How to Use SmartSlices and MindTime Theory for Advanced Psychometric Marketing

When Coca-Cola launched New Coke in 1985, how much thought did they put into adding the word “new”?

Not enough, any student of marketing might say, because that one word was largely responsible for one of the most infamous branding disasters in marketing history. It sparked backlash from loyal customers and ultimately forced the company to reintroduce the original formula as “Coca-Cola Classic.”

What could Coca-Cola have done differently? What did $4 million in research and development, extensive taste tests, and numerous focus groups fail to consider?

MindTime Theory: A New Perspective on Old Marketing Challenges

Unfortunately for Coca-Cola, the key theory that could have helped didn’t exist at the time.

First proposed in 1997 by John Furey, MindTime Theory posits that people see the world through their own unique temporal perspectives. Everything we observe—including specific words—is processed through this perspective, with sometimes profound (and expensive) effects.

The theory identifies three distinct cognitive TimeStyles that influence how people process information and make decisions:

• Past Thinkers, who resonate with concepts like evidence, security, reliability, and tradition.
• Present Thinkers, who value order, efficiency, control, and harmony.
• Future Thinkers, who are visionary, experimental, hopeful, and innovative.

MindTime Theory has been successfully applied in various fields. However, its use in digital marketing has been surprisingly limited due to the lack of specialized tools and expert guidance, until now.

How to Apply MindTime Using SmartSlices

Developed with the help of MindTime architect John Furey, SmartSlices is a suite of digital marketing tools that makes the brilliant theory tangible for marketers.

Avoiding a high-profile branding disaster like New Coke is one potential application of SmartSlices. However, most marketers are focused on everyday challenges like optimizing PPC campaigns, refining email marketing strategies, or enhancing customer retention. This article explores how SmartSlices can address these familiar problems.

Ad Optimization

Marketers rarely have access to the perfect audience. For example, they may need to market an innovative product to a more conservative market. How can they adjust their messaging?

Optimizing digital ads is one of the most practical applications of SmartSlices. Marketers can significantly improve the performance of pay-per-click (PPC) and display ad campaigns by aligning ad content with the cognitive preferences of target audiences—Past, Present, and Future Thinkers.

For example, Past Thinkers, who value evidence and reliability, respond best to ads featuring trust-building ad elements, language, and imagery. On the other hand, Present Thinkers, driven by immediacy and practicality, are more likely to resonate with ads that emphasize practical actionable benefits and urgency.

Sales Funnel Optimization

While ad optimization is an obvious application of psychometric alignment, the same principles can be applied at each stage of a sales funnel. SmartSlices can assess the dominant TimeStyles of your audience and customize your content and CTAs for greater engagement and conversion rates.

According to a HIT Laboratories study on SmartSlices, funnels tailored to audience TimeStyles saw a 12.7% increase in conversion rates when content was aligned with users TimeStyle compared to those using regular, non-aligned content. By addressing audience psychology at the conversion stage, marketers can reduce friction, enhance engagement, and drive measurable results.

Media Placement

The success of mass media campaigns hinges on effective media placement. For example, an insurance company with a conservative brand may have a higher proportion of Past Thinkers, who value trust and reliability, while a tech startup’s audience might skew heavily toward Future Thinkers, drawn to innovation and forward-thinking ideas.

By selecting media placement according to cognitive preferences, marketers can increase engagement and efficiency in their campaigns. SmartSlices can help marketers map the TimeStyle distribution of an audience and adjust marketing content to match.

Lower Ad CPC

One of the more interesting applications of SmartSlices is reducing ad cost-per-click. CPC dropped by 17.4% in the HIT Laboratories research study when TimeStyle biased ads were “neutralized” using MTAi.

The reason behind this reduction lies in reducing cognitive resistance. When ads are designed to resonate with the cognitive preferences of the audience, they become more engaging and relevant, leading to higher click-through rates and lower costs.

It makes sense for campaign managers to at least check the hidden cognitive bias of their ads and test new ads with better alignment.

Product Framing and Positioning

Businesses often attract customers with distinct cognitive tendencies. For example, consider a financial services company with an audience skewed heavily toward Past Thinkers—people who value trust, reliability, and proven results. It’s difficult enough to launch innovative new products to Future-Thinking people, but how could this company launch an innovative product to Past-Thinkers without triggering cognitive resistance?

MindTime Theory can help. Avoid triggering resistance by keeping your audience’s TimeStyle in mind and choosing your words and imagery accordingly. New ideas can be presented as merely logical extensions of familiar concepts, or as Benjamin Franklin said, “Men must be taught as if you taught them not, and things unknown proposed as things forgot.” In this way, novel ideas are presented (in both language and concept) not as a break from the past but as a seamless continuation of it.

Wealthsimple applied this strategy in their highly successful “Early Adopters” ad:

Personalized Marketing Campaigns

Personalized marketing means tailoring messages and experiences to individual visitors based on their specific preferences, behaviors, or traits. Also known as one-to-one marketing, Salesforce research shows that 98% of marketers believe it helps advance customer relationships. SmartSlices provides a psychometric profiling survey to quickly identify customer cognitive preferences and inform your personalization technology.

Email Marketing Personalization

Every marketer knows that personalized email content delivers higher open rates and click-to-conversion performance.  Personalization is typically limited to the recipient’s name and basic information such as an item they expressed interest in. SmartSlices can personalize emails in a fundamentally different way—by tailoring email and lander language to match the recipient’s TimeStyle.

Customer Journey Optimization

Customer journey optimization involves refining every stage of the buyer journey to create a seamless, personalized experience. Each touchpoint—from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement—can be enhanced by aligning messaging and interactions with the customer’s TimeStyle (TS).

Traditional personalization focuses on surface-level adjustments, such as past purchases or browsing behavior. SmartSlices takes this further by enabling full individually or statistically aligned journeys. This can help every step of the buyer’s experience feel intuitive and welcoming.

Social Media Content Optimization

While social media posts can’t be personalized for each viewer, they can be tailored to match the TimeStyle profile of followers. This is useful information for a brand voice guideline, resulting in posts that are more easily digested as visitors scroll by.

Customer Retention Strategies

Customers prefer brands that align with their values and thinking, and brand affinity keeps people engaged and loyal. SmartSlices enhances this effect by aligning with customers and a fundamental cognitive level. This alignment makes customers feel understood and valued.

Content Marketing Optimization

Content marketing thrives on relevance—articles, videos, infographics, and podcasts must resonate with the target audience to drive engagement. Most companies rely on brand voice guidelines, but they rarely account for the cognitive preferences of the target market. While a SmartSlices analysis can help inform writing guidelines, the suite of tools including MTAi can also help rewrite content to align with audience time styles.

Marketing Campaign Troubleshooting

A common job for most marketers is fixing underperforming marketing campaigns. Traditional troubleshooting involves tweaking CTAs and reducing funnel friction but may overlook a deeper issue: misalignment between the campaign’s messaging and the audience’s cognitive preferences. When marketers know their audience’s TimeStyle profile they can easily check each stage of their funnel for cognitive alignment issues using SmartSlices tools.

Brand Design

Effective brand design goes beyond aesthetics—it’s about creating a name, logo, color scheme, and identity that resonates with the target audience. Traditional brand design processes often incorporate principles like color psychology, word association, and attributes that convey desired values. However, adding insights about the TimeStyle of the target market offers a new dimension to this process, ensuring deeper alignment with how audiences think and perceive brands.

Product Launch Campaigns

Coca-Cola could have used SmartSlices back in 1985 when launching new Coke. A MindTime analysis of their brand may have revealed a strong association with traditional values, reliability, trust, and proven taste. This would create a strong resistance to change from their customer base, and even feelings of betrayal among loyal Past Thinkers. 

While the company recognized a need for change, “new” was not the best word or concept to associate. It’s not surprising then, that sales of the “old” Coke reached new levels soon after rebranding it to “Coca-Cola Classic” —a decidedly Past-associated word.

So whether crafting a new marketing campaign or refining an existing one, it makes sense to check the TimeStyle profile of your audience using SmartSlices and consider how subtle choices in language and visuals may affect your results.