When I say “Jump,”
You say “How high?”
Then watch how they jump.
Last time, we talked about how Kate Smith, who raised today’s equivalent of $480 million dollars in 18 hours by selling war bonds during World War II, built trust and raked her audiences over a smouldering hot bed of emotions.
You saw how she repeated certain themes, while not mentioning their opposites:
- Overall theme: buying bonds is a sacred act, a moral responsibility
- Sacrifice: servicemen, their families, and Kate Smith herself
- Participation/Community: we’re all in this together
- Competition: Los Angeles is beating New York
- Ease in Buying: helping buyers commit to the action they themselves want when they’re most emotionally engaged
- Family/Community: those boys are our boys, those are your boys
- Personal: create deep intimacy and vulnerability by opening your heart to your audience while using you, your, yours: “I have a dream I want to share with you. An impossible dream. Will you help me make it come true?”
These themes helped her eliminate competition with and comparison to other products or sellers of the exact same commodity product: war bonds. And they definitely will help you do the same. They make your product or service unique, even in selling a commodity product like a PC, salt, or a nearly-impossible-to-differentiate service which everyone and their grandmothers are offering, like basic website design.
(And in the weeks before that, you even saw a real-world version of using the overall theme in Ally Bank, the new champion and protector of the ordinary saver, you saw how their misuse of this theme had the American Bankers Association screaming “FOUL!”, and you saw how the master strategists behind Ally Bank responded. I’ll give you an update on Ally Bank’s next step soon. Like before, you’ll clearly see how Mass Persuasion helps you penetrate through corporate communications’ murky messages, so you clearly the true face behind the public mask they show to you.)
So, how can you make the impossible actually happen for you?
How can you make a commodity like salt or basic website design unique and eliminate your competition?
NOTE: If you’re convinced you’re unique in the minds of prospects, you’re in denial. Pine trees are unique among trees. Each of the 115 species of pine is unique among the family of pines. And each pine tree is unique within its species. So which ones of the thousands or tens of thousands you’ve seen do you remember?
Resistance is futile:
You previously saw how Kate Smith squashed sales objections to her incessant “Will you buy a bond?” calls to action, like an ancient bald Kung Fu master calmly catching flies with chopsticks:
“I’m pestering you, I know, but let’s put this aside for now.”
“You may be tired of me, but I’ve got to keep going.”
I promised you that this time you’d find out the answers to these burning questions:
- Why couldn’t her listeners just turn the radio off?
- Walk away?
- Or find some other escape?
- Why did they hand over control of their lives to this marathon sales event?
- Why did they turn into zombies and the day into the night of the living dead?
I need to see how it ends:
Generally, when people are interrupted while chasing down a goal that’s important to them, they become uneasy until they can return to it. Their tension continues until they complete their goal, and there’s emotional resistance to any suggestion to stopping before they reach the end.
Ever go to a boring but required staff meeting and when it finishes, everyone runs like hell back to their desks to resume their important work? That’s how powerful the tension and urge is to complete a goal.
This was the compulsive zombie pattern that glued listeners to their radios: they were striving and straining toward a goal, especially those who identified themselves with Kate Smith, and they needed to experience “closure.” Otherwise, they’d have a lingering sense of incompletion, like walking out on a movie just before the revealing twist ending.
So Kate Smith’s radio marathon goes beyond a single event: it becomes a race or endurance contest with a prize or goal at the end. It really was a marathon of 18 hours rather than 26.2 miles (or 42 kilometers).
And like a marathon, deeply emotionally invested fans cheered Smith on as their favorite runner and were concerned about her ability to endure. For them, she became a heroic martyr, sacrificing herself for others.
“Every time she spoke we discussed whether she had been stronger or weaker than the last time and just when it would be safe to bet on her ending.”
If she fails, I fail:
If she failed, they also failed. This is the essence of the sociology of sport: the need to have a hero who validates you through their success. Have you seen any of the Rocky Balboa movies, based on the underdog hero who physically sacrifices himself in a 15-round combat marathon? His fans are deeply invested in the outcome, and if he fails, they also fail. The same happens with professional, amateur, and school sports. Ever been a fan on the losing side of a national championship? How did you feel about yourself? Almost as bad as the athletes? Why? Because you were participating emotionally along with them.
Others more casually just enjoyed the race without knowing any of the runners:
“I think many people stayed (at the bar) because they wanted to see the outcome of her endurance.”
I use a model to teach people about selling. Tease your prospects, build up the tension, relax a tiny bit, then build that tension some more. Then they will buy without you having to ask for the sale.
“After each announcement there was a sort of tension in the place to see whether she would come on again.”
As the marathon stretched on, Smith’s voice grew weaker and more strained. And Smith herself had stated throughout the day that her voice and energy might not last.
This was a calculated move, based on understanding people deeply.
The Kate Smith campaign scriptwriters effectively hinted early and often that she might have taken on too much of a challenge.
If an marathon running race doesn’t seem exciting enough for you as a comparison, I’ve got the perfect example where you yourself may have experienced being captured by the television event: election night for the national leader (president, prime minister, etc.). They use everything you just learned about above: candidates as marathon runners in the final stretch, a fixed goal, early reports projecting the future, later reports updating the past, regional reports and updates, tension built from races that are “too close to call” and expert opinions that are vague on purpose.
Mass Persuasion master tip:
Holding attention
Please read this very closely. It is the Golden Key to holding people’s attention during an event, especially a marathon:
The performer who is on the verge of failure captures sustained interest. Nobody cares about a weightlifter hoisting 10 pounds, and nobody cares about watching him fail to budge 1000 pounds. But somewhere in between, where he might succeed or fail, the audience holds its breath. Between the easily possible and the clearly impossible lies the profitable region of challenge.
But there’s more to this than just building up the reasonable possibility of failing.
Yes: you need more than the trust you worked hard to establish; otherwise, people won’t give you five seconds of their time and you’ll forever need to run “shock and awe” campaigns just to get noticed. And continuous “shock and awesome” just turns them into awesomely shell-shocked zombies.
Yes: your themes are extremely important; otherwise, you won’t put your prospects into those critical emotional states. Instead, you will be forced to submit to comparisons of features, benefits, and price like all sellers of salt and bank savings accounts.
But: The Summer Olympics games are a major international event for one reason: they are no ordinary event.
Find out next time the right way to make sure your marketing is no ordinary event. In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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