BLISS in Business: How to Build Love Into Your Marketing Systems

Jeffro (00:03.698)
Most marketing today feels like noise. Automation has made campaigns faster and cheaper, but not necessarily better. But what if AI could actually help us become more human and amplify that? What if your marketing didn’t just sell, but it connected with your audience? My guest today is Stephen Sakach, the founder of AICMO.io and Zero Company with three decades of experience in digital media, journalism and marketing strategy.

Stephen’s mission is to help SMBs create emotionally resonant campaigns, using AI as a tool for empathy, not just efficiency. And at the heart of his approach is something he calls BLISS, build love into scalable systems. It’s about rethinking the systems we build, the campaigns we run, and the way we show up for customers. If you’re a service business owner who wants marketing that feels as good as it works, this is an episode that you won’t want to miss. So Stephen, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (00:56.652)
Welcome, great to be here. was an excellent intro. think we summarized a lot there. Very well done.

Jeffro (01:03.357)
Well, thanks. think it’s a good way to set up our conversation because I, well, before we get into, you know, bliss and everything, your background includes journalism and studying human consciousness. And I’m curious to hear how that kind of shaped the way you approach marketing and AI.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (01:18.158)
Yeah. So I remember way back when going to this consciousness event, you know, and we’re talking about oneness and integral theory and stuff like that. And then we’re sitting down at breakfast and they’re all, so how are you going to apply this to your business? And at the time I’m like, I don’t know. I just do Google ads. How am I employing? And, it’s this question that kind of stuck with me, right? Is like, yeah, how do we apply some of this higher consciousness to, to what we’re doing so that it shows up in our, in our marketing campaigns. And so that question really, you know, stuck with me over the years, kept asking it, kept asking it. And then really it turns out that it’s all these things about the way you run your company. if you can do them, you know, with, kindness, with love, with compassion, and then you can tell a story from that place. And then really that that’s when, how it comes out in that one sentence in the, in the Google line, headline or description there. So, it was, it’s a long process, but,

Jeffro (02:10.771)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (02:18.945)
That’s really kind of where we got to with our marketing agency and while we kind of took this empathetic approach, like you kind of mentioned to, to, marketing where it’s really trying to go a little deeper with what we’re doing instead of contributing to all the, noise out there. you know, talking about the features and benefits and all the boring stuff that, know, 10,000 other businesses are, are talking about.

Jeffro (02:44.681)
Okay, well that makes sense and it kind of leads right into how you talk about the importance of a company’s purpose in creating authentic marketing, right? That’s a direct line I can see. So how do you help a business kind of uncover and clarify what that purpose is in the first place?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (03:01.215)
Yeah, so that for me really happened a long time ago and part of this process where we were sitting in the meeting with like a CEO, right? And we’re going over the regular sort of stuff about the business and the product. And to me that it just, wasn’t connecting. It was just kind of dry. And I went to the CEO, I’m all, how do we create something here with a little bit more meaning? Why did you start this business in the first place, this product?

And he had a survival product, Is about, while you probably were thinking about survival, helping your family during this, you know, tragic time, right. And he’s all, yeah. And I’m a, well, this is what you’re doing out there. You’re helping all these other families. Why don’t we start talking about it from that kind of level, right? That was really brought in his higher purpose into the conversation. And so that kind of, you know, set off a light bulb in his head. He was like, yeah, this is exactly what I want to do. And you can see him get energized.

And the storytelling became suddenly energized from starting at that point. So a couple of years ago, you know, we kind of had our methodology going and we were thinking, you know, with this new AI shift, why don’t we create the CMO or chief marketing officer that we wanted to see someone that’s, you know, more about that higher purpose, more about empathy, more about emotional connection that will help us you know, kind of in that journey as, as company and so that we can scale, you know, the sort of compassionate approach we have to everything. and so we kind of started out on that journey. so with our, our product, really, that’s one of the first things you can do and go in there is it’ll take you through this, this process of this Q and a process of trying to pull out what your higher purpose of your business really is. Cause a lot of times you just haven’t articulated it. Really. You may have started the business because you made some money doing something, but really you step back. It’s like, you’re in service to people to help them in some way or another. Probably, you know, solving problems for them that cause other problems, you know, in their life. You can find a train of thought there to pull out a higher purpose. And so that’s really one of the key guide rails that like we start on with our process is focusing on.

Jeffro (05:17.999)
Yeah, sounds like, once you start looking for it, you’re going to find it because it’s there. If you just never stop to think about, you know, what that actually is, and you just caught up and doing the business and talking about features and things, you kind of miss out on.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (05:29.857)
Which yeah, all of us, we’re all, we all get caught up in that. And sometimes you don’t just step back a little bit and dig a little deeper, you know, ask those like five why questions, you know, that go, that go deeper in there. And there’s another benefit to this besides marketing. like right now only 21 % of the world workforce is engaged. Four out of five are disengaged. They’re going to work day after day, hour after hour. they, you know, it’s just soul sucking machinery there that they’ve hooked themselves up to. But when you really can start to define that higher purpose of what you’re doing, this is how suddenly that work comes to life, right? This is where you suddenly get the soul into what you’re doing versus the soul sucking thing. So, yeah, there’s all kinds of data behind that showing churn rates, retention goes way up, happiness at work, and all those things related to that, when you can articulate this which, know, we really love to tell that story, but we want to make sure that you’re also living kind of that story, you know, authentically. which is, I think you mentioned kind of our bliss philosophy, which is really that part of it is for us, it’s like, how can you build love into what you’re doing? How can you build compassion into what you’re doing at your work? so we have the bliss acronym build love into scalable systems, which is Auditing your business by your systems and trying to figure out, you know, can you audit it by your higher purpose? Can you audit it by love or compassion in the things that you’re doing so that it’s prompting us to be better humans, be kinder, along the process of running our business. because that’s always going to be kind of the, the bigger win if you can do that. Yeah.

Jeffro (07:24.432)
people are going to connect with that a lot better when they’ve got a feed full of stuff. You you’re going to have something more that they’re drawn to.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (07:31.711)
Yeah, it’s almost tragic that kindness is a differentiator, right? Because, but it is, it is, and it can be.

Jeffro (07:35.511)
Yeah.

Jeffro (07:41.798)
Yeah, well, I think there’s these stereotypes about how business interactions are supposed to go and professionalism. And on the one hand, of course, it’s good to have a professional approach to things, to be respectful and on time and to keep your word. Like that’s all good. But you don’t want to discard the human elements or the personality that makes you you. And I think with all the AI prompting, like this is what’s missing, right? You can tell it, hey, I’m selling a widget that does X, Y, Z.

Help me write a post about it. Okay, all you’ve told ChatGPT is the features, so it’s gonna give you a post that relies on the features.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (08:14.669)
Yeah, right. And 10 other people are doing the same exact thing, or 100 other people.

Jeffro (08:20.406)
Exactly. But when you add in your purpose to that and say, okay, and here’s why I’m doing this, now write a post. It’s suddenly, even though you’re using AI, it’s going to have that human element to it, right?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (08:29.226)
It suddenly started.

Yeah, it’s starting to come to life a little bit there. And there are also other things that you can do, which we do with our software, you know, help you figure out how you differentiate from your competitors. we’ve specifically tried to focus on making emotional connection through that process. so there’s things in there that when you’re experiencing a product or service, you know, we’ve got tools that help you come up with ideas to build those positive emotions.

Um, with a positive connections with, with your, clients, if you can build that emotional connection, you’re going to have 306 % higher lifetime value over a satisfied customer. So, I mean, that’s just huge if you can get to that point, but a lot of people, a lot of businesses don’t know ways to do that. So we try to make it super simple, you know, in marketing, half the time you don’t know what you don’t know. So, um, You know, even someone like you said, I’ve been in this forever, but there are in our platform, a hundred different expert techniques in there for anything you’re doing. And I didn’t even know that they, all those existed, but so when you’re building any sort of campaign, you can also apply some of these techniques to go along with your purpose, to go along with your differentiation, to go along with your brand voice that we take time to figure out. so that it, it very much is about your business.

Jeffro (10:00.367)
So let’s, I mean, obviously this makes sense, right? A big picture. Can you share a specific example of an emotionally connecting campaign that you’ve helped with and worked on to help us understand what made it work and kind of what you did to make that happen?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (10:16.843)
Yeah, I think to that, like that one example that I kind of talked about with that survival thing. mean, we were able to focus then on, you know, focusing on the family first. There are a lot of really famous campaigns out there too, that people might be aware of. Like, I think like probably the classic one that if you want to figure out what’s an emotionally connecting campaign might be like mastercard, you know, it’s like baseball game tickets, you know, $15,

Jeffro (10:42.568)
yeah.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (10:44.365)
a hot dog and a beer, know, $20 spending time with your 10 year old son, priceless, right? Suddenly you get to that. go from these transactions to suddenly you get to that example now of, this is something a bit more than a transaction, right? It’s kind of pulling at your, your heartstrings. And there’s, was like one of the famous ones. think another famous one might be like the dove real beauty campaigns, where, They kind of realized their mission, you know, they’re trying to help with beauty, but that only 2 % of women felt themselves beautiful. So they’re like, okay, this is a serious problem. Why don’t we use our ad spend to address that kind of issue, um, and help in the world, you know, in a positive way. so, you know, obviously the campaigns went viral. Both of those did really well for them. Um, yeah, we did others where it was like, um, helping with.

Jeffro (11:36.857)
Yeah.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (11:40.501)
with food waste, whereas like love your leftovers kind of approach, where we’re working with government agencies to help people think about food waste as well. there’s a lot of different examples there. For sure, if people try to figure out what does it mean by emotionally connecting.

Jeffro (11:58.094)
Those are great examples. love the MasterCard one too, because I remember seeing those commercials and they’re entertaining and memorable. And that’s why, right? Because it’s more human. It’s not just a thing.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (12:07.595)
Yeah, yeah, it kind of sticks with you on another level than just, you know, features and middles. There’s probably a thousand other MasterCard commercials that we couldn’t remember or even pull up. But yeah, those ones, it’s because of that emotional connection they went for.

Jeffro (12:18.143)
Yeah.

Jeffro (12:23.81)
Okay, so let’s talk about small businesses for a minute because I know a lot of small businesses, especially with the economy being tight, people are trying to save money and be efficient and things. And that’s part of why many of them are adopting AI. But how can they balance that efficiency without losing that personal touch? What sort of advice would you give them for approaching this, you know, so that you keep the authenticity but still gain the benefits of, you know, AI?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (12:53.417)
Yeah, and I think often I mean we tend to think of all the things that AI can do first very fast You know, that’s it’s it’s maybe people’s first experiences like something that would have taken me a week I can get done in five ten minutes But we have tools in there that are also gonna help you brainstorm ideas for your business that are kind of you know offline non-digital ideas, so like surprise and delight ideas around your business, right like this those purple goldfish ideas, um, you know, something that’s unexpected. Um, and this has nothing to do with digital, right? It doesn’t have to be a digital surprise and delight. I’m like, this is how you run your business, but we’re using AI to really impact that human connection you’re having with other people. Um, and do it in a smart way. Cause we’re focused on emotional connection. Um, there are 17 consumption emotions. If you want to get technical when it comes to product or service experience and we’re trying to focus on the positive ones, know, surprise, delight, excitement, contentment, gratitude, those kind of things. So we can use AI to develop stuff that’s totally offline. That’s never going to be a digital item if you don’t want. So that’s one way you can really have it to prompt us to be, know, use AI to prompt us to be kind of better humans, better at connecting.

Jeffro (14:21.408)
Right, and so some examples of that might be like if you’ve got your CRM hooked up with your AI, can tell you, this person’s birthday is coming up or they’ve been your client for two years, and then you can send them a card, right, or a gift or just a note. And that is something in the real world that even though it was prompted to you by AI, it means a lot to them because you noticed and acknowledged it.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (14:43.083)
Yeah. And there are a thousand other ideas beyond that too, where, mean, you can kind of really, think about when someone does something just a little unexpected extra for you, you’re supplying them with a, some sort of thing from your business where you’re, go above and beyond. you can work with your vendors that way. It’s really kind of, if you think about it, just audit your business from more of a conscious capitalist kind of approach instead of just thinking about profit, think about people.

Think about planet, think about your higher purpose and think about profit and all those things can work together. you know, if you take the time to just set aside, you know, some goals for each of those.

Jeffro (15:25.378)
Yeah, that makes sense. let’s talk about, you know, we know where we’re at now. AI is still evolving quickly. We don’t have like actual artificial intelligence yet. But where do you see this kind of empathetic AI going in the next few years? And is there anything we can do to kind of prepare for that or start, you know, getting to that point quicker?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (15:42.541)
Hmm.

Yeah, this is like one of those areas where it’s like, Ooh, I can see the both sides of this thing. like there was a study that university of Zurich did where they went on to Reddit and they used AI to try and change people’s minds. And they got into trouble a little bit for doing this. Cause once people found out, you know, you were doing what, but it turned out AI was able to persuade people six times better than humans. And that’s scary because we’re at the very

Jeffro (15:58.561)
You

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (16:14.185)
start of this movement. so at some point, yeah, you know, when your car salesman is going to be attached to some sort of AI, something or other, they’re going to have the exact right thing to say to everyone during that sales process. But like, we’re just barely starting at this. So AI is going to be very persuasive. What I kind of worry about there is, you know,

Jeffro (16:16.32)
Yeah.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (16:38.605)
from optimizing an AI for over a decade with Google and things like that. it’s, if it’s assigned a goal that it’s going to optimize toward, it’s really good at just going after that single goal. So if our single goal is just profit and it’s not going to care about people or planet, we’re going to be in a bit of trouble. So we do need to build this sort of conscious approach to how we use AI and how it’s going to make decisions. And hopefully, like you said, an empathetic AI is in this process and I think we’re kind of seeing it develop that way to some extent. It’s trying to, develop that way. There’s business studies out there that are showing that the empathetic AI approach to like your customer service and things like that. It’s. You know, it’s very methodical how they’re thinking about it, but that it people actually are preferring it over the human approach because it’s, know, humans can have bad days and, and, you know, they may not be great at customer service that day, but AI can kind of hit the keynotes in that emotional customer journey that a customer is going through at the time. So I hope we’re optimizing toward empathy, toward compassion with AI, but we really do need more businesses to be thinking consciously to get there. Because if we aren’t,

Jeffro (17:54.634)
Yeah. you think it, sorry, do you think it matters though if we do have AI that’s so empathetic and more human? Like if someone’s having a chat conversation with a business and it’s AI, they could be fully convinced that it’s a person and have a better experience. Does that matter that it’s not a human?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (18:19.797)
I, you know, that’s a good question. It may come to personal preference, but I’m thinking we’re, raising a whole generation now that will never have not known AI at some point. So, so I don’t know what their experience will be with interacting with it. It may not be that big a deal. I mean, there’s older people in the generation who, Hey, I just want to talk to a human. Right. so it may be, it may come down to like that personal preference to some extent. And I know people, if they’re not getting what they want from like that AI, it’s going to be an extremely frustrating experience for them. But, so there’s probably gotta be a way to, to get them through that kind of process. and actually, you know, talk to someone that they can feel heard about whatever their, their issue is. But I, it’s a good question. Cause I, I think attitudes are going to be changing over time about this and where it’s going to be pretty commonplace.

Jeffro (19:14.538)
Yeah, well I can see it also like whether you know or not is going to affect the interaction, right? So if I have an AI waiter that I know is not a person and I ask them to make a recommendation, I’m going to be suspect about that recommendation because like, that’s probably just the special that the owner told you to push, right? It’s not an actual, like you haven’t eaten the food, you’re a robot.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (19:31.917)
you

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (19:35.787)
I’m still suspect by the waiter if they’re to tell me that. It’s in the back of my mind, right?

Jeffro (19:39.135)
true, but I’m more likely to trust the waiter if he says, you know, we have this on our special, it’s actually my favorite. Like, okay, I’m going to trust him. Even if he is pushing it, I feel better accepting that suggestion because it was a person.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (19:52.322)
Maybe, but, like people’s experience with AI, they take it as an authority more than humans do. I mean, talking to two people, they’re going to believe the AI so much more than a person because they’re attached to all kinds of different other motives to people. So I don’t know. mean, it’s very authoritative. It’s very persuasive. and it will know probably the buttons to push before we’re even talking the conversation. You know, it’s like.

Jeffro (20:06.409)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (20:21.663)
it’ll be able to read facial gestures and dang, probably go through your whole social experience and profile you really quickly. It could get a little bit unnerving, I’m sure. But there’s going to be whole generations where this is how they grew up.

Jeffro (20:35.561)
Yeah.

That’s true. It’s going to be interesting. I do think the context matters, right? There are going to be some contexts where people will inherently trust it more than people. And I could see also scenarios where it’s the other way too. But to your point, like if that’s all that people have known from the time they’re growing up, it’s like the Jetsons are, you know, that’s just normal. You talk to the robots, they help you do stuff. Like you go, you don’t think too much about it. It’s just how it is.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (21:02.359)
I know my daughter is going to medical school. is her planet and AI is going to play such a big role in that. And I’m like, I almost need both opinions on any sort of medical thing now, because, it’s proven like it’s beating humans out in all kinds of areas in healthcare medicine. But I also want the human there to, balance it out. So I think there’s this, I always think of the AI right now. It’s just this jazz session. think where we’re co-creating and we’re working together in some way to ideally create something better, at least that we hope sounds good. It’s not a crappy jazz session, but yeah, that’s

Jeffro (21:44.593)
It’s kind of a dance right now. Rather than relying on it to create something original, you’ve got to give it that interesting human perspective and it can help you sharpen that in the way you present it, format it or whatever. But back to what we started talking about at the beginning is if you’ve got that purpose and you infuse that into your prompts or whatever you’re creating, then it’s going to help you make that and amplify that to be even better.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (21:56.737)
Yeah.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (22:08.237)
Yeah. So we’re helping you prompt AI and help and having AI help prompt you to be better at what you’re doing. So it is this dance kind of thing, but we’re trying to do it from this loving, compassionate place in marketing with what we’re doing, because, um, you know, the world doesn’t need any more noise out there. Like we were talking about, and we’re the most marketed to generations ever on the planet right now. And I think we’re getting pretty savvy about stuff. Right. So I think you’re going to need to go deeper with how you’re using AI. so that it’s something that really does truly speak to you as a company, you know, speak to your higher purpose, something that you will a hundred percent get behind. and as a company, you got to walk that walk, right? You can’t just be talking the talk. No one’s going to buy it. Like I said, we’re savvy. We’re savvy marketers out there. All of us, younger generations are even savvier. They can sniff it a mile away.

Jeffro (23:06.012)
Yeah, definitely. Well, Stephen, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. I think it’s clear that marketing doesn’t have to be manipulative or mechanical and it can create this virtuous cycle that we’re talking about where you’re making it have more empathy and love or humanness in those interactions that we’re creating and actually build real trust and connection if you do it right. So for those of you listening, if you want to learn more about Stephen’s work with AICMO and Zero Company, you can check out the links in the show notes.

And we’ll wrap up with one last question for you, Stephen. What’s one small change a service business owner could make this week to start creating more authentic and emotionally resonant marketing?

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (23:46.734)
Thanks for asking that. mean, this goes back to our bliss thing that this is why I love getting onto a podcast is to tell you to just look around the systems that you’re doing. How can you build love into your systems? There’s a, you know, there’s people out there who are wonderful at doing random acts of kindness and we all love that. But when that person leaves the room, you know, that love goes with them. If you can build some love or some compassion into a system, you’ve kind of left a legacy. You can step back and it’s going to be producing that love that compassion that you’ve built into that system. So you’ve left your mark. You’ve left a legacy. So you can ask yourself, we’ve gone through this with our company for years and years where day after day, week, day after week, month after month, we’re just asking, Hey, how can we build a little bit of love into what we’re doing here? And over time, little by little, little makes a lot. And you suddenly start to be more of that conscious, kind, compassionate company. So, um, think about how you can build love into a scalable system.

Jeffro (24:45.959)
Love it, pretty simple. All right, well thanks again, Stephen. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple or Spotify that helps other service business owners discover the show and learn how to achieve digital dominance in their industry. But that’s it for now. Thanks again, Stephen. Take care, and we’ll see you next time.

Stephen Sakach (aiCMO.io) (25:03.918)
Thank you.