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You're Not the Hero: Big Brand Truths Small Brands Hate Hearing (Feat. Will Leach)
00:35:29
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- [00:00]
A
Surprise. Nate, this is Will Le.
- [00:03]
B
What's up, Will?
- [00:04]
A
Nate. Will is my longtime mentor. He was the guy that got me started on all this psychology stuff.
- [00:12]
B
Should I start paying him for consulting? I was about to put you on retainer.
- [00:15]
C
Probably going to want to get me out of here, cuz we're nerds on this stuff. You're not. You're going to be like, come on, man.
- [00:21]
A
I've gotten Nate on this like heavily though. In the last four years, you and I have been doing all kinds of behavioral stuff. And now he's taking it from one brand that used to do. He used to be with like luxury watches and now he's in the supplement space. So it's like drastically different.
- [00:34]
B
It's the first time recording on a Friday in a while. Feels good. True.
- [00:38]
A
We have been recording on like Monday Tuesdays there for a minute, which was weird. That's a weird.
- [00:44]
B
I got selfish and took a new job and it threw off our recording schedule. I was late to this one.
- [00:49]
A
How dare you.
- [00:50]
B
We're working out the kink still after 115 episodes.
- [00:55]
A
We're still working on the King. Doing well. We have a guest on our podcast today. Good friend, good mentor of mine. I've been following him for years and years. First read his book back in. That was like 2022 maybe. It's been a long time. Will Leach, welcome to the podcast. Author of Marketing to Mind States, amazing behavioral scientist. You have lots to share with us today. I sprung this on Nate. Nate, didn't even know you were well.
- [01:18]
B
Great to meet you, man. How are you?
- [01:20]
C
Very good, man. Thank you very much for having me. I've been looking forward to this for a while. I see the amazing stuff you guys have been doing. Enjoy the podcast and yeah, just going to rumble a little bit on behavioral science and marketing and what's going on out there. So. Looking forward to it.
- [01:33]
B
Yeah. Now I would love to hear how you got into it because I know that you kind of got Sarah into it. Sarah got me into it. Is it just a pyramid scheme? Is it just people recruiting other people into.
- [01:44]
C
Only we could make the money. Like those awesome pyramid schemes we remember growing up?
- [01:50]
A
No.
- [01:50]
C
So you know, I'm one of those typical. I fell into it. Right. So I started off in the military and worked my way out of the military to University of Florida from undergrad in economics, masters in applied econometrics. So I never took a social science psychology class. Nothing. Right. I was a business guy, loved analytics, femo, over to a number of biotech companies, energy. But then I went to PepsiCo. I live here in Dallas, Texas. And back in like 2007, we start investing really heavily in neuroscience and behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, because we knew, I don't know if we knew it, but there were people in the organization that started thinking, you know what? Imagine this. People make emotional decisions. We have no understanding of how. We just think that people make emotional decisions. We have these highly emotional brands. And so I was lucky enough to take over a laboratory. It's about the size of a Best Buy, and it was in Addison, Texas. And we filled it up with five neuroscientists that were testing advertising neurologically using eeg, skin calipers, I mean, the whole thing. And we had behavioral psychologists and anthropologists on staff. When I was the traditional quant jock that was running this lab, I just was floored with the social sciences and how people really make decisions. And I fell in love with that. I could not stop reading my wife, we went on vacation one time and we're at the beach and she's reading her, you know, classic summer novel. And I'm stacked. I have a stack of academic papers I never heard of. I never heard any of these, these concepts of, of motivational psychology or goal theory or whatever. And the more I read, the more I realized that the way we were looking at marketing was absolutely wrong. It had to be by science perspective, like from a biology perspective. And so I dug in and I could not stop thinking about it. So looking at my degree and I'm still paying on student loans for a degree that I no longer believe in. And I went ahead for it, so much so that I finally just decided to get out and do it myself. And I started my company about 10, 12 years ago called Mindstate Group. And that, that's kind of what we do, is understand human behavior, but more importantly, teach marketers, teach brands how to apply behavioral sciences to optimize their marketing.
- [04:04]
B
Yeah, yeah. It was like when, when I first started, like listening to Sarah, I was like, this stuff sounds great. I didn't assume it had anything to do with my day to day work, but I was like, yeah, sounds cool, love it. And we, we finally hired her for a project. She delivered a report to us with like a couple sample ads. And I was not impressed. All right.
- [04:29]
C
Like the same stuff, right?
- [04:30]
B
And I was like, yeah, like, that's fine. Like, sure, run it. And we ran it and it crushed. And I was like, that's a fluke. Let's do it again. Again. And it crushed. And it's been. Been so eye opening to see how illogical a lot of our behavior is. And, like, it's even opened my eyes. Like, some of my purchasing, like, behavior is like, oh, I was stressed and frustrated at work that month, so I, I spent 600 on a cowboy hat. Like, that's, like, that's really interesting. When, when, when you first kind of get into a brand and start digging into their different customer Personas, how. How do you know where to start? How do you kind of decipher, like, what's the strongest feeling here? Who's who, who, like, which Persona and which mind state is like the best one to kind of attack. Right?
- [05:24]
C
Yeah. So before I even think about mind states, Nate, whenever I, I come to a new brand and whether they have a Persona or not, I don't even care about the Persona at first. The first thing I want to do, and I ask this question because I think it's fundamental. Because if you don't answer, if you can't answer this, it doesn't matter how much psychology you build into your ads, it doesn't matter what are the goals of your customer? Something called goal theory. And here's why we always, always. Every behavior you have, outside of a reflex behavior or, you know, reflex action you touch something high is directed towards a goal that you have. There's a reason why you're on this podcast. There's a reason why somebody's listening to this podcast. It is somewhere there's a goal because at some point you decided to turn right, turn left, whatever. So there are two different, three different types of goals. There's what we call functional goals. That's easy stuff, right? I want more value. I want it to taste yummy. I want to get a good deal. Easy stuff, everyone knows that. More importantly is the stuff that brands don't generally know is what's called higher order goals. There's the emotional purpose behind why I want to reach my goal. So I'm not talking about brands at this point, right? I'm just saying you have goals and you use brands to help you get to those goals. Part of that goal is you want to feel something. Higher goals. And then the aspirational goals and aspirational goals are. Think of those as being. These are the things that my customers want to be, or this is the person my customer wants to be on their best day. It's their aspiration. If you can build a brand that tells them psychologically or even very, you know, overtly, if you buy my brand, I'll help You become your best self. I know. It's so simplified. You will build one of the strongest brands out there. The problem is, Brandy, is we always want to talk about ourselves. Yeah, I have this cool thing. Look at this switch. All people care about at the subconscious level is it will this thing help me become my aspirational self? That's the first thing I'll do before I do anything. If you don't know that, we shouldn't move forward until we figure that out.
- [07:22]
A
Oh, so smart. Okay, so I have a follow up question to this then. You work typically with bigger brands. Nate and I are usually with. I don't even like to call them small because they're making like hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But smallish brands, what is, I guess something that you see from the big brands that the small brands continue take outside of that aspirational thing because obviously Pepsi has a very different strategy. Totally different, like customer, different business goals, different things than somebody who just started like a supplement brand or somebody who's grown a supplement. What's kind of a big takeaway that.
- [07:52]
C
You'Ve seen the brands are doing right now, you mean?
- [07:55]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [07:56]
B
That, that bigger brands have figured out that haven't trickled down to us. Pepsi.
- [08:01]
A
That's a good way to put it.
- [08:01]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know if you. I'm sure that your brands are feeling these pains similarly, but. But maybe are articulating them a different, in a different way right now. I believe there's this K economy. I've heard about this K economy. All I believe so many of our industries are bifurcated, meaning that there are separations in people. One are those people that are making a ton of money. That's the upside of K. And then those people that are on the downside of that K. It's not a 50, 50 split, as you can imagine. Right?
- [08:34]
B
Yeah.
- [08:34]
C
Talking about the middle class, all the stuff that is legit happening. So what's happened in many of these brands over the last couple of years? This is no secret. It's in their financials. They have been able to take price, increase their prices and take product out of their bags, out of anything for a while, for a number of years. Why? There's all sorts of reasons why that's happened. Consumers have used credit cards to buy things and they've just been able to get price increases. That is done like, that's done. So imagine these massive brands that I'm working with, you know, the big Doritos of the world, the Mondele, whatever. Multibillion dollar brands, they can no longer increase price and they can no longer take product out of the bag. Consumers are savvy. They know it now. And so they're moving down to store brands, things like that. So what they're having to account for now is how do we keep our price as it is? Because there's no way in the world a publicly traded company is going to lower their. Not for long, they can't.
- [09:28]
B
Right.
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C
They'll get fired. Right. So what do they do? How do we bring the power of our brands to make it so powerful that you're willing to pay an extra 20, 30, 40%? So behind the scenes, right, these big companies, we think they have these amazing, massively fun brands that are highly supported at the highest levels of the biggest companies. They don't always bleed in marketing. Imagine that.
- [09:54]
A
Whoa. So the brand is like everything for these brands, then? Brand is everything for the brands.
- [09:59]
C
Well, you know, what it used to be is, you know, let's say if you had a CEO who came up through the sales organization, they don't care. They don't think marketing works. Like, no, get me in front of a customer, I'll get them to buy. Dropping, give me a custom coupon, I'll raise our. I'll raise our. Our sales. Right now, those things don't work anymore. They don't work. So now the power of branding, the power of emotional marketing is so much more important now. And now, it's funny, is the biggest brands in the world you think have been using this stuff like the apples of the world. They really haven't been using some of these things as much as agencies help them. But the brand manager, behind the scenes, they haven't been really. I would say only the last couple of years have they really been hunkering down and saying what truly is a brand. How do we use the power of our brand to drive revenues as opposed to winning awards, as opposed to getting on the Super Bowl? Now it's like they're being held accountable to that ad. Must drive. Just don't worry about penetration. Don't worry about velocities. I need to know the dollar amount that ad gives me, and I think a lot of that came from you guys. We never had to do it. You guys have to do all the time.
- [11:03]
A
I was going to say, this is all we do is perform. We don't know anything about.
- [11:08]
B
Yeah. And like, I think you touched on something super interesting there that Sarah and I have watched play out in real time, for sure. Of like, I don't believe customers. I don't believe the American consumer right now is price sensitive. I think they're value sensitive. And for a while I would blame. I'm the classic marketing guy. When like, performance is good, it's because I'm awesome and it's great. When performance is bad, it's because of macroeconomic headwinds that I. That are.
- [11:36]
A
You can't control.
- [11:38]
B
But when we started doing more of like value based marketing, wrote better copy, increased the quality of our content, like really sold people on. You're not just buying a watch at the time. You're buying this feeling. You. You're buying becoming the identity of your aspirational AOV almost doubled in two years. People were buying more expensive watches. Then we went and built more expensive ones and they were buying those faster. So like, it really kind of opened my eyes. Do you think you can do this to both ends of that K market? Like, like, do you think you can get the top people who have the money to spend even more? But is it also like almost a necessity for the bottom 80% right now who are holding onto their dollars because groceries are insane, but you can still get more out of them if you're better at communicating value than other brands?
- [12:34]
C
Yeah, I know you can. The value idea has been the number one question I've been working on this year from brands. How do we do that? Right. Because we have this K curve and. And so we need to increase sales at the bottom of that cave. Right? All these people who have opted to go into store brands and just not buy. And what I loved about what you said is value is there's a part of my model called regulatory fit and we call it approach. So we approach our goals in one of two ways.
- [13:02]
A
Let's pause for just a minute. I'm going to tell you something that I have 100% never told anybody before. For years, I 100% thought that ads were just really a creativity thing. They only won if I chose the right hook, the right creator, the right script. I was 100% sure that ads came down to production. And it turns out that's not at all how ads work, especially after iOS 14 and especially with the way Andromeda works inside the ad account these days. We are testing and tweaking and chasing trends, but nobody can tell us why that ad worked. This is the reason why I built the Tether West. I am so tired as a creative strategist of not having any insight as to what's going to work. The Tether OS is a system, very simple creative strategy system that reads what your customers are saying in real time, finds the emotional patterns that are underneath those trends and then turns them into direction that your creative team can actually act on right this second. Brands that are using this are currently cutting their creative time in half. They are saving thousands of dollars a month on personnel costs and they really are just less stressed because they know exactly what to say, how to say it and who to say it to. Anybody can use it from your CMO all the way down to your brand new creative strategy hire you. You guys want to test out a creative strategy system this year that's very, very simple. Check us out at tetherinsights IO and now back to the show.
- [14:18]
C
One of the ways, what we call optimistically, another one's called cautious. So when you're optimistic, you are seeking more good things to help you reach your goals. So always go back to the goal, right Nick? So you will look for brands, messaging strategies. Anything that tells you is if you buy this, you are more likely to get this good outcome. Then there are people who are cautious. You can take the same type of goal, same type of motivation. But then these people are cautious, are like they're looking to avoid loss. So in this case you, they're looking for brands, messaging, communication, say oh by me you will less, you're less likely to lose. Right. You'll avoid bad, avoid pain. Here's what we find on value. There are some people that are very much a, hey, I need to save money. That's not really value that but that's legit. Like that's a, that is a, I lost my job, I have to save money. The majority of people, we still have employee rates at, you know, 90, 95% like there we don't have that many people out of work. So people you are looking for is I want to get more from my dollar. Yeah, more from my dollar is value the words. I just had a conversation with a really big company yesterday about this and we're looking at all their promotions and they kept saying save a dollar, save a dollar, save a dollar. I said, when we did the research, we uncovered that your customers are optimistic. They don't want to save a dollar, they want to get a dollar.
- [15:43]
A
Get more.
- [15:44]
C
Yeah, more value. They're getting the same discount, but just by rewording that increases emotional. Right. I want to stretch my dollar. I keep using my hands because those are promotional prime. So my point is the vast majority of people, you're right, want value. But how you provide them value is not saying save anything. That is a prevention. That is a cautious prime. You need the message differently to give them more for their money. That matters easily 5 to 10 percentage points on. On your returns, on, you know, engagement scores come from just language like that, because you got to get how they feel, and that's how they feel. They don't want to save money. They want more for their dollar.
- [16:22]
B
Yeah. I actually think the last five years of inflation have helped brands more than it's hurt them, because I have been, like, obsessed with this concept of, like, personal price anchors where someone used to spend 200 bucks a week for groceries, now they spend 400. So they are more used to giving away $400 over and over and over again. All you now have to do is not convince them that your product is worth two weeks of groceries. It's only worth one. And like, I. I think we benefited from that a ton at. @ OG and I. I think if you nail the value, the dollars start to not matter. Because people give away dollars all the time. They have to.
- [17:02]
A
Yeah. Yeah. This is really interesting, too, because Nate and I just ran an NLP on this, I don't even remember a little while ago, and we're finding that there's different, like, value systems, different value views, I guess you could say, by product. And that's. That I find really interesting, too, because I don't think anybody in our industry is looking at this, which I'm like, guys, oh, my God. It is critical for you to understand it's not just a brand perception thing or an industry or a category thing. It can also vary by product. Even products under the exact same brand will have very different values. And we've seen this many times where one product will be very optimistic, and the. The one right next to it might be cautious. It's like the weirdest thing. Have you seen this in, like. Okay, yeah.
- [17:45]
C
Yeah. And I think a lot of that comes from the brand themselves. Have been speaking to their customers in that way for so long that they create their own anchor. And so they're. And they inadvertently did that. Like, you wouldn't have known this a decade ago when you started your brand. And I would say, on the. On the. On the value thing, what's the most important thing you can do? Certainly, you know, the promote. I'm sorry. The optimistic versus cost is great. You guys know this. The number one thing if you want to extract value or provide value is how do you anchor. Or what do you anchor your customers?
- [18:19]
A
Yeah, what do you anchor Them to. Yeah.
- [18:21]
C
Give you example, I use this in my class. Right. So you know, every day, every Friday I'll probably do this and I'll go to Walmart and look for a frozen pizza and I'll look for frozen pizza. I got a teenage kid, he'll eat anything, he'll eat cardboard. So I'm gonna go with the cheapest frozen pizza I can. Right. However, let's say if you're Digiorno, you're Giorno and you're in the freezer aisle at Walmart, you are a highly, incredibly high priced frozen pizza. So you lose that battle and say economy every single day. Unless. Unless. Rather than being compared against those other low cost frozen pizzas. I'm not being, I'm not. You shouldn't anchor me on that. You should anchor me on delivery style pizza.
- [19:01]
B
Yes.
- [19:01]
C
Livery pizza is 20 bucks. My 7 bucks frozen pizza is a 5549 or whatever. So what they did and what they've created value around is saying don't compare me to what I'm right next to in the freezer. Compare me to a hot pizza you have to have delivered. And if you notice what they've done, they're able to extract a massive amount of economic outcome. And because they're like not compares to delivery pizza, we're not delivery, we're digiorno. Huge thing. So if you're going to try to figure out how to create anchors and you want to raise the price that's so good to something higher, like when you do a luxury watch, I don't know what watches you, you're doing right Nate? But obviously. Well one obviously is you can, you can increase the price of your watches by 20, 30% but then say, but then compare next to a Rolex or a tag or whatever and it could still look like a great value. I just got ads on Facebook this week from a brand that's. It was a beautiful ad and basically it basically says, it talks, it shows this beautiful watch. And as it's going the, the, the voiceover is talking about how some people need to feel like they're, they, they have esteem from a Rolex. Some people need to feel worth that comes from products. Right. So they're anchoring this like high like kind of. It's almost funny because they're anchoring on these Rolex, these high price things. But then they're almost telling you that's embarrassing if you're the type of person. Yes, self esteem from that, that's embarrassing. But so, so also 100% OG I.
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B
Yeah, I think I.
- [20:31]
C
Because I've got that role. I'm looking. I don't want to be that guy. But what did they do? The whole time they talked about their watch being compared to this, you know, and even on the anchor, I think the anchor was a $10,000 Rolex. And then, you know what I did? I double clicked that ax. I'm saying, what do they sell them at? Because it looked like it said it was made from steel. Whatever. I. I looked at it, it was like $125. I was like, man, that's a great value. Whoa. 30 bucks. 20. Who knows?
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B
Yeah.
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C
They could have charged, honestly, 500. Like, it's a great value. It's not. It looks just like that Rolex. And I'm that type of guy who built their steam off of what they buy, and they loved it. Anchors.
- [21:12]
B
Yeah. I think it matters, like, more than anything. And I actually think, like, there's. There's more opportunity in the bottom 80% of spenders right now because of this. Because it's easier to, like, kind of, kind of on the luxury high end thing right now. It's like, hey, look like, you don't have to do the X, y, and Z. We're not thousands of dollars, but we provide something that those brands don't give you or that you don't need for those brands. Yeah. I think it's super important they create an out group.
- [21:45]
C
It wasn't that they said, you don't need that. They say if you're the type of person that would spend ten grand, you're not a real mean. I mean, that's not what they said. I wish I'd had it. It was like, I felt like small thinking. I'm the type of guy that would pay that. They create an out group, and I'm. I don't want to be like them.
- [22:00]
B
Yeah.
- [22:00]
C
By the way, for their money, will pay $200 for a watch. Even though I may only be able to afford a $70 watch that. Just because they created that out group. It's a slight little. I mean, these are slight little things you can do.
- [22:12]
A
Tribalism, man. We were totally ripping on Nate the other day because the guy bought a Land Rover, which I just find hilarious. He doesn't look like a Land Rover guy. He owes one. He also is the type of guy. Castile soap. Like, he's very, like, into his health. It just. It's interesting when you start pulling apart people from the inside because there's all these weird little threads that are like, you would have no idea that was in there unless you really looked at what they were purchasing when in their life they purchased. It is also critical. And then what was happening in that.
- [22:41]
B
I think. I think people generalize their customers. I think they will say, like, our brand has customers who are cheap or they're rich. And like, for me, like, there's some categories of things I will spend all of the money on. Whiskey, steak, cars, land guns. I will spend thousands of dollars there. But then there's stuff I cheap out on all the time because I'm like, why are we paying ubereats 10 bucks to deliver us food? Like, I'll go and get it. And I think, like, that's what DiGiorno did excellently. It's like, yeah, like, we could look at Walmart's customers and say they're cheap, low to middle class, so we can't sell them the most expensive pizza on the market. But they were able to because they anchored it to something that wasn't in that store.
- [23:31]
A
Yeah.
- [23:32]
C
Those anchors are clear. Is in the behavioral sciences is that your wants, needs, desires, attitudes, belief systems, values, all of those things are very fluid. They're very fluid. And one thing I think as marketers and just people that are in the world of branding is that we do these Personas and we go figure out our customer. And then we don't realize they're much more dynamic than that, than what we saw in that one little study that we did. Now, they have tendencies. Like you said, there are tendencies you have around. You may spend two grand on. On the right shotgun. Right. But I can. I can promise you that I could put you into a situation, Nate, if you give me a little bit of time, some messaging that would. That could place you less acceptable. Say, you know what? Maybe that's not the right purge. And so we will tend. We'll put people in these categories. We don't realize. Like, Sarah, you said it. Life changes, different life stages, things like that environment.
- [24:24]
A
Yep.
- [24:25]
B
Yeah.
- [24:25]
C
And so even. Even the time of. Or when I message to you could be very, very different. So I talk about in my book.
- [24:32]
B
When he said when.
- [24:33]
A
When everybody note that when I cringe.
- [24:38]
C
When I see supplements or weight loss drugs being sent to me on a Friday are like, are you kidding me?
- [24:43]
B
Yes. Diet starts Monday night.
- [24:46]
C
On a Friday.
- [24:47]
B
Diet starts Monday. Guys have like, haven't you Hurts.
- [24:50]
C
It's ridiculous. But these are small little things. I'm a different person on a Friday after a long, hard week than I am on a Monday. So these small little Things. But you're saying what? But no, Nate is, or Will is a health guy. Why is he buying burgers on a Friday? It doesn't make it irrational. No, it's actually very rational. If you understand that I'm not a simpleton that only has.
- [25:11]
B
Everything. Well, and like Sarah mentioned earlier, I quote, care about my health is sometimes like all the, the food we have, organic food, farm grown. My soap is like the cleanest in ingredients. But I'm going out with friends tonight. I'm going to drink seven Jack and Cokes at the bar. You know what I mean? Like, I don't really care about my health, do I?
- [25:34]
C
Like, well, no, especially in the world of AI like, you know what's coming. There is a day, and that day could be two or three years from now where it's very likely that I will have an agent make my purchases for me. And the day that happens, your ads don't mean anything unless there's a powerful brand or something in the background that's telling my agent that that's the right product for me. So my agent, if you don't have a strong brand or you don't have some strong, you know, presence in the. In the artificial intelligence kind of generative space, then you're in a bad. I think you're in a really bad way two to three years from now. Because I'm not going to look at ads anymore. I'm going to have my agent take those ads away from me. As a matter of fact, just have my agent do my purchases. So that's a whole other thing you can talk about. Like brains matter, imagine.
- [26:22]
B
Yeah, I'm super interested in that because like I having worked with AI a couple of years now mainly to write copy, I think like my agent won't be able to capture who I am.
- [26:37]
A
Oh, really?
- [26:38]
B
Yeah, Like, I think my shopping agent. I'm gonna have to tell it things like, hey, whiskey and boots. Spend all the money, I don't care. But what are we buying scented Q tips for like, come on, let's get cheap here. So I'm. I'm. Well, just. You were. AI skeptic right now. We'll see how fast it gets there, but it'll look drastically different for sure. I just don't know if it's going to be good or not yet. Can I get one more question in?
- [27:10]
A
Yep.
- [27:10]
B
We'll talk about your time at Pepsi.
- [27:12]
C
Yeah, love to.
- [27:14]
B
I. We bring up Pepsi a lot on the show because they've done some of the wildest campaigns in history. I have looked at that from the outside of like, well, they have to, they have the inferior product. I think Coke is better. Someone call me a cokehead and about that, but.
- [27:37]
C
Sorry, you're breaking up.
- [27:38]
B
I can't hear you. How do you think about a brand like that, that doesn't dominate market share, that has a clear competitor that is bigger than them? Is, is there any, anything differently that has to happen or does it all come back to those goals still?
- [27:56]
C
Nope. I'm not another, another part of the model to this conversation. I have this conversation a lot with. I've done it in pet food. I've done it many, many different categories where you have a, you know, you're not the category captain. Like the main brand in that, in that space. And everyone wants to be the category captain because you get more shelf space, you get more leverage on price, everything else. So everyone wants to be a category captain. Your point? On the beverage side, even today, Coca Cola obviously number one. In fact now Dr. Pepper is, you know, is bigger than Pepsi. My friends at Pepsi still. So here's what I tell them. So if you are not the category captain, you have some decisions you need to make. So realize that in every category, not only do you have goals, but you have motivations. Motivational psychology. There are nine human motivations that drive people to go after their goals. So I'm going to just name a couple. Autonomy, Our desire for freedom. Empowerment. Our desire for control. Belonging. Our desire for affiliation. So there's, there's these nine things. Every category, in almost every category I've ever done research in is dominated by one of those nine motivations, right? So let's say for pet food, I'll tell you for pet food. Pet food is oftentimes dominated by nurturance, Motivation, because I love my pet, or achievement motivations. I want my pet to be healthy, successful, that, that kind of feel energetic, all those things. So let's say if you're, you're a, you're looking at the category and you know that your, your brand, I'm sorry, your category is driven by nurture, making our desire to feel love. And you look at your brand and you say, you know what? That category captain, that top brand is also associated with the love, highly associated with love, which happens a lot. That's why they're the category captain, right? Because they stand for the category. The category is built around them. Or they, or they built the category. Either way, those motivations are the same. So now what are you going to do if you're Pepsi, are You going to try to outspend Coke to try to earn that? No, no, no. They're not the most nurturing brand, are y' all right?
- [30:02]
A
Yeah, Yeah.
- [30:03]
C
I could slam money on that and it may take me a decade. I could do it.
- [30:08]
B
Losing battle, though.
- [30:09]
A
Yeah.
- [30:11]
C
Pepsi or Coca Cola will win. Right. Over time.
- [30:14]
B
Yeah.
- [30:14]
C
So I can spend money and do that. Here's what I would tell you. That's a dumb move because it's because once. Once people establish the meaning of a brain in their head, you know how hard it is. Especially that Brian.
- [30:26]
A
So hard.
- [30:27]
C
Just replace that. It's hard.
- [30:29]
A
Yeah.
- [30:29]
C
So we have these things called secondary motivations. Right. So let's say it's dominated by nurturance. But you also found out that that category is driven by belonging as well. Secondarily, it's not the top motivation, second, second most important motivation, and that's about affiliation. Here's what I would do. My category driver is nurturance. Great. So I'll keep talking about nurturance a little bit, but you know how frame up nurturance. Let's care for each other. Let's. Let's. Let's bond together. Let's. Let's have. Let's have a commitment or accepting or aligning with others. What that does in people's minds, like, oh, yeah, he still cares. Nurturance. There's something different about the way Will does it. He's about, we all care for each other. And if you don't know that little nuance, then you can just keep screening nurturance all day long and your monies will never get your brand to be the best.
- [31:24]
A
Oh, my God.
- [31:26]
C
I can go, oh, yeah. But he's still nurturing. So this is a better way of nurturing. And it brings two motivations together which can significantly increase kind of your sales. So when you're. And this happens a lot, I have a lot of companies, like, when you're the best in your category, you don't usually need research. Right, Right. So I don't get those calls every day. I get calls from the ankle biters like, how do I compete in this market that is dominated? The first thing I'll tell you is like, you better nail that goal.
- [31:49]
B
Cool.
- [31:50]
C
Once you do that, look for that secondary motivation that you can kind of build your brand around saying, oh, we're the belonging, caring company. You do that, you'll establish a little different connection in the mind which will help you stand out and then own that space.
- [32:03]
B
So you. So you're not trying to beat Them at their own game. You're trying to do your own thing that your customers still care about, but Coke or whoever the captain is hasn't tapped into it. Yeah, I love that.
- [32:16]
C
Even if a brand stops marketing happened during COVID it happens all the time. Even when brands stop marketing, like, 100% pull all their brand funding, they still own that customer space for years, three, four years. They're not spending anything. They still own that space with.
- [32:33]
B
Yeah, like, I feel like Bud Light hadn't done anything cool for, for five to eight years before the incident with them, but they still dominated, like, beer sales forever. And then it took one up, and every other brand was ready to capitalize on it. It's crazy.
- [32:53]
C
So it's almost like brands don't do anything. And I can. I'm good to ride. I don't think it's.
- [32:57]
B
Yeah, Nothing at that point.
- [33:00]
C
Yep.
- [33:01]
A
Will, one last takeaway from you. What's, like, the thing that you're like, this is the hill. I will die on that. I need every brand to just know this one thing.
- [33:11]
B
Yeah.
- [33:11]
C
I. This isn't nearly as controversial as you may imagine. But for my brands, the brands that I work with, I work with, you know, Fortune 100 companies like that. Your brand is not nearly as important as you think it is to people.
- [33:27]
B
Amen.
- [33:27]
C
It's not. And I, I, I drank the Kool aid. I worked on sun chips. I worked on Doritos. And when you. You get on these brand teams and everything around you is red, you're getting free food all the time. You're going to these cool parties. You believe that your brand means a lot. And on any given day, your brand doesn't mean anything. What matters to people are, am I getting closer to my aspirational goals? And if your brand helps me get there, great. So I tell brands all the time, I've used this analogy. Your customer is Batman. You are the utility bill. When you say that, you're the hero that I was like, no, no, I'm the hero of my own life. I am. Batman's utility belt's really important. I can't do everything without the utility belt. But don't say you're bound me. I see brands here.
- [34:10]
B
That's such a good analogy.
- [34:12]
A
I love that analogy. That's perfect. Oh, my God.
- [34:15]
B
Oh, my gosh. Let's end it there. That's amazing. Will, where can people find you? Where can they buy the book? Where can they hear more about what you're up to?
- [34:24]
C
Yes, you can find me. My website's mindstategroup.com and I do most of my work on LinkedIn these days, so I'm kind of all over LinkedIn. But mindsetgroup.com and if you wish to go to Amazon, Walmart, all those types of bookstores.
- [34:39]
B
Awesome. So great to meet you. I might. You might be getting an invite to come on my podcast at some point. Yeah. If you're down. I like this a lot, but this was awesome. Sarah, great guest. Thank you.
- [34:51]
A
I was like, you know, Will and I have been talking for, what, four years and I haven't found you on my podcast yet. I'm so sorry. All right. It takes me a minute to get organized. Thank you for coming. We're so glad you're here. This is lovely conversation. We'll have you back again. We'll dig into this more. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Appreciate you guys listening. If you want to follow me, I'm Sarah Levenger. Anywhere you can see. If you like this show and if you like this episode, go ahead and, like, subscribe. Share with a friend. Drop us a review when you have a minute. We would appreciate it. Otherwise, have a great week. We'll see you next time.