HYPNO-TISING!: The Secret Science of Ads That Sell More Products To More People for More Money with Dr. Mark Young and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #457

Marketing and advertising is a combination of psychology, anthropology, sociology.

Statistics, art. I mean, that's the amazing thing about what we all get to do. We all get to use all these different disciplines and pull them all together.

Ideally in some form or fashion that no one else has ever combined them together before.

That's what really makes great marketing, is how can I take this part from psychology and this from anthropology and this from demographics and how can I add this piece of artwork to it and how can I pull all that together and come up with a great message?

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.giusnetwork.com today everyone get a copy of Mark's book. By the way, it's called Hypnotizing. You can get it wherever books are sold. The secrets and science of ads that sell more. Dr. Mark Young. He's been a friend for a long time. Very, very smart guy. Let me just officially read your bio, Mark. I know you're sitting here in the wings, so I'll just, I'll just. This will be the only portion that I'm going to be reading. Anything except some questions I jotted down for you. So meet the doctor behind Jekyll and Hyde Dr. Mark Young is the founder and CEO of Jekyll and Hyde Labs. He leveraged his passion for neuroscience, persuasion and human biology to build Jekyll and Hyde Labs into one of the nation's most successful advertising agencies for Challenger, Challenger and emerging brand consumer products. His agency has been the driving force behind hundreds of successful consumer packaged good products with combined sales measured in the billions. He, Jekyll and Hyde has won dozens of national awards and represents consumer products at every major retailer in the US no one can move the sales needle faster for Challenger and emerging brand CPG consumer product goods, that is than Dr. Mark Young and the full service team. At Jekyll and Hyde Labs. Mark constantly studies trends in technology, human behavior, geopolitics, economics, science and health. His unusual style of processing information and problem solving was formed early on based on his own combination of. And I'm not going to say the.

Word right, how do I say Epistemology?

Okay, there you go in multidisciplinary thinking. While other kids looked up to superheroes on performers or performers, Mark was studying everything he could about Benjamin Franklin, Thomas and Edison. He lives by the words of these men, especially Pascal Blaze Pascal who said that it's impossible to know everything about everything. So it is incumbent on us to Know something about everything. Mark is a serial entrepreneur with interest in advertising, real estate, life extension, and media. He co hosts multiple podcasts and is a pilot motorcyclist and soon to be Guinness record holder race car driver. Are you. Are you. Have you hit the record yet?

I have not hit the record. The record has been. It's been reserved. And I will break the record in August.

In August.

In August at the. At Pittsburgh International Speedway. In August, I will officially become the oldest professional rookie race car driver in history.

How old are you now?

I am now 66.

That is awesome. And you're, you're in great physical shape, mentally and physically. So learn more about Mark's philosophies and the psychology of advertising in the CPG industry by listening to his highly acclaimed podcast, CPG Insiders@CPG Insiders.com which I was just on a few weeks ago. And so I present to everybody, Dr. Mark Young. He's a really, really smart guy. And those of you that are running businesses, which is pretty much everyone here, I'm sure you will find it very, very valuable. I've got a few questions for Mark. This will be very conversational, and I will leave some time for some of you to ask some questions also after we kind of get into it. So, Mark, what. Didn't I say that probably someone should know about you that goes beyond a bio?

I don't know. That's, That's. I was, I was listening to saying, wow, that doesn't sound realistic. This seems like too much stuff already.

I actually, like yourself, am one of those individuals that's unemployable. So I've just figured out I had to make my own way in the world. And then, of course, due to my lack of attention, I just have to keep opening companies. Right, Right.

What is that sort of driveness? Where do you think that comes from? I mean, I actually have the author of, of the book Driven coming to Genius Network in June where he describes the, you know, D2D4 gene of the driven entrepreneur. But, you know, there's, there's, there's something about people that gravitate towards marketing and advertising in the sense we're on the I Love Marketing podcast. What do you think it is?

Well, first off, and I do want to thank you for being here and it. And this is a. By the way, being on the show with you is a big deal because you are one of the, I mean, one of the true geniuses of marketing and so is Dean Jackson.

People like us, people like you, people like me. People like Dean. I believe we were born this way. I don't believe we became this way. Yeah, yeah. I think this is. I think literally this is way we were. We were built to be. And I think if we look at, if we, if we looked at it evolutionary wise, we are probably the hunters. Yes. Amongst the gatherers.

So I first want to talk about your book, because there's only so much that we'll get into here. And I think it's a smart thing for people. It's a very, very good book. There's. Let me find this. If I can flip to it. There's this one part where you talk about the goal of advertising and you say the goal is to not sell people things they do not want or need. The true goal of great advertising is to inform potential customers who have a need for the product or service that a new solution to their need exists and to help them overcome their own resistance to change. And you actually utilize a lot of NLP in the way that you create advertising, the way you write advertising, the way you structure it. Love to have you speak about, you know, what your thoughts are on. What's the difference between, like, marketing, what's the difference between advertising? What's the difference between selling? Because everyone here, if they had just a different framing and improved ways to do it, they would all have more success in their businesses.

Well, let me, let me back. Let me start off. Why is the book called hypnotizing? And in the reason it's called hypnotizing. I'll try to make this as brief as I can.

During my studies and becoming a PhD and so on and so forth. One of the things that I became was a hypnotherapist. It was part of my training.

Yeah.

And what I discovered very quickly was that hypnotherapy is using words and images to create an immediate change in a human's behavior.

Advertising is using words and images to create an immediate change in a human's behavior. It's the same thing. So that's kind of where it came from. The other aspect of it is simply this. All of us live in a. In a series of hypnotic states. We go from state to state to state. When you're watching a movie, you're in a hypnotic state. When you drive to work, you're in a hypnotic state. Think about it. You're in the car, you're driving down the freeway. Your mind is not focused on driving that car. Your mind is focused on what are you going to do when you get to the Office and you have a lunch meeting. And what's the first meeting I have? And what do I have to do this afternoon? And what am I doing this evening? You're not driving the car. Your unconscious mind is driving the car.

And this is why. This is where this comes from. Because very quickly, Joe, when we look at how the human brain works, we have a conscious mind. And I want people to think of the conscious mind as being a grape. And that grape is sitting on a thin dime, and that grape and dime are sitting on a beach ball. That grape represents your conscious awareness. That's seven bits of information, plus or minus two. This is why telephone numbers are seven digits, because that's roughly the most things people can recall. This is why a good billboard or a good headline is no more than seven words, because people can read seven words as a phrase. After seven words, they start going left to right, reading. And do this for yourself. Look at a billboard, and if you see a billboard in more than seven words, you'll realize, wow, that billboard really sucks. But if it's seven words or less. Yep, I get it now. That unconscious mind, it can process thousands of pieces of information per second. So when we're advertising, so many of us are focused on appealing to the conscious mind.

Except the unconscious mind is where all the decisions are happening. And I'm going to give you another example. I want you to think of the conscious mind as a rider. And the unconscious mind is an elephant. So the conscious mind is sitting on top the elephant, holding a set of reins, trying to tell the elephant where to go. But in reality, the elephant can go wherever the hell he wants. Can he? Right, because you're that little rider on top of that elephant. He might have some input, but he's only going to get input if the elephant feels like letting him have input. And it's. It's that unconscious mind where all the decisions are made. So how do we talk to the unconscious part of somebody's mind and not focus on the conscious part? The other thing I want people to think of is the cons. Think of the conscious mind as a spam filter. It's trying to block your advertising messages from getting into the unconscious mind. So our goal, whether we're doing hypnotherapy or whether we're creating advertising, our goal is how can we knock the conscious mind offline and talk directly to the unconscious mind where all the decisions are really happening?

I'm going to give people an example of why the unconscious mind's in control. If the conscious mind was in control, we would all be driving $13,000 Chevy Sparks today because it will take us from point A to point B at the speed limit, and it will do it for the least amount of money, for the least amount of fuel. So why are there Teslas and why are there Corvettes and why are there Rolls Royces? Because of unconscious desires of what that car represents to me, what it makes me feel like, what it tells the world about me, how the car feels from a visceral standpoint or from a kinesthetic standpoint. None of those decisions are rational after you have acquired transportation. And anything past transportation is not actually a rational, conscious decision.

So to go back to what I, what I asked about the difference between marketing and advertising and selling, you know, there's the direct response world, right? And most people here that listen to I love marketing are very familiar with that. People that are new, they're like, well, what is this? And I guess I would step back, when did you, when did it first occur to you what marketing even was? When I go back to my being a Deborah carpet cleaner. I was a hard working guy. And one of the things I learned early on that there's no relationship between being really good at cleaning carpets and getting paid for cleaning carpets. And I bring, I always bring up carpet cleaning because when people bring up objections as to how it's difficult to sell what it is they're selling, I have to remind people that I had to figure out how to successfully sell something nobody wants to buy. I mean, no one wakes up and says, man, I can't wait till the cat pisses in the corner so I can call a carpet cleaner. I mean, you know, it's one of these unnecessary evils. And so there's a lot more sexy products and services out there than there's other stuff that people are selling or offering or happen to be in a business where, you know, there's not people beating down their door in order to buy the stuff. And so when you don't have supply and demand on your side, you need to be more sophisticated and intelligent about how you present, package, and offer whatever it is that you're selling. And I didn't even understand what marketing was until I read a newsletter by Gary Halbert back in, you know, the early 1990, February 1992. I mean, I thought I knew what marketing was, but I didn't really understand what marketing was. And so I was to ask you, like, in your evolution here, you have sold billions of dollars worth of products and services. You work with some Very successful people. You're a guy that helps people get into big retail stores and there's variety. I mean, every media you have, you have something to do with. And many people probably, I'm sure everyone here has bought something somewhere that Mark probably had his hand in and you may not even know it. So, uh, when did this, how did this all start for you and what did you learn? Because my, my, my reason for asking you that is I'd like everyone here, I'd like them to feel more capable in the area of, of of marketing and packaging and positioning what it is they're offering so they have more success. So I think it's useful to hear your evolution of how you came about all this.

Well, evolution wise, very quickly I will say you and I have almost the same story. So I was the dead broke plumbing and heating contractor. I didn't clean carpets. I fixed, you know, broken pipes and broken furnaces. Also something that people were not lining up to go by this morning when they got up because they woke up and the heat's out. So it was kind of, kind of that same kind of world. And I very quickly, after a while found out that I was much better at selling the stuff than I, than it made more sense for me to sell it than it did for me to do it.

Right. Yeah, I was the same way.

So not unlike yourself. I ended up starting an ad agency that specialized. When we first started, we specialized in home improvement because we know how to sell all this home improvement stuff. So we literally showed other people in the heating and plumbing and window business how to, how to sell more stuff. To get to your question, advertising and marketing, I believe are completely different. I believe marketing is, I believe marketing is a one on one relationship. It's about building an ethos with someone. So I think that marketing is when I'm moving my goods or services to you and I'm figuring out a way that we have a really good equitable exchange. Something that you say, which I love, which is your offer has to be bigger than your ask. And I think that's a big part of marketing. Now advertising, I have a different view of. Most ad agencies will tell you that they are in the business of building brands. We're the brand ambassadors, we're the brand guardians, we're the brand creators. Just go to all these ad agency websites now. I will tell you that that is all garbage. No ad agency can build a brand. If you want to look at a brand, let's take a look at Harley Davidson. There are no ads that build Harley Davidson. Harley Davidson is Harley Davidson because they built an ethos with their customer bas. They have a relationship with their customer base. Do they run ads? Yeah, they run ads, but that's not what builds the brand. Same thing with Apple. Apple isn't built on an ad. Apple is built on an ethos. So what I always tell people is an advertising agency or you doing advertising is not about building a brand. It is about being a dating service. I always tell people that our ad agency is match.com for product. And our job is to get you as many first dates as possible today. It is your job as the manufacturer, the marketer, the creator of the product to get a second date and to get an engagement offer and to get a marriage. Because all the advertising in the world will not support a bad product or bad service. So our job, I really look at our job as.

Driving, trial, getting people to that first point. The other thing that I look at advertising as is when we look at how humans operate, the biggest fear that humans have is the fear of change. They fear change more than they fear death. They fear change more than they fear public speaking. And I promise you this is correct. And I'm going to say, if you think about it, the fear of change is why a woman stays in an abusive relationship. It's why somebody stays in a job that they can't stand. It's why somebody stays addicted to drugs. They're not. They're no longer in love with what the drugs are doing for them. They understand the drugs are destroying them. They fear what life is going to be like if they don't have the drugs anymore. So it's the fear of change that locks people in. Well, the fear of change is what stops people from. From buying products. So good advertising is about us creating a message that will reach the right consumer. Can't sell carpet cleaning to someone without carpets. So we have to reach that right consumer. And then our job is to help them overcome their own fear of change. We have to help them overcome their fear and help them come to the conclusion that this company offers a product, a service, whatever the case is, that is going to make my life better. We have to help them come to that conclusion that we can make their life better. And that's where a lot of advertising misses the point. Because as you know, Joe, a lot of advertising is just yelling and selling. Right? Right. And it's not taking a moment to figure out what's the problem I'm trying to solve here. And that's where we approach advertising. Is what is the problem we're trying to solve? How do we solve the problem? How do we solve this problem better than other brands? Now, how do we help people overcome their fear of making a mistake, fear of getting ripped off, fear of looking foolish? This all boils down to fear of change. How do we help them overcome their fear of change so that they can try this new thing that will make their life better? And that's how we view advertising.

Do you mind sharing, like, some examples of what you do that is effective advertising, that is effective communication so people can kind of get a better sense of it?

Absolutely. I'm going to give you some examples of things you can do, and I'm going to give you some examples of things not to do. So let me give you an example. Has anybody here ever gone to a hypnosis stage show and seeing a hypnotherapist or hypnotist on stage?

Mark, believe it or not, we were. And I was texting with him the other day, Flip Orly, have you ever, you ever seen that comedian? Yeah, we were just at his show like two weeks, two or three weeks ago.

Now, I have never been to his show, but I guarantee you that I can describe his show to a T. If he's doing. If he's doing hypnosis now, what he's going to do is he's going to grab 15 people out of the audience, 15, 20 people. He's going to line them up on stage and he's going to do something called a suggestibility test. And he's going to have them hold their hands in front of him. Then he's going to magnetize their fingers together. And as he figures out which ones are susceptible, he's going to keep those upstage and he's going to quietly ask the other people to go ahead and go back to their seats. Now, the way he does this is he tells them he wants them to try doing something. He's going to say, I'm going to have you put your hands together as you see me do right here. And I'm going to put your hands together. And no matter how hard you try, I want you to keep trying. No matter how hard you try, you pull your hands apart. Keep trying. Try harder. Try more. Here's the reason why, as hypnotists, we use the term try. Try is your unconscious trigger word that tells you you will not do something.

Let me give you an example, Joe. I call you up and I say, joe, I've decided to move out of my home. Saturday And I need you to come over and help me move. Do you think you can make it over? Now you're thinking, I would probably rather get my teeth drilled than help somebody move out of their house. But I'm a polite guy, and I'm going to say, well, I've got a bunch of stuff going on Saturday, but I'm going to try. I'm going to try to get by. I can't guarantee it, but I'm going to try to come over and help you. That's your unconscious mind letting you off the hook. But your unconscious mind is saying, pry is my exit word. Pry is the word that means I don't have to do it. Now, what do advertisers do in their commercials? Try our new service. Try our new product. You are telling the unconscious mind, and you don't have to. It's okay if you don't want to, because if you try to do something, chances are you won't. So you eliminate things like that. You eliminate. You. You try to eliminate anything that is not concrete.

Let me give you an example with children. I was with my niece one day, and she kept talking about how her little, tiny. She got a little boy, and he would play with a little car on the table. And as she would say, she would tell him, don't throw your. Your car on the. On the floor. And as soon as she would say, don't throw it on the floor, he would throw it on the floor and start laughing. And she goes, I can't get him to stop that. I'm like, watch. I pick the toy car up, I put it on the table. I move it back and forth, and I'm like, okay, A.J. keep your car on the table. Car stays on the table for the rest of the dinner. He's playing with the car on the table, and she's like, what the hell just happened? How did you do that? Here's the reason. The unconscious mind is a literal version of your brain. It's literal when I say, don't throw your car on the table. To a child. The term don't doesn't have a concrete visual image. So all the child hears is car, floor. Okay, Put the car on the floor when I say car, table. That makes sense. So what do you want to do in your ads? Get rid of. Stop worrying about trying to win awards. Stop worrying about being entertaining. Stop worrying about being, you know, funny or whatever the case is. And get rid of anything that you don't need that the unconscious mind can misinterpret. Try to create your messages in a literal form, because that's what the unconscious mind is seeing. An example, Joe, is if. If I put somebody in a hypnotic state and they're now in a hypnotic state, and I say, can you tell me your name? They will say, yes. That is literally how they will answer. Because their unconscious mind says, yes, I know my name. It will not interpret, oh, I should tell him my name right now. Right? And that's one of the things, one of the ways we know that somebody's actually hypnotized. Let me give you another example. Another example is what's called a because statement.

The human mind craves reason. We have to know there's a reason for things. This is. This is how conspiracy theories get started. This is how there was conspiracy theories of people saying, well, the Twin Towers couldn't have come down from a couple of airplanes. There must have been bombs set in them weeks in advance. And they must have been detonated because, you know, you can't blow up a building from the top down. First off, let me back up for a moment and say, in my earlier life, I grew up as a contractor and I ended up becoming a professional engineer and I built high rise buildings. I can tell you when we built high rise buildings, we built them to not be blown up from the bottom. None of us ever thought of blowing one up from the top.

So they're not designed for that. So it is completely physically normal for that to happen. But the conspiracy theory happens because people don't want to accept the randomness that I could be in a building and somebody could just fly an airplane into it and I could be dead. So our brains want to come up with these reasons. So in the book, I use an example from a great researcher named Ellen Langer. And Dr. Langer did some research years ago, and she's done many, many research pieces that are amazing. This particular one was she sent students into a college bookstore and people were standing in line to use the copy machine. This was common back when I was in school. And she would ask if they could cut in line. Do you mind if I cut in line? And a small percentage of people would. Would let them cut in line. Then she had her actors go in and say, do you mind if I cut in line because I'm going to be late for class. And now all of a sudden, like, 93% of people let people cut in line. So then she decided, let's make the reason dumber.

Now. They kept making the reason worse and worse and worse until they finally got down to do you mind if I cut in line? Because I don't like standing in lines. Guess what? 93 to 94% of people still let the person cut in line.

Because here's what happens. Notice I just used the word because in there.

Yeah.

When you, when you do this, when I say.

Product X is going to be. Product X is going to solve this problem for you because your brain jumps to the reason.

And remember we talked about taking that conscious mind offline. That conscious mind goes offline for a second. It goes offline and it says, okay, here it comes, here's the reason. And when that goes offline, the comment that came before the word because goes directly into the unconscious mind as what we call an embedded command.

So when we're doing radio and television, we will literally change the cadence of the voice. So we will literally do something like go to CVS now. We'll actually give that commanding sound. Go to CVS now and pick up, you know, XYZ because. And now when we get to because, we'll bring the voice back up. The voice will be friendly, the voice will be cheery, but go to CVS now and pick up X. It's a command because the command goes into the unconscious mind. The because becomes irrelevant. It can be because you're going to love it, because it's going to make your life better, because it's going to get rid of wrinkles. It doesn't matter. What matters is you're doing a three card Monty with people's minds is what's going on. You're, I'm telling you, watch the shiny object over here while this message is going directly, directly into your unconscious mind. I'll give you an example. We have, we had a TV commercial running, been running it for years. It's been incredibly successful. It's for a product called WaxRx. Now WaxRx is a ear wash earwax removal system. It's in a category where the most expensive product in the category is $8 and WaxRx is $40. So we're over 4x, the highest priced in the category, which for most parts in consumer goods would be considered a non starter. What we've done with the TV commercial is we actually, we actually do what's called feel felt found at the beginning of the commercial. So the talent says, have you tried other earwax removal products and been disappointed? And what do we do? We allow the person to say, yes, I feel like that. And we do feel felt found. Now the talent says, I had the same experience. Okay, now what have we done? Feel Felt. Felt means. Oh, okay, so this guy on TV is just like me. He had the same frustration I had. And remember, this is all happening at an unconscious level. So are you having problem? Have you tried products to clean earwax and have been been disappointed? Yes, I have to. Until I got waxrx.

Feel Felt found. This guy confirmed how I feel. He agreed with me and now he gave me a solution. So that's how. And by the way, this, this little product has been the little product that could. So everyone in retail said when we presented this product to Walgreens and Walmart, everybody said, no, we can't bring in a $40 product in an $8 category. So we went direct to consumer, like a lot of you guys, and we went and sold a hundred thousand pieces direct to consumer. Now that product is now in Walmart and Walgreens and CVS and every place else. And that product is a $25 million single SKU, you know, annual SKU by itself, which is a phenomenal thing for. And keep in mind, this is in a category where when you buy it once, you probably don't need to buy it again for five or 10 years. So it doesn't even have a replacement benefit attached to it because it's more of a device. But that's an example of, of how we set the hook, so to speak, with that kind of model. And there are, there are other areas, there's other ways to do it, but that happens to be one. Another technique that we will use quite a bit is to use a compliance set. It's kind of a compliance set is kind of like using a yes set. Are you, you know, are you over the age of 65? Yes. Are you concerned with the high cost of Medicare? Yes, I am. Would you like to learn how to lower your cost for Medicare Part B or Medicare Part D? Yes, I would. This becomes the classic A thing in motion tends to stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force. So if I can get people to continuously agree with me, the odds are they will continue to believe me and they will continue to agree with me. Let me put this into a therapeutic state. If I was seeing you as a patient and I was going to hypnotize you, I would say, say, Preston, would you like to sit in my trance chair? Would you like to sit in the hypnosis chair?

Doesn't matter. You're making a decision. You are making a decision to be hypnotized. I will then say, press what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to sit kind of straight up in a chair. Put both your feet flat on the floor for me, if you would, I'd like you to put both your hands on your knees. And if you would, I'd like to just take a few deep cleansing breaths. Now, in reality, I don't need you to do any of those things to put you into hypnotic state. I am telling you all those things because I am conditioning you to take the commands from me. I am just conditioning you to do what I say. We can do the same thing in our messaging. We can do the same thing in our advertising. We can ask. We can do that same thing. Are you over, you know, are you over the age of 65? Are you on Medicare? Are you concerned about the high cost of Medicare? Would you like to know how to lower your costs of Medicare Part B? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. You're taking commands for me at this point from an ad side. As humans, we all create these things in our minds called heuristics. And heuristics are mental shortcuts. And we all create these mental shortcuts because evolutionary wise, we. We built ourselves to do the least amount of thinking. And the reason we did that was because our brain takes up a good 20 to 25% of our caloric intake. So we don't want to push our brain into a lot of. A lot of work because it had too much of a caloric cost back in a day when food was scarce. So we have the system one and system two thinking. The system one is intuitive. System one is two plus two equals four. And in system this, system one and the system two thinking is 25 times 11 divided by 15. That. Now all of a sudden I've got to burn some calories and kick that in. So that's part of what happens. So from an ad standpoint, when we're talking to people, we need to figure out what are the heuristics of the people we're talking to. We all focus on, well, we're talking to white females the age of 50 plus. That's our customer base. But that's not our customer base. That's the big picture of our customer base. Now we need to know what is the heuristics. Think of a heuristic as a picture frame. And inside that picture frame is everything that that consumer thinks that they believe. When I talk to you, inside that picture frame, when I talk to you within your belief system, you are more likely to accept me and more likely to believe Me, when I talk to you outside of that frame. I have much heavier lifting now because now I've got to kick your system two in and I've got to start getting you to spend calories, to really think things through. So that's kind of where that happens on a marketing side, on a therapeutic side. Most all our behaviors are at an unconscious level. And when we think of things like PTSD and irrational fears, we usually find that most of these things happen when we were. Most of them happened before the age of three, but usually by the age of seven, they've all happened. So when we're looking at these behaviors, like where did that come from? Why am I afraid of heights? Why does the spider freak me out? We really need to kind of go back and find out where that came from and what happens is we get these fears. So when we think of PTSD as an example, I'll use that because that's more dramatic and people know what it is. PTSD is a normal memory, just like you'd make any other memory, except the memory was triggered with adrenaline. So now in your brain you have a memory and a memory that's married to adrenaline. So let's say that when you were three years old. In fact, I'm going to give you an example. My office manager was, I overheard her one day talking about how she hates making left hand turns. And I said, oh, tell me about that. She goes, every time I make a left hand turn, my heart races and my hands get sweaty. I'm like, huh? I'm like, well, tell me about the accident that your parents had when you were three years old. And she goes, how did you know my parents had an accident when I was three years old? I said, well, tell me what happened. She goes, well, we were driving and my mother got in the left hand lane. She went to make a left hand turn, somebody hit us. We ended up in a ditch and I broke my collarbone. I said, okay, so let me tell you what's going on. When you make a left hand turn, your unconscious mind says, and I want you all to remember, the unconscious mind is always reacting in your best interest. It always thinks it's doing what's right for you. So that unconscious mind is saying, oh, we're in a left hand turn lane. This is when we crash. Let's prepare for the crash. Well, if you knew you were preparing for a crash, if you knew the crash was coming, what are you going to do? You're going to stiffen up, your focus is going to get tight, your Heart rate's going to go up, adrenaline is going to kick in as you get ready. Well, the unconscious mind doesn't know any different. So if we can go back and find those events and now look at those events through the eyes of an adult, not look at those eyes through the emotion of a seven year old, we can now look and say, okay, I understand we had a car crash and I understand why we had a car crash and I understand now that car crashes don't happen every time I make a left hand turn. This is one of the reasons why we're having so much success in therapy now with ketamine therapy, quite honestly, because ketamine acts as a disassociative drug. So when you take ketamine it actually disassociates you from the emotion. So now all of a sudden I can say, let's talk about that trauma you had as a child and you're completely disconnected and looking at the trauma as the adult you are today and you're able to look at it and say, oh yeah, I kind of see why I feel like that. And yeah, that doesn't make any sense, does it? There's really no reason to be afraid of spiders. I've seen people who have crazy fears of spiders because when they were five years old, their little brother put a plastic spider under their pillow and it freaked them out and it locked to that adrenaline and now that fear exists there. So I don't know if that completely answers your question, but yes, we can go back and we can find those things.

The other thing is it is also possible to do a lot of self hypnosis or other form of meditation and be able to examine those issues yourself and be able to find them. But it takes some work to do. It's not easy. It's not easy to do. It's hard work.

Mark, you're a psychologist, right?

Correct.

Yeah. So in the study of marketing.

How has it impacted your, I guess, human happiness and view of the world? Because I often refer to, I don't know if you would agree with this. I think marketing is applied psychology.

It is applied psychology. It is. Marketing and advertising is a combination of psychology, anthropology, sociology.

Statistics, art. I mean, that's the amazing thing about what we all get to do. We all get to use all these different disciplines and pull them all together.

Ideally in some form or fashion that no one else has ever combined them together before. That's what, that's what really makes great marketing is how can I take this part from psychology and this from anthropology? And this from demographics. And how can I add this piece of artwork to it? And how can I pull all that together and come up with a great message?

Yeah, yeah, totally. So, I mean, it was extremely helpful for me, the study of marketing, especially when with my addiction recovery, as weird as that would sound, it. It's really, it's one thing to.

Change yourself. It's another when you actually can influence the behaviors of other people and that, you know, that can be used in good and, and, and bad ways. How would you. This would be a weird question. How would you view all the propaganda that's going on in the world right now with all of the crazy stuff? I mean, we, you know, we can get into whatever you want, but I think there's some real evil uses of marketing being done on the planet with propaganda with many companies and individuals that I consider outright evil. And they're doing a very effective job with persuading and gaslighting the population.

We were talking about heuristics and some of these mental shortcuts, and some of those mental shortcuts also fall in the area of what are called biases. We all have these biases. And two of the biases that I'm going to say evil marketers leverage is what's called confirmation bias, and the other one is called availability bias. Confirmation bias is we know through studies done by Daniel Kanahan that people will place more. They will place the equivalent value on one piece of information that confirms their current beliefs versus 10 pieces of information that contradict my belief, right? So all of a sudden one person says, Joe Biden is the devil. And I believe Joe Biden is the devil. So therefore, see that, that I believe that. Now here's nine people over here telling me Joe Biden is not the devil, but it's going to take a 10th one just to balance that out. So they, they play into this availability bias by again, knowing your framework, knowing that through social media we can, we can so target your belief system because we know everything about you and we can start pushing messages at you that, that literally fire you up, that literally get you angry. That literally says, yes, this, that's what I believe. I believe Donald Trump is Satan. And we get you to believe that. The second biases that happens is called availability bias. And availability bias goes back into that system one, system two, thinking of not burning calories. And what it is simply this. People have a tendency to, to believe that the information they see most frequency must be the truth. So because I see this message, because I see now Flip it and say, because I see Donald Trump is a Russian spy. So because I see Donald Trump as a Russian spy, and I've seen it so many times, I assume that is true because we all believe that the crowd is smarter than we are. We all believe that the mass is smarter than we are. So if everybody is saying Russian collusion is real, I don't want to be the outsider. I don't want to be, you know, on the outside. I'm going to fall in with the rest of the group. I'm going to buy into it. And that's two of the. There's not the only two, Joe, but it is two of the things that they so, so depend on is giving you the messages that get you riled up and then giving them to you at such a high frequency that it washes all the other messages that you're getting away.

Yeah, this, this mark could be an interesting topic, maybe for another conversation. Just on this is for one thing, how to be more effective with your own marketing and advertising, which you're doing a great job of explaining people how to do here. The other is how to protect yourself from bullshit. How to protect yourself from, you know, just the sheer manipulation and propaganda that is so, you know, so destroying so many people's lives right now.

I will tell you how I do it. When you started the podcast, you were using the word epistemology. Epistemology is a philosophy that is very important in my life. And epistemology means simply this. How do you know what you know?

So when I see a message, and I don't care whether it's msnbc, cnn, Fox News, whoever, when someone says today such and such happened, the first question I ask is, how do they know that?

So then if I'm interested now, I may not be interested. If I'm interested, I'm going to look and see. I'll probably go to, let's say CBS made a report. Well, I'll go to CBS and read the article and how did CBS say this and who wrote this? And what's the biases? What's the history of the biases of the person who wrote this now? What's the background to it? And if I can find the background and if I'm still interested now, I'm going to go read what made, what was the information they got their information from? I will keep drilling down until I actually know what I know that I'm not taking someone else's opinion for it. And I'll give you this very quickly. In the world of Medicine and drugs, which we deal with a lot.

Everything. You see all these clinical studies. Well, the first thing people don't understand when you see something advertised at a clinical study shows that XYZ formula reduces wrinkles by 68%. Understand that there could have been 10 clinical studies that were run before that one that all failed. And we just threw all those ones away because those studies didn't have the result we wanted. So we don't have to publish them. So we throw all those clinical studies away. Now we look at the clinical study and we have to ask ourselves, okay, well, this is what they claim the clinical study says, who ran it? Who paid to run it? What was the methodology that was used? Because most clinical studies, most reporters, most news outlets are not today focused on finding the truth. They're focused on.

Backing up or proving a predetermined narrative. When we think back to Walter Cronkite, Walter Cronkite was actually a far left liberal, but Walter Cronkite was a newsman. And he, and he believed that his job was just to report the news.

So back when I was young, we would watch the facts and come to our own conclusion or come to our own opinion. Today, we have to watch everyone's opinion and try to figure out what are the facts. We're no longer being given the facts. We're being given the opinion. We have to extract the facts from them. That's Joe, this is the way you protect yourself is with epistemology. How do I know this is true? How do I know what I know? Yeah, fortunately, people aren't asking that.

No, you're right. Very good. Thank you for. Thank you for that. What, and you've already spoken to this. You know, I have questions about metaphors being used effectively in advertising. What are PGO spikes? But we can, we can speak to those if you want. But what ultimately, that you've not already shared makes up the most effective response. Getting ads. And what are the steps someone should take to writing them or creating them?

From a broad standpoint, I would say the first thing, what we look at when we're creating copy, the first thing we look at is, okay, who's the demographic we're talking to now? How do we get inside their head and really drill down deeper to get into that frame? What do they believe is true? What is it that they accept? How can I have an ethos with this customer? So that's where we start with. Then we start looking at, okay, what are the, what are the words that are going to motivate these people. What is the cadence of those words that are going to motivate these people? How can I, can I work in a because statement? Can I work in an embedded command where I can literally give them a direct command to go do something because that stuff works? You can literally change that cadence of that voice and say, you know, go to SuchAndSuch.com right now and order X. And now give me a because statement. I'm going to give you a And you were talking about metaphors. Metaphors are. This are one of the most powerful ways of being able to, to persuade people. If you think about it, we're incapable of speaking to each other without metaphors. We literally can't communicate without metaphors. We constantly do it when we say, when we say, wow, that really hit the nail on the head. That's a metaphor. When we say, geez, he's crushing it. No one's crushing anything. It's a metaphor. Yeah. How do we find the right metaphors that will connect with people? And sometimes those metaphors are nothing more than telling people a story.

And the story has a conclusion that brings people to the place that we're trying to take them to. I will give you this very quickly. So I was in class in hypnosis class and I was with a guy who is instructing and he's amazing. And it was a week long program and he told everyone he was going to do a metaphor. And his metaphor was, I'm going to try to do this very quickly. His metaphor was he was going to meet an old friend. And the old friend told him he hadn't seen his old friend in ages. And his friend told him meet him down at the park. And I walked out of the university and I walked downstairs and I went, I went right past the school bookstore and I turned left and I headed down to the park. And I couldn't understand why he was having me go to such a seedy part of the city. But he did anyways. And I got there and he was wearing this tweed jacket with arm patches. And I'm thinking, it's 98 degrees. Why is he wearing this tweed jacket? Anyways, he goes on and tells the story. That was on a Tuesday. On Friday, he asked everyone in the class how many people went downstairs to the school bookstore and bought the new CD from the band 98 Degrees. About 85% of the class went and bought that book because he embedded it. He said, I walked downstairs, I went by the school bookstore and I noticed the posters on the window. There is a Big poster there for the new CD from 98 Degrees. And then I headed over to the CD part of town. CD and it was so hot. It was like 98 degrees. I can't understand why he would tell me to meet him when it was 98 degrees out. He literally embedded this, the CD from 98 degrees and to buy it. And most of the class bought it.

Wow.

And here's the part that'll freak you out. Half of the class said they didn't even like the band.

They had no idea why they bought it. They literally said, I don't even know why I bought this. I've never bought anything from 98 degrees. But he literally created a metaphor. And the metaphor, when you have heard, if you could heard him deliver it, because it was like a 15 minute metaphor. The metaphor was so filled out and it was so colorful and it had such detail to it that every time he dropped an embedded command like cd, like 98 degrees, like look at the bookstore windows. You didn't notice that he was giving you these, these pinpoints because your imagination was filling in this very colorful explanation of what was happening. We can do this in our messaging. And by the way, Joe, you know how to do this. I've watched you do it because you do it in long form writing. You do it all the time in long form writing, a little harder to do in 30 seconds. But like in your newsletters and in bigger things that you create, you do it all the time. So I don't like the term selling, to be honest with you, because when I think of selling, I think I'm trying to get you to buy something from me. And I see it as a very one sided transaction.

Yep.

So I preferred, I prefer to be more focused, less about selling and more about exchange. So how can I provide you something that is going to be of great value to you, that is going to enhance your life? And how can you give me something in return which is probably money, which is obviously something that it is an amount that you feel is worth what I'm going to give you. Whenever I hear selling, I always think of, you know, for me, I always think of people trying to push people into buying something that they didn't want to buy. And I will tell you, as marketers, as long as we're selling a valuable product or a valuable service, we don't need to push people into buying things they don't want to buy. There's plenty of people out there who will buy it willingly as long as we tell them the value. As Long as we explain how it's going to the problem we're going to solve and how it's going to impact their life. So I mean, I'm curious to what your definition of selling is.

Yeah, well, I look at selling marketing versus selling. Selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face some with somebody in zoom in front of them, you're talking with them. Marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you properly or on zoom or whatever mechanism that you're with that person.

Properly positioned so by the time you're talking to them, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to do business with you. Which is what I look at marketing as positioning.

So what I learned, and it took me probably 20 years of being in the marketing and selling world, which every single person here is in that world, if your income is contingent upon producing a result and in exchange, as you call it, which I think is a great way of looking at it.

If I change it to think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling, people seem to, it brings down the defenses. Because the word selling, you know, like you said earlier, you know, like the, the car industry is an example. I mean, they branded themselves as high pressure. You know, where people think, you know, selling is yelling in the more big and amazing and you know, all that. So everything from urgency to, you know, outlandish offers and claims to giant discounts, I mean, all of that could be done in a very opportunistic, annoying way. And so people, I think people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured, but the selling is often done in a very pressured way with people that are not, there's not any good marketing put in front of them. Like, you know my friend Robert Cialdini who's going to be here next week at Genius Network. You know, he wrote a, he wrote the book Influence and then many years later he wrote the book called Pre Suasion. And he's like, the way to have the influence moment be most effective is what you do before that moment of influence. So before you have an opportunity to talk to someone, before you have any actual selling that's being done, the marketing sets it up, the marketing tees it up. And the way that I used to explain this to carpet cleaners is good carpet cleaners will go through a series of steps in order to most effectively clean the carpet. They will pre vacuum. They will vacuum the carpet before they go and clean it. They will pre spray the carpet so that they can moisten the carpet and make it easier for the extraction. And what I would say to a room of carpet cleaners when I was explaining marketing very early on, this is started in 1994, when I started teaching carpet cleaners how to market the things that I had discovered that were working for me in my own carpet cleaning business. I said, how many of you use pre spray? And so most of them will raise their hand. I'm like, okay, well, if you have a plate and you eat spaghetti and there's spaghetti sauce that's dried on the plate, and you go to wash the plate and you, you know, just put water on, you turn the water on and you just try to. You're going to be scrubbing it to remove the hardened spaghetti sauce that's on the plate. But if you just put the plate in the sink, you turn the sink on, you let it soak for even sometimes just a minute or two, you can just rinse it off and you can scrub it off real easy. Right? You don't have to put a lot of effort, but if you don't do that, there's a lot more effort. I said the same as with selling. You're all pre spraying the carpet because it's a lot easier to clean the carpet if you pre spray it and let. Let it sit there for 10, 15, 20 minutes before you extract that particular area. But if you just go right at it, you're going to be putting a lot of effort. Well, the same with sales. If you have no relationship with somebody, if they have no idea who you are, then you're, you're going after people that you're. They're going to view you as annoying. So that's, that's a long response to different ways that I think about marketing versus selling. However, though, I think what you said about exchange is really important because if someone does not want to exchange anything with you and you're trying to force it down their throat, or you're going to be viewed as pressure. And people wake up every day hoping that they can avoid a salesperson. You know, they're hoping they can go all day long and never have to run into anyone that's selling them anything. So the way that you've described it and the way that you described it with hypnotizing is actually creating the process of where people will literally invite you into their homes, metaphorically. Right. And really into their stores and into their lives by the way that you actually talk to them, the way you present it, the way You. So that's. Those are my thoughts.

Yeah, I completely agree with you, Joe. And I don't think we're in the business. When people ask me what we do at Jekyll and Hyde, I tell people we're in the business of persuasion. We're not in the advertising world. We persuade people to overcome their own biases to make their lives better. That's the business we're in. And what do we do for our clients? If you were in my office, you would see a plaque on the wall. And the plaque says, we help our clients sell more stuff to more people more often for more money.

And if you're not doing one of those four things and you work here, you're doing the wrong job.

Can you say that again? Because I love it. It's great.

We're in the business of selling more stuff to more people more often for more money.

And that means increase the size of the demographic, sell more of it, get people to buy products more frequently, and work with our clients to be able to increase the price of their product and increase their profitability. We refer to it here as the four mores. And whatever it is you're doing, unless you happen to be in the accounting department here, whatever it is you're doing better be focused on one of those four things today or you're not doing your job.

Yeah, no, totally. I love it. So Deborah said, does the book address in person presentations? I believe almost everything you wrote in there could be applied to in person presentations.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, there's a lot of stuff in there that that absolutely applied to that. And I'll tell you the area, Deborah, that really applies to it, and that is there's a section in here where we talk about building rapport. And rapport is. Is everything about being a therapist. It is also everything about selling. If I am not in rapport with you, I could almost be offering you something for free. And you're not going to buy it from me because you don't believe me, you don't like me, you don't trust me. So there is a big section in there on just how to build rapport and the techniques you can do to build rapport. Folks, this is the thing that we all have to deal with because we have to deal with ourselves. And it is incumbent upon people as humans, we all want to be congruent, and the studies show that we want to be congruent. And a quick example of that is if you go up to somebody and say, hey, I'd like you to fill out a survey. Most people will avoid you if you go up and say, excuse me, do you consider yourself to be a helpful person? Most people would say yes. Then if I say, would you mind filling out a survey five times more people will fill out the survey because they want to be congruent with what they just said about themselves. I said it was helpful. So I can't not do this because otherwise I'm not congruent. I need to be congruent. That's. I understand that I, I have a pre, preconceived notion of who I am, and who I am is. I. I. My focus is on how am I going to bring value to every person that I meet every day. I can't do that if I sell people things that they don't need or if I sell people things that I know are bad. So for us at this company, we turn down products that we think are bad for people or that we don't think add value or that we think are just bad products. And the example I would give you, we had a very large company who makes meal replacement drinks come to us, big, big meal replacement company that you've all seen and say, we'd like you guys to handle advertising our meal replacement drink. And on the phone I said to them, I said, well, your meal replacement drink has 24 grams of sugar. That's the equivalent of two crispy cream donuts.

Are you reformulating the drink? And the comment was, we did just reformulate the drink. I said, but your, but you're giving people diabetes. Yes, but they'll lose weight while they're using it. And you're giving people diabetes. You're telling people to consume 2 Krispy Kreme doughnuts twice a day. And we literally said on that phone call, this was, this was millions of dollars in business. We literally said, we're not right for you because we don't believe this.

And that's what we have to do. We have to live with ourselves. You know, people will ask us how we, we have a track record of almost never having a failed ad campaign. And people say, we'll have new clients say, well, you know, how do you attribute having such a good track record? Because we don't take the stuff we know is bad.

I'm of the same mindset. There are certain people. There are. They are, to use our friend Dan Sullivan's term, there's front stage and there's backstage. Right? So backstage of your business, there's all kinds of languaging and thing we're all in the selling business. You make no mistake that Mark knows that everything that all of you are here for your nothing's going to happen in your lives as someone does not buy what you're offering. And if you do not sell it, how you refer to it and how the public views it is a completely different thing. There's a video of mine called Is Selling Evil? That is a conversation with me 13 years ago. So I talk about DVD player, so that's why it sounds dated but it's a 3 minute and 50 second video that's actually been used in university classes teaching selling. And someone asked me it's B roll footage for a movie they were interviewing me for that never made it into the movie but one of my team members saw it and is like that's really interesting what you say. And it became this whole thing called Is Selling Evil? And I talk about, you know, selling can be used for good or bad. So certainly Mark is a proponent of selling but when he says I don't like the word selling, he's you know, well I'll let y', all let you finish him there. I mean my, my view is that, you know, certain people, if you say I'm going to try to sell you, they immediately have a confirmation bias. They immediately have an association with it. So it's, it's not that you're not doing the activity of selling, you know, so I, I just wanted to speak to that because I think this is where people get hung up.

We're actually, we're absolutely in the business of selling more stuff to more people, more often for more money. As Joe said. That's a backstage comment that is on the walls, the four walls inside the office. Not the terms that we would express to an end user or to a consumer. We would never put that out to a consumer to see. It's an internal communication. When we, when we talk about exchange versus selling, we're simply this. If I can persuade you that I have a solution to a problem that you have and my solution is priced properly and it will improve your life, I don't need to sell you. Yes, I'm going to sell you the product, but I don't need to sell you on the product. I just need to help you over, help you understand the benefits and overcome your own fears or bias of change. Yeah, and that's why we kind of avoid the idea of selling because again I think of selling as pushing, trying to push something on someone and we don't ever want to push things on products. We don't want to push products on people. We want to attract people to us. We don't want to push it. We want to attract.

Yeah. So no, so, so good.

So good.

So, Mark, how do people get more of you? Obviously buy the book Hypnotizing if they want to listen to your interviewer podcast or anything else that, you know, you offer. Where, where's the best way for people to find more?

Mark Young well, our, our podcast on marketing is called CPG Insiders and it's really about the consumer packaged goods industry. So if you're not in specifically that some of it may be good and you can find that at CPG Insiders or you can get it in any place that you get podcasts.

I also do a very big political podcast with Chuck Woolery, who is the former host of Wheel of Fortune and Love Connection and those shows. And Chuck and I do a show called Blunt Force Truth and it's politically on the right. I will warn people of that in advance. Chuck actually is the get off my lawn guy and I kind of play the guy who's a little more rational and a little more scientific on this particular program.

But those are both places that you can get more, of course you can go to. If you want to learn anything about the agency, you can go to jekyllheidlabs.com and learn more about the agency itself.

Mark, you are an extremely helpful, valuable, useful and very bright guy. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and share your thoughts with people. I hope everyone is able to go deeper with all of this. Utilize it in your businesses. And when you read Hypnotizing, you won't just find it useful for your business, you actually find it for yourself as a human. You'll learn a lot about what causes us to respond or not respond to be to to increase desires that you know, people have and how they exist, including your own. Also, Mark is going to be at the Genius network annual event December 1st, 2nd and 3rd here in Arizona. I will be doing an interview with him live on stage and that will be awesome. So some of you that are here already registered for that. But if you that is not a inexpensive event. It is A, a $10,000 person event for people that are not Genius Network members. And you have to qualify for. You can check that out if you want to see Mark in person live, which will be held in Scottsdale, Arizona. And it's going to be awesome. So if you're interested in that, go to geniusnetwork.com and geniusnetworkevents.com is specifically about the event. So again, Mark, you're awesome, man. Thank you. And everyone, have a wonderful day. Utilize what you heard here for good and go make some good stuff happen. And that's it. And we will see everyone on the next episode of I Love Marketing. Thank you. Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilove marketing.com subscribe if you'd like access to the show notes to take action on what was discussed, please visit ilovemarketing.com 457.