The Mmm...letter Podcast

WARNING: The following is exaggerated for dramatic effect. Yes, I’m okay. Mostly.

If one baseball player uses steroids, it’s obvious. They’re twice the size of the next guy and their flyballs reach the moon. Spectators grow suspicious.

But if all but one player uses steroids, what becomes obvious is the lone moralist. And as he fails to keep up with colleagues, this loner’s career falters.

Last week, a series of honest answers faltered my career. As someone who remains honest in interviews, I’m beginning to feel like the loner. Today I bought steroids (metaphorical steroids), and I’m staring at a loaded syringe.

At my core, I still believe misleading others is wrong. But having a family suffering from atmospheric stress-levels is testing my resolve. Despite how these interviews tend to go, I enter each trusting the people on the other end to expect a fallible, imperfect human to appear; read any of their company’s core values and you’ll find honesty littered among them.

So on Friday, I prepared my honest self for an interview with a VP. He showed up 10-minutes late. Despite the laundry list of qualifications in the job description, several of which I fulfilled, he homed in on one linchpin: a skill I lacked. The job description felt like a sham, and I should’ve said goodbye.

But no, I talked myself up out of desperation to win him over. It was people-pleasing and repulsive. Afterwards, eyewitnesses reported hearing me scream, “what the fuck is wrong with me?”

And now I think, why, when asked whether I can perform some rote task, did I answer ‘no’? Why did I remain honest when his job description hadn’t? Why remain honest when the majority of applicants are playing the game as it is meant to be played: on steroids?

And why do our customers trust us when modern marketing is all bullshit? They shouldn’t, but they do. When customers have needs, they are inclined to trust those bearing solutions and ignore those who give them doubt.

Most of us buy the story of a product, a job to which we’re applying, or an applicant we’re screening; we buy the promise. A marketer’s job is to paint an unrealistic promise in the buyer’s mind. We incept the idea that a purchase will make the customer healthier or happier; but on average, the product will fail to do so because civilized humans are insatiable.

As a consequence of my virtues, I fail to market myself and I’m beginning to think I chose a vocation incompatible with my being; one in which honesty is a crutch. I still love the artistry of marketing, but it’s primary responsibility is to engender desire with fiction.

If all we as marketers did was tell people, “here’s the thing, here’s the price, and here are some possible benefits,” we’d go out of business. As soon as we’d brought the thing to market, we’d entice other players onto the field (competition). These players eventually discover a performance-enhancing drug: they start to out-promise us with “marketing.”

So I ask myself, is it time to shoot up?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

Every summer, marketers fail to learn from watermelons. Despite finding them in the fruit aisle, buying a watermelon ain’t no produce snag-and-grab, and studying the process teaches us a little something about buying psychology.

People apply more scrutiny to watermelons than they do any other fruits. And Russians have their own method for choosing watermelon. My dad would pick one up to his ear, slap it as if he were fixing our old Mitsubishi television, and listen. Good echo? Good melon. Growing up, my dad knocked a lot of melons, but only half ever answered the door; 50% is great for at-bat, but mediocre for melon-picking – he might as well have flipped a coin.

And despite knocking their melons, most people never cross-examine a banana. Why not? We may find a clue in the watermelon’s price.

A watermelon is often more expensive than other single fruits, so perhaps the high cost demands high scrutiny. Unfortunately, like the bad melons my dad bought, this theory doesn’t hold water. A watermelon may be more expensive than a single apple, but not by volume. When comparing apple and watermelon purchasing powers by-weight, the difference in cost is negligible and may even favor the melon. So price is unlikely the primary reason we turn into Sherlock Holmes at the melon stand. Perhaps we find another clue in the watermelon’s size.

In the states, watermelons are available exclusively in the summer, so rarity would entice us to buy several. But due to their size, we usually purchase just one. So when we buy a bad one, we buy a whole lot of bad – and end up hate-chewing a cubic foot of crimson seafoam.

Perhaps there’s something to be said about wrongness-per-volume. We buy apples by the bunch, and thereby distribute our risk across several attempts at fruit-based pleasure. With watermelons, we’re forced to get it right 100% of the time. And here’s what really kicks our scrutiny into high-gear: we rarely buy watermelons for ourselves.

If I want watermelon, I grab the individually packaged wedges. But when a group wants watermelon, I’m usually buying the whole melon to share. And therefore, the pressure to absolutely crush the melon-picking game is as immense as the melon itself – the melon, by volume alone, dominates the fruit table at any party. Bad melon? Terrible host. Great melon? Okay… okay.

So the pressure to purchase a good melon is high, and the absence of in-store assistance enables people to beat fruit in public. Despite the zero studies released about the shopping habits of produce-abusing Russians, grocers know that shoppers apply added scrutiny to melons every summer, yet they do nothing.

When customers scrutinize, purchase rates fall. The only way to combat this is to help customers answer their questions, and to improve their chances. Here’s my free advice: slap a buying-guide right next to the watermelon price-tag, and title it, Sounds Good! A 5-Point Guide to Picking Perfect Melons for the Hearing-Impaired (also Russians).

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

Last week the United States’ Supreme Court revoked the federal right to abortion.

Now if you’ve read The Mmm…letter dutifully, as God intended, you know I occasionally dip into politics, but prefer to stay focused on marketing, business, entrepreneurship, and pure silliness.

So I will not harangue you with whether the supreme court did the right thing or whether they could have spent more wisely the hundreds of man-hours they dedicated to overturning a right that 70% of Americans support, the same Americans who pay their salaries… I digress.

Instead, I’m going to focus on how the supreme court achieved their goals and the parallels we can draw from the business world.

The supreme court reminds me of a private equity firm – the kind of organization that scoops up a failing business and immediately starts making cuts to prop up revenue:

* “Limit 2 per customer”

* “Available on Tuesdays only from 3 AM to 5 AM”

* “Our bottomless mimosas are no longer bottomless, and due to a change in recipe, we can’t legally call them mimosas”

Etc. And these companies know customers will recognize the policy changes as money-grabs, so they refuse to provide any warning. They make the policy change a surprise, much like the supreme court did its ruling.

Customers wake up to find a new policy in place: “no breakfast served after 11.” And customer-facing employees are left to bear the outrage.

For a short while, revenue goes up, but trust dwindles and customers go looking for alternatives. Private equity rely on these methods because they are highly-analytical people. They can calculate how plump their bottom-lines will grow after they introduce reductive policies. But they struggle to see past the ends of their noses; revenues will grow, at first, but what happens after two-years? How about five?

These policies restrict access to beloved services and weaken customer trust because they rarely provide a benefit to anyone other than the brand. A few years later, contracts expire, customers find alternatives, and profits are back on the decline as the market stabilizes.

And if it sounds like I’m talking out of my butt, you’re right, because I once introduced reductive policies, and had my butt kicked.

In late 2020, I was working with a fair but demanding client. My frustration led me to increase my project rates by 10% (quietly). Initially, my client failed to notice because I set my rates after completing the work. And my client’s accountant handled all of the accounts payable. After a half-dozen or so projects at the new rate, my client smelled something fishy. And once he caught on, it blew up – a week later, he cut me off.

It would take a year before I received payment for outstanding invoices, and just as much time to rebuild his trust. Today, we’re working together again and I’ve I learned my lesson.

So if a naïve Millennial can figure this out and make it right, so too can the combined wisdom of six supreme court justices – n’est pas?

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

I’m in-between jobs. That’s what I say at dinner parties instead of, “hi, due to my dickhead former boss, I presently serve no societal function. Have you tried the lettuce wraps?”

And as functionless people do, I picked up a few job descriptions for some light summer reading. Much like false advertisements, these listings feature incredible promises. Among the least credible are promises made of the workplace culture.

Workplace culture is like God—no two employees understand it the same way, but both pray for its mercy. The most common promise made of workplace culture is the freedom to bring your self to work. Let’s pause.

I believe words are important, and language defines our universe. If we lack the words to explain something, we make up new ones. Occasionally, we combine words in ways that hide an idea rather than define one.

Most often, these take the form of feel-good phrases that when dissected, reveal a harsher reality.

My first example: “live your truth.” Well I certainly can’t live Steve’s truth. But if I choose to live a lie, is the lie my truth? Are there several truths? Is mine the best? Please say yes.

What this phrase means is that your perspective is reality, and that you may avoid engaging with perspectives that place your reality in question – in fewer words: ignore people who disagree with you. Not such a positive reinforcement after all.

And then there’s live-your-truths’ cousin born with an extra chromosome: “lived experience.” As if we can possibly experience something in any other state. Although, there are unlived experiences, we call those plans. This phrase is another way of saying, regardless of other perspectives, what you perceive to happen is what happens; another anti-intellectual narcissistic platitude wrapped in a pretty bow.

Which brings us back to our phrase of the day: bring your self to work. First of all, if I could have brought anyone other than myself to work, that would’ve been my day-one power move. But this promise is not permission to be whatever it is you think your ‘self’ is, it’s far more constricting.

In fact, it’s coded language for the cause du jour, transgender rights, and the tacit permission for non-binary individuals to present themselves how they see fit.

But that’s not what is written in plain English, is it? What’s written is that I can bring my true self to work, and here are some of the ‘selves’ I plan to bring.

Self one believes the new business-casual is a pair of old sweatpants and a pit-stained hoody from college. Self number two believes in bathing… at least once a month. And self three can’t talk to his boss until he defeats Darth Malak, the evil Sith boss at the end of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, available now on the Nintendo Switch!

You know guys, I actually have a pretty good feeling about this next job, and I haven’t even lived that experience.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

I’ve given a lot of thought lately to power.

Our sociopolitical leaders treat ‘power’ like a four-letter word. They talk about power in the wrong hands, power-imbalances, power-hungry people, and systemic abuses of power–the derision goes on. And yet these people who denigrate power all seem to share something in common: they want power, badly. And they believe that to gain power, they must take it ‘back’ from someone who has it, as if it’s a commodity one can shift around like the very electricity that shares its name.

But power, and its application, leverage, are contextual. Imagine a brawny squad of 6’3” firefighters glistening with sweat riding atop a firetruck find themselves bursting into the middle of an active, definitely-not-on-fire-courtroom–the firefighters have little power in that context and everyone is wondering how the firefighters plan to repair the firetruck-sized hole they just put into the side of the courthouse, and yet, those same firefighters can exact tremendous leverage at an active fire.

They gain leverage when they find themselves in the right place, at the right time, and accompanied by the right equipment (in this case, perfectly sculpted biceps). And one missing ingredient can place their power at risk. For example, a team of firefighters arriving on time without a firehose have no power to wield over the flames raging through their neighborhood; they find themselves in a context where they cannot apply leverage.

Instead, firefighters must go where they’re needed, when they’re needed, and with what is needed; they go where a congruence of variables enables a context in which they have the power to affect great change: turn a burning building back into a safe one, stop a forest fire from destroying a countryside, or save Mrs. Whiskers from the tree she finds herself in every Tuesday.

When we go-to-market, we often think about whom we serve, how we serve them, where we find them, and why they choose us over the alternatives. But we can approach that process from another perspective, from a perspective of power. We can ask ourselves, metaphorically, which fires do we put out, how do we put them out, and how can we position ourselves as near to the fire as possible? (Start it yourself, of course!).

Bringing a viable solution to market which delivers value to customers and profit to you is the result of seeking situations in which you have power, and applying that power through leverage. In which metaphorical situation will the terrified townspeople turn to you and scream, “please, you glistening Adonis, save our babies from that burning building!”? Your situation may not share that level of drama, but you and your product have power. If you sell water, you have power in the desert, of that I’m certain.

Your job now is to acknowledge that fair profit is derived from applying lawful leverage. You have power, and your products have power. Find your fire, put it out, collect your reward.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

If your boss incessantly asks you why your tasks take so long, you need to manage up. And if you convince your boss to give you a raise, keep you on staff, or acknowledge your existence, you’re an all-star up-manager. But you shouldn’t have to be.

The crux of the practice is this: my managers will fail to manage me, so by managing them, I receive the respect I’m entitled to in my workplace. But is this something we want to be good at? I’m not sure, because if it were a desirable skill, people would brag about it on LinkedIn.

Managing up is undesirable because the conditions under which you must practice the skill are when you managers fail to acknowledge you, harangue you over minutiae, or wonder why you’re doing your job instead of what they told you to do – in other words, conditions under which they don’t trust you. And if they don’t trust you, why the hell do they manage you?

Without mutual trust, a team cannot operate as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The employee fails to receive appreciation for their hard work, and management fails to inspire exceptional performance because they’re too busy asking why you keep going to the bathroom. And as long as managers presume their reports are guilty until proven innocent, they encourage deviant behavior and frequent 3-hour bathroom breaks.

In a trusting environment, managers believe in your greatest potential, and no one discusses ‘managing up,’ do they? I never had to manage my boss at Bloc, we trusted each other implicitly. However in a distrusting environment, managing up isn’t just another skill, it’s a survival mechanism – it’s coaxing favors from your prison guards.

Because when you work a job that requires upward management, you don’t have a job, you have a death sentence – and you’re doing whatever you can to run out your clock.

On May 2nd at 9:00 AM, my clock ran out.

I was fired by a distrusting single-celled troglodyte, and in case you live in a cave, that word is a pejorative for people who happen to live in caves – don’t worry, your cave smells nice, and is well decorated I swear.

I was fired without warning, quietly, and in secret, which is precisely how troglodytes prefer to run through their todo lists. But that wasn’t at all upsetting; what upset me was that they failed to consult my team, the people who I built deep relationships with over the past 8-months, and who’ve come to trust me to protect them from the paint-sniffing oaf snarling at their doorstep.

The same oaf who prohibited me from saying goodbye or wishing them farewell. It’s not all bad, though.

By firing me surreptitiously, my employer saved a good deal of money. But now every one on my team knows they’re not at work, they’re in prison – and beginning today, the prisoners plan their escape.

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

Best Email Templates for Sales.

Best Macha Green Tea Lattes at Home.

Is Your Best Life Ending? Getting Ready for Your Best After-life.

Throw a rock at the Internet and you’ll hit three pieces of content telling you how to be or have the ‘best.’ I’ve only clocked a mere 34 short years on this planet, so I can’t say how long this has been a thing, but if you study western society’s media, we appear obsessed with having and being the best.

There’s nothing wrong with being or wanting the best. But an imbalance exists between the relative significance of best and the energy we spend idolizing it and chasing it in our day-to-day lives. I’m calling it bestism, the compulsive desire to have and be the best.

The reality is, best is reserved for a select few individuals and organizations, and for a limited-time at that. The majority of businesses and people (both living and deceased), existed throughout history as not-the-best. Not the best parents, cooks, marketers, or underwater basket weavers. And guess what? They survived. And the number of people who live happy, fulfilling lives who never reach best outnumber the contrary a million-to-one.

That should be self-evident, because we can’t all possibly be best, especially at the same time. Best-sellers deny this obvious incongruity and demoralize us until we take action to become the best, because to them, not-best might as well be diagnosed as a terminal condition. Yet among all pursuits personal and professional, the majority of us operate somewhere between best and dogfood your dog rejected. And many of us continue to exist there despite swallowing the belief that ‘only the best’ will do.

This leads us to pursue tactics and adopt comparison-mentalities that bring undue stress to our lives. These feelings hit me hard this morning when I opened my inbox to newsletters I had saved for later. Among them were over a dozen clarion calls to exceptionalism: “stand out”, “be different”, “excel”, and “never settle for mediocre,” were but a handful among the battery of backhanded affirmations.

And I can’t blame the authors for publishing these rallying cries, I espoused such ideas, too! At some point, to me, average was synonymous with morally repugnant. What they and I failed to appreciate was just how much average actually runs the world.

The popular and well-recognized bests are only the top 1%. The remaining 99%? We do all that ‘average’ stuff, without which our world would malfunction. We cook average meals, write average copy, brew average coffee, and take average jobs.

And while it’s an absolute positive to work toward the best, whether you wish to be a best parent, best coffee brewer, or best 5’10” male brunette marketing newsletter writer, we should spend just as much, if not more time taking good long looks at our average-ass selves in the mirror and cracking a smile.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

This week, a comrade joined the ranks of the sovereign nation of Stanleystan… Or, Shrimpy hired a marketer. Finally. What’s great is that I now have something to bounce ideas off of other than the echoes of my own baby-voice. He comes to us with years of agency experience in content, advertising, branding, and beyond.

We were on call discussing an advertising opportunity. Being a new Shrimper, he asked some general questions regarding our marketability. He wanted to know whether a reputable institution had ever featured Shrimpy. I invoked the full power of two brain cells to conclude that in fact, never has a reputable cryptocurrency publication featured our brand; and I would’ve needed even fewer brain cells to drum up a publication that managed to merge cryptocurrency and reputability.

David pressed on. “What about any site or column where we paid to have our name placed?” Somewhere, a dark lightbulb switched on. I knew exactly where David was going; he wanted us to write something along the lines of, “Featured on CoolDadCrypto.” With that verbiage among our marketing collateral, potential customers might come to trust us sooner, even if that signal was bought and paid for. In other words, Le Bullshit du Marketing.

I laughed. He laughed. It’s the decisions that flow from moments like these that chart the course of a company’s life. Down one path, we peddle in bullshit, down the other, truth. I came off my laugh when I realized this was one such moment. I told David I wasn’t comfortable in using a paid affiliation as evidence of our renown, but that our CEO could override me in this decision.

David too expressed some hesitation, but then attempted to comfort me by giving this tactic a cute name, one that mitigates its harm far more so than my preferred term of marketing bullshit; he called it, “marketing cheese.” As in, the cheese that lures the mouse.

He continued, “you know, it’s weird but it’s the stuff that works and gets people to check you out.” It does work, doesn’t it? It works like jaywalking works to help you cross the street. It works like evading taxes works to reduce your tax burden. And it works like getting addicted to meth, losing your family and friends in the process, and entering a life of street prostitution to subsidize your drug problem works to get you out of the house more.

Boy have I said this before and I’ll say it ad nauseum: just because something works, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. I told David what I’ve told all you brilliant people many times before: if we want customers to admire our brand, we should have a brand worth admiring.

I don’t believe in faking it, I believe in the truth. And if the truth of your brand is too hideous to bear, take time to improve the truth rather than spending that same time finding the cutest lipstick to slap on your pig.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

Two-weeks ago, I dipped my toes into some ick. As an avid reader of this column, I implore you to sit down, preferably in front of a toilet, before you learn of this shocking revelation.

On Monday, the 18th of April, in our year of the lord 2022, I, Stanley Bogode, became a cold-emailer. I emailed 100 people I have never met, whose names and addresses I stole from the Internet.

And afterwards... I didn’t hate myself. In fact, I’ve now sent a total of 5,153 emails to over one-thousand complete strangers. I’ll pause here until the vomit clears out of your throat.

You’ve read this column, you can presume that a tactic so impersonal, so tasteless, and so basic is beneath a refined marketing creature such as myself. You were wrong. As part of this year of expanding my comfort zone, I added cold emails to the list, here’s why.

As Head of Product, I now have a title in my LinkedIn profile that attracts a lot of offers. I’m approached by marketers, software agencies, compliance firms, and headhunters – their emails are so cold they could fight global warming. But once in a while, an email strikes me right in the part of my brain that says, yes, actually that is something we could use and I’m interested in learning more. And I respond.

Surprisingly, the emails which fail to entice me also fail to bother me. Yes, there are some salespeople who’ve trapped my inbox in an infinite follow-up loop. And it’s time to setup a filter which burns every email beginning with, “Hey Stanley, checking to see if you got my last email…” But when an offer breaks through, I have no criticism of the representative who brought it to me.

They had a solution that piqued my interest, and they left both my body and mind unharmed as they told me about it. No bodily torture? That’s an A+ outreach to me. I concluded that receiving cold emails is mildly annoying, but receiving offers I find valuable is pleasant. I can then assume that people receiving cold emails from me, will, on the whole, experience the same thing.

That discovery gave me permission to unlock my talent. As a digital marketing freelancer, I wrote dozens of clever and crafty cold emails for clients. I even wired up the technology to send them out to prospective customers. Creating these campaigns on a client’s behalf never rattled me, my name stayed off the letterhead.

But applying that talent for my own behalf was always out of reach thanks to my pride and my fear of rejection. Today, I’m going for ‘no’ – I'm actively looking for people to unsubscribe from my emails, to reply ‘stop,’ or to shoot me down – and I’m at 93 souls and counting.

I’m still doing it, I’m not stopping, and I’m even growing perversely attracted to it – somebody, call the police.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com

It came to a shouting match. Our team was winding down a conference call when the CEO brought up customer reviews. Two-months ago, I convinced us to partner with a well-known review site, let’s call them ConfidenceCaptain, or CC for short.

On the call, our CEO went for their throat; he railed against their business practices. He used that as a pretext to demand we terminate our relationship. I bristled at the suggestion.

At the turn of the year, we had a glowing reputation on CC’s platform — and by glowing, I mean radioactive. Based on two-dozen reviews, our score was 1.8 out of 5-stars. Yum. Anyone stumbling across our page was running, not walking, into the arms of the competition; competition who fared much better on CC’s platform. I was hell bent on changing that.

By partnering with them, we were able to invite customers to leave reviews without them having to create an account with CC. Furthermore, we were granted 90-days to invite customers en masse to provide honest feedback right from their inbox. This had mixed results.

As of now, we have a 3-star rating, which is an undeniable and significant improvement from our previous... situation. However, you can’t take the good and leave the bad. We had some serious and unattractive new feedback to contend with.

Our CEO argued that the renewed attention to CC’s platform raised its profile on Google Search, insuring that more prospects would find the negative reviews. He called this, “bad marketing.”

I sat dumbfounded, realizing we had very different models of the world. As he argued to choose a new platform or pay for reviews elsewhere, I loaded my canons.

In words that were 80% less pleasant than the ones I’m about to use, I snapped. If our reviews, or any brand’s genuine reviews are negative, that is not the fault of the platform. Let alone from one which our rivals greatly benefit.

Furthermore, rather than diverting energy toward damage control, minimization, and cover-ups, we should do everything in our power to prevent extremely negative experiences from ever occurring. Experiences such as getting locked out of your account for over a year, unable to reach support, yet still making on-time payments — thank you, recurring subscription model!

And we only discovered this customer after inviting him to leave a review.

Based on how we reacted to this situation, we’ve earned all 3 of our stars. And until we change our attitude, we will remain a 3-star business. No amount of complaining will change that.

While reviews are an imperfect measure, they are on the whole correct. We mustn’t fear them, nor dismiss them. Authentic feedback is best for businesses and for consumers, a group to which we all belong.

So if you’re willing to improve, you should welcome negative reviews. And if you’re not, then sharpen your stabbing knives and go kill yourself some customers, err, messengers.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mmmletter.com