We feel before we rationalise, yet most positioning is built on rational feature lists rather than the raw human motivations that actually drive action. The best tech companies have quietly flipped the seven deadly sins into growth engines, turning sloth into efficiency, ego into professional pride, and lust into open-mindedness and connection.
Sara Gordon uses the story of Flow, a period-tracking app in a fiercely commoditised market, to show how digging into deeper human desire reframed the whole business. By listening to how women actually used the product to understand their sex drive and connection with their partners, the team moved from tracking, which feels like work, to empowerment, repositioned Flow into a higher-value category, and shipped features like an AI sex-therapy chatbot. Along the way she shares a practical positioning diagnostic and argues that marketing and product, working as one experimentation loop, is what turns human nature into valuation.
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Hi everyone, really good to see you today. So we're gonna end the day with a spicier topic. I know you're very excited about AI, but we're gonna talk about sex for a little while. So the topic is around human nature, and the case study I'll be going through today is flow health.
So flow is, who's heard of flow in the audience? The women, mostly the women, some of the men. Good. Flow is a period tracking app. There are dozens of period tracking apps on the market, but Flow reached a billion dollar valuation in the past few years and did that by really digging into into period adjacent categories and empowering women rather than just giving them work to do, which is tracking their cycle.
So a bit about me. I'm from the US. I'm a reformed brand strategist. I love brands, but today we're gonna talk about human motivation and positioning. Positioning is really the foundation of brands, and that's by inherently understanding customers' jobs, the category that you're in, and the value that you provide to people.
And I got into positioning from a very early age and really trying to understand what makes humans work because I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, and we went to church every Sunday and every Wednesday, and I sat there thinking, what?
I don't understand why people believe in something that they can't see. And that's kind of like software, right? We have this code in the background and magical things are happening, but what's the value proposition? What's the belief that we're building in the products that we're selling that really gets people to take action?
And that's what this talk is about today. So a few of the brands that I've worked with, I'm now at Zoe Health, which is a science and nutrition company, helping people really understand what foods are best for their body and helping them unpick all of the health halos that exists all over the world today with so called health foods.
But what you'll learn today are three things. So how are people motivated? What motivates us as human beings? And this works whether or not you work in B2B or B2C. So positioning works for any kind of business and human motivation, it's not about whether or not you're selling a B2B software proposition or a box of flowers, right?
Understanding what underpins action is important for both kinds of business. So we'll then get into how does that shape positioning and some frameworks around whether or not your positioning is strong or not. So I'll show you my framework so that you can evaluate your own positioning in the market.
And then how can that accelerate products? So I've worked in lots of businesses in the marketing function, but really closely liaising with products teams, and those two teams often sit in silos. And so one of my strengths and one of the things I love to do is to be the village busybody and go from marketing into product and try and bring insights into both teams and really builds these great learning loops that allows the product team to accelerate their innovation by taking insights from marketing where we can learn things really, really rapidly.
So to start off with, what motivates us? Right? Think about our basic human desires. And the way that our brains work is that we feel first. So if you saw Angelie's talk earlier, lots of the brands that she showed, we have an immediate feeling when we see a brand or an image or words on a screen.
That then puts us in a position where we react, right? We either say, yes, that's for me. Or we say, no, that's not for me or I don't resonate with that. And if you do resonate with it, you then rationalize and you think, well, here's why I should buy that thing or here's why this thing is for me, right?
So the thing that's really important to understand when you're speaking to your customers, you're speaking to your prospect is what are the things that keep them up at night? What's motivating them to go through your sales journeys or even to consider your products?
What are the things that are letting them down? How does that make them feel? It's often asking the really uncomfortable questions. And if you're here tomorrow, I encourage you to go see Hannah Parvez's talk because she'll talk to you about some of those questions that you can ask people to really get them to open up to you in in user interviews.
But having real conversations really gets you to the point of understanding what motivates people deeply. So if you're familiar with jobs theory, the way that I start by thinking about human motivation and thinking about positioning is by starting with what are people hiring your product for?
This shouldn't be something that you're not aware of, but this is a really simple framework to understand, you know, when something is happening that's creating a struggle for a person, what's the thing that is motivating them to take action to find a better outcome for themselves?
So what's actually helping them make progress? And how do you fit into this statement or thought process that someone has as they're trying to move to a better outcome? As humans, we're wired for progress. We always wanna keep moving forward, not backwards, and so we're constantly searching for things that feed an emotional desire and human outcome.
And that's really important to remember again, no matter whether you're selling a B2B proposition or a B2C proposition. And one of the shortcuts that I always tend to encourage teams to think about as a heuristic when they're thinking about human motivation is the seven deadly sins.
So I was in the VNA with a friend of mine who's a marketer, and we were walking through one of the stained glass galleries, and we were looking up and looking at a portrayal of the seven deadly sins, and I thought, oh wow, the tech industry has really leveraged a lot of those things and flipped them on their heads to really think about how do we take something like Sloth and actually think about efficiency?
How do we take lust and transform it into something that's more like open mindedness? So if you look at some of the greatest tech companies in the world, they've really tapped into that human motivation. If you look at Uber, if you think about Tinder, right, it's not about casual sex, it's about open mindedness and connecting with people.
If you think about LinkedIn, and I'm sure many of you are posting on LinkedIn today, secretly it's about ego, but actually it's about pride that you're here, you're developing, you're connecting with people, you're enhancing your career. But fundamentally, you're driven by progress for your own careers, for your businesses to get investments.
And so, you know, we think about other brands. I saw the tagline for Timu yesterday, and it struck me like a lightning bolt. It was shop like a millionaire. Right? So it's about being able to have as much as you want and really tap into this motivation for accessing more and more and more, but thinking about it in a way that is positioning against a lifestyle that someone's looking after achieving.
If we think about Netflix, we think about over consumption of media and that's not about gluttony, that's about pleasure. So that's about relaxation and enjoying yourself, but inherently, and then X we think about wrath or justice. Denae and I were talking about Vala and you know, employers maybe taking advantage of people or situations at work not going the right way.
And actually it's really an opportunity to help employees find justice in in moments that aren't working for them. And then finally, we think about Instagram, and we think about envy. It's about inspiration, but it's also looking what other people have that you don't.
And so often if you think about your business and you start talking to customers, really tapping into the things that are driving them at a really, really basic human level is really important as a foundation for your positioning. So how do you get to these insights?
And again, one of the things that I often hear when I go into product teams where the user research tends to sit or customer insights teams that tend to sit within marketing, sit in silos, right? User research will often say, well, we've got automated user testing set up, and so we ask a bunch of questions and we take people through a flow.
And then on the customer research or insight sides, on the marketing side, they'll say, we've done surveys. So you've got two sets of data that are completely different. But actually, if you're a founder in the room and you're not actually having active conversations with customers, I'd encourage you to pick up the phone, schedule a Zoom call, have a real open conversation with someone.
There's ways that you can turn that into something through some of your AI tools to to take that information and digest it in a way that's really useful to unpick those motivations. But having real human conversations is key. And by taking somebody from marketing and somebody from products to then speak to customers and really dive deep into what's what's struggling in their life, what are they struggling with, And what's the outcome that they're really looking to achieve?
You can start to unpick their motivations. You can unpick their jobs and really start designing products that have an edge, and then using that edge in your positioning and in your brands. So the case study that I'll talk about today is Flow. It's one of the biggest health apps in the world.
It's got seventy million monthly active users and over three sixty million users worldwide. And it's in a really commoditized marketplace of apps. So you can track your period on Apple Health, you can track your period on Oura Ring, you can use something called period tracker.
And there's so many tools out there to track your periods, but it's creating work for the user because we're asking them to go in and log and give us information. But what they really needed to do was think about how do they continue their growth trajectory and how do they understand their users' motivations so that they can enhance the experience to be more about empowerment and more about predicting how a user would feel to add value to their life.
So we went from a world where we had automated user interviews going on in the background with ChatGPT digesting them into some jobs that we thought were right, and we started having real conversations. So we had teams from product and user research and marketing really trying to understand what was going on in our users lives.
What was going wrong and what was going well and what did they need to shift? So where were they then and where did they need to move to? And we did that as well as understanding on TikTok and on our social channels, what were people posting about?
What were people giving us information about how they were using our product? So I'll replay the slide. So if you're familiar with Flow, this is the calendar that will tell you when your period is, which is the days in pink. And then the Flow Hearts are when a user would log the days that they had sex.
And so what they were trying to do and what they were trying to explain to their friends on TikTok was the moments that they felt *****. And so as we started having conversations with users, they were actually using the product to hack their sex drive.
So they were trying to understand why their sex drive went up and down, why they were disconnected from their partner during certain times of the month, and really what was actually a way that they could engineer their date nights, the time that they were spending with their partner and so on and so forth.
And so the motivation that we started to really get under the skin of was lust. So how could they actually have a much deeper relationship, a more connected partnership through the data that we had around their cycle? So when we started to think about job statements, we then started with the struggle.
So when I'm not connecting with my partner, when things feel like we're miles apart, when he doesn't understand my sex drive or she doesn't understand my sex drive, I want to know when sex would be most enjoyable so that I can deepen my relationship.
The other group that we look after in the app are those who are trying to conceive. And if any of you in the audience have been on that journey of conception, you know that it can be really difficult. And sometimes you're trying for months, sometimes you're trying for years, and sex becomes this programmatic thing that you have to do on the month or on the day that she's ovulating and you have to do it now, and sex sort of loses its magic.
And so we embarked on this journey of trying to figure out how do we help women find that magic, and how do we move from tracking to empowerment? How do we move from here's the day that my period's coming to here's the moment that you can actually connect with your partner on a level that you hadn't connected with before.
And so we had the job, we could understand really quite deeply what she was looking to to do, that she was really looking to connect with her partner, whether it was on a conception journey or whether it was on a on a a cycle tracking journey.
So we look at those customers in in two different cohorts within the app. And then we started to embark on this journey of, well, how do these jobs affect our positioning as a business? If we know that she's looking for more than period tracking, she's looking for things adjacent to her periods, whether it's sex drive.
We looked at other topics like menopause, perimenopause, and all of these moments throughout a woman's life where she's looking for more information, more empowerment, where the healthcare system might be failing her. We then started thinking about, well, how does she think about herself?
What is her identity? What's her purpose in life? Right? Because if you think about what's the last thing that you bought? You bought that because it reflects a mission that you have, an emotional needs that you might have, but it also is something that reflects your identity and your purpose as a human.
And so that is the is the, I guess, the basic thesis around positioning is how do you look at a brand and know that it's for me? And these design systems, the language that we use as as brands and businesses in our positioning are there.
They exist to attract people to understand if that product is is for you. So you look at the semiotics of a brand identity, and you're choosing colors, you're choosing patterns, you're choosing language that attracts someone to your brand. So a quick diagnostic. This is a good time to take a photo.
One of the frameworks that I tend to use with businesses is is this. So do you have a clear job? Is it bad, okay, or good? So do you have really clear solutions to two or three very high value jobs that customers are looking to achieve?
Is your category really clear? And a lot of companies will say, well, we're innovating, we're creating something completely new, and that's great. But we tend to choose products that are anchored in a specific category. If we think about the brain like a filing system, we put things into buckets.
If you're giving people a bucket that they've never seen before, that's clear and magical over here, We don't process that. So thinking about what you sell and putting it in a very clear bucket in a category that is high value to consumers is super important.
In the case of flow, period tracking was super commoditized. And so we had to start thinking about how do we put ourselves in a higher value category. When I sat down with the CEO and founder when I started at Flow, he said, how do we get people to part with cash to use our product?
Our product's not very expensive. It's forty dollars to sixty dollars a year depending on which market you're in. And I said to him, well, if you think about it, women spend hundreds of dollars on skincare products. If we know when their cycle is happening or when their period's happening within their cycle, we know when their skin's going to be bad.
Women spend lots of money on sex toys and sex courses and sex therapy. So if we can help them understand their sex drive and understand how to communicate their pleasure patterns to their partner, then that's money that we could be taking into the business.
If we then also understand when perimenopause and menopause might be hitting, and we can use our predictive algorithm to help them understand that, then we could be supporting them in a way that their doctor can. And that also creates value. So when we start to think about the category moving from period tracking to a health partner that's empowering them, we start to move into a very different category with a very different value proposition and a very different valuation for the business.
And then finally, what's the value that we're delivering? So are people hitting your homepage or your app store listing or seeing your sales deck and are things falling flat? So are you communicating the value that you're delivering against the job that you know your prospects are coming to you to solve?
So I would love you to think about this and rank yourself really honestly, as a way to start thinking about where do you need to improve your positioning. So are your jobs clear? Is your category the right category to be in? And sometimes this can be a really simple language shift to help people understand that you are in a high value category because the value that you offer is better or different to the alternatives that exist in the market at the time.
And so we had that conversation around all of the other solutions that women were using to hack their health, right? So the sex toys, the skincare products, the doctor visits to understand their hot flashes and their brain fog. And all the while, I was asked to come in and help them do a rebrand.
Now at face value, so this is one of Flow's biggest competitors, it's called Period Tracker. Very simple. They're both pink and Period Tracker was essentially copying a lot of their ads and copying a lot of their features. And so we had to think, is this really just about lipstick?
Is this just about us differentiating ourselves visually and verbally through a rebrand to help distinguish ourselves in the market? And so the question became a lot deeper around, is this just a visual refresh? Or actually actually are we changing our proposition, our value proposition that we're putting out into the market?
So that not only we can get more monthly active paying users, but that we're actually delivering a product experience that's that's delivering on all of the needs that our users are coming to us for outside of understanding the day in which their period starts.
So we started ranking ourselves in my diagnostics. So we had lots of solutions, right? We could predict the day that a period was starting. We could predict down to the hour when a woman was ovulating. We could predict, you know, when her sex drive would be highest or would be lowest, when she's gonna be most stressed, when is the best day for her to give a presentation.
Today is not that day for me. And we could also help her think about, you know, the best moments for her to connect with her partner. And so we had lots of really clear solutions to high value jobs for women. But the problem was we were in a really commoditized category.
So we had Apple Health nipping at our heels, Oura Ring was launching a period tracking feature, and we had lots of other smaller apps coming up in the market, stealing our lunch. And we also had a lot of customers who had a low willingness to pay because they said, why should I pay for this?
I can get it free from Apple Health. So we had a really tricky business problem to solve that, at the time, I didn't believe a brand refresh would help us with. It was really more about a positioning problem. And if we think about positioning at face value, it is the thing that underpins the brand strategy.
But in my opinion, as somebody who thinks about positioning not only as something that underpins brands, it's something that fuels the commercial proposition of a business and inherently changes and molds and shapes the product that gets delivered to market. So the question then became, how do we reposition to create more value to existing users, but also how do we change the perception of us in the market so that we could attract new customers to us?
Lots of women didn't think that we were for them because they had irregular cycles. Lots of women didn't think that we were for them because they were going through perimenopause or menopause, their cycle might be ending. Lots of women were looking at other solutions.
And so we started to think about how could we actually shape our value proposition, use our predictive technology to help them understand that we were more than just a period tracker. We could deliver value at every single stage of their life and empower every decision that they could make on a day to day basis, whether or not it was with their relationship, whether it was with their job, whether it was with their family and their partner and how they connected with the world.
And so we came back to these jobs. These were, I guess when we did the interviews, we talked to about one hundred women in the US, which is their biggest market. And these were two jobs out of probably twenty five that we looked at.
And we then get to the question of, well, we've interviewed lots of people, we've got too many jobs, which ones do we focus on? And so we tested lots of jobs in the market. We tested them in marketing, and I'll talk about how we did that.
But we narrowed it down to think about lust and to think about this connection that women were looking for that they couldn't figure out how to solve on their own, even if they were doing sex therapy or doing therapy on their own. So if we go back to how people are wired, if we think about what's that fear that's kicking off, what's the thing that's keeping them up at night, We really uncovered that she didn't wanna feel disconnected from her partner.
She didn't want to have a decaying sex life over time. But she also had this inherent desire, I think this slightly more unique to the US, is that I deserve pleasure. I don't know where to go to really understand it. And I don't know how to access it in a way that's private.
And that was a really important piece to the puzzle. And finally rounding off how we rationalized that, the logic was I can trust flow because it's a source of medically credible information. And so we took the jobs, we mapped it to how people feel, and then rationalized their decisions and started to test it.
And so this is where we came to the point of product and marketing working in a really harmonious way where they were working in silos before. So every week we got together, and we started to think about how do we take the twenty five jobs we've gotten from the hundreds of customer interviews, and how do we put that into creative testing on Meta, and then taking the winners from Meta and starting to build out content in the app that was behind a paywall.
And then how do we, if that content behind the paywall is helping us monetize existing users and bring in new users, how do we then turn that into product features that the health team can then spend months developing to bring to market and using our tech in a really insightful and deep learning way.
So this is an example of one of the ads that we tested. It's quite on the nose, but it really goes into the struggle, right? It goes into the struggle of I don't know how to access pleasure, and the thing that I really want to do is connect with my partner and access that pleasure and do it in a way where I'm not going on to Google and I'm typing in, how do I have an orgasm?
Because that's embarrassing. So we were presenting prospects and presenting our existing users with the opportunity to access something that they hadn't accessed before in a space that felt safe. And that was really, really key for us to to win trust. And so we took an existing category of period tracking, and we started to move into adjacent categories to augment the product and make it a much more enhanced empowering experience to users.
And when we sat in these growth meetings with products, one of the things that we talked about is what's our learn rate over our burn rate? How much are we learning every two weeks when we're going into these learning cycles where we're sprinting through new ads, new user language in those ads, and how much are we spending, right?
If you're a founder in this room, you understand how much you're burning every month, but are you learning as quickly as you can to enhance your product, evolve it, and monetize it as much as possible? And so having this relationship between marketing and product becomes really fundamental to grow much faster than product teams working in isolation, marketing teams working in isolation, and sales teams working in isolation.
So getting all of those those parties in one room to run an experimentation process becomes fundamental whether or not you're running a b to c business or a b to b business, and really putting some structure into those sprints. And so you then start to take your learnings and you start to put a price tag on them, and figuring out then how do you take those learnings, put them into your monetization and sales strategies, and then bring new customers in, as well as monetize the existing ones that you have.
So we started to finally see a shift as we changed our strategy. We knew that we had really clear solutions to our jobs, but we weren't surfacing them in the app as well as we could have. So we changed that over time. We then started moving from period tracking.
We're still period tracking in the App Store because that's what what people search for. But further up in the funnel and for the existing customers that we already had, we started presenting ourselves with slightly different language around empowerment, around giving women access to information that their doctors couldn't give them.
We have one of the biggest data sets in the world around female health, and that's something that even an OBGYN at the best hospital in New York City couldn't give you this insight around when your sex drive might be highest compared to millions of other women around the world based on the data that you give us around your symptoms and around when your cycle starts and ends.
We then started moving people from thinking that we were just a period tracker to giving them value that they were actually willing to pay for. So we started changing their value perception of the business, and this is key. You can take human motivations.
You can evolve your value proposition. And if you're pitching yourself in the right category to the right types of customers, when that value is clear, it becomes easy to make that sale because you're speaking in their language and you're delivering on the thing that they're actually looking for.
So we kept asking ourselves this question in our weekly growth meetings, is how do we move from tracking, which feels like work, to empowering? How do we predict how she's going to feel and give her that information rather than just waiting for her to give us information on her symptoms.
And so really this became a question of how do we move from features to emotions, and how can our features deliver on the emotional state that she's in and the motivations that she has so that we can deliver her progress. So if we go back to her job statements, these are the the progress points that will make her life better, that will help her feel like she's moving from a to b in a in a much more empowering way than she had before.
So we did that by also adding our credibility, and that taps into her logic brain, right? So if we start with the what's keeping her up at night, her emotional state, we then layered in the logic. And now all of you will have that logic.
You'll have your the things that make you credible. The things that the experts and spokespeople that you can bring from your brands to help people post rationalize the decision that they're making. But by starting with emotion, you win them over and actually bring that lead in to be able to have that rational conversation.
And so we took all of these insights, we ran all of these tests, and fundamentally we came up with what I think was probably one of Flow's most holistic marketing campaigns that also changed the product inherently. So we launched the world's first AI sex therapy. There is a bit of AI in this talk.
Where we took one of the US's best sex coaches and we transformed her into a chat bot where if we knew that your sex drive was gonna be high or was gonna be low, we gave different routes for our users to understand what they should do that day to connect with their partner.
We created safe spaces in the app where people could talk about weird sex questions that they didn't wanna ask other people, and do that in an anonymous way. We created content around squirting and multiple orgasms that no one wants to search for on Google, and you probably don't even wanna search for them on TikTok, and most of that content is not even available on a lot of those platforms because there's a lot of taboo around that.
And so we really started to break down barriers and become known for not just an app that was tracking your cycle, and really helping you figure out when do I need a tampon. It became something that was so much more than that because we had really difficult conversations.
And so I'd encourage you to sit down with your prospects, sit down with your customers and ask them how they feel. It gets weird. What progress they're trying to make in their life, and just listen. Oftentimes, I see founders have conversations where they're like, do you like my product?
Or tell me about the features that you like. And that inherently becomes a very rational, logic driven conversation. I think some of the best conversations are just listening to people's problems, to people's struggles. And inherently within those deeper conversations, you start to unpick the emotions that people have around problems that they have, and what's really driving them to potentially use you or to use some of your competitors.
So I'd leave you with really trying to understand what is their motive, what is that emotional state that people are in, and that can really help fuel differentiation, and it can help fuel monetization within your business. And with that, I will hand over to Denae.
