[Exclusive Excerpt] The Hype Handbook (and why Bacon & Eggs is the quintessential "American" breakfast)
12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World’s Greatest Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers (by Michael F. Schein)
Why do some thought leaders (i.e. Tai Lopez, Grant Cardone, or Marie Forleo) become business world sensations whereas other, arguably more credible, subject matter experts and entrepreneurs miss out on the “hype” behind their work?
Michael F. Schein, long-time friend and founder of MicroFame Media, has spent the last few years studying the world’s greatest self-promoters, cult leaders, propagandists, marketers, celebrities, and more to find repeatable tactics we can use to increase awareness and publicity for our legit business ventures that positively influence the lives of our Ideal Clients.
His clients include eBay, Citrix, Equifax, LinkedIn, and a wide range of individual consultants and CEOs.
Last week, Michael published The Hype Handbook (McGraw-Hill) and below I’ve been granted an exclusive excerpt to share with you from Chapter #2, which is all about “the Piggybacking Principle” and creating your own “secret society” of raving fans.
Learn why bacon and eggs became the quintessential “American” breakfast, cigarette smoking spent decades avoiding public shame for its negative health consequences, and Dixie Cups became the “go-to” party supply, all because of one man’s hype.
Enjoy!
-Jared
EXCERPT FROM THE HYPE HANDBOOK:
While a plate of bacon and eggs is seen today as the quintessential American breakfast, this wasn’t always the case.
In fact, as recently as the early 1920s, most people in the United States kept their first meals of the day light. It wasn’t until Edward Bernays set up shop as the original public relations professional that this all changed.
As nephew of psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays was in a perfect position to learn about the inner workings of the human mind.
However, Bernays lent his knowledge to purposes considerably less pure than those of his esteemed relative. Early in his career, Bernays worked as part of the Creel Committee—the propaganda agency responsible for selling World War I to the American public with sayings like “Make the World Safe for Democracy.”
He then turned his talents to the more lucrative private sector.
While on retainer to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes, he effectively eliminated the taboo of women smoking by organizing a “spontaneous” march in which suffragettes lit up cigarettes to demonstrate their liberation from the shackles of the past.
He was behind a behind-the-scenes campaign to promote the idea that disposable cups were more sanitary than reusable ones on behalf of Dixie Cup.
He even engineered the overthrow of a democratically elected government in Guatemala for the United Fruit Company.
It was while working on a campaign for Beech-Nut—one of the country’s predominant producers of pork products at the time—that he managed to change the culinary patterns, and waistlines, of the American public forever after.
Edward Bernays had spent a great deal of his professional energy cultivating ties with some of the country’s most influential people across various industries—people who themselves had webs of connections across their fields. Now he contacted a prominent physician and persuaded him to conduct a “study” on the health benefits of bacon.
What the physician came back with was that bacon was, in fact, the perfect breakfast food in that it “replaces the energy you lose during sleep.”
Once assured of these results, Bernays asked the doctor to communicate his findings to the medical community, which he did by distributing them to a list of 5,000 MDs across the United States. Within no time, doctors from coast to coast were recommending that their patients eat bacon for breakfast, and the dietary habits of a nation were transformed.
PIGGYBACK ON THOSE WHO HAVE WHAT YOU WANT
Regardless of how you feel about the ethical implications of pushing packets of concentrated cholesterol on an unsuspecting public, there is a lot anyone selling anything can learn from Edward Bernays’s notorious promotional campaign.
A lot of advice on marketing, promotion, and sales focuses on painstakingly building a following person by person. Bernays, on the other hand, understood that the appearance of a spontaneous grassroots following is far more important than whether it actually happens that way.
Where he found real power was in identifying the individuals or institutions that had the most sway with the audiences and markets he needed to reach and then getting these individuals and institutions to want to advocate products, causes, messages, or ideas on his behalf.
It is difficult and time consuming to get masses of people to discover you and love you. The most effective hype artists hedge against this difficulty with a two-pronged approach.
On one hand they generate the public perception of a spontaneous groundswell of dedicated attention (one of the best ways of doing this is detailed in the previous strategy).
At the same time, however, they work assiduously to foster strategic alliances and mutually beneficial friendships. In many cases, it is the latter that has the biggest impact.
Jared Kleinert is the founder of Meeting of the Minds (motm.co), as well as a TED speaker, 2x award-winning author, and USA Today's "Most Connected Millennial".
Meeting of the Minds curates "super-connectors" and subject matter experts as invite-only attendees to 3 day summits in places like Napa Valley, Bermuda, and elsewhere, as well as “deep dives” such as this Marketing and Biz Dev strategy & implementation workshop. Members of the MOTM network include CEOs of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses, creators of globally-recognized brands and social movements, New York Times bestselling authors, founders of pre-IPO tech unicorns, c-suite execs from Fortune 500 companies, and others.
Jared's career began at 15 years old when he started his first company, and took off at 16 while working as the first intern, and then one of the first 10 employees, for an enterprise SaaS company called 15Five, which today has raised over $40M and has almost 2000 forward-thinking companies as monthly recurring clients.
Later, Jared would become a delegate to President Obama's 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Malaysia, write multiple books including the "#1 Entrepreneurship Book of 2015", and speak at TED@IBM the day before he turned 20.
As a highly-sought after keynote speaker and consultant, Jared’s clients range from organizations like Facebook, Samsung, Bacardi, Estee Lauder, IBM, Cornell, Berkeley, AdAge, and the National Speakers Association. His insights on entrepreneurship, networking, marketing, and business development have been featured in Forbes, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Fox Business and more.
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