🤫The Secret to Getting Noticed ⚡

I wanna start off with a decree. You, you have a responsibility for your business to get noticed. Let me ask you a question and I want you to answer honestly. Are you better than the competition? Do you respond quicker? Do you care more? I'm not saying you're better in all capacity. Are you better in at least some? Now, if your answer is, I'm not better than the competition whatsoever, do you deserve to be in business? Why should clients deal with you? I strongly suspect you're better in some way. You care more, you respond quicker, you're better quality service, you're more price competitive. There, there's gotta be some ways you stand out and perhaps in all these ways. Well, if you're better than the competition, actually you have a responsibility to get noticed. That's why I'm creating this episode. We're gonna explore how marketing really works and we're gonna deep dive into it because you have a responsibility to out-market the competition. Now I will tell you what most entrepreneurs do and what doesn't work for most entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs follow the standard fare of everybody else. You say, well, if everyone else is doing Facebook ads, I gotta run Facebook ads, or everyone else sends out postcards around Christmas season, that's what I need to do it too. In this episode, we're gonna explore why that doesn't work and what you can do that does work. And here's the best thing, it doesn't take a ton of money. In fact, it takes, I would say, very little. What it does take is out-of-the-box thinking. What will require is courage to not do what everyone else is doing. But I again want to implore this upon you. You have a responsibility to get noticed. If you have a better product, better service, better offer, better deal, better value, you must be noticed and therefore step up and step into it. Now let's explore how to do this. The common approach business owners use to market their business is they say, "Wait, what's the competition doing? I'm gonna repeat what the competition is doing." And what I challenge you to do is that's the one thing not to do. And the question is why? First, let's go through an example. If everyone in your market sends out postcards and you also send out a postcard, it becomes invisible. Why? Because there's a tendency toward habituation. Now I got a cool thing for you. I got the brain model. Boom, here it is, this brain, and we're gonna explore this together. So what we're looking at here is the brain, and I want to quickly dissect it. There we go. Brain split into two halves. Doesn't matter which half we look at too. Uh, we'll look at this half. The brain, of course, is made up of many components. I want to focus on this general area. It's what's called the reticular formation, and the reticular formation is where all the inputs come in. So here's your brainstem. Or your spinal column, it comes into your brainstem and so forth. The information comes in through multiple inputs. What are the inputs? Your sight, visualization, your smelling, sense of odor, taste, touch. We have all these different inputs. Well, those inputs come in and they get fed to the brain. But if every single input was fed to your brain, it would overstimulate you. Right now, as you're watching this, there is countless elements around you that could be catching your attention. Maybe there's someone talking in the distance, maybe there's someone walk by, maybe there's a media playing, maybe there's wind blowing by, but there's multiple stimulus. If we paid equal attention to all of it, it would overwhelm us and we couldn't be focused on any one thing. So the job of the reticular formation is to be a neural net, figuratively, but almost literally, because it is a net that sits there and says what comes through and what doesn't come through. It's the ultimate filter. Our minds are very capable of triggering habituation. We have a learning center that says if this thing we're experiencing, this input was of no value in the past, to disregard it, to ignore it. So what we need to realize is there are 3 ways to get past this input. So I'm going to draw the brain out. Here's the brain. What happens is there's inputs coming into the brain through sight, sound, and all the different senses. Then what happens as an input comes in, it hits the reticular formation. We'll call it the RF. And what the RF's job is to do is to block out, to shield out unnecessary input. The majority of stimuli is not relevant in this moment. It offers no opportunity. It's not a threat. It's simply ignorable. So there is a process of how the mind works. First, I call it ITODD. What it does is says, is there something in here that is ignorable, already known to be of no value, and discards it. But in this moment, maybe you're listening in and there's some wind whistling by and you ignore it. In fact, we can run a real quick experiment and I'll prove how capable your mind is at ignoring things. Pay very close attention to your breathing. Perhaps you can hear your breathing in and exhaling. If you breathe through your nose, you maybe can hear that if you pay real attention to it. Now, here's the irony. For the last rest, you know, rest, last parts of your life, your entirety of your life, including the last 10 minutes and last hour and the last 10 hours you've been breathing. Did you notice? Did you pay attention to it? You had to put cognitive focus there. And the reason is habituation says it's not relevant to your conscious awareness and therefore disregard it. When it comes to our brain here, the reticular formation is analyzing, is this relevant now or is it ignorable? And the vast majority, I would say 99.9% of stuff gets ignored. But it also considers 3 other subsequent elements and it does it in this order. First of all, is this stimuli a threat? I don't know if you've ever been like, uh, sitting outside in the yard and all of a sudden you see something squiggle through the yard. In a case like that, that could be a threat. It could be a snake or something like that, or maybe someone just turned on the hose and it squiggled. But in that moment, we perceive threat. The reticular formation opens up and it feeds information into the amygdala. The signal comes up the brainstem, reticular formation axis allows it through, and it hits the amygdala. The amygdala is this hyper-response area in the brain. It's in this general area. So information comes up, reticular formation releases it, hits the amygdala, which is the threat response area of the brain, among other things, and the body then reacts. So threats will hit the amygdala in this rough area, in this area. Now, you see that kind of thing squiggle through the ground, and you jump. Have you ever noticed you jump so quickly that you don't even consciously recognize it yet? You're not aware. You jump back and then recognize, oh my gosh, that's a snake. That's how the amygdala works. It's our hyper response to threat mechanism, but it also evaluates the next thing, and the next thing is opportunities. So the reticular formation gets hit, it says this is ignorable, it blocks it out. You don't even pay any conscious attention to it. Threat comes through, hits the amygdala, We respond through immediate action. Self-preservation could also be an opportunity. An opportunity is something that adds value to us. Let's say you are at a, like a deli or something like that, and you're sitting down and you look on the ground and there's some money sitting there. Well, what do you do? Your mind becomes hyperfocused on it. Like, oh my God, there's cash. And what's interesting too is you don't necessarily dive on it. You're like, oh, there's money. Let me take it. You may carefully put your foot out and hop down, pull that money back, make sure no one's looking. So when there's an opportunity, we're always suspicious. Is it safe to consume? And our body goes through this kind of— our mind goes through this mechanism of evaluating safety. So first, ignorable items, the vast majority gets pushed aside. Threats get moved over to the amygdala and opportunities hit the amygdala and it's the prefrontal cortex, this area of our brain for conscious evaluation and consideration. Prefrontal cortex. This is where conscious thought goes and consideration. Consideration. We start evaluating threats, opportunities, and there's one more thing that can get through, and it's different. Different means it's not qualified yet. So ignorable stuff is stuff that's known that should be ignored. Threats are known threats. Opportunities are known opportunities. And then there's different. Different is when something unexpected presents itself. Our mind at hyperspeed jumps and notices that something's changed, and it can notice it within a second, actually within a millisecond. For example, you just noticed that I was wearing glasses before and pop, now they're in front of you. You didn't have to evaluate the scene. Your mind didn't go through real slowly. You pop because something different presented itself. I'm going to talk about some of the behavioral effects around that. When an unexpected thing presents itself, it goes through a ticket formation, hits the amygdala to determine threat or opportunity. It goes to the prefrontal cortex for evaluation. If you've ever walked down the street and you do that, what the what? Take, that's your body saying there's something different and I need to spend further time investigating it. Yeah, believe that to be true, my friend. And you notice this too. All of a sudden he's wearing a hat and a shout out to Coach Beard, even though I know that wasn't his hat. That was totally a Ted Lasso thing. The goal here is to be different. Now you know how the mind works. We have a responsibility to be different. If you're marketing like everyone else, it gets habituated. I think one of the most classic habituation examples happened right out where I live outside New York City, and they've changed the sirens on rescue vehicles. It used to be a high-low pitch, and they would come down the road. People were dying literally while these rescue vehicles were going to save someone else because they were being hit by the rescue vehicles. They were walking across the street, jaywalking perhaps, and getting hit by an ambulance that's racing down the road. Even though there's this squealing coming and this loud noise, the mind had become habituated to it. So repeated access for repeated exposure to a stimulus to be known of no value to us. Like it's, it's innocuous, it's irrelevant, it's of no value, gets disregarded. And even though it presents itself more frequently at a higher volume, even we are very effective at filtering it out. So people weren't hearing the siren and getting rolled over it. So they created a new sequence that constantly changes blips, burps, chirps, and so forth. So we notice it. The reason they do that is to break through the reticular formation, that blocking center, hit the amygdala and/or the prefrontal cortex for evaluation. In your marketing, the opportunity is to be different. Market in a way others don't market, because if you market the same way, it's being habituated and people are not seeing it. So now we talked about how the mind works. I also have this big poster for you. I don't want it to go to waste. Just wanted to show you, if you look at the brain, the amygdala is in this area. And what happens is the stimulus comes up this way, prefrontal cortex acts as a shield, rejecting most of the stimulus. And then the amygdala is for the threats that come through. And then there's a hyper— the response to the prefrontal cortex. And this is where opportunities are considered. And when something different presents itself, something different comes through. It illuminates the entire brain. So when it comes to marketing, this is what we want to do. You want to do different. Let's talk about something that you're already familiar with. Junk mail. This stuff comes popping in all the time and you can go through it 1, 2, 3, and you know what's relevant. You know what's not. You've done this, right? I bet you can go to your mailbox and ba-ba-ba-ba-ba rifle through things. Why do we rifle through things so quickly? Because when something is recognized to be not relevant, The reticular formation says, "Disregard it." It goes right in the recycle bin. Sometimes there's something in there that is a threat. You ever get those, that mail that has like, it looks like a government piece of mail, but it's not, but you can't tell. It's like, you know, "Must open within 30 days, jail and fine of $50,000 for illegally opening," or something like that. It's a threat-based mail. And so you're more likely to open it because the amygdala has been activated and What do we do? We open it up and say, oh, it's a scam. And now you're frustrated and angry. So while threats get into the brain center and is noticeable, and that's the key for marketing, you must be noticed first. While it's noticeable, it is a threat. And when something is a threat, brain's activated, amygdala is activated, hyper-response. We do that jump back and then we notice we're tricked. Prefrontal cortex gets activated and says, son of a bitch, those, and, uh, we tear it up and throw it out with total disregard and disappointment. My tip is don't market through threats. It can be recognized, but it can get people really upset. So you can do through opportunities, and you've experienced this too. You ever get something that, uh, it's like a piece of mail that when you open it has like a dollar bill stuck to it, or it has return addresses, some form of gift? It's an opportunity. So what do most people do? It's like Dollar for me. And we throw out the rest of the product or offer because they're trying to persuade us to do something, trying to leverage reciprocity and stuff. That's how we respond to opportunities with skepticism, right? Something presents itself and we're like, oh, there's the thing, but what else? What's the hook? What's the trick? Going back to that situation where you're at the deli or whatever and you see some money on the floor, you don't just jump on, take and say, hey, lucky me, look everyone. You carefully take it because there's suspicion with opportunity. So opportunities don't typically cause a negative association. This part of the brain, it does activate the prefrontal cortex, but it causes suspicion. So what we want to do is different. Now that mail comes through with the dollar bill attached to it, you may open it, but you may disregard it because you're suspicious of it. So the third approach that works is being different, unexpected. You ever arrive home and there's a box there and you're like, Did I order something from Amazon? Like, what is this? And you excitedly open it. That is what different does. It activates our entire brain region and we're totally engaged in it to determine, is this a threat? Does it sound like something— there are snakes or spiders in here? You know, I know that's extreme, but we do go through that, at least at a subconscious level. Is there a threat? Is this an opportunity? What is it? It evokes full engagement. That's what we want to do. And you've experienced this with mail yourself, so you know how it works on you. Now let's investigate the behavioral components so you can leverage this to effectively market your business the best. We started off, I said, are you better than the competition? Are you, are you the best? I hope you said yes. Better than the competition in some capacity. You have responsibility to market. All right, I'm gonna get off my preaching level and we're gonna start talking about the different strategies that you can use. There is a behavioral effect called the Von Restorff effect. This is named after the psychiatrist I think his name was Hedwig von Restorff, and I apologize to anyone that knows how to pronounce his name if I pronounced it correctly. But what he demonstrated in a psychological phenomena is that items that are distinct or different from the surroundings are more likely to be remembered. Imagine a scenario where everything is of one color, all black umbrellas, and there's one red umbrella amongst them. How quickly can you identify the red umbrella? Very quickly. In fact, we use this in our common dialogue. If you and I haven't met and you don't know what I look like, or vice versa, and we say, hey, we're going to see each other at this airport, I'll be wearing something distinct, you know, a rose on my lapel, or I'll be wearing this silly believe— I shouldn't say silly because Ted Lasso, while it can be silly, it was an awesome show. I'll be wearing a believe cap or something. We identify a distinguishing component that is atypical in the environment. So that is the Von Restorff, Restorff, I hope I pronounced it correctly, Von Restorff effect. Be different in the common environment. So lesson one is whatever your competition's doing for marketing, that's the one piece of marketing you shouldn't be doing. If everyone in the photography industry, if that's what you do, sends out a mailer in the middle of the fall season when people are getting family portraits and saying, here's these great portraits, that's the one thing you shouldn't to do because that's all the black umbrellas. We gotta be red. And you can select the medium or the method to distinguish yourself, but you have to do something different. If you're familiar with MrBeast, very popular on Amazon, he did a video where he counted from 1 to 100,000. I think it took him 40 hours to do it. They compressed the video, maybe 24 hours. I think there was a limitation or something in the editor he was using, but all the videos had a, their established approach. And he said, What does— what has no one ever else done, or what does no one do? And he made a video counting from 1 to 100,000. It is boring. I watched it for about 5 minutes and I wanted to put a bullet in my head, figuratively. But the lesson is no one else had done it. Red Umbrella. Let's go on to another theory. It's called the incongruity theory of humor. According to this theory, it's jokes and comedic situations that are unexpected and incongruent with what the expectation is that causes people to laugh. I'll tell you a joke I use that gets people typically laughing. Talk about teenage boys. And so how I open up, I'll say, hey, anyone here in the audience have teenage boys? And people raise their hands. I'll point at them and say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so deeply sorry. Now people are expecting me to say, oh, that's great, that's wonderful. I'm saying something unexpected and therefore is humorous. And they say, well, I'm sorry because they're not teenage boys, they are creatures, right? Another humorous moment. Unexpected for me to call creatures. And then I'll say, I got two of these monsters and they wake up somewhere around the ass crack of 2 in the afternoon. Again, a juxtaposition between ass crack, you think it's gonna be early in the morning, and they say 2 in the afternoon. It's a comedic situation. Comedy leverages take your formation, it's, it's using habituation to disregard elements, and then something breaks through because it's unexpected, it's different, activates amygdala, prefrontal Cortex, and so forth. So do the same thing. Let's have something unexpected in whatever common scenario is, and it can cause an awareness. And if it's comedy, it can cause a form of relief, which is laughter. If it's your marketing, it can cause a form of engagement, and, and that's what we want. There's another, uh, paradigm or effect that was studied in neuroscience called the Oddball Paradigm. And what the study revealed is that when when there is a consistent stimuli or expected nature of what will play out in a certain scenario. When something odd is introduced, it brings about this awareness, this immediate stimulation, and therefore engagement. Now I'm going to talk about this in later videos. Once you do something different, it guarantees attention. It guarantees every single time. That's how our brain is wired. It does not guarantee permanent attention. So we need to retain it. And that happens kind of in these millisecond moments. But do you remember there was a video, uh, the Dollar Shave Club, where the President of the club does a video for razors that's so atypical. It's not what you see on television. It was this humorous, irreverent video kind of lashing out at the shaving community. It was highly effective. That's what we need to do. What is the common noise? And being the oddball is what guarantees attention. Have you ever played Cards Against Humanity? It leverages The Oddball Paradigm. Literally cards I just pulled out. What would Grandma find disturbing yet oddly charming? One titty hanging out. Cards Against Humanity. There is another phenomenon called the visual pop-out effect. What researchers identified is when there is a common stimulus, something unexpected presents itself and it gets noticed. One example is Liquid Death, which is water. It's simply water, and they have it in aluminum cans, so recyclable, much more recyclable than plastic bottles, the competition. So the regular Stimuli is plastic bottles, and here you have can, but they also have Liquid Death. I think there's a skull on it, and it's really targeted at the Gen Z community as something that's much better for our planet, and the water is selling like crazy. I don't know if you know the background of this company. It was founded by a marketer who worked for some large organization. I cannot remember the organization, but he specifically was focused on marketing strategies and leveraged the behavioral techniques. And you can do the same. You can make your own, you know, Liquid Death marketing. Do something that's different, unexpected, and it's guaranteed to get attention. Now, it's not guaranteed to succeed, and that's the key. We're gonna talk about that in other videos I prepare for you, but different is the only way to get noticed. So question is, you know, obviously this works. You know it works. It works on you. We talked about mail. We talked about all these different things. You know different works. It gets your attention. So the question, of course, is why don't you do it? Well, there's the natural resistance. A, it is very scary to be different. We are programmed that way ever since kindergarten. The old, you know, teacher says, "Color in the lines." If you do something that's outside the rules, you'll be corrected for that. But there's also that peer pressure. If you don't dress like your friends, what's your problem? Next time you walk down the street and you see people walking together that know each other well, often you'll notice they dress very similarly. It's actually almost bizarre to watch. It's a form of compliance. We are afraid to stand out because of rejection. And, and back in the Neanderthal days, rejection meant certain death. Like if you weren't accepted by a tribe, you were on your own and no one could survive on your own. Out in the cold and attacked by saber-toothed tigers or whatever it was. You had to fit in to work communally, but you wouldn't get noticed. Today, you won't die if you stand out, if you do different. You may get rejected. That fear is still there, but it's the only way to get noticed. There's other reasons too. Cognitive bias always plays in. Cognitive bias is where we believe something to be true, we'll affirm that to be true. It's a confirmation bias. So, you know, I'm marketing, it's not working, but I believe it's the marketing that it is. I'll argue to myself, I'm just not doing enough volume, or maybe it was a bad time of the season, or whatever. But we'll stay with it even if something's not working. We'll justify sticking with it because it's comfortable, and that's a confirmation bias that, that triggers that. So how do you get started? Well, we've got to start building that muscle of yours. We've got to start getting different. So I want to give you a real small bite-sized piece to do, and you can do this anonymously, and that's why you feel that social consequence or social risk, write a kind note to a neighbor, someone in your apartment complex or lives on your street or is in a building near where you work or someone just saying, "I'm a neighbor of yours. I just want you to know I appreciate you tremendously." You don't even put your name on it, but just give a note of appreciation. It's different and you'll feel it takes courage to do that. Something I do habitually, and I'm not saying you have to do this, but it's a great way to build muscle and it's a great way to care for your community is I'll go to someone who is working a labor job, cleaning restrooms or postal worker or someone that doesn't typically receive acknowledgments or tips and approach them with gratitude. I was recently on a bus ride at the airport from where you drive and drop your cars off and you have to go to the terminal. And when the bus drove over there, it was late night. It was a peculiar flight. It was probably 1:00 in the morning. I was the only person on the bus. When it stopped, I went to the driver, said, "I just want you to know how appreciative I am of your professionalism and your safe driving." And I gave them a tip. And the person started to well up and say, "I don't get that. Thank you." Honestly, it's a great way to care for community and care for others. It's a great way to exercise your different muscle. So that's the bite-sized piece. Now, I want to also give you the big piece. So if you really want to push yourself, here's what you can do. I'm just going to give you some ideas. And the challenge is this. One of these four and, and do it. Just do it. So one is send videos. You can use two tools like Loom or Bonjoro, but make these videos. You can embed an email. I want you to do it for 10 clients, existing clients you have, and send out an email just saying, I want you to know I appreciate you. Thank you for being a client. There's nothing else to this message but you knowing you are valuable to me, to my organization. As a person, I respect and value you tremendously. So Thank you for being a client. I'm wishing you continued success in all you do and honored that we're able to serve you. That's it. Do that with 10 clients. Again, it'll be exercising your different muscle. Here's another one. Chalk art. Get out in the street and draw a big piece of chalk art. Cool company this way, you know, have an arrow pointing or celebrating our clients. Join me. Or, you know, it's our 10th birthday as a business. Come and celebrate with us. You, anything like that, but just get some chalk art out there and point to your business. Is it going to bring leads or opportunity? I don't know, but I'm trying to build your different muscle here. You can beautify a neglected space. In our own community here, there's some areas that, uh, trash kind of piles up, and I gladly clean the space. And with permission, you can insert a sign saying this space is maintained by your business. Another way to contribute. I'm just trying to build your different muscle. How about this one? Send a puzzle with a missing piece, and you can say the solution to a The goal of a puzzle is to have all the pieces. We may be your missing piece. And then of course offer to send that extra piece because it'll drive people crazy not having the one piece to complete a puzzle. I got one final kind of story and experience how I leverage different— I use it regularly and I challenge you to do the same. Again, you're a small business, you must be discovered. I wrote my second book, it was The Pumpkin Plan, and I wanted to get endorsements from some really notable people. Of the time, and I think they still are. Guy Kawasaki, The Art of the Start author. Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow. Michael Gerber, folks like that. Bob Burg. What I did was instead of reaching out to people saying, can I get your endorsement? Like, who's being ignored? That's what everyone does. The reticular formation blocks it. It's ignorable. It's habituated. I did something different, which will hit the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. And what I did was I sent a letter from my mom to these authors and the letter I'll never forget to Michael Gerber from my mom. I wrote it, but the letter said something like, Dear Mr. Gerber, my son has written a book and is a little bit embarrassed to reach out to authors like you. So I thought being a good mother, I would do this for him. Before I make my request of you, I want you to know I've been a fan and user of your products. In fact, Michael was raised on Gerber food. Now, of course, Michael Gerber is not part of Gerber food. Part of the joke. And then there was even a picture of me, the most embarrassing picture we could find where she inserted it. And she went on to say, would you be willing to endorse my son's book? But wouldn't you know it, all of the authors that I reached out to this way responded. It was fun and lighthearted. It was totally unexpected and engaged everyone. And my mother got gifts from Bob Burg and Guy Kawasaki, sent her gifts of what an extraordinary mother she is and kind things. Which was just absolutely awesome. That's how you can leverage being different and getting noticed. Now you know the behavioral secrets. Go out there and do it. Your good business, your great business needs to be discovered and only will if you are noticeable.