How did Guinness become Britain’s most popular pint?

Back in 1759, Arthur Guinness took out a 9,000-year lease on the St. James's Gate Brewery in Dublin. Ten years later, he began exporting to Great Britain, and 264 years later... In 2023, Guinness became Britain's favourite pint. The Irish classic now accounts for one in every nine pints pulled in the UK. And the results are echoing across Europe, with Guinness enjoying an impressive 19% boost in sales over recent years. But why?

Why is Guinness so popular? Because here's the weird thing. Guinness, to be poured successfully, takes almost two minutes to serve. That means if you order a Guinness, you'll be waiting at the bar for much, much longer than your mates. This should be a negative. It should put people off. But today's guest on Nudge says it has the opposite effect due to some strange psychological biases. In life, people have realised that generally...

higher quality things take more time. All of that coming up in today's episode of Nudge. Now chances are you're listening to this ad while doing something else, maybe a couple of other things, maybe three other things. Unfortunately, this is the bane of podcasters like me. We have to repeat points because many listeners don't pay full attention when they're listening. There's a bit of evidence that suggests people only pay attention to 70%.

of what you say but that is just us podcasters now imagine only listening to 20 now that would be ridiculous and yet most businesses do exactly this with their data. They miss 80%. The emails, the calls, the chats, all of these data points just float into the digital abyss. HubSpot, however, pulls that data together so you can actually learn from it. It helps you see the data you miss because the more you know, the more you grow. Get the full picture at HubSpot.com.

Today's guest on Nudge should be familiar to many loyal Nudge listeners. My name's Richard Shorten and I specialise in applying behavioural science to marketing. And Richard has just published his latest book. So I've written three books on the topic, Choice Factory...

The Illusion of Choice, and then a new one out, which I've co-authored. It's with a wonderful American friend called Michael Aaron Flickr. And that new book's called Hacking the Human Mind. And Richard writes extensively about Guinness in his book. This is one of my favourites. We had a chance for the book to interview Walter Campbell, who was crucial to the campaign. So back in 1997, Guinness had been doing very well as a business, but I think there's this relentless...

pursuit at Guinness to try and push things further. The ads prior to 1997 are world famous. The original campaign featured the now iconic Guinness is good for you slogan written by Dorothy Sayers. Try a Guinness a day for a while and enjoy proving that Guinness is good for you.

Now it's okay saying that back in the 50s but by the mid-1990s you couldn't really claim that drinking a Guinness a day was good for you and you couldn't really claim that Guinness was good for you at all. So Guinness needed a new slogan. So they actually put the creative business up for pitch. One of the agencies involved is AMV. And they show the brief to a creative director called Walter Campbell. And Campbell reads through the brief.

And the thing that sticks in his mind is the brief says you may not draw attention to the fact that we're slow. You need to get over this problem. The brief specifically said that under no circumstances should the campaign talk about the Stouts slow. poor. The aim was to win over lager drinkers and the brand was concerned that waiting two minutes for a pint might put those lager drinkers off.

Some competitors even made light of this. Newcastle Brown Ale, one of Guinness's main competitors in the 90s, used this as their tagline in their ads. Brown drinkers get straight to the pint. So Newcastle brown drinkers might get straight to the pint, but not Guinness drinkers. They have to wait two minutes. However, Walter Campbell wasn't concerned about this apparent weakness. But Campbell?

i think is a quite a contrarian soul and he thinks well actually i get this i've got this wrong there's a real power he says that there's something quite powerful about this delay this sense of anticipation so He ignores the stipulation, and then he comes back with this line, good things come to those who wait. So he's drawing attention to the floor of slowness, but crucially...

He then links that weakness to the positive upside of quality. It takes 119.5 seconds to pour the perfect pint. Guinness. Good things come to those who wait. That was Campbell's first ad. Titled Swim Black, it specifically called out that the pint took two minutes to pour. His second ad, Surfer, took this idea even further. He waits. That's what he does. And they'll tell you what. Tick followed talk followed tick followed talk followed tick. Here's to waiting. This ad was all about waiting.

And it did incredibly well. It topped Channel 4 and the Sunday Times' 100th greatest ads of all time in 2000. And the results were pretty impressive as well. The campaign, according to Campbell, was credited with a 12% increase in Guinness' sales. And the slogan has been used for the last two decades. In a 2020 US TV commercial, legendary quarterback Joe Montana said this. Good things come to those who win.

Guinness chose to broadcast rather than hide its weakness. This seems counterintuitive until you learn about the Prattful effect. This is an idea called the Prattful effect. So essentially, it's the argument... that we find people or products more appealing if they have a flaw so the original study was done back in 1966 by Elliot Aronson psychologist at Harvard and this wonderful study he recruits a colleague

He gets that colleague to take part in a quiz. He gives the colleague all the answers to this quiz. So the guy does amazingly well, gets 92% of the questions right, wins the quiz by miles, looks like an utter genius. But then... As the quiz is finishing, the contestant makes what an American would call, or an American in the 60s would call a pratfall. He makes a small blunder and he spills a cup of coffee down himself. Aronson has recorded all of this.

He then takes the recording and he plays it to listeners. Sometimes, though, he plays the entire incident. Sometimes the listeners hear an edited version in which the spillage has been removed. They only hear the amazing quiz performance. Now, when Aronson questions those listeners as to their feelings about the contestant, the people that have heard the entire footage...

So remember, they have heard that mistake. They've heard that spillage. They rate the contestant 45% higher in terms of appeal than the people who didn't hear the spillage. So the argument from Aronson is this wonderful point that There is a kind of a humanness. There is a appeal to people who exhibit a flaw.

In Hacking the Human Mind, Richard and Aaron write how Aronson's findings have since been confirmed by many others. In 1993, for example, researcher Kipling Williams and colleagues at the University of Tol Deo led a study into legal settings into a technique called the stolen thunder technique. Now, the stolen thunder technique is a tactic you'll know if you've watched a lot of crime dramas. It's where a defence attorney in court admits a weakness in their case.

for the person they're representing, before the prosecution has a chance to bring it up. In other words, they highlight their own weakness before a competitor can. So, for the study, the researcher Williams recruited 257 participants and asked them to read one of three versions of a criminal trial. All the versions were identical except for one detail. In the first group, the damaging piece about the defendant was absent.

So there was no thunder here. In the second group, that damaging piece of evidence was brought up by the prosecutor. So that was the thunder. And in the third group, the damaging piece of evidence was first brought up. by the defence. So that's the stolen funder group. The results show that a defendant is 12% more likely to walk free if a damning piece of evidence is shared by their own side rather than the prosecution.

If you share your own weakness, it reduces the impact of the negative element and boosts credibility at the same time. This is exactly the approach taken by Guinness. Customers have to wait. They know they have to wait. So why not just accept that? or even turn it into a selling point. Now that's, I think, what Walter Campbell's tapping into so brilliantly. And I don't think it was completely post-rationalisation to say this was an aim.

Because the head creative, the A in AMV, was one of the world's best copywriters at the time, David Abbott. And he had famously said, confession is good for the soul and it's good for copy too. So Walter Campbell's boss, David Abbott, had realised this fact there's real power in making a remission. And Guinness is hardly the first to apply this principle.

Volkswagen came up with many Prattful-inspired lines. They created ads saying that ugly is only skin deep. They referred to their car as a lemon or America's slowest fastback. Or take Avis, who say when you're only number two, you have to try harder. Listerine said the taste people hate twice a day. And Southwest Airlines says we're not fancy. But what was so clever about Campbell's...

interpretation of that idea was he didn't just admit any old flaw like kind of happens in aaron's experiment he picks a flaw that has a mirror strength And that's, I think, an absolute brilliant use of the principle. Richard writes in Hacking the Human Mind about a study that clearly demonstrates the importance of admitting negative issues that complement your core strength. The experiment from 2003 comes from a researcher at Blielefeld University in Germany.

This researcher investigated the impact of the Pratful effect on attitudes towards a restaurant. The researcher recruited 133 participants and split them into three groups. Each group was shown a different ad. for a fictitious Italian restaurant called Fresco Francesco. One group was told about only positives, so for example, the cosy atmosphere in the restaurant. The second group was shown the positive features, so that cosy atmosphere, and then an unrelated negative feature.

So, for example, no dedicated car parking spaces. Now, the final group was shown the positive features, cosy atmosphere again, but a related negative feature. So for example, an inability to accommodate a party of more than four. That's related because if you've only got small tables, it leads to that cosy atmosphere. After, all of the participants then rated the restaurant.

Interestingly, the ad with only positive features actually scored lowest. So that was 4.29. They scored it out of nine. And then in line with the Prattful effect, there was a slight improvement for the ad which included an unrelated negative feature. So this scored 4.51 out of 9, higher than the 4.29 from before. But Richard writes that the most successful ad by far was the one with the related negative feature. This ad was scored at 5.62.

Out of nine, when the restaurant had a cosy atmosphere and could only accommodate groups of four, it was rated as 31% better than those who only saw the positive ad. Matching a strength. with a related weakness, made the restaurant's ads more successful. And Richard thinks the same effect plays out for Guinness. Because if you just say, oh, you know...

Guinness sometimes has bits in it and they look really unsightly you know that doesn't make people think it tastes higher but in life people have realized that generally higher quality things take more time So that becomes a rule of thumb. And again, with all of these rules of thumb, they sometimes get applied even when they're not applicable. So Campbell emphasises that slowness because he knows the kind of mirror strength.

He's high quality. Buckley's offers what they call a foul-tasting cough medicine, but they match that weakness with a strength. They say, Buckley's, it tastes awful and it works. It tastes awful. That's an obvious weakness. And it works. A strength that feels more believable because it is matched with that weakness. Or take Stella Artois. For years, they have said they are reassuringly expensive. They connect their weakness, which is their high cost, with their quality.

And it's this, this connection between a strength and a related weakness that made the Guinness ads such a success and ultimately helped them become the most popular pint in Britain today. So yeah, one of my favourite... chapters of the book you know good things come to those away it's an absolutely brilliant line uh from i think a brilliant creative director and a brilliant agency

But Richard wasn't done there. He said he had a similar example from an adjacent industry of a brand that achieved incredible success by applying some interesting behavioural science. And there was this amazing line. It took me 5,127 prototypes before I built the bagless vacuum. All that's coming up after the break. The podcast My First Million is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals, and it's the podcast I'd recommend.

Today, My First Million explains how successful entrepreneurs made their first million and how you can apply their learnings to capitalize on today's business trends and opportunities. There are many fantastic episodes, but the one I really enjoyed was with Will Guidara.

gadara's book is one of my favorite books it explains how will applied behavioral science to create a three-star michelin restaurant it's a fantastic book and it really made for a fantastic episode so if you want something to listen to after this go and listen to my first

wherever you get your podcasts hello and welcome back you are listening to nudge with me phil agnew james dyson built the 15 billion dollar dyson brand by more often than not doing the opposite of what his advisors told him to do. For his first vacuum, Dyson insisted on keeping the vacuum cylinder transparent. Advisors told him not to. They feared that customers obviously wouldn't want to see the dirt and grime being sucked up inside the machine.

But Dyson insisted on keeping it see-through. And Richard thinks it's because Dyson really knew a thing or two about consumer psychology. Richard realised this after reading just the first line of Dyson's biography. picked up the autobiography of James Dyson, flicked to the first page, looked at the first sentence, and there was this amazing line, and it's essentially Dyson saying, it took me 5,127 prototypes before I built them.

bagless vacuum. And James Dyson shares the same example in interviews, like this one with the How To Academy. I mean, I thought it would take me sort of six months, you know, and it took me four years. and 5127 prototypes. And there were 5126 failures. I thought as soon as I saw that, that single sentence is packed with two amazing principles that Dyson have applied again and again.

because that number of 5127 it appears again and again you look at the first ads that Dyson ran so I thought I'd try and design something better And a few thousand prototypes later, I had it. The PR that they push out. It took me 5,127 prototypes. The website, they're always talking about the huge number of prototypes.

that James Dyson went through before he managed to get to his final invention. Now you could easily argue this story, if you approached it from a kind of narrow-minded logical perspective, you could argue it's irrelevant. Surely what a... buyer of a vacuum should do is just rate the vacuum on its design how beautiful it is how nice and look in the corner of the room how how well it sucks up dirt but behavioral scientists say well we don't just care about

What people should do, we're interested in what they actually do. And what people actually do is use effort as a proxy for quality. Evidence for this comes from a 2004 study by Justin Kruger. Kruger and colleagues recruited 138 participants and split them into two groups. Kruger asked all participants to read the same poem, a poem called Order by Michael van Weyligen.

But here's the twist. One group was told that the poet had written the poem in just four hours, while the other group was told it took the poet 18 hours to write this poem. Participants then rated how much they liked the poem and they also estimated how much it might sell for in a poetry magazine. Did the effort become a proxy for quality? Well yes, it did. Those told it took 18 hours to write, liked the poem 10% more, and they said it would sell for nearly two times more.

than those who were told it took just four hours to write. The exact same poem was judged to be both better quality and more valuable when people thought more effort had gone into creating it.

Kruger's study, it focused on poetry, a rather niche domain, but Richard has run studies to see if this same idea works in commercial settings as well. So Michael and I did a little study into this to try and... tease it out in a bit more commercial setting than some of the initial experiments so we showed it was 278 people an image of this beautifully designed vodka bottle so a fake brand called black sheep vodka

A very good designer called Richard Barnes created this image for us. And some people were just asked to rate the beauty of the bottle. Others... We added one line, which was the designer went through 143 iterations before creating this end one. And then we asked them how much they liked the design of the bottle.

And there was a very clear pattern. You get this 35% increase in ratings. If people think lots of effort have gone into it, they think it's higher quality. Even though both groups are being shown exactly the same imagery. They rate the one that they think has been imbued with lots of effort. And I think the argument from this, and I think Morales makes this in her 2005 study into the same principle. Now her point is that...

If people are faced with complex questions, like how high quality a service is or how good a brand is, those are tricky questions. And what people do when they're faced with a tricky question... is as Kahneman says, they replace it with a simpler one that gives an almost as good answer. And the simple question is, how much effort do I think the brand went to? So if we know a brand's gone to lots of efforts, we will rate exactly the same product.

that much higher. Now the argument here is not you as a brand should be manipulative or deceitful. This isn't about lying to the customer and making up fictitious stories of effort. But most brands, they already go to amazing efforts to create good products. The argument is you've just got to be more transparent about those efforts. Don't assume people will realize unless you are very, very clear.

It's clear that James Dyson took this principle to heart because he applied it to his product design as well. Dyson's see-through cylinder is a beautiful example of showcasing the work, the effort you've put into something. The product will literally show you all of the dirt.

picking up a very visceral example of the effort it's putting in and james dyson makes the point that this is a key element of good design he said before and i quote brunel's bridges look so inspiring because you can see the maths and science behind them every The arc, nut, bolt and girder tells a story. Design should not be afraid to bear its innards. Guinness took a weakness, the slow pour, and turned it into a strength.

Dyson took his failures and made them part of his success. Rationally, both of these brands should have hidden their flaws and their failures. The textbook advice is to showcase strength. not limitations, but behavioural science reveals a way to turn those negatives into positives. If you liked today's episode of Nudge, you'll love Richard's latest book. Here's Richard explaining what his books are all about.

So the first two books followed a set pattern, so choice factor and illusion of choice. Each chapter was about a bias, so it might be the practical effect or precision. And then I'll talk about what that bias was. the academic studies that prove that idea, then the studies I'd done to show those ideas could be applied to marketing, and then I talked about the practical implications. With Hacking the Human Mind, we've kind of flipped that on its head.

So we've got a mix of different biases. There's quite a lot of new stuff in there. But every chapter is about a brand. So whether it's Guinness or Five Guys or Klarna, a little history of the brand. Quite a short history, but just to get to the point. And then we talk about what are the one or two principles that that brand has used to power its success. So certainly not the case that...

The entire success of the brand has been driven by these psychological principles. But they're certainly part of that story. The book is an absolute triumph. full of incredible examples of how to apply behavioural science to your work. Search for Hacking the Human Mind wherever you get your books and you'll find it. I've also left a link to the book in the show notes if you want to pick it up from there as well.

Also in the show notes, you will find links to subscribe to the free Nudge newsletter and to watch more Nudge on YouTube.

If you're keen for more behavioural science wisdom after this, then that is where to go. If you have time today, I would massively appreciate it if you took the time to subscribe to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts and perhaps think about leaving the show a quick review on Apple or Spotify. Those reviews really do... help the show climb the charts so if you have left a review already thank you and if you do leave a review don't shy away from talking about

a small negative you have about the podcast. Maybe you can't stand my voice or you think I ramble on for a bit long. Maybe you dislike the lack of music. Don't be afraid of sharing that negative because if Guinness has taught me anything, it's that sometimes showcasing a flaw. can make us even more popular.