Fascinate

Sally Hogshead

• Publisher: Harper Business
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062405937
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

The New York Times –bestselling author shows you how the perfect words can captivate your customers and how your brand can harness the force of attraction. Why is Jägermeister the most popular brand nobody likes? Why dowomen pay more to be fascinating than they spend on food and clothes? What raises the price of gummy worms by 1000%? And then there's the most important question of all: How can your brand become impossible to resist? Master marketer Sally Hogshead reveals the surprising answers, providing readers with a framework to fascinating anyone. This extensively revised and updated edition includes Hogshead's latest research on the science of fascination. Combining original case studies with award-winning copywriting experience, she gives you the exact words you need to capture the attention of a distracted world. This new edition includes a free assessment tool called the Brand Fascination Profile, which will help you earn attention in any environment by learning how to:

• Increase prices with ideas from poker to Play-Doh
• Build revenue by learning about the $14 million license plate
• Get better leads through hypnosis by Sigmund Freud and Steve Jobs
• Attract raving fans by following the cult of pistachio ice cream

Whether you realize it or not, your brand is already applying one of the seven Advantages Hogshead describes here: Innovation, Passion, Power, Prestige, Mystique, Alert, or Trust. The question is, how can you apply these core Advantages to stand out in a crowded and distracted world? Hundreds of large corporations, small businesses, and universities—including Twitter, IBM, Porsche, and New York University—use the Fascinate system to captivate their customers. Why? The answers are in this book.

PART I

Fascinate or Fail

Will you fascinate? Or will you fail?

The Science of Fascination

STEP INSIDE THE LABORATORY

The Most Popular Brand That Nobody Likes

The bitter, sweetly harsh taste is unmistakable. Some say it tastes like Robitussin. Others say it reminds them of black licorice. I think that’s putting it kindly. I’d compare it to a shot of battery acid laced with kerosene.

So let me ask you. Have you ever had a shot of Jägermeister?

Did you like the taste?

If you didn’t like the taste, that’s okay. Few people do. Very, very few. And yet the brand has grown exponentially. Jägermeister is one of the top-selling spirits in the world. So how is that possible?

If you’re reading this book (and I happen to know you are), the odds are quite good that you’ve done a shot of Jägermeister. If I may, allow me to make a prediction about your experience of it at some point.

It was past midnight on a Friday or Saturday night. You were with a group, standing at the bar. Somebody in your group—the troublemaker, perhaps—suggested with a sly smile, “Hey, let’s do a shot of Jäger.”

Your first thought was to decline. You already knew the shot would corrode your throat, and you knew you’d make a face of disgust as soon as you managed to down the whole thing. But the mere suggestion of a shot of Jäger hit a hidden crazy button inside your brain. A chance to find out exactly what was beyond your wildest imagination.

As the bartender poured the liqueur, it seemed heavy enough to plop into the shot glass—glub glub glub—and concentrated enough to make permanent stains on an asphalt highway. When your shot arrived, you hesitated imperceptibly, jaw clenched.

What was going on in that moment? You were playing a mind game with yourself. Psyching yourself up and bracing yourself at the same time, like an extreme skier dropping down the face of a double-black-diamond run. The shot was cold, but not cold enough to kill the pain.

Afterward, you looked to your friends and smiled with a mixture of victory and relief. Your empty shot glass became a medal of valor.

So what just happened?

You didn’t do the Jäger shot despite the unpleasant taste. You did that shot because of it.

A History of Liquid Fascination

The year was 1878. Wintertime stag hunting was a popular pastime in Germany. Hunting parties braved the cold, and a shot of liqueur helped take the edge off the chill. A hunter named Curt Mast developed a drink for his stag-hunting excursions. What were his ingredients? Only a handful of people knew. It was a secret mixture of fifty-six herbs, spices, and blooms.

Mast named his drink Jägermeister, which translates to “Master Hunter.” The greatest hunter of them all.

Because Mast didn’t want a bottle to shatter while hunting, he tested various designs while on his horse, dropping different bottles while galloping at full speed, until he discovered the specific squared shape that was the least likely to shatter. This led to the iconic squared dark-green bottle we know today.

Mast adorned his shatterproof green bottle with imagery of mystical hunting legends. For instance, a Christian cross glowed eerily between the curved antlers of a stag. This cross was in homage to Saint Hubertus, the patron saint of hunting. Legend has it that Hubertus converted to Christianity when he saw a vision of a stag with a glowing crucifix between its antlers. Images of the saint, born in 656, still hang in churches around the world.

In 1935, Jäger was commercially released in Germany, marketed as an after-dinner digestif. While it had originally helped hunters brave the chill, now it helped the digestive system brave the bratwurst.

The green bottle later served in the fields of World War II as an anesthetic for wounded soldiers. In the 1980s, however, it made the leap from painkiller to hangover creator.

In 1985, an American marketer and entrepreneur, Sidney Frank, bought the rights to import the drink into the United States from Germany. This wasn’t an obvious move at the time. The drink was only a very modest seller, barely worth the license. Up to that point, the digestif was a nostalgic drink for traditional blue-collar German immigrants who remembered it from the homeland.

But then everything changed. Frank came across a short article in the Baton Rouge Advocate. It described his digestif as a cult drink, hopped up with opium, Quaaludes, and aphrodisiacs.

A conventional marketer would have suppressed the article, worrying about reputation damage. Frank did quite the opposite. He made hundreds of copies of the newspaper article, and plastered them in college bars all around the country. So it began.

College students visiting New Orleans swarmed to the bars, clutching bottles of the mysterious brown elixir, bringing them back to campus and secretively sharing them with friends. Hurry up, get your bottle soon, because surely an imported drink with opium will be illegal at any moment.

And what about that stag pictured on the label? Rumors spread that the drink contained deer’s blood. What about the cross? People researched the religious symbolism. And how about that mysterious poem in the design? What was it saying about God and man and beasts?

It seemed everyone (including the authorities) wanted to know: What exactly floated inside that potion?^*

Thus spread the cult, student to student, school to school, a wildfire lit with the taste of kerosene.

These students were not merely buying a drink. They were not even buying flavor. They were buying a flirtation with forbidden ingredients. If their hard-won Jäger bottle tasted delicious, it wouldn’t be nearly as compelling. In fact, the more horrific the drink tasted, the more convincing the rumors. With such a repellent flavor, surely an aphrodisiac or two must be lurking in there somewhere.

The Brand Promise of a Toxic Experience

In 1975, the two reigning soda brands, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, waged a war over which cola tasted better. Heard of it? The Pepsi Challenge? It became nearly as competitive as a scene out of Game of Thrones. In a spontaneous blind taste test, consumers were asked to take a sip from two unmarked cups of soda (one with Coke, the other Pepsi), and name which one tasted better. Pepsi claimed to be more delicious than Coke, and vice versa, on and on, for years.

The whole mammoth marketing campaign hinged on one factor: taste. Virtually every drink on the market sells itself on the basis of taste. With good reason. Taste is a perfectly rational reason to buy one soda rather than another. So how can Jäger sell despite the taste?

Think this through. Can you imagine doing a blind taste test challenge for Jäger, like the Pepsi Challenge? Um, no. Imagine people’s facial expressions the first time they did a shot.^*

Yet what if you’re a marketer trying to sell a drink, and that drink’s taste is (in the eyes of many) your main disadvantage? Sidney Frank actively touted the unappealing flavor: a poster showed a man who had just finished consuming a shot with a grimace on his face.

This approach took the barrier head-on, turning the shot into a rallying cry. It elevated the product beyond rational benefits, adding to its growing mythology. With this drink, bad flavor isn’t a barrier to trying it; it’s a reason for it. An overall toxic experience is part of the brand’s promise. Customers can dislike your product but still love its message, if they love what your brand says about them.

Many brands are faced with the difficult task of selling a product that people don’t necessarily want to buy. Nobody gets excited about buying headache medication, car mufflers, or burial plots. The beauty of Jäger’s marketing is that it sells an extraordinary volume—at a premium price point, no less—of a product that people don’t even want and, more to the point, actively dislike.

So how does the brand manage to sell almost as much as Absolut, when the taste puts hair on the tongue?

Under the Spell of Fascination

Think about your own purchase decisions. Why do you buy certain brands and not others? Why do you remember certain messages, but forget the rest?

More often than you realize, you aren’t just buying a product. You’re buying the emotions, connotations, values, and priorities of the brand. Brands give us a shorthand. In a distracted and confusing world, these shortcuts help consumers make sense of all the options. And if you’re trying to stand out, finding shortcuts is critical.

For instance, I’ll describe a man to you. I won’t tell you how old he is, what he does for a living, or what kind of personality he has. Instead, I’ll just describe the brands he buys. What do you envision with the following examples?

1. He’s wearing a Tommy Bahama shirt, driving a Jeep.

2. He’s wearing a Tommy Hilfiger shirt, driving a Volvo.

3. He’s wearing Diesel jeans and driving a BMW coupe.

4. He’s wearing an oversized Tag Heuer watch and driving a Hummer.

You probably have different mental images for each of these men, based on the brands they choose.

Just as a Tommy Bahama shirt sends a message that the wearer is laid back, the dark-brown liquid of Jägermeister sends a message as well. When you order a Jäger, you’re telling anyone who witnesses it that you’re willing to stick your toe over the line, if not hurl your body across it. You refuse to drink from the mainstream.

The shot is not better than other spirits, but it is decidedly different.^*

When people buy a shot of Jäger, they aren’t buying a drink. They’re buying an experience. By holding the shot glass, they’re announcing that they have officially turned up the volume on the evening ahead. This explains why Jäger is so popular among groups at bars. It’s a team-building exercise. Can you imagine someone at home alone on a Tuesday, pouring a Jäger bomb? It makes about as much sense as sitting on your own lap. Even the logo has become shorthand for stepping it up a notch. Once someone suggests a round of Jäger, mental bells start ringing inside the minds of the group, signaling that it’s one of “those nights.”

That’s a very specific brand promise, one that’s unlikely to be confused with that of any chardonnay.

All this doesn’t make sense, of course, on a rational level. It doesn’t have to. The brand is not selling a rational benefit (such as better gas mileage or longer-lasting paint), but an emotional experience. When you see the hidden patterns in how fascination casts a spell on people, seemingly irrational behaviors become clear.

The good news is that, without even realizing it, you already have intensely fascinating qualities built right into your brand. And once you build your communication around those qualities, you can compete against bigger companies, bigger marketing budgets, and even better products. I call these qualities your “orange tickets.”

Do You Want the Orange Ticket, or the Green?

Let’s go on a ride.

The Mission Space ride at the Epcot theme park in Orlando, Florida, is based on the conceit that the rider is training to be an astronaut, practicing to save planet Earth while hurling through the atmo...