 I like to say it's really easy to find the right answer to the wrong question. And so if you don't spend enough time thinking about that, you know, you're making band-aids when, you know, someone has a virus. Hello, Melina. What an honor to have you with us today. And thank you so, so much for taking the time. You're a superhero, so I am so excited to have a dad. Well, thank you for that. I'm honored to be a superhero and glad to be here. So for those of you who don't know who Melina is, where have you been hiding? You need to, you need to find out right away. It's absolutely incredible. So Melina is most famous, I think, really probably for running or being the CEO of the Brainy business, which has a ridiculously incredible podcast that's super fantastically famous and lots of people listen to it. So if you haven't listened to it, go and listen to that. And also is the author of a book which I've just finished reading, which is amazing, called What Your Customer Wants and Can't Tell You. And it's on behavioral economics or behavioral science, I would say. Behavioral science and behavioral economics, I guess, yeah. It's, we'll get into the book a bit later, but really, if you're looking for something that explains very easily behavioral science concepts and uses lots of, lots of examples in plain English with notes of how to use it practically, then this is definitely the book for you. I was just telling you earlier before we started this that I really honestly think is it's the most helpful sort of practical, enjoying, enjoyable book that I read on behavioral science ever. So congrats. And it's relatively new, right? Yeah, I came out in May of 2021. So actually, you know, just under six months ago from when we're recording now today. So, and that is, you know, seeing the large library books you have behind you, that means a lot that it's one of your favorites. It's, well, I wish I had a bigger library. Yeah. We're getting there one day. But yeah, I mean, how did you get into this business? I mean, you're, because you're now also a lecturer at Texas. Is it A&M? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So my undergrad is in business administration marketing. And I remember, you know, when I was in school, there was just one, like, section of one book in one class, just this little tiny thing on buyer psychology. And I thought it was just the most amazing thing in the whole world. And, you know, right then, like someday when I go back, I'm going to get a master's in this. And I thought it was awesome. And I spent the better part of 10 years calling schools across the country and asking for, you know, their programs. And everybody said that's, that's not a thing that doesn't exist. And so I just, you know, was working and loved my job and was doing some innovation programs and, you know, finding, learning, you know, I think it's clear I love to learn. So I was finding other programs and things to be part of. And I was in this innovation group, kind of like a fellowship for people in this financial space that I was in. And we were at a conference and they brought in some people for us from the center for advanced hindsight at Duke University, which is Dan Ariely's lab and group down there. And I had said, oh, like it's like, ah, this is what I've been looking for for all this time. And so I cornered them and made them tell me everything about behavioral economics. And so I went and found myself a master's program as promised. And then, you know, I knew I was early ish because I had spent so much time researching and, you know, school said it wasn't a thing. But on the applied side of behavioral economics, behavioral science, I was, didn't realize just how early I was. And there was nobody talking about the stuff that was so obvious to me about how this applied to communications and marketing and brand strategy and for companies to be doing pricing work and all these things. And so kind of ended up in the, well, I guess I'll start doing that. And, you know, the podcast came from there and it was the first behavioral economics podcast, definitely for business. As far as I know, just even like consistent behavioral economics podcast, the first one, which is why it became so popular that anywhere in the world you would search behavioral economics and podcasts in mind would be the first or only one that came up. So, yeah, then with the podcast, again, about applying things that then got to a lot of people with my consulting that would say, like, I get it, but like, I don't know where to start. You talk about it, it makes so much sense. I hear you, but I'm not sure what to do in my own business. And so that is kind of where the book came from. And you said this was early. What sort of year is this like? Not as early as you would think with the people that you know, I guess, so I started my masters in 2017. So like not early in behavioral sciences as a thing, but in that applied space and people really talking about applied, it was the right, it was the perfect time. Yeah, I think it's easy when you're in a specific industry. It's easy to overestimate how popular a subject is. I mean, I think when I chat to friends who are not in in behavioral science or not in, just in other industries, they've kind of heard about it, but it's right. It's sort of a topic that seems to be spoken about, but not necessarily exercised. And I guess it is tricky to apply it to businesses sometimes. Or is it? Well, what do you normally, how do you normally go about that sort of thing? Like is there a trick? Are there some basic questions you can ask yourself? Yeah. I mean, the biggest mistake as you've seen in the book, the thing that businesses get wrong is starting from the very beginning and not spending enough time considering the problem that you're working on. And so from both my work and then people I've interviewed for my show and for the book and things really kind of across the board, everybody I've talked to says that same thing. You need to spend more time thinking about the problem so that you are fixing the right thing. I like to say it's really easy to find the right answer to the wrong question. And so if you don't spend enough time thinking about that, you're making band-aids when someone has a virus, I guess. Like there's no, it doesn't make any positive impact. And when you spend enough time thinking about the problem, the solutions can be very easily presented and you can implement really small changes that can make a huge difference for that business. The book has just 16 concepts that I think are the most relevant for business and the ones that are easiest to apply, like right off the bat. There are some others that are, there are many, many others that are really useful, but just for someone to get started themselves, this is a really solid kind of tool kit to work with. You've got really great examples of sort of priming and scarcity and all these sorts of things. And I know in that section of the book you use that, is it Einstein that was that great quote, isn't it? I can't remember if you remember, it was something like if I was given a problem to solve. Yeah, so reportedly, you know, Einstein was asked if he was given an hour to save the world, how would he spend that hour? And he says he would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes solving it. And so that's like, I would say to anyone that's listening, you know, how, if you think about the last problem or project you worked on in business of your relative hour, you know, what's your ratio? How much of your time did you spend thinking about the problem? And in that way, a one hour meeting before you spent hundreds of hours on a project doesn't count. It's not, it's not enough. And for most people probably don't even spend five minutes of their hour working on thinking about the problem. You just think, oh, we need, we need more customers. Ta-da, right. And you just like jump into it or like people don't like this flow or our form is bad. That's the problem. And you just jump in. It's too expensive, whatever that thing you think is wrong, because it's the first thing that came to your brain and we're biased to think that we're smarter and better and faster than everybody else. And so you just start working on that and trying to solve something. Oh, thank you. That's very kind of you to say. Yeah. So you go jump in and start working on something that may more often than not. Like I didn't get into pricing too much in this book. There's a future book in the series will be dedicated to pricing. But in this case, you know, pricing isn't really about price. It's all the stuff that happens before the price that matters more. Speaking of concepts from your book. There was one thing which I thought was quite interesting that you said you do in your, in your own, for your own podcast. And it was around leveraging the power of questions. And then in part of the book, you were saying here every episode of the brain, business podcast ends with me saying thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful. Be thoughtful. And, and it says the phrase be thoughtful, which is also how I close all my emails, has multiple facets. First, the bee is intentionally capitalized to represent able economics. The concept of thoughtful is more than meets the eye as well. I just thought these kind of doing some of these small things often have such a big impact. And I wondered if I wanted to talk a bit more about that or share any other examples of things where. Sure. Yeah. That's, you know, understanding the associations that happen within the brain and how we're priming ourselves constantly, whether we think about it or not, makes just such a huge impact. And so that thoughtfulness around a brand and all the little nuances or, you know, in movies or whatever, you talk about them like Easter eggs, right? The little thing that you get to see and you think is so kind of fun and interesting. Another would be the logo for the Brainy business, which is has a rocket ship that's taking off and then this, but the smoke under the rocket is shaped like a brain. And you don't notice it right away, right? You have to kind of look and I have a font that's a little bit squishy, I would say, but it is kind of brain reminiscent, I guess would be the way to talk about that. And it's one of those that you look at also, because I know that the topic is such a heavy one and so much of when people are just starting, they're like, am I going to like this? This seems like it's going to be rough. And hopefully people can tell from here and like you said from the book, like I'm, I'm, I try to be fun and lighthearted with stuff. It's not academic. It doesn't feel while it's very academic and there are lots of citations. It doesn't feel like a boring lecture when you're listening to the show, when you're reading the book. So making sure that the logo and the art has this kind of cartoony fun aspect to it makes you think, you know, I'm going to try this one. If it is next to something else that looks very like stodgy, then you say, you know, like maybe I'll go here first, right? This is the first one. So those little bits and knowing what your brand is about and how you need to be tying that in to everything that you do, including, you know, my own sort of like anchor woman sign off, I guess, of remembering to be thoughtful is, is very important for all brands. And I love incorporating that sort of stuff. Yeah. And there are just so many incredible stories in your book and you really have done the hard work. You know, you've looked at all of these academic studies and then translated them into really easy and enjoyable short stories really, which is kind of a lot of what we try and do with, with 42 courses as well. So it's, it was, yeah, that was very pleasurable to, to read and see. Are there any other kind of examples from companies that you really admire? I know perhaps like one of the ones you talk about in the book is peak end rule. Have you got any, can you remember any of those amazing examples off your head? Okay. So I know now I'm having this like specific peak end rule company example. What, what is coming to mind is something that has to do with surprise and delight, which is the Bing translator and including Klingon so that they were able to better compete with, with Google translate and things like that. And so that was some work that Matt Waller did while he was at Microsoft. And, you know, when it's something like a translator, what, what's fun about that, right? And because with surprises and delight, you need this delight comes from not having an expectation of what is to come. And you fully expect that a translator is going to translate things properly. It can't translate something so well that you're going to go out of your way be like, amazing. It was the greatest translation ever. And I'm excited, right? Who cares? I'll be really mad if it's wrong. And I go say something and sound stupid where you're unexpected in there. But, you know, what could be delightful about that? And so looking to work with the Star Trek into darkness movie was coming out. And so they decided to create Klingon in the Bing translator. And the whole like, like took over the movie premiere and people were able to engage with the brand in a way that really becomes this peak moment for a lot of people that care about Star Trek, that would then be very loyal to Bing as a translator, you know, moving forward, because they were asked to be part of that conversation and to be working on everything. So, okay, another peak end thing would be Disney. Maybe that's what you were talking about. It's like, ah, there's so many, it's, you know, I mean, I think in every great experience you have a peak, which is kind of something in the middle or when you start the experience, which you remember, and then you want to end with something, the end experience has to be really good too. And yeah, this example was lovely. I hadn't actually read that before. Oh, great. Yeah. So with Disney is so really knowing what your end point is, is important because we would like to think it's, you know, when someone orders something off of your website or whatever that is. And so way back Disneyland realized and knew that when people left the park was not the end of the experience that they had with Disneyland. It was when they went and took those, you know, ancient things of film to have them developed and then you get the photos back and you get to open and look through them all and you like relive the trip and get to show that to everyone and whatnot. So in that experience, they then worked with Kodak to figure out the best colors to paint around the park so that the photos that they would take would pop and look amazing. And then you want to share them and it helps this like flood of emotion come back and you love it that you end on this real high versus for any of us that are old enough to remember waiting on and getting photos from a trip and they're all like blurry or kind of green or whatever like faded and doesn't. It's just disappointing. That's a terrible way to end. And so making it so you have this amazing end point can then help that you want to come back again. But if you don't understand that true end it can be having such a big impact on your business. Yeah, I guess the modern day equivalent would be probably doing something with Instagram and having some square frame that you can take a picture of as you're leaving the background or something. Yeah, exactly. I was just talking with the client that's in spirits like alcohol and we're talking about having beautiful cocktails that people want to take a photo of and then it's, you know, you get home and it's seeing how many likes there are and engaging in the comments that does keep going if you have something that's grammable. I don't know. I guess actually it's an interesting thing. We're coming up to a very traditional U.S. day which is what, Black Friday? Yes, the day after Thanksgiving. Now it's like National Shopping Week I think is what it should be called because you have Black Friday which actually starts Thursday and now some of the stores are releasing. I think I saw Walmart letting people know the deals now even several weeks in advance and then you have Small Business Saturday. Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday. I was trying to think of what Sunday was and then Giving Tuesday is to be giving stuff to nonprofits and that there are matches that go with that. So like I said, it's spend a lot of money on that. So are there any, I mean thinking back on those, are there any sort of, because a lot of that's to do with framing often. Apart from your sort of usual like buy one, get one free, are there any things that you've seen that stuck out that you thought were really pretty fun or interesting or more I guess. Well, you know, Black Friday is a really great holiday consumer science wise where it's got the scarcity, the time, pressure, loss aversion and FOMO things that come into play that you feel like you have heard and you see everyone else jumping on board and you want to as well. Availability bias because it's in the news and everybody's talking about the great deals that really amped up for it. But as a business, the, we feel often that we need to do something for Black Friday because everyone else is doing it, but that is a hurting instinct in and of itself. And so similar to that thoughtfulness that you'd be giving to everything is to say, like, is it actually best for my business to do something as a big deal right now because it's kind of like permission. You don't have to do something when there happens to be big sales happening just because everyone else does doesn't mean that you have to and actually like the other piece on this is like everyone sends gifts to their clients in December. Right. That's like the national international time of sending a gift basket or a card or a little something. And because you're one of everything that's happening you actually have so much for one. It's like just one more card. So it gets kind of tossed off to the side and you get judged against all what other random gifts other people are giving. So if you just sent a card or you sent something that's not as cool as this amazing gift basket, then your effort is totally wasted. Whereas if you would send those things in April or June and you're the only one like an anniversary of when they became a client or a partner. Right. Or when you started the business like it's our birthday so we're sending you something. You can do things at other times of the year and you're more likely to be remembered and to stand out to have that benefit of surprise and delight than if you're just expected. That's the same thing with expectations. People expect to get a whole thing like from your dentist that's saying, oh happy birthday and don't forget to come in to see me. Very sincere. Yeah. So if you can do something at a different time when they wouldn't be expecting it just send something nice, it will resonate a lot more. It makes a lot of sense. And then I think sort of yeah, going back to you, I mean are there any kind of projects that you've been working on recently that you're allowed to talk about or share that you thought were? I so wish I could talk about more things. And this is the issue with in applied behavioral sciences. There's a lot of amazing projects and things that are going on that people just don't talk about because of corporate disclosures and things like that and there's a lot of competitive advantage and whatnot. So what I will say is that I've been doing a lot of work with what I call question storming. It's based on a technique by the right question Institute, which is their question formulation technique of being able to help people to find the actual problem, to spend more time thinking which doesn't really work well with how our brains actually work, taking time to ask good questions and so facilitating those sessions either to start early on to say what should we even be looking at? Where are we? What matters? What should we be doing? Or then this other piece being when you have a project or you think you know what the problem is or you have a problem, you know we're slipping in this space over here and we don't know what's wrong, then we can start working and like I say attack it with questions and so take something that we think the problem is and start asking a lot of questions about it in this facilitated fashion to help determine the real problem that then turns into a project that we can put those questions into. If anyone does have a business and they're looking to do some consulting, he can get in touch with Milena any time he wants. Website is thebrainybusiness.com and then just quickly I forgot to ask you this earlier. You said that when you first got into into behavioral economics it was just you had taken a sort of a module or something that you were doing your other work and Dan Ariely sort of team came in. Was there a particular story that really caught your attention? Like what was there was there a hook that really got you into this? Was there or is it just generally the field and general? Yeah. So from that undergrad space I don't remember the book or I remember where I was but what I do know so when the team from the center for Advanced Hindsight came out one of the studies they were talking about is this gold coin experiment which was one they did in Kenya and it was working on helping people to save money and so they had a bunch of different interventions that they used I think 12 or 18 or something and they were looking at people making a commitment saying yes I want to save for your kid to go to school or whatever it is and there were different some were getting matching funds some got text messages as if they were from the children that were saying like thanks mom I really appreciate that you care about me enough to save this money so that kind of guilt factor to help bring you back into why you were doing something where you had numbers around the edge so it was one through 12 on the one side and 13 through 24 on the other and then each week that you save you get to kind of scratch the edge of the coin to show that you did that and the coin itself was the most impactful piece people saved more with that than the text messages than matching funds and they did worse than just the coin as an incentive on its own and this like active marking off and like the gamification of wanting to make sure you go through the process and so actually my master's thesis research project I worked with a financial institution in the states is probably the easiest way to say here to do a six month saving programs and because you know so that doesn't mean much of anything right yeah you wouldn't remember and what not and even an app doesn't have you can delete those notifications and what not and hide that or whatever but refrigerator magnet is what I ended up using and that was Dan Ariely was very kind and had a conversation with me while I was a lowly master's and if he was going to continue the study and so I went forward and went with the refrigerator magnet that had the it says like scratch if you saved it has a picture with a big pile of money on it and you claim your goal and what not and so in that six months the group that had the magnet saved more and had higher they use NPS scores net promoter score that didn't have the magnet and just a control group Wow be amazing I love it the way it's often these totally random things that you would never normally expect to try that often are the things that succeed the most I think it's one of the reasons why I love behavioral science too is it's often these wacky creative things and quite often they're not massively able to do hugely beneficial things for their lives or for their future yeah that actually made me think of actually a client story I can share that is in the book which is from a financial institution that had a new checking account they were super excited to have on all their billboards that you can earn 1.26% APY on up to $25,000 in balances which means $25,000 last year it's the same it's the same numbers but it actually means something to your brain and you can very quickly say no it didn't and who the heck is talking about that right you are now curious and want to go learn more versus feeling like I think brands so often feel like they need to get like hey hey hey look at this like you're trying to entice them to get the same amount of money to be able to do a free frame they ended up having from the same media by they were planning on doing and they ended up with a 60% month over month growth and new account opening Wow that's amazing and I'd imagine the same is true for credit cards and things like that I mean they're normally terrible with the sort of millions of different types of I spent six years running marketing department for a financial institution and a lot of my clients are in that space as well and that's I kind of like to joke that if I can make checking accounts sexy you know you can sell anything right that's amazing but I know we're probably like running out of time a bit but I guess kind of to close I think the best thing is that you can have a sneak peek at your book and I know very kindly said if you're a if you're a listener to this podcast you can have a sneak peek at the first chapter and so we're going to create a URL which I don't know what that URL will be yes yes I do it'll be so people can go to the brainy store and it's waiting there for you you can get the first chapter of what your customer wants and can't tell you for free thank you so much and if you can't wait and I highly recommend that you can't wait just go to any bookstore or Amazon if you have access to it and search either for Melina Palmer and you'll find you can get in touch in touch with you is it Twitter or I guess on your website as well there's a contact yeah yes to all of those on all the socials pretty much you can find me as the brainy biz and you can also LinkedIn is great and I have mindset that you can actually connect with me versus having to follow and things like that so you can just find the brainybusiness.com or the brainy biz on most of the other socials it's amazing thank you so much taking the time and sharing some of these incredible stories and bravo with everything you're doing yeah absolutely in war and well done bravo on being you thank you for chatting again soon yeah hopefully we can get you on one of our courses sometime soon sounds great there's some more behavioral science stuff that we're going to do shortly but thank you so so much really really appreciate it absolutely thanks for having me