Why Price Hurts the Brain with Phil Barden

Speaker A: Human beings learn. Our brains learn by frequency and consistency. Repetition, really. So if you come and chop and change, you're destroying all of those memory structures and associations. And often the smartest thing to do is to remain consistent. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. So, yeah, this client's been consistent in its application for the last six years or so, and it's continuing to work.

Speaker B: Have you ever been introduced to a person that completely changed the course of your business or life so much so that much of what you have today wouldn't be possible if not for this person? Each week on, um, the Million Dollar Relationships podcast, your host, Kevin Thompson interviews successful entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs as they share their personal stories experience around this very question. Your invitation is to have a seat at the head of the table as, uh, they honor and introduce you to the most valuable people in their lives and remind us that relationship capital is the most valuable asset we possess. Each week you'll be inspired and motivated to intentionally create more meaningful, rewarding and profitable relationships in your life so that together we can make a far bigger impact in this world. Your host, Kevin Thompson, places the highest value on relationships. He's created $16.1 million in revenue solely through strategic partnerships. And the introductions he's made have been worth millions.

Speaker C: Hey guys, it's Kevin Thompson. And you know, we've been igniting limitless opportunities for impact driven entrepreneurs in the Tribe for Leaders community for over two years now. And I've got an invitation for you. It's the only one you're going to get and it's for the preferred partnership community. And those aren't my words. That's just what's happened where we've made millions and millions of dollars in introductions that have allowed our members to grow their businesses and make a far bigger impact in this world. And if that's something that you're interested in, check it out today at www.tribeforleaders.com to see if you qualify. Foreign. Back with you for another episode of the Million Dollar Relationships podcast. And today I'm here with Phil Barden. Phil, welcome. So awesome to have you on the show today.

Speaker A: Thanks, Kevin. It's a pleasure.

Speaker C: Well, I'll tell you, I have been looking forward to this because you and I, we've already got to have a conversation and, and get to know each other a little bit. And I'll tell you, you have an absolutely fascinating story and I have really been looking forward to doing this interview with you today and stuff. And, and so we're just going to dig right in and I'm gonna, I'm gonna start off with a nice simple question to get us going and then we'll dig deeper as we roll along here and stuff. But what to start with, Phil, what do you do and who do you serve?

Speaker A: Okay, so I am, um, managing director of a decision science consultancy called Decode Marketing. And I serve brand owning clients, mostly B2C brands, but also some, some B2B brands as well. And the business leverages what's been studied and learned about human behavior, how to influence it, how communications work, why we buy certain brands and not others, and leverages science in pursuit of brand growth. That's what I do.

Speaker C: Okay. How did you. You know, I think when I was a kid, when I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and be a fireman. And I never did become a fireman. And I would have never in a million years imagined that what I'd be actually doing now. And I would imagine that's similar for you. So let's, you know, let's go back a little bit. How did we get here? How did you even get into doing this kind of work, Phil?

Speaker A: That's a great question. So when I was at school, I had a very good friend with still friends many years later. We used to create stuff at school. So we used to write sketches, we used to produce a magazine. We like the creative process. Now my friend went into the advertising business after school. He became a copywriter and that has been his career. And whilst I loved that side of it, I felt I wanted to produce something more tangible. So I went into product marketing in uh, a CPG company and had a great time producing things. So from an idea, turning that into a physical product that you could sell and you could touch and you could say, I did that. I found that very, very rewarding.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And I did that for many years. 25 years I spent in packaged goods, mostly packaged goods marketing. So most of that was with Unilever.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: And then moved to Diageo, the spirits, uh, business. And then my final client side role was in T Mobile and so a service business rather than a

Speaker C: product.

Speaker A: And whilst I was there I commissioned some research and the research went very badly wrong. And I was worried for my own job frankly, because I'd put a lot of personal equity into this particular piece of research. It was a six figure sum that we were spending, it was running in multiple European countries. And the data we got back was just rubbish, didn't make sense. And somebody introduced me to a Couple of guys. And this is not only part of the key part of the story, but also about this tide turning relationship that I experienced. So one of the guys is a neuroscientist, he did a double PhD at uh, Caltech in the US and the other is a cognitive psychologist. And they teamed up together uh, because they realized that the combination of their knowledge was very impactful in the commercial world. And so I tried these guys out, I met them, I said look, here's an ad, it's written to explain a proposition for T mobile, but it hasn't worked. Why is that? And um, they looked at the ad and within two minutes they gave me a reason which seemed very plausible and I thought, wow, this is interesting. They're looking at this from a very different dimension or through a different lens. And I'll uh, let me explain the ad. So uh, you can see the sort of insights they had. The proposition was for a flexible tariff. Now at the time in the mobile business you bought a bundle of minutes and a bundle of SMS text messages and once you had depleted your bundle you then went on to what was called a run on rate, which was very expensive, you paid a premium price. And customers were getting very frustrated that they maybe had used all their minutes up but still had a bunch of texts left that they hadn't used or vice versa. So we were getting feedback like I've got this money sat on the table but you're charging me a premium because I've exhausted the other bundle. So the idea of this proposition, it was called flexed, the idea was that it was flexible, that once you had depleted one bundle you could then start to use the value from the other bundle. So it's revolutionary in the market. And the creative idea that our agency came up with was to use objects and things that we know to be inflexible. But show that with this proposition they became flexible. So this particular ad, it was a print ad and an outdoor poster ad, had a guy leaning on a brick wall and the brick wall was flexing under his weight so you could see that this thing was flexible. And he was gazing out over the wall into a park where there are a bunch of people, um, playing ball and um, picnics and there was some copy there talking about the proposition. And I said to them, look, this is, people get right that the wall is inflexible but with this thing, with this proposition, it's, with this tariff, it is flexible. So why is this ad not working? And they said, because you've shown this guy, the guy who's got bought the tariff to be a loner, to be a sad individual because he's separated physically by this wall from the group of people who look like they're having a great time together.

Speaker C: Wow, he's

Speaker A: on his own, he's a solitary figure. Now, years ago, it reminded me, actually, years ago there was a cigarette brand called Strand. And they had an ad of a, ah, guy in the street smoking a Strand cigarette on his own. And the copy line read, you're never alone with a Strand. And I thought this was very clever because, you know, the, the cigarette's almost your buddy.

Speaker C: But

Speaker A: it backfired on them for exactly the same reason. You're never alone with the Strand because you haven't got any friends, you've got no social life. And it was exactly the same thing that had happened with our ad. And nobody in the creative agency, nobody in my team client side had spotted that, but these guys just immediately, within a couple of minutes said, there's your problem. So that was like, wow, okay, this is interesting, I want to hear more. And I tried them out on different ads and the more they explained things to me, the more these sort of veils lifted from my eyes. And I realized these guys know things that the commercial world don't and that in the commercial world don't. And I said to them, how do you know all this stuff? And um, they looked at me really bemused and said, but how come you don't know this stuff? Because what we're doing is we're leveraging studies from the last 200 years into human behavior. You know, the academics and scientists have done nothing in those fields of psychology, cognitive, social, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience. All they do is try to understand people's behavior, how we process information, how attention works, how memory works, what role emotions play. And they had this vast repository of knowledge that was just there, uh, ready to leverage in the commercial world. So that's a long winded way to answer your question. How I got to where I got to. Because I then commissioned them to work on the relaunch of T Mobile throughout Europe. And the relaunch was so successful commercially, we together with them created an ad that grew sales by 49%. It grew share by 6 percentage points. It doubled footfall into T mobile stores within 48 hours.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: Business had never. Yeah, it had 40. It's got 41 million YouTube views. And at the time we didn't have Instagram or TikTok, we only had YouTube and Facebook. It spawned 72 Facebook groups. And everyone in the company was just, wow, what's going on? What's going on? When I reported the results to these guys, they said to me, so why is everyone surprised? Because we have encoded in that ad motivators of human behavior. So why are you surprised that it works? And I just thought, oh, I need to be part of this. Because what they had uncovered for me was the essence of marketing. Marketing is all about behavior change. Right. I m want you to buy my brand. I want you to buy more of my brand. I want you to recommend my brand or to share stuff online, whatever it is. It's all about human behavior. And this decision science and behavioral science approach gets right to the heart of that. So I wanted to be part of it. And I ended up quitting my 25 year client side career.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Set up the company that they had founded in Germany. They're, uh, based in Germany. So I set the company up in the UK with no clients, but with a utter conviction that this was the right thing to do and that it works powerfully and commercially.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: And that was. That was over 10 years ago.

Speaker C: 10 years ago. And you've been doing this ever since. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. What a major pivot, you know,

Speaker A: what a

Speaker C: major discovery. And that you've been doing this for 25 years, then you discover this thing. It's like, wow.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. It was a shock, frankly, because I'd grown up particularly in Unilever. You like Unilever and Procter and Gamble are like the two big marketing universities. And I'd grown up with a lot of received wisdom and mental models and ways of thinking about how marketing worked, how advertising worked, et cetera, et cetera. And when these guys came along and presented me with their worldview, some of it modified what I knew, some of it completely challenged what I knew fundamentally. And I had to kind of unlearn, scrap it and then rebuild, start again. It was that fundamental.

Speaker C: Yeah. Wow. So now, so you're 35 years into this journey and 10 years in since this major discovery that you made today. What inspires you most about the work you get to do, Phil, and, uh, the impact that you get to make?

Speaker A: Well, there's two, I think, two things. One is that this. The fields of study that populate decision science. So from neuroscience through the various flavors of psychology, and more recently behavioral economics, everyone's still learning. There are new studies published on a daily basis. So it's alive, it's vibrant. It's really interesting to try to keep up with all of these developments and Better understanding. I don't think we'll necessarily ever have a perfect understanding of the brain. I mean, for example, you know, people spent their entire careers trying to understand the brain and just scratching the surface still. But learning, that's one of the key things. The other thing that excites me is how we can harness AI for what we're doing. So we have, we set up a sister company to do exactly this. So I mentioned one of our, uh, founders did a double PhD at Caltech. One was in neuroscience and the other was in AI. And he co authored a book over 20 years ago called Understanding Intelligence. And he was teaching robots to learn way back then. So with all the new computing power, he's been all over it. So we've built this sister company that has a tool that enables prediction of creative effectiveness. And we've got some of the world's biggest businesses, like Unilever, Kenview, PepsiCo, Henkel are already using this on a global basis to predict the effectiveness of their creative assets. So that's really exciting as well, seeing where AI can take us. Because of course you can teach. You know, this is machine learning. You can train it with human data and then it can do stuff for you in minutes at very low cost that enables clients to do so much more. They can test more stuff, they can run iterations. And we'd never had the ability to do that before. And because it's been trained with human data, it's accurate to at least 90% and in some cases up to 99% in terms of what a human would do.

Speaker C: Yeah,

Speaker A: so that's, yeah, that's amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. So what is an example? What's a couple examples of results that you've helped client get, clients get that you're just incredibly proud of? Phil.

Speaker A: Yeah. Let, um, me give you a couple. I mean, 1, 1, 1 is a big one. And I can't, I'm afraid I can't name the client because we have a very strict NDA with them. But it's about a brand relaunch, so brand positioning. So we have a quantitative research approach that is what's called implicit. It's a methodology that comes from social psychology that gets around what's called the say do gap. And the say do gap is that human beings will say something and then do something completely different. And if you ask them in research what they're going to do, they'll tell you something, will make something up, but then their behavior will be quite different. So we have a, uh, research Methodology that can close that gap. So you get the real true intuitive gut response, if you like, from the system one in the brain, the automatic set of mental processes that dominate our decision making. So that was at the heart of what those guys did with me back in T Mobile. And um, we still deploy it. So this was a similar job for another CPG client of really understanding what the motivators are in their category at a social, emotional, psychological level as well as at a functional and feature level. So that gives you why do people buy the category. That's the context and the frame of reference. We then analyzed and profiled the client brand versus its competitors. And we're able to also using this technique, measure consumers unmet needs and what they are willing to pay more for. So a lot of brands are on a kick to premiumize. I've kind of got as far as I can in volume. So how do I upsell? How do I get a premium for my product so we can find out what people are willing to pay more for. So the, the combination of that understanding the brand's position within the category, understanding what people would be willing to pay more for and what their unmet needs were led to a growth strategy that has performed for the last six or so years. So that's good. And the great thing is that the client's sticking to it as well consistently. Because one of the things I learned about, and I'm guilty of this when I was a brand manager, you know, you come onto a brand or you want to make your mark so you change stuff. Yeah. And often that can be the dumbest thing you can do because human beings learn, our brains learn by frequency and consistency. Repetition really. So if you come and chop and change, you're destroying all of those memory structures and associations. And often the smartest thing to do is to remain consistent. And if the if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So yeah, that this client's been consistent in its application for the last six years or so and it's continuing to work. So that, that's one and that's quite, you know, that's a big ticket number for them in terms of revenue. But the other extreme, just helping a client with this might sound trivial in comparison to big brand repositioning, but helping a client with their menu layout so they are a drinks brand and they wanted to understand how the menu that they use in bars and restaurants could work more effectively. So we use some behavioral science techniques in terms of how you order products, whether or not you show the Currency symbol. That's an interesting one. If you take the currency symbol off it, people tend to sell more or up, uh, trade. Certainly the order in which they see things affects what they buy. How many you have in a range on show can affect people's perceptions and which one they will pick out of a range. So just helping them with little tweaks and changes like that. They got an 11% revenue increase just by taking the currency symbol off.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker A: Yeah. Which is crazy, right? The science behind that is that, uh, when the brain perceives a price, it activates a part of the brain called the insula, which deals with physical and uh, mental pain and also disgust. So pain is quite. Sorry. Price is actually painful for the brain. So you can mitigate that by taking the currency symbol off or making the currency symbol as small as you can. In fact sometimes trying to separate it from the number. So you're seeing a lot of restaurants now and it started in upscale restaurants, but it's spread now and I've seen it in the US as well as Europe that the, the dollar sign has disappeared. And it's for exactly that reason

Speaker C: in Turin. I did not know that, but I am definitely see that. You know, especially like you see it on menus. There is not, there's not dollar signs. It's just whatever the price is, you know, in dollars and cents. But no dollar sign there.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Okay.

Speaker A: Also, the order in which things like the, uh, the drinks appear on a menu, you'll often see a wine list and it may well be with the most expensive bottle first. Now no one's ever going to buy that, but what it does, it serves as an anchor against which you judge the other prices in comparison. Because our perception is always in comparison with something else. It's never absolute. So whilst we don't buy the first one, it does a job to anchor the price at whatever it is. And then you tend to pick from a little bit further down the list. Not the cheapest either, because, you know, everyone knows that's the cheapest. So you'll go somewhere in the middle. But that's what the restaurant wants you to do.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely Abs. You know, I think years ago when my very first business was a, uh, we did a, uh, car, I had a carpet cleaning and water damage restoration business. And when we would do go out and do evaluations for, for people to have their carpets in their home clean, we would give three different prices with different packages with the goal really being get. Getting them in the middle, you know?

Speaker A: Yeah,

Speaker C: exactly. Which was a great place for them to be. And it, and most of the time we just, we ended up. That's where they just gravitated to was the middle package, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very well known phenomenon. People tend to choose the middle option. We had a case with Deutsche Telekom and also British Telekom where they, because they were the state incumbent telephony company, they had not just fixed line, but also mobile TV services and Internet services as well. So they would sell bundles. So one of them came to us and said, listen, we've got three bundles, let's call them A, B and C. And uh, then we price them in ascending order. But you can see as the price goes up you get more. And they said, we're selling a lot of bundles A and B, but not bundle C. And that's the one we really want people to buy. What would you advise? So we said very simply introduce bundle D, which is even more expensive and has even more things in it, but reverse the order. So the first bundle people perceive when they read, and this was a print ad. So reading from left to right they see bundle D first because that sets the anchor a bit like the wine bottle example we just spoke about. And then you have C, B and A in descending price. And they tried it and lo and behold they sold lots of bundle C, which is their intention because bundle D now acted almost like a decoy. It's like, well, I'm not going to spend that much. But in comparison, bundle C now looks like great value.

Speaker C: Yes,

Speaker A: some bundles B and A look too cheap. So it was just that order effect, the anchoring effect and um, again giving a little bit more choice to, to help that reference.

Speaker C: Yeah, you know, it's interesting now that I think back because we sold the cleaning and restoration business a long time ago, but we did present them in descending or ascending order. And like now I'm thinking like, ah, huh, Wonder what would happen if we presented the pricing in descending order, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, this is an interesting one. I give. So the other part of my story is I wrote a book which was called Decoded the Science behind what why We Buy, which is my attempt to put in layman's terms for marketers, agencies and general people in business. What I had learned from these two guys and one, one study that I cite in there was where pizza company wanted to test was it better to offer just uh, a pizza base on which people could add toppings and hence, you know, the price went up as you customized or should you Start with the fully loaded pizza, uh, and then give people the ability to remove toppings. So they tried both of these. Have a guess which one sold. Well,

Speaker C: now, just based on our conversation that we've been having right here, I'm going to say that the ones where they had it loaded and then you took off what you don't want and stuff.

Speaker A: Absolutely. That's right. And the reason being that as you take things away, you're reducing pain in the brain.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you still end up with your customized pizza. But it's exactly that. We set the default as the high anchor price. And then just removing things relieves pain, rather than the other way around where you're adding pain as you add each topping.

Speaker C: Yeah,

Speaker A: yeah, you're right.

Speaker C: Yeah. Wow. Very interesting. Well, okay, so now that we've got context set here and people have a little bit of an idea about who you are and what you're all about, Phil, I want to switch gears just a little bit. I want to dig deeper into the relationship side of all this. So. And I know you've kind of alluded to this, but have you ever been introduced to a person or persons who completely changed the course of your life or your business so much so that much of what you have today would not be possible if not for this person or persons? And I'm just excited to hear your story and your experience around this topic of relationships as we dig deeper.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, it has to be. What I've already talked about, these two guys.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So one. One's Swiss, the neuroscientist, and the other is German, the cognitive psychologist. They have. They are not only probably two of the most intelligent people I've ever met and worked with in my entire life, but they have the unique ability to translate scientific and academic findings into everyday language and to apply them for business, to answer business questions. And that's a really rare gift because I've worked with lots of other academics and scientists since I've been in this more recent role, and very few of them can do that. They grow up in quite a rarefied atmospheric in academia. They're used to writing scientific and academic papers, which, if you're not in that community, they are, frankly, impenetrable. The language they use is just weird. You need some. Somebody to. Or something to translate them into layman's terms so that the rest of the world can understand them. So these two guys can do that. They just intuitively, uh, they get the science, they get the studies and everything that's been done, but they have an amazing ability to very quickly say, so what, what are the implications? And uh, now what, what should you do with this? And that's the approach that we take with clients. It's like, you know, you don't need to read the papers, guys, we can do that for you. We will come up with the implication and the application. So. And uh, they're also very personable so that they don't shy away and hide in uh, in labs wearing white coats. They are, they're very personable characters. So I think quite a unique, A uh, unique couple of guys. And excuse me, no, if I hadn't met them, my life would not be as it is now. The whole success of the T Mobile relaunch, they went on with the CMO to. The CMO actually wrote a book documenting the whole brand relaunch because it started with T Mobile but then it spread throughout Deutsche Telekom. So they had, you know, they've got a, they've got a B2B arm, but they had a TV arm, they had a Internet and fixed line business as well as mobile. So the whole brand got, in the end got, got relaunched in the same way and the CMO wrote a book about the whole history. And yeah, it's just, it was just an amazing experience, a story to tell and I love, I still love interacting with them. Um, I still, you know, they're still available and you can ask them anything that you might think is a stupid question and they'll answer it. It's quite uncanny. They're very, the other thing is they're uniquely very open minded. They're still learning and they'll admit that they're still learning. So I had an interaction with one of them the other day about analyzing some market research reports. And at the end of the conversation he says, oh, you've taught me something today I didn't know, blah, blah, blah, uh, and I thought, wow, that's an honor. I'm delighted to have taught this man something. But yeah, I think if I hadn't met them, if I hadn't had the eye opening experience it was, you know, people will often talk about the sort of the, the Road to Damascus moment and the light bulb going off. If I hadn't had that as a result of meeting those guys, I would not have had the, I wouldn't have been brave enough to change my career. You know, I was on a good track. I was VP in a multinational organization and had a future mapped out there. But uh, I threw it all in and as I said, set up business on my own with no clients. But if it hadn't been for these guys, I would never have been brave enough to do that. And yeah, they've continued to educate me and be colleagues, be friends, sounding boards. So yes, I was very fortunate to meet them.

Speaker C: Yeah. Well. And so here you are 10 years into this, since you met these guys, and you're at this point right here, right now. What's your vision for this going forward, Phil?

Speaker A: I think more of the same actually, because as I said, there are, uh, studies being published on a daily basis. So the knowledge frontier continues to expand. AI. We don't know exactly what its capabilities are going to be. It's developing so rapidly. So that's exciting to try and stay abreast of. And I won't say I've mastered it yet, but you know, this, um, brainy guy, the co founder with the double PhD, does stay on top of it, thankfully. And yeah, he started talking about his friend Claude, by the way. And I thought, who's Claude? I've never heard. You never spoke about Claude before. Oh, I asked Claude this and Claude told me that. And I thought, I asked one of my colleagues, who's Claude? He said, oh, don't you know, I've got the

Speaker C: same friend and stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, he's my best friend now as well.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So, uh, yes, it's quite amazing. But yeah, I think more of the same because it's not boring. That's.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: One of the things I enjoyed in my client side career, particularly working in Unilever, is because it's a multinational company, I was able to work across different brands and divisions and countries. So the variety was very motivating. And I did wonder, uh, at one point before stepping off and starting this new career, would I get bored at any point was there going to be the sort of variety? And thankfully there has been because it's, as I said, it's constantly evolving.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll tell you, I, you know, I was really looking forward to this interview because from our first conversation I was totally fascinated and now I'm even more fascinated. And so for anybody that might be listening to this right now, thinking to themselves, wow, Kevin, you know, man, I really like Phil. I love who he is, I love how he shows up. And man, maybe he could help us or maybe I'm thinking of somebody else. I know that man. I want to connect him with a friend of mine because I think maybe he might be able to help them and stuff. Any websites, any resources we can share with folks Phil?

Speaker A: Yeah, sure. I mean I'm happy for people to connect directly with me. I'm um, on LinkedIn.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker A: Find me easily there. They can. I'm happy for people to email me direct if they'd like to. So my email address is philemarketing.com Decode marketing is all one word. And they could. I, I think you, you were kind enough to say you'd put a link to our website.

Speaker C: The links we will include right down below for you. Make it nice and easy for you.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so those are the, the direct contact through LinkedIn or email. And um, if people are interested in learning more around the topic, then there's my book Decoded the Science behind why We Buy, which is available, uh, from Amazon and all good booksellers.

Speaker C: Well, and I'll make sure we, we include the Amazon link for your book as well and stuff.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: Phil. Is there any last thing that you feel led to share before we call it a wrap?

Speaker A: I would, yeah. The one thing that really galvanized me in this new journey was some of the fundamental points about decision science that I, I just didn't know or that challenged my conventional unreceived wisdom. So what I would say to anyone who's interested in learning more in this field is be open minded because you will be challenged. Your mental models will shake and in some case the foundations will be pulled right out from under them. And that's not a bad thing. It's scary. There's even a. By the way, behavioral science can explain this. There's even something called the Semmelweis reflex, which is a human tendency to stick to the status quo and reject things that are new. Because new implies change and change implies risk and risk implies I might not, ultimately I might not survive. Right. So a lot of the behavioral biases and behavioral science really comes from millennia of evolution. So we stick to what we know, we love, we resort to, we default to the status quo. And a lot of what I've learned challenges the status quo. Particularly often. The longer you've been in business, whatever business that is, the more ingrained your habits and your mental models become. But what I've learned is if you just open that world a bit and let some of this thinking in, it can have dramatic and powerful commercial impact. Because I'm living proof of that. Right? The whole T Mobile relaunch, I mean it went Deutsche Telekom's brand value has grown from that relaunch to last year where it is the biggest telco globally, not just in Europe, but globally. And it's something like the 8th biggest brand globally after Apple and Amazon and Alphabet and things like, you would never put Deutsche Telekom think to put Deutsche Telekom up in the same area as them. But in terms of brand valuation, that's what the relaunch did and the consistent application of it, it's dramatic. So my, my final thoughts would be just embrace it. See what it can, what behavioral science and decision science can bring to your business because I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Speaker C: Yeah. Well, Phil, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you and I am excited to get this out there and share it with folks. So thanks so much, Phil.

Speaker A: You're welcome, Kevin. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker C: You bet.

Speaker B: We trust you were inspired by this episode of the Million Dollar Relationships podcast with your host, Kevin Thompson. One more time by invitation only. It's the preferred partnership community for the highest level entrepreneurs and experts. If you're ready to experience something better, check out www.tribe4leaders.com today and we'll see you on the next episode.