HYPE STRATEGY #3

The essence of propaganda is a well-designed package.

—ELLIOT ARONSON AND ANTHONY PRATKANIS

In the years immediately following World War I, a young German playwright decided communism was his thing. His name was Bertolt Brecht, and despite his attraction to radical equality, it was incredibly important to him that his name appear in lights. He realized, however, that his biting dramatic critiques of capitalism would lose all legitimacy the moment anyone discovered the real story of his upbringing.

Brecht came from a long line of businessmen, landowners, and white-collar professionals. Furthermore, the bookish young man had never done any of the sort of manual labor championed by the movement that had captured his imagination, and he had no intention of beginning to do so. Yet Brecht, every bit as talented a self-promoter as he was a playwright, saw in the Marxist vision of the world a terrific marketing opportunity.

After Germany’s defeat in the war, the country’s economic state was dire, and its mood was one of extreme humiliation. It was in this climate that the popularity of communism soared. The playwright seized the moment. Despite his crafting plays that were arty and intellectual, he constructed a persona that screamed laborer. He filled his wardrobe with the shirtsleeves and leather caps typically worn by mechanics and factory workers. He consistently sported a three-day stubble. He wore simple wire-rimmed “austerity spectacles.”

Brecht was as concerned with dressing for success as any Fortune 500 CEO, and his view of how to do so was remarkably shrewd. He could have chosen to wear variations on the same kind of outfits that the other writers and thinkers in Weimar-era Germany favored. Instead, he used clothing as a mechanism to control how he was perceived. He had a certain image he knew was essential to his success, and he used what he wore to ensure this was the image people associated with him.

What made Brecht’s strategy work so well for him was that he committed fully. He didn’t only wear his worker’s uniform on the opening night of a new play or in interviews but instead sported his signature garb at all times. In doing so, he became synonymous with the “working man’s playwright.” It’s how people still think of him today.

Seventy years later, around the turn of the twenty-first century, a young American songwriter surveyed the music scene of the time and hated what he saw. Bro metal, rap rock, and vapid pop ruled the charts. Everything the young man had always loved about rock ‘n’ roll—the glamour, the flash, the artiness—seemed completely absent. To the young man, this was an egregious sin, and he set out to remedy it.

If you haven’t guessed by now, that young man was me.

In 1999, I wrote a bunch of songs, assembled a group, and put together a stage show that would serve as a corrective to the times.

We had lights. We had confetti cannons. We convinced a friend to dance in a cage while wearing a gas mask. And we dressed awesome. Tight striped pants. Ascots. Pointy boots. Top hats.

It was a lot of work for a bunch of young scrappers, but we made it happen. We imagined the fantastical onstage world we had concocted to be the next in a line that included David Bowie, George Clinton, Devo, and even the musicals of Bertolt Brecht. We wrangled our first gig, called everyone we knew, and got them to call everyone they knew. We were convinced that when people saw our outrageous stage show and flamboyant outfits, word would spread throughout every corner of New York City and beyond.

That’s not what happened. Even though the people we invited seemed to have a good time, the shows that followed were sparsely attended. As the months went on, it was clear the problem wasn’t getting any better.

As a student of rock ‘n’ roll, I knew image was everything. As such, I figured if we dressed like rock legends on stage, we would become legends. What I failed to realize was that true rock stars have never drawn a distinction between stage and street.

I wasn’t like that. My wardrobe was full of all kinds of clothing I had accumulated over the years during various phases of my life without much consideration. Khaki pants. Baggy jeans. Banker-blue button-down shirts. When I was onstage, I was a rock god. In my day-to-day life, I chose what to wear by grabbing whatever happened to be clean.

Because the Lower East Side music scene was tight-knit, people undoubtedly noticed the contrast. As a result, my front man act came across as bogus. Even though we were putting on an entertaining show, we lacked the commitment to carry it through in the rest of our lives. We dressed for the moment but didn’t use our clothing to tell a story. And that was where, at least in the beginning, we fell short.

TURNING YOUR INSIDES OUTWARD

One day I was complaining to one of my hippest friends about how we were failing to attain the heights of the rock legends we worshipped. She listened to me talk for about an hour. Then she looked me up and down.

“Do you really think Bowie would ever go out of the house looking like that?” she asked.

That was how, after playing a year’s worth of sparsely attended shows, I filled a trash bag with all my khakis, button-downs, and functional shoes and hauled them down to the local Goodwill. It was then that I realized that if I was going to save rock ‘n’ roll, I should try to be a little better about living rock ‘n’ roll. From that day forward, I told myself that there would be no distinction between what I wore on stage and what I wore when walking around.

And you know what . . . it worked. We started to see the same faces at our shows again and again. Eventually we got a residency at the legendary New York venue Arlene’s Grocery and then sold it out on a Wednesday night. We even recorded with the guys who had produced Sonic Youth and the Ramones.

Did we go on to play Madison Square Garden, hit number one on the charts, and embark on a decade-long sprint of decadence and debauchery? Nah. Turns out, it takes a lot more than clothing to drive rock ‘n’ roll stardom. That said, the strategy helped me—a third-rate guitar player who can barely sing—to get closer to being a rock star than I had any right to expect. And as I moved into the next phase of my career, the lessons I learned about how true stars in every field package themselves for success have stayed with me.

In traditional marketing, packaging refers to the wrapper you choose for the products you put on store shelves, with all the attendant color, texture, and font choices. As we’ve increasingly moved from a goods-based to service-based economy, considerations of packaging have grown to include things like visual brand identities and web design.

Master hype artists understand that focusing first on these sorts of details betrays a lack of understanding of the propagandistic power of packaging. They know that human beings are drawn to follow other human beings, rather than abstractions, and that the process by which they decide which other humans to follow operates on a primal, largely unconscious level. Since people can’t crack open your skull and peer into your mind, they use the wrapping paper you choose for yourself to judge whether to follow or ignore you, without even realizing that’s what they’re doing.

Most professionals don’t understand this. They view dressing for success as wearing a suit and tie to business meetings. Or maybe they don a blazer and new sneakers to show how creative they are, even though everyone around them is doing the same. As a result, they blend into the herd. Hype artists, on the other hand, draw on the deepest parts of themselves to construct a persona, often identifying and reworking parts that might come across as negative in other contexts. Then they commit to embodying this persona in every aspect of their lives and work.

Neil Strauss had risen to the pinnacle of his profession as a journalist, progressing from lowly intern to top ghostwriter for some of the biggest celebrities in the world. But he still wasn’t happy. Why not? Because he was plagued by that unique combination of loneliness and shame that marks the romantically unsuccessful. Women simply didn’t like him. 

After a lifetime of being a romantic flop, Strauss had come to believe that people fell into one of two categories: naturally attractive people and naturally unattractive people. He was a member of the latter group, and there was nothing he could do about it. 

But then he got a lead on an underground community of young men who had reverse-engineered how to successfully seduce women. He smelled a story, as well as an opportunity to improve the state of his own life. 

Strauss infiltrated this community and immersed himself in its lifestyle. He attended a course on fixing his posture and took speech lessons to improve his “fast, quiet, and mumbly voice.” After experimenting with cowboy hats, feather boas, and necklaces that lit up, he landed on a signature look of leather armbands, perfectly tailored shirts, and a shaved head.

Finally, he chose a new name that was better suited to his transformed identity—“Style.” Before long, he was one of the most successful pickup artists in the world. The book that came out of the experience—The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists—would become a bestseller many times over.

The reason Strauss was so successful at reinventing himself in this way was that in the earliest days of his exploration, he happened upon a mentor who, it would quickly become clear, had an uncanny understanding of the psychology of attraction.

Mystery was a dark and charismatic figure instantly identifiable by his fuzzy top hat, layered jewelry, eyeliner, and painted black fingernails. When he entered a room, women’s eyes floated in his direction before he ever said a word.

What the many imitators of Mystery who emerged in the wake of The Game’s publication failed to grasp was that his packaging was rooted in the core of who he was. Back when he was lonely Erik James Horvat-Markovic, he was already a fan of the theatrical, magical, and macabre in the form of Dungeons&Dragons. It was from that stereotypically unseductive starting place that he would go on to craft his eminently attractive persona. And attraction is simply another form of hype.

Neil Strauss ended up crafting his own packaging in a similar way. It is telling that Mystery gave him the nickname “Style” at one of their earliest meetings, well before Strauss had landed on his signature new look. As Strauss wrote, “That was one thing I prided myself on: I may never have been socially comfortable, but at least I knew how to dress better than those who were.” His packaged persona was simply a consciously thought-out amplification of tendencies he already had.

Think Andy Warhol with his silver wig and foil-covered factory. Think Steve Jobs with his simple black turtlenecks or Ayn Rand with her black cape and dollar sign-shaped brooch pin. These master hype artists did not blend in, but neither did they package themselves haphazardly to court attention at all cost. True hype artists select each element of their external presentation to convey a specific message about who they are and what they can do.

The human brain did not evolve to give us an accurate view of reality. It evolved to help us survive and spread our genes. If we had to analyze and assess every one of the stimuli we encounter all day long, we would never be able to make decisions about anything. To accommodate this reality, our brains make constant predictions based on surface-level indicators similar to what has been encountered before. This processing happens instantaneously. The most effective hype artists understand this fundamental facet of human psychology and use it to their advantage.

Beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, Kansas-based “Dr.” John R. Brinkley developed a procedure he claimed could reinvigorate vitality and sexual potency in men. His procedure consisted of him cutting patients open and dropping goat testicles into their groin area. Over the course of his career, upward of 40 people died on the operating table or shortly afterward. Yet Brinkley was so popular that he became one of the richest and most famous inhabitants of his home state, at one point coming only a few votes shy of winning the governorship.

During Brinkley’s heyday, there were plenty of other people hocking bogus miracle cures. However, most of these pitchmen carried with them the air of the circuses and medicine shows through which they had come up. Brinkley, on the other hand, positioned himself as more doctorly than even the most established physician. He unfailingly wore a white coat and the Vandyke beard that was associated with prestigious physicians at the time. He prominently displayed his medical school degree—one that he paid for and received in six weeks. He sprinkled his speech with medical terms and spoke with unfettered confidence at all times.

Gustave Le Bon, the social scientist who originated the discipline of crowd psychology in the late nineteenth century, once wrote that “prestige is the mainspring of all authority.” Le Bon was not referring to accomplishment or talent or ability, all of which are rooted in the concrete and measurable. Prestige, on the other hand, is all about surfaces. It is about the symbols and signposts of leadership, success, and power. And if you are able to manipulate prestige to place yourself at the head of a tribe of those bound by mutual beliefs or mutual enemies, you can use that as the starting point to build a true movement.

It is important to expose people you wish to influence to indicators of your prestige as often as possible. If you once appeared on TV at two in the morning, there’s no harm in placing “As Seen on CBS” on your website. If you once took out a tiny classified ad in the New York Times, you may want to allude to your appearance in the nation’s paper of record. If people ask you about the details, certainly tell them. But what you’ll find is that they usually don’t.

SAME STUFF, DIFFERENT PACKAGE

Joe De Sena grew up in the largely Italian American neighborhood of Howard Beach in Queens, New York, in the 1970s. If you’ve ever seen the classic Martin Scorsese mobster flick GoodFellas, you’re aware of the importance of processed meats, fried food, and the Catholic church in that neighborhood. So when De Sena’s mother became a vegetarian yogi, it was not easy for him. Her transition made him and the rest of his family stick out, and it eventually contributed to his parents’ divorce.

De Sena moved firmly in the other direction. He became a hard-hustling businessman. He turned gigs cleaning neighbors’ pools into a full-fledged company. Then he went on to found a successful investment practice. His lifestyle became one defined by long hours behind a desk, little sleep, and nightly dinners full of rich food and wine.

Eventually, however, his lifestyle caught up with him. His energy faltered. His mood suffered. He felt sluggish and weak. He began to make bad decisions and fall short of his goals.

Many hard-driving people ignore these kinds of signs until they burn out (or have a heart attack). De Sena admits he would have done the same if not for the way he had grown up. “I would have been just like everybody else,” he said. “We’re all lemmings, and I would have done what everyone else does.”

But unlike the other lemmings in his environment, this one had a mother who had transformed herself by radically shifting her physical and nutritional behaviors. For the first time in his life, he saw the value of what his hippie mom had figured out. Now instead of running from it, he embraced it.

De Sena was soon practicing yoga with the single-minded dedication he had applied to building his businesses. Before long, he was incorporating intense physical activity into every aspect of his life—from running up high-rise staircases to embarking on grueling wilderness treks. He put an end to the rich alcohol-fueled dinners and replaced them with raw food. He became obsessed with getting eight hours of sleep each night.

De Sena began persuading employees—and then clients—to embark on this lifestyle with him. Within a few years, spreading the word about this radically healthy way of living had become the most important thing in his world. For this purpose, De Sena started a second business called Peak, while still running his investment practice full-time.

As he saw it, the lifestyle he now practiced was so transformative that all he had to do was preach its benefits and the world would follow. He put whatever spare time he had—and spare cash—into the endeavor.

It failed.

A different person might have given up. After all, he had a successful finance business, and the new venture was draining his money and time. But De Sena understood the potential of his message to change lives, and he believed in it deeply. At the same time, he realized he was packaging that message all wrong.

In describing the shift that ultimately made his new venture a success, Joe De Sena explains, “I’m a snake oil salesman. I’ve had to deceive people and continue to deceive people. The reason is because human beings’ number one source of motivation comes from avoiding discomfort.” To counteract this ancient wiring, De Sena determined he needed to pinpoint a void that a large enough segment of modern people felt in their lives, and then he had to position what he was selling as the way to fill it.

To this end, De Sena figured out that a considerable number of people in the modern world felt unfulfilled by the soft lifestyle enabled by first-world countries. Armed with this knowledge, he developed a hypothesis that if he could give these people a common identity, he could override their reluctance to embark on the uncomfortable path of lifestyle change.

To make this happen, he reinvented Peak as Spartan Race.

At their core, Spartan Races are intense obstacle course challenges that test participants’ strength and endurance at various levels. The courses emphasize commitment and strength, and they challenge you to stretch the limits of your capabilities. Everything is presented as an extension of the values of ancient Spartan culture—namely, those of self-reliance, physical perfection, and toughness.

It is the packaging that gives what he offers so much meaning to those who take part in it. It allows participants to see themselves as part of a 3,000-year-old tradition pioneered by a breed of warriors who dedicated their lives to personal betterment through rugged living.

“I think Spartan is really the yogi vegan thing wrapped in a cloak and an ancient Greek helmet,” explains De Sena.

That the wrapping he chose is based on a hallowed tradition that has been memorialized in countless novels, works of art, and legends is no accident. Particularly after the release of the hit movie 300 in 2007, which depicts a stylized version of the Spartan victory against the Persians at Thermopylae, the designation of Spartan became synonymous in the popular imagination with toughness and tenacity and the ability to overcome obstacles. In other words, to be a “Spartan” has become prestigious.

From its start as a single race in Burlington, Vermont, in 2010, Spartan grew to 1 million racers participating in 250-plus events in more than 40 countries. There are also bestselling books, media productions, and community gatherings. Carola Jain, the company’s chief marketing officer, describes it like this: “There are all these people—20,000 people—with Spartan tattoos. It’s like a little cult. They want to go around and tell everybody because they know how positively it’s impacted their life.”

No matter what you’re selling, there’s a lot you can learn from Spartan Race’s example. De Sena understood that when Aronson and Pratkanis are talking about the power of packaging, they are talking about something that—while it might be expressed visually—is fundamentally more profound. It is about how you use seemingly surface-level details to generate a cause, movement, or tribe in which people can invest their identities.

When you’re deciding on your own package, consider what gap—of meaning or emotion or identity—you can help fill with what you produce. Then create a name, an image, and a message that people can latch onto and use to make themselves feel as if they are part of something vital and monumental. If you can do that, people will follow you anywhere you want to take them.

However, basing your packaging on a void in the marketplace—solely on what people want (whether or not they know it yet)—is not enough. Instead, you must find the spot where that void meets an image that only you and you alone can project and provide. What this means is that you need to figure out the inherent elements of your personality that make you you, your most treasured interests, and even your quirks and weaknesses.

Typically, we display these parts of ourselves in a haphazard and disjointed way, mixing our most revealing parts with those that society expects from us or that we just fall into. Work instead on eliminating those haphazard parts and replacing them with those that most accurately reflect the real you. Exaggerate these elements in your packaging. Blow them up. But whatever you do, don’t bury them. Bring them to the fore.

Despite our modern so-called sophistication, we are every bit as tribal an animal as we were when our ancestors were scouring the Gold Coast of Africa for the shellfish that would save us from extinction. Ironically, human beings of all kinds are remarkably similar in most ways—from our genetic makeup to our behavioral patterns. What divides us is all surface level. As such, to lead people in the direction you want them to go, you need to take advantage of these manufactured divisions, and the only way to do so is to become a master of working with surfaces.

There is a reason chieftains and kings wore clothing that set them apart from the masses. There is a reason that national flags and symbols have, throughout history, exerted such a powerful sway over people that they have gone to war and died to defend them. We see these external pieces of packaging as inseparable from our identities.

Whenever you make a choice about the clothing you wear, the colors you display, the symbols (or logos) you use, think hard about how they can allow people to identify with a tribe or movement or type, which you lead and which the stuff you’re selling embodies. Does it allow them to say, “I’m a Spartan,” or “I’m a Communist,” or “I’m a Vayniac” (or whatever the equivalent is in your case)? If so, you’re on the right track.

Putting It into Practice