Connection Through Personal Branding | Leslie Zane

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1:53Visit bjs.com slash Thanksgiving and get the same great savings online as in Club. Think of this as a game of Monopoly. Whoever owns the most physical real estate in other people's minds wins. Welcome to the Art of Charm podcast, where we break down the science of powerful communication and winning mindsets so you have the cheat code to succeed with people. Every episode is jam-packed with actionable steps to unlock the hidden superpowers inside of you. Level up with us each week by listening to interviews with the best in business, psychology, and relationships. We distill thousands of hours of research into the most effective tools and the latest science so you can start winning today.

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3:08All right, let's kick off today's show. Today, we're talking with Leslie Zane. Leslie is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker, and an authority in accelerating brand and business growth. In 1995, she founded Triggers, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science. And she's the author of the book, The Power of Instinct, The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. Today, she shares why you need a personal brand to stand out and accelerate your career, how to use the same psychology big brands like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Nike use to stand out and persuade, why tapping into your instinctual subconscious is the key to becoming influential and the secret to understanding the brain connectome to build authority.

3:48Welcome to the show, Leslie. So great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. John and I are huge fans of behavioral science. It's influenced our own careers. We'd love to learn what intrigued you about behavioral science and how it's influenced your career. Well, if you've ever tried to change somebody's mind, you know how incredibly hard that is. But that's what companies and brands have been trying to do for 100 years. And the traditional approach is to try to persuade the conscious mind to do what you want it to do. And that simply doesn't work. So in my book, The Power of Instinct, I teach people and organizations how to harness the instinctive mind via cognitive shortcuts.

4:30And you can use those to scale your business, your brand, your idea, your personal brand, all of that much faster than going against that very resistant conscious mind. It's basically the path of least resistance to a sale. I know for many of us, we rationalize our decision making through our conscious mind. So we often give it more power than it actually has. So it might be helpful for our audience to learn a little bit more about how the brain works and how we actually make these decisions. Our brain has two mechanisms. our primary mechanism is actually our instinctive mind that's making decisions on autopilot all the time and we just don't realize it and to your point the conscious mind is a post-decision rationalization mechanism essentially that comes in after the fact but around 95 percent of the decisions that we make are made by our instinctive mind which is really the opposite of what we were taught in marketing and in business school, the premise is that you can control people's decisions.

5:36You can get them to change from one brand to another, and we can basically persuade people to do what we want them to do. But the fact is that the conscious mind is very resistant to change. It is skeptical, it thinks it knows best, and it doesn't want to do what you tell it to do. That is the key reason why persuasion just doesn't work, because you're running up against that very resistant conscious mind. It turns out that the instinctive mind, which actually is making 95 % of the decisions that we make anyway, is much more malleable. And ideas seep in there much more easily. And so you can influence that subconscious, instinctive, non-conscious, whatever you want to call it, mind to your advantage, to get people to do what you want them to do.

6:26Buy your brand, buy your idea, get your partner to take out the garbage, whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish. Get your kid into an Ivy League school. At the end of the day, we're all marketers. We may not think of ourselves that way, but we are all marketers. Everybody is selling something. Everybody is trying to do something with their personal brand, with their business. All of these things are within your grasp and you actually can be empowered to be much more effective if you know these new rules of engagement. Now, there is a concept in the book that was a little unfamiliar to me and I'd love to unpack for our audience and this idea of the connectome and how we've started to study the brain recently and recognize all the connections that are happening and developing through neurogenesis.

7:12You know, the old way of thinking was you can't teach an old dog new tricks and that these pathways were wired and it was very difficult to change. But new science shows that the brain is malleable and changes quite often. A hundred percent. That is exactly true. So what is the brand connectome? The brand connectome is the cumulative memories that have gotten sort of glued to your brand in people's minds over time. Some going as far back as childhood. So if it's, you know, Pepsi and Coke or McDonald's, these are brands that you have many, many memories. attached to. And so your choice to buy one brand over another is very much driven by those cumulative memories and maybe even the brand that you grew up with in your household that your mother served.

7:59So the brand connectome is really useful because what we now understand about it is that the larger that brand connectome in people's minds, the more people instinctively reach for that brand. Contrary to the old thinking that a brand should only stand for one thing, a successful brand, a successful brand connect home actually has to have a myriad, an abundance of connections in your mind to many things, to many things in your mind, not just stand for one thing. So if you're Volvo and you just stand for safety, you're really going to stand for too little in the mind. You also want to stand for advanced technology and a good appearance and fits your whole family and like all of the many associations.

8:48Essentially, a brand is known by the associations it keeps. It's not about your logo, your product, your package, or even your personal logo if you're a personal brand. It's about the connections and associations your brand is connected to who your friends are, what platforms you go on, the books that you read, who your friends are. It's really all of those connections that define what a brand is. And if we're cognizant of that, we can build our brands much more successfully and much more easily. You give this great example in the book around the Harry Potter books and just how they grew in popularity compared to other children's stories that have very similar themes in hero's journeys, but have not nearly reached the level of popularity as Harry Potter.

9:35That's such a great, a great point. And I was fascinated by Harry Potter myself. I read the story to my, to my older son. I got tired out for the second son, but for the first son, I read like the whole book from beginning to end. And, and I was fascinated by it, I thought that there was more that was going on there than just that it was a coming of age story about this kid who has magical powers. And to your point, there were many other stories like that out there. But what distinguishes Harry Potter from all those other books is that Harry Potter is entering a world. When you go into that franchise, you are entering the world of Harry Potter.

10:23And it has cities and it has train stations and it has universities and it has sororities and fraternities, you know, the four schools, Slytherin, et cetera. It has sports, it has the Olympics, you know, Quidditch. It has all the many things that we have in our own world. So essentially it's a mirror image of our world here, but the difference is they put a magical twist on all those things. So I kind of think of it like, here's our world, here's the Harry Potter world on top. And we have all the same connections to Harry Potter that we have in our world, which is what makes it so relevant, but with that magical twist on all those things.

11:05But that's what makes it so salient in people's minds. You have all these amazing positive associations on the sports, on the sororities and fraternities and going to university and coming home for Christmas vacation and going on adventures with your friends. Like they have all the same things, but you're just doing it in this magical way. So by having such a similarity and overlap, you can reach and connect with so many viewers and readers of that book in a way that moves them to buy your tickets to the rides, to get all the memorabilia and get so engrossed and dress up for Halloween as those characters, whereas some of those other children's books that have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years don't have nearly the salience.

11:52That's right. It's a$40 million franchise. When you think about the Lego games and the movies and the books and the Disney ride, all of that all taken together, it's just a huge success. When you think about what is really going on here. Harry Potter has taken a seed of an idea and grown it in people's minds so that it has all these many different neural pathways. And so I think it's useful to just think about this almost like a metaphor. When you're building a brand, you're planting a seed in other people's minds and you want to feed it nutrients. And the nutrients in this case are water, sun, soil.

12:38In our world, this is positive associations and positive connections. And the more associations that we connect with that brand, the more that seed is going to turn into a seedling, is going to turn into a plant. It's going to put down a root system and it's going to, you know, little by little, sprawl throughout, sprout throughout the brain so that it encompasses more physical terrain in the human brain. And that is really what we are doing as people who build brands. We are gardeners planting a seed and we need to grow our brand in people's minds physically so that it has more touch points, more connections in other people's minds.

13:24It's not about you. It's about the connections that the brand makes to other people in their minds. What we really need to do is think about how do we grow that brand connectome on an accelerated pace. And that's the challenge you're asking me. What do I do if I'm a new brand and I need to build my brand connectome overnight? And the answer to that is you actually can do it. You actually can do it. Sure, the legacy brands will always have a tremendous sort of built-in advantage, but there's a million cases of small brands in categories that have overtaken those big brands and done it very quickly.

14:03I mean, just look at Dollar Shave Club. Dollar Shave Club with one video, one 60-second video that happened to have gone viral. They hit all the right things and they sort of targeted the bigger brands, the Schicks, the Gillettes, without naming them specifically. But they called out implicitly those bigger brands by talking about all the strengths of Dollar Shave Club, all the vulnerabilities of those big brands. And they had a series of what I will call triggers, which I'll define in a moment. And they packed those into that 60-second video to the point that between zero and 60, they were able to make these tremendous inroads in these gigantic legacy brands pretty much overnight.

14:50And so it is absolutely possible for a small brand just starting out to take a big chunk of market share from a legacy brand if you have the right recipe. I think what also played in their favor is they were able to take aim at the old way of doing things. So the old way that these razors were made, the old way that you purchased those razors, the old way that you dealt with razors, they were able to take aim and choose that as its enemy, right? And show, give you a new way. Well, now this replaces those connections, right? So now I have a better way that I want to view shaving. I don't want to have to go to the store to purchase this.

15:36I do want fresh, amazing razors every time that I shave and never have to worry about it. Again, that's a thing now that I don't have to think about on my grocery list. And everyone that came into the market at that time and saw the path that was laid out in front of them because of Dollar Shave Club, those connections were very easy for everybody to make. Well, let me just say how smart that is because that's exactly what they did. What you are talking about is the fact that the brain is a relativity machine. If you're up on Pepsi, you're down on Coke. If you're up on Coke, you're down on Pepsi.

16:16And so what they created, what Dollar Shave Club created in that moment was the notion of a foil. They weren't just selling Dollar Shave Club. They were selling Dollar Shave Club against the Gillettes and the Schicks of the world. That was the foil. And the brain loves contrast. And so that's one of the most successful techniques that you can use in branding, which is to elevate your brand and simultaneously take down the other guy. And that doesn't sound very nice, but that's how competitive strategy works. And you can do it in a way without being overt because they were not overt in the Dollar Shave Club example.

16:56They were selling against these things, but you didn't know exactly who they were talking about. But, you know, people who shave knew that they were using a Gillette razor or a Schick razor. And it was very clear to them that this was a better alternative because it was cheaper. It was high quality. They employ people of diverse backgrounds, like all the good things that they packed into that message. And you're not paying for all that innovation and creating, you know, razors that have an air conditioner, a hammer, a flashlight, you know, all of that gadgetry. You just need a simple razor. And the CEO is very relatable.

17:37And I think when you start to talk about these large incumbent brands, you know, there's a big backlash against large corporations and the owners and how much money they're making. So you see this upstart guy. He's very relatable. He's using his product and he's touting a new way to shave with fresh blades. And that resonance, of course, created the virality. And then everyone I knew at that time was buying Dollar Shave Club and talking about it. And we would host all of our clients at the house. And so many of them at that point were using Dollar Shave that they were struggling to tell whose razors was which.

18:08100%. Yeah, no, it was a very clever strategy. He was very relatable. and even the environment that he was in. He looked like he was in his own garage instead of like a fancy skyscraper with glamorous furniture, which would suggest to the consumer that you're putting your money in the wrong place, that you're putting it into the environment that you work in, into fancy offices, and that the consumer's paying for that. The other thing that worked in their favor was to gather the attention that they deserved for the new product they had disruption on their side. So a disruption of the status quo of shaving.

18:48Every man knows the issues of shaving every day or every other day, however that goes out. So to hear that there is a disruption in your everyday routine and life, that puts eyeballs on there's a disruption. What do you have for me? What is the big commotion? Oh, I never have to think about this ever again. I just sign here. Great. 100%. Well, I was at a weekend event with some friends, and it was funny. You know, we grew up with the Pepsi Coke challenge, but none of my friends were drinking Pepsi or Coke. They were reaching for Olipop and Poppy and these new upstarts that are touting gut health and a lowering of sugar.

19:26So even when you are a mega brand that has a huge brand connectome, there are trends that you need to be following. And people now looking for healthy alternatives, less sugar. We recognize the impact that all the sugar is having on us. So now we're seeing these brands enter a huge industry and take on the big dogs around this new way of viewing drinking your soda. Exactly. And every brand is vulnerable. And these legacy brands, which is actually who the majority of our clients are, these legacy brands need to constantly evolve. If you're not growing and growing new branches and new neural pathways in the connectome and making new connections in people's minds, then you're dying.

20:15And it really is very much like a plant or a tree. I think about a brand very much that way, that we have to constantly tend to our tree, constantly tend to our brand connectome to keep it healthy. And the way to keep it healthy is to reinforce the positive associations that your brand stands for. Stop the negative associations, stop those right away that get into the brand connectome that are hurting you because those hold back growth. And then add new positive associations that those new younger consumers need in order to come over that you haven't quite won over yet. So it's a very simple recipe.

20:57Keep, stop, add. And that's a really good sort of construct for the audience to know about in terms of renovating their own brands. You know, keep, stop, add. Keep the positive things you're known for. Keep reinforcing those. It's almost like studying or you study for something, you learn it better. And that's how the brain works. You can't assume that people know those things about you. You got to keep telling people, telling new generations the good things about you. Second, you need to stop the negative associations that are creating barriers for the growth target to come over. And then three, add positive associations in the form of triggers, which we haven't talked about yet.

21:39And I want to tell you all about because I think they're super useful as a way of accelerating growth of your brand. Yeah, a great example of that in the book that I thoroughly enjoyed was M &M's. So classically, I grew up on M &M's having chocolate in them, and then all of a sudden there's peanuts. But recognizing that there's a trend to snacking, M &M's capitalized on adding new ingredients that people were looking for to snack on wrapped in their candy coating. And that allowed them to stay relevant and add new connectomes as all these other upstarts were entering the market. And I thought that was a really fascinating story that you shared.

22:15Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, candy is not as permissible as snacking is, right? Candy, you're going to say, oh, maybe I should only have one of those, one a week, two a week, whatever. But snacking, you do that all the time. And so the more that M &M's associated itself with snacking, which would be pretzels and nuts, peanut butter, things that are more food-like as opposed to candy-like, the more they were able to grow their franchise and develop all these different innovations and kind of surround the consumer. Now they're bridging two categories. They're in candy, but they're almost acting more like a snack.

22:54And that drives permissibility and permissibility drives usage. So let's talk about these growth triggers and how our audience can start to recognize them and then utilize them in their own brands. I use this example all the time because it's just really simple for everyone to understand. If we were in the bottled water category and you looked at a snow-capped mountain, let's play the game. What are the associations that would come to mind when you would see a snow-capped mountain in the bottled water category? Pure, crisp, refreshing, natural. There you go. So everybody does that. What you just did is you pull to mind all the associations that you have baked into your neural pathways, baked into your memory about Snowcap Mountain.

23:40And the advertiser or the person that's selling the bottled water, they don't need to say any of those things. That's how efficient the Snowcap Mountain is. So the definition of a growth trigger is that it's a succinct code or cue in any of the five senses, which means could be visual, could be verbal, could be olfactory, could be a smell, could be tactile. Could be a taste trigger. But let's, for the moment, since we're talking about marketing, focus on visual and verbal triggers. So the Snowcap Mountain is an image trigger, a visual trigger, because it has all these positive associations baked into it.

24:19And if I connect my brand to that growth trigger, now my brand inherits all those positive associations. Pure, pristine, eco-friendly, water from the glaciers, all of these positive things. And the perceptions of my brand become elevated to the point of this is a superior bottled water. And it's a beautiful thing. So imagine if I give you the 25 triggers for your brand and you pack those into your communications, into your marketing materials, or even to your conversation, if you're pitching your company services, now I'm going to accelerate the growth of the brand connectome. because all those positive associations from the snowcap mountain are going to come onto my brand.

25:09And that's essentially how this works. So you take an existing brand connectome that may be small and lacks salience, and you add these triggers that are packed with all these positive associations, and my brand connectome is going to grow and sprout new pathways that it didn't have before. and now my brand is going to take over more of your mind. Think of this as a game of monopoly. Whoever owns the most physical real estate in other people's minds wins.

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26:55Apply today at theartofcharm.com slash elite now. And recognizing that it then subconsciously becomes that instinctual purchase. A hundred percent. So if I have salience, if my brand has a large physical footprint in people's minds, then I'm going to instinctively reach for that. Now, if I give you a coupon or if I take a lot of money off, I can get you to buy, but it's more likely going to just be fleeting because I haven't built those neural pathways. So yes, you can go the conscious route and promote your brand, take price off, give people coupons, promotional incentives, rewards, all those things.

27:43I can do those things. But I'm telling you that you're not going to get sustainable growth from that. The only way to get sustainable growth is to grow that brand connectome to your point so that the brand footprint, the physical brand footprint is larger in other people's minds. And that is going to give me instinctive brand preference where they keep buying you over and over again. And it's the brand connectome that is making that happen. So you think you're calling the shots. You're not calling the shots. You're not choosing your brands. Your brand connectome is literally driving you to buy that same brand over and over again, and you are powerless to resist.

28:24So in thinking about from a brand's perspective, is it important to engage all five senses with triggers? How do you go about designing these growth triggers from a brand's perspective to grow? It would be great if you could have all of the five senses. But even if you just have two of them, the verbal and the visual, you can get a lot done. So again, I don't know what kind of business we're talking about. Do you own a brand that you're selling in stores? Is it your personal brand? Is it your business? Like, what are you selling? But in any of those cases, you also want to put some of those triggers into your sort of verbal pitch that you might have when you're talking about your company, your elevator pitch, or if you were even, I don't know, you know, going up for a new job and you were talking about a job interview and you wanted to get a promotion or any of those things.