FuturePrint Podcast
FuturePrint is dedicated to and passionate about the power of print technology to enable new opportunities and create new value. This pod features deep-dive discussions with the people behind the tech as well as market analysis, trends, marketing and storytelling!
FuturePrint Podcast
#220 Unlocking Emotional Branding, Consumer Behaviour & Gen-Z with Philippe Assouline, Expert in Behavioural Marketing
In this fascinating discussion, Marcus talks with Philippe Assouline, an expert in behavioural marketing and consumer psychology, and the founder of propelloriq, a boutique strategy consultancy firm working with leading companies globally.
Philippe's intriguing journey started with a career in computer science, and then law to PhD studies in mass psychology and data to now working with some of the world's leading brands to help them better understand the emotional landscapes of consumer behaviour and develop their emotional and marketing strategies. The discussion includes a fascinating lens on how evolutionary biology and neuroscience can influence consumer buying decisions and help companies thrive in an increasingly complex world.
We discuss the ever-evolving landscape of identity, stereotypes and the challenge of globalisation. The conversation sheds light on the psychological dynamics of belonging and how digitalisation is challenging the long-standing norms, offering both obstacles and opportunities for brands to connect and prosper. We talk about the human obsession with logic and whether this is holding us back! And we delve into the tension between group conformity and cultural exploration, revealing how brands can harness these instincts to foster genuine connections and societal growth.
Philippe shares valuable insights into emotional branding strategies, particularly in the volatile post-COVID era, where brands are tasked with providing not just products but also identity, belonging, purpose and comfort to their consumers.
We also talk about how B2B and B2C buying behaviour is more closely aligned than ever before, and why the power of storytelling and emotional connection is so important in B2B too!
Philippe emphasises the significance of building trust and authenticity, especially in times of crisis and uncertainty, and how your business can do so. Philippe explains how by better understanding the emotional drivers of their audiences, companies can navigate challenges more effectively, turning obstacles into opportunities for growth and trust-building.
The episode concludes with a compelling exploration of generational shifts in marketing, highlighting the unique worldview of Gen-Z and the importance of empathy and emotional resonance in crafting successful branding strategies.
Contact Philippe Assouline: info@propelloriq.com
Website: propelloriq.com
Listen on:
Apple Podcast
Google Podcast
Spotify
What is FuturePrint?
FuturePrint is a digital and in person platform and community dedicated to future print technology. Over 15,000 people per month read our articles, listen to our podcasts, view our TV features, click on our e-newsletters and attend our in-person and virtual events.
We hope to see you at one of our future in-person events:
FuturePrint TECH: Industrial Print: 21-22 January '26, Munich, Germany
Welcome to the Future Print Podcast, celebrating print technology and the people behind it.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the latest episode of the Future Print Podcast, really happy to have back with us Philippe Asselin, who is an expert in an area that is really fascinating and something that is rapidly evolving, something that we perhaps don't even consciously think of, but should highly applicable to marketing, to the industry we're in, which is print, and can't wait to get going. So welcome back, philippe. Hi Marcus, thank you for having me. Philippe, would you give us, before we get going in the content which we're talking about emotion and branding and so on, a little bit of a background about you and how you got to this point? So I think your backstory is pretty interesting journey in itself.
Speaker 3:Thanks, yeah, so I am an expert in, I guess, the non-conscious parts of our behavior. What is actually driving us to choose brands, to choose beliefs, to choose causes, to fall in love? And I came to that a bit orthogonally, not in the traditional way. I grew up in Canada, which in the late 90s was a place full of brands but also full of causes, full of activism, and it's something that stuck with me. I couldn't figure out what was going on, but I knew there was something important there and I didn't choose that as a career.
Speaker 3:At first I was a computer scientist. I then became a litigator in New York City and then I was defending big names and big litigations that were in the media, and I realized that most of what we were doing was not when we were preparing witnesses, was not to give them a background of the law as much as to try to make them appealing to the jury. So at one point, I think essentially, I became obsessed with the question of what was going on. The world was changing and I went to UCLA and I discovered the field of political psychology that's how they call it there and I basically have been studying and practicing for the last 12 years, the non-conscious parts of the brain, how people choose beliefs, how people choose causes, brands, politicians to vote for, how they fall in love, and advising clients in the world on how to uh, how to benefit from that and use data to do so fascinating, and now you, you consult across the world for different people in different industries and um focused on on that and um, we'll find out more about that.
Speaker 2:So that's, that's an interesting thing. So a lot of this is really about non or unconscious behavior and how people come across to other people and how, and also how brands communicate and what it is they're doing. So explain that, because it's is it a lot about the biology, in essence.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 3:It is very much so.
Speaker 3:We have this notion in the Western world that we have a body and a soul, or a brain that somehow a mind that somehow divorced from the body, but obviously that's not the case.
Speaker 3:The brain is like the knee or the spleen, or it evolved with the body and it's all biology. And our brains are doing one thing they're trying to protect us, they're trying to predict what's happening next to protect us, and they're doing it with a lot of information from a long time ago, mostly 200,000 years ago, if I can roughly speak right. There's this evolutionary package and, historically, people who have a lot of talent or intuition know how to use it or bad guys have known how to use it big propagandists, if you think of that and I just tried to put some numbers to it and try to put a method to it. So, yeah, I've been advising companies around the world on how they can, especially now, in the age of social mediaarded with information, people rely on biology, or impulse, whatever you want to call it, a lot more. So it's important for companies to understand what's going on, or else they're going to become irrelevant pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's just, in your view, become more important that people are more interested in it, because you know, like the VUCA world that we live in, you know, like the VUCA world that we live in, the the fact that the world is, on the one hand, so interconnected but equally so fragmented, and you know we're so distracted right as well. I mean, I get the sense that not only are we in business and consumer brands as well fighting for hearts and minds, we're actually fighting for attention. Um, how does this? I mean fascinating and valid and all of that, but we're, we are also obsessed with, like you said, logic, um numbers being able to measure things. I mean, this is, this is hard to explain just to a cfo, and you know why. Should somebody invest more, or a business invest more in this kind of thing than perhaps something that might make more logical sense and is more sort of I don't know visible on a spreadsheet?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that makes it. That's a wonderful question, so it does make sense. And you have to justify things, especially the CFOs. You have to know your audience that's rule number one and what they need to feel, what they need to experience what I'm talking about results in direct returns right, it's either brand equity, it's crisis communication, avoiding you a disaster, and, most importantly, you could do this on a day-to-day basis and get a lot more ROI. Stop wasting your money on misdirected marketing and things of that kind, whether it's performance or something more complicated. You can show this to a CFO and the numbers will speak for themselves. Now, for everybody, for myself included.
Speaker 3:I used to be a computer scientist and a lawyer. I needed numbers for myself to not just believe what psychologists were writing in books, right, and that's why I got into neuroscience and I back everything I do. I try to back it with data. But that's how the brain works also. That's also part of it. We decide things and then we need to justify to ourselves using logic the decision's already been made, because logic is kind of an error correction mechanism. It's only there to like, at the end of the day, nail down something you felt before which.
Speaker 3:I mean, is getting us into the substance now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the focus on logic right, which sounds to some extent, I'm going to say, logical, but of course, if something's logical, it's right. The kind of view that I have, and I wonder what your view, is that we've become over-obsessed with it and the opposite of logic isn't necessarily stupid, is it? No, and it could be better. And why is it we're over obsessed with logic? I mean you, we were talking about history.
Speaker 3:I think there's a great, great question. There's a couple reasons I can think of. Number one it feels safer. Right? Logic basically means what we've seen happen a million times before. Two plus two equals four. Maybe it doesn't right. There's all kinds of physical theories and and theories of math that say it doesn't. But if we've seen something a million times and everybody agrees on it, it feels safe, and safe is what our brain wants. So that's number one.
Speaker 3:Number two we're in the age of the enlightenment still, where objective kind of quantified cartesian logic is what is the social contract? That's how we agree on things and move forward. So I have zero problem problem with that. On the contrary, I think it's a good way to test yourself. But that's not how humans work. And when I discovered that and that we could finally now like kind of see a system of how humans actually work, I found it fascinating, a lot more interesting than being a lawyer. I'll tell you that much.
Speaker 3:I just want to add one thing about what you said earlier about fragmentation. I think people now are open to the psychology because they're seeing so much change. Because of the Internet. We're confronted with different ways of seeing things which we weren't before. Everybody kind of saw things the same way, so we just took it for granted. That's a law of nature, but it's not Everything's up for grabs now, whether it be gender or values or whatever it is. So people are number one trying to find agreement, and logic is important for that. But they're also aware that something else is going on. Finally, at the beginning of my, my new career, the latest career, the last 12 years it's very hard to explain this to people. Now there's a, there's a receptivity. People understand that we're not actually what we think we are and in my thing, it's critical that's nice.
Speaker 2:So so, yeah, there's much more of a dialogue and understanding around how the brain works generally and how humans today, for sure yeah, and bookstores you get.
Speaker 3:I think there's a lot of snake oil unfortunately in this field people who don't know much, who say a lot, but there's a lot of also very, very reliable, solid science in it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely fascinating and very useful how does um this manifest itself in nationalities and behavior and stereotypes? Um, because you mentioned canada and I know that obviously you're not in canada now and um, stereotypes can be helpful on the one hand, and but equally, sometimes people say, well, well you shouldn't stereotype people, but tell us a bit about how that plays out in nationalities, because with the British we're a certain type and there's positives and there's also funny idiosyncrasies. Right, explain a bit about how that plays out.
Speaker 3:It's an offensive topic because you know I'm a big Anglophile, I love most things English or British. But okay, stereotypes are fundamental to how we think. We think in categories. They don't have to be negative. Right, there's a stereotype, like I just made one I like everything British. I think British people in general are funny, they're quite affable. Right, that's not true. It's a category I created. The same way we create categories of everything Trees have leaves and roots and et cetera. So that's number one. You know, we learn that way and we can't undo that. Much more importantly, and this relates to branding directly, we think in groups.
Speaker 3:Humans are not like baby turtles. You ever seen a baby turtle be born? A baby turtle? First thing it does is climb out of a massive pit, pushing itself past 300 siblings it's never met before. And then it gets to the beach. It has to escape birds trying to eat it and then it has to swim past fish trying to like. It's a crazy survival triathlon. Humans are weak. Humans function by working together. That's how we survive, by working together. That's how we can communicate.
Speaker 3:And so stereotypes in terms of tribalism, nation, my in-group, that out-group, it's fundamental to anything we do. So right now there's your listeners identifying with you and I'm the new guy, but you and me, if we go in the street now, have a beer, we become a group, and then maybe, if I'm wearing a hoodie like you are, then there's another thing connecting us. We're always looking for what group to belong to, and that's critical in everything we do in morality, in branding, in business, in, obviously, in marriage, love everything. And so now that we're confronted with groups from all over the world I remember the first times I was on social media I'm like what the hell is this? I'm fighting all the time.
Speaker 3:I'm just because we're confronted with different groups and different values and on some subconscious level, that means we're threatened with dying Right. If you're confronted with different values 200,000 years ago, it means you're facing another tribe. They're probably going to kill you or you're in danger, at least they're going to enslave you. Something bad could happen. That's why the belonging part of branding is so important today. People who are confronted with all this change and all this info, their evolutionary system that we're not aware of is looking for things that made us safe a long time ago. That means emotion and it means belonging. First of all, Fascinating.
Speaker 2:So, going back to where you started, you said you know the human brain and logic in that is about keeping us safe. So evolution is tribes and groups of people, and again that it's about keeping us safe. So evolution is tribes and groups of people and again it's about safety. So the best way to for an individual to be safe in that group to be safe is for everybody to conform to around the stereotype or around the the kind of what yeah, we're all little fascist inside.
Speaker 3:We have to be careful with that and I think europe realized that a few hundred years ago and started to push the enlightenment, individualism. It's a big part of why I like Britain and your heritage and bringing that about. But you're not going to change nature overnight. And the idea of belonging, of tribe, of being part of a group and of being loyal to that group and having rules in that group and there's us and there's them it's super deeply ingrained in us. I think it's coming to the forefront more than ever today. This is just too much confrontation with difference and change and when people are afraid and when they're bombarded with too much information, they fall back on this system. Now this is an opportunity. It's a threat, but it's also an opportunity. You can harness these things for good. You can certainly harness them for business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so great segue into sort of business and into branding and everything else, because ultimately, I guess a nationality is an identity and a brand of some description anyway, isn't it really? I suppose? Of course, yes, absolutely Values, identity, imagery, all of that. So business terms, then what you said there is actually people are looking to relate to things and belonging yeah, that sense of belonging which I guess is also out off the back of covid, and then volatility, it's um become a pressing concern. How's that playing out in the world of branding and in business and how are you seeing that? What kind of discussions you're having?
Speaker 3:you need to point to any examples, maybe, of course, yeah, I can point to a few uh, and you can stop me if I start to ramble on too much. Let me think about where I start. Um, and the first very interesting project I did where I got to apply this stuff were for big, big brands. You know, I was very lucky through contacts that believed in me and I realized very early on that people were number one. The scientific term is freaking out In a way. People are not in a good place and if you look at the levels of anxiety and fear in the world they're very, very high Probably unprecedented Makes no sense because we're really safe comparatively. Very, very high probably unprecedented, makes no sense because we're really safe comparatively.
Speaker 3:And a big big part of all the branding I was looking at was number one they wanted to feel. People want to feel better. So there's a whole like therapy element to branding. And then, number two, they want to feel part of the group. They want to project that they're part of a group. This is like we can tell ourselves all kinds of stories but really it's a primitive evolutionary 101 thing where you want to be part of a group to feel safe and you also want to broadcast that you're part of that group to be attractive, and so I was looking at beauty brands, for example, and how they were trying to market themselves really, really global ones I prefer not to say the name, but global beauty brand and completely flying in the face of what people were expressing by their behavior on social media.
Speaker 3:So people on social media were, um, this was a time when women were speaking openly about their insecurities as well as authenticities. A few years back, when body positivity was coming along and this brand was more into being bombastic and I told them look, this is not going to Look what your audience is telling you from social media. And they ended up changing the strategy to something much more subdued, much more authentic, because without that, the people who felt insecure at home couldn't feel identification. I was looking at other, looking at brands in the time of Corona, where people were lonely and afraid and stressed and you could even see, apart from the belonging, obviously, people were drawn much more to faces this is something I recommend to a lot of companies to put faces in their logos, because it feels like they're not alone but also the colors people were drawn to. So, in times of stress, people were suddenly looking at posts and being drawn to posts that had orange, pink colors that were warm, whereas when they were more relaxed they were going for star colors.
Speaker 3:I'm talking again about not just beauty, but other industries, the kind of food people. Food post people are going there. People show off a lot about health, food and kale and all this inedible stuff and in times of stress, all of a sudden, the posts that were the most popular were ice cream and chocolate and cakes. So people consume brands or marketing material. Through evolution, they're trying to make themselves feel better.
Speaker 3:And the last thing I want to say there was a beer brand that came to me to try to figure out who their audience was, a longstanding, illustrious beer brand having a bit of trouble figuring out their audience, like a lot of companies today, and we looked at behavior on social media and we found that their main audience and they didn't expect this was these guys were like 35 to 45 alone coming home and pairing this beer with food while they were cooking and posting it online. They thought it made them feel like they were part of a sophisticated group, like they're getting an identity like I'm a more refined guy, I don't drink wine, I'm not going to go home and like pretend I'm some italian dude, but this beer is not just like for everybody, it's for refined types, it's come compared to food and posted. So this is this whole thing where people are doing first and giving themselves self-worth through this brand, but also building a tribe around and the company didn't even know. Yeah, that's fascinating that.
Speaker 2:There it's. It's a lot about expressing and and and then sharing how you're, you know what a, what, the, the particular brand you're invested in, and how you're experiencing it and and and and then sharing it with your, your friends, and that's. That's a sort of a fundamental change, I guess enabled by social media to an extent as well, isn't it?
Speaker 3:it's not um you're not just buying a liquid it's a statement, right but what I'm saying really is that it's about what the brand can do for people at that point and what they're feeling. Uh, it's really not about the product so much the product. Product comes after. I think, if you think of Mac computers like they were brilliant at doing this Apple. But you're looking at people at a time where there's super high anxiety among young people, a lot of loneliness, lack of confidence, economic uncertainty. Now the brand can come in and either try to sell them something or try to sell them a feeling and an identity. And if you can do that, then you have not only loyalty and excitement, you have ambassadors.
Speaker 3:And the way I did that with these brands I was talking to you about sorry, I can't give the names is to look at what the audience was telling me. If you have the right tools and the right approach, you look at social media, you look at other places where people are. Basically, it's the biggest reservoir of behavior we've ever had. People are using social media as their diary and you can figure out from how they behave and what they say what they need to feel and what kind of group they want to belong to. And then you give them that and they're happy, your brand is happy, your client's happy, you make more money, the audience feels better. I mean, I think it's a win-win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So I guess this impacts how a brand promotes the market its product. So you work both with brands that have a product and they need to understand how their customers are engaging and what it means to them. Do you also help brands and businesses at the point of ideation, when they're thinking of new products as well? How does that play out in that regard, then?
Speaker 3:So for me, most of the work and this is where maybe my background as a lawyer helps. Ironically, brands come, and often they have, if they're earlier stage and they're developing a product. They have a lot of pride in the product and how it works and what it does, and the challenge is for me to turn it into a story with the right emotional buttons so that people can connect to it on a non-conscious, deeper level. So, if you think about it, imagine you're meeting somebody on a date. Right, it's the same brain. You meet somebody new, so they're trying to sell you who they are.
Speaker 3:Right, put on all the best behaviors, you dress nice, you smell good, but really what the? What your brain is looking for is? Uh, how do I feel about myself when I'm with this person? Do I feel like the coolest version of myself? Right, I know, remember falling in love and you feel like a rock star. But also, how much do we have in common? And you're like, desperate to find it right. Oh, we both like led zeppelin, like everybody likes that, right, but it suddenly takes on a lot of meaning.
Speaker 3:It's the same thing with brands you can have the best product in the world if, if you don't push those two buttons, at least at the beginning, you're going to have a much harder time. So my job is to find those buttons. And it also gives brands a lot of equity, in the sense that it's a lot easier to sell product when it's tied into a story that's compelling. It's a lot easier to get investment to promote it, to have a strategy for advertising. That's the story. So it's really doing the same thing at different stages. It also expresses itself when it's about technology and how the product works, how it functions. That's a bit of another discussion yeah, and the um.
Speaker 2:The fascinating thing is that that obviously your work, I believe, worked quite a lot with within the consumer world and that used to be a very distinct set of behaviors and community and route to market than the world of B2B. But all the research is pointing to the behavior sets becoming far closer in terms of how people buy and therefore how people and businesses should sell right. So obviously, the industry I'm in is printing and we're connected. We're not far from the consumer world but we serve in a kind of supply chain or a b2b industry. What kind of advice and you know approach should a, a b2b technology business, take with when it comes to this? What? Okay, yeah, what would they learn from from your experience?
Speaker 3:yeah, it's a great, great question. So you're right, most of the work I do is b2c. That said, it's been done with b2b more and more, and I think it's the same approach. When I do b2b, at least I try to figure out. You know the segment is much smaller. Sometimes you're dealing with individuals. It's the same idea.
Speaker 3:How can I align with what this person's brain needs to feel now? How do I help their career? How do I create a sense of connection with me? How do I create a sense of belonging that's going to make them look upon my offering or my client's offering more favorably? Now, one way to do that is to build trust. We spoke about this last time with Dario. Can you become a thought leader that gives them a guide? Right, it's very hard to navigate their world. Can you be a guide for them? You've earned trust. It builds reciprocity. Again, it brings us back to the tribe. 200,000 years ago Somebody helped me out. I owe them something. But also, can I make my product an advantage for them in their career, in their advancement? Can I make it fit with what they already believe? And so there's a lot of study that goes into.
Speaker 3:Really, my work is about understanding how I connect with the target audience. So when you do it for B2B, do it a bit more detailed. You have a chance to sometimes interact with the people you're pushing a sale and you really have to try to align it with, and it doesn't really matter which industry I. You're talking about print, but I've done it with dentist equipment, another another. You know things that are very technical. At the end of the day, you're dealing with people. They want to feel they're understood, feel right, not think. They want to feel they're understood intuitively. They want to feel like they get you and you get them, and especially if you're bringing them value, that that creates trust. Trust is extremely important. So it's the same logic, applied more personally, maybe a bit more slowly, but it works the same.
Speaker 2:And trust, I mean in terms of brand. Is that one of the, I guess, key outcomes, really, that the work you do tends to focus on? And where do you see? You know? So I'm sure, I'm sure you come in and are brought in sometimes when things are not going well. Right, yes, what? What are the key reasons? And, again, without naming names, why are things not going well? And and what, what is it that's missing from what they're doing with? Whatever it is the product? Is you know what? What you know? Is it a lack of trust?
Speaker 3:or you're right, there's a lot of. I think there's a lot more importance in crisis communication. I like it because it's high stakes, it's it's it's fast paced, it's exciting and it's kind of dangerous. Um, our brains today are looking for reason to dismiss things, to cancel things. There's too much going. A company makes a slight mistake? You have all the people pouncing to cancel it. There's the moralizing that goes on. Indignation is super satisfying. It's got a lot of benefits, especially if people were anxious. So if a company does something mildly wrong, oh, you get to be indignant and look down upon it. So there's a lot of problems with companies and they bring me in often, you're right, when there is trouble.
Speaker 3:Now, what I'm looking for there is what's the misalignment with what this audience or audiences? Right, you're dealing with three, four segments. Let's say mothers. What's the misalignment here with mothers and this brand? Okay, so there's an accusation that this product suddenly is bad for their kids. So, number one, they're protecting their kids. There's nothing more fundamental and sacred. And number two, they don't want to be bad mothers.
Speaker 3:How can I align back with their feeling that they're doing the right thing? So it's certainly not to argue. I have advised companies sometimes to say nothing, let the storm pass and they flip out and then they see it works. It's very hard for people to do nothing when there's a big problem, but fundamentally, if I have to give a formula, I use use what I showed you last time my heart's, then mind's, model. I got five dimensions I look at in everything I do, and one does it align with what they need to feel, and that's not always something positive. Sometimes they need to feel anger, sometimes they need to like we talked about indignation, sometimes they want to feel inspiration, sometimes it's just they want to feel trust and calm. And then what kind of a group do they feel that they're part of if they adopt this belief or message? So I hope that answers the question. But yeah, you have to align. Again, think about it.
Speaker 3:If you're arguing with somebody, everything I'm talking about can be, I think, projected onto an individual relationship, right? Your relationship to a brand is like your relationship to a person. So if you're in an argument with somebody, let's say that's the equivalent of crisis. You can argue and keep fighting and trying to be informed of how you're wrong in your perception. That's not going to make things better, right? You're just going to be resentful and it strengthens the negative. You could let it pass, which is sometimes the right thing. It's favored, I know, among the British to sometimes say nothing, or you can try to really understand what's driving the person underneath. So if you're arguing with a roommate or a spouse about who did the dishes probably not about the dishes. It's probably about feeling safe and cared for and looked after. That's what I try to go for with brands. At the end of the day, people want to feel like they're taken care of, that they're safe and that they matter, that they're heard. That's what I try to do when I align, for example, with crisis communication.
Speaker 3:It's not always the same If you're dealing with a power company versus a food company or things of that kind. It's not always the same exact thing. It's not the same audiences. They don't care about the same things. And there's a whole dimension about how you transmit the message. It has to be effortless. You got to use what people already know. That's a whole challenge. That's essentially the the method in a nutshell.
Speaker 2:Or parts of it. Yeah, it must be quite challenging. I imagine you're going to, uh, like you said, every, every. I mean it's fascinating what you're saying, but and misalignment and miscommunication and trust broken down. You've got to get to the root of the issue and there's various methods for doing that.
Speaker 2:Do you sometimes struggle, when you go into a business, that there's a problem and the culture and they don't want to accept they may have made a mistake or they may have something may have gone wrong, they may have broken contract. They may say broken contract it's. You know, the behavior of the business didn't align with the. We've all experienced this um and again I'm not going to name a company name but they, they project a certain image and then the service you get doesn't align with the image. You know what I mean. Of course you feel like, hang on a minute. You're saying I think or feel you're cool, I like what you mean and what you do and how you do it, and then the service you get doesn't quite fit. You get into the leadership group, which is presumably who you're dealing with, and is there sometimes a disconnect between what they think and what is actually the real world? And is that culture really difficult for you to fix.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sometimes. So this is why I like crisis communication, because people are usually attentive. They're at a point where they're afraid and they'll listen to what you say. They're averse to risk. That's why I was telling you.
Speaker 3:I worked with a big company. I told them do nothing. That was very hard to sell and then they loved it when they saw it worked. But I have to apply my methods that I developed for my clients to my clients. You have to come in and know you're dealing with people. How do you make them trust you? How do you make them feel what they need to feel so they give this a chance and at the end of the day, that's very important. They have to believe I have their best interest at heart and I do right. I mean, I did this because I wanted the good guys to know how to do this, not just the bad guys.
Speaker 3:But, yeah, to apply this to the leadership and what you I think you're referring to is also a question of authenticity. People can sense if a company is not doing what it says it's doing, or uh and and and. Yeah that that is also true with leadership. But I have to say I've generally been lucky to have clients who do listen. They may not do it right away. That's also a part of psychology. They have to hear it a bunch of times until it feels like it's their idea, which is part of my job, um. But you know, if you believe in something and you really think it could help your client, you find ways to get them to feel like it's good for them.
Speaker 2:Individually as well, it's a b2b operation within the company yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I guess the fact they brought you in there is a level to which they they want to listen to what you're saying.
Speaker 3:And then I guess, sometimes they have me and a few other people. You got to make sure that your, your stuff, stands out. It's got to be compelling and easy to understand and easy to envisage, uh, envision. Sorry, but yeah, usually when it's crisis they listen, they're more careful and it's the ceo you're dealing with, or people around the ceo, not not the cmo, which is another, another culture, another set of interests, and it's the CEO you're dealing with, or people around the CEO, not not the CMO, which is another, another culture, another set of interests and it's interesting.
Speaker 2:Sorry, just moving into sort of going back to the logic versus emotion thing. Um, at that level you're sort of dealing with the. You're able to present this in a logical way, right, and I guess that's something you've done.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have to and some people have called me on it like you're talking about emotion in such a rational way, I'm like because now I have to cater to my audience. My audience wants to understand what's going to happen. That's important. I also, you know, build emotional models based on logic. What we're feeling If you're angry, what seems rational to you, is very different than if you're afraid, or if you're disgusted, or if you're happy, or if you're in love. Right, it's the same brain performing a supposedly rational exercise, which is just about connecting dots that usually go together. But the dots that are going to be connected depend on the chemicals in your head. If you're happy, different dots are going to be connected than if you're angry. So that's also a consideration for logic. You can't just make a cartesian argument. You have to know how people are going to assess uncertainty. Right? Community crisis communication. There's a lot of uncertainty for you, for you, for their audience, for the public.
Speaker 3:If the public is angry, it's not going to see things the same way. When we're angry, we think that we have control over everything. We think everything's predictable. We tend to blame or want to blame, if we're fearful, the same situation, but we're fearful. We tend to not think anybody's to blame. We don't think anything's predictable, we don't feel we have any control. Same person, same set of facts, right, same logical brain being used. You need to be aware of this. If you're going to make a point that, at the end of the day, might be summarized in a two-line press release or like a repeated statement on social media, you need to know how people are going to absorb it based on what they're feeling.
Speaker 2:So logic is a bit misleading right, like you say, it's almost like confirmation bias, right it is yeah very much.
Speaker 3:I think confirmation bias is at the root of a lot of things today, but it's also just what makes sense, just what is going to make sense. Do you buy this now? Well, it depends how you're feeling. Does it make sense? It depends how you're feeling. Is it logical? Depends how you're feeling. So that's why it's so important to try to study your audience. It's like a, it's like a GPS to success If you have enough empathy for the audience, like you need a method. You can't just feel it ironically, but it's a GPS to success and companies that invest in this and you lay it out for them first of all. They're fascinated and it gives them tools for later.
Speaker 3:Logic is not enough, no Logic alone hurts sometimes, if I say to you I'm not a thief, I'm not a thief. Look, I'm going to prove to you I'm not a thief. I'm really using a vulgar example here. But if I prove to you I'm not a thief and I show you with records and I would apply for a position as treasurer of your company, you'd never give it to me, right? I'm the only person of all away, because that's how the mind actually works, right? So logic.
Speaker 2:Logic is of limited, uh, usefulness alone and I bet there's a huge amount of knowledge you've got and experience in terms of communicating and projecting from a place of authenticity but where you're able to perhaps turn up the power of influence and persuasion and so on. And it isn't contrived and cynical, it's about optimizing your performance and your chances, success right, which we. We live in a competitive world. Why shouldn't we invest in that? Because it's happening anyway.
Speaker 3:It's happening if you're not aware, you're still sending these signals when you're speaking. Our brains evolved to read these signals long before we had complex language and rules and books and governments and companies, so you might as well know what you're doing, what people are feeling. The problem is in an age of stress. When we're stressed or there's worry or companies are concerned, they tend to focus inwards too much. That's the human response to fear is anxiety, not to fear, sorry.
Speaker 2:Anxiety is when you don't know what you're afraid of, so you're looking inside and scanning for what could be going wrong, which means you're not listening to the audience yeah, that's right, and anxiety, I think is, is a again, it's another word that we've come to understand better about, and partly because of the relationship with mental health, but it is this it does seem to be a simmering anxiety. We haven't really hit on um, and I think anxiety affects everybody, of course, but in the world we're living in, the sort of gen z and the, the, the group that perhaps does behave differently to um. I think I'm Gen X, for instance, but how's that influencing the world we live in and is you know, what can we learn from?
Speaker 2:understanding that group better. Yeah, so much interesting.
Speaker 3:So, first of all, gen Z is contrary to Gen X. A generation has gone through a lot of hardship. Think about Gen X. I'm Gen X, I loved. I mean it was peak humanity as far as I'm concerned, because everything was easy right Relatively. I know people went through hardships. I'm not minimizing that, but overall, as a stereotype, if you want to go back to that, we had the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had the internet come up, we had crime disappear, especially in North America. Our culture was peace, love, unity, respect, parties and everybody together and traveling and it felt safe, it felt promising and that had a big impact.
Speaker 3:If you look at North America, there are very few Gen X politicians compared to the size of the cohort. Even the ticket that just won Trump is a boomer and Vance is a millennial. They skip over Gen X, a forgotten generation. Now Gen Z people who were born in 1995 and later. Again, I'm talking largely about North America, but I think it's true in Europe as well. I've seen the same in my studies. In Europe First memories are 9-11, then you have the Iraq War, you have the financial collapse of 2008,. You have ISIS, you have identity politics and riots and you have climate, corona, etc. Etc. And instead of meeting up to get comfort, they're on social media, which makes them more lonely, it makes them compare themselves to other people. It makes them very, very sad and anxious. They have record levels of anxiety as the main emotion they feel. Most of these young kids are going around the world being afraid. That has tremendous consequences on the economy and it has huge consequences on how a company has to communicate with them, to hire them, to sell to them anything like that, and there's trends online that they're super interesting. If you look at the election in the us, and it's the same brain choosing a candidate, choosing a product. It's the same people, same brain. You have to have the same approach. I think there is a move away from what's been traditionally popular to more masculinity and very like stereotypical terms masculine values, traditionalism, craft we just spoke about this last time. Uh, I think companies need to be on top of this stuff.
Speaker 3:You look at what jaguar did recently with his branding. Uh, I mean, i't know. I'm sure they have a lot of research to back it, but for me that's tone deaf. Four years late and even four years ago, it didn't fit with the brand, I think, and what people wanted to feel when they thought of Jaguar. So you really have to have your finger on the pulse, especially with Gen Z, because things change super fast. They don't trust anybody. The relevance of Hollywood is gone. They don't trust anybody. The relevance of hollywood is gone. They don't even like follow celebrities anymore. They have their own guides and leaders and and influencers. Uh, and they are changing fast. They're changing fast.
Speaker 2:I don't think, I don't even think young gen z is the same as older gen z in terms of what they want it's interesting as well that that age group is not necessarily going to follow the systemic path that we followed in terms of marriage, mortgage and all of that. So it's like the system's changed for them and to some extent we're like well it's you know, as parents, well, it's a shame they can't and actually is it.
Speaker 3:It's in a way quite liberating, but then more unpredictable, I suppose look, there's a lot of suffering because they don't know they don't have a model to follow. On the other hand, they're a very courageous generation that's building their own model. You're absolutely right. There's a lot of self-help kind of or guides or inspiring figures online who are replacing religious figures, really to tell people how to live and exercise and eat this way and do this at work and invest and don't be into. There's a lot of fear of of uh relationships and and and the role of women and men and how they relate to each other a lot of fear on both sides. I think it's an extremely difficult time for women. The women our age didn't have social media to wake up to and compare themselves to. You know, they might have compared themselves to a few supermodels in magazines and that has all kinds of problems. But to compare yourself to 10,000 people every morning, can you have two daughters? I mean it's terrifying to me, but on the other hand, their model is going to probably be more adapted than ours. I'm looking at my generation so much divorce. People don't really know why they follow their parents model and whether it fits with their life. And again, I'm sorry to bring it back every time, but this is an opportunity, right, when you're a brand at fundamentally, I don't.
Speaker 3:I disagree with simon sinek. He says you're selling why you do something. I don't think so. I think you're selling how you make people feel, because that's how we make decisions, that's all we right?
Speaker 3:And most people don't train their emotions to identify whether it's a good one or a bad one. They just follow what makes them feel. Right. That's how you get swept off your feet and you can't. That's what we want. We don't want to be able to control, we want to be so into something. So if you have enough empathy to look at young kids and then there's Gen Alpha coming up to look at young kids and then there's gen alpha coming up there even a whole other story then you you understand there's an opportunity there, right? I'm not selling them toothbrushes or food or beer or wine or cars. I'm selling them peace of mind, a little bit of calm and something they feel they can cling to as an identity through this product. So you need to map the first parts and figure out how to, how to communicate it to them that you understand them, that this is what you're doing and there's ways to do it.
Speaker 3:I mean, it's not, it's not magic. Uh that my whole work has been to give it a methodology numbers. I can show the cfo brilliant brilliant.
Speaker 2:Well, listen, I, I think we'll we'll finish there. That's been a fantastically interesting um discussion and really appreciate you joining us, philippe um, and, like you say, telling how you feel and that's a brilliant way to end and that's obviously. Gen z are a different gen, a different generation, gen x, but they're still people, right.
Speaker 3:So the fundamentals are there and the methodology is still applicable, so that that's reassuring maybe in future conversations hopefully, if we have some we can talk about how companies can put this into practice. It might seem daunting, something they don't know how to grasp on. It's doable, it's actually quite doable and I think it's very satisfying. And you know not to end on a silly note, but I think it might even add a quote unquote spiritual dimension to the work you do, when you're really trying to understand your audience and make them feel good about themselves. You know, if that's the case, yeah, why not?
Speaker 2:I mean, like you say, the power of that and also the learning on the way, and I think that's something that's important.
Speaker 3:I think it's a business imperative. If you don't do that, you're going to be lost.
Speaker 2:Brilliant Well. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you for having me for listening.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe now for more great audio content. Coming up and visit futureprinttech for the latest news, partner interviews, in-depth industry research and to catch up on content from Futureprint events. We'll see you next time on the Futureprint Podcast.
