This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - The Power Of Instinct In Business And Life with Leslie Zane | 214

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

When we market our business we know the outcome we want, but how many of us truly understand what our potential clients or customers want? Do we understand how they make decisions? On this episode our guest talks about the Age of Instinct and how we can and should adapt our marketing efforts in a way that actually influences people. Joining us is Leslie Zane, award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and recognized authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth. Founder and CEO of Triggers, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science, Leslie champions the primacy of the instinctive mind in brand decisions. She is the author of The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life and her groundbreaking contributions have deepened our understanding of human decision-making and unlocked the elusive formula for accelerating brand and business growth. How can you leverage Growth Triggers in your business, in your communities and in your life? Because let’s face it, it’s not just business owners that are trying to get other people to do what we want. Every single one of us has a brand – and we’re all out there marketing it. We’re living billboards for our values, our beliefs, and our choices. Connect with Leslie: Book: https://thepowerofinstinctbook.com/ Website: https://lesliezane.com/  TedX: https://www.ted.com/talks/leslie_zane_the_hidden_link_between_success_and_the_subconscious/up-next  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Breathe better with AirDoctor, the air purifier that filters out 99.99% of dangerous contaminants (allergens, pollen, pet dander, dust mites, mold spores and even bacteria and viruses) so your lungs don’t have to. Visit airdoctorpro.com and use my promo code: TIWW to get up to $300 OFF air purifiers and a free 3 year warranty (and additional $84 value).

I am Nicole Kalil, and you probably know me mostly as the host of this show. And while the This Is Woman's Work podcast is one of my most favorite things that I get to do, it's not all that I do. In my professional life, I am an entrepreneur. I run a service-based coaching business. And as any business owner would tell you, there are about 1 million things that go into running a successful business. And most of us only know how to do like five of those things really well. Since we don't have time for me to list all of those 1 million

things, I'm going to share a few that are on the top of almost every business owner's mind. These are things that are often the priorities or essential for success of their business. Things like client or customer acquisition, marketing, sales, brand identity and awareness, profitability, and growth. Because this is top of mind for so many, there are an abundant amount of business and marketing podcasts out there, countless online courses, sales trainings, and books. We have mentors and coaches, speakers and gurus, and they're all telling us how to do these things well. But what I mostly see and what it boils down to is that we have a lot of do what I did,

say what I say. It's a regurgitating of old ideas, strategies, and tools of persuasion. I recently personally attended three different, and I'm going to put in air quotes, free workshops that promised to tell me how to grow this and teach me how to do that in my business. And all three followed pretty much the same structure where they spent 60% of the time upselling a course or offering, 25% of the time getting us excited and about 5% of the time actually delivering on what they said the free course was about.

And at that point, it no longer felt free because of the investment of my time. Clearly this works for some people or people wouldn't be doing it, but it definitely didn't work for me. When we market our business, we know the outcome we want, but how many of us truly understand our potential clients or customers and what they want and how they make decisions? Most of the women I know tell me they don't like the aggressive sales tactics, the way that other people are marketing or selling, and it doesn't resonate with them.

And like me, they're looking for a more authentic approach that actually impacts the people they serve and gets the results they want. There has to be a better way, right? Well, today we're going to talk about the age of instinct and how we can and should adapt our branding and marketing efforts in a way that actually influences people. Here to teach us all about that is Leslie Zane, award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker, and recognized authority in harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business

growth. Founder and CEO of Triggers, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science, Leslie champions the primacy of instinctive mind in brand decisions. She is the author of The Power of Instinct, the new rules of persuasion in business and life, and her groundbreaking contributions have deepened our understanding of human decision-making and unlocked the elusive formula for accelerating brand and business growth. So Leslie, thank you for joining us. And I have to start by asking, what do you mean when you say we're living in the age of instinct? What is that? First of all, good morning, Nicole. It is such a pleasure to meet you and to be here this morning,

and thanks for that lovely intro. The Age of Instinct is, I would say, sort of from 2020 on, we have arrived in this new era where we have a whole new understanding of the human mind that we did not have before. And one of the main reasons you know we're in the age of instinct is because of chat GBT. Chat GBT is only possible because scientists figured out that the brain is not a sequential decision-making machine. It's analogic, meaning our brain connects dots. We connect one dot to another, and we think in a myriad of multiple connections all at the same time, making associations. That's how the brain works. It's really the understanding of the instinctive mind. So my work is all about that, the instinctive mind, and I think this is going to affect every single aspect of our lives. Okay.

So if our brain is connecting many, many dots, which resonates with me, what does that mean for us when it comes to branding and marketing? How does that change things? So our instincts lie in our unconscious mind. We may think that our conscious mind is making our decisions, but actually it makes only 5% of the decisions in our unconscious mind. We may think that our conscious mind is making our decisions, but actually it makes only 5% of the decisions in our lives. 95% of our decisions are made by the instinctive mind. And as it turns out, that instinctive mind is connecting dots all the time. So if you are trying to build a brand or build a business, what you are going to have to do is to plant a seed

in that unconscious mind, which really means in people's memories, and you're going to need to add lots of new associations to that brand or business. And the more connections your brand makes to people's brains, then it grows. So it really, it's very much like you're a gardener. You plant that seed, you add lots of associations, which are sort of the soil and the water and the sun, the nutrients that that brand needs. And then as it grows from a seed to a seedling to a sapling to a plant, it takes on roots. The more terrain that this brand or business takes up in the mind, then it becomes your instinctive go-to. It's all about making lots of connections.

Okay. So I want to dive into a little bit of how to do that. But I opened up the show by focusing on branding and marketing as a business owner. And before we hit record, you and I had this conversation, so I know we're on the same page with this, but I want to be really clear that this isn't just for business owners. We're all branding all the time. We are a living brand for our values and our beliefs, and we're constantly marketing ourselves, whether that be in business or in our relationships or at the PTA or with our children or local communities. So does this translate outside of just business? It translates to every little

thing you just mentioned. It's a mother trying to get her child to do their homework. You can try persuading them over and over again and cajoling and nudging and yelling, and it's not going to work because you are approaching the conscious mind. And the conscious mind is resistant to change. So it doesn't matter if you are trying to start a new business or you're trying to campaign for the president of the United States or sell a social cause, or maybe you're doing a fundraiser, like whatever it is you are trying to grow in people's minds, the fact is it needs to grow in their people's minds. You can't have success outside the mind until you've had success

inside their minds. Okay. So is most of what we're seeing from a branding and marketing and sales perspective in that persuasion category? And if so, can you give us some examples of what that looks like so that when we talk about the other, the other, it'll, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So one of the ways I love to think about this is, is a metaphor using the metaphor of an, of an iceberg. So think about the top of the iceberg is the conscious mind, the tip of the iceberg. And that conscious mind is very resistant to change. So traditional marketing is trying to persuade that conscious mind through all different kinds of techniques. And I'll tell you, give you examples of those techniques in a minute. But it's trying to persuade that conscious mind to do something

it doesn't want to do because the conscious mind is skeptical. It's rigid. It's resistant to change. It's stuck in its habits. So all of those things mean that it's basically pushing you away and that's when people clash. And you see it all the time. I mean, probably in the last conversation over Thanksgiving that you had with a relative over politics, you probably had one of those clashes because you were trying to persuade each other and neither one of you is budging. But that subconscious mind, that non-conscious mind, that's the part below the waterline. And that, as it turns out,

is responsible for 95% of our decisions. And traditional marketing does not work there. I mean, it doesn't even try to do it there. And that's really what my techniques are all about, is approaching that subconscious mind. So that's where we want to concentrate our efforts. And to give you an example of the difference, let's say I am marketing my pet sitting business. If I send out coupons and discounts and barrage people with messages about the business, as well as lots of coupons and discounts, I'm basically trying to buy them to use my business. So it's a very promotional oriented approach and it's going to get a bump. It's going to get maybe a fleeting bump, but I haven't instinctively changed their minds. I haven't made them believe that this is superior. I haven't connected with them at that instinctive

level. So the other way to do it would be to represent that I'm a pet lover. I'm like obsessed with pets. And when the target, the pet owners in my neighborhood understand that I love pets as much as they do, it's not a direct confrontational approach. I'm more collaborating with their mind. And now we have some shared values and we're making a connection. I'm making a connection into other things they believe. And now we have this much more instinctive connection. I'm making a connection into other things they believe. And now we have this much more instinctive connection. And I don't need to discount. I don't need to coupon, which means it's more profitable too. Okay. So in preparation for our conversation, I saw growth triggers. Does that play in here? What is a growth trigger and how does it help drive results?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you want to find out what your growth triggers are for whatever it is you're trying to sell. I'll just do it in the world of commercial brands that I live in every day just because it makes it easier and it'll be more relevant to the audience. But as an example, if I'm in the bottled water category, the snow-capped mountain is a growth trigger. Why is the snow-capped mountain a growth trigger? Because it's packed with positive associations. That tiny little cue, that tiny little symbol on that bottle, it has so much meaning. And I don't need to say any of those things because it's imbued. It's intrinsic

in that. Pure, pristine, water from the glaciers, fresh, natural, eco-friendly. You get all of these associations with that tiny little cue. And so it's incredibly powerful, supercharged piece of ammunition, honestly, that I can use. And so now if you want to know what are the 25 for your business, for your brand, for your fundraiser that you're doing, for anything, it's going to be really useful for you to kind of figure out what those growth triggers are. Okay. So that makes perfect sense. How do we figure out what those growth triggers are. Okay. So that makes perfect sense. How do we figure out what those growth triggers are? Because I'm assuming if that were easy, we'd all be doing it. We do a lot of research. So we do a lot of research into people's minds and we actually have them show us their memories because memories hold all these things already. The beauty of the snow-capped mountain

is that it already exists in people's minds. I don't need to introduce something new. And this goes to one of the new rules of persuasion that I explain in my book, which is that the whole system of marketing needs to basically be turned upside down because we were all taught that it's all about uniqueness and standing out and being different, differentiate or die, be the purple cow. And as it turns out, the human brain is hardwired to connect with the familiar, not with the unique. So when I show something completely foreign, people are actually going to reject it. The beauty of the snow-capped mountain is it already exists in people's minds. And so I'm latching on to something that's already

there, but now I'm attaching it to my brand. I'm kind of co-opting something that's in other people's minds, my target's minds, and I'm connecting my brand to it. That's how you make connections. You keep connecting to things in people's minds and you go through a process of discovery with your customers or your prospective customers even better, the people you want to get, to understand the pieces, the anchors, the little anchors that you can connect to. Okay. So, I mean, that does turn things on its head. I've been taught and have taught, be different, have your differentiators be what has you stand out. And what you're saying makes sense, but how do we distinguish?

So not every water bottle can put the glacier on there, right? So is it about distinguishers, if not differences? How do we separate ourselves from our competitors if we're going with what's familiar? Nicole, you ask the best questions. Thank you. You really do. And you're such a great listener. It's amazing. So that is such a fantastic question. As it turns out, what we want to search for, what we want to be in pursuit of is distinctiveness, which is different from uniqueness. So familiarity is the thing that doesn't get any credence today at all because I've been accused of, well, you're going to just develop generic marketing. No, no,

no, no, no, no. I am latching on to things that are already in people's minds, but I'm going to put a creative twist on it to make it my own, to make it the distinctive to that brand. So as an example, Aquafina bottled water, they took a snow-capped mountain, but they rendered it in this very distinctive abstract design. So it's like two little peaks, a higher and a lower one. And then there's this wonderful little orange sunrise that symbolizes sort of the beginning of the day that comes up behind it. So now you've sort of co-opted something that's already in people's minds, the snow-capped mountain, but you've made it distinctive to that brand Aquafina bottled water.

When I moved from California to Massachusetts, I had never experienced allergies before. And while the springs in New England are gorgeous, they also come with itchy eyes, scratchy throat, and a lingering headache, at least for me. And after seven years, I finally got serious about it. And one of the things that I know has helped me a ton this spring is my Air Doctor air purifier. Because the indoor air that we breathe can be up to a hundred times more polluted than the outdoor air, according to the EPA. And my air purifier filters out 99.99% of dangerous contaminants like allergens, pollen, pet dander, dust mites, mold spores, and even bacteria and viruses. Air Doctor also comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So head to

airdoctorpro.com and use promo code TIWW and you'll receive up to $300 off air purifiers and a free three-year warranty. Lock in this special offercom. That's airdoctorpro.com and use promo code T-I-W-W. Now that we can breathe better, let's head back to the show. Anything to pay attention to, whether it's positive memories or negative memories, do people, you know, so like if we're honing in on people's memories, I've noticed in, for example, my email newsletter, people tend to click on the ones that have more of a focus on the problem or like what could be perceived as, and I put in air quotes negative because my intention is not to be negative, but all of that to ask, what type of memories are we locking into? So you bring up the question of what is the human mind intuitively or instinctively more likely to connect with the positive or the

negative. And they kind of serve two different purposes, but you are right that people are six times more likely to click on something negative than they are something positive, which is not a good thing. No. Yeah. Because that's what is fueling a lot of the sort of negative conversations out there in the world. But I think what you want to do is you want to have a foil. You want to be operating against something. You want to be selling against something. So if you have a new way of doing something, you kind of want to say this is better than the other way. So it's much more useful to the brain to have a contrast. The brain, again, because it's sort of like all about associations, comparing and contrasting all the

time. If one competitor is up, the other one is down. So if you choose Pepsi, you don't choose Coke. If you choose Coke, you don't choose Pepsi. So it's really, the brain is a relativity machine and it's really useful to have something that you're selling against, whether it's a different way of doing things or a different competitor. And sometimes you don't even have to mention that other competitor. I wouldn't even recommend doing that because then you can come off as bashing, but you can kind of implicitly, if you're more advanced, then by definition, your competitor is going to be less advanced, if that makes sense. It does make sense. Okay. So if you're newer in business or trying this out for the first time, you know, with the fundraiser you're doing, if we haven't had the opportunity to do a ton of

research and we're newer and we don't have a long history of positive associations with our brand yet, how do we start? So every category has growth triggers already. There are growth triggers for your category. There are growth triggers for your brand. And again, marketing, traditional marketing would tell you, you should favor the ones about your brand because you want to be different. But if you're not hitting the category drivers, if you're not hitting the category triggers,

you're not even in the game. So if I were starting out and creating a brand new business, I would not worry about being different. I'd start by worrying about being the same so that I can just get into the same consideration set as my much larger competitors that are already established. And I would look at what they're doing and take some sort of creative twists on that. I mean, a great example of companies that do this very well, although it's kind of sad that they do,

is the whole private label store label business in supermarkets. So, you know, there you have the wonderful Johnson's Baby Shampoo that's been around and has spent a lot of money for decades on that tear-shaped bottle with a little No More Tears pink little teardrop. And then out comes the private label version of that that they put right next to it. And they're riding on the coattails of those existing neural pathways in people's minds. And they can take 10, 20, 30% market share away from a big branded competitor. So you can learn a lot

by looking at those big dominant players. And that's where I would start. If you're, for example, not trying to be a multi-billion dollar enterprise, but just, you know, like in my past, I've worked with financial advisors a ton. Is there advantage or power in looking to what you're attracted to and sort of replicating that. Because obviously there are a bazillion different financial institutions and ways to market financial planning or whatever. And I always think the people who are most likely to gravitate towards me or anybody are often similar in some way. There is a connection. And so if I'm looking to model

myself after someone, it might not be the biggest or the best, but the one that resonates most with me. Is that question making sense? Yeah. No, I think that totally makes sense. You want to represent yourself in a way that fits with your values and the benefits that you're going to provide. And I would say, like, if I were starting a business today, and I can tell you what really was the key for me in my business, you know, anybody can be a consultant. Anybody can start a marketing organization, a branding firm, but so what? How would somebody know to come to mine over anybody else's? I think that the most important thing to establish is what is your expertise? You need to codify an expertise

because people don't really believe that one person can be better at something than anybody else. What they do believe is a system. And so I would say that the biggest unlock in my, in my, you know, trajectory of my company was I very early on kind of created a system that, that was replicatable. And so whoever, whichever client it was from any industry, they knew that they were going to get the system, not necessarily Leslie, but the system that, that I was putting into place. And now, you know, we've got a company that does, you know, many different categories, many different clients, but we use that system over and over again. And you know, you're going to get that consistency. Because by the way, when you are building a brand or a business of any kind, consistency is what it's all about. When you go to drink Pepsi, you don't want to have a different experience every time. You want to get the same psht. You want to get the same burn in the back of the throat.

You want to get the same bubbles. You want to get the same taste. You want to get the same invigorating refreshment. And so it's really important to be able to promise that consistent experience and codifying your expertise is one of the keys to that. This is such powerful stuff. I wish I could selfishly take over and just ask all about my business, but I will not do that. Okay. Out of curiosity, what about some of these brands out there who have maybe inadvertently created a negative association with their business. Is it too late? Can you

overcome? How does that work? So that's a great question. The only way to get rid of negative associations is to use positive ones to displace them. So a great example of how to do this can be seen with McDonald's. So McDonald's several years ago was beset by these awful videos that had gone viral showing pink slime in your chicken nuggets and horse's eyeballs in your beef. And the videos were having like 25 million views per video. I mean, it was really awful stuff. And it was all a hoax. None of it was true. They get their food from real farms. And what they did to overwhelm those negative associations was displace them with positive associations. So they started showing the farms that their food comes from,

the farmers that they get their tomatoes from, where the beef is raised, where the chickens roam. And this started to slowly turn around the situation. What you can't do is say, no, I don't have pink slime in my chicken nuggets. Because all that's going to do is reinforce a negative association. So what we want to do is we want to overwhelm negative associations with positive ones. What about emotional or story selling? We hear a lot about that. I'm imagining our memories have emotions associated with them, but it seems like you're

distinguishing between those. So what is the difference? Does emotional and story selling work and how is this different? So stories are great, but emotion doesn't stick. So what you want to do if you're creating, again, anything that we're trying to sell, because we've agreed we're all marketers, we're all selling something, is we want to have assets that can actually stick in people's minds. So back to the snow-capped mountain, logos. And really, you have to go way beyond the logo because the logo is just,

it's very narrow and it's very one-dimensional. So you want other things, other parts of your portfolio of assets. We call them distinctive brand assets and distinctive brand triggers. These are codes and cues and symbols that act as cognitive shortcuts that are sticky and they get lodged in your memory structure. And the more of those that you have, they kind of get glued to your brand over time and become more salient in the mind. Because this is a game about salience. You need to scale the brand, scale the business, scale the fundraiser, scale whatever it is in people's minds. And then the moment that it gets very large is the moment it's people's instinctive go-to choice.

Okay. Last question is what are some of the most common, I don't know, fantasies are the right word, but you see brands tapping into you and what do you see are most effective? So the beauty of fantasy is that we all have them. And if a brand can tap into a fantasy, then it can own the highest place in people's minds. A great example of this is Gatorade. So with Gatorade, they very early on sort of glommed on to the fantasy of being in that situation where there's a tough challenge that you need to overcome. So you drink the Gatorade, you're able to overcome that challenge and you can go for the big win. You can, you know, win the US Open if you're Serena Williams. You can make that three pointer if you're LeBron James.

And so that overachievement, it's kind of summoning your inner strength to overachieve. That is the Gatorade fantasy. So one of the things that we can do as individuals here is figure out what is the fantasy we want to create for our brand, our business, the thing we're selling, and match what's in people's minds. But you want to kind of find what that ultimate fantasy is. And it's not that hard. Sometimes it's actually pretty obvious. But if you can own it, then you actually own the high ground and the highest territory. Think of it as being on the pinnacle. If you're on the pinnacle, that highest ground in the category, then no competitor can kind

of come up on top of you and grab something as strong. This has been wildly fascinating. Thank you, Leslie, for joining me. And if you're anything like me, whether you're marketing dinner to your three-year-old or creating brand recognition in your business, you want to get your hands on Leslie's book. So go to thepowerofinstinctbook.com or pre-order it or order it on Amazon. I don't know about you, but I am doing that right after we stop recording here. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much, Nicole. It's been a pleasure. All right. There you have it, friend. It's our instincts and our memories that drive our decisions, purchases, and votes. And not all triggers are bad. How can you leverage growth triggers in your business, in your communities, and in your life? Because let's face it, it's not just business owners

that are trying to get other people to do what we want. Every single one of us has a brand and we're all out there marketing it. We are living billboards for our values, our beliefs, and our choices. So I won't go so far as to say branding and marketing are women's work, though many, many women are mindfully doing it.

But the power of instinct, though many, many women are mindfully doing it. But the power of instinct, listening to, leveraging, and trusting those instincts, well, that is woman's work.