To Make Higher Performing Ads, Know What Your Customers REALLY Want (With Sarah Levinger) transcript

how do you write ads concept ads for your brand that actually sell products you do that by speaking to what benefit your product actually provides to the Deep desires of your customers and if you have a good product and can do that effectively then you should be able to draw that out and tell people how to do that and Sarah linger can help you Sarah is a consultant who does uh consumer Behavior strategy uh for Brands I have followed Sarah for so long it is sort of silly that this is actually the first time we've ever talked um and you're going to love this conversation because we're going to go to exactly how and I mean I try to get exactly as possible we're going to be very tactical and practical to actually write ads that do this I want you to walk away from this episode and probably pause this episode multiple times and write down here is the hook here is the angle here is the information here is the outro Sarah is going to help you do that by thinking more about consumer psychology what people really want and how to speak to those things so let's not delay it let's talk to Sarah linger oh my gosh Nate's gonna be so happy that he just plugged his but yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah shout out to Nate shout out Nate Legos well so I mean this is a good starting point Sarah Nate um I I had followed you for a while and then Nate who I think is uniquely awesome uh Nate's been on my podcast twice I will link both those in the show notes um of this episode writing that writing that note down right now so so don't forget um and and when I was talking to Nate he was like you know one of the things that really helped us at original grain was talking to Sarah linger and thinking more about um about about really what our customers want he sells watches really cool watches with all these collabs and all that kind of stuff and he said um he said he said talking to Sarah helped us realize we weren't selling watches and that's something you know that that's what he said and so maybe maybe that's a good starting point just because it's a reference point that's shared from a few different places um what is original grain selling and how does that nicely intro who you are and what you think about and what you do such a a good segue I I actually really loved working with Nate because again shout out to Nate everybody should just shout out Nate because he's just really good at what he does yeah his podcast is great by the way like I I plug it a couple times and it's only like 10 to 15 minute episodes like you can you can like shotgun it really fast and they really are like tactical and practical I'm like shocked that he's able to keep it to that because sometimes you just get in the Weeds on podcast but anyways I digress so when I met Nate uh we had basically just been chatting like on Twitter and things we've been commenting on each other's posts for a while and he had hired me basically to come in and take a look at all of their specifically their messaging on their advertising now usually when I get hired in these capacities most of the time I'm working with a couple different people either the founder the media buyers some sort of operator in the business the CMO those type of things and they're they almost always assume for some reason that I'm going to come in and tell them oh you just need to increase the amount of social proof or you just need to add more urgency or more scarcity because the entirety of my business is built on a psychology Foundation um and I have have to gently remind people that I don't I don't do like marketing hacks per se yes scarcity proof and Authority proof is psychology uh but that's not what I do this so I'm sorry to interrupt you this is like this is like so much of the kick I'm on right now is that when people think about advertising and things like this right like they they hear they're just like all of these case study type pieces of content on the internet about that kind of stuff got to add and so I hear that all the time and I just want to bang my head against the wall because it's like first of all like the vast majority of those case studies and those pieces of content were not created with any like scientific rigor like no nobody is like meaningfully testing this with replicable processes or anything like that right yeah um and secondly what I continue to believe is that it's actually about messaging it's a it's not like those things may be useful tools here and there and help you squeeze out a couple more you know like percentage points not like I should say small percentage increases in value or something like that but they are not going to to meaningfully impact your business they're not they are not what is going to do that is your ability to speak to these things so um so okay so anyway so you said you start talking to Nate and they they y you start talking about messaging and people did he think that's what you were gonna say or was he aware yeah well I think Nate came in with the idea that Sarah's gonna help us with our copy right which is a piece of what I do but the M the majority of what I focus on is understanding the behavior that actually drives like purchases right um and I again this is all kind of comes down to how well you understand what humans are actually susceptible to and influenced by so when I started working with Nate they really had a good messaging Foundation that the brand was actually scaling very well they had a very healthy setup they had a pretty healthy ad account just because Nate's good at what he does but when I came in we had to identify pretty quickly which way do you want to take the brand emotionally and this is goes back to like your first question which is like what what are they actually selling now the physical entity of what a brand sells is a product almost always unless it's a service or B2B obviously or SAS but in D Toc we sell products that's what we do PE people purchase something from us we ship it to their house they actually physically get to interact with Our Brands but that's not actually what they're buying most of the time I have to do deep dives into all kinds of different psychological I don't know models to help people understand people purchase from emotion right they're not purchasing from The Logical side of their brain they purchase with emotion and then justify that purchase with the logical side of the brain and that's just how Neuroscience works so yeah that's what I work with Okay so so let's just take that to another level I mean there's a lot you could say there and I think that's that's really right um and by the way I like flag here that sometimes when I hear conversations like this I think about like it almost sounds manipulative right it's like you're like tapping into psychology whatever well but but there's a simple way to like solve this sort of from an Ethics perspective which is to sell stuff that is actually good like if you do that then you actually doing yeah anyway so that's the way that I have sort of thought about this for my agency is like I just don't take clients whose products I don't actually want to sell people and I don't take take and I don't take clients who if we succeed and they get very rich I think will'll probably make the world meaningfully worse with their money so um that's like those are like my two those like my two ways of staying away from this and then within that framework I'm like okay now how do I sell as much stuff as possible so if anybody else like to your point oh my gosh psychology is happening whether you know it or not right exactly sorry to interrupt but this is like my shtick is like you're using psychology whether you know it or not my job is to help you learn how to use the psychology effectively and ethically and on purpose so that way you know which direction to go next because half the time you're doing it on accident which is worse I think than doing it on purpose yeah well okay so I don't I don't know if you're under M andda or anything like here so um if you can't say anything more about what original Grant is selling that's okay we can come up with a different example but but let's actually take that to another level right so you said you know you're not selling the product you're selling something else um let's just use that example because it's a good example and an easy one just because we're on it right yeah um original grain selling watches you know as n has talked about watches made out of whiskey barrels watches made out of old guitars all kinds of stuff like that right um what is original grain uh selling sort of beyond the watch in that case you know and again if you can speak sort of specifically to their thing then that would be great and maybe we can ask Nate if it's okay if we say this or not yeah but but yeah a tangible example give this information away yeah yeah so uh to to kind of understand how to sell an emotion you have to kind of go down into what consumers and humans are actually building emotion from right so how the brain actually processes emotion through so when you get information in the brain it's going through the subconscious mind which processes about 95% of what your decisions are on a daily basis so that sounds like a lot if it shocks you it should like I'm terrified on The Daily that most of my decisions are not being made logically they're all irrational it's coming from like years of experiences and like different things that I've interacted with over the course of my lifetime and then I'm just taking it and making a a very reactive decision for most things that I interact with during the day and this is for everybody on the planet right now since the information is going through that particular brain the subconscious mind is a very emotional one it's a very old brain brain um some people call it lizard brain it's the brain that we don't really have a whole lot of access to but you can gain access to like to that side of your brain Through The Logical side so your conscious mind is very very important it's a slow processor it only processes about 40 to 50 bits of information per second compared to the subconscious which processes about 11 million bits per second yeah so it's very slow guy but it's very calculated right it's making very conscious decisions so since that's how consumers are actually making decisions if we can speak to some sort of emotional piece of themselves that is buried deep within the subconscious mind it's going to be so much faster more efficient cost effective and just much more powerful way to Market Brands so for in the case of original grain they actually had two different markets individualized Market where somebody was coming in purchasing these watches for themselves and then they also had a GI maret now the yeah these are two totally different love this of purchasing right yeah and a lot this is a great this is a great uh lead into this concept I actually think this is a really helpful way to illustrate some of these things you're saying because gift purchasers like at first glance it looks like what they're buying as something for somebody else but they're actually not they are buying they're buying for themselves like because there is something in it for the gift purchaser yeah yeah I don't even think it's a hot T it just occurred to me because I had a gift brand for a while and it was like 80% gifts and so I just it occurred to me like oh like and I've people who listened to me for a little while probably heard me say this but I'm a I'm a terrible Gift Giver and so like it is a I am and so it's it's deeply fulfilling to me when I come up with a gift that I feel like a good GI is a good like and and I I get a lot out of that experience and so it's a perfect way of illustrating I'm actually buying this thing but I'm really not I'm buying the experience of giving a gift that is fulfilling to me to to do something because it feels good to give great gift so it's like it's like a perfect illustration but yeah so anyway so keep going the the weirdest part about this too is if you can understand like how human behavior actually works and you start to identify the core pieces of what goes into it you realize that emotion is Blended there's never one emotion that we're feeling all of it at at one time unless it's like you know basic emotions like rage like if you're feeling real ragy usually other emotions can't kind of like come into that one but for the most part emotions are Blended so in the case of gifters this idea of what we call nurturance right where you're trying to love and appreciate and show some sort of affection for the people in your life lives that's a huge piece of it and that's usually the only messaging marketers go after which is like get them a gift that they will love right to your point that's only half of it right the other half is esteem Focus so the the esteem emotion comes down to like I want to feel like I have good appeal with the people that I want to be respected with right so when you're going after a market that is esteem focused they really want to find products and purchase them things that help them feel like they are somehow elevated above other consumers or other people in their life so for gifters this is a blended emotion you have esteem focus and you have nurturance focus and you got to come up with messaging that hits both not just one or the other and this is this is the reason why I tell people I'm I don't do copyrighting I don't do psychology hacks I'm teaching like Blended emotional empathy basically so empathy training is probably what I'm best known for but in the case of original grain this is the reason why it worked because we were able to figure out a message that Blended both emotions into one you probably know you should be considering offshoring more labor in your business and the problem with your thinking about that right now if you are thinking about that is you're also probably thinking about that as something that is entirely about being cheap getting low-end lowquality talent for repetitive tasks Etc and that is the wrong way to think about offshoring Talent your business the right way to think about it is to go find incredible a players with deep e-commerce resumés who you can pay a premium relative to local market wages in the countries where they are uh that is more than other people get paid in their same country and less than you would pay here and the place to do that is with my friends at more Staffing in the Philippines where uh there are folks with Incredible deep e-commerce resumes who are building e-commerce businesses know what they're doing across every part of the organization supply chain operations all the way the customer service marketing people with really good resumés who can come and help your business for a much lower cost than it would cost to same hire those same people in the US how do I know more Staffing is the place to do this because I have worked with them myself and they're Staffing my business I have more employees in the Philippines than I do in the US and they have all been staffed through my friends at more Staffing I have never fired one of them they're awesome I just add another one recently so go to Mor staffing.inc uh they will do an incredible job for you they'll even give you a one-year guarantee so in the event that you make a hire that doesn't work out which of course does happen occasionally though rarely in my experience with people working with more Staffing uh in the event that that does happen they will replace that uh they will find you a new person to fill that role for free they will not charge you an additional cost to do it so go to more staffing.com to get started with more Staffing now so you then help craft that message so you say like this is what's in it for the the customer for your customer you take the gift customer in this case right right and so then then Nate from there is going on Crafting the messaging and sort of running it by you and saying is this like how does that do a little plug for your service here how does what actually makes that um practical for somebody to turn that insight into actual Marketing in this particular case I actually wrote this headline because it was a part of my service and this is something I still provide so it it I guess we have to back up it's very important once you understand how the brain processes information and emotion to now try and figure out which emotion are we going after and this is something I think All Brands miss everybody wants to go straight to the marketing hacks and cro and changing button colors and using emojis and getting ugc and y yadada y just wasting your time before you do that like just slow down a little bit just slow down uh I do not believe in a volume game I get a lot of flack for this but I love this hot take I don't believe in volume-based marketing or advertising I do not think you need hundreds of ads in your ad account and testing all of these different angles and ideas every single month just to try and get two winners that prop up the entire account you should have somewhere between seven to 10 winners all scaling at the same exact time all based on the emotions that you know are going to hit super crazy important so I only test nine ads a month okay and that that's it so I can walk you to the process of how we did this for original grade well let me pause there because people I think are going to hear that as somewhat different than my strategy and I'll tell you what I actually think about that what I think is that um it might be right I'm not I'm not totally convinced uh of that this this is obviously just my opinion right um I think it's possible to generate massive amounts of advertising and to build a media buying approach that allows you to basically take the thing you're doing and also at the same time like to essentially do that alongside a quantity approach where you are yeah trying to take some of the insights that you're bringing and then um and then also just generate Mass amounts of them simply for the reason that you might be wrong and and that that basic belief about myself that I might be wrong about some of and not not not that you're wrong about that strategy but that I might be wrong about what the consumer actually cares about I might be wrong about how this product I might just not have thought of something and if you can create enough assets cheap enough and the cost of testing those assets is also extremely cheap um then you have a very um high cost to impact ratio right or I should say low cost impact or impact to cost ratio right so um I think in that world you can do it and it's funny I've got a podcast that'll probably come out before this one goes live with Taylor holiday who was probably on the extreme other end of what you just said um and Taylor Taylor Made the case and and I was actually reflecting on our conversation afterwards and thinking to myself I don't know I maybe should have pushed back more but I'm just unsettled in my own thinking about this I'm I'm watching one client of mine right now uh who is extremely good um at leveraging Ai and um in terms of creating mass volume I'm not totally sure it's going to work yet even though he can he can spin out assets faster than anybody I've ever seen like long form Landers insanely fast and so um so it's sort of interesting I I mean this is a little bit of detour but I think it is a helpful thought like one of the in the midst of that one of the things I'm doing per purposefully with that client is not using those tools very much and instead trying to think like almost line by line on some of these ads because of this like messaging is everything kicked that I'm on like the volume isn't there so so so I don't know I don't know what I think about that quite yet but I'll say what I do think for sure is that at least part of what you're saying is Right which is that I do believe that thinking really deeply about these kinds of things will produce better assets and I do think you will generate like a higher let's just call it hit rate on your ads by by doing that I think it's just maybe that you can do also both there's also some ways to generate um a high quantity alongside the high quality and there's a place in your marketing mix for both of those things and that you shouldn't commit to one to in point of fact and this maybe comes we we'll segue back to your point um in that same Twitter thread and I'll link it here that you and you and Nate and I were all in Taylor chimed in and said he thinks messaging is really important too um but that messaging is Downstream from marketing planning which is Downstream from product which is Downstream from your brand and the actual problem people make is that they haven't thought hard about brand they haven't thought hard about like how their brand and and not just you know colors and and design preferences right but like what is your brand saying and doing and contributing to the world and then from there all of that go down creating into your actual Ming which I actually think May some overlap in what you two are saying there right which like step back what do this BR actually contributing to the world and then go and execute the specifics of your ads yeah well and that's where I think Taylor and I I love getting in discussions with Taylor because like we disagree heavily on a lot of stuff there's like 100% yes it's like it's good brain training for me because I'm like this interesting I never thought of it the way you're thinking it's America when I say especially on Twitter so when I say I don't go for volume I always have to caveat that because usually that's the response I get which is like what do you mean you don't go for volume absolutely you should be producing ads at scale in a volume format after after you have solidified what you're actually selling the emotion of what you're selling so for instance true classic is the only brand I've ever seen that has been able to go for a volume strategy but it's because they understand the emotion of what they're selling so incredibly deeply that they can go after a large volume of ads because most of them will produce something valuable for the brand same with um liquid death liquid death is prolific exe with I mean they are running so many ads but they have never once deviated from the emotion that they're currently selling so again my strategy is basically to get people to the emotion that they should be selling first and then give it to the creative teams and teach them how to do it at scale so it's not that I don't like volume it's that I don't like volume as a testing methodology okay yeah well I so again I might disagree a little bit on that point entirely because I think it's so cheap to test at volume with manual bidding but the the uh but that's actually a little beside the point I I it doesn't it doesn't so much matter for this conversation in the sense that um I think your basic point is right and actually the very the place that I trying to go with this this client right now that is I'm extremely good at Ai and and I may bring him on because because I think there real value in what he's he's doing and and have him talk about it a little bit because it's because it's it's pretty cool and and certainly there are some parts of the marketing mix for the brand that are that are working great with AI so there's no question there but the um the uh what was I gonna say oh the um at the same time we're trying to do exactly what you just said right now we're going like okay the to to take we're sort of plateaued on our span to take us to the next level we're all stopping and analyzing a lot and going like let's make some hypothesis what is actually driving the customer to make this purchase and let's think about that a little bit more and now let's go develop assets that do this and the hope is to go a step past that as well which is okay how does this not only form our sort of core identity but then also how do we Supply creators influencers any of those kinds of people with the brief and the prompt while letting them be creative in some ways this is where we want you to make the inroad to our customer and then go do that at scale yeah yeah yeah yeah well and that that it t that takes time like you need to take time for your brand to step back and pull yourself like out of the day-to-day operations to be able to identify that so again my the entirety of like the strategy that I use is built upon uh a good amount of data because again I can't tell what's happening unless I've studied what the consumers are actually doing behaviorally and that comes out in your data now in my book in my book data is a indicator not a validator it doesn't tell you why people are doing things it just something is happening yes and it drives me crazy when people are like well we have X amount of CPA and our clicker rates this is this so this is why it's working and I'm like that's a hypothesis it might be it might be why it's working but then you have to go test it and yeah this is right this is this is the right way to test this kind of thing right and make that hypothesis about the messaging make don't make it about yes frame changes and stuff like that right think about like what is messing we just went through this with the client I actually may see if I can share it at some point because I think I think it's exactly right and now we're trying two or three different hypotheses at some scale for exactly the same reason I think you're so right about that and people really miss this I also totally agree that people are just distracted there's too much to do and so they don't step back and do the analysis y yep and half of that takes just uh self-control and a little bit of like scheduling you got to schedule it in every single week you should be sitting down pulling all the way back and just being like what is going on behaviorally for instance I had a good brand that I was working with uh actually an agency brand that they had this really weird anomaly where they were noticing the colors that were currently selling best with this particular brand and this product didn't match up with the demographics the demographic information showed High female audience much older kind of Boomer age and then all these different very masculine colors for this particular product and it was fascinating because when I went in there my initial hypothesis was oh this product is being sold to a female audience and you should go this way with this particular messaging after we started noticing the colors though of what was selling the best it was immediately apparent this female audience is purchasing for her husband yeah and we never would have known known that had we not looked at the actual data of like this color is selling but it's selling to a female audience but it's a masculine color like it just you got to take everything into view you can't just go one data piece at a time to your point you test if that's actually true right you go make create the messaging CU that's your hypoth we're going and now you go generate the next batch of ads to go test is this right and go do that so yeah it's all about that messaging and now we can say like buy this for him and the the messaging shifts and we'll see how that performs if it performs much much better than everything else we know we're on the right track right and then you go scale it up yep you are still doing your ad tracking with the native pixel integration between Shopify and meta ads you are doing it wrong and you should switch to Billy right now b. a is an affordable 100% server Sid tracking actually a One-Stop shop replacement for Google tag manager you can use it for meta ads Google ads G4 I like get the click of a button they will all be set up Tik Tok ads Snapchat ads all one place all really fast and all with upgraded tracking on meta ads you will see extremely high event match quality scores I know it because I use it with my clients and so I watch the emqs go up in meta ads manager relative to uh other tools that I've used as well as relative especially especially relative to the native Shopify integration also like if you do Google ads it'll be immediately built with enhanced conversions turned on Billy's a great tool I use it with my clients b. for 100% server side tracking get better data from your store send that data to meta ads which means better Fuller reporting and uh and better performance as well so go do that right now b. a b. you can get started for test it for yourself in your account for $1 for the first month so this is really no risk to you go check it out that's that's so good um that's interesting I a while back I did an episode about like the three phases of meta ads growth and it's occurring to me now that I'm that I'm that I should have thought of something differently which is that I framed it as you find your creative message that works that's step one that's phase one step two is build process to go generate that at scale and then phase three is you go multi channel from there right so you meta is the most profitable Channel if you want to add other channels you got to start by doing one and two first right um I think the Miss in that um framework is that you actually may have multiple versions of step one right so in your in your account right to to the gift and non-gift purchaser you may go like okay here's customer a is like this customer B is like this and so customer a you find the messaging that works and then you scale it up and then you go multi Channel with that message then you go repeat the same thing with a new set of customers in a different value proposition and and all those kinds of things you know and I think that's that's probably a better way to frame that to to the I think to the point that you're making yeah um can you you only need as many like uh icps and Target it like um what would you call it Target markets right so you only need as many avatars as people have reasons for buying some Brands may have 12 avatars some Brands may have two y it just it all depends on the behavior that people are currently like involved in themselves in and who's influencing that behavior yeah so yeah okay let's do more take let's do more let's do more psychology um so let's see talk about do uh I'll let you decide uh do you want to talk about um more broadly or do you want to stick with the original Grand example and talk more about somebody buying for themselves let's talk about maybe a dude buying for himself this is where I would go tell me if this is not where you want to go if a dude's buying a a wa a watch for himself let's say a whiskey barrel watch from original grain um let's make that the same distinction right he's buying the watch but then there's like the psych the psychology element of what he's actually buying or however you want to frame that right I don't want to put your words in your mouth um uh so we talked about the gift purchaser a little bit um what what about the person buying for themselves and how do we apply this framework to that situation individual purchases are really interesting because depending on the product uh their behavior also will change because there'll be Blended emotions that kind of come into play here and to your point when it comes down to messaging I have to try and make the distinction between are you purchasing this as a status symbol when it comes to watches at least in this example is it a status thing for this person or is it more of like a self-love thing for this person so for instance I had two different brands that I've done this before the very first brand I ever ran any of my NLP reports on like the actual psychographic research report that I provide that brand was a high-end luxury leather bag from Italy that was being imported that sold for like $300 to $600 a pop like it expensive product and so I went through ran the NLP and found out pretty quickly that it was for men I I actually really love like male focused products because there's a lot of really interesting things that come out with dudes that are very different than women right like self love for men looks very very different than it does for women behaviorally so for this particular product we found very quickly that the message of treat yourself to Italian leather worked incredibly well for this audience because the majority of the behavior that we were seeing was people were purchasing for Milestones that they were hitting in their life graduations graduated from law school got a new job moved to a new city right so treat yourself as a nurturance focused message it's actually self-love yeah but it's it's it's very still steeped in this idea of uh esteem as well right so they're both of them still ran in the same targeted audience of esteem and nurturance so treat yourself to Italian leather very different though than what we ran for uh original great yeah so original bra continued kind of the messaging that they had from before cuz Nate had something that was working extremely well which was this idea of like if you're a whiskey lover you will purchase a whiskey made right like watch right different kind of messaging same core emotion right fantastic like really interesting stuff yeah um that's so good okay so do you um so tell me about the psych psychographic report you you Bree passed that but what do you actually provide people and uh this is a totally non-sponsored episode I'm actually just curious to see like what kind of insights are you I mean go do this right with Sarah but like um what kind of insights are you pulling from that and then how is that informing actual marketing messaging yeah so uh the research reports that I uh currently run is basically built off of a psychology model built by a man named will leech I praise this guy constantly he's a really good friend of mine good Mentor he wrote the book marketing to mind States so anybody who's read that book because I'm obsessed with it this is this is his model so will is a 25- year veteran in uh he's an economist and he's a behavior scientist so he was obviously working with the big Brands like Pepsi Fredo like big big ones and found that there were nine different emotions that usually came out during the pre-purchase process and this is just based on all the data that he was running through so his specific model was built to run through customer interviews and when I read his book I was like I bet you I can do this with ATS like I'm pretty sure I can take what he's doing and use it an ad so my current NLP reports I take down as many reviews off of the website as possible I'll run it through an AI system that will categorize it into these nine different emotional categories for me and then from there I can identify based on frequency number the top three emotions that are occurring before people purchase so these are usually the emotions they're looking to solve by purchasing this product now depending on where we uh download or like you know where we gather these reviews from the sentiment changes a little bit reviews from Amazon are usually very intense people are not calm on Amazon uh but if you take it from the brands usually they're very like Neal a little bit to the positive sentiment because they're trying to like say something nice about the brands they love after we find out the Three core emotions though from there I basically do a whole bunch of nuanced uh headline generation messaging generation right using chat GPT and thesaurus yeah.com yeah sure because I don't like to think like I don't want to have to think about about messaging it's too difficult so I have an entire process that I used that will help me generate headlines specific to the emotions that I know are customers are purchasing with yeah yeah that's really cool so okay so can we talk about what some of those emotions end up being like what I maybe maybe what are some of the common ones what are people thinking about um regularly that are coming up for a lot of sort of D Toc product Brands you may want to take this to men to women wherever you want to go like are there are there typical things that you're seeing like for for uh for for Brands to be aware of yeah so the weirdest part about consumers is their behavior changes cyclically like in a cycle about every 12 weeks right so as the seasons come up we start to change our consumer Behavior sometimes twice usually in Q4 it changes two times because of Black Friday um so consumers just change naturally their behavior how they're doing things if you start to notice a Slowdown in purchases around end of September early October that's on purpose it happens every year it's not weird consumers are changing their behavior because they're waiting for Black Friday that's on purpose for them so consumers are changing their behavior about every 12 weeks so I've worked with a few Brands now like three or four years that we've just tracked it using the data to see which messaging hits in Spring which messaging hits Best in the summer which messaging hits Best in the fall and now we just know every year we need to start like for Beauty Brands we need to start boosting that kind of confidence style messaging somewhere in the spring once we hit summer it's not confidence anymore it's a different message right that will work for that particular audience so confidence and spring so let's let's pause there for a second confidence in Spring what is it in summer well for this particular brand it was two types of confidence which I found really fascinating so when you do these nlps it'll give you the actual um like frequency numbers right but it's my job to basically do more deep-seated research using all kinds of different things Google Trends and interest Trends and all kinds of things uh to understand again what type what type of confidence and every time I say this to a brand they look at me like I have two heads they're like what are you talking about yeah yeah makes tot sense and I'm like okay this is messaging this is what we're talking about today is like messaging is not supposed to be basic right because emotions are not basic we just talked about earlier they're Blended right yeah so confidence can go in two different directions you can either go boss babe confidence which is more like self-esteem and like working on who how you feel as a person your confidence and ident Identity or it can go cheeky which is much more appeal focused it's not necessarily identi FOC yeah right yeah I I totally see what yeah that that's a that's a really helpful distinction I think you think about like just like instincts of different women I've been around or something like that right because we're talking about beauty indry we're talking about women like yeah the sort of Boss the boss bab Woman versus like the The Cheeky almost like charm is almost the word I would think of as like as different ways of yeah um exerting their uh exerting their confidence right one of them is almost more like seeking to I'm generalizing here so tell me tell me if you think I mean you've thought about this a lot harder than so just tell me where I'm wrong but um the I think of one as seeking to exert a more sort of active kind of I want to say control but I think that's actually um that's actually probably not quite the right word but we'll just use it okay maybe the boss is more like active kind of um control and and um sort of manipulating their world right really directly more directly whereas I think of the other person is also trying to do something similar but actually with a more indirect subconscious kind of um they're not trying to exert the control they're trying to attract a certain kind of person which is and maybe maybe the Boss B person is actually less concerned about attracting and more concerned about just like exhibiting and so like yeah speaking to but both I totally see what you mean both are reflecting a certain kind of confidence right both work yeah both can actually work well and like the boss babe it goes more into capability I want to feel capable right everything I do no matter what I'm doing with my job or my kids or my husband or my boyfriend whoever it is I'm capable everywhere I go right capability right yeah understanding ability it's still confidence but cheeky is much more about this like I want to be flirtatious I want people to be attracted drawn to me right different type of confidence and the weird part is is happens in every single industry in every single brand for every single customer on the planet like you cannot you can't go with base emotions fear surprise disgust anger sadness happiness that's about as far as people go in marketing it's so much deeper than that incredibly complex and the deeper you go the better it hits yeah that's a really helpful principle that essentially the more you can really tap into those desires and and probably the more that your product actually accomplishes or or can conceivably accomplish things that you're the thing you're trying to do there the more it can the more it can um conceivably deliver on that promise to the customer right like the easier it is going to be to reach that spot which is why you start with one and then you expand out from there where it might get more expensive to reach somebody who's who's maybe a little further away from your sort of core value or something like that I think um I think it's it's it's really helpful can we talk a little bit about how you would speak differently to those two women um so again sort of take it to next level um to to the sort of super practical level um if I'm thinking about let's say I'm in the beauty industry maybe skincare or something like that right like do I build my brand for one of those women and leave the other one on the table is that is that the way to do this and like really recognize that I'm trying to speak to a subset of people all the way down to the Brand level because there's plenty of power like yeah boss women and there's plenty of cheeky women out there and so I don't need to try to really win both or do I like or do I think about this at the ad level or I'm trying to create separate funnels like how do you how do you think about sort of actually taking that into what the brand is going to try to accomplish next yeah this goes down into Taylor holiday so shout out to Taylor yeah I 100% agree with him this is a brand issue now yeah we're not specifically talking about again I like to test messaging at the ad level and then I like to take it into the bigger ecosystem yeah I want to test what's working uh psychologically on the ad and then move it to a Lander and then move it into the email and into you know the entire ecosystem as a whole so best example of this I've ever seen I'm obsessed with liquid death I cannot get enough of their marketing they are brilliant over there mostly because they know what they sell liquid death does not sell water in a can in fact they weren't even the first to come on the market to sell it Aquafina was doing it for years before they were however Aquafina was going after one specific type of emotion which was um basically Duty yeah is what they were trying to go after they were going after the eco-friendly angle so they were trying to get people to feel responsible for the planet which is actually very difficult angle to go after emotionally yeah like what death came on the on the scene and figured out pretty quickly that there was a group of people that were basically using cans dumping out the Red Bull and filling them with water so that they could take them to their shows and drink water on stage without having to seem like they were drinking from a plastic water bottle right so it was really interesting Origins I don't know if you've ever heard liid death yeah that's the reason why he did it is because he he's literally just like into metal bands and Mike CIO went to a concert and saw people were dumping out dumping out R so again use case fantastic emotion though goes much deeper than that so he could have gone and just sold the idea of hey maybe just make a can right that has water in it that's like Aquafina and we're still kind of eco-friendly but he went a totally different direction and started selling Rebellion right and that was the emotion that got people hooked on what he was providing cuz doesn't sell water in a can he sells Misfit level Rebellion yeah and it's also everywhere funny I mean like it's like it's like trying to to speak to people in a way that takes I mean I I think it I've always thought liquid death is a fascinating example because it speaks to the um the it's the it's the ultimate indication that the idea that like product always wins is just totally wrong like like it is the same is literally the the most ridiculous product to like to possibly sell and or it's the product where the marketing does all of the value ad more more obviously than anything else you can imagine right it's literally water and you know and then like it's it's an unsellable product ever there's no feature and benefit here right like if you're try and sell hydration with water like it's just silly um so it just can't be it and but I think that even the behavior you're talking about is another example of this it's sort of fascinating like the idea that somebody would go to a metal show and would be sort of so embarrassed to drink out of a plastic water bottle yes oh so key embarrassment right that they that they actually are dumping out but they also don't want to drink Red Bull because they're like a little health conscious or what they don't to get jittery or whatever it is and they it's like you know again sorry Nate Legos that Red Bull is poison they like they they they're like poor yeah they they dump out a can of Red Bull and put water in it like that is a fascinating human behavior that speaks to something much deeper than drinking water you know yeah well you notice like and again I I get into to deep arguments with people mostly because I truly believe the again 100% of what we almost 100% of what we do is based off emotion we're just doing things out here we're just reacting to whatever feels good in the moment basically the toughest part about that as as marketers and tactically focused like operators in an industry where we're trying to sell products to build companies we have to have tactical ways and logical ways to solve for emotional behavior and that's what I'm trying to fix is like liquid death sells emotion that's the only reason why they've grown to be as big as they are is because they sell rebellion in a humorous way and to your point like a little bit ago how do you sell to multiple different people with multiple different emotions you find one core emotion that fits several large markets is the best way to do this because Rebellion goes everywhere everyone at some point has felt like they don't fit in and that's why they buy from liquid death yeah yeah or yeah and I also I mean I I also think there's a thing where people just want to it's not maybe Rebellion is like a almost a negative framing of it but like another framing of that same thing would be um just being like cool or different like the desire to sort of stand out in it's interesting where it's like yeah okay with being unique yeah and there's there's something about um there's something about that product is a good example of this too where it's just like Aquafina like you mentioned the the climate kind of angle or whatever you know and I I agree with you I think like um I so this is a broader there's there's actually been a lot of times in this conversation I've wanted to actually step out of the marke conversation and talk to you about philosophy but the um the that' be such a good episode yeah maybe we just like tag it on the back but the just sorry if you don't care what our musings about human behavior are in a philosophical sense if you just want the marketing stuff then fine but the um the uh yeah the the I I I believe there is no Human Action that isn't self-interested that's that's like one of the things that I think is is fundamental to Human Experience I don't think that's good or bad I think it's like saying gravity is good or bad it's like who cares like it's it just is it's gravity it just is that's what I think and so so I think it's very hard to sell people on the idea that even the idea of selling like toms is the extreme example of this right so you go back to Tom's and their Heyday when they're selling all this stuff people were not buying shoes for other people that is not what they were buying they what they were buying was being the kind of person who bought shoes for other people in that respect it's self-interested right um signaling yeah exactly signaling is the right word for it right and it's like if you're a Tom's purchaser you're buying something for yourself and no not to say people are like yeah anyway I don't mean it to sound again it's not it's not even negative really in one sense like it's like it's like gravity I'm just saying it's that's what it's going on as opposed to even casting a lot of judgment about that I just don't think um and in fact I think the most amazing things people do in the world is when they um can find the inner um the interaction the overlap of their self-interest and like the good that gets created from their actions in fact most times those are exactly the kinds of things that bring them the most Joy which is self-interested as well so I so so it's okay it's okay to buy shoes that signal something if you think it's doing some good in the world because you get some joy out of that that's fine but the um but yeah I think I think there's something to to that notion that you can't do that so to come back to the example Aquafina I think of as selling freshness as much as anything else like the whole the whole brand is like around this idea that you'll feel cleansed you'll feel like it's like almost like fi is maybe a more extreme example of this right exactly you and you'll feel like you're taking care of yourself you're doing something good for you it's like it's good quality water that will make you you know what I'm saying and whereas liquid death you're like who cares it's water this is funny and I'm going to stand out and drink the like death water you know well oh this is such a good example of two different brands using two different emotions I don't know that Aquafina knew which emotion they were going after they just thought people like water because it's refreshing yeah if you go for superficial emotions it's going to be so hard to get where you want to go because again the deeper the emotion the better your ads are going to hit the better your messaging is going to hit with your consumer your customer it's really important to realize though that if you choose an emotion that all of your competitors are also going after there's no reason for you to even be in business right you're got it's going to be an uphill battle the only thing that will differentiate you at that point is a price War yeah and I do not suggest you get into that because pricing psychology is a whole another topic we could talk for like hours on that one so again which emotion are you selling you need to know and then again your whole brand needs to just completely attach itself to that one emotion and never get off like just stay as close to that emotion as you possibly can and if you can then you end up with results like liquid death and Nike and apple and like because these people never deviate from what their core emotion is yeah um where should someone start thinking about this for their for their brand like let's say you listening to this conversation you're going um okay I'm sold I believe what Sarah is saying here and I have not thought enough about emot I've been thinking entirely about Futures and benefits and and all that stuff um how should someone begin to to you know to do the thing we talked about earlier right to do the analysis step how should somebody begin to get at this a little bit in their Brand This is a little bit tougher mostly because you know I've I've been doing I've been in marketing for 15 16 years and I've been studying consumer psychology behavior for 10 so like mostly just because it was interesting like Sarah's just a weird person and I just love the information um if if you're the type of though that you're just like I don't even know where to go for information on how to get started on this one you either hire someone like me who can just do it for you totally or the best place to go it is just to start studying the people who are dissecting human psychology specifically for marketers so go read that marketing to mind States book that's probably my top of my list because it will teach you kind of the emotions that currently are in the markets um and what to do with them how to Market to them secondary to that that is in the show notes I'm writing it down right now so if you want to get that you can go follow up there yeah okay second you're saying my next resource right now that i' I'm just addicted is a website called arah R I think that's how you say arah a r i y.com this is from uh a gentleman named Thomas McKinley he's fantastic he's actually like a consumer Behavior researcher so he distills down all of like the research-based marketing studies that are currently being like actually cultivated in the a little bit without having to go read journals yes exactly because like unless you're Sarah and you like to read studies that are boring and dra let's assume you're not this it just takes a lot of time exactly it takes a lot of time so the nice part is too if you go into his like pro version AR insights it'll break it down for here's all the studies about e-commerce here's the ones about messaging a copy here's about like reviews and how to price things correctly and how to do promotions correctly based on the science of what's currently being studied so that's a secondary research that I'm like in every day all day long yeah I've always wondered oh he's got a newsletter too huh I've always wondered like who is out there doing this because there's this research being done and there's all of us just trying to operate at businesses and there's this bridge that somebody needs to make so it sounds like this is that bridge that's cool okay I'm interested in that yeah fantastic stuff over there but really I mean you could just start with chat that sounds weird but like having something that has the ability to deeply dissect language is immensely helpful so you can do your own research by taking down your reviews or your customer surveys or like your postp purchase surveys and throwing them into chat and say chat analyze this for me and tell me which emotions people are currently experiencing while they purchase who's influencing those purchases are they talking about their parents or their sister or their best friend who's influencing the purchase and then third to that what were they feeling after the purchase and chat as long as you have a decent amount of data chat will go through and actually do that analysis for you that's a that's a very good idea that that is a nice answer to the question where to start and I like those resources as well so you can get the the sort of ongoing resources mixed with like a really practical thing here which is like run your reviews through chat GPT go and and and yeah that's that's really good um all right Sarah uh there's a lot more we could say uh but we will save it for a future episode for now uh thank you for this it's been really helpful um where let's say I want to go hire Sarah leer to work on my Brands and to um to understand consider psychology rebuild my brand re rebuild my messaging to speak to these things more deeply uh where do I go to do that yeah you can go over to Sarah linger.

Co with Sarah with an h l a v i n g e r.co I'm also SAR at Sarah ler basically everywhere except for Instagram because I couldn't get that handle I was so mad stupid Instagram I know I'm like who else what other Sarah linger is there yeah somebody out there and nobody's on that account like it's an empty account I'm so confused anyway yeah sarah. ler over on Instagram everywhere else it's actually somebody you know who just like was trying to I'm sure it is trying to go on there and then sell it to you yeah people I mean smart I like that I appreciate the hustle yeah right amazing okay Sarah l.o a recently revamped website I'm told which is great so you can actually do that and you can reach out or you can just DM her on Twitter which is what I did to get this conversation going um and uh and uh and you should definitely go and do that uh yeah Sarah thank you so much this is really helpful yes thanks for having me all right all the links for everything that I talked about with Sarah in this episode are available to you in the show notes go check those out to follow up with Sarah follow up with me past episodes of mine that I referenced all those things are there for you uh if you would like to reach out to me for anything else it's all available through AJF growth.com including of course subscribing to this podcast uh you can do that right now wherever you are listening to it or there there all the links for where you prefer to listen to your podcasts are all there go to jf.com for that drop your email address in the email capture there and uh you'll get my newsletter as it starts coming out more regularly here in the very near future and uh great episodes coming up soon that you're not going to want to miss I've got an episode on growing an apparel brand a fashion brand with uh Alex greefield that's going to be really good um that's actually going to be yeah that's a really cool episode that's coming if you missed my episode of Taylor holiday go back and listen to that that was a really fun conversation a longer one um and like I said subscribe wherever you're watching wherever you're listening don't forget to follow up with my sponsors they are great that's Billy and more Staffing links for those are in the show notes as well thanks so much I'll see you next time [Music]