Brand Persuasion

A female guppy always picks the brightest male.
 Until two males are equally bright.
 Then she picks the one the other females already chose.

You do this too. So does every customer you have.

Episode 9 of Position to Win is about persuasion, and why most brands only use a third of it.

Aristotle named the whole system 2,400 years ago. Ethos, character and trust. Pathos, emotion. Logos, proof and logic. Most founders live in logos. They build the better product, show the better numbers, and wonder why the market still picks someone else.

We get into the guppy and social proof, the precise-number trick that makes a claim feel more true, and the move most brands get backwards. They cast themselves as the hero of the story. But your customer is already the hero of theirs.

Your job is to be the guide.

Make your customer the hero. Be the guide worth following.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:04

There was a study done with fish that you can actually buy at your local pet store, right? Whether Petco or your neighborhood store, and they're called guppies. And guppies are these beautiful fish. Now there's the male fish, and they're usually smaller and more colorful, and they have spots and bright streaks with bright tails, uh, much brighter than the female fish. The female fish are larger, they're rounder, and they have muted colors. And so the study showed that the female fish are attracted to the male fish with the brightest colors. The reason for this is that the brightest colors is a sign of good health. The male fish who had better diets had brighter colors of orange and red in their skin, about two and a half times brighter than the ones who had bad diet. So if a female is comparing two males, it's naturally attracted to the one that is more beautiful, the one that is brighter and more colorful. And so if a female fish is comparing a male fish that is brighter versus one that is not bright, it will always go to the brighter fish every time. So then the researchers went a little bit further. So if two male fish glow equally as bright, then the female fish would be attracted to the other fish that already has another fish attracted to. And so rather than trying to seek exclusivity with that fish, it tries, it sees the other fish or it reads the other room to see who is the most attracted to, which is really interesting. Another interesting portion that they found is that the most influential in the room would be the ones that the female fish would be the most physically fit, right? The one that would be the largest. The other interesting portion to this, it doesn't really end there, is that she copies the bigger, higher quality female rather than the smaller one because the female's judgment that is bigger looks worth more and it's easier to trust. The science community calls this choice copying. We do the same thing every day. We think that the brands that have the more following are the ones that are better, they're the ones that are worth trusting. We assume that the influencer's favorite matters more than our own. We are just as irrational as these pet fish that you can buy at your local pet store. I'm Jean-Luc. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands: the ones that accept their position in the market and the ones that challenge it. This show is for the challengers and the founders and CMOs who are responsible for making that happen. Now, every brand needs to persuade. A brand needs to move a person from not trusting to trusting, from not caring to caring, from unconvinced to sold, right? That's persuasion. Everything else, the logo, the voice, the color, the palette, the story serves to really fit that job of persuasion. Now, this idea of persuasion was framed almost two and a half thousand years ago from Aristotle. Aristotle said that every act of persuasion runs into three different categories, three different appeals. And so there's ethos, pathos, and logos. Now, ethos is the character of building trust. Pathos is the character of building and connecting through emotions. And logos is logic and fact and reasoning. Now, when he originally brought this up, he was talking about how speakers move a crowd. However, he might as well be talking about how brands persuade because it's very applicable to today. Ethos is your reputation, right? Pathos is how you make people feel, and logos is the proof behind the numbers, the argument behind it all. Ethos persuades by building trust, right? Ethos is whether the audience believes who you are. Now, when Patagonia sues the sitting presidents over a public land, it reads as them fighting over a principle rather than just a publicity stun. Because the founder spent 50 years protecting the land that they climbed. The credibility was already there. Ethos Trust is the slowest to build, but it's the fastest to lose. You build it in small consistent acts, right? This is the product that does what it's promised, the refund without really fighting, and the founder who does the unpopular but the true thing. Now it can vaporize, it can you can lose it all the moment the integrity underneath is not held up by its promise, right? When when someone's not when a brand is not true to its own word. Trust is built in many deposits and can be lost in a single withdrawal. And then there's pathos, which is really what the guppy story was about, right? This is persuading using emotion. And emotion isn't a private or fixed thing, it's really social, it's relative to what's happening, it's contagious. Social proof works really by implication. Now you do not have to say that you are popular, you want to stage the appearance that you are, that you are in demand. A behavior scientist Richard Schoten has an example that works. And this was an Amazon vending machine, and they swapped out the sold-out labels for so good it's gone. Turning the empty slot into evidence of demand and key pe and it kept people checking back for more. Okay, when is it gonna be back? When is it gonna be refilled? And so this evidence of demand made it seem like it was more popular than what it really was. Actually, Red Bull did the same thing. And Red Bull would go to popular clubs in London, they would crush empty of their empty cans and they would sprinkle it around their trash cans of popular clubs as an evidence of demand and popularity. See, people wanted what other people have already wanted. Every one of them was a human version of Guppy, which is a female wanting what the other females have already chosen. Social proof is the heart of Shawden's first book, The Social Factory. The point is that we're irrational, and most of our decisions are really based on emotions. So this is a core element I don't want us to forget, even when we go through the other elements. And then there's logos. Logos persuades through reasoning, through logic and facts. This is where your unique positioning comes from. When you claim that you are the one and only, well, show me the proof, right? Here's the strange part. Even proof gets felt. Now, humans are irrational even when it comes to logical reasoning. In Shawten's book, The Illusion of Choice, he makes some really great points about this. So let's go through some of them. Now there was a deodorant ad. One said that it'll reduce the sweat by 50%, another one said it will reduce the sweat by 47%. Now the precise number was rated 10% more accurate than the 50% number. So the precise number seemed to be more accurate than the whole rounded number. And the same thing ended up happening with street beggars. So researchers dressed up as beggars went into the streets asking for different types of money. Some of them asked for a dollar, some of them asked for a quarter or 50 cents. Now, another scenario, they tested it out to see what kind of revenue they were able to bring in. The next day they switched the 25 cents to 17 cents and then 37 cents and 48 cents and these specific numbers. And these specific numbers, when they had specific requests, end up implying that there was a precise need, precise numbers, precise needs, and it sounded as though there was a real goal behind it. And so the strange thing is that this ended up increasing the revenue for the beggar to have a more precise number of their requests. That's the strange thing about logos. We think we're judging facts objectively, but even facts arrive with framing involved, and we precise numbers tend to feel more calculated. Also, rhyming. Rhyming feels easier to process and tends to feel more trustworthy. So people think that sentences that rhyme tend to be true more often than the ones that don't. So when you are writing copy, you say the strongest things you can defend it, make it specific, make it memorable, if you can make it rhyme, but never let the presentation become more convincing than the truth underneath it. And that's how proof really gets built into trust. Now, the most important factor in persuasion when you're trying to persuade is storytelling, the story itself. And it is the part that's often overlooked. So look at the top 10 websites of your favorite industry and check out their homepage. What's their unique value proposition? What's their taglines? Are they using the same three words, the same promise, the same stock photo, the same style, the same everything? And everything just tends to blur together. Almost every category falls into the same trap. And they cast themselves as the hero. They say, we are bold, we are the leaders, we are revolutionizing the category, that the founder is the protagonist, the founder is the main character, and that the company is coming to save the day. And the problem is that the customer already sees themselves as the hero. They already see themselves as the main character in their own story. So when your brand shows up and says, Well, we're the hero, too, uh, a person sees that brand as a peer and doesn't necessarily see themselves as something that is need, right? Hero is not looking for another hero. A hero is already the hero in its own story. The main character is already the main character in its own story. It doesn't need another main character. A hero is looking for a guide. Luke has Yoda, Frodo has Gandalf. The guide already has been where the hero needs to go. And the guide can show them the way, right? Every customer has a problem to solve, and the guide doesn't say, no, we're the hero. It says, look, we know where you're where you are, what your past pain points are, and where you're trying to go. And this is actually the heart of Donald Miller's book that is building a story brand right there. Your customer is the hero, your brand is the guide. But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Last episode you called Nike the hero, and now you're saying that brands shouldn't be the hero and that the customer is the hero. So so you're telling me that we should be the guide instead. So which is it? I'm kind of confused. Great question. They answer a different question. These things do not fight. Hero is Nike's archetype, its character. What it embodies in the actual ad, Nike is playing as the guide. When we say just do it, Nike is not telling itself that it's going to do it. It's not telling itself that it's transforming and revolutionizing shoes, etc. etc. It's telling the customer to just do it. It's actually being a glide. It's playing behind the athletes, saying, we support you, we are believing and we are equipping you. We are telling you to just do it because we've been there before. Trust us. It is an order pointed at you. You are the one who needs to do it. Nike just stands behind the athletes, believing and equipping. Nike is great because of how effective they are at being a guide. And an effective guide really needs to do two things. They build empathy so that the customer knows that you understand their problem, that you understand their pain point. And number two, they build authority so that they believe that you can solve their problem. You can help them from going from A to B through that journey. All right, Nike shows them the path. The path is just to do it. So empathy and authority are key to being a guide. So that is pathos and ethos aimed at the customer. And a guide does more than just understand a hero. A guide gives them a map, a path to go through through the customer's journey. The customer is stuck because the way forward isn't clear. So you hand them a map, a plan, and you name the first steps, or you challenge them to take it. When the guide establishes empathy by saying, okay, what's at stakes? It names it plainly. Okay, who is hurt? What does it cost them? What are the main pain points? You name the choice you made and the real risks behind it. So when the brand does this, it keeps the customer inside the chair of the hero and establishes themselves as a guide the whole way through it. Warby Parker does a great job doing this, and they're probably the cleanest example. So the founders lost very expensive glasses, and they were in college at the time and they couldn't afford to buy a replacement of glasses. And it became frustrated as they needed the glasses, but they realized, well, this pure cost material is just deeply overpriced. This is just plastic and glass and a little bit of metal. We don't understand the cost. And so Warby Parker gave a customer a simple way out by making affordable glasses and being able to sell them online. The frustration exposed a larger problem. Eyewear was unnecessarily expensive, and that the market really offered very little choice for somebody to buy something at a reasonable price. In this story, the customer is the hero of the story, and Warby Parker is the guide, helping customers find their way out to be able to get affordable glasses. Now, when you tell a story, context really matters. A founder selling hospital procurement should not sound like a founder selling to teenagers or kids. Part of your job is knowing your audience well enough to actually choose the tactics that actually move them. So these can be the same three categories that we talked about, but different settings on the dial. If a story is repeated by customers and a story is being retold by customers, then it's working. If a story cannot be repeated, and a story does not travel on its own, then it doesn't work and it needs to be rethought through and retold. So a company with no story, no earned trust, no honest proof is not saving money. It's paying extra for persuasion. It is paying for persuasion the most expensive way there is, right? Marketing does not land, sales does not close, content that nobody shares, and it is buying with cash what persuasion would have handed it for free. Your brand's one job to persuade. So you have these core jobs, right? You want to build trust, connect through emotions, or or align with reasoning. And when you are speaking to the customer, you want to cast the customer as a hero. They are the main character. The story is about them. Too many companies are only talking about who they are and what their accomplishment is. Like what's the problem with the customer? What are the pain points for the customer? Where do they need to go? So be the guide, build this out, and keep them honest, run them everywhere, and then become a brand that persuades. Next episode, we'll talk about what happens after you persuaded someone once. A persuasion that does not stick does not really help you too much. The real question is how a brand gets remembered, and that's brand recall, the distinctive assets, and what drives it. So thanks for listening, and we'll talk soon.