The Science Of Your Customer’s Choice with Leslie Zane

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There we are recording. Hey, we're talking about unique, distinct, different. Like what is that? We talk about that all the time around strategy that our best scale ups do something really different and different in a way that stands out and is relevant in the minds of your core customer, of the person you ideally want to work with, that company, that individual. So that's the topic of our show today. How do we get into that? We're talking to a real master who's done a lot of really compelling work in this and what's the science behind it? All that. All that. More coming right up everybody. My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this fine Scaling up business podcast. Our show comes here every week. It's one of my true joys and pleasures is to record these great conversations with business leaders, authors, gurus, so CEOs, experts in the world of scaling growing your company. We've got over 550 shows now in our back catalog along with monthly workshops, coaching programs, all that kind of thing to help grow and scale your company. We work with many, many companies every year in one of our programs. We hope that we could work with you. Find all that and more@scalingcoach.com ScalingCoach.com also has links to our monthly workshops and to our free mini course on how do you identify the stage you're at in growing your company and what's necessary to move to kind of the next stage of growth as you grow, scale and hopefully eventually exit. All right, listen, I'm joined now by Leslie Zane. She's up in Armon, New York today. She's award winning speaker. She's the author of a new book, the Power of Instinct, the New Rules for Persuasion in Business and Life. There it is, Power of instinct right there on the screen in the show notes as well. Look, she's a super baller in the world of maybe I shouldn't say it that way right, like, but she's awesome in the world of this area of marketing. And she has a firm called Triggers that does behavioral science around branding and that kind of thing. She's worked for big brands. She's Yale, Harvard, Bain Company, Procter Gamble, published and noted and all that. HBR, World Economic Forum, Newsweek, on and on. She's the, she's the real deal and she's going to share some of her stories and that kind of thing with us. So Leslie, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Bill. I think we're going to have a fun conversation today.

I hope so.

I Hope so, too. It's up to us. Nobody else.

So I. How, like, tell. What about your background leads you to write this book? Like, why. Why did you. How did you get here? Why'd you get here?

So after I graduated from Harvard Business School, I went to work in brand management at a couple of fabulous companies that you may have heard of. Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble. And I was kind of astounded that here I was at the marketing capital of the universe and a lot of our brands weren't growing. And I thought, what's up with that? How is this possible? I thought I was going to be here and learn from the best and learn how to do it. And in fact, I found that at the end of the day, marketing was a very random process. Different companies had different ways of doing it, and a lot of it did not work. There's the classic, you know, you don't know which half of your marketing is what you know, half is marketing, but you know which. You don't know which half. And so I set off in 1995 to start my own company because I had very different ideas, and I wanted to explore those ideas. And it was really hard to do that in a traditional marketing environment. So in 95, I started my own company. I started using behavioral science before that was even a term that people were talking about. This is literally 30 years ago. And we kind of cracked the code on how to drive consistent growth and how to scale companies faster. So I hope that we can share some of those lessons and lessons learned with your audience today so that they have a little bit of an easier time than a lot of other businesses have.

Well, we're going to talk about all kinds of really great stories. Things that happen at McDonald's, things that happen at Snickers, Johnson and Johnson's baby business. We'll get into all that and more in a minute. Before we get into some of those great stories that you have with things that hopefully will stimulate people to think about what to do for theirs, talk a little bit about this idea of brains science. And what is it that we are missing about the way our brain. Everybody loves the brain science topic, so hit us with some of that magic.

Awesome. So today, traditional marketers still try to persuade the conscious mind to do what they wanted to do, and it doesn't work very well. And it doesn't work for two reasons. One, the conscious mind is resistant to change. It sees you coming, it knows what you're trying to do, and it says, I don't think so. I don't think I'm going to do what you're telling me to do. And then the second problem is that the conscious mind makes up only 5% of the decisions that we make. The vast majority of our brand decisions and really quite frankly, every other decision in our life is instinctive. The instinctive mind makes up 95% of the decisions that we make and we're just not even focused there. So like, think about it, ladies and gentlemen, we are spending 100% of our time, resources and energy on only 5% of the decisions people make. No wonder getting sustainable growth is so hard. The opportunity is to switch our focus to the instinctive mind, which is much more malleable and you can make change much faster there. And that is the world that I want you to step into with me today. The world of the instinctive mind, where brands exist down there in a very different form than people think about. They're not even aware that they, that brands exist down there. And I'll explain, you know, all of that, how that works. But that is really the huge opportunity to gain the instinct advantage.

So when I hear that what I mean other topic speakers, things come to mind for sure. We've talked a lot about Simon Sinek. Start with why. And this idea of sort of a preconscious emotional center that's driving decision in action. We're thinking about what I feel about something before I start to organize my thoughts around what that feeling is, how it exists, what it means to me. Like that is that. Are we talking about the same thing there?

We're talking about something similar but different. So start with why. And I'm a huge fan of Simon Sinek. I think he made some wonderful strides for the industry. The problem is it's not all about your why a brand. Actually it needs to be comprised of many things, many associations, and your why your purpose is really only one of them. So I think the thing that happens in marketing and this is just human nature, we tend to glom on to the latest big thing and we go do that for a few years. And so whether it's demographics or brand purpose or segmentation or whatever it is, we do that for a few years, it doesn't end up growing the business all that well and then we go on to the next thing. So I think the, the problem with, with the why is simply that people ended up using that as like the whole story of their, their business. They, they went too heavily into it and when it's really just a component. So let's Talk about what is a brand. I think that's going to be super helpful. To just anchor everybody in a brand is the cumulative memories that have gotten attached to that brand in the subconscious or instinctive mind. And it lives in our memories. And some of these memories that are attached to your brand can go as far back as childhood. So in the case of a McDonald's or a Snickers or a Ragu Italian sauce or a Colgate toothpaste, these are brands that go way back. Every brand has a connectome. A brand connectome. You're looking at a model of the brand connectome behind me. Essentially, it's a central node with a bunch of neural pathways connected to it that are physical. They have a physical presence in your mind. So a brand is not this wispy thing. It's not a bunch of emotions. It's not any of those things. A brand is a series of neural pathways that, that hold associations and memories that have formed and connected, gotten connected to your brand over time in the mind. Every brand has one. And there are certain rules that I'm going to share with you about how you make that brand connectome grow as fast as possible so that your brand becomes the instinctive Go to choice. The brand connectome is the command control center and telling you what to do. You walk into the supermarket, you go to buy sneakers online. I don't care where this happens. But you, you, you are not choosing your brands. Your brand connectome is dictating what you choose. And that's the feeling that you're talking about. So when you say it's, there's an instinct, you're 100% right. But the instinct isn't driven by emotion. The instinct is driven by this brand connectome that exists in people's unconscious minds, in their memories.

When I hear you say that, what I'm like, okay, what does that actually mean? I feel like. So I have a bunch of memories, experiences, impressions around a particular brand, some super conscious, some not, but. And I'm left with feelings, good or bad about them. And then I've got sort of a, a sum or collected thing like, this one's good, this one fits me. This one's good, but doesn't fit me. This one is not me, definitely not me. This one is downright evil, like 100%.

That's that. And, and what it's made up of is all of these connections. So think of each one of those branches as a connection to you in your life, which could be anything. It could be a nostalgic Connection. It could be a way that you think about its expertise. It could be an influence, a role model, somebody in your life who used that brand. It could be a friend. It could like all of the connections that you have to this brand holistically, that is how the brand exists in your mind. And basically there are three rules for building brands in the mind. They need to be large. So you need to have a large physical footprint. This is like a game of Monopoly. Whoever owns the most physical real estate in the mind wins. It's literally just about more connections versus fewer two. You need to be distinctive. And that doesn't mean every branch needs to be distinctive or the whole thing needs to be distinctive. You just need to have some distinctive elements because that's. We'll talk about that. As you mentioned before, that distinctiveness is different from uniqueness. We'll talk about what that is. And then the third thing is that you need to have a higher ratio of positive to negative associations because negative associations hold back growth. If people have negative associations in their mind about your brand, then it's going to be really hard to get them to come over. Even if you spent $100 million in advertising. Right. They have those negative associations become barriers, implicit barriers.

So we're deep into concepts and things now. I think it'd be useful to step back and like bring it to life a little bit. You in, in preparing the show, we. You shared a bunch of stories with us and it seems like maybe the first one or the experience for you was when you happened upon the breakthrough with the Johnson's baby business and the imagery there. Talk about that. Maybe.

Yeah. So I was a young marketer just starting out. I was working on the Johnson's baby business and the Johnson's baby business was not doing very well. They were losing share to private label and men and baby magic. And at the time they still only had blonde blue eyed moms and babies in the traditional Madonna and child pose in all their advertising and was pretty much wallpaper. But I had noticed that dads, this is now early 90s dads were getting more involved in caregiving. They were changing diapers, they were taking their kids to soccer games. And when a dad walked down the street pushing a baby carriage, mom's heads would turn. And so this was my moment. I put on my skirt suit, my pussy bow blouse, my highest pair of high heels. This was the working woman uniform of the 90s. And I marched into my boss's office and I said, I know how we're going to turn around The Johnson's Baby business. This. Let's put the first father in a Johnson's Baby shampoo commercial. And he said, you're crazy. It's moms, not dads, that are buying these products still today. And there's no research to support anything that you're saying. But I kept on advocating because I am a little bit crazy. 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. This was like a knife in my heart because I had been told that strategy was my superpower at Bain and P and G. But I kept on advocating because I just really felt I was right. And I think they finally gave in out of sheer exhaustion and they put the first father in a Johnson's baby shampoo commercial. And guess what happened? It was the highest scoring commercial in the company's history. Not just Johnson's Baby's history, but corporate Johnson and Johnson history. And products started flying off the shelves. And why this was meaningful is because I had found my first trigger. I had found the unlock to that other 95%, the unconscious mind, the instinctive mind. Here was something dad with baby operated as a cognitive shortcut, standing in as a shortcut for all these positive things. Progressive company, you know, dad's giving mom a break. Dad taking care of baby. It's, it's a, it's a. It's a visual contrast. There's, you know, between the strong male body and the, and the, the, you know, innocent, little fragile baby. Like there were just all of these positive associations that came from this, that the company wasn't tracking because they don't look at that kind of research. They don't look at those kinds of nuances. And I realized at that moment that I had found the unlock between the instinctive mind of your target audience and revenue growth. And in, in that one second that became, like, the name of my company, Triggers Brand Consulting. And it's what I've based my entire career on.

You know, I think there's something really useful here. So we talk a lot about differentiation, about standing out, about picking a niche, about, like, that kind of thing, and the whole world of being different, the way you run your people and your team and your company, your culture and like that. But there's different in a positive way, and then there's different just to be different or annoying. And you picked the trigger there.

It.

It's. It is. It's all positive, right? And so it's Different, Yes. Now we stand out. But you could stand out and, you know, put the baby in harm's way and people freak out. Like, it would be repellent. Right.

Like, what you're talking about is so important. So, I mean, you really nailed it. What we did was we took mom and baby and we took a. Create, made a creative twist on the familiar. That is what this is all about.

If you just did another mom and baby, your wallpaper, there's no distinction. Nobody notices, nobody cares. You did something different, but different in a positive, appealing way, and you went with your instinct. Like, I keep noticing that women notice when men hold a baby. And we know now, like, it's sexy when a strong man holds a baby and it can be tender as well as strong. Like, that contrast is cool in image. But you didn't pick like a crazy looking guy.

I actually have the ad from the. From 1993, which is kind of cool. But the. Really, the point is that we took something that was highly familiar. Parent and child, mother and child. Right. That's highly familiar. We put a creative twist on it that nobody had done before, making it distinctive to our brand. And I think that that's a difference that's worth spending a moment on. I am suggesting that we eliminate the word uniqueness from the language of marketing because it causes people to pursue things that are not fruitful, that are too foreign, and the human mind rejects the foreign. And. And it connects with the, the. The familiar. I mean, literally, we are hardwired to connect with the familiar and reject things that are different. So what you want to do is ride the existing neural pathways of something and, and we call it sort of anchor and twist. Take something that's familiar, put a distinctive twist in it, on it, and make it your own, but do it off of something that people already know. Otherwise you're just. It's. It's friction.

Yeah. So the. To underscore that, let's not put the baby in a bulldozer. Let's put the baby in a. In the other parent's arms. Right. Like, so it's different, it gets attention. So talk a little bit more about uniqueness versus distinction. I think when I think about some of the, like, fashion has thrown some really jarring images at us. And sometimes we're like, yes, it gets our attention, but we're also really off put by it.

Yeah, we may not want to wear that bizarre thing, part of that brand.

Because it's like, oh, that's not me. Like, that's.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So think about the pandemic. When it was the pandemic, when we went to the store, we did not reach for the brands that we didn't know. Right. Those were the, all the ones that were left on the shelves, if you recall. All the brands that were gone were the legacy brands with the big names that, that made us feel comfortable and made us feel secure. So in general, we are hardwired paper.

And that.

That would take anything. Anything. Yeah, you'll take anything. But in every other category, it was the familiar brands that made us feel comfortable and secure because we were afraid for our lives. Our survival instincts kicked in. And I would say in general that it's really a good rule of thumb. So the, the old rule you can think of is uniqueness is key to successful marketing. So I say let's throw out that old rule because that's a rule that was geared for the conscious mind. But now that we know that it's the instinctive mind that calls the shots, the new rule is familiarity is more powerful than uniqueness. And distinctiveness is best of all because distinctiveness allows you to ride the existing neural pathways that exist in the mind and co opt them for your brand to make them distinctive. And that's the path of least resistance instead of the path of greatest resistance.

So the words unique and distinct, you're saying unique is not the way to go. Distinct is. Those words feel really similar to me. Unique as I'm like the only one. Distinct as I'm part of, but different.

Yeah, I think that's a good way to say it. I mean, I can give you another example. Let's take a snow capped mountain in the bottled water category. I will tell you that when I worked on this, on the bottled water category about 15 years ago, and I told them that the snow capped mountain was really important. I was. And this was not the marketers who told me this. It was some designer that on the side who basically said, leslie, that's a cliche. The snow capped mountain is a cliche. And she was, you know, casting aspersions at my recommendation. And I said, okay, you can call it whatever you want, but think about all of the associations that consumers have with the snow capped mountain. I mean, you can do it with me right here. We can play the game with our, with the audience. Pure, pristine, you know, just call them out cold, fresh water from the glaciers. Like all of these, these positive associations come to mind. Those are baked into our minds already attached to the snow capped mountain from our education, from society. From our culture. And so that is, that is something that is familiar. And you could call it generic because there's lots of snow capped mountains. But what Aquafina bottled water did is it took that snow capped mountain and it rendered it in an abstract design with a primary peak and a secondary peak and a little orange sunrise behind it. And now suddenly it's distinctive to them. So now they're riding the existing neural pathways of all the wonderful associations we have with snow capped mountains, but they're making it distinctive to their brand. Now they have a distinctive brand asset, or better yet, a distinctive brand trigger because it's packed with meaning. See, when you do your branding, you don't want it to just be pretty labels or colors like that doesn't have enough meaning. You want it to actually have a message. You want it to be packed with positive associations. So the snow capped mountain on the Aquafina bottled water is not only a distinctive brand asset, it's a distinctive brand trigger because all those positive associations, pure, pristine, untouched by human hands, water from the glaciers, you know, the highest level of purity, all of that is now coming together with my brand. It's going to be conferred upon my brand and my brand is going to be elevated as a, as a result of that. Does that make sense? That's distinctiveness versus uniqueness.

Yeah, let's. You got some great stories here. Talk to us about McDonald's. That's one that everybody knows worldwide and is definitely a company that's had moments of trouble around that. And you did something interesting there.

Yeah. So McDonald's was suffering. This is maybe going about eight or eight years ago, I would say. McDonald's was suffering from these videos that had gone viral all over the Internet. Anywhere between 25 million and 50 million views per video that basically showed that there was pink slime in your chicken nuggets. It was this ugly whining. Almost looked. Do you like pink goo? 100% or they. There were also some around horse's eyeballs in your beef or meat that doesn't mold. I mean, there were a series of them. They were just awful. I mean, if you're the chief marketing officer at this point, you're crying yourself to sleep. And so they really didn't know what to do, but they did what they thought they should do and they launched a big advertising and marketing campaign that said, no, you don't. We don't have pink slime in our chicken nuggets. And guess what happened? The brand took a further nosedive because now they're Telling even more people that they have pink slime or that they might have pink slime. And they also were reinforcing a negative association, which is never want to do.

Right.

What you want to do when you have negative associations is first of all you need, you want to find out what they are.

Right?

And you won't find that out from your current customer because they won't really, they don't have a lot of negative associations. You need to find out what your negative associations are in the minds of your growth. Target the people you're trying to get.

And then second, yeah, that's really important. Don't look at how all customers feel about your brand, your competition. Focus on the ones that you want more of. We all know there's, there's this group of customers that I really hate dealing with and pain in my ass, always asking for discounts. Never say anything good. And then there's this other, like, figure out who those people are. The core customer is a really, really useful thing to figure out. First, who do we want more of? Right. And it's not necessarily the biggest group out there. It might be a pretty small nation. We're going to be the best for them.

So I will tell you what our philosophy on this is and where we've been able to get the growth for our customers. We feel that the core customer is actually a trap. I, I'm not saying that the core customer isn't important and that we're not going to show them a lot of love and give them white glove service. Like, I mean, you absolutely need to appreciate your core customers. I appreciate my core customers. But the only way you're really going to get growth is to target the largest number of non customers possible. Those could be competitive users. They could be non category users. Either one. Competitive users are going to come over faster because they're already in your category. And I would say that that's a really important shift to make because most companies spend all of their time trying to sell more to their existing customers. And the fact is you can only sell them so much. I mean, how many bottles of shampoo can I, you know, how many times can I wash my shampoo?

I'm not talking just about existing customer. I'm talking about a type of. Right.

Some segment, even a type of. I'm not trying to match the profile of my current customer. I am trying to cast the widest net among the growth target. The growth target being all the, the way we think about it is there's the people I have and the People that I don't, and the people that I don't have are the ones I'm going after. And I wanted. I want to actually have the largest number in my target as possible. So I want to cast a very wide net because if I only have a dollar to spend, and I'm sure a lot of your audience is small companies that don't have a tremendous amount of resources, what's better for me? Is it better for me to put my $1 against a small target or my $1 against a big target? If I put my $1 against a bigger target, I'm going to get more volume back than if I target only a small audience. That's just simple math. You're going to get a greater return from targeting the largest audience possible of people you don't have. So that's. So that's a really big distinction, that your core customer is essentially a trap because they're not going to reveal what's wrong with you. Your growth target has some negative associations, otherwise they'd be using you. By definition, they have some negative associations. If we can find out what those are, and particularly the ones that are not so much on the surface, but more implicit in nature, then I actually can create a strategy for taking down those negative associations. And I want to displace the negative associations with positive ones. I am never going to try to convince people, no, I don't have pink slime in my chicken nuggets. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to replace it with triggers and messaging visuals, verbal cues, all of that, that are positive in nature, because positive displaces negative. And what McDonald's ultimately did is they found, they. They went on a real food strategy and they found all of this, these visuals and verbal cues around what real food looks like. And by the way, all of this was true. None of this was. None of this was made up.

The.

It was the videos that had been made up that were fake news. But. But the brand actually is, you know, uses sustainable methods and they have family farms for their potatoes and they use 100% USA USDA beef. And the. One of the most important triggers that they used to turn around the brand was the fresh cracked egg. Because a fresh cracked egg, everybody knows what that is. That actually means that McDonald's cooks, they do fresh cooking when they make your egg McMuffin. And during this period, people had forgotten that McDonald's actually cooks over there. When you walk into McDonald's, you hear a lot of, like, beeping machines and you see things being warmed up. And so the mind created this story about McDonald's that it's just an assembly line of fake food. And together with the videos which corroborated that, you could see how it was easy to create negative associations in the minds of the growth target and the current customers at that time. Yeah.

Absent the picture of a cracked egg, I'm thinking that some egg product from a factory is going to get poured out of a milk carton kind of thing into a frame and then like that's going to be perfectly sized and go. It feels like factory like. And we know that they've automated, they've created special machinery and systems to be really fast from the get go. So we have that like, even on, like an expectation, you know, that until you say it or until I think about it, like, I didn't really think about that, but, oh, an actual egg is getting cracked and cooked. I do that, you know, when I'm home by myself most days.

Yeah. And that egg comes from a farm and it comes from a chicken. And like all of the really the roots and the sourcing of the food. A lot of companies, a lot of food companies spend too much time focused on the consumption experience, which is showing people happy eating the end meal. But what people care about today is the integrity of the ingredients. And so it's far more important to spend more time on the sourcing. And McDonald's just hadn't been doing that, so they just started telling the actual story of how they make their food and the business started to turn around. So I think the fascinating thing about negative associations is they're not permanent. Any brand can grow. Any brand can. Even if you've had some missteps, you can, you can recover from those as long as you replace them with positive associations and start doing the right thing.

Well, it's a really old story now, but Tylenol had some product tampering and people died. And then people are scared to take Tylenol use Tylenol products because that Tylenol said, great, this happened. Here's what we're doing. And they're like, okay, we're. The things look like this now and they have this cap and they're like, we take this really seriously. And they're like acknowledging it and then dealing with it. Because in this case it was tampered with. People did die. Made all the difference in the world. Right. Became memorable because, oh, we actually care. Right.

Yeah. I mean that. The Tylenol case study is probably one of the most Important marketing and PR stories for everybody to study because it was a case study in how to handle a crisis. They did everything right. They took the product off the shelves, which cost them millions and millions of dollars. They did all the right things in terms of those safety seals, and they were able to build the business back pretty quickly. Very different from a company denying that. That anything's wrong and trying to brush it under the rug. So, yeah, there's lots to be learned from these stories of successes and failures and how to handle them.

Yeah. What happened with Snickers and Betty White? And share that.

So Snickers is a great case study because here you are, a candy bar sold on taste, and, you know, then you're just like every other candy bar. And people tend to limit how many they can eat of those because it's candy, and everyone knows it's not necessarily good for you. So what we did for Snickers, which was different, is that we went after a related category. We took hunger satisfaction from snacking and brought that over to the candy category. So now Snickers has a point of difference, of hunger satisfaction within the entire category of candy bars that just taste good. And so now it has an incredible point of difference. And that point of difference is not only different, but it actually elevates the brand above other candy bars that are just about taste. Now. This actually has a purpose in your life beyond that of satisfying your hunger, not just being something that's delicious. And it makes it much more permissible and much more wholesome, in a way. And all of that, along with the insight that when you're hungry, you're kind of not yourself, all of that led to that fabulous campaign, the Betty White campaign. You're not you when you're hungry, which will.

I don't think most people remember the campaign, remind people what it. What it looked like.

Yeah. So Betty White. Oh, I'm sorry. It starts out with a bunch of football players, and somebody walks up to one of the football players and says, you know, what's wrong with you today? You're just not. You're just not. You know, you're just not dip. Cutting it. And the guy is no longer himself. The guy has turned into Betty White, who we all know and love, of course. And she's out there playing football with everybody and being tackled, but she eats a Snickers bar, and that satisfies her hunger. And now she's brought back to the original guy. So through this. This visual transformation of this guy turning into Betty White and then back again they dramatize what hunger satisfaction, what hunger look can look like and the problem. And then they also visualize the solution of eating the. The candy bar and now getting your. Your energy back and being able to perform in the. In the. In the football game. But it was a fabulous way to dimensionalize the whole thing. And it was funny, and Betty White was unexpected. And, like, who doesn't love Betty White?

So, you know, I. Like. So you're speaking to. I'm. I'm guessing the audience is fairly male for this. And the message was fairly male. Like, it's a. Get this candy bar when you're really hangry and change your thing and with the nuts in it and the complexity and the sugar like, it. It would address that. Right. So. So you're speaking, but then instead of turning them into a more raging person, these football players, you're turning them into Barry White. The opposite. And I. And I know from experience, even recently, I got a little hangry, and this one went to, like, level 11, and I was just, like, out of my mind irritated. And I kept trying to. I'd, like, walk into this restaurant, that restaurant, try to get served, and I was just like, I was having bad luck, and I. My wife, daughter were freak. They were, like, worried about me, that I was gonna lose it, punch something, or, you know, I was turning into the Hulk, not Betty White. I wasn't a humorous, sweet older woman. I was a demon.

Well, they could have gone either way with that creative dramatization, but really funny.

And made me Hulk like. That would work, right? Yeah, we would get that.

A little bit of humor goes a long way. But actually, that's another really important point. Humor only works when it is useful, when it's in service of the benefit. So the beauty of the Betty White switch was not. It was not a superfluous thing just to get a laugh. That laugh is directly connected to dramatizing the transformation of the person back and forth into somebody who was hangry, as you say, and versus somebody who was satisfied and able to keep going and do what they had to do. And that's a really important point because a lot of advertising kind of loses. Loses the plot and forgets that. That's why it's there. And when you just create humor like that, it goes in one ear and out the other when it's not connected to the benefit that you're trying to portray. So that's really something that's very important to. To keep in mind. Don't just be. Just don't use. Don't use emotion just for the sake of using emotion. Make sure it's in service of the thing you're trying to communicate.

Yeah, that's the difference between good marketing and stand up comedy. Right. Like, you know, if I'm just trying to make you laugh, that's one thing. If I actually want you to have a positive association with my brand, that's a whole different kind of thing.

Well put, well put.

How do we find our triggers? How do we figure out that, you know, in our case, right in, in this audience, many of their companies are not well known. They don't have negative associations. They're completely like not on the radar for people. And so they want to get on quickly and then they want to have a positive association with something that's unmet, that's unfilled, that's like that.

So, I mean, what I would suggest in that case is that you really spend some time thinking about your visual cues because if you're, again, you don't have a big budget. Visual cues go a long way to creating salience. Those are the things assets stick. Even words, unless you have a really pithy, clever handle or phrase which you should try to create. The visual cues are really what stick the most in people's memory. Our memories imprint those things very quickly and they're stored in our mind connected to our brand. So I would spend a lot of time trying to figure out what is not just your snow capped mountain, but what are several different visual cues that you could use to kind of flesh out your brand. Maybe there's a visual cue for your process. Maybe there's a visual cue for your expertise. Maybe there's a visual cue for the growth that you're going to give people. I don't know if this is B2B or B2C and I don't know what kinds of businesses your audiences work with, but it could be either. And half of our work is B2B today, so. But it works for everything because everybody makes decisions on instinct. I don't care if you're in an RFP process or if you're, you know, selling Pepsi versus Coke. It's all the same. Human beings make decisions on instinct.

It's cool. The book the Power of Instinct, the New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. There it is on the screen in the show notes. You find it on Amazon right now and that's the place to go. Leslie Zane, thank you so much for joining us for the conversation today.

Thank you so much for having me though. This is super fun. Lots of great questions.

Thanks again to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish who created the whole scaling up framework that we use with our clients customers, over 550 episodes in this whole back catalog of ideas, thoughts, things around scaling growing your company. You'll find all that@scalingcoach.com join us for one of our next workshops. We do a workshop every month to help you shift your mindset and figure out what are the right tools to use. And then we got a free course that you could do at your own pace on what are the distinct stages of growth of a company, where are you at and what are the critical repeatable like always moves that you have to do to go from one to the next stage. That's there@scalingcoach.com so scalingcoach.com thanks again to the folks at StoryOn who helped get our show produced ready in and out each week and Seth Cameron, Tom Crystal, all those guys. Thanks again to you all for for tuning in, for watching, for listening. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling.