In much of the western world we’ve been flooded with Black Friday sales messages for the past week. The deluge has been impossible to ignore.
This is a window during which stores can hike the price of their goods before offering them at ‘special’ lower prices for the duration of the Black Friday promotion. It’s very clever.
Also clever is stores which slap on ‘special offer’ stickers on goods they cannot otherwise get rid of at a lower price. It’s a double win of reducing unwanted stock AND having customers pay more.
Not all operators are like this, of course, but it’s rife in retail which is the biggest beneficiary of the Black Friday phenomenon. By contrast, a 40% discount on the usual price of a service or subscription such as the cost of one of the new LinkedIn live audio event partners, Restream, is a true bargain. And one which could not have come at a better time for audio event hosts still reeling from last week’s decision by LinkedIn to dump its existing audio event platform.
Other overtly cynical marketing and sales techniques also rile me. I particularly loathe sales emails and the requirement of an email address in exchange for information of some kind. This is known as a lead generation tool. But just because I am interested in the topic does not mean I am in the market to buy that product or service. I almost never am.
And you can be sure that once I’ve handed over my email I’ll be deluged with emails, most of which will be only lightly disguised attempts to sell to me. Some will be overt.
Sales tactics that feed into human greed and our inexhaustible desire for the next new and fashionable shiny object have been around since forever. More recently, celebrities selling their soul … I mean their reputation or influence have proliferated. President-elect Trump is peddling MAGA guitars, for instance. And let’s not forget Trump steaks, Trump University and no doubt many other items that devotees snap up in large numbers simply because they bear his name.
I freely admit that my feelings about overtly cynical marketing tactics are at odds with the time I spent as a copywriter, a role I never felt truly comfortable with in hindsight. Today, instead of attempting to persuade someone to buy from me, I prefer to share information freely and build relationships with those who will, with luck, appreciate the value I bring and then want to do business with me. They will not have to be persuaded, bullied or bribed into working with me, it will be something they enter into willingly and with enthusiasm.
If people chose to work with me I want them to do so because they understand I have knowledge and expertise that I can bring to the table and it is something they value.
Anyone choosing to contact or connect with me can be sure I will not immediately try to sell them anything. I will share resources, ideas and invites to events.
That to me is the spirit of LinkedIn – not connect with me so I can sell to you. And I believe the world would be a better place if we put service ahead of sales.