See the show notes for this episode: S 01 | Ep 58 The Neuroscience of Marketing: Understanding Consumer Behavior for Better Results | Show notes.
0:00:01 - Alex Shevelenko
I am delighted to introduce you to Roger Dooley, the best-selling author of Friction, one of the best-in-class books on customer experience, and Brainfluence, a book that defines how we use neuromarketing. Roger, welcome to the podcast!
0:00:25 - Roger Dooley
Thanks for having me on the show, Alex!
0:00:27 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, let's dive into your books. Obviously, there are a lot of neuromarketing applications happening in our everyday lives. It’s good for us to understand where we’re being influenced as consumers. For those in the audience who are really interested in creating world-class communications and moving their organizations and audiences forward, how can they use neuromarketing to succeed in the areas you specialize in, such as customer and employee communications and experiences?
0:01:10 - Roger Dooley
Well, maybe, Alex, we should start by defining what neuromarketing is, and I'm going to use my definition, which tends to be broader than some, at least some historical definitions. I consider neuromarketing to be any use of our understanding of how the brain works to improve marketing efforts. This can include neuroscience and its tools, which formed the foundation of early commercial neuromarketing—things like using EEG or fMRI to measure brainwaves, as well as neuro-adjacent techniques like eye-tracking and biometrics. The purpose of using these tools is to understand what consumers really think and what they really want. Marketers have long tried to figure this out by asking questions like, "What would you like in a product like this?" or "Would you buy this particular product that we’re showing you?"
But what we all know is that people often can’t answer those questions accurately. Sometimes they may even answer dishonestly, depending on the nature of the product. Usually, it’s just an inability to provide an answer that truly reflects what’s going on in their minds and what their future behavior will be. It’s very hard for people to predict future behavior in any form. That’s why people started looking at neuromarketing, and, boy, it’s been just under 20 years since I started writing about this topic.
What I found was that in the early years of neuromarketing, it was mainly for big brands—the BMWs and Coca-Colas of the world—who wanted to see which version of a Super Bowl ad was most effective with their customers. And that’s fine for them, but for the vast majority of businesses—small and medium-sized businesses, and even other large businesses—this wasn’t really practical. What I found, as I wrote about these topics, was that my audience pulled me in the direction of more applications of behavioral science—the principles of Robert Cialdini, the ideas of Daniel Kahneman, of BJ Fogg—which can be applied at scale by any size business, even tiny businesses. They can use these tools more or less for free. I mean, you can pick up a copy of Bob Cialdini's book or my book Brainfluence, and you can start doing these things without really any additional cost. It usually just involves changing your messaging, changing your imagery, even things like changing fonts and colors.
0:03:51 - Alex Shevelenko
I completely agree, and I love that you're intersecting these ideas because I think what happens in academic disciplines is that, for example, a neuroscientist might stay within their neuroscience bubble, while behavioral science is somewhere closer to the economics department, and sometimes they don’t communicate with each other. But at the end of the day, as a practitioner, you need to take a combination of things that work. So, when we were designing RELAYTO, for example, I remember hiring a PhD in psychology and having her go discipline by discipline, asking questions like, "What's cognitive fluency? What's the latest research in cognitive fluency?"
Then we looked at how to combine that with behavioral science because typically, academics isolate one small element and prove that it works, but that's not the real world. In the real world, you have a package of features and capabilities that you need to bundle together. So tell me more about how you apply cross-disciplinary insights from economics, social psychology, and neuroscience. Is there an example where everything comes together in one cohesive element, where you can blend different disciplines into a single insight?
0:05:20 - Roger Dooley
I'm not sure they work exactly in that way, at least not how I'm thinking about it right now, Alex. But I do think that as consumers, we're constantly bombarded by messages based on behavioral science. For example, when you visit a travel site and see that there are only two rooms left at this price, that's employing scarcity, one of Bob Cialdini's principles. When you see on that same site that 50 people are looking at this hotel right now, that's social proof, and it creates a sense of urgency—this is scarce, it's popular, so I better book now. This is Behavioral Science 101, and everybody uses it: "1 million sold," "Our newsletter has 23,000 subscribers." All of these are simple uses of behavioral science. Some of these techniques have become so common that people don’t even think of them as being rooted in science—they just think, "Oh yeah, we should show that we’re popular."
0:06:26 - Alex Shevelenko
Let's dive into that example. On that same website, the most important scarcity message needs to be easy to read, maybe in bright red to highlight the contrast from other, more standard messages. In my mind, if I'm designing an app or a website, I’m combining scarcity, which is a principle of behavioral science, with neuroscience, which involves understanding how my eyes and cognitive fluency process information, directing my attention to that very visceral message. That’s going to hit my "crocodile brain." I think that combination is powerful. You could have fantastic copy based on Cialdini's principles, but if it's in small print, barely visible, and that happens to be the most important message, it doesn’t work—the attention doesn't get there. That's what I mean by the confluence of different applications. Do you see what I mean?
0:07:34 - Roger Dooley
Yeah, Alex, I completely agree with you on that. Often, you know, I don't do much consulting—I mainly speak and write these days. But when I've been called in to sprinkle some magical neuromarketing dust on someone's website, it's not always about slightly better messaging based on behavioral science making it perform better. Often, it's basic things, like what you're talking about, where people can't find the buy button. So, I think combining a technique like eye tracking, for example, where you can see what people are looking at and in what order—whether they’re looking at something first, second, third, or fifth—is very useful for understanding customer behavior. Click tracking is another tool that helps with this.
Now, we're getting a bit farther away from neuroscience, but click tracking measures the behavior of your customers or visitors, and there's a lot of hidden information there. People often measure which links are clicked on, giving you a heat map showing, for example, that 10% of people clicked on a link at the top, and 5% clicked on another link. What you don’t see in those heat maps is the stuff that people are trying to click on that doesn't do anything—they're trying to click on a headline, and nothing happens. When you do click tracking, you can see that, and it tells you some really interesting information. First, if people are clicking on something that's not clickable and many are doing it, then you either need to make that thing clickable or change the design so that it doesn't look clickable.
0:09:13 - Alex Shevelenko
So, it doesn’t look like something they should click on.
0:09:16 - Roger Dooley
Yeah, exactly. But I also recall a story about a company that had five product benefits listed in a paragraph—just five bullet points. When they looked at the click tracking map, they found that people were trying to click on these bullet points, but they weren't clickable. They were just bullet points talking about the product's benefits. This told them a few things. First, maybe you should make those things clickable because people want to learn more about specific benefits. But also, two of those bullet points had significantly more clicks than the others, indicating that these two benefits were what people were most interested in learning about. So, a huge amount of information can come from something that is often completely overlooked—like people clicking on something that's not clickable. Who cares? There's valuable information there about understanding your customer's real behavior.
0:10:14 - Alex Shevelenko
This is music to my ears. At RELAYTO, one of the things we do is take historically non-interactive content like a PDF or PowerPoint, which is meant to be consumed in a very linear fashion, and make it interactive. It’s really important not to have something like a rounded button that looks like it can be clicked on but is actually just a design element in PowerPoint that isn’t clickable. Either you need to make it clickable or change the design, because once people think something is interactive, they expect to be able to click on it. Even before the bullet points, they'll try to click on the buttons. What’s interesting is that we can capture not just whether they click on page one or page two, but what exactly they are doing. That’s mind-blowing for the average audience. You don’t need to be a brain scientist or a neuroscientist—you could be an average producer of a sales presentation or a marketing asset and still see, like you said, what people are looking at.
One of the other things I wanted to mention—and I totally support this—is something you quote Jeff Bezos on in your book Friction. You say that when you reduce friction and make something easy, people do more of it. It sounds very obvious, but one of the applications of this that we see in content is that if you make it very easy for someone to navigate to the relevant parts of, say, a book, e-book, or 100-page document, people go much deeper into the content. They find what they care about and spend more time on it. Then they start exploring more because they’ve fulfilled their initial need and are now curious to learn more. This creates all these positive ripples. If all you do is reduce the friction of navigating through a hundred pages with your thumb on a phone by using dynamic navigation, it sounds basic, but I think it strongly validates that when you reduce friction and make it easy for someone to get to what they care about, they have a positive association with your service and end up doing more than they initially intended. What have you found from your workshops and keynotes about applying this notion of reducing friction to drive behavioral change?
0:13:26 - Roger Dooley
Well, I think many executives underestimate the power of reducing friction, or they believe their current user experience, customer experience, or employee experience is already as low friction as it can be. You know, Jeff Bezos and Amazon spent millions of dollars defending their one-click ordering patent, and the only advantage that gave them was one tiny click compared to their competitors. One tiny click—it doesn’t seem like much, but when Steve Jobs and Apple were introducing their new music store, they paid Amazon a million bucks to have that one tiny click advantage too. In the real world, we see companies operating with varying levels of friction. My friend Peter Ramsey in the UK is a user experience expert—I recommend his work. He’s at builtformars.com, I believe. He did an analysis of banking where he subjected himself to something totally inhumane: he opened accounts at 12 different banks and fintech firms, and then proceeded to carry out transactions at each one, like making a deposit or doing an international money transfer.
0:14:44 - Alex Shevelenko
That sounds like torture to me—doing all that within one week of opening the account.
0:14:52 - Roger Dooley
Right. He then documented each step of the process—how much effort it took, how many clicks it took, how long it took for an account to become operational, how much effort it took to do a transfer, and so on. The differences he found were amazing. To open an account—this was a few years ago, so things have probably gotten a bit easier since then—the best experience was with a fintech firm where you could set up an account with something like 21 clicks, which is a pretty low number considering that setting up an account isn’t the easiest thing. The competitor with the most clicks was a traditional bank, a big brand bank, where it took around 120 clicks to do it, which is insane. And how long did it take for an account to become operational?
Most of the fintechs and even some of the big banks were able to get accounts fully operational and usable within two to three days. But again, there were some outliers. The longest one, which might have been the one with the most clicks, took around 36 business days to get the account operational. Who’s going to wait that long? They’re going to open an account somewhere else. People don’t have a month and a half of real time to wait for their account to be working. Companies just don’t realize how important this is, and that’s why, in many cases, fintechs have grown far more quickly than traditional banks. Of course, they’re taking business away from traditional banks because they understand how to make things easier for their customers—how to onboard people easily, how to make their websites very user-friendly, and their apps very user-friendly. That’s probably the starkest divide, where you have companies that are essentially in the same business, but some are really good at it, and some aren’t.
0:16:49 - Alex Shevelenko
What’s really interesting about this is that you actually don’t want to compare yourself to direct competitors, especially established brands. I’ll quote you again from your book Friction: “Saying that you’re easy to do business with is one thing, but delivering on that promise is another. If you really want to make it easy for your customers, don’t compare your process to that of your direct competitors—they may be even worse. Instead, compare yourself to companies like Amazon. Your customers shop there, and that’s the friction-free experience they expect from you too.” I hadn’t read this before, but we’ve been thinking about it. In our world, as we’re consumerizing enterprise and business content, we’re not looking at folks in that universe; we’re looking at Netflix and Amazon. These companies also have a lot of complex information—like, you can buy anything on Amazon, right? And movies have so many categories on Netflix. How do you make that easy to digest and continue to reduce friction, seamlessly getting people onto the next show without them having to click anything? So you have this continuous flow, and that really inspired us. So tell us a little bit about what you see as the best companies to look to for inspiration. Obviously, Amazon is one, but where else can people find inspiration for radically increasing their performance relative to the industry they’re in?
0:18:29 - Roger Dooley
Well, two examples I often use are Uber, which crushed the traditional taxi business by eliminating multiple friction points in the process. Before Uber, we didn’t think about taxis as being high friction—they were just taxis, that’s the way things were. People didn’t see all the friction in that experience, from trying to flag a cab by the side of the road, to explaining to a driver (who might have a language barrier) where you wanted to go, to paying at the end with credit cards or foreign currencies and figuring out tips. These are huge friction elements, but we didn’t notice them because we thought they were inevitable—just part of the process. We couldn’t imagine it any other way.
Then two tech bros came along who knew nothing about transportation, saw that friction, and said, "Oh, we can make it easier." And they did. After that, every time Uber entered a new city, they crushed the existing taxi business. So you have to look for friction, and you can’t take things for granted. You’ve got to imagine that there could be a different way. Another example of a company that really grew despite much bigger, better-financed competitors is Zoom, which we’re using now. People think of Zoom as a pandemic phenomenon—suddenly we’re all on Zoom calls, wearing Zoom shirts—but even before the pandemic, they were growing much, much more quickly, I assure you.
0:20:07 - Alex Shevelenko
I’m fully closed.
0:20:10 - Roger Dooley
No comment. Zoom was growing bigger and faster, surpassing huge companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Google in actual volume. But how did they do that? For the first six to eight years of Zoom's existence, its mission was to make communications frictionless. It made sure that its platform was dead simple to use—to start a call, to join a call, to everything. It figured out the easiest, simplest way to do it.
If you've ever struggled with WebEx or some of the earlier Microsoft apps, you know it can be challenging to get started, get set up, or configure them with your system. So, Zoom was already growing much more quickly than these big brands. Then, when the pandemic hit, even IT departments that were traditionally "Microsoft shops" or "Cisco shops" suddenly had to say, "Wow, we’ve got to onboard 500 users by Wednesday. No way we can do that with WebEx or Skype. Just put them on Zoom, and we’ll figure it out later." This was huge for Zoom.
Though I have to add, parenthetically, that they later changed their mission to something much more encompassing, like "the ultimate communications platform," and they lost that frictionless emphasis. I’m finding a lot more friction on Zoom today. When I tried to join this call, it pushed me to their web app and then told me I had to update. This was when I had only one minute left before the call started, and I saw the progress bar creeping along. I thought, "Why can't you let me update later? I don’t have to update right this second, do I?" But they don’t see that in their customer experience now, even though people often join calls at the last minute, or even late. You can’t force them to update at that point. Most software will say, "Update now or try later," but in their infinite wisdom, Zoom would not take no for an answer. I ended up having to ditch their app completely and join via web browser, which they conveniently make very difficult to find. It’s a little tiny link at the bottom that’s very hard to locate. So, I think Zoom has kind of lost its focus on being frictionless, but they’re still a good example of how being easier than their competitors allowed them to blow those competitors away.
0:22:52 - Alex Shevelenko
It’s interesting that we’re applying this to examples from the consumer world, right? Zoom is obviously a business, prosumer-type application. But you’ve mentioned that you’re spending a lot of time right now simplifying the employee experience and reducing friction. When you were talking about those banking sites, it reminded me of one of the use cases that we see quite a lot, and it surprised us—probably shouldn’t have, but I think it’s very telling. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. economy is spent on healthcare, and a lot of that pressure is put on employees when choosing their healthcare plan or different Medicare plans that are available. That information is incredibly complex.
HR departments, insurance brokers, and benefit advisors who help HR departments are often overwhelmed themselves in supporting all sorts of employee queries. They typically present a relatively complex set of options to people who are not very familiar with the terminology, which can be overwhelming. As a result, people either choose the path of least resistance by selecting the defaults, or they have to spend a lot of time figuring this stuff out—getting their partner involved to make the right healthcare decisions. This is at a time when half of Americans fear bankruptcy related to a healthcare event, which means that there is actually quite a lot at stake. Yet, because the information is presented in such a complicated way, people are making suboptimal decisions about their healthcare. Companies are not gaining the value from the investments they make in paying for healthcare, and it just feels like a massive waste of resources that go absolutely nowhere.
You’re also seeing this in employee engagement and communications. This is as far from the Amazon experience as you can get. When I think of this particular experience, we’re obviously helping people with it and we see great opportunities to assist, but I think the status quo is really a disaster. Are you seeing a similar disparity between consumer marketing and B2B marketing, especially in terms of communications to employees? Any observations there would be really helpful.
0:25:47 - Roger Dooley
Well, I think you've hit on two huge pain points, Alex. One is employee experience and its importance, and the other is the healthcare experience, both for patients and other workers in that industry as well. But getting back to basic employee experience first, I've had management guru Tom Peters on the Brainfluence Show a few times, and he emphasizes that your employees can never create a great customer experience if they’re unhappy. Your company’s experience for customers and employees must prioritize doing right by all your stakeholders. But I think the point is that if you have unhappy, disengaged people, they are likely not going to deliver the exceptional customer experience you're hoping for, and this is often overlooked.
I think Amazon is an example. There has probably never been as relentlessly customer-focused a company as Amazon. I mean, they optimize every part of their customer experience, even returns, to make it easier for customers. Having been in the mail-order business for years, I know that returns are not something you usually want to encourage. You prefer to discourage them because they cost you way more than you would think by the time you deal with the merchandise, process it, and ship new items. Returns are terrible for anyone in the direct marketing business, but Amazon makes them easy.
But when it comes to employee experience, we've heard some nightmare stories about Amazon, where employees don’t even have time to take bathroom breaks and are wearing diapers. These are probably extreme examples, maybe from individual locations where on-site management is less than perfect, but nevertheless, I think Amazon, in its early years, largely overlooked employee experience, particularly for its hourly workers.
You can look at other industries too, where they have call centers, and these centers are relentlessly optimized for efficiency. How many calls did you take? Your average call length is 30 seconds over our target. You need to tighten things up, get the customers off the phone more quickly. What happens there?
First, you're demotivating your employees, who want to interact with the customers but feel under pressure to do things more quickly than they should or to implement policies that aren't great for the customers. When they have that feeling, they're not going to communicate with empathy, and they won’t seem friendly and happy to their customers. They’ll just seem like they’re doing their job and counting down to quitting time.
So, doing everything you can for employee experience not only increases your retention rate and engagement rate and makes it easier to recruit new people, but it also has all these additional benefits. It’ll make your people more efficient because often the things that are most demotivating to your employees are the things that waste their time. You know, processes they have to go through, forms they have to fill out that really aren't necessary. Usually, they know when they're not necessary, but that's just how things are done. When you start eliminating those time-wasters, you're making them happier and getting more productive at the same time.
0:29:47 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, I even wrote down another quote from Brainfluence, and this one talks a little bit about the subconscious nature of how people feel about your employees' attitudes. Right, and I'll quote it: "The passion your customers can sense—the passion of your people—even if they don't process it consciously. They can process body language, speech patterns, and other cues to give your customers confidence that the person they're dealing with truly believes in your product."
And I think this is really profound, right? There are all these cues, right? And obviously, people pick up on communication messages that come from others. The enthusiasm—does the sales rep feel like they have an extra quiver in their arrow that gives them confidence and passion because they're well-supported? Well, then they may feel more confident, they may not need to be overly salesy; they may actually relax and listen to the customer, which creates all sorts of positive effects, right?
Or if there are resources that customers can find themselves, for example, like you also wrote in the book, that if you give stuff without asking for something in return, people appreciate that much more. So imagine you give people a great product tour or a demo before asking them for their email, organization size, and all those other things to put them on a spam list. You give them something of value first, and then they are more educated, which opens up a more genuine interaction between them and your employees. Your employees will feel happier too. So I think there's a lot of really interesting intersections here that you've brought up about well-enabled employees and selecting employees with the energy to engage customers. It creates a positive spiral of benefits for the company down the road.
0:32:08 - Roger Dooley
Yeah, I think the passionate employee is really the most effective one, whether they're in contact with the customer or not, but especially if they are in contact with the customer. Customers can sense when the employee, the salesperson, is truly excited about the product versus just excited to make a sale and listing the benefits to the customer. There's a difference. People can be passionate about anything. You think about it—well, okay, maybe I'm selling industrial chemicals. That doesn't sound like anybody's passion, but even there, when you know that you can deliver something that's going to do the job for the customer, you know you can deliver it on time, it's going to be better than the competition, and you can convey that excitement, you're going to be a lot more convincing.
0:33:00 - Alex Shevelenko
So, getting back to this theme of employee experience, a great employee experience leads to a fantastic customer experience. What else do you see that organizations miss when it comes to how they treat their employees relative to communication and experience goals? Where can we tap into other disciplines and bring that into employee experience?
0:33:33 - Roger Dooley
I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but simply asking people two key questions can be powerful. One is, "What do our customers complain about?" When you ask your customer-facing employees or even those who know what customers are experiencing this question, they have probably already told you what customers complain about, but you didn't fix it. Maybe you thought, "Well, yeah, but that would be expensive to fix," or, "That's in the roadmap for two years from now."
When you ask employees this question, you're actually accomplishing two things. First, you're finding out what customers are complaining about and hopefully finding something you can take action on. Second, you're listening to your employees. A huge complaint among employees is that "nobody listens to me. I've told them that five times, but nothing happens. I gave up." When you ask people with intention what customers complain about and then act on that, you're showing that you listen and care. Your employees will really get on board and help you find more things you can do for customers. They'll say, "Wow, they fixed that one customer complaint. This other one isn't as important, but it's still there, so let's talk about that one."
The second question, Alex, is a bit counterintuitive for managers. It is, "How can we make your job easier?" Usually, managers think about how employees can be more productive, and they ask questions that are intended to elicit ways to get more work out of employees, maybe not in those exact words, but that's often the intent. But when you ask people, "How can we make your job easier?" they will tell you where their time is being wasted—by stupid rules they have to follow that don't really matter, by inefficient processes that everyone knows are inefficient, but nobody seems able to change. This is an extremely powerful question because when you eliminate a bad process or a rule that's wasting time, you're making that employee happier and feel heard. You're also making them more productive, so it's a complete win. But many companies simply fail to ask simple questions like that. Or they might ask something along those lines but then think, "Oh, well, yeah, we'd like to work on that, but that's too expensive," or, "That's legacy code; we can't change that; it's the way it is." That, in turn, is demotivating for your employees.
0:36:31 - Alex Shevelenko:
Got it. This is fascinating. I particularly love the idea of asking people something that you may already know because, typically, in any organization, you have a large number of problems, right? Sometimes, a problem today may change in a week's time, and it’s no longer a problem, so it doesn’t need to be a priority. However, I think some very technical or scientific people may believe, "I already know this is a problem; you don't need to keep repeating it to me." But I think it’s quite the opposite. If you keep asking, "Hey, where are customers having problems?" and week after week, from different people, you hear a similar pattern of issues, it allows you to say, "Hey, this is a significant problem; we need to address it." This is a blocker. In contrast, if you ask once, recognize it's a problem, and then it somehow fades away until the next new problem arises, it might be overlooked because we are novelty-seeking animals.
So, sometimes we tend to get excited about solving either something that’s urgent or something that’s new. I feel that by asking these fundamentally important questions consistently, we need to encourage people that it’s okay to mention the same issue if it has happened before. You’re not looking foolish; you’re actually helping by consolidating the data and showing that this is a bigger problem than we initially thought. As a product builder who never has enough time to address every issue, I can say that you need to find ways to consolidate this feedback and unlock the frequency of it.
0:38:37 - Roger Dooley:
Another thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is trust. Trust inside companies, as well as customer trust in companies, but especially internal trust within the company, is a friction reducer. Often, the reason these bad processes are in place is because of a lack of trust. I've been an entrepreneur for decades, but I had a corporate stint for a few years where a company that I co-founded was acquired, and I ended up joining that company in a senior role for a period of years. Despite being a senior executive who could fly business class internationally, if I wanted to submit an expense report, I had to attach every single receipt, even for a $2 item—a cup of coffee in the airport, for example.
When I would submit an expense report, it would have wads of little receipts stapled to it. This wasn't a tax requirement. The IRS would allow much higher thresholds for documenting expenses. As long as things were reasonable, there was no need to document them. But in this company, you did. Eventually, they streamlined the process by allowing employees to scan their receipts on a flatbed scanner, number them, and refer to those numbers in the expense report. This wasn’t an experience enhancer; it was probably easier to just staple the receipts to the back of the paper than to scan and number them. But it sped things up for the people in the office who were reviewing these reports. I found that they actually did review them. One time, I lost a receipt for just a couple of dollars between when I filled out the report and when I submitted it. They ended up bouncing it back, saying, "Hey, I can't find this; either correct the report or submit the receipt." And I thought, really, we’re doing this over two bucks?
After I left the company and after the CFO had also departed, I asked him why they did this since it wasn’t a requirement. He said there was a feeling that they couldn’t trust people to do it correctly or honestly and that without this requirement, people would cheat. This lack of trust forced everyone in the company to go through an onerous process that wasn’t really necessary. I contrast that with what Reed Hastings describes in his book "No Rules Rules" about Netflix, where they said, "Don’t worry about it; we don’t have a travel policy or an employee handbook. Do what’s right for the company and leave it at that." If you do something that ends up not being right for the company, they might tell you once and say, "Hey, this wasn’t good judgment." If it happens two or three times, then they might say goodbye. But they got rid of all these administrative tasks that were wasting people's time and showed a lack of trust.
There’s a lot of research on trust in companies. One book I really like is "Trust Factor" by Paul Zak, the oxytocin guy who discovered that oxytocin is the hormone of human trust. He and his team went into companies—both high and low-performing—and conducted thousands of surveys, asking people about different aspects of the company, including trust. "Do you trust the company? Does your boss trust you?" They also took thousands of blood samples. When they analyzed all this data, they found that the high-performing companies were high-trust companies. The surveys showed high levels of trust, and the levels of oxytocin in people’s bloodstreams were higher in those companies.
To me, this is a great example of how using neuromarketing techniques or biometric techniques confirms the soft information you’re getting. I think there’s a lesson here for companies. Certainly, we've all been part of companies where there hasn't been a lot of trust, whether it's between coworkers or between the company and the workers. Everything seems just a little bit adversarial. You need a stapler? Okay, fill out that form in triplicate and get VP approval. It’s stuff that just doesn’t make sense.
0:43:46 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, this is fascinating. I think it's particularly relevant in the social context we live in today, where there's a lot of mistrust, even at social and cross-national levels. Building institutions that foster trust is crucial, and I believe it's the role of all of us as leaders to embrace this view. If we can create oxytocin-generating societies, we’ll see a lot of positive outcomes all around. Building on that notion of trust, let's circle back to brain fluids and perhaps focus on future customers who don't know you yet.
One of the things we spend a lot of time on is figuring out how to build trust without boring people to tears. When dealing with technical, complex topics, there's often a desire to share all the information to demonstrate the work that's been done. But our attention spans are shrinking—we're like a goldfish on adrenaline these days, jumping from one thing to the next. We may not have the patience to dive into deeper details right away, even though that sometimes builds trust. Do you have any ideas on how to navigate this information-heavy environment without overwhelming people with too much detail while still building trust?
0:45:24 - Roger Dooley
Well, I think when you're building trust, you have to start with a few simple things. First, be trustworthy yourself. That goes a long way—no one will trust someone who doesn't behave in a trustworthy manner. The flip side of that is to be trusting. When you trust someone—whether it's a subordinate, a coworker, or a boss—you show that you're trusting them, and they're more likely to trust you. This ties into Cialdini's principle of reciprocity: when you do something for someone else, they're more likely to do something for you. In this case, trust is reciprocal. So being trustworthy and extending trust to others are probably the two simplest ways to begin, especially in a company environment.
Transparency is another key factor. If people see things as opaque, they're less likely to trust. I had a friend who was unexpectedly called into her boss's office and laid off, with no prior indication that there was a problem. It was likely a business issue rather than a performance issue, but that didn't matter—the lack of communication leading up to that point created an untrustworthy environment.
In fact, if a company is facing issues, the solution is to be totally transparent with employees about what those issues are and what needs to be done to resolve them. For example, share where revenue needs to be, where costs need to be, and what other metrics must be met for success. But often, managers hoard that information, thinking that employees will be demoralized or scared. That’s not how it works—when you're upfront with people, they’ll work to make things better.
From a customer trust standpoint, Amazon is probably the most trusted retail brand, perhaps even the most trusted brand overall. They didn't achieve that by just saying, "Hey, trust us." They earned it by behaving in a very trustworthy manner—never hassling customers about returns, never pointing to the fine print to justify a problem. I've seen major companies where, when a customer has an issue, they dig up something in the fine print to justify their actions. While they may have the legal right, it doesn't make the customer feel better. Amazon doesn’t operate that way. Even when you return something, now often at Whole Foods where they can see the product, they trust you. They refund you within an hour, even if you could be shipping back a brick. That level of trust makes me trust them more.
0:49:02 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, this is really powerful. There are a couple of metaphors that I'm taking away here, one in particular. You were talking about predictability and meeting expectations. In user experience, there's a term called "affordance," which means that when you're interacting with something, you can guess that if you click on a button, a certain action will happen, and your expectations will be met. We were discussing this earlier, and I think you're effectively saying this applies to both internal and external communications. One thing that breaks trust for me, for example, is when people ask for your email to access a gated asset, and then after you enter your email, a form opens up that's the size of a Tolstoy novel, with a bunch of fields to fill out.
In this case, it's like using Cialdini's techniques to get a foot in the door, to get someone to commit by entering their email. But subconsciously, I start feeling resistant because it feels like a bait and switch. The marketers might think they're getting more leads this way, but it's probably backfiring. They would have been better off just asking for the email and maybe a name without requiring a much more detailed form, or finding other ways to collect that information.
I've seen these behaviors that are incongruent with the goals of building trust and are more focused on transactional goals, like getting a lead and claiming a contribution to the pipeline. But in reality, you've already betrayed trust at the very first step of getting to know someone. There isn't enough of a mindset focused on trust-building, whether it's through buttons that do what you expect them to do or avoiding misrepresentation to meet corporate goals. Do you see these kinds of counterproductive behaviors?
0:51:41 - Roger Dooley
Oh yeah, I agree. I love your example, Alex, of the form that looks simple at first, but then suddenly, whammo, there's this giant form to fill out to actually get what was promised.
0:51:53 - Alex Shevelenko
You're right, maybe they do get more leads that way, but it probably leaves people with a negative impression of the brand, or a lot of people just abandon the form at that point. I think the abandonment rate is through the roof, and it backfires. I think some marketers believe they're being clever, but they’re just creating frustration.
It feels like people are only focusing on one aspect, like Cialdini’s principle of commitment and consistency, but they end up breaking down trust in the process. You can't just optimize for one variable; you have to take a holistic approach. I feel like a lot of our optimization tools don't account for this, and maybe it requires leaders or a culture that refocuses on the bigger picture. Are we in the business of getting pseudo-leads, or are we in the business of creating a memorable experience for visitors, assuming that if we create a great experience, they will become champions for us in one way or another?
0:53:09 - Roger Dooley
Yeah, and you know, if people look at their analytics, they can see if what you describe is happening. If they find that, for example, people are willing to give their email address and name, but 80% bail out when asked for their company name, role, and 10 other things, then that tells you something about your customers. You need to decide whether there's another way to get this information. Is there an easier method? Can you eliminate half of those questions to reduce the abandonment rate? Can you use a micro-commitment strategy by not presenting a giant second form, but by asking a few more questions at a time, within reason, before they get frustrated and bail out?
There are many things you can do. Obviously, there are some free tools available. Google Analytics, for example, can provide a lot of insights, and it's a free tool, though you're sharing your data with them. Another product that's less known but worth mentioning is Microsoft's Clarity. It's a behavior measurement tool that offers features like click tracking. Tools like these can help you understand what's really happening with your customers. It requires a time commitment, and of course, these are free tools, meaning you're paying with your data. For many companies, this is an acceptable trade-off. You can have my data because I appreciate the tool, and when you observe what your customers are actually doing versus what you think they're doing, you might be surprised.
0:54:52 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, well, and this kind of leads back to the beginning. Before you build trust, you need to grab attention. I want to revisit one of your quotes from Brainfluence where you mention that whether you're presenting to a group, selling one-on-one, or designing a TV commercial, using motion helps grab the audience's attention and focus it where you want it. If something is moving, that's where the audience will look.
So, applying lessons from TV commercials and one-on-one selling to less exciting areas like benefits education, which is often more one-to-many and internal, it might seem obvious, but if you provide a static, non-moving asset where every page looks the same, you inherently have a harder time drawing attention to important information. If a motion is used to convey that you care, that you’ve thought about this, and to align with your brand proposition, then it adds value. Without it, you're limited to a black-and-white print approach that goes straight to the analytical brain, missing out on other sensory experiences. I see a lot of employee communications still organized this way, not utilizing these basic principles that are well understood in the advertising world and sophisticated marketing and sales organizations.
How do you think we can increase awareness about these issues? Is this a persistent problem where people just think about putting content on paper without considering the audience, or do you see progress toward more visual and dynamic communication since you wrote the book?
0:57:08 - Roger Dooley
Well, I think we are less reliant on print these days, which is inherently a static medium. Instead of just glossy magazine ads, now we have web ads of various kinds that can employ motion. You can use full video, animate things, and do other stuff. One often overlooked aspect is using motion to either show effort or create delight. For example, when I was trying to log in, I encountered a Zoom progress bar, which was essentially a horizontal line with a colored part on the left moving slowly towards the right. I ended up bailing out, but that's what most progress bars are like. Sometimes you don't even have that.
At least if a person sees a progress bar while waiting for your website or app to load, they know something is happening.
I think of Lufthansa Airlines, which has always had a progress bar with little airplanes taking off. It's really cool and fun, making the wait slightly less burdensome.
There are other ways to do this. For instance, a voice system might make typing sounds while looking up your account, implying that work is being done. Visually, you might see something like an elf on a typewriter saying, "Our elves are finding your account now," or something similar. This shows that work is taking place and makes the experience more valuable and entertaining, rather than just watching a blank screen and worrying that your browser or app is frozen. Simple, fun elements can improve customer experience, even if they don't seem crucial. For example, Lufthansa's use of animation softens their image and adds a touch of personality.
0:59:42 - Alex Shevelenko
I think this approach softens their image a bit. One of the experts I studied under at Stanford, Jennifer Aaker, talked about the importance of creating a sense of awe. Sometimes, a mesmerizing image of airplanes taking off or clouds in the background can evoke that sense of awe. It may not seem like it should have a disproportionate impact, but these little background elements—whether they signal that something is happening or simply keep you engaged—can enhance the experience. It's similar to the old technique of placing a mirror in the elevator lobby to distract people while they wait, creating a more positive experience.
We're seeing similar quick fixes in content, like adding a background video at the start to set the tone. For instance, Netflix preloads small snippets so something is available immediately during previews. These are all quick wins, Roger. There are tons of ideas here, and I'm excited to dive into the science and direct applications for employee and customer experience. Where can our audience find you and learn more from your experience?
1:01:29 - Roger Dooley
The best place to start, Alex, would be my website, rogerdooley.com. There, you’ll find links to my Forbes page, YouTube channel, and social media profiles like LinkedIn. I'm most active on LinkedIn, X, and now Threads, which I find to be a friendlier place than X. But starting at rogerdooley.com is a good place to find my books and other resources. You can also find me by googling Roger Dooley.
1:02:05 - Alex Shevelenko
Thank you for writing great books. I’m excited to have shared your experience with our audience.
1:02:12 - Roger Dooley
Thank you for having me, Alex! It’s been a lot of fun.