When you claim “This is very special,”
they will raise their hands in agreement.
We’ve been following the incredible story of how Kate Smith raised today’s equivalent of $480 million dollars in 18 hours by selling war bonds during World War II. That’s $444,000 a minute, $7,400 each ticking second!
Here are the facts to bring you up to speed:
- Commodity product: her buyers could walk down to any bank or post office and get their bond there instead
- Shell-shocked buyers: they had been bombarded with “Buy Bonds” messages for three relentless years – and had it up to here about hearing anything related to war bonds
- Not a salesperson: Kate Smith was a singer, and all she did was read scripts handed to her by master copywriters behind the scenes who orchestrated the whole affair
- No mention of features, benefits, proof of these: she never mentioned anything like price … great interest rate … safely backed by the US government … sound investment … help your family … testimonials of satisfaction from others buyers to support any of the above
- Built trust and stoked the fires of emotions using themes: instead of approaches of either “How you can (find a solution to your problem)” or showing them their dominant resident emotion, showing your satisfying solution, then asking them which they prefer, she dug deep sinkholes in her audience’s path, let them fall into them by themselves, then rescued them with the only rope they could possibly grab: the Buy A Bond safety rope
- The themes had a powerful uniting structure: she used an overall theme that’s hard to challenge and marched them into the sinkhole: sacredness. Then she used specific themes (sacrifice, participation, competition, ease in buying, family and community, and personalization) to get them to grab the Buy A Bond safety rope, which she offered 65 times
- Listeners turned into zombies under her control: they experienced the marathon as a single event and, like national TV coverage for the presidential race, they just had to find out how it turned out and, like a die-hard sports fan following their team in the championship, they were fully emotionally invested in the outcome – if their candidate or team wins, they are winners
And while the entire world is being fooled by some new bank that seems to be saying all the right things, you used Mass Persuasion to cut through master propaganda manipulator Ally Bank’s overall theme (“champion of the high moral ground in consumer banking”) and understand that their name is pronounced “A Lie.” And I will give you an update to them later.
Why is it when some many other marketers today — including the smartest, most talented marketing departments and ad agencies of the largest corporations, backed by unlimited budgets – flat fat on their faces …
Why did this combination of facts you read in the list above create a Niagara Falls of money pouring in at the rate of $7,400 a second for 18 continuous, non-stop hours?
May I have your attention, please?
This is no ordinary event
Let’s look at the repeated messages, those that got people to feel this was a very special radio bond sale event, with Kate Smith going through great personal pain, which got them to run over to their phone and call in a bond pledge while screaming and raising their arms high in the air, “I have seen the light and now I believe!”
While you read this, keep in mind that these bonds already had been selling for three years (totaling $384 billion in today’s money), people were sick of hearing sales pitches to buy them, Kate Smith already had hosted two prior radio sales marathon events, and marathon radio events already were being used by other radio superstars. Learn from this and apply it to your Mass Persuasion campaigns:
- This is no ordinary event:
- “I’m going to appear throughout the day from now until one in the morning.”
- “In all these years, I don’t think anything even remotely like this has ever been done before.” (not true, since she had done two prior marathons)
- Personal meaning to her (thus special, not ordinary):
- “… Working on what I hope and believe is going to be the most wonderful, the proudest day of my whole life.”
- A large corporation recognizes how extraordinary this is:
- “This CBS Bond Day. It’s the day when we — and when I say we, I mean all of us here at CBS and all of its stations are getting together to make a dream come true.”
- “All regular business at this station has been suspended, with the entire staff manning the telephones.”
- Day long event like a very long infomercial (rather than the usual unorchestrated appeals like a 30-second TV ad or even the 60-minute informercial):
- “I’ll be on the air all day today”
- “I’m going to be here all day”
- “I’m working all day long”
- Toward the end, her announcers increasingly emphasized her long and hard effort, producing a psychological effect of great importance, and also making it clear to latecomers that this was no ordinary performance:
- “Back to Kate Smith who is on her 14th hour.”
The result of repeating these themed messages on listeners? They clearly felt they were witnessing or even participating in a special event.
A quick note: Why did this work when this ploy was also used by others back in Kate Smith’s 1943 and you and I see this ploy used on TV all the time today: “Attention! Please stayed tuned for a special announcement . . .”?
You learned the answer before in a prior post: the all-important trust she built in her listeners:
“The audience put enormous importance on her integrity Why? It was based on their experience and magnified by the anxiety that followed, that they were often the object of exploitation, manipulation, and control by others who have their own private interests at heart.“
Sure, she used a proven technique but, unlike the advertising manipulators who had no credibility, people believed her because they trusted her.
Mass Persuasion master tip:
Your Attention Please:
This is an important Special Event announcement:
Please read this very closely. It is the Golden Key to using your repeated messages to create the impression of a “special event” effectively:
The sequence of Kate Smith appeals was structured to focus the attention of the audience on its special aspects. “The art of persuasion consists largely in directing attention to those aspects of a subject that will influence the mind of the person to be persuaded.”
We have Kate Smith’s audience believing that they were experiencing a special event. She placed those emotional sinkholes in their way, they willingly fell in, and then she lowered the Buy A Bond safety rope 65 times to them, resulting in $480 million dollars!
Like a chimpanzee sticking a twig into a termite nest, pulling it out, and eating all the clinging insects. Yep: It’s so easy even a monkey can do it!
Kate Smith used one repeated message consistently in the exact same place — at the very end — with the exact same words all 65 times:
“Will you buy a bond?”
But there’s more to this than just robotically repeating your message and asking for the sale. You’ll quickly lose their interest if you just squawk your messages like a parrot. In fact, they literally won’t hear you, and there’s a precise reason why.
Find out next time the right way to repeat your messages. You’ll see this is not monkey business and, once you use it yourself, your competitors will imitate your success ape-like. But they’ll fail while you continue evolving onward and upward, because they don’t know how or why it works. In our next post covering Mass Persuasion.
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