Overview:

As one of America’s leading behavioral management specialists, James became fascinated with how beavioral management could be used to simplify a person’s ability to persuade just about anyone. More than 25 years of research and application across a wide range of industries led to his development of BRAIN GLUE ™, a power tool used by the world’s most persuasive professionals from Steve Jobs to Warren Buffett to Snoop Dogg, and more.

Takeaways:

• James discusses brain triggers and tools from his book Brain Glue that can be used to simplify persuasion and boost sales, like metaphors, rhyme, alliteration, humor, and trigger words.
• Examples of successful products and companies that used these brain triggers are discussed, like Squatty Potty, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and Virgin Records.
• Small changes to product names, slogans, or pitches using brain triggers can significantly increase sales, as seen with books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.
• Trigger words like "stupid", "dirty", "sex", and others can be powerful attention-grabbers if used strategically in advertising.
• James helped multiple struggling businesses explode their revenues by teaching them how to use brain triggers in their marketing.
• Explaining the key benefits of a product using logical reasons first, before applying an emotional brain trigger, tends to be most effective.
• Past, present, future questioning techniques can help identify client needs when pitching services like advertising.
• Keeping clients laughing and reducing their stress through humor aids creativity and problem-solving.
• Examples where brain triggers backfired or didn't work as intended are also discussed.
• James emphasizes the importance of truly understanding your product or service to effectively communicate its benefits through brain triggers.

Automatically-Generated Transcription:

So welcome everyone, and today we've got a couple of super exciting sessions.

The first up is Mr.

James I.

Bond, and, uh, James, one of the, is one of America's leading behavioral management specialists.

Years ago, he became fascinated with how behavioral management could be used to simplify a person's ability to persuade just about anyone.

He's worked with the likes of Warren Buffet amongst others, and with more than 25 years of research and application across a wide range of industries, has led to his development Brain Glue, which is a power tool used by the world's most persuasive professionals.

From Steve Jobs to Warren Buffet to Snoop Dogg and Moore.

You're in for a treat.

I interviewed James on a podcast recently and my head was just bouncing around with like, uh, brain cells were bouncing around like popcorn.

So, uh, uhoh, welcome, welcome, James.

I'll hand the reins over to over to you.

Great, Scott.

Nice to be here.

Thank you.

I always think, you know, it's oh oh seven, but I'm oh seven.

Nevermind.

What can I say?

Okay, you all see, can you see this?

Okay?

Yep.

All, all clear.

So here's the question I have for everyone is, could changing the name of your product or your sales pitch by using Brain Science multiply your income?

You bet it can, and I'll show you.

I wrote a book called Brain Glue, which covers this.

We go through this and I'm gonna talk about some of the elements of Brain Glue.

Now, first, I'm, and Scott said, I'm one of America's leading behavioral management specialists.

I work with a who's who of American business.

I'm originally from Montreal, by the way.

Uh, Canada, I'm love to show you a simple way to boost the selling power of your products, your ads, your social media posts, your pitches, your slogans, using brain triggers that activate the emotion centers of the brain where decisions are made.

This is actually quite, quite profound.

Yes, my book is a finalist as the Best Business Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, because it's blowing the minds of so many people in advertising and marketing and entrepreneurs.

It's one, it's a reader's favorite five star award winner.

And Jack Canfield, one of the richest authors of all time, who sold 500 more than 500 million Chicken Soup for the Soul Books and more than 60 other major bestsellers called this book Mind Blowing and has forced everyone in this company, all the marketing people in this company to read this and to apply it, not just to read it.

By the way, as he explains it, if you're in business and you don't know this, I believe you have a massive in a disadvantage and you probably don't realize it.

So this is a revolutionary way to simplify how we influence, persuade, and sell by tapping the behavioral patterns that are ingrained inside us.

Everyone on this page, or every and every or every image on this page has brain glue elements in it, okay?

So brain glue, when you start to understand it, you start to go like, oh, and then you start to recognize it in other areas.

Okay, so let me see here so I can read this.

So our brains are already programmed to recognize specific phrases and patterns.

So this, I could see this.

So anchoring our products and ideas to something already stuck inside our listener's brain will also trigger an additional part of their brain.

The same region where images are processed and decisions are made.

And that's why Brain Glue is able to simplify your ability to persuade and sell just about anyone by amplifying your message.

So it sticks in the brain, your listener's brain like glue.

So let me talk first about how I discovered this, and then I'll give you examples of how this applies and how it works.

Okay?

Now I said, how did I discover Brain Glue?

I started an advertising agency in Montreal.

We built it up and then eventually won some of the world's biggest clients, Kraft Foods, Timex watches, Avon Cosmetics, Seagram's or World Headquarters is there.

And I had an opportunity to win the anti-drug campaign in America.

And I came up with, because of my connections and of all the work that we did, and I had an opportunity to win the anti-drug campaign in America.

And I came up with powerful, logical reasons why you should not do drugs.

And then I saw the ad that lot that I lost to, and it terrified me.

Okay?

When I saw the ad that one, I realized this is emotional selling, not logical selling, and it's infinitely more powerful than anything I knew how to do.

It was a guy holding an egg saying, this is your brain.

Then he cracked the shell and dropped the egg into a sizzling frying pan with exaggerated sizzling sound pointed down and said, this is your brain on drugs.

And he questions.

It was, it was pretty scary.

And I realized, I don't know, emotional selling and emotional selling is not something they teach in school and there are really no books on it, et cetera.

I mean, there are some things that are superficial, but nothing that really explains how to do emotional selling.

So I love three by five cards.

So on a three by five card, I wrote the words Your Brain on drugs.

So I'd remember the ad, and then I put a box next to my computer and I called it a passion box.

And every time I saw an ad or heard something that was emotional selling, it could be from, um, a, a quote that somebody had.

Every time I saw something that was emotional selling, I put it in the passion box in the hopes that eventually I'd be able to figure out how emotional selling works.

After a little more than 10 years, I'd moved from Montreal, Canada to Southern California.

It's a lot warmer here, I'll say that, but I think it's 50 below here in Montreal now.

But anyway, but 10 years later after I moved to Southern California, I met John Gray at a major convention and John Gray was telling me about a book he wrote, men, women in Relationships and people who read the book loved the book, and they said it changed their life.

It was profound as far as a relationship book was concerned, but he couldn't sell a lot of books.

He only sold a few thousand books and it was really frustrating him.

So he decided to change the name of the book to Men Are From Mars, women Are from Venus, and tweaked the Content a little.

So it referred to Men Are From Mars, women from Venus.

Throughout the book, what do you think happened almost overnight?

He sold half a million copies than 1,000,002 million and 5 million.

He went from 20,000 copies with men, women in relationships.

When he changed the title of the book, he sold more than 50 million copies of the book, all because he changed the title could simply Changing the titles be all he needed to Explode Sales through the Roof.

Absolutely.

So when I got home, I looked at, you know, my, I dumped my passion box on the bed and I discovered that it's a metaphor.

You know, men are not really from a different planet.

Some of you women out there probably think we are, but we're not really from a different planet.

It's a metaphor.

And I realized that like dropping an egg into a sizzling frying pan, that was not a brain, it was an egg, but that was also a metaphor.

And I realized that metaphors is one of 14 brain triggers at the heart of emotional selling.

I started applying this, I've applied this personally to more than 161 companies, but hundreds of companies have applied this and I had tremendous results.

But my results, I took a $2 million construction company and these three partners that had, it took 10 years to reach 2 million in sales in one year, I took them to 10 million and then they reached 32,000,002 years later by applying this, I had a tech company, it was about to be shut down and they had 21 million in sales in one year.

And sorry, in 18 months, I took 'em to 66 million in sales by applying this.

And then I had, you know, small businesses and people that are startups use this too, because it doesn't require money, which is really great and it helps you explode your revenues and the power of your marketing and advertising because it uses brain triggers.

But I helped two women with a struggling button website that generate their highest income ever and a lot more people.

So their 14 brain true of brain glue tools, and I'll take you through a few of them here.

Let's start with rhyme.

So there was a mom and her son with no business experience, okay?

And they watched the TV show Shark Tank and they went like, Hey, it would be fun if we can create a product and maybe, you know, become successful and get on Shark Tank and get investors to invest in us.

So they were thinking about it and then they came up with this idea and they said, you know, my mom was ha the mom was having difficulty going to the bathroom.

So the doctor said, get a stool that raise raises your feet above six inches off the ground and it will really help you because it changes the shape of your body.

She tried that, it worked really well.

And then they realized, why don't we start a sell a product that ha is a toilet stool, okay?

But they didn't like the word toilet.

We don't wanna call it toilet stool.

My wife said maybe you should call it the stool Stool, but I don't think that works, just by the way.

Okay?

But so they said, I, you know, they said, I don't like the name toilet, toilet stool.

What's another word for toilet?

Well, and I'm assuming 'cause we're from America, okay, Australia might have different terms for it, but it was potty.

You know, it's a potty.

And then if I'm sitting on that, it's almost like I'm squatting, what don't I call it the Squatty Potty.

They went from zero to a hundred million dollars in sales in less than two years.

And so here's a simple question.

If they called it the toilet stool, do you believe that sales would've skyrocketed the way it did?

No.

There's something about the name Squatty Potty that resonates.

So when we take a look at rhyme Squatty Potty is a good example.

We have famous Amos cookies that took off like gangbusters with a guy that had virtually no money.

OJ Simpson, uh, the celebrity OJ Simpson was in a murder trial.

And the attorney said at the end, if the glove doesn't fit, they had a glove for the, uh, you know, for the, uh, murder.

If the glove doesn't fit, you have to acquit.

And the glove got him off.

The, the phrase got him off from an almost certain guilty verdict in a murder trial.

That's how powerful rhyme is.

Give a hoot, don't pollute is used, was used, it uses the term ri well, excuse me, it uses rhyme and sun sense elevation.

Hoot, hoot, hoot competitors to Wonder Bread.

Wonder Bread invented sliced bread and became dominant in America for more than 10 years.

And then competitors came up with this phrase, the whiter your bread, the quicker you're dead, relating it to a disease that was common there called GRA and Wonder Bread.

When people stop using Wonder Bread, almost overnight, they went from dominating the industry to almost bankrupt because of this phrase, the whiter your bread, the quicker you're dead.

So brainless simplifies how you use rhyme to sell your ideas and products.

So here's a rhyme exercise list three words that relate to your product or idea, then list all the words you can think of.

You know, you can use AI at chat GPT or whatever else, but come up with all the words you could think of that rhyme with each of those words.

And I bet you'll be able to come up with interesting phrases here.

Here I did it with brain glue.

So for me, brain glue.

So it helps you with a slogan, helps you with the product name, helps you with a pitch.

Oh, pitch, I like that.

I found Switch your pitch if you wanna get rich.

Okay, there's my first phrase.

Then I said, I want a more sophisticated phrase.

Well, so what does brain glue do?

It helps boost the trigger, the emotion, the passion, the desire.

Ooh, desire.

So, you know, brain glue helps you light the fire of desire in your buyer.

You hear how that works?

It resonates, doesn't it?

We have products like Squatty Potty, Reese's Pieces in America.

There's Elf on a Shelf, there's Famous Amos Give a who don't pollute.

Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker.

Zig Ziglar was fam became famous with phrases like, you wanna have an attitude of gratitude.

Excuse me, you wanna avoid stinking thinking.

See how that works.

So, so then we have trigger words.

So you guys know billionaire Richard Branson.

What does billionaire Richard Branson, Madonna, and Olive oil have in common?

The word virgin.

Virgin olive oil.

Okay.

Madonna became a blockbuster of fame with the song like A Virgin Touch By for the Fairy.

First Time, I don't even remember the song, but it's great.

That song helped her become a blockbuster.

And Richard Branson, Richard Branson dropped out of high school and borrowed money from his dad so he could start a magazine for the music industry.

Eventually he decided to start a record company and he came up with the name Virgin Records because he figured that'll really get people's attention.

He was able to win people like the Rolling Stones and a lot of other groups.

And he realized that the word virgin is really a powerful word.

It's a brain trigger.

And so he started getting, uh, trademarks for all these other businesses.

He has Virgin hotels and he has Virgin Airlines, he has Virgin Galactic, et cetera, because he recognized the power of a trigger word.

There's a product in America called Blue imu, which is anti arthritis cream.

And their ads always go like this, blue imu, it works fast and you won't stink.

And I remember watching a TV show while the TV was on next to my computer while I was doing work.

And he says, blue emu it work fast and you won't stink.

Turn my, what did he just say?

And you won't stink a trigger word.

It gets your attention and it helps them turn into a blockbuster of success.

How about the word stupid?

Would we use the word stupid if we're describing someone?

And yet, if you're in sales, one of the terms we have is kiss.

Keep it simple, stupid.

And because they have that trigger where it's stupid, it makes it easier to remember.

James Carville held, helped Bill Clinton become president of the United States with a phrase called It's the economy stupid.

That's what we wanna focus on.

And it's amazing.

I talk to people in large groups and I say, it's the economy and everybody's, almost everybody goes stupid.

'cause they still remember the phrase that was used in his political campaign.

It's a trigger word.

Warren Buffet and I work with Warren Buffet's team and had lots of fun with them.

Warren Buffet loves these types of trigger words and types of phrases.

And he, one of his famous phrases is, only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.

Okay, basically he's saying, only when times get tough, do you discover who's really competent.

But doesn't it resonate more when he says, only when the tide goes out to you discover who's been swimming naked.

So here's our trigger word exercise.

Choose one of these trigger words.

Dirty, naked, stupid ass badass, vomit, stink, ugly, sex dark.

And then take a product or description and add that, add one of those or many of those to you to that, and watch what happens.

See if it becomes more resonant.

Let me give you some examples.

You've probably seen the movie or heard of the movie Dirty Dancing.

Okay?

It became famous and successful because of the word Dirty.

Dirty Harry movies were massively successful in America.

Certainly it's the economy, stupid, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

You know, famous movie, the Ugly, okay, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly became massively famous.

Virgin Airlines in America, we have Vagina Monologues.

It's a story of what women have to go through.

And if she called it, if she called her, it's a play off Broadway.

And the MHBO has a series now called the Vagina Monologues.

But if she called hers women, what the, the, the, the difficulties that women have to go through, you think it would be as successful as the Maggi Vagina Monologues?

I'm not sure I would name my product that, but she did and became massively famous.

A big Ass Fans was created by Carrie Smith.

It was actually a fan company.

And he ran an ad and he was joking around and he said, why don't I call it the Big Ass Fans?

And it became massively successful after he started from nothing after 15 years, he sold the company for 500 million.

I know this guy David Bayer, BAER, and he has an advertising training company for advertising companies.

And so I said, you know, you're Bayer, that's a great name.

You should change the name of your company.

The Bear Naked Advertising.

Okay, bear Naked Advertising.

Don't you think his, he has a partner.

His partner loves that name, but he's not crazy about it.

Whatever.

So, but I think that's a really good name.

But so what's your trigger worded product or idea?

Name?

Okay, next is Metaphor.

So men are from Mars.

Women are from Venus, you know, is a metaphor.

Men are not really from a different planet than women are, but it took his book from 20,000 to 50 million copies with that metaphor, the television show, shark Tank.

It's not a tank full of sharks, although it probably feels like that on television, but it's, you know, a a metaphor works.

Dryers became massively successful with the name Rocky Road Ice Cream.

And it's interesting 'cause you open up Rocky Road Ice Cream, it's got rocks in it.

No, it doesn't actually.

Rocky Road is chocolate ice cream with nuts and marshmallows.

But the name Rocky Road is like a, when you open it up, it's bumpy, like a rocky road.

When it rains, it pours turned Morton salt to, into a dominant consumer salt company.

And they, this, over a hundred years ago, they started this concept, when it rains, it pours.

It's the first, it was the first salt that was unc clumpy.

'cause salt used to be clumpy and they still dominate.

Even though so many competitors have unc clumping salt, you know, their, uh, their metaphor when it rains, it pours, has helped them become a monster of success and dominate the industry, the salt industry.

So Paul Tran created an electric razor for man's private areas.

Okay?

So he wanted to come up with a name for his product that made it easy to understand what the product does.

But he didn't wanna offend people.

He didn't want something offensive.

So he was thinking about it.

And then he came up with this metaphor, which is actually the name of the product.

He calls it the lawnmower.

Okay?

The lawnmower.

How's that for the name of a product?

Okay.

And it became a monster of success.

He's generated way over a hundred million dollars of success.

In fact, he changed the name of his company to Manscaped.

Okay?

We're gonna landscape a man with a lawnmower, okay?

For growing and body grooming.

But it stands out from the crowd because he uses a metaphor.

It's a lawnmower, it's not a lawnmower, it's a shaver.

No, it's a lawnmower and have lots of fun with that.

So let's say you wanna persuade someone.

I was trying to persuade a friend to have a more open mind.

Okay?

So here's how you develop that.

So what do you say to a person?

Well, so what works best when it's opened?

An umbrella, a parachute, a book works better when it's open.

A computer, a 10.

Let's pick a parachute.

So your mind is like a parachute.

It works best when it's open.

I said that to my friend and he went, Hmm, okay, okay.

He was much more resonant, he was much more, you know, effective positively by it.

Because I put it together in a metaphor like this.

It's like you're, you know, you're so d Dharmesh Shaw is the Chief Technology Officer, the CTO of HubSpot.

He has this great line, okay?

If you wanna hide a dead body, put it on page two of Google, okay?

For all you, all you guys.

Okay?

So what did he basically say?

He said, page two of, you know, we want, we, you need to, if you're gonna promote on Google, you need to get to page one.

'cause nobody sees page two.

You know, you're actually hiding if you're on page two.

So let's see, what else?

If you wanted to hide something, you put it on page two.

Okay, what do you hide A dead body?

That would be fun.

So he came up with the phrase, if you wanna hide a dead body, put it on tape, page two of Google.

And he uses that as a way to promote why HubSpot is very important, because it helps you get to page one of Google.

You think that's a good one?

Metaphors can also be visual.

And there are lots of ways to make metaphors visual.

How deep is the mud?

Well, it depends on who you ask.

We all go through the same stuff differently.

And this image kind of shows, you know, that, or there's an ad for Tabasco sauce as a fire extinguisher.

I guess that's a fire extinguisher.

But by using that visual, it helps them make their point that it's really hot.

It says hot.

It's so hot, you need a fire extinguisher.

So here's a client I work with.

I've done this with lots of clients.

It was a martial arts equipment company and one of the, so we worked with them and got 'em to develop a product.

One of the biggest problems that martial arts people in martial arts industry have is they have so much equipment that it doesn't fit in a backpack.

And so they have to carry two backpacks or carry out, you know, carry separate bags and everything else.

So we got him to create a backpack that's super large that could hold all this stuff.

And then he created a, a slightly smaller one that fits on the overhead compartment in airplanes, okay?

And he created this ad and he called it the Travel Locker.

And I'm like, what's a travel locker?

This is so critical when we're advertising, you know what?

He said?

Well, we put all these things, it's got pouches and pockets and all these definite features in it.

I said, let's stop.

When you're running an ad, you can, you only wanna do one message.

You don't, it might have multiple benefits, but you wanna pick one benefit and focus on that.

This is his ad, not mine.

I'm gonna show you my ad in a second.

Okay?

And I said, so you forgetting, you're forgetting something.

Okay, the Travel Locker, what's the number one most important feature of this bag?

It's that it's large.

You created a large bag.

So I changed the name of the bag and I called it the Beast.

A backpack So big that it holds all your gear.

You think that's a better ad than this one?

Sales exploded when we did it.

We ran retargeting ads.

Here's the CNN.

Okay, so you see in the top right, the Travel Locker ad, and here's the Beast ad.

Okay, which one do you think stands out more?

This one or this one?

Okay.

The beast.

The backpack's so big that it holds all your gear sales exploded because I simplified the metaphor of what we're simplified the message and, and created a metaphor.

It's not a beast, it's a backpack, but still it works.

So metaphor, exercise, my product or idea is just like, what?

And start with the craziest idea possible and then you can come down, okay?

But be as crazy as possible.

My book makes you feel better.

Well, chicken soup makes you feel better.

Why don't I call the book Chicken Soup for the Soul?

Take Drugs and your brain gets fried.

What else gets fried eggs?

So let's have an egg frying and say, here's your brain.

Brain glue is like a naked man running through your backyard.

So you can't, whoa.

You see that?

That's what brain glue does.

It gets, you know, it makes your, whatever your product, service or idea is, jump off the page.

So for all of you, my product or idea is just like, what?

And then the last one I have here is sense elevation and anchoring.

And this is an important one to note, they all are, but how do you like someone to steal your idea and get rich while you starve to death?

Would you like that?

Would that be fun?

Not right.

So, so post serials competes with Kellogg's and the head of post cereals decided he wanted to come up with a unique product that's totally different from what Kellogg's has and everything else.

And he can dominate the marketplace.

So he decided to come up with a, a little cake that has jelly inside it.

Uh, you know, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries.

And you put it in a toaster.

And he called it country squares.

And three months before he launched it, he bragged to the media, we're launching this product called Country Squares.

They started showing the product and people were amazed.

But the head of Kellogg saw the, uh, the, uh, article, the interview that he was on and went, oh, that's an amazing product.

We guys, guys and they got all the people in the company.

We gotta make that product.

We gotta make a product just like that.

But he came up with a better name, okay?

Using brain glue type tools.

This is what he did.

He said it pops out of the toaster.

So the name has to have pop.

And uh, Andy Warhol was famous back then.

The, the, uh, pop artist.

So the word pop art was really powerful.

We call this anchoring in, in brain glue.

Okay?

You're taking something that already is in the mind and just slightly tweaking it.

Pop art.

So he called it Pop-Tart, of course, like a competitor.

He launched it one week before Country Squares got launched, of course, right?

They sold out, they sold out so fast.

It's became the biggest selling product that Kellogg's has ever had.

Okay?

It sold out so fast that he actually ran ads saying, oops, we're sorry.

We, we ran out a product.

Just hang on and product will be available soon.

Nobody bought Country Squares.

They waited for Poptarts to become available again.

And then sales exploded.

Poptarts, as I said, is the largest selling, or has been the largest selling product that Kellogg's has.

And within six months post stop selling country squares 'cause nobody was buying them.

How'd you like to invent something or come up with an idea and your competitor steals it from you, you, and makes a fortune and you don't, okay?

So if you're in advertising and you don't know brain glue, you have a disadvantage.

Brain glue simplifies all this.

Naming your product service or business boosting the impact of your ads, your emails, your social media posts, your presentations, persuading others, even juries as you saw, and political voters, all this by making your ideas sticky.

And so to learn more, the book Brain Glue is available on Amazon and at major bookstores.

But the, I go back to the question is, could changing the name of your product or your sales pitch by using Brain science multiply your income?

And the answer is absolutely yes.

So I hope that was interesting for you guys.

Scott, was that okay?

Yeah, that was, that was awesome, James.

I've got, uh, heaps and heaps of notes and uh, you know, like I I say every time you talk, the the popcorn goes off in my, in my brain.

So, uh, you like, do you like that metaphor?

I love it On your ears.

I'm learning, I'm learning.

So, uh, yeah.

So, so we might open the, open the, uh, stage up for, for questions and see what, see what questions everyone has.

Sure.

Hey, can James, do you use everything all at once?

So the rhyme, the trigger words, the metaphors, or do you just use one of those strategies?

That's a really good question, and I'm gonna give you an answer with this.

Typically, you only need one, usually, but I'm gonna give you an ex a product that use several and okay, so brain glue.

So Rocky Road Ice Cream uses three, okay?

Rocky Road uses a metaphor because it's not really a rocky road, okay?

It's a bumpy, it's bumpy ice cream.

But the second thing it uses is literation.

I didn't have enough time, so I couldn't do more of these, but alliteration, which is a repetition of sounds, Roro, Rocky Road, Marilyn Monroe in America, we had Chevy Chase.

You know, we have Coca-Cola, PayPal, best Buy, TikTok, you guys know TikTok.

If they call it the Chinese social media platform, you think it would be as successful as TikTok.

So alliteration is another tool.

And then the third tool they used was humor.

Okay?

And it works this way.

Rocky Road Ice Cream was invented during the Great Depression.

And the Great Depression in America was called a Rocky road.

And so the concept was, we're all on a rocky road anyway.

We might as well have Rocky Road ice cream.

And people would laugh when they heard that.

So it had humor too.

So you can use multiple brain triggers, but you don't have to because most, many of these men are from arts, women from Venus.

It's not, I guess it's kind of funny too, uses humor.

But it's, you know, so the the, the answer is yes, both ways.

You could use one, just one of these and have tremendous success, or you can have multiple of them.

I had a client, we were doing a turnaround of the client, and they were under tremendous pressure, okay?

Including the owner of the company.

So I said, I know you're under a lot of pressure.

Remember this pressure creates diamonds.

So we help you go from stress to success.

So what did I do?

So pressure creates diamonds.

I'm illiterate, you know, I'm using a metaphor.

And then stress, you know, we help you go from stress to success.

That's alliteration.

A repetition of sounds.

So, so stress, success.

And by saying that they all went, oh, okay, that sounds like fun.

Okay.

You know?

And you know, especially if you're doing a turnaround, if you're ever doing a turnaround on somebody who's in trouble, people are so stressed that they don't have creativity.

It stress shuts down creativity in a lot of people.

And so that's why I would tell jokes all the time.

I'm a terrible joke teller, but I would tell jokes all the time, and then people would just keep repeating the joke to me.

I had one, I was turning, doing a turnaround of a company, martial arts equipment company.

And I said, so a man was hiding in the main, a maintenance man was hiding in the maintenance closet.

And whenever people would come up, he would open the door and scream supplies, you know, instead of surprise supply, you know?

So all year, every time I'd look inside somebody's office and they looked really stressed, you know, a glass window, and I'd look inside and they're really stressed.

I don't know if we didn't have product, or it was, it was some kind of problem, I'd open the door and say, Hey.

And they'd look at me and go, oh, supplies.

And they tortured me with the, the, the punchline for the joke.

But they remembered it and it changed their body language.

You'd see them go from stress to suddenly smiling and laughing, you know?

I mean, it just changed everything.

And when they did that, they became more creative.

And so, yeah.

So I know it's a long answer, but yeah, you could, you can use just one of these and then have tremendous success.

Or you can use multiple of them, you know, but you don't have to use multiple of them.

Yeah, No, that's, uh, that's great.

And I think Tim, Tim has his hand up for a question.

I do, I do.

Presumably it takes a, a relatively brave business owner to kind of go, yes, I'm gonna run with this kind of unusual idea in terms of presentation, because this is not what we'd normally see in advertising.

What are some examples of where it hasn't worked as successfully, where, you know, you're trying to be creative in a funny or something and it doesn't work.

It doesn't hit the, it doesn't hit the mark with the audience.

So in America, we have an ad that was got milk, okay?

And it was trying to improve the milk industry.

They spent a fortune, they had famous actors in it and everything else, and people loved it.

There are lots of competitors or lots of other industries that said, got milk, got cake, got whatever.

Okay.

They thought it was really successful.

Business Week in America, had an article about 10 years ago that said, got milked, 385 million sales still continued to decline.

And what it's, it was a terrible marketing campaign.

And yet you, I have books on Got Milk and in Milk mustache with famous people, famous actors and stuff with mustaches on famous athletes and stuff.

People think that's successful, but it's not successful because it doesn't sell.

And so that's why what you wanna have, you know, you wanna, if you're gonna come up with a name for your product or a pitch for your product, it, it talks, and I'll go back to the one I was talking about with, uh, with the Beast.

The backpack's so big that it holds all your gear, you know?

I mean, it's still, it's, you still have to let people know what the product does, what's so good about the product, okay?

It's like Squatty Potty, you know, you laugh Squatty Potty, what's that?

Oh, it helps, you know, you explain what it is, you raise your feet when you're on the toilet, it's really cool.

And it helps you actually go to the bathroom better and people go, okay, from that point forward, they understand what Squatty Potty is.

They may not buy it, but they understand it like, huh?

Like the, uh, you know, manscape, like the, uh, the lawnmower, okay, I never bought it.

If I, if I bought it, I would not share it with my friends.

Let's start there.

Okay?

But I'd probably share the name, I'd call my friend, you know, I, I could see myself calling a friend and saying, Hey, guess what I just bought?

Oh, what'd you buy Jim?

I said, I bought the lawnmower.

Oh, you have to mow your lawn.

No, no, no, it's a shaver for man's private areas.

I could hear him start laughing and go, Hey, Mary is talking to his wife or girlfriend.

Guess what?

James just bought the lawnmower.

Oh, he has to mow his lawn.

No.

And then suddenly it spreads like wildfire.

So, I mean, let me go back to the guy, bear, da David, David Bear, you know, bear naked advertising.

I think it would be tremendously successful because it would grab your attention, but also because the word naked has lots of different meanings, deeper meanings, you know, naked doesn't mean he's standing there naked.

You know, naked has a second meaning.

And the meaning is that it, maybe it's honest, it's, you know, it's the essence.

It's the bare, you know, it's the bare bones of it.

And so it makes it more powerful.

But yeah, you have to, you know, it has to be a po Well, except for the whiter bread, the quicker you're dead, if you wanna drop a competitor, but I mean, in most, in most cases, you still have to address the positive benefits of the product.

Now, I'll give you a good example.

There's a type of, I forget the name of the car, but it says, shoot, I can't remember the name of the car, but it's a brand of car.

It's in from, uh, from, uh, I'm going, I'm getting old, what can I say?

But it, it just says, oh, I'll see you in a Kia.

A Kia Motors.

Okay, see you in a Kia.

Well, the problem is they're in a competitive marketplace.

It's not saying anything positive about it that goes like, oh, well what's so great about I Kia, it just says Sia in I Kia.

And so I believe, and I know this because they've sort of changed their advertising, they could, they would do much better if they came up with a trigger word or a phrase or whatever else that actually gave you a reason why you wanted Kia.

You know?

And so see in a Kia, yeah, it rhymes.

Okay, great, great.

But it doesn't make me wanna buy a Kia.

And I think that's, you know, the Kia car, it doesn't give me any reason why.

And so you have to remember that you need a reason why somebody should buy.

I'm amazed by how many people I say I talk to, how many businesses I've worked with, like tons of businesses.

And I do work with the US Small Business Administration.

So I'll get like 300 to 500 business owners at a time.

And I ask 'em two questions, what are you competing with?

Or what are the alternatives to your product or service?

And why should somebody buy from you?

But you're not allowed to use the word price or quality.

So tell me why somebody should buy yours instead of somebody else's.

And I'm fascinated by how difficult it is for people to answer that question.

You know, they have to take a few minutes and think about everything else.

If you're in advertising, you wanna understand like what makes this product different from everybody else?

Or milk, you know, the got milk campaign.

Why should somebody drink milk if they said something like, uh, there are certain enzymes in milk that aren't in other vitamin C, you know, people take milk because of vitamin C, but you can get vitamin C in, in, you know, in all kinds of other products.

But so why should you take milk?

Because milk has certain enzymes in it as well as vitamin C that are catalysts that make the vitamin C work more.

So it strengthens your bones much more than other vitamin C tablets.

I'm not, I don't know if that's true, but I'm just saying that if I said that, then you're going, oh, now you're giving me a reason to buy the product.

Okay, you're going, oh, okay.

So that's interesting.

It's like Gatorade, you know, I mean Gatorade, if you're an athlete, you use electro electrolytes.

And so Gatorade says, you know, we're focusing on, if you're an athlete, your body uses up its electrolytes and it needs more electrolytes, and Gatorade is better than water because it has electrolytes.

So it's actually giving you a reason why you should buy.

That was a long answer, Tim.

I don't want you to have an accent while you're Driving.

Yeah, no, that's okay.

That's okay.

Just a follow on question from that.

'cause it's all product examples.

Do you think this works equally in a service based sector?

Say an accountant or a lawyer does it, you know, like that Absolutely.

Like the rest, A marketing company like the rest of us here.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think that's why you gotta, you know, you gotta come up with a, a, um, a pitch that explains something about your marketing company is different from everybody's market, everybody else's marketing company.

And so that you start, and here's how brain glue works.

We're logical, most of us are logical.

You start with a logical reason why, and then you apply a brain glue tool.

That's the emotional trigger.

Okay?

But if I ask you why, Tim, why should somebody hire you instead of another?

Well, you have two, you are competing with two things, right?

Why should somebody hire you instead of doing it themselves?

That's one thing you're competing with, right?

And then why should somebody hire you instead of another company?

By the way, just by the way, whenever you're talking, 'cause we had an advertising company, past, present, future is very, very important to ask a client, okay?

So you start with past, have you ever, when you're sitting and talking to a prospect, have you ever worked with an advertising agency before?

It doesn't matter if they say yes or no, you say, well, what worked for you and what didn't work for you?

Okay.

And be aim, be, uh, you know, prepared in case they say, well, nothing, everything worked fine.

Well, did you know all the media that exists?

Did you know this and that?

Everything else, okay, well maybe we didn't know all the media, okay, blah blah, but so past what worked for you?

What didn't work for you in present tense?

Are you using an agency now or are you doing it on your own?

It doesn't matter what they say.

You say, well, what's working for you now?

What's not working for you now?

And then you go to future, the ideal situation, what would that look like If you had a, an agency working with you so you can actually get what you really wanted, what would that be like?

And they're basically telling you how to sell them.

I want Seagrams in Canada because Exactly for that, because I wa I was used to walking in and showing my whole portfolio and hopefully something will resonate.

And talking about some of the concepts that we focused on, how you going?

Seagrams is the first one that I went that I went into call you today.

And I didn't.

And I didn't do that bum.

And what I did was I, I asked past, present, future.

I said, you know, like what?

So I said, what worked for you and what didn't work for you?

And the first thing he told me, the buyer for Avon, for uh, Seagrams was, you know, we spent between 50,000 and a hundred thousand dollars for the bottle and label design because to us that's very important because it has to have an image that works in advertising, but it also has to have an image that works on the shelf.

And so, you know, for us it's always annoyed us because people don't appreciate how important the bottle design, the label design is that it's gotta be photographed really well and it's gotta look great in ads.

Well, we had done a catalog for a lighting manufacturer and I said, oh, well we work with a lighting manufacturer that had glass lamps and you know, we had the glass and plastic lamps and we had to show the texture and the translucence of it and everything else and, and the shape of the glass.

We showed him one sample and he went, oh, I wish I had known you guys a long time ago.

We're hiring you guys.

We're gonna give you tons of work because we love what you do.

I was like, it was the first client that I didn't show my whole portfolio.

I sort of went, well, I can show you more of my portfolio.

And he went, well, you can if you want to, but you don't have to.

And I went, okay, fine.

I was tortured because I was so used to showing my whole portfolio, but I just showed him one sample and he was, it was a client.

It's because he told me how to sell him.

And that's why you Yeah.

Awesome.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

That's good ideas.

Yeah, No, that's, uh, that's, that's awesome.

Yeah.

Thanks so much, James.