Why Emotional Realism Wins in Marketing

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sara Payne, and I'm bringing you fascinating conversations with some of the industry's top marketing minds. Today, we're talking about a subject that's easy to throw around in marketing circles but much harder to do well, and that is emotional storytelling. We all say we want to connect on a deeper level with our audiences, but are we really willing to go there? Are we committed to showing the messy truths, the vulnerability, the lived experiences that don't always fit neatly into a campaign? Joining me is Lindsey Wehking, chief investigative strategy officer at Nonfiction Research. Nonfiction explores the hidden parts of American life through immersive research. Their researchers have sat beside patients in hospitals, inmates in prison, and even interviewed Atlanta rappers while rollerblading. Their findings have been featured by ABC News, Axios, msnbc, Fox, and Fast Company. Lindsay and her team are known for uncovering the stories that most research barely scratches the surface of.

And their work has inspired new products, new films, and even new divisions at some of the world's biggest companies. Lindsay, welcome to the show.

Hi, Sara. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today because it's so incredibly important, I believe, to the success of many health marketing campaigns today to really lean in strongly to this emotional storytelling. And where I want to go first in the conversation with this, Lindsay, is the commitment piece. Right. Marketers love to say we're committed to. To emotional storytelling, but when it comes down to it, are we really walking the talk? So I'm wondering from your vantage point at nonfiction, what do you see in terms of our brands, really committed, and where are we at today?

Yeah, I mean, it's a beautiful question and. And a tricky one because like you said, I think storytelling is, you know, a beautiful ambition, but it's often kind of a trope in our industries. Right. Like, everyone has great storytelling, and I think it can be a lot harder than we. Than we lead on because I think it requires, you know, from a research perspective, it often requires going deep into people's lives and. And wrestling with topics that we don't normally wrestle with in the workplace. You know, we're not like, we. We claim to want to do deep emotional storytelling, but how often are we talking about, like, deep, dark, difficult, emotional things at work? Right, right.

And so I think it's. It's interesting that I think a lot of professional culture sort of gets in the way of teams, even really well meaning teams, both kind of going where they need to go in research, but also going where they need to go creatively to bring difficult and relatable and real and funny and weird and heartwarming storytelling. Storytelling to life.

Yeah, I agree with everything you say there, and I think you're absolutely right that there is something in the workplace culture that may default to conversations that feel a little bit more safe or comfortable. Right. For. For a multitude of different reasons. And that's really what I want to push on and challenge today is how do we really challenge ourselves to push back against that and try a little harder, a little deeper to get more to that raw emotional storytelling. And I know you all in your work believe that. Again, said it in the intro. Most research just really scratches the surface of people's real lives.

Like the real honest truth and that, you know, a lot of research can, can lack that real depth and the emotional complexity. And why is that? Like, what is it about the structure of a lot of research? And then the back second part of that question would be, what happens when brands don't go deeper?

Yeah, you know, it's funny, we often tell our team that like, we are not, we're not satisfied until we get, we call like diary level insights. That it should feel, you know, the research should feel like reading someone's diary. It should feel that intimate and that confession. But that's not what a lot of marketing research. I don't know. I'm sure you've read a lot of marketing research. I'm not sure if that's a lot of the marketing research you've read, but it was not a lot of the marketing research I was reading before coming to nonfiction. And I think that's for a lot of reasons.

I think one of them is that marketing research especially is often conducted in these sort of like fake environments. You know, you've got focus groups or some professional researcher who calls you and asks you your thoughts and opinions on things. And so that environment is fake and contrived and does not make people feel safe or comfortable or intimate enough to really reveal who they are. I think, you know, that trickle down of the professional culture. People often feel afraid, I think, to ask the real questions and to go there in these kind of environments. And so I think, you know, I don't think it's, it's not from a lack of skill. I think it's often a lack of permission. You know, feeling internal permission of teams feeling like they have permission and also really like knowing that that's the standard.

Like, you know, great research should feel like great art. It should feel that moving and that confessional and, and so I think with that, you know, that's a very different standard than, I think, what we're used to thinking about when we think about like Mintel Reports or, you know, the latest, the latest trend docket.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's. Let's talk a little bit about the concept of immersive research and how you do it, because this might be a new concept, I suspect, for some people if they haven't experienced it. And again, as I said in the intro, you and your team literally immerse yourselves in people's environments. For you, this has included prisons and anime conventions and indigenous reservations. Why is it so important to, to go there, to go that far? You know, really well beyond the, the survey or the, the traditional focus group, as you mentioned.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we call what we do kind of a deeply immersive research, but we also call our kind of genre of research what, what our team uses is like emotional realism that we're looking to get, you know, to the emotional heart of things. And I often think immersion, like being there and seeing it for yourself is really the only, the only way you can do it. And, you know, we like to say that we will, we will go whatever it takes, wherever it takes and do whatever it takes to get to the heart of what someone is really thinking or feeling in any topic or issue. And you know, that can look very differently. Like you said, we've been, we've sat bedside patients in hospitals while they receive really difficult times, diagnostic news, because guess what, like seeing that reaction firsthand and how the family responds and what people are feeling is going to, is just going to mean and look so much more vivid than if you're talking to someone about it in, you know, in, in a memory or in reflection. And so, you know, we really try to. And these aren't, these aren't new.

You know, obviously, like anthropology and a lot of marketing research has used things like ethnography and participants and observation. I think, you know, a lot of the industry has gotten away from those kind of techniques with so much pressure on budgets and timing and AI and kind of the ease of social media observation. But I think what we see is there's often these huge gaps. You know, even though there's so much, there's so many narratives and stories that you could pick up online, there's often huge gaps between people's real lived experience. And you can't sense, you don't have a real felt sense for those Gaps until you've seen it for yourself and. And you've seen the reality of the people on the ground. But. But I also think it's more than just technique.

Like, I do think, you know, doing immersion and, you know, living with people or going to the, you know, playing soccer while they're playing soccer, or, you know, going to the doctor with them. Like, all these are really beautiful and important ways to do deeply immersive work. I think there's also a dimension to it that's beyond just a technique, that it's sort of like a spiritual possession that you will do whatever it takes to step inside the experience of someone else, be with someone else physically, and still not really be coming out of your own world and your own beliefs and your own ideas and really understanding their. Their world and their ideas. And so that, I think, drive to just kind of do whatever it takes to really understand that experience. Experience, you know, can happen in a lot of different ways. And I think that that is kind of really the heart of. Of immersive research, more so than any, like, specific technique.

Yeah, that's so great. The way you. The way you explain that. I totally agree that. And, you know, you said earlier, there's really no proxy for being there and experiencing it. And I also love what you said. It isn't just the technique of being there. It is the willingness to ask the tough questions and truly listen to what you're hearing.

Right. You can have. You can even have a prepared script going into that, that. That is committed to asking tough questions, but it takes that real time in the moment. Pivot. Wait, we just learned something we didn't expect. And now, you know, this is a little bit like journalists, right? We gotta lean into that because now. Now we actually found the real heart of the story here, the real element of what drives them, what makes them tick, what keeps them up at night, whatever it is.

And now we gotta lean in real hard on that and explore that further.

Yeah, and I love your. Like, I can tell you're such a person who, like, loves that moment of, like, you know, the eureka moment where you have to, like, piss, pivot everything. But so many of our teams aren't built to move that way. You know, they aren't built to move in a way that allows discovery and improv and the ability to throw away a discussion guide and write a new one on the fly, which is so necessary when you're working with real life and making real discovery.

Yeah, for sure. What are some of the examples of. Of cliches that we might fall back on in advertising or PR if. If we didn't have the richness coming out of this immersive research.

Yeah, I mean, I think. I think a lot of times it's really easy to get really functional, you know, to think about people as really rational and to market or speak to them like they are, you know, rational, functional people. And. And I think it's always, you know, when you're talking to real people and you're living with them and you're immersing with them, like, you just. You learn to love how, like, idiosyncratic and contradictory we are, and we're full of paradox, and we say one thing and then we do another. We think we believe something and then we. The next day. That's so different.

And so I think there's that element to it. But, you know, I think advertising in particular can kind of fall into, like, a toxic positivity of always wanting to be the hero and to have the happy ending and thinking that that is the only way to sell things and resonate with people. And I just, I. You know, I don't think that's true. Like, when you're. People have such a large range of emotion and they want to be able to feel all of these other things, and they are feeling all these other things. But often advertising, I think, when it's not staying connected to the people, is speaking to, like, a really narrow range of our human experience.

Yeah, the Persona. Right? The Persona in a box. Right. And it's like, well, that's not. That's not real. We're very multidimensional. We're very complex beings. I love your point about.

We're very contradictory. Right. Say one thing, do another. So, yeah, great, great points there. You know, I. In preparing for this conversation, I was like, well, yeah, of course, everyone. Everyone said. Says everyone believes that emotional storytelling works.

Like, that's. That's not what we're here to convince people of. Like, people already know that, but it's. It's actually understanding how to get to good, like, true, like, real emotional storytelling from your experience. What makes that deeply immersive, emotional, raw storytelling that you uncover actually work better than the polished cliche versions we often see.

Yeah, well, maybe I'll. I'll tell you, like, a quick story. We. We were working with a client who was studying fathers, and particularly fathers who were not super involved in their children's lives, and they were trying to figure out, how do you motivate these dads to be more involved in life and the client at the time kind of thought that we just. We need to prove to them how important a dad is, right? Which leads you down this path of, like, there's plenty of clinical research that shows the impact of a father on child development. And, you know, you can measure outcomes of a child in life. And, And I think the mindset then was just show. Just show them.

Show them that information and that'll, you know, show them how important they are. And, you know, we spent a lot of time getting to know dads. We did, you know, confessional interviewing. With fathers, we don't. Didn't just talk the father. We often talked to their ex or the person that they were having the child with. Even if they weren't together, we would. We talked to their parents.

We went to father fatherhood classes that were put on by different nonprofits and government organizations. We got into the family court system. We sat with dads who were just getting out of rehab and some even prison. And one of the major things that we saw and learned was that most dads who aren't super involved in their kid's life know how important a dad is because they didn't have one themselves. And so intellectually, they get it. Emotionally, they even. They get it. What was often happening is that a lot of these dads had really hard life circumstances.

You know, they were up against a lot of challenges, complicated relationships, messy divorces, you know, a, A, a system in, in family court that was very difficult. Some of them were struggling with addiction and, and records. And it was kind of like, you know, once they started to hit these obstacles and they started to feel like a failure, the shame would accumulate, and eventually they would tell themselves a story that their. Their kid was better off without them because they felt. They felt ashamed. They felt like a failure. And so what we really learned was that you didn't need to tell dads how important they are. You needed to show them that you understood the depth of the struggle, which required really emotional storytelling.

Like, these aren't Pollyanna lives. Like, you've got to be able to tell that story in a way that they can see themselves in. And then you have to inspire them to keep going. Like, to keep going no matter what the obstacle, to keep going no matter what happens in the relationship or. Or what happens with a job. Like, to keep going with almost a delusional sense of resilience, because that's the job of a dad. And I think that was nothing. We, we wouldn't have gotten to any of that had we not really Been in the field with fathers, seeing it firsthand and seeing the ways in which that, that shame was causing them to give up.

Yeah, that's such an incredible example and reminds me of another podcast I recently consumed Grant in his rethinking podcast where he was talking about. And I'm not going to be able to cite the research and where it comes from, but look up Adam Grant and, and you'll find it is this whole conversation that guilt might motivate someone, but shame does not. Because guilt is I did, I did something bad and shame is I am bad. Wow. Right. And, and then that's a label and that's a, you can't move past it sort of thing. And it's just, it's just interesting this example that up, I mean that's such a deep, deep, deep seated thing. And to look at that from a, you know, communication, education, marketing perspective and think about how do we recognize this is reality and help them build a different narrative for themselves.

Right. Rather than just like you said, trying to convince them over and over again, it's important for a dad to be involved in a child's life. Like they don't know that. Like the, the conversation has to shift. We have to shift to something else. We have to get them to, to move past the shame and, and, and, and get the help they need or what, whatever that conversation is, that's a very different conversation. And if you think about that from a marketing perspective, again, let's pretend this is a marketing campaign. Don't spend your budget trying to reinforce something that isn't, that isn't the real issue.

Right.

Get down to the core of it.

Yeah, yeah, that's beautifully put. And you know, a lot of the storytelling at the time, before the research was, you know, these very kind of clean images of like dad coming home from work and like playing with their kid. And it wasn't, it wasn't connecting because it wasn't showing the reality of a lot of these guys lives.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it highlights some of those cliches that we, that we can fall back on in lieu of, you know, a different, a different perspective, a better insight. I also want to talk about. It's one thing to do the research right, that, that, that, that's hard. You know, you got a budget for it, you got to have time for it, you got to be willing to do it, you got to be willing to listen to what you're going to hear. And it's another thing then to actually be able to use it. Effectively as the North Star for your brand storytelling, your advertising, whatever that looks like. So let's talk a little bit about what it actually takes to do this.

Well, in your view, Lindsay, what does it take to bring emotional realism into advertising or pr?

Oh, I mean, I think it takes courage because often you will get into conversations where people will say things like, are we sure? Or does that feel inappropriate?

Or it's going to make people uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable. Or it's a little. That's a little dark. You know, it doesn't always have to be heavy. I think even, even with not heavy stuff, people have these kind of allergies to real, to realness. And, and then I think, you know, I think in marketing we're often taught to go for the universal. And we, we believe that by doing storytelling in a most universal way, we will reach the most people. The irony is, is that's that the exact opposite advice that every great writer ever receives, right? That I think, like Great Writing 101 is like, you find the universal in the specific, but you have to begin with the specific.

A specific person's story, a specific, you know, community experience. And then from there you find the universal, you know, theme or thread. And I think marketing tries to do it the opposite way a lot. And the problem is we just never get back down to the specifics. So we're speaking and storytelling in the most like vanilla abstract and, and most vanilla, you know, banal like context and life. And it doesn't have the same texture and resonance that like your favorite novel does or your favorite TV show does. And I think that's just misguided. You know, I think that's just, just kind of bad industry thinking.

Yeah, I love that your word was courage, because I was kind of thinking you were going to go in that direction, and I'm glad that you did. And I was also going to use the word vanilla. So we're totally on the same wavelength there. But you're right. I mean, there's so many business strategy books out there, right. When you're building a product, right, and you want to get this out there into the world, and it's this whole decision around, are we going to try to be something for everyone? Yeah, right. And there's. And it's like, no, you, you, you aren't for everyone.

You need to carve out and really understand the market that you serve, the segment that you serve and own that, own that really well. Because when you own that really well, you're. You're going to create so much loyalty and love of product, that there is going to be a halo effect. And potentially you have the opportunity to. It either expands just naturally. Right. Or once you get into it and you get really good at that and you understand, you know, what people love about the product, then you can pivot and say, well, now, now we're going to, you know, offer this other thing over here, or we see new use cases for this. Right.

To these other markets. And so I think it's just a great reminder of all of this other evidence we have out there that would indicate, you know, let's not try to be everything to everyone. Let's be true to who we are and what makes us best at what we do. And as we think about that, in terms of the audience that we serve now, as we're talking about immersive research, what are those very real raw, emotional things that hold them back from doing the thing we want them to do? Let's get really clear about that. Let's get really honest about that. And then how do we, through our communications, through our education, through our marketing, shift that concept? Right. Change those behaviors, get them to think differently. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just so much to unpack in all of this.

But it really starts at that, really knowing those immersive insights about your audience.

Yeah, I love, I think that's brilliantly put. And you know, I think the other kind of funny dynamic that maybe we don't parse enough is like you can be a mass brand for a lot of people and still not have your storytelling be generic. Like, you know, you think about some of the top grossing films or music albums. Like, I don't know about you, but I don't think like, uh, the Jedi experience is something anyone technically relates to in their day to day life. But you know, Star wars is one of the biggest grossing empire, like you know, film empires in human history. And so I think like storytelling can exist in worlds that are more specific and with experiences that are way more specific while still resonating with a large audience. And I think sometimes we, we forget that in marketing.

Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the barriers that would keep companies from walking down this path? We've talked a little bit about it. Right. There might be fear or risk associated with it. What else do you commonly see?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, sometimes it's just timelines and resourcing, like move very quickly and, you know, take a step back and really try to do this kind of foundational research can feel inconvenient. I think, you know, this kind of research is not easy in terms of, you know, we like, we're very particular like at non fiction in terms of, like we give our researchers long dark periods. Because if you're forcing your research team to really collate insights quickly and fast and be in a lot of meetings in that high stress environment, they're never going to get the depth that they release. So.

Great point.

Does require like a cadence and a, a different kind of working that often, you know, corporate cultures that are really fast paced and stressful and need constant updates, like it can be a little bit at, at odds with. Yeah, but, but I do believe everyone can be doing this. Like, I think you don't, I don't even think you need to be commissioning research to do this. Like, if you really want to understand your audience, like, you know, there are conversations you could be having tomorrow if you need it. Like I think there's some kind of internal permission to just go, you know, to fight to find the person, to find the expert who knows, you know, the therapist who's had a million conversations with dads, you know, that that's a great person to talk to, to get an unfiltered experience of your audience. And so I think a little creativity and a little self permission probably goes a long way.

Yeah, I love that. Great advice. I wanted to, to ground this conversation in, in a very real world example of how these powerful emotional truths can be, how powerful they can be in health care. We recently engaged on fiction with a client of ours, Axogen, on research around sensation loss after mastectomy. And a lot of people don't know this, but many women experience numbness after mastectomy. And for some it can be permanent. And this study that you did uncovered some really powerful insights. Women describing their chests as disconnected, their intimacy disrupted, and even safety concerns because they couldn't feel injuries as they were happening to that part of their body.

From your perspective, why do findings like these really break through in ways that traditional clinical data doesn't?

It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful question. You know, obviously clinical data is so important for the scientific and medical innovation process, but because they're focusing on, you know, often trying to find different dynamics at scale and create clean categories that are easily measurable and testable. It often leaves out like the lived experience. And a lot of these, you know, the words you have to use in clinical work become really sterile because they have to be specific. But then when you hear, you know, when you listen to a woman who has Lost sensation in her breasts, Talking about the grief of not even feeling like a woman anymore and not being, feeling connected to her partner or her lover, or not being able to feel the hug of her children, or not be able to even like enjoy the same feeling of like the sun on your chest. Like there are all these experiences that are so vivid and moving and heartbreaking that just don't show up even in language like disconnected, you know. What does disconnected really, really mean? Well, you know, it means she can't feel the people she loves. And I think that being able to hear it and see, see it and feel it through the lived experience of, of a person and how it, you know, interacts in their day to day life, that level is often missing.

And in clinical, in clinical data, yeah, for sure.

And I think it's important to clarify too that, you know, it would probably give the impression in this entire conversation up to this point that the type of immersive research that we're talking about is only qualitative. And while that is certainly a big opportunity and a big component here, the type of research that was done for Oxygen had a quant, a big quantitative component. Can you speak to that and sort of resolve maybe this disconnect people might be having and assuming that what we're talking about here is largely the qualitative piece?

Yeah, I mean, you know, it is funny we are called an immersive research company, but we do a lot of quantitative. And some of the most like stunning and startling findings and quotes for that Axogen project came from, you know, a survey. And I think that's in some ways like, wonderful. And I think what we often find is that, you know, qualitative is good for generating how people are talking about things and knowing like, where, where is the emotion at and how do you ask questions in the right way, but with, with when you then pull that, that way of being into, into quant, you know, you can write surveys with so much more intimacy, I think, than we, when we think about. And so being able to really bring intimacy into that quantitative experience. So you, there's a felt sense and you're asking, you know, it was through a lot of background research and some qual that we really came to understand, like what are the very specific experiences women miss? Like, is it hugging your child? Is it, is it the touch of a lover? Is it water on your chest in the shower? And like we did the qualitative to get the right things, but once we got those, like quant's amazing because it can test it, you know, you can figure out just Mary or is there 5,000 Mary is. Or they're, you know, 90% of, of women have this experience. And, and so I think that's what's so beautiful about quant is I don't, you know, quant can, can get you very intimate, very emotional things as long as you prepare, you know, either use qual or background research to really understand where the emotion is and how to use the right language.

Yeah. And, and I love that, you know, we specifically double clicked on this point because I, I think a lot of people might assume again that it just this type of really deep, immersive, powerful emotional insights is going to come from only from the qualitative. And the reason why Oxygen chose quantitative is they have long believed that this, this numbness impacts quality of life for women. But until now they didn't have strong data to back up that claim. They didn't have formal clinical data. But now having. Right. A large sample, statistically relevant sample data really cut through that challenge they had of not having the data to back that up.

And it's now giving them a way to bring the conversation forward in a new way and really lean into that strong storytelling component. And that's where our work comes in, is taking, you know, that's, that's the why we love what we get to do is taking these amazing insights that your team uncovers. And honestly, are our team listening to some of these findings and some of these people talking about not having a will to live like true suicidal thoughts relative to numbness brought tears to our team's eyes. I mean, we already knew about this numbness. Right. This was not new to us. We had worked on this for quite some time and, and yet we were seeing it from a brand new, super powerful perspective. And I think that just highlights the brilliance of this work and the importance of it in terms of really powering a campaign that's, that's going to work and really resonate with people.

And I, I just want to say that, you know, in case people are really like, what, what does it look like? Right. I want to see this, what you all are talking about. It sounds great, but I actually want to see it. This research is brand new. The report will be out very soon, so I'm going to include a link to it in the show notes if people want to see an example of what we're talking about here and just how powerful these immersive insights can be from a marketing standpoint. I was curious, Lindsey, beyond the Oxygen example, do you have any other favorite examples of other brands that you think do a great job of emotional realism in their advertising or their brand storytelling, whether it's inside or outside of healthcare?

Yeah, well, two things come to mind. We, we actually, we did some research for. For Twill, which is a mental health app. And they were looking at pregnancy in America and really trying to understand, like, the very real experience of pregnancy. And. And, you know, it ended up creating a podcast called the Invisible Weight that really, that dove into just how difficult and dark pregnancy can be for some women. And, you know, the very. These very specific experiences that many women didn't even know you had in pregnancy, had not told anyone around.

Things like being pregnant and having dreams of your partner cheating on you or having dreams of accidentally harming your baby. Like, these were experiences that women were so alone with. And so I think being able to talk about those and being able to make people feel seen in those and also, you know, help them understand, like, what. What needs treatment or not. I think that was really amazing work. For some reason, motherhood is on my brain. And I don't know if you know the brand Frida, the postpartum, they have a lot of, like, different, like breastfeeding. Yes.

Technology. Like, I remember they did a. A commercial a couple years ago. I think they showed the first nipple on like, prime time television in like.

That's right. I remember this. Yes.

But they also showed that postpartum time of both, like, you know, just the insane range of emotion and what it actually looks like to be a mom when you're like, you know, like in a shower, eating a sandwich and then like, you know, breastfeeding on the floor and just like, what a mess that time is. And like a beautiful mess. But, like, it's okay to, you know, hate everyone during that time. And like.

Yeah, you're not alone.

Yeah. Embrace the full range of like, of feeling in that. In that postpartum time. So I thought that was. That was tremendous. How about you?

Are there? Yeah. Well, my. One of my favorite examples is, is Nike. I think they do this brilliantly. Their super bowl ad from this year, I think the campaign was called so Win W I N. It had all of these female athletes in it. And, you know, it starts off with all these negative things that women are told when they try to achieve great things. Like, you can't be demanding, you can't be confident, you can't dominate, you can't win.

And then the back half of the commercial really flips it and says, you know, you can't win. So speak up, be ambitious, be confident, and win. And to me, the brilliance of it is it speaks to a core truth that women experience. Again, we're talking about these are all three examples in a row here that are all women and just totally coincidentally. But these are narratives that women have been constantly fed their whole lives. And what Nike did with this spot was bring it out into the open and say, don't let, don't let it hold you back, dammit. Like, be your amazing self. And it's this strong message of empowerment, but it finally sheds light on a frustration that that audience has felt and lived with their whole lives, rather than some glossy, like, cheerleading empowerment thing about, like, you go, girl, you know, you're strong.

Like, it actually talked about the fact that we're often told we're not and we can't and we're never gonna be, and this really pulled that out into the open. And I think that your example with Frida does that brilliantly as well. And, and, and, and also the, the fathers. It's like we're talking about these things that people are feeling and the, and the, the pregnancy one is like, let's talk about these real weird feelings people actually have and are very uncomfortable talking about, but let's bring it out of the open because that's what's really needed for, for people to feel normal, to feel seen, and to have a brand that sees them as the real, raw person they are. Man, that's a brand I can get behind.

Yeah, that's beautifully said.

Fortunately, we're coming to the end of our conversation and running out of time. But any parting advice for CMOs and other marketing leaders listening in on, you know, the first step they can take to move their organizations towards emotionally real storytelling? Yeah.

I think the first thing I'd say is that, you know, this work can be tricky. It can be a little bit difficult, it can be inconvenient. But, you know, when you're making thousand, $100 thousand decisions off the back of research, like, you should be scared shitless if that reflect real life. It doesn't mean you have to speak to all the experiences in the research. Doesn't mean your brand has to become dark or depressing, but I think really like honoring that. Like, the research process should be getting you the most real and authentic and unfiltered experience of the people that you serve and the cultural context. You know, so much of the culture, I think, is left out of a lot of work like that. And, and, you know, you can begin tomorrow.

So much of it is really a mentality, mindset, I think, in a philosophy more so than it is a specific firm or a specific technique. You know, I think nonfiction is one of, I think many research firms that are popping up that are dedicated to this mission of more emotional realism and research. But it can be done in house, like, really well. And I think it's just getting everyone to believe that that's really the. That's really the purpose.

Well said. Well said. And that's a great way to end the conversation. Lindsay, thank you so much for joining me today and for the work that you're doing to really push our industry toward much deeper, more courageous storytelling. How can our listeners get in touch with you or learn more about your work?

Yeah, you can if you'd like to. We've got nonfiction often does a lot of public work that we post on nonfiction. Co. We are terrible at marketing ourselves, but you can find our work there and then you can find us on LinkedIn and Instagram, too.

Awesome. Thanks again. Thanks so much. And for our listeners, I am going to include a link to the Oxygen report we referenced earlier in the show notes so you can learn more about that and actually see some of Lindsay's work in action. Thanks so much, Lindsay. Bye to our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for being part of the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence because the future of healthcare depends on it.

We'll see you next time.