Podcast

Understand Your Customers Better Through Behavioral Science with Linnea Gandhi [LLC 027]

updated on

Understanding how your customers make decisions when confronted with things like pricing, limited time offers, and diverse choices, can help you as a business owner make better decisions in your own business. There are certain patterns that can be extrapolated and accounted for when building your products and services.

My guest is adjunct assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Linnea Gandhi. Along with teaching, Linnea runs a company called BehavioralSight, which applies insights and methodologies from the growing field of behavioral science to everyday business problems.

Our discussion revolves around behavioral science and the information we can extract as business owners from the behaviors of our customers that will help us provide better service.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

  • Why customers (aka humans) are working with limited cognitive resources and aren’t very logical in their decision-making
  • The common decision-making errors that all humans make and how business owners can understand those better
  • Anticipate decision-making errors that consumers might commit so you can build your products and service to help them avoid them
  • As a new entrepreneur with no existing clients, how do you begin to understand the behaviors of your prospective customers?
  • Writing the narrative of how your new product or service could be a failure, you begin eliciting all the risks and errors and that allows you to get the benefit of hindsight prospectively
  • How the left-digit bias affects how you price your products/services
  • How many choices are too many? In-n-out and Cheesecake Factory sit on both ends of the spectrum when it comes to how many food items they offer so which one is more effective?
  • Enriched vs. impoverished offerings ? which one will a customer select?
  • The importance of social proof like testimonials, especially when there’s uncertainty around your product/service
  • Time scarcity and the role urgency plays in getting customers to take their wallets out

Resources:

Daniel Kahneman

Sheena Iyengar – “jam” study

Robert Cialdini – Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Contact Information:

Twitter: @linneagandhi

www.behavioralsight.com

Thanks for Checking Out the Show Notes and for Listening!

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. I would really appreciate it if you shared this show with a friend who could benefit from listening to this particular episode.

Please don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE so you can get each new episode delivered directly to you when it’s ready. You can find the show in Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, and TuneIn.

Leaders sure do love company so be sure to get social with me:

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

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nicoleabboud

Or email me at nicole[at]nicoleabboud[dot]com