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The Value Creators Podcast Episode #69. AI, Trust, and the Return to Human-Centered Marketing: A New Marketing Framework with Bryan Phelps

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Many businesses and business functions are grappling with the question of the role of AI in future value creation, none more so than marketing agencies and the marketing function in business. Bryan Phelps is CEO of the marketing agency Big Leap, actively navigating this challenge every day. Bryan shares how his team developed a clear AI policy to guide innovation—and why humans must remain at the center of creativity, decision-making, and brand expression.

This episode is a practical and forward-thinking look at how businesses can build trust, scale responsibly, and stay human in the age of algorithms.

Key insights include:

  • Why your AI strategy should start with a policy—and how to align teams with clear principles.
  • How to preserve brand essence and emotional connection while integrating AI into marketing.
  • Why trust and empathy are the new growth engines—and how to lead with values, not just data.

If you’re building a brand in the age of AI, this conversation will help you navigate the future with clarity, integrity, and confidence.

Resources:

➡️ Learn What They Didn’t Teach You In Business School: The Value Creators Online Business Course

Learn more about Big Leap

Connect with Bryan Phelps on LinkedIn

Bryan’s Newsletter

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

1. Don’t let AI replace or eclipse Human Creativity

  • Big Leap’s first principle is keeping humans at the center of marketing strategy.
  • AI tools support ideation, but don’t originate brand essence.
  • The best outcomes emerge from human-AI collaboration.

2. The best way to navigate the AI challenge is to start with Policy, not with Technology

  • Big Leap created a 9-point policy before deploying AI tools.
  • A clear framework builds internal confidence and external trust.
  • Policy drives alignment across teams and clients.

3. Responsible Design Demands Human Oversight

  • AI can generate inaccurate or misleading – or just not very good – outputs.
  • Users must verify quotes, facts, and context, and provide critique.
  • Responsibility is shared between tool and operator.

4. Brand Essence Must Be Protected

  • AI should enhance—not dilute—core brand identity. Does it truly understand?
  • Bryan suggests building a “brand avatar” that holds the brand’s soul.
  • Human input can train AI on voice, tone, and values.

5. Experimentation Fuels Innovation

  • Big Leap runs dozens of simultaneous experiments, without assuming the right answers in advance.
  • Testing helps discover new formats, messages, and channels.
  • Speed of iteration becomes a competitive edge.

6. SEO Is Evolving, not Static. But it’s still SEO.

  • Traditional keyword search is shifting toward knowledge exploration.
  • Brands must optimize for questions, not just clicks.
  • Bryan emphasizes helpfulness over hacking the algorithm.

7. Trust Is the Foundation of Modern Marketing

  • Metrics like engagement – a mechanical idea – must be reframed as emotional outcomes.
  • Marketing returns to its roots: relationships, trust, value.
  • AI helps, but human touch builds brand love.

8. Big Companies Must Embrace “Venture Mode”

  • Startups iterate fast—enterprises must learn to do the same.
  • Bureaucracy can’t keep pace with AI-enabled shifts.
  • Big Leap helps large firms act with entrepreneurial agility.

9. Clients Want Impact, Not Just Efficiency

  • AI enables better brand perception, faster results, and meaningful insights.
  • Bryan notes a shift away from pure efficiency to effectiveness.
  • Value creation now trumps cost-cutting.

10. Brand Monitoring Must Extend Beyond Owned Media

  • Teams now track Quora, Reddit, and other forums for consumer and customer insights.
  • Presence in conversations requires both listening and participating.
  • Tools + human review ensures brand is represented “lovingly.”

11. Communities Can Be Built Intentionally

  • Brand communities don’t have to be organic only.
  • Bryan discusses how to nurture them with content, interaction, and value.
  • AI helps scale presence—but humans spark connection.

12. Optimism in a High-Speed World

  • Bryan believes we should welcome change—and prepare for it.
  • Culture, systems, and mindset help Big Leap adapt.
  • Relationship-based marketing is the stabilizing force amid AI disruption.

The Value Creators Podcast Episode #68. Bliss, Love, Empathy, and Business: Human-Centered Marketing with Stephen Sakach

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How do you design a company—and an AI—that leads with empathy?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings speaks with Stephen Sakach, founder and CEO of The Zero Company and creator of aiCMO, an AI-powered marketing platform built to scale human connection. Stephen shares his journey through digital media, consciousness studies, and systems design to develop a framework where love, purpose, and empathy drive business performance.

He calls it BLISS—Build Love Into Scalable Systems.

Key insights include:

  • How empathy can become the foundation for scalable marketing systems
  • Why companies must audit their operations through the lens of purpose
  • What it takes to align AI development with emotional intelligence and ethical goals

This is a visionary, practical conversation for anyone building the future—consciously.

Resources:

➡️ Learn What They Didn’t Teach You In Business School: The Value Creators Online Business Course

Learn more about Zero Company Performance Marketing

Learn more about aiCMO.io

Connect with Stephen Sakach on LinkedIn

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

1. Empathy Is a Business Skill, Not Just a Trait

  • Empathy can be taught, practiced, and systematized.
  • It’s essential for customer connection and employee satisfaction.
  • It’s the foundation for authentic, resonant marketing.

2. Purpose Must Be Lived, Not Posted

  • A purpose statement on a wall is meaningless without alignment.
  • Companies should audit all systems and decisions through their stated purpose.
  • Real purpose inspires internal motivation and external advocacy.

3. Emotional Connection Drives Lifetime Value

  • Customers emotionally connected to a brand are 300% more valuable.
  • Emotional resonance leads to referrals, reviews, and loyalty.
  • Purposeful storytelling creates deeper brand relationships.

4. Empathy Can—and Should—Scale

  • Sakach’s BLISS model embeds love into systems, not just culture.
  • Businesses can design processes that prompt consistent compassion.
  • Empathy isn’t random—it can be engineered into experience.

5. Marketing AI Needs Empathic Guardrails

  • AI without humanistic intention optimizes only for profit.
  • Guardrails like purpose and values steer AI toward constructive outcomes.
  • aiCMO prompts businesses to consider people, not just metrics.

6. Data and Emotion Are Not Mutually Exclusive

  • Empathetic insights can be reflected in metrics like retention or sentiment.
  • Tools like aiCMO help identify “empathy signals” across customer journeys.
  • Qualitative outcomes can be modeled and scaled with care.

7. The Entrepreneur as Empath

  • Entrepreneurs create value by understanding felt needs.
  • Emotional intelligence is essential to discovering and delivering value.
  • Internal entrepreneurship thrives in self-managed, purpose-led cultures.

8. Self-Management Unlocks Innovation

  • Zero Company is structured as networked pods with independent decision-making panels.
  • Employees take ownership and pursue passion within structure.
  • This autonomy fosters creativity and accountability at scale.

9. Conscious Culture Attracts Conscious Talent

  • Younger generations seek purpose-driven work, even at lower pay.
  • Companies that embody empathy have a strategic advantage in hiring.
  • Culture grounded in values is magnetic and sustainable.

10. AI Must Reflect Human Values

  • Training AI on empathy-centric data reshapes outputs.
  • Tools like aiCMO evaluate customer emotion at every journey stage.
  • Experience design must optimize for positive emotional outcomes.

11. ROI Meets ROL—Return on Love

  • Empathy improves retention, reduces churn, and builds advocacy.
  • Trust, gratitude, and surprise-and-delight are measurable business assets.
  • Marketing that feels good performs better over time.

12. The Shift Toward Conscious Business Is Inevitable

  • Systems will evolve toward purpose and emotional intelligence.
  • Businesses that resist empathy will lose relevance and talent.
  • The future belongs to companies who build with love.

52. Mark Schaefer: The Future of Marketing Is Austrian – How Human-Centered Marketing Can Fix A Business Function That Has Lost Its Way.

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This week I spoke with Mark Schaefer about his iconoclastic and deeply insightful book Marketing Rebellion, in which he expounds the solution to modern marketing’s failures, via an approach he calls Human-Centered Marketing.

Listeners to Economics For Entrepreneurs and aficionados of Austrian Economics will recognize the close overlap between Austrian Economics and Human-Centered Marketing.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Marketing has lost its way – in its current state, it’s no longer a useful business growth tool for entrepreneurs.

  • An obsession with technology has eclipsed the focus on people and human values.
  • A mania for measurement has obscured emotional connections with customers.
  • “Marketers hide behind their dashboards” and are not conducting conversations with customers.

The solution, says Mark Schaefer, lies in the principles of Human-Centered Marketing. Austrians can easily recognize these principles as our own.

Austrian Principles vs Human-Centered Marketing Principles

Click on the image to download the full PDF

The customer-sovereignty perspective yields actionable truths.

  • Customers don’t need ads – they don’t see them, they don’t hear them, they block them.
  • Customers are rebelling against the interrupt-and-annoy approach of marketers.
  • The customer is in charge.

What do customers want from marketers? The answer for Mark Schaefer lies in Core Human Truths – what Austrians call Highest Values.

  • They want to feel loved.
  • They want to be respected
  • They want to belong
  • They want you to advance their self-interest
  • They want proof that a firm or brand is contributing to their community

These are deep human needs that don’t change. Whatever the speed of change in market, these values are constant. Humanism lets marketers hold on to what is not changing, rather than being overwhelmed by change.

Marketing mantras like “loyalty” and “engagement” are false.

  • Customers don’t want to be loyal; they want freedom and choice – they like shopping around.
  • Engagement does not result from clicking on an e-mail and downloading a white paper or a coupon.
  • These are dashboard measurements, not human values.

Mark’s recommendations are grounded in humanism.

Customers respond to shared meaning and shared values – so long as the sharing is authentic. Businesses must be loyal to consumers, never let them down, always be consistent. Live on their island.

Seek trust. Marketers have burned through trust. The Edelman Trust Barometer shows trust in business and brands and advertising going down for 11 straight years. Now brands must transcend the public’s mistrust.

Flip your branding. A brand is not what you tell customers. A brand today is what customers say about you to their friends and peers. People trust other people.

Let customers create their own value. This is pure Austrian Economics: customer value is an experience that takes place entirely in their domain. Brands and businesses facilitate – but can’t create – the customer’s value experience. Customers hire your brand or business or product or service to help them create value.

Marketing is promise management.

  • Choose the promise you make to customers carefully – is it one they really want from you and will they trust you when you make it?
  • Ensure that you have the capabilities to deliver on the promise. Don’t over-promise.
  • Keep your promise every time, with no exceptions ever.

BONUS: Small and medium businesses have an advantage in human-centered marketing.

The larger the business, the harder it is to connect to customers on an individual, emotional level. Small business has an advantage in showing its face, demonstrating its personality and exhibiting trustworthiness.

Items Mentioned In This Episode

Mark Schaefer’s Human-Centered Marketing Manifesto is here. 
For comparison, our Menger’s Manifesto, from Principles Of Economics, is here. 
Find Mark’s book, Marketing Rebellion, here.
Mark’s website is https://businessesgrow.com 

Free Downloads & Extras

Accounting From An Austrian (Misesian) Perspective: Our Free E4E Knowledge Graphic
Understanding The Mind of The Customer: Our Free E-Book

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