The 7 Advantages of Fascination with Sally Hogshead - Genius Network Episode #8

Foreign. Welcome to the Genius Network show. In this episode you'll hear from Genius Network member Sally Hogshead about the seven advantages of fascination, how to charge more for selling the same thing, and much more. Sally is a multiple New York Times best selling author, professional speaker, Chief Executive officer of Fascinate, Inc. And a former advertising executive. That helps you understand how to stand out by understanding how to how the world sees you. If you would like access to the full interview, the full feature video presentation and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 8 that's geniusnetwork.com 8.

I'm going to show you today how you can charge up to four times more for selling exactly the same thing. I did an experiment in which I gave women two pairs of sunglasses. They were exactly the same. The only difference was that one pair had a Chanel logo. And I asked women how much they'd be willing to pay for these two pairs of sunglasses. The pair with the Chanel logo, they were willing to pay four times more for it even though the utility of the sunglasses was exactly the same. So here's the takeaway for marketing. People were paying for the logo even though they were buying the glasses. In other words, marketing can improve your price points by up to four times. So today I'm going to show you some examples of the hidden patterns that I found in studying 600,000 people. It's based on a decade of world class branding experience with some of the top brands. But before we talk about valuable brands that attract exactly the right customer, let's talk about having a major branding disadvantage. What's my last name? Hogshead. Hogshead. Can you imagine what it was like growing up with the last name Hogshead? I was literally tortured on the playground for my legal last name. And I remember going up to my mother, Mrs. Hogshead, and saying, why couldn't we just have a normal last name name like Smith or Jones? And she said something I'll never forget. She said, it's the thing about our name that makes it different, that will one day make you love it. And this is what I found in marketing. It's the thing about a brand or a company or a person that makes them different, that makes people truly love them and be willing to pay more money for them. This is especially true in a crowded, competitive environment. And I'm going to give you an example of a competitive environment. This is a photograph that was taken of my sister, Nancy Hogshead when I was seven years old. When I was seven she was the number one ranked swimmer in the world in two events. She had two Guinness Book world records when I was seven. So I want you to imagine, here I am, a seven year old, sort of the challenger brand, the underdog in a competitive marketplace. And my sister went on to win three gold medals and a silver in the Olympics the same year my brother graduated from Harvard. So I want you to imagine in my seven year old mind trying to differentiate myself and trying to find what's my competitive advantage in this marketplace. And so I remember thinking to myself, well, I can't do athletics, I can't do academics, those trees have been peed on. What am I going to do? So I did what you do, and you're not good at athletics or academics. And I went into marketing. And from the very beginning, from the very beginning, I knew that my competitive advantage was not in following what other people did, but in developing new ways of helping people differentiate and standing out. And so I decided that I was going to write a tagline for myself. And I want you to remember, over the course of my life, when I check into a hotel, they literally say, no, seriously, what's your real last name? Or when I make a reservation at a restaurant, they cancel it because they think that it's a joke. The maitre d comes and thinks it's been a prank. And so my father said to me, you know, the name Hogshead really isn't that bad. A hogshead is a barrel that holds 62 gallons. It's a wooden cask that was used to ship rum from the old world to the new world. So when I wrote my tagline, here's what I wrote. A hogshead is a barrel that holds 62 gallons. So what's your last name, smartass? Now this is what I call strategic polarization. There are certain clients that wouldn't want to work with me because I have the word smartass in my tagline. And that's probably a really good fit for me to know at the beginning they don't want to work with me because I have smartass in my tagline. We're probably not a very good fit for anything. So when you think about your own marketing and your own communication, figure out who you're not talking to so that you can more accurately identify who you do want to talk to. Because in today's marketplace, different is better than better. It's not enough to be the best. A lot of people are the best. But when you're trying to compete on being better than your Competition, you're just incrementally trying to outdo them at their own game. So if you offer 0.2% better returns, well, you know what? Next year somebody else is going to come into the marketplace and they're going to outdo you. If you're not better than you're going to compete on price. And if you compete on price, then there's no loyalty. And if there's no loyalty, then you're never going to be able to really scale and replicate and build your brand. So instead of trying to be better, I recommend that you try to be different, to tap into what are those qualities, not only about your company, but about yourself, that make you inimitable, in other words, that nobody else can copy because it's so easy for you as an entrepreneur to infuse them constantly. Now, over the course of the last 10 years, as I've studied over half a million people, we've looked at the high performers. We've gone inside companies like AT&T, GE, Cisco, Qualcomm, Intel, Intuit, and we've looked at the high performers. What do they do differently? We found that there are specific communication patterns among the entrepreneurs and the team members that are able to get the best possible results and get that 400 return. And the key is, oh, I'll tell you in just a minute. Fascination is an intense focus. When you fascinate your customer or your client or your team, they're only thinking about you. They're not thinking about your competition. They're not distracted. They're not checking their iPhone. They're not thinking about their next meeting or what they're going to feed their kids for dinner. They're only thinking about you. And neurologically, in a state of fascination, the brain opens up. Fascination is a state of intense focus. This is what it looks like in an mri. When the brain is in a state of fascination, it opens up neurologically. It looks as though the brain is falling in love. So when you fascinate a customer or a client, it's almost like they're falling in love with you. They're not being cynical, they're not being skeptical. They're not thinking about. No, they're not thinking about how they can defer the decision. They're not overcome by inertia. They're ready to take action. They're more likely to listen to you, remember you, and put in place what you say. And so when you fascinate your customer, you have a tremendous competitive advantage. The problem is that today, although the average attention span used to be 20 minutes long. The BBC reports it may only be nine seconds long. The average attention span, nine seconds. So you're in a pitch or you're in a meeting with your team, or you're listening to me at the front of the room. Every nine seconds, your brain scans to see if it should focus on something else. In other words, attention span has become the most precious resource. When you introduce yourself to somebody, if you don't make a strong first impression, you've actually damaged your odds of communicating with them again. In other words, you have disincentivized them from communicating with you. The next time.

You've been listening to the special presentation with Sally Hogshead. We will return shortly. If you would like access to the full interview, the full feature video presentation, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 8 that's geniusnetwork.com 8. Let's get back to the presentation.

So the next time you send an email, the next time you raise your hand to speak in a meeting, think to yourself, am I adding value or am I taking up space? Because if you fail to fascinate them, then the next time they're going to be less likely to turn and listen to you or open your email or take your call. When you fascinate somebody, you become most worthy of their attention, their most precious resource, their attention span. They want to give it to you instead of giving it to everybody else. And this is key, not only in marketing, but in having effective meetings, building your company, building a career and a life that you love. As an entrepreneur, you're either adding value or you're taking up space. And there are certain ways in which you create new value that feels for you like a wellspring. So let me show you what it is that high performers do differently. Yesterday, the most important thing for you to know was how you see the world. Raise your hand if you've ever done a test like Myers Briggs Strengthsfinder Disc Colby. These are great tests, and they show us how you see the world. They're built on psychology, so they're looking from your eyes out. I created the first assessment that takes that and turns it around and shows the opposite. It shows how the world sees you. It's not built on psychology. So I'm not looking out of your eyes at the other person. I'm showing you the kind of impression and cues that you consciously or unconsciously send to other people. So in the same way that a brand can measure how the world sees the brand, or that a company can Measure through market research how the customer sees the company. I'm showing you how the world sees you. And this is a really uncomfortable perspective for a lot of people. We're not used to thinking about how the world sees us. We're used to thinking that we can show up however we want. So the problem is that people try to be all things to all people. And instead of focusing in and honing on those key benefits that they naturally offer, they water down their benefits. And just like a brand that tries to be all things to all people, it's hard to get traction. For the first half of my career, I was a copywriter in advertising. When I was 24, I was the most award winning copywriter in the country. When I was 27, I opened up my first advertising agency with Target and Remy Martin as my clients. My work still hangs in the Smithsonian Museum of American History. And what I found as a copywriter and creative director for these brands is that when I could find the perfect words to identify a brand, that brand became more valuable, more admired, more loved. So the key was for me to unlock the positioning by finding the absolute perfect words that were going to inspire action and fascination in the consumer. And I found that what I really loved most about creating advertising messages for brands was being able to hone in on that core essential difference and the key of creating a great brand. There are two steps, little secret here. First step is how is the brand different? And the second step is, what does the brand do best? Once you figure out how a brand is different and what the brand does best, it becomes really easy to create a positioning that the brand can just naturally live into over and over and over again. And the same is true for you. Once you can identify how you are different and what you do best, it's easy to have a wellspring as an entrepreneur because you can hone in on those areas of core focus. Now, I told you earlier about how women are willing to pay four times more for a pair of sunglasses with a Chanel logo, even though it's the exact same as a pair that doesn't have a Chanel logo. This phenomenon happens all the time in everyday life. Raise your hand if you buy Morton Salt. We're paying 187% more for Morton salt than regular salt, even though chemically it's the exact same salt. It's literally a commodity. So people are buying salt, but what they're really paying for is the Morton's connection to the brand. We see this happening all over the time with products and we're familiar with that in marketing, but the reality is that the same is true for you. If you can identify what has people see you as being different and better than your competition, it becomes easier for you to charge more. So in all of marketing, what I learned from this decade as a creative director is you have a choice. You can either have the biggest budget or you can be the most fascinating. If you have the biggest budget, you can just pound the message in over and over again with television commercials. But if you don't have the biggest budget, then you need to be more competitive and you need to find something that's not only going to interest your customer, not just add value, but truly fascinate them. It's better to avoid putting yourself in front of somebody than to waste their time with weak communication. The same is true in your marketing. If you're not differentiating yourself, you might as well donate that money to a charity. Every time you communicate, you're either adding value or taking up space. So today, I'm going to show you how to add value, how to create value. Every time you communicate in those first nine seconds of the attention span, the key is stand out or don't bother. Every time you create a marketing message, that message needs to stand out or else it's going to compete and fail. When I began researching brands in my last book about 10 years ago, I found that there are seven different ways that brands create marketing messages. I created a structure for developing marketing messages for any type of company or organization or person. And I found that each one of them creates a different type of fascination. It works differently in the the brain. Five years ago, when my book came out, I decided that just simply as a launch technique, I was going to create a personality assessment. The assessment outdid the book. Within just a few months, we had 30,000 people do the assessment. That was for free. So I realized, wow, maybe it's not about writing about brands. Maybe it's about helping people figure out what makes them fascinating. And now we've had 600,000 people do the assessment all over the world, with research translated into 14 languages. So there are seven types of communication, and you naturally use two of these. One of them is your primary advantage. Your primary advantage is when you are in the flow, you are in the groove. You feel confident you're more likely to persuade the person on the other side of the table. Your secondary advantage is the way in which you are second most likely to fascinate and impress that person. You also have a dormant advantage. The dormant advantage Is exhausting. And when you have to use your dormant advantage, it's just. It feels like quicksand. So for example, if you have a primary power advantage, you're very comfortable in a position of being a leader who makes decisions for you. That feels like a wellspring. You could do it all day long. You feel confident in these situations. If you have a primary passion advantage like me, you're a relationship builder, so you have a competitive advantage. In situations in which you're going to go in and immediately create a connection with other people. Passion personalities like to come in. They like to talk a little bit before they do business, tend to like spreadsheets. And when we do training with companies, we separate people according to different groups. We put the passion people together and the innovation people and the trust people. And the passion personalities are always really excited. High five. Woo. Love that. Awesome. While they're brainstorming together. And then by the end, they've never actually come up with an idea. So the problem is that people entrepreneurs tend to hire people like them. In other words, they're replicating themselves instead of optimizing themselves. So as you're watching this list, I want you to be thinking, which one of these seven is your quicksand? In other words, it's your dormant advantage, the one you're least likely to use, because that is the person that you most need to hire. A mystique advantage is almost like the opposite of a passion advantage. Mystique personalities like to stand back. They like to watch, they like to listen and observe. They want to take all the data and then find the right answer. So what happens in the workplace is the passion personality bounces in. Hi, how are you doing? How's your weekend? And the mystique personality doesn't really want to engage. They don't want to talk. They just want to get the job done for them. This all feels a little bit like much. So it's kind of like the passion personality is saying, why don't you tell me you love me anymore? And the mystique personality is saying, I told you I loved you last year. And if that changes, I'll let you know. So we see that there are these dynamics all throughout all of our communication that we're not even aware of, but are actually extremely predictable. Prestige personalities are overachievers with higher standards. They like to push to the next level. Alert personalities are precise detail managers. This group scores incredibly low in alert, which is common among very successful entrepreneurs, because they tend to not be detail focused, not as concerned about Implementation, innovation. These are untraditional problem solvers. They like to find a whole range of solutions. They love to be able to brainstorm. They don't think, 1, 2, 3, 4. They like to go 1, 2, 4. And finally, trust personalities are very stable, very reliable. When we measure large groups of accountants or family physicians or mortgage brokers, they score very high in trust because their communication is naturally going to be extremely consistent and they're going to do the same thing over and over again. So if you open up the book, you will see that there's a matrix, and the matrix shows you how the world sees you. There are seven different advantages here. You have a primary advantage and a secondary advantage. Your primary advantage, remember, is the way in which you're most likely to create value for other people. When you combine the primary with the secondary, that gives you the archetype. The archetype is a specific look at how you're most likely to be successful. In other words, if you're going to go into a pitch or a meeting or presentation or a speech or a difficult conversation, if there's one way that you can focus your communication, this is going to be the way that you are most likely to have a successful outcome. These are the adjectives which I'm going to get into in a minute. The adjectives are your positioning in a crowded marketplace. And when you use these adjectives in your copywriting, in your LinkedIn bio, in your self description, your introduction, you're more likely to be seen as confident and authentic by the other person. This is your fascination advantage. Your archetype is your fascination advantage. It's the way in which your personality is most likely to create value for your clients, for your customers, and for other people. So what I've done is, is in the same way that I used to do market research and positioning for brands, now I'm doing the same thing for you to find out what is your positioning in a crowded marketplace? It's almost like imagine you had a focus group of 100,000 people measure who you are at your best, and then I give you the words to describe that. There are 42 different archetypes. Each one of them has a slightly different style of communication. But when you understand which archetype you are, it becomes really easy for you to take the copy I've already written and to use it in your communication.

Thanks for listening to the highlights from a recent presentation with Sally Hogshead on Genius Network. If you would like access to the full interview, the full feature video presentation, and the special resources for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 8 that's geniusnetwork.com 8. Don't miss out on more insights, strategies and wisdom like this on geniusnetwork.com subscribe to Genius Network today by visiting geniusnetwork. Com. Subscribe. That's geniusnetwork. Com. Subscribe.