973: Mastering the New Rules of Persuasion with Leslie Zane

Pete Mockaitis
Leslie, welcome.

Leslie Zane
Hi, Pete. It’s lovely to see you and to be here today. Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to hear your wisdom. And I’d love it if maybe you could kick us off with a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us humans and persuasion and influence over the course of your illustrious career?

Leslie Zane
Well, that’s pretty easy because my entire book is about the fact that human beings are unpersuadable. We try really hard, we try to convince, cajole, we hammer people over the head with messages but, at the end of the day, we’re really just trying to convince a conscious mind that doesn’t want to be convinced because you really can’t persuade anybody of anything. But what you can do is kind of go around that and tap into their instincts, which is a completely different mechanism, and you have much more success there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is fascinating. Could you bring it home for us, if the listeners are saying, “I don’t know if that’s true. I could be convinced of some things.” Leslie, lay it on us, what’s the evidence that, in fact, we are not convincible?

Leslie Zane
Well, 95% of the decisions that we make are made on instinct. We may have a post-instinct rationalization of a decision that we made, so we may think that we were making that decision consciously, and with rational information, but most of the time, most of the decisions we make about brands and actually about many things in our lives, we make them on instinct.

And we see this over and over again, and we’ve seen it in every category, we’ve seen it in financial services, we’ve seen it in insurance, even doctors prescribe HCPs, healthcare providers prescribe medications on instinct. So, everybody thinks that they’re in control of their decisions, but for the most part they’re making decisions instinctively, and it’s their subconscious mind that takes over.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so now, if we all think that we’re making them consciously but we’re actually not, how does one learn, or know, or discover, or prove this phenomenon is, in fact, at play?

Leslie Zane
Well, so that goes to the question of, “How do we understand people’s drivers, their decision drivers?” And the answer to that is you really can’t trust what people say. And this is why most conscious surveys are misleading, many of them, why political polls are often wrong before a presidential election, because we are asking people conscious questions.

And they think they know the answers, but that’s not necessarily what takes over when it comes to the actual decision, let’s say, in the voting booth. They’re probably going to do something completely different than what they said they were going to do in the conscious survey. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. I guess I’m thinking of the specific example of polling. I mean, maybe they made their decision, or maybe I’m nitpicking here, Leslie. So maybe folks have already made their decision and they’re honestly reporting it, but that decision was made previously based on instinct, like, “Oh, I like that. He’s handsome,” is maybe subconsciously what’s operating. Because, I guess, I’m thinking polling is like, eh, close-ish, right, in the ballpark?

Leslie Zane
In the world of marketing, when it comes to brands, when you think about the kinds of research that companies do, generally speaking, they do these very large-scale brand health tracking studies, and there’s a list of attributes about the brand and people sort of check off what are the attributes that they say yes or no for that particular brand.

And those kind of capture their conscious associations, their conscious thought about those brands. What it doesn’t uncover are some of those implicit negative associations that are lying in the unconscious mind that nobody is really aware of. And then several years later, down the road, the business falls out of bed and, lo and behold, the business leader is sort of surprised, “Oh, my God, what happened here?” And, in the meantime, all those conscious measures that were in the brand health tracker were humming along pretty well, unchanged.

So, what’s really going on is that these negative associations accumulate in the unconscious mind, and you’re unaware of it, the business leaders are unaware of it. And so, it’s really important to constantly monitor your implicit barriers and drivers, not just the conscious barriers and drivers that are easily accessible in these large-scale tracking studies.

Pete Mockaitis
Man, negative associations accumulating in the subconscious mind, whew. There is a phenomenon that I imagine is happening all the time about lots of things in our lives. And then in the context of business, I’m thinking about, I don’t know, like a cable company. It’s like, “Oh, I’m annoyed that I have to give a four-hour window for my installation. Ooh, I’m annoyed that it costs so much. And, ooh, I’m annoyed they don’t have these options.”

And then, lo and behold, ooh, you got some streaming options available, “Oh, this is way better,” and then all those negative associations come to the fore. It’s like, “At last, I am freed. Let’s cut this cable out of our life.”

Leslie Zane
Yeah, you’re really talking about there are whole industries that are sort of beset by negative associations, whether it’s the insurance industry or the cable industry. And what those companies need to do is they need to fight back and really displace those negative associations with positive ones. It’s the only way they can grow.

So, if your brand is not being selected, it means that the growth target, the people you don’t have, the prospective users, have some negative associations that are holding them back. And if you don’t constantly prune your negative associations, they eventually turn into barriers, and the barriers can be really large. At that point, it doesn’t matter how much you spend on marketing or advertising, you’re not going to bring those people over because those barriers are pretty high.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of how an individual, a team, a company, a brand goes about pruning negative associations?

Leslie Zane
Well, first, you need to understand what the negative associations are, and the technique for doing that is to uncover their brand connectome. So, what is the brand connectome? This is a key construct in my book. It’s the cumulative memories that get stuck to your brand, that get glued to your brand in the unconscious mind, and this is a physical thing.

So, a brand is known by the associations it keeps. It’s, literally, it has physicality. A brand isn’t this wispy concept. It actually has roots and pathways that are connected to it. And every brand has a connectome, and the biggest brands have really large connectomes, and the smallest brands have very small connectomes. And their job is to grow the connectome in the mind of their growth target, the people they’re trying to get.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say…oh, sorry.

Leslie Zane
No, you go.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say it’s physical, are you talking about, like, neural pathways inside my brain and spinal cord physical?

Leslie Zane
Yeah, there’s literally physical neural pathways that’s almost like paths in sand get dug in there, and whenever you sort of reach for a particular brand, those pathways kind of light up. And so, when you go to the supermarket, this is how instinct works, and you choose your go-to brands, you’re not really sitting there doing a lot of deciding, saying, “Oh, product A, product B, let me see which one I should buy.” There’s not a lot of that going on.

For the most part, you’re going directly to your go-to brands. You’re grabbing, you’re sticking them in your cart, and you’re walking out. And if you didn’t have the ability to do that, make those snap judgments, then you’d kind of be in the supermarket for like three weeks because there are so many products to choose from. But your brain has this ability to tune out everything that you’re not interested in, and your brand’s connectome, the brand connectome that is the largest in a category, is the one that you are going to reach for.

So, if you’re a loyal Pepsi user, as an example, your Pepsi connectome is going to be very large, it’s going to be very robust, it’s going to have a lot of positive associations. And we can talk more about the framework of how you analyze that in a minute. But the point is that, if you’re reaching for Pepsi, it’s because you have a large positive brand connectome for Pepsi, and your Coke connectome is probably a little smaller and probably has some negative associations because the brain is a relativity machine. So, if you’re up on Pepsi, you’re down on Coke, and if you’re up on Coke, you’re down on Pepsi, and they kind of work against each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is intriguing. I was just thinking about Coke and its connectome. I guess I’m thinking inside me. I was thinking, “Okay, Coca-Cola,” there’s just like all of the things, like, Santa Claus, and the troops, and America, and Atlanta and southern hospitality. And so, it’s like I got all those things. And then, Pepsi, I got, I don’t know, like Beyonce and Britney Spears, and be young and have fun, Generation Next.

Leslie Zane
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And it doesn’t feel rational, but like these emotions and things, it’s like, in me, Coke feels more wholesome, even though it’s like sugar water, which is not really healthy for you, but relative to Pepsi, feels more wholesome. And Pepsi feels more like edgy and risky. But they’re almost the same thing.

Leslie Zane
But they manifest, as you just pointed out and dimensionalized so beautifully, they manifest very differently in people’s minds, and people have an inclination, a bias you could say, for one versus the other. And then, of course, there are people who go back and forth, but for the most part you’re either sort of pro Pepsi or you’re pro Coke.

And I don’t mean to just pick on Coke and Pepsi. We could talk about this for Apple and Samsung, for Nike and Adidas, for the Mets and the Yankees. I mean, this is literally every single category has this kind of dynamic, and these brands are basically vying against each other in people’s minds. And that’s what it is. It’s a battle for the terrain of your brain. And the brand that has the most terrain, the most territory, almost like a game of Monopoly, whoever wins the most real estate in the mind wins.

Because the three most important things, in terms of a framework that might be helpful to your listeners for the brand connectome, for you to have a healthy brand connectome it’s got to have three things. It’s got to be large. It’s got to be positive, lots of positive associations, not negative ones And, third, it needs to be distinctive. Those are the three things that you’re shooting for.

Large, because the more connections a brand has in the brain, the more salient it is, and the more it’s your instinctive go-to-choice, if that makes sense. So that’s critical. Two, positive associations, not negative ones. Negative ones hinder growth, so you want to get rid of those negative associations right away. And then, third, you want distinctiveness. You want to have some clarity and some distinctiveness, but that’s not nearly as important as the other two, the salience and the positivity. All three are important, but salience and relevance, positive association is really critical.

Pete Mockaitis
Also, if we zoom in to the experience of a typical professional, and we each in a way are a brand, a personal/professional brand, how might we apply these principles so that we are positively associated and featured in the brains of our colleagues, of our bosses, those who are deciding if we get raises or promotions or cool project opportunities?

Leslie Zane
I love that question. So, what you’re really talking about is the personal brand, and using your personal brand to make sure you get all those wonderful opportunities. I think of a brand as a seed that you plant in other people’s brains and other people’s minds. And what we want to do is we want to make that seed grow. So, the more positive associations we add to the seed, the more it lays down roots and pathways, and branches out. It turns into a seedling and then a plant. And then little by little, hopefully, a full-grown tree.

So really what we’re talking about is growth. We need to grow our brands in other people’s minds. And the way to do that is by keeping on adding lots and lots of positive associations and making more and more connections to those people’s lives. Not one dimensional, but multi-dimensional. And this is a key difference in our philosophy versus a lot of others, certainly, versus traditional marketing. Traditional marketing would say that every brand should stand for only one thing.

But I just told you, you need a myriad of connections in people’s minds to have a salient large brand connectome. So, it’s actually the opposite of what we’ve been taught, “Oh, Volvo should stand for safety.” No, Volvo should stand for safety, and advanced technology, and looking good, and having great styles, and great color.” Like, it needs all of those things, not just one thing. Because if your brand only stands for one thing, then it’s going to be basically invisible in people’s minds. It’s going to have a very tiny connectome.

So, in terms of your personal brand, you want to make as many connections as possible in people’s minds and just keep adding those positive associations, almost like nurturing it, nurturing your brand as if the associations are the soil, the water, and the sun that you would feed a plant.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Leslie, so let’s say folks hear that and say, “Yes, I am so in. I am going to turbocharge my seed trajectory amongst my colleagues, boss, and stakeholders, collaborators at work.” What are some actions, behaviors, things that they might do so that we’ve got lots of very positive associations to us?

Leslie Zane
So, one of the first stories in my book, The Power of Instinct, is a story about a woman named Anna who’s trying to sell one of her ideas at a company. She’s trying to get them to use the marketing campaign that she wants them to use, and she’s having a lot of resistance, and the president of the company tells her that this is something that they’ve tried before and it didn’t work.

And so, she basically goes on a marketing campaign for her idea, and she goes to sales, and she goes to R&D, and she goes to the head of HR, and she starts to build, basically, build a marketing campaign around her idea by seeding positive associations with each one of those different audiences so that by the time they get into the big meeting everybody’s already positively predisposed.

Because the more, this is about early and often, the more times you seed your idea, and the more positive associations people receive about it, the more they’re going to buy in. And, little by little, your idea, that seed, is going to grow. And so, the same thing would be true, whether it’s your idea that you’re selling or if you’re talking about your personal brand itself.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when Anna’s doing this going around seeding positive associations, what does that mean in practice?

Leslie Zane
It means that she’s having conversations where she’s talking to the person about her idea, and she’s finding some shared common values that they can agree on. So, if she’s talking to sales, maybe she’ll be talking about the value of this idea to the selling process. If she’s talking to HR, she’ll be talking about the value of the idea for internally with employees and why this is going to be good for retention.

It really doesn’t matter what the specific case is, but basically what you want to do is you want to latch on to things that are already in your audience’s mind, and you want to leverage those and hook what you’re selling to that. This is all about leveraging the familiar and creating shared values between you and your audience, between you and your target, so that rather than selling against the conscious mind, which I told you is unpersuadable and only makes 5% of decisions, that is basically going up a brick wall.

If I tried to persuade you of something, you’re going to say, “I don’t think so. Thank you very much. I know what I’m doing. I know best.” You’re set in your ways. You’re stubborn. That’s just how the conscious mind works, and it’s true for everybody. So instead, what we want to do is we kind of want to go through this back door of the instinctive mind, which is much more malleable, it turns out, and I want to latch on to things that already exist in this target’s minds, and hook my messages and what I’m trying to sell to those things that already exist. That’s the path of least resistance, whereas, the conscious mind is the path of greatest resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leslie, I’d love it if you could zoom way in on a case study. So, someone has taken the appealing to the instinctive mind approach for their persuasion campaign, can you lay out a case, in particular, of this person had this idea, and they were trying to win over person A, person B, person C who had these different values or connected pieces, and here’s how the magic unfolded up close and personal?

Leslie Zane
Well, I will tell you a story that happened early in my career, which I do think demonstrates the unconscious approach to winning over an audience. And remember that at the time, I was very young and I didn’t know how to do this yet, but I’m going to show you how it ultimately worked. So, I was working on the Johnson’s Baby business, this was many moons ago, and the business was not doing all that well.

And so, I had noticed that dads were getting more involved in caregiving, but we were still showing just moms and babies in the traditional Madonna and Child pose in all of our advertising. And I also noticed that when dads walked down the street pushing a baby carriage, mom’s heads would turn. That’s what they paid attention to. Not so much a mother walking down the street, but a dad walking down the street pushing a baby carriage.

So, I marched myself into my boss’s office, and I said, “I know what we need to do to turn around this business. We need to put the first father in a Johnson’s Baby shampoo commercial.” And he said, “Leslie, you’re crazy. It’s moms that buy these brands, these products, not dads, and there’s no research to support anything that you’re saying.”

But I kept on advocating because I felt in my bones that I was right. And that year, I got my performance review, and it said, “Leslie is too passionate about putting fathers in advertising, and this is an executional concern, not a strategic one.” Now, Pete, you know I used to work at Bain & Company like you did, and I had been told that strategy was my superpower. So, this was like devastating to me, but because I’m a crazy person, you don’t know me very well yet, but I don’t take no for an answer.

I kept on advocating in spite of this, and I think at a certain point, they just gave in because they were exhausted, and they put the first father in a Johnson’s Baby Shampoo commercial, and the business took off. It was the highest-scoring commercial in the company’s history. What I had found was a trigger. I had found my first trigger, a cognitive shortcut. Father and baby was a creative twist, a distinctive twist on mother and baby, that brought all these new positive associations to the brand that it didn’t have before.

Progressive brand, giving mom a break, and a father tenderly taking care, the strength of the dad, tenderly taking care of a newborn was this phenomenal visual contrast that you didn’t get with mother and baby. There were just all these positive associations that just took Johnson’s Baby to a different level. And it worked at the subconscious level that wasn’t captured in any of their research because it was something that was operating at an implicit level.

And so, that is a really good example of something you can use, whether it’s for a brand or a business that you’re on in your in your work, or you could also look for triggers like that to sell your ideas. But that’s what it’s all about, verbal triggers, visual triggers, finding those cognitive shortcuts that already exist in people’s minds, and sort of co-opting them and linking your business, your brand to that thing. That make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
It does, and I love it. And what’s flashing into my mind, look, I guess that’s my connectome, right? The associations here is I’m thinking of the movie, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” and we’ll link it in the show notes, this clip, when I think they’re stuck in an airport, and they need to get some cash? Have you seen this?

And John Candy, he’s a sales guy, that’s what he does, and so he has a bunch of shower curtain rings. And so, he goes from group to group to group, just saying exactly what they want to hear. So, there’s a bunch of teenage girls, and he put the shower curtain rings on their ears like earrings. He said, “Wow, boy, these really make you look older. Boy, you can really pass for 20 or 21 even.” And so, they just hand out their money, because he’s connecting to something, like, “Yes, I am trying to get into, I don’t know, dance clubs I shouldn’t be going to at my age, but I can’t get into.”

And we’re just sort of connecting to the desire. They had no desire for shower curtain rings before, but now, by golly, you have linked that to something that they want, that they want deeply. So, well, now, Leslie, I’m thinking, well, the hard part is figuring out, well, what is it that people want deeply and that we can trigger to get this effect going for us?

Leslie Zane
Yeah, and that takes research, and I can’t give you the magic bullet to that. I can only just give you examples from different categories of what are great triggers, and then I think that could kind of get the ball rolling. So, for example in the bottled water category, the snow-capped mountain is a growth trigger. It’s an amazing succinct device that has all of these positive associations associated with it.

So, you just look at a snow-capped mountain, and if you’re in the bottled water category, you know that stands for pure, pristine, water from the glaciers, fresh, natural, cold, clean, all these positive associations. So, you take that little snow-capped mountain and you put it on your bottle and, now, suddenly, the bottled water inherits all of those positive associations. And you don’t have to save them because they are already built into our brains over time from our learning, from our education, society, culture has done all that for us.

And so, that’s really the beauty of triggers. This is a way to leverage what already exists in the mind because human beings are hardwired to connect with the familiar, with the things that we already know, and you latch on to these things, and it enables your message to go down into people’s memory structure much faster, much more easily, without confronting that conscious mind that’s resistant to change.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and what’s kind of wild is that snow-capped mountains have good associations like clean, pristine nature, whatever. When in fact, bottled water can be kind of problematic for the environment, and it’s sort of like, “Oh, I feel like this is wholesome and pure.” It’s like, “Well, you know, there’s many things you could point to that says this is destructive and evil from some business practices or value systems that you evaluate it.” But none of that is consciously happening, it’s like, “Ooh, that looks pure and wholesome. I like that.”

And I’m also thinking about carpets. Carpets always got to have a baby on them. There’s always a baby on the carpet because it must be soft and pure and wholesome and homey and cozy if this little baby is on that carpet, right, because this baby wouldn’t be on a toxic, harsh, troubling surface, would it? And so, in a way, well, Leslie, it feels like there’s a way of real responsibility to behave ethically with this powerful force that we’re playing with here.

Leslie Zane
I mean, that’s definitely true, and it goes really way beyond these cognitive shortcuts and these triggers. There’s really a whole philosophy that I talk about in the book. The fact is marketing is really doing it all wrong today. Traditional marketing has it upside down because when you think about it, the rules of marketing were created like 50-60 years ago when we thought the conscious mind made decisions, but that’s not the case.

The real case is that our instinct of mind is making most of our decisions, so we really need a whole new rulebook for how to go about changing people’s minds, changing their behavior, getting them to buy our brand, getting them to hire us, enabling us to get into the college we want, whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. My book kind of lays out the rules, the new rules of marketing that displace the old rules.

So, here’s another example. The old rule of marketing would be that your core customer is most important and you should spend all of your time on your core customer. Well, the fact is the core customer is really a trap. Your core customer is never going to tell you what you really need to know about your negative associations because they’re happy with you as you are.

They’re not going to help you evolve. It’s going to really be hard to get more sales out of them because how many bottles of shampoo can one person use? You can only get so much out of your core existing customers. And so, if you want to grow, the most important thing you can do, the best thing you can do is to reach out to the people you don’t have.

So, your growth target, the prospective customer, is really far more important to increasing growth at an exponential rate than your core customer. It doesn’t mean that we ignore our core customer. Of course, we take excellent care of them. But where we want to prioritize our resources is really the growth target because, otherwise, you have a leaky bucket. There’s always some people who are leaving you.

And so, if you’re not constantly replenishing your existing customer franchise, you will have a leaky bucket. So, that’s just one more example of how those traditional marketing rules kind of get it wrong. And the new rules are really critical for getting the growth that you want according to how instinct really works.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really good. And I’m thinking about all sorts of elements of persuasion, whether you’re doing a presentation, or you’ve got a landing page and you’ve got your headline, your copy, and you’ve got your images. Tell me if this feels right to you, Leslie. It’s like the focus of this message should be less upon “This is the superior option for these six key reasons,” and more of just like getting the trigger that makes you go, “Yes!” like that moves my heart and soul. Like a snow-capped mountain, like a baby on a carpet.

And that is the hard part in terms of like, “What does it for you?” For someone, it might be flyfishing, it’s like, “Oh, the freedom, the escape, the peace, the adventure.” And for someone else, that totally doesn’t do anything. And so, to really understand what gets people going, any pro tips on how we do our research to elicit that?

Leslie Zane
Well, first of all, I want to validate what you’re saying because what you’re basically saying is that if we use very overt messages, like, “Here are the six reasons why you should listen to my podcast,” that is not going to work very well. But if you connect with your audience on shared values, on shared images, on fantasy, and we can talk about that, then you’re going to have this collaborative approach.

So, I think of that overt approach as sort of confrontational. You’re basically telling me what to do, and most humans don’t like to be told what to do, but this is about being collaborative and basically knitting your message, knitting your brand into the brains, almost like a symbiosis between the brains of your perspective users, because we’re talking about growing audiences, and growing your following, and growing your brand.

So, that’s really what we’re talking about, is being collaborative with them, and finding out things that they care about. But that doesn’t mean you want to lose your identity, and only show them things that they care about. You want to find the things where you have commonality while still keeping your own identity.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is they think, when I start talking about this, they think that I mean that they should be emotional in their messaging, and that actually doesn’t work at all, because emotion goes in one ear and out the other. And I also can’t tell people how to feel. That’s another example of being overt. So, what we really want to do is create distinctive brand assets, because distinctive brand assets and distinctive brand triggers, those are the things that are sticky that last in people’s memories, and that would be things like verbal triggers as well as image triggers.

So, we’ve already talked about image triggers like a snow-capped mountain, or like the dad with the baby, that’s an example of an image trigger. An example of a verbal trigger would be “Just do it” or “Do the Dew” from Mountain Dew. These are verbal triggers that get lodged in people’s minds and memories and are very, very sticky. They remain.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so funny, like, when I drink Red Bull, I think about all the marketing, or “Do the Dew, or “Red Bull gives you wings.” And so, sometimes I even say to myself, I’m just joking, “I’m going to slam a Red Bull because I’m so extreme,” and I’m just kind of being silly. But, in a way, there is something there in terms of, “Yeah, I’m about to get some pretty serious about the thing I’m about to do, and I would like to be caffeinated as I do so.”

And it’s funny, so we both have roots at Bain. I remember there was a bit of copy in the recruiting literature. They kept using it for years and years, and it might still be there, I haven’t checked. And it resonated with me, and I think that’s why they kept it around so much, and they said, they’re sort of like, “Hey, what’s it like to work at Bain?” or, “What are Bainies like?” And they’d said, “We laugh a lot.”

And I thought that was perfect, because, one, I like to laugh a lot, and who doesn’t, right, really? But I thought it was fantastic because it was distinctive. I didn’t see that in the other information sessions with companies that were recruiting on campus, and it was something that I wanted for my experience of work and colleagues, and I found it to be generally true, like, “Yeah, sure enough, we did. We did laugh a lot.”

In our collective analytical dork-dom, was able to find humor, shared humor and some stuff in a way that I don’t, still to this day, don’t find with many people. It was kind of special. We did laugh a lot. And so, that was money. That was magic. And they stuck with it for a long time, and again, it seems like you got to do the research to surface those things. Like, “What’s distinctive and resonant for folks?” And ChatGPT isn’t going to spit it out for you.

Leslie Zane
Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly right. And, really, where you want to do your research is with your growth target. So, most people would think you’re going to find it by talking to your existing customers. You’ll find what turns your existing customers on, but that’s not going to help you know how to win the new people over. So, you really have to find out what are the barriers, the implicit barriers in your growth targets’ minds.

I promise you that’s the key to growth because if you can take down those barriers with positive associations that overcome those barriers, you can get those people to come over. That is the freeing enlightenment that is out there to be understood. In fact, I would argue, you should not create a strategy for your company without knowing the implicit barriers of your growth target. And I tell you how to do this in my book. Each chapter is basically another rule or principle for how to go about this.

But another example is fantasy over reality. We’re told in marketing that you should show reality to your customers. That’s what they want to see. And if you ask consumers, they will tell you every single time, “I want to see reality.” But I told you, don’t listen to what people say, because what people say and what they do are two completely different things, because all of our research shows that people connect and go to fantasy every single time. Even that Red Bull example that you just used. The guy kind of going up in the air with the wings. That’s fantasy. And that’s what we want. We want fantasy. We want to fulfill our dreams.

Pete Mockaitis
So, just to make it all the more real, Leslie. Let’s just say I own a podcast production company, and I do. And let’s just say our core customer is wealth managers, and they are, but I’m seeing some opportunity with the growth zone amongst psychologists or mental health professionals, and I do. So, what might be an example of an implicit barrier of someone who has a psychology practice who’s thinking, “Oh, maybe we should launch a podcast for marketing, but I don’t know,” of like what an implicit barrier might be and how that might be addressed?

Leslie Zane
For them to create their own podcast or to come listen to yours?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so the idea is like we sell a podcast launch service and they would launch a podcast as a means of promoting their practice.

Leslie Zane
I mean, I don’t know what their negative associations are. We need to go out and discover that. But we could guess, I wouldn’t rely on that, but we could guess that maybe they think this is too business-oriented, or that they wouldn’t have the expertise to do it, or that it would take up too much of their time, or they wouldn’t be able to get good guests, or any number of those things.

They may also have a certain image of what a podcast host is like, and maybe they feel disconnected with that image. Maybe they think it’s a certain type of person that’s a narrow persona, and they think of themselves as more mainstream. I don’t know. It could be any one of those things, or none, or something completely different.

But that is the discovery process, and it’s actually really exciting. Because once you understand what the negative associations are that are holding back the people you’re trying to get, you’re empowered. You actually know what you need to do from a business standpoint. Instead, you’re just throwing spaghetti against the wall guessing at your business strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. And then the implicit side of this is not so much like, “Hey, you could be a podcaster, too.” “You know what? I don’t care.” Like someone’s like, “You know what? I don’t care for Joe Rogan. That’s who I hear when I think of podcasts. I think of podcasts, I think of Joe Rogan. I don’t care for Joe Rogan.” And it’s like, “Oh, well, if we showed imagery of a 24-year-old tattooed woman, you’re like, ‘Oh, well, that’s not Joe Rogan. That’s more like me. Huh, what’s this about?’” You certainly got some curiosity going there.

Leslie Zane
Yeah, or even somebody, like, I know I’m making this up, but let’s say, I don’t think this is true, but Reese Witherspoon, who has this big company now, and she’s got a production company, and she’s got a million different things going on. We learned, for example, that she started out as a podcast host, right? So, like finding aspirational people and/or celebrities who actually started as podcast hosts and were able to build their business into a mega brand. That would be another way. People want fantasy and they want that aspiration, and they want all the possibilities, and they should have them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, you’re talking about fantasy, this is making me think of, like, in the fitness communities. Like, folks will say, “Oh, this is a hardcore workout that equipped so-and-so to pass Special Forces or SEAL training or selection, or that this celebrity used to get jacked for his superhero role in a movie.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, I want to get jacked like Chris Pratt or Wolverine or whomever.” And so, it is speaking to fantasy, and it’s powerful, even though it’s like, “I’m not going to be in a movie, but I think I should work out like that guy, because, wow, I could be so pumped and buff like him.”

Leslie Zane
That’s exactly right. We want to buy the dream, we want the aspiration, and those celebrities. And, obviously, you don’t only have to do this via celebrity because that’s very expensive. But the idea is to tap into people’s aspirations and what they want to be and where they want to see themselves a few years from now.

Pete Mockaitis
And it could totally be mundane. It’s like the manager dreams of a day in which he doesn’t have to fiddle with seven different software tools to get a simple thing done. And so, then we sort of just see what’s something that is simple and elegant and reliably just works in this person’s life and whatever, it’s a hammer, it’s a saw, it’s a favorite pencil or pen. And then we just sort of see how we can kind of get things linked up from the idea I have, “Hey, let’s use a single software platform to this simple tool that reliably works and delights you with that.”

Leslie Zane
A hundred percent. Sounds good to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you got my wheels turning in so many ways. Leslie, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Leslie Zane
I would just say that I have another sort of construct that I find useful in terms of growing brands and growing, whether it’s your personal brand, your business, your idea, whatever it is you’re selling. By the way, we’re all marketers. I talk about marketing a lot, but everybody’s a marketer. Everybody’s selling something, even if it’s trying to get, sell your kids on doing their homework, you’re still selling something.

And that formula is keep, stop, add. Keep the positive associations you already have in people’s minds. Hold on to those and keep reinforcing those so that they’re not forgotten, because it’s like learning. The more you reinforce it, like studying, the more it stays sticky in people’s minds, and the more it’s remembered.

Stop the negative associations that you may be sending out inadvertently, that you may not even know you’re communicating, but they’ve collected in people’s minds because people connect the dots in their minds in ways that are very often competitively disadvantaged for you, but you want to understand what it is that those connections that they’re making that could be hurting you, and you want to replace those negative associations with positive ones.

And then the add, is add new positive triggers that are packed with so many positive associations that they sort of explode your brand connectome overnight, and increase the salience because salience means it’s the instinctive go-to-choice, and the moment that your brand is more salient than the next guy, it has a larger brand connectome, that’s the moment that people come over to you, or you get promoted, or your business grows double digits, etc.

So, keep, stop, add. It’s a very useful formula. The reason it’s useful is because some people, when they try to change their brand, they change too much and they forget the keep. So, this is about evolution, not revolution. You don’t want to lose your identity to the people that you already have. Keep, stop, add.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Leslie Zane
Well, one of my favorite quotes, because it happens to fit with how I think personally as well as professionally, is, “When you stop growing, you start dying,” which is a quote from William Burroughs. I like that quote because I think all of us should always be learning and educating ourselves to grow. And I think it’s true, when you stop growing, you start dying.

But it also happens to also be true brands and the brand connectome that if you’re not constantly evolving and adding new positive associations to your connectome, little by little it atrophies. And so, it turns out that growth is what it’s all about. It’s important for us and it’s important for our brands in order to thrive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Leslie Zane
So, my favorite research is the research that we do every day here at Triggers. We have so much of it. We’re literally doing research every day, and what we consistently find is that the growth target has a very different connectome than the core customer. The core customer has a myriad of connections, and the growth target is missing positive associations and has some negative associations. And it’s the contrast between the core and the growth target that you really want to examine.

So, it’s very useful to understand that the mind maps of those two targets are very different, and your job is to add positive associations to your growth target and to take down those negative associations so you can turn a growth target into a core customer.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Leslie Zane
My favorite fiction book right now is The Measure by Nikki Ehrlich. I highly recommend it. It’s phenomenal. In the book, everybody receives one day, a little box on their porch that has a thread in it, and the thread is a measure of how long your life is going to last. And each person decides whether they’re going to look in the box or not look in the box.

But from that premise, a whole bunch of things happen. It’s a phenomenal premise. She wrote it during the pandemic. Nikki, she’s a very young author in her early 20s, and it’s a bestseller. It’s being turned into a movie. It’s super exciting, and I would highly recommend it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And favorite tool?

Leslie Zane
My favorite tool. I didn’t see that on your list. I’m going to ask you to… I don’t know what you mean by that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. That’s just something you use that helps you be awesome at your job. Sometimes people will point to an app or a platform or a thought framework.

Leslie Zane
My favorite tool is the brand connectome because it really helps you understand how the world works. Everybody has a brand connectome, everybody is a brand, whether it’s the candidates running for office right now for president of the United States, or the brand or business that you’re working on. If you understand the brand connectome, you kind of understand how to navigate the world and make success in it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Leslie Zane
My favorite habit is boxing. I do it four times a week. It helps me get all my stress out, and I love the metaphor of kind of overcoming challenges. And I think boxing kind of fits with my personality. I really love it. And it’s also a great way to get tremendous exercise without ruining your knees.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks that they quote back to you often?

Leslie Zane
I’ve got three of those. These are some things that that I say in the book and that also people have quoted. First, “A brand is known by the associations it keeps.” That’s a really helpful way to think about a brand is. “You don’t make your choices. Your brand connectome does.” And, “You can’t persuade anybody of anything, but you can leverage their instincts.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Leslie Zane
ThePowerOfInstinctBook.com is where they can see the various tiers of offers in terms of my book and get discounts, etc. So ThePowerOfInstinctBook.com. And you can also link with me on LinkedIn, Leslie Zane. I love meeting new people and I’m very responsive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Leslie Zane
I would just say stop trying to persuade people to do what you want and instead grow your brand, your business, your idea, your personal brand by harnessing instincts, because if you do that, you can work with the brain instead of against it, and achieve anything you want.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leslie, thank you. This is fun. I wish you all the best.

Leslie Zane
Thanks so much, Pete. Thanks for having me. This is a great conversation.