Persuasion with Lee Hartley Carter

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr. Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley.

Our guest this week has a passion for language. Lee Hartley Carter is a partner at maslansky + partners, a research-driven language strategy firm that specializes in finding the right language and messaging. She oversees a diverse range of language strategy work for companies ranging from Fortune 500 businesses to nonprofits in the US and around the world. And we got our start in politics, advocating for teaching hospitals, graduate medical education, the use of bicycle helmets, and healthcare for those who couldn’t afford it. And she is the author of the new book, Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter. Lee is also an occasional contributor to Fox News and MSNBC. Welcome to the show, Lee.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to have this conversation, especially with you.

Roger Dooley:     Well, thanks. Yeah, Fox News and MSNBC, they seem like strange bedfellows. You’re still welcome on both?

Lee Hartley Carter:       I am still welcome on both. I think what I bring to the table for both of them is an understanding of what’s resonating and what’s not. And it doesn’t really matter who’s resonating and what their political ideology is as much as understanding what it is that people here. And so I’m able to help people navigate who was on top of the election process right now.

Roger Dooley:     Right, and for our international listeners, Fox News and MSNBC are at the opposite ends of the political spectrum. And often the commentators on one would not necessarily be welcome on the other, but if you stick to the facts, although oddly enough, Lee, your book says facts don’t seem to matter, but it seems like you’re doing well by sticking to the facts, at least in this case.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Yeah, what I really think is important to my job when I’m uncovering what’s resonating and why it’s not my opinion matters it’s the target audience. So I really try to keep my opinion out of it and keep the voters’ opinions in it. And I think that’s really one of the keys to persuasion as a whole anyway, is in many ways, it doesn’t matter what we think. In our business, we say, “There’s two truths, there’s your truth and their truth.” That’s the truth of the target audience and there’s only one that matters and it’s theirs. And so that’s really the key, I think, to everything

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Why is it that facts don’t seem to matter today? Is this a unique period in time or has that always been the case? Because, I mean, it really does seem like people are simply often oblivious to facts that if you put a few rational people together, everybody would agree regardless of what part of the political spectrum they came from. Say, “Okay, Lee.” Now, this is generally true, but these days it just seems like that doesn’t happen very often.

Lee Hartley Carter:       It does feel that way. Although, I would argue that we say that the facts no longer matter. I’m not sure that they ever did. I just think we’re living in a very different time in history. It used to be that we had authority that we trusted. So whether that was the one person at the dinner party that you used to say that was your fact checker, or it was the good housekeeping seal of approval, or it was a company being able to say some fact about themselves. We use to trust authority and is solutions we don’t want anymore. And that’s because information is really been democratized, and we’re able to check everything with a couple of strokes on a keyboard or on your mobile phone, and you don’t have to trust anybody anymore. You can get your own set of facts.

And so there’s the scientific reasons that we don’t necessarily trust facts by themselves. And I know a lot of folks are familiar with what we call confirmation bias. We’re likely to pick up opinions and data and facts that already reinforced opinions that we hold. And if we hear a fact that contradicts, a thing that we believe, we might ignore it, we might reject it, we’re not likely to believe it. And so that’s why we have to do something different and just communicate with facts because all the time I’m with clients who are trying to sell their product, they’re trying to turn their company around. And they’ll say something like, “If our customers only knew we had the better product, if they only knew that we were really a good company, if they only knew the facts around sustainability that we have on our side, then they know that we’re a good company where they buy our product.”

And usually, when it happens, you know that people are trying to communicate with facts alone. And facts alone, and we say, “Facts don’t set you free.” I talk about that a lot in my book, and they don’t. Facts don’t tell your story, and they’re not going to change hearts and they’re not going to change minds.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, it seems that people are unpersuadable today, but perhaps that’s not entirely true. I think the unpersuadable thing comes from what you describe as confirmation bias. And one thing that is a little bit different I think today than perhaps in the past is that we have these confirmation bias bubbles around us, where there are the streams of information that are directed at us. Now, we can pick and choose those that we tend to agree with, whether we’re doing it consciously or unconsciously. And as a result, our opinions get more entrenched and our ability to reject other people’s ideas or even facts that may contradict ours is certainly a lot higher than it would be otherwise.

Lee Hartley Carter:       That’s right. And because we are in these bubbles, our opinions or ability to reject facts is even more vehement, or even more visceral in our reaction because we know that there’s so many people that agree with our own opinion. And it’s just become more and more emotional. There’s also something that’s called the backfire effect. And the backfire effect is if you hit somebody with facts alone and they contradict and you can actually make them… you sort of dig their heels in even deeper and say, “They start to prove that they’re right rather than they’re wrong.” And so it’s a really interesting phenomenon in age that we’re living in to try and communicate against this path to get people with either an element of surprise, you have to meet them where they are, you have to treat them with empathy. There’s a lot of emotion around how you have to engage somebody so they’re going to be receptive to hearing your message rather than just saying, “I’m either going to ignore it, reject it, or get angry by it.”

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, a few weeks ago I had Duane Varan of MediaScience on the show. He didn’t call the 2016 election for Trump, but his firm use neuroscience tools like EEG and facial expression analysis to highlight some of the negative emotional responses to Hillary Clinton, even among many Democrats. And you actually did predict a Trump win. What did you use for your research that led you to that conclusion that really was out of step prior to the election with the polling?

Lee Hartley Carter:       Yeah, so we use a technology called emotional response or instant response technology. We used to do it in person and focus group settings. We get 30 people together at a time and try to understand how they’re reacting to the candidates’ different messaging. And people would respond on a second by second basis using a handheld dial to different messages. And I can remember in 2015, I was in San Francisco and I was doing a group with environmentally engaged consumers. Now, that is not a group of consumers who would ever be pro-Donald Trump or any Republican message, except that I tested it with this group and I found that there was some positive responses to part of what he was saying. But when I asked them in person what they thought about what he was saying, they said lots of negative things. He’s crazy. He’s never going to be president. He’s terrible. He’s a reality star. He’s never going to be president.

And then I asked them to write down what they thought about the now president. And they wrote down things like provocative, different, unique, maybe he brings something different to Washington D.C. And I realized that there had to be another way to capture emotional response besides traditional polling and in-person focus groups. So we developed an online tool along with a company to try and understand more broadly how people were reacting. And it was that tool that allowed us to understand people’s visceral reactions to all the messages. And what we saw when we did that is that it wasn’t just Republicans that the president was capturing at the time, it was also independence. And there were things that the president was doing at the time, whether you like him or not, that really are what I would call some of the essential keys to persuasion.

We had them versus the other candidates in the primary, and then we had them versus Hillary Clinton in the general election. And I would argue that right now Elizabeth Warren is using those same keys, the persuasion that Donald Trump did. But there’s a lot of similarities in their campaigns and messaging and the way that they’re going about persuading. There’s not a lot in common in their policies, but it’s really interesting to see, and she’s having a smaller third right now to what Donald Trump did in 2015.

Roger Dooley:     Right, what are some of the techniques that you would say Warren is using now that mimic Donald’s?

Lee Hartley Carter:       Yeah, so when you look at the messaging of each of the candidates on the Democrat side, and they were 17 of them, all of them had messages that were in reaction to Donald Trump. Joe Biden was, we’re in a fight for the soul of America. Mayor Pete was talking about, we can’t go at about being great again. We were always great. A lot of the candidates all have this message that’s not surrounded on us, the voters, it’s around them and their ability to defeat Donald Trump, or the reason that we need to be Donald Trump. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, has a master narrative that’s really about creating an America that works for all of us, not for the wealthy and the well-connected.

So she’s developing this master narrative that is very much about all of us having a better place to live and it’s very much about us versus them. Them being the wealthy and well-connected, Donald Trump had it very much about being us versus the swamp. So very similar in how they set it up, but he was to make America great again. And she is developing this other narrative that’s just sort of coalescing. I don’t think she quite has the tagline down yet, but every time she talks, it’s very much about us versus the wealthy and well-connected and America that works for all of us, not just a few of us.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, very interesting. Way back when I wrote about Trump’s sort of us versus them messaging, which is very powerful persuasion tool because it’s so incredibly easy to use that type of messaging. And I think it was a unretired field scientist who first worked on that and found that you could divide a class into two groups and within a few minutes have them at each other’s throats practically with ridiculous distinctions like you’re the red group and you’re the green group.

Lee Hartley Carter:       It’s true.

Roger Dooley:     And it is unfortunately powerful, even if it is divisive, but it works.

Lee Hartley Carter:       It does work.

Roger Dooley:     Well, one other thing I think you mentioned too was that some of the other candidates are talking about their plans, their messages. To me, that’s very analogous to a company that wants to talk about its products as opposed to the needs and wants and even the unspoken needs and wants of their consumers. If you’re talking about your policies, what you’re going to do, your stuff, why you’re better, and so on, that’s no different than a company saying, “Hey, we got the best product. These are the five reasons why it’s better.”

Lee Hartley Carter:       Exactly, right. So this is the other thing that I think that Elizabeth Warren does very, very well right now. And that is she’s packaged up her policies under broad themes, rather than saying, “Here’s a list of all my policies.” And instead of saying she’s got 112 policies to address the problems America’s facing, she said, “I’ve got a plan for that.” Now, I’ve got a plan for that, has become sort of a symbol for her people wearing T-shirts outside of her rallies. But the thing a lot of companies and a lot of people do when they’re trying to persuade is exactly that. I’ve got a product for you, I’m solving this problem. They’re not really talking about the benefit to folks. And I think that it’s a big mistake and a big mess if we don’t start with a need that the person has. So if the need that people have is around creating a quality in the workplace, that’s what we should be talking about, not about this is the policy. And that’s something that she does very, very well.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, Lee, early in the book, you talk about persuading someone to give you what you want starts with intimately knowing that person and caring about who they are and what they need. Now, for people in business, they may say, “well, gee, we’ve got all kinds of customers.” How do you recommend they go about doing that?

Lee Hartley Carter:       I remember when I first started in this business years ago, it was our job to really fall in love with your target audience. And I don’t mean just have data about them, and I don’t just mean like to know demographics, swats about them, how much money they have. I mean, really truly understand what makes them tick, what’s important to them, why they do what they do. And so I think we have more data than we’ve ever had about our customers. So we know them less. And I think that our job is really to start to get to know them and understand them better. And we’ll say that their customers are all shapes and sizes and they’ve got huge numbers and different kinds of customers. But I think most successful brands are really zeroed in on a couple of them. So they know them very, very, very well.

The great persona is behind them to really understand what makes them tick. And so you can see in political campaigns, Mckenna really knows their target audience. You can tell that, and I think president knows what a Trump supporter is and he communicates right to them. Elizabeth Warren knows exactly who her base is. She’s communicating right to them. Companies who are really successful at this, they have a personality and they know their customers really well. So the way that I teach people to get to know their products to say you really clear on who they are. If any of my clients ever tell me that as huge number of different people, I say, “Well, let’s try and narrow it down and let’s pick no more than three.”

And then let’s try and pick apart three attributes that I really want everybody to understand. And I teach this in the book, what I call active empathy. Active empathy is about having empathy for the person that you’re trying to persuade, and it breaks down into three things. It’s trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they do what they do, why they have the values they do, or why they believe what they believe. And the third is why they feel the way they feel. I think it’s important to know that empathy is not an endorsement. Empathy simply means you’re taking the time to understand them and really get underneath their feelings. It’s not until you understand why they feel the way they feel that you can start persuading them and really start moving them. Because oftentimes when we have a superficial understanding of what people are about, we’ll make a mistake in how we communicate with them.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, just understanding what they feel it can be important. You had a good example in the book of actually several bank that was really surprised that its customers or potential customers didn’t think they were really great people because they knew they were great people, and kind of a similar thing for the pharmaceutical industry where one company thought, “Okay, Hey, we’re out here creating these lifesaving drugs. People must love us.” And it turns out people think they’re greedy jerks.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Exactly.

Roger Dooley:     So just getting to that realization that these maybe have no basis in fact, or they may have some basis in fact, it could be that your brain is being confused with other brands, or who knows. But just knowing what people feel to begin with is really important because I think so many companies just start off whether they’re even in the B2B market as well as the B2C market, that they think they know what their customers think, but actually they don’t.

Lee Hartley Carter:       That’s right. I think it’s so important that we take the time to really take a pulse in the beginning of what they think today. Because most of the time when we’re operating at a deficit and that we don’t necessarily understand how other people view us because we already know our company, our products, our services, our offering, we know a lot about it, but we don’t know what it’s like to know us from the outside. So taking that time to really understand can change the whole direction of how you’re going to communicate, and so I think the one example that you were talking about in the pharmaceutical industry, we thought this was so, so interesting and so important to the whole conversation was they could not understand why people felt so negatively towards pharma companies.

Most people at pharma companies or pharmaceutical companies go into the pharmaceutical industry because they are producing life saving medicines. And so they think that, “Why would you hate it? We’re good people.” And they were absolutely shocked to find out that most customers or most people out there had no idea that pharmaceutical companies are the engine behind research and development. Most people out there believe that invention and cures come from research hospitals and come from charities. And the reason for that is that whenever any one of us has a relative or knows someone who’s diagnosed with a terminal illness, the first thing we do is not get down on our knees and pray to a pharmaceutical company to come up with a cure. We’ll pray for cures and we’ll all sign up for a fundraiser. We’ll all go walk for a cure. We’ll do whatever it takes, but it’s never about the pharmaceutical company, it’s always about the charity.

And so people’s perceptions of pharmaceutical companies were they acquire these cures and then they sell them for a lot of money and they make money off the back of sick people. It’s a terrible misperception, but it’s a terrible reality that the pharmaceutical companies need to come to terms with. And so the answer is not for a pharmaceutical company to go out there and say, “Look at all of the great things that we do. We have a medicine out there that’s changing the face of cancer forever. We’ve got something in the pipeline, it’s going to maybe help with Alzheimer’s.” The answer is that they need to show people all the R&D that’s going on within their doors. All of the different things that they’re focused on, whether it’s for a cure or the small things that’s going to help your day-to-day life because people had no idea that that’s what was happening within the pharmaceutical industry. And once they were able to see that, then there would be more likely to have a conversation and be more open to the facts about what the pharmaceutical companies are doing.

Roger Dooley:     Right. How do you communicate that without looking self-serving? I mean, I could visualize a pharma company running ads, talking about these great work they’re doing, the cures that are under way, maybe even some individual scientists who have made breakthroughs and such, but I think consumers see double digit price increases every year on products that have been around for 10 plus years and they say, “Okay, these guys are gouging me.”

Lee Hartley Carter:       Right. But I think that the issue with persuasion is that you can’t put lipstick on a pig. I’m not going to try and tell people that they’re pulling the hood over anybody’s eyes, the wool over anybody’s eyes. They really need to be able to tell a good story. And so you have to have the truth and the facts on your side in order to persuade, at least in my opinion. And so in these instances, I think that it’s really important that you understand that. So that’s what sort of the starting point. But to answer your question, it takes a lot of discipline because we’re not going to change our minds right away. And to try and say that this company is different from that one company that might’ve been selling the EpiPen at crazy prices or this other company that was selling insulin for crazy prices, when you know that those things are out there, and a lot of the instincts that people have when they’re doing that they try to say, “Well, yes, but that we’re not.”

You have to help them create a new narrative and something that might even address that head-on. And so what we find is that you have to tell your story. You have to find a way that it’s going to be heard. You have to get information out there and you have to repeat it over and over and over again. We say if you haven’t gotten nauseous from repeating your message, you haven’t even begun to get traction. And so I think what you’re talking about is showing the scientists having people tell their stories. All of those things are exactly what you would expect and it is how they need to get out there, but they have to have the same message. They need to be out there consistently, and they need to have the data and the facts to back it up. But the data and the facts can’t tell the story by themselves.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). one point you make in the book is the importance of empathy and understanding that the other person’s point of view. I just the other day ran across a quote from Blaise Pascal from 1600s that said, “The way to persuade somebody is to first agree with them.” And that is almost really what you’re advocating here that you have to understand where they’re coming from and acknowledge that in some way. Show that, “Okay, we understand your point of view. And in fact, yes, there’s merit to some of what you say.” Let people know and that tends to disarm them a little bit as opposed to simply trying to pound them with facts and figures to change their mind, which generally doesn’t work very well.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Oh, 100%. The idea that you have to find common ground is one that I think is absolutely essential to persuasion. And I find in crisis communication especially, but in really all forms of whether it’s sales or whether it’s marketing, trying to understand where that other person’s coming from is so, so important to the conversation. So if you’ve ever been watching a crisis go wrong and you see the company coming out and communicating about all of the reasons why they weren’t that bad, you think about the United scandal a few years ago when they mistreated a passenger on a plane, it took them so long to get to the fact that no one wants to see somebody hurt or injured and it was a terrible thing. Instead, they were trying to say it wasn’t us, it was the police. They go right to trying to correct the facts that were wrong.

But the truth of the matter is, until you acknowledge the wrong, until you acknowledge that that person was hurt, you can never move forward. And that’s the reality. Whether you’re trying to persuade somebody in crisis, or whether you’re just trying to persuade somebody that your credit card is the better credit card, if you’re trying to say, “I feel your pain that you can never use those reward points that you’re accumulating,” we want to have a credit that you can actually use. There’s something refreshing about people understanding and meeting you where you are. And I think it’s just essential.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, early in the book you mentioned Frank Luntz who we’re both fans of, is famous for choosing amazingly effective words and even creating words, turning the estate tax into death tax, which sounds a lot whole lot worse and so on. I’d like to get to some of the specific word choices that you talk about in the book. What is wrong with an innovative sleep aid? Sounds like a good thing to me.

Lee Hartley Carter:       It’s really interesting. And innovative sleep aid, a lot of people said, “I don’t want to be the Guinea pig, I’m a sleep aid. That sounds dangerous. And innovative sleep aid is not necessarily something I want.” But if you told me that you had a breakthrough sleep aid, very similar language, but it actually means something different to folks. Breakthrough is something that could change the game and usually means it’s changed the game for the better. So people would say things like, “Well, let me tell you that penicillin is still a breakthrough today. But it changed the game.” So that was really important. They also talked about this idea of a sleep aid with no trade-offs. All sleep aids on the market today had trade-offs.

So if you talked about it as… an innovative sleep aid they said, “Well, is that going to be something that’s still going to give me that hangover feeling in the morning and I might miss the next day. It’s like I’d sleep tonight, but worst day tomorrow. They’re saying it was the sleep aid with no trade-offs with something that was really, really powerful to folks and indicated to them it meant an unsolved problem that they had the sleep aid category. So those two pieces of language did a lot more work for them than just saying was an innovative

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). And how about vodka? Do you want an innovative vodka?

Lee Hartley Carter:       You don’t want an innovative vodka. One of the things that we found, there’s this trend in the beverage category where everybody wants craft. And so this company was trying to figure out the best place to talk about their innovation around craft. We found that people were more likely to be in tune with this company because of their heritage. They had a long history of handmade vodkas that came from Europe. And so that was a much more important to their story then anything else they could talk about because it was incredible who they were.

And then we also worked a while ago when Starbucks was coming out with instant coffee. They wanted to talk about it as instant coffee, but the problem was nobody wanted instant coffee. Certainly, in the United States, instant coffees conjured up this idea of Sanka, which was watered down, grainy, not strong enough. And when we changed the language from instant coffee to Starbucks coffee in an instant, also instead of calling it instant coffee, we called it ready brew, it had a very different impact on the consumer and they were able to hear it very differently. But again, it was language that met people where they were and it didn’t send off those triggers. So really being aware of what people think about what it is that you’re talking about helps you shape the conversation so that you can talk to them in a more powerful way.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, and it has to resonate with the brand too. Like if Budweiser said, “Wow, people want craft beer. So we’re going to call our Budweiser flagship brand name Craft beer, people would reject that as being a false claim because it’s not really even… it may be well crafted, but it is not what people are expecting and it’s not an artisanal beer or handcrafted.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Yeah, and I think that really goes back to understanding if you go through these steps in a process, as I lay them out in the book, the first thing is creating your vision. So knowing crystal clear what it is that you want. The second thing is understanding your target audience, really what they want. But then you really need to understand what they think about you so that you can identify those weak points or those points that are might be obstacles or barriers for you when meeting them where they are. And so if you’re Anheuser-Busch and you’re trying to come out with craft beer, once you go through that exercise, you’re going to realize you’ve got a problem.

So either you’re going to have to address it head-on and say, “We know that we’re a big beer company who makes Budweiser, but we also have the ability to make craft, or you’re going to have to address that need in some better way, but you know that you absolutely must address it, or you will not pass though. Because in this day and age where the most important things you can do in persuasion is authenticity. Authenticity is everything. And so I think people would rather make some kind of a sacrifice or trade-off or know that you’ve got some kind of inherent weakness that you flipped on its head. That’s the way to be more effective in communicating.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, jumping back to the vodka market, now in the book you talk about Tito’s being the competitor for your client’s product. One thing that they’ve done, they’re based here in Austin, and I don’t know if you’ve seen this campaign, but they’ve been promoting it as Vodka for Dog People, which I find really fascinating is there are absolutely no connection between vodka and dogs. But there are a lot of dog people in this country. At one point, I ran the numbers and it’s like there’s three times as many dog people as dog owners, as people who drink vodka. So it’s hardly a limited market. And with that claim, they are invoking what Cialdini would call either liking or even unity. It’s partly that part of we’re part of the same ingroup that we talked about earlier.

And so to me, it’s a brilliant strategy. I don’t know how else it worked. I know they’ve done it for a while. They put it on little neck rings and other types of advertising, their web advertising. So I guess it must’ve gotten a pretty good reception. And the other thing that’s cool is people will share that they did some swag for pets and people will share their pets wearing Tito’s swag, like a little sweater and it says Tito’s on it or eating out of a dog bowl that says Tito’s, where they’re probably not going to post a picture of their vodka bottle.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Right. Well, I think that does two… well, actually probably does three things what they’ve done there is, one, you’ve created a sense of community around your brand. If I stand with Tito’s that’s what it means? And I think that’s really important of effective persuasion. You know what it means when you stand with something and there something really, really powerful about that. So creating community around that. Two, there’s something really emotional about how people feel about their dogs and about dogs in general, whether you have one, or whether you’re a self-identified dog versus cat person because I feel like most people say they’re one or the other. so you created this sense of emotion and belonging. And then you’ve also created some kind of shareability, which is I think one of the things that you want to be able to do when you’re effectively communicating is creating ambassadors for you. You have a simple repeatable message is something that people can then do for you.

So by saying that and giving out that kind of swag and making those kinds of Instagram bowl or social media shareable moments, you’re creating a whole host of brand ambassadors for you. And so when you can find a persuasion strategy that does those three things really, really, really well, you’re definitely onto something because that’s the ultimate goal. It’s not just for you to be able to say it. You want other people to repeat it, and you want people to be part of your community and belong to it and identify with it.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, Lee, before we wrap up, I want to talk about one last topic that I found really clever and fascinating. I think that there’d be some good takeaways here for our listeners, and that is how you can flip a weakness into a strength by using language. I wonder if you could give a few examples of that, like for a company that’s really small and that generally would be perceived of as being a weakness.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Oh, yeah. If a company’s really, really small, competing against larger companies to say something like you’re a boutique company who is able to service somebody’s unique needs, you can really flip that thing. We’re not small enough to say, “We’re not big enough to compete,” we’re small enough to be able to meet you where you are. And I think there’s a real trend around that. I think there’s a lot of… whenever you have a weakness, there’s just always an opportunity to turn it into a strength. If somebody might not have experience in a certain sector or in a certain place, and you can say, you bring an outside perspective. If you’re too big, like we were talking about Anheuser before, you can say, “We’re big, but we have enough scale that we can have a huge impact.” So you could talk about something differently. But I think it’s really important and it’s a big opportunity that the companies and folks have to create a real authenticity point of connection if you take that weakness and flip it into…

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s great. I love the small flipped into boutique. We’re not a small agency, we’re a boutique agency, or we’re a focused agency that changes the whole narrative with just one choice of words. So if our listeners want to get more of that, I will remind them that today we are speaking with Lee Hartley Carter, partner at maslansky + partners and author of the new book, Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter. Lee, how can people find you and your ideas?

Lee Hartley Carter:       So you can learn more at leehartleycarter.com, or you can find me at maslansky.com. You can follow me on Twitter @lh_carter.

Roger Dooley:     Great. Well, we will link to those places and any other resources we spoke about on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast. And we’ll have a text version of our conversation there too. Lee, thanks for being on the show. It’s always great to chat with someone who’s really focused on persuasion.

Lee Hartley Carter:       Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book Friction is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to rogerdooley.com/friction.