The Mmm...letter Podcast

To gain early attention, my team put up a waitlist for a new offering. Give us your email, answer some questions, and you’ll be the first to use our service. This practice is gimmicky, but it’s so common that we might as well include it in every My First Marketer Barbie playset. However, what happened this week lives deep in gimmick territory, so set your cringe-o-meters to ‘eww.’

On Monday, we discovered a direct competitor is basically launching the same product. And they too have a waitlist. However, theirs is weaponized.

Each participant earns 10-points when they sign on, and their points land them on a leaderboard. Entrants may earn points by interacting with the brand on social media, but the big scores come from attracting others.

For each person recruited, participants receive 15-points. And as of Monday, their waitlist sports over 170,000 participants with some people scoring as high as 40,000 points. Here’s the kicker: when the product goes live, the company will turn points into dollars. To collect the rewards, participants must deposit $100 into the new platform and hold it for 30-days.

Naturally, this highly-publicized success failed to rattle our resolve. We just turned the other cheek and went about our busin—🚨 ATTENTION ALL STANLEYs, THIS IS A DEFCON 5 FOMO EVENT. REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE SITUATION ROOM. 🚨

After our CEO discovered this waitlist, 5-minutes failed to pass before he asked my team to replicate it. Now if you’ve read my column, you know that my finely-tuned marketing senses smelled nothing but bullshit. And my first thought was on the price tag.

At even $10 a head, their campaign could cost our competitors $1.7M. To rationalize a similar expense for us, our CEO underlined that a $10 customer acquisition cost is relatively cheap. But would these gimmicks acquire actual customers?

Hype is not success, and 170k contestants are not 170k dedicated customers. We have yet to promote our waitlist and already we have 30 participants. We’ve given no incentive, paid nothing, and made them answer ten personal questions before taking their names down. That makes one of our participants worth a thousand of theirs.

The moment we pay customers to use our product, we put our thumbs on the scale. And we might as well staple them down because fear will prevent us from taking the pressure off.

If discounting is Adderall, paying customers to use our product is crack cocaine: addiction is imminent. I don’t pay anyone to be my friend, I don’t pay someone to retweet me, and I don’t pay someone to date me — if you do, you have neither a friend, nor a retweet, nor a date. What you have is fake af.

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

As our Disney World trip approached its end, the melancholy set in. I enjoyed our last day, but as I did I also watched the light at the end of the tunnel recede: the following day, we would fly 500mph. In reverse. Forcing myself to leave a fantasy land in favor of the real-world was like kicking a crack habit: not fun, and I probably shouldn’t have done so much crack.

As it happened, two of our friends also returned from a Florida getaway the following day and we met up to lament. The cold and bitter Chicago winds felt like an ex-lover rubbing salt in our happy place as we reluctantly hooked back up, “I knew you’d be back,” howled the bristling breeze as it slapped our collective faces. Then I learned something interesting.

According to one of our pals, some avoid this comedown by planning two vacations in advance. As the first vacation ends, they touch down softly on a bed of future plans already made. Genius. And if we can do that for ourselves, why can’t we do it for our customers?

Not every product or service rewards customers immediately. And some services are painful until the customer ultimately benefits. Think Korean body scrubs. The people who perform this service rub what is effectively sandpaper across every part of your body, even some parts that biologists haven’t discovered. The pain is excruciating. However, by the end you feel a sense of rejuvenation — and you’ve shed three-pounds of skin.

Those benefits would’ve been nice to know before a small Korean man treated my private parts like his first woodshop project. If we have the opportunity to tease outcomes for customers, we must take it. Anticipation is proven to be more delightful than surprise, so we must build that anticipation for benefits that come in the future, especially when the interim is rough. From my personal experience, TrustPilot does this well.

At my behest, we partnered with TrustPilot at Shrimpy to improve our rating on their platform. During our sales calls, TrustPilot teased the ability to show our star rating on Google search results, one we could only display after reaching a minimum number of reviews. It would take time and a lot of work before we got to that point, but TrustPilot fed me enough motivation to justify the efforts and resources required.

Whether your product delights immediately or rewards customers far down the line, don’t let them crash. Tease the next trip, wrap it in Mickey Ears, and then get to work.

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 year, I donated (PING—NEW VOICEMAIL). Last year, I donated blood during a blood drive. Now don’t begin to make me out as a saint, the whole affair was Simona’s idea (PING—TWO NEW VOICEMAILS). Having my fluids drained in an RV never makes the cut for my weekend plans, but Simona is apt at lulling me into generosity. PING.

My experience was admittedly positive. Th e staff worked judiciously and kept me at ease. Keeping me at ease was vital because there’s over 300 reasons why I typically refuse to walk into any hospital adorned with turn signals. After stepping out of the completely legitimate blood collection van, I felt I had made a small yet meaningful contribution by suffering a bit of queasiness for 15-minutes.

Little did I know, I would soon find myself on the receiving side of “no good deed…” Two weeks later (PING) the voicemails began. And now they (PING) simply refuse (PING) to stop! PING. Stop! PING! Seriously! PING!!!

I have rare blood, the multi-purpose kind that hospitals prefer. And now that the blood bank has a taste for it, they are thirsty for more. So thirsty, these vampires call me four times per week to remind me how desperate they are to tap that precious oil pipeline running through my veins. Normally, cold calls this high in frequency are enough to leave anyone squeamish. But they come from a non-profit organization with an aspirational mission against which few people can argue.

Of course blood donation is vital for hospitals and the health of our nation at large, I get that, we all get that. However, just like blood itself, one mustn’t let their holier-than-thou mission rush to their head.

Bloody Ends, Bloody Means

I am on the receiving end of a numbers game. This non-profit believes that ends justify the means, a pitfall of marketers in any well-meaning organization. To them, beating me over the head with automated calls and elbowing their way into the guiltiest parts of my brain are crass, but necessary tactics to achieve their lofty goals.

Grandma doesn’t care how guilty you feel as long as you finally pick up the damned phone and call her once in a while—she won’t be around forever, you know? This non-profit continues to make a classic marketing blunder: they forget about you, and they forget about me, they forget about the customer. They forget that you and I lack the same level of enthusiasm for giving as they have for taking. They forget the person who, while sympathetic to their goals, requires at least a shred of carrot to go along with the stick.

As marketers, we must always be of two minds. The first mind is internal. The internal mind understands the value we offer, the advantages customers gain from our services and products, and how exceptional we are. The first mind is natural, the second mind less so.

The external mind sees us through the eyes of the customer, which means this mind can only know what the customer knows and feel only what the customer feels. When we project the internal mind onto the external, we start making mistakes.

Internal thinking convinces us to launch a guilt-tripping robocall campaign that spams Type-O blood donors four times per week because God dammit, it’s the right thing to do. Wrong. Your cause, your solution, your world is number one only to you; it’s rarely, if ever, as meaningful to your customer.

With a recession approaching, interest rates hiking, and a war in Ukraine, there are thousands of things your customer may be more concerned about than your prerogative. Remember that when a person takes the time to listen to you and consider your message, they give you a precious gift: their undivided attention.

Don’t (PING) waste it.

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

In an alternate universe, in a civilization similar to our own, they have no money (gasp).

Without money, a store of value and means of exchange, they are forced to come up with collateral for the goods they wish to purchase. They exchange pales of fish for pairs of shoes, and flat-screen TVs for a three-night stay in Boise.

It’s a labor of love, this universe, because to even produce a flat-screen TV, tens of thousands of market participants each demand a tailored bit of collateral for every exchange. The semiconductor producer responsible for the TV’s itty-bitty computer brain takes payments exclusively in rice, 40-some-odd trillion grains to be exact.

The plastics manufacturer who molds the housing for each TV has a thing for Mexican telenovela stars and beachfront properties in Fort Lauderdale. On it goes as they barter their way through a global supply chain of divas.

Thankfully, this universe is but a figment of the imagination. In our universe, we do have money, we need not barter nor forge an autographed headshot of Salma Hayek every time we buy a 65” from Samsung.

However, the alternate universe marketplace has one advantage that we lack. In barter-land, there are no buyers, and no sellers. In a bartering world, every purchase is an equal exchange agreed upon by both parties.

The moment they trade the deed to a 5-bed 3.5-bath beachfront villa for ten-thousand plastic TV parts, they get the parts, and the plastics manufacturer has a new home in Florida; both sides know the value of what they’ve received is equal to what they’ve exchanged.

In our reality, where we exchange money for things, the question of fairness is ever-present. In an earlier piece, I note that buyers take a leap of faith with every transaction, but what about sellers?

In most cases today, a seller receives cash. Barterism lives on in the margins, but for most transactions that take place between buyer and seller, cash is involved. After the transaction takes place, the seller’s time-to-utility is zero—the thing they receive, money, is useful upon receipt. On the buyer side, that is not always the case.

There are few situations in which buyers are guaranteed to receive utility as quickly or sooner than the sellers. Even if we buy a water bottle to quench our thirst, uncertainty remains—what if the complete lack of electrolytes in that bottled water prevents our body from hydrating? (Fun-fact: milk hydrates better than water).

Which means the 99-cents we hand over in exchange for our planet’s most abundant liquid trapped in a transparent tube made of the planet’s second-most abundant liquid can fail to provide the utility we demand.

However, the seller now has 99-cents, and if they did everything right, a profit which enables expansion and further business—they have money whose utility is a given. And therein lies the flaw in our marketplace.

In our reality, buyers must give away a known quantity for an unknown quantity. And good marketers must keep this in mind. Sometimes the known quantity is small, as is the risk of loss, such as in the bottled water example. But there are many cases where the gap in confidence between buyer and seller is tremendous.

When we buy a house, a car, or designer clothing, anxiety is often our third wheel: is this iridescent pink Chanel scrunchy actually worth three paychecks? And unless the product is terribly under-priced, the seller never feels such anxiety. This inequity is what creates pushy salespeople and scummy marketers.

Those people enjoy the imbalance as they employ psychological tactics to temporarily shrink the confidence gap. Extreme discounts, limited-time offers, unrealizable promises, and big flashing signs that practically read, “you would be stupid not to buy this, Janet,” all help convince the buyer that they’re making the right decision.

I understand that purchases are emotional choices, and will almost always require at least a teensy-tiny poke at our lizard-brain to make them happen. But, that does not excuse us from holding the customer’s hand when and if we should. We have the opportunity, when we face a first-time customer, to provide a utility forecast.

We can reduce their anxiety, through marketing, by telling them how and when our product will fulfill its promise. And when the customer puts it to use, we can go above and beyond to ensure they gain everything they intended from that item.

Because lord knows, when they bought it, we got a guarantee, they got a promise. It’s our job to make sure they ultimately get a guarantee, too.

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

In my anniversary issue, I called out an idea that I wish to revisit. In Brandon Turner’s real-estate book, I picked up the term ‘comfortable discomfort.’ His hypothesis states, as so many already have, that growth happens outside of one’s ‘comfort zone.’

And yes, that piece of sage wisdom did win the No Shit, Sherlock awards last year. Nothing novel about that idea, but Turner breaks the uncomfortable zone into two distinct zones.

By drawing three concentric circles, Turner suggests we can operate in one of three areas: comfort, comfortable discomfort, and uncomfortable discomfort. We all know comfort. Doubtless you are wrapped in a blanket of comfort right this moment—and if this column makes you uncomfortable, please contact our customer support, they will not help you.

At the outermost circle we find uncomfortable discomfort; this area is fraught with impostor syndrome, failure, and immense anxiety. In a paraphrased example, Turner imagines an investor beginning her real-estate career by renting out a spare bedroom.

After 6-months spent as a landlord, she goes from managing one rental to managing 801-rentals; she purchases a skyrise. As the universe pours discomfort into her Big Gulp, she forgets to say ‘when.’ And as a consequence, the project quickly overwhelms her.

Even though some elements are familiar, purchasing and managing a skyrise worth of apartments depends on experience earned somewhere between renting out a spare bedroom and the investor’s current, massive undertaking. Doubtless, our investor was driven by big rewards, so she took a big risk.

Turner understands that people often find themselves driven by one of two motivators: the rewards at the end of a journey or the fears at its beginning. If we focus too heavily on the rewards, we skip the necessary self-development required to reach our goals with dignity. On the other hand, we also fear failure.

And fear prevents us from taking even the smallest steps necessary to reach our goals. If I’m honest with myself, I admit to suffering both flaws. Thankfully, Turner’s perspective reduces my anxiety.

Before, I saw most of what lies outside my ‘comfort zone’ as uncomfortable discomfort—that only by feeling great discomfort can I grow in a way that I’m proud of. Yet those large steps are the most frightening; and fear prevents me from seeing the smaller steps I can and must take to get where I want to go. Turner advocates for the small step: reaching for something just beyond our current perceived limitations.

By conquering a challenge adjacent to our capabilities, we grow our circle of comfort by 1% and shrink the distance between our comfort zone and the uncomfortable discomfort in which our greatest rewards lie. If our investor repeats this often enough, the big skyrise with 800 units eventually becomes her next small step.

In a personal marketing example, content production is deeply rooted in my comfort zone. Content has been there so long that you can see it’s ass-print every time it gets up off the couch. And plopped right next to content is me sharing a piece from this column with one or two colleagues, at most.

However, nestled somewhere outside my cozy cottage and likely buried in martian soil is me partnering with a PR firm to promote my column in a major U.S. city. Not only am I far from comfortable allocating funds to such a project, I am certain to fail in attracting and retaining valuable readers through such a campaign.

Somewhere between telling two close friends about this post and retaining the services of a top-tier New York public relations firm lies my comfortable discomfort. Which brings me to my next natural thought: what does lie at the border between comfort and comfortable discomfort?

I’ve previously stated that my goal with The Mmm...letter’s second year is to grow its audience by no more than 10x—as of March 1st, 2023, you will be an audience of 170, but not significantly greater. To reach that goal, I plan to peak outside, put on some bunny slippers, and take the tiniest hops into the wilderness.

I hope you’ll join me.

🐇 My first bunny hop

First, share this column with a friend. If they subscribe, you both earn a coffee, on me. I’ll send each of you a gift card to your favorite coffee shop (I hope it’s the same one, so you know, you can go get a coffee together).To get your caffeine buzz on, after your friend subscribes, have them email me at [email protected]. No limits apply. Offer expires April 30th, 2022. Because of course it does. 😉

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’s been a year. When I started my newsletter, the goal was a year’s worth of posts. I faced setbacks, priority shifts, and pressures on my time. I put my consultancy on the back-burner, got a ‘real’ job, and got tied down to a great woman. In between, I struggled to dilute my musings into something of value for you.

I challenged myself to make it one-year without stopping, and while I failed to conquer my challenge in the gold-medal photo finish sort of sense, I earned the crap out of my participation trophy.

Where this goes next is some hard truth about you: as of one-year on, you are an incomparable 17-strong. You might be thinking, “you’ve been writing nearly every week for an entire year for a mere 17 people?” Absolutely not! Most of that time there were only six.

My wife, a beloved recurring character on this column, routinely asks me why I fail to promote it. My response? It’s not worth promoting. Which is to say, I’m not proud of it and may never be—but I realize that is just me strapping on emotional armor.

Does it make sense for a column about marketing, written by a marketer, to undergo no marketing? It makes no sense. This points to a broader challenge I face with everything I’ve ever produced. Marketing the work of others, or even work done as a team is a trivial effort—I put my marketing pants on and get to work.

However, marketing something I made, from scratch, with nary an editor? That’s an opportunity for deep, personal rejection. And the fear of rejection gurgles at the molten hot core of my anxiety planet.

I owe this to an adolescence spent making short films hoping to inspire pride in my father. It was an unworthy cause then, it remains unworthy now. Yet the pain of rejection irrationally persists. If I believe my column is trash, then I can avoid promoting it and hold tight to a ready-made excuse for why hardly a dozen people even read it. But this column is not trash.

Looking back, I published a handful of pieces that I should be damned proud of.

* The Curse of the Discount Cliff

* No Sleazing, All Pleasing

* The Cost of Price

* and Should You “Fake It ‘Til You Make It”?

I am forced to acknowledge, I’ve done some good here. But what comes next? I came across a mental model this past year that I fell happily in love with: Brandon Turner’s concentric circles. This concept boils down to one idea: to grow, we need to operate in a zone of tolerable discomfort. Too comfortable, we sit pretty, too uncomfortable, and we fail explosively. Comfortable discomfort is where growth happens.

And what was uncomfortable about this first year, at least on the surface, was simply doing the work; focusing on a topic, meeting personal deadlines each week. The real discomfort comes in year two. As Alan Weiss said, “if you don’t toot your own horn, there is no music.” It’s time to play a little song I call, Stanley Bogode.

For The Mmm...Letter’s second year, her goal is to grow her modest readership by ten times. Achieving this may not solve my underlying neuroses, which will require copious therapy sessions to debug. But placing myself in a situation where I face my discomfort and operate where growth can occur is a natural remedy to my personal impasse.

And year two has one other thing going for it: gratitude. As I grow this column, I remain grateful to everyone who takes the time to consider my words. Thank you, all 17 of you, for sticking by as I wade through uncharted territory and release a brand new Stanley who plans to finally get the hell out of his own way.

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

Time to call myself out. In 2005, my high school conducted a class-wide personality assessment. The assessment was to guide me in choosing my career path. And this was a good test for me to take, for I was a bit of a wildcard.

I did well generally—excelled at math, but spent much of my free time performing comedy and making short films—so I welcomed the chance at finding direction. In the assessment, I was tasked to read statements and indicate to what level they applied to me. For example: “I enjoy confrontation, I like working with Animals, and I wish to experience foreign cultures.” For a career in Spanish bull-fighting, please select all three.

I answered in earnest, and then a couple weeks passed by unnoticed. One fateful Monday, the results came in. The school corralled us into the gymnasium and one by one, handed each of us a printed career prospectus with our name on it.

For my generation, this was the closest we’d get to an actual sorting hat ceremony at Hogwarts, and soon we’d discover who would be a Gryffindor and who would be a licensed HVAC technician—the cavernous gym buzzed with anticipation.

The meat of the document was a pie chart cut into eight individually-colored and equal-sized categories of labor: agriculture, health care, manufacturing, research, on it went. Drawn atop this chart was a constellation of three points joined by translucent lines. The area beneath the shape represented plausible careers for that student.

For some, these shapes formed a triangle slicing across two or more categories, with peaks representing careers most likely to align with the student’s preferences. For others, their shape took the form of a diamond pendant, highly-concentrated in a specific category; a ‘dream job’ of sorts.

And for special souls, such as those who authored this fine newsletter, they offered a ninth category. As my classmates enthusiastically shared their futures, I quietly fixated upon mine. At the center of my pie chart, unnoticed by most, was a small grey hexagon. In it I found not three points but one, and above my single point, a question mark. Unknown, read my purpose in life.

A software developer, then actor, then educator, then author, then digital marketing freelancer, then head of product, then 16-years later and this disappointing disoppinionated little question mark had proved itself right: I wasn’t meant for anything, I impact everything. Such too is the fate of marketing.

Today, software is the ground layer above which many businesses are built. A lot of manual labor still takes place, but most of it in developing countries. The businesses I often know and hear of are software businesses developed by people with a mindset fixated upon zeros and ones, a mindset which until recently poisoned my marketing. And here’s where I out myself: up until last week, I was a self-titled data-driven marketer.

There’s no strict definition as to what makes one a ‘data-driven’ marketer, but as I see it, I study inputs and outputs, and choose my next move based on the numbers I swallow. How many impressions did I get? How many clicks? How many permutations did I try? Do I have a large enough sample? Can I A/B test the header copy? What’s my CPC? CPA? Blood pressure?

So deep are my processes embedded in this metric-based decision-making that I lost sight of the marketing’s higher purpose. And while marketing does serve a grand purpose, it has no specific function.

Marketing is a men’s fashion accessory. The standard clothes I wear are so utilitarian I can’t quite tell my outfits apart. Standard jeans to cover my hairy legs, standard shirts to hide my dad bod, standard hoodies to keep me slightly warmer than I otherwise would be, I may as well assemble my clothes on a conveyor belt. Each element serves its purpose, and in this way, I dress to satisfy the conditions for which I must suite myself. And then I slip on an accessory: a bright red bracelet.

A bracelet that, by my count, has no known purpose. That bracelet weighs my right hand down. I can easily misplace that bracelet or get it tangled up in my coat pocket, or God forbid caught in my shoelaces. And yet, that one out-of-place detail differentiates me, highlights something about me, leaves in others an indelible impression of who I am. It leaves them with questions, intrigue, and a memory.

That red bracelet is marketing. I can’t put a price on it. I can’t quantify its output, for it has myriad impacts, many of which I will never perceive. It will repel some, yet attract others. It is my best shot at communicating what I think makes me valuable, and if I have to ask precisely how well it achieved that aim, I miss the boat entirely.

Missing the boat entirely are many of today’s executives who believe marketing’s sole purpose is to convert customers. As a consequence, wannabe scientists have taken over marketing departments everywhere. They tweak knobs, perform experiments, and launch campaigns based on data they glean from dashboards. And curiously absent in all this “marketing” is guts, art, instinct, and passion.

More like my red bracelet, marketing’s actual purpose is unknown, but its side-effects are palpable. When a candidate drops in for an interview and has a positive impression of the brand, thank marketing for that. When a customer refers another, thank marketing for that. And when the team rallies around a new beautiful campaign, thank marketing again. I can’t put a number on it, and I can’t answer why we had to do any of it, but I know damn-well it was necessary.

Out of college, I ended up an engineer. I worked within the bounds of a hard science, one in which zeros and ones defined everything possible. But as a 15-year-old who hadn’t taken that personality test and received those ambiguous results, I was a theater kid. I made movies and dreamt up commercials for top brands as lampposts whizzed past my passenger-side window.

I won a marketing award, the only thing I ever won outside a copy of Santa Claus on VHS. Yet today, the wrong version of me runs the marketing department, the wrong kind of nerd. It’s time for the engineer to take a back seat, and for the drama kid to step up to the plate.

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

Welcome, reader! This marks the very first issue of The Mmm…letter that you can experience through your earholes! Give my voice a shot and let me know what you thought in the comments.

This column teaches me more than it teaches you. When I sit down to evaluate my beliefs regarding the profession of marketing and its routine practices, I challenge my former self. Today, I wish to revisit what it means to be an ethical marketer.

In earlier pieces, I dwell on marketing ethics. You see me ponder writing a book and pulling firmly on virtuous threads. I gravitate toward these topics because few marketers discuss them. We are instead busy hunting for tools, tactics, tips, and other t-words. We fixate on conversions and traffic, and pay little mind to whether our actions bring us steps closer to marketing hell—and marketing hell is where you spend an eternity recording cringey TikToks for Hitler’s GenZ campaign.

To avoid marketing hell, I once imagined some X-wrong-things-to-do, but I no longer believe such a definitive list can exist. Instead, I’m going to share the one and perhaps only thing that separates good marketers from the ones that end up dancing to Wagner remixes on TikTok, and it’s quite simple. But first, let’s revisit precisely what it is we do here...

In any marketplace you will find two parties: one in possession of goods, and the other in need of such. Post-barterism, both parties deal with intermediary value, money, cold hard cash baby. As a consequence, the seller wants money, and the buyer wants a solution to their problem; econ 101.

In a fair market, the seller cannot force the buyer’s hand, so what does she do instead? She goads the buyer into a choice, and more directly into taking a leap of faith. In that last point lies our linchpin.

Unspoken in commercial exchanges is a mutual understanding that both parties often refuse to communicate. The seller knows there is some chance the product fails to meet the buyer’s needs. The buyer knows there is some chance the product meets their expectations. These probabilities vary between seller and buyer. And the primary job of a marketer is to instill in the buyer a high confidence in the product, high enough that they make a purchase, high enough to take a leap of faith.

All of our tactics and gimmicks aim to raise the confidence in the mind of the buyer. As marketers, the moment we knowingly inflate the buyer’s confidence above our own is when we start firing up our TikTok accounts. I believe this is the one line that separates do-gooders and those willing to risk their immortal souls. Let’s look at an example: imagine your first day in mattress sales.

And your first day is Memorial day—no time to train. Customers stream in all day looking for a deal. They ask you for recommendations, firmness levels, the latest tech, warranties, and about that one model that prevents a resting wine glass from spilling as their wife jumps on the mattress like a deranged chimpanzee.

You have no answers and frankly you find the chimpanzee comment offensive. You lack familiarity with your products, so you’re left with two options: express your ignorance or start the bullshit. In both cases, you have very low confidence in whether a given mattress will satisfy the customer—one version of you answers, “yes, and there’s more!” to every request. The other version of you admits ignorance, but expresses your genuine desire to help. This latter version of you will close very few sales on what is basically the biggest mattress-buying day of the year; and that’s okay, you do not deserve them.

You lack the requisite knowledge to help customers reach an appropriate level of confidence. The bullshit version of you will get some sales, and you may even send some customers home happy. But if you’re at all like me, and I bet you are, you know that outcomes do not decide the morality of an action

So there it is. If you work for a company that makes an awful product, everything you do will feel like marketing bullshit because you must instill in your buyers a confidence you do not possess—you smile through your teeth.

If you otherwise serve an organization that works hard for its customers and delivers quality results to the best of its ability, every tactic feels justified. You will want your customers to feel the same way about your solution as you do, that makes your job morally easy, even if tactically difficult. Understanding the limits of your product and communicating that honestly with your customer is the purest way to market, and the purest way to help others.

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