Ian Baer Podcast Transcript
Ian Baer joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ian Baer. Ian Baer is the founder and CEO of Sooth, the first predictive market intelligence company built to decode the emotional, practical, and situational signals behind real world decisions.
He has spent more than three decades. Helping major brands unlock growth and challenger brands outperform expectations, holding leadership roles at Publicis, TBWA, RAPP, Deutsche, and others. With a background in journalism and behavioral science, Ian is known for turning deep human insight into measurable business performance.
Well, good afternoon, Ian. Welcome to the show.
Ian Baer: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be here.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. I appreciate it, my friend. I really do. I know you had to make some time zone changes, calendars, et cetera. You’re in New York. I’m in Kansas City, and I just really appreciate the opportunity to meet you on a podcast and get your story out to the world.
So, Ian, if you don’t mind, I’m gonna jump right into your first question. You’ve spent more than three decades in global agencies, and now you founded Sooth as a predictive marketing intelligence company. What fundamental blind spot in traditional marketing measurement pushed you to build this platform?
Ian Baer: Oh, gosh. It’s so much more than a measurement issue. I mean, if you think about marketing since its inception if you go back to, the early 20th century when door to door selling turned into the scalable practice of marketing. There really hasn’t been much visibility into why people buy almost every marketing strategy, every marketing campaign that’s ever been created every.
Spot you’ve ever seen on television starts with people looking at demographics and maybe some information on past purchases of people in the category or of the brand. And then there’s just an awful lot. Of guessing that masquerades as predictive modeling and but really it’s all guessing. It’s gotten somewhat more sophisticated and tech enabled over the years.
But the problem when you base everything on demographics and past behavior is those only allow you to predict about one in 14. Of the need driven choices people are gonna make. The 13 out of 14 are based on people’s individual emotional needs and then the practical and situational filters that they’ll apply in the context of a certain buying occasion to choose one brand or another.
And realizing that nobody was really looking at those other 13 that drive the vast majority of choices, I pivoted out of the agency world when I realized I could codify, approach and a methodology which now exists as our own AI system dedicated to doing nothing but predicting the emotional, practical, and situational needs of buyers in any industry.
At a 91% rate of accuracy. That’s what we do. We help brands, truly understand the needs of the people who buy from them. So that marketing starts to feel like help and problem solving and a lot less like this very volumetrically driven law of averages thing that it’s somehow, devolved into over the years.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I appreciate that. Obviously, marketing and sales have come a long way. You talked about that door to door to where it is today to this Multi-trillion-dollar global marketing beast, right?
Ian Baer: Yes! More money spent in marketing last year than any year in history.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. It’s crazy, but to see how this is working. And you’re right, I’ve talked to a lot of your peers and other CEOs on the podcast about marketing analytics. And as you said, it has been a lot of guessing. And if you’re just relying on demographics and past behavior, and then again, as they say put the lipstick on the pig and say, well, that’s predictive modeling.
It’s really not. And I like what you did. You pivoted out. Of this agency world to fix this gap, helping the brands and the buyers find each other and make that perfect marriage. And as you mentioned, a 91% accuracy rate, which is phenomenal. So, thank you. And Ian, you’ve created the emotional blueprint method arguing that over 90% of buying behavior is emotionally driven.
Yes. How does this framework move brands beyond demographics and surface level targeting?
Ian Baer: So, there was a study done a few years back by Harvard Business Review. It was called The New Science of Customer Emotions. And in that they determined that the single most beneficial thing a brand could do in order to improve customer value and, and pretty much every marketing metric we care about, acquisition, retention, loyalty, referral.
Best thing you can do is emotionally connect with a customer and when people feel their emotional needs are being met. Well, what the Harvard study measured a bunch of years ago was that customer was worth on average, 52% more. In continuing to study this as I have now for the past decade, I can tell you now the value of an emotionally connected customer is five times that, of one who is simply satisfied with the product.
Or the service. So as everything else in marketing has become truly commoditized, data media, all of it, creativity now in the era of AI is starting to become more commoditized. The one thing that will never be commoditized is the way people feel. And the way you make ’em feel. And when it comes to the 10 emotional needs that Harvard study isolated as the only ones that correlate with positive brand behavior, well, everyone feels all these things, but we don’t feel ’em all to the same extent.
We’re talking about things like the need to care for others, the need to feel like you belong to a group or a community. Or the need to feel safe or the need to have fun. All of these matter to all of us, but they don’t matter to the same extent. And even more importantly, what it takes to make you confident, Brian, is not necessarily what it takes to make me feel confident.
Some people might gain confidence from having tools that allow them to control. The outcome of whatever situation they’re in or monitor their health or but others might gain confidence from advice from an expert they really trust. Well, knowing that each of these emotions have different triggers.
That also means that people will then seek out different content, different experiences, different answers, and ultimately different brands. In order to meet this unique set of emotional needs, they have what we are able to do by simultaneously accessing more than a hundred million live data signals for each audience that we built for a client we can interpret the.
Hierarchy of emotional needs. So, the emotional blueprint that we’re able to produce takes these 10 emotional needs and creates a needs-based hierarchy through which we can. Predict and process how people will make choices. We create a data model that we call a decision. ARC stands for decision architecture.
It’s the 75,000 most determinant signals that a given audience will have that. Sets up the patterns for how they will make choices. And once that decision arc has been built, we can then use it in activation mode to guide any marketing decision a client needs to make from which channels to invest in to.
Is a celebrity endorser something that would help? And if so, which one? What’s the role of social influence? How do people share information? How price sensitive is one audience or another? Who are the indirect influencers of purchase? It and it really goes on and on. We create intelligent audience ecosystems for brands and then work with them to get the most value out of each of those audiences.
And for a given brand, it might be anywhere from five to 15 audiences that make up that ecosystem.
Brian Thomas: That is amazing. That’s a lot to unpack there. I’m not a marketing guy, but it resonated with me. I loved how you went into that emotional blueprint method. You talked about turning these 10 emotional signals into these needs, into a needs-based hierarchy, basically.
But I, like you did go back on Harvard Business Review did a, that study that found out of everything, the best thing was to emotionally connect with the consumer or the customer. And connecting emotionally. I didn’t know this. Thank you for sharing. Connecting emotionally to the customer has a value five times of that, of a customer that may be fully satisfied with their product, which I didn’t know.
So, thank you for sharing that really deeply.
Ian Baer: Well, when you think about it and I appreciate you calling that out, it from a standpoint of behavioral science and neuroscience, which is very much at the core of the work we do. And I’ll encourage anyone who’s listening to this podcast right now, think about some of those emotional needs I mentioned, like the need to feel safe or the need to feel confident when your needs are being met, whether it’s by a person, a company, a brand a product, you will.
Feel better about moving forward, about making decisions about taking steps, but when those emotional needs aren’t being met, when you don’t feel confident or you don’t feel safe. The likelihood is you will do nothing. It’s not that you’ll go buy some other brand, it’ll just lock you up, and that’s one of the reasons that people are making impulse purchases more than ever.
I mean, with so many options, with so much decision fatigue wearing down the brains of the average consumer or the average business decision maker. It’s easy to understand why very often people wait to the very last moment. One of my proudest achievements in the work that we did to build this method years ago when I was working with a large German auto manufacturer, a luxury German auto that probably a lot of people listening drive their average sales cycle was 13 weeks to, to sell a new SUV.
We were able to reduce that to five weeks. And the way we did it was building this emotionally sensitive approach. In that case, using actually dynamic creatives through digital channels so that we were constantly feeding back to the person what they signaled their needs were. And if I can meet more of your needs faster than anyone else, you never make it to the point of impulse because your emotional needs were met.
You felt comfortable, and you move forward and made a choice. A place this is playing out right now in, in a very real way in our country is we published some data towards the end of last year we published the ELI report. A couple of times a month and it’s data that we’re able to see at the ground level that points to financial trends, market trends, industry trends.
And we started looking at the people who are fearful of losing their jobs and that’s unfortunately a very real fear. Today, and what we found was of the people who have this anxiety that for one reason or another, their job’s gonna go away. Consolidation, technology, ai, whatever the case may be. About 70% of them are doing nothing.
We call them scared stiff, and it’s because it’s such an uncertain economy and environment. People don’t feel comfortable moving forward. They don’t necessarily know that they’ll be able to maintain their income level. They don’t know what demand will be there for the skills and experiences they have.
They don’t know if they are technologically prepared for what employers expect, and for all these reasons, rather than hunting on LinkedIn and building up their skills and brushing up their resume, they’re just doing nothing and waiting for the bad thing to happen. And that is as real an example of emotional needs not being met.
As I can possibly think of, that’s what we’re trying to help brands solve for the people who buy from them.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, and that was a good segue right into the next question here, Ian Sooth, AI system, Eli, which you talked about the emotional logic interface claims 91% predictive accuracy. What data signals are you analyzing that allow you to forecast emotional drivers with that level of confidence?
Ian Baer: Oh it’s quite a vast array of signals that we process. I mean, again, if you think of everything in those three lanes of emotional priorities, which really are always the drivers, and then practical and situational filters that trail those emotional needs. Well there, there’s almost a limitless set of data signals for each, right, for emotions.
We can look at public conversations people have in social media. We can look at their sentiment. We can look at the emojis they use. We can look at their reviews and comments on brands and products and any place they’ve expressed their opinions and. We can gather up multiples of these to use psychographic modeling to determine, what their priorities are.
Let’s say as an investor or as a parent, what is your tolerance for risk? And then when we get down to the practical and situational filters, we’re looking more at things like purchase behaviors. Media patterns, influence patterns, platform engagement, where somebody is in their career, what your interpersonal style is, what your learning style is, how you process information, which times of the day lend themselves more to you, making choices versus you acting in a more passive way.
So, you roll all of this together and it is literally, as I said. Over a hundred million live signals that if you look at all the permutations, you’re in about four quadrillion. Possible combinations of variables that go into building each of what we call audiences. We don’t use terms like targets or segments or, because the truth is people are somewhat migratory.
We don’t look at anyone ever as having permanence. That’s one of the big problems, for example, with brands that use personas. Personas are very static. They don’t assume migration. They assume a level of permanence that doesn’t exist, and they assume a level of interest in your category that also doesn’t exist.
So, we really look at these people in their day-to-day lives and map who they are. To the way they could interact with a given business using these signal patterns, and that’s all Eli is built to do. And unlike most ais, Eli is trained to never hallucinate. You may know that, as much as 70% of all the data marketers use is either inaccurate or hallucinated.
Deloitte recently reported 71% of all consumer data is inaccurate. And how did they find that out? They literally put people’s data records in front of them and had them cross out the things that were wrong. And about three quarters of all that data turned out to be wrong. So, we use only data that begins with somebody actually taking action, answering a survey, buying something, visiting a store, watching a TV show, listening to this podcast.
And then from those determinant data sets, we find the patterns that show us. How people make choices, and that’s what we use so that the brand can act really in a kind and empathetic way. And we put the brand in a position to be a problem solver, not just somebody who shouts with frequency.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. Again, a lot to impact there, but I like that you focused on that predictive accuracy, 91%. And I know there’s a lot of signals that you all process. You talked about that you went through a myriad of ’em emotional drive, practical filters, media patterns, platform engagement, time of day, all that stuff.
And what I took away from it, what I, I thought was interesting. You don’t use personas or targets because they can be static, right? Yes. You call these audiences due to the fact that they can migrate. And I didn’t know that, but it makes sense. So, thank you. And Ian, the last question of the day, as we look ahead to the future, do you believe predictive emotional intelligence will become standard infrastructure for brands? And what happens to companies that continue relying on guesswork?
Ian Baer: Well, I think I’ll answer those in reverse. We’re seeing right now what happens when you rely on guesswork and things get more and more commoditized, and consumers and business decision makers literally have a limitless number of choices.
When it comes to buying almost anything, and when I say I don’t just mean a limitless number of brands, channels, price points, timing, method of delivery, you can have anything exactly the way you want it, and it has turned marketing into this overly commoditized. Fight to the bottom. Overall marketing effectiveness globally, according to some data that Salesforce published is down about 70% since 2020.
It’s not getting better. It’s only getting more fragmented and more commoditized. So, emotional connection is the only path back for brands. And, and since we are a company that uses ai. I often feel the need to point out, if you’re using AI to do things that people are doing already and just doing them cheaper or faster, it’s not gonna help.
All you’re doing is speeding up and scaling failure. We use AI in a more meaningful way, which is to understand people’s needs. So, whether you apply predictive intelligence, whether you want to invest in traditional research whether you wanna just get out there in the field, if you’re a B2B marketer, and spend a lot more time talking to customers than you ever have one way or another.
Your marketing performance will not improve until you understand the emotional, practical, and situational needs of the people who buy from you and you’ve got choices. You’ve got a platform like ours that makes that scalable and somewhat automated and, and makes it extremely time and cost efficient, or there are traditional means of getting the same understanding.
Neither is better or worse. But ours is a lot more efficient and a lot more timely because one of the cool things about our audiences is once we build them, we refresh the data weekly. So, when little things happen. Or big things happen, whether it’s current events, something legislative, something that your competitor does to changing the, the pricing expectations in your category or some piece of celebrity news.
I call it the Taylor Swift effect or whatever the case may be. Well, if you’re using traditional research, you can’t exactly go back and reconvene the same research panel a week later and a month later and a year later. But when we refresh these audiences every week, we can see those small fluctuations and help our clients react to them in real time.
So, I, I would say having emotional intelligence about the people who buy from you. It’s not optional. Even if it feels like it is it, it’s the only means to getting better results. Otherwise, you’re just gonna keep trying to optimize things that were almost programmed to fail from the start.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. You talked about the overall marketing landscape. It’s gotten so commoditized, so fragmented where are we going? But down, and you talked about the only path back for brands is this emotional connection. Yes. And again, AI, you’re absolutely right. We’re seeing it in other areas and verticals is just speeding up failure.
And unless you meet that emotional, practical situation, situational needs of the. Consumer, as you mentioned you’re not gonna win this game and I really appreciate the insights today. I really do. And Ian, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Ian Baer: Oh, well, I enjoyed it so much and thanks for having me.
It’s been great to meet you and certainly look forward to helping as many brands as we can in the future. I’ll leave you with just one more thing ’cause I think it’s pretty cool. We actually just announced today that we have been hired by a team that bought a cattle ranch of all things a, a very high-end meat farm. And they are baking Eli into their model, not just for marketing strategy, but for product development at the very core. And it’s gonna be the first brand ever that’s literally being built from the ground up. Based on an understanding of emotional connection of both the business and commercial audiences.
And we’re talking to an academic organization about actually documenting all this. And we really think we are creating what’s gonna be a landmark blueprint for a lot of brands to follow. So, keep an eye on legacy maker meets if you can. It’s a pretty cool thing we’re into.
Brian Thomas: Thank you again and bye for now.
Ian Baer Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
