Hi, Melina, and welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you on again for another episode. We loved your last episode so much that we couldn't wait to get you back on to talk about another one of your amazing books. So welcome back. Oh yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Cool. So today we're going to be talking about your book, What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You.

So do you want to give us a brief overview of that and what it was that kind of drove you to dive into the neuroscience of consumer behavior? For sure. So this is my first. book and it is one that really is capitalizing on or just like showcasing the value in understanding our brains and how people really want to be communicated to.

So taking a bit of a step into some stuff we didn't really talk about so much on the previous episode of the show so kind of how I found behavioral economics and behavioral science. And why it mattered, you know, to me and why I knew it was so valuable. So my undergrad is actually in marketing, business administration and marketing.

And I remember there was just this one, yay. There was this one section of one book in one class, just this tiny little thing on buying psychology, like why people do the things they do and buy the things they buy. And I thought it was just the most amazing thing that I had ever seen, and I was just delighted by it.

And I had never really thought about going back to school, you know, beyond just an undergrad. And but at that moment, you know, said. You know, I'm going to go back. I'm going to get a master's in this. This is the coolest thing ever. And I spent the better part of 10 years calling and reaching out to universities across the States and asking them about programs.

And they just said, it's not a thing. It doesn't exist. There's nothing here yet. And so like I ended up going into industry. And working in areas of innovation and started doing marketing for a financial institution. I worked at an advertising agency, the, you know, the things that we do. And in that process, I was part of this kind of fellowship that brought in some people that were focused on like innovation and the work they were doing in research out of Duke University.

And I realized that this is exactly what I had been looking for, for all this time. And they said it was called behavioral economics, which as a marketing person was like, Economics. Nuh that's not what I'm looking for, right? And it turns out that it really was, and there was this emerging field and space, and I found myself a master's program and jumped right in, just like I said I would, and was amazed At how little people knew, you know, I knew I was early because I had spent years looking for a program, but especially on the applied side, no one was talking about all the things that were so obvious to me in how this can be applied into communication, into marketing, into headlines, into, you know, our brands and everything in a way that is so So clear and it just didn't exist anywhere yet.

And so that rolled into a kind of a, well, I guess I'll do that, which turned into the brainy business podcast, which launched in 2018 and was really the first of its kind in the world. And so from that I ended up having people from all around the world reach out and say, You know, oh my gosh, I'm in, you know, Japan and there's nothing here yet.

I'm in Peru and I don't know how to apply this. I can't find a program. I can't find anything schools around the world, universities using the podcast as content for their doctoral students and everything because there just wasn't content around. And through that process, too, I started having people that would say It's like, I hear you talk about it.

I get it. I'm excited. Like, I want to do it. And where do I even begin to think about starting? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. So, that is why I knew that writing a book was important. Because being able to tangibly go through a process of saying, Okay, I got this. I know how to do that. You can kind of flip around.

And that's why I describe this book especially what your customer wants and can't tell you is like the choose your own adventure book and it really falls It's pretty concretely between a textbook and an applied, you know, how to use it sort of manual, but in a way that you can, you know, jump over here and do something and go back over there.

All the chapters end with, you may have remembered this. You read about it in chapter five and you can like flip back and forth. So it's meant to be something that you use. All the time, because it's also applicable for brands. Yeah. Amazing. So one of the things your book does is demystifies how the brain works and how this can be then applied to business and customers.

So what are some of the secrets of the brain that you think are most relevant specifically for our audience in the world of advertising and advertising of product brands online, which is, you know, what we call e commerce? Well, one of the key things that is so, so critical and understanding is that our brains don't work the way that we think they should.

And one of my favorite analogies and ways to think about this comes from a psychologist out of NYU. His name is Jonathan Haidt. And You can think about your brain like a person riding an elephant. You have the logical, conscious rider that knows where it wants to go and what it needs to do, and can see the path and the best way to get there, and it's like ready to go.

And you also have that subconscious elephant. And if the elephant wants to walk in another direction, or it wants to sit down, or it wants to run, You can't really push or pull or logic it into doing what you want it to do. You're kind of at the mercy of that elephant, but understanding what motivates it, what's going to encourage the elephant down the right, quote unquote, right path, is really valuable and something that we can do.

And so I, you know, talk a little bit about being like an elephant whisperer. And what's funny about Our work, you know, we all buy things all the time. We're constantly deciding if we're gonna open the email, if we're gonna keep reading, if we're gonna click on that thing, pick that one thing off the shelf, whatever.

And in the bulk of that, we are elephants in all the decisions we're making. But when we sit down in our companies and say, okay. How do, how should we price this? How do people want to buy this? What will they care about? What would I want? You just totally forget that you're an elephant, right? You're thinking you're a writer talking to other writers and we're just not.

And so what behavioral economics and, and my book do are help you to understand how to communicate with those elephants in a way that they want to be spoken to.

Amazing. So what are the, what are some of those ways then? Yeah, well, there are lots of, of fun ways. So in the book, I break down 16 different concepts of the hundreds that we could have gone from. Right? I picked 16 that are the most usable and like a great place to start for anyone who's just wanting to learn how to apply these things.

So the first chapter in that. In part two that breaks down these concepts is on framing and that is very intentional They're not all in a it's not like a priority order throughout 16 But framing really is first because of its It's ease and applicability and the value it can provide. So framing shows us that how you say something matters more than what you actually say.

And so my favorite example for this is if you think about you know, imagine you're going to the grocery store and you need to pick up some hamburger, you know, it's spaghetti night or whatever. So you go, you have to go get some, there are two stacks. It's almost identical. The only difference is one is labeled as 90 percent fat free and the other as 10 percent fat.

Now which one do you want to buy?

90 percent fat free, I think. Yes. As does almost everyone. And so I've, you know, given this presentation to thousands of people all around the world and overwhelmingly people say 90 percent fat free is the one that they want. Logically. We know they're the same, but they feel totally different and even if you say well that doesn't impact me I don't even care but just because I'll go ahead and get this 90 percent one That's so silly, but I'll go ahead and keep this other one, right?

So the framing of how we hear that Has a real big impact on the decisions that we make and whether it feels easy to buy from you or not. So, as a brand, this is really amazing and empowering to know that if people aren't buying what you're selling, it doesn't mean that the product is bad. It doesn't mean that the price is bad.

is wrong. You may just be talking about it as 10 percent fat and you can look for the opportunity to flip that frame and use 90 percent fat free language instead. Even though it's the same, it can feel totally different in a way that is going to see some lift and have a lot more impact. Yeah, I can think of this crazy example of this.

It's like a fake maple syrup brand here. And they say something like 30 percent less sugar than sugar.

Like literally it says that on the bottle. So it's because of the liquid content in the bottle that makes it less sugary. Like I couldn't believe that, but it must work. People are like, Oh yeah. Okay. It's got less sugar than sugar. Yeah. And I'm going to use like so much. There's, there's a funny an example.

I like to is one that's talking about how. It was someone who was trying to tell people they shouldn't eat or drink soda because of how much sugar is in it. And this ended up going viral on the internet as things do several years ago. But it was showing that there's the same amount of sugar, you could eat six donuts.

to equal the amount of sugar that you get in, you know, bottle or whatever, of Coke. And so it was saying, would you, you wouldn't eat six donuts, would you? To which the internet very loudly said, I would absolutely eat six. Six donuts and that seems amazing. Like I've learned that I can eat, you know, drink half a Coke and eat three donuts and like it's better, right?

I can now switch my , you know, everything. And then it's all the memes of things about how everybody's realizing like, I should be eating more donuts is what everybody turned this into, which was super not what the, the point the person was trying to make. And so that's where it's also important to know that you are too close.

to the message that you're trying to communicate more often than not. And so, considering all the different ways that this could be interpreted before it gets out there is really important. To avoid awkward missteps, for one thing, but also just to ensure that it's going to be the most compelling, you know, sort of language that you put out there.

Cool. So that was number one framing. Yes. So I don't think we'll go through all 16 cause you know, we don't necessarily have time pick out the ones I guess for us that like most may be relevant to like online product brands that make up most of our audience. Yeah. Well, the last time that I was on the show, we talked a little bit about priming and that how something that happens just before a decision.

What I often talk about is the scent of the cookie is going to draw people in, has a big impact on decisions that we make. And so in the case of priming, looking for the visual, the emotional cues you're looking to trigger, the word choice is really important. And so even You know, something where we don't want to say, Hey, this is really expensive, but you want people to know it's expensive and not have people, you know, kicking the tires continually.

Right. A word like investment, right? Say this is an investment in yourself, whatever can make it to where we can tell that it's expensive without you saying it and it feels better. Right. So that's something you can do. It's also just really important to know that images. are so complex, we may think, you know, a rose is a rose, flowers are flowers, it doesn't really matter.

But, you know, you think about red roses in December. They are not the same as red roses are in February. And it's not the same on February 13th as it is on February 15th, especially if someone didn't get flowers for Valentine's Day. And red roses aren't the same as yellow roses or daisies or whatever, right?

So the images you choose are going to be triggering emotions, and they're connecting in a different way within the brain. And you want to make sure that it's lining up with whatever it is that you're wanting that person to make a decision about. So that you think shouldn't matter is really, really important.

study where they had people, they brought in to work on a project together. So they were saying, you know, you're supposed to be working with a team of people that you've never met before. And one group got along really well and was really collaborative and the other was really not. And the only difference was in one group, there was a backpack that was visible and the other had a briefcase.

And nobody noticed it, like on a conscious level. But it impacted their behavior. The backpack people were more cooperative than the briefcase people. And it's because of these associations we have with these items. And similarly, people that were shown a flash of the Apple logo were more creative on a task that they did than those who were shown the IBM logo.

And people were more honest when they saw a Disney logo than when they saw the logo for E. And it was shown In these like micro moments to where they couldn't even consciously register that they saw them, but it impacted their behavior. And if you think about that and what your brand is, so brands are memories really, and it's this mix and culmination of the memories we're building with customers and all those points of interaction and think about how dedicated Disney or E or Apple have to be.

To have a micro flash, just a tiny moment of seeing their logo would impact someone's behavior consistently enough. Right? So if somebody saw a flash of your logo or even saw it for like a minute, a full minute, would they have enough? like consistent messaging to know what that means and have it impact their own behavior after the fact.

For most brands, the answer is no. And that's an opportunity to make sure that you're consistently priming for the experience of what your brand is about. That's a real testament to being a really solid brand. Hmm. Love that. Okay. So. And people can read the book and see some really great summaries of some of these other psychological concepts and how they can apply to your customer and framing your message and your advertising, but we won't dig into all of them today.

Practical applications. So can you share some examples of how e commerce businesses can apply the principle? . So another kind of set of concepts that I really love are including surprise and delight, which is, you know, something you've maybe heard of before.

And then another piece, which is the peak end rule. And so I'll tell you a little bit about what this has to do with experience and the way that people interact with our brands as we're building those memories, right? So when we think about experience. And if you were to say, okay, we're going to work on our experience.

And if you're lucky, you have a team of people that's helping you with this already. Not everyone has that. But you may be wondering, you know, where do we even start? And as I'm telling you about these little tiny micro moments and how impactful they are on decision making and things, maybe like, Oh my gosh, there are millions and millions and millions of moments.

How do we even choose where to start? And that would be a real easy opportunity to just. Spin and never do anything. So what's wonderful is because our brains are really lazy, they use these rules of thumb to make decisions. One of them, when it comes to experience is that we only really care about two moments.

And so when someone says, you know, how was it? You're not evaluating every tiny micro moment. You really are looking at two moments, which is the end. So the most recent thing that happened, and the peak, and both of those can be positive or negative moments. And so when you're thinking about your experience, you do want and need to be plotting some of those interaction points, those moments of how people engage with your brand, and you can find, you know, these Positive peaks, negative peaks, and see how they tie in.

But you don't have to do everything. And what you want to do is to remove big negative peaks. If you have them and you want to try to bolster up some positive peaks and you can incorporate these moments of delightful surprise that will help people to like, keep having these moments of excitement. And so when we think about our brands, we feel like we need to be fair.

Everybody gets something, right? So we, we worry that if we are giving something away or we have an opportunity, we have to be constantly like one upping ourselves. The problem is when something becomes expected, we cannot be delighted by it anymore. And delightfulness is really important in driving loyalty.

So when we have something that's expected, we can only just be satisfied, right? You go to the bank, you ask for 20 and they give you 20. You're not going to go tweet about it, right? It's not a delightful experience. And so you need a little something else. So with this and our brands, if you're doing, you know, giveaways or the, you know, random wheels sometimes now you're seeing on websites to determine what your discount might be that you're going to get if you buy something within the next two hours or whatever, which also brings in time pressure, which really changed.

It does some interesting stuff with our brains to be sure. So you can be trickling in these moments of delightfulness. That can be bringing in positive peaks and shareable moments that people want to talk about they want to see what they might get They're excited And if you see someone else winning you don't get mad at the company because you didn't win you still have the chance, right?

We love a lottery. We love these sorts of interaction moments. It's giving us dopamine And other chemicals our brains really love so Being able to incorporate those moments of delight can help to make it so people really love to engage with our brands. And just one piece for this, that's important when we think about the end, the true end is something that we aren't often thinking about in the right way.

And when Jennifer Kleinhans was on my podcast, she was talking about an experience with Disney, which I do talk about in the book. If you think about going to Disneyland. What is the end if you work for Disney and you're planning out the experience for Disneyland, the end of that experience is when, when you leave Disneyland, what it feels like it should be.

Right. But several decades ago, they were thoughtful enough to realize that that's not the real end, but it was actually, you know, back in the day when we had to develop film, you know, you had to go take your little cartridge and drop it off at the, Walgreens or whatever, and you wait for a week and you go pick up your photos and see who's going to be blurry or whatever.

And so what they did, when you're then like going through the photos, that is the real end. And whether you feel like elated remembering it or you're kind of let down. So they worked with Kodak to paint the park in colors that were going to pop and look fantastic on Kodak paper. Amazing, right? So, so smart.

And so these days it may be sharing on Instagram or going through photos with people creating those TikTok reels or whatever. But when you're going through this process and thinking about the end, it may not be that last moment with you. So if you are in e commerce. And you just pick the cheapest partner to be delivering those boxes to a front door.

But they don't handle them properly. They don't actually try to Find people and say, you weren't home, even though you know you were home and they never knocked on the door or they busted something on the way in. It's easy to say, well, that's not us. That's them, but it absolutely reflects on your brand.

So understanding then if somebody goes to complain, what's that process like? What happens after that? If they go to talk to someone else, if then, and then, and then to really tease out those end moments and do everything you can to make sure they're not. Terrible. Yeah. Yeah. And it's so interesting that this is like.

You know, if you've been in eCommerce for a while, you know, these things are important, but you don't necessarily know that it's actually based in psychology. And that's the reason why this is important. So having a framework to apply to these decisions about whether to spend that extra money on the packaging or the ship, you know, the shipping partner.

You apply it back to this, and it makes it much easier to make those decisions. I love that.

Cool. You talk a little bit in your book about choice architecture. What is that, and how does that apply, and how could e commerce businesses kind of think about that? Love choice architecture. Such a important aspect of what makes behavioral science and behavioral economics different than advice you get in other places.

So, the way you present information. Impacts the choice someone is going to make. I've already given some examples of that here in this conversation and the last time I was on the show. So we get that and it's easy to say, you know, but I don't, I don't want that responsibility, you know, and say like, well, I'm just going to make it random.

Or something along those lines, but you know, for better or worse, whether you think about it or not, the way you're presenting information is influencing the decision someone is going to make. So I say it's always better to be thoughtful about it than not, because you might be nudging them towards something that you absolutely don't want.

And that's not a good fit for them. So in this case, you know, whether you present things by price, by. In alphabetical order you know, the way that you're doing groupings of information is all going to impact the decision that someone is going to make so you can structure those choices to make it easier for them to make a decision.

So to make a comparison here, think about going to a restaurant and having the menu. We're pretty used to now seeing menus are split into things like Appetizers, and then salads, and then drinks, and then we have entrees, and we have pizza, or whatever, right? You can look and see, you have red wine, white wine, and beer, or whatever, right?

They're grouped together in a way that helps you to make. If everything on the menu was alphabetical, imagine what a ridiculous and terrible experience that would be. It would be impossible to make a choice to where you just say, I don't even know. Like, and, and they're alphabetical and they have random names that don't necessarily tell you what the thing is.

Right. It would be so confusing and overwhelming. It's just not even worth making a decision. So when you think about someone coming to your. website, your ideal customers. So you think about, you know, using our Pareto principle, that 80 20 rule, you know, so if 80 percent of people are going to do the 20 percent most, you know, business with you.

And so if you cater to what they're most likely to want and to need and message for them, what do they care about first? What matters most in the way that they're going to order, how they're going to use the product, how they're thinking about it. So if you're selling clothes. You know, for me, size probably matters, right?

If you don't have the shoes or the pants in the size that I need them to be. I don't need to see them, right? Cause it's not, it's just going to make me upset. I had a client who sold the custom made, you know, handmade shelving units that were also jewelry organizers, really, really cool systems that you could buy.

And they had the style and they had some set sizes, some set, you know, you could pick if you wanted the hardware to be gold or silver, you can pick which color you want the wood to be, but pretty much anything. You could do all the colors of wood. You could pick gold or silver knobs. And the most important thing was the style you like, and then you pick the size and because they have, you know, standard across, and then you can pick color and hardware, you're good to go.

If they would have. Only had something, you know, this only comes in this giant size and they didn't ask you about that first, it'd be a really terrible experience where you have a bunch of people upset because they found something, they fell in love with it, and I can't get it to fit on the wall that I need it to be on or whatever that is, right?

So, Understanding the criteria that someone's going to be sorting by and then how you present the information and help them to where it's not so many choices, but we can group them. It can help make that decision. We also have a paradox of choice when there is too much, we often opt to do nothing to wait and deal with that tomorrow.

And so being thoughtful about those choices makes it a lot easier for people to buy. Amazing. Loads of practical applications here that I can see right away. I'm excited to go and dig into this more and see what we can devise as like tests for our landing pages and even positioning of the products on the website.

Yeah. It's super exciting. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience? specifically around how this how these frameworks and contexts apply to e commerce? Well, I think just, you know, one thing that came to mind where we were talking a little bit about some of the experience and those true ends, you know, for you, there was the shipping item, but also being thoughtful about say your 404 error page, so often people get there and it's just like want, want, like too bad, but that's a moment where you can be a little bit.

Cheeky, say if it ties in with your brand, when you go to my website, if you put in the wrong URL somewhere on the brainy business, it will take you to a landing page that's saying like, oops, sorry, you know, we messed this up. But you know, if you're looking for something brainy, you know, it's got some little tips and tidbits.

I'll let you go discover yourself URL on there. Something that's going to tie in with your own brand, that's going to help them Not go, ugh, and leave, right? But they're going to come back to something. And for me, it's, you know, what do I want people to do? Like, learn more about the podcast. You were probably looking for one of these things.

And if not. Here's how you can ask us a question or something. Right. So being thoughtful about those, you know, something that simple can be a little bit delightful of something that would have been kind of, yeah. Yeah. And it's about making that next step, nudging people to a next step, always be the goal rather than getting them to stop in their tracks or be too confused to make the next move, which.

That means we've lost them, right? And we've paid to get them to the site in many cases, so we want to make sure that they keep that journey going. Yeah. That's awesome. Okay, awesome. Well, thanks for coming along. So how can our users get their hands on your book, or find you, or follow you? I think you mentioned you have something free for our users sorry, our users, our listeners, that they that's where they can find you.

Yes, for sure. So you know, best way to find stuff from me in general is just to go to thebrainybusiness. com. You can find my books, the podcast, Connectabout, consulting, whatever else. And as you said for your listeners, we do have a special URL you can go to. It's Thebrainybusiness. com slash jessie.

And you can get a chapter of any of my books for free. You can check out, see if it's a fit for you. You know, the try before you buy sort of a situation there. So you can all go and get that at thebrainybusiness. com slash jessie. Amazing. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. So people can access it.

Great. Thanks so much for coming along, Melina. Yep. Thanks for having me.

Okay. Awesome.