“She’s no longer a 10.”
So said your favorite President Trump while running for office back in 2015.
He was talking about former Supermodel Heidi Klum. And at the time he said it, Heidi was out of the Supermodel business, and was a mother of 4, and simply not a Supermodel anymore.
Her response?
She had quite a bit to say, it turned out.
Including:
“…[women] do so many things, so in my book, every woman is a 10.”
Clearly she has never read the description of the character Granny in my Enoch Wars books.
Whatever the case, here’s why I bring it up:
Heidi kept bringing it back up afterwards to the media.
Each time, she was visibly more angry, and more rattled than the time before.
All because he simply said she was “no longer a 10.”
The result was a lot of free press for Trump at the time, and his polling numbers shot up even while the mush cookies, white knights, and sob sisters declared his candidacy was dead now, there’s no way he would be elected saying things like that, blah blah blah.
Point of this is not to glorify Trump’s comment.
It’s to highlight the fact how, with 5 words he was able to generate massive amounts of press, attention, and, yes, engagement. And he did it in a very sneaky way he’s used probably hundreds of times — whether when haunting Rosie O’Donnell, fighting with the media, or mocking his enemies.
I call it “sneaky” because nobody in marketing ever does it.
And the reason they never do it is probably because they don’t understand it.
In fact, I would guess probably less than 1 in 1,000 marketers (not including many “Email Players” subscribers, as I have talked about it before in the newsletter), with all their super persuasion books and social media chest pounding about how great they are, even know what he’s doing. And lest you think this is some kind of inherently evil tactic because “TRUMP!” think again. This tactic he uses and has mastered to the point he probably doesn’t even think about it anymore, it’s just something he does… is also something the late, great Gene Schwartz talked about in his magnificent “Breakthrough Advertising” book.
I used it quite a bit in the weight loss niche especially.
And, when I had the opportunity to be a guest on a podcast with the late, great master of negotiation Jim Camp that David Garfinkel & Brian McLeod invited me on shortly before Mr. Camp’s death, I asked him about it.
After I described it, I asked Jim Camp what he thought of it.
His answer:
“You’re solving a real problem and you’re creating vision for that person of a solution to a problem they see clearly coming because you’ve helped them discover it. So all you’ve done is provide a solution to a real problem for her.”
There you have it.
Trump uses it.
Schwartz used it.
And Jim Camp used it.
I also use it, a lot, in my emails & sales copy, and explain it in detail on pages 17 & 18 in the July “Email Players” issue, along with an example of it from an email I used in the prostate niche.
And now you can start using it too, to potentially get people obsessively reading and buying from your emails
To subscribe in time to get this special issue, go here before tomorrow’s deadline:
Ben Settle
