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From SEO to AEO: Todd Sawicki Reveals How AI Is Transforming Search

From SEO to AEO: Todd Sawicki Reveals How AI Is Transforming Search written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Todd Sawicki (1)Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Todd Sawicki, founder and CEO of Gumshoe AI, a cutting-edge platform helping marketers navigate the rapidly evolving world of AI-driven search and discovery. Todd breaks down what AIO, AEO, and AI search really mean for marketers, why buyer behavior is shifting, and how brands can optimize for the new era where large language models (LLMs) drive discovery, answers, and conversions. If you’re looking for practical ways to future-proof your SEO and content marketing, this episode is packed with actionable insights and big-picture context.

About the Guest

Todd Sawicki is the founder and CEO of Gumshoe AI, a platform at the forefront of AI-driven search and discovery solutions. With a deep background in digital media, marketing technology, and scaling startups, Todd is a sought-after voice on the future of search, LLM optimization, and how marketers can adapt as buyer behavior and search platforms are transformed by AI.

Actionable Insights

  • AI-driven search (AIO, AEO) is fundamentally changing how buyers search, what they expect, and how marketers must optimize—think “training the AI salesperson” rather than just ranking on Google.
  • LLMs (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews) are increasingly personalizing answers, using your site’s content, FAQs, product detail pages, and structured data to deliver tailored recommendations.
  • AI search users are high-intent and convert at dramatically higher rates—often 2–20x higher than traditional organic or paid search—because they are pre-qualified and further down the funnel.
  • Content quality, structure, and freshness matter more than ever; LLMs reward authoritative, updated, and well-organized information, not just what’s most popular or backlinked.
  • Updating and repurposing existing content (especially with FAQs, schema, and summaries) is critical—LLMs cite content that has been updated within the last 90 days.
  • Competitive insights and personas are key: Tools like Gumshoe can reveal what LLMs say about you, your competitors, and which personas they surface—providing messaging ideas and identifying areas to improve.
  • Focus on high-intent, conversion-focused queries (not just top-of-funnel trends) and use AI insights to build better ad campaigns, content, and product positioning.
  • Track, measure, and iterate: AI traffic is growing fast—use analytics to see where it’s coming from, how it performs, and how your optimizations are working.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:31 – The Rise of AI Search and Zero-Click Experiences
    How AI-driven search is changing user expectations, buyer behavior, and marketing priorities.
  • 03:21 – Why Buyer Behavior Matters More Than Technology
    Users are asking longer, more complex, and more high-intent questions, and expect personalized answers.
  • 05:18 – The Value of AI Traffic
    Why visitors from AI answers convert at much higher rates—and what marketers should do about it.
  • 06:49 – Training the AI Salesperson
    How to “teach” LLMs about your product, and why product marketing and messaging matter more than old-school SEO tactics.
  • 08:30 – What Content Do LLMs Prefer?
    Brand websites, FAQs, knowledge bases, and structured content are the top sources cited by AI.
  • 09:52 – Why Doing Content Right Pays Off
    How years of quality content and structure are finally being rewarded by AI-driven platforms.
  • 12:26 – Content Freshness, Updates, and Repurposing
    The average AI-cited content is only 86 days old—updating and repurposing is critical for ongoing visibility.
  • 14:42 – How Gumshoe AI Works
    Using personas, synthetic users, and competitive insights to see what LLMs are saying about your business—and what to do next.
  • 20:38 – The Future of High-Intent Search
    Marketers must focus on conversion-ready, long-tail queries and position for the new funnel managed by AI.

Insights

“AI-driven search means you have to train the AI like you’d train a salesperson—answer objections, provide detailed info, and position your product for each persona.”

“Content quality, structure, and freshness are the new currency—LLMs reward the right answers, not just the most popular ones.”

“Focus on high-intent, conversion-ready queries—AI search gets users further down the funnel, and marketers need to adapt their messaging and content to win.”

“Analytics prove it: AI-driven visitors stay longer and convert more. Optimize now and track what’s working as AI’s role in discovery grows.”

“Competitive intelligence and persona insights are critical—know what LLMs say about you and your competitors to improve your messaging and positioning.”

John Jantsch (00:02.52)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Todd Sawicki. He’s the founder and CEO of Gum Shoe AI, an innovative platform at the forefront of AI-driven search and discovery solutions. With a background in digital media marketing technology and leading high-growth startups, Todd is known for his deep insight into changing landscape of search. We’re going to talk about SEO, we’re going to talk about AIO, AEO, all the

Other rows that are out there.

Todd Sawicki (00:33.81)

As long as we don’t call it GEO, what, you can tell the person who came up with that had no background in marketing because I’m sorry, the minute I’ve been in the paid landscape, the minute you see the letters GEO, you instantly think of geo targeting, hello people, the last thing we wanna do is make anything more confusing than it might otherwise be. So, my little soapbox for today.

John Jantsch (00:48.622)

Sure,

John Jantsch (00:54.86)

And so with that, with that Todd’s on the show. So welcome Todd. So let’s, mean, I kind of laid that out a little bit. You know, you’ve created a tool that is really taking advantage of some of the changes that are going on in marketing today, especially around search. So maybe give a high level kind of in your view, let’s start with the basics. All this stuff we’re hearing about.

Todd Sawicki (01:10.609)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:21.41)

GEO for one, AIO, AIO, know, all those kinds of things. I mean, what does it all really boil down to for the typical marketer or typical business?

Todd Sawicki (01:31.374)

It is a it is a good question. So I think we all woke up a year ago. And with the rise of zero click searches with AI mode in Google search taking off, and we began to see Google traffic starting to decline. And at the same time, if anyone was sort of looking at their, like GA four analytics or whatever they’re using, they started to see, look, I’m getting this new basket of traffic from chat, tbt and others. And so AI

John Jantsch (01:50.478)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (01:58.706)

and sort of looking at that. so the AI search is taking off. And so as a marketer, suddenly you had to start paying to this attention, this new thing called AI search. And so fundamentally, we look at it as, you know, marketers want to understand what the hell are LMS saying about me. And then from a product standpoint, we like to say yes, we help marketers understand what LMS think about them and their brands, and ultimately what to do about it. And I think that’s one of the interesting things is there’s a lot more you can do about it, because AI search is a

fundamentally different platform and approach than traditional search and really in many ways I think a search is solving a lot of the problems we’ve been complaints as end users we’ve had about traditional search and then there’s downstream applications for marketers and how to think about how you work with those platforms as a result.

John Jantsch (02:45.262)

Well, and I think you’re hitting on one of the things that I try to get people to understand. Everybody always goes, oh, we’ve got these new platforms. Um, but what they fail sometimes to recognize is that the buyer behavior is changing because of these new platforms and how people, what their expectations are, how they now go to, even to Google. mean, I’m seeing people do this. We used to put it in these nice little compact searches. Well, I’m seeing people put in these very long searches now, very high intent, you know, very filtered almost because they know they can get AI overviews and things. And I think that.

Todd Sawicki (02:57.202)

Correct.

Todd Sawicki (03:09.039)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:15.222)

change is really what we really need to adjust to, right? It’s not necessarily the technology, is it?

Todd Sawicki (03:21.778)

I agree users have fundamentally changed and you probably hear this even anecdotally amongst your friend sets. Like you start kind of experimenting with chat tpt or perplexity or whatever it is and you’re like you ask it a real deep question that you know is very frustrating to get answered in traditional search and you would have to click through 10 things and it was just a pain in the ass and took a lot of time and where now you get a pretty good answer most of the time right away and it fundamentally changes the experience. I mean we’re seeing dramatic thing changes especially in complex areas like b2b type searches.

It’s a great use case when you’re researching very technical things. You’re researching like more long tail areas for traditional search work wonderfully in the world of AI. And I think the other thing that traditional search really did a poor job of, and it really shows up in AI search is AI search does a phenomenal job of personalizing its answers for you. And that is one of the things that

in even in terms of our own product and platform, but the implications of that are very interesting. And so as an end user rate, would you imagine think of the LM as you walk into a shoe store, and there’s a wall of 500 pairs of shoes behind that salesperson as you walk in, and the LM is the salesperson. And so you’re trying to know what’s the right pair of shoes? Well, Google you do it doesn’t really ever answer I need a new pair of shoes, you would never like Google just would struggle with that. But with

John Jantsch (04:43.488)

Or give you the most popular shoes or whatever.

Todd Sawicki (04:45.488)

Or give you the most popular one. Exactly. Just give you the most popular one. But the LLMs are really trying to understand, are you a runner? Are you a hiker? you have an account, you register, they’re building profiles of you, interestingly enough. Right? The minute you put your email in, it knows where you work. It knows what you’re affiliated with. And so as a result, your users are seeing that there really, there’s a value for that relationship between you and the LLMs. It learns more about who you are. It discovers things. It’s trying to personalize the answers. And so it therefore can give you a better answer and really help you in a way that

Traditional search never quite got to.

John Jantsch (05:18.252)

You know, and one of things that I get business owners pretty excited about, because a lot of them are going, is all hype or like, don’t, you know, do I got to really do this or am I really going to get AI traffic or not get AI traffic? So all these questions and all I do is show them analytics. and I am able to demonstrate that to them, the people who come from AI stay on your site 10 times longer and convert seven times more than your paid ads, more than your organic traffic. And a lot of that, think is just what you talked about because.

Todd Sawicki (05:43.602)

Yup.

John Jantsch (05:47.5)

they are doing the filtering themselves. And if they get to your website, it’s because you had what they wanted. Right.

Todd Sawicki (05:51.258)

Exactly. They’re pre-qualified. Right. No, and we’re seeing stats on the B to C. We typically see a little bit less than seven X, probably more in the range of kind of two to five X increased conversions on the B to B side. We’re seeing increased conversion rates up to like 20 X better. Cause again, they’re down the funnel. Cause right. When I think about, you think of from a marketer standpoint, let’s think about the classic marketing funnel. There’s discovery, then consideration, then conversion.

Google managed discovery and then handed you off to websites to manage consideration like your own website some third-party writer whatever it might be but AI is trying to do not just discovery but manage through the Q &A process consideration as well and then hand that user off for conversion and So that’s why you see these higher conversion rates. They’re further down the funnel AI has managed that now from a marketing standpoint You’re now your challenges. I need to manage AI differently because now suddenly it’s it’s the one selling my product

John Jantsch (06:49.09)

Yeah, yeah.

Todd Sawicki (06:49.35)

And I think that’s the fundamental shift here as a marketer is you have to going back to that, that shoe store analogy, that element as a salesperson means you’re going to have to manage that person, right? That’s not your job. Whereas SEO, and I think this is one of the other big changes. SEO is a very technical thing, like link building. And remember that the just the ridiculous debate we had for years about is it a sub domain or a folder? Right? Is that marketing? No, that’s a very technical thing. And you know, any non technical marketer, whenever that discussion and by the way,

for those who don’t pay attention that went on for years like it was like a red versus blue sort of battle in the online marketing sphere. And but a very technical thing not marketing based at all. And I think the differences for LLMs, it’s much more of a, oh, how do I teach the LLMs what to say about my product, just like I teach, you know, a salesperson at the front of Dick’s Sporting Goods store kind of the same way. And so it’s now it’s much more of a product marketing exercise than it ever was with traditional search. And I think that’s the other thing is

You’re going to have to think about how you talk to the LLMs and how you market to them.

John Jantsch (07:50.35)

Well, and this gets at the crux of, you know, a good salesperson is trained on, know, all the objections of, you know, all the questions they’re going to get. Right. And so now all of a sudden our content has to be answers.

Todd Sawicki (07:57.222)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:04.722)

Correct? absolutely. So one of the things, so Gumshoo as a platform has been, we publicly launched it about six months ago and we’ve already worked more than 3,500 marketers have signed up. We’ve already generated millions of prompts on behalf of marketers so they understand what elements say in response to these prompts. And as a result, we’re able to analyze those response. think it’s like 10 million answers that we’ve analyzed.

John Jantsch (08:29.112)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:30.416)

And then you really, you start to see patterns in what they’re doing, but they absolutely want you as marketers to provide them kind of sample question answers back. if you, of the fascinating things about LLMs is they actually link, they prefer the number one source that they link to for product information are brand websites. And then within that, they link to product description pages or PDPs or product detail pages, whatever description you want to use, like the PDPs, FAQs,

John Jantsch (08:50.616)

Mm-hmm.

Todd Sawicki (08:59.896)

knowledge base articles, how to sections, they love that sort of informative how to answer questions for them. And they use that as a guide. Now they process their own way, they kind of regurgitate it in their own way, but they want to use that as a basis. So you’re right, you’re gonna you have to just like you train that salesperson on Rude Q &A, you’re doing the same thing now with the models, which I think is interesting to marketers, when they start kind of like seeing and understanding like it’s not a marketing exercise, and not a weird technical link building sub domain folder esoteric discussion anymore.

John Jantsch (09:04.738)

Yep. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:25.292)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and one of the things that we have seen, because, know, I’ve always believed that, that you do content, right. You’re going to get rewarded by the search engines. Well, we’ve been doing content, right. In my view, you know, hub pages, structured content, FAQs, table of contents, summaries, schema, you know, we’ve been doing all that stuff because it was good content marketing. well,

Todd Sawicki (09:37.244)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:52.258)

the LLMs and AI are actually rewarding us for that work right now because we ranked high in Google. We are now ranking higher in AI overviews and in chat GPT. Are you seeing that as well?

Todd Sawicki (10:06.354)

So if you don’t have content online, it is hard for AI to even know you exist. And so that’s sort of step one. You’d be surprised at the lack of content out there. It’s, know, all right, well, you sell it. You sell these programs. But I think it’s because everyone probably thinks they’ve all, everyone’s done content marketing. It’s not always the case.

John Jantsch (10:12.526)

Well, yeah.

Well, no, no, I would not be surprised.

Yeah. Yeah. I always love it. I always love it when we go to work with a new client and they say, yeah, well, our SEO firm is doing this for us. And it’s like, what are they SEOing? Like, there’s no content there.

Todd Sawicki (10:35.83)

There you go. Exactly. There’s no content. There’s nothing else. And so the differences here you mentioned, like you generated content that the difference here though is there’s a subtle, you know, benefit and you kind of address this, I’m gonna call it what you said, which is you’re getting rewarded. But what’s interesting is Google, it was rewarding popularity, not necessarily the best content and the most authoritative content. What LMS are doing is doing a much better job of rewarding the correct content. So

It’s sort of like, and we have a good stator on this, is, we look up the traditional Google rank of all the URLs that are cited by AI and its answer, and its justification for its answers. The traditional Google rank is below 21, 50 to 90 % of the time, meaning page three and beyond. So it’s pulling out these, so it is looking at some of those that traditionally link to content SEO, but it was always these deep links. And the problem with traditional searchers,

John Jantsch (11:18.658)

Well, yes.

Todd Sawicki (11:28.602)

is, you know, we kind of generically use the stat one out of 100 people go to page two on Google, one out of 1000 go to page three, one out of 10,000 go to page four, and no one goes to page five. And that’s very exactly how the dead bodies but AI to my stat 59 % of the links they surface are in that that sort of buried into because they have AI or machines, they have infinite patients. So what they’re good at doing is finding authoritatively correct like we like to see canonical information. And then and so as a brand,

John Jantsch (11:38.734)

Yeah, that’s where you hide the dead bodies, right?

John Jantsch (11:51.15)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (11:58.416)

all that work that maybe struggled to get surfaced in Google, because it just wasn’t as popular or using out to people buying links. Now, now they’re really to your point, really rewarding good content, good highly valued structured content. And so it’s sort of like, it’s sort of the it’s paying off 10 years of work, finally. And so the people who may be struggled to get some of that popularity in Google, it is absolutely paying off in AI overview, AI search and AI overviews and things like that in a way that you always prayed and hoped for as a content market, like your day has come.

John Jantsch (12:07.842)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:13.964)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:26.35)

Yeah

Todd Sawicki (12:26.716)

Producing great content is a payoff and it’s happening. And I think that’s really fascinating here, which is people are like, with the rise of AI Slop, no, the models want good content and they’re good at deducing what is good content. AI Slop will not get ranked and you have to, they want authoritative information. And so that’s content that will get ranked in AI search and then drive traffic today and tomorrow, agentic purchases, right? You’re ultimately trying to drive some of that conversion more and more that AI will be driving that itself. Like Perplexity’s browser will load a cart for you today.

Right, it’s loading products it’s picking on your behalf into that. So that future is coming fast and furiously. And so I think that change is sort of fascinating to see when you look at what’s happening. Now, the other stat about what’s really fascinating here is, okay, what if I don’t have been produced 10 years of content, am I screwed? Well, one of the other facts that we’ve seen is that the average age of a cited piece of content

is only 86 days old in AI search. And that’s falling 10 to 15 % quarter per quarter. Now there’s a caveat there, which is it doesn’t have to be originally published, it just has to be updated. Like the AI will look at content that’s older, but as long as it’s been updated, and you note that that updated date, it will value that as well. And so and that 86 days is falling 10 to 15 % every quarter. So today it’s 86 days, next quarter is gonna be 78, 70 to the quarter after that, and see you get faster and faster.

So you’re gonna have to be doing a lot more work around content, maintaining it, updating it. It’s not a publish once and walk away model anymore. It’s gonna be a constant refresh. And so, the good side of that is you’re just starting out. We’ve definitely seen this with people where you can impact the results well within a 90 day window where traditional search that was almost impossible. And so there’s a definitely, don’t wait, get started. Hire John and his team.

John Jantsch (14:12.504)

But again, yeah, well, but I was also going to say that another best practice for years has been repurpose your content. And so, I mean, I now it’s like repurpose your content in a specific way, you know, add FAQs, you know, to that content, right? But, but I think that’s what you’re saying is should be very helpful for those people that just kind of wrote the hundred one off blog posts. It’s like, no, now go back and make that pay. Let’s talk specifically.

Todd Sawicki (14:28.146)

Correct. Right.

Todd Sawicki (14:39.94)

Exactly, exactly. It’s fascinating to kind of, you know, watch that all happen and come to fruition.

John Jantsch (14:42.742)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk specifically about gumshoe. I know that’s what you want to talk about. But first off, I have an account. I’ve played with it and it is in seemingly incredibly complex what you’ve built. And so my first question is, my first question is, where did that come from? Are you a mad scientist or did you hire people or how did you develop that? Because

Todd Sawicki (15:02.844)

Well, thank you.

Todd Sawicki (15:10.77)

So we have a team, right? We have a team. I’ve been in digital marketing tech for 20 years in my career and got involved in, and really the common theme has been around customer acquisition as it turns out. And I even view the purpose, we only care about AI search as marketers, ultimately because it can drive business, right? It’ll drive traffic and revenue, right? So fundamentally it’s a, and so I 20 years ago got involved in toolbars and search. Then I got into the social marketing landscape, just as that was taking off like 2007 to,

John Jantsch (15:28.334)

That’s right. That’s right.

Todd Sawicki (15:39.986)

to 2012 and then got into paid and built a DSP. So in the programmatic space and then was playing in ecommerce and Shopify’s ecosystem, you building customer acquisition apps in there and then ultimately transition here. And it was sort of the space of a year ago was talking to marketers. And again, the beginning of this conversation around AI search and the rise of that. And if you’re a marketer, and suddenly the channel you’re relying on Google search falls off a cliff. for some key keywords, I heard

30 60, even 90 % declines in traffic, even on the paid side. Like it just Google is sacrificing even paid traffic and on some keywords. So that’s an existential change in the landscape. And then as we started thinking about this in terms of working with marketers, you’re like, well, you know, to what I said earlier, gumshoe helps brands understand what elements think about them. And then what to do about it. Well, that where does that come from? Well, if you’re a marketer, you can’t just log into chat tpt and find out what it’s saying to you because

John Jantsch (16:12.813)

Mm.

Todd Sawicki (16:37.508)

as you I don’t know if any everyone should go watch the season premiere this fall’s episode from Boulder natives, you know, the creators of South Park, the first episode this year, the main one of the main characters dads is like falling in love with chat tbt because all it does is flatter him. And it says like every idea he has is wonderful. And it’s a great and he’s got some he’s trying to start a new business. And his wife gets all pissed off because he’s constantly going to ask chat tbt and says see I’m right, you know,

John Jantsch (16:54.285)

Right.

Todd Sawicki (17:05.426)

his wife’s name is Sharon, see I’m white Sharon, chat TBT says I’m right. And he’s like, No, it just says that to everybody. And so as a marketer, you you can’t just log in and ask chat TBT what it thinks about your business, because it’s going to kind of lie, it’s going to flatter you, it’s going to say the most optimal thing it can because it by the way, the minute you put your email in, it looks you up on LinkedIn, it knows it knows where you work, it knows your products, it’s no it knows how to answer things. And so then you realize as a marketer, I don’t care what LM say to me, I say, I care what it says to my target customers.

John Jantsch (17:17.666)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (17:31.832)

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (17:34.01)

And so the way that we built our product was around how do you help marketers understand what it’s really saying to its customers? And so our point of view as well, how do we get in the shoes of that customer? And so what we do is we build these personas which become synthetic users. right, so those are what are asking prompts in the models. We have a better understanding of how they, how will they talk to, how the models speak to these different, different customers and those insights of like, okay, here’s how it, and by the way, the variety of answers between one type of

persona and another is fascinating. And they’re absolutely customizing their answers. Like, John, you’ve seen this, right? Just one customer will say, like, just imagine you’re a hiker, you’re going to get a different answer for the pair of shoes than if you’re a marathon runner. And so that makes rational sense as a marketer kind of understanding this nuance and how it’s treating different types of end users using AI search is sort of a fascinating insight. And it’s cool just to look at the answers and see what they say to different things. So that’s my point about marketers and the messaging and seeing how it talks to different people.

John Jantsch (18:06.594)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:31.374)

One of my first observations that kind of blew me away frankly was I just put in a company’s URL, I think is all I did. yeah, and it came up with, I want to say eight, maybe it was a little more than that personas. And they were, we had already done that work, but they were very spot on, maybe even a little better descriptions. And what I found was interesting was it actually,

Todd Sawicki (18:39.324)

Correct, that’s what you start with. You start with the URL, correct.

John Jantsch (19:00.342)

All the analytics and search was great, but we actually got some messaging ideas just from that part of it, and that wasn’t even the intent.

Todd Sawicki (19:10.652)

Well, and that’s what I mean about it. you know, it’s, was talking with a head of product marketing earlier today, and I’m like, this is product marketing’s moment, because AI search is fundamentally a product marketing exercise. And it’s a positioning exercise. And when you read those prompts and answers, we hear that all the time, because what we help you on what we ask questions and basically ask questions around product areas for your business. And those will give you a set of responses like, we recommend these three companies or these eight companies or these five. And then you see the rationale for those

recommendations. And that’s great marketing, right at feedback. It’s it’s what’s our positioning, what’s our competitive positioning, you show this to any product market, like, oh, my god, this is like my competitive messaging framework, which you’d by the way, what you describe john a itself serve, can do this yourself, anyone can enter a URL of a company to get this. And in like 10 to 15 minutes, you’re walking away with a really cool understanding of your products position in the marketplace, at least the marketplace of AI search, which is meant to be a broader perspective of the world, obviously.

But it’s no, hear this all the time. It’s fascinating. Like it is a total rabbit hole for anyone who cares about commutative or comparative messaging.

John Jantsch (20:13.742)

Yeah. So the other observation is that, you know, lot of people that are talking about losing search traffic, it’s for, let’s say I’m a remodeling contractor. It’s they’re losing traffic for trends in kitchens, right? Which was not somebody that was going to buy anything, right? They’re losing a lot of that traffic because they’d written a great trend article for 2025, right?

Todd Sawicki (20:37.138)

Correct.

John Jantsch (20:38.37)

But that was not going to ever convert. But what’s interesting from what you’re unearthing is you’re unearthing all these really high intent searches. I mean, the search string is such that it’s like, yeah, that person’s looking to remodel their kitchen. And I think that that’s what marketers need to really focus on is that, forget about the, I mean, we do still have to do a lot of things to create awareness. But what we really need to focus on is high intent right now and capturing that search.

Todd Sawicki (21:07.138)

That is absolutely, I think a change, which is you’re going to go a little bit more down funnel. And you because you I think you can with AI search problem with Google is all those searches were so high level and so generic. It was hard to, to you’re right, the lack of long detailed searches in Google meant it was hard as a market, you couldn’t really target that sort of bottom of funnel activity. But AI is kind of all about that. And even if you ask a generic question, AI will follow it up with a more specific like they want to, they want to know which direction they need to go. There’s a back and forth that never existed in Google search.

John Jantsch (21:16.962)

Yeah, right.

Todd Sawicki (21:35.878)

that absolutely exists in AI. And you anyone who’s experienced this, when you go to the models, it’ll it’ll ask for follow ups, it’ll clarify things, it’ll make sure it understands what you’re talking about. So that it’s its goal is to give you the very best answer possible.

John Jantsch (21:41.932)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:48.686)

Yeah, it wouldn’t have been great. You go to Google and say, no, that answer was wrong. Fix it, right?

Todd Sawicki (21:52.324)

Exactly, we all wish we could like that search, you’ll get some results. You’re like, that is a terrible right link. And now with all the like the amount of Google searches that are so link baited to death. I love to get the analogy of in a lot, you know, I said earlier, the AI search is fixing a lot of things wrong with traditional search, like how many times in our lives like you bought like a new TV, and I just need to know the damn matter the width of it. So will it fit on my mantle or not? And you do a search and like you get every link is 10 best this or 10 best that or trends of

hot TVs this Christmas like I just need the dang measurement. Come on, Google.

John Jantsch (22:23.854)

or a link to Amazon that’s not even a TV. Those are my favorite. So I’m sorry, we got geeking out here on like all the under the hood stuff. And I’d love it you could just like give us the two minutes feel what is gumshoe? How you know, how does it work? How does somebody try it out?

Todd Sawicki (22:28.187)

Right!

Todd Sawicki (22:42.556)

So at any market, it’s a publicly available and you can try it out for free. It is, you can generate a report about your company. You go to it, as John said, you’re going to enter your company’s URL. And then from there, what we’re gonna do is again, show you what LMS think about your business and product. You’re gonna select a product that’ll generate personas and then we’ll generate the prompts that represent the activity that users are having with AI. And then…

run a series of real-time conversations, we turn those personas effectively into synthetic users. That’s kind of a buzzy word. Synthetic is the ultimate now AI buzzword. It’s a simulated user, it’s a synthetic user. And then that user will, yeah, exactly. It’s better than that. We’ll have a series of conversations with the LLMs. We kind of create those and then we analyze the chat activity and kind of package that up in a way so that you can help identify areas, topics of these types of prompts where you’re doing well or you’re doing poorly.

John Jantsch (23:14.648)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (23:18.83)

It’s better than bot though, isn’t it?

Todd Sawicki (23:38.736)

And then the next step is we also allow you to sort of then generate the content based upon, you know, where your strengths and weaknesses are that through our platform that you can then host on your site. And the way to think of it is, is your personas are your predicted customers, who the elements think are your top customers, and then they want instructions, the content you generate is intended to be or write on your own, is intended to be the instruction set back to the models. Okay, for these customers, here’s the features and benefits that we believe appeal to them and why they want to pick our products.

And ultimately, that’s going to send traffic back to your site. And then can help analyze that to understand was it good traffic, bad traffic, what have you. And so the goal of our point of view is to say, again, how do we help you understand what I’m thinking about you and then what to do about it, right? You’re ultimately how do you capture as much revenue or as much referral traffic as possible from the LLMs. And so that’s the way Gumshoe works. You can go to gumshoe.ai. They said you just start with the URL. And in 10 to 15 minutes, you’re going to walk away with sort of insights about what you can do. there’s, again, you don’t need an inter credit card that’s just freely available. Everyone can create an account. And then

The way we work is it’s not a subscription based a time based. If you want to rerun a report, you want to run it again, like in a weekly or monthly basis, kind of track how you’re doing, you would then sign up to pay an ongoing basis. And so it’s just based upon how often you want to sort of leverage the platform and use it. That’s the model. So feel free once you generate a report, whether it’s a free one or a paid one down the road, it’s available to you for as long as we’re around as a company.

John Jantsch (25:03.266)

Yeah. And one of the things that I failed to mention, you didn’t mention either is I thought does a really good job at, at, identifying competitors, as well. Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (25:12.466)

Correct, because what we’ll do is in those answers, we’re going to get multiple companies products recommendations and we surface that to know your competitive great great point, John, you know, your competitive standing, our competitors doing better or worse than you in AI. And that’s obviously often a key indicator. And then we’ll help you analyze where they did better versus you. So you know, what’s your point about messaging, right? And the product messaging, like what features of a competitor are winning versus ours?

where is their positioning better? Is it something else? Or and that’s sort of a great insight is where all the other companies getting mentioned alongside you, and then we’ll help you identify also, what were the reasons like what led to the models answering the way they did? Like what citations and sources so if you want to do outreach from a PR standpoint, you can we help you identify the places you should be going and talking to, or even read our core threads you should be posting on. We now have a feature where we’ll we’ll give you a draft post for Reddit and Cora.

John Jantsch (25:49.816)

Yeah.

Todd Sawicki (26:05.498)

Again, but it’s based upon, you know, strengths and weaknesses that we identified and said, here’s the things you should be talking about more to help you get more visibility to AI. And so that’s sort of the goal here is how do we help you talk back to AI. So you’re feeding it the features and benefits of your products. So they’ll talk about your products next time instead of someone else’s.

John Jantsch (26:26.878)

I’m sorry to sound like an ad for, for gum shoe, but you know, we actually took a lot of this long tail searches and built some ad campaigns around, around them as well.

Todd Sawicki (26:35.792)

We have heard that because the persona piece is great for that, like audience targeting and things like that. No, no, we’ve absolutely heard that, that there’s some interesting crossovers about this. Once you realize it’s messaging based, there’s a ton of things you can do with this data. It’s really, I’m not kidding about being a rabbit hole. Like you start reading the chats that we generate and surface. just, it becomes, it’s really fascinating to kind of see what’s being said in a way that you only ever got through focus groups or weird surveys before. And now and again, it like.

15 minutes, getting some really interesting insights. can then spend a lot of time diving into and learning from in a way that we just never had access to before.

John Jantsch (27:10.99)

Well, we’ve gone over time. appreciate you. Take it a few moments to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast is gum shoe dot AI and Todd again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Todd Sawicki (27:24.914)

Thank you very much. Appreciate the time and attention.

How to Create Exceptional Experiences

How to Create Exceptional Experiences written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:
 

Photo of Neen JamesOverview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Neen James, globally recognized leadership and customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and author of “Exceptional Experiences: Five Luxury Levers to Elevate Every Aspect of Your Business.” Neen shares how any business—regardless of size, industry, or budget—can create extraordinary, memorable customer experiences by leveraging attention, intentionality, and five key “luxury levers.” From the power of origin stories to practical experience audits, Neen unpacks how luxury is a feeling, not a price tag—and why making people feel seen, heard, and valued is the greatest differentiator in a world full of automation and noise.

About the Guest

Neen James is a leadership and customer experience expert, keynote speaker, and author known for helping Fortune 500s and fast-growth businesses turn ordinary interactions into extraordinary results. Her frameworks focus on attention, intentionality, and leveraging luxury “levers” to make brands more memorable, profitable, and impactful.

Actionable Insights

  • Luxury isn’t about price or exclusivity—it’s about how you make people feel; exceptional experiences are defined as high quality, long lasting, unique, authentic, and (sometimes) indulgent.
  • Any business can use the five luxury levers—Attention, Anticipation, Personalization, Generosity, and Gratitude—to elevate customer experiences.
  • Attention is about presence, storytelling, and meaningful origin stories, not just being loud; collaborations and origin stories are powerful ways to capture mindshare.
  • Anticipation is the hallmark of luxury: Think like a concierge, not a bellhop—anticipate client needs before they ask.
  • Personalization and customization are rooted in genuine curiosity and fascination with your customers—capture details and use them to create more tailored experiences.
  • Engage all five senses—luxury is often subtle, seamless, and easy; even digital businesses can use the language of the senses to stand out.
  • Experience audits (and mystery shopping) are practical ways to spot where your business falls short of luxury and to inspire your team to elevate every touchpoint.
  • In an automated world, human touches—like handwritten notes, personalized videos, or exclusive small events—are more valuable and memorable than ever.
  • Differentiation often comes from surprising luxury in unexpected places—when you deliver above-and-beyond experiences where clients least expect it.
  • Start small: Engage the senses, be truly present, and look for one way to add delight, anticipation, or a personal touch in the next 30 days.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:17 – Redefining “Luxury” for Every Business
    Why luxury is both inclusive and exclusive—and always about feelings, not price.
  • 03:47 – What Does Luxury Really Mean?
    The five universal qualities: high quality, long lasting, unique, authentic, indulgent.
  • 04:36 – The Five Luxury Levers Explained
    From attention to advocacy, Neen’s elevation model for mindshare and market share.
  • 06:32 – Capturing Attention Through Origin Stories and Collaboration
    Why being present, telling powerful stories, and creative partnerships win in a noisy world.
  • 08:54 – Anticipation as the Hallmark of Luxury
    Learning from the concierge: how to anticipate needs and create wow moments.
  • 12:13 – Experience Audits and Mystery Shopping
    Practical ways to spot and fix gaps in your customer journey.
  • 15:48 – The Power of the Five Senses
    How fragrance, tactile experiences, and even digital “sense” can elevate your brand.
  • 17:37 – Human Touch in an Automated World
    Handwritten notes, personalized videos, and thoughtful gifts drive real connection.
  • 21:21 – Differentiation Through Unexpected Luxury
    Why luxury in “ordinary” businesses creates the most powerful word-of-mouth.

Insights

“Luxury is about making people feel seen, heard, and valued—no matter the price tag.”

“Anticipation is what sets luxury apart; be curious, ask questions, and solve needs before they’re spoken.”

“Engage the senses—luxury is as much about ease, atmosphere, and emotion as it is about products.”

“In a digital and automated world, human touches and surprise-and-delight moments are your top differentiators.”

“Start small: pick one luxury lever and look for ways to add a personal or sensory touch to your next customer interaction.”

John Jantsch (00:01.464)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Neen James. She is a globally recognized leadership and customer experience expert, sought after keynote speaker and author. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies and fast growth businesses alike, helping them turn ordinary interactions into extraordinary results with a focus on…

Neen (00:06.681)

is today is Neen James. She’s a globally.

Neen (00:14.203)

keynote speaker and author. She has worked with Fortune 500 companies and fast growth businesses alike, helping them turn ordinary interactions into extraordinary results with a focus on attention, intentionality, and luxury levers that we’re going talk about today. She’s passionate about making businesses more memorable, profitable, and impactful. And we are going to unpack her latest book, Exceptional Experiences by Luxury Levers to Elevate

John Jantsch (00:26.592)

attention, intentionality, and luxury levers that we’re going to talk about today. he’s passionate about making businesses more memorable, profitable, and impactful. And we are going to unpack her latest book, Exceptional Experiences, Five Luxury Levers to Elevate Every Aspect of Your Business. So Neen, welcome back.

Neen (00:44.571)

of your business, Dean, welcome back. G’day, what a treat it is to be back with you. It’s been a minute since we got to play like this.

John Jantsch (00:52.682)

That’s right. So you we need to start here, I think, because you kind of opened the book by saying, OK, let’s talk about this word luxury, what it actually is. Right. Because I think we think Ritz Carlton, we think Rolex, we think Mercedes, whatever. I’m not sure those are the most luxurious brands, but you get the point that that’s how people think. So if I’m an accounting firm or I’m a remodeling contractor, like what does luxury have to do with me?

Neen (01:00.303)

Mm-hmm.

Neen (01:04.705)

Sure.

Neen (01:17.485)

Yeah, think luxury is a divisive word, John. I think to your point, some people think it’s expensive or it’s elitist or it’s unapproachable. And yet I’m on this mission to really reframe and change the narrative around that. It’s my belief that luxury is both inclusive and exclusive. So inclusive, John, meaning I think luxury is for everyone every day. It’s just that our definitions of luxury are different. We can get into that.

John Jantsch (01:20.492)

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:24.439)

Right.

Neen (01:45.339)

But I think it’s exclusive because we all have the privilege of being able to roll out a red carpet experience for our clients, for our team members. And so if you look at my body of work, you mentioned intentionality and attention. So if you think back through the books that I’ve already written, folding time, I said to the world, you can’t manage time, but you can manage your attention. And then I published Attention Pays, where I said it’s really intention that makes our attention valuable.

And I had shared that attention’s about connection, right? And I see my new book, Exceptional Experiences, as the evolution of all of those things, because what I believe is that it’s really luxury is about the human connection, and now more than ever before in our digital AI world, John, I think we’re all craving that human connection. So really to me, luxury, what it means to me and what it means to you could be different. And so what I did was a research study on that.

very topic. So even luxury as a word, John, it is one that we all need to kind of think about what it means to us personally and what it means to brands.

John Jantsch (02:43.382)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:52.174)

Yeah, and I think a lot of people jump immediately to, you know, gold plating or something. mean, you know, like the tangible things, right, of luxury. And I think I may have read this actually in your work. It’s really more, luxury is more of a feeling or how you make somebody feel, right? Or how whatever the product or purchasing the product makes you feel. And I think that that’s probably the, I mean, should we even say luxurious? Does that sound more like a feeling?

Neen (02:56.951)

Sure. Mm-hmm.

in your work. It’s really more…

Neen (03:07.803)

Right. Yes.

Neen (03:16.635)

Should we even say luxurious? that sound more like a feeling? Yeah, and I think it is. But John, think too what makes you feel special and feels like luxurious to you could be different to someone else. But we all have this power. have this power to create these experiences for others, which is why the book has been called exceptional experiences, because I think one of the things that I did when I did this proprietary research study, the only one of its kind in the world.

John Jantsch (03:29.678)

I assure you it is. I assure you it is.

Neen (03:47.131)

While people have different versions of what luxury is, they have different mindsets, What they all agreed was that luxury could be defined as high quality, long lasting, unique, authentic and indulgent. Now, indulgent is the word that most people will be like, you know, some people are like, I don’t know if that’s me, but think about all the other four words, John. They could apply to leadership.

John Jantsch (03:53.55)

Mm-hmm.

Neen (04:14.863)

High quality, long lasting, authentic and unique. And so that’s truly how luxury is defined. So then what we do is we take it a step further and say, well, what does luxury mean for you? And that could be different.

John Jantsch (04:26.73)

Yeah. So, so also in the subtitle, five luxury levers, attention, anticipation, personalization, generosity, gratitude. Did I get that right?

Neen (04:28.077)

So also at the summer.

Neen (04:36.771)

Yeah, so we have taken these five luxury levers and what we’ve said is because of all the consulting that I do with global brands, whether it’s as a keynote or whether I’m confident to the CEOs working with their teams, what I realized was this experience elevation model, which is the framework is inside the book. You can all see that in the book is what I realized is.

My CEOs are measured on two things. And so are so many of the small businesses listening to this or the marketing professionals. And that is they’re measured on mind share and market share. The model has been designed so that you do everything from capturing the attention of the clients you want to work with, right? Which as marketers, we always were in the attention business, right? How do we capture the attention? And so that is really top of mind. How do you really grab that mind share all the way through to the pinnacle of the model is how do you create

advocates of those same people, which is really about driving revenue, which is about market share. So if you think top of mind, top of market, what my experience elevation model does inside the book, it’s just a framework that anyone can apply as you entice people to do business with you and invite them into your community. You get them excited about what you’re offering and then delight them with all the different ways you can do that. So you ignite them to be advocates. That’s the five luxury levers.

John Jantsch (05:56.654)

All right, so let’s unpack them, each of the words, can we? And you say lever, I say lever, I don’t know.

Neen (06:01.168)

Yeah!

Let’s yeah, we can go with whatever makes you feel comfortable, but I know our listeners are probably saying, what did she say? Lever, lever. We can go with lever for today.

John Jantsch (06:10.318)

Okay, so attention is kind of a loaded word for marketers, know, right? Because it’s getting really noisy. There’s so many distractions because everybody’s trying to get our attention. So what are some practical ways that attention is more about being present rather than being loud?

Neen (06:16.248)

Mm-hmm.

Neen (06:22.046)

So noisy.

Neen (06:32.634)

Mm hmm. It is. I mean, John, think about it as marketers, we’re brilliant storytellers. But what I think we need to do is, and while the book does mention storytelling as a system of elevation, of course, because we need to be able to tell stories. One of the stories that can really capture people’s attention is origin stories.

If you look to luxury brands like Chanel, if you’ve even walked into a Chanel makeup counter in your department store, every product, every piece of merchandise, every name is associated with Coco herself. And as the sales associate explains the name of that lipstick and why it is the way it is and that the merchandise has been designed like the staircase in her apartment in Paris.

All of a sudden as a consumer, you’re like, I need that lipstick because I want to be closer to Chanel. So when it comes to attention, it’s not just about storytelling. It’s also about the origin story so that people get to understand why you as the small business owner, why you as the marketer are so passionate. But another system and a practical thing we talk about here as far as capturing attention, John, is being more collaborative and being very creative. Billy Carl-Samuel, one of my favorite champagne houses.

They partnered with Hansman Seville Rowe, a bespoke suit tailor. Now, what do those two businesses have in common? Well, they share the same kind of clients, but what they were able to do was to create a tweed that was based on champagne. The white flowers, the white foam of champagne, the steel vats with the silver, the green leaves of the vines. And so they created a tweed based on their partnership that they then sold to their clients.

So understanding that if we want to capture attention now, John, we have to do it in more creative ways through the origin stories, through the collaborations we have. But being present for some of us in the most practical sense is sometimes just putting our phone down. Sometimes it’s just actually looking at the person and saying hello and making them feel seen and heard. That’s a very easy way for all of us, no matter what business we’re in, to be more present.

John Jantsch (08:39.624)

I want to go to another one and we don’t have to unpack all five of these, but one that I thought was kind of curious or I’m curious about was anticipation as the hallmark of luxury. Can you maybe use an example of that one? Because the book is loaded with case studies.

Neen (08:54.679)

Yeah, I love this. Yes. When you think about it, the luxury lever, to use your word, of delight is, know, how do we anticipate needs that people don’t even know they have? And let’s think about this. If you, think too often as marketers, as small businesses, as managers of businesses, we act like the bellhop. And a bellhop in a hotel is vital. They move the bags quickly through the hotel lobby and up to your room and efficiency is key and it’s very transactional for them, right?

But if you think about it, we don’t want to think like a bellhop. We want to think like a concierge. Because a concierge, John, they’re the most well-known revered position in a hotel. They’re the go-to person, which is what we want to be as a small business or a marketer, right? And what they do is they get us that ticket to that particular concert or that table. We couldn’t get that reservation, but here’s how a concierge is different. A concierge anticipates needs we didn’t even know we had.

They make suggestions in our community or in the hotel or things we didn’t even know we wanted. But what that requires is a fascination. Luxury brands are genius at personalization and customization. Personalization is really about information and as marketers we have a lot of information data points. Customization is about connection. How do you connect in a deeper way to the clients who already love you or want to do business with you?

But I think it is fascination that requires that anticipation. We have to be so curious about the people we want to serve, John, that we ask the extra questions, that we get to give them our undivided attention. So personalization, customization, fascination, this anticipation, we need to have systems in place to do that. We need to teach our team to be more curious.

to spend more time, to capture those data points so we can use it in our conversations later. It might be the simplicity of a newsletter that you have and actually using the person’s name and capturing their first name in your sign up form so that that’s the simplest, easiest way and get it right so the spelling is correct. But let’s like.

Neen (11:06.337)

simplest form, we love the sound of our own name, John. You know, if you go into your coffee shop and they know your name or your favorite restaurant, you just smile a little bigger because someone saw you. That’s what anticipation is.

John Jantsch (11:25.826)

You know, it’s funny. mean, some of this is right out of, some ways is right out of how to win friends and influence people, right? It’s some of the…

Neen (11:32.883)

Dale Carnegie said it himself in the early 1900s when he wrote that book he says a person’s name is the sweetest sound and he was right back then and it’s as right today as it was back then because but the stealth message don’t tell anyone but the real message of this book John is how do you make people feel seen heard and valued luxury brands do that so so well my whole body of work is about how do you create these moments that matter for people

And he had it right when he wrote that book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And we all crave that.

John Jantsch (12:13.41)

You talk about something, because I’m sure there’s some people that are starting to say, okay, this is great. Like, how do we start kind of thinking this way or bringing this around? You talk about something you call experience audits. You want to kind of walk us through that?

Neen (12:16.795)

There’s some people that starting to say, okay, this is great. Like how do we start?

something you call experience on it. Can you walk us through that? Yeah.

It doesn’t matter, you don’t have to have a luxury product to provide a luxury level of service, right? So you could be running a mechanic shop. I use the same consulting model when I’m working with the emergency rooms for some of my hospital clients. So you can apply these five luxury levers at any business. It’s really about finding the system of elevation that makes the most sense for you and what you’re trying to achieve. But an easy experience audit is maybe you could even find out what the luxury points are not.

doesn’t feel like luxury in your business if there’s too many forms to fill out, if the lines are too long, if there’s weeds in your garden, if there’s dusty old magazines in your reception area. It’s very easy to see and look around what’s not luxury, John. That’s a really easy starting point. I do encourage businesses, regardless of what type of business you have, to if you want to upskill your team to provide a more luxury level of service,

Send them to a hotel lobby, give them a budget, get them to order a coffee and sit and observe what’s going on. Do they notice the way the staff move, they dress, they speak, the sounds, the smells, the touch points, the service they receive? Allow your team members to enjoy some luxury so they understand it and then get them to come back and debrief it with the team. What did they see, hear, smell, touch?

Neen (13:48.74)

What was all of the senses that were engaged in that experience so they can do an audit out into the world as well? I also really encourage my teams, the clients I work with to mystery shop, to mystery shop, have someone mystery shop their business. Now this is an old technique yet it’s still valid for today, right? Mystery shop your competitors, mystery shop, have someone mystery shop your business and then do a bit of a readout so the team get to hear.

This was their experience. There’s so many ways you can do an experience audit.

John Jantsch (14:21.218)

You know, it’s funny, when I think back in hindsight, some of the best experiences, luxury experiences I’ve had, wasn’t, the place wasn’t trying to be that. They weren’t trying to put that on as like, we’re very, like you said, exclusive. They just did everything. In some ways you don’t notice luxury, right?

Neen (14:26.485)

experiences I’ve had. wasn’t, the place wasn’t.

Neen (14:39.684)

Yes, and it’s easy because one of the things that often is associated with luxury is ease. The Ritz has a, they have a preference that you only ever enter your information once. Now let’s think about this. Like I was at a hotel this week. I mean, I travel for a living. That’s my job. Some people drive, I fly. It’s the same thing.

It’s just different form of commute. So I stay in a lot of hotels and every time I open my computer I had to add my hotel room and my name for the Wi-Fi I mean multiple times think of how often we open and close that computer and so the Ritz has got it right because they’re like Let’s just enter your information once so now the system says I see you. Mr. Jance I’m so glad that you’re back with us and then that’s all you have to do. So sometimes luxury is ease How do we make it really easy for people to do business with us?

John Jantsch (15:08.419)

Yes.

John Jantsch (15:28.012)

Yeah. So, all right. If you were going to, I loved, I love doing this to people that write books and they have like five key things or seven key things. And I asked them to pick the fit, not only their favorite, but like if somebody came to you and they probably do this at the end of a talk, right? Okay. That’s all great, Neen. But like, what’s the one thing I need to focus on like for the next 30 days, what would you tell them?

Neen (15:41.532)

If somebody came to you…

Neen (15:48.419)

Yeah!

can tell you what my favorite thing is that often gets overlooked. And that is how do you really engage the five senses? Because John, we all know this, especially as marketers, that our sense of smell gives us a deeper emotional connection to a brand. We can smell a meal or a fragrance from someone who’s important to us and all of a sudden we’re transported back.

Look at something like the Addition Hotels. They have a signature fragrance. If I walk into the Tampa Addition, the Madrid Addition, or the New York Addition Hotel, every time I know exactly where I am because they have a signature scent. I would invite people that regardless of what business you’re in, how do you engage the five senses? And if you’re a digital business, if everything’s 100 % online, think about how you’re using the language of sight and smell and touch.

And think about how do you elevate that? Look at Ikea. 60 % of the purchases at Ikea are unplanned. Why? Because they deliberately appeal to all five senses. You smell the meatballs, you walk through the store, you touch the fabrics, you build it yourself. And then $500 later that you didn’t even know you needed to spend, you’ve got a whole lot of to-do list items because you’ve been shopping at Ikea. They’re geniuses at this. So I would say to people, start.

with thinking how do we engage the senses in the lobby, the reception, the collaterals, all of those things.

John Jantsch (17:14.83)

I was going to ask you, not just digital businesses, mean, every type of business is using more automation. We’re using AI. We’re becoming more efficient. We’re in some ways distancing the customer. How do you take advantage of the fact that I think people are craving that more because they’re losing it?

Neen (17:17.884)

I mean, every type of business is using more automation. We’re using AI. We’re becoming more efficient.

Neen (17:31.621)

take it.

Neen (17:37.966)

Because I do things like I still write handwritten notes. I’m a big fan of a handwritten note. And so that’s an easy way to say to a client, we really appreciate doing business with you. And it costs me a stamp and two minutes of my time. I’m also a fan of sending like what I call lumpy mail. So like actual packages in the post so that someone opens it. Because if you get your mail at the end of the day, I don’t know about you, but all the white envelopes generally equal some sort of bill or invoice. So if I get something that feels like a present.

John Jantsch (17:41.837)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:55.074)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:05.878)

or no, it’s a credit card application. It’s what it is. Yeah.

Neen (18:07.708)

It’s awesome. Okay, a credit card. There you go. There you go. So I think what we need to think about is how do we bring the human connection back into those opportunities? How about instead of just sending an email, what if you got out your cell phone and you shot a short video and sent a text message and said, I love doing business with you. By the way, we just got this new set of tires in. I think they’d be great for your car.

John Jantsch (18:23.726)

Mm-hmm.

Neen (18:32.636)

I just wanted to let you know about them. Here’s a picture of them. Send. imagine if we brought our voice, our human voice back into business through video messaging, through the text messaging, through voice notes. There’s so easy ways. It still feels like a system of elevation, but instead of just sending yet another email that’s going to land in someone’s inbox and get cluttered up by the 200 other emails they have, what if you leverage that personal touch?

That’s the type of thing. If you see something and say, Hey, I saw this and I thought of you. That’s a very easy line to say to a customer. Like I see you, I hear you. know you’re important to me. That’s why I think luxury is about human connection.

John Jantsch (19:16.204)

Yeah. And I, and I do think, I mean, I personally recognize when somebody, I mean, it’s easy to hit, like you hit, you said send, you know, to 20,000 people at once, right? That’s why it’s appealing because you can do it. But, but yeah, I was going to say, but I, I, I personally noticed when somebody does something that I know they can’t automate.

Neen (19:25.308)

Right? That’s why it’s appealing. Sure, it’s efficient, but that’s thinking like a bellhop.

I notice when somebody does that.

Yes. And it’s more obvious now, John. And so when you think about it, if you really want people to pay attention to what you’re doing, you don’t want to be like everybody else. You want to think about, for example, I use pink, my brand is pink, if people didn’t know that, and you’re listening to this, I use pink mailers for books that I send out. Does it cost a little more? Sure. But when people get it, they say, I know it was from you immediately.

John Jantsch (19:39.799)

Yeah.

Neen (20:02.33)

because there’s a consistency of the brand, right? But I still have to ship things. So I most will just choose something that feels a little bit more unique. I hand write labels so that they know that it’s my handwriting that I took the time to send it to them. That’s why I like to write a handwritten note that you can’t order. I mean, you can, that’s not true. You can automate that kind of thing now, but I feel like we have to think about, especially those top tier clients that we’re have, that we’re serving.

What is it that we’re doing for them? It could be the simplicity, John, of having a private event. Maybe, let’s say you’re working, going back to the tire shop example, you might be running a tire shop, which does not feel like luxury, but you know what you could do?

You could open a little bit earlier for your top tier clients. They could meet the mechanics. They could explain more about the tires and the wheel balancing and how you take care of them and what to do in bad weather. And all of a sudden you’re getting more of an exclusive luxury experience from your local tire dealer. It doesn’t take a lot of thought, but it does take effort.

John Jantsch (21:06.818)

Yeah, it’s also interesting. mean, you expect a luxury experience from the bespoke tailor. mean, that’s sort of like that’s the bar of entry for them, right? So imagine this business that you’re not really expecting that from. What a differentiator, right?

Neen (21:12.644)

Of course.

Neen (21:21.402)

Yes and then because it’s so differentiated, the client can’t help but tell other people. We used a Tyler for a home project many years ago. I cannot tell you how many times I have referred that Tyler. They had perfectionism like I’ve never seen before. They cleaned up. They were so lovely, so polite, well groomed and

People want that level of service from anyone who’s in their home, but this Tyler, he went above and beyond all of that. And so what I want people to think about is luxury, that connection point. What is it you could do to anticipate things? People didn’t even know they needed, therefore thinking more like a concierge. We can all do that. We just have to invest the time and energy to think about it in advance. Then you can systemize it.

John Jantsch (22:06.336)

And now we’re back to attention, aren’t we? So, Neen, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where would you invite people to connect with you? Obviously, find out about your work and your latest book.

Neen (22:08.152)

Always about attention,

Neen (22:19.328)

Neenjames.com you can find out everything there. You can also download a free self assessment to find out what your own luxury mindset is. It’ll take you less than five minutes to do it. It’s free. So go to the website Neenjames.com grab your copy of the book and download the assessment.

John Jantsch (22:33.824)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Neen (22:38.864)

I would love that. Thank you for everything you do in the world, John.

From The Vault: How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era

From The Vault: How to Stay Visible in the AI Search Era written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Episode Summary

Back from the vault! In this rerun of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I revisit a solo episode where I—John Jantsch—explore a topic that continues to reshape the foundation of online marketing: search visibility in an era dominated by AI search, zero-click results, and evolving Google behaviors.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has always been about rankings, but today that’s no longer enough. In this episode, I explain why the focus has shifted to search visibility—your brand’s presence across the entire digital ecosystem. From featured snippets and branded SERPs to Google Business profiles and authoritative content that aligns with E-E-A-T principles, visibility is about showing up where people actually find answers.

As AI overviews increasingly deliver information without clicks, your strategy must evolve beyond chasing keywords.

Key Takeaways

  • SEO is now about search visibility, not just rankings. Brands need to show up in multiple answer-delivery formats.

  • AI search and zero-click results mean most users get what they need without leaving Google, so multi-platform visibility is essential.

  • Google is now an answer engine. Structure your content to provide direct, trusted answers.

  • E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals matter more than ever.

  • Use structured content like FAQs, TL;DR summaries, and hub pages to boost your chances of surfacing in AI answers and snippets.

  • Local SEO still drives results. Treat your Google Business Profile as a publishing platform.

  • Refreshing older content improves freshness signals and knowledge graph visibility.

  • Prioritize quality, experience-driven stories, and unique insights over generic AI-generated content.

  • Don’t chase head terms. Focus instead on long-tail queries and intent-driven content formats.

Chapters:

  • 00:09 Opening
  • 00:58 Evolution of Search Engine Optimization
  • 03:01 The Current State of Search
  • 03:41 Focus on Search Visibility Instead of Rank
  • 06:13 How to Demonstrate EEAT
  • 09:04 Audit Your Content Gaps
  • 10:07 Help Pages
  • 11:46 FAQ Pages and Trust Elements
  • 13:03 Refreshing Your Content
  • 13:41 Utilize Your Google Business Page
  • 14:35 Find Out How AI Is Sourcing Information
  • 15:42 Common Mistakes

Sponsored By:

Morningmate_logoMorningmate is the all-in-one work management platform for client-facing teams.

Manage projects, chat, and files in one place—simple to use and scalable as you grow.

Get a 30-day free trial today

 

John Jantsch (00:01.506)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show. I’m going to talk about search engine optimization or as I’ve started to call it search visibility because the game has changed. Now, the first question you might be asking yourself is why is John wearing a cowboy hat? Those of you that are on the video version, I’m wearing a Stetson open road. this is the straw version in the cognac.

color is my favorite summer hat. just decided it’s Friday when I’m recording this. just decided to put it on and wear it for the show. My grandfather and father had this style hat and a number of US presidents over the years chose this as their primary hat as well. So Stetson Open Road, there you have the story. All right. As I said, I’m going to talk about search engine optimization, what we’ve always long called, not always.

Believe it or not, a 20 year history with something called search engine optimization, which is really moving completely. There’s been lots of changes over the years, different algorithms, different things, different search engines come along. But this is a fundamental shift in how that tactic or approach really is going to be applied going forward. And what what it actually is even going to mean to business and website owners going forward as well.

So I thought I would start with, before I jump into like eat and generative AI and AI overviews and things, just do like a 30 second kind of timeline on search. Well, I started actually playing around with search in 1998. And really, again, was my first website and it was, do we rank?

and get on page one, you know, what are the things we need to do? I won’t go into all what all those things were, but most of them are not relevant today. At least, you know, that was in the early days of search engines. They were little infants and they were, you know, the game was to trick them into putting your stuff on page one. That lasted till about 2010. And then, you know, the search engines just got more and more complex and more and more, you know,

John Jantsch (02:21.142)

ability to understand what a page really was about rather than what we wanted them to think it was about. And so now you start having mobile be part of the deal. You’ve got the local search packs. You’ve got answer boxes starting to show up about, you know, from 2010 to 2016, roll up to about 2017. And now all of sudden voice search is a factor featured snippets become a factor.

near me becomes a factor also searched for. So a lot of things just keep getting injected. And of course, all the while the ad units and how they display all over the page, you know, are changing as well. Kind of really shifting what even ranking, you know, on page one even meant anymore. So I guess fast forward to today, 2024 or so it happened, you know, AI overviews.

Um, SGE from Google, 60 % of, of, of us Google searches ending with no click at all, according to search engine land, uh, the, uh, the infamous zero click searches, uh, instead of, you know, a list of 10 links on a page. Um, you know, we’re now to the point where maybe you get featured as a source in an AI answer and hope that that generates a click, but,

six to seven times out of 10 today. That search is just gonna end in somebody getting the answer or getting the information that they wanted.

What I’m talking about now is this idea of a complete mindset shift away from search and optimization, away from trying to rank for keywords and more about this idea of search visibility. It’s kind of your brand’s share of the answers, the mentions, the knowledge panel, real estate, local pack slots.

John Jantsch (04:19.086)

really clicks for everywhere that, um, that, that a prospect looks, I think that’s what we have to do today. So, you know, chasing one phrase or two phrases or something. mean, it’s really going to have very, very little value. Um, unless it’s just a very high intent phrase that, uh, if somebody searches that they’re not looking for an answer, they’re looking to purchase. Um, those are really going to be the, um, you know, the, the, the highly sought after, guess, um, types of searches.

So I think instead of, of thinking now in terms of like position ranking or impressions, it’s really going to be this, this whole collection. And this is going to be hard for people to measure, but this whole collection of like branded SERP coverage, is really going to be the, you know, the, example. I use a case, a local dentist publishes like does whitening hurt. they have an FAQ short vid, TikTok video, Google business posts, a patient story.

you know, now that now they have the chance to actually own the FAQ snippet for that, maybe the local, local rank, map pack for that, maybe a YouTube carousel. mean, so that’s how I think we have to start thinking about these is, know, there’s no more. There’s no more, you know, I want to show up on for this, you know, key search is it’s how do I put myself into this idea of answers? And in fact, you know, a lot of people are actually calling,

you know, not even calling them search engines anymore. They’re really answer engines. And the consumer behavior, you know, has changed so dramatically. Search behavior has changed so dramatically. You know, we were all very conditioned to type in six, eight words for what we were looking for and then hoping or maybe refining that search if we didn’t find what we were hoping for. But now we can actually, instead of typing in, you know, plumbing contractor in my town, you know, now it’s

plumbing contractor with 24 hour service, more than 4.7 star reviews within two miles from me, whatever. mean, you can type that long search in now and you’re going to get that very specific, in most cases, you’re gonna get that very specific result returned to you that you were able to kind of custom tailor to what you wanted rather than saying, okay, Google, give me what you think I want.

John Jantsch (06:49.39)

One of the things that, and I have to set this up a little bit, that we have to start thinking about when it comes to our content, you know, writing the 101, the how to blog content. And many people are finding that they’re losing all the search traffic that used to come for that because why would they send them to your page? They can answer that very easily because it was just basic information to begin with.

you’re wasting your time. If you continue down that path of just creating the 700 words on blah, blah, blah. very generic. And the bad thing is of course AI makes that really easy to do. You can, you can spin out 10 of those a day now, without really much sweat, it’s, it’s practically useless unless you are in just such a niche category that nobody else is trying to create content around it. It’s practically worthless. So Google has this new

No, fairly new couple of years, acronym called EAT. And there’s two E’s in there. So E-E-A-T. And forgive me if you know all about this, but I’ll explain it in very basic terms for those who may not understand it. But the idea behind it is that they want to see not just expertise. That’s one of the E’s, but they want to see experience. Have you actually done what you’re talking about?

They want to see authoritativeness. That’s the, the other a, or I mean, that’s the a. So they measure that by, know, are you getting links mentioned, you know, are you in local press? I mean, are you appearing in industry lists? So they’re measuring like, are you an authority on this thing that you’re talking about? So experience, expertise, authority, and then the last one is trustworthiness. are there signals, of trust, warranties, refund policies, secure checkout badges.

real contact info. mean, all those kinds of things go into the mix as well. So what we have to do, I think, is it’s no longer enough to write this article about how to do something. You have to actually have a case study in there. You have to have examples of maybe you doing it in actual real time or behind the scenes.

John Jantsch (09:02.603)

So that it’s very clear that that you’re not just talking about this. This is something that you do. This is something you’re an expert on. This is something somebody can trust for you to do for their business.

John Jantsch (09:16.844)

So in March, 2024, I’m reading a stat here. Knowledge graph update extended each signals by 38 % to really surface credible people and brands again, according to search engine land. that certainly signals that this is not going away. I mean, that this is going to be a significant piece as well. So how do you compete in an eat world, in an AI world?

In a world where really the need for producing content is still there. mean consumers still need the information So now it’s a matter of you know, how do we how do we stay visible so that we can get them the opportunity even to get them that information? first thing is There’s five step plan here, right? Okay. Number one audit your content gaps. So

Export all of your site URLs. List the top 25 customer questions and use Google Search Console. Again, what we’re trying to do is find how can we become an answer engine? So take a lot of your content. And again, this is a place where some of the AI tools are really good at this. You’ve written good, useful content. How could it be better? How could it answer more questions? How could you add FAQs?

to the end of all of your service pages. How could you add a table of contents to your long form content? How could you add a description box? Some people call it too long, didn’t read TLDR, you’ve probably seen that. How can you add that at the top of your content so that these…

They’re not really search engine spiders, but so that the AI tools that are going out there and trying to surface good sources for content can have a very quick view of what it’s about. It gets very user friendly. It’s very structured in a way that shows kind of the hierarchical structure.

John Jantsch (11:24.718)

I have for years been talking about this thing called hub pages. Um, and the idea behind that is that if you write about, I use an example, if you’re a kitchen remodeler and you’ve got a whole bunch of blog posts about various aspects of remodeling a kitchen. Um, what if you turn that instead of just having them randomly placed on a blog, uh, out there in the ether, what if you turn that into a kitchen, uh, the ultimate guide to remodeling a kitchen and you took all of your content that you’ve written over the years.

And you placed it on that page. don’t mean physically all of it on that page, but at least structure it in such a way that somebody can jump around to how to pick countertops, how to pick cabinets, how to pick finishes, um, how to pick lighting. And then those all, uh, you know, kind of becomes a playlist for anybody who’s thinking about, uh, designing, um, or remodeling a kitchen. So we’ve been talking about that for, I would say at least eight or 10 years.

and the good news is it was a very effective SEO tactic. mean, it, as soon as we would build those for people, it would immediately change, how, how Google viewed their website, but it’s also very user friendly. Somebody comes to that hub page and they want, they are interested in information. It’s like, here’s the whole guide, you know, on what I’m trying to do rather than I just found one, you know, I went out and randomly searched and found one, one blog post on something. So the, the, you know, the,

Again, doubly good news is that those pages really are highly rewarded in an AI world as well. So think about your top three or four services, your top three or four products, your top three or four things that your company does. And think about ways that you could create a very useful guide or a hub page around those and collect it. It’s really, in some ways, it’s the same content. You’ve just structured it dramatically different. Boy.

FAQs, and again, in an answer engine world, having answers to the questions that people ask is a clearly makes a lot of sense. It’s also been a very useful piece of content anyway, but now really being rewarded in this answer engine world. So every single one of your service pages, every single one of your product pages, even your About Us page now, I think should actually, whether it’s structured as a Q &A, or just has an FAQ section,

John Jantsch (13:42.826)

at the bottom of it and you know, pay some attention to the questions you’re being asked. Again, the AI tools are pretty good at that surfacing, you know, common questions around things, but you might think in terms of even some of the questions that you’re not being asked necessarily, but you should be people should be paying attention to so you can use that as an opportunity to educate around like why you and what you know, what you do that’s different than competitors, for example, that they might not actually be asking about.

You know, monthly case studies, you know, measurable results, quotes from customers, those kind of trust elements, even, you know, badges that, that symbolize that you’re in professional organizations and things that you’ve achieved certain certifications. mean, those, you know, the more we can double down on, on just proving that we do what we say, really quite frankly, the better. and then the last piece of the puzzle is.

John Jantsch (14:43.128)

How can you keep this fresh? So, what I’m telling people, and I need to do this myself as well, is we’ve got reams and reams of content that we wrote years ago. it needs to be freshened up. In fact, about every quarter, you ought to make a goal of saying, Hey, I’ve got these five blog posts that, know, are decent blog posts. How could I freshen them up, add more links, add more experience, add more proof.

in these, maybe I can structure them, you know, with a table of contents in that TLDR, maybe I could add FAQs to them. You will be highly rewarded for for refreshing that content. And I would last thing I would say is. Start thinking, and this is particularly true for local businesses, not as much for somebody who’s really more of a national scale, but that Google business page, think of it as another

publishing platform. Now you don’t own that platform, of course, but you have a lot of leeway and how optimized it is all the photos, the videos that you can add there, all the service descriptions you can add there. And you can post there. I would be taking again, in some cases daily if you’ve got a lot of content, but certainly weekly, create a Google or post in your Google Business page that can come from

can be just a shortened version of something that you’ve written, and published, you know, years ago, but you’re giving it a new place, a new home. And again, it’s just going to add all up to the soup of, know, how you get noted or, or quoted as a valuable source. The other thing I would tell you to do is to do a bunch of searches, in some of the AI tools that there were searches you’d love to show up in, you’d love to win. Now, hopefully you show up in front of those. So.

I use my kitchen contractor, remodeling contractor. So best kitchen remodeling contractor in X city would be a link that or something that they’d want to really show up for. Right. And take note of who shows up. That’s important. But also one of the things the AI tools do is they tell you the sources that they went to, to, to make that determination. And in some cases, these are directories in some cases, you know,

John Jantsch (17:03.63)

common in the remodeling industry is one called house, that, they actually got a lot of that information from. So if you’re not participating in any of those sources or you don’t even have a listing in a directory as obscure as it may sound, there’s your checklist of some things that you probably need to add to, what you do to get in those directories or to start participating in, you know, a Quora or a Reddit or a house, dependent upon,

you know, the industry that you’re in. So, all right, a couple of common mistakes. Stop obsessing over a handful of head keywords. It just doesn’t matter anymore. Don’t write for algorithms. I think this has always been true. Think in terms of the human question behind any query that somebody is asking. We use a tool called Answer the Public. I highly recommend that you go there and…

If you’re, if you’re at a loss for what questions people are asking in your industry, that can be a great resource for that. Frankly, the AI tools are pretty good at it. They can surface what questions people are asking in, certain industries. You can’t set and forget your website. You know, if I go and I look and there’s your last blog post was 2022. We probably got some work to do. This is something that.

You just need to make it a weekly, monthly, quarterly plan that you’re going to do X, Y, and Z and just commit to doing it. don’t obsess over all the tools. mean, don’t go down the rabbit hole. mean, Structured schema is important. there are plugins that, that can actually do that. So that when you write FAQs, the, underlying code, tells Google or tells the.

Whoever’s visiting your website, this is an FAQ section. So, you know, spend some time on that part. Don’t over obsess about, you know, over engineering tools on this. So here’s what I would say. If you’ve got some ideas today, pick one. If you don’t have any FAQs, that’s where I would start. If you don’t have any case studies, I would certainly think in terms of that.

John Jantsch (19:23.666)

if you haven’t visited your Google business profile, I would highly recommend that you think in terms of your strategy there. pick, pick one of the things that, that, I mentioned here today and just start working away at it. mean, don’t, don’t listen to all the gloom and doom and look at your Google analytics and say, my traffic search your traffic’s down because

there’s a good chance that a lot of that search traffic wasn’t that meaningful. Anyway, it was somebody looking for that how to article. They were not actually looking for your product or service. So search visibility being seen where people go to get their information, being seen as an answer engine, as opposed to an information engine is how we have to change the mindset. So if you got value, hopefully you will subscribe either to the YouTube channel or to the podcast itself.

Love those reviews on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, share the interview, share this episode with, one business owner who needs a little marketing clarity, who would like a little, simple, effective and affordable, good old duct tape marketing practical advice. All right. That’s it for today. Thanks for tuning in. Hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Building a Business That Runs Without You

Building a Business That Runs Without You written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Sabrina StarlingOverview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Dr. Sabrina Starling, founder of Tap the Potential, business growth expert, and creator of the Four Week Vacation™ model. Sabrina shares her hard-won lessons on succession planning, letting go, and building a company that can truly run without you. After a personal tragedy forced her to step away for six weeks, she discovered the systems, mindsets, and leadership development needed to create a business that’s sustainable, profitable, and supports the lives of owners and teams alike. If you want your business to thrive—whether you’re present or not—this episode is packed with practical, people-focused advice.

About the Guest

Dr. Sabrina Starling is a business growth strategist, founder of Tap the Potential, and a sought-after coach, speaker, and author. Known for her expertise in people-focused systems and her signature Four Week Vacation™ approach, she helps entrepreneurs build companies that support—not consume—their lives. Sabrina’s work centers on leadership, succession planning, and sustainable, joyful business growth.

Actionable Insights

  • Mindset is 98% of the battle—most bottlenecks in business start with owners’ beliefs about what’s possible and what they “have” to do themselves.
  • Letting go can be forced by life—don’t wait for a crisis to test your business’s sustainability; plan, delegate, and build systems now.
  • True succession planning is about protecting your team and your business’s legacy, not just who “takes over” someday.
  • Simple, recurring reviews (every 1–2 years) are better than overwhelming, one-time estate planning attempts; aim for progress, not perfection.
  • Don’t assume family will want to take over—groom and empower team leaders and create buy-in/ownership options thoughtfully.
  • Delegation is a growth engine: Use the $10,000 Activity Chart to identify what only you should do and empower your team to take on the rest.
  • A Four Week Vacation is a test—and a tool—for building a business that lasts. Start with small steps, unplug for a day, then build up.
  • When you delegate, let your team own the outcome—don’t take the task back or undermine their growth.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 00:39 – The Real Bottleneck: Mindset, Not Systems
    Why “I can’t” thinking is the real block to business growth.
  • 02:57 – What Happens When You Truly Step Away?
    How a personal tragedy revealed the power of systems and team leadership.
  • 05:57 – Refocusing on Succession and Legacy
    The new lens of estate planning, sustainability, and impact after loss.
  • 09:12 – The Team-First Succession Model
    How to protect your people and business, even if family doesn’t want to take over.
  • 14:33 – Leadership Development, Not Just “Replacement”
    Why you must nurture leaders and build systems for a company to outlast its founder.
  • 17:59 – The Four Week Vacation as a Reality Test
    Why you should step away before you feel ready—and what it reveals about your business.
  • 18:39 – The $10,000 Activity Chart
    A practical tool for owners and leaders to delegate, focus, and grow.
  • 20:56 – Growth for A Players
    Why empowering your team to own projects is key to their growth and retention.

Insights

“Mindset is 98% of the issue—most bottlenecks start with owners’ beliefs, not their systems.”

“Succession planning is ultimately about protecting your people and your business’s ability to serve—not just who takes over.”

“Don’t wait for a crisis: test your systems and your team’s leadership now, not someday.”

“The Four Week Vacation is more than a dream—it’s a stress test for sustainability and a path to real freedom.”

“Empower your team, delegate for growth, and let go—your business (and your life) will thank you.”

 

Sponsored By:

Morningmate is the all-in-one work management platform for client-facing teams.

Manage projects, chat, and files in one place—simple to use and scalable as you grow.

Get a 30-day free trial today

John Jantsch (00:01.304)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance and my guest today is Dr. Sabrina Starling. She’s the founder of TAP, the potential of business growth and leadership development firms specializing in helping entrepreneurs build profitable, sustainable companies that support both their lives and the lives of their teams. Known for her work on the four week vacation model and her expertise in people-focused business systems, Dr. Sabrina is a sought after coach and speaker.

for owners ready to take their business to the next level without being the bottleneck. So Sabrina, welcome back to the show.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (00:36.692)

Thank you, John. I’m delighted to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.392)

So you work, your work primarily centers around helping business owners get out of the weeds, struggle to let go, things of that nature. Do you find, you know, I know people probably come to you and say like, what’s the hack? What’s the system? What’s the process I need to put in place? Do you find the first thing is really a mindset issue?

Dr. Sabrina Starling (00:59.124)

Mindset is 98 % of the issue, if not 100 % of the issue. And I know for myself, there’s so many ways that I have over the years held myself back, held the company back, gotten in my own way, just from the statement of, I can’t do that. That runs through my head. You know, we hear wonderful advice and ideas and strategies on podcasts like Duck Tank Marketing. And then,

For whatever reason, we’ll say, well, I can’t. And I have learned that we can do incredible things that, and we really need to shift any statement that starts with I can’t, or I don’t know how, or I don’t have the resources to what can I, what resources do I need, what support do I need, where can I learn, and just start asking those open-ended questions to create possibilities.

John Jantsch (01:55.278)

Yeah, I know. You know, I’ve been doing this for a long time and I do know that, you know, one of the things that creeps up all the time for me even this is like, well, I could do it faster myself is one. The other one sometimes is, but that’s kind of where I get like my joy or happiness, you know, even if that’s like not where I need to be. Right. mean, so sometimes it’s, I mean,

Dr. Sabrina Starling (02:12.56)

yeah.

John Jantsch (02:19.906)

Do you ever have sessions where you’re like got the couch out and it’s like, let’s visit your childhood. Cause like, are, what are some of the reasons that these exist?

Dr. Sabrina Starling (02:28.276)

You know, I don’t find it very productive to go back to childhood just because we don’t have time in life to rehash and figure out where all these issues come from. What I have found is that when our back is up against the wall, we can do things we didn’t think were possible. And especially when we have these things in our businesses that we hang on to because they’re our fun.

John Jantsch (02:31.118)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:40.066)

That’s the doctor part though, right? So I just assumed.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (02:57.462)

our joy. So for me, that was a big example of that is the Profit by Design podcast. I love hosting the podcast. I love sharing and teaching. I love interviewing guests. And then in the summer of 2024, right before I was going to take a four week vacation, fully unplugged, it was the week that I was just wrapping things up.

My husband, Ned, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. The trauma around that, can’t even, I don’t have enough background as a psychologist even to go into the level of what that did to me. All I was able to do is call one of my team members and say, don’t worry about the business. We’re going to figure it out, but I can’t be there right now. And

The beauty of that was that somebody in my family had already notified the business. So they already knew, thank goodness. And my team member said, Dr. Shabrita, don’t worry, we’ve got this. You just go do and take whatever time you need. I ended up being completely out of the business, fully out, like I couldn’t track anything for six weeks.

And that meant the podcast was just completely taken from me. And I was so relieved that it was. My team member, Melissa, stepped up and started leading the podcast. you know what? We had this whole transition plan in place where she was going to take it over and it was going to take a year and a half for us to get there. Well, this switch flipped overnight and she stepped up and took it.

And she’s done amazing things with it and our listenership has grown. We’re getting incredible feedback on it. And so, but in my head, back to the mindset issue, I had created like, this is going to be hard. And Melissa had created stuff in her head about the hosting the podcast and all the mental space that would be involved for her and why it would be hard. And all of a sudden we didn’t have an option. She just had to run with it.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (05:21.526)

and make it work.

John Jantsch (05:24.238)

Well, and I know that you have in some ways refocused your work a little bit on this idea of secession and sustainability. I think it was always about getting out of the weeds, but I think maybe it’s taken a new level of, of, of legacy and impact perhaps. and you, you, you did tell, you did share the story about your, your husband’s death off air. so again, I can’t imagine, but, talk a little bit about, you know,

Dr. Sabrina Starling (05:32.297)

Yes.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (05:36.649)

Absolutely.

John Jantsch (05:53.954)

that kind of refocus or shifted focus, I should say.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (05:57.633)

So the shift in focus that it created for me, he and I were in the midst of estate planning. Because we’re young, you don’t expect that life is going to end at this phase of, at this stage of life. And so we had postponed our estate planning for two years for various reasons. You know, we would get started and stop. No, one of the main reasons is not fun.

John Jantsch (06:12.163)

me.

John Jantsch (06:19.722)

It’s not very fun is one of the main reasons.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (06:24.842)

But one of the things that I became acutely aware of is one of the barriers for us is there were so many things that felt so complex and so many things to figure out. And so we kept postponing decisions, like we would kick that can down the road. And we’ll talk about that next month. We got too much going on this month to deal with this issue. And now that I’m on the other end of it, of feeling the pain of all of our decisions that we didn’t make,

John Jantsch (06:34.732)

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (06:54.384)

and living through it and all the complexity that has been created because we didn’t make these decisions. It’s made me highly aware of all the people in my life that I don’t want to put through that, including the business. And so I’ve really started looking at the business from the lens of if something happened to me today, what’s going to happen to the business and most importantly, what’s going to happen to my team members who put

everything they have into coming into work and serving our clients. I want them to know they still have a job, a paycheck, and that their opportunities continue to exist regardless of if I’m here or not. And because I know if they’re okay, they will take care of our clients. So I’m looking at it from the perspective of what do I need to put in place to make sure that my team is okay. And then I’m looking at it from the perspective of

You know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen 10 years from now, so I’m not doing my estate planning 10 years from now. I’m doing it based on here’s where we are right now. And if something were to happen to me this year or next year, and then I’ve got a reminder in my scheduling system every other year to prompt me to review my estate planning and the succession planning at Tap the Potential and update it. And that will be how I…

handle things just from a one to two year perspective rather than trying to figure it all out because that trying to figure it all out is too much. And I have a 19 year old and I have an 11 year old who neither of whom have any interest in owning tap the potential or running tap the potential. And so

What does that mean for my team and for the legacy that’s been created at Tap the Potential? Tap the Potential has been in existence for 20 years. We support business owners in taking their lives back from our business. We’re passionate about what we do. I don’t want that to stop if I stop for some reason, right? So how do I ensure that this operation can go on? Well, everything that I’ve been teaching

Dr. Sabrina Starling (09:12.449)

for how do you build a sustainable business that’s profitable and that can run without you applies when it comes to succession planning. Because we’re looking at how does the leadership team run the business so that my daughters could continue to own it. And we can create the opportunity for members of the team to purchase it down the road if they so chose. But even if they didn’t.

there could still be, it can still be owned by my daughters, but the business can continue to run with the leadership team and the systems that are in place.

John Jantsch (09:51.182)

I’m curious, this kind of launched you on a little bit of understanding more legal structures and financial structures and things that maybe somebody who does exit planning for a living would do?

Dr. Sabrina Starling (10:03.497)

Yes, so absolutely. It’s also led me to look at what is the most simple solution to put in place, because there’s a lot of legal complexity that could get added into this and financial complexity that a lot of small businesses just aren’t in a position to take advantage of and it wouldn’t serve them. really looking at, we know this business can run

with the leadership team running it. It has been, we have the processes, we have the systems. So what’s really the next level to get the business where if I’m gone and I’m completely out of the picture and a 19 year old and an 11 year old are owning this business, obviously with a trustee, somebody who is guiding them in the background, but ultimately they’re the owners.

What needs to happen? Well, the first thing that needs to happen is my daughters need to know the team at Tap the Potential, right? And my team needs to know them. They need to know my intent. All of that needs to be documented. The operating agreements need to be updated at Tap the Potential. That’s what my attorney is looking at right now as we speak. And so these are things that

John Jantsch (11:08.973)

Mm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (11:29.335)

can be done in any small business from the perspective of, if you, John, you have family who want to be a part of duct tape marketing and continue that legacy, but not every small business owner has that. And so.

John Jantsch (11:44.974)

Yeah, but even even up, so I will say, you know, it was not anything intentional, anything planned. You know, she came back from backpacking, you know, after college and said, I need you, do you have like some work I could do? You know, that was literally, you know, how she got into business, you know, 15 years later, 13 years later, you know, she’s the CEO. But we have, I will say we have not been intentional. It’s been, hey, I know you, you know, me, we trust each other, we’ll make it work. And it has.

But I wouldn’t suggest that that’s probably the path for everyone, is it?

Dr. Sabrina Starling (12:16.535)

If it is an opportunity and a possibility, it’s a wonderful thing. But we have so many small business owners at Tap the Potential where the business owners come to us because they’re frazzled, they’re burnt out. We support them in getting that business profitable and it can run without them. And a lot of times they’ll say, now that it’s running so smoothly, I don’t really want to sell it. I’d like to own it. I like it again. It’s fun.

John Jantsch (12:29.388)

Right.

John Jantsch (12:39.918)

I like it again.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (12:45.585)

And so great. And really that’s where I am because when I came back, I thought, you know what, I can’t run a business. don’t want, I need to sell this. I need to get out because my head is just not here. Well, so first off, when you’re grieving, you don’t make any rash decisions. So fortunately I did not act on that. I just allowed that feeling to be there.

John Jantsch (12:54.208)

Mm-hmm. Mm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (13:08.311)

And now that I’ve stepped back in and it’s, you we’re a little past a year out and I reflect on it, I’m looking at, okay, things are running really smoothly. I can do the parts that I love, which is coming on podcasts and the visibility sharing our message. And one of the things that we wanna be so intentional about it to have the potential is sharing our learning and the journey that we are on. So that’s why we’re talking in full transparency about this.

But I’ve seen so many business owners who have family members, adult children, who are maybe in the corporate world and they’re hoping to somehow lure those kids to coming in and taking a leadership role in the business. And for one reason or another, it rarely works out. The kids don’t have necessarily the same passion that we have, we who founded the business and started it.

John Jantsch (13:46.839)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (14:04.428)

But there are people on our teams who have that passion, who own our immutable laws, who bought into our vision, who help us grow that vision. And it’s a very organic process. And so really looking at how do we take what’s already strong in the business and allow that to grow and not bottleneck it by saying, I want to continue to own it.

John Jantsch (14:08.364)

Yes.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (14:33.876)

and be in it, there’s a difference, then that’s transition that I’m in. Now I’m working about 10 hours a week at the most, a lot of weeks it’s less than that, and really looking at how do I serve the business, but most importantly making sure that anything that I’m doing can run, can continue without me. So the systems are there to make it happen.

John Jantsch (15:00.301)

So.

What I’m really hearing you say a lot of times too is you’re right a lot of times the dream is like, I want my kids to take it over. But you know, really what the typical business really just needs to start actually grooming that was probably not their best word, but grooming leadership folks almost from the beginning, right? I mean, start identifying them with the idea that that however many years from now, you you’re going to need leaders if you grow, but also that’s your best bet for transitioning.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (15:31.703)

Yes, and it may not be that the leaders buy the business. A lot of times we talk business owners off the ledge. We just had a conversation in one of our small groups this past week where a business owner wanted to give ownership percentage to a member of the leadership team to kind of create a safety net there that that person is going to then take over the business and become a co-owner.

John Jantsch (15:54.646)

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (16:00.183)

A lot of times we’ve seen that go awry over the years too. And so what we have to remember is that we, the business owners have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into building these companies. And if we give someone ownership percentage and yes, they may be an incredible leader in the company and they may be doing, you know, they may have great strategic vision and being a huge support. But if we’re going to just give the ownership

what are we really doing to that A player? So right, one of the things psychologically that we have to be mindful of is that A players are intrinsically motivated. We show up, we work hard because it matters to us to do a good job. And so when we start giving bonuses or incentives financially to reward an A player who works hard, that takes away that intrinsic motivation. It can interfere.

John Jantsch (16:57.39)

Hmm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (16:58.432)

with it. And so I’m not saying don’t ever give ownership percentage to leadership team. That’s not where I’m saying I’m saying be very thoughtful and make sure there is a clear plan and way that that is going to be done. And I would really encourage looking at creating the possibility for people on the leadership team to buy into the business over time, just like you want to buy stock on the stock market into another company, create

those opportunities versus just here you go because you’ve been a wonderful team member.

John Jantsch (17:32.238)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in, in light of everything you’ve shared today, the four week vacation almost, almost feels trite. You know, because I mean, it’s like, I’m sure people that are hearing their story are like, I need to take a four week vacation. Cause who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. Right. And I know that’s something you’re known for. In a way.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (17:40.376)

you

Dr. Sabrina Starling (17:52.76)

Right.

John Jantsch (17:59.576)

Do you find that sometimes people are like, okay, yeah, that’s the goal. That’s the goal. I’m to get myself there. But you kind of explain something where maybe just do it and like rip the bandaid off. Do it even if you don’t feel ready and see what happens.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (18:13.941)

Yes, so do it and be planful. Like the worst way to do this is, know, sudden and unexpected. When we support business owners in getting to the point where the business can run four weeks without you, we say start small, start with the baby steps. So it’s not overwhelming because none of us can talk ourselves into just saying, okay, team, I’m going to be gone for four weeks. Good luck. We’re never going to do that.

John Jantsch (18:36.472)

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (18:39.767)

But if we look at what’s the longest we’ve been able to be away from the business fully unplugged and increase that. So if the longest is four hours, because let’s face it, some business owners are tied to their phone constantly feeling like they have to respond to everything. So maybe you take a full day off where you are fully unplugged and really look at what is going to fall through the cracks and

what can be delegated, what can come off my plate. We use a tool called the chart of $10,000 an hour activities. And it is an incredible delegation tool. And it really comes at things from the perspective that we’re spending the majority of our time on things that give us very little personal satisfaction and can be competently handled by another person. The statistic is that we spend 44 % of our time.

on activities that offer us little to no personal satisfaction and can be competently handled by another person. And so we want to start moving in the direction where most of our time is focused on these $10,000 an hour activities. We are doing a $10,000 an hour activity when we are working from our strengths, making everything else easier or unnecessary for ourselves or others.

That definition means that every person on the team can be doing $10,000 an hour activity. And the beauty in that is that as we start delegating and taking things off our plate, we will have leadership team members who become overwhelmed and start to burn out because everything we’re putting on them, they’re kind of just like, I can’t breathe.

John Jantsch (20:25.601)

Yes, right.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (20:28.355)

So guess what? They have to learn how to delegate too. And they pull out their chart of $10,000 an hour activities and look at what’s the highest and most valuable use of their time around the sweet spot and what drives the profit in the business and start delegating down. This, when we’re delegating down in that way, what we’re doing is we’re creating a business that is highly desirable for A players to work in because A players want one thing.

John Jantsch (20:52.621)

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (20:56.309)

opportunities for growth. Not necessarily advancement, opportunities for growth. And so when we hold on, like when I held on to the podcast hosting, I thought I was just doing it to keep my team member from being overwhelmed. She jumped in and she grew and she is so proud of what she has done with the podcast. Now I just come on, I’m kind of like a guest on my own podcast and we banter back and forth, but she’s grown.

and she owns it and she feels proud and that’s the rule of thumb around delegating is once you’ve delegated it and the person has handled it you don’t take it back because when you take it back what you’re saying is I don’t think you’re that competent like yeah you handled it in a few weeks but you can’t handle it long term and so this this chart of ten thousand dollar an hour activities you can download it at tapthepotential.com forward slash

John Jantsch (21:39.638)

Yeah, you failed, right. Right. Yeah, right.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (21:54.426)

10K. That is the baby step forward to really thinking about how do I get this business where it can run without me and it can live beyond me.

John Jantsch (22:07.522)

That’s the perfect segue because I was going to say, what’s the one simple thing you just gave it to us? It’s tapthepotential.com slash 10 K. So, Sabrina, I appreciate you stopping by, the duct tape marketing podcast. think you’d invite people to find out more at tap the potential anywhere else you want to invite people to connect with you.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (22:11.065)

You

Dr. Sabrina Starling (22:24.971)

If you love podcasts, check out the Profit by Design podcast.

John Jantsch (22:28.366)

Well, again, it was great seeing you. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Dr. Sabrina Starling (22:34.862)

Yes, thank you, John.

Why Thought Leadership is the New PR

Why Thought Leadership is the New PR written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Amy Rosenberg—seasoned PR strategist, agency founder, and author of “A Practical Guide to Public Relations for Businesses, Nonprofits, and PR Leaders.” Amy demystifies today’s PR landscape, explains why digital PR is now vital for Google and AI visibility, and shares her practical approach to integrating thought leadership, content, and social media into campaigns that actually move the needle for brands of any size.

About the Guest

Amy Rosenberg is a veteran PR strategist and agency founder with decades of experience helping organizations of all sizes build visibility, credibility, and real-world results. She is the author of two books about PR, and a go-to resource for business owners and PR professionals seeking honest, actionable guidance in a rapidly changing media landscape.

Actionable Insights

  • You don’t always need PR—start by building a solid online presence and content base before layering in media outreach.
  • Modern PR is more than press releases; it’s about thought leadership, digital media coverage, and leveraging those wins for SEO and AI search visibility.
  • High domain authority media links are essential—these are trusted by both Google and AI and provide lasting credibility.
  • Thought leadership is not just for CEOs—start with strong blog content, pitch expert articles, and build step by step.
  • Podcasts are a powerful and efficient PR channel that drive backlinks, content, and allow leaders to practice their message.
  • Social media should be systematized—pick your platforms, create rules for content sharing, and always tag media and partners.
  • PR impact can be measured: use tools like Muckrack to connect coverage with Google Analytics and tie PR wins to business goals.
  • If you’re starting from zero, a monthly blogging program is the best place to begin—then layer in PR as your strategy and resources grow.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 00:55 – Do You Really Need PR?
    Amy explains why sometimes it’s best to start with your online presence before pursuing PR.
  • 01:51 – PR and AI Search
    Why digital PR and authentic media coverage are now crucial for Google and AI visibility.
  • 03:40 – What is PR in 2025?
    Amy demystifies modern PR—from media relations to crisis comms and strategy.
  • 05:46 – PR and SEO
    How high authority media coverage drives both search and credibility.
  • 07:16 – Thought Leadership for All
    Practical steps for building authority, even if you’re not a well-known CEO.
  • 10:29 – The Power of Podcasts
    Why podcast guesting is a high-ROI PR move for content and reputation.
  • 12:49 – Social Media Systems
    How to systematize content, media tagging, and reputation management.
  • 14:29 – Measuring PR
    How to connect PR wins with analytics and business outcomes.
  • 17:39 – The Best First Step
    Amy’s advice: Start with monthly blogging, then layer in PR and keep your marketing calendar organized.

Insights

“You don’t always need PR—focus on building a solid online presence and content before going after media.”

“Authentic media coverage and thought leadership now drive both SEO and AI search visibility.”

“Podcasts are high-authority PR: great for backlinks, content, and practicing your message.”

“Systematizing your social media is key—pick platforms, create rules, and make your media wins visible.”

“You can measure PR’s impact: connect wins to real business results with analytics and clear goals.”

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John Jantsch (00:01.496)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Amy Rosenberg. She’s a seasoned PR strategist, agency founder and author with deep expertise in building visibility and credibility for organizations of all sizes. We are going to talk about her latest book, A Practical Guide to Public Relations for Businesses, Nonprofits and PR Leaders. So Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (00:28.578)

Hi, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:30.912)

So you cover a lot of ground on the book. mean, it’s something that’s called a practical guide is usually pretty broad. I mean, traditional media relations, obviously SEOs in there, AIs in there. What are the most common misconceptions basically when it comes to PR that you see businesses still having in 2025?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (00:55.96)

Well, I’m gonna laugh. If people still think that we need to do press releases, that’s like an old misconception that like people should actually be over that by now. But mainly, this is gonna be funny. You don’t always need PR. That’s kind of the thing. So here’s the thing. And that’s the whole book title, practical. We need to be practical about things. We don’t need to do everything. And sometimes we can do PR. Sometimes we can do a press release, but.

We need to kind of like think about it first and get things organized first. And actually, we need to have ideally a nice online presence first. And then we can go and do some PR. And right now, PR is actually helping with AI search. So showing up in AI. So the old story used to be, PR helps with SEO, which is showing up in Google.

John Jantsch (01:43.47)

Mm-hmm.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (01:51.544)

But now, well, we still want to show up high in Google. And we can do that through digital PR. And I can talk about how. But now, apparently, PR is very important for AI search. But of course, I’m going to have to dig into that because nobody is using that AI.

John Jantsch (02:08.066)

Well, I think there’s no question that the AI crawlers, if we’re going to call them that, are really looking at trusted media sources to get a lot of their information. there’s no mystery, I think, in why that’s become more important.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (02:26.284)

Yeah, and so it’s always been a mystery to talk about PR because it, well, it’s PR people actually like to make it very mysterious. So what I tried to do with my first book and then also now my second is to demystify it. So the first book is for PR people because I started to see a lot of them actually weren’t trained and there’s kind of a right way and a wrong way to do things. And oftentimes when we have rules,

that kind of helps us in a hard field and it kind of gives us some guidelines to stick by. But as I finished that book, I was thinking, well, this book is really possibly not helpful for business owners because, well, I’m giving a little bit too many examples that the PR people need. And so this book, like five years later, six years later, is much more streamlined, stripped down on the media relations tactics.

really actually leads with thought leadership and how thought leadership, it’s always been a part of PR, but now thought leadership is really the key to getting up higher on Google and AI.

John Jantsch (03:40.366)

All right, I want to come back to that. But I think part of the confusion is, you know, in the old days, before we had all these digital platforms, it was really more of a, it was very much a relationship game. was, know, who you knew at the publications because they were very gated. You know, how you could spin a story in a way that was meaningful to a journalist. You those were the real skills. But then all of sudden, you know,

We’ve got Facebook, or we’ve got blogs, and we’ve got Reddit, and we’ve got all these other things that essentially can be lumped into PR. I mean, how do you help people kind of say what PR actually is?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (04:19.138)

Well, good question. And I love that because it’s I do. Honestly, I kind of do want a little bit of silo or separation. We can take a PR campaign and we can transform it into content to anything. Right. But PR typically is like you’re saying the media relations aspect. But also there’s a lot of more sometimes some strategy in there.

some crisis comms, some crisis prep. So sometimes we’ll know we can pick out our negative aspects and get organized around those and then actually not necessarily spin it, but kind of look at the positive side of our negative aspects and put the stories around those.

John Jantsch (05:09.422)

So you already mentioned SEO and I’m seeing a lot of SEO folks, know, it used to just be, we could get keyword rankings by doing X, Y, and Z all day long. That’s how it worked. And I’ve seen certainly a lot of them say that’s not working so well anymore. And I see a lot of SEO people talking more about PR, not as a siloed practice, but as a part of SEO now. And then you make that case certainly in the book.

Do you have an example of where integrating SEO or really thinking like PR as a core component of SEO made a measurable difference?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (05:46.788)

Well, I feel like right now I’m the worst salesperson ever and I’m the one that will never tout my profession too much because it’s a little salesy. But a lot of SEO people have been saying that PR is the actual driver of authentic links. So here’s the thing, Google knows when you’re buying links, sometimes. So you can kind of like forget,

John Jantsch (06:06.222)

Yeah, totally.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (06:16.792)

sponsored articles sometimes, depending. And then we just need to get our clients, if we can, ourselves on high domain authority websites. And the media actually has a higher domain authority than other websites. So not only are they more credible, well, some media, more credible in the public’s eye.

they’re more credible in Google’s eyes. So if you’re showing up in Google, then ideally you would show up in an AI chat box as well. But I mean, that to me is a little nebulous. I feel like more research needs to be done on that. you don’t get, anyway, you don’t get all of those links that you don’t get to review in AI. So it’s just gonna get really much more strategic and thoughtful. And that is…

really what PR people are good at.

John Jantsch (07:16.28)

So talk a little bit more about the, the idea of thought leadership. put, know, certainly there’s, there’s certain types of businesses, certain types of industries. makes a ton of sense, know, nonprofits. certainly makes a ton of sense. Do you feel like that, that needs to be, a strategic component of just about every business? mean, not just that person that’s like, I’m, know, I’m this well-known CEO with a book and blah, blah, but just like every business almost has to have like.

their version of an influencer that is, you know, that’s seen in the media.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (07:51.788)

Yeah, it would be great if they could. let me just back up a little bit. So thought leadership, so B2B media or thought leadership type of media, that’s an easier way to do PR. It’s easier to get results for that. So often we are not looking at relationships. We are looking at streamlining. want, because we can’t make relationships with everybody. So we need to have good ways to scale our PR campaigns.

John Jantsch (08:02.926)

Mm-hmm.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (08:18.07)

And so when we’re doing thought leadership, that’s positioning a person, whether it’s an article or on the stage, we are streamlining everything because you’re getting a lot more value actually in Google’s eyes because it all ties back to, I don’t know if you know the acronym EAT, I’m gonna mess about, but that’s what thought leadership is, is EAT, which is the

John Jantsch (08:41.08)

Sure, of course.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (08:47.46)

what Google looks for. have human reviewers and they’re looking for anyone that’s writing on a topic to have experience, authority, trust, and there was another one. don’t remember. Two T’s.

John Jantsch (09:00.406)

It’s the other E, the other E they add is expertise. So it’s experience, expertise, authority, and trust. And so that’s where obviously the media plays a big role, but also being able to say, I did this thing rather than telling somebody how to do it. Case studies, things of that nature have become really.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (09:04.06)

thank you.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (09:20.374)

Yeah, and I just want to add that we don’t, we need to kind of start somewhere, right? We don’t need to start. A lot of people get really tripped up over thought leadership because first of all, I mentioned this stage. Well, a lot of my clients are shy and they are running companies, they’re CEOs and they’re busy. know, who really has time to go out and do a lot of speaking engagements, right? So sometimes we will do that, but often we start, you got to start somewhere again. So we start with

content and this is where we’re doing great blogs from the CEO and then we’re taking that and turning it into a press article and then the press Article can run ideally on a high domain authority website and then our CEO doesn’t have to go anywhere like for us We’re really all about efficiencies, too. So and I feel like my clients they don’t Maybe they don’t have time to to get on a stage or

or they don’t want to. So that’s where this kind of like practical approach to public relations comes in.

John Jantsch (10:29.518)

How do you, I’m going to go through a couple of categories or a couple of platforms, should say, or channels, maybe is a better word, and relate them to PR. You know, I, I, you know, we’re on a podcast today, recording this. I happen to think podcasts is amazing channel for thought leadership, for exposure, for backlinks, for content creation that really is not a huge lift for a lot of people, you know, to come and do those. How do you work podcasts or being a guest?

more specifically on a podcast into your overall PR world.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (11:03.46)

Good question. So first of all, they are huge for building domain authority or for getting SEO because, know, so often what we will do is podcasts are part of the whole thing. So we really get detailed with our media lists and this is where we have all of our lists, but we do outline DA. So to tell you the truth, before I decided to do, well, thank you for having me on the podcast.

John Jantsch (11:30.294)

Yeah.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (11:31.34)

I looked and you have a good DA, you have a really good like 54, which for my agency, I’m at like 20 something and I’m a small agency. So you are great. And then the media, they’re around 80 to 100. so we look at that and then for some clients, again, they don’t wanna be too, they’re busy, we don’t wanna bug them. And so we will vet.

John Jantsch (11:45.582)

in 70s, 80s, yeah.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (12:00.258)

where we replace them, and then we will also think about it as a way to practice our talking points. So this is where, again, starting somewhere. So if we do wanna go and do a speaking engagement, we do need a little visibility first to get our client accepted. So we start with podcasts, actually. And then sometimes, again, podcasts are more efficient to just keep doing those.

John Jantsch (12:07.597)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:23.052)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:30.168)

Yeah. Yeah. So, so let’s jump to another one. Social media. think for a lot of PR people, it’s kind of a double-edged sword from a reputation standpoint. how do you view or how do you advise clients to, work social media into their overall marketing slash PR type of plans?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (12:49.496)

Well, again, I don’t want to say again because I’ve never said this before, but I noticed that you do a lot of systems work. so we can’t busy people, especially myself. We can’t do anything without systems. So and so it might not be quote unquote strategic, but we need to get things done. And we do need some visibility on some of the platforms, not all of them. So we’ll look at a client will think, OK, on what platforms do you want to

should they be on and then we will create kind of rules around how often we will post about something and a rule would be for example three posts per blog post and then another rule in different writing right you have to write the post differently and then another rule would be at least one if not two posts per media hit and we have to do those because

we have to thank the media and tag them. So anyway, so we have those systems and oftentimes we were a PR firm. So a lot of PR people will say, well, you do social, that’s your job. You shouldn’t silo it. Well, okay, but here’s the thing. Sometimes people just hire us for PR and then we notice they’re not doing social and we might need them to because we’re looking at a crisis down the road. So we need some positive social now.

John Jantsch (14:16.077)

Mm.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (14:18.252)

And so we will just kind of say, okay, here’s our system. This is what we’re doing around this social and kind of get it done.

John Jantsch (14:29.74)

So PR, I know you’re going to have an answer for this, but I got to set it up this way. know, PR is often looked at as, you know, as a nice to have, you know, you can’t measure it. doesn’t, it doesn’t drive sales necessarily. How do you get a client over that or how do you actually prove to them that the PR is valuable?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (14:50.308)

Well, again, I just love your questions. Well, like I said, I’m the worst salesperson ever. So I don’t. I don’t fight people. don’t have. Nobody has time for that also. And then also, in a way, they might be right. We have to look at the budget. It’s all about your budget and your bandwidth. So some clients we can’t we can’t work with everybody. That’s why we wrote. I wrote the book. But also we would like to work with.

And it doesn’t matter what we want. It’s who is ready for a PR and who’s not. And it’s gotta be somebody who you’ve gotta get your stuff together first, which is your base, which is content, I think, in this day and age. We’ve gotta have like a nice kind of streamlined thing going so that you’re in the groove. We’ve gotta feed the beast. Then we can layer in some PR. And then we can put PR again on a program.

John Jantsch (15:31.821)

You

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (15:46.69)

where we can look at it like we have goals. They could be almost like sales quota goals, but for PR or content where we say, okay, we’re gonna just, we’re gonna do one campaign per quarter and that might just be enough. And we just have it all scheduled out so that we’re not feeling like we’re missing something. But we can’t really, we’re trying to measure our results, right?

So we do have a great database called Muckrack that is our software that connects with our clients’ Google Analytics. And so we can track, like, hey, we have this online school. So we can track where our coverage landed in terms of the location. And we can track the enrollment for the school by location. So you can get really granular with that.

John Jantsch (16:19.681)

Mm-hmm.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (16:45.326)

But at the end of the day, we’re all working together as a marketing team in-house, you know, marketing team. And we’re not going to say it was from the PR.

John Jantsch (16:54.958)

Yeah, right. So, all right. People listening today, we’ve been kind of all over the place talking about PR, SEO, a little bit about AI, content, social. If somebody’s out there and they’re thinking, you know, I need to do more in this, I mean, is there a single most important thing they can focus on, say, the next six months in your view? If somebody said, hey, I want to get the most out of it. And again, I’m not saying, I mean, maybe the best thing they can do is hire you.

But, you know, short of that, are there things that you’re telling people that, you need to either stop doing this and start doing this, you know, over the next six months that you think would move the needle the most?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (17:39.204)

So if you’re really just not doing anything, I would just say try and get yourself on a monthly blogging program for SEO. So then you might not consider that PR. But once you kind of get that going, then you can look at like the marketing calendar and kind of think about how when you can do some PR, when you can do some proactive PR. And if you look, I have a…

calendar on my website that is free. need to make sure that you can access the link, but it has, you could fill out your marketing calendar and I call it marketing, but a lot of it is PR. But to be clear, PR looks a little different these days. It’s not a press release per se. It’s an article or this, that, and the other. So if you’re interested in learning more, there’s a lot of great resources.

John Jantsch (18:28.354)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:38.296)

Well, so where would you invite people to kind of find? I know we’re going to have links. We have a link to your blog and PR resources. I see. So are there, is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you and find out more about the book itself?

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (18:52.196)

Well, I’d love if they would like to connect on LinkedIn. And I’m doing a lot of posts there about PR. And then, yeah, if they want to go to the resources section, and it might actually be under Marketplace on my website, you can buy books there. But also, we have other things there that are free, like a bunch of videos that can walk you through the process.

John Jantsch (19:21.196)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Amy Rosenberg (She/Her) (19:29.336)

Yay, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Building Resilience at Any Age with Lynn Smith

Building Resilience at Any Age with Lynn Smith written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

 

Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Lynn Smith—nationally recognized TV news anchor, keynote speaker, media consultant, and founder of Rylan Media. Lynn shares the inspiration and story behind her new children’s book, “Just Keep Going,” a beautifully illustrated fable that offers a blueprint for building resilience and courage in both kids and adults. Drawing from her own career pivots, setbacks, and reinventions, Lynn discusses why perseverance, emotional honesty, and self-awareness are the real keys to success—on the page, in business, and in life.

About the Guest

Lynn Smith is a media consultant, renowned TV anchor, speaker, and founder of Rylan Media. She’s helped thousands of professionals find their voices on camera and in the boardroom. As the author of “Just Keep Going,” Lynn brings her expertise in communication and resilience to a new generation, offering practical lessons for overcoming fear and embracing growth.

Actionable Insights

  • The central message—“just keep going”—was inspired by three words that helped Lynn persevere through a dark period in her life; that same mantra now helps children and business leaders alike.
  • Choosing a mouse as the main character adds an underdog, relatable spirit—animal stories are less intimidating for kids and help lessons land.
  • The book’s lessons on resilience, reframing adversity, and emotional honesty are as relevant for adults and entrepreneurs as they are for children.
  • Illustration is a powerful storytelling partner; trusting expert collaborators (like illustrator Lauren Gallegos) can amplify your message.
  • Teaching kids practical techniques—deep breathing, asking for help, shaking off setbacks—makes emotional skills actionable and memorable.
  • Self-awareness is critical for resilience; most adult communication challenges are rooted in childhood fears or experiences.
  • Parents and teachers can model perseverance by sharing their own setbacks and how they move through them.
  • The book includes an educator and parent guide with prompts, definitions, and a “worry journal” to help kids—and families—process big feelings.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 00:37 – Why a Mouse?
    Lynn shares why the main character’s journey needed the relatability of an underdog.
  • 02:40 – The Origin of “Just Keep Going”
    How a friend’s text became a life-changing mantra—and the heart of the book.
  • 03:41 – Is This Just for Kids?
    Why the book’s message is vital for entrepreneurs, parents, and anyone facing adversity.
  • 05:18 – On Writing Short and Deep
    The challenge of distilling big lessons into a few, powerful words and pages.
  • 06:42 – Illustration as Storytelling
    How trusting the right creative partner can turn words into emotional magic.
  • 08:23 – Making Complex Lessons Simple
    Turning resilience, courage, and reframing adversity into actions any child can take.
  • 10:37 – Autobiographical Lessons
    How Lynn’s own pivots and failures shaped the book’s core message.
  • 12:37 – Self-Awareness and Root Causes
    Why most adult fears and communication struggles trace back to formative childhood moments.
  • 13:43 – Modeling Perseverance as a Parent
    The importance of letting kids see you fail, try again, and share your process.
  • 16:20 – Tools and Guides for Families
    The book’s educator/parent guide and the power of a “worry journal.”
  • 19:07 – Lynn’s Own “Just Keep Going” Moment
    From live TV slip-ups to business setbacks, how perseverance drives every reinvention.

Insights

“Just keep going” isn’t about guaranteeing success—it’s about embracing the process, moving through fear, and seeing what’s possible on the other side.

“Children’s books distill complex lessons into simple actions—breathing, asking for help, shaking it off—so kids (and parents) can practice resilience together.”

“Self-awareness and emotional honesty are the roots of real, lasting growth at any age.”

“Modeling perseverance—letting kids see you face setbacks and keep trying—is one of the greatest gifts a parent or leader can give.”

“Every reinvention, every pivot, and every setback is a chance to just keep going—and to get stronger along the way.”

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John Jantsch (00:01.228)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Lynn Smith. She is a nationally recognized television news anchor, keynote speaker, media consultant and founder of Rylan Media. She’s helped thousands of professionals find and use their voices on camera, in the boardroom and beyond. And we’re going to talk about her new book, Just Keep Going, which draws on her own journey through career pivots, setbacks, reinventions.

to offer a blueprint for resilience, mindset, and forward momentum in working life. So welcome to the show.

Lynn Smith (00:36.092)

John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:37.966)

All right, so first I have to ask what inspired you to use a small mouse to tell the story of resilience?

Lynn Smith (00:46.12)

Originally, actually, it was a child. And this book went through so many different iterations and rejections. And it’s actually perfectly named Just Keep Going because throughout the process of writing it, I could have just said, you know what? This is really hard. I think I’m just going to quit. And maybe this isn’t for me. And I just kept going. And so instead of saying this stinks and everyone hates it, I made tweaks to it. And one of it was

John Jantsch (00:58.21)

Good.

Lynn Smith (01:15.72)

turning the character into a mouse and I chose a mouse because I feel that they have in story time this like underdog feel to it. It’s like the little one that you just wanna kind of root for and then along the way mouse encounters friends from a deer to a bear to an owl and Lauren who did the illustrations just knocked it out of the park with beautiful ways of bringing this to a magical and whimsical life.

And so I wanted these characters to be the most relatable for children, right? They’re the least intimidated by animals. And so messages tend to land easier when they come from animals. And so I think it was a great transformation for us to make with the manuscript.

John Jantsch (02:04.226)

I’m thinking mice in my youth, was you had Tom and Jerry and you had Mighty Mouse and you know, so they they they’ve got a long history of course Mickey Mouse, how can we forget? So a long history of being in children’s or at least in in cartoons. So you you mentioned of course the book struggle that you had just keep going. But how’d you land on that as really the central message for I’m sure that became as

Lynn Smith (02:09.48)

Sure. Exactly. All the Disney characters.

Of course.

Lynn Smith (02:23.176)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:34.09)

an afterthought in the struggle you had with the book, but you went into it with that central message. How and why did you land on that?

Lynn Smith (02:40.772)

It came from the three words that were sent to me when I was in a really dark place in my life. It was in my early thirties and I had a friend from college that just texted me those three words. Just keep going. It wasn’t you’re going to be okay. It wasn’t things are going to work out, which is our go-to when people are having a hard time and you’re like, no, I’m not going to be okay. Things are not going to work out. But the three words of just keep going was exactly what I needed to hear. And so I did.

And then I continued to have great times and not so great times, just like we all do in life. And that phrase got me through a lot. And so I wanted to bring that concept to young minds because it’s certainly what I do when I’m working with executives. I show them how to overcome their fears so that they can just keep going. And I thought, well, why am I doing this with 47 year olds or 57 year olds or 60, 70, what?

Why am I not doing this with seven-year-olds so that we don’t have to get into the boardroom and be so paralyzed by those fears that we have?

John Jantsch (03:41.848)

Yeah. I mean, the lessons in this book, yes, you’ve written this for a young audience, but the lessons in this really do. mean, I, there a of, lot of my listeners are entrepreneurs and, you know, resilience is probably one of the core characteristics of a successful entrepreneur. Do you feel like you limit the message a little bit because somebody looks at that cover and says, well that’s not for

Lynn Smith (03:57.916)

No,

Lynn Smith (04:05.243)

Well, I think that it’s for, is there somebody that is an entrepreneur with no children that’s going to buy the book? No, probably not unless they read children’s books for themselves. It’s for the entrepreneur that has their little one that they want to be able to instill this message that they’ve so brilliantly embraced because you can’t survive as an entrepreneur without it. And so I think myself as a recovering W-2, what I like to call myself,

and now an entrepreneur that I hope my children will become because I think it’s the greatest path in your career that you can have. And it does take a certain mindset. And there’s a reason why in life there are two types of people. There are ones that need to be sort of told what to do and those that can take on the risk and the responsibility of not only doing, but also telling their team how to execute their vision. So can we

raise those many entrepreneurs. think we can.

John Jantsch (05:06.966)

So I’ve written seven books myself. I think my longest book topped out at slightly over a hundred thousand words. Was it hard writing a book that doesn’t have that many words?

Lynn Smith (05:18.791)

Great question because I’m in the process of writing a nonfiction. Spoiler alert, there will be a version of a Just Keep Going for grownups. The challenge wasn’t the amount of words. It was the way that you distill down a very complex topic like resilience, courage, bravery, and took years for me to accomplish. So everyone talks about their nonfiction books, which you being an author, you know this very well. It can take up to…

two years to write a book, the time that it takes to write a thousand words, but it took just as long to write 40 pages because there were so many different iterations and it helped me grow as a writer. I’m used to writing four minute television segments where I hook them and I give them twists and turns and then I button it up and I can’t write like that. So I grew as a writer through that process and what we landed on, I’m confident, helps children understand and not a you

John Jantsch (06:03.758)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Lynn Smith (06:16.187)

be resilient kind of a way, but it takes them on the journey where they realize that they can just keep going through their fears and they can get to their destinations.

John Jantsch (06:26.486)

I’m curious, know, children’s books and the illustrations quite often tell a great deal of the story. How was that having such an important collaborator really? You know, not just to mention the beautiful art, but that it helped tell the story.

Lynn Smith (06:32.103)

couldn’t agree more.

Lynn Smith (06:42.505)

and Lauren Gallegos, who is the illustrator who I didn’t choose because the publisher chooses it and I could not be happier because to your point, what she did with the illustrations was she brought to life the emotion. So when Mouse is feeling overwhelmed, you see this cloud around him with jagged edges and it slowly dissipates over time and the whimsical idea of breathing in and out and his ears.

John Jantsch (06:50.87)

wow.

Lynn Smith (07:07.371)

up when he breathes in look like he’s about to float away and when they’re down it looks like they actually move. I mean, only an artist can do that. And what I did, you know, because I’ve been asked the question, was it hard to let go of your story and hand it over to somebody else to bring it to life? What I learned throughout my career is you find the best of the best and then you trust them because they’re the expert.

and maybe you learned that you didn’t find the best of the best and then you move on to the next thing and you lose a little bit of money. We know as entrepreneurs how many vendors did we hire and we have just, it’s like, okay, there’s another 10 grand out the window. This was, it truly was the best and best out there and I just trusted her expertise.

John Jantsch (07:48.334)

So there are a lot of very adult themes in this book. Re-framing adversity, for example. A lot of adults really have trouble with that. How do you bring that, something that’s that complex and make it not, I hate the term dumb it down because that’s not what you’re doing. You’re making it understand. So how do you take something that is really hard for

Lynn Smith (08:09.241)

No, it’s drill it down to that audience. Yes.

John Jantsch (08:16.17)

know, full adults, grown adults to understand and make it something that a seven year old, as you mentioned, understands.

Lynn Smith (08:23.495)

Throughout the book, Mouse starts in a forest and he’s trying to get home and he encounters a animal along the way through each challenge he faces. So in some cases, it’s sometimes Mouse has big feelings and that makes him scared. And a friend will come along and say, have you tried taking a deep breath in and taking a deep breath out? that helps. I’ll just keep going. And he gets to his next scene, which is sometimes Mouse is frustrated because

someone won’t share. Have you tried jumping up and down? that helps. And just keep going. And throughout each vignette, there are different physical techniques that are very simple that kids understand. So when my kids read it, they’re the best test market, right? And that’s what I did before the manuscript ever was finalized. I was like, does my six-year-old like this? And, you know, they were reading it and then they’d get off the couch and they’d start jumping up and down. Or they know this because I put it in the book.

because this is what we do when I say, a deep breath in and they’re like, take a deep breath out. And so it is not, are overcoming adversity, which is what we would say to an adult. It is leading them to the water through these magical scenes. And then at the end he gets to his house and he realizes that putting one foot in front of the other, taking deep breaths helped him to get to where he wants to be. And the ultimate, okay,

we nailed it on the messaging was my now six-year-old, who’s my youngest, my six-year-old at the time who is now nine is my oldest. That was my test market when I was writing this. But my six-year-old now said to me at the start of school, he said, Mom, can we bring your book into the class? And I said, well, why? And he’s like, well, George just started at our school and he doesn’t know anyone. And I think he’s scared. And I was like, yeah, okay. They get it. They get it.

John Jantsch (10:17.112)

Mm. Yeah.

Lynn Smith (10:21.519)

because that’s the situation that they can relate to. And I said to him, you’re being a deer, you know, because with a deer is one of the friends in the book. And so it’s like, can we teach them how to be the other animal that might help the mouse out there? Because I think there’s a mouse in all of us.

John Jantsch (10:37.952)

Yeah. So, so speaking of that, while this is not purely autobiographical, I’m wondering how much you’ve had some reinventions in your career. I’m wondering how much of this you feel like is, is autobiographical.

Lynn Smith (10:47.441)

Just a few.

Lynn Smith (10:53.615)

Yeah, and I don’t even know that word reinvention because that almost makes it sound like there’s a restart to it. I would say more of a development of where I went with my career. So I was a news anchor for 15 years, felt the news business was no longer how I could serve. And so I wanted to reverse engineer what helped me to feel like I’m talking to you when you’re sitting in your living room and like, I know her, I like her, I want to spend time with her.

How do I teach that to executives that are struggling with the boardroom or the presentation that they’re giving? And so when I made that transition, were there just keep going moments? Of course. I was starting from scratch as an entrepreneur. mean, John, I didn’t even know how to do an Excel worksheet. You know, I read Glass for a living. I didn’t know how to do any of these things. I didn’t even know what the term scale meant. Like, what does it mean to scale was an actual Google search?

John Jantsch (11:42.403)

Yeah.

Lynn Smith (11:51.97)

And what I had to do along the way was just keep going. You’ll fail. I have bad business partnerships, bad decisions, bad people that came through. All of it’s happened. It’s going to happen again. We know this to be the case. What do we do when it happens? We just keep going.

John Jantsch (12:12.012)

Again, find myself keep going back to adults on this because it’s so relevant, how much do you think self-awareness plays a role in being able to just keep going? Rather than like the world’s against me, I’m a failure, I’m this, how much of it is, no, this was supposed to happen, for example.

Lynn Smith (12:17.137)

Yeah, that’s.

Lynn Smith (12:37.895)

I think the reason that you keep going back to the adult piece is because we as adults, the things that we’re struggling with are often rooted in childhood. So when I’m working with executives and I uncover for them the reality that what they’re struggling with, which is their communication, is not actually their problem. Their problem is their fear. Am I going to say the wrong thing? Are people going to like this? Do I sound smart? That’s what we fix first, and then I teach them the tactical.

And whenever I’m digging through the fear piece, I always ask the question, where do you think that comes from? And inevitably, and we’re talking hundreds of executives that we’ve tested this with, and these are fortune 500 CEOs in many cases, always goes back to childhood. Well, you know, I was a latchkey kid and I had to sort of figure out things on my own or, you know, I had a very critical mother or whatever it was, it somewhere rooted back in

childhood and so much of this book I wrote for the parent reading it to their child as much as I wrote for the child.

John Jantsch (13:43.32)

Yeah. So as you’ve mentioned, you’re a parent. And then obviously, I’m sure there are going to be a lot of teachers that see your book. How do you think adults then can model that just keep going kind of mindset in their own lives for those who might be paying attention? Because I do recall, I do recall they hear every word you say and see everything you do, whether you know.

Lynn Smith (13:59.772)

Yeah, and I, yeah.

Every word. And gosh, I could be so hard on myself for that reality because I’m learning how much that’s true and how many times I have screwed up. And I am not a parenting expert, but I do host a parenting podcast. So I’ve talked to a lot of parenting experts and they helped me to change the way that I present to my children. I say, well, they say, and I’m believing, if I’m doing it 70 % of the time, then…

John Jantsch (14:09.1)

Ha ha ha!

John Jantsch (14:15.886)

You

John Jantsch (14:32.418)

Yeah, right.

Lynn Smith (14:32.481)

we’re good. They’ll forget the other 30. But what I have done is I’ve welcomed them into my failures. So I shared with them throughout the book process, you know what, someone rejected the book again. I’m disappointed. But you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to do something that, you know, they said that maybe this could be worked on. So I’m going to go and do you want to help me? Like I brought them into the process so they could see me pushing through rejection.

and perceived failure. And then things like I’ve had my son when he was nervous about a game. What if I don’t win? Right? Instead of, know, get out there, you know, win, right? That’s what we teach our kids. Get first place and then you are on the sidelines and these parents are going crazy. And what does that teach our kids? Like, oh my gosh, wait, the stakes are really high. My mom and dad are on the sidelines. Like, they’re screaming at me to just do better.

John Jantsch (15:21.048)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lynn Smith (15:30.119)

And instead it’s like, you know, I was, cause this did happen to me when I was in middle school, I got cut from every single team. And instead of sulking, I went to camps during the summer and I, and I tried practicing every single second that I could. And the next year I made the team. And so I share that with them of like, if you don’t, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to stop or are you going to keep going and practice and get better? Because that’s entrepreneurship, right? You get knocked down and you don’t get pushed out.

John Jantsch (16:00.942)

So have you, I’m sure in your consulting, you’ve developed some frameworks and some tools and there are some things that you mentioned in this book, breathing, asking for help, shaking it off. Do you envision some worksheets or things that could be used in the class or used by families?

Lynn Smith (16:20.763)

Yeah, we actually have an educator and a parent guide that we have on the website for the book. And we did that because we wanted this to be the starting point. We wanted this to spark greater conversations with your children. So in the guide, it’s definition of brave. What is the definition of courage? What does it mean to fail? And then question prompts, like, have you ever felt like you failed at something? What did that feel like? And

What does it mean to be brave? And how can you be a friend to somebody that might be struggling? And then at the end of the guide, it’s a worry journal. And this was from another parenting expert that shared with me the importance of writing kids’ feelings down. And I started it with my boys. And now my son will say, mom, can you go get my worry journal? So we put that at the end so that they have a place where they can write down the feelings, the big feelings that we address at the beginning of the book.

mouse sometimes has big feelings. And I use that word specifically because I have a big feeling kid. So I have a big feeling, big reaction kid. And sometimes we’re big feeling adults, right? We react bigger than maybe we need to because of our emotion. And so, yes, in my frameworks, what we work through are beating the brain bully, which is our inner critic, and

having the Goldilocks effect of preparation so that we walk into communications with the right messaging. All of those things are the big, big concepts. We just wanna teach our kids what does it mean to be brave? What does it mean to have courage?

John Jantsch (17:56.92)

So you mentioned already that you’re working on a book that uses the same, really to use in your consulting, right? The same message. do you, do ever envision a series of books? Maybe it’ll depend on how well this sells, right? Do ever envision a series of books that, you know, you have a whole group of emotional lessons that you could probably talk

Lynn Smith (18:19.707)

Well, from your mouth to the skies, yes. Of course, that’s the dream for every author, that your message resonates and that it develops and it continues. And that’s what I would love to be able to do with this book. As you say, you’ve written, you said eight books, is that right? Seven? Yeah. And when you’re an author and you just feel like your content evolves and you want to share your frameworks and your IP with as many people as possible, because that’s how you make an impact, right?

John Jantsch (18:22.1)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:37.294)

That’s seven, but yeah.

Lynn Smith (18:49.765)

especially as a business owner.

John Jantsch (18:49.806)

Yeah, absolutely. So, all right. The hardest question, I said the hardest question for last, maybe it’s not the hardest question. Was there a time in your life, career or not career related, that you had to just keep going?

Lynn Smith (19:07.025)

could give you hundreds of examples, right? I’ll give you a great story for TV news. So I was a producer at the Today Show and they approached me when I had appeared in one of the segments and they said, have you ever thought about doing on air? Well, the skills of being great on camera are not natural for most people. And that was true for me. So they sent me to Hartford, Connecticut to cut my teeth.

get a reel and then they sent me to Philadelphia for a little boot camp and local. And so was my first day on the job. I was supposed to be a consumer reporter because clearly I could write great pieces. I was at the Today Show, but they needed me to be on tape so that they could train me to be great on camera. And the first day on the job, I was sent to a breaking news stabbing at a school and I had never reported breaking news. I was a disaster.

John Jantsch (19:55.349)

what? Huh.

Lynn Smith (20:00.433)

Bumbled through it. I said the wrong name. I said the wrong weapon. This is why people say that you should cut your teeth in a small market. We could have a whole other podcast in my disagreement with that statement. That being said, it was humiliating. It was on live television. It wasn’t the last time something embarrassing on TV happened, but I continuously choose throughout my career and in my life to just keep going and not have those failures stop me from what I want to accomplish.

And I hope that this book inspires your children to do the same.

John Jantsch (20:33.422)

Well, again, Lynn, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to find out more about you, your work, and obviously just keep going.

Lynn Smith (20:43.779)

John, it was great to be with you. My work with executives is linsmith.com, where you can learn all about what we do. And then the book is justkeepgoingbook.com. It is out on September 30th, but available for presale, whatever you love to buy your books.

John Jantsch (20:59.63)

Awesome. Again, well, congratulations and I appreciate you stopping by. Maybe we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

The Brain Science Behind Successful Marketing

The Brain Science Behind Successful Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Catch the Full Episode:

 

Michael Aaron FlickerOverview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Michael Aaron Flicker, founder and CEO of ZenoSci Ventures and co-founder (with Richard Shotton) of the Consumer Behavior Lab. Michael shares insights from their new book, “Hacking the Human Mind: The Behavioral Science Secrets Behind 17 of the World’s Best Brands.” They discuss how the world’s top brands—sometimes knowingly, sometimes not—leverage deep principles of behavioral science to drive memorable marketing, build loyalty, and create legendary campaigns.

About the Guest

Michael Aaron Flicker is the founder and CEO of ZenoSci Ventures and co-founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab, an organization dedicated to applying the science of human behavior to media and marketing. Alongside renowned behavioral scientist Richard Shotton, Michael explores how behavioral science can be practically applied to build more effective brands, campaigns, and customer journeys.

Actionable Insights

  • Great brands often leverage behavioral science—even if they’re not aware of the academic research behind their strategies.
  • Marketers should focus on concrete, image-rich messaging (e.g., “a thousand songs in your pocket”) rather than abstract claims or feature lists; concrete language is proven to be more memorable and persuasive.
  • Specificity and the illusion of effort (e.g., “17 brands,” “5,127 prototypes”) increase credibility and audience trust.
  • Creating peak moments—unexpected, memorable experiences—can dramatically elevate brand loyalty (e.g., a popsicle hotline at an average hotel).
  • Behavioral science helps decode why people really buy; understanding these principles arms you to design smarter campaigns and better experiences.
  • Marketers must use these tactics ethically; understanding human shortcuts is about guiding, not manipulating, decisions.
  • The best way to apply these principles is to test them: run A/B tests, observe outcomes, and iterate—even small businesses can experiment and learn.
  • Success comes from a mindset open to science, measurement, and continuous observation—move beyond gut instinct to evidence-based marketing.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 00:55 – What Does It Mean to “Hack the Human Mind”?
    Why the book starts with brands, not academic studies, and always ends with “so what?”
  • 02:00 – Ground-Level Psychology
    Why both big brands and small business owners have direct insight into consumer behavior.
  • 03:20 – Debunking the Feature Stack
    The Five Guys story: Why less is more, and focus beats feature overload.
  • 06:53 – The Power of Concrete Messaging
    How Apple’s “a thousand songs in your pocket” leverages proven behavioral science.
  • 09:21 – Why “17 Brands”?
    Specificity and the illusion of effort make numbers more credible and memorable.
  • 11:00 – The Peak-End Rule and Creating Brand Moments
    Why a popsicle hotline at an average motel generates top-tier reviews.
  • 13:32 – How Any Business Can Create Peak Moments
    Small, intentional actions can create powerful, memorable experiences for any brand.
  • 15:10 – Ethics and the “Dark Side” of Behavioral Science
    Why marketers must use these insights responsibly and educate consumers.
  • 17:20 – How to Get Started in Behavioral Science Marketing
    Adopt a science-based, test-and-learn mindset—not just gut instinct.
  • 18:52 – Measurement and Testing
    Why even small businesses should observe, experiment, and iterate.

Insights

“Great brands use behavioral science principles—sometimes knowingly, sometimes by instinct—to create memorable, effective marketing.”

“Concrete, image-rich language is four times more memorable than abstract claims. Show, don’t just tell.”

“Specificity and visible effort—like a precise number of prototypes—build trust and credibility.”

“A single, unexpected peak moment can make an average experience legendary in the minds of customers.”

“Behavioral science is about understanding humanity’s natural shortcuts and designing better, not more manipulative, marketing.”

Consumer Behavior Lab (00:00.365)

perfect.

John Jantsch (00:02.467)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Michael Aaron Flicker. He’s the founder and CEO of ZenoSci Ventures and co-founder of the Consumer Behavior Lab alongside renowned behavioral scientist Richard Schotton. The CBL’s mission is to explore how behavioral science can be applied to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of media and marketing. Michael Aaron and Richard’s book.

is what we’re going to talk about today, hacking the human mind, the behavioral science secrets behind 17 of the world’s best brands. So I go welcome the show.

Consumer Behavior Lab (00:42.191)

Thanks so much for having me, John. Excited to be here with you.

John Jantsch (00:44.909)

So let’s start, a lot of times I have to start with the title of a book. So what does it really mean to hack the human mind in the context of marketing and branding?

Consumer Behavior Lab (00:55.723)

So, so many books about behavioral science, about the academics of marketing start with the studies or start with the, with esoteric research. And we said, what if we turned it around? And what if we said some of the best brands in the world have insights into human psychology that they’re taking advantage of whether they know it or not. So let’s take those examples.

break them down, understand what they’re doing, and then explain some of the science behind it so that you can have confidence using it in your own business for your own brand. So we wanted to start with the brands rather than with the academic studies and make sure that we always ended it with, what? So what do I do with this knowledge so that I can apply it to the brands or the businesses that you’re running?

John Jantsch (01:48.579)

So you mentioned something I was curious about. said whether they know it or not. I mean, how often did you find that brands were like, what are you talking about? I mean, we just, it’s like, that’s why my mom said you should treat people. Is that not good?

Consumer Behavior Lab (02:00.014)

I think what we find is that great marketing strategists, great marketing creatives have an insight into human psychology in a way that many of us do not have. But we also found folks that are selling hot dogs on the street, those that are running florist shops on the corner market have those same insights because they’re this close to the consumer.

They’re next to the consumer, they’re selling every day. And so at both extremes in the vaulted agencies and brands of the world, and at the ground level, when you’re actually selling to people every day, you learn things about human psychology that get put into practice. so it was, so our, our, our belief is that most of the campaigns, most of the brands we looked at, they understood that they had access to something special.

We don’t think they knew many of the academic studies behind it that proved why it was likely to work.

John Jantsch (03:01.687)

Yeah. So in some ways you were validating something they had already discovered, but didn’t realize it was a secret. So were there any myths or best practices in quotes that you found that you could challenge head on or that you were even trying to challenge head on?

Consumer Behavior Lab (03:05.902)

It’s a nice way to say it.

Consumer Behavior Lab (03:20.375)

I don’t think we sought, we set out to challenge this, but one of the most common things we see marketers do is they have something they want to sell and then they start stacking the RTBs, the reasons to believe this thing goes faster and is quieter and by the way, it’ll clean your teeth while you do all those other things. And you know, we did not set out to debunk that, but we opened the book with a story about five guys.

which is, if you’re an American listener, one of America’s fastest growing, better burger chains. And that founder, Jerry Morrell, started with an insight that he was just walking along a Maryland boardwalk where he sees one company stall with a massive line when everybody else’s stalls were empty. And Thrasher’s fries on the Maryland boardwalk

John Jantsch (03:48.697)

Mm-hmm.

Consumer Behavior Lab (04:16.63)

had this massive line. And he got to thinking, is this stall that only sells one thing fries, doing something better than everybody else that sold burgers and milkshakes and sodas? And so anyway, that’s one of the founding beliefs of Five Guys. And even to today, $1.6 billion franchise, they don’t sell chicken, they don’t sell salads, they don’t sell ice cream, they only sell burgers and fries. And there’s some interesting academic

studies that back that up.

John Jantsch (04:47.213)

Yeah, yeah.

I can think just in my own experience of some kind of local places that only do like fried chicken or something. And they’re just, they’re kind of legendary because they, I think there’s something about the experience of that too. It’s like, we know why we’re going there. So let’s get into the lab work. mean, you, you and Richard are both, I mean, you have consumer behavior labs. So there is a little bit of laboratory work involved in that, right. In the research. How do you take insights?

Consumer Behavior Lab (05:15.55)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (05:19.006)

I don’t know, academic behavioral science and turn them into like real campaigns or product design.

Consumer Behavior Lab (05:26.528)

I think what we’re always looking for is that there’s an incredible wealth of knowledge happening in the universities that stops short of, so what do we do about it? And so it’s this goldmine of insights and goldmine of observations that gets validated. But then the question is, so what do you do? And so what we’ve been looking for is saying, well, we have high performing campaigns in the UK. They have something called.

John Jantsch (05:38.497)

Yeah, yeah.

Consumer Behavior Lab (05:55.786)

the IPA effectiveness database, is campaigns that are proven to drive sales. And there’s a lot of data supporting that. So you look at famously effective campaigns, and then you look at, what’s the academics that could help understand that. And there’s not always a match, but when you can find a match, you can mine the academics and you can match it to the effective work. Now we have a starting spot.

But if that match is just kind of a fun uncover, we don’t think that matters. Then we have to make sure you can apply it to a business or a brand that you might be working on. And then we feel we have some material that’s worthy of conversation.

John Jantsch (06:39.641)

Do you want to give me a couple of concrete, specific, detailed examples about, I don’t mean a whole campaign necessarily, but here’s one human behavior that we discovered you could impact this by doing it. Give us an example.

Consumer Behavior Lab (06:53.515)

So often as marketers, we get this idea that we can just paint in the picture of the mind of somebody, how amazing our brand or our product is, that they’re just going to buy it. And what the data tells us is that may be true, but how you paint it really matters. And a brand that we dissected in the book was Apple, but not all of Apple, specifically when Steve Jobs

reveals the iPod and he stands up in stage and he holds the iPod up and what he says is it’ll be a thousand songs in your pocket. And up until that point, everybody else was saying five gigabytes of storage, 128 kilobytes of this. And so what we got thinking was, well, what’s the science behind why a thousand songs in your pocket really connects with people?

And the study that we went to was in 1972, Ian Begg, Western Ontario University, recruits 25 students and he reads them 22 word phrases. Some phrases are impossible amount, rusty engine, flaming forest, and others are apparent fact, common fate. And when he asked the group to remember as many terms as they could, they can recall

just about 23%, just about one out of five. But here’s the observation that matters. They can only remember 9 % of the abstract words, like impossible amount, but 36 % of the concrete terms, like white horse. That’s a four-fold increase if they can picture it in their minds. And so what it teaches us is that great taglines, great phrases,

Conjure an image in your mind red bull. It gives you wings Eminem it melts in your mouth Not in your hand skittles taste the rainbow Maxwell’s house good to the last drop you can picture what I’m saying as you say it and that really can make the same idea much more sticky and much more concrete in the mind of the buyer

John Jantsch (09:09.594)

Great example. I was curious when I read the subtitle, did you choose 17 different, was there some sort of like psychological trick being played or hack being played by the number 17?

Consumer Behavior Lab (09:21.606)

the answer is yes. The answer is yes. And, you know, there’s, there’s a few things at play here, but the illusion of effort is something that Richard and I are really, are really interested in. And the basic psychological principle here is that by getting to a very specific number, it shows a lot more intentionality and a lot more purpose. We think if we had said 20 of the world’s best brands, know, we just roll right over it.

There’s some interesting science behind it, but that’s why. Yes, we’re trying to show specificity. We’re trying to show the effort that went into that. And we know that that has caught more people’s attention because of it.

John Jantsch (10:03.354)

Yeah, 3000 % increase as opposed to 3217. Way more believable, right?

Consumer Behavior Lab (10:09.916)

In our book, we dissect a brand Dyson. And I don’t know if everybody knows this is a famous vacuum cleaner. James Dyson is the inventor. And when he invents it, his first ad that he puts into the market was 5,127 prototypes to get to the world’s first bagless vacuum. He loves it so much in his autobiography. It’s the first line of his autobiography. Look at the effort to get that bagless vacuum. It’s just more believable.

John Jantsch (10:35.508)

the

Consumer Behavior Lab (10:39.721)

than if he had said 5200 prototypes.

John Jantsch (10:44.056)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. you, since you did profile and you, actually chose 17 brands, were there any like that really surprised you? mean, somebody doing something behaviorally significant or savvy that, that you didn’t expect.

Consumer Behavior Lab (11:00.714)

You know, I think there was one that had a big impact that I wouldn’t have originally thought. And it’s this concept that comes from Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner economics. 1993 Kahneman and his colleague, Donald Radelmeier come up with a study on colonoscopy patients. And here’s how the study goes. The colonoscopy patients are going through an actual procedure and every 60 seconds,

they register their pain level. At the end of the experience, they get two chances to give a retrospective rating. One right after the experience is over, and then another one a month later. And what you find is that those retrospective ratings do not correspond with the total pain level at all. In fact, the retrospective ratings, whether it was the hour after or a month later, coincide with two

critical moments, the peak intensity that happened during the experience and the final moment of the procedure. so Kahneman calls this the peak and rule. So that’s kind of interesting. Like this is where academic stops. But what does that mean for brands and marketers? There’s a LA hotel called the Magic Castle Hotel. It was featured in Chip and Dan Heath’s book, The Power of Moments. And the Magic Castle Hotel

has top 5 % of all TripAdvisor hotels in LA. 94 % of their reviews are very good or excellent, better than the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. But what’s surprising about this hotel is it’s a 1950s motel. Gated decor, mediocre rooms, small swimming pool in the courtyard. But what have they done so well? And what does almost every review talk about? They have a popsicle hotline in the pool. And you pick up the phone.

John Jantsch (12:44.74)

Mm.

Consumer Behavior Lab (12:59.165)

day or night, and they will bring out on a silver platter as many popsicles as you’d like to eat. It’s a peak moment in a average hotel, and that makes everybody love going there, and everybody loves to dial the phone. So thinking about how you can use what would otherwise be a very hard to advertise LA motel and make it into an all-star in the city, you don’t have to redo everything.

John Jantsch (13:05.242)

Yeah,

Consumer Behavior Lab (13:26.736)

In fact, if you could just come up something that everybody loves, a lot more people will be endeared to you.

John Jantsch (13:32.858)

Well, and I suspect also one of the key ingredients is it’s kind of unexpected. Like, who does that? Right.

Consumer Behavior Lab (13:37.98)

I think you’re right. Yeah, I mean, I think that the point of the peak is that it stands apart from everything else. If they had just the softest pillows, somehow you think it might not make as much of a difference, but something fun and social in a courtyard surrounded by all these relatively uninspired rooms, it stands out.

John Jantsch (14:02.298)

Yeah. And I think the beauty of that message, I mean, obviously it’s a hotel, they’ve got a different application, but almost any business could do something like that, couldn’t they? mean, something that just really has somebody go, you got to see what these guys did.

Consumer Behavior Lab (14:16.416)

I think it can be a customer experience like that. It could also be, we had a guest on our podcast a few weeks ago and they were talking about, go every month they go to this shore town and when they get there, they always go to their favorite restaurant. And the favorite restaurant has flowers on some of the tables.

But whenever they come in, he brings over the flowers and places it on the table they sat at. And they say, now the table’s ready for you. It’s a small act. It’s intentional. He’s just using this little vase with three flowers sticking out of it. But it makes the person feel special. That’s a peak moment that requires no extra money, requires no grand strategy, but it does require intentionality and consistency. And that’s another example of how anybody can use it.

John Jantsch (14:50.68)

Yes.

John Jantsch (15:10.522)

All right, let’s go to the dark side, shall we? Understanding these things, what risk do we run in exploiting, manipulating, using them to not necessarily do what’s in the best interest perhaps of the customer?

Consumer Behavior Lab (15:13.286)

Yes.

Consumer Behavior Lab (15:30.951)

So we would say, first of all, that these insights into human behavior and human psychology are facts. And understanding them is first about understanding why we are naturally prone. We have a quote from Kahneman in the beginning of the book, thinking is to humans like swimming is to cats. They can do it, they just prefer not to.

Humans naturally want shortcuts. naturally want to think as little as possible to get to the decisions we need. first, understanding these is about understanding humanity and human psychology. Second, we write books for everybody to read so everybody can be aware of them. So we’re educating marketers about how they can use them for positive ends. And we want consumers to understand that these are

our natural leanings and inclinations that we got to be aware of. But yeah, for sure there’s ethics in behavioral science, like there’s ethics in marketing, like there’s ethics in AI. And we have to be aware that we’ve got to use these for ethical and moral purposes.

John Jantsch (16:43.07)

Years ago, had Dr. Childani on the show wrote influence, know, probably the earliest. Yeah, yeah. And, and he told me during that interview that he actually wrote the book, so people wouldn’t be exploited. And of course, you know, then, unfortunately, you know, people turned around and used a lot of what was in it, you know, in a way that wasn’t intended necessarily. So if a marketer is listening to this, and they want to hack their own campaign,

Consumer Behavior Lab (16:47.59)

a seminal book in our field. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:12.154)

or customer journeys or whatever it is they’re working on. Are there certain habits or mindsets that they’re going to need to adopt? mean, where do they start?

Consumer Behavior Lab (17:20.678)

Yeah. So we would say that this is a field, behavioral science is a field that’s really blown out in Europe and in the United Kingdom. Here in America, it’s a much more nascent budding place. So if you’re interested in the approach of behavioral science and how it could prove marketing, lots of material online, lots available, of course, including our book.

But in order to get started, think you have to have an interest in the academics and the science that powers why we do what we do. If you’re a marketer that believes everything’s done on hunches or on gut instinct, it’s going to be hard to embrace this type of marketing because this is based on a belief that you can decode human behavior through science and through observation.

It’s not that you can guarantee what’s going to happen, but you can make your campaigns more likely to be successful if you use this science-backed thinking. So we’re increasing the probability that you’re going to have good outcomes in your marketing.

John Jantsch (18:33.754)

The flip side of that mindset though is measurement, mean, understanding, okay, this is our hunch, if this is our hypothesis based on research, how do we prove that we were right? And is that become a stumbling block for a lot of folks?

Consumer Behavior Lab (18:38.757)

you

Consumer Behavior Lab (18:52.269)

We would say that there’s a massive industry around consumer insights that has its place for some marketers, but for every marketer doing tests and seeing the outcomes, everybody can do. So if you are an e-commerce based or a web based, A-B tests are very easy to do. If you’re not, we would advocate for observational research.

John Jantsch (18:59.876)

Mm-hmm.

Consumer Behavior Lab (19:19.043)

do something and see what happens. And you could do that on a small scale and you can watch the outcomes and then you can continue to innovate or go down this path. So what we would say is, if you’re a small business owner, if you’re a solopreneur, use these tactics and then find ways to test them small and learn from those tests.

John Jantsch (19:42.01)

Mike Irwin, I appreciate you stopping by to talk about Hacking the Human Mind. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you?

Consumer Behavior Lab (19:48.866)

We have our website, the consumerbehaviorlab.com, where you can learn about the book, about the masterclass. And then we also have a podcast that’s been much shorter than John’s called Behavioral Science for Brands that we invite everybody to take a listen to.

John Jantsch (20:06.383)

Well, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Consumer Behavior Lab (20:11.791)

Thank you, John.

Adapting Agencies for the AI Era

Adapting Agencies for the AI Era written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Brent Weaver (1)Overview

On this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Brent Weaver, CEO of E2M Solutions—the leading provider of white label WordPress, SEO, content, and AI solutions for agencies. Brent shares his view from the front lines of agency evolution as AI, automation, and changing client expectations reshape the digital marketing landscape. They dive into the real impact of AI on agencies, the future of marketing leadership, the enduring value of strategy over tactics, and why human expertise still matters more than ever.

About the Guest

Brent Weaver is the CEO of E2M Solutions, a top white label provider of WordPress, SEO, content, and AI solutions for digital marketing agencies. With deep experience both running and supporting agencies, Brent is a recognized voice on AI, agency growth, and the new skills required to thrive in a fast-changing industry.

Actionable Insights

  • AI is rapidly raising the bar—not just for agencies, but for clients who now expect faster, better results and more transparency.
  • The white label model is evolving fast, with providers like E2M embracing “AI first” internal training, education, and even offering fractional AI services to agencies.
  • The hype of AI often exceeds reality—experiments abound, but many projects never deliver, so agencies and business owners must remain adaptable and strategic.
  • There’s still no “all-in-one” AI marketing operating system, but the industry is heading toward more integrated, seamless solutions.
  • SEO is far from dead; but marketers must get creative, focus on proprietary expertise, and optimize for both LLMs and Google—especially for local businesses.
  • Human leadership and strategy are more vital than ever. AI makes agencies more competitive, but also increases client expectations and the need for specialization and niche expertise.
  • The human element remains central: The future belongs to those who can combine AI tools with strategic thinking, EQ, and deep client understanding.
  • Agencies—and marketers—need to retool, learn continuously, and be ready to lead and manage, not just “do.”

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:10 – The Elephant in the Room: AI’s Impact on Agencies
    Brent shares how AI is changing agency operations, results, and client expectations.
  • 02:25 – White Labeling in the Age of AI
    How E2M is retooling with “AI First Saturdays,” fractional AI services, and ongoing education.
  • 04:46 – Will We Ever Get a True AI Marketing OS?
    The reality (and limits) of current AI tools and what’s coming next.
  • 06:18 – The Hype vs. Reality of AI Projects
    Why many AI initiatives fail—and why experimentation is still worth it.
  • 08:10 – Is SEO Dead?
    Brent’s take on what’s changed, what still works, and how local and LLM optimization are evolving.
  • 11:55 – Why Agencies Are Working Harder, Not Less
    AI may automate, but competition, complexity, and client demands are rising.
  • 13:31 – The Human Element and Future-Ready Skills
    Why strategy, specialization, and leadership will define the next era of agency growth.
  • 15:17 – AI Agents, Frictionless UX, and What’s Next
    How AI will reshape customer journeys, jobs, and digital marketing roles.
  • 18:17 – From Doing to Managing: Evolving Careers and Teams
    The growing need for strategic thinkers, EQ, and continuous learning.

Insights

“AI has raised the bar for agencies and clients alike—faster, better results are expected, but human expertise is still at the center.”

“There’s no magic all-in-one AI solution yet, but those who combine tools with strategy and leadership will win.”

“SEO is evolving, not dying—marketers must focus on unique value, local search, and optimizing for new AI-driven experiences.”

“Agencies need to retool for an AI-first world, but the need for deep specialization, leadership, and EQ is greater than ever.”

“The future of digital marketing belongs to those who can marry the best of AI with strategy, creativity, and relentless learning.”

John Jantsch (00:01.405)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Brent Weaver. He is the CEO of E2M Solutions, the leading provider of white label WordPress SEO content and AI solutions for digital marketing agencies. So guess what we’re going to talk about today? We’re going to talk about agencies and we’re going to talk about digital marketing. So Brent, welcome to the show.

Brent At E2M (00:28.728)

Great to be here. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:30.427)

I did get the title right. Didn’t I? You’re the CEO currently. Yeah. Okay. I was.

Brent At E2M (00:34.446)

Yeah, yeah. Joined E2M in June of 2025. So I’m wrapping up my ninth week on duty. So it’s been a new adventure for me.

John Jantsch (00:40.198)

Yeah.

Ha ha ha.

John Jantsch (00:47.197)

Well, E2M is not new necessarily, so it worked with hundreds of agencies. Just in your time and what you’ve learned or from the folks there, what do you see as some of the biggest changes in the agency landscape right now? And I know it’s evolving rapidly, but I’m curious what you’re hearing because you pretty much talk to agencies all day long.

Brent At E2M (01:10.722)

Yeah. I mean, the obvious elephant in the room is artificial intelligence and what that’s doing both in terms of how agencies are run and also how they’re deploying services and also how clients are expecting, you know, what the clients are doing with AI as well. So it’s not just like the agency using it, but the clients are using it. So I think some expectations are changing and also speed to results is changing because a client might say, well, Hey, if I can just have AI do this in

three minutes, right? Like, why is it gonna take you three or four days and just kind of working on how to up level your level, know, what you’re doing for your clients in terms of results. mean, that bar has certainly been raising very, very quickly in terms of what expectations are. And so I think a lot of agencies are feeling a little bit of squeeze, but at the same time, they’re feeling a lot of excitement. So there’s that whole topic, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:00.833)

Well, so to tag, I was going to say to tag onto that though, of course, your primary function is to, in most cases, act as a white label support for that agency. So I’m curious, has the white label mode evolved? mean, how are you, because it’s affecting agencies. So how’s it then in turn affecting what a white label provider like yourself is doing?

Brent At E2M (02:25.614)

And we’ve really like planted a flag that we want to be an AI first agency. And so we are doing lots of internal, kind of retooling education. have a thing called AI for Saturday where our whole company comes in every first Saturday of the month. some of that time has been dedicated to education, working on projects kind of, you know, within the teams doing demo days, hackathons. and so we’re definitely taking AI very seriously. Our team’s taking AI very seriously.

we’re also doing fractional AI services for agencies. So actually going in and helping the agency implement AI solutions. And so I think it’s, you know, people want better results. They want them faster, right? It’s kind of like, you know, dealing with Amazon, right? Like people used to think, I ordered something on the internet. It’s okay that it takes seven to 10 days to show up, right? But in the post Amazon world, you’re like, well, like my kids, for example, they’re like, why I ordered this

30 minutes ago, why is it not already at the front door? I think some of that impatience is seeping its way into the business to business service model. And I also think some of that kind of what people expect in terms of a customer centric centered business, like Amazon will give you refunds on just about anything. think customers are expecting some of that for some of their agency customers, but you know, it’s certainly having a huge impact on the overall industry.

John Jantsch (03:40.967)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:49.917)

So, since you opened the AI can of worms, I’ll go there directly. You know, what I’m seeing a lot of people do is, you know, it’s like we’re in this wild west days still where there’s 473 tools. People are hacking this $20 a month thing together with this $20 a month thing. They’re talking about agents and what they can do. What I’m seeing on the business side, the small business side, it’s like, okay, I get it. I get it. We need to do AI.

but this is exhausting. And, you know, is, there ever going to be a day you think where some, a business owner can actually buy the full like marketing operating system that is AI run and installed in their business and not, you know, have to lean on their agency to do this and an SEO person to do that with AI to me. And again, I’m, just asking your opinion because it doesn’t exist today, but, but I feel like that’s where we’re going to go.

Brent At E2M (04:42.083)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:46.237)

There’s going to be the $5.99 a month solution that’s sort of an all in one as opposed to custom this and custom that and custom, you know, whatever.

Brent At E2M (04:56.494)

And perhaps, you know, I think John that the more I’ve gotten into AI personally and the more Like projects and use cases that I’ve seen it. It’s it’s like the more, you know The more you realize you don’t know and I certainly think that that’s true with AI and and we’re seeing a lot of people do some what I would almost consider to be magical things with AI but then there’s also this like

maybe they do something where they don’t really have the foundational skillset. They’re using a tool like lovable and they’re doing vibe coding and they build an application that gets to a certain point. And then the client says, well, hey, we actually need this for a business requirement thing to do this other thing. And then all of a sudden that other thing maybe isn’t possible within the vibe coding interface. And all of a sudden you have this thing that an agency has spent weeks on in terms of a vibe coding application build.

John Jantsch (05:27.292)

Yeah, yeah.

Brent At E2M (05:49.6)

And then the thing that they needed to do from a business case is not possible within the AI. And so then we’re hitting this wall and we have to go, my gosh, we’re going to have to completely, we have to build this new ground up without vibe coding in order to make the business case work. I there was a study that said that something like 40 to 60 % of enterprise AI projects, and I should probably have a source on this of them quoted, but 40 to 60 % of AI projects at the enterprise level are being abandoned or never seen the light of day.

John Jantsch (06:18.609)

Yes.

Brent At E2M (06:18.85)

and if we all know, from reading wall street, like how much money is being invested in AI, that means like over half of the investment that major corporations are making are, basically being thrown in the trash. And I I’m seeing that same level of kind of experimentation, happened at the agency level and also at the small business owner level. And so I think there’s still, gosh, there’s just so much learning that has to be done. And the upside though, is you find an AI, automation or

agentic workflow that, that works, it gets to a hundred percent. it can have game changing impact on the business, right? Like the ROI on it can be, you know, infinity. And so it’s certainly worth making these investments, but it doesn’t mean that every investment is going to pay off.

John Jantsch (06:51.869)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (06:57.223)

Peace.

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Yeah, I think one of the challenges in the the window that we’re in right now is, is in some cases, the hype of AI is actually outrunning the reality of it. And I think that a lot of people are like, we can fire everybody and do it all with AI. I mean, you see these people, you know, on Facebook ads, like, I have a $16 billion company and I only have two employees, you know, you’re like, you know,

Brent At E2M (07:13.848)

Sure.

Brent At E2M (07:26.982)

They like show this big like screenshot of all their automation crazy I’ve replaced 64 employees right like maybe I don’t know I mean usually I find when you kind of double click on those things and you go in there’s there’s usually some smoke and mirrors around those things but I don’t want to like bash anybody that’s

John Jantsch (07:31.482)

You

John Jantsch (07:35.909)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:41.341)

Well, they’re 100 % there is. And I think that, you know, it’s like all things. It’s kind of like taking advantage of the craze is actually making the reality a lot worse and a lot harder for that business owner that just needs a couple things, you know, figured out to, you know, to make, to not even to replace people, you know, but to actually empower their people in ways to do better and more work. All right. So I’ll get off my soapbox on that one and move to, let’s talk about SEO.

Brent At E2M (08:06.993)

Hahaha.

John Jantsch (08:10.727)

you know, which is a tactic, of course, a channel, if you will, that, that you guys play in quite a bit. There’s that’s another one of those where there’s, you know, like, it would take me about two minutes to find somebody who, who today put on LinkedIn SEO is dead. And so, you know, how are you, how are you, by the way, it’s not, but how are you advising clients? How are you changing even your routine and working around the reality that a lot of top of funnel

Brent At E2M (08:10.819)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:40.679)

types of content that used to generate traffic has certainly gone away. We can debate whether or not it was that valuable anyway. But how are you evolving your model when you think about SEO practices?

Brent At E2M (08:54.414)

I mean, if there’s a piece of content that you could easily just ask, you know, chat, and you would get a great answer for that content, if that’s what you’re gonna be putting on your client’s website to help them grow their rank or grow their traffic from the LLMs and things like that, I mean, that’s certainly probably not gonna be a great strategy. And I think most people got that memo when they saw how much traffic decreased for…

John Jantsch (08:58.781)

Right.

Brent At E2M (09:19.566)

Those kind of common things right like how do I make great guacamole? Right is just going to be the user experience to ask that question on On chat is going to be far better than on a Google browser unless somebody has some type of proprietary ingredient or approach or they can actually build some intellectual property around it and kind of protect that unique recipe right in that case or they have a really great personality around

John Jantsch (09:36.199)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (09:42.727)

Mm-hmm.

Brent At E2M (09:47.054)

teaching people how to make guacamole or whatever, and they’re a great YouTuber, and there’s some type of thing that’s unique that AI cannot replicate that they can bring to the marketplace. So I do think marketers have to be a little bit more creative. There’s kind of a reinvention that’s going on. That being said, there’s also a ton of people that are now using LLMs to search for business recommendations, to search for services. And certainly there’s…

John Jantsch (10:09.307)

Yeah, 100%.

Brent At E2M (10:13.248)

a whole cottage industry. our, amount of SEO business that we’ve had has, has categorically gone up year over year, right? And that’s kind of in the post AI world. And a big thing on the, on the E2M team is how are we optimizing our clients’ websites and search strategy for the LLMs, right? Kind of the AEO strategies while we’re also using, you know, continuing to invest in Google. And I think Google, for instance, I I don’t know if search traffic, you know, the

John Jantsch (10:15.035)

the

John Jantsch (10:21.661)

Mm-hmm.

Brent At E2M (10:40.738)

The Google usage has necessarily gone down. mean, I think they’re still driving a lot of traffic to businesses. Google Local, massively important for businesses to be active, right? Especially if they’re a service business or they’re working locally or regionally, right? That’s something that I think the LLMs aren’t doing nearly as well as Google. And so there’s certainly still lots of blue oceans, I think, on the SEO side.

John Jantsch (10:47.132)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:02.119)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.853)

Yeah, and I think you’re 100 % right. mean, I’m speaking in a conference next month of all remodeling contractors. And they’re all talking about like, what do need to be doing to change? And it’s like, hey, you know, show up in that map pack, do a better job of your reviews, you know, that, you know, answer, you know, have a lot of FAQs, you know, that answer questions that people would have about remodeling, because that the trust, I think, with the map pack, whether it’s deserved or not, you know, that the consumer has is going to, I think, give that

a life for a long time. And I don’t think you’re going to see the AI overviews for somebody that’s, I mean, you can go there and say, you know, in AI mode, you can say, what’s the best for modeling contractor in this town. And it will give you an opinion. But I think people still value the map pack and the proximity and all the things that come with it.

Brent At E2M (11:55.086)

You know, one thing I think there was this like undertone of like, is AI going to make agencies like obsolete or something? And, and it’s weird because like I’ve asked this to a lot of agency groups have been like, okay, in the post AI world, like who here is working less, right? And I asked people like raise their hands and like, nobody raised their hand. I’m like, okay, the, the right, they’re working more. They’re working way more. Right. It is weird. It’s a weird paradigm, right? Because you would think, Hey, artificial intelligence, the computer is going to do all the work for me.

John Jantsch (12:00.955)

Yeah, yeah, you bet.

John Jantsch (12:11.133)

It’s more. They’re all working more, in fact.

Brent At E2M (12:24.718)

You know, it’s like the logical outcome of that would be that we wouldn’t have to work as hard. And, you know, even though these tools do magical things, I don’t think they make finding leads and customers any easier. If anything, they’re just making it even more competitive. They’re giving advanced marketing tools to a lot larger group of people. And so it’s getting more competitive out there. And that means that businesses…

John Jantsch (12:42.993)

Yeah.

Brent At E2M (12:52.51)

still need agencies and specialists now more than ever. In fact, they need specialists that are specialized in specializations instead of specializations. And that was the other thing I was going to kind of bring as a theme is, is looked like knowing who your customer is, having niche expertise, you know, really knowing your market backwards and forwards, knowing your market better than your clients know their industry, I think is now more important than ever. You know, the idea of just being a general

John Jantsch (13:15.783)

Mm-hmm.

Brent At E2M (13:21.432)

Hey, I’m Brent, I’m the web guy, right? Like I don’t think that’s gonna fly in 2026 and beyond if it is even flying right now.

John Jantsch (13:24.401)

Yeah, right.

John Jantsch (13:31.293)

So let’s talk about the human element. think a lot of people are wringing their hands around. mean, every time you see these headlines that, you know, Microsoft says are 40 % of all jobs will go away by, you know, the next three years. I think you have a lot of people kind of wringing their hands around about like, is this going to destroy the world? know, if people, 40 % of people are out of jobs. How are…

I tell you what we see is I see a lot of people that are working more, as you said, and a lot of it’s because the consumer or the business owner behavior has changed a little bit in that they expect more. So that’s part of it. our mantra has always been strategy before tactics. We actually feel that if you develop a great marketing strategy, marketing becomes less complicated, but far more effective.

and, and so, you know, what I see is a whole lot of agencies that were, have always been delivering tactics are now just using AI to deliver a new set of tactics. and not still not thinking strategically. I think what Mark, what businesses are going to need in the future is marketing leadership and not marketing doers.

Brent At E2M (14:48.78)

Yeah. Yeah. mean, I think we’re running this event. It’s all about AI for agency owners. And I promise this is not just a direct plug for our event, but obviously it’s my duty to promote our event right now. But one of our attendees, and he’s kind of an AI first person, he registered for our event, right? Went in and purchased a ticket.

John Jantsch (14:50.845)

I should have posed that as a question, but it was really more of a statement.

Brent At E2M (15:17.166)

All using his chat GPT agent. So he literally just you know driving in the car Said hey Go buy a ticket to Vistara and his agent, know went and it takes screenshots and says hey This is what I’m doing along the way, but you know, he just kind of had to say yep Yep in the agent already has all of his information and it has all of the information that it needs in order to make that fill out the web forums and actually purchase a product and

It’s, it’s almost like every business from that perspective, every business’s website just became kind of the Amazon one click shopping experience. You know, if, we fast forward two, three years, if we all have these agents that have, you know, secure access to our banking details and to our PII and they know kind of our preferences. mean, what could you do if you can line up an experience that you know is going to meet the needs of a specific target audience? you know, you have.

very few barriers standing between you and them making a transaction, becoming a customer. And I think in that way, AI is going to be disrupting some of these workflows, some of these user interfaces, just as web professionals and digital agencies, how we view creating those experiences. And so I think that while AI is certainly going to destroy some number of jobs, whether it’s 40%, 20%, I don’t know what the number is.

John Jantsch (16:40.976)

This is…

Brent At E2M (16:42.646)

I trust Microsoft, they’re now worth $4 trillion. They must be doing something right. But I think for every job that it destroys, there’s going to be new jobs created. You know, if I was, if I lived in a Waymo city, I was just out in California. I rode in my first driverless taxi. Would I still have a car? I don’t know because I’m like, well, what if I just used Waymo to get everywhere I needed to go? And when I’m in the car, I’m going to work on

John Jantsch (16:45.309)

You

John Jantsch (16:52.625)

Yeah, I’m seeing that already, right.

Brent At E2M (17:10.094)

I’m going to be productive. I’m going to do work. I’m going to be calling, I’ll call 10 more agencies to see if they can come to my event. Right. So I do think that there’s like some things that are not super exciting in terms of jobs in the marketplace right now that likely are going to go away, right? Like data entry, data harvesting from the internet, you know, content editors, right? Like I can get a lot of my content. can dictate it to chat and

John Jantsch (17:28.943)

Mm-hmm. Just basic research. Yeah.

Brent At E2M (17:38.52)

gives me pretty good content. It even gives me some suggestions on how to evolve it and gives me different, know, hey, here’s a version for LinkedIn. Here’s a version for Facebook. Here’s a version for Instagram, right? Here’s a script that you can go and put, take a video and record, right? So things that I would have relied on three, four or five people before I can get done myself. And a lot of times I don’t think I was necessarily hiring those people. I just wasn’t doing it, right? I’d post maybe on one platform instead of four and I wouldn’t hire a social media person to do that.

John Jantsch (17:45.917)

All right. Yep.

Brent At E2M (18:07.022)

And so I think that some of these things are certainly going to destroy jobs, but you know, like what will my kids’ jobs be in 15, 20 years? I have no idea, but they’ll have something to do, I’m sure.

John Jantsch (18:07.867)

Yes.

John Jantsch (18:17.841)

Yeah. Yeah. I’m even seeing that in our organization. you know, people that, that really were good doers, good implementers, you know, we’re really pushing them to, know, they have to be more, they, whether they have employees under them or not, they have to really think more like leaders and think more like managers, who are going to optimize, you know, some of these tools, as opposed to, you know, writing the, every bit of social media content, they’re going to be, you know,

looked more as managers. And I think that that from a skill set standpoint, that’s, that’s probably not everybody’s sweet spot. I mean, there definitely are people that are just very good at give me an SOP and I’ll follow it. But I do think that from a career standpoint, you know, if you’re one of those people, you probably need to really start looking at how do I, know, how do I, my strategic thinking, my EQ skills, you know, over and above, you know, being able to, to manage a spreadsheet.

Brent At E2M (19:15.79)

And sometimes, you know, not to like be like capitalist or whatever, but like, think at some point, right, if people aren’t willing to move towards that opportunity voluntarily, they will, you know, maybe have to earn some, learn some hard lessons. And in those, some of those might be expensive lessons. think certainly as an entrepreneur, I’ve had to learn some expensive lessons when I didn’t pivot hard enough or, you know, change my business or change my mindset fast enough. And then you…

John Jantsch (19:32.327)

Yeah, Yeah.

Brent At E2M (19:43.51)

And then you’re like, was a hard lesson. I’m never going to do that again. So I think, you know, people don’t evolve right now and they don’t invest time. Like again, we’re doing these AI first Saturdays as a team. And at first people were like, I to come in on Saturday. we’re like, Hey, look, this is the reality. Like we’re all working an extra, an extra day right now to make sure that we can properly retool and learn enough about this tech because during the week, we’re all very focused on client work. We’re focusing on.

John Jantsch (19:46.097)

Right, Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:55.121)

Yeah, right.

Brent At E2M (20:11.758)

know, doing the day-to-day business. so, you know, we’ve, we’ve made that as a priority all the way up to our leadership team. Right. I mean, I’m waking up at four o’clock every Saturday, joining, joining the team and you know, working on AI stuff.

John Jantsch (20:25.713)

Well, Brent, we’ve frittered away a perfectly good 20 minutes here trying to help people talk people off the cliff a little bit. Is there some place you’d invite people to learn more about e2m’s solutions?

Brent At E2M (20:39.34)

Yeah, you can definitely check us out at e2msolutions.com. You can always email me brent at e2msolutions.com. We’re running an event called Vistara at the end of September, depending on when this episode airs, join vistara.com. So we’re doing two full days on artificial intelligence and agency growth. So, I mean, we’re, think this is such an important topic. We’re running a full two day event on this in Denver, Colorado. So if you’re interested, certainly reach out.

John Jantsch (21:01.319)

Yes.

John Jantsch (21:06.791)

Well, I’m just down the road. should probably come down and speak at the event. Well, let’s make, let’s, let’s make it happen then. All right. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll see you soon out there on the road.

Brent At E2M (21:10.606)

I think so. I think so. should. Let’s make it happen.

Brent At E2M (21:20.942)

Thanks, John.

Why Inner Excellence Creates Outer Success

Why Inner Excellence Creates Outer Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Jim Murphy, high-performance coach, speaker, and creator of the Inner Excellence Methodology. Jim has coached world-class athletes, Olympians, and business leaders, helping them master the inner game that leads to breakthrough results. He shares the story behind his book’s viral moment with NFL star AJ Brown, the practical spiritual approach to peak performance, and why detaching from outcomes is the secret to true excellence—on the field, in business, and in life.

About the Guest

Jim Murphy is a high-performance coach, author, and creator of the Inner Excellence Methodology. With a background as a professional athlete and decades of experience coaching Olympians, pro athletes, and top business leaders, Jim’s work blends science, spirituality, and practical tools for living—and performing—at your best. His book, “Inner Excellence: Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life,” has sold over half a million copies and is available in more than 25 languages.

Actionable Insights

  • Viral validation: Wide receiver AJ Brown’s sideline reading of “Inner Excellence” sparked global interest, taking the book from niche to worldwide bestseller.
  • Lasting results come from mastering your inner game—moving beyond tactics to focus on mindset, heart, and presence.
  • Detach from outcomes: The best performers focus on the process and personal growth, not just external results or wins.
  • Redefine success: Go beyond achievements and ask, “Who do I want to become? What do I truly value? How do I want to live?”
  • Freedom to fail is essential for high performance—joy, excitement, and learning are key to resilience and breakthrough.
  • Inner Excellence applies equally to athletes, business leaders, and entrepreneurs: the inner game is universal.
  • Daily practices for entrepreneurs and marketers: Learn and grow every day, give the best you have, be present and grateful, focus only on what you can control.
  • Embracing vulnerability and humility (accurate self-view, not over or under-inflated ego) leads to greater confidence, peace, and fearlessness.
  • Lasting change happens when you strip away “doing” and shift toward “being”—starting with speaking the truth and expanding beliefs about what’s possible.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:30 – AJ Brown’s Sideline Reading Goes Viral
    How an NFL star’s ritual turned “Inner Excellence” into a bestseller overnight.
  • 04:37 – From Minor League Struggles to Mindset Breakthrough
    Jim’s journey from pro baseball disappointment to coaching and creating his method.
  • 06:41 – Letting Go of Outcome Control
    A Ryder Cup client story and the power of trading “small lollipops” for a bigger vision of success.
  • 09:11 – Fear of Failure and Redefining Success
    Why baseball teaches resilience and how to focus on what truly matters.
  • 10:49 – The Inner Game for Athletes and Executives
    How mindset mastery is the same for business leaders as for pro athletes.
  • 12:08 – Daily Practices for Entrepreneurs and Marketers
    The four goals: Learn and grow, give your best, be present and grateful, focus on what you control.
  • 14:21 – Vulnerability, Humility, and Embracing Failure
    How accurate self-view and “letting go” drive real breakthroughs.
  • 17:25 – Shifting from Doing to Being
    Why speaking the truth and expanding your beliefs unlocks new levels of possibility.
  • 18:46 – How Viral Success Changed (and Validated) the Work
    Jim reflects on confidence, humility, and seeing himself as a messenger, not the “originator.”

Insights

“Detach from outcomes. Go for the whole candy store: fullness of life, not just small tangible wins.”

“Redefine success. Ask who you want to become, what you value, and how you want to live—not just what you want to achieve.”

“Freedom to fail and the joy of learning are essential for high performance—whether on the field or in business.”

“Humility is an accurate view of self—neither overinflated nor underinflated. Let go of ego, and you can be fearless.”

“The most important change is shifting from doing to being—stripping away what isn’t true and expanding what you believe is possible.”

John Jantsch (00:00.773)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jim Murphy. He’s a high performance coach, author, speaker, and the creator of the Inner Excellence Methodology. He’s coached world-class athletes, Olympians, and business leaders, helping them achieve breakthrough results by mastering their inner game. His own journey from minor league baseball player to elite coach led him to develop a practical spiritual approach to peak performance.

that goes beyond tactics and into mindset, heart, and presence. We’re going to talk about his book, Interpresence, or I’m sorry, Interexcellence, Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life. So Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim (00:44.194)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:45.851)

Few years ago, I had Captain Sullivan on the show. You may recall he is the airline pilot that landed his airplane after taking off in New York City in the Hudson River. Do you remember that a few? Sully, right. And then I turned it into a movie. Of course he had a book. So I had to start that show, you know, as he said, well, I have, you know, I have to tell that story, you know, every time I now am asked to talk about, you know, how that went. So he certainly had the story down. Not nearly as dramatic, but.

Jim (00:57.336)

So weak.

John Jantsch (01:15.451)

You have a bit of an AJ Brown story. want to, I’m sure people are asking you and I’m sure you love telling it. You’re probably getting tired of telling it, but you want to tell us kind of your kind of moment happened. Gosh, what was that now? Eight, nine months ago.

Jim (01:30.254)

Yeah, John, I’m very grateful to tell it. So on January 12th, uh, AJ Brown was a, he’s a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s a wild card game Packers versus the Eagles. Um, Sunday night football, the only NFL game on and, um, in middle of the game, he’s reading the football reading, reading inter excellence on the sidelines during the football game. And so the TV station zooms in on it’s like, what is AJ Brown doing? And then, oh my gosh, he was reading a book and Kevin Brown and

John Jantsch (01:37.051)

me.

John Jantsch (01:57.435)

you

Jim (01:59.81)

Tom Burkhart made a big deal about it afterwards. They asked him, what were you doing? Were you bored? Were you? He said, no, it’s a book that I read before I bring to every game. Read it before the game to get centered and read it after every drive to get re centered. My teammates call it the recipe. And so that was the first time I actually heard about him doing this. I saw a picture of him on social media of like a month earlier, but I had no context. didn’t know anything about it. And so I found out what the rest of the world.

that he was doing this at that time. And just an amazing thing for him to do to be true to himself, that find something that helps him be better at what he does and to be more fearless and show all of us that we all have time to read.

John Jantsch (02:40.687)

Well, and then of course the punchline, I suppose, what happened to you next?

Jim (02:48.424)

a few things, john, a few things. Yeah, my world changed a lot. The you know, the message that selfless is fearless, as you know, spread around the world now, love, wisdom and courage. And so the book had sold maybe seven or eight or 9000 copies in nine years. mean, sorry, 16 years, initially was was published in 2009 by McGraw Hill. And then I

John Jantsch (02:49.563)

Hehehehehe

Jim (03:18.329)

put out a revised edition self-published in 2018 or 2020. And then so that’s the book AJ Brown has been reading. And since then, it’s sold, I don’t know, close to half a million copies, I would say.

John Jantsch (03:32.123)

So, I’m curious, how did you print the books without that sort of immediate demand?

Jim (03:42.21)

Yeah, so it’s amazing how the world is now with Amazon and they print on demand. so if

John Jantsch (03:44.645)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:48.527)

Yeah, but they were able to print on that kind of demand. Yeah, yeah.

Jim (03:52.27)

Well, apparently they did run out at some point. So they’ve got print centers all over the world. And so there was a time when the demand was so high, it’s sold tens of thousands of copies every day for the first few weeks that they did run out at one point.

John Jantsch (04:09.435)

Yeah, that’s a crazy story. Well, good for you. know, frankly, I love to hear stories like that. Persons out there doing their work and you know, as a magical moment happened, I think we all deserve it. You start the book talking about your own struggles as a minor league player, the mindset, you know, performance anxiety, self doubt. Would you say that that was instrumental to you developing kind of your own framework?

Jim (04:37.78)

yeah, yeah, absolutely. My whole life since I was a little kid, I obsessed about being a superstar. I was going to play in the NFL like A.J. Brown or I was going to be in the NBA or Major League Baseball. And so when I got drafted by the Cubs, it was a dream come true. But I had a vision problem that was with me for my entire professional career. I played five years in the minors and then eventually had to retire because of it. And my identity was completely wrapped up in my role as a pro athlete. And when I lost it, I felt like I lost everything. And so

I got a job with him. asked got out asked to coach a high school baseball team in inner city Seattle and I had no interest in coaching but I took the job was driving a truck for FedEx and we went undefeated and I realized wow I love coaching. Who knew? And then so I went on this journey to become a pro baseball coach. I got went to grad school got a job with the Texas Rangers two weeks after graduation. So now I felt like I was somebody again and then I quit six months into the first season and so.

devastated again my identity, you know, I was somebody and I lost it and then somebody again I lost it and so I kind of got tired of this merry-go-round of feeling like I was someone and no one and end up leaving for the desert to go live a life of solitude to figure out what to do with my life and that’s where Interactionless was born. I spent five years full-time writing and researching how to have peace and confidence under the most pressure and what I found John was that that The path to having the most peace and confidence under the most pressure is the same path of building an extraordinary life

when filled with deep contentment, joy and confidence, independent of circumstance. It’s a wholehearted path where you understand what the human heart deeply needs and wants and how to get it.

John Jantsch (06:15.611)

So you started touching on this idea of your identity and you spend a lot of time or one of the core principles really is kind of this idea of letting go of the need to control the outcome, which is, you know, being very attached to the outcome. Can you, do you have a client story, executive athlete, I suppose you don’t want to name names, but where, you you help somebody kind of overcome that control of the outcome.

Jim (06:41.582)

Yeah, I’ll tell you. When I was at the Ryder Cup years ago, it’s one of the biggest events in golf pro golf. You have the team USA versus Team Europe. And one of the players top 10 in the world said Jim, I’m too attached to the results of my my performance. You know, I get too tense. What can I do? And I said, Well, imagine there’s a little kid who loves lollipops, and he’s got a lollipop and you want to take it from him, but you don’t want to struggle. Is there any way you could get him to give you the lollipop?

by volunteering it to give it to you. And he said, you know, I don’t know. And I said, well, what if you had a bigger lollipop and asked him to trade? And he said, he’d probably trade. What kid wouldn’t trade a small lollipop for a bigger one? I said, that’s what you need. Your lollipop is too small. Your lollipop is, I just want to get birdies and I want to win the tournament. And I, you know, I want to be successful. I want to get some tangible results. That’s way too small. First of all, you don’t even know if that’s good for you to get birdies and

Good results and have more success. Is that going to be good for you in the long run and your family? You don’t know what you need is to pursue fullness of life and develop yourself in that way, which we know is good for you where you feel fully alive and make that your your Pursuit go for the whole candy store. Don’t settle for these little these 10 these tangible things that you don’t even know if will make you happy let alone fulfilled

John Jantsch (08:06.651)

You talk a lot about fear. You identify a number of them. Um, one of them of which is true. don’t care what you’re doing. Fear of failure shows up in a lot of people’s lives when they pursue anything. Um, I’m curious. I’m a huge baseball fan. That’s, that’s my sport. Um, and you know, it’s very cliche to say, but I’ll say it anyway. You know, the best baseball players fail 70 % of the time, right? In the, in the, uh, hitting world. Um,

So, so how does, I mean, how do they get through that and you know, that, that idea of I’m, afraid to fail, but you know, and, what’s weird about it is 20 hits in a season might make the difference between being seen as a failure or being seen as, as a superstar. So, you know, how do you, how do you, how do, how did you, or how do you see baseball players in particular? This would apply to all athletes, I suppose, but I just.

I feel like baseball has more failure in it than any other sport. So, you know, how do, how do you, they deal with that?

Jim (09:11.534)

You got to redefine success to something that’s meaningful to you and then break it down into smaller components Specifically, how do I want to feel in my life? How do I want to live? Who do I want to become? Who am I meant to become? And What is my purpose? What do I value most if you’re not clear on those things then the default is I just need more success I need more base hits and But that’s too far out of your control. It’s just you

John Jantsch (09:37.115)

Mm-hmm.

Jim (09:40.844)

Now you’re just happy if you get hit, sad if you don’t, and stressed when you need it, and you’re never gonna be your best when you’re stressed. We need to have freedom to fail to be your best. There needs to be an element of joy and excitement to be your best. In order to have that joy and excitement, we need to focus on the reason why you want the base hit. Why do you want the base hit? Well, so I can have a good batting average. Why do I want that? So I can become an all-star. Why do you want that?

So I can make more money. What do you want that? Well, I want a great life. Really. I want a more comfortable life. Well, what is it that you really want? Is it just a $10 million house on the water? Is that what you want? Or is it what you think that will give you, which is great experiences and deep enriching relationships where you’re learning and growing and making a difference, where you feel fully alive? Is that what you okay? That’s what you want? Well, I’m going show you how to go for that directly and let everything else be added to you.

John Jantsch (10:33.932)

So we have been talking mostly about athletes, but you coach a lot of business leaders who are certainly not performing in the same way. Is it any different or is it really basically get down to the same bottom line?

Jim (10:49.582)

Exact same thing. I don’t teach people what to do, how to do their job. Unless it’s pro baseball, I might have had a few couple things there, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO of Google or you’re a pro athlete or Olympic swimmer or anybody. It’s really how do you be fully engaged in the moment when you’re performing unattached to what you’re trying to do? How can you expand what you believe is possible? How can you perform with freedom and passion?

John Jantsch (10:58.361)

Yeah.

Jim (11:18.848)

unattached to what you’re trying to do. And that’s, that’s everything I’m telling you about is really clarifying these things that are most meaningful to you and, pursuing them.

John Jantsch (11:28.123)

So athletes today, I mean, obviously they’ve trained their body. mean, that’s kind of a lot. That’s, that’s what comes with the deal. Increasingly, you’re seeing sports psychologists. You know, you’re actually seeing people in the dugout, uh, that are, you know, mindset related. Business owners don’t necessarily, well, a lot of them don’t train their body like an athlete, even though they need to perform, but they certainly don’t have the same idea of training their mind. Are there exercise? I know there are exercises in your system. Uh, you want to talk a little bit about.

ones that are really geared towards entrepreneurs or even have a lot of marketers on this show that would help them train their mind.

Jim (12:08.684)

Yeah, well, with the InterEx Lancers, the number one goal every day is to learn and grow. If you want to be great at business, we need to be creative. We can’t be attached to the results and circumstances. We need to think clearly. We have to have a clear mind and unburdened heart. If you want to be great at anything, business included, we can’t be caught up in the past and future. so learn and grow every day is the number one goal. And then within that, we have four daily goals.

Give the best of what you have some days it’s not going to be good. Be present, be grateful, focus on your routines and only what you can control.

John Jantsch (12:46.575)

There certainly is, you talk openly about the spiritual elements of what you teach, presence, gratitude, acceptance, in addition to like performance metrics. Do you ever, especially with business leaders, do you ever get any skepticism, pushback that, just like give me the tools, give me the, you I don’t need that woo-woo stuff.

Jim (13:09.68)

yeah, yeah. Pro athletes, business leaders. Yeah, definitely. If you’re a high achiever, then you don’t want the woo woo. You want tangible results. You don’t want to mess around. You don’t want to waste your time. And I get it. The question is if something is really important to you, if this is the biggest year of your career, maybe your free agent or maybe you have a massive deal you’re working on or just trying to get a job and you need the money.

The more important it is to you, then the more important the process of how you live and what you do every day is, you know, then it’s more important. So the question is, what’s the best process for you to be your best every day? And that’s what InterEx is, is I present to you what I think, what I’ve learned is the best process for the majority of people to be fully engaged in the moment, heart, mind and body on a test and what they’re trying to do.

John Jantsch (14:02.297)

You talk about in the book embracing, excuse me, vulnerability and even failure in some cases. You want to talk a little bit about whether it’s on your own personal life or with the client where you’ve helped, we’re embracing that imperfection has kind of led to a breakthrough.

Jim (14:21.922)

Yeah, I define humility as an accurate view of self, not overinflated and not under inflated. And so

John Jantsch (14:25.563)

Right.

Jim (14:34.382)

pro athletes and most people they come to me because they’re underperforming and essentially they come to me wanting they’re obsessing about things that they want can’t control and then they just try harder and then the trying harder causes them to be more tense more anxious and worse performance and so then they just that causes more stress and then they feel like they need to become more needy and so it’s just this endless loop and so essentially

They’re coming to me for low level needs and desires. Become world number one. Be the best in the industry. That’s a low level need is, well, one, I call it low level because you don’t even know if it’s good for you, let alone gonna make you happy. Say you got a million followers or $10 million or $10 million house on the water. Is that gonna make you happy? You might think so and hopefully, but it may not. And so, but that’s people come to me because I’ve helped people achieve extraordinary success.

John Jantsch (15:09.275)

Mm-hmm.

Jim (15:32.438)

generally most people their first year together, they have the best year of their careers. It’s because we focus on developing themselves as people giving inner strength and inner peace, let everything else be added to them. So, this is the crucial thing.

John Jantsch (15:48.773)

So how do you balance the fact that, especially in the field that you’re working with, mean, that people are taught their entire lives to strive for excellence, to hustle, to work harder, to outwork everybody else. I how do you balance that? Because you’re not, I mean, they obviously have to have the skills they have to put into work, but you’re telling them something completely different than what society is probably pumping in.

Jim (16:14.998)

Yeah. Society says the only thing that matters is the results, bottom line, black and white, zero sum score. Like it’s either win or lose. There’s only only so many pieces to the pie. And I’m saying, we live in an unstable, unfair world that has a lot of, horrible things in it. And, if you don’t have a clear system, you’re going to get sucked into negativity and because of all the instability and even evil and violence.

So we need to have a clear system to make sure we’re focusing on who you can become and what’s possible in your life. And so, Inter Excellence is about developing the habits of thought and action every day where you can be fully engaged in the moment more often, unattached to the results of what you’re trying to do. And we do that by training your heart to love most what’s most empowering.

John Jantsch (17:03.493)

So I’m guessing a fair amount of people you work with need like you need to strip some stuff away, you know, because they come to you with being full on being doing. What’s kind of the first step to get somebody to shift their mindset from that, you know, away from doing and more towards, I guess you would call it being.

Jim (17:25.762)

how they speak. The first thing we do is we make sure that we’re speaking the truth. That’s Inter Excellence has nine disciplines and one of the disciplines is to speak the truth about the past to create possibilities in the future. So people come to me and they want to perform better. they’re, they often will talk to me about how they’re struggling with something. And, but the thing is your subconscious is what’s running your life and creating these beliefs that are limitations on what’s possible.

It’s really, really hard to outperform your beliefs, the subconscious comfort level with what you feel is possible in your life. And so, Inter-Excellence is largely about expanding what you believe is possible by getting yourself to see possibilities and feel it as if it’s real. And so we need to be able to come to edge of our feelings and beliefs and not resist those moments where we’re super uncomfortable.

John Jantsch (18:18.393)

Because your work went from being exposed to X amount of people to a much larger X, has that changed just because I’m guessing you’re getting a lot more feedback, you have more people reaching out to you saying, hey, I want a piece of you. Has that changed not you, but has that changed anything, how you think about your system, how you think about the work, or is it only validated?

Jim (18:46.894)

Oh yeah, it’s changed a lot. My life has changed a lot. Um, I think of what if I would have died January 11th or before, you know, I, the majority of the things in the book that I wrote 16 years ago are the same. And it was selling one to two copies a day before January 12th. And then, um, you know, now it’s like I said, it’s going to be in 26 or 27 languages and it’s sold half a million copies or whatever. And so, um,

John Jantsch (18:58.255)

Right.

Jim (19:14.646)

what’s changed is is well, I want to more definitely more confidence in the message. Like in the past, I you know, I believed in the message for sure. But there’s always a wonder like, why don’t more people? Why isn’t the book more popular? didn’t understand it. And so now it’s just kind of that’s really cool. But I don’t think of myself as as the originator of this.

John Jantsch (19:32.304)

Yeah.

Jim (19:41.876)

or even author. I’m just a lowly messenger. And so because it’s so extraordinary, everything that’s happened, it’s, I mean, it’s, there’s no way that I could say, I did this. And so the moment we start to think that I’m doing it and that I’m somebody because I’m doing these great things, then we start to get afraid of, what if I make mistakes? But when you can take yourself completely out of the picture,

John Jantsch (19:52.123)

Thanks

John Jantsch (20:06.521)

Yeah.

Jim (20:10.904)

there’s no concern for self, then you can be fearless. God’s given me this gift that I realized, you know, at the very most I’ve added maybe one or 2 % to anything good that’s happened in the last six months. And since I know that there’s no like, I’m somebody now. I know I’m nobody.

John Jantsch (20:30.873)

Yeah. Well, Jim, I appreciate you taking a moment to share with our listeners. Is there some place you would invite people to connect with you? Obviously the book’s available everywhere, but if people want to learn more about your coaching or just really, you know, anything, explore anything deeper from the book.

Jim (20:53.09)

Yeah, I would go to interexcellence.com and sign up for the newsletter. We have a VIP newsletter that talks about our retreats and workshops. We’ve got a retreat coming up in Mexico here very soon. and then social media, Instagram, InterExcellence, InterExcellence, Jim Murphy, and other social media outlets. You’ll find me.

Jim (21:16.28)

Thanks so much, John.

Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends

Marketing in the Era of Uber Trends written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Listen to the full episode:

Overview

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Michael Tchong, innovation expert, futurist, and founder of Uber Trends. Named “America’s most influential trend spotter” by Daily Telegraph, Michael has helped brands like Apple, Amex, and Mercedes-Benz anticipate seismic shifts in technology and consumer behavior. Michael breaks down the difference between fleeting fads and true “Uber Trends,” shares his process for pattern recognition and trend validation, and explains why transparency, instant gratification, and user experience are core forces reshaping marketing, business, and culture.

About the Guest

Michael Tchong is a renowned innovation expert, sought-after speaker, and the founder of Uber Trends. He’s been recognized as America’s top trend spotter and has guided Fortune 500 companies in anticipating and capitalizing on shifts that drive consumer behavior and technology. Michael is the author of “Ubertrends: How Trends and Innovation Are Transforming Our Future,” founder of the Uber Trends Academy, and a passionate advocate for leveraging deep trend insight for competitive advantage.

Actionable Insights

  • Uber Trends are massive, value-shifting waves that reshape society and spark dozens of subtrends—unlike shallow fads, they create lasting change.
  • Pattern recognition and connecting data “dots” is the key skill for trend spotting; analyzing headlines, reading research critically, and tagging patterns are daily habits for Michael.
  • Time compression, instant gratification, and “TBD” (too busy disorder) are core Uber Trends affecting everything from TikTok to retail hours—businesses must adapt to shorter attention spans and higher expectations.
  • User experience and transparency are essential for future-ready businesses; consumers demand seamless journeys, clear pricing, and visible customer support.
  • The explosion of martech and AI tools signals a “great martech displacement”—disruption is coming from nimble new players, not industry incumbents.
  • Marketers and business owners should focus on finding pain points tied to Uber Trends and build innovation around solving them (not just chasing the latest app or fad).
  • Trendspotting is a skill anyone can build: Read widely, analyze patterns, maintain a trend database, and be skeptical about research and survey data.
  • The future belongs to those who can connect systemic shifts to actionable business ideas—turning trend insight into competitive advantage.

Great Moments (with Timestamps)

  • 01:09 – Uber Trends vs. Micro Trends
    Michael explains his framework and why only a few shifts truly change society.
  • 03:18 – What Makes an Uber Trend?
    Massive, value-shifting, and “changes people,” not just culture.
  • 04:42 – Pattern Recognition and Connecting the Dots
    Why trend spotting is about data analysis and seeing the big picture.
  • 08:31 – Turning Trends Into Business Innovation
    How leaders can build around pain points and lasting shifts, not fads.
  • 10:25 – The Great Martech Displacement
    Why 40,000 new AI apps are disrupting traditional marketing tech stacks.
  • 13:19 – User Experience as the Ultimate Differentiator
    Why transparency, customer support, and frictionless journeys are the new competitive edge.
  • 15:15 – Transparency, Pricing, and the Self-Led Buyer Journey
    Marketing must adapt as buyers expect everything to be visible before talking to sales.
  • 17:14 – Spotting Trends Early—and What Michael Missed
    Reflections on time compression, instant gratification, and what’s next.
  • 20:14 – Habits for Marketers Who Want to Spot Trends
    Michael’s daily reading, trend database, and tips for separating signal from noise.

Insights

“Uber Trends are not fads—they’re massive, value-shifting waves that actually change people, not just society.”

“Pattern recognition is the heart of trend spotting. It’s about connecting the dots and seeing the big picture among all the noise.”

“Time compression, instant gratification, and higher expectations are pushing businesses to deliver user experiences that are fast, transparent, and frictionless.”

“The martech world is being disrupted—not by incumbents, but by nimble new AI players who understand the next wave.”

“Anyone can learn to spot trends—read widely, question research, maintain a database, and always look for actionable patterns you can build a business around.”

John Jantsch (00:00.93)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Michael Tchong. He’s an innovation expert, sought after speaker and founder of Uber Trends. He’s recognized as America’s most influential trend spotter by Daily Telegraph. Michael has helped companies like Apple, American Express and Mercedes-Benz anticipate and capitalize on seismic shifts in consumer behavior and technology. He’s known for his energetic

presentations, uncanny predictions and unique frameworks for decoding the future. So, Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Tchong (00:37.382)

thank you for having me, John. It’s a pleasure to be here, especially with someone who is in the digital marketing arena.

John Jantsch (00:44.59)

for many years before we had digital marketing in fact, but still in it. So as I read in your bio, you’ve been called America’s most influential trend spotter. So I’m wondering, do you have a kind of a personal process for identifying, know, real lasting trends versus kind of passing fads? you got a methodology that generally is on target?

Michael Tchong (01:09.197)

Well, I think that and I have a book called uber trends how trends and innovation are transforming our future I am really focused on my eight uber trends because they are what I consider to be value shift inducing trends most trends just skim the social surface so

Those eight uber trends, the digital lifestyle, the marriage of man and machine, generation ecstasy, been there, done that, voyeur orgasm, I like to watch. I know these are, you know, stand out waves that I believe repercuss through society, rippling across our social surface and creating many, sub trends in their wake. that now, so if a if I see a phenomenon that is

John Jantsch (01:44.334)

Yeah.

Michael Tchong (02:02.637)

tied to one of these trends, then I know it’s part of a lasting happening. think that that’s really how you have to look at it. So for example, you know, the experience if inflation, which is one of my Uber trends, is, of course, quite appropriate for Las Vegas, because we have so many.

John Jantsch (02:10.87)

Mmm. Okay.

John Jantsch (02:27.278)

Yeah

Michael Tchong (02:29.837)

of Meow Wolf, and now we have the Universal Horror Experience, and you’ve got the Sphere. These are all things that are aimed directly under the aegis of Generation XTC at an audience that’s become so bored and so immune to excitement because they want to move on to the next thing, just like, you know, been there, done that suggests.

John Jantsch (02:56.846)

Hehehe.

Michael Tchong (02:57.677)

that I look at those type of phenomena as a part of a lasting change in society.

John Jantsch (03:05.293)

So maybe I better back up a little bit. Let’s define first the concept of an Uber trend that obviously it’s central to your work. How do you define one? What makes it different from say a micro trend?

Michael Tchong (03:18.221)

Okay, an uber trend is a massive wave, think tsunami that cascades through society, leaving many sub trends in its wake. And what sets it apart, like I mentioned, unlike most trends, it does not skim the social surface, it actually changes people. So let me give you a perfect example of that. Time compression, the acceleration of life.

We are all suffering from TBD, too busy disorder, as Ellen DeGeneres coined it. We are all multitasking to save time. We’ve all become massively impatient. So the TikTok video view is now two seconds because everyone clicks off in 1.6 to 1.8 seconds. That is part and parcel.

John Jantsch (04:11.65)

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Tchong (04:15.637)

of the time compression Uber trend. So when you see again, these snapshots in society, I connect the dots. We’re all inundated by data. And so what I tried to say is, look, this is all part and parcel of a phenomenon that has legs and that is something that you need to watch as a marketer, especially.

John Jantsch (04:42.092)

So I have been doing this show for coming up on 20 years. Actually, August 1st is my 20th anniversary of doing this show as a podcast. Prior to that, I actually did a radio show. And so I have interviewed many, many people. I interviewed John Nesbitt, who was the author of Megatrends. And so he was kind of the first person to talk trends, to me at least. I’m sure there have been others. your work been influenced by some of his early work?

Michael Tchong (04:52.801)

Wow.

Michael Tchong (05:02.422)

Yes.

Michael Tchong (05:06.198)

Yeah.

Michael Tchong (05:12.917)

Well, megatrends is what everybody will call it when I talk about Uber trends, right? But, you know, remember I’m a marketer by heart. Okay. That’s my background. I worked a shy day, you know? So when I decided on the Uber nomenclature way before Uber was cool, I was Uber cool. I adopted that as the name for my trends. And think about it.

John Jantsch (05:16.898)

Yes. Right,

Michael Tchong (05:42.901)

You’re a marketer. Think about the marketing perspective. You’ve got the seventies. You’ve got Alvin Toffler, Future Shock. Everyone talks about that. Then the eighties appears and you’ve got John Nesbit, Megatrends. Everyone talks about that. Then you get Fade Popcorn in the nineties and some people talk about it. Then you get Malcolm Gladwell in the two thousands who is more of a author, you know, someone who’s

John Jantsch (05:49.784)

Right.

John Jantsch (05:59.416)

Alright, the popcorn diaries, right? Yeah.

Michael Tchong (06:12.48)

Paints a great story, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider him to be a sublime trend watcher. I think he’s really more focused on creating these stories and, you know, 10,000 hours that you have to become before you become proficient at something. So there is a vacuum in my view and the vacuum that is currently being occupied by the likes of say a Rainier Avers at trend watching in the Netherlands.

John Jantsch (06:27.256)

Yeah, right, right.

John Jantsch (06:32.408)

Mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (06:41.228)

And there’s a gentleman in Jeremy Gucci in Canada with Trend Hunter. me, yeah, and with all due respect, let me tell you something. Many of their 10,000 or so, 20,000 or so trend labels, most of those are fads.

John Jantsch (06:44.91)

Yeah. Jeremy’s been on this show. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:07.448)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Tchong (07:08.46)

Most of those are, know, a picture, a picture hook for your wall in the shape of a dagger. Who cares? I don’t. That may be good for a small business operator who’s looking for a creative idea, perhaps, but I am more interested in the systemic shifts in society. That is my difference.

John Jantsch (07:19.309)

You

Right.

Michael Tchong (07:37.932)

And so when you are looking for a value proposition as a marketer, how do I take an idea of an emerging trend and turn it into a you know, shape shifting business solution? That’s what I’m all about.

John Jantsch (07:55.35)

Yeah. mean, I mean, all the conversation around trends is really just kind of almost fun pop culture until you can do something with it. Right. And I think that that’s the, that’s the real rub is a lot of people can say, yeah, that, okay. I see that coming. Or maybe I don’t, or maybe that’s a big deal, but how do I capitalize on it? So, you know, how do you advise people you, I mentioned in your bio that you work with some, big name companies, how do you advise them to take something that

Michael Tchong (08:04.595)

Exactly.

Michael Tchong (08:15.36)

Right.

John Jantsch (08:24.13)

that maybe you’ve defined and you see coming and then say, hey, here’s how to prepare for it.

Michael Tchong (08:31.306)

Well, look, there is no real magic in anything that we do as business people. I always say you’ve got to pay attention to the details. So for example, in my presentations, I talk about the fact that, you know, everyone aspires to come up with a disruptive innovation. But Steve Jobs, with all the things that he did.

John Jantsch (08:53.774)

Sure.

Michael Tchong (09:00.182)

did not necessarily create anything new. When he took the iPod, he takes something that came out of Singapore, creative strategies. I’m not a creative strategist, but you know who I’m talking about. They already had an MP3 player, but he just did a best of breed. He put a five megabyte, which at the time was huge, of storage into a device. But the biggest innovation there was

John Jantsch (09:16.27)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:21.388)

Yeah, right, right.

Michael Tchong (09:27.958)

tying it to a music store so that you could automatically seamlessly download some music. So as a business person, when you’re looking at emerging trends and you’re seeing all the things that are happening in our current landscape, and there are many, okay, you have to then decide, okay, how do I build a business around that? So again, you take baby steps, you say,

John Jantsch (09:31.47)

Yeah, right.

Michael Tchong (09:56.921)

What is the pain point in society related to this emerging trend? What are people not able to do or accomplish in a simple fashion to get this to work for them? Especially in this day and age where, know, let’s go through some numbers here. You’re in digital marketing. You know as well as I, the Scott Brinker has that barometer.

John Jantsch (10:13.848)

the

Michael Tchong (10:25.9)

And in May, he said there were 15,400 or so digital marketing apps. And that took 31 years from the day that that first ad banner appeared on Hotwired, 1994, May 1994, till now, 31 years to get to 15,400 apps. Since the debut of OpenAI’s chat GPT, November 30th of 2022, we will never forget.

John Jantsch (10:32.748)

Mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (10:55.596)

We now have almost 40,000 AI apps.

John Jantsch (11:02.892)

Yeah.

Michael Tchong (11:03.486)

Massive, massive, but what that does tell you is that there is a, and I call this trend the great martech displacement. Okay. Because in all my explorations, if you will, of the apps that are marketing related.

John Jantsch (11:14.158)

Mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (11:29.032)

One of the things I noticed that, hey, you know what? There are almost no traditional players in all these articles that are talking about, you know, the digital sales representative and, know, GEO, which is now the new SEO, Generative AI, born engine optimization, is that these things are not occupied by the traditional player.

John Jantsch (11:35.384)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:41.709)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (11:47.49)

Mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (11:58.78)

If I was a small business consultant and I was focused on what the next generation of my clients would be demanding, I would suggest that they start looking into what are these leading edge tools and build a business around.

John Jantsch (12:15.406)

Yeah, I actually think that it’ll be interesting. Some of the entrenched players, I think will try to get it in the space, I think that, I think there’s a, right now that the AI apps are, you know, there are 200 of them that somebody could use and at any given time, I think those are all going to get consolidated and eaten up by somebody who figures out how to create the AI operating system as kind of one deliverable package. And I think people will

You know, right now there’s a whole bunch of $20 a month tools. think there’s somebody’s going to come along and create the 599, you know, all in one package that I think, I think will, especially for small and midsize businesses.

Michael Tchong (12:51.455)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (12:55.363)

That’s what Elon Musk says he wants to do. There’s been talk about that super app for years now. I have not seen it. In 1992, I created the first incursion of what I consider a modularly upgradable CRM system. It was called Hello.

John Jantsch (12:57.998)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:03.49)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s because it’s hard.

John Jantsch (13:17.39)

Hmm. Huh.

Michael Tchong (13:19.145)

because I am focused on the user experience. That is what I believe is the number one thing you should be talking about when, in this new age, with everyone being hyper competitive, the customer experience is what sets you apart. So as a small business person, that is what I focus on. Transparency is the other thing that I highly advocate everybody pursue.

We are living in an era where that’s ruled by voyeurgasm. I like to watch UberTrend. And that is propelling that urge by society to be able to see more. It’s propelled by YouTube. You’ve got celebrity worship syndrome. You’ve got reality shows. know, everything has become transparent. We’re living in surveillance culture. You know, again, all of these are opportunities as they keep exploding.

to create businesses around and, you know, make sure you do that. So for example, in our business, in our software business, you know as well as I do, every developer out there hides their customer service email. They have no 800 toll free numbers. They try so desperately to make sure that no one can find them. There’s no street address. There’s nothing.

John Jantsch (14:34.136)

Ha ha.

Michael Tchong (14:44.413)

It is totally anathema to the wave of the future of transparency. Absolutely. So I go and preach to an audience that is totally hostile. They don’t want to hear that. And I say, look at your ketchup bottle. You will see that there is an 800 toll free number on your ketchup bottle. Why can’t you have that? If I have to pay you $50 a month.

John Jantsch (14:49.1)

Yeah, I agree with that, yeah.

John Jantsch (14:57.603)

Yeah.

Michael Tchong (15:13.759)

for your service.

John Jantsch (15:15.906)

Well, I’m, I’m actually, I tell you one trend that I’m seeing then that’s directly related to marketing is people, you know, because the buyer now has so much control over the journey and information and what they can find, you know, even creating short lists of, of, potential vendors that pricing is not going to be, I think, showing your pricing, revealing your pricing on your website as part of the customer journey before I ever have to talk to a salesperson.

I think is a trend that goes to this transparency, but also kind of, think goes to how people expect to buy today. They don’t want a salesperson to call them. They want to almost do a self-led journey, even for very high ticket items. I think that you’re going to see more and more marketers that are going to put everything on the table because they have no choice.

Michael Tchong (15:58.335)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (16:09.609)

Yeah, I hope so. know, I still the minute I run into any solution that has no pricing page, I go away, you know, and yeah, we’re a small business people. We all know we need to be diligent about our budgets and spending. So it is absolutely crucial that I know upfront that I have full pricing transparency and that I, like you said, don’t have to call somebody.

John Jantsch (16:11.086)

You

John Jantsch (16:19.788)

Right. Well, and I think you’re not alone. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:35.47)

Well, or, or, or I was going to say, just, don’t want to waste my time to find out it’s 10 times more than I can afford, uh, you know, is the answer. So, so it’s like, I want to at least know what I’m getting into before I even want to have that conversation or waste my time. think that, you know, kind of goes to your short attention span, you know, nobody wants a sales call. I mean, we want to be able to just do it 24 seven when we feel like it. Are there any?

Michael Tchong (16:43.476)

Yes.

Michael Tchong (16:50.847)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (16:59.239)

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

John Jantsch (17:02.594)

Are there any trends that you feel like you spotted early on and you’ve been able to take advantage of? And then I can give you the flip side. Are there any that you feel like you really missed?

Michael Tchong (17:14.991)

Well, I was talking about time compression back in the 90s. And so I, to me, society has been evolving at a speed. Then when I started to do research into it, I discovered that it really started way back as far as the forties, 1946, the discovery of the microwave oven, the discovery of

John Jantsch (17:19.714)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:36.878)

Mm-hmm.

Michael Tchong (17:44.475)

of the Polaroid camera, these both introduced America to instant gratification. And now it’s become part and parcel of our culture. We all want to, you I love that Google finding, you know, the interest in results for open now have declined, have increased exponentially as opposed to store hours. Again,

John Jantsch (18:12.876)

Yeah, yeah,

Michael Tchong (18:13.712)

for the retailer, that’s good to know because really, you know, I don’t want to have to search through your whole website to find what you, if you are open now. I almost advocate that we go back to that. Remember those little banners that used to run on the websites in the nineties? They had a little neon chasing thing. That’s what we need on your retailing website, on the homepage, open now.

John Jantsch (18:32.119)

Yeah.

Michael Tchong (18:44.146)

I mean, to me, is a, you know, I mean, why do I have to dig it? Now, of course, Google is provided in its summary of results. Thank God. Because again, yeah, I mean, you know, not even that, that directory listing on the right of that business that has the hours and the website and all, mean, you know, that is all information that you as a marketer should have already provided upfront on your homepage.

John Jantsch (18:46.616)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:53.944)

Yeah, the AI overviews are definitely cutting into that kind of search.

John Jantsch (19:11.512)

Yep. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Kind of reminds me, you were talking about the instant gratification. There was a movie, I never can remember the title of this, but the characters were teenagers and their mother had died and they found a camera that, film camera that she had taken some, obviously taken some pictures and they were like, let’s go get these, you know, developed, see what’s on it. So they take it in the store and he said, do you want the one hour service? And they were like, we have to wait an hour to get these pictures.

Michael Tchong (19:30.634)

Mm.

Michael Tchong (19:39.108)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:41.678)

I really, I find that to be one of the kind of the funniest moments to really sum up this. All right. So.

If a marketer wants to become a trend spotter themselves to some degree, are there any habits that you think that they need to start building around looking for those? is it simply a matter of read your book, Uber Trends, and then try to apply those to some process in their book or in their business?

Michael Tchong (20:14.186)

or join ubertrendsacademy, my school, where you will be learning a lot about trend watching. Essentially, it’s parsing a lot of information. It’s pattern recognition, okay? I I look at four to 500 headlines a day. I then categorize and database the articles.

John Jantsch (20:24.088)

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Tchong (20:35.818)

They’re all stored now in an Airtable database. I have keyworded them. I track over 350 trends, most of them related to my Uber trends because I cannot track every trend known to man, you know, because that would be tens of thousands. But I am just looking at the ones that everyone talks about. So I’ve got about 350 of those. And then what you then do is it’s a relational database. So it’s categorized, it’s tagged. Trends can have

John Jantsch (20:46.606)

Sure.

Michael Tchong (21:05.466)

overlapping market impacts, so they have to be tagged. So if I were to say to you, okay, you want to become a trend watcher? Yeah, you can, absolutely. Read the New York Times, read the Wall Street Journal. They are the biggest providers of trend watching in America. Then BBC and perhaps, you know, Futurism, know, Wired.

I read TechCrunch every day, I read The Verge every day, and then I go into Google News and I look at what they provide me, and then people share a lot of information with me as well, so that helps. That’s my informal trend-watching army. So I get help, and I need it. There’s too much stuff to absorb, it’s impossible, right?

John Jantsch (21:59.554)

Yes, yes. Yes, yes.

Michael Tchong (22:02.793)

Yeah, you can definitely become a trend watcher. So you have to analyze the data. You have to spot patterns, and that’s the critical thing. You have to really understand the difference between a good survey and a bad survey. And most research is bad. OK? Let me give you that. So when you see.

John Jantsch (22:20.76)

Yeah.

Michael Tchong (22:25.322)

a statistic for example that says 43 % of kids would love to play video games on their watch. You then have to know that in traditional research we divide audiences into quintiles, which are approximate fifths. And the spectrum goes from the one end of the spectrum is people who do everything

And then the other end of the spectrum is the people who do nothing. All right. As I call them legally dead. And in that spectrum, what you will find, and it goes into those approximate fifths beautifully really, because the top two quintiles, 40 % want to play video games on their watch.

John Jantsch (23:00.525)

Hahaha.

John Jantsch (23:20.536)

Yes.

Michael Tchong (23:21.82)

And so that 43 % statistic tells me nothing. That only tells me, hmm, it’s representative of the market at large. So reading research is absolutely critical because that is, you know, when they say, you know, 20 % of people never use AI. Hey, it’s the bottom quintile. They never do anything.

John Jantsch (23:31.468)

Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (23:46.53)

Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. That’s funny. Well, Michael, I appreciate you stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. there some place you’d invite people to learn about you connect with you? Obviously, find out more about your uber trends group.

Michael Tchong (23:51.581)

You know? So…

Michael Tchong (24:06.762)

Yes, absolutely. So ubertrends.com, that is where the Academy is based and that is where you will find plenty of information about our community. I invite people to join it. It’s on Mighty Networks, which is a startup by Gina Biancini who started Ring, if you remember that from the, I’m sorry, Ning, Ning, not Ring, Ning, in another community platform. Yeah, Gina, Gina, oh, you get around, man, you know.

John Jantsch (24:25.72)

Yeah. Yeah. Ning, Ning. Yeah, yeah. Gina’s been on my shelf on this show. Yeah.

John Jantsch (24:36.357)

I do.

Michael Tchong (24:36.362)

So, yeah, so what we’re trying to create is a community of people that talk to one another, you know. I don’t know if you remember, but I was the founder of Iconocast. We were one of the preeminent digital marketing newsletters during the dot com boom. So we had 50,000 readers each week that were part of and parcel of a very hardcore community. That’s what we like to build again.

John Jantsch (24:53.602)

Yeah, I remember that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (25:03.99)

Awesome. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you. I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Michael Tchong (25:06.196)

All right.

Michael Tchong (25:11.186)

And by the way, this is a T-shirt that is part of my innovation crusade. It’s you call that innovation is the hashtag. It’s a laughing emoji because the reality is, as you well know, everyone talks about innovation, but it’s like teenage sex. No one does it. On that note. Take thanks. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (25:19.054)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (25:34.838)

Awesome. I appreciate it.