 68–9
UCL 13, 58 visual contrast 63–4, 65
ultimatum games 20 visual metaphors 87
Underwood, Benton 116 voice 173
unexpected stimuli 66–7 von Osten, Wilhelm 3
UNICEF 96 voting behaviours 121
University of California 66
University of Cambridge 58 Wal-Mart 152
University of Geneva 43 Wansink, Brian 90–1
University of Hiroshima 42–3 Waxler, Robert 100–1
University of Leicester 64 Webdriver Torso (YouTube channel) 79
University of Leipzig 99–100 Whiskas cat food 154–6
University of Michigan 53, 81 Whiten, Andrew 6
University of St Andrews 133 Wilson, Timothy 23, 93
University of South Australia 43 Wood, Orlando 49
University of Sydney 165 Woolcott, Michael 132
University of Toronto 77, 85 workplace communications
University of Warwick 64 170–5
University of Washington 103
urban legends xii, 18, 102 yellow backgrounds 157
YouTube 18, 31, 41, 68–9, 79, 88
vaccines 96, 181, 182
valence of emotions 47–8 Zajonc, Robert 55
INDEX 191


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Cover.

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‘From bizarre psychological principles to testing approaches that actually work,

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First published 2016 (print and electronic)

© Patrick Fagan 2016 (print and electronic)

ISBN: 978–1-292–07442–9 (print)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cover design by Two Associates

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PART 2 SECTION 1 INVITE ATTENTION

SECTION 2 IGNITE THINKING

SECTION 3 INCITE ACTION

PART 3 PUTTING IT TO USE

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Patrick Fagan is a consumer psychologist with both academic and

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xii THANKS AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Source: © Liliya Kulianionak/Shutterstock.com

Take a good look at this puppy.

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Predictive power for sharing

–30% –20% –10% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

xiv LET'S GET #HOOKED

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LET'S GET #HOOKED xv

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SEEING PATTERNS THAT DON’T EXIST

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It’s hardly surprising, then, that surveys by consultancy The Fournaise

Belief True False

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MAKING MESSAGES SOCIAL

1 The Science of Communication 7

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WHY MESSAGES MATTER

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TRADITIONAL APPROACHES TO GETTING READ

The central route to persuasion The peripheral route to persuasion

The model proposes that consumers process the message centrally or

1 The Science of Communication 9

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Central versus peripheral

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1 The Science of Communication 11

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Average cartoon funniness rating

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