Today’s interview is with Leslie Zane, who is the Founder and CEO of Triggers, a brand consulting firm, and an authority on harnessing the instinctive mind to accelerate brand and business growth. Leslie joins me today to talk about her new book, THE POWER OF INSTINCT: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life, why she thinks we have entered the age of instinct, being 10-15 years ahead of Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahnemann, the Brand Connectome™ and growth triggers amongst a bunch of other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The customer isn’t always right – Interview with Daphne Costa Lopes of Hubspot – and is number 512 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Hubspot who have built an AI-powered customer platform with all the software, integrations, and resources you need to connect your marketing, sales, and customer service. It’s all very cool so do check them out at HubSpot.com.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Leslie:

• Leslie wrote The Power of Instinct, New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life because she felt that marketing was being done all wrong.
• Marketing is upside down, we are approaching it in a very confrontational way, and we’re not leveraging how the brain really works.
• Marketers are taking the path of greatest resistance to a sale.
• The brain has two mechanisms (the conscious and the unconscious) and these two mechanisms work together to help us make decisions.
• It is now widely accepted that the unconscious mind dictates and influences the majority of our decisions (95%).
• But, when you think about the rules of marketing and advertising, much of it is based on the idea that it is the conscious mind that is making decisions.
• As a result, current tactics could actually be a recipe for shrinking your brand because they fight the brain. They work against the conscious mind.
• Think about persuasion. When you try to persuade somebody of something, you’re going up against the conscious mind and you’re working really, really hard. You have all your arguments and your data, and you barrage people with messages, and it doesn’t really work very well for two reasons.
  • One, because the conscious mind is resistant to change, it’s skeptical, it sees you coming, and it says, “Uh, no, thank you very much. I’m not going to do what you are asking me to do, or telling me to do.” So, that’s the first problem.
  • The second problem is that the conscious mind makes up only 5% of the decisions we make anyway, so we’re concentrating 100% of our resources on only 5% of people’s decisions.
• Instead we should focus on the unconscious mind or the instinctive mind. That is actually where brand decisions get made.
• Leslie was using these insights 10 to 15 years ahead of the publication of Daniel Kahneman’s and Dan Ariely’s books.
• Discounting and promotional incentives can get you a temporary bump but it doesn’t drive instinctive brand behavior.
• I don’t think there’s such a thing as loyalty. We don’t have a conscious devotion to brands and I don’t even believe that the net promoter score tells us much of anything that’s useful.
• The Brand Connectome™is the cumulative memories that have gotten glued to your brain over time that live on neural pathways connected to your brand.
• For example, if you think about Pepsi or Coke, then most people would have a Brand Connectome™ for either of those brands in your subconscious mind. And, whichever Brand Connectome™, Pepsi or Coke, is physically larger in your mind and more positive, that’s the brand that is your instinctive choice.
• There are three rules for a healthy Brand Connectome™.
  • One, it needs to be physically salient i.e. whoever owns the most physical real estate in your brain wins. That’s going to be the go to instinctive choice because it’s got the most salience.
  • Two, a higher ratio of positive to negative associations.
  • Three, you want it to be to have some clarity, to have some distinctiveness. Not uniqueness, but distinctiveness.
• You have a competitive advantage by being a legacy brand that’s been out a long time because you have salience.
• But, you only have to look at all the myriad of disruptor brands that have come out and have taken big chunks of market share from these large legacy brands to know that it’s actually not hard to be a disruptor.
• One of the key ways you do that is to find a weakness in the legacy brand. Some negative association that has not yet been fully patched up, let’s say.
• If the competitive brand can make that their story, that they’re addressing that negative association, they can turn that into a positive and they can make some major inroads in terms of market share in that bigger brand. Look at Dollar Shave Club.
• One of the things about the Brand Connectome™is that it needs to keep growing.
• When you add triggers to your Connectome, it makes the Connectome grow. A good example of a trigger would be the snow-capped mountain in the bottled water category, but it could be in any of the five senses. But the snow cap mountain is packed with positive associations….pure, pristine, eco-friendly, natural, water from the glaciers, the best water there is……etc.
• That is how a Brand Connectome™can grow. You take your brand, you connect it to one of these ideas that already exist in the mind so you’re not confronting the brain, you’re leveraging what’s already in there, those familiar things that are not just familiar, but they’re familiar with wonderful meaning that helps my brand. This is the path of accelerating your business growth because you’re not introducing foreign things. You’re latching onto things that already exist in the brain that have positive stories connected to them.
• However, you have to keep going; otherwise, if you don’t, then the Brand Connectome™will atrophy over time, just like memories.
• The importance/power of uniqueness is a myth because the human brain is hardwired to connect with the familiar.
• We should absolutely copy our competitors, particularly if they are doing something that works because it means that they’re onto something. However, make it your own. Do something with it that is distinctive.
• Leslie’s best advice: Harness the power of instinct. It’s the most powerful force for changing human behavior, and doing that is the key to driving sustainable growth.
• Leslie’s Punk XL brand: Apple
• Satisfaction is too low a bar. Instead, we need to look to create the ideal experience and not just aim for satisfaction.

About Leslie

Leslie Zane is an award-winning marketer, TEDx speaker and 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, Zane champions the primacy of the instinctive mind in brand decisions. Zane pioneered the Brand Connectome and Growth Triggers, helping define today’s understanding of human decision-making to unlock brand and business growth. An alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School, and Bain & Company, Zane is a recipient of the Congressional Women of Distinction and the Ogilvy Award. She coined the term Covid-stasis, forecasting the pandemic’s lasting psychological and behavioral effects.

See her compelling TEDx Talk here on the hidden link between success and the subconscious.

Find out more about Leslie at her website and the Triggers site, say Hi to her on X (Twitter) @Leslie_Zane and feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash