Your Next Move - The Behavioral Science Behind Better Marketing

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

In this episode of Your Next Move, Inc. staff reporter Ali Donaldson sits down with Chris Schembri, founder of Alethia Marketing and Media, ranked No. 1,342 on the 2025 Inc. 5000. Alethia is a marketing solutions and media company that combines behavioral science, audience data, and AI to help brands understand what motivates their customers and create more effective campaigns. Chris explains how Alethia developed its values-driven marketing approach—and why moving beyond traditional demographic targeting can improve campaign performance by as much as 20 to 25 percent. He also shares how acquisitions, recurring data revenue, and thought leadership have helped the company distinguish itself in a crowded industry. The conversation also explores how Alethia is incorporating AI into data analysis, hiring, and everyday workflows; why founders must learn to trust their leadership teams as their companies grow; and how transparency guides difficult decisions around costs and staffing. Plus, Chris discusses the dangers of relying on a handful of large clients, the growing importance of visibility in AI-powered search, and why sustainable growth requires entrepreneurs to build a strategy beyond hope.

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Hi, I'm Mike Hoffman, editor-in-chief of Inc., and you're listening to Your Next Move audio edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One business. In this season's audio edition, we're bringing you conversations from the Your Next Move pop-up studio at the Inc. 5,000 conference this past October in Phoenix, Arizona.

You'll hear Inc. writers and editors interviewing the founders of some of the fastest-growing private companies in the country. In this episode, Inc. Staff reporter Ali Donaldson speaks with Chris Schembre, founder of Alethea, marketing and media, which ranked number 1,3342 on the 2025 Inc.5,000 list. Elifia is a marketing solutions and media company that's built its recent growth around a distinctive approach Chris calls values-driven marketing, combining behavioral science data and AI to deliver stronger performance for clients. The conversation begins with Chris explaining how his team uses behavioral science to understand what truly motivates audiences and why aligning messaging and human

values has become a powerful growth lover in an increasingly crowded marketing landscape. Sure. Hi, I'm Chris Shembury from Alethea Marketing and Media, and we ranked 1,342 on the Inc's best 5,000. So talk to me a little bit about what your company does. Yeah, so we are a marketing solutions tech company. And what that means is we do marketing media placement and as well as strategy and development. However, what we've been working on over the last two or three years has been the introduction of values and values-driven marketing using behavioral science to be able to identify targets. And what we've uncovered over the last couple of years is that when you use behavioral science to target audiences and evaluate messaging, using it.

you can improve your overall performance by about 20 to 25%. Oh, wow. Yeah. And when did you make this change in terms of the behavioral science side? Yeah, so it was a few years ago I acquired a company called Zensi. And it was one of the pioneers in using Shalom Schwartz's theory of values behavior. And what they did is they synthesized the 33 different segments into about six key ones. And so I saw that as an opportunity for us as a mid-sized firm to go in and acquire that company and use that data.

to start to really learn how we can use behavioral science to target customers. And then just fast forward to about a year and a half ago, there was a company that we started engaging with called Pluralytics. And what they developed was a patented technology that was able to identify what motivates a customer based on the copy or the photos or the imagery or the video using the same behavioral science platform. So what we've done is integrated that and come up with, with what we call values-driven marketing.

And with values-driven marketing, we spent the last two years getting it validated and accredited by the World Advertising Research Center. So they just rolled out a new study that just launched two weeks ago. And what it does is it supports the theories. It was pressure tested, peer-reviewed, all the things. And what it did was it really supported the theory

that you actually see a significant increase when you use science and behavior. science, along with messaging intelligence to get to better marketing and media performance. That's interesting. And so, Chris, we're talking because you all have had massive growth over the past few years. When you look back over those past three years, what has been the single biggest driver of growth? And when you look over the next three years, what's going to be the biggest driver of growth? Yeah, the single biggest driver was the consistent use of data and audiences that we have acquired and applied to our client's business.

And that for me was one of the biggest avenues of growth. And as we look forward, what we're seeing is that now using the AI platforms that we've acquired and seeing that we can break our business up into like four or five components, one of them being data and audiences, another is just the media, sure media planning is buying and strategy, consulting, and then also spinning off companies that do just programmatic and programmatic media buying. and another area in healthcare is we've seen that what we're able to do is expand the tentacles of what we're doing and drive more business and using data and technology that will allow us to drive the business and keep our margins high, you know, and keep our expenses to minimum. And you mentioned little margins there.

When you're looking at something like data in audience, what are the other metrics that tell you that this is working as a growth driver? So the key thing that we really like to tie to is the business performance, right? There's any client that we work with in a typical agency model, they'll really concern themselves a lot with like impressions and clicks and things like that. And those are all important metrics. But to us, the proof is in the pudding when we work with our clients. And it's all about understanding that we have moved the business needle. We've driven incrementality to their business. And that we've also made an impact to their bottom line in any way, shape, or form.

Chris, one of the hardest things about rapid growth is sustaining it. So how do you think about maintaining that sort of velocity? That has been one of our hardest things. And, you know, it's really about constantly being in the marketplace and making sure your pipeline is full. And for us, it's been about driving thought leadership, finding the kind of what we call the blue ocean of where we can compete, where nobody's competing.

And we think we found it with values-driven marketing, at least for a time, because there really isn't anybody out there who's doing it similarly. And so by being able to do that and consistent, expanding and adding different revenue models helps. For us, it was always about finding the recurring revenue model, which is difficult in the ad agency business. They're not always there.

So the audiences and the data really give us that opportunity. And as you've been going in on the audiences, the data with values-driven marketing, are there any tradeoffs you've had to make? Yeah, there are customers who just may not buy in, and or they may be too small. You know, as an entrepreneur in your first starting, every business is sacred. and you want to take everything. But with the values-driven marketing, we're able to be a little bit more selective in that

and apply the theory and it works. So that's been probably the biggest challenge, I would say. Okay, Chris, tomorrow, let's say scenario, you had a 30% cut in your budget. What are you going to do? Look at your P&L. What's going to go? What has to stay?

Yeah, unfortunately, we are a people-heavy business. So it has to make tough decisions on people. We're actually facing some of that right now and where we're trying to improve overall profitability for 2025. So we've had to go through that. And you have to go through that kind of navel gazing and like, all right, what am I going to cut? And am I going to cut too close to the bone? Or am I going to make strategic cuts that will help us drive the business?

And what I've learned is you can find reasonable outsource solutions that are just as effective as having full-time employees. And it's not ideal always, but it helps you get. to that level of reduction that you might need in order to continue to drive success. What are some of those roles you think that work better if you have to outsource it versus others that just that never worked when we try to outsource it? Yeah, a lot of them are tactical roles. So like people in platform, you know, doing programmatic trading or doing even the backroom accounting pieces, those are things that can be more automated or they can be done offshore

and you're not going to lose any integrity. And what we try to do is manage to make sure that we've got strategic and top-level people that are U.S.-based, and then supporting them would be people that might be offshore so that we can maintain that level of integrity across for our clients. And, Chris, when these tough decisions come up, how do you communicate that with your team? So my company is named Alethea, and if you don't know about Alethea, she is the Greek goddess of trust, truth, and transparency. And that is one of our core values as being transparent. So as sometimes as painful as that might be, telling them like it is is always the method that we try to use to give them all of the information. So, you know, we're completely honest with them in terms of, hey, look, here's what's happening.

We've got either this hardship or this thing that we've got to get over. We'll get over it together. But it might mean some adjustments in terms of our overall team. And Chris, as the business has evolved, as you've gone in on the values-driven marketing, how is it change your go-to-market market? Are there different kind of clients you're looking at? Is the pitch different? How are you thinking about that? Yeah, the pitch is a lot different. And what we found is actually people are intrigued by it because everybody is used to hearing, okay, I got to target, you know, 25 to 54 women and they earn $100,000. And that's just not how we're doing it. We're approaching it as we're understanding what motivates and what's the behavior that they're igniting to make that decision. And so clients are a lot more engaged when we go through it and when we demonstrate. Like with the plurality, tool that we have, it allows us to evaluate content. So you could load in, you select your benchmark,

then you load in your content, it evaluates that content, and it'll tell you the tone, style, and engagement that that content is going to have. And it'll offer you suggestions to make adjustments to that content. And you could use the AI model to do that, or you could have your copywriters do it. And what that allows us to do is, once we've evaluated that content, we now have

gotten so far ahead because we know that that content is going to work once we've put it into the market. You mentioned AI. Talk to me about how you all have been implementing AI, both in the business and even in day-to-day kind of stuff. Yeah, it took me personally a little bit of time to just get used to the fact that, okay, AI is going to be a thing. But then once I've embraced it and we've embraced it across the organization, I like to think we're a bit of a learning organization. So I gave everyone access to chat GPT. And so we bought a company instance. We also gave everyone access to training for a period of time. We were using UDEMI, and everybody was allowed to go in and take as many courses as they want to learn about AI.

And so what we started to do is have these group sessions where we would go through and teach people how to use all the prompts that are necessary. So, like, if you want to evaluate a situation, you can go in and put all the different criteria so that you can provide context and enough context for the AI to actually give. you meaningful information. What was initially happening was everybody was just checking their email and making sure that it was going to be an effective email. But what we did is take that one step further and then also used it for data analysis as well because what would take somebody maybe three, four hours or war to evaluate a spreadsheet or some data, AI can do it in, you know, 20 minutes or less and you get essentially the same result or better. And did you have much buy-in from your team from the start, were they curious about AI2?

Are they a little hesitant? It's been of both. So some people were really all in, like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. And then there were people like, this is still scary. I don't know if I'm going to be able to adjust to it. And what we found was is that once they got settled in and we gave them small examples of how to use it, it's regular for them, right, in terms of how they use it and what they use it for. Were there any kind of surprising use cases that became a big favorite for the team?

Yeah, I think the biggest one was using the, AI as your buddy and your partner to bounce things off of. It's like, hey, run it through. We used CRIT, which is context, role, interview, and task. Right. And so it's really about just going in there, providing a little bit of context of what you want, right? And providing a little bit more background information.

And then having the AI interview you, having it ask you questions so that they can get to a better result and then giving it its task. And that gave people the opportunity. they started to think about it a little bit differently. Chris, so you all have grown and the business has evolved, how have you approached hiring? So at the very beginning, I had to rely on recruiters. And I love recruiters, but they're very expensive. And so as we've evolved, we started to build the culture and start to being able to bring people in through word of mouth,

bring people in through relations, people who work with the company. Because I believe that if you have good people and they know good people, that's generally how you can grow your word of mouth. you can grow your team. But then also, too, we were actually been using the AI to help assess out where the best candidates are. Because you can write script that you can pop into LinkedIn where you can pop into Google to find the candidates that you're looking for on LinkedIn.

So we would use that. Oh, wow. So you're like, I'm looking for this year's experience, this kind of company. Yep. And you can run it through and you can find them in your area. You can put the role, the position, all of the things. And because I think for them, too, we've all been on the other end sometimes of that when you get the called DM of someone saying, I'd love to talk to you. There's no better feeling than that of being like, oh, I'm in demand.

Yeah, 100%. At first you're like, this is kind of weird. But then for the most part, they respond and you see the response. It's like, yeah, I'm interested. You know, you put the criteria in. Obviously, if somebody just transferred over to a new job, they're probably not one that you're going to talk to. But they'll probably still take the call. Yeah. And say for the future, like maybe not now, but down the line. Yeah, exactly. And I'm curious, too, Chris, how do you approach with hiring in terms of, you know, making sure that your team isn't stretched too thin, but not running the risk of overhiring? Yeah, so what we've been deploying lately is kind of like a test before you buy kind of strategy where we'll offer contract rules and bring people in under contract. And then with the potential of bringing them in full time. We've done it a couple of ways. And what I found is when we just continue to add bodies, it impacts your overall profitability.

you get kind of bogged down with that. And then if you have to pivot, it's more challenging to pivot. And so in using the contract model, it's allowed us to at least understand how that person works. And then they understand how we work. They get to taste the culture. We get to understand and sample how they work. And then eventually bring them on full time. When you've done this, have you figured out the sweet spot of how long that contract should be?

And also how to pitch that to the person? Because I think, you know, like you said, you want to make sure it's a good fit for them, how do you approach that conversation? Yeah, a lot of times we'll ask if they're interested in that and before we even have a conversation because we're totally up front with like, hey, if this is what this inquires, it is a contract, a full-time role. And anywhere from three to six months is what we would typically start with. And it also, too, depends on the role as well.

If it's a more technical role, we might go with a longer contract. And if it's a less technical, more strategic role, we might go with a shorter contract. And when we come back, Chris talks about how Alethi is. culture evolved as the company scaled and why stepping back as a founder helped it grow stronger. Growing a business sometimes means taking a leap long before you feel ready. That's what Hayden Wadsworth, Capital One business customer and co-founder of Hydrojug learned when he and his brother Jake launched a reusable water bottle brand from their parents' garage. Starting with three colors and a nerve-wracking 3,000 unit order, digital ads help them scale fast.

100,000 in year one, 1 million in year two, quickly outgrowing the garage and pushing them to sign their first warehouse lease. Through that rapid growth, they relied on their Capital One business credit card and cashback rewards on ads spent to help fund the move and keep momentum strong. Learn more at Capital One.com slash business cards. I'm curious, too, how do you approach culture at the company and how do you create it to be a fun environment? because I feel like a lot of things in marketing and advertising can be fun. It's very creative, but also making sure that it's professional as well. Yeah, this has been a work in progress, if you will. When I first started the company, you know, there was six or eight of us and the culture was evolving.

And then when we got to as high as 70, it was like, okay, now the culture is really starting to hum. But what I found was, the less involved I was at trying to form the culture, the more the culture was developing. Oh, that's interesting. Say a little bit more about that. Do you think it just came down to hiring the right people? Yes, it was definitely hiring the right people. And then they would all sort of start to create events on their own. And it's kind of like that mentality is like they don't want the boss there all the time.

They don't want the forced fun, you know? Right, right. And I, you know, and I always say, like, look, we're not a family, just so everybody knows, because I think families can sometimes be dysfunctional. We're more like a community. We're a community of people. Yeah, a neighborhood that has, you know, everybody's got different skill sets and different personalities. But then what was happening is that they were going off and organizing their own charitable things to give back to the community.

They were organizing their own events to go off and do a happy hour. And what I provided was the avenue to be able to do that. So we have the puzzle table, which I didn't really realize was a thing, but it's a thing where we have a table with a bunch of puzzles and everybody goes. It's in the center of the office. That's cool. And everybody goes in and adds their pieces and different things. That's probably a nice thing too when we all get, I think, I think, is. a writer to, you get stuck on creative things

and you're like working on the same thing over and over in a rut, but say, I'm gonna go work on that for a few minutes. It probably helps with ideas. Yeah, you get a brain break, you know, and it's a lot of times if you're working on something or you're trying to process data and it's like, all right, I gotta go step outside or go to the puzzle table and put a few pieces together.

Puzzle table, we need that. Yeah. All right, so Chris, when you think about the next year from now, what customers are gonna be the most important for you all in your continued growth? Yeah, definitely, the data customers. So what we've been able to do is we've created, from the first company I bought called ZENZI, we created Zendi audiences that will now live on the DSPs, the demand side

platforms and the supply side platforms. So any trader can go in and buy our audiences. And that is an area that we think will be really strong for us as we develop the data and the audience awareness for people to go off and buy those on their own without having to engage us at all. As you go in on these data customers, what are you going to be looking at to sort of validate that this was the right bit? Yeah, it's essentially going to be, obviously, usage, right? But I think also effectiveness in terms of how those audiences work and continually to test those and continually to get the case studies, if you will, that support the way that they've been working. Chris, when you look at the next year, two years from now, what's the biggest external risk to your business?

Obviously, AI, I think is a really big risk in our industry. I think it's still evolving, so there's still a lot of unknowns from that regard. And I think trying to see where the big agency partners are going, like the WPPs and all of those and what they're doing because they have more of the means financially to be able to go in and soak up a market pretty quickly, I think it's going to be continually trying to pivot away from being what they are and being our own separate thing

that can still perform effectively and not necessarily have to go through all of the steps that you would by being with one of those larger companies. That makes sense. And I'm curious, how do you approach leadership? Are there any sort of habits you're trying to break and any sort of traits you're really working on aspiring to? Yeah, definitely habits I'm trying to break. I will be completely honest there. Let's hear you.

Yeah. Well, you know, and when you own the company and when you started the company, you have a lot of baggage, right? that you have to shed as your company grows. Because you bring in strong leaders to be independent, right? And you bring in strong leaders to drive the business. And your influence has to change. You can't always be everywhere all the time. And you have to just let that happen naturally with your team.

And you have to trust your team, your leadership team. And so that to me has been probably one of the biggest learning curves is that, look, I've got very senior people in certain roles. And I just have to trust that they're going to. to do the best job to drive the company forward. And as part of that trust, do members of your team have permission to call you out? And if so, how do they do that? Yes, they do.

And we meet every week with the senior leadership. It's usually a two-hour kind of accountability meeting. And in those meetings, they'll let me know if, like, hey, you think maybe you can give me a little bit more latitude here or whatnot. And then in our strategy sessions, we go through a lot of that as well. We do four strategy sessions a year for each quarter and really drive home, how things are going from a leadership perspective, and then what they could be doing and what I could be doing to make sure that it's a little harmonious. And Chris, when you're thinking about the path of the company going forward,

is there anything you look back on the past three years that really helped propel growth that you think is no longer going to work? Yeah, you know, the large-scale clients and the spend that comes with some of those large-scale clients, I think that they become harder to achieve getting those larger scale. And I'm talking clients that are spending $30, $40, $50 million. They come every once in a while. And so you have to have sort of the wherewithal to be able to withstand not having those types of clients. And so diversifying your portfolio and being able to manage without that so that when they do come, that's like another rocket ship that comes into your growth because you get this influx.

But don't count on it that's going to happen. Correct. Yeah. Plan for like. It's a nice to have, but can't. Right. Yeah. It's like everybody says, hope's not a strategy.

So you can't really have that as part of your strategy. Okay, Chris. Tell me about a recent mistake you've made. Yeah, I would say that the beginning of this year, we had some hardship that we had to overcome. And I was hopeful that we would be able to get through some of it. And I did a strategic cut at the beginning of the year and then waited to do another cut in the middle of the year. And that was a mistake. I should have pulled the Band-Aid off at the beginning of the year.

It would have got us to profitability a lot sooner. It wouldn't have had as great of an impact on culture. Is that going to be a lesson you take with you now that if we have to do a cut, it needs to be all at once? Yes. Because, you know, people got to understand what's in for them and their lives and make all their decisions. And so if I'd done that at the beginning of the year, it would have been less of an impact, I guess, to folks. And it probably feels, you know, a little less personal at that point, too.

Right. Right. And so, okay, three years from now, next thing, 5,000 version, what do you think the growth of your company is going to be at that point? Yeah, well, I definitely can hope to continue to be on the list. And I think that, you know, I think our growth is going to be significant if we continue the stride that we're working on. Everyone's committed to driving the pipeline and driving the business, and we've been closing business. So that's been good. We had a little bit of a rut in the middle of the year, which is expected.

You know, everybody was sort of like regrouping. But now that we've regrouped, we've won several new pieces of business. We've gotten our strategic partnerships in place. And now we're starting to see the fruits of the labor on the audience work that we've done because that's starting to generate revenue as well. So it's all of these things are starting to take shape. And I just see that momentum continuing as we look into the next three years. And when you think about planting the seeds of future growth,

Are there any metrics you like to look at beyond just revenue? Essentially, for me, it's about how we're seen as a thought leader in the space because the revenue typically follows that if you are seen as one of the leaders in the space, especially with what we've been doing with values-driven marketing and us getting a head start on developing that, that I think that's what will set us apart. I always liken it to Accenture Song, right, when they came out with that model. And to me, that's sort of like one of the models I emulate a little bit because they created something totally different that was outside of their comfort zone and it kind of gave them their blue ocean. And I think very similarly to that for us is like there is no mid-market agency that is doing, and there's no large agency, really, quite honestly, that is doing exactly what we're doing.

And how important has thought leadership been now that people are using AI for search? Because that's something I've heard a lot is the best way, whether you call it GEO or, the new version of the SEO that thought leadership is really important if people are typing into chat GBT, where should I take my business if I want values-based marketing to have you all come up? That's extremely important, extremely. So like right now, if you were to type into chat GPT, which agency is doing the best values-driven marketing work, because I've done this, we come up. We come up as number one.

And part of it is driven by the study we just did with Wark, and they released it worldwide. So we've been getting pressed from like places in Africa, Korea. Oh, that's incredible. England, you know, and Europe and in the U.S. And so that helps with the thought leadership because all of that ties all the way back to us. So when you're searching for values-driven marketing and who's doing it right, we come up. When you're trying to search that, because I've heard that from a lot of other founders, they'll be searching themselves to see where do I come up on chat, CBT, on cloud,

in all the places. Are there any other things that you think have been really helpful in terms of this new version of SEO? Yeah, I definitely think having your content live in multiple places and sharing your content. That's one of the strategies that we use across all of our employees. So it's like when we post something on LinkedIn, please post it in multiple places so that it's being found in multiple places because the more places it is, the more likelihood that it will get found.

And that's really been a big part of our strategy. And then also continuing to just publish new material on a regular basis. And so we have a content calendar that we follow. And we've even gone out and created research so that we could promote that. You know, one of the things we did was around the Cracker Barrel logo. Oh, tell me. Yeah. So this was really cool.

Like we did a study amongst 25 or so casual dining restaurants. And we uncovered what their personas are for their brains. And the thing with Cracker Barrel is they were screaming traditional in their personas, which... The new logo was just a little ugly, too. It was, and it wasn't... It's all cheap. Yeah, it just took... It didn't take into consideration the client, like they're customers, right?

And I understand if you're trying to change your model a little bit, but you kind of want to keep your bread and butter happy until you can make your transformation. And what we found was, is that by focusing on the traditional seekers, that that was an area that they could have done super easy. You could have found a way to integrate the barrel or integrate the man into the logo and then bring it to market. Or bring it to market in slower stages, or at least have some research that is tied to the values piece.

That's fun. And I'm curious when you're thinking about posting everywhere. Are there any new or different channels you're thinking about that have been effective? Well, obviously we post on ink. Reddit has been one. I've been hearing that. I think there's been like a Reddit resurgence. Yeah.

What's happening is the LLMs are using Reddit quite a bit when they're doing the research. So the algorithms are reading the Reddit content. I've noticed Google now in their search rankings, Reddit is typically much higher. Yes. Yeah. And so that is one big thing. And Google's made some changes to how they're listing as well. I think they've reduced it from 30 to 10 in terms of top listings and things like that

so that it's getting harder to get into that ranking. But yeah, with Reddit, a lot more content is being. pulled out of there because there's good contributors. Yeah, it's crowdsource. I think it's a little bit more trusted because I think people know now how SEO works and people are a little cautious of thinking, is that the first result on Google because they paid a lot of money? Right, right, exactly. Exactly. All right, Chris, this has been fun. Thank you so much for my life. No, I appreciate it. I appreciate the time. Thank you.

That's all for this episode of your next move. Our producer is Blake Odom, editorial editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Additional editing from Sam Gibauer and Tad Wadams. And our executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to your next move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And your next move is a production of Inc. and Capital One business.