If You Could Buy Friends, Mine Would Return Me

Sorry, No Refunds

Why do I suck at marketing myself? I have finally answered this question.

Imagine living in a small tribe of hunter-gatherers. In that environment, there is only one thing you can do to convince others that you are useful: be of use.

You hunted, you gathered, you took care of children, and you walked a good distance from camp to do your business–thank you, Gronka. But if you were a lazy jerk who failed to keep his promises and popped your squats wherever you pleased, you wouldn’t have survived for long; your group of 150-nomadic peoples would’ve kicked your prehistoric ass to the curb–but in modern civilization? Not so much.

Today we can lie, exaggerate, cheat, and even get caught only to resurrect our practice wherever ignorant victims remain. And why? Because it’s far easier to launch a marketing campaign than it is to improve ourselves.

Often when we launch a campaign, our goal is to grow bigger than we are. We want to reach new people and we want them to think we’re big, too. Big is established, reliable, and safe because those are precisely the things that reach big-ness.

But do big companies start big? Do they simply launch a bigger campaign on their first day of business? Do they blow their capital on the naming rights to a stadium? No. They actually start, and let’s say it together… small.

Like a true revolution, big grows like a seed from root. Along the way, it matches its marketing spend to its perceived presence in the marketplace–which is why big marketing is often a reminder, and bs-marketing is often an announcement. Bullshit is trying to look cool before being cool. It’s cutting to the front of the popularity line, it’s buying friends with money. And it works much like an Advil cures a headache: if headache persists, take more Advil.

Our job as marketers today is to grow our brand’s popularity in a digital drug lab. But it’s the wrong job. And we do this job because our supervisors are optimizing for the wrong results.

What do you call a business that relies primarily on word-of-mouth? A great business.

If you’re complaining that the majority of your traffic, leads, and sales come from word-of-mouth. Good morning, you don’t have a marketing problem, you have untapped revenue.

And perversely enough, if you complain, “all my sales come from ads,” unfortunately, you don’t have a marketing problem, either.

In both cases, we look to marketing to help us grow, to emulate the big guys, so we copy the behavior we believe leads to those results: ads, posh, and hype. But true bigness is earned through the long hard work of growing through the only form of meaningful publicity: word-of-mouth.

So instead of marketing myself, I’m going to try being myself. And if no one talks about me, I’m going to do whatever it takes to make my self worth talking about.