The Top 5 Emotional Triggers That Motivate People To Buy

Hey there, everybody.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, Dan Kennedy is interviewing Robert Embryolli, an author and professional coach since 1995, trained under Tony Robbins. Now, a lot of us really focus on the art and science of selling tactics. Robert focuses on a totally different area, specifically the psychology of the buyer. So lean in, take notes as Dan Kennedy and Robert Embryolli talk about the The top 5 emotional triggers that motivate people to buy.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hello everybody, welcome to another, uh, gold audio program. Uh, I have on the line with me, uh, Robert Imbriale, one of our members, a long time, and the author of Motivational Marketing, for which I was happy to write a foreword. Motivational Marketing, if you have not gotten your hands on the book, you should. It is a great look at, you know, the psychological issues of advertising, marketing, and selling by any media and by any mechanism. And Robert has used his strategies to directly generate more than $150 million of sales. Revenue through online marketing and has worked with clients in virtually every imaginable business. Do you want to add anything to your bio, anything people ought to know?

They ought to know that this book was a genesis of— actually, Dan, I give credit to you because early on you were the first person that I started to learn really this concept or these ideas of direct marketing. The book came out of really my own journey of making the mistakes that a lot of people make going on. I could probably write another book called Direct Marketing Disasters. Once you start varying from what's being taught, I knew the what to do, but I never understood the why to do it. This book is really about the why to do it. It allows you to be a lot more creative and go in areas that you wouldn't be able to go in otherwise. And that was really where this got started about 10 years ago.

Well, it's a great point. There's like 3 types of, well, there's 4 types of knowledge, right? What not to do, what to do, how to do it, and it's very useful in the marketing arena to know why you're doing what it is that you're doing, how it actually affects the recipient on the other end of the formula. I picked a couple of things from the book that I thought would comprise the bulk of our conversation today. They are topics that I don't think get enough thought and attention and focus by most marketers, and so we'll pick your brain about that more than anything else. And I'm going to start with types of benefits. And just about everybody who travels your path, you know, sort of comes over from the from the traditional side to direct response marketing and emotional marketing, one of the first things that they kind of discover and learn about is the difference between features and benefits. Although, even people schooled in direct marketing, you can usually, if you're critiquing their stuff, find things left as features and never translated to benefits. But going beyond that, there are of course different types of benefits. And a lot of people stop with one, never get to the other. And you did a fabulous job in the book, and I wonder if you'd spend some time now on sort of the movement from the one type of benefit to the other.

Sure, and the easiest way, in my book anyway, to understand the difference between a feature and a benefit, because you're right, we do get caught up in that, and I find that if you're the product creator,, it's even more difficult to translate those features into benefits. And the way I look at that simple concept, I say, okay, if it is about the product, it's a feature. If it's about the prospect, then it's a benefit. And we start to look at the benefits and we say, okay, there are different kinds of benefits. What are they? Well, the first one is what I like to call a direct benefit. And this comes from, you know, a lot of training from Ted Nicholas and other people that we've— I know, Dan, you've talked a lot about it in your newsletter as well. Direct benefit. What's the cause and effect benefit of using my product or service? And a great example of that, we can use this as a kind of a learning tool, if you will. If I'm a manufacturer of a diet pill, and that diet pill, let's assume that it actually does work and you do lose weight when you take the pill. Well, the cause and effect benefit of taking the pill is losing the weight. So you could go out there and say, you know, all day long, lose weight, lose weight, take my pill. But in today's market, you're not the only player out there. That's really not that sexy. So what I like to do is I like to say, okay, let's look at what is known as an indirect benefit, the benefit that's linked to the obvious benefit or the direct benefit, if you will. So in the case of the diet pill, I might look at the person taking the diet pill and I might say, okay, now that you've taken the diet pill, it's done what it's supposed to do, you've lost the weight. Well, that's going to be in the copy. You lose the weight when you take the diet pill. That's no question that's there. What else happens? Well, let's see. You lose the weight, you have more energy. Maybe you meet that person of your dreams. Maybe you get that long-awaited promotion at work. Maybe you just have more energy, you start being more active, you spend more time with your kids. And we could just go on and on and on, all different directions here. In fact, the indirect benefit is where the, the quote-unquote creativity of your direct marketing or your copywriting comes in. And you can really have a lot of fun with this and illustrate this through, and I love the technique that you use with this, Dan, is using this with client stories. You do this a lot in your copy and illustrate how indirect benefits are okay. This person learned direct mail. He learned how to write copy. And from there, what was he able to do? Well, you know, today he's living the life of his dreams. He has the big house. He has the fancy car. He's got the boat. He takes trips all the time. All these different pieces. This allows you to have so much fun. So the two benefits, really recapping real quickly here, direct benefit, cause and effect benefit, what does my product or service really do? And indirect benefit is pretty much what does it lead to after you've got the direct benefit? What's next?

Well, you know, you make a spectacular point is that ironically the closer and more intimately involved with the product or the more intimately involved somebody is in delivering the service,, the harder it is for them to really get a grip on the, the, the indirect benefits from the prospect's perspective. I know early when I, when I started doing consulting that then leads to copywriting, sort of a big part of my business, early, if I was explaining that to somebody, I would mostly be focusing on the direct benefits. And gradually listening to clients, you know, what they were walking out of the room with was very different from the thing I had built that I was delivering in the room. And so like in my case, you hear over and over and over again from a client that, I came in the room thinking I was in business A and I left realizing I'm in business B, C, D, E, and F. And I had never pitched that. I had never really designed the service to do that. But it turns out that's the real important benefit people were getting from the service, which then changes the way that you sell the service and also incidentally dramatically changed the way the service got priced. Because there's more value in the indirect benefit than there is in the direct benefit. And yet, you know, if you look at most freelance copywriters, they write to assignment and they price their work by the page, you know, a very limiting pricing model. And I think a lot of people don't understand the price-liberating power of indirect benefits. And when we talk about price elasticity in businesses and people are afraid to raise their prices and think they can't raise their prices It's largely because they're stuck in the little box of their direct benefits instead of the big box of the indirect benefits.

It's so true, and you brought up an interesting point too where, you know, you don't know normally where to go to find these indirect benefits, and as you noticed by, you know, just speaking to the people who've been through your seminars, speaking to the people who use your product and service, you'll find that they use it very differently than you're sitting in your conference room trying to figure out how they're going to use it. Go for the real-time. Go for the examples. List the— it's worthwhile talking to your customers and having that kind of communication. A, it gives you great testimonials, and B, it gives you great ideas for how to market it going forward. And it gives you the indirect benefits that you might not necessarily think about.

Well, you used a term too that I think is really useful and instructive. You used the term processional effects of using a product, taking a product, and then sort of building the list of indirect benefits in order.

You want to talk about that a little bit? Sure. And that's part and parcel of looking at what happens next after somebody takes— because it has to be linked. In other words, you can't just come up with, come to my seminar and you'll be wealthy. Okay, well, what happens in between there? The person in their mind has to understand what the processional effect is, what the steps are to get from taking your seminar, attending your seminar, reading your book, or buying your program to get what they really want out of life. And you illustrate that. One of the better ways to illustrate, obviously going back to the testimonial stories, is, you know, the rags to riches, is really going back and showing people, okay, this was a person who, just like you, struggled each month to pay the bills, struggled each month with the mortgage, got behind on car payments, blah blah blah, yada yada yada, and they came to the seminar Not only did they get the benefit of the seminar, the direct benefit is we're going to give you the knowledge, but going beyond that, here's how they applied the knowledge and here's how they changed their life and here's how they— and, and you know, it's just step by step and you illustrated that procession of what happened. And people go, oh, okay, that makes sense because I can see myself in that guy being behind in the mortgage payment, you know, missing 2 or 3 car payments, struggling each month financially. And I can now understand very clearly if taking— how taking your seminar is really going to make me the wealthy person that I want to become. So they've got to be linked.

I think it's a step, you know, that people miss a lot, uh, in, in healthcare marketing. Years ago, I invented in chiropractic a thing that in selling the appointment, your 6 basic questions will be answered, and it takes the prospective patient through really a list of 6 benefits that they're getting just from the appointment, because otherwise there's fear and trepidation of, okay, what's going to happen, you know, and again, they don't understand what's going to happen in what order to get them from pain and sickness to health unless you lay it out for them. And so this strategy I thought was one of the most significant things in the book. And sort of tied to it, you talked about the power of 5. So why don't you go there next, if you would?

Power of 5 is really looking— and when I wrote the book Motivational Marketing, I had done a lot of research probably over the last decade, even more than the last decade, of having a lot of fun with the, you know, the what and the how of direct mail marketing and copywriting and all of this, but never really understanding the why. Then about 1995, I got involved with Tony Robbins and got all excited about the psychology and got involved with being a trainer with his company and did all that sort of stuff. And while it was fun fixing people's marriages and their relationships and talking them out of suicide and everything else that we were doing, I realized that really wasn't my passion. I had a real true passion instead for this area of marketing. So I thought, hmm, how does all these, these these psychological triggers, these psychological buttons apply to that person pushing the cart down the aisle. And I started to ask that question more and more and really started to come to light that these are emotional decisions that people are making. So The Power of Five looks at the top 5 emotional triggers or emotional buttons, if you will, and that's basically the core of the book. And I'll give them to you right here in rapid-fire order. You may want to write them down if you're listening to this. The first one is connection and love. Now what in the world does that mean? Well, you know, we all want to be connected. So Dan, you and I in the seminar business or in the newsletter publishing business or the book business or whatever, people want to join us because they want to be part of a community. You want to be a Gold Plus member, you want to be a Gold member, you want to be part of the Info Marketers Summit that's coming up, and you want to be part of everything that is going on in your industry. So people love this idea of connection. So connection means networking. Means coming to a seminar and meeting new people and all that sort of thing. Because increasingly in our society, if we look at where we're going with the technologies that we have, the ironic part is we have more ways to communicate and connect with other people today than at any time in history. Yet we are also the most isolated people because we can sit behind that computer screen and think we're connected with the world, but that's not really what's happening. So the truth is we have this innate desire in us to connect eyeball to eyeball and to shake hands and to meet people. So we look for these opportunities.

Yeah, and if I won't derail you, I want to quickly point out to people that it doesn't just apply in the obvious way to the businesses you and I are in. I mean, it applies absolutely at the commodity level. You know, the old theme song for the television show Cheers, you want to go where people know your name. I mean, that for the local business is such a powerful thing. But if you even look at, you know, a fairly mundane commodity like insurance, AARP has done done the most brilliant job of essentially putting a very different face on the front of a business that is at least 50% about selling life insurance, long-term care insurance, and other types of insurance, and creating a sense among the customers that they are connected to something And by the way, AARP just surpassed Reader's Digest this year as the largest circulation magazine in America. That's significant. It's extremely significant. I mean, it reflects a lot of things, the boomer population and so forth. But it speaks to the great job that they do with this whole issue of affinity and connection and membership concept marketing and so forth. And you're right, it operates at the emotional level, not the intellectual level, but it absolutely governs buying behavior. When you feel a part of something, you'll drive past 5 stores that you could easily have gotten the same thing at in order to go to the store go to the store that you're a member of, you'll patronize the restaurant where everybody knows your name, etc., etc. It's a very powerful force.

It is. And in the research that I was doing, I really got started with this looking at, in more respects than any other, looking at the network marketing industry. And these guys are geniuses. I mean, you think about what network marketing is— these are professional marketing companies. So you see this a lot in there, and it's always like, join us, be part of our group, And that's probably one of the bigger selling points. Of course, the other ones we'll talk about are in there as well. But this is certainly one, be part of our club, be part of the in-group, be part of the group that's going places, and that's the draw. Now there's a different level to this too. Connection is sort of like the initial affinity level if you want. There's the next level which I looked at and I said, okay, there's more than just connection here. We can raise it to the next level and call it love. And we know we look online, just look at some of the more popular websites. The dating services, for instance, those are ones that pop up and all of a sudden you turn around a month later and they've got a million members. What are they really selling? Well, they're selling this idea, this concept of love, connection at the next level, if you want. So then I said, okay, is there a level above this? And there is. And oh God, we're going to talk about sex here, aren't we? Yeah, we are, because sex is sort of the next level. And the sexiness that is sold— and if you look at all the automobile ads, for instance, you never see an overweight guy with a beer belly standing by the car. You know, it's always beautiful woman and And I always laugh when I go by Barnes Noble and I look at the magazine rack. You always see the Harley-Davidson. And what's on the Harley-Davidson? You know, the typical guy you'd find riding a Harley? Or is it a scantily clad woman? So what are they really selling here? They're making that connection between, you know, the Harley and the woman. And that's the, you know, the implied idea there is that you're selling sex or you're selling love. So pornography, obviously on the internet, we know is the biggest industry, and it still is to this date. Why? Because people are isolated, like I said, and they want that idea, or they want to be able to connect, and they think they can do that through their computer screens.

Well, so you're about, you know, you're really into how do you connect your product or service to really driving even base emotional desires of people so that I mean, I don't think anybody consciously thinks, you know, oh, if I drink this beer, attractive women will gather around me. But the link is certainly made by the advertising.

An emotional link, exactly. And you don't even know about it consciously. You're not thinking about it consciously because your conscious thinking tends to go in terms of, okay, there's 16 ounces in this one, there's only 12 here. You start to think of things like that that are kind of on the surface.. But the emotional drive is much stronger than that.

Yeah, I think one of the places that that applies in advertising where, frankly, those of us who are really copy-oriented tend to drop the ball, and I really try and discipline myself not to, is with the photographs that are used. Because you can really convey an emotional link through the photographs used to illustrate your story. And people, marketers are often pretty casual about just sort of grabbing whatever's around and sticking it in there.

They are, and it's a great point you bring up because when I first started looking at this, the internet really hadn't come across the way it is today. I mean, it's just sort of everywhere today. And people would always ask me, where do I get these kind of photos to illustrate this? And I said, well, today it's very easy. You can put up a webpage with all those photos. A website, iStockPhoto.com, for $3, $4 you can get these kind of photographs to put on your website, and they are royalty-free. You can use them on your website, your print ads, your postcards, whatever, and these are available to you. Let's look at the second of the power of 5, if you will, and it is getting something free or getting something at a bargain. Now again, emotional triggers here. We know the word free in the marketing world is one of those things that gets people's attention. You put up a classified ad and you say free ebook. Well, that doesn't work quite as well as it used to, but that used to be a very powerful ad that you'd be able to run. So something for free, people are always looking for that. They, you know, the tire kickers or the freebie seekers, if you will, that's a big part of the market. And, you know, Dan, you do that very well with your newsletter offering a free 3-month trial when people start up and you give them a whole slew of product. I mean, that's an irresistible offer. Because A, the price is right, but B, I'm getting all this stuff for free. So even if I don't like the newsletter, I'm still ahead of the game here. Very powerful for a lot of marketers. The other part to this is getting something at a bargain. In other words, we know, and it's not always the case with every person in the marketplace, but we know that dropping our price makes all the difference. We've all heard the Robert Allen story where he tells of, you know, $96,000 in 24 hours. That was back in what, 2000, 1999, 2000? Yeah, a while ago. A while ago. Then we said, "Okay, what really happened there?" Well, what happened was he had his products normally priced at X price and he said, "I'm going to send out an email to this group of people that were buying his programs." All he really did was drop his price.

Yeah, there's a classic case of that. There's another great example right now, but there's a classic case of that. There's an old mail order pioneer. His name is Dean F. Duvall. Dean's been in the opportunity-type magazines off and on for, gee, I don't know, 40 years. He sells a lot of relatively low-price books and courses and so forth. But he always had his ultimate package, what he called the Mail Order Matrix, which was priced at $15,000. And it was a red herring price, meaning he never anticipated actually making a sale at $15,000, and to the best of my knowledge, never did. But all— he was constantly putting it in front of all his customers that the ultimate thing to get from him, which contained, you know, all the secrets of the universe, was the Mail Order Matrix at $15,000.. And so customers who are spending $10, $20, $90, at most a couple hundred dollars, are having this put in their face constantly. And there's no way they're going to make the leap, right? And then several times a year, he would suddenly— and he would have a reason each time— and he would mail— this is pre-internet— he would mail all his customers with the reason why, the story, that he was gonna let X number of them, some small number, 37, 42, you know, go at only $5,000. And the orders poured in because it was such a bargain, and there was this pent-up, you know, demand that you wanted it. But you weren't going to pay $15,000 for it. But when it was suddenly available at $5,000, you leapt at it. But without that, had he been putting a $5,000 item in front of $10 and $20 and $50 buyers, he wouldn't have been any more successful than the regular $15,000 price. The other great example of that that's going on now is one of the hottest things in in moving residential real estate is the auction, and both physical auctions and actually online auctions. But the interesting fact about auctions is, is that 70% of the time people pay more than they would have paid through direct acquisition rather than less, because of course they get caught up in the emotional fever of the auction. Itself. I can tell you from owning racehorses, you know, the worst place in the world to buy a horse is at an auction because you almost always pay more than you would through direct acquisition. But it feels like a bargain is being had. And so I think that— and the other interesting thing about this is people think sometimes that free and bargain strategies best apply to lower, medium-income people, but they apply to the affluent just as well.

Everybody is motivated by the opportunity to get a bargain. They are, and if you look at the other example that I like to look at is Macy's. Macy's has the same thing, pent-up demand, high prices typically, and then they'll run that one-day sale and the place is flooded. I mean, you know, the shelves are empty, the place is ransacked after they run that because again, they've had all that pent-up demand, all those people looking for, to buy these products and go, "Oh, they're too expensive." But with a one-day sale, hey, they've chopped 20%, 30%, 40% off that and they're still profitable. But they built up all that demand to cash in on it. The other thing, mentioning auctions, when you look at something for free or something for a bargain, the whole bargain idea is what drives eBay. 220 million people on eBay these days.

That's what they're there for. Yeah, that's astounding. It really is. But you're right, it's the driving motivation.

It is. Okay, so that's 2. That's 2. Number 3 is the one where a lot of us tend to play as the magic bullet or the blue pill, or, you know, whatever you want to call it— effortless money-making. Buy my product and you'll become wealthy. A lot of people today are, you know, frustrated and fed up with, you know, the standard salary that's, you know, they're able to spend more than they make. So what they do is end up looking for opportunities, businesses they can start at home, books they can read, or courses they can take, seminars they can attend that will give them the magic potion, the magic formula to be able to double, triple, quadruple their income. Now we know this is a whole industry. The opportunity market is huge and it seems to be growing ever since the internet really took off. That market has really exploded in my mind anyway. I've seen it explode. And it's always going back and offering people the opportunity to use my book, use my program, use my website, use my training, my coaching, whatever to be able to achieve that financial independence that we all seek. So that market is red hot as far as I can see, and certainly on the internet it's really exploded. If you're wondering how big it is on the internet, just check your inbox. Every day you're getting bombarded with emails that basically touch on this emotional motivator.

Well, your reference earlier to the weight loss industry, it functions around the same emotional motivator, you know, as do many other businesses and as many other businesses should. I always say that, you know, we never want to— we entrepreneurs never want to engage in the behavior that drives our customers because consumers are always in search of the simplest solution possible to complex problems. And so as a seller, you want to keep that in mind as a buyer. You don't want to be buying it because the way to solve complex problems is with complex solutions.

Usually. It's interesting looking at that particular button, how you're right. They're trying to solve a complex problem which is not enough money. Well, there are a lot of reasons why there isn't enough money. And buying another business product or a book sometimes isn't going to be enough. In fact, most times it's not going to be enough because the behavior behind it that's causing the problem in the first place doesn't change.

Yeah, same with the weight loss. I mean, even if you have a pill that works, you know, there's exercise issues, there's eating behavioral issues, there's emotional issues. And so when we say the pill doesn't work, it's really not that it doesn't, it's just that it needs to work in context. But if you're the seller of the pill, the more you can make it the magic and simple solution, the better. So it's a real important thing to remember about people, that what they really want is one thing to do, one thing to take, one answer to a question. Again, the simple answer to a more complex issue. Friend for years. His name's Dr. Herb True, and he taught at Notre Dame for a number of years, business and management courses. And Herb said that every year his students early on would be confused because he would— about a particular issue, he would give them 3 or 4 books to read, or 3 or 4 chapters in 3 or 4 different books to read.. And they would all come back and their primary question was, "Okay, which one is the right book?" Yes, huh?

I get that all the time in my business in the consulting too. We talk about different ways to market and promote. They always come back and they always ask, "Well, I don't want to do all of them. Just give me the one that will work. Give me the one that will work the best." Yep. Well, it isn't that. It's a conjunction and a collaboration of all these pieces or the sum total of all the parts that you put together that to make this successful business. Number 4 in the list, this one's kind of an interesting one, is making people's dreams come true. Now you might think, well, wait a minute, how do I know what a person's dream is? And that's always the first question that comes up when you, when you talk about having a dream come true. Dream could be, you know, living in that big house, having that fancy car, having that fancy boat, making your first million, you know, whatever, whatever that dream is. And here's what's interesting about this, is what I found is when you look at any marketplace, you look at the chiropractic market, you look at the dentist, you look at the, you know, the stay-at-home mom, you look at— every one of them share common dreams. Now, you might not hit everyone's specific dream and get the right color and the right make and model of the car that they're looking for, but they do share dreams in common. Now, again, how do you find out what these dreams are? Well, if you're marketing into this market or this niche, if you will, you go in and you start asking questions, and you find out what it is they really want. Why are you buying this seminar? Why are you buying my program? Why are you buying these diet pills? And then you can start integrating those dreams as an indirect benefit. Most often these are going to be indirect benefits for a lot of you. You're going to integrate these dreams into your copy, into your presentation, into your phone scripts, into whatever it is, how you're communicating with your prospects, your potential customers. And it's interesting, when you do tap into this, it does have a measurable effect on your results as far as sales go. Because you know, you're hitting them right where they breathe. They're doing this, why are they doing it? Are they doing it because it's fun? Well, oftentimes, you know, getting on a diet, hey, that's not going to be a whole lot of fun. But what you get them to focus on is what happens after you lose the weight? What does life look like at that point? And you get them really associated very clearly on what that dream is of being, you know, the size 7 or the, you know, being able to fit into the jeans that you wore back in high school. And you get them real associated with that in your copy. Make it tangible almost. And you'll find that they'll just jump all over this. It's a very powerful motivator. And I've done a lot of research on this particular one because it tends to be a little, eh, yeah, make your dreams come true, yeah, so what. It doesn't sound that good, but it is very powerful. A lot of examples of that, you know, you start to look at the television, the infomercial world, and you start to see that all over the place in there when you're very clear on what this is.

Well, it really is about— I call it aspirational marketing. It really is about elevating the product service offer far beyond ordinary reasons for buying and tapping into people's, as you say, dreams, hopes, their aspirations, and it gets us to, as you alluded to, taking the time even for the way the phone is answered or what's said in response to a customer question or objection or what you're saying from the front of the room as well as the copy you may be putting in the media, really getting into aspirational language, you know, and really crafting that language to tap into sort of their— their their fantasy life rather than their reality life. I find that most people have a level of aspirations that they have sort of come to the conclusion that they are not going to get, that they're not going to experience, but they're still there. And if you can trigger those and hold out fresh hope for those level aspirations, you can get people to do or buy just about anything at just about any price.

Yeah, that's the key point to this whole thing. Why are we doing all this? Well, you wipe out the price issue in most cases. You know, when you start talking about aspirational marketing, you start talking about connecting them with their dreams and really positioning your product or service as the vehicle that they need to be able to achieve that dream, price doesn't matter anymore. It's really interesting what people will do. One of the great examples, you look at them— I don't know if you've ever seen the magazine, Dan, called Backstage? Yes. It's a Hollywood publication and it reaches the aspiring actors community. And the way that they market is all these guys in there that are promoting and selling their seminars and their coaching programs and their their voice coaching and everything else is like, "You too could be a star." They are tapping into the dream. What's the dream? Why is a person going to Hollywood in the first place? Well, they want to be on the big screen, right? They want to be there, and these guys understand it, and they tap into it. And some of those ads are really, really, really productive for them because they are able to tap into that. Price doesn't matter. It's like they will find the money to hire the coach if they really truly believe that that coach is going to help them get on the screen or get their first recording contract.

Well, in that same category, by the way, a great illustration— it's not so much paying a price other than paying a price in, you know, standing in line for 22 hours or sleeping in the parking lot overnight. Right. If you look at American Idol and you look at its predecessors— so its predecessors go all the way back to— you got to be up there, but it's before my time— but the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. And then you had, all the way to fairly recent, you had Ed McMahon's Star Search. These shows were about winning a contest and winning a cash prize. And consequently, they had relatively small numbers of people entering, and they often had to actually chase people and work at getting people to enter. American Idol now, which is basically the same construct, will have hundreds of thousands of people trying to get on. And when they do an audition in a market area, I think last year, it's either last year or the year before, they were here in Cleveland, one of the places I have a home. And as I recall, they had, I don't know, 15,000, 20,000 people, and they were sleeping in the street the night before and everything. Because American Idol is about not just winning the competition, but becoming the next manufactured star with a career and a recording contract and a concert tour and all of that. And so, you know, the predecessors were selling something sort of small, whereas American Idol is tapping into these great aspirations.

They're selling a whole lifestyle. Yeah, exactly right. Here's everything that most people work a lifetime to achieve. You win this one contest, we give it all to you.

Hard to say no to that. By the way, that's another powerful part of this tapping into dreams and hopes and aspirations is tying it to speed. I mean, God knows we live with a public now that has the highest level of impatience maybe of any civilization anywhere at any time. And we want it all right now. And when you tap into that, that's a powerful emotional trigger too.

You know, I felt that when I ordered the new DVD set you have out, The Phenomenon, and I was like, why, I want to watch this now. Why can't I watch it now? We want it immediately because we're so used to it. It's like, I don't want to wait for UPS to show up 2 days later. It's so far down the road. You're so right about that.

That's such a powerful one to add to the list. All right, well, watching the clock, let's get to number 5.

Number 5 is fear, and that's one that is used in various ways. We've seen this one used a lot in the insurance companies. You know, you see the salesman standing in front of a smoldering house.

It's probably going to happen a lot here in San Diego these last few days.

Yep, that'll be a great place place to be selling fire extinguishers in about a month. Uh-huh. Yeah, it certainly will be. And, you know, they're standing in front of the smoldering ruins of your house, and, and now what do you do now that you've lost everything? Or what do you do after you pass on? Who's going to take care of your family? You know, and they scare you half to death. And oh my God, yeah, you get— when you get attached to that vision, you know, it sends chills down your spine. It's like, okay, I need what these guys are offering. They're offering me a solution, so I no longer need to to worry about such things. We had one story of a friend of ours who just lost her home on Monday afternoon here. The fire went through and took out the home, and she wasn't panicked because after getting over, okay, the mementos are gone, the stuff, she called her insurance company, and the insurance company said, no, don't worry about it. You're insured for $1 million for the house contents. So all of a sudden there was this sigh of, ah, it's going to be okay. And they can sell it that way. The other way to use fear, which is what a lot of us do in the direct marketing industry, and you alluded to it earlier, Dan, in D&F Duvall's example where you said, you know, there's only 32 available, only 42 available, or this offer ends at 12 midnight. And that's the way to get people to respond right now. It's also known as scarcity marketing. There's only a few available, that sort of thing. It falls under this umbrella of fear is the way I look at it. Scaring people or getting them to take action now rather than, "Yeah, this DVD looks good," or "This seminar looks good," and they put it away and they put it in their stack of stuff. A week later that stack of stuff is so big they get so frustrated they take the whole stack and toss it in the trash because they don't get back to it. You've got to get them to take action now. The way to do that really is looking at this concept of scarcity or fear marketing and really scaring them a little bit or jostling them a little bit is what I like to say. To say, into taking that action, pulling out that credit card, making that order, filling out the order form, making the 800 number call, whatever it is you're asking them to do. So you've got to have a tool in there, and this one is very powerful. Again, you look at your marketplace and say, okay, what are some of the fears in here? Well, the fear of missing out on a great opportunity, that's powerful, kind of covers most markets. But are there any specific ones in my particular market niche that I could use that maybe my competitors aren't using? I've got to tell you something. There are very few, if anybody, in most industries that are using all of these. And the game that you really want to be playing here is not looking at, okay, let me just pick one or two. Let me look at it instead and say, well, how do I use all 5 of these emotional motivators in one advertisement, in one sales letter, in one webpage? How do I put them all in there? And you may not get them all in, but at least if you make the effort, your ad stands head and shoulders above your competitors.

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