Will Leach on Mindstates, AI, and the Psychology of Influence

Will Leach: I think in today’s world where we are so inundated with marketing messages, we say 35,000 a day. Pretty good marketing will give you a pretty good lift and people at the highest ranks of companies that get a pretty good lift on their marketing, get fired every day. You need to message to the person’s psychology. The number one voice you hear every day is not the brand voice. It’s not Sun chips brand voice. You hear your own voice in your head every single day. What a mindstate is, is understanding how in the moment, context, people around us, the environment we’re in, social factors, how those are influencing our wants, our needs, our desires, our belief systems, right?

Jeff Kavanaugh: Consumers are bombarded with ads and marketing messages during almost every waking hour, and the volume keeps growing. Infosys research shows that marketing leaders have already embedded AI into their daily work, with nearly two-thirds using it for their essential tasks. Generative AI lets teams produce and distribute content at an unprecedented pace.

But here's the real question, which of these messages are actually effective? My guest today, Will Leach, founder of the Mindstate Group, studies how people make buying decisions and how brands can cut through the noise to influence them. Welcome to the Infosys Knowledge Institute podcast, where we talk with experts shaping business and society with bold ideas and deep insights. I'm Jeff Kavanaugh, and today we're joined by Will Leach. He is the head of the Mindstate Group, a leading behavioral research and design consultancy located here in the Dallas area. He's also author of the bestselling book, Marketing to Mindstates and also teaches at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business and teaches at the Texas A&M Applied Behavioral Economics Program. Will, appreciate you being here.

Will Leach: Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Your book and your research overall explore how marketers move beyond intuition and use behavioral psychology and economics to understand their customers. Tell us, what do you mean when you say mindstates and why is that important concept for marketers?

Will Leach: Yep. So when I was over at Frito-Lay working with a lot of the biggest brands doing research with Sun Chips and Doritos and Lay's, what was instilled in us as marketing professionals was that our job is to grow the economic value of brands. So it wasn't just about market share, it was about to growing the actual revenues. As I look at growing revenues, by definition, every bit of top line growth has to be a change in consumer behavior. Has to be. So if we are going to fact grow the value of our brands, we better understand how do we use marketing and messaging to persuade. And there is science behind that. And so I got fascinated with that sciences and really explored how do we make decisions at that non-conscious level? How do we really make those decisions? Because there are patterns that we see in research and there are models we can use. That's the power, I think, of bringing in mindstates into marketing.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Because you're changing, I won’t say their heart, but certainly what's going on below the surface before they actually do the cognitive part.

Will Leach: Or maybe not even changing as much as understanding. Tapping into. That's right. That's right. And the best brands in the world are going to understand what are those mechanisms that influence our decisions and then how does our brand fit into that. Not so much as how do we change that, but how do we actually embed ourselves into those mechanisms to help them make better choices.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Got it. You've created this mindstate behavior model. How does this model differ from the way marketers traditionally think about consumer behavior?

Will Leach: So I think that most marketing agencies and professional marketers understand that making an emotional connection is what they're trying to do. So I remember we were, oftentimes at PepsiCo, we've got to create a deep connection, a deep emotional connection. So we need emotional marketing. Well, as I said, there is science behind that. So I can remember sitting in a meeting and remembering that we were going to talk about the joy of Pepsi. Now I was studying behavioral sciences and behavioral psychology at the time, and I remember thinking, why joy? Why not confidence? Why not happiness? Why not interest? There’s all these different feelings and emotions we could push into. But somebody somewhere decided it was the joy of Pepsi. And I wasn't clear about whether that was right or wrong, but what I did understand was that that was somebody's subjective opinion, and there's probably an objective way of thinking about emotions. And so I started studying mindstates. Mindstates are composed of four different things. First is understanding what are people's goals. So this is using basic goal theory. And that's important to understand because every behavior, every action you take, every purchase any of your customers make, is towards a goal. But all because we know their goal, maybe we can message somebody's goal. It doesn't mean they're gonna do anything different. It just means that we messaged to their goal. Then we started studying motivational psychology, because we have to create emotional arousal to get somebody to take an action. I can know your goals, I can tell you how it's important, but if you lack motivation to go and make a change in your life or to buy a product, well, it doesn't do the business any good. So we started studying motivational psychology. Third, okay, I can get all that right, but people hate to change behaviors. They hate it. It doesn't feel intuitive. So we had to understand how we lower cognitive resistance, right? So not physical resistance, that's easy to solve, cognitive resistance. That's when we started looking at a science called regulatory fit theory from Tory Higgins work over in Columbia. And then if I understood all three of those things, even then customers may not actually buy immediately. They may feel these emotions. It's very a specific emotion that we should have them feeling. It's going to help them reach a goal. Now they won't buy. Well, it's probably because they lack a trigger, something that creates an immediacy and a specificity to act now. So that's behavioral economics. So all I did was put in these sciences that made sense as a marketer. I must first get people to be aware of my message and to capture and maintain their attention. I need to give them some emotional component or a motivation to buy. I need to lower the resistance for them choosing to hold off on their decision. And last, I created a trigger. When I built those four things together, we understood that these moments in time when people make these decisions, they're under what's called a mindstate. So a mindstate is not a segmentation, it's not a personality profile, those things are interesting. What a mindstate is, is understanding how in the moment context, people around us, the environment we're in, social factors, how those are influencing our wants, our needs, our desires, our belief systems, right? So you and I have done research over the years and we do all this work to understand people's beliefs and we understand their attitudes. The problem is, is those are not as consistent as we think they are. So we'll do a massive segmentation and we do all this customer learning and we find out through behavioral data, well, they're not acting the way that they should act it. We saw this attitude said they're greenies and they're environmentally aware, but yet they're driving the four by four truck, right? So what's going on? People lie? Not so sure about that. One, you either had a bad segmentation. We've already, I've done enough of mine in my past too. Or actually what you did was you didn't understand the psychological mindset moments in time where their beliefs from one time was to be a greenie and wanting to go into green. And another time it's something else, it's a self-identity trait. That's what mindstates help us understand, moments of time. So what I try to do with mindstates, overlaying mindstates on top of whatever you already know about your customers, to understand moments in time and all these factors and how they influence.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Great theory, great structure, now it's a pilot of tech to it. You started your behavior, your research in customer behavior, before generative AI arrived on the scene and swept through the marketing function. How does this tech, GenAI, change the way marketers trigger this emotional engagement?

Will Leach: Previous to natural language processing and AI, I would say there was no real good solution on this. We would do our best to look at unstructured data, open ends from surveys, qualitative research to try to come up with some themes that we saw in the research, even if it was really grounded in behavioral sciences. And we'd give that information to marketers. And then there's this massive translation gap because we worked with anthropologists at PepsiCo and we had behavioral economists and we have neuroscientists and we're studying all these great important things to understand human behavior. But then we go and go into a meeting with a marketer. And on their best day back then, they had like a consumer behavior class in their MBA program. And agencies, marketing agencies, were way beyond that. They didn't even have those. So what generative AI does, and I think people may not be using generative AI the right way they should be. So we could talk about AI to identify these factors, these mindstates. And that was, again, before NLP models, that was somebody like me looking word by word making checks looking for tells. It's like just like poker when people talk they give you tells into what's going on subconsciously but that required a person with dedicated incredible discipline to look at word for word and looking for patterns. Artificial intelligence does that work incredibly well, better than me. In fact, I've got a story when I looked back on a piece of research and I looked and I said, you know what? I ran it through generative AI, I said, that did a better job than I did. It did. So that's the first part. But then the second part I think is that, so you have these insights. Well now, how do we use generative AI to go do something different in marketing? If you were just trying to upload a piece of research into generative AI and say, now I need you to go create marketing based upon some of my brand characteristics and my brand tonality and things like that. I think you're going to get pretty good marketing. But I think in today's world where we are so inundated with marketing messages, let's say 35,000 a day, pretty good marketing will give you a pretty good lift and people at the highest ranks of companies, they get a pretty good lift on their marketing, get fired every day. So I think what you need to do is understand and use generative AI to not talk about the marketing through the lens of the marketing, the tonality of the marketing, of what the brand wants to be. You need to message to the person's psychology. So I tell my students all the time that the number one voice you hear every day is not the brand voice. It's not Sunchip's brand voice. You hear your own voice in your head every single day. The more that marketing can understand my voice and tap into the structures that make me feel like I'm making a good decision, the better your marketing will be. Currently marketing's not really doing that as much. They're using brand voice. They're using things like this is my tonality, this is my brand identity, this is my character, this is my persona. That outside of bringing in behavioral sciences is again good marketing, but good marketing gets lost every day.

Jeff Kavanaugh: There’s sometimes, since you mentioned the emotional part as well as the science, there's sometimes a conflict, at least a perception of one, between prioritizing human-centric aspects and data-centric elements. How do you bridge the gap between the emotional and the analytic?

Will Leach: And we were talking about this before. I felt that tension when I was at Frito-Lay when we started investing heavily in analytics. And marketing analytics makes… Has the pendulum swung too far the other direction? I think it has because the technology and the advancements in technology allowed us to understand very clearly the what, when, who, and how. Not the why. Not the why. Now, you can get some superficial whys at surface level. Why is somebody making these decisions? Well, the data showed me that there was a price decrease and there was a coupon that was dropped. So that's why they're looking for less money. That is a very, I'm sorry, they're looking to spend less money. That is a very superficial why. Right? And if I'm a marketer and I keep thinking to myself, well, then I have to drive sales, but I got to drop the price, that is going to kill your business. So you can get a much deeper why using behavioral sciences. And I think what happened was that there was a massive shift into getting to all your W's on one side, thinking analytics was going to get it right. And analytics can get you pretty far down the way. But if you lack that deep why, now I understand, actually, she's buying not necessarily because she wants a lower discounted price, but because she's driven by security protection motivations. And she knows that her budget, her ability to budget allows her to nurture her family and provide for her family in a way that otherwise she can't.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Kind of going off on a bit of a tangent, you think that's one of reasons why Walmart has continued to do so well is because they allow people to do that, have something of quality and lower price, and yet they're able to meet these goals.

Will Leach: Yes, and guess who also has a behavioral science group inside of Walmart. They do, right? Walmart understands. Walmart hires behavioral scientists to bring and integrate that why into all their data analytics. So certainly their analytics platform is amazing, the power on what they're using, but they also have people inside Walmart who are thinking about how do we apply these social sciences. Just an example but it comes to life. You mentioned how contextual factors play a significant role in consumer decision making. How well do marketers use these vast amounts of data and analytics capabilities to understand these factors because I don't think the average person can comprehend how much data is flowing around. Yeah. So if, if any of are out there and you are having to do work from a previous BCG model, you know right now the answer to that question, which is that it's not providing very much. So, back up. BCG and other consulting companies have gone around for the last decade and they have said, we are going to help you capture context. So you may have heard about these demand moments or maybe occasion-based marketing. It's a totally different way thinking about your brands, as opposed to looking at a brand consumer, we're going to grow your brand in occasions. So lots of occasion-based research and the occasion-based research was let's go do a massive survey and ask people where they are when they buy a product, who they're with, when did they do it? What was going on? And it's all in this massive, massive data sets that can be mined and analyzed to say, okay there are these moments in time that That we now understand and we now can go to a big brand, you know maybe it's Procter & Gamble or whatever and separate brands not based upon people but based upon these occasions. Great. Theoretically makes a ton of sense. I will tell you in the last three years, my company has exploded because they're now in year five of this and they're like, but we don't understand why. Great example is I'm working with a client right now. I don't know who, maybe it's not BCG, it's a big consulting company, they didn't tell me who did the work. Probably safer that way. So as a consulting company one of their biggest drivers was craveability. And so for the last couple of years, they've been talking about craveability. We want to understand craveability. Guys, craveability is a very difficult psychological construct. Like, how do you even define the word craveability? I don't even know where to begin, right? But they kept coming back in their data. So they collected data points that said craveability was a very important factor in a whole bunch of their different occasions. But now three, four years later, their occasion based work has not really shown the growth that they wanted. Now there's lots of other factors, inflation and things. But when they look at that data, they look at it through the lens of, well, now, we don't understand craveability, but it's the second most important driver. We didn't really understand the why behind it. So marketers, I think, are using analytics to provide these great ways of growing their brands. Totally get that. But what they're lacking is that deep psychological why in some of these bigger things like craveability.

Jeff Kavanaugh: I’ve got to think about craveability. I haven't thought about that word in quite that way before.

Will Leach: If you do any bit of thinking around craveability, craveability has so many different aspects. Nostalgia, something makes something craveable is nostalgia. It could be taste. It could be the feeling of past experiences. It gets all these things, but yet on a survey it says, how craveable. And what do you do as a marketer, right? If you're thinking about it, you're like, well, do I talk about nostalgia? Do I talk about the gap between what I wanted and what I see? Is it because I'm low on calories? The moment you try to quantify it you’ve lost the moment. Totally, totally.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Our research on marketing has found significant concerns about risks from AI. More technical research, more than behavioral. From hallucinations to flattening brand identity. What risks do you see in your work with AI and how do you find to mitigate them?

Will Leach: Yep, I think the first risk I've come across is that we tend to use very large language models, whichever one you want to use, to take what was built for everybody and apply it to something very unique. So what I like to say with our company is that we didn't build AI from the whole world, we built our AI on your world. So I think that the first...

Jeff Kavanaugh: Instead of a large language model, a very small targeted one.

Will Leach: That's right. That's exactly right. Because I remember about a year and a half ago, a post went viral on LinkedIn and I tapped into it and me and the speaker, the person who wrote the post was a qualitative moderator. And she said, I don't get this AI stuff. I'm running all of our interviews through whatever platform she was using. And she goes, they're okay insights, but I wouldn't say… they're great findings, she goes, but I wouldn't call them insights. Am I missing something? She was legitimately like, am I missing something? Am I not using AI correctly? And there was this massive group of people coming in and saying, well, you got to think this way and think this way. And when I looked at it, I said, well, because you're using a very large language model to understand a very unique subsegment. And so the first thing I thought was building AI to fit your world is the number one thing you should do. After that, I think there has to be a component of training that language model in a very unique way. So I think we talk a lot about prompting. We got to be better prompters. I totally get that we should be better prompters. You get a lot of increases to whatever question you have if you prompt correctly. But underlying that prompt, I believe that you have to have a model that has been built that would bring all this data into something that's structured that makes sense to activate against. That's why I chose, not surprisingly, the Mindstate model, right? So what I've done with my AI and our platform is I'm going to create our platform on data that's very relevant to you, your customer data. And then of course we can bring in other large language models to fill in some gaps. But then after that, I'm going to force that answers go through some kind of a theoretical structure so I know that when I'm walking out of there, I'm not getting something like craveability. I'm getting like, here are four things, goals, motivations, regulatory approach, cognitive heuristics, whatever, that you should be now understanding so that you can impact human behavior. I kind of think from the back up, right? If our goal, and I believe marketers goals are to top line revenue growth. I build models to do that, ultimately. So it's interesting that I found out through this model, there's a tell that people are driven by nurturance motivations. That's interesting. I only care about that insight, if you will, if it drives a sale, somebody to click, somebody to take an action that's better for them.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Because there's plenty of insights that are not relevant to revenue generation.

Will Leach: And we nod in meetings. We go, yeah, this is great. This is awesome. And we walk out of those meetings as brand managers. And we do nothing with them. Well, because it wasn't really relevant. It was insightful. It was exciting. It was interesting. But nobody can translate that into, as you said, a human behavior. That's why I think there has to be an underlying model for behavioral change. That's why I love the integration of behavioral science with artificial intelligence.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Even for the Knowledge Institute, we’ve got great writers, great researchers, sometimes the insights they develop are wonderful, but for our audiences, help them make a better decision for their context in our lane.

Will Leach: And I think it's only going to get worse, right? I think that gap is going to get wider. So I believe artificial intelligence, if you're a market researcher or a marketer, is going to do so much of your work for you that it's going to give you lots of time to be more strategic. I've heard that argument forever. That's great. I think you're right on that. But, what I think you need to do is rather than you being more strategic, I think there should be artificial intelligence tools that will come in and let's say if you're a market researcher and you want to add more value to the company, I believe that you're going to have a market research tool that allows you to expand your influence into other areas of the company. So let's say if you're a market researcher and you have more time, you can think strategically or you can use artificial intelligence to help you become a better ideator. Now there's lots of platforms that help you become into ideation, totally get it. And maybe that's not in your role. A lot of times it's not the role of market researcher, but what if we created artificial intelligence that not only is a better ideator and the market researcher can use this AI agent to ideate, but it actually will ideate based upon the subconscious factors that you as a market research professional have now understood your customer. So that the ideas that are coming out can be mapped back to the psychological drivers that drive your customers to buy. So you can actually go, we came up with this idea and it's tapping into these two motivations. And because of that, we should expect that that idea, once it's been developed, will actually grow sales. That to me feels like the next stage of artificial intelligence. It's certainly going to free us up of time, but it will help marketers go into other areas of the company and do amazing things. It'll help market researchers go into other areas of the company as well.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Yeah, and before we leave the topic, that's kind of where we’re going with our thought leadership is trying to influence more of the relevance to market because in a world that is commoditized, how do you stand out? Well, speaking of other concerns, how do you address concerns about behavioral science drifting from all this fun, good marketing to manipulation? Kind of the benefits versus the dark side.

Will Leach: I'll give you an example. But first, what I tell my students is that, or anybody who says, you know, how can we, you know, how do we get away from the, or how do we get into the ethics of AI? The first thing I would tell you is that you can manipulate somebody into getting a sale. It's not hard at all. I can scare you into buying my product. I can put something sexy up there and get you so aroused and whatever, you're going to go buy a candy bar. I can do those things. What I will tell you is that if you use these techniques, to manipulate or to kind of temporarily create a behavior that otherwise you wouldn't have done, it'll work once. And I think if you do that again and again, meaning only two or three more times, the impact in your brand will be pretty bad, pretty tremendous. Because what happens is people aren't stupid. When they buy something that they were coerced into, even if they didn't realize they were being coerced, there's this feeling of, huh, later on, that doesn't, so your product and your brand better deliver. If you're going to manipulate, you better deliver. So here's an example of where I think... Only if you want repeat customers. That's a great point. You can make the argument that there's a whole argument to made. That was completely sarcastic. You absolutely want to repeat them. So you'll damage the long-term. You can get a bump in sales, no doubt about it, but you can also long-term erode the power of your brand and you'll be out of business. Hurts. I remember going into JFK, I think, a couple of months ago, a couple of weeks ago, and I went to the Hertz counter, and this is where, and I don't know if they mean to do this or not, but when I go to the Hertz camera, or to the counter, and they're walking me through the extras that they give you, and if you know you've done this, you get to a car, and you're like, do I buy the toll tag, or do I not? Do I get the gas thing, do I not? But the way that it's structured, the way they do things felt manipulative to me.

Jeff Kavanaugh: The gas thing, every time. Every time.

Will Leach: And so I'm at the counter and the person behind the counter says, which option do you want to go with? And it was, was this options for tolls. And one was option A, one was B and it was confusing first of all. And I felt like it was being deliberately confusing, but I don't know. But the way she framed it up is she said, which of these two options? And so I'm going A or B. And then I just took a moment. I’m like, I study this, like I write about this stuff. So I should be an expert. And I was getting confused. And so I said, do I have to take an option? She goes, no, you don't have to take an option at all. But she didn't frame it as would you like any of these two? She said, which option do you want? There is a distinct line of where that became manipulative in my head. I don't know if she meant to do it. I don't know if it's been trained, but that felt like the way it was framed up was that I have to choose between one of these two and you have to be pretty sophisticated in life to say, wait, do I need any of them?

Jeff Kavanaugh: You call your book a practical guide. It's right there. Practical guide. What are the challenges companies face taking these insights that you're talking about and converting them to actions that actually resonate with customers?

Will Leach: Yeah, there's two things that come to mind. The first thing is that when you use the term behavioral economics, behavioral science, it feels very intimidating to people. Or very theoretical. Yeah. And so it's like, well, I don't have a PhD. I don't… So there's automatically there's avoidance or this this kind of feeling of I'm not smart enough to use these things. I'm telling you the principles of this book, you know, they are so intuitive. In fact, if you go through the book, I talk about the birth of my son. How do I get my kid to eat vegetables?

Jeff Kavanaugh: I saw that when you stopped by the daycare place and you just felt that emotion and that's why you walked in, you'd done the research, but that was the trigger because you didn't have the five weeks because it's premature.

Will Leach: That's right, that's right, thank you. So what I would first say is that using the term behavioral science is intimidating, which means that even researchers and people who are supposed to really understand human behavior feel like, I'm not smart enough. I promise you, you are. You are doing all these things. There are just words and vocabulary that helps you.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Well, I'm not just saying this, but after going through this, the thing that impressed me the most about it was you took something, by the way, it is complicated stuff. You applied these, you created these frameworks that don't lose the sophistication of all the science, but you made it simpler and you've broken it into things that are easily understood.

Will Leach: Thank you. I was trying simple, but not simplistic was the idea and the goal.

Jeff Kavanaugh: When you create a model or framework, how do you capture that power of the logic without losing anything, oversimplifying?

Will Leach: You just don't realize it. So a great example was I was doing a creative review with the CMO of La Quinta years ago. And we're going through this thing, we're going through the creative, I'm with the agency, the agency brought me on to be an expert. We're going through this, this whole creative and we're having this conversation about social proof and why do you have multiple people in this ad and we were going through all this and she goes, this was the best creative discussion I've had in years. She gets up and walks away. I’m like, hey, I start shaking hands with the agency. Great job. The head of the agency said, Will, three weeks ago we were in this meeting and I was trying to explain the same things that you did. And she hated it all, she hated the idea. We didn't change the creative. All you did was give us science behind what we were trying to convey. We knew intuitively we wanted to put more people into the ad, but when you called it social proof, then it made it feel more science and we're being more objective. So what I would tell you is that creatives out there, there's a resistance to science, but if you just realize that there is actually words behind your intuition and you could convey those words into meetings, that CMO would love it. She would love it.

Jeff Kavanaugh: You're allowing, you're using this approach to tap into the way they make decisions. I mean, in some respects, you're applying the same logic for your own purposes. You could, absolutely. Back to AI. Your behavioral intelligence system, which you actually have one, which is amazing, harnesses the power of agentic AI. What value do you already receive from agentic AI now? Because it's not been in the popular lexicon for a long time. And as importantly, where do you think or how do you think you'll get value from it in the next couple years?

Will Leach: For me, I think there's a bifurcation of the AI industry and most of, and I'm gonna speak to the research side, the market research part of kind of AI. Most technology and money is going to efficiency AI. Don’t knock it though. It’s saving money. No, totally. That's why, that's totally why we're getting budgets, right? So we're able to do research faster, cheaper, and arguably better. And I think that's incredibly important. So, that's where a lot of the investment's going. What I think about, there's also this area of opportunity called effectiveness AI. How do we make market researchers more effective? The number one thing I think agentic AI can do for both marketers as well as market researchers, anyone in that marketing space, is to create voice of the customer. What I mean by that is typically, you know, hey, I have this idea and I've got to know the idea has legs. I need to know within 48 hours. Well, a lot of investments, like how do we get technology to go out and interview a bunch of people and bring those insights back within 48 hours? And now that time limits two hours sometimes, it's fast. What I would rather us do is be able to pick up our phone and talk directly with the voice of the customer, a kind of a, if you want to call a digital twin or however you want to talk about it, an assistant. But what I believe is most important is being able to not just have that voice of the assistant go back to my old research, look up the research parts and come back with some data. I would much rather have a conversation with my customer and say, hey…

Jeff Kavanaugh: So, they end up becoming your customer. A true digital twin of your customer.

Will Leach: A 24/7 customer right now, where I don't have to have that customer, hey, I want you to go and find this data point. I'll have the conversation. But that customer needs to have emotional intelligence because I'm all around behavioral science. Let's understand the deep why.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Not just occasional.

Will Leach: That's right, yes. So what I believe that what you can do is I want to be able to talk to my assistant and let's say your brand persona is Jennifer, right? You know all about Jennifer, you take all that data and upload it into a 24-7 assistant that you can talk to Jennifer any day, multiple times during the day. Because we all know that the power… And Jennifer’s characteristics can be different depending on your need. That's absolutely right. Professional, stay at home, drives a truck, rocket scientist, whatever. By the moment, yeah, by the moment. That's exactly right. So if I'm able to make daily small decisions that I have the voice of the customer at hand whenever I need to in any meeting, that to me feels powerful because the success of your brand is not just the big decisions you make, it's the daily small decisions you… So you have true north the whole time. Right, but I think that AI assistant or agent, if you want to call it that, needs to have deep emotional intelligence. It can't just go off and kind of go in the hallucination, just think, here's what I think. You have to be very confident that she understands the goals of your customer, the motivations, the regulatory approach. Not telling you what she thinks you want to hear. So I had an example, this happened with a client of mine, and they were in a meeting, I won't go through the brands, but basically it's a large global brand and they have sub-brands, and it was in the paper industry. And this one group, this one brand came in and said, we're going to do a value brand, we're going to launch a sub-brand, because everyone needs value right now. Well, my client, brand manager, says, wait a minute, I think that if you do that, that's going to cannibalize my sales. This brand manager doesn't care. This brand manager has the P&Ls for what they're doing. And this P&L over here, they're scared, like, wait, you're going to steal from us. So they start debating. And I wasn't in the room, but they told me this was how it so great with Jennifer. They had access to Jennifer. So somebody in the meeting says, why don't we ask Jennifer what she thinks? So they just have the conversation. Hi, Jennifer, give her all the context. Here are these two brands. We're trying to weigh the importance of what's going to happen if they launch a sub-brand. Boom, it's on the screen. Executives are in the room, and all of sudden on the screen, Jennifer says, you know what, it's so difficult shopping the paper aisle. I don't know the difference between a napkin, a paper towel, and sometimes even like a tissue. And there's so many brands, there's so many different ideas and boxes out there. My daughter really loves Costco, and I'm thinking, why don't I, she should at least consider going to buy Kirkland. Now, what my person in that meeting said, everyone shut up and it was like this moment of silence. And somebody said, that's our customer who's telling us. Which is, it's kind of because it's not our customer, but it was. So what it did was in the moment when a big decision was being made, I still think it's a small decision we need to be aware of, they were able to access their customer. Now, you're not going to make multi-million dollar decisions, but it told the VP in the room, we need to go do research on this. You're asking the wrong question. I think so. So I think that the future of AI, the biggest thing I think would be giving marketers and market research professionals the ability to have always on access to the customer to ask the most rudimentary, smallest decision we normally just take for granted. Should we increased our prices, you know, by X percent? Some brand managers will just make up that thing, at least get some understanding of your customer to say, hey, if you do that, there's some real impacts on it. It makes you slow things down, which is probably not a bad idea to do in this day's in today's world, you know?

Jeff Kavanaugh: Moving on, your work challenges many traditional marketing assumptions in a good way. What's the most outdated belief that you wish marketers would finally give up?

Will Leach: I say this in humility. If you are a brand manager, you're on a big brand, you are not the center of attention to your customer. We spent millions of dollars in advertising and research, digital marketing, to create this attachment, this bridge to our customer's heart. And what happens is that marketers, because you're all day thinking about your brand. And I did it on Sun Chips. I can remember Sun Chips, for example. And after a couple of weeks of being on that brand, I absolutely lived that brand. Love it. Because that's all you're talking about. For all the right reasons, we want to make healthier chips, better tasting chips for our customers. And we convince ourselves that we are very important. Like we are, we have to build this, this relationship, this emotional relationship with our customers. And what I would tell you is that your customers do not buy your brand. They don't buy your brand. Your customers buy the ability to get a job or a need fulfilled. And if your brand does that in an emotionally compelling way, it taps into their goals. It helps them feel a typical, a specific motivation. You will be bought again and again and again. The problem I think with marketing is that we talk so much to ourselves about we need to get our brand tonality. We have to get our brand identity. We have to create what's our archetype, right? Our brand archetype. Rather than focusing on our brand archetypes and then communicating that to our customers, what we should be doing is trying to what is our customer's voice? What are those goals? What are those motivations? And just speak to those and create that relationship. So the number one thing I think right now is that marketers have somehow created that they are the most important thing in their customers lives and they're really not. Very few brands are really that important to people's lives.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Switching gears a little bit, one thing we explore a lot at the Knowledge Institute is the power of insights. Design, research, analysis, interpretation, and adoption of the patterns that others overlook. In your view, what role do insights play in understanding marketing better, and how can leaders use those insights to their advantage.

Will Leach: I believe that if we're going to create brand managers who can say, I increase the economic value of my brand, like it's top line revenue growth. If that is the job of marketing, you're supporting a marketer. There to me feels like there are, and I always go back to my model, not surprisingly, that you can use science to grab people's attention. We know there's decades worth of science out there that tell you from a biological perspective, from a neurological perspective, from a psychological perspective, how to grab somebody's attention. You now know that you can increase people's desires and emotional arousal and etc. So I think that what you can do as a market research professional is rather than giving people these insights, which like I said, there was always this gap between the insights I would provide and then their application.

But if you turn the application and you turn it on yourself to say, here's what I'm going to provide, I'm no longer going to provide insights to my brand manager. What I'm going to do is I'm going to tell you, how do you activate on people's goals? Well, you can actually show people reaching specific goals in your advertising that you know your customers have. That's a pretty easy way to activate on someone's goals. You can prime the need. So we all have these needs, but there's lots of needs in competition. So if your marketing is good, it will then prime the need that your customers have in these moments of time so that when they have that need, your brand will come to play. You can frame the choice. I can either speak to my brand as being, my brand is going to help you get more good things in your life, or my brand is going to help you avoid bad things in your life. Hope of gain. Fear of loss. That's right. That's important, right? Because if you talk about, you know, kind of achieving gains, but your customers are actually psychologically wanting to avoid loss, if you test that message, people won't throw up all over it. Yeah. Sell it to a CFO. Try to hope to gain. No, that's right. That's exactly right. It's funny you said that. I could tell you a whole story about how a marketing, a CMO came to us and said, we have this meeting, we know the CFO is going to be in there. How do we frame up our messaging? And that's exactly what I just said. CFOs are never going to want that the optimistic side or very few. You better be choosing the cautious and the fear of loss of not making my numbers. And then you can trigger the behavior, which is you integrate a, you know, a bias or whatever into your marketing that will get somebody to move from wanting to act to actually taking action. So I think that marketing and market research professionals have if they understood that their real job is to activate the goal, activate the want, prime the need, frame the choice, trigger the behavior. If you look at the world that way, I think you'll be much more effective marketer and you're doing things in the right way.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Getting more personal, how do you develop insights and how do you use them in your role as a thought leader?

Will Leach: One thing I'll tell you is that curiosity is everything. So I'm not a cognitive psychologist. I went and did my degree in applied mathematics, basically, applied econometrics. So, what I found in my career is over time, as I studied these social sciences, whether it's psychology, social psychology, anthropology, whatever, there are powerful or very powerful frameworks that you can use to help us understand and hopefully change or at least influence a human behavior. So what I try to do and almost everything I do to find an insight, we talked about this a little bit ago, right, Jeff? I said that to me, it's not insight until I first understand what's the behavioral change I'm looking to do. Whether it's put more money into my 401k plan, if it's to get your kid to eat vegetables, if it's to get somebody to buy a car, a specific brand of car. From there, I think what are the components, what are the insights I need, what are the things I need to understand to help make that come true? Social sciences have a lot of great ways of looking at the world of decision making. So an insight to me then says, using these frameworks, I have my framework, there's other great frameworks out there. Clayton Christensen has his framework, there's lots of great frameworks out there. Looking at that framework and then once I can fill in that framework that will ultimately hopefully predict whether somebody is going to change a behavior, that to me becomes the insight. If I can wrap my head around a framework and I don't just use the frameworks in my book, I use lots of different frameworks depending on what the client needs to do. That to me helps me feel confident when I walk into a meeting that I'm not just giving something that's interesting, I’m giving them four, five, six things that they can use to ultimately change a human behavior.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Well, it's been a fascinating discussion. In fact, I expect course credit after this. You may have earned it. You had to listen to this. As we close, can you just share two or three highlights or takeaways from all this we've talked about?

Will Leach: Yeah, first thing I would say is that there is science behind emotion. You don't have to just think that you have to be emotion for the sake of emotion and just use emotional language, emotional things in your advertising. There's science behind it. Secondly, I don't think that science is very difficult. I'm not a bright man. I learned an entire different kind of skill in my master's program. And now I just read a lot of different books to come up with my own understanding of behavioral sciences. So, one, like I said, there's science behind it. Two, that science is not all that difficult. Third thing I would tell you is if you're interested in doing this, start small. My first, I may have talked about this in the book, my very first experiment ran me about, I think it was $700 total. And I used the corporate credit card to do it. And why that was powerful is that it was a very small one store test that I read something from an academic study. I applied it to one store and it increased sales by X percent. That gave me enough encouragement internally to say, maybe I should go further with this because I just did something that nobody else had heard of. And it gave me confidence I wasn't going to lose my job if I did something wrong. So I'd say start small. These are big words, whatever, but if you just take a few small little things that you can learn from behavioral sciences and start small on your job, chances are you will do something pretty incredible. If nothing else, you'll learn a lot.

Jeff Kavanaugh: Will, thank you for a very thought-provoking discussion. We can't cover every element of your research. But for those who want to know more, you can pick up Will's book, Marketing to Mindstates, a practical guide to applying behavioral design to research and marketing. And you can find details on this podcast and others at Infosys.com/IKI in our podcast section. Thank you, Will, for being part of this. Yuli De Bari and Christine Calhoun produced this podcast. Dode Bigley is our audio engineer. I'm Jeff Kavanaugh from the Infosys Knowledge Institute. Until next time, keep learning and keep sharing.