Phill Agnew

speaker

40 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Phill Agnew’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Embracing Marketing Mistakes · From Petrified Wood to Pints Social Proof Gone Wrong · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

And people were stealing it.

And Robert Cialdini, who's the author behind the book Influence, he went into this park and he looked at the signs.

And the signs say, people who enter this park steal one point or something like 100 tons of this wood every year on average.

Please don't.

This is a really bad thing to say.

Yeah, exactly.

So if I just take a little one for my daughter that weighs about two grams, it won't even make a difference.

And then when he changed the signs that said, just please don't steal the petrified wood, the amount of people who stole actually decreased.

And I see this all the time.

If you go on Wikipedia today, probably you will see a message that says something along the lines of only 1% of people reading this message will donate.

Please donate to keep Wikipedia running.

The studies suggest that shouldn't work because what people will think when they read that is, oh, nobody really gives anyway and Wikipedia is quite successful.

It's not going to go anywhere soon.

They probably don't need my help.

Whereas if they said something like, if they wanted to use social proof,

I'm in Bristol.

If they said something like 4,000 Wikipedia lovers in Bristol donate on a monthly basis, could you join them?

That should, according to the science, be much more effective.

And I'd love to see Wikipedia testing that.

So negative social proof is definitely a mistake I see a lot of companies make.

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