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Emotional Motivators, Neuromarketing Principles, and Psychological Creative | Sarah Levinger
29 Plays1 year ago
The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers are managing their media mix to drive growth!
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Sarah is a behavior strategist and expert in consumer psychology. Voted as a Top 20 E-commerce Expert to follow in 2023, she works as a paid creative consultant leveraging psychological principles to grow E-commerce brands. She also runs the wildly popular newsletter "The Best Brands Do This" where she shares advanced neuromarketing secrets that billion-dollar brands use to convert customers.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH SARAH: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahlevinger/
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Transcript
Introduction: The Efficient Spend Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Efficient Spend podcast where we help startups spend their marketing budget more efficiently. My guest today is Sarah Levenger. Sarah, thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to chat.
Sarah Levenger's Journey into Marketing
00:00:13
Speaker
Yeah, I'm really excited to dive into your experience with psychological creative. Would love if you could give a brief background into your background. Yes, absolutely. So I started out in the space probably about
00:00:27
Speaker
Oh my gosh. I think I've been in marketing for about 12, 13 years. Um, and it was interesting because when I first started, I didn't really mean to like do any of the things that I did. That's kind of a big piece of my story is all of this is on accident. Uh, but I started at 20. I was like super crazy young when I got into marketing. Um, most because I was taking like elective classes at college for graphic design back when InDesign was a thing.
00:00:52
Speaker
And my professor at the time had told me, you know, you don't have to have a degree in this. If you really enjoy graphic design, if you want to just go start working in the industry, you could just like start be a freelancer, create a business and go do it. And I was like, cool. I don't want to pay for school. So I dropped out of college and then went straight into the industry. So I started freelancing at 20 and had a lot of different clients that kept asking me over and over.
00:01:15
Speaker
Do you know how to do WordPress websites? Do you know how to do email marketing? Do you know how to do Facebook ads? And I would always say yes, even though I had no idea how to do it. So like I'd have to go learn how to do all these things. Um, and I, I have a love hate relationship with the internet. I don't like truncated information. And every time I tried to learn stuff from the internet, it was all just like bites of what I needed. And I I'm like full context person. So I would go to the library of all places.
00:01:41
Speaker
And check out all these books on how to do all these marketing things. And right next to that section was all the psychology books, like consumer behavior and like economics and really interesting things on psychology. So it was entirely an accident that I started researching all this stuff, but then I just did it for 10 straight years. Cause I was just obsessed. Like it was fascinating how the brain worked and how the body works and how behavior is actually generated inside the brain. So I did that for.
Networking and Growth During COVID-19
00:02:08
Speaker
You know, 10, 11 years accidentally fell into paid advertising because I had a client who was like, do you know how to do this? So that was right before COVID hit. And then in COVID, I had like nobody to talk to because it was COVID. And I had two kids, five year olds, three year old. And I was just like, I need people to talk to. We went on Twitter just to find friends in the industry.
00:02:31
Speaker
and ended up growing a following just cause I was sharing all these really weird psychology hacks that I knew and it just exploded. So yeah, I had really humble beginnings and it just kind of turned into this based on right time, right place and right skill set, I think more than anything else.
00:02:49
Speaker
That's really cool. Yeah, I think the best marketers are the marketers that understand people and are interested in people the most. And even outside of my full time job, I'm really interested in meditation and habit development. I've done retreats and like part of me is, you know, kind of very focused on
00:03:13
Speaker
being present and calm and different habits to do that. And then the other part of it is like, how am I acquiring customers online, right? Which is this kind of like very weird dichotomy, but understanding, like approaching marketing from a psychological perspective is I think the best way to do that.
Integrating Psychology into Onboarding and Strategy
00:03:38
Speaker
I wanna dive into
00:03:41
Speaker
you know, how you work with brands. And I know you focus on performance creative, but when you're onboarding a new brand or client, what's the onboarding experience and process that you go through that blends in and ties in elements of human psychology and things like that to be, to output a very like focused strategy, right?
00:04:06
Speaker
This is a great question. My VA would tell you that I'm not as psychological with my own business. Which is totally true. There's all kinds of like psychological effects that come into play when you're working on your own stuff. Especially when it's like your baby, your business, your thing. It gets a little harder for you to pull yourself out. And this is a hundred percent true for me. To pull yourself out of the business and start like strategizing high level of how would you just take this particular business model to the next level.
00:04:34
Speaker
So for a long time, I didn't have any onboarding employees. I didn't really have a strategy because I wasn't, I wasn't really selling anything. Like I was a media buyer, you know, for four years. So I was just buying ads more than anything else. And then I started having people come into the ecosystem and start asking me, do you have any classes? Do you have any trainings? Do you have courses? Like, can we work with you? Do you consult? And I just was like, sure. Because that's what I always do is like, yeah, absolutely.
00:05:02
Speaker
but then I had to create those from scratch. So for a long time, I didn't have anything to sell anybody. And then in about, probably about a year ago in 2022, I went full on into consulting. And so I had to generate something, right? That would help people get the results that they wanted. Now I'm in paid advertising. So those results are almost always, we need more sales and we need it cheap. And that was the whole goal. So I had started,
00:05:28
Speaker
to kind of develop this system to where I could get people like insane amounts of decrease in costs pretty quickly. The best I ever saw was about a 40% decrease in ad costs, like to get somebody in the door CPA wise. And then the least amount I ever got for dropping CPA was about 32%. So like, and that was within about two weeks. So every client that came in the door, I was testing this model and this methodology of using
00:05:56
Speaker
psychology to help them drop costs.
Challenges in Applying Psychology to Business Strategy
00:06:00
Speaker
Onboarding wise though, I had basically nothing in place. It was just like, get on a call with Sarah, talk to them and then they hired me. I don't know. I feel bad. I didn't have anything in place at all. And what are those quick wins? What is that low hanging fruit that you're doing in two weeks? Yes. So the model was really interesting because I didn't know I was doing this and I think some of the best
00:06:22
Speaker
uh, products in particular or services are built on not knowing you're doing something, even though you're doing it. Mostly because science tells us the brain is much better at psychologically doing things in the background. The, the actual subconscious is much stronger of a computer than the conscious mind is. Um, and 95% of our decisions are made from the subconscious mind. So we're running on autopilot most of the time. So what I was doing was I had came on board as like basically a junior media buyer with an agency.
00:06:52
Speaker
And really good friend of mine, Matt was very nice and was like, I'll teach you kind of how I do my media buying and then we can just move you up in the ranks. We found out very quickly, Sarah's like an okay media buyer, but I was much better at doing creative and psychology. So I was spending way more time on actually generating the creative than I was in the ad account.
00:07:14
Speaker
So pretty quickly he was like, do you want to just move over and do all of our creative? Cause you seem like you really enjoy it. So while I was doing that, I had to figure out a way to generate fast results for these clients without having to spend more money to do it. So I was prioritizing statics over anything else.
00:07:31
Speaker
Cause I could create statics in Canva in literally 10 minutes. We didn't have to hire anybody to do video or get a creator on board, nothing. So one of the very first things I did was I went on Instagram of all places, went to the brand page and I would start reading hundreds of thousands of comments beneath them.
00:07:50
Speaker
specifically the pieces of organic content that had the highest views. So anything that was just like really viral, I'd go and I'd read all of the comments beneath that. And again, I didn't know I was doing things that I was just really just trying to figure out what to run basically. So then I would take all those review downs and stick them into a spreadsheet and just start trying to figure out
00:08:10
Speaker
What was coming out of there that was closest to what I wanted to say to these people? And that was based upon 10 years of psychology research. I already knew we needed a lot of emotion to be able to stop people on a page. So I would choose specific phrases that came out of the like customers mouth and then rearrange them into an app.
00:08:30
Speaker
And again, that was entirely on accident. Over the course of about two to three years, I took the system and made it way more robust. So I actually have an AI generator that does this for me now, where it will categorize all of the reviews that come off of a brand's website into nine different emotional core, like motivators.
Leveraging AI for Emotional Analysis in Marketing
00:08:46
Speaker
That just helps me understand which direction do we need to go messaging wise to be able to cut costs down. The faster you can connect to the subconscious emotion, the cheaper your ads are going to be.
00:08:59
Speaker
So that's what I've prioritized over time. I'm not gonna ask you to kind of say all nine, because I don't know if you'll be able to remember all of them off of the back, but within those different categories, and I agree, I think emotional-based creative, engaging with that consumer also always helps.
00:09:24
Speaker
How do you determine which ones to use based on what audience you're reaching and the cycle and the consideration phase that they're in, in determining that product? It's something I always think about where if you're trying to create urgency and you're reaching an audience that is basically bought in, you're going for a different emotion than if you are
00:09:50
Speaker
uh, reaching kind of a passive, uh, listener that could be interested in your product, right? So how do you think through that? The interesting part about consideration windows and like where you are in your journey, most marketers will come at it from the standpoint of product aware, solution aware, right? Like unaware or most aware type of the thing. We've heard this kind of model over and over.
00:10:12
Speaker
I think we need to go a little bit deeper than that though of just how aware you are and go more towards where are you right before you hit that point, right? So if somebody is what we'd call problem aware, they know they have an issue like I'm 20 pounds overweight or my dog won't stop barking, like those type of problems, but they don't know what to do about it. That's more top of funnel is what we usually bucket that in.
00:10:40
Speaker
So usually I'll see a lot of marketers come at it from an education standpoint, educate, educate, educate. Now, the funny part about doing that is they get stuck. Marketers get stuck in this mode of I just need to educate people and teach them why they need this and then they'll want it. That's not entirely how the brain works, unfortunately. And I think it's important for us to have psychology knowledge so that we understand you're not persuading anybody to do anything.
The Role of Emotions in Effective Marketing
00:11:09
Speaker
Not even Ogilvy was persuading people to do things, right? Like it's very important to realize all the emotions and all the desires that anybody has are deep within the subconscious and have been there for sometimes decades, right? Sometimes some of these people, depending on what somebody said to them in high school will have a deep need to look better or buy faster cars or wear fancy clothes because of something that happened 20 years ago.
00:11:36
Speaker
that just got stuck, right? This changes the entirety of the behavior that they have in their everyday life. So going back to like how we put this into marketing, when it comes to awareness levels and trying to decide which emotions go into which awareness level, it's important to know that emotions change depending on the time of year, depending on when you are in life, depending on what age you are, who's around you, what lifestyle you live.
00:12:02
Speaker
So the more data we can get on what that person's currently living like, the closer we can get. So I try and identify those emotions that are coming out of the reviews, because it helps me kind of understand the core emotions of the whole, you know, addressable market.
00:12:20
Speaker
But I also like to spend some time working on thinking about what this person is actually living like. Because as we talked about before, like you have two dogs, two cats, that's very specific to you, but that also changes a lot about how you behave on a daily basis. There's gonna be a time of the day where you always leave your house to walk the dogs. That's an interesting behavior that I need to know as a marketer. So long way to say. To be able to market to a specific,
00:12:49
Speaker
awareness level, you really have to know where people are in life. Sure. You know, I wonder, like, I'm thinking about the brand that I work on full time itself, it's a credit building app, right? And there are 100 million Americans in the US that have lower no credit, big number, right? There's probably some percentage of them that are problem aware. And you could
00:13:17
Speaker
run all of the ads in the world of here's how to build credit. Here's why these things matter. But to your point, if you take it from a perspective of habit development, they need to also build that habit. It's like you could probably leverage similar ways that like, just to go on a completely opposite example,
00:13:46
Speaker
Alcoholics Anonymous works with getting people to not drink, right? Like there's different. Yeah. So, I guess, as you think about, you know, pulling from these different emotions,
00:14:03
Speaker
When you're constructing kind of a creative roadmap of things to test, you mentioned kind of the nine emotions you're pulling from. What are other elements that you're using to, to come up with kind of a thesis of here's what I'm looking to do. Some of this comes down to how much knowledge do you have about humans, right? So I do a lot of research every single week on
00:14:27
Speaker
mostly just studies about what's happening within the human brain, what's happening within the human mind. So I can stay up to date on like how the brain works. And then a lot of this comes down to understanding generational impacts. Cause the culture impacts a lot of what you do in your life.
00:14:43
Speaker
depending on where you live. If you live in the South, you have a very different idea of what life should be like, what freedoms you should be, what's the word, like privy to, right? How you should kind of structure your weeks, especially around Sundays, if you're religious, right? Like there's a lot of different pieces of your life that come from where you live, your location, depending on your political views, depending on your religious views, how many family members you have,
00:15:10
Speaker
birth order is also a really interesting study that's coming out right now for psychology and how you see the world. So I'm just weird and I do a lot of research into all these different things. But yeah, some of this comes down to understanding just how people work. The easiest way to do this is to just start
00:15:29
Speaker
Digesting information so the nudge podcast is one of the ones that I always listen to every time a new episode comes out. Marketing to mind states is probably one of the best books I've ever read he a good friend will leach wrote it he's. An economist been doing it for like 25 years and so the nine different emotions that I use to kind of.
00:15:49
Speaker
judge how people are feeling. That's his model that I based that entire framework off of. Uh, so just getting more information helps a lot. And then for me, I think it's really important to understand the generational impacts because generational marketing, I think is going to be really an impactful new kind of way to market to people. Cause yeah, depending on the generation you're in, you have a very different behavioral set than everybody else. So yeah.
00:16:19
Speaker
When you're talking kind of about how humans make decisions and how we are for the most part on autopilot, are you kind of insinuating that you develop messaging that speaks more to that subconscious state?
00:16:38
Speaker
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So best example of this, I have a whole bunch of different brands that have run a ton of messaging for me. But one of the best ones that I had was a brand that made non-alcoholic tea. So they basically just put hops inside tea. So it tastes super close to hoppy beer, right? But there's no alcohol in it and it's really low calorie. It's like really good for you, right?
00:17:01
Speaker
They hired me to come in and basically understand where their consumers set psychologically. And I did a ton of research. I ran the NLP report. I identified all of our different and nine emotional motivators and tried to hone in on what do these people want most? And that I think for most brands is very difficult to identify. What does this person want most?
00:17:21
Speaker
So when I went through, there was a really impactful review way down from like three or four years ago that I had to like dig up. And it said specifically, I want to thank this brand for giving me back a taste I thought I'd never have again. And that like, even today, it like just gives me goosebumps. Cause it's like, it's a happy tea. You wouldn't think that this is something that's like iconically deep for people, right? It's just something you drink.
00:17:48
Speaker
But for somebody who's given up alcohol, whether it's for health or for habit, you know, whatever it is, they still want it. They still want, the behavior is still there that I want to taste hops and I can't, right? So now we're dealing with a person who physically is feeling friction on a daily or weekly basis when they get around their friends or they're in some sort of a party situation where they want to consume something that they like, but they physically cannot.
00:18:18
Speaker
So identifying those particular behaviors is so incredibly important because it tells you how deeply emotionally tied people are to your brand. And you'll see it very quickly. Once you start doing the research, you'll either see superficial attachment or you'll see deep attachment. And how deep it goes usually has a direct effect on your bottom line. So it's kind of important.
00:18:47
Speaker
I think that's a really good example of identifying demand for a thing and then capturing it, which aligns itself very well to performance creative.
Building Brand Identity with Emotional Triggers
00:19:01
Speaker
What are your thoughts on maybe creating that demand if it didn't exist and how do you go about that? This is such a good one. I actually had this conversation with a client probably about a week ago sometime.
00:19:13
Speaker
There was a time where the name Barnum and Bailey meant basically nothing to anybody, right? But now anytime I tell anybody Barnum and Bailey, you know exactly what that is. It has something to do with a circus, right? Even if you don't know the story of Barnum and Bailey, it has something to do with traveling circus. The funny part is with traveling circuses, especially if you're new to the industry, you basically have to come into your market and immediately establish rapport with people
00:19:42
Speaker
And your marketing has to be spot on because you're only in that town for maybe two weeks and then you move on. So the weird part about Barnum and Bailey's marketing system, and I highly suggest if you haven't read their story, it's just like bloggers. The weird part about their particular product and service and trying to match right with the actual target they're going into, the market they're going into, their market moved. And every time they came in, they were an unknown.
00:20:06
Speaker
So the fascinating part about this is you can 100% attach yourself to somebody very, very quickly.
00:20:14
Speaker
if you're capitalizing on the basic core emotions that rely on every single human, curiosity, fear, surprise, right? And really when it comes to it, just resource allocation, you know, safety, health, food, water, shelter, those types of things. So it's, yeah, it's just really interesting because there's,
00:20:38
Speaker
There's a lot of brands that think that you really need to have like a really robust system for coming out your marketing. And I'm like, Barnum and Bailey did it every single week. What did they do like when they went into those areas? Uh, most of the time they had, they sent somebody before.
00:20:57
Speaker
So they would send someone up and they would go in and basically start just like getting in the community and talking about their comment, like Barnard babies coming in, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, very, very quickly within three or four days, they would come set up this huge tent that was red and white usually that had all these animals sitting outside of it. So it was basically generating
00:21:17
Speaker
like virality without having to do almost anything just based upon how they looked, right? They had a very specific look to them that was different than anything you've seen before. So this goes down to some psychology of novelty, which I think for paid advertising in particular is really, really important. Novel things get noticed. Now, novelty can be taken overboard, which I've seen a lot of brands do where they try and be really different and it tanks. And they just, everybody's like, I don't know why this didn't work. Like we're so novel.
00:21:47
Speaker
People don't want scary novel, they want familiar novel. So they did a study on like the top 10 Billboard songs. I think this was way back in like 2014, 2015. And within the study, they found that to get into the top 10 songs on Billboard, you only had to have a 16% differentiation between all the other songs on the top 10.
00:22:11
Speaker
So it wasn't like these songs were drastically different from each other or in different genres or just, you know, sounded different. 16% was all it was. That just blows my mind. I'm like, you don't even need to be super novel. You just have to be like a little bit novel. Right, right. Well, and yeah, I mean that it's like a novel elasticity. It's like making a little change in novelty can have a big impact.
00:22:41
Speaker
Um, yeah, I think through like, um, Tesla's pricing model and how they're reducing pricing now to capture a wildly, wildly larger percentage of the market by just making a small, uh, relative relative change. Um, yeah, that's super cool. Uh, pattern interruption is, is an interesting one. And I want to get your take on this a lot of.
The Impact of Subconscious Influences on Video Marketing
00:23:10
Speaker
money is being spent on vertical video specifically now, more than anywhere else, right? And it's, it's cool, you have a good bang for your buck, because you can create this nine by 16. And then you can put it on tik tok YouTube, short snap, snap, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
00:23:28
Speaker
There is part of the best practices to get your brand in there in the first X amount of seconds, right? And really do that. But what I've seen recently be really successful is sometimes telling the story where you create a little bit of curiosity and you actually don't get to the thing for a little bit.
00:23:53
Speaker
What are some things that you've seen worked well in that medium and do you have a strong opinion on that? Video is really difficult for me because I am so psychology based. So I want to see the research, right? Like give me some like hard cold data on how you're doing this and how it's working. Video is extremely difficult because of the way the subconscious works. It could literally be like the plant in the background, right? That gets people to purchase and we would never know. We just don't know what the brain attached to.
00:24:23
Speaker
to be able to move forward and click and you add to cart and actually purchase. So with video, I have seen a lot of studies about introducing the brand within the first five seconds usually has some healthy impact on your metrics. I haven't really seen whether or not it actually increases conversions, just that it can increase clicks or engagement or those types of things.
00:24:44
Speaker
Now it depends on what type of media buying you subscribe to. Some people are heavily focused on soft metrics as a way to incrementally lift some sort of, you know, result. And some people just absolutely not. They won't even look at them. It's like conversions or nothing else, basically. So.
00:25:01
Speaker
In general, video is a really tough one for me. I prioritize statics almost all the time because it's a cheap way to get what I need. And it's also something I can control every single piece that goes in there. So I know exactly what worked. Video's too volatile for me. I'm just like, it dresses me out.
00:25:21
Speaker
No, listen, I agree with you. I mean, you know, I lead creative production itself right now. And what that means is I am leading strategy for TV, digital, offline, static based images, right?
00:25:38
Speaker
And when we're talking about launching a new product or a new feature, often what I'll do is I'll say, we're going to develop some hypotheses on what we want to test. And we're going to test that with static because you can A-B test widely different messaging personas very easily. Whereas if you're creating a 30 second ad, there's a lot more room for variability there. And it's a lot cheaper too.
00:26:07
Speaker
How do you think about kind of like A-B testing and message hypothesis testing? You know, if we could just use like an example of an e-com brand, take like Allbirds, for example. And I was asking you with, hey, I want to develop a performance creative roadmap using some static images. Would you kind of use those nine different emotions or how would you kind of approach that? Yeah, so I have my own test methodology for this.
00:26:34
Speaker
But I think it's important to remember before we actually get into the testing phase of which one do you test? When do you test it? How do you test it? We have to remember how these are going to get seen, right? So very first thing that I do is remember every time this is on a platform. The platforms have millions of different things trying to vie for attention. Even though the platforms are built to keep people on them, they still like all of these platforms make their money through advertisers. So like they have to be able to get people to click off somehow. Now,
00:27:03
Speaker
We also have this saying in marketing right now, which is we are in interruption marketing, right? So all we do is just interrupt the scroll, stop the thumb, and somehow we'll get them to click. I disagree with that. We are not in interruption marketing. We are in reminder marketing, right?
00:27:21
Speaker
So as people are scrolling through, the only thing they're trying to do is escape. Just think of yourself when you're scrolling. I'm just trying to escape for 10 minutes. Just like, please don't bother me, dogs. Like, kids, please go away. Like, just give me 10 minutes to burn off brain cells, basically. Because of this, all we're trying to do every time somebody scrolls through is remind them about something they're currently experiencing subconsciously. My entire job is just to remind you that you wanted this, and that's it, right?
00:27:49
Speaker
It's not my job to get to convert because I literally can't persuade you to do anything. Your brain will decide whether now is the time or not. So that's what I start with secondary to that. I always identify those core emotions through research and a lot of like linguistic analysis. Once I've identified the top two or three, right? So esteem or belonging or whichever one it is. Then I do a lot of basically just a lot of like headline generation with AI. So I use chat GPT every single day.
00:28:20
Speaker
A lot of times I'll use mid-journey to generate any sort of images that I can't get from the brands. So I'm trying really hard to make sure the pairing of headline to image is very psychology focused as well. Image gets processed about 60,000 times faster than text in the brain.
00:28:37
Speaker
So the image is getting processed first, no matter what. And that includes video. Now on video, it's a little different because for the brain, it's the image and it's the sound that gets processed first before the video even gets seen. It's the sound. So for video, I prioritize whatever the sound is has to be very good, like very interesting for the brain. For statics though, I will go and I'll basically test one emotion at a time within sets of about three to five static ads.
00:29:06
Speaker
I don't, I don't usually follow the general testing roster where it's, we have a testing campaign, we have a scaling campaign, and then we have like a wildcard campaign where we're still testing local likes, right? I don't do that as much anymore because it, and I think we're slowly starting to figure this out that if you launch a set of three ads, one of them starts to take off and you turn off the losers, the winner immediately diminishes.
00:29:32
Speaker
I have kind of guessed this for years, but all of your ads are going into the system at the same time. So they're kind of attached to each other as they go through the system, especially since it's a lottery, right? Like right now it's just gambling. We're entirely in some sort of, you know, a system where we're competing with other brands. So what I want to do is test emotion first and don't turn off anything unless it's just dragging the whole campaign down.
00:30:03
Speaker
So I'll go through and I'll test five ads to esteem, five ads to belonging, and then five ads to nurturance or whatever it is. And then from there, I can tell campaign wise, nurturance is doing really freaking well, right? Once I've identified what's going on with the actual emotions, then I'll go through and do a lot of linguistic work to try and identify which form of that emotion works best. So this I do through the thesaurus. I literally go to thesaurus.com and I type in the main emotion and it'll give me
00:30:33
Speaker
thousands of different ways to say this one emotion. So for instance, I worked with a beauty brand who was really heavily focused on confidence. And when we did the NLP research, most of their customers were responding pretty well to this sentiment, but they were like, we get a decent amount of acquisition and like retention's okay, but our issue is, it's just so expensive to acquire anybody. And we know that they're coming in with confidence. We just don't know how to fix that, the cost problem. So I went through and identified
00:31:03
Speaker
Like basically five to seven nuances of confidence. Cause confidence can go several different directions. Cheeky is confident. Boss babe is also confident, right? There's different ways that it comes out from the human behavior. So I need to know which one is going to hit the best. So for these guys, cheeky worked so incredibly well for some reason. I thought it was going to be boss babe. Like.
00:31:28
Speaker
Just total transparency, Sarah was wrong. Totally thought it was gonna be boss, babe. And then we ran an ad that was just like something to the effect of like makeup as cheeky as you are, right? And it crushed. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, but we ran one campaign, five ads, all the cheeky. And that one just took over the whole spread, like dominated. So it just goes to show you, man, there's a million different ways to say the same thing. And we're stopping at step one.
00:31:58
Speaker
I love this kind of approach to creative testing that starts with the emotion because I've done a lot of it where it's more like, okay, we're going to test these different outcomes against each other, or we're going to test these different products against each other.
00:32:19
Speaker
starting with the emotion is, it's psychology. It's like akin to trying to convince your significant other to do this thing, right? And it's like, you have to appeal to the emotions to do that. And maybe you experiment with a couple of different approaches before you,
00:32:39
Speaker
Everybody needs something different. It works so well with your safety of another, I might add, and your children, honestly, because I'm constantly thinking like, how can I psychology you into this? But everybody needs something different. And, you know, if you followed it for the last like 10 years, Love Languages has really like boomed in the US. People are buying books and all kinds of courses and trainings on trying to figure out people's love languages. Well,
00:33:01
Speaker
that has to do with your core values and the psychology beneath what you think you want. For me, I'm not an affirmation person. I don't really need to be told like, you're doing great, right? But I'm quality time. Like you need, I need to spend time with people. So for my husband, if he wants me to get, if he wants me to do anything like, hey, it's cool if I go golfing, he will literally trade time for time.
00:33:23
Speaker
you will come at it with a message of, if I go golfing this weekend, I'll take you to a movie tomorrow, right? And I'm like, done, 100%. So the message has to fit the underlying need and the emotion attached to it. Otherwise, you're just burning money for no reason, basically. How do you think about testing kind of moving away from negative emotions
00:33:51
Speaker
versus more positive based emotions because a lot of times, so like removing pain creates more urgency than adding pleasure, right? Like removing the thing. How do you think about that? I struggle with this one mostly because I, my personal mantra is moving away from anything that's painful, especially painful emotions is not healthy. It's actually really, really bad for your system.
00:34:19
Speaker
to bury emotion underneath a positive outlook. This positivity message is very cultural and really came out of more of like a millennial Gen Z generation. Gen Xers were the first to start it though. They actually raised their children to be mindful of how your mental health is on a daily basis, mostly because they were raised by boomers.
00:34:41
Speaker
And boomers came out of a very volatile economic and political time period in the sixties and seventies. So the boomers raised their children to be self-sufficient, fearful and extremely individualistic. Right. Because they wanted their kids to survive.
00:34:56
Speaker
in what they thought was going to be a very evolved time period, right? So we don't discredit any parent for any sort of like, you know, manipulation of their children because it's just the brain trying to protect the next generation. Now that doesn't, you know, you shouldn't abuse your children a hundred percent. Like you should be kind to your children. However,
00:35:15
Speaker
The millennials and the Gen Z took this to a point where now any negative emotion is not necessarily positive, right? You shouldn't be feeling that way. So we almost got toxic positivity going on inside the cultural subset. Because of this, now marketers in particular are very sensitive to it. We don't want to tell women that wrinkles are bad. We don't want to tell them that aging is awful.
00:35:39
Speaker
We don't want to tell men that what they're feeling is bad. They should only feel good. We're getting to this point now where we can't process out negative emotion because we're so concerned about hurting people's feelings. I personally don't like that because as a marketer, it's my job to make sure that you live the lifestyle you want to live and get the help that you need in whatever form, whether it's shoe therapy or actual therapy.
00:36:08
Speaker
I need to make sure that you're getting what you need as a consumer and as a human so you can live a better life. Because if the individual lives a better life, the community lives a better life, the nation lives a better life. So in general, if I work with a brand that's like, we do not want to put forward a negative message, I'll work around it, right? So we'll just work in messaging because there's millions of different ways to say it. But for the most part, I don't think it's a bad thing to target that emotion and just say, we know you're feeling in the dark.
00:36:38
Speaker
and it's okay because we've been there too and we want to help, right? So as long as you're not trying to be creepy with it, I think it's totally fine to use negative emotion because it exists. It's a real thing, for sure.
00:36:52
Speaker
It's authentic that someone is trying to solve. Yeah, I practice, like I said before, I practice meditation. And one of the people that I've learned from is a Vietnamese monk called Thich Nhat Hanh. He actually worked with Martin Luther King Jr. back in the day, done a lot of activist work. But one of his ideas is this idea of habit energy and how individuals have habit energy that came from
00:37:22
Speaker
their parents that came from their parents parents etc etc and you work all the way back. And I've done a few meditation retreats where you start to observe your emotions and you can identify okay, this thing is coming from that. And sometimes that habit energy like you said,
00:37:39
Speaker
Uh, it's coming from an individual, which is like your dad or your mom or whatever, but, um, it can also be like, like, um, cultural in a sense, societal in a sense. Yeah. It's deep, man. Those, those emotions run really deep. And the weird part is they've done lots of studies about how mothers feel in pregnancy will change how that baby comes out after a utero, like their entire personality changes. Two of the most important, um,
00:38:09
Speaker
I would say world events where this actually happened was the Holocaust. And I think it was the Danish famine where mothers were just hella stressed because of what they were going through as a person. And those personality traits were attributed to their children then. So like now their children are built for stress. Now, if that happens in pregnancy before the baby has even like formed these like really interesting intricate neural connections,
00:38:38
Speaker
What does that say for us when we're just living our lives for 35 years and now you can't understand why you always buy chocolate every time you go to the store. You just can't help it. It's like habitual, right? I can't not buy chocolate. It's stemming from years of the brain trying to protect itself by building in these mechanisms of fear, anxiety, stress, like trying really hard to figure out the world that we live in causes some very strange purchasing behavior.
00:39:07
Speaker
For sure. And yeah, I think that's a takeaway for brands or marketers listening to this, which is what are those emotions that are in the subconscious within your target audience? Because it's a lot easier to appeal to those things. Let me ask a little bit of a sidetrack here, but one of the things that I've been struggling recently with at itself
00:39:33
Speaker
is that we've had a lot of competition enter the space. And I think I joined when we were a smaller startup, not a lot of competition, very easy to scale, the messaging worked, right?
00:39:48
Speaker
when you have everybody saying, hey, we help you build your credit, how do you differentiate that? And I don't know if there is a psychological approach to that, but I'm just curious like your thoughts on kind of responding to competitors and operating in a very competitive space where you know that there's a high degree of likelihood that someone seeing your ad is also seeing ads from four other people saying the same thing.
00:40:16
Speaker
My question to you would be, what do people already think about credit? I think that's probably where I would start, right? Cause we can, we, everybody knows what credit is for, for the most part, a generalized, you know, level of education, but I need to know what do you think about credit in general, right? Cause for the most part, you're going to get a lot of education focused. Every competitor that you have is going to be going after the same angle, which is like,
00:40:42
Speaker
increase your credit because you know you need to, because you can build a better life, right? But for a lot of these people, especially for people who have never had any sort of training before, they know they need it, but they don't know why. I know that credit can help me buy a car, but I don't know how it actually works, right? I know sort of how to build it, but I also don't know like how long will it take me to build? Is it something that I can transfer to my children? Like what's the basis of it?
00:41:11
Speaker
And then the underlying aspect of what are they trying to achieve? Because not everybody's trying to buy a car with credit. Not everybody wants to get a house with credit. Some people just really enjoy the score. Some people have good credit because they just like the number that's attached to their name. And it's almost like a bragging point that I have like a 740 or whatever it is, right? Or like an 800, whatever. So I'd be interested to find out what they already think about it.
00:41:39
Speaker
What do you think about your credit? Do you think it's okay? Do you think it's low high, right? What's, I have no idea how these people feel about their credit. And I also need to know where have you attached that in the brain? Is it a part of your identity? Because if it's not, that's almost a worst problem. Because education isn't going to do anything if they don't care, right? Like if it's not important to them, then we got a different problem we got to work on.
00:42:05
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And you're absolutely
Emotional Marketing for Financial Products
00:42:09
Speaker
right. There are people that are trying to build their credit for a specific outcome. They want to get a better interest rate on a mortgage. They want to move out of their apartment, whatever. But for some, and thinking about your approach of starting with customer reviews and really reading those heavily and then
00:42:26
Speaker
applying emotional components to that. A lot of the positive reviews speak more about feeling more in control. Like I struggle to do this thing, right? And now I'm making positive payments and I feel like I'm on a good path again. Cause that's not goal achievement, right? That's what would be termed as more autonomy.
00:42:55
Speaker
Autonomy and competence are probably the two emotions that would go deepest into that, because this is now talking about, I want to feel as though I'm capable of managing my own life. Like basically I want to feel like an adult by having a high credit score. Again, the numerical number is going to be really important for you guys, because that, anytime you have a number attached to you, it tells other people about you, like what you are, who you are, what you believe in.
00:43:24
Speaker
how capable you are as a person. So if that's the reviews that you're seeing, I would immediately start running some ads towards feeling competent and feeling autonomous. Right.
00:43:37
Speaker
That's cool. Cool. I know we have a couple of minutes left. I guess I want to talk a little bit about some of the brands that you work with. We talked a little bit about it in the past, but do you have any other examples that you can think of brands that you've worked with to bring this more emotional based approach to creative testing and kind of the results from
Case Study: Original Grain's Emotional Campaign
00:44:03
Speaker
that? And I think maybe just like one story is probably.
00:44:07
Speaker
So the most recent one that I worked with is a brand called Original Grain. And they're solidly in the like watch jewelry space, which is a very, very difficult space to compete in, mostly because it's entirely based on discretionary income. So the people that are purchasing your products have to have extra cash to be able to do it. And even if they don't have extra cash, the prioritization of this product is heavily emotional, right? So they had split audience.
00:44:36
Speaker
basically women buying for their significant others or men buying for themselves, basically. So we had to have two different routes. So we had to identify core emotions between two different audiences, which took a little bit. But from there, we actually generated headlines specifically for Father's Day this year.
00:44:55
Speaker
towards the actual gifting audience because it was Father's Day. Some fathers might be purchasing for themselves, but for the most part, it was gonna be the women buying for the men. So we generated a couple of different headlines focused primarily on this nurturance, right? So I wanna buy him something to actually nurture the relationship between us, that was step one. But the secondary core emotional motivator that we pulled out was actually Esteem, which I thought was really interesting for this audience.
00:45:23
Speaker
They want to nurture the men, but they also want to seem like they're a good gift giver. And that was the funniest part is I was like, these women are concerned about their dudes, but they're also kind of concerned about themselves. Like I don't want to give him a bad gift, which makes total logical sense. So the best headline that we ran was, show him he's worth every second this father's day. So it was, and this is why it's really important to get somebody who understands the psychology, but also understands messaging really well if you're going to do this because
00:45:52
Speaker
we actually tied the message of nurturance and esteem into the watch itself. So we connected the product to the actual message and it crushed for Father's Day. I think this one was the one that they increased their revenue by 30% over the course of the next like six, eight weeks that they ran this. It just like took off. So their bottom line was looking really good in the spring. And this was the best spring they had ever had based upon that one ad.
00:46:22
Speaker
was just so emotionally tied. Yeah. And it's just like at first glance, you might approach a watch and you're like thinking, how do I promote this thing? And then it's really like, okay, well, who's going to be buying it? Is it going to be somebody for themselves or is it going to be a gift?
00:46:42
Speaker
Why, why give that gift? And well, I love that approach. It was amazing. It was really amazing. And their team was really great to work with. So we did the same thing for this Christmas offer that they're going to go into. And we pushed it even farther this time. It was very still tied to that, like, you know, show him his worth every second. But we added a subhead onto the back of it, which
00:47:04
Speaker
something to the effect of like give him a gift as storied and as timeless as he is, right? So now we're just layering on deeper and deeper and deeper emotions that still stick with esteem and nurturance because I'm trying really hard to figure out how deep does this go? Because if it goes really deep, we can run with this message for the next 20 years and it will never fatigue because we've hit it just spot on.
00:47:30
Speaker
Um, you'll notice this happens a lot with like De Beers. De Beers did this in the seventies, uh, with this kind of message of, um, Oh, what was the best I ever saw? This one ran a message that was show her, uh, what the next 20 years are going to be like. Right. And it was just so incredibly specific to that audience of guys who was like, I want to like show her something.
00:47:55
Speaker
that's gonna tell her I'm gonna take care of you for the next 20 years. And that ad ran for years and years and years. So if you can do this properly and you can identify the right emotions and get the message very, very specific, nothing really fatigues. It just stays and stays.
00:48:14
Speaker
I love, um, yeah, as a, as a marketer, I I've come up with a few headlines for products that have like, uh, stood the test of time and are like for self that, you know, we still have the same headline. I'm like, it feels kind of cool. It's a, yeah, it's awesome. Um, well, thank you so much. This was a great conversation.
Conclusion and Social Media Connections
00:48:32
Speaker
Um, Sarah, where can people find you and interact with you? I am over on Twitter all the time, probably more than I should be, um, at Sarah Levenger on Twitter, at Sarah Levenger on LinkedIn.
00:48:43
Speaker
I have a whole bunch of different things coming out next year, but the primary place to find me is probably on social. I do a lot of like consulting for brands. So if you're interested and want to learn more about emotions, come find me and let's chat. Cool. Thank you so much, Sharon. Thank you.