MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I was going through Mass Con­trol over the week­end, nerd that I am, and I came across some­thing Frank Kern called the Death Grip Method. Frank Kern says that this is the most valu­able thing you can learn from Mass Con­trol. In that $2,000 course, this is the mil­lion dol­lar for­mula. It is specif­i­cally applied to the last 4 or 5 days of any launch process, and imme­di­ately after this you usher in the “Buy Now” but­ton. The Death Grip Method is to be used in the last 5 days build­ing up towards the launch. Frank Kern says this is a form of pres­sure stack­ing, pil­ing pres­sure upon pres­sure, and he gives this formula:

S + IC + OT = BF

where,

Scarcity + Increased Cool­ness + Out­side Threat = Buy­ing Frenzy

What Frank Kern says is this: when it comes to the last 4 or 5 emails of your launch process, you incor­po­rate all three of the above-mentioned elements.

S = Scarcity:

Like all prod­uct launches, you must have scarcity in some form. How­ever, you must make sure that it is implied scarcity. Don’t say, “If you don’t buy it by this time you’ll be mis­er­able,” but rather say some­thing like, “I don’t mean to put pres­sure on you, but here’s the facts: we’ve got 5,000 peo­ple on our prelaunch list, and we only have 200 prod­ucts to sell so it will be sold out fast. So again, I don’t mean to put pres­sure on you, but please buy my product.”

IC = Increased Coolness:

This is one of the key fac­tors, and it’s basi­cally a form of reverse psy­chol­ogy. Well, not really psy­chol­ogy, but it does flip the whole scarcity thing on its head. Most direct mar­keters, and these days, inter­net mar­keters as well, play this up a lot. It’s always in the neg­a­tive ‘if you don’t buy this prod­uct there will be con­se­quences’ kind of way, but this is dif­fer­ent. He says, ‘if you buy this, there’s cooler and cooler stuff you can get’. What Frank Ken sug­gests is tak­ing the cooler bonuses and putting them aside only to reveal them in the last 4–5 days.

To illus­trate, Frank gave the exam­ple of mar­ket­ing a prod­uct to a fra­ter­nity, where they can ‘buy a date with Paris Hilton’.

Scarcity is obvi­ous, because Paris can only go out with one guy per night, and you have only 40 packages.

Increased Cool­ness is announc­ing in one of your last emails –only days before your launch — “By the way, Nicky Hilton is com­ing along too, so your date is with both Nicky and Paris.” Remem­ber, it is impor­tant that the unex­pected, per­ceived added value or sur­prise bonus is some­thing you have not pre­vi­ously revealed in your sales let­ter or any­where else.

And the very next day, to increase the implied scarcity and to increase the cool­ness even more, you would say, “Not only do you get to go on a date with the 2 sis­ters, you also get a com­pli­men­tary cham­pagne Jacuzzi to round off your night”. What you are sim­ply doing at this point is lit­er­ally stack­ing up the ‘cool’.

Out­side Threat:

This out­side threat is some­thing that will increase the scarcity even fur­ther. For exam­ple, in these last 4–5 emails you could write that you ‘just got off the phone with the NY Times and they are very inter­ested in this…and as you know, this pub­li­ca­tion is read by a few mil­lion peo­ple…’ As a result, the implied scarcity increases at the men­tion of more com­pe­ti­tion for the already lim­ited sup­ply. The key secret in this is –you put the blame for the scarcity not on your­self, but on other people.

Let me give you an exam­ple of using the Death Grip in the more generic inter­net mar­ket­ing field.

Scarcity: You are only sup­ply­ing a lim­ited num­ber. For exam­ple, you have 50,000 peo­ple on your list but only 500 prod­ucts are avail­able. E.g. when you are doing some­thing per­son­ally, you can say ‘because you only want to give qual­ity con­sul­ta­tions and want to be avail­able for peo­ple around the clock, there’s really only so many peo­ple you can take on’. You sim­ply lay out the facts, and come straight out and say that it’s scarce because it just really is scarce. Don’t men­tion mis­ery and con­se­quences if they don’t buy, only imply scarcity.

Increased Cool­ness: In the last few emails, you say that you have a really cool prod­uct that can do A, B and C for them, and you’ve just decided to give it away with the first 100 sign-ups. But, in order to trig­ger the psy­cho­log­i­cal desire to buy when you launch your prod­uct, it has to be a very desir­able bonus that peo­ple actu­ally really want.

For exam­ple, on the third-last day of his launch Frank Kern said he was going to give a live sem­i­nar, free. The thing is, he nor­mally charges $5,000-$10,000 and sud­denly he says that if you buy his prod­uct you get his live sem­i­nar for free. It def­i­nitely increases the ‘cool­ness’ of the product .

Alter­na­tively, you can also slip in a few small bonuses if you don’t have any really big ones but, obvi­ously, the cooler the bonus the bet­ter. This is evi­dent when there’s a big launch going on; you’ll see the gurus sud­denly give out a video for free and they’ll say some­thing like, “I’ve just come up with this, it’s sup­posed to come with my new prod­uct but I just couldn’t wait for the launch, you’ll find even bet­ter and more in the new prod­uct itself.”

What is really great is that Mass Con­trol actu­ally comes with all the swipe files for the Death Grip –i.e. the whole series of emails, among other things.

Out­side Threat: You say you’ve just got off the phone with Mike Fil­saime, and he’s going to email his list first thing this morn­ing, and he has a list of about 200,000 peo­ple. And you say that there are other affil­i­ates are com­ing in as well and it’s going to be a melee, so you are going to open the doors 10mins ear­lier for your list before your affil­i­ates’ lists buy out every­thing. All your infor­ma­tion has to be true, of course, so don’t name Mike Fil­saime if you don’t know him.

The trick is, it’s not one-by-one but it’s all three com­ing at once. You layer on all three (Scarcity, Increased Cool­ness and the Out­side Threat) in every sin­gle email so that every email hits these psy­cho­log­i­cal factors.

The last email lit­er­ally reads, “Click here to buy now”.

This method may seem sub­dued, but Frank Kern really puts on pres­sure + pres­sure + more pres­sure in his emails…and then he says, “I don’t mean to put pres­sure on you,…” then he adds more pres­sure, and then, “But don’t worry, it won’t sell out in 2hours…” and then even more pres­sure. Another dif­fus­ing line fol­lows, and he goes on like that in his emails.

In sum­mary:

Just before a launch the Death Grip For­mula states that
Scarcity + Increased Cool­ness + Out­side Threat = Buy­ing Frenzy

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About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

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