Episode 5 Season 2

Kenda is a forensic psychologist turned marketer and author who uses consumer behaviour to improve marketing campaigns.  

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In this episode we discuss: 

  1. Automation Ninjas – how it started and how it’s going 
  1. The common mistakes marketers make in campaigns  
  1. Why the brain gets overloaded and what marketers can do to help 
  1. Behavioural nudges and the ethics behind them 
  1. The difference between neuroscience and psychology  
  1. Going from a degree in forensic psychology to running an Infusionsoft certified agency 
  1. Being a scout master and why that’s important  

Kenda Macdonald 

Kenda Macdonald is a forensic psychology major and the founder of Automation Ninjas. She is an international keynote speaker, a multi-award-winning businesswoman, a doting cat mom, and the author of the best selling book: Hack The Buyer Brain. 

Her biggest bugbear is how “modern” marketing doesn’t take consumer behaviour into consideration. Her mission is to fix that. 

Over years of insight through growing Automation Ninjas into an award-winning agency, becoming the UK’s leading behavioural automation agency through this behaviour first approach, Kenda has distilled her marketing knowledge and combined it with psychology proficiency.  

The results for her clients have been phenomenal – and she’ll share those secrets with you. 

Kenda on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-marketing-automation-expert/  

Twitter https://twitter.com/_KendaMacdonald  

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kendamacdonald/  

Book Recommendations  

Hack the Buyer Brain by Kenda Macdonald   

Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein   

Popcorn Psychology podcast  

Freudian Sips podcast  

Other Things We Talk About 

Strategy Sessions podcast with Juliet Hodges (BUPA) https://eximomarketingstrategy.com/strategy-sessions-episode-23-nudge-nudge-with-juliet-hodges/  

Digital Marketing Strategy Course 

My Digital Marketing Strategy Course in partnership with the University of Vaasa in Finland is available now via Teachable for just €249.  

It’s perfect for small business owners, entrepreneurs and those who want to get a better understanding of what marketing strategy is and how to embed that strategy across an organisation.  

Sign up for the programme here: https://univaasa.teachable.com/p/digital-marketing-strategy  

Andi Jarvis 

If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on Twitter or LinkedIn

If you don’t get the podcast emailed to you (and a monthly newsletter) you can sign up for it on the Eximo Marketing website. 

Make sure you subscribe to get the podcast every fortnight and if you enjoyed the show, please give it a 5* rating. 

Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing. 

YouTube Tags (only for use on YouTube) 

Andi Jarvis, Eximo Marketing, Digital marketing, marketing, business podcast, marketing podcast, marketing strategy, marketing strategies, marketing tips, strategy, strategy sessions, the strategy sessions, toptip, toptips,  

Interview Transcription 

This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent. 

Welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I’m the host of the show and the strategy director at Eximo Marketing. Thank you for coming along to listen. We’re at episode five of season two and I’m joined today by Kenda Macdonald. Kenda’s background takes us into one of my favourite subjects, which is behavioural psychology and importantly, how that interlinks with marketing. It’s ground we’ve covered before, but from a slightly different perspective. I had Juliet Hodges on in season one – link in the show notes as always – 

And we talked about Behavioural psychology. Juliet worked at Bupa and did a lot of her work there, but a lot of it is relevant for marketers. Kenda, however, runs an inbound agency. She’s infusion soft certified and yeah, just looks at this stuff all day, every day. How to improve campaigns by using Behavioural psychology. It’s a really great, fascinating insight and there’s a lot of tips for you to take away from it before we get into that. I just like to tell you a little bit about the course I have. I don’t really cover Behavioural psychology in the course, but it’s with the University of a Vaasa in Finland. 

It’s a digital marketing strategy course. It’s online entirely remote and costs €249, which I’m sure you’ll agree is an absolute steal, right? And as Christmas is coming, if you listen to this episode when it’s released, it will help put presents under the tree for the children and food in the bellies. And don’t worry about that. I’ve been a bit using emotional blackmail for you, but that’s because I’ve been listening to Behavioural Psychology talking to Kenda. But if you are interested, check out the details in the show notes and the link to where you can go by taught by me. 

So despite it being with a Finnish University, it is entirely in English as you’d expect, and it will help give you a structure to putting a strategy together. A framework you can use that’s repeatable and will help you not only create a strategy but deliver it as well. Cheque it out. Any questions? Do let me know. Do ask. That’s it. I think in terms of stuff to promote. Just listen to what Kenda has to say. Like I said, get straight into it. Here we go. Kenda, 

Kenda, welcome to the Strategy Sessions. 

How are you? 

Really good. Thank you. 

Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where are you? Where are you from? Because people might pick up you have a bit of an accent and tell us about your company. 

Okay, so I’m actually in the Southwest at the moment, Froome, just outside Bath in the UK. And I’m originally from South Africa, from Cape Town in South Africa. Hence the dodgy accent. And my company is Automation Ninjas – Behavioural Marketing automation specialist. 

I always think Froome is the fastest sounding place in the UK. Dad jokes are starting early today. Well done. We’ve got 30 seconds in. And here they go. Right. Moving on from that. Moving on as quickly as we can. Automation ninjas. You do Behavioural psychology and automation. Tell us about that. What sort of client do you work with and what sort of services do you do for them? Yeah. 

So I like to explain what we do in terms of we help people understand a little bit about how the brain works, a little bit of why we do the things that we do and how that has a mismatch with a lot of the marketing that businesses tend to do, and therefore why their marketing doesn’t work very well. So we give them that understanding, and then we help them automate the process. So we help them put marketing automation in place to actually make the things happen. So the clients we tend to work with, you’re going to range from really micro businesses, which we have an Academy for. 

So we have, like, a little place where they can learn and they can do things themselves. So that’s for the micro and smaller businesses all the way up to sort of medium enterprise. And it’s predominantly businesses that have a developed marketing team that are looking to kind of push what they’re doing with their marketing and their marketing automation and build their customer journeys out. 

Got you. So you must see when you work with clients and you obviously still follow a process that you’re working with them. I’m interested in this. You teach them about the brand first and how it works and why we make the decisions we make now. We could probably fill days and days, if not years and years of a podcast with that. But let’s look at some of the key things that people get wrong or not get wrong. Sorry, not talking about buyers. Let’s look at some of the key things that you can predict that buyers do or won’t do when they’re in that buying process? 

What are the sort of common things that people do in terms of decision fatigue or being overwhelmed and things like that. How does that work for people buying stuff? 

I guess the biggest thing we try and teach businesses is about the purchase formula. So that’s a little bit of neuroscience that actually goes into what the brain is doing when it’s making a purchase decision. And when people understand that formula, they realise why so many other component parts of marketing that aren’t sexy parts of marketing. But the parts of marketing that we all should be doing is all good advice. But no one wants to do it because it ain’t sexy. It’s not the cool trend. Now that part of marketing is really important. 

And when they get that understanding, it’s like businesses sit back and they go, oh, shit. Yes. I know. I was supposed to be doing that thing and I stopped doing that, and that’s why it’s had a knock on effect to everything else. So if I can get people to understand the purchase formula. Suddenly everything else becomes a lot clearer and it provides context around why they should do certain things and why they shouldn’t do certain things. That’s the number one thing I try and get businesses to understand is that purchase formula. 

And then there’s all the little biases that go around it and exactly things like decision fatigue and just overwhelming people with information providing the wrong kinds of contextual information as well. So you’re not actually helping the purchasing or buying process. There’s a lot of little bits that go into it, but the purchase formula is the critical point for people to understand. 

So I mentioned decision fatigue, not you, but it’s just something that’s on my mind at the minute because I’m trying to book to go to a conference in Bristol that I want to go to and I realised I haven’t booked to go yet. And the reason I haven’t booked to go is that getting back is proving a massive challenge. And this is a weird thing. The organiser of the conference, who I keep visiting their site and giving them huge signals that I’m going to buy a ticket to come to the conference and I haven’t converted yet. 

The reason I haven’t converted, it’s got nothing to do with them. But I’m overwhelmed by the train and travel options to try and get out of Bristol to get there. And it’s only take me three or four days. I’ve looked at this. I’m like, this is decision fatigue of me not being able to decide. So now I haven’t booked a flight, I haven’t booked a train, I haven’t booked a hotel, I haven’t booked the conference tickets. I haven’t done anything because I’m just overwhelmed by this amount of information about trying to get out of Bristol because it impacts on lots of other stuff about where I’m trying to go. 

That to me seems like an example, at least a rough, practical example of decision fatigue. What I see sometimes when people talk about decision fatigue on Twitter, for example, is they talk. Steve Jobs always wore the same colour T shirt so he didn’t have to make a decision. Is that really decision fatigue, or is every decision as equal as that? I don’t know what’s your view. 

No, that is what you just said. Now somebody picking up something that is a very good, sound psychological principle that has been uncovered and taking that and applying that to marketing in something that makes no sense is a big thing that makes me very angry. 

Let the anger out. This is a safe space. Let it go, go. 

It really pisses me right off. It is so frustrating. And it’s one of the things that I’m trying to combat. My new book will combat it’s, really focusing on those kinds of things and going, no, you have applied one principle to something that is entirely different. Decision fatigue is when we have to make a lot of decisions throughout the day or throughout the process. And as a result, it becomes harder to make the following parts of the process because those neurons that are being used to make that decision are tired. 

They’ve been used a lot. And therefore it becomes harder for the brain to decide because the brain has used a lot of calories and the brain is not limiting itself. Do you know any ADHD people in your life, anyone who’s gone? Yes. And you know me. I’ve got ADHD. So our brains don’t limit themselves in the same way that normal people’s brains will limit themselves. That is why we represent. So even though it’s called hyperactivity disorder, really, what our brains are doing is our brains are lazy and they’re not limiting themselves in the same way that a neurotypical brain would. 

We have all this crazy energy and all these crazy things that are going on because the brain isn’t going now, we’re just doing this thing. We’re using our energy here. And for the most part, what tends to happen is that when you’re making a decision, you’re using calories. The brain does not like using calories, because all the body doesn’t like using it, because that means that you sort of reduce your chances of survival. From an evolutionary standpoint. You start to make lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of decisions. 

The brain is using a lot of processing power, and it doesn’t want you to do that. So it stops feeding various different things. So decision fatigue happens when you have to make a lot of choices and all of those choices impact on one another, and you get too tired to make a proper choice. And when the brain doesn’t have enough context around something or something is difficult and you’re overwhelming somebody with lots of information, the brain just decides not to choose, which is exactly what you’re doing. 

The brain just goes, no, we’re not making decisions too much and it stops. And that’s what you also do when you overwhelm people on sales pages with tonnes of different options and you make people choose tonnes of stuff, you’re giving them decision fatigue because you’re causing the brain to do stuff. The brain doesn’t want to spend the calories, so it just doesn’t. Yeah, it’s not the same as getting up in the morning and having two new clothes. It’s not the same thing. 

There’s a cult around Steve Jobs, which clearly wasn’t his fault, that he’s grown up. But it’s like Jobs did this. Therefore it must stop it. Come on, stop. It bought black, I’m sure, because it was quite thinning and mediaeval felt a little bit. So that’s why I wear black anyway, not today. Clearly. So jumping off my views about Jobs and these black T shirts or whatever it was tell us about. You must see, I reckon all marketing agencies see the same things coming through the doors over and over again, especially when you have a nation you specialise. 

So do you almost sort of go to an introductory meeting with a client and you just like you almost have a bingo sheet of they’re going to have made this mistake, pick and this mistake pick and this one take bingo. 

I want to put one together. Now I want to put a bigger feet together, actually, just for funsies. We do have a laundry list of things that we know clients are going to have done. The biggest problem. And this comes back to the purchase formula, again, is lack of nurture, so lack of appropriate follow up based on the behaviour that someone has displayed. And when I say nurture, I don’t necessarily mean like someone lands on a sales page and then the salesperson picks the phone up and has a conversation and asks how the kids are. 

That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is when someone signs up for a lead magnet, you are sending appropriate information that is backing up the stuff from the lead magnet, encouraging consumption and adding value and educating on top of what you’ve already given them and then making sure that they’re at the appropriate awareness stage for where they’ve actually signed up for something. And you’re not jumping straight from really low awareness stage all the way through to sales. So it’s making sure you have that in place, but also that you have long term nurture in place, something that is adding value and educating over a longer period of time. 

Shall I get into a little bit of the neuroscience quickly? 

Yes, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Okay. 

So the purchase formula was a really phenomenal sort of experiment done by Professor Brian Newton and his colleagues at Stanford University. And what they did was they put people in an fMRI scanner and they watched what the brain did while it was making a purchase. They showed them pictures of products. They showed them pictures of the pricing of the product, and then they gave them a button to give them arbitrary amount of money as well. To actually spend on these things. They gave them a button to push to say whether or not they would buy that from the arbitrary amount of money that they had. 

And they just watch what the brain did. And while they were going through this process, we got some amazing insights. First and foremost, when people saw the product, if it was something that they wanted, the reward centres of the brain that up like Christmas tree. That kind of makes sense. You see what you want. Brain gives you a little bit of a dopamine hit to really actually want that thing, and therefore you actually want to go and buy it. That makes sense. And the brain is emulating having that thing as well. 

That’s why the reward centres are fighting. But then when people saw the price, that was where everybody kind of got really confused because we thought that what was going to happen was that people were going to have maybe some massive prefrontal cortex activation. So in terms of those parts of the brain that are responsible for logic and making decisions and that kind of stuff that would make sense for a purchase decision. Right. If you follow along with Antonio Damasio, he was a neuroscientist that uncovered that you have to have emotion in part of the decision making process. 

Otherwise, you can’t actually choose because we have to label something as good or bad. And emotion is the thing that allows us to do that in order to make a decision between two things. We thought we would see some emotional activation as a result of that research, not what happened. Didn’t see prefrontal cortex activation. Didn’t see emotion activation. Instead. When people saw the price of the product, the pain centres of the brain lit up. So this is like. 

This is music to my ears. Everyone in Yorkshire who’s listed this podcast now is going Fuki told you exactly. 

This is like literally the part of the brain that deals with physical trauma. So like breaking an arm, stubbing your toe, that kind of a deal or emotional trauma, like losing a loved one going through a breakup to that kind of deal or being bullied in school. Right. 

More painful, much worse. Yeah. 

Exactly. Much worse than all of those things. So that’s how the brain understands it. And everybody was like, what what is happening? And some of the theories that have come up as a result have been things like, obviously, biggest thing is the fact that the brain did not evolve in order to buy things online. It didn’t do that. 

Right. That’s a killer. 

Insight. You came to the podcast. It didn’t evolve to that. It evolved literally to get our genes to the next day in the most efficient way possible and just make sure that maybe we survived. But if we didn’t survive, at least the DNA survived. Right? That is what the brain evolved to do. And some of the theories that have come around that have been things like pricing and money is giving away resources, decreasing chances of survival. The brain doesn’t want you to do that. And because you’re giving away a resource, it understands what you’re paying the cases, whatever the theory is that backs that up. 

We understand pricing. When we see the price of a product with the pain centre of the brain and the brain is hacking itself in order to survive in modern life. So those two things happened, which was already, like, amazing insights. But then what they started to see was relative to the amounts of reward and pain activation. They could say that person is going to buy and that person’s not going to buy, and they could actually really accurately within a very narrow margin of chance, statistical probability all intact. 

They were able to say, yes, that person was going to purchase. No, that person is not going to purchase. And that gave us the purchase formula. And so the purchase formula is that the net value of a product and therefore the likelihood of someone purchasing is equal to the amount of reward activation that the brain gets, minus the amount of pain activation. So that just means that you have to have higher reward activation, much higher reward activation than you have pain activation in order to purchase a product. 

And that has some serious implications for our marketing and for sales. Because what we always tend to focus on is minimising the amount of emotion that we have when it comes to pricing, we don’t have control over that. We can minimise it to a certain extent with how the brain understands pricing. What we have a lot of control over with our brands is increasing reward activation. So, for instance, if we focus on heightening the positioning of the brand and creating a more luxury brand, you get higher reward activation than you get from a more normal brand. 

But what this also really means is that when someone is in the moment of purchase, it’s too late. It’s too late to affect the outcome. It’s too late because the brain is a really assigned reward activation. So what we need to focus on doing is increasing the reward activation. That’s why nurture is important. That is why helping your audience and adding value and educating becomes important. That’s why all those unsexy parts of marketing the long term Nurture your weekly emails, your monthly newsletter that you’re sending out that kind of stuff is really important in the long run. 

So one of our clients, New Zealand Natural Closing. We have case studies on the site about them. We increased their conversion rates by 351% just by focusing on the long term nurture just by sending a weekly email that added value. 

Now, if you’re not watching the YouTube video to this, you won’t have seen how far my eyebrows raised when 351% came off. I looked like a 14 year old girl who had just been out of her first brow effort. So it was incredible. Wow. 

Okay. 

So that’s not by fiddling with the short term conversion activity that’s by sorting out long term Brandon and just in the old marketing terms as an old marketer called being there, keep showing up for your customer. 

And that was over a two year period. So the baseline stats, theirs was like the perfect example. So because they’re a clothing brand, they have very seasonal activities. And the baseline stat we took was Mother’s Day and Mother’s Day sale. 

Right. 

So they have their seasonal calendar activities. So we took stats from when we first started working with them and then from a year of implementing long term nurture and then two years of implementing long term nurture. Technically, it was only 18 months. We only just started before the second Mother’s Day. But six months of long term nurture activities before the second Mother’s Day would increase conversion rates by 38%. 

Right. 

So really significant six months of sending really good quality emails showing up and being true and authentic to what they wanted the brand to be. And then a year and a half after sending that, it was 351%. And so we’ve increased average order value by 100 and something percent now to double their average order value. And we significantly. And so we have a beautiful system in place that really works for them now. So they just turn things into the beginning and we have the system that loves their customers. 

So who knew being nice to your customers was actually really worth it? 

Funny, I know. Can you imagine that being nice to your customers? Paging, move on. I don’t want a lot of solicitor. I suppose the synagogue me says good luck with your client review in two years time. And they’re like, Kendra, you’ve only grown sales by 12% this year, not by 100% or 400%. What have you been playing at? It’s an amazing case study. And look, there’ll be links in the show notes to all these case studies as well. So if you want to dive in and find out a bit more about the detail, please do to question you and to throw some hand grenade your way about this. 

So what you’ve been describing, I think, comes from the Stanford research without having read it, I think, was based on consumer goods. And the example you give us consumer goods as a consultant in the B to B field, my sales are B to B, and there’s a general acceptance in a lot of B to B sales. That being too cheap is as much of a problem as being too expensive, because if no one gets fired for hiring IBM or you get five prices or three prices in. 

And if one of them is either way, way too high or way, way too low, you just throw them out the window. So what you were saying there about price being a pain factor when I’m sort of try and apply that to this to be sales logic of actually, you don’t want to be too cheap. You want to have a price that kind of carries the gravity of what you’re doing, the gravitational of what you’re doing. How does that work in line with the purchase formula research or how do you think if it’s not been researched, what’s your thoughts on it’s? 

My city grid the whole time we’ve been seeing all of that. So one of the things that people get really surprised by is if you mess about with the pricing, it either increases or decreases the reward activation of the brain gas. You ever heard of the term reassuring the expenses stellar. 

That’s why I used it for years in a campaign. 

Yeah, 100% it works. So if you have premium pricing. Obviously, it has to be relative and realistic to your marketplace. Again, you don’t want to be completely the outlier for pricing. The brain does go just because by virtue of it being a little bit more expensive and having premium pricing, it must be more valuable. So you actually do get higher reward activation from that. I can’t remember the research and I don’t have the book right next to me, but I can’t remember who did this research, but they did a whole bunch of research into not only premium pricing, but also the way that you put the premium pricing out there, increasing the reward activation in the brain. 

It’s one of the ways that you can mitigate for the pain activation that the brain is going to have by increasing reward value. If you are going to go down the premium pricing model, you have to match it with everything else that you do, right. Otherwise you’re going to have cognitive dissonance and the brain is going to look at that and go right. You’re charging this much, but you don’t look like you should be charging this much. So you do need to make sure that if you’re going to go premium pricing, that the look and feel of everything matches that. 

Otherwise you’re going to cause people to feel funny. And so the way that I always say to people is remember from an evolutionary standpoint, and there’s lots of neuroscience that backs it up as well. But from an evolutionary standpoint, we evolved to understand and see things that didn’t match, because when suddenly the forest went really quiet and the birds weren’t singing, there’s a predator around, right? That means you’re going to die. And if your dies, you wouldn’t be here, right? So effectively that’s one of the things that the brain is looking for all the time is mismatches because of the fact that where is that Tiger going to jump out from? 

It might not actually be a target, but it might be a scary salesman now. So we have our own different types of predators in today’s world. Just make sure that you are matching things because the brain is constantly looking for things that might be out of place. Make sure if you’re going to go for premium pricing, you look premium as well. It has to match up, but yes, it will increase reward activation. So 100% go for reassuring the expenses and just make sure that do not drop your trousers for pricing. 

It decreases reward activation in the brain. It is not a good idea. 

That noise you can hear if you listen carefully is the noise of a million performance marketers. And as we’re in the run up to Black Friday here, although I think the episode is probably going to go out around Black Friday time, but the noise you can hear the screams of the millions and millions of performance marketers who are seeing amazing results at the moment by applying the thumb screws to their clients and going probably need to put a discount on this side. Otherwise it’s not really going to perform and the brand market is at the other side. 

Go and stop. Please do that. And look, this tension has always been there between discounts into boost sales and keeping your margin. And look, there’s a lot of I oversimplify sometimes when it comes to those pricing decisions. And I know why the performance marketers are doing it, especially with rising ad costs and zealous focus on ROAS. But yeah, it has a wider effect, doesn’t it? It depends on what timeline you’re looking at. Performance marketers tend to look at a really narrow timeline and measure success over a really short space of time. 

Brand market is if they stay around long enough, look at a little bit longer. And you’re also saying there’s actually a deeper impact between discounting and sales, isn’t it? 

100%. And I get into fights with people about the level of their ROI analysis. So you should never be looking at a superficial enough level to go, oh, from that one purchase, somebody’s return on investment. Is this no. Look at second level, third level, especially if you’re working with Ecommerce. No, not everybody’s ecommerce, but with B to B, it’s really easy to pick this out, because if your customer is coming back time and time again and they came from a slightly different ad source that maybe you didn’t feel got a good return on investment at that time. 

But you look later on down the line. You’re like, Holy crap. This group of people is now the customised time values through the roof. That’s the number we should be looking at when we’re looking at rows and that kind of stuff. Not just that initial superficial. It’s hard to do. So it is hard to do. So it is an oversimplification on our part. But you’ve got to be looking deeper. 

Those numbers to be fair to a lot of performance markets, they are the ones banging the drum for better analysis of what they do. They’re measuring at huge companies. They are looking at this in a much more in depth and broader level. Anyone who is not a household name probably doesn’t have the resources to be able to look at this in the scale you need to do. So you talk to a good performance market and saying here’s our OS figure, but we know that and throwing in all the other caveats that they need. 

So it is a difficult and we’re definitely still in the storage of measuring this. Definitely. So in ten years, time, 15 years, time will be like, do you remember when we used to do last click attribution do you remember that? It’s early days and we are still in the early days of this. So I’m not just hating performance marketers. I promise. I’ve had a couple on. I like them. I do like performance marketers they do a good job. They’re just. Yeah, not all marketing is performance marketing. 

I’m ranting. Move on, move on, JavaScript. Move on. You’ve mentioned the word neuroscience quite a bit in this conversation, and we spoke beforehand because I have a particular thing that makes my teeth hitch when I go to marketing conferences, see, people stood on stage using the term psychology and neuroscience interchangeably, which all that senses to me is that they don’t know what neuroscience means. So as somebody who does know what neuroscience means on psychology, explain the difference between the two. And tell me if it makes your teeth hitch when you see people getting it wrong. 

Yeah, it does. You can get into arguments with neuroscientists about this. Neuroscience and psychology do have quite a bit of overlap. So you will have psychologists who are neuroscientists, and you will have neuroscientists who are not psychologists. And that does muddy the water and confuse things. But effectively, neuroscience is the science of looking at what the brain is doing when various different things are happening. You can be a neuroscientist who is literally someone who looks at MRI scans in a hospital. That doesn’t mean that you understand exactly how someone makes a purchase decision. 

It means that you are looking at the science of the brain effectively. That is what neuroscience means. It means the science of the brain. So it is very much based on brain scans, looking at what’s going on, looking at various different types of brain activation. It’s all based around that. That is what neuroscience is. It could be going deeper chemicals that are happening between neurons. But that’s what’s happening. 

The clues in the name as well, isn’t it right. Except when they came up with a word, they were like, let’s see if we can hide what we’re doing. 

Yeah, exactly. Whereas psychology psychology is one of those things that I really wish it wasn’t as much of an umbrella term as it is. So psychology is huge. Psychology can go everywhere from evolutionary psychology, which is some of the things that I’ve spoken about today are deeply rooted in evolutionary psychology. The problem with evolutionary psychology, you can’t prove anything wrong because you have to go backwards in time in order to be able to see that something is exactly happening that way in order to disprove it effectively. 

Psychology starts from all the way from evolutionary psychology. It can go to child psychology to clinical psychology. You can be a psychiatrist and give people drugs as well as psychology. There are all sorts of things that encompass psychology. But because you are a psychologist doesn’t mean that you understand the neuroscience. So you could be somebody who works day to day with people and understands, maybe familial relationships. And you are a therapist helping people understand how to move through those similar relationships. Do you necessarily understand how to interpret a brain scan? 

Probably not, because that’s not what you train to do. It’s like saying someone is a doctor versus saying someone is a brain surgeon. There are vast differences between the two. So in psychology, you could sit down and do a little bit on colour theory, which doesn’t take any actual sort of hard science into consideration because it’s not looking at what the brain is doing. It’s making some sort of demises from experiments, maybe. And so very vastly different. But yes, it does make me itch a little bit in the same way that I get really annoyed when I see people taking a theory that comes from a specific subset of experiments and applying it to something entirely different because you haven’t done the research. 

You don’t know if the brain works in that way. The brain is so complicated. It is so unbelievably complicated that it can be hard sometimes to even just replicate. One type of experiment moves slightly to the right. If you do exactly that experiment in exactly that way, you can replicate the results. But if you change it slightly, the results are completely different because now a different part of the brain is doing something. So it’s really, really hard to apply things. And I would just suggest that people don’t take things and apply it without doing a bit of deeper research. 

That’s probably the best way to do it. 

I would suggest that that ship has already sailed. Market is extrapolating data and hypotheses that really don’t need or shouldn’t ever be extrapolated again. There’s lots of things I feel like I’ve been really negative today. It’s one of those things that really makes my teeth it’s in fact, it boils my piss. I’m going to go even stronger when you see stuff being shared. And it’s like, this is the most popular something or other in Britain, and you’re like, okay, and then you click on it like, based on a sample of 36 people on Twitter. 

Statistical valuity. 

It wouldn’t even get that far. It’s just like it get rid of it. 

No, I mean, there is so much that marketing has got to answer for and Funnily enough brightness here. I did a little experiment with my talk, Andy. You wouldn’t know. But I was absolutely bricking it before I did my talk because one of the slides in my talk was about how marketing sucks. Now I’m a marketer, right? I am a marketer, but marketing sucks, man. We’re just a massive collective bag of Dicks. We’re really a horrible little people for our audience. We’re not good in anything. 

There’s the trail. 

We’re bad, and we should feel bad. We really are. We’re terrible. And basically, I was going to stand up in front of three and a half thousand other marketers and tell them that. And I was terrified because every time I walk into a conference, I will go. And it’s so funny. When I was prepping for this, I was on a panel with somebody else who was doing exactly this. And it took everything for me to not play the man alive. We are so good as marketers are picking up an idea and remarketing it because that’s what we do, right, and finding ways that we can use that to our advantage to increase our conversion rates. 

And every conference you go into. Somebody’s talking about psychology, someone’s got some insight from psychology, and invariably someone’s talking about cognitive bias because everyone loves a good cognitive bias. We are all fascinated by how the brain works, and invariably someone’s got it completely wrong. And I’m not saying that I don’t want to come across as a snob when I’m saying that because of course, I’m not the world’s most qualified person out there either. It’s just that we take things that we don’t 100% understand and we apply it to a situation where it cannot be replicated and there isn’t science behind it allowing us that replication. 

And we miss the point as a result. Often we miss the call point of that research because we’ve skimmed an abstract instead of really going into the study and understanding what that study is about. So every conference I go into, there’s a marketer utilising some kind of cognitive bias and marketing insights for manipulation purposes, and it sucks me right off. It really pisses me off. 

A massive bag of Dicks might well be my favourite phrase. Anyone’s used in about 30 episodes of this podcast. So thank you very much for that. I think being generous, the marketing world, especially the agency side of that, can be quite cut throughout. There’s a lot of competition, and people are always looking for the next thing to help them stand out a little bit. And let’s be honest, we’re selling sometimes to people who might have a title that says they know marketing, but often don’t really know what marketing means. 

So having something that makes you sound slightly more clever than the other person who walks into the room. It can be a good sales tip, right? It can help you get over the line and the rewards can be great. But to me, it goes back to something I talk about regularly is that we’ve become obsessed with the next big shiny thing and forgotten the core principles of marketing. And that’s all I bang on about is core principles. Who are you selling? So why are they going to buy from you? 

What difference we’re making in their lives? How do we sell objectives? Because if you start there, you don’t need to worry about cognitive bias or you don’t need to worry about Ross or any of that shit just yet. You get the basics right, and then you can pick the right things from your armoury to go and go hunting with. And you don’t need to start worrying about that because there might be a time when you need an expert in Behavioural marketing, but you don’t start off needing an expert in Behavioural marketing. 

You start off understanding all the strategy stuff and where you’re going and then you find the expert in Behavioural marketing who can help you improve all that. And we’ve forgotten the core principles a lot. We haven’t forgotten it. Most people have just never bothered to learn them. 

They’re not sexy. It’s the unsexy parts of marketing. What is much sexier is like tracking what people are doing and like getting into the nitty gritty of like, why is that person doing that? What’s going on there? That is much more sexy. If I say the word progressive profiling. People get excited, people get really excited by that kind of stuff because it is something shiny is something new. And yes, to a certain extent, the brain isn’t actually helping with that because it wants new, shiny little bits of information. 

But I feel like we have a bigger responsibility. And I feel like if you have to rely on cognitive manipulation and coercion, which is what a lot of the tactics that we use and those tactics, not strategies, tactics. A lot of the tactics that we use nowadays is cognitive manipulation. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re coercing our audience to do something that they might not necessarily want to have done. If you didn’t have a cognitive bias to manipulate. And when that happens, you need to take a step back and go, why isn’t my product strong enough that I can do it without this? 

I just feel like that’s what we’re missing. We need to have the strongest product possible and deal with that. 

And there’s a little bit there about marketers, if you think in simple terms, about the four P markets, as these days are generally only ever the promotion fee, rarely involved in pricing decisions, hardly ever involved in product decisions, maybe a little bit of place in there, depending on the organisation. But every market is involved in promotion. That’s why I think another reason why we end up with these sorts of things where because we just sat with only one out of four things to play with. So we end up just playing with the bits that can help that. 

So when you’re talking about cognitive manipulation, we’ve talked before on this podcast with Juliet Hodges from People about Nudges, which is kind of maybe populist term. I think for some of the things you’re talking about using Behavioural nudges to move people through the sales funnel or get them to buy things and activate and things like that, I think you’ve nailed your colours to a must already on this. Are you sort of completely against them? Do you think they can be used judiciously in certain circumstances or in Washington view. 

I was going to say, I don’t have a strong view. That’s a fucking lie. That is a real lie. 

This is a safe space for strong views. 

Kendrick, I have a very strong view on it. So I need to take a little step back in order to explain my view on that there is a movement that’s happening, which I have labelled Conscious consumerism, and that is going to be the title of my new book, which comes up next year. And Conscious Consumerism is where consumers are wanting to be conscious in the choices that they’re making, and they’re wanting to learn more about businesses. And this kind of desire for learning more about the people that they’re spending money with is driving a lot of changes in sustainability and responsibility in welfare responses and forcing companies to make some rather expensive but necessary changes to the way that they do things. 

Take a look at Apple having to change the factories that they get some of their stuff done in that kind of thing. There are some big shifts that consumers are making as a result of David Attenborough’s Blue Planet, Aggressor Thunberg and all the things that she does. There are big shifts that are happening. There is a lot of green washing, and that’s happening as a result of that as well. However, consumers are driving that by wanting to spend their money in a slightly different way and the consumer voice of their wallet. 

Right. But there is an underlying thing that is happening. Thanks to the Internet, we are becoming more conscious, and we are developing a desire to learn more all the time and become more conscious. It’s almost like a habit that we formed. We’re a bit addicted to knowing a little bit more about something than maybe we would have done 50 years ago. And I think that that’s really important. That shift is really important. And what we are seeing is consumers get really upset with brands when they have been duped. 

That is not something that necessarily used to happen before, but because we are developing and marketing is driving, this brand is driving this. We are driving emotional connections to brands. That’s what we’re wanting to do. We want to build an emotional relationship with our audience. And because we’re doing that when that fails, the consumer feels betrayed in the same way that it would do in a normal relationship. So this consciousness has got quite a few good things attached to it, but also some negative aspects attached to it. 

And what we’re doing as marketers is ignoring all of that happening. For the most part. We’re like, yeah, we want to drive a relationship with our consumers. You’ll see the word relationships thrown around like, it’s nothing, right? Like $1 bills in a strip club is basically what’s happening with the term relationship. It just gets chucked out there. 

You go to cheaper strip clubs than I do, my dear. 

I like the fact that you’re like I said, the strip is more just incriminating yourself. 

There completely avoidance of doubt if my mother’s listening. 

Sorry. Anyway, yes, we throw around this term relationship, but with that comes a little bit of responsibility with the relationship. 

Right. 

And so this consciousness that’s being driven means that consumers are wanting to make better choices, and that trickles down to a lot. So when you’re trying to help the consumer make a better choice, what do you do? Do you manipulate them into making a choice that they wouldn’t necessarily want to make? Or do you lean into that consciousness and help them make a better choice? So my stance on it is consumers want to be educated. They want to know they’re being furthered by this. We also want to build a positive relationship with our consumers. 

So as a result, what we should be doing when we’re looking at nudges and biases and cognitive biases, we should be debiasing, because if someone making a decision without bias wouldn’t choose your product, you have a problem. You have a deeper problem than relying on some nudges is going to help you with. I’m just talking from a real sort of normal product being sold into the marketplace. I’m not talking about the nudges really need to be used. In other words, where places when people are not going to make responsible decisions because of bias. 

Right. 

So very often, if you look at nudge, the original book, right. If you look at nudge and you look at Styler and Sunstein’s work, what they were trying to do was getting people to make more responsible decisions because the brain is incapable of making them. So they were utilising nudges to help people make better choices about pensions and put money aside. These were for moral standpoint. 

Right. 

So my argument is you can’t get your marketing past the ethics committee of the psychology group. Don’t do it. 

It’s a good point. And there’s a book on the shelf over there inside the Nudge unit, which is by David Halpin. I think he’s called they worked with Cass Sunstein and brought nudges to British government policy. So smoking cessation pensions, that type of thing. It’s not without its controversy because there’s things that everyone agrees on. We should have less people smoking, shouldn’t we? Yes, of course we should. 

Right. 

Okay. But then you move into should we make more? Should we try and get more people to save more? Wow. Overreach in the States, there’s a whole section of ethics in that book from a marketing standpoint, this is a continuum I think I’m slightly more towards. I think they’re okay side of this continuum. Yeah. 

I definitely don’t want to give the perception of that. I think that they’re completely evil. That’s not the case. I just don’t want people to rely on them. What I want people to do instead is I want people to back up if you’re going to use a nudge or if we’re being really honest about it, if we’re going to manipulate a cognitive bias that someone is making. Remember, these cognitive biases are errors that the brain is making. So if you are leaning into the error that the brain is making, you need to have good reason to do so. 

And that’s what I want to get across the business. And I want you to back it up, help people give them, like, funny enough, if you are helping somebody make a decision and someone has decision fatigue and you look at that and go, okay, I can help you make a better choice. I can separate the information out. I can make it totally non overwhelming. I can highlight the information that’s really important. So it’s a clear takeaway for you. If you can help people do that, they build a positive relationship with your brand. 

So if you know that they’re going to be falling foul of a cognitive bias, life decision to take and they’re going to be falling foul of a couple of things, you can help them and you can be there and you can help them. So what I’m saying is, don’t go. I’m going to build my pricing table like this, and I’m going to make things discolour or do this because you think that that is helping a cognitive bias instead. Go, why is that happening? Why is someone struggling to make a choice? 

Why do I have to do that? And what can I do to actually help and enhance the consumer? It will work better. So I’m not saying that it’s like a bad thing to do. I’m saying that we need to understand. Actually, I am saying it’s a bad thing to do. 

Manipulating people is bad. I should just clarify that – manipulating people is bad and you should feel bad and that’s why marketers are dick heads, right? So we should just examine that a little bit closer and we should take it apart and we should try and debias. And that is what nudging is about. And people have forgotten that people have forgotten that. What nudging is about is it’s about looking and going. There is a cognitive bias and someone’s going to make a poor choice. So let’s help them make a better choice. 

And what marketers have done is they’ve gone. We can manipulate choices and forgotten. The message was to help people make good choices. 

I think I’m on board. If we change the term nudge to manipulating bias, it makes you think about it in a different way and your use of it, my view on it. There’s a lot of people when you say nudging or manipulating bias or even explain what those tactics look like immediately jump through to what on previous guest called contrepreneurs – people who aggressively stack manipulation and biases to force you into kind of take you down a path where you’re buying something that’s overpriced, you probably don’t need… Digital courses that don’t deliver the things they’re going to do. 

And I’m absolutely against that. Where I tend to land is that I think for a lot of consumer goods, I don’t believe there is one best product. I believe there are a number of things number of products that will solve a problem for a customer so where you get a customer who’s arrived at your site, if your product solves the problem that customer has, I’m comfortable and it’s at a price that is suitable for that product. So if you sell in a glass and it’s £12,000, maybe if someone’s stupid enough to buy it, then maybe that’s their own fault. 

But if your product solves a problem, the customer has at a price that is fair in the market for those things. I’m not against using nudges or manipulating bias to move that person from. I’m interested. So I’m now a customer. As long as the product does deliver on what it says it’s going to do, I’m completely against lying. This product will do X, Y and Z, and it won’t. Right. But moving someone through because I don’t believe that in many circumstances there are just one thing that solves a problem for a customer. 

There’s a range of things. So if you’ve got someone, why wouldn’t you use those tactics to push them through the funnel? 

My rebuttal to that is simply that why do you need to use them? Why do you need to use them? And it’s examining that deeper and going. But why? Why do you need to do that? And it’s just going back to the consumer wants to make the best choice. So if you help them make the best choice, they will make the best choice. 

The best choice exists, though? 

It’s relative. I think if you genuinely believe that your product is the best choice and you help the consumers see that and you help. I think it’s nudging has always been about choice architecture and about helping people understand, therefore, what the best choice is for them. It’s about at its core, it’s about debiasing, it’s about accounting for biases and errors the brain is going to make. So my suggestion is rather than try and rely on a bunch of cognitive biases on the sales page, at which point, generally it’s too late help people make a better decision before they get there. 

So help them with information and debate it in a way that helps them understand what the best choice is for them. And you might very well be the best choice. And most marketers aren’t going to like some marketers, know that their job is literally sprinkling glitter on a turd. They know that. But I think most businesses aren’t in that situation. Most businesses genuinely believe that they’ve got a good product that helps their consumers. And maybe that’s an optimistic view of the world. 

I’m in a lucky position. I only really work with people I want to work with, and if they don’t believe in their product, I’m definitely not going to work with them. I’m not in the third Polishing business. I’ve got other things to do with my time. So yeah, you’re right. I don’t think we’re a million miles apart on our views on this. No, definitely. They’re using four more or a ticking clock or a use of limited availability of a digital product. I’m like, Listen, turn that shit off right now because this ain’t happening, right? 

But you’ve got bigger problems. 

Yeah, you’ve got an ebook. There is no limit to them. It’s an ebook, right? Take that off. Now, you just make yourself look cheap. I don’t think we’re a million miles apart on all this, and I’m going to have to dock my cap and suggest you know more about this than I do as well. So hopefully no one’s listening this far into the podcast and heard me admit that. 

I’m going to have a T shirt that says it. 

Now I know more than I do on the subject of you knowing more than me. You have a degree in forensic psychology and you’re also in Infusionsoft certified. So how did you get from forensic psychology to Infusionsoft certification? Well. 

There is a story that we definitely don’t have time to go through completely. But I was offered a job by the British Police office, which is why I ended up in the UK, and I came here to do so that didn’t work out because it turns out that you have to naturalise in the UK for five years first, which is something that just admitted to let me know when they offered me the position. So obviously I had to fill that five year time period. And in that five years, I realised that I couldn’t go five years without studying. 

My brain was going to melt. So I put myself through uni, which is a really hard thing to do when you’re an international student and you’re paying five times where everyone else is paying. So I was working sort of three or four jobs at a time to pay my way through my degree. And one of the jobs that I ended up landing was as a PA for somebody who was an infusion self certified consultant and did marketing automation. That was my first sort of insight into the marketing world, because that was not my career path. 

I was going down for criminal profiling was what I wanted to do. It’s definitely not my career path of choice. And it was just a lucky coincidence of time that I was studying my neuroscience module at the same time as I was doing this job. And within about six months of working for this dude, I was his operations manager because marketing automation just clicked. And I was so frustrated by the fact that so many of the things that people were doing, it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. 

So my best thing into the industry was people who took Russell Bronson seriously. 

Right? 

That’s like the coaching. I was burst into the coaching world. I kept looking at everything and going, that’s not going to work. That person is never going to buy again. And like, from a basic economic standpoint, customer lifetime value is obviously the metric. You should be looking at. And I was like, that’s not going to work. And my boss, obviously being like a Frank Kern, Russell Brunson fanboy, wasn’t taking any of my advice and doing the things that would actually work. And Funnily enough, he ended up shutting his business down. 

All the things you’ve said that annoyed me today. This is the thing that annoys me the most when I was how I burst into the industry. 

Can you imagine that being your first introduction into marketing like this is the way to do things? So I have built some campaigns for some of the biggest names in the industry as a result, because when you’re in that, it’s very incestuous. That part of the industry. And I got to see very quickly what worked and what didn’t work. And I kept going, we need to add some psychology to this. My boss did not want to know the idea didn’t come from him. He was not interested. 

So I ended up he shut his business down and I thought, Fuck it. I said to my husband, I wanted to try this. I want to try this stuff that I know is going to work that I know that the brain needs. I want to try it. And I want to give it a go. And I spent a while talking to people about that. And people were coming on board. And so we just went and automation Injuries was born, and it’s been a happy seven years since then. 

Really brilliant. 

How many automation ninjas? How many ninjas do you have? 

We have seven ninjas and we have a team of outsources for content. 

This is a behavioural psychology nudges, and you’ve got your number ending in seven. It just ends in seven because that makes people buy more, right? 

That’s the advice I got from Russell Brunson. 

Always enterprise in the seven cheaper 3997. So you’ve always stuck with seven staff because that’s the golden number. 

We’ll not let the lady who I’m interviewing on Monday who’s probably got the job into the job then as number eight. 

Welcome to Automation Ninjas because this will go out after you’ve offered her the job. So hopefully she accepted this bit of the podcast. You’ll be like, Andy. 

I’m sorry, I’m very honest. 

Kind of tips to listeners. Marketing podcasts often fall into two categories of awful or fucking awful, but they are awash with people giving tips mostly usually pretty awful tips as well. But look, there’s some good stuff out there as well. This is a very different podcast long form discussion with people who know what they’re talking about. That’s kind of the marker for me. But I do like to give the audience what they want. And people sometimes want a tip that they can take away and go. I could maybe try this tomorrow or look at this tomorrow and maybe make that change, and it might be useful for my marketing. 

So I also put a theme tune to it as well. So I’m going to sing a theme too, and I’ve put you on the spot here to get a top tip. I sing it twice and then it’s over to you. If you can think of a tip to give people, let’s see if this works out right. It’s time for everyone’s favourite part of the show. It’s time for top tips, which goes T-O-P-T-I-P-O-P-T-I-P gender long term nurturing place number one tip. So much hard work. 350% return on investment. 

Let’s do it. Excellent. Thank you for it. I just love singing a theme too, and it’s the highlight of the show for me. 

That’s great. 

As we’re kind of heading towards the last lap of the interview, something in your bio stood out to me as something I wanted to talk to you about. You’re a Scout master? Yes. Tell us about that. And also, do you use Behavioural nudges with the kids? Oh, no, you can have one marshmallow if you do this or two, if you wait until the end and all that. 

I may have experimented on some of the kids, but totally with their parents. No, I did. Experimenting on kids is really hard because they didn’t give a damn about your experiment. They’ve got their own agenda. 

Never work with children and animals. It’s absolutely true. 

Very true. 

Yeah. 

No, I am a Scout master. Scouting is a really big part of my life, right? From being a kid in South Africa, we sort of petitioned really hard to get girls in Scouts in South Africa because girls were already in Scouts in the UK. About that point. And south is a little bit behind the ties. A lot of things and gender equality is definitely one of them. It’s a really big part of my life, particularly survival skills, foraging and teaching kids how to build shelters and safely use knives and axes and purify water. 

As a Northerner, you’re just feeding my fears about the south of England. I mean, yeah, of course you need survival skills. I mean, sounds like the most dangerous place in the country. I’m, like, never go down south. I don’t go south of Darby. It’s dangerous down there. Telling you, is this just because the south is some sort of dystopian nightmare and you’re worried it’s all going to fall to pieces? Yeah. 

We got lots of very scary posh people that we have to worry about. 

The worst absolute pits. Anyone who talks about the Lexus and, you know, you’re in trouble. I’m going to take the Lexus to the golf club. One of them, aren’t you? 

It’s just about getting kids more in touch with being outside. And I’m not one of these people that seems to think that kids are getting less in touch with outside. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I just think that it’s important for every generation to spend time as much time outdoors as they possibly can. I think it’s really exciting for me watching kids really get into something. And with every troop, you’ll have some kids who, like, go full Rambo and who are, like, full into survival skills. 

And those are always the ones you have to watch as being one of those kids. They’re the ones you have to watch. But every kid gets really excited when they’ve made their first fire from things that they’ve found and the confidence it gives kids to know. And like when they’re pointing things out to their parents and that enthusiasm they get for it. It keeps me going back, even when it’s pissing down with right outside this cop. 

Let me throw a start at you because you’re wrong. Actually, I don’t like saying this, I guess. But you’re saying about kids don’t spend as much time outside Pursel of all people did some research. I had the brand manager on the shore, although for various reasons, episode never got released. But they personal did some research into their dirty good position. So when they were looking at this and they came up with this and the stat that they came up with was that it is falling the amount of time kids spend outside over time over the years. 

And when they did this research, which is probably about ten years ago, now your average it was done in America. So what do they call junior school, not kindergarten, but primary school. Kid spends less time outside than a high security prisoner does. And they were like, very sad. So I don’t know whether this amount of time, whatever time per day is a good thing or a bad thing. But if you’re spending less time outside than someone who’s on death row, that’s not good. 

It’s probably a bad thing. 

Yeah, it’s probably about. And that led to their dirty good position and trying to encourage parents to let kids go outside get dirty. They were trying to sell more personal, right. But the research led to that which I found really Funnily enough. 

It is always the parents that I do find hold their kids back in scouting because it’s always the parents who have the problem with the kids going away camping and that kind of stuff. The Scout Masters are giving their time up for free. The kids want to do it. But the parents get their nickes and a twist about the kids doing something. And it is a parent’s job to naturally worry about your child. That’s literally. But sometimes parents, it’s not the worry. It’s that. Oh, but we’re going to London for the weekend or we’re doing this or we’re flying to Maligo or whatever it is. 

It’s those things where parents aren’t willing to give up on what they’re doing sometimes to let their kids do something that’s a little bit more on what their kid wants to do. And that does make me sad. 

Get back to your long term nurture to kind of try and awfully sync parenting and marketing together in a way that probably shouldn’t never happen. It’s a short term and long term thing. I as a parent, feel this a lot where you have this sort of desire to protect, but actually it’s quite a short term is thinking, but by not letting them go camping and not letting them go experience these things and not letting them go outside on their own, you’re actually creating huge long term problems of them not being able to make decisions when you’re not there and not being able to work it out at University or get out with funny situations that maybe shouldn’t be in because they’ve never been experienced to having to make a choice for themselves. 

And it goes right back to kids are learning to fasten shoes later now than they ever did because parents go it’s easier just give them fail for her shoes or I’ll do it for them all the time. I’m kind of over parenting and not being able to fasten shoes is one of the things that people are talking about. If they’re not learning that, then they’re not learning other things along the way of getting into primary school because we’re trying to overpower and it’s a short term short term. 

It all makes sense. It all comes from a place of love. No one’s going. I’m going to overpower with them because you’re delivering love, but actually storing up longer term problems. That was an awful ungainly segue between your long term view and my and my parents and things. But I think it was worth saying at least. 

There are Scout troops around here that are still full. I mean, my Scout troop when I was in London was full. The problem in London was I had to shut my Scout troop down even though it was full and it was the most underprivileged Scout troop in London for Tower Hamlets and Isle of Dogs. Because of the fact that I couldn’t get another leader to help me. You can’t run any sessions as an adult by themselves, so Scouting needs more adults to help with it. But hopefully that’s another conversation for a different podcast. 

Get Baggy can come on and do a conversation about that. 

The kids survival skills are a little bit higher, not mine or mine are catered for desert conditions. I’ve had to relearn a lot of survival skills moving to the UK because one of the things you don’t have to learn about in South Africa is how to survive in massively Soviet conditions. There’s not much you have to survive from in the UK. If we’re honest, the badges aren’t going to attack you. You might have a Fox Nick some of your stuff, but you’re not going to get eaten by anything here. 

The worst thing you can do is get lost and wander into a town. It’s very hard to get lost in the UK as well. 

And you get a lovely clot white. While you weren’t trying to work out where you are, all that makes sense so quickly. Two questions to wrap up any book recommendations or podcast recommendations. Tell us about your first book because that’s available to buy, and there’s a link in the show notes and any other books you want to recommend. 

I’ve got a podcast that I really love that isn’t necessarily a marketing podcast. Am I allowed to do? 

Yeah, of course. 

Recommendations. I’m just going to open it up now just to make sure that I get the name right. So it is a psychology based. It is a psychology based podcast, and I believe, of course, everything is taking forever to load now, but I believe it’s called something. It’s about movies and the way that it works. While I’m just waiting is popcorn psychology. The way that it works is basically it is a podcast where three psychologists get together and they watch movies and they discuss the psychological principles behind the movie. 

A lot of horror movies in there, a lot of non horror movies in there. But if you like movies, it’s a fantastic podcast. The thing I enjoy about it is their discussions about the psychology. They are actual therapists that are discussing it. There’s another one called Freddie and Sips, which is a fantastic one as well, which is where a mother and daughter. Both I think psychiatrist and psychologists, both therapists are having cocktails and they discuss psychological principles. Everybody should be listening to more about this. These kinds of things, not only from a therapeutic standpoint and understanding how we work, but also from understanding just in general, how humans work in certain situations. 

The reason I like popcorn psychology and I suggested to people is it’s really important for us to understand the difference between what movie psychology is and what normal psychology is because people get really caught up in that and they apply that to marketing and that psychology is flawed. 

It was never meant to help people. It was meant to make a good film, right? 

It was meant for the movie fiction, right. 

So I like your book Hack. The bio brand is available in all good bookstores, and there’s a link to go and buy that in the show notes, if you like how when did that come out? 

That came out at least two years ago now, probably maybe three years ago. Now it feels like yesterday, but it also feels like a lifetime video. Writing that book took me five years. 

I must have said on at least a dozen episodes of the podcast, I am writing a book on marketing strategy. I started writing the book when I started the business four years ago. I think it was 50% finished when I first started and probably about 60% finished now. So I just admire you and you’ve got another one coming out next 2022. 

Did you say. 

Let us know when that comes out and we’ll retweet and share on socials and all of that. Where do people find you LinkedIn? The LinkedIn. Is that the best place to find you? Twitter Instagram again, it’s all in the show notes. 

But you tell me LinkedIn LinkedIn best place for sure. Twitter. I occasionally appear on. I’m a Lurker on Twitter big time. I’m a Lurker on social media. I’m not the social media. I’m not very active on social Twitter. I tend to appear on when I’m at a conference because that’s when I have something secretly tweet about and Instagram. If you want to see the witchnanigan that I get up to in terms of gardening stuff that I’m doing and outdoor things that I do, that is the case. 

Instagram is more of a personal thing. But if you want to follow on with Widget Nanogen, that’s the way that’s the taste to it. But yeah, LinkedIn for more professional stuff. 

Perfect. And my last question to every guest is, what one question do you usually get asked that I haven’t asked you today? 

That’s a really good question. 

At the end as well. 

That is mean, cruel and unusual. People normally ask me some really tactic based questions, and you manage to have avoided that for the most part. But people do normally ask me like a really tactic based question. They’ll be like, how do you put together something like that? 

What’s the best colour for my website? 

Yes, exactly. Those kinds of things. What do you think about button colours on website? People will always ask what’s the best cognitive bias and then shrink when I give the answer. 

Yeah. I’m glad you’ve said that. That means a lot to me that I’ve avoided the tactical discretion. 

Yeah, definitely. 

Excellent. Well, listen, Kendall, thank you very much for being on the show. And, yeah, I always think I should really plan the ending because I always seem to cock it up. So let me try that again. Kendall, thank you very much for being on the show. Come back in two weeks time. We’ve got another wonderful guest who’s going to talk marketing with me. 

Thank you. Bye.