Making Them Believe: The 21 Principles and Lost Secrets of Dr. J. R. Brinnkley-Style Marketing

by Dan S. Kennedy

Brinkley’s product was the transplanting of goat testicles into the male sack and the revolutionary (and documented via testimonials) results that had occurred in his male patients … due to his surgical techniques and skill. In effect, Brinkley offered the fountain of youth, and was not shy about saying so. The operation may have been bogus, despite the copious testimonials. But if you deeply analyze what Dr. Brinkley was really selling, it wasn’t surgery, and it wasn’t even the promised physical effects of the surgery. John Brinkley was giving men self-confidence. A great many businesses have been built on the same deliverable. The Dale Carnegie empire was built by giving men c...

We have already touched on this subject briefly and now as we begin to really hone in on the marketing strategies and principles that enabled John R. Brinkley to become a magnet for paying customers, it’s time to list the core ingredients of the Brinkley marketing message blueprint, as applied to the male population: Are you feeling inadequate? Are you insecure? Are you worried about this? Do you feel as if you’re now unattractive to your wife? Are you miserable about your inability? These are the questions John Brinkley frequently raised in his advertising, radio broadcasts and speeches. By raising such questions, he undermined men’s confidence. If it was already lagging, this made it worse. It’s the “Agitate” step in Dan Kennedy’s Problem+Agitat...

Amongst the many ‘lost secrets’ of Brinkley marketing, we can see that the posing of questions that raise and reinforce self-doubt and personal anxiety can be more powerful than the making of assertions and affirmative statements. Some of the greatest classic mail-order/direct-response advertisements of all time-share this approach. Worthy of your research*, for example, are legendary ads and direct-mail campaigns bearing these headlines: • Do You Make These Mistakes In English? • Does Your Child Ever Embarrass You? • Are You Just A Hair Shade Away From Looking Younger And Prettier? • How Many Of These Common Gardening Mistakes Are Causing You To Work Harder Than You Really Have To? • Have You Ever Felt Lonely—Even With Other People Around? … Or asked yourself: “Is this all there is for me?” • Are You Ashamed Of The Smells In Your House? The arousal and agitation of feelings of inadequacy, being looked down by others, failing to measure up—whether in the bedroom, bank account or backyard gardening—is a very reliable strategy from which John Brinkley extracted a fortune. You can too. *Relevant reference books: How To Write A Good Advertisement by Schwab; Twenty Ads That Shook The World/Twitchell; The Greatest Direct-Mail Sales Letters Of All Time/Hodgson

People think about their businesses in ways that sabotage rather than elevate. How you think about yourself and your business can be imprisoning or liberating, small or big, trivial or important or profoundly important, ordinary or exceptional, competitive or unique, innovative or repetitive, focused on your deliverables or focused on their meaning, you choose how you think. Those choices ultimately control how others think about you. This is no small thing!

The thing to be thinking about is: how can I help my target customers get what they want? Not: how the devil can I sell what I’ve got? But, most business owners spend most waking moments thinking about selling their stuff, not identifying, understanding and fulfilling wants. Most take a merchandising approach, not a psychological approach.

HIGH VALUE QUSETION: how can you best help your target customers get what they want—and be perceived as doing so?… NOT: how can I sell my stuff?

PRINCIPLE #6 ELEVATE YOURSELF WITH MEDIA PRINCIPLE #7 MULTIPLY YOURSELF WITH MEDIA

SELL TO PROPERLY PREPARED PROSPECTS

FROM THE BRINKLEY BLUEPRINT: A thorough, thought-out process for preparing the prospect to buy—before a selling situation occurs or buying decision is asked for.

Sale Delayed, Sale More Easily Made By Dan S. Kennedy For many years, I’ve been utilizing an unusual, contrarian strategy, of deliberately delaying the selling, in order to better prepare the prospect for buying. I have gotten a few clients to use it, but most frankly resist it and won’t stick with it. I teach it, but I know most won’t accept it. The idea is that selling to a poorly prepared prospect is a stressful struggle for salesperson and prospect alike, so the entire process can be significantly improved by deliberately delaying the sales presentation until elements critical to a prospect’s readiness to buy can be put in place—such as trust, authority, category of one status, price or fee appropriateness. For people with a ‘sales instinct’ or a great deal of traditional sales experience, or an urgent need for income, the tendency to leap on a prospect the first moment he reveals himself and sell, sell, sell is irresistible. Gotta get ‘em before they get away.

In our terminology today, he generated leads, then had to send media to those leads, putting the burden on it to move the prospect from tentative interest to the first commitment; costly travel for consultation; then, there, moving that prospect the rest of the way to complete commitment. Forced into this, Brinkley began with fairly simple sales letters, but graduated to what I now call a “shock ‘n awe package". Those packages I build today are typically multi-media, including a sales letter, other printed literature, a book, audio CD, DVD, packaged in an impressive manner. Clients incur fees upwards from $50,000.00 to have me develop theirs, for very good reason; they can be “game-changers". My personal modus operandi has long been the delayed sale, with some version of a shock ‘n awe package delivered between the prospective client’s query and the time I finally have a personal conversation with him. So, for example, when someone called my office to inquire about booking me to speak for their company’s or association’s meeting, I never—repeat: never—either immediately jumped on the phone to engage that prospect, or returned a call or had a phone appointment arranged before delivering a package of my material and allowing a few days for its review. Most of my peers who became aware of my approach were terrified by it and wouldn’t dare use it, fearing the impatient prospect would simply move on to someone else and book them. I do not believe in conducting business fearfull...

What Chip has identified as the single most important factor in Dr. Brinkley’s remarkable success—the desire to believe—is a little-understood, extremely powerful force that, when consciously and deliberately harnessed, can lift an ordinary man or women to great heights of influence, fame and fortune, and fuel the growth of a business as nothing else. Putting this force to work, as your ally should be a high priority. This force is at work in every aspect of life. What Eric Hoffer identified as ‘the true believer’ in his must-read book of that same title, is someone who arrives at a point where their desire to believe ‘x’ is so great they refuse to indulge in critical thinking about it, or to consider information or opinion in opposition to it. Devout followers of any religion refuse to objectively question it or acknowledge any of its incongruities. Victims of a financial fraud like Bernie Madoff’s ignore even the most obvious signs of something amiss—in his case, uninterrupted, consistent, above par returns. Partisan political purists and ideologues will remain committed to a course of action or to a candidate or elected leader despite abundant evidence of failure. It is sadly common for repeatedly abused wives to excuse the abuse and accept one promise after another broken promise after another broken promise from the violent husband that “it will never happen again.” Yes, there may be complex psychology at work in her staying in an abusive relationship, but a major fac...

In fact, a Brinkley strategy was to be alert for opportunities to capture particularly dramatic testimonials—something too few marketers focus deliberate effort on.

If you want to excel and stand out from competitors and clutter with social proof, it’s not enough just to collect and present testimonials at random. To replicate Dr. Brinkley, you will seek and intentionally create and present exceptionally dramatic human interest stories from customers who not only provide reason to believe, but also motivate desire to believe.

AUDACITY AND THE BIG IDEA AND BIG PROMISE

He didn’t stop with talking about his current surgical procedure; he claimed that his success with goat glands transplants to restore sexual vitality and slow aging would soon lead to additional surgical advancements such as: Making blind people see via transplanting of goats’ eyes Transplanting vital goats’ organs so that the dead may live again No documentation exists that the doctor ever attempted such medical procedures, but the sheer boldness of the statements brought the desired publicity and made the general public stand up and take even greater notice of John R. Brinkley. So here’s a question for you: have you been able to successfully tap into the “Power of Audacity” for your marketing message?

There is now a pressing need to adopt the Brinkley blueprint in this regard: having the audacity to bring a bigger than life, bolder than ever before made USP (Unique Selling Proposition) forward as your own. We’re back to that word again, audacity. With its power there is hazard. It’s one thing to make all kinds of outrageous claims, promises or guarantees; quite another to be able to back them up. This requires any marketer concerned with long-term customer value and with the law to walk a fine line between fiction and reality, something John R. Brinkley’s critics believed he crossed with abandon. Countless marketers continue to walk on the wild side today, such as the fortune teller/psychic who claims to be able to tell you the future, or in a more conventional sense, the financial guru/money wizard who says he knows how to turn your small nest egg into a giant sized nest large enough to house five fully grown eagles, six large owls and nine full-sized ostriches through winning stock market tips, made with his secret formula. While you may shake your head at the idea of selling such an audacious proposition, I invite you to check the pages of Investor’s Business Daily this very week. You will find at least one full-page advertiser insisting he, in fact, has some secret, proprietary, magic formula for making money 100% of the time regardless of market ups and downs. In short, audacity is advantage.

For the individual making audacious promises, a carefully cultivated and promoted Dynamic Persona is important. The stock market guru isn’t driving around in a ten year old clunker but rather is seen in a Bentley, Rolls Royce, or perhaps a Ferrari. He may present himself as a man of great controversy, at odds with the Wall Street establishment. Or as a man of science, who has brought a unique discipline to investing, based not on traditional financial thought, but on nuclear physics. Or as a confidante of the rich, famous and mighty, photographed with Hollywood, sports and business celebrities. One way or another, he will create an aura of intrigue and interest for himself—he will never be personally unimportant, with all the focus directed at his product. Likewise, John R. Brinkley was careful to cultivate such an aura. He told the world that he was a serious and driven student of his craft. Brinkley presented himself as a cloistered man, someone not easily available just because someone wanted to speak with him, even a potential patient. In his radio broadcasts, he made it forcefully clear that he did not accept just anybody as a patient, and had to be convinced of your sincerity. He did not run from the fact that he was at odds with the medical establishment; he made much of his rogue status. He told of other doctors’ and hospitals’ failures and of his dramatic life-saving successes. He made himself big and important—he did not just have an office or clinic; he had The ...

Maybe the greatest, most amazing marketing and promotional feat ever accomplished is Christianity. Reportedly, by one guy, starting with but a handful of followers. With a very Big Idea: salvation and eternal life after death in the kingdom of heaven. Is there anything people fear more, deep down, than the end? FROM THE BRINKLEY BLUEPRINT: 1. THE Big Idea 2. THE Big Promise The bigger and bolder The Big Idea, the more powerful. The more connected to deeper meanings and deeply held emotions—fears and desires—the better. What most marketers think of as a Big Idea is actually quite small. A Big Idea Can Command Attention, But It Takes A Big Promise To Fuel A Movement Or A Fortune I don’t claim to be a theologian, but it seems to me you can boil Christianity’s Big Promise down to this: believe—and you’re in. There’s a secular version of this, by the way, originally imported here from England; popularized, ironically, by a minister, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale; at the heart of “the success-thought movement” from beginning to present. It fueled Napoleon Hill’s career in the 1940's; it fueled Tony Robbins’ career more recently. A few years ago, all eyes focused on the video ‘documentary’ titled The Secret. Its “stars” appeared everywhere, from Oprah to Larry King to TIME and Newsweek. The Big Promise of it all: think a certain way i.e. believe, and whatever you desire will come to you. This is a very big and extremely appealing promise principally because of all it omits—like, say, ...

My co-author Dan Kennedy ranks Price as one of the most interesting aspects of marketing, and says that he has probably helped more people make more money with price strategies than with any other type of strategies. From him, that’s a very big endorsement for the importance of price. I understand he’s at work on an entire book on the subject.

One of Dan’s favorite concepts is: price elasticity—that most people could be successfully stretching their prices higher, and that there can be conditions created that make a price otherwise thought of as too high or unaffordable, acceptable.

There were three things that made it possible for John Brinkley to command the extraordinarily high fees that he did, from a virtually unlimited number of patients, with virtually no resistance, and all three are replicatable. First, it must be noted that Dr. Brinkley’s patients rarely questioned how his goat gland transplant surgery actually worked. There was a presupposition that goats were sexual dynamos, well known by people at the time, as most were farmers or lived among farmers. In fact, it’s thought that that first farmer who came to Brinkley in search of solution for his “lack of pep” and sexual dysfunction may have suggested the goat glands transplant to Brinkley, rather than the other way around. Brinkley built on an existent foundation of accepted fact. FROM THE BRINKLEY BLUEPRINT: Building on the existent foundation of accepted fact. This is extremely important. The sale of countless “Hollywood secrets” for losing weight quickly, for ageless beauty, is possible because of an existent foundation; that actors and actresses possess such secrets is accepted fact for many people. Similarly, stock-pickers’ tips are sold because its accepted fact that Wall Street insiders have privileged (and possibly illegal) access to information the rank and file investor does not. Tips of which horses to bet (in Dan Kennedy’s world) or which sports teams to wager on are sold by purported insiders playing up their connections to this same accepted fact. The entire industry of ‘how...