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If you’ve ever launched a great idea only to watch it fall flat, behavioral science has the explanation – and the solution. Melina Palmer takes a practical looks at the brain biases that shape how customers and employees react to change, and how small shifts in communication can turn resistance into buy-in.
Why Your Customers (and Employees) Hate Your New Idea
We like to think that if we build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to our door. But usually, the world just looks at the new mousetrap, shrugs, and keeps using the old one.
Why? Because the human brain loves predictability.
Whether you are a small business owner trying to get your team to adopt new software, or a marketer trying to get customers to switch brands, you are fighting a biological imperative: the status quo bias.
I recently sat down with Melina Palmer, a behavioral economist and host of The Brainy Business podcast, to dig into why change is so hard—and how we can make it easier.
The Problem with “Graduation Goggles”
Melina brought up a concept called “graduation goggles.” You know how you can complain about high school for four years, but in the last week, suddenly you’re misty-eyed about the hallways?
That’s loss aversion kicking in. Even if the current situation (the status quo) isn’t perfect, our brains romanticize it the moment it’s threatened. When you introduce a change, even if it’s better, you aren’t just offering something new, you are taking away something familiar.
If you frame your new marketing strategy or office policy solely as “look at this shiny new thing,” you trigger resistance. Instead, you need to frame it in a way that feels like a gain for them, not a loss of autonomy.
Are You Wasting 17 Hours a Week?
This statistic Melina shared blew my mind: The average employee spends about 17 hours per week clarifying things that were previously said.
That is nearly half a work week spent asking, “Wait, what did you mean by that?”
When we introduce change, we tend to overload people with information because we’re nervous. We dump 15 calls-to-action or a 20-page manual on them. This creates cognitive overload. The brain shuts down and defaults to—you guessed it—the status quo.
The fix? Slow down. Be thoughtful. If you are running a meeting about a change, send the agenda 24 hours in advance. Clarify exactly what is needed. Saving those 17 hours of confusion gives your team the mental bandwidth to accept the change.
Poke the Bruise
In marketing, we often try to list every single benefit of our service. We want to be everything to everyone.
Melina suggests a different approach: “Poke the bruise.”
A bruise is easy to ignore until you press on it. Your customers have pain points they are ignoring because change feels too hard. Your job isn’t to list features; it’s to gently press on that bruise until they admit, “Yeah, I really need to fix that.”
Once they feel the pain of the status quo, then you offer the solution. But pick one thing. Don’t poke fifteen bruises at once.
The Tropicana Lesson: Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken
Remember when Tropicana changed their packaging, removed the orange with the straw, and lost $50 million in a few months?
They changed something their loyal customers loved just because the brand managers got bored. If you have a loyal audience, don’t change the core elements they identify with just to “shake things up.”
If you want to attract new customers with a new look, launch a new product line. Don’t alienate the people who are already paying your bills.
Framing the AI Conversation
This applies to AI, too. If you tell your team or your clients, “We are an AI-first company now,” they hear, “Robots are replacing us.”
Instead, frame the change around the human benefit. Ask your team: “What are the boring, mundane tasks you hate doing?”
When they list them, you say, “Great. We’re going to use AI to handle those so you can spend more time being creative.”
Now, you aren’t forcing technology on them; you’re giving them a superpower.
Your Next Step
Identify one change you’ve been struggling to sell—whether to your team or your market. Look at your messaging. Are you talking about the features of the change, or are you addressing the fear of losing the status quo?
Rewrite your opening pitch to focus on their gain, not your excitement.
Transcript from Melina Palmer’s Episode
Rich: When the world’s top brands need to understand why and how people make decisions, they turn to my next guest. She is a leading voice in applied behavioral economics, a three-time bestselling author, and globally sought after keynote speaker. Her podcast, The Brainy Business, has over 1.5 million downloads in 170 countries or more. Honestly, I didn’t even know there were that many countries. Yeah, I guess that’s because I learned everything about geography from playing the board game Risk.
She’s a consultant who loves training corporate teams on why customers buy and employees buy in. She also teaches Applied Behavioral Economics via the Texas A&M Human Behavioral Lab.
She’s been featured in multiple outlets, including The Washington Post, Forbes Inc., and Psychology Today, and on stages including SXSW and TEDx Portland. Returning for a third time to the Agents of Change podcast to talk about how you can apply behavioral science to either encourage or resist change, it’s Melina Palmer. Melina, welcome back.
Melina: Yay. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Rich: Now, you have spent years exploring how people make decisions, and you’ve helped companies navigate big shifts. What’s one change that surprised even you in how people respond?
Melina: You know, I think it’s just one of those things that the way our brains work, we like to think that we’re framing something in a way that’s going to definitely get buy-in. Like the thing that makes you excited, is typically not what anyone else cares about.
And so it’s really easy to go into those change conversations thinking, yes, I love this and you’re going to love it too. And then it just was a total flop, and everybody hates it. And so not taking the time to think about what’s going to matter to people, and positioning, and framing it in the way that is what they care about and not what you care about, is really, really important. And just slapping the thing they care about at the end is not good enough.
You know, recently there’ve been a lot of companies who’ve been announcing AI initiative changes and things like that. And Duolingo said, we’re going to be AI-first, and this is why we care about AI, blah blah, blah, and it’s not going to replace people. But nobody got that far in the messaging, and it was just all over people canceling and leaving.
If you would’ve led with, “because we care about humans, we’re going to be doing this, and this is going to help people to be more creative” and whatnot. And so we are asking about AI secondary piece. But you know, they led with what was exciting to them, maybe a CEO and C-suite. And people didn’t get far enough into the why it would matter to them, and they kind of bailed.
Rich: Understood. And here it was, I thought it was just because they killed off the owl. Now I know the true story.
Melina: Yeah, I know. People didn’t even leave, people hung around when Duo got killed off. But, you know, this is too much.
Rich: Now, having stood in front of a room of people, having stood in front of my team, having stood in front of my children and explaining to them how good this change was going to be for them, and it falling flat, falling on deaf ears, I’m very excited about the conversation we’re going to have today.
I guess the question I want to start with is, why is change so difficult for people, even when we think it’s clearly in their best interest?
Melina: Well, I mean, one key reason is that we humans, our entire life experience, our brains, everything is built on predictability, familiarity, and the status quo. And when you’re going to take that away, like one, so humans are really loss averse. We’re going to start to feel some fear. We think, how’s this going to be impacting me? And maybe draw some negative conclusions in the space of something.
We’ll use the example of graduation goggles, right? Like even if you’ve been complaining about school forever, I hate it here. I can’t wait to be out of this place. And then it’s like the last week and you start to go, oh, maybe it’s not so bad. I can’t believe I have to leave. It was amazing. Right? Everything changes when you think about going away from where you have been. It’s that idea that the change is really here now. Before I could lament about how much I hated it because there was nothing out there. But now that it’s going away, our brains shift and put the best possible light on what we have had and where we’ve been before.
And when you just talk about it in terms of like, ‘it’s this new thing and you should love it’. Like then when it’s like my status quo is being taken away and it doesn’t feel like something I had a choice in that I was part of creating, but like you’re forcing it upon me. That’s that psychological reactance that we’ve developed as young children to hate when someone tells us we have to do something. If you can shift the way you present it so that they can feel like, yeah, I do want that thing, I am excited about that, it’s going to be good for me because of this. It just helps make it so that the fear and loving to stay in that status quo isn’t going to disrupt everything.
Rich: So I can see bringing people in earlier if it’s me and my team. You know, so I want to implement something at work and I kind of feel them out first, I know them a little bit. It’s obviously a very different experience if I’m the owner or a marketer of a business and I’ve got this new idea or this new thing, or I want to change a product like New Coke that’s been around for a while.
What are some of the mistakes we’re making when we’re trying to introduce something and just expecting our prospects or customers to adapt to these changes, and how can we fix it?
Melina: Yeah. Well, I think one question to ask is, why are you changing it at all? So New Coke being a clear example, I actually really also like an example from when Tropicana was looking to rebrand back in like 2009 and they were taking their flagship product of their main juice, and they came up with new packaging for it because they maybe got bored with what they had or felt like people should like something new and saying, hey, it doesn’t show juice. It’s just an orange with a straw in it. So we’re going to do something that’s purely showing the juice. And had some cool ideas if it had been a new brand.
Like entering the market and doing something that’s very juiced forward, it might have done really, really well. But people that love you, that are buying you all the time, that are your top consumers, actually really love the straw and the orange and didn’t ask you to make something new. The people who liked Coke didn’t ask for a New Coke. They just liked what was there.
And so there’s a question of like, why are you even doing it? And if it is that you want a new line of revenue to attract new people, maybe the other Coke should just be its own new brand and not change what exists. And not to say that we always need to be adding more and more, but it’s just a question of if you actually need this thing or not.
So to sum up the Tropicana piece, within a few months that lost $50 million, and they reverted back to the original packaging because people hated it so much and had said, “why would you even do this? It’s so ugly and terrible and we hate it.” But they might not have felt that way if it hadn’t been taking away something they already knew to look for and loved.
So that would be my first question, is it actually something that you need to do, or something that you’re just feeling a little bit antsy that you’ve been marketing the same thing for such a long time and you want to do something new that you want to change? And if it is about them, then why would they care and how can they be brought into the experience to say like, “we’re going to do a contest that you get to design our new packaging”.
Like I love how Lay’s does their “do us a flavor” campaign. People get to suggest a flavor. People can win. You get to try and vote, and if something becomes a flavor, you’re excited that that’s in the mix now. That’s a way to bring people in and it has good social proof and all sorts of stuff. And most of those flavors aren’t going to make it, and that’s okay. It’s not necessarily about that, and you can make it just more fun and interesting for people.
Rich: Yeah. And suddenly you’ve given back this autonomy to the consumer, in that particular case. You think the people over at Cracker Barrel would’ve learned something from the Tropicana mess, but here we are.
Melina: Yeah, it’s been a thing. It just happens again and again with all the different brands.
Rich: Absolutely. Now you talk about how overwhelmed brains stick with the past. So if it’s our job to get people to change their behavior, how can we reduce that overwhelm so they feel safe choosing something new?
Melina: Yeah. One of my favorite stats that I came across while I was working on my book, What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You, is that 17 hours per person, per week, is spent clarifying something that was previously said. Like 17 hours per person, per week, clarifying something previously said, is such a huge waste of time.
And so if you think about how often, and if we just think about this as leading an internal change with people, right? So you’re saying like, “Hey, come into my office. I need to tell you all these things. And can you take notes on this and can you do that? And can you look this thing up and go do this and do that and do that? And don’t forget about that other meeting. And hey, can you send an agenda for this?” And then brain dump all over the person that happens to be in your office at the moment because it feels better for you to not have that mental burden. It’s like that’s their problem now. And if they mess up like, well, I told them it’s not my fault, right?
But then you say, okay, now we’ve done all of that. I want to tell you about this really important thing. We’re actually going to have you taken off of this project. Or you’re being moved to the other side of the office. You’re going to report to someone new. Like, I need you to just get on board with this thing. But like you totally overloaded them with a bunch of stuff that’s not important in the moment, where maybe the most important thing is to be able to talk to them about that change and have them be excited about it as you think about it in this like long-term context, right?
And so if instead of just saying so many little fragments of information all over the place. If we are to take some time and say, “Hey, this meeting is coming up, what will everyone need to know?” I’m going to let them know the time zone that it’s in, and I’m going to clarify that I will send the agenda 24 hours in advance, and I expect it to be read, or there’s going to be supplemental information that I’m going to send on the Friday before. And please send me a question you have by Tuesday at 3:00 PM Pacific Time so that I can be ready for the meeting at noon the next day. If you include all that information, there just isn’t a lot of follow up that has to take place, and we can eliminate that.
And so if you think about in a business, maybe you’re not going to get back a full 17 hours per person per week, but if you get back ten or five or two hours by being a little bit more thoughtful in your communication, it can help alleviate all that stuff that’s spinning around for us all the time. And it just makes it that much easier. And when we aren’t overloaded with all the unimportant stuff, we do have more room to be less reliant on that status quo, to be more creative, to be more open, to change all the things we want people to be in our business, ourselves included.
So I always advocate for more thoughtful communication, spending a little bit more time upfront, and knowing that it’s going to save hours and hours of time on the other side.
Rich: I can definitely see how that would work internally with my team. I’m curious how we can do that if we’re marketing or advertising. Like if somebody’s maybe happy or unhappy with their current digital agency, how can I inject myself into that conversation, assuming that I can get their attention?
Or if they like a certain restaurant and I’m a new restaurant owner and I’m trying to get them to break habits, what are some of the things that we can do, either in our communication or anything else, that will kind of help them be calm enough to make that behavioral change? I know we can’t force it on them, but how do we put them in the best position so that they’re open to try something new that we have to offer?
Melina: Yeah, so I would say just how often have you either been part of the pitch meeting or finishing up a final ad or whatever it happens to be, and there are too many cooks in the kitchen here and you end up with 15 calls to action? Because it’s like all the things that anybody might possibly care about and think is important in the way that we’re going to position this thing.
And there are so many points you’re trying to make. None of them end up landing and it’s just a mess of possibilities, where you’re trying to cover all the bases 15 times just in case someone has a question. That overload will make it that, I think I’ll deal with that later. I’m going to just stick with what I have.
But if you can find one thing that you know really is going to resonate with the right person that’s your best potential client. And it’s to say you have to take the time to say we’re not the right fit for everyone. It’s not that everyone needs to move to us, but I just need like three or four of the right people this month, this year, whatever, to move over to us. And so if I think about who they are, what’s an issue they’re dealing with.
Phrasing I really love for this. So I recently spoke with someone I interviewed for my own podcast, and he was talking about this idea of poking the bruise. So we have pain points. A bruise is something that’s really easy to ignore until you go up and put some pressure on that thing. And once you poked it, you’re like, oh man, it’s all I can think about. And so if you can be thoughtful enough about like, what’s that thing they know is kind of annoying, but they’re able to have it be under the surface, that you can just keep bringing up enough to where they say, yeah, I really should. And you can say, well, good news. I’m the solution for that thing. You don’t have to feel that pain anymore if you keep kind of doing that.
Then it can come like full circle, and you can have follow-up information when you get the meeting, when you get to have the conversation, when they have a question. You can do all of that and have supplemental points for anything they might bring up. But don’t try to put it all up front. Pick one thing that you can really make clear, and it’ll resonate with enough people to get that ball rolling.
Rich: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve definitely been to those websites that just overwhelm me with the number of options, and you can’t make a decision, and the easiest thing is to back off. And I’ve also been to those sites where we have three options, but here’s our team’s favorite, or here’s the most popular. And that idea of nudging people towards a certain decision. Also, just kind of simplifying it so it doesn’t feel like it’s that big a decision that they have to make.
Melina: Yeah. And like you said, that’s a social proof thing too, right? So when you can lean in and say, people like you do this. But you have to know who the ‘like you’ is, to say “This is the most popular option and a lot of people in your position also do this thing. They have done it before and they’ve given us five stars”, or “They wrote the testimonial” or did the thing.
And with that, I recommend for people too, if you’re looking for a particular position or there’s something that everybody kind of brings up as their pain point, when you can find someone who can give you the testimonial that says, “You know, I was really uncertain. I wasn’t sure if this was going to be worth the move because X, but I’m so glad that I did because Rich and his team exceeded my expectations, and I made 10 times my investment in the first year” or whatever, right? Then I say, hey, I have that same concern. They did it and look what happened for them.
It may feel like we don’t want to admit that anybody would have a concern about working with us. But actually, when you can and somebody can say, “but it was so worth it”, then that makes it much easier for someone to move forward themselves.
Rich: And I think, obviously this comes from talking with your current clients. One of the things that I’ve heard over the years from people who have left their agency to come to us, and this works for any business, but this is just my own personal experience, is sometimes it’ll be like, “I never got any new ideas from them. I always had to bring them new ideas” Or “I could never get in touch with them”, or “They were always kind of squirrely about what I was paying for” and things like that. So that became some of the first things that I talked about.
Really not talking about every single thing we could do for them, but focus in on what are those pain points, what the poking of the bruise, that I’m hearing from clients and then repeating that back to new prospects. So I’ve found that to be, that makes a lot of sense. And definitely ways to get people in a position where they feel more comfortable changing and you’ve given us some good ideas, not forcing it on people, giving them some feeling that they had a choice in the matter and autonomy.
Let’s flip this though. Let’s say that we’re an established brand and there’s been a new disruption in our industry. There’s been a new restaurant opened up across the street, or suddenly there’s three new hotels in our city. What are some of the things that we can communicate to both current clients, and to prospects, that they shouldn’t make a change and they should stick with us?
Melina: Yeah, of course. It depends on the industry and all sorts of things, right? But I would say for one, in general, avoid giving like in some cases feeling like you need to create something that directly competes with that other thing that’s there.
So I often give an example of say if you make just Cheerios, right? You have people that are Cheerios buyers that when they think about going to the store, they’re not saying go get cereal and look and find cereal. But they are devoted Cheerios eaters.
If you start to look around and see that there are chocolate cereals and fruity cereals and all these other things, and you say, oh, well we should make frosted Cheerios and chocolate Cheerios and fruity Cheerios and all the things, which we see now. And so you start to give your devoted Cheerios buyers a coupon, let’s say, to get a free box or buy this at a very good discount that you could get the chocolate or frosted Cheerios.
You may have now opened up a window for people who never would’ve considered anything else to be a reasonable cereal choice to say, oh, hey, that does taste better. Duh. Because it’s full of sugar. And so I like that. And I might say, but why now that I’ve opened up the idea of getting something else, why would I get the kind of knockoff frosted thing, I’m just going to get Frosted Flakes because they’re the real thing, and it’s about the same price.
And you’ve now caused a bunch of people that never would’ve thought about leaving to try something new, and you’ve given them the path to leave you. So it is important to note. When you have that loyal segment, you want to lean in on why they love you and not give them a reason to leave. So maybe there are some other perks or benefits or things that you’d be giving.
Like with the hotel. It’s like double points or something. That’s going to be making them want to come back, or they can gift a night, or they get special upgrades. Or I know I have different hotel chains where I can just automatically get late checkout at 2:00 PM and not have to ask or beg the front desk to let me have that, which is really great since I travel a lot. And so I choose to go with them because of that. And I don’t even have to look at the price, right? It’s because I can just know that I can check out at 2:00 PM, and since I typically fly out late, that’s a win for me. I get that extra time for the room.
But if they were to try to talk about something that’s competing directly with someone down the street and make it really clear to me, well, we know that they have rooms for half the price, but don’t do that. Like, don’t bring to my attention the new thing. But if you are trying to attract the people who are buying Frosted Flakes and get them to move to Frosted Cheerios, you need to advertise to them in a way that’s going to appeal to them coming over. Like maybe you actually do have half the sugar but all the flavor or something. But you don’t want to take away from that loyal segment of Cheerios buyers you already have. So just being thoughtful about how you’re unlocking that and keeping some people in what they’re already doing.
Rich: And I wonder if, the things that keep us from wanting to make a change, if there’s a way that we can play into it. Whether it’s like, you’re comfortable using the hotel example, you know, come back to a place where you’re comfortable, where people know your name, and things like that. Just kind of playing up all the things that might make us anxious when it comes to some of these changes that are going on in our lives.
Melina: Well, even things like the DoubleTree chocolate chip cookies, right? Like it can be something totally random that make it feel more like home, going to that place. And you know, you hear places like a Ritz Carlton, they know the temperature setting you like on the room. They’re reaching out to you at other are times and they go above and beyond in ways that are beyond just the price of the room that you’re getting there.
And maybe it could be that they have cars that are set up for you, or they get an upgrade to the Uber black without having to pay the difference when you have a code or something. I mean, it could be any sort of peripheral benefits that you get from being there that the other guys can’t compete with. Because sometimes your economies of scale are going to help you to be able to diversify and keep who’s already with you.
But again, if you’re small and not the leader, you don’t necessarily need to go that way.
Rich: So earlier on you kind of teased up a question that I wanted to ask you at this point. But I’d like to dive a little bit deeper. It’s something I hear every day, and I’ve had experience in my own company as well, a mixture of excitement and fear around AI, artificial intelligence.
What are some of the behavioral factors, do you believe, that drives this hesitation in people about AI?
Melina: Well, there’s some real fear about losing our job and livelihood and all the things, right? And it doesn’t get made better in the way that people ask for you to do work on it like so often. And you know, framing how you talk about it is so key.
And I talked about that in that Duolingo example. If you come in and say, “Hey, I’m pretty sure that this thing can do 80% of your job, can you train it for us?” I don’t want to do that at all. I hate that idea.
And if you ask about it in a different way. So saying to people, Hey, I’m guessing there’s a bunch of stuff, like mundane junk that keeps you from doing what drew you to this career in the first place? You wanted to be creative, that’s why you came into marketing. What’s the other stuff that you wish you didn’t have to do that could free you up to do something you really do love, that’s creative that only your brain can work on?
Say, oh, well I hate writing email, or I wish that I didn’t have to do X, Y, or Z. Say, that’s amazing. We love your creative process and want you to have more time and space for that. In order to free that up, we’re trying to identify these things that you don’t want to do anyway, that we can help to lean into a process with AI. Can you help come up with some ideas so we can free you up for what we love your brain for, why you’re here, and help you to be the best you can be?
Like, I want to do that all day long. That sounds amazing for all the reasons, right? You framed it in something that matters to me. You’re asking for my opinion. I want to help you not have to write those boring emails or rethink about templates every single time, or whatever that happens to be. And so I’m willing to invest and work on that.
But even if you want to say, well, people should know that at our company we care about them and their job is not in jeopardy. Like we are seeing the world around us right now, and everyone is worried about it because you’re seeing it on social media, as someone got laid off or someone lost this other job, or whatever it is, right? There’s a lot of people that are out there losing to AI, and I think companies are also now seeing, oh, this didn’t replace people, so now we need to hire new people.
That’s pendulum is going to come back, that some went too far. But that fear is already there. And whether you’re talking about it or not, people are feeling stressed. And you just spin on those ideas and questions and things all the time if the company is not talking about it. And so they may think you’re doing something behind closed doors that you’re not actually working on or doing anything with already.
So if you are having conversations about AI, if you do want to find ways to make it work, where can you let people be part of the conversation and finding a way that it can be really beneficial for you as an organization and help your people to do the best people stuff and the mundane kind of junk to go to the AI.
Rich: I love everything you said. And one thing kind of struck me. You said something about like, “in this company, nobody’s job is at jeopardy.” But of course we’re seeing this in the outside world.
I also think back to my days of riding a mountain bike, and the rule on the trail was never try and miss the rock. As soon as you try and miss the rock, your brain focuses on the rock. And I wonder if we say, “Your job’s not in jeopardy”. the only words that pop out are “job in jeopardy, and something like that.
Melina: No, don’t worry, Trust me, it’s fine. Yeah.
Rich: Yes. Yeah. When I brought AI into my company, I remember saying. “No one here, you guys know me, no one here is going to lose their job from AI”. Which I can see might even be problematic. But I said, “but if we don’t figure this out, we’re all going to lose our job to people who have figured out AI”. And so it was kind of like a little bit of a carrot and stick where it’s like, we’re in this together and we’re going to.
And I’ve since instituted some things to get people to participate and learn from this. But it is, it can be a challenge. And I have these discussions all the time on the same note. If we are a company that is starting to introduce AI into our products and services, how should we communicate that to our audience? Or should we not communicate it at all?
Because I know that there was recently some research done that consumers trust a brand less when it has AI. Now I think this was done with like refrigerators and toaster ovens that had AI, which I agree. Why would you need AI in your toaster oven? But it is a conversation I’ve had with other business owners who are starting to use AI and they’re concerned about, should I even mention it? Should I call myself an ‘AI-first company’? And because we put all of our focus there, are we devaluing the work? How do you feel that we, as business owners and perhaps marketers, should navigate this very new minefield that we find ourselves in. Where we want to talk about these advances we’ve made, but we also recognize about the existential threat that some people see from AI?
Melina: Yeah, it’s of course a complicated scenario. And either way can work, right? So we saw with the example I gave from Duolingo, when you are an established brand that employs a lot of people, and if you say, “Hey, we’re going to be AI-first from now on”, people may freak out a little bit, right?
If you are a smaller entity or you’re newer into a space, you also want to think about what aspects of the AI are you using and how does that matter to the person on the other side? So if you are selling to a marketing team at a large organization, like let’s say you’re an agency working with people at their own companies who have bosses who are saying, “Hey, you better figure out this AI thing”, and you’re an agency that’s able to say, “Hey, we figured out this AI thing for you and we lean into this.”
First, we can train you up a bit, show you how to use some prompts. And we’re using it to help make better decisions or to understand your analytics or to do something else. Like we are helping you do the thing your boss is asking you for. And we’ve put in that work so you don’t have to. That’s a pretty clear win for that person.
If there are different brands that are saying, “this commercial was completely made by AI”, you are like, yeah, I can tell. Why does that person have six fingers? And like all the random things that happen when we start to use AI. Or where people have a conversation on a chat and then are told at the end, by the way, this was a bot. They are much more upset than if you say, “Hey, this is our AI chat bot. Let’s have a conversation.” And then it’s like, I know it was the AI and it did or didn’t help me. And if I have a concern, I can ask another question or something.
When it feels like we’re tricking people into thinking it was a human person, but then it’s not, and especially then you tell them at the end like, ha ha, it was AI. We’re smart. People do not like that. That’s not something that feels very good. And so just being more forward about why. Again, understanding who you’re talking to and what’s going to help them, and to know that saying we’re starting to look at how we can make things more efficient for you, the customer, or we’re looking to be more effective or for our people to use their brains in the best possible way.
Like, why are you using it? What is it supposed to be doing? Why do they care? What is it helping them to do or accomplish? And put that all with a nice bow on it. That would be what you want to be able to do and share.
Rich: Melina, if you had to summarize what we should consider if we are trying to get somebody to change their behavior, what are some of the key concepts that we should have in the back of our mind so that they are more likely to embrace the change that we’re suggesting?
Melina: Yeah. So first again, who are you talking to? What do you want them to do? What are they doing now, and what do they care about, that’s going to get them from A to B? And then how can you frame it in the least amount of words and things possible to get them there, to understand that how you say it matters much more than what you say?
You don’t have to share absolutely everything about everything, because that’s overwhelming. And the way that you present those options, the choice architecture of the process can help them to either lean in or not. And when you can show that other people like them have done this thing before and make it feel safe, since we are a herding species, that is something that can lean in on that social proof to make it easier to make the decision.
That’s my most succinct, knowing I said lots of things and I always… brevity and I are not the best of friends.
Rich: I love it. So I understand that you’ve got a free chapter from your new book, What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You, available for our listeners. Where can we send them to get that chapter?
Melina: If you go to thebrainybusiness.com, you can find the podcast, you can find all the books, learn about consulting or anything like that. But if you go to thebrainybusiness.com/books, then you can find it there, and be able to get to what your employees need and can’t tell you, check out that chapter and I hope you love it.
Rich: And I think you may have already answered this question in your last answer, but if people want to learn more about you, check out your other stuff, where can we send them?
Melina: Well, of course my website is good. But you can also find me on all the socials, pretty much as @TheBrainyBiz, as well as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn.
And I do have a brand-new channel on YouTube that’s at BrainyMelina, all one word, that has fun and interesting stories from all across business, and personal of how people are either failing or doing well. That’s some fun stuff there, so check that out, too.
Rich: Yeah, if you like those kind of stories that talk about why brands succeeded or why they failed or why they made mistakes, the videos up there are a great place to get started.
Melina, it is always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming back.
Melina: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Show Notes:
Melina Palmer is a bestselling author, applied behavioral economist, and host of The Brainy Business podcast. She helps companies understand why people make decisions and how to communicate change in ways that increase buy-in.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing