Two-time World Heavyweight Champion, George Forman was the celebrity speaker at this years Info-SUMMIT in Atlanta. He took the stage yesterday, wowing the audience with his stories of dedication and hard work ethic (and not to mention his humor and charm).
After his session, I had the pleasure of conducting a short interview with him. I thought you might like to see for yourself.
Historically, free standing inserts in daily newspapers tended to advertise discount tax preparation services, furniture sales, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Payless Shoes, a chiropractor’s office, an auto repair shop.
Recently, in a daily newspaper, I found a slick, full-color, 4-page insert for a ‘private lakefront community’ with a Jack Nicklaus golf course, homesites starting at $200,000.00, boat slips available.
It wasn’t all that long ago, incidentally, that the symbol of affluence was a two car household. Now it’s a two house household. On a flight to Orlando, every person in first class owned both a Cleveland home and a Florida home.
An article in the New York Times (4/21/05) asked the question “Who Pays $600.00 For Jeans?”. Upon reading, I discovered, a lot of people do!
In fact, the Secret Circus Clothing Company have produced a pair of jeans (seen in the picture at the top of this post) which have 15 diamonds attached to the back pockets sold for $1,000,000.
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There is a tendency amongst authors writing about “success” as well as entrepreneurs, small business owners and CEO’s telling their success stories to be warm ‘n fuzzy and present classically popular ideas palatable to the largest number of people. To say that nice guys win. That having a positive attitude and drawing little smiley faces above the i’s you dot will not only endear you to people but actually attract prosperity.
In truth, there is little evidence of this. None of it is harmful in moderation, but it conceals fundamental truth about ultra-high achievers: they tend to be tough, intolerant, hard-driving, demanding, competitive people often viewed as difficult, mean and ruthless by others. And they tend to have a profound sense of superiority usually viewed as arrogance. It sometimes gets them in trouble, but it is also an essential factor in their success.
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“OK, now that I have your attention, let me talk to you about financial planning.”
This is an ad gambit as old as the hills. Call it whatever you like: lying, bait ‘n switch, trickery.
You yell out one thing to grab attention, then switch to an entirely different subject once you have eyes and ears. Sometimes it works. More often it backfires because the people instantly feel cheated or conned, and either exit as quickly as they entered or are loathe to trust you.
When it does work, the switch needs to be to something pretty darned interesting itself, and leads to such an appealing offer that people with distrust still in their mouth respond anyway. So, in the above example, it would at least need to go from the big SEX headline to “Slashing Your Tax Bill By At Least 33% (Guaranteed)Is Even Better Than Sex! – that’s what my top clients say.”
THE QUESTION FOR YOU is: is “suckering ‘em in” a strategy you ought to use? There’s no easy answer.
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Celebrity P-O-W-E-R!
I first learned about the power of celebrity from Dan, but I really didn’t fully embrace it until I saw it with my own eyes. Dan has often used his client, Guthy-Renker, as an example of how they have become the ‘top dog’ in the infomercial world by using famous celebrities such as Victoria Principal, Jessica Simpson, and Sean John (a.k.a. P-Diddy).
Why is a celebrity so powerful? Think about it. What happens when you’re up late at night and you’re pushing the remote control button while watching TV and all of a sudden you arrive at a show where you see Jessica Simpson (or some other celebrity you recognize)? What do you do? It makes you stop channel surfing and say to yourself…what’s Jessica doing on at 2 AM in the morning?
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Have you ever had a brief encounter with somebody famous? Almost everybody has at least once in their life. How did you feel? Excited? But maybe also a bit tongue-tied and nervous?
To at least some degree, you too can and should be creating this same kind of feeling in the minds of your customers and prospects. How? By getting yourself and your business written-up in newspapers, magazines and trade publications as well as featured on radio/TV shows. You don’t have to be a household name to easily cultivate more celebrity status in your industry or niche. Once your prospect sees you as a THE expert, their skeptical faces will turn into bright smiles. They’ll feel excited to meet you maybe even nervous and that’s a good thing.
Publicity establishes you in the minds of your customers and prospects as somebody special. They feel like they know you. They trust you. Consequently, they buy from you. Fame is power.
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