Oliver Atkinson sits down with behavioural science researcher Will Leach, founder of MindState Group and author of Marketing to MindStates, to reveal how “hot states” (MindStates) shape decisions, and how targeting the moment can lift your B2B messaging.

Will maps his MindState model, goals, motivations, regulatory fit, and triggers, showing how nine core motivations and 21 decision shortcuts can turn a fuzzy persona into a usable brief.

Hear how a hotel CMO flipped from trashing a campaign to championing it once it was framed as social proof, and why brands should be the utility belt, not Batman.

With audiences making around 35,000 decisions a day, the default response to complex messaging is to swipe past and “think about it later.” If you pitch, launch, or sell inside crowded categories and buying committees, this is your guide for measurable lift, without gimmicks.

Plus, Oliver and Will dig into the AI angle, including Bevy (behavioural intelligence), emotionally intelligent customer personas you can “ask” in meetings, and where AI helps most (and where to be careful).

 

• 05:04 – Mind States Over Personas: Why temporary moments of emotional arousal tell you more about how to reach your audience than any static profile or segmentation ever could.
  
  
• 16:25 – Be the Utility Belt, Not Batman: Your customer is the hero of their own story — stop leading with your brand and start speaking to their aspirations instead.
  
  
• 17:29 – More Information, Less Persuasion: Every extra bullet point adds cognitive load. The brain's default is to not decide - so simplicity wins every time.
  
  
• 26:04 – The Two-Why Ladder: Ask "why" twice to move past functional needs and unlock the aspirational goal - who your customer wants to become on their best day.
  
  
• 49:23 – Motivation vs. Manipulation: Behavioral science can cross the line, but the non-conscious mind always knows. Short-term tricks quietly erode long-term brand trust. 

00:00:01:22 - 00:00:08:15
Oliver
This is the Audience Connection, the podcast where we go beyond what
connects and into why it actually sticks.

00:00:08:21 - 00:00:19:10
Lydia
Episodes are grounded in both research and real world experience, unpacking
what's behind audience behavior, from psychology and neuroscience to
cultural cues and decision making.

00:00:19:13 - 00:00:28:16
Oliver
And then we ground all those principles into real world applications, so you
understand exactly how to create stories that are memorable and change
behavior.

00:00:28:20 - 00:00:36:18
Lydia
We talk to brands, storytellers, behavior scientists, and communication leaders
about the real drivers of attention, trust, and action.

00:00:36:20 - 00:00:42:16
Oliver
Sponsored by casual, where behavioral science meets storytelling to build trust
for your audiences.

00:00:43:02 - 00:00:46:20
Lydia
Where are your hosts? Ali Atkinson and Lydia Chan.

Lydia (00:00)
Welcome back to the show guys. Today we're getting into why some ideas land
and others just don't. We're diving deep into the psychology behind how
people actually respond to messaging in real moments, not just neat personas
that departments create of them on slides and presentations.

Olly (00:20)
Yeah, exactly. So this week we are joined by Will Leach. He is a behavioural
science researcher and founder of MindState group. And he's also written a
book called Marketing to MindStates. And Will's whole thing is about these
MindStates, the idea that people don't just respond to messages based on who
they are, but it's actually based on what's going on in their head at that exact
moment.

Lydia (00:44)
It's great to have Will on the show because he's spent years applying this
thinking ⁓ inside huge consumer brands like Pepsi and Frito-Lay. But you guys
also talk about how much of that behavioral science playbook really carries
over in B2B marketing, ⁓ corporate decision-making, and many more.

Olly (01:04)
Yeah, right. So people think that these principles apply to consumer marketing
when actually it's very applicable across all types of audiences. So we're going
to get into mind stakes, motivation and why adding more information can
actually reduce persuasion and how creative teams can use this behavior
science without killing the magic.

Lydia (01:25)
All right, well, another good one about what drives human behavior. So let's
jump right into it.

Olly (00:00)
So Will, welcome to the show. It's great to have you on. I'm really looking
forward to unpacking all this with you. And before we get into it, I'd love to sort
of jump into a bit around how you got into this. You've been consulting for
around 25 years, right? So, so what initiallyled you into behavior science. 

Will Leach (00:56)
hey, first, thanks for having me, Ali. I really appreciate love the show. Yeah, you
know, my pathway probably very similar to other people's pathways are I just
kind of wandered into the space. So I started my career in the US military, went
off and got degrees in economics and applied econometrics. So I had never
taken a sociology class, a psychology class in any of my academic work. But I
went into the field of market research where I was working in quantitative
methods.
And I rotated into biotech companies and energy companies, but I found my
way over to PepsiCo back in 2009. And at that point, PepsiCo was really
heavily investing in neuroscience and behavioral economics. And back then,
these were really early states. these were not commonly kind of used, you
know, academic types of studies that we were doing, but we had somebody
come in and tell us about the importance of bringing neuroscience and behavioral
psychology into market research. And at first I was skeptical and didn't know
exactly why we were doing this because I felt data in data is where you get all
the meaning. Like why would I ask anybody a question when I can just look at
their purchase data? And then you grew up a little bit and I started working in a
laboratory that Pepsi invested in. was like $20 million investment in
neuroscience as well as behavioral sciences.

And I fell in love talking with neuroscientists, seeing the true reasons why
people make decisions the way they do. And I started heavily reading ⁓ so
much so that finally my wife said, will you just leave Pepsi and start your own
company? And ⁓ and that's what I did. So ⁓ I kind of wandered in there. I was
lucky enough to work with a major CPG manufacturer who could afford to
spend millions of dollars of ⁓ research into this space until eventually after
about four or five years of doing it for Pepsi, I decided to do it for myself.

Olly (02:47)
Wow. And yeah, I think I was listening to another podcast and you were talking
about, you know, you'd go on holiday and you just have all these white papers
piled around and just got really into it, which is a thing where we're going on
our journey at the moment. Me specifically, I'm really interested in it at the
moment. So feel like I'm at a very early stage. And I think what's really stood
out in your book is it's different to the other behavior science books that I've
read. And it's all about kind of that moment that people...
are in there's this kind of and it's all in flux right and so let's let's go back to the
start so what do you mean by a mind state

Will Leach (03:22)
Right? So the way we think about mind states are mind states are temporary
moments of emotional arousal. You would know them as a hot state. When
you're in a hot state, you're much more susceptible to influence because
you're using more emotional processing in the brain. Right? So we think about
system one and system two. I know your audience knows a lot about that.
When you're in a hot state, you're much more likely to be in a system one state
of mind.

Because of that, you're more open to persuasion because you're using these
emotional factors. So a mind state is really, it's not really an attitudinal way of
thinking about our segmentation. It's not a personality profile. It's a way of
thinking about a moment in time when your customers are making a decision.
And when you understand their psychological mind state that they're under,
you now know the types of words they want to hear, the types of motivational
language they like to hear, the visuals, et cetera. So it's really understanding
moments in time.

Olly (04:15)
And we often talk about this kind of gentoo marketing and personas and it's all
felt paper thin for a long time. So why are mind states more useful than a
persona or segment?

Will Leach (04:29)
Yeah, you know, I'll tell you, and I don't necessarily throw up all over that stuff
because they can, but I do say they can only go so far. So I like to think of a
mind state is overlay this on top of your persona, overlay this on top of your
segmentation. We've all been there. I have been the person who probably did
my fair share of bad segmentation studies, right? I was on the side of market
research. I commissioned these studies and the problem with why you're not
seeing your segmentation

Olly (04:33)
Okay.

Will Leach (04:56)
you know, the insights you get for segmentation, the reason why you're not
seeing those play out in the real world, one of two reasons. One, you got a
crappy segmentation. I totally get it. I've commissioned bad research in the
past as well. Or there's nothing wrong with the segmentation except that you
are not identifying what's happening in moments of time. So every
segmentation is going to give you some customers, their wants, their needs,
their expectations, their belief systems, their attitudes, their values, right?
Segmentations are generally going to get that. The problem with those things is
behavioral science is very clear. Your values, your wants, your needs, your
desires, your belief systems, they change based on what's happening in the
moment. So if you're not capturing that in your segmentation, then your
segmentation is going to be only looking at one specific moment in time. So I
think mind states oftentimes can help a previously bad segmentation get much
better. because you can overlay these moments of time and understanding how
psychology is influencing people's behaviors. and sometimes frankly,
customers are like, I don't want to do a segmentation and they'll use a mind
state kind of analysis to give them their ⁓ pseudo segmentation if you want.

Olly (06:07)
Right. So your segmentation, that gives you the basis effectively. And then
these mind states are giving you those moments when you can really kind of,
you know, take advantage of, you say those hot states.

Will Leach (06:17)
Yeah, and because they're behavioral science focused, if you look at the
literature, there's not a ton of literature out there that tells you how do you
market to a belief. But you know what? There's a ton of literature that'll tell you
how to market to a motivation. There's a ton of literature out there that tells you
how do you activate on a specific goal that somebody has. So because they're
behavioral science focused, they're much more applicable and actionable for
brands.

And so I think that also makes it really, really important

where it takes a normal attitudinal segmentation and you
can go take that same information, give it to an agency to go off and go do a
craft better creative based upon the behavioral sciences behind that segment.

Olly (06:52)
Yeah, I mean, that's what we've started to find is that, you know, the behavior
science is starting to really give you that reasoning about why a creative idea
works. And it doesn't have to kind of strip away from the creative. The creative
can still be wild and out there and super creative really, but it just gives you that
really solid justification. And often something you know in your gut is the right
way, you know, from your experience of making films or producing campaigns.
It just gives you that real grounding and the client starts to really understand.
It's got a scientific backing when you're pitching. It really, really helps.

Will Leach (07:23)
One of the best examples I can tell you, so we used to talk about quantification
of the gut, though it's not quantification, but I was consulting with an agency
and the agency was ⁓ working with a really large hotel chain in the US. And so
they brought me in for me to be in the room with their chief marketing officer to
talk about the creative. And so I was looking at the creative and I looked at the
creative through the lens of behavioral science. And I remember talking this
one concept to the CMO and
She, I mean, she just got so into this, this whole creative idea, this whole
campaign. And so she gets up and she says, literally, goes, this was the best
review I've had for as long as I can remember. Right? So she gets up, she
leaves the meeting table. I'm like, great. And the guy leans over to me, the
creative director goes, we presented this same campaign three weeks ago and
she shit all over it. But because you call something social proof, when we were
talking about the importance of showing business travelers at this hotel and
how they can, and she said,
He said, you brought confidence where she didn't have that confidence in
herself. And all I did, I didn't tell the creatives to do anything differently. They
showed me their campaign. I looked at it through the lens of behavioral science
to say, oh, I like how you're doing this. And that's, gave her much more
confidence. So I love this idea that most great creatives are using behavioral
science without, they may know they're using it, but they don't know the actual
term. I just come in sometimes tell them the term they're using and it brings
more confidence to their, to their executions.

Olly (08:47)
Yeah, completely. Okay, so and I think the wonderful thing about your book is
it's essentially a manual really of how to start thinking in this way. It's got really
actionable chapters, it's got a kind of whole model there to follow through. Can
you just take us through a little bit around the model and the book and how that
can be used?

Will Leach (09:05)
Sure. So what I did was I created first a behavioral model and how do you
understand human behavior in moments in time, the psychological mind states.
And then I just applied that model to marketing. So technically, Ali, I could have
called it managing to mind states, selling to mind states, parenting the mind
states, coaching to mind states. And I won't go into, was going to even think
about other books around this idea, but let's stick with marketing because I
love marketing and that's where I came from, from PepsiCo. So
Basically, the idea here is that if you want to understand why people do what
they do, you got to understand four different factors. The first factor are goals,
people's goals. So I use goal theory and that's really where there's why you do
that is you need to understand what people want because when you
understand what people want at different levels, there's aspirational goals.
We'll talk about that later. I'm sure ⁓ you can grab people's attention when you
speak to somebody's goals. It registers immediately.
But I've been there. You can speak to somebody's goals. It's January, what is
it? 13th. I don't know if I should have told the day, but it's January 13th today.
Across the world, everybody has lots of goals. have New Year's resolutions
and many people are thinking to themselves, oh, I broke all my New Year's
resolutions. That happened not because you had bad goals. It's because you
lack motivation to keep continuing after your goals when there's a little bit of
resistance. That's why I went into motivational psychology, the second part of
the Mind State Model. Understanding
deep motivations, there's only nine core motivations that drive the vast majority
of human behavior. That tells you why people want to reach their goals. Then
you have to go to the next stage, which would be, okay, well, I can understand

somebody's goals and their motivations behind reaching that goal. We got a
lower psychological ⁓ kind of ⁓ resistance.
So what we do is we use regulatory fit theory, some work out of Tory Higgins
work out of Columbia University. But basically, we need to lower resistance to
taking on a new idea. So what we do is we think about the world in terms of
cautious versus optimistic approaches to making decisions. Or we'll talk about
it later, promotion versus prevention regulatory focus. That's the scientific
name of it. And then lastly, the fourth part is
How do we get somebody to actually take a behavior and go? And that's a
trigger. So we use behavioral economics. All four of those things are awesome.
I think they're really important for you to know because if you understand
somebody's goals, you know how to activate on that goal. You know how to
grab somebody's attention. If you understand somebody's motivation, you
know how to prime that desire. So you can put that desire in your marketing
creative to create emotional arousal.
I can lower psychological resistance by framing up my messaging around my
brand will help you get more good things in life or my brand will help you avoid
bad things in your life. So regulatory fit and I can drop in a cognitive heuristic, a
trigger that will help somebody make a fast, easy decision. Those four things
are really, really important, but ultimately they come, those four things turn into
a psychological mindset, which you could build brand creative and strategy
again. So the mind state model,

Olly (11:59)
Hmm.

Will Leach (12:08)
takes those four factors, puts it into a place in a moment in time, which is
psychological mind state, and now helps you activate that in communications
and innovations.

Olly (12:18)
Now, when you've talked through all of that, I think some listeners might be like,
that is incredibly complicated. But actually, once you break it down into the
steps, it's really quite manageable, right? And you can kind of apply it and then
you look at your work and think, actually, this is really applicable. So when a
campaign or content specifically fails, what is typically the root cause?

Will Leach (12:44)
Yeah, and hopefully this will simplify things for your audience, right? Because
they're like, these four things, how do I know these four things? Sometimes
what you want to do is focus on the one out of those four that makes the most
impact. So in your question, which is the one? Well, it depends on the
campaign's objectives. So for example, if the campaign's job was to increase
penetration, maybe the campaign was a new product, so you want to increase
trial, then really you want to focus on goals.

Olly (12:49)
Hmm.

Will Leach (13:13)
That's really the big thing because if you need to drive trial, you better speak to
somebody's goals. You want to capture their attention. You want them to focus
on your brand. Now, if you had a campaign that was more focused on driving
repeat business, maybe ⁓ bringing in lapsed users. Now, don't worry about
goals. You want to focus on motivation. Why? Because you know that if they
were previous buyers, buyer of yours, they were already motivated to buy.
They just kind of forgot about you. So focus on motivation.
You know, if you want to increase trips or basket size, maybe you're running a
small shop or you have an online business and you want somebody to buy ⁓
slightly more products or maybe increase the price per unit. Now you want to
focus on lowering resistance, right? You already have them in the basket. You
want them to buy, but you want to increase your prices. You want to lower
resistance, which would be approach. So it kind of depends on what you're
trying to accomplish on where you want to lean in. I will tell you that
An overall rule of thumb is when I see marketing fail almost always, it's
probably because they didn't really truly understand their customers' goals and
they conflated their goals as a brand to what their customers really want. And
lot of times, and Ali, this is so hard for brands to hear because I was on the
brand side, customers don't really care a lot about your brand. they don't. They
care about their aspirations. They care about their goals.

Olly (14:24)
Mmm.

Will Leach (14:40)

And so I see brands talk more about what they wanna do to help you reach
your goals or whatever it is that they have their new product. And that's where I
see marketing fail most of the time is that you're like, all you've done in two
thirds of your ad is talk about yourself and how you can do all these great
things. And frankly, you never captured their goals.

Olly (14:57)
Yeah, and that's where you use your Batman analogy, right? Yeah.

Will Leach (15:01)
Yes, that's right. Be the utility belt, not the Batman. So you should be talking to Batman, your
customers Batman. They're the hero of their own story. Talk about them and
you're the utility belt that helps Batman. Batman needs a utility belt. They need
your brand, but you can't go in there and say, Hey, Batman, I'm your savior
because Batman is going to be a hero regardless. Your customers Batman, you
be the utility belt. Know your role. Know your role.

Olly (15:05)
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we've often found that teams will, when they are responding to complexity,
they add information. It's like if we really need to communicate something, ⁓
we need to pack everything in. Why does that often lower persuasion instead
of increasing it?

Will Leach (15:45)
Yeah, because for every piece of new information that you're trying to give
them more facts, more information to make a better decision, you're actually
creating more cognitive load. The brain is constantly trying to make sense of all
these words, all these facts that you're sending somebody. And it doesn't take
a lot, Ali, until you get to what's called an avoidance response. Even if you're
being clear, even if you're trying to simplify the language by adding that extra
bullet point, the brain registers that as more work.

Olly (15:56)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (16:15)
And if there's more work eventually, that, like I said, that bar is really low where
there's a, this avoidance response and the avoidance response is not as if
they're going to look at your stuff and just immediately throw up all over.
They're not going to review you badly. They'll just sweep. They'll just pass
those. Cause the number, I tell my students this all the time, the number one
decision we make every single day and you make about 35,000 decisions
every day. The number one decision you make is to not decide. You just say, I'll
look at that later. I'll think about that later.
So when you add something that you're trying to use to simplify a message or
simplify a concept, realize that you're creating cognitive load and what could
happen is that your customer just says, I'll think about that later and they hardly
ever come.

Olly (16:58)
Mmm, and it's about kind of keeping your ego in check as well like, you know
Don't don't try and pack in loads of long words and try and sound smart
because that just in turn like makes people avoid and just go actually know you
know what that I'd Yeah

Will Leach (17:09)
Yeah. Or it's the features, right? It's the features, your
brands, they have beautiful features. Like I'm working on this right now with my
own business where I have these six features in my AI. And what I'm being told
is I think they're so clear and I see how the value of everyone has features and
the feedback I'm getting is focused on one feature. Well, the main feature, call
it your wedge and you could sell them later on on multiple features. But to me,
it's so hard because I've spent a lot of money and a lot of time thinking through
these features and why they're so important for my clients to use.
and I'm hurting myself by telling them how much better my product is because
they're getting confused. It's so frustrating out there, but you've got to do that.
You've got to do it if you're brand. It's simplify, simplify, simplify to the main
feature, the main benefit, and you'll see your sales rise. You should.

Olly (17:54)
And it's why brands like Apple are so successful, right? They distilled it down to
being like a thousand songs in your pocket or whatever, you know, like they,
they, they just kind of, I remember chatting to one of the creative directors of

Apple in, in Europe and he was, he was saying exactly the same thing. I was
talking about casual actually, and oppositioning and he just kept trying to, he's
like, no, strip it back, go down. I said, I can't, I don't think I can. I don't think I
can go as far as you want me to, kind of strip this back. It's so difficult as well
to do it.

Will Leach (18:00)
Yeah, I was just about to say that.
But it takes your ego. It's, it's the worst.

Olly (18:21)
what would you say the quickest signals are that your audience are in an open
or closed mindset? Is that language or is it objections, behaviour, context?
What are you looking for?

Will Leach (18:33)
Yeah, for me, it's always language and almost all. mean, you could see it in
behavioral data, but it's really the language people use. That's why I love the
world of artificial intelligence and large language models, because it used to
take me so long to go line by line to look for these signals, these tells, because
when you and I are having a conversation, you were giving tells just like you are
poker into your subconscious. You're giving tells. But normally what I used to
have to do is look for certain words.

Olly (18:42)
Mmm.

Will Leach (19:00)
that you're using and I go, gosh, he used the word gain. Ollie used the word
accomplish. yep, he used the word increase. He's more open. That's what we
call promotion regulatory focus. All so you're using optimistic types of
language, which makes me believe now, if you use enough times, you're open
to new ideas, new brands, things like that. Or if you're using language like, I
need more accuracy or I'm a little anxious. These are prevention words.
I think the best way to understand whether somebody is open or closed is
looking at those individual words and after a while you start picking up on
patterns. Your subconscious is speaking whether you like it or not. So
unstructured data, conversational data, your customer reviews, your survey,
open ends, things like that, to me are the best telltale sign to whether I can
identify whether you're optimistic and open to new ideas or if you're cautious
and you're kind of more avoiding new ideas.

Olly (19:38)
Mmm. Yeah, that's really interesting. mean, I would have myself down as an optimist
just from an end, you know, just from like coming away from all these talks and
being like, we need to put that in, but maybe, maybe not. Maybe my
subconscious is saying something different. ⁓ Yeah. And I loved in your book,
how you, you know, the fact is you kind of to pick up these signals and again,
you know, this will all have changed with AI and we'll come onto this in a bit,
but you talk a little bit around, you know, interviewing, ⁓ you know, for storage
solutions that,

Will Leach (20:04)
Yeah, that's right. That's right.

Olly (20:23)
lady who was you know, she was actually was all about shame rather than just
keeping the wardrobe tidy. How long does it take to actually pick all that out?
How long were you with the subject just out of interest? just kind of Yeah, when
I was reading, was thinking how long you spending doing that.

Will Leach (20:39)
Yeah, so in that type of work, we're in homes and we did home research where
we go into people's homes. We find that people start opening up almost
immediately once you have them in context of where they make the decision.
for the people who haven't read the book, the story is that we're doing
research around home storage
And basically we had a respondent open up her closet
And beforehand, she was so nice and she was great. She was showing off her
home. Her home looked beautiful. It was well tidied. It was great. And she
opens up a closet and then there were just her closet was a wreck. And as she
saw her closet as a wreck, she was in context where she makes decisions and
she starts breaking down. And so when she's crying, she's talking about this
idea that it's shameful because what type of person, what type of mother
would allow her closet to look like this?

And so once you get somebody into context, especially if they're going to use a
product in that context. So if you're in the kitchen, you're, you're doing
research and you're working for a soup company, get them in the closet. And
very quickly, those tells come out. If you do a survey and they're taking that
survey and you're doing a survey on breakfast and they're taking that survey at
10 o'clock at night in their bed.

it's a lot harder to find those signals, right? Because they're not in the place
they make decisions. They're not in that same context. So quicker you get them
into context, the better. If you can do that, of course. And once you get in
context, you usually get those signals pretty quick.

Olly (22:09)
move on to the kind of behavior model and the four inputs.
terms of the, the higher, the goal high, this higher goal that we have, how do
we, how, how, what's the kind of like shortcuts to getting to that higher goal? If
you don't have the opportunity to go and sort of stand in someone's wardrobe
with them, how do you do that?
in the world of virtual kind of, you interaction.

Will Leach (22:32)
Yep, it's actually much simpler than what you believe. It's a concept called
laddering. And really what you're gonna do is ask the word why a few times. So
the first thing you wanna do, if you wanna understand somebody's goals, now
there are different levels of goals. And we talk about it in the book, right? The
first level of goals are these functional goals, we call them. And these goals
are, if you just ask me, hey, what's important to you when you're making a
decision? And they're gonna tell you things like, it's gotta be low price. It's
gotta taste good. It's gotta have easy to see packaging. All those functional
things, which are not really emotional, right, Ollie?
They're important, you know, they're obviously important because people are
saying that they're important to you. They're fine to use, but your creative is not
going to be emotionally engaging if you talk about these functional goals.
They're just very functional. So all you have to do is ask and you can do this on
a survey. You can do this on anything. Just one extra question. say,
collectively, you just told me these five things are important to you. Collectively,
why are they important to you?

and that should ladder somebody into more of emotive state. And they'll say,
well, if you're able to give me those five things, it'd be much easier for me to
make a decision around what dinner should be set aside or what kind of dinner
my family wants. Okay, that's great. You can get some more emotions. Now
you know that you're making your life simpler. More importantly is what we call
aspirational goals.

Olly (23:43)
Hmm.

Will Leach (23:51)
And this is where I think brands should be positioning themselves around their
customers aspirations. Aspirational goals are who do I want to become in my
best day? So what you do is you ladder that higher order goal again. So if you
know that, oh, you want to make dinner easier for her as a mom, you say, why
would that be important to you? Why is that important? Why? Why again?
That's the ladder. And that second why they'll go, well,

Olly (24:18)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (24:21)
If I can make this dinner faster, that would give me more time to spend with my
family and be a really engaged mom. If I build a brand around that idea, every
time she doesn't feel like she's being an engaged mom, whether she's in traffic
or whether she's signing up for, you know, she's making food and I'm a food
company, I come to mind. That's the best part of branding is I want you to
come to mind. If I'm a brand, I want to come to mind when
ever my customer feels like they're not being their best self on their best day,
their aspirational self. So that's why you want to get to that higher order goal
and all you have to do is say why twice.

Olly (24:55)
Mm.
don't you have to be like to pick out those moments when you're because isn't
there always a level of self-report that might be misleading in that in that once
you're going on that journey you really need to know how to pick out those
moments right

Will Leach (25:14)
Oh, I agree. And like if I do it on a survey, I lose 20 to 25 % of all my responses
because nobody gets to that level. No doubt about it. So if I can have that
conversation when I say, why is that important? It just is. Okay, okay, let's take
a step back. But tell me why you're gonna have that conversation. Again,
unstructured data matters so much. But you're right, even with my best
moderators, I lose sometimes 20 to 25 % of people because they just won't let
you get there. Especially if you work with doctors and surgeons and stuff like
that. They hate talking about their emotions.

Olly (25:25)
Yeah, yeah.

Will Leach (25:43)
So, but you're going to find it hard, but when you identify that they're really
close, sometimes you have to give them an example. Somebody say, well, is it
this? Is it because you want to make dinner more efficient? And they'll go, yeah,
I never thought of it that way. You're trying not to lead them, but sometimes you
have to give them an example.

Olly (26:00)
Yeah, it's trying to like almost like producing an interview where you're kind of
trying not to get them to say the answer. You're not like, just say this. ⁓

Will Leach (26:06)
I know, they make our jobs
so much easier if they would just tell us what their subconscious was telling
them.

Olly (26:11)
Yeah. ⁓
And then in the motivations, can you run through a little bit around like how,
how we kind of really unpick that from, from someone's psyche? How are we
trying to get that idea of the motivation? Cause there are, there are nine, right?
Did you say there are nine? Yeah.

Will Leach (26:23)
Yeah, again, that's right. There are nine core

motivations that drive the vast majority of human behavior. So these are things
like very Maslow, right? Security is a core motivation or maybe Desi and Ryan,
they did work long time around belonging and empowerment ⁓ and autonomy
or desire for freedom. So there are these nine core motivations that drive the
vast majority of human behavior. Like there's other psychological, there's other
physical motivations like sex or like food. We're talking about psychology. So

Olly (26:29)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (26:52)
Your brand and categories in general are generally driven by maybe two, at
most three of these motivations. Your job is to identify the top motivation that is
driving people to consider what brands they want to buy. So let's say if you're
in the insurance world, if you sell insurance, high probability that your
customers are driven by safety. It's risk, right? And so

Olly (27:19)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (27:20)
That's
easy. It's one of the core nine, right? The idea of safety. Or let's say if you are a
financial services consultant, chances are the vast majority of your clients are
driven by the achievement motivation, which is our desire for success and
wealth. So, you know, what you want to do is identify which of these nine best
drives or most drives people's decisions. And then there's secondary
motivations, which can help you differentiate your brand.
Again, I think there are easy ways to get to these motivations and harder ways
to get to these motivations. I use ⁓ a lot of visuals, you know, because I want to
tap into more of the emotions. So I don't say, hey, which of these nine
motivations do you most want to feel? Right. Because people like, that one.
What want to do is again, if you have a conversation and they will tell you there
are these tells that people will have and you can look for those tells in
unstructured data. You can look at all those sentences, go through those
verbatims, everything else.

Olly (28:05)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (28:17)
Or you can do picture based activities and you can say something like, which
of these pictures best expresses how you want to feel if you had your best day
⁓ in this category. If you bought the ideal product and then they'll look for
these images and we have images that will correlate strongly back to one of
those nine motivations. So when they select the image and you can talk to them
about that image. Tell me what is about that image? Like, well, that guy has his
arms up in victory and I just feel like that. between you and I, Ali, when people
show that
victory pose with their hands up in a V, that is highly, highly correlated with
feelings of achievement and power, like success. So now if I get them talk
about that, I'll pick up on those cues, they just use the word success, and now I
can reasonably believe that that person is driven by the achievement
motivation, and now I can start priming that achievement motivation in my
marketing, and I can do all sorts of great things with knowing that motivation.

Olly (29:11)
Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting. And I think that the you know, when we think
about our clients as well, we often talk about like, obviously scratching our
heads around what motivates our clients, because we want to know, you know,
how to market to them and how to get them to sign off the jobs really. And we
often think, you know, someone saying that our club, the best way to win a job
is to get our clients boss promoted. And so sort of try to kind of, you know, go
down and I think
In terms of corporate comms in the area that we work, it's a lot about risk,
right? People want to be the person that did the great thing and had the pat on
the back and produced a really award-winning campaign. Like there's loads of
awards around, know, people want to win the awards and there's a lot of
recognition going on there. How can we apply this? You know, how can we find
out this sort of motivation again, like in that sort of environment where you've
got more of a buying committee, I guess, as well, rather than sort of, yeah.

Will Leach (30:08)
Yeah,
well, I'll tell you, first off, it's hard. I'm gonna tell you right now. It's really hard.
⁓ There's a couple of tricks though that I'll tell you that I've, because I do about
half of my business is through B2B and I have to go through committees on a
lot of that stuff, right? No doubt about it. So there's some rules of thumbs you
can use. First off is what I try to do, and I know this sounds so quaint ⁓ and
flippant, but I try to identify the leader that is

Olly (30:12)
Okay. Damn.

Will Leach (30:36)
probably going to make that decision. Now that's hard to do sometimes, but if I
can identify that leader, I'm very interested in the words that leader uses. Now
that could be a CFO, that could be a chief operating officer, a head of
marketing, whatever it is. So first I try to do the leader, but that oftentimes
doesn't work because they're dealing with a committee and yeah, you know
that leader has maybe more influence on the decision, but they're in a
committee because other people are going to weigh in.

Olly (31:05)
Yeah.

Will Leach (31:06)
So the second thing I try to do is I will try beforehand to look at anything I can to
identify their culture. So let's go back to insurance. If you are working for an
insurance client, the culture is gonna be risk adverse. Why? Because their
product is risk adverse. And when you think about the insurance guy coming to
your holiday party, you're not expecting the insurance guy.
to be the guy who's going crazy at the party, right? The insurance guy is more
reserved. I know that's so wrong to say, and it's so stereotypical, but it's true.
So I will literally go to the website and look for things like who we are, our
values, and I'll look to see, this more of a cautious type of company? Are they
risk adverse in their language? Are they more optimistic and they're talking
about their future and things like that? So I'll do that. ⁓ And thirdly, if I don't
know, and sometimes you just have to do this.
you should expect that, ⁓ it's, I, a rule of thumb is if there is somebody in
finance or accounting or legal, you should naturally expect that those people
are gonna be more cautious. Their job is to protect the company from risk. It is.
Every so often you'll get a CFO that loves to invest money for growth, but
generally CFOs get canned all the time.

Olly (32:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Will Leach (32:24)
because they didn't plan for a time period where revenues were gonna be
down. That's why they get canned. Then if you're in marketing, if you're in
innovation, if you're in strategy, their job generally is to grow a company. So
they tend to be less risk adverse. It's a stereotype, so be careful. You have
CMOs out there that are absolutely trying to take the cautious approach and do
things because they've been a long time, they wanna keep their career. Most of
the time, the marketing people, the product innovators, the strategy people,

Olly (32:29)
Yeah, completely.
Hmm.

Will Leach (32:53)
their jobs to grow, which means they're more open to new ideas, so they're
gonna be more optimistic. So three ways I do it. And when in doubt, I think
about their job function. Is their job to grow a company or to save a company?
And that's how I'll make my

Olly (33:07)
Yeah, and I think, you know, that's from experience to just think it's it's great to
have that balance across a board, right? You need those different personalities
in there to let you say if everybody was splashing the cash the entire time, then
when the downturn happens, you're in trouble. So let's focus then on the the
regulatory approach. We're talking optimistic, pessimistic, or is cautious, right?
So what where how do we identify this and

Will Leach (33:21)
That's right.

Olly (33:35)
Yeah, take us through this.

Will Leach (33:37)
Yeah, so it's similar again in the words that people use. Now there are visual based
tools that I use, so I can actually put up two different types of images and some
of the imagery. Imagine that you're given a choice on how do you feel or which
image best expresses how you feel when you're making a decision for your
ideal product again. And certain images you'll show that are people like a shield
or somebody with their hands up like that or whatever. Those

Olly (33:57)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (34:05)
are correlated with prevention regulatory focus or what we call cautious
approach. They're a little bit more cautious. Or you could show images of
people ⁓ excited and that they're moving forward. Those are images that are
more correlated with optimism and promotion regulatory focus. So I don't
actually like the image exercises as much here. What I like to do is very, very
specifically look for those words.
So if you want to identify if somebody is being more cautious, you can actually
pick up words and you're look for words like circumvent, dodge. I'm reading
some from a list because I had to build an NLP model on these words in the
past. ⁓ Evasive, shield, terrified, alert. I mean, there's hundreds of words that
fit into this box called prevention regulatory focus or what we call cautious
approach. And you can look at those same boxes.

Olly (34:55)
Mm.

Will Leach (35:03)
but over on the optimistic side, and you can look for words like hope, get,
crave, yearn, growth, rise, energy. So what you wanna do is you wanna look at
conversations and you're looking for these words. And know you're not gonna,
and it sounds so easy for me to go, look at these exact words. But what you do
is when you read it, you're like, ⁓ as I'm reading it, I can tell that they're
thinking more benefits. What can...

Olly (35:18)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.

Will Leach (35:31)
what good will come out of this decision? Or you could just look at it and say, ⁓
what are they trying to avoid? Here's one thing I tell my students. As I'm
reading a, let's say you're gonna look at a bunch of review data, right, Ollie?
And you can look at the review data and I hope people can watch this. I'll put
my hands out by my head. And as I'm reading, if my arms are moving out this
way,
that's probably a signal your body can intuitively understand that's optimistic.
This person is optimistic. As I'm reading, if I'm going like this, your body will
naturally bring your arms and your fingers in when you're reading a review that
somebody is angry or they're cautious. It sounds so stupid. You gotta be
Italian, right? You gotta talk with your hands. Yeah. And so as you're reading,
you're like, if you're like this, like, okay. So yeah, the person, this idea, they love
the product. It's bright, it's cheerful, it's expected.

Olly (36:01)
⁓ really?
Interesting. That's crazy. Yeah.

Will Leach (36:24)
your arms will naturally move away from your body. But if it's cautious, they're
like, I'm so mad at this. Like, why did you do this to me? That's cautious. It's
such a small little thing, but that's how sometimes I'll go, okay, and frankly,
you're not always gonna know. And what's even scarier is sometimes people in
the same paragraph will switch from one to the other. You're not always
optimistic, you're not always cautious. In the same conversation, you can
actually be both. So what you're looking for are tendencies. Are they more
optimistic or are they more cautious?

Olly (36:25)
Wow, what a giveaway.
Yeah.
Mmm.

Will Leach (36:52)
And the way I look, in natural words, at least here in the United States, also in
the UK, it's usually about a 60-40 split. So people, 60 % of the time, are slightly

more optimistic than they are cautious. And if you go to other countries, maybe
in the West, it's the exact opposite. So you're never going to be one or the
other. But in general, going, is this person typically, or they seem to actually
talk in a way that is optimistic, but now with large language models, and of
course with NLP programs,
You can go, yes, I can have a probability with high percentage of confidence
that this person is optimistic. Or we couldn't do that five years ago now. It's so
easy to drop verbatims and reviews into these machines and you can
absolutely identify with high likelihood that this person is optimistic or they're
more cautious.

Olly (37:39)
Yeah, yeah, we'll come on to the large language models later because I think
you know what what? You're starting to create there with bevy and and you
know the the AI tools there is is really valuable and I think you know when
brands can actually have that this the guesswork starts to stop right and you
start to be able to sort of feed it in and get a kind of live response back I have
got some questions around that though to sort of understand it a bit more and
test it a bit so
heuristics, obviously, you know, that's the behavior science bit, isn't it? That's
really kind of like how you get get people to change take us through that. What
I quite liked as well in your book was when you talk about the effect, the effect
in a bias, that's quite different, right? Whereas a bias is not typically like less
healthy than an effect. But yeah, if you could take us through a few of those,
that'd be great.

Will Leach (38:25)
Yeah. So imagine that you understand somebody's goals and you activate in
their goals and you know what motivates them. So you know the emotions that
they desire. So you could put that into your marketing and then you've lowered
resistance by framing up your messaging around, ⁓ you know, your brand is
going to help them avoid pain or your brand is going to help them dig, you
know, get more gain and success, et cetera. But even then, even if you have
those things, people still may not buy. Why?
because they need what's called a trigger. In my book, I call it a trigger. You
would know it out there as a cognitive heuristic or a cognitive bias. So we all
have these biases, these heuristics that we use to make decisions very easy
and very kind of natural. So you may know it as an intuition. You have a gut
feel, the rule of thumb. And these things actually help people make fast, easy
decisions. And almost always the fastest, easiest decision
is the one that we'll make. So I know at one point, I think you may have said
like, what's the number one thing I could do? If my app's not working, what's
the number one thing I could do? If you needed short term sales, I would not
focus on goals, I would go right to that trigger. Why? Because you're helping
somebody make a fast, easy decision. So if I'm trying to choose between a car,
and there's so many features on cars, and I'm looking at three different models,
it's probably complex, really complex.

We go to the avoidance state of mind, like, maybe I don't want to make a
decision right now, but then you say, hey, 10,000 people think that this outie is
the best deal. That's a very easy decision for somebody. Well, that's that
heuristic is what's called social proof, right? And so social proof is this concept
that we tend to we tend to assign value, higher value to things that we believe
other people are doing. So when you say 10,000 people,

Olly (40:08)
Hmm.

Will Leach (40:20)
trust us with their kids lives in their car. That's something called social proof.
And you don't have to do all the comparisons like well, if 10,000 people believe
that this is right brand, so should I. Or another one is, ⁓ let's see, let's see, let's
do another one. Egocentric bias. Egocentric bias is that we tend to believe
there's we overvalue things that we believe decisions we believe we made on
our own, and that will benefit us.

Let's do it. Of course we would do that. So egocentric bias. So if you know that
your customers can make easier decisions when they believe they made the
decision and it will benefit them, well then you include that in your marketing
saying people like you always make the best decisions because you know that
when you're successful others are successful too. So there's these 21 in my
book. I've seen these heuristics have been codified into over 200. I've seen
them less than

Olly (41:03)
Mmm.

Will Leach (41:19)

six depending on which author you look at. The fact of the matter is your
customers are using these decision shortcuts and if you identify which ones
they're using then you can bypass a lot of the critical thinking and just give
them conformity effect, social proof, scarcity effect, hey limited time only, that
right off the bat say if it's only limited time I better grab it before it leaves.
They're not doing cost benefit analysis. So that's why these little things that we
look at marketing and they're so sometimes

Olly (41:38)
Yeah.
Mmm.

Will Leach (41:49)
made fun of from a behavioral psychology perspective, you're helping your
customers make fast, easy decisions and they want that.

Olly (41:57)
Yeah, it's funny, like, you know, we've been putting more behavior science into
our process. And we talk about it a lot in the team. Now in each production
meeting, we're talking around these things. And you start to just see it
everywhere. Once once you start to read about it, and you're like, Oh, that's
social proof. Oh, there's someone doing the labor edition. Oh, it's the practical
effect. You know, you just you start your brain starts to change and you start to
label everything.

Will Leach (42:15)
Yeah.
Yeah, and sometimes you think it's overused, like social proof was so overused
four or five years ago and it just is or scarcity, right? Limited time only, while
supplies last. And I think, you know, I don't know if there's a lot in the literature
that says that people get bored of this stuff. It does feel like some of those are
being so overused that they're not novel anymore. And we know through
behavioral science is that novel novelty drives, you know, kind of attention
sometimes. So sometimes even if you know that social proof is a good heuristic
to use, you got to pull back from it.

Olly (42:25)
Yeah.

Will Leach (42:49)
or figure out a different way of using it because so many people use these, it's
these marketing ninjas that come out there and they tell you to use these
things. There's a lot of gurus out there in the behavioral science space that will
tell you to use these things and you'll find out very quickly that they're so
overused that they're not as effective as they used to be.

Olly (43:08)
Yeah. And I think one of the watch outs as well is to just, you know, if you, if
you throw these things into chat GPT and just try and follow that, it can be a bit
misleading or, you can get it wrong. Right. And I think one of the problems is
you might be going in thinking you're using a principle and you're actually not.
And if you're labeling and you're talking to people about it, so we've been quite
careful as well about how we're, how we're using it, trying to get consultants in
and trying to really make sure it's watertight before we go out with it.

Will Leach (43:34)
That is, that's

Olly (43:35)
Because I

Will Leach (43:35)
true.

Olly (43:35)
think that's the temptation now is just throwing things into chat GPT and

Will Leach (43:40)
Well, Ali, the best thing I had heard was that the way to think about it is that
these large language models were never trained on behavioral science. Like
they're just too broad, right? And so when you expect to drive behavioral
science based outcomes by using just a large language model, you should
expect that there are going to be other things that are involved with that. And
so that's why it gets wrong. Now, if you had a large language model is very
focused on behavioral science, then you're going to get cleaner outputs. But
you're right. Like if you just drop things into chai chibiti,

Olly (43:50)
Mmm.

Will Leach (44:09)
You are taking the world's collective knowledge on all things to come up with a
very specific behavioral science principle in marketing. If you were to lower
that model, and don't know if there's even one out there, right? But if you were
to lower that model into a small language model that was very behavioral
science focused, then maybe you're okay. But right now, I don't think that really
exists.

Olly (44:17)
Hmm
Right? It's not
around yet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's also kind of like trying to trying to please
you all the time as well, isn't it? So it's always trying to throw back in your your
work that you've talked to about previously, I keep seeing these things pop up.
And I'm like, that's not behavioral science. something I said a couple of months
ago. And it's definitely not right. So yeah, it's a bit of a watch out. Okay, so if if
a team could fix one factor first, which gives the biggest lift the fastest so and
why

Will Leach (44:47)
Yes.

Olly (44:57)
So I think I'd love to kind of dig into some case studies here around your work
and what you've seen. It really gives some impact.

Will Leach (45:05)
Yeah, so the first thing I think of is, you know, the biggest lift and the fastest lift.
Those are two different things. The fastest lift, what I would tell you, just like I
just said, is I would drop a trigger in there as fast as I could. Make somebody's
decision easy and fast, which may be at the very end of your landing page or
whatever, you say, while supplies last, I know that's terrible copy. You can do
better than that. But for something that's fast, I would do.

Olly (45:11)
Mm-hmm.

Will Leach (45:34)

If you want a bigger lift, think what I would do is I'd focus on somebody's goals
or maybe the motivations because once you nail that motivation, let's probably
motivation is back to where I would go because motivations, know, it's
basically trying to understand their emotional desires that they seek. When we
have brands that communicate or that deliver on somebody's emotional desire,
I will pay more for that.
I absolutely will pay more for that. You know this, if you've ever, ⁓ a friend of
mine has traveled to India this week and he hasn't been away from his kids.
They're really small. They're like toddlers and he's never been away for like 10
days and he's just dying. Like he's so sad or whatever. And I said, here's what
you need to do. You need to go to a toy store and you need to go buy a gift. It's
such bad parenting, but go buy a gift for your toddlers. Why?

Olly (46:02)
Mm.

Will Leach (46:32)
because the gift is really not about the toddlers. The toddlers don't even know
that he's in India, right? Like they know daddy's gone, but really the toddlers,
they're okay with mom. The gift is for him because he feels like he's not being a
good dad. So what he needs to do by buying a toy for his toddlers, it brings out
the nurturance motivation, which is our desire to provide care and love for
others most of the time. So if I'm at the airport,

Olly (46:39)
Hmm.

Will Leach (47:00)
He's flying back from India. I'm sorry. He's from he's in India. He's gonna fly
back from India. If I'm at the airport kiosk, I could probably double the price on
my toys. And he'll buy it. Because if he forgets he's gonna buy that not
because those kids think that's a great toy. It's because he needs to feel like
he's a that he's being a good dad. So that's why I say the bigger price would be
the motivation because when you're in an emotional state, you're more you're
much more willing to spend more money.

Olly (47:21)
Yeah.

Will Leach (47:29)

because it makes you feel like a better person. So I'd focus on the motivation
for the larger.

Olly (47:32)
Hmm
Does it does this tip over and I asked this group a of our different guests and
when we're talking about the subconscious does it tip over into manipulation
and if it can't if it does how do we guard against that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just
manipulation. Yeah, it is.

Will Leach (47:48)
Yeah, it does. It can. It can. It is. Yeah.
So here's what I would tell you. I can scare you into buying my product. There's
no doubt about it.
put something sexy and get emotional arousal for you to buy my product.
Absolutely can do that. And those are very manipulative, right? But you can
trick somebody. You can trick somebody into
⁓ into buying your product. ⁓ There are rental car companies that the way that
they frame up their offers around do you want this insurance? Do you want the
gas? Do you want the toll? When I look at it, it's manipulative. It just is. It's so
confusing. I have a master's degree and I'm like, I can't understand what you're
offering me. So you can do that. Here's what I'll tell you with doing that. When
you get somebody

Olly (48:22)l
Yeah.

Will Leach (48:40)
and you manipulate them to buy your product, you damn well better deliver a
incredible experience. You better over deliver as a matter of fact, because your
conscious mind may not even know that you were scared into it. I will tell you
your non-conscious mind knows. And when you're scared, if you're using one
of these tricks and you scare somebody, you will associate that person, your
customer will associate that feeling of like, I'm scared to your brand.
If you do it again and again, how many brands you know of like, I love that
brand. They're scary. Very few people do that. So long-term it's going to hurt

your brand. Or if you don't over deliver, they may feel inside the go just, they
wouldn't even be able to articulate it, Ali, but there would just be this feeling of
hesitation because your subconscious knows something was off. You were,
you, you did something that you normally otherwise wouldn't do. And the
payback wasn't good. You didn't experience the food that

Olly (49:26)
Mmm.
Mmm.

Will Leach (49:38)
tastes as great as the menu seemed to suggest. So I would tell you that it's a
short term way of getting sales. It's a very quick way of hurting your brand.
And so when clients, I've seen a client, I've had a client actually go down and
ask if we could go down this path and it's up to them. It was on the verge, it
was on the line. And I said, but just realize when you do that, you may see short
term success, but I guarantee you if you do that long term,
you're going to hurt your equity and your brand which is to hurt your long term
sales. So be careful about that. But yeah we're in the wild west right now. There
are there are no ethics really. I mean we like to pretend there's ethics but you
know it's a science it's only been around 60 70 years. Like we're in our infancy.
We're the wild west. Some brands will go out there and say crazy things. Some
gurus out there on social media will say I know the 10 most successful subject
lines you need. That's manipulative. 

They're just throwing stuff out there. ⁓ So you got to be careful, I think, until there is more
of a governance. There's more of a, you're relying on everybody's own social
values. There are certain values I have. There are certain companies I'll never
work with because ammunition companies, that's not who I am. Cigarettes, I'm
not going to ever work in those types of things. There are other social
scientists, like absolutely I'll work with them. I don't see anything wrong with
smoking. I don't see anything wrong with arms.

Olly (50:52)
Yeah.

Will Leach (51:01)

So those are some individual values are going to dictate whether or not you're
going to use some of ⁓ these tactics. But short term, yay, maybe you get lucky.
Long term, you're going to hurt your brand. I guarantee it.

Olly (51:01)
Mmm.
Yeah, actually that's aligned with casual as well. We don't work with smoking or
⁓ guns company. don't say no smoking, no guns, especially in the office. So if
we're talking about how to apply this to the craft, thinking about.

Will Leach (51:21)
Yeah.

Olly (51:31)
and then memory and then driving people to action, right? So how, if we're
focusing on the open and close of that path, what's the best way to apply this?

Will Leach (51:42)
Yep. So if I want to capture attention, I'm thinking goals. want to and I want and
specifically I want to be able to message to somebody's aspirational goals.
Remember we said which is who they see themselves on their very best day.
You can do that visually. You can do that and copy. I did that one time for a pet
food brand.

Will Leach (52:05)
That was a, imagine at a grocery store, there was a blade. It's basically, know,
think, imagine your grocery, you're shopping for groceries. And it was a little
blade that stuck out from the shelf. And it was a picture of a dog jumping up
and it was about to grab a dog treat. And it said, thanks, mom. That's all I did.
Thanks, mom. Or my agency did that. That thanks, mom was the aspirational
goal that pet lovers have that they have this desire to

Olly (52:26)
Yeah.

Will Leach (52:34)
provide ⁓ this amazing experience for their pets, their dog, in this case, it a
really small mini chanel that was jumping in the air. And so it tapped in, thanks
mom, of this desire to build this relationship with their dog, this like parenting
relationship. So it doesn't have to be crazy, it could be just something as simple
as thanks mom, with that picture of the dog, and a dog lover immediately
knows, I wanna feel that way, that's what a aspiration, that's me and my best
date, that my dog would say thanks to me, that would overwhelming.

Olly (52:57)
This is me. Yeah.

Will Leach (53:03)
So if I'm gonna grab attention, I'm focused on goals. If I think about the action
side of it, ⁓ that's where I'm thinking again on those triggers, right? So the
motivations and all the other stuff, that's probably more in the memory side of
things. The motivations and regulatory approach we're talking about, optimistic
versus cautious. If I'm thinking about the action, I'm really gonna focus on, by
now, tell the mind what to do and when to do it. Give it some specificity
because we don't wanna overthink, make it easy. So what do you do?
Tell the mind what to do, when to do it, and throw in this cognitive heuristic,
scarcity effect, social proof, whatever. So that's the way I probably think about
it.

Olly (53:41)
I think we should kind of touch on the AI side of things now. Like I'd love to sort
of understand how, when you sort of saw these large language models
appearing, did you immediately think, this is a great opportunity to sort of feed
this in? How have you created Bevi and how does that work? Take us through
Bevi as a concept or a tool that people can use.

Will Leach (54:05)
Sure. So Bevy is a platform that we built out. ⁓ Bevy stands for behavioral
intelligence. And what we've done with Bevy is created emotionally intelligent
brand personas, or Bevy creates these for brands. So imagine that you have
the ability to, you you have your phone and anytime you're in a meeting, you
could just hit the Bevy badge and you would see your customer that has been
trained on all the research that you have in that customer, all your brand
strategy.
and then behavioral psychology. Because what I want to do is make sure that
your customer persona, your AI persona has deep emotional intelligence,
meaning she recognizes here's her goals. Here's what motivates her in the
category. Here's how she approaches decisions. She's cautious, she's
optimistic. Here are the cognitive heuristics that are most important to her,
these triggers that get her to buy. So in the mind state, a whole bunch of other
things too.
And if I can combine all those things, I can have a 24 seven customer that I can
interact with. Great example is one of my clients was in a meeting and in that
meeting, ⁓ another brand entered the meeting and came in and said, hey, we're
going to offer a value line. Well, my client was in that meeting saying, wait a
minute, I have a feeling that if you offer this and they're in the same category,
different levels, but they're in the same category. all of a it's like, wait, if you
offer that thing, you're going to cannibalize my brand. There's whole argument
breaks out.
Well, no, it's not gonna happen. We've got to get our brand out there. We've
got the whole creative ready to go. So somebody in the meeting says, why
don't we ask Samantha? Samantha is the name of their persona that has deep
emotional intelligence. So what they did was they said, brought up Samantha,
asked Samantha and using conversational, hey Samantha, here's the situation.
Here are the two brands. They give the entire situation and Samantha replies to
them. You know what? Shopping down the paper towel aisle.

Olly (55:39)
Right.

Will Leach (55:55)
is really confusing anyways. I don't know the difference between a napkin and
a paper towel and now you have these tissues. It's so confusing. My daughter
really loves Costco. I wonder if we should just go get Kirkland. So what this
Samantha's picked up on was saying, you know, if you start introducing too
many brands, maybe I'm going to leave your entire portfolio brands and go to
your competitor. What happened in that meeting is that the senior vice
president in the meeting says, that's our customer talking to us.
We need to listen to her, which is funny because it's not her customer, but it's
artificial intelligence that's trained on the customer to basically give feedback.
So when these larger language models came out, I was an early adopter, but
not in the way I'm using Bevy now. I used it for my own business. I'm like, OK, I
can have a large language model write my own marketing emails for me. That'd
be great. So you go down this path. You start realizing that the marketing is not
great. The emails don't sound like you at all. And so what I do, I trained using
prompts.

Olly (56:27)
Yeah.
Right.
Hmm.

Will Leach (56:53)
I trained, here's my tone. gave a lot of articles that I wrote. And then I say, well,
wait a minute, if I can do articles that I've written, I can give it my book. Why
not input the book? And all of a I started thinking, well, if I can have it look and
learn from my book, I can actually now start using the, a prompt. Now I can
actually start using ⁓ large language models to help me do research. And that's
where a lot of people are in this space now, using large language models with
great prompts to do better research and better marketing.
Bevy takes it to a totally different space because what we want to do is rather
than help you do faster research and help you write better creative. What I
want you to do is have 24 access to your customer. So when you're in a
meeting you want to ask Bevy or Samantha what do you think about this that
she's going back to your data. She's reviewing all that data and she's giving
you conversation back and forth telling what she thinks about your ideas how
to make them better etc. And then of course with Bevy we can do other things
as well but. That was kind of the evolution of Bevy, but that took a solid 18 months to
almost two years. I first used it for myself. Then I started thinking, well, clients
actually want this and now clients are actually paying.

Olly (57:52)
Mmm.
Cool. How long did it take ⁓ to train Samantha up? Would you say so it's really
effective?

Will Leach (58:09)
Yeah, it's less around amount of time. It's more about the quality of data that
you have. So I'm working with a brand right now that all they really have is
customer review data. It's a multi, well, it's a over a billion dollar brand, but they
just don't have traditional market research. They don't have a lot of, they
haven't bought a bunch of industry reports. So really they have customer care
data or customer call data and review data.

Olly (58:15)
Right.

Will Leach (58:34)
So I can plug that into Bevy and depending on how many I get, like I've seen it
work as high as maybe as little as 44,000 reviews. did a work for a client had
40,000 reviews. Bevy was great with those reviews, but they were really the
brand had high engagement. It was a lifestyle brand. And so when people gave
a review, they gave multiple sentences. didn't just say this sucks, you know,
cause I'm not going to get much training on this sucks. So that would be,
in one stage where you need with review data, a couple thousand. Most of the
brands I work with, they may have market research reports, they may have
really good brand strategy decks. And so in that case, if it's high quality, you
get great responses. If you're doing your brand strategy using Chai GPT, for
instance, and you throw that into Bevy, you're not gonna get great quality
results. So It's less about the quantity, it's more about the quality, but there's a minimum for sure. I
created a persona based upon what I thought a brand needed, and then when I
loaded that into Bevy, and this was maybe four five pages worth of high quality
stuff, but I did it through my own intellect and used ChachiBT to kind of build on
it, the output wasn't very good. It wasn't very strategic. It gave you stuff that
probably anyone would give you, and so that's the way I think.

Olly (59:55)
Okay, and then in terms of like what would you say it's really good to use like
what are the day-to-day things you would use bevy for and is there anything
you would say Probably best to leave that alone

Will Leach (1:00:08)
God, it's such a great question because clients I see, my developer said, once
you let Bevy into the wild, once you give a Bevy over to a client, you're going to
see that they do things that you told them never to do, but they're still going to
do it like it's in the wild. So here's what I tell you. I say, use Bevy and ask Bevy,
what do you think? What do you think about this price increase, Bevy? What do
you think about this new message, Bevy?

Olly (1:00:20)
Yeah, yeah.

Will Leach (1:00:36)
AI is going to do a great job. These emotionally intelligent personas are going
to do a great job at telling you what they think. What you don't want to do is
saying, what should we do? Should we increase our prices, Should we move
forward with this campaign, Bevy? So when you're talking about what you
think, Bevy, when you're talking about Bevy and your customer, she does great.
It's awesome. She's going to give you what she thinks. When you start having
Bevy and AI tell you what to do,

Olly (1:00:46)
Mmm.

Will Leach (1:01:04)
That's where you get into a lot of problems, right? That's where you get into all
the biases that are in data and things like that. So that's kind of the way I think
about it. What do you think versus what do we do? If you put we in any of that
stuff, you're probably not using AI the way you

Olly (1:01:18)
And do you think this could be applied to something? you know, one of the
common challenges across our clients is they're always trying to hire tech
talent away from, you know, the big tech companies. Everyone wants to go and
work at Google or, know, and so often they're trying to draw them away. And
this is always a challenge that they might have. Is that something you could see
further down the line there being a case for something like Bevy where you
could put in, you know, the mind state of these engineers and how to actually
entice them away.

Will Leach (1:01:32)
Yes. totally think that we could have easily called the book, know, managing demine
states, recruiting demine states at a human behavior level, right? We have goals
and motivations for our careers. So if you identify that or to drop that,
something like that into a Bevy, Bevy would create compensation plans, right?
If you understand somebody's goals and what motivates them, she could
create any AI, I shouldn't say Bevy, any AI could give compensation plans.

emails to send that person. How do you frame up your offer in a way that's
more enticing, even if the salary is lower? Like how would you talk to that
person? We're all human beings. So if you use behavioral sciences, you can
use that in almost any domain as long as you stay at that. What do people
want? And in this case, you're going to look at people as it relates to their
career. Absolutely could do it easily.

Olly (1:02:35)
I really want to have a look at this now. So look, think they've got one more
question and then I want to move on to our audience of one, I think ⁓ beyond
views and clicks, when, what are the signals that tell you you've hit the right
mind

Will Leach (1:02:38)
To me, I always tell my students the whole reason why you are using behavioral
science in business is to drive top line revenue growth. So the reason why I
think in market research and marketing, your job is to grow economic value.
Like if the brand is more valuable after you leave it, you did your job well.
So the metrics I'm most interested in, I love clicks, because those are actual
behaviors, right? That's important for me to identify. But ultimately what I'm
looking for is top line revenue growth. So if I know that this initiative started at
point A, I applied behavioral design, behavioral sciences in my marketing, and I
hit down now and I'm now, initiative is now increased.
⁓ you know, sales by X percent, 10 percent, 20 percent. That's the number I'm
most interested in. Now, it doesn't always have to be revenue. So I worked with
a financial service company as a credit card company. And years ago, they
were working on increasing sending people to use an online platform versus
calling their customer care centers. In that case, the metric was how many calls
did we divert?
to an online platform. In that case, it's not revenues, we're actually saving
costs. So that's a great way of thinking about the actual number that you're
looking for.

Olly (1:04:19)
well, look, well, I've got one more question, but it's been absolutely fantastic to
have you on and
We will put your website your book in the show notes and if anyone wants to go
and have a look and have a look at Bevy I know I will be chatting to you about
that afterwards please do go ahead and So it comes to wrap up on our final
question the audience of one So when you're writing your book or when you're
creating content Do you have someone in mind that you think of and if you do,
how does that change the way you work?

Will Leach (1:04:49)
Yeah, what I tend to do, just like anyone would, would be in my mind, I'm
writing to, especially with marketing, I write to a person named Patrick, who's a
real individual who is a CMO at a company that I used to work with Patrick, who
works at a company now as a chief marketing officer. So Patrick, when I
originally did a bunch of research around CMOs and I did some deep research,
trying to understand what are the frustrations of being a chief marketing
officer, et cetera.
Patrick kept coming to mind and you're right, when you're writing a book or
when you're writing marketing, having that one person you're writing to matters
so much more than a collective segment or even a mind state. So actually mine
is Patrick, I won't give it the last name because it'd be kind of embarrassing for
him because who knows who would go over to him. But I write to Patrick, who
is a friend of mine, but I specifically speak to conversations that we've had over
beer and knowing that helps me understand his goals. And if I understand his
goals, I ultimately understand
who's in my specific ideal customer profile ⁓ is a CMO of a brand about his
size who has these frustrations.

Olly (1:05:55)
Excellent. love yeah, and I guess if it's always over a beer, you can think well if I
finish this chapter I can go and have another beer with Patrick so works out
Brilliant alright. Well look will thank you. Thank you so much for coming on Will
will be in touch. Hopefully we can get you on again in the future, but yeah, take
care

Will Leach (1:06:06)
That's right.
I'd love to. Thank you very much for having me, Olly.

Olly (1:06:19)
well, look, well, I've got one more question, but it's been absolutely fantastic to
have you on and
We will put your website your book in the show notes and if anyone wants to go
and have a look and have a look at Bevy I know I will be chatting to you about
that afterwards please do go ahead and So it comes to wrap up on our final
question the audience of one So when you're writing your book or when you're
creating content Do you have someone in mind that you think of and if you do,
how does that change the way you work?
chapter I can go and have another beer with Patrick so works out Brilliant
alright. Well look will thank you. Thank you so much for coming on Will will be
in touch. Hopefully we can get you on again in the future, but yeah, take care

Will Leach (1:06:56)
That's right. I'd love to. Thank you very much for having me, Olly.