How To Make Your Brand or Business Impossible to Resist

Imagine a future journey of going from copywriter to National Speaker Association Hall of Fame speaker, chief executive officer of your own business, and an advertising executive. How would you see the world differently having first started as a copywriter with direct marketing glasses? Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today's episode, Dan Kennedy is going to be speaking with Sally Hogshead. Now Sally is a New York Times bestselling author of her book Fascinate. And she wouldn't be following Dan Kinney's principles without having written a book. And she is also the chief executive officer of her business, How to Fascinate. Now, Sally's story is unique because she has seen both sides of the coin. She has seen the companies that have tons of funds and do lots and lots of focus groups, and they spend months on strategy before things are proven, as well as creating something that is truly fascinating and changes people's minds in an instant without the budget. So what is the secret sauce? What is that magic? Well, it might have to do with stop creating ads and start creating. Well, there are a lot of steps. Let me let you listen in as we talk to Sally Hogshead and Dan Kennedy, how to make your brand or business impossible to resist.

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. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Diamond Call with guests we will get to in just a moment. Someone most of you are familiar with, Sally Hogshead. Sally, thanks for making the time. Welcome. For those who somehow have missed seeing you at GKIT and are unfamiliar I will let you do your own, your own who you are, what you do, where you came from encapsulation.

Sure. Well, Dan, you know, the way in which you have influenced my work and helped me build my business is irrefutable and something I'm intensely grateful for. And I would love to share all my secrets today on the call by, by by giving some concrete case studies and demonstrations of what I've learned from you and how I've applied it to not only grow my business but help other people grow their businesses too. Would you like me to jump in with some— a quick bit of background for those of us on the Diamond Phone?

Yeah, for those that have been in the Ludd Cave, we want to establish that first.

Oh my God. Can I just say you have the— you're the epitome of a great sarcastic commentator, so I always love having calls with you. Okay, so quick bit of background. When I first began my career, I was a copywriter, and not quite the same type of copywriter as Dan's legacy. I was a copywriter in advertising, so I was working with big brands like Nike, Mini Cooper, Coca-Cola, BMW, Twitter, and I helped them come up with the big picture ideas. And it was very much about what's the next TV campaign we're going to do. And as I worked with these different brands and found it extremely rewarding and very profitable, I discovered that there's a shortcut. There are certain shortcuts you can take to deliver the best quality idea strategy, outcome for marketing, but you don't necessarily have to go through all the same steps. And I'll talk more about that in just a moment. As a quick overview of how this allowed me to create a career and a life that I love, when I was 24, I was the number one most award-winning copywriter in the United States for advertising. When I was 27, I opened up my first advertising agency in Los Angeles, and our first two clients were Target, and Remy Martin. And then when I was 31, my work was hung in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. So when I look back on that first part of my career when I was helping brands grow and increase revenue, and we were— at that point there were billions of dollars a year of media spend that were being allocated for these big messages that were going out. I stood back and I looked at it. And I said, this is great for the companies that can afford this, but the people who are doing the most interesting work, the most meaningful work, there's no way they have a budget of $100 million a year or a month. So it seemed like it was unfair to me, and it always bothered me. And so I got out of advertising and I began exploring how could anyone have a brand that makes a difference in the world, that can drive profit, that can move the needle with just one ad instead of having to have a Super Bowl TV commercial or a massive print buy. In other words, what can the rest of us do? What is branding? What is marketing for the rest of us, for the small business leaders like Dan and me and most of us who are listening right now on this call? And I saw that there's an inequity that's happening right now in marketing, and it's getting worse. There are two ends of the spectrum. On one end of the spectrum, there are the people, the brands that have enough resources that they can do focus groups around the country. They can spend months figuring out what their strategy is going to be. And then after many, many meetings in big conference rooms with lots of café au laits and sushi dinners, they can finally agree on a strategy. And so after a year of work and $1 million later, they come to the point of the strategy. It's good, Dan, are you familiar with the concept of good, fast, and cheap? Good, fast, or cheap, pick any two? Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, so when you work with an advertising agency, it's good, it might be fast, might not be, it's definitely not cheap. In fact, it's so not cheap it's out of reach for most of us in small businesses, those of us who actually have something important to say.

Well, on the other hand, to be fair, to be fair about it also, the, the ad agency world where you spend a lot of time and I spend a little, one of the reasons it's not cheap is because there's an inherent conflict of interest, right, in that the money is made and the awards are won by getting the advertiser, the client, to spend as much money as is humanly possible. There's no real incentive for ROI efficiency in the traditional advertising world. And I also think the fragmentation, you know, from 3 TV stations to 3,000, from terrestrial radio to satellite radio, internet, all of that has worsened the inequity that you referenced because there's so much more media. You would think that would be all good news, but it actually isn't for the small business player because while the big advertisers' resources, their bandwidth is essentially infinitely expandable one way or another. The guy down here with 5 dental practices is dealing with a relatively finite bucket of resources that keeps getting diluted over more and more and more media. So it's actually getting a lot worse.

And not only is that not fair, in other words, that it puts— if you don't have the big budget, you're at a huge disadvantage according to that model. But it also means that the messages that really matter are not getting heard because they're being overpowered by people who can spend more with boring, irrelevant messages. So to put it in a nutshell, you have two choices. You can either have the biggest budget or you can have the message that's the most fascinating. And here's what I mean by that. If you've got a huge budget, you can just sort of outspend your competitors. You can slam your message in over and over again across forms of paid media. And it doesn't have to be smart because you're just going to dull your listeners' senses into having brand awareness so that they follow like sheep into the store pulling your product off the shelf or buying your services. But there's an alternative, and the alternative is you can have the most fascinating message. In other words, the message that people want, that they focus on, that they seek out, that they talk about, they refer, and they come back to again and again. And if you don't have the biggest budget in your category, you don't have a choice. You have the option of being the most fascinating. Otherwise, you're going to have to compete on the basis of price, which will completely screw your business model because then you're just going down the drain of, of being irrelevant, ignored, forgotten. So when I took a step back after working with all these high-level, world-class ad agencies and brands, I realized that I really didn't want my work, my life's work, to be about interpreting these high-level brands. It was a game of who could spend the most money. So about 10 years ago, I began looking at exploring this, researching this. I researched 1 million customers. And what I found was there are patterns. And once you know those patterns, it becomes like a backstage pass. So instead of standing in the line and going through the focus groups, the café au lait lunches, the sushi dinners, lots of talking, very little doing. If you can shortcut that into a formula, you've got a massive competitive advantage because you can find a way to make your message stand out in a competitive, crowded, cluttered, distracted, commoditized marketplace. And instead of spending more money, you can say something people actually want to listen to. And so a few months ago, Dan, I shared this with you, I wrote a major overhaul on my original book named Fascinate. And in the book Fascinate, I kind of pulled back the curtains on the ad agency. And I know I've probably pissed a few people in ad agencies off, I forgive those who paid me a lot to help me develop this system. Advertising has been very kind to me. But I saw that there was something that was just unjust happening in the system of marketing when it comes to having a bigger platform. And so I developed a system that will allow anyone, anyone whether you're creative or not creative, a leader or not a leader, a marketer or not a marketer, an entrepreneur, or a staff member, anyone can come in and get pretty far along the process. So instead of taking a year to figure out your strategic plan, in about an hour I can get you about halfway there. I can't get you all the way there. I mean, at some point you know your brand better than anyone. But if I can show you a template, and I can say there are certain decisions you need to make, here are those decisions. These are practices called upon by the world's greatest greatest, most powerful, most profitable admired companies. You can apply that to your business whether you're a solopreneur, whether you have a series of yoga studios, or maybe you're an attorney like my husband. Maybe you want to grow something with information marketing that you see the scale, but you just don't know how to get the word out there. And so what this allows us to do as small to medium business owners is we can stop getting freaked out and paralyzed by the decisions that come with marketing. So A, you can move forward with a sense of confidence. You can be in the flow. You don't have to sit there and second-guess yourself because I've already done all the hard work and heavy lifting. Second, your team isn't fragmented and freaking out because they know what they're supposed to do. Third, the money that you do spend on marketing doesn't have to be done in dribs and drabs where it's competing because you're saying one thing in social media and you're saying another thing client presentations and your website has a completely different message. Instead, everything's unified. And the fourth thing is it allows you as the business owner, the driver, the engine of the business, to have a sense of clear purpose and to fall back in love with your business again because you don't have to be digging the ditch of marketing, which for most business owners, most business owners were not trained to be marketers and yet We're stuck with carrying the marketing hat because either we can't afford it or we haven't found somebody we trust. If you look at this, in the past there have been two options, like we were describing. To summarize what we just said, on one hand, there's the big, fancy, glossy ad agency, which is good and probably fast, but it ain't cheap. On the other hand, There's you or some junior intern you've hired to do marketing, which is cheap and it might be fast, but it's probably not good. And in fact, it could be damaging. So what I wanted to find is, okay, how do we get out of that? It's a no-win situation for everyone. How do we find a way that we can distill the best practices from the best, most profitable companies into an accessible form that allows all of us to take back our brands? And, Dan, the day that I got the copy of my book from the publisher, the day that I released this system, I sent the very first copy to you. Do you remember that? You received it in a FedEx box. Yep. And I was staying in San Diego. I was at the Del Coronado, beautiful hotel, and it was about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and my publisher shipped me 2 advance copies of the book, and I I sent one to my parents and I sent the other one to you. And it was so funny because I remember distinctly, we were at the Hotel Del, you know, it's like the most beautiful hotel. And my husband was like, can't we just sit out and have a glass of wine? And I was like, no, we are getting this FedEx out to Dan because Vicki says he only gets his packages once or twice a week and I am not going to miss that train. So we went into the town of Coronado and searched to the left and to the right and finally found in this this like little ramshackle, it wasn't even a FedEx bureau, it was like mail depot. And there's one guy who's sitting there hand-filling out everything. And he was like, "Dan Kennedy, I feel like I've heard that name," as he was, you know, in his 80-year-old handwriting filling it out. I was like, "You probably have." So I knew that it was going to go off to you, and then when you and I had our phone conversation a few days later, you were so great because you've been part of the journey of developing not just the content, but this system and helping me make it something that can move the needle for more people for bigger results faster. I want to thank you for that.

Well, the core importance of your work, I mean, I— people are so end result oriented they tend to skip what causes great results. So, you know, they want an ad, they want to do some marketing, they really want customers, clients, patients, or donors, so they're in a big hurry to say things, but I tell clients all the time it's very hard to say anything impact if you don't have anything to say.

Right. Yeah, if you don't have anything to say, just donate the money to charity because you're going to damage your brand.

I mean, in a sense, it's Ogilvy's old caution that one way or another, great advertising makes news. It has some it has some reason for its existence in addition to the fact that the advertiser wants to sell some coffee. And you really focus people on that other thing. If we're in a coffee business, we definitely want to sell coffee, but we ought to have some reason to be communicating to the marketplace. Other than our motive of selling coffee. Or absent that story, the only strategy that does work is the first one. If everybody else is spending a billion, you got to spend a billion too.

Right. I don't think many of us who are in this conversation right now with you, Dan, have a billion too set aside for our marketing budgets 2017.

Well, and more so— More so, even that's no guarantee. You know, so I guess tonight Trump formally accepts the nomination and the 16 who are not getting the nomination combined outspent him during the primaries by more than 3,000 to 1. Wow. Bush alone dropped, uh, somewhere between $80 and $100 million. And not only is he absent, but I'll give $100 to anybody on the call who can enunciate what Bush's message was. Um, and, and I don't think he had a message. I think he was his message was, "I'm Bush and I want to be president," like, "I've got coffee and I want to sell coffee." I'm not even sure you can spend your way to success that way.

Not only that, but it can damage. When you've got too much money, you make sloppy choices. People get the impression that you're basically spam. You're that guy in the meeting who keeps raising his hand and interrupting a meaningful conversation and showing up in your inbox and calling you when you don't I don't want to be called, because you have more money than value. And the reality is the world doesn't need another ad. You know, like, thank you, we have enough ads. So don't create ads to create ads. Don't create messages to create messages. But if you have something meaningful to say, then you have a duty to make sure that that's delivered. And so I think that's where, Dan, you and I feel like we have an obligation and a responsibility sort of a way that we can make a difference in people's businesses and lives by helping them take the message they already have, but articulating it in a way that their customers and clients can really hear and take action on.

You know, you'll appreciate this. One of my great frustrations is you find somebody who has this reason beyond. They want to sell whatever they've got to sell. They have a message to communicate. They have something of unique value to bring to their clients, their conversation. And by their own devices or often by people around them, they get drawn back into looking and sounding like everybody else. I, I spoke earlier today to a client that his office just sent me his brand new whiz-bang PowerPoint presentation for his website, and it's like technically perfect. I mean, the graphics are great, the copy's fine, the architecture is okay. I mean, it presents ideas in the right order.. It has some sizzle to it, and yet pretty much any competitor in his world could use it. You could take one name off of it, put another name on, you wouldn't do much damage. And it's— and it is completely devoid of any distinctive personality, voice. Motivation for being there, where this guy and his company has all that in spades. And every time I turn around, he's let some website developer or ad agency or something strip all that back out. And it's a great fight not to let that happen.

And it's so tempting for— when a business leader has to make a marketing decision, it's so easy to outsource because it takes a lot of emotional effort to make a choice. Decisions are hard, and they can really rattle your focus on making sure that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, which is running and growing your business and focusing on revenue. And so the thing we often do is we alleviate the pain by outsourcing it.. And what we get is a template that's cookie cutter. You could put any of your competitors' logos at the bottom and it would work fine. And in fact, the person that you've just outsourced your soul to has probably done work for your competitors. And so this is something I think is really important for us to understand right now, 2016, at a time when too many people are outsourcing too much of what their brand stands for. And as a result, they look and sound like everyone else, and as a result, they have to compete on the basis of price because they have no differentiation. And the lesson is this, you already have everything you need to create a great brand, you just don't have the time to do it. But if somebody can accelerate that timeframe and help you get from A to C by bypassing B, then you are, you can create your brand in a fast way that's good, fast, and cheap. If I may, Dan, can I give a couple of examples of this for small businesses? Yes, please. Okay, great. I'm just going to give a couple of quick examples that are obscure but very telling. The first one is I— my husband and I have a beach house in a tiny sleepy little surf town named New Smyrna Beach. It's in central part of Florida. It's right at the very end of A1A, right where A1A runs into Cape Canaveral. So it's very obscure. We don't have any chain restaurants. When my husband and I my husband and I are at the beach house with our kids, the only place we can go to get a gallon of milk in the morning is we go up to the bait shop, which is literally up the block right next to the beach. And so, it's like a choice. You want live shrimp or do you want milk? In this sleepy little town, there's one strip of restaurants and bars, and they're all cute and independently owned. And one of them has an extremely undesirable geographic location. It's named Gnarly's Surf Shack. They have great wings, cold beer, and that's pretty much it. And so they're right at the base of the drawbridge that goes up and down arbitrarily when sailboats come through. And because it's a small community, it's not regulated. So the sailboats might come through every 10 minutes, or they might come through once an hour. You never know, and the guy who's running the drawbridge raises on cue. Well, Gnarly's Surf Shack had a huge competitive disadvantage because why in the world would you want to sit outside eating your wings and beer when you could be interrupted at any moment very unpredictably by ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and the cars back up and there's like noxious fumes pumping into the porch. So, they did something that I think all of us as small business leaders can learn from. They took their disadvantage and they turned it into an advantage. In fact, a way for them to increase revenue by something that before had been costing them revenue. They created a program that little— actually, I shouldn't call it a program. It was like a sign, handwritten sign, "Bridge up, beer down." And the deal they offered was when the bridge goes up for a sailboat, beers are only 25 cents. As long as you can hear the ding, ding, ding, ding, beers are 25 cents. But as soon as the ding, ding stops, beer goes back to being $2 or whatever it is. So now what was what was before a massive competitive disadvantage that was costing them business and revenue has become a source of growth. Because people flock, waiting to see when the bridge is going to go up. The regulars love it because now they get cheaper beer and they know when to anticipate when the sailboats are coming. They talk about it to their friends. It's been written up in the press. Visitors, the tourists who are coming by, say, "Oh, let's go to that place where we have to wait for the drawbridge." So, for all of us,— a key point of growing our business without spending more on marketing is to find something that's distinctive or as I would say fascinating that people want to talk about and they remember and brings them back over and over again so that you're not a commodity. It's very hard for a small restaurant to— hey, I have better beer than you do. Hey, I have prettier waitresses or I have spicier wings. And that's not an area where you can compete and win. "An area where you can compete and win is to find something that's so weird and wonderful about who you are that when you can communicate it in a way that has— that you're taking marketing and turning it into something conceptual." I mean, that is awesome. What do you think of that example, Dan?

Well, I think it also— so I would— the entrepreneurial principle that it illustrates. Is that it's my contention that there is always something you can do. So regardless of your inherent disadvantage or a new disadvantage, you're in retail and Walmart opens up, you're your location, the main road to and from it is going to be ripped up and under construction for a year, you know, on and on and on. It's my contention there is always something you can do. There's no excuse for paralysis. And often the thing that can be done is exactly what you've just illustrated. Is somehow the apparent disadvantage that would send 99 out of 100 people screaming into the night. In it somewhere lies the opportunity to creatively make it a unique advantage, and you're right, you see it— the mother of such invention is desperation. And so you tend to see it in big business only at time of immense desperation, and often then it's too little too late. But you see it at the small business, the independent operator level. Actually, you see this quite often. If you were to go to 300 obscure tiny towns all across the country, you would probably find somebody in every one of those obscure tiny towns who has figured out something equally quirky or odd or unusual to do to differentiate themselves. I also think it's a really important point that The argument of incremental superiority, be that spicier, colder, faster, cheaper, this argument, it may, you know, it worked decades ago when there was not nearly so much choice. It just does not work now. It's a losing argument. And yet so many people default to it. You know, they operate in this box that I define as product/service, feature/benefit, comparative superiority, and price. And they keep going, they keep running back in that box and trying to make some change in one or more of those categories against a competitor. And it, you know, it's like running back into a burning building. It's, it's, it's just not the place that you're going to find a breakthrough. And here you describe somebody who has They've not only found a breakthrough by ignoring all of that. Yeah. And by leveraging a disadvantage. But they have come out the back door of that with an unassailable unique position. Uh, what, a competitor is now gonna, uh, gonna, gonna come down there and open up next to them? I want the other side of the bridge. You know, we're gonna charge 24 cents a beer. Right, yeah, I mean, it's unlikely. And, um, and the other thing implicit in your story is, is the earned media, um, which again in this political season has shown itself more than maybe ever in the history of politics, is that one, one way to offset the inequality that you have spoken about, that there's somebody in your category, in your space, in your community who has the ability to outspend you by a big margin for one reason or another. One of the antidotes to that, of course, is free media. Is earned media. And only by doing these kind of things will you get it. You're not going to get earned media because you claim, and some people agree, that your wings are spicier. But this sort of weirdness gets at least the annual TV coverage. It gets some newspaper coverage. It gets some web coverage. From time to time you see these kind of businesses get picked up and their sign is on the Tonight Show or something. I mean, there's a lot of differential free media opportunity that comes with this approach.

What's your other one? May I give a couple of other examples? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, well, first of all, let me describe something I saw this weekend of what you should not do. So this is in the case category of things to avoid. My family and I, we were on a road trip going from point A to point B and from one kid's sleepover camp to another. We were driving through a very obscure road right outside Vermont in New York State. And there was a billboard. I hope you can appreciate just how bad this is, but the billboard said, all propane gas is the same. Ours is cheaper. So it's saying this category is a complete commodity and there's no way to differentiate yourself. And the way we're going to differentiate ourselves is to drive our prices down so much and then we're going to flaunt that. And I thought to myself, what a great way to run your business into the ground because you can never recover from a positioning like that. Like, oh, we used to be cheaper, but now we've decided we're going to be a premium brand. And so what that business is going to constantly be forced heretofore as doing less, cutting corners, paying less to their employees, hiring worse talent, and even if they get scale, the scale that you're looking at in this tiny sleepy town of 2,000 people is probably not highly replicable. So, Dan, would you agree that that's in the not-to-do category?

Yeah, and it falls in— so you see small business people all the time who observe something big business is doing and copycat it. And the issue, as you just pointed out, it's scale. So I mean, even Walmart struggles with lowest prices, uh, has a position And they keep trying to find their way back out of that hole. But Walmart does have the benefit of, of giant scale. So if they can only make 2 cents instead of 4 cents on something by the, by the direction that they created in the first place of having to be cheapest, still 2 cents on a million items, 2 cents on 10 million items 2 cents on 100 million items, that's one thing. But if you have a hardware store in Bupkis, Vermont, if you take that position with your store or with anything you sell at that store, such as propane, the direction you set yourself on is inevitable extinction, because there is always some moron who will sell cheaper than you, even en route to bankruptcy, and drag you there with them. It's an utterly unsustainable position for anything that is geographically limited, market size limited, uh, frequency of purchase limited. And yet people will see big businesses doing it. So, you know, ask the individual franchisee how happy he is with the dollar menu. He's not. Now, that's great for the franchisor because they're getting 7% of gross. So for them, driving volume by scale is an entirely different proposition than the guy who owns 5 of those fast food units. And is only going to sell so much stuff. There's only so many people he's going to feed this month. And when he cuts his profit margin by 30%— I saw the president of Carl's Jr., uh, who I think is just a brilliant CEO, uh, day before yesterday at the RNC on TV, and he explained the impact in California of going from a $7 minimum wage to a $15 minimum wage in the fast food business. For the franchisee, all costs in, because of course you don't just get to raise the wage of the counter clerk. Now you got to raise the wage of the supervisor and you got to raise the wage of the store manager and on and on and on and on and on. And the cost of benefits go up, obviously. They double if you double the wage. And so all in, a fast food franchisee in California with that wage increase goes from an average of $3,800— or excuse me, $3,800 a year profit per employee to a loss of $2,800 per year per employee. And that's the sort of economics that a small business owner doesn't understand if they copy the economics of a big business. And if you copy the advertising marketing price strategy positioning of a big business and you're a small business, you're in trouble. You're— you know, I would say it's like having the greatest jockey in the world, but you put him on an elephant, um, he still ain't winning a Kentucky Derby because you're on a different animal, and that animal doesn't even belong in the race. So it's really important to be careful who you are emulating and who you are feeling compelled to emulate, and Price is maybe the all-time worst thing to ever advertise or market or promote. I mean, you look at online trading, the E-Trade of the world, and you go back and look at where they were 5 years ago, and you look at where they are now, because each one of them keeps dragging the other one down further. They are often now to the point of your first 50 trades free, your first 100 trades free. The inevitable outcome of that is they're all gone and it's free-free. That's the inevitable outcome. And if you— it's bad enough for them, but you replicate that locally, you're doomed.

So there's some great There are some great examples of really intelligent discounts where something becomes a loss leader. But you don't want to take the core of what your company sells and discount that. Like, I'll use an example that is out of reach for many of us who are small businesses, but the principle still is the same. Chanel loses a huge amount of money when they send those $100,000 dresses down the catwalk at the Parisian fashion shows.. They lose so much money because nobody's actually going to buy those dresses. But those dresses allow them to sell the $4,000 suit, the $3,000 bag, the $25 lipstick. And so they can achieve scale not only because they don't discount their core product offering, but because they overprice it. So at $25 when every other lipstick starts at $4.99 and goes up to $14.99. $25 seems like a lot of money, but it's a way to buy into the $200,000 dress on the Parisian catwalk. If you take the same principle, I always think it's important for you to sell something that's slightly out of reach from what your customer can spend, because studies again and again in behavioral psychology and price elasticity demonstrate that if you give somebody a few different options, they're tend— going to end up in the middle. So I always like to have One thing that we offer that maybe has a little sense of humor, but that is understandably out of reach. For example, at one time we had a special. Dan, you and many other people know that I created a system named How to Fascinate, and that it describes your personal brand and how your personal brand is perceived by others, by your clients and your customers at your best. And there are these different archetypes, and the archetypes are the different personal brand categories. And we had a deal running where we said, for $1 million, we will rename one of the archetypes with your name. So in other words, Donald Trump is the Victor. If Donald Trump wrote a check for $1 million, we would rename his archetype, the Victor, to be the Donald Trump. Now, of course, nobody was going to buy that. The point wasn't that we were going to get a check for $1 million, although that would have been nice. The point was it It created a perception of premium quality that wasn't competing on the basis of price. So when we charge for the kind of assessment that, you know, we sell hundreds day in and day out, then it keeps those from being a commodity.

Yes, and I think that with enough visibility, you might have got a billion-dollar check from somebody. People grossly underestimate. The top end of their market. So I think all audiences, all markets are, are pyramidal, and there's a 1%, and there's a 4%, and there's a 15%, and so forth. And I— so most, uh, businesses, I think, uh, completely omit anything for the 1%, um, who will pay some obscene amount of money, uh, by most people's standards, to be—

and sometimes we want an experience like that. You know, we, we want to do something that's so extreme that we can tell our friends we did it simply We're doing it so that we can say we did it, like a bucket list item. And one of my favorite examples of this, Dan, have you ever seen the Dom Pérignon on the Hooters menu? It's not highlighted. And I'm not even saying you hang out at Hooters. But it's a wonderful example of what you're talking about, that you can create news and create media, create media stories, free PR, talk value, social media. Which is of course the best form of media of all, is when you let other people talk about you. And so it's a form of endorsement. When you scroll past the wings and the burgers and the beer, nestled at the very bottom in the list of beverages, there's an option to get a dozen wings with a bottle of Dom Pérignon for $99. It might be more than that, but you get the idea. So it's a menu filled with things that are $2.99, $4.99, and then there's this thing for $100. And I don't know if it's ever been ordered, but it— in the same way that Hooters prides itself on those tacky orange polyester dolphin shorts and tan pantyhose, this is just another way that they're kind of taking tacky to the extreme in a way that they are owning who they are.

And it becomes a talking point on the menu. So, You obviously spend more time at Hooters than I do. Hey, Dan, I waitress there. No kidding. But look, the, you know, look, it used to be called a red herring, you know, the thing that the price point that nobody would spend that makes the other prices more reasonable. But I think also often these things make the business more interesting. You know, it's just— so, you know, hotels, for example, have figured it out, right? They did the concierge floor and— but very few hotels really figure out that there's some number of people coming through there who will buy the presidential suite. And then if they figure that out, there's some number who will buy the presidential suite package, which also they station a butler outside the door the whole time you're there, and there's a designated car downstairs, um, waiting to take you somewhere.

And haven't you gotten that at Disney before?

Don't I remember you mentioning that? Yeah, look, Disney is— so Disney is such a great example of continually adding a new top on to a category of products or services and pricing. I mean, at one time all Disney private guides were one price, then they went to two price, now there's three price tiers depending on who you want, what you want, and all of that. And there's some very— if you look at what they do with weddings, I mean, essentially at the very top customized, there's no limit. I believe the last stuff I saw, the most expensive at Disney wedding yet has been $2.1 million. The average package is between $35,000 and $40,000. So if you think about the— the spread between the average, and they sell a lot of six figures, and then all the way up to a seven figure, the spread's pretty, you know, huge. But nonetheless, there is, there's a percentage of that customer base that will buy the differentiation, the separation, the cocktail party story, the you know, all of those things that have nothing to do with the intrinsic value of what's being purchased. And charities the same, have the same opportunities. And so I think in the sort of in the category first of all of overall net margin, everybody ought to be figuring it out. But beyond that, it is often a way to make your business more interesting. It's marketing, not product offering.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. You asked about a story. So something I wanted to mention about the point that you and I were discussing a moment earlier, Dan, which I think is really crucial, is I'm a big fan of offering something that's highly aspirational in your pricing list, even totally out of reach, unrealistically out of reach, like the $10,000 chiropractic session or the $1,000 cup of coffee. And you know, it just, it adds personality. But here's the key to remember. We have offered very, very premium offerings and then even gone on to incorporate them into our ongoing menu of products and services. But the problem is I didn't realize at the beginning, your goal is to offer something that is either A, only meant to be sold once,, and it's a media play, or it's something that you can build once and then it's not gonna require additional effort so that you're not building Fabergé eggs and selling them over and over again. Because what ends up happening then is the margins are always gonna suck because you haven't automated it, you haven't replicated it. So, as you're thinking about a premium offering, make sure it's not an ongoing offering, it's something that you're gonna sell once, or unlike what we did, we offered premium training packages where we have about 100 Fascinate Certified Advisors, and then we would fly them all over the country and they would come into businesses and they would do these deep immersions, and it was very expensive. But the problem was for us, we didn't take home very much of that revenue because there were so many hard costs involved, and it became very stressful for us. So, that's how not to do it. Do premium pricing. I'll just leave you with, before we go into Q&A, a quick example of something that I think is a charming example of how a brand earned personality. I was in a store recently and in a gift shop and they had something at the cash register that said dinosaur food and it had a little package of candies. And on the label it had a Tyrannosaurus Rex chasing these little kids looking terrified. And inside it had what looked like dinosaur food. And I thought, that is so fun. I'm on my way home. I'm seeing my kids. I'm coming home from a long trip. I'm going to get the dinosaur food. My kids are going to be thrilled. A little, you know, fun token for them. So, I got home. The kids opened the bag and inside of that bag there were 5 gummy worms. And so, I looked at the packaging and the packaging was great. The kids were like, oh, we're eating dinosaur food. This is It's so cool. But really what it was was 5 gummy worms that could be purchased at Costco for 3 cents, and I had paid $4 for this. For the packaging, for the concept, the idea, the marketing had elevated it from a 3-cent commodity purchase to a $4 highly differentiated purchase. And I thought to myself, this is something we all need to learn from. Because my kids were thrilled with this. I felt like a hero. I didn't feel cheated at all. But really what they had done is they had taken something that was a parody product that you could find anywhere and you would never think to pick up as a gift. And they attached it in such a way that the margin between the cost of— the hard cost of the product, meaning the gummy worms, versus what they were able to charge, which is like I don't know, 6,000% increase was simply the intelligence of the person who came up with the creative idea. And that's something we can all do. We don't have to change our products. We don't have to do more products. We don't have to add overhead. We don't have to hire more people. We don't have to work more hours. We need to be smarter about how we make what we already have more fascinating so that we can increase the price margin and get people to fall in love with our products.

If only, since we are both authors, if only somebody in the book publishing entire industry would learn that lesson, we would all be happier. Instead of every 3 minutes we need another new product and they're all commoditized. If they would just figure that out, authors the world over would be happier campers.

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