Photo by Growtika on Unsplash.
Hacking The Human Mind: The behavioural science secrets behind 17 of the world's best brands.
By MichaelAaron Flicker and Richard Shotton
A review by Eaon Pritchard:
I can be a wee bit old school in some respects. For example, I prefer to get a physical review copy of books. Getting the PDF makes me think I’m on the B-list. Although having the digital version is handier for the copy and paste of nickable nuggets. And rest assured, dear reader, almost all of this is highly nickable. To be fair, I think the authors designed it this way.
Shotton and Flicker take 17 famous brands, tease out the specific psychological levers those brands actually pulled on in successful campaigns, and then give you all the bits and pieces you can lift because there’s experimental evidence for them. In fact, and in a nutshell, Hacking the Human Mind is like a field guide/how-to for agency types and marketers who want to prioritise proof over platitudes.
If you know Shotton’s previous work, this one is a slight detour from the formula.
It’s more of a reverse-engineering-the-winners kinda thing rather than another ‘bias compendium’. Although I do expect it to do similarly spectacular numbers as the previous two mega best-sellers. Each chapter opens with a brand story, digs into the psychological lab notes, and closes with two or three things you can steal for your next brief, pitch, or board pack. It’s an explicit attempt to cut out guesswork by highlighting copyable behavioural tactics that have already worked under controlled conditions.
The seventeen chapters are a tour of the modern brand canon. Starbucks, Snickers, Apple, Red Bull, Guinness, Liquid Death, KFC, Pringles, et al, each twinned with the biases that best explain the mechanisms at work in the work.
On Guinness, Shotton and Flicker upack the surprising logic behind why admitting that a proper pint takes an age to pour shouldn’t work unless you know about the pratfall effect, a cognitive foible the explains why small, honest flaws can increase likeability (and distinctiveness).
The Pringles closer turns what many creatives know intuitively into a set of scientific ‘roadrunner’ rules. Rhymes tend to read truer and are more easily recalled because of increased processing fluency, and designing for multisensory experience helps memory structures.
What makes this collection more than just chin-stroking material is how it arms you for the practical and political job of marketing your marketing. Persuading sceptics inside the building.
Ignaz Semmelweis noticed a brutal pattern in a Viennese maternity ward and ran a simple intervention (hand-washing) that produced a dramatic, documented drop in deaths yet the establishment rejected it anyway. That reflex to dismiss evidence that threatens status, habit, or hierarchy is now shorthand as the Semmelweis reflex. Marketing has its own version, ‘We don’t do that here.’
‘Hacking…’ uses the ‘case-bias-takeaway’ engine as an attempt at the antidote to the Semmelweis reflex.
This is also an unusually usable book. Shotton and Flicker assume readers don’t want to ponder life’s complexities, but just want some levers to pull. They use the famous Kahneman aphorism, “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats… they can do it but they’d prefer not to”, so they cut to the chase, connect lab effects to commercial outcomes, and keep the prose clear without dumbing down the science.
Quibbles?
Hacking the Human Mind excels at the proximate level, the how of biases, framing, and design. To deepen it, I would add a thin ultimate layer, the ‘why’ our minds evolved these responses. They’ve totally nailed mechanism and development but a dash of ‘adaptive value’ and phylogeny would make each chapter’s “why this works” more predictive across categories and cultures.
I’m on a mission to reframe “bias” with Error Management Theory, anyway. Many so-called cognitive errors minimise the costlier miss under uncertainty (‘better safe than sorry’). Saying which error your tactic reduces is useful for forecasting boundary conditions.
In this way we move from ‘what worked’ to why it generalises and turns strong explanations into portable, testable ones.
If you’re a strategist, CMO, or creative who wants to win arguments with more than just your personality, ‘Hacking…’ gives you the language, the lab notes, and the “do this next” bullets to get things moving. Steal from science, then test on your turf.
Hacking the Human Mind is out on September 30 and can be pre-ordered now on Amazon. Grab one and keep it in your desk drawer.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.