#1053 - Richard Shotton - 11 Psychology Tricks From the World’s Best Brands

In This Is Marketing, entrepreneur and marketing expert Seth Godin challenges conventional marketing strategies. He argues that in today's media-saturated world, traditional marketing techniques are no longer effective. Instead, Godin emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with customers based on trust, authenticity, and empathy. Effective marketing, according to Godin, goes beyond mere sales and aims to bring about positive changes in people's lives.

In this guide, we’ll explain why Godin says old marketing techniques are no longer effective and outline his guiding principles for successful marketing in the modern age. We complement his suggestions with insights from his other books as well as those of other marketing experts such as Ryan Holiday (Perennial Seller), Byron Sharp (How Brands Grow), and Pat Flynn (Superfans).

In This Is Marketing, entrepreneur and marketing expert Seth Godin challenges conventional marketing strategies. He argues that in today's media-saturated world, traditional marketing techniques are no longer effective. Instead, Godin emphasizes the importance of building strong relationships with customers based on trust, authenticity, and empathy. Effective marketing, according to Godin, goes beyond mere sales and aims to bring about positive changes in people's lives.

In this guide, we’ll explain why Godin says old marketing techniques are no longer effective and outline his guiding principles for successful marketing in the modern age. We complement his suggestions with insights from his other books as well as those of other marketing experts such as Ryan Holiday (Perennial Seller), Byron Sharp (How Brands Grow), and Pat Flynn (Superfans).

What if everything you knew about marketing was wrong? In How Brands Grow, marketing professor Byron Sharp argues that many of the marketing principles commonly taught in business schools are unsubstantiated myths. By examining the real-world data that indicates which marketing techniques succeed and which fail, Sharp claims to have discovered a new set of empirical rules that directly contradict the widely-held “common sense” principles of marketing.

In this guide, we’ll explore what Sharp believes most marketers get wrong about where a brand’s profits come from and the psychology behind consumers’ purchasing decisions. Furthermore, we’ll define what Sharp believes to be the optimal strategy to market any brand. In addition, we’ll contrast Sharp’s theories with those of marketing experts who argue against his contrarian stance, such as Al Ries and Jack Trout (Positioning) and Seth Godin (Purple Cow). Finally, we’ll update Sharp’s theories in light of the most recent marketing developments and trends, including personalized advertising, social media engagement, and the renaissance of the subscription business model.

Never Split the Difference aims to provide a comprehensive guide to negotiating theory and strategy, giving you the tools you need to negotiate successfully. Voss’s thesis is that good negotiation happens on the emotional level of the brain, not the rational level. Your job as a negotiator, Voss argues, is to practice and display empathy toward your counterpart by understanding their emotions, learning to see the situation from their point of view—and, ultimately, getting them to feel comfortable enough with you to let their emotional guard down.

In this guide, we’ve supplemented Voss’s ideas with findings from outside research and incorporated insights from other key negotiation texts—like Roger Fisher and William Ury’s Getting to Yes and Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation—to give readers a more balanced and nuanced perspective on negotiation and evaluate how Voss’s findings square with those of other acknowledged experts on the field.

Are you a salesperson? You might be surprised to learn that the answer is “Yes.” Hate it or love it, in the modern world, we’re all selling something, and the value of sales skills has never been higher.

To Sell Is Human explains the history, evolution, and significance of sales. It challenges commonly held assumptions by redefining the meaning of sales, re-evaluating the purpose of the salesperson, and showing you how to effectively harness sales skills to create purpose, growth, or “movement” in your life (whether it be for personal or professional gain). Using our guide, you’ll build on your inherent sales instincts to develop confidence, build connection, and generate success in your life.

Most people think of willpower as a virtue, an admirable trait that we strive for but don't always achieve. But science tells a different story. Willpower—the ability to exercise self-control when you need it—is an instinct that's wired into our brains. Yet it seems like willpower vanishes at crucial moments, like when your coworker shows up with a box of donuts.

To harness your innate willpower, you need to understand what factors make you give up your self-control. In The Willpower Instinct, Stanford psychology professor Kelly McGonigal details how our natural willpower gets compromised by stress, distraction, lack of sleep and exercise, and a host of other factors. Using the latest psychology and neuroscience research, she offers strategies to help us defeat procrastination, control cravings, and achieve our goals.

In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz contends that the vast array of choices presented to us leaves us stressed and indecisive. To lift this burden, Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action, recommends we learn how to better navigate our choices, from groceries to health insurance.

Schwartz’s work combines psychology, economics, and his personal experiences. In this guide, we’ll examine the types of choices we face, the challenges of making choices, how excessive choices make these challenges more difficult, and how to live with expanded choice. Our guide adds scientific and cultural context to Schwartz’s ideas, plus updates on how choice has grown since the book’s publication.

Thinking is the key to improvement in all areas of your life—but what if it’s your thinking that needs to be improved? In The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, award-winning educators Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird provide a guide for maximizing your thought process to achieve the greatest success possible in the classroom, the workplace, and your personal life.

In our guide, we’ll explore the five principles Burger and Starbird recommend for learning to think effectively, which they structure around five elements: earth, fire, air, water, and change. We’ll also examine how these principles relate to established theories of learning and educational psychology, and we’ll compare them to works from other authors on how to change your thinking and mindset to improve your life and achieve your goals.

The early 21st century has already seen numerous catastrophic failures of prediction: From terrorist attacks to financial crises to natural disasters to political upheaval, we routinely seem unable to predict the events that change the world. In The Signal and the Noise, statistician, analyst, and FiveThirtyEight.com founder Nate Silver sets out to explain why—and how we can do better.

Silver argues that our predictions falter because of mental mistakes such as incorrect assumptions, overconfidence, bias, and warped incentives. However, he also suggests that we can mitigate these thinking errors (and thus improve our forecasts) with the help of a method called Bayesian inference. In this guide, we’ll explain how fields ranging from politics to poker to meteorology can teach you how to make better predictions and avoid costly mistakes in judgment. Along the way, we’ll update Silver’s examples with the latest research and place his arguments in conversation with other experts on prediction such as Philip E. Tetlock and Daniel Kahneman.

We often don’t know why changes succeed or fail—we just know that they do. As it turns out, successful change follows a pattern that can be applied again and again to help you reach your goals, spark organizational shifts, and get people aligned with your ideas.

In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath dive into the inner workings of change, offering actionable advice for creating changes that not only succeed but stick.