William Leach: Marketing to Mindstates

Transcript

[0:00:19] Charlie Hoehn: What’s up everybody, I’m Charlie Hoehn, the host of Author Hour where I interview authors about their new books. Today’s episode is with Will Leach, the author of Marketing to Mindstates. I was really thrilled to talk to Will because my background’s in marketing, I got a degree in marketing, I’m also self-taught, I used to read dozens of books on marketing and I actually had a journal where I would write down the best marketing ideas and the most powerful tactics that I found, it was my marketing playbook. One of the more recent books that I’d read was Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini and he talks about how you can prime people on a sub conscious level to make purchases and make decisions and it’s this kind of an old field and behavioral psychology, not super old but it’s new in marketing. Will is an expert in this realm. He is the founder of TriggerPoint Design and he’s worked with fortune 50 companies to solve their most important behavior challenges. Will is actually known as one of the top experts in America in applying behavioral science to marketing and in this episode, he explains exactly how he applies these behavior design principles to marketing for these huge companies. It’s really powerful so if you’re a marketer who loves books by Robert Cialdini or Dan Arielli or Seth Godin, this is the episode for you, it’s pretty mind-blowing. Now, here is our conversation with Will Leach.

[0:02:18] William Leach: I think it all kind of start off 2009, maybe 2010. I was working with Frito-Lay and I was working at a laboratory that they built, that did a lot of experiments around shopping behavior. Imagine this thing, it’s about the size of the Best Buy, half of it was dedicated to neurological testing, the other half of it though was dedicated to what we called a theater and what this theater did was it allowed us to bring in people to come shop, you know, the inside of a grocery store so we had it – it was a legit grocery store like you know, had checkout clerks, it had products on the shelf, prices everything else. We would do test. Some of the easiest test you can run is packaging or packet changes, right? The idea is that you know, you bring in 75 people and you have them shop the store and then overnight, you switch the store around or in this case, you switch out packaging and then you bring in another 75 people to come shop the store and then hopefully, you see a lift because you incorporated new packaging so you see a lift in sales.

[0:03:17] Charlie Hoehn: How much would you change the packaging like, was it pretty drastic or was it subtle?

[0:03:22] William Leach: It could be both. It’s funny because a lot of people think that subtle changes and packaging will show this massive behavioral change and frankly, there’s so many different factors that influence people shopping behavior. We try to do much bigger packaging changes, just test really, if something significant was going to make it significant lift in sales. You know, the whole genesis of behavioral design and my journey was in a moment, it was a study that I was running in this laboratory for Frito-Lay and I pre-recruited 75 people, I was running shopper insights and we had 75 people shop our laboratory. Then, I was expecting to have new packaging come in later on that afternoon, I was going to then switch out the old packaging with our newly redesigned packaging and then the next day, have 75 more people come through and just see if the packaging made any significant lift. Well, around 4:00 came, no packaging, 5:00 came, no new packaging. So by 6:00, I’m thinking, I don’t have any new packaging to test for tomorrow. We found out that the agency was running late, we weren’t going to get that packaging but I had already pre-recruited 75 people to come in and shop the next day. So I just said, you know what? Keep the same environment, we’re not going to make a change, I’ll just get a sample size of 150 people. Next day, another 75 people come in, they shop the environment and then they leave, great. What we did was we actually looked at the data. Just merged the data and in doing that, actually, really scary thing happens because between one day and the next, the data changed dramatically but imagine in my world, I had the exact same variables. I had the same planagram, the same packaging, the same pricing, the same flow but yet, very different shopping behavior. That as a researcher is a very big deal because now, what’s right, which is the correct day, what’s the reality, is it the first day or the second day? I’m sitting and looking at this data and I start thinking, I’ve got to figure this out. Well, just so happens, a VP over in a shopper marketing, basically said hey Will, you need to figure this out because if you can’t tell me which reality is true, is it day one or day two. Though, you control all the variables, then we’re spending a lot of money each year running these tests. I start figuring this - I thought I was going to lose my job or certainly, this entire laboratory and all the employees we had, we had about eight employees, we’re all going to lose our jobs, so it was right in this moment that I also, it’s kind of two stories merging. I went to a conference from the Institute for the Future and it’s kind of a think tank if you will, I just so happen to get invited, I said sure, I’ll go and this is where I was introduced to this idea around marketing to the non-conscious. It was around persuasion and it’s all kind of, in the book. This idea of I had something that wasn’t supposed to happen which was, changes in sales but I controlled all the variables that I could control and I didn’t understand why and right around the same time, I go to this conference that’s all around the idea that there are these other non-conscious things that are happening in environments that we can’t control that influence behaviors. I had this eureka moment, right? Where I’m thinking to myself, my gosh, the solve is not data, I was looking at mathematical processes to try to figure out what reality was, that wasn’t it. You can’t mathematically find this, it was what’s happening at the non-conscious and that entered the journey for me and I couldn’t stop thinking about this stuff, I couldn’t stop reading enough, I started reading everything I could on behavioral economics, motivational psychology, just trying to understand the deep psychology that influences us and it got to a point where literally, it was 2:30 in the morning and I was reading the stuff and my wife, she wakes up in dead at night, she’s like, what are you doing? I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. She goes, will you just leave and I thought, okay, I got to leave the bedroom. She was no, just leave free to lay, she’s like, you’re never going to read about chips the way you read about this. Just go off and do it already. That’s where I started my own company.

[0:07:21] Charlie Hoehn: Man, that’s awesome. I was just saying before we started recording, you, sharing – stories about your wife. You’ve got a very supportive wife, that’s awesome.

[0:07:30] William Leach: I do.

[0:07:31] Charlie Hoehn: I agree. Absolutely, the right recommendation and it seems like this field of marketing, although, it’s not exactly new, it’s being discovered by marketers as this massively influential thing. As soon as you discovered it and started reading about it, did it kind of just completely debunk your previous work as like you know, all these data is sort of irrelevant when you have this other factor that we haven’t taken into account at all.

[0:08:04] William Leach: Yeah, there was a moment where I’m looking at, you know, I’m paying off student loans and I had my degree in applied econometrics and I’m looking at that and econometrics and economics, this idea that we make decisions based upon emotions was very foreign, in fact, it was not even talked about. This idea is that we’re always trying to do pros and cons or looking for maximizing utilities. We’re trying to look for the cost benefits, this moment and diving into how understanding of our psychology and context influences how we perceive decisions, that totally made me rethink my entire graduate degree and thinking, why did I pay all this money for a graduate degree in econometrics, right? No, it does. What’s great about this field and you nailed it. It’s kind of been out there but what’s happening is academics for let’s say 30 years, at least since the mid-70s, you can even go back a hundred years if you really wanted but at least since the mid-70’s. There had been great schools and great professors out there doing incredible experiments but it hasn’t trickled into marketing because it sat in kind of the silos inside universities like Stanford and Harvard and Michigan. It’s all out there on google scholar, what I was able to do is bring all these four different social sciences that we talk about in the book together into one uniform kind of model and it’s because of that, it’s all based in strong behavioral sciences but it’s been out there for 30 years and now we’re getting to the point because it’s becoming popularized like you said, Cialdini and Ariely and Kahneman, now, marketers, brand managers, you know, creative people are reading these things. Now, it’s kind of giving them science behind what their intuition was telling them what to do in the first place.

[0:09:44] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it’s so exciting and fascinating and also, kind of freaky. What we’re about to talk about. To all the marketers who are listening, this episode is definitely for you. I want to share a quick story with you Will, I was recently watching a Netflix special - series with my wife and I believe it was called Magic for Humans and it’s this guy who – he’s got this, he’s super charismatic, very likable, unlike a lot of the street magicians are. He’s super likable, he’s got these great tricks and basically, for six episodes, I had no idea how he was doing what he was doing. Then he had this one trick where he sent this woman off to kind of go around the city for a little bit while they set up her apartment with - to look like Paris, to have a raspberry cheesecake as a dessert. All these specific details and the setup of the trick was, we’re going to send you out and we’re going to setup your apartment to be the perfect date. When you get back, we’re going to ask you some questions like, what city would be the perfect place for you to have this date in? What’s the perfect dessert that you would love to have? Of course, she gets back and she guesses all the things that they’d setup and they reveal it and she’s like, my God, how did you do this? My wife was like, how did they do that? It was the only trick that I was like, I know exactly how they did that. They primed her, they did marketing, the stuff that you talk about in your book and they set her up to say all those things and she had no idea because it was all unconscious.

[0:11:39] William Leach: Yeah.

[0:11:40] Charlie Hoehn: Am I right?

[0:11:40] William Leach: You are absolutely right, there is another guy that you can look up on YouTube named Derren Brown and he does a very similar experiment where he brings creatives and if you’ve ever seen this, he takes creatives from their hotel and they takes them on a taxi ride before they get to his office and Darren brown puts him in a situation where he says, I just want you to come up with a campaign. Through that video, I’m going to watch it. They literally draft up the exact same images and words as what Darren Brown was using during the taxi drive, he was priming them the entire time. It’s a great video and I use that actually when I teach this over at SMU and I teach my clients. I use this thing to say, the power of priming. And priming is a big part of this book, you’re absolutely right.

[0:12:20] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s what we mean by freaky. These stuff, I mean, when you see it happen, you’re like, my god. How have I been living my life? Who has been manipulating me potentially, right? Let’s talk about why humans behave this way in the first place? You start off your book with just understanding human behavior. What is this behavior design and why do sit affect us this way?

[0:12:46] William Leach: At its essence you know, incredibly complex. As we get more and more messaging and more and more access to channels like platforms better, it’s computers, watches, artificial intelligence, things like that. We’re inundated with so much information that your mind naturally has been created actually to filter out a lot of content, a lot of things. Because if you had to really do cost benefit analysis on every one of these kind of stimuli’s, it’s a prime or something sprained, you never get through today. Here’s what happens, we have two decision making system. System one, are all those decisions that you make more or less not considered none consciously right? These are thing that are kind of more habitual, emotional in nature and things like that. Then there is system two part of your brain which is much more conscious decision making where you’re really thinking through, you’re thinking analytically, are more likely to think analytically. What’s been kind of happening in the last 30 years is a lot of researches now focused on that system one, none conscious. How much more power there is in that part of your decision making. Imagine this forever since the days of proctor and gamble back in maybe the 30s with polling. We’ve always thought of marketing as tell people to think differently about my brand, I want you to persuade people to use my brand. Here’s all these great benefits and here’s some things that we want to make sure they understand. We’re the cheapest, we’re the fastest, we’re the best. That system to thinking. Now we’re starting to realize that system one, that none conscious, that emotional part of our brain is so much more influential and that’s the part that researchers and marketers haven’t really started to kind of migrate towards, we’re getting better, particularly here in the states but we’re starting to now tap into that. That, if you understood that you are making the vast majority of your decisions and your experience is happening at the none conscious level, you would start thinking about how you would message differently. I’ll give you one fact and this puts things in perspectives, for my clients and my students. Research will tell you that yo make 75,000 decisions on any given day. 75,000. The vast majority of those have to be at the non-conscious, not in considered states because you wouldn’t get out of bed if you had to start doing post analysis of why you decided to turn off the alarm and not turn off the alarm, put my left hand or my right hand. That number of decisions, you have to understand these none conscious factors that influence.

[0:15:03] Charlie Hoehn: Let’s dive into some actual examples of this and trying to think of the best way that we can do this. Maybe you can point out companies that are marketing to the neocortex, right? The system two way of thinking, the rational brain and companies that are marketing more to the subconscious and the system one, healing brain.

[0:15:31] William Leach: Yeah, you know, it’s kind of funny, we’re in this incredible state of the industry where there is a lot of overlaps. Don’t think of it as much as there’s either/or. It’s actually – now, many more companies are speaking to that system to rational brain. The slower rational brain because that’s been happening for the last 60 years. That’s how modern marketing has been kind of setup previous to all these sciences. I mean, all the big brands, absolutely, all the way down to the local real estate agent, the local plumber, the ad agency that’s right down the street, they’re still thinking around this idea of building preferences and what’s your unique point of differentiation and your benefits. What’s your call to action? That’s very system too. Then, there are those companies, think about the Coca Colas, the Pepsicos, the SE Johnsons, the Kellogg’s, these companies are now moving through the space. They’re becoming, they’re bringing greater behavioral science expertise but they’re still – old habits die hard, we talked a little bit about that a while ago. You’ve learned through your MBA programs, this modern, what they consider modern day marketing and now. All of a sudden, it’s totally flipping things around to where you can actually incorporate a psychological prime inside of your ad. You can reframe the benefit in a way that’s about avoiding loss or maximizing your chances of success. These small things which previously were never even thought of, then now we’re starting to gravitate towards that but there’s still a lot in the middle. Here’s what my classic thing happens all the time. I’ll go do a big project and I’ll say, listen. This is none consciously, here is the mindstate that two really need to start messaging towards, it’s the cautious, optimistic mindstate. There’s 18 of these mindstates. I told a major client here this recently. They said yeah, but it’s a hundred year old brand, over hundred year old brand. We don’t feel real comfortable with that so can we just kind of keep doing what we’re doing but then just integrate some of these ideas and that seems to be the path that most are coming. Those are big brands, the only exception that companies that are truly going all in and they’re hitting it, it’s Silicon Valley. Those guys, they know what they’re doing because they have environments where they can test these theories out almost immediately, they don’t have heritage on their brands so these companies. Think of the Amazons in the world, a lot of the tech companies, they’re using this all the time and they’re absolutely incorporating these principles into their apps or into their messaging as well.

[0:18:00] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, Amazon’s a great example, you said things like psychologically priming and the benefits and all this is like, let’s dive in to amazon as an example. Point out how they’re using the mindstate behavioral model that you talk about in your book which lets quickly go over that, actually, then we’ll dive in to Amazon as an example. You talk about in your book and I’ll just list the four and then you can go in deeper, you talk about activating the goal, priming the need, framing the choice and triggering the behavior, right? That’s the mindstate behavioral model.

[0:18:37] William Leach: That’s right. Let me take a step back and the reason why this model is so effective at marketing, it’s this understanding that remember we make all these decisions on any given day, you know, some people say, 75 thousand, you know, let’s just even take a step back and just say that maybe there are a couple of hundred which I think is low. But let’s just take that. There are these moments in your day, they’re called hot state moments where you go through, let’s say a couple of hundred times a day where you’re very susceptible to influence. These are called mindstates. In this moments, you’re in a mindstate. Here is a reason why. When you have a mindstate, if you’re under this influence, you have high emotional arousal, when you have high emotional arousal, you’re much more susceptible influence, that’s biologically why emotional marketing works. When I see agency saying, we want to get more emotional, there is science behind emotional marketing. This science is this mindstate idea.

[0:19:32] Charlie Hoehn: What’s like one of those mindstates, what’s one of those moments where we’re susceptible.

[0:19:36] William Leach: Absolutely, there’s one called optimistic achievement, that is a person who is under achievement motivation so they want to feel successful, victorious and proud and they want to overcome obstacles. Imagine Olympic athletes, imagine the type A personality, the entrepreneur who is really kind of really going after it but the go after that using a promotion regulatory approach which means that they’re seeking to maximize gains or their chances of successfully achieving their goal. Under those conditions, under that mindstate, there are very specific words, very specific visuals that you should be using in your creative to activate that mindstate because when they’re in that mindstate, all of a sudden, they’re using that system one thinking, they’re making decisions of intuition, their gut, it will feel so natural to them, your message and they’re seeking messages and brands and strategies to help them breach that goal that they had under the optimistic achievement so it’s so important to understand these four factors because if you understand the factors, you can now market to those mindstates. To that none conscious system one. You’re able to increase that emotional arousal or that hot state decision making and that leads to much more effective marketing because again, you’re not trying to convince anybody of anything. You are creating a feeling of intuition and naturalness with your messaging that breaks through the filter. You’re not trying to –

[0:21:02] Charlie Hoehn: I want to pause you and interrupt you there because that’s amazing, that’s so important what you just said. I’ll just repeat it, you’re not trying to convince anyone of anything and this is what I think a lot of marketers miss, myself included sometimes is we think it’s our job to convince rather than to create this emotional state, right?

[0:21:23] William Leach: That’s exactly right. You have too much stimuli, too many people trying to convince you to buy this product over that product. This brand over that brand and so how do we try to convince? I try to do it really big viral event and I try to get an actor to promote my product, that’s the classic thing that companies do to try to differentiate themselves. If you just understood that every company’s trying to do the exact same thing to break through that filter to convince you to buy your product. What if I told you that you could just access it none conscious to seamlessly go through that filter and it just feels natural. It bypasses all that other messaging that’s out there.

[0:22:02] Charlie Hoehn: How much more effective is it to go the route that you’re talking about, to let go of trying to convince and instead, create the emotional state, the person wants to have. How much more effective is this?

[0:22:17] William Leach: Yeah, variables of course make a big difference and of course, you always got to remember, there’s still the system too. I can create emotional arousal but ultimately, you have to be able to justify it or in many cases, you’re going to have to justify it for big purchases, budgets, things like that.

[0:22:33] Charlie Hoehn: Explain it to your partner.

[0:22:34] William Leach: Exactly. I will tell you this that in a lot of our work, we’ve been doing this now for about five years and a lot of our work, we’re seeing gains of eight, 10, 12% every so often, we’ll get something up to around 20% change in behavior and that actually for me is quite scary because when you start hearing people talking about you know, I was able to convert 80% of people, there’s often times, there’s something that’s way outside of what they’re really doing. Traditionally, if you’re getting eight to 10% lift, that’s pretty normal and that could be sales lift or that could be just you know, click rates or whatever but that tends to be at every so often, we’ll get something around the 20% but when I do that, I go back in the data really hard to make sure that I’m actually measuring what I think I’m measuring because people are complex regardless how much we know about the subconscious, we’re habitual creatures, we love to not change, you and I talked about that a little while ago. It’s really difficult to get people to change a behavior. But, when you’re talking about the brands that we’re talking about, an extra 10% of lift or even a 3% change in the lift, hundreds of millions of dollars, that’s absolutely right.

[0:23:39] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean, sorry. I’m normally not this – let’s jump around in the interview but this is something I’m fascinated with. I’m curious, going back to like the Frito-Lay packaging, knowing what you know now, what would you change if you’re marketing to the subconscious?

[0:23:59] William Leach: Yeah, wow, great question. What I would do differently is I think that we used to build brands around this idea of we got to create a brand story and a narrative and so we’re going to create a moment or a movement with our brand lovers and so what we would do is we would do lots of research to really understand somebody’s lifestyle and you know, a profitable target, things like that. Understand them so that we could try to create an identity that just feels natural to that person. We may look at Doritos, rather than saying we’re extra nacho cheese, we may say, you know, we’re all about expression, self-expression because that’s what our customer or brand lover really want. How do we make Doritos a vehicle for self-expression? That’s classic out there and I think that’s pretty good marketing because you’re not talking about the benefits, now you’re talking about Doritos in a very different way. What I would do is I would take that exact same heart model, brand story, you know, equity, whatever you’re going to build your brand around and I would tell you that you could overlay these mindstates. In that moment where they’re trying to create the self-expression. They have belief systems, they have attitudes, preferences of how they want that experience to happen, I can tell you that I would overlay my mindstate on top of it and then in our case, we said the optimistic achievement mindstate. I could say, how they want to express themselves, we need to create psychological primes and frames around optimism and this idea of maximizing my chances of self-expression and if you do that, putting in queues around achievement. It sounds very scientific by the way and it’s sometimes feel like it’s so – why are you bringing all these complexity? I can tell you, it’s something as simple as literally, I did an experiment when I was at PepsiCo. where I created – we talk about achievement, I created a race ribbon. It was on a display and I’m sorry, a checkered flag for a race car. A checkered flag, that association of winning, right? A checkered flag people associate that with race cars which associates the winner gets the checkered flag. That creates a feeling of achievement. I just cued that optimistic achievement. I didn’t have to talk about if you eat Doritos you’ll be an achiever. That is such an artificial way and people will see through that right? But just by putting a subtle cue there, I can create an association of Doritos with achievement. If I didn’t have enough time to help build that association all across the entire brand and when you are in front of 300 different chips and all of these different private label chips that are trying to keep eating those Doritos and they are trying to say, “We’re cheaper than Doritos,” you are not cheaper than making him feel like an achiever. That’s the power of using this stuff on top of equity. So yeah, I think that would be a pretty good example. I would say take these sciences to activate on your equity. And you could do it much better and you create this emotional route so that you will get people to buy more. That is why you are doing it in the first place.

[0:27:00] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, wow. Awesome stuff. So I want to dive back into this behavioral model. I love that you broke this into four key components, activating the goal, how do you decide - I mean is this deciding on the goal or is it just I don’t even know what you mean by activating the goal?

[0:27:22] William Leach: Here’s the idea. Every behavior that you take, every behavior you take, you have a goal associated with that. You personally have a goal associated with it. So what I am trying to tell people that it is important to understand people’s goals as relates to your clients category. So that could be what’s your goal when you buy a car, what’s your goal when you buy a house, what’s your goal when you are deciding what to eat for lunch? So you have goals and it’s –

[0:27:45] Charlie Hoehn: So like what is the ultimate result that the person wants so like when they buy a house, they want security.

[0:27:53] William Leach: Ah that’s motivation, we’ll get there in a second.

[0:27:54] Charlie Hoehn: Oh okay.

[0:27:55] William Leach: The goal, when I ask you, let’s go to that house example. So here’s what I would do, what’s really important for me to understand if you are going to go buy a house is understand your functional goals meaning those things that you would expect here. “Well it has to be under this price. I want to be in this kind of a neighborhood,” etcetera. Those are just functional things that goal theory helps you understand. Then there’s this thing called higher order goals, why is that important to you. So I do an activity within our research to try to understand those more system one non-conscious goals. So I’ll do it to you right now Charlie. So let me just ask you a question, are you a home owner?

[0:28:28] Charlie Hoehn: No, I’m renting.

[0:28:29] William Leach: You’re renting, okay. Do you want to buy a home eventually?

[0:28:31] Charlie Hoehn: Eventually. I feel conflicted about it. I maybe don’t want to go through far down this rabbit hole for me but yeah, my wife and I got to go back and forth on it. It’s a confusing topic, so yeah.

[0:28:45] William Leach: It won’t matter to me. Let’s just think of your home whether it’s a house or if it is an apartment. Let’s just say this, here is what I want you to do, I want you to step into a time machine. So imagine that you are stepping into a time machine and I want you to go 10 years into the future and you are going to check out your home whether that is an apartment, a cabin, a tent, a house, whatever it is I want you to just step into that 10 years from now and I want you to see that. What is your future self, where are you living? So I want you to imagine that like where is that, imagine yourself 10 years from now where is your ideal home? Where is it? Is it in Paris? Is it in Austin? Any idea?

[0:29:22] Charlie Hoehn: Gosh, this is so hard for me but I’ll play along because I want you to have an answer. Yeah, so let’s we’re in Colorado, our home is in Colorado and how descriptive do you want me to be here?

[0:29:37] William Leach: Do you have a family? 10 years from now do you have a family?

[0:29:40] Charlie Hoehn: Yes, we already have a daughter but yes, we’ll likely have another child and yeah, so our family is in the home.

[0:29:48] William Leach: Awesome, so what makes that the perfect house for you? Lots of rooms?

[0:29:51] Charlie Hoehn: I would say that actually nature, that is easy access to nature around us. And that we’re close to a community that we’re close with and the home is not so big that we feel compelled to fill it with stuff. We both want a compact home, not a tiny home which I know is popular now but a compact home that feels cozy.

[0:30:20] William Leach: Awesome, then I have just one more question and I could keep going of course but okay, so if you have this ideal home. It is integrated within nature, it is in an area that you want because it is close to people that you identify with and that you want to be around, if you had that home what would it provide you and your family?

[0:30:36] Charlie Hoehn: I would say, I think joy and security and stability.

[0:30:43] William Leach: Brother, out of that small conversation I just identified highly like a particular mindstate or actually two just from that experience right there that you would be susceptible to your future self in particular, but I would talk to you now to help you reach that ideal goal. So those words that you’re talking about just now put you into a place called optimistic safety and actually what’s interesting, I love where you went optimistic belonging so safety. So you are driven in that case because you said you are looking for the security. So security is defined as to feel secure, safe and protected from threats. You are trying to make sure that your family is safe. You use that word twice and then you talk about belonging. So belonging motivation is to feel aligned accepted and affiliated with others. So there are nine of these motivations and that is one part of the model but what you just told me is you have a goal and your functional goal was in that conversation was you are looking for a home that is a particular size and a particular place. Those are very functional goals. Then what you told me was a high order goal which was bring family together in a place that is safe psychologically and hopefully physically safe too. That right there, if I can activate that in messaging to you, if I can now show you, I am not going to tell you, “If you buy this home you are going to be safe,” that is too artificial but showing you creative or showing you an image where you are activating that concept in your mind’s eye view and not consciously. It is going to start that emotional arousal process. So I tap into that higher order goal just by that conversation. I identified a little bit of it and I would talk to you longer if I was doing the research. That’s goal theory, that’s jobs to be done there. That is one part of the model then you told me the motivation. So the second part of the model is motivations or it is primed the need which you just said, that’s motivational psychology. So totally different social science but an important one. Because it is the engine that drives you after your goal so it is going to get you, that engine is going to take you to go and help you pursue your goal. So think of it as an engine to a car. Your goal was the destination you are trying to go to. You told me that you were driven if you will. Your motivation is around belonging and security as it relates to your home. So now I can start framing up, imagine I am a real estate agent. I can talk to you and say,“Well you know this area in the neighborhood, this is one of the really safer areas of Colorado. What is really great about this area as well is that there is a real community here where people feel safe, keep their doors open and invite people over. Just come over, we have a really tight knit group of people here.” That’s a very different message than if I thought you were being driven by cost or you are driven by say, competence which is another motivation which is around maybe you desire to do a fixer upper. So if I understood you were driven by competence, I am going to talk about things like, “You know, this house right here there is a lot of tweaks that the last owner was working on that you could actually make your own. They are the same house, same floor plan.” I can position that slightly differently. That is how I use motivational psychology because when I use the motivation for you which was belonging and security, I should now start making you feel much more comfortable with this idea of taking on that behavior.

[0:34:02] Charlie Hoehn: Holy cow! Super effective and I am realizing man, what a practical conversation to even have with you and your partner with me and my wife to just understand our needs better. So this is even beyond marketing, just understand how to communicate what’s important to us, yeah.

[0:34:24] William Leach: The way I did that is I did what’s called a third party projection. I basically rather than saying, “Tell me what you are looking for in a house,” which all real estate agents do, “Well I am looking for this square footage,” and you know you can get there but it is a lot harder but if I have you I imagine in an ideal situation and if I really had you keep thinking about it and keep asking you what is important, why is that important, I can create that emotional arousal. And because you are in that system, you are going to tell me a lot more about what you are really looking for and I can make sure that you don’t make a bad decision, right? And so it is not just to persuade and manipulate. It is actually understanding what is going to truly make you happy and that is what’s important to do, provide the services for that.

[0:35:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I am a big believer in the phrase ‘ask why until you cry’ because you need to get to the core of why you are doing what you’re doing, yeah.

[0:35:10] William Leach: We call it laddering. So that was where the first two parts of the behavioral model, understand people’s goal, activate their goal and messaging, understand why they’re going after the goal that is motivational psychology. That is how you prime people’s needs. The next thing is this, we all go after goals, all goals in one or two ways. One is called promotion regulatory focus meaning that we are seeking to maximize our chances of reaching that goal. The other one is prevention which is we’re seeking to avoid mistakes or minimizing risk of not reaching that goal. You may think of it as approach versus avoidance or whatever. It sounds like a small detail. It is a big detail on how you frame up.

[0:35:50] Charlie Hoehn: It’s huge.

[0:35:51] William Leach: Very huge. So for you even on the home thing, right? I could start talking about if I knew that you wanted to belong, I would position the house as and then I knew that you were in a prevention motivational focus, I would start talking about how this home is going to make sure that you are never without your family around you right? Or I could the other way, I could take the exact same home, the exact same motivation and now I could say to you, actually this home is always going to bring you together. She’ll enjoy more togetherness. So one is about avoiding separation the other one is about more togetherness. That to you, the way I frame up that house makes it feel much more intuitive and that’s just the way you work with that theory.

[0:36:29] Charlie Hoehn: Totally. This was originally explained to me as the heaven or hell exercise and I am a big, big believer in framing the choice because I don’t know actually any more powerful marketing technique than laying out in clear terms what you want to get and what you are trying to avoid.

[0:36:56] William Leach: That’s so true. I use it all the time. It is not just marketing. I use it to get my kid to eat vegetables right?

[0:37:00] Charlie Hoehn: Right, it’s communication yeah.

[0:37:02] William Leach: It is. It is just finding the path of least resistance. Remember that we have all of these decisions and my job as a behavioral designer is to make this whole decision making as fluid and sailing as possible and if I know my path of least resistance is that you were seeking to maximize the benefits then I can frame up all of my benefits in that way and if it is framed up in that way, it would just feel natural. It is an easier decision versus going the other way. So it is a very simple thing to do with my clients. I am like, “If I do nothing else, let me help you on that right there” and I will tell you same brand, same benefits. Let me just tell you how to frame up that choice and you can see and immediate lift. It’s a regulatory fit.

[0:37:41] Charlie Hoehn: Absolutely. So that’s huge now triggering the behavior.

[0:37:45] William Leach: This is behavior economics 101. This is, oh there is so many books on behavioral economics and this is just this idea of cognitive heuristics. So for those of you who don’t know, the idea is that we have this mental shortcuts, this heuristics that we use to make decisions very, very easy. So here is an example, its classic in America. It’s scarcity effect. So we tend to value things that we believe are scares in nature. So when it says limit eight or a limited time only or only one seat left in an airplane, regardless of us doing cost benefit analysis, we often assign value to them and we go, “Oh my gosh, I’d better go buy it.”

[0:38:19] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, a buddy of mine by the way has told me spent thousands and thousands of dollars and completely unaware that he was being triggered by that scarcity effect by a long time on stuff that he was like, “I don’t even care about this stuff. Why do I have it?” And he finally figured out it was because it was exclusive and limited.

[0:38:40] William Leach: Yeah remember you talked about Amazon? Think about what Amazon does, right? They use scarcity effect all the time, only three left. Or this, social proof. So social proof is a bias that we use or a heuristic that we use that creates value in things that other people have. So the more people have something or the more people made this decision, it feels safer to you. So what does Amazon.com do for you? It tells you reviews. It shows you hundreds of people or it will say this or create a conformity effect and it will say, “People like you also bought this” that is all psychology and so what they’re doing is they are creating this cognitive shortcuts for you. So when you are on there, you’re on an emotional hot state because you are buying. You found something that you really like and then it’s triggering the behavior because a lot of people go to amazon.com. They go to a grocery store, they go to a display, they look at this package of cookies and they look at it and they’re like, “Oh,” they get that emotional arousal and then they walk away. If people are walking away, if they’re not clicking through that website it’s because you haven’t triggered the behavior. You haven’t created, you haven’t integrated a cognitive heuristic, that scarcity effected, limited today and that could be the thing to get somebody from emotional arousal to actually buying. That is why trigger the behaviors at the end of our model. So we take goals, motivations, regulatory focus and then this cognitive heuristics, put those together and it is what’s called a mindstate and when you are in this mindstates, there are actually clear cognitive by seizures you should be using and it is not me saying it. It is out there in social science literature. There are clear biases that people should be under the influence. There are words. There are visual images things like if I want to create a sense of reciprocity, I can actually dilate the pupils of somebody I’m taking a photograph of, let’s just use Photoshop, if we are going to go by some photos. By creating dilated pupils, research will show you that if I am reading an add and there is just a slight dilation in the pupils of the lead model within the ad, actually you’re pupils self-dilate themselves and that is a sense of reciprocity because what that signals non-consciously is that she’s interested in me. Therefore, I am interested in what she’s saying. There is a psychological sense of reciprocity. That small detail could get somebody to create that emotional arousal to then go ahead and look at that ad more and engage with that ad. That’s what behavioral design is at its essence. This mindstates will tell me and tell you because I am giving these mindstates over in the book, it will tell you how to activate these hot states and ultimately make your marketing better.

[0:41:06] Charlie Hoehn: Dang that is mind blowing. That is wow yeah.

[0:41:10] William Leach: Didn’t I tell you I love what I do? Didn’t I tell you? I love what I do.

[0:41:13] Charlie Hoehn: Oh it’s clear as day. You can hear it listening to you. So the book is Marketing the Mindstates and in part three, you have applying the mindstate to marketing. Now I don’t want to give everything away in the book so I want to save that for people who actually pick it up and read it which any marketer listening to this I’m sure has already done. I want to wrap up our interview Will with maybe your favorite success story that you’ve had with a client with applying this mindstates to their marketing.

[0:41:47] William Leach: Yeah, so I am blessed to have worked with some of the world’s largest brands on this. I was really early in on the market and I’ve made a name. But actually, my favorite client of all time was actually a very, very small company. I actually reference them in the book. I can’t remember which chapter they’re in but it is called Carolina Fine Snacks. It’s a small snack company out in North Carolina and they approached us very early on with their development of their business. So here is the idea, there’s this guy by the name of Phil Cossack and Jim Buck. Phil is this genius inventor when it comes to food technology and food science and he invents to this day, I’ve never seen a more wholesome nutritious snack and I came from Frito Lay. So I have been with some of the best. This guy has an invented a product that is actually a nutrition. I shouldn’t even say it’s a snack. It’s a nutrition in snackable form but here is the idea. It is a 20 man shop over in Raleigh, North Carolina and he’s like, “How do I compete against Frito-Lay, the juggernaut that has all of these marketing?” Because they don’t have marketing budgets at Carolina Fine Snacks. They don’t have distribution yet. All he has in an invention that he thinks, “You know what? I want to change American eating.” So this guy, I went to his – I actually brought my whole team over to his office because he can convinces me over the phone in a grocery store. Because he just randomly called me and he found out about behavioral design. He says to me, “I think we need to use behavioral psychology to drive our brand.” So we took this guy’s invention, we go to visit him and did it pretty much for free because I was so inspired by him and the mission of Carolina Fine Snacks and we built a brand from scratch. I mean the name which ends up being Wicked Crisps. We actually created the tagline. We created the logo, we created the packaging. We created the website but it was all based upon these mindstates. So we did just very basic research for his marketplace and basically what we found out was that his consumer marketplace, imagine this is a millennial mom, a millennial female that’s his core target and under this condition, it was a really simple research we found out that she’s under the optimistic autonomy mindstate meaning, she is driven by autonomy motivations. So being unique and dependent having self-determination in her actions but she goes about snacking with the optimistic mindstate or regulatory focus meaning she’s seeking to maximize her chances of winning. So in her world, we found out that there’s always tensions if you think about millennial moms or just millennials in general or people maybe in general but this idea of there’s this tension between we need to fit in but I also want to be myself. I want to support large companies because they give you more value, they give you lower prices but I love smaller companies because they provide my ability to give a purpose playing it safe in life versus I want to be free to discover, right? And then lastly, this tension around doing the right thing versus doing things that I just want to do or supposed to do. It is that kind of tension between what’s right versus what I really want. So basic tensions from that we created this brand. That literary takes into account these tensions and this idea is this: Traditionally in snacking, it’s either eat healthy or eat something yummy. That’s it and I used to fight this at Frito Lay all the time. Well we’ve met portfolios of snacks that these are the better for you snacks and these are the fun snacks right? Millennial moms don’t see it at this dichotomy. It’s a false dichotomy because in life, they see that I could have both. Why do I have to choose whether I want something that’s tasty or something healthy? I want both and what we did was we position this brand and if you go to the book or if you go to Wicked Crisps, we designed in the logo, in the tagline, you’ll read all about this, how we integrated these psychological primes to drive this mindstate of optimistic autonomy. We integrated that in there and what is great about this is I just wanted to see this guy succeed and his first launch, I mean his very first launch of his first brand out there, I mean he had massive distribution like 30,000 stores within the first year. With no marketing research, with no marketing budget at all, in fact he just uses social media but when they are going up to buyers in Walmart or whatever, they were talking about the behavioral psychology integrated into this brand and by into its nature and it just resonates and so I mean they are blowing it up, they are going crazy gangbusters and for me, that was a time where I got to help somebody who otherwise was just going to try to wing it. He was going to call it Phil Snacks or anything that he could come up with but he knew the power of behavioral design and to this day, it’s my favorite. It’s my favorite brand and my favorite project at all time. I love all the toilet paper studies I do and all that stuff to, I’ve got it but that is the one.

[0:46:25] Charlie Hoehn: That’s awesome and they look delicious. I want to have a pack.

[0:46:29] William Leach: They’re amazing. The nutritional credentials are out of this world.

[0:46:33] Charlie Hoehn: Awesome, well this has been great Will. I’ve got two more quick questions for you. The first one is how can our listeners connect with you or follow you if you want that?

[0:46:42] William Leach: Sure, so we are just getting our website up for the book. So that is marketingtomindstates.com and then that of course, you get a free chapter and there is going to be some content that we’d put on there because we are trying to actually push the workshops and the worksheets through this. I want you to be able to do these things. So there is lots of free content because it is a practitioner’s guide to doing this. I am trying to take the science out of it. So you can get more information at marketingtomindstates.com. You can find me personally at LinkedIn and also personal Instagram account and then Marketing to Mindstates also has an Instagram account and a Facebook account.

[0:47:16] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent and the final question is give our listeners a challenge. What is one thing they can do from your book this week that will have a positive impact?

[0:47:25] William Leach: Here is where it starts, I would say if you believe that you are making 75,000 decisions on any given day, let’s just say that you are actually making because maybe you may not believe that, right? Maybe it’s like, “Well I don’t consider making a left, stepping left-stepping right of decision grace.” Let’s just say you are making 400 significant. Only 400 decisions on any given day, I want you to try to remember consciously how many of those did you consciously consider in making that decision. And if you can name 35 out of those 400, I’ll just tell you, you are doing really, really well and you are very self-aware. I can tell you the vast majority of people cannot come up with more than 20 decisions that they are actively consciously considering and if that’s the case, for all of those other decisions mindstates are going to matter. So first off, it’s being aware that you are not really taking in this environment. You are not really aware of all of these doctors. So being aware that there is this other world around context and how things are positioned to you influence your behaviors. It will help you across things that you are looking in the media, how things are positioned on news, how your instincts –

[0:48:31] Charlie Hoehn: The book is Marketing to Mindstates. Will, thank you so much for being on the show. This was awesome. Many thanks to Will Leach for being on the show. You can buy his book, Marketing to Mindstates, on amazon.com. Thanks for tuning in on today’s show. If you liked what you heard, here is what I want you to do next. Open up the podcast app on your phone or iTunes on your computer and search for “Author Hour with Charlie Hoehn” and then click “ratings and reviews”. Take 10 seconds to rate this show or leave a review. It is a small favor but it’s really the best way to show your support and give me feedback and if you know someone else who’d love Author Hour, take another three seconds to text them a link to this episode. We’ll see you next time.