Grant Cardone: Learnings from An Influencer Without Accountability

Why has Grant Cardone been successful in maintaining his celebrity when so many people claim he's a fraud? And what can we, as students of branding and online marketing, learn from his tactics?

Grant Cardone is an internet influencer: self-proclaimed entrepreneur, investor, sales coach, real estate mogul, in-demand speaker, bestselling author —and, reportedly, a world-class scammer.

You’ll find tens of thousands of users engaging positively on Cardone’s socials, but you’ll also find a vocal minority insisting that his courses are overpriced and offer no value, as well as a handful of detractors who claim he robbed them of their life savings.

So how has Cardone been so successful? Why are no societal white blood cells kicking in to hold him accountable? And what can we learn about how trust is conveyed (or misconstrued) online?

The Story of a Self-Made Billionaire

At first glance, Cardone feels like Gary Vaynerchuk and Richard Branson—an iconoclast and entrepreneur. Searching for Grant Cardone on Google News reveals a steady stream of adoring articles. He’s best known for the 10X Rule, which could be summed up in two points:

1. you should set targets for yourself that are 10X greater than what you believe you can achieve

2. you should take actions that are 10X greater than what you believe are necessary to achieve your goals

   

But if you look past the fluff pieces, you’ll find a Forbes editorial about Cardone’s allegedly condescending way of speaking to black professionals. You’ll see The Real Deal’s reports about a class action lawsuit. 

And you’ll find this particularly damning HuffPost piece. Most notably, his investors filed a class action lawsuit against him in 2020, accusing him of using social media to mislead them with inflated promises of high returns. A judge writes that Cardone’s content is “the types of potentially injurious solicitations that are intended to command attention and persuade potential.”

The article shares the story of small business owner Lisa Williams, who signed up for a six-year training contract at $795 a month. When she tried to cancel the training program, Cardone Capital sued her for the remaining $52,000 on the contract. That’s not a great way to make money: tricking individual consumers into enrolling in training courses that have fine print committing them to years of payments. 

A Wealth Influencer’s Secrets (Real!)

Despite Cardone’s numerous red flags, the engagement on Twitter (1M followers), TikTok (1.9M followers), and Instagram (4.5M on followers) are almost entirely positive. What gives? How has he been able to build up this level of trust? And what can we, as observers of branding and online marketing, glean from his tactics? 

Here’s my take: 

Cardone uses personal charisma to sell a product

Cardone is attractive and willing to be vulnerable. He’s talked about addiction, coming from nothing, and being a family man. He even gets his wife and kids to speak at his conferences.

Cardone uses short snippets of useful (albeit generic) advice and motivational content that’s bite-sized and hard to disagree with. Delivered in a bombastic style and published multiple times a day, it’s perfect for social media.

Most importantly, Cardone speaks with brusque confidence: he’ll jump from topic to topic quickly, seemingly poking holes in otherwise logical arguments, and will easily have you nodding along.

What can we learn from his approach:

1. People want to engage with other people, not brands. I tell all the startups I work with that we need to pick a persona, usually a co-founder, and put that persona at the center of all our social media marketing.

   This means posts on LinkedIn and Twitter come first from the co-founder and are then get retweeted/amplified by the company’s handle. And it means investing heavily in communities like HackerNews, Reddit, as well as Slack and Discord communities. We scale this by using tools like Hubspot Inbox and Front on the backend so that a team can field responses. 

2. Even though Cardone’s authority stems from a narrow idea of real estate, he’s been able to broaden out his appeal into sales excellence and motivation.
   We did something similar at Codecademy: We identified an overlap between coding and personal development. So we cultivated narratives for Zach (our co-founder and CEO) to speak about on topics like the benefits of meditation and how to run effective meetings. 

   Doing this allowed Codecademy, through Zach’s persona, to insert itself in a broader set of conversations and connect the company’s mission back to a broader mission around helping our learners succeed in their careers.  

He capitalizes on the human desire to be wealthy.

Everyone dreams of being wealthy—but not everyone has the drive to put in the work necessary to gain wealth. That’s exactly what makes get-rich-quick schemes irresistible.

Scammers use this very human desire against their victims, luring them with giveaways and welcome gifts (“subscribe now and get a chance to win $10,000!”—Cardone has been running Twitter ads with this exact message) and over-simplifying the things they need to do to become successful (“You just have to do these simple steps [that I could help you with] to advance to the next level!”). This video is one very good example:

What can we learn from his approach:

This is a great example of the “Jobs to be Done” framework in action: identifying what the customer really wants to accomplish and how they want to feel when buying your product, and connecting all your messaging back to evoking that feeling. 

At Codecademy, we figured out that the customer segment with the highest willingness to pay was folks who wanted to gain skills they could apply in their careers. It’s a rational need that stemmed from an emotional place: Codecademy’s customers felt trapped and frustrated by not having technical skills. They feared for their job security.

Rationally, they might be learning HTML to solve a problem at work, but emotionally they were doing it so they could experience some forward career momentum. By learning HTML for work, they’d gain some control over their career, and feel empowered and “ahead.”

As a result, all our messaging leaned into those two emotions: empowerment and economic freedom. 

Cardone understands how to leverage trust signals

Cardone has worked hard to be associated with media brands like Forbes and personal brands like Donald Trump, Floyd Mayweather, and Tom Brady. He also goes out of his way to create content showing off mansions, jets, supercars, and yachts. 

What startups can learn from him:

There’s lots of customer research on how contextual factors influence trust. It’s why people will pay more for a plastic surgeon with a Beverly Hills address. 

1. One simple approach: pay to create or syndicate your content with brands that people trust. At Bloc, we paid for me to join the Forbes Marketing Council so my blog posts would get published on Forbes.com.
   A/B testing platform Kameleoon was also able to find a way to leverage the credibility of much larger players. First, they commissioned Forrester to do customer research, surveying dozens of CIOs and CTOs. Next, they packaged Forrester’s findings in a webinar and paid Forrester analysts to speak as subject matter experts. Next, they came to me, the then-Twilio Partner Marketing lead, with a webinar opportunity: They’d done all the legwork to create this amazing webinar. It was a no-brainer for me to add Twilio’s name to it and promote it to our email database. And that’s how Kameleoon, a much smaller player, was able to borrow credibility from Forrester and Twilio.

2. In the same way, startups should be strategic in how they use investors and influencers to position themselves. For example, my friend Ayush Agawaral who founded Pencil made a point of securing seed investments from notable entities in the edtech space. Maven Clinic, a womens-health platform, did the same, seeking out 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki as an investor. 

3. A similar approach makes sense for influencers: the same way Grant Cardone tapped Trump, Floyd Mayweather, and Tom Brady to be speakers, Maven Learning made a point of going after some of the biggest influencers in key categories, partnering with Lenny Ratchitsky for a course on product management and with Shaan Puri on copywriting. By starting with people who already have credibility (and huge audiences) in these disciplines, Maven was able to position itself at the top of the market, and then slowly expand out. Today Shaan Puri’s course is no longer running, but a dozen more niche instructors are teaching similar courses, and the world has heard of Maven.

What Have I Learned from Grant Cardone?

It was fun for me to dig into Grant Cardone and try to form an opinion for myself. The thing that’s most interesting to me is that just under the surface there’s ample evidence Cardone’s courses aren’t worth it.

But the way our social media platforms are built incentivizes content that is shallow, and we haven’t all necessarily developed the skills to evaluate the content on its own merit. We fall back on old-school trust signals like the people you associate with or your ability to buy a fancy car. But it turns out these things are easy to fake.  

Social platforms also incentivize publishing new content every few hours, when in reality, creating content of deep value requires days or weeks of deep research. The result is that Cardone is able to get millions of people to “follow” him but his support is a mile wide and an inch deep.

I’m hopeful that as social media evolves, platforms like Twitter and Instagram will give way to platforms like Reddit and YouTube that do a better job of prioritizing quality over recency. 

What are your thoughts on Grant Cardone? Love him, hate him—tell me what you think below.

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