4 Key Components For Crafting Absolutely Irresistible Offers

Have you ever wished you could make your perfect prospect just stop dead in their tracks and pay attention to what you have in front of them? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen to the myths and the legends, Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer, and they're going to be sharing with us 4 key components for crafting absolutely irresistible offers. Because oftentimes our customers are doing this thing called avoidance activity. I know you have no idea what that is, but we all do some variation of that, right? We are all having some avoidance strategy. How do you actually make sure that your offer is paid attention to? And how do you make sure that you don't sabotage the entire process? There are 4 key compelling messages that you're able to use and lots of different ideas that we're going to be talking about in this podcast for you to help grab attention and make your irresistible offer the number 1 thing your customers want, including so many secrets. But one of my favorites is how to make price your friend instead of your enemy. Without further ado, let's jump in as Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy talk about the 4 key components of crafting absolutely irresistible offers.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons. They're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Hello everyone, this is Bill Glazer bringing you another one of our Diamond Telecoaching calls, and this month our our call is how to create a compelling message that practically forces prospects to stop what they're doing and take notice. So anyway, Dan is with me. Dan, how you doing?

I'm doing great.

Great. So let's dig right in, okay? So again, it's about how to create a compelling message that practically forces prospects to stop what they're doing and take notice. And so I guess first question to you, Dan, is Why do we need to force prospects to actually take notice?

Well, I think there's a lot going on. I mean, I think the hurdle today is for attention is really very high. There's so much stuff that there's sort of a resistance to being overwhelmed. People feel they're too busy for anything new. Um, Henry Kissinger's old quote, can't be a crisis until next Tuesday because I have— I'm fully booked. I think that's, you know, I think that's really going on with people there. I like to say that their pipes are clogged with junk. Um, you know, the statistic, um, in, in, in the 1970s was that the average mailbox had 5 pieces of junk mail or sales material in it in an average day. And not only has that number gone up, but of course there's 50 or 500 emails and, you know, everything else to pay attention to at the same time. And they're embedded with videos and links, and people are trying to pay attention to what's going on on Facebook and And with that, you've got the ease of deletion, the ease of being ignored, the lowered barriers to entry, so there's a lot more clutter. I mean, it used to cost money to do marketing. Now, of course, there's a lot of marketing that can at least be begun, entire businesses begun, and enter the fray with very little cost. So the barrier's a lot lower. And then I think you add to all of that the impact of what you rather graciously identified or gently identified as a roller coaster economy. There's almost a predetermination on people's part not to put themselves in positions of temptation. Just as I might route my errands so that I don't drive past a doughnut shop. Many people are simply trying not to spend, and the best way they know not to spend is not to be exposed to anything that might cause them to spend. So you have a certain avoidance activity going on, and when you add all that together, As I said, the hurdles— the hurdle for attention is pretty damn high, and somehow standing out in all of that clutter and confusion is really about forcing prospects to pay attention.

Well, you know, before I ask you my next on-topic question, I have a non-topic question to ask you because, out of curiosity, because for years I've been hearing about This temptation to not stop every time you drive past a donut shop. And just out of curiosity, how often does the donut shop win?

Not very often anymore, uh, because, um, the more of that stuff you trim out of your diet, the, the sicker it makes you and the quicker it makes you sick when you put it back in. So, uh, it doesn't win very much. Anymore, maybe 4 times last year. Um, the other item of the same ilk would be a milkshake, and maybe about the same number of times, 4 times last year, because I really do have a severe adverse reaction to them now. Um, that doesn't really stop the desire, incidentally, but, uh, but the, but the price to be paid is higher.

You know what's interesting about The answer to that question is that I think if we visit with the members a week after this call, they'll remember that stat better than anything else we teach on this call.

Well, I'll go further. There will be people who will now go eat a doughnut or drink a milkshake who would not have otherwise because of the conversation.

Just because of the mention of it.

Yeah. Yeah.

So let's get back on topic again. So in looking at, you know, how to— create this compelling message. I know that you often talk about there's two components to creating the best strategy to do this, which is one is the who and the other is the what. So can you just comment about both of them, the who and the what?

Yeah, most people start with the second rather than the first. And so where most people start is I've got a wagon of red bricks. Or blue rocks, and now I got to figure out how to sell my red bricks. And after I figure out all the great things I can say about the red bricks, then finally, gee, I wonder who might want a red brick. And that makes the whole process pretty tough sledding. Obviously, there are times where you have no choice but to begin there, but most of the time we have greater flexibility. And so in forcing people to stop and pay attention, it is extremely useful to have picked someone in the first place who can be stopped and can be forced to pay attention. And in big broad general terms, there's responsive and unresponsive people and responsive and unresponsive prospects. But beyond that, I think that most business owners and marketers do not spend enough time and attention on trying to be for somebody specific so that when that person sees them, hears from them, they are instantly stopped because something has appeared of great personal relevance and great interest rather than trying to be all things to all people. So I talk a lot about aiming for the responsive and being for somebody specific so that they are going to be responsive to you. And finally, aiming at those who will respond in the way you need them to respond. And so if you back through that, first of all, people respond in different ways. It's why— simplistic example is often customers who rent lists of TV buyers, direct response TV commercial buyers or TV infomercial buyers, and then mail to them in direct mail. Are often very disappointed at the results, as opposed to mailing to a list of direct mail buyers. If you need people to come into a room to be sold, they better be people who will come in a room, and ideally they're people who regularly and routinely come into a room. So if you think about that for infomarketing, for example, Dentists go to a lot of seminars. By comparison, MDs go to hardly any. So if you need to sell something in a room, you're in for tougher sledding if you're going to sell it to MDs than you are to dentists because they really don't respond the way you need or want them to respond. As to who the responsive is, and I don't remember now and I neglected to find it before the call, but Uh, either in a Look Over My Shoulder recently or an info letter. I know I used it also at a seminar. Um, there— Pastor Warren, Rick Warren.

Yeah, it was— I think it was an info letter.

Was it info letter?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. Um, uh, big mega church. If people don't know him for any other reason, they may know him because he's the one that got Obama and McCain to come to his church and at the same time and have a discussion on stage, but a huge megachurch marketer and big blockbuster bestselling book. I think it's probably still on the New York Times list, The Purpose Driven Life. Well, he has a book for his— well, he has a course for his affiliated church owners, but then he has a book really for any pastor called The Purpose Driven Church. And it's a marketing book, so by the way, it's worth reading for anybody who markets at the local level, just as a local church does. And one of the most interesting things about the book is how candid and forthright and detailed he is in describing what many people would consider very predatory practices about knowing exactly who is likely to be responsive to them and who isn't, and then targeting the responsive and ignoring the unresponsive, and then making messages that are for those specific likely-to-be-responsive people. And there's a profile of their ideal, I'll use the word customer, in the book, and there's a checklist of things that make people responsive to them, such as trouble in the marriage, recent diagnosis of disease with someone in the family, etc., etc. And it's instructive because it comes from someplace you would not necessarily expect very sophisticated, targeted, and if you like, predatory marketing, really being good about all this. And so since it's there, maybe it's easier to understand it and transfer it to another business. But certainly the best strategy I know for being paid attention to starts with focusing on the who is going to pay attention. Rather than the what it is that you want them to pay attention to.

So, and you kind of alluded to it already, but obviously there's, you know, there's this whole process in people's minds often gets sabotaged. So what do you see as the most common ways that this does get sabotaged in putting together this compelling message?

Well, there'll be a message-to-market mismatch one way or the other. And so for certain things, the market might be fine, and for certain things, the message might be fine. But when these two are put together, there's a fatal flaw in them that causes them not to work at all or not to work very well. One that is an increasingly common mistake has to do with generational differences, with marketing to leading-edge boomers the same way you market to 30- or 40-year-olds, with marketing to seniors the same way you market to leading-edge boomers. I'm working on— a book like a Marketing to the Affluent book about this right now. And I'm working with several clients who market to leading-edge boomers and seniors. And not surprisingly, the members of the client company or client group who are under the age of 40 make a lot of mistakes because they don't get what their actual customer is all about. And vice versa, of course. So, you know, generational issues are a very easy way to kind of muck this up. Very similar is being off the mark with their— with your prospectors' companies' client group, customer groups, sort of tribal language and symbols and a tribal code so that you get yourself immediately marked as an outsider and at many times an offensive outsider. And so if you do get attention, it's damn short-lived and it's negative. Maybe one of the best examples, And it sort of shows you how a little thing can have big impact. Years ago, a company called SmartPractice right now, they began as a company called Symantodontics, and they sold pretty much everything advertising, marketing, and practice building related to dentists. So that's everything from our kind of product, information courses, training down to recall, pre-done recall cards and pre-done patient newsletters and imprinted pens and pads and you name it. And they decided to expand into chiropractic, and they built their first catalog, and they pretty much changed all the language to be chiropractic, but either out of ignorance or laziness or speed or cost, they used the same photographs they had in their other catalog. So all of the imprinted stuff, most of it, had a doctor's name with DDS after it. Now, that wouldn't be deadly, but some of the photographs, for whatever reason, and it would not be deadly with dentists, had MD after the name. And it might not be quite as deadly today as it was 30 years ago, but chiropractors and medical doctors did not get along. And as a matter of fact, the AMA was suing the chiropractic profession at the time, trying to put them out of existence. And generally speaking, all you had to do was say MD within range of a chiropractor and, you know, you were on their death list. And so this catalog did very, very poorly, much to their surprise. But I understood it within 30 seconds of skimming the pages and seeing the photograph. So, you know, there's these kind of mistakes. And then I guess the last one I would mention really has to do with sort of not a mechanical mistake so much, but an assumptive mistake. A sense of entitlement and assumption that you are going to be paid attention to because you ran an ad or sent somebody a letter or made a video and stuck it up online or sent out an email. The very act that you did it and it contains content that you believe should be of interest to the people it was aimed at, that it will be paid attention to. And looping all the way back to the beginning of our call, it's a very poor assumption. And so I think increasingly we have to be not only cautious of it, but go to great extremes to avoid it, to get people to pay attention, to ask them to pay attention, to nudge them into paying attention, never really assuming that they will pay attention.

So now I'm going to ask everybody who's on the call right now, if you don't have in front of you, and provided that you're not driving around in your car listening to this call live, but if you're sitting at a place, if you don't have in front of you, get out a pad and pen if you haven't already been taking notes, because we're about to ask Dan next really would suggest taking some notes. If you're receiving this CD after the call, again, and you're driving around, don't do it when you're driving around, but then go to a place afterwards and listen to this next part with pad and pen in hand because, you know, people really love checklists. You know, it's like sort of like a formula for people. So I'm going to ask you a quick checklist question, Dan. So let's go over a checklist of some compelling messages or some winning ways to create a compelling message, okay?

All right. I think there's 4 big keys. So there's, you have to be concerned with the means you use of getting attention so you have a chance. Then you have to be concerned with presentation. My third key would be some version of the unique selling proposition. And my fourth key would be the offer. And that either includes or separately gets all the way to a fifth key of response instruction. So if you go back now and sort of fill in those blanks, The list I rely on most for means of getting attention, so you have a chance, is there's drama and/or fear. There's breaking news or a link to news. And those two things sometimes go together, not necessarily. There's the big giant promise. There's the classic new and improved, which is the ultimate oxymoron. Can't be improved if it's new, and it can't be new if it's being improved, but nonetheless, for 60-some-odd years, new and improved has worked in advertising. There's free. There's profound specificity. And personal relevance. So if you're a one-legged golfer with asthma, also missing a thumb on your left hand, with bad vision, who wants to play on the Senior Tour, and you somehow got an envelope that said, if you're a one-legged golfer with asthma, also missing a thumb on your left hand, and really bad vision and want to play on the senior tour, this is for you. That piece would leap out of your mail stack at you because of the profound specificity. There's celebrity and celebrity endorsement. And I have to tell you, one of the funniest things going on right now in the celebrity endorsement world, Kim Kardashian,. And most people know the Kardashians are essentially brand licensors more than they are anything else. And, um, brought in $28 million last year and are on pace to do between $55 and $60 million this year. So they had— they have a brand to protect. And so, um, Old Navy, the clothing store chain, is being sued by Kim Kardashian. Because they're running TV commercials with a Kim Kardashian look-alike in them. This will interest you, Bill, because of course you used to use voice, you know, celebrity voice impersonators. And I mean, this woman looks exactly like Kim Kardashian, and they're selling generic clothes that match the kind of clothes that are in a licensed Kim Kardashian line with another retailer. But what may have sparked the lawsuit more than anything else is Kim Kardashian's ex-boyfriend is now dating the Kim Kardashian lookalike who appears in the Old Navy TV commercial. But the Kim Kardashian lookalike in a 60-second TV commercial, by the way, works just as well. She's not going to speak. She works just as well as the real Kim Kardashian. So Old Navy's create a little firestorm here. And then last on the list would be some kind of entertainment or gimmick, and most people are familiar with that more than anything else with grabbers and lumpy objects and toys in boxes and so forth. So those things individually or hooked together in concert are the best means I know of getting that initial head turn, few moments of attention paid, so that you have a chance now to move from attention to interest, to getting someone now to set aside what they're doing physically or at least mentally and give you some undivided attention for a long enough period of time that you can really deliver a marketing message.

So you covered the first key, which is means. So you want to move on to presentation?

Yeah, so now if you get that opportunity, now you're going to present yourself, your company, your product, and you need to do it in the most relevant way possible, which of course loops back to the who. There's a whole school of called Reason Why Advertising that really gets to the issue of relevance. And so there's reasons why your thing, your it exists. There's a reason why your particular version of that thing should be of interest to somebody. So why should they have any interest in a garden hose?, and then you move to why should they have any interest in a garden hose that has an automatic doohickey on it that conserves water, and when you're done with it, it coils itself back up, and then why should that particular person have an interest in that particular garden hose, and finally, the reason why that particular person should have an interest in that particular garden hose at this particular minute. And that's essentially as good of a way to dissect and then assemble a marketing message as any.

So then the third key is the unique selling proposition.

Yeah, which probably everybody on the call is— you know, at least conceptually familiar with. It's the chief kind of proposition on a whole list of types of propositions. And it's essentially unimportant until you've interested somebody in your category of product or service. And then it's really important to move them from anybody's thing as interchangeable commodity to yours and yours only. And it's also, if you're very successful at marketing, it's a critically important key to avoid just being a market maker for other people. Some, a few kinds of businesses sort of give up and live with that reality. So what I was told some years ago by a VP of marketing at Coors is that all the beer advertising on TV during a sporting event does nothing to move market share from one beer brand to the other. All of it in aggregate in an entire year during televised sporting events do nothing to change market share. What they do is make somebody want a beer and they get up off their chair and they go use up the beer they have in their refrigerator and they buy more. So really, all the advertisers are being market makers for all the advertisers. They really are just selling beer. But in most worlds, that's not the way you want to approach business. You don't really want to be using your ad dollars to stimulate sales for other people. And the barrier to that, the prevention to that, the antidote to that is a really, really, really strong unique selling proposition. So that when you advertise and market, you wind up being the only choice for the person you've aimed your advertising at. As you know, there's all sorts of other propositions too. There's unique value proposition. There's unique timing proposition. There's unique price proposition. And all of those have to be considered, but the big key still is You know, why should I do business with you versus any and every other option available to me, including doing nothing? What's the unique selling proposition?

So let's leap over the fourth key, which is the offer, and then we're going to come back to it because I want to— the fifth key should only take a moment to explain, then we'll go back in more depth into the— whole offer thing. So the fifth key is response instructions. And you know, so many people screw this thing up, but why don't you just talk about that for a second?

Well, I mean, you're right. A lot of people leave it off. Or, you know, they make assumptions again about what people are going to do, what people know how to do. What people are willing to think through on their own to do. I have an appointment at a business on Monday, and I've only been there once before, and it's been a year since I've been there. So yesterday I called up to get directions because the confirmation notice they sent me has no map and no directions. And so I get transferred to somebody to take care of this who immediately upon hearing the question, A, confesses to me they're not very good at directions, really can't tell me how to get from where I am to where they are. Told me they're just right across the street from the Nestlé plant, and surely I know where the Nestlé plant is. Which I don't, nor could I give a damn where the Nestlé plant is. And then, because my guess is she's 30, in a very frustrated tone of voice she said, well, why don't you just MapQuest? There's like 9 mistakes in that, presuming you want to get money from me. Now, if you don't care about getting any money from me, then there's no mistakes, and you're perfectly entitled to your opinion that I ought to know where the Nestlé plant is. And that I ought to be using MapQuest and that I ought to have a GPS, but you're not entitled to that opinion if I have the money you want. And so everybody makes these mistakes all the time. They make them on order forms. They make them on confirmation notices for appointments. They make them on seminar announcements locally that are bringing people to a hotel that, oh, everybody knows where that hotel is. They make them by not saying that a toll-free number is a toll-free number, and then at its core, not telling people exactly what to do and how they are expected to do it. And response almost always goes up with clear— and complete response instructions. I can tell you in selling from the front of the room, it's a real variable, the order form itself and the response instruction about what to do at the end. And like at the Peter Loewentz, I mean, it is something I did experiment with, exactly what to say at the end of that speech. To get people up and moving in the right direction and filling out forms and so forth. So it really is an important and often ignored or screwed up key.

So let's go back to key number 4, which is the offer, and obviously the best approach to the offer is developing into what we term irresistible offers. Talk a little about sort of how you put together an irresistible offer, and then maybe we'll even do a little bit more further in-depth conversation on that.

Well, I think there's 3 main components. So one is the product or service, the stuff, the bonuses, you know, what's being sold and what's being gifted with sale, and the more personally relevant that is, the more appealingly titled it is, everything that can be done to make that appealing, so much the better. The second component is price, and for an irresistible offer, price has to feel like an unbelievable but made-believable bargain. It has to feel like a really wise investment. It has to feel like what I call the brain-dead price where everything else considered, product, bonuses, service, warranty, relevance to me, etc. Everything else considered, now this price is a no-brainer price. You would have to be an idiot not to grab it before the seller changes their mind. So there's price. And then last, there's urgency. What is it about this irresistible offer that mandates taking advantage of it with no delay and no hesitation right this minute. And so those are the three, I guess, boxes you work in or that I work in when I'm sitting down to build an offer.

So, and again, I think that people just sort of do not— they come up with bad offers or certainly not strong enough offers. So I want to dig into this a little bit more. And so, and some of this you might actually repeat when I ask you this question, but repeat what you've already said, but so when you focus, when you personally focus on the offer, so what are some of the things that you have on your sort of checklist of things that you think about in terms of crafting this offer?

Well, the big goal is clarity. So that kind of hooking offer and response instruction together so that people understand it. There are a few instances when actually you're selling and you don't want them to understand it, but they're few and far between. For the most part, you do want them to understand what they're buying and why they're buying and all of that. And so clarity. That gets more and more dicey and difficult the more component parts, the more moving parts, the more complexity there is to the offer. But complexity and clarity do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. One is just a challenge to the other. But generally speaking, The confused and uncertain consumer tends to do nothing. So clarity is a biggie. Choices, biggie. I am— this is to me so basic, and yet I am consistently amazed at how many advertisers, marketers, sellers put one yes or no choice out in front of the prospect. Doesn't matter whether it's a chiropractor or dentist presenting a treatment program, or it's, you know, a salesman of a consumer product, on and on. It's amazing to me, a financial plan from an advisor, how many put one choice out there, thereby creating a yes or no circumstance when simple math tells you that you improve the odds of a yes if there are 3 yes choices and only 1 no choice to choose from, or 2 yes choices and 1 no choice. There's also a whole side issue there discussed in length in the price strategy book, but about the net profitability of a premium choice and so forth. There's the description of the core product or the service and what that ought to be out of everything in the basket versus what ought to be bonuses, premiums, what added value can be created And so if we got a red brick and a blue rock, which ought to be the product and which ought to be the bonus? And obviously much more complicated than that. Do we emphasize the service with less emphasis on the tangible goods, or do we emphasize the tangible goods with less emphasis on the service? I noticed an auto dealer the other day, an Infiniti dealer here, I noticed a sharp change in their TV commercials. There's no way to know if it's intelligence or accident. I just— just interesting that they're running a TV commercial that says almost nothing about the car but is entirely about the service after the sale. And the biggest thing they're emphasizing that I have not noticed them emphasizing before is that they have a fleet of 50 Infinity loaners, so of the same brand that you're buying, loaners, and that they will bring you the loaner car and pick up your car and bring your car back. So they've really switched from showing the car and talking about the car, the product if you will, to talking about the service. So there's that whole— the technical term for all this is weighting. How much weight— not waiting like procrastinating, but weighting like fat. How much weight you put on product, how much weight you put on service, how much weight you put on bonus. Does the bonus drive the sale? You know, et cetera, et cetera. And then I guess last would be the risk reversal element. How do we make it risk-free to buy? How much emphasis do we put on the risk-free aspect of our offer? Is there one guarantee or are there two guarantees or are there three guarantees? Are they money-back guarantees? Are they double money-back guarantees? Are they— is it positioned as free trial regardless of whether in fact it is free trial or not? All of those risk reversal issues.

So again, before we move on to the next question, but, you know, we just went over the 5 keys to sort of what makes up a compelling message, and I really urge everybody to listen to this over and over again, take copious notes, and then when you create that message, go get out your notes and make sure you're following this along because it's a game changer in terms of getting people to respond. So the next question is, in presenting price, how can you sort of— and I know you have a brand new book out on price that you co-authored with Diamond member Jason Mars, but how can price, how can you sort of turn it into sort of your friend as opposed to your enemy when you're presenting? Because everybody from the world that I came from, which was retail, and then every other niche I've ever seen that I've worked with, almost everybody is so fearful of price. So, because they think price is going to really kill their sales. How can you, again, make price your friend and not your enemy?

Yeah, you're right. People act like price is a terrorist. And they really are afraid of it. And I think every begetter is, you know, but you kind of need to get over it. You said it in an important and accurate way that price is best presented, not just stated, and certainly not disclosed only under duress. And so not only shouldn't it make you anxious, but it really can't appear to the prospect or the customer to be making you anxious. I think that when you present price, you always have to think about timing. Where in the overall presentation you put it. You have to think about context, which, for example, you never allow apples-to-apples comparisons. You always create apples-to-oranges comparisons that make your price seem substantially less than value and make it impossible to compare it directly to some other price. So there's context. There's how low can you go in the way it feels without it feeling so low that that in and of itself produces anxiety, you know, that the price is incongruent with the positioning or really causes somebody to question value. The— and, and you're very well aware of them and, um, and competed with the Men's Warehouse and Joseph A. Banks and those guys of the world. Where I live, at least right now, Joseph A. Banks is one of the most aggressive TV advertisers, um, I think I've ever seen, uh, in clothing. And They're very big on incredible— I think the last thing I saw the other day was buy one, get two free. So buy a suit, get two free sport coats. Buy a pair of pants, get two pair of pants and a sport coat. I mean, just insane. And at some point I wonder, well, it certainly attracts one kind of customer and I think repels another kind of customer. And I wonder at what point they do themselves more harm than good because people start to wonder if the stuff is any good. So, you know, I think that's all an issue. And so the presentation of price is at least as important as the presentation of product. It's not an oh, by the way. It's not something to be hidden, but— and it is something to be—

to have context created for.

Well, just out of curiosity, so what about if the price is so compelling?

Because you mentioned before the fact that you usually don't lead with it. You don't present it until later. In the proposition. But what about if the price itself is just such an unbelievable price that that would be very compelling to people? At that point, would you say that you could lead with it?

Could. There are actually two times when you will see an advertiser or seller lead with price. One is the scenario you just described. When it is such an obvious bargain, such an amazing, incredible bargain. The other is actually when it is profoundly expensive, and really now that price is being used as marketplace differentiation and as call-out to a certain kind of customer. And you— there are classics over the years of successful advertisements where literally the lead focus of the ad is, here's the most expensive blank ever made, ever sold, ever offered. And so both of those scenarios provide opportunity and reason to lead with price, and so you can, and you can do so successfully. It's still not— I'm still not inclined to do it very often. I'm still more inclined to want to set it up and tell the story rather than actually be selling based on the price. But, you know, there's— look, there's a very successful campaign. It comes out normally during bad economic times very aggressively and is dormant or hardly used during good times. But— and there's been variations of it over decades. It's an opportunity kind of pitch., and it is about, um, how to buy homes for $5, how to buy a car for a dollar, um, and it's about government seizures of stuff from drug dealers, uh, things left behind at freight companies and storage sheds, bank foreclosures of properties, and you will see very aggressive advertising that is totally focused on price. Look, somebody got a Mercedes for $50. And if you have this information or if you come to this auction or if you go to this website, you'll find hundreds of homes that you can buy for $500 or less in good neighborhoods all across America. And you'll find cars that you can buy brand new, less than 10,000 miles on them, still under warranty for $500 or less. Well, that's a— they're totally selling price. And they feel that that's the best path they have to commanding attention from the marketplace, and they may very well be right. My big fear with it for businesses that you intend to sustain over time has to do with, A, A, how you've sort of conditioned the customer that now that you have them, is that the only way you're going to be able to sell to them again? And B, does it just mark you as a price seller? And over time, almost all who sell by price ultimately do die by price. So those are my concerns. But there's no doubt that it's a strategy that can work.

So before we open up for some Q&A, and I do want to leave a fair amount of time for that, I do want to go back then, because we're running at a pretty good pace. I want to go back and spend a little bit of time with you getting into a little bit more depth with the list you get out as far as some of the means of getting attention. So we'll go through those sort of like one by one, and then I'll go through as many of those as we can until we have to go over to Q&A. So Dan, let's go back to the list. So the first item on the list that you get as far as means of getting attention, and again, we can try to go through these as quick a pace as possible. The first one is drama fear. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 'Cause that's one of my favorites.

Actually, the second part, the fear part. Yeah, well, overall, fear of loss motivates more purchasing and more response than does anything else. Relatively small percentages of populations are ambitious for gain, but virtually 100% of every population reacts adversely to having things things they have taken away from them. So fear of loss is very, very powerful, and when it is presented in a very dramatic way, it's doubly powerful. Right now, modified since some FTC chain rattling in the past 6 months, but the gold industry, if you pay attention to the advertising of the gold industry, financial newsletter marketers, again, bad economies, really cranks up those industries' efforts, and they are very much fearmongerers. And so the talk is about how the government is scheming to take away your whatever, you know, your retirement benefits, your guns, your retirement benefits and your guns, shocking irrelevance statistics, amazing stories that are incredibly dramatic. These have made the tabloid industry what it is. These have made cable news what it is. And it sells an awful lot of product.

So the next one that you mentioned, And actually, by the way, if I could just make an aside about this, even before I move you to the next one, that oftentimes these exact same means of getting attention that Dan is mentioning in terms of creating a message, oftentimes we use these exact same lists when we create headlines. So it works the same equally well there as it does even in your compelling message. So the next one, The second one is the breaking news.

Talk about that. Well, breaking news has become wildly overused on cable television, but still, when the breaking news banner runs across the TV screen, people perk up. David Ogilvy said that the heart and soul of great advertising is news. We are sort of conditioned to pay attention to what is news, and so when you present yourself as either news or linked to news that is very current, very timely, you can gain an edge in grabbing that attention. For long enough now to try and move from attention to interest. The news links to certain constituencies are even more powerful because of personal relevance. So, you know, a new medical breakthrough for Type 2 diabetics, that put out there as a marketing message will get zero attention from just about anybody but Type 2 diabetics., but it is extremely effective at getting attention from Type 2 diabetics. Today, Congress officially declared war on 401(k)s, is likely to get zero attention from people that don't have 401(k)s, but is likely to get profound attention from people who do have 401(k)s. So when you take breaking news and you target it to a constituency, you have a very powerful means of getting attention.

The next one is the giant promise, and, you know, again, I'm going to ask you to talk about it, but I would also like you to also just briefly mention about not only some examples of people that have done giant promise, but I've also seen it work adversely at times. So can you talk about any caution about when doing it? When's the right way to do it?

What's the wrong way to do it? Well, the danger in it is its unbelievability. So You know, we can probably, without a lot of sweat, we could probably convince people that secret millionaires are running around this month giving out money to deserving people. And so if you will put a sign in your yard, with the, with the reason in 146 characters or less that you ought to be chosen, there's a possibility that a secret millionaire will choose you. We could probably get a lot of signs put out. It'll be harder if we make the story about secret millionaire aliens from another galaxy who have come here to hand out free money this month to deserving people who have signs in their yards. Now, depending on who we aim that at, We may still be able to get some signs put in the yards, but, you know, we made our job a little tougher. Generally speaking, though, we marketers will be more sensitive to that danger than the danger actually exists, because people are quite willing to set aside sanity and rationality for a promise that they really want. Money promises, you know, The 4-Hour Workweek, its predecessors like Carbo's Lazy Man's Way to Riches, even executives. I mean, a huge best-selling book was The One Minute Manager. That's a big promise, especially if you translate it literally. And yet, on a rational level, if you've ever managed anybody, you instantly know that there is no 1-minute management of anything, of anybody, any way, shape, or form. But still, it's a big attention-getting promise. The best headline still of all time is a headline of a classified ad called "Corn's Gone in 5 Days or Money Back." And It's a big promise. It has a meaningful specific of a number of days. It has a guarantee all packed into it.

That's a great way to deliver a promise. I'm going to skip over new and improved only because I want to make sure there's a couple of those gamuts on here I wanted to discuss. One of them I really want to discuss is the entertainment gimmick one. Actually, let me just stick— let me just keep it entertainment right now before we get to gimmick is I think you would agree, Dan, one of the great examples that all of our members have seen where we have embraced this is in the special 16-page no BS International Enquirer marketing— that we put together to promote the InfoSummit. And you and I actually, we recorded an entire call for our Copy Confidential Look Over Your Shoulders members who sort of explain the whole process that went into that. But because this is one that again is not used nearly enough, so talk about the advantages of trying that entertainment gimmicky type of approach, to why that would get people to take notice?

Well, I view it as a way to buy permission to sell, and in a sense, to obligate it, because people very much like to be entertained, maybe more than anything else. On the planet. Last weekend, in a nation with 9% unemployment, 18% functional unemployment if you factor in underemployment, real estate in the dumper, every economic, you know, fact of life not good, the new Harry Potter movie took in $186 million. In 3 days. There are entire companies going through gyrations of manufacturing product, distributing product, selling product, with product on the shelf of every store in its category in America, won't do $186 million in business this entire year. And it is significant that it is an entertainment product that does it. So people very much like to laugh, chuckle, have a good time, be entertained, be amused. And so when it can be done and care taken not to have it overwhelm the selling, then I often do it. And I view it as a way to sort of the trade, the ethical bribe if you will, of I want you to pay attention to my sales message, but I'll at least make it kind of fun and interesting and entertaining for you to do so.

And that really is the theory. Dan, let me go back and ask you about one of the other items that was on your list. And it, I mean, it obviously needs to be there as far as a way of getting attention. And I don't know if you would agree with what I'm about to say, but if it's not the most commonly used one, it's amongst one of the most commonly used ones, which is the word free. So talk about the word free and talk about the advantages of it and perhaps even the disadvantages of it.

Well, the disadvantage is, first of all, it has enormous peril. Because of what it does to you and your relationship with the customer after you acquire them. It has the risk of being disbelieved and therefore making everything you have to say disbelieved. With all that said, it continues to test In instances where tests are run, has the most compelling thing you can do in advertising when you do it right. Almost everybody will tell you rationally that they are well aware there's no such thing as free, and almost everybody is spending an enormous amount of time and effort and energy trying to get free. And so it's hard to beat it as an attention-getter, especially if it is combined with the promise of something for free that the constituency to which you are appealing really wants. And so because it is so powerful, it is usually unwise to operate without it., and it is wise to try and find a way to use it that does not bring with it the worst of the disadvantages. And so, just about in every split test, if you work it into a headline or into a subhead, you immediately get a response bump. All sorts of offers are positioned as free that of course really aren't. And a staple in direct response radio advertising is a free offer that leads to a telephone sales floor where actually something very expensive is sold. And almost every advertiser that does that will tell you they'd rather run an ad that did not use free their sales force would rather be getting people on the phone who were not calling to get something for free, but the call count drops so badly with any other approach that the ugly mess created by the free is more profitable than any other alternative.

So like, so like, to that effect, I'm going to sort of ask you a little twist to the question. So if you look at like magazine subscriptions, the best one, I think is the best example of it is Sports Illustrated. So they built an entire huge magazine subscription on the back of a free offer which is a free football phone or whatever the free thing there. A lot of times they have the, after a Super Bowl or World Series they have a free commemorative thing that's related to that. What is your thoughts about that approach, whereas basically the free thing is almost the premium that's now tied to the actual thing you want to sell?

Well, it literally is gift with purchase on steroids, because in a huge number of cases, people are subscribing to the magazine only to get that gift.. And they would not, almost under any circumstances, pay for the magazine otherwise. Now, in some businesses that would be deadly. In their business, they don't make money on subscriptions anyway. They make money on advertising revenues, which are dependent upon the number of subscribers you have. So buying a subscriber and knowing in advance that it may be very difficult to renew that subscriber. Still makes good sense in their business model. So all of these strategies are situational. In a lot of businesses, free or nearly free is okay, even, even though it trains the customer badly, because it creates habit of use. And so the grand opening marketing for a business is often better done with free or nearly free than anything else, despite the obvious disadvantage. In the dry cleaning business, the business is all about habit of use. If you can get somebody to visit the same dry cleaners 3 or more times within 6 weeks, you got them forever. The car goes there automatically as soon as you put clothes in the car, unless and until they screw everything up so badly that the person is motivated to go elsewhere. So the 1 Hour Martinizing guys, their original grand opening strategy, which they relied on for years, was targeted residents around the location, you could bring in all you could carry and get it cleaned for free. Then it was a buck. And then when you picked it up, second time back, you got a coupon to bring in everything you could carry and get it all cleaned for $3. So now you brought stuff in, you came back to get it, you brought more stuff in, you came back to get that, You've been back 4 times in a short condensed period of time. They got you. And they got you now at full price. And so, you know, the free strategies are fraught with peril. They come with a price. And most importantly, they are situational. Each one makes sense in one business model, doesn't make sense in another.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast Lost with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.