Marketing to Mindstates

Tom Nixon (00:01.474)
Welcome back everyone. Yes, we are back in our respective home studios. So that is not a reflection on how last week went. We suggested that might be the last ever now. It was only the first ever together live in studio episode of Bullhorns and Bullseyes, but we’re back to our normal format this week, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (00:17.963)
It was a fun in-person episode. We’re gonna have to do more of those. Maybe we could get some sponsors and that way we could actually create a studio. Something aspirational.

Tom Nixon (00:24.694)
Hey, there you go. I like that idea. Yeah. So, Curtis, you told me off air that I’m expected to hit it off with our guest today and I’m guessing it’s not because we share a barber or an what is it? opto no, an eye doctor. Right here. Let me optometrist. That was the word I was looking for there. Now we are more kindred spirits, but why do think we’re going to hit it off so well, Curtis?

Will Leach (00:42.44)
Ophthalmologist, right? That’s what we’ll call it on this show. Optometrist, maybe that’s it. Yeah, put it on there. I want to see. There he is.

Curtis Hays (00:43.489)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (00:54.231)
Well, so I met Will through a referral, through some colleagues. I come from that IT world, Tom, if you remember. And I get this email out of the blue like eight months ago. I hear you’re the guy to talk to with DNS issues. I’ve got some problems with my email. Will you help me? And so we did this call. I helped him. And then some issues crept up a little while later.

We worked through that together and we were on a conference call like this. And we got through it all. He’s like, I want to pay you. How can I pay you? And I was like, no, well, first of all, just leave me a review. So taking a little bit of our own medicine here, just trying to build our Google reviews. I was like, if you don’t mind just taking a couple of minutes to do that. But it’s like, you’ve got this book behind you there. And I’m actually really curious what it is you do and what this book’s all about. And so he starts explaining it to me.

And I was like, man, this sounds a lot like what my partner in crime talks about, Tom Nixon. And what really struck me was like, what he was describing was what you talk about in when you do customer interviews, you want to get to a state of mind of what were they thinking about before meeting that company, that software, whatever, what was it like working with them and what’s life like now?

Tom Nixon (01:55.566)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (02:11.918)
Bye.

Curtis Hays (02:17.982)
That’s those transformational moments. You turn that into marketing messaging to resonate with other people who are in similar states of mind that likely would go on that same journey. To connect really and hit that messaging, I was like, okay, you guys got to meet, you got to talk, will you come on our podcast? That’s how you’re going to pay me. You’re to come on this podcast. Here he is, Will Leitch. Welcome to the show.

Will Leach (02:37.578)
you

Tom Nixon (02:41.623)
Will Leach (02:45.472)
Thank very much. I’m happy to share my passion and thanks for having me. I love this stuff. Happy to be on the show.

Tom Nixon (02:53.036)
All right. Well, just so people could tell us apart, I’m going back from my Clark Kent look to my Superman look, or maybe this is Lex Luthor, but we’ll reach. Yes. That book you were talking about, I presume was, Will is the bestselling author of marketing to mindsets, which is what you just, I think, describe Curtis. We’re to dive into that today. Founder of the mind state group. So we’ll, tell us just a little bit about your experience and what you do day to day, relative to what Curtis just introed.

Will Leach (03:22.228)
Yeah, so about 25 years ago, I started my career in the world of market research, but just very traditional market research, doing surveys, doing interviews with customers. And I found my way over to PepsiCo back in 2009. And we started really heavily investing in neuroscience and behavioral psychology. I fell in love with the idea of the non-conscious mind and how many of our decisions are made at the non-conscious level.

So, you know, it’s classic whenever you love your job, especially if you’re in a corporation, that’s exactly when they want to rotate you to a new critical experience. And what that meant was I may have to go work on oatmeal in Chicago and I love oatmeal, but I’m not moving the family to Chicago to work on it or go up to New York. And I was in Dallas, I was working at Frito-Lay at the time. And I thought, you know what, I have this passion.

And I know that the vast majority of marketing is broken. I know because we see all the metrics of PepsiCo. If you want to understand marketing, PepsiCo puts massive amounts of millions and millions of dollars into understanding analytically how marketing works. They had neuroscientists on staff, behavioral psychologists on staff. And I thought to myself, there’s so many other companies that don’t understand these things. I was trained in it. So I started my company about 12 years ago.

And so it’s MindStake Group. So basically what we do is we’re behavioral research consultancy, mostly on the brand communication side. We specialize in understanding non-conscious factors of human behavior. But then what we do is we work with our clients too. Okay, so we understand here’s what motivates your customers. How do we translate that motivational science or behavioral economics or these different social sciences I’m sure we’ll get into. How do we translate that into brand marketing? So that’s the world I’m in. It’s brought me all over the world.

I wrote a bestselling book, you said, on marketing to mind states. And I get to live my passion every day. I love marketing, but more importantly, I love how people make decisions. And so we created a model to help us understand those decisions, but also how to message against those different non-conscious factors.

Tom Nixon (05:20.788)
Are those bottles outlined in the book?

Will Leach (05:23.23)
They are, it’s the Mind State Model. It’s composed of four different parts of decision making.

Tom Nixon (05:29.486)
So Curtis was right in the way that he kind of framed my approach to messaging because I think too often and maybe this is what you’ve seen well too often companies will just start talking about themselves how great they are benefits and features hoping that’s going to wow and impress the reader enough so much that they can’t wait to put the product in the cart and check out and in the B2B world that we live in for one the buying process is much more complex than that.

And the need is much more complex than transactional. And so what I’m trying to encourage brands to do is just what you said, Curtis, get in the mindset of the people who have already traveled that journey that ended up at the destination that you wanted and map it right from the very beginning before they’ve even heard of you. And if you do that, then you’re going to shepherd them into the action of your choosing, but on the timeline of their choosing. So that’s my little sermon. Well,

What does your book tell us about mind states and how people can sort of not weaponize them, but maybe just put them into into optimum mode?

Will Leach (06:30.592)
Yeah, one thing I tell my students, I teach this MindState marketing at SMU down the road. I live in Dallas, Texas. So SMU as well as Texas A &M’s Human Behavior Laboratory. And I always like to tell my students the first thing, and this just seems if you don’t need to understand behavioral psychology at all to understand this premise of what you just said, Tom. So imagine the day you were born, you looked out and at that moment until the day you die, you are the center of attention. Every time you look up,

The entire world is coming into your eyes, right? Every day. So the first thing you got to understand is that you must understand the customer is the center of attention. Why? Because that’s how the entire world works around them. And we’re all that same. Second thing, and I used to deal with this when I was on the brand team, but the idea is we get so enamored as a brand that we have to find our voice and we have to connect our voice to the customer, whatever. Yet again, let me remind you guys, the number one voice you hear

Every single day is whose voice? Your voice. It’s your own voice. You’re talking in your head constantly. Your tonality. What motivates you? What your psychological approaches to problems. And so what we do on the brand side though, guys, I worked on the biggest brands in the world. I’ve worked on Lays. I’ve worked on Pepsi. I’ve worked on Gatorade. I’ve worked on these amazing brands. And what happens, and I think this doesn’t even happen in the biggest brands, honestly, Tom, I think it happens on even your small local brand.

Tom Nixon (07:30.402)
You’re home.

Will Leach (07:57.95)
That is the center of your world. So I remember being on Sun Chips and at that point Sun Chips, I got transferred on the Sun Chips brand and it was a healthy snack. Well, I’m not really into healthy snacks. I’m just not. I’m a Doritos, especially back then I’m a Doritos guy. And so it wasn’t necessarily my favorite brand, but you know, I got to do my rotation. So I go to the rotation and then they decided when I first joined the brand, we’re going to change Sun Chips into an environmental brand. So no longer is it a healthy brand. We want to change to an environmental brand. So.

Tom Nixon (08:09.166)
Yeah.

Will Leach (08:27.198)
Now all of a sudden I’m like, okay, well, I wouldn’t call myself a big environmentalist, so I’m even less excited about being on that brand. But you know what happens? Every day you go into a meeting, you go into a cubicle, you go in and you talk to people who live that brand every day. And buddy, you drink the Kool-Aid. You just do.

And if you talk about that brand every day and every meeting is about growing that brand, all of a sudden you start thinking to yourself that you are the center of attention and there is nothing in behavioral science that tells you that you the brand is the center of attention. Never, never, never. But yet we’re so absorbed in these meetings and it’s my business. I gotta make money. I gotta make revenues. So that’s a first issue. You gotta remember that your customers are always the center of attention because that legitimately is the fact of the matter and that they’re always hearing their voice.

So if you think your job is to try to figure out how to connect your brand into their subconscious or whatever, that’s not the way you should be thinking about it. What you should be thinking about is what motivates your customers in your industry and now how do I adjust my brand? Always start with the customer. And the way we do that is through psychological mind states. And all it really is is composed of four different things. I’m happy to go into details on it. The first thing you have to understand is something called goal theory. But what are your customers’ goals?

And that’s usually goals at maybe the category level. So you want to understand not just their functional goals, which are the things that they tell you about. I want a great tasting snack. I want it to be affordable. I want on the go packaging, whatever. Those are great. You should know that by your customers, by the way, because when people tell you what they want, you should put that in creative. Like they’re telling you, totally think you should do that. After that, you want to do figure out their higher order goals. Higher order goals are those emotional goals that most marketers want to get to. Like what makes…

Tom Nixon (10:04.259)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (10:12.896)
How would they feel if they reached those goals, right? Value, on the go snacking, whatever. What’s great about function, or I’m sorry, higher order goals, is that’s where you kind of want to think about campaigns. Because that’s the emotion you want to evoke in your communication so that when you feel that way, oh wow, a brand comes to mind, which is the highest level of goals. And this is actually what you’re talking about, Tom, I believe, aspirational goals. So we always aspire in every behavior you do.

Every single, me getting on this podcast, met an aspirational goal of mine. I may not know what it is by the way, because it’s subconscious a lot of times. But if it didn’t meet an aspirational goal, I wouldn’t have shown up. I would have gone and grabbed a sandwich, right? So your customers are always trying to reach their aspirational goals, which is them at their best day, their best self. And every action is towards getting the aspirational goal in the future, whether that future is a minute from now or 10 years from now, or it’s about avoiding things that could make sure, that could make me not.

reach my goals. So goals are the number one thing you should do. Easy to find out, not necessarily easy to implement into marketing. But then motivations, you want to understand motivational psychology, which are nine motivations that drive human behavior. I like to tell my students that when you on January 1st, go out and you set your goal list out and you create your resolution list. And by February, you’re upset with yourself because you didn’t reach your goals of whatever kind has nothing to do with your goals. Your goals are probably fine.

problem is that you lack motivation to keep going after your goal when a little bit of resistance comes in, Friday night I drank a little bit, Saturday morning I may not want to go for that run. The run is still an aspirational goal. I just don’t have the motivation to keep going when there’s resistance. That’s motivational psychology. We look at nine different motivations. Then the third portion of this is called regulatory fit theory. Basically we are either optimistic when we’re going after our goals or cautious when we’re going after our goals.

optimistic of things like I seek a brand, a strategy that will help me maximize good things when I’m going after my goal. That’s just optimistic. Or people will be cautious. I seek to avoid bad things or obstacles that could help that could force me to not reach my goal. That may sound like a small detail, but guys in the framing of your copy, you can have the exact same brand you can say, buy my brand. Let’s say let’s say aspirin, buy my brand, you can avoid headaches.

Will Leach (12:39.69)
buy my brand, you can feel better after a long night of drinking. Maybe I’ll stop off on the drinking analogies, right? But that’s it. It’s the same aspirin. But other some people go no, it’s about avoiding a hangover. Other people like that same aspirin say no aspirin is about getting and recovering faster from an hangover. Same aspirin but the way you frame up your messaging, you talk about what it help you avoid or what will help you gain makes your messaging more salient. It just feels more natural.

Tom Nixon (12:43.726)
you

Curtis Hays (12:45.442)
You

Will Leach (13:06.784)
And then the last thing is just behavioral economics. And that is we have these shortcuts, these triggers that help us make decisions fast and easy. You may have known things like scarcity effect. And scarcity effect is a trigger that we tend to value things that we believe are scarce in nature. So when we say in some sort of an ad, limited time only, at the subconscious level, that tells the mind that, wow, these are scarce in nature. They must be valuable. I should go probably buy one of those things. Or if you say limit eight per

per purchase or per shopping trip, that tells the mind, I’m limited, this must be valuable. So there’s all these little psychological, they call them heuristics or triggers that you can use as a marketer. And so in my book, I talk about goals, motivations, approach, and then these triggers. And then ultimately, I bring those things together to identify a mind state. And that’s what I use those four principles to message against.

Tom Nixon (14:00.962)
Yeah. Awesome. Curtis, it sounds like that’s all the science that backs up what I just somehow fell backwards into just because it felt natural. Yeah.

Will Leach (14:08.97)
That’s… That’s the point.

Curtis Hays (14:10.88)
Right, right. Yeah. Well, it reminds me of so a few episodes ago, we did our marketing framework that we work from, which is your why, how, what. So we start with the customer’s why. And we talk about how are you different and unique? How do you meet that why? And then what do you offer? Like that’s at the end. Okay, what are the products, services, know, those types of things that you actually offer? We layer on top of that the ADA model, Awareness, Interest, Decide, Act.

Will Leach (14:19.69)
Okay. Yep.

Curtis Hays (14:40.618)
We layered on that the race model with how are we actually going to plan and measure all of this? Will, see like us layering, like if we had an overhead projector, and we had those transparent sheets, like I think we could fit your methodology right on top of what we’re using because you do, you are starting with that, like, you know, clarification of what matters to that customer and where their mindset is and

What are they actually seeking? And you’ve got to start there to actually have any hope of connecting with them, right? And then that needs to be at an emotional level, kind of bringing that down, connecting that to their needs, and then kind of further on down. So as the analytical person myself and liking process and those types of things, it really does start to come together when I think about it that way.

Will Leach (15:30.122)
Yeah, one thing that reminds me is that guys, it’s very easy to capture somebody’s attention. Like I can scare you, I could throw something sexy up on a billboard or whatever. Maintaining attention is very difficult. And that’s what we’re talking about. When you’re talking about that, you know, that why, what, how, that’s how you can not just capture the attention, but maintain the attention. If you start with the emotions people want to feel, you can keep their attention going longer. And so that’s…

That’s why it’s so important to understand these principles, right? It’s not about capturing or I’m sorry, it’s about maintaining that attention.

Curtis Hays (16:00.033)
Meep meep meep

Curtis Hays (16:03.936)
Yeah, and so I heard you say in one of your videos I was watching 90 % of your marketing is not consciously seen. So describe it as we’ve talked about like, get Google’s got this 711 for rule, you know, we’ve got a seven hours of content across 11 different touch points and four different channels and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you know, it’s this repetitive nature that we have.

in advertising, particularly in delivery of impressions, just that, gosh, you know, what’s our reach? How many impressions are we getting? You know, what’s our audience penetration? All these types of metrics. But what you’re kind of saying is the majority of that consciously isn’t seen. It might be there subconsciously, you know, we want the con from as marketers, we want the conscious part of it.

Will Leach (16:43.038)
Yeah.

Will Leach (16:49.696)
No, it’s true. imagine that, you know, I have or I ran across a stat that said, we see up to 35,000 advertisements every day. Guys, 35,000. That’s not brand impressions. That’s advertisements. It’s everywhere. You go to grocery store, all the packaging, you’re driving, think about all the signs, whatever. So you can’t remember, I’m telling you, can you imagine remembering 20 brands you’ve seen already just today? No.

but you’ve technically probably seen thousands of those ads. So there’s this thing called the reticular activating system. And it’s a part of the brain that basically takes all those ad impressions and subconsciously sees them all. But it just basically says, I’m going to get rid of all those things that filter just filters out the vast majority of marketing. What doesn’t it filter? Goals. Cause if your brain is looking to see how can I reach my goals, the first part of my model,

it’s letting that information become more resilient, or I’m sorry, it resonates more, right? So the fact of the matter is, is if you don’t understand people’s goals and what motivates them, the first two parts of that model, then the problem is, that the reticular activating system, that filter that we all have, that’s eliminating so many of the vast majority of ads from ever being even consciously understood or seen, you will always continue to be filtered until you understand how that works. And the way it works, the way to get through that filter is speak to somebody’s aspirations.

and then speak to their motivations. Well, how do you want to feel? So that’s the reason why that whole thing works.

Tom Nixon (18:17.87)
You know, I work primarily in B2B. I know Curtis and I share a bunch of clients in B2B. And a number of our clients have products or services that their market isn’t even necessarily aware that the category exists, right? They solve a problem, but the market’s not out there looking for product because they don’t even know that this thing exists will replace Excel. So, right? There’s a lot of SaaS companies that will replace Excel, all the manual real time and errors and all that stuff. And so when you lead with features in

product descriptions that the reticular whatever you just said is going to completely filter that out because that person doesn’t even think they have that need. But if you lead with the here’s a pain that we solve and it’s very common and here’s what you’re probably feeling that’s going to get through right? Well, because we’re like, they understand me. How did they know I have that problem? I hate doing that. What is this product? How does it work? How is this different than Excel? my gosh, look at everything it does. That’s the path you’re trying to chart not Hey,

Will Leach (18:52.192)
Yeah.

Will Leach (19:03.785)
It does.

Tom Nixon (19:16.824)
Here’s my product. Do you want to buy it?

Will Leach (19:18.94)
love what you said the RAS that reticulating act or reticular activating system is primarily focused about pain. And so I call it the bleeding neck problem. Like what is the problem if you can message to somebody’s bleeding neck problem, they get stabbed in the neck. And also like they need help. They don’t care how good your product is. If you tell them that I can stop the bleeding, they’re not looking for what does the bandage go around all of it is a hyperallergenic. All they want to know is that you’re going to stop the bleeding. Now that’s so hard to do, right? Because you got to figure out what it is.

Tom Nixon (19:40.541)
Yeah.

Will Leach (19:46.95)
that bleeding neck problem that they have that you solve. And when you can do that, it bypasses the RIS and then you get seen. And then of course, then I wanna learn how more it works. So it’s good to have features. It’s totally good to have features. You just want those at the very bottom. Like you don’t care. It’s all about, can you stop my bleeding? Yes. Will I get better? I won’t die. Yes. Tell me more. Tell me more. Tell me more. Then the features become important.

Tom Nixon (20:08.398)
In our market curse, we’ve been talking about how the data it varies, but something of the order of 97 % of B2B buyers aren’t currently in market at this very moment. So what you’re going back to the RIS is that if I don’t feel like I’m in market, I’m totally probably not ignore or not even absorbing that it’s coming through. But if you could constantly resonate with somebody on the level that you understand their pain, even if they’re not in market now, they’re banking that information in that’s resonating.

with the time they move themselves into market, which is typically what B2B buyers do. They’re thinking of you because they remember that lion know the mouse that took the thorn out of the elephant’s foot. Remember that story? I solved the pain. was months and months and months ago, but now you remember that I solved it, Curtis. And so now it’s like, okay, I’m ready to market and I don’t even think I need a bid list because I understand that Curtis and company are the ones to remove the thorn.

Will Leach (20:48.352)
You solved the pain. was a bleeding neck problem.

Curtis Hays (20:49.154)
Yes. Yes.

Will Leach (20:57.371)
There’s a pain. I have a solution.

Curtis Hays (21:05.098)
And so, Will, I think I read this too, where you’re, are you focused more than, obviously, on the mindset and not necessarily the persona? Because a lot in marketing, right, we’re developing these ICPs, these ideal customer profiles. And yes, there’s a description in that of maybe the problem they might be facing, but usually it’s like, we’re marketing to Sue, who’s 54 years old and she has, you know,

She’s been in her job for 20 years and this is her job role and like all of these characteristics and yeah, that’s great. But it’s like you’re after something completely different, which doesn’t necessarily fit into a persona per se or does it? I don’t know, describe that.

Will Leach (21:47.892)
Well, I like to think of it this way. A mind state overlays on top of a persona. So my clients also have personas, most valuable consumer, brand persona, whatever. And, you know, I would even argue that most personas that I deal with today even have some cool attitudinal information. It’s not just the demographics. It’ll say things like, but you know, she also is a mom and so she enjoys family time on Saturdays and she knows that being having pure ingredients in her lotions like that gets something more emotional. I think that’s okay.

But what a mind state is, is it overlays on top of those personas that says this, says yes, but at this moment when she is considering your solution, here’s her wants, needs, desires, preferences, belief systems, et cetera. So you have all these things, right Curtis? You have wants, needs, desires, have preferences, you have beliefs, you have attitudes, all these things. The problem is, that they change all the time. We were just talking before the show started about our kids.

When I talk about my son, I’m not Will Leach marketing to MindState’s guy. That’s my persona that somebody has. I am dad, right? So in those moments when my son just almost ran out of gas before the show started, I had to go run to the gas station because he didn’t realize or he thought he could drive on a yellow tank for a while. So I had to go to the gas station and get him gas. That moment in time, I have different beliefs. I have different attitudes. I have different wants. So what I do is I use these MindStates. I study these moments in time.

Tom Nixon (23:04.248)
you

Will Leach (23:17.054)
when my brand clients are saying, okay, we want to sell more lotion, gave you that example, great. I will study those people not at the persona level because they’re moms, they’re all sorts of things, that’s great. What I need to do is identify those psychological mind states, temporary mind states that they’re under and what’s happening then. So what I actually do is I supplement their personas and I add a whole bunch more richness to it.

So that’s how I usually use a persona work. And like we do archetype work. I don’t know if you guys do archetype work, but some of our brands want, I a hero brand or am I a sage brand? We have to know those too. So I’ll even map the psychological mindset. Cause sometimes women or somebody’s looking for a sage brand for instance, sage is like a brand that’s authoritative, smart, you know, think like Gandalf, my little wizard behind me, right? Then other times you may be, you want a hero brand, think Nike, Adidas or something that’s going to help you make a success.

So I also will map these mind states back to brand archetypes. So you can figure out, okay, I am an achievement brand or a hero brand, that’s my archetype. How would I message correctly to be able to activate on that mind state? So you can even map those things to archetypes if you wanted to.

Tom Nixon (24:29.08)
Beautiful. Yeah, love it. Alright, let’s take a little bit of a veer here. The AAA of temptation I have in my show notes here, which is I’m going to let you explain it, but near and dear to my heart. So what is the AAA of temptation and how is that impacting brands marketing efforts?

Will Leach (24:48.606)
Is that the attribution?

Tom Nixon (24:50.762)
attribution, algorithms, and arithmetic. Did I invent that? No, you invented that.

Will Leach (24:53.216)
Yep. And arithmetic. Well, I don’t know if I invented it, but it is a bit of a thorn in my side. so I guys, I came from the world of econometrics. So I did my undergrad in environmental economics, did my masters in econometrics. So I came out of the research world with the belief that data is everything. I don’t necessarily disbelieve. I think it’s important for us to collect data. However, I think as advancements in technology,

have allowed us to do say attribution analysis, right? So I can understand, this TV advertisement gave me X percent lift, this coupon gave me X percent lift, and I can attribute my marketing spend so I can optimize. That was really not available a decade ago, not accurately. And I know because we invested heavily in that stuff, but it was very, very difficult to track. So if somebody said, how successful is your marketing? You’re like, well, I’m building broad equity, that’s what I’m doing. And then the CEO was like, awesome.

Can you tell me how much, how many dollars you brought in? Cause I know the sales guy can, sales guy can totally tell you. It’s like, yeah, I have four calls. I landed five clients on those four calls. I dropped a coupon. I created this percentage of Lyft very easy in the sales world. Marketing was not like that until technology, mathematics and mostly technology allowed us to capture those. The problem is, is that as we’ve been able to use technology to help us understand attribution and we get these scores and things like that.

I believe that we became to optimizing our messaging around those metrics versus what we just said, what drives human behavior is people. And when it really matters, so I talked to Amazon, was at a conference, I went to go present at Amazon one time and I was talking about the mind state stuff and a guy was up there and he said, Hey, well, we don’t really need that. And arguably he’s right. Cause he said, I can do A-B testing

across millions of transactions in just an hour and I can optimize my messaging. Right. And I said, very fair. You win. You can kind of do that until something happens like COVID. When that happens, people’s mind states shifted dramatically. Everything you could possibly want during COVID and I was tracking these things guys, all was all around empowerment, which is our desire for control or safety.

Will Leach (27:17.6)
I was looking at candles. I was doing work on candles. Like, does it give me more control? Does it give me more control? That’s all people wanted. All that data, if you looked at all the candle data, there would not have been anything in there that would have told you that you can sell more candles by saying, hey, my candle company can give you more control. But the fact of the matter is almost every product out there started talking about it’s safe for you and it’ll give you more control. The successful companies were doing that. Why?

It’s because they understood human behavior. They understood that people were very anxious. They didn’t feel like they had any control. Because all of a sudden my house is my restaurant. It’s my place of worship. It’s my school. It’s my sanctuary. I the house became everything. And when the house becomes everything, everything needs to feel safe. So Amazon, God love them. And that guy, arguably, he said the right thing. But I always wonder back, but how would you have ever understood how to test yourself out of that?

I don’t know if you could have done that. So that’s why I believe that analytics are important. In fact, I know they are because now marketers can actually go back to their CEOs and their CMOs and say, hey, we generated this dollar for the business. And I totally get that’s important. The problem with that is that we get so focused on those metrics that we forget there’s human beings behind those things. metrics will, they will have a difficulty trying to measure goals and motivations of how important those things are to

Tom Nixon (28:39.182)
Curtis, as you being the resident mathematician on the podcast, what I love about your approach to data is you look at attribution, algorithms, what’s the third one? Arithmetic. Not as the end, but as a means to an end. And the end is understanding everything that Will just said so that you can feed it back into your own intelligence, into the intelligence of the algorithms to say, this is what happened, but this is what it means. Now get smart on.

Will Leach (29:01.717)
predict.

Curtis Hays (29:08.576)
Right, I think the mistake marketers are making is they’re optimizing to the algorithm, optimizing to the arithmetic and the math and all those types of things, right? So it’s like, hey, I can build you a landing page, a click funnel, or whatever that’s going to do this and convert at this conversion rate and all these types of things. But if that doesn’t lead to a sale at the other end, what do those metrics even matter, right? And it’s like, I can’t tell you how many times a

A client is asking me, what keywords should we use? We need to optimize for keywords, right? It’s like, at what point did we make the mistake as marketers that we were optimizing for keywords? We should have always been optimizing for customers. And so get to know your customers. Don’t get to know your kids. It’s like the keywords is the secondary part. Yes, I’ll give you the best practices you need to make sure that your website is going to get found in Google. But you start with the customer. You don’t start with Google.

Tom Nixon (29:48.204)
Yeah. Amen.

Will Leach (29:48.286)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (30:03.234)
And this is just the same thing. You don’t start with conversion rates. You start with getting to know your customer and saying, does this content, does this copy, is this page helpful? All of those types of things.

Tom Nixon (30:13.474)
Well, real quick before you respond to that, well, what marketers have done, maybe I’m guilty of this. It’s sometimes then they they would look to implement sort of artificial metrics so that they could gauge success and say they did this. We had 500 form fills in to download our lead magnet. Okay, let’s look at the leads. Ready of a good well, they all were wrong counterfeit email addresses people were just giving so that they could get out download. Okay, well, so

The data looks good. It looks great. Have we achieved? Yeah. All right. Look at all these downloads and leads, right? But that’s an extreme example. We get the point. Well, it’s right. It’s like let’s not interject artificial metrics just to validate the marketing spec.

Will Leach (30:44.704)
Do you feel good about that? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Will Leach (30:57.3)
No, I agree with everything. I love how you said it, And I think, you I always say that they’re the two of the scariest people in the world. The first one is your kids best friends, older brother, because they’re going to introduce your kid to things that they should never hear. And the second one is that McKinsey consultant or that BCG consultant who’s 24, 25 years old that don’t understand anything about marketing and human beings, but they built a new technology they can sell to a major company say, we can tell you exactly how to.

Tom Nixon (31:11.788)
You

Will Leach (31:26.176)
find with mathematical precision how to find this person and message that person. And after a decade of that guys, I’m telling you that the companies I work with and the large companies in world, they have come to realize that that is not the end all be all. It’s important. But when you say now what am going to say? Okay, so you know, they know that this word, this keyword may have done really well two weeks ago, and that keyword no longer does well, then what do you do? What’s the next key word? Analytics can

try to help you get there, but if you understood the psychology of your customer, you understood that bleeding neck problem, and you knew that they’re driven by success, okay, so rather than using the word success, you may have to modify that word, but you don’t know that if you’re just using pure data analytics, you’re not taking that last final mile of really understanding why, the why behind that metric. So when things change, when you have to change your messaging, which by the way, guys, you change your messaging all the time, because the brain gets used to stuff, it’s no longer novel, so the brain looks for something different, it still wants to have something that

felt compelling, but it just doesn’t like the words, the way you articulated. That’s why your ad resonance falls after a while, because it’s not novel anymore. The brain figures out, okay, I got it. What do you do next? If you understand your customer, you know what to do next. You just have to tweak that messaging in a way that you know is going to map back to their psychology.

Tom Nixon (32:39.53)
Awesome. So, well, let’s end with this concept of brand attachment because we’ve talked in recent episodes, Curtis, about what does life look like in a post SEO world post search, right? With the, we’ve been just referencing keywords and now already this podcast is out of date because we shouldn’t be optimizing for keywords necessarily as we used to anyway, but brand attachment is different. That’s I think going to demark the winners and losers. What is it? And you have four rules for building it. What are they?

Will Leach (33:07.488)
Yeah, I do. So let’s just first talk about brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is incredibly difficult to get because we have so many choices in today’s world. We have so many choices. We’re constantly being inundated with new brands, new positionings, new brands, new options, et cetera. but brand loyalty, the way to think about brand loyalty and this, know we all want to strive for brand loyalty, but I think there’s something deeper and better than brand loyalty and that’s attachment. Brand loyalty,

is the idea is that your brand is trying to connect with somebody’s standards or maybe their principles, maybe a value. So traditional brand loyalty is you go do a bunch of work on your customer. found out my customer values purity. Okay, great. So now what you want to do for brand loyalty, you keep screaming, we’re pure, we’re pure, we’re pure, we’re pure. And hopefully you create an association between somebody’s standards and their principles and your brand.

Here’s a problem we just actually talked about a couple minutes ago. Your values and your principles change quite often in the moment. In fact it changes a lot. I am a different person when I had a child and my values change dramatically once I had a child. My values change dramatically when I got married. My principles and values things like they change. They’re not nearly as fluid as we I’m sorry they are more fluid than we think. So that’s why

when the pandemic hit and you had outages or whatever, that you saw loyalty scores drop and people would buy anything they wanted to. If somebody was truly loyal to your brand, they would have foregone their toilet paper purchase and they would have waited for their brand of Charmin. Guess what they did guys? Damn Charmin, I’m gonna get toilet paper, right? So you’re sharing Charmin like, we’ve been working on loyalty for so long and look, we’re looking at our basket data and we know that people are buying outside of Charmin. Yep, they are.

It wasn’t because you didn’t have nearly the loyalty you thought you did. So there’s something stronger. It’s called brand attachment. So rather than trying to find a connection between a value or it may be a, a principle that your customers have, attachment connects a brand to the human being and that goals and motivational perspective, because those things don’t change or it’s very difficult for those things to change. If as it comes to whatever you’re selling,

Will Leach (35:30.62)
If you’re motivated by success, then that doesn’t change even when pandemics happen. Well, in that case, it does change. I mean, it so dramatically different. But your desire for success for this one category will remain for a long time. So what you do is if you could connect to somebody’s goals, if you tell, if you say, hey, brand, I’m sorry, hey, customer, I will help you reach your aspirational goals. That thing that you think about

or that non-consciously your brain is looking for and my brain can help you get there, that creates attachment. If I also tell you, and if you use my brand, I’ll help you become more successful. I hope you feel that you are more confident and successful. That creates almost a person to person relationship. It’s no longer just looking at a value. It’s now looking to a person to person attachment. And when you get brand attachment, here’s what happens. When the brand goes through

and out of stock, or they do they make a bad move like Pepsi did a couple years ago with it with a commercial with what they did with Kylie Jenner. You can make your brand lovers become activists. They’ll fight on your behalf. Why? Because that’s my best friend. I associate that brand with the same goals and same goals and motivations that I have. So they will actually become activists for you. Those are the types of people that when somebody takes you on a on a Reddit page, they start

talking about your brand, these people jump to your defense. These people, when you get a one rating, they jump to your defense. That’s restaurant owner you know down the street that you know, yeah, that’s not fair what they’re saying about them. You jump to their defense. Loyal customers don’t do that. Activists attaching customers, they will do that. So it’s a different level of depth. So don’t try to focus on people’s values. And what you really want to focus on is what are their core goals?

And then what motivates them to reach those goals? If you do that, you have a much deeper relationship.

Tom Nixon (37:28.684)
Yep. Again, that is the… Go ahead. Go ahead, Wolf.

Will Leach (37:30.016)
And then I think I think, oh, go ahead, sorry. Well, was gonna say how to get to brand attachment. I kind of talked about it, right? One, you gotta let, you need to basically grab or to create brand attachment, you need to one, let them know that they’re the hero. We already talked about that. Like you’re the hero, I’m just the person or I’m just a brand that’s gonna help you. You’re the Batman, I’m the utility belt, right? The second thing you wanna do is just make sure you’re associating your brand with those motivations. We just talked about that. So.

You want to make sure that your brand helps you. I will help you hero become more successful. And then the third thing. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (38:03.842)
Well, let me pause you real quick. Just I want to translate this into our analogy of Star Wars. All right. So start at the beginning. The client is Luke Skywalker. That’s the hero. We’ve been saying Han Solo is the brand, right? So, okay, now continue.

Will Leach (38:17.694)
Yeah, yeah, no, that’s it. That’s right. That’s exactly right. And they should always see themselves as the hero. Yeah, it’s just a tool, a very important tool, a very important tool to the whole story. But technically in Luke Skywalker’s mind, he would have found a way he would have found a way right because he’s the hero. But the tool was Han Solo with the Millennium Falcon, right? You know, getting Darth Vader and then therefore he could drop the bomb, right? So that’s a big thing. You have to realize that you are the asset. You’re the tool.

Tom Nixon (38:20.846)
The utility about this case was the Millennium Falcon. That was the utility, right? That’s just a tool.

Tom Nixon (38:33.176)
Yep. Exactly. Right.

Curtis Hays (38:33.366)
Yeah.

Will Leach (38:46.494)
and tools are very important. Batman’s utility belt is incredibly important, right? But ultimately, your hero is your customer. And then we talk about temporal landmarks. I won’t beat this into the ground, but there are times where people seek their aspirational self. You know this by at least I’m gonna talk for myself. Every Monday morning, I wake up and I look at my body, I’m like, man, I got to go on a diet, man, I’ve got to start working out. So if a brand around health, health and wellness working out,

If they message me on a Monday morning, a temporal landmark, they’re more likely to grab my attention than on a Friday night when I’m at a five guys, right? That’s not a good temporal mark. So these things called temporal marks, landmarks. So it’s the first of the month. It’s the first of the year. It’s when you reach a 50th birthday. It’s when you have a life changing event like I got diagnosed with cancer or I got married or there’s an anniversary or it’s the start of spring. There are these moments in time. And you can read about this by Dan Pink. He’s done a whole book called when it’s a really cool book about

when and time has a big impact on our abilities to want to make change. So if you want to have brand attachment, you want to create that attachment. You want to think about what are these temporal landmarks in your customer’s day. Maybe it’s a Monday morning. Maybe it’s the first of the month. Maybe it’s like I said, the beginning of spring. When you message at those moments, you’re more likely to get a deeper connection because the person is thinking about.

their aspirational selves, they’re open to new ideas. So that’s a third and final, really the fourth way to build brand attachment.

Tom Nixon (40:21.154)
Well, Curtis, did it turn out the way you hoped? mean, we are kindred spirits as well. Each guy and I.

Curtis Hays (40:27.837)
yeah, this podcast could continue on and maybe we will have a part two at some point, but definitely.

Will Leach (40:31.328)
It could.

Tom Nixon (40:33.334)
Yeah. There was a part two to Star Wars, as I recall.

Will Leach (40:38.4)
We’ll go through all six, all nine if we have to.

Curtis Hays (40:39.156)
And three, and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, yep.

Tom Nixon (40:42.348)
Yeah. Yep. So this sounds like a fascinating book. Well, so I where can I go get it?

Will Leach (40:49.982)
Yeah, so you can find marketing to mind states on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, it’s pretty much available in any online store. And there’s even an audible version, but I will tell you guys that the voice ended up not being mine. was, I couldn’t stand hearing my voice. So you may hear a comedian’s voice if you download it, if you buy it on audible, you may recognize the comedian’s voice that actually did the voiceover.

Tom Nixon (41:14.771)
that’s what they call a tease in this business, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (41:17.314)
I’m going to pick it up right after this show with my audible subscription.

Will Leach (41:17.322)
Sorry.

Will Leach (41:22.608)
Yeah, okay, there you go.

Tom Nixon (41:22.744)
Perfect. All right. It will link to that. We’ll link to the buying state groups website. So thanks, we’ll eat for being on the show. Like we said to be continued. And what did they say in Star Wars? Was it go forth and prosper? No.

Will Leach (41:27.69)
Thanks.

Will Leach (41:36.512)
Star Trek. you got all the guys so upset.

Tom Nixon (41:41.3)
I did. And that’s how we’ll leave you this week on Bullhorns and Bullseyes.