Welcome to CultivatED Marketer …

In this ninth episode of CultivatED Marketer, hosts Brent Bowen and Matt Tidwell, PhD, chat with Grant Gooding, CEO of PROOF Positioning. After a professional start in the mergers and acquisitions world, Grant spent nearly a decade analyzing, valuing and transitioning hundreds of small and mid-market businesses. Eventually, he naturally gravitated toward understanding the 70% failure rates of acquisitions. Grant discovered a quant method that helped assess brand preferences; with that as a starting point, he and his team utilized some principals of neuroscience and created a new methodology that accurately quantifies emotional resonance.

Brent and Matt talk with Grant Gooding, CEO of PROOF Positioning and emotional data expert. Using principals of neuroscience, he and his team created a new methodology that accurately quantifies emotional resonance. He’ll share his take on analytics from an emotional data perspective in part one of this interview.

• Brent asks Grant about the emotional data process and how it differs from traditional marketing research. Grant says that the high failure rate of acquisitions led him to ask questions no one else was asking: Why is anyone even doing business with either company? This led him to developing his quantitative emotional data method.
• Grant shares that “secret sauce” to his method is the ability to digitally survey people to truly understand how important things are to them — emotionally.
• Grant is confident that, without asking a survey participant who they were voting for, they could very accurately arrive there. In fact, his team won’t use their method in politics because they believe it would work so well, it would even impact election results … “dangerous stuff.”
• Matt wants to know that “moment” that Grant realized he was doing something special and could turn it into a business/agency. Grant says, “You’re not going to like the answer” … When the housing market collapsed, regulations that came down made it difficult for certain acquisitions, so he saw the writing on the wall in regards to his previous job. He wanted to keep his wife, his dog, and his house, so he needed a way to make money. Grant believes that anyone can be an entrepreneur — it’s not a genetic predisposition. You just have to show up every day.
• To finish out part one of the interview with Grant, the guys discuss how fear is a strong emotional motivator. Brent asks about Grant’s “Fear” webinar he did last year. According to Grant, fear is the most powerful emotion and is responsible for the actions of many people throughout history. And fear is part of our everyday life, even though most people don’t realize it.

• Join us for part two with Grant Gooding shortly.

• Kristen Petrillo Majdanics — Senior VP of Marketing for Firehouse Subs. She will share her experience in B2C marketing and likely talk about what it’s like in the restaurant industry during a pandemic.
• Jessica Best — VP of Data-Driven Marketing at Barkley and previously worked at emfluence. Her specialty is email marketing — for anyone who thinks it isn’t effective, Jessica would beg to differ.