Hypno-tising How Your Brain Thinks - Ep. 43

Foreign. Welcome back to CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Justin Gerard, and with me, as always, is my trusted mentor, Dr. Mark Young. How are you, sir?

Long day. I've been doing podcasts all day long, and I'm still going, poor you, poor you, poor me. Think of all the people that have to listen to all those podcasts.

I don't want to be that. So today, we are going to continue this series that we have started that's based on the book that Mark has written that's coming out soon called Hypnotizing. And so today, what we wanted to talk about was really getting an understanding of the mind's thinking process. How do we think? How do we make. How do we go through this process? And so we want to get an understanding of, as people, you know, what is the process our minds go through so we can understand it, so we can understand our consumers. And then also as advertisers, how do we apply some of this knowledge moving forward?

So I'm going to give people a few different analogies to think of. The first one is we've used it on previous episodes where we talked about the grape sitting on a dime sitting on a beach ball.

Yep. We covered it in the last episode.

And the grape process is seven bits of information. The dime represents critical faculty. The beach ball represents your unconscious mind, where thousands of bits of information per second can be processed. So as marketers, we need to deal with the conscious mind, but we need to sell to the unconscious mind, because that's where all the decisions are being made. Another way to look at this, Justin, is to think about it as the rider and an elephant. So you have this big elephant with a saddle on it and a rider on top, and the rider's directing the elephant. He's got a set of reins, and he's directing the elephant on where to go. At any point that the elephant decides to go in a different direction, the rider is powerless. So think of the rider as that conscious mind. The elephant is the unconscious mind. So, yeah, the rider can kind of call the shots to a point, but not when the elephant decides, I'm going over there. There's a peanut vendor over there. I'm going to head in that direction, and you can tug on those reins all day long. So think about this. When we think about the rider and the elephant, think about that being desire. So I'm running an ad for some delicious ice cream, and that conscious mind is saying, no, you don't need to be eating ice cream. You know, you don't need the extra calories. It's got sugar in it, and sugar is not good for you. But the elephant says, ice cream, and just changes direction and starts heading to the ice cream. And where's the rider going?

Going to the ice cream.

Riders going to the ice cream. Right. Because the rider is powerless to control the elephant. So that's part of this. Now the next thing we want to talk about is really lean into the work of Daniel Kanahan. Kanahan won the Nobel Prize, brilliant PhD and he really coined. He and his partner Trudycky, really coined the phrase system one and system two. So system one, thinking. System one is quick, fast, intuitive system. That's the system one. And the system one makes the snap decisions. It's what gets the first impression. It's where you get that gut feeling. It's where all that comes from.

Well, it's also the emotional sector. Correct.

And it is the emotional side. System one is where if I say, justin, two plus two equals you say four. Because system one responds to that. Now let's look at system two. System two is slow, methodical, deliberate. If I said, Justin, what is 25 times 17 divided by 6?

Right. I've got. I've got to work that out.

Now, system two needs to come in because that's not an intuitive answer.

Well, not for me, anyway.

Not for most people. So now system two has to kick in, and system two has to reason out the problem. So system two looks for evidence, makes calculations, looks for solutions. What are the formulas? System two is how you will answer that math question. System two is how you make bigger decisions.

Rational sector, right? What you would call it.

Yes. But there's a part of our brain that doesn't want to use system two. So we were created depending on where you believe things are. Evolutionary. We can still agree that humans are thousands of years old, if not millions of years old. And we evolved. Now, I'm not saying we were monkeys. I'm just saying we evolved.

Right. We've changed. Yeah.

And when we. Prior to the past hundred years of grocery stores and restaurants, oftentimes people didn't know where the next meal was coming from. And if we go 10,000 years back when people were nomadic, they really had no idea when the next meal was coming, and it could be days from now. So humans actually evolved to burn as few calories as possible.

Makes sense. To survive.

To survive. And think about it. You can get on a treadmill and run on a treadmill for an hour and find out you burned 450 calories. Right, yeah. So you're like, damn, I just killed myself for an hour for a donut. Because we're evolved that way. Well, when we look at our brain, our brain, which makes up like 3% of our body mass, burns about 20 to 25% of our calories. But it burns those calories when we put it under load, not unlike a computer. So when you start really making your computer crunch, your computer does what?

It gets hot and it slows down.

It slows down and it physically gets hot and the fan comes on and it starts drawing a ton of electricity. This is why mining bitcoin has become so expensive, because the electrical load on the computers become so massive that to mine a bitcoin, which is enormous amounts of calculations burns a lot of electricity. Our brain is no different. When we have system one running, we're just sitting there chatting, watching a movie, watching tv. We, when system two kicks in, now we got to do the math problem. Now we got to work on a medical issue. Now we've got to examine something going on. That's where the calorie burn really goes up. So we're designed to avoid it. Evolution has told us, don't use system 2 unless you have to, because we're going to burn a lot of calories.

Okay, that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.

Now, by the way, all kidding aside, you want to increase your calorie burn, go start learning a new instrument, start learning a language, start doing some heavy research, start doing some math formulas. You will up your calorie burn significantly. You will burn a lot more calories. You look at a race car driver, when you look at race car drivers that are in two to four hour races, like an Indy 500, something like that, those drivers will lose up to 14 pounds in a two to four hour race. It's not all water. The calorie burn is massive because they are massively making unconscious calculations in fractions of seconds every minute of that time. So it's not just I'm sweating and burning, it's literally the brain is torching calories. Keep going. So because of this, our brains develop these things called heuristics.

What's that?

So heuristics are mental shortcuts.

We all love shortcuts, right?

So it's a way that our brain creates a shortcut. And there's a number of different types of heuristics, but we create these heuristics so that we can get to an answer quickly, intuitively, without having to kick the big machine in.

So in More of the common vernacular. Is that where things like use common sense or things like that? Is that where that kind of came from as heuristics or is that something different?

You could kind of say that, okay. But these heuristics are the way that we come to conclusions. And these heuristics are shortcuts. They're even belief systems, okay? So really I might have a belief that guys with really big giant muscles must be super strong. That's a heuristic, by the way. It's not necessarily true because many things come into play. I mean, what's the muscle density? What's the quality of the muscle? Is the muscles. Was it drug induced? Is it cosmetically induced? But I have a shortcut that says there's a guy with really big arms, he's probably strong. I might also look at him and say this guy's really big, so he must lift weights. Because my mind has made a shortcut that big muscles equals guys who lift weights, when in fact he may have never lifted a weight and he could have done it all with drugs. But I create a shortcut. When we're advertising, we want to lean into the shortcuts because the shortcuts become that person's universal truth. Let me give you an example of a bad shortcut. A new piece of research out shows that this was done by Gallup poll. When we look at COVID 19, we know that statistically the odds of dying from COVID 19 are a fraction of 1%. These are just the statistics. This is not my opinion. This is what the stats are. Go to the CDC and you can find this a Gallup poll of people who identify themselves as Democrats. 41% of those people believe they have a 5050 chance of dying from COVID 19. That's their heuristic. That's their shortcut. That's their reality.

So is there a difference between a bias and a heuristic or are they interchangeable?

They are not quite the same. Okay, so heuristic is more of a thinking shortcut. A biases is more of a more philosophical belief system bias.

It's more of aligned biases, more of a belief system, if you will. And heuristics, more of a thinking hack, if you will.

A thinking hack. A shortcut. So it's the two plus two equals four. That's a heuristic shortcut. So if I was trying to convince people to get a vaccine, so let's say I was selling vaccines, I was selling vaccines, do I want to try to correct everybody's information that there's only 1% chance of dying, or do I just know that there's 41% of people who think they have a 50, 50 chance? I might as well just lean into that and appeal to their fears and drive them to a clinic to get a vaccine, Right? That's their heuristic. Sometimes these heuristics are built out of availability bias. So there's a lot of relationship. Sometimes they're built out of availability bias, where this is the information I already got. This is the way I grew up. This is, you know, my parents were a Democrat. My parents went to this church. You just, you develop these different kinds of shortcuts that, that set your life, so to speak. So as advertisers, we want to understand these heuristics, and we just want to lean into them.

And as advertisers, when we're looking at our brands, our products, what are some ways that we can understand these heuristics of our consumers?

So let me give you some examples of heuristics.

Okay?

A heuristic is an example of the word because here's what works. Our minds automatically are looking for evidence. They're looking for proof. They're looking for reason. They're looking for the other shoe to drop. They're looking for us to say, you should go buy this. Well, why? Why should I buy this? So when we tell people about using the word because, what happens is the first half of the sentence goes away. So if I say to my daughter, you need to go clean your room tonight, because her heuristic is, here it comes. That's my shortcut. Now I might say, because we're going to go to dinner tomorrow and that's fine, but it doesn't matter. And we covered this on a previous episode where we talked about Ellen Langer. She did her research where she had people, actors, go to college campuses and stand in line and say, do you mind if I cut in line? Because I'm going to be late for class. And people would let them. And then do you mind if I cut in line? Because I need to make some copies and do you mind if I cut in line? Because I don't like standing in lines. It didn't matter what the excuse was. As long as you had an excuse, all you had to do was have the excuse. Now, another heuristic is pattern thinking. The human brain is a pattern recognition system. So what that means is when you drove to the office today, you didn't get in the car and try to figure out which button to push to start it, where the shift lever was, how to turn the wheel, what the two pedals on the floor did. And you didn't even think about how to get here, right?

I didn't even. I don't have to think about it.

Driven here now, Right? Because your pattern recognition machine has built a system that says, this is how a car works, this is how a car operates. This is what I do to get from my home to my office. So meanwhile, your driver driving to the office, but you're talking to your wife or you're on the phone, or you're thinking about what am I going to do when I get there. And you're paying no attention to the ride to work, by the way. You're also missing all kinds of things going on around you that you're not even paying attention to. And once in a while, you will pay attention to something only if it's out of the norm, right?

Only if it's novel, right?

So the novelty will get your. Get your opinion or get your attention. Your attention. But these heuristics are, these patterns is what got you here. Well, as advertisers, how do we find people's patterns?

Right? How do we figure out for our consumers what those are? Right?

Because if we can lean into their patterns, then guess what, we have no credibility issue now, do we? Because. Oh, that. That's right. That's correct. Another heuristic is called anchoring effect. An anchoring effect is where people are given certain pieces of information and they become anchors in their mind even though they're not there, even though the information's wrong. So one of the examples of this was a study that was done talking about Gandhi. So the Gandhi experiment was simply this. They asked people, ask one group of people, how much over 35 years old was Gandhi when he died?

Okay.

Now another group of people was asked, was Gandhi 114 years old when he died? So this is group A, this is group B. The group that was asked was. Now, after they were asked this question, they were then asked to guess at the age Gandhi died. When I tell you, did Gandhi make it to 114 before he died? And you probably say, no, but then I say, well, how old was he? Guess at how old he was. You will guess him at a significantly higher number.

The anger is 114.

Then the people that I said, how much longer? How much past 35 did Gandhi live? So the difference between the two is huge on what the difference is, because I set an anchor. I set an Expectation in your mind. We can use these expectations as advertisers. Price conditioning is this kind of anchoring. I had this experience years and years ago. My wife wanted to buy a baby grand piano. And in my mind the anchor was, well, it's probably about $12,000. We then started shopping for them and at the time they were $25,000. So now I created a new anchor. So my old $12,000 anchor went out the window. The new anchor of $25,000 came in. Then the salesperson said, we're having a sale at 1995. Now, had I walked in expecting my 12 been offered 1995, I would have said, you're crazy. Screw this. This is $7,000 more than I think. But the fact that the pianos were all over the showroom with 25,999 written on them. My anchor got shattered. A new anchor was created. Now all of a sudden $19,000 was looking like a bargain. When five minutes earlier I would have said, that's insane.

Well, Amazon does this. They've built their model this way. If you go on any listings, you'll see a price slash and then a bigger price, which is always lower. Some purpose is to set the anchor at a higher number.

Set the anchor. We can use this in our marketing, in our advertising, when we're establishing, you know, the regular price versus the sale price when we're so. So this is the problem. This is the problem that advertisers have because they might run an ad that says 10% off. 10% off of what? It means nothing to me. If I haven't anchored the value to tell me I'm going to get a discount and I don't have an anchor of the value. The discount means nothing makes sense. So we can use this. There are other heuristics, substitution attribution. That's kind of what's called three card Monty. There is a heuristic called optimism and loss aversion. And optimism and loss aversion is simply, is somebody a glass half full person or are they a glass half empty person? Because that will affect how we want to talk to these people. If somebody has a glass half empty mentality, I want to sell them into fear, don't I? If they have the glass half full, I want to send them into hope. I want to sell them into the promise of something better because that's where their brain is at. And there's even other heuristics that we know are used by juries. And this is really important for advertising. So I'm going to say I'm going to be a defense attorney. And I tell people I'm. I've got. I'm trying a crime, and the crime is going to be decided on DNA evidence. Okay? So I'm going to be the prosecutor. If I'm the prosecutor, I'm going to say, jury, do you know that 99.9% of all DNA is proven accurate? Jury's going to say, wow, that's. That's huge. That's almost 100%. Now, I'm going to be the defense attorney, and I'm going to use the exact same statistic. And I'm going to get up and I'm going to say to the jury, do you know that for every thousand people that are tried on DNA evidence, one innocent man goes to prison who didn't deserve to be there? Now the jury's thinking, wow, one out of a thousand. That's not that much. I don't want to be the person who locks up an innocent man. I don't want to be responsible for ruining an innocent person's life. They're the exact same statistic.

Yes. It's framed differently.

Correct. Now, how do we use that in our advertising? Do we want to tell people? I mean, think about it. Do we want to say we have a 95% satisfaction rate, or do we want to say 5% of our customers hate us? It's the same comment, isn't it? Yeah, it's the exact same comment. Now, another one we want to look at is what's called Sunk Cost Fallacy. This is also a heuristic. This plays into how we're advertising. Because Sunk Cost Fallacy is like the movie the Money Pit. It's.

Oh, yeah.

So it's a couple buys a house and they get this great deal, and it's like crazy cheap. And we should never been able to buy this house for this price. So we got it. And then they just keep putting more money and more money and more money, and no matter how much money they keep putting in, they keep putting in more money. Instead of just saying, now we know why this house was so cheap, let's cut our losses and get out of here. Because they keep doubling down. This is what affects gamblers. I'm playing roulette. I'm on my sixth spin of Red, and blacks come up six times in a row. Well, I can't just get up and walk away. I know red has got to come up. Now think about it. That gambler will say, blacks come up six times. Red has to come up next mathematically, actually, there's no reason red has to come up next. Black could come up, you know, five more times or the House numbers could come up. But in our mind, I'm this far in. This is what keeps people in a bad relationship. This is what stops people from changing jobs. Companies are notorious for it. How many clients have we had where they've rolled out a new SKU and it's failing miserably? And we will go to them and say, you know what, you need to, you need to start thinking about how to, how to, how to manage, delisting this sku.

It's just not a winner.

But instead they'll say, no, no, no, let's, let's, let's increase the ad budget. Let's double down on this thing and try to make it work. Because I'm in so far, I can't admit I'm out. This happens a lot in politics, by the way. You will see people that will say, well, Senator so and so is a flip flopper, because 20 years ago he said this, but now he's saying the opposite. In reality, we should actually want Senator so and so to be able to evolve his thinking and change his opinion based on new information. His own maturity changes in the world, whatever the case is. But what does the media tell us? The media tells us, no, he made that comment 20 years ago. If he ever changes his mind, that means he's just a flip flopper. So what happens? Politicians lock themselves into sunk cost fallacy of. Well, I've been saying this for so long, double down. I've got to double down on it. I can't just come out and say, you know what? It was kind of a good thought experiment, but it didn't work. This was a bad idea. Now, wouldn't it be amazing if we actually had government leaders who were willing to just come up and say, you know what? We tried this and it kind of sucked. You know, it made sense when we tried it.

This is what we learned and it didn't work out.

But, you know, this is what we know now that we didn't know then. And folks, you know, sorry for that, but we're going to try doing something different. I would, I would love to see leaders behave like that because I don't expect that every leader we get can possibly be 100% right about everything they do. So this is really what we're talking about. And I could go through a lot more of them. Market crashes are built on heuristics. You would Think about the stock market being a place where System two is always in line.

Right? I mean, you would think, you would.

Think these guys are trading stocks and they're looking at all the numbers.

All the numbers. You're looking at the.

Right now, have a tech stock, take one, let's say, use a drug stock. Let's have one drug stock. And that drug stock gets a notice today that the FDA is going to reject their drug application. That stock will take a beating today. Right. But guess what? The entire sector will go down today. Every drug company will go down behind it. Now, did the fundamentals in every other drug company change? It did not.

Did it?

One drug company had one drug that the FDA said they're going to reject, but the entire sector goes down. Why is that? Because even the most sophisticated thinkers cannot stop themselves from having system one kick in. They can't help themselves. This is why, when our clients are getting ready to present their products to a buyer, we have to understand the buyer's a human. You would think the buyer is making their decisions like the stock market person, the stockbroker. You would think the buyer's making their decisions based on scan data and IRI and SKU rationalization and my product mix and my profitability and all these things. But at the end of the day, that buyer is still a human. And emotion motivates the buyer. So we have to think of our products when we're creating our advertising, creating our marketing, we have to think we're selling two buyers, we're selling the end user, and we're also selling the buyer at the retail center, at whoever the chain is. And we need that buyer to buy in. But understand they buy for consumer kind of reasons too. Everything they do is just not analytical.

They are consumers.

They are still consumers at the end of the day.

So is there any way for us as marketers and brands to discover what their target market heuristics are? Is there a way to discover that information?

Yes. As we look at demographic data, we can look and see, okay, so we can look and see who's our demographic, but we can go past who the demographic is and we can start looking at their behavior. This is why sometimes you'll notice that you and I will look at a product and we might look at MRI and see that the people who buy this particular product tend to be Republican.

Sure.

Or they tend to be Democrat, or they tend to be conservative, or they tend to be liberal. Now, why would we care how they vote? Because how they vote tells us how they feel their Voting habits tells us a lot about their emotions. Because so much of politics is driven by emotion, not driven by logic. If we voted logically, we would rarely vote for anyone who runs for office.

Right Care.

Because we would look at most of these people and say, good Lord, these people are defective. I don't want any of these people. But politics has become almost like a. Almost similar to pro sports now. You know, like my team's the Lions. Even if they can never win a championship, they're my team. But to that point, do Lions do Lions fans just. Sunk cost fallacy. Double down on the team and buy tickets and. And go to the games every year?

Yes. Yes.

Sunk cost fallacy.

Isn't it our year, Mark?

Sunk cost fallacy. So if I know what your sports proclivities are, if I know that you like fantasy sports, if I know that you vote a certain way, if I know that you like certain television shows, as you know, we can look at MRI and we can see what TV networks does this kind of person watch, what TV shows this person listen to, what radio stations does this person listen to? All of a sudden I look at the research and say, well, these people listen to conservative talk radio, okay? So if they used to be Rush Limbaugh fans and they're listening to Sean Hannity and they're listening to Glenn Beck, I know certain things about their heuristics, certain things about their behavior that I can lean into. So if I want to sell, if I want to sell gold bullion to people, what do I want to do? I want to find people who think the stock market is going to crash. I want to find people who don't trust government. I want to find people that think the dollar is overvalued and inflation is going to eat it up. I want to find people who feel better about having wealth that they can touch in their hand than numbers on their computer screen. I want to get people who want to go down to their safe and pull their gold out and roll around with it like Scrooge McDuck every once in a while so that they can feel secure that I have some physical wealth in my hands. We can discover that that's their heuristics. Think about those people. I don't trust banks. I don't trust governments. Whatever the case is, you have to get beyond their females between the ages of 25 and 49 who have a household income of $60,000 and have 2.7 kids.

Now, again, you can still pull some heuristics from that data as well, now they're not. They're not concrete. You can pull something out of there and you can pull some data out of mental reports that we pull that talk about purchase drivers and why do they purchase these things? And so when they say, oh, well, I buy the price or I buy it because of the value, or I buy it because it does X deliverable for me.

Think about the data that we get by going to Google Analytics. We can go to a client's website, pull up to Google Analytics and drill down into them, and all of a sudden we can find what other kind of websites they like to go to. Wow, look at this. These people, 22% of these people like to go to pet sites. These are pet lovers. Well, what do we know about pet lovers? Because there's more to that than we're selling dog food. We might not be selling dog food, but knowing their pet lovers will have an influence on how we're going to talk to these people. How do we get. And one of the things we liken it to, Justin, and you've seen this graphic, is using an iceberg. When we look at an iceberg, a real ICEBERG, Only about 15, 20% of that iceberg is above the waterline. The majority of it is below that waterline. And what's below that waterline is bigger, wider, more massive than anything we're seeing above it. Demographic data, Basic demographic data is the iceberg on top of the water. We're looking for women between the ages of 25 and 49 who have children.

Great.

Now below the water is we're looking for women 25 to 49 who have children, who participate in school PTAs, who go to a church more than four times a month, who shop at Walgreens, who vote a certain way, who always watch the view, who we can keep getting deeper and deeper and deeper, and we can figure out what's their heuristics, what's the beliefs, what's the mental shortcuts that these people have already developed. And here's the key. Lean into them. Don't try to buck them. It's called framing. So I want you to picture for a minute. There's a picture on the wall, and our picture has a nice beautiful wooden frame around our picture. And inside that frame, in all the pictures that are in that frame, is the things you believe. So your beliefs, your heuristics, your shortcuts are inside that frame. If I talk to you using the visuals, the words, the pictures that are in your frame, I'm like, You, you and I have an ethos. I think, like you, we have a commonality. And what I'm saying becomes a universal truth for you. So you believe me. As soon as I try to step outside of your frame, you don't believe me, so you resist. If I go to someone who loves President Biden and I try to convince him that Donald Trump was a good president, I'm outside of their frame, they will resist me. They will go as much as dislike me, they will go as far as maybe even not want to ever talk to me again, and it can go the other way. So this is not one way or the other, because I've stepped outside of your frame. I've stepped outside of your belief. As advertisers, we need to put a frame around our customers thinking we need to get a complete picture of that painting that is inside that frame. And now we need to learn to work within that picture. What are the visuals? What are the feelings? What are the words? What are the things that is inside this person's frame that when I say them, will ring true? That's what we need to do as advertisers.

So to sum up what you just said, we need to. We need to get a deep understanding of who our consumers are, what their beliefs are. Again, any heuristic biases that are within there, because that's their frame of reference, lean into them to immediately establish rapport core, which will allow us to start directly communicating to that consumer. And leveraging these tools, these heuristics, allows us to get past that. Getting back to your first analogy, that that driver on the elephant is straight to the elephant, right?

And as I said, the elephant's going to go where the elephant's going to go. The elephant wants ice cream. The elephant's going after ice cream. And that rider can sit up there and pull on those reins and kick that elephant all he wants. And guess what? We're having some damn ice cream no matter what rider says. And by the way, haven't you been the rider and the elephant at the same time in your life?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Haven't really. You've had that experience where the rider part of you was saying, this is bad for me. I don't want to do this. I'm, you know, I'm not going to go out tonight with my friends and have drinks because I know I got to get up in the morning or.

No, I don't need to eat those last two pieces of pizza now. It's already late. I'm already full Yep, but I want it.

But the elephant says, nope, we're going in.

We're going in, baby.

And think about it, there are riders up there tugging away, even feeling guilty that the elephant's charging in, but the elephant's still gonna win.

Elephant wins.

So as advertisers, we need to talk to the elephant and just drag the rider with us.

So to sum up, to leave our listeners with their top three takeaways from this show, number one, our thinking process has two brains. We've got system one and system two. System one, that's the fast, that's intuitive, it's emotional, that's the guy that's really doing a lot of the work most of the time. Then there's that system two. Slower, thoughtful, deliberate, and more effort. Right? Burns a lot more calories. So remember, as people, and we're all consumers as people, we think that we are using system two when really it's system one that's doing it.

And number two is you have heuristics. Let me remind people, heuristics are the shortcut that allows us to stay in system one. Heuristics allow us to not have to use the energy part of our brain and be able to make the fast decisions.

So again, our minds want to do.

That, we want to do the shortcuts every time.

And number three, lean in to those heuristics, lean into those heuristics, lean into that frame so that we can build rapport with the consumers through our messaging, through our framing, through how we communicate to them. So they say, oh, you're like me, you understand me, I want to listen to you. And then we hop onto those heuristics bandwagon so that we can get the shortcut to system one and begin to do what we want.

This is one of the great skills of the psychiatrist who is the father of modern hypnosis, which was Eric, Milton Erickson. And Milton Erickson was this kind of a crazy looking guy that always wore purple suits and he had a voice that sounded like this. And he was suffering with Ms. Most of his life and spent the last part of his life in a wheelchair, but still seeing patients. And he was a psychiatrist, an md. He's the guy who created modern hypnosis. He is the father of neuro linguistics programming that we use. And what Erickson figured out was Erickson figured out in order to be able to use NLP or hypnosis on a patient, you had to have two things. You had to have prestige and you had to have rapport. So prestige would come in as much as, I'm Dr. Milton Erickson, I'm the greatest living hypnotist in the world, and hypnotherapist and NLP practitioner. So people would travel great distances to come and see him. So he had the prestige because of who he was. That's your brand. Your brand is your prestige. Okay, now, rapport. What did Erickson learn? Erickson learned that to have instant rapport with someone, he had to mirror them. So patient comes in. If they're moving their chair back and forth. Bill Erickson moves his chair a little bit. They're tapping their foot, he taps his foot. If they cross their legs, he crosses his legs. And what he does. And if they're talking fast, then he's going to talk really fast. If they talk really slow, then Erickson's going to talk really slow. And then what he's going to do is he's going to mirror their exact words back to them. So Erickson would do something like this. So tell me what you know. What's the problem with you today? Well, Dr. Erickson, I just seem to be overwhelmed with anxiety whenever I go out of the house. And Erickson would say, so you're overwhelmed with anxiety whenever you go out of the house? Yes, that's. Yes. So tell me what that feels like. Well, it's like this feeling in the pit of my chest, and it's like I get this tightness right here in the center of my chest, and it starts to affect my breathing. So you get this feeling in the pit of your stomach, and you start to feel this pain and it starts to interfere with your breathing, right? Yes, that's exactly what happens. So Erickson would ask them questions, get them to tell them what they felt. He would repeat it back literally word for word. Now, what did the patient say? The patients always said, Dr. Harrison, amazing, because he understands me. He gets me. No, he didn't get you. He didn't care about your anxiety. I mean, he cared about it, but he wasn't feeling your anxiety. He was just using your words because you believe you. So I'm just going to say back to you what you said. How do we figure out how to say to our customers their word? How do we get so inside their head that it's as if they're talking when we talk to them? So think about some of the campaigns we have going on. We use a technique called Feel Felt, found in some of our spots. We have a campaign going on for a product. This TV commercial has been on the air for what now? Three years and still crushing it. It's commercial for WaxRx. Commercial starts with. And I'm just kind of guessing at the words here, but it starts with, have you tried other drugstore ear cleaning products? Only to be disappointed. Yes. Okay. Feel. The guy on TV feels same way I do. Now, what's the next thing that the guy on TV says? I felt the same way. Wow. Feel felt. Not only does he understand me, he agrees with me. He understands me that these products don't work well. And he understands how I feel because he feels that way, too. Okay, instant rapport. This guy gets me. What's the next thing Feel Felt found. Do you have a problem with, you know, have you tried other Earwax products at the drugstore and it didn't work for you? I did, too. I was frustrated also. I'm like you. But then I found waxrx. Feel, Felt found. Now, what else have we done there? We've also gotten. Yes. Yes. Do you feel this way? Yes, I do. I found out. Yeah, I feel that way, too. Thing in motion tends to stay in motion. The more we get that client agreeing with us, the more the likelihood that that customer is going to keep agreeing with us. I agree. I've tried them. They failed. Yep, I agree. You and I are just alike. Oh, you found something else. Well, you seem to be a lot like me. I want a referral. I want somebody. I mean, what's the best advertising? Is somebody suggesting you try something? So what we've literally done in that campaign is we've taken a total stranger, put a complete stranger on tv, and made people think that the stranger is a trusted friend who you can get advice from. That's what we need to do.

All right, so I think that concludes the episode today. So, again, if you want to learn more about our brains and how the thinking process works, you can always contact us@jndhlabs.com the book, again is going to be coming out here soon. Believe what, next four or five weeks.

Well, Matt just said four weeks. Is it really that close? That'd be exciting.

Awesome. So in four weeks. So keep a lookout for the book Again, we appreciate everyone who's listening. We're going to start releasing a little bit more regularly to give you guys some more content. As always, we can't tell you how much that we appreciate reviews. Please drop a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps us reach more listeners and entrepreneurs like yourself. So thank you so much.

If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product. Don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing, by the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllhideagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800542.

Sam.