3 Takeaways - Start with Understanding: Change People's Minds Under Impossible Conditions with Best Selling Author and Wharton School Professor Jonah Berger (#66)

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Have you ever wondered how you could change someone’s mind  or make something go viral? Jonah Berger shares what works to change people’s minds – even under almost impossible conditions – and how to make things “catch on.” Jonah Berger is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and an internationally bestselling author. He is a world-renowned expert on change and on word of mouth, social influence, viral marketing, and how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. He has taught tens of thousands of students and executives, and advised hundreds of companies including Apple, Google and Nike.He is the author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind and Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be with Jonah Berger. He's a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on getting people to change their minds. He's also an expert on the science of social influence, word of mouth, and why things become popular. He's taught tens of thousands of students and executives and advised hundreds of companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, and Nike.

He's written two books, The Catalyst, How to Change Anyone's Mind, and Contagious, Why Things Catch On. Both are terrific and I highly recommend them. Let me start by quoting Jonah. Quote, everyone has something they want to change. Salespeople want to change their customers' minds and marketers want to change purchase decisions. Employees want to change their boss's perspective and leaders want to change organizations. Parents want to change their children's behavior. Startups want to change industries. Nonprofits want to change the world, unquote. Jonah's going to tell us how to get people to change their minds using methods similar to hostage negotiators. And hostage negotiators work under seemingly impossible conditions, trying to get terrorists to let

hostages go or trying to get a bank robber who's locked himself in a bank with hostages to come out by himself, even though he knows he's talking to a police officer and that his life is going to change forever when he comes out. According to Jonah, a hostage negotiator gets the bank robber to come out by himself nine out of 10 times, and he comes out just because someone asks. So Jonah is going to share what works to change people's minds, even under almost impossible conditions. He's also going to share how to make things catch on and go viral. Jonah, welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today. Thanks so much for having me.

My pleasure. Jonah, how did you first become interested in changing people's minds? I'm an academic at heart, love doing academic research, have been teaching out at the Wharton School for something like 15 years. But a few years ago, my life changed a little bit. As you mentioned, I wrote a book called Contagious, which was my first book. And things changed for me a bit after writing that book. Before writing that book, I sort of spent 90, 95% of my time doing teaching research. And once in a while, I might have talked to a company in a consulting or speaking capacity. But once I wrote Contagious, I made the New York Times bestseller list, Wall Street Journal

bestseller list. It's now out in a million copies in 35 languages around the world. I started getting a lot of calls from companies and organizations that wanted help. They wanted help getting a product to catch on. They wanted help getting a service to get traction. They wanted to make content get attention online. And I learned a lot about business from working with these different industries. Everything from industries we think about a lot, like consumer packaged goods and technology, to industries we don't think as much about, like aircraft engines and B2B logistics services. I learned a lot about marketing, a lot about business, and a lot about the way that technology is shaping consumer and customer behavior. But what I realized is that all

these clients at the core had the same issue, which is they all had something that they wanted to change. Just as you nicely outlined for the marketers or sales folks, it might be a customer or client. For the leadership or sort of organizational development folks, it's changing company culture or getting a certain project or initiative to get traction. Startups want to catch on, nonprofits want their issues to get attention. And people were trying different things and they weren't working. And so I started to wonder, well, could there be a better way? And I applied lots of tools in Contagious and we got some of the traction that we were looking for, but there were still tools that were outside the book that I was starting to use that I realized might deserve more attention.

And so it really started from the question of, could there be a better way to change minds? And if so, what might that way be? So how do most people try to change someone's mind and does it work? And if not, why not? Think for a moment about a chair, a physical world, moving something in the physical. What do we often do? Well, we often try to push the thing, right? If you've got a chair or you've got a refrigerator or whatever it is you want to move, you think about pushing it in the right direction, it'll go. And indeed, we tend to think that same way in the social world. So when I

interviewed thousands of executives from a variety of different industries, a variety of different verticals, and I asked them, hey, what's something you want to change? And what's something you've tried to change it? Over 98% of the time, people list some version of pushing. What I mean by that, I mean, adding more facts, more figures, more information, sending one more email, making one more phone call, one more PowerPoint, making one more phone call, one more PowerPoint presentation. We tend to think that if we just give people more information, they'll come around. If I just dump more stuff on them to push them in the right direction, they'll go. And while that works really well for chairs, if you look at people, you'll see

something kind of interesting. When you push chairs, chairs slide across the floor, when you push people, they often push back. They often resist. They often dig in their heels. They're often less likely to do what we want them to do rather than more. And so I realized if pushing doesn't work, well, could there be a better way? Tell us about how pushing, telling people what to do can actually backfire. As we just talked about, you can lead people to resist or dig in their heels a bit. And when people are pushed, they push back. And so we have this sort of ingrained desire not to go along.

And so it actually turns out a better way to change people's minds actually comes from chemistry. If you look at chemistry, changing chemistry is extremely hard. I think about turning carbon into diamonds or plant matter into oil. It takes forever. It takes a really long time. And so in the lab, chemists often add temperature and pressure. They squeeze things together. They heat them up.

They add energy to the system with the idea that adding energy to the system will make change happen. But it turns out there's a special set of substances that chemists often add that make change happen faster and easier. They do everything from cleaning the grime on our contact lenses to clean the grime on our car's engine. And multiple Nobel Prizes have been won for innovations in this space. But most interesting is how these substances create change. They don't add more energy, turn up the temperature, increase the pressure. What they do is they lower the barrier to change. They actually make the same amount of change happen with less energy, not more. And very simply, these substances are called catalysts.

As we think about catalysts in the social world, we tend to think about someone as a catalyst if they're a change agent. Oh, so-and-so is a catalyst, or this person was the catalyst that drove this action. But catalysts actually have a very specific meaning, which is not just that they're a change agent, that they created that change through lowering the barrier to change. And so I think the same tools, if you look across great change agents, are true in the social world as well. Great change agents, great catalysts don't say, well, what could I do to get someone to change?

Instead, they say, well, why hasn't that person changed already? What's stopping them? What are the barriers or obstacles that are getting in the way? Whether that person is a colleague, whether that person is a peer, whether that person is a customer, whether that person is society around a particular issue, what are the barriers or obstacles that are getting in the way of change? And how by understanding them and mitigating them, can we make change more likely? I think a good analogy to think of is imagine you're parked in your car. You get out of a game or from going shopping, whatever it might be, you get in your car, your car is parked on a hill. So you stick your key in the ignition, you turn the key, you put your foot on the gas.

If the car doesn't go, we often just think, well, I must need more gas, right? If I step on that gas, the car will move. Same with change, right? We think if we just push harder, people will change. But if the parking brake on that car is engaged, it doesn't matter how much we step on the gas, the car's not going to go anywhere. And so the same is true as change agents. Too often we step on the gas. We've got to think about what are the parking brakes, right? What are the barriers or obstacles that are getting in the way of change and how by removing those parking brakes can we make change more likely? Yeah, we all think that people are rational and by making rational arguments like don't smoke, that people will stop smoking or

do whatever you want. And it just doesn't work that way. I was fascinated that you started by analyzing good hostage negotiators. What's their approach and why does it work so well? I found, and first of all, I want to thank the hostage negotiators who spent time talking to me because they obviously have more important things to do than talk to me. But one guy said it very nicely. He said, look, novice Haas negotiators come in and they try to start with influence. They say, hey, come out with your hands up. They say, hey, this is what I want. Do the thing that I want.

And that's indeed what we often do as change agents, right? We think, well, look, I'll just tell everybody in the meeting what I think is the right course of action. I'll just tell that customer or client what I want them to do. I'll just give them information and they'll change. But as he talked about what experienced negotiators would do, what experts do is they realize they have to start with the person they're trying to change. Because telling someone to come out with their hands up or telling them what you want them to do isn't going to work. You can't change someone if you don't understand them. And so great negotiators really start with understanding. They start by understanding who is the person that I'm trying to change

and how by better understanding them and what they need, can we make change more likely? Can I tell a quick story? Is that okay? Yeah, absolutely. One guy was telling this amazing story and it's a little sad, but it ends well. He was talking about a story about someone who's thinking about committing suicide. And the reason he was thinking about committing suicide is that he lost his job and he wants to take care of his kids, but he can't anymore because he can't find work. And he thinks the insurance policy is the only way to have his kids have a good future. And so he thinks, hey, if I kill myself, my kids' future will be taken care of. And so this hodge negotiator shows up on the scene

and the issue is it actually the insurance policy won't pay out so if he commits suicide the insurance policy is not going to pay out and if you tell the guy that is he just going to rationally go oh you're right i really should stop thinking about this or is he just gonna he's emotionally on edge is he just gonna do something that might hurt himself and so the hostage negotiator comes in and he starts what he does in every negotiation not by saying hey this is what I want, but saying, hey, this is my name. Are you OK? And the guy says, yeah, I'm OK.

Everyone's trying to tell me to not commit suicide, but yeah, I'm OK. And he says, oh, can I get you anything? What do you need? And they start having a conversation and he starts trying to figure out why is the guy here? And the guy's talking about, look, I've got these two boys and I want them to grow up to be great young men. And I take them fishing and I teach them manners. But look, I don't have any money to support them. And so I'm worried if I can't support them, they're not going to have this life. And so I am here today because I want to help them out.

So they have this conversation. They're going back and forth. Negotiator's asking all these questions. And finally, he goes, after the guy's talking for a couple of minutes, he goes, wow, you sound like you love your kids a lot. And the guy goes, yeah, yeah, I do. And then the negotiator goes, well, if you kill yourself today, your kids are going to lose the best friend that they've ever had. And then he just pauses there and lets that sink in because what he's done is he said, look, I'm going to start with understanding, but by understanding you, I'm going to show you that the best way to get to where I wanted to get in the first place, which is you not committing suicide, the best way for you to get what you want, help your kids, is actually to do what I wanted in the first place. And the guy goes, sits about it, listens, he thinks about it, doesn't right away do anything, but he eventually stands down, doesn't commit suicide, and goes and finds another job and has a happy life. Now, that's a story I hope we never find ourselves in, but I think it highlights the power of understanding the person we're trying to change. Great change agents don't just say, this is what I want, do it. Great change

agents say, well, why are you where you are? Where am I? And how can I get you from where you are to where I am by better understanding you? And so by starting with understanding, we can really show people that the best path to achieve their goals is something that's consistent with our goals as well. Starting with understanding sounds absolutely critical. One of your other strategies is providing a menu. Can you tell us about that? Yeah. The issue both of these strategies are following against is this idea of reactance, which we talked about briefly. And the notion is when pushed, people push back. When you

ask people to do something, when you tell people to do something, they push back. Why? Because they want to have freedom and autonomy. I want to feel like I am making my own choices. I am in the driver's seat of my own life. Why did I buy a certain product, use a certain service, do a certain thing? I did it because I wanted to. I am in the driver's seat of my life. But as soon as we, whether we as a marketer, a colleague, a peer, a boss, whatever it might be, as soon as we come in and try to influence someone, now it's not clear whether they're doing something because they wanted to do it or because we wanted to do it. And the more they feel like they're doing it because we wanted to do it, the less interested they are in doing it. They're basically an ingrained anti-persuasion radar.

It's almost like a missile defense system that goes off when we feel like someone's trying to persuade us. And so we engage in a set of defensive measures, right? We avoid or ignore the message. Maybe we delete the email. We turn off the television to avoid being persuaded. Or even worse, we counter-argue. Yeah, we're sitting there listening, but we're really thinking about all the reasons why we don't want to do what someone has suggested. And so the

challenge here is we can't tell people what to do. The more we sell them, the more they push back. So we've got to get around and sell them. We've got to get them to buy in rather than persuade them. We've got to get them to persuade themselves. And so at the core, what we need to do is allow for agency, give them back some sense of freedom and control. And this idea of providing a menu is one of the ways to do that. One way to reduce reactance by giving people back autonomy and super simple. Usually when we're presenting something that we want people to do, we say, this is great. And here's why. And we list all the reasons why we think someone should do something. And people are sitting there. They might seem like they're listening, but really they're counter-argumenting to think

about all the reasons it won't work. And so what great change agents, what great catalysts do is rather than giving people one option, hey, I think we should do this. Instead, they say, hey, I think we should do this or this. Which one do you think is better? Because they're giving people a choice, right? Now suddenly people have a different job. Rather than thinking about, well, I don't like this thing and here are all the reasons why.

Now I'm thinking about, well, which of these things do I like better? And because I'm focused on which one I like better, I'm much more likely to pick one of them at the end of the interaction. And it's called providing a menu because notice what we're not doing. We're not telling people what to do, but we're also not giving them unlimited choice. We're saying here is a limited set of options. Choose from within this choice set, and that will guide your choice in the right direction. And so we're not forcing people to do something. We're guiding their choice, but because we've given them that freedom, they're much more interested in going along. Jonah, can you give some examples, perhaps parents or doctors or ad agency or consulting firm? How would you apply that? Consultants talk about this all the time. So they say, look, rather than giving the client a solution,

which they'll hate because it's a solution. Instead we say, Hey, look here, two or three solutions. We think these two or three things would be the best direction to go. And which one do you guys think is better? As parents, you tell your kid to put on their pajamas. They say, no, at least if you have a young child, If you have an older child, they're already putting on pajamas by themselves. But if you tell your four-year-old to eat their broccoli, they say no. Not because they hate broccoli, because they want to express their independence. If you instead say, hey, which do you want to eat first, your chicken or your broccoli? Or you say, hey, which do you want to put on first, your pajama bottoms or your pajama top?

They're going, ooh, which one do I want to put on first? That pajama bottom? I don't know. Let me think about what I want to do. And because they're focused on what they want to do, they forgot about the other option, which is running around the house naked and never putting their clothes on, right? Or having ice cream for dinner. They're focused more on the options at hand than the options that aren't at hand, but that makes them more likely to change. Another one of your tactics for getting people to change their mind or do what you want them to is the tactic of asking questions rather than making statements.

Why do questions work, and can you give some examples? Sure. Let me start with an example. I was talking to a startup founder a couple of years ago, and she was talking about having trouble motivating her team. There's a big project coming up, and everybody needed to put in extra hours, and people didn't want to do it. And so she calls a meeting. She says, hey, what kind of company do you want to be?

A good company or a great company? Everyone says, oh, of course we want to be a great company. But then she asks a real question. She says, OK, how do we get there? How do we become a great company? And she starts getting some feedback. And questions do a few things, some of which we've talked about already. First, as we've talked about, questions shift the job of the listener. Rather than sitting there and thinking about all the reasons why they don't like what you're talking about and thinking about all the arguments that go against what you're saying, instead, they're thinking about their opinion, which they're more than happy to give you right? Because it's their opinion. And so they're happy to give their opinion. That's good thing number one. You've deactivated that anti-protection graveyard.

Good thing number two, though, is consistent with that starting with understanding idea that we talked about before. You're collecting information because you're not just asking any questions. You're asking questions that help you figure out how to enact the change that you want to create. You're thinking about questions that allow you to collect information. Too often, I think we've talked about this a little bit already, but as change agents, we know the outcome we want to achieve and we focus on that. We don't know enough about the people that we're trying to change, but questions allow us to get that information. Now we know more about our audience. Now we know more, as that Ha go. She ever did about why this person is there. And so questions help us. But the third thing is that questions encourage commitment to the conclusion, because if that boss says,

Hey, how do we become a great company? And someone says, Hey, I think we need to do X, Y, Z. And then she says, fantastic. We're going to start doing X, Y, Z. It's a lot harder for that person to say, I don't want to do it because it was their idea in the first place. Essentially, what she's done is she's encouraged commitment to the conclusion. She's gotten them to put a stick in the sand or a foot down, whatever it might be. And now when she comes back and say, great, we're going to do what you suggested, it's their idea. They're already bought into it. Somebody recently I was talking to said, you know, so funny, my boss likes feeling something is his idea. I said,

the funny part about that is he's not just your boss. Everyone likes feeling something is their idea, right? Because if we have ownership of it, we're more bought into it. We want to see it succeed. It's not just a thing. It's our thing. And so the more we can get people to buy into that process and be part of that process, the more they'll support us along the way through the solution. And so sometimes we've got to give away ownership. We've got to stop thinking about, is it my idea or not, but how I can get people on board by giving that idea away. Jonah, whose mind cannot be changed or under what circumstances is it impossible to change somebody's mind? I think the problem is not whose mind can we change or if someone's mind is impossible to change. And the problem is more

about the timeline that we seem to set for ourselves. I think given enough time, you can change anybody's mind, but it really depends on whether what we're trying to change is a pebble or a boulder. And what do I mean by that? Sometimes you're trying to get people to do something really small. Like, hey, I'd like you to try this new toothpaste. That's not a life-shocking change. It's a pretty small thing. Maybe I'd put a trial sample of it in a hotel room and you try it and you end up buying it, right? It's not that big of a deal. But if I'm asking you to put solar panels on your house or I'm asking you to change political parties, that's a big change. That's a boulder. That's going to require a lot more work to get that change to happen.

And I think sometimes just think, well, it'll just happen overnight. And one message will magically unlock it. And there are messages and ways of communicating that will help more. But if you look at the Grand Canyon, the Grand Canyon wasn't formed overnight. It wasn't just like, oh, boom, and there's the Grand Canyon, right? It was like a little trickle of water from rain that turned into a stream, that turned into a river, that turned into a gorge that eventually formed the Grand Canyon. And so really big changes are going to take more time. It's not impossible.

I talk about in the book of people that change political parties. I talk about people that end up voting for things that they were initially against. So change is possible, but I think we have to be realistic about how long it may take. Some cases it may be really easy and it may happen tomorrow, but in other cases it may be more difficult. I'd love to talk to you more about the catalyst, but I also want to ask you about contagious and things catching on. What are some of the most memorable things which have caught on and why did they catch on? There are six key factors that we've found drive things to catch on. Sometimes we think it's random or it's luck or it's chance. You have to bottle lightning or get lucky for something to go viral or something to become popular.

But we've looked at thousands of pieces of online content. We've looked at tens of thousands of brands. We've looked at millions of purchases around the United States and around the world. And again and again, we see the same six factors come up. And so in Contagious, I put those factors in a framework called the STEPS framework, and that stands for social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. Each of those is a psychological driver of why people talk and why they share and leads all sorts of products, services, and ideas and behaviors to catch on. And so it's not about being the most persuasive communicator. It's not about being a digital influencer that we have time we can get into whether it's actually valuable or not.

It's really about crafting content and messages and ideas and products and services that are more likely to be shared. If we follow those steps, the social currencies, triggers, emotion, public, practical value and stories, we can make anything catch on. I've worked with hundreds of companies and organizations to apply these ideas. And sometimes I think people think, oh, something has to be naturally remarkable to become popular. We talk about a lot of boring things every day. We talk about what we're having for breakfast or lunch. We talk about music artists we like or what we're doing this weekend, not because someone's paying us, giving us a referral bonus, but because of the psychology of sharing. If we understand how conversations work, if we understand why people talk about

and why people share some things, we can really get them to share anything. Let me ask you about a couple of those. But before we get there, let me ask you first, does it take a huge marketing budget? That's an easy answer. No, there's so many things that catch on without a huge budget. We have the notion that the best things always went out, the highest quality things, or price really matters a lot. Is this the cheapest thing? Or big advertising budgets matter a lot. Is this the most advertised thing? But take a look at baby names, for example. There's no difference in price, baby names. There's no difference in quality. There's no advertising.

No one's out there saying, Josh is the best name ever. I'm going to advertise that it's the best name. And yet certain names catch on and others don't. And so it's not just about things like quality. I wish it was about quality, but it's about the motivations that drive sharing. Word of mouth is a much more powerful tool than traditional advertising. Research shows, for example, that word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of traditional advertising and shows that a dollar spent on word of mouth goes 10 times as far as a dollar spent on traditional advertising. That's not meant to say that advertising is not useful. It can be useful in raising awareness, but really when it comes to driving persuasion, changing minds, driving action, that's where word of mouth becomes very important

because it's more trusted and it's more targeted. We know that companies and organizations are trying to convince us, even nonprofits, even political candidates. They say, well, I'm not selling something. I'm just trying to get people to do social good. That may be true, but you're still asking people to do something in particular and people are smart. They know that nonprofits are going to say that this particular cause is the most important cause.

No nonprofit says their cause is not the most important cause. But because people know that companies and organizations are self-interested, they're less likely to trust what companies and organizations have to say, more likely to trust their peers. Because your peers will tell it to you straight. They'll say, hey, this was great, or hey, this wasn't so good. And because of that, we're much more likely to believe them. And there's also the targeting benefit of word of mouth, right? People tend to share information with others they think would find it interesting. And so word of mouth is a great way to find interested potential folks for a product, new potential customers for a political campaign, new potential voters. People tend to be friends with others like them, tend to know people that might be

interested in what they're interested in and can target that information to those individuals. Jonah, you mentioned your six principles. Your first one is social currency. Can you tell us more about it and give an example? The idea of social currency, very simple, is the better something makes people look, the more likely they are to share it. So if you're walking around New York City, around the Lower East Side, and your stomach is rumbling, there's actually a restaurant you might see that has a big hot dog shaped sign

with the words, eat me written on it. It would look like mustard. If you walk down the flight of stairs into that restaurant, you'll be in a restaurant called Criff Dogs, amazing hot dogs, best hot dog place in New York City. But if you finish eating your hot dog,

you'll notice in the corner of the room, there's a phone booth. And you walk inside that phone booth, it's pretty cramped. It's a phone booth after all. But there's a Rodeo phone. Stick your finger in the number three, go around in a circle, and hold the phone up to your ear. Well, the phone will actually ring. It'll go ring, ring. And then someone will pick up the other line. And they'll ask you whether you have a reservation. And the first time I heard this story, I said, a reservation? What could I possibly have a reservation for? But if you're lucky and a friend of yours happen to make a reservation or they happen to have space, the back of that phone booth will open and you'll be led into a secret bar called Please Don't Tell.

Now, Please Don't Tell is violated like every law of communications we can think of. There's no sign on the side of the street. There's no sign inside the restaurant. They do everything they can to make themselves difficult to find. And yet every day they're full. 3 p.m. phone lines open up by 3.30. All the seats are gone. People finally have to hit redial again and again trying to get through. And it's not lack of competition. There are dozens of other similar places within a few block radius. So what did they do to cut through the clutter? And they did something really simple. They made themselves a secret. Let me tell you a little secret about secrets. If you think about the last time someone told you something and they told you not to tell anyone else, think about what you did with that information. If you're like most people,

you probably told someone, right? Because having access to information that no one else does makes you look smart and makes you look in the know. And that's one example of what I call social currency. What we share is a signal of identity, just like the car we drive and just like the clothes we wear, the things we talk about and the things we share affect how other people see us. And so too often, whether we're marketers, whether we're leaders, whatever groundswell of movement we're trying to build, we think the answer is to make ourselves look good. Let me tell people why we're great and they'll want to be participating in it. What social currency says, we got to think about our audience. If we can make them look good, they'll talk and share to get that social currency and bring us along for the ride.

People love talking about their frequent flyer status or pulling out their American Express black cards or sharing pictures of themselves on vacation because it makes them look good. And so as brands and organizations, if we can give away that social currency, we can make things scarce or exclusive, make people feel like insiders, smart, special, in the know. If we can give away some of that social currency, we can get people to talk about us. Triggers is another one of your principles. Can you tell us briefly about triggers and how you can create them? The triggers idea, very simply, the quick version, it's top of mind is tip of tongue. We don't only talk about things we like. We don't only talk about things that are exciting.

We talk about things we're thinking about. So if I said peanut butter and, you might think of jelly. If I said rum and, you might think of jelly. If I said rum and, you might think of Coke. These things are linked in our mind. One is linked to the other, even if it's not there. And the same thing is true in the world around us, right? We tend to talk about what's top of mind. We tend to talk about things we're thinking about. Someone asks us a question, like you've been asking me today. If I sit there in silence, it gets a little awkward. So I want to fill in that conversational space. What's So I want to fill in that conversational space.

What's a great way to fill in that conversational space? Talk about whatever's top of mind. We're not always looking for the best story or the most interesting thing that happened to us. We also talk a lot about things that are top of mind, which means as companies and organizations and groups that want to generate word of mouth, we've got to make ourselves top of mind.

We've got to link ourselves to something in the environment to make people think about us more often. The brand Kit Kat, for example, linked themselves to coffee and saw an increase of $200 million in sales, not because they changed how much people liked the brand, but because they changed how often it came to mind. Now, when people thought about drinking coffee, they thought about having a Kit Kat. And so it came to mind a lot and it changed behavior. And so triggers is all about making sure we come to mind more often. Before I asked for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today, is there anything else you'd like to mention? Is there anything else that I should have asked you but didn't? No, I think the only quick thing I would

say is we are at an amazing time in society's history. We are learning more and more about behavioral science and more and more about behavioral science and more and more about data science than we ever have before. And so I think if you are in the business of changing minds, which means that you are a person, we're all in the business of changing someone's mind, the more we can understand about human behavior,

the more successful we're gonna be. It's not enough, as you said earlier, to assume that people are rational or economic actors. We've gotta understand the psychology of decision-making and the people we're trying to change to most effectively change them. And what are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? The first thing I would say is start with the people that we're trying to change. Whether you want somebody to catch on or you want to change someone's mind, start with understanding them. Second, start by understanding the barriers that are getting in between them and the outcome that you want to achieve. The more you understand about the process

to which they get to you, the more effective that you'll be. And the last, just on an unrelated note to what we've talked about today, is just, I think, the power of curiosity. As we get older, it's easy to get in our old habits and see things the same way. But the more we can look at things with new eyes, the more we can always be curious. I think we can live life always learning and enjoying it more as well. Jonah, thank you so much. This has been great.

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new fresh weekly episodes, be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3takeaways.com or follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Note that 3takeaways.com is with the number three,

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