I’m Alex Berman and you’re watching SELLING BREAKDOWNS
There’s a big movie coming out on Christmas day, a musical starring Hugh Jackman called
The Greatest Showman.
It’s about the life of P.T.
Barnum, one of the powerhouses of the entertainment business before movies came along.
Today we’re going to take a look at this fascinating character and see what about him
is just myth and try to give a fair representation of him as a person.
Let’s start with a myth.
One of the more famous is a quote attributed to P.T Barnum: “There’s a sucker born
every minute”
He never said it, but the quote stuck because this is one of the impressions people have
of him, that he was basically a con-man, out to squeeze whatever money he could from the
general public.
If you’ve no idea who the man is, I think you’ll find his life pretty interesting.
Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Connecticut in 1810.
The business spirit burnt strong in him and by 12 years old he was selling lottery tickets,
inspired by his grandfather Phineas Taylor.
His father died when he was just 15 so, as a young man, he moved to New York, hoping
to make his fortune and to support his mother and five siblings.
He had a natural flair for salesmanship and wasn’t afraid of some wild exaggeration.
He bought an old slave woman, Joice Heth, for $1000 and made that amount back every
single week by charging the public to meet her and telling everyone she had been George
Washington’s nanny and was over 160 years old.
And, although profiting from slavery is clearly a terrible part of this biography, Barnum
did recognize the need for change and left the Democratic party in 1854, to join the
newly formed, anti-slavery Republicans.
However, his appetite for the weird and wonderful only grew, leading him to buy and renovate
a museum in lower Manhattan, which he reopened in 1842 as Barnum's American Museum.
He added to the existing stuffed animals and strange artifacts by bringing live acts, like
25 inch tall Charles Sherwood Stratton, and some famous fakes like the Feejee Mermaid,
which was actually just a young monkey corpse sewn to a fish.
If this sounds like just a pure con, Barnum saw it differently.
The mermaid, for example, was just to get people through the door.
But the museum, as well as the acts and curiosities that he toured with, did bring people real
excitement and entertainment.
He felt that if you gave people real value, it didn’t matter that you’d got them through
the door on false pretenses.
And there’s no doubt that people loved what was on offer.
The museum became a landmark and his tours, with acts like Swedish opera singer Jenny
Lind, made him half a million dollars.
The name of the Hugh Jackman movie, The Greatest Showman, is mostly taken from Barnum’s later
work running a huge circus with a partner James Bailey, which he named “The Greatest
Show on Earth”.
It’s what he’s most famous for but he didn’t actually start the show until after
he was 60 years old.
Once a showman, always a showman, I guess.
Although, some of the reason was that the museum burnt down in 1868 so he needed another
gig.
Barnum and Bailey's Circus lasted all they way until May 2017.
Throughout his life, he reissued an updated autobiography.
The Life of P.T.
Barnum, Written by Himself was first published in 1854 but he added to it as the years went
by and even put it in the public domain, so anyone could print it and eventually it was
the most widely printed book in North America, after the New Testament.
It’s impossible to pin Barnum down as either a egotistical salesman or a great entertainer,
who wanted to inspire imaginations.
Because the truth is he was a little of both.
He spent time as a politician, not just to improve his adopted hometown of Bridgeport,
Connecticut, but also campaigning to ban alcohol and abolish the death penalty.
And a lot of his work raises an interesting question; do the ends justify the means when
it comes to promotion?
If you’re customers are happy with what they get, does it matter that it’s not exactly
what you offered?
Customers are much more savvy today and honesty is far more effective than anything else.
When everyone can check information in an instant, you’re going to get found out fast
if you can’t meet your own claims.
We also live in an age where businesses need to build trust with their customers, not just
to keep them but to grow.
You’ll notice the change in copywriting today.
Simplicity is king.
We’ve gone through the years of big, hyperbolic taglines, and then we got buried in euphemism
and buzzwords.
But I feel like more businesses are realising that customers just want straight talk.
That’s what we aim to give you on this channel; the greatest channel on earth.
Wanna learn more about business theory and history?
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