Take Back Your Brain!

TBYB! believes the most valuable thing we can do with our technological gadgets is to use the things they know about us to support our own growth. The Nintendo Wii, especially with Wii Fit, is one of the most elegant applications of computing power applied to human development I have ever seen. If your goal is to be more of an athlete (or just play one on TV), the Nintendo Wii is about as good as it gets.

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The Small Talk hack uses one or more props to disrupt your visual presentation in a way that makes others feel safe, sympathetic, helpful, interested, or just curious enough to voluntarily begin conversations with you about a goal you have chosen. These conversations will remind you about that goal several times a day, cause you to return your attention to it, and give you the opportunity to reinforce the idea as you talk about it.

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Branding is about how you position your product in the mind of the consumer. In personal marketing, the product is your goal or behavior, and the consumer is you. The position of your brand has less to do with what that goal actually is, than with about how you think it, which benefits you associate with it, and what feelings those benefits evoke. Positioning is also about differentiating your goal, with its associated benefits and feelings, from competing options.

This is the point in the marketing process is where you have an enormous advantage over commercial marketers, because you know so much about you! While they’re busily segmenting the population into ever more specific sub-groups and then studying them to discover a position that will be appealing, you only have to appeal to a demographic of one consumer that you already know very well.

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Images get to us; we remember them and act on them. Sometimes we even seem to try to make our world look like it does in the picture. Advertisers know this, so they make sure to expose you to lots of images of their logos and products, especially pictures of people that look like you using their products.

This is one reason it’s so effective to visualize a result you want - to see yourself succeeding in your mind’s eye. Your brain sees the outcome in your imagination, believes it, and gets busy changing the parts of your world that don’t match that mental picture.

We can do even better than mental pictures, though, because technical toys like digital cameras and photo editing software give us the ability to externalize our visualizations, and then to repeat our exposure to them more frequently than we might remember to do on our own. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s advertising.

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I want to tell you what’s been going on for me with the Post-It note hack, because I believe the results I’ve experienced from these very simple steps we’ve taken illustrate a critical fundamental principle of personal marketing:

YOUR AD MUST ILLUSTRATE THE RESULT THAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE!! It cannot be about you WANTING it; it must be about you HAVING it. (As a corollary, it’s also very good if it makes you feel something.)

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it’s my pleasure to review Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth because it’s so relevant to the work we’ve been doing on our back-to-school personal marketing campaign. Steve’s first published book reads like a volume of personal development’s greatest hits, but not in the tawdry, exploitative way that you might see on a late night info-mercial. Instead, you realize immediately that this is a guy who has read widely, thought deeply, applied fearlessly, synthesized intelligently, and then done us the enormous favor of writing down his observations. The result is a comprehensive yet simple framework for personal growth that helps you make sense of everything from diet to career choices to religion.

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If I’ve learned anything at all from studying marketing it’s that the process is not random. The thousands of ads we’re exposed to every day are specifically designed to push the buttons of the demographic those marketers have decided to target — you.

The problem with many of our attempts to influence ourselves is that they’re much more generic than that. We exhort ourselves to eat less, exercise more, or save money without putting nearly as much thought into who we are and why we would do that as the people who sell us bathroom tissue. We try to change ourselves instead of understanding ourselves.

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Personal marketing uses commercial and social marketing principles to help us succeed at goals we have chosen for ourselves. It’s powerful stuff that can really help your life. But the following feedback from a reader made me realize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed about how and where to begin. This article shows you how to find that starting point, and then how to continue step-by-step to develop a great ad to influence yourself.

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You can’t advertise to yourself all the time. I guess you could, but it would be time-consuming and exhausting, sometimes you don’t really know what you want to work on, and other times you’re just busy with other stuff. Besides, if you do it too much you risk having your own ads become part of the mental “clutter”.

What you can do during the fallow or busy times is take advantage of the delivery channels you’ve already established to throw up very easy, low-maintenance messages that inspire or nourish you until you’re ready for the next round of progress.

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Thanks to a reader from Canberra, Australia for sharing these awesome personal marketing ideas. Most of the time TBYB advocates advertising about stuff you DO want, but I think the results here speak for themselves.

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One of the first rules of marketing is to understand as much as you can about who you’re trying to market to. The clearer picture you have of your target consumer, the better you can position your product to meet their needs.

In the case of commercial or social marketing, the target consumers are other people. But in personal marketing, the target is you. This difference has the potential to give you a huge advantage. While others must be content with grouping people into “market segments” with similar characteristics, you have the luxury of communicating to a demographic of only one person…a person you know very well!

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After taking a marketing class winter quarter I’m more convinced than ever that it’s where the action is when it comes to understanding and changing human behavior, and therefore those of us who are motivated to grow can benefit greatly from learning about its fundamental techniques.

Marketing includes deciding exactly what you’re selling, honestly assessing your strengths and weaknesses, sizing up the competition, learning as much as you can about your consumer, and strategizing about how to position your product to appeal to him. It includes deciding how to manipulate the four classic variables over which you have control: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Promotion, in turn, is divided into many possible persuasive activities, one of which is advertising. Other elements of a “promotional mix” can include direct marketing, interactive marketing, sales promotions, public relations and personal selling. In other words, advertising is just one tool in what is often a carefully planned and well-orchestrated campaign to convince you to do something.

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The reward centers of your brain seem to be stimulated by anticipating a benefit in a way that’s very similar to actually receiving it. The implication for marketing is that you can create a very rewarding experience for your consumer - you - by helping yourself to vividly imagine how good the outcomes of a behavior are going to be. The idea is that stimulating the reward center in your brain will create positive associations about the target behavior. By advertising the benefits to yourself it may be possible to begin collecting positive, rewarding experiences about a behavior before you even begin to do it!

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TBYB encourages you to level the playing field, as it were, by stepping up the production values of your own advertising. Though you’ll likely never decide to sink a million bucks into producing an ad to influence yourself, it’s certainly possible to add a little color, a photograph, or a slogan. Rather than just writing your goal on a list, consider introducing interesting imagery to reinforce the concept.

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In part one of this series, I showed you how to manipulate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decide how to best frame a message to motivate yourself. In part two we selected a slogan, took photos, and developed a creative concept. This week we’ll create the ads for your campaign and set up an automatic system for delivering them to yourself.

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In part two of this series I show you how to develop an ad campaign that targets a level on the hierarchy of needs, including how to select a slogan, do the photo shoot, and and discover your creative concept.

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Advertisers are very interested in what motivates our behavior. One of the models they use to understand motivation was developed in 1943 by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow studied healthy, high-functioning people and from that research postulated a five level hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s thinking goes that humans are motivated to meet these needs in ascending order. So someone who is hungry, alone, or fears for their life is not that concerned with self-esteem or reaching their potential. On the other hand, people who have their basic needs handled are most motivated by needs that are higher up on the hierarchy. One of the strategies advertisers use is to bump their messaging for a product up one or more levels, from where it naturally fits to where they believe their target demographic is most concerned. You can use the technique of moving your message up or down the needs hierarchy to motivate yourself to reach your own goals, too.

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It seemed a bit early, but of course that’s the point. Who was thinking about Christmas shopping on November 8th? Yet when I walked into Starbucks last Thursday morning, the holiday transformation had occurred completely. The store is now entirely decked out in red with a few green accents. Special holiday drinks are on the menu. Numerous displays of potential gifts are available to browse while waiting for my drink. And of course each employee was wearing the obligatory red shirt; one even asked me if I was ready for the holidays. Are you kidding?

It was all kind of a shock the first morning, but within a few days I’ll be used to it. In fact, that’s already happening. And again, that’s the point. Aggressive reminders about the need to complete holiday shopping will have become a normal part of each morning; perhaps something I’ll hardly notice.

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The Christmas season is a fascinating time to study advertising methods. The rule set of the festival (everyone buys a gift for everyone else) ensures that more money is spent during these few weeks than at any other time during the year; thus the competition for holiday dollars heats up into a massive no-holds-barred persuasion frenzy.

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We normally focus on advertising TO ourselves here at TBYB. What if we advertised FOR our own goals, but TO others? What kind of visible public commitment could you make about your goal?

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My early ads in the RV ad campaign were mostly just pictures that I downloaded from manufacturer’s websites. They worked well to keep the idea in my consciousness, and prompted me to take many actions that I’m sure I would not have otherwise. However, as the campaign went on I discovered a few other techniques that were so effective they produced huge shifts in my mental journey from impossible to inevitable.

Three of the four methods below use a variant on visualizing your desired future reality with you (or your home) already in it. I’ve written about that pretty extensively in the Put yourself in the picture series. Basically you use technology like your digital camera and/or Photoshop to help you make a picture of that future.

The fourth method uses large high-resolution color images that change very frequently. Think TV. Although this method was not at all technically sophisticated, I was surprised by how much it engaged my attention and emotions.

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I just met a HUGE goal, largely due to a relentless advertising campaign I’ve been waging on myself for the last couple of years. Two years ago purchasing a motorhome seemed impossible. By last month it felt inevitable. Today I have a new RV sitting in my driveway. I’m completely convinced advertising is what made the difference.

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A key piece of our strategy here at TBYB is to borrow the tools that advertisers use to persuade us and deploy them in the service of our own goals. Before Phrases that Sell, the text usually felt like the weakest part of my ads because I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I have one of the same tools the pros use on my desk.

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One of the most successful ad campaigns I ever ran was designed to get myself to ride my bike to work. Instead of basing it on standard motivators for exercising like health and fitness, I observed how commercial advertising works hard to associate positive feelings with a product and modeled my campaign after that.

I order to add an emotional dimension I thought about WHY I wanted to ride to work. Of course, the usual reasons about exercise and health applied, but they had not been enough to get me to do it so far. Instead, I reached back to the memory of the time when I was riding my bike all the time, and tried to identify the things about it that were pleasurable.

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I can remember vividly how difficult it was to learn how to drive nails. When I was training we used to practice by pounding hundreds of long, thin 16 penny box nails into a large beam - trying over and over to drive them all the way in without bending. Most of them did bend for the first few weeks until I learned the secret: focus all of my attention on the nail going in.

I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the techniques I’m describing in this blog: keep our attention on the outcomes we want. Whether that outcome is a job, a behavior change, an adventure, an object, a relationship, or whatever - encountering images and messages about it regularly helps keep our attention focussed on that goal.

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This article is the last in our series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The scarcity principle boils down to this: we want what we’re afraid we can’t have. Fear of losing out on something can be an extremely powerful motivator.

Availability might be threatened by limited quantity, a time deadline, or by competition. Whatever the reason, the item in question becomes more attractive to us if we think we can’t have it. Whether it’s a potential mate, a used car, or an item on sale, once its availability is threatened we WANT it!

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This article is the seventh in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion In this chapter, Cialdini convincingly demonstrates that most of us have a very strong tendency to follow the instructions of someone we perceive to be an authority.

This article has been more difficult to write than the others because so much of Take Back Your Brain’s emphasis is about taking back our own power. Why would we want to give it away again? The answer to that question comes from Cialdini. He says that anytime we see a technique widely used by compliance professionals it’s because it works. TBYB is interested in taking ownership of any technique that others use to hijack our attention, and applying it instead toward achieving our own goals.

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This article is the sixth in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I’ve been writing about the principles in Cialdini’s book in some detail because the primary mission of Take Back Your Brain is to level the playing field between the advertisers and us in the competition for our own mindspace. While we use weak methods like “trying to remember to do it more”, they possess an arsenal of incredibly effective psychological techniques that are very difficult to resist.

One of the ways advertisers get to us is through the principle of liking, which asserts that we are more likely to say yes to a person (or product) if we like them. Therefore, a useful question is, what makes us like someone? It turns out there are several dimensions to liking that are relevant to our personal advertising campaigns.

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This article is the fifth in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

The principle of social proof suggests that we tend to look to others to decide what to do, especially when we are uncertain about the correct behavior. Seeing others doing something has a powerful influence on us, especially if we perceive those others to be a lot like us.

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This article is the fourth in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Social psychology research suggests that taking even a small action creates commitment in us to the position that action represents, and that we will thereafter want to appear to behave in ways that are consistent with that position to both ourselves and others.

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This article is the third in a series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. According to Cialdini we are massively socialized to feel uncomfortable if someone has given us a gift or done us a favor that we have not returned. This feeling of indebtedness generally originates from one of three sources: favors, gifts, or concessions.

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This article is the second in a series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. If we see two things in sequence that are different from one another, we will tend to see the second one as more different than it actually is. This is called perceptual contrast. For example, a realtor or car salesman might show us a unit that is overpriced and in poor condition before showing us the one they really want us to buy. By contrast, the second one looks like a great deal and we want it more.

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I believe a lot of expertise about how people change their minds and their behavior resides in the selling and advertising and industries. A core mission of Take Back Your Brain is to learn the secrets those industries know about how to influence us and use them to make it more likely we will achieve our own goals. To that end I’ve been reading lots of books about sales, marketing and advertising. One of the best so far is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini.

Cialdini identifies what he calls “compliance professionals”, such as salemen, fund raisers, con artists and advertisers. He researched the book for three years by trying to learn what they know about how to influence us. He distills and organizes the thousands of tactics he observed down into a handful of basic techniques that he calls “weapons of automatic influence,” the common denominators found in most of the techniques he studied. He claims that each of them is based on a human psychological principle that has the “…ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people, that is, a willingess to say yes without thinking first.”

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The thing that really made the refrigerator ads pop is adding a huge, adorable photo of our dog. What that did was move the vacation photos from foreground to background, and I think that’s good. Instead of the conscious mind weighing the pros and cons of vacation logistics, time off, air travel, etc - in other words, all of the things that prevent us from going on vacations in the first place - I just look at the refrigerator and laugh. Seriously - who could not love that mug? Of course in my peripheral vision when I’m feeling so open and happy are the photos of the beach and camper.

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The beauty of the Post-It note is the stark simplicity of the medium. Because producing and deploying your ads is so simple with this method, it offers the opportunity to focus solely on your marketing message. The centrality of message can be eclipsed in other, sexier, delivery systems, but not here. The zen of the Post-It forces us to look square in the face the question: What is my message? And that’s what makes this technique so valuable. Because even when we are enthralled by the delicious glitter of technology, message is all there ever is, really.

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The campaign to get you to buy Christmas gifts combines several strategies that are enormously effective, Together, they are able to create a mass trance that lasts for two months and causes people to do crazy things like go into debt, wait in line outside big box stores at 4am, and buy chia pets.

Because the pitches for these holiday dollars are so intense and in your face, the holiday season is an especially good time to examine advertising for clues about how we might persuade ourselves to do our own bidding. Let’s deconstruct some of the Christmas marketing strategies to see if there is anything we can use in our own ad campaigns.

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