Chapter One: Love and Money – The Two Big Weenies In Life
Love and Money are the weenies of everyday life.
A Weenie is an older movie industry term for the thing the characters are all after. It’s the thing everybody wants, the thing everybody fights for. It’s the reason for the car chases, fist fights, alliances and treacheries.
In “Raiders of the Lost Ark” the weenie is the Ark itself. The Ark keeps Indy going despite how bruised, exhausted and lost he might be. It’s why he would brave the snake pit despite a crushing fear of snakes.
Simply put, in a civilization, love and money are the two big weenies. They are the things people spend the most time working at and figuring out how to get.
Love and Money are the things they seem to argue about the most and apply the most cunning to win. They are what people brave the most difficulty and strife to obtain, worry about the most and become willing to do the most out of character things for when either one is lacking in life.
There are real parallels between these two things. In fact, if you are or were a typical guy in your teens and twenties, you put a lot more thought and a lot more effort into how to get a woman to submit to your charms than you put into all of your other interests combined. Some of those other interests were just a way to get the woman in fact.
You mostly wanted to know what you had to say or do to be able to get into the pants of the woman you were interested in. You sought the advice of others. A lot of that advice was terrible but you tried it anyway hoping the other person knew more than you did and you just needed to man up.
Most of the guys I knew back in high school were working really hard at this and had it on their minds a lot but were not actually getting any. The way it looked to me when I was a day-dreaming-about-sex-all-the-time adolescent was that there was just not that much sex going around. The demand way exceeded the supply and a guy was going to have to be damned lucky to ever get any.
There just didn’t seem to be that much nookie to be had out there and a smallish number of guys were getting all of it already. That would prove to be false, but you couldn’t have convinced me back then.
In the adult world, money looks the same way.
It often looks like there’s only so much money out there and for some people it comes easy but for most of us we have to work really hard at it. We go and go and figure out better ways and work, work, work. We take bad advice hoping the advisor knows more than we do.
It turns out there are real business lessons to be learned by examining the ways men and women go about trying to find and keep each other. These lessons can help you make a lot more money.
If you think these subjects are unrelated then answer me these two questions:
When you were 19, could you be talked into the idea that there was such a thing as too much nookie?
Here and now, could you be talked into the idea that there’s such a thing as too much money?
Or how about these:
When you suddenly found yourself with no one to talk to of the opposite sex, did you look for a place where people you might be interested in might go, like a night club or a cycling club you could join?
When you suddenly found yourself with too few customers to sell to, did you look for a place where people you might want to sell to might go, like a trade show or a mall you could rent space at?
So this book is all about pointing out the many ways in which these subjects are similar so you can gain an understanding of exactly how you can go about using the lessons learned in love in order to get what you want now.
Here’s how I came to see this myself: I live in a city where, about 8 or 10 blocks from my condo, there’s a section full of great restaurants and bars and clubs. On the weekends it gets very lively and often there’s no room on the sidewalks due to all of the people.
I was in my car one weekend night driving home, and a parade of young men and women all dressed up to hit the clubs crossed the street in front of my car (you can tell I am an old guy because I use terms like “young men and women” and also because I even noticed there were some guys there at all).
The girls were all wearing heels and tight dresses that didn’t leave much to the imagination (another clue – only old guys say things like “didn’t leave much to the imagination”).
This was not an unusual event but for some reason it suddenly struck me that I was looking at what amounted to marketing strategy. I am a very happily married man and have been out of that particular game for a long time, so the distance helped, but why it took until that night to see something that’s so obvious, I have no clue.
I felt like the clouds parted and I had lifted the veil on some of the mysteries of my youth.
I will share it with you now:
Women, since they know what guys want, dress like sex. Men, the ones who bother to market and who are deluded into believing they know what women want, dress like money.
I got to thinking about it and I eventually found enough links between the world of nookie marketing/acquisition and the world of marketing businesses to fill up several books.
There’s a lot that can be learned from figuring out what could have worked in your love life that you can apply to business. There’s a really good chance you’re making the same dumb-ass mistakes now in marketing your business you made back when, if a man, you were trying to get a woman to lower her standards enough to have sex with you or, if a woman, you were trying to get a man to fall smitten at your feet, devoted to you forever.
You will also notice that I will be using what could be considered to be stereotypical or unenlightened views of men and women. This is entirely on purpose. If you are not the person I allude to then you probably know someone who is. I acknowledge in advance that my broad statements about men and women do not apply to all cases. I do not agree I am a knuckle-dragger. I offer these examples only to help bring understanding of the broader subject of marketing. I will not be apologizing throughout the book – or even now.
If this insults you then please exercise your right to cease reading now.
You and I are going to explore the marketing of love and sex in order to use it to help you figure out how to make your business more successful. You’re going to find out I’m not interested in helping you have more one night stands. This is not a book for a pick up “artist”. I’m assuming you are actually an adult. I write for the man or woman with a business who is looking to expand it and to make their family’s life easier or happier.
The goal is to help you understand the basic principles of marketing. I may use an example or two that applies to your business directly but I’m not going to teach you how to boom any one type of business. That would be too ambitious. If you pay attention you will be able to figure out how to apply these things to your business now.
If Sex Sells Why Sell Sex So Hard?
Sex sells. We have heard this over and over and over.
There’s a pretty good case for the fact that sex sells. If you take an advertisement and add a sexy woman or dude - chances are good your response will improve and you will sell more of your stuff. This is one of those things that’s so well known that it’s horribly overdone but works anyway.
Adding sex to an ad campaign is kind of like adding bacon to a meal in the culinary world. If you want to make a dish better you can try throwing bacon in it and chances are it’s going to be better.
If your Chicken Alfredo recipe is good, how do you make it great? Bacon. You can sell hot dogs at the county fair or sell bacon wrapped hot dogs and knock it out of the park.
At the last fair I went to they were selling bacon dipped in chocolate. In that case, I can’t tell if they added bacon to chocolate or chocolate to bacon. Chocolate has similar powers to bacon and sex.
If I was looking for a new business I would go into the business of tricking people into eating disgusting things by covering them in chocolate or wrapping them in bacon. There’s already an existing marketing term for this kind of thing – delicacy. But I digress.
Back to sex. The thing is, even though sex sells, there’s a great deal of selling that goes into sex itself. You would think that if sex was the magic fairy dust that caused things to sell, this would be unnecessary.
But man, there’s so much marketing and thought and effort that goes into selling sex and love generally. Some of this marketing is spectacular and some of it is terrible. Some of the terrible stuff even works.
Is All Of The Drama Necessary?
Let’s say there’s a million people in a city. Approximately half a million of them are men and half a million are women. Men and women are drawn to each other with an irresistible power. It cannot be stopped.
If people were simpler creatures, like magnets, the two halves would fly together as a matter of course and there would not need to be a lot of drama or heartbreak. We could all then get along with the happily ever after part of the story.
But that is absolutely not the way it happens. Instead we behave like Rams during the mating season.
Have you ever seen what the male rams do to each other as soon as the females go into heat? They bash each other mercilessly. Not just honorably in straight up head-to-head combat either. They kick each other in the balls if they can and if one can get the drop on another they will t-bone each other off cliffs hoping to take them out of the competition.
There are usually enough girl rams to go around, so what are they competing for? Well, the way they do it in Ramsville is that the girl rams wait it out quietly, in heat, for one winner to emerge. Then they all have sex with that guy and all the other man rams go packing. No nookie this year for them. The odds are good there was none last year and there will be none next year too. The documentaries like to tell us the man rams are fighting for the right to pass on their genes to the next generation.
That “passing on the genes” thing must really be something.
With Rams, it’s “fight like hell or no nookie for another year” but with people it isn’t that way at all. With people it’s open season all year round and we don’t do the all-for-one-and-none-for-anybody-else thing. So why then do we fight so viciously to dominate, undermine, out-play, out-maneuver, lie, cheat and/or steal in the game of love?
Tell me you have never felt like you had been kicked in the balls and t-boned off a cliff. Was it by your best friend or by the person who was supposed to love you?
Have you ever had a sale “stolen” from you? By a “friend”? Or found out one of your competitors tells vicious lies about you in order to get business away from you? It feels a lot like getting kicked in the balls and t-boned off a cliff doesn’t it?
The whole heartbreaking mess reminds me of a Scottish joke I heard as a kid:
There’s a new ranch hand on a farm and at the end of the day all of the workers take off running for the fields.
“Where are you all going?” asks the new ranch hand of an old ranch hand as he runs by.
“That’s where the sheep are”, answers the old ranch hand.
“Why are you all running?” he asks, knowing there are enough sheep to go around.
“No one wants to get the ugly ones.”
The new ranch hand thinks this over briefly and then starts running since he knows he can outrun a few of the older guys.
Imagine you are a single guy in the 1 million person city. How many of the half million women would you drive past on the way to pick up a date? Hundreds? Tens of thousands? Likewise, how many auto repair shops would you drive past to get to the one you want? How many restaurants would you drive past to get to the one that serves the food you like? How many other businesses do you ignore that apparently offer the same thing as everybody else.
Very generally speaking, any one person has their own concept about what a life well lived would be and what kind of person would be able to share in that and help create it. Whatever is on that long list of qualities one person is looking for in another makes that half a million possible prospects seem to shrink down to a trickle. Suddenly you find yourself running for the fields to beat out the other guys or t-boning the competition.
People are more complex creatures than you may think they are. As we examine that in this book through the lens of love I expect the world of marketing your business to become clearer to you.
In matters of love it makes sense for you to drive past all of those people on the way to a date. Some of them are too old for you, some too crazy, some of them are married, some of them are too good-looking, some are too ambitious, some too slovenly, etc.
In business, perfectly good prospects “drive past” you every day. Very possibly they drive past you to get to someone who is not better at what they do than you are. So why keep letting yourself be so ignored?
Recognize you know almost nothing about the people you drive past on the way to the date.
That means two things: 1) There’s something about your date that aligns with the long list of character traits you are interested in that may lead you towards greater happiness and 2) something about the way she marketed herself to you got through.
It’s the same with businesses. Perfectly good potential customers ignore you. It’s your fault. You didn’t find out enough about what those perfectly good potential customers would really want out of you AND you didn’t get through to them with your marketing.
The Way Sex Is Sold Is Used In Businesses Too!
Many businesses today are in a strange position. The business was possibly built in an economic climate in which the marketing they were doing was mediocre but worked well enough. But that climate changed and they needed to (among other things) start doing really good marketing but didn’t know how.
They went from being the only pretty girl at the town dance with a full dance card to being in a room full of pretty girls with only a few men to dance with. For you men business owners it would be like being at a party full of pretty, single women and only a few men that suddenly turned into a sausage party (a gathering that has a lot more men than women - a large gathering that has a lot more men than women is a sausage convention).
This can be very stressful and confusing in business. You scramble to fix it or to figure out what to change. Each sale becomes important to your survival so you bone up on your selling techniques but your desperation may show through anyway. You may even close up shop and go in search of where the “girls” went.
Success or failure in that kind of climate hinges on making the right changes.
The neat thing is that very workable fortune-building methods of marketing used in the world of commerce have duplicates in the world of selling love and dating and sex. You can actually get a really clear understanding of how these things work because you either used it or had it used on you or you saw somebody it worked on or failed on.
The ways that sex and love is sold are used by successful businesses to sell ordinary products and services. These businesses want nothing to do with putting babes in bikinis or shirtless dudes in their underwear. We are talking about regular people who want to list more houses for sale or sell more burritos or get more people into the front door of the shop.
These successful businesses don’t lower themselves to putting a half naked woman in their store window – and they shouldn’t. The very fact there’s so much marketing in the world of love means we can take it and learn from it and keep the good, ditch the bad and come up with a working strategy for your business that’s built upon sound, tried and true principles.
