Introduction to Dan Bennett and Behavioral Science
Melina Palmer
Welcome to episode 589 of The Brainy Business. Understanding the psychology of why people buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Dan Bennett, global head of Behavioral Science at Ogilvy. Ready? Let’s get started.
Announcer
You are listening to The Brainy Business podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain-friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer
Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business podcast. Have you ever shown someone something you were really proud of—a purchase, a pitch, a new product—and known immediately from their reaction that you’d missed something, even if you couldn’t quite explain what it was? That feeling is telling you something important. And today’s guest has spent 14 years and hundreds of projects figuring out exactly what that is. My guest today is Dan Bennett, global head of Behavioral Science at Ogilvy, where he works alongside Rory Sutherland and an amazing team of behavioral scientists solving the thorniest behavior change problems brands bring to the door. From breakfast cereal to fast food to airport security, adult diapers, and luxury fashion, they’ve done it all. And Dan is here to share how the lessons cross-pollinate so you can apply them to your own work, no matter what industry you’re in. Dan is also one of the driving forces behind Nudgestock, the world’s biggest festival of behavioral science and creativity. If you aren’t familiar with it already, it is a great in-person event, but they also stream it live for free, and hundreds of thousands of people watch from around the world. It’s awesome. I highly recommend it. There are links in the show notes so you can easily check that out along with links for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/589.
Now let’s jump right in. Dan Bennett, welcome to The Brainy Business podcast.
Dan Bennett
Thank you very much. Lovely to be with you, Melina.
Melina Palmer
Oh my gosh, it’s so lovely to be with you. I know we got to spend some time together recently. We’ve spent time together on two continents now, very far away. So of course I was in London for Nudgestock a few years ago and it was amazing, and I love it. So honored to have been there. And then, we were in Australia together not too long ago and had the conversation of me saying, “Why have I not had you on the show?” I don’t know what’s wrong with me. And thankfully you agreed to come hang out with me for a while.
Dan Bennett
Longtime listener, first-time contributor. I’m excited to be here. Yeah.
Dan’s Journey and Work at Ogilvy
Melina Palmer
Well, for everyone who doesn’t yet know you, can you share a bit about yourself and the work that you do?
Dan Bennett
Yeah. So I’m Dan Bennett. I’m the global head of Behavioral Science at Ogilvy. I’ve done it my entire life—the past 14 years. And we’ve just completed our 1,000th project, which is, you know, a bit annoying. So 999 + 1 projects—different behavior change projects. So I work with Rory Sutherland and an amazing team of people, and basically we solve lots of different puzzles that clients bring into us, all united by either figuring out how do we overcome a strong psychological barrier or how do we change someone’s behavior. So really deep, thorny things. And what’s great about it is often people come to us once the traditional toolkit hasn’t solved their problem, so we get all of the misshapen, difficult, juicy problems to solve. That’s turned out to be great.
Melina Palmer
Yeah. And so, as you said, your whole corporate life has been working at Ogilvy. So what was that kind of like? What are some of the stories—whether it’s a Rory story that’s fun (who’s been on the show before, of course) or something else? What’s it really like within the Ogilvy walls?
Dan Bennett
It’s crazy, really, because the variety is so huge. Sometimes we’ll be in a car going to an army base to talk about something interesting there. Sometimes we’ll be hanging out at airport security watching people go through to see if we can kind of speed up the amount that people go through. And sometimes we’re thinking about how do you untangle an organization in more of a creative way than just kind of following toolkits. Sometimes we’re kind of innovating on potty training. Sometimes we’re getting rid of the stigma of adult diapers. Sometimes we’re doing big communication campaigns to try and reduce misogyny. Sometimes we’re selling crisps. It’s an amazing variety. And we have this belief that every problem has been solved—it just hasn’t necessarily been solved in that category yet. And so actually the best things that we can do… we’ve learned things in airport security that have been helpful in selling crisps and all that kind of thing. It’s the cross-pollination of all those worlds that’s been most interesting, I think.
Melina Palmer
I love that. And so as far as coming into the early days of the behavioral science team at Ogilvy when you came in, right, you’ve been part of that from—I don’t know if day one, but pretty close, right?
Dan Bennett
I’ll claim day one. I think there was someone else before who left, so—
Melina Palmer
So who cares?
Dan Bennett
Yes, day one.
Melina Palmer
So what was your background before that, as far as, you know, did you study behavior or just sort of find yourself in this role?
Dan Bennett
Yeah, it’s a series of fortunate events, really. At A-level, I originally wanted to study philosophy and genuinely didn’t know the difference between philosophy and psychology. Ended up studying psychology by accident and then ended up studying it at university because I loved it. And so mistakes sometimes take you a long way. And yes, I studied psychology and spent a bit of time publishing one academic research paper on why it’s annoying to overhear mobile conversations, which was like my first dip into doing proper experiments. And then I found everything in academia a little bit sludgy and slow. And then I saw Rory and others doing TED Talks at the time, talking about doing it, and I thought it’d be amazing to try and get a job where you can actually apply it and take the incredibly valuable fields of understanding people’s heads. You never get to go to behavior change school, do you? Everyone goes to English, math, science, geography, history, but you never get to go to behavior change school. And yet behavior change is the skill that everybody needs. And so to kind of bring that mindset to teach marketers how to think like a behavioral scientist has been an amazing journey.
Melina Palmer
Yeah, well, I love that. Do I remember correctly… I feel like I heard the story that you had two resumes that you turned in for the job. Was that—did I make that up? Did you AB test your resumes?
Dan Bennett
Yeah. I emailed Rory and Jez Groome, who set up the practice. I emailed them two CVs: a good CV and a bad CV. Because as behavioral scientists, we know that if you put a bad version of a choice next to a good version of a choice, the good version of the choice becomes even better because you’ve got that relative framing. And so I emailed them a good and a bad CV. The bad CV had parking fines and a terrible job history. And they still say they’re figuring out which one is the real CV at the end of it all!
Melina Palmer
I love it. And just such a good practical example that helps you really stand out, cut through the clutter, and at that time say, “I’m not just interested; I get it,” right? It’s a really cool way of showing “I know what we’re doing here, and I’m also not super boring.” Knowing both Rory and Jez, you can’t be boring hanging out with that crew, for sure.
Dan Bennett
No, I think you have to never just say you can do the job—always show that you can do the job. Show you have the skills that you need to get it, rather than pleading to say that you have them.
Melina Palmer
Yeah, yeah.
The Five Status Signals in Luxury & Consumer Behavior
Melina Palmer
So, not the smoothest of transitions, but you are talking these days about status signaling. You’ve talked about this, and that was kind of what we said we would be looking at a bit today. Can you share how you got interested in that? Do you have a particular case study or things you were finding that led to creating these five categories?
Dan Bennett
Yeah, we were asked to speak at a Luxury Communications Council conference, and we thought, well, this is interesting because we’ve always done mass communication, but we’ve never really looked specifically into the high-net-worth population to see how their psychology differs. And so we dug into the academic research and started to find some fascinating things: that there’s a different set of levers to pull to change people’s behavior depending on how much income they have. And there are different levers depending on how you got that wealth as well—whether it was self-made, whether it was through talent and celebrity, whether it was inherited. There are these distinct psychological profiles that come from being given lots of money versus earning lots of money, and so on. We started to find that world fascinating because the more we learn about what you might call “extreme user groups,” the more it gives us clues into how everyone’s behavior is changed.
We started looking into Nudgestock as well. I think that year was all about power, so we were looking into these great power shifts we’re seeing in the world. And status is a topic that we don’t really admit to. When you’re with your friends, one of you is higher status than the other, but it’s kind of tasteless to think that way, isn’t it? There are loads of things where we’re subconsciously communicating to each other, subconsciously signaling, and there are loads of behaviors that we do that I don’t really think people know exactly why they’re doing.
I thought the world of luxury fashion was fascinating. I remember buying my first pair of Gucci shoes because things were going well that month, and I was so proud of myself. Then I was desperate to show my friend who is in that space. And the first thing he said to me was, “I wouldn’t have bought those ones.” And I was like, “Oh…” It’s not just about the money that you spend; it’s about discernment and taste signaling.
So it gets you looking into this space of going: okay, if there is this world of psychology of high-net-worth individuals, and there is this thing called status signaling which has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, it can’t just be one mono-signal that we’re sending. Otherwise, my friend wouldn’t have said I was wrong for buying those shoes; he’d have just gone, “Oh, you’ve spent money on shoes, that’s great.” And so I was curious to dig deep into going: what are the different types of signals that one sends unconsciously? Like, what is my body, my dress, sending out without me knowing it’s happening? And how does that mean we have to design products and experiences for high-net-worth individuals?
We were digging in, and there were five that really stood out:
- Costly Signaling: This is the idea that you have these real hard-to-fake signals—the peacock’s tail, evolved to say “I have excess wealth and resources.” It goes beyond utility: “Look how strong I am, look how beautiful I am.” Apparently, birdsong is incredibly complex to do a similar thing. Stags’ antlers have a bit of a function for fighting and protection, but they’re really there to say, “Look how incredible I am.” All of these signals show “I’m desirable, I’m competent, well-resourced, and well-connected.” (Please don’t cut that for the advert for this show! Those signals—I tell myself every day…)
Melina Palmer
Marking it now that we’re going to have that be the intro clip!
Dan Bennett
“I’m confident, I’m desirable, I’m well-connected!” Because those signals get you, fingers crossed, better mates, more allies, more connections, more resources, and basically help you get luckier more often. It’s really interesting when we look back: animals in the past would also value the principles behind luxury goods. If there were feathers that were brightly colored, they would gather them up. If there were snake skins that were particularly distinct that they hadn’t seen before, they would gather them up. Bones and feathers that looked unique and beautiful—they’d collect them. So our ancient ancestors have been collecting these rare luxury goods for a while, often because they can help display some of these signals. So we have the costly signal as the first one.
- Discernment Signaling: If costly signals are “look at all these resources I can spend,” discernment signals are about “I have taste as intelligence.” These are insider cues. This is me not just buying any Gucci shoes, but knowing I should have bought the latest or a certain style along the way. This is that signal that I got incredibly wrong when I bought my first pair. It’s really interesting: in Manhattan, Gen Z are really into Coach bags as a first step into luxury products. For me, bringing a packed lunch into the office might signal that things aren’t going very well, that I can’t afford the canteen—it wouldn’t get me better mates or allies! But over there, it’s a signal because it’s socially known amongst certain groups that if I’m bringing in my own lunch, that’s because I’m saving money to buy a luxury tote bag or Coach bag. So these signals become not universal, but very bespoke to different communities.
- Morality Signaling: This is really showing that you care—ethical consumption, sustainability as status. Anything where you’re trying to legitimately show, “I think beyond my self-interest.” That can be an incredibly attractive signal as well.
- Identity Assurance: This is basically your self-storytelling, the signaling that you do to oneself. You have a developed worldview, a worldly opinion because you’ve soaked up all this richness, and you basically say, “I am a great, worthy person.” A lot of our behaviors are actually there to send signals back to ourselves. Booking into a certain hotel is so you can look good to other people, but it’s also so you can reassure yourself that you’re doing well.
- Social Bonding Signals: This is saying “I belong”—these tribal memberships. A lot of the research shows an inverse correlation: the more you think you’re not doing something to signal to a tribe, the more likely it is that you are! The more you think, “No, I’m dressing this way because I’m an individual,” remarkably, it makes you dress in exactly the same way as your group. We do a thing in the office here where we have about 25 people on the team, and we like to think that we hire a broad spectrum of people. And yet at least two days a week we’ll be able to take a “matchy-matchy” picture, where you see people wearing exactly the same outfit. So as much as we think we’re being individual, we’re really not.
So these are the five signals that we found. And it’s just fascinating because people don’t know they’re sending these. That means people that work in organizations and marketing departments don’t know they’re sending these. And therefore, when we sit around to think about how we design products and services for people, we don’t design for those very well because we don’t know we’re sending them. But as soon as we become conscious about how we actually work, that’s when you really start to come up with much more elegant ways of building these signals into products and services. That becomes one of my favorite things about behavioral science: when it becomes an unlock for fresh thinking. It opens up the solution space and brings you that new lens to look at the world. Because most people who work in businesses are in a rush and don’t have unlimited resources. Therefore, you get repetition, you get small thinking, and you get a lot of copycat behavior. Everyone wants to do “best practice.”
And best practice, by definition, is behind your leading person, isn’t it? What we really want to get people to do is discovered practice—to find new ways to reach customers, to do well with customers, to help their businesses grow, and to encourage them to relate to us. I think that’s what behavioral science does: it’s one of the best disciplines for opening our eyes to things to try that we haven’t yet.
Reframing Problems and Unlocking Creative Solutions
Melina Palmer
Yeah. I have so many things I want to say, but I like the point you were making. I definitely agree on the point that people don’t realize they’re sending the signals, but they definitely are really good at picking up on them, right? We can feel it. Like your friend with the shoes—
Dan Bennett
What are you picking up right now?
Melina Palmer
I’ll never tell! No, but it’s like you can tell when something is off. This is where I’ll talk a lot about how you go to send a pitch email or connection request, and it is so weird, spammy, and awkward on the receiving end. But the sender thinks, “This is great, they’re going to love my pitch!” Yet when you get those emails and LinkedIn requests all the time, you go, “Spam! Ew, gross, get out of here.” So why are we like that? You can sense it when it’s coming in—you know you don’t want that. But it’s that System 1 / System 2 issue, right? I get in my own head about what I think I would want if I were the receiver, and we’re wrong most of the time. I think that comes up in brand stuff as well.
Dan Bennett
Yeah. It’s that asymmetry that makes us really bad at operating in marketing organizations. If we’re unaware of how we operate, we can’t design effectively. Just like a chair is designed to fit the human body, if we can’t design innovation, transformation, and communications that fit the human mind and how we really operate, it’s not going to work. You get so many of those things where a brand says, “This product feels right, but it’s just not taking off,” because it’s not sending the multiple signals it needs to send.
Melina Palmer
Yeah. Oh, that totally made me think about one of my very favorite books: A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger. It’s such a great, amazing book. If you haven’t read it, Dan, I recommend it. That’s one of my favorites. It’s all about these aspects of innovation and finding the thing you’re so interested in that you just love that question and live with it for a long time. He talks about a person who ended up creating the Cheetah prosthetic limb—the prosthetic leg—and how original prototypes were designed to look like a human foot. It was all about how good it looked as a foot so you didn’t look weird out in the world. It had nothing to do with actual functionality. And so by understanding what’s going to help someone actually jump or move or run, it doesn’t look like what someone would think a foot or a leg looks like, but it’s so much more effective and usable. People aren’t falling over because of a terrible wooden block at the end of a leg, which makes no sense functionally.
So that aspect of stepping outside of what someone thinks should be the logical course or what “should” matter, and asking better questions so that we can identify what really works… maybe it’s about performance and not just about fitting in, right?
Dan Bennett
It’s been really interesting working at Ogilvy for 14 years. We spend a lot of time working with creative people, and creative people operate in different ways. That’s why they’re valuable—because they connect dots in different ways. At the beginning, I think there was a bit of anxiety because people thought that behavioral scientists were going to come in and say, “That’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong,” and close down a lot of ideas. But actually, what we’ve done is work very hard to open up the solution space for people. Not to come in like a policeman and say, “That’s incorrect, don’t do that,” but actually to go, “Did you know, for that brief, if you want to form a habit, try these things?” And all of a sudden their brains explode with other areas to explore. Then you get this divergence that goes beyond what even their highly divergent brains could reach on their own.
I think that’s what’s so fascinating when you plug behavioral science into creativity: you can really open things up. You might assume the scientific method is about closing down, but it can be used for opening up.
We did an amazing project—one of my favorite projects still—working on an adult diaper product. It’s kind of riddled with stigma because they’re often put down the wrong aisle—aisles for the over-60s—when a lot of the products are useful for people over 40. No one in the adult diaper category had really tackled that stigma successfully. So you can’t just look next door and say, “What do we need to copy?” What you can do with behavioral science is boil it up to the core psychological challenge, which is stigma, and then look for how everyone else in the world has solved for stigma.
We had people looking at how individuals sign up for stigmatized groups like Scientology to examine the techniques used to help you feel comfortable through that process. You can look at how people sign up for adult websites and get memberships as a slightly stigmatized thing: what are the things said during that journey to get you along? And then you can borrow back those lessons into a category that’s never had them before and do something very different.
So we retested the name of the condition from “bladder weakness” to “manageable bladder weakness.” You add “manageable” into there, and you add a sense of agency and control because people think, “Oh, I’ve got the type that you can do something about.” You don’t get the ostrich effect of burying your head in the sand about a problem you don’t think you can solve. Define it as manageable bladder weakness, which is what most people have, and people feel much more inclined to lean into it when you do the testing. That’s the magic of borrowing different lessons from different categories. We could all spend the rest of our lives doing that and the job would never be done!
Melina Palmer
Yeah, I love doing that. It’s amazing—the reframe that comes from a one-word change, right? Understanding what that says about my identity, what that means about me wanting to tackle a problem, not liking to feel out of control, and realizing I can go do something about it. There’s so much happening when you get that one perfect word. It doesn’t mean it’s the only one, but it’s such a great lesson. You didn’t make it into this long diatribe or try to go too far outside, and it’s an easy thing to test: if we just throw “manageable” up there, what happens?
Dan Bennett
Yeah.
Melina Palmer
I love that. Ogilvy—you all do really great tests and case studies. A thousand of them now!
Case Studies: Testing Persuasion Drivers and Framing
Melina Palmer
Do you have some others you want to share before we close out the episode?
Dan Bennett
Yeah, we did some really interesting work with IAG Loyalty. They manage Avios, which we as a nation in the UK are obsessively into collecting. We were looking to find the right persuasion driver to get more people to buy Avios.
We had the control email, which was: “Multiply your Avios by up to four times.” It’s a feature called the Balance Booster.
Melina Palmer
And these are like airline points, essentially?
Dan Bennett
Oh, yeah—for an international audience, these are addictive airline points, basically air miles.
Melina Palmer
Yes.
Dan Bennett
Avios is the program for British Airways and partner alliances, and British people and beyond are obsessed. We did a lot of work with high-net-worth customer bases lately, and people will make almost irrational decisions. They will refrain from buying an Hermès handbag that day because they want to go home and make sure they use their BA Amex credit card, coming back the next day and making another hour-long journey just to make sure they’re collecting the points! So it’s one of those amazing programs.
Melina Palmer
It’s like in a divorce where it’s like, “I get the miles and you get the—” well, I won’t say the kids! But, you know…
Dan Bennett
That’s putting it a bit too close to home for me lately, Melina! But yeah, I did take the Avios, just in case anyone’s wondering.
Melina Palmer
Yeah!
Dan Bennett
It’s very important to take the Avios! So, you basically get a bit of a balance, and you want people to have a bigger Avios balance so they get into the spending ecosystem. You can email them and say, “Pay a bit to multiply your Avios up to four times.” Sometimes people do that.
Or we can use present bias, where we value immediate rewards more than future rewards. So you could say, “Is this the fastest way to your dream flights? Boost your balance instantly.” You highlight that instantaneousness and make it a bit more real regarding where you’re going.
We also tried contextual priming, which is all about how our current context or environment influences decision-making. We said, instead of just multiplying Avios, “Turn winter days into sunny getaways. Escape the winter blues.” You make it a lot more real—it’s winter, it’s January in the UK, and you want to get out.
But then we also tried concreteness. Concreteness is all about how the brain processes concrete information far better than abstract information. So rather than “multiply your Avios by four,” we said: “Transform 25,000 into 100,000 Avios.” You give them a concrete example. And as we know with behavioral science, the results can be disproportionate. In this case, we had a 17% increase in conversion, which led to a billion extra Avios being purchased in that condition versus the others!
Just finding and testing out the right lever to pull—using behavioral science to try different ways of framing the information—allowed these quite abstract things like Avios to be much more psychologically potent to the brain and drive that conversion.
Melina Palmer
It’s so interesting because people would think, “Well, four times is concrete, it’s so easy,” right? But hearing “get four times,” you think, “All right, whatever.” But “take 25,000 and make it 100,000″—it’s like, whoa, 100,000 Avios! I can’t wait to have those! It feels so tangible in a way that “four times” just floats out in the world, and you feel like you can deal with it later. But you don’t want to miss out on 100,000 easy points that you could get.
Dan Bennett
It’s so much more real. But without personality data on the audience—which we’re finding some correlations on—it’s really hard to know what’s going to work best beforehand.
We also worked with IAG Loyalty on a campaign with Barclays Bank. It was basically getting people to switch their current account to open an Avios-earning current account: ditch your old bank, move over to Barclays, and get extra Avios. Before we started, we had options ranging from the control (“Supercharge your Avios balance”) to “Is your current account unlocking holidays for you?”
We also tried status signaling again: “It’s your chance to bank more Avios than average members—be in the upper half of folks.” I thought status would win! I thought people would like a bit of one-upmanship because people tend to use their Avios balance socially—you want to know how other people are doing. But the one that worked the best was the endowment effect: “Your yearly cabin upgrade—ready when you are.” It really made it feel positioned for you, and it had a 152% increase versus the control in click-throughs! So sometimes it’s just really hard to predict which one is going to be the strongest, to be honest.
Melina Palmer
Which is why we test, right? We have our suspicions, but I love these examples. I’m a big advocate for throwing in the weird option that no one thinks is going to work, because often it goes gangbusters and does really well! It goes over the top and people love that. So it’s good to try different things and test, because even with what we think should work, even those of us who have been doing this work for a very long time, it’s interesting to see all the different levers at play and what will have an impact at that time.
As we close out our conversation—knowing that you and I can and often do chat all day long—
Looking Ahead to Nudgestock
Melina Palmer
Do you want to give a final mention to the amazing Nudgestock? I know that’s coming up, as it does every year. Everyone should attend—those who can go in person, and others can stream it. Say good things about Nudgestock!
Dan Bennett
Oh, thank you so much. It is a massive labor of love for us all. We’ve done Nudgestock for 14 years now. It’s really putting behavioral science and creativity at the heart of business. Rory Sutherland is the thread through it all—”Mr. TikTok,” as we now call him with his recent fame! He says he can’t go to Burger King without a man asking, “Are you Rory Sutherland?” It’s really taken off.
He threads throughout the whole day. This year’s theme is about “Trust Issues,” because consumers have trust issues, societies have trust issues, and seeing is no longer believing in a world of AI. Brands have trust issues. But it’s not often in marketing and business that we get to look at that problem laterally. So the whole day is about taking different perspectives from social psychology, evolutionary psychology, and more to look into how the trust game has changed in the world due to these massive macroeconomic and social shifts, and what you can do about it.
There should be 750 of us in London coming to watch the day, and then we’ll have hundreds of thousands of people online streaming for free. So fill your boots, and think about coming!
Melina Palmer
Yes! As someone who has made the trek over and been there in person, I highly, highly recommend snagging one of those 750 coveted seats in the room, or streaming it live and watching past ones. It’s so amazing that Ogilvy does that. So thank you to you, Rory, and the whole team for the awesomeness that is Nudgestock, and for joining me on the show. It was wonderful and delightful to chat with you today, Dan.
Dan Bennett
This is a wonderful podcast and I could listen to it forever. Thanks so much for having me!
Wrap-Up and Episode Outro
Melina Palmer
Thank you again to Dan Bennett for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation?
For me, I really appreciate the way that Dan laid out the five signals. Being able to categorize things like this can help you start noticing them in everyday moments you have with brands—either your own or those you use or covet. Like that moment Dan shared about his Gucci shoes: he was so proud until he wasn’t! It’s amazing how the right tone, two little words, or even a slight movement of the eyes can change everything.
I also love calling attention to these moments where we’re often bad at understanding the signals we’re sending (or don’t think we’re sending at all), and then when we get too self-conscious, we tend to miss the mark. But man, can we pick up on signals when they’re sent in our direction! The ability to tap into that feeling from the outside is what allows brands to be really successful. Leaning into the power of a few simple words and asking deeper questions can change everything in resonating with your audience. Those thoughtful questions lead to things like adding the word “manageable” to that bladder weakness campaign. There’s so much power in the right word in the right place at the right time.
So if something in your own work isn’t landing the way you expected, consider it a signal mismatch and an opportunity to ask thoughtful questions about the signals you’re inadvertently sending. What are you actually communicating, and how is it aligning or misaligning with what your audience is looking for?
Before we close out the show, I want to make sure everyone listening around the time this comes out knows that Ogilvy’s awesome event, Nudgestock, is taking place this year on September 17th, 2026. If you haven’t already signed up to stream live, details are at nudgestock.com. It always sells out for the live show, but if there are seats left and you can get to London, it’s definitely worth doing. I’ve been once before—it’s a totally fantastic event with lots of amazing minds in the room. This year’s theme is “Trust Issues,” which feels very timely. And if you are listening to this after September 17th, great news: you can catch it all on the Nudgestock YouTube channel, as they share all the content for free.
There are links in the show notes to make it easy for you to find, along with links to my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/589.
Thank you again to Dan Bennett for joining me on the show today—it was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another episode of The Brainy Business podcast. It’s going to be a lot of fun. You don’t want to miss it! Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer
Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain-friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
