How to Use Metaphors and Alliteration to Sell More with James I Bond

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue strategies and their 10x ROI B2B growth guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, James I. Bond. Now I'm going to read his bio to make sure I get it right because he's done a lot of cool stuff. James I. Bond is one of America's leading behavioral management specialists and author of the award-winning book Brain Glue. We're going to talk about that book quite a bit today. That book is blowing people's minds and changing how thousands of marketers and entrepreneurs are selling their products and ideas. For 13 years, he ran one of Southern California's leading behavioral management firms, working with a who's who of American business. Early in his career, he ran an advertising agency in Montreal. He is a past workshop chairman for the resource partner of the US Small Business Administration and has been a featured guest speaker at 2 Southern California universities. So James, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.

Hi, Mark. Thank you for having me. You have an awesome podcast. I'm really glad to be on it.

Oh, well, thank you. That, that means a lot. So tell us about Brain Glue.

So, what's the most powerful tool of human interaction? I'm using it now, aren't I? Can you tell what I'm doing? I'm asking questions.

Okay.

Questions are really powerful, aren't they?

Yeah.

Why are questions so powerful?

Because they beg the engagement back.

Exactly. It engages. And so when we do advertising or marketing or trying to promote our product or service, The first thing we want to do is we want to wake up their brain. Okay? And it's important to do that. Now, questions is one tool that you could use that with. Okay? There are lots of other tools that I address. I want to talk about some of them. But we have to— we think that people are listening to us when we talk. We think people are reading our stuff and really getting into it when they're reading an ad or whatever else. But most of the time they're not. Their brain, more than half of their brain is occupied with something else. Or thinking, well, I just want a client or what am I, I have to win another client or I lost a client or my wife, are we going through a divorce or my husband or is it raining outside? Is it raining outside? Did I forget to close my windows? You know, and then while you're talking, they go, no, no, keep talking, keep talking. Okay.

Sure.

We think they're listening, but they're not. And what you want to do is you want to trigger the brain so they go, huh? Huh? What? Oh, I'm listening. Okay. I'm talking to this guy, I was just talking to this guy and he's got a nonprofit and it's called Operation Kids Foundation. And I asked him as I asked lots of people, tell me about your business. And it took 20 minutes before he finally, before I finally realized what the heck he's selling. And so I came up with a slogan for him and it's we fix broken kids.

Wow.

You know, and what am I doing? So the first thing we're doing is we're saying we fix broken kids and making that as his slogan. Okay? And so we fix broken kids. The first thing that happens is you have a rough idea of what it is that he does, but you're going, hmm, what, how does he do that? And now what you're doing is you're starting a discussion. When you wanna sell a product or service, you wanna start a discussion. So I have a computer, I have a TV next to my computer. I'm sitting and working on a computer and normally it isn't on, but for some reason it was on. And They have an ad for Blue Emu and they have Johnny Bench, who's a past, you know, he's in the Hall of Fame, talking about it. He's talking about Blue Emu. I could care less. Blue Emu, it's arthritis cream that you put on your joints and all that stuff in your shoulders and whatever else if you have pain or you get pain on a regular basis. But I could care less. I'm doing work and then I hear him say, Blue Emu, it works fast and you won't stink. What did he just say? From that moment forward, I was listening in detail and watching the commercial. And that's what we want is if we're running an ad or if somebody says, what kind of business are you in? You have to say something so they go, oh, and then like asking a question, like they go, oh, tell me more. Okay, tell me more. Tell me how you do that. What is— that's it. Very interesting. Huh, what is that? Okay, and there are lots of ways to do this. Okay, now I'm one of America's leading behavioral management specialists. I didn't say that. Somebody said that, and I said, okay, I guess I should share it. He started telling me, you got to share with people so they know you deal with behavioral management. Okay, but, um, so we have to understand that we want to trade. So let me give you an example of something, okay? And I'll tell you how I came up with all this stuff because it's blowing people's minds. Jack and Jill went up the hill. Okay. And I bet we all, everybody who's listening knows that. When was the last time you heard that? 5, 10? For me, it was like more than 50 years ago. I'm really old. 60 years ago, actually. Okay. And yet I remember it like it's yesterday. I could be on my deathbed and someone says, hey, James.

What?

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. You know, on my deathbed, I'd remember it because it's stuck to the brain like glue. You know, it's rhyme is one of the tools that I discovered, or 14 tools that are profound. So think of this for a second, okay? Let's say you're representing O.J. Simpson at his murder trial, okay? And you're the lawyer, Johnny Cochran, okay? And your buddy told you this phrase and you went, yeah, I want to use this phrase. And so you're at that right at the end, you know, he has a glove and he tried to put on the glove. Of course, he, he's an actor, so he, you know, it We don't know if it was real or not, but it probably wasn't. Okay. It probably fit in nicely, but he made it look like it was really hard to put on. And so Johnnie Cochran said to the jury, so remember, if the glove doesn't fit, you have to acquit. Okay. Now I start saying this and I, I can't tell you how many people remember that line. Everybody does.

That's right.

Well, there's a journalist who's interviewing 2 of the jurors at the end of the trial. And he's— he asked the question. One of them answers while the other one is nodding her head in agreement. And the, the interviewer said, with all that evidence against O.J., why'd you find him not guilty? And she said with pure confidence, well, we knew if the gloves don't fit, you must acquit. The glove didn't fit. We had to acquit. Okay, it's rhyme. Okay, how about this one? I was standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona. Such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford slowing down to take a look at me. Okay. The Eagles. Love that song. Okay, well, Eagles did not try to sell this, but here's what they sold as a result of this. Winslow, Arizona has become a place that people are visiting, a tourist attraction. I have this woman who's in Arizona. She said, have you ever been to Winslow, Arizona? It's a hole in the wall. It's nothing. It's like one street, but they put up a statue of a lamppost With a guy with a guitar leaning against it, and on the lamppost it says "Standing on the Corner," and behind it in huge letters it says Winslow, Arizona. And people who are driving on Route 66, you're driving along, you go, "Winslow, Arizona." Oh, let's check it out! And they check it out because of this song. Okay, they go there, and then of course they stand up next to the statue, and they take photographs of themselves next to the statue so they can show their friends. Hey, I was at Winslow, Arizona. You know, that's just. It wasn't even intended as a sales pitch, and yet it's a sales pitch for Winslow, Arizona. And it's because there are certain triggers that help us expand and explode our sales like crazy. And what we want— there are 2 things we want to do. Well, a few things we want to do when we're talking to somebody. The first thing we want to do is we want to wake them up so they go, okay, I'm interested, legitimately interested. Not like, okay, tell me more. But no, I was like, hmm, that sounds fascinating. Okay. So you want a trigger that does that. The second thing you want is you want to make it clear what you offer.

Yeah.

And then the third thing is you want to make it memorable, stick to the brain. So with a lot of us, we're gonna have, might have 1 or 2 or 2 or 3 presentations or meetings with a prospect before they actually become a prospect. Or we might present it to them and they're not ready to buy now, but they might be ready to buy in a month or 2 months or 3 months. What you want them to do is you want them to remember like, oh, you know, we wanna, you know, I wanna, you know, I remember this guy, hang on, let me call him or email him and let me get going and buying his product. So these are things that you want. And so let me tell you how I figured all this out.

Okay.

So I'm originally from Montreal and I worked my way up and ran an advertising agency and eventually won major clients like Kraft Foods, Timex Watches, You know, Seagram's, their world headquarters is in Montreal. And I had an opportunity to win the anti-drug campaign in America.

Okay.

And I came up with, which most of us do, if you're in business, you're probably a logical person. I'm a logical person. You know, you're solving a core problem and you're logically figuring out how to solve it. But Zig Ziglar, I went to a Zig Ziglar workshop when I was young with my wife. And he had this great line because I hated selling back then. Today I teach it. But he said he had this great line and it changed my life. And it was selling is nothing more than transference of passion.

Sure.

If you're passionate about something, if I saw a movie I love, you don't have to teach me how to sell it. Man, I just saw this. It was great. You know, I mean, I just, I've got passion and I'm transferring that passion to you. Well, I learned in school be logical without realizing when it comes to selling, I had an advertising agency and I was all logical. Clients loved it, but the big accounts, they would use somebody else, not me. And I couldn't figure out why. So I had the opportunity to win the anti-drug campaign in America with powerful logical reasons why you should not do drugs. And they liked the ads that we came up with a lot until they saw this other one and then they decided to choose that. And it was a guy holding an egg saying, this is your brain, cracking a shell and dropping the egg into a sizzling frying pan. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? And you're nodding because you remember it. It's amazing how long ago it was, and yet we remember it like it was yesterday. It was profound. And when I saw the ad that beat us, 2 things happened. First is I recognized this is infinitely more powerful than anything I came up with. I had logical things. This was And the second thing was it's emotional, not— it's emotional selling, not logical. And I have no clue how to do emotional selling. I'm a logical guy. And so it scared me. I did some research and there's like nobody really teaches you how to do emotional selling. And so I'm thinking, oh wow. And so the scientist in me came out and said, I gotta figure out how to do emotional selling. So I put a box next to my computer. I called it the passion box. And I said, I love 3x5 cards. So, I wrote your brain on drugs on a 3x5 card so I'd remember the ad and I put it in a passion box. Then, whenever I saw an ad or heard somebody say something that's emotionally powerful, rather than trying to analyze it because I didn't understand how it works yet, I would write it down or tear out a page out of a magazine or whatever. I put it in the passion box in the hopes that eventually, I'd have so many examples that I could figure out how to create emotional selling.

Okay.

Because I'm in marketing, hey, you know, and in behavioral management. And about 10 years later, I moved to Southern California. We, our family moved to Southern California. Excuse me. And I met John Gray, an author. And John Gray was telling me about this incredible book he wrote called Men, Women, and Relationships. And he was frustrated. Sorry. He was frustrated because people who read the book loved it and said, this is the best relationship book I've ever had. And yet almost nobody was buying it. So, he got this crazy idea. What if I change the title to Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and just refer to it throughout the book? Just put some references to it, but otherwise keep the same book. What do you think happened? He's telling me almost overnight, I sold half a million copies and a million and 2 million.

Wow.

Steve Harrison, who helps him with marketing, was telling me he went from 20,000 to 50 million books sold, from 20,000 to 50 million books sold, all because he changed the title.

Whoa!

I thought my head was gonna explode when I got home. I was gonna take the passion, the book Man from Mars, Woman from Venus, and put it in the passion box. But then I stopped and I said, Wait a second. Men are from— men are not really from Mars. I mean, I think women think we are. I know. Okay. Yeah, we act like it sometimes, but we're not really from Mars. But what he's basically saying is men are so different than women sometimes that it's almost like we're from a different planet.

Yeah.

So he came up with the title Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. It's a metaphor. And so I start thinking, wait a second, this is your brain on drugs is also a metaphor. Because he wasn't holding a brain, he was holding an egg. Okay. And they're probably sitting around a table and saying, okay, so we have to run an ad for, for, you know, drugs. Okay. Anti-drug campaign. So what happens when you take drugs? And someone probably says, ah, it fries your brain. Hmm. Okay. What else gets fried? An egg. Why don't we take an egg and say, here's your brain on drugs. And they came up with that concept. So I'm thinking maybe metaphors is the secret to emotional selling or at least one of the secrets. So I took my box and I dumped it on the bed, on my bed because I needed a big space that was high up. And I realized that metaphors is one of 14 brain triggers at the heart of emotional selling.

Okay.

And as I started researching it, so there are 2 things that happened. The first one is because I was a, you know, I'm a coach. I was working with these 3 guys who were in a construction business. And after 10 years, they had $2 million of sales. So, I thought, why don't I try this on them and see what happens? I'll tell you how I did it in a second. But let me tell you what the result was first. So, in 10 years, it took 10 years to get $2 million of sales. Not bad, huh? In 1 year, I took it from $2 to $10 million in sales. And then, they reached $32 million 2 years later. And so what we did was using brain glue, I said, I started with a whiteboard and I said, let's make a shopping list. You guys have been in business for 10 years. Let's make a shopping list of all the different types of clients you've worked with because you've worked with as a construction company, lots of different types of clients. We made a long shopping list, okay, on a whiteboard. And then I said, let's make it, let's play a game. Let's pretend you're only gonna focus on one type of client and you're gonna say no to everybody else. Well, they said, oh, do we have to? We don't want to say no to anyone. I said, oh, we're just playing a game. Don't worry about it. Okay. Hahaha. And I— so it took them a while and they finally said, you know, fire restoration for insurance companies. There are 2 insurance companies that we work with that— and only— we've only done it 2 or 3 times, but where they had a client that had a fire and they asked us to come in and work on it. And they said there are 2 things that we would do with it if somebody had a fire. The first thing we do is we check the frame to see if it's damaged. If the frame is damaged, you tear down the whole building. But if it's not damaged, then you fix it up and, you know, and work it that way. And yeah, if we had to pick somebody we'd work with, we'd love to work with insurance companies for fire restoration. So I said, okay, great. So let's pick a trigger word. If they have a client that has a fire, what's the trigger word that you want to remember? You know that maybe we can use, and they went, "Oh, I don't know. We can't think of it." I said, "Come on, think about it. If they had a client that had a fire, what's the what's a word that they would trigger that might trigger them?" And then one of the guys says, "Fire." I said, "Yeah, fire. Fire is a good one." So what work? What are some phrases that work with fire? I said, "How about fire extinguisher?" Ah, we're the fire extinguisher for insurance companies. So they laughed at that, and I said, "I want to go with you on some of the prospects." some of the prospects and let's try it out. So the first prospect we went to, an insurance company, they were talking and they never used the phrase because they were embarrassed or whatever. So I said, hey, okay guys, Joe is the name of the prospect. I said, Joe, whenever you have a client that has a fire, we're your fire extinguisher. We're the fire extinguisher for insurance companies. In fact, you can look us up. We did firex.com. Okay? But we're a fire extinguisher. He started laughing. You know, laughers are buyers, by the way. He started laughing and he said, you're the fire extinguisher? Yeah, we're your fire extinguisher. He started laughing. We got back into our car and we drove back to the office. When we got to their office, our receptionist was saying, oh, we just got a call from the guy you were just with. And he was laughing while he said, tell them they need to call me because I got a client for you right now. These guys went from 2—

That's great.

to $10 million in sales in one year by becoming the fire extinguisher for insurance companies.

That's great.

I started realizing and I started, you know, studying other businesses and it just floored me. I mean, it just floored me that people are, you know, and this works with, you know, with tons of businesses and we're talking about B2B here. Okay. So when you're selling B2B, Bob Parsons owned a company That was a website development company.

Okay.

Okay. In Phoenix, Arizona, and he was on Jomax Boulevard. So he decided to call his company Jomax Technologies. Okay. And people loved when they would hire, you know, buy his service, they would love the service, but almost nobody was buying it.

Sure.

So he decided—

Another one, like there's a million of them.

Yeah, exactly. Why would I buy yours? So he said, I need to come up with a name that's easier to remember and is more fun. And so he said, why don't we call it GoDaddy? You know, he actually said GoDaddy would be really fun. They actually said Big Daddy. He started with Big Daddy. So let's call it Big Daddy. But Big Daddy was taken.

Okay. Okay.

So he said, but I love Daddy, that Daddy. What else can we do? Why don't we do GoDaddy? The rest, they say, is history. I was listening to an article recently or listening to an interview recently and they said last year their sales were $3 billion. Sure. Okay. He went from almost nothing to $3 billion in sales. He sold the company.

So why is GoDaddy so much better than, you know, Joe Mack Consulting or whatever?

Joe Mack Technologies.

Joe Mack Technologies.

Because it sticks to the brain like glue. Okay, when I started—

what is it about that phrase that makes it stick? I'm curious.

It's alliteration, the repetition of sound. So let me tell you how many— I'm gonna start telling you some of your— I think you're gonna be surprised because you never thought of it, the fact that they use alliteration. Okay, Coca-Cola. Yeah, Best Buy, PayPal, TikTok, Bed Bath Beyond. Okay, I mean, is it a coincidence that they use that? Build a bear if you have kids. Okay, I mean build a bear. Ba ba ba. In politics, Biden's build back better. You think it's a coincidence that they picked that? Trump's make America great again. Gu gu. Okay, no, there there's something about. So Marilyn Monroe, her actual name, her name was Norma Jean Mortensen.

Sure.

And her manager said, and she had brown hair, and her manager said. You know, Norma Jean is not a good name for a model. You know, you're a model. You know, why don't you come up with a name like Marilyn? She goes, Marilyn. Okay. And her mom's maiden name was Monroe. So she didn't know brain glue. This is a brain glue tool. But she knew that she liked the alliteration, the repetition of sound. Marilyn Monroe. You know, it's like Chevy Chase. Okay. Chevy Chase. Okay. But so Marilyn Monroe. So she says, okay, I'm gonna call myself Marilyn Monroe. She had this famous actress named Jean Harlow that she was a real fan for, a fan of in the back in those days. And Jean Harlow had platinum blonde hair. Yeah. But Marilyn had brown hair. So she went to the same hairdresser as Jean Harlow and said, could you please make my hair the same color, platinum blonde? And so she suddenly became a platinum blonde with the name Marilyn Monroe. Okay, so that's attractive. But Marilyn has a birthmark or had a birthmark on her cheek. Yeah, right. You're pointing because we remember that birthmark, right?

Yeah.

But she would cover it up with makeup. One day she was looking at photographs of Jean Harlow and she saw in some of the photographs Jean Harlow had a beauty mark on her cheek and in some it's on her chin. And then she goes, wait a second, I bet she doesn't even have a beauty mark. I bet she's just putting a dot on her face to attract attention to herself. So Marilyn decided to darken the dot instead of hide it. And suddenly it was about that time that she suddenly became a supermodel. So there's Cindy Crawford, who's a supermodel. She was the first major supermodel.

Yeah.

And in her biography, Cindy Crawford talks about the fact that when she was a kid, she has this beauty mark above her left, uh, chin, um, lip. And, uh, she begged her mom, please take me to the doctor and get it removed. And she says, I am so glad my mom never got it removed. I believe that beauty mark is the reason I became a supermodel. I stood out from all the other models that didn't have any dots. You put a dot on your face. So there's a famous advertiser named David Ogilvy who's the beginning of the advertising industry.

Sure.

He was doing advertising, the first advertising for Hathaway shirts. Excuse me. And if you run an ad for, if you're doing an ad for a shirt company and you're gonna put ads in a magazine, so what are you gonna have? You have a good looking guy wearing one of the shirts, nice pair of pants, probably in a nice background, right?

Sure.

Just like every other ad.

Right, right.

He decided I need to make it stand out from the crowd. So he decides to put an eye patch on the guy and he calls it the headline because what if people look at the photograph and they go, huh? Then they read the headline, the man in the Hathaway shirt. He never explained why the guy had an eye patch, but everybody knew it's the guy with the eye patch is the man in the Hathaway shirts. Hathaway shirts became a blockbuster of success. I worked with Warren Buffett and his team. He bought Hathaway. His company is called Berkshire Hathaway. It's because of Hathaway shirts. And as it grew, because it became so successful, because he grabbed attention. It's something that in marketing we call asymmetry. We like symmetry. Yeah.

Sure.

But if you put a dot on somebody's face, you're gonna notice that face more because it has the dot on it. And so, uh, you know, asymmetry is one of those tools that when we recognize it, we start to understand, you know, I wanna look at everybody and have one eye closed. You know, they're gonna wonder like, what the heck's that all about? Or, you know, or put an eye patch on me or put a, put a circle with a dot on it or something on my face. I'm not sure I would do that. But if I wanted to stand out from the crowd, I'd do that. You know, you wanna be different, not so different that you're odd, that you're crazy. You can't be crazy, but you wanna be different enough that people go like, whoa, and it grabs their attention. When it grabs their attention, you have a better chance of being able to win a client.

Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Well, it's so interesting to hear you talk through this and, you know, in B2B all the time, we, You know, so often our message is so logic-based, and it's all about, you know, sort of the features and the benefits, and we forget that it's humans on the other end of the decision-making, and humans are fundamentally emotional beings. And so when you use some of these levers to create some emotion, whether it's the— I guess it was the metaphor you talked about, or the Alliteration that you talked about or the asymmetry or, or a few of the— you've dropped on us so far that sort of creates the space for this emotional connection.

And here's the biggest thing we have to remember is when we're marketing to somebody, their brain is already overwhelmed. Yeah. We have to assume that right from the start, no matter how calm they look and they're listening to you and everything else, you have to assume their brain is overwhelmed. Okay? And so you need to be able to wake up the brain in such a way that they go, hmm, that's interesting. Like you said, How many internet-based companies are there? And yet there's GoDaddy. GoDaddy. You know, I remember I can, you know, because I use them some, you know, and I, it's God, G-O-D. I can't remember it. I go, God, G-O-D. That's a GoDaddy. You know, it's not, I don't mean to offend anybody, but I just mean that's how I remember what the ticket is. I go, who are they again? Oh yeah. We want to make sure it's easy to remember and the easier it is to remember, The easier it is to trigger the brain, the greater likelihood we have to sell our product or service and to stand out from the crowd. So let me give you a couple of examples.

Yeah.

So there's a mom and son in Utah who love Shark Tank. I love Shark Tank too. And so the mom said to the son, can we invent a product that'll be really cool and we maybe can get on Shark Tank and then we'll become millionaires? And they said, yeah, that's a good idea. What's a good product? And they're thinking, I don't know, it took about a month to come up with the product. So the mom is constipated. And so a doctor told her, when you're on the toilet, I don't wanna get too much into this, but when you're on the toilet, it helps if you raise your feet 6 to 8 inches off the floor because it changes the shape of your body and suddenly becomes a lot easier to go to the bathroom.

Yeah.

She tried it and it worked and it was fabulous. So then they said, why don't we create that as a product? We'll create a little stool that slides under your toilet and whenever you're on the toilet, if you want it, you just slide it out and put your feet on it.

Sure.

Okay, we need to come up with a name for it. Well, it's a toilet stool, which is all of us start with a logical name. Okay, so it's toilet stool. Yeah, but they went, I don't like that name toilet stool. That doesn't sound really good. So what's a better name for toilet? What's another name for toilet? Potty. You're like, we all know the porta-potty. Okay, the potty. And you're squatting, squatty potty. Let's call it the squatty potty. In less than 2 years, they generated $100 million of sales. And let me tell you how powerful this is. Okay, I had a heart bypass surgery about 2 months ago. Not fun. Okay, but I'm in the hospital. And I'm talking to one of the nurses and she says, so what do you do? So I said, well, I wrote a book, Brain Blue. And she said, oh yeah, what's that all about? So I started telling her this story of the Squatty Potty. She says, interesting, you should talk about that. I'm a nurse, so I know that when you're in a bathroom, you want to raise your feet 6 to 8 inches off the thing. So I've got a little, little thing I use, a little cart I use to raise my feet. But I was in a store and I saw Squatty Potty. I love the name so much, I bought it. You know, she already had something that does this, but she loved the name so much she bought it. It was like $20. It cost about $4 to make this thing. It's in plastic. But it's— that's how Brain Glue is, is so powerful, that when you understand how to wake up the brain. So how would you like to invent a product, your biggest competitor steals it from you, they make a fortune, and you starve to death? Wouldn't that be fun? Come on, that would be fun, wouldn't it? Not at all. So Post Cereals competes with Kellogg's and the head of Post Cereals said, let's come up with something totally different than cereal that would really be cool. And so the number 2 in command there was working on it and came up with this idea of this little cake. It's about a square cake.

Yeah.

And you put jam and you put, you know, strawberry, blueberry, raspberry jam inside it, which is really cool. You put it in the toaster and when it comes up out of the toaster, You've got this nice warm cake and we'll call it, sorry, we'll call it the, see, I have to remember the name now. What is it?

Test for Cakes?

No, it's square, it's square cakes or something square. The stupidest name you could imagine. Okay?

Sure.

And so 3 months before he launches the product, 3 months before he launches a product, he promotes it to the media and says, Country Squares, that's what it's called.

Country Squares.

Let's call it Country Squares. We have this new product called Country Squares. You put it in a toaster, it pops out of the toaster and you get this nice warm thing. They showed pictures of it and everything and the media covered it. And so the head of Kellogg's saw that and went, oh, that's a fantastic product. Guys, guys, come here, come here. We gotta— I want you to figure out how to make that product. Okay? But we need a better name. And so he's thinking there's something called sense elevation, which is when you pop it out of the toaster, it pops. So the name Pop should be in there. It pops. So people remember it pops out of the toaster. And then back then, Andy Warhol was really famous as a pop artist.

Yeah.

And so let's call it Pop Art, which is anchoring, which is we were taking something that's already in the brain. And you're gonna apply it to your own product or service. You might twist it a little bit. So let's call it Pop-Tarts. When they launched it, of course, one week before Country Squares got launched, duh, they were launching it in a week. We're gonna launch it now, guys. Okay, sales exploded. It became the largest selling product that Kellogg's ever had. In fact, it scared them because they ran out of product everywhere. Suddenly had no product. So he ran full-page ads apologizing. I am so sorry. We ran out of it. Just hold on for a few days. They literally ran apology ads. Sales exploded and nobody bought Country Squares. They waited for Pop-Tarts to become available. Okay. So much so that within 5 or 6 months, Post stopped selling Country Squares completely because nobody was buying it. And I was just reading an article and they said that last year more than 3 billion Pop-Tarts were sold.

Wow. Yeah.

Because he came up with a better name. He came up with a name that uses triggers, brain triggers. And so if you have a business, you want to use brain triggers so people go, whoa, you know, I mean, think of, what's it called? Hooters restaurant. Okay. I mean, these guys didn't have a lot of money. They wanted, they had enough money to start a restaurant, but what are we gonna call it? Why don't we get a bunch of girls who, you know, they're not, they're good-looking girls and we're gonna put them in a Bikini or something like that, or shorts, and we'll call it Hooters. People started standing in line. Hey, I want to check this out, Hooters. They came in and Hooters became massively successful. I live in Southern California in Thousand Oaks, and it's not— they don't have naked girls. There's nothing like that. But they're starting— they decided they wanted to build a Hooters restaurant right here in a busy area, and people were protesting. No, we don't want a Hooters in this area. It's just a simple restaurant with girls with shorts. But no, it's just the name resonated so much. Anyways, they put it somewhere else, you know, they made hundreds of millions of dollars with the name. And that's why when we're selling a product or service, we want to come up with a name that makes people go like, what? You know, I mean, New Pig Corporation. These guys started a rag company. They sell rags and they would import it from China and all this stuff, you know, old rags and stuff like that. And they would sell them to gas stations and, you know, car repair places and stuff like that. But they wanted to come up with a name that would be really memorable. And they thought, you know, a nickname for rags is pigs. Why don't we call it New Pig Corporation? Okay.

Yeah.

In fact, they had so much fun with it. They had their salesmen who would show up with a pig hat, a hat with a pig snout on the front and a tail in the back and say, by the way, if you buy rags from me, I'll give you one of these hats. And they go, oh yeah, okay. New Pig Corporation became like a billion-dollar company. It's a private company. It's owned by these, I think, 3 guys and they have so much fun with it. But they had fun selling rags because they called it New Pig Corporation. Everybody, you know, would want to buy their rags from New Pig Corporation. That's amazing.

That's an amazing story. So obviously there are tons of great examples from Brain Glue and I, I, you, I think you mentioned at the beginning there's 13 different, uh, sort of mechanisms that, uh, you talk about in the book. Is that right?

14.

14?

Yeah, 14.

And, and where can folks that are interested, uh, you know, get a, learn more about Brain Glue and, and more about sort of your consulting work?

Well, if you do Yes, if you go to yesbrainglue.com, that'll take you to, uh, you know, a page that actually talks a lot about Brain Glue. And by the way, I'm doing something with Yes Brain Glue that's very important. That you want to remember that your website, you know, your web address, when you tell people what's the web address, if you say, oh, it's joejohnson.com, you know, it's like, okay, you know, I mean, the America's top fitness coach, I forget his name, but his website is, his website is lookgreatsticky.com. Okay. Okay. Sorry. No, no, no. lookgreatnaked.com. That's what it is. lookgreatnaked.com. Sorry, I forgot his name for a second. But it's lookgreatnaked.com. And, you know, is it easy to remember his website?

Yeah, for sure.

You know, and so, yeah, but so if you have a website and it's a complicated name, then you can always find a fun name, a simple name for it. And then you could forward that to the website. And that's what we do with Yes Brain Glue. Yes Brain Glue takes you to this page that has lots of details on how Brain Glue works. And so, yeah, just in fact, let me give everybody an example of something they want to try in Brain Glue, if that's okay.

Sure, absolutely.

So I talked about metaphors, okay? And if you complete the phrase, my product or service is just like blank, Okay, then it makes it easier to remember, you know, to understand how your product works. We have a behavioral management firm that we built and we would actually, we could take the top people in companies and get them to tackle stuff bigger than they would normally tackle on their own. But it's technical as we describe how we do that, people would kind of, you could see they get glassy-eyed.

Right.

We realized like what else is like that? Well, it's like a personal trainer that gets you to do pushups. You know, come on, come on, Mark, 4 more push-ups, 3 more, you can do it, 2 more push-ups, come on. You know, a personal trainer, a personal coach can get you to do more push-ups. So we would say we're just like a personal trainer that can get you to do more push-ups than you can do on your own. We can get your people to tackle bigger projects than they could tackle on their own. And then people went, oh, that's interesting, and it kind of resonated with them. So for all of you out there, think of this. My product or service is just like what? And have fun with it. Be as crazy as possible. You know, my book Brain Go is just like a naked man running through your backyard. You know, you go, whoa, it grabs your attention. Okay, that's how Brain Go does it. So for you, my product or service is just like what? And the more fun you could have coming up with what is it like, the more you can come up with a phrase that resonates with your prospects in such a way that they go, oh, interesting. Okay, yeah, we want to check it out. But yeah, yesbrainglue.com is a good way to at least start to check it out.

That's super interesting. And one thing that I have to sort of call out because, you know, very often we see, you know, clients sort of struggle with, you know, how do we, how do we be memorable? How do we, you know, really make the connection? And one of the ways that we help them do that is, you know, creating real deep understanding of who your customer is and a real deep understanding of, you know, the buyers that are actually buying your product and loving it. Real deep understanding of the competitive landscape so that you know how you're different. That then creates this sort of framework within which you can say we're just like, and come up with those phrases. So really great applicable way to do that. Well, James, thank you so much for joining us today. We could go on and on. I can't wait to get my copy of Brain Glue. I'm sure a lot of our audience is super intrigued to learn more as well.

Oh, Marc, thank you for having me. I love this podcast and I was almost late because I was listening to 2 of the other podcasts, but one of the other podcasts, I was like, oh, look at the time. And so, yeah, it's awesome.

Thank you. Very nice of you. But yesbrainglue.com, did I remember that correctly? And we'll look forward to seeing you more later. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.