Using Personality, Persona & Stories To Keep Customers Interested

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're going to be talking about what keeps your customer coming to you over and over and over. We're talking about long-term interest because often putting out good products, services, and having good customer service just isn't enough. We as humans crave something more, and today's guest understands that extremely well. Dan Kennedy is going to be bringing on Susan Berkeley, a voiceover expert, to talk about how personality, persona, and stories keep your customers interested for life.

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 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. Welcome to the call. We have a a double today. We're going to spend some portion of time talking about personality in marketing and some portion talking about speaking and presenting. I have with me, and actually will be taking over the call, a long-time member, which makes you sound old, so I shouldn't say that. Susan Berkley, who many of you will know if no other way than as the voice you hear for AT&T and Citibank. Susan is a top voiceover artist. Her voice, disembodied from her body, has sold millions of dollars worth of products and services on TV and radio commercials. Her great voice company provides professionally recorded marketing messages in any language in voiceover marketing for clients all across the world. She spent— survived would be a better word, probably— 15 years in broadcasting as a radio personality, including a 2-year stint as a cast member on the Howard Stern Show. Piece of trivia: Susan's grandfather was the co-creator of Archie Comics. And she was a behind-the-scenes expert presentation skills coach on Donald Trump's The Apprentice, helping to coach the winning apprentice in season 4. And most recently, she's launched, or I suppose relaunched might be better, the Speak to Influence Academy, where she helps entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and others use their voice properly in influence and persuasion. Susan, thanks for being with us today.

Hey, Dan, it's a great pleasure, and I can't wait to ask you these questions. So let's start out about a personality in marketing with comic books. Now, you have often said we should study them along with serious fiction, and this, of course, is near and dear to my heart. As you said, my grandfather, Louis Silverkleit, along with his partners, started Archie some 70 years ago, and the property is still around today. My father worked in the business his whole life, and so did I for a while. What you don't know about me, Dan, is that in the 1980s, I wrote the Archie Comics title, Katie Keene. Did you know that about that comic?

No, I had no idea. I mean, I know the title. I had no idea you wrote it.

Yeah, for a while. So this comic, for people that don't know, is about the adventures of a fashion model in New York City, and as a reader, what was so cool about it, you would send in your clothing ideas, sort of like a precursor to Project Runway, and the artist would then draw those your clothing designs on the characters and give you credit in the magazine. So that was a real hoot. And when I was a kid, we used to actually ink the comics at home around the dining table when they were super busy in the art department at Archie. We gave them away by the box for Halloween. And when I fell in love for the first time, my dad actually said to me, "Does he have little hearts floating over his head?" So I grew up around this stuff. Now back in the September InfoMarketing Letter, you see You say Superman's greatest danger is not kryptonite or supervillains, but the only enemy that can bring about his permanent demise is not being interesting. And you say your value over the years is not tied to your own super abilities, but finding ways to be newly interesting to the audience, and you dare not stay the same for long. Yet there are certain things you must stand for permanently, just like Superman stood for truth, justice, and the American way. Now you say you have a strategy for this that has been reasonably been incredibly effective over the years. Can you talk a little about that strategy?

Well, I think it's a critically important point, and it's important really for people in any business, all the way down to the ordinary millionaire next door type businesses, the dry cleaners, the restaurant, the small manufacturing company, whatever, in that it's very hard for any of us to keep people interested in us and our businesses and engaged with us over long periods of time purely based on doing what we're supposed to do, which is if we're in a restaurant, feed people reasonably well and not poison them. If we're running a dry cleaners, get the clothes clean. If we're in my kind of business, it's show up on time, be able to speak competently, right, et cetera. And in the information business, just the core information is not enough anymore than the core goods or services are in any other business. They may be of high interest to somebody when they first discover them or first begin to patronize a business, but over time, they become routine and mundane and ordinary and therefore uninteresting and then raising the danger either of commoditization or of seduction by competition. So the idea of interest and really the idea of human interest and having customers interested in the human behind the business. Is, I think, an outstanding if not essential way to achieve differentiation in the marketplace and a retention strategy for customers over a long period of time. As to the strategy for that, it really is, if you look at the comic book world and maybe more specifically the really long-enduring superheroes that keep getting refranchised in movies and in television, and the comic book world has actually gotten very sophisticated and advanced at not just reinventing them from time to time, but at having multiple incarnations of them operating at the same time, aimed at different age groups, different markets, different media beyond the comic book. So you— we just— people that were at the Info Summit, of course, and I saw today a little crawl on the news when I was eating lunch The original Batmobile is up for auction.

Oh wow.

But, you know, people who were at the InfoSummit met Adam West, who was TV's Batman, and saw the Batmobile and got their picture taken with the Batmobile. And, you know, that TV version of Batman, the real silly, campy, moralistic figure, came about at a time when the comic book version of Batman was really dying. Its circulation was was falling rapidly and DC Comics was struggling. That reinvention really brought a whole new wave of attention. But if you look at these characters and how they have been managed over decades and over generations, they are— they have their, their cycles of popularity and waning interest, and then somebody has to figure out a way to renew the marketplace's interest in them, whether that is actual character change or storyline change or surrounding cast of character changes. And so there's sort of a short list of options that are available to them to do that with. Pretty much it's the same short list that we have for ourselves as real living, breathing humans in which we want to sustain an audience interest over a period of time. So, you know, the comic book world is really a great thing to study. There's a brand new book out about Marvel that just came out, I think this month or last month, that I'm a couple chapters into that that really does an excellent job of explaining all this. And so I think that's something people need to be aware of and they need to pay attention to and they need to borrowing from this place, from other fictional environments like long-running series candidates, characters, they really need to have a short list of how do I periodically refresh myself and make me newly interesting again to the same audience.

So one of the reasons I think Archie endures and Disney endures is because of nostalgia. And nostalgia is a powerful force in marketing. And you seem to understand and utilize it very well with your classic cars and some of of your ventures like Kennedy Barber Clubs and your venture with Reed Ice Cream, Kennedy and Reed, I think it is, and of course Adam West in the Batmobile in the recent InfoSummit. And you seem to always be on the lookout for these nostalgia opportunities. But I think most business owners don't use nostalgia enough. So what are some of the ways we can inject more of it into our marketing?

Well, I think business owners, first of all, don't really Many business owners don't think, you know, really even in terms of demographics. So, you know, any customer with a wallet and a pulse is okay. Every customer is okay. So they're really not, you know, even leaning towards sophistication about this. But in the most recent book in the No BS series, the Guide to Marketing to Leading Edge Boomers seniors. I mean, the statistical case is very clear, profoundly here in the United States, but also in some other markets around the globe. But here, it's by 2017, over 50% of all adult consumers in the United States will be over the age of 60, and more than 70% of the discretionary spending will be in their hands. And the advertising world, and if small business owners sort of follow it and think about emulating what they see in big business advertising around them, the advertising world tends to want to go young because it is a creative place and it is heavily populated. With young creatives, but the demographic trends and the follow the money mandate tells us that we really need to pay attention to and we need to be adept at doing business with 50+, with 55+, with 60+, with 65+. Nostalgia for real or imagined places, people, activities, the way things were, really begins to set in with people around age 50 and begins to grow as they age. And so if you think about like Archie or the TV ripoff of it, Happy Days, You think about The Andy Griffith Show. I mean, these— this really never actually existed, but it's an idealized version of what existed, and people have nostalgia for it because they grew up with it, but because it is an idealized version of So it's an enhanced, to use a Playboy term, airbrushed memory, which in many respects is even more alluring than an actual memory. And so you're right in that marketers leave a lot of opportunity behind by not making a point of making these connections., of appealing to people's nostalgia for people, places, and things, uh, that are part of, uh, their youth or their now enhanced airbrushed memory of youth or their idea of, uh, of what it was immediately before them. And Disney One of the big trends at Disney is a significant growth in merchandise that is quote, quote vintage, that is replica of merchandise and bringing back the way the characters were presented in the 1950s rather than what they are now. I mean, only a handful of years ago, that was maybe one shelf in the back of a souvenir store at Disney. Today, it's probably a third of the store. Now, to be fair, they keep reinventing things, aiming at the younger and younger market too. And Disney bought Marvel— to go back to comic books for a second— they bought Marvel for the very reason that they didn't really have anything that strongly appealed to the preteen and teen. So they had a gap between relatively young kids and adult nostalgia-driven fans. They just gave George Lucas a ton of money for all the rights to Star Wars, which is a nostalgia play. That's exactly what it is. And they of course believe they can rebirth the franchise anew for the young, but they also recognize that it has enormous nostalgia value. And so they're very, very good at it. You know, at the small business level, there's so many things you can do. There are holidays. There— Archie must have a birthday. I don't happen to know what it is, but I'm sure Archie has a birthday. You have Elvis's birthday. You know, you have these benchmark events and days and times, Pearl Harbor Day, you know, that mean things to people that can be leveraged. I've often told the financial advisors who deal largely with leading-edge boomers and even to a greater extent seniors, that were I in their business, I would absolutely own and drive a classic car prominently placed in front of my office for everybody coming to an appointment to see, because everybody has a reaction to it above age 50. At 55 and 60, everybody has car stories. It's essentially the equivalent of a guy being at patio of coffee shop full of women and he's got a cute dog with him. I mean, you know, you get a warming of response to you immediately, and that's really what you get with nostalgia when people are looking for human connection, affinity. If you value and are interested in and connected to the same things they have warm feelings for, they now have warm feelings for you. So it's free, you know, it's all pretty much available to us for free. For the most part, we're dealing with dead celebrities and historical events. And pictures. There's a, there's a restaurant at Disney, and now I'm gonna butcher the name. It's like the 59-and-something. It's— oh yeah, it's in Hollywood Studios. It's in Disney Studios, and the decor is perfectly accurately the 1958 to 1961 house. Um, maybe even '55 to '60 house. So the waiting area is a living room, and the pole lamps that we remember are there. The— everybody sits in a little kitchenette. Old black and white shows are on old television sets, um, and down to the nth detail, it is perfect. It is like walking into my parents' house and my mother's kitchen. And if you're there when it's busy, and anybody who goes should go, watching the reactions of people, uh, is fascinating. And the reactions of people by age is fascinating because the kids being drugged there, of course, have no connection to it whatsoever and pretty much don't react to it at all. Um, the youngest ones fixate immediately on TV because any moving picture is better than none. But, and the teens have no particular reaction to it. But the older the person is, the more profound and enthusiastic and delighted and fascinated is the reaction. So I think marketers, particularly those that are aiming at Boomers and seniors, ought not underestimate the value of nostalgia.

Yeah. Now, in How to Create Personality in Marketing, which is a great course everybody should have, you say you make yourself up, and for the most part, you're creating a fictional character. So going back to when I worked in radio and I was a cast member on the Howard Stern Show, the big revelation I had working with Howard was that he made himself up, and I didn't realize that. So I thought that what you got on the air was is really the real guy. And when I was on that show, my first day on the air with him, they laid into me. I mean, they ripped me to shreds to the point after I got off the air, I was in tears and I called him up off the air and I said, "Well, I guess you guys don't like me." And he goes, "No, you're great!" So that's when I realized that this was, you know, he was a made-up character and I got to become really good friends with him, spend a lot of time with him off the air and he's the sweetest, gentlest, shy person. So Howard made himself up and so do most media superstars. And you have always encouraged us to turn ourselves into larger-than-life persona and not focus on the boring facts about our business, like how long we've been in business, how many widgets we've sold, you know. And I think a lot of people listening may be feeling a little intimidated about this. So how can you make it easier for people to get started? What's the first thing you should do to create your marketing persona?

Persona? Well, I think, well, the first thing you should do is consider who your market is, who you want to appeal to. And so, you know, Howard, for example, built himself for a very specific demographic and psychographic, and he is basically giving, you know, permission to, to, to men to be adolescent boys.. And, you know, the Howard Stern persona, you know, is not going to work on Fox, on Fox News, ever. And so I think you have to consider place and target audience or customer. Beyond that, the Howard example, and I've read that, and you of course have told me before, you know, that Howard is, you know, nearly— has been nearly painfully shy and probably was early. And so his is really a, a Clark Kent to Superman level transformation. Most aren't. They are more embellishments of the real person. Um, they— so it is more about exaggeration for effect than it is outright fakery. So what bothers some people about this is the idea that they have to be something that they aren't or present themselves as someone that they aren't. And, and, and I don't think that's true. I do think that most people have the genesis of an interesting compelling character in them. They have the genesis of a heroic character in them, if that's the way they want to present themselves. And just about everybody has characteristics that fit a marketable profile, whether that's, you know, the kindly gentle father figure. If you think about Dave Thomas of Wendy's, um, now you have to be of a certain age to pay attention. So he always reminded me, and I always wondered if any of it was deliberate, he reminded me of the Mr. Wilson character on the Dennis the Menace show. Oh yeah. Um, which you have to be of a certain age for that reference to mean anything. If Brittney Lynch is on the call, her head just exploded, because none of that made any sense to her. But, so, you know, whether it's the kindly, gentle parental figure, whether it's the adventurer that everybody wishes they were, I mean, there are character profiles repeatedly appearing and succeeding in fiction that reoccur, you know, year after year after year, decade after decade after decade, generation after generation after generation. And really, they were modeled originally on real people. And so most real people fit one of them and then can exaggerate that, those aspects of themselves, to to make themselves even more colorful within that frame. I think the third thing you have to consider is, you know, does it match up well with the core things you need to communicate to a marketplace? And so, you know, if you look at what— how Hefner built his character. Some of that is Hefner exaggerated, and some of it is quite fictionalized. He too, if you study Hefner, is really sort of a reclusive, and has long been sort of a reclusive, private person. Big parties he gets them started and then sneaks off and goes off by himself. And so the persona that was presented to the public was, was both different and embellished. So I think there's a number of factors you have to consider, but, but the one thing that is, that is, is beneficial for people to understand is, is that a, a face, a human, a an interesting human is a much easier thing to market and promote and make people interested in than is a nameless, faceless corporation or a corporate brand or an institutional voice. And I've often said that small business owners are often in a mad rush to get to nameless, faceless entity status. Yes. For really no good purpose, no useful purpose. There's an argument about it if you're building a company for a big equity play, and it's a complex topic. But, you know, most small business owners aren't doing that.. And yet they tend to neuter their personality out of what it is that they do. But if you look at the most successful in every category, you will find more often than not they are personality-driven. And even in big business you find real breakthroughs. I mean, you look at what Branson has done. I mean, he's fundamentally in big business type businesses— airline, phone. I mean, the long-distance phone commercials, really now the latest commercials are all about Branson. And so I think people don't get that. They do get obviously that the world is fascinated with celebrities. And as an aside, I heard— I saw Ryan Seacrest interviewed the other night on something, Kimmel, I think. And Kimmel was razzing him about the Kardashians, which is essentially his creation at E! Network. And he said they're really just today's Brady Bunch, which is really sort of an interesting aside, but, and in a sense he's right. But so we get that people are fascinated with celebrities. Most businesses and business owners don't really feel financially able and comfortable to go rent them and buy them at an effective level, but you already own one. That you don't have to pay extra for, and that's you. And so the decision about whether to do this or not and do it well or not, if you purely look at it from a standpoint of what works and what works best and what works most consistently, then you would very much want to be in this game.

That's great. Well, let's move on over to the subject of influence. And you, of course, are legendary for for the speech that sells. And in fact, you've helped a lot of other people have them too. You helped me craft a speech that sold over $100,000 of product in 90 minutes for a T. Harv Eker event. And it was the very first time I spoke to sell from the platform. I'm forever indebted to you for helping me to do that.

But you yourself— Forever spoiled. What?

And forever spoiled. Forever spoiled, that's true. Now you yourself have sold over $850,000 in a single platform presentation in a In your recent info marketing letter, you did a fantastic analysis of the speech that sells, sharing 7 secrets. Oh, that speech was the 7 Secrets Patients Never Tell You and 7 Pathways to Greater Income and Autonomy. And you analyzed the speech you did for Jake Eyre that sold over $460,000 of your materials in 90 minutes, and you said it was one of the 3 best you've ever done for buying entity. And you say one of the secrets for having this amazing speech is that people must have their truths taken away from them before you can exert influence and that you have to turn solid ground into thin ice and upset people a little to make the sale. So when— that's a little intimidating for people, you know, because people I think get up there, they want to teach, teach, teach. You're saying the opposite. So when we put our presentations together in our own niches for our customers, can you give us some common denominator guidelines guidelines for identifying the places where we can take truths away from our audience?

Well, so if you stop to think about it, you know, everybody comes into a room, physical or virtual, if you want to lay this over onto webinars and online videos or TV infomercials or, you know, whatever. We do the same thing with an infomercial. So the viewer, the person in the audience, the prospect, they— nobody is devoid of beliefs. So everybody has a belief system pretty much about everything. Most people have it about many things with hardly anything to base it on. I mean, probably everybody on the call has a belief system about global warming. Pro or con, real or fake, significant or insignificant, and hardly anybody on the call has read any of the science on it, but they have an opinion. And so people have a belief system about just about everything. If it is about their own business or their own industry or their own profession, they have a belief system that borders on the on the theological, on the so ingrained that, that challenging it or doing anything, accepting anything contradictory to it, is just heresy. And so you have to know that they have brought that to the chair with them, and you have to sort of figure out what of it is in your way for the case you want to make, the discomfort you want to cause that will motivate the purchase of some sort of solution, the proposition you want to present. You have to figure out what's in your way. You have to figure out what, if any of it, is compatible, is useful. That can be zeroed in on and leveraged to your advantage. And so you really have to do that analysis before you ever think about the structure of a presentation and the content of a presentation. And under ideal circumstances, what's going to happen, what's going to be communicated to them about you before they're ever in the room. So we're really trying to get clarity about their belief system as it applies to topic X or to product A. And then those things that are in our way that would prevent a person from accepting our proposition. Based on their ingrained belief systems. We've got to find a way to blow that up, and we've got to find a way to blow it up that doesn't make them angry at us. Um, there are exceptions to the last part of that, but for the most part, we don't really want antagonism, uh, but, but we do want them to severely question, if not set aside their long-held belief that is now in the way of us selling them whatever it is that we want to sell. And if we skip past this— so the worst thing would be teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach, teach. Oh, by the way, now that I've demonstrated how smart I am, I got this cool thing for you to buy. That's like the worst speech structure of all. I've seen two speakers in my entire lifetime be able to to get away with it profitably, but I've seen a whole lot of others die with it. But so that's the worst way to skip it, because you won't change a belief system by teaching. So at the end, when you're all done, doesn't matter how smart you looked, that thing is still in the way that prevents them from buying. But any structure, if you skip over the step of figuring out these belief system issues and figuring out how to leverage the ones that favor you and blow apart the ones that don't, then really any speech structure, any sales structure you're then going to use— attention, interest, desire, action— you're going to show them social proof, you're going to do physical demonstration, No matter what you do, at the end, you will not still be able to sell to them because buying will be antithetical to their belief.

That's great. When you want to influence someone, job one is getting their attention. So you often say that interest and patronage is largely taken for granted. In a sales letter, we have to get them to open the envelope and, you know, you teach a number of ways we can get them to do that. And once they open the envelope and we craft the headline that will get them to read the rest of the letter. But in speaking to influence, I've always felt that people make two big mistakes. One is they focus too much on themselves and how they look or come across rather than really zeroing in on what's most important to the audience. And two, they try to wow the audience with their PowerPoints, their facts, their figures, and they think they're you're going to get someone's attention with that. It's almost always the opposite effect. They bore people and put them to sleep. So if great headlines help grab attention in sales letters, what does a speaker need to do to grab attention when presenting one-to-one or one-to-many?

Well, great headlines are still a good idea. I think there's an interesting trend I've noticed in the past couple of years of of speakers who sell regularly, that that's their thing, more and more of them are abandoning PowerPoints. At the last two events I'm at, that I've been at, the ELMO was suddenly popular again. And I'll tell you why. It's because they're discovering what I knew all along is that technology is really not your friend up there. Sinatra's great line was, "Anybody who needs more than a microphone and a spotlight is a putz." And I watched Joan Rivers' new comedy specials on either HBO or Showtime right now, and I saw the act live a year ago at the Cleveland Playhouse. Because she was on the road getting it ready for this special. And now I watched the last, I don't know, 10-15 minutes of it. And, um, one of the unsaid funny things about the thing is she's got a big orchestra up behind her. However, it's all mannequins because she don't need that stuff. She's compelling with a spotlight and a microphone. And so the people who became very, very dependent on PowerPoints and little video snippets and all that, it really distracts from your ability to connect with and control the audience. And if they've come from corporate, There's even a physiological reaction to it because while some good speakers use that stuff, all bad speakers use that stuff. And so you start to crank up the PowerPoint presentation with an audience that has seen a lot of bad speakers do PowerPoint presentations, inside they die. You know, we're stuck here for 40 minutes I'm in the third row. I can't leave. Oh my God, he's got a PowerPoint presentation. So there's even a physiological, you know, disconnect to it. I think it is far more about— it is not really about cosmetics. Cosmetics matter. I can tell you with reasonable certainty that certain dress will help or hinder you up there. There's always somebody who can violate the rules, but for the most part, there are rules or, if you will, probabilities, factors that either help or hinder you, but ultimately it is really about a sense of connection on the audience's part. So at the very beginning, yep, got to get their attention and got to hold their attention long enough to create interest. That now really doesn't change media to media to media. One of the things about me and speaking, so you come to it from the broadcasting side. And the interesting thing about coming to it from where you came is you spoke in a closed room with no audience, right? And you— and they can't see you even on TV. So you had to get really good at voice because pretty much that's all you got. I came at it from print, and so to me, the speech that sells is a sales letter delivered by a human. The speech is really just another piece of media, just as a print ad or a direct mail piece is a piece of media. The way I've always come at structure is to structure it like a sales letter. Now, the interesting thing about when we work on infomercials on television is the sight and sound is integrated. Obviously, it's not a disembodied voice like it was when you're in a radio studio. So the sight and sound is integrated, just as it is for a speaker on stage. However, people don't watch TV like they sit in an audience. A whole lot of people actually listen to TV because they knit, or they're on the floor playing with the dog, or they're looking, paging through magazines, or they've walked from the couch to the kitchen counter, TV is still on, and they're fixing a sandwich. So there's a lot of TV viewing that isn't viewing at all. There's also TV watching, viewing with no listening, because people— two people in a room, the TV's on and they're also talking. They're screaming at the kid or the kid is screaming at them. The spouse in the kitchen is interrupting and talking to them. So one of the things I've always done with television infomercials, and I believe the same principle ought to apply to online video, although very few people apply it, is I want to see what it looks like with no sound., and I want to hear what it sounds like with no picture, and I want each to work independently of the other so that I can get your attention and create interest even if you don't hear it, and I can get your attention and create some interest even if you don't see it. The speech on the stage gives us the benefit of no clicker in hand. They don't have a, they're not at the computer with a mouse, they're not on the couch with a clicker, and that helps. There's some peer pressure around them to pay attention, that helps. However, everybody's got a clicker in their mind, and so we're really fighting the same battles to get attention early, create interest, and then to hold and sustain interest all the way through.— and so that's where, you know, all of the training that you do on voice inflection and persuasive voice matters. That's now where body language matters. It's certainly where message matters. And the biggest principle is not to— well, the biggest principles are not to underestimate the difficulty of the task and not to take attention or interest for granted, even minute by minute by minute. Now, we learned that in the infomercial business because we have real stats on when they click out. You can get it website and webinar, you can know minute by minute by minute. It's very— it's profoundly known if you ever appear on a home shopping channel. So when somebody like Joan goes on QVC You know, second by second by second, how many are on, how many are off, and as with a telephone, whether the phone's ringing or not. And if the phone's not ringing, whatever you're saying and however you are saying it isn't working, and the time to alter that is right this second. So these environments really teach things that if all somebody ever does is step to the stage and speak, they don't have those experiences. They don't have your experience of being a disembodied voice. They don't have the print experience. They don't have the home shopping experience. And they're not as sensitive to us as people are who have that experience, but they need to be.

I'd love to fit in one more question before we open up the phones, and that's about stories and influence. I recently met a GKIC member who took some of your key training programs and reduced them to a mind map, and he was all excited thinking he'd found the essence of Dan.

Well, of course— God bless him. Yeah, I know him well, and he does, you know, he does a terrific job at it.

He did. He did a great job, but it was so dull, and, and, you know, he didn't have your stories. He took out your stories, your voice, your energy, and your spirit. So stories are the gift we give the audience, and most audiences won't remember content anyway, but if you tell good stories, that's what they remember. A good story has the power to go viral. People will tell it to others. They're going to spread it like wildfire, and I think stories lift an audience out of time and space and stimulate emotions, and that's where real influence happens. Now, you're a master storyteller. I'm sure you've worked hard to develop that skill. You did a great presentation on stories at the InfoSummit. You say stories are a bridge to shared experience Rapport, which you absolutely must have in order to influence, and you actually gave us a checklist of the types of stories we need, stories about origins, stories about your champions, about your miracles, about your adventures, stories that reveal character and strength. And I know we won't have time to go over all of these today, but could you pick one or two and expand on it for us?

Yeah, and I'll quickly make an overarching comment. So our friend the engineer and academics, professional curriculum developers, they all want to do that with my stuff. And of course the first problem is 2 days becomes, you know, 12 minutes. But the second, so from a, you know, packaging it up and selling it standpoint, that's not necessarily helpful. But beyond that, they don't get really what moves people to thought, response, and to action. And that very rarely is information. It's hard enough to interest people in information. It is even harder to move them with information. And so story really is the path to results. And from a sales standpoint, it is the path to response. And so if you take any period of time, any decade you want, and you go find the 50 most successful ad campaigns of that decade and you find the 50 most successful sales letters of that decade— and so it doesn't matter whether you want to go do 1920, 1930, '40, '50, '60, '70, '80, '90, or into the 2000s— you are going to find that 80 to 90% of it all, of the top-performing stuff, is story-driven. It's not information-driven. It's not the default of selling. It's not driven by product/service features, benefits, comparative superiority, or price. It's story-driven. And you are 10,000% correct in that if you want to embed, if you want to be remembered, and if you want to be talked about, you will achieve that far more with story than you ever will with information. And so in reality, when we say the information marketing business, I don't really mean it. It's a, I guess, a convenient description, but it certainly is not, you know, an accurate description. Of all of the genius of Disney, the Disney— the genius from the very beginning was— so when Walt opened Disneyland and created Disneyland, the amusement park industry was like Six Flags, Cedar Point of 20 years ago, because they stayed there a long time ignoring what Disney had done. On, and they still aren't any good at it, but they at least now seem to understand it. Um, they were a place you went on rides. I mean, there was a Ferris wheel, there was a roller coaster, there was a merry-go-round. From the very beginning, Walt's principle was that every ride has to be a story. Um, and so there is no Disney ride, never has been. Not none now. That is really not the equivalent of a start-to-finish story, a movie that you're in. And, and, and he understood intellectually and intuitively that you didn't really do anything to people emotionally by just putting them on a ride, that if you wanted to emotionally affect them, if you wanted viral, as you, the term you used, then you had to do something more than that. To respond to your question about types of stories, you know, there's a master arsenal of all the types of stories, and then There's situational application. What kind of story do you need for what purpose or what place in a presentation or a sales letter or a piece of ad copy? What story do you need to tell to prove a point, to undo a belief system, etc.? One of the universal stories that everybody needs and a lot of business owners have and don't use is their origin story, which is a way of explaining why I'm here other than just to exchange a box of stuff for your money.. And it shouldn't matter in many kinds of businesses to anybody. And on a conscious intellectual level, many people, if it was put to them, would say it doesn't matter if you have any reason other than trying to make the most amount of money from each customer in the shortest period of time. I mean, so if, if I'm going to get whatever, I'm gonna get my house painted. The only thing I should really care about is who's going to do the best job. And if the only reason the guy's painting houses is because he's incapable of doing anything else, and that's how he makes his money, and furthermore, the only reason he even works to make money is because he's, he's a drug addict and spends his weekends at strip clubs. I shouldn't care about any of that. What difference does it make? But subconsciously, unconsciously, emotionally, most people care a lot about those sorts of things. And so the origin story is what enables that emotional need of the prospect or consumer to be met. And it provides an acceptable understanding of why we are here, why we're in this business, why we're doing the thing we're doing, and why we're doing it the way we do it. And the comic book example that I always use, which because we just did Batman at the InfoSummit, it will be very fresh to people, but You know, if you take away Batman's origin story, which Batman now is so well known, if from nothing else than movies, that people who are not fans, who may never have read a comic book in their entire life, a good significant percentage of them know the gist of the Batman origin story. So if you ask 10 people at random, 5 of them can give it to you. And that's more than can get which brand of battery is sold by the bunny right. So that tells you about the cultural penetration of the Batman origin story. And if you take away Batman's origin story, which for those who don't know, succinctly summarized is young Bruce Wayne with parents leaving theater, takes shortcut down an alley, robber leaps out, and in front of boy, executes both mom and dad. And this now sends him into essentially a revenge has justice mode. If you take the origin story away, Batman makes no sense whatsoever. Um, he's a freakish character, uh, in a weird costume who runs around beating the crap out of everybody and blowing things up and getting a fair amount of innocent civilians killed by accident as collateral damage in the process, and operates outside the law and really needs to be arrested and put away. Somewhere either in an asylum or prison. He makes no sense. In fact, he's scary to law-abiding people. And so we really underestimate the danger of making no sense to people when we don't have a good origin story. Beyond that, a lot of times the origin story is really, really useful in, in, in in bonding as differentiation. So I have a client right now I'm writing copy for who is a money under management financial advisor, very high-end. He works only with— his only clients exclusively are people who are selling or have very recently sold their own company for no less than $10 million and no more than $50 million. Million. So that's the target. The overwhelming majority of these people tend to be 50-plus. They tend to be male. And more often than not, they tend to be in dull, boring, millionaire-next-door kind of businesses. Only about half are college-educated. And they almost all tend to be pull-up-by-bootstraps kind of people. So the commonalities they have— most of them worked when they were young, they started making money in their teens if not before, they worked their way through school, they started a business from scratch, they sacrificed to build it, etc., etc. So he has been marketing by information and almost not telling his origin story at all. His origin story is phenomenal. I mean, I've got black and white pictures of the literal shack, little tiny crappy wood frame house that he grew up in, living there with parents siblings and grandmother all in 2 bedrooms, outdoor plumbing, no indoor plumbing, heated by a wood-burning fireplace. I've got him starting in selling things to make money at age 8. I've got him starting his first business and, you know, building it up by hook and crook and hardscrabble and sacrifice. I mean, he is the heroic version of every one of his potential clients, for real. I don't have to make it up, and it hasn't been used. And it's simply because, A, he didn't think it was important, and B, he's uncomfortable telling it. But it's probably the greatest asset he's got. It's infinitely more useful to him than The fact that on money under management in his high-income portfolio, he outperformed the S&P 500 by X percentage over the last 7 years, and he uses a blended strategy of 5 different kinds of— I mean, I just put everybody to sleep, right? But the story, see, is powerful, and the origin story ultimately gives him a mission, reason for doing what he is doing.. And so that's a universally applicable kind of story that really everybody ought to have and everybody ought to use.

Susan, thank you very, very much.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Dan. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free. Just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at nobsltr.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 $1,000 gift, you also need a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.