For decades, marketing has been built around a flawed assumption: that people make decisions consciously. Most don’t. Brands, companies—even candidates—win or lose based on associations formed deep in memory.

In this provocative talk, behavioral expert and award-winning Fortune 500 brand consultant Leslie Zane reveals how to move beyond the conscious mind to activate the instinctive mind—the true driver of choice. When you do, growth accelerates with less spending, less time, and less risk.

Drawing on groundbreaking work with McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Mars, and other global leaders, Zane introduces the Brand Connectome®—the command-and-control system behind instinctive decision-making. Master it, and you can unlock faster growth for any business, brand, movement, or political candidate.

Sample topics include:

• Why Taylor Swift’s success is behavioral, not accidental

• How to reignite legacy brands when momentum stalls

• How underfunded brands and startups outgrow far larger competitors

• How to strengthen your personal brand to accelerate your career

• Why politics is so polarized—and the behavioral recipe for winning elections

This isn’t marketing as usual. It’s the new science of instinctive choice. Once you understand how brand growth actually happens, you’ll never look at marketing the same way again.
 

Leslie Zane is an award-winning marketer and behavioral expert, TEDx speaker and foremost authority in harnessing the instinctive mind for brand and business growth.
 
During her early career at P&G and Johnson & Johnson, Zane maintained that what people say is unreliable, that telegraphic cues are more effective than direct persuasion and that brands are being over-promoted instead of creating instinctive brand preference. Like many unconventional thinkers, her ideas were often dismissed. In 1995, she founded Triggers®, the first brand consulting firm rooted in behavioral science generating over $25 billion in incremental revenue for Fortune 100 clients.
 
An alumna of Yale, Harvard Business School and Bain, Zane is recipient of the Congressional Women of Distinction and Ogilvy Award. In 2021, she coined the term “Covid-stasis,” predicting lasting behavioral effects of the pandemic. Zane’s work has been featured in over 25 prestigious publications including Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum. Her new book, “The Power of Instinct: The New Rules of Persuasion In Business And Life,” has been hailed as “the biggest gamechanger since Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Blink."

Zane serves on the board of El Centro Hispano which empowers Hispanic immigrants with skills to thrive in the United States.

This Event is organized by Liliane Offredo-Zreik '00 MBA - HRCW Board Member