How to use controversy to create a fan-base and to sell more of your stuff.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast. This is Russell Brunson and I'm excited for today's podcast. I hope you all had an awesome weekend. I had a chance to go on a family trip down to a wedding, which was always fun. While I was driving, my thoughts were upon marketing.
I wanted to give you guys an eight hour podcast. That's how long I was in the car but I was dealing with a bunch of crazy kids and a beautiful wife, so was not able to do one but I was thinking a lot about it. I got some good topics for this week coming up. I want to go through a bunch of them.
Right now is the one that I was most excited about, and it's the topic of polarity. This is one of the keys in your marketing. If you learn how to master this, it will mean more traffic, more sales, and a lot more repeat sales and raving fans. The back story behind where this concept came from today, I got a Skype from one of my close marketing buddies who makes a lot of money but is very conservative, very neutral type personality.
He Skyped me and said, “Man, I can't believe how much drama you've been involved with in the last month.” At first, I was trying to remember, “What drama was he talking about?” Then I remembered all the drama we've been involved with in the last month. It's been really interesting.
One thing in the drama, some of you guys remember I was competing for a Ferrari which I won. I thrashed the guy who took number two, and the number two guy did not take that very happily. The last four days of the contest, he went out there and started this whole hate smear campaign against me which was kind of funny. It was like a two year old girl crying after getting beat up by a bigger kid. That's kind of what it reminded me of.
He was doing all this stuff, and there was all this controversy was caused, and there were people that were really upset at him, and people upset at me but what was interesting is the last day of the contest, I didn't really say much. He was the one out there ranting and raving, and posting stuff all over Facebook and trying to trash me, and tell everyone he was a better person than me.
We had three times the sales the last day than we had the entire prior last week combined, so it worked in our favor tremendously. In fact, I had a bunch of JV partners who were so annoyed at what he was doing, they actually went out there and were promoting, without me even asking, were promoting my bonus package just so that he wouldn't win which was kind of funny. It all kind of comes around.
Then we were in the middle of this launch of Rippln which I'm sure some of you guys have had a chance to see that. I was brought under to write the whole sales and marketing part of the company launch, help orchestrate all that stuff. It's been going amazing. We've gotten over half a million people to sign up in the first 30 days. It's been fun, but with that, there's been a lot of controversy written about it.
We had Tech Crunch, this big huge tech blog, go and write. They don't really write anti articles but they wrote a huge anti article about my video, the pre-launch video which made me proud. Then we got Salty Droid did a write-up on it, and some other guys who think they're cool wrote big write-ups about how we're scam artists, and all this stuff.
It kind of made me smile because all this fuel has just been great for our business, for our brand, for everything that we're doing. The controversy behind things has been awesome. Now, what I want to talk about today is the concept of polarity. Polarity is the opposite of neutrality. A lot of people in their marketing want to be very neutral. They don't want to offend anybody.
They are very careful not to step on anybody's toes but the problem with being neutral is when you're neutral, you're boring. Nobody listens to you. Nobody pays attention. As much fun as it is to make everybody happy, that's not the way to make money. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not in this business to make everybody happy. I'm in this business to make money.
The neutrality behind most people's marketing is what keeps them from really succeeding. It makes them irrelevant. It makes them so that people don't really talk about you. You may have some people that are interested but nobody talks about you. That's what causes your business and your brand to grow.
It was interesting, I was talking to Mike Filson about this awhile ago, and Mike said one of his biggest things he's always trying to do is figure out how can I stay relevant. He said, “You know, guys like me and him have been in this market for 10 years and so, and you look at how many people and personalities have come and gone in that time,” and he said, “most of them just aren't relevant anymore. What are we doing to stay relevant, to stay top of mind, to stay on people's radar?”
Because literally, in the internet world, if you're quiet for a week, you're pretty much gone. You've disappeared off the radar, which is a whole other story in of itself, why it's important to contact your audience more often, email at least daily. Daegan, one of my close buddies, he preaches emailing twice a day.
Staying relevant is a big thing. Back to the neutrality part of it, I was reading this thing awhile ago. This is a couple of years ago so I'm sure I don't know the stats but the concept, I remember. It was talking about Howard Stern and about people that watch his show. They did surveys.
They found the average person who liked his show listened for 35 or 40 minutes at a time, and the average person who hated his show listened for over an hour at a time. When they surveyed both audiences to find out why they listened, the reason was the same in both cases. It was, “We wanted to hear what he was going to say next.”
That's really a key here. You look at the great figureheads, you look at the people that have the big brands, just in the celebrity world. We just watched the finale of Celebrity Apprentice last night. Look at Donald Trump. When he was doing this whole campaign against Obama when he was going to run for president, this whole thing about Obama, trying to bring out his birth certificate, that for me, I don't care which side you’re on or anything like that, but it was interesting.
It got people talking and noise, and all this stuff. People hated Donald Trump for it, people loved him because of it but he caused polarity. What happens when you cause polarity is there will be a group of people who despise you and who hate you. Most people don't do that in their marketing because they're scared of that. They don't want that.
That was always really, really tough for me. It was really tough for me to see people talk bad about me. In fact, it's still hard for my employees when they see stuff like that. For me, it doesn't bother me anymore. It's been happening long enough, I get it. There are going to be people that don't like me. I'm okay with that.
The other interesting fact about polarity is when you create a group of people and make them dislike you, it also takes another group of people and makes them love you 10 times more. That's the power of polarity. When you switch from being in a neutral state where you're trying to please everybody to a polar state where you pick the things you want to do and not want to do, stuff like that, again, you get people who despise you and you'll get people who love you.
Those people who love you will spend so much more money with you because of that. They're attracted to that polarity. I look at all the people that I spend money with. I buy things in a lot of different niches. The people I buy from are always the kind of crazy people a little bit. I always joke the crazy people have the best ideas.
I always like to subscribe to what they're doing and they’re talking about. That's what I spend my money on because me and everybody, even if they won't admit it, you like the people on the fringes. You like the heretics. You like the people that are kind of pushing the envelope because it's more interesting. It's a more interesting conversation to talk about, to think about, to participate in, and people are attracted to that.
At the same time, like I said, there are going to be people who are not attracted to that but if that's happening, that's a good thing. Dan Kennedy, one of my mentors, he said, “If you haven't offended somebody by noon each day, then you're not marketing hard enough.” I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you guys but it's the key.
One thing I want to mention about polarity is there's a right and a wrong way to do this. The right way, at least the way that I subscribe to is I don't go out there trying to pick fights. I just do what I'm going to do, and then I stand behind it. For example, the whole Rippln thing, we did it and I stood behind it.
The launch for Pure Leverage that we won, we did our thing, I stood behind it but I wasn't going out there picking fights. I look at the guy who we thrashed in the contest, and I look at the way that he was trying to create polarity. I think it backfired on him. He went out there and started a hate smear campaign against me and made videos, and posted on Facebook every 30 seconds for two days about how much he hated me, and how he was going to steal my Ferrari, and all this stuff.
It was really distasteful, and maybe he got some audience from that. He probably did but all I know is that he was polar so far to the other opposite, to the other extreme, that the people in our market, our peers were so turned off by what he was doing that they started promoting my stuff without me even ever asking.
I think there's a level where you can go way too far and you outcast so many people that they don't want to become part of what you're doing. There's kind of a fine line there. With the two campaigns this month that caused all of our controversy, I wasn't doing anything really. I was just doing my thing.
Because we were doing it and we were doing it aggressively and we were doing it well, it caused people to become upset and it caused people to become huge fans. That's what I want to say about polarity. Don't go out there. You're not trying to be a thug. You're not trying to go cause fights and that kind of thing.
People can see through that. It's not the right way to do it. It's just coming out there and being yourself, not being nervous about who you are, and just doing it. It was interesting, two days ago, I was in our garage. I rented a power washer and power washed our whole driveway. It was super fun. If anyone hasn't done that, it's a fun project.
I power washed the whole driveway. Then I found these boxes that got wet. In some of the boxes, there was this tube. I pulled the tube out. I remember seeing when I was a kid. I pulled it out and there was a picture of my ninth grade graduating class inside of it. I opened it up and saw all of my friends, all these people that meant so much to me.
I looked at it, and there wasn't a single person in that picture that I've kept in contact with over the last, I guess ninth grade was probably 13 or 14 years ago now. There wasn't a single person that I kept in contact with. I remember sitting there looking. I remember being the shy, awkward ninth grader who was so concerned about what everybody else in that picture thought.
It's all I could think about, “What if they don't like me? What if they make fun of me? What if whatever?” Because of that, I didn't thrive in that environment. I was an awkward, shy teenager. For me, I didn't start thriving until I started wrestling in high school. That's when I found my thing. I just stopped caring about everybody else and focused on that thing.
I think that so many of us in our business, we're like that shy, awkward ninth grader in the picture who wants everybody to like them and because of that, they stop bringing their own personality into the game. They're so concerned about nobody making fun of them that they're just neutral and just sitting there.
Because of that, nobody knows who they are. I was so neutral and I was so boring in ninth grade, that I guarantee you if I showed that picture to everyone in that graduating class, most of them would have no idea who I was because I was that shy, awkward, neutral person who didn't want to offend or talk about anybody.
You look at the high school graduation, it was different because I had picked my thing. Wrestling was my thing. I focused on that, and people knew who I was because of that. It's the same way in your business, you guys. Quit worrying about what the haters, what the people who don't like you are thinking.
Quit worrying about everything else. Just be yourself. Who are you at your core? Just go out there and do that. Whatever it is that gets you excited in the morning, go and do that kind of stuff. The way you talk to your audience, listen, this podcast was me talking in my car. It makes me laugh because I did a news segment the other day on Huffington Post.
It was really cool. Our PR person afterwards messaged me and said, “Russell, you really need to learn how to clean up your ums and your ahs.” I thought, “You know what? Yeah, I could do that but then I’d be losing who I am.” I want to connect with you guys at a personal level because that's where you're coming to me.
You're coming to me with personal issues. You want your business to grow. I could give you the textbook answer or I could give you what actually works. That's my goal is to be real with you guys. I want you guys to do the same thing, to be real with yourself and not be scared of polarity. It is a good thing that's going to help you win this game.
Step off your neutral line. Quit trying to please everybody, and just be yourself. If you do that, like I said, you'll find a group of people that don't like you and they're going to be mean to you, and there are going to be hate blogs about you. Who knows how extreme it will get.
The more aggressive you get, the more exciting you are, the more people will come out of the wood works to write hate blogs about you. It makes me laugh nowadays when I see the ones that people write about me but at the same time, because of that polarity, just by the nature of how polar opposites work, while one group will move away from you, another bigger, larger group that's more passionate and more willing to spend money will move towards you. That is the key, you guys.
That is the key to this whole attraction marketing game. That's what I had for you guys today. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm at the office now. I have a fun day. I'm going to try to ruffle some feathers, do some fun marketing, and hopefully it makes people angry and in the interim, makes some people really, really happy. If I can do that, I've succeeded.
If you can do that, you've succeeded as well. Thanks you guys. Again, if you had any good experiences with this podcast so far, please go to iTunes.com, go to the comment section, leave your comments, leave your feedback. I love it. Right now, it's my most exciting thing everyday to go look at the comments. Please leave comments, love to hear from you guys, and we'll talk to you all soon.