For the past week, I’ve sent you emails asking you to consider that quote from Margaret Mead, US anthropologist & popularizer of anthropology (1901 - 1978):

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Quite an inspiring quote, isn’t it? What if we edit it to read:

“Never doubt that a small group can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Today, we begin a look at public relations over several weeks. It is part of the DEEP Marketing series on psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing. And much of it is taken from Adam Curtis’ excellent four-hour political science series called Century of The Self. (And the black-framed images with captions come from Despair.com, which mocks Successories corporate motivational products.)

What’s the connection between public relations and psychology or sociology?

Sigmund Freud.
It’s his ideas that drove public relations
which drove advertising:

It begins with Freud finding the power of people in large groups to be absolutely frightening …

Sigmund Freud puts forth his new theory about human nature where he reveals his discoverry that there are primitive forces in all people. If not controlled, these forces lead people and societies to chaos and destruction.

This scared the small group that controlled the world. (Since this small group included the royal families and the rich individuals, you conspiracy theorists concerned about the Rothschilds and Rockefellers may be on to something after all.)

Thus, these forces are dangerous and need to be repressed by society. The horror of World War I, which unleashed these forces, confirms his findings.

Edward Bernays was Freud’s American nephew and founder of public relations, which influenced advertising. He was the first to take Freud’s ideas and use them to manipulate the masses: showing corporations how to make people want things they didn’t need by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires. From this came a new political idea on how to control the masses: by satisfying people’s inner desires, one made them happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self, which has come to dominate our world today.

We’ll extract this wisdom so you can understand how public relations has bled into nearly all messages you see around you, from obvious paid advertising from less obvious news reports and even Hollywood movies.

Bernays begins in a mighty way when he’s hired to promote the US effort in World War I: “Bringing democracy to the world” then at the post-war peace conference” “Make the world safe for democracy.”

His success in winning over the European masses to a political idea inspired him to apply his propaganda techniques to peace: American advertising. Since the Germans had ruined the term “propaganda,” he found another word: “public relations.” His purpose: to find a way to manage and alter the way the American masses thought and felt. Or more bluntly, to make money manipulating the unconscious.

He based this on there being a lot more going on in the individual and in groups than just information to drive behavior. His conclusion: you need to find devices that play to people’s irrational emotions. Prior to Bernays, both governments and businesses assumed you present the rational argument for supporting policies or buying products.

His early successes included: getting women to smoke when it was taboo for them. This took place at the same place women were fighting for the right to vote.

How did he change the social standard
of the entire nation?

His cigarette manufacturing client wanted to boost sales. And half of the market sat untapped: women. Bernays went to work:

First, he hired a psychoanalyst who told him cigarettes represented freedom from male restriction and smoking symbolized women regaining their power and independence.

He then got a group of women to march in the Easter Day Parade.

On his signal, they would bring out and light up hidden cigarettes — an absolutely shocking public act!

He told the press he gathered for this that the women were marching for the right to vote and their cigarettes were “torches of freedom.”

Note:

1. how he finds a psychological hot button, freedom from social restriction …
2. then ties it to a core American political ideology, freedom …
3. promotes it in a controversial public act that defies social standards by shifting them higher to the women’s new ideal standard of freedom …
4. and wraps it in a three-word slogan that encompasses freedom … and
5. connects it to a huge issue of the day, the then-current women’s struggle for the right to vote

Result, he creates an iron-clad argument for women to smoke. After all, who in America can argue against half the population standing up for their freedom? And he proves you could create irrational (and absolutely deadly) behavior by linking them to people’s irrational emotions and feelings. All this to change then current beliefs and social standards … for a deadly commercial product. And the industry continued to link emotions and feelings:     Smoking = freedom     Smoking = rebellion from parental authority     Smoking = being cool, hip

If you want an example other than everyone’s favorite punching bag, look at our consumer culture and status goods and the link between irrational (and financial deadly) behavior and irrational emotions and feelings:

    Owning a Lexus or Mercedes Benz = feeling rich
    Owning a Louis Vuitton or Gucci bag = feeling rich

Yet, how do most people acquire these symbols of wealth? By driving themselves away from wealth and riches by going into debt with a high-interest car loan or credit card charge.

Now, if this was done in the earliest unrefined days of public relations, imagine what people believe today with 90 years of professional tweaking and refining? Imagine what you believe today?

Truly, how much of what you believe:

About the environment and global warming … About the crime rate, poverty rate, and other social indicators … About gross domestic product, national debt, average income per person, unemployment rate and other economic measurements … About healthcare reform, financial reform, the upcoming climate and energy reform, and other political measures … In spiritual matters … … how much of it is true, and how much has been manufactured to advance an agenda to boost profit or power, perhaps as deadly as hooking half the adult population into a deadly addiction?

As I said in my recent email to you, It’s even worse than the conspiracy theorists claim!

NEXT TIME: We witness the rise of American consumerism, an entire retail infrastructure, and planned obsolesence to address manufacturers’ age-old problem of overproduction … … as we continue to draw back the curtain in our look at public relations. Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing. In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send them to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. COMING SOON: Below everything is the DEEP reason for its being …
2. Regularity Theory and Constant Connections
3. The power of the story or narrative to sidestep the truth

Today, we take a look at the buttons you can push to get people to do what you want. I’ve extracted this information from a book written by Richard Brodie entitled Viruses of the Mind.

We’re not taking this information because Richard Brodie is a recognized psychology or marketing expert because he’s not. But he has had big-life experience. According to several biographies, here’s some info about him:

• He dropped out of Harvard to join Bill Gates in the personal-computer revolution at Microsoft. There he wrote the first version of Microsoft Word before becoming Gates’s technical assistant, and was employee number 77 at Microsoft
• An American computer programmer, motivational speaker, writer, and professional poker player
• His books Getting Past OK and Virus of the Mind are international bestsellers, published in many languages across the globe

Viruses of the Mind is chock full of lists of hot buttons along with deep psychological reasons why these buttons work at fundamental psychological depths.

His premise is that our genes are the deep drivers of our behaviors and actions with the sole purpose to make sure they are replicated through offspring. And using genes as a model, ideas can be viewed as replicating units with those going viral and taking over society as the most successful, regardless of whether they help us personally in meeting our own loftier goals for our lives.

He states he wrote Virus of the Mind to help people protect themselves from propaganda and how ideas evolve: “People who understand [this] have an advantage in protecting themselves against increasingly subtle manipulation.”

With that in mind, here are some buttons I extracted for you from Richard Brodie’s book Virus of the Mind:

The “4 F” Primary Buttons:
Fight, Flight, Food, and er … Reproducing:

Initially, the brain’s only purpose was to help DNA replicate. In other words, the four Fs:

        Fighting, fleeing, feeding, and er … reproducing.

Because of their importance in surviving and continuing the human species, information involving danger, food, and sex gets our attention and spreads faster because we are wired to pay more attention to them — we have buttons around those subjects.

How do you communicate these primary buttons?

You can do it in two ways:

FIRST: Use words similar to those above in literal, physical terms:

• Fight: Fight this battle to take away your rights!
• Flight: Gold on the rise: Signs everywhere to abandon the dollar NOW!
• Food: The coming American Food Shortage — and what you can do about it!
• Reproduction: 30 days to a healthier, sexier YOU! Here’s how:

SECOND: If using these in their naked form seems too obvious, you can mask them, as I show you below (along with notes from the Virus of the Mind book on why they’re useful communication for physical survival):

Crisis: Quickly spreading fear along with specific details saved many lives.

Mission: Communicating fighting an enemy, building a shelter, or finding food helped people survive during adversity or scarcity. Those people evolved to be good at sending and receiving the mission idea had fitter DNA because they could work together for a common goal.

Problem: Identifying a situation – no food, competition for mates, etc – as a problem equipped individuals better to survive and mate.

Danger: Knowledge about potential dangers, even if not immediate crises, was valuable: knowing where predators hunted or where water was poisoned enhanced survival and mating.

Opportunity: Acting quickly to avoid missing out on a reward – food, prey, potential mate – was a benefit.

The “4 Fs” are used everywhere:

Do these occupy a disproportionate amount of communication today? Take a look at news and other items online, on TV, and in newspapers and magazines.

For example, in best-selling books:

National fiction bestsellers are populated with thrillers and love stories.

Nonfiction bestsellers are filled with: deadly diseases, improving your sex life, eating better food, political crises … but only occasional self-improvement (probably read only because people are scared of dangers encountered if they don’t).

You see ads like: The Doctor’s Quick Weight Loss Diet: Opportunity to have someone you trust address the problem of your sex-appeal crisis over food.

And I find some of my most effective headlines for building subscriber lists start with one word:
W A R N I N G !

Using his own book as an example, Richard Brodie writes two summaries to show the effectiveness of these, one a rational presentation and the other a button-pushing version:

Some skepticism kicks in with the second version, doesn’t it? The skepticism kicks in to protect your existing set of ideas. Unfortunately, it resists beneficial and harmful ideas equally.

Beyond Primal Instinct:
The second order of buttons:
Pass the word:

The first-order buttons are the four basic first-order drives. We also evolved countless secondary strategies to make us better at survival and reproduction AND to satisfy the four first-order drives. These focus on our relationship with others and their power lies in the fact they tend to be easily passed along to others like a virus.

Some second-order buttons are:

Belonging: Humans are gregarious. Reasons include: safety in numbers, economies of scale, concentration of mates. Ideas giving people a feeling of belonging to a group have an advantage.

Distinguishing yourself: The drive to do something new, innovative, significant makes an individual more likely to find food, shelter, or stand out from the crowd as a potential mate

Caring: Caring for others has a survival advantage

Approval: A drive to do what others or you approve of. As humans evolved into societies, individuals fulfilling their roles increased perpetuating their genes. This hooks into people’s drive to get approval and play on the guilt, shame, and hurt that result if they don’t get it.

Obeying Authority: It’s in an individual’s interest to recognize and follow authority – those more powerful or wiser than them. Going along increases DNA’s chances to replicate, while fighting might get him killed or left out in the cold to starve and die.

The ways these work is similar to first-order drives: you get some kind of good feeling when you’re doing the things that the drive drives you to do, and you get a bad feeling when you’re not. These feelings often aren’t crystal clear.

People have many secondary drives connected to various strong feelings, and ideas that activate these feelings have the evolutionary advantage. It’s in our nature to simply pay more attention to those that push our buttons. That button-pushing attention tends to get passed along. Ideas that annoy, seduce, enrage, or scare us tend to become widespread.

More second-order buttons
rising out of culture
with the imbedded message:
“Pass this along:”

The buttons below evolved through cultural “organisms” in the environment of the society of human minds. They don’t enhance your survival. They enhance the survival of the culture or institution such as religion:

Tradition: A strategy to continue what was done or believed in the past is automatically self-perpetuating. It doesn’t matter if the tradition is good or bad. Once a tradition gets started, it automatically continues until something more powerful stops it. People infected with traditions are programmed to “repeat this idea of tradition in the future and spread this meme to future generations.”

Compare these two:

Slug Club stresses tradition: conducting meetings on Saturday mornings, employing a little ritual of emptying the saltshakers before lunch.

Kangaroo Club stresses novelty and variety.

In 20 years, the Slug’s traditions are likely to be around: Meeting Saturday Morning and Empty the Saltshakers. The Kangaroo original ideas of novelty and variety will have died in the name of variety.

Evangelism: This idea explicitly involves spreading itself to other people, thus having an added advantage. Evangelism is often combined with Mission.

Faith: This entails believing in the idea blindly. Why? It can never be dislodged from your belief system by any attack or argument. Combined with Evangelism, Faith makes for a powerful mind-virus envelope that can be stuffed with just about any content.

Skepticism: Questioning new ideas is a defense against them overtaking your existing ones. It’s the opposite of faith, and works in a similar manner: skeptics are resistant to new ideas just as the faithful are.

Familiarity: Unusual words or phrases quickly change into familiar ones (The french word “beaucoup” and pronounced “bowe-koo” becomes pronounced “boo-koo”). The familiar spreads more quickly than the unfamiliar because people already distinguish, label, and categorize familiar things and thus notice them more.

Making Sense: Ideas that make sense spread much rapidly (remember: it’s not a matter of if it’s true but if it sounds reasonable). People are quick to accept flawed explanations that make sense over more accurate ones that are hard to understand.

The unstoppable plan to enslave you
in the coming one-world collectivist government
controlled by the Fed and Big Banks:

US replaced by North American Union …
US Dollar replaced by the Amero …
Your freedom replaced by
(read more now before it’s too late):

You can see these powerfully at work in all the theories and entertainment concerning ghosts and psychics and conspiracies about UFOs, Illuminati, shadow governments, and similar ideas that sound reasonable but are actually riddled with holes once you understand them. But they sound reasonable.

The only way to understand them is to step outside the arguments made by any of them.

For example, in ghosting hunting TV programs, you’re presented with evidence that ranges from:

The non-existent: “Me and FreddieMac and SallyMae and FannieMae were in there and all of a sudden I thought I saw/felt/heard/smelled/emotionally sensed something. I can’t be sure and may be it was just my eyes adjusting to the dark, SallyMae’s perfume, or my poison ivy rash. I hope we caught it on video.”)

To rigging events like moving chairs and person-like ghost shadows: “Hey. I would never lie to you, even though my rising salary and continued ballooned ego and flow of sexual partners depend on our technical team tossing rocks into camera view and rigging stuff to move without apparent human involvement.”

And backing them with outside, objective third-party expert sources like the American Petroleum Institute speaking on behalf of Big Oil about the global warming myth: We’re here at Ghost Video Analysis Associates with our footage. For our fee and national exposure, they’re delighted to say anything we tell them. Let’s listen in on their impartial expert feedback: “From my expert opinion, this cannot be explained by human intervention, and it must be paranormal. And thanks for the huge check, GhostGuys!”

But step outside the program and you can see clearly:

The game is to present solid and credible scientifically backed evidence of a large viewing audience in order to sell them to advertisers who actually pay for everything. You wouldn’t take a Pixar animated movie as real, would you? It’s entertainment, right? Same goes for ghost shows and even the six o’clock news. They’re entertainment and misleading, and have simple-to-understand profit or power agendas behind them.

DEEP MARKETING: PART 3:
Psychological Hot Buttons
. . . as a downloadable PDF for you:

WHAT’S NEXT? We focus on how Freudian psychology came to dominate American culture through massive long-term public relations begun by Freud’s American nephew who was driven by a cynical view of people as dangerous bundles of irrational emotions who must be controlled by changing them from active citizens to passive consumers. President Herbert Hoover referred to the masses as consuming Happiness Machines.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send them to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Tweets, avatars, and PDFs
2. Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness?
3. COMING SOON: Below everything is the DEEP reason for its being …

Today’s post on psychology applied to the online world won’t have any tactics and tricks for building your lists, getting better optin rates, or increasing conversion rates.

Rather, they’re good simple ways to both float above the online landscape below and a way to be firmly grounded in the deep aspects of who we all are as human beings first — before being marketers and potential revenue-producing customers and prospects in an online world . . .

So take each of these short sections as food for thought and jumping-off points to think about your products and customers and what you’re doing . . .

Sharing and connection:

It’s only by sharing and connecting can anything have any meaning — including these words in front of you. Words are symbols and symbols build up meaning through sharing and repetition. For example, tweets are Twitter posts. They used to be what cute fluffy birds sang in the spring.

And sharing and connecting only happen with community and culture. The broad sharing or connecting of your product or service is essential to it having meaning to as many people as possible.

That poses the questions:

• How do you share and connect your product or service more broadly?
• What are the broader trends and directions of your community and culture?
• How far into the future can you see and how much can you bring back to the present to share with others in your community?

Invisibility:

The ring in the massively successful Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s massively successful books) is based on a moral story 2400 years ago in ancient Greece. In the movie and books, there’s a quest to destroy a golden ring with magical powers and restore peace to the Earth.

In The Republic from 380 BC, ancient Greek philosopher Plato writes about the ring of Gyges which grants its owner the power to become invisible at will:

In a cave with a tomb, Gyges discovers the ring on a large man’s corpse which gives Gyges power to become invisible by adjusting it. He arranges to go to the palace. There he uses his new power of invisibility to seduce the queen, murder the king, and become king himself.

Through the story of the ring, The Republic discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions.

That poses the simple question for you that focuses on being authentic or real:

• In an online world where you can assume and project any identity and make your real self invisible, how do you conduct yourself?

Altruism:

Each of these psychological ideas is easy to understand and overlap, so let’s jump in. Just read them to get your juices flowing on how to use them:

• Social exchange theory: we do what we do for others with the understanding that something will come our way. Giving away quality free online content is a big example
• Reciprocity principle: we feel indebted when others do things for us — even if it’s something we don’t want (like the gift of a hideous men’s necktie). This is also known as building “psychological debt.”

  Back in my real estate days while negotiating deals, I saw others do this well by buying a coffee for a prospect. And I saw others screw it up by buying the coffee, so to speak, then turning to the prospect and say: “I did something for you. Now you can do something for me. Buy this property.” Go and build the psychological debt. But don’t call attention to it by asking for something to come back to you in negotiation fashion

• Bystander Effect: People take action depending on what others are doing. The larger the group, the more people will not do anything, thus the more likely any one person won’t do anything.

  This is known as “diffusion of responsibility” and is a challenge in getting the first sale after presenting to a live group or a great challenge in societies where the majority of people want change but wait for authorities to take action rather than organize themselves effectively. You gotta break the ice.

  Live presentations get around this by having people give testimonials to demonstrate there already is a history of buyers, then having confederates come up and make their first purchase to get the ball rolling. Once others see the first buyers step forward, they stand up and join the crowd, which then becomes self-reinforcing. (I saw this tactic work like a charm when I was roped into attending multilevel marketing presentations in the 1990s.)

  Political protest marches have the same effect

• Ambiguous situations: the more ambiguous a situation, the less likely we’ll act. Since most of life is not black or white, most situations are ambiguous. Adding to this is the increasing confusion of too many choices online and too little information to evaluate those choices in the short time given to a buyer (“Sale Ends Tomorrow. Act Now!”). Thus, most people will NOT act.

  How to get around this?

  Help them see clearly: You step forward and create order and harmony and pattern and then point out the pattern so your prospects will see it clearly, like we did in previous posts about optical illusions, remember?

  

  Put your prospect into the scene where they own and are using your product. Let’s take copy for this nutrition supplement as an example:

  Just imagine what this could mean for you in one week, when your first supply of REVV reaches you.

  Within minutes of eating your first REVV wafer, you’ll literally feel the super-energy surging throughout your entire body!

  While quietly in the background, its 100% all-natural ingredients are detoxifying, cleansing, and nutrifying every cell, organ, and system in your entire body …

  Remove the ambiguous what-ifs of unknown risks:

  Think through like you’re embarking on an unknown venture involving your entire net worth and ask yourself in worst-case scenario disaster planning fashion:

       What can possibly go wrong?

  Then go through and address those what-ifs. Here are a few:

  • Lose money? Provide 100% money-back guarantee.
  • Potential physical, mental, psychological, financial, or social harm to me or my family? Show how it cannot harm you.
  • Not enough time to use it before money-back expiration? Extend the period.
  • And the greatest fear: Looking like a gold-plated jackass: Make sure your customer isn’t merely paddling in their canoe out to your ship, trading their beads in good faith for your goodies, then paddling back into isolation feeling deeply embarrased for being fooled while you sail off into the sunset laughing about the suckers being born every minute. Instead: be there for them: provide support, service, answers to questions.

Sharing and connecting, altruism, invisibility or aritificial personalities, and ambiguity are all humongous factors in the world online.

Technology will change.

Ways in which people share and connect and project themselves will change.

But human beings themselves will not.

WHAT’S NEXT? We focus on psychology in the form of “memes” or what are called “viruses of the mind” and get an extensive downloadable guide listing dozens of psychological hot buttons ordered by levels from primal to sophisticated.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send them to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Psychological HOT buttons
2. Repetition, Memory, and the Trace/Decay Theory
3. What you see is what you get … kinda

Progress is a recent idea, only about 200 years old, Before that, people in Western society identified themselves as part of a group rather than as an individual in society.

You can get a good sense of this group identity by looking at English surnames that identify that person as part of a trade or occupation: Smith, Wright, Carpenter, Cutter, or Sawyer. Other surnames connect them with their locality. And others through their relationship, usually as son of a certain father, such as Robinson or Jackson or Johnson.

With progress, a person stands as an individual apart from group and tradition. Yet, the group still is very important. Understanding this social energy between the individual and the group lets us see where to apply marketing pressure through social proof and where not.

Internal and External Improvement

Underlying the idea of progress itself are two things:

1. Doing better than others through competition, giving a person a sense of self through achievement and a sense of freedom
2. Science/technology, which can make things better.

Progress: Both Carrot and Stick

When you combine these two things in a sales or marketing presentation, you can simultaneously offer both the carrot (of harnessing modern science or technology and making things better in their lives) and the stick of falling behind (and being less competitive, achieving less, or experiencing less freedom, and ultimately a worse-off life).

The Rotten Carrot . . .

That same sense of being an individual with freedom from tradition and the dicates of the group means the burden of freedom: experiencing the responsibility of failure.

Marketers often introduce general social proof to demonstrate how easy their product or service is. You know:

• So easy a brain-dead caveman can do it
• $9,794.76 PER MONTH on absolute autopilot…(a 17 year old is doing it)
• Farm Boy: From $6/hour to $1.2 million

This appeal is meant to help the prospect say: “Well, if a brain-dead caveman or an inexperienced 17-year-old or a naïve farm boy can do it, I certainly can.”

BUT … what if your prospect can’t? Have you set them up for the ultimate social risk: feeling extremely embarrassed? That might be the greater unspoken fear lurking in the minds of your prospects, many of whom are wise to marketing ploys and understandably suspicious of “overly easy” claims: they afraid of being made to look like an idiot.

Keep in mind: Many people like to talk about what they’re doing now or what they’re about to do. On one level, they’re connecting by sharing. On another level, they are showing pride in themselves while making themselves vulnerable, since others may ask them later how the project or purchase is turning out for them. If they have to admit that it didn’t work out, they are essentially admitting lack of achievement (which lowers their own individual worth) or bad judgment (which lowers their social worth as a leader).

Seeing this in terms of crediblity and trust, they can boost their credibility if they succeed. But they’re going to look like Bozos if they don’t. And as the seller, you lose your credibility and trust with them.

So help set them up (and yourself) as glowing winners, not humiliated losers. Don’t offer a seemingly low hurdle of proof that might actually trip them up.

. . . And The Stinging Stick

If the carrot dangling in front of us is the hope and promise of getting ahead, experiencing a greater sense of self through achievement, and more living a life of greater individual freedom …

… then the stick stinging our rear end is the opposite: falling behind, being less competitive, achieving less, experiencing less freedom, and ultimately living a worse-off life.

But we as marketers or buyers don’t live in a vacuum. We live in society.

We need to be socially integrated. In order for us to be socially integrated, we need to restrain ourselves through a conscience (right/wrong) judgment, criticism, and correction (I want to, I can’t. I must not. I shouldn’t. I won’t.)

Thus, we learn to limit our own freedom and put ourselves in a cage with the illusion of being locked in.

We learn to preserve this self-perception in order to experience the emotions of being accepted, loved, and admired.

These are more pressure points where social proof can be applied: acceptance by others, loving yourself and having others love you, and being admired.

The Buyer’s Dilemma:
Risk vs. Reward:

People often will go for long odds, such as in the penny stocks, options, and commodities markets. Psychologists call it “variable rate reinforcement” or “gambling behavior:” they continue in an activity for long periods even though they haven’t received a payoff in quite a while.

In the back of their minds and all buyers is …

The Buyer’s Big Doubt:
“Am I doing the right thing?”

On one hand, many people will apply the lessons of success and persist rather than quit. After all, we’ve all heard many tales describing success as being just one step beyond giving up or persevering to become a “20-year overnight success.”

As long as there are no outside forces of opinion and coercion of community (including social proof), people can continue in their gambling behavior.

But if you question whether they’re doing the right thing and create doubt, you open up the possibility for them to switch from what they’re doing now and give your product or service a try. You can ask them:

• “Sure, it worked before, but are you absolutely certain circumstances haven’t changed? Are you absolutely certain you’re doing the right thing? Here are testimonials from satisfied customers like you who experienced success.”

But instead of offering them the Rotten Carrot — the ultimate social risk of feeling extremely embarrassed for making a decision to go with you and failing, even if they can get all of their money back . . .

Help carry their burden for them:
Reduce their risk:

You diffuse their responsibility by transferring some of the burden from them (as individual) to both you and them (as a group):

• Going from: “You only have yourself to blame – nobody made you do anything”
• Going to: “We’re in this together and you have ongoing customer support and service”

People are glad to be relieved of personal responsibility for their actions. One of the ways they do this is by handing over their power by deferring to authority: “obedience to authority.”

The famous 1960s Milgram Experiment at Yale University demonstrated this in the extreme: volunteers were asked to electrically shock unseen people at increasing voltages while hearing the recipients strapped into chairs scream in excruciating agony, then fall silent at maximum voltages. The lab-coated psychologist Stanley Milgram reassured the volunteers he assumed all responsibility for what might happen, even though the volunteers knew they were engaging in morally wrong behavior: torture and possible homicide. Most volunteers (65% to 92%) continued to the 450-volt maximum.

Finally:
Priming the pump & breaking the ice:

• If buyers have the Big Doubt of whether they are doing the right thing or not …
• If they act like gamblers and stick to the same activity looking for the occasional but big payoff …
• If they want to progress, do better and gain a greater sense of themselves and a greater sense of freedom …
• If they feel that science and technology can make things better for them …

then your social proof not only can help answer these, but also can prime the pump to get things flowing. To break the ice.

Instead of using a testimonial such as “So easy a brain-dead caveman do it,” your social proof answers the question of: “So, who’ll go first?” The problem is: When you ask that question, you’re usually answered with hesitating dead silence and no movement. We need to figure out why they pause instead of leap …

One reason why buyers hesitate:

Buyers often need to see someone else go first.

Those they consider to be peers are an extremely powerful source of behavioral control and direction.

And those they consider authorities or leaders are even more powerful sources.

In social living, we need to factor in others’ needs, purposes and respect those because ultimately it’s grounded in principle: living in a certain somewhat harmonious way with others.

Why do buyers hesitate?

From your buyers’ perspective:

• Someone within the group will do something, so I personally don’t have to
• Nobody’s doing anything so why I should I?
• There’s social risk in acting:
  • I might embarrass myself
  • My action can be interpreted as questioning others’ judgment. This is especially risky if the leader does nothing but I do, thus challenging the existing order

How to get around this?

FIRST: Don’t set them up for the “Rotten Carrot:” ultimately feeling embarrassed if they fail.

SECOND: Transfer some of the responsibility and risk for their decision to yourself by providing support and talking in terms of “us” rather than “you” versus “them.” This includes money-back guarantees to remove financial risk at minimum.

THIRD: Prime the pump with social proof, including yourself as the first one to step forward as a true leader does. I saw a financial advisor start a service by personally putting $1 million at risk to demonstrate his commitment, while asking subscribers for only several hundred dollars each backed by his money-back guarantee.

Summarizing . . .

Offering proof taps into the poweful force of groups and peer pressure and everyone’s desire to experience progress in their lives. But as you have seen, it can backfire on you if you’re merely activating doubts and fears lurking in the backs of your prospects’ minds.

Take care in applying proof, without going overboard, and transfer some risk and responsibility to yourself by creating a new group of WE by combining your buyer and yourself.

WHAT’S NEXT? We focus on psychology applied to the online world.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send them to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Tweets, avatars, and PDFs
2. Psychological HOT buttons
3. Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness?

Psychologists have conducted the following experiment with rats:

In the rat’s exciting day-to-day life, they’re given a choice between food or pleasurable stimulation such a drug. Like your run-of-the-mill hardcore junkie, they end up forgetting all about eating while hitting up the drug again and again.

Then, the psychologist give the rats the choice of a new brain stimulation and found the rats may prefer the new stimulant over their regular one.

But, the rats won’t choose that new preferred drug more frequently than their regular one.

Instead, they hit the new stuff only occasionally while sticking with the regular drug day in and day out. Like drinking beer all year long, then breaking out the expensive 50-year-old scotch in the locked liquor cabinet only to celebrate a big business transaction or momentous personal accomplishment.

Now, I know we’re not rats, at least those of us not running “too-big-to-fail” banks or “Beyond Petroleum” energy companies. Yet there’s a quick lesson here in response rates we can apply in interpreting your customers’ behavior in your marketing:

A good way to see this is through a simple list of examples to give you different angles and some food for thought to get your mental gears revving:

• You eat your regular monthly menu of Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and American every night (high frequency) then go dining occasionally and choose something entirely different, such as French or Ethiopian cuisine (low frequency)
• If you’re offering an upmarket version of a product, your customers may prefer you but not choose you very often – even if their budget is absolutely unlimited. Many people worldwide can easily afford and quietly prefer a Rolls Royce but use a Mercedes, Lexus, or Infiniti for their daily needs
• Here’s one I found a non-marketing book about turning the special into the ordinary:
  

  If you went to your neighbor’s house next Friday at noon and give him $1000, he’d be delighted. Let’s say you repeat this for the next nine weeks. By doing so, you establish a status quo of expectations. And by now, your neighbor has budgeted the free money into his overall life. On the 10th Friday, without a word, you decide not to make the gift, so you don’t show up. Your decision would cause a negative reaction. More than likely he would call you undependable and a dirty cheat, for you have tampered with his survival mechanism

• And you may know I collect books: I have a special sealed bookcase just for the rarest of the rare in my library

This little psychology lesson can even be applied to how you’ve positioned your products and your company itself: to understand why your competitors are raking in the cash falling from the money trees while you’re not.

If you take something occasional and special and experience it more frequently, it turns into the ordinary and then into the expected. Champagne and caviar every night become utterly boring.

A very fancy mustard established themselves years ago as upscale and occasional (watch the video now to see if you remember this one):

But now you can get Grey Poupon’s finer pleasures in Costco quantities:

So instead of doing these:

• featuring discounted price (Grey Poupon: now in 52-gallon drums!)
• novelty approaches that gets attention but which wears out fast (the bikini girl or boy on the free calendar from your auto parts distributor) or
• free logo-branded pens and keychains with every bottle of Moet Champagne or XO Cognac to boost brand awareness …

… see if your lower response rates are because your customers consider your products to be special and only for occasions. If so, jack up your prices.

WHAT’S NEXT? We revisit Eternal Marketing’s social engineering in understanding peer groups and peer pressure where you can harness some deeply imbedded desires common to us all as humans … then focus on psychology applied to the online world.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send them to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Tweets, avatars, and PDFs
2. Psychological HOT buttons
3. What you see is what you get … kinda

There is NO math involved here:

Within our series so far on DEEP MARKETING, we’ve looked at the psychology of your prospects and how their minds work, and in finding ways to enhance what you do with techniques that harness these truths about people.

Today, we turn the tables and focus on YOU.

Often when we have a situation or a problem, we resort to what we already know. And of course, this works most of the time.

Psychologists call this reliance on what’s familiar “functional fixedness.” That’s when you say, “It’s always worked, so I’ll apply it here.”

These are our Tricks of the Trade and our Rules of Thumb. (Psychologists have their own fancy name for these: “heuristics.”)

We all fall prey to the “heuristic” or Rule of Thumb of what’s conveniently available: using what tools you have rather than expanding your toolbox by adding some new ones to it.

Today, we specifically focus on ways you may be psyching yourself out and missing little bits here and there, create a downward spiral that reduces the effectiveness of your marketing.

By reduced effectiveness, I mean something like this (remember, no math here):

   5% x 5% x 25% = 0.0625% or one-sixteen-hundred (1/1600).

That means for every 10,000 visitors you start with, you only have 6.25 customers at the end:

   10,000 visitors come to your website …
   500 sign up for your email subscription …
   25 open your emails …
   6.25 ever buy anything.

If you spend $10,000 to get those 10,000 visitors, you need each of your 6 customers to buy $1600 just to get back your advertising money. That’s fine if you’re selling cars or homes or exploding oil rigs. It’s disastrous if you’re selling a $79 eBook or $500 online study course and don’t sell them anything again.

So, how are you possibly psyching yourself out?

By stumbling and learning through blind trial and error … rather than looking at your situation and applying new marketing Tricks of the Trade and Rules of Thumb.

Later in the post, I give you a Trick of the Trade that turns those numbers around:

   FROM: 5% x 5% x 25% = 0.0625% or one-sixteenth-hundred (1/1600).

   TO: 5% x 100% x 25% = 1.25% or one-eightieth (1/80)

This means you have 125 customers instead of 6. You need to sell each one only $80 to break even – such as your $79 eBook. In short, you do 20 times as much as before. And it costs $0.00.

And, a second Trick of the Trade below builds further on that improvement:

   FROM: 5% x 100% x 25% = 1.25% or one-eightieth (1/80)

   TO: 5% x 100% x 66.67% = 3.33% or one-thirtieth (1/30)

This means you have 333 customers instead of 6 or 125. You need to sell each one only $30 to break even – such as your cheaper $29 eBook. In short, you do 2.7 times as much as before – on top of the prior trick that got 20 times as much. And it costs $0.00.

So, if you’re interested in making your existing marketing 53.33 times more effective (from 6 customers to 333), continue reading …

Let’s look at one relevant marketing example:
Is this your situation?

You want to boost revenue, but whatever you do, it doesn’t seem to be working. Sound familiar? Frustrating?

Are you opening every email from every online marketing guru promising you the golden solution to your problem, sold like miracle wrinkle cream in a jar that returns youth and beauty – or your money back? Are you plunking down your hard-earned moolah for your own jar of heavily hyped hope?

Let’s talk about absolutely FREE stuff for you,
because you’re my subscriber:

You may have heard of filling the sales funnel or filling the pipeline. You put leads in one end, cultivate them, and over time, you supposedly get a growing number of new customers multiplying and spreading like a bad rash. Simple enough concept. But does it work simply enough for you?

Instead of a funnel or pipeline, let’s find something you can relate to in your ordinary experience: a garden hose.

Often, our marketing efforts are like simply hooking up a garden hose to the faucet and turning on the water: We know the faucet works and the hose is connected correctly, but we don’t see much monetary water coming out the other end.

And if we’re paying good money for that water flow, we tend to be super-duper-quick in turning off the faucet if we don’t see enough results coming out.

If traffic or visitors instead of water goes into the hose, we only know two pieces of information so far:

1. What went in: a certain number of visitors
2. What came out: a certain number of sales dollars or subscription signups

We might have a little more information by using a 1-2-3 prospect ranking system for those visitors entering the hose, ranging from hot, warm, and cold.

Is this where you are at in your marketing intelligence? Even if you aren’t, continue reading on now:

With the physical garden hose in front of us, we can easily see if the hose has leaks and exactly where.

With our marketing, we cannot easily “see” if our hose has leaks UNLESS we know what to measure … how to measure it … how to analyze it … and how to improve it.

It’s as if the hose is running under the house in total darkness and comes out the other end: if there are leaks, we can’t see where they are.

Instead of turning on the faucet to full-blast (and psyching ourselves out by doing the same things as before) . . .

This is where we add some new tools: We plug into other people’s tricks of the trade and rules of thumb to guide us in knowing what and how to measure our results, then how to analyze and improve them.

So here’s a checklist for your hose – from faucet connection to the revenue flowing out the other end.

It’s TODAY’S TIP. In fact, you can DOWNLOAD not only this but the complete and entire posts — including TIPS — for the past 3 weeks – as Part 2 of DEEP MARKETING:

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

DEEP MARKETING: Part 2 (last 3 posts):
. . . as a downloadable PDF for you:

WHAT’S NEXT? We give you some tips for using psychology to harness really peculiar human behavior profitably … revisit Eternal Marketing’s social engineering in understanding peer groups and peer pressure and you can harness some deeply imbedded desires common to us all as humans … then focus on psychology applied to the online world.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

And if you missed downloading
DEEP MARKETING: Part 1 (first 5 posts):

Related posts:

1. COMING SOON: Below everything is the DEEP reason for its being …
2. You are a spirit that will never die . . .
3. Change we can believe in . . .

Psychology tell us that, if we’re given two similar options, we tend to find the BEST version is:

• the cleanest version …
• the simplest version …
• the most coherent version

Let’s start off with an obvious example: a kitchen …

Which kitchen do YOU like better?

I’m not a designer. I don’t even play one on TV. So I can’t reveal the deep secrets of color matching and combinations.

But from my experience in business and with sales, marketing, and advertising since 1985, I do know this:

Your packaging or presentation
can make them LUST WITH HUNGER
for your product:

The emotional impression of the presentation is as important or even more so than the meaningful content inside. The Japanese even have a saying for this regarding their food:    In Japanese: “Me de taberu”    Translated: You eat with your eyes

If you look carefully, that gorgeous arrangement has only about 50 calories on it! But because it’s such a feast for the eyes, you’ll gladly hand over $25 … $30 … or more (then head down the street after lunch for a couple of $1 e-coli burgers to kill that gnawing, hungry feeling).

And by using certain darker, richer colors (such as dark blue or dark red), you can convey a feeling of elegance, refinement, and sophistication. And this sets the expectation of a higher price — because that association of darker, richer colors and higher prices has already been established in society — which you can then charge:

When everyone zigs … ZAG:

The benefit of “white space:”

I got this ZAGGING idea back in the mid-1980s from famed marketing consultants Al Ries and Jack Trout in their classic book, Positioning. The essence of positioning is to set yourself apart by taking a different “position” so prospects can easily remember you.

Their examples include: 7-Up: “the Uncola” … Avis: “We’re #2. So we try harder” … the original VW Beetle during days of Detroit’s monster cars: “Think small” … and Burger King’s: “Flame broiled, not fried.”

I used this during my real estate brokerage days to advertise only two listings per week in the Sunday paper classified section of single-column ads, making them “available by appointment only” (I absolutely refused to hold open houses, thereby making me more exclusive, but also because I valued my free time).

My secret? I had the newspaper classified ad department indent my ad around all sides, adding premium “white space” and elegance in a place you never see it: the ugly, cluttered one-column classified ad section. The newspaper was happy to do so, since it made my ads longer and made them more money.

How can ZAGGING help you? First, let’s see the ACTUAL ads from the early 1990s and see if you can spot my ads among the others:

And how can adding white space – or ZAGGING in general – help you?

BENEFIT #1: You set yourself apart in a commodity or overcommunicated market:

If you’re in a business where you have competitors … with all of you claiming to do the best job possible and be the only choice … and the public perception is that there’s no real difference between any of you any more than the difference between one brand of table salt versus another, how does an uninformed prospect tell you apart from all the others?

By your packaging and your shallow, surface-level appearance: your clothes, your hair, your speech, your collateral materials, your office, your ads, your car, your associations, your college, your high school, your personal interests and hobbies … all the things that rationally don’t matter whatsoever really make all the emotional difference when comparing salt vs. salt.

BENEFIT #2: You present something unexpected for its context:

As I showed you clearly in Shoes and socks and the Law of Association, people expect to see classified ads as densely packed words shoved to the edges of each column, with each column looking the same, day after day, week after week, year after dreary year. (NLP or neurolinguistic programming calls the out-of-context presentation a “pattern interrupt”.)

By adding the “white space” of extra margins, these ads force your attention on them. You could spot my 1-column ads from 30 feet away!

BENEFIT #3: You can accidentally attract business from hot-to-buy prospects who find you:

I got business from geographical areas I didn’t cover from people I wasn’t marketing to and who didn’t come through a referral. How did they hear of me and why did they call me? “We liked your ad – it was very easy to spot. That’s the kind of broker we want.”

ZAGGING in a print ad:

I harnessed the same “ZAG” factor with my ads in the real estate magazines – which usually only push listings for sale and look for buyers — with the same wonderful results by trolling for sellers. When have you seen a real estate ad like this?

I also ZAGGED some more with my ads by doing the following: First: I targeted only women, which even the women real estate brokers didn’t do on a publicly visible level Second: I made sure to dominate the publication without paying a premium, by requesting to be on the top of the right-handed page as close to the front of the magazine Third: I featured myself in HUGE professional photos: A couple of female friends told me I was good-looking, so assuming their opinion held with the general female population, I had a fashion model photographer shoot me for a series of ads. (And yes: I did get some calls from gals interested in me personally, but I won’t reveal to you if I closed the sale with them.)

TODAY’S TIP:

Psychology tell us that, if we’re given two similar options, we tend to find the BEST version is the cleanest, simplest, and most coherent.

Your packaging or presentation can go a long way in giving you the edge.

And by using the principle of positioning, or ZAGGING, you set yourself apart from the crowd of me-too contenders without resorting to flashing neon lights, turning up the volume to ELEVEN!, or using irrelevant bikini-clad models to catch people’s attention.

All of these can help you support a higher price.

If you’re delivering materials in the physical world, such as brochures or proposals:

• think of custom designing and printing the large envelope that holds your collateral materials. That way, you get away from those ugly kraft brown 11×14 envelopes …
• Even consider custom-designed and printed pocket folders to hold your collateral as if they are holy and precious religious documents

If you’re delivering these in the online world, do as much as you can to convey the same physical equivalent in your virtual packaging.

I see this presentation tactic work as a book collector: put a newly published $50 book on an IKEA table in Borders and people treat the book like used Kleenex. BUT . . . Bring in a locked case like a Ancient Egyptian museum display, tape a “Rare Books” sign to it, then put your 200-year-old, leatherbound, $50 book in it, an elegant card next to it just like the museum does, and first-timers to book collecting will expect they need to wear white gloves and hold their breath while handling it. (To the right: “Juridisk Arkiv No. 4” … published 1805 … Contemporary 1/2 leather and brown marbled boards … $45. Free shipping from NY.)

NEXT TIME: Stop psyching yourself out by using psychologically proven tricks of the trade and rules of thumb to improve your marketing.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Tweets, avatars, and PDFs
2. Psychological HOT buttons
3. What you see is what you get … kinda

Much of what we and our customers know depends on direct daily contact with the world around us. Yet there some innate principles and processes that guide what we actually end up knowing. Without these, our experiences would be utterly meaningless.

These innate principles and processes are like this browser you’re using to read this blog post. Without the browser to interpret the computer code, you won’t experience the post. The browser gives you the framework for setting for your experience. And all our experiences take place within this framework.

As a result of this framework,our experiences and thoughts tend to be of a whole and complete. There’s a pattern to what we see and know:

Expectations:
You see what you expect to see:

Expectations: What we see is what we expect to see. Unlike our computer screens, we’re not simply receivers of data and information. We actively participate in our own experiences and choose what we experience.

Here are two of psychology’s classic examples. Take a look at the images below:

• On the left: Which side is the front of the box?
• On the right: What are the two twins saying to each other? Are they happy? Are they male? Female? About what age?

Now, look at the two images again and answer these questions:

• On the left: The box is sitting on a table in front of you several feet away to your left. Where is the front of the box?
• On the right: Is this a chalice or cup similar to those used in the Christian communion? What material is it made of? Gold plate? Silver plate?

Not only do you see what you EXPECT to see, but …

Ambiguous situations:
You impose order that doesn’t exist:

Imposing order applies to not only what we expect to see or to suggestions on what to look for in ambiguous situations.

If the situation is ambiguous:

We impose more order and clarity than physically exists: What do you see in Figure A? 3 PacMen facing each together A triangle covering 3 circles Both A and B What about Figure B? And C? And D?
And we simplify by grouping things together: We see the left side as having one group of circles and the right side as having three groups (while physically they both have 36 circles):
And we create closure or completion: What do you see to the right? (There’s neither a circle or a rectangle here, but we see them anyway):

Your explanations, perhaps turned into a very short story, improves your memory, doesn’t it? After all, which of these is easier to remember:

1. Three hard-to-describe geometrical segments separated from each other?
2. OR … 3 PacMen facing each together, ready for the final ultimate Battle Royale Smackdown?

TODAY’S TIP:

Because you are not a mind reader, you don’t truly know if someone else sees the same thing you do and gets what you’re trying to promote.

In marketing, you are guiding your prospects’ perceptions toward a conclusion you want them to reach while also guiding them to feel they reached their decision entirely on their own. That conclusion of course is: “I’m buying this product.”

Grouping guides our behavior, shapes our knowledge, improves our memory, and conditions us to behave in certain ways. So here are some ways to help you:

1. Make things stand out:

2. Explicitly point them out … like you saw before on how optical illusions show our minds play tricks on us, remember?

3. Plant the seeds of suggestion first… “Flowers are one of the most popular gifts on Mother’s Day.”
… then later show them something and ask: “What would you put in these?”

4. And harness the need for closure and completion … with “cliff-hangers,” like these world-class masters have done for 4 years:

The LOST series is pure entertainment set on the north shore of Oahu, the Hawaiian island where I grew up. And each episode ends with a “hanging-in-mid-air” cliff-hanger. By doing so, they harness your need to find out what happens. You can easily do this in an information or educational series by setting yours up as a overall story broken into segments, then ending each segment with a cliffhanger. Added benefit: Stories or narratives also are powerful psychological devices that help your customers understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. And they sidestep the whole issue whether your story’s true or not, as long as it sounds reasonable. We talked about using stories here … remember?

NEXT TIME: We find out why simpler is better psychologically and gets you higher response rates … how you may be sabotaging yourself with your online “pig sty:” a cluttered website or email newsletter crammed pack full of links, ads, and promos in extra columns … and how to set yourself apart in commodity or competitive markets without resorting to flashing neon lights, turning up the volume to ELEVEN!, or using irrelevant bikini-clad models to catch people’s attention by triggering their basic sexual instinct.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively
2. COMING SOON: Below everything is the DEEP reason for its being …
3. The power of the story or narrative to sidestep the truth

Last time, we discovered our minds don’t always view reality correctly. It also uses false logic: because day is followed by night, day causes night.

Our minds make their conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together. When one thing dependably follows another, it’s a habit of the mind that A causes B.

The more desperate a person’s situation, the more that person will accept such illogical conclusions. You saw this in the “proof” a religious organization uses to promote consistent giving (called tithes) to the church in order to receive from the universe:

Falsehood #1: The great monopolists John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie tithed. Therefore, their wealth was caused by tithes. (False: they gave after they built their wealth, just like monopolist Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have done.)

Falsehood #2: A businessman tithes $15 to his church. Soon after, his bank informs him his saving account earned $15 in interest income. Therefore, his giving created the income. (False: the giving did not create the receiving any more than if that man killed a sacrificial chicken that morning on the way to work, then received interest income that afternoon.)

Whether tithing is or is not a spiritual truth is not at issue. Whether the mind fools itself is the issue. And the mind does.

“Let me tell you the story of William Wallace:”

Stories are fun. Stories are entertaining. Stories can make the dullest product come alive when it’s put into a story and has a role to play.

We all remember details better of those events we can incorporate into a narrative account: stories, songs, and dances.

(You’ll recognize these are the basis of culture and history.)

We explain what’s happening in the world — social phenomena — by explaining people’s actions of why they’re doing what they’re doing by incorporating it into a story.

The best explanation is a story.

And in marketing, they’re especially powerful – beyond the obvious reason that they can be interesting and engaging.

Why? When you hear a story, you don’t ask if the explanation is true or false. Instead, you ask if it’s credible or reasonable that matches with the kinds of experiences the rest of us had. Stories sidestep the whole issue whether it’s true or not! (“I don’t know if what you told me is true or not, but it sounds reasonable. Put me down for an order of 200.”)

You can’t be William Wallace:
“William Wallace is 7 feet tall!”

“Yes I have heard, he kills men by the hundreds
and if he were here he’d consume the English
with fire bolts from his eyes
and bolts of lightning from his arse.”

Stories are especially powerful with complex events (and give rise to myths). That means you can create an entire narrative — back-story, current situation, and the future – to build an aura or presence that grows by itself over time. It gets passed along (or even goes vertically viral).

Drawbacks to stories:
Let’s Play “Telephone” and
“Fill in the Memory Blanks”

Information gets distorted as it’s passed along as rumor or in any other form. If you ever played the Telephone Game in school — by hearing a whispered message change, you saw how a simple message like:

          “Meet me at the corner of Polk at Vine at 3 this afternoon” turns into:
          “Meat, Miata, and corn robbed, poked, and fined by 3p.m.”

How does this happen?

All of us, including our customers we communicate with, use what psychologists call “constructive memory” to fill in the gaps in a story or narrative we’re recalling. We fill in the right content in order to fill in the narrative.

“I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, your Honor:
There were books in that photo …”

For example, you look at an old black-and-white photo of a famous author’s room. You see a chair, desk, typewriter, and a bookcase without any books.

One week later, you recall seeing a chair, typewriter with paper in it, pens and pencils in a cup on the desk, an ashtray filled with cigarette butts, a half-full bottle of scotch, and a bookcase filled with books.

We fill in the gaps to complete the story.

NEXT TIME: We review the psychology of using repetition effectively … put it together in a simple 319-word strategy … and put all of that with these last five posts into a free PDF you can download.

AFTER THAT: We take a quick peek at what we really see and experience … give you some tips for using psychology to harness peculiar human behavior profitably … revisit Eternal Marketing’s social engineering in understanding peer groups and peer pressure … then focus on psychology applied to the online world.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively
2. Regularity Theory and Constant Connections
3. COMING SOON: Below everything is the DEEP reason for its being …

Last time, we discovered our minds learn and remember certain things best depending on how many times they’re repeated and when and how important they are to us:

We learn best if we’ve had 20 or more impressions or marketing messages … and we can best remember later with 2 messages … and we remember the first and the last the best … along with stuff that’s filled with meaning of significance, tragedy, relevance, and importance … and if it’s specifically pointed out to us and put in front of us again like optical illusions to show how our minds play tricks, remember?

Today, we continue understanding the deep psychology of how to effectively use repetition in our messages by looking at how the mind tricks itself into believing things as silly as: “Because night follows day, day causes night.”

“Because night follows day,
day causes night:”

We’re discovering the mind doesn’t always view reality correctly. The optical illusions are a famous example of that.

But it also uses false logic. And the more desperate a person’s situation, the more illogical that person views reality. Here’s what I mean:

Our minds make their conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together.

Whenever A and B have been constantly connected together in experience — if A takes place and B reliably takes place after some interval later — it’s a habit of the mind that A causes B.

This makes sense in many experiences, but isn’t always true: night always follows day, but day does not cause night.

“First: The sun rises.
Then, it travels across the sky.
Finally, the sun sets:”

Thanks to some keen observers 500 years who risked enduring hell for speaking truth to power, you know the sun doesn’t rise or travel across the sky or set. The Earth spins. And because of its spin, we all have the experience that the sun is moving around the Earth — even causing the sun to move around the Earth.

It’s true the Earth is rotating but there’s nothing in our daily experience to confirm it. Our minds constantly see the sun rise, travel, and set.

And even wackier “day causes night” examples:

San Francisco has many jaywalkers who begin crossing the street just before the light turns green. But they don’t cause the light to turn green.

And in certain popular versions of “law of attraction” or other “new thought” spiritual practices, this is twisted to incredible dimensions of unbelief, yet desperate followers want to believe so much they let their minds lead them astray

In one book on the ancient practice of giving a tenth of your income (tithing) to encourage receiving, the author states the great monopoly fortunes of the early 20th century (John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and others) were brought about by the practice of tithing. The fact is: These fellows were ruthless competitors who cut many throats to build their monopolies. After their empires were secure, they set up their foundations to give their billions away.

In another of the author’s books, she writes:

“A businessman gave an offering of $15 to his local Unity center. As he did, he spoke the word of receiving, and was soon informed by his bank that his savings account had just earned $15 in interest.”

Golly, you and I can do the same without mystery:

If you open a savings account and know it pays $15 in interest on the 5th of each month, you can tithe $15 of income on the 5th of each month and then declare your giving caused you to receive the $15 instantly.

You can “prove” this spiritual principle over and over, month after month, by religiously tithing on the 5th of each month.

Finally, you can declare without doubt in your soul or body as an absolute spiritual truth that you are indeed harnessing a tremendous, mysterious force that transcends the limits of the physical and financial world and forces money to magically appear in your savings account.

Personally, I’m a great believer in giving. So none of this is a personal statement railing against “law of attraction” or New Thought devotees, only a solid example of how a religious organization uses the false logic of “Day Creates Night” to ramp up revenues (tithes) from its more desperate followers.

For your marketing, you’ve heard me tell you a number of times: make sure you do the right thing. You heard me say it over and over in Mass Persuasion. Because what you learn in Ripper Marketing is powerful, and if you harness a tremendous, mysterious force the wrong way, it will come back to haunt you like the devil.

That IS a proven spiritual principle. As sure as night follows day.

NEXT TIME: We finish up understanding the deep psychology of how to effectively use repetition in our messages by plombing the dark depths of mind to explore the deep psychological power behind stories and narratives in effective marketing.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Repetition, Memory, and the Trace/Decay Theory
2. The power of the story or narrative to sidestep the truth
3. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively

Post #1: People literally go deaf and blind to the same messages repeated over and over like a parrot because of their hard-wired biological filtering. And our minds play tricks on us because our lifetime in a highly structured environment conditions our perception mechanism to find order, angle, and precision wherever it can.

Post #2: Our minds make its conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together: by time, space, and similarity. Shoes and socks. Coffee and cream. Square/rectangular floor tiles. We come to depend on and expect to experience these constant connections. And we’re highly sensitive when they’re not together: we notice something’s missing.

Post #3: It takes about 20 repetitions for people to learn anything. And just 2 to recall something they learned before. They remember those things best that are: first or last impressions … the most recent thing learned … those with historical or personal signficance, tragedy, or relevance to their own lives … and pointed out to them specifically, like how optical illusions show our minds play tricks on us:

Post #4: The mind also uses false logic. And the more desperate a person’s situation, the more illogical that person views reality. Our minds make their conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together. This makes sense in many experiences, but isn’t always true:

• Night always follows day, but day does not cause night
• San Francisco has many jaywalkers who begin crossing the street just before the light turns green. But jaywalkers don’t cause the light to turn green
• Great monopolists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates gave billions away. But their (later) giving didn’t cause their (earlier) receiving billions during their industrial careers as one religious leader claims

Post #5: Stories or narratives are powerful psychological devices that help your customers understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. And they sidestep the whole issue whether your story’s true or not, as long as it sounds reasonable.

… as a downloadable PDF for you:

WHAT’S NEXT? We take a quick peek at what we really see and experience … give you some tips for using psychology to harness really peculiar human behavior profitably … revisit Eternal Marketing’s social engineering in understanding peer groups and peer pressure … then focus on psychology applied to the online world.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Repetition, Memory, and the Trace/Decay Theory
2. Shoes and socks and the Law of Association
3. Regularity Theory and Constant Connections

Last time, we discovered our minds make its conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together: in time, in space, and in similarity:

Shoes and socks. Crowded roads during rush hour. 2% milk always on the coffee shop condiments table. Bev and Tom are always together. Floor tiles are almost always square or rectangular. Carving knife is always where you put it.

Today, we continue to dig deeper into the psychology of getting your messages across instead of having them blocked like some psychological spam filter …

As we look at the laboratory-tested and proven psychological fact that our minds learn and remember certain things best depending on how many times they’re repeated and when and how important they are to us. How many times? When? What do we mean by important?

What do people actually remember?

Psychology easily explains how memory works and how repetition either enhances that memory and people’s ability to remember anything — or worsens it.

They call it the Trace/Decay theory of memory and it goes like this:

It takes about 20 repetitions for anyone to learn something. (This is why you’ve heard that take 20 or 21 days to drop a bad habit and pick up a new good one.)

Those 20 repetitions are like an investment you make — just like you would in your marketing messages.

Once you’ve made all 20 investment installments, you don’t have to repeat them as often. In fact, psychologists found that it takes just 2 repetitions for people to actively remember what they’ve learned before but haven’t recalled in a while.

This is why advertising practices pulsing and flighting, where you run your ads for a while, then stop them for a period, then run them again for shorter periods. It’s not only a smart way to stretch precious advertising dollars (economics), but it harnesses the fact that once you’ve created the memory, you need fewer repetitions to help people recall it later (psychology).

Are you making the mistake of not investing enough time to help your audience learn your message? Or how about not benefitting from your investment by coming back to it later with a few more messages?

What’s remembered the best?
What’s hardly ever remembered?

Psychological studies give the answers plain and simple:

• First and Last: first and last messages are recalled the best. The ones in between are recalled the least. That’s why a lousy movie can still be great if the beginning and the ending are wonderful
• First impressions count: the state of being first often creates a strong, almost unshakable, impression, nearly impossible to erase. That’s why being first to market is so important with dot-coms in virgin online categories
• Recency: things most recently learned are remembered best. Remember how it takes 20 repetitions for your audience to learn your message?
• Filled with meaning for them: the meaningfulness of an event enhances memory (especially a historic or tragic event, like the JFK assassination or the Space Shuttle explosion or Hurricane Katrina or something within your family or group of friends) and so does the relevancy (do your messages address issues relevant to your audience who wants to hear about them?)
• Point it out to them: Called the “cued retrieval technique,” it’s more than giving them a hint. It’s showing it to them and saying, “Remember this about optical illusions? That they’re fascinating because we realize our mind plays tricks on us. The lines are straight or the same length. Remember now?”
  

And our minds learn and remember certain things best depending on how many times they’re repeated and when and how important they are to us:

We learn best if we’ve had 20 or more impressions or marketing messages … and we can best remember later with 2 messages … and we remember the first and the last the best … along with stuff that’s filled with meaning of significance, tragedy, relevance, and importance … and if it’s specifically pointed out to us and put in front of us again

NEXT TIME: We continue understanding the deep psychology of how to effectively use repetition in our messages by looking at how the mind tricks itself into believing things as silly as: “Because night follows day, day causes night.”

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Regularity Theory and Constant Connections
2. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively
3. The power of the story or narrative to sidestep the truth

Last time, we discovered we’re hard-wired to block out messages that repeat exactly the same thing — even becoming literally deaf and blind to them.

And we experienced optical illusions and found our mind plays tricks on us because our highly structured culture trains us to find order, angle, and precision wherever it can.

Today, we continue to dig deeper into the psychology of getting your messages across instead of having them blocked like some psychological spam filter …

As we look at the Law of Association and how memory, recall, and repetition work:

The Law of Association:
How we develop habits and expectations:

Certain things go together. Like a coat and tie. Shoes and socks. Coffee and cream. Bagels and cream cheese. Christmas and presents. Diamonds and a wedding ring.

Our minds make its conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together:

• In time: men at work usually wear shoes and sock at the same time … our roads are usually congested during rush-hour morning and evening times … a close couple usually goes everywhere and are seen together all the time …
• In space: coffee shop customers usually will take their cups over to the table where they can add sugar or cream …
• In similarity: floor tiles are usually square or rectangular

We come to depend on and expect to experience these constant connections. And we’re highly sensitive when they’re not together: When we see a man wearing dress shoes with other men in suits, we don’t notice anything if he’s also wearing socks. However, we DO notice it when he’s NOT wearing socks (“How weird … doesn’t he know how to dress properly?”) We’re not surprised to see congested traffic during rush hour. However we DO notice it if the roads are EMPTY during rush hour (“Is it Sunday? Excuse me, I know this is weird but what day is it? Is there an emergency? I better turn on the car radio and listen to the local news”)

• There’s Bev but where’s Tom? (“Did they have a fight? Did they split up?”)
• Where did the 2% milk container go for my coffee? (“Are they out? Did they stop offering it? Do I have to pay for it now?”)
• Where did my good carving knife go? (“Who stole my carving knife?!”)

You can see how this constant association calms our nerves — and how our emotions jump when what we expect isn’t what we experience.

Creating new expectations:
Establish new connections and destroy old ones:

If you want to build your trust through credibility through consistency over time — as we discussed in Mass Persuasion — you need to build up your market’s expectations over time that you and trustworthiness are connected in time, space, or similarity.

If you want get rid of their old expectations about you and replace them with something better — such as when you shift from always promoting low prices via last-minute sales to promoting greater value — you announce your new connection and set new expectations by reinforcing it over time in your messages.

So, our mind make its conclusions based on how constantly things are usually connected together: in time, in space, and in similarity:

Shoes and socks. Crowded roads during rush hour. 2% milk always on the coffee shop condiments table. Bev and Tom are always together. Floor tiles are almost always square or rectangular. Your carving knife is always where you put it.

TODAY’S TIP: If you give people what they expect out of their habits, they won’t notice it and won’t notice you. Simply create new connections that make people notice something’s out of alignment: Dress shoes without socks … Pancakes for dinner … Sale: 50% off 1 item only … Male CEO at stockholders meeting dressed in a Victoria’s Secret bikini … next year in Manolo Blahnick high heels … next year in?

the sticky note strategy: we notice what doesn’t fit constant patterns

NEXT TIME: Our minds learn and remember certain things best depending on how many times they’re repeated and when and how important they are to us. How many times? When? What do we mean by important?

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively
2. Repetition, Memory, and the Trace/Decay Theory
3. Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness?

Marketing is the discipline of getting people to act in certain commercial ways. And marketing is built on the foundation of psychology, sociology, and economics.

What are psychology, sociology, and economics?

They look at why we do what we do as individuals (psychology) and as groups (sociology), and how we make our choices under conditions of scarcity (economics).

Today, we look at the psychology of repeating your messages.

Specifically, why can some businesses repeat their messages with great results, while messages from other businessess simply get ignored?

Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness?
Why do people respond in lower numbers?

Let’s look at two psychological areas: sensory awareness and cultural conditioning:

1. Sensory Awareness:

Our body’s biology and behavior have built up certain hard-wired sensory responses over the over millions of years of evolution in order to continue the human species.

We constantly scan our environment for opportunities (like delicious food or beautiful guy or gal) and threats (like powerful lions, tigers, and bears). This is why we use the appeals like: “NEW AND IMPROVED!” and “WARNING! Your portfolio may be at risk!”

If we repeatedly present the exact same message like a parrot, our audience quickly learns to categorize them as “Opportunity: yes/no” or “Threat: yes/no.”

It was new and improved the first couple of times they saw it, but it gets old and unimproved after that. It was a valid warning at first, but they checked and saw they didn’t own any foreign currencies (or whatever is at risk) in their portfolio.

Now, I’m not merely talking about email messages and mental stimulation. This goes to the core of our senses. Let’s look at hearing:

In loud industrial settings (such as noisy factories or jack hammering on roads), too much intensity for too long leads people to become literally deaf in those ranges, creating what are called “tonal islands” and “tonal gaps.” They cannot hear in those ranges of sounds matching those industrial noises.

Perhaps you’ve experienced a mild form yourself, with an office or home near a busy street or noisy school. After a while, you don’t hear the cars or kids, while your guests are astonished you can put up with all the racket.

The reason for this?

The factory worker’s hearing is not damaged like a punctured ear drum. It’s because their nerves stop alerting their brains to the sound — like muting the sound on your iPod headphones or earbuds. Your headphones or earbuds work just fine, but the mute has filtered out the music from your iPod.

So, some of your messages are not getting through because of your audience’s hard-wired biological filtering. They don’t see or hear them anymore.

But not everything is due to unchangeable biology. Some is due to:

2. Cultural Conditioning:

Perhaps you’ve seen optical illusions in images like these before:

They’re fascinating because we realize our mind plays tricks on us: the lines in each of these is straight or parallel rather than curved — and in the last one, the three lines are the same length!

Yet, people in cultures who live entirely in nature don’t experience the illusions. Their minds do NOT play tricks on them. Why us and not them?

Our lifetime in a highly structured environment conditions our perception mechanism to find order, angle, and precision wherever it can.

We have a lot coming at us and in order to sort through the opportunities and threats, our minds use shortcuts to quickly categorize everything.

And it works fine most of the time. But when there’s a conflict — like in each of the optical illusions — our minds do the best they can to find that order, angle, and precision.

So, we’re hard-wired to block out messages that repeat exactly the same — even becoming deaf and blind to them.

And our mind plays tricks on us because of our highly structured culture.

NEXT TIME: We continue to dig deeper into the psychology of getting your messages across instead of having them blocked like some psychological spam filter …

As we look at the Law of Association and how memory, recall, and repetition work.

Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.

In DEEP MARKETING.

Have questions, comments, thoughts, and opinions?
I’ll answer them directly and promptly:

          1. Share them below
          2. Send to me privately if you prefer privacy (bill@rippermarketing.com)

Related posts:

1. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively
2. Regularity Theory and Constant Connections
3. Repetition, Memory, and the Trace/Decay Theory

This post is a web page and is only made up of html code.

HTML code is simply keyboard characters: some of them are the actual words you’re reading now, and some simply refer to files elsewhere and instruct your browser to place the images in certain places on this page or to display the text in bold or italics.

This web page is made up of the keyboard characters, the related graphic images and other files, and behind all of it are your browser, your computer, and the entire internet infrastructure, and electricity-generating infrastructure.

By itself, there is no thing called a web page.

Marketing is like this web page. Marketing is made up of psychology, sociology, and economics. You can’t have marketing without these. Or without customers to market to. By itself, there is no thing called marketing.

What are all of these?

• Psychology: how individuals think, feel, and behave
• Sociology: how groups of individuals think, feel, and behave
• Economics: how individuals and groups make decisions under conditions of scarcity (scarce money, time, and resources)
• Marketing: how to get individuals and groups to think, feel, and behave in order to make buying decisions that are commercially profitable for an entity (a company or NGO)

We’re going to start a series of short, easy-to-follow posts that go below the surface of marketing and explore psychology, sociology, and economics. But only as they relate to marketing, advertising, public relations, and sales.

You won’t see any 18th century Adam Smith microeconomic theory here.

And you definitely won’t hear any “tell me your fantasies about your mother or father” Freudian analysis.

However, you will learn very usable stuff for your marketing, advertising, public relations, and sales, all backed by specific examples so you get it:

• Some will be “Well, DUH, Bill … but I didn’t know the actual scientific reason for it”
• Some will explain how knowing the exact number of messages your prospects need to get to learn what you’re offering (psychology) solves the problem of a limited budget (economics) in creating your advertising plan and schedule. It’s really simple. In fact, it’s just two precise numbers, thanks to psychological research
• And some will help you continue with those things you’re doing that are working because now you’ll know deeply why they work — while correcting fundamental mistakes you might be making out of habit for those handful of things that aren’t working

Because I already you know you’re bright, I’m fully confident that you’ll get tons of ideas beyond the specific ideas and strategies I give you.

Our series unfolds with this topic over the next six posts (each one about the same length as this post you’re reading):

The DEEP Psychology in using Repetition Effectively:

• Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness? Is this reversible?
• How do we develop habits and expectations? If they’re hooked on Brand X, how do you get them addicted to your brand? Psychology’s Law of Association
• What do people actually remember? How do we help them remember your product?
• “Because night follows day, day causes night:” Why our minds trick us into magical thinking … and why’s that a good thing for you
• Tell me a story: the deep psychological power behind stories and narratives
• Strategy: DEEP Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively

For each post, I strongly encourage you to publicly post your questions, thoughts, or comments OR privately email them to me.

Remember: Ripper Marketing is for YOU. (I already know this stuff. Really, Ripper Marketing is for YOU.) So ask your questions and you SHALL receive your answers. But I’m not psychic yet, so enter a comment or send an email.

Talk to you in three business days with our post about the DEEP …

Bill

Related posts:

1. Why do repeated messages lose their effectiveness?
2. Never doubt that a small group can change the world
3. Psychology shows us how to use repetition effectively

When you unite people with your idea,

You unite them with eternity:

Last week, we looked at how freedom means responsibility, and how many of your prospects prefer an escape from freedom rather than freedom itself. So let them escape to the non-existent Promised Land you create with sacred themes.

Today, we dig into the power of sacred themes.

To unite your followers with an idea, and thefore eternity, your idea must be either sacred or moral.

Which idea, you ask?

Look at these ideas:

• The Promised Land
• Enlightenment
• The Kingdom of Heaven
• Perfection
• Nirvana
• Completion and Fulfillment

First — notice they come from religion or spirituality.

Second — and this is going to feel extremely sneaky, but it is essential to retaining your followers — the idea must be a vision, and a vision can never be realized.

You can never reach The Promised Land, The Kingdom of Heaven, a state of nirvana or enlightenment or perfection or completion or fulfillment. Never ever.

You can never fully express your individuality or maverick rebel nature. Never ever.

Sacred ideas are your trump card:

Like an Ace in a deck of 52 cards, sacred and moral ideas are higher and more powerful than all other ideas.

But it gets better: sacredness will trump morality every time. So you want to use sacred themes over moral themes:

• Sacred themes: You are a spirit that will never die. There is hope. You can have: freedom … power … wealth … health … beauty … wisdom … love … fulfillment … perfection … completion
• Moral themes: Love thy neighbor … Obey the commandments, the law, or authority figures … Be a good boy or girl … Follow the rules … Put litter in its place … Vote … Do the right thing

Do you see?

Do you see how sacred themes open you up to grand unlimited possibilites, while moral themes merely build limits and restrictions that keep you within someone else’s pre-defined possibilities?

Do you see how sacred themes don’t need an explanation and don’t need to be sold because they are ideas that can mean anything to anyone?

Do you see how moral themes might need an explanation and might need to be sold? Follow the rules: “What rules? How? When? Where? Why should I?”

Which list of themes feels better to you: sacred or moral?

Look at these sacred ideas that successfully sold a product (a political candidate):

Here are the themes again in action:

Sacred Theme: What does Christianity do to keep its followers on the path to The Kingdom of Heaven (which perhaps you now know cannot be reached by doing anything)? Repeat the importance of believing, trusting, and having faith … sacred themes.

Moral Theme: What do white-haired elder masters do to help their students build their character, which is a lifelong process that cannot be completed? Repeat the importance of doing the right thing … a moral theme.

How do sacred themes trump moral themes?
They use guilt trips:

You learned in Mass Persuasion that Kate Smith saturated her 65 calls to buy war bonds with her overall theme of “buying a bond is a sacred act.” The sacredness of the war becomes a holy cause to right wrongs and the sacrifice of sacred life in this holy cause. A purchase is more like a donation to your religious organization to further its good works than it is a purchase of a financial investment.

You also learned that she used the idea of morality (doing the right thing) by shifting prospects away from the social standards they had already fulfilled to moral standards that can never be fulfilled.

Then, she took it even higher, using the idea of sacredness to shift prospects away from the moral standards they had already met.

Kate Smith used the Aces of sacredness and morality and trumped every possible objection anyone could ever lay down on the table:

• Sacred: I did enough. “This mother has given one son . . . What are you doing compared with what this mother has done?”
• Moral: I met the socially accepted standard: I used 10% of my income to buy bonds. “Buy a bond and bring the boys back. Don’t you think you owe that much to Mrs. Smith and her son and all of the other mothers, each who’s praying each night for the safe return of her boy?”
• Moral: I’m interested in bonds only as a safe investment. “Can you go down the street and tell Mrs. Jones, who just saw her son off to war and may never see him again, that you are interested only in the coldly calculated rate of return, when she may never see him return at all?”

Aren’t these guilt trips absolutely chock full of shame and humiliation? Of course they are. Guilt is an emotion based on a sense or feeling of conduct, and conduct is based on what is acceptable

Kate Smith shifted the definition of what is acceptable. Your bond purchase counts only when you make it to intentionally support the sacredness of life right now. Anything else (social or moral acceptability) fails to meet the sacred standard she sets:

• If you buy because bonds are a great investment, that doesn’t count
• If you already bought, that doesn’t count, even if you bought to intentionally support the sacredness of life
• If you already used 10% of your income, that doesn’t count

And that shift in what is acceptable creates guilt, because you as a buyer can’t win unless you buy another bond right now while kneeling before the altar and declaring, “I make this donation in the name of the sacredness of life. Amen.”

You can’t make anyone experience guilt or any other emotion. Only they can do that. But you can establish a sacred idea which helps them separates themselves from the lesser idea they are currently united with. That creates inner conflict that creates guilt.

Kate Smith separated them from the ideas that: bonds are coldly calculated investments … prior purchases count for something … and their sacrifices (even if they sacrificed their own sons in the war) were sufficient.

The competitive advantages
of using sacred themes:

Why use sacred themes? When your idea is sacred:

• Competitive Strength: You build a strong fortress against competition and your followers will continue marching with you
• Promise of the Dangling Carrot: Your Promised Land is the dangling carrot in front of the horse who keeps on marching forward trying to reach it
• Doubt and Confusion Relieved: You automatically answer the Big Questions that keep them in constant tension:
  

  “Am I doing the right thing? Is this the way to go? Is this the idea to follow?”

How couldn’t you be doing the right thing by buying an Apple Mac, when life is about being an individual rather than just an anonymous bee in the collective hive?

How couldn’t you be following the right idea in buying a Harley, when rebellious expression within the limits of conformity is part of the myth and religion of being American?

Industries and their sacred themes:

Look at these industries, the sacred themes they use, and how it keeps its followers coming back for more in order to reach that unreachable state of being because they can never reach that dangling carrot:

• Health and beauty: fitness, nutrition, cosmetics, and fashion industries
• Freedom, material wealth: internet marketing, multilevel marketing, franchise opportunities
• Kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, perfection, completion: religions, spiritual, and personal development industries

You saw the Scientology video last week (“You are a spirit that will never die”). Once you join their group, you will be pursuing an unreachable state of being.

Like a complex educational system, they have years of material that take you from their kindergarten to university PhD and beyond – from books and home-study courses to live events, classes, workshops, training, certification, and more – to keep you involved for several hundred years. (But of course, as a spirit that will never die, you’ll have plenty of time to complete the work.)

The power of sacred themes is
a many-splendored thing:

• They are ambiguous, unlimited, and personal: Freedom, wealth, health, love, and beauty mean something different to each person. That means you can offer a promise like: “Unlock your inner beauty” or “Achieve financial independence” and everyone can agree
• They are future-oriented: Although they may exist in the here and now, none of us can fully experience them. We must work toward experiencing their fullness, which happens some time in the vague future. This means your prospects are constantly refreshed by the internal energy of hope for a better tomorrow
• They are eternal: This is because they are ideas — and ideas are not subject to time and space. You’ve seen that they cannot be never satisfied. Do you know any person who’s reached Nirvana? Whose shipping address is The Kingdom of Heaven? It will take an eternity to reach Nirvana and forever for that package to reach The Kingdom of Heaven
• They relieve doubt and confusion: You automatically answer the Big Questions that keep your prospects in constant tension: “Am I doing the right thing? Is this the way to go? Is this the idea to follow?” Were Obama’s Progress, Change, Destiny, and Hope the right things … the ways to go … the ideas to follow on Election Day 2008?

I know this post has been long. But the importance of the power of sacred themes can’t be stressed enough. It got enough voters to put a presidential candidate into the Oval Office.

Sacred Ideas:
Themes You Can Believe In:
10 weeks of eternal ideas:

NEXT POST IN 2 WEEKS: We’re going to put these last 10 posts about the IDEA as sacred theme together into one powerful strategy you can use. That gives you time to review what we’ve covered. An easy way is to keep in mind the Obama presidential campaign and its themed posters above, then read the summaries below. You can quickly review the posts themselves by clicking the links below:

GIVE ME YOUR QUESTIONS: I strongly feel this is much too important for you to miss. If there is anything you don’t understand in any of the posts below, either: (1) post your question as a comment below OR (2) if you prefer confidentiality, send me an email: bill@rippermarketing. com. I will answer each and every question you have. So ahead and ask!

Questions or comments?
Post them below and I’ll gladly respond:

GIVE ME YOUR QUESTIONS: I strongly feel this is much too important for you to miss. If there is anything from any of the posts above you don’t understand, either: (1) post your question as a comment below OR (2) if you prefer confidentiality, send me an email: bill@rippermarketing. com. I will answer each and every question you have. So ahead and ask!