1, 2, Many, Lots

Today I want to talk about donuts and something called the density bias, with thanks to Ted Riolo for starting the discussion.

Human brains are hard-wired to perceive the world and process information a certain way. Because of this, there are countless ways to trick your brain. A good example of that is brain freeze. When the roof of your mouth drops below a certain temperature, your brain assumes that you’re freezing to death, and opens up as many blood vessels as possible. That extra pressure is what makes your head hurt. Part of the reason that people seem more attractive when you're drunk is that alcohol blocks your brain's ability to determine a lack of facial symmetry - one of the key factors in human sex appeal.

There are ways to trick your brain to behave a certain way even without freezing it or drowning it in alcohol. As you may have heard, one of Motorcars' new business ventures is Daylight Donuts & Coffee, and there’s an aspect of the donut business that illustrates an interesting fact about how our brains work.

The retina of our eyes is actually part of our brain. Because of that, our brains - and the brains of all primates - are hard-wired to perceive quantity in a certain way. It works like this:

We can instantly recognize up to 4 of something at a glance, but our brain automatically estimates any number of items greater more than that. It’s not that we can’t count higher than 4 – of course we can – but we tend to make errors of judgement when confronted with quantities beyond that number. There’s even a joke about this that’s actually true for apes, and is one of the things that sets us apart from them: For a chimpanzee, numbers go ‘1, 2, many, lots’. Their brain can only discern quantities up to about 3 of something, so at least we’re one step up from that.

And in a roundabout way, that brings us to donuts. All primates are hard-wired with a bias toward quantity over surface volume. What this means is that you will spend more money to buy 5 or more donut holes than to buy the same net weight of donuts, because your brain is convinces you that the number of food items is more important than their size.

Brain manipulation happens all the time, and we’re completely unaware of it. As you might have guessed, grocery stores - with their tiny profit margins - are among the best at it. For an example, check this out the next time you’re at the grocery store – especially if you shop at a higher-end store:

You may notice that the size of the floor tiles change from one part of the store to another. If they do, I bet that the tiles are much smaller in the parts of the store where the store makes the most profit per item – the deli, the meat counter, and the wine rack. The reason for this is that we subconsciously hear the sound of our cart’s wheels click when they roll over each tile, and making the tiles smaller makes us slow down. The more we slow down, the more likely we are to browse and buy items that make the store more money.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how to price donuts – or anything else - by volume, I’ve included a link that explains the difference between all unit and incremental pricing: https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/volume-pricing-strategies-digital-goods/

Mirror, Mirror

Today we’re going to talk about the human brain. Our brains are hard-wired to behave certain ways and to recognize and seek out certain patterns, even if we’re not conscious of it. For example, we’re automatically attracted to people who have symmetrical faces, no matter where we’re from or how we were raised. We see pictures in clouds because our brains try and force a pattern onto things that don’t have any.

One of the things that our brains are hard-wired to do is to respond favorably to someone whose accent, pace, and gestures mirror our own. A recent study found that salespeople who observed and mirrored how quickly or slowly their Customers spoke, their accents, and their hand gestures were 5 times as likely to close the sale as salespeople who did not. This is because our brains are hard-wired to trust someone who talks and acts like we do – no matter what their age, sex, or ethnic background is.

Try this when you speak with Customers – and remember that your company's employees are internal Customers. If the person that you’re talking to speaks a little slower than you do, slow down. If they cross their arms when they speak, do the same thing. Have you ever noticed that Hillary Clinton’s accent changes depending upon where she’s speaking? She does that on purpose – and many other politicians and other public figures do, too.

When Customers are tense, such as when something costs more than they were expecting or we have to deliver unhappy news, mirroring helps to ease the tension. It tells the Customer, “We’re just like you. We’re on your side. We’re going to help.”

Sales and Customer service are all about communication – learning to speak all of our Customers’ languages. The better we learn to mirror their pace, accents, and gestures, the more successful we’ll be.

The (Lack of) Persistance of Memory

The human brain is an amazing organ. Despite our current technological expertise, it has yet to be equaled in terms of computing power per ounce, but it does have something in common with the hard drive on your computer:

Every time that you remember something, your brain re-commits it to memory, effectively playing post office with itself and fundamentally changing the memory. This has such a profound effect on your perceptions that it's actually possible to create memories of events that never happened, so vivid that your brain can't tell the difference.

Aside from how disturbing this is when applied to the idea of 'eyewitness testimony' at a trial, this has potentially destructive implications for your business. Even Customer Service and Salespeople that are 'young and sharp' remember things differently than they actually occurred.

How do you combat this? By making it part of your organization's culture to record everything in your CRM or database as soon as it happens (while it's happening, if possible, so that even the wording used is retained). If it was a phone conversation, record those and attach them to Customer accounts (in my call center experience, 95% of Customers remember a phone conversation differently than what actually occurred). If it was an email chain, make certain that those are attached to the Customer account, too.

The essential ingredient here is urgency. If a rep or anyone else who has direct communication with Customers is slow to record those communications, curb this behavior immediately. The longer anyone waits, the more that will become your culture, and the less accurate the information in your database will be. And then why are you spending so much money for it?