A friend said, “I sometimes find myself trying to explain to my students what I think of as “righteous marketing”, and they get tripped up on things you’re excellent on—“but marketing feels sleazy” “what if people don’t like us” “aren’t we just selling out”, etc.—and I wish I could stick your masterwork in their hands.”
I haven’t yet written a marketing masterwork, but I can take a stab at answering the above questions. In all of cases, the path forward involves hitting “inspect element” on them to dig deeper with more precision. What exactly is the issue, and what can we do about it?
“Marketing feels sleazy.”
What about it exactly? Often it’s things like false promises, a false sense of urgency, bait-and-switch tactics, pushiness. You can leave out all of those things from your marketing. You don’t have to promise that they’ll achieve amazing results in a short amount of time. You can just tell the truth. This is one of those things that surprises some people because it somehow never occurred to them that you can just do that, go out and tell the truth. I periodically get DMs from people who are surprised that I make youtube videos by just talking into my phone camera. They’re so used to seeing polished perfection that “some guy just talking” seems fresh and surprising.
Here’s something that’s true about my book Introspect, that I have been shy to point at directly, until I heard someone describe one of my youtube videos this way: it helps people unblock layers of understanding of themselves. This is a thing that my book does! Now, I can’t guarantee that it does this for every conceivable reader. I don’t yet have a strong sense of what the % is. Conservatively I would say maybe 40%. (Optimistically, 80%+, after selecting for the kind of person who already follows me and is familiar with my work.) Would you pay $15 for an interesting reading experience with a 40% chance of understanding yourself better? Not everyone will! But that’s fine, I don’t need everyone to read my book. That said, once I’ve witnessed what it does for some people, it feels almost like I’m doing my future readers a disservice if I’m not telling them about it.
“What if people don’t like us?”
In the general sense? It’s fine, because you’re not for everyone. Not everyone likes apple juice. Not everyone likes chocolate, even. It’s good to not be liked by people that you don’t want to sell to. And that’s something you get to define, by the way! Anti-customers. I highly recommend articulating, at least to yourself, who your anti-customers are: sensible people who would never use your product because it’s just not for them.
You don’t need to go out of your way to be polarizing – I think it’s possible to get swept up too much in that – but I do believe that all good products are intrinsically somewhat polarizing, because there are likely strong decisions built into them. It’s better to be conscientious about what your product’s polarities are, so that you can work with them.
Or did you mean “what if people don’t like that we are doing marketing at all”? Such people do exist. They’re a fairly small-ish % of people, and they can be very loud. And it can be rattling to encounter someone like that the first couple of times. This is part of the trial-by-fire of selling anything in the public domain: there are some loud people who will yell at you. But if you’re doing work that you believe in, then this is wonderfully counteracted by the people who will express gratitude and delight at the work you’ve done. It’s up to each person to weigh for themselves if it’s worth the trouble.
What about dissatisfied or unhappy customers? Sometimes you’ll get freak incidents with people who are unreasonably mad, which you should learn to gently ignore or wave away, but otherwise, dissatisfied customers are really a learning opportunity. You might learn that there’s something missing from your product that could make it better. Or you might learn that, this subset of customer actually isn’t a right fit for your product, and that you should update your messaging and manage expectations better to reduce the odds of similarly dissatisfied customers from picking up your product in the first place.
“Aren’t we just selling out?”
I’ll be honest, I struggle with this one a bit too myself – I grew up on internet forums which had very strong anti-sales, anti-marketing vibes, and I internalized some of that ethos. And those forums probably cultivated the right culture in order for them to function, because most marketing is spammy, noisy, and pollutes the commons. I always found myself straddling two worlds – wanting to respect the commons, and also doing good marketing for products that I thought deserved to do better.
My commitment to myself – and maybe this is a little bit more than what is sensible, but I think that’s why I’ve managed to cultivate the reputation that I have, and get the opportunities that I have – is that I will always ensure that any marketing I do in the public commons is at least as good as the median chatter if not better. To do this, you have to have a model of what the median chatter is. Which is a nerdy way of saying you have to cultivate a familiarity with the culture of the context and medium you’re posting in, as a user yourself.
I find myself thinking of Reddit AMAs, where celebrities for example show up to answer questions in order to promote a movie or something. A small subset of people just hate all AMAs, but those people aren’t very fun and you shouldn’t care about them. Some AMAs are broadly disliked because the celebrity clearly was uninterested in answering questions and simply wanted to promote the movie. Whereas others are beloved because of the effort that’s put in, the presence, the aliveness. You know you’re being marketed to but you don’t even really think about it or mind because it’s so much fun, or so interesting, and so on.
Here’s a fun example that I think about from time to time: in 2014, President Barack Obama answered a bunch of questions on Quora, including “What’s it like to play basketball with President Obama“, where he basically wrote one line of “My hair’s getting grayer, but I’d like to think I’ve still got a decent jump shot”, before going on to use the rest of the answer to shill healthcare.gov. It seems forgivable because 1. It’s the President and 2. It’s a good cause, but I actually agree with Yishan Wong in the comments that it’s a bad precedent to set. If you’re going to answer a question on Quora, you should properly answer the question before you shill whatever you’re selling. Anyway I no longer hear anybody talk about Quora like it’s a place to look forward to, and it’s probably in part because low quality spam has taken over. Thanks, Obama.
Jokes aside, the point of that little anecdote is: you’ll be okay if you’re honest and you make sure that your contribution to the commons, actually contributes. We could get into some nitty gritty about specific platforms – it’s totally your right to be salesy on your own Twitter, your own Instagram, your own YouTube channel, and it’s your followers’ right to unfollow if they don’t like what they see.
If the question is something more of a deeper, broader thing about selling anything at all anywhere ever – the only people who can get away with NOT doing that are people who have inherited generational wealth. Everyone else needs to pay the bills somehow, and we all do some selling somewhere to do it. Maybe you sell your labor to a specific organization and nobody else has to see your shame (jk, jk) – one of my suspicions is that people actually take a “pay cut” or a “discount” for that relative invisibility or privacy. You’re basically outsourcing the sales to someone else. If you work as an engineer or in HR or legal for some company, that company needs to sell some product to customers (or to advertisers) in order to make money to pay your salary. You can’t make money if you don’t solve for distribution, and you can’t pay your staff if you don’t make money.
Anyway. Selling is not an intrinsically bad thing. The origin of the term “sellout” didn’t just mean “person who sells things”, but a person who compromises their values, principles, promises, etc. So as long as you have a strong sense of what your values are, you should be alright.
[radio advertiser voice] and if you have a problem with knowing what your values are when you’re selling stuff, you can hire me to talk you through it! I have a qualifying process with my prospective clients: I don’t want your money if I don’t think I can create a win-win where I help you get more than your money’s worth.
Talk soon,
Visa