How to Become the Person People Think of First

Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a strategy each week to influence human behavior for good from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

Thank you all who took the poll! About 60% of you wanted short newsletter issues, but 40% wanted the full break down. So I’m giving you BOTH! Each issue will have a “60 Second Influence” section upfront and then an “Influence Deep Dive” for those who want the full breakdown.

(DEEP DIVE AFTER THIS SECTION)

“If people can’t repeat your value, they can’t recommend it.”

There are professionals who deliver great value, but are not as successful as they deserve. Why?

Mostly because they are invisible and unremarkable (they aren’t designed to be remembered and talked about.)

You see, the brain prefers:

So if people cannot quickly describe what makes you valuable, they will struggle to:

This is why many highly capable people plateau while less capable ones get more opportunities and become more successful.

From my interview with the father of modern branding, David Aaker, his most important piece of advice:

“Brand your secret sauce.”

That means:

The ones who get it do this constantly:

These names become cognitive shortcuts.

Professionals should do the same.

Examples:

The goal is not about sounding clever. The goal is to reduce cognitive effort.

Because careers are shaped by what people can remember about you when you are not in the room.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

(If you want, I’m hosting a live event: The Invisible Expert Problem this Thursday. Register HERE)

Most people think branding is primarily about visibility.

Logos.
Colors.
Design.
Advertising.
Social media.

As someone who’s been working as a brand strategist for more than decade and my recent conversation with the father of modern branding and Vice Chairman of Prophet, David Aaker, it solidified my thesis about branding.

Branding is designing a system for memory.

And brand equity — the thing companies spend billions trying to build — is ultimately a mental asset that exists inside other people’s minds.

Which means branding isn’t just about visibility, it’s about becoming associated with something specific. Think about the most iconic brands in the world, what are they trying to associate with?

And that process of association? It usually begins with framing.

During our conversation, David referenced the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who argued:

That idea sits underneath almost every successful brand.

Strong brands frame conversations. They direct attention and focus toward a specific lens, problem, value system, or experience.

This is why positioning matters so much. (Positioning is about intentionally occupying a space in the mind of the customer, standing apart from available options.)

Without positioning, the market defines you by default.

You become generic.
Interchangeable.
Difficult to remember.

But once a company successfully frames the conversation, branding begins reinforcing that frame emotionally and repeatedly.

This is where many people misunderstand branding.

They assume people make decisions through rational evaluation first and emotion second.

But neuroscience suggests something far messier and more human, and yes, even in B2B situations. (Think about the social risk a B2B buyer faces if they chose the wrong company to work with?)

Antonio Damasio, the world renown neuroscientist’s work on decision-making showed that emotion is not separate from reasoning — it is essential to it. People with impaired emotional processing often struggle to make even simple decisions despite retaining intelligence and logic.

Which means human beings do not navigate the world through pure analysis.

We navigate through emotions and associations.

Stories.
Feelings.
Symbols.
Memories.
Patterns.

That is why David spent so much time during our conversation talking about stories.

Stories bypass resistance differently than explanations do.

An argument can be debated while a story is felt.

And emotional experiences become especially important because emotion strengthens encoding in memory. The brain tends to retain emotionally charged experiences more easily than neutral information.

This is one reason why signature stories become powerful brand assets over time.

They transform abstract positioning into something lived and emotionally understood.

But there is another important layer to branding that emerged repeatedly throughout the conversation:

NAMING

In an example, David described how Uniqlo didn’t merely create innovative fabrics. They named them:

This matters far more than it initially appears. Without names, innovation remains cognitively slippery. Think about all the great ideas with terrible names, they don’t usually go very far.

The brain struggles to retrieve unnamed (or poorly named) complexity.

But once something receives a memorable label, it becomes easier to:

HeatTech is designed to signal value. It is not just a fabric, it becomes a category cue.

A mental shortcut.

A branded association between Uniqlo and warmth innovation.

That is what strong brands do repeatedly: they compress complexity into memorable cognitive structures.

Over time, those structures accumulate emotional associations, trust, familiarity, and meaning. That accumulation becomes brand equity. And this applies far beyond companies.

Professionals (you) build reputations the same way. People eventually become associated with what they show up as over and over again. And if you don’t intentionally build those associations, imagine what they could be?

The professionals who become highly referable are often the ones whose value becomes easiest to retrieve from memory.

This is why branding is not superficial.

It is fundamentally about:

Or put more simply:

The goal of branding is to occupy mental territory.

This comes from the Lakoff/Aaker idea: Whoever controls the frame controls the interpretation.

Most professionals let their role define them:

That’s weak positioning.

Instead, define:

Examples:

This becomes the mental frame people associate with you.

Not your job title.

(Quick reminder, I’m hosting a live event this Thursday: The Invisible Expert Problem. Register HERE)

This is the signature story concept.

Instead of:

“I’m good at stakeholder alignment.”

Tell:

“We had six departments fighting over priorities and I was losing sleep over it. Then two weeks before launch we realized the real issue wasn’t the strategy, it was that nobody shared the same definition of success. So I…”

That’s memorable and that gets people to lean in “what happened?”

Stories:

Behaviorally: emotion strengthens memory encoding.

That’s why stories travel farther socially than expertise alone.

This is the “brand your secret sauce” layer.

Most expertise remains invisible because it has no cognitive anchor.

So:

Examples:

The point is cognitive fluency.

The easier your value is to retrieve, the easier it is to spread.

And that’s ultimately what branding is: making meaning easier to remember and transmit.

This is how you become the first person on someone’s mind when they think about a problem YOU solve!

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

​Follow me on LinkedIn

P.S. 24% of respondents say they will shift perspectives to calm emotions in a tense situation. What would you do? Join 796 other leaders who’ve uncovered their natural influence style profile: Take the free assessment.