CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.
Elias St. Elmo Lewis is the 19th century advertising pioneer who came up with the marketing and sales funnel. That’s the idea that to earn a loyal customer, you have to take people through a series of stages. First, you have to make them aware of your product, then you have to get them to consider it in their lives. Next, you have to get them to buy it, and finally, you have to convince them to become a repeat customer and to tell others about it.
In a way, the whole funnel is built on persuasion, but our guest today says, that’s outdated. She says, “People are actually pretty obstinate and persuadable.” She says, “The right way to think about marketing is that it lives and dies by instinct.” Here to explain how to market better, whether it’s a century old brand, a brand new product, or your own personal brand is Leslie Zane. She worked at consumer packaged goods companies before founding Triggers where she consults with Fortune 500 firms, and she’s written the book, The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life. Leslie, thanks for being here.
LESLIE ZANE: Hi, Curt. Thanks so much for having me.
CURT NICKISCH: In your career, you’ve seen marketers focus so much on trying to persuade buyers. Is that the training you had? Why do marketers do that? Where does that focus come from?
LESLIE ZANE: Traditional marketing is built on the premise that the conscious brain makes its decisions, and we need to muster a whole bunch of arguments in order to convince the conscious mind to do what we want it to do. The rules of marketing, the whole practice of marketing and advertising was developed back in the early, probably 50s and 60s in the days of Mad Men, when we still thought that the conscious mind made our decisions. We didn’t have neuroscience, behavioral science, we didn’t have an understanding of those things.
So we barraged people with messages. We used coupons and incentives, and there are two problems with this. The conscious mind is resistant to change, it’s skeptical and it sees you coming, and the conscious mind makes up only approximately 5% of the decisions that we make anyway. So essentially marketers and really many other business people are spending 100% of our time, energy, and resources on only 5% of the decisions that people make. It’s no wonder that companies have such a hard time driving growth.
CURT NICKISCH: It is interesting when you go back and you see old ads and they feel out of touch or just don’t work anymore, but you can also look at a campaign like the Marlboro Man. That wasn’t really going after a conscious mind. That seemed like that was all about much more subtle marketing than trying to persuade anybody with information.
LESLIE ZANE: I think that’s 100% true. There have been marketers across time that have done some of what I’m recommending instinctively, and I think there were many ads in the early era of marketing and advertising that got it just right, and they were built on image. And I think more and more as we went into a sort of data driven society, I think we’ve lost some of that actually, but the customers always made decisions on instinct. This is not anything new, it’s just that we haven’t allowed the marketing process to adopt to a new understanding of how the brain works. We are hardwired to make decisions on instinct. We don’t buy on need, we don’t buy on loyalty. People buy on instinct and they make most decisions in their life on instinct.
CURT NICKISCH: If we’re to think about marketing to people’s instincts rather than trying to persuade them, what does that mean?
LESLIE ZANE: I think it’s helpful to use a metaphor here and think of the human brain as an iceberg where the conscious mind is above the waterline making about 5% of the decisions, and the instinctive mind is below the waterline making 95% of the decisions.
What we want to do is understand that the command control center, the command control center of decision-making is actually located in the instinctive mind, and we can influence so much more there. The instinctive mind is more malleable. You can leverage ideas that already exist and latch onto them, and it becomes really a much faster way to drive growth. We’re harnessing the brain’s inherent practice of making snap decisions and learning how to influence them. And if you do that, it can actually give you what I would call a different kind of competitive advantage, an instinctive advantage.
CURT NICKISCH: You mentioned neuroscience and behavioral psychology. These are things that we have a much better understanding of today. There’s been a lot more research. What has that shown and how does that inform your understanding?
LESLIE ZANE: What we now understand is that the way brands exist in the mind is a much more organic structure than we thought before. Brands actually have physicality. They are a series of cumulative memories that get glued to a brand over time, and that is what exists in the subconscious mind, in the instinctive mind. And so these cumulative memories that hold all of our positive and negative associations, we need to reach that. We need to make the invisible visible, get down and understand the implicit barriers and drivers that lurk beneath the surface, beneath that waterline. That’s the key to being able to shape outcomes and change your business results.
When I speak of instinct, I’m thinking about everything from a person in a grocery store instinctively reaching for their go-to brand a Pepsi over Coke to a plan sponsor, choosing an asset investment manager. I mean, it actually applies to B2B just as much as to B2C or even in a job interview where we know the interviewer is making a snap judgment about the candidate probably within the first few minutes.
Ideas seep in there without people realizing it, and it’s much more malleable than the conscious mind. So it could take you 10 years to make inroads against the conscious mind, which basically operates like a brick wall, and you can make strides much faster if you leverage and work with the instinctive mind.
CURT NICKISCH: I’ve often thought about it’s changing people’s behavior and that’s obviously a difficult thing to do. Can you change people’s instincts or are you just trying to tap into them to kind of go with their flow?
LESLIE ZANE: So instincts and behavior are driven by what I call the Brand Connectome. The brand connectome is the cumulative memories that get connected or glued to a brand over time in the unconscious mind, some going as far back as childhood.
And everybody has a Brand Connectome. Brands like Pepsi and Coke have a Brand Connectome. You have a brand connectome. I have a brand connectome. Our personal brands. President Biden, President Trump, they have brand connectomes. Everything is a brand. And it turns out you can actually go in there and understand what that Brand Connectome looks like.
If it were, let’s say, a brand of pasta, what you might see in the Brand Connectome would be Sunday dinners, red checkered tablecloths, the wooden spoon that your mother used when she made dinner, getting to lick that spoon, a whole host of positive associations. And you can think of the brand as a seed. You plant the seed in people’s minds, and over time as you add positive associations to that seed, the seed grows into a seedling, into a plant. And if you do your job right as a marketer or as a business leader, it grows into a full-grown tree. So the moment at which a person switches from one brand to another, it’s when that brand connectome gets to be really physically large in the brain. It grows to that full-grown tree and its canopy is larger than the other brands. That’s the moment of switching.
CURT NICKISCH: So let’s get into some practicalities, to get from here to there. You talk in your book about a number of different kinds of mistakes that a lot of marketers make and a lot of companies. Let’s start with associations like negative associations. Where do those come from and how do marketers contribute to those?
LESLIE ZANE: Negative associations can basically infiltrate your tree. I think of it like a virus that gets into your Brand Connectome without you realizing it. They’re not seen so much in your current customers, but they’re really seen in your growth target, the people you’re trying to get. And if you’re not monitoring the unconscious mind of your growth target, then they can be growing wildly in there without you realizing it. Suddenly the business leader sees a fall off in their revenue or their growth stagnates, and they’re surprised. But had they been monitoring the connectome of their growth target, they would’ve seen those negative associations. That’s why it’s so important to spend as much time with your prospective customers as it is with your current customers because in a way, your current customers are almost like a trap. They lull you into thinking that everything is fine.
CURT NICKISCH: I think that’s a tension that a lot of people have, right, serving existing customers, but also looking for growth and new customers. And you’re basically saying that a mistake that many organizations make is that they focus too much on existing customers. How so? What happens and where’s the danger there?
LESLIE ZANE: This trade-off between core customers or your existing customers and the growth target is a classic issue in marketing. And if you interview most chief marketing officers and business leaders, they will tell you, I think there was a recent Gartner survey that said that 78 or 80% of them were going to spend the following year marketing existing products to existing customers because the perception is that it’s easier. I can just go back to the people who already know me and I’m going to have an easier time driving growth. And the issue there is that first of all, they lull you into thinking that business is fine. Secondly, they don’t tell you what their negative associations are. If they even have any, they’re going to be a very small number. And the third problem is that there’s churn in every business. Your existing customers are leaving you all the time.
In fact, there’s a statistic from Byron Sharp that suggests that 50% of customers leave you every year. So if you are not aggressively replenishing, you’re going to have a leaky bucket problem and your growth is going to start to stagnate or even decline.
Here’s a simple fact, you cannot grow your audience with your growth target without taking down their negative associations. It’s critical. You have to overwhelm their negative associations with positive ones. That is the key. And you need to start by understanding what those negative associations are because that’s the key to brand evolution. And if you’re not evolving your brand, then you’re stagnating.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, even century long brands still face this, right? They can’t rely on the way they used to be and they have to keep building. And it’s also encouraging because if you’ve made some mistakes or developed negative associations, you can overcome it – over time.
LESLIE ZANE: The formula that I use for this is keep, stop, add. Keep reinforcing the positive associations you have with existing customers. Stop the negative associations that are holding you back with the growth target and add these new powerful cognitive shortcuts, that connect with the growth target on an instinctive level and overwhelm the negative associations with positive ones.
So about eight or so years ago, McDonald’s had all these negative associations as a result of these videos that had gone viral on YouTube. Pink slime in your chicken nuggets, a horse’s eyeballs in your beef, meat that doesn’t mold. Basically it’s fake food. And so leadership did what they thought they should do. They launched this big campaign saying, no, we don’t have pink slime in our chicken nuggets. And as you can imagine, what happened there is that the brand took a further nose dive because now they were telling even more people about this potential problem of pink slime in the chicken nuggets.
So what they ultimately did is they adopted a real food strategy, which was really just telling the story of the ingredients and food and sourcing that the company already did. It just hadn’t been brought to light and the brand started to react. They started talking about the fresh cracked eggs that they make in your Egg McMuffin and the 100% USDA beef and all of these positive things that again, were just the story that was never told. And the business started to turn around almost immediately, and the brand was saved.
CURT NICKISCH: Let’s talk about another thing that you write about, which that a lot of marketing teams make a mistake of trying to be too distinctive. What are they doing and how does that play into the emotional choices that people are making?
LESLIE ZANE: So one of the oldest rules in the marketing book is that uniqueness is king, stand out, be the purple cow, differentiate or die. But wait a minute, we now know that the human brain is hardwired to connect with the familiar. In fact, we reject the unique. You could see this in the pandemic. The brands that were grabbed first on the shelves were the ones that made us feel comfortable and secure. That was the familiar. It was the unfamiliar, no-name brands that were left on the shelves.
So what we need to understand is that uniqueness is a full hearty pursuit. In fact, I would say that we should remove the word uniqueness from the language of marketing and advertising. What we want to do instead is recognize that familiarity is more powerful than uniqueness, but distinctiveness is best of all.
A good example of this would be the snow capped mountain. The snow cap mountain is filled with positive associations, and if you’re a bottled water brand, you want all those associations connected to your brand, pure, pristine, echo friendly, water from the glaciers, cold, refreshing, clean, all these good things. So the rule of uniqueness would say never show a snow cap mountain on your bottled water brand because it’s generic and,-
CURT NICKISCH: Everybody else already does. Yeah.
LESLIE ZANE: Right. It’s generic, it’s cliche, but the new rule would say, wait a minute, I don’t want to throw out that snow cap mountain. It’s really powerful. That would be allowing my competitors to take the snow cap mountain. Instead, I want to adopt the snow cap mountain into my connectome and just put a creative twist on it, make it distinctive. And that’s exactly what Aquafina bottled water did. It took the classic snow cap mountain, it rendered it in an abstract design with a larger peak and a smaller peak and a wonderful little orange sunrise behind it. And lo and behold, now the snow cap mountain is part of the Aquafina brand and helping drive years of growth.
CURT NICKISCH: It occurs to me that a lot of what we’re talking about sounds like mass market products. There are early adopters out there. There are people who are more willing to try new things and enhance their variance with products. Are you recommending this for really all brands, just mass market ones? I’m trying to understand the arena here.
LESLIE ZANE: Yeah, this approach works for anything and everything. And if you’re a small brand, you need to gain an instinctive advantage the most because you don’t have the same kind of resources that the large legacy brands have. So what you can do, and what is a really effective strategy for a disruptor as an example, is to find a vulnerability in the connectome of a larger brand and to put your strength against that vulnerability.
What’s really interesting, it’s actually back to the distinctiveness thing. You don’t want to be completely different. You want to be similar to the legacy brand in some ways. In other words, you need to have category drivers in order to just even get in the consideration set. And then you also want to have brand drivers, the things that make you different and distinct, but it’s a balance of both. You want to be similar to the big brands and you want to be different, and that combination is really actually a lethal combination that can take a lot of share from a big player.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah, you had a great example of this in your book with Dollar Shave Club, which was going up against big consumer packaged goods companies like Gillette.
LESLIE ZANE: Yeah. The Dollar Shave Club example is really a great example of a disruptor almost building its business overnight by doing exactly what I’m suggesting a smaller brand can do, which is to find a vulnerability in those larger brands. And I think Gillette and Schick and other brands like that had really become almost over-engineered. And what the CEO of Dollar Shave Club did in this 60 second video was make it very clear that there was a contrast between the simplicity of their razors and these very over-engineered, overly expensive five blades, seven comfort strips, all these things that you probably didn’t need. And he made that contrast so vivid for customers that one could almost say that the Dollar Shave Club connectome grew overnight. It grew in people’s minds in the course of that 60 second video that went viral, and the competitive brands like the Schicks and the Gillettes kind of shrank in people’s minds in that moment, creating immediate switching and building Dollar Shave Club into a unicorn.
CURT NICKISCH: You’ve talked about overwhelming negative associations with more positive associations. You also described some of this in the book as layering where a lot of people in marketing, if they’ve learned it classically, they think about funneling, right, they think about the funnel. How should they be thinking about this differently?
LESLIE ZANE: So another one of the oldest rules in the marketing playbook is that your brand should only stand for one thing: be single-minded. Don’t confuse people. If you have too many messages or too many associations, people are going to be confused.
CURT NICKISCH: It’s just, it’s brand soup. Yeah.
LESLIE ZANE: But that’s a myth because I just told you that the more connections your brand has in people’s minds, the better. And so the layering comes in from adding positive associations year after year after year. And let’s take Taylor Swift. If you were a country music star and you listened to the old rule of marketing, you would only ever develop country music. You would never stray from that. But what she did instead was to lean into her artistic curiosity and develop folk music and dance music and pop music, and with each new type of music, she added another branch to her connectome, creating another connection in people’s minds.
She has other types of connections as well. People kind of feel like they know her on a personal level, so it’s not even just a traditional celebrity fan relationship and all of these connections in people’s minds. People think of her as their friend, some of them call her mother. All of this keeps her brand connectome expanding on and on and on until she’s become this incredible sensation with a billion dollar tour in 2023.
CURT NICKISCH: How do these rules apply to your own personal brand? Is it just as encouraging that if your personal brand has some negative associations, that you can do work to create more positive associations? I think a lot of people, when they think about their personal brand, they’re thinking about avenues to extend it or media to use to build it. But what kind of lessons do you think individuals could take from these company lessons you’ve been sharing?
LESLIE ZANE: Listen, everyone is a brand, and by the way, we’re all marketers. We’re all trying to sell something, including ourselves. So the key for a person managing their personal brand is to start early, create positive associations over time. Don’t wait until you’re up for a big promotion let’s say. Start as early as possible. Building those positive associations. Create positive buzz. You want to have, just like a regular brand, you want to have influencers. It’s so much better if other people are saying good things about you than for you to be saying good things about yourself.
And when you’re creating presentations or making your ideas known and trying to sell your ideas in a company, don’t even think of them as presentations. Think of them as mini ad campaigns. I think that all of this is incredibly relevant.
And if you do have negative associations, let’s say you had a negative performance review, which all of us have had at one time or another, it’s absolutely fixable. Brand perceptions are not entrenched. All you have to do is do what McDonald’s did and replace those negative associations with positive ones, and the world is your oyster.
CURT NICKISCH: Leslie, this has been really great. Thanks for coming on the show to talk about this work.
LESLIE ZANE: Thank you so much for having me, Curt. It’s a great conversation.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Leslie Zane, marketing expert and author of the book, The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life.
And if you like this episode, check out episode 927, How to Reinvent a Consumer Brand. We have nearly 1000 episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them all at hbr.org. Find them all at hbr.org/podcasts, or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, associate producer Hannah Bates, audio product manager Ian Fox and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Thank you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Curt Nickisch.