The Right Stuff

 

In the last post, I told you that your customer has to feel loved and special. In the previous post, I mentioned that your customer also needs to be afraid. Sales and public relations bring Fear and love together in the most elegant way. If the customers love you, they trust you. If you tell them they have something to fear, they will be afraid of it. If you like it, they’ll love it. If you hate it, so will they. Just like politicians, salespeople have to present themselves as authority figures. And if you have The Right Stuff, you can use sales and marketing principles to rise to the million-dollar round table or leader of the free world. And when I say “The Right Stuff,” I mean The Right Props.

Sales and political campaigns are run by the same PR and marketing firms. So the props you’ll need to sell, well, anything, will be the exact same props you’ll need to get elected to public office. Your primary prop will be clothing. Clothes create the impression you want to make. If you want to sell life insurance, wear a two thousand dollar hand-tailored suit. If you’re going to sell Krishna, you wear an orange robe and a funny braid. Other products might require you to dress up or dress down. It all depends on who you want to reach.

Going back to Horst and his introduction to the Nazi Brownshirts. (If you don’t remember Horst, review the last two posts.) Would he have paid attention to them if they dressed like regular people? Let’s say they were dressed like factory workers. Horst would assume they were his peers and ignore them or treat them like the cranks they were. If they wore business suits, he wouldn’t have trusted them. But the brown shirts and their swastika armbands made those guys look military. During that period in German history, military uniforms inspired respect and obedience. So when the brown shirts marched into the tavern, Horst automatically treated them like authority figures.

In the mid-80s, I bought a powder blue suit from a thrift store for my Jerry Falwell Halloween costume. I was trying it on when my partner told me we were out of diapers. So I ran out to the convenience store, wearing a powder blue suit. In the two blocks it took me to get to the store, two junkies begged me for Jesus. An actual evangelical preacher came to talk shop until he recognized me. I walked to that convenience store and back over a million times. Yet, nobody recognized me because of the damned suit. This is the power of clothing.

People pay much more attention to clothing than to features like a ponytail and beard. The heaven-colored suit triggered religious feelings in everybody who saw it and didn’t notice it was only fucking Bill being an asshole again. I wore the uniform of the evangelical church, and it was instantly assumed that I was a religious authority. I decided to do another experiment and wore the powder blue suit to a NORML meeting, triggering all sorts of panic and hostility. Until everybody realized it was just Bill being an asshole again. (My friends retaliated by signing me up with everybody from the Catholics to the Rosicrucians.)

Imagine how successful Bernie Sanders would have been if he had dressed like an early 20th Century socialist instead of a banker? Not very. He wouldn’t project the image of authority a majority of Democratic voters expect. The same happened with Barack Obama. His PR people managed his wardrobe. By carefully choosing suits and accessories for him, Barack Obama reflected the authority and security centrist voters demand.

Remember Sam and the dinner seminar he attended? Remember how I kept emphasizing the expansive suits? Fine clothing implies prosperity. Sam was as impressed as hell with Seminar Guy’s hand-tailored suit. It practically smelled like money. And Seminar Guy’s trained monkeys were dolled up in suits from the higher-end retailers. Chances are the monkeys went into debt for those clothes. It was theater. The whole idea was to look prosperous. That added to the illusion that Seminar Guy was THE AUTHORITY on money management.

Do you have to be an authority on anything to be a salesperson/politician? Of course not! Have you seen Donald Trump? That poor moron is so inept I pity him. Everything he touches turns to shit! The one and only intelligent thing the poor pumpkin-colored dimwit ever did was hire the right PR firms. Because in sales and politics, giving the appearance of authority is more important than ability.

It’s all smoke and mirrors and the manipulation of perception. And like magicians’ tricks, they lose their glamour once the customer/voter figures it out. And most people don’t want to give up the glitz and glamour. They want to believe, and all you have to do is meet their irrational expectations, and you’re on the road to wealth and power.

The wardrobe is also the most versatile prop there is. Clothes can also be used for advertising. Look at all the fashions sold because a celebrity wears them? Who hasn’t left a concert without merchandise with the band’s logo silk screened on it? Merchandising is advertising that turns a profit. Look at what a dimwit like Donald Trump did with a stupid red hat. Merchandising is the gift that keeps on giving. It also creates a group identity. MAGA would have fallen apart already if it weren’t for those red hats.

For some sales or political campaigns, books are one of the most fabulous props ever invented and can complement the wardrobe. Books make even the dullest moron look intelligent. Take another look at Trump. He routinely hired ghostwriters and took credit for monumental works like “The Art of the Deal” and “Think Big and Kick Ass.” He presented these learned tomes as his work and made himself look like an authority with a capital A.

Even a sleaze like Seminar Guy can write a book thanks to ghostwriting. He’s a licensed agent and not allowed to publish anything without approval from the State Insurance Commissioner. It takes about two years for the average commission to pass or reject a manuscript. By then, the entire economy has moved on, and the book is outdated. Most high-end insurance agencies have ghostwritten articles that the commission has already vetted. Agents are encouraged to download those articles, put their names on them, and present them as their own work.

All Seminar Guy had to do was download a book that approximated what he was selling. He stuck his name on it and put his picture on the back cover. He paid to have about twenty made up. (And there are presses whose only business is printing prop books for salespeople.) And presto-change-o! Seminar Guy becomes the Harlan Ellison of the financial world. And the funniest thing about it is that a dozen other Seminar Guys are simultaneously putting their names and pictures on the same book.

I don’t think anybody was more surprised at Mein Kampf’s success than the Nazi leadership. Most of them dismissed it as “that silly book.” But Joseph Goebbels, visionary that he was, noticed it had tremendous popularity with the rank-and-file Nazis. So the head Nazis shrugged their shoulders and endorsed it.

The Brown Shirts adored it. They even passed out copies at street corners. Maybe one person in fifty even read it. But Mein Kampf brought in enough new converts that a sawed-off shrimp with a ridiculous mustache became a major leader of the Nazi Party.

Another prop that goes well with clothing is a title. Reverend, Brother, Father, Doctor, and professor are all guaranteed sellers. Even the Rosicrucians from San Jose call themselves Frater and Sorer and add FRC behind their names. It sounds so learned and esoteric. The Born Again Ministry Industry is full of doctors, brothers, reverends, reverend brothers, sisters, and mothers, and they all have their followers. The Seminar Guy I worked for called himself a doctor. If pressed, he had to reveal he was a doctor of Physical Education, but he got a hell of a lot of mileage out of that Ph.D. But my seminar guy didn’t write a book. He operated on a level where his prospects were liable to read it, and that would make him look like shit.

Take a look at what Dr. Edward Bernays has to say on the subject. We all see titles as symbols of authority, and we tend to obey people who use them. I’ve reached the point where titles mean nothing to me. A doctor once tried to bullshit me, and I walked out in the middle of the appointment. Nobody has the right to use their titles to mistreat other people. Yet it happens all the time.

When I was much younger, I ran with Youth International. Now that I’m retirement age, I learned we were right. All authority is bullshit. And some of the most miserably greedy excuses for featherless bipeds have titles. So if somebody has a title, you make him earn your respect like any other mortal. And if this mortal contradicts your education and better sense, avoid that person like the fires of hell.

The same with books. If somebody wrote a book, read the book. Please don’t assume the guy who wrote it knows what he’s talking about. It should take you only a few pages before you know whether or not it’s bullshit. And chances are you might have read the same book under another byline and author photo on the back cover.

Clothes may make the man, but they also make the con man. Or con person; let’s not be sexist here. Women are just as likely to be predatory as men. I remember one mortgage salesperson I worked with. She went to appointments wearing an extra short leather miniskirt. She was let go for trying to push forged documents to the underwriters. Male, female, or nonbinary, anybody might be out for your cash, and they will dress to impress or distract you.

The prop you should be the most careful of are internet pictures. Is the person behind the profile actually a buxom blond? Or is it some guy in the Tenderloin phishing for your credit card number? Is that guy on Twitter truly an African American activist, or is it some bastard in a Chinese troll farm? Internet props are the most dangerous because they exploit our expectations and imaginations. We’ll go into this in more detail in a future post.

It’s a jungle out there, so we all have to be gazelles. Keep our noses in the air, sniffing for danger, and ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. It’s not pleasant having to maintain such a level of distrust, but this is the age we live in. And it’s the most distrustful gazelles who avoid being the lion’s dinner. The only thing we can trust is kindness. A single kind deed can reveal who is really in the fancy suit or behind the Twitter account. So always choose kindness.

Special Note. I promised a reading list, and this is the first book you should be reading. The Selling of the President 1968, by Joe McGinnis. The observations on how wardrobe got us President Nixon is priceless. Please try to get the book out of your local library. If you can’t find it, try thrift stores and brick-and-mortar bookstores. If you don’t have the time or patience for it, here is the Amazon link. Please save it as a last resort.