What behavioral economics tells us about how people connect with brands with Kristian Alomá, PhD

Hey everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign Agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

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Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market with 25 plus years of experience. As both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here and you guest at I am back with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super excited to introduce you to our guest today. Super smart, really fascinating topic. So I think you’re gonna love this episode. Before we get into that though, I want to tell you a little bit about one of the speakers who’s gonna be at the Build A Better Agency Summit. As you know, unless this is your very first exposure to a AMI o once a year, we bring agency owners from all over the globe together for a conference. We called it the B, we call it the Build a Better Agency Summit. This is year four of the summit, and for the first time we have moved it to Denver, Colorado. So it’s our, our venues for Chicago, we’re changing around.

And as many of you know, Danielle and I live in Denver. So it made sense to bring the conference to Denver, gonna be in a brand new renovated, completely renovated Westin downtown. So great location, great city, easy for everybody to get to. The conference itself is May 21st and 22nd if you are a member. Then we do member day on May 20th. So we come in after lunch and do some member only content, including a two hour workshop with the folks at Mercer Island Group. And then we have dinner together. But for everybody, the conference is Tuesday and Wednesday, the 21st and 22nd. So one of the keynote speakers is a guy named Jim Stern. And so Jim is, he is a data guy, he’s a technology guy, he’s an AI guy.

So what Jim’s gonna talk to us about is the fact that we all know that clients are asking us for better data, better analytics, tangible results, where’s the puck going? How do we move to what the data is telling us? And so Jim’s supposition is that that’s really a challenge for many agencies as as you have experienced, to really deliver kind of on the spot numerical evaluation of the work you’re doing with clients and what that data tells you in terms of helping your clients and also helps your agency in terms of identifying additional work that you could do. So the fact that we have a ton of data, so Jim’s presentation is called Data, data Everywhere, but not a thought to think.

And he is gonna talk a little bit about, obviously we have access to all kinds of data, but what data actually matters? How do we help clients? Actually they say they want the data, they say they want the analytics, but it’s really hard to get them to pay attention to it in a way that is actionable, right? A lot of times you just send them the report, you know, they don’t look at it. So how do you analyze the data? How do you wrap your own head, your agency’s head around how hundreds of data points? Do you need an in-house analyst or do you have to subcontract it? What does a good dashboard look like? So Jim’s gonna talk about all of that and give us some solutions. He is got 20 some years of experience working with agencies around data collection, cleaning, the number crunching, and most important, the interpretation and insight delivery of all of this information that we have.

So it’s gonna be a fantastic keynote presentation. You’re not gonna wanna miss it. So we would love to have you join us head over to the Agency Management Institute website and right in the upper left corner of the navigation, it says BA BA Summit, build a Better Agency Summit. Click on that and you’ll get to the registration button. We cap the attendance at 350. So do not wait too long. And by the way, the price keeps going up. So buy your ticket today. What a while. We have tickets to sell and B, while they’re less expensive, we’d love to have you. Alright, with that, let me tell you a little bit about our guest. So our guest’s name is Christian Oma and he runs a, we call it sort of a strategic consultancy around brand insights.

So I’ll let him tell you a lot of his own story, but he has a PhD in psychology and they’ve developed a methodology to really get to the sort of the core of how human beings connect with brand and what those brands mean to them, and then works with agencies like ours to help translate those insights for clients. So I think you’re gonna find this fascinating and I want you to listen both in terms of how you can use this to help your clients, but I also want you to listen from the lens of how do your clients experience your agency’s brand. Okay. Alright. With that, let’s welcome Christian to the show ’cause I have a lot of questions.

Christian, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you.

You too. So tell everybody a little bit about your background. ’cause it’s a little unusual for what you do for a living and how you sort of blended that background and that education with the work that you do every day.

Sure. So it is a little unusual, I suppose. I started in marketing and I often tell folks that I’m a marketer turned social scientist. So I worked in advertising, I worked in marketing departments. I eventually landed at a consulting firm that conducted market research through the lens of sort of understanding the emotions of consumers. And it was there that a number of light bulbs connected to each other that hadn’t connected for me before, which was the role of psychology and understanding human behavior and its kind of impact on better branding and better marketing and and and better to sort of behavior design. And so there I began pursuing an academic degree in psychology.

I got my master’s in psychology and my PhD in psychology, all with a focus on understanding consumer identity and consumer behavior. And it’s through that lens that I kind of took that and did not plan in staying in academia and decided to come back to the marketing world and bring those insights and bring that sort of expertise to helping organizations basically build better relationships with their customers. And that sort of is where it all kind of combined, where it all connects.

So I know you talk a lot about behavioral economics, so talk to us about what that, what that is, what it means Yeah. And how it translates to the work.

Sure. So behavioral economics is a, a field of psychology, technically not economics. It’s, it’s essentially economics when all the psychologists moved in and said, Hey, it’s not just about supply and demand. And so they started looking at the way behavior sort of was unpredictable, right? The way people made decisions that were, as you probably have seen in different books, things like that, irrational from one perspective or another. And so ehavioral economics attempts to understand and codify and make sense of those sorts of behaviors, right? Why don’t we invest the way we should? Why don’t we make choices that are in our best interest? Always those sorts of things. And it has sort of, through that research brought about a great deal of understanding of how people make decisions the way they are influenced, the way they make choices that are extremely relevant to organizations all over the world.

And so we bring those things, you know, you hear about like loss aversion or risk aversion. You’ll hear things about like choice paralysis for example, where people are in these scenarios that we see repeatedly in consumer behavior and predictably reacting in very similar ways. And so when we start to understand that we can either design to sort of help, you know, make that decision making process easier, or design contexts and scenarios and choices that help them make, you know, what are sort of maybe broadly seen as better choices for them, right? For saving for the future, for taking better care of their health, things like that.

So in the work you do today, you sort of take that truth and then sort of layer that over how a brand behaves, talks, shows up. So talk a little bit about how you, how you think about that. And I know one of the things that you sort of believe is that consumers generate and nurture and connect to brands in the same way that sort of mimics the relationships they have with other people. So talk a little bit about what that looks like and then how do you uncover for with a brand, how do you uncover what that should be? And then translate that into brand behavior.

Sure. And, and this is what was at the heart of my academic focus, was understanding the relationships that consumers have with brands and what research before my time demonstrated and what my research further validated is that consumers, people build relationships that are very human with brands, right? We say we love Nike and we love Lululemon and things like that, right? These are, these are words, these are emotions that are typically reserved for human relationships, right? And so when we started to understand that and we started to look at it, what we, what a number of us in the field start trying to understand is how are those relationships built and how deep do those relationships really become? And what we see is there are, there’s theories around different kinds of relationships that people have with brands from, you know, sort of that intimate sort of deep loved relationship to, you know, what I sometimes call the familiar stranger, which is a brand that kind of just comes and goes and doesn’t sort of stick in a person’s life.

And even to sort of the more negative frameworks of, you know, abusive relationships, right? Where you feel like, I, God, I can’t get off this social media app, for example, and you like, feel bad after using it. So we see all these different sort of relationships exist. And so one of two things sort of that I tried to do in the work, the first was understanding when and why do these relationships sort of merge. And there’s a concept known as trait confusion or inclusion of the other in the self, which is this concept that in humans,

A human good old inclusion of the other in this, in yourself.

Exactly. Yes. It it, I remember talking to, it’s right off the tongue, right?

Yes.

Yeah. The academics aren’t known for their marketing prowess, right? But you know, it’s, it’s the, the, the, the concept essentially was, and we see this in, in, in per person to person relationships. That the deeper relationship you have, let’s say with a significant other partner, family member, the more your sense of self sort of is connected to their sense of self, right? So if my partner has a, an amazing sort of accomplishment, I feel joy as if that were also my accomplishment, right? And vice versa. And what we saw is that people do that with brands, right? So the closer or the longer relationship they have with a brand that they feel loyal to, if that brand does something really amazing in the world, they kind of feel good about that because they feel connected to that brand in their own.

Now on the opposite end, if that brand sort of does something awful in the world, they kind of feel really embarrassed about that, right? Because they’re such sort of close, they have such a close relationship to that brand. Now, the way we sort of try to clearly understand that is through a framework of, in psychology known as narrative psychology, and narrative psychology looks at the way we make sense of the world by how we tell stories about the world, right? And, and whether we tell those stories to someone else or we tell them to ourselves doesn’t really matter. It’s just the fact that we are constantly creating narratives to help us make sense of what’s going on. And so when we understand those narratives about people’s relationships to brands, we more clearly understand that relationship.

’cause stories are all about obviously sort of a beginning, middle and end and a conflict and a hero, but also about the relationships within that story, right? Who’s doing what to who, who’s an ally and who’s a foe and who’s driving the story and who’s the catalyst. And so when we look at those stories, we can understand what roles brands play in that story or where are they missing, right? What role could they play in those stories? And so that sort of is where we sort of both try to understand the relationship and understand how to get into the relationship or deepen that relationship with those customers.

So talk a little bit about, is there a brand that comes to mind that you think sort of exemplifies doing this well? Yeah. And, and just kind of walk us through, point us to some of the things that maybe we wouldn’t have associated back to this we would’ve missed that are the Clues that a brand does as well.

Yeah, yeah. You know, one of the less obvious, ’cause you’ll hear, you know, obviously all these stories about Harley Davidson or Apple and, and how powerful those brands are. But, you know, one of my favorite is Airy, which is a sub-brand of American Eagle Outfitters. They’re the intimates brand, if you will, for I

Was gonna say it’s underwear.

Underwear, yeah. Bra.

Anyone who has teenage girls, you’ve been in this store. Yep,

Exactly. Exactly. Now, one of the things that they did is to sort of understand the way women all over the world right? Felt about how underwear bras was, was being marketed to them, right? And, and as we’ve seen with other brands and, and, and news coverages, it makes a lot of women feel bad about themselves, right? Right. To see either this impossibly thin supermodel sort of flaunting as if that is every woman, right? Right. And so then they compare themselves in self-confidence drops. What Arie did is said, we’re going to break all of that, right? We are not going to retouch our models. We’re going to have a diverse set of models.

We’re going to have models not only from different backgrounds, but in sort of different life scenarios, right? They’ve got models with colostomy bags and models with different sort of skin conditions and things like that. And what that has done is created this sort of narrative and created this sort of relationship to the customer that says, when I use this brand, I feel more confident about myself. And there’s actually been some research that demonstrates that Hmm, women who are fans of this brand, their measures of self-confidence have been increasing because of the way this brand has been telling its story and fitting into their lives.

Hmm. I wonder if it also makes them feel like they’re supporting other women. Like they’re sort of acknowledging that there are all kinds of sizes and shapes and Oh sure. Moments of women. And so it, I I I just wonder if it also triggers that sense of, you know, comradery that women have about supporting each other.

Yeah. There’s, especially

Around body image, right?

Absolutely. And there’s, there’s a couple of sort of things at play that we hypothesize in regards to what creates that effect. One is, we are most influenced by our peers or people that look like us, people who sort of feel as though they’re in the same community as us, right? And so when women see these models that look like them, right? There is that sort of sense of one, I’m, I can support this idea, but also if that woman has the confidence to be in an Instagram ad wearing her underwear, maybe I can have that confidence too, right? So you sort of borrow some of that confidence as well. You borrow some of those values. And that’s that, back to that sort of point I made, the, the wonderfully brandable term of inclusion of the other into the self, right?

Is that if, if I feel so connected to this brand, when that brand displays confidence, I think I also feel a little bit of confidence, right? Yeah. And so they share that identity, they share that value.

Interesting. So I want to, I wanna take a quick break, but when we come back, I wanna talk about there has to be an unpeeling of all of this, right? To sort of figure out a, where the brand’s audience is, what you want them to feel from and with the brand and how you architect that. So when we come back from the break, I wanna dig into the mechanics of how you come alongside clients and do this work with them. And also, I’m curious if clients, ’cause this all sounds great, but you know, we’re, we’re in an era where clients want stuff they can hold and touch and that they can go, oh, I gave you a dollar and I got $2 worth of leads.

So I’m curious how you sell this into clients too. So let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and we’ll talk about a how do clients react when you talk to them about this and the fact that it is a little ethereal, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then two, what’s the mechanics of sort of unpacking it for a client? So, all right, we’ll be right back guys. I promise I’m only gonna keep you a minute before we get back to the show. But I wanna remind you that the Build a Better Agency Summit, the annual conference where we bring 350 agency owners and leaders together is coming up May 21st and 22nd. May 20th is a AMI family day or member day. But whether you are a member or not, we would love to have you with us May 21st and 22nd to read more about the conference, see who the speakers are, or register head over to agency management institute.com.

And the very first button on the nav is BABA summit. Click on that and all the information is right there. And we would love to see you in Denver in May. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back and Christian and I are talking about behavioral economics and narrative psychology and how that all infuses into the brand work that he and his team do. So b, before the break, I asked the question how, how receptive we’re, we’re recording this in the first quarter of 2024, how receptive, given the economics and the pressure to deliver sales and leads for that. A lot of CMOs are feeling, how, how do you engage someone into thinking that this is worthy of investment?

That’s

A great, really great question. A couple of things that, that we sort of see succeed in sort of helping convince clients and others that this is a valuable investment. One is we, we see a lot of clients facing a lot of noise in the marketplace, right? Where they have competitors that are kind of doing very similar things to them. There is a lot of other sort of content that’s being put out there with very similar messages to their own. And so one of the things we see clients come to us asking is, how do we stand out in this space but not just stand out? Because, you know, you can check the Super Bowl ads, they all stand out, but do they actually work or not as the next question, right? So the next question is, how do we stand out and resonate with this audience?

And so what we help them do and what we sort of explain to them is that when you unpack, when you understand the story of your audience, it is important to have all of the quantitative demographic data that you typically collect through surveys and, and that sort of thing pull from, from different data sources. But this helps you understand what’s really going on with that individual, right? How they make decisions, the things that they like or don’t like, and the things that they like or don’t like about your brand specifically right? Now, when they understand that, right, we can point to them and say, Hey, listen here is your customer, your persona, your ideal customer’s story. And here are the gaps in that story where you should be showing up or you could be showing up better, right?

And if you know that, then you know, okay, we need to turn up our focus on this benefit or this experience or this emotion in our messaging. We need to tell stories like this. And oftentimes it does two things. One is we now know the stories we should be telling. We now know the kind of brand we should have. But perhaps what’s often more important to these clients is they also know which ones they should stop telling, right? Which ones are distracting from or creating noise around their brand narrative. ’cause you see a lot of organizations tell many different sort of stories out trying to hit one of those audience members. And if you’ve ever, I mean, I come from a large Caribbean family, if you’ve ever had 10 people trying to tell a story at once, you don’t really hear any of them.

Maybe you hear your own and that’s it, right? And so the story doesn’t get through. So that sort of is the first, I think, sort of way in which we explain the real benefit to this is about sort of if, if you’re going to be making these investment decisions beyond this, right? Where to go, what to create, what kind of campaign to develop, what kind of commercial to shoot, you’ve gotta have a really clear answer to who are we and where do we fit into their lives? And that’s what the, this is where that fits in. So it’s a really important sort of upfront investment where we very much work in that sort of strategic space of deter making these decisions first before you start creating stories, before you start creating campaigns.

And I, and I have to think that when you get air quote the answer, it’s not just about marketing, it really would absolutely change everything. So my agency did a ton of brand work and we used to always say, this is not just for the marketing department, this is gonna change hr, this is gonna hire change how you hire people, this is gonna change your physical space, this is gonna change everything. So I would assume with the depth of work that you are doing, it’s transformative if they’re, if they’re willing to do it, it’s transformative for a brand. Yes.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it is the sort of thing, a couple of things happen, right? One is yes, you answer all those sort of marketing questions that the marketing department wants to know, right? And and that’s typically our sort of first level of like, did we do the a good job here? Right? But when we start pulling these stories out of their customers, one, it’s surprising how many marketers and also how much of the rest of the organization never actually listens to their customer, right? Yeah. I mean, they say that they’re customer driven and they’ve got the data, but they don’t actually hear their story unfold. And so you pull out a story like this, oftentimes out of the entire report that we present back to the client, there’s this one story that just circulates through the organization, right?

That just gets socialized. And that’s a story that’s typically about the impact your brand has on their life. Sometimes you help a person feel a confidence that they couldn’t feel before or a happiness, they couldn’t get access to a connection to a loved one that they couldn’t connect with. I constantly talk about Fortnite being the sort of bond between my nephews and I, because we play online, right? Almost every weekend, right? And so you see and hear those, I don’t care about Fortnite as a game, I care about Fortnite with my nephews and Fortnite gives me that platform, right? And so when you socialize all of that, you do start to see, well how does this story fit into accounting? How does it fit into legal? How does it fit into these sort of different roles?

And you start to see the organization start to identify what its story is, right? And how it relates to their customer story. A long time ago we did this work for a hospital system and we socialized it through the organization. And this was of course about their brand. But then we heard back from someone in sort of accounts receivable, right? And they said, every now and then a patient would somehow get through the phone tree to my desk. And they said, before this work, what would happen is I’d pick up the phone, I’d realize it’s a patient, I didn’t know what to do, so I’d hang up. Right? Right. Now, after they heard this work and they heard about what role they play in these patients’ lives, that same individual said, now I try to figure out what they’re trying to get.

Right? Who are they trying to find? I try to actually help them. ’cause I realized I’m not just an accounts payable guy, I’m part of this story about how this person accomplishes the best health of their life.

Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about the mechanics of this. So Sure. How do, when you go to work with a client, how do you get the answer? The answer, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So there are some probably very basic universal sort of elements to it. All right? It, it is at its core a market research project, right? Right. So we identify who that we need to speak with. And typically you’re looking for a mix of those who are fans of the brand as well as those who are sort of either unaware or just sort of neutral on the brand, right? Right. There is a separate line of research that we can, you know, perhaps talk about where you look at folks who don’t really like you at all, but you typically don’t get the best insight from an audience like that. You get the best insights from your loyalists because they have gone through fire to become your best friend, right? So we will find those individuals, we will set up conversations with those indivi individuals.

And where it gets unique to this sort of approach is the way that interview is conducted. So we use what we call a psycho biographical research approach, which is basically narrative psychology applied to market research. And so we are prompting these participants to tell their stories. We’re probing into those stories. A lot of clients tell us it looks like a therapy session when they’re watching this sort of research, right? Because it gets emotional, right? They’re telling their stories and they’re not answering questions that sort of is at the heart of it. It’s not, do you like this and why don’t you like this? Or would you like it to be blue instead of red? It’s, tell me about the last time you struggled with this experience. Tell me about the first time you encountered this brand.

Right? And when they tell those stories, those can be really emotional stories. I mean, I remember a while back and we did research and someone was describing the sound of the motorcycle as the sound their wife made during labor with their first child, right? And, and that was the connection that they made between these two things, right? The, this guy is tearing up right in this interview. So you get all of these really raw, wonderful emotions and we’ll do that with 15, 30, 45 depending on the scope of the project participants either across the US and we do it across the world as well, right? Because you see those same storytelling techniques in any culture. And then you look at and you identify what is that master story?

What are the stories that are being told across all of these interviews? And we analyze that using those same lenses we’ve talked about, behavioral economics, narrative psychology, interpersonal relationships, all those sort of different lenses and theories to try to identify those insights and then come back to the client and say, okay, here they are. Right? And we map that out. We map out what the story is, we map out who the hero of those stories are, we map out those sort of critical tensions which translate to, you know, the needs that the client can pot potentially address. And then we look at, alright, here’s where you fit in or what would happen if you did enter this story, right? How that story would change overall. And then we just work alongside that client and oftentimes with their creative agencies to help them figure out how to craft the best story to tell back to that customer.

Yeah. So what you’re finding is you’re finding brand advocates or brand fans and then you’re, then you are sitting down one-on-one with them and talking about sort of their experiences. And do you then find patterns or threads through the stories that allow you to sort of extrapolate that, this wasn’t Drew’s story, but this is for 35% of the people we talked to here was a core, here was a thread that ran through their story that had tied to some family relationship

Or something else. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you will pull sometimes a single participant story out because they articulated an idea really well. Sure. Right? But it’s not an insight to us unless it is that thread we saw through many different interviews, right? Right. And so the way oncologists relate to their field is gonna be pretty consistent. And you’re gonna start to hear those similar stories, or you might hear two major stories kind of revealing out of all of them, even though each of them is gonna be slightly different, each of them will have different characters, different paths. You’re gonna potentially hear that same sort of three ideas of, you know, I, I was really interested in the science of medicine, I really wanted to help people, and this is a field that’s constantly changing, right? You’ll hear those three patterns repeatedly in those stories.

And so that’s what we might pull back out of that. And we’ll do the same thing with these brand fans of any category. And, and you know, sometimes again, those sort of, not necessarily like the brand haters, but the brand fans and the brand neutrals that are going through this category and having these experiences, the human experience is oftentimes more alike than it is dissimilar, even though we try to identify differences between them all. Yeah.

So I’m, I’m putting myself in the seat of the listener Yeah. Many of whom do a lot of brand work and, and I’m wondering if they’re saying, well let’s, let’s use the airy example. Yeah. I I probably would’ve guessed that a lot of women feel bad about their bodies. Yeah. Because the places use mouth. So how often are you surprised when you drill down that deep? How often? Like I’m sure you try to go in without a expectation or an opinion, correct. But it’s human nature that you’re probably like, oh, well I bet these guys, you know, don’t like the fact that they’re getting older or whatever the thing is. So how often are you surprised and is there a a pattern to the surprise?

Yeah, I would say in a typical study, what we see on average is 40% of what we hear is what we probably already knew. Right? Yeah. We could have all guessed it. The other 40, 30% that we hear is we sort of knew it, but we didn’t understand it in this way. Right. It’s a clarifying sort of insight. And then the final 30% tends to be something that we just did not hear before. Right? It’s either deeper than we’ve ever been or an angle on that we’ve ever been. We’ve come to expect that because one of the things that I see across the board is what organizations brands think is most important to the customer is oftentimes the least important to the customer, right?

Right. And vice versa. Right. What the customer thinks is most important to them, the brand is often ignoring, right? You know, I i, years ago we did work with a printer company, printer manufacturer, and they were investing so much energy into the display and the software that comes with the printer. All these things that kind of feel very outdated to us nowadays and taking all the energy out of the printer tray, right? They were like, we’ve got a SAP budget somewhere. They take it outta the printer tray. We talked to the customers and they were like, I don’t care at all about the software. What I hate is that I’ve spent six months working on this scrapbook or this idea and I go to print it and it all falls on the ground ’cause the printer tray broke off.

Right? Right. That completely reshaped how they started prioritizing investment in those printers moving forward. And so, you know, those are the sorts of things that we start to see and we see that pattern of what we thought was important isn’t now, there’s always an interesting thing that happens with this kind of work in the social sciences we call an insight. The unthought known, right? Is that once we reveal it, all of a sudden everybody knew that was the answer, right? Because

It

Feels so obvious, it feels so sort of human nature that that would be the thing we care about. But we all get stuck in that mindset of what we are thinking about, what we are focusing on. And so sometimes the greatest benefit to being an outsider is we challenge the sort of standard way of thinking about all of these things, right? Yeah. So we push them to, to say, okay, maybe it’s not about that. Maybe it’s about something else. Maybe it’s about something deeper overall. And, and so it’s really, you know, either some of those surprising insights or sometimes just putting some boundaries around things. Things to say, Hey, listen, I know that’s maybe a really funny concept or a really creative concept, but it’s a concept that’s gonna make them feel like you don’t care about them.

Right? Or it’s a concept that places your brand in the role of hero in the story, which is a pretty sort of natural thing for marketers to want to do. Right? And if the brand is the hero in the story, there’s no space for the customer to be the hero, right? And, and if the customer isn’t the hero, it’s not a story they care about anymore. So, you know, that’s, that’s the other sort of major thing we see or the major impact it has on, you know, the further development from all of this. So

One of the things that all of this work has taught you, I think is that, you know, and, and I think everybody talks a lot about know, like, and trust and a brand has to be trusted before anybody’s gonna spend any money and all of that. But your, your belief is that the opposite of trust isn’t that I don’t trust you, right? Is that I feel betrayed by you.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

So talk a little bit about that. ’cause that sounds horrible. No, no brand wants a customer to be betrayed by them.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, trust is, is a concept and everyone talks about it. It’s at the heart of, of all these relationships, I mean, it’s at the heart of human relationships as well, right? And trust is built on three sort of key things. At least one of the theories of trust is that it’s built on three key things. One is capability, right? Can you do the thing I need you to do? Yep. Reliability, right? Can you do the thing I need you to do when I need it? And repeatedly. And then the third is consistency, right? So are you there, right? Do you perform, are you there for the long term overall right? Now when those things fall apart? So one of my favorite examples was, and I’m a fan of the Volkswagen brand, right?

But Volkswagen had its emissions gate a number of years ago, right? Where they were caught manipulating the software on their cars to basically have fewer emissions on the government tests than they actually were, right? And that got revealed, it came out. Now here’s the thing, right? A lot of people who were buying those Volkswagens, those diesel engines, things like that, they were doing it because they considered themselves environmentalists, right? The story that they wanted to tell is, I care about the environment. I don’t need a big chunky gas GS guzzling car. I wanna do something that feels good for my own identity and for the world.

This news breaks, right? If you go to the boards comment boards, customer feedback boards, all that sort of stuff, you don’t see, I don’t trust this brand anymore. What you see is, I feel like an idiot, right? My neighbors think, you know, oh, he thought he was all about the environment, but look at him, he might as well be driving over seals while he takes his kid to school. Right? Like,

Right, right.

The the whole narrative that they wanted to tell about themselves was trashed because of what the brand did. Now it can be recovered, but that is a very long road to recover. Yeah. Right? From that kind of betrayal where I have invested not only my financial resources, but my emotional resources in using this brand to tell a story about who I am. And it turns out that’s not the story I can tell with this brand. Yeah. And that’s devastating, right? So, so yeah. Absolutely. If, if, you know, this is why I think, and, and it’s become more and more important nowadays, you know, the, the way customers are buying on values and they want the brands to align with their personal values and it’s for those very reasons.

’cause they don’t want to get caught in that trap of being betrayed again, that’s what trust is a shortcut. Trust is so I don’t have to evaluate you every single time I go to buy you. And, and once they feel that, they wanna make sure that’s a really thoroughly vetted sort of trust they’ve placed in you.

Yeah. It’s interesting. So I am a huge fan of, of the Disney brand and all of those experiences, and it’s been interesting to watch them pre pandemic and certainly post pandemic Sure. Shifting their model to being much more expensive, being much more exclusive, much more. And I find that there’s a, as a, as a brand loyalist, I will defend them all day every day. It’s getting, it’s getting hard to defend them because I do question some of the choices there. I I understand intellectually why they’re doing it. They lost millions of dollars every day during the pandemic. I totally get, have stockholders and all of that, but the experience they’re creating, which was an experience that I sort of loved and, and spoke about with great affection and, you know, sort of reverence about what they gave families.

Yeah. Now it’s, now that’s a harder story for me to tell, right? So it’s Oh, absolutely. It’s exactly, it’s exactly right. It, and it, and it feels like, and I think this is something for us to remember as we build brands for clients when, when a brand that I am associated with does bad things, people poke at me and go, well, did you see what your, what your Disney did today? Right? Right. And, and then I feel lousy about my association with that brand because they Yeah. They’ve sort of, you know, they’ve sort of messed things up a little bit. And so you’re exactly right. It does, it feels very personal. Like, like they’re doing it and I now have to explain for them why they’re doing it.

Right. Like they, I understand the word betrayal, and by the way, it’s still go to Disney World, but nonetheless, but I understand that emotion. So us helping our clients understand that it’s not transactional for their clients. No. Right? It is not. It is, it is relational. And how do we, in this world of gotta count, clicks, gotta count this, gotta count that. How do we make sure that we’re showing up in a way Yeah. That our, our best customers are proud to be associated with our brand.

That is at the heart of sort of my major kind of proposal to the marketing world, which is we brand in a narrative economy, right? People are not buying products just because they clean their toilets better, or just because the car looks nicer or gets better gas mileage. They’re buying cars, they’re buying these products, they’re buying these brands because of the stories it allows them to tell about themselves. Yeah. And that’s why, to your point, it’s it branding and, and I think that the industry has been moving in this direction for a long time. It’s not the logo and the tagline and the campaign branding is the relationship between the customer and the organization. And that relationship goes from the marketing department all the way to the accounting department to legal and to the c-suite.

Right. And so you’re you’re absolutely right. It came all the way back around to inclusion of the other and the self. Right. You feel bad. Yeah. I do like

To talk about that

Quite a bit. And

He does bad. Yeah. Right.

Right.

So, well, and it, and it’s reflective of you, right? So we, we have to, we do, to your point, we have to understand what being a loyalist of a brand means to a person. So if I’m only gonna buy a Harley Davidson, I would not buy any other sort of motorcycle. That’s not because I wanna spend more money on a motorcycle than I would Right. On any other brand, or it’s not because I wanna wait two years for the new motorcycle to come out. It’s because I think it says something about who I am as a human being.

Absolute right? Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, I, I’ve got Apple written into my will, so Right. You know, if, if I’m a, I’m an Apple fan boy. Yep. And if, if, me too, if my wife and I meet our demise, it is instructed that they should have Apple technology until they’re 18 and can choose for themselves. Right. Right. That that’s it. You know, so to totally agree, totally agree. It’s, it’s totally integrated into that. And to your point, you know, from Apple, McDonald’s has had some news recently about, you know, the choices they’ve made about the pricing on their menus and what that’s doing to the brand. You know, you look at some of the issues around Tesla, around people who really wanna own a Tesla, but they’re not sure about the way Elon Musk’s brand sort of connects to that. Right. You know?

Right. So you do you see all of that noise around the story that they’re trying to tell and then how they feel about that?

Yeah. It that, well that, and we could do a whole different conversation about sort of the CEO or the leadership’s personal brands and how that influences Oh, for sure. But also even in our world, the influencers you choose, right? Oh yeah. And, and how their brand connects to your brand and what that makes people feel like. So in, in an era of everything is digital and everything is about accountable work underneath it, it, there’s still the core message that we have to carry to clients, which is people choose you because of how they feel about themselves when they make that choice.

Perfectly said.

Yeah. Yeah. This is fascinating.

I like to think so. I enjoy it.

So if folks wanna learn more about the work you do, if they wanna follow some of the things you’re writing about, about this, if they want to dig into this deeper, where would you point them?

Yeah, you know, the best is, you know, one the, my agency’s website, so thread line.co. But otherwise, you know, where I’m most active is on LinkedIn. Both my personal LinkedIn and the businesses, LinkedIn. And, and to hear sort of more about these ideas, I did write a book called Start With the Story Brand Building and a Narrative Economy. And that’s available on almost all of the online retailers and all the different formats, audio and paperback and digital and stuff like that. So, you know, that’s where I’m talking about it. Or just reach out to me. I’m, as you could tell, I like to just talk about this stuff. So happy. Yeah, fascinating. Happy to chat about it.

Christian, this has been awesome. Thank you for coming on the show and thanks for sharing your insights and methodology with everybody. I, I, what’s interesting about this and, and perhaps what is the proof for all of us that this matters is, I guarantee you everybody listening has been thinking about one of their brands, one of the brands they love and, and the story they would tell if they were in that room and someone was asking them about the connection to the brand. And if we all went to that place ourselves as consumers, as human beings, then we know that that is tandem out to the brands that we serve and the customers that they serve and or that they’re trying to attract.

Yeah. It’s just human nature, right? And so if we can help our clients tap into that human nature and, and align more tightly with their best customers, we are doing them a huge service, both in the short run and the long run, especially in the long run. If we can get them to really seep it through the entire organization, that it’s not a marketing thing, it really is the accounts receivable person. It really is the loading dock person. It really is the delivery driver. It really is the, you know, interns that everybody either helps tell that story or tarnish it, tarnishes that story. Yeah,

Yeah, yeah. And doing this work has convinced me that the marketing department, the marketing profession is the most influential profession in the world. And, and as a result, I think it’s also the one that demands the greatest amount of responsibility to wield that power. So yeah, you’re absolutely right. And, and I appreciate you having me on the show. I loved all the questions and looking forward to hearing more from, from your show and from the audience.

Yeah. This is awesome. Thank you so much, Christian.

Thank you. Take care.

Alright guys, so here’s the deal. I, I want, I want you to think about this from your client’s perspective. Like, how could you do this better for your clients? And again, I don’t care what kind of agency you are, you are helping them tell their story. If nothing else, even if you’re not their brand agency, even if you’re not their strategy agency, let’s say you’re their web dev agency, you could ask some great questions that would trickle up through the organization and get them thinking differently. But I also want you to think about it from your agency’s brand story. Think about the customers and the clients you are trying to attract, or the clients that you’ve had for 10 or 15 years. If we put those clients in a room, what stories would they tell about your agency and what stories do you want them to tell about your agency?

So this, I want you to think about it from the work you do for clients, but I think it’s equally important that we think about it from our own businesses’ perspective. And what are we trying to create for a brand story and a brand connection, and what do we do that accidentally creates a sense of betrayal, because that’s a, that’s a harsh, strong word. So lost to think about from this episode. Please go and connect with Christian, follow him, keep feeding your brain with this stuff. I think it’s so easy for us to get caught up in the mechanics and the technology of our work that we forget about the humanity of our work. And honestly, I think the agencies that don’t lose sight of the humanity of what we do and the importance of what we do, those are the agencies that are gonna survive whatever’s coming next.

’cause there’s always something coming. Those are the agencies that are gonna thrive in the future. So lots to think about. So before I let you go, of course you know, I want to thank our friends at White Label IQ. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. So they come alongside agencies and they do white Label dev design and PPC. So if you’ve got a gnarly project and you don’t have any in-house team, or you have a client that needs something that you don’t normally do, or maybe your web dev team or de development team or PPC team is swamped and you need some extra hands, head over to White Label IQ dot com slash aami and you can learn more about the work they do for agencies just like yours. All right. Before I let you go, you know, I try to always end every episode reminding you that I know you have a lot to do.

I know you’re busy. I know that you are multitasking pretty much all day, every day. So I’m super grateful that we’re in the mix, that you hang out with us every week, that you listen to the show, that you find value in it, and that you let us know what episodes resonate with you. So would love to hear how this episode resonated with you, what I got you thinking about differently. And of course I’ll be back next week and I hope you will too. Alright, thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next

Week. That’s all for this episode of Amiss Build. a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agency management institute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to mid-size agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.