Want To Persuade People? Work With Their Brains, Not Against Them

Agency, the privilege of making choices and decisions of our own free will, is a heaven-sent gift that we enjoy as humans.

But exactly how we make those choices and decisions has been open for discussion for millennia.

Leslie Zane offers thoughtful additions to the discussion in The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life.

Zane, an alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School, and Bain & Company, is an award-winning Fortune 500 brand consultant and behavioral expert.

People don’t make decisions with their conscious minds, Zane says. They decide on instinct. But harnessing that instinct, she says, requires working with the human brain, not against it.

The “conscious marketing model” is dead, Zane says. She explains why.

“The conscious marketing model is the premise that our conscious mind controls our decisions, from the brands we buy to the political candidates we vote for,” she says. “Traditional marketing [developed decades ago and still practiced by most companies today] is based on this conscious model. But behavioral science has taught us that the brain has two mechanisms, conscious and non-conscious, and the unconscious mind controls an estimated 95% of the decisions we make.”

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Traditional marketing, Zane says, “tries to persuade the conscious mind. It barrages people with messages, provides discounts and coupons, etc. But these techniques don’t work very well for two reasons: (1) the conscious mind is rigid, skeptical, and resistant to change, and (2) the conscious mind makes only 5% of decisions anyway. So, essentially, marketers are putting 100% of their time, energy and resources against only 5% of people’s decisions. It’s no wonder that driving growth is so hard.”

Zane says brands actually reside physically in the unconscious mind and that they can be influenced. She explains how that works:

• “Every brand has what we call a Brand Connectome®—a network of cumulative memories (positive and negative associations) that become ‘glued’ to the brand over time in people’s minds—some going as far back as childhood. Contrary to popular belief, a brand is not your logo, your package or even your advertising. Rather, it’s the convergent associations that consumers have with your brand—visual, verbal, experiential. Let’s say you’re the CMO for a large brand of pasta. Your Brand Connectome might include Sunday dinners with family, Mom’s favorite recipe, the wooden spoon she cooked with, licking the sauce off the spoon if she let you, red checkered tablecloths, a host of positive associations. You don’t choose your brand of pasta, your Brand Connectome does.
• “Think of your brand as a seed that you plant in people’s minds. As you add positive associations (its nutrients), the seed grows into a seedling, a plant, and, if you treat it right, it becomes a full-grown tree. The moment the canopy of your brand covers more terrain in someone’s mind than the competition, they instinctively buy your brand.”

Zane writes about “growth triggers,” succinct codes or cues packed with positive associations. So, when trying to establish and maintain a high-performance workplace culture, how can leaders make good use of growth triggers?

“The human brain is lazy and it doesn’t like to work hard,” she says. “That’s why it’s drawn to Growth Triggers®, simple codes or cues in any of the five senses that are packed with meaning. For example, the inspirational, orange-colored beads of sweat on Michael Jordan’s face in the 1991 Gatorade campaign, ‘Is it in you?’ (revived in 2024) are a Growth Trigger. These orange beads are a cognitive shortcut to much greater meaning: perseverance, excellence, achievement, inner strength and a myriad of other positive associations.”

But these triggers, Zane explains, are not limited to marketing communications. They can be used to create a high-performance culture or superior customer experience.

“Hotel Nizuc in Cancun, Mexico, uses a Growth Trigger to greet guests,” she says. “Every employee from the bellhop to the lifeguard places their closed-fisted hand on their chest the moment they see a guest. This simple hand gesture conveys: welcoming, peace and relaxation, I’m happy to work here, and we care about you. Growth Triggersâ are like fertilizer to the Brand Connectome, providing a burst of positive associations that accelerates its growth overnight.”

When establishing a new brand—for a product or service—what’s the key to differentiating yourself from competitors?

“One of the fastest ways to establish a new brand is to leverage a weakness of a large dominant competitor,” Zane says. “Disruptor brands are known for this. Differentiation shows up in many areas: expertise (e.g., the Cloud 5 technology behind the On sneaker), brand personality (e.g., Buffalo Wild Wings’ irreverence), even imagery (e.g., AllBirds’ grassy fields, sheep and freshly-shorn wool). But new brands still need to deliver on category drivers. By differentiating on a few key elements while still delivering on category drivers, a new brand can get break into the market overnight.”

Zane says familiarity is more powerful than uniqueness, but distinctiveness is strongest of all. She explains how that applies to professional people establishing and maintaining their personal brands in the workplace.

“The traditional thinking in marketing is that uniqueness is king,” she says. “This is one of the oldest rules in the marketing playbook, i.e., stand out, be the purple cow, differentiate or die. But we now know that human beings are hardwired to connect with the familiar—they reject the unique. That’s why nine out of 10 new products fail.

Distinctiveness lets your marketing ride familiar neural pathways while making it ownable to your brand. This works the same way for a personal brand.”

First and foremost, a professional needs to be accepted, Zane says. And that means being familiar.

“In subtle indirect ways, you want to convey that you are part of the team, aligned with the company’s mission and committed to the company’s success,” she advises. “But familiarity is not enough. You also want to be distinctive. This means having innovative ideas, coming up with a creative growth plan, and implementing new methodologies (e.g., AI, applied behavioral science). Striking the right balance between familiarity and distinctiveness will put your personal brand on the fast-track.”

When promoting something with social media (a webinar, for instance), what’s the advantage of multiple messages over a single brand message?

“One of the longest standing rules of marketing is that a brand should stand for only one thing,” Zane says. “Marketers are raised on it. Ad agencies promote it. The problem is: if your brand has only one association, it doesn’t stand for enough. If you were promoting a webinar in social media, you would want simple succinct messages that create hundreds of positive associations in people’s minds. That’s because, the more connections you create, the more salient it is. Like a game of monopoly, the player that owns the most physical real estate in people’s minds wins!”