684: Founder and CEO of Triggers, Leslie Zane. The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion (Strategy Skills classics)

0:02And when there is no vision, the people perish. We choose to go to the moon. If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

0:44Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast. I'm your host, Krista Parova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It is a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are currently updating your resume, you can get McKinsey and BCG winning resume. It is a resume that got offers from both firms, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. Today, we are speaking with Leslie Zane, an alumna of Yale and Harvard Business School, ex-Bain consultant.

1:24Many of us are consultants, so we have similar mindset, always helps have that background. Former senior director at Revlon, also a world-winning marketer, the ex-speaker, and also currently a CEO of Triggers that serves Fortune 500 companies. Welcome, Leslie. So great to have you with us.

1:42Leslie Zane: Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I love your show. This is going to be a lot of fun. Absolutely, it will be. So let's start with the age of instinct. What do you mean by that? What do we need to know? So I believe that we are in the age of instinct. If you think about the eras that we've gone through as marketers, as brand people, as business people, first we thought that demographics was all that was important back in the 1960s. Then we went through this era of segmentation. Then we went to brand purpose. And we keep on sort of grasping for the next shiny object that is supposed to give us the answer to everything that's just going to drive growth.

2:26Leslie Zane: And it turns out that every single one of those eras has been a little bit disappointing because there really isn't a magic bullet. But what we do know is that understanding and harnessing the instinctive mind, which makes the majority of our decisions, that's the era we're in now. And I would say it's the most promising to actually get to the heart of growth, to actually crack the code on what drives growth. And I'll tell you more about that as we go on. But the clues that we are in the age of instinct, one only has to look at the tremendous rise of ChatGBT. ChatGBT proves that we are in the age of instinct because Jeffrey Hinton, who was considered the godfather of or grandfather of AI, what he said is that the big breakthrough came when they realized that the brain is not a sequential decision-making machine, but rather that the brain is an analogic machine.

3:27Leslie Zane: It connects dots. It works in multiple ways simultaneously. The brain is basically a dot connecting machine. And so once they realized that, that was the big unlock for AI. And that happens to be the essence of instinct and all the work that we do at Triggers Brand Consulting. And the work you do is so fascinating. I feel that everyone needs to read your book. So let's talk about unconscious mind and how we as companies can get understanding on what our consumers are thinking on unconscious level so that we can help create positive associations related to our brand and actually deliver the value we want to deliver to the world and get noticed.

4:15Leslie Zane: 100%. So I started this journey because I worked at Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson and all these big, wonderful companies. And here I was working on these brands, very famous big brands, and some of them weren't growing. And I said, wait a minute, how can this be? Here I am at P &G. If P &G doesn't know how to consistently make marketing the engine of growth. That means nobody knows. And I quickly realized that we were stuck in a traditional marketing model of persuasion, basically trying to persuade people to do what we want them to do. And that is what traditional marketing has been all about.

4:57Leslie Zane: So I'm going to give you a coupon. I'm going to give you an incentive. I'm going to discount. I'm going to barrage you with messages. And it turns out that all those techniques go up against the conscious mind. And the conscious mind resists. It's rigid. It's resistant to change. It's skeptical. It's conscious. So it sees you coming. And so it says, I'm not going to do what you want me to do. That's the conscious mind. That's the problem with marketing to the conscious mind. So making change there, getting people to change from one brand to another, driving growth, That's going to be a very, very slow process.

5:36Leslie Zane: What we realized is that the instinctive mind, which, by the way, makes the majority of decisions, 95 percent. Just ask Daniel Kahneman and read all of his work and you'll see you'll understand that the instinctive mind is making the majority of decisions. So why are we spending any time at all trying to persuade that conscious mind? That's not where the decisions are made anyway. They're made in our memories, and we actually have very little control over the decisions we make. We make them instinctively. So that's where we want to operate. And I've spent my entire career developing a system for driving growth, leveraging the instinctive mind, which is far more malleable than the conscious mind.

6:21Leslie, you know, it's very interesting because we know that most of our decisions, most of our behavior throughout the day is on autopilot. But we have not connected it. Most people have not connected it to how we market our products and services.

6:37Leslie Zane: I love what you're saying. That's exactly right. That you just literally articulated the problem. And you've got to understand, I have been talking about this for 30 years. Since 30 years ago, I said we're over incentivizing people. And all of these coupons and discounts and promotions, They're getting a fleeting bump, but we're not instinctively changing people's preferences. When you look at somebody shopping in a supermarket, they are exactly as you say on autopilot. Just watch how somebody shops. They have their go-to brands. They go into the supermarket. They grab their go-to brands. They put them in their cart and they walk out.

7:21Leslie Zane: They're not sitting there contemplating the benefits of this one, the benefits of that one, making a long list. Which one is better? They just reach and they go. Some people might even call it sleep shopping. They're sleep shopping. So what we want to do is we need to understand where is that instinct coming from? Because when you have instinctive brand preference, that's the best thing you can have. That's better than loyalty. That's better than anything else. It means that their brains are hooked on your brand. And we'll talk more about how to make that happen. But the point is, once you have instinctive brand preference, consumers are powerless to resist.

8:05Leslie Zane: And that's how you drive growth. So let's talk about how can companies actually build those positive associations and change what our clients, customers, prospective customers and clients actually think about our brand and maximize chances that they would instinctively give us a chance. Absolutely. So strategists love constructs. So I am going to give you a new construct today. And the construct is the brand connectome. The brand connectome, a model of which is behind me, that orange object, that three-dimensional object, is the representation of what a brand looks in the subconscious mind of consumers.

8:50Leslie Zane: And what it really is, is the cumulative memories connected to the brand in people's minds, and in some cases, going all the way back to childhood. So think of the central node, that center ball, as the brand itself, and then the series of arms or branches that are connected to it are the neural pathways that have formed that actually have physicality. This is a physical thing in the brain. A brand is not this wispy thing. It is actually a physical thing in people's minds. These branches have been laid down over time. And what lives on these branches are positive and negative associations. So there's three rules for a healthy brand connectome.

9:39Leslie Zane: And that's how the construct works. First of all, you want the brand connectome to be large. You need to have a lot of salience because when you have a lot of salience in the mind, then it becomes your instinctive go-to. Think of it like a game of Monopoly. Whoever owns the most terrain or territory in the brain wins. So salience is number one. You want it to be large. And that comes from the largest, having a lot of connections in people's minds. Second, you want to have relevance. And that comes from having more positive associations rather than negative ones. Negative associations hold back growth.

10:20Leslie Zane: Think about it this way. If my growth target, the prospects, prospective users, the people I don't have, or even non-users, if they have negative associations about your brand in their minds, you're going to be, I don't care if you spend$100 million on advertising and marketing, they're not going to come over because they have barriers up. So you want to have very few negative associations. You want a high ratio of positive to negative associations. And third, you want clarity and distinctiveness. And you don't need to have uniqueness. And this is another big fallacy in marketing. You want to have distinctiveness, which is different than uniqueness.

11:01Leslie Zane: Distinctiveness is basically when you take something familiar and you put a creative twist on it to make it distinctively ownable to your brand. But it doesn't need to be something from Mars because in fact, uniqueness actually turns people off. It's alienating. We connect with the things we know and we push away the things we don't know. Fascinating. I love this concept. So let's break it down a little bit now, go a little bit deeper. So large, few negative associations, clarity and distinctiveness. So for a brand that is newer and needs to build out all those things, And let's say it is something like a content brand that produces educational resources, free and paid, some coaching, consulting, and some other products that help people.

11:51For example, if you take my company, and then we can look at other examples as well, if you would like. We also, of course, have other things as well. But I was wondering, so for a brand like that, how would you start building along those three components?

12:04Leslie Zane: Okay. So let's say you're a new brand. which is what you're newish, let's say. Your brand, think about it like a seed. I'm going to plant my seed in the brain and I need to add a lot of positive associations in order for the seedling to grow. Think of the positive associations like the soil, the water, and the sun. It's the nutrients I need to feed the seed to make it grow. So basically, you have to be, Chris, you have to be a gardener. You have to take your seed. You need to feed it and nurture it. All these positive associations in people's minds. Lots of positive associations. Lots of positive connections.

12:49Leslie Zane: Because little by little, then the seed will sprout. It'll turn into a seedling. It'll take on roots. It'll hopefully, please, you know, if we keep doing it right, it will turn into a full-grown tree. And the moment your brand is a bigger tree or has a bigger canopy than the brand connectome of your competition, then people are going to switch over to you. Because this is about that salience, that growth, and positive and clear, all those three things. It's all about growth. And that's a really interesting thing and an interesting way to think about this whole area. We're actually talking, we talk about business growth, but the first thing that has to grow is the brand or the business or the company.

13:42Leslie Zane: It has to grow in people's minds. So you cannot increase your share of market until you increase your share of mind. And then once it grows and you're thriving, then the revenue and the sales will follow. Such an important thing you said. So the prospective customers and clients you want to attract to your products and services will switch from your competitor when your brand connectum is bigger in their minds and also have more positive associations versus negative. It's just the more attractive, I guess, brighter, shining brighter in their mind versus that of competitor that they may be currently using.

14:23Leslie Zane: Exactly. It's about making more connections. And a lot of people make the mistake. They think that they're just selling their product benefits or their features or their particular services. And they tend to approach marketing in a very isolated way. And that's actually the opposite of what we need to do. You need to connect your brand to everything in people's lives. The more connections it has, the more it sprouts because those little arms of the connectome, they stretch out to reach different things that already exist in your brain. And it just starts to go sprawling. Those roots stretch out and cover more and more brain terrain.

15:07Leslie Zane: So as an example, I'm a big fan of partnerships. because if I connect my brand to three or four other companies or organizations out there, then I'm going to make my connectome sprout more easily than if I just stay by myself, you know, completely isolated, basically with my arms cut off, if that makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. So what are some of the specific things, for example, my company could do differently versus the way most people currently market their services. So one of the, again, sort of myths in marketing is that we want to create an emotional positioning. Now, it's true that people instinctively connect with human brands.

15:59Leslie Zane: So you would want to definitely sort of tell your story, you know, how you came to this country, how you got started, your early years, your founding story, why you even care about this whole area, your heritage, and why this all matters to you, your passion, all of that matters. But what people don't understand is that that alone is not going to win the day because emotion goes in one ear and out the other. Emotional connection is the outcome we want. We people, but we don't get there by being emotional or saying emotional things. I can't get somebody to love my brand. You have to earn that. And the way you earn it is through distinctive brand assets that go into memory structure.

16:53Leslie Zane: So distinctive brand assets are these very sticky codes and cues that sink into people's memory structure and they get lodged on those neural pathways that I was talking about. And the more you have of them, the better. So everybody will kind of create a logo, but even a logo isn't enough. You want to have distinctive brand assets for other things. Maybe you want to have a distinctive brand asset to represent your expertise or a distinctive brand asset to represent your benefit or even to have a brand world as your distinctive brand asset. So what's an example of a distinctive brand asset? I'm going to explain a distinctive brand asset and a distinctive brand trigger.

17:42Leslie Zane: So a distinctive brand asset would be something like the Geico Gecko. When you see the Gecko, you think of GEICO and you know that that belongs to that brand. But is that really a trigger? Is that really a cognitive shortcut that has tons of positive associations? I'm not so sure. But something like a snow-capped mountain in the bottled water category, that is a trigger, an image trigger, we would call it, because the snow-capped mountain is packed with positive associations. It's pure, it's pristine, it's eco-friendly, it's glacier water, untouched by human hands. All those associations are imbued and embedded in that snow-capped mountain without saying any of them.

18:33Leslie Zane: So if I put a snow-capped mountain on my brand of bottled water, I'm going to inherit all those positive associations for my brand very quickly. And if I go a step further and not just take any snow-capped mountain, but make it distinctive to Aquafina with an abstract design and two peaks and a little sunset, so it becomes sort of branded and distinctively ownable to Aquafina, then I'm going to create something that is both distinctive, but still riding familiar neural pathways of what snow-capped mountains mean in people's minds. And so that's what people want to do as a business leader. You want to make sure you have a portfolio of not just distinctive brand assets, but of distinctive brand triggers because they have more meaning and they create more positive associations in the mind.

19:29What brand trigger do you use for your company if you have any? Is it this thing behind you?

19:35Leslie Zane: So that is the brand connectome. But I love your question. I love your questions. They're so wonderful. This is the icon that we use for my company. It's a brain. It happens to be the profile of a woman because we're a woman-founded company. And it's got a brain and then a spark in the brain, which is supposed to be like the trigger. So somebody came up to me a few years ago and said, Leslie, your logo is dated. You need to change your branding. And so we tested 150 other symbols and everybody kept coming back to this one because I think it's a trigger. I think it actually communicates what it is that we stand for.

20:24Leslie Zane: We tried to do something different. And we just came back to the fact that this had more meaning and more positive associations for people. I love it. I love the color. And by the way, you said it is a female, but it's hard to say. So I think even men would not be. It's pretty neutral. It is pretty neutral. And everyone wants to be bright. So there are a lot of positive associations. Very, very interesting. Could you give us some other examples? Because I think our listeners now thinking very hard what they could use for their companies. Maybe you have some. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that category triggers are a great place to start.

21:07Leslie Zane: So depending on the business that you're in, you're in a, I don't know, a child care business or you're in a party planning business, a good place to start is what are the triggers that are already used in that category? And many people will say, well, I don't want to use that because it's generic, it's cliche, it's already well utilized, well worn. And my answer to that is, yeah, but it does help communicate your category. So that's why I say distinctiveness is more important than uniqueness. because what you can do is take a category trigger and then just sort of put a little twist on it and make it different enough to make it your own.

21:54Leslie Zane: And that's one of the places that I would start. I would see what other companies are doing. I would look online. But you want it to be, you want it to, the test is it's got to communicate instantly. I'm snapping my fingers here. And it's got to be packed with positive associations and I think there's a way to sort of create a branded category trigger, if you know what I mean. I remember an example from one of your talks. It was related to baby care products and you were suggesting to put a dad in some kind of promotional asset and I guess that would be an example of category trigger because it has very positive associations.

22:34Leslie Zane: So do you want to hear the story? Because it's a pretty good story. That's great. So I was working at a very large baby care company many, many years ago. And the business was not doing all that well. We had lost a lot of share to Men in Baby Magic and to even private label. And so, you know, what were we going to do? And what I had noticed was that all of our advertising was still just moms and babies in the traditional Madonna and child, you know, pose. and it was just like wallpaper, very, very generic. But I had noticed that dads at that time were getting more involved in caregiving. They were changing diapers.

23:17Leslie Zane: They were taking their kids to soccer games. And so this was my moment. I put on my skirt suit, my pussy bow blouse, my power watch, and the highest pair of heels that I could find. And I marched into my boss's office and I said, I know what we need to do to turn around the business. We need to put the first father in a baby shampoo commercial. And he said, you're crazy. It's moms that buy these products, not dads. And there's no research to support anything you're saying. So he showed me the door. And I kept on advocating. You don't know me that well yet, Chris, but I don't take no for an answer.

24:04and I'm very persistent, which people either love or hate.

24:09Leslie Zane: And I kept on advocating for this. And that year came my performance review. And I remember it to this day. Leslie is too passionate about putting fathers in advertising. And this is an executional concern, not a strategic one. Oh my God, this was like a dagger in my heart. I had been told at Bain and at P &G that strategy was my superpower. So I was devastated. But I kept on advocating. And I think at a certain point, they just gave in out of just sheer exhaustion. And what happened was the brand took off. They put the first father in the ad. It was the highest scoring commercial in the company's history.

24:55Leslie Zane: And the business started flying off the shelves. And really, that was an important moment for me because I had found my first trigger, my first creative twist on the familiar, a cognitive shortcut. Dad with baby was a creative twist on mom with baby. And people had all these positive associations with that dad and the baby. Progressive, he's giving mom a rest. By the way, he was a pretty cute dad. So the women really loved that. and it was a direct connection between what goes on in the subconscious mind and business growth. So it was very exciting. Can you share maybe some of the other brand category triggers so it is easier for our listeners to think what they could use?

25:44Leslie Zane: Sure. Well, in the Italian sauce category, plucking the red juicy tomato from the vine would be an example of a category trigger. Let's see. Give me another category and I'll try to think quickly. Orange juice would be the sun. It's sun, it's orange, it's yellow, it's bright, it's morning. So that tends to be a common category trigger in the orange juice category. What about the development space? Um, probably blackboards and chalk and, um, uh, a little red schoolhouse, uh, with a nice little path up to it, a pile of books. Those are all category, category triggers. And I'm not saying to per se use category triggers to necessarily do your branding.

26:42Leslie Zane: I'm just saying it's a good place to start for brainstorming. And then maybe you'll figure out what is your twist on that? What are you doing differently and distinctively in that category that could make it, you know, ownable to you? I mean, think of the name Netflix. That's a trigger, right? Flix is movies. It's cinema. And net is the internet and or streaming. So Netflix, I mean, that's, they took a so-called trigger and they put those two words together to create something completely new and different and ownable. But nobody said to them, well, you're using two terms that are too commonplace because once you put them together, they become new.

27:25Do you have anything that comes to mind related to management consulting space?

27:32Leslie Zane: Let's see. I mean, I would say that in management consulting, a lot of the brands tend to look pretty similar. and I think it's important to communicate wisdom. So I'm not a particular symbolism coming to mind right now, but I would think that, you know, as an example, actually one symbol is coming to mind. Bain & Company, for example, uses a red circle. I think it's a red circle with a red arrow kind of angled upward, which I think is symbolically and implicitly communicating the notion of growth. So we have sort of an upward slant in our minds as we think about growth. We think about the growth chart, whether it's a bar chart that's going from low to high.

28:20Leslie Zane: This kind of angle, I think, is how business people think about growth. And so I think Bain & Company is riding that desire, that implicit instinctive desire for its clients to want to drive growth. Fascinating. Lesleyan, you mentioned for training and development, very interesting ideas. You mentioned Little Red School with a path towards it. Do you think there's a positive association in people's minds because we kind of miss childhood and we miss this time when we could focus more on learning versus trying to make a living? I think that childhood has tremendous nostalgia and nostalgia is a really positive force in every brand that we've ever studied.

29:05Leslie Zane: nostalgia, if it has a nostalgic connection, if it's been around for a while, maybe handed down through generations from parents to children or even grandparents to parents to children, those brands tend to have a lot of longevity and they're riding this sort of powerful force. So I think the Little Red Schoolhouse, in many ways, it's like a throwback to an earlier time in contrast to our high-tech era. And I think there's a warmth and comfort that's interesting in juxtaposing something very advanced with something that's more, you know, homey and comforting. Let's think more about this. So for someone now listening and they are a leader within like organization or they are running their own, let's say, boutique consulting firm and they're thinking what Leslie's sharing is so interesting.

29:59I will read the book, but I feel like it's just so much that I don't understand. Once they read your book, what would be some next steps? Maybe some homework you could give to our listeners for those who want.

30:11Leslie Zane: Yeah. So interestingly, if you buy the book now, there is a free checklist that comes with the book. It's a great time to get it because that free checklist kind of gives you a list of here are all the things you should be thinking about in your business. So I would definitely recommend that. I can say that what is in the book, and the reason that I think it will be very helpful to people, is that what it is is really 10 rules that I've learned that we have to overturn. The old marketing, you have to remember that the old way of marketing was created at a time that we thought the conscious mind made all the decisions.

30:55Leslie Zane: So I learned over time, over my 30-year career, that these rules are actually holding back growth. Because just one example, uniqueness, that is what you're taught when you're a marketing person. You've got to stand out, be the purple cow, differentiate or die. But it turns out that our brains are hardwired for the familiar and to reject the unique. So one of the main marketing rules that we all live by in marketing is actually a recipe for turning people away. And so what I did in the book was I captured the 10 rules that I am saying we need to put in the garbage pail and we have to have 10 new rules that replace those rules.

31:42Leslie Zane: So each chapter takes down an old rule of marketing, gives you the new rule, and you can follow these rules in your daily job, in your daily business, and quite frankly, in your lives. Because some of the things that I talk about in the book have nothing to do with classic commercial brands. I talk about politics. I talk about elections, political parties. I talk about Taylor Swift. I talk about the Yankees. I really think that everything's a brand. We're all brands. You're a brand. I'm a brand. My mother is a brand. Where I went on vacation last is a brand. And we all actually are marketers. All of us are selling something, whether it's our personal brand, our business, whether we're trying to convince our children to do their homework or get our spouse to take out the garbage.

32:34Leslie Zane: You know, we're all selling something. We're all marketers. And so I wanted to provide a set of rules that could really be used in any situation. Leslie, and as we are speaking today about this important topic, I also was thinking how it's not only about growing your business and delivering value you can bring to the world to a large number of people who can find you and decide to work with you because of this new approach to marketing. But it's also about helping your current customers enjoy more being your customers. Well, what's so interesting about that is that every time we find the barriers that hold back growth with the growth target, the clients are always worried, well, how do we know that this new positioning for the growth target isn't going to turn off the current customer?

33:28Leslie Zane: because obviously we don't want to have a leaky bucket. We want to hold on to the old customers, the existing customers, and we want to bring in the new customers. And what we find every single time is that when we remove the barriers of the growth target, the people you don't have, everybody, the whole brand becomes elevated to everybody. And the core customer gets really, really excited that this is the brand that they were using all along And now it's even better because we built those new associations into the brand. Really, brands have to evolve. They can't stay stuck in their ways. And you don't want, you have to be really careful when you evolve your brand because you can make a mistake and you can change it too drastically.

34:20Leslie Zane: And then you really do, then you would have a disaster. You would lose more customers than you gained by making the change. So you don't want to do that. And you certainly don't want to lose distinctive brand assets in the process. So you have to be really careful and thoughtful about how you make change to your business and your branding. But a good recipe for evolution versus revolution is keep, stop, add. And this is one of the formulas that I provide in the book. Keep the positive associations that you already have with the existing customers. Keep those. Don't let go of those. They're really important.

34:59Leslie Zane: You want to find out what those are and hold on to them and keep reinforcing them because this is like learning. The more you reinforce it, the more it sticks. Then you want to stop the negative associations that are holding back growth with the growth target. And those you want to prune right away. and you can't get rid of a negative association by saying, no, I don't have this negative association. The only thing you can do is displace the negative association with a positive association. It's like a replacement strategy. And then you want to add the triggers that we were talking about, verbal and visual triggers that are packed with new positive associations that that growth target needs to come over.

35:43Leslie Zane: So keep, stop, add. If you do that, you're holding on to the things that your core customer finds precious about you. You're getting rid of those negative associations so that you let new people in to drive penetration and growth. And you're adding the triggers that basically increase the salience and positive associations of your connectome and the growth targets minds so that purchase becomes instinctive. Leslie, so how can we find out positive associations and negative associations our current clients and customers have about us? For example, us, we have clients who have been with us for 15 years and they're glad to get with me on the call and answer my questions.

36:27So if I would have conversations with them, what kind of questions can I ask to get to unconscious associations versus conscious answers?

36:37Leslie Zane: Love it. So the kind of research that you want to do is called memory elicitation. Because if I just ask conscious questions, then I'm going to get conscious answers. And those answers may may not be true. They actually may be misleading because I maintain that people don't even know why they buy the brands they do or why they listen to the podcast. they do or why, you know, they really don't know. So you can't trust conscious answers. This is why surveys in a presidential election, the polls are always wrong. They're always wrong every single time because they're asking conscious questions and something very different takes over in the voting booth.

37:26Leslie Zane: And that's instincts. Instinct takes over, which is completely different. So to get at people's instincts, we need to get into their memories. And so one of the things that I have in the book is some of the sample kinds of questions you would ask to start delving into people's memories. But a good first question is, you know, what's the first memory you have of this brand? You know, what's the first thing you can remember about it? What are some of the experiences that you had with the brand that are memorable? What's some of the imagery that you have in your mind about the brand? How do you see it?

38:07Leslie Zane: How does it come to life? If it was a person, what would it look like? So you start to uncover some of those more implicit kinds of positive and negative associations that you really want to know. And very importantly, do it on the competition as well. You want to understand what the positive and negative associations are of your competitors because it's really useful. First of all, you can learn something from them if they're doing something right, but also you can learn what their vulnerabilities are. And maybe you can take some customers from them and bring them over to you. Leslie, and do you have situations where you're working with clients and you see, and then you kind of make it clear for your client or in your work, you both understand basically that they thought that something is a positive association, but it's actually negative?

39:01Leslie Zane: Oh my God, that's such a great question. We see that all the time. A lot of associations that are positive can have a negative flip side. and it's really understanding what some of those negatives are to make sure that you're balancing them out because essentially what happens is that consumers come to their own narratives. They connect the dots in their minds about your brand in a way that may be different than the way you want to present yourself, different than the way you want your business or your brand to be portrayed. And that's primarily because, again, the brain is a dot connecting machine.

39:45Leslie Zane: So it's creating a narrative about your brand that may or may not be servicing you well. So you really want to understand some of those negative flip sides that may be coming from something that you've done or said inadvertently. And it's like, it's not your fault. It's just the story that people created about your brand. But knowing what that story is, is critical, Because otherwise you're developing a strategy by just throwing spaghetti against the wall. Sure, you may have some conscious information from brand health trackers, but that's very surface. You're not getting at the real heart of what holds back growth, which are those implicit barriers and the way to drive growth, which is the implicit drivers.

40:32Leslie, is there something that you wish I asked you and I didn't or anything else you wanted to share related to the book? And then also where can everyone learn more about you, get your book, anything you want to share?

40:45Leslie Zane: Well, if you'd like to talk a little bit about politics, we could talk for a moment about that. We're not going to convince anybody to vote for anybody. But if we just want to see how does this all of this thinking, how do these principles apply to the world of politics? It could just be fun to think about it. Would that be interesting? Of course, let's go for it. OK, awesome. So it turns out that political brands, political parties work the same way as Coke and Pepsi. right? So if you're a Pepsi user, you're instinctively and positively biased toward Pepsi and you're negatively biased toward Coke.

41:30Leslie Zane: And if you're a Coke user, then you're positively biased toward Coke and you're negatively biased toward Pepsi. So the brain is like a relativity machine. If one brand is up, the other one's down and vice versa. So the same is true in politics. If you are a Republican voter, then you have a very healthy, robust, large brand connectome that's filled, Republican connectome that's filled with positive associations. But your negative, I'm sorry, but your Democrat connectome is going to be a little bit smaller and have a lot of negative associations. And a Democrat is going to have the opposite, literally the opposite.

42:17Leslie Zane: They're going to have a very robust, positive Democrat connectome and a very small, a smaller Republican connectome that's going to have a lot of negative associations in it. So when these two people get together and try to talk politics, their connectomes, their brains are literally the mirror image of one another. And like holes of a magnet, they repel. So you ask yourself why at the last Thanksgiving was it impossible to have a conversation about politics without people getting red in the face and their hearts starting to beat very fast and everybody almost coming to blows? it's because these connectomes really are what drive us.

43:06Leslie Zane: And Professor Michael Platt at Wharton did some fascinating research where he found that if you criticize somebody else's brand that they feel very passionate about, the same part of the brain that feels pain lights up. So it literally is like feeling pain to you. That is fascinating. As we were talking now about politics, I thought of an association for my members that is negative for some and positive for others. And I guess this is another issue that your clients also facing. And so my example is one of the products that we offer to our clients, customers, members is membership on strategytraining.com.

43:45And it has over 6 ,500 amazing, very powerful episodes of very unique content. And what is interesting is that some members tell me that it's overwhelming. mean. It's too much, too many programs, too many episodes. I feel that I'm all behind. Some members love it and want more. So in a situation like that, when someone is facing a situation where they have negative and positive association, for some it is negative, for some positive, I guess it's just judgment call. You have to see what majority of your clients are thinking. What would be your thoughts when you encounter this issue?

44:21Leslie Zane: Which one does the growth target prefer? The people that you're trying to get? Or are you talking only about your existing customers? I was talking about my existing customers that currently using the membership. I would say maybe that feedback is reasonable feedback that maybe there's a way to, well, first of all, I wouldn't reduce your content, but maybe there's a way to simplify it or organize it differently or make it more accessible and easy to sort through. for those people who find it overwhelming. So I like to take feedback from customers, but I would more likely change something drastically if I found it was a big barrier to growth for growing my audience.

45:14Leslie Zane: But I do think there's little things probably could do. I don't think any situation is black and white. I think it's always like this end. Of course. Leslie, so great to have you with us. Where can our listeners learn more about you, buy your book, anything you want to share? Oh, thank you so much for asking. So my book has a landing page. It's called thepowerofinstinctbook.com. Thepowerofinstinctbook.com. And there's a bunch of different offers there. If you work at a big company, for example, you could choose one of the levels and there's a bunch of free sort of giveaways like a talk or a webinar.

45:59Leslie Zane: There's a lot of different opportunities to get something juicy as an add on to the purchase of the book. So that's one thing you can link with me on LinkedIn and email me. I love to meet new people. and yeah, it's been just such a pleasure to chat with you. You're so smart and so strategic and we got into a level of depth that I personally appreciate because I know we're talking the same language. So thank you so much for all those wonderful questions. Thank you, Leslie. I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. I hope we can do round two because there's so much more to discuss and I also think that people really need to learn more about your book because it's very important information for people to know.

46:48And our guest today, again, has been Leslie Zane. Check out Leslie's book. It's called The Power of Instinct. You can find it on thepowerofinstinct.com. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies. It is a free download and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG winning resume free download at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. Thank you, Leslie, again so much for being here.

47:23Leslie Zane: Thank you, Chris. This was so, so much fun. Thank you everyone again for tuning in and I look forward to connect with you all next time.

47:35Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firmsconsulting.com. We look forward to helping you develop your strategy, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication skills next time here on the Strategy Skills Podcast.

48:09Thank you.