The Marketing Strategy I Hate the Most

I’ve spent most of my life with a dire aversion to marketing and sales.

(Not ideal for one who wants to create for a living, eh?)

Thanks to Ryan, Kass, Jenn, and the community of their marketing group Unusually Focused, I’ve grown up a lot when it comes to my understanding of and relationship with marketing.

Instead of getting annoyed when I am being marketed to, I can pause, appreciate, and learn (what works or what doesn’t work, as the case may be).

But there is still this one marketing technique that annoys me to diuretic proportions (annoys the piss out of me).

It’s the super-duper long sales video that you can’t skip ahead on, and you can’t rewind without starting the whole thing over.

These videos make comprehensive work of appealing to your emotions, establishing connection, and providing enough “free” value to almond-butter you up for the inevitable sales pitch.

And unless you’re new to the Internet or my sweet grandma, you already know the whole point of the thing is the sales pitch.

But they make you wait for it in awkward suspense as they pull every marketing magic trick they know out and fap it around shamelessly, hypnotically.

It takes what seems like three effing hours to get to the point. Because the point actually isn’t the point, is it? The real point is not the product or service.

The real point is getting you to think you need the thing.

It has been hard for me to just be OK with it when I know all that emotional appeal and connection is being used like bait on a hook.

Here’s the kicker: Sometimes those videos are so well-done that I watched them anyway, which usually ended up in my certainty that what they were offering could have truly added massive value to my life.

So at very least? In those cases, the marketing was working. But I’ve rarely gone through with it to find out if the product or service was worth the hype (more on why not shortly).

Competent marketing does not necessarily equate to competent service.

Yet it’s an easy assumption that someone capable of delivering such high-caliber marketing has what it takes to deliver high-caliber goods.

Plus, these videos generally have a high production value standard, reflecting that money, experience, and expertise have been invested here.

Companies or individuals with the resources to fund and implement such campaigns have clearly achieved some level of monetary success, and unless they are con artists, that success could have come from providing extraordinary value consistently to their customers.

I’ve told myself before that I will NEVER make a video along these lines.

That I’ll always be more direct and straightforward than all that.

That I’ll never manufacture the appearance of providing unconditional value and information while being driven by an agenda to systematically conquer a person’s resistance through connection, emotion, relation, and other forms of “manipulation.”

Here’s the one main difference between me and the people running those promotions:

I’m relatively broke, and they relatively aren’t.

They have gainful, steady businesses, and I don’t.

So how much good has my thinking done for me?

The root of the (my) problem

It traditionally annoys the shit out of me when marketers use arbitrary scarcity to apply pressure.

The only reason to say, “Buy in the next hour, or eff you, it’ll be five hundred dollars more at 10:00:1,” is to secure the sale quickly.

It’s funny… When I wrote that last sentence, my next thought was, “Why does this even annoy me?”

The whole point is to provide value for people, but people get stuck and lost on their way to your value.

Applying pressure through scarcity potentially moves the person closer to the value.

Keyword: Value.

In other words, it’s something that’ll make their life better.

So if the way to make someone’s life better is to set some arbitrary time limit, I guess that’s not too annoying.

Tactics like this have had a slimy connotation of inauthenticity and manipulation in my mind for a long time.

I guess manipulation is one word for it, and sure, the tactic can be used by people with slimy intentions.

But let’s get real here.

Does my aversion to being sold to come from inherent distrust in the intentions of others?

Or could it come from frustrations with my own financial limitations? My own poverty?

Riddle me this. When a perma-broke person is walking through a market and a salesperson wants to sell them some awesome shit they can’t dream of affording, what’s the person’s emotional reaction likely to be?

Or what if the salesperson pretends not to be a salesperson? Pretends to be a friend? They just act like they want to talk and connect, swap stories, develop a bond, and be helpful for no other reason than that’s what decent human beings do for each other?

Then an hour later, suddenly they reveal that this whole thing was a powerplay to try and sell awesome shit that the person still can’t dream of affording?

What’s the emotional reaction to that?

Poverty sucks. Being lower-class and feeling stuck there, sucks. Feeling ashamed and judged? Sucks.

Feeling exploited when you already feel like you have nothing to give? Not even going to hold in the f-bomb here. It fuckin’ sucks.

So, right. My aversion to sales may partially be a semi-valid assumption that I am being lied to for other people’s gain.

But I need to open my eyes to the fact that the aversion is also based on bitterness, envy, and the fear of being stuck in poverty. And when I truly look at this? This is the larger factor. Mind blown.

My attitude here has not served me well at all. It has held me back.

So I’m slowly growing out of it. Working on carving out some abundance-laced neural networks.

A realization lately is, I can celebrate my values while filtering out a lot of the distorted noise that has been detrimentally mixed in with said values.

I can adapt to what works in terms of providing value (and part of that is convincing people that I have value to provide, and leading them to it) and receiving money for that value, and I can do all of this without defiling my heart and soul.

Maybe now I can have less angst about those sales videos…

Maybe I’ll learn a thing or three in the process.

Maybe I’ll make one of those ridiculous videos myself one day after all, and the poverty of my past will all be in the rear-view mirror, and I can help some other kindred spirits rewire their poverty mindsets too.

Sounds all right to me.