Blindsight: How Marketing Reshapes Our Brains

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Full Episode Transcript

With Your Host

The Brainfluence Podcast with Roger Dooley

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 Blindsight: How Marketing Reshapes Our Brains
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Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker

Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world
class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with
advice based on science or data.

Roger's new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now

available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr
Robert Cialdini described the book as, "Blinding insight," and Nobel winner
Dr. Richard Claimer said, "Reading Friction will arm any manager with a
mental can of WD40."

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller

of your choice.

Now, here's Roger.

Roger Dooley: Welcome to Brainfluence. I'm Roger Dooley. Today we

have two guests on the show, Matt Johnson and Prince
Ghuman. They are the authors of the new book,
Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing
Reshapes Our Brains. Welcome to the show, Matt and
Prince.

Matt Johnson: Thank you. So good to be on.

Roger Dooley: To start with. I'm going to let you explain who you are and
what you do, to paraphrase my friend and podcaster
extraordinaire, Miss Joel. So Matt, you go first.

Matt Johnson: Fantastic. Yeah. So my name is Dr. Matt Johnson. I'm a

professor, researcher and coauthor of the book,
Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways Marketing
Reshapes Our Brains. My background is primarily in
academic neuroscience. That's what I did my PhD in and
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Prince provides the marketing half of the neuro-marketing

combination that we are.

Roger Dooley: Great. In your case, Doctor is an earned title, as opposed

to your co-author Prince where he's not actually royalty.
You can explain that Prince.

Prince Ghuman: I'm Prince Ghuman. I am a chief marketing officer turned

professor and now turned author of Blindsight and so
much so that Matt is my research Batman to the Robin.
And then I'm the application-heavy person to be the
Batman to his Robyn. There. So, happy to be on the call.

Roger Dooley: Great. Glad you guys could join me and do it together too,
which is really great. So I've written about Blindsight once
or twice, and it's a really weird phenomenon. People who
are not just legally, but truly blind can somehow manage
to navigate around obstacles in a hallway. Explain their
kind of blind sight and what's going on there.

Matt Johnson: Yeah, absolutely. So it's a very rare neuro-psychological

condition where the person themselves feels as if they're
blind. So when there's internal subjective experience, it's
complete darkness, but what's really interesting is with
this very specific community, they still exhibit some
behavioral evidence of still having visual information.
They can still react.

So you sit someone down who has blindsight, you toss a

ball at them, they can actually reach out and grab it and
you ask them, "Well, you're blind, how did you do that?"
And they don't have a great explanation. It's intuitive, you
felt it was coming, you could actually do similar
experiments where you sit down in front of a computer

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and you flash different lights and you asked, "Well, how
many lights flashed?" And they're like, "Why are you
asking me that, I'm blind. It's so insulting." You just prod
them to guess and if they make a guess, it's actually
staggeringly accurate.

So they do actually receive visual information. But what's

really interesting is that it just doesn't breach the level of
our conscious awareness. So vision is such a fascinating
process. We feel as if it is a monolithic process, you open
your eyes and there is the outside visual world. There's
many different complicated pathways sending visual
information back to the brain. The visual pathway, which
gives rise to conscious visual experiences is damaged
and the ones which still can influence our behavior,
thoughts and emotions is actually preserved in this very
rare condition. So it leads to this very interesting
behavioral profile.

Roger Dooley: Well, does that tell something about normally-sighted

people, do people who don't have some major visual
impairment also have this non-conscious visual
processing going on?

Matt Johnson: Absolutely. That's really what the fascinating thing is

about the condition is, we all have these pathways. We all
have conscious visual pathways. We all have non-
conscious visual pathways and when we open our eyes
and we're experiencing the world, we never notice that
these are different pathways and they're bifurcated in
different parts of the brain. It's really only in the case
where we have these very specific types of brain damage
that we do see how complex and how multifaceted vision
is.
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So these unconscious pathways are really geared more

to our fundamental reactions. So really geared towards
acting on visual information, not to analyzing information.
So you think about a pencil and your conscious visual
pathway, there's very specialized regions for processing
color and the width and the shading and you get all the
richness of the pencil, but imagine a scenario where a
pencil is thrown at your head. Now, it doesn't matter what
color this pencil is, doesn't matter the exact hue that
you're able to perceive with your complex visual system,
you just got to get out of the way. And that's what these
unconscious pathways are for. They're just for detecting
very hoarse amounts of visual information and getting us
to react based just on that.

Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So before we give people

the wrong impression, the book is not all about this
strange visual phenomenon. It's also used in a
metaphorical sense, right?

Prince Ghuman: Yeah, it is. We use Blindsight because it was such a great
analogy for how the consumer world works. So, in the
same way that you're able to dodge obstacles, rather
being able to see anything because your brain is picking
up many other signals in the periphery. We wanted to use
that to tell the story of marketing. There's a lot more to
marketing than just a billboard you see. It's what the
impact the billboard had on top of the store maybe you
walked into that was on the billboard, to the online
experience. And you're only conscious of such a small
part of it. So really we named the book Blindsight
because it breaks down and it really is a great little frame
to have for the amount of impact the other aspect of

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marketing that you're not conscious of is having on your

behavior every day.

Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. So one description of the

book I read implied that it may, it's probably from the
publisher, that it was a consumer-ish book, designed to
protect people's brains against being manipulated by
marketers. But in reading the book, I found it to be more
neutral in nature. It wasn't implying that all marketing is
evil and manipulative nor explicitly how to manipulate
consumers guide to marketers. So was that your intention
to try and steer a path between the two extremes?

Prince Ghuman: Absolutely. I mean, Matt and I are really passionate about
this and this is one of the driving force behind why we
wrote this book and I'll speak personally. I've spent a lot
of time being a marketer, but I've spent a lifetime being a
consumer. And especially in the last 10, 15 years, the
amount of distrust in consumers and products and brands
has gone up. And there's something about that that didn't
make me feel too good as a marketer. And vice versa. So
marketers want to create great products, but for whatever
reason, there's this separation between them. And we
wrote the book to be the bridge between consumers and
marketing.

We wrote the book because look, we want to show how

the sausage is made. It doesn't make it any less delicious
knowing how it's made, if anything, knowing how it's
made will make you appreciate the amount of time and
effort it takes into making it. So we wanted to do this book
right by making it for the consumers, but clearly, and
we've got marketers in the room here. Clearly, so much of
marketing is not taking into account the psychological
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impact of marketing. Some very select and well-funded

teams and brands certainly do that, but we know that
there's a big difference between Coca-Cola's marketing
department and a small, medium, or even a large size
company that's not Coca-Cola.

Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I think there are certainly

techniques that businesses of any size can use here,
hopefully in an ethical fashion. That's something that I
always try and emphasize in my writing. Yes, this is a
technique, but just about any technique can be used in a
manipulative fashion if you want to. Heck, the simplest ad
can be manipulative or even deceptive if it contains false
information, but that doesn't mean all advertising is bad. It
just has to be done in an ethical and transparent way.

The first part of the book, you describe a lot of the

cognitive biases and quirks that marketers exploit. And I
think probably our listeners are familiar with a lot of these,
but one is the peak end effect. And that says that people
tend to remember the peak points and the end of an
experience much more than the entire experience,
particularly if it was a lengthier experience. So I'm thinking
to explain the research that sort of led to that conclusion
and in particular, the colonoscopy research, which I found
to be really fascinating.

Matt Johnson: Absolutely. So the peak end effect is just a really

fascinating window into this disconnect really between
experience and memory. So we feel as if, when we're
having an experience that we just have the record button
on, and then we feel as if, when we're recalling this
memory, we're just pressing the rewind button, but neither
of these things are actually true. And when you look at
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experience itself, there're certain aspects of the

experience that reliably weighted much more heavily in
memory. And so this is what was originally pioneered in
the famous Kahneman colonoscopy studies or infamous,
depending on your views on it. Essentially what they did
here is they allowed for people who were taking part in
the colonoscopy, the patients at the colonoscopy, it's
painful enough as it is but now you're asked to essentially
tell on a dial exactly how much pain you're experiencing
at any one moment.

And then after they got this data, they would ask the
people after the procedure and two weeks later, how
painful do you remember the entire experience to be?
And so now they have these two data points, they have
the actual moment-to-moment pain that they received in
the procedure, and you have their memory for how painful
it was. And what they found interestingly is, it wasn't the
overall aggregate amount of pain which was correlated
with a painful memory. It was two very specific things.

One was the peak. So if, and this is a little bit of a graphic
detail, so apologies to listeners, but if the doctor's hand
slipped or something happens where there's just this
amazing shot of pain just in that millisecond of time, even
if it's just for a very, very small amount of time, if there's
an immense intense peak in that experience, the whole
entire procedure is remembered as being very painful.
And the other thing which stood out is the end. And so if
the end was painful, the entire experience was
remembered in a painful manner. If it wasn't so painful,
then the whole experience wasn't actually remembered
very painful at all. And this led to a followup experiment
where they actually elongated the procedure and they
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had appeared at the end of the procedure where the

colonoscopy device was actually left in, and this wasn't
comfortable, but it wasn't as painful as the actual
procedure.

And so you elongate the amount of time, elongate the

procedure, more aggregate pain, but because the actual
pain at the end, wasn't very intense, the overall memory
for the painful experience was not as high. So a really
interesting example of just this disconnect between
experience and memory. And the really great thing with
the peak end effect is that it pertains not just to negative
experiences like colonoscopies, but also to very positive
experiences as well. So you're going to remember much
more of the peak of the experience at the end, whether
it's a positive experience or a negative one.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. I want to get to the customer experience

implications of that but before we have dissuaded all of
our listeners from ever getting a colonoscopy in their life,
even if their doctor wants them to do it, I have had them
and in recent years, I think their techniques have
improved considerably with anesthesiology that they are
not at all painful. But this is really a fascinating experiment
because prolonging this bad experience actually improve
people's memory of it. And I think there's a lesson there
for anybody who is designing customer experience. On
one thing I'll throw out and then maybe you guys have
some input on that, back when we could travel, I was a
moderately frequent cruiser. I'd go on cruise ships and
these are typically many days, might be a week or two
weeks, or certainly there are much longer ones, but
they're not ones that I usually go on.

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But you know, in the two week experience, you're going to

visit a bunch of places. You're going to have some great
dining experiences and you really don't remember all of
that. As you say, you haven't recorded a mental video of
the entire experience and so you remember the unique
things, maybe there was a hike across a dormant volcano
that melted your sneakers. I mean, you're going to
remember that for years and years, it's a pretty distinct
memory or an incredible dining experience someplace on
a cliff-side restaurant. But the other part is the... And see
those points are going stand out or something really bad
too. If you got stuck standing on a hot dock for three
hours because now the ship couldn't pick you up or
something.

But the end of cruises always ends up being very

anticlimactic. If not unpleasant, you've got to pack your
bags the night before, eat your breakfast in the morning,
it's kind of a rush. Then you sit around waiting for your
turn to be called to get off the ship. And there's a mad
dash for luggage and then you go through immigration
and customs. I'm curious, if either of you folks has any
idea of how that experience might be modified a little bit
so that it ends up being at least a little bit better way to
finish that off for the travelers?

Prince Ghuman: I agree. And I love the science of memory because it

really does go back to what we'd started the conversation
off with. It's not so much exploited. I think this is a great
way for consumers, because consumers want memorable
experiences, whether it's a retail store or a cruise or at a
music concert, we want to make memories. And as
people, as marketers, as designers of these experiences,
you want to be remembered as a product as a brand. So,
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it goes back to that bridging the divide. And I think one of

the things that I would suggest is adding an element of a
positive surprise at the end, because they'll remember
that. So, is there a way at the goodbye step off, is there
something that the cruise line can do beyond just letting
you go, waving back at you?

You see a lot of restaurants that use this really well, and
you see a lot of restaurants actually tap into the element
of surprise towards the end. Typically, it's Michelin-starred
restaurants, but nonetheless, there's that element there.
And to answer your question, Roger, I think we have to sit
down and truly think about how we can create a better
end for cruises, but really walking through what it's like to
be part of that experience. And I'll be honest, I haven't
been on a cruise, but there's better ways to create that
experience.

Just think about when you leave a best buy or a Costco

and you have such a good experience with Costco
sometimes, but at the end you're like, "Okay, I want to
make sure that you're not a thief." Best buy, I want to
make sure you're not a thief. And that's the end of my
experience with best buy, as opposed to Apple. You walk
into an Apple store and you leave and that friction isn't
there and that's the last thing you remember. They always
say hello to you as you walked in to always say goodbye
to you as you leave. And it doesn't seem fake. So, and
that's a perfect example of a good end versus a bad end.
And we're looking at best buy who's clearly thought about
their customer experience. They're missing that piece.

Roger Dooley: That last minute, once over when the person at Costco or
Sam's Club looks in your car to see if you're not... they
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make sure you're not walking off with anything you're not
supposed to. That also signifies a lack of trust, which
when they signify that lack of trust in you, that will lead
you to trust them less. And one of my favorite examples is
Amazon, where you return something to them. And by the
time you get back to your home or office, after dropping it
off at ups, it's been scanned in and you may have your
account credited already. They don't know that you
returned the exact item you were supposed to, but they
trust you and that in turn causes you to trust them. And
so, yeah, I suppose there's a good business reason for
having that last checks and step because there's a lot of
stuff on the shelves that people could walk off with, but it's
not the best end.

Speaking of ends in retail. One example that you use in

that same area is at the Amazon Go store. And at first I
was kind of perplexed by that because I was thinking,
"Okay, well, wait a minute, there is no end experiencing a
Go store." You get your stuff and you walk out, but the
mere lack of a checkout process, of a waiting line, having
to get your credit card out and everything else, much less
have somebody inspect to make sure you're not
shoplifting, that itself at least in your initial few visits is
going to be kind of a wow experience like, "Whoa, Hey,
that was really cool."

Prince Ghuman: It is. And just so the listeners are caught up to it, the
example we use is the anti example to show the point of
the peak end effect, which is, you always remember the
peak or the end are these experimental Amazon Go
stores. As far as I understand, there's only one in your
Amazon's headquarters, Pacific Northwest, one in San
Francisco and I think there's one in New York City, but
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there's not a single checker. You walk straight in, you pick
a product and Amazon knows you picked up the product
and you walk straight out. It is so frictionless, but in the
context of all the other shopping experiences, the peak at
this moment of experiencing the store really is the fact
that you're walking in. There's no one there. And in the
end, you just walked out and they charged your prime
credit card if you have it and on the way out.

And that totally feels like the next, of course, it's hard to
pull that off with $4,000 laptops, but nonetheless. I'm not
quite sure Apple's retail boss is going to design this sort of
experience around that for obvious reasons but for
Amazon, it totally works. There's no reason why other
others can't try it, but I love the trust angle. You're right.
Roger. It's like, they've been able to create that trust
subtext that they do with refunds with their Amazon Go
stores.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. I talk the Go stores and also Alibaba was in my
stores in my Friction book. And you two mentioned friction
briefly in your book and in the context among other things
of difficult to read fonts, which I also cover now, from my
perspective, I advise marketers to always use the
simplest easiest to read fonts because there's plenty of
research showing that when people read things in more
difficult fonts, they perceive that the effort involved in
whatever it is that they're reading about is greater.
They're less likely to follow instructions, even important
medical instructions and such, but in your book, you make
the good point that there is a positive aspect to it in that
there's some research showing that when a font is difficult
to read, people will remember what they read more. So
where do you think the balance is there? What should
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people be doing in that font battle between easier, harder

and so on?

Matt Johnson: Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I think it's just a
really interesting thing we've converged both of us on in
terms of friction, is that friction can influence different
aspects of the consumer experience and consumer
decision-making in different ways. So as you rightly point
out, there is a large swath of literature, really attesting to
easy to read fonts, really being what's more enjoyable,
much easier to bring to bind. A lot of this is done by Adam
Alter and Danny Oppenheimer. It's really well done
research and very robust findings there. On the other side
though, when you look at fluency from the standpoint of
memory, we actually see a slightly different effect here.
So if you're able to make the font slightly difficult, you
force the reader to strain their attention slightly to bring
the information to mind. Evidence suggests that actually
boosts the memory for whatever you're reading.

And this is the Sans Forgetica font, which we talk about in

our book and you talk about it in your book as well. So, it
speaks to the flexibility which marketers really have to
have when they are organizing their consumer experience
and designing for specific outcomes. So there's really no
plug and play when it comes to these elements of friction.
So if you're designing for something, you really just want it
to be enjoyable for that moment and irrespective of
whether it's remembered, or if that information is digested,
then a much more fluent, easy to read font is best, but if
you really want the information to be processed and you
want that information to be encoded, then introducing a
little bit of friction can actually boost the later memory for
that.
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Roger Dooley: Yeah. I think I'd be inclined to use that harder to read
Sans Forgetica font on something like a billboard,
something very short text, because if you give somebody
even a paragraph of difficult to read text, they just aren't
going to read it. In a lab setting, you can say, read this
paragraph, people will read the paragraph because that's
what they're being told to do but in a consumer setting,
you just can't rely on people to do anything. One thing
that I've noticed lately, everybody's on social media even
a greater extent than usual and the amount of non
reading that goes on is incredible. A poster will ask a
question about something and they'll get replies that show
that the person responding got to about the first four
words of it, or the first sentence, completely ignored
everything else and as a result gave a not totally
inappropriate, useless reply, people just do not like to
read. They will make as little effort as they can.

Matt Johnson: Absolutely. I mean, it really speaks to the law of these

mental effort when we're engaging in this very
exogenistic-driven attention when it's things in our
environment which we're just responding to, the amount
of effort that we're giving to process these things is very
minimal. So we see that a lot in terms of how this affects
online behavior and really how it affects consumer
decision-making as well.

Prince Ghuman: And just to piggyback on what Matt said earlier, if you
want to remember a book because you're studying it for
school, or you just want to absorb more of it than reading
in Sans Forgetica at least in theory will help you
remember it better. But Matt also said, if you want to
optimize for the experience itself, then that piece of
friction might not help. I feel like we can talk about it in
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terms of fonts, but I think it's really fun to talk about it in

terms of events.

In which case, you're not thinking about optimizing a retail

store experience as much, or you're not thinking about
optimizing a website where you don't want to add enough
friction, but if you want someone to remember your
billboard, instead of making it a billboard, finding a way to
interact with it, which is a form of friction actually helps not
only memory, but if you do it right, it'll actually create an
experience. That's in terms of finding the balance. So
instead of getting... We mentioned this in the book as well
as is, if you're selling pianos and you have a billboard for
a piano, why not buy out the set of stairs at a subway so
that when people are stepping on your piano keys, there's
that little bit of interaction there. And it can turn up one
more level by adding lights every time you step on it. And
you can turn up a second level by making it makes
sounds, as people are stepping on it.

Every single time, technically, that's friction. It's more

friction to step onto a walking billboard that makes sounds
versus just looking at it, but it adds, I would argue, joy or
experience and an age to the memory.

Roger Dooley: Yeah. It's not diminishing the person's experience in any
way when that happens. It's not like they have to go
through a maze to get up the steps when they're just
trying to get home or something. A few years ago, I was
involved in higher ed marketing and one of the hot
techniques that the company I was working with was
using was sending a personalized video to applicants and
these are really pretty cool and fun. The applicant would
get a video personalized to them. They would see these
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school mascot holding up a welcome sign with their name

on it. They might see a dorm room with their name on it,
swinging open, and this would actually be pretty well
done.

So it looked fairly realistic as opposed to something that's

just a mirror, like a subtitle on it or something of that
nature, or maybe they're in the stadium at a football game
and the jumbotron says something about them. So pretty
cool experience. But in your book, you're talking about the
future of marketing and you talk about face swap videos,
explain that concept and how far we are from actually
being able to realize that.

Prince Ghuman: I love this conversation. So the future of marketing, one of

the things we bring up in the book is the future of face
swap videos. But really what we talk about is digital fakes.
Just earlier this month, so in the book we mentioned a
digital model. It is a model who is not a real person who
was a supermodel. She has deals with some of the
higher-end luxury brands like Fendi, Tom Ford and she
recently signed a record deal and will be in an entertainer
album probably dropping soon. So the point Matt and I
love to make is this.

If they can make a supermodel and a DJ in a virtual form,

that people are buying and paying large sums of money
for, they can definitely make a fake of us, of the three of
us, of everyone listening. And that's where we talk about
face swap. An example of face swap is that app that
came out about a year and a half ago, which people took
photos and aged themselves 40 years, made them
younger and ultimately the product creator walked away
with digital rights to fake photos of you. So, and this is
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where we go back to the two square one, this weird level

of mistrust between marketers and consumers and
understand the implication of that, I think goes down the
discussion about privacy and data and creating digital
products and what that means in the future. Matt has
something to say, I can see him raising his hand. Go
ahead, Matt.

Matt Johnson: Yeah, just to piggyback on that. I think the face

conversation is especially interesting and it's compounded
by the fact that we have a special place in our attention
for our own faces. So this is the visual cocktail party
effect. So the auditory cocktail party effect is a very old,
very robust effect in psychology, where if you're at a
cocktail party and you're engrossed in the conversation
you are currently having, you're looking directly at
somebody, if you hear all of a sudden out of the corner of
the room, Matt or Roger, whatever your name is, your
ears will peak up. And so you weren't listening a
millisecond ago and you weren't paying attention to these
people in the corner of the room having a conversation,
you have this residual amount of attention bandwidth
which is designated just for these very highly salient
stimuli, such as your own name.

And a piece of research which came out about a year

ago, found the same thing but with our own faces. That
our attention is drawn to things even if we don't
consciously recognize it as our own face, as we paid
more attention to stimuli, which actually has our own face
in it. And so with this finding, this could be a very, very
potent type of marketing technique where you're scrolling
through your Facebook feed, Facebook, Instagram have
tons of aggregate photos of you. You could easily see a
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banner ad for Nike shoes or a grill, whatever the case

may be, but it's your face. It's you advertising to yourself.
And that could a very potent form of marketing, which
might not be too far in the future.

Roger Dooley: And LinkedIn has been doing that for probably eight or 10
years. I've used that as an example of both good and bad
advertising, where LinkedIn will put your photo, which
they just pull from your profile which is pretty
straightforward, in an ad for... like a recruiting ad for
somebody or an ad, you might like to follow this brand.
And it's good in that it gets your attention because as you
point out, Matt, when you see your face over there in the
margin, it's like, "Hey, what's my face doing in the
margin?" And you've got to look at it, but then it says,
"You might like to follow a Comcast business." Yes. Well,
why would I want to do that? You've given me no reason
other than putting my face in their ad.

So, if you're going to personalize it, you need an effective

message to as to why that's relevant to you, but it does
work. And I can imagine once they manage to do videos
that way... As you were talking, I was visualizing a video
for a vacation resort where your fake supermodel is
welcoming a fake you to the resort and showing you
around as if you're actually part of this immersive
experience and that would certainly hold people's
attention for a while, I think.

Prince Ghuman: Imagine if it wasn't LinkedIn. Imagine if it was a life

insurance commercial, a car insurance commercial, but
with your face on it. And it doesn't have to look exactly
like you. So the attention grabbing nature of the cocktail
party effect is amazing. You can see a Ray-Ban ad in
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your Facebook or Instagram feed, and it just has to look

enough like you, that it pauses you from the habit of
ignoring the surfing the feed and boom, you got the
attention and minus the creepiness of them actually being
you, it looks close enough to you, you might not even
think anything about it. And now you got your attention.
Sorry, Matt, I cut you off. What were you're going to say?

Matt Johnson: Yeah. No, just to jump on top of that. Yes. I mean, the
photo thing is relatively easy. I mean, they've been doing
that for about a decade, but really what the advent of the
face swap technology, they've had full movies now, which
you can watch and you are Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.
You are frame for frame him at every moment of that
movie and the same could conceivably exist for these
ads, which I think could be much more potent than the
video feature. Yeah. Or the photo feature rather.

Roger Dooley: Mm-hmm (affirmative) And I think to the unexpected

nature of it, like now, I think we're pretty much inoculated
on LinkedIn to those ads because they've been there for
so long but if you were watching a television show and
your face popped up in a commercial, that would
definitely get your attention right before you shut down all
your electronics and fabric.

Prince Ghuman: Put tin cans on your head and be done with it for the day.
Yeah.

Roger Dooley: One point you make in the book is that persuasion
techniques are not binary in terms of effectiveness. In
other words, there's a spectrum ranging from not effective
at all to guaranteed effective. And I think that probably
most marketers recognize that when we do conversion
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optimization testing, whether it's AB testing or some other

kind. We can see, "Okay, well. Hey, this has no effect.
This has a 5% conversion and so on." But I'm curious as
to whether anybody is using this scale in the way that you
presented in the book that is there a technique that is
90% effective or something like that, where, I mean, that'd
be pretty cool to have where you could show people that,
but I'm sure it's more of an individual thing, isn't it?

Matt Johnson: Absolutely. Yeah. So this is what we had discussed in the

book in terms of the ethics of marketing. So as you
described really any given marketing campaign, the
effectiveness of it on an individual level really exists on
this spectrum. If they do nothing, it's 0% effective. You're
equally likely to engage with this product or not, all the
way up to hypothetically a hundred percent, which is that
if you are exposed this marketing campaign, you are
virtually guaranteed to make this purchase or call to
action or whatever the marketing campaign is geared to
do. And really marketers aren't going to get any worse at
persuasion. So as they have more information on you, as
they have more information on your purchasing behavior,
what you're likely to do, more information about the brain
and how it processes information, marketers aren't going
to get any worse at moving up this scale.

And so really the ethical question we wanted to raise here

is really a hypothetical one which is, at what stage along
this spectrum, is it to persuasive? Is it if a marketing
campaign is on average 10% persuasive? Is that too
persuasive? Clearly I think most people would agree that
if it's 80, 90, a hundred percent, when we pull our classes
just anecdotally people get uncomfortable with anything
about 75%, but really where should the line be drawn?
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And then the other question we ask in tandem with this is

what other factors should matter.

So if you have a very, very, very persuasive marketing

campaign, but you're persuading somebody to ultimately
act in their own best interests. So you're trying to quit
smoking and you're persuading somebody with a very
potent marketing campaign to quit smoking. Is that more
okay than if you are trying to persuade them to continue
smoking, which is not in their longterm interest. And the
bit of research we've done on this is that people tend to
be very, very utilitarian in their judgments. They really
don't care too much about the sheer persuasiveness of
the advertisement. Even if this does involve some
subliminal messaging provided that the outcome of the
campaign is actually in their best interest. So the research
is still early, but I think the spectrum of persuasion is a
really interesting way to look at that.

Prince Ghuman: Yeah. The consumers take on marketing ethics being so

consequentialist is very interesting. I think, all the
marketers listening out there that it still shows, despite all
the talk about lack of trust, consumers are putting trust in
us as long as we don't abuse it to create a product that is
ultimately better for them. That's what early research is
showing. However, that's putting a lot of trust and
sometimes marketers don't know what is better for them.
It's one thing to create whatever 'quit smoking' app or
'make me healthier' app from running or whatever that
may be, that supposedly adds a better habit to you and
nudges you towards that behavior. But that's giving quite
a bit of trust into marketing.

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So Matt and I, when we wrote the ethics chapter, our goal

was to provide a framework to push this conversation on.
It's not to say this is right, this is wrong. It's to create this
continuum for ethicists, for public policymakers, for
marketers and active consumers to have this
conversation openly. Because stuff like face swap
stealing the digital rights of two-year old infant photo of
you does not scale long term. It can't. For ethical reasons
but also, there's only so long that consumers who don't
know about it will find out about it and they'll be absolutely
livid at said product.

But there's a way to find that middle ground. I think one of

the ways is what I call the definition of marketing, which is
trading value. Ultimately, how am I as a consumer getting
value from your brand and your product and how are you
attracting value from me as a marketing team, as a brand.
And in the book, we talked about that. When that
relationship is transparent, people are happy. When that
relationship is unfair, then you have an unfair trade of
value and that's where you have stuff like face swap, or
someone might say Facebook, where it's not entirely clear
how they're extracting value from you. And that goes
down that rabbit hole of discussion, but between the
continuum and the new definition of trading value, I think
that's a good place to start to talk about marketing ethics.

Roger Dooley: Right. And that's probably a good place to wrap up too. I
think we can encourage all our listeners to use these
techniques in an ethical and transparent fashion, because
if you don't, it will come back to bite you sooner or later.
So, let me remind our listeners that today we are
speaking with Matt Johnson and Prince Ghuman, authors
of the new book, Blindsight: The (Mostly) Hidden Ways
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Marketing Reshapes Our Brains. Where can people find

you two?

Prince Ghuman: They can find us on popneuro.com. And the book is on

Amazon. It's on all major booksellers everywhere, online
and offline.

Matt Johnson: In addition to the website, popneuro.com also I can follow

me on mattjohnsonisme on both Twitter and LinkedIn.

Roger Dooley: Great. Well, we will link to those places and any other
resources we spoke about on the show notes page at
rogerdooley.com/podcast and we'll have a text version of
our conversation there too. Prince and Matt, thanks for
being on the show.

Prince Ghuman: Hey, thank you for having us, Roger. Appreciate it.

Matt Johnson: Thank you so much, Roger. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more
episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger's online writing and
resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger's new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon,

Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan
Pink calls it, "An important read," and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger
said, "You'll understand Friction's power and how to harness it."

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to

RogerDooley.com/Friction.

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