Ep 211: How Neuromarketing Can Ethically Increase Your Revenue and Impact In Business with Roger Dooley

Jaryd Krause (0:00)

What is ethical neuromarketing? And how can it increase your ROI and impact in your business? Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the buying online businesses podcast and today I'm speaking with Roger Dooley, who is an author and international keynote speaker. Now his books include Friction: the untapped force that can be your most powerful advantage, named one of the best business books of 2019 and his other book Brainfluence: 100 ways to persuade and convince consumers with neuromarketing. He writes the popular blog neuromarketing as well as a column at Forbes.com. He's also the founder of Dooley Direct a consultancy and co-founded College Confidential, and he's the leading college bound website owner. He's a serial entrepreneur since he left a senior strategy position at a fortune 1000 company to enter the home computer market. Now, this is such a valuable, valuable podcast episode that Roger and I did. I'm super excited because he just firehose so much valuable information around marketing psychology and emotions.

We talk about behavioral marketing, we talk about consumer neuroscience and how we can tap into the data of a consumer and how different forms of data imagery and sensors make us feel along our buying journey. He also just shares a long list of ways that we can market our business better with psychology, neuroscience, marketing emotions, when we dive into talking about what cognitive biases are, what type of cognitive biases that there are, and he shares a bunch of them, and why we should know these different types of cognitive biases, and understand these as business owners, but also just for our own sake of personal development and emotional intelligence in our own lives. We also talk about making logical decisions versus emotional decisions and which is more prominent and why and Roger shares just a such a powerful parable, a really cool story on our emotions and our logic and the relationship between those two. And we also talk about a bunch of different books that Roger recommends that I recommend.

And lastly, we talk about the link between emotional intelligence and marketing. And there's so much value in this podcast episode, I just had a really good time talking to Roger, he just made it super easy for me as a host and just talked so much about so many great valuable things that we can do in our business. I know that you guys are just going to absolutely love it. Check it out.

Do you have a website you might want to sell either now or in the future? We have a hungry list of cashed up and trained up buyers want to buy your content website. If you have a site making over $300 per month and want to sell it head you buyingonlinebusinesses.co/sellyourbusiness or email us at [email protected] because we will likely have a buyer. The details are in the description.

Roger, welcome to the podcast.

Roger Dooley (3:00)

Well, thanks for having me on Jaryd. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Jaryd Krause (3:04)

Me too. Roger up neuromarketing. This is what I wanted to get you on to talk about neuromarketing, which is fascinating to me. You've written multiple books, and you've been in marketing for a long time. Now, what is neuromarketing? Explain it to somebody that is a business owner and why they need to know what neuromarketing is.

Roger Dooley (3:25)

Right, Well, I guess there are multiple definitions. I use a very inclusive definition, which is any use of our understanding of how our brains work to make marketing better. And I really kind of divided from there into two subsets. One field has been called consumer neuroscience. And it's using neuroscience tools and also other tools, things like eye tracking, and biometrics that aren't neuroscience, to measure how customers or potential customers respond to Ads, to content to packaging, to a retail environment, where you have something you want to evaluate or better even you have two or three versions of what you want to evaluate. And then you use these tools. Tools from a neuromarketing standpoint could include fMRI, which is something that is primarily used for medical purposes and research purposes. It's not used much in commercial neuromarketing, but it's kind of a gold standard for academic work, where you put a person in this narrow, noisy gigantic tube that is usually used to provide very detailed imagery for medical purposes. It can be used to see how people are responding on a second by second basis almost in real time to stimuli, which could be content. It could be two versions of an advertisement; it could be a package. They've even done taste tests, by putting a tube into somebody's mouth and giving them tastes a thing. So that's more commonly commercially. You see it used where the subject has a cap with electrodes on it, and these can be run things are very complicated with wet electrodes, which are about as appetizing as they sound, it means they put some goop in your hair to get really good contact, which provides high quality data down to a much simpler headset with just a couple of electrodes that are very easy, they're not intrusive at all, but may not provide the depth or quality of data that the more complicated systems do. Anyway, that's one space. And that was how it started. The good news in that space, Jaryd is that it has come down in accessibility and price, what used to be something that was only usable for big corporations looking at big problems, a new television campaign, a Super Bowl Ad, a major package redesign, where they could afford to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars on studying the problem now, partly driven by the pandemic, but partly it had been evolving before. Now, some of these services are available on a service basis, a software basis, a SaaS model, where you sign up for a monthly subscription pay, 50, 100, - $200 a month, and I'm talking American dollars. But these are not real fixed numbers.

And you get to access these services that you can use to evaluate the same kinds of things. They are often not as high quality as a detailed lab study, but they are infinitely cheaper and infinitely more convenient. Imagine trying to recruit people, like your customers, bring them into a laboratory, having them put goop in their hair, so they can look at then your ads and see what their reaction was, that's going to be very difficult to get your customers to want to do that, you're probably going to have to use subjects that you hope are like your customers, where these new tools are much less intrusive. And we can get into some of the details on that in a bit if you want. But they are much more accessible and be used by any size business, even small agencies, small businesses, and some are portable enough or unobtrusive enough that they can be used to measure things like training events, how people are experiencing these things on a minute by minute or second by second basis. The other category of neuro marketing is what I call behavioral marketing. And that's not evaluating a specific ad or a specific image or message, but rather using the tools of behavioral science of psychology, behavioral economics to come up with better ways to market generally, I would say come out and come up with a hypothesis for a better way to market ready to sing.

Well, yes, the science says we should go with this headline, rather than this other headline, I would say you would use the science to say, let's test this new headline against our old headline and see if it outperforms it. And those tools are also accessible to anybody who can read a book, listen to a podcast or watch a video on YouTube. And they're very powerful. And you see major corporations using these tools. Perhaps the best example I can think of Jaryd are travel sites where most major corporations now the biggest corporations actually have a behavioral science team, for marketing also for working on internal things, employee experience and so on. They understand how powerful behavioral sciences, but if you go to book an aero plane reservation, you will see all kinds of behavioral science tricks at play there. There's only two rooms left at this price. These prices are good for today, only 25 People have booked this hotel in the last 24 hours. All of these things are using Robert Cialdini, his principles of influence to try and spur customers to act right away before they click through to some other travel website. Maybe look at some other options.

Jaryd Krause (8:48)

It's really I've done a lot of study in marketing. And I've read the book Robert Cialdini influence. It's by Robert Cialdini but the book is called Influence guys, check that out. If you haven't, we'll probably put a link to it in the show notes. It's such a valuable book on what you would call probably behavioral marketing. Is that what you would call behavioral marketing and using psychology.

Roger Dooley (9:09)

It's part of that and you would, he would probably call it influence marketing. And it isn't specifically a marketing book, per se. It's explaining human behavior in a way that marketers can use my own book, Brainfluence was much more geared directly to marketers saying, Okay, here's the science and here's how, as a marketer, you might be able to apply this science. But Bob is actually a pretty savvy business person. He's been around for quite a while. And he often points out ways that these ideas can be used in business. And I should insert here that he and I just thought every other person in the space would say, these tools should be used in an ethical way, because it can be used in in a way that's evil, but it's token advertising. You can have advertising that's truthful, or you can have advertising that's false or leaves omits important facts. The customer should know. And in the same way, you can use these scarcity techniques in an honest way. Or you can simply make up and say, Hey, I've only got two of these left, even though you've got a million of them, and doing things ethically is really important.

Jaryd Krause (10:13)

I agree. There's been times where I've seen there's only two seats left on a flight, like you've mentioned before, and there's more than two seats left on the flight, you see that when you're booking, there's only these two seats left at this price. But when you get on the flight, there's a lot of seats there. And well.

Roger Dooley (10:29)

There's ways to finesse that Jaryd, it's possible that the particular slot you're looking at only has two seats that the airline has made available. If they sell those two seats, they go back to the airline and get two more, or, yes, the seats priced at $220. There's only two available, but there's also additional seats priced at $221. Or who knows, there's a million sort of quasi ethical workarounds to me, I would really like a more honest approach on these things. If something is really in short supply, if there are two physical seats left, then okay, yeah, use that. But don't play these games where you've got a plane that's 90%. Empty. But you're still creating this false scarcity.

Jaryd Krause (11:15)

I agree. I think reputation is worth upholding. And if the consumer can work out, like a lot of people, a lot of consumers are pretty smart these days in how marketing has evolved, and can pick up on these things. I know that I'm in this space, and I know it, but I know that there's so many people that aren't in online business don't know much about marketing that have become clued in quite intuitive to these different scarcity tactics, and these different things that are psychological influence marketing hacks that may be used in an unethical way. And I think people have a pretty good BS radar detector on. So I'm glad that you mentioned that ethic. You know, being ethical with this. You also mentioned there's like so many cognitive biases that people should know. And this can be attached to ecommerce, it can be attached to any sort of business. What is a cognitive bias when we're looking at digital marketing and selling cognitive biases?

Roger Dooley (12:10)

There are ways that our brains behave in a way that isn't entirely logical, you might consider them errors, say calculation errors in certain cases. And depending on how you count them dozens of these, there are some constants over 100. I've seen numbers as high as 130 cognitive biases. Some of these are minor variations on the others. But a few are really important. I probably a fundamental bias that we have is that humans are loss averse. People hate feeling a sense of loss, they hate losing something, and that often outweighs the gain. So the exact same problem posed to somebody as a loss seems more important or different than the same exact math applied as a gain. So if you're told that you've got a serious medical problem, nine out of 10 patients who take this medicine survive, that sounds pretty good. And you probably say, Okay, let's do it. That same exact math, if they said, one out of every patients dies, suddenly, whoa, what are the alternatives to this, so those odds are very good. And that works, not just in circumstances like that, but in financial terms, is losing money looms bigger than gaining the same amount of money. And there's a whole tonne of experiment, experimentation on this work of Daniel Kahneman his book Thinking Fast and Slow. And other one I highly recommend for somebody wants to do a deep dive into this talks about that a lot.

But there are lots of cognitive biases. There are see, well, temporal discounting is one kind of bias. If I say, Hey, Jaryd, I'll give you $10 today, or in two months, I'll give you $20. Like, you being a smart guy might say, Well, hey, I don't need the $10. Right now, I'll take the 20 in two months. But many people will take that $10 Right now, even though they don't necessarily need it, they discount that future value. And it's something that's very common. And that's why you have all kinds of sort of Front Loaded financial offers out there that offer you something very immediate in the short term, because people are discounting what's going to happen down the road, everything from Adjustable Rate Mortgages, to credit card deals, where hey, we'll give you a $200 credit if you sign up for a credit card. And all these things are giving people a value in the moment. There is recency bias, we tend to remember things that happened more recently. There's peak end experience, which says that we if we have an experience of some kind, whether it's a customer experiences a customer experience in an amusement park or whatever.

The two areas that are most important are the peak experience whatever was sort of the emotional high point whether it was good or bad for us, and then how it ended and so one practical application of that is in the medical field where colonoscopy is used to be pretty uncomfortable. Today there between anesthesia and the current equipment, they actually are uncomfortable, but they were paying it used to be painful. And what they found was simply by prolonging the end, so it was less uncomfortable. In other words, there was a comfortable period, at the end of the experience before they said, Okay, we're done that made the entire experience feel better to the customer, they remembered it as a less painful experience. So I mean, there are many, many ways that our brains work in a somewhat incorrect fashion. Often, these are shortcuts that may serve us well, in certain cases. If we believe evolutionary psychology, a lot of our current decision making processes date back to our days as hunter gatherers, for a hunter gatherer piece of fruit in the hand, is worth much more than a piece of fruit that might be there two weeks from now, or maybe it won't be there two weeks from now. So there are good reasons for some of these are very good reasons.

Jaryd Krause (16:05)

Like fee is a is like we've talked about the, you know, we don't want to possibly run off a cliff, if we didn't have fear, we would just do that and possibly die. So I think there are.

Roger Dooley (16:20)

That's I think our stress reaction is an example of that, because reacting to sudden stimuli and having a kick in our adrenaline is good. If you have to worry about a carnivorous animal hiding in the woods. When we're in an office environment, and our boss sends us a memo and says, Hey, we have to talk, come into my office at four o'clock. That's going to kick in, though that same effect, but it's not going to serve us very well, because we don't have to suddenly run away at high speed. We just have to show up at four o'clock. So yeah, there's good and bad.

Jaryd Krause (16:55)

I'm very curious about the one that you mentioned on where people will take the gratification right away, rather than delayed gratification. What's that cognitive bias, the one where you explained where people will kind of buy something on after pay in a way that they might be like 50 months’ interest free? What is that cognitive bias called?

Roger Dooley (17:19)

Well, it's typically called temporal discounting, and some temporal discounting is okay. If you say, I'll give you $10 Today, or $10.10 in a year, I'll take the $10 today, because I cannot that I could invest that $10, but it's not a good deal to wait a year for it. But yeah, opportunity costs, it's it becomes a cognitive bias and negative cognitive bias, when we make decisions that don't really make logical sense. Now, obviously, to if we have zero money in our wallet, $10. Today, maybe better than $20 in a month. But assuming we're not like most people where it's not going to be life altering, we need to be making those kinds of decisions in a somewhat calculated away.

Jaryd Krause (17:59)

I got it. It’s fascinating. Because as humans, like, our makeup is that if you said like, you can have a banana now, or you can have it in. Back in the day like ancestor like you could have two in two months’ time, or one-month time or a week's time, it might actually be best to take that banana ate it right now, because there might actually be no bananas in two weeks’ time. Right? Roger Dooley (18:23)

There was really not necessarily a concept of high trust, where you knew for sure that something would be there, just because of the nature of their circumstances, so yeah, it's different. And I think we even see that in our pet behavior today. If I give my dog to dog biscuits, he's not going to say one for later, he's going to bump through right away.

Jaryd Krause (18:46)

Definitely, I think their survival mechanisms are a lot stronger than ours as humans, which have evolved, probably passed what a canine might be. So I want to talk about the psychology and the behavioral marketing, because a lot of people listening and have an online business. And they may want to change the copy in them on their website, or on their blog post or on their product descriptions. What are some of the things that you've seen cognitive biases used? That could be good examples of people that they might want to change some copy on their site? Right?

Roger Dooley (19:23)

Well, I think probably, I would focus for somebody who's just getting started in this rather than focusing a lot on cognitive biases, what I would do is focus on say, shelving, these principles, originally six, and now seven. And some of these relate to cognitive biases. Social proof, for example, is a cognitive bias. Some people call the bandwagon effect. You see other people doing something, you're more likely to do that thing yourself. So they aren't unrelated. But I think he provides a better framework for understanding these. And I think since I mentioned social proof, that's a great one. We see a lot of it already in digital marketing, you'll see sign up for our newsletter join 47,000 other subscribers like you to our newsletter. And that's, that's a smart way to market yourself, whether it's listing your number of customers or users of your software, whatever, because you are showing that other people are doing what you want this new person to do.

And the more persuasive that argument is, the more comfortable they are doing it. If you're looking for a restaurant and you come to two side by side, one is very busy full of customers, another one is completely empty, even though you would get served faster and the empty one, you will probably choose the one with all the customers because you figured they know what they're doing. The other one might be questionable. But there are some things that you can do in social proof that exploit some additional biases. One is there is a precision bias for numbers. Generally, precise numbers are seen as more reliable, more truthful, you could, instead of saying we have 20,000 subscribers, you could use your actual number which you probably have some place in your software that's 20,125, that's going to be accurate, it's going to be truthful.

And it's going to be just a little bit more persuasive. You can use instead of simple numbers, or you can use testimonials and testimonials are they're a form of social proof. But they are most convincing, if they include a photo or better even a video showing that it's a real person, when you see these testimonials of Wow, great product. And it's like two initials after that, you have no idea whether they just made that up for the website, or whether it's needed to remain anonymous. But when you see a real person whose photo is there, maybe their company affiliation is there, then that makes it more powerful. And in fact, one example that I've seen, it's kind of interesting is it blends social proof into authority. Authority is another Cialdini principle that instead of being sort of regular people are doing this, it is an endorsement or somehow somebody who is an expert in the field, saying something good about your product or being a user of your product. And that that's very powerful. If you look at any business book, what do you see on the front or back cover? You see endorsements, from bestselling authors from subject matter experts, these are exploiting authority. You may not have heard of Roger Dooley. But if you see endorsement from Bob Cialdini on the cover, say, Well, okay, maybe this guy knows something. Or maybe Bob was just doing him a favour, who knows that authority is very powerful. And often it is, if you're buying basketball shoes, it's great to have social proof, hey, we've sold a million of this particular style, or some endorsements from people who just randomly wear the shoe.

But you would do much better with an endorsement from LeBron James or some other famous basketball player. And this applies in any field, where there are people who are known authorities, you can get authority in different ways. You can have people who merely have titles, if you're selling something even remotely related to health, having somebody in a white lab coat, somebody who is a doctor, whether they're a PhD, or an MD, all of these things lend authority using imagery, the person in a white lab coat, who is actually in a lab with maybe a microscope, and maybe some lab equipment around, that's going to add a veneer of authority to your marketing. So all these things can do it and to circle back to the point I was going to make shared that one company I saw use social proof in an interesting way, in a very smart way. I think as long as you don't overdo it.

They had some testimonials from three customers who use their software, I was pretty normal three sort of random people who use their software. They had what the nice thing that person said about it, under it, they had a little icon size picture of the of the individual a photo of the individual, their name, and their company in tiny print underneath it. Above the text, though, they had a rather large logo from the company. And these were prominent companies. So what they were doing was leveraging the fact that they had a happy user at this company into a little bit of authority that, hey, this person isn't just anybody.

He works at Google or wherever. And it almost turns into an authority endorsement from Google. Not quite if anybody really looks at it. They'll realise okay, this guy is not, Google or secret, or something's probably some random person. But nevertheless, it does have that veneer of authority. So there, there are subtle cues you can use to create authority. And when you combine authority and social proof that way, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Jaryd Krause (25:15)

Definitely. Authority lending authority is huge. And that's something that people are starting to do more with their blogs in our space, where it's important for Google to rank content that has been written by people that have an authority or websites that have an authority. And that's why a lot of people are looking to have writer’s kind of right on their website that have authority in the space and use those certain images of those authors that maybe in a white lab coat doing a test and actually showing like, I have proof in this space.

And here's me doing the work, or here's me if I'm, fishing expert, here's a photo of me with a fish catching a fish, those things really do help. So wow, you just fight you just Roger, that was amazing. You just Firehose so much valuable information to us. I just didn't know how to how to tackle it and break down each single one. I think this is the testimonials are so damn valuable. And what I've found is that the longer the conversations are like, we have this on our website where we have success stories, which are basically case studies or testimonials that people have worked with us and bought our businesses, I sit down with them, and I chat with him.

And it is awesome. Like, how was your experience? What did you learn? How can you share what you've learned with others? And it's a really good sort of testimonial that people can listen to they get value from because they're working out how people have bought these businesses before, what they need to look out for that this other person might have, like, failed that or had to learn the hard way for themselves. And it's might be like an hour long conversation upfront, it just looks like a valuable video. But really, it's an amazing testimonial that they can do it as well, which is social proof to and once you bank it up with all of these, like if people go to our site and click on success stories, you see a whole page of just a few people that have done this. So that's I think that's super valuable.

Roger Dooley (27:15)

Well, that's really smart, Jaryd, I think because the more detail there is in a testimonial, the more believable it is and the more it'll help a potential customer or client translate that experience into their own experience. If somebody just says, Wow, fantastic service that doesn't tell you much. I mean, it's good that it's there. But it doesn't really tell you but if when somebody can relate what the service was, like how it transformed their business or transformed even one small thing in their business for the better than that just not only makes it more believable because there's detail there, but it also shows the customer client how to relate to that how it might affect their business.

Jaryd Krause (27:56)

Now in your book, Brainfluence, guys, there'll be links to that in the show notes as well. You talk about logic versus emotion. And we all know that people are buying based on emotions, but sometimes we believe that people will buy based on logic Can you talk to the relationship between buying based on emotions versus logic and why we buy based on emotions.

Roger Dooley (28:22)

The sort of ratio of logic to emotion in any purchase varies a lot, depending on primarily depending on the product category to some degree. Also, on the customer. For example, if you are marketing fragrances, you are going to market primarily with emotional imagery. You look at fragrance, as you don't see appeals to logic that, our perfume lasts twice. 7% longer than the leading brand. According to our lab studies, you don't see 83% Customers preferred our fragrance to the seller brand in a blind test, you don't just don't see that the all you see is imagery, very, very little text at all. You see images of romantic situations may be of people you would like to be people you'd like to be with. That is almost completely emotional marketing. And the price of fragrances kind of indicate that because it's pretty hard to logically justify, paying a massive amount of money for half an ounce of something.

On the other hand, if you're selling industrial machinery in the b2b market, you are going to skew heavily toward that logical rational side of things. You're going to have to furnish a lot of information about the product, its characteristics about logistics, when can this be delivered? Because if it's not on time, then it's going to shut the plant down. What kind of warranties are there what kind of service is there? If this thing breaks down, what's going to happen or if it fails, there are a million very important, logical rational questions that often need to be answered in a b2b situation. I wouldn't not discount those but even in b2b marketing, or for that matter, marketing a technical product, like, a camera or a drone or something, something that has a lot of tech specs that the purchaser is going to want to know and understand. There is a motion.

Actually, if you one thing that comes to mind in beyond even b2b in the consumer market, people buy iPhones often not because the specs are better than the top of the line Android models, the top pixel or the top galaxy. But in part, because of the brand, they want to be part of Apple brand, particularly younger consumers heavily favor Apple, because all of their peers are using Apple. And they would look weird when they're messaging back and forth, if they didn't have an Apple phone. So, there are these no conscious drivers that affect that that's more of an emotional decision.

They don't look at the specs on the camera and say, Wow, this one has 10 more mega megapixels, or the telephoto lens is a little bit better. Often it is an emotional decision. But even in b2b marketing, people always say, Yeah, well, all this psychology stuff is great, but our customers just make decisions based on price and features. And there's no emotion involved. But that's not true. It's simply not true. There are many things that can enter into a b2b decision when a purchasing person whether our decision maker could be somebody who's actually a buyer, or maybe an executive in the company, where this decision has been pushed up to a higher executive level, even the CEO. They are thinking maybe not consciously, but unconsciously of okay, how is this decision going to affect me personally? How are people in the company going to view me? What happens?

If it turns out to be a great decision? A will I get promotion? Will I get a get praise from other people? If it goes wrong? Will I ever get a raise again, will I get fired, or all these things and even novelty, I was in the IT business for a while. And you think again, of purchasing a big hardware upgrade for your company's network or updating to a brand new network operating system, which is a very wrenching decision involves expense and training and all kinds of stuff. So it's not a not a decision companies take lightly. I have seen managers make decisions to upgrade to the newest hardware or the newest software, not because their business really demanded it, because they wanted to play with the latest new thing that was out there. They wanted to have that experience. They wanted perhaps to improve their own resume.

So if they were looking for a job, at some point, they would say, hey, yes, I'm fully versed in this latest hardware, this latest software. And some of this may have been conscious, they may have been spent thinking, wow, I can be looking for a job in six months. And so I better get trained on this. But in other cases, they really think that this is the right decision for the business. Even though underneath the surface, there are these other drivers. Let me give you a quick parable. Jaryd, there is an author and Professor Jonathan Hite, who says that our decision making resembles a rider in an elephant. You have humans sitting on top of an elephant.

And the human often thinks that he's in control of where the elephant is going. But really, it's the elephant. And in the metaphor, basically, the elephant is our emotional state our motion to emotional decision making. And the writer is this little rational, logical piece on top. And, according to height, elephant is the one that decides where the pair is going. The writer may think he's in control. But really, the only thing that's left is for the writer to explain where the pair went and why. And this this is not this, that pair of parable or metaphor appears is relatively new to a few years old. For decades, advertisers, salespeople have said that people buy with emotion and justify with logic. And that really sounds a lot like the elephant making the decision and the writer saying this is why we made that decision.

Jaryd Krause (34:30)

It's so good Roger, like I see this. I see this in my business as well. And it's such a logical decision to people to join what we do is 150 bucks a month, 150 bucks a month and it might take you a couple of months or even if it takes a year to buy a business it's so cheap in how like the ROI that you're going to get back from the business the education you get back. It's ridiculous. It's so damn logical to do. But then you have people that these logical decisions sitting on Top of the elephant that have all these other emotions that are attached to it that prevent people from doing so like, can I actually do this, and then they get down the years down the track, and they realize, like, oh, wow, like, I'm going to back up my life, I'm going to back up my decisions of why I didn't make it because I was emotional, or that wasn't the right time. For me, I didn't have enough money or all these other things, I've got too many kids too busy, and we justify it. And it happens on the other reason other way as well, where I see people that do jump in, it's a very logical decision, they buy the business, and then they justify why they bought the business, but the business has done very well. And they justify it based on whether it's good or bad. But the emotions end up taking control, as much as I would like to say people buy based on logic with within our business, because that's investing in ROI. And if you spend this much, you should make this much back. Logically, it's so damn smart to do. But the emotions are what people get in people's way. So that parable of the elephant and the rider is just spot on. I'm so glad you shared that with us.

Roger Dooley (36:04)

Right. And you know, I think even in large company acquisitions, mega acquisitions, involving billions of dollars, yeah, see emotion entering into it, where, especially if you have a couple of businesses competing for to buy the same business, people casually tack a billion dollars onto their offer, so they get the deal. And at that point, emotions really playing into it, we're not going to lose, if we don't get this business, we're going to fail. And so we've got to win, even though they complete the acquisition, the chances of that proving to be a profitable move are minimal. And I think if those big levels, often they don't work out, I think that at smaller acquisition levels, they can be because you can get your arms around a business and the impact in a much more immediate way than what a merger of two giant corporations would look like five years down the road.

Jaryd Krause (37:00)

is there's so much more in the way it's harder to turn a big ship than to turn a little boat that's going in a great direction. It's funny that this just leads into us needing to work more like if we want as a personal development thing and marketing. Like we just need to really work on our emotions more and understand our emotions and understand emotional intelligence, I believe to help us make better decisions. Do you see a direct link and tie with some of the things that you learn with that you've talked about in euros, neuroscience, marketing, brain fluency linked with emotional intelligence?

Roger Dooley (37:36)

I think so if you are aware of a cognitive bias, then you have the at least the opportunity to recognize that and recognize how it might influence your decision. It's still difficult, even if you recognize that you have biases, they're still there, what a common kind of bias that I don't really get into, but it's the sort of bias and diversity training that people get, they get training on biases, in general, that has not proven to be particularly effective. And maybe it's the quality of instruction in some cases. In other cases, it's the mere fact that a very busy person is being forced to do this training, which they resent, and it has sort of a backfire effect, there's a cognitive bias for you the backfire effect or something, , you try and push somebody one way and it ends up going the, the opposite direction, I think, but awareness does help if you are aware of temporal discounting, for example, and you're presented with an offer that has a time component to it, you can evaluate your initial reaction and say, okay, my initial reaction was, this is a good deal or a bad deal. Here, I've run the numbers. Here's what logic says, and then figure out maybe what the right course is, but it's almost it's probably almost impossible to overcome our biases, but being aware of them can certainly help.

Jaryd Krause (38:58)

Definitely. That's cool. Well, I we could just chat forever and ever and ever, but I just want to say thank you so much for your time. Roger, it's been great to have you on we'll put links to your books and stuff in the show notes. But where can people find out more about what you're doing?

Roger Dooley (39:13)

The best place to start? Jaryd would be rogerdooley.com. There, I've got links to my other content, my Forbes content, my social media profiles, I'm most active on Twitter and LinkedIn where I am Roger Dooley.

Jaryd Krause (39:29)

Awesome guys, check those links out in the show notes. Everybody that is listening. Thank you so much for listening. If you own a business, make sure that you go back through this podcast episode again. And listen to it very carefully because Roger just firehose value to us and it was I to be honest, Roger just list just listening to you whilst I was being the host. I was like, Well, how do I take these in different tangents and you just came up with more and more valuable, valuable insights. And I just want to say I'm so grateful for that. So people listening really Listen to this if you do know somebody that's in online business or about to get into online business do them a massive favor and share this podcast episode with them thanks again.