From Mind States to Messaging

Tom Nixon (00:02.872)
You chose the more expensive option and you can’t even fully explain why. You post-rationalize it with features you haven’t even used yet. The decision just feels right. Good, confident even. There’s no second guessing it, even knowing that you’re not using the product to its full and complete potential because you haven’t unlocked all of those features, at least not yet. Maybe someday though. For now, you’re enjoying the purchase because it solved the problem or scratched the itch. But even though you behave this way as a consumer,

You do the exact opposite as a provider. Your customers are acting just like you did though, right now with your competitor maybe. And you’re still writing feature comparison charts and making bold performance claims on your website and listing the product or service specs. So why is there that disconnect? Curtis, in lesson one of this season, we talked a lot about marketing drift and mirror marketing. And I think today’s episode is going to lead into both of those with today’s guests.

Curtis Hays (01:02.507)
It sounds like you just described the recent fishing pole purchase I made. The $250 fishing pole that was made probably purchased more off of emotion than actual, you know, need.

Tom Nixon (01:07.278)
Is that right?

Tom Nixon (01:18.2)
So hold on, you purchased a fishing pole out of emotion and not out of like intellectual rigor. You didn’t compare the specs.

Curtis Hays (01:25.475)
I did look at the specs, but you know there’s I mean there’s probably 25 different fishing poles that probably all have the exact same specs or relatively the same. I don’t know for some reason this one I think is gonna you know get me that personal best so I just I just felt like I had to pull the trigger and we’re gonna see how it does this this season.

Will Leach – Mindstate (01:43.948)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (01:49.944)
Yeah, right. Well, thankfully we have an expert that can explain to you and to me why you would buy the more expensive option when your head would tell you to maybe buy the most practical option.

Curtis Hays (02:02.967)
Yeah, so last episode, we did talk about Drift and this idea that a lot of companies right now, they’re moving away from what I’d call their North Star, which is, what do they get into business to do? What are they trying to do? And over time, whether it’s personnel that’s changed internally, whether it’s agencies they’re switching, whether it’s an algorithm that’s changed that’s happened.

Their marketing maybe isn’t performing as well as it used to. And the one thing, I shouldn’t say the one thing, but one of the things, specifically the thing that we’re going to talk about today, that they’re likely not paying attention to is that their customer may have changed. And more specifically, maybe what our guest today taught me the last time we had him on was maybe their mind state changed. So, love to welcome back Will Leach.

who has his book, Marketing to Mind States. And I know you’ve been heavily working on some AI, which is exciting. So even though we’re gonna talk a little bit about behavioral psychology and kind of some fun things there, you’re actually using AI to do some things. And so excited to have you back and talk to you today about what you’ve been working on.

Will Leach – Mindstate (03:20.939)
I’m excited.

It is great to be back on the bull horns and bulls eye podcast. was great. we had gotten some really deep psychological stuff, last time. And so maybe this time we’ll get into more practical tactical. Let’s go bring this to life for your, for your audience.

Tom Nixon (03:38.67)
Yeah. Well, that’s the hope and that’s the plan. So we did mention last season, we’ll link to that episode in the show notes in case people want to go back and have a refresher course or if they missed it. the book and your sort of mantra is marketing to mind state. So knowing that people either have already listed that episode or we’ll go back and listen to it. Just give us a recap for those who aren’t familiar with the term marketing to mind states.

Will Leach – Mindstate (04:02.047)
Yeah, it’s the idea that the vast majority of human decisions are made at the subconscious level. So if your marketing isn’t speaking to people’s subconscious, then it’s always going to be less effective. Now, the way to do that is understanding the psychological filter. And when you understand the psychological filter, it’s called the RAS. We may not talk about that. When you’re using a psychological filter, you can now understand why people make the decisions they do, like Curtis buying a fishing pole that maybe he shouldn’t have.

But more importantly, how do you activate on these four subconscious factors when you identify these four subconscious factors? It’s somebody’s temporary mind state. So really what the book is about in our last podcast was talking about how these mind states come to life and then how do you use those insights to optimize your marketing?

Tom Nixon (04:49.802)
I love this whole concept for what I mean, it maps in a way. And I think we talked about this last time right over our why, how, what model Curtis. So I’m always trying to get clients to think in terms of the customer’s why understand what that temporary mind state is. Right. And if you understand that you can articulate it back to them, then you’ve made a connection that other brands won’t. So why do you think my clients are resistant to this notion that

Buying decisions are emotional and psychological and not just completely rational, non-conscious you might call.

Will Leach – Mindstate (05:25.823)
You know what’s funny about this time is that if you just have a conversation and you just gave him the example of the fishing pole, almost all of your customers, your clients would go, well, yeah, you’re right. We make emotional decisions, but it’s, but it’s something weird when we don’t think of ourselves as people. think of ourselves as marketers and customers and things like that, personas that we forget. So here’s what I would tell you. I think about a decade ago, marketing changed quite a lot. And I was in that world at a large brand and

Basically, what happened was marketing became accountable for delivery of revenues. So if you’re a marketer and you know that you have to deliver revenues, those things that get measured are those things that get financed and get funded. And it’s much easier for you to think of yourself as, OK, I now know I need to drive leads or whatever, and I’m given this budget and I can now monetize. I can see.

from my expenses or from my investments, the number of leads, those things are easily measurable. What’s not easily measurable is our deep understanding of our subconscious or the subconscious of our customers. And so if we optimize that, we can get better outcomes for our brands, more the long-term brand building versus the short-term kind of sales enablement for marketing. I think that’s probably a large part of what’s happening.

We are sales focused as marketers. have to be sales focused. So therefore you’re going to think about those rational things. What people say they’re going to do. That’s what I want to hear. The other thing I would tell you is this. I think we as behavioral in the sciences and the behavioral science side, we’re not good marketers. Like, like we’re not, we love this idea of consumer understanding and deep understanding of our customers and things like that. But the CFO needs to feel that through that understanding,

I can increase revenues or the owner of the brand, whatever. And we’ve never made that connection as behavioral scientists to show that yes, by our deep understanding, we can actually drive sales. So I got the book, right? Marketing Mindsets, the Practical Guide to Applying Behavioral Design to Research and Marketing. That subheader, the Practical Guide to Applying Behavioral Design to Research and Marketing, that is a feature, There’s nothing emotional in that. Like even I, the expert, if I was smart,

Tom Nixon (07:42.99)
Ugh.

Will Leach – Mindstate (07:46.122)
I would have said something closer to the point of grow your brand by optimizing your marketing to your customer subconscious. That is a pain point. Like, grow my brand. I didn’t even put that in my own book. So I think behavioral scientists, we forget that even we’re not very good at marketing. just like kind of a plug, even the experts at this don’t always get it right. Cause we think about ourselves and we think about our features and what we can provide versus what our customers need.

Tom Nixon (08:11.736)
That’s the trap right there. What you just said, right? And so Curtis, it’s interesting because he just described a journey that you’ve sort of been on over this past decade, right? Which was, yeah.

Curtis Hays (08:21.431)
which you revealed to me, yep, which is this idea of mirror marketing versus window marketing. And the mirror is we’re always mirror mirror on the wall, know, we’re always looking at ourselves and looking at our own brand and that’s gonna be the tendency and what we write in and build campaigns around and those types of things.

it’s very difficult to turn that mirror around and look at a window, see our customer on the other side and understand them, let alone understand them at a psychological level. Because like you said, Will, and this is the question I have for you, is like, how do you get a mind state into like a CRM? You mentioned personas, know, ICPs, we’re building strategy. And it’s like, okay, Sally’s an HR leader who’s between the age of 25 and 45. And she…

you know, works at these types of companies that’s this size and she’s interested in these things and she uses these pieces of software. But where does the psychology part come into that? And then how do we really plug that into when we’re building campaigns? And then, like you said, maybe the bigger question is how do we measure that?

Will Leach – Mindstate (09:29.547)
Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. First off is that understanding that your customers have these psychological mind states that drive their consideration of any brand in your category. And then ultimately their preference to buy your brand. So these psychological mind states just we’ll leave it at that. Now, once you understand that and there’s lots of research techniques that we talked about in the last podcast to understand that the book will help you get to that too. And then the other thing, how do we activate it on CRM?

You’re right, there’s no such I don’t think I don’t know, maybe I should build it like a cool CRM tool that says, hey, the optimistic achievement mind state and it goes finds these people because right, because by definition, these mindsets are temporary, right? They’re temporary, you go through different mindsets all the time. So here’s what I would say. Now these mindsets, please.

Tom Nixon (10:13.004)
Will real quick on that. They’re temporary. They’re also not outwardly expressed. Right? If they’re in the subconscious, no one’s out there posting on Facebook. Hey, I’m in this kind of mind state today. Who wants to market to me? But I digress.

Will Leach – Mindstate (10:24.157)
No, but Tom, I would argue that they are expressed. We as marketers don’t know how to translate those expressions. So I consider it like poker. When you get your customers to talk, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s your customer service calls, whether it’s review data, there are tells. There are tells just like poker and the words that they use, if you know what you’re looking for, will give you those tells. So you can. Now, I’m not saying it’s easy, but I am telling you that you can do it.

because we have technology, artificial intelligence, by the way, guys, is like a great way to do that work for you, right? Because they can pick up tells that even I can’t tell. But getting back to if you understand that your category and your brand are driven by these two psychological mind states or whatever. Well, there’s no such thing as a optimistic achievement, you know, button that I hit on my CRM. Here’s what I would tell you. You can use something called I’m going to get into the weeds here a bit, but temporal landmarks.

What that really means is that there are moments in time or places where we are where you can activate on mind state. So you don’t need to have a button that says optimistic achievement mind state, but you can use a temporal landmark, which is a moment in time where you would expect that mind state to be prevalent. Give me example. So I was I took my son to a college tour, Texas A University down the road. And when I was down there,

Imagine there’s a moment in time on a Saturday, all these parents come down to Texas and they’re going to look at different colleges or whatever. They now know that there’s a moment, a place where I’m going to be in an area around a university. Every place I went to around Texas A &M University, I was thinking to myself, if they were smart enough, they would be selling me stuff around my mindset, which at that time was competence is the motivation. want like, I feel smarter when I’m in college. I want my kid to have a great.

experience. want my kid to be smarter coming out of college and all that kind of stuff. Anything that was sold to me about, hey, this is going to help you make a good decision on a college, me as a dad, and it’s going to help your debt, help your son become a better student. Brother, I would have, I would have eaten that up. I would have bought anything, anything, because that’s the mindset I was under there. So you can actually target using these moments in time. You think about where somebody is going to be and when they’re going to be there. That works.

Will Leach – Mindstate (12:47.423)
So you can actually do that. It’s not as easy, you can actually do it. And then we talked about the last thing is you can prime people as well. You can temporarily activate on these mind states. So even if they weren’t in that psychological mind state, you can temporarily bring that desire for achievement in that case up if you wanted to.

Curtis Hays (13:03.235)
So Tom, I was going to ask for you to provide the example because I’m curious as to this because Will you said like transcripts which we’ve used to pull insight out of these kind of psychology things. we talked on our last episode about like, well, can AI pick up on a pause or a sigh or even if it’s an in-person interview and you, they slouched down in their chair, you know, there’s those behavioral cues where an interviewer knows, okay, there’s something there. I’m going to…

Tom Nixon (13:03.342)
Go ahead, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (13:33.185)
I’m gonna pull back that onion. Tom and I talked about that on that last episode. And we kind of have that one example with Mario’s company, the senior care Tom, describe that, the like, what is the perceived pain that they have, but the actual pain, the underlying one that we uncover from a psychology perspective. What is that one Tom?

Tom Nixon (13:56.591)
Well, in this case, was so off air, Will and I were talking about our parents getting to the age, you know, to a point in life where you got to start contemplating, how can I help mom or dad live the, you know, whatever time they have left to the best of their ability. And this is a company that Curtis was referring to that does that they provide in home care, non-medical care. And the, the reflex is to look at the mirror and then tell people how

great you are and how wonderfully cared for the your parent will be. And we’ve been in business the longest and our people are second to none. Everything that every other competitors also saying true or not. Right. But when we interviewed our clients, clients, and we talked to the people who actually made the decision, which is not the aging senior, it’s right. It’s the child, someone like Will or I who’s caring for their parent. And we got into their mind state and it would total completely different story.

It might sound selfish, but these people wanted their lives back, right? They had been, they are unequipped to take care of their parents and they realize it and it’s frustrating. And they’re spending all of their time, money, resources, and energy doing it. And when you get these people to start talking about that, that’s where you get so the quiver in the voice, right? That AI is not going to pick up in a transcript and you live have the ability to say, tell me about that. Well, what’s it like? you know, tell me, like give me a example of a weekend in which

this affected you and they’ll tell you so that I just want to get my life back and I want mom to have her life back but she can’t do it the way so anyways the point of that whole thing is like yeah you can send out AI to crawl the entire universe and in 15 seconds or less come back and tell you what he thinks but if you really want to get to this and this is the problem I had will is when you said yeah well you could get

these mind states, they’re expressed, that presumes that my client is willing to let me go and talk to those people or that they’ve done the research themselves. And I think that’s what people are either afraid to do, loathe to do, don’t think they want to spend money to do. And I think that’s the problem. They’re not willing to talk to the clients to understand the mind state.

Will Leach – Mindstate (15:59.734)
Yeah, no, it takes time and money. And frankly, there’s some ego in our businesses, right guys? Like I know my customer, I was once, I built the company to make sure that I’m satisfying that customer, you know, their needs or whatever. And so there’s some ego in there too. It says I’m good. I don’t really need it. So we’re fighting, we’re fighting our own psychology by not investing in that space. I’m redoing it all the time. I’m sure.

Tom Nixon (16:04.462)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (16:20.321)
And then there’s this trap that AI is going to answer that question for you, right? Which you can’t go to a chat GPT prompt. You can, it’ll give you an answer. I actually used this example recently where I said, let’s pretend I’m in a meta conference and I’m giving a TED talk to 100 CEOs. And I say to those 100 CEOs, what is the one thing you’re afraid of losing?

Right? And then I go to chat.gbt. I pull up my phone and I say to chat.gbt, I’m in a room with 100 CEOs. What’s the one thing they’re all afraid of losing? Now chat.gbt is going to give me an answer. And it’s probably going to be a pretty good answer because it’s not going to say, hey, I’m not in the room with you. I don’t know. It gives an answer. Now, if I just walk away blindly with that answer, statistically, it probably isn’t going to be the 100 CEOs.

Will Leach – Mindstate (17:01.643)
They’ll look really good too.

Curtis Hays (17:18.839)
their answer was, and if they’re potentially my customer, I’m going to want to know that insight over what ChatUBT gave me, which is likely going to be a pretty decent average.

Will Leach – Mindstate (17:31.756)
Yeah, sure. I think it’s just everybody’s understanding of that. These large language models, regardless whether it’s chat, GPT, Claude, Grok, whatever, they’re built on the world’s data. But if you’re making decisions for your customer on the world’s data, you’re going to get vanilla world types of answers that sound good, by the way, like we know that it looks really good rationally. Like that makes total sense. So what you have to do is you have to refine the world’s data into your customers data. Now.

There’s tools you can do that. There’s techniques. We use behavioral AI to do that stuff. So it’s very deep psychological understanding of your customer to take all that large language model, filter it through your customer’s point of view to get you something that’s much closer. But even with that, guys, you’re right. Like AI will never get you, Tom, to that point where you feel the pause, you see the quiver in the eye. And I’ve been in the closet in my book. I was in the closet where I saw what break down and she was trying to be so great.

about talking about her house. And then we got her into this moment. She broke down in her in her closet to cry. I’m like, that’s the best insight I’ve ever gotten. Because we were in the with that person in the moment when this stuff really became real. AI will always struggle at that. It’ll always show.

Tom Nixon (18:42.68)
So you referenced sort of a paradox that I run into all the time earlier, Will, is that intellectually you can tell a business owner or leadership exactly everything that we’re describing with today. They’re going to nod and say, absolutely. And then when we talk about putting this into practice, do we have to, it’s that sort of, do we have to slow down and actually talk to people? Like you said, I know my customer. So how does this break down when intellectually and you just, you threw yourself out of the bus. You’re like, I could.

make the cover of my book, anything I want. And here I am talking about features and that benefit. So why does this break down?

Will Leach – Mindstate (19:17.559)
I think that there are two things. One is the immediate need to show your value as a marketer to your founder, your company or whatever. Like, and that becomes short term focus. And if my focus is on driving revenue or maybe it’s maybe cost per lead or whatever, whatever the metric is that you’re looking at, it forces you get very myopic on the day to day versus the bigger decisions that could, or the bigger insights or decisions that could impact your brand.

years from now. So that’s the first thing. The second thing I think that comes to mind is that when we experience our brands, maybe they were going to get the mirror conversation right now, right? When we see ourselves in that company every day, we’re making decisions on behalf of our customer every single day. And because of that, you’re so myopically focused on the day to day running of your business.

that you forget the broader like, no, the customers have real needs. And actually lot of their needs have nothing to do with you, but if you just knew and you actually empathize with their needs that even are beyond what you could service them, you would become such a stronger brand. Your message would be so much more relevant. So I think that the idea is that every day we’re so short-term focused on what do we need to do to get our next quarter’s numbers, our next week’s numbers. That is a big reason why we stall out on truly understanding.

what makes our clients tick or our customers tick and what it’s going to take for them to want to buy us again and again and again. It’s just it’s all about focus.

Tom Nixon (20:57.292)
Yeah. Curtis, you live in that world too and play well in it, by the way, when we’ll talks about the myopic view of, right, give me a report on our CPLs this month versus last month. So you live in that and you’ve lived in it for years. like, where do you, how does this resonate with your evolution and now your clients evolution? Cause they’ve started to embrace some of the things that we’ve been talking about.

Curtis Hays (21:20.791)
Yeah, give Will this example, which I’ve talked about on the podcast before, which is, well, when I got into marketing, one of the reasons I got into marketing was because I watched marketing people in meetings, basically fudged the data that they would they would put together a report that only showed a good story and not truth. Yet to make it look like, hey, what they were doing was actually working. And so you’d like, well,

Last month you talked about this data, this month you’re talking about this data. Why is there no consistency in what you’re talking about? And so this agreement on what is it we’re building towards, what are the things that are important to measure and then being consistent about measuring those things. And making sure now I want to make sure we have in a system like you said earlier, marketing is now accountable to revenue.

Tom Nixon (21:53.773)
Hmm

Curtis Hays (22:12.757)
And so do we have a system from a marketing perspective that we can measure things that do align to revenue, that we can tie what we’re doing from a marketing perspective towards revenue? And I don’t know, Will, this kind of really leads into, think, a good post that you had yesterday on LinkedIn, which you got some really good feedback from, and maybe a little pushback from some people with what you were saying, which…

So you said, here’s what behavioral science taught me about CFOs. They don’t make financial decisions in meetings, they make emotional and psychological ones, which I think you were tying to the fact that like as consumers, we also make emotional decisions, correct? So you’re going to take in that emotional decision and now bringing that into the boardroom. And, but the comments that you got were really kind of seemed more like, how do we, how do we take this like certainty that the CFO is looking for, even the CMO is looking for and like,

Will Leach – Mindstate (22:51.135)
Yep, another thing.

Curtis Hays (23:08.727)
at least from a psychology perspective, actually get that in a system or get it on paper and actually measure it so that the board or the executive suite feels comfortable with the decisions.

Will Leach – Mindstate (23:21.951)
Yeah, yeah, I think where it hit the nerve was this idea that previously CMOs could come in and say, man, we got on our ad meter, we got X number of views on something, Or clicks or whatever, right? And that no longer matters to a CFO. What CFO wants is certainty and that certainty can come from data for sure. But as I talk to CMOs out there, CFOs, all because you come on with data guys, they look at them like, do I trust that data?

But just like you said, Chris, it always seems like marketing is doing a really good job, but yet I’m seeing that our pipeline is slowing down. Right. So there is some question, even if you’re doing attribution analysis and mixed model marketing, mixed modeling, all this stuff, CFOs are still questioning, but you know what? They aren’t questioning as much is when you as a CMO, as a brand manager, come in and say, here’s what makes our customers tick. And when we release this ad, here’s what we should expect to see what happens. It’s all.

Curtis Hays (23:56.141)
Alright.

Will Leach – Mindstate (24:20.383)
future focused. And if we don’t see that happen, we know enough about our customer that we can pivot very quickly. And I talked about that. Now some of the pushback I got on that was like, yes, but and the but was, I also want to make sure that we’re all aligned on the goal that I argued that’s good. I didn’t write about that. I should have written about that. Or the systems like you said, because at end of the day, you’re right, because we got to have set of systems and metrics, whether that’s, you know, cost per lead or cost per revenue, you know, generated lead, whatever.

those metrics matter a lot and they’re they’re consistent in those things. And I didn’t talk about that in the post, which some people were almost saying yes, but I think we got to a really good place. But I do know that all a CFO wants to do is if you can tell them you can count on me because I know our customers so well and I know our messaging is going to resonate because of these psychological factors. They don’t care about whether you know the mind state. They don’t care about it. They’re like, if I can count on you, you show that next month you met that revenue goal. All they want to know at that point, how do I scale?

How do we can scale this? How can we do this again and again and again? And that’s what I think CMOs currently don’t have. Or these brand managers, they’re not having, they’re trying to look at past marketing mix models, past data. We got this many clicks, therefore we should expect this many clicks next month. CFOs don’t see it that way. They’re not, there’s no way they see it that way. like, nope, I need to know that I’m gonna get that number of clicks, that number of leads, those numbers of conversions. It can’t just be based on last month’s stuff. Because Tom, would your point?

things change pretty dramatically. Just like when COVID happened, things changed dramatically and you couldn’t look at past data. You just couldn’t.

Curtis Hays (25:51.115)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (25:51.539)
things are changing so fast nowadays. mean, we thought things were changing fast in the internet age. I mean, this is just insane what we’re experiencing now, which is all the more reason why you got to keep taking the temperature of the mind state of the customer because if that’s shifting, it was temporary before, it could be fleeting now. There’s a part of me that wants to admit the following to the CFO, and is that if I can guarantee you two things if you lean into this model.

Will Leach – Mindstate (25:53.451)
LIT

Will Leach – Mindstate (26:09.717)
Very fast.

Tom Nixon (26:20.462)
whether it’s the why, what, or it’s the marketing of the mind stage. First guarantee is it’s going to work. Second guarantee, I will not be able to show you on paper where and how it worked because what I do, and that’s, I’m not in the lead gen business like Curtis’s and that’s why we work together. I’m a bull horns guy. He’s the bulls eyes guy, but I can’t do what Curtis’s does, but I know I could do this effectively to the point where this will change your business. CFO is going to, I don’t know if they’re going to buy that promise.

Will Leach – Mindstate (26:51.547)
It takes storytelling and it takes seeing some results over time and systems are returning. That’s why a lot of CMOs are being let go. Like the fact of matter is that’s happening, right? Because they’re promising the value of the long-term equity. in three years from now, four years from now, when that X happens and we’re going to be able to sustain that drought or that, you know, that poor campaign, CFOs can’t count on that. They don’t see that, right? So it’s a big deal. It’s a lot of tension.

Tom Nixon (27:16.844)
did have a client once that had to cut services with us. was during one of the real bad downturns, but it kept good terms. Years later, they came back and rehired me. They’re having a great year. I’m thinking, well, why do need me if you’re having all this great? I asked them, what’s been going so well? They said, well, all the things that you told us to do three years ago, we did, and it’s paying off.

I think God if I would have told you just wait three years back then you would have said no you’re crazy, but but it

Curtis Hays (27:48.131)
And it’s hard to measure that, right? It’s hard to get that into a dashboard or report or, you know, I have a really good example. So Mark Schaeffer, I’m sure you read this, Tom, today, or it’s in your inbox to read later. here in, actually, this is, he linked to an older post that’s from October. And there’s an interview with the founder of Liquid Death.

Tom Nixon (27:52.078)
That’s my point, yeah.

Curtis Hays (28:13.91)
Liquid Death, if you’re familiar with it, is this. And last episode I talked about Popi, so I don’t know why I’m on the like sodas and soft drinks and those types of things now. so, yeah, right. We need to get some sponsors. So the headline for this piece that he’s got here is you only win with brand. And this thing that I’ve been struggling with is what you’re saying was like brand in the end wins. We see that time and time again, but you can’t measure

Tom Nixon (28:22.094)
Are they sponsoring the podcast by any chance?

Will Leach – Mindstate (28:24.597)
No.

Curtis Hays (28:42.646)
brand or it’s very difficult to measure in these monthly reports, these quarterly reports with CFOs. says, entrepreneurs create something new. They have a product name and maybe they hire a graphic designer, but it’s not that interesting or smartly branded. Later in the game, when they have money, they hire marketing agencies to build campaigns around this uninteresting thing to make people care about it or somehow make it relevant when it’s not. But when you have the people involved at the beginning who understand

culture and psychology and have them create the brand, it’s a far more powerful position. And I feel like as marketers, we’re left in this position. Oftentimes, a client is coming to us who doesn’t have a brand and they don’t understand that yet. That if you don’t truly understand the psychology of your customer, and if you can’t answer the question, why do people buy from you? It’s very difficult for me as a marketer to do much with that.

because I don’t know why people buy from you. So how do I activate that out when I’m doing campaigns and those types of things? Yes, I can put money in channels, but those are just levers that only go so far. There’s nothing you can really scale with something like that. So, Will, it looks like you have something you want to say about that.

Will Leach – Mindstate (30:00.586)
Yeah, let me. Well, I would just before this podcast, I was talking to the former CMO of 70 11 big company and she was talking about that. We’re talking about CMOs in general and people trying to run businesses right now. And there’s this doom and gloom around AI and that our agents gonna basically make brands irrelevant. And there’s a lot of people that believe that’s true, right? There’s a lot of people that think that agents are going to talk to other agents and AI and brands will collapse because people are not making decisions. There’s a whole other group of people.

that talk about no, the brand will be your moat. The brand, it’s not gonna be operations, it’s not gonna no longer be distribution, it’s not gonna be your pricing, it’s gonna be the brand is the one thing that the LLMs will even know and go, there’s trust on this brand, there’s meaning of this brand, and it’ll actually bring it out, that will be your moat. I lean more on that end, right, on the psychology side, and that’s why it’s even more important, I think, right now, because I think there’s a lot of marketing spend being pulled back saying, you know,

will AI make our brand irrelevant? I almost think it’s going to be the only thing that’s going to make your brand viable will be your brand and what you mean to people. And then you better to do that. Well, you better understand the psychology of your customers.

Tom Nixon (31:10.254)
Absolutely. You mentioned earlier, I do want to go into it. You said maybe we’ll come back to it. RAS, which is the checks notes reticular activating system. See, I really did check my notes. Did I get that right by the way? So tell us what that is and tell us how that maps to what we can do as marketers to market to mind state.

Will Leach – Mindstate (31:22.739)
Yeah, yeah.

Will Leach – Mindstate (31:29.267)
Right. So everybody like you’re being inundated with stimuli, billions of pieces of stimuli are hitting you all the time. Voice, temperature, things in your visual periphery, like your mind is constantly trying to process threats and what’s the meaning of the world, right? So how does it do that? There’s this thing called the RAS, the Reticular Activating System, which basically is a bunch of cells. It’s the base of the brain that is constantly filtering all of these things from your conscious awareness. Because if you had to take

all of the stimuli that’s being hit at you, not just marketing guys, like everything, then your brain would just be overwhelmed. You couldn’t make a decision. So the RAS is think of it as a filter. And how does it filter? It filters based upon what your goals are, your psychology, what’s important to you in that moment. How that maps to mind states is that if I understand that my customer’s goal is to, let’s say, not get fired from his CFO next quarter,

because I’m really worried about my pipeline. Like that’s a very specific goal, right? It’s a very emotional goal. We’re not talking about I want better ad spend, whatever. It’s a very, I don’t want to get fired next month. He’s given me a 90 day window. My pipeline looks like it’s getting softer. What the ARIUS does is anything that is speaking to that problem will come to mind. It will get through the filter. That’s why it matters. If you understand what your customer’s deep pain,

like what they’re trying to avoid, that fear that they have or who they want to be on their best day, that the pleasure, I think we talked about it, Tom, the pain or the gain. If you know that, you now know what makes your messaging go through that filter. If you messaged it, anything else, here’s my feature, here’s this funny, here’s this funny comedian on my ad, here’s a sexy girl on my ad. I am telling you, yeah, you may get a pop and you may think you’re aware of that. It will not do anything to persuade your customer to buy you. You have to understand that pain or that gain that your customer is looking for.

We talked about the bleeding neck problem on the last lesson. Similar idea. When you understand the bleeding neck problem that your customer has and speak to that, it makes its way through the filter. And if you don’t get through the filter, it doesn’t matter how much psychology doesn’t matter how much your pricing works, how great your product is. It doesn’t matter. It’ll never be. It’ll never, never be acknowledged consciously.

Tom Nixon (33:43.375)
Did we talk about last episode? It’s sort of peripherally related to this is that when you buy a new car, all of a sudden you see that car everywhere. You didn’t see it before, but now your mind is connecting dots, right? And so the same thing happens. And I think, I think a lot of the times the root of the mirror marketing problem, Curtis, that we’ve been talking about is when challenged with, say, creating this new website, messaging for the website. I think there’s this presumption and check me on this, Will, that

Will Leach – Mindstate (33:54.677)
That’s it. If you’d like that, yeah, that’s it.

Tom Nixon (34:11.756)
We presume the customer has already decided they’re going to buy something. And now it’s just a matter of, it you or somebody else? If for some customers that is maybe where they are in the customer journey for others, it’s just, I feel like my neck is bleeding. I wonder if I should make that stop. What would happen if I don’t? Right. And so they might be coming to your website with that. And if you’re already talking about products and features, right. Then you’re not, you’re not going to connect those dots with that customer. And it’s hard to get our

Clients who are coming up with the honest to come up with messaging for their advertising website, whatever to stick in those terms that don’t just think they’re there to compare your features against somebody else. Somebody might, but most aren’t. Isn’t that right? Well,

Will Leach – Mindstate (34:52.691)
Exactly. I would tell you if you’re looking for Hey, what’s the one thing or two things I should take away from this? I think the first thing you should be thinking about is, do you know that pain or the bleeding neck problem? What’s that problem that if they don’t stop it, that bad bad things could happen to them, right? Or their business? Or what is that aspiration that they really seek that if they don’t reach that aspirational self like that perfect person on their best day, that they’re going to be regretful. If you don’t put that

The first thing you do, if you know that you should put that in the subject line on every email you said. It’s going to make, cause it doesn’t matter if I just cut down the email and I delete it. have, if you’re not noticed, right? You put that in every subject on every offer you have. The first thing you should be doing is talking about that. That would be the thing. And then if you’re in a meeting, you guys should be doing this too. But if you’re in a meeting and we’re talking about any kind of marketing and the first thing we’re not talking about is what’s the customer’s goal? Like what’s the customer’s pain point? If we’re talking about

Here’s why I have this idea. want, we’re to do a quarter for a new relaunch of our whatever. You should stop the meeting. You just stop the meeting and say, we’re not going to talk about a quarter for the first thing we talk about in any marketing meetings. It should be, what are our customers goals? What is that bleeding neck problem? If you’re not going to start there, that doesn’t matter about your relaunch. And so those are two things that I’ve, I’ve talked to my clients about putting that pain point in the, in the header of a post, putting it in the subject line.

on the very top of your web page. Maybe not the very first thing, but certainly you better start talking about that within the first scroll of your website or you’re just going to lose them.

Tom Nixon (36:27.31)
I love that. wish we should adopt that Curtis start every strategy meeting with reviewing the ICP. What makes our clients tech?

Curtis Hays (36:32.364)
I like that one.

Yeah.

Will Leach – Mindstate (36:35.731)
It feels redundant sometimes. totally get it. until it really is not, if it’s not starting your meeting like that, then we were not ready to have a meeting. We’re not.

Tom Nixon (36:42.54)
It gives somebody the opportunity though to raise their hand and say, I’m not sure that’s true anymore. Wait, what do you mean by that? Well, I was in a client meeting the other day. They didn’t bring up any of that stuff. They were actually talking about this other thing. So talk about shift marketing shift, Curtis.

Will Leach – Mindstate (36:47.274)
Yeah, I love it.

Curtis Hays (36:57.423)
but I have some clients who don’t even know who their customer is still. So we’ve got to, we’ve got to go back a little bit more. And let’s define the customer and then we can we can say, okay, do we are we still on the same page with their goal, but no.

Tom Nixon (37:01.706)
Yeah.

Will Leach – Mindstate (37:10.805)
But Tom, what it also does is you talked about this idea of when we are in our business and we’re marketing, we just have so much focus on ourselves as the brand. What that would do is start that meeting off with is we’re not focused on ourselves. We’re going to focus on our customer. Imagine if every company did that, how much more respected marketing would be. And it doesn’t feel so sleazy to customers because you’re constantly trying to push your stuff on me if we actually spoke to our customers about their needs. Like it would change marketing’s perceptions universally.

Curtis Hays (37:40.803)
Well, you helped me do this, Tom. So the Kaleidoscope website says, if your marketing spend is increasing, but sales aren’t, something is broken.

And so it’s like.

Tom Nixon (37:53.974)
It used to say something like we are a performance marketing agency that does.

Curtis Hays (37:58.008)
company, basically. Yep. So now it’s, know, and this, this, you know, it, discover what’s dragging down your ROI and how you can fix it. Like something’s broke. So what we’re saying, you don’t know what it is. We can come and help diagnose it. Let’s figure out what it might be. I think it’s probably you don’t know your customer personally, because I think that’s where most people are at today. And I didn’t get a chance to comment on this, Will, but I think you’re

Tom Nixon (38:20.141)
mm-hmm

Curtis Hays (38:27.319)
your conversation with the 7-Eleven executive was right on point. And that’s why Tom and I are doing this podcast. That’s why we’re talking about these things. Brand is going to be your moat. We are firm believers in AI and we’re trying to figure out how to use it for ourselves and for our clients. But the differentiator at the end of the day, even when it comes to AI, is the context around your brand. And if you know that well, you can make AI work for you.

If you don’t know it well, be prepared to drift. Because in drift, what was it? was, Tom, what’s the saying? slowly and then suddenly.

Tom Nixon (39:08.43)
Gradually and then suddenly

Curtis Hays (39:10.391)
Gradually and then suddenly. Yep.

Tom Nixon (39:12.366)
I like to quote literature as an English major. That’s one of my favorite quotes, but it’s become a theme of season three here because gradually you don’t notice. Suddenly you do, but suddenly it didn’t happen without gradually.

Will Leach – Mindstate (39:27.019)
And suddenly happens a lot more nowadays, right? The market changes so fast, it suddenly happens a lot more.

Tom Nixon (39:29.87)
It does. It does.

Curtis Hays (39:32.526)
So Will, how are you using AI? We’ve talked a little bit about it. We’ve talked previously that it’s in some ways a false profit, that I can jump in, I can have it build me a campaign in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, could do my entire social media marketing for me for the next year. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna land with my customers, right? So all that work for nothing.

It’s just noise. And everybody’s doing that right now at lightning speed. And so again, that’s where I think the mode is. But for you from a psychology perspective, where are you finding the use for AI specifically? Maybe what could a business owner or somebody in marketing take away today that’s like, here’s how I might use it differently.

Will Leach – Mindstate (40:06.161)
It’s cheap and easy.

Will Leach – Mindstate (40:22.847)
Yeah. So, you know, we’ll go back to the conversation where if you’re using a large language model by itself to do campaigns, you’re taking data that’s collectively of the world and has nothing to do with your customer. And it will, it will trick you into thinking it does know your customer, but it doesn’t. So what we’re doing with AI is we’re building out behavioral intelligence. call Bevy. And what Bevy does is we work with our clients to first get their data on their customer. If they have it, sometimes they don’t.

Right. Just like you said, if that’s the case, we look at review data or we will actually go do and figure out how to get the data on your behalf. So building out a customer foundation, a brand foundation, because you don’t want to have messaging. If AI doesn’t understand your brand tone of voice, your unique selling proposition, what’s your positioning in the marketplace, who are your competitors, et cetera. We build out a brand foundation and then we build out a behavioral science foundation, which is just the elements of the book guys, right? Like what are your, help you identify your customer goals, the motivations, regulatory approach, all those mind states things.

We wrap that up into a system where we have two basic benefits, if you will. First is a 24 seven always on customer persona that you can talk to. So if you’re in a meeting and all of a sudden, know, somebody has this idea right now, you’re like, well, what do you guys think? Is it a good idea? Is it not a bad idea? And we’re going with our mirror cells. We’re thinking about, do I think this is a good idea? And whoever wins is probably the CMO that says, I think it’s a good idea or the founder of the company, whatever. What if you had your customer?

So what if your customer is on an AI phone and you said, hey, Samantha, here’s this idea. What do you think about this idea? But she’s going back to her subconscious understanding of how she makes decisions. So we’re building our EQ personas, emotionally intelligent personas for clients. And then the back end of it, okay, so now that we have a deep understanding, I can ask my customer a question. She’ll give me feedback based upon what we have trained her on, on her customer data, on the brand. Then the other side of the house is,

Now go help and tweak messaging. So I don’t believe AI is great, honestly, at taking concepts and developing your email campaigns. I do think AI is really good at tweaking that stuff and editing for you. So if you understood your psychological drivers or your customers, run your campaigns, run your ads through this and let her give you feedback. It’s not testing. like, here’s what I like about this ad. Here’s what I don’t like about this ad based upon her mind state. Here’s what I would do differently if I was you. So it gives you the ability to have your customers weigh in on all these decisions.

Will Leach – Mindstate (42:44.723)
I’m trying to bring the voice of the customer into your collective empathy in your company, but also into your marketing.

Curtis Hays (42:51.531)
Yeah, really smart. So you’re saying you’re not just going to Claude and using the brand voice skill to build your brand voice in five minutes.

Will Leach – Mindstate (42:58.333)
No, no. Guys, it’ll look good. It’ll look good. it’ll take you like where Tom said that very quick, like, gosh, we really made a mistake. And in today’s world, you make one mistake, one mistake and your brand’s never considered again. It just isn’t right. There’s too many brands out there doing the same thing. So you get one shot at this life.

Tom Nixon (43:19.062)
Well, should we wrap up there? I’m going to ask for some homework assignments. Well, on our last episode, the homework assignment was we asked listeners to go and talk to at least five of their customers and ask them why they bought from them. Right. And raise your hand if you did that. Nobody did it probably I’m assuming, because we just discussed why nobody wants to do that. Next week, we are going to talk to a person who is a master market researcher who goes in.

does customer segmentation, customer interviews, and does the quantitative data collecting at scale. So that’ll be, if you haven’t done your homework from last week, then I guess wait till next week because then you’ll learn how to do it properly. So my homework assignment is going to be simply go to your homepage and look at all the copy above the fold. They call it the hero section and identify who the hero is. If it’s we, our company, if you’re using those sort of first person singular plural pronouns, then I think it’s probably not right.

If it’s saying you or implying you then second person, I think then you’re onto something. That’s my homework assignment. Will, what would you give homework assignment for listeners so they can start putting this into practice? Obviously go buy the book, Marketing to Mind States.

Will Leach – Mindstate (44:29.023)
Yeah, thank you. I think that homework is spot on. I’m to go back to in any meeting, you’re going to talk about your marketing before you start talking about here’s what we need. Here’s our metrics, whatever. The first thing you should talk about is let’s talk about a customer. Who are they and what is their pain or what is that pleasure that they’re seeking? If you can’t talk about that, just stop the meeting.

Tom Nixon (44:52.578)
love that.

Curtis Hays (44:53.665)
I like it too. Yeah, I want to start using it. I do. Well, and I think Will would like this one. One of the real values we found recently, and I know you’d probably make more use of it than I am right now, but at least I’m using it as been call transcripts. So we’ve got, I’ve got one client, 16,600 phone calls from last year that we ran through AI and found a lot of common themes. And those common themes,

Tom Nixon (44:54.958)
Curtis, you gotta have something too.

Curtis Hays (45:21.755)
have been brought into this year’s positioning strategy and how we make use of that in all of our marketing campaigns.

Will Leach – Mindstate (45:32.332)
So Curtis, let me build on that. Just do this one extra homework assignment. Take the book, Marketing Mind States, and just say, based on this book, what mind states are you seeing in that Google’s doing that right now? Like, right, they don’t have special training, but there’s a guy at Google who’s a fan of the book, and you’d be surprised out of those call transcripts, you may find some psychological factors or some goals. So even if you don’t know the book, just say, what goals do you see? What are people’s aspirations? What are people’s pain points?

Curtis Hays (45:39.041)
Yep.

Will Leach – Mindstate (46:00.276)
Run that through that and you may find some really good stuff in those call transcripts. We’re doing that right now for our clients, for one of our clients and it’s brought about, they didn’t have to go and do new research. They’re like, we have 60,000 hours worth of customer care calls. I’m like, let’s just run it through AI. And it identified MindStates. think they were pretty, when you looked at them, they looked pretty good.

Curtis Hays (46:20.577)
Yeah, all right, we’ll do it. Appreciate it.

Tom Nixon (46:24.142)
Cool. All right. Well, we’ll link to the book. We’ll plug the book. I don’t know if you want to tease you have a new product release coming out. Well, but we can link to your website. What is just give us a quick tease so we know what’s coming.

Will Leach – Mindstate (46:35.401)
It was that, it was that bevy, the behavioral intelligence platform that we allow people to optimize their messaging to their customer subconscious.

Tom Nixon (46:37.304)
Happy.

Tom Nixon (46:43.0)
So is Bevy trained like ChatGPT to be obsequious and say, this is excellent. Your thinking is right on. And here’s why.

Will Leach – Mindstate (46:50.921)
Nope, she’s pretty contrarian actually. So be careful there. We have to actually talk about sometimes she could be a little bit too forceful, but she does it in a nicer kind of way, at least recently, but no, she’s, she’s pretty contrarian.

Tom Nixon (46:53.048)
Look at them!

Tom Nixon (47:02.722)
I will f-

Curtis Hays (47:03.331)
I like this compression test or friction test you’re doing too, where you’re building the personas and then testing messaging against those, I even of course there’s likely cost to using the tool, but if you think about it from a business owner perspective, you’re doing that in a campaign anyway, you’re spending money to put it into a Google ad or a meta ad or on LinkedIn or something. So…

Either you’re running a thousand dollar, $10,000 test there, or you run it through a platform first and get the feedback. It’s six to one half dozen the other. I’d lean towards putting it through a tool that gives you some feedback, but know your customer first.

Will Leach – Mindstate (47:41.225)
Because mistakes today cost your business a lot more than they used to. A big mistake today could cost your business. So you try to do the pre-test.

Curtis Hays (47:48.663)
Yup.

Tom Nixon (47:49.614)
Well, and just the final thought going back to AI is AI is going to accelerate, amplify whatever you decide to activate. So if you’re right, great. If you’re wrong, that’s expensive. So, all right. With that, we will thank Will Leach for coming back to the podcast. We’ll have to have you back next season. This is one of my favorite topics and one of my favorite guests, because it leans right into this kind of where my mind state always is. So thank you, Will, and come back next week every.

everyone and learn what you should have done when you were supposed to have interviewed your customers. We’ll see you next time on Bullhorns and Bullseyes.