Kevin Hogan

What’s unique about Instagram?

Interactive? Archive stuff?

Nah.

You peek. You are a voyeur and you are the center of the voyeur’s attention. 15 years ago, you’d go to jail for what is now normal behavior. Peeking, once horrifying, is now what we encourage, develop, desire and follow through on.  As I’ve written so many times, stalking and love are very similar things and peeking plays a role in all of this. In 2019 people want the world to peek at them and their experiences. Values are changing rapidly. Those who get it will excel. Those who don’t will die off.

And what are people peeking at? They are peeking at a BRAND and that brand’s strategy for the day is easy to compare to yesterday’s strategy…and tomorrows.

You walk into  the local store.

“Hi I’d like to get my brand!”

And of course in an imaginary world you’d get your brand identity. After all for a long time I’ve told you that you ARE a brand.

You are just like Instagram, Apple or Facebook.

And most people don’t get that they are Walking Brands. Every single person is a brand. Not just you and me. Everyone is.

Think of each of those names individually and various words, images, thoughts, feelings, colors come to mind.

Now, imagine your Self. Imagine that you are no different from Instagram. You are Instagram with fingers and toes. On each of those fingers and toes is a tag.

Those tags all have one or two words that encapsulate who you are in the MINDS of those AROUND YOU or those OUT IN THE WORLD.

If you think of the Marvel character, Iron Man, you might find words like, “ego” “sarcastic” or “edgy” on a couple of tags. You might see the color “red” or “control freak” “Tony Stark” on a couple of others.

Try another one like Chandler from the old TV show Friends. Tags on his fingers and toes might include “Monica” “Roommate” “funny” “bad jokes” “duck” “cigarette” “good hearted” and so on.

Now how do those Brand Aspect Tags get there?

Each tag describes an interaction between YOU and THE CHARACTER.  Chandler tries to be cool in the early years of the show. No one sees him that way in the fiction world of friends. Chandler would WANT to be able to tag his index finger as “cool” but it’s not part of the interaction between him and the characters on the show. And it’s not part of the interaction between Chandler and the viewing audience.

Brand is mostly about behavior, physical features, actions. (There are exceptions.)

At Influence: Boot Camp 2008 we did a fascinating experiment loosely based on Gerald Zaltman’s work.

YOU are going to do this same experiment so read carefully.

I had everyone draw a circle on a sheet of paper and then lines extending out from the circle like hands on a clock. Then as on a Mind Map (ala Tony Buzan) I had people close their eyes, clear their mind, think of the words/brand Kevin Hogan, open their eyes and write, in an open circle, the FIRST WORD that came to their mind.

Then I repeated the process and asked people to write down What they FELT when I said, “Kevin Hogan” and repeated the process over and over for feelings, thoughts and words.

Legend Point: For most brands and products, there are about 7-12 unique characteristics, qualities, feelings, thoughts attached to a brand which are generally held by people (consensus maps) who loyally use a brand.

If you can get about a dozen loyal brand users to interview, you can usually hammer out an excellent metaphor map of the loyal customer’s feelings and thoughts about the brand.

….One of the very few forms of market research that works for real world products, people and services.

It’s a bit more complex than I’ve described, but if I leave it here, you will get the basics.

My guess was that the brand “Kevin Hogan” would have about 10-15 unique associative constructs. I am well aware that “Kevin Hogan” is a complex construct because there are actually a few different fields for which that brand name is known. (Success, influence, selling, medical, therapy, hypnosis, wealth building, etc.) And there are a few different ways people have interacted with the brand where that interaction caused a continued interaction.

Your situation will be much easier to distill.

….It turned out, there were almost three dozen unique associative constructs in the influence/persuasion brand of Kevin Hogan.

How could I have been so wrong…?

Earlier that morning, I had written down what I thought those 10 – 15 associative constructs would be.

I only got six right, and there were TWENTY additional constructs.

In an effort to find where I was correct about something, I remembered that it’s much easier to know someone else than it is to your Self.

In other words, I thought I 100% understood and “knew my brand.”

I thought I knew how I was “seen” and “felt” in the minds and hearts of others.

I was dead wrong…at least in what I didn’t know.

I truly believed that I could self-evaluate myself as a brand. (Overconfidence heuristic, yes?)

Legend Point: In business and in life, you see yourself from one filter and others see you from another. Those filters can be as different as night and day, or, they can be similar, but until you elicit the RIGHT KIND of information, you will never know.

A packed house of people showed me who I was, what I was and how I interacted with them, in their minds and hearts.

Because it dawned on me that this information would be incredibly valuable to my competition if I released it all, I’ve decided to give you some of the information and you’ll have to wait for the rest when Boot Camp 2008 is released on DVD.

I speculated that people would input “Coffee, Ginger Peach Tea, Survivor,  Gold, Persuasion, NFL, Body Language,” and eight other markers of identification.

I was amazed to find that not one person’s metaphor map had “body language” inputted, yet, I’m well known as one of the body language experts on the planet. But not ONE person had that associative marker. In fact, the majority of people who end up at my web site from search engines found it as a result of typing in “body language.” It’s taken almost a decade to figure out why this was the case, and I finally found the answer but we’ll have to save that for the next book.

Suffice to say, I’m well known to corporate America and to media as the body language expert, but for those who actually interact with and buy the brand, it is not a big part of the brand they are buying.

That was dumbfounding.

It was no surprise that “influence/persuasion” were heavily weighted on the metaphor map.

An interesting distinction was “Influencer” – I had coined the word, now in use generally in the context of social media, but it was NOT something I had considered. That said, it was consensual over and above “persuasion/influence.”

“Survivor” made the cut, but not the other TV shows I so often talk  about. It was Survivor. Maybe it is a coincidence, but that is probably the most powerful association (word/feeling) I have about myself from childhood, into adulthood. An interesting coincidence.

I was sure The Playboy Mansion would have been at the front of people’s minds after having thousands and thousands of hits on the website.

Not one person. Forget having 30 people have an association there.

Again: Surprise.

Legend Point: People see you, they experience you in a context, and specific constructs in their mind. You are more than free associations in someone’s mind, but those free associations often represent their entire picture of you or your product.

I suspect you’ll want to find out just WHO YOU ARE to THEM soon.

“Ginger Peach Tea” and “Coffee” were both HUGE associations with the Kevin Hogan brand.

Legend Point: Repetition of theme and context are not only crucial, they are REMEMBERED and ASSOCIATED to you. Make sure those triggers are something people will experience daily if at all possible. In the case of Coffee and Tea, most English speaking people have one or the other. It’s not necessary that they have Ginger Peach Tea, as long as TEA is in the mix.

That was neither surprising or even unexpected. It was interesting that it was much more important than so many other things.

What was really fascinating were the emotions people felt about the brand, Kevin Hogan.

I’m not going to go into depth here because this is where the most critical marketing information about the brand Kevin Hogan comes in and we’ll keep that in house.

Suffice it to say that I did think a few powerful associations would be highlighted.

It turned out there were more than a few; they were very powerful, surprisingly positive (compassionate, approachable, authentic, passionate, kind, and 16 other positive emotions people felt about the brand in a consensual fashion.) In other words, they were consistent among the people in the audience.

I don’t think of myself in most of the terms that people felt about me, but the people were clear that “compassionate” is not the same as “kind” and that “passionate” is not the same as “intense,” and intense was one of the biggies…”funny” was most interestingly not the same as “sense of humor.” “Provocative” I expected.

In no way did I expect the emotional mass of feelings, however.

There was only one negative “emotion” or “label” attached to the brand and that was “Bad Ass” which I thought was interesting, but although it wasn’t consensual, it was certainly something I consider true in some aspects, especially in the coaching areas of the brand.

There was a color that was on the map: Red.

I’m not sure why, but I find it interesting that the “Kevin Hogan” brand is a RED product. Covert Persuasion book cover perhaps? Something more profound? I asked what color Dave Lakhani was if I was “red.” “Blue,” was the answer.

Legend Point: To not utilize information on your consensual metaphor map could be costing you millions or more.

Well over the last decade I’ve discovered that a dozen unique feelings toward a brand is very unusual.

Hershey’s had four, I believe.

My heart pounded before doing this because you never know what is going to happen “live” without a script, and if people start rattling off things you wish they wouldn’t have, then you can be in trouble.

That didn’t happen.

I haven’t talked a lot about metaphor maps and associative connections between “brand” and “customer/client” outside of the Science of Influence CD’s, but the information the audience revealed to me is worth an enormous amount of money for the future of the brand.

It allows for highlighting parts of the brand that haven’t been highlighted in the past, or at least I didn’t think they were.

Legend Point: The crucial factor, of course, is that your most loyal customers and clients have very similar maps of your brand.

If you want to be successful and have a brand with longevity, you must know what your customers and clients truly think of you and, of course, continue to be loyal to them in generating the feelings that they experience when they take part in your brand.

A couple of notes are worth thinking about from the scientific page. I was leading the elicitation and was standing in front of the group as they opened and closed their eyes and wrote. That certainly could create a bias of some kind by highlighting what they see instead of what they NORMALLY see when they interact with the brand at home or in their car. If  you can get a couple of people to elicit your personal brand, I suspect that will be optimal.

The lack of strong negative emotions people get when thinking about the brand, Kevin Hogan, was, for some reason, disturbing to me. I’m not sure I like to be thought of in all of these positive shades of rose.

Always remember that it is valuable to have a culturally perceived weaknesses.

Legend Point: Your metaphor maps point out how your loyal customers and clients experience the brand. They don’t try and convert those who do not self select from the brand meeting the consumer.

Metaphor maps teach you how to market to the world so you attract those people who will be long-term loyal customers.

One thing is certain. No matter how well you know your customer…. and how well you think you know what they think….never allow yourself to become overconfident. Finding out what your customer REALLY thinks is absolutely crucial and you NEED to do that!

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