Live stream with neuromarketing expert Roger Dooley

The camera here. All right, we'll wait for some people to show up. You can see you're driving here, your Hummer. We've got a few people already showing up. Good morning everyone. We are on our way to south by Southwest. I'm in the car with Roger Dooley. He is a well known expert in neuromarketing. He runs the neuromarketing based blog around. It's a fantastic blog. I read all the RSS posts that come out a few times a week. He's got great content. He's the author of several books on neuromarketing, brain fluence. He's got some fantastic content out there. And so he's also been kind enough to be my host here at sxsw and I've really enjoyed hanging out with him over the past few days. And we are on our way right now to south by to attend some sessions and I thought this might be a perfect opportunity to do a meerkat interview with Miradra as he's driving now. We're going to see, we're going to test your cognitive abilities here of driving and being interviewed at the same time. Roger.

Right. This is probably the definition of distracted driving. I won't be making eye contact. I'll be keeping my eyes on the road.

Okay, good deal. So why don't we kick off some questions. We've got about 53 people watching right now. If you have any questions, post them about anything having to do with neuromarketing, with designing for the mind in terms of crafting your product experience or customer facing experiences. So toss out some questions if you can for Roger here. And in the meantime, I'll ask some of my own questions, namely with the client work that you do and people who are reading your blog and reaching out to you, kind of what's the biggest opportunities that you see that people aren't necessarily addressing?

I think probably the biggest mistake that most marketers make, and I do focus on marketers with not totally digital marketing, but with kind of a skewing in that direction, is focusing only on their products, features and benefits and their price. And that's really addressing just a small part of the potential customer's brain where we know that there's so many non conscious processes, so many decisions that are made based on emotion and rules that are built into the brain more or less. And it's much easier though to design for the obvious. Just let's focus on features. Oh, let's add features to our product instead of trying to figure out what the customers really Want for one, and then addressing some of those emotions.

Yeah. And obviously I couldn't agree more. Big part of why I wrote Hooked and the Hooked model is about helping you figure out what to build, as opposed to just building what the VCs say you should build or what the CEO says you should build, or even what the loudest customer says you should build. Sometimes it's better to back up, take a break, and figure out what framework, what model are we using that justifies why we should build what we're building? What effect will it have based on something more than just a gut feeling? So is there a framework or a model or a heuristic perhaps that you say might be the most useful in your work? Like what comes up all the time.

In terms of what?

In terms of designing. Like how can a product manager or designer filter out what they should build and what they should not build? What's a good way to filter out?

Well, you know, my favorite filter is kind of prosaic. It would be a B testing where you can, you know, you need to have some ideas of what you think are going to work. And these kinds be ideas that are product based. But they could also be, is it better to have an expert endorsement for my product or show how many thousands of users I have for this product? And you can get expert opinions from conversion experts, from psychologists, whatever, but you won't really know until you test it. And there are no best practices that really work.

So where do you start? We have a question here. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. By the way, we've got 68 people. Thank you for your retweets. That's fantastic. We can get more people in discussion.

I'm going to interject a commercial for Austin here. We have driven almost to the outskirts of downtown during rush hour and have not gotten stuck in traffic.

That is awesome.

I promised that we'd get stuck in traffic so we could work on this interview. But we're breezing into downtown on the first day of south by Southwest.

Right. That's fantastic. So we have a question here. So one question we have from Darren is where does a team start with neuromarketing?

Read some blog posts and read a book or two on the topic.

Right. Start with neurosciencemarketing.com.

Right? Right. Yeah. And then of course, your site has great insights. Too near, particularly for apps and software people and website people. So, you know, that's, that's a start. If there's one portion of neuromarketing is the sort of technical neuromarketing that involves actually running various kinds of tests on your potential customers to see how they react to your ads and your product. And these could be like eeg brainwave measurement. It could be fmri, that's not real common, but it's getting more common. It could be as simple as something like web based facial coding, looking at people's fleeting emotional expressions via webcam. And typically that's been the province of big brands. But now the prices are coming down to the point where even smaller companies and smaller brands can, can do that. But what I try and do a lot is focus on not using those tools, but getting the understanding from some of these tools of neuroscience and behavior research and developing, if not rules, at least starting points for people who don't have the budget to go out and test everything at the cost of thousands and thousands of dollars per test.

Hmm, I see. And is there a. By the way, thanks for posting the link. We've got Lovelpaton who posted your link there. That's, That's Roger's blog, neurosciencemarketing.com he's also written several great books on the topic as well. Is there any particular application of neuroscience marketing or the tools of behavior and persuasion that really stands out to you over the years, like who's doing it particularly well that you admire?

You know, I think that there are, there are a lot of people in the sort of physical, the technical neuromarketing space. It's really hard to tell from the outside sometimes who is getting results because they do these experiments for brands who are often somewhat secretive. They don't want to expose their exact methodology because they feel it's their secret sauce. So it's a little bit hard to tell. But I think companies like Interscope Research, Sans Research Interscope uses primarily biometrics. Sans uses a combination of EEG and biometrics. They've been around for a long time and have been quite successful. There's a company, Neurofocus, that is now part of Nielsen. They use primarily EEG and deal with a lot of big brand type projects. There are a lot of, a lot of folks and FMRI is probably the up and comer now, even though as expensive as it is, it's getting a little bit more accessible, a little bit cheaper.

One question I get sometimes is around the capability of new devices and new products to use different data sources around how customers are feeling. So for example, might the Apple watch with its heart rate monitoring and all the different capabilities that are built in and I don't know all those specifications yet, but do you see a future where wearables give us more information about how customers feel?

Absolutely. I'm sure that there are folks who are working on those right now because they've already been able to exploit the ubiquitous webcams that people have for reading facial expressions. And once there are, there's a critical mass of devices that can actually get sort of biometric type data coming from consumers. You can be absolutely certain that somebody will say, okay, we're going to expose a panel of, you know, 50,000 users to this ad and record their biometric data and see what happens. It's in the. I think the good thing about that is that you'll be able to get much larger sample sizes and at very low cost. If you want to do an FMRI study, you're probably looking at a sample size of 10 or 20 subjects, which is, from a statistical standpoint, not that great. There's data that shows it's good enough. But still, a lot of particularly big consumer brands get a little antsy if you say, well, we're going to do a study on 15 people. They think, no, we need more.

Yeah, yeah. So feel free to post your questions. If you have any questions for neuromarketing expert Roger Julie here, who I'm driving to south by Southwest with, feel free to post them as you like and retweet. Thank you very much. For those of you who have done that, why don't you. So we're on a panel together on Saturday and I'd love for you to give us a little preview. We're all going to give like a little summary of our work and I'd love to for you to give a preview of kind of what you're going to be speaking about as well. By the way, a little plug here that Roger will be at the Habit Summit this year, March 24th at Stanford. So he's going to be giving a talk there as well, in case you can't catch him at south by, even though I need to announce as well, the Habit Summit just sold out as of two days ago, so that was a pointless commercial. But we are still doing the video. So you might be able to catch Roger there. But can you give us a little preview?

It's good appeal to scarcity, right?

Exactly.

You can't attend in person, but you can still get the video.

Right, Right.

The. And unfortunately, I've got to drive here for a second. Yeah, we're now in finally hit. We're in the middle of downtown crossing the Bat Bridge and the famous Austin Bridge has a million bats that live underneath it and fly out at dusk every night. But that also signals that we are very near to our destination. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna tune out that and tune into driving to park here.

No problem.

So it's been great, folks. Thanks so much, and sorry I couldn't be a little bit more of a participant here.

No worry. You did a great job. You. You definitely proved that multitasking is possible, even though we've heard so much data that it's not possible.

Had we crashed, it would have been ever.

Exactly. But thanks for driving and. And getting us here. If you have any other questions, if you want to tweet at me, I'll send those to Roger. Tell us real quick, while you're driving, where people can learn more about you and where they can find out about your work.

Best starting point is rogerduley. Com. That's got links to all my various other sites and resources. And on Twitter, I'm at Roger Dooley.

All right, thanks. Terrific. Thanks for tuning in, and see you tomorrow.