John Tyreman: 0:19

Welcome business developers to another episode of Breaking Biz Dev. I'm John. As always, I'm joined by my trustee, co-host, mark. Mark. How you doing this morning?

Mark Wainwright: 0:28

John, I am, I'm well, thank you for those of you who, who are just listening in, John has his new uniform on, which is his breaking biz dev truckers cap. We'll talk about this in another episode. I think recently you went to a conference or something where you, people were commenting on your hat. So I I love it. I'm, I'm I'm failing on the branded end of things. I know that, you sent me a t-shirt a while ago for Breaking Biz Dev. Across the chest. And, I love it. I think it's so much fun. I,, who knew, right? Who knew we'd have all this fun stuff going on. But yeah, we've really enjoyed it. And it's just another way for us to a brand out there and have people be more comfortable. And on our topic, du Jo today, familiar. Our brand.

John Tyreman: 1:17

Yep,

Mark Wainwright: 1:18

This is a good episode and I think this is, it's maybe a little bit less about, mark and John are gonna talk about a specific business development concept that people are gonna kind of use in their marketing and selling, but it's, it, there's an idea here that we want to get across that is kind of like you've said earlier. That is across all marketing and selling. It's just this really important that we want to talk about and it keys off of that word familiarity.

John Tyreman: 1:48

That's exactly right, mark. And we're gonna have to get you more swag so that you can wear different kinds of hats. You like the dad hats, right?

Mark Wainwright: 1:55

am, I'm a dad hat guy. Yeah,

John Tyreman: 1:56

So we're gonna get you a dad hat, and if anyone listening wants some swag, reach out to Mark or I or, and we will get you hooked up. Uh, but yeah, we're gonna talk about the mirror exposure effect. Some people refer to this as the familiarity bias.

Mark Wainwright: 2:10

Right.

John Tyreman: 2:10

Um, so that's what we're gonna break down today. What is it? Why is it effective? How can you use it in your marketing, your sales activities? And then we've got a pair of guest voices that we're going to bring for your listening pleasure. We've got Melina Palmer, who is the host of the Brainy Business Podcast, and then we have Ryan Paul Gibson, who is the founder of Content Lift. He is the customer interview guy. So. Stay tuned for that. That'll be at the back half of this episode. So Mark, should we open the box here and dig into the mere exposure effect?

Mark Wainwright: 2:46

Yeah, that right. We gotta start at at the beginning,

John Tyreman: 2:48

Yeah.

Mark Wainwright: 2:48

That's like, what the heck is the mere exposure effect? And this is one of those things that, is screamingly obvious to many people out there, as are a number of these cognitive biases that, you know, we experience either, with people that we are. Working with or, or whatever, selling to marketing, to whatever else, or that we are experiencing ourselves, and maybe we're aware of it, maybe we're not, but these cognitive biases are everywhere and this is one of the mere exposure effects. So yeah.

John Tyreman: 3:23

Yeah.

Mark Wainwright: 3:23

let's, let's define it. I know you pulled out your Webster's dictionary or something like that, so you know,

John Tyreman: 3:28

I, I did, and I liked this definition from simply psychology. The mere exposure effect is a cognitive bias where individuals show a preference for things they're more familiar with. It goes on to say that repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking and familiarity. Even without conscious recognition. So you like it, you're more familiar with it. You like it even though you don't know it. And then essentially the more we encounter something, the more we tend to prefer it based on familiarity alone.

Mark Wainwright: 4:00

Yeah. Based on familiarity alone.

John Tyreman: 4:05

Right.

Mark Wainwright: 4:05

this unconscious interaction that's happening. There's, some amount, there's some quantity or some frequency of interaction that all of that leads to increased. Preference, tendency, whatever else. And

John Tyreman: 4:24

Huh?

Mark Wainwright: 4:24

flies in the face of what many experts out there in professional services firms believe, is they will be selected by a prospective clients because of their expertise,

John Tyreman: 4:42

They'll be sought out because of their expertise. Yep.

Mark Wainwright: 4:47

right, right. But lo and behold, there's a bunch of stuff at play, not the least of which is what we're talking about today, is this mere exposure effect. It's just people's maybe even unconscious familiarity with them.

John Tyreman: 4:58

Well, and, and I think there's, there's a lot of research also that goes into, into, even complex decisions are made with emotion and justified by logic. I. So if you kinda, if we wander into why this, this cognitive bias, why this is effective to use in your marketing and sales strategy is because it boils down to, I, I hear this all the time from marketers and business developers and accounting in architecture and engineering. It's, our industry is about trust. Winning new deals is about trust and so if trust, if building trust is kind of that end goal or that the objective of your business development activities, then let's reverse engineer that a little bit. Well, before someone trusts you, they've gotta like you before they like you. They've gotta know about you before they know about you. They need to be introduced to you and become familiar with you. And that is the kind of that stepping stone to trust the, it starts with being exposed for the first time. So here we are.

Mark Wainwright: 6:00

right. We're gonna hit the head on this nail again and again, John, because it's just not the sort of default thinking of most experts in expert firms,

John Tyreman: 6:11

We need to, we need to create exposure for the mere exposure effect.

Mark Wainwright: 6:14

we, right, right, right. People need to understand that, oh, this is not a, this is not a nice to have. This is not an, oh by the way, it would be really convenient if they were more familiar with our, with us and our brand and our expertise and everything else. It's like this is a have to have, like this is a critical component that individuals and firms, organizations out there can leverage. To build this strong foundation of familiarity on top of which you can build your, your case for, you know, your expertise and your experience and all those types of things. So that's great and it's worth noting as this little asterisk aside, John, one of the core reasons why you and I got together and started this podcast in the first place was for you and I establish. Ourselves and become visible experts in this world of, you know, crazy professional services, marketing and selling. So, you know, if people are their heads as to how this plays out and what it means and what it looks like, everything else is what looks like this. Right? And we'll talk and we'll talk more about that.

John Tyreman: 7:25

Yeah. Well, let's, let's break it down. So some, what are the keys to leveraging this mere exposure effect? How do we put, take this concept and how do we put it into practice? And Mark, you alluded to what we are doing with this podcast and, the, very first bullet point that I have here is consistency. Right. And so we publish an episode of Breaking Biz Dev every other week. We've got bonus episodes we throw in here and there, but that's largely our schedule that we, we've stuck to for almost two years now.

Mark Wainwright: 7:56

Right,

John Tyreman: 7:57

So that, that is a critical part of it.

Mark Wainwright: 7:58

yeah, that's the quantity part of it, where you start building this quantity

John Tyreman: 8:02

Mm-hmm.

Mark Wainwright: 8:03

for quantity's sake, right? It's gotta be good stuff, people who engage with you in one way or another. It needs to be of value.

John Tyreman: 8:10

Mm-hmm.

Mark Wainwright: 8:11

them. So you and I work hard to make sure that the stuff we cover is, relevant and important to people, but Yeah. But it's a, it's this quantity and cadence thing is that you need to find the right cadence. I feel like we've done a decent job of that. And so you, you know, we start walking up those stair steps towards, like you said, that trust thing. And we start building this, um, this little, this, this cadence, these interactions with people. Sometimes we're just, you know, the voices in people's heads as they walk their dog. You know, sometimes people, you know, see us on little clips on social media, LinkedIn. Other times people will wanna watch these on YouTube. But yeah, we've, we've created a number of different ways that people can start to establish familiarity with us, because no one's gonna wanna listen unless they start believing and trusting in what we say.

John Tyreman: 9:02

Okay.

Mark Wainwright: 9:02

So we start baby steps. these every other week, little voices coming into your head, and then people start, people start believing actually what we're What we're saying,

John Tyreman: 9:15

Well, and it's, and it's not just the, the every other week, it's also consistency in the message that we're sending out too. So we've been pretty consistent with the premise of the show in that we beat up and break down topics related to business development. And I think we've maintained a consistent theme that understanding your clients and having a low self-orientation and all of these, um, these fundamental components of our message have been very, very consistent. And so I think that's, like you, you mentioned the quantitative aspect. I'd say that this is the qualitative aspect of that.

Mark Wainwright: 9:51

yeah. Good, good.

John Tyreman: 9:55

So, uh, you know, some other examples of leveraging that mere exposure effect. You know, we've talked about the podcast and how we are doing it. You know, it, you can also apply this to other aspects of your business development function. Prospecting, you could apply it to being visible at events and conferences. So I think that there's, there's different ways to where you can incorporate repetition and familiarity in being consistent and not running a blitz campaign and then stopping to measure, but making sure that your brand is, and your name is visible, whatever direction you pursue or whatever channels you pursue.

Mark Wainwright: 10:33

Right. You, you mentioned prospecting, and that's one of the things I focus on with my clients when

John Tyreman: 10:37

Mm-hmm.

Mark Wainwright: 10:37

to introduce themselves to new prospective clients, likely organizations and people that, that they don't know and don't know them.

John Tyreman: 10:46

Mm-hmm.

Mark Wainwright: 10:46

it's, we start with this little tiny nugget of familiarity. Maybe it's, a connection or a tap on social media. Maybe it's an email that drops into someone's inbox where you're just starting to establish some baseline familiarity with. Your name, your organization, what you do, what you're interested, what you're focused on, that, that, that sort of a thing. So we do these in these little prospecting sequences that we've talked about in the past, or these little four or five, seven touches, that lead to an increased level of familiarity to the point. Hopefully we're one of these prospects. We'll take you up on your offer for a conversation. So, yeah, there's longer term. Building familiarity like we have done over where are we? Right? 50 plus episodes

John Tyreman: 11:32

think so. Yeah.

Mark Wainwright: 11:33

over many, many months to these shorter opportunities to build familiarity maybe in sort of a sprint over the course of a couple weeks or so, where you go from no one ever heard of you, knows you.

John Tyreman: 11:46

From zero to one.

Mark Wainwright: 11:47

Zero, right. Zero to one. Exactly. Right. Good stuff. Good stuff.

John Tyreman: 11:50

And it, and it's not just prospecting too, it's not like, it's like marketing, build familiarity, prospecting. And then once you, once you get a lead, then you need to stop. I think like synchronous conversations in that sales process all the way through. Even beyond closing a new deal into the engagement, it's important to maintain that familiarity, maintain exposure for yourself, just so that you can stay top of mind.

Mark Wainwright: 12:15

Good point. Good point. Yeah, it's, this is not just a, a, a, a marketing tool. It can be leveraged across that entire sort of marketing and selling continuum that we've referred to in the past,

John Tyreman: 12:26

Yep.

Mark Wainwright: 12:26

the way across there. Because you constantly need to be, establishing and building trust, because a lot of times in professional services, we are asking significant

John Tyreman: 12:34

Yep.

Mark Wainwright: 12:34

our clients. We're asking them to invest a lot of dollars and cents. We're, we're, we're asking them to, to invest their time and their resources in us as consultants, right? So we have to get them to the point where they can make a comfortable, confident buying a. Decision, you know, when it comes down to that dollars and cents in contracting point. And we have to build that trust throughout because we want our buyers to have really have a lot of, have a lot of trust in us so they can make a confident decision. And then we need to continue to build it so that they don't experience this kind of, you know, gut wrenching buyer's remorse. Right. We need to. Continue to build on that. And we do that constantly building and reinforcing, familiarity across everything we do.

John Tyreman: 13:21

But, uh, you know, mark, you and I are not experts in behavioral economics or buyer psychology. We apply it to our trades. But we are, we're not experts on this topic, and that's exactly why we've brought in a few guest voices who are experts on these topics, So first up we have Ryan Paul Gibson, who is the founder of Content Lift. Ryan's story. If you follow Ryan on LinkedIn, you'll always notice that little red balloon that he has in his posts. That's part of his strategy using the mere exposure effect. you'll hear that and more from Ryan. I am joined by Ryan Paul Gibson, founder of Content Lift, or I guess the person who's on the hook for content lift.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 14:07

Yeah.

John Tyreman: 14:08

how you doing today?

Ryan Paul Gibson: 14:09

how you doing? I'm doing great, John. for having me chat with you.

John Tyreman: 14:12

Yeah, totally. So we brought you on'cause we want to have a conversation around this concept that Mark and I are beating up called the Mere Exposure Effect. Would love to get your 2 cents on it, your experience with it, kind of looking at the clients that you serve through Content Lift, but also your own experience, promoting Content Lift. And you've got a very involved personal brand as part of your strategy so first of all, I think it would be helpful to just kind of provide an overview of content lift. Like what are the services you provide and who do you serve?

Ryan Paul Gibson: 14:45

so where I fit is really on the umbrella of market research, which sounds so boring, but I love it. And I think it's actually the foundation of business development. And it's maybe a whole other podcast topic, but, within market research, I do qualitative research, all in-depth interviews, so one-on-one conversations, I do them with customers or in-market buyers to understand, you know, how and why they buy things out of a, you know, a product category or various options in a market. So I can help and sales teams build more effective go-to-market programs. I really just care about the acquisition side. Like how do what, how do we need to talk to a market so we can actually influence them? And so I help, I do all the interviewing and all the qualitative research with a bit of what we call desk research. So you know, just public information and I throw it all together and spit out some thoughts on they can go from here.

John Tyreman: 15:48

And that qualitative research is really important for B2B companies because the total addressable markets are. Fairly small when compared to like the broader consumer markets.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 16:01

Yeah, that, that's one part of it. And the second part is like, if you look at how qualitative research is used in, let's just say the social sciences, that's the tool they use for understanding complex decision making.

John Tyreman: 16:18

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 16:18

And that's what B2B transactions

John Tyreman: 16:21

Exactly.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 16:21

them, often, call them like, highly considered decisions. Over less considered decisions. So really good example would be buying a cup of coffee versus buying the manufacturing equipment for a coffee plant, right? Like it's

John Tyreman: 16:34

Yeah,

Ryan Paul Gibson: 16:35

the broad strokes of how we make choices there are gonna be a little different.

John Tyreman: 16:39

it's like$5 versus$500,000.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 16:41

Exactly. So, and to your point, since there's only a small amount of market and these, there's multiple factors in these decisions, research is actually. Often much better than quantitative, like surveys and stuff like that to

John Tyreman: 16:55

Yeah,

Ryan Paul Gibson: 16:56

and why people buy.

John Tyreman: 16:57

totally, totally. I think it's worth underscoring that point for our audience, which is mostly, professional services firms, and so it's probably even more of a niche for. For those companies as well. Smaller total addressable markets, which means that qualitative research is even more important, for that market. So, mark and I wanna break down this, this whole concept of the mere exposure effect, and we've got our own kind of definition of it. But I would love to hear in your own words, how would you describe that cognitive bias or that psychological phenomenon?

Ryan Paul Gibson: 17:32

So, how I look at it from a, a commerce perspective. Is that people tend, people gravitate towards what they're familiar with and understand or not even understand, you know, like in the realm of their contextual understanding that, you know, if that makes sense.

John Tyreman: 17:52

Yeah.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 17:52

exposure effect is early, I think at its core is understanding, you know, how do you leverage. That bias in people's brains where they gravitate towards the familiar to then, build marketing programs that can be effectively get you to be that brand they're familiar with right over and over again. Hope I answered that. Okay.

John Tyreman: 18:20

Mm-hmm.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 18:20

it's, it's really at the core of what marketing does with those first few interactions when we talk into a market. Because if you're not remembered. All the research we've seen over the last five decades is you're not gonna end up in a consideration set. It's just not gonna happen. And people buy what they remember. It's clutch understanding like how we need to get in front of people, influence them. There's debates on whether you need a certain number of like, call like touchpoints or like brand impressions. And I know that like seven is the one, like seven. You need seven.

John Tyreman: 19:00

Right.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 19:01

There's actually a lot of data that suggests that's actually not true, you can see on LinkedIn you can see the debates on that. Some people say it's just the one. It's just one. You just need one really good impression to like imprint. Happens though is that our brains are memories of that impression start to recede over time. Right, because, uh, new information's coming in. the exposure effect is like, how do I ensure that I'm just gonna re-upping Right? That familiarity. if that makes sense. Because since in B2B specifically, people don't instantly buy right away. And I would know this'cause all I do is talk to buyers. have to wait for the conditions to be right. And there's a whole bunch of reasons and I, I had a conversation just today and I give you an example of how, how it. into play, but it could be years after someone sees your marketing ad, piece of content, whatever, before they're actually ready to invest in your solution in the, in the B2B world. So how do you stay top of mind within that?

John Tyreman: 20:06

Right.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 20:06

and what do you need to do to stay top of mind? Like what is it you need to show them? So anyway, I'm, I'm just sort of getting ahead of everything, but it's like, it's clutch.

John Tyreman: 20:17

Well that's, that's a great segue into like what I was gonna like ask you about next is when I go and I, and I'm writing, let's say hooks for like a LinkedIn post and I. I look for inspiration. I always come across that little red balloon that you use

Ryan Paul Gibson: 20:36

Oh, yeah.

John Tyreman: 20:37

in your, your post, and every time I see that, I think of Ryan. And I think that's, that's just kind of one example of like the mere exposure effect of is you're using that consistently. What are some other like ways that you've leveraged that mere exposure effect in your own marketing of content Lift.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 20:54

Oh, interesting. Yeah, so that's one of them. And people have actually said that before To me, I look for the red balloon. And that, that was my conscious thought around it was that, The other ways that I've done it, to speak to my experience again, if we're thinking about just marketing generally and how people buy, you know, like I said, people prefer familiarity. They look at things through the contextual lens of what they know. Our brains often, know, want specificity as opposed to vagueness. Like, there's all these things, right? And. When I was going out, thinking about how I wanna promote myself, one of the things you'll see in marketing literature is, know, you have to niche down. Like, people say that in different ways,

John Tyreman: 21:44

Yeah.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 21:45

Why, why is that a thing? Like, that's also reason why we segment. Why, the more specific you can be about a certain topic and. thing, easier it is is for their brains to understand the familiarity and context of it in this microseconds, the fraction of seconds to see thing.'cause the mere exposure effect doesn't even happen consciously. All happen subconsciously, right?'cause our brains have how our

John Tyreman: 22:11

Right.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 22:12

information. So I'm gonna answer your question. I said, okay, well what can I talk about over and over again familiarity that I will be attached to that. I will be known as the person who was an authority on that. And it was customer interviews. So I purposely, for the first couple years in LinkedIn, that's all I talked about every single day was customer interviews. I know people, marketers will often struggle with that type of repetition, but. Think about how often your target market will be exposed to something that, of all the things throughout the course of the day and within all the things that are being inundated with all the information. So even though I'm repeating the same thing, John over and over again, and I'm just finding new ways to write it. What that did about a year, about eight months later, I started to get tagged in posts about, oh, Ryan knows this thing,

John Tyreman: 23:18

Yeah.

Ryan Paul Gibson: 23:19

thing. That was the beginning of it. Because what I had done is I had built familiarity. had spoken with so I had built trust.'cause that's really what the mere exposure effect helps as well, helps, us build, trust with brand. And it made that link or two from like, this is like, I need the information, how to do this. This is where I go to learn how to do it. I hope that answered the question, but that's like how I, that's how I've really tried to do it.

Mark Wainwright: 23:52

you're listening to breaking biz dev

John Tyreman: 23:54

the podcast that beats up, breaks down, and redefines business development for the professional services firms of tomorrow. Your hosts are John Tyerman, founder of Red Cedar Marketing, the podcast marketing company for experts and professional services firms,

Mark Wainwright: 24:08

And Mark Wainwright, principal consultant and founder of Wainwright Insight, the fractional sales manager and sales consultant to professional services firms.

John Tyreman: 24:18

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by following the show and leaving a review on Apple podcasts

Mark Wainwright: 24:24

and now back to the show.

John Tyreman: 24:27

Alright, mark, what did you think of that conversation with Ryan? I.

Mark Wainwright: 24:30

Well, I, you know, above and beyond the content, I just really appreciate his, thoughtfulness. I think he's, he, um. understands, calls out, brings, brings to the level of consciousness. All this stuff that's kind of going on in our heads, which is always fascinating to me. I think that he, he understood from the get go that he needed to be the guy, right? I mean, like, he, he was super intentional about creating, creating this visible authority. That's a term we've used a lot, right? Creating this visible authority. So he was not so one of many, he was. was the, you know, customer insights Right and yeah, he reinforced a lot of the things that we said, he uses a, a few words in there I thought were good. He uses, you're building familiarity to get to a certain point where, your clients will put you in sort of the consideration category, right?

John Tyreman: 25:22

Right.

Mark Wainwright: 25:22

A term, right? So it's once you cross that line. Once, once they trust you, once you're credible enough, once they understand that you have a certain expertise, then you can be considered, you know, one of the, prospective, consultants. And without, being remembered, without building familiarity, without doing all the work ahead of time, you're just not gonna make it to the point of consideration.

John Tyreman: 25:46

Yeah. Totally agree and that was, that was one of the big takeaways that I had too. The other one that I thought was kind of stood out the most to me was when Ryan said that memories of impression fade over time. And so the exposure effect re-ups that familiarity. So that just kind of like reinforces that whole core concept of being consistent with your marketing, being consistent with your sales activities all throughout that customer journey.

Mark Wainwright: 26:13

Yeah, and as I mentioned earlier, this, some of this stuff is just screamingly obvious, but we're not intentional, deliberate, about, recognizing the importance of it and then sort of building mechanisms in our organizations to establish, maintain familiarity, you know, with current and prospective clients, uh, then it fades over time and lo and behold. Fast forward months, years down the road, it's just we've completely lost track of, you know, even

John Tyreman: 26:48

Yep.

Mark Wainwright: 26:48

that we've worked with. It's just we've, those, those connections have become thready just because we've failed at this familiarity.

John Tyreman: 26:57

It's just like growing a garden, you know? Once they get to a certain point, you gotta trim, you gotta fertilize, you gotta tend to it. So,

Mark Wainwright: 27:04

Yeah, I'm, I'm a terrible gardener, John, so I just, you know, truth be told, I I, I appreciate the metaphor, but man, yeah. It's just, it's a top one for me.

John Tyreman: 27:12

well, it's springtime here. My tomato plants are starting to pop up, so.

Mark Wainwright: 27:15

Yeah. No, that's good. Yeah, we're, we're in the Pacific Northwest. We have a window of about eight minutes

John Tyreman: 27:20

You're right.

Mark Wainwright: 27:20

stuff, so we'll see what happens.

John Tyreman: 27:23

Alright, so that was Ryan Paul Gibson, and so I'm glad that we were able to capture his expertise on this topic. We have one more voice for you listeners out there, and Molina Palmer is the CEO of the brainy business. She also hosts a podcast by the same name. And Mark, you turned me on to Molina. I hadn't heard of her. And then you mentioned her to me and I, I love her content.

Mark Wainwright: 27:48

Yeah, she's fantastic. She goes deep.

John Tyreman: 27:50

Yes.

Mark Wainwright: 27:50

to call you and I any level of expert when it comes to, you know, behavioral science, behavioral economics, any of that stuff, you know, would be ridiculous compared to the knowledge. And the, content library that Molina has built in her podcast, in her writing, everything else, her consulting practice is great. So she does speaking events, everything else. So we all know you have discretionary time to spend on podcasts and other things like that, and we appreciate that you've come to listen to us. But man, if you find a little bit of extra time, go listen to some stuff from Melina. She's fantastic.

John Tyreman: 28:25

Absolutely. So with that said, here comes Molina Palmer on the Mere Exposure Effect. i'd like to start with one that I refer to as the mere Exposure Effect. You know, it, it's probably called many different names. Can you share with our audience just the basic principles behind that cognitive bias and then how it could be applied to specifically consultants who are offering a professional service?

Melina Palmer: 28:50

Sure. And so, yes, the mere exposure effect is a thing. And there's also, similar or other names that you might. Come across or people might have heard being familiarity bias or the

John Tyreman: 29:01

Yep.

Melina Palmer: 29:02

principle. And so essentially what research has found is that the more we are exposed to something, the more likely we are to like it. And that new stuff we are less likely to like, and that's where. If you are exposed though to the same thing multiple times, you will essentially like it more and more each time. The most common sort of example that gets thrown out for this is if you think about we all have where there's that new song and the first time you hear it, you hate it. Like, why does anyone like this? This sucks. It's the worst. Turn it off. Then the next time maybe you listen to a little bit more. And like before you know it, it's totally your jam and you're rocking out to that song forever and you love

John Tyreman: 29:51

wasn't

Melina Palmer: 29:52

to it again and again on repeat. And it's your absolute favorite. And that transition is something that comes from being just essentially exposed to it. And so. applies to all sorts of things. This is where people are likely to fall in love with, their best friends or coworkers as you're around people more. And then for brands, where if the first time you see a product, I. You may not notice or not care about it or think it's weird or dumb, but if you see the same ad multiple times, more likely to buy. And to feel like, oh yeah, I like this thing and it feels like everybody must have this thing. I know what that is, right? So, you wanna buy in on whatever that is. So lessons in business, for one, it's easy to feel like. I did the pitch and nothing happened and it's over. And now I have to do something new and different. And you wanna be innovative all the time. But that is not really how our brains work. We like the things that we've seen, multiple times and so don't be too quick to jump and say, well, I said that once and so now I can never say it that way again, or I can't show that ad or that product again. Because. That doesn't really work with how, how our brains are aligned. So, you know, stick with it and know that it can, have people open up to it, you know, a little bit more over time. Um, and then also just for your own self, you know, as you know, people are. We also have a status quo bias. And so you are gonna

John Tyreman: 31:28

Mm-hmm.

Melina Palmer: 31:29

for, the way you've always done things. What feels familiar is something that your brain is wired to like more. And that doesn't mean though, that it's better. Than what is outside of it. And so even that example I was giving, earlier about on my podcast where I had a certain way, I was doing episodes, and even by episode seven I'm saying like, but this is how I've done it and this is what people are used to hearing from me. So I can't change the format. But it feels comfortable, familiar, safe, because I've been exposed to that process before and that new thing may feel a little bit uncertain, but by switching to that new format, I would say so much growth of the show and how it has built my business came from that shift that I made by being willing to be a little bit uncomfortable and try something new. So. Helping yourself get out there and try different stuff. Even if it feels a little bit awkward or bad, or like you're not good at it, know that that can come if you just try it a few more times. So even committing there, like with my podcast saying I'm gonna do it for six months or a year before I get to decide if it's working or not. Picking a longer term where you can get familiar with it, over that, you know, exposure of time can help to really see if there is value in that thing and just be open to letting go and trying something new though too.

John Tyreman: 32:49

Alright, mark, what were your takeaways from what Molina had to say?

Mark Wainwright: 32:53

Yeah, we're hitting that nail giant. It's like nothing new. Right. She had that one analogy about the, the song,

John Tyreman: 32:58

I liked that one.

Mark Wainwright: 32:59

that, you know, and I know you're a, a musician. yeah, the song thing is that you hear the new song. And for me it was when I hear the new song from an artist that I really enjoy

John Tyreman: 33:11

Uh,

Mark Wainwright: 33:11

the song. Isn't immediately comfortable'cause they think, oh, that's, that's a familiar artist. I think the the artist's songs need to sound a particular way or they need to be a certain thing. And then over time, you know, they, they, we get more and more familiar and lo and behold, we like them more. But the song was the same from day one. Jung, the song

John Tyreman: 33:30

that's right.

Mark Wainwright: 33:31

It's been us that has been changing around the song.'cause the song stayed. The same to use a Led Zeppelin

John Tyreman: 33:38

remains the same. That's,

Mark Wainwright: 33:40

So there you go. So

John Tyreman: 33:42

there you go. So

Mark Wainwright: 33:42

wow. That was been, that was, I

John Tyreman: 33:44

I'm a Big Zeppelin fan. Yeah.

Mark Wainwright: 33:45

I love it. So that was fun. I, I, I appreciated that and we've all likely experienced that. Again, these are, you know, Molina and others are experts in taking all these things that are happening behind the scenes and are subconscious and bringing them to light. So she did a good job with that.

John Tyreman: 33:59

Totally, totally. Yep. The song analogy was kinda my big takeaway, and I love that, how she made that so relatable to the listeners and everyone out there. I think the big takeaway for me is, you know, give campaigns time enough to build that familiarity, right? So often do I see professional services firms give a marketing campaign 60 to 90 days, and then they pull the plug before it has a chance to take a hold.

Mark Wainwright: 34:23

Yeah, good, good point. And, and not just pulling the plug on the campaign, John, like just writing off, all marketing in general. They're like, ah, that doesn't, that doesn't work. You know, we just, we just need to get our people in the room to, you know, handshakes and backs, slaps and close the deal, and they don't. They don't spend the time and energy and, and sort of exercise sufficient patience in order to see these things So yeah, good point there.

John Tyreman: 34:57

Yeah. All right. Well, I think we've sufficiently beaten up this principle and made it readily available and exposed the mere exposure effect for our listeners. Mark, this was a ton of fun. Until next time.

Mark Wainwright: 35:11

Until next time.