Quick summary:
- Neuromarketing tools that once cost millions are now accessible through AI-powered apps that can predict customer behavior with 90%+ accuracy
- Major brands like Cracker Barrel and Southwest are making costly emotional missteps that AI could have prevented
- Keeping a “friction log” of customer pain points can reveal breakthrough opportunities for AI automation
Roger Dooley didn’t mince words about Cracker Barrel’s new logo. He called the mark “hideous” and said it felt like an intern made it. But it also pointed to a deeper failure — leaders ignored how loyal customers would feel, a lack of empathy that would lead them to revert to the old logo a week later.
Dooley, author of “Friction” and “Brainfluence,” has spent two decades translating neuroscience and behavioral science for marketers. Now, he sees AI tools delivering insights that once required a lab of PhDs that only the Fortune 500 could afford.
He explains to host Greg Matusky on The Disruption Is Now how AI tools that can predict customer reactions can help companies avoid emotionally deaf decisions, but the leaders who win will be the ones who keep human emotion in the room.
Watch now:
Key takeaways:
AI made neuromarketing tools cheap, fast, and effective
Eye-tracking studies that required bringing people into specialized labs with expensive equipment can now be done using regular webcams or phone cameras. Even more remarkable, AI simulation tools claim 90% to 95% accuracy in predicting where humans would look on a webpage or advertisement.
“There are probably about at least five providers of this service now,” Dooley explains. “It’s available as a SaaS product, a software service, pretty inexpensive in most cases.” The process that used to take weeks now happens in minutes.
Biometric measurements follow the same pattern. Instead of wiring people up with sensors in laboratory settings, companies can now gather the same data using tools everyone already owns. A smartwatch paired with a mobile app can capture the physiological responses that reveal how customers really feel about your marketing messages.
AI democratizes insights that previously required massive research budgets.
AI can prevent the kind of brand disasters that hit Cracker Barrel
Cracker Barrel’s recent logo catastrophe offers a perfect case study in what happens when executives ignore emotional intelligence.
The problem goes beyond bad design. Cracker Barrel had been systematically breaking promises to its legacy customers for years, shrinking portions while raising prices, abandoning its core value proposition of from-scratch cooking in a comfortable environment. The logo became the final straw that broke customer loyalty.
“You wonder, like I’m sure you were sitting there, Greg, and saying, what were these people thinking when they made those decisions?” Dooley asks. “Did they not anticipate that there would be a reaction from long-time customers?”
Similar patterns plagued Southwest Airlines, where activist investor pressure led to abandoning core brand principles, and Carnival Cruise Lines, where executives changed their lifetime loyalty program in ways that made longtime customers feel “kicked to the curb.”
AI could have predicted these reactions. The technology understands emotional resonance even if it can’t feel emotions itself.
A friction log reveals your biggest AI automation opportunities
The most actionable insight from Dooley’s work might be the simplest: Start keeping a friction log. Every time you encounter something that slows you down, wastes your time, or creates unnecessary steps, write it down. Do this for both your own company’s processes and when dealing with other businesses.
“When you train your brain to see these friction points, you are really helping everything,” Dooley explains.
Matusky discovered this principle when a client asked for conference recommendations. His team provided a spreadsheet of options, which created immediate friction. The client still needed to schedule a call to discuss which conferences to prioritize. Instead, he had AI create a scoring system that ranked conferences based on whether they were good for attracting investors, users, or partners.
The result eliminated multiple back-and-forth exchanges and provided immediate value. “AI internally and externally comes over, overcomes those friction points,” Matusky notes.
This approach extends beyond customer-facing processes. When employees know their time is being wasted by rubber-stamp approvals or unnecessary forms, their engagement drops. With employee engagement at a 10-year low according to Gallup, eliminating internal friction becomes both an operational and retention issue.
Key moments:
- Neuromarketing 101 (1:57)
- How AI is changing everything — and Dooley’s next book (4:11)
- AI attention simulation with 90–95% accuracy (6:03)
- Southwest, Carnival, Cracker Barrel, and the empathy miss (8:30)
- The emotional disconnect behind the Cracker Barrel rebrand fail (9:46)
- The case for using AI to project tone and empathy (12:18)
- How Major League Baseball won new fans without losing old ones (17:20)
- Dealing with friction and keeping a friction log (21:19)
- Why AI frees you for higher-level thinking, not cognitive decline (30:59)
Q&A with Roger Dooley
Q: What is neuromarketing, in plain terms?
Dooley: My definition of neuromarketing is broader than many. Originally, it started off as using the tools of neuroscience, things like EEG brainwave measurement, fMRI, brain scans, and so on, to evaluate how customers reacted to things like advertising, packaging, and so on.
What I focused more on was how to take what we could learn from these tools and also from the research done by behavioral scientists and consumer psychologists… It’s all based on the concept that your customer is making a decision not completely rationally. According to Gerald Zaltman of Harvard, only 5% of our decision-making processes are conscious.
Q: How is AI changing the neuromarketing field right now?
Dooley: On the sort of hardcore measuring customer reactions to things, now there are tools like biometrics that can be done instead of in a laboratory, just using tools like a smartwatch and a mobile phone app… There are tools for eye tracking that instead of bringing people into a lab where again, they have relatively expensive setups… now this can be done using webcams, phonecams, or even AI simulation. And the AI simulation is pretty remarkable… they claim accuracy of 90 and even 95% and up in predicting where real humans would look.
Q: Why do smart companies still make tone-deaf moves like the Cracker Barrel rebrand?
Dooley: My guess is that it’s a combination of first, a pressing business need. Like when I talked about Southwest, they’re under very heavy pressure from activist investors. And so they had a problem they had to solve. Cracker Barrel, I think they were under pressure to do things that would increase traffic, increase sales. And so they’re really looking for that solution. They fixate on something that’s going to work… in many of these cases, the CEO or the executives making these decisions don’t really have the customer at the center. They are looking at the business problem that they’re facing and putting that at the center.
Q: What’s a friction log and why keep one?
Dooley: There are two concepts there. I call it a friction log, a friction diary is fine too. And certainly you can do it in your own experience within your company. And when you see something, make a note of it because that’s something that you can work on and fix. But also I like the idea of creating a friction log when you encounter friction in dealing with other companies…
You’re training your brain to see friction in other people’s experiences because then when you look at what you’re doing, you’re going to say, wait a minute, that same thing happens on our website.
Q: Can AI really help with empathy if it has no feelings?
Dooley: People think that AI is incapable of emotion. And of course it is. AI can’t have emotion. AI can’t be empathetic. But AI understands it. And AI can help you be better at it.
