How to break the hold of MAGA

Marketing lessons from the bestseller, Your Money or Your Life

As DJT takes over what he considers his personal mega-corporation of America - and we call our country - what do we do, we little people, in the nosebleed section of the bleachers, far from the action?

We can get up off our seats, cry foul, yell at the umpire, cheer for the democracy team, but our voices don’t reach down to where it counts.

The state of the little people

Everyone I know is wondering what we can do. I once was the lead paddler on a river raft trip, so I know the feeling of digging into water, in a class 3 rapid, bow pointing to the sky and paddle pulling on air.

It feels like that up here in the nosebleed section. We’re paddling, but going under.

My focus for years has been relocalization - shoring up local resilience as the climate destabilizes and institutions crack - so my instinct is towards that. With polarization, it’s even more important so I show up for Indivisible, which is doing an incredible job of organizing a peaceful resistance to this dictator’s march to dominance. The Women’s March. 50501. Progressives and liberals are finding their Mojo. We privately know that dictators take a long time to dislodge, but still do what we can within peaceful means.

What more can I do?

Is the pen mightier than the sword?

Pundits, communications teams, essayists, journalists and, yes, Substackers, are paddling with our pens for all we are worth through these rapids. I sit down every morning to wrap ideas and feelings in words that can matter.

I also have a lived experience of paddling through similar rapids for decades. With Your Money or Your Life, a bestseller for over 3 decades now, we moved the needle a bit on the religion of consumerism, impacting a few hundred thousand people, though we didn’t, as we hoped, change the whole damn society. How, other than rank persistence and team focus?

Before launching Your Money or Your Life, I took an adult education course in marketing from a brassy red head who gave me clues. Will any of these success strategies work now? Let’s see. Warning. You may not like these seat of the pants lessons. They may not scratch the itch of fury. But I feel called to distill that lived wisdom… as a writer.

Features versus Benefits

From that brassy red head marketing expert, I learned this key insight about Features and Benefits.

Features are what you our into the product: style, color, shape, design, packaging, statistics, market analysis, buttons, Bluetooth, channels, chips, policies and on and on and on.

The customer, though, doesn’t care about any of that. They care about benefits, how the product brilliantly meets their real, felt needs.

You want them to care about policy. They care about themselves and their families and their wallets and their weekends.

It’s also called “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”.

Selling on features talks down to your customers. Selling on benefits talks to their lived experience.

This is unfortunate for high-minded people like me who don’t want to sell into ego needs like status, power, sex-appeal, security, phobias (dirt, germs), dominance, control, in-with-the-in-crowd. Sorry. Self-interest is wired into our species. Fortunately, though, egos also want to be good or seen as good, to do good and be recognized for that, to love and be loved. We want respect, admiration, and autonomy.

Respect and honor, then, are also sizzle, but without the “lower” ego desires, it’s won’t be a best seller of anything - a book, a movement, a politician.

The very best sizzle is a pitch for a product that appeals to both self-interest and higher values. Your Money or Your life fulfilled on that: I’ll save myself and by the by, save the planet, or I’ll save the planet in a practical way that saves me too.

You can’t get to this without respecting the real needs of real people: your customer.

Who is your customer?

You can’t say “everyone.” Everyone doesn’t exist. Which types of people want what you offer enough to change some habit or behavior? Don’t bother with extremists. Either left of right, however right or wrong.

I learned this from George Lakey, a Quaker nonviolent change teacher. You do not try to convince people at the extremes, who are rigid, righteous, resolute and reactive in their positions. These are the people who get under our skin. They have us frothing at the mouth and feeling helpless/hopeless about our country.

No. Not them. Don’t waste your time.

You “market” to the people on “the other side” but closest to your point of view. These might be independents, reluctant or disillusioned Trump (or Harris) voters, or non-voters. You want to speak to their misgivings, their disappointments, their love for the country or their utter despair that politics is a pathway to well-being for them and their type of people. Assume their choices are considered, but not ideological. No shame, no blame. Respect them. If you were in their shoes, you might think or want what they do. Disdain never works.

Focus on the persuadables; if your pitch is plausible, and you are trustworthy, and your path doesn’t require them to abandon everything, they might listen, and act.

Name the pain and offer a viable alternative

You market into the greatest point of pain of your customer (not you). If people aren’t in pain, they aren’t looking for alternatives. With Your Money or Your Life, the point of felt pain was financial desperation - never enough, stuck in dead end or deadening jobs with no way out, just slammed by a big recession. The way out we offered was a straightforward, step-by-step program for tracking and evaluating the flow of money and stuff through your life - with the carrot of financial independence. The felt pain was pressing. And the program was proven through 2 decades of living, and 1 decade of teaching, and a survey showing that those who followed the steps for 6 months cut expenses by 20% and were happier!

This is also the great teaching of the Buddha. We are marionettes of the drives to seek pleasure and avoid pain. But there is an answer, he said:

• Existence is suffering.

• The origin of suffering is desire.

• There is a way out of suffering.

• The 4-fold path is the way.

Unfortunately, charlatans can also use this formula as well, if they don’t mind lying, which they don’t. However, see below about cognitive dissonance.

I tried to hit a second bullseye with my next book about local food, but I read the pain wrong. I could see the problems with the long, global supply chains, and pesticide-ridden food system. I saw local food as the antidote: fresh, nutritious, increasing local prosperity, hedge against disruptions, and community building. None of that convinced anyone. The grocery stores are full. Food is plentiful, cheap and convenient. Local food means shopping sweet little farmers’ markets and farm stands. It’s inconvenient. It’s seasonal. And it’s expensive. No thank you. My activist-self got the better of what I knew to be true.

What is the greatest pain point now? Perhaps loneliness? If you promise an end to loneliness, say as joining a movement, or an insurrection, people may grab hold in a way that no amount of sensible strategies could. Or perhaps buyer’s remorse? Or maybe financial insecurity? Back to Buddha, avoid pain, seek pleasure is a great sales pitch for willingness to change. No shame No blame

If you shame or blame people into change, you and your customer will both be miserable and stuck. Punitive religions are good at controlling through threats, but compassionate religions forgive you for your mistakes and invite you back into the fold, again and again and again. Offer redemption, not correctness.

Cognitive Dissonance

If the gap between what is promised and the evidence of our own eyes is great enough, we feel cognitive dissonance. Believing two contradictory things at the same time is increasingly uncomfortable, and the mind demands resolution. Leon Festinger invented that term, which Wikipedia defines as:

“a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions. Being confronted by situations that create this dissonance or highlight these inconsistencies motivates change in their cognitions or actions to reduce this dissonance, maybe by changing a belief or maybe by explaining something away.”

This is behind one of the most amazing cracks in the Joe Rogan support of DJT. On June 18 he said:

"These ICE raids are f****** nuts man…I don't think if the Trump administration, if they're running and they said, 'We're gonna go to Home Depot and we're gonna arrest all the people at Home Depot. We're gonna go to construction sites and we're going to just like tackle people at construction sites, I don't think anybody would have signed up for that."

This is how cognitive dissonance can change minds. I voted for Trump. Trump is doing things that conflict with my values. Something needs to give. And this was Joe Rogan, with 14.5 million followers! We’ll see whether that comment unfolds into a rift or blows over. If it is a rift, it will make a difference.

You can do this with your messaging, be it to your uncle or on your protest signs or in your opeds or on the campaign trail. “I wonder how you make sense of that he promised this xxx but we have that yyy?” “I don’t know about you, but it makes me crazy that I see with my own eyes that xxx is happening while he claims yyy is happening. What about you? Scratch your head. Rub your chin. Be sincere.

It’s tricky. "Make America Great Again” is snake oil, yes, but If people buy it and it doesn’t produce the promised results, it could cause the customer to cling tighter to resolve the dissonance rather than admit they were conned. Sure, it didn’t cure my rash, but I would swear my eyesight is better.

Blind Spot

Your rear-view mirror does not show you cars close beside you. That’s your blind spot, and smart drivers know to swivel their heads to check before passing.

People with large egos have blind spots. They stop seeing the part they don’t want to see or don’t need to see because they are the biggest truck on the road or kid on the block.

With Your Money or Your Life we spoke into that blind spot by asking, “Is the money you are spending buying you a life that you love?” That pulled the rug out from marketing speak about you will be happier, smarter, better than others with our product.

What is DJT & Co’s blind spot? Is it Epstein? The courts pushing back, and winning? The Governor’s pushing back, and winning? Not ending wars? Prices going up? Think about it. And interrogate your assumptions.

Sound-bytes

Sound-bytes are clever phrases that carry your message. Your Money or Your Life was a perfect sound-byte.

Sound-bytes are ear worms. They aren’t easy to craft. Wars run on sound-byte rallying cries, often lies that our leaders know are lies. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Domino Theory. Biden’s Build Back Better was DOA. Trump’s Make American Great Again worked.

Consider Gavin Newsom with his “fight fire with fire”, promising to up the gerrymanders gambit in Texas with a bigger and better one in California. It works, especially with the timing. It’s also “If they go low, we will go low, but if they don’t, we won’t,” retains the higher ground. Music to our ears. Suddenly, we see that Governors have more power and guts than kowtowing congresspeople. Read this on Substack. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!!

This is an art. Start watching for effective sound-bytes. Why are they earworms?

What does this have to do with reclaiming America?

Here’s where we all need to imagine, test, learn, and work hard. I don’t have a magic sound-byte. What I offer you is a check list, in a way, for your messaging… because we (those who did not vote for DJT) are losing.

1. Do people really want what you are offering, and how you are offering it? Do they have prior desire? Or a deeply felt pain?

2. Are you coming from respect for the person, even if you don’t agree with their position?

3. Are you, or your standard bearer, believable, and trustworthy?

4. Are you selling benefits, not features? What’s the sizzle? The thing that makes people’s mouths water?

5. Are you honoring the whole person, both the ego needs and the higher aspirations for meaning and goodness? Or are you pandering or pontificating?

6. Are you offering a believable, reliable path out of despair? Are you offering grounded hope? Are you a reliable and relatable “avatar”?

7. Are you speaking to those with ears, as Jesus said, or are you going after extremists?

8. Can you induce cognitive dissonance, a visceral gap between belief and results?

9. Is your language simple and direct? Are you speaking to people the way they speak to themselves and one another?

Nobody wants this

A friend, talking about tanks along the beach in LA, said, “Nobody wants this. Nobody wants to go to the beach and see tanks and guns.” Maybe that has some legs, I thought. Related to Joe Rogan’s sentiment, “I didn’t vote for this.”.

• Nobody wants parents and children to be separated.

• Nobody wants the rich to get richer and us to get poorer.

• Nobody wants innocent people cowering in their house, unable to leave

• “I didn’t sign up for …

  • raids on innocent people…

  • the owner of our favorite cafe in a small Midwest town scooped up in a raid.

  • ICE smashing a car window of an American citizen who knew his rights and refused to open his door.

Maybe there could be a campaign called “Nobody wants this” with pictures of the norms violating behavior or “Did you sign up for this?”

Do these have legs? Try them out. Play with the messaging principles: respect, persuadables, proven path, aiming into the pain, cognitive dissonance, pithy messaging that goes deep into our values.

Or look for good messaging, out there even if you don’t agree with the cause. Why is it sticky?

WAITT

We’re all in this together. I’m dropping these clues into our common work of dislodging the worst effects of this administration and returning our country to sanity and democracy.

I simply hope this helps. I’m working hard to find the words to move others. If the pen is mightier than the sword, let’s all get good with fighting words.