Behavioral Marketer Uses Behavioral Science, AI, & Psychology to Understand Customer Decisions and Opinions, with Jen Clinehens of Choice Hacking

How do people make decisions? Is it based on facts, logic, emotions, or other factors?

Jen Clinehens, a behavioral marketer, helps organizations large and small better understand the psychology and science behind customer decisions and opinions. 

Jen has worked with brands like AT&T, McDonald's, Adidas, and Starbucks and is the Founder and Managing Director of Choice Hacking, a customer experience (CX) agency.

Whether it's understanding why a customer is buying one brand's product over their own or why the customer is putting less product in their cart than before, Jen helps individuals and organizations dive deep into the brains of their customers. She uses a combination of behavioral science, AI, & psychology  to increase customer growth and engagement. 

We talk about her career path starting at age 16 as a classical violist to how watching "Mad Men" allowed her to consider a career that involved creativity and business. She also shares how running her own business since 2020 takes her back to entrepreneurial roots where she wears many hats.

You can find her podcast "Choice Hacking", newsletter, blogs and more by going to her website.

Contact Info:
Jen Clinehens  - Guest
jen@choicehacking.com (email)
ChoiceHacking.com

Julie Berman - Host
www.womenwithcooljobs.com
@womencooljobs (Instagram)
Julie Berman (LinkedIn) 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I absolutely LOVE being the host and producer of "Women with Cool Jobs", where I interview women who have unique, trailblazing, and innovative careers. It has been such a blessing to share stories of incredible, inspiring women since I started in 2020.

If you have benefitted from this work, or simply appreciate that I do it, please consider buying me a $5 coffee. ☕️

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/julieberman

Thank you so much for supporting me -- whether by sharing an episode with a friend, attending a LIVE WWCJ event in Phoenix, connecting with me on Instagram @womencooljobs or LinkedIn, sending me a note on my website (www.womenwithcooljobs.com), or by buying me a coffee! It all means so much. <3

Transcript

Unknown: 0:00

I'm looking at behavioral science kind of through the lens of marketing, and customer experience. So that might mean like, you know, where do we talk about what in a store? What does the store experience? Like? How much do people want to be helped or talk to or interacted with? That will certainly vary by culture. And I think, you know, these behavioral scripts that people sort of have will absolutely vary by culture. So things like behavioral script just sort of describes what we think should happen in something. So the example I like to give is, I go into a restaurant and first I get an appetizer, and then I get a meal. And then I get dessert. If I went into a restaurant, they said, Oh, we we do dessert first here, my whole behavioral script to just be like, Well, okay, is every What do I do? I don't know what to do. Because you've turned everything that I expected on its head, and said, I've got to figure out a new way to kind of navigate all of this. So behavioral scripts that people have for different experiences are just different.

Julie Berman - Host: 0:56

Hey, everybody, I'm Julie, and welcome to Women with cool jobs. Each episode will feature women with unique trailblazing and innovative careers. We'll talk about how she got here, what life is like now, an actionable steps that you can take to go on a similar path, or one that's all your own. This podcast is about empowering you. It's about empowering you to dream big, and to be inspired. You'll hear from incredible women in a wide variety of fields, and hopefully some that you've never heard of before. Women who build robots and roadways, firefighters, C suite professionals surrounded by men, social media, mavens, entrepreneurs, and more. I'm so glad we get to go on this journey together. Hello, everybody. This is Julie Berman, and welcome to another episode of women with cool jobs. So I have a very special guest to announce today who I've been following along her journey, almost probably from the time that I started this podcast a few years ago. And I finally asked her to actually be a guest on the podcast. And she said yes. So without further ado, I would like to introduce Jen Kleinhenz. She is the founder and managing director of choice hacking. And basically she helps businesses, individuals, organizations, large and small really understand why do we make decisions? And why do we form certain opinions. And there are so many things that go into it, besides what we might think besides the things that are obvious, that actually help us reach decisions that actually make us feel a certain way or cause us to react or act in a certain way. And I really was excited about Jen and her material ages ago, because I just thought it was so fascinating. All of the science and information that she shares that goes into exactly what her business is called Choice hacking, and like how do our brains work? How do we form decisions and take action, it's not always those obvious things that we think are happening, there are so many other things that factor in. And she is an expert at helping people to understand the customer journey, the customer experience, and how to use that for marketing purposes, to solve problems to increase the bottom line. So we have this really beautiful conversation about some of the details of her job and how she got into this job. How you know, there's factors of owning your own business that you may or may not know about, depending on if you're an entrepreneur or business owner yourself, and also where she came from, which was being a professional musician, which so that is just so cool. To me. I love seeing examples of people who have untraditional career paths, but yet are doing something that is so cool that's so meaningful and purposeful for them. And also they're really gifted at doing and that certainly describes Jen, and what she's doing now in the field of customer experience and marketing. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. And remember, please share this with at least one person. If you can think of someone specifically who would love to hear about Jen and what she does. Please make sure after you finish listening, that you share it with them because that is how we share the word about so many women with cool jobs that we are doing all these incredible, neat things in the world right now and that so much as possible. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening and enjoy my conversation with Jim. I'm so excited today to bring on my My next guest, her name is Jen Kleinhenz. And she is the founder and managing director of choice hacking, a customer experience agency that helps individuals and organizations use behavioral science, AI and psychology to increase customer growth and engagement. And in a nutshell, when I think about Jen, your job and like what you do and what I've seen, I think of it as like the psychology and science behind the customer decisions and opinions kind of like your mind your mind hacker, for, for lack of better words. But I've been following along your journey for a few years since you started choice hacking. And so I'm just so excited to chat with you and learn more about what you do and how you got here. So thank you so much for being on.

Unknown: 5:50

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Julie Berman - Host: 5:52

So I want to ask you, in your own words, how would you describe your cool job?

Unknown: 5:59

Oh, yeah, I think that's a good one. So it kind of feels like, because I am an entrepreneur that I'm a little bit of everything. Right now. Primarily, I'm somewhere between a business strategist and a content creator. I do a lot of working with businesses of all sizes. So clients like T Mobile, and these other sort of big fortune 500 companies all the way down to startups that are just kind of getting started, they're creating a product, and they need some help to do that, to those companies in the middle that may be making, you know, like millions of dollars a year, but they're not quite sure what their customers are doing or thinking or how they might need to change their marketing and customer experience to better reach those people. So there's certainly that part of the business, the consulting side, and then to drive all of that and to be honest with you, like, I like consulting, but the fun stuff, quote, unquote, is the content side. So that's writing that's doing tick tock, so it's being on YouTube, that's the podcast, which is really taken off, that's writing the newsletter, it's all the things that I sort of see as a kind of a good way to like pre educate clients in a way. So I've kind of put out all this information, hopefully, it's really helpful for those people who that's enough. And they can kind of stop with the free information that's out there. But then if they want to kind of go to the next step, with training, or consulting, or whatever it might be, they can reach out to me and then we kind of start that one to one connection. And that's always really gratifying to see people like yourself who've been following along for a really long time with the choice hacking materials, which obviously, like it's evolved as it's been going. Yeah, I would like to think I'm getting better at the content side. We do our best. Yeah. Yeah. Just it's great. It's really gratifying, I think, to hear that people have been following it as long as you have, or other folks have, you know, who reach out who just want to chat or they want to like work together, potentially. So yeah, it's kind of a balance between those two things.

Julie Berman - Host: 7:55

Yeah. And I think that's so interesting, I appreciate you sharing all those different sort of facets of what you do. Because I know myself as a budding entrepreneur, like there are so many things that come into play that you don't necessarily realize in the beginning of this process. And so I love that also, you have all these pieces to what you do that share all this information like that's like what I loved. I think that's why I started following you and your journey as well, because I just thought the information, and the concepts and the things that you share are so fascinating. And I would love to kind of maybe get into a few examples in this episode as we go along. But I want to go back now at this point, because that was such an amazing overview. But I guess like, you know, and you can pick whatever point feels comfortable or like the right place to start. But how did you get into this field? Because I think you know, where, where you come from, it's such an interesting place. It's not just, you know, I was in PR kind of communications world. And you come from a very different place of like communications, but it's, it's a different spot that you're starting from. And so I would love to hear like, what got you started in this career? How did you find out about it? Where are you always sort of interested in, in science, because you have so much actual, like factual, fact based science backed information that you sort of ground your work in. And I love that so much. So wherever you want to start, I would love to hear about you. And your journey. Sure.

Unknown: 9:34

Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit of a weird one. So, I mean, I obviously came from, you know, marketing. That was how I sort of found my way through and to behavioral science and neuro marketing and all this. But way before I was even a marketing I was a career switcher. So I was a classical violist for like 15 years. So I turned pro, like very young, I was in orchestras like 1516 playing the gigs doing the thing. And you know, sort of I mean, if anybody out there is a classical musician, you know, it kind of gets to a point where it's like, well, I'm either gonna, you know, Duke this out for the next 10 years to try to find an orchestra position. Or I could keep kind of doing like studio work and you know, have it like a string quartet I toured around with and as a part of being a professional musician I was in Nashville is in Boston, New York. And I always felt, I guess it's kind of like acting, a lot of people understand, like the audition process for acting, it's kind of like that for music as well, a lot of things are just out of your hands. And you often see like actors will write a script, because that's their way of kind of like taking control, my way of taking control that process was to start like a booking company. So basically, what we would do is we never worked with Taylor Swift, but like, if Taylor Swift came to me and said, I need a string quartet to play backup on my tour, I'd say perfect. I've got you know, this whole group of people I can connect you with, I can do all the contracts I can do, you know, the the money stuff, all the boring things. And that was my way of kind of like drumming up business and getting the people around me gigs, and then myself, hopefully, gigs. And what I started to find is I was really enjoying the business side of things a lot more than being in a practice room, eight hours a day about driving, like 200 miles to go to some orchestra, like in Kentucky or something, and play for the weekend, stay in a hotel. Okay, we did the orchestra concert, and I gotta go back, I have to teach a whole studio students that after a while, I was just like, you know, that's, I think it's just not a good match for kind of where I want to go and what I want to do. So I said to myself, like, Okay, we're gonna go into business, we're going to do this seriously. We're going to think about marketing, we're going to learn all about it. How do I do that? I knew I knew I wanted to do something that was a good mix still of creativity. And I guess like numbers or business. And so I started to look at the creative industries. And I was lucky because you know, when, instead of going to high school, I went to a boarding school called North Carolina School, the arts, it's now University of North Carolina School, the arts. So as a college and a high school program, they had like a film school, they had, you know, a bunch of actors, like famous actors went through their musicians and things. And so I had a lot of exposure to the creative side of things and like what the options might be, but didn't necessarily connect the dots with the business side. So at first I explored like, nonprofits, I was like, well, maybe I can like work with an orchestra or whatever it might be. That wasn't quite satisfying. And at the time, I mean, it was what 2011 And at the time, the biggest show on TV was mad men. And I started watching Mad Men, I was like, Oh, is this kind of like advertising? Is it? Can I be a creative person, but then also kind of be a business person at the same time. And had my grandfather actually had worked. He was a VP at Pepsi, like, years and years ago, right? And had always had these interesting stories about like Madison Avenue and working with marketers and things. And I thought, Oh, that's really, you know, his stories are really cool. The show is pretty cool. I don't know, let's see if we can get into an advertising program. And then I just happened to get into like, the best advertising program, I was create a brand manager, which was exactly that it was, you know, working with creatives, and then being kind of like the business person, and went through graduate school, through a series of coincidences. It's a long, long story, but I ended up working in the innovation department at AT and T. So obviously, a huge company, 300,000 people at that time, and the innovation group was like, oh, yeah, we've got to be concerned about the business of telecoms, but then also, we can be creative, we can think of like, new ideas and patents, and all of that. Part of that job is doing something called being an innovation champion. So basically, it was like a mini CEO that would be inside the company, they would give you an idea. And your job then was to go around and like raise funding internally, like funding for this idea to get the relevant people together from the different departments to hire vendors and agencies, and basically be the person who kind of spun up the idea. And that was such an incredible experience, not only to get to know, like an in like a organization that size, but what does it take to sell in an idea? How do you change people's minds? How do you get them to try something that you've never tried before? And as part of working with those vendors in agencies, I started getting exposed to psychology. I mean, behavioral science was still like, not quite popular at that time, but a lot of behavioral science concepts. And at some point, I picked up the book Freakonomics, which any behavioral scientist like a real like PhD behavioral scientist who's hearing that is probably like, rolling their eyes like, oh, Freakonomics. But for me, I was like, Oh, look at this whole side of things. This whole side of like human behavior, that isn't what you would expect it would be. So between working with people who are experts in you know, UX design and things and you know, human psychology, and human computer design, things like that, and then starting to just kind of self educate plus work with them and try out stuff. I started to kind of self educate on it, to be honest. You know, when I went back and got my MBA from Emory University, I focused on consumer psychology and marketing analytics for those reasons, because I wanted to know more about it. They will, how are consumers behaving? Like? How can we reach them with marketing. So it all kind of dovetail to the point where Long story short, long story long, I went off to Australia worked in an agency and then ended up in the UK at an agency, and the timing and what the client was asking for just all came together. And I started creating like behavioral science frameworks. For them. I started using predictive AI. And, you know, obviously, like, you can't talk specifics about specific clients, but I was working on clients like McDonald's, Adidas, Pepsi, a lot of UK based brands as well. So Lloyds Bank, which is the biggest bank here, compare the market, which is like Expedia, sort of like a comparison site. And so it was getting this amazing experience working like, not only in the UK, but in Europe, Middle East Africa, like Asia, obviously, Australia, because I was there and started to just kind of like, you know, see the world for, like these behavioral patterns and the things that people shared across cultures, the behaviors that they shared, and how could we kind of figure out what those were? And how could we then turn that into marketing. So it's, it's not like a straight path. It's not like I just decided, one day, I'm gonna get a degree in behavioral economics or behavioral science or whatever it might be. It just really came very naturally. And it really came from practice. And then educating myself getting a little bit of formal education, combined with the fact that I was doing strategic consulting for these, you know, big giant companies, which was an amazing experience I was lucky to do. And that was it. I mean, I think I started writing about to your point, I think we said this earlier, I started writing in 2020, or 2019, maybe late 2019. I just started putting up blogs on medium because I was like, working with these clients who wanted to know about behavioral science, but they weren't. I think the academic literature, the literature that was out there, a wasn't there wasn't created for business people. It wasn't created for marketers. It was created by academics, by and large, or academics who had gone into a blogging phase in their career. But it wasn't really written for people who didn't know anything about behavioral science, and who only cared about marketing, who had marketing budgets, who had KPIs and needed to know like, if I do this behavioral science thing, like, what does that mean? What does it look like? Like what kind of return could I expect? So that's how the blog started. And then the momentum just kind of picked up. And there was, you know, the Instagram that really picked up as well, the newsletter I started, and I was doing all of this while I was still working. But it just got to the point where I was in an amazing job at a big agency called Hi, boss. And it was very heartbreaking to just kind of look and say, You know what, if I'm going to go, I have to go now, because that's one thing I've learned is that something has momentum, you have to jump on that momentum, because that will disappear. And there's no guarantee it'll ever come back. So that's basically what I told my bosses at Havas was like, this is heartbreaking. And I struggled with this decision, but I have to go. Because if I don't go, I will regret it. So that's how I ended up back in entrepreneurship sort of full circle, I guess, using the behavioral science and kind of the marketing expertise that I gained along the way, but also then having to kind of relearn in a new world. It's a long time since 2008 2009. How do you take something that for all intents and purposes is very thick? It's you know, it's hard to get kind of your head around. It's like, complicated information. And I'm not sure how to apply things. And how do we turn that into an Instagram post? Or how to turn that into like a tick tock edit that that in and of itself is a big learning experience for me. And I'm lucky that it's been successful. So that's, I guess, the long winded story of how it up here today in front of you.

Julie Berman - Host: 18:42

I love that. I mean, I don't think it was long winded at all. I think it was very concise. But you went through like a lot of steps and sort of took this road of curiosity, and and figuring out like, Okay, well, this is fun. Let's try this or like, that sounds interesting. Let's go the next step. So I I love that. And I think to your point about, like, there's a few things you said in there that I kind of want to go back to I loved your point about madmen. And then the fact that you had sort of I did watch that show as well. And so that's interesting that you at that time were like, Okay, well, this this idea of creativity in business, can I combine these two, based on also stories that you had from a family member from your grandfather who had been doing that? And then I think, taking, you know, sort of taking that path of like curiosity, and then not only doing stuff here within the US, but then going around the world to different places. And having that perspective. I know now you're in London. And so I'm curious, what do you feel like because you have now been to different parts of the English speaking world. Well, you know, we'll put it that way. Do you feel like A lot of the same thinking processes, or ways that people look at things that have you found a lot of consistency or just things shift a lot, just with culture by location. What is your experience with that?

Unknown: 20:17

Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to say that there's hard and fast principles. I mean, I can give you a good example. So for things like food imagery, like, there's certain ways that you might show food in the UK, that if you showed it in the US, it wouldn't look appealing. And the one thing I always remember, is melty cheese. So in the US, we apparently love melty looking cheese in everything, right? In the UK, they do not like that it looks messy, and things will not sell of human behavior. Yeah. And then you see Australia is kind of like in the in between Canada's more like the US and that way. But it's little things like that you would never expect, but it's the type of thing I think you train yourself to start to look out for things you have to remember to like, I'm looking at behavioral science, kind of through the lens of marketing, and customer experience. So that might mean like, you know, where do we talk about what in a store? What does the store experience? Like? How much do people want to be helped or talk to or interacted with, that will certainly vary by culture. And I think, you know, these behavioral scripts that people sort of have, will absolutely vary by culture. So things like behavioral script just sort of describes what we think should happen in something. So the example I like to give is, I go into a restaurant and first I get an appetizer, and then I get a meal. And then I get dessert. If I went to a restaurant, and they said, Oh, we we do dessert first here, my whole behavioral script would just be like, Well, okay, is everything, what do I do, I don't know what to do. Because you've turned everything that I expected on its head, and said, I've got to figure out a new way to kind of navigate all of this. So behavioral scripts that people have for different experiences are just different people shop in different ways. You have different experiences, even for things, you know, like Amazon, so when I first moved to Australia, they were just just basically getting Amazon in the way that we would know it. And so as a culture, they were just, they would behave differently, when it came to things like ordering online, they at that time with a lot of the work that I did, and I'm generalizing, but would be much more likely to you know, kind of go to a store for things that when I was living back in Atlanta, I would just be like Amazon, Amazon, I would just have like six packages on my doorstep the next day, right? I'm not saying one is better than the other. But it's a learned behavior based off of, you know, the market environment that you're operating in. And I think that has been a really interesting learning to see. But I think the number one thing, again, is just training yourself to look out for those things that might be different, that could be different, and then experimenting to make sure that you're actually giving these different markets, things that they're going to respond to. And I would say the the other thing is, it gives you a real sense of humility, because then even I mean, and obviously, like, I'm here in London, but you know, I'm back and forth to the US. And it's a little bit of culture shock sometimes to go back and say, like, oh, I wouldn't have thought that would work. But you never know, you just have to put stuff out in the market. And then, you know, come back here and go, like, I can't believe this works in here, and it doesn't work there or something works in Europe, that doesn't work in the UK, or South America, or mea or wherever it might be. But that's the thing is you have to kind of keep that humility and say, there really are no hard and fast rules, there's principles, but we still have to test them. We have to experiment with them all the time. I love

Julie Berman - Host: 23:31

that. And so can you explain? Because, you know, we talked at the beginning about how you use behavioral science, AI and psychology? Can you like touch on those a little bit? And actually really even get into? Like, how do you define behavioral science? Like I would love to hear your sort of layman's version of of these and like these components, how you fit them together?

Unknown: 23:52

Yeah, well, behavioral science is essentially like an umbrella term. So people say like, what's the difference in behavioral economics, behavioral science? Well, behavioral economics is like under the umbrella of behavioral science, right? Psychology even is under the umbrella of behavioral science. But you will often hear me break out those two things, behavioral science and psychology. Because a lot of people who are marketers who run businesses are not familiar with what is behavioral science. They've never heard that before. They don't know why they need it, or what it is. So that's why you always hear me say behavioral science and psychology, because they'll look up things like oh, I need marketing psychology, or what is the psychology behind this? They're not they're not googling what is the behavioral science behind marketing. So it's kind of all it's all there. I mean, because behavioral science is such a big umbrella. I mean, there's a ton of things that fall underneath it. But basically, it's the study of like, why we do what we do. Right? So what might be influencing these decisions? And I think, you know, nudging is probably the one principle that a lot of people have heard of, and they kind of know what it is. And nudging is basically when you're kind of gently steering people towards one decision or another. Hopefully that decision you're steering them toward words is good for them and ethical. It should be. But that doesn't always happen. I think Amazon Prime is learning that right now, because they made it really difficult to cancel Amazon Prime with the kind of the way they were designing the experience. And now they're getting taken to court. So, you know, it's one of those things, you gotta you got to make sure you're doing things ethically. But it's gently kind of steering people in one direction or the other. And sometimes they're aware of it, and sometimes they're not. But that that falls under behavioral science, for sure. It's kind of a good intersection between design, marketing, behavioral science, neuro marketing, you know, we're the kind of looking straight into people's brains or neuroscience, cognitive psychology, informational design, you know, like, it's all there. Anything you can think of that might affect how somebody is going to make a decision is under that big umbrella behavioral science in terms of AI? I have kind of a fraught relationship with the term AI, because I do feel like it's become one of those things everyone has just slapped onto their agency. Oh, we do AI? Hey, everybody would do AI. I've been using predictive AI now for six years, and was working with like, so predictive AI is one type, and then working with like machine learning and stuff for much longer than that. But the predictive AI that I use is based around the concept of salience. So the idea is, whenever we see something like we walk into a store, a product on a shelf could catch your attention, or we could miss it completely. Right? And as a business, we want to know, what is capturing your attention. Like maybe we've got like a package that we're doing a packaging redesign. And we want to know, is anybody gonna pay attention to this? Does it stand out? You know, on Amazon, when people are scrolling and searching for things? Does it stand out on a shelf? Well, predictive AI tools, you can basically take a video or picture or whatever it might be. And it uses this AI that's been trained on like billions of data points for people all over the world, all ages, all education levels, you know, every gender, anything that might be controlled for, and then within like, one and a half, or 2% percent, sorry, 2% accuracy, it can then say the AI can go like, Oh, this is what people are gonna pay attention to, and this is what they're gonna miss. And tools like that are incredibly helpful for businesses, because it helps you kind of see through the customers eyes, you know, it helps you kind of see past all of the things where you might ask them, Hey, did you notice our product on the shelf? And maybe they're looking around, and they're in one of those scary rooms, like the one way mirror? And they're like, Oh, God, I don't want these people to like, not pay me. Oh, yeah, definitely noticed it, it was great. I'm gonna buy it every time I go to the grocery store. So it allows us to kind of bypass that problem and get some like real data that is helping us then steer really quickly, business decisions and marketing decisions and design decisions. And all of that, based on that kind of immediate feedback that we're getting from, you know, the predictive AI tool. So it's not the generative AI stuff I use here and there. But I'm much more about the predictive AI at the minute and have been for quite a few years. Yeah,

Julie Berman - Host: 27:59

that's amazing. And is that I, I looked, I was like, looking at all your stuff. Before we chatted, and I forgot what the name of it was. But it was like some really cool tool that it analyzes and shows different colors on on a picture. And I know you had a really great example of like, I think it was the Walmart pickup area. And it's, it was basically showing that like the signage and everything for where you would pick up your pre ordered Walmart packages was like super, super red. And so basically meant that it was really easy to see, like really easy to just sort of, for the customer to like skim and be like, Oh, this is where I go to get this item. So is that what you're talking about? As far as that predictive AI? It's like that tool that sort of actually, visually shows what someone really looks at by like, laying sort of colors over it like a heat map almost.

Unknown: 29:00

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that tool is called dragonfly AI. Okay, so they are used by like LVMH Diageo, I get to use them for my clients, because I've been using them for a really long time. And they're kind enough to allow me to use the tool, because it's very expensive. They're so kind to do that. But ya know, I've used that, you know, with companies big and small digital experiences, physical experiences, and it's exactly that it kind of gives you, it does some other things as well. So it'll tell you where people look first, and second, and third, and all of that. But the heat map is the one that I've been using the longest. And it is so helpful just to be able to say like, oh, we thought they were going to look here, but they look there. It's, I think one of those things where you're always sort of shocked by what they're missing, especially as a marketer, if you're in like a big company or something and you've got, you know, some poster and you're like, Oh, it's beautiful, it's simple. It's just got the logo and like an image and they're gonna get it right away and then like legal gets their hands on it and they're like, no No, you can't say this beautiful one liner, you've got to add three lines underneath it, let everyone know that this isn't exactly true. And it's only true between the hours of this, this between Monday and Thursday. And then all of a sudden, you have this beautiful, simple poster that people would pay immediate attention to, and pull their eye in and communicate really easily. And now they're just kind of missing it because it's got too much information on it, or it's not as simple you know, and as beautiful as it was. So in a lot of ways, especially in big companies, I mean, creatives, I think when they first hear about it, they're like, oh, no, is it gonna tell is this robot gonna tell me what to design? It's like, it's not that at all. It's not grading your homework, what it's doing is saying, okay, we can dial this little thing up or dial that thing up. But often what it says, And often what it does is give quantitative support to what designers want to do anyway, which is clean, like beautiful, simple visuals. Yeah. And it's really nice to kind of go back to a legal or whoever's boss said, we should add these four lines of text underneath and go, well, actually, when you do that people pay less attention to the entire thing. It just kind of shoots their attention everywhere, which we know is not good, right? And we want their attention focused on just a few places. So yeah, that's that's exactly what it is. It's like a little heat map.

Julie Berman - Host: 31:14

Yeah, that's such a cool tool. Like, I love that so much. I mean, it seems like super fun to play with. And I could see that, and then I want you to touch on to like you. So in your work, one of the things that I think really drew me into what you started doing, you know, years ago was this idea of breaking down concepts, really, into the basics, you know, like you talked about, even in one thing I read like the idea of chunking, which actually I'm familiar with, because my background, part of what I did was like in higher ed, I helped you instructional design. And that was like a huge concept chunking. And the idea of chunking is that you're taking this huge concept, and you're breaking it down into basically bite sized pieces, so you can eat the whole sandwich at some point. And I love that. And I think you do that so beautifully in your materials, which is why I'm sure it has taken off so well. Because you take what would be quite complex topics, or scenarios, and you break them down and provide some really neat insight with different theories and and sort of the terms that might go along with like explaining why Why does IKEA do well with having like a cinnamon bun at the end of their experience? You know, or, or like, just different situations like why someone might mark something down from 250 to $75. And we think it's the most miraculous deal. But if we just saw it for $75, like, we might not buy it otherwise. So I love that. Can you explain like a little bit about that your understanding, I guess of like, when you do pair some of those theories, or I'm not exactly sure what the wording would be, but you know, like, basically a whole bunch of those concepts that you use from behavioral science. And then how do you use those in your everyday work? Like how I mean, are they just on top of your mind? Because you've worked with them so much? Or how did you get the exposure to some of them to know what they were? And then the ability to like recognize them in the in the world?

Unknown: 33:25

Yeah. That's a big question.

Julie Berman - Host: 33:29

It is a big question.

Unknown: 33:30

Yeah. I mean, I think in terms of the first point around kind of taking these complex topics and trying to break them down. I mean, interestingly, I taught a lot. So I taught like three year olds how to play the violin, I taught, you know, like graduate level courses, I went through actually pedagogy teacher training. So like how to teach a concept complex, like a complex concept and kind of break it down, and just had like, 15 years of experience doing that. No one's doing that in music, right. But I was kind of, without knowing it was kind of learning. Alright, well, how do you explain something that is really complex or abstract to someone who has the physical dexterity a three year old is the mental layer not the mental dexterity with regard but you know, like, let me put it this way. You know, when you're teaching violin to a little three year old, they can't you know, you might say like, move your first finger. And they'd be like, Am I moving it? Am I moving it? No, you're not moving it? Well, am I doing it like I don't even have like the brain body connection. Yeah, to be able to say like, oh, I'm moving it. I've looked I'm doing it. I mean, that would take like months to do to get them to just be able to like, move your elbow this way. Oh, okay. You know, like, so when it came to you know, like something like behavioral science or psychology. I mean, it's kind of the same thing I think, on for I guess for better for worse. You do get a lot of academics in behavioral science who their audiences other academics, right, so why Should they, I guess, for lack of a better term, like dumbed down something or break down something for people who might be offended that they think they don't know, the very basics, you know, and then for me again, like my audience is marketers and entrepreneurs, like, people who are more like myself. So I know that I need a bite at a time. I need concrete examples. I need real life examples. I need analysis. And so all of that, I mean, helps me as well. I mean, you know, you're talking about like, I see a new concept, and I want to try it out, I want to look for it in the real world. I mean, that's what I do. I say, Okay, let me like, read this paper on it. Let me read some really complex stuff. And let me translate it for somebody like me who I'm not, I wouldn't call myself a behavioral scientist, I would call myself the translator between behavioral scientists and then like, the real world, yeah. And that's really where I see the utility. It's not in teaching behavioral scientists new examples of how IKEA is using behavioral science. Though, certainly, there are a lot of behavioral scientists in my audience, which I find really flattering. It's very nice. But like, I'm not out there doing experiments in a academic setting. Like I do experiments with businesses all the time. But that's not perfect. You know, I'm not out there trying to discover some new principle. What I am trying to do is say, okay, like, this seems to be working, like the study is really interesting. Now, how can I apply it? So that somebody who doesn't really even know what behavioral science is can go, Oh, that's really cool and interesting. I can see how that might work for my business. Maybe I should try that and see what happens. So really, that's my goal with the content is to get people thinking in a different way. It's not necessarily to make everybody a behavioral scientist, because even though I think for a lot of people, I act as a gateway as a gateway to what is this world of behavioral science? And how could it work for business. I mean, I'm not full of myself enough to think that I'm going to get them all the way to being a behavioral scientist, I'm going to hand them off to more complex information at some point, which I'm totally fine with. And kind of speaking about, you know, like breaking things down, it's really funny, because that is such, that is a really difficult thing to do with, like science and scientific findings. Because obviously, there's this whole world of like pop psychology and a lot of academics who I think very rightly, say, you can't simplify these topics. This simply, if you simplify them too much, they lose the nuance, and people kind of take them as gospel. And then before you know it, you've got people like, just doing crazy stuff based off of like, a finding from a study where like 10, people did something. And so that's a real balance for me that I hopefully hit, which is the this is really cool. It's really interesting. Here's how other people are using it. But make sure you experiment with it. Here's some things, some thought starters, like, Could this be right for us to try? Yes, no, maybe. So I really want to provoke thought rather than necessarily saying like, these are the three ways to grow your business with psychology. And that's it, and kind of steer away from the whole like Twitter thread 15 Psychology hacks for marketing, you know, like that. Don't leave any room for nuance. Don't say like, this might work for a luxury brand. But it's not going to work. If you're, you have a value brand such work for Walmart, but it might work for Ferrari, or vice versa. Right? Or you might little things

Julie Berman - Host: 38:16

you might need melty cheese in one place, and not melty cheese and another. Yeah, that's I think that's great. I think that's amazing that you keep that in mind. And I, I mean, it's so fascinating to so I'm, I have to sort of follow up questions like my first call was, are you when you're going? And I know, you said you travel between the UK and the US as well. Like, are you when you're walking into different environments? Or when you're interacting with different people? Do you feel like you're super observant, and you notice things in a different way? Because of your training? And because of your experience? In you know, working in this field?

Unknown: 38:56

I would say yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm always somebody who's been I mean, my fiance will tell you like, he cannot take me to a grocery store, because I will like watch people like not creepily but like I'll just like observe people. And I'll look at all the new brands and I want to see every label and I want to see how things are packaged and why they do this, do that. And you don't do that as much here in the UK or in Europe or Australia wherever I'm traveling as I would in the US. And I think even more so now that you know, I've been working in customer experience and I do a blend of digital and physical retail so like and digital retail. So for me going to a store is like the funnest thing ever. I'm such a dork. Like, oh, look at this cool brand. I mean, like I was in the US to visit a client. I went to Dallas, and they had I just have to say I was in Frisco. So Frisco, Texas, if you're listening to this, you have a god to your target. They had a brand spanking new it had like an Ulta in it has CVS in it. That target was like the best target I've ever been in. It was amazing. For somebody who like doesn't get to go to Target ever so like Yeah, crazy. I probably spent four hours in the targets, looking at stuff just being like, Oh my God, look at this different kind of oh, look at these product extensions. Oh, look at this new way of packaging cleaner, like the signal thread that I was sending. It's my fiancee works in marketing as well. I was like, Look at this thing, look at that thing. And he was like, okay, all right, you know? A little bit. How long have you been in there? And I was like, Look, I've got a coffee. I went to Starbucks, I could be in here all day. But yeah, I definitely think and you know, just kind of seeing the way people shop and how they behave and how they consume different things and how they choose this brand or the other. I mean, it's just something that I find really exciting. A lot of other people probably don't probably like to shop, but they don't necessarily like to just kind of look around and watch people look at new brands and things. But yeah, it's probably been exacerbated having worked with behavioral science, psychology, and AI and CX and all of that. I don't know if I can help it. It's just kind of like what I'm thinking about all day. Right?

Julie Berman - Host: 40:59

No, that makes complete sense. And, like, on that note, can you kind of take us through an example like, you know, it can be a generic example that you make up or just like without sharing the details that you're not allowed to share? But like kind of an example of when someone approaches you for something like what is the process that you would be going through, and working through sort of these different points of like, helping them understand how to really speak to their clients, and like how, whatever the end is, like getting them to buy more product or getting them to notice this particular advertisement and go to event? Like, can you walk us through kind of a process?

Unknown: 41:39

Yeah, I mean, every every challenge is different. And some clients you talk to, they know exactly what the problem is. And they're like, We want you to fix this. And you're like, okay, and that gives you a little bit more scope to kind of like, narrow things down. But often, a client will come to you and just go say something like, I, I'm not selling as much as I used to, like, people aren't putting as much in their basket when they shop with me. Do we know what can we figure out? Why that might be? Like, what's stopping them from doing this? And what are they doing now? And like, instead, they'll come to me with like, these very general sort of business challenges or business questions. And always we start with discovery. So discovery can be a lot of different things. Often, there is an audit, just to go through and you know, just through my experience, things that I've seen work, I can say, Okay, this is not working, here's three things we could experiment with and try. And those three things will be powered by Oh, social proof, or gradient effect, or whatever these principles might be. And that just comes from, you know, years and years of seeing honestly, like the same problems over and over again. But again, having the humility to say, well, go gradient effect usually fixes this, but I've got to give you a couple other avenues as well. Because your context is different, your customer is different, this store or your website is different. So we do have to make sure that we give people options they can experiment with. So an audit is certainly one of them. I mean, I always say look at what people do, not what they say they do. So behavioral data is a big one. But then I also do talk to customers, you know, you want to hear their language, you want to hear what's motivating them to do something, what's stopping them from doing something. So whenever I look at behavioral data, I do also want to talk to customers. And I think that's a little bit of the balance of they're doing one thing and saying something else. So what is going on in the in between? And then where can sort of marketing or the business step in to fix all of that. So that's discovery. Again, it's different depending on, you know, different projects and different goals and things. But generally, you just want to like, do a little bit of what's going on here. What do we think is going on? You create some hypotheses, right? And for some of those, you know, you need to get those hypotheses validated. Obviously, you need to test them and find out what things are going on. For some businesses, you put together, you know, a few recommendations, like I was saying, like, goal gradient effect could work, but you could try social proof or loss aversion. And here's some examples of how you could do that. So I will go all the way from doing the research and auditing the customer experience putting together a customer journey map, potentially, like measuring emotions, talking to customers, and then saying, you know, this is the messaging that you need. And I'll work with copywriters or I'll work with art directors, or, you know, I'll sometimes work with businesses that don't have those resources. And I go out to my kind of choice hacking list of gold standard freelancers, and we bring them in and we work through how this might look in practice. We go through, you know, managing handhold the experiments for them. And then other times it's, you know, a fortune 500 company, and I, you know, go work with like their team of 25 data analysts, or their team or their agency partner, who was this person they know I'm talking about. But, you know, again, it just it depends on the size of the company, what they're trying to achieve, but it's generally some kind of discovery process definition of the problem. I designed some kind of hypotheses and the little test those in the real world. Okay.

Julie Berman - Host: 45:03

Wow. And when you're going in, like, is it usually that you're working with a few key people or because I imagined for your job and totally correct me if I'm wrong, but like, I feel like your role could have the potential to really stir things up, where it's like, you know, like, people may not want to change, like, maybe they've been working on something like this campaign for a year, and or something's about to roll out. And they're like, what you think I should change this? Or, you know, on the flip side, like for you mentioned, like, for the lawyers who are like, oh, you should actually put in a whole bunch of a whole bunch of tiny, tiny words here to like, give us all the if ands or buts for the so like, how, how do you navigate that? Because I feel like the sort of, there's all these skills that go into what you do as far as like, analysis, and then collaboration and things like that. But that piece of the may be stirring things up. I'm curious, like, does it serve things up or to people? I mean, or am I totally wrong about this? Like, how do you usually go about that aspect and sort of convince them that this path is actually really going to be who view like, it's really, that's why you're hiring me, like, trust me along this path to get to these these endpoints that you're looking for?

Unknown: 46:29

Yeah, I mean, I would say it like that, in and of itself is a skill set that I just had to learn through trial and error. And the place that I learned that was at a TNT doing this innovation champion job where I had to be the person who was kind of like the hub, I guess, the hub of the wheel, right, and you kind of are bridge is probably a better metaphor, just gonna die for metaphors here. But you kind of have to be that person. That's like negotiating between different stakeholders, you have to go to somebody and be able to build a relationship. And it's like, you don't have to like me, right? Like, you don't have to be like your favorite person to see walking down the hall. But I do think you should I should be my goal is to be seen as somebody who is working for the good of the customer and the good of the business, right. But I'm not stepping on everybody's toes to do it. Because I have seen many a consultant many, many and agency strategists, many a brand manager, kind of try to elbow their way through things and say, we've got to do the CX thinking, we've got to do design thinking, we've got to do behavioral science, and if get on board or get out of the way. And it's like, well, that's that's not the best way to get people trying new things. I mean, I think the best way to get people trying new things is through evidence, is to say, like, hey, we sort of, you know, we went in on this project, it was already happening. And we added a little bit of value here, can we maybe slide over to your project, and I think we could add a little bit of value to your thing, you know, your stuff, too. I don't want to step on your toes, I'm not there to change everything about the way you're working, I'm there to help you kind of consider customer behavior, the customer psychology, the context of how the customer might be making decisions. And I think kind of positioning yourself as a resource when it's needed. So again, like a lot of consultants will go in and be like, I'm the expert, you gotta listen to me. But it's like, yeah, kind of, but my job isn't to push everybody like, you know, in a certain direction, my job is to like, be there and listen to them. And understand like, why haven't you tried it this way? Maybe you just haven't thought of it before. Maybe they tried it and didn't work. Maybe there's one particular stakeholder who thinks psychology is a made up, and I need to use the harder stuff like the predictive AI or, you know, I need to present more quantitative studies to that person, I think is really is knowing, like, how to persuade inside of an organization, knowing what the personalities are, knowing how to align your goals, to their goals, knowing how to take challenges off of their plate. And I think honestly, just like interpersonal skills, again, I don't have to be your best friend. But I do want you to feel like I'm listening to you. And in turn, I think you listening to me is probably good for everybody. So it's, it's a process. And I think, too many people try to be change agents with the elbows rather than the longer tail process, which is the right way to do it. But that isn't always as obviously persuasive. If you know what I mean. It's not it's not pushing people around. It's, I guess, use some behavioral science terms. You can, you know, nudge people in one direction or the other. Yeah. Rather than just trying to like make them go where you want them to go.

Julie Berman - Host: 49:33

Right. Yeah, I love that. And I appreciate you sharing that because I think it I mean, not only does it make it more of a collaborative process, it also shows that you respect the people who are doing the work right like and they have been doing the work and saying like, Okay, let me come in and like share these sort of new thoughts or these new perspectives or like try this new thing, because of this factual information or this proof, or like what I've seen before. So I think that's an amazing way to come to come at it in a much more respectful way than Yeah, like, you're, it's like my way or the highway kinda, you know, kind of thing. And that's definitely not to say that, like, I would never think that you're going to do that for anything that I ever saw. But I was curious about that question just coming in, because I could see how that might stir things up or ruffle some feathers or whatever. And especially if it's a, if it's an organization that maybe has been doing something for a while. And then as you said, like, maybe they aren't getting as much sales. And it's like, but we've always been doing this. And it's always been working. Like what, what happened, like, an having some changes.

Unknown: 50:51

Yeah, I mean, I think the thing too, about persuading people is like, different people are persuaded by different types of information, but are different tactics we should say. But it's not always information or education. In fact, it very rarely is, there are a lot of people who feel like they need that before they are allowed to make a decision. But you know, emotions are really the things that are driving somebody those decisions, whether those emotions or fear, like fear of change, or fear, you're gonna come out, you know, you're gonna make my job redundant, or you're gonna make me look stupid, because we didn't do this thing, the way that you want to do it. You know, it could just be the not invented here, issue, which is the, what's the saying ideas are like two toothbrushes, nobody wants to use one that isn't theirs or something. So it's this idea that sometimes they'll just reject your ideas off of the fact that you're just not in their culture, their organizational culture, right, like you just are an outsider in their eyes. So part of your job is having them look at you like you're no longer an outsider. I mean, that's, that's a skill I've gotten better at, you know, living in the UK is because unless I change my accent, there's no way to hide. I'm, I'm not British, you know, I don't have you know, all the same. And I've lived here for almost seven years, but I don't have all the same sort of cultural references. There are some things I have to look up, the people just know, and our experience with some things are completely new to me. And again, like, like any place, I mean, some people here see that you're different. And that's just more ammunition for I don't necessarily want to do things the way that you're saying we should do them. But I mean, just to kind of put a pin in that discussion, I think, the one thing I've really noticed, and if you know, you're like have a PR background, so agencies and brands and brands and agencies, I've sat on both sides of the fence from a consulting slash, you know, ad agency side and a brand side that was at, you know, at&t for five years as a senior brand manager. I think the most destructive attitude that I've ever seen, or that dynamic is the agency or consultancy thinking that the client is stupid, and vice versa sometimes, or the brand thinking that the like consultant or agency could never possibly know their business. Now, I do think that there are bad strategists and bad brand managers who definitely fit into those stereotypes. But often from the agency side, you'll have people say, Well, why didn't they do this? That's so stupid. Like what it but often it's because they're not educated about the business, and they're not looking outside of marketing. They're not looking to operations where staff like HR, how are they? How are the store staff? How are they training people, and they might think like, a marketing campaign can fix everything, when an actual fact is brand manager now to take your marketing campaign and go sell it into people like it, or, you know, like, people who are dealing with frontline employees. It's it's a very different job and a very different experience. But I think seeing sometimes that breakdown that happens between people who tend cuz I haven't seen it in anybody that's crossed to the other side of the table, because I think you start to Oh, okay, I've seen through their eyes, but people who are all brand side or all client or excuse me all consultancy or agency side, I think there is a gap in communication there, there are some assumptions, because they haven't walked in each other's shoes. So that's the biggest thing as I always say, like, you've really got to think about how this other person is experiencing the world how they're navigating their job. And often, it may look like a quote unquote, dumb decision to you or why can't they just do it the way I'm telling them to do it. But we what you're not seeing Are these like invisible barriers, whether they're psychological or organizational, or the challenges that this person is having to deal with it. I think it's good for all of us, because it's going to take a look and say, you know, am I giving this person the benefit of the doubt? Or am I just sort of keeping some blame on them? Because I'm not willing to kind of put myself in their shoes.

Julie Berman - Host: 54:35

I love that perspective that you come, I think, to the projects that you do with just because, yeah, you have like a completely different sort of inside scoop on the way that people think. And that decisions that we make are not always for like obvious reasons. And some of it comes down to I think you're training to it. In the behavioral psychology and knowing all of these different cool concepts that so many of us don't know, and also like just having that experience in the field and like being in someone else's shoes, and having been on that flip side, I think is also super helpful. I mean, I think just even in my experience, it's interesting now doing a podcast and getting pitched and having been in someone's shoes pitching, right, for better or worse, there are sometimes pitches that I get, and I'm just like, oh, what were you thinking? Like, why are you pitching a man for my podcast? People like you are not paying any attention, you know, but, but it's like, also, I have more respect for people to like, when they are pitching for different things. Because I also know like, I've been there. And it's, it's, you know, it can be a tough job. So it's, that's really, I appreciate that you're sharing sort of those perspectives with us, because that was something I was wondering about. I, I also wanted to ask, like, if there are people who are interested in doing this type of job? Do you have any recommendations for like, how they could get into it? Whether it be doing certain degree, you know, maybe following a certain career path? What would be sort of your advice to someone who's like, oh, my gosh, this sounds so cool. I would love to learn more about it.

Unknown: 56:28

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess it really depends, like, if you're kind of looking at it from the marketing angle. I mean, the whole you know, obviously, like, for me, I went to school, like, I went to graduate school for it and just happened to be in a good place The Right Place Right Time and met the right people and ended up in a really cool job. But that's that was my strategy was like, go to grad school if I really want to switch and do something different. Because I mean, again, to be frank, like, I needed the knowledge and I needed the connections. And that was the easiest way for me to get them coming from way outside of that world, or at least what I perceived to be way outside that.

Julie Berman - Host: 57:07

Because what was your undergrad? Was your muse? Yeah, it was okay. Yeah,

Unknown: 57:12

yeah. Music and English Lit. So I went to UVA, and did like the Musicology, well, I guess, music Musicology, and then I actually went to graduate school for a while in Nashville, in music performance and conducting, so I conducted orchestras and stuff. And yeah, so I mean, you can't get much different from conducting to corporate innovation, I guess. Yeah. Well, maybe it's me, it's kind of similar. I don't know, you gotta get a lot of coordinated in the same direction. But yeah, I mean, I definitely think like, that's one way to do it. But that's not possible for everybody. And when I made that switch, I mean, there, there just wasn't like a lot of like, these online learning resources and things that we have now. Like, the MOOCs, the I forget what MOOCs stands for, but like the online courses that are free, yeah, and I certainly think that's a good place to start for, for self education, I think, you know, there's a list of books on toy sacking.com, that are like good beginner books to kind of get understanding like, what's, what is it what's going on. And I think the same is, you know, and again, I'm not a behavioral scientist, and so like, my understanding is, you know, it's kind of a similar path for that side of the table, it's, you know, if you want to go to school, you know, you can do some level of self education. But if you need kind of those connections in that underlying base of knowledge, that's a good, good way to go. But again, like, we don't always all have the privilege to like, say, Hey, I'm just gonna quit my job and go to graduate school, or whatever it might be. So definitely the self education stuff. And that's really what I try to do with choice hacking to is make a lot of the principles and tools really practical and simple to understand and digest. So if, for example, you're working in marketing, and you want to do something that's behavioral, behavioral, sciency, I mean, I have courses on choice hacking dot Academy, I've got the podcast, I've got a gazillion it feels like blog posts at this point. And then I've got the newsletter, and those are all good places to start. And then once you kind of get into that world and start to see like, okay, maybe I can take an online class, maybe I can do some of the newsletter work, you I think you'll then start to see like a, is this something I'm really interested in, that I might want to invest in, like a graduate degree or switch to focusing on completely? And if so that's probably, you know, a slightly more robust path than if you're somebody who just wants to know, like, 100 principles and start to think about marketing through a behavioral lens.

Julie Berman - Host: 59:29

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, that makes so much sense. And also, I think it does provide such a good sort of taste of what some of the main concepts are and how they've been applied in different situations. Are there other organizations or like groups, associations, even on Facebook, or what have you, that you are part of or that you might recommend where there are other professionals doing similar things to what you do? That someone might ate, you know, be able to be part of or look at reference?

Unknown: 1:00:06

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a little bit of a weird one because there aren't a ton of like behavioral marketers, I guess you could call, right. So what you'll find is like, I think a lot of these principles have really taken root in design. And they've been around in design much longer than they've been around. So design and like UX longer than they've been around in, like marketing, but like communications type marketing. So that's what I would say is like, there's a ton, I'm going to, can't think of one off the top of my head, the name, but if you go into LinkedIn, and literally just search behavioral design, you will find a lot of really interesting things. Oh, and growth, growth design is a good one, if you're looking for something that's more like, design focused, or like product design focused, which I talk I have a lot of like client experience with, but I just haven't gotten around to like making a lot of those case studies yet on the website, we'll get there. But it's just growth Dot Design. And they go through and have some really nice kind of like interactive case studies and things which I think are really accessible, and good for beginners who maybe don't want to like say, like, Okay, how, how are these principles actually being applied? I think that's a good place, even though it's not specifically marketing. Because I think that's the other trick, isn't it, it's like, you then have the behavioral science, folks, and there's certainly like, resources out there. But again, I think that can be kind of intimidating for people who are just starting, but by all means, like, go and search out things and look, and kind of see what resonates with you. It may be choice hacking, it may not be might be other things, you know, might be like books or other podcasts, like behavioral grooves is a good podcast. It's also brainy business, which Melina Palmer runs, which is a really good like interview podcast with people who work, you know, in the world of behavioral science, so cite behavioral scientists. So that's also a good place to start. But then, yeah, I would also I, I can't come on a podcast and not Hawk my own stuff. You know, of course, you have to, I wouldn't be a bad marketer you

Julie Berman - Host: 1:01:59

would be I know, and I always do ask again, but I'm glad I'm glad that you covered it before we got there. Because you really do have such an amazing, I mean amount of resources to just to sort of educate people on kind of some of the basic fun concepts. And I had a blast learning about them all. So yeah, yeah. So and I want to ask to like, for people who are interested in this, do you feel like someone can go in at different stages of life? Like, do you feel like someone could go in younger and start or maybe at an older age? What do you think of that?

Unknown: 1:02:39

I mean, honestly, I don't see any reason why anyone of any age couldn't, couldn't integrate the concepts on. I mean, I think the only danger that I see is people out there who have found that audiences on social find the concept of psychology and business really fascinating. And those folks who maybe don't have experience applying those principles, don't know the pitfalls. Don't know anything other than, hey, this is a shiny psychological principle, I would say just just be aware of that, make sure that if you want to use these principles, like find opportunities to experiment with things and learn things, and make sure that the people that you're learning from are people who are using these principles in real life. And you know, not just kind of doing like the Twitter thread thing, which God bless them. I know that I know, that gets retweets and stuff, but the it's just a big difference. And I hate to see like, you know, some of these these other like, I'm not going to call anybody out, because that would be totally terrible. But I will say, I was subscribed to like a psychology for business newsletter. And they started recommending that people do these deceptive patterns. So dark, dark patterns, deceptive patterns. And they were they were just recommending them as things that people should do. And not considering things like long term brand health, or whether it was ethical or not. They just saw something that they thought was cool that somebody did. And they said, Oh, well, let me just tell my 10s of 1000s of followers, like, oh, you should go do this too. And it's like, those kinds of things. It's yeah, again, I think just be mindful of the ethics of things like try and experiment things where you can try to learn from people who have practical experience that I think are really upfront. Oh, the other one I want to recommend, so why we buy is a good newsletter as well. I'm gonna forget the name of the woman who runs it. But that's a really good one that's really taken off of the last eight months or so. And yeah, I mean, I again, I just think like, look for people who have actually used the principles in real life, not just people who have found that they get the clicks and yeah, and you know, will abandon it for the next thing.

Julie Berman - Host: 1:04:39

I think. I appreciate that because I think there's a responsibility there, right, like when you are in a position where you can potentially be influencing in a very large way, the outcome or what people are doing or not doing. I appreciate that you have that in I tend to be making sure that you're on the good side of ethics, right?

Unknown: 1:05:05

Or at least are considering it.

Julie Berman - Host: 1:05:07

Yeah, right. Exactly. So. So I appreciate that. And then I love this topic. Like I could ask you so many more questions, I want to, before we really come to an end, is there anything else that I didn't ask you that you feel like is important to mention that you do that I may not know about?

Unknown: 1:05:26

Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would say that I might add, I think, based off of this last little bit we've talked about is going into this understanding that, you know, there there are things that change, like, there are findings that are found, and then not replicated, for example. So they'll run additional experiments to see if they can replicate the same thing that one experiment did, and they can't do it. Right. So replication crisis is a big thing in behavioral science and psychology. And just knowing that, like, this is why experimentation in your contexts with your customer, so important, specifically, like the the principle of priming, so let's talk about priming. And priming is one that's really fallen afoul of the replication crisis. But it's something that I've seen literally create, like in the way that I was applying it, whether it's priming, or mere exposure, whatever it is, is creating millions and millions of dollars worth of value for these businesses. But then the the studies, you know, some of the more fantastical, like magical type studies aren't replicating. And then so you'll have kind of the academic side of behavioral science say, like, we've got to throw the whole principle out, it's not working. But then you've got the practical side where it's like, it may be priming, maybe something else. But I all I know is I'm doing this and it's creating results for whatever reason. So just kind of understanding that that dynamic exists, that things are changing and evolving. And, you know, studies that we thought were cast in gold, and they were looked up to and like biblical principles out there, or sometimes, you know, like, there, there's more nuance to it than we thought more things changed slightly. But that's one thing, I would say, context, context, context is so important for applying any of these things, that we really need to make sure that yes, you're on top of like, the latest studies and things, but that you're experimenting in your context with your business with your marketing. Don't Don't bet the farm on like a shiny behavioral science tactic you saw, like, test things and see how they go. That's the last thing I would say.

Julie Berman - Host: 1:07:22

I love that. Emily, you just briefly explained what is priming, for those of us who may not know, what does that mean? Yeah. So

Unknown: 1:07:28

I guess like the short example of it would be, it's something that you're exposed to that then influences your later action. So some of the studies would be things like, you know, I'm in a wine shop, and I hear French music and sales of French wine go up. Nobody's going, Oh, French music, I should pick French wine. It's just kind of subconsciously like priming them to make a French decision or decision or whatever it might be, depending on the music. That's one way to think about it. I mean, sensory stuff, pumping smells into retail stores. We know that that increases sales. It's a whole nother debate, whether it's like down to priming or some other principle, but that's another example. So it's a lot of sensory like, what am I seeing beforehand? How was that sort of influencing them the decision that I make?

Julie Berman - Host: 1:08:14

Okay, thank you for explaining that. That is so fascinating. Well, I have so many more questions I could ask, but we're gonna wrap it up here. In honor of time, I want to end because I always ask the same question every single time with all of my guests. So I want to ask you the same question, will you share a sentence that uses verbiage or jargon from your field? And then please translate it for us so we can understand what you're saying?

Unknown: 1:08:40

Well, you know, what, I actually defined a couple of the ones I had ready. So a lot of my head, okay, um, I mean, choice architecture, we didn't talk about choice architecture. So choice architecture is literally just describing like how you design a choice. So what choices you put in front of someone. So for example, if you're selling a cup of coffee, and you got small, medium and large, like how do you price those, that's the type of choice architecture depending on how you price, each one of those more people might choose a large versus a medium. So chart choice architecture is a big one that we didn't necessarily hit on, but it really is just a fancy way of saying, How are we designing the choice that we're putting in front of people?

Julie Berman - Host: 1:09:16

Okay, I love that. Yeah. And that can be so important, right? To like, not have too many but not have too few. Yeah, that's

Unknown: 1:09:26

a whole science in of itself, right? I'm sure. Myself,

Julie Berman - Host: 1:09:29

I'm sure it can be. Alright. Well, thank you so much, Jen, just for being here for kind of explaining what you do. And I know broad strokes, because we couldn't get to all the details, but giving us that insight into like how you help people and how you got here. It was super fascinating. And if people want to reach out to you, how can they do that? What is the best way?

Unknown: 1:09:54

Yeah, it's just Genet choice hacking.com Or just go to choice hacking and join the newsletter and you can respond to All the emails that come from Jen at choice hacking.com,

Julie Berman - Host: 1:10:03

which I get also, and I love them, so they're very fun to read. All right. Well, thank you so much. It was such a pleasure.

Unknown: 1:10:10

Awesome. Thank you for having me.

Julie Berman - Host: 1:10:15

Hey, everybody, thank you so much for listening to women with cool jobs. I'll be releasing a new episode every two weeks. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. And if you love the show, please give me a five star rating. Also, it would mean so much if you share this episode with someone you think would love it or would find it inspirational. And lastly, do you have ideas for future shows? Or do you know any Rockstar women with cool jobs? I would love to hear from you. You can email me at Julie at women with cool jobs.com Or you can find me on Instagram at women who will jobs again that women will jobs. Thank you so much for listening and have an incredible day