is your marketing too polite?

Sometimes Nice Guys Need To Use Machiavellian Methods…Or Do They?

I made cabbage for Easter dinner. 

You could tell which people at the table were blood-related because they were hyped about the cabbage. My brother Quentin heaped so much cabbage onto his plate that my mom told him to slow down. No one wanted one single leaf of cashew-covered Easter cabbage wasted. 

Meanwhile, all the kids had looks on their faces that said, “I WILL SMITE YOU IF SO MUCH AS THE SCENT OF CABBAGE REACHES MY END OF THE TABLE.”

Not everyone likes cabbage. Some people get gas and should probably not eat it at all. I am not here to tell you the best dish to serve is cabbage.

Just like I am also not here to tell you about the best way to sell services and programs on the internet. 

Personally, I prefer consent-based strategies. They solve the problem of overbuying, trapping people into purchases they regret later, excessive no-shows and low completion rates, and much more. Most importantly, using consent-based strategies helps people feel good about marketing, so they do more of it. That’s probably the best argument in favour of consent-based marketing.

But there are unlimited ways of doing marketing. 

Lots of my mentors, peers, and advertisers use marketing strategies that I personally would think twice about. One of my internet heroes is James Altucher, to give you an extreme example. He is so fucking smart but his sales videos are seriously unhinged. He is not shy about saying things like, “Listen carefully, because very few people are talking about this. A major event is going to rock the financial world on February 25, ushering in the era of AI 2.0, but only a select few will benefit.” 

…then of course you have to subscribe to his $5000/year newsletter. 

James Altucher has explained himself by saying, essentially, that his products are much better than his scammy competitors, but in order to get people to buy them he has to engage in the same power games his competitors are using—an idea he got from Alain de Botton in his talk Machiavelli’s Advice For Nice Guys.

“Copywriting, unfortunately, works the best to sell newsletters,” he said during his interview at the Newsletter Marketing Summit.   By “copywriting” he meant the high-pressure and huge-promises variety. He’s willing to do that because that’s what sells financial products.

That’s James Altucher’s way, and while it’s not what I would do, I am not the arbiter of who gets to say what and when. Thank goodness because that would be exhausting. And I’m reminding you of this today because you don’t have to do that either. Save your energy for this much more important job:

Your job is to exercise your powers of discernment. 

If marketing makes you feel weird, turn it off. Trust yourself. If something smells, unsubscribe. If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t bother trying to smash your foot into it—especially if that person is a marketing teacher selling a course about how to do marketing.  

I don’t want you to watch some webinar or buy some book just because Tarzan said it’s good. You are not required to like anything just because I do. If it doesn’t tickle you in the sweet spot, don’t click it. Don’t give it your time. You can even hit “reply” and give me a piece of your mind. I love that. 

You can be discerning. You can take responsibility for your own marketing and the marketing you consume. You can say, “I like this part, but not that part.” 

We live in an era where it’s quite common to only spend time with people whose beliefs are the same as yours, to only move in circles where everyone agrees about everything, whether it’s the best way to do marketing or the rights of undocumented workers. 

Personally, I don’t think that’s healthy. 

It’s important to practice being in open debate with the people in our lives, and train our nervous systems to see that it’s safe, that you can disagree with people and still love them, that we can share some beliefs and not others. 

Of course, not everything is as simple as cabbage. 

Last year I watched people I dearly love marching against the rights of trans people, for example, and that was very hard. It took a lot of work (and therapy) to see those people as human, to see that while we disagreed on things I felt to be true in the deepest reaches of my heart, it was still possible to stay in relationship. Not to excuse harm or bypass a necessary conversation, but to stay in the mess of it long enough to say, “I see that you’re more than this belief. I can love you and also disagree with you.”

This is the work of being a human in the world right now. 

On earth as it is in marketing. 

Your thoughts on this—including all the ways you disagree with my position in this email—are always welcome in my inbox.

xo,
Tarzan

Tarzan Kalryzian [she/they]
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P.S. If you do like cabbage, here's that TikTok.