This is a short keynote by Richard Viguerie on marketing fundamentals, introduced by Joe Polish. Viguerie presents his “Four Horsemen of Marketing” — position, differentiation, benefit, and brand — argues for a written plan structured as Vision → Goal → Strategy → Tactics, and offers a nine-element checklist (mnemonic: TIP C B U L S S) for successful direct-mail/fundraising and list-building. He emphasizes intense study of marketing classics and the importance of interactivity and audience/list selection.
Chapters
I am absolutely delighted that this next individual not only came to the event offered to do a 10 minute talk, this is truly one of the smartest brilliant marketing minds on the planet, bar none. I mean this guy, I would put him at the level of like David Ogilvy. He is awesome. His name is Richard Viggory. He's the chairman of American Target Advertising, the original inventor of of conservative direct mail and brings a wealth of experience as these numbers prove. His 81 employees will mail this year, over 300 million postal and emails. He knows marketing, advertising and the Internet. And so I want everyone to focus on the number four because Richard Viggory's title is Viggery's Four Horsemen and a four part plan leads to success. Give it up for Mr. Richard Viggory.
Awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, Joe. Sometimes I jokingly refer to myself as 003, which means I've been active at the national level in conservative politics longer than every living conservative except two others. And 001, by the way, is Phyllis Schlafly, who is 90 years old today. So I want to keep being number three for a long time. As Joe said, I've got 80 employees. At age 80, which was last year, I literally spend 12 to 14 hours, five and a half days a week involved in marketing and my public policy activities. Love every minute of it. Thanks to see Babs. Where's Dan? Because of Babs and Dan, I enjoy almost every minute of what I do. And because they taught me early on the concept of unique ability, I focus on that. And I feel I've been retired for the last 12 or 14 years. In 1961, I get the opportunity to go to New York City to become executive director of a political youth organization founded on Bill Buckley's family estate a few months earlier. I'm a green kid from Texas. I know nothing about marketing. I, I tried to duplicate what Buckley was doing, read everything that I could about my beliefs and freedom and liberty and all that. After a year I said, I'm not going anywhere with this. Buckley is so far ahead of me, I can never catch up. So I'm going to become the best marketer I could. In those days, conservatives didn't have enough. But we had people like Buckley. We had writers, authors, we had candidates and elected officials. But we didn't have anybody that could market those beliefs and ideas and organizations and candidates. So I made a major, major study for maybe 10, 12 years just focusing in on marketing. And today at my age, I still spend two and a Half to three hours every day studying marketing, six days a week. And if you are interested in really taking your skills much, much higher, you spend two, three, four hours a day studying marketing. And within two or three or four years you'll be at the very, very top level of marketing. Because the vast majority of people, quite frankly, are amateurs in this area. There are hundreds of marketing books, but I focused on about 20 that are written by the Giants. Joe mentioned David Ogilvy, certainly that Al Rees, Jack Trout, Seth Godin, Claude Hopkins. David Ogilvy, premier advertising person of the 20th century, said no one should be allowed to have anything to do with, with advertising until they had read Claude Hopkins seven times. I don't know very many people in market who have read Claude Hopkins seven times. In fact, most of the people I know have never heard of Claude Hopkins, much less his book, Scientific Advertising. So because of all of these books that I read this tens of thousands of hours of study, I've distilled it into a number of concepts and I'll start with what Joe said, what I call Vigory's Four Horsemen of Marketing. And I am just a nut about this. It permeates everything in our organization. And you've got to get these four things right. Get them right and life is downhill with the wind to your back. Get them wrong and you're going to be going uphill with the wind in your face and you're not likely to succeed. And I'll explain each one, but quickly. They are position, differentiation, benefit and brand. Position is nothing more than a hole, hole in the marketplace. And that's what you do kind of privately. What's my hold in the marketplace? Differentiation is what you do publicly to differentiate yourself from the competition, et cetera. Out there. Benefit is obvious. What benefit do they get if I give you $25000, et cetera? Brand is a combination of those other three. It's what makes you singular, what makes you unique. In Seth Godin's words, it's what makes you a purple cow. Help you understand a little better. Maybe the Fox television, let's say 20 years ago, Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, they want to start a new television network. They don't say, well, CBS does this, we'll do this, ABC does that. You know, they, they don't care what abc, NBC, cbs, CNN did, okay? They're going to occupy a hole in the marketplace. There's a large community of right of center people who are dissatisfied with what's on television. So they rocket to instant success almost because they occupied a hole in the marketplace. Then they differentiated themselves by having people like Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Hannity, Fox and Friends for a while, Glenn Beck and others, okay, benefit is obvious. Okay? You get news and information on there, you don't get anywhere else. And the brand, again, is what makes you singular, which sets you apart from everybody else. And they have a brand, of course, that's separate from all the other TV networks out there. Then life becomes pretty simple. Once you've identified your position, your differentiation, your benefit and your brand. Once you've done that, oh, let me give you another example. 2008, there's five people running for president on Democratic ticket, Obama and Hillary. They have these four things. They've got their brand, their position, et cetera. The other three, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, they didn't. That's why when you had primaries election, they'd get a half a percent, 1%. They thought a differentiation between these other candidates was I'm smarter than the rest of them. Public doesn't accept that. They think all of you are smarter. You wouldn't be running for president. Okay, so there was no position, no differentiation, no benefit, no brand for these other three. So they disappeared. Okay, then once you have identified your four horsemen of marketing, then you have to have a written plan. And I'm just a nut about a written plan. And you know the old adage, if you don't know where you're going, any train will get you there. And it's very simple. I've got a very simple quick concept how to do this. Actually, it's not mine. 20, 25 of us used to get off together in late 70s 1980s Conservative leaders plot plan. We'd come up with a problem. How do we defeat this legislation? Pass this legislation and a young congressman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, go to the blackboard. We didn't have whiteboards in those days. And he'd write the four words on there, Vision, goal, strategy and tactics. And once we'd filled out, what's our vision? What's our goal, what's our strategy, what's our tactics? Okay, we saw a way forward. And the number one benefit of a plan is not working. The plan, that's important, but that's secondary. The number one benefit is clarity. You understand things. Maybe you thought you wanted to go over here. No, I see I need to go over here and, and more of this and less of that. It brings, it crystallizes your thoughts. And so you've got to have a written plan. Once you have identified Your hole in the marketplace, et cetera. Third concept, I've developed nine critical elements to successful marketing through postal mail. And this applies primarily for people doing fundraising like I've done for these many years. But it also should apply for anybody here doing postal mail. And there's. You don't have to get all nine of these, right, but if you get all nine of these, you are guaranteed success. Just absolutely guarantee it. And I refer to it, I just developed this last week, this concept. I've been using them for 50 plus years. But I've got to work on this name. It's tip. C, middle initial bulls, B, U, L, S, S. Okay, so bear with me here. Tip T is for technique. You've got to have a technique in successful postal mail. That can be a sweepstake, can be a survey, a free premium. I is for interactive. P is for program, project. What are you going to do with my $25, my dollar, et cetera. C, credibility. I've heard that from any number of people today, talking about, you know, I'm having trouble being credible, being believable. That is huge. You've got to deal with that. B is benefit. C is urgent. L is the most important part of all of these things here. It applies to everybody. And L is for list. Okay? You can, J. Abraham can write the world's great direct mail package, but if you send it to people in nursing home, it's not going anywhere. Okay? So you list your audience. If you're on radio, television, Internet, your audience is huge. That's everything. The S, First S is story. The second S is scarcity. We all know about. Limited number, first 100 to reply, et cetera. You build quickly. You build a brand. Not with advertising. Save your money. You build it with buzz. Once you've got a brand, then you can protect it with advertising. The list is huge. I started my list, my company, with 12,500 names. And from that, a year later, I had 100,000. A million. Now we have 13 million names and addresses of people who contribute to political campaigns. That's huge. Number one secret of the Internet is interactive. It must be interactive. Five technologies out there, Gutenberg's printing press, radio, television, Internet. You've got to realize each one of those has unique properties. What's unique about the Internet is not founding other technologies, it's interactive. The number one reason you have your share of market is your relationship with your customer. We heard about Dan Sullivan's new best friend, Amazon best buddies, Dan, you know, et cetera. And so your relationship with your customer is hugely important. And lastly, read, read, read. Study, study, study. You do that for a few years and read Focus on the Giants. Anything that Al Rees, Jack Trout, Seth Godin, David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins. Focus on those Giants. And you don't read them. You memorize them, underline them. Go back every few months and look, in 15 minutes you can go through the whole book. If you underline it. Thank you. Thank you.
