The Brain Behind Brands with Leslie Zane: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, the only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down the brain behind brands. To drop these vibe bombs, I brought Leslie Zane into EO Fire Studios. Known in the industry as the brain behind brands, Leslie has turned the marketing industry on its head. She is changing the way companies do marketing through her unique expertise, applying behavioral science to change instinctive brand behavior. Her company, Triggers, has delivered over$10 billion in incremental revenue and was the first brand consulting firm founded by a woman.

0:41In today's foundation, we'll talk about how you don't need a lot of money to be successful. You need expertise and how when you harness the power of instincts, you work with the brain instead of against it and don't follow the classic marketing rules. Following them is a recipe for slow growth and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode is Leslie and our sponsors. If you've ever considered launching a show on YouTube, I may have the solution for you after launching a very successful show on YouTube in 2024, MicroStrategy Today. I've learned a lot on what it takes to create a successful show and have launched a one-on-one mentorship program called YouTube 100.

1:18If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com. This is the year of YouTube. Let's go. Leslie, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Thanks so much for having me, John. I appreciate it. There's a belief out there that you have to invest a lot of money to be successful, that money begets success. I think that's a huge myth. You don't need a lot of money to be successful. You need expertise, something you do better than everybody else. I mean, if you look at the kinds of jobs people have today, the kinds of businesses they're creating, pediatric dentists, closet organizers, Kid-friendly meal delivery services.

2:08People are willing to pay a premium for specialized expertise. We're becoming a nation of specialists, which means that the more specialized your company's expertise is, the better. I think that's far more important than having money. Fire Nation, I love that. We're going to be talking about the brain behind the brands. As you can tell, Leslie's really dialed in to this stuff and to what we have to discuss here today. And that's something that I want to start with, Leslie, because you are referred to as the brain behind brands. What the heck does that mean? How did you acquire such a nickname?

2:47First of all, that phrase came from a much too kind client who was explaining to a colleague that she had noticed our strategic fingerprints on many of the brands she had worked at as she moved from company to company. And she hadn't known we were there before because our work is largely behind the scenes. Nobody knows that. And the brain part was just really clever of her and also very kind because it has a dual meaning. I am championing a new way of doing marketing that harnesses the power of the subconscious brain. It enables your marketing to work faster and more effectively, even if you don't have deep pockets.

3:24And I think that's where the name came from. I love that. And one thing that I think you definitely did to acquire that is that you're just a problem solver. I mean, you're a problem solver for your clients. You're a problem solver just in life in general. Let's get specific here. I want to talk about the kinds of problems that you help your clients solve. Let's give some examples. Get as specific as you're able and willing to do. The key problem most companies have comes down to growth, revenue growth, Revenue growth, it's either slowed down or it was high last year and leadership needs to hit the same high rates again this year.

4:04It's literally a constant battle. Business and marketing leaders have a huge list of reasons why they're not achieving the growth they want. And they'll tell you it's category commoditization, it's competitive proliferation, a digital disruptor came out of nowhere. And then they always tell us that they're being outspent four to one. But it turns out that's actually not what's holding back growth, even though all those things may be true. The real reason is that marketers are taking the path of greatest resistance to the sale. They're working against the human brain instead of with it. And because of that, they're caught in an endless loop of creating, revising, optimizing, changing their strategies, changing their advertising, and never getting to the big unlock that catapults your brand.

4:56Well, it turns out there's a much easier way. The key to accelerating growth is to gain the ultimate competitive advantage, which I call the instinctive advantage. Because when you harness the power of instinct, you work with the brain instead of against it. Fire Nation, I hope you kind of went ouch right there when you heard Leslie say that marketers and businesses sometimes in general are taking the path of greatest resistance to the sale, not the path of least resistance, the path of greatest resistance. And I think some of you might've been like, huh, she's kind of talking about me right there because I seem to be doing that.

5:37And listen, the truth hurts, the truth hurts, but that's why you are on this episode listening here with me and Leslie having this conversation so that you can gain the ultimate competitive advantage, as Leslie calls it, the instinctive advantage. So let's talk about that instinctive brand behavior, as you call it. What the heck specifically is instinctive brand behavior and why is it so important? Well, it's really important because it's that moment when people reach in the supermarket or click online for the same brand over and over again without thinking. They're literally on autopilot. Coke over Pepsi, Nike over Adidas sneakers, if you're buying your sneakers on Amazon, Robin Hood over Morgan Stanley.

6:25What makes people reach? It's not loyalty. It's not that they have some passionate devotion to a brand. It has nothing to do with your net promoter score. Or when consumers buy over and over again, that is instinctive brand behavior. They're literally powerless to resist it. So if you want to be really successful, you need to create what we call instinctive brand preference. You want your brand to be that go-to brand that customers reach for or click on over and over again on autopilot. That's the holy grail of marketing. and you can't get there through incentives or promotions. That's the conscious approach.

7:08That's trying to persuade somebody. That's trying to incentivize somebody to do something. It doesn't work. Instead, you want to go through the subconscious mind. That's the path of least resistance. And the way you do that is you piggyback on ideas and imagery that people are already familiar with. Now, can we get an example from a past client of yours, maybe a current client on this exact action? Like how did this work for them? What problem were they having? And then when they made this switch, how did it change the game? So a good example of using the subconscious mind is the idea of triggers.

7:46What are triggers? Triggers are very succinct codes or cues that are packed with positive associations already. Let's take the snow-capped mountain from the bottled water category. You look at a snow-capped mountain and you know exactly what that means. It means pure, pristine, eco-friendly, fresh, clean, cold. Little people travel to the top of the snow-capped mountain and put glacier water in containers and carry it back down the mountain. Our brains have a whole story about the snow-capped mountain. If you take that little snow-capped mountain and you put it on your bottled water package or in your advertising or in your social media or in your digital advertising, you are creating all these positive associations for the brain really, really, really fast.

8:37And you don't have to say them all. Your brain already created that story for you. And that's a great example of using subconscious just triggers these very succinct cognitive shortcuts to expand the meaning of your brand in people's minds. Fire Nation, we're going to dive more into the conscious and unconscious. We're also going to talk about how you can apply all this stuff to improve your business today when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Traveling has always been one of my biggest passions. You get to experience different cultures, see places that are impossible to capture through a lens.

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9:50They can even help with design and styling. So if you've got an extended trip coming up and you need a little help hosting while you're away, you could hire a co-host to do the work for you. Find a co-host at airbnb.com slash host. Let's talk YouTube. Have you ever considered launching a show on YouTube or do you currently have one that's struggling to gain traction? I may have the solution for you. After focusing on audio for 13 years, I launched my first YouTube show in late 2024 and have seen fantastic results. Over 12 ,000 subscribers, every show getting well over 10 ,000 views, all 100 % organic, $0 spent on promotion or advertising.

10:33That is the beauty of YouTube. If you create the right content with the right cadence, YouTube will make sure it gets in front of the right people. My show is called MicroStrategy today, and I'm having a blast creating content on a daily basis because it's on a topic I love about a company that I truly admire. What excites you? What fires you up? If you want to launch a show around that passion or improve your current one, I'm launching an exclusive coaching program called YouTube 100, where in 100 days, I will mentor you one-on-one, and together we will create a show that you love and that's successful.

11:05I hired the best mentors when I first started and have learned so much along the way. I'm ready to help you ignite your show and let YouTube do the heavy lifting of building a meaningful audience that will allow you to grow and monetize your show in ways you might not currently think possible. If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com. Put YouTube 100 in the subject line and we'll schedule a time to chat, j-o-h-n at eofire.com. this is the year of YouTube. Let's go. Leslie, we're back. And as I mentioned before the break, I really want to dive into the conscious and the unconscious.

11:45You did mention it a little bit before the break, but some people may be surprised to hear that there is a difference between the conscious and the unconscious mind. Can you share this disparity? Absolutely. So it's a really important distinction. We have different parts of our brain, but different parts of our brain do different things. Let's start with the conscious mind. As marketers, we spend all of our time trying to persuade, convince, cajole, incentivize our customers to buy our products or switch from a competitor's. But if you think about it, those tactics are all designed to convince, persuade, very objectively, very overtly, the conscious mind to make that decision.

12:29And there's two major problems with this strategy. The conscious mind is resistant to change. It's skeptical. It sees you coming. It says, oh, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to sell me. So marketers are basically going up a brick wall. You can't persuade the conscious mind to do anything. You know that from, I don't know, the last conversation you had with a relative about politics. You can't persuade people. So that's the first problem, that the conscious mind's resistant to change. The second problem is it turns out that only 5 % of the decisions that people make are conscious decisions.

13:085%. That's tiny. So let's be clear. We're basically spending 100 % of our time and energy on 5 % of consumers' decisions. No wonder driving growth is so hard. Now, the other 95%, that's happening in our unconscious mind. It's instinctual. The instinctive brain works completely differently from the conscious mind. It's malleable. Ideas seep in there without our realizing it. All you have to do is piggyback on existing memories, and you take the path of least resistance to the sale. Now, you discover something called the brand connectome. What is this? and how can marketers influence it? So the brand connectome is a network of cumulative memories that gets glued to your brand over time.

14:02If you're a brand like McDonald's or Pepsi, that's been around a very long time, some of your memories about that brand go back to childhood. So it's cumulative. And the brand connectome is the representation of that in the subconscious mind. I think of a brand or the brand connectome like a tree. You plant your seed in the unconscious mind and it takes root. And as you add positive and negative associations to that seedling, it grows from the seed into hopefully a full grown tree. And there are two really important rules about growing brands in the unconscious mind. One, you want to have the largest physical footprint in the brain that you can have.

14:49So this is like a game of monopoly. Whoever owns the most real estate, the most physical real estate in the brain wins. And secondly, you want to have more positive than negative associations. So large and positive. Those are really the only two important rules that matter when it comes to marketing. And here's the really powerful thing. There's a direct connection between the size and health of your brand connectome and revenue growth. So all your entrepreneurs out there, if they want to scale their company, they have to first scale their brand in people's minds. The larger your brand connectome, the larger your business.

15:31The smaller your brand connectome, the smaller your business. It's that simple. There's a direct connection. Well, we are all entrepreneurs. We are Fire Nation. We're small business owners, solopreneurs, sidepreneurs. So how can we apply this information that you've been talking about today in our personal businesses? The more specific, the better. Whether you're a small company or you're in the Fortune 100, human beings make decisions the same way. They make decisions on instinct. So the great news for entrepreneurs is that they can actually use this information to to gain a competitive advantage, even if they don't have particularly deep pockets.

16:11So let's look at an example. Let's take Dollar Shave Club. This is a company that came out of nowhere to grow to become a unicorn practically overnight. So when CEO Michael Dubin created his video that went viral, by the way, 27 million views out of stocks in a couple of hours, a lot of people said, oh, Dollar Shave Club, that was an anomaly. That can never happen or very rarely happens. And that's not true at all. What Michael Dubin did, what Dollar Shave Club did, is that he used a formula that we've discovered to be the key to changing subconscious brand preference. He expanded the brand's positive associations in customers' minds overnight so that it became an automatic involuntary choice.

17:01And if you look at the video, and maybe we can put that in the show notes, he added very rapidly a myriad of positive associations to his brand, good value, high quality, practicality, direct delivery, job creation. He's creating jobs for people and a very quick understanding of what people need and what they don't in a razor. And he just as rapidly added a whole bunch of negative associations to his competition, the Gillettes of the world. Quoting from the video, he said, does your razor really need a flashlight, a vibrating head, a back scratcher, and 10 blades? Of course it doesn't. So that's a magic formula.

17:45He created many positive associations for his brand and simultaneously gave many negative associations to a large dominant competitor, that one-two punch enabled him to make tremendous inroads in this behemoth and the razor business overnight. It's really fascinating. And I love that example specifically because Fire Nation, if you think about it, these big behemoths like Gillette and all of these companies, they were actually forced to continue to add all of these little functions. Because otherwise, it's like, why would somebody ever trade up? because if they just keep coming out with the same thing, well, I have that thing.

18:23I don't need that. I'm just going to keep buying razors from you. So no, they had to add a vibrator. No, this one vibrates now. And then there's a flashlight on this one. And then there's this on that one and that on this one. And they had to keep doing that. Otherwise, people who had just the actual razor, not the blade itself, would just keep using that forever and ever and ever. And they wanted to keep selling the other thing as well. And then here you have somebody swoop in, say, I'm going to disrupt this. I'm going to make fun of them because they should be made fun of for all these reasons.

18:51But the reality was they were forced to do that, but he was still able to take advantage of it in a great entrepreneurial way. So Leslie, you've dropped a ton of value here today. Give us the one key takeaway that you really wanna make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today. Then tell us how we can connect with you, any call to action that we may have or that you may have for us. and then we'll say goodbye. My big advice is don't follow the classic marketing rules. Following them is a recipe for slow growth. There are a whole bunch of these marketing rules that were created, quite frankly, in the days of madmen.

19:34Uniqueness is the key to success. Differentiate or die. Cater to your current customers, not your new customers. Most of these rules were created before we knew how the brain worked, before behavioral science. So we give our clients a new rule book to follow. And that's what I'm trying to share with your audience today. One that leverages the fact that it's the subconscious brain that makes most brand decisions. If you follow this new set of rules, you should have success much faster and more easily. And how can Fire Nation connect with you and any call to action you have for us? Yeah, we put together some of the most important principles in a free growth triggers action guide that we created, especially through your audience.

20:20And everything they need is right there. The inside scoop on really what moves the needle, what works and what doesn't, that we've gleaned from 25 years of marketing projects with our Fortune 500 clients. And it's something that we haven't shared until now outside of our own clients. they can get it at lesliezane.com backslash fire and i and i hope that they'll find it super useful and and helpful and i look forward to connecting with people fire nation you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with and you've been hanging out with lz and jld today so keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com and type leslie l-e-s-l-i-e in the search bar her show notes page will pop up with everything that we've been talking about here today.

21:07And Leslie, one more time, what was that URL for Fire Nation? Lesliezane.com backslash fire. Leslie, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. It was so much fun. Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having me. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Leslie and Fire Nation. If you've ever thought about creating a podcast of your very own, the podcast journal is for you. It is gorgeous. It is faux leather and it will guide you step by step in both the creation and the launch of your podcast in 50 days.

21:45Visit the podcast journal.com the podcast journal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. If you've ever considered launching a show on YouTube, I may have the solution for you after launching a very successful show on YouTube in 2024, MicroStrategy Today. I've learned a lot on what it takes to create a successful show and have launched a one-on-one mentorship program called YouTube 100. If you want to jump on a call and learn more about this program, shoot me an email, john at eofire.com. This is the year of YouTube. Let's go.