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WE ARE EXPERTS IN ELEVATING BRAND PERCEPTIONS.

We create brand strategies that not only create emotional connections—they work!

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Triggers® Philosophy

  • Every brand has untapped growth potential.

  • A penetration strategy creates more growth than getting existing customers to buy more.

  • Emotional benefits only work if they’re rooted in your product experience.

  • The right question to ask is not “how are your customers different” but rather how are they alike.

  • Design and visual identity are not merely "executional;" they’re the strategic responsibility of company leadership.

  • Mature and legacy brands have the power to become disruptors.

  • The only consultant worth your investment is the one that treats your business like their own.

  • The smallest nuances in customer habits often drive the largest innovations.

our team

Meet the people that are changing how marketing is done. A unique team of consultants with deep expertise in changing behavior and driving top-line growth. Averaging 15 to 30 years of experience inside and outside companies, they have the rare combination of analytical and activation skills need to jumpstart your business. No strategies too general to implement. No death by Powerpoint. Just people that are passionate about helping their clients—with the skills to deliver.

Leslie Zane

Founder & President

Known in the industry as THE BRAIN BEHIND BRANDS, Leslie Zane has turned the marketing industry on its head. She is changing the way companies do marketing through her unique expertise in changing instinctive brand behavior—the brand decisions that consumers make on auto-pilot.

Zane is the secret weapon behind some of the world’s most famous brand successes from McDonald's and Aquafina to Snickers, to name a few. Her company, TRIGGERS® Brand Consulting, has turned around Fortune 500 companies where no other brand or consulting firm was successful. Their secret? Instead of marketing to customers' conscious minds (an uphill battle), their Growth Triggers® process leverages cognitive shortcuts in the subconscious. Results are often 2X plus revenue growth. The company has generated $10bb in incremental revenue growth for its clients.

A Yale University and Harvard Business School graduate, Zane began her early career at top companies including Bain, P&G and Johnson & Johnson where she was surprised by the hit-or-miss performance of marketing initiatives. Zane’s perspectives defied traditional thinking. She maintained that what consumers say is unreliable, that indirect cues were more effective than direct persuasion, and that successful brands have multiple associations, not one defining identity trait. But, like many unconventional thinkers, her ideas were often dismissed. TRIGGERS® Brand Consulting had a 25-year head start practicing what behavioral science theorists are just trying to figure out now. Zane is a TEDx speaker and has been published in the Harvard Business Review, Knowledge@Wharton, MIT Sloan Review, Forbes, Ad Age, CMO.com, Barron’s, Newsweek, Mediapost, Scientific American and more. TRIGGERS® Brand Consulting was also the first brand consultancy founded by a woman.

A native New Yorker, Zane sits on two non-profit Boards: El Centro Hispano, dedicated to helping improve the lives of Hispanic immigrants, and CURATE 360 where she helps minority-owned companies improve their branding, become “retail ready” and scale their businesses.

Tom Gosline

VP & Brand Strategist

Gosline is a respected brand and innovation specialist with a 25 year hands-on track record of building brands in U.S. and international markets. He joined TRIGGERS® after being a client for a decade at PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. Previously, Gosline was Senior Director Experience Design at PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay and Director of Consumer and Shopper Insights at Quaker. Gosline also spent a decade leading global innovation at Kraft. He received his BA from Northwestern and MBA from Kellogg.

Mindy HARRIS

Research Director

Bringing over 30 years of experience to TRIGGERS®, Harris is considered one of the most respected researchers in the marketing industry today. She is highly regarded for her deep psychological insights and memory elicitation work. Harris directs the research component of client projects from inception to completion. She received her MSW from NYU in psychology and clinical social work, with a specialty in family and group dynamics.

Christi Botello

Senior Director

Christi is a creative and strategic brand marketing executive who has been responsible for multiple large scale brand restages and launches over the last 16 years. With extensive experience in both large and small scale companies, she’s often been brought in as a “fixer” to analyze complex business problems and solve them. Prior to joining TRIGGERS®, Christi held leadership roles within world class CPG companies including P&G and Revlon, as well as a start up in the personal care, Hello Products.

Heather Coyle

Managing Partner

Heather Coyle came to TRIGGERS® with over 20 years of strategic global healthcare branding, communications, and commercialization experience. Her diverse leadership background in HCP, DTC and DTP marketing, digital strategy, payor strategy, pharmaceutical sales, medical education and publication planning has provided her with an exceptional ability to address brand challenges and that drive measurable change in behavior for all target audiences. Prior to joining TRIGGERS® Coyle held leadership roles at Coordinated Health, Evoke Health Group, Cline Davis and Mann, and others.

Our Story

For 25 years we’ve been driving consistent growth for our clients.

As a brand manager in the 1980s, Leslie Zane saw brand-building differently from the rest of the industry and, like many unconventional thinkers, her recommendations were often dismissed. Instead of direct persuasion, Zane argued that indirect messages were more effective with consumers. Instead of judging products and content on likes and dislikes, she found that positive associations were a better predictor of purchase.

In 1995, seven years before Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his “System One” thinking, Zane pioneered and launched TRIGGERS®—the only proven method for changing instinctive customer behavior and increasing market share. It was also the first brand strategy firm founded by a woman. TRIGGERS® has a 25-year track record as practitioners (not just theorists) of behavioral science, boosting top-line growth consistently.

We believe in the power of brands to change and evolve.

This philosophy is ever-present in everything we do.

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