← The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
577. The Persuasion Engine: AI, Empathy, and Effective Communication
00:50:31
Loading summary
Transcript76 lines
- [00:01]
Melina Palmer
Hey there, Melina. Here.
- [00:03]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
If you've been feeling like things are changing faster than you can keep up, you're not alone. I hear it all the time.
- [00:09]
Melina Palmer
Smart people doing good work but feeling
- [00:11]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
unsure of where to focus next, it
- [00:13]
Melina Palmer
tends to show up in places like
- [00:15]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
your pricing, sales, conversations, messaging, competing priorities, even the experience you're creating for your team and customers. Your brain wants clarity, but when it doesn't have it, everything feels heavier than it should. And that kind of uncertainty keeps businesses stuck, and you don't want to be left behind. So if you've been craving a bit
- [00:35]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
of a reset, a way to step
- [00:38]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
back, get clear, and feel confident in what you should be doing next, I'd love to help. I work with two to three clients each month, from solopreneurs to global teams, to translate behavioral science into practical, usable strategies you can apply right away. So customers buy and employees buy in. If that sounds like what you need, head to the brainy business.com contact and book a discovery call to start the conversation. Again, that's the brainy business.com contact. I can't wait to hear from you. And hopefully work together. And when you're ready, let's start the show.
- [01:15]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Welcome to episode 577 of the Brainy Business, Understanding the psychology of why people Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Roger Dooley, author of the Persuasion Engine.
- [01:29]
Melina Palmer
Ready? Let's get started.
- [01:36]
Podcast 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.
- [01:52]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business podcast. When people talk and think about AI, a lot of the conversation gets very big, very fast.
- [02:04]
Melina Palmer
Will it replace jobs? Is it good or bad?
- [02:06]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Are we moving too quickly? Not quickly enough. And while those questions absolutely matter, there's another one I think is worth asking. What if AI could help us be more thoughtful, not less human, but more. Because at the end of the day, business is still about people, about understanding what matters to them, how they make decisions, where friction shows up and what makes a message land well or go very, very wrong. And that's why this conversation matters. Right now, there's so much noise around AI and a lot of people are really over complicating it. Others are dismissing it entirely. But as you're going to hear in today's conversation, there's a real practical middle ground. One where AI can help make behavioral science and smart persuasion more accessible, especially for smaller businesses and teams that don't have giant budget budgets or in house experts on speed dial. Today I'm excited to be chatting with my friend Roger Dooley, who's been on the show before to talk about his book Friction. He also wrote the foreword to my first book, what your customer wants and can't tell you. He writes and speaks about neuromarketing and using behavioral science and marketing and business. He wrote a book called Brainfluence also Friction, and his newest book is called the Persuasion Engineering. And he has definitely been spending a lot of time translating big important ideas into bite sized, usable insights people can apply. And I'm super excited to have him back on the show today to talk about this new book. In our conversation we're going to talk about prompting, persuasion, empathy, communication and why using AI well isn't really about getting one magical answer, but it's about asking better questions, pressure testing your thinking, and being more intentional about the experience you're creating for customers and employees alike. Really quickly before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com577 now let's jump right in. Roger Dooley, welcome back to the Brainy Business podcast.
- [04:17]
Roger Dooley
Well, Melina, it's great to be here again.
- [04:20]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Yay.
- [04:20]
Melina Palmer
I know it is a funny thing. I was just realizing, so I may have said something about this in the intro outro. Who knows what I'm going to say at this point. But you and Near Eyal were two of the very first guests that I ever had on the show. So I had done like 70, 80 episodes that are just me doing solo things before I started having guests. And because his new book just. Well, it's coming out next week when we're recording, but like a little bit ahead. And then your new book is going to be out by the time this comes out like that, right around the same cadence that I have you both back. Like how amazing and lucky for me.
- [05:03]
Roger Dooley
Yeah. Well, I guess I think near has been a little more prolific than I have. I think he's had maybe a book in between our last two, but I'm not sure. But yeah, Nir. Nir is great. He was actually one of my first guests on my podcast a long, long, long ago.
- [05:17]
Melina Palmer
Amazing. Yeah, well. And great books and insights from everyone. So really excited to have you here with me today. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
- [05:35]
Roger Dooley
To keep it brief, I write and speak about neuromarketing and using behavioral science in marketing and business in general. And so that takes a variety of forms. I, I write at Forbes. I've got three books out now or, well, two out and one soon to Be the Persuasion Engine, coming out in May. And I have a podcast, which I haven't released new episodes soon, but I may resume that. I have a YouTube channel too, where I actively record stuff. So I try and stay busy, but it's mainly in trying to sort of get the word out about how to use behavioral science in business and a little bit more specifically the field of neuromarketing.
- [06:17]
Melina Palmer
Yeah. And of course, you and I are very kindered spirits and in that way. Right. Of helping, like, for me, this, like, more people knowing and understanding these things matters.
- [06:28]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Right.
- [06:29]
Melina Palmer
So that's where, you know, podcasting, it's like, let's talk about the concepts and how they work. We're going to take academic articles and make them so they're usable, help more people to know. And I would say, you know, for me over the years, I've always said, like, small business really matters to me. I love doing corporate stuff, you know, that's great. But being able to help people in small business to have the information, it's always, you know, I've said it's like, because they don't have the same budgets, like, if people aren't focusing on them specifically and taking that time to help them to understand these things, more and more just going to kind of get gobbled up in the process. Because large companies can invest in, you know, hiring people like you and I, you know, directly to come in and do work or, you know, different aspects of their teams. And so potentially, you know, AI has some opportunity to help spread the knowledge wealth, I guess, into small business. As we look at that, you know, what are your thoughts kind of in. In that space as we look at something like, you know, behavioral science, neuromarketing, all sorts of other topics, being more accessible to, you know, kind of more people in this age of AI?
- [07:48]
Roger Dooley
Well, I totally agree with you about smaller businesses, Molina. The. It's. It's difficult running a small business. I bailed out of the corporate world, boy, decades ago and have been a serial entrepreneur ever since. And so I totally identify with, you know, starting up with practically nothing and having you know, 100 things to do and you only have time for 20. And so trying to expect somebody in that mode to be an expert in behavioral science so they can really target their marketing, it's, it's a tall order. I think the reason my first book Brainfluence did so well is because it translated not just work like Cialdini's, but from many other research sources into things that were really sort of easy and bite sized. So somebody could pick it up and read a five page chapter and get a concept they could use. And so I mean, I guess I've been working at that for a long time. But even there, you know, if you want to be well read in behavioral science, just starting off with say the, the classics of Bob Cialdini's influence and Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, that's about a thousand pages of reading there. And you know, who has time to read all that? And even if you do, which I've done, and I'm sure you've done too, you know, it's impossible to remember everything in there. You know, you come away with a high points and after that it, you know, after a month or so it starts getting kind of vague. So I think that what I see the opportunity for AI is to really democratize the whole field. Even for people who don't have a lot of resources, they can't hire behavioral scientists, they don't have a nudge unit in their company, they don't have time to read thousands of pages and then actually try and figure out how to apply those lessons. Now AI can be a big help in that. And it's really a dramatic change. And I think that even looking beyond small business, if you look at even large corporations, you have the ability for previous we say a small department, marketing department in a division that's dealing with one or two products. You know, they're not going to get access to the nudge unit or to neuromarketing labs or anything else. They're there on their own, just like a small business. And so these kinds of people can use these tools, even say an individual salesperson who's trying to learn how to be more persuasive. Again, they may have some lessons available from the company, some training, but they don't have the ability to go out and ask an expert every time they're going to pitch a client. And now AI really offers them the chance to do that.
- [10:28]
Melina Palmer
Yeah, I totally agree. And even like you're saying about sitting and reading, thinking fast and slow and Influence of which I'd say, like, love both of those books. I know a lot of people have said, like, yeah, thinking fast and slow.
- [10:43]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
That's like.
- [10:44]
Melina Palmer
That's a rough go for. For a, like, normal person off the street to sit and read. Like, I loved that book. I'm like, this is amazing. But even when I assign it for my students, you know, people be like, oh, man, it's. It feels a little more slow than fast when you read it.
- [11:00]
Roger Dooley
Maybe it's a heavy lift for most people, I think. And, yeah, it's like when. When you're already sort of steeped in the science, suddenly see these things and. Oh, yeah, that makes total sense. So this is where that idea came from. But if you're just sitting down to read it for the first time, it's, you know, not like Harry Potter or something.
- [11:20]
Melina Palmer
I always feel like that's a bit of when people will say, like, what's the best intro book that you should read? And people say that. They'll say, thinking fast. And so I'm like, I don't. I mean, I don't know. I don't feel like that's the entry point for a lot of people because there's, yeah. A bit of a learning curve before you go full into that.
- [11:41]
Roger Dooley
Well, it's. It's sold millions of copies. Million. I think it's probably up there with. Stephen Hawking's book is a book that's been on a lot of bookshelves and coffee tables but never completely read.
- [11:51]
Melina Palmer
Yes, I think that's probably true. It's a very great, knowledgeable, useful paperweight in some ways. But there's such good stuff in there, like you're saying. Right. And so what I love about thinking fast and slow, speaking specifically, one of the many things. But I really like that you get a little. There's so many glimpses of the way that Kahneman thought about things. Right. Like the connections between concepts and, like, how you came up with these. I love, too, in having Richard Thaler on the show and looking at original anomalies work. Right. This, like. But, like, I have this kind of question. I was wondering about this and that. And like, when you get into just some of that academic paper, you lose a lot of that context and those connection points between things, they get so pigeonholed, I think. And there's maybe some benefit as we look at things like AI to be able to think like that person. Right. And. And understand these deeper connections that might get missed when I only remember a piece of a concept and Maybe part of a study and I'm trying to think about how to use and apply it. I really love some of the adv you give around prompting kind of in that way and how you can even leverage, you know, beyond. Most everybody can't actually just call up Cialdini and have him do work for them anyway. Right. And some of the, you know, as you, we don't have access to a lot of people. What are your thoughts as it goes into kind of setting up some of those prompts or how you can leverage this even beyond what's really possible for anybody in the field, whether you're applying it as a behavioral scientist and looking to incorporate things into your own work or within industry.
- [13:44]
Roger Dooley
Well, the whole prompt thing was kind of an issue for me as I was planning the book because the second major part has a lot of detailed prompting advice and very, very specific stuff, which to me is very useful for people, but also made it sort of immediately obsolete because the field of AI and generative AI is changing so quickly that that device is going to change. So one little tweak I did was I put a link at the end of every chapter so that people can both copy and paste the prompts in the book and also get any updates or suggestions, additional suggestions that I might have that, you know, due to the evolution of the technology. But, you know, I think that the key thing is you can't just, you know, tell a prompt, hey, you know, you're Bob Cialdini, come up with a marketing plan for me or what should I put on this website page? Or you know, what, whatever, Eve, there's still thought required. Just as with using AI for any other tool, you cannot delegate everything to it. But boy, for getting ideas and for doing iterations on things and really coming up sometimes with viewpoints that you didn't expect, you know, AI is great at all of those. And in particular, the more detailed your prompt is, the more you avoid that sort of stereotypical thinking. You know, if you say, hey, which Chaldean principle is going to work best on this page? It's probably going to say social proof, because that's the most common one, you know, and I've noticed that. But if you prompt it, you know, explain how each Chaldean principle would, or explain how you could use Unity, suddenly sort of force the AI model out of that comfort mode of just, okay, let's do what's expected here, and it will come up with more innovative results. And of course, you can just keep pushing it like, okay, that was one Idea, give me three more or five more. And the more you push it, the more you're going to find someone, hey, this one really resonates, you know, it's like even just for generating copy for all behavioral science aside, if you're going to write an article and you say, okay, I need a headline for this article, AI will come up with a headline, and it's probably going to be not that great, but if you could tell it to come up with 10 more and then maybe pick one and say, okay, I want 10 variations on this, that sort of teamwork between you and the AI is ultimately going to produce a pretty good result, I think.
- [16:12]
Melina Palmer
Yeah. And it is definitely the. I'm just thinking about all of my own. As with everybody, as we're learning new tools, I battle with the AI all the time. And even where you talk about where you can set up your own, the bot or whatever. But we have the Molina's voice. I always jokingly call it Moline AI. Right. It's the other version of me. And I have, you know, we have specific content that. So it's like trying to sound like me. And I'll use it for things like, you know, we, we have this conversation. We've done the interview here, like, say,
- [16:54]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
hey, let's do a first pass.
- [16:56]
Melina Palmer
Think about, like, how might I do the intro outro? Or like, if we're thinking about article ideas and, like, think like me and do this and like, sometimes nails it. And sometimes it's like, gets the person's book wrong. Even though it's like, I gave you one piece of content. Like, all I gave you was our conversation. Like, what are you even doing here with this? Like, when it's the same kind of background insights and things. And so, you know, it'll get better. You know, everything is evolving.
- [17:26]
Roger Dooley
It is getting better, Molina, you know. Yeah, but you're absolutely correct. Anybody who's using this really still has to exercise caution. You don't just take the first answer you get. If it has specifics in it, you want to check the specifics. You know, you can verify some of these things yourself. You can ask the AI to check. You can ask another AI to check. So if it's got a series of links, you know, you can check them. Another AI can check them. But please do check them, because we've all heard about the cases where, you know, a lawyer filed a brief that had all these false citations in it, which did not earn any points with a judge.
- [18:03]
Melina Palmer
Yeah. And that's, I mean, so that's part of the. There's this balance of we know enough to know. Like one, when I'm learning some, like when it puts something out, like gives me a suggested draft or something, I can say, that's not what that concept means. Right. Like, you're wrong on this. Like, I know that that's not a thing. Or like, what are you. What is even the same thing you're making up? What are you talking about and calling a term or whatnot. Right. A certain effect or something.
- [18:38]
Roger Dooley
Right. Yeah, I've seen that too. Like Chellini's liking principle. Molina. Yeah, liking is one that tends to misinterpret because it interprets it literally. Liking. Oh, like you like somebody so you're gonna be more persuasive or they like you. And I mean, that's part of it. But obviously, as we know it, it goes a lot deeper than that. So, yeah, you know, you have to prompt it.
- [18:58]
Melina Palmer
Yep. So knowing that we accept that, it will be obsolete even by the time the episode comes out. As you're kind of saying, what are some of those tips, though, you would that you give for prompting, knowing there's some general things I'll say. One thing that really stood out to me is so I try to have a good conversation with the AI. Like, I'm. I'm not just like, hey, give me a marketing plan.
- [19:23]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Right.
- [19:24]
Melina Palmer
To you have your example of what you shared there. Trying to be more like, this is what I'm trying to do and this is why and ask the question. But I haven't, other than when it's something in my own voice, I haven't done as much around the, like, you are this person, like, setting it up. There were really interesting tips and some of these, like, trials that you've had. Can you share a little bit about, you know, how you have used some of that and tips for. We'll say for people in business, whether that's intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, what have you.
- [20:00]
Roger Dooley
Right. Well, Melina, I think just about every AI expert suggests that one thing you have to do carefully is specify the AI's role. In other words, you wouldn't just say, you know, which influence principle is going to work best. In this case, you would first assign a role to the AI. And that could be an expert in behavioral science who's well familiar with Cialdini, Kahneman, and you know, listen to some of your other favorites. You could also say you are Robert Cialdini and. Or you are Dale Carnegie. You know, you can do things like that. And there's some evidence now, you know, this is probably evolving as AI gets better. But at least when I was doing my initial research there was some evidence that, that doing a UR prompt, where you're actually assigning a role in that definitive matter works slightly better than, you know, act as an expert in this area. So, but you know, undoubtedly that's changing. You know, I think some of the other things that people can do is first of all you can use the more sophisticated models. And I'm sure that again, when I even the worst models today are the cheaper models today. Claude Sonnet, for example, is better than what the more advanced models were back, you know, when I was initially doing the research for the book. But generally if you use a model that does deeper thinking, you are going to get more result, better results. And some other things you can do is, some other things you can do are you can ask the AI to improve your prompt, like explain what you're trying to do and then have it create a prompt. And I found that if I give it a hundred word prompt, it might come back with say a 400 word prompt that goes into a lot more detail both in terms of how it's supposed to think about it and what output you're expecting. And of course then you can edit that yourself when you look at and say, okay, well this sounds good, but this other thing we don't need or I can change that to make it better. And so that's, that's a pretty easy way to get a much better prompt from the start. You can actually have it create a team of experts and either respond sort of in unison or you could have the individual team members debate each other. And I talk a little bit about that. I mean, this is sort of an involved thing, like you're probably not going to do that on every project. But if you're trying to come up with, you know, some key element of your marketing plan, you know, then really forcing the AI to get into these different roles debate and then maybe find a compromise that really forces it to think and it may end up with a result that is better. And of course again, you know, iteration is the key. You can't just go with that first result and say, wow, okay, this is it. I mean, maybe it is, but the more you iterate, the better. And I think as of course it's a trade off. We've talked about how this is a huge time saver for organizations, whether they're small organizations or even in a big company that are really stressed for time and have Too many things to do. At some point you have to balance. Okay, I could keep iterating on this, but this looks like it's going to be good enough for my needs.
- [23:16]
Melina Palmer
Yeah, definitely. And like you said, different levels of investment, both in like how you're building the prompt and how many reviews you do. As far as like, you know, I loved the piece, by the way, about having the different people debating each other in there. And also like we're saying things that you can't actually. You could. No one could ever actually do. But if you like, the AI might allow you to say, you know, we have a panel like, review my website as if we've got a panel from, you know, Robert Cialdini and James Clear or BJ Fogg and let's throw in like, you know, Tony Robbins or something. Right. Like we're gonna go and look at this thing. What might the points be? And I love how you even said, like, have them get into an argument being on different sides of a point, like one. I mean, this just sounds fascinating anyway, so like. But really cool to get those different perspectives. And also showing that there is never just one right answer.
- [24:19]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Right.
- [24:20]
Melina Palmer
That's a big point of this. And what I think comes from anybody that's, you know, looking to be effective in business, whether using behavioral science, neuromarketing or anything else, is the first answer. Isn't the right answer even, like the accepted thing isn't the right answer? There are always different ways to look at it. And that's. I love that art aspect of the greater behavioral sciences anyway. And if you say this expert would look at it this way, this one might look at it that way. And maybe there's something in between that could be interesting for us that someone hasn't done before. Like, can kind of help to shape the way that you think and help people to stand out if you are thoughtful about how you do those sorts of prompts.
- [25:02]
Roger Dooley
Sure. And really, Molina, if you got, say four random experienced behavioral scientists in a room who are maybe chief behavioral officers are working in nudge units or something, they wouldn't agree on anything. You know, they would have to sort of debate it out and say, okay, well, you know, which, which might work best in this case. And they might end up agreeing or not. But the discussion is what's really the valuable part where you as sort of the moderator here can do that. One. One other prompting tip. I think that's important. I did not append this to every sample prompt in the, in the book just for simplicity's Sake. But whenever you're beginning a process, always ask, or even at some inflection point in your process of prompting, always ask your AI to ask you any questions that will help improve the result. And often these can be very helpful in refining it. And then of course, the other key thing is providing as much context as you can. And again, this is typically part of most prompting frameworks. But if you've got information about your company, its customers, its markets, its past, ab, test results, what's selling, what isn't selling, all of that kind of information can go into, say, a project knowledge or a custom GPT and give you much, much better results than if the AI is just sort of guessing at what's going on in your case. And of course you can even use AI to help create some of this context, but by say, analyzing a pile of data and then coming up with sort of the key findings so that it can stick into its knowledge.
- [26:38]
Melina Palmer
Definitely what I was thinking about in the book and you talked about it at a few points, right. And knowing it's kind of more on this customer facing side. But we know internal communication is just as important, right? And I think a couple things just in general, like prompt learnings, right? To be better at prompting AI, I feel like there's a really interesting opportunity for people to realize how bad they actually are at communication. Like when you try to ask the, the, you know, the GPT or whatever it is to do something, right? We go into that AI and we ask the question and it gives the worst response ever. It's like, what did I not say, right? And if you ask like, tell me how to prompt and all these things where it's like, well, who are we talking to and what is it that you want them to do and what's the background and how about this? And like maybe you said this, but did you mean that like being able to actually learn with an AI tool instead of a human person that you could unintentionally offend or like set off on a, a bad tangent or something? Feels like there's a lot of opportunity there. Just as we think about, you have a whole section on empathy. And I think that it's really valuable to say, like, how humans can actually learn to be more human and empathetic by interacting with the AI in a way that I think is really cool, right?
- [28:07]
Roger Dooley
That's very important. I think even just to jump very quickly back to behavioral science before we get to the empathy part. The this will, by using these processes with your favorite AI, you will Learn more behavioral science. You know, as it's suggesting different techniques that you could use, it may suggest something else. You know, you know, be wary of fundamental attribution error. Huh? What's. What's that? And it'll explain it to you, or even just how to apply the most common principles like reciprocity or whatever, you know, it's usually when it gives you a result, it'll often explain why it chose that. And you are learning from that process and getting better at it yourself, and that's improving your own judgment for going down the roadside. I think it works that way. But back to the empathy thing. This is really something that I find surprises many people, if not most people, and that is that AI is actually better at empathy than most humans. Supposedly, even a couple of years ago, you'd hear people saying, well, yeah, yeah, AI can spit out answers, but one thing it can't do is understand emotion or empathy. Those things are uniquely human. But more recently, there's been research showing that when they gave both AI models and humans tests of emotional intelligence, EQ AI models scored in the 80s compared to humans who were around 60 or in the 60s, which is just kind of shocking. But when you see some of the things that people do in corporations, even presumably very smart CEOs, they send out communications to employees, they send out communications to customers that just land completely wrong and end up going viral, not for good reasons, and with a lot of blowback and sometimes significant business damage, you wonder, what were they thinking? And AI is actually better at that sort of thing. Had they, and this is a drum I've been beating for over a year now, that you can use AI to improve your understanding of how customers or employees will respond and then adjust your communication or even adjust your strategy if necessary. Because there are so many of these corporate miscues that we see sometimes that require complete reversal of what they announced. And you know, that's you've already done the damage and then you look even worse by going back, okay, we were kidding. We're actually not going to do that thing we said we were going to do. You know, at that point, you've lost, lost customers and you lost credibility.
- [30:47]
Melina Palmer
We just want to keep digging this hole. Like, is there a larger hole we can dig here and make it just worse in this process?
- [30:55]
Roger Dooley
Right? Well, I'll give you one good example of that. A Carnival Cruise line just, I think maybe eight months ago now, when we're speaking, announced a new loyalty program or loyalty program changes. They were trying to confront a real business Problem. They had a lot of customers with high loyalty levels. They were at the very elite levels, diamond level loyalty. And they had certain perks. For these people, this was a lifetime status. Like, once you hit that level, you were diamond for life. And they were in a situation where some, on some sailings, you know, they had a third or half the ship that had elite status. And so what does early boarding mean when, you know, half the people are early boarding or what? How does being invited to the captain's reception work when there are too many people to fit in the room for the captain's reception? You know, it doesn't make you feel special anymore. You know, like, if everybody's special, nobody's special. So this was a business problem. But the way they went about it in their first announcement was to basically say, okay, we're scrapping that program. Diamond members will be grandfathered in for a period of years. After that, they'll have to spend 30, $32,000 every two years to maintain that status. Now, this was Carnival Cruise lines. Nobody spends $16,000 a year almost on Carnival Cruises. And so basically they just, they told these people that, okay, at this point, we're done. You know, we're done with you. And not only that, they wouldn't get luggage tags, they wouldn't get loyalty pins. Like, none of these things that really meant something to many of these people who'd been working for decades to achieve this status. It's like, you know, they, they rip the loyalty pin right off the person's chest and say, okay, we're done with you. And of course, the blowback was absolutely enormous. I wrote about it and I posted videos about it, and I got feedback from Carnival customers who. I've been a loyal carnival customer for 30 years. You know, my wife and I have cruised them every year, one time every year, even two times every year. And now it's, you know, I'm done with them. They, they basically are saying, like, it's like your spouse said, okay, you know, it's been great, but now I'm going to find somebody who can spend more money on me. And this was the kind of emotional impact that it had. You know, like, I get the fact that they had to control certain aspects of the program to make them viable. Okay. You know, if you've got too many people subscribed for something, you've got to have some other criteria for that thing. But, you know, you don't suddenly kick your loyal customers to the curb. And so after, I don't know, maybe four Months of just a tremendous blowback from customers and people switching lines and canceling cruises and all this kind of stuff. They said, okay, we'll, we'll actually grandfather in our existing diamond customers. They can keep their status, but I mean they could have avoided this whole thing. When I ran it through AI, it predicted exactly what would happen. You know, that these loyal customers would feel completely rejected, disenfranchised, and pointed out that even if there were some things that needed to be changed, that didn't mean you couldn't do the emotional recognition part. Now this is AI suggesting that it had a better understanding of how the customers react emotionally than the CEO did, which in this case appeared to be true. And so they restored some of those things, but they went through a whole lot of pain in the meantime.
- [34:27]
Melina Palmer
Yeah, and that is, it's shocking how many of these examples there are. I know every day. I'm sure it's same for you. I mean, good opportunities, I guess, for us to go, okay, I'm going to write an interesting article about that thing because these come up. But you look at this and like you said, the framing makes such a difference, right? So for one, ideally, you know, if we think about what someone inside of an organization might have done, so possibly, you know, there, there, I'm guessing there were some people at the, at carnival that were saying, hey, this is probably a bad idea. Like maybe we shouldn't like one, don't give out life, don't call something lifetime if it's not actually able to be lifetime. Like be sure you know what you're saying before you just willy nilly throw out names like lifetime status because you know you'll feel bad about that when that comes to roost eventually. But like, so someone who, let's say was like trying to be a whistleblower on this thing inside of the organization and feels like they don't have tools to be able to communicate what the problem might be. How might that person have used AI to understand like the human element of this and maybe come up with a recommendation? Because I know a lot of people, you'll have the CEO or whomever that'll say like, don't come to me with a problem unless you have a solution. Right. And so I want to do this thing and you can't bring it up unless you know what we should do differently or have these other elements in place. So like if you are a person inside of Carnival, you see these things starting to come out that someone's saying they're going to do and Announce what might you do using, like, how can AI assist in that process?
- [36:12]
Roger Dooley
Well, I think that the, there were probably people in the room when that decision was being finalized who saw that coming. But you know, either they were too junior or, you know, you had a leader who is just really, this is the direction we're going in. You know, it's, we're not really looking for commentary. We just need you to get all, get behind this. And we know there are leaders like that out there who really don't want even constructive differences to be raised. You know, once they've set a course, it's like, okay, everybody fall in line behind it. And I think that using AI by a person who is in the room knowledgeable enough with what's going on, that could be another voice like, hey boss, here's this little project I ran. I did an AI audit on the announcement and here's what the customer reactions are predicted to be. And here's a version of it that is better and will is expected to produce fewer negative reactions. I mean, sometimes it's the whole thing. There, there is another example. I'm not going to go into all the details, but Royal Caribbean decided that they would bring three of their ships together in the middle of the ocean for a photo shoot to create a corporate asset of a. It turned out to be an 8 second video of three ships from the parent company all in the same place. Now, I don't know what use that marketing asset is really. It's not like any of the customers care. But to achieve that, they ended up totally disrupting the vacations of 700 passengers on the luxury vessel. And these aren't people who spend a couple thousand dollars a year on cruises. These are people who spend tens of thousands of dollars a year, even hundreds of thousands in some cases on cruises. And to get this photo shoot. And when I, when I ran that through AI, it's like, don't even think about doing this. You know, this, this is the dumbest idea ever. Not I'm exaggerating a bit, but basically said don't do it. You know, this, this, it's not worth it. And I think that that doesn't necessarily mean that you're always going to derail a CEO or a leader of any kind who's got, you know, an idea fixed in their head and that we really need to do this. But at least it's another voice and it might empower that person who wouldn't normally say, well, you know, you know boss, in my opinion, I think the customers are going to do this at least? Sure. They've got sort of a third party validation of their concerns. And ideally the boss himself or herself is doing it. William, you know, it's like before you come up with this idea, the boss ought to have their own AI and saying, okay, hey, what do you think about this?
- [38:58]
Melina Palmer
Right? Yeah, it's kind of, kind of an interesting. I know for a lot of people in companies that like, people will bring in an expert voice because you don't always listen to employees on the team. Right. And so where you can almost have the AI kind of act as that neutral third party that is an expert of sorts, like that's a stretch at the this point. But if it can help at least to like put a little like, you know, crack in the foundation or get a conversation going where someone's more likely to not divert the ship for the 8 second asset that actually is like, pretty sure you could have invested much less money to like have, you know, AI or some sort of designer just like put ships so they look like they're near each other in the ocean. Like there was no need to have actual physical ships out doing this, this thing here. But like you said, so you give really great examples in the book of showing like, what might if when you run it through after the fact, like, what can we do now? How might we change this? But also, you know, one of the things I liked in that is that it was saying, okay, if you're stuck, right? And the CEO says, I don't care, we're doing this, it's happening. Like, we're gonna do this photo shoot thing. Some of the missteps that were in there were also in the way it was communicated. Right. Because it was talking about like, yay, like let's and everyone come out on the deck to celebrate and look happy when you're missing your flights over. I think it was like spring break and like, good luck finding a new seat on the flight and maybe we'll help you. Probably not. We're just going to pretend like this is a fun thing that people are excited about and look totally oblivious and, you know, maybe that's stretching it a bit, but kind of felt that way. And so like to say, well, if even if you have to do it, maybe like, let's not talk about it that way and instead let's bring in this human emotion element and empathize with the people. And would you, you know, in the book, when it has the example that you were able to come up with with the AI, like I hear that. And I even felt like, okay, this isn't ideal, but I'm nowhere near as mad as I felt when I heard about it before.
- [41:23]
Roger Dooley
Right. Well, the problem with that original communication, when I saw it, and this was an interesting case study because I was able to view in Facebook groups and forums like Cruise Critic, I could actually see how people responded when somebody posted an actual copy of the letter they got. I looked at that and said, oh my God, this is tone deaf. Because as you mentioned, it sounded like it was, this is going to be a fun thing. And there's the minor course deviation and you may have to adjust, you might have to adjust your travel plans. And if so, you know, we'll do reimburse you for a cost if they're reasonable, if you get them to us promptly. But there was like no, no empathy, no recognition that in the middle of their six star cruise, these people are going to have to be calling their travel agents or airlines and really going through all kinds of grief. And so, you know, in that case, I asked Claude to rewrite the letter saying, okay, this decision's been made. How else how would you express this? And it crafted a much better letter that acknowledged the disruption to the customer's travel. It empathized with them, it offered more solutions. Now, of course, some of those were business solutions, like a modest future cruise credit, for example. That's a business decision. You know, the CEO or somebody would then have to decide, okay, should we offer this or shouldn't we? But at least the AI was suggesting it. And I think that with those pieces in place, there would have been far less resentment. I mean, it's still a bad idea to begin with, but had it been communicated in a much more empathetic way, then I think that there would have been far less blowback.
- [43:04]
Melina Palmer
Definitely. Yes. So really good to be able to think about how we can use AI, you know, on the front end as we're looking at strategy, right. To say, maybe it has to do with, I'm thinking about going in a new direction for my business. Or like, look at the plan from these perspectives of experts in all sorts of fields, right? Like behavioral science, neuromarketing and otherwise. We can also think about, as we go to, like, what am I missing here? Like bring in, you know, some sort of a, like, you know, you are a person at, I don't know, McKinsey or something that's going to come and evaluate our strategic choice or some other communication or PR firm. You can also be looking at, hey, if we Drop this email. What might our employees say if this gets posted out? Like someone goes and puts this onto a Facebook forum or something else or gets on Reddit. How might this go bad for us and what's the most important stuff to fix? Like, lots of really useful ways to think about this human element in communication for all sorts of things that will hopefully make it so those humans are less likely to do. We'll say silly things to make silly mistakes like this in the future and to be able to understand, you know, that some of those concepts on a deeper level that can apply in all sorts of areas.
- [44:40]
Roger Dooley
Sure. And Melina, this can be done at a smaller scale too. For example, most companies have probably hundreds of standard communications they send to customers. You know, sorry, your order's delayed because of something or other. You know, use AI to craft those in a more empathetic way. Or even if you have a salesperson who's communicating with a customer, you know, have AI give it a quick check just to see if there are anything, there's anything that could land wrong. And you know, to me that's, that's a big advantage. Most people don't create, have the opportunity to create screw ups that affect the entire corporation. But everybody communicates with customers, everybody communicates with employees. And by using AI to check those properly prompted of course then you can really communicate better and avoid things that just don't land the way you hope they will.
- [45:39]
Melina Palmer
I love that idea that just was making me think about even if as companies have more and more procedures and experience points in an experience journey, like you could put them all in and say hey, this is all the stuff that can happen. Do we have any inconsistencies that we're not thinking about? Is there unnecessary friction points that we might be able to alleviate? Like are we talking about this thing in the wrong way? Right. That it can look at the a holistic system as well as those individual items and see if there are things that can get removed or things that are like definitely fix this thing immediately. Help like prioritize some of those opportunity points. And maybe even then you say like and then can you go like here's all the stuff we have. Can you also go scan, you know, some areas of social to see if people are already commenting about big points that are problematic. You know, we can work on our peak and rule optimization and get rid of some of those negative peaks. Yeah, some things that would take a human team a very long time to do the, you know, could have I do relatively quickly as you collect all those assets and, you know, put them into space for sure. Yeah. Awesome. Well, great ideas. Obviously you and I can talk for a thousand years, but we will end at this point and know that for everybody, highly recommend the Persuasion Engine so that you can see some of these prompts and examples and thoughtfulness and more about empathy and, and so much in Roger's book. We will of course have links in the show notes, but for everyone who is now so excited to follow you and learn more and get the book and, and all the things you know, what's the best path for them to do so?
- [47:23]
Roger Dooley
Probably the single starting point that makes Most sense is rogerdoule.com I've got links to all my stuff there or search for me on Google or YouTube. You will generally find my stuff all over the web.
- [47:36]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Perfect.
- [47:36]
Melina Palmer
Well, like I said, we will have links for those things in the show notes. And thank you so much again, Roger, for joining me on the show today. It was really delightful to chat with you.
- [47:46]
Roger Dooley
As always, it's been a lot of fun. Melina, thanks for having me on.
- [47:51]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Thank you again to Roger Dooley for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I keep coming back to those cruise line examples. Some of those decisions felt so obviously
- [48:05]
Melina Palmer
just like, not great from the outside,
- [48:08]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
and yet inside the business, they made sense. At the time somebody made that decision. Lots of people went along with those things. And that's such an important reminder. When you're close to a problem, when you're in it every day, it's really
- [48:21]
Melina Palmer
easy to lose perspective.
- [48:23]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
Things that would feel completely off to a customer or even to your past or future self can start to feel normal or even like the best option available. And that's where I think this idea of using AI as a thinking partner can get really interesting. It shouldn't be used to replace your brain or those on your team, but it's a way to step back and pressure test ideas to ask better questions and see what you might be missing. I've been playing around with a lot of the prompting techniques that Roger shares in the persuasion engine. It's been really fun to see how small tweaks in how I ask for something can completely change the quality of what comes back. And sometimes I feel like I want to ignore it. I want to go with my own gut. But that's a whole other conversation, a question to be able to ask and to consider human behavior and where it might not be about me, but it's about the people I'M looking to communicate to. And that's what behavioral science and this human decision making factor and empathy is all about. Because it's really just about understanding how people actually think and decide and experience what you put out into the world. AI can help surface some ideas. It can help to understand how people that aren't like you might respond. You can use that prompting to help the AI imagine your customer and give some information about them or employees before you send out communication to get this broader perspective. And yeah, it's not going to do everything. Sometimes you really need to have humans helping on human problems. And you know, I love that because that's the type of work I do. It's really fun and something I enjoy doing with all sorts of companies. So if that is something that you want some help with bringing behavioral science into your messaging, pricing or customer experience or with your team, I would love
- [50:13]
Melina Palmer
to work with you.
- [50:14]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
If you're interested, go ahead to the BrainyBusiness.com contact. You can set up a time to chat and connect and see if it's something where it makes sense for us to work together. And I'd love to, of course, know what stood out for you most in this conversation today. What are you excited about implementing? Where are you still a little bit hesitant about AI? Come share those thoughts with me and with Roger on social media. You're going to find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy as well as links to my top related past episodes and books, including the Persuasion Engine, ways to get in touch, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthebrainybusiness.com 577 and thank you again to Roger Dooley for joining me on the show today.
- [51:06]
Melina Palmer
It was a delight to chat with
- [51:08]
Melina Palmer (Podcast Host/Narrator)
and learn from you. Join me next time for another Brainy 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.
- [51:27]
Podcast Announcer
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
- [51:47]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
Hey, before you go, quick reminder that we do have a couple spots open right now for that Brainy reset. If you if you've been feeling stuck
- [51:54]
Melina Palmer
or just want to move forward with
- [51:56]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
more clarity and confidence, I'D love to talk. Head to the brainy business.com contact to get started. Even if you're on the fence.
- [52:05]
Melina Palmer
No pressure.
- [52:05]
Melina Palmer (Brainy Reset Promo)
It's just a conversation with me. Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you. What do you think? Another episode?