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Viewing: What » Ethos » It stinks.

It stinks.

(6 minute read.)

The essence of marketing?

Moving on…

Where am I going with this? Simple: I'm slating in-vogue business methods which are counter-productive to the best efforts of good people trying to do decent things, and which contribute to an overall helps-nobody dumbing-down.

Like what? Like this…

Enough. F***in' enough.

…accepted follow-the-crowd 'wisdom' like 'get on Facebook, start Twitter-ing, hone your elevator pitch, attention-grabbing headline, strong CTAs, sevens in your pricing, free!, special reports and if-you-order-now bonuses, articles beginning with numbers, email lists, get-on-my-list enticements, groupie 'great post!' blog comments, 'your investment' (it's a 'price', stoopid), ya-better-not-miss-this-or-you'll-die-sad-and-lonely-sucker pitches, buy-this-now squeeze pages, testimonials, website seals, 2.0, unconditional guarantees, writing your bio in the third person, 'all marketers are liars' (we're not; 'storytellers?' yes, 'liars?' no), clichés and other lame lingo, same-as-the-others business networking sites, 'click here for', and other assorted paint-by-numbers 'business-building' dumbed-down f***wittery I forgot to mention here and which panders to the lowest common denominator rather than raising the damn bar.

Why my dis-ease with it? Just because I 'don't like it'? Hell, f*** no. Not. At. All. Why then? Simple…

It's not that there's anything wrong, per se, with such stuff, but for many it's become 'the way to do business', and blindly followed with little-or-no real understanding.

The losers here are sensible business principle & practice and 'real marketing'… which are fast becoming 'oh, that's so yesterday' unknowns.

Like lies, dogshit in the streets, uncaring ineptitude, my mother's holier-than-thou attitude, and a bunch of other stuff which were I not so fried I'd likely bother to recall, there's no excuse for such stupidity.

So what were once vices become habits and, in swallowing the advice from the 'I'm a fully-loaded rocketship to the stars in-demand leader-in-my-field and so expensive-I-price-by-the-half-hour but-I'm-not-telling-you-this-to-impress business advisor', people who don't know better then figure this must be the way to do it and so another ounce of integrity bites the dust.

Major crime? Hardly. But nonetheless another brick in the wall against which god bangs her head wondering just why she didn't stop early, before putting people on the planet. 'And on the sixth and seventh days she rested' would have been a whole other tale.

Whilst the digerati pundits speak of how the web has leveled things with the seemingly plausible 'a domain/site costs you the same twelve bucks as it does Coke, so you can compete evenly', that's of course total crap. 'Just the start matey', to prosper you'll need a lot more than just those few bucks.

What this directly translates into is 'being mediocre is now easy, fast and cheap'. Any idiot can slap-up a replicant template site, but building something good (or even worthwhile) is a whole other game.

Instead of taking some of the money it would have cost to have set-up-shop pre-web, redirecting it toward learning what's required to do good business and thus become at least competent, we now have legions of the-not-very-good trading among themselves.

Simply, we have too many businesses doing same-ol' me-too stuff, and not very well. And this, considering just how much good learning material is freely (often literally) available, is the cherry of stupidity on the hot fudge sundae of ignorance and dumbness which comprises much of modern-day commerce.

Notes… »