Simon sits down with Sarah Levinger, consumer psychologist and founder of Tether Insights, for a conversation about what's actually driving purchasing decisions — and why most marketers are selling to their own biases instead of their customers'.
Sarah dropped out of college at 20, freelanced her way through a decade of marketing work, and quietly spent 10 years reading psychology books from the library shelf next to the WordPress manuals.
She didn't tell anyone what she was learning. Then she hit e-com in 2020 and could suddenly test a psychology principle and get a result in 4 hours.
We go deep into how she ran a research panel for a near-nine-figure supplement brand and produced a 302% lift in landing page conversions just by aligning the team's messaging with what customers actually believed, why Meta's Andromeda update broke the AIDA framework for good and what you need to replace it with, the valence and intensity model and how to use it in your ad account today (including a tactical Claude prompt), and why she thinks avatars are mostly a crutch and what the Swiffer story taught P&G about billion-dollar product development instead.
This episode is about how getting inside your customer's head starts with getting honest about what's going on inside yours.
