Secrets to Getting Promoted, from Harvard Business Alum Leslie Zane

28:45And I think that that is what creates so many connections in the mind that at this point, Harry Potter is like a$40 billion franchise. The book has sold over 500 million copies. It's one of the greatest successes ever. But the reason that it's so successful is because it has so many connections in our minds. It's basically a mirror version of our world. And that is why it has so much salience. And whether you're a parent or a child, everybody can read the books together, much kind of like Sesame Street, where it's operating on multiple levels, but everybody shares those same connections because we all live in a world with all those same things.

29:28Sporting events, dormitories, colleges, universities, sororities, fraternities, all those same things. Games of chess, just brought to life in a different way. Our world, but with a magical overlay. That's exactly right. A creative twist on the familiar. Take all of the positive, familiar things in people's lives, put a creative twist on it and magical creative twist. And now you have the Harry Potter world. So it makes sense to me that maximizing touch points would give you salience because people are seeing you over and over and over. That accounting firm in Kansas City, people see them sponsoring the Little League team.

30:06They see them at the local chamber of commerce. They see them reappear at major community functions again and again. And so those touch points become more frequent. And so the salience is more frequent. That makes a lot of sense. How does that square with relevance? Because the old rules of marketing would say relevance means being in a niche. Relevance means being known for that one thing. So relevance is really about the ratio of positive to negative associations. So negative associations are what hurt your relevance and what hold back growth because if a customer has negative associations in their mind about you, they're not going to use you.

30:52So let's talk about an example of this that I think is really clear. It's a very, I think it's a very vivid example. About eight years ago, McDonald's was suffering from a very bad problem called pink slime in your chicken nuggets. What? Yes. Now there really wasn't pink slime in chicken nuggets, but there had been these videos that had gone viral showing tubular pink slime pouring out in a wavy pattern that people were told this is what's in your in your mcdonald's chicken nuggets it went viral 25 million views per video and they started losing customers hand over fist wow and it wasn't just that it was there's pink slime in your chicken nuggets there's horses eyeballs in your beef there's the meat doesn't mold, all these negative associations.

31:46And so what do you do if you're a business leader and you're running this business and you have this terrible problem? They did what they thought they should do. They created a big advertising campaign where they said, we don't have pink slime in your chicken nuggets. Yeah. And guess what happened? The brand took a further nosedive. The business declined further because brand and business are indelibly connected and your financial results are completely linked to the percentage of positive and negative associations you have. So at this time, McDonald's had more negative associations than positive ones, which was why they were losing customers and why their growth was in decline.

32:29What they finally ended up doing was going on a real food strategy, telling the true story about how McDonald's makes its food, which is remarkably sustainable, remarkably fresh. It's all real food. It comes from sustainable farms, family farms, USDA beef, like all of the good things, but they just hadn't been telling that story. And they did that with growth triggers. They told that story with cognitive shortcuts that were packed with positive associations. As an example of that, the fresh cracked egg was one of the most famous commercials that they used. because people didn't know that McDonald's cooks.

33:09They had forgotten that McDonald's is actually cooking back there. Yes, there's a lot of machines that are beeping and lights flickering and telling people that their food is ready. But behind all of that are people actually cooking your food. And so the fresh cracked egg on the griddle reinforced that McDonald's actually cooks and makes your meals fresh all day long. And that started to turn the brand around. That fresh cracked egg was so loaded with positive associations, wholesome, good for you, delicious, real people cooking back there, like all those positive associations, that it started to overwhelm the negative associations.

33:48And that's how triggers work. Triggers are succinct cognitive shortcuts, verbal or visual. They could be olfactory or tactile too. But let's just talk about visual and verbal because that's mostly what you work with in marketing. There are succinct codes or cues in any of the five senses that are so packed with positive associations that they overwhelm negative associations and they make your brand grow in the brain. So that's how you heal a negative associations problem. So the answer to what do you do if you have negative associations is you need to overwhelm them with positive associations.

34:27And that's what McDonald's did with these growth triggers. And so the Fresh Cracked Egg brand campaign, was that literally just a close-up of human hands cracking an egg over a grill? Exactly right. And turning into an Egg McMuffin. Wow. And if you think about it, the brand had been very focused on before on just showing people eating the end result. But now they were showing you what goes into your food. And this is a really interesting thing in the food and beverage industry. What we often find is, especially today with the health trend being so important and so powerful, it's really important to spend more time on the creation of the food than on the consumption experience in terms of where the weighting of the messaging should be.

35:15Right, which back 20 years ago, people might have been more persuaded by images of enjoyment, like families out for a lovely Sunday lunch. Exactly. And one of the things that we would say is you probably need a little bit of both because you still want to show the enjoyment, but you don't need to spend a whole 30 seconds of a commercial on the consumption experience. Maybe it's like 80-20. Spend more time really explaining where the food comes from, the ingredients, the freshness, how it's made, the craftsmanship. All of that is going to go a longer way. And then, of course, you can still show people enjoying at the end.

35:54So would it have been better then, in this example, McDonald's was hit with some negative news and they addressed it. By addressing it, did they fuel it? Like would it have been better for them to just not have addressed it in the first place? A hundred percent. That's the lesson. You can't get rid of negative associations by telling people, we don't have that negative association. We don't have pink slime in your chicken nuggets. All that's doing is reinforcing and fueling it and telling more people that you might have a pink slime problem. Instead, what you want to do is displace negative associations with positive ones.

36:31And that's exactly what they did. And this was one of the most brilliant turnarounds in corporate history. Right. And so that goes back to, I'm thinking again about the sixth grade school teacher and there's this kind of stuff that happens in the sixth grade. The notion that responding to a rumor just fuels it or the notion that responding to negative feedback just fuels it. 100%. 100%. I've had people come up to me. I mean, I'm not a career advisor. That's not my job. I help brands grow. But I have had people come up to me and said, you know, Leslie, I had this negative performance review or something bad happened at work and I don't know what to do.

37:10I feel like my brand is ruined. And what I say to them all the time is put that out of your head. You need to walk away from that because if you're dwelling on the negative association or even bringing it up again with your bosses or your company, you are just reinforcing that negative associations. Move ahead, move on, forget it, and focus on building your positive associations. And that's what will little by little make that negative association fade. The great news about this is that the brain is a learning machine. And so any negative association that you have is you're not stuck with it's not entrenched we keep learning new things just like studying for a test and the old things fade and you can regenerate yourself rehabilitate your brand anytime no matter what happens to you all you have to do is look at the biggest comeback stories in history tiger woods is an example like you can do this too what i'm thinking about right now are all of the people You know, you see these social media takedowns often where on social media, a bunch of people will go after a given person for a given thing.

38:20What I'm hearing from you is just don't respond. That's what I advise. Yeah. I mean, the whole world that we live in today, I think, is kind of a gotcha culture. I think it's very unfortunate. But I would definitely say if that happens to you, just let it go. Don't feed it. Don't respond. Move on and communicate something positive. Right. That makes a lot of sense, particularly noisy world that moves fast. So that is, we've talked about salience and we've talked about relevance. The third part is be distinctive. How does a brand become distinctive? So this is one of my favorite rules that I take down.

38:57The old rule was you have to be unique to stand out and that it's all about standing out. Be the purple cow. Differentiate or die. But wait a minute. the human brain is hardwired to connect with the familiar, not with the unique. I mean, think about babies. If you take a baby out of its mother's arms, it's going to scream because its mother's face is familiar. And now you're putting it in a stranger's arms. Or think about the pandemic. During the pandemic, what did you go for? What did you reach for? You reached for all the brands that you know and love with those big names. What was left over on the shelves were the smaller no-name brands that nobody wanted because the big name brands gave us comfort and security.

39:44Right. So we love the familiar. But marketing would tell you that if you were, let's say, a bottled water brand, the last thing you should do is use snow-capped mountains or babbling brooks or streams on your packaging. In fact, you should probably stay away from the color blue altogether. That would be the old rule. What we would say is, wait a minute, don't throw out that snow-capped mountain. Think about all the positive associations of the snow-capped mountain. Pure, pristine, eco-friendly, water from the glaciers, clean, refreshing, cold, like all these good things. Why would we want to get rid of those things?

40:23We want all those positive associations for our brand. And so as an example, Aquafina bottled water took the snow-capped mountain and rendered it in a very distinctive way with a larger peak, a smaller peak, and a little orange sunrise behind it. And so they were able to ride the familiar neural pathways and positive associations that I just rattled off for you, but bring them over to their brand. And so that's the difference between distinctiveness and uniqueness. Uniqueness is creating, I don't know, like the symbol on the Fiji bottle, like a pink flower, what does that have to do with purity or any of the positive associations people want from water?

41:06But that snow-capped mountain, that is the most powerful trigger in bottled water. And you want all those things for your brand. So I would say the new rule is familiarity is more powerful than uniqueness and distinctiveness is best of all. And what we know is that when something is too unfamiliar, people actually have a pretty adverse reaction to it. That's exactly right. One of the stories I love to tell is the story of what happened to Jeopardy when the longstanding host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek, unfortunately passed away. The show is really in a quandary. Who can possibly replace this amazing host that we've had for all these years?

41:53And it's a very, very loyal audience. And they were, you know, committed to Trebek. And so what they did was what you would think that they should do, which is they had a parade of different celebrity hosts come in. They tried Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper. And I think the audience ratings at the beginning, January 2021, were like 6.1. And little by little, with every new celebrity that they tried, it went down in May to 4.8. And I think at that point, the producers of the show were kind of tearing their hair out, and they couldn't understand why is it that people are not accepting these new hosts?

42:33Well, what they thought was going on was that each of these ratings was a commentary on how much people like or dislike Katie Couric or Anderson Cooper. And in fact, that had nothing to do with what was going on. What was really going on was that the brand was atrophying over time from January through May because each of those celebrity hosts, whoever they would have been, was contrary and in conflict to the familiar things about the show that people knew and loved. And it wasn't until they introduced one of the original contestants, one of the most successful contestants of all times, Ken Jennings, that the ratings started to zoom back up.

43:21And what Ken Jennings was, if you really think about it, he was an extension of Alex Trebek. He was part of the Jeopardy Connectome because everything is in the Jeopardy Connectome. All their past contestants and certainly the well-known ones, Alex himself, the board, all of those things are what makes up that brand. And what they were doing by introducing these celebrities was introducing something completely foreign to the brand. Whereas Ken Jennings was already part of the connectome. And so the audience connected with him and accepted him right away. He was essentially an extension of the existing familiar brand.

44:03And so he was almost sort of the natural successor to Alex Trebek. He really was. And it's just so funny. Look how many trials they had to, they didn't discover that until the very end. But it was a series of sort of hit or miss, trial and error kinds of things. But had they understood these kinds of theories, they might have gone for Ken Jennings right at the beginning. Right. And I can see, well, it's not intuitively obvious that you would have a contestant become the host. So I can see why they wouldn't have thought of that. But then it kind of sounds obvious in hindsight is Ken Jennings was the most famous Jeopardy contestant.

44:43Exactly. And people felt very comfortable with him as a host because he had tremendous expertise. So it wasn't a tough thing for him to graduate to the role of host from contestant. And they ultimately ended up with a co-host model with Mayim Bialik, the former star of Blossom, who was also on Big Bang Theory or something. I don't know. She was on some some nerd shows. Yes, but it but it really is Ken Jennings. Right. That is the roots of the brand and that keeps that audience, I think, connected to the brand that they that they knew and love. It's being really part. It's a continuation of Alex Trebek's history.

45:22Okay. So when your 12-year-old ran for student council, he wanted to create these posters that were unique. And you advised him not to. You said, don't be unique, be familiar, and then be distinct. How did that impact his student council posters? Great question. The fact that my son had the rule of uniqueness in his head at 12 years old, that to me was already fascinating. That somehow these rules of marketing have penetrated our culture so that everybody thinks that they're really the way to build businesses, brands, or do what you want in life. And in fact, they send you down the wrong road.

46:03So I told him, stop putting Mars on your poster and instead connect with things that the students care about. And so he started showing images of better cafeteria food and ice cream at the end of the day. And like all the things that the kids actually wanted. And rather than trying to brand himself in a way that would be irrelevant. Do 12-year-old student council positions have that kind of power? I don't know, but my son is pretty convincing. So I think that he ultimately was able to make a couple of changes, maybe get the ice cream truck to come after school once a week. All right, let's go back to the example of a small accounting firm based in Kansas City.

46:49What could they do that would be distinctive? So I think the fact, I don't know enough about accounting, Kansas City. I don't know enough about either of those things, but what I could say is that there are probably some sports teams that are from Kansas City that are really popular. They're probably - Travis Kelsey, Kansas City Chiefs. There you go. There you go. We were just talking about Taylor Swift. There you go. So you've got teams, you've got probably some cultural foods that are strong connections in Kansas City. And so I think - Barbecue, there you go. oh, that's the best, the down-home barbecue.

47:29So I think there are a lot of things that this accounting firm could tap into that could become part of its identity. And while you might think that that would only be relevant to his Kansas City, this could be anybody, their Kansas City clients, I would argue that that sense of heritage could actually be relevant to anybody in any part of it, which is really interesting. People love a heritage story. They love to know where you come from, what your backstory is, and it creates a sense of nostalgia. And by the way, everybody has barbecues. So you don't have to be from Kansas City to find that relevant.

48:08But it could be one of the ways that this person creates distinctiveness for their brand. There are probably 100 others. Okay. But that's one example. Okay. Let's try this in a few other ways. So let's say that you have a landscaping business. How do you, we'll go through all three, how do you create salience, relevance, and distinctiveness for your landscaping business? You're in the business of mowing lawns, trimming hedges, that type of work around your local community. So in terms of salience, you would want to do in your local community is put your information out in all the touch points where people might encounter it.

48:50So the local drugstore, the local coffee shop, the schools, you're going to want to just spread the understanding of your business in more places. So just more touch points, reaching more touch points in people's lives. Be everywhere. Be everywhere. And ride other people's platforms, ride other people's large audiences. The second thing that you want to do in terms of distinctiveness, I mean, when you think about landscaping and making plants grow, everybody's frustrated with it. That is something that people complain about all the time. My plants aren't growing or this tree turned brown or whatever.

49:26So I do think expertise is an important aspect of this business. It's probably very important in the accounting example too. We just didn't touch on that. But the landscaping business, if they could sort of explain in a way what they do differently to make their plants that they take care of or the lawns healthier, I think that could be a really interesting twist. So it's still about landscaping, but their creative twist on that would be that they have a unique technique or a distinctive technique that they use to make sure that your lawn is always thriving, that your plants are always thriving.

50:05Expertise is really, really important. I'll just take you back to when I started my business, that initially I just kind of put out my shingle as a consultant, right? And I didn't get a lot of takers. because why should anybody think that I know more or I'm smarter than anybody else? Right. This is 1995, right? Yep. 1995. But then I realized that when I talked about my process and how I do what I do, that I got a completely different reaction because people could see that there was actually something repeatable that I was doing that worked over and over and over that I had done previously. first of all, when I was inside the corporate world, but I kind of took those ideas with me and created a proprietary process.

50:52And I think that's a really important thing for really any professional. Even the hygienist could have a particular way that they go about cleaning people's mouths. That's sort of their special approach that they find more effective in terms of getting rid of plaque and tartar. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. So how do you convey that, especially if by virtue of conveying it, you have to kind of explain things that are technical. And I'll give you an example from my own life. I have an online course called Your First Rental Property. It's all about how to buy a rental property as a beginner.

51:28So it's designed, if you have zero rental properties, we are the course that will take you from zero to one. What is distinct, particularly about the way that I teach rental property investing, is that I am at odds with a lot of the other rental property voices out there. There are many, many other rental property voices out there that promote a particular formula called the cash on cash return. It's very popular. If you were to go to any of the other real estate platforms, people are going to be talking about cash on cash return all day long. I personally think that that formula is a bunch of bull poop and I don't like it at all.

52:08And I don't teach my students to use it. So I teach my students to focus on a different formula called the cap rate. How in the heck would I get that across in a 30 second Instagram reel, right? That's, it's just so technical and so complicated and like not, there's no elevator pitch to that. It's a really good question. First of all, watching you explain this was very exciting for me as a potential customer. Because where your eyes lit up was when you were drawing the contrast between your approach and everybody else's. And contrast isn't a very effective technique because the brain loves contrast.

52:50And so I don't think you need to go into the details initially of the process in your opening pitch when you're trying to get people interested in working with you. But I do think you can say this way that it's being done, it's been done traditionally, I have found doesn't work very well. I'm going to show you this new way. And I think having that contrast as sort of the first bite of the apple that people take into getting to know you is a great way to pull them in. And then when they sit down with you, you can explain cap rate versus cash on cash, how they're different. And I would challenge you to find a really succinct visual way to convey that difference.

53:33And that can become a mnemonic device, a visual device that you can use over and over in your business. Now you're codifying your expertise in codes and cues. There's yours, mine works, this one doesn't. And then you go ahead and explain it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. But so the initial, that 30 second Instagram reel would have to be the mainstream way of doing it is wrong. I've got a different approach. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And that's going to work really well for you because the brain loves contrast. Said another way, you're giving your positioning a foil.

54:14If you just, I'll just tell you from our work of 30 years, if we just position the brand that we've been hired to work on, the Fortune 500 brand that we've been hired to work on, we will get growth for our customers. But if we both position the brand of our client and talk about that while depositioning their competitors and making it clear why one is superior to the other, we will get twice as much growth. Twice as much growth. That's huge. That means the mind wants a foil. Does distinctiveness require a little bit of us versus them? It's not required. It's just, if you have the opportunity to do it, go there.

55:02Right. Because it's just going to paint a much clearer picture for your audience. The brain is a relativity machine. If you're up on Pepsi, you're down on Coke. Right. If you're up on Coke, you're down on Pepsi. If you're up on Adidas, you're down on Nike. And because the brain is a relativity machine, if you can draw that contrast. You don't have to actually do it overtly. You don't need to call out your competitors. I'm certainly not suggesting that you be mean or you bash the competition, but I do think you can draw a distinction between how you do what you do, how they do what they do, and just very simply say, this way has worked better for me.

55:45And let me tell you why. What I'm imagining right now is the taco stand that says, we have the hottest salsa or we have the most variety of salsa or something like that. Something that makes them distinct from all of the other taco stands. That's right. They are creating a relative claim. And that's exactly what I'm saying the brain wants. It's the relativity effect. All right. And that goes back to then a person who's trying to get promoted at work. What is it that they do that is different from what all of their colleagues do? So if we want to apply this to a situation where somebody's trying to get a promotion or a raise or even just landing a job, we have an unemployment problem in this country right now.

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57:40And so I can give you some examples of the kinds of things that I think you would want to do in an interview as an example. So the first thing that you want to not do is you don't want to walk them through your resume. That is very boring. And they have the resume in front of them anyway. and so it's redundant. Instead, what we want to do in an interview is we want to bring the person that's on the piece of paper to life. And so I think there are a few things that I would do in that situation. The first thing that I would do is start by creating a connection with the interviewer, finding something, look at their LinkedIn profile, learn something about the person you're about to meet and create some kind of common connection where they went to school, what team they root for, something that's going to create sort of shared values.

58:36The second thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to want to show a tremendous enthusiasm about the company. And that comes from doing research. You have to do a lot of research about the company that you're interviewing for, way beyond your particular role. Really start to show that you are a big thinker and that you understand where this company is headed, maybe you've done some work by listening to earnings reports or reading the company's strategic plan or reading their annual report. Where are they headed? What are they trying to accomplish? And then you can fit your story into what they're trying to do and show how you can actually help the company achieve their objectives.

59:20That is big thinking that's much larger in scope than just your little job that you're going to go perform. And it shows that you're able to think enterprise level, which is going to elevate your stature relative to other candidates. You're also going to want to talk about your personal heritage and how you got to this point. Why are you passionate about this area? How did you get here? Maybe there's a story from your childhood. I'll just tell you one of the stories that I tell is that when I was a little girl, I to make posters for all the clubs in the school. All of them, whether I was in the club or not in the club.

59:59I was playing with taglines and visual cues from the age of 14. My mother has pictures of me drawing them on the living room rug, spread out while I was doing my homework. So I think that kind of shows that your passion is not just like you decided to interview with this company yesterday, day, but it's been a longstanding passion and interest of yours. I think that it can be interesting to quote the CEO and bring that into the conversation. And so what I'm really saying to you is just like anything else, there's no one magic bullet. But if you keep flooding the person's mind with all these positive associations that bring you to life, that have you jumping off the page, it's going to be much more effective than just going through the resume.

1:00:51Right. In fact, you wouldn't even really have to talk about your resume at all. You can just gloss over that. If they want to read it, they can read it. A hundred percent. So if you were to say something about yourself, and you would obviously want to use an example, and the example could be pulled from the resume, but you would want that example to be more vivid than just a list of accomplishments. Because contrary to popular belief, We do not choose candidates based on their list of achievements, even though that's what goes into the resume. Really how we choose is by how many connections we have to that person.

1:01:29And a lot of these things are decided within the first few seconds of an interview. What do you mean by connections that we have to that person? So I mentioned like five or six different things. We're going to connect with them in terms of like something that we have in common. That's one connection. Second connection, we're going to talk about the company and where it's headed and that we understand where the company is headed. A demonstration of shared understanding. A demonstration of shared interest in where the company's going. You want to talk about your expertise, just like we talked about with those other examples earlier.

1:02:07So you're going to want some example of your expertise. You're going to want to quote the CEO because that shows that you're really thinking big outside of your particular job. And you're somebody who reads and knows what's going on. And you know where the company's headed. So all these different connections are going to mount up. And by the time that interview starts to the end, you're going to grow your little seed into a full-grown tree. It can be done that quickly in a half hour. you can grow your brand connectome in the other person's mind. All right. So that is how you create distinctiveness as an employee.

1:02:44And salience. Yeah, distinctiveness and salience as an employee who is looking for another job out on the hiring circuit. Yes. And so that's how you would do it in a hiring situation. But if you were in a company, what you would want to do is create a lot of connections to many different people in the organization, not just in your department, but across departments. And so that everybody is saying positive things about you. So that by the time you get to your performance review, there's all this positive buzz about you coming from all these different departments, not just the colleagues that you work with, not just your boss, but there's this sort of growing positive associations about your brand in the workplace.

1:03:28So you're essentially generating buzz about yourself at your own workplace. Yeah, because if you get into a performance review and you have to tell your boss how great you are, that's not a great recipe for success, right? It should be coming from other people noticing. It's much better to have other people say great things about you than for you to have to say great things about yourself. So how would you do that then? Because I know a lot of people who try to do that, but then they either come off as braggy or they come off as like they're taking accomplishments that are unearned. They're stealing the accomplishment credit away from somebody else.

1:04:07I'm definitely not saying to do that. Yeah. What I'm saying is to create relationships to people throughout the company that you work with, that you're somehow touching. It could be cross-functional. It doesn't have to be that you have a reporting structure into them. and do things for them. Help them out. Help them out of a bind. Let's say somebody has a report that's due tomorrow and they're not finished. Maybe it's not in your area, but maybe you decide to stay late and help that person out. That kind of connection and that kind of assistance will go a long way. That'll be a story that other people tell.

1:04:46So I'm not at all saying you're taking other people's credit. Rather, you're doing the opposite. You're serving other people and you'll get a tremendously positive reputation by helping other people be their best. Okay. So the way that you create buzz about yourself at a workplace is through service to others, a hundred percent. Those are positive actions that are really going to create indelible relationships and loyalty to you because you helped them out when they were in a tight spot. And that's going to come back in a big way in the future. How do you, when it comes to relevance and when it comes to positive associations, flooding out negative associations, how do you deal with that in the workplace if there's some negative association that's tied to you?

1:05:37Maybe you worked on a project that flopped. maybe you got blamed either fairly or unfairly for some calamity that the company suffered. Maybe people just don't like the way that your food always takes up a big place in the company fridge. How do you deal with that at a workplace setting? All of those things can happen and have happened to the best of us. So that's how careers go. You're going to have some successes and you're have some failures. And my best advice is to move on from the failures quickly and substitute those failures with positive successes. Brush it off, pick yourself up as if you fell down, go like this, and then hit the ground running the next day and accomplish something great.

1:06:27And that will make that negative association fade in people's minds. Memories fade over time, they do. So it's only the good things that you want to keep reinforcing and keep in people's memories and those other things, just let them go by the wayside and move on. Now, there could be a point where things are so negative and people keep coming back to that negative thing. That could happen in your life and that means that's time to move on to another company. But for the most part, what I've seen is that there are really very few things that are total calamities that you can't build back from. So similar to what McDonald's did with pink slime, where they found that addressing it directly only reinforced that idea.

1:07:15But if they instead talked about their successes, if they talked about real food, if they talked purely about the positive and they focused the conversation there, it helped. It sounds as though at the individual level that works in the workplace as well. If there's negative feedback about you, if you worked on a project that flopped or if you were responsible for a mistake that cost the company a lot of money, rather than address it and dwell on it, you shift the focus, kind of shift the frame to something positive that you're associated with. That's exactly right. It's no different than McDonald's.

1:07:53You want to displace negative associations with positive ones. And we all have the ability to do that. So throughout this conversation, we've talked about three core rules. Be salient, be relevant, be distinctive. Are those the three or are there any rules that we haven't covered? I can do one more. So one of the oldest rules in the book is that you should spend a lot of time talking to and understanding your core customer. In fact, your core customer is everything. And of course, we love our core customers. We love our existing customers, and we should absolutely treat them with kid gloves. But if you really want to grow, you need to reach out and constantly be bringing in new customers into the fold.

1:08:38So the new rule is your core customer is actually a trap. And the only way to really get tremendous accelerated growth is to actively reach out and get new customers to come in. So why is it a trap? It's a trap because your core customers are never gonna tell you what's wrong with you. And so it's gonna cause you to not evolve. Your growth target is the people who have those negative associations you need to discover, those implicit mental barriers. You wanna take those down, but you can't take them down unless you know what they are. So you need to spend more time with your growth target, understanding why they're not buying you in order to overcome them with your strategy and create a strategy that pulls them in.

1:09:25All right. This is very kind of high level and esoteric. Can you give an example? Yeah. Let's look at Bed Bath & Beyond. Bed Bath & Beyond was busy rewarding its core customers over and over again with these blue and white coupons. I bet you can picture it right now in your brain, right? I've got so many of those. You probably have a whole drawer filled with it. So what that shows is that all the coupons in the world aren't going to necessarily get you to come into the Bed Bath & Beyond store because all you're doing is layering price off after price off after price off to the point where the merchandise doesn't even have a value anymore.

1:10:05That is the epitome of, number one, a race to the bottom because you've kind of ruined the value equation. And then secondly, you're trying to get blood from a stone. Your core customers are only going to buy so much from you. There's a rule of thumb that I talk about in my book that essentially says that about 50 % of your customers are going to leave you every year. That's a shocking statistic. 50 % are going to leave you no matter what you do, no matter how much you reward them. And so what that means is if you're not actively bringing new customers in to your franchise, you're going to have a leaky bucket problem because you have churn with the existing franchise and you're not filling the bucket fast enough with the new people.

1:10:51Right. And so really the implication of all of this is that you need to spend more time and more resources getting new customers to come into the door. Your customer acquisition strategy is really the most important thing that you do because your core customers are only going to take you so far. And the new people that come in the door, should you be looking for the same type of people or should you be, I don't want to use the word avatar because it's so overused, but I'll use it here just for the sake of a clear question. Should those new people be that same avatar as the core that you're already serving?

1:11:28Absolutely not. Why not? Because you don't have the world in your franchise. You have a couple of customers, even if you have 100 customers or 1 ,000 customers or a million customers, the whole world should be your customers. We don't believe in segmenting your audiences at all. We think there's really only two segments that matter, the people you have and the people you don't. And the question that segmentation answers is, how are people different? That's not the right question. The question we should be asking is, how are people alike? That's where we're going to find those universal triggers that work for everybody.

1:12:10And so we would say the biggest audience you can reach out for is the audience you should target. And that means pretty much, you know, everybody, you know, within reason, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but essentially there's the people you have, there's the people you don't. And the larger the audience you target, the more share, market share, revenue, growth you're going to get back. How do you square that with the standard advice of go into a niche and define yourself inside of that niche? Again, I'll use an example, but my online course on your first rental property, that's really a niche.

1:12:49First of all, it's not real estate investing generally, it's rental property specifically. And second, it's your first. So we're targeting beginner rental property investors. So we're like really in a niche niche right there. So I think there's two different things we're talking about. One is a niche in terms of your expertise as the owner of the business who's providing this service. And I think it's fine to be a specialist and good to be a specialist because this is a world of specialists that we live in right now. The world is becoming more and more specialized in terms of expertise. So you have a tremendous expertise in that.

1:13:28Great. Sell that. But I would argue that it may be, maybe that expertise is relevant to a much bigger audience than you think. What I'm saying is that your audience shouldn't be a niche audience. You want to have the largest audience possible because if you only have a dollar to spend in marketing resources against an audience, if you put that$1 against a large audience, you're going to get a lot more people back than if you target a small audience with that same$1. That's just simple math. Right. In this particular case, it isn't just people who are interested in personal finance who are also interested in real estate investing.

1:14:08There are a lot of people out there who might not be into personal finance, but who are still into real estate investing or rental property investing specifically. Exactly. I think that there's a lot greater potential for what you're providing than just the narrow definition of the target that you've identified. All right. People in the Harry Potter audience who are interested in rental property investing. There we go. There we go. That's millions and millions of people. Love it. So your book is called The Power of Instinct. What is instinct? Instinct is that moment when we reach over and over again for the brands that we know and love.

1:14:49And we think we're controlling our choices, but we're really not. It's our unconscious mind that's calling the shots. Instinct is the most powerful force for driving human behavior and behavior change. And if you can harness instinct, which I teach you through all the rules of the book, then really you can accomplish anything, both in business and in life. Perfect. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Leslie Zane. You can buy my book on Amazon, Leslie Zane, The Power of Instinct. the new rules of persuasion in business and life.

1:15:29There's a lot more goodies in there that I think people could really use to help them achieve what it is that they're trying to accomplish in their lives. Thank you so much. And we will link to all of that in the show notes. Thanks so much for having me, Paula. This was a lot of fun. This is great. Thank you to Harvard Business School trained marketing expert, Leslie Zane. What are three key takeaways that we learned from this conversation? Well, Leslie discussed three key elements of how you make people feel, which is another way of saying your brand. And those three key elements are salience, relevance, and distinctiveness.

1:16:08Each of the following three key takeaways will highlight one of these concepts. Let's start with key takeaway number one, be salient by creating buzz. Create multiple connections and touch points within your organization and within your industry. Get to know people in different departments. Get to know people not just up and down the ladder, but laterally. Find out how you can help them solve their problems. This is how you generate buzz, word of mouth about yourself within your company and within your industry. It increases your visibility and it makes you more memorable to colleagues and to decision makers.

1:16:52And this applies regardless of whether you're a school teacher or a dental hygienist or an accountant. The more things that teacher does, the more connections that it has to the kids, to the parents, to the students, to the administration. The web just starts growing and growing, that web of associations. And the network gets bigger and bigger. And it grows organically, just like a tree. That's how it works. Okay. And then the dental hygienist who wants that promotion at work would be involved in the community as well then? Yes. And have more relationships, more connections with each of their customers, actually.

1:17:32So let's say they call the patient after they treated them and said, hey, how are you feeling after your intense session today? Are you feeling okay? And that sleep problem that you mentioned to me, I have a thought for you about how you can address that. By increasing those connections, you become more salient in people's minds. And that higher level of visibility can lead to more opportunities for advancement and recognition. Remember, it's not just about doing your job well. It's about building those meaningful relationships across your organization and across your industry. So that's key takeaway number one.

1:18:13Key takeaway number two, be relevant by focusing on positive associations. Rather than dwelling on negative experiences or feedback, like rather than dwelling on a project that you worked on that just didn't meet expectations, instead of doing that, concentrate on reinforcing positive associations. You don't want to be the equivalent of McDonald's saying, oh, no, we don't have pink slime. You want to be the equivalent of McDonald's saying, hey, look, we do have fresh cracked eggs. So the old rule of marketing was that your brand should only stand for one thing. So if you're a Volvo, you should stand for safety.

1:18:56And so if you were following this rule out to its execution, if you were a country music star who had a very successful country music album, the last thing you would do would be to go into other types of music. You would never go into folk music or dance music or poetry or any of these other kinds of musical genres. The approach of focusing on positive associations demonstrates the power of reframing. Rather than wallowing in setbacks, concentrate on creating and reinforcing the positive. This not only helps manage your reputation, but it also contributes to a better work environment because people want to be in a positive place.

1:19:43So spread that optimism, spread that cheer, spread that focus on what's working. That's key takeaway number two. Finally, key takeaway number three. don't try to be unique. Instead, be distinctive while maintaining familiarity because people take comfort in the familiar. Now, you can be distinctive, meaning you can offer a creative twist on familiar concepts, but don't be too far out of left field because that's just jarring. One of the stories I love to tell is the story of what happened to Jeopardy when the longstanding host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek, unfortunately passed away. The show is really in a quandary.

1:20:25Who can possibly replace this amazing host that we've had for all these years? And it's a very, very loyal audience. And they were, you know, committed to Trebek. And so what they did was what you would think that they should do, which is they had a parade of different celebrity hosts come in. They tried Katie Couric and Anderson and Cooper. And I think the audience ratings at the beginning, January 2021, were like 6.1. And little by little, with every new celebrity that they tried, it went down in May to 4.8. The Jeopardy! example illustrates the importance of maintaining familiarity, because after Alex Trebek passed, the Jeopardy!

1:21:10audience didn't want an outsider hosting the show. They wanted someone who was already associated with the brand. Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper are amazing hosts. They are absolutely fantastic at the skill of hosting a television show, of course. But they weren't previously affiliated with the Jeopardy brand. There are no memories of seeing them alongside Alex Trebek. So they felt unfamiliar. Even though they're celebrities, even though we all know who they are, they felt unfamiliar in the context of Jeopardy. But by contrast, Ken Jennings had already been a fixture on the show. He was already associated with Alex Trebek.

1:21:53He was already part of the brand. And that's what made him the perfect choice. He was familiar in the context of Jeopardy. He's not as big of a celebrity. So he's not familiar in that regard. But he's familiar within the context in which it mattered. And so in your own career, look for ways where you can be familiar in the contexts that matter because that's how you become both memorable and relatable. And that's what's going to increase your chances of getting that promotion or getting that plum assignment of getting that professional success that comes from how you make people feel at work, how people think about you at work.

1:22:35which is the definition of your personal brand. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Harvard Business School alum and prominent marketing expert, Leslie Zane. Her new book is The Power of Instinct. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, subscribe to our newsletter, affordanything.com slash newsletter. There's absolutely no cost and there's plenty of benefit. So affordanything.com slash newsletter. That's number one. Number two, follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, youtube.com slash affordanything.

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1:24:00Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.