Buyer's Psychology

[00:00:00] Rafael Gi: And not to introduce the star of our chat. Katelyn Bourgoin, hopefully did not butcher that.

[00:00:06] Katelyn Bourgoin: You did awesome.

[00:00:07] Rafael Gi: Katelyn is a 4x founder turned customer whisperer and CEO of Customer Camp. She's recognized as one of the top 20 wonder women of SaaS marketing and growth by SaaStock.

And has been featured on Forbes, Inc., HuffPost, Bustle, CBC, CTV, Global TV and more. She's an expert on helping businesses understand their customer and leading frustrated products to help figure out where to focus so they can make their make better decisions or market better. Before we begin the session, a couple housekeeping notes.

All the sessions are gonna be recorded and posted on YouTube will be taking a 10 minute Q&A at the end of the hour, so please close your questions on the Q&A. And with that out of the way, let's get started. I'd love to start with a session by asking you simple question. How do you define Buyer's Psychology?

[00:00:53] Katelyn Bourgoin: So my definition is probably wrong, because I would say that I'm an expert in this, Ralph and I were talking beforehand.

I'm student, I am a practitioner. I'm obsessed with this stuff. Once I started writing our newsletter, Why we buy became something I got really excited about. But, the practical term, the term that they use in a sense community that a lot of the stuff that I teach comes from is behavioral economics, but I don't know about you, but that sounds really boring.

People don't now what it means. And so we're marketers, right? So we wanna communicate in a way that we're gonna understand and get excited about. So really what I teach is behavioral economics. I talk about the cognitive biases and risks that drive buyer behavior. But ultimately it comes down to what makes you what they do.

How can we understand people better? And what I get really excited about is the overlap between how humans think in broad like the broad term. And how our own customers think, because we need both, right? We need to marry basic like psychology that applies to a broad audience to our own customers and what works with them.

So my definition's probably understanding drives decision making, which is the behavioral economics part, and then understanding what drives your specific buyers, which is customer research driven.

[00:02:23] Rafael Gi: Awesome. That seems like a pretty clear definition. I'm guessing you do this for a living, right? Just in turn with that why is it important for businesses to focus on it?

I'm sure there's a lot of analytics teams and a lot of the organizations that are here today, but there's not a lot of buyer's psychology departments. Why is it important for companies to focus on, to help scale the growth.

[00:02:49] Katelyn Bourgoin: We spent all this time obsessing what figuring out what works, right?

Like we wanna figure out like if we change the headline to this, what's the conversion gonna go to? Or if on this channel using this type of format, how's that gonna do? And ultimately, a lot marketers and growth teams spend a lot of time trying to figure out what works. But the fundamentals, the why it works is the stuff that I think a lot of people kind of sleep on.

They're not really spending time understanding that. So they're looking at trends in the market. They're looking at other marketers that are sharing wins. They're looking at experts who are talking about conversion rate optimization or growth hacking. And they're applying those methods and they're not getting the same results.

And it's because the context is different. They're missing a piece of understanding why those tactics are effective and on that, the buyer psychology piece, or again, to use the kind of proper term, the behavioral economics piece. Once I started learning about this, I start seeing it everywhere in effective marketing.

But before I would just be like, Oh, they're running a sale and they're using a countdown clock, and that's smart. But now I understand why that's smart and I understand when that's smart because it doesn't always work, right? Yeah. Like sometimes it's if you have the wrong audience and you're trying to create false scarcity, it's gonna be a turnoff.

So it's really important not just to figure out what works, but to spend the time to understand why.

[00:04:20] Rafael Gi: That makes sense. And maybe to make it pragmatic for our audience members, has there been like a recent example of something that Brandon has that you're like, That's really smart. Usage of buyer's psychology, or is there something that you can share from a previous experience that really helps sharpen and get you excited to learn about.

[00:04:42] Katelyn Bourgoin: Let me do a screen share here. So I've got one that I think there's so many, there's so many examples. The interesting thing about the behavioral economics world is these cognitive biases. There are the ones that we as marketers probably are pretty familiar with. Things like scarcity, reciprocity.

The idea that when we give something to someone, they feel this desire to return the favor. Probably familiar with loss aversion, the idea that we don't lose out and we're more willing, we're more worried about than we are about gaining something of equal value. These are common ones. But there's actually I think 150 of these, and there's overlap between them.

There's different researchers doing different things, so it's a really broad scientific community, but there's some neat ones that when you see them you just go, Wow, like that. How does that work? And it does. So let me do a screen share. Okay.

[00:05:36] Rafael Gi: Not sure if we've had a speaker get interactive yet though, so this is great.

[00:05:41] Katelyn Bourgoin: I just, I wrote a thread, see my screen now?

[00:05:45] Rafael Gi: Yes.

[00:05:46] Katelyn Bourgoin: Awesome. I wrote a thread, We broke down some different biases, teen, different concepts that marketers need to know, and it's pinned to my profile on Twitter, so you can go and see this after if you want, but one that really stands out to me, something that's just like shockingly brilliant is this one from Snickers.

So they ran two different campaigns. They had signage in stores and they were trying to encourage people to buy Snickers for their freezer. And they had one sign that said, Buy them for your freezer. And then they replaced the word them with 18 , which seems like an astronomical amount of chocolate pairs trying to put in your freezer.

But because they set this very high anchor, this idea that the number was high, the sales actually increased by 38%. , So anchoring is this really interesting one that I'm seeing smart things with. So anchoring is the concept that, again, like when you share a number, you essent create an anchor in somebody's mind.

And once they have that anchor, Logical or not, they're comparing other things to it. So you can use this in your marketing in an interesting ways. You can use showing, what the sale price was and that will make them think, Oh wow, that was really expensive and now I'm getting this great deal.

The other way that it works, which is surprising, is even let's say you're pitching your agency and you are describing your boat to share your price and maybe your price ain't cheap because you do amazing work and you work with the best brands and you deliver great results and maybe you're gonna charge $50,000 for this client, which is not a small number.

But if you start, as you're talking about your pitch and you describe the amount of dollars that wasted in marketing because they are ineffective, unaccounted for, and let's just say you say something like, $7.4 billion every year study show is wasted marketing budgets, like we wanna help you avoid becoming statistic, and then you start talking about your price.

Now you've anchored them with that exorbitantly high number. And even though it's not a number related to your services specifically, that high anchor works. So a great example of this is Costco, right? When you walk into Costco, what do you see the first moment you walk in? You see a bunch of TVs and laptops, the most expensive things in the store, and automatically you're thinking, Okay, those are high price.

However, I know that they're actually value compared to if I were to go to another store and buy the same laptop or buy the same tv, I know I'm gonna do more. So I know they're a good deal. And then your brain automatically applies that same. This is a deal to everything in the store because we don't know how much 400 boxes of Cheerios should cost.

Yeah. But we assume we're getting a good deal, right?

[00:08:34] Rafael Gi: Yeah. I guess it's also the same trick, a lot of groceries, right? Like they'll move down things like milk and eggs, like staples, and then everything else is expensive. To that anchoring perception. That's awesome. That's really interesting. Tying it back to earlier

You had mentioned there's like over 150 different behavioral economics principles that you can rely on for somebody who's looking to dive in to this subject matter where, what are your top five go-tos? That really..

[00:09:03] Katelyn Bourgoin: I love that too. I'm actually your screen share again,

[00:09:07] Rafael Gi: we didn't practice be behind stage

[00:09:11] Katelyn Bourgoin: The thing is, I started thinking about this from a practical perspective because even I get overwhelmed and I study the stuff, right? Yeah. And every newsletter that we write with why we buy quickly will share a new bias or new heuristic or something interesting to reveal these concepts.

But there's, it's hard to retain. This is something that you'll from biases as well. Like we struggle with holding a lot of information in our memory at one time, right? Like we can only have so much no working memory at once. And so I started thinking about if I had to narrow it down to the ones that are the most important for marketers to understand and the ones that are gonna use work the most often, and I had to add context about when they're gonna use these, what might that look like?

And so I created our buyer psychology cheat sheet, which anybody who signs up or our newsletter, they get it for free and I'll show you what it is and we can walk through some of them. So let me just do a screen share here again.

So this is it, and basically broke it down around the buying journey. Cause ultimately we wanna know, again, context matters. Where can you best apply these? So everything starts with a trigger event. So I talk about this a lot, like there's a moment where a prospect goes from being like, fitting your ICP, but having zero interest in the thing that you do or the thing that you sell.

To actually being triggered to enter the buying journey, whether or not they know it. So the first thing I talk to people about is the importance of understanding those trigger events. And trigger events can be biological things like being cold, right? If you're at the beach and you're hungry and there's a snack shack that trigger event's gonna get you to go and buy food. But they can also be situational things. Emotional things, having a fight with somebody or feeling insecure, and then social stuff like, maybe a friend makes a suggestion. So ultimately, it all starts with that trigger event. Figuring that out is critical to create the right offer in front of the right people

who are more likely to buy. Then there's the passive looking stage. This is where people are not actively out searching for a solution like yours, so they're not on Google. They're not necessarily asking their friends for a request yet, but if you were to get in front of them, at this stage, they have awareness that they have a problem to solve and they might pay attention to you.

So what cognitive biases are gonna be the ones that are gonna be the most interesting at that stage? One of the top ones is you wanna have think about distinctiveness, right? We pay attention to things that stand out from other stuff. So this is called the Bond Restore Effect, if you wanna get

technical, but essentially if you see, a bag of apples and they're all green and there's one red apple, you notice the red one, right? Yeah. And this can apply very well to marketing. So Coinbase did this amazing ad at the Super Bowl, which is like pretty legendary, where everybody else spent their $5 million for their Super Bowl ad.

And they had incredible high production quality, and they were funny and interesting. And Coinbase ad came up and it was just a black screen with a QR code bouncing around. It immediately stood out. Yeah. What's that?

[00:12:22] Rafael Gi: I said game of pong. Yeah, .

[00:12:24] Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. Immediately stood out. You're like, I'm not seeing anything else like this.

I think they got 20 million visits. They're crash. It was a really effective use of distinctiveness. So another one is, Mere Exposure Effect, right? The more we're exposed to something, the more we come to trust it. And this is why marketing and advertising and content marketing is so important. By the time we're actually ready to go into the active looking and evaluation stage, if we've actually seen something a number of times, we're gonna be more trusting of social currency.

[00:13:00] Rafael Gi: I guess that's what, Oh, sorry..

[00:13:02] Katelyn Bourgoin: Oh, no, go ahead.

[00:13:03] Rafael Gi: I guess that's what advertisers. Call saliency, the Mere Exposure Effect. That's how salience.

[00:13:08] Katelyn Bourgoin: Absolutely right.

[00:13:09] Rafael Gi: ...and hold the battle between distinctiveness and Saliency. What do you rely on here?

[00:13:14] Katelyn Bourgoin: I think that you can use both, right? So you think about Coke, Coke spends $4 billion a year on advertising.

Yeah. Everybody knows what Coke is, right? Nobody is Oh my goodness, I've never seen that bottle before. How interesting. But yet, Coke can also use their, the ability to kind of show consistently. And then they compare that with a really unique campaign that stands out. So they did this is, old now, but they did their Christmas campaign.

Instead of having the traditional like Santa Claus and elves and like what we think of as Christmas, they had the polar bear at the time that was pretty distinctive. It was not something that you commonly kind of the Christmas motif. So you, these things are not things that use as one-offs.

They're things that you can pair. I'll share one more. This one a lot. The Barnum effect. So anybody who's ever gone to a fortune teller or who reads their horoscope, you are actually being, you're essentially experiencing the Barnum effect. And the Barnum effect is really drawn towards statements or questions that feel very personal to us, even if they could apply to anyone.

So when you read your horoscopes oftentimes it'll say something like, You're gonna have an important financial discussion, and you're like oh snap, that totally just happened. Like I just talked with my boss raise, or I went to the bank, or I'm trying to save for a house. And it feels very personal, but anybody, because when they were born would probably be able to read that and find an example of their own life.

So this is a really fun one. I actually was just on Phill Agnew's podcast, Nudge and we talked about the Barnum effect and he shared some examples of campus that he's running and testing using this effect. And it's super cool. So last I'll share is this one. Cause I think it's awesome for an event like this.

So a lot of these you probably are familiar with again, but I really like this idea of the Peak-End rule. So when we remember an experience, if you're trying to craft a really unique experience for your customers, like a conference like this, you wanna think about strategically designing each element that there's like a high peak.

So maybe if it's a speaker, they've got the super high peak in their talk, and then you want it to end on a high note. And those are the things that you're gonna remember. You're gonna remember the peak, whether it's good or bad, and you're gonna remember the end. And some interesting study thought on this. You can see brands that do this really well, like Disney's thinking constantly about creating this amazing experience.

So you don't remember all the words you spend waiting in line , but they did this with a colono, which is a very unpleasant experience and the peak of that experience is the pain and after the pain it was over. And so you would, people would just remember the pain so much and they would be resistant to wanting to go and get one again.

And so what they did was they actually changed the procedure in that they, the only thing they did was they add like some unnecessary, extra stuff to the end, but it created a more pleasant ending which made the pain and the experience of the peak being painful, not as bad. So there's things you can do as a brand that you can leverage to really like shape the experience, shape your ad, shape your creative, all that kind of stuff.

[00:16:33] Rafael Gi: That's awesome. Really insightful. I'm guessing you're gonna get a lot of subscribers.

[00:16:40] Katelyn Bourgoin: If people wanna subscribe, great. I can also drop a link. I would have through my Google drop. I can drop a link to this. People don't wanna subscribe. Let me know. I'll drop a link. But I found a hand is I would be thinking about a campaign.

I'd be writing ad copy or creating like a social post. And I would be like, How can I pepper this with some of this stuff? And I have it actually as a screensaver on my computer. So I just close my windows and look.

[00:17:04] Rafael Gi: Yeah, that's a really good transition. How do you apply, How do you pick and choose to apply?

There seems to be like so many great tools and methods, even in that little cheat sheet that you put together. How do you prioritize?

[00:17:16] Katelyn Bourgoin: What it comes down to is oftentimes when we're creating something, depending on what the asset is in the format, we don't have to use just one, right? So my landing page for one of my products, I was before on this call, I was thinking I might show it as an example.

Yeah. In the hero area, before you even scroll, I'm using like four different things. Yeah. And they're subtle, right? People are gonna go, Oh my goodness, she's doing that and that. But once you understand this stuff, then you're like, Oh. And I think it's the combination of these things that really can have the biggest impact, but it makes it trickier for testing it because you oftentimes wanna test like not just one tiny change, but like a bigger variation where it's okay, fine.

These things and these, and I run these two different versions. What's gonna have the bigger results.

[00:18:06] Rafael Gi: That's a fair point. So maybe I can dig a little bit deeper around this work with organizations, you help them start to apply this, cause I can assume that everybody might take a slight different approach.

But how do you find your clients are scaling some of the lessons that you're sharing across?

[00:18:25] Katelyn Bourgoin: So I don't actually do much client work. My business is primarily live shops where I teach like my core focus and the thing that I sell. Like we have all this stuff away for free, but there's ultimately, this is information that is out there and people can, I think that understanding people in general, that I think everyone should know.

The work that I do and the stuff that we actually sell is around understanding your customer specifically. So we have workshops on how to do customer interviews to pull insights about the buying journey that you can apply to marketing. We have workshops about helping you figure out who your best buyers are and we have products that help them to figure out how to go in mind reviews for insights.

So the way I think what it is like that stuff is the, it's the input that you need. And once you have that, then you can use smart marketing tactics. You can use buyer psychology, you can use a framework that I that we share called the trigger technique. And you can use all of apply it. But getting those insights, that's the things that we teach.

[00:19:32] Rafael Gi: Super smart. In addition to that, one of the questions I often face as a agency executive is clients always ask us you know. Research or testing, do you hypothesis or do you do buyer research, customer journey based research to identify when would you apply which research method?

[00:19:52] Katelyn Bourgoin: I like it to do. So it depends on the risk. Okay. That's what I say what are we doing here? Are we doing a 5 million Super Bowl ad or are we doing a Facebook ad or a TikTok ad that we can change really easily? So what I like to do is we've designed this method called the Trigger Technique, because I'm a big research nerd.

But I also think if you are, if you're building a product, especially like a hardware product or a really complicated software product where you're gonna spend months, if not a year, more building. You do not wanna just go in and make assumptions, right? You need to do a lot of research to understand your audience.

But if you are a marketer and you're trying to figure out how to craft the right message so you can really get dialed in on like message market fit, or you're trying to figure out how to create some great content so you can drive some traffic. You don't need to go super deep. So what I recommend people do is that they do research and so like you go off and like maybe you interview one buyer and you can get amazing insights from one buyer story and then you can take those insights and plug them in again to this framework we have called the trigger technique. And you can use that and apply the cognitive bias stuff to come up with some campus that are smart to they work.

So I would rather see marketers spend like not create these massive research projects that take them months or even weeks to do. I'd rather see them doing research, really lean and then testing really fast. And but testings smart, right? And that's why this buyer psychology stuff is so important because you can chuck anything out there and be like, Oh, that thing didn't work.

I said no providence, the execution might have sucked.

[00:21:37] Rafael Gi: Yeah, that's fair. And I think you make an instant point around insights. I know, especially in the agency space, that could be a very loaded term. How do you define an insight? What is a good insight versus a bad insight as research?

[00:21:52] Katelyn Bourgoin: So I would, so I am very blessed to spend time with and learn from Bob Moesta, who's one of the co architects of jobs to be done along with Clayton Christensen.

And one of the things that he's really had that someone is you wanna focus on the cost stuff, right? , the insights that matter is like what is it that actually causes people to do things? So when I'm interviewing people, I wanna spend time going back in time, understanding what first thought what was that trigger event that led them to beginning to like

think that they might have a problem with solving, and then what were all the activities that happened in between that, and then purchasing our product or purchasing our competitor's product. If you're interviewing a competitor's customer and really connecting all those dots, but things you should be paying attention to from an insight perspective, we are all very opinionated and opinions can be really interesting, hearing the emotions that your customers talk about in the buying journey, that can be really interesting. But the stuff that is most interesting is what they're actually doing. And really getting a sense of okay, so then who did you talk to and why did you decide to do it that way? And was that the only solution you considered?

Or were there others? And once you start pulling these questions out to people, it's really interesting because oftentimes, they've never really thought about their buying journey. Cause this is another thing that comes to buyer psychology, which you probably know. Have you read Thinking Fast and Slow?

[00:23:19] Rafael Gi: Yes, I have. By Mr. Daniel Kahneman? Yeah.

[00:23:22] Katelyn Bourgoin: Do you wanna explain it or do you want me to explain it?

[00:23:24] Rafael Gi: Oh, no, go for it. Go for it.

[00:23:26] Katelyn Bourgoin: So thinking Fast and Slow is by Daniel Kahneman, who's a behavioral economist, and he basically shares that we have two kind of modes of thinking. What he calls system one and system two. System one is like fast and it's intuitive and it's unconscious.

We're not really thinking about it in the moment. System two is like we're thinking hard, we're focused, we're paying attention, and that causes us to use a lot of energy, right? And our brain is, our bodies are under conserved energy, so we don't wanna spend all of our day in system two. We wanna get lazy and go back to system one.

And so the interesting thing about interviews is what you find when you become a skilled interviewer is you can actually pull information out of people that they hadn't really connected. It's almost like you become like a therapist and like they're sitting on their chair and you're pulling out their childhood stories that they didn't there.

Yeah, because there's thinking about their actions consciously in the moment because they're not think they're gonna have to tell anyone about it with their life. So you can learn a lot through those conversations and you can get a lot of really interest insights.

[00:24:32] Rafael Gi: Yeah. 100%. I know for me at least doing some research over time, one of the things I found observational research methods are really powerful because you can see the true meaning behind behavior versus sometimes when you talk to customers they just wanna piss you right on the call and give you the sensor versus their true feelings though. Yeah.

[00:24:53] Katelyn Bourgoin: It's hard. And this is why research is ill and it's something you have to learn and you have to practice. It's like sales, right? I'm reading right now I'm reading it for the second time. I'm reading Never Split the Difference.

It's a great book. It's about, it's a sales book, but the writer, he was a FBI negotiator for hostages. So if somebody got taken hostage, he went negotiated with the. In most cases, like criminals. On all cases, criminals. And what was interesting was his approach was completely different than what business schools are teaching negotiation.

Business schools are thinking people are very rational. Business schools are thinking that when it came to negotiating, let's say a business deal, that you had to think there was like all of these things that they were teaching, which when you actually go into the real world didn't work.

And one of the things that he shares, and again, this is where becoming a skilled interviewer, or in his case, a skilled negotiator. So powerful when somebody says something like you are right. That's like them, like getting you to stop. They're like, they want you to stop asking them questions. They want you to, They feel like they're being patronized and like they're just being like, Yeah okay, leave alone.

But when they say that's right, that's different. Cause it's like they've just made, they've just connected the dots and now they're agree. That the whatever call action you're recommending or whatever information you just shared is something that they're going along with. And there are these little cues that as an interviewer, if you learn to do this stuff, And again, I was lucky enough to learn from Bob Moesta.

You can really start spot and pull information out of people in a way that they're not just pacifying you that they're really like sharing some information.

[00:26:50] Rafael Gi: The analogy just click in my head so we have a lot of obviously growth marketers on the line here, a lot of individuals from startups and scale up.

Are there any practical methods that they can start applying on their day to day basis to really bring in some of these research methods? Are there maybe types of research or approaches that you would've meant to get started?

[00:27:18] Katelyn Bourgoin: So when it comes to the cognitive biases and understand like how people think.

What I would say is start off with doing a little bit of build your kind of foundational knowledge. Start by learning the basic, so you read our newsletter but I'd say you wanted to go into some books like the top two I'd recommend as like starter would be influenced by Robert Cialdini, which I'm sure you may have read and probably people that are on the chat have read if you have showed it out.

Great book and then there's a newer book, but my friend Melina Palmer and she's a marketer who went back to school to study behavioral economics and it's called What Your Customers Wants and Can't Tell You. And in that she breaks down, I think 20 of these biases talks about how they've been applied to marketing.

Gives lots of examples that's written in a very approachable, awesome way. So I'd start off by the basics and I would go out into the wild and like analyzing good stuff you're seeing out there. So one thing that we as marketer are really lucky that we can do is we can literally evaluate other people's work and get a sense of like, why did I buy that?

And we can like back and like deconstruct what was going on that led to our own purchases. Cool. But I would say starting with the foundational knowledge and then looking at stuff in the wild that you find really compelling. That's awesome.

[00:28:42] Rafael Gi: It a little bit. I don't know if you, I see ads all the time and I'm like, I try to take deconstruct on how they got to that point.

[00:28:50] Katelyn Bourgoin: Constantly. And then like how is that like I don't that feels like it wouldn't work. But then sometimes too, I mean we all experience this as marketers. The thing that you don't think is going to work works and you're like, that was the one that we just lobbed in there to be like the crazy horse and it actually works.

And times it works because when we are looking at it. We're using system two thinking, we're analyzing it, we're being rational, we're being logical, but when our audience sees it, they're using system one thinking. They're just intuitively, it's just in their atmosphere, they're experiencing it. A really interesting study was done on how we make decisions and how we process, and this is particularly true because oftentimes in B2B, you, get pushback and people go,our customers are Jesus, right? They're like, extremely talented engineers or they're that, and like they don't like any of this fluffy marketing, so that's gonna work on them.

Yeah. And it's they're still driven nearly by emotions. So there was a man who had a brain tumor. And the brain tumor actually, it affected the frontal lobe of his brain, which responsible for emotions and making decisions. And so we use emotions so much making decisions that he, his life basically got ruined.

He would spend hours every day trying to evaluate what to have for breakfast. What was the optimal breakfast decision? Because he didn't have emotions to tell him, just be like, just figure it out. Just like what doesn't matter. What are you feeling like having? And his life fell apart and so they like...

so we don't, so we're not rational. So when we look at our ads, we're in system two mode. And then when our customers see them show up in on Facebook or LinkedIn or talk or wherever, they're not right. And so the things that work are not necessarily the thing. Sometimes it can surprise.

[00:30:55] Rafael Gi: Yeah, no, that's a fair point.

Going back to the heuristics that you shared especially around the passive shopping, right? how would you coach marketers to think about the consistent emotion they want to create on behalf of their buyers? So maybe going back to Coca-Cola example having worked on that brand, I know that brand is really focused on the idea of happiness.

So when you like crack? Yeah. So when you crack open, when you hear that, not really about refreshment, it's about joy. That's why they associate themselves with Christmas cause they wanna themselves with the feeling of joy. For startup or scale up, how do you founders and marketers figure out what emotion to focus on?

[00:31:39] Katelyn Bourgoin: I think that, I would say that it is unfortunately not gonna, you're probably gonna have to take your time with it and try some things like you narrow in on something that feels right and then you might evolve over time. But the best brands, if you ask what are those driving factors?

Like they can tell you like Apple's about being cool, right? Yeah. Steve Jobs was like totally against the iPhone. He, the smartphones were dorky and that cool people didn't use them and it took him a long time. His team, a lot of prodding for him to essentially eventually said what we do to change that?

Like , how could we make a smartphone? Cool. And was like oh shit. good question. Maybe we can, maybe we should do a smartphone. And of course that changed the world in many ways. You look at a brand like Red Bull about energy, right? That is their word. So finding a word or something you want to be known for is a smart move, but I think it's often not intuitive at first.

So I think about why we buy and what I kept hearing back from our audience. Cause again, oftentimes this will come from your audience. Yeah. But what I kept hearing back from our audience is like this, it's, you make it fun, it's smart, but it's fun. And then I would look at some of the other information out there studying these topics again, like all of it using

proper terminology and very, making sure that all of the sources are always like in AP style and like it was like, this stuff is great too, but I'm not trying to change the world. I'm not telling people how to change a colon procedure. I'm getting able to try stuff in marketing, like I wanna be so serious.

And so it became, for us, what we really focused on was like the emotion. I wanted our customers to feel smarter for reading it and I knew that they'd read it if it was fun. So it was like the tying those two things together, it's like I want them to feel, I don't want us to look smart, I want them to feel smart.

I want them..

[00:33:44] Rafael Gi: To positioning. Cause I'm sure a lot of research and behavioral scientists focus on sounding smart, not making it fun.

[00:33:51] Katelyn Bourgoin: Totally. Cause they have to go off in their peers and they to fight for their peer reviewed journals and stuff. I haven't do that. , I can just make it fun and I'm not trying, again, I'm not trying to change the world.

Like the worst case scenario that tries and experiment their marketing. That doesn't work.Yeah. It's not like we're trying to change governments or like retirement plans or get people to wear mask in Covid. These are all things that Behavioral economics. Yeah. And then applied to solve but in my case, I was like, I don't need to take myself seriously.

And I want our readers to feel like superheroes on their team. I want them to be able to point the things and be like, we should change this and here's why. And I knew that. Guess what? We read? We read stuff that's interesting. , right? Or we read stuff we have to read. Mostly we read something that's interesting, and how do you make it interesting?

You make it fun. So for us, that's how we found it. But I would say the emotion behind a brand, it's, I don't think it just happens like magic. I think it like evolves from like a dialogue with your audience.

[00:34:57] Rafael Gi: Yeah. That's awesome. Maybe a bit of a pragmatic question. This is something I actually think about quite often, especially when running research and insights theme, but how do you differentiate a fad versus a trend versus a true insight that you can anchor your experiments around over.

Especially the, just the influx of data, right?

[00:35:18] Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So when you mean a fad versus a trend versus an insight. Yeah. Do you mean when you pressing your data, and your data and you're analyzing it, you see like a, like one off, It seems like, okay, this is happening, but it's right.

[00:35:34] Rafael Gi: And people might overreact and recur all of their marketing go through that, but they it's working.

Yeah. So how do you...

[00:35:42] Katelyn Bourgoin: I think that what I would say is that this is where the conversations, I think can be so salient. Yes. So one thing that Jeff Bezos says is he said if you show me the anecdote and the data are not aligned. The anecdote's almost always right? There's something wrong where you're measuring it.

And I think that the true, cover led organizations like Apple and Amazon, and Intercom, like they spend a lot of time not just looking at what people are doing. But digging into understanding why, and I think both, like you need to be able to look at the data and look at the trends and look at the chains that are spiking.

And then you need to know why. So in one of my talks, I took my journey to buy a alarm clock. An old shitty, what do they call, a twin bell alarm clock. Like you, oh, before you had to power anything. Yeah, exactly. I operated, you don't plug the thing in. And my trigger event that led me to along the journey to buy this alarm clock, although I bought it like three months after the trigger event happened was it was New Year's.

I made a resolution to try to get in, shapely wait. And I was sitting up in bed on my phone, scrolling and not going to bed on time. And this became this consistent problem and eventually, looking at different solutions. I'd dug up my old alarm clock, but I would just hit the snooze button like I tried moving it across the room

But again, I'd get up and hit the snooze button. I looked at different solutions. But if you look at the the search data for Twin Bell, alarm clock, Google, you'll notice spike in January. If you didn't talk people to know why, you might be like, Okay, like it's, colder. Like you might, you're gonna try to hypothesize what spike.

But there's a spike because people like me have set these life goals for their future selves that they wanna achieve, feeling motivated by their new year's resolution. and they need to get up earlier, whether it's to work out, whether it's to work on their side hustle, whatever the reason. And they've found that a twin bell alarm can be that solution and they've rationalize that.

Yeah. So you've gotta data, then you find these little

[00:38:01] Rafael Gi: Yeah. I love to dig into that a little bit. And help the audience understand how do you get to that context, right? Cause the data point's not gonna get that that context, right? You see the spike, but what, Yeah. Yeah.

Take your interpretation can take it in many different ways. What is the magic on how you get to that insight.

[00:38:23] Katelyn Bourgoin: It's that it's not sexy, but it's voice for customer, right? It's interviewing somebody who bought and asking them what was going on. It's surveys don't work particularly, surveys aren't bad.

Surveys are fine, but surveys, you just get narrow responses because you can't dig in any deeper. So surveys are a good alternative to doing nothing. Not asking, but I would say that looking at like the key ways to get this, it would be number one's always gonna be interviewing a customer, trying to deconstruct their buying journey, focusing on what they did, not how they feel.

You don't have to talk that much about what they think of the product. Oftentimes, that's what they assume that you're gonna do. You're gonna really tell me about the product. What do you like, what don't you like? You don't care so that as a marketer, you care about what happened between you realizing you need something to solve that problem, and you buying from us and

tell me about the middle. Another really great method is review mining. So people who write reviews often feel passionate about a product, either passionate in a positive way or passionate in a negative way. And you can find a lot of neat insights in those reviews around trigger events. For instance, I have a product called the review, the Golden Nugget Review Mining System and the example that we lived in, it is my friend Amanda Go. She's got this incredible company they sell weed gummies and they are for stress and for sex and for sleep. I think they're their four main uses. And if you go through and you read the reviews written by her customers, there's all these interesting trigger events in there.

So one person says, I pop a gummy after bedtime frenzy. And Rafael, you and I were talking about being new parents. . Yeah. Understanding there is a bedtime. Yeah. There's a moment where you find okay in their sleep. Yeah. And that breathe. And so you start to see this pattern where you're like, oh, so these are women, moms, they have young children cause they're still doing the bedtime frenzy.

There's some stuff there. And then I read some of the other ones and somebody was talking about having to give a big presentation at work.

[00:40:31] Rafael Gi: Sorry to jump in as well just cause obviously I have a partner and as you mentioned, Katelyn, we have a young child there. One of the things that I've realized and just

being part of her journey is as a new mom, you don't turn off, So for your friend's product like the weed gummy will help speak to that, right? Because you're thinking about your kid 24/7. Maybe it's a way for you to not even just relax, but take your mind off being a mom. It's that kind of say that...

[00:40:57] Katelyn Bourgoin: In this review and there's a series of reviews. I think I analyzed what, 50 in the example one person says it quiets the never ending to-do list. Now imagine using that in your copy. Yeah. Imagine an ad where somebody talks about the never ending to-do list. That's just genius, right?

Yeah. So the, a lot of interesting insights they're gonna tie together the quantitative data that you're seeing is by matching with the qualitative. Yeah. And it's not a perfect science as much as there are people who would like to say than it is. Yeah. It's experiment driven we need test up 100%.

[00:41:31] Rafael Gi: I still remember, for us there's a big chunk of time between 2012 and 2017 where everybody was obsessed with hustle culture, right? And you can imagine I don't know if you remember this, but when you ask people how are you, most people answer by saying, Hey, you're busy. I'm busy.

I'm busy. Oftentimes we've talked to brands. When people say that it's not that they're looking for help, they're actually trying to be recognized that there's somebody of importance, because now when you, we use the word busy, it's not to create the meaning again around that, the fact.

To be saved. You wanna be seen by your peers that you have a lot of important things going on in their lives. So I think huge.

[00:42:08] Katelyn Bourgoin: And that is just reason why we buy things. And it's something that, again, particularly in B2B, I think that people think that if you have multiple buyers in a decision, especially if you're selling their enterprise, like there people are all like, looking at things from a very

logical and pragmatic perspective. Yeah. But oftentimes they are not, they're choosing the vendor who took them to the nicest dinner . They're choosing the vendor who has a VP role that's gonna be opening up soon and they wanna leave their current company. So they're like, Sure, I'll go with you.

And yeah, hopefully get an over here and get some good will. Like we are, as humans, we're very motivated by how we are perceived by others. Yeah. And by making our life easier and saving time, saving money, producing stress, all those things.

[00:42:56] Rafael Gi: 100%. So just doing a quick time check, I just wanna ask one more question before we transition to the Q&A.

But you mentioned buyer journey a couple of times. I think maybe not everybody in the audiences might know what you mean by that, but how would you define what a buyer journey is and what a good buyer journey looks?

[00:43:15] Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah. So again, I used to define this differently and then I got smart because I was lucky enough to discover Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta.

But the buyer journey, if you look at the way that like Salesforce talks about the buyer journey, they'll often show you this visual where there's all of these different dots and it's all of these touch points that the customer has with your brand. And they'll talk about there's the good ones and those will be up on the top and it'll be green.

And there's the negative ones that might be like dealing with your call center. And everything that like oftentimes we think about from the buyer journey perspective is in relation to our company. And how stupid is that? Because guess what there is so much happening in your customer's lives that have absolutely nothing to do with you

and if you can learn that stuff, you can get so much insight. You can figure out how to get in front of customers sooner in less crowded channels with smarter messages, better offers before they start actively looking for a solution like yours. So when I think about the buyer journey, I think about, again, this is something that I learned from Bob.

Take me back to the very first moment where you realize that you might have a problem you needed to solve. . And they'll go, and they'll think, and like they'll share and then I want them to walk me through all the different steps and what will typically happen in a buyer journey. If you're tracking it properly and you're making all your notes, is that you'll see that there's

the trigger event, but usually they don't know about solutions yet, right? , they might have a sense of what might be out there, but they haven't started like really doing any real work of putting any effort in. So that happens and then they go into passive looking where they're like noticing things.

They, if something pops up on LinkedIn, they might download the ebook. They are walking down the street and they see something interesting. They might pay attention. Like they'll see a billboard that they've driven by a hundred times and never noticed, and now they notice. So in the passive looking stage, they're not actively seeking out a solution yet, but they're noticing things they would've ignored before.

And then usually something will happen in their life. A catalyst. That will push them to actively looking. Typically, catalysts are painful, frustrating experiences as marketers, catalysts are gold because once you understand what those catalysts are, you can figure out how to position your offers at, get in front of people at the right time.

I'll finish the buyer journey and I'll share a fun story , so will happen,then they'll get pushed into the active looking mode. Right now they're actually searching for solutions. They may not be looking at a solution specifically like yours yet, but they are assessing and evaluating the same way that like, I dug up my old, like old school alarm clock.

As opposed to going on Amazon and buying this twin bell alarm clock. They're searching for solutions. Then usually another catalyst will happen that will push them into, I need to decide if I'm gonna buy or not. I've narrowed down my choice set. It's between maybe doing this, maybe waiting, maybe I'm looking at three different options and trying to compare them and evaluate them and something will happen.

They'll push them into decision on, I need to decide, and then they will buy the thing and they will use the thing and they'll evaluate it and they'll go, Did this work? Am I getting my job done? Am I making progress the way that I'd hoped? And if it did, then they're gonna be happy. They're gonna keep using it.

They're gonna tell people about it. They'll keep paying your subscription. They'll buy it every time they go to the store. And if it didn't, then they're gonna fire it and they're gonna look for something new to hire. Yeah. So that is the buying journey that I pay attention to. And while your product is part of it, there's often other products that you wouldn't even consider as competitors that are also part of it.

And you can really get smart about how to get in front of people sooner if you know what those alternative solutions are.

[00:46:58] Rafael Gi: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that last point cause one of the things that we talk about at Bell Curve with our clients, especially when we do competitive set, we always look at who's your core competition that directly competes around your point of difference.

Who are your adjacent competitors? Who are alternative solutions to what you do, and then emergent, who might you be looking at who's currently not competing against you, but will what's that called potentially steal market share in the future?

[00:47:25] Katelyn Bourgoin: So the story I wanna share with you is really interesting.

I interviewed, I have a thread about this. I can share link to it, but I interviewed somebody about their decision to buy BarkBox, and if your listeners are not familiar, BarkBox is a doggy subscription box. Yeah. So you get a box every month and it's full of dog stuff, like snacks and shoes, toys and whatnot.

Yeah. But her buying journey to actually buying BarkBox began when she found out she was pregnant. So she had, they got a puppy. The puppy was about four months old. They got pregnant with their first child. They did not plan it, but they were excited. And she thought, Oh, we have a puppy , and now in nine months we're going to have a baby.

Okay? And so in the back of her mind, she was thinking, Okay, like I'm gonna have to figure out how to be a mom to both my dog and to my new baby. And so then the baby was born and she was very busy. All of a sudden she's home all the time, which is confusing to the dog cause she wasn't home before and she has no time for the dog because she's taking care of a baby.

And so the dog is understandably confused and sad and like acting out and trying to get a lot of her attention. And so before she ever considered buying BarkBox, she looked at all these alternative solutions. She thought about getting, she taking the dog to the park more, just letting him ride out his energy.

But like walking with a stroller in one hand and a dog leash in another hand is really hard. It was wintertime, it was icy. She ended up having her brother bring his dog over and thought they'll just go out and play. But it was like double the work. So that didn't work. , she looked at all these different things.

She looked like letting him go to a kennel a couple days a week, but it was super expensive. So BarkBox probably isn't thinking about new moms as their core audience. Yeah. And they're probably not thinking about like the dog kennel necessarily as their competition? Yeah, they are. Because of the job that she was trying to get done is, keep my dog distracted and happy while I'm busy for other things.

Yeah. So when...

[00:49:25] Rafael Gi: and is that example of a trigger point I guess?

[00:49:28] Katelyn Bourgoin: Totally, And guess what else mom's, she's a dog person, but she's not an obsessed dog person that probably follows like a hundred different dog people on Instagram. But guess what she is doing? She's watching all of these now.

Mommy bloggers, she's reading about sleep training, She's doing all of this mommy related stuff. . So if BarkBox were clever, you don't just invest in the doggy influencers. You could work with mommy influencers who have dogs. Get them to talk about their experience with the product, get them to talk about how it like saved them time.

How the dog would sit happily for hours chewing on the chew toy because they were such high quality. When you start to understand the buying journey and you start to think about it from your customer's perspective instead of your company's perspective, you'll identify opportunities. , that your competition probably isn't thinking about that can be really foundational to getting a great customers and creating good experience for them.

[00:50:19] Rafael Gi: That's a really good note. Awesome. That was a great story. I know we only have a couple minutes, so it might field one or two questions here, but maybe I'll start with Sammy Lee Nares. I'm not sure if I'm saying your last name properly, so I apologize, but she's asking whether fire psychology shifts over age groups and income brackets and then fixed.

[00:50:42] Katelyn Bourgoin: Yeah, I would say that there is..In the marketing world, we talk about demographics, we talk about psychographics, we talk about firmographics, right? Demographics is like age, income, Psychographics is like how I see myself and do I see myself as like a runner or do I see myself as like environmentally friendly and I would say that the core concepts

that I talk about the cognitive biases, they probably cross different demographics, different age bracket, different age brackets, different races. But if you go into not everything's gonna work as applied, right? Context is everything. One thing that, like I talk about all the time is context is king.

So does scarcity work really well with marketers who are really familiar with it and who know when it's fake? We know that's not real. We know that this webinar's not actually starting in five minutes. We know it's extreme important. , we know that we can buy the product tomorrow, enter a different email and get the exact same offer so it doesn't work like this.

This stuff, it globally like applies, but the context of your buyers still matters. You still really need to understand them and think about them thoughtfully as you apply this stuff.

[00:52:03] Rafael Gi: That's awesome. Okay, with the last few minutes, I actually wanna do this as turn it back to you cause this has been such an awesome chat and would love to wrap up the session by

letting, giving you a chance to let our audience know what you're working on and how to get in touch you

[00:52:19] Katelyn Bourgoin: Awesome. So the best way to get in touch with me, definitely Twitter, I'm super active over there. If LinkedIn's your jam, we can do that too. But what I'm working on right now, I actually have a special promotion going on our products.

We've got our clarity calls, cheat sheets, and we've got our review mining system. I can share a link to those, but essentially we're taking advantage of a trigger event right now is the beginning of Q4, right? And we're all marketers and we're all thinking about how do we reach our annual sales goals?

How do we make sure that we're ending the year on a high note if we probably need to figure out how to do more with less? And oftentimes, one of the ways to figure that out is through customer research. So I'm offering a sale on my two products. They're 25% off, and it ends tonight at midnight Atlantic time,

Near city.

Yeah. What's that?

No, it said scare city. Yeah. Yeah.

The thing is, you, I, these products are always available. You can buy them tomorrow, you'll just have to pay a little bit more. But you need to give people a reason to act now. So whenever I run a promotion, I always sell a lot more. Within that little window of time because people go, You know what?

I've been thinking about this. This is a good reason to buy now. So again, that catalyst, by the time people buy my stuff, something else has happened in their life that's moved them along the buying journey to the point where they're now making a decision. I'm just giving them a reason to act. Now I'm creating a catalyst.

And as marketers, we often need to create channels. So those products are available. If you have any questions about them shoot me a message on Twitter and go through and even just for fun, go on the clarity called Cheat Sheet sales page. If you wanna see how I'm actually applying this stuff.

Like I said, like that page, from top to bottom, there's different stuff that I'm using. And see what you can spot and like what's effective for you and what you go, like what turned you off. It'd be interesting. I'd love if anybody wanted to tell me afterwards what they caught that I was doing. Cause I'm doing some stuff there that is, again, subtle cause it should be that is effective.

That page converts really well, so check it out. Even if you just wanna see a bunch of these examples we've talked about apply.

[00:54:27] Rafael Gi: Awesome. Thank you very much for your time, Katelyn. I learned a ton from you and the audience obviously loves you, so thanks again for spending an hour with us.

[00:54:37] Katelyn Bourgoin: Thank you for having me. This has been so much fun.

[00:54:40] Rafael Gi: Awesome.

[00:54:40] Katelyn Bourgoin: See you everybody.

[00:54:42] Rafael Gi: Thanks everybody. We'll see you tomorrow