Pop Tarts and Brain Glue with James I Bond

It’s a tale as old as times – people don’t buy for logical reasons; they buy for emotional reasons. Our guest today is an expert in emotional selling, and he’ll teach you how to win your customers’ hearts.

Meet James I. Bond. James is a leading Marketing and Behavioral Management Specialist helping businesses scale their business through simplification of their management and marketing. He has extensive experience in sales and marketing. He worked with the famous investor Warren Buffett on simplifying growth and selling at one of his companies. He also ran one of California’s leading behavioral management firms for 13 years, with mid-size & Fortune 500 clients such as Amgen Biotech, Tenet Healthcare, and British GE. James is a published book author. His book is called  ‘Brain Glue: How Selling Becomes Much Easier By Making Your Ideas Sticky,’ and it’s a real game-changer for anyone looking to master the art of selling.

According to James, marketing is not just about flashy campaigns and catchy slogans. It’s about understanding human behavior and connecting to your customers on an emotional level.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the concept of emotional selling, how to unlock brain patterns for marketing success, the power of metaphors, and how making your ideas sticky gives you a competitive advantage.

Don’t miss this episode if you want to transform your marketing approach by tapping into your customers’ emotions.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: James I. Bond

💡 What he does: He’s a Marketing and Behavioral Management Specialist.

💡 Noteworthy: James is the author of ‘Brain Glue: How Selling Becomes Much Easier By Making Your Ideas Sticky.’

💡 Key Quote: “Your marketing has to include emotion. If it doesn’t include emotion, you have a disadvantage.”

💡 Where to find James: LinkedIn

Key Insights

People don’t buy for logical reasons but for emotional ones. When launching a product or service, some companies get caught up in listing features, assuming that logic alone will win over their customers. However, the truth is that people buy for emotional reasons, not for logical ones. James explains, “The problem I realized that most of us have is that we’re logical. When we start, when we launch a business or start a product or create a product or something, we get passionate about, Oh, wow, I created this whole thing, but then when we try to sell it, we try to be very logical. Here are the benefits of it. Here’s what it has and includes everything else without realizing that people buy for emotional reasons.”

Unlock brain patterns for marketing success. Our brains are wired to recognize and retain patterns. If you want to catch your customer’s attention, make sure you uncover those patterns and then use them in your marketing and sales. James explains how this works. He says, “It’s deeper, but it’s, so what happens is the brain has patterns, and let me give you a pattern right now.  Everybody listen to this. Okay. Jack and Jill went up the hill. Okay. Now, when was the last time you heard that? For me, it was almost over 50 years ago. I’m old. What can I say? And yet I remember it like it was yesterday on my deathbed […] because it sticks to the brain, there’s certain patterns that stick to the brain. And so what happened was I have uncovered those patterns, and so now people are going, Oh, I can take that pattern and apply it. And it applies not just to product names, but description to quotes.”

Metaphors are very powerful. One of the ways to communicate to your customers on a more emotional level is to use metaphors. James shares many interesting examples from his real-life clients, one of them Warren Buffett. “He has a line; it’s a great line. He says, ‘Only when the tide goes out do you realize who’s been swimming naked.’ What he’s basically saying is, and we could say it this way. We could say, ‘Only when times get tough do you realize who’s really good in business.’ And it’s basically what he’s saying. But if he says that, you go, Oh yeah, no, it goes in one ear and out the other. But if he says only when the tide goes up, you realize he’s been swimming naked. It’s like,  what? What did he just say? You have to think about it. And the metaphor, it triggers different parts of their brain, and when it does that, it wakes up the brain.”

Making your ideas ‘sticky’ gives you a competitive advantage. Some companies have exceptional products, but for some reason, they’re not gaining the traction they deserve. More often than not, the answer lies in emotional selling. James explains, “If you don’t apply brain glue, if you don’t understand brain glue, you have a disadvantage, and you don’t realize it. You’re a sitting duck. Either you’re being tortured, and you shouldn’t be, because you have a really great product or service,  but you need help, but you also need to understand that it’s because you’re a logical thinker, you came up with a great product,  but that can’t be your advertising. That can’t be your marketing. Your marketing has to include emotion. If it doesn’t include emotion, you have a disadvantage.”

Top Quotes

“You start with logic. Don’t turn off logic. You’re always going to start with logic. […] So start there, get it out of your system, and then start using the brain glue tools.”

“We’re trained logically.  That’s the logic side of the brain, but we make decisions emotionally.”

“There’s Gerald Zaltman, who’s a Harvard business professor, and Daniel Kahneman, who’s a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, and both of them discovered that more than 90 percent of buying decisions are emotionally triggered. You could include logic, but it has to be emotion.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if you could just tweak the name of what you offer or how you describe it and suddenly see sales explode? I’m telling you personally, it’s freaky when it happens, but freaky exciting.”

“Can you imagine if you had invented something and somebody you don’t like suddenly steals it and has a better name, and you have to stop selling it because you can’t make a dime from it? That’s why, to me, I want to teach as many people as possible who are in business.”

“The first thing you want to do is name it logically, what your product is, and then look for synonyms for that. What’s it like? What are some other words for it? And then that’s a starting point. Then you want to use rhyme as a very good one.”

Links

Brain Glue by James I. Bond

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Brain Glue Website