Themes help you eliminate competition with and comparison to other products or sellers of the exact same commodity product. They make your product or service unique, even in selling a commodity product like a PC, salt, or a nearly-impossible-to-differentiate service which everyone and their grandmothers are offering, like basic website design.

So, how can you make the impossible actually happen for you?

How can you make a commodity like salt or basic website design unique and eliminate your competition?

Discover how here:

We’ll use a real case where one woman used the radio to broadcast to tens of millions, asked her prospects to buy 65 times in 18 hours, and generated $ 480 million in today’s dollars in sales during World War II . . .

IMPORTANT: If you’re convinced you’re unique in the minds of your prospects, you’re in denial. Pine trees are unique among trees. Each of the 115 species of pine is unique among the family of pines. And each pine tree is unique within its species. So which ones of the thousands or tens of thousands you’ve seen do you remember?

FIRST: “I need to see how it ends:”

Generally, when people are interrupted while chasing down a goal that’s important to them, they become uneasy until they can return to it. Their tension continues until they complete their goal, and there’s emotional resistance to any suggestion to stopping before they reach the end.

Ever go to a boring but required staff meeting and when it finishes, everyone runs like hell back to their desks to resume their important work? That’s how powerful the tension and urge is to complete a goal.

This was the compulsive zombie pattern that glued listeners to their radios: they were striving and straining toward a goal, especially those who identified themselves with this woman on the radio, and they needed to experience “closure.” Otherwise, they’d have a lingering sense of incompletion, like walking out on a movie just before the revealing twist ending.

So her radio marathon goes beyond a single event: it becomes a race or endurance contest with a prize or goal at the end. It really was a marathon of 18 hours rather than 26.2 miles (or 42 kilometers).

And like a marathon, deeply emotionally invested fans cheered her on as their favorite runner and were concerned about her ability to endure. For them, she became a heroic martyr, sacrificing herself for others.

“Every time she spoke we discussed whether she had been stronger or weaker than the last time and just when it would be safe to bet on her ending.”

SECOND: “If she fails, I fail:”

If she failed, they also failed. This is the essence of the sociology of sport: the need to have a hero who validates you through their success. Have you seen any of the Rocky Balboa movies, based on the underdog hero who physically sacrifices himself in a marathon 15-round combat? His fans are deeply invested in the outcome, and if he fails, they also fail. The same happens with professional, amateur, and school sports. Ever been a fan on the losing side of a national championship? How did you feel about yourself? Almost as bad as the athletes? Why? Because you were participating emotionally along with them.

Others more casually just enjoyed the race without knowing any of the runners:

“I think many people stayed because they wanted to see the outcome of her endurance.”

I use a model to teach people about selling: Tease your prospects, build up the tension, relax a tiny bit, then build that tension some more. Then they will buy without you having to ask for the sale.

“After each announcement there was a sort of tension in the place to see whether she would come on again.”

As the marathon stretched on, her voice grew weaker and more strained. And she herself had stated throughout the day that her voice and energy might not last.

This was a calculated move, based on understanding people deeply.

She effectively hinted early and often that she might have taken on too much of a challenge.

If an marathon running race doesn’t seem exciting enough for you as a comparison, I’ve got the perfect example where you yourself may have experienced being captured by the television event: election night for the national leader (president, prime minister, etc.). They use everything you just learned about above: candidates as marathon runners in the final stretch, a fixed goal, early reports projecting the future, later reports updating the past, regional reports and updates, tension built from races that are “too close to call” and expert opinions that are vague on purpose.

Themes help you eliminate competition with and comparison to other products or sellers of the exact same commodity product — by getting your prospects to invest themselves in the outcome and in you.

The information above is extracted from Mass Persuasion, a tremendously powerful integrated system specifically designed to harness the power of dominant emotions your customers and prospects already have. Mass Persuasion takes manipulative propaganda and turns it on its head, so you can harness its power ethically and morally.

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