From $1 million to $2 million to
$39 million to $110 million and beyond:
How to build momentum and rack up $600 million
In our last post, we looked at the differences between Mass Persuasion and propaganda.
You learned that:
- Mass Persuasion takes advantage of any of the credibility factors to build trust for a hidden purpose (to make profits) that serves both you and your audience. For example, your audience benefits when they “Get this health information free and try out our health remedy (guaranteed to work or you pay nothing)” while you benefit from the profits from those who order and reorder (hidden purpose).
- Propaganda takes advantage of the factor called “recognized authority” and the implied trust people place in those in positions of authority in order to put forth lies that build trust for a hidden purpose. Two examples help you see this clearly:
- getting people to go to war, and
- getting people to believe Ally Bank “values integrity as much as deposits” and is “doing the right thing” by “taking banking in a new direction” because its great experience has shown that “these times demand change and a new way of doing business” – when what really happened was “the banking arm of GMAC changed its name to Ally Bank in an effort to repair its tarnished image.”
The difference between the two is that Mass Persuasion makes sure your audience is tended to and taken care of, while propaganda is delighted to use them as cannon fodder or victimized buyers of questionable banking products.
Given the fact that Mass Persuasion is truly powerful, and given the fact that you are a responsible person truly concerned about the welfare of your prospects rather than merely being interested in harvesting their bank accounts, you’re probably wondering this extremely important question:
We’ve been learning the hidden secrets of success behind the $39 million ($480 million in today’s money) that Kate Smith raised during World War II.
Kate Smith had already completed two bond sales marathons:
- First marathon: $1 million — a great success by any measure
- Second marathon: $2 million — double the first one
The one we’ve been learning about, her third, went way off the charts, raising $39 million. (She did it again in her fourth marathon, raising $110 million — $1.32 billion dollars in today’s money.)
All together, she raised $600 million during World War II — a mind-boggling $7.4 billion dollars in today’s money!
In short, she had been doing a series of marathons. Not only did she know how to get her sales to snowball during each marathon, but each marathon itself helped build momentum for the next one.
What was her secret?
Did she go back and polish up on her sales skills?
In her favor, we find:
A lot of people in her audience had demand pent-up because they didn’t buy the last time (but felt they should have) and were anxiously waiting to relieve their anxiety and guilt by buying this time.
And she had a number of fans following her from her huge radio show audiences who looked forward to the next marathon in order to support her.
And using themes during her marathons, especially the overall theme of sacredness, she built that guilt and anxiety to very uncomfortable levels.
Against her was this factor:
The challenge in selling a product in a series of events is that success is narrowly measured by the sales gain over the last event. You need to climb higher each time. (This is the problem in the quarterly report for publicly traded corporations: you need to keep on producing gains, or you become a loser. And that leads some companies to lie, cheat, and steal to “make the numbers.”)
And because the marathon event is part of a series, the latest results determine whether the entire multi-marathon series is a success or failure. All that awesome success that you delivered before doesn’t count now.
Her marketing team used a “product launch” just like promoting a movie:
The promotional build-up to the marathon helped awaken that emotional need for release in those who hadn’t bought before. And it fired up the fans to help her make this marathon her most successful ever.
And using themes (which you learned about in an earlier post), she continued to solidify her position as the leader of the high moral ground:
With Kate Smith as the leader, her army of tens of millions of devoted followers focused on what Smith said and wanted, even forgetting the purpose of the bond drive: to sell bonds to support the US war effort. They wouldn’t buy elsewhere, even from other big radio stars conducting their own marathons.
And each time, Kate Smith built intimacy by sharing her deep dream of making that marathon the most successful ever, while asking her audience to help her make her dream come true.
The result of: stoking the already pent-up emotions of guilt and anxiety in her audience long before the Marathon Event arrived … building those emotions even more during the marathon … and sharing a treasured desire while asking her audience to help her make it come true — was a string of sales records!
What started as an event about selling bonds turned into an event about what Kate Smith wanted. It had turned into hero worship.
But if she hadn’t used themes … if she hadn’t asked for the sale correctly 65 times and most important … if she hadn’t built credibility into trust — she would have flopped and never been able to get back up to rebuild her momentum. She would have been finished, done for, kaput, washed out, a has-been, an also-ran.
Turning credibility into trust is the most important thing you can do. Fortunately, there are specific “How-to” steps to do exactly that.
So next time, we’ll look at credibility and trust. It’s so simple, yet it goes way deeper and is much more important than you will ever possibly imagine. When you command the power of trust, you can detour around most of the one billion bits of advice that marketers swear you must follow. Without that trust, you’re guaranteed to be just another unremarkable, unnoticed company out there.
Mass Persuasion master tip:
Using series of events effectively
Please read this very closely. It is the Golden Key to using the repetition of events themselves to get people to blindly follow you:
You must continually build your audience (and therefore your following) and remain in contact with them, even during periods when you have nothing to sell.
One of the most powerful ways to do this is to give them things or help them in some way. With the internet, you can do this easily, by giving information. (Think of Don Corleone in the first Godfather movie: he’s a “solution provider” who fixes things for people, whether paying someone’s rent, bribing or threatening a government official, mediating a dispute, or killing a greedy rival or interfering family member.)
Repeating what we said in the last post’s Mass Persuasion master tip: Only use updates that can be viewed as gains or successes. In propaganda, you control the means of communication (such as newspapers and radio) and talk about successes that don’t exist. In Mass Persuasion, you simply filter out what’s not successful and focus only on success – but you don’t lie.
Credibility and trust: Is it really that simple yet deeper than you can ever imagine? Find out in our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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