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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Some Case Studies Using the Method

“How do I get an agent?”

That’s the question that screenwriters, directors, and actors get asked all the time. The industry has gatekeepers, and you don’t have the keys to the gate, so an agent is the answer.

As Brian Koppelman has generously pointed out, it doesn’t work in this direct a manner. Sure, the agent will field calls for you, but he’s not going to become your full-time sales rep, making calls night and day and tirelessly promoting you to the industry.

The method isn’t to go out and find an agent. The method is to do work so impossibly magical that agents and producers come looking for you.

You, the one who cared enough to put it all on the table, who fell in love with your viewers and your craft, and who made something that mattered.

It doesn’t have to be a feature film or a Pulitzer-winning play. In fact, the approach works best if it’s not a fully polished and complete creation.

The best work will create an imbalance in the viewer, one that can only be remedied by spreading the word, by experiencing this with someone else. The tension this imbalance creates forces the word to spread. It means that asking, “Have you seen . . . ?” raises the status of the asker, and the champions multiply.

What matters is the connection you made. Everyone has ten friends, fifty colleagues, a hundred acquaintances. And you can cajole them into seeing your work . . . and then what happens?

If it’s electric, if it makes an impact, if the right sort of tension is created, they’ll have to tell someone else.

Because telling someone else is what humans do. It’s particularly what we do if we work with ideas. Telling others about how we’ve changed is the only way to relieve our tension.

This is the hard work we discovered many pages ago. The hard work of deciding that this is your calling, of showing up for those you seek to change.

Do that first.

Tesla broke the other cars first

When the Tesla Model S was launched, its primary function was to tell a story that, for a lot of luxury car neophiliacs, would break their current car.

Break it in the sense that it wasn’t fun to own anymore.

Wasn’t worth bragging about.

Didn’t increase their status as a smart, wealthy person, who was clearly smarter and wealthier than everyone else.

This luxury car owner went to sleep the night before, delighted that the car in the garage was shiny, new, and state of the art. That it was safe, efficient, and worthy.

And then he or she woke up to discover that the story was no longer true.

Tesla understood that no one who bought one of the first fifty thousand Teslas actually needed a car. They all had perfectly fine cars.

So Elon Musk created a car that changed the story that a specific group told themselves, a story that undid their status as early adopters and as tech geeks and as environmentalists and as those that supported audacity.

All at once.

The existing car companies have always had a hard time turning concept cars into real ones. They launch concept cars at auto shows to normalize them, to socialize the innovations, to make it more likely that the real car, years down the road, won’t bomb.

They couldn’t launch the Tesla. Not because they didn’t know how (they did) and not because they didn’t have the resources (they did). No, Ford and GM and Toyota didn’t launch the Tesla because car companies like us don’t take risks like this. And their customers felt the same way.

Making a car that could have the impact the Tesla did on the story of luxury cars wasn’t easy. Musk chose to go to difficult extremes in positioning the car on behalf of his fans: it’s the fastest, the safest, and the most efficient car of its size, ever. All three.

This audacity is available to more and more organizations as technology shifts from “Could it be done?” to “Do we have the guts?” The NRA as a role model

There are few groups more controversial than the National Rifle Association. But as focused nonprofit/political marketers, they have no peer.

They have only five million members, less than 2 percent of the population, but have used that base to change the attitude and focus of thousands of lawmakers. They are regularly vilified by the masses but continue to confound expectations in their impact, revenue, and profile.

When nonprofits talk about changing hearts and minds, when they target “everyone” and seek to get bigger, they can learn critical strategic lessons from the NRA instead. By focusing on the minimal viable audience (just five million people), the NRA is very comfortable saying, “It’s not for you.” By activating those members and making it easy for them to talk to their friends, they’re able to create significant leverage. A Pew study shows that gun owners are more than twice as likely to contact government officials about their issues than nonowners are.

The NRA intentionally creates “people like us.” They’re comfortable with insiders and outsiders, and often issue public statements that are, at their best, viciously divisive. They have bent a corner of the culture in significant ways, and they’ve done it not by changing worldviews but by embracing them.

The NRA isn’t my version of “better,” but it clearly resonates with those that they seek to serve.

This persistent, disciplined approach to an issue is precisely how much of the change has been made in our culture.

Getting the boss to say yes

It’s one thing to market to the world, but it feels quite different to market to one person . . . like your boss.

Except it’s not. Not really.

Your boss is probably not eager to change her worldview. She wants what she’s always wanted. She sees things through the lens of her experience, not yours. She is aware of who the people like us are, and what they think. She wants to do things that help her achieve her goals, which probably include status, safety, and respect.

If you go to her with what you want, with a focus on price or features or false urgency, it’s unlikely to lead to the answer you seek.

If you go to her asking for authority without offering responsibility, that too is unlikely to get you very far.

But if you can dig deep and see the status roles, can decode dominion versus affiliation, and can use trust to earn enrollment, the process can change.

You can produce better by serving the people you market to. Turning them from customers to students. Gaining enrollment. Teaching. Connecting. Step by step, drip by drip.