Brand Persuasion.

There was a study done with fish you can buy at your local pet store. Guppies. The males are smaller and more colorful, with spots and bright streaks and bright tails. The females are larger, rounder, muted.

The study showed that female fish are attracted to the males with the brightest colors, because bright color is a sign of good health. The males with better diets had orange and red about two and a half times brighter than the ones with poor diets. So if a female is comparing two males, she goes to the brighter one every time.

Then the researchers went further. If two males glow equally bright, the female is drawn to the one that already has another female attracted to him. Rather than seeking out the unclaimed fish, she reads the room to see who is most wanted. And she copies the bigger, higher-quality female rather than the smaller one, because the larger female's judgment looks worth more and is easier to trust.

The science community calls this choice copying.

We do the same thing every day. We think the brands with the bigger following are the ones worth trusting. We assume the influencer's favorite matters more than our own. We are just as irrational as fish you can buy at a pet store.

I'm John Luke. Welcome to Position to Win. There are two types of brands, the ones that accept their position in the market, and the ones that challenge it. This show is for the challengers, and for the founders and CMOs who are the ones responsible for making that happen.

Every brand has one job

Every brand needs to persuade. A brand needs to move a person from not trusting to trusting, from not caring to caring, from unconvinced to sold. That is persuasion. Everything else, the logo, the voice, the color palette, the story, serves that job.

This idea was framed almost two and a half thousand years ago. Aristotle said every act of persuasion runs through three appeals. Ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is character, and building trust. Pathos is connecting through emotion. Logos is logic, fact, and reasoning.

He was talking about how speakers move a crowd. He might as well have been talking about how brands persuade. Ethos is your reputation. Pathos is how you make people feel. Logos is the proof and the argument behind it all.

Ethos, the slowest one

Ethos persuades by building trust. It is whether the audience believes who you are.

When Patagonia sued a sitting president over public land, it read as a fight over principle rather than a publicity stunt, because the founder had spent fifty years protecting the land he climbed. The credibility was already there.

Trust is the slowest to build and the fastest to lose. You build it in small consistent acts. The product that does what it promised. The refund without a fight. The founder who does the unpopular but true thing. And it can vaporize the moment the integrity underneath does not hold, when a brand is not true to its own word.

Trust is built in many deposits and lost in a single withdrawal.

Pathos, and the guppy

Pathos is persuading through emotion, and it is what the guppy story was about. Emotion is not private or fixed. It is social, relative to what is happening, and contagious.

Social proof works by implication. You do not have to say you are popular. You stage the appearance of being in demand. The behavioral scientist Richard Shotton has an example that works: an Amazon vending machine swapped its "sold out" labels for "so good it's gone," turning an empty slot into evidence of demand. People kept checking back. When is it coming back? When does it get refilled?

Red Bull did the same thing. They went to popular clubs in London, crushed their own empty cans, and scattered them around the bins as evidence of demand.

People wanted what other people had already wanted. Every one of them a human version of the guppy, wanting what the other females had already chosen. Social proof is the heart of Shotton's first book, The Choice Factory. The point is that we are irrational, and most of our decisions are made on emotion. Do not forget that as we go through the rest.

Logos, and why even proof gets felt

Logos persuades through reasoning, logic, and fact. This is where your positioning has to hold up. When you claim you are the one and only, show me the proof.

Here is the strange part. Even proof gets felt. Humans stay irrational even inside logical reasoning. In Shotton's The Illusion of Choice there are some good examples.

A deodorant ad claimed it would reduce sweat by fifty percent. Another claimed forty-seven percent. The precise number was rated about ten percent more accurate than the round one.

The same thing happened with street beggars. Researchers asked passersby for money. Some asked for a dollar, some for a quarter, some for fifty cents. Then they switched the asks to seventeen cents, thirty-seven cents, forty-eight cents. The oddly specific requests implied a precise need, a real goal behind the ask, and the takings went up.

That is the strange thing about logos. We think we are judging facts objectively, but facts arrive with framing attached, and precise numbers feel more calculated.

Rhyming does it too. A rhyme is easier to process, and easier to process reads as more trustworthy, so people judge sentences that rhyme as true more often than ones that do not.

So when you write, say the strongest thing you can defend. Make it specific. Make it memorable. Make it rhyme if you can. But never let the presentation become more convincing than the truth underneath it.

The part most brands get backwards

The most important factor in persuasion is the story itself, and it is the part most often overlooked.

Look at the top ten websites in your industry and read the homepages. What is the value proposition? What are the taglines? Are they using the same three words, the same promise, the same stock photo, the same everything? It all blurs together.

Almost every category falls into the same trap. They cast themselves as the hero. We are bold. We are the leader. We are revolutionizing the category. The founder is the protagonist, and the company is coming to save the day.

The problem is the customer already sees themselves as the hero. They are the main character in their own story. So when your brand arrives and says it is the hero too, the customer reads you as a peer, not as something they need.

A hero is not looking for another hero. A hero is looking for a guide.

Luke has Yoda. Frodo has Gandalf. The guide has already been where the hero needs to go, and can show them the way. Every customer has a problem to solve, and the guide does not say no, we are the hero. It says we know where you are, what your pain points are, and where you are trying to go. That is the heart of Donald Miller's Building a StoryBrand. Your customer is the hero. Your brand is the guide.

But you called Nike the Hero

Wait. Last episode you called Nike a Hero, and now you are saying brands should not be the hero, that the customer is. So which is it?

Great question. They answer different questions, and they do not fight.

Hero is Nike's archetype. Its character. What it embodies. In the actual ad, Nike is playing the guide. When Nike says just do it, it is not telling itself to do it. It is telling you. It stands behind the athlete, believing and equipping. It is an order pointed at you. You are the one who has to do it.

Nike is great because of how effective it is as a guide. And an effective guide does two things. It builds empathy, so the customer knows you understand their problem. And it builds authority, so they believe you can solve it, and take them from A to B. Nike shows them the path, and the path is just do it.

Empathy and authority. That is pathos and ethos, aimed at the customer.

Give them a map

A guide does more than understand a hero. A guide hands them a map. The customer is stuck because the way forward is not clear, so you give them a plan and name the first step, or challenge them to take it.

The guide establishes empathy by naming what is at stake plainly. Who is hurt. What it costs them. What the real risks are. Do that and the customer stays in the hero's chair while you stay the guide the whole way through.

Warby Parker is probably the cleanest example. The founders lost an expensive pair of glasses in college and could not afford to replace them. They got frustrated, then realized the cost made no sense. This is plastic, glass, and a little metal. So they made affordable glasses and sold them online. The frustration exposed a bigger problem: eyewear was needlessly expensive and the market offered almost no reasonably priced choice. The customer is the hero. Warby Parker is the guide.

Context, and the cost of skipping this

When you tell the story, context matters. A founder selling hospital procurement should not sound like a founder selling to teenagers. Part of the job is knowing your audience well enough to choose the tactics that actually move them. Same three appeals, different settings on the dial.

If a story gets repeated by customers, it is working. If it cannot be repeated, if it does not travel on its own, it needs to be rethought and retold.

A company with no story, no earned trust and no honest proof is not saving money. It is paying for persuasion the most expensive way there is.

Marketing that does not land. Sales that do not close. Content nobody shares. Buying with cash what persuasion would have handed over for free.

The close

Your brand has one job, to persuade. Build trust, connect through emotion, and align with reasoning. And when you speak to the customer, cast them as the hero. They are the main character. The story is about them.

Too many companies only talk about who they are and what they have accomplished. What is the customer's problem? What are their pain points? Where do they need to go? Be the guide. Build it out, keep it honest, run it everywhere, and become a brand that persuades.

Next episode, what happens after you have persuaded someone once. Persuasion that does not stick does not help you much. The real question is how a brand gets remembered. That is brand recall, distinctive assets, and what drives it.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.