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Thoughts on sports and trash-talking in real-life (Muhammad Ali) or a football field, to the movies (Apollo Creed) to even comedy actors in wrestling like Andy Kaufman.

How trash-talking is used as an effective form of intimidation in life.

Transcription

Does trash-talking work?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I wanted to talk about this, is kind of a second in the series that we’re doing, having to do with manipulation through marketing, and just a general manipulation to human beings.

It just happens. It’s automatic and understanding these elements of human behavior, allows you to communicate with people better in your marketing, and also to not fall into a lot of the traps that people tend to fall into.

When you’re dealing with trying to get people to do what you want them to do, which is what really what marketing and sales are about. You’re trying to encourage people to do a certain thing. And hopefully, it’s a good thing.

But it makes no difference whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, the same principles in place.

And so what I’m going to talk about is trash-talking.

Trash-talking and sports is a model for something. It’s a model for intimidation. It’s a model for getting attention. It’s a model for outrageousness.

It happens on so many different levels with humans, but sports is just an obvious place. And one of the most obvious places I’ve got a book here I’ve shown it before. This is a really good book by Bob Zmuda, on Andy Kaufman.

Andy Kaufman was a comedian in the 70s and 80s, who really got into he always enjoyed the theatrical of the whole thing, and was very much a well, very much a performance artist.

He would enjoy professional wrestling before professional wrestling really went mainstream in the 80s and 90s. And he got into the trash-talk persona, and able to really put it out there.

It’s what wrestling is professional wrestling is known for American professional wrestling is known for you would not have really, I don’t know, maybe a third or a half of the entire performance that happens is this back and forth trash-talking, which is just intimidation, outrageousness, making outrageous statements, and you see it in the most extreme form there.

But you also see it on a level of professional sports, when we’re talking about Muhammad Ali, one of the best trash-talkers of all time, in terms of just saying these outrageous statements about how great he was about how he was going to destroy the other person.

In an almost poetic way, he would get away with this outrageous talk. And people loved it, they enjoy it, they love hearing it, they know it’s partially a game, it’s partially just a process.

But at the same time, there’s an intimidation factor that happens.

So when I played football in high school, the same thing would occur, you’d have some guy on the other side of the field, and I was aligned. You’d have some guy on the other side, just saying the most outrageous things about your mother and everything else, just to intimidate just to get you to react. This is what we talked a lot about yesterday about that reaction factor, there has to be a reaction at some point.

Either you’re reacting to them, or they’re reacting to you or you’re able to stand outside of that game, and not play it. But there tends to be a reaction back and forth.

The person that is reacting, is losing to the person that is causing the reaction to happen, which is provoking the reaction. And so that’s what you see in professional sports over and over again.

You see it even to the point that it bleeds over into entertainment, in terms of you know, the Rocky movies, every person Rocky’s ever been against has been a provoker you know, the Apollo Creed and, you know, Mr. T’s character and all the rest.

They’re all these outrageous trying to get the other person’s goat so to speak. And the whole thing is that works. The reason why they trash-talk is that it works.

It really brings something out of the other side, it causes either resentment, or, at the very least annoyance, and if you’re able to get the other person annoyed, you’ve gained something over them.

And so you see this even used in advertising, one of the most up rightest examples or outrageous examples was a see if I’ve got just random that I’m pulling this stuff out.

Because I’m trying to remember names and seeing and seeing if I have any great pictures here.

Billy Mays, I don’t know if you remember Billy Mays, he used to do these OxiClean commercials. here’s a whole chapter about him. Really good book by now. That’s a good one up. But there’s a whole chapter all about Billy Mays, and his persona is outrageous in your face, loud, obnoxious person.

It gets attention, it gets a reaction. I know this is driving a bunch of people crazy that I just made my shelf go sideways, I will put it back to normal, don’t worry.

But I wanted to see if I had a good explanation, this is all off the cuff, I don’t have anything to show you right there.

But Billy Mays was this outrageous character he didn’t trash talk. But in a sense, he would get people reacting and you have to have a little bit of that.

Somewhere in your marketing, you have to cause some form of you’ve got to cause people to stop in their thought process and come over to you and listen to what you have to say.

Even in its most mild way, there has to be some form of reaction for you to be able to move forward. This is how people conversate in its most extreme, you get situations to where you have people taking over countries like Hitler, I mean, Hitler, the outrageousness, the cartoony behavior of Hitler is no accident.

And it’s no accident that very, that a lot of the outrageous dictators through time, all have these crazy movements and everything else.

It’s all this game of back and forth of reacting and causing a reaction. And that it in its worst-case scenario, causes a controlling factor. But in its best-case scenario, and it’s the very subtle scenario, you just have a back and forth and human beings learning how to interact with each other.

The problem is we don’t talk about it very often. And so a lot of people get steamrolled by outrageous characters and outrageous people because they just don’t know how to handle it.

But in its lightest place that likes in sports is a great place to be able to see it.

You see how it works out over time, and how it annoys people, and also propels these characters up into infamy and into fame just because of little subtle things that they do, which first started to annoy people or to get attention.

And then it became something much bigger and I’m we have a perfect example of it tomorrow. So come back tomorrow and I’m going to get back to the example that Brad mentioned to me last week, and we’re going to get into that tomorrow so come back then.

In the meantime, go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You get a free copy, at least for now over at AmazonProofBook.com you have a great night.

Get out there and let the magic happen.