The Secret to Theatrical Marketing: Day with Dan Kennedy (3 of 4) | #Marketing - Ep. 17

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Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast. That's sellingonline.com/podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. What's up everyone? This is Russell. Welcome back to the show. Excited to be hanging out with you guys and Dan Kennedy today. We are moving on to part 3 of my Day with Dan interview from Funnel Hacking Live 10. And hopefully you enjoyed number 1, number 2. If you missed them, I'd go back and do it. It's all part of a 2-hour series we did all about becoming the radical in your market, in your industry, and changing everything and getting people to follow you. And it's, I don't know, Dan Kennedy's the best, I love it. So if you are not our Dan Kennedy student or fan yet, hopefully these interviews are helping you. And I'm excited for this one, okay? So this is part 3 of my interview. During this session, we talk about the power of positioning, theatrical marketing, and leveraging leveraging opposition to your advantage. And if you ever wondered why some brands skyrocket while a lot of others get stuck, this episode's gonna reveal the hidden playbook behind disruptive marketing. And that's what we're gonna be talking about. And a lot of people are like, well, is this stuff Dan's talking about actually real? Just so you know, Dan was my number one coach and mentor. I was in his mastermind groups for 6 years, him and Bill Glazer, before we launched ClickFunnels. As I listen to ClickFunnels, I listen literally to Dan Kennedy almost every single day. I have every course, every book, every product, and I listen to him over and over and over again, 'cause I wanted to always get in the mindset of Dan. A lot of the movement we built was based on the teachings I learned from my man, Mr. Dan Kennedy. So I had a chance a couple years ago to buy his company and get close with him, and it's just been one of the coolest things ever. And one of the coolest things we do as part of Dan's company is we have a monthly print newsletter. I know you may be thinking that's out of date, like we don't do print things anymore, but it's amazing. We got a couple thousand active members who subscribe to it, and every single month they get this newsletter in the mail, and it's literally like getting a seminar from Dan Kennedy every single month. It's cool because it's not digital. It's cool because it's, It's like you get it and you can unplug from the computer, your phone, everything, to sit down and actually read. I know a lot of us forgot how to read, but it's really powerful. So readers are leaders, and the best stuff to read is Dan Kennedy's monthly newsletter. In fact, I literally just got mine today in the mail this month, and so I will be unplugging today, sitting in a chair next to my— who am I kidding? I don't turn my fireplace on. It's not cold enough for that. But if I had a fireplace and it was cold, I'd be doing that. But I literally will sit down today with a chair and I will read the entire thing.. And every single month is just something different. So if you're not a subscriber yet, go to noBSletter.com, go subscribe, you get a free trial and a whole bunch of free Dan Kennedy goodies and bonuses from him and from me just for trying it out. And so go to noBSletter.com if you want to like go deep with Dan Kennedy. But other than that, we're going to jump into day number 3 or part number 3 of my day with Dan, and I hope you guys enjoy this episode.

Your other question was, you know, about implementation. And so your first thing, your big idea, your radical thing, right? You have to be able to put that across in a very big way. And if you want all through history. It's like we take— most people now don't even remember, but we sort of take the Atkins products, weight loss products for granted. They're just there. It's benign. People like Rob Lowe, who's never had a weight problem in his entire friggin life, right? Is doing the commercials. Nobody really remembers Dr. Atkins, but that whole thing started— Dr. Atkins started the anti-carb, you know, the food pyramid is wrong, the government food pyramid is crap, and anti-carb, and you can eat all steak you want, steak 3 times a day if you want to. And the original Atkins diet was a radical big idea attacked by pretty much the entire medical establishment, which made it, made it. And that happens. A lot, right? You can't have a small villain. Whatever you pit yourself against has to be big and important. You know, Superman, they lasted about 3 months when they created Superman with him lifting cars above his head. Getting Lois Lane, she fell off a cliff, and but now what, right? And so hence the creation of the supervillain, because you really don't need a superhero if you don't have supervillains, right? And that's the same for all of us who want to take this position. And the second thing about it is you need to find a way to be theatrical with it. You know, it needs to make itself visible. So in whatever market it is that you are cracking this way, you've got to get into all the media. You've got to maybe be in the physical locations, you have maybe got to get people in a room, and you've got to be able to do something really dramatic in the way that you present this.

Do you remember— side tangent— I don't know if you remember Big Mike that was in a— he was my mastermind with Glaze, with Bill, back in the day. He sold hydroponics stuff.

Yeah, I do remember him.

And he got kicked out of the trade show. They wouldn't let him come. So the night before the trade show, he threw the biggest industry party outside and everybody came. And then he gave everybody these t-shirts of this big bull drinking his product and then peeing out the competitor's product. And he gave them all t-shirts and he said, we're going to have runners around handing out $1,000 bills to people who are wearing this during the event. So the next 3 days, every attendee at the event had that t-shirt running around and, uh, and just took over the entire industry. And they all hated him, but he ended up just taking the whole thing.

Yeah, look, you all, you only get to do that stunt once, um, so you want to get it right when you do it because you only get to do that stunt once. Um, but see, where they have where that association has gathered all these people, right? They're there because it's the only association there is for them. So they're there. They're being told what they're being told. Some number of them are hearing about hydroponics. Some number of them are questioning quietly, privately what they're being told. And when that erupts, everything changes. Just the big, the big number changes things. Because the same dynamic that made people go along with A makes them go along with B, right? The Trump rallies in and of themselves persuade some people because there's exit interviews. They know it. People go, it's like people used to listen to Limbaugh. They go predetermined to hate it. But first of all, then they see all these people. Well, how can all these people be crazy? Right? We're gonna stay in. MSNBC told us that these people were Oh, all lunatics. But geez, there's a lot of lunatics here. You know? And then they start to talk to him. And some of them are rascals, right? And some of them, they're like, he's a doctor, he's a lawyer. Martha, how can this be? And then they actually listen. Now, if there was only 50 people there, that dynamic doesn't happen. If that guy only got 20 or 30 people running around wearing the shirts, it's over, right? He gets nowhere. So if you are going to stunt, you need to stunt big. The stealing the audience in front of the the meeting, the association meeting for myself and for clients. I've done that a lot. And again, you only get away with it once. They ban you from the hotel, so the hotel won't take you, and they threaten with your membership. But so they had— NSA had their convention in Phoenix the year I hijacked the— because we didn't wear face masks at the time. And so I had the event re-promoted and I had 3 airport shuttle buses I rented that had signage on them for NSA attendees, free transportation. And so the buses picked people up at the airport and brought them to the seminar. And I had a big billboard at the airport, you know, Dan Kennedy and NSA welcome you to Phoenix. And yeah, there were a lot of people kind of mad, you know. And I mean, it was like, well, can you show me in the bylaws where it says somebody can't rent a billboard to welcome people? To their city. I don't understand, you know, which makes them madder because, oh, but they're almost asking for it in many of these markets, you know, because they are enforcing in many cases dumb or self-serving things from the top down. And so there's these restless natives that are a great, great opportunity.

So good, so good, so good.

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I don't know if you ever read the Salesforce book, How to Launch Salesforce Behind the Clouds. That's what Benioff did too. He went to the big Oracle conferences and he paid off all the cab drivers and they had the death of software signs everywhere as they were— people were coming in. And that's how they leveraged, and that's how Salesforce got their launch as well, was the grassroots.

So you have to be willing, right, to be disliked, right? And not to be, at least for a while, welcomed into the club. Maybe never. So you have to be very results-oriented, but you want the opposition because you want the visible vocal opposition, because that's the most effective way to attract attention to yourself is to be opposed visibly and vocally. All right. I always said about 2016, if Trump had run unopposed, he probably would have lost. Well, I mean, him getting elected the first time was ridiculous. I mean, it was just ridiculous. He's got like 4 people on his campaign staff. They hardly spend any money. He's never run for anything. Oh, it's just ludicrous. They're running against the Bush dynasty. They're, you know, I mean, it's sort of like Sunday's game. I mean, you can't even imagine how the Chiefs could play the way they played. You could imagine them losing, but like that? And you're looking at I said, if he'd run unopposed, he probably wouldn't have got elected, right? The opposition made it possible. Hillary made it possible. If they had had a halfway decent candidate that, you know, wasn't instantly disliked by 80% of the people who met them, there's no way he would have won that election. Now, this time around was different. But opposition is the quickest way to attract attention to yourself. There's a historic thing that's interesting to find and see. It predates many of you. But it was a big phenomenon in its time. Very controversial. It was a multilevel that was later outlawed as a pyramid scheme. The laws actually didn't exist. They were written and applied retroactively to put it out of business. A guy by the name of Glenn Turner. The two main companies were a cosmetic company, Coscot, and a motivational company, Dare to Be Great. And this predates the internet. So there's no cheap media except manual labor existent in the world. And Glenn's an interesting person in himself because he drove this with spoken word, with his own presentations, and grew up poor. So as a kid, he had a real bad hare-lip and 3 botched operations. So He used to be able to do it really well. So when he speaks, you know, and he does the 3-hour seminar like that. And it takes you 10, 15 minutes to, you know, be able to get it. And in 36 months, they put 620,000, 630,000 people in at $5,000 apiece. And the entire multilevel industry immediately hated him because he had figured out front-end loading. So all the other companies, you buy your $30 kit, you start doing business, you only make money when somebody does something. Well, you in the Turner system, you made money on the $5,000. Now he actually got it from an earlier, from William Patrick, who you know has a Napoleon Hill connection in Holiday Magic, but that's neither here nor there. So now it's, it was sort of like what we did with prepaid chiropractic. All of a sudden, you could recruit 4 people and make $12,000. And in the regular MLM system, you recruit 4 people and you made, you know, $20. So, so the difference was profound, which they hated, of course, you know. And so he discovered inventory loading. You want to be in the business, you should have inventory, and you should buy $5,000 worth of inventory to start, because any other business you got to have inventory. Why wouldn't you have it in this one, right? And it changed the whole dynamic. He was so controversial and attacked media, the MLM industry, and legally they eventually won, but in the interim. And so I'm sure you could find it on YouTube. There's an old— they made their own fake documentary. They were way ahead of their time because it's really good. The production values aren't Spectacular, but it's really good. And it's called Turner, Turner, Turner. I bet you find it on YouTube probably. And it's well worth watching because he took all the attacks, brought more attention to him. He always said, There's no telling how much Amway and Shackley and Mary Kay attacking me, how many people it put in. Because some of their people who were questioning, you know, I'm doing all these meetings and I'm not getting anywhere and I'm not like, When we came to town and did a meeting, they came to see the devil. They came to see what this horrible person and this horrible thing was all about. And 3 hours later, they were signed up. All right? The opposition drove, God knows, a third of his attendance maybe. I saw it the first time that way. You know, everybody in my upline was telling everybody every 3 minutes, you know, "Oh, don't go look at this." You know, "This guy's horrible." And he's, you know, and then they're holding a big meeting at a hotel and I'll go look. I didn't join, but I sat there and I said, I don't see what's wrong with this business model. Yeah, if I opened a store, I'd have to have inventory. What's wrong with this? So the Turner, Turner, Turner movie is really taking all the criticism and all the opposition and selling with it. Right. So when he published a book, the book about him, which you can get at Amazon, that they published, it made it look like a real book. Hired an old broken-down Orlando Sentinel reporter who had won a Pulitzer Prize at one time to write the book. It's called Con Man or Saint. So he, you know, leaned into this. And every way that he could. And in any place I've played the game, there's no better way to get attention than the opposition screaming about you all the time because there's curiosity early in my time in NSA. Pretty famous speaker. I won't name him. People would know him and he's not dead yet. Well, you know, those of my era. If you live a lot of life, you outlive all your enemies. All your peers and most of your friends. But he called, got to me at the office very early, 3 or 4 months after I had made the big splash and started to make noise. And he said, of the diet, if you ever talk about it, But I'm famous and I'm not making any money. I'm just barely one step ahead of all the costs, and I can't figure it out. And I want to come and see you, but you have to promise not to tell anybody that I paid to come talk to you, ever, to this day. And I said, well, you know, um, okay. I said, I should charge a double, but you know, okay, I get it, right? It's like He's arriving with the raincoat over his head, you know, coming in the back door. And but that's how high the opposition was in his immediate peer group, you know. And I had him as a client for 2 or 3 years and never, never testimonial, never You know, it was a big secret, which I found funny. But the opposition is, you know, is helpful if you respond to it properly.

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Um, the, uh, in finance, you know, Fisher Investments, which is the biggest biggest direct response advertiser in financial services. And they run more TV than anybody. We had candidate info summit. I don't remember when. But their most successful campaigns were early. And his position was, It still is. I think it's, I don't know, it's too rigid. But his position is against annuities. And the most successful campaign was Ken looking at the camera and saying, we don't sell annuities, we would never sell annuities, I'll burn in hell before we ever sell an annuity., and you shouldn't own them. And if you do own them, we should get you out of them. And you need our free guide of what's this here. And he said that the big annuity companies all filed ethics objections against him in the association. They went to the TV stations and scream bloody murder. We don't want you running these ads. And they ran a campaign. The ad, the big Wall Street firms told these stations not to run, right? My ad, Adarian Wilson Wilson, refused. I kind of did this in the Infomercial Association too. And I had an ad refused by then NIMA, the National Infomercial Marketing Association, which doesn't exist anymore, in their big convention program because it said what you're being told is, you know, horseshit. And so we printed it up with the ad, you know, NEMA refused to run and didn't want you to see. And we paid, we went to the housekeeping room in the hotel, found the room where all the housekeepers hang their uniforms and have their lockers, and we gave each one of them $300 to leave these in all the rooms. And pretty much everybody there was— I mean, we probably reached a few people that weren't, you know, there for the convention, but pretty much everybody was there for the convention. And I mean, the screaming went on for a year, you know, afterwards. But again, I said, well, I don't see in the bylaws anything that says I can't put this thing in rooms. You should have thought of that when you wrote up the bylaws. So they actually foolishly turned this into an open feud. Now, from their standpoint, the correct thing would have been to ignore it. They got up on stage and talked about how this thing was wrong and they had refused the ad, you know, and all that did was bring people to me. That's all it did, right? Because the curiosity especially of the restless natives goes through the roof. Right? Gee, maybe there's something there. Maybe this guy's on to something. Right? Because he's so opposed. And they're so afraid of him. And so that's, that's the way you play this game.

With digital marketing nowadays, would you do similar, like, people are talking about these running ads, showing the stuff and—

Sure, you got pros and cons to that, right? There, your opposition has an easier time of making a lot of noise. Because there's theoretically, there's almost no barrier, you know, to entry. So they can set up for a while, it went away, there was a God, what was it? It was dankennedyisathief.com. Really? Yeah, there's a website. It was up for about a year. And it was 3 or 4 ex-members and a guy I threw out of a seminar. And I do mean threw out. And not ask to leave, I mean, throughout. And they, like, made a project out of this and spent a lot of time on it, I guess, and chat, you know, all that. Well, obviously you couldn't do that pre-internet because probably no media would take that ad. And they'd have to spend money. And, you know, so that's maybe the bad side of it. But the good side of it is you have access to all that media too, right? And so once again, when there's a lot of opposition to you, in a— and there are restless natives. And you are findable. So now the online thing, they got to be able to find you when their curiosity is aroused, any place they might go. So you got to have an Amazon presence, you got to have a YouTube presence. You got to have a TikTok presence. If you're going to play this game, you got to be everywhere. Trump's kid and one partner ran this part of the campaign for Trump this time. And they really knew what the hell they were doing. And they were everywhere. And so he nearly carried 18 to 34. I think the Democrats held on to it by 4 points, which is unheard of for a Republican, although he's not really a Republican. But everywhere, that's why he's now got this TikTok dilemma. Yeah. Right. Is it helped get him elected. And he's very reluctant to, you know, to turn it off for obvious reasons. But he was everywhere. And so somebody hears a lot of bad stuff. And they decide Yeah, but I'm going to take a look. And whatever their impulse is, you want to be there to accommodate it. So if their impulse is to go to Amazon, I'll see if this guy's got a book. And maybe I'll buy a book. So it's why you will never see probably another intellectual property infomercial, a Tony Robbins type show, because the bleed-off to everything else is too great. The owner of the show can't control the business. There's a phone buying it. Yeah, well, they're going to go look. If you're selling a $399 box, they're going to go look to see what's on Amazon for $12. They're going to go see what's on YouTube for free. So the bleed's too great. But this is what you can capitalize on when there's a lot of noise about you. And it almost doesn't matter whether the noise is good or bad, and in some cases, it's okay if the noise is bad because that stirs up the curiosity of the restless native. And when the restless native finds a truth teller, and a man on a white horse, he is again a much more rabid customer than is an ordinary customer. And that means all sorts of things. It has to do with conversion percentages, ascension, amount of money spent, amount of money spent in a certain period of time. Their lust and their action levels are much higher than just an ordinary customer being brought through a system, right? Because a lot of their pent-up frustration is suddenly going away. It has a remedy which it did not have before, and that remedy is you.

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