While I’m posting social media conversations on my blog, here’s a few tweets that I exchanged with a guy I follow yesterday:
IJR: The world has become such a easy place to market to; sell them lies and they will buy it… Give them truth and they will shun it…
Sell them lies: Diet pills, shakes, body braces, etc and they will buy… Sell them truth: More vegs + exercise and they will shun it
Me: it’s not necessarily truth they shun. It’s WORK.
The world is so easy to market to, not because people buy lies (although they do), but because they want ease.
That’s why grown men buy clip-on ties, why most of us don’t cook food from scratch. Make life easier & marketing gets easier
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Marketers and salespeople can use deception to get sales, no doubt about it. A lot of people do. It’s a bad idea, but it can work in the short-term…
For that reason, a large percentage of us automatically distrust salespeople and think of advertisements as mostly fantasy (or at least puffery).
But truth sells, too. It’s a little harder to dig out truth than to make up stories, but truth-telling is a much more intelligent, more sustainable business model.