Ep #90: Neuromarketing Mix with Ryan Hawk

Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley, author, speaker and educator on neuromarketing and the psychology of persuasion. Every week, we talk with thought leaders that will help you improve your influence with factual evidence and concrete research. Introducing your host, Roger Dooley.

Roger Dooley:           Welcome to the Brainfluence Podcast. I’m Roger Dooley. I’m often asked to be a guest on other podcasts. Once in a while the conversation goes in a direction that we haven’t covered here yet. This week we’re going to hear what I recorded with Ryan Hawk on his Learning Leader podcast.

Ryan got his own early leadership experience as starting quarterback and football team captain at Ohio University. He’s now an executive at LexisNexis where he has hired over 35 people to lead sales teams to record-breaking performances.

Ryan started The Learning Leader Show so he could speak to and learn from the greatest leaders in the world. None of them were available for this particular episode so Ryan settled for me. You can learn more about Ryan on the show notes page at RogerDooley.com/Podcast. As with all episodes of the Brainfluence podcast, there will be a text version of our conversation there as well.

Ryan and I covered quite a few topics and I think you’ll find them interesting and actionable. I appreciate Ryan letting me share these with you. Now, here’s Ryan Hawk.

Ryan Hawk:                Okay, Roger, extremely excited to have you here on the Learning Leader Show. This has been months in the works for me. I love your book, Brainfluence, and I have a quick question to get us started here with some oomph to it. That’s around people who have achieved big things, high achievers. I’m curious, for the ones that you’ve studied, people that you’ve been around, people in your network, you, yourself, what are some of the common characteristics of high achievers?

Roger Dooley:           Happy to be here first, Ryan. I suspect you may have heard this before but I would have to say that the ability to focus is absolutely critical. Today there are so many distractions, particularly with social media, with our various electronic devices that we carry around with us. There’s just so many constant interruptions and distractions. The ability to, “I’ll sort of put that stuff aside and focus on the key objective.”

Of course, it isn’t just that kind of stuff as say an author. Do you focus on writing your next book? Do you focus on creating great content for those people that are following you? Do you focus on building your platform? So you’re tugged in all these various directions. Not to mention the constant pinging of electronics. So the ability to say, “Okay, today we are going to do this” and to actually do that, I think is really one key aspect.

Ryan Hawk:                Do any specific people come to mind when you hear the word high achievers? Like who are the people that pop into your mind?

Roger Dooley:           Good question. I think that if you look at just about any successful entrepreneur, they would have to qualify as a high achiever because so many entrepreneurs are not successful. I mean, obviously folks like Elon Musk probably is the consummate entrepreneur. He has I think a great ability to focus and also a great ability to put teams together because he could clearly not do all those things that he’s doing in totally different areas if he was not able to build in each case a great team of really talented people.

Ryan Hawk:                Yeah, absolutely. He’s one of my favorites on that list of dream guests to have someday. So, Roger, let’s take a step …

Roger Dooley:           Well you work your way up the food chain, start with me, and about a thousand podcasts later, you’ll be ready for Elon.

Ryan Hawk:                Hey, man, you got to be persistent and set big goals and that’s what I do. I’d love to take a step back and look at what, well really one of the main reasons why we’re talking. I’ve spoken with a number of people who’ve done over, I don’t know, 75 of these talks now and on more than a few occasions, even whether I’m recording or after I get done recording I have a conversation or an email conversation, a dialog and people have mentioned your book Brainfluence. And the full title of your book is Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing.

I’m fascinated by how our mind and how our brain works. How it could potentially be persuaded by things that you don’t even know. According to the leading neuroscientists, 95 percent of all thoughts, emotions, and learning occur before we are even aware of it. You are an expert in this area, you wrote the book on this, I’d love for you to take a moment to talk a little bit about yourself. What specifically you do and then why you wrote the book Brainfluence and the effect that it’s had on others that you have heard from.

Roger Dooley:           Okay, Ryan. Well I don’t want to give my entire life story but I started off life as an engineer and worked my way up through project and product management and finally was in a senior strategy position at a Fortune 1000 company and then chucked that all back in the early days of home computers to become an entrepreneur.

Since then, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. My original business was catalog marketing because the internet was not around yet, at least anything resembling its current form. But that was a really quantitative kind of marketing. I loved the fact that we could see what was really working. We could do A/B tests. We could test different color illustrations on the catalogs. We could calculate the sales per square inch of every product to figure out which products were making us money and which ones weren’t.

So this of course over time morphed into various digital businesses, built a huge community along the way, sold that a few years ago. But about ten or eleven years ago I saw the confluence of neuroscience and marketing and I certainly wasn’t the only one to see that. There were already some small entrepreneurial companies that were trying to apply neuroscience tools like various kinds of either brain imaging or brain wave measurement techniques to determining whether an ad would be effective or not.

Well first I did what any good digital marketer would do, I bought a domain, NeuroscienceMarketing.com. Kind of keyword-ish but it really combines those two topics nicely. I started writing there and continued that for quite a few years until finally I guess now probably about four years ago, Wiley and I got together and they brought out my book that was based on these topics.

But one thing I found over time was there was a certainly some neuroscience involved but there was an awful lot of behavior science too. I found that my readers responded to the behavior science perhaps even more than the neuroscience piece because most businesses do not have access to the tools in neuroscience. Now some of those tools are getting cheaper where you can hire a company to perform tests for you but even today with the somewhat more reasonable prices, these tools are out of reach for many smaller and medium-sized business and entrepreneurial firms.

But what I have tried to do really practically from day one was translate the findings from both neuroscience and academic studies of behavior into actionable advice that businesses can employ without necessarily going out and doing those same experiments or running those same tests themselves. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve got over a thousand articles now at my main blog. I’ve got a blog at Forbes as well where I’ve got a couple hundred posts or something. So it keeps me busy.

What I’m doing today is primarily that, writing. I do speaking engagements and a little bit of consulting although really I kind of discourage that, it’s not scalable. I prefer to spend my time on writing and speaking to people who have an interest in these topics.

Ryan Hawk:                It’s fascinating like I mentioned. So if you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to dive into some of the parts. I have my earmarked and highlighted parts of the book that I wanted to … like I said, this podcast is really cool for me because I find these books that have a big impact on my life and this gives me the vehicle to go out and then speak and dive deeper with the people who are the subject matter experts like yourself.

It becomes neat for me and for our listeners that we’re able to hear you dive deeper into some of the things that I’ve read and then hopefully other people will go and get the book and be like, “Oh yeah, I heard Roger and that’s pretty cool that he said that.”

So I’d love to dive into some parts, some notes that I took right now and you could talk a little bit about why these things have an effect on our brain and why it has an effect on our decision making without sometimes us even knowing it.

Roger Dooley:           Sounds good, Ryan.

Ryan Hawk:                So there’s a lot of things I have here. One of the things that you talk about from Brainfluence is about how people ease the pain of high prices through bundling, through using decoys, and anchoring prices effectively. Talk to me more about that. What do you mean by that as far as how to handle that pain through those tactics?

Roger Dooley:           Okay, well I think to begin with one of the most interesting things is brain imaging work that was done some years ago now by George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon and Brian Knutson at Stanford where they found that when people saw, were presented with a product and a price that appeared to be high.

In other words, it wasn’t a bargain, it was kind of reverse where it would strike them as being high for that product, it actually lit up the pain areas in their brain. So it was almost as if they were experiencing physical pain. I mean, obviously it’s not a direct corollary but that was I think one key finding. Therefore, it is good for marketers to try and find ways of avoiding that pain reaction.

One example is buying sushi, which is one of the more painful types of purchasing experience that you can have because you’re going out and buying these expensive little pieces of fish where every time you make a decision, it costs you another five or ten dollars. You have multiple pain points as you go.

Where presenting that same type of product in say an all-you-can-eat situation, one price, all you can eat, may not actually save the customer money but it would be a less painful experience. That’s why various kinds of pricing schemes that pay one amount of money for a batch of products or an unlimited amount of product or whatever …

Ryan Hawk:                So people like you and your spouse want to go to an all-inclusive and you’re like, “Oh this is great. Once we get there we don’t have to pay for anything. We can just go eat and drink and do whatever we want to do.” In reality, it might not be saving you money but you feel better about it because you have this one time bundled charge.

Roger Dooley:           Sure, absolutely. I occasionally go on cruises and Regent cruise line offers very nice but very high-priced cruises in comparison with their competition but they are all-inclusive. You can go to any of the restaurants, the bars, whatever, and you will never have to sign a ticket for anything. The experience was really a wonderful because you never had that sort of decision point where, “Oh, do I really want to order that cocktail?” or whatever and then have to sign for it right then. It was just all included.

Now, that was not a money-saving opportunity. I suspect that I could have gone on another nice cruise line and paid à la carte for everything and still come away cheaper but it would not have been the same experience. I think the one thing too, it’s kind of a related topic, you mentioned bundling. When you have products that on a stand-alone basis might appear to be costly or expensive, sometimes combining them makes that easier for the consumer to decide.

I think a great example is if you’ve bought a car in recent times you may have found that there’s a luxury package. That includes the leather seats, the upgraded stereo and maybe three or four other options. That might cost $3,000 or $5,000 or something like that but it does not produce the same reaction as if you were simply buying those things individually. Then you can also compare them. You might say, “Gee, why should I pay $2500 for leather seats when I can buy an entire leather couch for $1,000?” for example. When it’s in a bundle, those individual comparisons are a little bit less apparent.

Ryan Hawk:                I think I got a counter point to this but it elicits a question. So there are … I think another way to view this is some people see whatever costs more is worth more. For example, I can name a few of these, like Harvard, right? Harvard has enough money in their endowment to give everybody a scholarship for the next thirty years but they’re still the highest-priced school in the country.

Or Apple does not discount their prices. Another company, I just spoke with the CEO of Mizzen+Main, a men’s clothing company, that they will never discount their prices anywhere, regardless of who’s selling it. It’s the same price and it’s priced depending on who you are speaking with, it can be deemed as priced high and there are certainly much cheaper ways to go about it.

What do you think about what happens to your mind when people say, I’ve been with people who I’ve gone to dinner with them and they’ll say, “What’s the most expensive bottle of wine that you have? Give me that one.” You know, maybe they’re celebrating there … or trying to …

Roger Dooley:           That’s when you know you’re having dinner with a moron [laughs]. But no, I know what you … there’s certainly people like that.

Ryan Hawk:                Right. You know what I mean? There are people who they see a high price and they immediately think high value. Like that’s how their brain works whether it’s Apple who won’t discount and those other companies, how does that affect the brain and your mind when you’re seeing that type of strategy towards the market?

Roger Dooley:           Okay, several of the products you mentioned would fall into the luxury product category. That category has a fundamentally different approach to pricing. There you’re typically not trying to convince the consumer that you’re offering a bargain or even great value for the money because clearly if you buy a piece of luggage that costs $2,000, you’re not getting ten times the utility of one that costs $200 but you are paying for superb quality perhaps.

You’re paying for prestige. People will recognize that and you’ll be in essence buying yourself status. There are a lot of factors that go into that. So, yes, you’re absolutely correct, luxury products generally do not discount or benefit from discounting. Obviously there is a market for discounted luxury products but to the extent that it influences the perception of the product as being luxury that can backfire. We’ve seen some luxury brands historically that have tried to go a little bit more mass market and ended up suffering in the long run because they lost their cache.

You mentioned Harvard. Actually there’s some interesting data. I spend some time in the higher-ed space, at one point when the Ivy League schools which are all typically very comparable in tuition, there may be $1000 or $2000 difference between the schools but all of the Ivies are very competitive and some of their differences are geographic so room and board at Columbia might be a little bit higher because they’re in Manhattan.

At one point, they diverged somewhat but the schools that were at the lower end of the price spectrum were getting fewer applications presumably because people thought, “Gee, well there’s something a little bit wrong with them because they’re not at the same price level as everybody else.” So ultimately they pretty much took the approach of staying competitive with each other. Unfortunately, competitive being all at very high levels that are tough for the average student and family to afford.

Ryan Hawk:                Yeah, changing gears a little bit, you wrote about an interesting experiment from John Bargh at Yale University found that the temperature of a beverage makes a difference in how one person judges another person. The takeaway, and I’ll let you dive in here, is that the warmer the beverage, the better a person thinks about you and that’s oftentimes why people offer each other coffee. Talk to me a little bit more about that.

Roger Dooley:           Yeah, well that’s a fascinating experiment and there’s several that show how tactile impressions translate into emotions and our emotional perception. You mentioned the coffee where people felt better if they were say in an interview situation, they felt better about the person they were talking to as if that person was warmer when they were given a warm beverage.

Another example is when people were asked to evaluate a resume, they were handed the resume on a clipboard. Some had it on a very heavy clipboard and the others had it on a light clipboard. The people with the heavier clipboard felt that the candidate described was more impressive. So there was this sort of weight or gravitas that was carried along merely with the weight of the object.

So there are all kinds of examples like that that show you have these very subtle influences and of course they’re totally below human awareness. In other words, we have no idea that we’re being influenced by that warm cup that we’re holding in our hands or by the weight of the clipboard. Nevertheless, those influences exist. So if you are serving somebody a warm beverage, you might consider a mug without handles so they actually have to sort of cup it in their hands.

Ryan Hawk:                Wow. Fascinating stuff. That’s why I love the stuff you write about because there’s so many of these nuggets. Well really, there’s a hundred of them and there’s many more when you read your blog. I found that one, I was like, wow, I took a note and I said, “I never thought of that but now it makes so much more sense.” These are what really get me so I want to ask more about them.

One of the ones that I found interesting was chapter 39, it’s about trust. I talk a lot about this on this podcast with people and the importance of trust and developing it and what it actually does. There’s chemicals in the brain, oxytocin actually, that is involved when it comes with the feelings you get when you are trusted and when you trust somebody else. Can you dive a little deeper when it comes to the science, the neuromarketing, when it comes to trust and the chemicals that are involved with that?

Roger Dooley:           Yeah, oxytocin is a really interesting compound. It is sometimes called the love hormone or the hug hormone. Paul Zak, a researcher out in California has been the preeminent person in that field. Oxytocin is released for example when you give a person a hug. They actually found that, and this in turn creates trust. Now obviously it doesn’t mean you should go hug somebody that you want to trust you. It might seem socially inappropriate and end up having the opposite effect.

But this chemical is released and they’ve even artificially introduced oxytocin and found that people’s trust was increased when they were in essence given a whiff of oxytocin, not that they could smell it but when it was introduced into their system that way it increased trust. There’s really all kinds of things but what in general physical contact when it’s appropriate I think can be a powerful tool. There’s even some research and I’m not sure if this is really oxytocin related but showing that people’s feelings were changed by a very light touch on the shoulder.

For instance, if you were inviting somebody back to your office, their opinions of you were improved in the event that you just touch their shoulder lightly as you were say guiding them to your office. Again, I think that all these tools have to be used in a smart way because these days folks are very sensitive about touch. But when it can be used in an appropriate way, it can really be powerful and makes you as an individual more persuasive.

Ryan Hawk:                Yeah, I was thinking of that too, especially people who work at a big company or corporation, there can be a little bit risk involved with that if you don’t use it in the right way as you mentioned.

So I want to progress to what you’re currently working on. So you’re working on a project called the persuasion slide. Whenever I think people hear the word persuasion that that creates a couple of thoughts. Some are positive and some are negative. I think people are fascinated by the topic, I am. I think we’ve all read Robert Cialdini’s great text called Influence. A book that’s really a classic on persuasion and so this is something that you’re working on now and I’d love to hear more about your research, your writing, and everything that’s going into it.

Roger Dooley:           Sure. And Bob Cialdini’s had some subsequent books that are definitely worth the read too. His most recent is The Small B!g which is 50 or 52 short, little chapters all describing some kind of persuasive influence example. Persuasion sounds to some people like manipulation and I guess it can be because certainly there are con people out there who use these tools to manipulate people into doing things that they really shouldn’t be doing. But I think that something that Bob Cialdini emphasizes and I emphasize and really almost anybody in this space, is that persuasion must be ethical.

If you are helping a person achieve something, if you’re helping them say put more money in their retirement plan, then that’s perfectly ethical and indeed desirable. If you’re tricking them into buying something that they don’t really want or need and won’t use, then that is not ethical and you shouldn’t do that.

So what I’ve been working on lately is the concept of the persuasion slide. It’s something that I spoke about a couple years ago in Germany and then did a blog post on maybe a little bit more than a year ago. Now I’m turning it into a short book. What I wanted to do was create a model where marketers could incorporate both conscious and nonconscious factors because you talk to most marketers, “Well, why would people want to buy your product?” They’ve got features and benefits and they can offer discounts and things and these are all conscious factors.

But then they say, “Okay, how do we incorporate these nonconscious factors?” As you know, there are hundreds, if not thousands of nonconscious factors and you’ve got Cialdini’s six principles but then you’ve got factors from evolutionary psychology that are very powerful. You’ve got these weird factors like we were just talking about with warm coffee cups and so on. So how do you bring this all together in a single model?

So my model is pretty simple. It uses the playground slide as a jumping off point where you need a nudge at the top, which is some way of getting the customer—I will say customer—it could be a potential lead or it could be something else, but your customer’s attention. And getting them moving on the slide. Just as say mom or dad gives a little kid a little shove at the top and then you’ve got the force of gravity which is what’s motivating the customer.

Often as marketers, we don’t focus on what’s motivating the customer, we focus on ourselves and telling them how great we are. How wonderful our products are and so on instead of looking at their needs.

So then there’s the angle of the slide. That’s where you bring in these both conscious and nonconscious motivators. So, yes, your product has features. It’s got benefits. It has certain characteristics that perhaps the customer has to have. Those are all important. But then you’ve got these nonconscious factors you can bring in as well.

Then the last element of the slide that is often overlooked is friction. If you’ve ever seen a little kid get stuck partway down a slide because it was rusty or poorly maintained, that is friction where it prevents you from getting down the slide. Unfortunately, in today’s marketing there is a huge amount of friction. Every year, four trillion, that’s trillion with a T, dollars’ worth of merchandise are left in shopping carts online every year, abandoned shopping carts which is a stunning number.

Now there are a variety of reasons why that happens. It may be people put it in because they couldn’t figure out the shipping and they had to do that or various reasons but in many cases, companies paid a lot of money to drive that traffic with pay-per-click ads and SEO and content marketing. Then they created a great website and they’ve got a warehouse full of products and got the customer all the way to the point of completing the purchase, but because they got to that order form or whatever and it was just too daunting, they bailed out. So friction is huge.

There are nonconscious factors there too. Even the font that something is printed in can make the action seem harder. There’s weird transference, the concept is cognitive fluency and when something is difficult for us to process, as in a font that’s a little bit hard to read, it ends up being, that difficulty ends up being transferred to the action that’s being described.

So if you want somebody to fill out your lead form or whatever, you want to make it as simple as possible using very clear, simple type. The more you embellish it, the more there is a background that makes it a little bit harder to read, that difficulty will go straight to what you’re asking them to do.

So anyway, the slide model brings all this together in a way that marketers can think about and be sure they’re covering all their bases.

Ryan Hawk:                Wow, this stuff is so interesting. I think just to … it crosses so many just different things that we don’t necessarily consciously think about. That’s really the whole point of your work is to I think to directly be more conscious of it. Have a better understanding of and awareness really of what’s going on around you and then if you’re somebody trying to sell to these consumers, also gain a better understanding of the process and the way, strategies to do it.

I don’t know what others believe but I think there’s a huge market for your work and people who have a fascination in learning more about this. It’s really what my show is about. I believe is to have conscious thought around a number of different topics and to really think, just elicit thoughts and create people to take a step back and think about things. So you’ve certainly done that for me, Roger.

I know I want to be respectful of your time. I have one more question in regards to, before we get out of here in regards to my show. I know we’ve talked a lot about tactics and things that you’ve written about but I want to talk a little bit about leadership and this changes the direction a little bit because … but there are leaders involved in everything from a psychological standpoint and from your work as well.

I know you speak with a lot of leaders on your podcast, a lot of impressive people. When you hear the phrase, so my show is called a Learning Leader Show, when you hear the phrase “learning leader” I’m curious to a guy who’s really a master at and understanding and has studied the effects of words and things on people’s brains, what do you think of when you hear the phrase “learning leader?”

Roger Dooley:           I think a leader who is not learning constantly will probably not be a leader for very long. Today things simply change too quickly to be applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems.

Ryan Hawk:                Agreed. I guess just that not to go too meta but when you think when people see this and maybe they’ve never heard of the show, what do you think the first thought that comes to mind for the regular consumer, not a professional who studies this like you but what do you … if you were paid to say what type of thought process is this creating on a consumer’s mind, what would you say?

Roger Dooley:           Hmm, interesting question. I think that probably they might conclude something similar. Perhaps there’d be an overlay of learning how to be a leader but I think there’s been various types of leadership concepts created like the servant leader, somebody sort of leads from within as opposed to being out in front and giving barking orders.

So to me, I think a learning leader probably conveys a sort of a sense of open-mindedness and perhaps even a sense of humility which are both pretty good characteristics for a leader.

Ryan Hawk:                I love to hear that. It’s cool to see you kind of analyze it here quickly. I know I didn’t prep you with that question so I appreciate you kind of off the cuff going after everything here. So, Roger, really appreciate your time. Where can everyone go to find you online?

Roger Dooley:           The best jumping off point is RogerDooley.com. There you can find my links to my blogs, my podcast, my book, and my social profiles on Twitter, which is the network where I’m most interactive. I am @RogerDooley.

Ryan Hawk:                Perfect. Well, again, thanks so much, Roger, for being here. I’m fascinated by your work. It’s had a profound influence on me so I love it. I’m appreciative and I’m happy that we’re able to dive a little bit deeper here today on The Learning Leader Show, so thank you so much for being here.

Roger Dooley:           Well thanks for inviting me, Ryan. It’s been a lot of fun.

Ryan Hawk:                All right, great. Talk to you soon, man.

Roger Dooley:           You bet.

Ryan Hawk:                All right. Bye.

Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Brainfluence Podcast. To continue the discussion and to find your own path to brainy success, please visit us at RogerDooley.com.