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What is the key to accelerating marketing growth and success? How can you tap into your audience’s influential subconscious mind with your marketing, rather than trying to convince their instinctive, skeptical mind? Which new rules of marketing should you start using this year?
Marketing is changing, but the human brain hasn’t. In this episode, Leslie Zane shares why most traditional marketing strategies fail, how to tap into the subconscious mind of your audience, and the new rules you need to follow to make your brand stick.
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Meet Leslie Zane
Leslie Zane is an award-winning behavioral brand strategist, TEDx speaker, and author recognized for pioneering the use of behavioral science to drive instinctive brand growth. She founded Triggers® in 1995—the first consulting firm built on the principles of unconscious decision‑making—and has since helped major companies generate over $25 billion in incremental revenue.
An alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School, Bain & Company, and Procter & Gamble, Leslie has received prestigious honors including the Congressional Women of Distinction award and the Ogilvy Award. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Knowledge@Wharton, Newsweek, and at the World Economic Forum.
Leslie’s insights into how people really make decisions weave together sharp psychology, strategic branding, and engaging storytelling—making her a compelling voice on the intersection of mind, behavior, and impact.
Visit Leslie’s Personal and Business Websites, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
In This Podcast
- The overlap between psychology and marketing
- Marketing strategies that don’t work well
- How to work with the subconscious client mind in marketing
- The new rules of marketing
- Leslie’s advice to private practitioners
The overlap between psychology and marketing
The brain is a very complex thing, and I’m sure your audience knows that better than anybody! But to understand how it works and make decisions, you really need multiple disciplines. In our practice, we are using everything from psychology to behavioral science and a little bit of neuroscience, anthropology … You need multiple disciplines to get to the bottom of what makes people tick, and how to influence their behavior, and create behavior change. (Leslie Zane)
Leslie has been working in marketing for almost her entire professional career, and in marketing, she explains that she was essentially working in behavioral science, too.
She realized that if you really want to influence people, you cannot confront them directly. You need to keep the conscious and unconscious mind at the foundation of your marketing efforts, knowing that a person’s mind is influenced by both.
Tapping into the unconscious mind … Is really the key to making any change for any human, as well as for growing your business. (Leslie Zane)
Marketing strategies that don’t work well
Many of the traditional marketing techniques, such as …
- Persuasion
- Barraging people with messages
- Giving people instructions
… are not effective. If a person’s brain is turned off and unaware of something, then none of these tactics are going to work. As Leslie explains, they will not work for the following two reasons:
1 – The conscious mind is skeptical and resistant to change
2 – The conscious mind makes up only about 5% of the decisions that people make anyway
What we need to do is redirect and focus people on the 95% [of the mind] where decisions are actually made. The unconscious mind … is the control and command center of all of our decisions. We are instinctive decision-making machines … But it turns out that the unconscious mind is far more malleable than the conscious mind. (Leslie Zane)
How to work with the subconscious client mind in marketing
For small companies, word-of-mouth is worth gold. When one person loves your work and tells their friend about it, they will share it with their other friends, who in turn share your name with theirs, and people trust their friends. Soon, it creates a snowball effect.
A brand is the cumulative memories that people have heard about your little seed, you know, that keeps growing. Essentially, a brand is known by the associations it keeps. If you are a small brand, then the more you can have your brand connected to other things that are larger in people’s minds … [the better], because if your brand is isolated and it doesn’t come into contact with other things that customers are aware of, it’s going to be on an island. (Leslie Zane)
Remember, keep it simple by considering that getting your brand known is marketing.
The new rules of marketing
1 – Be cautious of the Rule of Uniqueness: Everyone tells you how important it is to stand out in your brand by being unique. However, the human brain is hard-wired to connect with what is familiar! It rejects uniqueness more quickly than it does what is familiar.
The truth is, familiarity is more powerful than uniqueness, and distinctiveness is best of all. What is distinctiveness? It is the new uniqueness. It means you take something familiar … and you render it creatively in a distinctive way … that makes it your own. (Leslie Zane)
2 – Your brand doesn’t have to stand for only one thing: Most companies will spend a lot of time figuring out the one thing that they should stand for. But a brand has to have many connections in the mind to be salient.
So, you may have an overarching idea, platform, or theme, but within them have different pillars or connections that support the main idea of your business or practice.
3 – Old marketing focuses on current customers only: The problem with focusing on your core customer only is that they will seldom tell you what is wrong with your business, which becomes your blind spot.
Spend time looking at your current customers as well as your growth target, the customers you want to get, to test how well or poorly you are connecting with them, and to see where you can improve.
Find out what your growth target’s negative associations are about you or your business because there are probably some of them hidden … that you are unaware of that would be really useful for you to understand [because] they might be the key to scaling your business faster. (Leslie Zane)
Leslie’s advice to private practitioners
Stop trying to persuade people! What you want to do is harness instinct, because that’s the most powerful force in the human brain.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Leslie Zane – The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life
Sponsors Mentioned in this episode:
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Useful links mentioned in this episode:
- Visit Leslie’s Personal and Business Websites, and connect on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Check out these additional resources:
Two Ways to Use Social Media and Still Keep Your Sanity with Kelley Stevens | POP 1233
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Meet Joe Sanok
Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners who are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.
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