Creating New Intellectual Capital

Welcome to Capability Amplifier, the show for business owners and entrepreneurs who want high performance upgrades for their brains, bodies and bank accounts. Welcome to another episode of Capability Amplifier. This is Mike Koenigs. I'm here today with Dan Sullivan. And today we are talking about creating brand new intellectual capital. And that's about creating tools, products and services to elevate your brand and business. Something that Dan and I absolutely love to do. And what we're going to reveal is, are some of the strategies that we've been using to rapidly create our own content, our own products. And you also go behind the scenes and hear more about what Dan's been doing at Strategic Coach. He just changed his model of rapid content creation for driving the quarterly events. And I think you're going to find this one particularly interesting because it also ties into who you want to be a hero to. So, as usual, thank you, sir. Nice to be here with you, Mike.

Really great. So, you know, I started off, you know, I kind of have some, you know, besides growing up on a farm. My first foray into the business world after university was as a copywriter with bbdo, big global advertising agency in their Toronto, Canada office. And I've always been very, very attracted to packaging and branding ever since I was a kid, you know, and I have to tell you a story. It tells you little bit about my background and that is. So I grew up with six siblings in a farmhouse and I wasn't the in the fields boy. So there were four other siblings, my three older brothers and my sister. And they were out field hands and I was the houseboy. And one afternoon my mom was away, my dad and my siblings were out in the field and my brothers had model airplanes. They did. And you know the particular type of paint that you put on model airplanes, that's highly toxic. Know it's.

Yes, I remember sniffing that when I was 7, 9 years old and wondering what high meant. Yes, I do remember that. No, the SDS model glue in the orange cap, that was the stuff when they finally realized they shouldn't do that to children.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I do remember those days.

Well, I was more prone to gasoline fumes than glue.

Me too. Yeah.

Gasoline feels almost nutritional, the kind of paint you did that doesn't feel nutritional. But the thing about it was I felt that there was something lacking in our household and had to do with drawers and doors and closet doors, and that is that the door and the actual drawer did not name the person who was in that room, did not name the person whose belongings were in that drawer. So I used the silver paint. I found out it's easier to put on than take off. So I had a brush and, you know, I was careful not to drop it on the floor. And. And throughout the entire afternoon, I named every drawer and I named every door in the house. You know, kitchen, laundry, basement door. And I just felt that there was a lack of definition in the house that had to be remedied. And, you know, I had the time, you know, I had the means, I had the motivation.

So anyway, I did that. And that was a rough few months after that because I had to take it off, but didn't matter, Putting it on, taking it off. I was permanently a brand guy.

That's really funny. I was just going to ask how it was like to walk and sit.

After that episode, but yep, it was pretty cool. You know, I knew a losing proposition and I was not rebellious in the face of utter defeat.

Yeah. Well, the other thing I wanted to ask is, did you give them clever names or was it just straight?

No, no, no, straight. You know, this is truth in advertising.

Well, I think one of going to do is we're going to go down the path of brand new innovative capital as well and talk about how we suck people in and give them a sense of feeling as though they're getting a result and a benefit even before they use, read or consume what it is we're creating. Because I think that's just as important as anything else here when we talk about creating intellectual capital.

Yeah. So, Mike, and you've helped really hundreds and hundreds of individuals through one of them is publishing books, you know, videos, podcasts, everything else. So I think your experience is broader here because I've sort of confined my branding just to the concepts and tools in Strategic Coach. But you've gone much further afield and many different uses of branding. But technically, for someone who doesn't know what branding is, and I always say that if you have a brand, there's a packaging that naturally comes with the brand. So can you just kind of, from your perspective, which goes back a long way in a lot of different, very, very high profile branding mediums, you've really had a lot of experience with this.

All right, well, I'm going to tell you that my definition of a brand, because there's all kinds of traditional definitions, I think of them as an emotional connection or a feeling someone has to a product, a company, an individual or a service. And the more feelings they experience that are positive, the more likely they are to want to buy that and have A continual emotional attachment. So it's sort of like an embedded trigger inside them. So Coca Cola, for example, means a lot of things to a lot of people. I think that's one of the greatest brands of all time. It's longevity. So hearing it, there's a branded sound, there's a branded smell, for sure. There's definitely a very memorable feeling of what that sugary substance, that bubbly substance feels like. And then anyone who ever grew up going to movies and experiencing movies and drinking Coca Cola and eating popcorn and then stacking on the experience of what the emotion of the movie had also gets combined. So it enters into a very deep and complex experience of if you involve all the senses. So I've thought about it an awful lot through that lens. And of course, having built and sold a number of companies and my first business was an agency, I didn't really understand the depth until we did a project once. And I'm going to go down a little rabbit hole here just to illustrate, I think the big value. And that was my company. It was Digital Cafe. We got hired by General Mills to write and create a video game that wound up being shipped in 6 million boxes of Chex Quest cereal. And what we did is we made this video game and the whole idea is it had to be a non violent game that had mass appeal. And they put this game in their boxes of cereal and it sold 220 times more product than normal. And I remember the agency head and I were talking about that and at the time I didn't understand the depth that Chex Quest and all of General Mills products, once they were built and branded, they were literally like printing money, like Cheerios, for example. It's just a bean counters game once you create an established brand. And it also explains why if you ever create a product and it starts generating sales, especially food and beverage. When a food and beverage company buys you, you might need to be at a point where you're generating 10 or 20 or $30 million worth of sales. But a company will come in and they could potentially pay you 10 or 20 times your earnings. That is your gross revenues, not your profit. Because they know that if a Coca Cola or a PepsiCo or any one of the big branding companies buys your product, they can press a button, distribute it worldwide instantly. They've got all the distribution, manufacturing, packaging and the negotiating at their fingertips. I had heard multiple times by different people that when a company buys a product, they think anything less than a billion is a rounding error to them. So if we present that as why that's important to us as business owners. I think once people feel like they get something when they look at your logo or visit an event or whatever your product or service experience is, and they can feel that and know it's going to be a recurring experience, they could potentially be customers for life. Having the wherewithal to think through that lens is an incredible, powerful gift when you start developing products over and over again. So I way went deep on that, but I'm super passionate about it.

Well, here's two things that will really make it real, I think, for our listeners, Mike, and that's where a brand got to you. Like somebody else's brand really spoke to you. But the other thing where you've been very successful in creating a brand and it really spoke to a lot of other people. So people can get both sides of it, both on the receiving end and on the delivering end, because I have some examples. And, you know, I thought that this would be an interesting discussion to make it really practical.

That sounds awesome. So I think one of the things that I'd like to do for our listeners is talk a little bit about our process of content, product creation, branding, and also talk a little bit about getting inspired, gathering and creating ideas and aggregating them. Because one of the things that we were talking about before we started rolling is the fact that right now you're committed to producing a book, a quarter for each event. And the book actually is the curriculum or the course material. And the furthest I ever took that is I got to the point several years ago where when I decided to create a new product, the first thing I did is I'd start by creating an offer, and then I would create a presentation to sell that offer. And then I'd turn that performance or that content, along with some other useful educational material, into a book. And then I'd turn the promise of the book and the order form into the product itself. So I would very frequently prototype the product as I was creating the book. So the book became the playbook for the delivery and the branding and the big promise, and it effectively became the primary sales vehicle, or at least the blueprint for it. And in a way, that's very much what you've been doing. And in our most recent quarter we spent together here was who do youo Want to Be a Hero to, which was the book. So do you have any commentary or thoughts on that before we dive into our own processes for creating, delivering, and the promise of the brand and the product and service?

Yeah, well, the thing that I find is that brands actually grow like living creatures, and you want to make sure the right genes are there at the beginning. So, you know, I mean, because anything you do that doesn't ring true at the beginning will be multiplied through your branding activities, you know.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Giving birth to ugly babies has consequences.

I've created a lot of deformities in my life, you know, but the big thing, and this isn't me, but I want to show how this works in the real world, that in 1984, one of the most famous television commercials ever was the Apple 1984 commercial, which was done at the Super bowl in 1984. It was a take on George Orwell's 1984 about totalitarian mind control. And Apple positioned Microsoft as Big Brother and IBM. Those were the two, and IBM and Microsoft. And there was a rebel who ran in and had a hammer and threw the hammer and it destroyed the screen with Big Brother.

And.

And Apple positioned itself as the personal computer platform and machines for the creative class on the planet. And it just took hold there. They positioned themselves. And Steve Jobs was big about this, and also Tim Cook, who did this, that you have a relationship with Apple and your personal information is never sold to anyone. And we never use it for any reason other than what the agreement was. And they established that in the 1984s. And it's come back really big time right now because of the problems of privacy. And there's a billboard. I saw it driving from our place in Toronto to our office in more or less the center of downtown Toronto. And it's a black billboard and it's got just a white headline with the Apple logo. And it says, we're in the business of staying out of yours iPhone privacy. The thing is that it's so perfectly timed. Right to the center of an issue. Right to the center of an issue. I said, this is one of the finest strategically placed message, branding message that differentiates what he's saying. There's everybody else in the world who are manipulating your information, misusing your information. And we've always protected your privacy. And my feeling is that technology requires two things now. It has to be useful, and it has to multiply you and make you more capable, but it has to protect and respect your privacy. And we're drawing a line in the sand now. We want both. We want both. You know, lots of people say, well, privacy is a done thing. You know, it's gone. Get used to it. And Apple's saying, well, we never got used to it and we're the only ones who still stick to this. And I think it has enormous emotional impact. So that's just an example of branding.

Well, I want to plus that just a little bit because one of the things that I do with my advisory clients is we get together, we spend a day together and it's an intentional exercise, it's a little bit woo woo. But the outcome and goal I have is I want to establish an emotional connection. So I say what is the primary emotion and feeling you want to walk away with? And I've discovered that over time the two things that people want more than anything is clarity and confidence or clarity, confidence and courage. Those are the big three. And then I wind up spending a lot of time talking about their values and what they want in their new vision of their reinvention of themselves or whatever. And ultimately the big word that I use is to create a category of one. And that's really what you just talked about right now, which is if you create a category of one where you disqualify everyone else, you are in a unbelievable position of power. We could spend lots of times talking about how politicians who do not know how to define and create a category one for themselves are absolutely screwed. And the same is true with being a devalued race to the bottom, which is, that's the other phrase I've been using is my goal and objective is to create a race to the top for you all the time, which is creating a premium brand, a premium experience. Because many is not a good answer these days, big corporations. And it requires huge money to be a brand of many and play the race to the bottom game. And if you don't have an unlimited source of funds, you've got to figure out what your category one is. And in Apple's case, they had historical precedent which is they haven't sold out privacy wise. And they absolutely can point fingers at and just dig into everybody else, the bones of everyone else. I mean, the core of Google is to be evil. Even though they used to preach don't be evil.

Yeah. And Facebook wants to really break everything that comes across. I mean that was their model.

They are paying the price right now, which is a perfect opportunity for a massive reinvention in the social sphere and to make new promises, for example, to incorporate blockchain. And there's all kinds of conversations these days about a new social platform that basically says, look, we're actually going to let advertisers pay you to put their message in front of you. And we're going to split the deal and maybe do an App Store deal where it's a 70 split, for example, or whatever it may happen to be. Or pay in bitcoin, pay in cryptocurrency that is exchangeable somewhere. There's so many interesting things that can come out of this. It's very, very fascinating.

But one of the things you brought up here and you framed the podcast this time, that it's a deep, emotional experience that a brand has. It's really interesting, you know, how Disney has done so well with this over the years. You know, deep emotional connection with people have. And people don't know this, but Mickey Mouse is the most highly paid entertainer of all time. You know, Michael Jackson can't hold the candle to Mickey Mouse. And people say, well, you don't see Mickey Mouse cartoons anymore. But I said, go to Disney World. You'll see his picture all over the place. You know.

Yeah, I'll stack that a little bit further by saying, I'm going to make sure this is in our show notes. But there is an article in. It's on a website called Cartoon Brew and they display every company that Disney owns. And when you look at it, it is unimaginably giant from ESPN and Hulu and they're into everything, which to me, when I look at branding and capital right now, it's my opinion, and we're going to go into this in another episode, but I am absolutely certain that incorporating entertainment in experiential communities and movement is the future of products and branding. Period. End of story. When we look at where we've evolved to in the dematerialization of just about everything and the virtualization of just about everything right now, meaning in a very short period of time between what's going on with augmented reality and virtual reality and also what's happening with deep fakes, we simply won't be able to determine what is real and what is not real in a close period of time, I believe maybe not this election, but the next election, the amount of crazy stuff that can happen. And what does that mean for branding, for example, where you can emulate just about anything, including reality, but that where it comes back to branding is the immense amount of content and experiences and feelings and emotions we're going to be able to present to a viewer or a listener so quickly every button's going to be pushed and the concept of branding and creating a category is going to become more and more important and valuable. So I know that went down a big, long, deep tunnel, rabbit hole But I am deeply fascinated by this right now.

Well, here's the thing. So, two things I've noticed. One is just a personal experiment for the past year, which actually ended yesterday. It was 365 days yesterday. I have gone without watching television for a full year since I was 10 years old, except for three second halves of football games. And I give myself a pass on that.

Now, is that American football games or European football games?

No, proper football, that's played with your hands, you know, like.

And anyway, but the whole point was there was no intention of actually doing this project. It's just that it was summertime here in Toronto and it's a short summer, you know, it's cold a lot of time of the year. And so Babs and I, instead of watching television, we have a great patio. And, you know, we ate out and, you know, we had our Kindles and we were reading books and we were chatting and we got kind of into a groove with this during the summer months. And we came back and I said, I like this thing of just eating and reading and talking and then just going to bed and not get kind of all charged up by something. And on average we got about 45 minutes more sleep. But not jazzed by the electronic signals or your response emotionally. And I found that it was really pleasant. But the big thing is that I've gone much more reading in my daily life and much more listening over the thing. And I was just going to ask you a question. On Sunday, I had a Facebook live with a man by the name of Kerry Oberbrunner who is in the 10 times program. But he takes books and makes them audible. He makes them audible. And as a result of about five hours of my time over the last two months, each of my quarterly books is now going to go to 39,000 audible platforms around the world. And as a matter of fact, we went live on Sunday. And my favorite bookstore in the world is Waterstones on Piccadilly in London. And this morning, up pops My Plan for Living 156 on the website on Waterstones website, you know, so that's one of the platforms to do it. But within about a two or three month period, it'll be on 39,000 different platforms.

And.

And there are subscription fees that come back from this. And he usually gets 20% for an author. And I said, no, no, you're doing all the work. At least 50%. You know, 50%, she'll get 50%. But the thing was, he said, you know, there's a constant increase of the number of listeners to readers. He said, when I started about three or four years ago, it was four to one. Now it's five to one. But he says, I think it's accelerating. And first of all, it's a little bit more adaptable to listen, because to read you have to be 100% concentrated. But with listene, if you're not doing real heavy mental work or creative work, you can listen to things in the background. But here's something I'm going to bring up with the fakery that you talked about with video. And my sense is that most of the faking is intensely video faking. And I'm wondering if people are retreating back to voice because they feel that they have a greater sense of real or not real dealing with voice than they do with vision. That's just an idea that thought to me that we're actually saying we're going to go back to an inner defense, the outer defenses have fallen, and we're going to go back. And I'm just wondering that the difficulty of faking human voice may be of a magnitude greater than faking visual.

Well, here's what I'm going to tell you. There is a new tool. They called it Voco from Adobe. And this technology allowed you to essentially seed this tool so you'd have it listen to a bunch of audio, and then you can type in words, and it assembles your voice in any format. You can cut, copy, paste, and create someone's dialogue. So it still is a little bit rough, but about within the next couple of months, it'll be so good that Adobe has promised that they are going to watermark the audio so it's detectable. But the bottom line is audio, and your voice will be, and already is very forgeable, just like what deep fakes can do.

No, I'm not saying people are going to be successful in this, you know, and actually resisting, but I'm just wondering if it's a defense response on a lot of people to fall back on a sense that they feel gives them greater perception and gives them greater control over what's coming in.

Yeah, I think there's an old saying, I used to quote it all the time about you recall, you know, remember 10% of what you read, 20 or 30% of what you hear, and 40, 50% of what you see, and then 60, 70% of what you see here and read. I know that historically, audiobook readers are more loyal. They consume more than readers do. And we also know that the consumption rate of audio podcasts is Significantly higher than video podcasts because of the commitment required. So when you look at commitment and convenience, which I think are the two key things that roll this all back down to even branding as well, is the commitment and convenience factor for listening to an audiobook is significantly lower than reading or having to watch. And it's also more intimate because I think something gets lost in the visual. So, you know, if we were going to kind of bring this around to what's this all about, I would absolutely say, you know, if there was a regret I had, it's not creating audiobooks of all my books. And moving forward, every book I'll ever create, I'm always going to do an audio version of it, along with commentary and a workbook version of the audiobook as well.

Yeah. So here's my insight at the end of our time period here for this. I think this is just the first of a series of podcasts here, because I think what we've gotten into is fascinating to me, and I think it'll be fascinating to our audience, but there's so much other things that we can do with this. So I would not want to cut off right here. And I'd like to go on to our next podcast where we talk about how we each approach our actual packaging of branding. And actually, you know, what we're trying to achieve. And who are we trying to achieve it for? Because I have a podcast with my podcast manager, Gord Vickman. Gord came up with two really, really great lines. Well, he came up with one great line. I came up, and he says, make sure before you start a podcast that you actually have something to say.

Yes.

And the second thing I said, don't talk to anyone unless you love them.

Oh, wow. What do you mean by that? I'm really curious.

Well, you love the audience. You really mean well for the audience. So you have something to say, but you mean it really well for the audience. So we're not vocal terrorists here. We're not trying to pillage and burn and everything like that. We're really trying to create things that amplify people's capabilities. That's the whole intent. And I think we both have some really interesting things to say, because I think we've been in the business even before we knew this. We've been, each of us, the majority of our careers, we've been in the business to try to amplify other people's capabilities, and we want them to actually benefit enormously from what we're saying. So I think we have a lot to say, but we mean well for our audience who's listening.

Yes, I completely agree. And you know, it's interesting just since we've begun this product, the podcast in general, every episode, I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about our audience. Obviously we get in contact with them. And when I'm at Coach events or when I'm at Genius Network or other events, first of all, I'm always happy to hear people walk up and say, I listened to XYZ and here's how it affected me. And the other thing that has been really interesting is I know for a fact that Strategic Coach has seen a good number of enrollments, people who've listened and come in and said, yeah, I joined Coach because of this. Or I've had people and this is what's been happening to me. I'm very expensive when I work with people and I work as an advisor. What I have been finding is someone who meets me once and then listens to four episodes of the podcast in 20 to 40 minutes, they say yes to working together. They're absolutely convinced that they should be working together. So one of the things that I believe very strongly is, and we've known this for a while, that podcasting has definitely come of age and email deliverability is at a hideous low. Social media, although, yes, it's still popular. I just read recently that the level of consumption and trust in influencer content, meaning Instagram and Facebook and stuff, has just sunk at an absolutely notorious rate recently. You know, and I've publicly said it, I hate social media. I mean, I pay someone to do it for me because I find it to be a soul sucking menace and a waste of time in general. And it's necessary, it is necessary to build and grow a brand there. But I haven't found it to be satisfying or fun or engaging on any level. I much prefer this. And I like people who take the time to engage with us, for example, through this, which is, I think a good break point before we come back with part two and we get into our how formulas. And that is one of the things that we talked about at the end of our last episode is we said, first of all, one of the best things that you can do is head over to Capability Amplifier and leave us a message. So any kind of commentary, praise, if you take issue with our perspective, leave that too. And also, if and when you go over to itunes and leave us a review and comment, go back over to Capability Amplifier, leave us a message. Because what we're doing with every episode Is we're giving away books, Strategic Coach books. I'm also giving away to a lucky winner, a version of one of my products, Reinvention Masterclass, which is all about reinventing yourself, your business, and creating a vision for yourself you can monetize. And all you gotta do is spread the word and spread the love. So I think that's a good place to go. And the reason I did that is to first of all prove to you that this is the most fantastic way to communicate, build and grow an audience of people who love a conversation. And it is incredibly intimate. So there we go. I rolled both into one place there, Dan. But is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with at the end of this episode?

Well, you know, we've had our company Mike for 30 years, so we're 30 years with the Strategic Coach program. And in all those 30 years, we've tried different forms of marketing. Marketing comes in a lot of different varieties and advertising. I'm an old copywriter with bbdo, and the thing I've noticed, I would say that the drawing of interest to us and the commitment that we feel from people out in the marketplace and the reinforcing of people who are in Strategic Coach, the impact is 10 to 1 from our podcasts over any other thing that we've done over the last 30 years. The podcasts are a category of one, as you put it, in terms of impact and establishing what people feel is a relationship with someone that they feel they trust.

It's uncanny. And that really comes down to getting clear, first of all, on who you want to be a hero to, picking your ideal audience and being able to speak in a language and a message sequence that they're used to. And it's funny, people self select very, very rapidly. So it's my favorite form of intimate communication, other than, of course, one on one, pressing the flesh.

Yes.

Well, let's do this. We will leave you our listener. And first of all, we absolutely appreciate the fact that you're here listening to the two of us, and we want to continue the conversation. So what you can expect to hear in the next episode in part two of the Branding and Creating Intellectual Capital is Dan and I are going to deep dive into the how we do it now that we've established philosophically why we do what we do and what we think about when we create and for you, think through the depth of the connection in the intimacy you want to create through, whether it's your brand, your logo, your experience, or whatever it is that you deliver in your product and your service. So with that, this is officially the end of Capability Amplifier. As usual. Thanks for being here Dan. Always a pleasure to co create with you.

Thank you.

Mike, will you head over to itunes right now to rate the Capability Amplifier? Show every rating and review helps spread the message and create more empowered entrepreneurs like you. And if you've already done that, please share this episode with a friend who you know can benefit from Capability Amplifier. And if you have any questions or suggestions, head over to capabilityamplifier. Com. There you can leave us an audio message and Dan and I listen to every single one of them. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you soon.