Dan Kennedy
A YouTube video by Marketing Secrets. Translated for you.
How To EXPLODE Your Business In 13 Minutes … With Dan Kennedy
Ok Pop Quiz: You guys know that Dan Kennedy is famous for saying that everything he talks about, there’s no BS, right? And you guys know that the mascot of the Magnetic Marketing brand is a bull. Who here knows what the bull’s name is? Oh, someone said it. Say it again. Bruno the bull is the name of the mascot for Magnetic Marketing, and we’re pretty lucky Bruno Bull actually came to Funnel Hacking Live today to be with you guys on the ball. He’s the coolest. That was the greatest thing ever. Okay, so tonight I want to do a very special session. The session I wanted to do is, some of you guys saw earlier today that we just finished a new book, called “Magnetic Story Selling.” And so, for the next two hours, I wanted to go deep with Dan on all these principles, all these things because this is like some of my favorite thing in the world, talking about story and how we story to build customers for life and to get engaged people, get them to be part of our communities. So, I am pumped to begin this off. If we can all stand up and put our hands together for Mr. Dan Kennedy, Funnel Hacking Live. Thank you. So glad to have you back.
Well, I’m excited for tonight’s interview because one of the very first things when I first came into a camera, was the first Super conference or Info Summit one of the ones I went to like I heard about copywriting I heard about your direct mail all marketing all these kind of things but it was the first time that you talked about it wasn’t just like copyright to get a customer but it’s like how do we create customers for life and the lens you talked about was using this thing called personality and copy so I’d love to kind of kick this off by asking you how to use personality copy to create customers who will last a lifetime.
There has to be a relationship, not just a series of transactions. So the customer for life was always my goal in business because the only thing you ever really own is the customers you have a relationship with. Everything else can be disrupted, taken away, media can come and go, it can be affordable one year and unaffordable the next. So the only thing you could ever really own is the customer who is your customer for life, and that requires a relationship. So one of the requirements of a relationship is an interesting personality. Hi, Billy Mays here for OxiClean. If you’re in a relationship with somebody and you start to bore them, you tempt fate. So it’s an essential element.
How do you create something where you’re not boring people, especially like in our world, you know, we’re running ads, we’re sending emails? What are the mechanisms or things that you do to keep people engaged and excited in you and your personality? I think four things to keep in mind, and here this game is easiest if you got the match right in the first place. I’ll give you an example. Stanley and Jack Kirby created most of the Marvel characters. The first one that worked was Spider-Man. Before Spider-Man, you had the DC Comics. So, Superman, really, nobody could identify with. Batman, some people could identify, but not really. So Kirby and Stan Lee were the first ones to say, “Let’s design a character, a personality to match a particular audience.” And who will buy more comic books than anybody else? Pre-teens and teenagers. Whoa, Spider-Man. So, let’s build the character for them. So they made the character match the teenager. They built this for a particular audience.
The second thing is really understanding this audience and what they want most, and often it is whatever they aren’t getting much of. Business owners, for example, they feel underappreciated, disrespected, overworked, and underpaid. So they want appreciation, respect, acknowledgment, admiration for who they are. Zig Ziglar, with Zig, was a fairly hardcore closing the sale sales trainer. Inside of you, my friend, there really is greatness. Two-thirds of the speech is Zig telling them what they most want to hear about themselves that they aren’t hearing from anybody else. You’re not stuck either with who you are or where you are. You can grow; you can change. And then, here’s how to be even more successful at what you do. And here’s some stuff in these 12 recordings with over 18 hours of life-changing.
The third thing is the match of these two things, really crafting your character, your personality, your voice to suit. And then the fourth thing is delivering that to those with whom you wish to maintain a relationship in a very prolific manner. Relationships, you kind of got to show up a lot, and you can’t just show up to sell them things. That’s like doing booty calls, not maintaining a relationship. And you can’t sustain a relationship for a long period of time doing that unless you’re paying. But another is the deliverable mechanisms you use to deliver content. That alone can cause disinterest. So if all you ever do is email the out of people and you never deliver paper and ink, you never deliver audio, you never deliver videos, every audio you deliver is a monologue. Now you could have templates for how you do things, but you can’t become one-trick pony-ish in anything that you do. So you have to be prolific, but you have to be prolific with a multiplicity of media.
One of the things I want to talk about, so a lot of the work in this book came from the influential writing workshop which you did. I don’t know how many years ago when you ran that event the first time, one of the points of it was like creating a legend so that there’s this aura or legend where people beside you are talking about what you’re doing. I’d love to hear you talk about your thoughts about that. So if you succeed at getting a lot of people interested in you, they are going to talk about you to other people. And if you don’t control that, God only knows what they will say, meaning well but perhaps doing a great deal of damage. One of the former presidents we had was George Bush number one, Bush won, not Bush, her, and I don’t think he even understood what he said, but Bill Bennett, the Reagan’s education secretary, was on the program sometime too. And so the first time Bush was coming on, I saw Bill in the city before that in the green room, and I said, “I’m going to meet President Bush, and we’re going to be in the green room for at least 10 or 15 minutes together. Is there anything you can tell me?” And Bennett says, “Well, he’s not as dumb as most people think he is.” Now this is not what you once said about your legend, right? You want to control it, which means you kind of have to package it so it can be memorized by osmosis and then said the way you want it said in order to attract more of the audience you want.
The next thing I have in the notes, the principle here that you were talking about is the principle of high concept. A lot of great successes come from what in the entertainment business is called high concept. So if you remember the TV show Miami Vice, sold with a two-word pitch, MTV plus cops. So at the time MTV was, you know, music videos, and that’s what Miami Vice was to. It’s music videos with cops, and the meeting was over, and everybody signed a deal, and they went and produced the show. In advertising, one of the great high concepts ever is “Eat the food, lose the weight” as a concept. How do you beat that? Because of everything it says by omission, no exercise, no dieting. Eat the food and lose the weight. And by the way, look at the food. It’s pizzas, burgers, ice cream sundaes, and pancakes. You can’t do better than that. And whoever wrote that concept down, I hope they got paid a million dollars because it’s worth every penny. In many respects, your great line about being just one funnel away, it’s eat the food and lose the weight. It kind of omits a few things. It’s simple. It’s instantly understandable. And it’s high concept.
The last question I want you to talk about is a concept called “Welcome the Profit Status.” Yes. So this is really useful in every population. There is a way of doing things. Here’s how you’re supposed to do this, and there is an establishment that dictates and tries to enforce the dogma. That will be what is going on anywhere you go to sell anything. But the second thing that will be going on is there will be some people who will be quietly, privately questioning all those rules and dogma. They won’t have voiced it because they don’t want to be the only one who stands up and says, “Wait a minute, right?” There’s a cool book called “Brand Luther.” It’s about the start of the Lutheran religion, and, you know, he blew up Catholicism by attacking his manifesto on the church door, which really questioned the rules and the dogma. And there were people waiting to follow Luther because they were already saying, “Well, wait a minute, like this doesn’t really make sense to me.” But nobody wants to stand up and be the first guy. So nobody knows it’s a third of the room because nobody says it.
So if you march into an environment like that and authentically do that, you say, “If you’ve been thinking that this is… if you’ve been thinking that there has to be a better way to do this than what you’re being told, I’m here to tell you you’re right.” There’s a segment of people who have been waiting for that prophet to arrive. It’s very powerful. That’s not the only way to play the game, of course, but it is a way to play the game. It’s a chosen personality. It’s the radical contrarian prophet arriving for the waiting radicals. I love that one. The audience is waiting for the radicals to arrive. So good. Dan, I appreciate the last two hours. It’s been insanely cool. Let’s stand up and give her a round of applause. Thank you, Dan.
