Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:01]
Jon Jantz
So what if you're the buying decision is happening somewhere? Your marketing never reaches the tools to understand where that is. Just became something any business can afford.
- [00:14]
Jon Jantz (Promotional Segment)
You know, most small businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a strategy problem underneath the marketing. I wrote a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success that walks through exactly how to fix it. From getting clear as a founder all the way to running marketing like an operating system. 20 years of working with small business has condensed into a framework you can actually use. And right now it's only five bucks. Go grab it at DTM World Seven Steps. That's DTM World Seven Steps.
- [00:59]
Jon Jantz
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ducktape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Roger Dooley. He's the author of three books that sit somewhere at the intersection of brain science and practical business. Today we're going to talk about his latest book, the Persuasion Engine. How Any Business Can Use AI Powered Neuromarketing to Understand and Win Customers. So, Roger, welcome, I should say welcome back to the show.
- [01:24]
Roger Dooley
Well, thanks so much for having me on again, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I think our audience is really overlap, particularly for the new book because this one is particularly geared to entrepreneurs, smaller businesses that have limited budgets, startups, solopreneurs and so on, because it's really enabling them. We'll, we'll get into that, but I'm really happy to be here.
- [01:44]
Jon Jantz
Well, thank you. So. So you've been writing about neuromarketing, behavioral science for, I don't know, 20 years, couple decades. What's changed in the last couple years that made you write a book specifically about AI? I know partly because editors want books with AI in the title, but from your own personal research, is there something about this moment that you think is significant?
- [02:06]
Roger Dooley
Well, absolutely. In fact, you're correct, John. I have been writing about neuromarketing for 20 years and I've actually come to the conclusion that now we have entered the era of neuromarketing 2.0.
- [02:17]
Jon Jantz
Right.
- [02:17]
Roger Dooley
And the big difference is that all of the tools have been democratized. When I started on the topic long ago, initially I focused on these sort of hard science type things like measuring brain activity with EEG and. But these tools were only available to the biggest brands, so I kind of pivoted to include a lot more behavioral science, psychology. I'm sure that many of your audience know about Robert Cialdini Six Principles or Seven Principles now and try to apply them. But in Any case, the what's happened is not only have the tools for measuring customer reactions, things like eye tracking for example, you know, it used to be very expensive, had to be done in a lab, you had to recruit subjects. Now you can even use AI simulations that are very accurate that, you know, they cost as much as a cup of coffee. So you can use them not just on some really big campaign, but you want to see, gee, well, okay, I've redesigned this webpage. What are people going to look at? You can get that answer answer instantly. So that, that's one area. But to me, the even more significant areas are, you know, I think that every smaller sized business has two big problems. You know, not enough time, not enough money. And they want to apply things like Cialdini's principles, they want to apply tools like cognitive biases, loss aversion and all those tools, but just trying to keep all those in your head at one time is difficult. Just to read Cialdini's book Influence and Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow is a thousand pages. So you know, that's a lot of, that's a heavy lift for most small business owners. But what now you can do, you can use the very these AI tools, large language models, Claude chatgpt, Gemini, that are available at such low cost to do this heavy lifting for you. And that's what the book is all about. It shows with very specific prompts how you can leverage these tools to suddenly become a sophisticated behavioral marketer. And then the last part that I think is really counterintuitive is that it can even help you communicate better with empathy and emotion. You know, we see John, we even see huge businesses who make these stupid announcements that end up infuriating their customers, where their customers revolt, where, oh, we changed our loyalty program, made some minor adjustments, and then suddenly people are up in arms saying, I'm never going to deal with this company again. You know, and these companies have sophisticated advisors, they've got PR people, and even then they make these horrible mistakes. But now AI can fix it. Not just for those not so clueless, maybe clueless CEOs, but it can help anybody communicate with empathy and emotion. In fact, I just did a short video, an article about how even Amish business people who you do not really consider the vanguard of high tech, used AI to write more difficult emails. Like, you've got to communicate with a customer who's got a project behind schedule, but they're a big customer and he can't afford to irritate them. And lose their business and how to communicate what has to happen in a way that will land.
- [05:20]
Jon Jantz
Well, you know, it's interesting because I think a lot of people think in terms of AI and they, they immediately think, oh yeah, I can do this number crunching and analysis, but you need the human, you know, for context and for empathy. And you're suggesting actually that these tools are maybe when directed the right way. Right directed, using some of these frameworks like Robert in Persuasion can actually do a better job than a lot of humans.
- [05:49]
Roger Dooley
Yes, exactly. And believe it or not, John, just last year, researchers in Switzerland ran an experiment. They gave emotional intelligence tests to measure people's emotional intelligence to both humans and to the major AI models of the time. And what they found was that the AI models scored far better on emotional intelligence than the average human. Humans were in like the 60% range AI was into the 80s. In fact, the best model was about 89% in most promotional intelligence. That's probably smarter than the most intelligently, emotionally intelligent person on most companies teams, which, and now that's last year's models. Today they're even better. So this is really so counterintuitive because I was with you, John, I always felt, well, yeah, the one thing that AI will never really master is emotion or empathy, but in fact research shows that it's better and you can actually try it yourself. Take a letter that you wrote that maybe didn't land that well and have Claude rewrite it for you. It will be better than what you did.
- [06:54]
Jon Jantz
So you mentioned you actually call something the new Million Dollar Team. I think that's actually a title of one of the chapters that cost less than lunch. Is that right? So what does an AI behavioral science team actually look like? And what should I expect to pay for?
- [07:10]
Roger Dooley
Right. Well, you know, imagine big companies can afford what they call nudge units where they hire various types of cognitive scientists, behavioral scientists and so on to come in and advise them on how to communicate more effectively, how to nudge their customers in one direction, how to increase conversion rate on their website, and so on, but you know, most of us can't afford to hire teams like that internally. And so instead maybe we use consultants, but even consultants can be very expensive. Now what is fascinating, you can create using an AI model like Claude or Gemini, a team of your top experts, whoever you think are the most relevant to your particular project. So you could put Robert Cialdini on there, you could put BJ Fogg, who's one of the founders of the whole principles of behavioral design, behavior Design. You could put Dale Carnegie on there. If you're in a direct sales situation, you really want to relate to people because he still has insights that are valuable. You could put a conversion expert like, oh, say a Peply or Brian Massey, to name a few of my Austrian compatriots here who are conversion experts. And you can have them work together to advise you on your marketing, to look at your website, look at your landing page, look at the direct mail that you're going to send out, and you can get this advice. You can have them discuss it, debate it, and I'll get into the details in the book. But it's, it's really so exciting to have these different perspectives that are actually being brought together on your particular project without, of course, having to pay for a bunch of experts.
- [08:44]
Jon Jantz
So let's just take a typical example. I've got a promotional email I want to write or a landing page I want to build or something like that to, to sell a product or service. What's the workflow for that look like now in your, you know, in your book or in your platform or your framework?
- [09:02]
Roger Dooley
Right. Well, I've got a whole bunch of very specific prompts, but I think what I would start with depends on where you're at. If you've got something that you're trying to improve, you could show that to the AI and ask it to critique it from various perspectives. You could ask it to look for friction. Of course, you know, I'm the friction guy too. Or I talk about how making things easy is better. And we all put these barriers in our. On our websites and other processes we don't really think of as being barriers or difficult, but to a new customer, they do look like a barrier of some kind. So you could have it do those kinds of analyses. Then you could have it suggest different behavioral principles for interventions that would work better. Do we need social proof or do we need authority? And you can also have it go out and analyze your competitors, see what your competitors are doing and use those ideas to improve yours and also see where they're falling flat. One of the stories I relate in the book is a. I did just an experiment for a local pool supply company. I created a hypothetical pool supplier, pool service company and had it do an analysis for my little local market here on the west side of Austin. And it came out and identified all the competitors. It found their websites, it looked at their reviews on Google and Yelp and so on. And it looked, it analyzed their websites and found some really strange things in one Case it found that this one competitor had this comparison chart and this was like on a. Not on their homepage. It was on a deeper page in the website that showed us and our competition. And it was really wild where, you know, we don't peek in your windows, we don't pee in your pool. And it's like all these crazy things that it said, okay, this is what this competitor is doing. So. And it pointed out that this is probably going to turn off more people than it's going to help unless they've had those specific problems, but which aren't really typical of pool service companies.
- [10:49]
Jon Jantz (Promotional Segment)
Right.
- [10:49]
Roger Dooley
But you can analyze what they're doing and then advise you on how to position your company to compete better.
- [10:55]
Jon Jantz
You know, I've spent over 20 years
- [10:56]
Jon Jantz (Promotional Segment)
watching good businesses waste money on marketing. That doesn't add up. And usually the problem isn't the tactics, it's the missing foundation underneath them all. So I put the whole system in a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. Seven steps, the right order with everything you need to build that actually compounds. You can pick it up right now for 5 bucks@dtm.world, slash 7 steps. That's dtm.world, slash 7 steps.
- [11:31]
Jon Jantz
So how do you know it's one thing to add, like you mentioned all the folks. I mean, we'll come back to Geraldine or, you know, all the folks that you mentioned. So you build all this, like, I think these are the best of the best. But how do you then tune that? You know, I. My brand voice might not be Dale Carnegie, and it would actually sound inauthentic. I'm just using that as an example. So, you know, how do you tune. How do you take that framework that those folks presented, but then put it in your voice?
- [12:00]
Roger Dooley
Right. Well, actually, what you're bringing up there, John, is a bigger picture which falls into the context area, providing your AI model with context about your business. And so first of all, for your voice, you can give it a whole bunch of your past communications, writing and so on, and it can learn your voice and there's techniques for doing that. But also you can talk about your positioning, your customers where you want to be. If you're at the high end of your market and you're trying to create a specific image, then obviously the AI has to know that. So it can give you better advice. You can provide it information about customers that are in. It can help you develop customer profiles, too. You know, I think in general, one piece of advice I have, John, is people type a Command into an AI, a prompt, and then say, okay, I got my results. It's far better to do that as a conversation where you probe and you push back on it because AI wants to please you and it'll give you answers you don't like. But push back on and say, okay, well why are you doing this? Would this other thing be better? Or what about this other concept I had? And when you make it, when you push back and ask more questions, that's when you get your real insights.
- [13:09]
Jon Jantz
We're, we're entering, you know, AI has been around enough to where it's, you know, certainly hit mainstream. There's very few people you can come across anymore that haven't at least played with it or toyed with it. But a lot of business owners have actually been genuinely disappointed with the results that were promised, or at least they thought, you know, the hype promised them based on what they actually got. What do you think they are actually? What are they typically doing wrong if they're getting disappointing results?
- [13:36]
Roger Dooley
I would say most commonly it is not providing enough context for one about the company, the customers, the marketplace, not pushing the AI to develop part of that context because you could have it go out and do the surveys. What's the competition doing? What's my market like? What are the factors affecting, you know, my specific market at this time? And your AI can develop some of that knowledge for you and you can create a whole document like i1ai like is perplexity for deep research. If I'm going to do a lot of research on a particular topic, maybe I'm going to introduce a new product. I really want to learn all I can about the product, the market and whatnot. I you can use any of the models, Perplexity is one, but also the others do deep research. You can have it create a 20 page report which you can then use for context in preparing your model. So I would say that not having enough context is one common mistake and then the other is not really probing deeply enough, not pushing back, not asking for other answers. And there's something else that I highly recommend is always trying this with more than one model. You know, right now they're cheap enough that you don't have to just adopt one and stick with that one. If I'm doing something important, I'll ask Claude, which is my sort of number one go to, but I'll ask Gemini and I'll ask ChatGPT as well. And sometimes I get not much better insights Once in a while. I was looking for a Tagline for something, I forget what. And the first two models I tried came up with pretty good stuff, but it wasn't quite there. And the third one, for whatever reason, just happened to hit on one that wasn't quite right in itself, but by changing one word. Then I had it. I said, okay, bam, this is it. But that only happened because I tried three different models. And of course, I used a little bit of my own knowledge and intuition as well.
- [15:21]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, it's. It is kind of amazing how it almost feels like day to day. It's like they have temperaments. It's like you get better output out of one one day and different output out of one the next day. It's. I think it's part of it due to that they're changing so rapidly as well.
- [15:37]
Roger Dooley
Well, they're definitely evolving and sometimes the newer model isn't necessarily exactly as what you were looking for compared to the previous model. But you know, you still, you can adapt. And they are getting more and more powerful and they're getting better. Fewer hallucinations, they're getting better at self checking. So before they give you an answer, they'll check it sometimes, or you could. It should always prompt it to check the answers too. Especially if you're creating any kind of a document that you're going to say, send to a customer, run it through a check and say, okay, be sure that everything I'm providing here is actually true. We've all heard those stories about the lawyer who filed briefs with hallucinated cases. And that's a serious issue.
- [16:14]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, yeah. I've actually noticed we use Claude predominantly as well. And I've actually noticed sometimes as it's putting together output, it will actually correct itself and say, oh, I made a mistake on that. Let me go back. I mean, you can see it in real time actually doing that kind of thinking. So I think they definitely are building that in.
- [16:35]
Roger Dooley
Right. Yeah. That's better than coming back and saying, yeah, Roger, you caught me on that. I was wrong. Yeah, I shouldn't have had to catch you, you know.
- [16:42]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, yeah. That always frustrates me as well. One of the things I think I read that I particularly picked out this line that you wrote that AI is surprisingly good at predicting how humans will feel about a message, even though it can't feel anything itself. Talk a little bit about that from a practical standpoint. If I'm writing a sales page or a pricing page.
- [17:05]
Roger Dooley
Right. Well, you know, we already talked about, or we mentioned the idea that AI scores better on emotional intelligence than Humans because it has consumed so much knowledge about human emotions. It's read novels, it's read science, scientific papers, and so it understands emotions fairly well. And if you prompt it properly, you can get it to see those sort of emotional blind spots that you miss. Because we all know what we know and we think our customers know. We think we know how they're going to react and sometimes we do like. And certainly there are exceptionally skillful salespeople and leaders who have that intuition about how customers will react. Maybe Steve Jobs, you know, say, no, don't worry, you know, nobody's seen this thing before, but they're going to love it when it comes up with the iPhone. But you know, most of us don't fall into that savant category and we think we're sending some communication that's going to be easily understood and accepted the way we mean it. I mean, a couple of examples I've got are one, when the Duolingo CEO sent out a letter, which is our. That was supposed to be very uplifting. It was that they're becoming an AI first company, you know, and it sounded really exciting and positive. Unfortunately, the way people interpret it was, okay, the employees are thinking, oh man, the robots are coming for our jobs now. And so it ended up being a demotivator. And they had, he had a backtrack and say, oh no, that was what I meant. And these things happen all the time. And you know, these aren't dumb people. It's just that sometimes the way we think our words are going to land doesn't work. I've got a. I'm not going to go into details, but a great story about a communication to luxury cruise line passengers who got a letter in their cabin about a departure or an arrival change that totally screwed up their flights. Beats for a corporate photo shoot. And the. So these luxury passengers were suddenly having to scramble for flights in the middle of Florida spring break when there's no flights, there's no hotel rooms. And the way that was communicated was in such a tone deaf way. There was not even an apology. There was a brief acknowledgment that if you incur extra costs, we'll reimburse them if they're reasonable. And you know, it missed the whole point of empathy saying, okay, these are your people who are attached to your brand, they love your brand and you're doing this to them. You know, you've got to let them know that you care. And I ran it through Claude, it created a fire. First of all, it's like don't do this if it hasn't been done. This is a terrible idea. You're going to damage the brand. But it then created a much better lighter that if you do have to create a do this thing, then here's how to communicate it. And it was just infinitely better than the one that whoever wrote it at that cruise line wrote.
- [19:43]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, that's probably. Delivering bad news is probably the hardest thing for most people to be able to communicate because it's just, you know, there's so much emotion built into, like, I don't really want to send this even. So if somebody's listening and they want to run their first behavioral audit on something they're working on, what's the first 30 minutes our look like to run that audit?
- [20:06]
Roger Dooley
Probably a series of prompts to first, you know, add the context about the company, add the existing marketing materials that you're trying to audit if you're trying to, you know, that's. If that's your goal, and then choose your experts or even have, you know, one thing that I always like to do with AI is if I'm not sure where to start, I will ask Claude or Gemini. Okay, here's my objective. How should I start? What do you need from me? And the other thing, you know, in the book, I did not append this to every prompt, but in the, I did create a little mini website on my own website, rogerdouli.com that is. There's a link in the back of each, at the end of each chapter where I've got copy and paste prompts so people don't have to type in, you know, lines and lines of text from the book. That'd be pretty brutal. And also some improved prompts that are go sort of go beyond what I could really include in the book because nobody wants a book that's full of pages of prompts. But what I was going to I was making is that I do recommend adding ask any questions that will help you respond. Every anytime you prompt an AI, just add that little phrase and often you will get a few questions back that'll greatly improve the output that you're getting.
- [21:20]
Jon Jantz
Yeah, I concur wholly on that one. Well, Roger, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Duck Fake marketing podcast. Is there somewhere you'd invite people to learn more about your work and obviously learn more about the persuasion engine?
- [21:33]
Roger Dooley
Sure. The best place to start is rogerdoule.com easy to find. And also I'm happy to connect with any of your audience on LinkedIn. That's where I'm probably most active on social media is LinkedIn. I post fairly frequently and I interact quite a bit there.
- [21:48]
Jon Jantz
Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully we'll run into you. I guess next time I'm in Austin.
- [21:53]
Roger Dooley
I hope so, John. Take care now. Thank you.