Consumers Don’t Want to Be Your Friend, and Other Truth Bombs, with Sarah Levinger, Behavior Strategist

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

Peter Crosby (00:22):
Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. So it turns out when you survey brand marketers and then their consumers, you all are not on the same page. But if you get on the same page, if you get past logic and really mine the emotional layer of your consumers, you will strike gold. Sarah Levinger is a behavioral strategist for D2C, B2B, for brands small and large, and she has honed survey strategies and deep data analysis and her own behavioral psychology to deeply understand what consumers want and really don't want from your brand. That can turn your total addressable market into your immediate addressable market and help you build the consumer relationships that meets them where they are at. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. We are so excited to dive in with you today. It's super great to have you on.

Sarah Levinger (01:15):
Thank you. I'm so excited for these conversations. It's like one of my favorite things to do is podcasts with people these days and just get to chat and yap for a good hour. So thank you. Well,

Peter Crosby (01:24):
Let's get yapping because what you spend time researching as a behavioral strategist is so fascinating. The psychology behind marketing and how and why people make decisions and what marketers think people want versus what consumers are actually asking for. And you recently ran two surveys, one to marketers and one to consumers to sort of get both sides and then you smushed them together to understand what is actually happening. So before we dig into the survey though, just tell us a little bit about how you approach this sort of psychology of marketing and why does it matter? Why are you here?

Sarah Levinger (02:02):
Such a good question. Why am I here? Why are you here? I feel like that's something that every marketer asks themselves eventually in their career. It's just like, why am I here? What am I doing? I honestly ended up here in a very random roundabout way. I didn't really expect to become a behavioral strategist and do what I'm doing. I'm so glad I am now, but I started out as kind of a generalist and so I was always asked, can you do all these different projects like WordPress websites? Can you manage our emails? Can you do all these things? And over the course of time, I finally eventually found myself at e-commerce and running ads on Facebook. Before we got to iOS 14, before Adrama for all this kind of craziness that we're into. And during that time period of just trying to figure out how to do all these different tasks that my customers were asking me to do, I kept pulling all these different books off the library shelf because at the time YouTube tutorials were not really big.

(02:54):
It was not a big thing. So you had to go to a library to figure out all this stuff. So I kept pulling all these books off the shelf that were specifically about psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, all these different really cool things. So I was self-taught really for about 10 years and I didn't tell anybody I had any of this knowledge until I landed in e-commerce in, that was probably like 2018, 2019, somewhere in there. It was interesting because as I started to apply all these different things to ads, you could see results within four hours. Whereas before when I was doing website work and all these different things, it was long. It just took lots of traffic, lots of different things before you ever saw any results. So the reason why I ended up in behavioral science and behavioral strategy work is mostly just because I saw how quick you can get people from, I don't quite know if I want to buy this all the way over to like, yes, I'm sold immediately, let's go buy this very, very quickly.

(03:49):
So paid advertising kind of became a litle bit of a medium for that. And then yeah, gosh, I don't know that I'll ever go back. I think behavior is kind of where I want to stay because it has done wonders for just not only my career, but also for a lot of other people that I'm starting to talk to as well. Marketers are kind of craving what's next,

Peter Crosby (04:08):
Especially

Sarah Levinger (04:09):
In AI. Yeah.

Peter Crosby (04:11):
And what sectors have you done work in?

Sarah Levinger (04:15):
Gosh, many. I have been in D2C. I've done a lot of work for B2B. I do a lot of work for service. I've done local. I've done a lot of local businesses doing a lot of behavioral work as well. So yeah, all over the place. Cool. Yeah.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:28):
And Sari,

Sarah Levinger (04:29):
You- Technology applies to everything.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:30):
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you learn a lot from each of the different industries.

Sarah Levinger (04:33):
Yes. 100%. It's so interesting how many things are applicable to multiple industries because it's human selling to humans. As long as human is your goal, it's pretty easy to copy paste some of these psychological things. So yeah.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:49):
And you recently did two different surveys. You did a survey to consumers and a survey to marketers and had some really interesting results. So we're going to dig into some of these myths here.

Sarah Levinger (05:04):
Yes, yes, yes. I love this. Oh,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:06):
Go ahead.

Sarah Levinger (05:07):
It was so interesting when I ran this because the original, I don't know, goal for this particular survey wasn't really to be as big as it kind of became. I had a company called ReMesh come in and want to partner with me on some of these really interesting surveys that they had, mostly just from a content standpoint. They were like, "We just want to see how would you use our platform?" We run surveys and QuantQual, all kinds of different cool stuff. And that's my jam. I'm like, anything databased, I want to see what's up. So I went over and the minute I looked at their interface, I was like, I wonder if you could run a one-to-one survey, meaning can I survey two different cohorts of people that interact with each other but don't know that they interact with each other? Because I think it'd be interesting to see how they both kind of view their own relationship.

(05:54):
And I was like, what better way to test this theory than to do it with marketers and consumers? So I ran about a, I think we had 23 questions on there. It wasn't super long. 23 question survey, exact same question types, I would say, just kind of altered so that obviously everybody had their own questions that pertained to their experience, one to marketers, one to consumers. The differences in answers on this were drastically different. The things that marketers assume and the things that consumers believe were like night and day and that I think was kind of- Red

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:26):
Flag number

Sarah Levinger (06:27):
One. Yes. Red flag number one, it was like, oh no. I even thought for a minute, I was like, do I actually want to share this? Because I don't want to break marketer's brain too often at least. I love going and debunking things just because it's fun. But some of this is hard to stomach as a marketer because a lot of our job comes down to being right. We're looking for exactly the right insight, exactly the right piece of copy, the right image, the right video, the right UGC, whatever it is. So in this survey, couple of the bigger points that came out very, very clearly. The first one was consumers really just want to be treated like adults, which I found really interesting. They don't currently feel that the marketing they interact with respects them as a human very much.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:12):
Which I found

Sarah Levinger (07:12):
Really interesting and kind of said- Do they

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:15):
Feel like they're being babied or spoonfed

Sarah Levinger (07:17):
That

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:18):
Information? Yes. Okay.

Sarah Levinger (07:20):
They feel overhyped that marketing is just, you're too much. It's like, I know for a fact that your product doesn't do everything that you say it does, can you tone it down was the general sense on

Peter Crosby (07:30):
That. So does that mean I think they're lying to me or that they're trying to, or they're trying to please me like I'm a little kid that here's your snack, which is not the intention not to lie or to do that, but which sort of level of dislike or whatever did that take?

Sarah Levinger (07:54):
From what I could tell, at least from the consumer side, nobody was bringing forth a message of like, "I don't trust you. " It was more like, "You're just a lot." Just

Peter Crosby (08:06):
Dial it back.

Sarah Levinger (08:07):
Dial it down. They had this kind of vibe of just you're overdoing it. You don't need to get this friendly with me for me to buy stuff. I just want to know if your product works. And I saw that language throughout the survey was just, I just need to know the facts. Please stop trying to be my therapist. Just tell me if it works. So yeah, people are very open to buying products and a lot of the people in this survey were like, "I'll buy whatever you have. I just don't want to be buddy-buddy friends with you.

Peter Crosby (08:33):
" Which is interesting because I think when you think about the conversational commerce, the shopping AI, in some ways the AI is the filter for that.

Sarah Levinger (08:43):
Yes. Oh, yes. 100%. And it's so hard when you think about it because AI is starting to make it almost even worse because now I can tell that this wasn't even written by a person. Don't insult my intelligence. Another filter. Yes. Now I'm being insulted twice. So people are just like, I can't take any more of this. And it was interesting because if you notice your own behaviors as a consumer, you take off marketer hat and you go out into Target and you start shopping somewhere. I just did this the other day, actually. There was an end cap at Target next to the makeup aisle that said the beauty edit, the beauty edit. And I was like, that was 100% not written by a human. And I can tell because I use AI every day. I just know the vernacular and the terms that it uses often, but I'm like, it's weird to see it on an end cap.

(09:30):
Because

Peter Crosby (09:30):
That doesn't mean anything to me.

Sarah Levinger (09:32):
You didn't accomplish anything

Peter Crosby (09:34):
With that phrase. It

Sarah Levinger (09:35):
Doesn't mean anything. Yeah. And that takes

Peter Crosby (09:37):
Me to actually one of the myths that you had, which is that marketers believed consumers want us to be their warm, empathetic

Sarah Levinger (09:44):
Friend.

Peter Crosby (09:44):
Yes. And it sounds like you're saying, no, they have enough friends.

Sarah Levinger (09:49):
Yes.

Peter Crosby (09:50):
But tell me actually what you heard there.

Sarah Levinger (09:52):
Yes. Well, and it was interesting because when you went back and looked at the opposite answer, so we looked at the consumers, what do you guys think? How do you want us to speak to you? Do you want us to be forward? Do you want us to be simple? Do you want us to be therapist, buddy, buddy friends? Everybody was like, "Please, dear God, no." Be funny. That's fine. You can entertain me, but don't be my therapist, my friend. The marketers were opposite. Every single one of them said, yes, we agree or consumers probably want us to be straightforward, but we also believe that the consumers want us to be their best friend. They want us to connect deeply with them. And I'm like, I think that's projection. I think the marketers want to connect deeply with the consumers, so they assume that consumers want the same.

(10:34):
And that's-

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:35):
Was there any differences by category or types of products? I'm curious, I don't know if you had insights on that, but a beauty brand versus an electronics brand, I don't know.

Sarah Levinger (10:44):
I didn't ask that question, unfortunately, because I only had 27 questions. And I was like, oh, so now I want to go back and run another one because I'm like, I need to see which products, which categories? Because some of these categories that I didn't think at all people would want a connective story around them have very deep stories inside them. For instance, there's a brand called Vacation Inc. They sell Suntan lotion basically. They're very 1980s. It's like this really cool kind of beachy vibe, but everybody's in 1980s close. All of the imagery looks very kind of grainy, old focused, those type of things. All of their content is wrapped around a character set of maybe 12 different characters. Fascinating. You guys are going to go some of these brands. So the biggest one in there is Neil from accounting, I think it is. And Neil, he just does a lot of content that's just crazy.

(11:35):
He's taking tennis lessons this weekend and he needs to bring his Suntan lotion. So they don't talk about the product almost ever. They talk about Neil and the whole brand is set down on Neil and all these characters that they're developing. And it's character-based marketing and it's so smart because consumers get attached to Neil. And then whatever Neil buys, I will buy because I like him. Because

Peter Crosby (11:56):
They identify with whoever of the 12. That's fascinating. And I think I'm reflecting on it myself as a sometime marketer. And I feel like the thing is I spend most of every day thinking about our customers and so I'm obsessed whereas they spend about 20 seconds a week thinking about me or/us. And so I think that's probably it is you probably need to step back a little bit and actually put yourself into really the day, the ... I don't know, now I'm starting to babble, but you get my point, right?

Sarah Levinger (12:41):
Yes, yes. Well, and I agree with this 100%. It's almost like a one-sided kind of, not like a toxic relationship, but just an odd relationship. Oh, I hope not. Because the marketers are very much like, I just want to understand you through and through. Who are you as a person? What's your life like? What's your kid's life? What's your family like? Not in a weird way, but in just the more I know about you, hopefully the more I can present this in a way that you understand. It matters to you. Help you. Yeah. I want to help. I've never met a marketer who doesn't want to help. Most marketers in here are very empathetic people. The toughest part about it though is, like you said, the experience is one-sided. It's not a two-way street. It's one way. The consumers don't want us in their business.

(13:22):
They don't want us in their life. Don't get access to my data. Don't look at any of my socials. Don't come near me, but I also want all of my products tailored.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:31):
Yeah,

Sarah Levinger (13:32):
Make it

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:32):
Personalized.

Sarah Levinger (13:34):
So it's the strangest experience to be a marketer right now, because I get it. Consumers are tired of people just messing with their stuff and getting into their business. But it's also difficult because I understand too, without that knowledge, I'm not going to be able to do my job well. So yeah, it's this interesting understanding of how far deep into someone's life do you really need to go to be able to present a solution. I don't know. I'm not

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:58):
Sure what

Sarah Levinger (13:59):
That light is.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:59):
That is an existential question for another podcast. So we mentioned AI just a bit as one of the things that came out of it. So this is one of the myths from the research is that consumers can't tell when we use AI. I know you said you could tell on the end cap, but I feel like this makes sense because AI is getting better and better and we are in it every day, but consumers might not be.

Sarah Levinger (14:23):
Yes. And this was so interesting because marketers and consumers were kind of aligned on this. Both of them are like, "Yeah, you can tell. You could tell when we use AI." And marketers was like, yeah, I think that people could tell. The interesting part though was when we asked how people feel about it. So after that first initial question of like, can you tell when we use AI? We asked another question that was like, how do you feel about this? Is it something that's a barrier? If you know that we're using AI, does it disintegrate trust? Are you not bothered by it? Is it like, we don't even care? Are you like, I will never shop with a brand like that? The marketers, pretty much all of them agreed. I'm sure that consumers are kind of bothered by it, but it's probably not a barrier to purchase.

(15:04):
The consumers were completely opposite. They were like, "If I can tell you're using AI, I will not purchase from you. I don't like it. I don't want it. It weirds me out. I'm concerned about how much of this I'm seeing." And I find that really interesting mostly because AI in organic form is highly prized. Consumers-

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:22):
What do you mean by organic form? You mean

Peter Crosby (15:24):
Videos or

Sarah Levinger (15:25):
Things like that? Yeah.

(15:26):
So on TikTok, if I can see a 30-second clip of me flying on a dragon and first point of view, which my kids love, the only videos I ever show them from AI is just like, look at the dragon. It's similar to going seeing a movie. And this is the interesting part for consumers is we're in a period of time where you don't have to pay, go in, sit next to people you don't know buy popcorn and the whole thing smells funny and it's lap. I don't have to do any of that to go see a movie. I just open my phone. So now like I said, it's flipped opposite and organic. They're a little bit agitated by how much content is becoming AI and organic ecosystem. Yeah, AI slap. They're not akin to that. But on the marketing side, they're very against it, do not market with AI.

(16:14):
So yeah, it's interesting how-

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:17):
It's interesting. Amazon just announced something today. When you upload images, there's now a checkbox that says, "Was

Sarah Levinger (16:24):
This

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:25):
AI generated or was there an AI influence to this? " And they haven't been very clear about what they're going to do with that information or where it will live, but it's kind of a blinking light for me that says, "Hey, are they going to start putting this on PDPs? Where is this going to show up? And how are people going to react to that? " Gosh,

Sarah Levinger (16:52):
I think they're doing this too out of necessity. Amazon doesn't do stuff just to do stuff these days, with the exception of a few random products that they've done. But in the ecosystem, they don't make these changes unless it's something that the consumers have told them, "We got an issue with this, or this is going to be easier for us to purchase," all kind of stuff. So for Amazon to be able to make an actual physical mechanism change that says you got to tell somebody this is AI, tells me how much the consumers are already saying, "We don't like this. " That is fascinating, I'm going to think about that now all day.

Peter Crosby (17:28):
It is. And with all of these things, and certainly I don't think anyone on this podcast knows, I don't know, it's going to keep getting better and there will be a point where I'm presuming the differences won't be so stark, but they still are today in some ways, thank God, because the future where we can't tell, really can't tell is frightening and probably not that far away. So let's dive into data. People love data. I think when you were talking earlier about, I think saying the sort of marketers sometimes don't want to hear stuff like this, they also do want to hear stuff like that. They're constantly hungry for more and better data and it stinks when it doesn't all agree and it whips you around, but it is vital. And so the myth is we need more data to understand what consumers want, but that's a myth and so they don't need more data.

(18:34):
Tell me what's going on there.

Sarah Levinger (18:36):
Yes. This one came from a qualitative answer actually where I asked people specifically, what is one thing that you wish the brands knew about you as a consumer about anything? What do you think the brands don't really know that you think they should know? And the consumers were pretty definitive. This is where we got a lot of those insights where it was like, don't treat me like a child, please treat me like an adult, be real with me, be honest, don't overhype your products, all these different things. One of the key ones though, which I'd have to go check the actual stat on this, I think it was like 65%, something like this. In this particular system with ReMesh, there's an upvote and downvote system. So everybody can see the qualitative answers of the survey takers before them. They can't see names or emails or anything like that, just the answers.

(19:19):
And there was one piece in here that was really interesting because it talked about the fact that consumers wish brands knew how hard it is to be a consumer right now and that was 65% upvoted. Everybody was like, "Yeah, it's expensive. I can't affor my life," is what they were essentially saying. That on insight was fascinating because my heart just breaks. I'm like, "Oh, these corporate consumers," because we have all sorts of products these days. We've got electrolyte powders and we've got nootropics and we've got fans and cases, all kinds of different things you can buy. Every single one of these brands is saying, "This is essential. This is life altering. This is going to change everything for you. And if you get this, it will make you happy finally." That's all the messaging we're hearing right now. And the consumers are just begging us, "Please stop saying that because it's not going to.

(20:18):
" That doesn't mean they won't buy. It just means it's too much as a human, my brain can't take this many life-changing messages being swapped in and out of my daily screen without me feeling like I'm just not good enough anymore. So that one was hard. So this is the reason why I come back to that. Do we need more data? No, we don't need to go and check more dashboards or get more information on our click-through rate or figure out why our conversions are bad. None of that information is going to tell you what customers want unless you just go ask them. "What's going on with you right now? "Which is technically why I asked that question of just tell us one thing that you wish we knew. That's not a question I see in post-purchase surveys or in emails or anywhere. Nobody's asking what's wrong.

Peter Crosby (21:07):
I hate to say this, but can you use synthetic panels? Can synthetic voice groups and data get you some way there or have you had much experience with that?

Sarah Levinger (21:19):
The only way they would be able to do that is if they have large amounts of training on what happened, meaning I would need them to probably digest historical data from 1940 all the way up. And the reason for that is because-

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:38):
Should we go get Neil? Sorry. He was 1980. Sorry. Yes.

Sarah Levinger (21:43):
This is why I'm just like, I think it's super important that everybody realize the reason humans can be human and why AI can't be human is because AI cannot experience the world. It can experience an idea of it, a mathematical representation of it. AI can experience a fake world, but it will never experience the real world and that's hard. So synthetic stuff I don't love to lean on because I don't think it's ever going to be able to give me an accurate depiction of what actually happened. So the reason I say back to the 1940s, as a millennial female, I grew up with a boomer parent. My boomer parent grew up with a silent gen parent. The way that you were parented gets passed down generation to generation to generation and silent gen gave their boomer children a very specific message, usually a message of like, listen, life is hard.

(22:31):
You got to figure it out on your own. Boomers then took that message, altered it because they didn't like that experience that they had as a child usually, then gave it to their Gen X kids and they said, Hey, Gen X, life is hard. I'll try and help you, but really we got to figure it out. I don't freaking know. I'm working, whatever. Gen Xers then took that message, altered it. And again, it just gets passed out, passed out, passed down. By the time you get to millennials, who are one of the largest consumer groups that we have right now, at least in the US, you have this very definitive view of what is and what should be based upon the way my parents, parents, parents, parents, parent talks to me. So that's why I say 1940s. 1940s up to 1950s, we started to see a very big change in the family structure.

(23:16):
That's when women went back to work and 50s were still kind of in this strange gender kind of a formulation. We got 60, 70s, 80s, all of a sudden all of the women are now in the workforce and we started to see a little bit of breaking of the actual family structure, not necessarily because of women or men or anybody involved. It just, that's kind of what happens when everybody's busy and distracted and stressed and tired. Then we start to get up into the early 2000s and we got millennials, we've got Gen Xers that are starting to be raised. We've got all kinds of war happening. We've got a serious amount of technological advances. We've got computers. We've got a recession that happens in 2008. You've got all these different things happening to all of these consumer groups and every single one of them is watching it and keeping it inside their brain.

(23:59):
So then you get to today, all these people have experienced all of this historical emotional data and then we're trying to make a good sense of what does this mean? How do we market to these people now that they're broken and hurt and traumatized and it's hard? And then we want to give it to computers to figure out. And I'm like, I just don't think they can. They don't have the emotional data.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:23):
That was some knowledge drop there, Sarah. Wow. I'm still digesting all of that. Yeah.

Sarah Levinger (24:29):
It's intense. I mean, to summarize all that, it really just does come down to all of us have emotional experiences and computers cannot. So it's impossible, I think, to get emotional data from a logical computer.

Peter Crosby (24:42):
So now I have to ask, because I'm sitting here thinking and I was trying to get through all the myths, but at this moment, I think I have to stop and ask, which is one, we know so many of our listeners do constant surveys, but there seems to be a difference here. And then once you have this conflicting points of view, what does the behavioral strategist tell their clients in order to start backing away from that gap and actually leaning into what the consumer wants and how do you make it a practice? Who's in the room for that conversation?

Sarah Levinger (25:18):
Oh gosh.

Peter Crosby (25:19):
That's a lot. I know. I'm sorry. Give us all

Sarah Levinger (25:22):
Your secrets. I know that might be a long answer. Okay. So first point of with all of the things that we just kind of uncovered, what are we supposed to do with it basically? So if you're the type of marketer that just loves this type of stuff and you're like, I want to start injecting it immediately. I have surveys. What do I run? Very first thing I would say is don't ask questions that sound logical. Don't ever ask a logical question. Humans are pretty much for the most part unable to understand their own emotional world because it lives kind of beneath that subconscious layer. We can access logical layer really easily because that comes down to the conscious brain. Subconscious though, emotional world is very difficult to access on purpose. The brain doesn't want you to mess with that because that's the OS. So that's where every decision is being made, 95% of them at least.

(26:11):
If you want to access that without having to go through therapy with your customers for a good eight weeks, the best thing that you could possibly do is ask what I would call metaphorical or analogy-based questions. I've run these for years and years. I've run these kind of questions for probably about the last six years or so. Asking somebody what their favorite color is very localized kind of a logical question. Depending on who I'm around, I might say blue, pink, purple, whatever. It's logical. I know how to get that answer. Asking somebody what their favorite color of flower is is a litle bit harder because now I have to narrow it down. I'm like, well, what type of flower is it? Is my favorite color of rows, my favorite color of daisy? Once you start to add complexity to it, variations, it's hard to get down to that emotional layer like we talked about.

(27:03):
So I kind of just bypass logical questions entirely. And I'll ask my cohorts things like, if our product was a superhero, which one would it be? Because I want associative answers. I already know a lot of superheroes, so I can kind of bypass the logical layer and I can go straight to the superheroes. I love the ones that come up the quickest. That's what I want is quick answers that just come out of the brain without having to think about it. So that's a good question that I ask people constantly. Second one that I usually ask, if you were in a relationship with our brand, what kind of relationship would it be? Are we dating? Are we in a situationship? Are we engaged? Are we married? Are we divorced? What are we?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:43):
I feel like you need to add new ones for all the new generations

Sarah Levinger (27:45):
And

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:46):
All the words I am unclear about.

Sarah Levinger (27:48):
100%. Take it with a grain of salt, do some research if you have to. But doing these kind of analogies or metaphorical things I've asked the most random questions to people or even just these simple answers such as what do we need to know that we don't already know? What do you want to tell us that we just really haven't been listening to in general? Those type of questions will tell you a lot more.

Peter Crosby (28:11):
So a lot of it really is sort of open answer, not

Sarah Levinger (28:15):
Multiple choice. It's

Peter Crosby (28:16):
Just tell me what you tell me and then you can make sense out of that. Yes,

Sarah Levinger (28:19):
Yes, yes. And this is where AI comes in because then I can feed that kind of qualitative data and say, take a look at all of this. Tell me how people feel about it, positive, negative, whatever it is. But then also I want you to look at what we call subtext within language. Subtext is interesting because it comes down to how people deliver the sentences. So I always use this example because this is the best one that I can think of. I can go in and tell my husband, "Listen, I'm so sorry. Did you take out the trash? Oh, I completely forgot to do that. Could you get that? " Or I could come in and just be like, listen, it's been five days and I'm sick of this. You need to go take this out right now. The subtext of what I'm communicating is totally different.

(28:59):
One is like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I'm just spaced it. I'm so stressed. Can you please help me? The other one is like, you are an idiot and I'm tired of dealing with it. Do something. The subtext in there really communicates what you believe about that human. And I talked to somebody about this the other day. Subtext is how we communicate what we want to get back, which is really interesting.

Peter Crosby (29:24):
It sounds like passive aggressive to me, but I could be wrong. Not to

Sarah Levinger (29:26):
Aggressive, 100%. Passive aggressive communication causes somebody to either respond very quickly depending on how their personality is suited or very strongly absolutely not depending on their personality. So this is why the question you ask changes the answer. So how you formulate that question is pretty critical.

Peter Crosby (29:48):
And so when does that feed into, okay, now this is what we do about it. That was so fascinating. So where does it then go? What does the marketer do with this data Yeah.

Sarah Levinger (30:00):
There's so many different ways you could take it. Oftentimes, as soon as I get back an answer, I go down a rabbit hole and just want to know why. So I constantly just, why? Why? Why, why, why? So for this answer of, listen, we just wish people understood how hard it is right now economically. I can't afford everything. Next, I want to know why. I understand that the answer is probably going to be because it's hard economically, but there's nuance to that. Some of us hard economically, financially I'm struggling, might come down to the fact that I can pay my bills, but I'm living paycheck to paycheck and it's hard for me to buy extra things. Others of us are like, I literally can't even pay rent. I don't even know how I'm going to pay for electricity this month. Some of us are in different buckets where it's like, I'm comfortable.

(30:44):
Everything's set and we're good. I just don't want to buy extra things right now. So understanding why getting deeper. Exactly. Yeah, because I'm mad about all this stuff. Stop marketing to me. Getting deeper into it is where we'd have to get more data. But once you figure out that deeper core issue, the nice part about it is those things apply across TAM. So people talk about TAM all the time and it drives me a little crazy because it's interchangeable and I hate that we don't have a definitive thing.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (31:12):
Total addressable market just in case anybody doesn't know what that means. TAM.

Sarah Levinger (31:17):
It used to mean total addressable market, which means here's all of the people that I could potentially sell to. Not all of the people I can sell to, just potentially. So now I'm kind of splitting these two terms apart. If I want to take this data and use it, I want to be able to apply it to my TAM, but what I can probably apply it to most often more likely is my addressable market, not the total addressable market. So who's in here that's ready to probably buy from me? If I have figured out that my particular customer thinks that we are in a situationship, they don't know if they want to buy from me or not. They're financially comfortable. They just don't want to buy extra products right now. And maybe they think of our particular brand as Batman. Somebody who's got a lot of tools and really cool things that I'm going to focus all my marketing on tools and innovation and the fact that we do things in a different way that solves the problem the first time, just like Batman does.

(32:19):
But you don't have to buy this. My message towards them is like, our product is not for everyone. It's only for people who are ready to make the financial commitment to do X, Y, Z. That's the message that I kind of pull from all those sources because I don't need everybody to buy

Peter Crosby (32:36):
It.

Sarah Levinger (32:36):
I just need the right person to buy it.

Peter Crosby (32:37):
And that's treating those people like adults. I understand that. They're like adults. Wow.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:41):
Yep. I love that. Wow. All of that coming together was pretty cool.

Sarah Levinger (32:46):
Well, and it's weird because it's like, how do these connects like Batman and situationships? There's no way you can put this together. But if you know enough about what you're pulling, then it's like, oh, A, B, D. Just okay, they build my marketing for me and I don't have to do as much work because I understand you want me to communicate like this. They're not asking for different offers or different products. They don't need different levels of things. They just want the communication layer, the actual language to be different. And that's

Lauren Livak Gilbert (33:13):
It. This is so interesting for brands thinking about we're in a crazy time right now. People are focused on growth. They don't know where the growth is going to come from. What can we try that's different? Take a step back and ask different questions, think differently about your consumer. To me, this is a great way to be like, wow, we're going to totally overhaul a campaign and see what works and really get more into the actual psychology of the consumer we're selling to.

Peter Crosby (33:42):
And it will bring the marketing humans back into the conversation, which I think is great. It kind of takes you out of your day-to-day and you go, let's really revisit our humans. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Sarah Levinger (34:00):
Yep.

Peter Crosby (34:00):
The

Sarah Levinger (34:00):
Marketers, I think, crave it. Poor marketers have been waiting forever for the last six years since AI came out. They're like, "When do I get to market again?"

Peter Crosby (34:09):
And does this become a repeatable process that brands do every quarter or something? What do you see happening?

Sarah Levinger (34:16):
Yes, yes, yes. So I'm primarily on the paid advertising side because I work with D2C is kind of like my bread and butter brands. These guys, I probably run through this particular survey type at least once a quarter. Once a month would be more interesting to see how it cuts and changes, especially since we're running it towards our current customers. Running it towards cold traffic is even more interesting because then you get the same thing that we got from the original survey was dichotomy. If I run it towards a cold traffic completely, they don't know us at all and then we run it towards our email list, people who are warmed up, they like us at least somewhat. Then I can notice the differences between the two. So yeah, eventually you get to the point where you start running it more consistently. It'll get a lot more out of it.

Peter Crosby (34:58):
Yeah. Wow. This has been so cool, Sarah. So if our audience wanted to stick a digital straw in your brain and keep sipping out all of this great stuff, where would they go to be able to hear your thoughts and data?

Sarah Levinger (35:16):
I am basically everywhere you consume content at SarahLevenger on Twitter, LinkedIn. I have a YouTube channel, if you guys want to go just digest every weird thing that I'm sharing these days. Overall, I also have newsletter, I have books, I have a community. If anybody wants to learn how to do this for their particular brand, I've got lots of resources I could share with you guys if you guys want the links to those, but yeah.

Peter Crosby (35:39):
Wow. This was so cool. I'm

Sarah Levinger (35:42):
Glad you like it.

Peter Crosby (35:44):
It's been so great to dig into this. Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time to drop some knowledge on us. It's really great.

Sarah Levinger (35:52):
Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was lovely.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:54):
And I have to say thank you to Scotty for introducing us and that is the reason why we know each other. So thank you, Scotty. And thank you, Sarah.

Peter Crosby (36:02):
Thanks again to Sarah for dropping all the truth bombs and what to do with them. We are so lucky to engage with all of these experts and their knowledge is always showing up at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Become a member to keep on top of it all. We don't want to be your best friend. We just want to help. Hope that's okay. Thanks for being part of our community.