Ken: So we literally think through our emotions. We think through sight, we think through sound. Pick up any copywriting and really look at it and see, how well does it appeal to your senses? How well does it appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, touch? How well does it appeal to the emotional level?

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Michael: Can other thinking, when people hear *** on contest market, this isn’t something you do when you’re asleep, is it?

Ken: No. It’s really the way people think and the way people make decisions and really appealing to that. I think most people kind of think that people make decisions logically. And I think a lot of marketing, a lot of sales tries to appeal to that logic. But most people actually make decisions unconsciously. They make it at the emotional level. A lot of sales people probably even heard that term that people make the decision with emotions, then justify it with logic. So really what we’re talking about when we talk about unconscious strategies, is we’re talking about how do we literally get into, you know, how people make decisions and why they make it. How can we use those techniques to dramatically increase, you know, whatever somebody’s doing with their marketing or with their sales techniques?

Michael: Do you think that many people who are into sales and marketing understand that line?

Ken: I think some people do and I think some people don’t. A good example of that is natural born sales people, for example, some natural born sales people understand, but they understand instinctively. A good example of that is I have a brother-in-law who is the CEO, the President of this long distance company. And he basically became the President of the company basically just because he’s a really good natural born sales person. Now if you ask him what he does, he doesn’t have a clue. You know, he just does it. But you can actually take the techniques that he does and teach them to other people so that people can become just like he does.

Michael: And how can your average person who’s interested in selling a product or a service take advantage of what you’ve learned and your services, to use unconscious marketing in that way?

Ken: Well, you know, it kind of starts off by figuring where you want to start with your unconscious marketing. You know everybody does marketing or everybody does selling. And there’s a little bit of a difference between the unconscious selling aspect of it and the unconscious marketing of it. On the sales side, it’s little more specific. You can work with somebody really individually and you can literally figure out what that individual person is doing and how they’re doing it. A good example of that is years ago, I was a stock broker, and literally, I never had anybody who came in that didn’t buy something. I literally had a 98% close ratio. I went six months one time without… The only person that didn’t buy from me was what they called a shopper. A person that had come in that was just testing out whether we answered the compliance type questions. And it literally shocked me that this person didn’t buy. The only reason they didn’t, obviously, was they didn’t have the capability to buy. So from a sales point of view, you can take these techniques and get really, really specific with a person. You can tailor it to them and meet their internal ways they do stuff. And I’ll give you some examples of how we do that.

On the marketing side really what we’re doing is appealing to the emotions. Appealing to, again, the reason why people do things and making whatever you’re doing that much more effective. Whether it’s a direct mail piece, whether its advertising. Let me give you an example of that. Years and years ago… Again, part of my background is a hypno-therapist. So years ago I was running some ads on weight loss. And I took one of these techniques and just put it into the ad. And for the same ad that was going into the paper. Once we put this technique into it, my income jumped 500% that month. So just by taking some of these unconscious techniques and doing what we’re already doing, we can really change things and move things around.

Michael: How did you find out about this? How did this come to you? I was reading a little bit about your background starting as a… The thing that really interested me was you starting off as a prison guard and looking at the manipulative side of cons and ex-cons. I thought that was a very telling thing about how people are able to be, have their unconscious desires tweaked when it comes to sales.

Ken: Yeah, that’s what fascinated me. When I first got out of college I spent 7 years as a prison guard. And it just fascinated me how, here’s these people that are in prison, they’re pretty much what you would consider helpless. You know, they have no power. Literally. And yet they’re able to accomplish amazing things. I mean, they get guards to literally bring drugs in to them. And yet every guard knows that they’re not supposed to do that. The first example that I had is a guy was hired at the same time I was and about six months later I heard the guy got fired for bringing drugs into the prison. I mean it was just incredible. I thought how is that even possible. You know consciously, logically, rationally that you don’t want to bring drugs into a prison to an inmate. You know you’re going to go to jail if you do that. You know you’re going to get fired. You know your whole life’s going to get messed up. And yet, inmates are able to persuade guards to do that all the time. And then I started looking at the same techniques that inmates use are the same techniques that con-men use. I think a lot of sales people could benefit by using the same techniques. Although using them, what we would call, ethically and with integrity. But it’s just amazing that con-men are able to take people and convince them to give them their entire life savings. And yet some sales people aren’t able to convince people to actually buy something that’s in their own best interest.

Michael: So, if your average person, say, for arguments sake, for me, if I had a widget that was, maybe, I knew was the best widget but I’m not converting sales, I’m not turning it around, what or which of your techniques would be a good one for me to start with?

Ken: Well, it depends on how you’re selling that again. We’ve got kind of a difference between selling one on one or selling to a general market, which is what I would call marketing. When you sell to a… When you’re doing advertising you’re selling to just a general population. If you’re selling one on one, that’s really simple. A good example of that is you can literally elicit somebody’s, what I would call unconscious buying strategy. And once you have that unconscious buying strategy all you have to do is literally follow it, and the person will literally automatically buy. Let me give you an example of that. Yesterday I was teaching a class to a bunch of real estate agents. And the class was called “Buyers are Liars.” Because in the real estate industry that’s a real common saying among real estate agents. Because all the time they’re out trying to buy a house to somebody, and somebody will tell them, “Look this is the kind of house I want. I want a house in this price range, you know, that kind of looks like this and has a bedroom like that.” Then a month later the person turns around and buys something completely different than what they told the agent. They might have told the agent they want a one-story ranch-style house and they end up buying a two-story house. They might tell them they want it in this particular price range and they end up buying a house that’s in a completely different price range. So in the industry, real estate agents are constantly saying buyers are liars. If you actually know somebody’s unconscious buying strategy, it’s really easy to sell to them. So for example, when I was teaching this class, I asked one of the real estate agents, we just literally elicited his strategy. And most of the time when you ask somebody what do they want when it comes to like a house, they’ll just tell you, “Well I’m looking for a house that has three bedrooms. I’m looking for a house in this kind of price range.” And they’ll give you some generalistic ideas of what they want in a house. Instead of doing that, one of the questions I asked the agents, asked this particular agent since we were listening to his strategy is, “How did you decide to buy your last house?” And based on that he gave me his particular strategy. His particular strategy was it had to be the right neighborhood, the house had to have the right layout, it had to have quality materials and it had to be easy to resell. Now once I got that, that was his actual strategy, and there’s a whole technique to that. It actually takes a whole day to teach that to people. But once we got that, now I could ask him real specifics. What do you mean by “the right neighborhood?” So we could get real specific about what he was talking about when he talked about neighborhood. It meant that it had to have houses of a similar kind of nature around the same kind of price range. With him it even got more specific that the house around it had to look similar. You couldn’t’ have a tudor house next to a ranch-style house for example. They had to look very similar. The next thing to him was the layout, so again we got real specific about what did the layout mean to him. And for him it was it had to be open. So when you walked in the door you had to be able to not only see the livingroom but the dining room, etc. It had to have this wide open feel to it. And then the third thing was the quality. And so the materials that the house was made out of had to be, were really really important to him And then the fourth thing was that it had to be really easy to turn over. Now he got real specific each one of those things meant, we knew exactly what he was looking for in a house. And then all he did was, literally, I told him don’t buy this house from me, and then I turned around and described it to him. It’s the right neighborhood, it’s got the right layout, it’s got the right quality, he’s going to be able to turn around and sell it real easily when you buy it. And the guy automatically said yes. And I said, “Wait a minute. Don’t buy it.” And he said, “I can’t help it. I’m going to buy it.” And that’s because it met his unconscious strategy. And we all have these unconscious strategies. For example you have an unconscious strategy for how you buy anything. And as a salesman, if I can just elicit that strategy from you, if I can figure out how you do that, all I have to do is repeat it back to you and you’ll buy. You literally will do it unconsciously. And you’ll like the process when you do it. It will literally feel good to you. So the whole concept of resistance in sales is just that. You don’t have the person’s buying strategy and you’re not repeating it back to them in a particular order that they used. For example let’s look again at this real estate agent. The order was totally important. If I started to try and sell him a house based on the quality and then the layout and then it was in the right neighborhood, he wouldn’t buy it. It had to be presented in the exact order. So as I’m selling a house to him I have to I have to start off with, you know, look at the neighborhood, the neighborhood’s right. Look at the layout, the layout’s right. Get a feel for the quality, the quality’s right. And you’ll be able to turn around and resell it when you go to resell. When it was put in that specific order and sequence, he automatically will buy. The problem with buyer’s are liars is the real estate agents didn’t know how you elicit that strategy. How do you get real specific about the order that somebody buys something in, and the specifics about what’s important to them? You’ll notice in that, none of those things that guys said had anything to do with how many bedrooms it had, what the bathroom looked like or anything like that because those things weren’t important to him. Yet if I had probably asked him in the first place what kind of house do you want, those would probably be some of the terms he would have used to describe it. You know, I want a house with three bedrooms, I want it in this kind of a neighborhood, etc. etc. And yet those weren’t really the important things to him.

Michael: Ken what’s the process? Tell me the process that you go through to teach a sales person how to take advantage of these unconscious persuasion techniques.

Ken: Well, I think again it depends on the sales person and what they’re doing. When we’re working with real estate agents we literally go through this process and teach them how to elicit somebody’s buying strategy. I think that’s real important. We also, with sales people in general, go through and teach them what I would call a whole bunch of hypnotic languaging techniques and sales techniques that come straight out of hypnosis. Language itself is really really important when you’re in a one-on-one situation. Let me give you an example of that. The words ‘and’, ‘but’ and ‘even though’. Those three terms are tremendously important when you’re using them in a sales context. I’ll give you an example of that. If I said “It’s sunny today and it will rain tomorrow.” That kind of makes both of those equations the same. “It’s sunny today and it’s going to rain tomorrow.” In your mind you give them equal weight. If I said, though, “It’s sunny today but it will rain tomorrow.” You really just count that it’s sunny today and your mind focuses on “it’s going to rain tomorrow.” If I said “It’s sunny today even though it will rain tomorrow.” You really focus on “It’s sunny today” and you pretty much discount the fact that it’s going to rain tomorrow. So just using the distinctions between ‘and’, ‘but’, and ‘even though’ you can change the way someone’s perceiving the words you’re using. Again, objections, you never get objections when you’re meeting someone’s buying strategy. But if you did get an objection, what you can use is a whole technique that we call “we framing”. We framing is literally changing how the person is thinking about your particular product or how it applies to them. I mean there’s literally 26 different ways you can do that. So for example, I was doing a consulting agreement with Farmers’ Insurance and we went in and took the whole concept of life insurance and wrote out some scripts for them and wrote out a bunch of these “re-frames” so that no matter what a client said to the agent, the agents had a “re-frame” for it that totally changed the person’s point of view and how they were thinking about insurance. For example, when we talk about life insurance, most people put the context or the frame around it that it’s an expense. It’s money that I’m going to be shelling out every single month that I may not ever use. And if the customer’s thinking that, it’s kind of a hard sell. How do you convince somebody to buy something like that if that’s the way that they’re thinking. If they think that it’s this expense that I’m having to shell out every month. One of the ways that we did that, there was a whole bunch of ways that we did it, but I’ll give you one of the ways. One of the ways was we changed it from being an expense to the fact that this money that you’re paying out every single month is a guaranteed investment. For example, if you invest in the stock market or in mutual funds, is it a guaranteed investment? No. You know it’s going to go up, you know it’s going to go down and when you die, do you know how much your children are going to get? No, you don’t know. You kind of can guess, but you don’t know. With insurance, if you put in X number of dollars, for example if you put in $1 million, it’s a guaranteed return. I can guarantee you that when you die, your children are going to get $10 million. Doesn’t matter what the stock market does, doesn’t matter what real estate does. Doesn’t really matter. It’s a guaranteed investment. And it’s the only think that you can get that is guaranteed to pay X number of dollars return. So when people all of a sudden stated thinking about it that way, they thought “Oh. Hey this is a much better investment than putting money in my mutual fund.”

Michael: And that was because you re-framed the situation?

Ken: Exactly. We re-framed it from being an expense, to being a guaranteed investment.

Michael: Changes the terminology in their mind that they’re thinking about it.

Ken: Totally. And there’s literally, like I said, 26 different ways to do that. When we’re working with any particular product on a one-on-one basis with somebody.

Michael: How do you move that across? How do you move these hypnosis and unconscious concepts across to the larger marketing where they become more, I would say, propaganda techniques perhaps in a way.

Ken: Well, when we go to larger marketing, when we’re talking about marketing or advertising, then we concentrate less on the specifics and more on the general principles that apply. For example, when we talk about generalized marketing, we talk about some of the specific principles like emotions. For example, people again buy things for certain emotions. Let me give you some examples of emotions. Curiosity is one of the principles we often apply there. A good example of that is when I was… I used to own some Arabia’s roast beef restaurants. And when I was building those, we would never put up a sign telling what the restaurant was going to be as it was being built. We would put up a sign that said “Coming Soon.” And we’d never say what was coming soon. And even as we were building the restaurant we would never put any kind of identification that would tell what it was going to be. By the time it was in construction, the construction workers would always get kind of irritated because every single day people would drive by and ask, “What are you guys building. What’s going in here?” And literally by the time the restaurant was built the entire town was talking about it. Because people would drive passed, they wouldn’t know what it was, they’d ask their friends. So using curiosity, the emotion of that can tremendously change things.

Another emotion that can really apply on a global basis like that is fear. So how can you use the emotion of fear to tie into your particular product. For example, what I found as a stock broker was the vast majority of people actually buy based on fear. Even back in the 90s when the market was going up every single day, a lot of stock brokers thought that people were buying based on greed. They really weren’t. They were buying based on fear. And the fear was they were losing out. Everybody else was making money, and they weren’t. So you even had 70 year old ladies walking in the door and cashing out their CDs and buying mutual funds because they were afraid that they were going to lose out. So you can take the concept of fear and apply it to your particular product. How are people going to lose if they don’t buy your particular product. If they don’t have this, what are they going to lose out on. Another particular psychological principle you can use that way is what I would call contrast. You can use contrast with almost any particular product. A good example of that is, the principle itself says that whenever we compare two things, the second thing we compare to will seem much more different. So if I handed you something light, and then handed you something heavy, the heavy thing would seem much more heavier if I had handed you something light first. So for example, if I’m in a clothing store, and I’m wanting to sell you a suit, the best thing I could possibly do is show you the most expensive suit I’ve got in the entire store first, doesn’t matter what your price range is, because now the next suit I show you is going to seem much cheaper by comparison. Same thing, if you’re going to buy several items of clothing, the best thing I can do is sell you the expensive suit first because now once you’ve bought the expensive suit, buying a tie, buying a sweater to go with it, buying a belt, is going to seem like, oh, no big deal. Those are all cheap in comparison. Same thing with real estate, again, if I’m taking you out and showing you houses, I’m going to want to use that contrast principle. For example, if I have certain things in a price range I want to show you, what I’m going to want to show you is the worst, most beat up houses in that price range first, because then when I show you the good things, the good things are going to seem much better by comparison.

Michael: You’ll think you’re getting a real deal.

Ken: Exactly. So again on a direct marketing basis, you can see that people even use that principle. Use that principle if I’m going to upsell you. Really I think some direct marketers actually misuse this technique because at the end of it they’ll say you know, you can buy our gold package and you get this much more for this much extra price. Really, the best way to do that is to try and sell the most expensive thing first. Then sell the other one. The other one is going to seem so much cheaper by comparison. You can see that with Ginsu knives. They keep saying it should cost this, it should cost this, and when they finally say it’s only $19.95, people just go, “wow, that is so cheap.”

Michael: These techniques would be very wise to use at the beginning of a campaign, wouldn’t they? So you could create your advertising and marketing around these techniques and tenants first.

Ken: Oh absolutely. You want to, it doesn’t matter what you do, you want to be able to, as you’re creating a marketing campaign, start going through the different psychological principles and seeing how you can apply them to what you’re doing. For example, you know, taking the whole idea of pain or pleasure. How would you apply that to what you do? Another good example is people have an unconscious desire to belong. To be a part of a group. So for example, how would you use that in your particular business? In your marketing stuff? A good example of that is doing some consulting with a martial arts studio. One of the ways we do that is people do get a certain sense of ego and a certain sense of personal power from taking martial arts and they’ve got all kinds of other emotional reasons for doing it. But we literally tripled the student count in this particular martial arts store when I had the guy literally make a t-shirt that had the name of his studio on it that was each particular… that he literally gave out to the students that they could wear outside of the studio. Now the other thing we did for them was we used another psychological principle along with that. Which is we said, look, people again get a certain sense of pride, which again works high on the emotions there, from each rank advancement they get. So take that same principle, let’s apply it to the t-shirts. Now each time they get a rank advancement, you know it’s really nice if I’m a black belt versus, you know, a red belt, but who know that. Well, everybody else in the studio. So nobody outside knows that. I don’t get to wear my black belt when I’m going into the super market. But in this particular martial arts studio, what we did is we said, “Give them a different colored t-shirt each time they get a rank advancement.” Now, there’s a certain amount of pride to wearing that particular t-shirt out in public. You know, no, there’s exclusivity, nobody else has it. Plus every time you get a rank advancement, now you get to wear a different colored one out in public. So you tied a whole bunch of emotion into it out in public, and people would ask about it, so it’s still word of mouth, people would wear the t-shirts, people stayed much longer as students, because again, they got to go out in public and advertise the fact that they were martial arts students. So again, you can see how you can tie that emotion into something.

Michael: Ken, are you doing all personal consulting sessions, or do you have an information product? A CD or an e-book about unconscious marketing that you have available?

Ken: I don’t have any kind of particular products at the moment, we’re in the process of doing a website and in the process of doing some particular products like that, but at the moment my times really taken up just tremendously by doing all the consulting that I’m doing. So it’s a matter of trying to getting the products out while we’re doing the consulting that we’re doing. I have done a lot of products, but they’ve been real specific like just specific industries and they’re proprietary to the particular client that we’ve done. For example, when we’ve done the re-framing or the sales work. Those are real proprietary to that particular industry. You can imagine how someone else would want to get a hold of that because the techniques are just so powerful. So when we’ve gone in and done a consulting agreement, it has been proprietary to that particular person.

Michael: Did you start your career in business or in psychology? What angle did you come in from first?

Ken: I actually did kind of start in the business and went into… I became a therapist just slightly after that. So it actually was kind of both at the same time. I’ve owned several businesses, I’ve owned several restaurants. And like I’ve said, I’ve been a stock broker and a couple other things that I’ve mentioned as I’ve gone through them. But for the last 10 years I’ve also been a hypno-therapist here in the state of Washington. So I come at it from both angles. I’m still also a hypno-therapist. I still will do some individual work with clients. So I still also do that on occasions. Again in that particular category, I specialize. Which again is a technique that businesses can use, especially people in any kind of a service profession. There’s a psychological principle that says people are much more likely to go to somebody who’s considered an expert or an authority in their particular field. A good example of that is a chiropractor friend that I know. And he established himself as a niche as, in sports medicine. And the way he did that was he literally had every single one of his offices set up along a different sports theme. So you could go into one of his rooms and it was set up with water-skiing things and would have pictures of some of the world champion water-skiers on the wall and they were all signed pictures. He literally would have water-skis leaning against the wall. You could go into another room and it was set up for rodeo. So you would have pictures of some of the world champion rodeo riders that were signed. He also would have, you know, saddles in the room and, you know, ropes and stuff like that. You would go into another room and it was skiing. And you would have some of the world champion skiers pictures in there. You would have articles he had written for some ski magazine. You’d have skis. Each room was set up so it, there was another psychological *** which was just kind of this “Wow” factor. People would go in and they’d leave and they’d say, “Wow, you got to see this guys office. He’s got all these things in there.” The other thing that really set him up as an expert because in each one of these offices you went in and saw the fact that… you went into the rodeo room and you saw that the guy had been the national director for medicine for Wrangle Pro Rodeo. And you saw all the world champion cowboys that he had worked on. Well if I fall down my stairs, gee, I want the chiropractor that’s actually helping people that have been thrown off a bull. If he can help somebody that’s been thrown off a bull, I think, “Oh, he can probably help me, you know, when I hurt my back.” Same thing, he was national director for the national water ski tour and had articles and stuff on that. So now every time I go into his office, I just literally go, “Wow, this guy is just an expert on all these sports injuries.” So as I’m out mountain biking over the weekend and I, you know, twist my back, who am I going to call next week? The chiropractor that’s closest to me that’s just right down the street, or am I going to call this guy that’s really an expert on all kinds of sports injuries?

Michael: And he’s, by the choices he’s made and how he decorates his office, which is, I guess is unconscious marketing in itself, you have that idea in your mind, this guy’s the best, this is the guy I want.

Ken: Exactly. Plus, you know, there was a whole bunch of psychological principles involved. Number one is association. You associate with all these world champions. So he got association from them. He posted the articles he had written on the wall, so there’s the psychological principle that this guy’s an expert at what he does because look, he’s written articles. And in this particular country we have this perception that if you write an article or you write a book, you are an expert. You know what you’re talking about. Number three, he had the psychological principle of this “Wow” factor going on. People wanted to talk about him when they left his office. We all have the psychological principle of self-importance, so if I go out and tell a friend about this guy and they have a good experience with him, now they think more highly of me. And who am I more likely to recommend, who am I more likely to think they’re going to have a good experience with. This guy who’s treated all these world champions and has written all these articles and has been national director or the water ski tour, he was also, when the winter Olympics were over in Norway, he was the team doctor for the winter team for Norway and showed that Norway actually hired him and brought him over to the winter Olympics to work with their athletes. So there’s a lot of psychological principles there, and when he was setting up his office all we had to do was sit down and go, “Okay, look, let’s use this principle. Let’s use this principle. Let’s use this principle. And we’ll tie them all together.” And once you get them all together, now you have this huge synergy that literally creates this huge word of mouth for his particular practice. He literally doesn’t have to advertise or do anything at all now. And he’s in a very, very competitive market in Southern California, where there’s literally a chiropractor probably on every single corner.

Michael: Many of us, many people who are in business and being entrepreneurs started in the food services and the hospitality industries. Could you tell me any lessons, any valuable lessons that you learned when you were in that field?

Ken: A good example, is again, let’s take the principle that people like to belong or what I would call like “social proof.” A good example of that is a restaurant that was just down the street from here. It’s a little Mexican fast food restaurant, it’s right next door to Taco Bell. In fact, it’s actually behind Taco Bell, kind of hidden. And six months ago there was a, same thing, a little Mexican restaurant there and the guy was advertising, promoting, he literally had people out on the street dressed in costumes trying to drive business to his business behind Taco Bell. He ended up going out of business. Literally went bankrupt. A few months later there’s another Mexican restaurant in there. This particular Mexican restaurant is doing gang-buster business. I never drive past there that they don’t have, you know, cars in the parking lot. Now the most fascinating thing that I found about it was when they very first opened, you know, they put the sign up on the wall and I drove passed it and I thought, “You know, another Mexican restaurant, they’ll probably go out of business, they’re a lot like Taco Bell.” But as I drove passed I noticed, “Gee, their…” It was three o’clock in the afternoon and being in the restaurant business I kind of know that’s a lull time of the day. And I looked at Taco Bell’s parking lot and Taco Bell’s parking lot had one or two cars in it. I looked at this particular Mexican restaurant and the parking lot was literally had like eight or ten cars in it. And I was thinking, “Wow.” My initial thought was they must be pretty good. Look at all those cars in the parking lot. So I literally stopped, went in and ordered something. Now the funny thing is that once I got inside, there was nobody in there. I think the guy literally, you know, had all his friends and family park their cars in the parking lot. But there’s a psychological principle there that says if there’s tons of cars in the parking lot, it must be good. And the fact is the food was really good. It’s really fast and I’ve eaten there a dozen times since. Same principle applies. I was back in New Hampshire teaching a seminar to a group of people and didn’t know where to eat in town, and literally drove down the road. And again, I used that principle. I looked in the parking lots to see which parking lot was full of cars. When you’re in a strange town you don’t know which restaurant to eat in. So I picked the restaurant that had tons of cars in the parking lot.

There’s a real important principle which is called the storytelling. And this is a principle that I found is really effective. For example, metaphors, stories, if you think about it, have been used throughout history to convey ideas. They’re extremely powerful to convey ideas. And as a hypno-therapist, we use metaphors and stories all the time to change how people are thinking at an unconscious level. A good example of that is probably one of the best selling direct mail letters of all time was a letter that the Wall Street Journal put out. And it was basically a story of two college students that graduated. One became president of a company, the other one just became a mid-level manager. And then they made the case that the reason the one became president was because he read the Wall Street Journal. I think stories, and telling stories and telling metaphors, is a very powerful, unconscious principle. It isn’t used very much in direct marketing, and it could be used much more. I mentioned the ad that we did with weight loss at one point that got that 500% increase response, and basically that was the difference we did with the ad, is we used a story. Literally it was a testimonial. And in building that testimonial, we used a lot of these unconscious principles. So I started off in the ad and said, you know, this is my name, and it was actually a person, so they could literally look the person up in the phone book if they wanted to. And then we used the psychological principle “pain”. We listed all of the pain that you get from being over-weight. You know you can’t do this, you feel the pain of embarrassment, etc. etc. And we just built up the emotions with the pain. And then we built up the emotions of how it felt to be thin. And so people reading the story could literally step into it. Whenever people read a story, in order to interpret the story, they literally step into it and kind of apply it to themselves. So when you use testimonials, that’s kind of one of the best ways to use them. Use them in such a way, how is your reader going to step in and apply this to them. In any kind of advertising. It’s the same thing when you’re selling directly. Have a bunch of stories, or metaphors, about how your product particularly applies, that makes it really easy to explain the concept. For example, as a stock broker, it’s much easier to explain concepts using stories and metaphors than it was to, you know, explain the principle in and of itself. If I was going to explain the principle of why you wanted to use some kind of an investment that doesn’t have taxes taken out of it, I could sit there and quote the numbers all day long and show, look if you’re having to pay taxes on this you’re getting a 33% lower return and over time, it’s that much lower return. But that doesn’t appeal to people. It’s much easier to tell them a story that says, look, if you’re trying to get from here to there, and you’re car has a whole in the gas tank, how effectively are you going to get from here to there? People instantly relate to that. They realize, wait a minute, if I’m driving down the road and there’s a whole in my gas tank and gas is leaking out the whole time, that’s not very efficient. Then they say, investing where you’re taking taxes out of it every single year is just like driving down the road with a hole in your gas tank. You’re losing gas, you’re losing money, every single year. People instantly relate to that on an emotional level. So using stories and metaphors like that in your advertising and you’re marketing, or even you’re directly selling to people, is a really, really important psychological principle.

Michael: Do you think there’s been a lack of metaphors and storytelling in advertising because an underestimation of the audience, or because there’s just so much copywriting going on as there is now?

Ken: I don’t know why it is. I’m not sure why it is. I think we have a tendency to get to technical, we have a tendency to apply to the logic side when it’s not really the logic side… the logic side’s important, granted, but if you really look at some of the copywriting and some of the best marketing that’s ever been done, you can really see the stories woven into it. A good example of that, again is one of the best ads that was ever done by Rolls Royce was done, that basically started off that said, at 60 miles and hour the only sound that you’re going to hear is the sound of the clock was the headline. Then it basically then told a story of how you could be sitting in a car, you could be driving along, and people can step into that, they can feel it, they can relate to it. Where if I’m trying to sell it based on the fact of oh it’s really good quality, people just don’t step into that and relate to it as much.

Michael: Not as effective as putting them in the scene.

Ken: Exactly. A perfect… One of my favorite books of all time, for example, is a book by Jerry Spence, the famous attorney. And it’s a book called “How to Argue and Win Every Time.” And here’s a guy that’s an attorney. And I’ve done some consulting for attorneys in the past, and again, most attorneys, when they go in, they use facts of logic and all that kinds of stuff to try and impress the judge or the jurors or people like that. And I think in marketing and copywriting we all have that tendency. We want to make sure you’re convinced and we give you a lot of facts and logic. And Jerry Spence, in this book, he literally spends the whole time in the book talking about how to appeal to the emotions. How to tell a really good story. How to get somebody to step into it. He give a whole bunch of examples in the book, but one of the examples that he gives is somebody driving down the road, like a product injury case where the brakes give out on a car, and you can tell that story based on the fact that, yeah the engineers did it wrong, and you know, if the brakes were applied with this amount of pressure it causes the brakes to lock up, and here this guy got injured, and because he’s injured here’s how much his expenses are, and here’s his lifetime expenses etc. Now that’s all logical and you can get people to kind of believe that, but it’s much better to tell a story and say, to start to tell a story about here’s this guy driving down the road on a peaceful summer day, sitting in his car, relaxing, enjoying the scenery. When all of a sudden his car’s flipping wildly out of control. You feel the panic, you feel the emotion. The next thing you know, he’s in pain and he’s lying there bleeding. His children now have a father that can’t play soccer with them, that can’t go to baseball games. When you actually tell a story, people now step into it and start to relate it to themselves. So again, that’s one of my favorite books because he takes the whole concept of how attorneys work, and he applies it based on, you’re much better off telling a story. Another great example out of the book is he talked about a young attorney he was training, he says, you know this guy was writing up a legal brief to send to a judge and it was all dry and full of legalese. And he said, he literally ripped it up and said re-write it and tell a story about how, you know, the attorneys are dancing around a campfire. You know, you’ll just get a much better response, even from the judge based on that, than you will from here’s all these facts and figures.

Michael: There’s a need for creativity and stories for everybody. Isn’t there?

Ken: Well, we all think, and here’s a concept that, again, most people don’t realize, but we all think using out senses. We literally think using our senses. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. At an unconscious level, and even a conscious level, that’s how you think. And the way I stress that with clients or even customers, is, think about a baby, for example. If a baby were born and it didn’t have sight, and it didn’t smell and it couldn’t taste and it couldn’t touch, couldn’t feel. How would it literally know anything? It wouldn’t. And if it couldn’t know anything, how could it think? And we forget that people think using their senses. So whether it’s in marketing, or whether it’s in personal selling, you really have to use the senses to do that. Earlier I talked about, you know, people’s buying strategies and I talked about this real estate agent where it was neighborhood, layout, quality and ease of sale. Really, when we teach that, we get much more specific and we talk about how it’s the senses that you’re really talking about when you do that. So when the guy talked about neighborhood, we’re really talking about how it looked. So again, I’m going to use language that says, see how this neighborhood looks. And we’re going to describe it in visual terms. Then when we talked about quality, it was really about the feeling for him. So we’re going to describe that in the qualities of feeling. People literally think using their senses. And that’s why stories and metaphors are really important in marketing, and that’s why, again, analogies are really important. Or ever people’s personal buying strategies are really important. Again, sometimes when we’re eliciting a list of people’s values, we ask them, what’s important about it to them. So for example, if I want to be their real estate agent, I’m going to ask them, what’s important about a real estate agent to you. And they’re going to start to tell me what’s important about that. They’re going to start to tell me emotion responses. And once I’ve got those emotional responses, now I can come back and apply that. For example, in talking to that real estate agent, as I was eliciting his particular strategy, at one point he made a comment that what was really important for him was the ability to make a quick decision. And when I asked him about that, what was important about making a quick decision, he really told me something about himself psychologically, that it was important that people perceived him, or that he perceived himself as somebody that could make quick decisions. So now, if I’m in a sales situation, I’m going to literally use that emotional response of his. I’m going to say, gee we’ve got this particular house and I know how important it is for you to not be a waffler. I know how important it is for you to make a decision, one way or another on this right now. What’s he likelihood that he’s going to sit around for the next two weeks, or even the next two days, or even the next 24 hours and go, “I want to think about it.” He’s literally not. Because I’ve literally used his own emotions to trigger responses in him. So we literally think through our emotions. We think through sight, we think through sound. And pick up any copywriting and really look at it and see how well does it appeal to those. How well does it appeal to your senses. How well does it appeal to sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. How well does it appeal to the emotional level? I think sometimes people get the concept in general, but the application is flawed. A good example of that is there’s a psychological principle called “reciprocation.” And a lot of people are aware of this principle now. A good example is, when I was in the financial services industry, wholesalers would constantly come around to the stock brokers and give them things. Like golf balls, pens, umbrellas. I mean literally everything. When I was talking to a wholesaler one day and we were talking about this concept of reciprocation where you give somebody something, they’re much more likely to repay it. And he said, “Well, that just doesn’t work. We give people stuff all the time, and they never sell my particular mutual funds.” And that’s true. Because in that particular, people get to expect it and you’re not applying it in such a way that they feel an obligation. So we said to him, look, here’s the particular book that you guys are promoting that had to do with a particular mutual fund, in their particular case. It was the economist, Harry Dent, had written a book called “The Roaring 2000’s”, then he wrote a book called “The 2000’s Investor”. And they have a mutual fund that was designed by Harry Dent based on these priniciples. And I told him, don’t give people golf balls, give them a case of these particular books so that when somebody walks into their office and has questions about how should I invest for the future, they can give their client a book. A book has a real high perceived value. And if you’re giving a book to a client, now the client’s going to buy something from you, which mutual fund are they going to buy? Are they then going to turn around and sell somebody else’s mutual fund to this particular client? No, they’re going to sell yours. Just by doing that technique, he upped his sales literally 100% the next months by giving out books instead of golf balls.

A good example of that is, last night, again, I went to several people’s websites. And people realize, again, on websites that giving out information… And I went to a specific marketer. If I mentioned the name people would recognize it. And the opening page was, here we’re going to give you all of this information and provide it for you, and I’m sure the purpose of that is, we’re going to give you the information then you’ll buy from us. The problem is, when it comes to the internet, I already perceive the internet to be an information source. So if I go to his particular website and I get information, do I feel a perceived need to reciprocate? No. Because that’s what the internet’s all about anyway. If he didn’t give that, I’d be ticked off. I think hard to market seminars does a much better job of that, for example. In the sense that they send out, you’re sending out this CD. Now, that’s not something I expected. That’s a “Wow” factor. I’m getting a CD. I can literally put it in and play it. I’m not going to throw it away. I’m not going to lose it like a piece of paper because it has such high perceived value. And it’s not something I expected. So now I’m evoking that principle of reciprocation. Whereas just providing information on my website, I’m not invoking that same principle. Even though I think that I am. But by sending out a CD, I am invoking that principle, because people look at it and go “Wow, it’s a CD.” You know, every time I normally buy a CD, it cost me $40, $50. This guy had to spend, you know, money to mail it to me. Whereas if I’m getting information just off of a website, it doesn’t have the high perceived value. So I don’t have the need, at an unconscious level to reciprocate. Does that make sense?

Michael: That makes sense. That’s investing time in understanding your audience and understanding your market. It’s an important consciously and it’s important unconsciously.

Ken: And really understanding how to apply the psychological principle itself is everything. You can have a psychological principle like reciprocation and apply it totally wrong. Like the wholesalers do, or like people do sometimes on websites. And just by tweaking it a little bit, just by saying “Look, here’s a different way to apply it, you get a whole different response.” So the real key is not only knowing the psychological principle, but how to apply it. Because just that difference in applying it, you’re going to get phenomenally different results.

Michael: Thank you very much. Today has just been fascinating. I’m really looking forward to hearing and seeing more of your work, your products and services. I think I’m coming to the end of my questions that I had here, Ken. I think, I guess, I should also ask how can our listeners get in touch with you and perhaps find out about any seminars that you’re holding that they might be able to take advantage of?

Ken: Well, at this moment and time they can certainly call me at 858-274-7851