The Best Brand Marketing Masterclass In The World
In this masterclass, Izzy Kiver delivers a sweeping, high‑energy roadmap for creating, scaling, and sustaining powerful brands. He begins by asserting that every brand starts with copywriting, citing legendary copywriters like Eugene Schwartz and the role of stress (or even alcohol) in unlocking creativity. Kiver then outlines the psychological foundation of any market: a perceived lack that creates desire, which must be satisfied within a framework of trust and safety – often conveyed through blue or teal colors. He stresses that word‑of‑mouth is the ultimate growth engine, likening it to a village‑to‑city expansion model. Kiver dissects the anatomy of cult‑like brands (Apple, Disney, NASCAR, even the US dollar) and explains how they generate loyalty through safety, social status, and myth‑making. He provides a step‑by‑step process for building a brand: (1) identify a scarcity‑driven need, (2) craft a myth or origin story (drawing on Greek mythology, war narratives, or maternal archetypes), (3) design premium visual assets (color, font, packaging), (4) assemble a four‑person core team – a psychiatrist/psychologist, a data scientist/analyst, a brand specialist, and a growth marketer/promoter – and (5) launch with a disciplined investment in thought, planning, design, and capital. The masterclass includes concrete product case studies (a “Freedom Marker” pen, limited‑edition Sharpie, Moleskine‑style notebooks) to illustrate how to turn ordinary items into status symbols through scarcity, high price points, exclusive distribution, and influencer unboxing. Kiver also teaches how to leverage current events (COVID lockdowns, election seasons) as emotional catalysts, how to segment audiences by race, gender, orientation, and interests, and how to use targeted advertising platforms (Google, Facebook, TikTok, cold‑email tools). He warns that branding is essentially a “lie” built on manipulation of human weaknesses – pain, fear, greed, the desire to feel important – and that ethical entrepreneurs must understand and responsibly apply these levers. Finally, Kiver emphasizes long‑term thinking: brands must adapt to changing climates, invest continuously, and view branding as a lifetime engine that generates money, which is then reinvested to keep the cycle alive. He closes with a call to action for participants to define their single product, single emotion, and single purpose, and to commit resources for a multi‑year launch plan.
Chapters
Alright, welcome to the masterclass on brand strategy and activating strategy for your brand. No matter what business you're in, this is going to be for you if you have a business and you're looking to increase exposure and to become a major player in any space. The first thing you have to understand where brand begins is with copywriting. The— some of the most famous copywriters of the last century were Eugene Schwartz, and something I learned from reading about Eugene Schwartz from his own memoirs is that copywriters are heavily creative people, and they're heavily influenced by alcohol. When they drink, it boosts their creativity levels, and they start getting to work. Actually, stress also boosts their creativity. So if you feel like you're in a creativity hurdle and you don't quite know where to begin with improving your brand or with new ideas, consider the effects that stress may have on you being crushed under a deadline or feeling like, "Oh gosh, things are getting bad." That feeling is not always bad. It actually boosts your creativity. I'm not advising you to drink, but if someone on your team does drink and they use that for creativity, it's a very non-conventional approach. Of how to get the creative juices flowing. I personally like going to the sauna, I like working out. Everyone has a different way to get those juices flowing and being more creative. When we think of design in general, we think Apple, okay? Apple is a brand that over so many years, so many decades, has perfected the design process. And when you're looking at how can you emulate a company that has crushed it in the design space, in the branding space, Apple has done so, which is also why they're very particular about other companies using their famous logo in their assets, and they will sue because they have perfected brand and they do not want other people taking away what they work so hard for. So how does all of this work? How does creating a brand, an image, a company really work? You have to start with lack, okay? Everything in this world, every business starts with a supply and demand. It starts with a certain demand for something. There has to be a lack of something. People want something, they desire something, and only through that desire can you create some sort of product or service that people will use. If there is no feeling of lack, okay, if people are these Tibetan monks and they feel that everything is zen and good, all they need is some porridge and they don't need anything else from these worldly pleasures, you cannot sell, you cannot build a brand around that. You have to start with lack. And when you have this lack and desire, it needs to be filled, okay? And to fill something, to fill a hole, you need to have trust and safety. And this is where marketing or anything that people talk about as far as sales go, where you need to have trust from the other person, is because of this factor. Okay, it starts with lack. You need desire and you need safety. You need to give people— you need to give people a feeling of safety in order to be able to fill their desire. Okay, think about sex for a minute. It's the exact same process. People have hormone spike, they feel desire, they feel the lack. There is a suitor potentially, he wants to fill that desire. The person will not engage, okay, in sex if there isn't a sense of trust and safety. Without those two things absent, and potentially alcohol and bad decisions, things are not going to work out. And it's the same with every sale, it's the same thing with your brand and the company. You have to figure out how will you create safety for your clients, which is why most brands use teal and blue colors, because that color itself, it invokes safety. Most businesses are successful when they use a blue or navy color. Think of Microsoft. Google uses that for their call to actions. It's the sense of safety, and it's an easy, easy win that you can do. Like they told us in Harvard in brand strategy, if you can't make it good, make it blue. And if you can't make it blue, make it big. All right, those are the rules. Have a quality product, use the blue colors, and use big fonts. Use something that people will It will catch their attention. So brand marketing, as it's been taught in Wharton, as it's been taught in so many Ivy League schools, it comes down to very, very simple processes which are severely complicated. They don't have to be. The best marketing, according to a Wharton professor— and I learned this over a decade ago when I was trying to learn how to become a better marketer for the company I was working in— is word-of-mouth marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing. Because think of a village. You start in a small space, okay? You do a great job, and then you expand from your village. Every— your village knows you're the hero, they think you're the best. And then you go out to the big city with the title from the village. You engage in more competition, you're victorious there, so on and so forth, right? Think of all the success stories of these major tech companies that started in someone's garage, right? It's the same concept. You start small, you capture a market, you prove yourself as a branding expert. We're gonna have to change studios if these flies become an issue. I killed that one, caught on camera. I will build a brand of fly killer. All right, keep that in the video. So word-of-mouth marketing is how will I be seen by others? What are people talking about in reference to you and your brand when you're not in the room? Okay, that is what branding is. That is what marketing is. What do people say about you when you're not present? Okay, if you think about Apple or some other, you know, luxury brand, people, people might say that, hey, Mercedes is such a great car, it's so luxurious. Same with Apple, it's sleek. That's what people are saying about these products and brands when there is no one from that brand present. That means that people have instilled in themselves, this is a good brand. Ask yourself this question: are people saying the same thing about you and your brand? Are they saying, oh my gosh, I just love these tissues, I just love XYZ? People feel that way about Kleenex tissues. It's a brand that has built that reputation through a quality product and through great market placement, right? Same thing with you. Think about, do you offer a quality product? Are you using the right colors? And are you getting the message across the right way through word of mouth? Now, you might find this funny, but examples of brands that build trust and create something you can stand behind, okay, almost have this cult-like leadership, are both communism and Disney. You might say, Izzy, what do communism and Disney have in common? And I will say exactly this: they have built a sense of trust and loyalty amongst their followers, and they have developed a cult-like following. Apple has done the same thing, which is why you have these debates between Apple and Android users. People might say Android is way higher tech, it has feature releases years in advance of what Apple will do, but people will Follow Apple and their brand like a cult because Apple has established this word-of-mouth marketing concept. They've established trust and something that people can stand behind. Ask yourself, have you done this yet with your brand? If you haven't, why not? And what are you going to change today about your brand to establish it as something that people can get excited about, something that people can plant their flag and get excited about and stand stand behind. This is the same about the branding between political parties, Republican and Democrat. It's something that people can stand behind and create an identity around. If you have not created this, right, around your brand, then you are missing out on this opportunity. You must develop ideas of how you're going to create a movement around what you are doing where people get excited about what you have to offer. A brand is something that people are attracted to and people want to be part of, and they want association with it. When you think about luxury brands like Gucci, Chanel, people want to be associated with Gucci, Chanel, okay? In some countries, people's entire identity is the Gucci or Chanel luxury items or shoes or clothing or purses that they're using or wearing. Okay, that is what it means to create something that people have a cult-like appetite for. Let's talk about foundations now. We are all created through sex. All of our desires, our needs, our existence is based on sex. Okay, it's the core of our creation. It's our DNA. It runs right through us. Our brand must answer to the feelings just like sex. Of trust, safety, and social advancement. People often will have sex for social advancement as well, and that is what your brand must accomplish, okay? It puts you in a new class of people. You don't use the store-bought brand of tissues, you use Kleenex, because you cannot be a middle class or upper middle class family if you don't have Kleenex in your house, for instance, right? Same with cars, all right? If you are driving a Volvo, versus if you're driving a Mercedes-Benz or BMW or a certain model of those cars. You are creating a different level of social advancement through the products that you use. And same goes for services and concierge services. Social advancement is something that we all desire. You must create a certain sense of social advancement through your brand if you want to create a massive brand. Okay, there are companies like Walmart who have niched down a very specific target, and they're not providing social advancement. However, they are providing a massive service to a certain class of people, which is a massively growing class, and they've nailed it without being awesome at branding. But guess what? No one's saying, "Oh my gosh, I love that Walmart brand. I just want Walmart brand products." People usually say, "Hey, those products are are usually from China and they're crap. And we know it, but they're cheap, so we buy them anyway. That's not a brand strategy. That's a whole different strategy. That is simple commerce. Buy cheap, sell, you know, sell a little bit higher, make the margins, and do your business. And that was a business that took 50 years to develop. Okay, we're talking about you coming across as an individual, as something, as someone that wants to provide something of great value, and you want to build excitement around this. You want to create a brand around this. If you want to retail and peddle cheap items here and there, you don't need a brand, it's not for you. We're talking about where you want to stand out. You want to build a brand strategy. You want to have an exciting company, and you want people to take you seriously. Let's talk about the hiring, who you actually need to hire in order to make this work. First off, you need data scientists, okay? If you don't have data scientists, which are basically people who are specialized in harvesting information, and they understand what makes a certain audience, a certain group of people, or some people call this a niche, feel safety and accepted by whom? Not by me, not by you, but by the people that they idolize. Who do you want to follow? Who do you want to follow on Twitter, who you want to follow on Instagram, you want to follow the guy that your idol follows. If you love Gary Vaynerchuk, or if you love, I don't know, a famous basketball player, and that celebrity follows someone else, okay, some random guy, let's say, he's not a random guy anymore. You have great respect for him. You're like, oh my gosh, He's now celebrity endorsed. He's endorsed by the person that you feel is a mile high and so far away from you. So that is the goal. The goal is essentially to feel safety and acceptance by the people, to be accepted by the people that your audience idolizes. Do you see how I put a layer in between there? I'm not saying go directly to your audience and make them want you, that's a very long battle, very, very long. Go find someone that your audience loves and get endorsement. People call a celebrity endorsement, but it's a lot more than just that. It's this idea that if you have found your audience and you know that your audience loves Tony Robbins, then get on the same boat as Tony Robbins. Go find someone who the people you're going after already love. And build a relationship with them. Build your brand that way, okay? Dean Graziosi did this with Tony Robbins, actually, okay? He was someone who sold courses, you know, he built a relationship with Tony Robbins. He's a great salesperson, a great brand expert in this regard, because he understood that his audience are very closely tied to Tony, and Tony has a bunch of people that love him, right? And before, there was Jim Rohn, right? Who was Tony Robbins' mentor/employer. So it's always this link, it's like a lineage, and you can become part of this lineage of having a successful brand and a successful company by understanding this key principle, that it is specifically this, precisely this, it is a lineage. You have to go after and be accepted and be loved and trusted by the people that your audience idealizes. Now we really need 4 experts here. We need a psychiatrist, a sociologist— call whoever you want— someone that is an expert in how people think and what makes people the way they are. Someone is able to sit and ask questions and figure out your audience and do surveys and ask these people, are you Democrat or Republican? Why? What were your dreams when you were younger? Where are you going in life? All of these important questions that need to be fulfilled, that need to be asked, and they need to be asked by a business psychologist, therapist, a psychiatrist, call it what you will. It's a person that understands people and knows how to pick apart your audience and understand every little thing about them. And the more data points they have, the more things they can pass on to the data analyst or the data scientist that can go and expand on that and understand to understand what are your people really about. Of course, number 3, you need a brand specialist, okay? Ideally, this is someone on the level of Eugene Schwartz or an Ogilvy, or you can work with those agencies themselves. It's not about who you're hiring, it's understanding what tasks are you giving these people? What are you trying to get out of them? Because if you don't know how to utilize your team, if you don't know how to utilize the resources that you hire, then you're gonna be failing as well. You have to understand that step number 3, after you have fully extracted all of the potential data points and what your audience is about, after you have used a data analyst to process this, understand there are 320,000 people in the world and they all share these common values, these common beliefs, and you should use these words and these triggers and these people that they follow, and you know everything about your audience, you can write a day in their diary. After all of that, you bring on the brand specialist that can process all this information, start building a brand portfolio. The colors, the font, the systems, everything around all of this information. That is why you're gathering this information, to get to that step. And after you have created this, essentially, frame, you created this idea, this product, this brand, all of this around your audience, around your people, then you bring in the marketing promoter. Then you start spreading this like wildfire. 'Cause if you just spread garbage or junk or something that is not catchy, and you spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing, something that is not catchy, something that is not great, you're gonna flunk. You're gonna be wasting tons of money on showing irrelevant information. But once you do this process, these 3 steps, you get the psychologist, you get the data analyst, and you get the brand specialist, and you create this wonderful package around what you're trying to sell to the world, right? Then you can hire a marketer or growth hacker, and they will make this grow like wildfire. They will get this on every news channel, they'll get this on every periodical, they'll get this on every single platform where it has to be. This is the secret sauce, okay? This is it. So let's come back and think about who are the biggest brands. Apple, Disney, NASCAR. What do they have in common? By now you should know, okay? NASCAR might have a bunch of hillbillies who love NASCAR and a bunch of other people who maybe make money off of betting on it, but Apple, Disney, and NASCAR have these cult followings. It feels like magic, okay? For the people who watch NASCAR, it's magic. You turn on the TV on a Sunday, you drink your beer, and you watch your NASCAR. It's magic. Okay, almost like football. Disney, same thing. It's magic. You go into their Disney, you go into their theme parks, it's magic. It's Disney magic. Every movie they make, everything just feels warm and fuzzy. Apple is the same way. You open it up, the tech is magical. It's not silicone chips, it's magic inside. And that is where the money comes. When your products, when your service, when what you do, people come back and they're like, holy, holy shit, Izzy, this is magic. All right. If you can provide a service like that, people will eat it up. They'll love it. They will love it so much. And if you understand your audience, you're doing all of these things, and the better you can execute everything I'm saying to a T, the stronger your brand will be, the more money you will make long-term. And this isn't a 1-year game. This is a lifetime game. This is 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Even after you pass away, your brand lives on, like so many amazing brands that we see, even IBM. This is a company that's been through everything, and 100 years later, however long it's been, they're still around. It's that brand, it's that trust. And it's not the fact that, well, they're so old, of course they're trusted. No, it's the fact that even though so many years have passed, they continue to be trusted, have not lost favor with their clients, customers, et cetera. That's the way you need to look at it, is that every year you risk being faded out, outcompeted, replaced, becoming irrelevant. And no, you look at those brands who have learned to adapt to the market, create new brands, appeal to the audience at every generation, every stage, and still stay relevant. Okay, other names come to mind, obviously McDonald's, even Exxon. These are all brands end of the day, and they've done a tremendous job of keeping and staying relevant for so many reasons. All right, let's be careful here first, okay? Make sure that everything you do, especially with branding, is not rushed but planned carefully, okay? It requires the following steps: thought, planning, design, investment. And only after you have 4 things—thought, planning, design, investment—then you launch. Then you launch. Before you have these 4 things, before you've thought about it, before you've planned it, before you've designed it out and put the money into it, only then do you launch. Okay, we're not talking about MVP or trying to get a product down the market or try to sell some small thing. We're talking about you expanding your business. We're talking about you getting onto a national or international market and becoming a well-known household brand. To do that, you must follow these steps and only launch after you've adequately prepared and put the time in. It's not a process that can be rushed. No matter how smart you are, no matter how talented your people are, you must take the time to be meticulous with this, plan it carefully, budget for this, and make it happen. The investment behind the brand, the money that goes behind the brand, is what propels forward your idea. It's not that you had a shower, you came out, you're like, "I have this great idea." It's the fact that you put investment behind something and you push forward an idea. And after doing that, new associations and new ideas and new discoveries and new things can come out organically, out of the climate, out of the environment. The climate could be a political climate, right? It could be any sort of climate, but your brand adapts to every climate, right? Whichever president is winning, you know, Apple is winning anyway. Whichever president is winning, Disney is working out. And that's this whole idea, that your brand grows out of the climate and knows how to shift and maneuver in whatever new thing happens because it's so solid, it's so great, and it's so functional and agile. That is what great branding is. So art is a mystical thing, secret, very difficult to understand. And as we all know, art is created out of thin air, okay? It's like in the Wolf of Wall Street movies, right? It's a wooji, it's a waji, it's, it's, it's air. That's what art really is, okay? It's always the insurance companies are backing a certain author and it's believable enough, or a certain artist and it's believable enough, this guy is good enough, and someone placed, paid for an insurance policy behind this piece, and they're like, sure, we'll insure just about anything as long as someone pays us to do it and it's believable enough. So, you have, in order to create a brand, in order to create an image, create a movement, right, now that you heard for the first time, hopefully not the first time, that art is essentially a prism. It's something that's made up from someone's imagination. Now that you understand this, try to use circumstance, something that's happening in the environment. If it's election season like it is right now, use a circumstance where people are getting angry about or riled about in order to expose your brand or to get a first pilot light, right? If it's something else that's happening, if it's COVID, if If there's something major, a major world event, you go on Twitter, you'll see the top trending things that have been trending for the last 30 days, for the last 60 days. Use those items as cannon fodder. Use those items as a pilot light in order to get your brand lit up. And that works so well. Find out what people are angry about to build a brand, okay? Emotions of hate, anger, all these things, they work so much faster, right? In order to get people excited, get people talking. If you build your brand around something like that, whether it's a solution to something people are angry about, whether it's something that stirs the flame further, it doesn't matter. You want to get noticed, okay? But not too soon, right? You don't want to get noticed before you have something tangible, something that is quality, something that you want people to notice, right? So to build a brand is literally the word brand new. You have to build something brand new out of the situation that people are living in, right? 5 years ago or 4 years ago was COVID. Now it's election season. Next year is gonna be something else. There's always gonna be something in the news, especially if Donald Trump is elected. There's gonna be very, very fun stuff happening that people can get excited about and build brands around that continue to grow past this, you know, fun event. Think of words like change. Think of words as, different, okay, and put the focus on— focus and hone in on brand marketing. Brand marketing, okay. And what's gonna save you here, what's gonna save your company, okay, is, is not the data scientist, not some astrologer or astronomist, it's not gonna be knowing a certain language, English or Chinese, it's going to be following these principles that I'm handing down to you maximally efficiently, maximally fast. You may want to watch this a couple of times when you can because this is truly the ultimate brand masterclass and the only one you will need in order to grow your company to a national, multinational level. Branding. Interesting thing. Branding is actually the same— it's exact filth that we are all based around, okay? As of today, right, in July 2024, all of the desire, all of the physical, everything that we have in this world as we know it is based around a very specific brand called the USD, all right? Say with me, USD. The US dollar. That is the biggest brand, all right? You pull out a Benjamin, you pull out $100,— that is a brand. You show it to a girl, she gets happy. You know, you give it to one of your employees, they respect you, they love you. Give it to your kids, to your wife, it's all, it's all just happiness all around, right? Why does this USD make people so happy? Because the brand and the associations they've built around it, okay? The dollar, cash, it makes people happy because they've associated that with power. They've associated around this dollar with with mobility, with freedom, with ability. Everything comes alive when people have more USD, okay? And that is just ingrained in us, okay? It's just drilled in. Slowly people are moving away, they're thinking Bitcoin, this, that. It's gonna be a long time to undo all these mental models, maybe 50 years, and people stop thinking of the USD as something great, something that makes them happy. 'Cause when you feel a physical dollar or a $10 or a $50 or a $100 bill, you're like, oh, this is great. I've got cash, I can do things now. Right, wouldn't you say so? Yeah, okay. So USD, the US dollar is a brand label. It's a label, it's like a Birkin bag. A Birkin is a label, Chanel is a label. The US dollar is a brand label the other brand labels are based around, right? Because if I have a Birkin that's $5,000, it's $5,000. I immediately associated the quality of my brand on this other brand called the USD. This is how high-ticket pricing works. It's this concept. It's the USD brand. And as a leader, as a leader, your job is to gather resources from everywhere. And execute on a certain plan. Okay? And think of yourself, like many business owners do, as Sun Tzu, Art of War, as you're the general, you're the leader that is sending their dollars, sending their USD to go do battle for them and bring back more USD. You see? It's all based on this lie that we believe in. And that is what branding is. It's a lie that you create that people believe in, That's rooted on another lie called the USD that people believe in. And guess what? It's not all grim and evil because it creates a functioning society. Does it lead to corruption? Yes. Does it lead to people suffering? Yes. Does it lead to a lot of very bad things where people are tied and there is no, you know, a certain class of people who have inherited a lot more or have been smarter about how they manipulate markets, etc.? Yes. But doesn't change the fact that it's done a lot of good. It doesn't change the fact that you are competing in this market and that you're living in this market. And wherever you are, whatever social class you are in, this applies to you, okay? This stops applying to you when you have your own reservoir somewhere way far from some— from, you know, mass civilization, humanity, and you're no longer tied to this. Or you're living in a town that you use a barter system and it's totally totally disconnected, but it's much rarer than you actually think. So if you are listening to this, you're probably also tied to this brand called the USD, and that is just a matter of fact. It's something you get used to, right? And you pay taxes, you make the system work, and I'll show you in a second exactly how the system works. So as the leader, you send your soldiers, your USD, the brand label, to do battle. And doesn't matter where you are, as long as you lead then you can win. You have to have the leadership mindset, leader mentality, and send the USD brand to do battle for you. Send the soldiers to do battle for you. And what they do, they bring back more dollars, because that's what the game— that's the game that you're playing. That's the game that you're in, okay? Even if you're a nonprofit, even if you're a non-commercial organization, doesn't matter. Whatever you do is based on this brand. You are sending dollars out and you're trying to bring more dollars back. Simple. So here's a game plan. Here's a strategy of, you know, A to Z of how you do this. You psychiatrists, data analysts, brand experts, and PPC guys— those are the marketing experts, people who do direct marketing through Google Ads or through Facebook Ads or through whatever, TikTok, or whatever profile you want, or even, you know, cold outreach emails using softwares like Apollo or Instantly— and you're You're sending out the blasts, okay, based on this whole framework. To create a brand, right, around a certain item, let's take COVID as an example, 'cause I already have this example written up. Let's say COVID and a pen. And we're gonna create this pen, right? Sell me this pen. I don't have a pen with me. I have a recorder. I'll use a recorder. It's fine, right? I have a recorder. Let's make believe this is a pen, doesn't matter. And the idea is try to create this item, right, that has significance, right, towards COVID. This is case study. This is a practical opportunity to practice what we've learned. So I want to create a brand not around this recorder, around the pen. I want to create it around the anger that people have surrounding the lockdown. Okay, and I want this brand to be about expression and freedom. How to express yourself, how to be free, right? We gotta choose the right product too, okay? T-shirts do not signify expression and freedom. You could say, okay, this is amazing cotton, you feel free in it. It's not really it, right? Definitely not a slogan on your t-shirt, "Be free." Come on, you need something that really signifies freedom.. And we're gonna use this recorder or a pen in order to signify this. Right? Think about Apple. They didn't sell t-shirts. Apple sold very fine microchips. This was actually in a Times Magazine article who said exactly these words, right? They have made microchips sexy. Geeky at first. Decades later, microchips are now sexy because it's Apple, and it's the way they sold the microchip. So think of the same thing. Think about taking a technology or taking a concept and making it accessible to many people. When you start off in business, you niche down, you try to find that small little hole, that target, or the bullseye, a small, small group of people who use your product. But when you start building the brand and expanding, that's where you start to expand and grow this wider. And when you grow it, you have to make it accessible for everyone. Just like Mint Mobile, for example. You're not targeting everyone, you're targeting a group of people who want a cheaper cell phone service. And then once you become big enough, then you start competing with the Verizons and try to really outcompete bigger and better companies. What you want to do with your product is talk about the added complexity component. The added complexity about your pen or about your recorder and what makes them better. This isn't a regular pen, this isn't a regular recorder. It is special, it's divine, okay? Think about using concepts and read up on Greek mythology, read about war, read about struggle, read about the mother and the father as paradigms, as dogmas and beliefs. You will learn a lot from these keywords of what it means to create an entire mythology around something. Look at Greek mythology and how they create entire gods around a single entity or a single concept. You will understand that you can emulate— heck, use ChatGPT and emulate that concept around your item. Create some sort of mythology, some backstory, origin story, something heroic, something interesting around this. Think often about the maternal, about the deep desire to save and to rescue. Okay, so you're coming from a place of anger. People are angry about something, and you're coming to rescue them with this maternal instinct, right? With this desire, with this grounded love, warmth, and your product needs to create that warmth. Disney creates that warmth. NASCAR gets people riled up and excited, right? And Apple creates that trust in the same way. Your product needs to execute, it needs to feel the same way. What's the feeling that you want to capture with this recorder, right? It's no longer a recorder. This is actually a device that makes you feel a certain way. This recorder will give you a feeling of being overcome, overtaken by something. You're like, wow, this is amazing! It's so sleek, it's so unique, it does something so incredible. It has to be this sense of beauty, sense of nature at the sight of it. You would maybe change the edges and bezel the product, make it sleek, make it feel thin and sexy in your hand. That is brand placement, brand marketing. You want to show videos of people unboxing this recorder, right? Show the feeling of they open it up, they're like, "Wow, this is amazing, this is incredible." And you're going to show influencers, your celebrities, people that others follow and love, they're unboxing this product. It could be a course that you've created and they're going through the course. It could be on Twitch. It's a great idea if you have a learning product, have people who use Twitch go through the product like a video game and gain points and be like, whoa, this is so cool. Oh my gosh, I unlocked this level. Give that feeling of being overtaken, like this is something really cool. You want to then think about what your brand is gonna do, okay? Because of COVID people feel isolated. They feel like they're broken apart. This brand is gonna be something that does the opposite. It unifies, okay? UNICEF, combines them, brings them closer together. Your brand breaks people. The brand is doing the opposite of what the anger is about. The anger is we're locked in, we can't visit friends, we're upset. Your brand is this is a recorder that will help unify all of you together. You can record yourself, share your notes, and then, share all your thoughts and ideas, journal and diary, and put it out onto a podcast. This recorder is gonna do the best job to share your feelings and thoughts with your friend during a period of lockdown and make you feel so connected regardless of your race, religion, or background. Here comes the data, okay? You need every single data point and factor that exists needs to be listed about this product. I want to know what race enjoys this more. Is it 57% Asian that'll use this recorder, or is it maybe 75% Latino that'll love this recorder? You gotta get down who loves your product and who you're showing this to, 'cause then maybe you should be doing your ads in Spanish like T-Mobile does and Sprint does in certain neighborhoods. They make their ads in Spanish because they understand that's their market in that area. Gender, so guys or girls, trans, who loves your product? What's their orientation? Is this a product that mostly gays use, straights use, somewhere in between? Who's using your product? And all the subgroups that fall under it. Because these are all brands and associations, okay? Grindr is a gay brand, okay? People aren't coming out and saying, "Oh, let's make Grindr for straight people." Okay, it's called Tinder. You have to figure out who your audience is and really appeal to them and just go after that. That is brand identity. So it's a paradox actually, because when you make something available to everyone, that's what makes it worthless. What makes something valuable? Scarcity. That it's not available to everyone. And it's the paradox we've created, a unifying brand. We're trying to bring everyone together and saying it's one thing for everyone, but at the same time we understand that if it's for everyone, then it's worthless. So we understand it's not actually for everyone. So we have to master these both— these two worlds. We have to make it accessible to everyone, but it's not for everyone. And there is a sacrifice or price to pay. With Apple, you know, there's a certain cost for entry. The iPhone starts at $900, for instance. It's a cost to entry. So they've made the iPhone at this point for everyone, but there's a cost to entry and becomes a symbol of success, okay? You go to certain countries, it's an iPhone country. You go to other countries, they can't afford the iPhone as the average citizen. So it becomes a status symbol because of the price to entry as well. So here's what you can do in order to make your brand more scarce and unique. You call the brand that it's so limited, so scarce that you cannot have it even if you're the highest up, even if you're the president or prime minister, you can't have it. It's not available. It's— no one can have it. It's not available to anyone. Doesn't matter what race you are, gender, orientation. It's less accessible than Harvard and MIT combined. And it's more coveted than those century-old brands. And the reason why we're able to execute on this so well is because our therapists, our psychiatrists use words and use notions and terms that made it so believable because they have accessed the psyche of our audience, they accessed the psyche of our people, and they got them to believe this. And we can create a brand to make money based on these four contributing factors: psychiatrists, brand experts, promoters, and analysts, right? You have a psychiatrist to pull everything apart, use the analyst to go deeper in the data, the brand expert that creates the wireframe, creates a frame for it, and, and the promoter that makes it spread like wildfire. Those are the 4 experts you need in order to grow a company and make it work. Outside of the sales, operations, and all the other stuff. Let's talk about the here and now, okay? You might be thinking, hey, I don't have the best team to do this, I don't have the best budget or the best guys in the world. Use who you have today, and then after you use your current employees and get as far as you can get, That's when you'll make a little bit more money, and then you'll use the extra capital in order to go a step further and get something better. Okay? Think about quality, craftsmanship, and safety again. The Moleskine notebook is a brand that's been built on quality, craftsmanship, and safety. There are so many notebooks, but Moleskine won the competition, won the market as being exclusive, brand that people love and trust. There are pockets lined inside, the organization is nice, the way they crafted this— so much work has been put in to make the perfect notebook, and it shows, and people love it. Think about people who have these interests will love this brand. Do you like Tony Robbins? Do you like a certain celebrity? Do you like a certain food or restaurant? Then you might also like my service. You can create these lookalike audiences or these special interest groups through Facebook and others. Let's do an exercise, real world, with a Sharpie pen, a limited edition Sharpie marker, or in this case it's just a pen, okay? And we'll call it Sharpie, the last writing tool that you'll ever need. It comes with a certificate, golden casing, and video showing the unboxing. Okay? It's a pen and marker in one that makes you feel safe, wanted, desired, all because you own this. Okay? And the starting price is $299. Only available through select distributors. Organize a label, a brand, casing, boxing. It's a common Sharpie, essentially, that you order from China at bulk for $1,000 apiece, but it's different because it's your brand. It's your exclusive brand. The Sharpie Fine Point is now Brand X, and it says fuck you to COVID. It says fuck you to being kept inside. I will express my thoughts with this tool of freedom. It is no longer a marker. It is a tool that helps you express your freedom and your desires. And it's no longer a pen, but a vehicle to help you beat COVID. It's the new spin that you put on things. And that's what you always want to look at. What is the spin on your service? You're not just a visa service. You are a life improvement service. You're not just business coaching. You help people create new opportunities in their life and for generations of wealth distribution. That's how you have to look at it. When we were in Web3 and blockchain, they told us that we're not just in blockchain, we're in this new industry that is most alive and current that will create opportunities for our children and grandchildren to come. That is brand. That is the bullshit that they sell you in order to get you hooked. And love something and work hard for something, okay? If you wanna get your employees to work hard, if you wanna get people to buy your product, you have to sell this dream. You have to sell this lie and get people to believe in it. Moving forward with a pen, right? It's more than just a pen, right? It goes against everything that being contained during COVID is and being boxed in means. It's a form of expression, starts at 199. It's a private brand, it's a private label. Deliver this unique gift this holiday season, and it's actually the perfect gift for every holiday. It's the ultimate writing tool, this fine point marker. So what you're doing is you're taking an old technology like a pen and you're combining it with a marker and you're calling this the marker pen. And people will love it, they'll love you for it because you've created a new form of expression, right? You brand it, you get it done just in time for the holiday, it's the perfect gift, it's high-end, it's $200. Some will say, "How much did you spend on this pen?" "For me? Like, I spent $200 and it comes with a certificate. I love you." Like, wow, he does love me. He spent $200 on this marker pen. He's an idiot, but he loves me. Let's talk about the anatomy of a campaign. We got COVID here, we have Christmas here, we have lost loved ones, and we have future loved ones. And we do this test, all right? We take all these human emotions and we concentrate them into a brand. Being happy this New Year's, being happy this Christmas season despite being closed and boxed in during a COVID lockdown means having this pen. This marker pen, because this marker pen symbolizes freedom. This marker pen symbolizes happiness in the face of defeat. It's happiness in the face of being closed in and abused and tortured. Let's talk about hiring, okay? We had level 1 hiring, now it's level 2, okay? Now you want, at this point, you've gone through those first 4 hires, it could have been contractors, that's fine. You need a skilled designer to reflect in the emotion. You You need a site design to reflect what you've built. You need a product design, even if the product is a virtual product, mockups and sketches, whatever you need. 3D models of what you're doing. And look at brilliant.org, they make 3D models even on the learning program. And also the actors and unboxing, doing demos of your product. So those are the next hiring stages after you get through the first. And don't get me wrong, this is an expensive process. And it's a process that works, and it's tedious. Alright, so if you're coming in here with, you know, a few thousand dollars, you're like, how can I make this work, Izzy? Go get funding. I'll help you get that too. But you need some cash to deploy to make this work. And this is how great products are born. Here's how I would list out the product details. A very special limited edition collector's Sharpie. You pay upfront, you wait 6 to 8 weeks for delivery because This is so exclusive, and you receive a custom fulfillment special for you based around your profile and your interests. The box, the promotion, the design, it needs to be fast, sharp. It needs to imitate Apple in the sense that they're sleek, and it has to feel high-end, right? You talk about collaboration partners. Go collaborate with Moleskine, right? You say, do you own a Moleskine already? You know, scan your Moleskine QR code or scan your, your serial number or ID for your Moleskine purchase and get 10% off this pen or 20% off this pen. Build a connection with other brands, build a relationship, whether it's Gucci or Moleskine or whoever else. And you say the best brands trust and use this writing tool. Don't just use any pen in your Moleskine. Don't waste a good notebook on that. Use this pen. This is the pen that the moleskin deserves. Or if you're creating socks, say these are the socks you need to use with your Gucci shoes because you can't just use any old pair of Nike socks with Guccis. Use these cashmere and awesome socks you've created. Here's an example of a press release for this pen. Signed in the fine print of the Freedom UOU. This is a common marker that has become the symbol for new hope where hope once stood. What is it? It's the Freedom Marker, a limited edition fine point marker that celebrates our freedom in light of COVID It marks our strength to unify and is the one thumb up campaign on the marker of freedom itself. Private labeled, sourced, gift boxed, tons of photos, All this is in your press release. And people look at it and they're like, wow, I want that marker. It's the freedom marker. It unifies freedom. It'll get me out of this situation. It'll get me to be happier. And guess what? You may have sold bullshit, you may have sold a lie, but you made people happy for a minute because they believed in it, just like they believed in the USD, and they went after it. And they'll love you for it. And the world will remember you as the guy who made people happy during COVID or the guy who made people unified during the election, or the guy who— girl who did something great and made people better because of what you did. And that is the heart that you need whenever you do a product or service, whether you're selling immigration services and visas, whether you're selling courses, whether you're selling sushi. You want to make people happy inside. You want to make people feel good because they've used your product or service. And that's the trick. Just do that for year after year after year, you'll become very wealthy. Make people happy. Make people feel good about what you're doing. Expert care and attention. Working with a branding agency is not cheap, okay? Investment on the brand level is not small. PPC, pay-per-click, costs money, okay? Think of all of these things and how they connect to your own personal story, to your own personal brand, and connect them back into the product that you've created. Alright, we are going to talk about stage number 2, and this is where it gets very real, very fast. Last 10 minutes of our webinar, I want you to pay close attention. Think of launching your brand and your product as you got one shot 5 years on this proposal, $200,000 you're gonna spend over these 5 years. What's it really worth to you? Are you willing to put in 5 years of your life and potentially belly flop? What is the one brand that you're launching? What is the one emotion that you want to exhibit? What is the one product that you're gonna sell? And what is the one single purpose of this product, right? Is it to mark freedom internationally? Is it to give silky smooth skin? Is it to unlock opportunity? What's the one purpose of this product? Dove ran a campaign with a single bar of soap and said, "Silky smooth. Use this instead of a moisturizer. Clean your hands. Clean your face. It's the one bar of soap that does everything." They sold millions of bars of soap. In the '60s and '70s. It was 50, 60 years ago. And they became a massive company. They started selling everything else, right, from this one bar of soap. And then in closing with our product, think of it as the Freedom Marker. What's the brand? Let's say, are you ready to change the world? That's what you're doing. You're gonna change the world through a pen. Through this fine point marker. Think about this next step, and this is where I want you to pay close attention. We have about 8 minutes left in this webinar. When you have a product, okay, you've created this brand, and we're gonna shift over to say a course. Say it's a movement, say it's a series of lessons called the Seven Teachings. Seven Teachings for Success, right? I want you to start thinking, how are you going to diversify the spread and get this into different groups, into different social groups of people that will love this? Let's call it the 7 Teachings for Engineers, for Corporate Women, for Sufferers of Anxiety. You try different niches, different groups, and see how well those groups react to your brand. Get on stage, speak, have someone else speak for you. Get moving, get part of the flow. And I want you to think of this example from Peter Thiel, Zero to One. He says that when they started off with PayPal, they had Palm Pilots transfer from one Palm Pilot to another Palm Pilot, and that flopped. 2 million users, it sounded like a great idea, let's go do it. But then they realized that there's no massive concentration of Palm Pilot users all in a single spot. They're trying to send money to each each other. What they realized later, almost by accident, is that eBay, an auction site, had people that were trying to send money to each other after they won an auction on eBay, but they couldn't because they had to wait a whole week to send a check in the mail or do it through their different ways. And they realized that they can add 10x value by taking PayPal and allowing people to do instant transfers of money to each other after a purchase. And that was the 10x formula. Think of your own idea. What is a flop and what is a 10x when you add this to someone's life or to a certain area? For payments, after the fact it became obvious that the 10x is where people are already trying to spend money but it's not working out. Where people trying to do, what companies are trying to make something work— and it's not working so well, and where does your product fit in that can supersize their efforts? If it's a productivity product, maybe you could go to companies that are suffering from lack of efficiency from their employees. Maybe companies trying to downsize and squeeze out more efficiency out of their employees. 10x if you have a productivity app or product or course or training. This is what you must know about sales. Dangerous stuff. Manipulation. Strength of the manipulator— the strength of a manipulator lies in the weakness of the victim. Again, manipulators aren't strong. They're just exceptionally good at finding really weak victims, brainwashing them, and convincing them to do as they say. And they know that the, the, the victim either needs something from them or wants something from them. Right? Whether it's sex, whether it's money, whatever it is, they find something that the other person wants and they manipulate them through this moving target, this thing that the other person wants. They give a little bit and then they pull back and give a little bit, they pull back and they draw the strings and make you dance. So a manipulator is someone that gets people to do things for them for money and they, they use the victim's greed, fear, or ego, right? Because these are things that get people wanting money or working for money. And they get people, on the other hand, others, they get them to give them money, part with their money, they do sales, and they work on the weaknesses of those people, shame, guilt, or greed. They get people to feel shameful or guilty or greedy, and they say, look, if you spend this money, you'll make so much more money. Or how could you not donate to the Red Cross? These kids are dying. Don't you feel bad that you buy yourself new shoes and these kids in Africa, you know, they're suffering? These are manipulations. And they're just, it seems like an entrepreneur is just the worst person on earth. 'Cause that's what they're doing. They're manipulating their employees for money to do things for them. And they're manipulating their customers with different sales tactics to get them to pay them money. And when you're running a business, you are the grand maestro, you're the grand manipulator. Your goal is to expose markets' weaknesses, find out people's weaknesses, and find out their weakness to manipulate them to part with their money because of grief, pain, shame, jealousy, the strongest human emotions, on the promise of giving them something better instead. You can't just, you can't just take something from someone without giving something even better as a promise. You're right, even a church will take money from someone and we promise you a greater place in the afterlife later. Here's a system, and I'll show this on a chart right here. And this is how the system works. You expose a weakness, right? Pain is a very common weakness. People are like, you have to find the pain points of your customer. What they really mean to say is you have to find the weakness of your client, of your customer. Exploit the weakness through the promise of something better in return, right? And then collect their money, which they spend time working for. And if you look over here on the left side, you see the money system. The right side, you see the business system, right? So you see, the first is you transact, right? You do, you do a transaction. You, you spend, you go to the bank, you You get cash, right? You transact. Number 2 is you work. So after you transact, you go and you do work. And then after you work, you pay taxes. So it's actually like a circle now. Because after you've worked for the money, you pay the taxes, and now you have to go work for more money. And then you use the money to transact, but then the taxes take 20-30% off of what you made, and you're basically like, like spinning, spinning your wheels. You never actually catch up. You have to continue to transact in order to keep working, in order to keep making money. If you stopped buying things, okay, you were able to live on bare minimum and not pay taxes, right? Then you don't have to work, they don't have to pay taxes, and the economy crumbles. So they've made it so that if you own a property, you pay taxes on your property.. And if you go outside and you sneeze, you gotta pay money for sneezing. And they find ways to get you. You have to travel, you have to use gas. You want to live in this world, you gotta keep transacting. You gotta go work, you gotta pay taxes on the work, and it keeps going. And the business follows the same cycle. You transact, you do a transaction, right? You sell something to someone in a business. You get people to work for you, and what happens next? They create revenue for you. This might not be obvious at first, but if you look at the two systems, they're exactly the same. The employee works and pays money to the system in taxes. On the other end, the businessman, he gets the employees to work and to create revenue, make money for the business, so the business can go back and then sell more products, continue to operate to get employees to work more and make more money for them. Just like the government system creates money, right? It has the Federal Reserve and all the other systems that are used to print money. They get people to work for the money, which they created out of thin air essentially, and then they charge people taxes on the work so that people are like, oh shit, now you go back to work so I can get more of this money that was created. But it feels real because I spent time working for this money and I pay taxes not for this money, but I pay taxes on my time worked. You see, they create money out of nothing, but they make you pay taxes and give a piece of your hours worked. How convenient, right? So the money system is a lie that you tell to manipulate people into sharing their time, energy, and effort And this is what people call the matrix, or the system that we live in, okay? Much like machines, people need a system to operate on. It's called an OS, an operating system, literally. And we are the same, just like machines, right? We can make believe that we're not, we're different, we're human. We're not that different. We're simply in denial when we think we're different. Our ultimate weakness as a human is this denial that we live in thinking that we're so different than machines. While the fact is that we're nothing special. Give that a thought. It's our innate desire to have a feeling of importance, to feel important, to be special, which is our biggest fault and down flaw. That's our biggest downfall, is this desire to feel important that Dale Carnegie says so many people are missing. And if you can make people— if you can make people feel important with your product, then you are winning. And if you can make people feel important, you can manipulate them. So exposing this weakness and manipulating people into feeling special is the biggest hack and trick towards getting them to do what you want to do. Make your employee feel special, make your kids feel special, make your wife feel special, and they will do things for you. They will love you unequivocally. Rinse and repeat this process over and over, and you can make people feel special to get them to open their wallets to you, to open up their time to you and their heart. And you make them feel special by giving them attention, money, and, and they will do things for you as well. So you need to invest as much as possible to build this engine, to build this machine, this conveyor of human emotion, of time spent by employees working for you. It makes people feel special because they work for you. And you can actually follow a playbook used by by the leaders of the Babylonian Talmud, the Jews of 2,000 years ago. It's created a chosen nation, right? That made people feel special. Shafar al-safaanu wa ta'atareese. Okay, okay. So essentially, you need to invest as much time as possible to build this engine, right? And that machine will produce money for you. And you put this money then back into the people who will go and make more money for you. That you made them feel special by doing this. Yeah? This is the business system. So let's keep talking about the lie for a couple more minutes and we'll stop. So this is a lie in which we believe in, we'll sell our own mothers for. It is the flaw and weakness we possess to feel special, and we are weak and ready to be exploited, manipulated through this. We're ready, able, and willing to be exploited Because essentially, most people have the slave mentality, and a slave wants this life. They want and yearn for an existence like this. And that's okay. We may be replaced with machines at some point in the future, and we'll have this utopia, right? And we'll may end up fighting over limited resources, may face famine, depression, lack of purpose, and then start thinking taking arms and kill each other, who knows? But the idea basically is that this is the current system we live in. This is a slave DNA, and this is the way people want to be treated. This is what people desire deep, deep down. As long as this desire exists, as long as this is the case, this desire can and is repeatedly exploited, and it's the way that brands make money. It's the way that people make money in society today. Think about your brand. What does it mean to you? For me, my brand is authentic, it's personal, it's mission-driven. I say things the way I believe they are. I say things from my point of view and the way I see the world actually is. And I've spent decades learning and studying ancient history, current history, modern history, people, events, sociology, psychology to really understand What is it that makes people tick? What is it that makes people the way they are and brands the way they are? If you need a good copywriter, start off with a small competition. Use a couple of websites. You're going to need this copywriter soon after you do your analysis, soon after you run through the analysis with your psychologist and your data analyst. These are the methods. To building a global brand. I'm so glad you joined this masterclass. I've been Izzy Kiver with COE, and I will see you in my next lesson. Okay, cut.
