Something You Should Know
The Psychology of Brand Loyalty & The Strange History of Everyday Words
17 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: How safe are elevators and what should you know about elevator accidents?
Today on Something You Should Know, just how safe are elevators? Do accidents happen? Then, the strategies major brands use to earn our loyalty, like Starbucks.
Pumpkin Spice Latte was a winner for Starbucks from the first year they launched it. It took a lot of courage for them as a brand to turn it off. And you could imagine that if Pumpkin Spice Latte could be bought in May, would it be as exciting?
Also, why your grocery store moves things around just when you learn where everything is. And where do words come from?
Chapter 2: What psychological strategies do brands use to earn customer loyalty?
And why do some stick around and others fade away?
The way that words stick around is when they bubble up naturally without you really noticing. Like the word selfie, for example. It's such a useful word. And we didn't have that word, you know, 30 or 40 years ago.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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You know, I'll bet there isn't a person alive who has ridden in an elevator and not wondered, well, what if the cable snapped? What if this thing went into free fall? Well, that is the question we're going to begin with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi, and welcome.
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Chapter 3: Why do certain brands like Starbucks create emotional attachments?
I'm Mike Carruthers, and, well, here's the good news, first of all. The chances of you riding in an elevator and the cable snapping and the car going into free fall is almost zero. In fact, there's only one case of a free-falling elevator caused by a snapped cable. It happened in 1945 when a B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building.
The elevator plunged 75 floors, and incredibly, the woman inside survived. What happened was the broken cable coiled beneath the car, acting like a spring, and cushioned the fall when the elevator hit it. Engineers at MIT later calculated that if you ever found yourself in a falling elevator, your best chance of survival would be to lie flat on your back in the center of the floor.
That spreads the impact evenly across your body. But the reality is, almost all elevator-related injuries and deaths, and there's about 30 of them a year, they're all because of door malfunctions or maintenance accidents, not falling elevator cars.
And when you compare the risks, you're 60 times more likely to die on a staircase and 15 times more likely to be hurt on an escalator than in an elevator.
Chapter 4: How do supermarkets manipulate product placement to increase sales?
So the next time those elevator doors close and you feel that little bit of anxiety, you can relax. Because statistically speaking, you're standing in one of the safest places you could possibly be. And that is something you should know. So every day you buy from certain businesses and stores and restaurants and you don't buy from plenty of other ones. You choose where to spend your money.
But why? Why do so many people default to Amazon when they want to buy something? Why are some restaurants packed and others sit empty? Why does Apple have customers who'd never dream of switching brands? The answer lies in behavioral science, the subtle forces that shape our decisions without us even noticing. My guest, Michael Aaron Flicker, has spent his career studying exactly that.
He's an entrepreneur, founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab, and he is a regular contributor to Fast Company. He's author of a book called Hacking the Human Mind, the Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World's Best Brands. Hi, Michael. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me.
So I have thought about this topic many times. Why do people, why do I choose certain stores, certain brands, certain restaurants and not choose others? And we'll get into some specific brands that are quite fascinating. But generally speaking, what's going on here?
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Chapter 5: What fascinating stories lie behind everyday words like 'water'?
So it's our contention that great brands are led by great strategists, great CEOs, CMOs, and they come up with a way to position the brand in the minds of buyers that's really effective. Sometimes they may know the behavioral science underpinnings of why that's the case, but many times they just are uniquely good at getting us to feel a certain way and then want to buy a certain product.
Behavioral science helps us understand why that might be, what maybe gave them a leg up that maybe they knew about or maybe they didn't.
So an example of what you just said that comes to my mind is Amazon and how people just kind of default when they want to buy something to buy it on Amazon. And I'm a prime customer and we buy a lot of things on Amazon in this house.
But I think a lot of it is that, and you talk about this, the sunk cost fallacy that I'd like you to explain, where if you're a Prime member, you've already paid for the shipping, so you might as well use Amazon.
The story of Amazon Prime is documented, and his executive leadership team was very worried that offering free two-day shipping could absolutely be abused by customers and drive massive financial disruption. They were worried that it could bankrupt the company by giving such a good offer away for one fixed fee.
And so when we talked about some people that just have this amazing insight into humanity, the credit goes to Jeff Bezos who said, I just believe if we give them this offer, it will really
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Chapter 6: How has the word 'selfie' become a part of our vocabulary?
increased their love of Amazon, increased their use of Amazon. And he was right. Today, approximately 83% of US households shop on Amazon. And Amazon Prime shoppers spend, they spend a one-time upfront fee of $139. And then wanting to be consistent with having now invested that upfront fee, they are coming back to the brand more and more.
And what the data shows is not only do they come back, they spend more than their non-prime counterparts. So it's really a win for Amazon to have them made this investment and then come back and shop and spend more because of it.
So if the prime strategy is so effective for Amazon, why aren't more retailers using it?
You know, it's an interesting question.
Chapter 7: What are some surprising origins of common words like 'cocktail' and 'silhouette'?
Walmart, I believe, now has two-day free shipping. So finally, they've gotten to the spot where they're matching the service. But there is something about being a first mover in a category that gives you authenticity in a way replicating other success sometimes falls short. We call what...
Amazon has really established here the sunk cost fallacy because it's not necessarily rational, meaning I spent this money for my Amazon Prime membership, but it could be less expensive at Walmart, and yet I still buy it at Amazon. That desire to want to be consistent with my past behavior may not be rational. It's more emotionally driven, but it is how we act.
And it's really a very interesting topic to observe how humans actually behave.
Talk about the gold dilution effect and Five Guys, because it's reminiscent to me of McDonald's in some ways, where back in the early days of McDonald's, there wasn't a big menu. It was just a couple of things. Isn't that kind of the same thing?
It sure is. But let me set the stage for everybody. it's 1986 and founder jerry morrell is walking down the maryland boardwalk with his four sons and so the four sons and jerry become the original five guys and they're walking on this boardwalk and they noticed that only one food stand has a massive line and its name was thrasher fries
Lots of food shops, lots of options, only one with this massive line. And Jerry comes up with the insight. I wonder if that's because they only do one thing and they do one thing really, really well. They make French fries. And because of that, with that insight, he starts Five Guys. And today, they have 1,800 stores.
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Chapter 8: How does language evolve and what influences its changes?
They do a $1.6 billion in sales. And they still are basically a burger and fry joint. They do no chicken. They do no salads. They do no ice cream. And they're tapping into what you raised, which is the gold dilution effect. And it's this very counterintuitive insight in behavioral science that if you say that you're good at many things, it is less believable
than if you say you're only good at one thing. And the academic study for this comes from University of Chicago, 2007. We have a study where we're asking participants to say if they believe eating tomatoes would be effective at one goal, preventing cancer, And then another group says, how effective would eating tomatoes be at two goals, preventing cancer and helping stop eye degeneration?
People rate eating tomatoes as 12% more effective at preventing cancer when it was given as the only benefit compared to when it was listed with other goals. benefits. It's not logical, but we as humans are more confident when we're presented with just one advantage.
And of course, this has lots of insights and effects, not just for brand marketers, but for us as buyers and for us as humans that communicate with one another.
Let's talk about Apple, because Apple has an extraordinary devoted customer base like no other. I mean, people love that brand. Why?
Apple has done an encyclopedia's worth of things right to make its brand so successful. When you think about some of the most creative uses of behavioral science that Apple has ever taken advantage of, there's a very clear moment when they first launched the iPod. When Steve Jobs got up on stage, he stood there, he looked out at the crowd,
And he pulled the iPod out of his pocket and he said, imagine a thousand songs in your pocket. And that was revolutionary in that moment because other companies had MP3 players. But the predominant way you spoke about them was five megabytes of storage, high fidelity audio. How many hours of battery life?
And what Steve Jobs and Apple took advantage of in that moment was this idea of concreteness. And we become more graspable, more emotionally resident when we use concrete phrases rather than abstract ones. And the behavioral science behind this is really quite interesting. It's 1972, Ian Begg at the University of Western Ontario recruits students and he reads them two-word phrases.
He reads them 20. I'll just give you a few examples, Mike. Impossible amount. rusty engine white horse subtle fault and he challenges the participants listen to those phrases and now write down all that you can remember. And on average of the 22 word phrases he read, they could recall 23% of the terms.
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