<\/p>\n
Sarah Levinger consults with ecommerce brands on marketing psychology. She says shoppers\u2019 emotions drive ad performance, and success comes from aligning messaging with those feelings.<\/p>\n
She did that with a D2C maker of hop-flavored teas, lowering acquisition cost by 30%. We discussed that example and other tactics in our recent conversation.<\/p>\n
Our entire audio is embedded below. The transcript is edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n
Eric Bandholz:<\/strong> What do you do?<\/p>\n Sarah Levinger:<\/strong> I\u2019m a consultant for direct-to-consumer companies. I help them understand consumer psychology in their marketing, specifically for acquisition and advertising.<\/p>\n I have been in ecommerce since 2018 and in marketing before then. In the last six or seven years I\u2019ve focused on applying emotions and consumer psychology to ads.<\/p>\n I started by analyzing reviews. I would take thousands of reviews and categorize them into emotional categories. I could read a review and understand the emotion beneath it, which provided a direction for the marketing.<\/p>\n That evolved into a system in which I interviewed customers and fed those transcripts into AI for analysis.<\/p>\n Reviews are fun, but they\u2019re short. Jennifer from Michigan might say, \u201cI love this.\u201d Nothing more. AI can quickly reveal the emotion behind it.<\/p>\n I would provide brands with the information, but they struggled to implement tactics to respond. Brands don\u2019t have time to understand what to do with data on the emotions emerging from all these transcripts.<\/p>\n So I started analyzing the psychology not just of consumers but also of the brands\u2019 personnel. I\u2019ll assemble the entire creative team \u2014 designers, videographers, strategists, media buyers \u2014 and I\u2019ll ask them a series of questions, such as, \u201cWhat is your job? What is creative? What\u2019s the purpose of ads? Who\u2019s your target customer? What do those customers want?\u201d<\/p>\n The answers are fascinating. They reveal the big gap<\/a> between what customers want, how they view the brand, and what the internal team thinks.<\/p>\n Bandholz: <\/strong>Give us examples of those emotions.<\/p>\n Levinger:<\/strong> I focus on the nine in \u201cMarketing to Mindstates,\u201d a book by Will Leach, a behavioral scientist and CEO of the Mindstate Group. He has identified nine emotions that people typically apply when purchasing products.<\/p>\n I like his model because humans experience hundreds of emotions each day, and sometimes they blend. We can experience joy and sadness, and call it \u201cbittersweet.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to purchasing, people have definitive goals and problems to solve. That\u2019s the reasoning behind the \u201cjobs-to-be-done<\/a>\u201d mechanism.<\/p>\n For instance, I worked with a brand several years ago that sold a tea infused with hops. It was non-alcoholic and delicious. They ran ads emphasizing the non-alcoholic angle.<\/p>\n But the top emotion that kept popping up in their reviews was belonging. The brand sought to reduce alcohol consumption \u2014 a kind of achievement \u2014 but many consumers seemed to seek belonging. I still recall one of the reviews, which stated, \u201cI want to thank this brand for giving me back a taste I thought I\u2019d never have again.\u201d<\/p>\n More and more of these responses kept saying the same thing: \u201cI didn\u2019t want to give up alcohol or my hoppy beers, but I was forced to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n So I started running hop-focused ads, such as \u201cYou can have your hops and drink them too \u2014 without the alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n Those ads lowered acquisition cost<\/a> by 30% within the first two weeks.<\/p>\n Bandholz:<\/strong> How can brands identify the right audience when customers buy for different reasons?<\/p>\n Levinger:<\/strong> We\u2019ve gone too far with personalization in our landing pages<\/a>, emails<\/a>, ads, and all marketing. Personalization often increases ad costs because it targets a single group.<\/p>\n For example, Doritos sells to millions of consumers. How would Doritos ever map to all of them? There\u2019s no way. Ditto for Pepsi, Coke, and Apple. People buy for their own personal reasons. But the emotions beneath them are pretty similar because humans are pretty similar, regardless of background, ethnicity, or family structure.<\/p>\n Bandholz:<\/strong> How does this translate to better ads?<\/p>\n Levinger:<\/strong> Keep the messaging short. Dial in the headlines, video, images. Understand which emotions people typically search for organically. Often it\u2019s something bizarre, an emotion that makes them feel good.<\/p>\n Bandholz:<\/strong> Where can people follow you, hire you?<\/p>\n Levinger:<\/strong> My site is SarahLevinger.co<\/a>. I\u2019m on X<\/a>,\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>, and YouTube<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n