In a dynamic discussion, James Bond, an expert in behavioral management and business marketing, shares insights on leadership and selling. With a background in advertising and running a behavioral management firm, Bond explains his journey from disliking sales to embracing them through the power of passion. He emphasizes emotional selling, citing his experience with an effective anti-drug campaign, which taught him the importance of emotional impact over logic in advertising.

Bond delves into the '14 brain triggers' essential for effective marketing, focusing on setting expectations, understanding tribal alignment, and simplifying concepts for the audience. He uses real-life examples to illustrate these triggers, showing how they can lead to successful marketing strategies and more engaging client interactions.

Concluding with a leadership tip, Bond advises starting with a logical product description before introducing an emotional appeal, as demonstrated by the 'Squatty Potty' success. He underscores the importance of these principles not only for financial success but also for making a meaningful impact and giving back to the community. Bond's approach offers a blend of practical marketing tactics and a deep understanding of human behavior, valuable for leaders and marketers alike.

To learn more about James' work, check out their website at https://cf.fasterbuyer.com/brain-glue1680156469985.

Connect with James on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesibond/.

Key Points

Transcript

Craig Andrews 00:07

Today I want to welcome James Bond. He is a behavioral management and business marketing specialist specialist. For 13 years, he ran one of Southern California's leading behavioral management firms, working with a Who's Who of American businesses. Early in his career, he ran an advertising agency in Montreal, working a wide range of Fortune Five firms. He is a past workshop chairman for the resource partner of the US. Small Business Administration. He has been featured as a guest speaker at three Southern California universities and has been a guest on a wide range of marketing and business podcasts. But one of his chief accomplishments is his authorship of the book Brain Glue, which we are going to be talking about a lot today. James, welcome.

James Bond     01:01

Hi, Craig. Thank you for having.

Craig Andrews 01:05

Let'S we're going to get to Brain Glue and talk about, you know, one of the questions that a lot of people have is how did you get from there to here? You're a marketer, and let me say this for the audience, you're a marketer that hates selling, by the way.

James Bond     01:24

Hated selling. I love it today I hated selling.

Craig Andrews 01:28

Okay, well, we're going to learn more about that. I think there's a lot of people that live marketers don't like selling. I would count myself as one. I think there's something really interesting for us to explore there. Obviously, we want to talk about how this ties into leadership, but first, let's start about how you got started. How did you get started in marketing?

James Bond     01:54

Well, so I have a mechanical engineering background, but I dropped out of school just before I graduated, even though I was at the top of my class, because everybody said you're good at math, going to mechanical engineering, and it was like they didn't realize. I also loved art and psychology. I love psychology in school, but so I started an advertising company and worked my way up. And my brother helped me for a period of time. And we won. Major clients like craft foods, timex watches, Avon cosmetics, seagrams or world headquarters in Montreal. I've been in Southern California for 36 or 37 years, but initially I started in Montreal in an advertising company. And I remember we went into Avon and Avon said, it's between my brother John and me were sitting there and to try to win a major project for Avon. And the buyer from Avon said, hey, John, that's my brother, it's between you and this other company. Frankly, I'd rather work with you guys, but your price is higher than the other guy. And so there's a pause. And then my brother leans across his desk and says, why do you think the other guy's so cheap? There's a pause. That was really uncomfortable. And then the buyer from Avon, like straight out of a textbook says, okay, I get your point, let me write up a purchase order for you. And I thought like, my head was going to explode. We don't have to lower our price. He's hiring us because our price is higher. What? And it was, like, fascinating for me. It was just really amazing. Later on, eventually, I broke up with my brother, so I had to learn how to sell. He was a great salesman. And I remember Zig Ziglar. I went to a Zig Ziglar conference with my wife. It was fantastic workshop. And Zig Ziglar said,

James Bond     03:45

selling is a transference of passion. Hang on, Pam. So selling is a transference of passion. The more passionate you are, the easier it is to sell. Nobody has to teach you how to sell. If you see a movie that's really fantastic, then I don't have to tell you how to sell it. I saw Hidden Figures I loved Know with the three black women at NASA, and it was like, fantastic movie. I love that movie. Nobody has to teach me how to sell it. And so when he said that, I started to realize the power of passion. And Brain Glue sort of addresses this because it goes through we get passionate about what we're doing if we created a product or a service. But then school taught us to be logical. So we're all very logical people. And then when it comes to selling it, we try to be logical in how we sell. And that's wrong. And how I learned this was just for a second, how I learned this was I had an opportunity to win the anti drug campaign in America. So we came up with ads with powerful, logical reasons why you should not do drugs. And then I saw the ad that beat us, and it deserves to beat us. We deserve to lose. And it was a guy holding an egg saying, this is your brain, and crack the shell and drop the egg into a sizzling frying pan with exaggerated sizzling sound. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions? When I saw that, it terrified me. First. I knew this is profoundly more powerful than the logic that I was going to use in my advertising. But the second one was, it scared me because I went, how can I be in advertising and marketing and business and not know emotional selling? This was emotional selling. There's no logic behind it. I guess your brain gets fried is what they're trying to say. But when I realized that first, it scared me. But the scientist in me said, this is because I love psychology. This is amazing. How can I not understand emotional selling? It was just it blew my mind.

Craig Andrews 05:48

Yeah. And I'm interested in exploring that further. I really want to get back. How did this all start? I mean, what got you interested in marketing and entrepreneurship?

James Bond     05:58

Well, my dad was an entrepreneur. He built a few businesses, and he was very successful in business. And I was, like, always in the back. I'm the oldest of four boy, girl, boy, so I got two brothers. So I remember my youngest brother, who's a CPA, saying, here we are folding towels. He had a commercial laundry was one of the business he had. He had all these different businesses, and it was good being in a personal laundry and folding towels, because whenever you'd fold the towels and you'd finally be done, guess what? A new shipment would come in. You have to start folding them again. So you kind of get used to like in marketing, there are certain things that you have to just kind of do them. Even if they're kind of boring, you still have to go through these things. So it taught me that, but it it made me fascinated by how do you create a business? How does business generate income? And I really didn't understand that. And so the more I learned about business, the more I became fascinated by how I started as a photographer, okay, an advertising photographer. But I recognized that advertising is the boss of photography in commercial advertising. So I started learning advertising. Then I realized that marketing is the boss of advertising, because marketing is how you put it all together, how everything fits together. So you decide who you want to focus on, what's the message you want to reach them with, and how are you going to reach them with that message. So I became fascinated by that, particularly because, again, I love psychology, though, the psychology of it. That's why I built one of California's leading behavioral management firms, like, about 27 years later, is because I was fascinated by how we act and how often it's different from what we think it is, how behavior works. And so from that, I started learning behavioral management, and that became exciting to me because certainly in marketing, it's exciting because I can have the greatest product in the world. I remember John Gray was telling me he has this fantastic book that he wrote called Men, Women, and Relationships, one of the most profound relationship books ever. Okay? But he was struggling, and he sold, like, 20,000 copies. Everybody who bought the book would love the book, but 20,000 copies? If you make a buck a book or $2 a book, you better get another job at McDonald's or somewhere. Okay? But he got this crazy idea. What if I change the title to Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and then tweaked the content a little so it refers to it throughout the book, but it's the same basic book. What do you think happened just by changing the title? Sales exploded almost overnight. He went from selling 20,000 copies to half a million copies almost overnight, then a million and 2 million. I have a friend, Steve Harrison, who helped him with marketing, and in my book, I say he sold 10 million copies. And Steve said, Ant wrong. I said, oh, did I mess up? He said, yeah, we're over 50 million copies got sold already. 50 million. Just because he changed the title, he went from 20,000 to 50 million copies. Wow. Why does that happen? And it just became so fascinating to me. I became a student of something that most people don't look at it's. How do you start with nothing or almost no money and suddenly become massively wealthy, often zooming past huge companies, fortune 500 companies that they're sitting there, and then you just shoot past them and make a ton of money. And nobody's researched this. I researched this and I uncovered 14 brain triggers. And when you understand the brain triggers, suddenly people start going like, wow, this is amazing. I saw this show on this history channel. Let me stop you there.

Craig Andrews 09:57

What are the 14 triggers?

James Bond     10:00

Okay, I have to remember them all. Okay, let me give you this one example and then I'll do the brain triggers, okay? Because it applies to lots of different areas. If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit got OJ. Simpson off from an almost certain guilty verdict. So that's rhyme, okay? Rhyme is a powerful tool. Jack and Joe went up the hill, right? How many people know that one? Right? It's wired into us. So rhyme is one of them. So the first one is set expectations. Okay? You want to set the right expectations. Muhammad Ali is a perfect example because he said I am the greatest. And he actually said, I saw an interview, he was talking about it and he said I am the greatest. You know who had the greatest impact on it had the greatest impact on me. Because if I'm telling the world I am the greatest in public and I'm not, then people are going to start to embarrass. I'm going to be embarrassed and humiliated. So I better be the greatest since I'm saying I am the greatest. But setting the right expectation in advance. Let's say I'm going to present something to you, okay? And I know that you're going to get a little annoyed a little bit because I want to get past that. To get to the point I make. If I say, hey, I'm going to tell you something, I know you're going to get all upset about it, but give me 35 seconds to just get past that because I want to make a point about this. It makes it easier to help you understand, to get you to the point that you can actually be more receptive. I saw this guy.

Craig Andrews 11:34

Yeah, let me jump in here. That makes a lot of sense. So number one is set expectations. I love the example that you provided. What's number two?

James Bond     11:43

Tribal alignment. Tribal know we have it in America, trump versus Biden. Okay? If I say I love Trump, then some people are going to say, oh, wow, we're with you. And other people are going to say we hate you. If I say I hate Trump, they're going to say, oh good, I'm with some people are going to say, yeah, go ahead. And other people are going to say, no, we hate you. Tribes. We live in tribes. People who say they're not members of any tribe are members of I don't follow anybody. Well, there are a lot of people that don't follow anybody, or they're not part of a tribe. So when you understand what tribes people are in, it becomes easier to sell them because you can actually push them away by announcing that you're in the wrong tribe. That's why one of the things anyway, one of the things you want to do is you want to look at things like LinkedIn, Facebook. I have this guy who's worth over $100 million. He's a financial guy. And I went to his LinkedIn page and I got some basic information, but I found out he has a Facebook page. In the Facebook page, he's talking about his daughter who just got married. So I wrote a book called The Secret Life of Fathers. I started something called the Father daughter project. So when I got there, I started talking to him and I said, So your daughter just got married? He said, yeah, where'd you know that? So I saw on your Facebook page how's that? Like, he started talking about it. I said, well, I started something called the Father daughter project. He said. Oh, wow. Really? And suddenly we became close because we made a connection. It works with masses also, because if you're doing advertising, if you can understand I hate to quote Bill Cosby, because we're not fans of Bill Cosby at all, but he had a great line and he said, I don't know the secret of success, but the secret of failure is trying to please everyone. And he's right on. So that's me to go through some of the other ones.

Craig Andrews 13:32

I'll briefly yeah, no, that's a great example, and I love that you pointed that out despite Bill. And this is something I've had to wrestle with in life. I've known leaders that have influenced my thinking who then later had failings and let's just kind of pause there for a second because I think there's an important lesson for the audience here. As we're talking about leadership, sometimes we learn things from flawed.

James Bond     14:02

Bill.

Craig Andrews 14:02

When you bring up Bill Cosby, a flawed person, we don't want to celebrate his flaws, but it doesn't mean he was wrong all the time. And there are things of value to take from that. And so.

James Bond     14:17

He was successful until he took advantage of success. But his work working up to mean he became a critical person. The Cosby Show was so important, particularly for black people loved it, but all of us loved it because he was showing a black family that was like it didn't matter if it was black or white. And so what he did was profound until he passed a point where he became a jerk, okay? He took advantage of so, you know, we don't want to look at somebody like that. But we also want to understand, if we look at success, what causes success? Success does mess people's minds. I've learned that with myself. I've helped companies who are massively in trouble suddenly have more money, generate more money than they ever thought they would ever have. And it's amazing how wealth can actually hurt to change how a person is. In fact, George Eastman, who founded Eastman Kodak, was the richest man in the world, okay? And he shot himself. He committed suicide. And his note was, My work is done. That's because he focused on himself instead of trying to change the world. If he said, I'm going to take all the money I have, and I'm going to try to give it back and try to make the world better, his work would never have been done. And that's why one of my favorite movies of all time is Pay It Forward. When you become successful, if you're just going to buy bigger cars and a bigger home and have fun, travel around the world and everything else, and you're not going to at least pay it forward somehow, it's karma. Karma is going to come back and bite you. But it's just our purpose in life if we're successful and we're not giving back to others and helping others make a difference. And you do it with this podcast, and I do it with the stuff I do with the US. Small Business Administration. I do volunteer work. I'll do it for, like, hundreds of people at a time. And it's a purpose in life that we have is to make a difference and help others. Obviously, we want to make money and make a good living. I had this one guy who said, oh, you're helping people get know. That's really nasty. I said, no, no, come on. Oprah Winfrey gets to help a lot more people than you get to help. So don't tell me about know. He went, oh, that's yeah, if you get rich, if you're not giving it back, then, yeah, you know the wrong kind of person.

Craig Andrews 16:34

Well, and that's a great so we had number one. We had number two. What's number three?

James Bond     16:41

Ease their understanding. Let me give you, I think, a really great example, okay? If I said, Americans discard 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour, what does that mean? It sounds like a lot. Is that a lot? But what if I said, Americans discard 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour? That's enough to reach the moon every three weeks. Perspective. Whoa. Selling. If somebody's selling and trying to win a client, I have past, present, future, okay? I learned this with our advertising business. This really helped me a lot. I remember I won Seagrams as a client by doing this past. Have you ever worked with I would say, have you ever worked with an advertising agency before, or do you do it on your own? Okay, whatever they say, if they do it on their own or they use an advertising agency, I say, well, what worked for you and what didn't work for you? That's past, present? Are you working with one now, or are you doing it on your own? What's working for you now and what's not working for you now and then? If you got to work with somebody that would really help you, what would be the ideal situation? Past, present, future. So I was working at an opportunity to win Seagrams, and before I learned this, I would just show them all our samples of our portfolio, and then hopefully one would stick. But the buyer from Avon, when I asked him the question, I said, well, have you worked with an agency? Mean for some of the things that we were working on, obviously they work with big advertising agencies. And he said, yeah. And I said, well, what worked for you and what didn't work for you? He said, Well, I'll tell you what didn't work for us, is we spend $50,000 to $100,000 a pop for bottle design, the bottle and label, and it's got to look really great because it's sitting on a shelf, and often people will choose it because of the bottle or the label. And we have people that just advertisers that don't understand that. So I said, oh, well, we actually did work with a lighting catalog, and a lighting manufacturer had hundreds of lights that are glass and plastic and everything else in different shapes and textures. I've started showing him that, and he said, oh, we got to work with you guys. You guys understand this? And it's all because instead of me showing him all the samples and hoping I would find something that's helpful, I said, what worked for you and what didn't work for you? When he told me that, I suddenly realized I can focus just in on this and win him as a client. And I did. I walked out there. It was like the first time I did it. And I was like, Whoa, this really works. This is amazing. But yeah, so that's ease their understanding.

Craig Andrews 19:14

So ease your understanding. So that's number three. There's 14 triggers, and they're in the book. Brain glue.

James Bond     19:22

Yeah. Okay, so I was just telling you, I saw this show on Bobby Flay, and he's a master chef, and he's all over TV. So the first TV show they came up with for him was called Boy Meets Grill. He talked about grilled food, not boy meets girl. So he took a phrase that is common in the brain. It's already stuck in the brain, boy meets girl. And he came up with Boy meets Grill. Okay, that's one. Then in the show, they're talking about Jamie Oliver, another guy who had the naked chef. Naked is a trigger word. I love saying this. Okay, what's his name richard Branson. What does Richard Branson and olive oil have in common?

Craig Andrews 20:07

Virgin.

James Bond     20:08

Virgin Olive Oil and Virgin Records and then Virgin Airlines. Richard Branson recognized that a trigger word like virgin is going to get people's attention. They go, you know, and he's Virgin everything, you name it. He started buying all these companies and putting the name Virgin on it. Virgin this, virgin that, virgin this, and he owns this whole mass of companies that are all virgin companies. But he recognized the power. He see went, I didn't have a lot of money, but I was competing in the beginning, he was competing with record companies, but he didn't have a lot of money. So he was Virgin Management, and then he became Virgin Records, and so he's able to win people like the Rolling Stones and some of these other people, mostly because they liked him, but they loved the fact that it's Virgin Records. What can you know when you learn these trigger words can really be helpful. And I love dirty.

Craig Andrews 21:00

I'm sorry. I would love to hear more. I do really hope that people will get your book Brain Glue, because it sounds like there's a lot of nuggets in there, but unfortunately, we're out of time. Let me ask you this. If you have one piece of leadership advice for people, what would that be?

James Bond     21:22

So whenever you're trying to sell something, start with logic. Okay? Start with a logical description. There was a woman came up with a toilet stool. A stool. So you can raise your feet when you're on the toilet. It actually helps you better. So the first thing she came up with was the name Toilet stool. But then she went, that's not really a really good name, but what's another way to say toilet? And it's potty. Okay? And while I'm sitting like this, I'm squatting. Squatty potty. Squatty potty took a mom and her son with no business experience. In less than two years, they generated $100 million of sales because of the name. So what you want to do is you want to start with a logical description of what it is, what your product or service is, and then come up with an emotional way to explain it. And when you do that, it becomes easier to sell, and you just make a ton of money. Does that make sense?

Craig Andrews 22:15

That does. Thank you for sharing that. Well, James, thank you for coming on. Leaders and legacies. Obviously your book is brain glue. There's 14 triggers to unlock sales. I think we got to hear three, and I think people should reach out and discover the other ones. How would people reach you if they want to reach out and contact you?

James Bond     22:35

Well, the easiest way to do it is go to yesbrainglue.com. Yesbrainglue.com. And first it will give you a lot of insight about how brainglue works, but it also talks about me and my background and stuff, and you have contact for me also. But I think hopefully you buy the book. But even if you don't buy the book, if you go to yesbrainglue.com, I think it's going to trigger a lot of things with you as you're going to go through this, and you're going to realize how powerful and easy it is to suddenly apply something like this so that you accelerate sales and you have fun. I can't tell you how many people suddenly, when they develop something like brainglue for themselves, they actually have a lot more fun sharing it, because people buy from you, first of all, and sometimes they're even laughing while they're buying from you. Laughers are buyers, by the way. That's another brain glue tool. But yeah, yes, brain glue. Yesbrainglue.com. Is a great place to check it out.

Craig Andrews 23:29

All right, well, thank you, James. Thanks for being on Leaders and legacies