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Re-Invention On A Grand Scale

By Chip Kessler

The John Brinkley Money Machine ultimately collapsed and disintegrated, as most frauds usually do. There was destruction wrought by outside forces as well as significant self-destruction, wrought by egotism and arrogance, waging too many wars on too many fronts with too-powerful of opponents, poor judgment, wildly profligate spending. Brinkley’s character flaws far outweighed his character strengths. But when you consider how long John Brinkley did perpetuate an expansive, infamous, multi, multi-million dollar (in inflation adjusted dollars, perhaps a billion dollar) marketing operation… more than once virtually destroyed but then rising from ashes as a more powerful phoenix… you have to marvel at the man’s resilience and durability. And you should wonder, what is it testament to?

For one thing, credit goes to the evergreen, universal, and deeply emotional nature of the big ideas on which is product, propositions, positioning and promises were based, and to his genius in settling on those ideas. One can’t ignore that a “fountain of youth” is secretly wished for by just about everybody (thus something people want to believe in), and something many are secretly, quietly or openly seeking. Today, at extremes, there are people selling and people buying “cryogenics”—having themselves or at least their heads fast-frozen upon death and kept in a state of suspended animation until some future time when their disease or aging itself is cured, they can be thawed, pull the tarp off their sports car and resume picking up girls! John Brinkley would love the cryogenics business. “Anti-aging” has become an industry, and “anti-aging medicine” a legitimized sub-set of the medical profession. Pharmaceutical drugs very specifically addressing the need that Dr. Brinkley’s goat glands transplants purported to cure are among the most popular, profitable drugs, and are openly advertised in every media. Their less-legitimate herbal and nutrition cousins are sold by the millions, predominately via online marketing, but also from health food store and drugstore shelves. One of the most popular of these concoctions, by the way, is “Horny Goat Weed", a nutritional supplement that promises sexual vitality, and credits the same source or inspiration, as did Brinkley’s surgery. The fastest growth segment of the skin care industry is anti-aging serums and creams and potions, commanding remarkably high prices. All around us, an aging population—the front line of boomers hit 65 in 2010, and 30-million Americans will add themselves to the Social Security rolls between now and 2020, and all around us, a youth-obsessed culture. Selling some made-believable fountain of youth is going to produce fountains of money for some time to come.

Still, Brinkley’s choice of product and subject matter, and his prowess and daring as a promoter notwithstanding, there is another ingredient, it a character strength, that contributed enormously to his success as long as it lasted. Simply put, John Brinkley refused to lose.

How Do You Vanquish The Opponent Who Refuses To Lose?

There is a sports cliché that I became very familiar with during my broadcasting career—this game will go to the team that wants it the most. It’s a time-honored cliché because it embodies a great deal of truth. However, it’s my observation that more close games and extremely competitive match-ups are decided by one competitor’s refusal to lose than by desire to win.

To start off with, refusing to lose is much easier said than done. After all, everyone quits at something in life, maybe even several something’s through time … how about you? We quit a class we started because we didn’t like the instructor or we suddenly decided that we had more important things to do on Tuesday and Thursday nights than sit for two hours and learn about whatever it was we enrolled in the class to learn in the first place. Maybe you quit taking guitar lessons? Perhaps it was a job? Whatever it was—you quit! In all likelihood, quitting the guitar or some obscure night class isn’t going to ruin your life. Maybe not even change it in any significant way. Napoleon Hill once commented that quitting some thing harmed few, but quitting many things made a habit that harmed many. It’s worth contemplating how many things you quit and give up on or start but don’t follow-through on in your business. We don’t get paid for the things we start; only for those we complete.

John R. Brinkley had every reason to quit before he ever got started. Growing up poor in some out-of-the-way Western North Carolina mountain town didn’t give him any obvious foundation for fame and fortune. We can assume that many others born the same week he was, in the same geographic area he was, raised in the same kind of poverty he was, never so much as imagined anything better for themselves, and stayed put where they were rooted. Brinkley used the poverty he faced as a youth as motivation to break away from what surrounded him, and to seek a better life. And Brinkley’s definition of a better life included enough money to buy whatever he wanted at the time, whether in any given moment it was a big new car, an exciting vacation, or things like hospitals or radio stations. He became a visionary who acted on his ideas and ambitions, and saw them through, even against considerable odds and stiff opposition.

As Brinkley progressed from minor league medicine show pitchman to famous healer attracting patients from all over the country to firebrand personality to enemy of the state, he encountered times when everything went awry—when his fast pace on his progressive path suddenly led off a cliff. Brinkley crashed more than once. And in every such instance, he…

…re-invented himself.

As example, when his method was discredited, and oddly, at the same time commoditized, it was the same Dr. John R. Brinkley who emerged, with a new technique for combating the same problem of male impotence. Long before Proctor & Gamble discovered the power of adding three words to their laundry detergent packages and advertising every 3 to 4 months, John Brinkley embraced the concept of: new and improved. a daring contradiction in terms! If it is improved, it must actually be old and improved. If it is new, it can’t be improved; there was nothing to improve. No matter. In other words, J.R. Brinkley had done it again! He had “gone back to the drawing board” and employed his unmatched genius as a medical scientist combined with resolute determination, and had discovered an even better solution than before! On that foundation, a new and improved Dr. Brinkley stepped forward, again the leader in his field. (If you do not see the Brinkley blueprint there, that you can use anytime your methods have been discredited or competitively positioned as out-dated, or your marketing has gone stale, you need to have your eyes checked promptly!)

In this case, Brinkley’s “new and improved” was presented by announcement that Doctor John R. Brinkley was no longer calling on male goats to be the source of restoring a man’s sexual prowess—despite his long-standing promotion of that method. Rather, he had developed an entirely new surgical procedure that would deliver superior, entirely reliable results to the sex-starved male. What was this breakthrough with a knife and scalpel? Ah this is another Brinkley marketing gem to make note of: it was too complicated to go into great detail about only that it had something to do with the dismal relationship (at least before letting the doctor operate on you) between the male organ/testicles and the epididymus. Here J.R. Brinkley’s response led the questioner into a confusing array of medical teachings and details best left to those trained to comprehend such complex information. In other words, take my word for it.

This change in surgical technique also led John R. Brinkley to another part of the male body, which led him to the cause of many a man’s health problems: the prostate. About this, the Brinkley marketing machine went to work, on a grand scale, mailing new information to accumulated, yet unconverted prospective patients as well as newly interested men, revealing the evils imbedded within an unhealthy prostate, and presenting the cure uniquely available from Dr. Brinkley. He had found new life with a new enemy: the prostate.

HIGH VALUE QUESTION: when you suffer a setback, HOW MANY WAYS do you creatively and simultaneously respond?

In this re-invention, Brinkley also focused more of his energies on more affluent patients. His marketing literature listed the new and improved, best option as the one recommended for men who owned the finest automobiles … the finest homes … the best horses … best diamonds … the best works of art. Brinkley also reportedly marketed his prostate procedure as featuring the Compound Technique, the Rock of Gibraltar of Dr. Brinkley’s work! And, after undergoing the procedure, each patient was charged an additional $100.00 for six bottles of Brinkley’s “Formula 1020” to be injected systematically after the patient returned home. The “formula” was the doctor’s personal, proprietary creation to stimulate the rejuvenated prostate back to good health.

Combined, John Brinkley responded to the challenge to his methods that might have left a lesser man wounded and paralyzed with three proactive measures: he came forward with a new and improved product/solution for the need he had been so successfully exploiting; he simultaneously premiered a product for another, related need, for which an array of new and additional beneficial promises could be advanced; and he focused his energies on mining the least price resistant segment of his market. This begs the question: when you suffer a setback in your business, how many ways do you creatively and simultaneously respond?

Each time that Brinkley got knocked down, he not only rose up and re-invented himself, but he upped the ante. He came back on an even bigger scale than he had operated before. He positioned each comeback not as a return, but as a grand and glorious accomplishment. He was never content just to get back in the game after injury—he sought to change the game!

As example, when John Brinkley was basically driven out of Kansas, and emerged in Del Rio, Texas, he relied on his greatest media discovery—radio—for his re-birth. But he didn’t settle for merely replicating what he had done before.

The new and improved communications weapon he built across the Texas boarder, radio station XERA in Mexican town of Villa Acuna, beyond reach of the U.S. government regulators, was built to dwarf broadcasting stations in the U.S., quickly growing (with the consent of the Mexican government) first to 150,000 watts then to 500,000 watts to, finally, 1,000,000 watts … an unheard of radio signal strength. As Pope Brock reports in Charlatan, with one million watts, the voice of Dr. John R. Brinkley was now heard in every state in the union, plus the far off reaches of Alaska (many years before it became a state) and several foreign countries. With this reach, John Brinkley not only made himself a bigger personality and force of marketing than ever before, but was able to be a “star-maker” for others he built products for and businesses around, notably including a fabulously successful female pitchwoman, Rose Dawn. With Rose, remedies for every imaginable ailment of far lower cost than Brinkley’s surgeries were sold to the huge numbers of listeners not ready or able to undergo the knife. To this end, Dr. Brinkley created and controlled his own competition. Once started down the path of diversification, Brinkley did not stop simply with creating a small stable of other pitch-persons and product lines, and in the Home Study Course, we discuss some of the other diversification maneuvers he took during this time in Texas and south of the border.

To the frustration of his critics and enemies, and delight of the public, it seemed, for a lengthy span of time, impossible to make Dr. John Brinkley go away. Each time it appeared he might fade away to distant memory, he re-appeared, re-invented, with bigger ideas, bolder marketing messages, and more aggressive marketing than before. This may be a hallmark of the super-entrepreneur, this unique trait of always falling forward.