The Business RadioX® Methodology: Why It Works, by BRX Founder Lee Kantor
Lee Kantor: [00:00:00] I think that I was uniquely positioned and qualified to create this platform because of my background. When I was in college, I went to the School of Journalism at the University of Florida and I have a degree in advertising.
So through the basics of education there, I learned about the principles of journalism and the importance of journalism in the community. But I also learned about some of the principles around persuasion. And as a bonus, my roommate in college for three of my four years got his degree in social psychology, where he was learning all kinds of things about persuasion and how it works in terms of social psychology.
That’s where I first stumbled upon the Cialdini about persuasion. And I was fascinated by that book. I read it cover to cover. It wasn’t part of my curriculum. It was interesting that for whatever reason, the advertising program didn’t talk about it a lot. But I was seeing a connection between his principles and what I was trying to do as a copywriter. That’s what I went to college to be, so I was immersed in Cialdini and I really took to heart his six principles of persuasion.
And for those who don’t know, the six principles of persuasion are reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. So when I came up with the idea of Business RadioX, it was really important for me to layer in each one of those principles in the activities that we do every day in the studio.
Lee Kantor: [00:01:39] For example, reciprocity, that’s one of the big ones. That’s an obvious one. Every day when we serve a guest and we give them a great interview that they’re proud of, that we hold them up, we help them articulate their message, and we don’t ask for anything. It’s a gift we’re giving them. One of the first things that happens time and time again is they ask, what can I do for you? Just by the activity of serving that guest with an open heart and some grace in terms of helping them articulate their message.
We’re able to trigger reciprocity in that. They want to help us in some way. And that help might be referred guessed, it might be having a conversation about them being a sponsor. It opens the doors to lots and lots of things. And I have never found a quicker way to create a relationship, a business relationship, where they want to help as fast as what we do. The second principle Cialdini talks about is commitment and consistency. One of the first things we do when we recommend any studio partner opening a studio, or any client having a show is to have a show on a regular, reliable, predictable rhythm.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:51] And that’s what triggers this kind of commitment and consistency in the mind of our prospects and the people that we serve because they know we’re going to show up every week, every month, whatever the rhythm is. They can count on us being there and telling these stories of being the voice of business for the niche that we serve, whether they’re a client, a sponsor, or the community as a whole.
So showing up on a regular basis and showing up at the places where they’re expecting us to be is an important component of how we work. Social proof is the third principle Cialdini talks about. We have this in so many different places, it’s kind of funny. And this is one of the benefits of a new studio partner coming on board and being part of the family. They get, by extension, what we do in any given studio.
There are photos on TV screens or in digital frames of past guests. So the guest sees that. Then they see on our website that we’ve interviewed all of these. There are tens of thousands of interviews that we’ve done that’s on our website. We show up at high-status events. They see us at the chamber events. They see us at industry events. We share all of our interviews on social media. These are all triggering social proof, social proof, lots of kind of proof out there that we exist.
Lee Kantor: [00:04:10] We’re good guys. We’re really serving our community. And our clients are serving their niche that they serve. So we have that all over the place, social proof. And like I said earlier, if you’re a new studio partner, you get all of that just by being part of the team.
So when you show up in your new market and you now have access to our website and you can point to all these different people and companies and different industries and organizations that we serve, you get that credential without really having to do much in order to get it. And speaking of credentials, authority is the fourth principle Cialdini talks about. We get to give our clients the credential of host.
We get to give our clients to credentialed studio partner. That automatically differentiates them from anybody else in their industry. We usually don’t have competing people in the studio as a host, so they get to be the only game in town for the length of their sponsorship. And this establishes them as authorities to the people who matter most to them. They’ve separated themselves from all of their competitors. They get to be the ones that are the voice of business for the needs that they serve or the community they serve.
Lee Kantor: [00:05:23] So that level of authority comes along for the ride when you’re working with us. The fifth principle Cialdini talks about is liking. How to be likable, how to be a friend to the community. One of our key principles is extreme generosity. We start out by being generous in our conversational approach to interviewing.
By allowing business people of all sizes and shapes and colors to come on shows. How we freely share the content on social media. That makes us very likeable. That makes us a friend to businesses. There is no doubt in the mind of anybody that interacts with us that we are a friend of business. We unabashedly have a pro-business agenda. We serve everybody in the community.
We make sure that the underserved business community is served. We are the place that tells the stories of businesses of all sizes. We don’t only talk to the biggest players in town. We talk to everybody. And that’s by design.
And then lastly, the last principle Cialdini talks about is scarcity. In order to create scarcity, what we do in a studio is that there could only be room for so many guests. There can only be room for so many people in a studio. Just by design. We can decide how many episodes of the show that we’re going to offer every week. We can decide if we want to exclusively offer shows to only certain categories, one person in each category.
Lee Kantor: [00:06:56] We can create as much scarcity as we’d like. We can decide how many studio partners that there are in any given market. So we have a lot of control over the scarcity of the opportunity to be part of Business RadioX, whether it’s for sponsorships or studio partners. So scarcity is kind of built into the equation.
The combination of all of those things when it comes to Cialdini in terms of persuasion, coupled with the heart of being the voice of business, allows us by design to help people and to get people to take action in a very, very tight, elegant process.
I think that a lot of what we do is, by design, that we’ve learned over the years and a lot of our principles are similar, so that this allows all of these things to just organically occur and to happen without anybody really, you know, going down a checklist and saying, I’m going to check the reciprocity box or the social proof box. We’ve just done everything in our heart the way we think that people should be served. And it also hits all of these persuasion buttons.
So because of that, that’s why The Business RadioX® Methodology works. It was done mindfully. It wasn’t done accidentally. And because of that, it’s very effective.
