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Nancy Harhut

Guest; co-founder and chief creative officer, HBT Marketing; author *Using Behavioral Science in Marketing*

Co-founder and chief creative officer at HBT Marketing, applying behavioral science principles to real ad campaigns for decades. Author of Using Behavioral Science in Marketing.

This is her actual first direct guest appearance (Episode 118) — a previously-flagged gap on this page ("her first appearance falls in the untranscribed episode gap between 81 and 119") is now resolved: this episode falls exactly in that range. In this appearance, Harhut and Phill Agnew jointly test five marketing principles with real experiments: scarcity (an hourglass-emoji subject-line study, replicated by Agnew — see Nudge Podcast Five-Marketing-Principles Test Series), the endowment effect (a monkey peanut-butter/juice trading study — see Endowment-Effect Monkey Trading Study — plus a retirement-savings vaccine-uptake example and a Publishers Clearinghouse "surrender your number" example), loss aversion (a retirement-savings message test — see Nancy Harhut Retirement-Savings Message Test), social proof (a Duke/Peking restaurant popularity-label study, predating this page's later Episode 281 citation, plus a voluntary-benefits insurance campaign — see Nancy Harhut Voluntary-Benefits Social-Proof Campaign), and reciprocity (Joe Girard's "I like you" card and a $68M New Yorker-cartoon reactivation campaign — see Joe Girard 'I Like You' Card Reciprocity Case, Nancy Harhut New Yorker Cartoon Reactivation Campaign).

Walked through five further marketing principles in Episode 121 — commitment/consistency, framing, input bias, the information gap, and authority bias — each paired with Phill Agnew's own live test of whether it worked.

Referenced again in Episode 134 for the German renewable-energy study in Using Behavioural Science in Marketing: 7% of households opted in to a higher-priced renewable tariff, but 70% stayed on it when it was the default (see German Renewable Energy Opt-Out Study).

Discussed in

  • Episode 118 — I tested 5 marketing principles to see if they really worked (first direct guest appearance)
  • Episode 121 — 121-i-tested-5-more-marketing-principles-to-see-if-they-really-worked
  • Episode 134 — 134-there-s-a-problem-with-the-world-s-most-famous-nudge

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