Afford Anything - Secrets to Getting Promoted, from Harvard Business Alum Leslie Zane

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

#540: What can M&Ms, McDonalds, Harry Potter, Aquafina, Taylor Swift, Jeopardy, and Bed Bath & Beyond teach us about landing a dream job or securing a promotion? Plenty. Imagine you're at a job interview. You've rehearsed your answers, polished your resume, and you're feeling confident. But what if the key to landing that job isn't just about your skills and experience? What if it's about how you make people feel? How you make people feel is your brand, Zane says.  That's what Leslie Zane, a Harvard Business School alum and prominent branding expert, talks about in this interview. She says that whether you're trying to get a new job, a promotion, or more customers for your small business, it all comes down to how you build your personal brand. Zane breaks it down into three main ideas: be salient, be relevant, and be distinctive. Being salient means making sure people remember you. It's not just about doing your job well, but about connecting with people all over your company. Zane gives an example of a dental hygienist who calls patients after their appointments to check on them and offer advice. This extra touch helps the hygienist stick in people's minds. Being relevant is about focusing on the good stuff. Zane says if you make a mistake at work, don't dwell on it. Instead, do more good things to push out the bad memory. She talks about how McDonald's dealt with rumors about "pink slime" in their food. Instead of denying it over and over, they started showing how they make their food with fresh ingredients. This helped people forget about the pink slime and think about good things instead. Being distinctive means standing out, but in a way that still feels familiar. Zane tells a story about the game show Jeopardy. When the longtime host Alex Trebek died, the producers tried inviting different celebrities to host the show. But viewers didn't like it. The ratings only rose when they chose Ken Jennings, a former champion contestant, as the new host. He was familiar enough that viewers felt comfortable with him. Zane also talks about how these ideas can help small businesses. She says it's important to reach out to new customers, not just focus on the ones you already have. She suggests finding ways to connect your business to things that people already enjoy. If you run an accounting firm in Kansas City, for example, you might talk about local sports teams or famous barbecue to help people feel a connection to your business. Throughout the interview, Zane emphasizes that building a strong personal brand isn't about bragging or being fake. It's about creating genuine connections with people and consistently showing your best qualities. You’re creating buzz about yourself. The more positive connections you make, the stronger your brand becomes. Zane's advice goes against some common ideas about marketing and self-promotion. She says you don't need to stick to just one thing or only target a specific group of people. Instead, she encourages reaching out to as many people as possible and finding ways to connect your skills or business to things they already care about. Timestamps Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic ad lengths 0:00 - Importance of becoming a personal brand for career growth 6:04 - Tapping into the instinctive mind 8:54 - How brands grow in people's minds 13:40 - Situational salience using M&M's example 18:40 - Why Harry Potter is a salient brand 24:23 - Three key elements of building a personal brand 29:20 - McDonald's addressing negative brand associations 35:40 - Be distinctive, not unique 41:00 - Jeopardy! host change and brand continuity 46:56 - Creating buzz about yourself at work 52:40 - Why core customers can be a business trap 57:20 - Handling negative feedback or associations 1:02:40 - Tips for standing out in job interviews For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode540 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Maybe you want to convince your boss to give you a raise, and if they don't, you're going to jump ship. Or maybe you want to convince your client to take you on because you have a great project proposal and you think that your business could serve them well and earn some great money in return. How do you convince your boss or convince clients or colleagues of something that you think is the right move? We are going to learn all about persuasion from someone who is skilled at branding and marketing, but who also says the traditional methods of marketing are a little outdated. Leslie Zane is the author of The Power of Instinct and a graduate of Harvard Business School. She joins us right now. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything but not everything.

Every choice carries a tradeoff, and that applies not just to your money, but to your time, your focus, your energy, any limited resource that you need to manage. So what matters most and how do you make choices accordingly? Those are the two questions this podcast is here to solve. We cover five topics, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. Welcome to the show, Leslie.

Thank you so much for having me, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here today on the Afford Anything podcast. Oh, I'm so glad that you're here. let's dive right in. Someone who's listening to this is at a job where they want to get a raise. In fact, I'm sure many people who are listening to this are at jobs where they want to get raises. But they need to sell themselves to their boss, particularly if they're at a big company where the boss might not know them or their work very well.

How does marketing, branding, that sounds so esoteric, how does that help that person? Everybody is trying to convince somebody of something. We are all trying to persuade somebody to do what we want them to do. I mean, essentially, we are all marketers in some way. And branding and getting it right and knowing the rules to use and the rules not to use is the difference between success or failure. That's true. Everyone is always trying to convince someone of something. And that happens in ways that are both big and small, right? We're trying to convince our spouse to buy this car or take this vacation. We're trying to convince our boss that our idea for a project is something that they should pick up. What are some of the things that people

do wrong when they approach this? Great question. So we are all trying to convince somebody of something, but it doesn't work very well because it's really hard to get people to do what you want them to do. Human beings are resistant to change. In fact, the opening line of my book is human beings are unpersuadable. And I say this to you as a marketer who has spent her entire life trying to get people to move from one brand to another. And so I had to figure out another way. And what I learned was that if you confront the conscious mind, if you barrage people with messages and give them coupons and discounts and all these different techniques that we use to convince or cajole people to doing what we want, it doesn't work very well because the conscious

brain is a brick wall. What you need to do is tap into the instinctive mind, which is on automatically and works completely differently, and that is much more malleable than the conscious mind. And you can make inroads much faster and get people to do what you want. And isn't there research that shows that we make decisions with something like 5% of our brains and 95% of decision making is unconscious? That's exactly right. So the brain has two mechanisms. And we can think of the brain as an iceberg where conscious mind is the tip of the iceberg. That's the part you see.

But that's really only responsible for 5% of the decisions that we make. To your point, the other 95% is below that waterline. under the iceberg, the part that you actually don't have access to, or at least you think you don't. And that is actually what calls the shots. So you may think you're making your decisions, but in fact, your unconscious mind is making most of the decisions that you make in an average day. And then your conscious mind is rationalizing that? 100%. That's exactly how it works. After the fact. So what influences the unconscious mind then?

There is a completely different list of techniques that we use to harness the unconscious mind. So in this world, the first thing you want to do is take down implicit barriers. So we all have mental barriers up. Let's say we were trying to reach out and get new customers into our business. Then the first thing we need to understand is if those people aren't your customer already, they have barriers. and there are conscious barriers and implicit barriers. The implicit barriers are the really interesting ones because they're the ones you would never guess.

You would think that maybe it's things like price or maybe that you're not well known or other things like that. But the fact is the implicit barriers, those nuanced things that people are unaware of are really what's holding you back. And in this world where we're trying to tap into the instinctive mind, metaphors, we use cognitive sure,

shortcuts. We use growth triggers. But we're talking about essentially anchoring into things that people already have in their minds and latching onto those in order to get our message to penetrate. That is the path of least resistance versus confronting the conscious mind. Yeah. Okay. So what I'm hearing is rather than inundate somebody with facts and data, you want to make a positive association. So I'm trying to think of. Imagine I live in Kansas City and I am an accountant and I run a small business, a small accounting firm with four other accountants, right? And we typically serve individuals and small businesses. That's our target client market in the Kansas City area. People who are not our clients already, they have certain implicit barriers to becoming our clients. I could inundate

that person with a bunch of facts and data and say, look, this is what we've done for our clients in the last year. This is the amount of hassle we've saved them. This is the amount of time we've saved them. This is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or I could brand my company in such a way that they associate it with safety and warmth and familiarity. And you're saying the latter would actually be more convincing in the long run. Yes. And the way a brand works is a brand is known by the associations it keeps. So it's really not you in isolation selling your brand. We need to get out of that way of thinking.

What you want to do is create more connections between you and your brand and their minds because that's how brands grow. So if I can take a moment to explain how brands grow in the mind. Absolutely. So think about your brand as a seed that you plant in other people's minds. And you need to feed that seed, soil, water, nutrients, sunshine in order to make the seed grow. As you do that, in this case, it's not soil, water, and sun. It's positive associations.

That's the nutrients we need to feed the plant. As we feed that seedling, all those nutrients, it's going to grow from a seed into a seedling, into a plant. It's going to grow, put down roots. And little by little, it's going to sprout more and more neural peasant. pathways that touch more things in your mind. This is literally like a game of monopoly. Whoever owns the most physical terrain in the brain wins. That is what we're trying to do.

Create more connections. So that accounting firm that you're talking about, they need to create more connections with their customers. As an example, instead of just having a professional relationship, they should also have a personal relationship. instead of just being this no-name sort of clinical company, maybe they use their Kansas City routes and they talk about what it was like to grow up in Kansas City and how that might be

similar to the way the client grew up. You're trying to find these shared values, shared connections, and then when you can't create those, then you just kind of tap into other cognitive shortcuts. But, you know, what is it that somebody's going to, an accountant in order to do. They want to build their wealth. That's what, I guess, afford to anything is about, right? And so what kinds of codes and cues could the accounting firm use to suggest that if you use this accountant, they're going to help you get on that road to wealth faster? What sorts of codes and cues could they use? Because oftentimes when I see companies, especially small businesses, attempt to do this, you see like the emoji

of a money, you know, the money bag emoji, you see, you know, you see kind of like hokey little things. Yes. So it's interesting. And we should talk more about this because some of those emojis are actually important category drivers. So let's say watching money grow. That's an example of something that people actually really want. So maybe we've turned it into a cliche. But there's probably a way to take the notion of growing.

growing money and do it in a refined, elegant, sophisticated way that wouldn't create perceptions of hokey or gimmicky. And an example, a good example, would be a tree. You know, like a tree is something that grows and you can use analogies and you can use metaphors. And all of those things are ways to get messages across in a way that is consistent with how people think. That's what we're really talking about here.

Rather than fighting the brain and trying to create something from Mars that they're not going to recognize, the fact is that human beings are hardwired to connect with the familiar. They actually reject the unique. They reject things from Mars. So you have to have certain category drivers if you're in the accounting business, even to get into the consideration set of being chosen. And then after you get your category drivers right, then you can add on, okay, what's distinctive about me? or about you.

And maybe that's the connection to Kansas City or a shared love of baseball or I don't know. But you see how this starts to work, creating that personal connection. More and more connections in people's minds, that's going to make your brand grow. Your brand needs to grow from a seed into a full-grown tree. So essentially, we need to think about ourselves as gardeners, growing our plant. and the moment that your tree is larger than that of the competition, people are going to switch to your brand. That's literally how switching happens,

that the brand that I'm going to choose, has more connections in my mind than the competitive brand. And is that the notion of situational salience? Is that what that is? That's exactly right. Ah, yes. Excellent. Yeah, got it right.

She's doing great. I know. Honor student. Can you give us an example of, Where in the world would we see situational salience? A great example of situational salience is the M&M's brand. So if you just define M&Ms as a candy-coated chocolate piece, right, then it's nothing more than that. But that's not how M&M's has run its business or built such a tremendous mega brand.

It's done it by all the connections that it creates in people's minds to that candy. So M&Ms means snacking. It means trail mixes. It means baking with grandma. It's sort of putting the little colored pieces in your chocolate chip cookies. It's the characters. They have M&Ms for your favorite sports teams. They have an M&Ms that is like a giant statue of liberty, the green one,

dressed up as the statue of liberty. and the guy at Buckingham Palace, those guards, they have an Eminem dressed up as the guy in Buckingham Palace. The point is Eminem's is much more than just a color-coated chocolate candy that doesn't melt in your hands. It has all these connections in your brain that make it very salient. And so it's sort of still the go-to, one of the go-to small-sized candies that we enjoy from our childhood to today. And all of those kind of lodge it into the unconscious? All of that lives in our unconscious mind. Now, when we go to the supermarket to we just reach.

Right. We are not aware of the brand dimensions, the brand associations that live in our unconscious mind. Those are cumulative memories that have gotten glued to the brand in your mind since childhood. But when you go to the store, you just reach. And you know that. You go into the store. You reach for your go-to brands. walk out. If your brain didn't have the ability to do that, then you'd be in the supermarket all

wheat consciously deciding between one brand or the other. But we don't do. Right. We just go in, we have our 10 go-to brands, we stick them in our cart, and we walk out. That is instinct. Three key things that you want to look for to know if your brand is healthy. One, you want to have situational salience, which means you're the one that's thought of first for this particular category or industry. Two, you want to have relevance. And relevance is a ratio of positive to negative associations. If your brand has a lot of negative associations, it means your brand is not going to be growing very fast because negative associations keep people away. And just back to the tree metaphor, that's like dead leaves consuming your

your tree. So you got to nip those in the bud, prune those dead leaves as soon as they come in to keep your tree healthy. And then the third thing you want is distinctiveness. You want to be different, but you don't need to be unique. You need to be distinctive, which is a completely different thing. Uniqueness is a creative twist on the familiar as opposed to doing something that's so strange and bizarre that people push it away and reject it. Interesting. Okay, so I want to dive into all three of these more. But what I'd like to do is we're talking about brands, and I'm sure there's some subset of the audience right now going, wait a minute, I don't have a brand. I have a 9 to 5 job as a human resources manager, or I have a 9 to 5 job as a dental hygienist.

Do they have a brand? Absolutely. We're all brands. Coke is a brand, Pepsi's a brand, Mountain Dew is a brand. And your brand, I'm a brand, this show is a brand. Everything is a brand. And the more we understand that, the more we understand that our success is hinged to our ability to grow that brand in other people's minds. Okay, but the 32-year-old dental hygienist who's listening to this, who is not a social media influencer, who doesn't even have social media, how are they a brand? She's a brand because she wants her customers to love. And she wants her customers, the patients in the dentist's office or in her own office to ask for her and to go to her instead of the other hygienist across the street. That person is still a brand because she wants

to grow her brand in the minds of her patients. She wants them to believe that she cares about them and that she has great expertise that she does a better job of cleaning their teeth than anybody else. And so the bigger her brand is in their minds, the more they're going to keep coming back to her rather than going to the dentist's office or a hygienist's office around the corner. All right. So in the example of the 32-year-old dental hygienist, we've got someone who has a customer base that could go elsewhere. What about someone who is a school teacher, someone who is an employee of the local county? Are those people also brands? I mean, I think. I think, I think everything is a brand.

My grandmother is a brand. My mother is a brand. I think of everything as a brand. Whether you want to act on that and use it to your advantage is obviously up to you. I'm not saying that everybody needs to walk around creating personal brands. I think that would create a very horrible world. But if you're trying to get promoted or get hired,

I do think that these principles can be useful for you. We don't necessarily need to create a logo. for our brand. So I'm really not talking about that. I'm talking about creating positive connections in other people's minds so that you can get other people to do what you want, hire you, promote you, pay you more money, all of these good things that I think we want if we are afford anything listeners. So what I'm hearing then is that every single person is a brand, regardless of whether or not you are in a competitive space, and every single person is a brand, of whether or not you even have a social media account.

Because if you're trying to get promoted or get a raise or anything to that extent, you approach it with the same principles that any brand would. Yes, because then you're managing your future more deliberately versus just being a recipient of what happens to you. And this is all about empowering people to really get what they want and achieve their dreams in life. This is going to enable them to do that if they're more aware of how to do this. All right.

And so the three core principles then that any individual can apply to their life if they want that promotion would be salient, be relevant, and be distinctive. Let's unpack each of them. Let's start with the first, be salient because we've talked a bit about situational salience. How does a person remain salient? to, let's say a sixth grade teacher, what does it mean for this person to be salient in the eyes of their boss? So let's understand what the old rule of marketing was. And what I'm going to show you is the new rule for the instinctive mind

that will enable you to create salience faster. Okay, perfect. Okay. So the old rule of marketing was that your brand should only stand for one thing. So if you're a Volvo, you should stand for safety. And so if you were following this rule out to its execution, if you were a country music star who had a very successful country music album, the last thing you would do would be to go into other types of music. You would never go into folk music or dance music or poetry or any of these other kinds of musical genres because you would think, well, I can't do that. my current audience might not like it.

I should stick to what they know. That was the old rules. That was the old rules. But Taylor Swift did not get the $10 billion tour, whatever it was in 2023, and become a musical sensation, a global sensation, by following the old rules. She followed her heart and her creative instincts

and kept expanding into all different kinds of musical genres. is she has a multiple type of relationship with people. She's not just the celebrity with the fan. She has almost a personal relationship where people think of her as their friend. Some people call her mother. So she's operating with all these different connections, and she keeps adding new connections. For example, she'll reinforce her old music and to new generations.

So she keeps expanding those associations. and those connections growing her brand more and more in people's minds. And that creates an incredibly salient brand that we haven't seen, I don't think, really, since the Beatles, this kind of frenzy around, it's a different kind of success. And it comes from the fact that she has been growing her brand dimensions, her brand connections in other people's minds incredibly effectively. So how is it then? Is it the fact that as Taylor Swift shifted from country music to pop music, it was an evolution

rather than a hard delineation? Was that? I think that's definitely part of it because she keeps reinforcing the old music as well as introducing the new ones. And that's the perfect combination. She's bringing the older fans along as she's creating new ones. And so as we look at that old rule of marketing that your brand should only stand for one thing, what we quickly see is the way the brain works.

That's a recipe for disaster. If you follow that rule that your brand should only stand for one thing, it means your brand is going to stand for too little. The new rule is the more connections your brand has in other people's minds, the better. So what I'm thinking about as you're talking is Google, which initially was a search engine, and now has the Chrome browser, it owns YouTube, it has Waymo. There, you know, Google is involved in not just search, but in driverless cars and online video sharing and your internet browser extension and all of these various, the Android phone, right? It stands for quite a lot.

That's 100% right. And that is how you turn into a mega brand. You take an expertise and you start to use that expertise. in multiple areas. And again, the conventional wisdom might be, well, if we do this thing well, we can't possibly do these other things well. But they brought their expertise along

and showed how it applied in these other areas. And that's just creating more touch points, more connections in people's lives to Google, which is what enables it to become a BMAF. Okay, so the sixth grade teacher who wants to look valuable in the eyes of his, boss so that he can get a raise might decide to expand that brand outside of just the classroom by being involved in after-school activities or being involved in the community.

That's exactly right. The more things that teacher does, the more connections that it has to the kids, to the parents, to the students, to the administration. The web just starts growing and growing, that web of associations, and the network gets bigger and bigger. And it grows organically just like a tree. That's how it works. Okay. And then the dental hygienist who wants that promotion at work would be involved in the community as well then.

Yes. And have more relationships, more connections with each of their customers, actually. So let's say they call the patient after they treated them and said, hey, how are you feeling after your intense session today, are you feeling okay? And that sleep problem that you mentioned to me, I have a thought for you about how you can address that. So just creating more connections, more ways to add value in people's lives, it's going to just put you on a different level than just the normal transactional relationship where you only have one singular relationship with. You're maximizing touch points? Absolutely. The more touch points in the

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If you, I don't know if you've noticed, but this ring that I'm wearing right now, for those of you who are watching on YouTube, you can see it. It is a lightning bolt. Ah! And a round, pair of classes. This is a Harry Potter ring because I'm a big Potterhead. But when I think of Harry Potter as a brand, you know, I think of Voldemort and Death Eaters. I think of Lightning Bolt forehead scars and platform nine and three quarters and broomsticks and moving pictures

photographs on the wall that move. To me as a layperson, they don't strike me as salient because these are all things that are magical. Your take is actually the opposite. Your take is that Harry Potter is a salient brand in spite of the fact that there's all of this magic and wizardry and footage and which, you know, how is a brand like that so salient? The reason that Harry Potter is so salient is because it is so connected with so many different aspects of our lives. So people may think that Harry Potter was this incredibly different story that there was never anything. like it. There were a lot of magical stories. And there's a lot of stories about heroes who do great things like Harry Potter did. But what was different about Harry Potter and I think what J.K. Rowling did so effectively was she created an alternate universe. And that alternate universe, the Harry Potter world, is an exact replica of our world, just a magical version of it. So they have our trains.

the nine and three quarters platform. They have our basketball games, the game of quidditch. They have our sororities and fraternities. They have Christmas vacations, and they have kids talking to each other in their bedrooms, in their dormitories, traveling to school for different vacations, back and forth. They have problems with their parents who drive them crazy.

Like, they have all the same things that we have in our world, but they have the magical version. of it. And I think that that is what creates so many connections in the mind, that at this point, Harry Potter is like a $40 billion franchise. The book has sold over 500 million copies. It's one of the greatest successes ever. But the reason that it's so successful is because it has so many connections in our minds. It's basically a mirror version of our world. and that is why it has so much salience. And whether you're a parent or a child,

everybody can read the books together, much kind of like Sesame Street, where it's operating on multiple levels. But everybody shares those same connections because we all live in a world with all those same things. Sporting events, dormitories, colleges, universities, sororities, fraternities, all those same things. Games of chess just brought to life in a different way.

Our world, but with a magical overlay. That's exactly right. A creative twist on the familiar. Take all of the positive, familiar things in people's lives, put a creative twist on it and magical creative twist. And now you have the Harry Potter world. So it makes sense to me that maximizing touch points would give you salience because people are seeing you over and over and over.

That accounting firm in Kansas City, people see them sponsoring the Little League team. they see them at the local chamber of commerce. They see them reappear at major community functions again and again. And so those touch points become more frequent. And so the salience is more frequent. That makes a lot of sense. How does that square with relevance? Because the old rules of marketing would say relevance means being in a niche.

Relevance means being known for that one thing. So relevance is really about the ratio of positive to negative associations. So negative associations are what hurt your relevance and what hold back growth. Because if a customer has negative associations in their mind about you, they're not going to use you. So let's talk about an example of this that I think is really clear. It's a very, I think it's a very vivid example. About eight years ago, McDonald's was suffering from a very rad problem. called pink slime in your chicken nuggets.

What? Yes. Now, there really wasn't pink slime in chicken nuggets, but there had been these videos that had gone viral showing tubular pink slime pouring out in a wavy pattern that people were told this is what's in your McDonald's chicken nuggets. It went viral, 25 million views per video, and they started looking. losing customers hand over fist. Wow.

And it wasn't just that. It was, there's pink slime and your chicken nuggets. There's horses, eyeballs in your beef. There's the meat doesn't mold. All these negative associations. And so what do you do if you're a business leader and you're running this business and you have this terrible problem? They did what they thought they should do.

They created a big advertising campaign where they said, we don't have pink slime in your chicken nuggets. Yeah. And guess what happened? The brand took a further nose dive. The business declined further because brand and business are indelibly connected. And your financial results are completely linked to the percentage of positive and negative associations you have. So at this time, McDonald's had more negative associations than positive ones, which was why they were losing customers and why their growth was in decline.

What they finally ended up doing was going on a real food strategy telling the true story about how McDonald's makes its food, which is remarkably sustainable, remarkably fresh. It's all real food. It comes from sustainable farms, family farms, USDA, beef, like all of the good things. But they just hadn't been telling that story. And they did that with growth triggers. They told that story with cognitive shortcuts that were packed with positive assessments. associations. As an example of that, the fresh cracked egg was one of the most famous commercials that they used. Because people didn't know that McDonald's cooks. They had forgotten that

McDonald's is actually cooking back there. Yes, there's a lot of machines that are beeping and lights flickering and telling people that their food is ready. But behind all of that are people actually cooking your food. And so the fresh cracked egg on the griddle reinforced that McDonald's actually cooks and makes your meals fresh all day long. And that started to turn the brand around. That fresh cracked egg was so loaded with positive associations, wholesome, good for you, delicious, real people cooking back there, like all those positive associations, that it started to overwhelm the negative associations.

And that's how triggers were. Triggers are succinct cognitive shortness, verbal or visual. They could be olfactory or tactile too. But let's just talk about visual and verbal because that's mostly what you work with in marketing. There are succinct poses or cues in any of the five senses that are so packed with positive associations that they overwhelm negative associations and they make your brand grow in the brain. So that's how you heal a negative associations problem. So the answer to what do you do if you have negative associations is you need to overwhelm them

with positive associations, and that's what McDonald's did with these growth triggers. And so the fresh cracked egg brand campaign, was that literally just a close-up of human hands cracking an egg over a grill? Exactly right. Exactly right. And turning into an egg McMuffin. Wow. And if you think about it, the brand had been very focused on before, on just showing people

eating the end result. But now they were showing you what goes into your food. And this is a really interesting thing in the food and beverage industry. What we often find is, especially today with the health trend being so important and so powerful, it's really important to spend more time on the creation of the food than on the consumption expense in terms of where the waiting of the messaging should be. Right, which back 20 years ago, people might have been more persuaded by images of enjoyment, and families out for a lovely Sunday lunch. Exactly.

And one of the things that we would say is you probably need a little bit of both because you still want to show the enjoyment, but you don't need to spend a whole 30 seconds of a commercial on the consumption experience. Maybe it's like 80-20. Spend more time really explaining where the food comes from, the ingredients, the freshness, how it's made, the craftsmanship. All of that is going to go a longer way. and then, of course, you can still show people enjoying at the end.

So would it have been better then? In this example, McDonald's was hit with some negative news and they addressed it. By addressing it, did they fuel it? Like, would it have been better for them to just not have addressed it in the first place? 100%. That's the lesson. You can't get rid of negative associations by telling people, we don't have that negative association.

We don't have pink slime in your chicken nuggets. all that's doing is reinforcing and fueling it and telling more people that you might have a pink slime problem. Instead, what you want to do is displace negative associations with positive ones. And that's exactly what they did. And this was one of the most brilliant turnarounds in corporate history. Right. And so that goes back to, I'm thinking again about the sixth grade school teacher and there's the kind of stuff that happens in the sixth grade, the notion that responding to a rumor just fuels it. or the notion that responding to negative feedback just fuels it. 100%.

I've had people come up to me. I mean, I'm not a career advisor. That's not my job. I help brands grow. But I have had people come up to me and said, you know, Leslie, I had this negative performance review or something bad happened at work. And I don't know what to do. I feel like my brand is ruined.

And what I say to them all the time is put that out of your head. You need to walk away from that because if you're dwelling on the negative association or even bringing it up again with your bosses or your company, you are just reinforcing that negative associations. Move ahead, move on, forget it, and focus on building your positive associations. And that's what will little by little make that negative association fate. The great news about this is that the brain is a learning machine. And so any negative association that you have is you're not.

stuck with it's not entrenched we keep learning new things just like studying for a test and the old things fade and you can regenerate yourself rehabilitate your brand anytime no matter what happens to you all you have to do is look at the biggest comeback stories in history tiger woods is an example like you can do this too what I'm thinking about right now are all of the people you know you see these these social media takedowns often where on social media a bunch of people will go after a given person for a given thing. What I'm hearing from you is just don't respond. That's what I advise, yeah.

I mean, the whole world that we live in today, I think is kind of a gotcha culture. I think it's very unfortunate. But I would definitely say if that happens to you, just let it go. Don't feed it. Don't respond. Move on and communicate something positive. Right. That makes a lot of sense, particularly noisy world that moves fat.

So that is, we've talked about salience and we've talked about relevance. The third part is be distinctive. How does a brand become distinctive? So this is one of my favorite rules that I take down. The old rule was you have to be unique to stand out and that it's all about standing out. Be the purple cow. Differentiate or die. But wait a minute, the human brain is hardwired to connect with the familiar, not with the unique.

I mean, think about babies. If you take a baby out of its mother's arms, it's going to scream because its mother's face is familiar and now you're putting it in a stranger's arms. Or think about the pandemic. During the pandemic, what did you go for? What did you reach for? You reached for all the brands that you know and love with those big names. What was left over on the shelves were the smaller no-name brands that nobody wanted because the big name brands gave us comfort and security. Right. So we love the familiar. But marketing would tell you that if you were, let's say, a bottled

water brand, the last thing you should do is use snow cap mountains or babbling Brooks or streams on your packaging. In fact, you should probably stay away from the color blue altogether. That would be the old rule. What we would say is, wait a minute, don't throw out that snow cap mountain. Think about all the positive associations of the snow cap mountain, pure, pristine, echo-friendly, water from the glaciers, clean, refreshing, cold, like all these good things. Why would we want to get rid of those things? We want all those positive associations for our brand. And so as an example, aquafina bottled water took the snow-capped mountain and rendered it in a very distinctive way with a larger peak, a smaller peak and a little orange sunrise behind it.

And so they were able to ride the familiar neural pathways and positive associations that I just rattled off for you, but bring them over to their brand. And so that's the difference between distinctiveness and uniqueness. Uniqueness is creating, I don't know, like the symbol on the Fiji bottle, like a pink flower. What does that have to do with purity or any of the positive associations people want from water. But that Snowcap Mountain, that is the most powerful trigger in bottled water. And you want all those things for your brand. So I would say the new rule is familiarity is more powerful than uniqueness and distinctiveness is best of all. And what we know is that when something is too

unfamiliar, people actually have a pretty adverse reaction to it. That's exactly right. One of the stories I love to tell is the story of what happened to Jeopardy. When the longstanding host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek unfortunately passed away, the show is really in a quandary. Who can possibly replace this amazing host that we've had for all these years? And it's a very, very loyal audience. And they were, you know, committed to Trebek. And so what they did was what you would think that they should do, which is they had a parade of different celebrity hosts come. in they tried Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper. And I think the audience ratings at the beginning January 20201 were like 6.1.

And little by little with every new celebrity that they tried, it went down in May to 4.8. And I think at that point, the producers of the show were kind of tearing their hair out. And they couldn't understand why is it that people are not accepting these new hosts? Well, what they thought was going on was that each of these ratings was a commentary on how much people like or dislike Katie Couric or Anderson Cooper. And in fact, that had nothing to do with what was going on. What was really going on was that the brand was atrophying over time from January through May because each of those celebrity hosts, whoever they would have been, was contrary and in conflict to the familiar things about the show that people knew and loved. And it wasn't until they introduced one of the original contestants, one of the most successful

contestants of all times, Ken Jennings, that the ratings started to zoom back up. And what Ken Jennings was, if you really think about it, he was an extension of Alex Trebek. He was part of the Jeopardy connectome, because everything is in the Jeopardy. connectome. All their past contestants and certainly the well-known ones, Alex himself, the board, all of those things are what makes up that brand. And what they were doing by introducing these celebrities was introducing something completely foreign to the brand, whereas Ken Jennings was already part of the connectome. And so the audience connected with him and accepted him right away. He was essentially an extension of the existing familiar brand. And so he was almost sort of

the natural successor to Alex Trebek. He really was. And it's just so funny, look how many trials they had to, they didn't discover that until the very end. But it was a series of sort of hit or miss, trial and error kinds of things. But had they understood these kinds of theories, they might have gone for Ken Jennings right at the beginning. Right. And I can see, well, it's not intuitively obvious that you would have a contestant become the host. So I can see why they wouldn't have thought of that. But then it kind of sounds obvious in hindsight.

Ken Jennings was the most famous Jeopardy contestant. Exactly. And people felt very comfortable with him as a host because he had tremendous expertise. So it wasn't a tough thing for him to graduate to the role of host from contestants. And they ultimately ended up with a co-host model with Miami Bialik, the former star of Blossom, who was also on Big Bang Theory or something? I don't know. She was on some nerd shows. Yes, but it really is Ken Jennings.

Right. That is the roots of the brand and that keeps that audience, I think, connected to the brand that they knew and love. It's being really part, it's a continuation of Alex Trebek's history. Okay. So when your 12-year-old ran for student council. He wanted to create these posters that were unique. And you advised him not to. You said, don't be unique, be familiar, and then be distinct.

How did that impact his student council posters? Great question. The fact that my son had the rule of uniqueness in his head at 12 years old, like that to me was already fascinating. Yeah. That somehow these rules of marketing have penetrated our culture so that everybody thinks. that they're really the way to build businesses, brands, or do what you want in life. And in fact, they send you down the wrong road.

So I told him, stop putting Mars on your posters and instead connect with things that the students care about. And so he started showing images of better cafeteria food and ice cream at the end of the day and like all the things that the kids actually wanted. and rather than trying to brand himself in a way that would be irrelevant. Do 12-year-old student council positions have that kind of power? I don't know, but my son is pretty convincing. So I think that he ultimately was able to make a couple of changes,

maybe get the ice cream truck to come after school once a week. All right, let's go back to the example of a small accounting firm based in Kansas City. What could they do that would be distinctive? So I think the fact, I don't know enough about accounting, Kansas City. I don't know enough about either of those things. But what I could say is that there are probably some sports teams that are from Kansas City that are really popular. They're probably, Travis Kelsey, Kansas City Chiefs. There you go.

There you go. You're just talking about Taylor Swift. There you go. So you've got teams. You've got probably some cultural foods that are strong connections. in Kansas City. And so I think there's... Barbecue. Barbecue. There you go. Oh, that's the best, the downhome barbecue. So I think there are a lot of things that this accounting firm could tap into that could become part of its identity. And while you might think that that would only be relevant

to his Kansas City, this could be anybody, their Kansas City clients, I would argue that that sense of heritage could actually be relevant to anybody in any part of it, which is really, interesting. People love a heritage story. They love to know where you come from, what your backstory is, and it creates a sense of nostalgia. And by the way, everybody has barbecues. So you don't have to be from Kansas City to find that relevant. But it could be one of the ways that this person creates distinctiveness for their brand. There are probably 100 others. Okay. But that's one example. Okay. Let's try this in a few other ways. So like, let's say that you have a, a, a

landscaping business. How do you, we'll go through all three, how do you create salience, relevance, and distinctiveness for your landscaping business? You're in the business of mowing lawns, trimming hedges, that type of work around your local community. So in terms of salience, you would want to do when your local community is put your information out in all the touch points where people might encounter it. So the local drugstore, the local coffee shop, the schools, you're going to want to just spread the understanding of your business in more places. So just more touch points, reaching more touch points in people's lives. Be everywhere.

Be everywhere. And ride other people's platforms, ride other people's large audiences. The second thing that you want to do in terms of distinctiveness, I mean, when you think about landscaping and making plants grow, everybody's frustrated with that is something that people complain about all the time. My plants aren't growing or this tree turned brown or whatever. So I do think expertise is an important aspect of this business. It's probably very important in the accounting example too. We just didn't touch on that. But the landscaping business, if they could sort of explain in a way what they do differently to make their plants that they take care of or the lawns healthier, I think that could be a really

interesting twist. So it's still about landscaping, but their creative twist on that would be that they have a unique technique or a distinctive technique that they use to make sure that your lawn is always thriving, that your plants are always thriving. Expertise is really, really important. I'll just take you back to when I started my business. That initially I just kind of put out my shingle as a consultant. Right. And I didn't get a lot of takers because why should anybody think that I know more or I'm smarter than anybody else?

Right. This is a 1995, right? Yep, 1995. But then I realized that when I talked about my process and how I do what I do, that I got a completely different reaction because people could see that there was actually something repeatable that I was doing that worked over and over and over. that I had done previously, first of all, when I was inside the corporate world, but I kind of took those ideas with me and created a proprietary process. And I think that's a really important thing

for really any professional. Even the hygienist could have a particular way that they go about cleaning people's mouths. That's sort of their special approach that they find more effective in terms of getting rid of plaque and tartar. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. So how do you convey that, especially if by virtue of conveying it, you have to kind of explain things that are technical. And I'll give you an example for my own life. I have an online course called your first rental property. It's all about how to buy a rental property as a beginner. So it's designed if you have zero rental properties, we are the course that will take you from zero to one. What is distinct, particularly about the way that I teach rental property investing, is that I am at odds with a

of the other rental property voices out there. There are many, many other rental property voices out there that promote a particular formula called the cash on cash return. It's very popular. If you were to go to any of the other real estate platforms, people are going to be talking about cash on cash return all day long. I personally think that that formula is a bunch of bull poop. And I don't like it at all and I don't teach my students to use it. So I teach my students to focus on a different formula called the cap rate. How in the heck would I get that across in a 30-second Instagram reel? Right?

That's, it's just so technical and so complicated and like not, there's no elevator pitch to that. It's a really good question. First of all, watching you explain this was very exciting for me as a potential customer. Because where your eyes lit up was when you were drawing the contrary. between your approach and everybody else's. And contrast isn't a very effective technique? Because the brain loves contrast.

And so I don't think you need to go into the details initially of the process in your opening pitch when you're trying to get people interested in working with you. But I do think you can say this way that it's being done that's been done traditionally, I have found doesn't work very well. I'm going to show you this new way. And I think having that contrast as sort of the first bite of the apple that people take into getting to know you is a great way to pull them in. And then when they sit down with you, you can explain cap rate versus cash on cash, how they're different. And I would challenge you to find a really succinct visual way to convey that difference.

And that can become a mnemonic device, a visual device that you can use over and over in your business. you're codifying your expertise in codes and cues. There's yours. Mind works. This one doesn't. And then you go ahead and explain it. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. But so the initial, that 30 second Instagram real would have to be, the mainstream way of doing it is wrong. I've got a different approach. 100%. 100%. That's going to work really well for you because the brain loves contrast.

said another way, you're giving your positioning a foil. If you just, I'll just tell you from our work of 30 years, if we just position the brand that we've been hired to work on, the Fortune 500 brand that we've been hired to work on, we will get growth for our customers. But if we both position the brand of our client and talk about that while depositioning their competitors and making it clear why one is superior to the other,

we will get twice as much growth. Twice as much growth. That's huge. That means the mind wants a foil. Does distinctiveness require a little bit of us versus them? It's not required. It's just if you have the opportunity to do it, go there. Right.

Because it's just going to paint a much clearer picture for, your audience. The brain is a relativity machine. If you're up on Pepsi, you're down on Coke. Right. If you're up on Coke, you're down on Pepsi. If you're up on Adidas, you're down on Nike. And because the brain is a relativity machine, if you can draw that contrast, you don't have to actually do it overtly. You don't need to call out your competitors. I'm certainly not suggesting that you be mean or you bash the competition. But I do think you can draw a distinction between how you do what you do, how they do what they do, and just very simply say, this way has worked better for me. And let me tell you why. What I'm imagining right now is the taco stand that says

we have the hottest salsa or we have the most variety of salsa or something like that, something that makes them distinct from all of the other taco stands. That's right. They're creating a relative claim. And that's exactly what I'm saying the brain wants. It's the relativity effect. All right. And that goes back to then a person who's trying to get promoted at work. What is it that they do that is different from what all of their colleagues do? So if we want to apply this to a situation where somebody's trying to get a promotion or a raise or even just landing a job, we have an unemployment problem in this country right now. People need to get jobs. And so I can give you some examples of the kinds of things that I think you,

you would want to do in an interview as an example. Yeah. So the first thing that you want to not do is you don't want to walk them through your resume. That is very boring. And they have the resume in front of them anyway. And so it's redundant. Instead, what we want to do in an interview is we want to bring the person that's on the piece of paper to life.

And so I think there are a few things that I would do in that situation. The first thing that I would do is start by creating a connection with the interviewer, finding something, look at their LinkedIn profile, learn something about the person you're about to meet, and create some kind of common connection, where they went to school, what team they root for, something that's going to create sort of shared values. The second thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to want to show a tremendous enthusiasm about the company, and that comes from doing research. You have to do a lot of research about the company that you're interviewing for,

way beyond your particular role, really start to show that you are a big thinker and that you understand where this company is headed. Maybe you've done some work by listening to earnings reports or reading the company's strategic plan or reading their annual report. where are they headed? What are they trying to accomplish? And then you can fit your story into what they're trying to do and show how you can actually help the company achieve their objectives. That is big thinking that's much larger in scope than just your little job that you're going to go perform. And it shows that you're able to think enterprise level, which is going to elevate your stature relative to other candidates. You're also going to want to talk about your personal heritage. and how you got to this point. Why are you passionate about this area? How did you get here?

Maybe there's a story from your childhood. I'll just tell you one of the stories that I tell is that when I was a little girl, I used to make posters for all the clubs in the school. All of them, whether I was in the club or not in the club. I was playing with taglines and visual cues from the age of 14. My mother has pictures of me drawing them on the living room rug. spread out while I was doing my homework.

So I think that kind of shows that your passion is not just like you decided to interview with this company yesterday, but it's been a longstanding passion and interest of yours. I think that it can be interesting to quote the CEO and bring that into the conversation. And so what I'm really saying to you is, just like anything else, there's no one magic bullet. but if you keep flooding the person's mind with all these positive associations that bring you to life, that have you jumping off the page, it's going to be much more effective than just going through the resume. Right. In fact, you wouldn't even really have to talk about your resume at all.

You can just gloss over that. If they want to read it, they can read it. 100%. So if you were to say something about yourself, and you would obviously want to use an example, and the example could be pulled from the resume, but you would want that example to be more vivid than just a list of accomplishments. Because contrary to popular belief,

we do not choose candidates based on their list of achievements, even though that's what goes into the resume. Really, how we choose is by how many connections we have to that person. And a lot of these things are decided within the first few seconds of an interest. interview. What do you mean by connections that we have to that person? So I mentioned like five or six different things. We're going to connect with them in terms of like something that we have in common. That's one connection. Second connection, we're going to talk about the company and where it's headed and that we understand where the company is headed. A demonstration of shared interest in where the

company is going. You want to talk about your expertise, just like we talked about, those other examples earlier. So you're going to want some example of your expertise. You're going to want to quote the CEO because that shows that you're really thinking big outside of your particular job and you're somebody who reads and knows what's going on and you know where the company's headed. So all these different connections are going to mount up. And by the time that interview starts to the end, you're going to grow your little seed

into a full-grown tree. It can be done that quickly in a hand. half hour. You can grow your brand connectome in the other person's mind. All right. So that is how you create distinctiveness as an employee. And salience. Yeah, distinctiveness and salience as an employee who is looking for another job out on the hiring circuit. Yes. And so that's how you would do it in a hiring situation. But if you were in a company, what you would want to do is create a lot of connections to many different people in the organization, not just in your department, but across departments.

And so that everybody is saying positive things about you. So that by the time you get to your performance review, there's all this positive buzz about you coming from all these different departments, not just the colleagues that you work with, not just your boss. But there's this sort of growing positive associations about your brand in the workplace. So you're essentially generating buzz about yourself at your own workplace. Yeah, because if you get into a performance review and you have to tell your boss how great you are, that's not a great recipe for success, right? It should be coming from other people noticing it. It's much better to have other people say great things about you than for you to have to say great things about yourself. So how would you

do that then? Because I know a lot of people who try to do that, but then they either come off as braggy or they come off as like they're taking accomplishments that are unearned. They're stealing the accomplishment credit away from somebody else. I'm definitely not saying to do that. Yeah. What I'm saying is to create relationships to people throughout the company that you work with, that you're somehow touching. It could be cross-functional.

It doesn't have to be that you have a reporting structure into them and do things for them. Help them out. help them out of a bind. Let's say somebody has a report that's due tomorrow and they're not finished. Maybe it's not in your area, but maybe you decide to stay late and help that person out. That kind of connection and that kind of assistance will go a long way. That'll be a story that other people tell.

So I'm not at all saying you're taking other people's credit. Rather, you're doing the opposite. You're serving other people. and you'll get a tremendously positive reputation by helping other people be their best. Okay, so the way that you create buzz about yourself at a workplace is through service to others 100%. Those are positive actions that are really going to create indelible relationships and loyalty to you because you help them out when they were in a tight spot. And that's going to come back in a big way in the future.

How do you, when it comes to relevance and when it comes to positive associations flooding out negative associations, how do you deal with that in the workplace if there's some negative association that's tied to you? Maybe you worked on a project that flopped. Maybe you got blamed either fairly or unfairly for some calamity that the company suffered. maybe people just don't like the way that your food always takes up a big place in the company fridge, you know? How do you deal with that at a workplace setting? All of those things can happen and have happened to the best of us. So that's how careers go. You're going to have some successes and you're going to have some failures.

And my best advice is to move on from the failures quickly and substitute those failures with positive success. successes. Brush it off. Pick yourself up as if you fell down, go like this, and then hit the ground running the next day and accomplish something great. And that will make that negative association fade in people's minds. Memories fade over time. They do. So it's only the good things that you want to keep reinforcing and keeping people's memories and those other things. Just let them go by the wayside and move on. Now, there could be a point where things are so negative and people keep coming back to that negative thing, that could happen in your life. And that means that's time to move on to another company.

But for the most part, what I've seen is that there are really very few things that are total calamities that you can't build back from. So similar to what McDonald's did with pink slime where they found that addressing it directly only reinforced that idea. but if they instead talked about their successes, if they talked about real food, if they talked purely about the positive and they focused the conversation there,

it helped. It sounds as though at the individual level that works in the workplace as well. If there's negative feedback about you, if you worked on a project that flopped or if you were responsible for a mistake that cost the company a lot of money, rather than address it and dwell on it,

you shift the focus, kind of shift the frame to something positive that you're associated with. That's exactly right. It's no different than McDonald's. You want to displace negative associations with positive ones, and we all have the ability to do that. So throughout this conversation,

we've talked about three core rules. Be salient, be relevant, be distinctive. Are those the three, or are there any rules that we haven't covered? I can do one more. So one of the oldest rules in the book is that you should spend a lot of time talking to and understanding your core customer. In fact, your core customer is everything. And of course, we love our core customers.

We love our existing customers, and we should absolutely treat them with kid gloves. But if you really want to grow, you need to reach out and constantly be bringing in new customers into the fold. So the new rule is your core customer is actually a trap. and the only way to really get tremendous accelerated growth is to actively reach out and get new customers to come. So why is it a trap? It's a trap because your core customers are never going to tell you what's wrong with you. And so it's going to cause you to not evolve. Your growth target is the people who have those negative associations you need to discover,

those implicit mental barriers. You want to take those down, but you can't take them down. unless you know what they are. So you need to spend more time with your growth target, understanding why they're not buying you in order to overcome them with your strategy and create a strategy that pulls them in. All right, this is very kind of high level in esoteric. Can you give an example?

Yeah. Let's look at Bed Bath and Beyond. Beth and Beyond was busy rewarding its core customers over and over again with these blue and white coupons. I bet you can picture it right now in your brain. Right. I've got so many of those. How many? You probably have a whole drawer filled. So what that shows is that all the coupons in the world aren't going to necessarily get you to come into the bed, bath, and beyond store. Because all you're doing is layering price off after price off after price off to the point where the merchandise doesn't even have a value anymore. That is the epitome of number one, a race to the bottom because you've kind of ruined the value equation. And then secondly, you're trying to get blood from a stone. Your core customers are only going to buy so much from you.

There's a rule of thumb that I talk about in my book that essentially says that about 50% of your customers are going to leave you every year. That's a shocking statistic. 50% are going to leave you, no matter what you do, no matter how much you reward them. And so what that means is if you're not actively bringing new customers in to your franchise, you're going to have a leaky bucket problem because you have churn with the existing franchise and you're not filling the bucket fast enough with the new people. Right.

And so really, the implication of all of this is that you need to spend more time and more resources getting new customers to come into the door. Your customer acquisition strategy is really the most important thing that you do because your core customers are only going to take you so far. And the new people that come in the door, should you be looking for the same type of people? Or should you be, I don't want to use the word avatar because it's so overused, but I'll use it here just for the sake of a clear question. Should those new people be that same avatar as the core that you're already serving? Absolutely not.

Why not? Because you don't have the world in your franchise. You have a couple of customers, even if you have a hundred people. customers or a thousand customers or a million customers. The whole world should be your customers. We don't believe in segmenting your audiences at all. We think there's really only two segments that matter. The people you have and the people you don't. And the question that segmentation answers is, how are people different? That's not the right question. The question we should be asking is, how are people alike? That's where we're going to find those universal triggers that work for

everybody. And so we would say the biggest audience you can reach out for is the audience you should target. And that means pretty much, you know, everybody, you know, within reason. I'm exaggerating a little bit. But essentially, there's the people you have, there's the people you don't, and the larger the audience you target, the more share, market share, revenue growth you're going to get back. How do you square that with the standard advice of go into a niche and define yourself inside of that niche? Again, I'll use an example, but my online course on your first rental property, that's really a niche. It's, first of all, it's not real estate investing generally. It's rental property specifically.

And second, it's your first. So we're targeting beginner rental property investors. So we're like really in a niche niche right there. So I think there's two different things we're talking about. One is a niche in terms of your expertise as the owner of the business who's providing this service. And I think it's fine to be a specialist and to have and good to be a specialist because this is a world of specialists that we live in right now.

Right. The world is becoming more and more specialized in terms of expertise. So you have a tremendous expertise in that. Great. Sell that. But I would argue that it may be, maybe that expertise is relevant to a much bigger audience than you think. What I'm saying is that your audience shouldn't be a niche audience.

You want to have the largest audience possible because if you only have a dollar to spend in marketing resources against an audience, if you put that $1 against a large audience, you're going to get a lot more people back than if you target a small audience with that same $1. That's just simple math. Right. in this particular case, it isn't just people who are interested in personal finance, who are also interested in real estate investing. There are a lot of people out there who might not be into personal finance,

but who are still into real estate investing or rental property investing specifically. Exactly. I think that there's a lot greater potential for what you're providing than just the narrow definition of the target that you've identified. All right. People in the Harry Potter audience who are. who are interested in rental property investing. There we go.

There we go. That's millions and millions of people. Love it. So your book is called The Power of Instinct. What is instinct? Instinct is that moment when we reach over and over again for the brands that we know and love. And we think we're controlling our choices,

but we're really not. It's our unconscious mind that's calling the shots. Instinct is the most powerful force for driving human behavior and behavior change. And if you can harness instinct, which I teach you through all the rules of the book, then really you can accomplish anything, both in business and in life.

Perfect. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, Leslie Zane. You can buy my book on Amazon, Leslie Zane, The Power of Instinct, the new rules of persuasion in business and life. There's a lot more goodies in there that I think people could really use to help them achieve what it is that they're trying to accomplish in their lives.

Thank you so much, and we will link to all of that in the show notes. Thanks so much for having me, Paula. This was a lot of fun. This is great. Thank you to Harvard Business School trained marketing expert, Leslie Zane. What are three key takeaways that we learned from this conversation? Well, Leslie discussed three key elements of how you, you make people feel, which is another way of saying your brand. And those three key elements are salience, relevance, and distinctiveness. Each of the following three key takeaways will highlight one of these concepts. Let's start with key takeaway number one. Be salient by creating

buzz. Create multiple connections and touch points within your organization and within your industry. get to know people in different departments, get to know people not just up and down the ladder, but laterally. Find out how you can help them, solve their problems. This is how you generate buzz, word of mouth, about yourself within your company and within your industry. It increases your visibility and it makes you more memorable to colleagues and to decision makers. And this applies regardless of whether your school teacher or a dental officer, or a dental hygienist or an accountant. The more things that teacher does, the more connections that it has to the kids, to the parents, to the students, to the administration. The web just starts growing and growing,

that web of associations and the network gets bigger and bigger. And it grows organically just like a tree. That's how it works. Okay. And then the dental hygienist who wants that promotion at work would be involved in the community as well then. Yes, and have more relationships, more connections with each of their customers, actually. So let's say they call the patient after they treated them and said, hey, how are you feeling after your intense session today? Right. Are you feeling okay? And that sleep problem that you mentioned to me, I have a thought for you about how you can address that. By increasing those connections, you become more salient in people's minds. And that higher level of visibility can lead to more opportunities for advancement and recognition.

Remember, it's not just about doing your job well. It's about building those meaningful relationships across your organization and across your industry. So that's key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two. Be relevant by focusing on positive associations. rather than dwelling on negative experiences or feedback, like rather than dwelling on a project that you worked on that just didn't meet expectations, instead of doing that, concentrate on reinforcing positive associations. You don't want to be the equivalent of McDonald's saying,

oh, no, we don't have pink slime. You want to be the equivalent of McDonald's saying, hey, look, we do have fresh cracked eggs. So the old rule of, marketing was that your brand should only stand for one thing. So if you're Volvo, you should stand for safety. And so if you were following this rule out to its execution, if you were a country music star who had a very successful country music album, the last thing you would do would be to go into other types of music. You would never go into folk music or dance music or poetry or or any of these other kinds of musical genres. The approach of focusing on positive associations demonstrates the power of reframing.

Rather than wallowing and setbacks, concentrate on creating and reinforcing the positive. This not only helps manage your reputation, but it also contributes to a better work environment because people want to be in a positive place. So spread that optimism, spread that cheer, spread that focus on what's working. That's key takeaway number two. Finally, key takeaway number three, don't try to be unique. Instead, be distinctive while maintaining familiarity because people take comfort in the familiar. Now, you can be distinctive, meaning you can offer a creative twist on familiar concepts,

but don't be too far out of left field because that's just jarring. One of the stories I love to tell is the story of what happened to Jeopardy. when the longstanding host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek, unfortunately passed away. The show is really in a quandary. Who can possibly replace this amazing host that we've had for all these years? And it's a very, very loyal audience. And they were, you know, committed to Trebek. And so what they did was what you would think that they should do,

which is they had a parade of different celebrity hosts come in. They tried Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper. And I think the audience ratings at the beginning January 2021 were like 6.1. And little by little with every new celebrity that they tried, it went down in May to 4.8. The Jeopardy example illustrates the importance of maintaining familiarity because after Alex Trebek passed, the Jeopardy audience didn't want an outsider hosting the show. They wanted someone who was already associated with the brand. Katie Couric and Anderson Cooper are amazing hosts. They are absolutely fantastic at the skill of hosting a television show, of course.

But they weren't previously affiliated with the Jeopardy brand. There are no memories of seeing them alongside Alex Trebek. So they felt unfamiliar. Even though they're celebrities, even though we all know who they are, they felt unfamiliar in the context of Jeopardy. But by contrast, Ken Jenning, had already been a fixture on the show. He was already associated with Alex Trebek.

He was already part of the brand. And that's what made him the perfect choice. He was familiar in the context of Jeopardy. He's not as big of a celebrity. So he's not familiar in that regard. But he's familiar within the context in which it mattered. And so in your own career, look for ways where you can be familiar in the contexts that matter. because that's how you become both memorable and relatable.

And that's what's going to increase your chances of getting that promotion or getting that plum assignment, of getting that professional success that comes from how you make people feel at work, how people think about you at work, which is the definition of your personal brand. Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Harvard Business School, alum, and prominent marketing expert Leslie Zane. Her new book is The Power of Instinct. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. First, subscribe to our newsletter. Affordanithing.com slash newsletter.

There's absolutely no cost and there's plenty of benefit. So afford anything.com slash newsletter. That's number one. Number two, follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube, YouTube.com slash afford anything. Hit the notification bell for updates and leave us a comment or a thumbs up on YouTube as well as up to a five-star review in your favorite podcast playing at. And finally, number three, most importantly, share us with a friend or family member. Send them one of your favorite episodes. That is the most important thing you can do to spread the message of being in a good place with your financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship, double eye, fire.

Which are the five pillars that we talk about here. Share this with the people in your life who need to hear that message. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast. And I'll meet you in the next episode.