Andrew Tate: A Masterclass in Marketing
Hate him or love him, Andrew Tate has taken the internet by storm. It seems everywhere you look, his face is there. According to Google Trends, he has reached peak interest, going from basically no attention in March this year to owning everyone’s eyeballs in 3–4 months. Tate claims this was no accident at all, but only phase one of his master plan to conquer the world…
Tate has been making videos online since 2018 saying basically the same stuff he says now. So why all of a sudden did he rise so exponentially to fame and why did it happen this year?
I spent the past month studying him and his strategies in the pursuit of capturing the attention of literally everyone from the perspective of a marketer so that you don’t have to.
Here is what I found.
Intrigue and Mystery
Andrew Tate is undeniably an interesting guy.
Before his claim to fame, he was on track to follow in his father’s footsteps as a grand chess master, however, that dream was severed due to his parents separating. Tate then went on to become a professional kickboxer in his 20s where he won 4 world champion titles. After that, he started his webcam business where he got his various girlfriends to entertain men online for money. He has since started several other businesses including an online university called Hustler’s University and a private network known as the War Room.
Presently, he documents a lot of his lifestyle on his youtube channels — TateSpeech and Tate Confidential, where he shows behind-the-scenes footage of his everyday life. He travels the world and tells stories about dangerous things that have happened to him, It is not uncommon to see him riding around in one of his 20+ supercars including his iconic Bugatti Chiron ($5M)
So the guy has done a lot in his life so far.
Undoubtedly, Tate’s thrilling lifestyle plays a big role in why people want to keep tabs on him because not everyone basically lives the life of James Bond on a daily basis and documents it for the world to see.
So step one to marketing your personal brand, be interesting and make sure the world knows about it.
Be Polarizing
Andrew Tate is one of the most polarizing people I have ever encountered on the internet, and it explains why people can’t stop talking about him.
Being polarizing means you are divisive and exist on the extreme side of things, meaning people either love you or hate you with no real in between.
If you think about Tate, there is rarely a person who feels in the middle about a guy like him because his views and personality portray him in a way that either fully conforms to your worldview or is the furthest thing from it, and this is what enables him to have such a cult-like following from people around the world.
In the field of social media marketing, being polarizing is super useful for creating a personal brand because it ensures people from both sides of the spectrum are talking about you. I’ve seen posts about him from both his haters and most die-hard fans and what’s interesting is that the more negative media he gets about him, the more popular he becomes.
Oration and Body Language On Camera
Andrew Tate makes use of several oratory and body language techniques that convince you to view him as an authority figure, which is why people listen so intently.
Tate has mastered the art of communicating both in the verbal and non-verbal sense. When he speaks, he speaks with conviction, about everything. He does not stutter, he does not use fillers like “um, uh, like”, he speaks fast, loud, and with purpose. Even if he is saying absolutely nothing, he can convince you that what he is saying is important and that you should listen. Furthermore, Tate speaks in a clear, easy-to-understand manner while throwing in a few big words to give off the impression that he is very intelligent.
He also speaks like that of an authority figure using phrases like, “As a man, you should do X” or “A man does not do X if he wants to achieve Y”. This way of phrasing things as opposed to saying “I personally do X” Or “I do X to achieve Y” enables him to play the role as an authority figure, much like a teacher to a student, or father to son which has a massive appeal to young men who are looking for guidance.
In terms of body language, Tate likes to give off the impression that he is the one in control in any given situation. Whether he is a guest on a podcast, or at a party, on camera, or in the passenger seat of a car. He has to be the man in charge. He understands how to convey complete and utter confidence from the way he walks, uses his hands, sits, and behaves. All this is done to subconsciously reinforce the idea in your mind as someone who knows him at a surface level, that he is a boss and that you should respect him.
Tate’s Customer Acquisition Methodology
Alex Hormozi, founder of Acquisition.com, a portfolio of companies that do over $100M/year in revenue says there are 5 main ways of getting customers, they are as follows:
- Cold Outreach
- Make Content and grow organically
- Run paid ads
- Have affiliates and partners that refer them to you
- Word of mouth
The reason you see Andrew Tate everywhere is because he picked the two most powerful methods of the five to get your eyeballs on him — Affiliate and word-of-mouth marketing. These two are arguably the hardest of the five to do right because when you have them working in your favor, you have the entirety of the human population at your disposal to market your product for you. Let me explain how Tate did it.
Andrew Tate runs this online education company called Hustler’s University (HU), where students can enroll in 18 modern wealth creation methods to learn how to make money. One of these modern wealth creation methods is affiliate marketing. The way that method works is as follows:
- You become an affiliate for HU by getting a referral link
- You repurpose Andrew Tate’s videos on various social media platforms and throw in the link in the description promoting HU
- When people sign up for the program (costs $49) affiliates get 50% of the money for the first month.
- So if you refer 1 person, you get $24.5. Sign 100 people get $2,450
$2450 is a lot of money for simply repurposing old videos of Tate and only needing to get 100 people out of the 8 billion that inhabit the earth to make a decent income in most of the world. This is why you are seeing him everywhere.
This all feeds into the more powerful technique, which is word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing. Now that Tate is everywhere, and the algorithms push his content to the masses, people everywhere around the world at all times of the day are talking about Tate to other people. Hormozi states that of the 5 marketing methods, WOM marketing has the potential for true exponential growth because 1 person tells 2 people, 2 people tell 4 people, 4 people tell 8 people, ad infinitum.
This is exactly the effect Andrew Tate is experiencing right now and the best part is, it is all free. He did not pay a penny for all the free marketing everyone is doing for him, which leads to the final part of this masterclass in marketing:
The cult-like following.
The Cult of Personality of Andrew Tate
Andrew Tate has built a cult following online of mostly young men who are willing to defend him at all costs.
His cult of personality, much like many past tyrannical authoritarian leaders such as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, has enabled him to get away with saying all of the polarizing stuff that got him famous in the first place. This is because he is painted as the savior of masculinity for young men in a world where being a man is frowned upon. This cult following enables him to have unfettered access to those who follow him and can essentially print money on demand because a certain proportion of these people will buy anything he sells. Whether it be his courses, his content, or even his clothing.
What Tate has essentially done from a marketing POV is establish himself as a brand and got himself his ‘1000 true fans’, which has made selling almost embarrassingly easy for him.
Final Thoughts
Andrew Tate’s exponential rise to fame was no accident. It was a planned, highly calculated strategy that Tate even admits is still ongoing as he has only accomplished phase one of a three-part strategy of conquering the internet. Whether he will be able to sustain this level of fame for the foreseeable future is another story. One thing is for sure, he knows how to get attention and monetize it, which are the hallmarks of good marketing.
