404. Navigating the Customer Journey: Insights from Jennifer Clinehens (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 404 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is all about choice hacking with Jennifer Kleinhens. 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 a refresh of my conversation with Jennifer Kleinhens, author of Choice Hacking. How does one hack a choice? Is a choice even hackable to begin with? And if it is, why would you want to? Of course, that is all the focus of my conversation with Jennifer Kleinhens here today. We dig in on customer experience and how even though we want it to be this linear process where people do A and then B and then C, it doesn't really work that way. So how do you map a messy world with lots of moments and touch points so that it can be high value for your customers and have a process for your internal teams? We will talk about all of that and more here today as we dig into understanding choices. But value of the peak end rule, why so much of customer experience is built on psychology and more. Don't forget that there are links for everything, including my top related past episodes, books and articles all waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode which are found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 404. All right, let's talk about choice hacking. Jennifer Kleinhans, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely. So excited to be talking to you, talking about choice hacking, talking about this space between behavioral science and experience, which I know I get a lot of questions about. Listeners want to know where's the intersection? How does it come together? And so I'm excited to help people learn more about that today. If you can give a little bit of a background of, you know, know how you got here, what do you do? How did the behavioral science come in? Tell us about your. Your own personal journey.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I'm one of these people. I think like many people in sort of my line of work and experience, design, marketing, advertising, have sort of a varied background. Interestingly, I was an entrepreneur and a classical violinist for about 15 years and, you know, very different.

Right.

But I think it's interesting because coming into business and kind of thinking about like how things are designed or whatever. I've always kind of looked at it through that person first lens, so looking through the eyes of a customer because for me so long I was kind of on the outside looking in. So it was a really good perspective to kind of come into the business. But yeah, I mean I've worked on many different brands. I've been lucky enough to work on companies like AT&T, McDonald's, Adidas, both client side and on the other side and sort of ad agency land and you know, also across many countries as well. So I think I, I looked it up at some point. I think I had worked on a brand on every continent except Antarctica, maybe the ones nobody, only the penguins live on. How about that? Yeah, but yeah, so it kind of a mixed bag for me for the background, it's a little bit of innovation, a little bit of like, you know, product design, a little bit of experience design and a little bit of marketing and advertising. I went to advertising school at the VCU Brand center, which is a very well known sort of creative program and did creative brand management again, I think another case of sort of looking from the outside in. Eventually got an MBA at Emory University. But a lot of the work I've been doing lately here in Europe, in London has been about the intersection between, I'll call it behavioral science and psychology, a little bit of behavioral economics. It's a little bit of a mixed bag. And in terms of taking those principles and applying them to experience design and what I mean by experience design is basically any touch point a customer would interact with in an experience. So that could be a poster I see outside a store, it could be using the mobile app while I'm in a store, it could be going on e commerce website. So any of those touch points, I've got to think about the different ways that we can sort of use behavioral science to in an ethical way, get customers to do what we want them to do. I think the other piece of that, and we'll probably talk about this a little bit later, is the customer journey management. So it's like looking at that entire process of every interaction a customer is going to have with a business or a brand and thinking about how not just like in the points where we nudge, but across the whole consistent experience, like how are we using these different behavioral science or behavioral economics principles.

Right. And so if you were going to maybe walk through, I would love to have an example. And knowing that some of these, when we're talking about big brand names where you're able to say a couple. But no, you're not able to say. When I did the project for X, we were looking at this. But if you have things you're able to share, maybe an example that was in the book or something that you've done there.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's an. It's an interesting one in terms of kind of talking about like specific work that we do. Because like you were saying, I mean, I think it's. It's a matter of. There's a lot of experimentation that happens as well when you're working with big businesses and a lot of stuff doesn't really see the light of day. But that's a good thing, right? Because having worked in kind of corporate innovation for several, several years as well, you know, you don't want every idea to kind of see the light of day. But I think the beautiful thing is, like, I've been able to work with these great brands across lots of different countries and they're willing to sort of take on some of these principles and try things out and sort of optimize stuff as it's kind of out there. Probably the number, well, maybe it's tied. But one of the big things that I tend to do is framing on touch points. So that I'll just use the example of like a poster in a store. Right now, thankfully, I think we live in a world where, in a retail environment when we can all kind of return to normal in the retail environment. Digital signage has become really what everybody's doing now. You don't live in a world where you put out a poster and you hope. I hope this works. I don't know if I'm going to measure it, though. But when it's digital, you can change it on the fly. You can change what's on the poster, you can change when people see it. You can tie it up with a mobile app, maybe. I'm walking past a store and I get a little notification that says, hey, we noticed that you're using our loyalty program and you only need to buy one more of our widgets to get a free widget. So why don't you come on in and we'll see what we see and then sort of tying those things together. So it's been a lot of work sort of in the intersection of touchpoints as well. So, yes, you want to frame something in a certain way. You want to see what kind of reaction you get. You want to test it and then you want to see if you can roll it kind of wide. But then I also think it's a matter of connecting those things. Like the example I just used of mobile apps and digital posters in a store, that's a good example of they're better together. And it's not just one plus one is two, it's one plus one can be three.

Right.

If we manage, I think the behavioral science part of it, as well as right place, right time, right message, and then also sort of combining it with the understanding of a customer journey.

Yeah. The way that I have been explaining it and how I talk about this sort of process in my own book and in different areas is this thinking about small steps and knowing this, like, everything matters and that you need to break it down to this, like, minutia that seems so much more in depth than you would need to look at. And I've given the example a lot of a direct mail piece. And so the typical mindset would be like you were saying about the poster is, well, we send it and then they buy from us. Ta da. Right. Like that's the journey. Like we sent the mailer and then they buy. That's the journey. And where it's. Actually there are a lot of steps with the direct mail piece itself where you have to be cognizant of the flow of what's happening. So thinking through, you know, step one is that I'm into. I stop and look at it enough.

Right.

That which is the biggest hurdle to overcome. And that can be done by accomplishing, you know, maybe it's a different texture on the piece that they're holding, or an interesting shape or it's just calling your attention in the imagery. And then it's enough to read the point below or to notice the image that's on it. And then you care enough to turn it over and see the other side and try to look and see where it came from. And then they have to go cross over to a new medium, which we know is one of the really difficult points where people lose a lot of potential customers. So then I pull out my phone and I don't get distracted by Instagram when I want to go type in the URL to learn more. And then I have to get to the form and then I have to fill in each of the boxes and not get bored and want to leave and still care enough. And then I have to submit to then have you follow up with me. Like, there's a lot that happens in that process. And if you're not thinking about what each moment is getting the person to do, why it matters and what's next in that little tiny. You can only do one thing. What's next. The brands that do that and think about it just have a huge advantage over all their competitors.

Yeah, I'd agree. And I think the other complicated thing about it, though, is like, you know, when you design a customer journey, like, in general, you would use like a customer journey map, which I don't know how familiar people listening to this would be with what a customer journey map is, but basically it's a visual representation of what the customer journey is, and an emotional journey is a part of that. But interestingly, you know, it's a linear journey on the. On the page or on the wall or wherever you put it. But in real life, it's not like in real life, Maybe I get 10 emails and then maybe I go to the website, but then I forgot and I put something in my cart and I got an email, but I forgot to go back and check it, and then it's gone and I have to start all over. It's very messy. So that's the other thing to kind of take into account is like, yes, we have this beautiful picture of what the customer journey should be and what those levers we should pull at every moment. But then in the back of your mind, you also have to be really pragmatic, which I have to say is one thing that I really enjoy about applying behavioral science to customer experiences and businesses is that pragmatic side is the experimentation side even to say, like, we experimented with it, it was successful, but the people we experimented with, whatever this particular mechanic is, is that a big representation of our customer base? Is this a small portion? Is that okay, is this maybe just a geographic location? All these different things? I think you have to kind of bear in mind. So it's not an exact science, it's not a silver bullet. But I think the closer we can get to sort of designing touchpoints and customer communications with a scientific, in quotation marks, scientific approach, or at least a scientific foundation to apply all this, like, amazing research to, you know, the real world, for lack of a better term, I think the better.

Yeah, well, and that's definitely. Context is key. That's what matters. And where you're talking about the person who is going to see the message that in the digital ad that is about your one widget away versus a person that's there for the first time, you want to make sure that they're seeing different things and they need to get the message that's Right. For them. And then you think like further back and back and back in the journey and forward. Having to be knowing what has happened and what you want to happen or what's best for them along the path. So you talked a little bit about the customer journey. I know while most of the listeners potentially have some foundation in that or an awareness would love to hear, you obviously have a much deeper level of expertise in the space. So if you have, what are your key insights, you know, when you think about a journey, what are some maybe common pitfalls and like thinking about if it. Hopefully it ties in with some of the brain science stuff, but just interesting nonetheless.

Yeah, I mean, I think to me, from a macro level, the number one thing that brands seem to get either not at all or they seem to get wrong is peak end and applying peak end across a customer journey. So I talked a little bit about the emotional journey component of a customer journey map, which to me is really like the secret sauce. I do think that in and of itself can be a little problematic because depending on the methodology of how you build that emotional journey. Are you asking people, for instance, in which we know is probably not the best way to figure out where they're having the hardest time or where the end of that experience might be. So that's one portion of it. I think in an ideal world, it's autonomic. It's beyond just asking them what they think because as we know, it's not the right way to go about it. But again, putting the pragmatic hat on, sometimes you have to ask, sometimes you have to observe, sometimes you have to use your expert knowledge to extrapolate a little bit. But I think it's not being aware of something like peak end and how on the surface, I think it's very simple to apply to a customer experience, like, oh, the peak and the end where people get angry at us and then when they walk out the door. But interestingly, I think a lot of brands get the ending wrong. I think they don't know where their real ending is, so. Oh, good.

I was gonna say tell us more.

Yeah, okay, good.

Yeah. So expand, please. Please share.

I'll give you two examples. One, that is a personal example. So I'm going to use my sample size of one here, and I'm going to drag one of my favorite companies because honestly, like, I love them to death, but they have a delivery partner who for whatever reason cannot get their stuff straight. And I won't name the delivery partner, but Lululemon. I love Lululemon. So much like, I'm sorry. That's. That's me.

No apologies necessary. We can. We love all our brands for various reasons.

Yeah, totally. So I love, you know, Lululemon, and I do, like, order every once in a while, but for whatever reason. And I'm talking about Europe as well, so anybody in America is like, oh, they're great. Yeah, it's a different situation. But, yeah, I just ordered, like, some yoga pants. And I swear they could not find. They. They would park their truck in front of our house and not be able to find where we were. They would say that they called, they had not called. They. You know, it was just like a monstrous experience. And so in the brand's mind, they probably ended their experience when I bought the yoga pants.

Right?

That's it. Oh, we're done with you. But in actual fact, they handed off one of the most important parts of their customer experience to a third party who was not doing a good job. And I think they just don't realize a lot of times this is brands in general, that that last mile that really like what I call the true ending is so critical, and in so many ways, people just will hand it off to somebody. They're a partner with a delivery partner, a fulfillment partner. Places where I'm not expecting them to manage every single little bit of the customer experience, but I think it pays to just make sure that that last little bit is good. I'll give you an example of a brand. It's a little bit of an old example. I believe it is in the book as well. I was just talking about it the other day with somebody and actually on my podcast, on the Choice acting podcast, and that is Disney. So Disneyland Disney World. I don't think I need to tell anybody on this podcast that they are amazing. They totally get technology, the customer experience. It's all connected. Basically, we love Disney in Disneyland. So this is way back, I believe, in the 70s or the 80s, they figured out that people's ending of their experience was not when they walked out the gates. So you didn't go to Disneyland and have a whole thing. Actually, the ending was you got home back in the old days, you developed the film of the pictures that you took, and then you looked at the pictures and you went, oh, yeah, I remember that. Or, oh, God, I remember that fight we got into. It was terrible. And so actually, Disney spent quite a bit of time and they worked with Kodak and they figured out what colors in the park would look the best, the most vivid in the photos. And so then after working with Kodak to figure out what the end would look like, the actual photo, they painted the park in these colors. So the paths in the park were a very specific color. Because then you take a photo, then it's super vibrant. And then all of a sudden, because the very end of your experience is even better, even more exciting, looks even more picturesque, all of a sudden, your memory of the time you spent at Disneyland is even better. Because as we know, that's how you're constructing the memory. It's not from every single moment that you had. It's that emotional peak and then that true ending.

Well, smart Disney is just the Paramount.

It's like cyclically good.

Yeah, there's always a great example from Disney, but this is the. So Peter Steidl, who wrote neurobranding, has the quote of a brand is a memory which is so. So just resonates across all of it. And you think about every touch point, every experience, and how that ties in with the brain. It shows why the behavioral science is such an important infusion within those experience journeys. Because as much as it would be nice, like you said, to have the linear journey and the things happen in a vacuum exactly the way that we want them to happen in the perfect moment, and this is everything that should go along the way, it just doesn't work like that. And so understanding those, you know, the nudge of where's the error that we can be expecting and what feedback do we give to keep people within the, you know, do the bumpers or whatever on bowling to keep people down the lane or on the way. That can really help. But you have to think through the things all the way from the beginning, you know, even from putting your advertisement on as a commercial on a show that's talking about something. I love Mad Men feel like it's kind of. For us marketing and advertising folk, it's such an interesting thing to watch that show and see how they talk through the logic of it. I remember where they're just starting to get into television and, you know, Harry's talking about all of what they're going to be doing, and he's having to watch the program, read all the scripts to know what's going to be happening right before the commercial break to make sure that you don't have this horrible graphic scene before your commercial for Heinz.

Beans or whatever it is.

Right? Yes. Yeah. Heinz Beans. That was a big one that they had there in the Mad Men world. So. Yeah. And so knowing, or if somebody's in the hospital, then you don't have the Lucky Strike commercial come in right after it.

Or you know, some digital media companies might be.

Yeah.

Maybe think about that a little bit.

Right.

Context.

So knowing what somebody saw just before and while you can't control everything, if you don't think about it at all, that's a problem. Yeah, it's not going to be working for you. What are some tips that you would be giving when you work with your own clients or from when you were doing research for the book for discovering that true end. So it's one of those where we look at it now and it's such an obvious like, aha, just like Disney and Kodak. Amazing. Of course that's what you do. But then we look at our own business and go, so exactly how do.

I figure that out?

What is it? What do we.

Yeah, well, I think there's a few different ways that you can, you can kind of look for that true end. Right. And to be honest with you, I feel like there are a lot of companies where the low hanging fruit is literally just to talk to you or observe your customers. You may have a situation, maybe you're in a big company or a small startup and maybe the money's not there, maybe the time's not there or maybe just you don't have the chance to kind of get out of the office and actually do the research. Or what is more likely to happen is you've sort of outsourced the research and so you really don't have the knowledge yourself and you haven't really observed, you haven't followed customers all the way to using and sort of recommending your product. So I think that's really the issue is a lot of brands, a lot of companies think they abdicate responsibility. Not consciously, but I think subconsciously they're like, oh, they walk out our doors and maybe they use the product, maybe they don't. But we want them to come back. But they're pretty much out of our hands once they're out of the reach of our brand.

Right.

So maybe we can talk to them on social media, maybe we play some digital marketing. But basically in terms of customer experience, that's stuff for the creatives to kind of figure out how we want to talk to them. And I think, to be honest with you, part of the issue with finding that true ending I think also has to do, I mean in any size company really with silos, it's part of that. Well, the customer experience team does the own touchpoint, so we do what's in the store, we do what's on the app and then once it kind of gets out into the world, it's again not our responsibility. But I think thinking about the context to your point, about how people are interacting with our brand and a lot of that is out of people's control. So Amazon reviews are a good example. I see a lot of brands that they're getting terrible reviews on Amazon or good reviews or whatever, or on trustpilot or wherever and they're not responding, they're not reaching out to people, they're just kind of letting stuff lie, which I get. I think there's a good example of a brand that does really well with those post purchase pain points and that is in the UK there is a retailer called John Lewis. So I would think of them sort of like as a Nordstrom type. There's like clothes and furniture and they have basically everything, but they dedicate about 8 million pounds a year to what they call goodwill gestures. So this is, I've gone out of the store, I'm waiting for my tv, it gets delivered and there's a scratch on it. Well, I can call up John Lewis. And John Lewis has the authority to basically say like, okay, we'll just send you new tv. You know, they have that budget set aside to do that and as a result they have the highest NPS score on the high street. So of all the big retailers, like they're number one. Now I'm not saying it's only because of that. They do a lot of other stuff really well, but I think they're smart enough to say even if we get it to them, there's a product experience that's happening. It's not our product, but it's still our responsibility. So I think they really have spent the time to kind of think about like, where are we falling down? Honestly, experimentation is just part of that as well. It would surprise me if Walt Disney invented Disneyland and then immediately they figured out, oh, photos are the end of our experience. Right, they're smart, but I don't know if they're that smart. So I think it's a little bit of just trying stuff and seeing how it affects higher level satisfaction scores. That might be CSAT or NPS or whatever. But if you look at the research. So McKinsey did a lot of research around this and that is the brands that measure on a journey level versus just a touchpoint level. So how does my website work? How does this poster work? Do people see what we want them to see? Instead they go One level higher and they start changing things, but then they control for that higher level NPS or CSAT or whatever, they actually have much more value at the end of the day because they get. It's like, well, we may not know. We may think we know where the peaks and the ends are, but we may not know. Exactly. So let's figure it out. And I think once you kind of figure it out, you'll see it reflected much more heavily in those sort of metrics.

Yeah, well. And then I know you didn't necessarily say the words, but I feel like you were talking a bit about some of the surprise and delight piece as well with the retailer. And while it doesn't seem like having the saying that you'll just send a new TV isn't like, is that a surprise or a delight? And like, maybe it becomes expected once you're at the, like you said, Nordstrom and whatnot, that you just assume that people will do what you're wanting. But the. When it comes in and you're dreading that, you have to call. If you think about the mindset that someone's in and they're thinking, oh, this is going to be such a hassle, are they going to believe me? Are they going to think I did that? And you say, oh, no problem, we'll take care of it and get it out to you as quickly as possible. It is a delight of a moment that can create a new peak that. Where it could have been a really bad end. But if you're able to extend that experience a little bit further, it just helps with the overall brand memory, you know, to bring it back to what we were saying there a moment ago. I think, I think it's purple, the mattress company, where it's one of the ones that they send them out through the. That you get your, you know, mattress in the mailbox sort of a situation. And I'll look it up after to see that I'm attributing it to the right company. But one of these, they have it set up where sometimes people order the wrong size of mattress or they, you know, it comes in and it's not a fit for them. And that you would think when you order something like a mattress that came in the mail, how do you get it back? If I ordered the wrong thing.

This is your mattress now.

Now, yeah. Now that it's unrolled and is like puffed up, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this thing. And so what I've heard with this Is, you know, if you have that, it comes in, it's the wrong one, or, you know, you got the wrong size, they say, no problem, we'll go ahead and get the new one out to you. And what we typically will do is we donate those to a local homeless shelter or halfway type house or something. Are you okay if we send someone to pick that up at no charge and donate it on your behalf? So it takes care of the next problem of what the heck do I do with this extra mattress that I don't need? And the new one is coming and on its way out, and you get the goodwill feeling and it says something nice about the brand. There are so many amazing things that happen in that. And I'm sure, again, they have a budget set aside to don those mattresses that aren't a fit, but you don't have it where people are going to abuse it and say, well, I'm going to order four extra mattresses, so they have to donate them. All right. That's silly. People aren't. I mean, maybe someone did that once, but, you know, it's not over the top something that people are doing. So I think it's just such a good benefit for the brand. And again, thinking through all those moments in the experience and where there could be problems and frustrations and turning it into this really great shareable moment and story that you Then it ties into those emotional memory spots in the brain and you have just a different association with that brand.

Yeah, totally. I mean, I think to that point, you want to talk about surprise and delight, it's kind of the opposite. It's that a lot of brands, I feel like, get surprised by the fact that, oh, my God, did someone. This product might not work. It might be the wrong size or the wrong color. Like, what do I do?

Oh, no, your fault. You should have figured it out in advance. You didn't measure.

Yeah, exactly. Like, so they really. I think a lot of brands would be really. It would pay off for them big time if they would just spend a little time, like, map a journey. And again, I think knowing it's an iterative process, but like not being surprised by these moments of pain, especially when you get to the end of the experience and it's like, well, some brands will be like, well, I have the money. My interaction with you is done. I have what I want. But they haven't gone that a little extra mile to think, oh, well, if I can just, you know, like, I think Zappos is a great example. They built a whole Business on their return policy.

Right.

And there's many businesses that can do that, like purple, as you were mentioning. But yeah, it's just going that little bit extra and saying is, is that really the end? It's still our responsibility having some ownership over that.

Right. Well. And so we've talked about several concepts of behavioral science as we've been going through some of. I have notes about nudges, priming, framing, the peak end rule, surprise and delight. All of those have episodes of the Brainy Business podcast already. They'll be linked in the show Notes. Do you have any other favorite concepts that you, whether you always think of or incorporate or that you think are really important when you're looking at this customer mindset journey process?

I would say of all of them, so peak end is my favorite. But the one that I think is the most effective, that is the most overlooked is salience is visual salience. It's this idea of do people even see what we show them? And I think sort of tied up with that is cognitive load simplicity theory. There's a lot of sort of things that would work with salience. So we actually in sort of the day to day use an AI that bypasses kind of asking individual people like what do you see? What do you notice? It's that asking people when they don't really know all the time, most of the time they don't really know what they saw or what they took away or they're only remembering because you asked them by using something that can basically take, whether it's a website or a post or whatever, take a little picture of that and put the heat map on it and help us understand is it red all over? Are people seeing everything and therefore seeing nothing? Is it read in a spot where we don't really care? It's like someone's shoe that we're not selling a shoe. It's just a person standing there. It's a place we don't want them to look. Are they looking there? And I think that is a great and sort of easy way beyond the how are we framing this? What words are we using? What principles are we pulling on? And really it's just like the most base level, most low hanging fruit thing. Do people look at what we want them to look at? Because there's a lot of stats around this. But the one that I cite the most often is that people when they're in a store will look at something for 0.3 seconds. So if you have a poster on a wall, if you have a Menu board up someplace. If you have a display 0.3 seconds, that's nothing. That's just barely a glance. But if you can take a store environment or a website or an app and understand beyond just what people are saying, but what they're really looking at, they're really getting out of that experience as they kind of go through it. I think you're, you know, you're like streets ahead of everybody else.

Right.

Because you understand what people have taken in. But yeah, and again, like I said, I think I'm cheating a little bit because salience is really tied up with a few other ones, things like choice overload, choice paradox, like really thinking about just, do people see what we want them to see?

Right. And I was definitely reminded of when I did the tour of the Human Behavior Lab where I now teach at Texas A and M. And so we have all the, you know, alignment and everything there. But first going in and seeing the equipment and everything and doing the heat maps and the having the eyeglasses where you can have people actually mobile. They have, you know, all the stuff we have in the backpack where you can be doing your brain scanning and your eye tracking and everything while you're walking around a store, see what they're looking at, where they're focusing and really bringing that information back together. And I remember talking with Dr. Palma in that first interview way back, and I think it was episode 33, but where I talked about the overwhelmed brain. And then the next episode was that interview. So it's like perfect timing and what we're talking about here, but we're talking about, you know, if you have an advertisement and you're able to see that there's a lot of attention maybe that's being brought to a dog where you said about a shoe, say, so there's, you know, somebody's walking down the beach and there's a dog. Is that a good thing? You know, in one case, you're like, wow, they're looking at our ad for a really long time. But if you say they got distracted because that dog is too cute and it's actually pulling their attention away from the message and when we remove the dog, it makes it so people are more likely to notice the headline and then they get what they want and the right people stay and more people leave. But understanding this kind of what it means when they look at something and what we need them to be seeing and how that all comes together, that, you know, like you said, the salience is very important.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's that always that two sides of experience. And I think too often you have like a consultancy or an agency focusing on only one side of that coin. And the two sides are effectiveness and their emotion. And if you get into a big ad agency, you know, and the creatives are sort of doing their thing and they're being super creative and it's great. Too often they're too focused on like the emotional side of the coin and not the effectiveness side. That's not every creative, but that's a lot of them. And that's fine because that's their job, that's their specialty. Right? But I think then you look at the other side to the sort of numbers driven quant kind of consultancies and they're looking 100% at effectiveness and not at all at emotion. And as we know from the behavioral science principles, we need both of those things. So I would just encourage brands or agencies or consultancies to have someone who has agency for that, whose responsibility is to make sure both of those things are getting delivered upon and we're delivering on them on the journey level, not just on an individual touch point. Because again, I think it's especially like we work with a lot of specialists, right? We work with researchers, we work with people who are like copywriters or just UX people. They're very focused and they're very specialized and I think that's a great thing. And then too often you get into the client and the client is too generalized. So there has to be some kind of in between because otherwise you're going to get really, I guess, myopic, for lack of a better term, creative that does one thing really, really, really, really well, but doesn't necessarily, in the context of the journey, deliver on everything it needs to deliver on to get customers to act, to encourage them, to motivate them. I mean, at the end of the day, like get them what as a business we need them to do?

Yeah, no, absolutely. If you don't think about the whole high level to make sure, you know who needs to be doing what when and why. So you take that whole, let's look at all of it, put it in the map and then we can be observing, making sure people are doing what we're wanting and needing them to do. Where do we apply the nudges along the way? But you can't be applying the nudges, you can't be looking to see if it's doing what you want it to do. If you didn't know in advance what it's supposed to do, right? Yeah, that's a big piece of the, of the problem. One of my students was talking about how with a big brand that they used to work for and they did some of the stuff with the eye tracking and this is a brand that has 500 different SKU, you know, products. And so they were saying, but we wanted to see people walking through the aisles in the store and it was just not useful. The eye tracking didn't work for us. And say, well, that's not necessarily true. Like when you go in and just say, what do people look at in an eye aisle in a grocery store that is such an overwhelming amount of data that when you're not looking for something, it would be very difficult to dig in on and find some sort of usefulness from it. But if instead you say, we want to know when we transition and use a shiny reflective packaging, does it draw attention in the aisle? So then you can have people go through before it's there and then after it's there and you know, the placement of where it was next to the other toothpaste or whatever it happens to be. And you can see that yes, it drew attention more and people were more likely to buy it. But you're able to actually, when you know what you're looking for, then you can see if you're on track and put in those nudges. Whereas if you just to just say, well, let's just see what happens. There are some points of that in the journey that, where you want that piece to see if there are errors and things. But if you don't know the end game, it's not as effective as it could be.

Yeah, I mean, it's like anything. It's the same thing with a television commercial or a novel or an interior designer. The quality of the work is in the quality of the brief. And if you're not thinking about the brief at all, to your point, if it's just a la la la, I'm just gonna walk through the store and see what I see. That's not really useful. I mean, it's useful for some things, but not really. When you get down to kind of the nitty gritty of changing the things we need to change. And in fact, you talk about the right place to nudge and things like that. I think that's the number one thing we do when we first go in to usually retail experience with the brand is think about where are the points where we need to be nudging to action and where are the points we need to be inspiring people because those are usually not the same places. Almost never are they. Are you inspiring someone with the new fashion of the season? Like, oh, this looks really cool. And they're getting them to imagine what will it be like when I go out and everyone sees me in this great outfit? I mean, that's a different experience, a different emotional experience the customer is going through versus, okay, there's three shirts in front of me and they all have different prices and one of them's on sale. But I don't know. This one looks like the actual choice architecture of how do I choose between things? And actually, to your point about context, if the emotional part is really doing its job and the effective part is really doing its job, then it's easy.

Right?

I'm inspired and it's easy to make a choice. And making choices easy, I think is so, so much of what we do. But yes, like just getting brands, I think to understand, like where to get people ready to buy and where to get people to buy is very much a first step.

Awesome. Well, I think that is great advice. I'm sure everyone's brain is buzzing as we're listening to this and thinking about going and starting to apply within their own businesses. And so for everyone who is wanting to to get their copy of choice hacking to learn more about, you know, we've got the. You mentioned the podcast and I know there's a website tell people what's the best way to get more from you and choice hacking and all that. Goodness, yes.

So you've hit on a couple of big things. So we have our website which is all about education and kind of inspiring people giving examples like, what are all these different principles? A lot of use cases as well. There's a few use cases, there's three use cases that are on based big that are in the book of choice hacking, which you can find anywhere really that, you know, ebooks are sold, Amazon, Kobo, Google, the sort of usual places. You can also download the first chapter for free on choicehacking.com freechapter if you are a little, you know, we'll give you a little reciprocity. Maybe you'll buy the book, maybe you won't maybe read the introduction and not like it too much. But the thing that I would say about the book is I do think it's a good like first start for people to think about a framework to apply this because again, we go back to the journey level and that being so important, the book is really about introducing the choice framework and saying what does a great experience even have to have and what are the behavioral science principles under each one of those requirements? It's really focused on being very tactical, very easy to apply, and even comes with a free course on ChoiceHacking.com that has some other interesting things that would not fit into a book. So there you go.

Awesome. Well, we will definitely have links to buy the book as well as to choicehacking.com freechapter within the show Notes for this week's episode and just want to say again, thank you so much Jennifer for joining me on the show today.

Yeah, thank you for having me. It was great.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about choice hacking today? For me, there are two related things that I think of most when I reflect on this conversation with Jennifer prefer, and that's to understand the true end of your experience and how often it extends beyond where we might think at first glance. Hence the Disneyland example, which now has its own episode on the Brainy Business, a real favorite here on the show. And of course that's my top recommended next episode for you after this one and it's linked for you in the show notes it's so key to remember that brands are memories made up of many, many, many, many micro moments. You need those to all line up consistently in a way that's reinforcing your brand again and again. And I love to share about that.

With people as well when I speak.

About experience that while it may feel like it's overwhelming to consider that everything matters and it goes on and on. Beyond an obvious endpoint, it's also really empowering to remember that even in a negative moment where someone is saying they are done and really upset, it doesn't have to be the end. So often a negative moment like this can be followed by a positive peak. We of course don't want these negative moments to happen, but they're also a great opportunity to infuse some surprise and delight that can create loyalty and increased engagement. Especially these days as so many organizations are looking at including customer or consumer centricity into the work that they're doing. Robert Cialdini has a great story about this with a woman who wanted to play tennis with her kids while staying at a resort and complaining to the staff when there weren't any youth rackets available at the time they wanted to play. You can bet this got turned around in an amazing way. And that episode and story is also linked for you in the show notes so you can hear how it all turned out. Those show notes are waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 404 and just like that, episode 404 with Jennifer Kleinhens is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Roger Hernie, author of Outthink, Outperform. It's going to be a lot of fun fun. You don't want to miss it. 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 them.