
On Brand with Nick Westergaard · 2026-06-29 · 32 min
Key moments - from our scoring
Substance score
53 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
Will Leach draws on his two decades in CPG marketing and behavioral science expertise to challenge conventional brand strategy wisdom. Most of the 35,000 decisions people make daily happen subconsciously, yet brands continue designing rational campaigns for the logical mind. Leach advocates for moving beyond emotional marketing to a three-tier approach: understanding functional goals (what customers want), emotional goals (how they feel), and crucially, aspirational goals (who they want to become). He uses examples from his work on PepsiCo brands like True North and Sun Chips to show how static personas miss the complexity of human behavior - people aren't one-dimensional, they're multiple roles operating in different mind states. The framework emphasizes that goals act as the GPS directing behavior, while emotions serve as the engine powering action. Leach introduces mind state targeting as an overlay to traditional segmentation, showing how the same person might be a health-conscious snacker on weekdays but seek stress relief at Five Guys on Friday night. Marketers benefit from understanding these temporal moments of emotional arousal rather than assuming attitudes remain constant. His book, Marketing to Mind States, formalizes this approach using goal theory and behavioral science principles to help brands connect authentically.
A mind state is a moment of temporary emotional arousal when a person wants to take certain behavior, differing from segmentation because it's situational rather than demographic. The same healthy-eating persona might choose Five Guys on Friday night due to stress relief or reward-seeking, showing that attitudes and preferences shift depending on the mind state, not just the person's demographic profile.
Emotion alone acts as an engine without direction; goals serve as the GPS showing the mind where to go. Without connecting emotional arousal to a clear goal related to aspirational identity, consumers feel the emotion but don't know what action to take, resulting in awareness without conversion.
Acknowledge that people play different roles (father, health-conscious person, stressed worker) and study how messaging needs to change when your target shifts between roles. Rather than abandoning segments, understand when different personas activate and prime messaging to influence consideration during those specific mind states.
Goal theory suggests all behaviors outside reflexes are directed toward goals; understanding customer wants (functional goals), why they matter (emotional goals), and who customers want to become (aspirational goals) creates the framework for building iconic brands that connect deeply to identity.
Use priming - subconscious messaging that makes certain preferences more accessible - to influence consideration during different mind states. For example, position healthy eating as stress relief rather than restriction to appeal to the same person's Friday-night reward-seeking mind state.
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
The episode contains a handful of real behavioral-science concepts (goal theory hierarchy, mind states as segmentation overlays, priming, efficiency vs. effectiveness AI) but they are delivered slowly, repeated frequently by both host and guest, and padded with ad reads and conversational restatements. The insight-to-minute ratio is low for a 32-minute runtime.
Our goals are the target of our behaviors, right? You don't, you can't behave, you can't take action unless you know the goal. So the problem with just emotional marketing, Think of emotional marketing as an engine, the emotion you need to take action. But if you're not telling the mind in your marketing what action you should be taking towards somebody's aspirational goals, you can create emotional arousal. And that ad will test really well emotionally, but it won't drive purchases.
if you're using artificial intelligence to deeply understand your customers at these psychological levels, then efficiency AI is or, uh, I'm sorry, effective AI works really well.
The three-level goal framework (functional → emotional → aspirational) and the mind-state-as-overlay framing are practically useful repackagings of established behavioral science, but System 1/2 thinking, Damasio's quote, and the foundational premise that consumers are irrational are extremely well-circulated. No genuinely contrarian or first-principles arguments are made.
I always tell my clients, if I can associate your brand with people's aspirations, who they want to be on their very best day. I promise you, you can create an iconic brand.
I think brands are not stored in people's minds as visual assets. They're really stored as emotional predictions, I believe.
Will Leach is a legitimate practitioner - roughly two decades in CPG at PepsiCo running real brand campaigns (Sun Chips, True North), a published book, a founded consultancy (Mindstate Group), and a proprietary AI tool (Bevy). He speaks from direct operational experience at scale, not as a career podcast guest, though the product-promotion angle is present throughout.
I was on a brand called True north that we launched at PepsiCo
when I was on Sun Chips, right, we would do these massive segmentations and we found out we're trying to move, uh, Sun Chips into the healthy environmental space
The guest names real brands, products, and anecdotes (Sun Chips basket data, True North campaign failure, Spotify logo shift) and references concrete roles and timelines, but the episode is almost entirely anecdote-driven with no hard metrics, conversion data, or cited research beyond the unsourced 35,000-decisions-per-day figure.
when you look at their basket data, what these same people do in real life, they're buying crazy junk food, which doesn't intuitively make any sense
one of the people we highlighted was this marine biologist, or at least an aficionado who built her own submarine and she was going to the bottom of the ocean. Or another one was an artist in South Dakota that was creating these giant iron statues of chickens
The host opens with a solid Damasio framing and coins a useful shorthand ('the five guys of it all'), but he routinely restates the guest's prior answer before asking the next question rather than probing or challenging. There is no pushback on any claim, no request for evidence, and no productive disagreement across the full interview.
So I feel like I'm, I'm kind of restating, but I, I think it's important because we, we, we know what a Persona is.
I feel like that's what we, we, we kind of hear that as kind of the greeting card expression of marketing strategy
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
We like to think our buying decisions are completely rational and deliberate. The truth is that most consumer behavior is driven by subconscious perception and invisible mindstates that leaders completely miss. When we design brand strategies for the logical mind, we miss the actual human experience. Our next guest spent years inside PepsiCo unlocking how consumers really think. Now he is helping brands blend behavioral science with artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how we communicate.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
Speaker A: I'm Nick Westergaard and this is On Brand, helping you tell your story. We like to think that our buying decisions are completely rational and deliberate, but the truth is that most consumer behavior is driven by subconscious perception and invisible mind states that we completely miss. When we design brand strategies for the logical mind, we miss out on the actual human experience. Will Leach spent years inside PepsiCo unlocking how consumers really think. Now he's helping brands blend behavioral science with artificial intelligence to fundamentally change how we communicate. My interview with Will is coming right up.
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Speaker A: Will leach welcome to On Brand.
Speaker C: Hey, thanks for having me, Nick. I appreciate the time.
Speaker A: I'm excited to chat because without fail, no matter how often we think that we've got customers figured out, we're often missing the irrational side of that. I love the I think it's the Antonio Damasio quote that says where we think that people are thinking machines that occasionally feel, but we're actually feeling machines that only occasionally think. So I wonder how you reconcile that in a meaningful way.
Speaker C: Yeah, uh, I will first start off with a quick stat that I Tell my own students, and this should be very clear after you hear this stat, how I reconcile that idea. Every day you make about 35,000 decisions. So if you were to do cost benefit analysis on every one of those decisions, you wouldn't get out of bed, right, Nick? Because you would sit there and you'd think, okay, the alarm went off. Do I turn off the alarm? Yes or no? And if I do turn off the alarm, do I open my eyes to turn off the alarm or do I not, Do I use my left hand or do I use my right hand? And it goes on and on and on. Um, so if you think about all the decisions you make on any given day, the vast majority of those have to be made at the subconscious level. That's why marketing needs to take these sciences into consideration. Because if the vast majority of decisions are being made at the subconscious level, then your marketing better understand how to tap into that non conscious.
Speaker A: So as marketers and brands, how do we know which, which one of those systems that we're into if you know, I think we sometimes feels like we fall prey to. I think they're thinking about that decision a lot and they actually might not be. It might be something a little more automatic and lizard brained.
Speaker C: Yeah, I think that the. Actually I will tell you, the sciences prove that all brand decisions start emotionally. This is even for the paperclip company or the house purchase, right? We always hear, well, no, no, house purchases are so much bigger. And I've worked with builders, I've worked with really large manufacturers and CPG companies. But the builders are the funniest ones because they're like, no, no, no. People buy price per square foot. No, no, no, no, no. Nick. My wife had no idea the square footage of our recent house. But what she did understand were these emotions that that house provided and how she saw herself in the house. So all decisions are made emotionally first and then rationally. Now you can make the case of, do people only make emotional decisions? They never think about the consequences. Yeah, I can make that case pretty easily that there's only system one and not system two. But we always start with any neurological reaction. First actually a neurological, then an emotional psychological reaction. And then you go into maybe some, some rational types of thinking.
Speaker A: So in talking about that, and you mentioned starting with, where do you start with? You know, this kind of can be overwhelming thinking about how consumers are thinking. And sometimes it feels like. It feels so hard that some people skip it entirely, which is, is, is wrong. But is there a, is there a foothold into today's consumer where they're at and how we can connect with them in a meaningful way.
Speaker C: The first thing I'll tell you to do is don't start with let's understand the emotions of our customer. I think that's very easy to say. And for decades now, great marketers said, we have to figure out the emotional connection with our brand to our customer. I don't disagree. That's really important. But I think it's after you understand what are people's goals. So something called goal theory. And I talk about in my book marketing to mind states. So what you have to do is understand that all of our behaviors, no matter what the behavior, is outside of a reflex action, is towards a goal of some kind. Remember, there's 35,000 decisions. One of those decisions is, do I turn off my alarm or not? Your mind immediately goes to, what are the goals I have in this moment? Some goals went out. That's why we hit snooze. Other times we wake up, I want to work out, and we'll go ahead and turn off the alarm, Right? So you have to understand people's goals. And that's goal theory. And it sounds intimidating, but it's really not that intimidating if you just think of it through this lens. And this is how we do our research. And so I tell my what I tell my students. You have to ask, what do your customers want? That's it. Like, ask them what's important to you as it relates to whatever it is that you sell and let them list off things. I want it to be a good value. I want it to taste yummy. I want it to be easy. Those are things called functional goals, which are interesting and actually they're important in marketing. However, you now need to elevate that conversation. Say, well, if you collectively got those five things, how would it make you feel? Now we're getting something spaced the emotional marketing side. And that's where I actually think that campaigns should be formed around emotional, what we call emotional goals. How are these things together, um, gonna help make you feel. This is where a lot of brands stop. They go, okay, well, we now know the emotional connection. We need to make our customers feel x joy. We need to make them feel safe, whatever. There's actually a higher level that you wanna build your brands around, and it's called aspirational goals. Who do they see themselves on their very best day as it relates to using your product? That's where we get into actual brand building. I always tell my clients, if I can associate your brand with people's aspirations, who they want to be on their very best day. I promise you, you can create an iconic brand. The biggest brands in the world have done just this. So I always think to myself, start with goals. Ask people what do you want? Then ask them the second question collectively, why are those things important? And then lastly, do not forget this question. How will it make you become or how will it help you become the person you most aspire to be? And you want to be smart with that question. But if you get to that level of detail, I now create a great campaign that is going to talk about what's important to you, why it's important to you, so that you can become this. If I put all those things to an ad, even if it's a static image, I promise you, you can create deeper emotional connections than just talking about joy.
Speaker A: Yeah, and I does feel like that's what we, we, we kind of hear that as kind of the greeting card expression of marketing strategy of, of finding the emotion. But that's really squishy and hard to build a meaningful effective strategy around. But this idea of, you know, leveling up to goals and then aspirational goals that's informing how customers see themselves makes this something that is, is, is, is really pretty methodical as well.
Speaker C: Here's why, Nick, think of it this way. Our goals are the target of our behaviors, right? You don't, you can't behave, you can't take action unless you know the goal. So the problem with just emotional marketing, Think of emotional marketing as an engine, the emotion you need to take action. But if you're not telling the mind in your marketing what action you should be taking towards somebody's aspirational goals, you can create emotional arousal. And that ad will test really well emotionally, but it won't drive purchases. Why? Because you just took a great emotion and let people try to figure out what to do with it. That's why I say goals are so important. That's like kind of the GPS in your car. That's where I want to go. Now the engine I like to talk about, the engine is the emotional arousal. Now you bring in those emotions and then all of a sudden your ads start to take off and not just create awareness, but actual, um, you know, top line revenue growth.
Speaker A: So you mentioned your book Marketing to mind States, and I think that that, that last word in there, I, uh, think a lot about that. And when we talk about mind states, is there a push pull with what you've been talking about and what we traditionally think of with targeting demographics versus targeting, targeting a mind state there is.
Speaker C: So first off, let's just define what a mind state is. So mind state are these moments of temporary emotional arousal. You would know it as a hot state out there where people make more. We call subconscious system 1 types of emotional decisions. So you have been in lots of mind states if you've ever been at a poker table in Las Vegas at 3:00am, right? So emotional arousal. These temporary moments of emotional arousal are called mind states. This is why it differs than a lot of segmentations out there or ideal consumer profile profiles or customer profiles, et cetera. Because a mind state is a moment in time when your segment wants to take some sort of behavior. So that tension that you sometimes feel when you're going to do a segmentation, you've done all the work and I've done a lot of segmentations in my life. And then you look at your behavioral data and you're like, that segment shouldn't have bought this product. So the classic one, when I was on Sun Chips, right, we would do these massive segmentations and we found out we're trying to move, uh, Sun Chips into the healthy environmental space, right? So we had our greenie and we had our four or five different segments that we thought were going to be, you know, really want to target Sun Chips. But then when you look at their basket data, what these same people do in real life, they're buying crazy junk food, which doesn't intuitively make any sense. Like, wait a minute, our attitudinal segmentation said this person should be health conscious, health nut, whatever you wanted to name them, but yet you look at their basket and it's full of quote, quote junk food. Why is that one? Your segmentation sucked. I've done a lot of them. Sometimes that happens, right? More likely is your segmentation was built on attitudes and things like that. But in the moment you are under a certain mind state that uh, that changes your attitudes, your wants, your needs, your desires, your belief systems, things like that. So I talk about a lot about on Friday nights. I, you know, throughout the week I try to eat really healthy, right? And if you ask me on a survey, what do I like to eat, I eat things that I try to be healthy with, I love salads, things like that. But on Friday I am at a 5 guys. Why is that? Why is it that often my attitudes, my wants, my belief systems aren't any healthy change and I'm at a five guys on Friday night? It's because on a Friday. It's a moment in time where I did one of two things. One was, I got through this week. I deserve a reward. Or that big blow of air just, uh, knocked over the book. Or the other thing was, oh my gosh, what a terrible week. I need something to relieve the stress. So that moment in time is impacting my preferences. It's not just impacting my choices, it's impacting the preferences and wants and needs of that preference. That's why you really want to understand these moments in time and mind states. Help us understand that on brand we'll
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Speaker A: Now back to the show. So I feel like we've been doing some myth busting here because you've talked about, you know, the conventional wisdom of marketing to emotions and really making that more tactical, practical in terms of the aspirational goal setting. I feel like another thing that we are told that relates back to your last story, the, the sun chips and uh, and five guys of it all. And that is we're told as brand builders to really get to know our people. And we think maybe that means more market research. We think that means maybe creating some of the profiles, the Personas like you're talking about. Um, but it sometimes can be an incomplete picture. And I wonder what your response is to that advice of really understanding your people, uh, with all of the different inputs and disparities that we have today.
Speaker C: Yeah, I like to do this. So I was in the CPG world for, you know, almost two decades and here's what happens when we get assigned To a brand, we fall in love with that brand. We do like, it becomes our DNA because we're with people all day long talking about this brand. So I was on a brand called True north that we launched at PepsiCo and that brand was helping. It was more of a boomer brand. It was a nut, snake nut, ah, snack brand that we are trying to really take control of this market. And for, you know, I am probably at that point 29, 30 years old and I am working on a brand that's been positioned for somebody in their 60s. And after a while I start thinking that I understand a 60 year old, right? And it's, and it's not because uh, of anything more than we love our brand and we want to, you know, make an impact on our target. That's why people go into brand building. That's why they do that. So what happens though is we forget that people are really complex. We think of people as, oh, a 65 year old snacker who likes to eat nuts towards the end of the day so they can get, you know, having a moment of blank, right? And we focus on that so much. But you and I know this. We are more than just that moment in time of that age group. Right. I am a father, I try to serve my community. I'm a business owner, I'm a husband, uh, I go to church, I have hobbies. All these things are all roles that we play in the same Persona in the same person. I think what, what problems that brands have is they focus rightfully. So I totally get it that I want to talk to the snacker roll. That's the one I want to talk to because that's one who pays my bills. But if you don't understand that that snacker is also a dad who has a kid who is wanting to go to that five guys on a Friday night, all of a sudden I'm not going to act in my health role, I'm going to act as my father role. And I think we forget that. I know as a marketer you're thinking yourself, well then what do I do with that? If uh, nothing else, acknowledge that these people have different roles. Study those roles. So now you can understand how does, when, when I thought this, the healthy snacker role that I'm marketing to is in the dad role. How does my messaging need to change? That's really important. Just, just at least acknowledge the complexity of people and you know it yourself as you have a brand manager out there, because you're complex too.
Speaker A: So one question I, I Have with that as a young marketer, uh, in, in your 20s, working on a product for the 60s, uh, and you mentioned that you thought you could think like a 60 year old. Did you find yourself acting like a 60 year old? Did it, did it pull, did it pull any, any other, uh, traits for you? Were you more interested in, in golf or World War II than, uh, than, than, than you maybe, uh, maybe would have been for the average 20 something year old?
Speaker C: Yeah. Right. You do take on that Persona's identity. I will tell you this because of my work on True north. That was the first check that got me about three years later to leave Pepsi and start my company, Mindstate Group. Because our campaign, this idea was that when you start, you know, you leave your job and you want to do something with your life, the thing that you always love to do. And that was the True North. The idea of we're going to help people find their true north at that age group. Right. So what True north was was how are we going to help people reach their aspirational goals? You heard me say that term before. I had never heard of goal theory until working on this brand. And what we did as a brand is we made a mistake. I, uh, remember this vividly. We wanted in our very first product launch campaign to show these really unique people who got out of their daytime jobs or they retired and then they went for their dreams and then they became successful. So our brand was talking about other people's aspirations. So one of the people we highlighted was this marine biologist, or at least an aficionado who built her own submarine and she was going to the bottom of the ocean. Or another one was an artist in South Dakota that was creating these giant iron statues of chickens, um, in South Dakota. That's like a famous area in South Dakota where you're driving a highway. So we were highlighting aspirational goals. I didn't know it at the time. I was calling it their True north passion. But our campaign failed pretty miserably. And so I was asked, go figure out why. Like we did the research, we know that boomers are wanting to find their aspirations. What I found out is they are less intrigued by looking at other people's aspirations around creating iron sculptures along a highway road or building a submarine. They wanted us to speak to their aspirations. And again, remember, when you're on a brain, you're so focused on your brand and you forget that actually customers want you to focus on them. That, that brand I was around for, uh, about 18 months changed how I think about Marketing, which turned into the behavioral sciences, which turned into mind state. So, you know, yeah, I did probably walk a little slower. Right. But I also changed everything that I thought around marketing because I had to focus on behavioral science. And that got me all into the mind state work and then ultimately my company.
Speaker A: Well, we, uh, talk about changing the way that, that you're thinking and I think sometimes, because this work for all of the reasons that you've just mentioned is hard. And I think sometimes we gravitate towards the things that we can easily get our arms around and something that we can make like a Persona. And hey, I have that. I can point to that. Look, we've done that work. We get that. But it doesn't factor in uh, what you said. And I, for the shorthand, I'm calling it the five guys of it all. But it's the fact that we really do kind of contain multitudes and we might be someone different on a Friday night. Can those two things live together? Can we still make a Persona that is useful and meaningful that also encompasses the fact that will wants to go to five guys on Friday night?
Speaker C: You can think of a mind state as not a substitute to your m. Your segmentation, your ideal consumer profile. Think of it as an overlay to understand that same person in a moment of time. If you think of it that way, you may say, well, wait a minute, he's. This person is in that healthy. He's the healthy consumer. But they're at a five guys, right? So something's wrong. Their attitudes and beliefs are not matching to their decision. You as a marketer now have a choice to make. You can say we're going to give up Friday nights. We're not going to try to market. That's reasonable, I guess. Or you can do something called priming. What you can do is if I understand the wants, needs, desires, belief systems, values, preferences, all of my icp. And I know that on Friday night they're making a decision, they probably have a lot of stress and they want release. What can I do on a Friday at 2pm to get in consideration? What you can do is something called priming. Marketing primes all the time. And it sounds like what Heady, like what is priming? All marketing does, is creates things that are at the subconscious and brings them more to the forefront of consciousness. I'm not saying you are consciously aware, but it becomes more accessible by your conscious. So I have to do at this point is put messaging out there that talks to that person that basically says this. I know life is probably stressful and eating healthy is the best release to make sure that you reward, you're rewarded for this hard week or that, um, you are stress released after a great week. That's a way you can do it. Is it going to work for everybody? No, it doesn't. My cheeseburger calls buddy, and I'm going to eat that cheeseburger. For some people, it will change their, their, their preferences. Uh, and, and what they'll consider in that moment now you just have to do is give them the offer to say, yes, go eat my salad, come to whatever restaurant I'm in, and so you can get a greater proportion of those people.
Speaker A: It sounds like I'm, I'm kind of restating, but I, I think it's important because we, we, we know what a Persona is. And when talking about, we need to understand our people better. It's not necessarily that we need to like, deepen maybe that, that Persona, but rather understanding how they are moving through the world at different points and that, that moves them through different mind states as well. Ah. And you know, as we talk about thinking differently about all of this, I would not be a good podcast host if I did not ask, uh, AI, good thing, bad thing, helpful thing for understanding our people. Because I feel like there could be a gravitational pull for a marketer that sees some of these tough questions thinking about and said, what if I just dump that into, into. Into ChatGPT or Claude To. To get the answer to this hard question.
Speaker C: I think it depends on how you think about AI or what AI tool you use. If you want to use AI tools for efficiency, I call it efficiency AI. I want to make ads faster, cheaper. That's probably not great for you right now because I can 10x my number of ads, but I'm all really doing is 10xing mediocre marketing. Right. So all you've done is create more confusion. And by the way, everyone, your competitors are probably moving down the path of efficiency AI right now. Faster, cheaper, better even you could argue better quality ads visually, but not emotionally. So then the other side of it is effectiveness AI. So if you're using artificial intelligence to deeply understand your customers at these psychological levels, then efficiency AI is or, uh, I'm sorry, effective AI works really well. So we created a platform called Bevy. She's behavioral intelligence. And what we do with our clients is we build out an ideal consumer profile. We call them emotionally intelligent brand Personas. So just what we were talking about, right, Nick? But what we do is we say rather than Putting in these attitudes and, and these demographics. And let's just kind of ask her what she likes and what she, what she uh. Yeah, what she likes, what she would say. What we really do is say, hey Bevy. Or in this case maybe your ideal consumer profile is Samantha. Maybe it's John. Hey John, what do you think? So we create a customer foundation with a lot of data from our clients, you know, from review data, uh, customer care call data, deep psychological research data. But then we also create a brand foundation, understanding what your brand's trying to do, what's your unique selling proposition, what's your positioning, all that stuff. And then we marry behavioral science layer to really help her, your Persona, understand how she makes decisions and how she goes through those kind of those that process, lump all that together to where now you can have a conversation on your phone if you wanted to with your com, with your customer. But rather than just loading in your ICP into Claude or whatever and having a conversation and hearing her voice, I want to see how she thinks. And that is a much more important question to me. If I'm a brand marketer, then what you can do is once you have that, that's great just for feedback on ideas. But then if you have that information, why wouldn't you going to the activation side of things? So as a marketer now you can actually say, be my researcher. I want you to look at all this new data and help me understand what this data means to you, um, from the research perspective. Or you can have be an ad advisor. How would I create ads that tap into this mind state? So when you do effectiveness AI, you can not only get deeper understanding, but now use that same same AI to develop marketing that has been designed for your customer subconscious. So that's how we're using AI right now.
Speaker A: I think that's a great distinction for people to think about of efficiency versus effectiveness, um, and really what works best and when. Well, I have smiled many times in this conversation because I am one of those dads that likes an easy Friday night for having just made it through the week as well. But it is now my turn to get to ask you Will, for a brand new that has made you smile recently.
Speaker C: Yep, um, the one that comes to mind. And depending on when this uh, this gets aired, you may or may not remember this brand. But Spotify, uh, with the logo shift that everyone was talking about about two weeks ago. So if you don't know this brand, right, Spotify, um, on a lot of people's phones, people woke up one day. And all of a sudden the logo changed to a disco ball. And so many people had crazy or not crazy. Just so many opinions. Some people were like, this is the worst thing ever. Why would a brand that's so smart do this? And other people, like, it's brilliant. Uh, uh. And when I kind of looked at that brand, I can tell the tension. There's a lot of tension. That's actually usually good for a brand to do, is create tension in the marketplace, whether you know it or not, because tension creates awareness and it creates some meaning. Sometimes when I looked at that, I thought of this as, you know, brands, people were really focused on. You're confusing people. Here's. I don't think that's the case. Here's my take on that. I thought brands are not stored in people's minds as visual assets. They're really stored as emotional predictions, I believe. So when people make the argument, oh, my gosh, you made confusion. All of a sudden people saw a logo and it's confusing. Why would you do that? I think that is a superficial way of thinking about branding. I think more importantly is that Spotify worked for 20 years, probably creating connections with people. They allowed people to be introduced to music they never heard before. I had never heard of Amy Winehouse before Spotify, and that was an amazing experience the first time I heard her voice. Right. And it was through that mechanism. It was through Spotify. Never heard of these things. Right. So they created energy for people, personalization. They created enough equity in my mind that that temporary change on their logo. And it's temporary, Right. Though it's still on my phone, which is funny, surprising, but it's still there. So it's a temporary to, uh, this disco ball. But I don't think users create brand confusion. If you really have that on your phone, you're using Spotify a lot. I don't believe that's what's happening. I think they've earned the right to create meaning and through that ball, really, it shows some longevity. It was interesting. I'm sure there's all sorts of studies that they did. They're not stupid. They know that that ball creates some equity. I don't work for them, so I have no idea. But I don't believe that they broke trust. I think that when you earn the right after 20 years of helping people reach their aspirational goals, like listening to music and having. Listening to music you never heard of before or being introduced to artists you've never seen, that matters. And so, yeah, you have more creative liberty when you do that. So I thought the take was not whether it's good or bad. My take was have they earned the right? And I think they have earned the right. And probably my guess is this whole campaign has done really well for them.
Speaker B: Yeah.
Speaker A: And we're thinking about it, we're talking about it, we're moving it maybe, uh, from, from system one to two or, or vice versa. I forgot my systems numbering there. Uh, so where can we send folks will to learn more about who you are and what you do?
Speaker C: If you want to learn more about me the person, go to LinkedIn. I do a lot of thought leadership on there. I have a weekly email that goes out there our newsletter. So I do my deep thinking pieces there. Hopefully they're entertaining in some way. I usually talk about a brand in some way and talk about what they did last week. So LinkedIn, uh, and we'll, I guess we'll have that in the show notes will, uh, leach and if you want to learn more about kind of what we do, mindstategroup.com you can learn more about the research side of things if you're a brand manager, but also the bevy tool that I was talking about to uh, help use artificial intelligence for that more effective AI that you may be looking for.
Speaker A: Awesome. And you beat me to the punch. We will link up to all of that in our show notes which folks can find at on brandpodcast.com well, Leach, thanks for being on Brand with us.
Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
Speaker A: On Brand is part of the marketing podcast network. If you like what you're hearing, if we've made you smile, you can always listen free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatever your favorite platform may be. And please take a moment and rate and review the podcast to help others find the show. Until next week, I'm Nick Westergaard and I'll see you on the Internet.
Speaker B: Foreign. You may know you're listening to this show along the marketing Podcast network, but did you know there are other great shows on MPN to help your business? Heather Ek hosts an amazing show called your radiant Spirit. Heather, tell listeners about the show.
Speaker D: What if the colors you're drawn to, the creative urges you ignore, and the quiet intuitive hits you brush off are actually trying to tell you something. Your radiant spirit is the podcast that helps you listen and live with greater clarity and purpose.
Speaker B: And where can people subscribe?
Speaker D: You can find and subscribe at heatherech. Com yourradiantspirit on marketingpodcast. Net or search for it wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker C: You heard her.
Speaker B: Go subscribe. This podcast is heard along the Marketing Podcast Network. For more great marketing podcasts, visit marketingpodcasts. Net.
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