AI Has Leveled the Marketing Playing Field

0:00John Jantsch:So what if the buying decision is happening somewhere your marketing never reaches? The tools to understand where that is just became something any business can afford. You know, most small businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a strategy problem underneath the marketing. I wrote a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success that walks through exactly how to fix it. from getting clear as a founder all the way to running marketing like an operating system. 20 years of working with small businesses condensed into a framework you can actually use. And right now it's only five bucks.

0:39John Jantsch:Go grab it at dtm.world slash seven steps. That's dtm.world slash seven steps.

0:58John Jantsch:Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Roger Dooley. He's the author of three books that sit somewhere at the intersection of brain science and practical business. Today, we're going to talk about his latest book, The Persuasion Engine, How Any Business Can Use AI-Powered Neuromarketing to Understand and Win Customers. So, Roger, welcome. I should say welcome back to the show. Well, thanks so much for having me on again, Jon. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. I think our audience is really overlap, particularly for the new book, because this one is particularly geared to entrepreneurs, smaller businesses that have limited budgets, startups, solopreneurs, and so on, because it's really enabling them.

1:41We'll get into that, but I'm really happy to be here.

1:44John Jantsch:Well, thank you. So you've been writing about neuromarketing, behavioral science for, I don't know, 20 years, a couple decades. What's changed in the last couple of years that made you write a book specifically about AI? I know partly because editors want books with AI in the title, but from your own personal research, is there something about this moment that you think is significant? Well, absolutely. In fact, you're correct, John. I have been writing about neuromarketing for 20 years, and I've actually come to the conclusion that now we have entered the era of neuromarketing 2.0. Right. And the big difference is that all of the tools have been democratized.

2:21When I started on the topic long ago, initially I focused on the sort of hard science type things like measuring brain activity with EEG. But these tools were only available to the biggest brands. So I kind of pivoted to include a lot more behavioral science, psychology. I'm sure that many of your audience know about Robert Cialdini's six principles or seven principles now and try to apply them. But in any case, what's happened is not only have the tools for measuring customer reactions, things like eye tracking, for example, it used to be very expensive. It had to be done in a lab. You had to recruit subjects.

2:58Now you can even use AI simulations that are very accurate. You know, they cost as much as a cup of coffee. So you can use them not just on some really big campaign, but you want to see, gee, okay, I'm redesigning this webpage. What are people going to look at? You can get that answer instantly. So that's one area. But to me, the even more significant areas are, you know, I think that every smaller size business has two big problems. You know, not enough time, not enough money. And they want to apply things like Cialdini's principles. They want to apply tools like cognitive biases, loss aversion and all those tools.

3:36But just trying to keep all those in your head at one time is difficult. Just to read Cialdini's book, Influence, and Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, is a thousand pages. So, you know, that's a heavy lift for most small business owners. But what now you can do, you can use these AI tools, large language models, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, that are available at such low cost to do this heavy lifting for you. And that's what the book is all about. It shows with very specific prompts how you can leverage these tools to suddenly become a sophisticated behavioral marketer. And then the last part that I think is really counterintuitive is that it can even help you communicate better with empathy and emotion.

4:22You know, we see, John, we even see huge businesses who make these stupid announcements that end up infuriating their customers, where their customers revolt, where, oh, we changed our loyalty program. We've made some minor adjustments. And then suddenly people are up in arms saying, I'm never going to deal with this company again. You know, and these companies have sophisticated advisors and they've got PR people. And even then they make these horrible mistakes. But now AI can fix it, not just for those not so clueless, maybe clueless CEOs, but it can help anybody communicate with empathy and emotion.

4:54In fact, I just did a short video, an article about how even Amish business people who you do not really consider in the vanguard of high tech used AI to write more difficult emails. Like you've got to communicate with a customer who's got a project behind schedule, but they're a big customer and you can't afford to irritate them and lose their business. And how to communicate what has to happen in a way that will land well.

5:20John Jantsch:You know, it's interesting because I think a lot of people think in terms of AI and they immediately think, oh, yeah, I can do this number crunching and analysis, but you need the human, you know, for context and for empathy. And you're suggesting actually that these tools are maybe when directed the right way, right, directed using some of these frameworks like Robert in persuasion can actually do a better job than a lot of humans. Yes, exactly. And believe it or not, John, just last year, researchers in Switzerland ran an experiment. They gave emotional intelligence tests to measure people's emotional intelligence to both humans and to the major AI models of the time.

6:04And what they found was that the AI models scored far better on emotional intelligence than the average human. Humans were in like the 60 % range. AI was into the 80s. In fact, the best model was about 89 % in emotional intelligence. That's probably smarter than the most emotionally intelligent person on most companies' teams. And now that's last year's models. Today, they're even better. So this is really so counterintuitive because I was with you, John. And I always felt, well, yeah, the one thing that AI will never really master is emotion or empathy. But in fact, research shows that it's better.

6:41And you can actually try it yourself. Take a letter that you wrote that maybe didn't land that well and have Claude rewrite it for you. It will be better than what you did.

6:53John Jantsch:So you mentioned you actually call something the new million-dollar team. I think that's actually the title of one of the chapters. It costs less than lunch. Is that right? So what does an AI behavioral science team actually look like and what should I expect to pay for? Right. Well, you know, big companies can afford what they call nudge units, where they hire various types of cognitive scientists, behavioral scientists and so on to come and advise them on how to communicate more effectively, how to nudge their customers in one direction, how to increase conversion rate on their website and so on.

7:29But, you know, most of us can't afford to hire teams like that internally. And so instead, maybe we use consultants, but even consultants can be very expensive. Now, what is fascinating, you can create using an AI model like Claude or Gemini, a team of your top experts, whoever you think are the most relevant to your particular project. So you could put Robert Cialdini on there. You could put B.J. Fogg, who's one of the founders of the whole principles of behavioral design, behavior design. You could put Dale Carnegie on there. If you're in a direct sales situation, you really want to relate to people because he still has insights that are valuable.

8:06You could put a conversion expert like, oh, say, a peplier or Brian Massey to name a few of my Austrian compatriots here who are conversion experts. and you can have them work together to advise you on your marketing, to look at your website, look at your landing page, look at the direct mail that you're going to send out. And you can get this advice. You can have them discuss it, debate it, and get into the details in the book. But it's really so exciting to have these different perspectives that are actually being brought together on your particular project without, of course, having to pay for a bunch of experts.

8:43John Jantsch:So let's just take a typical example. I've got a promotional email I want to write or a landing page I want to build or something like that to sell a product or service. What's the workflow for that look like now in your book or in your platform or your framework? Right. Well, I've got a whole bunch of very specific prompts, but I think what I would start with depends on where you're at. If you've got something that you're trying to improve, You could show that to the AI and ask it to critique it from various perspectives. You could ask it to look for friction. Of course, you know, I'm the friction guy too, right?

9:18Talk about how making things easy is better. And we all put these barriers on our websites and other processes. We don't really think of as being barriers or difficult, but to a new customer, they do look like a barrier of some kind. So you could have it do those kinds of analyses. Then you could have it suggest different behavioral principles for interventions that would work better. Do we need social proof or do we need authority? And you can also have it go out and analyze your competitors, see what your competitors are doing and use those ideas to improve yours and also see where they're falling flat.

9:52One of the stories I relate in the book is I did just an experiment for a local pool supply company. I created a hypothetical pool supply or pool service company and had to do an analysis for my little local market here on the west side of Austin. And it came out and identified all the competitors. It found their websites. It looked at their reviews on Google and Yelp and so on. And it analyzed their websites and found some really strange things. In one case, it found that this one competitor had this comparison chart. This was like on a, not on their homepage, it was on a deeper page in the website that showed us in our competition.

10:27And it was really wild where, you know, we don't peek in your windows. We don't pee in your pool. And it's like all these crazy things that it said, okay, this is what this competitor is doing. So it pointed out that this is probably going to turn off more people than it's going to help. Unless they've had those specific problems, but which aren't really typical of pool service companies. But it can analyze what they're doing and then advise you on how to position your company to compete better.

10:54John Jantsch:You know, I've spent over 20 years watching good businesses waste money on marketing that doesn't add up. And usually the problem isn't the tactics. It's the missing foundation underneath them all. So I put the whole system in a new workbook called Seven Steps to Small Business Marketing Success. Seven steps, the right order with everything you need to build that actually compounds. You can pick it up right now for five bucks at dtm.world slash seven steps. So that's dtm.world slash seven steps. So how do you know, it's one thing to add, like you mentioned all the folks. I mean, we'll come back to Childany or, you know, all the folks that you mentioned.

11:38John Jantsch:So you build all this, like, I think these are the best of the best. But how do you then tune that? You know, my brand voice might not be Dale Carnegie. and it would actually sound inauthentic. I'm just using that as an example. So, you know, how do you tune, how do you take that framework that those folks presented, but then put it in your voice? Right. Well, actually, what you're bringing up there, John, is a bigger picture, which falls into the context area, providing your AI model with context about your business. And so, first of all, for your voice, you can give it a whole bunch of your past communications, writing and so on.

12:17and it can learn your voice. And there's techniques for doing that, but also you can talk about your positioning, your customers, where you want to be. If you're at the high end of your market and you're trying to create a specific image, then obviously the AI has to know that so it can give you better advice. You can provide it information about customers and it can help you develop customer profiles too. You know, I think in general, one piece of advice I have, John, is people type a command into an AI, a prompt, and then say, okay, I got my results. It's far better to do that as a conversation where you probe and you push back on it because AI wants to please you.

12:54It'll give you answers you don't like, but push back on it and say, okay, well, why are you doing this? Would this other thing be better? Or what about this other concept I had? And when you make it, when you push back and ask more questions, that's when you get your real insights.

13:09John Jantsch:We're entering, you know, AI has been around enough to where it's, you know, certainly hit mainstream. There's very few people you can come across anymore that haven't at least played with it or toured with it. But a lot of business owners have actually been genuinely disappointed with the results that were promised, or at least the hype promised them based on what they actually got. What do you think they are actually, what are they typically doing wrong if they're getting disappointing results? I would say most commonly it is not providing enough context, for one, about the company, the customers, the marketplace, not pushing the AI to develop part of that context.

13:48Because you could have it go out and do the surveys. What's the competition doing? What's my market like? What are the factors affecting my specific market at this time? And your AI can develop some of that knowledge for you. And you can create a whole document. One AI I like is perplexity for deep research. If I'm going to do a lot of research on a particular topic, maybe I'm going to introduce a new product. I really want to learn all I can about the product, the market, and whatnot. You can use any of the models. Perplexity is one, but also the others do deep research. You can have to create a 20-page report, which you can then use for context in preparing your model.

14:26So I would say that not having enough context is one common mistake. and then the other is not really probing deeply enough, not pushing back, not asking for other answers. And there's something else that I highly recommend is always trying this with more than one model. You know, right now they're cheap enough that you don't have to just adopt one and stick with that one. If I'm doing something important, I'll ask Claude, which is my sort of number one go-to, but I'll ask Gemini and I'll ask ChatGPT as well. And sometimes I get not much better insights. Once in a while, I was looking for a tagline for something, I forget what, and the first two models I tried came up with pretty good stuff, but it wasn't quite there.

15:04And the third one, for whatever reason, just happened to hit on one that wasn't quite right in itself, but by changing one word, then I had it. And I said, okay, bam, this is it. But that only happened because I tried three different models. And of course, I used a little bit of my own knowledge and intuition as well.

15:20John Jantsch:Yeah, it is kind of amazing how it almost feels like day to day. It's like they have temperaments. It's like you get better output out of one one day and different output out of one the next day. I think it's part of it that they're changing so rapidly as well. Well, they're definitely evolving. And sometimes the newer model isn't necessarily exactly as what you were looking for compared to the previous model. But you still, you can adapt and they are getting more and more powerful and they're getting better, fewer hallucinations. They're getting better at self-checking. So before they give you an answer, they'll check it sometimes.

15:55And you're always prompted to check the answers too, especially if you're creating any kind of a document that you're going to say send to a customer. Run it through a check and say, okay, be sure that everything that I'm providing here is actually true. You've all heard those stories about the lawyer who filed briefs with the hallucinated cases. And that's a serious issue.

16:14John Jantsch:Yeah, yeah. I've actually noticed, we use Claude predominantly as well. And I've actually noticed sometimes as it's putting together output, it will actually correct itself and say, oh, I made a mistake on that. Let me go back. I mean, you can see it in real time actually doing that kind of thinking. So I think they definitely are building that in. Right. Yeah. That's better than coming back and saying, yeah, Roger, you caught me on that. I was wrong. Yeah. I shouldn't have had to catch you. Yeah. That always frustrates me as well. One of the things I think I read that I particularly picked out this line that you wrote that AI is surprisingly good at predicting how humans will feel about a message, even though it can't feel anything itself.

16:56John Jantsch:Talk a little bit about that from a practical standpoint, if I'm writing a sales page or a pricing page. Right. Well, we already talked about or we mentioned the idea that AI scores better on emotional intelligence than humans because it has consumed so much knowledge about human emotions. It's read novels, It's read scientific papers. And so it understands emotions fairly well. And if you prompt it properly, you can get it to see those sort of emotional blind spots that you miss because we all know what we know and we think our customers know. We think we know how they're going to react. And sometimes we do.

17:35And certainly there are exceptionally skillful salespeople and leaders who have that intuition about how customers will react. Maybe Steve Jobs, you know, say, no, don't worry. You know, nobody's seen this thing before, but they're going to love it when it comes up with the iPhone. But, you know, most of us don't fall into that savant category. And we think we're sending something in communication that's going to be easily understood and accepted the way we mean it. I mean, a couple of examples I've got are one when the Duolingo CEO sent out a letter, which was supposed to be very uplifting. It was that they were becoming an AI-first company.

18:11And it sounded really exciting and positive. Unfortunately, the way people interpret it was, okay, the boys are thinking, oh, man, the robots are coming for our jobs now. And so it ended up being a demotivator. And he had to backtrack and say, oh, no, that was what I meant. And these things happen all the time. And these aren't dumb people. It's just that sometimes the way we think our words are going to land doesn't work. I'm not going to go into details, but a great story about a communication to luxury cruise line passengers who got a letter in their cabin about a departure or an arrival change that totally screwed up their flights for a corporate photo shoot.

18:50And so these luxury passengers were suddenly having to scramble for flights in the middle of Florida spring break when there's no flights, there's no hotel rooms. And the way that was communicated was in such a tone-deaf way. There was not even an apology. There was a brief acknowledgement that if you incur extra costs, we'll reimburse them if they're reasonable. And, you know, it missed the whole point of empathy saying, okay, these are your people who are attached to your brand. They love your brand and you're doing this to them. You know, you've got to let them know that you care. And I ran it through Claude.

19:24It created a fire. First of all, it said, don't do this. If it hasn't been done, this is a terrible idea. You're going to damage the brand, but it then created a much better letter that if you do have to create, do this thing, then here's how to communicate it. And And it was just infinitely better than the one that whoever wrote it at that cruise line wrote.

19:42John Jantsch:Yeah, that's probably delivering bad news is probably the hardest thing for most people to be able to communicate because it's just, you know, there's so much emotion built into like, I don't really want to send this even. So if somebody's listening and they want to run their first behavioral audit on something they're working on, what's the first 30 minutes hour look like to run that audit? Probably a series of prompts to first, you know, add the context about the company, add the existing marketing materials that you're trying to audit. If you're trying to, you know, that's if that's your goal and then choose your experts or even have, you know, one thing that I always like to do with AI is if I'm not sure where to start, I will ask Claude or Gemini, OK, here's my objective.

20:29How should I start? What do you need for me? and the other thing you know in the book i did not append this to every prompt but in the i did create a little mini website on my own website rogerdooley.com that is there's a link in the back of each at the end of each chapter where i've got copy and paste prompts so people don't have to type in you know lines and lines of text from the book that'd be pretty brutal and also some improved prompts that are go sort of go beyond what i could really include in the book because nobody wants a book that's full of pages of prompts. But what I was making is that I do recommend adding, ask any questions that will help you respond.

21:10Anytime you prompt an AI, just add that little phrase. And often you will get a few questions back that'll greatly improve the output that you're getting. Yeah, I concur wholly on that one.

21:23John Jantsch:Well, Roger, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by a Duck Lake marketing podcast. Is there somewhere you'd invite people to learn more about your work and obviously learn more about the persuasion engine? Sure. The best place to start is rogerdooley.com. Easy to find. And also, I'm happy to connect with any of your audience on LinkedIn. That's where I'm probably most active on social media is LinkedIn. I post fairly frequently and I interact quite a bit there. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully we'll run into you, I guess, next time I'm in Austin.