Mini Episode 5 - Why do I get so many notifications about the status of my parcel?

Marcel in Camberwell wants to know why DHL insists on telling him every intricate detail about his new tennis racquet's cross continental journey.

 Dan: 00:18 Hey, and welcome to Bad Decisions Mini Episode Five. I'm your host, Dan Monheit co-founder of Hardhat, and we are doing our best to get through the weird and wonderful questions that have been submitted over the years while Dr. Mel is off raising a young child. What up Dr. Mel? I know you're listening. I hope I'm doing you proud here. Today, we have another super locked out appropriate question. Let's hear what we're in for.

Marcel: 00:41 Hey, Marcel from Camberwell here. I order a lot of things through Amazon and nowadays, even more while in lockdown. I love the ease and convenience, but now I'm inundated with notifications. First, it's your order has been confirmed. Then, my package has been packed. Now, it's been sent. Next, it's in transport. And finally, it's been delivered. Why all of these messages to my email and phone? It's a bit annoying.

Dan: 01:05 I love that your name is Marcel and we are tackling a question about parcels, but I will leave that for some other time. So look, I know we say these things are kind of annoying, but there's also a little bit of us that kind of loves getting the adrenaline hit or the dopamine hit from those little notifications. And it does seem weird that these things turn up so often when you consider number one, how much these big logistics companies need to invest in technology to help them track and trace and share the status of must be millions of parcels around the world. When you consider number two, that conventional CX and UX wisdom tells us that we just need to make everything smooth and we should keep customers as far away from the tangled mess of the inner workings of our organization as possible. And number three, who really cares how many Brazilian distribution centers our six pack of crew socks had to pass through before it made it to our home in Melbourne or Sydney?

Dan: 01:55 So, these are all reasons that would make us wonder why would they even bother? I mean, the other thing to consider is that those notifications don't actually make them come any quicker, but they do have a funny way of reducing our anxiety about I wonder where our package is. And I wonder if they've shipped it and I wonder when it's going to get here and I wonder if it's on track. And there probably is some tangential benefit of less people calling their call centers to just ask where their golf balls are. But behaviorally, I think we've got a far more interesting thing to dive into as we ask ourselves why would global giants like DHL and UPS let us peek behind the curtain of these giant global networks that they are running? What I believe we can pin it down to something called the effort bias and that refers to our tendency to assume that something is worth more, just because more effort has gone into it. And it seems that we are wired to believe that effort is if not a substitute, then at least a leading indicator for the quality of something.

Dan: 02:50 This effort was beautifully showcased by Kruger et al in 2004 in a funny little study that involved poetry. Now what these guys did was they bought subject a room, they randomly split them into two groups, and gave each group an identical set of poems and asked them to evaluate those poems based on the quality of the poem, the overall enjoyment they felt reading the poem, and the amount of money that they believe that a poetry magazine should pay to publish those poems, which I guess was the thing to do in 2004. Not much money getting paid for poetry these days, but anyway, it was simpler times. Now, the only difference here was at one group were told that the poems had taken four hours to write while the other group was told at the exact time poems had taken 18. As you can imagine, the group that had been told upon to take an 18 hours to write considered them of a higher quality, found the more enjoyable, and believed that they were worth far more money than the group who had been told that they'd only taken four hours to write.

Dan: 03:43 Since this study, we've seen similar experiments done with different subject matter, everything from paintings to pottery and wine, we've seen experts and amateurs put through this, and the results are always consistent. We are really, really bad at separating how much effort has gone into something with the actual value that comes out on the other side. Once you switched onto this, you start seeing it everywhere from kitchens, which are now miraculously located in the middle of restaurants when once upon a time they were hidden up the back through to expensive watches that can't be serviced in a period of less than six to eight weeks because they needed to go to some master craftsperson in Switzerland or France all the way through to getting the relentless, but somewhat enjoyable SMS updates about the precise location of a USB powered fan that cannot get here soon enough.

Dan: 04:32 And it is those little notifications that help us appreciate all of the effort that goes in to getting things to our door. With that we value the service a little bit more and we might even be a little more forgiving if things don't go exactly as they were planned. The key takeaway for brands here is not to invent more complexity because the chances are if you are running a successful business there's already insane levels of complexity happening somewhere behind the scenes. Really the key takeaway here is to surface and celebrate whatever it is that makes you great. It might be the logistics process. It might be the ingredients. It might be the origin stories of the company, but if it is not visible, it can be valuable. So make sure people know that it's not all smooth and seamless and you guys really are sweating just a little bit behind the scenes.

Dan: 05:16 So, that's it for today. Marcel, I hope that answers your questions and you can take a little bit more joy next time one of those notifications comes through. If you guys have got more questions about reasons why we do the weird and wonderful things that we do, please shoot them through to me, I'm all over the internet at Dan Monheit or you can email me at askdan@hardhat.com.au. Catch you next time.

Mini Episode 4 - Why do I keep ordering the same burrito?

Adam from Bondi wants to know why he cant say no to that bur-ri-to.

Dan:                             00:17                Yo, and welcome to Bad Decisions, mini episode four. I'm your host, Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat. Now just a quick little reminder, these mini eps we're doing while Dr. Mel’s away with baby Layla. I am doing my best to get through all of these weird and wonderful questions that we've received over the years. Today we have a real doozy. This one has given me real lockdown vibes, so let's go to today's question.

Adam:                          00:41                Hey, it's Adam from Bondi here. I love your show. I've got a question for you. I have a lot of trouble when choosing a meal on Uber Eats. I don't know what to order, and I always end up going to the same burrito. Do you know why that is?

Dan:                             00:57                Right. Yeah. Adam, I really, really feel you on this one. At the moment we're in day 200 and something lock down of Melbourne. I'm doing a lot of ordering off the food apps and somewhere around day 50 of lockdown, I found this amazing chicken salad that I'm now ordering literally three or four days every single week. It has just become my go-to. I'm feeling you. Yours is a burrito, mine's the chicken salad, but I think we're dealing with the same thing here. Now what's weird, especially weird about this one is we all know that variety is, or at least it's meant to be, the spice of life. Today, from a food perspective, especially from a lunch perspective, we have more variety than we could ever hope to have imagined for. Any one of these food apps, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, DoorDash, each one must have hundreds, if not thousands of choices, and there's three or four different apps that you can be choosing from.

Dan:                             01:48                This should be a veritable smorgasbord, or even an actual smorgasbord for us to be making different selections from for our lunches every day. Strangely we seem to go for the same thing over and over and over again. If we look to conventional wisdom, which we can do from time to time with caution, it does suggest that we should love choice. The more options we have the better. This makes sense, right, because choice makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel in control, and the power of an individual to choose is really at the core of our modern democratic brand field capitalist society. Beyond that, I mean, as market, we are literally the Navy seals of capitalism. We dedicate our lives or at least our livelihoods to giving people more and more choices to choose from. It seems weird that you and me, Adam, seem to just keep picking the same damn thing for lunch every single day.

Dan:                             02:38                What we can attribute this to is something called the choice paradox, which refers to our tendency to love the idea of having choice, but become quickly overwhelmed when it's time to choose. The reality is that our small, fairly primitive brains are just not very well equipped to deal with all of the choices and all of the options that we might need to make in any given day. Should I get out of bed or should I not get out of bed? Should I have toast or should I have cereal? Should I wear gray sweat pants or black sweat pants? Well, I'm on Zoom all day so nobody notices anyway, but there's still choices that we need to make. Often what we do when we're faced with too much choice is just to pick the easiest thing that we can, and more often than not, that is the thing that we ordered the last 15 times that didn't kill us. Right?

Dan:                             03:20                It might not be the best burrito or the best chicken salad in the world, but we've had it before, we know it's safe, and we can really save a lot of cognitive processing power if we just go with that again. The choice paradox is beautifully demonstrated in the famous fancy jams study of the year 2000 in which psychologists, Iyengar and Lepper, tested the impact of giving people more choice on conversion rates. Now what these guys did was they set up in a fancy supermarket on back-to-back weekends, and on each time they set up, they had a little table set up with different jams for people to come and sample. When somebody sampled a jam they would then give them a coupon to go and get a discount on the jam if they decided to buy it, which beautifully let them test (1) what proportion of people did we give coupons to, and (2) how many of those are actually redeemed for purchases?

Dan:                             04:04                The first week they set up six different jams for people to come and sample. They had a wonderful 40% sampling rate. Of those 40% of people that stopped for a sample, 30% actually went on to buy. Pretty good, I would say. The next week they set up in the same supermarket on the same table, maybe slightly extended because this time they were showcasing 24 different types of jams for people to choose. What did we see? Well, we saw 60% of people now stop for a sample, which is a pretty good bump in sampling rates, but only 3% of them went on to purchase. Something happened between jam seven and jam 24 where we just exploded people's brains, and thinking about jam too much just became too difficult, and they moved on without it.

Dan:                             04:49                Now, you still need to choose something for lunch. Right? You can't just walk away. You're going to get very angry and very hungry by 3:00 PM, so it makes sense that we would just pick the simplest thing we can, the default option, the thing that we've had before, the thing that we know we like. Click the button, we get on with our day. What we can learn from this is that often less choice is actually better than more. Despite what our instincts and often textbooks tell us, giving people fewer but better choices will actually make our conversion rate better and make people happier with what they ultimately choose. Adam, if you are looking for a little hack or a little way around this, one thing I can recommend is you can give yourself a rule where say one day a week, let's say on a Friday, you are not allowed to order the safe and lovable burrito. You're going to push yourself a little bit. Maybe the Hawaiian burrito, or maybe go wild and order something completely off menu, but that'll at least force yourself to experience something new. Who knows, you might find a new family favorite.

Dan:                             05:42                That is all for today on the choice paradox. If you have other questions about the weird and wonderful things that you see others do, or that you've seen yourself do, you can hit me up at askdan@hardhat.com.au or all over the internet at Dan Monheit. We'll catch you next time. Peace out.

Mini Episode 3 - Why do cans of Coke, diet Coke and Coke Zero all suddenly look the same?

Bianca from Prahran wants to know what's behind Coca Cola's gigantic packaging u-turn.

Dan: 00:17 Hey, and welcome to Bad decisions mini episode three. I'm Dan Monheit, Co-Founder of Hardhat, and for those new to the party in this mini episode format, I am getting down to the bottom of why we do the weird and wonderful things that we do. Today's listener question is from Bianca in Prahran.

Bianca: 00:33 Hey Dan, it's Bianca from Prahran. Yesterday I went to Woolies to grab some Coke and almost accidentally grabbed a zero sugar one. What's the deal with the packaging being so similar? Isn't it confusing for customers?

Dan: 00:47 All right. I am so excited to get to the bottom of this question, but to do it justice I think we need to have a little bit of historical context first. So I'm just going to wind back the clock a little bit. 1937, Coke launches in Australia loud and proud in that distinctive Coca-Cola red we all know and love. Cruises along by itself for 45 years until boom, 1982. Everybody's wearing leotards, doing aerobics, starting to think about living healthy lifestyles, Diet Coke launches, and of course, it's going to look skinny, it's going to look futuristic, what better choice, silver.

Dan: 01:29 So we're cruising along until the new millennium and the good folk at Coca-Cola realize that Aussie males have decided that Diet Coke is maybe a little something for the ladies, and let's be honest, Diet Coke advertising absolutely took that and ran with it, and instead, Aussie males a little bit health conscious are deciding to max their thirst with Pepsi Max. So the good folks at Coke say anything you can do, we can do better, and 2005, we see the launch of Coke Zero complete with an $18 million marketing spam and the now the stinky black can.

Dan: 02:05 So here we are 2005. We have trusty Coke in red. We have Diet Coke in silver. We have Coke Zero in black, and the world makes sense. Until 2015 when Coca-Cola decide that after decades educating the world on the fact that Coke is red, Diet Coke is silver, Coke Zero is black, after billions and billions of dollars making ads ensuring that every person over the age of five knew this, everything changes. Coke strip away these three distinct identities. They instead put everything in one, almost identical can, a red Coca-Cola can save for a, let's call it 15% band across the top of the can, which has a colored strip, which denotes which can this is. So a little black strip for Coke Zero, a little silver strip for Diet Coke and a continued red strip for Coca-Cola Classic as it was then known.

Dan: 03:00 For the marketers amongst us, you've got to ask what the hell is going on here? I mean, we have just had some of the world's most distinctive brand assets trashed. We have had brand codes abandoned. We have had icons buried alive, and in their place, just this can conformity red homogeneousness of Coca-Cola cans. This seems like complete madness. Until you consider mere exposure effect. And the mere exposure effect is a behavioral bias that refers to our tendency to prefer something simply because that thing is more familiar to us. Effectively, it's a scientific proof that turning up really is half the battle. Over the years, scientific studies have proven that mere repeated exposure is enough to prefer particular words, Chinese characters, paintings, pictures, faces, pictures of faces, you name it. Just turning up over and over and over again is enough for us to build a preference towards something.

Dan: 03:57 Perhaps the most iconic study into the mere exposure effect was done by Robert Zion in the early 1960s. And what Zion did, was he managed to get hold of a whole bunch of fertilized unhatched chicks. It was the 60s. I don't know, anything goes, right? He split these chicks into... Or unhatched chicks, I guess you would call them eggs, into two groups and played one set of tones to each group of unhatched chicks. He then waited for the chicks to hatch, played both sets of tones to both groups and miraculously and wonderfully observed that each set of chicks consistently responded to, I don't know, maybe by dancing or something, responded to the tones that they had previously been exposed to, even though the previous exposure happened when they were still eggs. Now I can tell you that if this works in unhatched chicks, it absolutely works in hatched humans.

Dan: 04:49 The mere repeated exposure, it does two things for us. Number one, it builds a sense of safety. So we think if we've seen something 10 times and it hasn't attacked us, on the 11th time, it's probably not going to attack us either. The second thing it builds is something called perceptual fluency, which is really just a fancy way of saying how easy is it to understand what this thing is. And perhaps not surprisingly things that our brain categorize as safe and easy to understand, tend to be more likable than things our brain categorizes as unsafe and difficult to understand. And mere repeated exposure builds both of those things.

Dan: 05:21 By bringing their cans into line, Coca-Cola get to benefit from the mere exposure effect in an almost exponential way, right? Because every time somebody sees a can of Coke now they also 85% see a can of Diet Coke. Every time I see a can of Diet Coke, they also 85% see a can of Coke Zero, and round and round and round it goes. Given Coca-Cola's insane distribution and very, very prominent shelf space, what this can conformity helps them do is ensure that their most valuable asset, their packaging, is also one of their hardest working.

Dan: 05:52 For all of us working in marketing, we can all benefit from the mere exposure effect by just ensuring that we turn up early, that we turn up often and that whenever somebody sees a piece of communications from us, they know it is from us because our distinctive brand assets be that our colors, our fonts, our distinctive imagery, is front and center. So Bianca, hopefully that explains why Coca-Cola have put all of their cans into line for you. Listeners out there, if you've got more weird and wonderful questions you would like answered, you can hit me up askdan@hardhat.com.au, or I'm all over social media. You can usually find me at Dan Monheit. Looking forward to catching you next time for another Bad Decisions and mini episode.

Mini Episode 2 - Why do people queue up outside full restaurants?

A very hungry Laurence from Elizabeth Bay wants to know why more people don’t just cross the street.

Dan:                             00:17                Hey, and welcome to Bad Decisions Mini Episode two, I am your host Dan Monheit co-founder of Hardhat. And for those who are new to this format, we are taking a little period while Mel is off raising a small child and we are using it to get through some of the amazing questions that we have received over the years. Today's question, this is an absolute classic and this comes from Laurence in Elizabeth Bay.

Laurence:                     00:40                Hey Dan, it's Laurence from Elizabeth Bay here. There's this weird thing that happens when I go out for dinner with my wife and we'll be walking down the street and looking for a restaurant to eat at and I always want to go to the empty restaurants so we can get our food quickly, but my wife always wants to go to the full restaurants and line up in these queues and we usually do what my wife wants in the end, but I just can't work out why she likes to do that.

Dan:                             01:00                First up Laurence. I got to say, I love this question because for a guy who spends most of his time looking at and thinking about weird irrational behaviors that we exhibit as humans, standing outside a full restaurant while an empty restaurant waits for us to cross the street has got to be somewhere near the top of the list, right? Because if we were pragmatic, rational economic beings and all we wanted to do is feed ourselves in the most efficient way possible this is definitely not the way we would go about it. So, there clearly must be something else at play here. What is at play here is actually one of the most impactful heuristics in the whole arsenal and it is something called social proof and social proof essentially relates to the idea that we are social creatures or herd creatures by design.

Dan:                             01:46                And if you look at this from a biological physical level, our brains are literally wired to copy what other people do. So, if you think about how we learned to walk or talk as babies, it is not going to the library, it is not watching YouTube. It is looking at grownups around us and trying to imitate them and this doesn't stop when we're no longer toddlers. If you think about the last time you were in a weird new uncomfortable environment so, it might've been at a gallery opening or a very fancy restaurant or a religious ceremony where you're not particularly familiar with what's going on, we tend to look around and see what everyone else is doing and we rightly or wrongly conclude that well, if that's what everybody else is doing, then that is probably the right, the correct, the appropriate, the safe thing to do and I should do it as well.

Dan:                             02:26                Perhaps the most interesting and I would say terrifying research done into social proof comes from Solomon Asch in 1951. And Solomon Asch was one of the forefathers of early behavioral science studies and he spent a lot of his time researching the ways that people made decisions together versus individually. And he designed this really clever experiment where what he would do is he would bring students into a lab and tell the students that they were there as part of an eye test. And when the students walked into the room for their alleged eye test, there were seven other people or participants already in the room. Now, the student believed that these people were also here for eye tests. What they didn't know is this other seven people were actually working for the researchers and they were what we call Confederates.

Dan:                             03:11                So, the student comes in, sits down and then the researcher explains to them here's how the artist is going to work. There are going to be 18 rounds of this test and for each test, we're going to show you three lines of different length so, let's say an A line, a B line and a C line, we are then going to show you a target line and you are going to have to say, which of the three sample lines A, B or C does the target line most closely match. And let me tell you guys, the answer was always quite obvious. Now what the student didn't know was that the other seven participants had been instructed that on 12 of the 18 occasions to all give the same wrong answer. So, you can imagine you've walked in, you've had this test explained to you, they hold up the three sample lines, they hold up the target line.

Dan:                             03:55                The target line clearly matches sample line A and they go around the room and you hear, which is the closest match? B, B, B, B, B, B, B and now it's your turn to answer what would you say? If you were anything like one third of the participants, you would conform every single time. That's right, 33% of participants conformed every time and 75% of participants conformed at least once. So, this is university educated, intelligent people giving an answer that was clearly incorrect to a question that was very easy, simply because they'd had seven other random people give the same wrong answer before they did. And from here Solomon Asch and his team of researchers and us were able to conclude that not only is being part of the group important, but often being together is more important than being right.

Dan:                             04:49                So, social proof is why the leading online retailers like the guys at Kogan.com have little pop-ups that show you that other people are currently also shopping on this website. It's why news publications will tell you how many other people are currently reading this article or its why hotels and flight booking websites will tell you how many other people are currently looking at these deals right now. All of these are not so subtle cues that you are with the group, lots of other people are doing what you're doing and you should just continue along the path. So, really the key takeaway for brands here and how to make the most out of social proof is to show prospective customers the people who are already just like them have done the thing that we're asking them to do.

Dan:                             05:28                So, Laurence there you have it. Social proof is why your wife insists on waiting outside full restaurants. Chances are it's probably going to be a pretty good meal and hopefully you will enjoy the atmosphere of being in a packed restaurant rather than empty one more as well. I bet dear listeners as if you guys have got some weird interesting quirky human behavior that you have observed and you would love my take on why it is happening. Please hit me up with your emails or your social media messages, you can hit me up @DanMonheit across most of the internet or askdan@hardhat.com.au. We'll be back in two weeks and by we I mean I. It's so lonely.

Mini Episode 1 - Why do we keep the boxes from expensive shoes and handbags?

Carli from Melbourne gets us rolling with a listener question that's way too close to home.

Dan:                             00:17                Hey, and welcome to Bad Decisions, mini episode one. I am Dan Monheit co-founder of Hardhat. And if you've just come off listening to the previous episode that we did with Mel, you'll know she's off doing things far more important than recording podcasts, having a baby. Go with that, Mel. So I'm going to try and tide us over, and instead of recording new episodes about new heuristics, I'm going to start working my way through the backlog of amazing questions that we have received over the years about why people do some of the weird and wonderful things that they do. So the first question that we are going to look at as part of this mini ep series comes from Carli in Melbourne.

Carli:                            00:55                Hey, Dan, calling from Melbourne here. I thought it was just something I do, but I've noticed my friends have done this as well. The other day, I bought a pair of shoes, and when they arrived, I loved them and put the box in a closet along with 10 other boxes that have been there, collecting dust. I don't know why I do this. I'm probably never going to use it again. And I've realized I do this with a bunch of other products as well. I'm wondering why.

Dan:                             01:17                Such a good question. And this one is real close to home for me as both a sneaker enthusiast and the husband of a shoe and handbag enthusiast. I'm sure that at least 50% of my mortgage payments each month are just going to cover the cost of storing empty boxes from luxury goods. So this is a great one for us to dive into.

Dan:                             01:37                As I think about it, this probably extends beyond just luxury goods. So when I was younger, I remember like in share houses, people used to hang on to all of the old alcohol bottles from expensive whiskeys or champagnes that they drunk. I remember about the same time in my life. People used to collect the old bottles from the aftershaves and perfumes, even though there was nothing left in them. They didn't want to throw out the bottles. And I guess more recently there seems to be a global habit of hanging on to all of our old iPhone boxes even though we know we are never going to need them again, for some reason, we just cannot bear to throw them out. So it is weird that we would hang on to these things, especially when we know that objectively the value is basically zero.

Dan:                             02:20                So the thing that explains that I think explains a lot of this weird and wonderful behavior is a concept called the halo effect. And the halo effect is all around the idea that as humans, we have a tendency to take an initial impression of a person, product, service, brand. And we take that initial impression, and we apply it to the entire being. It's like why as children, we get told not to judge books by their cover because inherently that's what we do. Reading the whole book is long, boring, time-consuming. It's much quicker to just see the cover, make a call, and get on with your life most of the time. But obviously, this can lead us astray.

Dan:                             02:58                So if we think about some of the research behind this, and the first real piece of research done into the halo effect was done by a guy named Edward Thorndike in the 1920s. And what Thorndike and his team of researchers did was I went to the military, and in the military, they asked commanding officers to rate their subordinates on a series of attributes, including their character, their physical strength, their leadership, and their intelligence. And I think what's interesting about doing this in the military is that there's a natural, maybe not a natural, a forced separation between the commanding officers and their soldiers. So they know who each other are, but they don't know each other particularly well, which I feel is a good approximation for most people with most brands. You know what it is, but you don't know it particularly well.

Dan:                             03:44                Anyway, what they found after the commanding officers filled in their reviews and handed the results in was something that is both obvious, but also very, very interesting. What they found was disproportionately high correlations between positive attributes and disproportionately high correlations between negative attributes. So if a soldier was rated really well on one thing, they were probably rated really well on most things. If they were rated poorly on a thing, they were more than likely to be poorly rated on most things. Now, some of these things make sense. So you would imagine that leadership and intelligence should track together. A smarter person is probably a better leader. But someone's physical characteristics and their character or physical characteristics and their intelligence should really have nothing to do with one another, but they still seem to be tracking side by side of whether people were rated well or not well on those attributes. And from this, Thorndike and his team concluded that we tend to take that initial impression and apply it universally.

Dan:                             04:47                Now, the halo effect goes to explain a lot of other weird and wonderful pieces of research that have been conducted, where we tend to assume that tall people are more competent at their jobs, which perhaps in the NBA is correct, but, really anywhere else, it makes no difference. The halo effect is why Ferrari can sell ballpoint pens for $370. It is why good-looking people tend to do better in our legal system than less good-looking people because we judge books by their covers, and we get on with our lives. Now, there are lots of other wonderful brand examples of this.

Dan:                             05:19                Sometimes the halo is set from the top. It's set from the founder of the business. So the gentleman who founded IKEA, his name is Ingvar Kamprad. He, unfortunately, died a couple of years ago, but before he died, he was written up in one of the rich lists as being, I think, the eighth richest man in the world with a net worth of around $60 billion. And you know, what is amazing about this guy is that if you knew one thing about him, it's that he found that he founded IKEA. If you knew a second thing about him, it would probably be that he insisted on driving a 20-year-old beat-up Volvo, that he always flew economy, that he almost exclusively shopped in thrift stores and at markets. He was just a massive tight ass. Now, this might sound like crazy behavior for somebody that's worth $60 billion. But when you have a business built around sharp pricing, that halo of frugality shines all the way down.

Dan:                             06:08                Luxury brands use the halo effect incredibly well. And I guess, what they do, really core to their being, is they take the halo from their hero or their flagship product. So that piece of jewelry that you're actually buying from Tiffany & Co, and they managed to extend the shine of that halo to the tissue paper that wraps it up, to the box that it sits in, to the bag that it goes home into, the ribbon that ties the bag handles together. It sometimes even extends the retail experience to the perceived fanciness of the people serving us. And even the way we feel about their advertising. If the core product is beautiful and luxurious enough, they seem to be able to stretch that halo to everything else that it touches. And the rational attempting to be rational part of our brain says, "well, look, if you've just paid $520 for this silver pendant, which was clearly worth it, otherwise you wouldn't have paid it. Surely the tissue paper and the box and the bag must be worth something. So we'd better not throw them out".

Dan:                             07:06                So for brands, really, the idea is to remember that first impressions count. And whether that first impression is a website, a piece of content on social media, or in-store interaction, remember that people will judge you by it. So if we're going to be judged by our cover, let's make sure the cover is hot. Thank you so much for your question, Carly. Hopefully, that goes some way to answering why people hang on to the boxes from expensive bags and jewelry. If you've got a question for me that you would love to hear answered, you can hit me up on social media. I'm @DanMonheit. You can find me on LinkedIn, or you can email me at AskDan@hardhat.com.au. And if I've piqued your interest in halo effect, make sure you go back and check out episode 21 of the regular Bad Decisions podcast. We'll be back with another one of these in a couple of weeks. So stay safe, and I'll see you then.