Make Marketing Suck Less

One of the biggest gifts that 2020 brought us is that we are finally having real conversations about bro marketing and manipulative marketing tactics. I am so grateful that people are finally waking up to what these tactics are, how they're being used, and who is using them. It makes us better consumers and also makes sure that we are investing in programs that are really aligned with who we are and our own ethics and morals.

With that being said, I am also very, very weary. I am weary of people talking about bro marketing tactics and saying they aren't marketing with ethics and integrity. And then you take a closer look and you see that they're still relying on fear and scarcity and manufactured authority and atypical social proof to promote their programs, their services, and their products.

Being an ethical marketer is more about paying attention to what people do more than what they say. And my big concern for 2021 -- and I share this with my partner in crime over at Small Business Boss, Maggie Patterson -- is that we're going to see a lot of what is essentially “green washing” of ethical marketing. People saying that they're doing ethical marketing, but really they're still relying on the same bro marketing and manipulative tactics that they've been taught since they started their business.

And it's super easy to slap this buzzword of ethical marketing on your bio or in a headline. But ethical marketing is not a strategy. It's not a tactic. It's not something that you easily implement. It's a philosophy. It is a way of thinking about your business. So that's what we're going to talk about today on the podcast -- developing your own philosophy for ethical marketing so you know how to take a stand about what is right for you and what is wrong for you based on your own morals and principles.

So let's do this.

You're listening to the Rebel Uprising Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping passionate business owners become recognized leaders who make more money and impact the world by turning their messy, complicated ideas into thriving thought leadership businesses. I'm your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur. And I'll be your no-BS guide in the art of building a business that gets noticed. 

Each week, I share strategies, tools, and insights on how to turn your complicated ideas into great messaging and solid business structures. Are you ready to create an uprising in your industry? Let's do this.

Bro marketing is the air we breathe in the online world. And if you've ever taken any of the big name programs, you've been taught to market in that bro marketing way, because that person who is teaching you how to market was probably taught by someone else how to market like a bro.

And the thing about bro marketing is that it works. It's very effective and it's super easy to teach other people because it can be template’d. You can give people a formula and basically they can do Mad Libs for their marketing message.

And before we move forward, I want to be clear about why I call it bro marketing. It's not just that men use bro marketing because women are some of the biggest bro marketers out there. I use the term “bro” as a nod to the patriarchy -- that hierarchical, top-down system that says, “I know better than you. I know what your business needs, little lady. So I'm going to use these tactics so that you make the decision to give me your money because I know what's best for you.”

And that in a nutshell is what bro marketers want to do -- to shut down your thinking and say, “Oh yes, this is the problem I have! And, “Oh, it's so good that you told me about the problem I have because you have a course that I can pay $3,000 for. Yay! Everything's solved!” But that's not what ethical marketing is about and that is why I believe that ethical marketing and creating better messaging that gives people agency the ability to think about their purchasing decision is the alternative to bro marketing.

And the issue with ethical marketing is that I'm already having people ask me for frameworks and templates and formulas to be an ethical marketer. And it doesn't work that way because ethics are so personal and individual. All I can do is to help you create your own ethical philosophy about what is right and wrong for your business and for how you want to market and sell in your business.

So before we get into the messiness of ethics, I think it's important to get into the messiness of these bro marketing tactics, because the tactics that are used in bro marketing are neutral. The Big Six that Cialdini identified -- and those are reciprocity, social proof, authority, commitment, and consistency, liking, and scarcity -- these Big Six are inherently neutral.

In Cialdini’s book Influence, he calls these triggers “click, whirr” processing or the more academic term is fixed action pattern. So there is a trigger in our environment and then our brains are set up so we follow a certain pattern. So if the click is scarcity and we know like, “Oh my gosh, there's only one left and they're never going to have this again!” Then the pattern we follow that is ingrained in us is to buy something that is scarce. And why these triggers are neutral is because most of the time they can be super helpful and making decisions.

So we make hundreds of purchasing decisions every single week. Think about going to the grocery store. Yes, it's a gauntlet of putting on your mask and staying away from people, but you don't go into the grocery store and critically think about each decision you’re making -- you rely on the Big Six to make some of those decisions.

So for example, if I'm looking at a display of yogurt, you know how I'm going to make that decision about what yogurt to buy? I'm not going to sit there and look at every different variety. I'm going to go to Ellenos Greek yogurt. It's my favorite. And I'm going to buy that because I like it. So that saves me a ton of time and a ton of energy thinking.

But the problem with these triggers is when they are used to shut down our critical thinking skills when we're about to make purchases that should require us to critically think about them, like buying a car. When buying a car, you should probably actually think about that decision in terms of not only what kind of car you want, but the impact it has on your overall finances, your bigger goals in life. You want to critically think about that, but this “click, whirr” processing actually shuts down our thinking so that we're just like, “Mmm, it's scarce. So I'm going to buy that $3,000 course because they're not going to offer it again ever.”

So, how do you know when you should use the Big Six or not? And this really comes down to ethics. And ethics according to Oxford dictionary is “moral principles that govern a person's behavior or the conducting of an activity.” And morals are individual. Everyone's morals are a little bit different. There are some things we can all agree on and other things we cannot.

So some professions like doctors and lawyers have a formalized set of ethics they must follow. So if you are a lawyer, you've passed the bar exam, if you don't want to get disbarred, you cannot break their rules or their ethics otherwise you can lose your license to practice. However, in business, we don't have any standard ethics for running a business, especially not in the online world. So this is our opportunity to develop our own ethical principles.

So how do you start with that? I think the first place to start is to realize that ethics are messy and what one person thinks is ethical another will not. And this is the main reason I am not. Handing down to you from high, like, “These are what your ethical principles should be.”

So for instance, my friend and past podcast guest Alice Carolina, she has a movement called The Ethical Move and they have a pledge of like seven principles to be more ethical in your marketing. And you might be wondering, have I signed that pledge? And the answer would be no. Because I think the topics she covers are interesting -- I also realize that the ethics in the ethical move are not my ethics. They're Alice's ethics or whoever her board who came up with these, they're their ethics.

So, for instance, one of the places I ethically disagree with Alice is on countdown timers. So this is from their website, so “we pledge to not use countdown timers to drive a sale. Countdown timers create feelings of anxiety and a false sense of urgency. You have to do it now, or you will lose out forever. It's designed to make people make hasty decisions instead of allowing them the time to decide if it's the right purchase for them.”

What I love about this is that idea of “It's the right purchase for them.” And I'm going to talk more about that in just a second, because for me, this ethical principle is grounded in a good place -- like helping people make the right decision for them. However, I see some nuance around countdown timers. If your product is $37, that's not a big risk, especially if you have some kind of money-back guarantee. So if you put a countdown timer to help people make a decision so they don't languish an indecision about a $37 product, it can actually really be useful for people to take action and make a decision and move on with their lives.

My friend, Tara Newman at the Bold Money Revolution, she executed this extremely well. She had an early bird for an online workshop she was doing, and, yes, there was a timer that told us when it ended, but the thing was, is that it wasn't meant to pressure people into making a decision. It was there to help people who already know that they're going to say “yes” to this, but would probably put off buying it till the very last day.

So in that case, yeah, it's helping us make a decision. To me that feels ethical because I knew I wanted it. I knew I would wait till the last day to buy it, but since she had an early bird with a definitive end date, I was like, “Sure. I'm going to take advantage and get a hundred dollars off on that ticket.”

So who's right here? Is Alice, right? Am I right? Could we both be right? It depends. That's the messiness of ethics. And that's why I can't give you a list of ten things to do to be an ethical marketer. But what I can do is ask you this question: What are your guiding principles when marketing your business? That is the question I want you to journal on and think about -- what are your guiding principles when marketing your business?

And it might help you to think about when marketing feels good to you. When you've been marketed to and it felt good. Or if you've had a sales conversation or a sales process you've gone through that has felt really authentic and genuine and like they had your best interest in mind. So the goal here is to help guide you to create your own principles. And I'm happy to share mine with you or some of mine, but don't just take my principles and make them your own.

So my biggest guiding principle is that I want to help people make the best purchasing decision for their business. And that's why I loved in Alice’s pledge that she had “they need time to decide if it's the right purchase for them.” Yes. I agree. Like, I want people to make a decision that is right for them. But the decision-making process looks very different when I'm marketing and selling Marketing Uprising, which is a $99 workshop, or I'm marketing my high touch, one-on-one work that costs thousands of dollars.

So for me, I'm always like, “Okay, so what am I selling? How can I help my customers or my potential clients make the best decision for them?” So it's always going back to that. And any of the tactics that I use to sell, I will be able to tell you why I'm using those tactics because of my principles.

Another guiding principle for me is when I use a tactic like scarcity, I let you know why, or as I just said, I have a rationale behind it. So recently I sent an email to a very small segment of my list about the Bold Messaging Sessions. These are like one-off consulting sessions that I usually only do for Marketing Uprising folks, but I decided to release some to my general email community. And in the email, I say, “but I only have five spots available in the month of December. And I've got no clue when I'll offer this again because I can only do it when I have time in my schedule.” 

So I just used scarcity. I only have five spots and I don't know what I'm going to do this again, but I also provided the rationale behind why I'm saying that because I really don't know what my schedule is gonna look like in January and February, I might have time to open spots. I might not. It really depends on my bandwidth and I can't predict that. So that type of transparency makes me feel good. And I'm using one of the Big Six.

And then my final guiding principle that I want to talk about is increasing the likelihood that my would-be clients are thinking about my message. So bro marketing is meant to shut down critical thinking. It's meant to use those tactics to make your brain feel comfortable and like it knows how to act when you're making big investment decisions. So for me, I'm always like, “How can I make my messaging better? How can I be clearer?” So we can't template ethical marketing -- ethical marketing is about having a better message and having a message that speaks to our people, it gives them clarity about what we offer, what problem it solves, what we're promising, how we serve or how we don't serve.

And for me, when we have better messaging that is clear, that tells people what they're going to get without all of that hype, we're actually giving them agency to figure out, do they have the problem that I solve or do they have a different problem? I can't tell you how many times I've had consults where I'm talking to someone and I realized that they don't have their offer fully formulated yet. And for me, it's really hard to create a message for your business if you don't know what you're offering. So I'm always like, “Ooh, you know what? Too soon for me. You have to figure out what you're selling.”

That is very transparent that I'm telling them like, “No, I don't solve this problem.” Somebody who's unethical it'd be like, “I have enough experience doing business models. Sure. I can help you with that.”

The bottom line is, if you see someone touting that they are an ethical marketer, watch what they do and how they do it. Ask them why they're using a certain tactic, because it's so easy to slap ethical marketing into your bio. It is harder to implement it and to create your own philosophy. Knowing your guiding principles and having a marketing message that is clear and captivating is a way to become an ethical marketer.

And I do want to say that, yes, ethical marketing can still be fun. You can still be creative with your message and in your copy. I have a lot of fun with my own messaging and my own copy. So don't think it has to be all buttoned up and so-so serious. It just has to have the person's best interest in mind.

So the one reflection question I'm going to leave you with today -- and this one is a doozy -- what are your guiding principles when it comes to marketing your business?

Start. There. And then as you start to market or write copy, write content, film a video, you can start asking yourself, “Does this stand up to my guiding principles?”

Now, before we go -- if you're the kind of business owner who has been holding back on marketing your business because you don't want to be sleazy, manipulative, or bro-tastic, I want you to know that you can market your business without any of the bro stuff when you have a message that ethically guides people to make a buying decision.

And I'd love to help you create that messaging. It is what we do in the Three Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive, where we craft your Three Word Rebellion, your client journey (so how do you take strangers in to becoming clients while giving them their agency along the way), and a visibility action plan. And right now I'm enrolling clients to work with me in the first quarter of 2021. So if you are interested in marketing ethically and getting that message together, the first step is to go grab the Three Word Rebellion Service and Pricing Guide at drmichellemazur.com/guide.

Thank you for listening all the way to the end of the show. Your support means the world to me. Did you know the Rebel Uprising Podcast has a quiz that can help you pinpoint the number one way to build an audience of superfans while staying true to your unique personality? We do. And it's called What’s Your Rebel Roadmap to Exponential Impact and Influence? And you can take it at therebelquiz.com.

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You got this.