HYPE STRATEGY #1

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God but never without belief in a devil.

—ERIC HOFFER

Shep Gordon had a problem.

His client Alice Cooper had finally made it in America. Not only that, but Gordon had landed the band the gig of a lifetime—a headlining spot playing the 10,000-seat-capacity Wembley Arena in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the band had only managed to sell 500 of these seats, and there was less than a month before the big show.

Gordon had been in a similar spot before. When he had first started working with the Alice Cooper Band in Los Angeles, the mellow Southern California audiences hated the band’s harsh garage rock sound. Never one to be deterred by something as unimportant as actual music, Gordon had pushed for the band to compensate with an increasingly theatrical live show. It wasn’t long before an Alice Cooper performance looked a lot more like a circus freak tent than anything resembling a contemporary rock concert. However, the band wasn’t translating overseas, and a failure on the scale of what was beginning to look inevitable as the Wembley show approached had the potential to upend all his hard work.

Lucky for him, pressure had always spurred Shep Gordon’s best ideas.

A few days before the show, the manager secretly arranged to have a new promotional photo taken of Alice Cooper’s lead singer. But this was no standard press shot. After a good deal of back-and-forth, Gordon convinced Alice Cooper to sprawl nude for the picture with only a boa constrictor covering his most sensitive area.

Next Gordon rented a truck, had the photo blown up to the size of a billboard, and had it mounted on the back of the vehicle. He found a driver who would be willing to risk a bit of jail time to take part in his plan and paid him handsomely to make it worth his while.

It was during rush hour that Shep Gordon lit the fuse on the hype bomb he had so meticulously prepared. The truck drove into the heart of Piccadilly Circus (the most highly trafficked area of London) and “broke down.” London plunged into chaos. A line of cars snaked (no pun intended) for miles out of the heart of Piccadilly. News helicopters broadcast the image to households across the nation, sending respectable Brits into apoplectic fits. Parliament discussed banning the group from the country. Newspapers featured gems like “Ban Alice the Horror Rocker. He’s Absolutely Sick.” As for the kids—they loved it. Alice Cooper’s newest single rocketed to the top of the UK charts. And Wembley Arena—the band sold out the entire venue, and Alice Cooper went on to become one of England’s biggest acts.

HATRED: THE GREAT UNIFIER

From his earliest days as Alice Cooper’s manager, Shep Gordon understood that trying to break the band solely on its sonic qualities gave them no advantage at all. The opportunity he saw was in positioning this band of weirdos as the embodiment of the generation gap that was at its height in the late sixties and early seventies. He reasoned that if he could get parents to see Alice Cooper as the antithesis of all the values they held dear, he would get hordes of their record-buying children to rally passionately around the band.

“I wanted to get all the parents in the world hating Alice Cooper,” wrote Gordon in his autobiography, “and all the parents weren’t reading Rolling Stone and Creem. . . We had to jump over the rock media and get Alice in Newsweek and Time and Businessweek and the newspapers and tabloids and evening news, all the places where the parents would see him and be revolted by him.”

In the United States, the manager had made this happen by encouraging the members of the Alice Cooper Band to run with their most polarizing ideas. For example, their shows often featured mock executions, and they once took credit for the accidental dismemberment of a chicken at one of the their concerts. Parents were appalled, and kids couldn’t get enough. Gordon’s Piccadilly Circus plot in England was simply an extension of the same strategy.

WHY PICKING FIGHTS WORKS

There is nothing more effective for getting people to rally around a leader than the existence of a common enemy. While this doesn’t mean you should go around calling on people to commit acts of violence or cruelty, you will need to publicly take a bold stand about what you’re against, in addition to talking about what you’re for. Shep Gordon instinctively knew what science has since confirmed. Human beings are driven to define themselves as part of an in-group, which they see as existing in contrast to some “other.” In the case of Alice Cooper, that other was parents. The band members’ antics earned them the outrage of moms and dads everywhere, which is exactly what made kids identify with them so strongly.

During a series of excavations of early human settlements on a promontory off the coast of South Africa called Pinnacle Point, anthropologist Curtis W. Marean developed a theory of why we are so strongly wired to interpret the world in this way. It was there that he uncovered evidence of habitation it would seem was the refuge of the remaining members of our species—a small handful of tribes—that were not wiped out during a mass extinction event. What kept the members of these tribes from going the way of the rest is that they uncovered a dense population of shellfish in the area. The only real impediment to getting their hands on that food source was the other tribes that were competing for it. Under these conditions, people who had a high propensity to cooperate with those they considered to be like them but to act aggressively to those they perceived were not tended to survive at a higher rate than others.

Once conditions improved, the descendants of these survivors spread to every corner of the globe. Their outlook is now encoded in our internal chemistry. For example, we form emotional attachments as a result of a neurotransmitter called oxytocin. When your brain secretes oxytocin in the presence of someone you are forming a relationship with, you experience a feeling of closeness, warmth, and commitment to that person. But oxytocin has another, lesser-known function as well. The same brain chemical that cements bonding with people inside your circle also causes you to experience feelings of hostility toward those outside your tribe. In other words, on a purely physical level, fomenting an us-versus-them dynamic creates stronger and stronger bonds between the leaders who spark divisions and those that follow them.

Our tribal tendencies may not be rational, but their pull is incredibly strong. If you’re able to accept this facet of human nature, it places you in a powerful position. We live in a society that calls on us to relentlessly sell ourselves. But as the demands on us to self-promote grow more pressing, people are getting better and better at tuning out the self-serving messages they are bombarded with all day long. However, what our brains cannot disregard are messages that tell us to take sides. This is the secret the most effective hype artists understand. A hundred fifty thousand years and eight thousand miles away from the primal refuge where this behavior was born, it has continued to alter the course of world history.

THE CORNERSTONE OF PROPAGANDA

Regardless of whether you agree with the forty-fifth president’s politics, there is no denying that the perception Trump has managed to create around himself is vastly at odds with the cold realities of his track record. After a few early high-profile real estate wins that were largely funded by his family fortune, his failures significantly outnumbered his successes. Trump Steak. Trump Airlines. Trump Vodka. Trump Mortgage. Trump Magazine. Trump University. All were debacles—characterized by disappointed customers, stiffed vendors, and confusion on the part of virtually everyone involved.

The majority of businesspeople go out of their way to create great products, provide amazing service, and treat customers well. They do this based on the idea that each job well done will provide the foundation upon which to build the next win. When they do miss the mark, most of them work to repair the damage, make things right, and learn from the experience so they can create something more valuable and enduring the next time.

Trump is the exact opposite. He disregards the experience of his customers, partners, and vendors and any other data that might be telling him his latest venture is plummeting. Yet he is able to use each of his bombs to propel himself another step up the ladder because he is a natural hype artist, with a particular mastery of the skill we’ve been discussing in this chapter.

Here is an abbreviated list of the people and institutions that Trump has picked fights with since he became president: Mexicans, Muslims, Rosie O’Donnell, the continent of Africa, CNN, Megyn Kelly, NFL players, Omarosa Manigault, James Comey, Robert Mueller, Katy Tur, the cast of Hamilton, the Canadian Prime Minister, Harley-Davidson, Hunter Biden, Nancy Pelosi, NATO, and Greta Thunberg. The press and large swaths of social media spend a lot of time wringing their hands about this behavior. Yet the more the feuds he starts, the more his followers continue to adore him. Quite simply, the man has an intuitive understanding of human nature.

Trump’s approach surprises many of us because it has, until now, been largely absent (or at least, not so overt) in American politics. But he is far from the first political figure in history to use this method. In fact, generating this sort of in-group versus out-group dynamic is a main feature of what is most commonly referred to as “propaganda.” Social psychologists Elliot Aronson and Anthony Pratkanis have dedicated their careers to dissecting the propaganda techniques that the most successful leaders of mass movements have used to get large numbers of desperate people to identify with them, rally to their causes, and act according to how they would like them to act. In their landmark volume, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, they boil down the many tactics and techniques that propagandists use: “What the propagandist is really saying is ‘You are on my side (never mind that I created the teams); now act like it and do what we say.’”

While some of the greatest tragedies in human history have been perpetuated as a result of propaganda, there is no denying that it works. While the content of what these propagandists promote may be evil, the mechanisms of mass persuasion they use are not tied to any specific morality. Picking a fight and creating us-versus-them dynamics can be as much about pitting new and interesting ideas against old and outmoded ones as it is about encouraging violence and hatred. As someone who is working to build attention and attraction around ideas that can make the world a better place (which I hope you are), it is essential to understand how human psychology really works rather than how we might wish it did. And few people understand this better than that subset of hype artists called propagandists.

So we must study them, learn what they know, and reapply their tactics for good. With that in mind, before moving on, we need to take a look at another of the masters of political propaganda whose strategies we can adapt and apply to whatever we happen to be working on.

NOT ALL ENEMIES ARE CREATED EQUAL

Otto von Bismarck was feeling frustrated. Despite having almost single-handedly transformed his country into a dominant European power as prime minister of the Kingdom of Prussia, the central mission of his life was still out of his grasp.

While Bismarck had been working to create a united German nation for years, the people of the 27 states of Central Europe were simply too far apart in terms of culture to consider joining together—especially with the militaristic Prussians at the helm. It was a problem for which he could not see a solution.

And then it hit him. He would start a war. Bismarck knew there was nothing quite like a war to unify people. But while he realized it was the answer he had been looking for, there was still one question remaining: Which enemy should he choose?

What Bismarck realized was that when it comes to driving a desired outcome, conflict can backfire as often as it succeeds. This master propagandist understood that in a population where many of the cultures, dialects, and perceived identities overlapped with those of the other nations that surrounded them, choosing the wrong enemy could divide the various German states further than they already were.

After a great deal of consideration. Otto von Bismarck settled on France.

The choice was an inspired one. All of the various German peoples had been raised on stories and legends about conflicts with their immediate non-German neighbor that stretched all the way back to Roman times.

Bismarck doctored a note that implied that the king of Prussia had insulted French dignitaries, and then he arranged for it to be published. When the French declared war in response, he was easily able to get the other German states to come to Prussia’s defense. After all, despite the differences the various Germans had with each other, those differences were nothing when compared with what the Germans felt about the aliens on the southwestern border.

The victory of the German alliance in this Franco-Prussian war engendered a newfound pride in the various states. It wasn’t long before there was a brand-new country on the map—the unified nation of Germany.

Selecting the right enemy is key for any effective hype artist. But of all the potential conflicts out there, how do you make sure you’re choosing the one that will result in the reaction you want members of your target audience to have?

In the Introduction, I described a pivotal incident in my early career in which I wrote an article about internet marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk, taking him to task for his relentless focus on hustle. What made this small act of resistance resonate so widely was that so many others felt the same way but weren’t speaking up about it. When they saw my article, they now had a way to put a structure around their beliefs and antagonisms.

Vaynerchuk’s followers had long seen themselves as belonging to a tribe (they even call themselves “Vayniacs”). Now those outside the Vayniac circle who had read my piece had a way to identify themselves as another tribe that defined itself as being against the Vayniacs. And since every tribe needs a leader, and I was the one who stepped out first, I was able to easily assume that role.

The trick is to pinpoint a point of view that you’ve always disagreed with and that you strongly suspect a sizable number of others do too but aren’t speaking up about. Are there business gurus out there that you believe are enriching themselves by giving bad advice? Take a public stand against them. Are there popular ideas floating around that you’ve long felt are absurd or harmful but that no one seems to be talking about? Be the one who does.

What you’ll find is that when you take these sorts of bold positions, the many people who feel the same way you do will gather around you. And that’s how movements are built. People follow other people with a point of view. Get one. Find a prominent figure in your field whose view you disagree with and point it out. Publicly. Repeatedly. And make sure you offer a viable alternative. If you can show people why a commonly held belief is causing more problems than it solves, they will come to see you as the leader of a new movement.

Does this mean that you need to continually insult and attack those who differ from you? Not necessarily. But it does mean you need to draw clear lines between yourself and others.

Ask yourself the following two questions: What point of view do you often encounter in your field that is so wrongheaded that it literally makes you angry? And what point of view in your field are you 100 percent, unshakably confident in? Get clear on your answers to these questions. Spend as long as you need to figure it out. Write your answers down on note cards and tape them above your desk.

Once you figure out the answers to these questions, they can serve as the nexus around which you build your tribe. Find people who differ from your point of view and challenge them on social media. Write articles disagreeing with commonly held orthodoxies in your industry. Pick fights with the gurus and thought leaders in your realm that have been around so long that no one thinks to challenge them anymore.

If you carve out a contrarian and challenging position, you will cause those who tend to see the world your way to rally around you and evangelize your ideas, even if others vehemently disagree with you. It’s a strategy we encounter in all kinds of guises every day without realizing it. It was by using this strategy that Shep Gordon turned the members of a garage rock band into megastars, Donald Trump got himself elected president, and Otto von Bismarck created a new nation. Steve Jobs positioned the Mac as a symbol of the new against the stodgy PC to bring the brand back from obsolescence. Original Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham broke the blues band he managed by positioning it as the anti-Beatles with his brilliant catchphrase “Would you let your daughter go with a Rolling Stone?” The list goes on and on.

At the same time, this powerful strategy cannot exist on its own. If all you do is go around making enemies wherever you go, there will be no one to help you when you need it. Successful hype artists also cultivate relationships with great acumen.

Staking your career on the ability to pick fights while embracing personal connectivity is a paradox. It is how well you navigate this paradox that will ultimately determine your success.

Putting It into Practice