Monday, March 14, 2022
Why is it important to create a compelling message? On this episode Bill Glazier and Dan Kennedy discuss why it's important and some different strategies you should consider when creating your compelling message.
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Russell Brunson: Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing podcast. On today's episode, we've got something that's really exciting. We found an old diamond call between Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy. Those who know Bill Glazer, he was the original owner of Dan Kennedy's company, when Dan sold it originally, Bill Glazer was the person who purchased it and he took that company and blew it up.
Over the years, there were a lot of amazing calls that Dan and Bill did, where Bill was asking Dan questions. This is one that we found in the archives, it was so powerful and so timely. The title of this presentation was, How to Create a Compelling Message that Practically Forces Prospects to Stop What They're Doing and to Take Notice.
That's obviously important, probably even more so in today's market than it was when Bill originally interviewed Dan on this topic, because nowadays people have so many more distractions. Back then it may have been direct mail, phone calls and a couple things like that, where today we've got TikTok and we've got Snapchat and Facebook and Instagram and all the distractions. More so now than ever, it's very, very vital and important for all of us to create compelling messages that cut through all the noise, all of the other messages that our dream customers are hearing.
Like I said, in this interview you have a chance to learn how to do that and how to do it in a way that again, as Dan said that practically forces prospects to stop what they're doing and take notice. I hope you enjoy this interview from Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy.
Bill Glazer: Hello everyone. This is Bill Glazer, bringing you another one of our Diamond tele-coaching calls. This month, our call is how to create a compelling message that practically forces prospects to stop what they're doing and take notice. Dan is with me. Dan, how you doing?
Dan Kennedy: I'm doing great.
Bill Glazer: Great. Let's dig right in. Okay. First question to you Dan, is why do we need to worse prospects to actually take notice?
Dan Kennedy: I think there's a lot going on. I think the hurdle today for attention is really very high, there's so much stuff that there's sort of a resistance to being overwhelmed, people feel they're too busy for anything new. Henry Kissinger's old quote, "Can't be a crisis until next Tuesday, because I'm fully booked." I think that's really going on with people.
I like to say that their pipes are clogged with junk. The statistic in the 1970's was that the average mailbox had five pieces of junk mail or sales material in it in an average day. Not only has that number gone up, but of course there's 50 or 500 emails and everything else to pay attention to at the same time. They're embedded with videos and links and people are trying to pay attention to what's going on on Facebook. With that, you've got the ease of deletion, the ease of being ignored, the lowered barriers to entry, there's a lot more clutter.
It used to cost money to do marketing. Now of course there's a lot of marketing that can at least be begun, entire business has begun and enter the fray with very little costs, the barrier's a lot lower. Then I think you add to all of that, the impact of what you add other graciously identified or gently identified as a roller coaster economy. There's almost a predetermination on people's part not to put themselves in positions of temptation.
Just as I might route my errands so that I don't drive past a donut shop, many people are simply trying not to spend and the best way they know not to spend is not to be exposed to anything that might cause them to spend. You have a certain avoidance activity going on and when you add all that together, as I said, the hurdle for attention is pretty damn high. Somehow standing out in all of that clutter and confusion is really about forcing prospects to pay attention.
Bill Glazer: Before I ask you my next on topic question, I have a non on topic question to ask you out of curiosity. For years I've been hearing about this temptation to not stop every time you drive past a donut shop and of a curiosity, how often does the donut shop win?
Dan Kennedy: Not very often anymore because the more of that stuff you trim out of your diet, the sicker it makes you and the quicker it makes you sick when you put it back in. It doesn't win very much anymore, maybe four times last year.
The other item of the same ilk would be a milkshake and maybe about the same number of times four times last year, because I really do have a severe adverse reaction to them now. That doesn't really stop the desire incidentally, but the price to be paid is higher.
Bill Glazer: What's interesting about the answer to that question is that I think if we visit with the members a week after this call, they'll remember that stat better than anything else we teach on this call.
Dan Kennedy: I'll go further, there will be people who will now go eat a donut or drink a milkshake who would not have otherwise because of the conversation.
Bill Glazer: Because of the mention of it.
Let's get back on top again. In looking at how to create this compelling message, I know that you often talk about, there's two components to creating the best strategy to do this, which is one, is the who and the other is the what. Can you comment about both of them, the who and the what?
Dan Kennedy: Yeah. Most people start with the second rather than the first. Where most people start is I've got a wagon of red bricks or blue rocks and now I got to figure out how to sell my red bricks. After I figure out all the great things I can say about the red bricks then finally, gee, I wonder who might want a red brick. That makes the whole process pretty tough sledding.
Obviously there are times where you have no choice, but to begin there, but most of the time we have greater flexibility. In enforcing people to stop and pay attention, it is extremely useful to have picked someone in the first place who can be stopped and can be forced to pay attention. I big broad general terms, there's responsive and unresponsive people and responsive and unresponsive prospects.
Beyond that, I think that most business owners and marketers do not spend enough time and attention on trying to be for somebody specific so that when that person sees them, hears from them, they are instantly stopped because something has appeared of great personal relevance and great interest rather than trying to be all things to all people. I talk a lot about aiming for the responsive and being for somebody specific so that they're going to be responsive to you. Finally, aiming at those who will respond in the way you need them to respond.
If you back through that, first of all, people respond in different ways. A simplistic example is often customers who rent lists of TV buyers, direct response TV commercial buyers, or TV infomercial buyers, and then mail to them in direct mail are often very disappointed at the results, as opposed to mailing to a list of direct mail buyers. If you need people to come into a room to be sold, they better be people who will come in a room and ideally they're people who regularly and routinely come into a room.
If you think about that for info marketing, for example, dentists go to a lot of seminars, by comparison MD's go to hardly any. If you need to sell something in a room you're in for tougher sledding, if you're going to sell MD's, then you are to dentist, because they really don't respond the way you need or want them to respond as to who the responsive is. I don't remember now, and I neglected to find it before the call, but either in a look over my shoulder recently or an info letter, I know I used it also at a seminar, Pastor Warren.
Big megachurch. If people don't know him for any other reason, they may know him because he's the one that got Obama and McCain to come to his church at the same time and have a discussion on stage. A huge megachurch marketer and big blockbuster best selling book, I think it's probably still on the New York Times list, the Purpose Driven Life.
He has a course for his affiliated church owners, but then he has a book really for any pastor called the Purpose Driven Church. It's a marketing book, by the way, it's worth reading for anybody who markets at the local level, just as a local church does. One of the most interesting things about the book is how candid and forthright and detailed he is in describing what many people would consider very predatory practices about knowing exactly who is likely to be responsive to them and who isn't. Then targeting the responsive and ignoring the unresponsive and then making messages that are for those specific likely to be responsive people.
There's a profile of their ideal, I'll use the word customer, in the book and there's a checklist of things that make people responsive to them, such as trouble in the marriage, a recent diagnosis of disease with someone in the family, et cetera, et cetera. It's instructive because it comes from some place you would not necessarily expect very sophisticated targeted, and if you like predatory marketing, really being good about all this.
Since it's there, maybe it's easier to understand it and transfer it to another business, but certainly the best strategy I know for being paid attention to starts with focusing on the, "Who is going to pay attention?" Rather than the, "What it is that you want them to pay attention to."
Bill Glazer: You kind of alluded to it already, but obviously there's this whole process and people's minds often get sabotaged. What do you see as the most common ways that this does get sabotaged in putting together this compelling message?
Dan Kennedy: There'll be a message to market mismatch one way or the other. For certain things, the market might be fine, and for certain things, the message might be fine. But when these two are put together, there's a fatal flaw in them that causes them not to work at all or not to work very well.
One that is an increasingly common mistake has to do with generational differences, with marketing to leading age boomers the same way you market to 30 or 40 year olds. With marketing to seniors, the same way you market to leading edge boomers. I'm working on a book, like a marketing fluid book, about this right now and I'm working with several clients who market to leading age boomers and seniors, and not surprisingly the members of the client company or client group who are under the age of 40, make a lot of mistakes because they don't get what their actual customer is all about and vice versa, of course.
Generational issues are a very easy way to muck this up. Very similar is being off the mark with your prospective companies client group, customer groups, sort of tribal language and symbols and tribal code so that you get yourself immediately marked as an outsider and at many times an offensive outsider. If you do get attention, it's damn short lived and it's negative.
Maybe one of the best examples, and it shows you how a little thing can have big impact. Years ago, a company called SmartPractice right now, they began as a company called SemantoDontics. They sold pretty much everything, advertising, marketing, and practice building related to dentists. That's everything from our kind of product information courses, training, down to pre-done recall cards and pre-done patient newsletters and imprinted pens and pads and you name it.
They decided to expand into chiropractic and they built their first catalog and they pretty much changed all the language to be chiropractic. Either out of ignorance or laziness or speed or cost, they used the same photographs they had in their other catalog. All of the imprinted stuff, most of it had a doctors name with DDS after it, now that wouldn't be deadly, but some of the photographs for whatever reason, and it would not be deadly with Dennis, had MD after the name. It might not be quite as deadly today as it was 30 years ago, but chiropractors and medical doctors did not get along. As a matter of fact, the AMA was suing the chiropractic profession at the time, trying to put them out of existence. Generally speaking, all you had to do was say MD within range of a chiropractor and you were on their death list. This catalog did very, very poorly you much to their surprise, but I understood it within 30 seconds of skimming the pages and seeing the photograph. There's these kind of mistakes.
I guess the last one I would mention really has to do with not a mechanical mistake so much, but an assumptive mistake, a sense of entitlement and assumption that you are going to be paid attention to because you ran an ad or sent somebody a letter or made a video and stuck it up online. Or sent out an email that the very act that you did it, and it contains content that you believe should be of interest to the people it was aimed at, that it will be paid attention to. Looping all the way back to the beginning of our call, it's a very poor assumption and I think increasingly we have to be not only cautious of it, but go to great extremes to void it, to get people to pay attention, to ask them to pay attention, to nudge them into paying attention, never really assuming that they will pay attention.
Bill Glazer: Now I'm going to ask everybody who's on the call right now, is if you don't have in front of you and provided that you're not driving around in your car, listening to this call live. If you're sitting at a place, if you don't have in front of you, get out of pad and pen, if you haven't already been taking notes because what I'm about to ask Dan next really would suggest taking some notes.
If you're receiving this CD after the call, again, and you're driving around, don't do it when you're driving around, but then go to a place afterwards and listen to this next part with pad and pen in hand because people really love checklists, it's sort of like a formula for people. I'm going to ask you a quick checklist question, Dan. Let's go over checklist of some compelling messages or some winning ways to create a compelling message. Okay?
Dan Kennedy: All right. I think there's four big keys. You have to be concerned with the means you use of getting attention, you have a chance. Then you have to be concerned with presentation. My third key would be some version of the unique selling proposition. My fourth key would be the offer and that either includes or separately gets all the way to a fifth key of response instruction.
If you go back down and fill in those blanks, the list I rely on most for means of getting attention so you have a chance, there's drama and or fear, there's breaking news or a link to news. Those two things sometimes go together, not necessarily. There's the big giant promise, there's the classic new and improved, which is the ultimate oxymoron. Can't be improved if it's new and it can't be new if it's being improved, but nonetheless for 60, some odd years, new and improved has worked in advertising.
There's free, there's profound specificity and personal relevance. If you're a one-legged golfer with asthma, also missing a thumb on your left hand with bad vision, who wants to play on the senior tour, and you somehow got an envelope that said, "If you're a one-legged golfer with asthma, also missing a thumb on your left hand and really bad vision and want to play on the senior tour. This is for you." That piece would leap out of your mail stack at you because of the profound specificity.
Here's a celebrity and celebrity endorsement. I have to tell you one of the funniest things going on right now in the celebrity, celebrity endorsement world, Kim Kardashian, and most people know the Kardashians are essentially brand licensed more than they are anything else, and brought in $28 million last year and are on pace to do between $55 and $60 million this year, they have a brand to protect.
Old Navy, the clothing store chain, is being sued by Kim Kardashian because they're running TV commercials with a Kim Kardashian lookalike in them. This will interest you Bill, because of course, you used to use celebrity voice impersonators. This woman looks exactly like Kim Kardashian and they're selling generic clothes that match the kind of clothes that are in a licensed Kim Kardashian line with another retailer.
What may have sparked the lawsuit more than anything else is Kim Kardashians ex-boyfriend is now dating the Kim Kardashian lookalike who appears in the Old Navy TV commercial. The Kim Kardashian lookalike in a 60 second TV commercial by the way works just as well, if she's not going to speak, she works just as well as the real Kim Kardashian. Old Navy's created a little firestorm here.
Last on the list would be some kind of entertainment or gimmick. Most people are familiar with that more than anything else with grabbers and lumpy objects and toys and boxes and so forth. Those things individually or hooked together in concert are the best means I know of getting that initial head turn, few moments of attention paid so that you have a chance now to move from attention to interest to getting someone out, to set aside what they're doing, physically or at least mentally, and give you some undivided attention for a long enough period of time that you can really deliver a marketing message.
Bill Glazer: You covered the first key, which is means, you want to move on to presentation?
Dan Kennedy: Yeah. If you get that opportunity, now you're going to present yourself, your company, your product, and you need to do it in the most relevant way possible, which of course loops back to the who, there's a whole school called, Reason Why Advertising, that really gets to the issue of relevance. There's reasons why your thing, your it, exists, there's a reason why your particular version of that thing should be of interest to somebody.
Why should they have any interest in a garden hose? Then you move to, why should they have any interest in a garden hose that has an automatic Dew Hickey on it, that conserves water, and when you're done with it coils itself back up? Then why should that particular person have an interest in that garden hose? Finally, the reason why that particular person should have an interest in that particular garden hose at this particular minute. That's essentially as good of a way to dissect and then assemble a marketing message as any.
Bill Glazer: The third key is the unique selling proposition.
Dan Kennedy: Yeah. Which probably everybody on the call is, at least conceptually familiar with. It's the chief proposition on a whole list of types of propositions and it's essentially unimportant until you've interested somebody in your category of product or service. Then it's really important to move them from anybody's thing as interchangeable commodity to yours and yours only. It's also, if you're very successful at marketing, it's a critically important key to avoid just being a market maker for other people.
A few kinds of businesses give up and live with that reality. What I was told some years ago by a VP of marketing at Coors, is that all the beer advertising on TV doing a sporting event does nothing to move market share from one beer brand to the other. All of it in aggregate in an entire year during televised sporting events, do nothing to change market share.
What they do is make somebody want a beer and they get up off the chair and they go use up the beer they have in their refrigerator and they buy more. All the advertisers are being market makers for all the advertisers, they really are just selling beer. In most worlds, that's not the way you want to approach business. You don't really want to be using your ad dollars to stimulate sales for other people.
The barrier to that, the prevention of that, the antidote to that, is a really, really, really strong, unique selling proposition so that when you advertise in market, you wind up being the only choice for the person you've aimed your advertising at. As you know, there's all sorts of other propositions too, there's unique value proposition, there's unique timing proposition, there's unique price proposition and all of those have to be considered.
The big key still is, why should I do business with you versus any, and every other option available to me? Including doing nothing. What's the unique selling proposition?
Bill Glazer: Let's leap over the fourth key, which is the offer and then I'm going to come back to it because the fifth key should only take a moment to explain, then we'll go back in more depth into the whole offer thing. The fifth key is response instructions and so many people screw this thing up, but why don't you just talk about that for a second?
Dan Kennedy: You're right. A lot of people leave it off or they make assumptions again about what people are going to do, what people know how to do, what people are willing to think through on their own to do. I have an appointment at a business on Monday and I've only been there once before, and it's been a year since I've been there.
Yesterday I called up to get directions because the confirmation notice they sent me has no map and no directions. I get transferred to somebody to take care of this, who immediately upon hearing the question, A, confesses to me, they're not very good at directions, really can't tell me how to get from where I am to where they are. Told me, they're just right across the street from the Nestle plant and surely I know where the Nestle plant is. Which I don't, nor could I give a damn where the Nestle plant is. Then, because my guess is she's 30, in a very frustrated tone of voice, she said, "Why don't you just MapQuest it?"
There's like nine mistakes in that, presuming you want to get money from me, if you don't care about getting any money from me, then there's no mistake. You're perfectly entitled to your opinion, that I ought to know where the Nestle plant is and that I ought to be using MapQuest and that I ought to have a GPS, but you're not entitled to that opinion if I have the money you want.
Everybody makes these mistakes all the time, they make them on order forms, they make them on confirmation notices for appointments, they make them on seminar announcements locally that are bringing people to a hotel that, "Oh, everybody knows where that hotel is." They make them by not saying that a toll-free number is a toll-free number and then at its core, not telling people exactly what to do and how they are expected to do it. Response almost always goes up with clear and complete response instructions.
I can tell you in selling from the front of the room, it's a real variable, the order form itself, and the response instruction about what to do at the end. It's a Peter Lowe events, it is something I did experiment with, exactly what to say at the end of that speech to get people up and moving in the right direction and filling out forms and so forth. It really is an important and often ignored or screwed up key.
Bill Glazer: Let's go back to key number four, which is the offer. Obviously the best approach they offer is developing into what we term irresistible offer. Talk a little bit about sort of how you put together an irresistible offer, and then maybe we'll even do a little bit more further in depth conversation on that.
Dan Kennedy: I think there's three main components. One, is the product or service, the stuff, the bonuses, what's being sold and what's being gifted with sale. The more personally relevant that is, the more appealingly titled it is, everything that can be done to make that appealing so much the better.
The second component is price. For an irresistible offer, price has to feel like an unbelievable, but made believable bargain. It has to feel like a really wise investment. It has to feel like what I call the brain dead price, where everything else considered, product bonuses, service, warranty, relevance to me, et cetera. Everything else considered, now this price is a no-brainer price. You would have to be an idiot not to grab it before the seller changes their mind. There's price.
Last there's urgency, what is it about this irresistible offer that mandates taking advantage of it with no delay and no hesitation right this minute? Those are the three boxes you work in, or that I work in, when I'm sitting down to build an offer.
Bill Glazer: Again, I think that people they come up with bad offers, or certainly not strong enough offers. I want to dig into this a little bit more. Some of this, you might actually repeat when I ask you this question, but repeat what you've already said. When you personally focus on the offer, what are some of the things that you have on your checklist of things that you think about in terms of crafting this offer?
Dan Kennedy: The big goal is clarity, that hooking offer and response instruction together so that people understand it. There are a few instances when actually you're selling and you don't want them to understand it, but they're few and far between. For the most part, you do want them to understand what they're buying and why they're buying and all of that.
Clarity, and that gets more and more dicey and difficult the more component parts, the more moving parts, the more complexity there is to the offer. Complexity and clarity do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive, one is just a challenge to the other. Generally speaking, the confused and uncertain consumer tends to do nothing, clarity's a biggie.
Choices, biggie. This is to me so basic and yet I am consistently amazed at how many advertisers, marketers, sellers put one yes or no choice out in front of the prospect. Doesn't matter whether it's a chiropractor or a dentist presenting a treatment program, or it's a salesman of a consumer product, on and on. It's amazing to me, a financial plan from an advisor, how many put one choice out there.
Thereby creating a yes or no circumstance when simple math tells you that you improve the odds of a yes, if there are three yes choices and only one no choice to choose from, or two yes choices and one no choice. There's also a whole side issue there discussed in length in the price strategy book, but about the net profitability of a premium choice and so forth.
There's the description of the core product or the service and what that ought to be out of everything in the basket versus what ought to be bonuses, premiums, what added value can be created. If we got a red brick and a blue rock, which ought to be the product and which ought to be the bonus? Obviously much more complicated than that, do we emphasize the service with less emphasis on the tangible goods? Or do we emphasize the tangible goods with less emphasis on the service?
I noticed an auto dealer the other day, an Infinity dealer here, I noticed a sharp change in their TV commercials. There's no way to know if it's intelligence or accidents, it's just interesting that they're running a TV commercial that says almost nothing about the car, but is entirely about the service after the sale. The biggest thing they're emphasizing that I have not noticed them emphasizing before is that they have a fleet of 50 Infinity loaners, of the same brand that you're buying, loaners, and that they will bring you the loaner car and pick up your car and bring your car back.
They've really switched from showing the car and talking about the car, the product, if you will, to talking about the service. There's that whole, the technical term for all this is weighting. How much weight, not waiting like procrastinating, but waiting like fat, how much weight you put on product, how much weight you put on service, how much weight you put on bonus, does the bonus drive the sale, et cetera, et cetera.
Last would be the risk reversal element. How do we make it risk free to buy? How much emphasis do we put on the risk free aspect of our offer? Is there one guarantee? Are there two guarantees? Are there three guarantees? Are they money back guarantees? Are they double money back guarantees? Is it positioned as free trial, regardless of whether in fact it is free trial or not, all of those risk reversal issues.
Bill Glazer: Again, before we move on to the next question, we just went over the five keys to what makes up a compelling message. I really urge everybody to listen to this over and over again, take copious notes and then when you create that message, go get out your notes and make sure you're following this along because it's a game changer in terms of getting people to respond.
The next question is in presenting price. I know you have a brand new book out on price that you coauthor with Diamond member, Jason Mars, but how can you turn it into your friend as opposed to your enemy when you're presenting? From the world that I came from, which was retail and then every other niche I've ever seen that I've worked with, almost everybody is so fearful of price because they think price is going to really kill their sales. How can you again make price your friend and not your enemy?
Dan Kennedy: Yeah, you're you're right. People act like price is a terrorist and they really are afraid of it. I think every begetter is, but you need to get over it. You said it in an important and accurate way that prices best presented, not just stated and certainly not disclosed only under duress.
Not only shouldn't it make you anxious, but it really can't appear to the prospect or the customer to be making you anxious. I think that when you present price, you always have to think about timing, where in the overall presentation you put it. You have to think about context, which for example, you never allow apples to apples comparisons, you always create apples to oranges comparisons that make your price seem substantially less than value and make it impossible to compare it directly to some other price.
There's context, there's how low can you go in the way it feels without it feeling so low, that in and of itself produces anxiety. That the price is incongruent with the positioning, or really causes somebody to question value. You're very well aware of them and competed with the Men's Warehouse and Joseph A. Banks and those guys of the world. Where I live at least right now, Joseph A. Bank is one of the most aggressive TV advertisers I think I've ever seen in clothing. They're very big on incredible, I think the last thing I saw the other day was, "Buy one, get two free." Buy a suit, get two free sport coats. Buy a pair of pants, get two pairs of pants and a sport coat, just insane.
At some point I wonder, it certainly attracts one kind of customer and I think repels another kind of customer. I wonder at what point they do themselves more harm than good because people start to wonder if the stuff is any good. I think that's all an issue.
The presentation of prices, at least as important as the presentation of product, it's not an, "Oh, by the way," it's not something to be hidden and it is something to have context created for.
Bill Glazer: Just out of curiosity. What about if the price is so compelling, because you mentioned before the fact that you usually don't lead with it, you don't present it until later in the proposition, but what about at the price itself? It's just such an unbelievable price that would be very compelling to people. At that point, would you say that you could lead with it could?
Dan Kennedy: You could. There are actually two times when you will see an advertiser or seller lead with price. One is the scenario you just described, when it is such an obvious bargain, such an amazing, incredible bargain. The other is actually when it is profoundly expensive. Now that price is being used as marketplace differentiation and has call out to a certain kind of customer.
There are classics over the years of successful advertisements where literally the lead focus of the ad is, here's the most expensive blank ever made, ever sold, ever offered. Both of those scenarios provide opportunity and reason to lead with price and you can and you can do so successfully. I'm still not inclined to do it very often, I'm still more inclined to want to set it up and tell the story rather than actually be selling based on the price.
There's a very successful campaign, it comes out normally during bad economic times, very aggressively and is dormant or hardly used during good times and there's been variations of it over decades. It's an opportunity kind of pitch and it is about how to buy homes for $5, how to buy a car for $1. It's about government seizures of stuff from drug dealers and things left behind in freight companies and storage sheds and bank foreclosures of properties.
You will see very aggressive advertising that is totally focused on price. Somebody got a Mercedes for $50, and if you have this information, or if you come to this auction, or if you go to this website, you'll find hundreds of homes that you can buy for $500 or less in good neighborhoods all across America. You'll find cars that you can buy brand new, less than 10,000 miles on them, still under warranty for $500 or less. They're totally selling price and they feel that's the best path they have to commanding attention from the marketplace and they may very well be right.
My big fear with it for businesses that you intend to sustain over time has to do with A, how you've conditioned customer now that you have them, is that the only way you're going to be able to sell to them again? B, does it just mark you as a price seller and over time, almost all who sell by price ultimately die by price. Those are my concerns, but there's no doubt that it's a strategy that can work.
Bill Glazer: Before we open up for some Q&A, and I want to do want to leave a fair amount of time for that. I do want to go back Dan, we're running at a pretty good pace. I want to go back and spend a little bit of time with you getting into a little more depth with the list you get out as far as some of the means of getting attention.
We'll go through those one by one and then I'll go through as many of those as we can until we have to go over to Q&A. But before we do that, I do one to make one announcement that all Diamond members should be very interested in, which is on November the second, the night before the info summit in Atlanta, we'll be having our next Diamond networking dessert reception that evening at the event hotel.
All Diamond members are welcome to come, absolutely for free. You do not have to be attending the info summit, although most that will be there will be staying November the third through the fifth for the Info-Summit and the day after, November 6th for the Social Media Money Magnet Onus day.
Certainly everybody who can be, there should be there. It's very terrific opportunity to get to promote yourself and also look for people that you can actually reach out to and develop relationships with to help you to grow your businesses, in many cases, some of the best JV's in the world are created in that room. I'll mention that, November the second, again, that's free, that's included in your Diamond membership benefits.
Dan, let's go back to the list. The first item on the list that you get as far as means of getting attention. Again, if we can try to go through these as quick, a pace as possible, the first one is drama fear. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's one of my favorite-
Dan Kennedy: The second part, the fear part.
Overall, fear of loss motivates more purchasing and more response than does anything else. Relatively small percentages of populations are ambitious for gain, but virtually 100% of every population reacts adversely to having things they have taken away from them.
Fear of loss is very, very powerful and when it is presented in a very dramatic way, it's doubly powerful. Right now modified since some FTC chain rattling in the past six months, but the gold industry, if you pay attention to the advertising of the gold industry, financial newsletter marketers, again, bad economies really cranks up those industries efforts and they are very much fear mongers.
The talk is about how the government is scheming to take away your whatever, your retirement benefits, your guns, your retirement benefits and your guns. Shocking and relevant statistics, amazing stories that are incredibly dramatic, these have made the tabloid industry, what it is. These have made cable news, what it is, and it sells an awful lot of product.
Bill Glazer: The next one that you mentioned... Actually by the way, if I could just make a side about this before I move to the next one. Oftentimes these exact same means of getting attention that Dan is mentioning in terms of creating a message, oftentimes we use these exact same list when we create headlines. It works the same equally well there as it does even in your compelling message. The next one is the breaking news, talk about that.
Dan Kennedy: Breaking news has become wildly overused on cable television, but still when the breaking news banner runs across the TV screen, people perk up. David Ogilvie said that, "The heart and soul of great advertising is news." We are conditioned to pay attention to what is news and when you present yourself has either news or linked to news that is very current, very timely, you can gain an edge in grabbing that attention for long enough now to try and move from attention to interest.
News links to certain constituencies are even more powerful because of personal relevance. A new medical breakthrough for Type 2 diabetics that put out there as a marketing message will get zero attention from just about anybody, but Type 2 diabetics, it is extremely effective at getting attention from Type 2 diabetics.
Today, Congress officially declared or on 401ks, is likely to get zero attention from people that don't have 401ks, but is likely to get profound attention from people who do have 401ks. When you take breaking news and you target it to a constituency, you have a very powerful means of getting attention.
Bill Glazer: The next one is the giant promise. Again, I'm going to ask you to talk about it, but I would also like you to briefly mention about not only some examples of people that have done giant promise, but I've also seen it work adversely at times. Can you talk about any caution about when doing it? When's the right way to do it? What's the wrong way to do it?
Dan Kennedy: The danger in it is it's unbelievability. Without a lot of sweat, we could probably convince people that secret millionaires are running around this month, giving out money to deserving people, if you will put a sign in your yard with the reason in 146 characters or less that you ought to be chosen, there's a possibility that a secret millionaire will choose you. We could probably get a lot of signs put out. It'll be harder if we make the story about secret millionaire aliens from another galaxy who have come here to hand out free money this month to deserving people who have signs in their yards.
Now, depending on who we aim that at, we may still be able to get some signs put in the yards, but you know, we made our job a little tougher. Generally speaking, though, we marketers will be more sensitive to that danger than the danger actually exists because people are quite willing to set aside sanity and rationality for a promise that they really want. Money promises, the four hour work week it's predecessors like Karbo's Lazy Man's Way to Riches, even executives.
A huge best selling book was the One Minute Manager and it's a big promise, especially if you translate it literally. Yet on a rational level, if you've ever managed anybody, you instantly know that there is no one minute management of anything of anybody, any way shape or form, still it's a big attention getting promise.
The best headline still of all time is a headline, a classified ad, called Corn's Gone in Five Days or Money Back. It's a big promise, it has a meaningful specific of a number of days, it has a guarantee all packed into it. That's a great way to deliver a promise.
I'm going to skip over new and improved only because I want to make sure there's a couple of those gamuts on here that I want to discuss. One of them, I really want to discuss is the entertainment gimmick one? Let me just keep it tape it right to entertainment right now, before we get the gimmick. Is I think you would agree, Dan, one of the great examples that all of our members have seen where we have embraced this is in the special 16 page, No B.S. international inquire marketing piece that we put together to promote the info summit.
Bill Glazer: You and I actually, we recorded an entire call for our copy confidential, look over your shoulders members to explain the whole process that went into that. This is one that again is not used nearly enough. Talk about the advantages of trying that entertainment gimmick type of approach to why that would get people to take notice.
Dan Kennedy: I view it as a way to buy permission to sell and in a sense to obligate it. People very much like to be entertained, maybe more than anything else on the planet. Last weekend in a nation with 9% unemployment, 18% functional unemployment, if you faction in underemployment, real estate in the dumper, every economic fact of life not good, the new Harry Potter movie took in $186 million in three days.
There are entire companies going through gyrations of manufacturing product, distributing product, selling product, with product on the shelf of every store in its category in America and won't do $186 million in business this entire year. It is significant that it is an entertainment product that does it.
People very much like to laugh, chuckle, have a good time, be entertained, be amused. When it can be done and care taken not to have it overwhelm the selling, then I often do it. I view it as a way, the trade, the ethical bribe if you will, of, "I want you to pay attention to my sales message, but I'll at least make it kind of fun and interesting and entertaining for you to do so." That really is the theory.
Russell Brunson: Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you.
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