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Russell Brunson
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Dan Kennedy
Your other question was, you know, about implementation. And so your. Your. Your. Your first thing, your big idea, your radical thing, right? You have to be able to put that across in a very big way. And if you want, all through history. So, like, we take. Most people now don't even remember, but we sort of take the Atkins products, weight loss products for granted. They're just there, benign people like Rob Lowe, who's never had a weight problem in his entire frigging life, right? Is doing the commercials. Nobody really remembers Dr. Actitz, but that whole thing started. Dr. Actitz started the anti carb keto. The food pyramid is wrong. The government food pyramid is crap and anti carb. And you can eat all steak. You want steak three times a day if you want to. And the original Atkins diet was a radical big idea attacked by pretty much the entire medical establishment, which made it. Made it. And that happens a lot, right? You. You can't. And you can't have a small villain. Whatever you pitch yourself against has to be big and important. You know, Superman, they lasted about three months when they created Superman, with him, lifted cars above his head, getting Lois Lane, she fell off a cliff. But now what? Right? And so hence the creation of the super Villa. Because you really don't need a superhero if you don't have super villains, right? And that's the same for all of us who want to take this position. And in the second thing about it is you need to find a way to be theatrical with it. You know, it needs to make itself visible. So in whatever market it is that you are cracking this way, you've got to get into all the media. You have got to maybe be in the physical locations. You have maybe got to get people in a room. And you've got to be able to do something really dramatic in the way that you present this.
Russell Brunson
Do you remember Sci Tangent? I don't know if you remember Big Mike that was in. He was my mastermind with Glaze with Bill back in the day. He sold hydroponics stuff.
Dan Kennedy
Yeah, I do remember him.
Russell Brunson
And he got kicked out of the trade show. They wouldn't let him come. So the night before the trade show, he threw the biggest industry party outside. And everybody came and then he gave everybody these T shirts of this big bowl, drinking his product and then peeing out the competitor's product. And he gave them all T shirts. And he said, we're gonna have runners around handing out thousand dollar bills to people who are wearing this during the event. So the next three days, every attendee of the event had that T shirt running around and just took over the entire industry. And they all hated him. But he ended up just taking the whole Thing.
Dan Kennedy
Look, you only get to do that stunt once. So you want to get it right when you do it because you only get to do that stunt once. But see where they have, where that association has gathered all these people, right? They're there because it's the only association there is for them. So they're there, they're being told what they're being told. Some number of them are hearing about hydroponics, some number of them are questioning quietly, privately what they're being told. And when that erupts, everything changes. Just the big, the big number changes things. Because the same dynamic that made people go along with A makes them go along with B, right? The, the Trump rallies in and of themselves persuade some people because there's exit interviews. They know it. People go, it's like people used to listen to Limbaugh. They go predetermined to hate it. But first of all, then they see all these people, well, how can all these people be crazy, right? We're going to stay in. MSNBC told us that these people were all lunatics. But geez, there's a lot of lunatics here, you know, and then they start to talk to them and some of them are rashers, right? And some of them, they're like, he's a doctor, he's a lawyer, Martha, how can this be? And then they actually listen. Now if there was only 50 people there, that dynamic doesn't hamper. If that guy only got 20 or 30 people running around wearing a shirts, it's over, right? He gets nowhere. So if you are going to stunt, you need to stunt big. The stealing the audience in front of the, the meeting, the association meeting for myself and for clients. I've done that a lot. And again, you only get away with it once they ban you from the hotel so the hotel won't take you and they threaten with your membership. But so they had NSA had their convention of Phoenix the year I hijacked the because we didn't wear Phoenix at the time. And so I had the event re promoted and I had three airport shuttle buses I rented that had signage on them for NSA attendees, free transportation. So the buses picked people up at the airport and brought them to the seminar. And I had a big billboard at the airport, you know, Dan Kennedy and NSA welcome you to Phoenix. And yeah, there were a lot of people kind of mad, you know, and I mean it was like, well, can you show me in the bylaws where it says somebody can't rent a billboard to welcome people to their city? I don't understand, you know, which makes them madder because. But they're almost asking for it in many of these markets, you know, because they are enforced in many cases, dumb or self serving things from the top down. And so there's these restless natives that are a great, great opportunity.
Russell Brunson
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Dan Kennedy
So you have to be, you have to be willing to be disliked, right? And not to be, at least for a while, welcomed into the club, maybe never. So you have to be very results oriented. But you, you want the opposition because you want the visible, vocal opposition because that's the, that's the most effective way to attract attention to yourself is to be opposed visibly and vocally. Right. I always said about 2016, if Trump had run unopposed, he probably would have lost. Well, him getting elected the first time was ridiculous. I mean, it was just ridiculous. He's got like four people on his campaign staff. They hardly spend any money. He's never run for anything. It's just ludicrous. They're running against the Bush dynasty. They're, you know, I mean, it's sort of like Sunday's game. I mean you can't even imagine how the Chiefs could play the way they played. You could imagine him losing, but like that and you're looking at 2016. I said if he had run out of post, he probably wouldn't have got elected. Right? The opposition made it possible. Hillary made it possible. If they had had a halfway decent candidate that, you know, wasn't instantly disliked by 80% of the people who met them, there's no way he would have won that election. Now this time around was different. But opposition is the quickest way to attract attention to yourself. There's a historic thing that's interesting to find and see. It predates many of you, but it was a big phenomenon in its time, very controversial. It was a multi level that was later outlawed as a pyramid scheme. The laws actually didn't exist. They were written and applied retroactively to put it out of business. A guy by the name of Glenn Turner. The two main companies were a cosmetic company, Coscot, and a motivational company, Dare to Be Great. And this predates the Internet, so there's no cheap media except manual labor existent in the world. And Glenn's an interesting person in himself because he drove this with spoken word, with his own presentations and grew up poor. So as a kid he had a real bad hair, lip and three botched operations. So he used to be able to do it really well. So when he speaks, you know, and, and, and, and he does the three hour seminar like that and it takes you 10, 15 minutes to, you know, be able to get it. And in 36 months they put 620, 630,000 people in at $5,000 a piece. And the entire multilevel industry immediately hated him because he had figured out front end loading. So all the other companies, you buy your $30 kit, you start to a business, you only make money when somebody does something. Well, you in, in the tour system you made money on the 5000. Now he actually got it from an earlier, from William Patrick, who, you know, has a Napoleon Hill connection in holiday magic, but that's neither here nor there. So it was sort of like what we did with prepay and chiropractic. All of a sudden you could recruit four people and make $12,000. And in the regular MLM system you recruit four people and you made, you know, 20 bucks. So, so the difference was profound, which they hated of course, you know. And so he discovered inventory loading. You ought to be in the business, you should have inventory and you should buy $5,000 worth of inventory to start. Because any other business you got to have inventory. Why wouldn't you have it in this bar? Right. And it changed the whole dynamic. He was so controversial and attacked media, the MLM industry. And legally they eventually won. But in the interim. And so I'm sure you can find it on YouTube. There's an old. They made their own fake documentary. They were way ahead of their time because it's really good. The production values are spectacular, but it's really good. And it's called Turner, Turner, Turner. I'll bet you find it on YouTube probably. And it's well worth watching because he took all the, all the attacks brought more attention to him. He always said there's no telling how much Amway and Shackley and Mary Kay attacking me, how many people had put in. Because some of their people who were questioning, you know, I'm doing all these meetings and I'm not getting anywhere. And I'm not like when we came to town and did a meeting, they came to see the devil. They came to see what this horrible person and this horrible thing was all about. And three hours later they were signed up, right. The opposition drove, God knows, a third of his attendance. Maybe I saw it the first time that way, you know, everybody in my upline was telling everybody every three minutes, you know, don't go look at this. You know, this guy's horrible and he's, you know, and then they're holding a big meeting at a hotel and I'll go look, right? I didn't join, but I sat there and I say, I don't see what's wrong with this business model. Yeah, if I opened a store, I'd have to have inventory. What's wrong with this? So the Turner, Turner, Turner movie is really taking all the criticism and all the opposition and selling with it. So he published a book, the book about him, which you, I'll bet you get in at Amazon that they published and made it look like a real book. Hired an old brook endowed Orlando Sentinel reporter who had won a Pulitzer Prize at one time to write the book. It's called Con man or Saint. So he, you know, leaned into this and every way that he could. And in any place I've played the game. There's no better way to get attention than the opposition screaming about you all the time. Because there's curiosity. Early in my time in nsa, pretty famous speaker. Come on, name him, people would know him. And he's not dead yet. Well, you know, those of my era, if you, if you live a long Life, you outlive all your enemies, all your peers and most of your friends. But he called, got to me at the office very early, three or four months after I had made the big splash and started to make noise. And he said of the diet, if you ever talk about it, but famous, and I'm not making any money. I'm just barely one step ahead of all the costs and I can't figure it out. And I want to come and see you, but you have to promise not to tell anybody that I paid to come talk to you ever.
Russell Brunson
To this day.
Dan Kennedy
And I said, you know, okay. I said I should charge a double, but, you know, okay, I get it, right? It's like he's arriving with the raincoat over his head, you know, coming in the back door and. But that's how high the opposition was in his immediate peer group, you know, and I had him as client for two or three years and never, never testimonial, never, you know, it was a big and secret, which I found funny. But the opposition is, you know, is helpful if you, if you respond to it properly.
Russell Brunson
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Dan Kennedy
The in finance, you know Fisher Investments, which is the biggest direct response advertiser in financial services and they run more TV than anybody. We had Candidate Info Summit. I don't remember when, but their most successful campaigns were early and his position was. It still is, I think it's, I don't know, it's too rigid. But his position is against annuities. And the most successful campaign was Ken looking at the camera and saying we don't sell Annuities. We would never sell annuities. I'll burn in hell before we ever sell an annuity. And you shouldn't own them. And if you do own them, we should get you out of them. And you need our free guide of, what's this? You know. And he said that the big annuity companies all filed ethics objections against him in the association. They went to the TV stations and screamed bloody murder. We don't want you running these ads. And they ran a campaign, the ad the big Wall street firms told these stations not to run. I had an ad refused. I kind of did this in the infomercial association, too. And I had an ad refused by then, nima, the National Infomercial Marketing association, which doesn't exist anymore in their big convention program because it said, what you're being told is, you know, horseshit. And so we printed it up with the ad, you know, Nema refused to run and didn't want you to see. And we paid. We went to the. The housekeeping room in the hotel, found the room where all the housekeepers hang their uniforms and have their lockers, and we gave each one of them 300 hours to leave these in all the rooms. And pretty much everybody there was. I mean, we probably reached a few people that weren't, you know, there for the convention, but pretty much everybody was there for the convention. And, I mean, the screaming went on for a year, you know, afterwards. But again, I said, well, I don't see in the bylaws anything that says, I can't put this thing in rooms. You should have thought of that when you wrote up the bylaws. So they actually foolishly turned this into an open feud. Now, from their standpoint, the correct thing would have been to ignore it. They got up on stage and talked about how this thing was wrong and they had refused the ad. And all that did was bring people to me. That's all did, Right, because the curiosity, especially of the restless natives, goes through the roof, right? Gee, maybe there's something there. Maybe this guy's onto something, right? Yeah, because he's so opposed and they're so afraid of him. And so that's the way you play.
Russell Brunson
This game with digital marketing nowadays. Would you do similar? Like people are talking about things, running ads, showing the stuff?
Dan Kennedy
Sure. You got pros and cons to that right there. Your opposition has an easier time of making a lot of noise because there's. Theoretically, there's almost no barrier, you know, to entry so they can set up. For a while. It went away There was a.
Russell Brunson
God.
Dan Kennedy
What was it? It was Dan Kennedy is a thief. Dan kennedyisathief.com really, there's a website, it was up for about a year and it was three or four ex members and a guy I threw out of a seminar and I do mean throughout. And not asked to leave. I mean throughout. And they like made a project out of this and spent a lot of time on it, I guess, and chat, you know, all that. Well, obviously you couldn't do that pre Internet because probably no media would take that ad and they'd have to spend money and, you know, so that's maybe the bad side of it, but the good side of it is you have access to all that media too. Right. And so once again, when there's a lot of opposition to you in a and there are restless natives and you are findable. So now the online thing, they got to be able to find you when their curiosity is aroused, any place they might go. So you got to have an Amazon presence, you got to have a YouTube presence, you got to have a TikTok presence. If you're going to play this game, you got to be everywhere. Trump's kid and one partner ran this part of the campaign for Trump this time, and they really knew what the hell they were doing and they were everywhere. And so he nearly carried 18 to 34. I think the Democrats held onto it by four points, which is unheard of for a Republican, although he's not really a Republican, but everywhere. That's why he's now got this TikTok dilemma. Yeah, right. Is it helped get him elected and he's very reluctant to, you know, to turn it off for obvious reasons. But he was everywhere. And so somebody hears a lot of bad stuff and they decide, yeah, but I'm going to take a look. And whatever their impulse is, you want to be there to accommodate it. So if their impulse is to go to Amazon, I'll see if this guy's got a book and maybe I'll buy a book. So it's why you will never see probably another intellectual property infomercial, a Tony Robbins type show, because the bleed off to everything else is too great. The owner of the show can't control the business.
Russell Brunson
There's a phone buying it.
Dan Kennedy
Yeah, well, they're going to go look. If you're selling a $399 box, they're going to go look to see what's on Amazon for $12, they're going to go see what's on YouTube for free. So the bleed's too great. But this is what you can capitalize on when there's a lot of noise about you and it almost doesn't matter whether the noise is good or bad. And in some cases it's okay if the noise is bad because that stirs up the curiosity of the restless maid of and when the restless native finds a truth teller and a man on a white horse, he is again a much more rabid customer than is an ordinary customer. And that means all sorts of things. It has to do with conversion, percentages, ascension, amount of money spent, amount of money spent in a certain period of time. Their lust and their action levels are much higher than just an ordinary customer being brought through a system because a lot of their pent up frustration is suddenly going away. It has a remedy which it did not have before, and that remedy is you.
Russell Brunson
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The Russell Brunson Show: Episode 17 – The Secret to Theatrical Marketing: Day with Dan Kennedy (3 of 4)
Release Date: March 12, 2025
In Episode 17 of The Russell Brunson Show, host Russell Brunson continues his insightful conversation with renowned marketing expert Dan Kennedy. This episode marks the third part of Russell's in-depth interview series from Funnel Hacking Live 10, focusing on "The Secret to Theatrical Marketing." Building upon previous discussions, Russell and Dan delve deeper into advanced marketing strategies that disrupt conventional norms and captivate audiences.
Dan Kennedy emphasizes the critical role of positioning in marketing. He explains that establishing a strong, radical idea is essential for standing out in a crowded marketplace.
Dan Kennedy [03:50]: "Your first thing, your big idea, your radical thing, right? You have to be able to put that across in a very big way."
Kennedy illustrates this by referencing the original Atkins diet, which challenged the prevailing food pyramid and anti-carb sentiments of the time. This bold positioning against established norms helped the Atkins brand gain significant traction despite initial resistance.
The discussion transitions to the concept of theatrical marketing—using dramatic and memorable tactics to capture attention. Dan underscores the necessity of making your marketing efforts highly visible and engaging.
Dan Kennedy [03:50]: "You need to find a way to be theatrical with it. You know, it needs to make itself visible."
Kennedy shares the story of Big Mike from the hydroponics industry, who, after being banned from a trade show, threw a massive industry party. He distributed T-shirts featuring his product overtaking competitors’, ensuring his presence was felt despite official restrictions.
A significant portion of the conversation revolves around turning opposition into a marketing advantage. Dan highlights that visible and vocal opposition can generate curiosity and attract attention to your brand.
Dan Kennedy [16:19]: "You have to be willing to be disliked... The opposition is the quickest way to attract attention to yourself."
He recounts historical examples, such as Glenn Turner in the MLM industry, who faced fierce backlash but leveraged the controversy to build his brand. By embracing the opposition, Turner was able to create a narrative that drew more attention and curiosity towards his offerings.
Dan Kennedy provides several case studies to illustrate his points:
Atkins Diet: Positioned against the medical establishment, the Atkins diet's radical approach to low-carb living made it a standout success despite initial skepticism.
Glenn Turner: In the multi-level marketing sector, Turner's innovative strategies and controversial stance garnered massive attention, leading to substantial recruitment and sales despite industry pushback.
Dan Kennedy [13:17]: "He leaned into this and published a book called Con Man or Saint, which turned all the criticism into a sales opportunity."
Russell and Dan discuss the challenges and opportunities of implementing theatrical marketing strategies in today's digital landscape. Dan notes that while opposition can easily make noise online, it also provides opportunities to be found across multiple platforms.
Dan Kennedy [34:35]: "If there's a lot of opposition to you and there are restless natives, you are findable. So you got to be everywhere."
He advises maintaining a strong online presence on platforms like Amazon, YouTube, and TikTok to ensure that when curiosity is piqued, potential customers can easily access and engage with your content.
Dan shares anecdotes about executing bold marketing stunts that leave a lasting impression:
Dan Kennedy [07:14]: "I hijacked their convention by renting shuttle buses and putting up billboards, which created a stir and drew attention to my seminars."
Such tactics, though controversial, effectively generated buzz and positioned his brand as a formidable alternative to established associations.
While opposition can attract attention, Dan cautions that not all noise is beneficial. The key is to manage how your brand responds to both positive and negative attention.
Dan Kennedy [38:50]: "When there's a lot of opposition to you, you capitalize on the curiosity of the restless natives by being findable across all platforms."
He explains that negative noise can be a double-edged sword but, when handled correctly, it can lead to increased interest and higher conversion rates.
Russell and Dan wrap up the episode by reinforcing the importance of bold, theatrical marketing strategies that challenge the status quo. By positioning your brand against significant opposition and executing dramatic marketing stunts, you can create a compelling narrative that attracts and retains a loyal customer base.
Russell Brunson [40:25]: "If you want a great funnel, then you're going to need to use ClickFunnels... because you're one funnel away from changing the world."
This episode provides entrepreneurs and marketers with actionable insights into creating disruptive marketing strategies that go beyond conventional methods, inspired by the legendary teachings of Dan Kennedy.