Insurance professionals who came to the Island this week to attend the Bermuda Captives Conference and get a bit of fun and sun in on the side, probably had no idea they would get a lesson in life, business and how the world works, but they did. And they got it from a man who would know better than most: Ken Schmidt.With lines like, “Logic will kill us all”, “the most dangerous thing in business is an engaged brain”, and “it’s naive to think people are attracted to you based only on the product you sell”, Mr Schmidt’s keynote speech was unconventional, practical, and inspirational.Ken Schmidt is the former head of communications for Harley Davidson. He’s the man many in the business world credit with successfully turning the business around when it was on the brink of bankruptcy in the late 70s and early 80s — one of the most celebrated turnarounds in corporate history.Now Mr Schmidt travels all over the world, speaking with obvious passion, blunt honesty and great humour about how businesses of any size and scope can strengthen their brands and create demand by leveraging the basic drivers of human behaviour.“If you think something that is as visually cool and exciting and as iconic as Harley Davidson is has nothing to do with what you do and the way that you create demand for what you do for a living, I say au contraire,” Mr Schmidt told the audience.Anybody who is in business, he said — no matter if it’s the motorcycle business, the captive insurance business or a small local business — can learn from his philosophy that it’s not about what you sell, or how you sell it — it’s about you and whether or not people like you.“At Harley Davidson, what we learned is what we do, what we stand for and what we represent is not a product. We’re not a product company. We are a human behaviour company. What changes business has everything to do with human behaviour,” he said. “Folks, this is how the world works.“We have to stop thinking and believing that there’s a human being in the world that’s interested in hearing your quality message, your commitment to excellence message, your heritage message. No matter what these things are, they are very, hugely unappealing. They do not create differentiation. They do not create demand.”Mr Schmidt says differentiating yourself from your competition is about getting people to like you enough that they will go out and tell the world about you.To illustrate his point, he showed the audience two photos — one of the 2012 Harley Davidson Heritage Softail, the other of the Honda Shadow. He said the untrained eye can’t tell the difference between the two and that the Harley cannot and never will be able to do anything the Honda can’t. In the US, the Harley sells for $24,000, the Honda, for $8,000.“If we were rational human beings, and thank God we’re not, these are the bikes everybody would jump on — they’re $16,000 less!”Despite the price difference, the Harley outsells the Honda in the US twelve to one. In Japan, where the Harley retails for the equivalent of $75,000, it outsells Honda ten to one. Mr Schmidt says the reason Harley is able to do this has absolutely nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the way the company presents itself to the world.“Every story of every successful business in the world is not based on the quality of the product offering,” he said. “When we present ourselves to the world in the same way our competitors do, we say we are the same as they are and at that point, that consumer is forced to do something that we should never, ever, ever allow in the world of demand creation and that is to allow that consumer to engage their brain. The most dangerous thing in business when we are attempting to create demand is an engaged brain. Logic will kill us all! No one has ever chosen to do business with you for logical reasons.“Harley will sell a quarter of a million very expensive, very large motorcycles this year — not with ad campaigns or blimps floating over major cities. It will be friends, business associates or someone that you sit next to on a plane talking you into buying one of these.”Mr Schmidt showed the audience a photo of the famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which takes place every year in Black Hills, South Dakota. It’s where more than a half a million Harley riders gather every August for a week. He said he’s often asked how Harley gets so many of its customers in one spot at one time. He said his answer is always: “These aren’t customers.”“We used to look at them as customers when we ran ourselves into bankruptcy. A customer is somebody who buys something from you. We’re not interested in customers. These are disciples,” he said. “It’s not a religious term, it’s a human word. A disciple is someone who feels so good about something that, without being prompted, they tell other people about what makes them happy, what they enjoy and why it’s different.”Harley turned itself around by doing things differently, Mr Schmidt said. They cut their marketing budget completely and reinvested “boots on the ground” — passionate people. Enthusiastic employees evangelising the beauty and benefits of the Harley brand are key, he said.“We invest in people. People getting out and having influence on the people we do business with by getting them excited, passionate and enthusiastic,” he said. “It’s very simple. All we want to do is get people to like us. Period.”To do that, they started doing something no other motorcycle company at the time was doing: offering test drives. After the test drive, a Harley representative would ask the same question: “What do we need to change on this bike to get you to buy it?” What the company discovered was that every customer had a different answer. But they listened to all the feedback and gave the customers what they wanted: customisable options.“If you were to pick up a Harley parts catalogue from 1986, it would be 54 pages long. Today, it’s fatter than the Chicago Yellow Pages with about 20,000 very expensive, very beautiful things in it,” Mr Schmidt said. “It goes back to the very basics of humanity — engaging people in conversations about something that is important to them and then rewarding their behaviour by visibly reacting and acting upon what they are telling you. Asking what the customer wants and turning around and giving it to them.“People say, geez, Ken — every business does that. And I say, geez, Ken — nobody does that. Everybody talks a really good game about it though. ‘We’re a solutions provider.’ What does that mean?”“Then they say: ‘But we’re selling really important stuff. We’re talking about risk management here.’ Bull. BS — I don’t buy it for one second,” he said. “When two human beings are talking to each other, it doesn’t matter what’s being sold. Either they like us inherently in their heart and their soul or they do not.”When it comes to doing business, and doing business well, Mr Schmidt says it’s all about engaging and listening to people.“We’re an ego-driven species. We desperately want validation from other human beings that we are understood, that we are wanted that we are valued, that we’re appreciated that we’re liked, that we’re likeable, that we’re cool, that we’re awesome, that we’re powerful, that we’re kind, that we’re sweet. Whatever we feel about ourselves, we need to see that coming back to us from other people because then we feel whole and good.“Every human being on the planet has one favourite topic of discussion regardless of the thickness of your wallet, the colour of your skin or the God that you pray to: ourselves. The faster we get somebody talking about him or herself, the faster they like us, period,” he said. “Human beings do not like being sold to.”By engaging and listening to people, Mr Schmidt says, you make them like you and when people like you, they want to do business with you.“When people describe you in human terms, it means they have a human relationship with you. That means they are infinitely more likely to be a disciple and recommend you to somebody else — that’s all there is to it.”Mr Schmidt says it’s actually very simple — that if you’re passionate about what you do, and choose to show that, people will be drawn to you, will like you and will choose you over the competition.“The most singular, instantly magnetic, attractive behaviour that a human being can exhibit is passion. A passionate, energetic person is as magnetically attractive to another human being as a whiner, a dullard, a dork, a loser or a person staring at the floor is a turn-off,” he said.Mr Schmidt challenged the audience to adopt his philosophy on life and business: to never do what’s expected, make yourself as noticeably different as possible and have a lot more fun than you’re supposed to.“We choose every day when we come to work if we’re going to exhibit behaviour and language and tonality and passion and enthusiasm that people find likeable and attractable and thus instantly model or we choose not to,” he said in conclusion. “Nobody likes people that are endlessly predictable. What are you willing to do today that’s different than what you did yesterday for people who can take their business someplace else tomorrow?”