Jackpot branding secret from "world's worst mom"

One of my favorite business and marketing teachings comes by way of the great Dan Kennedy’s 7 Figure Academy Seminar from the 2000s.

If you’ve never heard of him, Dan Kennedy is universally-considered to be the highest paid copywriter on earth, and whose initial fee can range anywhere from $100,000 all the way up to over $1 million (and that number doesn’t even include the massive royalties he gets).

I first stumbled upon this great recording on a massive 1 terabyte hard-drive I bought that was filled with thousands of marketing seminars, swipe files, interviews, presentations, from tons of different entrepreneurs.

It’s hands-up the best business “apprenticeship” I’ve ever gotten, and as I build this political fundraising copywriting business of mine, I will no doubt be coming to its wisdom again and again to reap fantastic rewards. 

Whole reason I bring this up with you is because today there’s one crucial element from Kennedy’s teaching that I think is a conceptual “quantum leap” in marketing that can double, triple, and even quadruple your nonprofit’s brand presence for your donor base and donor prospects.

Do this right, and you could spring lightyears away from your competition and always keep your brand front and dead center in your prospect’s mind, and, depending how you execute it, can give you millions of dollars worth of free publicity and branding power.

So, what is this “quantum leap” of which I speak?

It’s simply the power of “self-appointment” yourself or your organization with some kind of powerful and demonstrable differential––rather than waiting for some kind of “credential” from someone else, which many others might already have.

What I mean by that is finding some kind of speciality that you yourself can uniquely occupy and can, with credibility, declare yourself the “world champion” of and then exploit for maximum marketing power.

One of my favorite examples of the power of self-anointing in action is Lenore Skenazy, aka “the world’s worst mom.”

Skenazy got this wonderful moniker after she dared to let her 8-year-old son ride the New York City subway by himself.

Gasp! The horror!

You can expect what happened next….

That’s right.

The media and concerned mommy bloggers everywhere jumped on Skenazy faster than Pabst Blue Ribbon at a hipster bar!

But somewhere along the way she channeled the outrage in a marketing coup d’etat and appropriated the label “world’s worst mom” as her own personal brand.

And since then it took off like wildfire!

It worked so well that Skenazy once said in an interview that if you typed “world’s worst mom” into Google, her name would take up the first 68 PAGES.

Hot diggity dog ‘dems some good publicity!

So using the principle of self-appointment (and being unafraid of polarizing people) she paralyed herself into being a best-selling author, commentator, and even founder of an activist nonprofit dedicated to changing the culture around hyper-over parenting.

I tell you all of this because you should be thinking about you can apply this to your own organization.

What can you “self-anoint” your organization is your fundraising appeals that will get people to look up and take notice?

Something to think about.

-David