Today’s interview is with Roger Dooley who is a a speaker and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, the popular blog Neuromarketing, and Brainy Marketing at Forbes. He joins me today to talk about his new book: FRICTION―The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, what friction is, how it affects us and what to do about it when it comes to customer experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Behavioural economics, alchemy, customer experience and the power of ideas that don’t make sense – Interview with Rory Sutherland – and is number 303 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Roger:

• Emotion, customer experience and the impact of psychology and behavioral economics/science have risen up the agenda in recent years.
• Roger has been speaking and writing about these topics on neursciencemarketing.com since 2005.
• Roger has just written a new book called: FRICTION―The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage.
• The origin story for the book goes back to a framework that he developed about five years ago called The Persuasion Slide, which has its roots in behavioral science and, in particular, the work of B.J. Fogg.
• In 2016, according to the most recent research Roger has seen, USD4.6 trillion dollars of merchandise was left in e-commerce shopping carts that year.
• If you look at the reasons that have been identified for this most of them are friction related.
• Friction is everywhere in the customer’s experience and an organisation’s ability to deliver a great customer experience.
• One study estimates that USD3 trillion of effort inside organizations is wasted because of bureaucratic procedures.
• Sometimes it’s hard to see the friction that exists around us.
• It wasn’t until Uber came along and showed us how much friction could be removed from the taxi process by showing you exactly where your ride was, when you’d be picked up, where you were during your trip and completely eliminating the cumbersome checkout process at the end.
• In business, 90 percent of the friction is bad but friction can sometimes be good.
• The use of behavioural economics and neuroscience insights have to be used carefully and ethically as they are powerful tools.
• Spiderman’s uncle Ben captures the situation well when he says “with great power comes great responsibility.”
• Zig Ziglar said the most important persuasion tool you have is your own integrity.
• Friction goggles are a mindset. Once you put them ‘on’ you begin to see friction everywhere and you’ll end up wanting to do something about it.
• This type of thinking applies to B2B experience as much as it does to B2C experience.
• Muda is the Japanese word for futility, uselessness and wastefulness and is a key concept in lean process thinking.
• Looking for muda is about eliminating even the smallest amount of effort from a process.
• Japanese manufacturing was able to become extremely productive by simply eliminating friction.
• Friction even extends to choice as the work of Iyengar and Lippar in the late 1990s and early 2000s illustrates. Their work was popularized by Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice.
• That is not to say that choice is always bad. Look at Amazon. However, they provide tools and features that help to manage choice such as filters, reviews etc.
• To start thinking about developing a friction aware culture inside a company so that everybody, not just the leaders, is sensitized to identifying friction then start to identify everything that doesn’t serve a useful purpose. Then, get rid of it.
• Check out Roger’s new book: FRICTION―The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage.

About Roger

Roger Dooley is a speaker and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, the popular blog Neuromarketing, and Brainy Marketing at Forbes.

He is the founder of Dooley Direct, a marketing consultancy, and co-founded College Confidential, the leading college-bound website. That business was acquired by Hobsons, a unit of UK-based DMGT, where Dooley served as VP Digital Marketing and continues in a consulting role.

Dooley spent years in direct marketing as the co-founder of a successful catalog firm and also was director of corporate planning for a Fortune 1000 company. He has an engineering degree from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the University of Tennessee.

Check out Roger’s new book: FRICTION―The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage, say Hi to him on Twitter @rogerdooley and connect with him on LinkedIn here.

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Thanks to Pixabay for the image.