Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

by Sally Hogshead

Overview

The New York Times–bestselling author shows you how the perfect words can captivate your customers and how your brand can harness the force of attraction.

Why is Jägermeister the most popular brand nobody likes? Why do women pay more to be fascinating than they spend on food and clothes? What raises the price of gummy worms by 1000%?

And then there’s the most important question of all: How can your brand become impossible to resist? Master marketer Sally Hogshead reveals the surprising answers, providing readers with a framework to fascinating anyone.

This extensively revised and updated edition includes Hogshead’s latest research on the science of fascination. Combining original case studies with award-winning copywriting experience, she gives you the exact words you need to capture the attention of a distracted world.

This new edition includes a free assessment tool called the Brand Fascination Profile, which will help you earn attention in any environment by learning how to:

• Increase prices with ideas from poker to Play-Doh
• Build revenue by learning about the $14 million license plate
• Get better leads through hypnosis by Sigmund Freud and Steve Jobs
• Attract raving fans by following the cult of pistachio ice cream

Whether you realize it or not, your brand is already applying one of the seven Advantages Hogshead describes here: Innovation, Passion, Power, Prestige, Mystique, Alert, or Trust. The question is, how can you apply these core Advantages to stand out in a crowded and distracted world? Hundreds of large corporations, small businesses, and universities—including Twitter, IBM, Porsche, and New York University—use the Fascinate system to captivate their customers. Why? The answers are in this book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062405937
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/19/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	727,620
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Sally Hogshead believes the greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself. Hogshead rose to the top of the advertising profession in her early twenties, writing ads that fascinated millions of consumers. Her internationally acclaimed book Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation has been translated into over a dozen languages. The science of fascination is based on Hogshead's decade of research with 250,000 initial participants, including dozens of Fortune 500 teams, hundreds of small businesses, and over a thousand C-level executives. She frequently appears in national media, including NBC's Today show and the New York Times. Hogshead was recently inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame, the industry's highest award for professional excellence.

Table of Contents

Start Here: Introducing the Revised and Updated Edition xi

The Origin of Fascination Witchcraft 1

Part I Fascinate or Fail

The Science of Fascination: Step Inside the Laboratory 13

The Biology of Fascination: Why Your Brain Was Designed to be Fascinated 29

Fascinate the Goldfish: Why Your Old Tricks Won't Work in a World with a Nine-Second Attention Span 37

The Schoolmarm and the Sorcerer: Why Marketing is Losing its Powers of Persuasion 45

A Million Years of Personal Branding: How All Branding, Including Personal Branding, Dates Back to Our Hairier Ancestors 51

Your Brand's Advantage: How to Identify What Makes Your Brand Fascinating 61

Part II The Seven Fascination Advantages How to Make Tour Brand impossible to Resist

The System behind the Spellbinding 67

Innovation: The Language of Creativity 71

Passion: The Language of Relationship 83

Power: The Language of Confidence 95

Prestige: The Language of Excellence 107

Trust: The Language of Stability 121

Mystique: The Language of Listening 135

Alert: The Language of Details 151

Part III Tactics: A Practical System to Customize Your Message

TurboBranding with Tactics 169

Next Up: Tactics: How to Customize Your Message 175

Innovation Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 181

Passion Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 191

Power Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 201

Prestige Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 211

Trust Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 219

Mystique Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 229

Alert Brands: How They Can Use Tactics 239

Applying Multiple Tactics 247

Part IV How to Get Started Today: Your 5-Step Action Plan

The Fascinate System for Brands 257

Author's Note 271

Appendix A The Kelton Study of Fascination 273

Appendix B Fast Facts about the Advantages 283

Appendix C Adjectives 287

Appendix D Nouns 293

Glossary 295

Acknowledgments 299

Notes 301

Index 319

Editorial Reviews

Fascinate is a riveting journey through the forces of fascination—how it irresistibly shapes our ideas, opinions, and relationships—and how to wield it to your advantage.

Alan Webber

Whenever your message hasn’t reached a customer, peer over at Sally Hogshead’s collection of stories and directives, replete with more illuminating, original, and doable ideas than you can handle in a lifetime. Okay, two lifetimes.

Richard Laermer

As Hogshead wends her way around the world of fascination, her citations are funny and apt, even educational... Fascinate is a fascinating book...

Richard Pachter

Can you dissect ‘fascination’? Sally Hogshead says, ‘Yes.’ Fascination is arguably the most powerful of product attachments—and this pioneering book helps us approach the word and the concept in a thoughtful and also practical manner.

Tom Peters

This is a transformative work, a beautifully written book that will forever change the way you see the world. I loved it. Let me be really clear: you need to buy this book, devour it, absorb it and then buy copies for your colleagues. A lot of copies.

Seth Godin

This is a transformative work, a beautifully written book that will forever change the way you see the world. I loved it. Let me be really clear: you need to buy this book, devour it, absorb it and then buy copies for your colleagues. A lot of copies.” — Seth Godin, author of Linchpin

“Can you dissect ‘fascination’? Sally Hogshead says, ‘Yes.’ Fascination is arguably the most powerful of product attachments—and this pioneering book helps us approach the word and the concept in a thoughtful and also practical manner.” — Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence

“Fascinate is a riveting journey through the forces of fascination—how it irresistibly shapes our ideas, opinions, and relationships—and how to wield it to your advantage.” — Alan Webber, author of Rules of Thumb

“Whenever your message hasn’t reached a customer, peer over at Sally Hogshead’s collection of stories and directives, replete with more illuminating, original, and doable ideas than you can handle in a lifetime. Okay, two lifetimes.” — Richard Laermer, author of Forecast 2011 and Full Frontal PR

“This slight but practical work packs a big punch.” — Publishers Weekly

“As Hogshead wends her way around the world of fascination, her citations are funny and apt, even educational... Fascinate is a fascinating book...” — Richard Pachter, Miami Herald

From the Publisher