The most important step before writing a marketing headline is to understand what motivates your customer. In all the performance marketing campaigns I have optimized for travel, retail, construction, medical and healthcare brands, the same pattern holds. Get to know the customer first, and results follow.
In today’s automated media environment, ad platforms now handle most of the targeting and bidding for you. Therefore, messaging and creative are the main variables that you always control.
Industrial research consistently attributes about half of the increase in sales to creative. This means the brand whose message resonates has the advantage. Reducing a buyer’s anxiety is often the difference between a significantly higher CTR and wasted ad spend.
I’ll show you how to apply this information and improve marketing campaign performance using a framework I call Friendship Codes.
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Understanding customers like a friend
The friendship is mutual. To create campaigns like a friend, you need context, understanding and information.
Behavioral economists and psychologists have well-documented processes for uncovering this information. Marketers have long turned to these experts for insight into customer emotions, identity cues, silent frustrations, and unspoken motivations.
Now, AI can apply simplified versions of these processes to analyze engagement data, customer prompts, call recordings, and more.
The Friendship Codes AI Skill
I integrated the codes of friendship into a AI Skillusing Need codes as the underlying behavioral pattern. As a set of written instructions that you give to an AI assistant once, a skill performs a complex task in the same disciplined way every time you ask. Think of it as a standard operating procedure (SOP) followed by the project or chat.
Instead of re-explaining your method in every discussion, define it once. Include the drivers to look for, the questions to ask, the output format to follow, and the rules to never break. From there, you feed new data to the AI assistant, and it executes your playbook rather than improvising or starting over each time.
Creating a skill takes more time at first but makes later work easier. Once you’ve developed a thoughtful, highly contextual skill, you can hand the AI assistant a messy pile of owned and external input. These may include transaction history, survey responses, focus group transcripts, Google Business reviews, Amazon reviews, App Store comments, and competitor copies.
How to develop the Friendship Codes skill
You don’t need my exact tools to develop your first skill. But you need a clear set of driving factors, a thoughtful collection of business data, and the time to think critically about what you learn.
To develop your first skill, start with four main factors:
- Function: Trust and long-term value.
- Compliance: Social proof and belonging.
- Experience: Sensory projection.
- Pulse: Identity signaling and prestige.
This skill identifies the dominant factors for the audience and returns structured information. You’ll get results showing which fear is blocking the purchase, which driver is doing the real work, and where the circles in the Venn diagram overlap. Next, the competency creates a sequenced plan throughout the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to advocacy, defining what to do and when.
The framework of friendship codes
First, gather your data. This includes customer relationship management (CRM) information, reviews, survey responses, search terms, competitor posts, and relevant Reddit posts. The goal is to understand how people speak when they are honest.
Next, provide context for what success looks like for your business. Clarify what has worked in the past.
Next, perform the Friendship Codes skill and ask the following questions:
- What would your customer say to a friend that they wouldn’t say in a survey?
- What concerns do my customers have before making a purchase?
- What are the three most common things customers say about my brand?
- What are four pieces of information that I couldn’t find anywhere else that will generate the business outcome I want?
- Give me two versions of a headline for each of my marketing channels.
How Friendship Codes Work in Practice
This framework provided valuable information to a high-end home builder I worked with. We’ve found that buyers who spend more than $500,000 are terrified of the hidden costs of upgrading and the regrets that come with it.
This idea helped us rewrite the title. A generic version said something like “Quality New Homes.” The version coded as friendship responded directly to fear: “Luxury without the headaches.”
We took this information and tested the copy across all channels, including search marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. Search marketing campaigns saw a 30% increase in click-through rate (CTR).
The same idea applies to each step. Upon acquisition, this resolves the fear in a search title. After the purchase, it becomes a retention moment: a proactive check-in confirming there were no surprise costs and the friend who follows up.
Using AI to Drive Understanding and Connection
The brands that win over the next few years will use AI to better understand people, then act on that understanding with the warmth of a friend who shows up regularly, remembers what matters, admits mistakes, and gives as good as he gets.
Use AI to move faster and explore what matters most to your customers. Then think critically and communicate like a friend who understands.
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