The four minds in your CPG market — and why you've only been speaking to one.

By Viktor Dimitrov · 10 minute read

I sold ice cream from a cart in a park in Sofia in 2014.

Not a brand. A cart. One location, one supplier, one employee — me. The cart sat in South Park, and the problem every cart operator faces arrived on the first Tuesday: how do you make people walk past fourteen other food options and stop at yours?

I wrote Facebook copy. In Bulgarian. By hand, late at night, after counting the day's take. One post described the ice cream as "the hypnotizing new trend that will make you want to stand in line" — and cited Cosmopolitan's coverage of a three-hour queue in New York's Chinatown. Another post introduced a code phrase: come and get yourself a Thais at South Park, use the code phrase, get a free topping. A third post carried three words that would have gotten me fired from any agency I later worked for: It's a sin not to try.

The posts pulled people ten kilometres across the city. The cart became the highest-revenue location in the franchise within weeks. I had no idea why.

I had instinct. The instinct worked.

The instinct doesn't scale.

Twelve years later — after Johnson and Johnson's supply chain, after building Brangels in Brussels, after running Anti-Marketing for growth-stage CPG brands across Belgium, the Netherlands, and beyond — I understand what happened in that Sofia park. Each post, without my knowing it, opened a different door in a different kind of mind. The Cosmopolitan post spoke to one mind. The code phrase spoke to a second. The "sin not to try" line spoke to a third. The cart succeeded because three different messages reached three different audiences. Not three demographics. Three minds.

If you operate a growth-stage CPG brand and your dashboard says your audience is one consumer, your dashboard is wrong.

Your market is four audiences that look identical from the outside. Four cognitive architectures that determine whether your message converts or repels before the conscious brain has time to evaluate it. The brand that speaks to one of those minds reaches one-quarter of its market. The brand that speaks to all four reaches the whole room.

The framework that proved this exists. The science behind it is fifty-seven years old. The application to CPG is ready. Most brands have never heard of it.

This is what every CPG founder needs to understand before their next campaign.

Howard R. Moskowitz spent his career — sixty-seven countries, nine hundred published papers, a Harvard PhD in psychophysics, and the work that taught Prego to launch three spaghetti sauce lines instead of one — proving that consumers do not respond uniformly to the same product, the same price, or the same message. Variation clusters. The clusters are stable. They appear in every population that has been tested with the methodology now called Mind Genomics. Four mindsets, repeatable across categories, identifiable through structured experiments, mappable for any brand willing to do the work.

In CPG, the four minds present as follows.

The Evaluator. Reads the ingredient list. Researches what each component does. Cares about technical specifications, scientific credibility, and ingredient quality. Believes if the science is right, the product is right. Opens the door for evidence, mechanism, and proof. Closes the door at hedging, fluff, or claims without data.

The Connector. Wants to feel part of something. Drawn to community, founder story, ritual, sensory experience. Cares about what a brand says about belonging — to a values community, a lifestyle, a generation, a way of caring for family. Opens the door for warmth and recognition. Closes the door at coldness, status signaling, or technical superiority talk.

The Protector. Wants safety. Reads what is not in the formula. Risk-averse, allergy-conscious, scrutinizing of source and process. Cares about clean ingredients, third-party validation, dermatological or nutritional credentials. Opens the door for reassurance and trustworthy authority. Closes the door at anything that could be interpreted as risk to themselves, their children, or the people they feed.

The Builder. Wants transformation. Imagines themselves with a body, a kitchen, a routine, a life that's different from today. Drawn to before-and-after, aspirational outcomes, identity shift. Cares about what's possible in three months, six months, a year. Opens the door for vision and personal change. Closes the door at maintenance language, status quo, or "just like the others."

Every population of CPG consumers contains all four. The proportions vary by category, geography, and price tier, but the four minds are always present and always distinct.

Your brand has been speaking to one of them.

You can probably guess which one.

In 2024, Anti-Marketing was hired by Zusto — a Belgian fiber-based sugar alternative. The product was excellent: a sugar replacement that performed identically in cooking and baking while delivering meaningful nutritional benefits. The brand had a technical pedigree, real science, and credible distribution. It also had a sales plateau that the founders couldn't explain.

The audit was straightforward. Zusto's messaging led with health benefits: this is a sugar alternative, it's better for your blood glucose, here is the nutritional case. Honest claims. Defensible science. Right consumer logic.

Wrong door.

Health-deficit messaging — you should use this because your current diet is harming you — reaches the Evaluator. It's a one-mind message. The Evaluator audits the claim, accepts the evidence, makes a rational decision, and converts.

The other three minds hear something different. The Connector hears you are making wrong choices. The Protector hears the sweetness you trusted is now suspect. The Builder hears this is a corrective product for people who got it wrong, and a Builder doesn't want a corrective. A Builder wants a step toward who they're becoming, not a fix for who they are.

Three minds, three closed doors, three-quarters of the addressable market walking past the brand's table.

The Mind Genomics work we commissioned with Howard's team produced a finding that reframed the entire brand challenge. When the product was presented with indulgence-first messaging — the pleasure of baking, the delight of sweetness that didn't cost you anything, the experience of having the full sensory reward of sugar — all four mindset groups responded positively. The same product. Different signals. Different meaning frame. Different experience.

The product didn't change. The packaging didn't change. The price didn't change. The distribution didn't change.

The doors did.

Six months of operating on the new positioning produced a 135 percent increase in Meta sales performance, 69 percent webshop revenue growth, a 73 percent reduction in Google Ads cost per lead, and a 29 percent retail lift achieved with zero retail-specific spend. The fourth quarter return rate held at 60 percent — six out of every ten first-time buyers came back.

The truer description of the product turned out to be the more profitable description. The product was genuinely a pleasure. It was also genuinely good for you. The brand that told the pleasure story first was the brand that told the true story — the story of what the product actually was, not the story of what the formulation team thought consumers should value about it.

Here's the part most founders find harder than they expected.

Identifying the four minds is easy. Anyone can read a list of four mindset descriptions and nod. The hard part is admitting that your brand has been speaking to only one of them, and that the one you've been speaking to is most likely the one you yourself happen to be.

Most CPG founders I work with are Evaluators. They built the company because they understood the science, the ingredient, the technical opportunity, the market gap. They wrote the first product brief. They designed the first packaging. They approved the first ad. Every decision filtered through an Evaluator's brain, and the brand's voice became an Evaluator's voice.

For ten years that brand grew on the Evaluators who recognized it. Then it plateaued. The team blamed the channels, the agency, the algorithm, the macroeconomic environment, the rising cost of customer acquisition. They were all wrong. The brand plateaued because it had reached the limit of the one mind it was structurally built to address — and three minds, representing three-quarters of the addressable market, had been walking past for years.

The framework asks something cognitively expensive. It asks the founder to admit that the voice they've trusted — their own — has been operating with a blind spot the size of three-quarters of the market. That admission is uncomfortable. It's also unavoidable. The brands that make it grow. The brands that don't, blame their channels.

The methodology doesn't replace the founder's voice. It expands the brand's repertoire. The Evaluator mind still gets reached, in the same language it always responded to. The other three minds get their own languages, their own creative, their own funnels, their own conversion paths. Same product. Four parallel conversations. Same brand, four different doors.

This is what the next decade of CPG growth will look like for the brands that win it.

Sit at a table with four chairs.

Your brand has been sitting in one of those chairs since the day it launched. The chair whose occupant matches the brand's self-image. The chair whose language the brand already speaks.

Three chairs sit empty.

Three minds — representing three-quarters of your addressable market — have walked past your table for years. Not because the product failed them. Not because the price excluded them. Because the brand never pulled out their chair. Never spoke their language. Never demonstrated, through recognition or aspiration, that the brand understood where they stood or where they wanted to go.

The dashboard says growth has stalled. The dashboard is reading the one-chair table.

The genome describes the four-chair table.