Sara Gordon: The Seven Deadly Sins & Positioning

• Slides
• Transcript
• About the Speaker
• Join the BoS community

Understanding what drives your customers to take action is a cheat code to success. If you know which of the seven deadly sins your product addresses, you can use that knowledge to differentiate your offering.

Sara shows how companies with a deep understanding of their customers’ primary emotions – Sloth (Uber eats); Lust (Tinder); Greed (Amazon); Gluttony (Brewdog, McDonalds); Envy (Instagram); Wrath (X); Pride (LinkedIn) – achieve powerful market positions.

She explains how, starting with understanding your customer’s ‘why?’,  you can position your offering effectively so the people that matter understand why your solution fits their needs. She shows you how as well as flagging the common positioning mistakes and why the key to positioning is execution.

Slides

Find out more about BoS

Get details about our next conference, subscribe to our newsletter, and watch more of the great BoS Talks you hear so much about.

Transcript

Sara Gordon 

Today we’re going to talk about something that’s a little bit different than most of the talks. And I guess, to start off with, I’ll tell you a bit about myself, and then I’ll tell you a bit about some of the work that I’ve done.

I’m a reformed brand strategist. Most people, when they think of a brand, they think, oh, that’s expensive, and is it gonna actually help my business? And I went through phases of not believing that brand was important, and I’ll tell you how I’ve gotten to positioning, but I guess to go way back to that age, or a little bit older. I’m from Massachusetts. I grew up in a super Christian conservative household, and I used to sit in the corner at church and think everyone believes in this thing that they can’t see.

What’s motivating people to show up here every single week, and in some cases, multiple times a week, for this thing that they can’t see, and that really set off this curiosity for me, on a human level, of what motivates people.

So I studied design and psychology. I moved to New York City. I worked at brand agencies, doing big advertising campaigns for Coca Cola, for alcohol brands, you name it. I probably worked on it while I was working in New York, and then eventually I moved to London, which was one of the best decisions I ever made, and started my shift to working in startups. So the first one I was at was Blooming Wild, and took that business from about 20 employees to 250 in five different markets.

Then I went to Zoe, when Zoe was known as the covid symptom study app. So some of you who, if you live in the UK, when we went into covid, we turned our nutrition science tracking software into a way for us to track covid all over the country and then eventually publish science around it.

And then I went to Flo, which is a period tracking app. I’m going to talk about that a lot today. Lots of you in this room don’t have periods, so I’ll explain them to you. Usually, 28 days you’re on a 24 hour cycle. If you’re a guy, women are usually on a 28 to 32 day cycle, where every day is different. And so it’s really good for daily active users, because every day is different, lots of insights and really interesting things that we could do at Flo. So a lot of my talk is talking about Flo, but just to give you a sense of what flow does you log in every day, we’ll predict how you feel based on your cycle data. We’ll tell you if you’re going to be in a good mood or a bad mood, if today’s a good day for a presentation, if your sex drive will be high or low, if it’s a good day to get pregnant. And the most important piece of information within that is, when is your period coming? Because none of us want to get stuck without a tampon. That’s probably the worst situation you could ever have.

What Drives Human Behavior & Identity

But I guess to come back to me sitting in the corner of my church watching everyone saying, what’s happening here? I don’t understand this. I can’t see that thing that everyone is, you know, praising. But when it boils down to how we make decisions, people choose things that reinforce their identity and their purpose in life. And I think Bob touched on lots of great points around purpose and finding purpose. But if you think about someone’s identity, if we look at Mark, for example, a rebel with a rebel squirrel, you know. A few people asked me yesterday, but how is this relevant for business to business sales? Well, people are still humans, right?

So if you really get to know your customers, you’re really digging deep into their identity and their purpose, so that people know whether or not that thing that you’re selling is for them, right? That’s what it boils down to. Is really digging deep to understand their jobs, their identity, their purpose, their philosophies, the set of values that drive them to understand is that thing for me, because those values, that identity, that purpose, each of us has an individual identity. What brand and positioning translates into is a visual identity. So that you can have some sort of shorthand for your customers to know, is this thing for me, right?

Semiotics — The Role of Symbols in Positioning

If I think about Slack, it’s about productivity. If I look at Teams, it’s about security, it’s about something that might be a bit more corporate. If I’m using Canva, which I’ve used for my presentation today, I’m not a designer. I’ve studied design, but I’m not a technical designer who might use Photoshop. How do we then use typography and visual assets to reflect an identity that connects with your customer? And so the thing I geek out about, and I know Diego, who’s talking later, does too. So if you want to come talk to us about semiotics, this is the study of signs and symbols that reflect our identity and our purpose. Now, if I look at the squirrel here, this is what I’m going to put you on the spot Mark. What does the squirrel represent? Do you know why did you choose that squirrel?

Mark Littlewood 

Because there’s a black squirrel, not black squirrels in Cambridge. I thought it was cool.

Sara Gordon 

In Chinese culture, the squirrel is about cleverness. In Native American culture, the squirrel is about preparedness, because they take all of those nuts and they hide them. And so actually, some of the things that you put into your visual identity are really important because they subtly hint at something. Elon Musk raising his arm is semiotics, right? Because that represented something else to the wider world.

As you start thinking about your positioning, the symbols and colors and all of that matters, often I see founders who say, I like purple, or I’m running a bank, so let’s make it blue, because that’s the design pattern that everyone understands. But is that the thing that connects with someone’s identity and purpose? So that’s a question to think about, because if you are in fact, and a few of you had had this conversation with me yesterday, if you’re trying to do something that’s all in one then it goes above our heads, right?

If you say that your company does everything all under one roof, I don’t have any sort of shorthand or heuristic that tells me that this thing is for me because you do something specific that will help make progress for me. So Matt Lerner will also tell you no all in one solutions.

So this talk is actually more it’s less about jobs, although we’ll talk a little bit about jobs, this talk is really more about what motivates people to care about the things that you’re selling, or the things that are interesting to you or part of your brand platform. And so to first get into you know what, what motivates people? How does our brain work right? Think about the last decision that you made, or the last reaction that you had to something, right? So when something happens to us, we feel something immediately, we react very quickly, and then we dwell on it again and again and again, right? Because the way that our brain works is that we think about our safety first, right? We’re like, Am I okay? Is everything fine? We then think about the motivations that are affecting how we feel about that thing happening to us, and then we rationalize, right? And so oftentimes, when we’re selling features into customers, we start with the rational reasons why you should buy this product. But actually that’s working in the opposite way that our brains work.

And so this is really about getting you to think about, how do you start tapping into people’s motivations, and even deeper than that. How do you tap into, potentially, some of their fears to sell what you sell? Because that is what drives human behavior. And if used well and not in a, not in a terrifying way, then it can be a real, I was going to say, a real weapon, but let’s, let’s not go there.

So if I take Slack as an example, and I think, Okay, I’m selling Slack into into a business, and I’m thinking about buying it, the first thing that comes to mind is, well, what if I miss something, right? What if we move from email to Slack and something goes wrong, right? But then actually, I think, God, emails such a bore, and I miss stuff in email all the time anyways. And actually, I want to be more connected to my team. I want more visibility over what my team is doing. And actually, Diego and I had a really interesting conversation about Slack a few months ago, maybe where he said, You know what slack is? Actually, about the CEO or founder having oversight and power over everything that is going on in the company.

And so when we get into the seven deadly sins, if you think about that power and that oversight, that is a motivation, right? That control is a motivation. And so the person who’s probably making that decision for the business wants to have that visibility over the company, and then finally, the logic comes in, well, I want to have that power and oversight, but actually, this is going to make my team way more efficient. We’re going to see things happening as they come up. We’re going to make decisions faster. We’re going to be more successful, and off we go. So we feel, we react, we then post rationalize.

People Decide Emotion First, Logic Later

So if you think about what’s the feeling that you want to tap into with your customers first, what are their motivations that are driving their behavior and their decision making? And there’s questions that you can ask them to get to the heart of that, which you’ve probably learned from other talks or maybe from Bob’s work. And then, what are the what are the rational reasons behind how they decide? So what are these drivers of survival and motivation?

The Seven Deadly Sins as Business Motivators

When, my friends laugh at me because I’m like, Well, when we were back in tribes, this is how people behaved. But actually, if you think about that, that wasn’t very long ago, right? Like the way that people behaved and the way that we made decisions, like we are shrouded in things that make us more civilized today, and so I like to sometimes have meetings to say, Well, if we took away all of our clothes in these buildings and all of these things, how would we act at our basic human level, right? And if you think about that as if companies were tribes, like, what would our motivations be?

So before I did this talk, and I did a similar talk a few months ago, I was saying to Matt Lerner that I was walking through the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in the stained glass gallery, they have all of these beautiful stained glass windows with the seven deadly sins. And I was thinking, Oh, my God, that’s like, you know, sloth is actually pretty similar to, like, Uber Eats. Somebody’s bringing a wagon full of food to someone here, and they’re a wagon of food to a priest. And this is the stained glass window for sloth. And so we can relate some of the best businesses to the seven deadly sins, right? If you think about sloth, actually, you can flip that. So I guess the going back to the previous slide, before we get into some of the examples, you can look at the sins, and actually, what we’ve done in popular culture today is we’ve flipped them to make them acceptable. So the things that make us more civilized, our clothes, our buildings, are, you know, all the things that move us away from tribal into what’s acceptable in society.

We’ve done that with these so if you think about sloth, actually it’s about efficiency. When we talk about lust, which I will in a few minutes, about Flo, it’s actually about open mindedness, right? If we think about ego, actually it’s about I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved. I’m sure many of you are on LinkedIn today saying, you know, I’ve heard this talk, and this is what it means for my business, and I’m really proud about the growth that we’ve had and the success that we’ve had. You know, that’s really sometimes when I post on LinkedIn, I’m thinking, Oh, my God, am I being too egotistical here, right? But it’s actually, we’re just really proud of our work.

Is greed really about innovation, right? And wrath, is that just about justice, right? And when we think about envy, is it just about inspiration? I think I had a conversation with somebody yesterday who sells direct to consumer products and that reflect who they are in their home. So tableware and is that just about reflecting your personal style, right? And again, coming back to your identity.

How Top Products Weaponize Human Desire

So if we think about slough and efficiency, we think about Uber maybe lust and open mindedness, Tinder, fields, modern day porn websites that seem to be flooding the only fans things like that is that just about open mindedness, it’s now news headlines constantly about people making money by selling pictures of their feet on the internet. That’s changing the way that people think about culture. AI girlfriends, AI boyfriends. Is it open mindedness, or is it lust, right? So if you flip it, you can start to think about actually, how are we tapping into human behavior and human connection. Ego and pride, if you think about LinkedIn, greed or innovation, you can think about things like Amazon. You can even think about Walmart. Gluttony and pleasure. I thought I’d put a non tech company in there, because you get wings and boobs at the same time. That’s gluttony, I think. Wrath and justice. You know, you think about X. I know we don’t talk about X or Twitter here.

But an envy, you know, you go onto Instagram, and we justify it to ourselves as though, you know, we’re just catching up with our friends, but actually you’re scrolling through and thinking, I don’t have that. I don’t have that. I don’t have that. So is it inspiration, or is it envy?

And so these companies have all been wildly successful by really tapping into not only something that is about human connection, but it’s also something that’s tapping into, you know, what we see as the as the sins.

So I loved this quote from Ev Williams at Twitter. So take a human desire, one that’s been around for a really long time, and use modern technology to take out steps. Now all of your businesses, if you’re running one, or if you’re consulting, or, you know, anything within this tech space, you’re tapping into a human desire for progress to deliver something. So again, if your takeaway from this talk is just trying to understand or dig deep into that human desire for the business that you’re running, that’s really the goal.

So I’ll give you, then an example about lust – in three parts. So we’ll go into a framework that’s a bit of a diagnostic around your positioning. Second, we’ll go into examples of jobs from flow that sort of brought us from, I wouldn’t quite say, flat growth, but the business was not growing as fast as it had in previous years. And so we’ll talk about some of the things that we did to get them to the unicorn that it is today. And then finally, how to think about motivations and some of your creative testing, which I know is often a thing that founders come to me and say, How do I test creative and how do I learn really rapidly? And how do I learn faster than I’m burning cash? So we’ll go through those, those three things.

Positioning Diagnostic — What Brand Is Not

So the first is a diagnostic, and before we get to the diagnostic slides, I guess a lot of founders will say, Well, I’ve bought this TV ads, and so I need to think about my brands now. But positioning is not your distribution, right? It’s not the media that you’re buying. It’s not the TV ads that you’re creating, or even the sales pitches that you’re sending your sales team out to have it’s not the stuff that you like, which is often a difficult conversation I need to have with founders. Like they’re like, Well, I like pink or I like purple, okay, but what does that mean to your customers and what does that reflect about their identity? So this is the stuff that brand and positioning is not.

But it’s really thinking about this cycle of how do you identify jobs? How do you build a visual and verbal identity that attracts their identity and their purpose, and then how do you take that, experiment with it and iterate on your value proposition?

Now, my career started in brands, and now I’m the general manager of a business. And that shift for me, happened because brands and proposition are just an iteration of what your business value is delivering for customers. And so for me, I was doing a lot of the top right of working on the identity in the you know, what does it look like? What are we saying? How does it feel when, actually, one of the things that we did at Flo was actually change the product to expand our target addressable market and grow the business in a really meaningful way.

So if you think about your company, and if you scored yourself across job category and value, do you have something that is clearly addressing two to three jobs that are high value to your customers or not, or are you an all in one that does everything fairly well. So I’d say, like, think about that as the first level, and then do people understand the category of thing that you’re in? I had this conversation with a few people at the round tables yesterday. They’re pitching one category, but actually customers are coming to them for a different category of things, so that’s like an easy thing to test and potentially change, and then is the value that you’re delivering against the job meaningful, something that people are willing to pay for? So Robin obviously had a lot of great advice around monetization.

The Flo Story — From Tracking to Empowerment

And can that value be proven? So do you have enough credibility in what you’re delivering that people trust the value that you have? So when I joined Flo back in 2022, they originally hired me because they said, well, we want to do a rebrand, and we want you to implement this rebrand, and at face value, if you look in the App Store versus our closest competitor, he could say, yeah, kind of looks the same. Maybe we should change the color, right? Like, that’s the gut reaction here. Everything’s pink. It’s a bit girly. It’s a bit, you know. And so we dug deep on whether or not that was a good idea, because a rebrand isn’t just changing everything externally, it’s changing the product as well. And so you think about the engineering time that’s going into that, you think about all of the the work alongside that, and actually we’re the world’s number one period tracking app, and so we had a lot of recognizability in the feather, which there’s no there’s no real story behind the feather. It’s just a feather, because they thought that that would be great for a period tracking app.

So we contemplated whether or not that was the right decision, and actually, we came to, I sort of sketched this out on a, on a book, or on a notepad, and said, okay, like we actually have some really great solutions, right? We can predict when a woman’s period is coming. We can help her get pregnant. We can help her identify some of the symptoms around her cycle. There’s definitely a lot more that we could do around period adjacent categories like sex and nutrition and all of these things that are in her health stack, but we had lots of great solutions, but we were in a really commoditized category. So what we could see in the data is Apple Health has period tracking. They’re nipping at our heels, and their product is free, right? So we have a freemium app, and then what we really needed to do was to monetize it more. So the question was not about recognizability and whether we should rebound. The question was about, how do we deliver more value to monetize the existing user base that we have and capture an adjacent market that could help us grow, particularly in the US, but more globally.

And so when we look at the value that there is value, our period tracking was more accurate than anybody else in the market. But if we’ve got Apple Health and the other tracking app that I had up on the screen, they’re giving those away for free. Apple’s got a lot of brand recognition, not necessarily medical credibility, but we’re essentially competing with free products that customers think are good enough, right? So this was more about how do we dig into what’s the value that we can deliver that can get people to pay?

And I remember when I first met the CEO and founder, he said, we really need to figure out what women will pay for. And I said, Well, women pay hundreds of pounds a month for face masks, for their acne, that’s probably hormonal related. They pay for lube and vibrators and things to make their sex drive work in a different way than they otherwise would, and to add spice to their relationship. They’re spending money on nutritionists and they’re spending money on health testing. So why are we not capturing any of that spend, right? That’s the really exciting stuff to go after. So if they see value in those things, which one of those categories can we start to fold into the product experience and actually sell?

So in my mind, it was much more of a positioning problem than an identity problem. The identity can come later. But really, if we’re seen as a tracker competing against other trackers and in a commoditized category, what’s actually the thing that we can do to change the direction of the business and to change the growth? And so we started with the process that everyone loves talking to our customers, and we had a user research team that was doing a lot of remote user testing interviews that were not run by real people. We just automate questions through and so I was like, Okay, can I get on the phone with real people? And so we then embarked on this answering this question of, how do we move from from tracking, which is work, which is free, to empowering women in a way that they hadn’t been empowered before, with something that can feel like magic, right? And a lot of you have built software that, probably, for your customers, feels like magic, right? Automations or things that change the way that they work and change the way that they feel, right? So this, for me, is, how do we move from logic, which is, I want to know when my periods coming, that’s very practical to how do I know when to give my presentation at work? Because I’m going to have higher estrogen levels. That’s magic. So today’s a good day for me.

Moving the Product to Where the Motivation Is

So, you know, we then embarked on putting together these statements to think about what’s really driving their motivation and what’s the outcome that they’re looking for. I’m not going to focus on outcomes in this talk. Instead, I’m going to focus on motivations and how we then tested that creatively.

Customer Insight: Women Want Better Sex Lives

I spoke to hundreds of women in the US, and we wound up running a lot of scientific research alongside our customer interviews, because what we were finding is that a few things came up. So sex came up. Women were really dissatisfied with their sex lives, but 80% of American women super dissatisfied, one of the top reasons for divorce after not agreeing on finances with their partner, so huge problem. But in the US, you’ve got the Bible belts, you’ve got a lot of pockets of the US where people don’t want to talk about that because there’s shame. So you’ve got this cultural problem of people don’t feel empowered to talk about this thing.

The second part is perimenopause and menopause. So the highest percentage of female suicide happens during perimenopause and menopause. Why? Because their body is basically going through puberty again in reverse. Their partner doesn’t understand and there’s very little research that’s been done around perimenopause and menopause. Billions have been spent on erectile dysfunction, but maybe 200 million has been spent on perimenopause and menopause.

So we then started to build up probably 15-20 different job statements to say, Okay, if we’re going to move from tracking to empowering, what are the period adjacent topics that we could get into where we could make the lives of our users more successful and make money, because there were dozens of opportunities that that presented themselves.

So the other thing that we did, if you go on to Flo’s Tiktok, the other thing that we did was our social team. In addition to us doing jobs interviews, I said, go on to social media and find there’s 1000s of posts every week where flow gets tagged. And what we were finding is that our customers, even some of our older customers, were posting on Tiktok, the screen that is the main screen of the period tracking app with the calendar on it. And what you can do when you log your symptoms is you can add Flo hearts. And so Flo hearts were sort of this inside joke to women of if you know, you know, if you add a flow heart to your calendar, it means that you’ve had sex. And so what we were seeing was this groundswell of women posting on Tiktok the days that they had sex, and trying to figure out, when were they horniest, and how did it relate to their cycle?

So we brought this to the data science team, and we said, this is really interesting, right? So we know that people are the our users are dissatisfied with their sex lives, our younger users who are posting about their sex lives on Tiktok because there’s sort of no, I guess, no sort of censorship in how much they wanted to share. Are then trying to hack their sex lives through Tiktok by saying to their friends, do you also feel this way x amount of days before your cycle. And so we took some of the jobs, we took some of the social listening, and we said, okay, let’s look at the two most important jobs. So we have two main audiences in the app, women who are trying to conceive and using flow for that, and they have a high willingness to pay. And then a bigger, the largest proportion of our users who are just tracking their cycle. They just want to know when their period is coming so they’re not cut out without a tampon. Those are probably, at the time, the ones who were most likely to switch to Apple Health or something that’s free or cheaper.

But what we found was the motivation around lust or pleasure was that both groups wanted to figure out when they could improve their sex life. So for those who were in a relationship and not trying to conceive, they just wanted to figure out how to connect with their partner more. And many weren’t enjoying sex, and wanted to figure out, like actually, when’s my sex drive highest? So I can plan my date night, and I can use my time well with my partner. And then for those who are trying to conceive, and nine months later, they still weren’t pregnant, sex wasn’t fun anymore, right? So we had a common job across two really important segments, which meant that we could start testing, right?

So we took this common motivation in addition to perimenopause and menopause, and said, Okay, we really know what they’re looking for. We know what’s motivating them to pay and so how do we start testing that in some of our creative? So this is a slight challenge, because Facebook does not like ads about sex. You can have sex around Viagra. You can’t have sex around periods and period tracking and sex. And so we had some long conversations with Meta around what was acceptable around health versus pleasure, and actually managed to get some things changed. ChatGPT, also pretty similar. I tried to upload a Flo ads to the platform, and they said, We can accept this photo because it touches on a subject that is not appropriate.

And so, you know, even just thinking about Lizzie’s talk yesterday, like, where are the where are the lines here, right? Because, actually, we’re moving to a place where women are feeling more empowered around their health, and so how do we actually get permission to market things that matter to them? So it was an important conversation in the business, but so we took sex, we took perimenopause, we took menopause, we took polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, all the jobs around those topics. And every two weeks, we launched hundreds of new ads in the language of our users with new content in the app put behind a pay wall in lots of adjacent categories. And we were on our way.

We did a lot of it using AI, and we learned incredibly quickly that if you look at that ad, the reason why the type is so small is because people then try to click on it and zoom in, so it’s slightly dark UX in that sense. But women were coming to us because that was the common job. They weren’t enjoying their sex lives, and they were really trying to figure out, how do I unlock this part of my relationship, and if I’m trying to get pregnant, how do I get on my way to go through the process of actually achieving that goal?

And so we started to have a conversation about internally, how much money are we spending every month where we’re not learning new things that go back into the product team? So the business had grown with a few specific ads that they’d been running for seven, eight years, and they’d been dining out on those ads over and over and over again, but we hadn’t learned anything new over that time. And so one of the things I’d encourage you to think about is, and we talk about this at Zoe a lot, is, how many insights are you gathering every single month? And what’s the cost of those? And if you don’t actually gather any insights every month, how much have you spent not learning? And so this exercise of testing hundreds of ads, testing hundreds of new content pieces every few weeks turned into this exercise of us understanding, how are we bringing insights back into products in a really meaningful way? And how is that making our marketing better, and how is it making our retention better? And so we really started to think about this idea of learn rate over burn rate, right? Like, how are you spending your money? How many insights are you gathering, and what’s the price of that insight, and how much is it returning to the business?

The second piece is their desire. Well, I also deserve pleasure, and I want to be able to understand how I can access it, but I don’t know how. And then on the third piece, logic, so I can trust this, because it’s coming from a doctor. It’s coming from an app that I trust. And actually, when we come back to the brand question around the feather in the pink they see that logo, and they actually trust it more than they do the other pink logo. And we gleaned those insights along the way.

Creative Testing — Learn Rate Over Burn Rate

And so in our growth meetings at Flo and in our growth meetings at Zoe, we bring together product and marketing in the same room to think about, how do we iterate the product and make it better, but how are we testing and bringing more insights into the business on a monthly basis? So what we wound up doing was we did a lot of research around bringing the problem to the forefront so women aren’t happy in their sex lives. A lot of women resonated with that, and what we wound up doing in the products is we built the first sex therapy program that you could chat with a chat bot, and you could talk about your cycle. You could talk about which day your cycles on, or which day your you might feel most excited to go on your date nights with tips and tricks around how to speak to your partner about pleasure. And we did all of that using their historical period data so that she could glean insights into how she could connect with her partner better. And so we built this into the app, but we also it also fueled our marketing strategy, and wound up giving way to lots of growth within the business.

And so I guess, just to wrap up and we’ll we’ll go into questions in some of my round tables yesterday, we talked about, well, how does this relate to B2B? Because this, these are, like, very basic consumer ideas. But I guess I would think about looking at these motivations right at a basic human level, and really go deep on your conversations with your customers. What are their ambitions? What are their hopes? What are their desires? What are their dreams? Because unpicking that can really get to the heart of what they might be looking for and how your product can actually deliver that progress. But then when you think about the visual identity of that, how do you communicate that feeling that they’re looking for from your product at the end of the day. And so if you think of yourself as a detective, and you’re on a mission to understand someone’s motive, right?

If you if you think about that question that way, and start answering questions that might feel a bit silly, but really trying to unpick their problem and the motivation behind it. You can really get to the heart of what might be driving their lizard brain, what might be driving their emotional brain. And then when you get to the Feature Table, you can then back end the logic in but that’s not the first thing that they’re going to see or feel. And so if you get to the heart of their feeling, I think you can really make progress in their life, because you’ll attract their attention in the first instance. We know that it’s super competitive space selling software, right, and a lot of visual identities look the same and feel the same. So how do you then think about their emotions? How do you stand out, and how do you capture that feeling that they’re really trying. To tap into from your product that it will deliver. So that is my final thought for you. Thank you, everyone.

Bridging Product & Marketing Through Emotion

And so we then started playing all of our creative through this lens of, how do we think about their reactions, their feelings, and then their logic and we built, I would say, at the beginning of my time, their product and marketing were fairly separate, and I see that this is a super common thing in most businesses that I work in, and we’re in the process of changing how this works at Zoe now. But how do we take jobs? How do we test those in marketing really rapidly to understand? How are we acquiring customers? How are we retaining customers? How are we converting customers to paid and then, how are we actually expanding or going deeper on our value proposition?

And so we then started to take some of those ads that we were testing to move us from a commoditized category to one that was about empowering women’s health, specifically around sex at the time. Now they’ve moved on to new categories, which is really exciting, and how were we delivering new value to them? So one of the things that, if you think about how we make a decision, we feel, we react, we then rationalize, women could come to us because we were the most medically credible app that was out there. We had hundreds of doctors who were writing all of the articles in the app. And not only that, we had lots of certifications that other apps didn’t. So when we then got to the piece around logic, once we tapped into their emotions, we could easily convert them at a paywall, because we had the credentials and the credibility to convert that lead.

So if we then come back to this example of how our brain works. We’d think about this with every ad that we were writing. You know, I’m scrolling through Facebook and I’m thinking, the thing that I’m probably thinking about is not work or about my friends, it’s that I’m not connecting with my partner in the way that that I want to and so is my relationship going to fail? So that’s our reptilian brain.

Mark Littlewood 

So you checked your app this morning. Did it say you were going to be sparkling on stage, etc?

Sara Gordon 

It’s going to be a little bit tired this afternoon, and I might need a nap now. So we got the right timing. Yes, we got the right timing. Not too early, not too late.

Q&A

Audience Member 

Thank you. I found that really, really fascinating and kind of pretty eye opening as an approach to coming into the way of solving problems and your positioning. One of the more intimidating areas of this, coming from the product side of a business, is this requires a lot of buy in and almost quite a lot of uncomfortable truths for your founders, for the senior team, what advice would you give on trying to facilitate the right environment to go down this sort of approach?

Sara Gordon 

I think the first talk yesterday around framing and having some of those hard conversations, I think a lot of pieces of advice from that talk feel relevant to your question. But also, I think if you go back to the positioning diagnostic, if you don’t have, like, getting the founders to think about, where are we actually sitting here? Is it, do we have a clear category? Are we actually delivering value, and do we have the credentials to deliver that value? And then finally, are the jobs clear enough, are we trying to do too much and not focused enough around the things that are delivering value to the customer and commercial value? So I think starting off with something that is rational in those conversations is quite valuable. I think leading with emotion in that case tends to be a little bit challenging, but it’s framing it in a way that’s we just want to be successful. So how do we actually get to that end state? I don’t know if that, if that answers your question, because you’ll tease out those motivations in the jobs, right? This is just going a little bit deeper on that motivational part of the statement, and really trying to understand what’s driving your customers and the decisions that they’re making.

Mark Littlewood 

John, I’ll just pass it behind you to Jonathan, thank you very much.

Audience Member 

Mike, I noticed another logo at the beginning. I’m interested in what sort of parallels in the experience of working with that team.

Sara Gordon 

Yeah. I mean, so incident management software, but started off as a Slack integration, and they came to me and said, so we’re being used by lots of early stage companies we want to sell to enterprise. Okay, so stop calling yourself a Slack integration. That’s step number one, because that’s a low value category. Let’s try and think about high value. But one of the things that we learned with them was actually, I think similar to Bob’s talk, is when you’re managing an incident, you’re the only engineer on call, and you’re doing that over and over and over and over again without support and without any structure around you, and without any any way to make that visible within the organization. What happens your engineers start handing in their notice, right? That’s the emotional territory. And so how do you get into the deeper human problem of the thing that you’re selling into, to CTOs, so it’s understanding at the different levels of people that you’re selling into, what’s the problem that they’re really trying to solve? Is it solving incidents faster? Yes, of course, and having less downtime, because that’s costing business money, that is the logical reason. But when I was going into conversations with their sales teams, like, you get to the heart of the issue pretty quickly. When you ask CTOs, like, tell me about the things that happen after the incident in the first month, three months, six months, and how can we help you think about solving some of those problems as they roll out. So I think it’s asking the right questions. It’s asking, What does it mean for your team? What does it mean for the organization? How is your team feeling around some of these things? It’s asking more emotional questions, I would say. But I think again, somebody asked me yesterday, how is this relevant to B2B? Well, B2B, customers are still humans, right? And so if we think about your customers as like full humans with a range of emotions and identity and drivers behind that, how do you get to the heart of the of the human problems that they’re trying to solve?

Mark Littlewood 

Does that still apply? If your customers are techies?

Sara Gordon 

They’re human, they still have emotions. Wow, actually, often This changes everything deeper emotions than we think.

Audience Member

So you started out saying it was positioned as a cycle tracker, and then you identified all the other more value use cases, is it still a cycle tracker.

Sara Gordon 

So in the app store, it is that’s because that is the category in the App Store, but the way that the business markets itself and sells to customers upsells within the app is not positioned that way. So it’s, it’s more of a reproductive health partner. So in the US, you’ll go to the gynecologist maybe once a year, but you never get enough time with that doctor, and you never get enough insights. And so in many ways, Flo was delivering more insights on a regular basis with more predictive data than a gynecologist could, so it’s really switching from the work that they’re asking people to do to something that is empowering her to have a better day and to be able to plan for that day.

Audience Member

Thank you. And you said, you’re currently working on more categories. Have you figured out how to bring them all in the same app, because, like, you’re saying you went into reproductive health, and then you have all those other areas. Like, I’m not sure which ones are, but like, then you have multiple markets you want to market in the same place, basically, that are conflicting around the space in the app, and the visibility.

Sara Gordon 

Well, every day is different in a woman’s cycle. So how you think about nutrition or exercise or sexual health? We can give insights about all of those topics on a particular day, depending on where she is in the 28 to 32 days of her cycle. So, that’s the exciting part of thinking about where you take the product. But you could have that be relevant for a FinTech, right? Like you have lots of different problems to solve across that stack. Which ones are the highest or lowest value? What do you then build off the back of that that integrates with this one thing. So I think you can take that example and make it relevant for any other product really.

Mark Littlewood 

Thank you, Dave.

Audience Member

I wonder if you have any insights in terms of how you get product and marketing to work well together. Unique issue. We’ve only got half a day left. Maybe it’s a talk and it’s own right, but magic mushrooms you talk about, I mean, very rightly. The Product folk going deep, lots of diagnostic, lots of analytics, lots of data. How do you, how do you kind of get that transferred to the marketing teams and that interplay.

Sara Gordon 

I think in the case of Flo, I was really lucky, because no one from marketing was talking to products, and you had three teams, one in Vilnius, one in a few people in Minsk, some people in London, and some actually, there was another office in Cyprus, and most of the product teams were in Vilnius, and the marketing team was in London. And no one was getting on a plane. So I was on a plane every week. I was like, let me come talk to you. And so it was just about building human connection in remote world. That was number one.

Number two was finding someone in the product organization that had willingness to think about marketing as a way to make the product better. So the woman who was thinking about content in app that sat behind the pay walls, I went and found her, and I said, you are going to be my friends. Let’s look at all the data together and then tell me. Tell me how, tell me how I can take this back to the marketing team. Let me be the translator. So, when BoS talking about superpowers, my superpower is like going into teams and saying, let’s take this thing that, Let me transfer it to the other team and bring that across the business and do my road show so that everyone knows what we’re testing. So I think finding someone in the organization, and I know we were talking about customer success yesterday, and taking some of the insights from there, I think it’s finding somebody who can, who can be the mole, in a way.

And so I was sitting in all the product meetings, in the scrums, and then taking that back to marketing, and saying, here’s what’s happening, here’s how we’re going to help them learn faster, and here’s how we’re going to automate a bunch of stuff, bring it back into the product team, present it to them. Some of it was just about basic communication and building relationships. And you know, we had the added challenge of most people, most people’s progression. And. So I was sitting in product meetings quite often being the only English speaker, thinking, okay, great, cool. So you know, you have these human challenges, but I think if you show a bit of empathy and humility in front of those other teams and respect what they do as well. Because you know that business grew through product led growth initially, which is why there wasn’t as much connection with marketing. So they built something amazing to start with, but then over time, you need to change your growth strategy.

Mark Littlewood 

Very welcome. Great. Now, Matt, just before you ask your question, people ask, how I find such amazing speakers? They’ve even asked me this time one of the one of the things is you hear people talk Matt is to be lost for words. Matt was responsible for introducing me to Sarah. Matt, just give me a little background on how she parachuted into your event, which I thoroughly recommend.

Matt Lerner 

We ran an event for entrepreneurs and marketers in London in November and April Dunford was going to be the keynote speaker, and four days before the event, she had to pull out because of a family tragedy. And so my business partner and I just went through our list of coaches and thought, Who do we think would be good on stage? And I think I WhatsApp Sarah on Sunday night and the event was on Wednesday, and said, Hey, can you speak at our event? And she’s like, Yeah, sure, but I’m gonna go to a business trip to Amsterdam Monday and Tuesday, but I get back Wednesday morning. And then she’s like, Yeah, I’ll do it. And then, like, Tuesday, I messaged her. I said, Hey, Sarah, can you send over your slides? And she goes, Oh, do I need slides? I’ll make them on my flight. So this was to replace, our keynote speaker, April Dunford. And Sarah got on stage and gave a 30 minute version of this talk. Absolutely crushed it. It ended up being the top rated talk at the event, and Mark was in the audience. So, and I like to talk even more this time.

Mark Littlewood 

Have you actually got question?

Matt Lerner 

I haven’t got a question. And it’s actually, weirdly, it’s a question for Bob, but you made such an important point at the end that I think people just assume that B2B is never emotional, and I think that just couldn’t be more wrong. I just think people don’t understand it. So, Bob, you’ve probably done what 1000s of jobs interviews in your life, and probably a lot of them were B2B. I’m wondering, how many times in those B2B interviews, do people end up crying way more than you think?

Bob Moesta 

To be honest, you know, it’s a great interview when you can get them to cry. Because the reality is they have a veil of it’s a very rational process we have, you submit a bid, and you do this, but when you actually get to how they choose, they choose emotionally. And so part of it is, is digging past all that and being able to get to it. So this is very, very relevant, especially from the emotional side, is that this is where, again, we assume it’s not emotional and it’s emotional and social. Like, I don’t want to lose my job, that’s social, right? And so you start to realize that it’s way has way more impact than just the functional of getting the best price and getting getting it the best delivery. And so B2B is way more about those other things than people think.

Sara Gordon 

Yeah, and often, I think we make more throwaway decisions as consumers, whereas it is such a considered process with procurement for B2B but yeah, I think with incident, I had a few criers who had, like, lost their best team members, and we’re trying to think about how they retain staff and how they run their tech team a little bit differently.

Bob Moesta 

So to me, one of the hard parts is actually finding the right person to talk to in the B2B side. And the way I think about it is who is taking the political risk to bring you in, and whoever that is has the emotion, and so everybody else has the ability to say no. But what you’re trying to do is figure out who’s the person who wants to say yes, and how do we get them not to say no. They don’t need to say yes, but not say no.

Audience Member

Sara, thank you for presentation. First insight I got is that the application flow, which I’m a customer, loyal customer of, is actually selling, not the knowledge of your cycle management, etc, but rather knowing yourself better, probably approaching to life more mindfully, maybe highlighting your needs and basically managing your body system, mental system, better and for your partner to be better partner. Because the first thing I really that, let’s say I like the most about my partner, is that he knows my cycle better than I do. I mean, he’s he could tell me, Hey, like, Do you want more chocolate, or do you want something? Why are you asking this today? And he says, Yeah, because I know that it’s that day of your cycle for partners, yes, and it’s actually he was the reason why I have it. Oh, really, I was never taking care of this, paying attention to this. And that’s something that I realize now that we very often we don’t know what we are actually buying, like we are buying better version of ourselves through the product. And how do you use it? Yeah, the question is like, do you use it in your let’s say communication or advertisement, like that you are selling, not the product itself, but what’s behind it.

Sara Gordon 

In terms of a better version of yourself? Yes. I mean, a lot of the ads that we were running, and press and brand campaigns that we were doing were showing people what their future state could look like, right? Being able to tap into pleasure, being able to be more successful at work. Millions of women drop out of the workforce during perimenopause and menopause, there’s a huge call. And why is that brain fog, exhaustion, feeling like they’re they weren’t themselves, right? And so how do you help people stay on their course and be the best version of themselves. There’s a great Apple Watch ad from a few years ago where you see a man on a sofa, and then a new version of himself comes off the sofa, and he’s putting his clothes on, and he’s going outside, and then he’s walking down the street, and he sees another version of himself running, and then the version of himself that’s running is running on the beach, and sees another version of himself finishing a triathlon. And it’s like, to me, that’s one of my favorite ads, because it’s not about the watch, the watch is helping him, but it’s about the best version of himself, right? Like, how powerful is that to see what we could be, right? And so you’re absolutely spot on. That’s really how I think you build belief and you capture a feeling.

Mark Littlewood 

Thanks, amazing. We could go on forever, but you’ll be around. Catch Sara in the break. Thank you. Amazing.

---

---

Upcoming Event

BoS Europe 2026 🇬🇧

13–14 April • Cambridge, UK

First speakers announced.

Save Your Place