The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life by Leslie Zane

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life by Leslie Zane https://amzn.to/4bK6GtQ Award-winning Fortune 500 brand consultant and behavioral expert Leslie Zane shatters conventional marketing wisdom, showing readers how to tap into the hidden brain where instinct prevails, creating a powerful network of connections that drive people to buy your product, company, or vision. People don't make decisions with their conscious mind, but on instinct. In The Power of Instinct, marketing consultant and behavioral science expert Leslie Zane shows that to grow a brand, business, or even a social movement, traditional persuasion tactics fall short. Instead, you must connect to the instinctive mind. And to do this, you need to understand the science of consumer choice and employ techniques that work with a person's brain, not against it. Zane uncovers the hidden network of connections that dictates the snap decisions we make and cracks the code on how to influence it. With a revolutionary set of rules for expanding the network, Zane shows us how to make any brand, business, political candidate, or idea the dominant instinctive choice. With science as your guide, as well as stories from the world's most successful brands from McDonald's and Lululemon to the Yankees and Taylor Swift, you'll learn: What kind of messages create the greatest amount of positive associations; Why finding new customers accelerates growth and relying on existing ones is a trap; Why emotional stories are not enough to drive trial and long-term brand loyalty. Whether you're an entrepreneur, Fortune 500 executive, marketing professional, or job seeker, mastering the power of instinct will help supercharge your growth and make whatever you're selling the first choice for any audience. About the author Leslie Zane is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and the foremost authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth. Like many pioneers, Zane's provocative ideas were dismissed early on. In 1995, she founded Triggers®, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science, where she continued to champion the primacy of the instinctive mind in brand decisions. With her groundbreaking discoveries in boosting salience, the Brand Connectome® and Growth Triggers®, Zane and her team have delivered over 2X incremental revenue growth for their Fortune 100 clients.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Good big show. It's always the Chris Voss Show. It's a family that loves you But doesn't love you enough To loan you money So we're not that kind of show People

We love you But we won't loan you money That's a new one on the take You there You're part of the Chris Voss Show family But we're a family that loves you Doesn't judge you At least not as harshly

As your family might But we still won't loan you money So there's that I need to write that down Anyway guys We have an amazing young lady and author on the show. She's going to be bringing us her insight, her knowledge, her power, everything she's learned over the course of her lifetime,

and disperse it upon us with these droppings of gold dust. Gold dust? I don't know. I'm putting a lot of power on her. Plus, I'm looking at the cover of her book. There's kind of some gold dust flakities on the front there. So anyway, she joins us. Her book is out June 18, 2024. It's called The Power of Instinct, The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. Leslie Zane joins us on the show today. She is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker, and the foremost authority in harnessing the instinctive

mind to accelerate brand and business growth. Like many pioneers, her provocative ideas were dismissed early on. In 1995, she founded Triggers, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science, where she continues to champion the primacy of the instinctive mind in brand decisions. Welcome to the show, Leslie. How are you? I am fine. Thank you so much for that kind intro, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here.

This is going to be fun. There you go. I was just laughing a little bit in my head when I heard the word triggers, your company. Maybe that's why they should have named Twitter, Triggered. Anyway, so give us a.com. Where can people find you on the interwebs? They can find me at lesliezane.com, on LinkedIn, Leslie Zane. Triggers.com is the name of the company. And on Amazon, they can find the book, Power of Instinct, Barnes & Noble, etc., etc. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of your new book. So this is a book about leveraging the instinctive mind as opposed to the conscious mind to scale

brands, businesses, personal brands faster and more easily with less spending. And the essential idea is that you're working with the mind instead of against it because most marketing actually does quite the opposite. It turns people off. That's true. There's a lot of marketing like that going on nowadays that turns people off. You're just like, oh, God, another ad. Yeah, exactly.

There you go. And there's something that doesn't seem to be much creativity. And even like lately, the Super Bowl ads have been, like, you're just like awful, man. What happened to the good old days? But maybe they weren't always good. Wait, is that a Billy Joel song? Do we have to pay him for that? Anyway, so Leslie, tell us a little bit about yourself. What was your upbringing? How did you become a writer and get into some of the business fields that you're in?

So I grew up in Queens, New York, shout out to Queens. And I worked early in my career in some great companies like Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble. Basically, I'm a career marketer. I've spent my life in marketing. And what I learned along the lines of just what was really surprising is that here I was at these great companies, and we weren't growing the businesses as they needed to grow. And I was kind of shocked. How is this possible?

Here I am at P&G, J&J. They know everything about marketing. And in fact, the businesses weren't growing. I realized very quickly that nobody knows how to actually drive business and brand results consistently. And I set out in 1995 to sort of follow my instincts about what would really work. I had these different ideas from everybody else. I thought we were over promoting, over discounting, barraging people with messages and doing these things kind of to buy people's sales as opposed to get them to instinctively connect with brands and want to buy them

automatically and so these ideas were like really foreign back then i was talking about instinct i was talking about the instinctive mind and people literally thought i was nuts but you had a good instinct for it i i mean i turned out to be, but the science really didn't come out until many years later. And so it was very much pushing a rock uphill. And then I, so I left in 1995 with the express desire and intention of cracking the code on business and brand growth, being able to do this consistently for companies and work with them so that they could drive growth anytime that they wanted without relying on some creative having a great idea in the shower, which is something, sort of a random event. I want institutionalized growth.

There you go. So how does this brain stuff work with conscious mind and instinct and all these different things? It's really quite fascinating. We can kind of think of the mind as an iceberg with the conscious mind on top of the waterline, above the waterline. That's the part of an iceberg you can see. And then below the waterline is the unconscious mind or the instinctive mind. And we can only access the conscious mind usually. And it turns out that that's where most marketing today is focused. In fact, all of us are marketers, by the way. Everyone is selling something. Everyone is trying to grow something, build their personal brand, build their business, get their kids into college, get that next job. Everybody is a marketer in some way.

I'm just trying to get a date on Tinder. There you go. You're a marketer too. And essentially, what we're all trying to do is to persuade the conscious mind to do something it doesn't want to do. And it doesn't work very well. And it doesn't work for two reasons. First, the conscious mind is resistant to change. It's skeptical. It sees you coming and says, no, I don't think so. And then the second problem is that only about 5% of the decisions we make are made by the conscious mind anyway. So we're basically putting all of our time, resources, and energy on only 5% of the decisions people make, whereas what is really where people make decisions is the instinctive mind. That's 95% of the decisions

people make. And it turns out that when you focus on the instinctive mind, you can grow brands and businesses, really do anything that you want, persuade people much more easily because the instinctive mind is malleable. The conscious mind is not. So this is about taking the path of least resistance to the sale. The conscious mind and barraging people with messages, promoting, discounting, all of that is taking the path of greatest resistance to a sale. There you go. Now, my understanding is, you're the researcher, so correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is people buy off emotion.

That's what I've always been taught in sales. Is that part of the instinct of mine then? I love that question. I love that question because that's another one that everybody's getting all wrong. Emotion is an outcome we want people to feel a certain way but they have to own that and the mistake that the whole industry has really made is that they've developed these advertisements and and positioning directions that have emotion in them so we're kind of trying to tell people how to feel. And it turns out that emotion, making people laugh or making people cry,

goes in one ear and out the other. It's not sticky. So the only way to really build brands is to physically grow them in the mind with particular assets. And we'll talk more about what those are. But essentially, emotion is something that you want the consumer to feel as an end result. What we need as marketers

to build is inputs and assets that go into people's memory structure so that the brand grows physically in the mind. That is the key. You have to grow your brand in people's minds in order to grow your market share and your revenue outside the mind. That is the key. You have to grow your brand in people's minds in order to grow your market share and your revenue outside the mind. Oh, wow. So, is it a matter of repeating? Can you give us some sampling? I mean, obviously, people need to read the book to get the details, but can you give us an overview of the sampling of how that's built? Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about the command control center of choice. The command control center of people's brand decisions lives in the instinctive mind, lives in people's memories. And so let me introduce you to the concept of the brand connectome. There's actually a model behind me, a three-dimensional model of what a brand looks like in people's minds, that orange object.

And what it basically is, is a central node with a series of networks or pathways connected to it. So what a brand is, is the cumulative memories that get connected to a brand over time in people's minds. Some going as far back as childhood. Oh, wow. Think about a McDonald's. Baby Gerber. Yeah, McDonald's. Yeah, McDonald's, Coke, Pepsi.

I mean, these are brands that have been a very long time. They have a very large connectome, which means they have a lot of memories, positive and negative associations attached to them. And there's essentially three rules of how you build a brand connectome and what you need to do to keep it healthy. It needs to be large. And I mean, physically large, a brand has physicality, it's actually a physical thing that lives in the mind. Two, it needs to have a lot of positive associations, not a lot of negative ones because negative associations hold back growth. And then

third, it needs to have distinctiveness or clarity, which is very different than uniqueness, which again, we'll talk about later. But those are the three rules, large, positive, and distinctive. So if you agree with me, and if we agree, like those are the only three things that matter for growing brands, it means that a lot of the things that businesses are doing today are actually going against the brand connectome and making business shrink and making brands shrink in the mind instead of making them grow. There you go. There you go. That's pretty amazing.

I mean, it makes sense. You know, when I think about what you're talking about, when I think of all the brands that the imprint of McDonald's when I was a kid, my mother would take us there, In-N-Out Burger the same way. I remember sitting out in front of the In-N-Out Burgers before they had long car lines and they were brand new. And you would have that experience, the shakes and stuff. I don't think things always seem to taste better back then, but maybe that's part of that branding that you're talking about. The fascinating thing about a brand is it's not your logo. It's not your package. It's not even

your restaurant, right? It's all the associations that the brand has in your mind, the things that you connect it to in your mind, like you just described. Your parents taking you there. Maybe they took you to McDonald's for an ice cream cone when you got a good grade or when you were feeling down or whatever. There's all these connections. And so a brand is known by the associations it keeps. That is what a brand is, and that's how it works. So what we need to do as business people or really anybody trying to build even an idea in people's minds is we need to create more connections rather than less. And so how do we connect more? I mean, some people

might say, well, just run more ads. How do we connect more? I can give you a sampling of like three rules in the book. And for the rest of the rules, people are going to have to read the book. But let's take three of the most common marketing rules. And I'm going to show you the rule that needs to displace it. So think about the 1950s and 60s, the Mad Men era. All of that was focused about trying to convince the conscious mind to change what they're doing. And that's what we thought back then, that that's how the mind worked. So the rules of marketing were created for the conscious mind. What I'm saying is those rules are going to get us in trouble because the instinctive mind, which makes 95% of the decisions, works differently. And so it needs a new set of rules.

My book is essentially the old rules versus the new rules and the new rules that have to displace it so that you get greater success. So let's take the first rule. One of the first rules you learn in marketing is that uniqueness is the key to success. Stand out, be the purple cow, differentiate or die. Now, if you were following this approach and you were, let's say, a bottled water brand, you would never show a snow-capped mountain or a babbling brook or a waterfall or a stream or pristine green fields with rivulets going through them. You would never do any of that. In fact, you probably wouldn't even use the color blue because you're thinking,

you know, that's too cliche. That's too generic. That's what everybody does. But it turns out those babbling brooks and snow-capped mountains are filled with positive associations that are very meaningful in our instinctive mind and very meaningful in our memories. And so why would you throw out the snow-capped mountain? Snow-capped mountain means pure, pristine, echo-friendly. You know, all of these positive associations, untouched by human hands, water from the glaciers. You want those positive associations. So what you want to do is instead of throwing out the snow-capped mountain, saying, I can't do that because it's familiar you take the snow cap mountain you render it in an abstract design the way aquafina bottled water did on its packaging

and now you're creating a distinctive version of that snow cap mountain that your brand can own so the new rule is familiarity is actually more powerful than uniqueness, and distinctiveness is best of all. That completely goes in the face of what we've been taught as marketers because everybody in the marketing and advertising industry is focused on uniqueness and standing out and creating things that look like they came from Mars. But in fact, those things end up turning people off because the human brain is hardwired

to connect with the familiar and reject the unique. There you go. So there's a lot that goes into it, but you simplify it for us so that we can understand it and we can figure it all out and utilize it. And of course, people need to read your book to get the full details. And these are the new rules of persuasion

and business in life. Can I use these rules in my personal life? Can I help figure them out for my dates on my Tinder, assuming I get any dates off Tinder? You can absolutely build your personal brand and you can build people's perceptions of you using these exact same techniques, because everything is a brand. Coke and Pepsi are brands. President Biden and President Trump are brands. The political parties are brands. You're a brand. I'm a brand.

This show's a brand. Everything is a brand. And so once we understand the three rules, once we understand all the rules, we can have a much greater impact because it essentially helps you grow the brand faster in people's minds. Does that make sense? There you go. That certainly does. What kind of messages create the greatest amount of positive associations is one of the aspects. Why finding new customers accelerates growth and relies on existing ones as a trap? Why is it that finding new customers accelerates growth and relying on existing ones as a trap. Why is it that finding new customers accelerates growth and relying on existing ones as a trap? I love that question as well, because most

companies think that they should mainly cater to their existing customers. In fact, I read a recent Gartner survey that said 85% of CMOs were going to spend their time focusing on existing products and selling them to existing customers. And the problem with that is it's kind of a recipe for shrinking your business because your current customers always leave you. About half of every franchise leaves every year, which is a startling statistic, meaning there's churn in every franchise. And so if you're not constantly replenishing that leaky bucket, you're going to end up declining in the coming year. Your growth is going to decline instead of increasing. So what we say is your existing customer is a trap.

Your new customer is really the opportunity for the greatest growth. And your new customer is going to be where you also learn what's holding you back. Because if your new customer isn't using you, because they're obviously not a customer yet, they invariably have some negative associations that are standing in the way of them coming over. Your current customers aren't going to tell you that. So it's super useful to understand and spend time with the people you don't have and understand what's holding them back, those negative associations, because only then can you develop strategies and communications that take down

those negative associations and bring people over. Wow. Wow. Another thing you talk about is why emotional stories are not enough to drive trial and long-term brand loyalty. So emotional stories like those, you know, like they do those stories that make you want to cry, you know, sometimes, you know, it's got the puppy in it and that sort of thing. And, you know, like what was that Coke commercial where we are the

world or something that everyone's seeing in the seventies or something. So those emotional stories are not enough to drive trial and long-term brand loyalty. Yeah, they're just not. We talked about that a little bit earlier that essentially making people cry or making them laugh, it kind of goes in one ear and out the other. But what does stick is distinctive brand assets. So let's talk about that. A distinctive brand asset is a code or a cue in any of the five senses. A good example is the snow-capped mountain. That is a succinct code or cue in any of the five senses. That one's a visual cue that is so packed with positive associations and meaning that we already give it in our minds that it goes into memory structure faster and it makes your brand expand in people's minds faster as well.

So that is how you actually need to build your brand, through verbal triggers, through visual triggers. These are the things that actually get lodged in people's minds and end up growing brands. That's your toolkit, so to speak. There you go. Build your brand. Make it your toolkit, so to speak. There you go. Build your brand. Make it smarter and all that good stuff.

So what are some examples maybe of you've seen people that have really successfully used your techniques and stuff in the thing? Do you have any stories we can pull that you can disclose? I can't talk about my clients, but what I can talk about is the people and businesses that are using these techniques already. Some of them do it almost by accident, but they're just really, really good at it. What I've done is created a system for those things that are random events and making them institutionalized.

But let's take Taylor Swift. If you were a country music star, you would think that you should, and you followed the rules of marketing, which basically say that your brand can only stand for one thing, because that's the old rule. Your brand should stand for one thing. And if you were Taylor Swift,

you would only stick to country music. You would have a very professional relationship with your fans the same way everybody else does. And you wouldn't stray from that country music sound because you would be afraid to turn off your current audience and go into something new. Maybe they won't like your new sound. Maybe they'll be turned off. Maybe they'll think this doesn't fit with who you are. But Taylor Swift did not do that. Rather, what she did was she explored her own creativity.

She did pop music and folk music and dance music. I mean, she's really done a little bit of everything. And little by little, she expanded that brand connectome with more and more branches she also has sort of a multiplicity of relationships with her fans not just on the professional side but she almost gets to know them like personally people call her mom they think they're her friend they think they know her they have her. I mean, it's really like a multiplicity of connections in the mind. Yeah. Sounds a bit stalkery, though.

It's a brand that just keeps growing and growing and growing. And it's because she has so many connections in the mind. So that's a perfect example of one of these rules. The new rule being have as many associations and as many connections as you possibly can, because that's how you get to be large and positive in people's minds. Ah, there you go. Yeah. I mean, and imagine her lyrics of her songs generate different emotions that maybe connect people. I don't know.

A hundred percent. And she also keeps reintroducing her old music to new generations while she's expanding her new music. And so she just, she keeps everything alive. And that's actually another really important technique that we use at Triggers, which is keep, stop, add. If you want to evolve your brand and you want to make it healthier, you want to keep the positive associations you have.

So that's why I use the Taylor Swift example because she keeps reinforcing the positive associations about her old music to new generations. Stop the negative associations that are not helping you, and then add the new positive associations through growth triggers, like the snow-capped mountain, et cetera. And that's how you bring new people in, and that's how you always keep your brand alive.

If your brand is not constantly growing, essentially it's going to be dying. Yep. If it's not growing, it's dying. The whole is written is rolling book there. 100%. Definitely. Definitely. So, final thoughts as we go out and tell people where to pick up the book.

Yeah. So, I would say, look, there's an amazing opportunity for everybody here. Instinct is the most powerful force for changing human behavior and harnessing it is the most powerful force for changing human behavior. And harnessing it is the key to really growing anything faster and more easily in people's minds. And that's the secret to success. And it literally applies to anything and everything. You can get my book on Amazon. You can get it at Barnes & Noble.

If you want to make a bulk order, you can do it on Porchlight. But I love to link with people. And if you have questions or want to make a bulk order, you can do it on Porchlight. But I'd love to link with people. And if you have questions or want to engage, you can find me on LinkedIn under Leslie Zane. And I just really hope that my sharing all of this learning that I have over the past 30 years will be helpful to people so that they can achieve success faster and more easily as well. There you go. There you go. There you go.

Hopefully we will. Give us a.com as we go out for your website and people can take a look at that too. Triggers.com and LeslieZane.com. There you go. Thank you very much, Leslie, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Chris. This was a lot of fun.

There you go. And thanks, Ron, for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress, Chris V LinkedIn.com, Fortress Crispus, Crispus1, the TikTokity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.