Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - Showmanship in Business: The Lost Book That Changed How I Launch Everything | #Marketing - Ep. 55

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I dive into one of my favorite lost books of marketing: Showmanship in Business by Kenneth Goode and Zenon Kaufman. It’s out of print, almost impossible to find, and yet it’s filled with some of the most powerful principles I’ve ever studied when it comes to getting attention and making your message stick. This book was endorsed by Dale Carnegie and breaks down how to turn your product, offer, or brand into something truly memorable. I walk through the four pillars the authors teach, and how I’ve used these exact ideas in my own business to boost show-up rates, get people to share what I’m doing, and create real moments that matter. Key Highlights: The four pillars of business showmanship: Attract, Emphasize, Emotionalize, and Create Action How Tim Shields created theatrical experiences to sell photography training online The story of my “Dan Kennedy pilgrimage” and why it changed everything for one of our webinars Why a good message alone isn’t enough… You need a performance around it How adding intention and drama can 10x the impact of your marketing, even without a big budget This book is a reminder that people don’t just buy offers, they buy experiences. The best marketers aren’t just teachers… They're performers. And when you wrap your content in a little showmanship, everything changes. If you’ve ever felt like your message is getting lost in the noise, this episode will show you how to make it unforgettable. Get Russell's book notes here: ⁠⁠⁠http://russellbrunson.com/notes ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Special thanks to our sponsors: NordVPN: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/secrets⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! Northwest Registered Agent: Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠northwestregisteredagent.com/russell⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to start your business with Northwest Registered Agent. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions: Get a $100 credit on your next campaign at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn.com/CLICKS⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Rocket Money: Cancel unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠RocketMoney.com/RUSSELL⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Indeed: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job’s visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Indeed.com/clicks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Russell Brunson Show. Welcome to The Vault. Today I've got another out of print book on advertising and selling that is going to change everything for you. So this book is new in my collection. It's called Showmanship in Business. I got this book because we were focusing on

like doing what we call dramatic demonstrations. Maybe someone back in the day wrote a book about this and I found this book and I'm like, this is the book. I got a screaming deal on this book and some of you guys may think I'm crazy to spend $500 on a book, but this one cost $500 and it gets first edition. One of the cool things about this book, a lot of people probably don't know, is Dale Carnegie who wrote first edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Dale Carnegie actually talked specifically about this book. I pulled out the quote today. He said, this is the day of dramatization. You have to use showmanship.

And then he said, read Showmanship in Business by Kenneth Goode and Zen Kaufman. It's an exciting panorama of how showmen are ringing the cash register. And he goes on and talk about some of the case studies. So in How to Win Friends and Influence People, he's talking about this book. Yeah, this book is out of print, it's out of publish. You can't find it, not even on Amazon.

We tried to buy one today and it is not there. So that's what Showmanship in Business is. It's all about how to add that extra flair in your business to get people to notice you, to see what you're doing. You know, front cover here's got this dog on a parade, just an example of showmanship. So, that's what the book's all about. I don't remember the story,

because again, it wasn't something that people were talking about. Whenever I'm deep diving into a topic or something that I'm geeking out on, I'm trying to find the other source material for me to learn from, right? We have a framework called the linchpin that we teach all of our people inside of ClickFunnels.

The linchpin, one of the parts of the framework is we have people do what we call dramatic demonstrations. So dramatic demonstration, it could be a webinar or a challenge or it could be, there's a lot of ways to create dramatic demonstrations. And so I was trying to find old school examples of this. In fact, Steve Larson and I are writing a book right now called Dramatic Demonstrations. And we pull a bunch of examples from other people from back in the early 1900s, late

1800s who were doing these big dramatic demonstrations. Right? You think about P.T. Barney, he was the greatest showman, right? And so I had those books, I was just trying to find some other related, I'm like, there's gotta be some more things to look at there.

So I'm always looking for old books, I was searching for things, and somewhere in my searches this one showed up, and just showmanship and business. I was like, just the essence of the title, it's like, yes, that's what dramatic demonstrations are, right? Everyone out there is running an ad to a landing page

and whatever, but it's like, if you wanna get people's attention today, you have to be different, right? The thing that makes you stand out, again, in my world, is creating a dramatic demonstration or adding showmanship into your business. That's how you stick out. That's how you stay relevant for a long, long time.

People ask me a lot, like, Russell, how are you still doing this business 25 years later? And the reason is because I add the stuff into our business. Like, nothing that we're doing is just normal, right? You notice we add showmanship into everything we do. I saw the title, I was like, yes, I need that book. Bought it, and then I found out later, again, that it was literally Dale Carnegie wrote about it

in How to Win Friends and Influence People. So it's now one of my favorite books in my library. The person that kind of got me thinking about dramatic demonstrations initially was a guy named Tim Shields. He's one of my Inner Circle and my Atlas members, and he's in the photography business, right? Which, you think about people teaching photographers

how to build a business, you don't think that there's a lot of money in that, right? It's not gonna be like this huge thing. But he's got a $10 million a year business teaching this. And so I started watching what he was doing and he made this documentary sent to me. It's like a two minute documentary and a little trailer. What he did is he was like showing how

he doesn't just do a webinar on how to do photography. Like he creates a dramatic demonstration. So what he did is he went to the side of the Grand Canyon. Him and his wife, they hiked out there. They promoted this whole audience. Like we're going to the side of the Grand Canyon. We're bringing in Starlink. We're gonna do this webinar from the side

of the Grand Canyon and all the Bell's drama and everything as they got there and they finally set it up and they're in the most beautiful place in the world and they start the camera and they do this whole webinar from the side of the Grand Canyon. And I watched that whole thing and then the next month he did another one where he went to Banff, Canada on this frozen lake

and he goes out in the middle of this lake and he does a webinar there. And he's done like eight or nine of these in a row, back to back. And he sent me just some footage of that. And he's like, Russell, this is what most people are missing. Like they're behind their desk doing a webinar.

And he's like, I don't do webinars. I do dramatic demonstrations. After he shared that with me, he's like, you know what you should do, Russell? I'm like, what? He's like, you bought Dan Kennedy's business. He's your mentor.

You always tell us these stories about the pilgrimage. People go to Dan Kennedy, go to his basement. And in the basement, there's no internet. And in all these things, he's like, we all hear you tell these stories. And we assume it's $100,000 to hire Dan to like have a day with him to see that. He's like, we all hear you tell these stories and we assume it's $100,000 to hire Dan to have a day with him to see that. He's like, you should take the entrepreneur role,

take your world to Dan Kennedy's basement. He's like, in your business, you're doing these dramatic demonstrations. Like you gotta take your audience in places they wouldn't go on their own, right? They're not gonna go to the side of the Grand Canyon. They're not gonna go to Banff, Canada on a frozen lake. My people are not gonna go to Dan Kennedy's basement,

but they want that, they hear about it, right? And so we made this whole campaign, this whole dramatic demonstration where I basically said, we gonna go to Dan Kennedy's basement, but they want that, they hear about it, right? And so we made this whole campaign, this whole dramatic demonstration, where I basically said, we're going to Dan Kennedy's basement, like, we're bringing Starlink in, I'm gonna show you guys behind the scenes, I'm gonna show you that there's literally, like his computer's not plugged in,

I'm gonna show you the fax machine. The nerds in the marketing world with me were freaking out. We got like 15, 16,000 people to register to go to Dan Kennedy's basement with me, right? And then, you know, we did this whole pilgrimage. As we were going to Cleveland, Ohio, we stayed at La Quinta, because it's like the worst hotel on the planet,

but it's part of the experience. Like everyone who's ever been to Dan's house always talked about the La Quinta, how it's the worst hotel. And it's like when we are pulling up to the hotel and we're like Instagram and live, this lady comes out of the lobby and she comes out and she's like livin' mad.

And she's like, looks at us as we're walking, and she's like, this is the worst hotel I've ever been to. Don't go in there. I was like, yes, like this is like, we're getting the whole experience. Next day we go to mad and she's like, looks at us as we're walking, she's like, this is the worst hotel I've ever been to, don't go in there. I was like, yes, like this is like, we're getting the whole experience. Next day we go to Dan Kenney's house, we bring in Starlink and we stream internet down. And what's crazy is the typical webinar,

you might get 15 to 20, maybe 25% of people to show up because that's what typical show up rates are in a webinar. Because it was a dramatic demonstration because we added the showmanship into this campaign and this marketing. We had like 80% of people who showed up for the webinar. People sat there. Dan Kennedy, we did a tour in his basement,

walked around and showed the bathroom, showed everything for like an hour and a half before we even got to any kind of sales pitch and nobody left. They were like enthralled. And so that's what adding showmanship in your business is. It's like everyone's doing a webinar. How do I take it to the side of the Grand Canyon?

How do I take my people to Dan Kennedy's basement? For you, who are your people? How do you add showmanship where it's like, you're gonna give them access to something they don't have anywhere else. Those are some of the ways that we're using showmanship and creating dramatic demonstrations inside of our business.

Now dramatic demonstrations, they don't always have to be huge as well. Last year for my birthday, the opportunities, there's something happening I can talk about, I can make a dramatic demonstration. It's like, we're having Russell's birthday, come and register for a birthday party we have all these speakers and come everyone's gonna talk and it's like it can be as simple

something like that as well so the key is not so much like it has to be you're spending tons of money or doing like leaving your location but it's like it's creating something that's gonna grab someone's attention and give you the ability to share and then to promote the thing you have. In the showmanship and business book there's actually a four-part framework that every business who's successfully applying showsmanship follows these four principles. And so I'm gonna write these out for you, kinda talk about, share some stories with each one.

So the first step to have showmanship in your business is, is to attract. And this one is something in our world, a lot of times online we talk about like creating a hook. Something that's gonna grab someone's attention is the first key, right? How do you attract somebody's attention? So I always think about this, like if I was to go

to the food court at the mall, and there's like 400 people's attention is the first key, right? How do you attract somebody's attention? So I always think about this, like if I was to go to the food court at the mall and there's like 400 people and they're eating and talking, if I was to stand up on a chair and yell something out, would it grab their attention? Would it ever stop and look at me? Or would they be intrigued or would they kinda like, ah, and they walk away? So I always think about that.

Like, I gotta say something that's gonna get their attention, make them stop talking, like, oh, what's happening over here? That's what I'm always thinking through. In the book, he shares an example, because again, this book was written in 1936. And so this is before, you know, obviously the internet and stuff like that.

But one of the examples they talked about the attractions is that there was a movie theater and they had all this candy at the movie theater. And there's a bunch of candy that nobody was buying. It just kind of, you know, it sat there for week after week and they were trying to figure out how do we attract attention to this? And so what they did is they got this little spotlight,

almost like a flashlight, and they shown it on the candy that nobody was buying. And because it looked like it was an attraction like people saw that like there's something like why do they lighten this up there's got to be something here that that candy and it's selling out the most and it became the highest selling candy because they added some attraction to it they added a light to it which is kind of a simple example so it's like finding something unique and like in a shining light on it right it's like again my birthday promotion it's my birthday shining a light on I'm trying to attract people's attention to it I'm going

to Dan Kennedy's house shining a light on it right so'm trying to attract people's attention to it. I'm going to Dan Kenney's house shining a light on it, right? So that's the first step in the framework. Number two is to emphasize. So as they ask you to have their attention, you have to emphasize either the problem or the things happening so people see it so they're gonna remember it, right? Like that's what showmanship is, the extra level.

Not just attracting attention, like emphasize. In the book, the example he shares is really cool. This guy named Walter Chrysler, you may have heard of him, he owns a company called Chrysler. One of the stunts he did to emphasize after he got people's attention, he actually took his cars and he had people come and he brought elephants out and he had these elephants

come and actually step on top of the car. Now if you see that kind of dramatic demonstration, you see somebody emphasizing something, you see someone with elephants on top of their car, that's one of those things you're never gonna forget, right? Like after that happens, it's like, okay, I'm never gonna forget this thing. I think about this, some of the best

that I've ever seen doing this, right? Like, I love watching and studying infomercials, but if you remember Billy Mays back in the day, Billy Mays was the guy that did OxiClean and most of the great infomercials of the 90s and 2000s, he was the best at this, right? He'd grab your attention really quick at the very beginning of the infomercial

and then he'd do a demo, right? Always do something where it's like, he'd have your white shirt, he'd put it through grass, it was all green and nasty, and then he's like, get that OxiClean in five seconds, it's like, oh, it's OxiClean, now it's done. He emphasizes the problem and then the react, like how the thing solves it, right?

Because you could be like, oh yeah, these cars are really sturdy, right? Or you could have an elephant stand on the car, that's the difference, right? Oh yeah, this will get stains out of your clothes. Or let me put a stain on it, let me show you, you're emphasizing it to make it real inside their mind. That's showmanship, that's the next level

beyond just marketing or just advertising. So number three is emotionalize. In the book, he said that people don't buy facts, they buy feeling. And this is something that is very, very true. When I'm doing a webinar or a challenge or anything, a lot of times we share the facts because we're speaking to people consciously and their logical mind is like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. But the thing that gets people to buy and to move and take action is the emotion.

Like, what do they feel about the thing? The more I study and the more I write about the subconscious mind, the more fascinating it is because people don't do what they think about, they do what they feel. Like if I feel like doing it, they're gonna do it or they're not gonna do it, right? And so feeling is what you're trying to create. So I attract their attention, right?

Emphasize the things. This thing gets burned and seared into your brain and then I gotta emotionalize it, right? So I'm bringing emotion to the table. You're telling stories, you're showing examples, like you're showing why this should be emotional to them. And emotionally, a lot of things. It can be sad.

I've seen people who are really good to tell their story, they get emotional, right? Or, there can be fear, there can be pain, right? I've seen people at Funnel Hacking Live Stage who use, some of our best speakers, they use anger to emotionalize things. Where I'm not really someone who comes in angry and hot, I come in very much more like visionary,

trying to show, I cast a vision, show people what's possible, right? And that's how I emotionalize things. So there's different ways to do it based on your style, but adding that emotion is the next phase. And then number four, which is the last part of the framework here, is to create action.

Which for all of us who know, it's like call the action. Tell them to do something. It says in the book, it says, all this leader means nothing unless you have action at the end. Doing a dramatic demonstration, showmanship, doing all these kinds of things, you get their attention, you give them emotion,

all kinds of stuff. If you don't have them do something, there's all kind of for nothing. So that's the framework from the book, is you're trying to figure out like, for you specifically, like how could I create a dramatic administration? Those are the things you're thinking through.

Okay, what can I do that's gonna attract their attention? Okay, after we get them, how do we emphasize this so that it gets seared into their brain? And then what do I do to create the emotional experience with them and then where do I take them to actually take action? And those are kind of how we use showmanship inside of our business today.

One more thing we do is showmanship in business. And again, a lot of times we think this is just if I'm selling an event or if I'm doing a course or whatever the thing might be. You can use this in any part of your business. Couple years ago we hired the Harmon brothers who do viral videos to make a video for us. It's been a lot of money to create a video,

we're gonna launch it on YouTube and drive ads to it. And then I was like, we gotta do something bigger. We need to make this dramatic demonstration. How do we engage our audience, get people excited to make this more than just like us putting something out onto the internet, right? And so we created a whole campaign around it. And what we did, we rented out

the Boise State Football Stadium. We went and got as many high level influencers as possible to come to the stadium for this event. We hired Gary Vaynerchuk to come and be our keynote speaker. And then to top it all off, I was like, we need something that's really gonna attract attention, emphasize what we're doing, emotionalize and create action.

We decided to do the largest bubble soccer game in the history of all time. And this was all to launch a YouTube video, right? It wasn't just posting online and hoping for the best. Maybe it goes viral. It's like this brings people together and let's launch it together, make an experience and create a dramatic demonstration. And so it's cool because we had almost two different ways. There's the internal people who came who have this experience

and all of them promoted it out to their following and their list which helped this video to go viral. But then externally our entire audience was watching as we were doing this. They had a chance to see behind the scenes this glimpse of like, oh my gosh, they couldn't be here with us but we're taking them on this journey.

We're not just doing these things in a silo but we're letting them kind of experience it with us. One of the things I remember, one of my mentors, John Allness, told me one time, he said that our job as entrepreneurs, as advertisers, and he said that he got this from a movie in the 80s, was a rock star talking about this, he said, for entrepreneurs, our job is to live the life

that our audience wishes they could live. They're living vicariously through us, and so we're putting this thing on, we're allowing our audience to watch this, they can vicariously live through us, watch us win the bubble soccer, watch this video go viral, see Gary Veen's other people speaking, and we're sharing that experience with them,

and it takes the showmanship to the next level, where that story and that message just keeps resonating and growing. Again, that was just to launch a YouTube video. So next time you're putting anything out there, it could be as simple as a podcast, a YouTube video, or as big as a product launch, it's like figuring out how do you add showmanship into your business

to get people talking, get people remembering you, creating emotion, and getting people to take action. If you want my notes from the Showmanship in Business book, I've got my notes. There's a link down below. We can go and get the notes for this entire book because right now it's not possible to find online. This is the only copy I was able to find, not even on Amazon. Go through my notes so you get the highlights from everything. You get some of the coolest quotes, examples and cases. They share tons of examples on all four of these things. Example after example after example. I think there's over a hundred different examples inside this book for these different points you

can read through, and hopefully it's first my ideas on how you can use this inside of your business. I feel like nowadays people are lazy because we have Facebook and Instagram, Facebook I didn't think they're genius, right? Back then, I got to go PT Barnum, I think he was the front runner of all this showmanship.

Imagine there's no TV, there's radio, but who knows? How do you get people to show up to a circus, or to a museum, or to whatever? They had to become masters of showmanship. And we've forgotten the art of this. If you go back and you study the art of it and you weave that into what we're doing now with the amplification we have of the internet,

it changes the game for everybody. So it's interesting, the lost lessons, but what they had to do. I think about this less like when I got started 20 years ago, like it was before Facebook, before MySpace, back when Friendster was the social network, I couldn't buy ads. So we had to do all sorts of weird stuff.

Like we were creating, making up stuff to try to get people to like find us on the internet, right? Like we were doing all sorts of crazy things back then that were just fascinating, but we had to. And now it's like, everyone's defaulted to just the one thing, I run some ads, you know, or whatever, it's like no one even remembers like all the things we had to do

to get attention back in the day. And so for us in our business, a lot of people ask why we're still around 20 years later. It's like, cause I weave these elements into the campaigns, right? We're using the media to like amplify ask why we're still around 20 years later. Because I weave these elements into the campaigns, right? We're using the media to amplify, but we're still doing the things that got us attention back before we had the media.

Before these guys had the internet, they were doing the stuff to get attention. And so you can learn so much from these things and apply them to your business today and it just changes everything.