Rule Of Seven Marketing

Your best message can be perfectly written and still bounce off people the first few times they hear it, and it’s not because they’re stubborn. It’s because the brain is built to filter noise, distrust novelty, and cling to what feels familiar and safe. That’s where the Rule of Seven comes in, a practical marketing and communication framework that explains why repetition is the real pathway to trust, recall, and action. 

We connect the science to real business storytelling: if you want prospects to picture an aspirational future with your product, your team to rally around why the company exists, and modern AI search systems to accurately understand what you do, you need consistent stories told many times in many formats. We talk through familiarity and persuasion, why “seven times” often looks more like “seven times seven” today, and how leaders can’t rely on winging it when the digital world demands content across Google, social platforms, email, proposals, and internal communication. 

Then we get hands-on with the solution: building a custom GPT that acts like a trained employee for your messaging. We explain how to set the GPT’s role, write clear instructions, and upload a knowledge base with your brand story, services, customer insights, and vocabulary so it can generate aligned content fast. You’ll also hear about a free public-facing Story Engine GPT you can use right away, plus how to evolve it into a version that’s truly yours. If this helps, subscribe, share the episode with a friend who’s overwhelmed by marketing, and leave a review with the one channel where you want your story to land next.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hey, I made simple life. I'm your host, Steve. You know, we've been talking about the three stories you need to nail for your organization the last several episodes. And uh when we wrapped up, where they all lead, all those stories where they all lead is to using uh AI, a custom GPT, to help you tell all three stories as an expert in the way that you need to tell. We've all heard that uh comment. Um you have to tell someone, you have to tell someone something seven times before they hear it. And it's like I was thinking about what's the science behind that? Why is that true that I have to tell someone some something seven times before they hear it? And so I wanted to show you a few slides here that help explain the science behind that. So here we go. Let's see.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

I'm on a share.

Brain Filters And The Rule Of Seven

Familiarity Builds Trust Over Time

Seven Channels For Three Key Stories

Leadership Storytelling And Team Motivation

The Digital Channel Overload Problem

Why A Custom GPT Solves It

SPEAKER_01 1:35

Okay. So it's called the Rule of Seven Framework. And in marketing, um it's they did these studies that talked about um how the commercial has to hit a bunch of times before it finally lands. And the reason uh what's going on there is because your brain is designed in a particular way to um to filter out a bunch of noise. And so when novel information is um is presented, the first thing you're naturally inclined to be skeptical, and so you dismiss it or you don't hear it, or you um you focus on what you know because it's safe. And so the initial exposure uh you become aware of it, but um you're not you're not necessarily bought in to it. But the more that you hear it over and over, the more that you begin to trust your what's happening is your brain needs a neural pathway to be uh manufactured for this information. There's a great book by uh Robert uh Cialdini. It's called Persuasion, and it's um one of the principles, it talks about the the various principles of persuasion, and one of them is the familiarity uh principle. They did a study, and so it's like uh maybe you have a kid, you're gonna you're gonna sell um you're gonna sell cookies for the club, the Girl Scout cookies, and so if you ran up and down the the neighborhood that's not your neighborhood, the odds of you uh getting someone to buy are low. But if you go to someone that sees you over and over, then there's already a level of trust built. That neural pathway of trust is already um there. You're familiar, they recognize you, maybe they've had several conversations, and so the odds of you uh selling uh the Girl Scout cookies to that person are much higher, and the same thing with your message. Your message needs to be um needs to be in front of that person in various ways, seven times. And really nowadays it's seven times seven, and we'll get there to that, but it's the the rule of seven. So imagine you have three stories that you need to tell the the story of your prospect um and the their aspirational future with your product um as a part of their identity and they're successful. Well, you've got to tell that story seven times across at least seven different channels for them. And you need to do that for your team, your internal team to build your culture. And you need to do that for your your um for the AI systems as well. And so, you know, this this is really where's my slides? Here we go. All right, so you got that you got your aspirational future story that your prospect facing. They're on the path to success, and your product or solution service is a part of their self-identity, and so they see they see it as congruent and they've ran into it enough, they trust you, and so they begin to um build a future with your product or service in their mind. But that's because you've been uh faithful with your messaging, you've been consistent over time telling that story. And where I'm going with this is that you have to be this awesome storyteller. Your team expects you to be an awesome storyteller to clearly define why your product exists, why it's a they uh it's a part of something bigger than them. There's a book by Daniel Pink that talks about how uh motivation, what motivates people, and it's not money, they need to see themselves as a part of something bigger, they need to have a certain amount of autonomy, they need to uh they need to be developing them themselves professionally. And so your your vision that you're building of the future of your company and those folks in their role needs to satisfy those three things. And so, there again, not only do you need to be an excellent storyteller and tell the story in a um a diversified way to your your prospects and your customers, you need to tell that to the team, and that's a whole nother different challenge, and you have to be excellent at it as a leader, and that needs to be um plugged into the whole why this company exists. And so imagine, imagine the aptitude you have to have just in storytelling and then discerning which story you're telling, and then how to format it. And then on top of that, this is where this is where the the website world began to uh disrupt or kind of like uh make the the business owner uncomfortable is that uh here I have a great product or service and I'm good at it, and I built a team and and I'm serving my clients, but all of a sudden now I have to be effective in this digital world that just appeared all of a sudden, and I didn't ask for it, and that's a big challenge. So now I have to be an expert storyteller in a digital realm in all of these different channels, Google and Google My Business pages, and whatever else they come up and change, and Facebook and Instagram, and so oh my gosh, now I have to be I have to be a ninja storyteller over here now. And it's like uh that's a full-time job, and it's a full-time job running my company, it's a full-time job. It's like it's too much, it's too much, and but that's what all the great businesses and the great brands do that you really appreciate and identify, and brands that you support. They've got that worked out. They hired a team of experts, they did all sorts of research, they they um have a marketing in-house marketing team and an outsourced research team, and they have all these things, and it's like that's not fair to the to um 95% of the businesses out there when you've got 20 or less employees, and you've got to be all that too, and compete. Um a custom GPT is where all of these stories lead, one pre-tuned custom GPT for your business that has the information for your aspirational future story for your prospects, that has all of the uh language and and why we exist and what we believe in. It has that information in it, and then and then um is able to create multiple diverse versions of this and bake it into the AI search halo that is now all of a sudden, um, just in the recent months, become another task on your list to stay relevant in the future of AI. And so all of this has been leading, all of these is like, all right, so let's clarify the stories we need for our top three stories, our top three prospects or or audiences that we really need to get good at. And then um, now it's like, all right, so how do I tell this story? How do I build this custom GPT and um um and succeed in all of these, right? That's that's a high hurdle, but I'm here to show you it's easily done, and uh and to know that this this custom GPT that I'm gonna show you how to quickly build. And actually, I'm gonna give you a free a link to a free custom GPT that will resolve most of this, but over time you need to do you need to build your own that has your own language and vocabulary and and backstory and your branding and all of those things baked into that. That's what a custom GPT will do way better. It's like you hire a great employee, you bring them in, but it takes several years for them to inculcate and learn the language and the insider language and your customers and your products and your services. It takes time to do that. But you can leapfrog that by creating a custom GPT. But this GPT, this one here that I'm gonna give you for free, if I'm sharing correctly, yeah. Let me share.

SPEAKER_02 11:06

Let me do this better.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

So if I'm so if I'm here just for anyone here in your story engine GPT, we'll have a link to it here in the episode. We'll have not showing thanks to my this is show business, people share my screen, share the window.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

There we go. How about that?

Tour Of The Free Story Engine GPT

How To Build Your Own GPT

Using The GPT For Plans

Links Help And Closing

SPEAKER_01 11:49

I've got my faithful support team in the background keep keeping me out of the ditch. Okay, so in the this is a public-facing uh GPT that you'll be able to go to, and you can see that there are three stories that this is designed to help you tell. Help me with your story one, the prospect-facing story, or help me with your story two, the internal team story, or help me with the story three, the AI search engine. And so you can go and get this and start going to town with all of the uh content that you need to be creating and placing in the various formats and in out there in that world, right? But let's show you how to build this GPT. So if we go in the back end here and look at this GPT that I built for you, all right, and if I'm sharing still correctly, there are components in a custom GPT that you need to build. So if we go over here, this is what it looks like when you start up. Okay, when you come in and you're gonna you're gonna come into your GPT area and you're gonna create a custom GPT. So over here you got your typical stuff, and it has a GPT section, and at the bottom it says explore GPTs. You're gonna come over and click create, and you want to go into the configure. I think that's a a more um, yeah, more control, and in my opinion. And so there are various areas that you need to um satisfy. A you got to tell it the role that you want it to assume and the responsibilities, um, the yeah, what you expect of this uh robot, this custom GPT, to help you accomplish, right? And so over here you're gonna tell it, help me tell the story, these three stories, and you're gonna tell it your who your um avatars are and what you want to do. But over here, you're gonna upload files. These files are your become your knowledge base. And so if we go and look in this this GPT here, um where we have information of the instructions that we wanted to talk about. But then we also have the knowledge base that um you're going to bring in here. So you can go and create, you can use this little side over here to generate your uh documents, to go out and research and find the information, be it your website, your brand, your backstory, um, your products, your services, your customers, information about your customers. You would create, you go over here and just create documents and then upload those documents. And that's going to give you all of the knowledge base that it's going to refer to. So this is the backstory. You know, when you bring an employee on, it takes some years to you know organically assimilate all this over time with experience, right? Well, you can that's where you're shortcutting this, you're just importing it or uploading it in here. Next, this would be like your training, all the instructions you would create around this. Um, this is what how you would train an employee. You would over time, whether it's it's very structured or on organic and the flow, that becomes their operating instructions, and then they refer to the the um institutional knowledge, right? So this is where you would come in, and you can use this side over here to help you actually accomplish these. You can bring in and you can bring in all your diverse stuff and help help uh expect it to structure that information in a great format. Take it, put it in documents, save those documents, and then upload those documents. And then you could come in and riff. You you can actually dictate and just go, here's my expectation of the role that you're going to assume, and how I want you to behave. And here's the rules of behavior. And I you can be deliberate, you can go back and forth, and what this is going to do, you you actually you're just telling a robot, help me write these instructions for my robot. And so the robot's gonna write great stuck structured knowledge over here, and then you're gonna copy and paste it, give it a name, click create, tell it the model you want. Click create, share. I mean it's it's that simple. And then when you update that GPT, and this is what is going to pop out right here. So let's go, let's go look at it. And so this begins your beta version of your custom GPT. So now we have in this case we have our story engine GPT. You can come in and say, all right, help me with the internal team story, or help me with a AI search engine story. It's going to tell you um what you can expect from it, how it's going um come of the strategy and plan. Then you can start answering the questions and go, hey, I wanna I wanna focus on number three. Okay, so um just help me focus in this case, just for an example, on um number three. Here's what uh we've been doing. I'm curious about, you know, as far as future trends, what should I be considering? But look at this. So they ask you answer, that's a Marcus Marcus Sheridan book. It's the essence of what people are doing, they're searching for answers to their questions, and so this gives you a nice format, a strategy, and a framework you can start following. You know, we as a leader, we're like, we have to know everything. We have to, the bug stops here, right? And so it doesn't matter what situation or day and time, you know, we have to oftentimes just wing it with the best we know. And this is the beauty of this is to come over here and go, all right, I this is the best I know, but actually, there's probably a successful framework I can follow. Help me identify what that framework is, and let's put a plan together. And now you've leapfrogged from just being good at winging it to actually following um a structure that you can um answer or give it just messy input, and it's going to take it and expand upon it and organize it and format it, and and then help you produce content to post in the various areas, whether it be a a um, whether it be an employee manual, whether it be a um a presentation, a proposal, emails, whatever it is, whether it's internal, external, or just content, you need to be publishing so that the AI search engines can start to get an idea of what you your services do and how you uh impact folks. So if you like that, be sure to get to get that uh custom GPT. The link will be in this episode's uh information about. You can also go to roionline.com forward slash link tree. You can also go, let's say, Steve, this is great. You convinced me, but I need a little bit of help with this. Well, this is what I do. I have a service, it's called uh get your custom GPT. So go to roionline.com forward slash custom gpt. Schedule a time with me. Let's talk about your project and let's get you um let's get your custom GPT implemented so you can tell these three stories successfully, right? You can build it, you can do your own, but if you need help, reach out, let me know. I do this with um a lot of folks. Another episode of AI Made Simple. Appreciate you. Steve Brown, like and subscribe, by the way. Tell your mom and dad, your neighbors. See you on another next week on AI Made Simple. That's a wrap.