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!

Seizing the emotional high ground:

“Your purchase uplifts mankind”

In our last post, we looked at the mystical power of trust and sincerity that even gets people to say:

“Even her commercials are interesting and she’s sincere about them”

Remember, Kate Smith sold $480 million dollars in today’s money in 18 hours — in 65 short messages. But she didn’t do it by shouting, “Buy Now! 50% off everything! Sale ends soon.”

Instead of using simple repetition –

which often makes people bored or irritated, or moves them to act by leaving instead of buying, or even trains them to consciously ignore the message so they literally don’t hear it anymore –

– she tapped into their emotions.

I know you may probably heard or already know very well that in selling a product, you can discuss the features (power lock windows) and the benefits (easily roll up your windows and keep your children safe).

And you can help the prospect project themselves into currently owning your product with sensory language, such as:

“Just see yourself as you roll into the supermarket parking lot and in a mere five seconds, silently roll up and lock all four car windows airtight with the gentlest tap on one master button built in your left armrest. You’re in control, and your new 2009 GM BankRuptor awaits your every command.”

Ultimately, whether buyers are looking at products or services, everyone wants to have an emotional experience. Why do people go to the movies or hop on theme park rides?

To experience emotions.

And you tap into these emotions using themes, using an overall theme of sacredness.

Sacredness? In selling frosty-cold financial products like stocks and bonds? Can you imagine: “When you buy US Treasury bills today, you are restoring mankind’s hope and faith that there will be a greater future. That the collective efforts of billions of people over centuries will mean something significant. Have you done your part today to restore hope and faith: Will you buy a T-bill today?”

So, let’s make sure you can tap into your buyers’ emotions by using themes:

How to tap into emotions using Mass Persuasion:

Start with your overall theme and work to find two things:

1. The emotional high ground: Kate Smith’s scriptwriters made bond buying a sacred act. How do you do this with your products or services? (We cover this below.)
2. The emotions of suspicion and distrust behind the face of every buyer: they are afraid they are being manipulated and exploited for commercial purposes. How do you acknowledge their suspicion and distrust, and turn that into believing and trusting you? (We cover this below and in prior posts: What is Credibility and Credibility: how to build yours.)

The emotional high ground:

Kate Smith’s scriptwriters made bond buying a sacred act. How do you do this with your products or services?

1. You remove your own benefit from the picture by not mentioning it
2. Instead, you talk about how your buyer’s purchase supports a higher purpose (buying is a sacred act. Take a look at the Treasury bill example above.)
3. That higher purpose can be anything, such as:
   • themselves: personal or spiritual growth
   • their families
   • communities – business, social, physical
   • industries, activities, and organizations – you can elevate something, such as engineering or mathematics, to mystical levels above the common human experience

Let’s now jump into our example:

“Your printing purchase changes the future for the better”

Instead of looking at an obvious example that uses sacredness — fund-raising for religious or humanitarian purposes — let’s bring it into the commercial, profit-oriented world, at the fictional SynthaPress Printing Corporation.

First, you remove your own benefit by not mentioning it. This means you don’t even have the “I’m doing good” self-congratulating tie-in with a charity which gets a percentage of your sales; the benefit to you as a good person is much too obvious.

Second, you introduce the higher purpose in your overall theme: the great significance of printing to improving mankind through change. You can do this in an informative yet entertaining historical series.

Third, within your overall theme of “Printing is Significant,” you introduce your specific themes and focus only the positive aspects, such as how printing:

• increased communication speed and quality
• freed hundreds of millions worldwide from the tyranny and slavery of ignorance through improved education worldwide
• upheld fair and just governments and leaders while overthrowing the unjust ones
• remains even more powerful and impacting today to bring about change, as the online world sees fewer physically printed documents — those few remaining printed documents carry a tremendous impact and effect by being physical

Over time, as you build your credibility and trust, the overall theme changes in your audience’s mind. It began as “printing is significant.” It transforms into “my printing supports an important activity to everyone. My purchase helps determine the future direction of mankind. My purchase can change the future for the better.”

You can use this series for generating leads, providing printed high quality versions of the series to interested prospects, perhaps as a booklet or as series of postcards or small posters.

Be extremely careful here: remain on the sacred high ground by keeping your light touch: don’t shift into overaggressive lead data collection that dims your angelic glow and tarnishes your saintly halo (such as a field that effectively says, “When’s the best time for our super-salesperson to call you and make you feel uncomfortable when they ask you for your order”) or follow-up techniques and all the other things that scream, “The series was a trick to eventually separate me from my dollars!”

Why is the light touch — rather than heavy-handed sales technique — so important?

The emotions of suspicion and distrust:
turn that into believing and trusting you

You saw before how buyers, like abused dogs, feel suspicious of sellers who approach them.

And you got a deep understanding of how to turn that into belief and trust in you.

But it’s important to point out some of it now, since you want to keep yourself firmly planted on the high ground in selling your SynthaPress printing products.

Mass Persuasion focuses on creating trust from believability, which only happens over time like a solid, close friendship that began with two total strangers.

Recognize that behind the face of every buyer lies the emotions of suspicion and distrust of this vague aching and dull pain: they are being manipulated and exploited for commercial purposes.

Manipulation and exploitation are like the polluted air we breathe: it’s everywhere and unavoidable.

Governments manipulate and exploit us constantly. (All of them except our own, of course.)

Big companies do it, too, especially with incredible-sounding promotions backed by fine print conditions that often break the very laws put into place to protect us because these same companies pulled off fast ones in the past and got caught red-handed.

Small businesses and their owners and representatives do it — especially when they are extensions of big companies, such as franchises — and sometimes those small business owners are contractually obligated to refrain from doing the right thing, even if they feel morally obligated.

Even those we consider friends or close acquaintances take advantage of us, if they know our vulnerabilities and especially when they themselves are seasoned in the practice of the dark arts of manipulation and exploitation.

The answer to all of this: build trust through credibility, and take action to prove you are sincere.

IMPORTANT: Notice that in these posts on Mass Persuasion, we keep on coming back to:

• how credibility consistently built up over time automatically leads to trust
• how you need people to believe you, which they will if they trust you, and
• how you can build that trust — eliminate your obvious self-interest by proving you’re interested in your audience: by taking the specific action of consistently and continuously giving away something valuable for free.

Can you start to see how powerful Mass Persuasion truly is?

Can you see how you can easily build the same kind of relationship with your audience that you have with your family, significant other, and closest friends — a relationship based on rock-solid trust?

Can you see how this rock-solid trust eliminates the need to always give testimonials, show your product in action, a mountain of bonuses just for ordering today, all backed by an extremely detailed risk-free money back guarantee?

This is the same way my partners and I sold shares of stock in one of our high-tech ventures, getting investors who didn’t even know how to check their email to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars when they didn’t have the slightest clue what the company did and didn’t even want to know because it was too technically confusing.

Sure, you’ll recognize familiar marketing terms like: testimonial, product demonstration, risk-free offer, money-back guarantee, ask for the order, relationship marketing, bonuses, and more.

It’s not what Mass Persuasion does, since it does the same thing as everyone else.

It’s how Mass Persuasion masterfully orchestrates these to tap into buyers’ existing dominant emotions and let buyers come to their conclusion that they can trust you because without a doubt they know you are sincere.

Mass Persuasion creates an orchestrated symphony of marketing. And that makes all the difference.

With this diference, you can even get people to come back and buy again, like stuffed-to-the-gills diners who open up the menu and order another plate.

We’re talking about the people who claim they already did their part for the cause, that they “already gave at the office” and don’t want to buy anymore.

Next time, let’s look at how exactly to get your customers to order again — by shifting the standards of acceptability.

In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.

Related posts:

1. Mass Persuasion (part 5): themes and their power
2. Mass Persuasion (part 19): Sincerity: Build up trust and they’ll believe
3. Mass Persuasion (intermission): A quick 10-minute peek at the map

How powerful is trust?

“Even her commercials are interesting and
she’s sincere about them”

In our last post, we looked at the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof.” How? By having your audience come through people you already know and have a close trusting relationship, and they in turn have the same relationship with their audience that comes to you.

As you discovered, this is exactly how my partners and I raised money by selling stock in one of our high-tech ventures to investors who did not understand the advanced technology behind what we were doing. They gladly bought although they didn’t know what they were buying.

And you saw how one of your fellow readers accidentally unveiled the near-magical power contained in a relationship: it instantly converted a Suspicious Skeptic into a True Believer.

By being introduced by a friend (that is, someone who trusts you mightily), you don’t need to provide proof to build up trust. You’ve already been pre-sold to your new customer and start with a high level of trust that is simply transferred through existing relationships.

Today, we dig how you build up that trust so they believe you . . .

If you have any doubt that anything from the 1940s has any relevance to our high-tech online world of today, take a peek at this quote:

“I don’t believe all the stuff I hear over the radio. That’s for commercial purposes. You might be able to fool the country people and the backwoods people, but not the city people.”

Sound familiar?

In a world of over-the-top advertising claims today (and back in the 1940s, this was just as a big factor for buyers as it is today), audiences are skeptical.

The solution . . .

Sincerity: Build up trust and they will believe

You need to be a credible seller. World War II bond seller Kate Smith was credible; she was like a mother figure. In the same way that you’d believe your father, mother, brother, or sister, a personality who you have a trusting relationship with cuts through this skepticism you read in that quote above, if they bring credibility and sincerity. Through the years of building up trust, audiences will believe them specifically when the same masterful words uttered by someone else will fall on deaf ears.

Her listeners agreed:

• “You know what she says is true.”
• “Even her commercials are interesting and she’s sincere about them, too.”

Her commercials?! That’s how powerful trust is.

In an audience that was insecure and ticked off by the deceit, double-dealing, and distrust of sellers (just like audiences today), Smith was a spiritual oasis. They were willing to believe.

In short, it will you take a bit of time of consistent, ongoing work to build that credibility that automatically turns into trust, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

But wait! That’s not all! You also get another way to build sincerity:

Eliminate obvious self-interest

Kate Smith furthered convinced them of her sincerity and lack of ulterior motives by doing her sales marathons without pay, a huge symbolic statement in a country that is based on commercialism. Working without pay translated into working for what was deeply important to her, and her words therefore were coming from the heart.

The result? Like a master alchemist who knew the mystical secret, she turned lead into gold:

She changed a monetary transaction (cash for a financial instrument called a bond) that went to support a good cause into the good cause itself.

And as you learned four posts ago, you can seriously eliminate any sense of obvious self-interest by simply giving something valuable away for free. Kate Smith was giving her time and her heart for something she cared about, like a volunteer at an NGO (non-profit).

Yet, I haven’t even gotten to the biggest, baddest, greatest factor of all – the Mother of all factors that singlehandedly — and without extra effort — built the iron-clad proof for all segments of her radio audience (regular, occasional, and non-listeners) that Kate Smith was sincere and not motivated by any self-interest whatsoever:

By merely doing the marathon – by merely participating – by merely taking action — Kate Smith devoured the seeds of doubts her regular radio show listeners had about her sincerity like a swarm of locusts.

In fact, we can even see the marathon’s effect on sincerity over time — through the before-and-after photography of buyer surveys:

Previously, you learned about the importance of action and how “action speaks louder than words.” That’s what you’re seeing in the change in sincerity above: the action itself — rather than marketing and copywriting and testimonials and all of that — is what does the work.

IMPORTANT: Notice that in these posts on Mass Persuasion, we keep on coming back to:

• how credibility consistently built up over time automatically leads to trust
• how you need people to believe you, which they will if they trust you, and
• how you can build that trust by eliminate your obvious self-interest by proving you’re interesting in your audience: by taking the specific action of consistently and continuously giving away something valuable for free.

Can you start to see how powerful Mass Persuasion truly is?

Can you see how you can easily build the same kind of relationship with your audience that you have with your family, significant other, and closest friends — a relationship based on rock-solid trust?

Can you see how this rock-solid trust eliminates the need to always give testimonials, show your product in action, a mountain of bonuses just for ordering today, all backed by an extremely detailed risk-free money back guarantee?

This is the same way my partners and I sold shares of stock in one of our high-tech ventures, getting investors who didn’t even know how to check their email to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars when they didn’t have the slightest clue what the company did and didn’t even want to know because it was too technically confusing.

Sure, you’ll recognize familiar marketing terms like: testimonial, product demonstration, risk-free offer, money-back guarantee, ask for the order, relationship marketing, bonuses, and more.

It’s not what Mass Persuasion does, since what it does the same as everyone else.

It’s how Mass Persuasion masterfully orchestrates these to tap into buyers’ existing dominant emotions and let buyers come to their conclusion that they can trust you because without a doubt they know you are sincere.

Mass Persuasion creates an orchestrated symphony of marketing. And that makes all the difference.

We’ve talked harnessing the nearly omnipotent power of themes before: the importance of your overall theme of sacredness and your specific themes like sacrifice, participation, and competition.

Next time, let’s dig into exactly how to tap into your buyers’ emotions using Mass Persuasion. As an example to drive the point home, we’ll use a definitely necessary but definitely not sexy product: printing.

In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.

Related posts:

1. Mass Persuasion (part 16): sincerity: 3 views of competition
2. Mass Persuasion (part 17): Sincerity: put together better offers
3. Mass Persuasion (part 18): Sincerity: getting around proving your product

The true power of relationships:

“I’ll gladly buy, although I don’t know what I’m buying”

In our last post, we looked at putting together better offers, simply by treating your customers as time-starved executives. If you include tremendous bonuses to entice or reward them for buying, make certain you’re valuing their time. How? Include well-thought-out overviews or executive summaries.

Recently, I purchased an information product that delivered tremendous value. Yet, the bonuses were 637 minutes of video footage — that’s 10.5 hours of my time that I’m not going to invest.

Today, we dig into the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof.”

I used this exact same strategy to sell shares of stock in one of my partnerships . . .

Getting around “proving” your product:
Your customer is your friend

You learn in marketing that testimonials and showing actual customers in action with the product is important. This is known as proof. Yet why do people need proof from you in the first place? I’ll tell you why: because you don’t have a close, trusting relationship with your audience. In short, they don’t trust you.

Compared to your list of prospects where you show your product works, how much proof does your signficant other need? Or your best friend?

They might be curious about how or why it works, but they will bypass all that resume-checking kind of stuff to protect themselves from you — because they trust:

• you’re not out to screw them
• you know something about what you’re suggesting

and most important,

• if things foul up, you will protect them from harm and loss.

For those of you who have ever had to hire an attorney for special purposes, such as asserting your rights, you had to place your trust in their guidance that they know what they’re doing on your behalf, and are working to protect you against harm.

It’s the same in the case of handing your life over to a surgeon.

It’s the same in the case of handing your financial life to a CPA or financial advisor.

In these examples — attorney, surgeon, CPA/financial advisor — can you see the common key element?

Forget about whether any of these are regulated by the government or require testing and licenses . . .

The key element is this:

• Perceived risk and loss in case it doesn’t work and how difficult it is to clean up the mess

And here’s the most important question:

How do you as a business person lower the perception that there can be any possibility of:

• risk or loss
• it not working: whether at all or just for your customer
• a mess to clean up

Answer: make sure they have already lowered those perceptions themselves even before you come into contact with each other and begin your relationship.

Wait a sec, you’re screaming now. “You’re saying you don’t even have a relationship with them and yet like someone naïve country bumpkin, they’re supposed to trust you?! And how in the heck do you pull that stunt off, Houdini?”

Here’s how: your audience comes through people you already know and have a close trusting relationship, and they in turn have the same with their audience that comes to you.

Just like a friend introducing their friend to you. Carefully notice: I said friend, not acquaintance or stranger.

It’s called networking, and it has built-in safeguards to protect buyers from those possibilities above.

We’re not talking about online social networking or business social networking, such as Linked In. And we’re not talking about in-person networking, where you meet and greet, get a stranger’s someone’s business card, but still need to begin the relationship and build the trust.

We are talking about arriving on the scene as a trusted advisor or consultant focused only on how you can help them. There’s no absolutely selling involved.

Just like your significant other or best friend, there’s no need to prove to them:

• others have used your product: they can be your very first customer
• others are satisfied: just because someone else is satisfied doesn’t mean they will be, so why compare them to others?
• you are legitimate: no need to invest $250,000 in a fancy office
• you are successful and profitable: they don’t care if you roll up in a rust bucket jalopy of a vehicle or wear ripped t-shirts and jeans.

There’s no need to prove anything. Proof elements are all just ways to calm down the nervous ego whose job in everyone’s life is to seek satisfaction and pleasure and warn of discomfort and danger.

Beside fancy high-priced attorneys, surgeons, and accountants, can you find this level of comfort and trust in boring everyday $10-an-hour life?

Yes, when your friend takes you to lunch or dinner at one of their favorite spots, although the food might seem a bit adventurous for you. You wouldn’t go on your own but, with your friend as a guide, you gladly will go without knowing what you’re in for.

This is exactly how my partners and I raised money by selling stock in one of our high-tech ventures to investors who did not understand the advanced technology behind what we were doing. They gladly bought although they didn’t know what they were buying. Below everything of how it worked and why it will work and all the techno-babble and the what-ifs was simply this: “I trust you to protect me.”

By being introduced by a friend (that is, someone who trusts you mightily), you don’t need to provide proof to build up trust. You’ve already been pre-sold to your new customer and start with a high level of trust that is simply transferred through existing relationships.

Next time, let’s dig into how you build up that trust so they believe you. Like a master alchemist who knows the mystical secret, you’ll turn lead into gold. In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.

Related posts:

1. Mass Persuasion (part 19): Sincerity: Build up trust and they’ll believe
2. Mass Persuasion (part 17): Sincerity: put together better offers
3. Mass Persuasion (part 16): sincerity: 3 views of competition

Add value by delivering
quality over quantity:

Just value their time as if it were your own

In our last post before we pulled over at the lookout point, we discovered why sincerity is so important:

1. Commercialization: relationships have been eroding as society becomes more commercialized. Instead of a genuine human being, everyone looks like a possible customer. Instead of genuine values, we get the appearance of concern for others. Instead of “How to win friends and win influence people,” we get “How to influence people by pretending we’re friends.” The reaction to this “I’m just a potential revenue source” emptiness by everyone in society? A craving for reassurance, an acute need to believe, a flight to faith. To satisfy that deep emotional craving, people start emphasizing sincerity, by judging sellers whether if “they really mean what they say.”
2. 3 views of competition: (1) Praise yourself: businesspeople compete with one another by trying to praise their own commodity more persuasively than their rivals. (2) Bash the competition: politicians compete by slandering the opposition. And so do some businesses. (3) Don’t compete: rise and remain above the level of competition.

By treating people as humans rather than ranched human livestock … by consistently doing what you say you’ll do to prove your word is your bond … and by rising and remaining above praising yourself while competitors bash you, you automatically build sincerity. As a result of this sincerity, something much more powerful happens for you:

Your prospects, customers, and other stakeholders will praise you and protect you against those who try to bash you.

Next time, we’ll dig into the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof.”

For today, let’s look at using sincerity to put together better offers by treating your customers like executives. Because everyone values their precious time:

Putting together better offers:
Your customer is an executive

Instead of talking about how to structure a great offer to generate leads, who you offer upsells and downsells to, and how to price all of them to maximize your revenue, we’ll kick it up a notch and focus on the mindset of who your customer really is, which in turns affects what you offer.

So you really get it, let’s put you in your customer’s shoes . . .

Talk is cheap, and there are lots of businesses making claims all the time.

Some of them do offer great value for free, especially in the bonuses that accompany your purchase.

Yet, some of those bonuses are overwhelming in the commitment you need to make in order to extract the gold that does exist within them. By commitment, I simply mean your most precious asset: time.

Have you ever purchased an internet information product, such as an internet marketing product from one of those “online marketing gurus”? Yes or no, here’s usually how it works:

• You buy the main product. Maybe you end up satisfied by the value you get. Maybe not. Usually the main product is overflowing with value
• You get bonuses, usually too many. From their perspective, they’re helping people say YES to buying the main product by adding value to the deal. From your perspective, the bonuses might hold great potential you can extract, just like a gold mine where you go in to dig up and refine gold ore. Their overriding concept is “more is better — quantity is quality”

If you buy the main product, you get $2999 in the form of bonus ebooks or videos that might take up 40 to 100 hours of your time. Where do you find that extra 40 to 100 hours? Do you hire someone at $15 per hour just to go through these bonuses for you? Or pull your existing staff off high-priority projects? That’s costing you real money: $600 to $1500 just to pay an outside contractor to examine free stuff.

What really happens? All these valuable bonuses — which are sucessfully offered separately to customers who really want the gold in them — end up in your virtual trash. Maybe they’re worth $2999 to someone, but not to you.

How can you solve this with your own bonuses? Here’s how:

1. include the bonuses — don’t strip the value!
2. invest a little more time in creating an “executive summary” for each of the bonuses, and connect them with your main product. And if you can’t find a strong connection, ask yourself: “Why in the heck am I including this?!”

Some of you are executives; I suggest the rest of you think like executives. By that, I mean, become constantly aware that your most precious treasure is time. Then turn around and assume your prospects are executives and their most precious treasure is also time.

If your only way to offer value is to steal your customer’s most precious treasure while they’re here on Planet Earth, then you’re a thief, plain and simple. They gotta invest their own time, or hire someone who needs to take up their time. Either way, you’ve taken time from them.

Remember, ultimately, any offer can be remotely connected to your main offer. By thinking like an executive and assuming your customers are executives, you have an easy way not to make that mistake.

Next time, let’s dig into the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof.” In fact, it’s the exact strategy I used to sell shares of stock in one of my partnerships. In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.

Related posts:

1. Mass Persuasion (part 16): sincerity: 3 views of competition
2. Mass Persuasion (part 19): Sincerity: Build up trust and they’ll believe
3. Mass Persuasion (part 18): Sincerity: getting around proving your product

Okay guys, let’s pull over
and see how far we’ve come:

With summer ending — and the return of silence and reprieve from the vicious, marauding hordes of decent kids watching cartoons … playing video games … snacking on the saltiest, fattest, sweetest, junkest of junk food … while staying up far past their bedtimes —

I’m drawn back to the summer when I was five years old and when my family moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Honolulu, Hawaii. The mover packed up our household possessions and Dad, Mom, my infant brother Alex, and I packed ourselves in a gas-guzzling Ford Galaxie 500, and drove from Princeton, New Jersey to Seattle, Washington.

Ever go on a long road trip?

As that five-year-old, I remember looking out at 1000 hours and 3000 miles of fields, yellow lines on black asphault and concrete roadways, guard rails that performed their 65-mile-per-hour weaving rhythm — along with the three highlights of: (1) riding in a stage coach in Dodge City, Kansas, (2) watching ceremoniously dressed native Americans dance (yep – cowboys and Indians in the Wild, Wild West), and (3) staying in a motel that had an indoor pool and this humongously high, heart-pumpingly scary slide.

Every once in a while, it’s good to pull over at a lookout point, get out and stretch your legs, and take a look not only on the landscape in front of you but also back upon where you’ve gone so far.

So, let’s pull over to the side of the road for a minute or two today, get out and stretch our legs, and take a look at the map to see where we’ve been with Mass Persuasion:

We started our road trip in World War II:

Kate Smith was a singer, not a salesperson, who starts selling a commodity available on every street corner, using the same general approach and same general message as everyone else, never mentions product price, features, or benefits of owning this product, yet raises $480 million dollars in today’s money in 18 hours using 65 short messages.

She goes on to build such powerful momentum that she raises $7.2 billion dollars of the commodity over four years. How did she do it? By using a sacred theme to seize the high moral ground, more themes that engaged her audience, consistent communication and building up their trust through credibility (or believability).

You learned:

Through the example of Ally Bank — the trust-based name of a financial division that lost so much trust with their customers that they had to change their name to Ally Bank in order to merely survive — how easily big corporations can and do manipulate and flat-out lie to people so they will believe and trust them – and how easily people let themselves fall for it, hoping that maybe this time the lies are actually true. Suckers are born every minute.

Then you saw:

How the banking industry’s trade association shows everyone that Ally isn’t really trustworthy — Ally is merely using the smoke and mirrors of corporate propaganda. But like all controversies, the uproar dies down and is replaced with a new scandal to draw people’s attention somewhere else, and banking consumers go back to believing Ally Bank is the holy answer to the most foul banking industry.

The propaganda lesson: acknowledge your accuser, return immediately to your sacred theme, restate that you remain on high moral ground in order to serve and protect your customers. Then continue on as usual.

Seize the high moral ground and
capture your market’s attention with themes:

Sacred themes help you seize the high moral ground, where you then bypass comparisons of price, features, and benefits by taking your buyers far above the ordinary world. You offer them ideals that cannot be bought at any price, such as: the kingdom of heaven, the promised land, freedom, liberty, and happiness.

Specific themes (such as sacrifice, competition, participation/community, and personal support) help you build intimacy and connect powerfully with your market by building up tense feelings of unworthiness and guilt, and this tension can only be released by doing the right thing: buying your product or service.

Your market becomes invested in the outcome:

You can capture and hold your market’s attention in the same way a horror movie or an evenly matched national election does: by building up tension, releasing it, and building it again. There has to be the real possiblity of failure, and the person on the verge of failure captures the most attention. Your market will need to find out the outcome (”I just have to see how it ends”) and invests themselves (”I want the good guy to win”).

Focus on the special aspects:

You can turn your commodity into a unique product by focusing on and demonstrating how special or unique the product is or how it’s being presented (in the case of an event-based product launch or release): “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything remotely like this before.”

Use variety within repetition so your buyers
don’t get bored or ticked off:

You need to ask for the sale consistently, but you don’t want to be annoying or monotonous so your customers tune you out. Solution? You use variety within a consistent format (such as telling different stories, then asking for the sale). This breaks down your buyers’ psychological resistance to making their purchase.

Persuasion: good. Propaganda: bad:

Persuasion uses credibility in ways that benefit you through profits and your customers through what your product or service does for them. Propaganda is happy to use that credibility to turn a tidy profit while turning buyers into cannon fodder. Building a relationship by personalizing your marketing communications is crucial.

Snowballing a sales event into $480 million dollars:

You build big momentum — like the promotion for a movie release — by consistently remaining in contact by giving people things that help them (or with movie promotions, that entertain and intrigue them with sneak peeks). Once you launch your product, only use updates that can be viewed as gains or successes. Then use each successful sales event to build momentum for the next sales event.

Credibility: overcome suspicion and distrust:

In our suspicious, distrusting world, it’s important to build trust through credibility. Credibility is how believable you are, and you received loads of specific examples how to use outside, objective, third-party references to build your credibility so people believe you.

Factors in establishing credibility:

Make sure you have no contradictions in your words, behavior, or action. These establish you as a recognized authority and build your reputation or character over time, banish any doubts about your sincere motive to help them, which in turn lead to better sales results.

The key? Take consistent action (which we call The Mother of All Factors).

Consistent action:

Your consistent words, behaviors, and actions over time reduce people’s suspicion and distrust of you and help you overcome the tendency of sabotaging your own efforts of expecting results too soon and giving up too early.

Where you start in building your credibility:

You start by taking action. This will disarm any arguments your audience can have about your motive, contradictions in words, behaviors, and actions, building your authority, reputation, and character — making it easier to produce results.

How to build your credibility:

Instead of being a vulgar “50% off, sale ends soon” carnival barker, consistently and continuously give something valuable away for free. Become a trusted resource your market can rely on.

So that’s where we traveled so far. When you look at it, you can see the key elements in Mass Persuasion.

Back into the car, guys:

Next time, we take a look at how you can put together better offers that your buyers will appreciate more: by treating people as humans rather than ranched human livestock. In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.

Related posts:

1. Mass Persuasion (part 4): propaganda
2. Mass Persuasion (part 3): propaganda
3. Mass Persuasion (part 16): sincerity: 3 views of competition

Satisfy their deep craving and
they’ll praise you and protect you:

Just rise and remain above your competition

In our last post, we discovered how to start in building your credibility:

1. Start by giving away something valuable for free
2. Consistently continue to do so. Yes, it means you need to find a consistent way to continuously deliver valuable free stuff

I hinted at the deeper reason why this works:

It has a lot to do with being consistent, and it’s like a light with magnetic qualities. It satisfies deep emotional cravings that all humans have: the need to be recognized and appreciated for who they are.

In today’s world, there’s a huge craving for reassurance, an acute need to believe, and a flight to faith. People need to believe — and that’s the essence of credibility.

The light that satisfies those deep cravings? Sincerity.

Why is sincerity so important? What needs does it satisfy in your buyers?

Let’s talk about two things today:

1. why people are drawn to sincerity like moths to a light
2. 3 views of competition

Then, in the next two posts, we’ll look at using sincerity to:

1. put together better offers by treating your customers like executives, and
2. the strategy of how to get around the important need for testimonials, showing buyers happily using your product, and other forms of “proof”

Sincerity: a light with magnetic qualities

It’s sad but true:

There’s been a continuous erosion of relationships as society becomes more commercialized. And that erosion does not support stable relationships. Instead of a genuine human being, everyone looks like a possible customer.

As a result, and especially because of the worst practitioners of manipulation for commercial exploit, people feel that they are the objects of manipulation, the targets for ingenious methods of control:

• through advertising that urges again and again, promises, and terrorizes
• through propaganda that suckers them into decisions which may not coincide with their best interests
• through subtle sales tactics which simulate values common to both seller and customer for private and self-interested motives

Instead of genuine values, we get the appearance of concern for others.

Instead of “How to win friends and win influence people,” we get “How to influence people by pretending we’re friends.”

And the result? Everyone will tend to look at every relationship through a profit-colored lenses. How much is that person worth to me in cold, hard cash?

The reaction to this “I’m just a potential revenue source” emptiness by everyone in society? A craving for reassurance, an acute need to believe, a flight to faith.

To satisfy that deep emotional craving, people start emphasizing sincerity, by judging sellers whether if “they really mean what they say.”

Why sincerity? Because of these factors:

• the wish to be considered as a person rather than a potential customer
• the reaction against feeling insecure about others manipulating them, luring them into false friendship and trust, only for commercial exploitation
• the response of people in a society which has lost many common values

Kate Smith excelled at satisfying their cravings by using sincerity, and exchanged that for $39 million of bonds.

The heavy emphasis in showing sincerity is on action: “actions speak louder than words” or what we called in fancy, schmancy terms the “propaganda of the deed.”

Actions means selling stuff. The way you sell your stuff influences how sincere you come across to your prospects.

Most of the time, you don’t have the total luxury of being the only one offering your product. Others are competing with you. How? Let’s look at 3 views of competition:

3 general views of competition

1. Praise yourself: businesspeople compete with one another by trying to praise their own commodity more persuasively than their rivals
2. Bash the competition: politicians compete by slandering the opposition. And so some businesses

And the third?

3. 3. Don’t compete: rise and remain above the level of competition