344. Mastering Customer Behavior: Neuroscience Secrets with Prince Ghuman (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 344 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about why we like the things we like. Ready?

Let's get started.

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.

Hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is digging into why we like the things we like with Prince Gumin. Prince is the co author of the fantastic book Blindsight, which he wrote with Matt Johnson, who's been a guest on the show twice before. This conversation with Prince was the 15th most downloaded episode of all time as recognized when doing the five year anniversary.

Episode early of the podcast earlier this year.

So I'm glad to have a chance to honor the conversation and refresh this episode with you here today. It originally aired in September of 2021 as we're going into the holidays looking at sales. Maybe you're putting one on yourself or you're going to be doing lots of.

Shopping in the coming weeks.

It felt like a fun time to refresh this one to see if it changes the way you think about buying and selling. As always, come share your insights with me on social media. You'll find me as the brainy biz pretty everywhere. There are links to connect with me in the show, notes and prints as well as links to related past episodes, books, articles, a full time stamp, summary of the episode and more. All in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 34 4. All right, let's talk about why we like the things we like. Prince Guman, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Hey, good to be here. Brainy business, that's my jam. Thank you for having me, Melina.

Absolutely. Yeah. I know it's so fun to talk about both marketing and brain science together, so I love that you have similar love on the marketing side there. For those who are not familiar with you and your background, just tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got into this world of behavioral science and marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. Hi everyone, my name is Prince Goodman. I'm the author of Blindsights and I'm also a professor at Hulk International Business School. And my background? Half of my career I spent working at startups and the other half at established corporations and during the first half it was during the earlier part of my career and my attempt at getting ahead of marketing at an earlier age was to read neuroscience and psych research on the weekends. And luckily working at a startup, you know, you can test stuff quite quickly. And I did that. I did that for years. And that was how I dipped my toes into the world of neuromarketing or behavior science. And over the years I had come up with my own little playbook that had internalized for over 14 years. And I was able to apply that beyond startups at larger companies. And eventually this business school in San Francisco got word on this sort of new way of marketing, the science based marketing, and they asked me to teach a class. So sure, I'll teach a class, you know, and I did, and it was fun. And then went on about my life, working my way up to be the next Bill Gates or what have you. Those were the aspirations at that time. And a couple months later they came back with a full time job offer and that totally threw me for a loop. Took a week off of work, meditated on it, and eventually decided, hey, life's too short to have one career, and pivoted over to the professor life. And that was roughly five years ago. And what the professor life gave me was time. Time to put together a curriculum, time to put together a playbook, lecture by lecture, of what I'd been doing over the last 14ish years. And that turned into a class on neuromarketing and turned into a book deal. And that's where blindsight came from. Met Matt Johnson, my co author, and he was the neuroscientist. So while I was just using the topical results of the research that neuroscientists like him do, he understood the research piece much deeper and I understood the tactics piece much deeper because as a marketer I was always driven by, hey, what's the takeaway here so I can test it right? So together we've been working together for a long time and now we both are founders of Pop Neuro where we teach marketers, marketing leaders, and a lot of times product and CEO how to apply neuroscience to marketing ethically.

Love it.

And such an interesting, like you said, that you weren't seeking out teaching it, so it found you, which is fun. Where so many people that are professors had a very dedicated plan to get there. So I love all of that. When you talk about the playbook that you made and some of how you talk about this, can you give some background into, obviously we're not giving away all of what's There. And I'm sure a lot of that's in the book, but what are the types of questions that are answered by your playbook or some key insights or things that you have as tips for marketers looking to get started in that space?

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that is lacking in the marketing curriculum, whether it's out there in the real world or in undergraduate and even master study program, is a heavier emphasis on neuroscience and psych. And so that is the underpinning of the playbook. And what is in some ways admirable and in some ways disappointing is what should be admired is UX professionals have used cognitive science really well. Right. And think about in the last 10 years, right? The iPhone came out in 2007. There weren't too many. I don't think there were any, actually UX undergraduate degrees. Right. You had to go get an undergrad in cognitive science and then go get a grad degree or master's in design and stitch all that stuff together. They did cover a bit of that in the design programs, but that was it. And the playbook that we've created takes that beyond the world of user experience. So if we are marketers, we are fundamentally students of human behavior and human psychology, and that underpins everything we do as marketers. So the downside of that is just how little we know about that.

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, really, when you talk about it now, I'm curious, I find, because similar background, when I had my undergraduate in marketing and there was just.

Like the tiniest little piece of one.

Class in the one book that was this biopsychology, like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And I want to go get a master's in this. And I spent 10 years calling schools that said that's not a thing. And so I was just sort of waiting.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. And then, yeah, found behavioral economics and jumped all in.

That's usually the first hole, Right. And then you realize that, Daniel, economy and thinking fast and slow, whatever your first drug was into behavior economics, that hole goes a lot deeper. And that's one of the things we do is behavior sciences, consumer psych, neuromarketing. For the casual, curious person, they might sound like the same thing. So one of the things we do in the boot camp that we do is it's all about dividing neuromarketing in two branches. One of those is principles, and the other is hard science, neuro marketing. And the second piece is all about imaging. How can we use neuroscientific imaging technologies to better understand and execute on marketing strategies. But most people, most marketers are priced out of that. And Matt and I are working on changing that. But until we do that, the principles piece is foundational. Just because you can't afford neuroimaging for a hundred people to understand insights does not mean that you can come up with better A B tests on your own once you understand the principles. So that, you know, goes back to what you were searching for. Even the principles piece is tough, even finding. And you said you got a sliver of it, right. But imagine, I mean, what we do is pretty intense. We take everything out of Matt's PhD in neuroscience. We cherry pick whatever stuff that we can apply and have tested, and then we beat you over the head with it for three days, eight hours a day for three days. And then you walk away like your head's going to be spinning, but you'll have way more tests, even if you never go to the second branch and actually put people in an FMRI machine or EEG or whatever else. So, yeah, I think the principles piece is as important, if not more important, than the traditional neuroscientific imaging techniques.

Absolutely. Well, and that's, I mean, for us and Matt and talking with him and multiple others now as we're kind of coming up in this, the academia was very important to create a foundation for the field and see what's there. And then there's a, you know, cohort of us that all, you know, around same time, ish, you know, over a certain span of years, we're coming in and going, I love this. And where's all the applied stuff? Like the things that seem so obvious to me, like why is there not. Why aren't there books on this? And why aren't we teaching people how they can use this in communication or marketing or pricing strategy and goals and all of that. And so we're all writing our books now.

And that was the thing is, I'm willing to bet that the one book that all your listeners have read or most likely have read is Thinking Fast and Slow by Dan Kahneman. I've read that book a couple times. I've assigned it in classes. Absolutely. Great book. Really puts decision making, not the vague decision making, but decision making with capital D and M into perspective. However, there's no tactics on there. And of course. And that's the world. So how do you apply the science of decision making to web conversion, to the customer's journey in a retail environment? And how do you contextualize the customer's journey in the retail environment with the neuroscience of emotion, the neuroscience of relation of identity. That's the kind of stuff that again, research we owe a lot to academics and researchers that even, even know that. But in many ways not their jobs to come up with the tactics. Right. The job has to be a crossover thing and that's the sort of toolkit that, you know, that's my vision. My vision is to make just like there's a UX person on every marketing team or product team, depending on organization, I would love for there to be one neuromarketing principles person on each marketing team because I think at the end of the day, marketers want to create good marketing, good brand experiences. And I think consumers also want to be charmed by brands and products and experiences. And I think it can become a very good place where incentives are aligned up and people enjoy products and people enjoy making products and everything else has revolved around that.

Yeah. So I'm gonna build on what you just said and ask a question. I'm curious, kind of like philosophically where you would stand on this? So knowing we both come from marketing and then are figuring out some of the behavioral science pieces from what you were saying is there's the neuromarketing person within the marketing team or would the vision be like taking a step back to say, you know, there's the chief behavioral officer or nudge units and looking at having the entire organization be very much focused on behavioral science and whatever tactic or name that you were to give it to say like our brand is about this and we infiltrate it everywhere and marketing is one of many places there or would you say you like the idea of it living within a marketing department?

What we've seen over the last few years is the value of cross functional teams. And that's really been a big piece of how startups have influenced corporate marketing. Right. Startups just out of no other choice had to have cross functional teams. Some of the original marketers on startup teams weren't marketers at all. They were engineers trying to figure stuff out because they can afford marketing. Again, this is pre Google AdWords at that time was all about okay, here's, you know, here's we need at least a minimum of X million dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars and we can do X, Y and Z exposure. And that simply didn't work for startups. So to answer your question, I'm confident that cross functional is the answer. And when I said earlier there needs to be one marketing neuromarketer on each Marketing team, that's the bare minimum. So yes, behavior science applies across the business world. I think every marketing position should understand behavior science. Whether you're writing email subject lines or working on brand strategy, a foundational understanding of neuromarketing principles is only going to help. And I think having a separate nudge unit kind of goes back in time a little bit. If you study the history of marketing and the evolution, it was really, hey, the engineers create the products, right? No, no, we've got, we're going to create this really amazing car at Ford. Just you're the coloring department. So when it's done, you guys can do your mad menning and do surveys and figure out a name and a color and whatever, whatever. But that simply isn't the case anymore. Engineers, whether they know or not, are a form of marketing. And your customer service and customer success team is a form of marketing. It is really. Ultimately, are we able to create a great brand together and a great product and a great experience together working in silos? And I think more and more over the last 15, 20 years, we've learned that that's not really the case. So I would posit the opposite. I would say if you can afford an entire behavioral science department, kudos to you. You're probably in the 95th, 98th percentile of the world. But for everyone else, having an understanding across the board is great. And if you can't get a handful of your marketing leaders in an organization to do that, then absolutely have at least one person, right? Yeah.

The dream is to info have it be everywhere. But you got to start somewhere, right?

You got to start somewhere, right? You do, you do. And, and you know, and it is, it is a bit of an evolution, right? So if you look at the history of marketing and the history of how they've adapted the scientific method over the years, I think this is the next step in that, right? So we took from ethnographic and anthropology studies, we took focus groups, right? And we. And surveying is a classic, classic old example of collecting data from the scientific world. And we've adopted both of those. And a couple decades ago we did the ab test thing and now a B test is great. So I know that there are marketers meeting. One of them felt pretty scientific. When I'm doing a B test, look, I got data, right? Data, data, data. But now the next evolution of that is truly understanding and coming up with better tests. Don't just do a blue versus a green add to cart button, have no idea what people are clicking it and you Move on. Now you have a psychological understanding of the psychological underpinning, you can actually come up with better tests around that. And that's really the next operating system of marketing is deeply, more deeply scientific.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's jump in. I know I told you as we were having kind of our getting to know you conversation, as we're getting ready to jump into the episode here, that there are so many directions we could have gone and I could keep talking about side peripheral type stuff like this with you forever, but I really want to touch on the. There's a chapter in the book about why we like, you know, the things we like. And there are several concepts mixed in there. And I already told you a little bit of kind of where I'm hoping we can go in the conversation with that. So can you tell a little bit about this, you know, why we like things and some things to keep in mind for our brands?

Yes, absolutely. I think, you know, understanding why we like what we like starts with the mere exposure effects. All else being equal, the more we philosophically touch something, the more we experience something, the more we are likely to prefer it. Right? And in many ways the advertising industry is what else if not a mere exposure industry, Right. So it immediately gives you a scientific context there. But what is lesser known about this, and this especially applies to products looking to get mass market appeal, and it can be applied to niche products, but it is new and safe. So the philosophical question I'll pose to everyone rhetorically is do we like Birds of a Feather or Opposites Attract? Well, nas, nas New and safe is a combination of both. We like things that are different because we like novelty and we like things that are similar because we like the safety of the similar things. However, depending on the context of the product and the brand, if something is too new, it hurts adoption. If something is too safe, it hurts adoption. For brand managers, specifically looking at where your product falls in, that is a great way to come up with better tests initially. But you can always tease that out. You can always tease that out with neuroimaging to see if this is actually somewhere in between new and safe. And one of the classic faux pas that played out was for Spotify, where they were supposed to do a brand new music playlist and the data scientists had an error in the code and ended up jumbling in current songs in the person's collection along with new songs. And they found out that with the mistake, users are listening to the new music playlist a lot more. So that's a fun way to think about, you know, whether you're running a museum or you're running any of an event, placing something new, sandwiching it in between two familiar things, helps bump up the likability of said thing, whether it's a piece of art or song on the radio, on a playlist. So the new and safe piece really, really freaks you out. Right. Because it's like, wow. But if you. What we don't talk about this in the book, we talk about this in the boot camp is the old book Crossing the Chasm by Christensen. And in many ways Gladwell popularized it with the Tipping point. But what we don't think about that is the neuroscientific context of nas new and safe in the context of product adoption. Think about that for a second. You've got the early adopters, the mid, early, the middle of the pack, and then the late adopters. What we don't talk about is psychologically what's happening in their mind. It's an old saying for new product launches. You go after a niche first and you expand out. And product managers know that model, the early adopter model, quite a bit. What they don't realize is early adopters have a higher acceptance of imbalance between new and safe when it's tilted towards new. And as you work further up the adoption curve, what you're actually doing is working further up the new and safe curve and ultimately landing at an imbalance towards safe. Mass market sits in the middle of that. A perfect balance of NAS between new and safe. And early adopters are tilted towards new, and late adopters tilted towards safe. Even putting those two pieces of research together, that changes how you launch products, that deeply affects how people consume products.

Yeah. So when you're first launching, just to kind of boil down with what I'm hearing from what you're saying and having read the chapters and you know, that is so at the beginning when you're trying to get those early adopters still having some familiarity, you need, we need some context, the, you know, relativity so we can have some value on something. But really, you know, more in the new, exciting, you'll be the first world as you're progressing through and trying to get that snowball moving up the hill. In our process here, we want to be incorporating, maybe shifting the messaging to be more about how it's familiar with a little bit of newness when we're trying to get the masses on board. And then by the time all the like late adopters are coming, it's super familiar anyway.

And so exactly Exactly. Thank you for summarizing and articulating that really well, Melina. That's the progression of a new product launch. But imagine if you're someone like Nabisco, right? They have so many cookies, EPG brands. If you want to get mass adoption of a new type of thing just so you can add more revenue, frankly, option A would be, I want to come out with a cookie that's Matcha tea based, for instance. Okay. Early adopters might jump all over it, but then you've got the middle and the late adopters. Big question mark. But if you immediately off the jump, go, now, I don't want to go after early adopters. I want to go big. I want the world. I want as many consumers I can. Then you literally sandwich it in an Oreo cookie. So you've got instead of the classic white filling, you do the Matcha filling. Then you've got the safeness, which is the familiarity with Oreos, and you got the newness literally sandwiched together into a new product launch that is aimed at mass adoption.

I had, I think it was a New York Times article. I'm not 100% sure, but I've had this saved in my, like, topic ideas, something I want to do something about for like months that has just been sitting there. And it was a, like, why Oreo continues to come out with these new flavors, even though the special flavors don't necessarily sell all that well. But there's also this hearing about the Matcha Oreo will give you some, like, they're back on your radar. So I guess we're getting some availability bias there. Right? To where you're thinking about them. People are talking about it makes you go, I could use some Oreos. Right? Yeah, Maybe you went into the aisle thinking about Matcha ones that you were maybe going to try it, but you went like, I'm just going to stick with my tried and true, the things I like. So I'm so glad that you brought up Oreos so we could talk about it.

There's also a second psychological experience happening in that. Right. So Oreo launching new products or new flavors or collabs even. Right. Here's the other thing. It also speaks to the neuroscience of attention. So attention is based on the brain's statistical learning tendency. Right. Our brains are always taking an account and picking up on patterns. Many times these patterns exist and sometimes they don't. Your brains pick up patterns anyways, like looking at the cloud and looks like a rabbit, for instance. Right. Statistical learning, when you've known Oreos for decades. It's really hard for Oreo to break through that statistical learning pattern of your brain. Attention is breaking that statistical pattern. So for Oreo to get attention from consumers who already know a lot about Oreos, hey, a really crazy flavor might do exactly that. And it absolutely does. Now, ultimately, only Oreo would know how much sales and how many, you know, what the brand lift is. The other online listening platforms. But ultimately, scientifically, that's a test that I would run 10 out of 10 times if my goal was to grab attention for the Oreo brand. Even if people don't actually buy the Matcha cookie Oreo, their eyes are going to perk up. It's going to break that pattern and hence gather attention.

Okay, well, I'm super glad that you brought up pattern recognition because I had someone in. So in my global community of people with interest in behavioral science, behavioral economics, the be Thoughtful revolution, we had someone ask a question about patterns. His name is Julian. And I'm gonna see. I'm gonna. It's kind of lengthy, but I'm gonna read it because I think it is fitting and we'll see if you have an answer for this. Okay, so he says there's a question about pattern recognition. Appears as if we like patterns and gain pleasure out of accurately recognizing patterns. Think about the pleasure we gain out of knowing our favorite song or mastering a Guitar Hero riff or accurately guessing what will happen in the film, reflecting on it. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense to see patterns. If we see a particular bush and build the association that the bush usually has juicy berries on it. Building the association of bush equals reward is going to be a good thing. I see this directly being associated with the dopamine serotonin loop and how habits form. But why is it that we get pleasure out of pattern recognition even without a direct reward? For example, many computer games provide pleasure as you begin to recognize and master patterns but offer no real reward. It's as if simply the pattern recognition itself is what causes the pleasure.

There's many. I mean, in that deceptively simple few sentences, there's many things happening.

I know.

One of the things is unpredictability in of itself gives you a bigger hit of dopamine, right? So although we might find Sudoku puzzles or. Or what have you rewarding. Cause we're figuring it out. Unpredictability really hits the reward center a lot harder. So that's one. That's one thing that. That is sort of. It's an assumption that isn't quite clear in that question. And that we can, you know, if Julian was here, we can nerd out on that, especially when Matt's around. Right? Yeah, but that's one of those things is like, I want to make sure we're clear on that. And the brain's pattern seeking behavior primarily happens behind the scenes. It just drives a lot of what we do. Right. It drives our attention, it drives our sense of association, which ultimately is what brands do. Right. A brand is an association created via neural networks over time. Right. So it is because of that attention seeking behavior we crave a Corona on a beach instead of a Heineken. It's why Coca Cola equals happiness. All those associations have been intricately created by brands over the years. And that's because our brain is picking up on that. So we do have the statistical learning to thank for those things. But the rest of that question probably requires a deeper dive. And I have to read it because like I said, it was deceptively simple, but it's actually way more dense than we might give it credit for.

Yes, for sure. Well, and we've been talking about having you and Matt come in and chat with the group inside the Be Thoughtful Revolution, which might happen before this episode releases. We'll figure it all out, but I'll make sure that Julian knows in advance and give him the heads up. But I think like you're saying, even that familiarity bias and or mere exposure effect as we're talking about here is a key in there to where it feels like you have an achievement of, oh, I know how to do this. Right. So you weren't necessarily expecting it to come back. Like you said, getting some of that dopamine for that unexpected reward makes you a little bit happy. And then you feel like you can be faster this time, which our brains like to be better than they were before. So we get a little confidence boost and we feel good about it, but it doesn't happen every time. So then we still have anticipation. Right. There's just like a lot of stuff going on.

There is. And then there's the evolutionary biologist angle as well. Right. We are biologically programmed. Let's put it this way. It's called the pursuit of happiness for a reason. It's the pursuit that gives us the most amount of pleasure, not the achievement of happiness. It's because biologically we're programmed to want more mates. And if we were just happy, then we wouldn't procreate. And again, the rabbit hole goes deeper yet again. But the evolutionary biologist perspective is also so interesting. And it's, you know, it's shown time and time again. It's unpredictability. We're programmed to feel more of a reward, which is a mechanism for repeating that behavior no matter how unpredictable it may be. And to go back to the video game examples that Julian gave so many of these video games are 100% to specific types of games based on unpredictability. Even games that were traditionally not designed for that are now designed for that. I'm not a big gamer, so any gamers in the audience, forgive me if I sound like a parent trying to reset a video game. But adventure games and shooting games, like 20 years ago, the dooms of the world and whatever else did not have unpredictability as part of the design element. Today Call of Duty for instance, one of the most downloaded games in 2020, Warzone, what they have is this loot system that you don't know what you're going to get when you open up a box, for instance. And this is something that is taken from role playing games from, from also back in the day. But they, they had sort of triangulated on this earlier is like, hey, you're whatever game it is and you might open this box and it might be a golden ax, that's super rare or it might just be another would thing. Right. And that unpredictability is what keeps people coming back so it increases engagement. And now they're using that across, you know, NBA Soccer, FIFA, NFL. They're using that game mechanic across the board in genres of games that we've never seen historically. It's because unpredictability works to increase engagement.

Well, even just going back for board games, Monopoly with the chance cards, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. Or the community chest, you know, I might have to pay money, I might get some money, I don't know.

Yeah, look, we can even pick something that's less obscure, right? We can pick whatever your favorite social media app is. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. It is the unpredictability on what's going to come up in the feed next that keeps us from pulling away from it, right? Pinterest, same thing. And we'd be silly to think that that's not designed. But again, they've ab tested their way to understanding that. Some of us are old enough to know that Facebook was chronological, some of us are old enough to know that Facebook existed before there was a timeline, let alone ig, all the other things. And absolutely, you can't even sort your Facebook stream on your mobile phone by chronological order. Good luck. Can't do it. Right. And even if you scroll, you can right now, if you're listening, you can pause the podcast and open up your Facebook or IG app, scroll down maybe five seconds, go back up, and it'll change the order of things that are there. Because if you can figure out what's going to come next, you are not going to be on the app that much. And that's. That's the engagement piece I'm using quotes. The engagement piece. Right. Engagement 2.0 is only a couple steps away from compulsive behavior. And that's why, you know, you've heard some of these apps come under fire for that.

Yeah. Well, even, I mean, bringing it back to the new versus safe. So I remember when, like you said, when Facebook launched the timeline and people were livid, like, oh, yeah, I hate this. This is the worst thing ever. But they changed a lot when they came out with the timeline. That was a big difference. But it wasn't so much that you lost everything, you know, and all the familiarity was gone. So to make it so that you would be okay with the newness, you needed some time to adapt. And they, like you said, they've made it where for a long time you could switch back and see or, you know, you could look at your timeline in chronological order, but it was still in the timeline format for people that didn't like that. So, like you're saying potentially going back to the, you know, the early adopters were able to just be like, this is new and different. I'm so excited. I'm going to take whatever they recommended for me. Huzzah.

Right?

But the people that were maybe, like, not quite ready could revert back on their own if they wanted to not take the default option. Feel like they have some control there. And then as it starts to phase out, then you just, like, forget. I'm sure there was a system of Facebook resetting you each time you came in to not be chronological to get you more used to it to where you eventually just sort of forget what's going on. And now we're just all used to it. When I did the episode on Familiarity Bias, saying, like, even the things like, today's new thing that you hate is replacing something that was new once that you hated then.

Yeah. And you throw the generation in there. Exactly right. Like, oh, no, the radio is evil, Rock and roll is evil. TVs evil, video games are evil. Mobile phones are, you know, like, every generation has their New thing to dislike. Absolutely.

Yeah. So if you were going to talk about anything else, if you think about from either something that's in the book that you don't get to talk about very much, or maybe things that that didn't make the book, or some stuff you've been really excited about since the book came out, like, this is your man. I really jamming on this right now. What would you want to share? What's something interesting that you like to talk about?

Yeah, I think here. Let's start. I have one thing I'd like to share with the marketers in the audience, one for the consumers who are not professional marketers. So we'll start with the consumers first. And again, I don't like the word consumers. It's kind of cult. We're humans. So really it's just humans who are not professional marketers. There's been a lot of talk recently about data science and it being used unethically. And inevitably you learn about data science and you realize, well, the reason why data science is so popular is because it can tell us a lot about behavior, it can help us predict behavior, and sometimes it can help us model behavior. And one of the things that I feel like does not get talked about enough, even with, you know, the great hack and the social network and that social network, social dilemma documentary, is there wasn't really a solution. It was, you know, you ever hear the old thing, don't bring just a problem once you have a solution. And I would like to pose a solution to that specific narrative that I think is going to get only more popular over the next few years. I think it's easy and it's perhaps correct to point a finger at a lot of these tech companies who are using data science to predict and model behavior. But one thing that does not get talked about enough is the role that users play in that. And it is not something that we really got to get into in the book. The book was written for consumers to just better understand themselves. It wasn't, you know, there aren't heavy tactics in there because we didn't want to just speak to marketers. If anything, we wanted to speak to everyday people so that way they better understand themselves. And this is one thing we didn't get to cover. As much as we want to point a finger at companies who are using digital products to model behavior, we also have to look at ourselves. These business models that are being criticized, rightfully as it may be, for being, for exploiting. They exist because us as consumers, as users, as humans who use these products, we don't want to pay. So until we decide to kick our addiction to free, it's going to be really hard to kick our addiction to Instagram. So that's the one thing is think of it as organic food. 20 years ago wasn't really a thing until not only did we ask for it, but we also decided to pay a premium for it. So it's a reflection on us as a culture who likes free. I'm sure you put out all this content. I mean, you're not charging a penny for your podcast and you're doing it for free. And as consumers, we can get entitled sometimes, and we've been entitled for so long that we finally realized, oh man, now we need to fix what we've done. We have a role to play in this. It's not until you actually say you're going to pay for Facebook or WhatsApp that it'll be free. And if you don't want to pay for Facebook or WhatsApp objectively, then that's the world you've created and you can't complain about it. They're not nonprofits, Right? So continue criticizing them. Absolutely. That's how we can change public policy. But we can't expect them to be nonprofits. We have to also play a role in that. So that's my first piece to consumers. The second piece to marketers is this. The neuroscience. The neuromarketing genie is out of the bottle. It has been for a little bit. However, it is still sitting inside the Fortune 500 consumer facing companies. And one of the things that we are as marketers, like I said earlier, we are students of human behavior. So in many ways, we owe it to our profession to understand behavior better. And to take it one step further, we owe it to our profession to understand it better so we have a better relationship with our consumers. And we don't have that right now. Just imagine the dissonance that people have with companies that make products that we use every single day. And yet here we are criticizing them. That's because a lot of marketers stumbled across this behavior pattern and created a product around it without really understanding the psychological underpinnings until after they're already a multi billion dollar company. So my second call to action is for the marketers out there to understand neuroscience and psychology throughout the entire marketing process, so that way we can create better products. Let's be honest, that's what makes marketers proud of what they do. Better brands, better products, better experiences. And for consumers to also Have a higher level of trust and also be more charmed and enchanted by the products and brands and experiences we create. And you can't do that unless you understand the neuroscience behind all of this, right?

Yeah. It's taking those things that the science didn't exist when Monopoly came out to have this example of the chance card, to know why the chance card was such an important piece of the process of playing the game of Monopoly. But now that we understand what's going on in the brain and why that is useful, it's best to be thoughtful and have some awareness about these underlying principles and what's there as you're developing your products, your services, your brands so that you can be in that ethical integrity as you're creating things, having that level of awareness while building something consumers want. You know, all the balance there together.

All the balance, absolutely. We're not going to. The answer to bad marketing is in no marketing. Matt and I say that all the time. Like it, it's better marketing. And neuroscience is this way to do it.

Yeah, yeah. Marketing being marketers from the beginning, it's. There are many fields where people say things are inherently bad but like you said to TV and whatever, all the new things when they were first new were, were bad or scary. But marketing helps this to get to where we have awareness of products and things that help us and our whole lives are built around that convenience and things that we're able to do and achieve.

So absolutely, yeah.

We have a responsibility as marketers to make sure we're doing this all ethically. And I like that you brought in that consumer piece too, so thank you for that. So as we wrap up here for everyone who wants to know more and learn about where to get in contact with you and you've talked about some of the, you know, the course you do through boot camp at Pop Neuro and the book, you know what's the best way to learn more more about you and get in contact.

Popneuro.com it's got links to the book in there. It also has links to the bootcamp, the three day bootcamp to do. And we also have an on demand prerecorded bootcamp. So if you can't commit like Melina were talking about the intense three day, that's fine. You can take it at your own pace. And it's prerecorded, same exact content. It's just not live and all the value that comes out alive. And if you're not a marketer, check out the book. Each chapter was written to feel like its own mini book and each chapter was written so that you can. Hopefully the biggest compliment you could ever give us is, hey, I understood myself better through my purchase behavior because I read Blindsight. Because that is, that was our end goal. So yes, popnero.com or just go to Amazon and type in Blindside.

Awesome. We will of course have links for those in the show notes too to make it nice and easy. And I will say I do like the format of the book that you tackle some big questions per chapter, but they're, they're not hefty feeling. For something that's from a neuroscientist and people teaching neuromarketing and whatnot, you might be afraid that it's going to be big scary words that make you have to go do a lot more reading. It's very conversational. Talk a lot about pop culture and Star wars and popular comedians and yeah.

So much in there and Drake and stand up comedy and all sorts of fun stuff in there. Yeah, yeah.

Yes, I know. I had the, when I was reading and it said the rereading this chapter like we were saying and it had the call me maybe reference. I was like, oh great, that's going to be stuck in my head forever now. So thanks for that.

Done. And our job is done. Yeah, our job is done.

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Prince, for joining me on the show. It's been just so much fun chatting with you and I'm sure everyone listening enjoyed it as well. So, so thanks so much.

Of course. Thank you for having me. Take care, Melina.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about why we like the things we like today? For me, I really love and appreciate how well Prince broke down something as complex as liking, which many of us would say and believe is dependent upon the individual and nearly impossible to measure and showed that there really is a science to it. I refer back to this conversation and the balance between novelty and nostalgia. Often when working with clients, speaking on a stage and connecting with people. With my students, it is so important for every brand to keep in mind. You don't want to be too novel because it'll be scary for people. Most people won't be ready yet and they'll prefer to wait for the rest of the herd, which isn't good for you, but you don't want to be too stale either. You need some novelty to keep people interested. And coming back, you need people to remember you and think of you to have a reason to engage with you. I love the example of Oreo and all their wacky flavors. There's an article for you in the Show Notes if you want to read more. But in their case, the goal of those flavors isn't necessarily for you to eat or buy them. They might just be there to keep Oreo top of mind for you to get them press and a reason to be talked about, potentially without having to pay for expensive ads, but instead leveraging some earned media and social chatter, which is a super smart strategy. This is why it's so important to know your own goals of what you want someone to do. What's the point of this thing? How will you know when you've achieved the goal? What are those small steps in the process and how are you nudging the customer along? This is such a key strategy that can show you why it doesn't matter what others are doing and why you don't need to be keeping up with the Joneses all the time. If they have different goals than you, this could be a really bad strategy. Knowing what you need, how people like to be communicated to, and yes, why they like the things they like, and let all that inform the decisions you make and how you present your information is key to anything you're doing in business. And really, when you're looking to be applying behavioral economics into the work you do.

This is like all of what I was just talking about really is the.

Foundation of my first book, what your customer wants and can't tell you. There is of course a link for you to that in the Show Notes, as well as to Prince's book Blind site, that Oreo article, other related past episodes, a timestamp summary of this conversation, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 344.

And just like that.

Episode 344 on why we like the things we like with Prince Gumin is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Dr. Paul Bloom to talk about his book Psych. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Another until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.

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.