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( Part 2 of 4 Summary )
Here is a brief introduction of the Part 2 of the transcript:
A person who is a Guerrilla Marketer has to keep compiling a list. You have lists where you buy… but the list you need is one that you compile yourself and asking everyone you come in contact with for their e-mail address. Then, the key to marketing online is sending those people very brief e-mails – never more than a page long – that has a link to a site that can be as long as you want. However long you make it, you're going to be resented by people because they'll want it even longer. That means, the people who are in the market and who are not in the market, you have to love those people, because at least they're telling you they're not in the market.
Focus on what you're doing. If they want to hear from you, then find a way to expand the permission they've given to you described in the book Permission Marketing, by Seth Godin. Feel good about the people who give you consent. Also, feel good about the people who don't give you consent, but treat those other people like family; really treat them well. You'll find by gaining consent and broadening that consent becomes inexpensive, simple and very profitable for you.
Here, you asked me a question that had a short answer, and you won't believe this, but that was the short answer.
Terry:
You know what, Jay? I'm just sitting here absolutely soaking up all this information. That is absolutely fantastic. I've just written a whole bunch of other notes on the side of my page about things I want to ask you but I don't want to interrupt you because you're such an inspirational speaker; it's absolutely fantastic. One of the things that just hit me was that you had your students write a seven-sentence Guerrilla Marketing plan, and now you've come up with 200 marketing weapons. Is it something that you can connect together? Using 200 marketing weapons in with this seven-step Guerrilla Marketing plan. Would that work hand-in-hand?
Jay:
It would work hand-in-hand, and I'll do it now because it's such a simple thing to do. I guess I was lucky when I worked for Leo Burnett because he taught us the simplicity of marketing. Most other people tell you about the complexity. There are two ways to get the 200 weapons of Internet marketing. One way is to go to our website www.gmarketing.com. Another way is to go to the Guerrilla Marketing Association and they've got a list of the 200 weapons. They could also get a list sent to them and get several newsletters is to sign onto our mailing list. Just send an e-mail to Amy at www.gmarketing.com and they can say, “Amy, please send me a list of your 200 marketing weapons.” There's no charge, and she'll send you the list. She'll also make sure you get a newsletter once a week, and learn what else the Guerrilla Marketing Association offers.
So, that's how you start with the 200 weapons. I can't do that in a hurry, but I can do the seven-sentence marketing plan, Terry.
Terry:
Oh, please. Yea.
Jay:
I hope everybody listening has a paper and a pencil because this is an easy thing that I'm going to ask you to do. First of all you should know that when I was teaching at Berkeley, I gave all my students this exercise. I said, “Write a seven-sentence marketing plan. I'll give you the structure of the sentences, and whatever you do, don't take more than five minutes writing this.” You have to trust your instincts. I will charge you $10,000 to do it for you, but you're going to do this right now for yourself for free. Here's the structure that everyone has to follow to get a marketing plan that is as strong as any marketing plan in the country. This is all you really need.
One of the most successful marketing companies on earth is Procter and Gamble. Almost all of their products are in first or second place in their product category. And, as big as they are, all of their products have a seven-sentence marketing plan. I kind of modeled mine after theirs. I did a lot of work for them when I was working in Chicago and London. If it works for them, and worked for my students, it's going to work for your listeners. This is all you really need. All the sentences are short except for one. If you take more than five minutes to do this then you're missing out on the point I'm trying to make which is to trust your instincts. Don't take more than five minutes to write it. I rarely see people take the whole five minutes.
The first sentence tells the purpose of your marketing what physical act you want people to take. Do you want them to click to your website? Call an 800 number? Look for your product next time they're at a store? Go to your store? What physical act do you want people to take? That's pretty easy to say in one sentence, and that's all that's going in that first sentence.
The second sentence is about one of your benefits. Think of some benefit that has competitive advantage. What is your competitive advantage? You may have more than one, but only put down one because you don't want to complicate it. Tell your main advantage, and that's how you're going to achieve your purpose. (cont'd)
If you want the complete text transcript to this 2-hour audio interview, you may buy it at LuLu.com as an immediate download. ( Part 1 of 4 Summary )
If you prefer the complete 2-hour text transcript to this audio interview, you may buy it at LuLu.com as an immediate download.
Here is a brief introduction of the Part 1 of the transcript:
If you've been out there and you've read Guerrilla Marketing or you've read one of the other 31 books that he has in that series, you know that his stuff works. This is a guy where you can read his book and apply what he says… this is not theory; this is the real stuff. Another thing that's kind of cool is that Jay also worked with Playboy. He's written columns and articles for Entrepreneur Magazine, INC magazine, and the list goes on and on. This guy is absolutely amazing; I can't tell you how excited I am to talk to Jay and have him share all the information that he is going to be sharing with us today.
Even thought he has a really impressive resume, the real tipping point for Jay was the Guerrilla Marketing book. Instead of me going on and on, without further ado, I'd like to welcome the father of Guerilla Marketing, the mentor of millions, Jay Conrad Levinson. I'd like to say thank you so much for being here with us today, Jay.
Jay:
Thank you Terry very much. You sure know how to make a guy feel good.
Terry:
I'm just recapping your history, my friend.
Jay:
Well, I'll do everything in my power to live up to it, but everything you said is the honest truth.
Terry:
I just basically touched on your background. Can you fill us in? How did everything progress for you? Where did everything come from and how did you get to where you are today?
Jay:
I'll start at the real beginning: I was a counter intelligence agent… I was a member of America's spy core. I was in for spies in the United States, finding them, and then I had to write up a report of my investigation. Since all of my investigations were about people, I did some very James Bond investigation work. The best thing about that work was the writing of the reports of investigation; I really went off on writing. I was in the Army at this time, and I was going to get out of the Army, but I didn't know what I was going to do. I knew I was going to go back to law school, which was a bad idea.
I loved writing so much that I started thinking of a job in writing. I didn't want to be a book writer because you can't make money from writing a book. I had written for the college newspaper in Boulder, Colorado, and I knew I didn't like the literary style of a newspaper. Somebody told me that I should look for a job in an advertising agency. I had never thought of that; I'd never taken any courses in advertising or marketing, but that sounded like a good thing for me.
So, I got a job in an agency, but I was hired as a secretary, not as a writer. I was typing 80 words a minute, and I was willing to go to shorthand school; that was something that made me very much appreciated by this small-time advertising agency in San Francisco. That led me to becoming a copywriter in that agency, then another, and then I went to Chicago, and sure enough, mister Hugh Hefner hired me to be the promotion copy director of Playboy writing pieces for advertisers to advertise in Playboy, writing pieces for subscribers to subscribe to this new magazine, and writing ads about Playboy itself, like about what sort of man reads Playboy and things for Playboy products.
After that, after about a year, I got bored because I had to write in the same voice all the time. I would have been insane if I told Hef that I wanted to change the voice I was writing in. Hefner was a wonderful boss, but I couldn't stay there because for a creative type like me, writing in the same voice over and over wasn't really going to cut it. So, I left and got a job in an advertising agency, then another, and then Leo Burnett's. Leo Burnett was in London and that was a great three years getting to travel everywhere in Europe.
Then, I came back to the United States and found out that Leo Burnett, who was very close to me, had died while I was away. I noticed the agency had changed its personality and changed the way it was. It was the best advertising agency in the world in the 60's, and it changed so I went to work for Jay Walter Thompson, which was the largest agency in the world at the time, and luckily they let me work in Chicago, which was my home base since I was raised there.
That was a lot of fun, however, I remember once waiting for a bus and it was 13 below zero. I remember that month in February that the temperature never went above zero. Here I thought I had achieved my lifelong ambition of being a vice president in a corner office working on these exciting accounts. So, I asked Jay Walter if he would transfer me to a place with a better climate. I asked, “How about San Francisco? You have a big office there.” They said, “You've done a really good job, and you've gotten really close to some of our clients like Quaker Oats and V05, so we can't transfer you but we'll give you a big raise.” So, that meant that I had to stand and wait for busses in 13 below zero for the rest of my life, and that didn't appeal to me, although the agency did.
I wanted a job in San Francisco and I got an offer. But, at the time that I gave my notice, Quaker Oats and the V05 people said that they didn't care where I lived as long as I continued to write for them. So, I accepted that and I told the advertising agency that I was going to work at in San Francisco that I'd work part-time and come in once a week, and they only have to pay me 1/3 of what they were going to pay me, but I'd do 100% of all the assignments they were going to give me. That sounded good to them.
So, I was living in San Francisco, I was doing work for Quaker Oats, V05, and for this advertising agency, and I was picking up little clients because of the new industries in San Francisco. The computer industry was pretty brand new, and the solar energy industry was brand new as well. Here I was, keeping really busy, working for those clients, and it dawned on me that I was only working three days a week and I was working from my home. The reason I worked three days a week was that I didn't have any memos to read, any committees to hold meetings and I didn't have people coming in to my office to talk to me.
I realized that being free from those distractions, I was able to work a three-day week. I thought that there was nothing special about me, but most people are trapped in a commuter lane working five or six days a week, doing work that was dictated to them from people above them. I, however, got to get rid of my alarm clock, which was one of the first things I wanted to do, and only do the assignments I wanted to do, wear what I wanted to wear, and work from my office overlooking San Francisco bay.
That's when I realized that I should write a book about this because anyone could really do this. So, I wrote a book called Earning Money Without a Job. People said, “You can make money without working?” and I said, “What do you mean without working? You have to work your tail off!” It's not your standard 9-5 job with someone else calling the shots.
My book was a pretty big seller, and it became the basis of a course at the University of California at Berkeley in their extension division. They said, “Jay, don't call it “Earning Money Without a Job”, it will make our professors think that it's a get rich quick scheme, and we know that's not what it is. How about we call it, “The Alternative to the 9-5 Job?” I said, “That sounds good to me,” so I started teaching “The Alternative to the 9-5 Job,” to young kids in Berkeley with long hair and empty pockets. I wrote a follow-up book when people were saying that the concepts were great, but they wanted ideas of the ways to do it.
So, I subscribed to a clipping service and asked people to send me unusual ways they are making money around the world. My second book was called, 555 Ways to Earn Extra Money, which made even more people attend my sold out class at Berkeley. One day, I get to class, and some students ask me, “Jay, you know we have good ideas, and you know we don't know beans about marketing, is there a book you can recommend to us for people with big dream but empty bank accounts?” I said that I'd be happy to come up with a book recommendation for you. After class I went to the library, and I couldn't find any books on that topic, so I went to Stanford's library and still didn't find anything, so I went to public libraries in the big cities in California and I found out that there were no books in the early 80's on marketing for people with budgets of less than $300,000 a month. And those were certainly not my students; they didn't have anything like $300,000 a month.
Still, I had promised them that I'd recommend a book. I put everything together that I had for my clients like the solar energy industry, waterbeds, computers… I had made a list of all the ways people could market without investing much money. That's a great and noble concept, but it's a bad title for a book. So, I decided to call it Guerrilla Marketing, because guerrillas won the conventional gold, but have to go about the attaining of them without the conventional means. I wrote it for my students; I never knew the book would take on a life of its own. I never knew it would be published in 44 languages. You're talking to a guy now who doesn't understand 43 editions of his own book.
The book has sold 15 million copies, but I only wrote it for the 100 kids in my class. Those kids in my class, the ones with long hair and Levi's, went out to make huge inroads in the big Silicone Valley companies from Hewlett Packard to graphic design companies. Many, if not most, of the Fortune 500 firms from Silicone Valley have students from my class working for them. Some of them are still running their billion dollar companies according to the same simple seven-sentence marketing plan that I outlined for them.
The big key to marketing is to start with a plan and then commit to that plan. That's a two-step process, but here am I, being hypocritical, because I didn't have a plan, but I responded with needs. When I wrote the book, Earning Money Without a Job, I was responding to the need of a lot of unemployment issues from the recession and people standing in line to get a job someplace and the same thing happening to them. So, to protect them from their parents' work ethic, I wrote my first two books. When the kids in the class were doing what I said but didn't know how to get it off the ground in marketing, I wrote that last book for them.
So, there are really 57 books now that I've written, and they're all in response to a need. My publisher, who also publishes Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, said that there's a lot going on online, would it be possible if you could write a book about marketing online? I said, “Sure, I'll learn about it.” I wanted to call the book, Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet, and my publishers said, “No, no… you can't use a new word in the title; people don't know what “Internet” means.” And I said, “But they will know what it means.” ... (cont'd)
If you want the complete text transcript to this 2-hour audio interview, you may buy it at LuLu.com as an immediate download.
