How to Best Master The Art of "Selling The Truth" Like a Pro - BM390

Susan Friedmann [00:00:31]:

Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books.

Today, my special guest is Hersh Rephun. With dual chops in comedy and advertising, Hersh Rephun has enjoyed an eclectic career spanning two decades as a messaging expert, and as a standup comedian playing gigs across the country. He hosts the popular YES, BRAND podcast, helping Founders and CEOs tackle messaging challenges with humor and humanity.
His clients include changemakers, market leaders, agencies, institutions, production companies, and Oscar-winning filmmakers. As a brand storyteller, Hersh operates on one simple principle: sell the truth.
 
Hersch, it's truly a pleasure to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.

Hersh Rephun [00:01:42]:

It. It's such a pleasure to be here, Susan. Thank you for having me.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:47]:

So sell the truth. Let's dig into that. I know that's the subject that's \near and dear to your heart, but let's first of all, as you know, I want to get very granular and make sure that we're all on the same page. What exactly does that mean?

Hersh Rephun [00:02:03]:

Yeah. Selling the truth really popped into my head, and I don't know how long ago. But I do know that it Having worked in public relations and copywriting and doing almost every form of communication in the written form and on stage and All That. The through line to me was always that things worked best, things landed best or resonated best when they were honest Because there's a certain confidence and a certain conviction that comes through with honesty. At the same time, I recognize That the truth is not always palatable, so the tendency might be to move away from it.  Not only that people sometimes tell a complete untruth, but they might just avoid it. They might avoid the truth.  And so it is a very layered subject for me in that it's not a moral statement.

Hersh Rephun [00:03:01]:

You know, honesty is the best policy because you shouldn't hurt people, and those things are things we understand and hopefully espouse, but it's not a judgment or a lifestyle direction. It's strictly a branding and marketing point of view that we have to embrace the truth and accept it first, and then we're able to sell it to the audience.

Susan Friedmann [00:03:25]:

We're touching on something very touchy here, and that is that there is so much fake news out there. How do we even tell fact from fiction?

Hersh Rephun [00:03:38]:

That is a very, very great point and a very difficult thing that we've been going through these past several years. I cover it a lot in my book, selling the truth, which is coming out very soon if it's not out already, but one of the things that I deal with is that we have to create a new baseline for reality. And because things can be manipulated, because we are manipulated by whatever media we choose to follow is going to kind of be a little bit off. We should really get back to the basics of what's true to us. You know, if you stub your toe and it hurts, you know that's true. Nobody can tell you you didn't stub your toe or it doesn't hurt. And I think if we start to focus on those very small, tiny incremental little truths, Then we can possibly rebuild our relationship with fact rather than get up there and say, well, that's not true. It's so clear.

Hersh Rephun [00:04:41]:

He did this or she did this. They stole this or they did this or they went here or they went there, and then it all becomes about world events and about politics and about social commentary and liberalism versus conservatism, and it's it's so silly to reach so high when we're trying to verify life on earth. Let's start with a very, very small personal truths that, again, we don't hide from ourselves.  And if we could just start to be a little more honest with ourselves, a little more granular, to use your term, about what is actually true, we don't have to tell anybody. We could keep these little truths to ourselves and just start collecting information. We might get better at it.

Susan Friedmann [00:05:25]:

And then there's the aspect of The little white lie or just sort of fabricating the truth a little bit. Yeah. There's a grayness here.

Hersh Rephun [00:05:37]:

Yes, Susan. I mean, that's something that I always had a little struggle with as a kid because It seemed to me that there are positions that you'll be put in where someone doesn't wanna hear the truth, or It's going to hurt their feelings and what is the value, but if you lie, then you're doing something wrong. What I believe is that it. Intent plays a large part in it. There's no easy answer to whether white lies, as we call them,  are good or bad. But, like I say, we're not really judging it. But what you can do is you can look down the line at the trajectory of your life. Like a mentor of mine once said, you have to be careful or you create a tissue of lies.

Hersh Rephun [00:06:22]:

But I didn't really Understand exactly what that meant or where he got that from, but it seemed to be like the idea of you're tying, you know, like, you look at a magician's, handkerchief string, And you 1 lie begets another lie begets another lie. And so I think if you look down the road from your little white lie, you may be dissuaded because you may go, oh, well, this could actually not work out so well, and this could backfire as it often does. Right? How does it often backfire? We tell a little white lie, and it turns into a bigger we're wrong anyway. So I think looking down the road is not a bad strategy.

Susan Friedmann [00:07:00]:

Well, and I think something with regard to that is also the fact that we always remember the little white lie that we told the other person might remember, and we may forget and say something else. And they're like, okay. Didn't you say something different the last done?

Hersh Rephun [00:07:18]:

And as you age, who remembers? You know? Like, I'll remember certain things, but I may not remember what we talked about before the Interview began, so you could very well catch me in a lie there. So you're right. I believe it was a Mark Twain quote of some kind that it's less to remember. Right? Telling the truth makes it easier than having to remember everything else. So that's a really good, ex Inspiration to be forthright, especially when dealing with consumers and an audience, you know, whether they're, your book reading audience or they're your audience of consumers or they're your fans.

Susan Friedmann [00:07:59]:

You said a word earlier that my ears pricked up, and that's the word perspective because we all have a perspective about certain things, and our perspective is our truth. Now if you have a different perspective on something, that's your truth, and I have mine, that's my truth. What's the reality there? What's factual?

Hersh Rephun [00:08:23]:

What's factual if our perceptions are well,  We're entitled to our individual perceptions, and yet we get into trouble. I'm perceiving a truth. It really becomes an opinion. I go back to what I said about the small, granular, little truths that are irrefutable because of the bigger things  If we accept that they're a matter of opinion, we can't convince the other person, and why do we need to? You say, who's right? Why do we really need to know who's right? What does it change? And I believe that a lot of people deep down, \ And this goes back to that theory of if we just start really small, we can rebuild our relationship with the truth. But I think a lot of people know what the truth is and that the argument is a lot of just bluster. So there's not really a benefit in  Saying the irrefutable evidence points to this because people will these days see irrefutable evidence and refute it. Right? I give them more credit. I think that people who are exposed to a certain truth may simply just choose not to accept it, in which case there's no antidote for that.

Susan Friedmann [00:09:36]:

Yeah. And that leads me to the idea of handling criticism from readers or if we're on stage, if we're speaking, Who might disagree with our perspective on a controversial topic. How do we handle that? What's the easy way that we don't sort of get into what you were just saying? You know, you believe this, and I believe that, and hey.

Hersh Rephun [00:10:04]:

Yeah. A friend of mine, Justa Diaz, also a writer, said that humor is the great equalizer. When we perform comedy,  We can neutralize the tension because we're distilling the stress and the strain with humor. That often comes in the form of not taking ourselves too seriously. We're not making light of another person's opinion. We're not mocking. It's not mockery. But I think perspective, go back to that word, comes through when we distill the tension and the opinions with some humor.

Hersh Rephun [00:10:41]:

It's like when you have the correspondents' dinner in Washington, and they traditionally poke fun. The media pokes fun at the president. The president pokes the media, and there's a kind of a laugh over some of the scrutiny that they both face in their respective jobs. And I think that stuff is good. It's good to lighten things up. That's the best tool I can think of.

Susan Friedmann [00:11:04]:

So humor, obviously, is something that we know you're very interested in and you perform, so how far is too far when you inject humor into a brand message?

Hersh Rephun [00:11:18]:

Yeah. Well, Susan, so there's a chapter in the book called "Comedy in Advertising: How Far Is Too Soon," which is a play on the phrase that People will shout it in a comedy club sometimes if someone makes a joke that's really a sensitive topic, and people will go, too soon. And how far can you go with comedy, and when is it too much? So, when it comes to that, I believe that intent is paramount. If you look at somebody like Don Rickles, who was, you know, what they would call an insult comedian, although  he, you know, and I've said this before. He really had such incredible likability and warmth as a human being that The persona wasn't taken to be threatening or serious. He defused the tension By calling attention to everybody's warts and, you know, to the elephant in the room and anything that might be A target for lampooning. he would lampoon it so that he could control the narrative, and there wouldn't be an opportunity for a fence. It was brilliant, and I don't even know that I've ever seen anyone do it so well. But that's, you know, a gift that he had.

Susan Friedmann [00:12:36]:

One of the things that you're very good at, and I know we've had your good friend, Izzy Geisel, here talking about improv.  So practicing improv, I mean, that was one of the best classes that I ever took was an improv class because  Just allowing myself to say something in the spur of the moment without having to think too much about it, I mean, makes a difference.

Hersh Rephun [00:13:04]:

Yeah. It's funny because when I started doing improv, I wanted to perform at such a high level that I put a lot of pressure on myself to follow the rules of improv, and it distracted me until I was able to let go and fall into that moment. And Izzy, as you know, uses improv to improve life skills, and there's so much that can be gleaned From extemporaneous conversation. That is what Izzy's doing in a way that you're having a conversation that doesn't have boundaries because it isn't held to a particular framework, a particular standard. Anything can happen because we know we're on a tightrope. And that's how we feel in life often if we're on some kind of tightrope. And I think the more we practice  Kidding around, and the less precious we make our own feelings around it, the better we'll get along with people.

Susan Friedmann [00:14:05]:

I love the idea of using humor to diffuse what could be, you know, as we get into an argument about a  controversial topic that having some one-liners to diffuse that, but that's something that you would have, like, in your toolbox. This is something that you could practice or just know a few lines that might Diffuse, you know, a controversial situation. Is that something you would recommend?

Hersh Rephun [00:14:38]:

What I think works best is when people are leaning into their true personality. And I think that if we try to do something that isn't us And doesn't suit us. That rings hollow and awkward, and it doesn't really help. So we have to really explore it and find out,  What is our sense of humor? What kind of sense of humor do we have? There probably is a test out there to figure out what kind of sense of humor you have. But is it dry? Is it outrageous? Is it goofy? Is it funny? You know? Do you like to play with language?  And figure out what your sense of humor is like. But, honestly, the heart is so much more important than conditioning our sensitivity for others and the fact that others are entitled to their opinion, their  Wild, crazy, whatever it is. They're entitled to the opinion. I probably could've saved this time.

Hersh Rephun [00:15:39]:

I could've said it this at the outset of this, diatribe that I went,  But that's improv. That's what happens when you're improvising. I think that if the intent in the beginning is to make yourself the foil so that you're not making the other person the whipping post. You're not Having fun at their expense. You're just doing it at your expense in the slightest way. It's a form of humility, and it's a gesture. So we don't have to think of it so much as funny as humility being a kind of a polite gesture that lets the other person know that we don't think we're better than they are.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:17]:

Yeah. I found that for me, humor was something that I never thought that I had a sense of humor. I was always so serious about Stuff. Well, I grew up in a family that was very serious about stuff. So Yeah. You know, it's hard. I met my husband, and he's the complete opposite. And he's got a very dry sense of humor, which takes a while sometimes for people to get.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:38]:

You know? They don't think they're like,  Is he serious when he says that? You know, they often say to me, though I love the idea of poking fun at ourselves.

Hersh Rephun [00:16:49]:

Mhmm.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:49]:

I've demonstrated it when I'm on the stage or even on the recordings is that, as you say, it's humility, it's humanity, it's authenticity, it's me. I mean, you know, I'm poking fun at me rather than, as you say, making another person the whipping post. Excited. Yeah. I love that idea, and I know that it works very well. And I think in comedy, generally, that's always something that works well.

Hersh Rephun [00:17:19]:

There are comics that develop a persona that is more of an acting persona, and that's acting. And sometimes what happens when that happens is that the acting persona is not following the rules of human engagement where you have to be nice. You know, Andy Kaufman was a perfect example of this with one of his stage characters and his own persona. They're just being offensive and being truly not considerate or nice, took it to a place where people didn't find it funny, or people had to struggle to find it funny. I think there's a way to get around that with our humor, and that's to turn the silliness on ourselves in an obvious way. He could have thought of Andrew Dice Clay, who had, you know, this dice main character, and he couldn't separate it from himself. when he was, at one time, the biggest comic on the scene, but he couldn't separate this character that he kind of saw as a goofball that he was kind of making fun of, but it was so appealing to the audience that he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be that person or not. And it became a career stumbling block.

Susan Friedmann [00:18:34]:

I am turning all of this back to this whole subject of selling the truth, and I feel that there's components of that in what we've been saying. But, yes, how does humor Play into this whole idea of selling the truth.

Hersh Rephun [00:18:50]:

For this, we have to point briefly to my other podcast, which is called Truth Tastes Funny, which really is not about business not about the consumer, and not about branding. It's simply a survival guide for the times we live in, And the premise is that what makes reality digestible is the humor that we bring to absurd Situations. We look at a pandemic or we look at any natural disaster, man-made disaster, the cruelty we see in the world, And we call on a reserve that allows it to mix with perspective, with some sense of absurdity and irony, and even an embrace of helplessness. And in there, we survive through comedy because that's what I did during the pandemic. I made silly little videos of me and my family Because I couldn't be around anyone else. We couldn't even go outside very much for a while. I called on all these characters that I used to do and made little videos because I thought that that was the only way to keep my sanity. So I think the same holds true. Without reality, there is no comedy.

Hersh Rephun [00:20:05]:

And without comedy, reality is too hard to digest.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:10]:

Oh, that's very interesting. I hadn't even thought about that perspective, but yes. I mean, if you think about something like Saturday Night Live or, you know, I listen on NPR to Wait. Wait. Don't Tell Me. I mean, they're constantly making fun of what's going on in the news. Yeah. That for us is reality, you know, whether it really is True or not, but, yeah, they're using that as great fodder for scripts for those shows and many more like that, all the comedy shows.

Hersh Rephun [00:20:41]:

Yeah. There's something interesting that happens with satire, Which is that as biting as it may be, it does work when it's biting something that is Bigger and scarier than it is. So, in other words, it doesn't pick on an underdog. Right? Satire targets power, True power. It can't just target a leader. A leader may not have the true power or may not be abusing the power, so the joke might fall flat. But  It attacks as its target power and threat and danger and wickedness or cruelty so that it.

Hersh Rephun [00:21:25]:

The stuff that it's aimed at is always bigger than it is. So it's a David and Goliath dynamic.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:33]:

You see that in cartoons. sure. It's interesting. I was just listening to something on NPR the other day that talked about the fact that  Being a cartoonist now is almost especially for papers and newspapers. That's a dying art. There used to be thousands of them, and now there are a mere few hundred who are still working as cartoonists for newspapers.

Hersh Rephun [00:21:56]:

Wow. Yeah.

Susan Friedmann [00:21:57]:

Yes. Yeah. You always see that the underdog and the bully are larger than life.

Hersh Rephun [00:22:05]:

But, you know, when you look at Mel Brooks and what he did with the producers and springtime for Hitler, he stared that terrifying monster in the face and laughed at it, which diminished its power. And it's very tricky to do  Because you have to be doing it in a way that respects the victim. You know, if you're making fun of Hitler and you're Jewish, that gives you a certain amount of ownership over the pain that you're exposing, which is important, I think, also. But that's part of it. You're diminishing that giant. You're knocking that giant down a peg, and you also understand that you're never gonna completely destroy it.

Susan Friedmann [00:22:49]:

And we all love the sort of David and Goliath stories, too. So
Yeah. The underdog making it big, and so often, people sort of support the underdog because they want that success. So there's sort of something in our nature That we want that underdog to be successful.

Hersh Rephun [00:23:09]:

Yeah. And you see it in sports too, don't you? I mean, at the same time, we also sometimes want to be the bully. We want to be the dominating force, and that's why sometimes people end up ganging up on the underdog. It's a strange phenomenon, obviously. We take The person in the 1st position down a couple of notches, then once they are missing 1 leg, then we jump on them. Now they become the underdog, and we're attacking them. And then some force of good has to rise bigger than us and pull us off, it's a strange cycle.  It's a very complex, brutal cycle we've found for ourselves.

Susan Friedmann [00:23:51]:

Yeah. And it's sort of part of human nature Yeah. And I know we could go on for a long time. This is going down, you know, lots of different paths. How can our listeners find out more about you? Take it away. Let us know.

Hersh Rephun [00:24:14]:

They can find me at Herschrephun.com, and they can find the book "Selling the Truth" at Sellingthetruthbook.com, And that pretty much covers it. I mean, truthtastesfunny.com has that podcast, and Yes Brand Method has everything to do with YES BRAND and that podcast. So that's where I can be found. Excellent.

Susan Friedmann [00:24:45]:

And we would love, I guess, to leave our listeners with a golden nugget. You've given us so many, but what would you like to leave our listeners with?

Hersh Rephun [00:24:55]:

Okay. Well, we talked a lot about conflict and diffusing conflict clicked and getting along in our respective realities. And I think that I thought of something the other day. Someone had called somebody else a name in the heat of an argument, and the question was, who won? And I told them nobody ever won an argument by saying you're an asshole too. So that, you know, the winning of an argument doesn't end in a reductive statement. I always believe that winning has something to do with rising above a situation, not trying to, you know, outdo the wickedness.

Susan Friedmann [00:25:34]:

Yeah. And that whole idea of win-win, too, wants to be in that win-win situation rather than I win, you lose. Yeah.

Hersh Rephun [00:25:44]:

Yes. That was another quote I have in the book: that I am a win-win proponent. I believe that in order for me to win, somebody else has to win.

Susan Friedmann [00:25:52]:

Awesome! And, again, different perspectives. So perfect. I think we've covered a lot of this subject, and I can't wait to read the book because I think it will be very revealing. Hersh, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us.

And listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. So go to BrainstormwithSusan.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparked some ideas you can use to sell more books.

Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.