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the marketing secret. mr. viguerr a living living? my mother went to her grave a few years ago, not really understanding what did. i was fortunate. back in. 1960s, early sixties to pioneer political direct mail. people have been raising money for a long time and they've been raising it money through the mails for charities, churches, etc. nobody could combine the two politics and the mails. and i did that in the early 60. for about 20 years, i had no competitors. and i went out there and and helped the conservative movement. and i can a case that without direct mail would be no conservative movement worthy of the name. when i did my pioneering work in the sixties, the left wasn't doing. now they're doing a better job than the are. have you always been a conservative when you even when you were growing in texas? i grew up right in pasadena,

texas, outside of houston. and kids in neighborhood playing cops and robbers, you know, were 11, 12, 13 years old. i won't tell anybody. i'm not shooting robbers. i'm shooting commies. i don't know. i have no recollection of any political conversation in my family. my extended family. but i just came to this world knowing are bad people. and i was dedicated to to, you know, fighting them, opposing the i'm second generation conservative, first generation bill buckley, russell kirk, barry goldwater, etc. , 100% of second generation conservatives. phyllis schlafly, jerry falwell, etc.. before we were conservatives, first we were anti-communist. that was the glue that held the conservative movement together in those days. back in the sixties, 1780s. what was that moment that burning moment for you when it came to direct mail and, mailing lists? you were visiting the national review office in new york city. well, the i was fortunate in i

had two weeks summer camp, national guard at a military base outside of chicago. and the first and only saturday we were there for the two weeks. everybody goes into chicago, richard stays in the barracks and reads national review. and so a small ad about an inch or two for four field directors for americans for constitutional action and didn't no longer exist. but i had a friend a buddy who worked for national review, a journalist, a writer there. and so i could hear the cannons and the guns going off new york in washington. the war was starting and i was desperate to get into battle and fight the left here in america. and so i called my friend david frankie and said, david, i've to get one of those four jobs. he says, it's not is one. it was a blind ad to run young americans at freedom. and i said, david, get me that job. i got the job.

and for about a year and a half a moved to new york, and i came in contact very regularly with bill buckley, frank meyer and brant bozell and intellectual giants out there, james burnham and i tried to be like them and i read everything i thought they were reading. i wasn't making a lot of progress, so one point i made a conscious decision to focus direct mail. we didn't have enough like buckley, who could write and, debate and all, but we had some. we had nobody that could market them to the country so literally went to my wife. by then i had a wife, two babies, and i said, honey, i think i've got something here is going to change. america, maybe even change the world. but i don't know. it. i've got to study it. could i be relieved of all household duties? no diapers, no trash, no yard work? she bought into it for seven, eight years. i made a deep dive in marketing and direct marketing, direct mail. and in those days it were the microphones of the country. back in those days, conservative message went up against the blockage new york times, nbc, abc, etc.

we couldn't get our message out. we were the tree that fell in the fourth. but starting with direct mail could go around this blockage right into people's homes. and that changed everything. i can make a case that ronald reagan would not have gotten the nomination in 1980 without direct mail, because when john connally and george h.w. bush were getting the thousand contributions, he was getting hundreds of thousands of ten, 15, $25 contributions funded campaign made all the difference. mr. viguerie what makes an effective direct mail letter? talk about one that you've written. well direct mail is used to be, until recently, the second largest form of advertising in the country. television number one now is number three, because the internet, internet's number one, television number two. direct mail is number three. and i recognize that early on. and i recognize that it's not a when i write a letter that goes to a million people, i don't write it to a million people. i write it to one person. had one person in mind, i'm writing that letter and i have a

conversation. well, for most of my political life it was my parents, my mother, my dad. i would have them met. they didn't give every time, but they were occasion a gift. so you don't want to write to somebody that gives it's not a child or never gifts. so you want somebody that occasionally gives in and you have a conversation with a and i bill buckley famously said he was a conservative, but not of the breed on saturday night, he's hanging out. john gilbert, truman capote, etc. . i am of the breed. i'm a my faith catholic. and as long as most catholics have been going to mass, they're not quite sure. when you stand up, when you kneel down, whatever. i can sit in the front row. i know, i know. at any conservative meeting to applaud when i am one with the audience and that makes a huge difference. i'm a i'm a true believer. many of your letters and those of us who have been involved in

the media or politics over the years have received these and they're often one line paragraphs and then three or four pages, and they repeat. what's the effect that. the one of the many reasons why like direct mail is don't have to guess does this work for that work because we take a million letters and we split it and have 500,000 get this appeal, the short paragraphs and 500,000 get the long paragraphs and it's been tested billions and billions of letters. so we know that a good long eight page letter is going to output a good page letter up to a point. the more page people say, i don't read that. and that's true. people don't read, but they scan. they just kind of flip through, look at this. look that. so the longer the copy, you would never give a salesman, say, selling a refrigerator, sell this refrigerator. but you can only speak 200 words or 400 words. you know, if you speak until you've made sale.

so short letters. short words. if you read the new testament, jesus words and are almost all and two syllable words, very few, three and four, he used very short words and short paragraphs, follow me, etc. so to matthew. so the you went long letters but but short words sentences short paragraphs. and let me just say that at my age i'll be 90 and a few months. i literally spend 2 hours a day studying marketing advertising business. and i've done that for over 60 years. and still today, you're to this day, i will spend 2 to 3. i've already spent probably 45 minutes today studying marketing and i young people are interested in a marketing advertising career. i tell them a study, study, study, read, read, read. competition is not that serious. out there, quite frankly. most people in marketing advertising haven't done a lot

of study. and so if you study the classics out there, the the giants who've come before us, you can get to the top of marketing in five years, you can be at the very top 5%, say. mr. viguerie has email and social benefited your business. not really in a major way. when i got involved in 1961 early sixties you're fundraising through the mail was not a mature business it's been out there for a little bit. it's very mature now. every fortune 500 company has a direct marketing division, a department. so we know who it works in direct marketing. we don't with the internet we'll figure it out that might be tomorrow might be five years from now but we haven't figured how to market on the internet. there's a lot of young people

who are trying it. they they're they've know next to nothing about marketing. they know the internet, but they don't know how to marketed. and so we're still in exploratory stage in terms of learning how to market using the internet back to go big. you talk about the four horsemen of marketing position different creation benefit and brand briefly describe what those for nothing original that at all board from this stone from then etc. but i put it together in a package which is really really important and i urge our viewers that it doesn't really matter in life whether running for office or want a promotion. you want a you want to raise you want a spouse i tell people when i dated my wife, it was a lot of competition for this pretty young hands, pretty young ladies hand in marriage. so i to separate myself from all that competition out there,

position number one is simply a whole early in the marketplace. what holding a marketplace can you occupy? and that's a private decision differentiation is what do publicly to let everybody what your what your who the marketplace is. i like to use either msnbc or fox television they they both have a a position holding a marketplace. they both differentiate it you know, it used to be. carlson and now it's, you know, brett baer and jesse waters and laura ingram, etc., on fox and rachel on msnbc, you find those people type of people anywhere else on. television. third is benefit by the way, you've got to your market, to your audience, you've got to get all four right, get all four right. life is downhill the when do you back? get one wrong. you're going uphill you're not likely to succeed. so fox to their audience succeeds for a benefit. they offer news information.

we don't get anywhere else out there particularly until recently. they have a little competition now, but previously there was no competition for decades i same msnbc fourth is brand and brand is the ball game. one is a combination of position differentiate and benefit is what makes you singular what makes you in the words of a famous communicator star seth godin, a purple cow? i live out in the country, gregory pass feels of 40 brown cows here, 50 black and white moves over there. can't tell one from the other, but if one of them has a purple cal, it stands out. so all of our goal in life is to be a purple cow. and i haven't figured out how to squeeze a fifth one in there, but there's a fifth one. it's called a tagline. and you want a tagline and a tagline when you come up, a tagline should be relatively short and summarize what it is that you do different, differentiates you from else out there. and if anybody else use your tagline, throw it away. it has nothing to do with how much more to do your faster how

how you jump or you better or anything else. it's something that really differentiates you from all of the products out there, all of the candidates. you know, if you're running for office, your name doesn't tell you. you liberal or conservative. so you want a tagline that the most effective tagline, by the way, in the last 40 years has been make america great again, and it liberals will acknowledge that because so that tagline separated trump 2016 from everybody else out. you want that tagline. and we had a well-known of out of virginia george allen he said you do the crime you do the time, some kind of a tune you can whistle. there. reagan 1980, are you off now than you were four years ago? and so you went that that tune people can whistle that's in a tagline mr. do you have to use have you found it effective to use strong language against your opponents at ak you know negative ads work well on tv

even though everybody says they hate them. the it's not necessarily words. i read something for the umpteenth time recently about truman. the people you say, give him hell, harry. he says, i don't give them hell. i just tell him the truth and they think it's hell. so i think it's just important. differentiate yourself from your your competition, whether it's in a primary, the general election or even if it's in an hour, get your a nonprofit your support you want separate yourself from all your competition out there and you want to explain in a few words what it is you're doing. it used to be people were exposed to a thousand, maybe 2000 messages a day. now it's in five, 10,000 with the internet. we're just inundated. so you've got to be able to succinctly, in a few words, identify your brand. and brand, by the way, is when you own a category, i am a brand. i own a category. i was the first ever duke

political direct mail who was the second person to fly solo across the atlantic? who who was the second pope? you don't remember? you remember the first. you want to be the first in a category. what surprised me in reading go big is you were talking about how liberals or the people the others have superseded the conservative movement when it comes to direct mail. even though you basically started it in when i did my pioneering work at this it earlier in the early 1960s i caught lot of criticism quite frankly up regalia tacked on nbc, new york times, time magazine all through seventies. but all of the criticism stopped within a few hours. election night, november 1980, huh? that's what viguerie has been up to. so i told conservative friends, editor for the heritage foundation, paul weyrich, howard phillips and many others that we

used to get together at my home for breakfast every wednesday, ten years. don't worry if taking me 20 years to learn how to do this, it's going to take them 30 or more years. because i'm smarter than they are not so within five years. roger craver and others on the left had caught up with the conservatives and now they have far surpassed us. in my opinion i wouldn't dream of flying an airplane with a pilot who had the skills that the average conservative marketer they just most people have learned it by their gut feeling. you know none of us would go to a doctor who learned medicine gut, you know, a seat of his pants. so, you know, the liberals are basically have about 20,000 single issue organizations, conservatives, about 1500. they raised 700% more money than we do from 100% more donors. well, yeah, talk about them as third force organization is correct. correct. which are one. i'm a big exponent of a third

force organization, not third party, of course, but third force. the liberals have these 20,000 single issue organization out there. think about if obama, former president obama called a meeting of all liberals environmental groups, it'd be 300 350 groups represented. there if the conservatives, if conservative did same, there would be, you know, five, six, seven groups represented. there. so each of these groups out there has their own agenda, their own source of money, their own membership, own leadership. and they're pulling everybody their way. i think within our membership accomplished, not just with the democrats, the republicans, independents. they pulled people mostly their way on many of their issues. and the politicians don't really set the agenda so much as these third force organizations and conservatives only with 1500 we really, really are far behind.

and one of the things i reason i wrote the book was to encourage mostly younger people when. you get to be my age or in your sixties and seventies, even your fifties, your dna is pretty well the very definition of an entrepreneur is a risk taker, somebody who's going to be bold and go out and take risk. so that's going to come from younger people twenties, thirties, early forties. and so i want everybody to a particularly conservative to read the book and get engaged, pick to lead. i talk about that and really i think it's very nobody was barack obama's run for the center, the president. he picked himself. in 2007, 2008 he's describing himself as a community organizer. donaldmp trump has no prior government experience. fifteen months later he's resident.g

don't wait for somebody to knock on the door. when i came to washington, i had all these ideas and energy and i said all this is going to waste and i called a meeting and they came. i called a meeting a week later implicated. early on she's climbing the democrat leadership from a surprise how many good people come to your meetings if you serve food and i served good food. all of a sudden they have meetings but have courage, be a risk taker. the old. [laughter] nothing i can do but the politics.

for marketing if you want to get a job, get a promotion, start a business, get a spouse, you learn to burn cheatal yourself from the competition so this book will help you differentiate yourself from everybody else. >> beginning with charleswh edison, who was it? >> a great human being. a pleasure to know him on the 60s, the youngest, thomas edison, the inventor. governor of new jersey and the last ten, 15 v here's of his lie he was very activeve in conservative movement he was quite wealthy. ... and one day we had a small office on the

fourth floor, no elevator. and middle on madison avenue advertising row in new york city. and so i'm working at my desk there about 2:00 in the afternoon, i look up there's charles ellison, you know, 75 years old or something like standing in front of me. he'd walk all the way from the waldorf-astoria of towers, 15 blocks just to kind of boost our morale, kind of encourage us and all that. just a delightful, wonderful man. and i called him on the phone when i first started asking a contribution. he gave me a contribution on the phone and i called a few other people like him, captain eddie rickenbacker of eastern airlines, world war one hero, and jay howard pugh of the sun oil company. they all gave me money generously, but i decided i didn't like asking people for myself to write letters. yeah, talk about that a little bit cold. calling people on the phone. voice to voice that. that's not me. it wasn't me. as in my twenties. and it's not me almost 90. i just don't like people asking for money. so you will write them a letter?

i started letters and you know, that seemed to work and so i got a secretary and i was able to write more letters. and then i got that hardly any of your viewers understand, remember and know about something. a mimeograph machine, big drum. you wrote it like it would print, you know, a few hundred out letters an hour or something like that. and that seemed to work. and then i got something called computers that nobody had heard of in those days. and we started spitting out letters and and after about a year and a half, by the way, at berkeley national review, young americans for freedom, i began to focus entirely on direct mail. and after a year and half, i thought i knew everything there was to know about mark. but then i had a just wife and two babies. as i said. so i quit a good job and hung out my shingle and started the viguerie company, which was the world's first direct mail political advertising agency and knew nothing. i thought i knew everything. i knew nothing. less than 1% of what i know now.

the one thing i knew that i didn't have that i needed, and that was names and addresses and i was able to get 12,500 barry goldwater donors, dollars plus donors. and that changed everything. and so by the end of that first year, when i started my company, 1965, i had 100,000 republic and goldwater donors, and now we're well past million donors. and activists, conservative movement. and i recognized early on that was the business i was in. i wasn't in fundraising too much or marketing i in the name acquisition business. mark zuckerberg figured that out too. mr. viguerie have you gotten rich in your business? i have not. as a matter of fact, i'm very comfortable. but to this day, my team will testify under that, i put everything possible back into the company. i'm a at every fiber. every fiber of my being as i

said earlier the definition of an entrepreneur anything that is a risk-taker so in this state everything i haveha available bk in the company. the reason i do that is 1965 i started the company in january and i went to organizations and let's do a test and find out. we 1 dollar now you spend a dollar and 50 cents and theac money comes back in there so much long time value. in i those days i two, three, four, $5. those results come in will mail 500,000. let's just mail another 5000. i said we had to go. and he said no, 5000. at that moment i said okay i want to save western

civilization. i know what to do so will tell you what i will do. i will finance it finance all the money to this day the vast majority of our clients refinance so everything i can get from the company i put back to finance more growth. >> by the way who was right? >> you need millions and millions. maybe in the next 18 months something around 300 million. >> somebody else who's been active in the conservative movement that you ride about in go big. who is the? >> he's a deer friend and i'm known in the conservative movement asti double as to which mena been acting at the national level the only living conservative exceptt for dr. le ebbers is double 01 and build goldwater in brent buckley and

brought moselle senior are all dead so i'm active on the national level for everybody except edwards. a deer friend i've known since 1961 called me on the phone one day and said this young conservativet he doesn't know u and you don't know him but you need to know him. i liked himlu so much and invitd him it back 10 late -- 10 days later for another lunch and morton said i spoke magic words to hamper the magic words i t spoke with morton i want you to come work with me and help me build the conservative movement. att that point i gave them a little pay increase. a some years he left and ended up working for ronald reagan in the white house. after a that he left and started somethingit called -- and theres no organization i can think of

with a the leadership institute they trained well over a quarter millionop young people senators congressman c legislators. over the years in right now as we speak he is with my president of my company and i'm the my company is in jerusalem with four, five or six other national conservative marketers and these teaching a couple hundred people in europe, conservatives how to be effective conservatives. so yes maybe 500 more inmates all over the country that his leadership institute teaches each year and he said more impact on the conservative movement than anybody else i can think of that's living. >> the book is called "go big" and the marketing secrets of richard viguerie and as someone said beforerd rush limbaugh thee

wass richard viguerie. we appreciate your time. >> good to be with you.