Human-Centered Marketing in an Automated World | Ashley Faus

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Navigating trust, empathy, and authenticity amid AI-driven content.

How can marketers create authentic trust in an era dominated by AI and automation? This episode explores the critical need for human-centered marketing strategies, highlighting the importance of empathy, authenticity, and genuine connections that algorithms simply can’t replicate. It also discusses innovative frameworks like the “Content Playground” and the “Four Pillars of Thought Leadership,” providing practical insights to help marketers effectively engage and build lasting trust with their audiences.

How do you build genuine trust when AI-driven automation floods our lives?

In this engaging episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, I sit down with Ashley Faus, author of “Human Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI”, to explore the irreplaceable role of authentic human connection in today’s tech-heavy marketing landscape. Ashley argues that while AI can streamline content creation and amplify messaging, the core elements of trust—authenticity, empathy, and credibility—can only be forged through real human interactions.

We discuss practical ways marketers can move beyond outdated funnel approaches, introducing Ashley’s innovative “Content Playground” framework, designed to engage audiences dynamically rather than forcing them down a rigid path. Ashley also shares insights on her “Four Pillars of Thought Leadership,” providing a clear structure for developing credible, authentic voices that stand out even in a crowded digital space.

Highlighting real-world examples, Ashley demonstrates how AI often falls short in understanding nuanced human preferences and emotions, reinforcing the need for marketers to maintain strong, direct relationships with their audiences. Ultimately, she makes a compelling case for why embracing our human quirks and personal authenticity is essential for lasting audience connection in the AI era.

Three Key Takeaways

Human Connection is Irreplaceable: Despite the efficiencies AI can offer, true marketing success hinges on authentic human connection and trust—something automation simply cannot replicate.

Shift from Funnels to Playgrounds: Marketers should move away from rigid funnel-based approaches and instead adopt dynamic, audience-centric strategies, like Ashley’s “Content Playground,” which encourages organic exploration and engagement.

Authenticity Drives Thought Leadership: Building credibility in thought leadership requires authenticity and empathy, grounded firmly in genuine interactions and consistent personal voice, elements AI struggles to mimic convincingly.

If you enjoyed Ashley’s insights on human-centered marketing and building authentic trust in the age of AI, I highly recommend checking out Peter Winick’s conversation with Bill Bice in Episode 157. Bill offers valuable perspectives on how data-driven content marketing and analytics can illuminate the customer journey, reinforcing Ashley’s points on authenticity and meaningful audience connection. Together, these episodes provide a comprehensive view of modern marketing, blending human empathy with smart, strategic insights.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman How do you build trust with your audience when algorithms, automation, and AI dominate the marketing conversation and even threaten to overwhelm human voices? Today, I sit down with my friend Ashley Foss, author of Human-Centered Marketing, How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. She challenges marketers to focus on what technology can’t replace, the human connection. Ashley is an accomplished in-house marketing practitioner, an active LinkedIn presence, and a deep thinker about marketing and thought leadership theory. She’s one of the people I really love to follow because she constantly asks questions that I deeply care about. How does this really work today? What patterns are emerging and what needs to change? Today, Ashley and I invite you to listen in. As we explore human-centered marketing, trust, authentic voice, and thought leadership. I’m Bill Sherman, and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Ashley.

Ashley Faus Yeah, thanks for having me back. I’m excited to chat again.

Bill Sherman Yeah, so the reason we’re recording this time is you have a book coming out as we’re preparing for launch for you on a human centered marketing. Tell us about that.

Ashley Faus Book and what’s your thesis. Sure. So the core of human centered marketing is really around building trust and rapport and relationships with your audience. And the subtitle of the book is how to connect with audiences in the age of AI. And part of the reason why this is so timely is because trust is the one thing that you cannot automate and you cannot outsource, right? You can outsource content creation. You can outsource. Billing and invoices and image creation, social posts, there’s a lot that AI can help you do. But to actually build trust, you have to have that connection with the humans behind the screen. At the end of the day, people buy from people they trust and people trust people like themselves. And so how do we as marketers build a journey, build relationships, create brand impressions, create our touch points in a way that actually helps build that with the audience.

Bill Sherman And to go a click deeper on that trust, you talk about in the opening of the book, how you were planning a trip to Palm Springs and sort of three levels of testing that you did. Can you summarize that briefly as an example into that framing of trust?

Ashley Faus Sure. So we were planning an anniversary trip. It was my husband and I, you know, like, okay, we’re going to go. We’re dual income. We are no kids. We were celebrating lifelong love. Let’s go do a weekend in Palm Springs. And so I started by Googling around and saying, you know, what are the best restaurants? What are the hikes? What the best spas? And I was overwhelmed by the Google results. I got a ton of stuff from TripAdvisor and from, you No. Tin best list, etc. And then I was like, you know what? I bet you AI could do this. Everybody says they use chat GPT to plan their vacation. So I put the prompt into chat GP T. I told it kind of who we are and the results were really lackluster. It basically came back with kind of a summary of the same Google results. And I was, like, I just don’t, there’s so many restaurants, like how do I choose which of these restaurants is the best or which of those trails is the the best? And then, I remembered that a colleague of mine had actually just gotten married in Palm Springs, like two or three months before. And so I pinged her and I was like, hey, what would you recommend on Slack? Or I ping her on Slack and I’m like, what would recommend in Palm Springs? And she came back with this excellent list. It was like curated and she had some notes and she was like oh, this place is very chic. You’ll wanna dress up and oh, if you wanna feel very fancy, this is the place. If you just want a casual spot, this the place and I like this is what I needed. I need someone who’s in my same stage of life, a similar income bracket, a similar mindset, a similar vibe with her loved one, right? So we went on the trip, we used a lot of her recommendations and it turned out to be perfect. And just that sense that like, she’s like me, she’s got the same vibe, I trust her and she can give me that personal insight because she knows me. And so she knows kind of what I’m looking for, right? And she can cut through the noise and I trust to cut through noise much more than the broad Google search results or the tailored chat GBT. Results that were basically just a summary of the Google results, right? So it was a really interesting thing because I actually find the AI is terrible at planning dates precisely because humans are too quirky. Like if it’s like, oh, I don’t want to go eat Thai food tonight. I just had Thai food last night. Well, it doesn’t know that, but I know that. Right.

Bill Sherman I’m not in the mood for spicy or whatever, right?

Ashley Faus Or, oh, I’m having Thai food tomorrow night, so no Thai food tonight, right? And the idea that, like, well, you need to tell it that, okay, but by the time I tell it that maybe I should just sit with myself or, you know, ask my husband what he wants for dinner, right. So it was an interesting journey to plan that trip using technology and then using human connection.

Bill Sherman And I think trust and also something that you talked about, which is that implicit sense of being seen by the other person, I think that’s a foundation. And we could make a nod to the Edelman trust index here, but more importantly, if you’re trying to do that connection or to deliver relevant thought leadership, your audience has to feel seen full stop.

Ashley Faus Well, and I think it’s so interesting, and this is kind of tangential to the book, but it is along that theme of putting so many tools and so much technology between us and our audience. When COVID first happened and everyone had Zoom fatigue and the question of like, is Zoom fatigue, like why is it so much more taxing to be on a video than it is to be in person? And there’s a couple of reasons. I think was the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Institute. They did some research on this and they found that there’s a couple reasons. One, on video you tend to basically sit or stand much closer than you would in person. And so literally the way your eyes have to focus, the depth of field, the amount of stuff that you’re taking in, I would never sit as close as we’re sitting on this call to a..

Bill Sherman Absolutely 18 inches to 20 inches.

Ashley Faus Yeah, or I’m she has to be like, well, yeah, right. And then on top of that, there’s just a hint of a delay on the video. And so your your brain is basically trying to catch up with this slight delay. And so the amount of processing you have to do on video versus in person, your brain basically has to focus more because there’s just enough of a relay that your brain picks it up, right? Like we don’t consciously pick it up. But our brain picks it up. And then the entire rest of the body language. And so depending on how you’re framed in the screen, if my hands are not on the screen but only the tips of my fingers are, it’s very distracting because you see that something is happening at the bottom of the screen but you can’t figure out what it is. And like, you don’t know what the rest of my body language is doing. And so you’re trying to process the emotions, how I feel, am I threatening you because you can’t see my hands. Versus in real life, if we were sitting at a table, you’d see that my hands are just in my lap under the table or my hands on the table, I’m sitting or whatever, right? But you can’t see what’s happening. And so there’s this subtle like, I gotta pay attention, where are her hands? What is she doing? Like, what’s the rest of her body language doing? And so again, this, and I do talk about this in the book around the importance of things like in-person events and connecting that online with the offline to build that trust. Because if the only experience someone has of you is with a screen in between you, it gets harder and harder for you to keep building that trust. And especially in the age of AI where video has come so far, that uncanny valley of like, is it me? Is it not me? What about this feels kind of wrong, right? So it’s fascinating when you start digging into kind of the psychology and the human behavior and pair that with the advances in technology. And then obviously from a marketing standpoint, look at how that shapes your strategy, your go-to-market motion, your tactics, your short-term and long-term mindset about building trust versus converting and then retaining and growing your customers.

Bill Sherman So you are one of my favorite people, not only to follow on social media, but also to talk with and spar with on brain works and thinking. We both sort of share a similar love of trying to figure out how does this work? How can I create structure that other people will understand? And you chose to include in the book a couple brain works and pieces of language that you’ve been developing on social media, at least that I know of for five years and possibly longer. You want to briefly sort of talk about the content playground and the four pillars of thought leadership, both of which I use in reference. And then let’s go into a meta conversation of how they got chosen.

Ashley Faus So the idea of the playground is to move away from mapping an audience journey as a linear funnel. There are a lot of pitfalls with the funnel, two big ones. First, it’s a very company centric mindset and a very companies centric framework. And it’s me as a marketer trying to force you on this journey that I want you to go on. The second I would say is that it’s retrospective measurement tool, not a forward looking strategy tool. Like, yes, a certain amount of people became aware of you. A certain amount of people… Thought about buying something, and a certain amount of people… That’s not a forward-looking strategy, right? That’s kind of a respective aggregate of what happened.

Bill Sherman And it doesn’t help you say for the people who are aware, what journey do they take to consideration? Are there common pathways? Are we missing opportunities? The funnel doesn’t give that.

Ashley Faus No, no, and, and it’s just so rigid. Like, so if your audience is not ready to buy. We just don’t do anything with them because they’re not ready. Unless you’re ready to go into consideration right now, Bill, I just can’t even talk to you. Unless you ready to into decision, not talking to you, it’s like, this makes no sense, right?

Bill Sherman Why wouldn’t I do a call to education and help frame how you think about an item, a product, a service?

Ashley Faus Well, and so that’s like at the high level from a conceptual level. And I talk about this in the book with content depths of conceptual, strategic and tactical. At the conceptual level, which is the what and the why of the idea, it’s this idea that the funnel is broken. You know, the audience has never gone on this linear journey and we are missing so many opportunities to connect and exchange value in the short and the long run if we only focus on this funnel mindset. So that’s the conceptual. If we drop all the way down to the taxable level, which is like nitty gritty, what needs to happen, you know, habits, tasks that need to be done regularly. This impacts things like your CTAs, your call to action. Everybody uses the learn more CTA. I don’t know what that means. What happens when I click that link? When you say learn more, are you trying to trick me into talking to sales? Are you going to trick into buying something, right?

Bill Sherman Am I getting a white paper, am I getting ice?

Ashley Faus A human, a video, I don’t know. I don’t know. And so even from a CTA standpoint, be honest, be explicit in your CTAs and match those CTA’s to the intent, which is the next action for the audience. So instead of me as a marketer trying to guess whether you’re in the awareness phase, I dunno. No. Do I want you to just think about what you’ve learned? That’s a true learn intent. I said it’s CTA and that’s not a buy intent or use intent or a help intent CTA, right? And so if I think about the next action that you take, if it’s logging into the products that you already own, that’s use intent. So I should say log in, use the template. If you’re a services agency, right, book office hours because maybe your contract comes with a certain number of office hours for consulting, right. That’s much more explicit than learn more. The next action is, you’ve already purchased, now you want to take advantage and get value from the thing you purchased, use intent, use and use intent CTA. Buy now, sign up for free, activate a trial, request an RFP, contact sales, et cetera. So that’s that on the playground side of it. And then the pillars of thought leadership, and I think this is a particularly fun conversation to have with you because you and I have some ideas, like we both respect each other’s ideas, but we have a different way of thinking about it where.

Bill Sherman We’re like at a 45 degree angle to each other. We look through a different lens. So yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Talk about the four pillars.

Ashley Faus Yeah, so the four pillars are credibility, prolific, profile, and then depth of ideas. And so you have to have all of those. And one thing that I do dive into and I’ve expanded on over the years is this idea of different types of creators in the marketing mix. And so a lot of companies think that thought leadership is the best. Or like, oh, we’re gonna do quality content. So it needs to be thought leadership, right? And I use these quotes. Right, great. It’s like, that’s not.

Bill Sherman Or my favorite, my favorite complaint. Thought leadership is your best content, Mark. What the heck do I do with that?

Ashley Faus With that, right, all content, I’m sorry, your sales content should be quality content, Telling is not bad. Every touch point. To buy, give them the option to buy. The problem is we keep, again, in this funnel mindset, we keep trying to shove people into a buying process when they don’t want to. So, or this idea that we’re going to do thought leadership for a founder. You’re not doing that. Do they have strong depth of ideas? Do they something interesting to say? Well, if you just get somebody to have them write a corporate blog and publish it, that’s not thought leadership, right? So there is a place for subject matter experts. There’s a place, for influencers, and there is place for thought leaders. And those are different. They score different in the different pillars. A thought leader is strong in all four pillars. Subject matter experts tend to actually be quite strong in the depth of ideas and the credibility pillars, but low in profile and prolific. So they tend to be great. For using on things like internal blogs or something like that where, you know, the expert who’s reviewing a blog, or maybe a lot of these folks sit on customer success teams or solution engineering teams because they actually love talking kind of one-on-one and diving deep, but they’re looking at existing problems and solutions. So that’s a big differentiator between a subject matter expert and a thought leader, right? And then influencers tend to be very high on the profile, lower on depth of ideas, and then kind of in the middle. On credibility and being prolific. They tend to talk primarily about existing problems and existing solutions, but they have a lot of followers. People like them. They’re popular, right, on usually one channel. But then again, they’re rarely saying new things. There is a place for each type of creator and building trust. And I think, again, we go back to that core of trust with the playground, pretending that something is thought leadership when it’s not, destroys the trust, and does not contribute to, you know, moving people through if you are trying to get them to buy. When you break the trust by saying, oh, it’s thought leadership, you know. Spoiler alert, it was action sales.

Bill Sherman Thought leadership also has a relative component because what may be new and earth shaking for one audience may not be for another audience, right? Where they’re like, they’re there, that’s the 101 version, thank you very much. We want all the chewy, delicious nuance, right. And what I love is I listened to your explanation again of the four pillars as well as then the influencer, expert, and thought leader categorization, you and I have tackled some very similar questions in parallel, but found different answers because the way that I’ve answered the question, usually I get asked, what is thought leadership? And so that answers a slightly different question than you just answered with the four pillars. And I define it by ideas. Content, which can be repurposed inside of an offering as part of an overall platform. Those are the things where you can, similar to you, rank on a scale. Do you have a really good idea, but you’re missing the platform? Well, you’re going to have a problem getting your idea out into the world. And if you haven’t codified your stories, data, examples, et cetera, and it’s all in your head, guess what? You’re going to be the only person who’s able to create thought leadership. You have no scalability. You can’t hand this off to a colleague or to a copywriter or whatever. Right. So that’s sort of our comparison four by four, but then you compare influencer expert and thought leader. Whereas I looked at the patterns and said, there are different profiles within thought leadership practitioners based on why they want to practice thought leadership, and how they practice thought leadership, whether that’s, you know, someone who’s using it because they want to grow their existing business and their growth might as CEO, or they’re the thought leader on the run who has to be in the room with the zoom to create value, or you can be the hall of fame thinker who’s struggling and saying, Hey, I want to retire one day or I may not be around. How did these ideas perpetuate without me? Right. Yeah. And so… There is a ton of value from my perspective in the two Frank group or in the two parallel sets of frameworks together because it’d be a great panel discussion, I think if we were sitting down.

Ashley Faus Well, and the part where I love your framework and the way that you frame it and approach the question as well. And I think the big thing that sticks out for me that I like in the way you frame it up is the practice of thought leadership. It’s not something that you just like, I declare it and now you’re a thought leader. Like I one time said one smart thing and cool, we’re good, right? I agree with you in terms of, I think there’s many ways to approach this problem. And this is something that I think I would have to go back to my book and double check. I have definitely referenced Dorrie Clark’s work in my blogging. So she wrote long game. That’s I think is her latest book. But one thing that she said was basically that this idea, people don’t speak up sometimes because they think everything’s already been done before. It’s already been said before. And the reality is It hasn’t been said or done by you in the way that you can say it. And so you are the unique kind of element to this. And again, that dovetails very nicely with my trust piece that yes, a lot of people have tackled what is thought leadership? How do you build a thought leader? How do assess whether someone is a thought lead, right? Which kinds of creators do we need in the marketing mix? You arrived at your own conclusions on that. I arrived at my own conclusions on that, that’s actually great. And I think the way you describe it, resonates a lot with one type of person or one person that reads it versus my framework, maybe it resonates, maybe both frameworks resonate and people pull different things from them, right? But the thing that makes it worth tackling the question is that each of us brings that perspective and that’s the unique thing that builds trust and helps unlock something for someone because they can hear it in a new way.

Bill Sherman And with that I not only get excited when I see books on thought leadership appear, but I often wind up referencing them for other people. It’s like, you need to go check this out, which is one of the reasons I wanted you on the show. But I get questions like on the ROI of thought leadership, how does it work? Right. And I go, okay, Cindy Anderson and Anthony Marshall did a fantastic job at IBM quantifying this. Go read their work. Because that’s their lane, right? And so we can be complimentary as we’re really crafting what the profession of thought leadership is and the tools and the resources practitioners need. So I want to shift now. We’ve had a meta conversation about frameworks and we could have that for the rest of the conversation, probably two more hours, but I want to ask you about the book. And you mentioned the subtitle. Yes. Was that the original subtitle or did it evolve over time into a conversation about AI, when did that idea emerge and how did you confront the question of AI with the book?

Ashley Faus So this is a good question. I think I would actually have to go back and look at my original book proposal and draft. One of the early title iterations was trust-based marketing or the trust- based marketer. And it just didn’t feel as connected. That is a central premise of the book and is a through line in the book, but it didn’t seem actionable in the way that I think human-centered marketing and then how to connect with audiences in the age of AI. I noticed that the questions that I was getting about the work I was putting out, so many people were asking, well, can I still be a thought leader if I use AI or how are you thinking about using AI to amplify your work on social media or to create more content for, you know, blogs or social media, or whatever it is. And so, I do think that there is a fundamental shift in terms of the mindset. And in terms of how marketing is gonna continue to grow, as AI becomes more mainstream and as, honestly, as laws catch up and as compliance and security catches up, right, technology tends to run quite far ahead. At some point, the rest of the elements since safeguards are gonna catch up. And so…

Bill Sherman Probably after litigation, lawsuit, and people getting burned in one way or another, unfortunately.

Ashley Faus It’s gonna take some collateral damage for those guardrails to catch up. And so I think as marketers, when we think about our duty to our audience, which is made up of humans, we can’t wait for the litigation to catch up and tell us how we should be approaching those humans and building that trust. And so the AI piece of it kind of came as I was like tackling these questions with these frameworks and going back to this. And then obviously it makes it. A very timely topic, but it’s interesting, we, you know, and I know you and I have talked about this a little bit of like the fact that I didn’t use any AI to write the book.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thought leadership leverage dot com/podcast. So catch the audience up on that conversation. What were the choices you made in this book with the AI?

Ashley Faus So one of the reasons it took me so long to write the book, I’ve had a number of people ask for years, oh, when are you gonna write the books on this? And I’m like, I don’t know if I need to write a book, right? One of the reason that I basically procrastinated for so long is because I feel very strongly that if I’m gonna write a books, I am going to write it. And I don’t want a human ghostwriter, I don’t want an AI ghostwriter. I don’s want a summary, right. I personally am gonna sit down and type these letters by hand. And so. I think there are a lot of awesome use cases for AI. You know, we chatted a little bit before we hit record about using it as a developmental editor. I used it to help me prep for a debate. I basically argued with it for like 27 pages and I argued my points and the other side’s points and I had it poke holes, right? It was great. I’ve had it help me do research, but in this case, I felt very strongly that a book on building trust with humans should be written entirely by a human. And so while I do call out areas where I think AI can be useful, and I do call out some of the potential pitfalls with using AI and where to bring it in, in a workflow, I did not use it for the book. In contrast, I know folks like Christopher Penn, who are writing entire books with AI, and he discloses that and he says, this book was written entirely by AI. Here’s all the source material that I fed it. So it’s his talks, his podcasts, past content that he himself has written. And then he’ll say You know, here’s the model that I used, Claude versus Gemini versus ChatGPT versus something custom he’s built. And so I think that you can use it as a sparring partner or as a writing partner, as a research assistant, right? But you still have to give it that source material. The source originates from the human. So that’s the first thing. You cannot outsource the thinking. You can have a ghost writer, you cannot have a ghosts thinker. And then the second thing is you need to be transparent. And I actually think It’s okay if you’re gonna use AI, you need to say what you did, how you used it, you know, what is the prompt, what does the model? That’s great, just be transparent about it. If you didn’t use AI then maybe say that too, say I, the human wrote this versus AI and that’s how you build the trust. It’s not that using AI itself destroys trust, it’s not acknowledging it and not recognizing the potential pitfalls of it that erodes the trust, right? If you’re transparent about and the mix, It actually builds more trust if you say this is 100% generated by AI or 50-50 me and then AI versus human, right, and in my case, 100% human.

Bill Sherman And from our perspective, as we put our manuscript together and built it, we realized we had a corpus of around 2.6 million words called 650 podcast episodes of interviews with practicing thought leaders. And I turned to my co-host, co-author, and business partner, Peter Winnick, and It’s like, okay, you remember the juicy bits in 650 episodes? We both tried to make a list and we had a few go-tos of, Oh, I remember this conversation, but that corpus was so large and so extensive in terms of eight years of content, there was no way to mind that let alone code it on a human timeframe.

Ashley Faus Well, and again, this is like a perfect example. So Notebook LM, for example, I’d been kind of playing around with that with some of my work. Chris showed it to me at Inbound last year, I think he was like, have you seen this? And it’s actually fascinating to almost get an objective third party, right? Like AI, you know, I uploaded a couple of things, you know talks and papers or whatever, and to listen to it, play back what it thinks I said. And I’m like, is that? What people think my idea is, like, in some cases, it’s almost this black mirror, you know, that’s just, like fascinating. And so in your case, the fact that you’ve got such a huge body of source material to cross-reference it with, and it can cite, oh, I pulled out this quote, and you’re like, where’d you get that quote from? And it’ll say, oh it was from this episode or from this blog post or whatever it is. You can then go back and determine Is that the right framing? Was it put in the right order? But you at least now know, okay, here’s what it thinks the interesting bits are.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. And there are obviously ways of hallucinations. At one point I asked it to make a list of all 650 podcast guests. And you could spot the point where it started hallucinating when it listed Tina Fey as one of our guests. And I’m like, Hey, Peter, it says we had Tina Fey on the podcast. I know I didn’t interview her. Yeah. And he was laughing too. But that ability, you have to be close enough to the material to know. And to your point, you cannot outsource the thinking. You cannot outsourced the accuracy, but you can use it to help really sharpen that thinking and reduce the blank page time or to get that alternate perspective, like you said of show me how someone from this point of view might look at this. Are they going to agree or are they going to go, yeah, you’re glossing over stuff?

Ashley Faus Well, and it’s interesting too, because the idea of ghost writing has been around for years. I mean, and its well accepted. Everyone knows that presidents don’t write their own speeches. They literally have a presidential speech writer and it is a known thing, right? There’s some blurry areas where I think it’s a mix of acceptance on huge companies and their CEOs, right, or their president or whoever, right. Like, do we actually- or a Someone who has their voice? Somebody’s doing that for them, right? It still has to match what you see in person. And so there is a certain cadence that you see each president, the way they speak, even if they have different speech writers, even if someone is writing the speech for them, there’s an expectation of what you will get based on who that person is. Same thing for certain CEOs, right? The joke of like, oof, I pity their PR team this week because it sounds like somebody let them log in to their own social handles, right? Or, oh my gosh, this was so moving, like shout out to their PR Team, but you know.

Bill Sherman So wouldn’t that you get someone who basically does the I’m Ron Burgundy Right and you’re like your man where they just read off the prompter whatever was fed in

Ashley Faus Yes. And people notice that again, especially if you go and you speak in person, it comes through. And I’ve had people say this to me when they’ve met me in person at an event or something. They’re like, oh my gosh, you’re the same person as online, or I feel like I know you, or somebody else posted on one of my LinkedIn posts. They were like, I feel I read this in your voice. But I don’t know that I’ve actually ever heard you speak because they’ve only consumed things I’ve written versus podcasts or videos. Right, right. And I said, oh, Handley, I just made a video the other day. Here you go. And she watched it and was like, oh my gosh, you sound like I think you should sound, right? So there is this congruency where if you tend to be conversational and approachable online, but then at an event, you’re standoffish or you’re aloof, or you tend to be very sarcastic and crass online, but then you show up very demure and formal in person or vice versa, right? It’s jarring and it’s inconsistent. And I think that’s an area where again, if you’re gonna use AI, you gotta train it and you need to tell it who it needs to be because it’s not necessarily the. When we talk about, oh, there’s certain words that are AI generated, and it’s like, it’s not so much that AI doesn’t have the right vocabulary, it’s that it’s inconsistent with how people know you, and most people don’t speak that formally in these- This goes back to-

Bill Sherman we’re quirky. Our idiom, our choice of cadence, presence, et cetera, all define and they’re, they’re a linguistic fingerprint, whether verbally presented or in writing. And you were talking about the ability to match voice to content and you were talking from ghost writing, but we could do a similar experiment. We could trade, for example, conference presentations. You take. The four elements of thought leadership. I take the four pillars. We should be able to talk to each other’s stuff with more fluency than the average person, but boy, are we going to start stumble. At least I know I will. And if someone asks me a question, there’ll be this longer pause as I have to like pause my own instinctive response process through my Ashley filter and then come back.

Ashley Faus Well, and it’s interesting too, because I think, to your point, and again, this comes about in the casual moments that make us human, that’s where you figure out if somebody has no freaking clue what they’re talking about, because you can just see, and, again, the body language, you can see all the eyes of like, what is happening? The blank stare, right? Or you weren’t paying attention or whatever it is, right. And I, it’s, interesting, I do musical theater as my hobby. And so I have a lot of experience saying someone else’s words to someone who is saying someone’s words to me, but we have to create this connection. And I remember one of my fellow actors told me, we were doing this show and the premise was that I had gotten left at the altar and she was like the wedding chapel manager. And so when I got left at altar, I would go sit down and sometimes I would sit with my head kinda in my hands and downcast. To say my line. And sometimes I would look up at her to say my lines. And this was a thing that I didn’t realize I was doing. But she told me afterwards, she’s like, sometimes I just feel so bad for you in that moment. And like, more than just what my character should feel like I genuinely like, are you okay? And she said, and I realized that I feel that when you look at me, when you make eye contact with me versus when you sit with your head in your I feel much worse for you in that moment as a person. The words are the same. In theory, the actions are the same and the pauses and the, you know, things that I’m, you’re the same, but that small moment of looking her in the eye versus looking down at the floor changes how she feels authentically, not what her character is supposed to say and feel. And so I’ve had those kinds of moments. Sometimes you just, you just. You know, when you get off stage, you’re like, man, I had it. Like tonight I was on. Right. It’s really hard to figure out what makes you on versus not on. And the audience might not even perceive it, but you feel it, right? There’s something really interesting from a human perspective about that. But I would argue.

Bill Sherman You from the audience perspective too, you can feel a live audience versus a dead audience and they can feel live performance versus one that’s going through the motions and having been both on stage and in the audience, you feel those moments of shape. The closest I come to is Shiksen Nihai’s flow state. Where it is a shared flow state that everyone is in the moment together. And the let us play construct of theater sort of falls away. And in that space and in that moment, it’s real.

Ashley Faus And I think that we can get that even in more transactional situations, which again, if you’re a business or you’re marketer, the reality is it is fundamentally a transactional relationship as opposed to a friendship or a romantic relationship or a theater or entertainment relationship where

Bill Sherman is less likely you’re celebrating your 15th anniversary with a brand free.

Ashley Faus Exactly, exactly. But there are people who have gotten Nike tattoos. There are people that have gotten Atlassian tattoos. Are we going to say tattoos now? Oh man, well I did that as an April Fool’s joke and everyone was like, you should do it. I was like what? No, I’m not getting a tattoo of my book. I don’t know. For whatever reason, that to me, I was just like, I am not doing that. This is a joke. But, there are people who get brand logos tattooed on their bodies, right? And so it’s like, man, what kind of emotional connection do you- And it was, and it don’t have to make, to break.

Bill Sherman Those brands also typically have logos that have names, the swoosh, the bar and the shield for Harley Davidson, for example. You can identify them by what they’re called. GE’s meatball for many years, right? Those are all ones where they’ve developed sort of anthropomorphic attributes before people put them on their bodies.

Ashley Faus Well, it seems like the idea, I mean, again, if we’re, like, attaching this into kind of your framework, the idea of it and the ethos of the idea stands on its own, right? And again, that goes back to some of the fundamental branding principles of like, it’s this idea or this perception or this feeling of trust. But it’s not just the name, it’s the mark as well and what that stands for.

Bill Sherman And it’s atomized down to a very simple element where you can encapsulate an entire relationship with the brand in a font type or, you know, a brush stroke. If you’re talking about the swoosh. So I want to go back to the human communication element for one piece. Cause this is a story that relates from the working with AI perspective on the manuscript. So working on our manuscript, I was feeding it quotes from our podcast transcript and working on a chapter that deals with retired senior executives, right? Many of them Fortune 500. We’ve had these people on our podcast. We’ve have them as clients. These are their actual words that I fed in. The AI, when I asked it to review a section said, oh, that language a CEO of a fortune 500 would find demeaning. And I’m like, okay, it’s a direct quotes. And, and so this ability to see each other’s humanity is something that the AI hasn’t parsed yet, right? That what was a human conversation? The AI even looking at transcript couldn’t believe was real.

Ashley Faus And I think, I mean, this again goes to some of the aspects of the book about authenticity. So I referenced the work from Frances Frye where she talks about the key elements of trust and there’s logic, which is like, do you know what you’re talking about? Are you competent? You know, is your judgment sound? Authenticity, which the ability for people to know the real you and then empathy, which is do they feel that you care about them, their needs and their outcomes? And I think AI is excellent on, well, minus the hallucinations. AI does very well on the logic piece. And it can actually do pretty well on empathy piece because there, I mean, you see this even with like parent-child relationships, right? Where the parent has to teach the kid to say, I’m sorry, or has to the child. When you say, be polite, the kid until you say, we say please, we say thank you, we say you’re welcome.

Bill Sherman You modeled the behavior. Bottled, right? Yeah, there’s Mimicry.

Ashley Faus Mimicry. And so AI can actually pick up on empathy pretty well, because as a species, well, and again, we can have a whole conversation about this, because it’s a cultural marker as well, right? In in Westover society, let’s say in English.

Bill Sherman We were even talking about I can’t act in perception. That’s a cultural marker. That’s also a personal style marker. Not everybody’s going to feel the same way. I’m sorry.

Ashley Faus Yeah, but that basically, it’s easier for AI to mimic empathy because we have some cultural norms around that that have actually been codified in our language, you know, the way we speak, the words we use, et cetera. And you can see that in how parents teach children, for example. Right. But the authenticity piece, like literally… You can’t really codify it. You can say, okay, these are the words that we use or this is the posture that you use. You know, again, this is how we dress. If you’re going to a funeral, we’ve all agreed you’re gonna wear black. In certain cultures, you don’t wear red in formal occasions because it’s bad luck, right? All of those are things that can be taught. But authenticity, it’s like, what are the word that make you authentic? What is the attire that makes you authentic as opposed to logic and empathy? Where we’ve codified those more. And so AI can mimic them, but it can’t mimic the authenticity. And I think that’s where you’re saying where it has this idea of what a CEO should be or a Fortune 500 executive should be.

Bill Sherman Rather than exactly rather than descriptive.

Ashley Faus Yeah. Yeah. So it’s super interesting. And I think there’s something there too, right? This idea of executive presence is how we’ve tried to codify a CEO or how a CEO should write, right. But we are always all facets of ourselves. We just don’t show all facets in all situations, right, I don’t bring wife Ashley or Jim Ashley or sister Ashley, or frankly, musical theater Ashley to this call. I bring professional Ashley, I bring marketer. Right? And the reality is I’m still the wife to my husband. I’m still the sister to my sister, right? I still am going to go to rehearsal tonight. So I still sing and act. But in this moment, I’m leaning into a certain piece of myself that is more focused on the logic side of who I am versus other situations might lean more heavily into that authenticity or empathy side to build that trust. And the you spend with someone. The more you see all the facets so you understand all three elements. AI leans so heavily into the logic element and the elements of logic that you miss those other facets and it’s a weird thing to get that sense of like, okay, we’ve codified logic so well, we’ve actually done a pretty good job codifying empathy and yet we are always our whole selves even if we don’t show as many of ourselves publicly as someone else. So it’s fascinating.

Bill Sherman We contain multitudes and often contradictory multitudes within ourselves, right? So I want to ask you a couple of questions about the book. You mentioned earlier that people had asked you about the books for years and you said no no no. What made you decide now was the time?

Ashley Faus Honestly, it was Kogan Page, reach out, that’s my publisher, and said, have you ever thought about writing a book? And I said, oh, in fact, I have. I actually have a whole chapter outline that I did to just see if I had enough to even write a book. And I think timing-wise and partnership-wise, they were the right partner. It was the right time. I don’t actually have better answer than that. Everyone’s like, what are you trying to do? Are you gonna become a writer and speaker? Are you going to quit your job? Are you’re gonna… You know, go be a consultant. And I’m like, no, I really like being an in-house marketer. And I think that I have explored enough of the depth of these ideas that I feel competent that I can do them justice. And I happen to get the right partner at the right time to say, you know what, let’s do this instead of continuing to procrastinate.

Bill Sherman Yeah. And I resonate personally a lot with that answer in that there is plenty of tape in this very podcast, let alone elsewhere that has me saying, no, no. No, we don’t plan on ever writing a book, you know? And I think we could even do an entire book campaign of Peter and Bill said they would never write a book. But there was a certain point, not necessarily a capstone moment, but the, okay, these ideas are baked moment. And I’ve shared them in shorter form, but let’s organize them. You could argue that with the podcast, let alone what we’ve been doing, we’ve writing for eight years and then the actual manuscript is the tale of this process. Rather than we started and said, Oh, let’s build credibility by writing a book. You, if we were to download from LinkedIn, let alone where else you’ve got a corpus of many, many words, which you could have fed to an AI and. Produced a book in short order.

Ashley Faus I actually, I have a post coming up that’s like how to write a book in six months. Step one, wrestle with a problem for 10 years. Step two, talk about how you solved that problem for years. Step three, write the book in 6 months. Like yeah, yeah, talk publicly about how to book in six months, but in reality, that’s not what I came to be, right?

Bill Sherman No, exactly. And the depth of thinking that you can achieve, and this goes back to that thinking part, you have to stew in those ideas to the point of discomfort where you wrestle with them again and again and say, is that what I’m trying to say before, you know, you get clarity and if you don’t have clarity, your audience won’t.

Ashley Faus Exactly So what do you hope to achieve with the book? Well, this is part of I mean again I get that question all the time and that’s part of since I can’t I don’t and I ask you

Bill Sherman It’s purposefully and open-ended, right? Because there’s a number of different ways that could be interpreted.

Ashley Faus I think the biggest thing for me, I have seen a shift in I would say probably the last one to two years as I’ve kind of gotten more senior in my career and I finally, again, you never stop growing or whatever, but let’s, I’m finally very successful in my career, right? Again, I’ve had a successful career, but I have finally kind of reached a tipping point where I am considered to be senior, though the level that I am in is a terminal level for plenty of people. My previous level was a terminal for many people. And because of that, I am starting to see the shift of kind of all the people who were my mentors and the people I looked up to for my whole career, endorsed my work, echoing my ideas, kind of handing the baton and saying, hey kid, you’re up. And it’s like, and not in a condescending way, in a like, we did our job as this generation of marketers. And yeah, we’re still here. We’re still driving things forward, but it’s your time. And I’ve seen this, I’ve had this conversation with a couple of friends who are also writing books, who are all so getting to that level, they just got their promotion or they’ve been at this level or whatever. They’re interviewing for VP roles or C-level roles. And they’re like, you know, I think it’s our time now. Like I think. Are we the old guard now? Are we, the mentor and I am hiring and mentoring, you know, the kids these days, fresh out of school and it’s like, I want the next generation of marketers to do right by the profession. And so if I have the ability to shape where this industry and this profession and these skills go, what are the models? That the next generation of marketers is gonna use. I wanna work with the models that, you know, I wanna to work with people who agree with my ideas, right? Like selfishly, I think my ideas are super smart and it would be awesome if we’ll keep adopted them so that I can work with these smart marketers, right. And I think there’s something really cool about having it codified in a way that does enable the marketers who are coming up behind me. To shift how they are implementing these practices and these tactics and these mindset shifts, right? And all the forward-looking ideas that 10, 15 years ago, I got from kind of the previous powerhouses.

Bill Sherman That you’ve read a book in a later fight, right? Yeah. And I have plenty of books on my shelf and I’m assuming you the same way. Do you hear someone speak or they present an idea or you read an article and you’re like, this changes. That ability, I think for me, from a thought leadership perspective, there are plenty of marketing courses and also marketing programs and associations. When you start talking about the ecosystem of people who think about thought leadership or could put a graduate curriculum together, if we’re more than fit on a city bus globally, I’m missing a few people, but only a few. And so that ability to start from what I look at in thought leadership as back where marketing is in the forties and the fifties of the 1900s, in some ways we don’t even have the four P’s nailed down. I know it comes leadership, right? And you be able to say, here are the patterns that I’ve seen as a practitioner. It’s supported by experience, it’s exported, it’s supported data as well, but let’s start codifying this so that we don’t have to learn the same lessons over and over.

Ashley Faus So I think, I think that’s the big outcome is like, and it’s a bit fluffy, right? Of, you know, grow the next generation of marketers, like change how I hear your works, right. But it’s, I mean, it’s an lofty goal, but it’s I think it’s a worthy goal to put out there to say, I want people to be able to take this and use this and improve their outcomes for their business and for their audience by implementing these ideas.

Bill Sherman And I think there’s twofold layers when you put frameworks out there. One is for people to actually use. And then for the framework junkies to say, engage with me on this. Do you see the world a different way? And if so, why? Cause I know you and I have had great conversations of our models are slightly different. What’s going on? Yeah. And that’s, that’s great. Ashley, I want to thank you for a fantastic conversation.

Ashley Faus Tell people about the book again and where they can find it. So the book is titled Human-Centered Marketing, How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. It is available on Amazon, Barnes& Noble, the Kogan Page website. There are a variety of places you can get it. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, I do talk about the book and I do include links so you can some previews and also just a single easy place to go and order your copy.

Bill Sherman And I’ll close by saying I’ve already pre-ordered my copy. I’ve read an advanced copy. It’s worth people ordering. And if you’re not following Ashley already, you should be. Ashley, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thank you.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game, and thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights. Take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.