Mia Fileman 0:05
This is Got Marketing? – a podcast with ideas, strategies, and tactics to help small businesses create smarter marketing. I’m Mia Fileman, a professional marketer, and the founder of Campaign del Mar. In this show, I chat with creatives and strategists about the different aspects of marketing, but without the fluff. Let’s dive in!
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the show!
Today, I am joined by an absolute legend – one of my good friends – Melissa Packham who is a marketing and brand strategist. Her business is A Brand is Not a Logo. Welcome, Melissa!
Melissa Packham 0:44
Thank you so much! What a beautiful intro! It’s such a cool thing to be here with you.
Mia Fileman 0:50
We are going to be discussing probably our favourite topic which is ethical marketing and the gurus.
Melissa Packham 1:01
Yes, can’t wait to dive into this. This is like recording our DM banter for the last multiple years. I’m excited to dive in properly in a conversation.
Mia Fileman 1:12
Yes, me too – to turn all of those DMs and emails and rants into something that’s actually useful and educational for small business owners. Let’s go right to the beginning. Who is a guru? What is a guru?
Melissa Packham 1:31
Well, it’s the eternal question that we’re trying to unpack right now, but I think it’s that celebrity entrepreneur vibe. They bring the secrets, the formulas, the plug-and-play solutions. “I’ve worked it out, and you can too!” They’ve turned that into their whole business model.
Mia Fileman 1:59
They’re the “rags to riches” narratives. They make outrageous claims like, “Work four hours a week. Make money in your sleep. Sell high-end courses on autopilot. Scale your business to seven figures in 12 months.”
They are prolific. You probably will have first encountered a guru on social media. They spend hundreds – if not hundred of thousands – of dollars on paid Facebook ads. They’re usually peddling this “rags to riches” narrative. Exactly as you said, Mel. “It worked for me, so it’s definitely going to work for you, right?”
Melissa Packham 2:45
Of course! What could possibly be different about your life to my life?
Mia Fileman 2:50
Right! What is unethical about the gurus?
I have my view on this, but I definitely want to hear yours.
Melissa Packham 3:00
It’s the whole formula for how they market and sell. It’s the shame-based language that they’re using. It’s weaponizing psychology against us. It’s making us feel like we’re lacking in something. It’s like we’re missing something that’s super easy. How can we not have seen it before?
They suck us into their funnels which are all using the same formula for funnels, and we get upsold from a $27.00 offer to a multiple-thousand-dollar mastermind. It’s just unnecessary. It simplifies something that is very complex. Running a business is complex; it cannot be templated, and it doesn’t all get distilled into six easy steps that simply or in the way that they’re trying to sell it to us.
That’s what I think is unethical about it – the language that they’re using, the oversimplification of something that cannot be simplified, the assumption that we’re all the same and we’re all going through the same thing and have access to the same resources as each other which is a whole other white patriarchal issue in itself. It’s all of that wrapped up, and we’re buying into it because we want to believe that these things are easy, and we want these quick solutions because we all want our businesses to succeed.
Mia Fileman 4:29
Absolutely.
For me, the thing that irks me the most is that it’s lying. Really, they’re lying. I understand that ethics are different for different people. I have a line, you have a line, and my line might be different to yours, but at some point, we need to draw a line. I draw the line at deceit and lying, and some of the claims that they make are outright lies.
For instance, and this is one of the more basic ones where they say, “You do not need an email list to sell a high-ticket offer and have it sold out.” Well, that’s simply not true because they themselves have huge email lists. It’s how they sell out their programs. They are giving advice to people that they themselves do not even follow. Not only does the formula not work for you. It doesn’t actually work for them either.
Melissa Packham 5:37
To what end? What is the benefit of that then? What is the benefit of that lie?
It just serves their bottom line. That’s all it is.
Mia Fileman 5:45
All of it is motivated by greed. That is all it is.
It really comes from a place of profit where they are like, “Profit first! Profit first!” They want to stop trading time for money. They don’t want to work with customers one-on-one anymore. They have needed to come up with a business model that is one-to-many. This is how they’ve packaged it up which is the generalisation and commoditisation of marketing which – as you and I know as professional marketer – is one size fits nobody!
Melissa Packham 6:24
Yeah, I think that’s the amusing thing, sitting on the sideline for so long. Now, we’re both becoming more vocal about this which is great because more people need that point of view. But sitting on the sideline and watching these tactics play out, you’re just sitting there, shaking your head, and going, “This is not right. This is not how this works. There are better ways. There are ways that don’t make you lose all sense of morality in order to sell something for profit only.” That’s a big part of it, isn’t it?
It’s that “profit first.” It’s losing the whole sight of the fact that the point of business isn’t actually money. It’s actually something else. If you’ve got something that is worth a high-value ticket item, then there’s more to it than just making money. It’s actually making transformation and something meaningful happen in somebody’s life. I don’t like that we’ve lost sight of that.
Mia Fileman 7:22
Absolutely.
I saw this on your social media – I think it was today – that we should be putting purpose above profit because we all know that, in the long term, money does not make you happy. It just doesn’t! Sure, for the first couple of years, it will be like, “Yeah, this is great! I made all this money!” but, ultimately, that’s not what’s going to fill your cup.
It’s going to be helping people transform and serving that higher purpose, for sure.
Melissa Packham 7:52
Yeah.
Mia Fileman 7:56
What is the litmus test then in terms of unethical to ethical marketing?
I’ve said it’s lying and deceit. While people listening might say, “Oh, but this is all very harmless. They’re making these outrageous claims, but who’s believing them? What does it matter? We can have a good laugh at them,” but you and I have both had clients come to us who have spent thousands of dollars with the gurus and have been left wanting.
Now, we’re the ones that are cleaning up the mess. It is eroding trust in the entire online marketing world where people say to me every day, “I’m sorry, Mia. Your program sounds great, but I don’t want to run another online program. I have a pile of unfinished courses. They promised that I was going to be able to run the business of my dreams, and I’m not running the business of my dreams. I’m sorry.”
What is a good litmus test, in your opinion, in terms of walking that line between ethical and unethical marketing?
Melissa Packham 9:13
I think, honestly, it starts with understanding your own values and your own ethics. Being really clear about what you value and what you believe is a good way to operate in the world because – remember – we are making a choice about how we market, and we are making a choice to contribute to society in a certain way.
If we choose to follow these tactics and make people feel less than or shame them into buying from us or not providing enough value that they’re not even getting that value and that transformation that they’re so desperately seeking, it’s not good for anybody. It doesn’t help us as business owners. It doesn’t help society at large. It teaches us, as marketers, that we can shame people into buying. I just think that’s wrong.
I think starting with your own personal values and to develop from there what those values inform in terms of the way that you do business, but the real thing is to ask, “Is this promoting agency in my audience? Do they have the right information in order to make a clear, informed decision about whether they spend their money with me? What am I withholding and why? What would I need to know if I were making this purchasing decision?”
That breaks down a lot of those barriers because, suddenly, there’s plenty to go around. There is no limit. We don’t need to activate FOMO because that’s not true. Like you said, it’s just lying. Is it lying to say that there’s limited spaces? It may not be the case. Maybe there are limited spaces. Is it lying that there’s a countdown timer flashing in my face that I need to make a decision and rush me into making a decision? Or have I been provided with everything I need in order to make that decision?
Of course, everyone has their own ethics. We make our own decisions about what specific tactics we will and won’t do, but I think planning that out, and thinking about it, and questioning every tactic or everything that you’re told in the plug-and-play formula – “Why is this happening? Why am I doing this?” – that’s a great way to test yourself and refer back to your own set of values. “Does it feel good? Does it feel right? Does it feel honest?”
“How will this make my people feel?” I just can’t imagine being able to answer that question with “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” because that’s just wrong! Business doesn’t work that way. Establishing honest and transparent relationships with people doesn’t work that way.
Mia Fileman 11:54
Yeah, one of the things that really disappoints me about all of this is that the gurus are telling their customers that this is how they need to market their business. The gurus are breeding gurus.
These small business owners who don’t have a marketing background think that this is how you need to do marketing. Even though it doesn’t sit well with them, they have been told by the gurus, “This is just how you need to do it. You need to be sending an email a day, and it needs to have some shame provocation and false scarcity and countdown timers because we need to nudge people into making decisions.”
Melissa Packham 12:33
Agitate.
Mia Fileman 12:34
Yeah.
“We need to push them before they jump! They’re walking around with a headache, and you need to give them a cure.” They’re not walking around with a headache. You’ve given them a headache, and then you’ve sold them something that’s not even close to getting to solve that headache.
I think the real thing that I want to get across to small business owners marketing their business is that there is another way to market your business. You do not need to do any of this – nor should you.
In fact, this is going to erode your brand value long term. This is going to chip away at your authority and your credibility. People just will not trust you. Trust? Well, that’s the ballgame. That is the basis of a relationship, and relationships are the basis of marketing. Really take out of this conversation that there is another approach to marketing that you can use other than the one set up by the gurus.
I just want to dig deep into one of the promises that the gurus use specifically which is around scaling your business. This one really, really shits me because they are telling small business owners to scale their business to seven figures.
Melissa Packham 14:06
Or eight figures.
Mia Fileman 14:08
Or eight, yes.
Melissa Packham 14:10
It’s just being casually thrown around here, yeah.
Mia Fileman 14:13
You know what? Three years ago, it was six figures, and then it was like, “No, that’s not outrageous enough. We need to go to seven figures.” There’s just this one up. We need eight.
Melissa Packham 14:25
But that’s all fuelled by “I need eight. Therefore, I need to tell my audience of people who I’ve just got to six figures – or maybe not – or maybe desperately seeking the six figures that we need to go to eight now.” It’s purely egotistically driven consumerism at its worst.
Mia Fileman 14:45
Sorry, but if you’re making eight figures and I’ve never fucking heard of you, that’s not odd. I’m pretty sure I can name quite a few of the billionaires. You pop up in my feed and I’ve never heard of you, but you claim to make eight figures and have never been on Forbes? Okay. Sure, great!
But the data tells us that the number one reason for start-up failure is premature scaling. The gurus telling us to scale our businesses is really dangerous advice. This isn’t just bad advice and unethical advice. You could lose your business and your livelihood over this.
Let’s talk about scaling.
Melissa Packham 15:39
Yes, let’s.
That promise works though because we want to believe that there’s a solution to overnight success. What that doesn’t do, what their promises don’t tell us, or what they don’t show us is the fact that they are not themselves a product of that formula. Like you said, they’re using completely different formulas to create their own business.
We’re not seeing the time and effort that goes into it – the trial and error. They talk about it, but they simplify it. They make out that all that they’ve learnt can be distilled into five easy steps to scale or whatever it might be, but what that promise also doesn’t do is account for nuance of context, and changes in the marketplace, and a deep, intimate understanding of your audience and what their changing needs are.
It’s a gross oversimplification of a strategic move that businesses make when they are ready to do so and when they’ve built essential foundations for doing so. I think that’s what’s missing.
Building those foundations takes time. It takes that learning. You’ve got to make the mistakes to learn the lessons. You’ve got to put stuff out there for people to respond to and give feedback. The pressure to scale comes to desperate business owners who want to see the potential for their business come to fruition.
Mia Fileman 17:13
Yeah.
The gurus all started as service-based businesses or product-based businesses. In the first three years of their business, they slogged it out like the rest of us – doing one-on-one consults and working with clients one-on-one – and then they reached enlightenment and decided to drink all from the same Kool-Aid and become gurus.
Now, what they’re saying is that you don’t have to go through those first three to five years of business like they did because they’ve unlocked some sort of formula. You can just take what they’ve learned and apply it to you which is some really high-grade bullshit. You absolutely need to go through those first really difficult, really challenging and tumultuous three years to figure out all of what you just said about your people, your offer, your value proposition, your service delivery, so that you can come up with a scalable model.
No, there is no erasing those first three to five years because those years for them is what built their profiles. It’s what got them those email subscribers. It’s what gave them their podcast listeners. It’s what gave them these huge personal brands akin to celebrity status. It’s what gave them tens of thousands of social media followers. It’s that huge audience that they are now marketing to and preying on, but they’re saying to you, “You don’t need a big audience.” Of course, you do!
To try to get thousands of people into your course or your digital products, of course, you need a big audience. It is a funnel, and it is shaped like a funnel for a reason.
Melissa Packham 19:14
It’s marketing mass.
Mia Fileman 19:17
The more people at the top, the more people at the bottom!
That’s the issue I have with the premature scaling. It’s very much “do as I say, not as I have done, and not as I have demonstrated and what I had to go through.” As you said, a huge oversimplification of what it takes to get to that stage.
But another point that you made which is a really, really good one is that a lot of the gurus at the moment rely on getting people in their online courses and evergreen digital products. Look, two to three years ago, that was an emerging market. The people that were able to launch evergreen digital products and online courses did quite well, but now this market is so saturated. Everyone is wanting to launch digital products and online courses. The results have been really questionable. Course completion rates are astonishingly low, so people are really wary of this.
They’re giving advice that doesn’t take into consideration market factors like the appetite. The demand for online courses and digital products has dried up and there is now an oversupply. They’re telling people to follow a business model that is not sustainable.
Melissa Packham 21:04
What will happen when that’s all dried up?
There’s a reason they’re trying to get people into their multiple-thousand-dollar masterminds right now. It’s because they know that. They know that that’s the next step. It’s the next thing that they can get money from.
The other big problem about all of this is it doesn’t teach business owners anything. There’s nothing there to be left with so that they can do that again and again. You can’t teach that level of complexity when it comes to business.
Only you know your audience. Only you know those market factors that impact your business the way that they do. Having that understanding and a framework – not a five-step formula – for evaluating those opportunities and threats and building strategy as a result of that is something that you can’t template. You can’t template that stuff. I know. I’ve been looking at it. How do I template strategy? How do you make that accessible for people? The truth is the results aren’t there. It’s just not the same.
By having a plug-and-plug “type in the response” formula for scaling business is negligent. Like you said, it’s dangerous that people put their businesses on the line.
The other thing is I’ve deconstructed a fair few of these gurus’ offers. Having had to sit through some of the video content and the course content, it’s strategy very simplified. If you actually invested time and money in understanding how strategy works, then you can apply those same frameworks and those same tactics in a way that’s actually meaningful and repeatable for your business. I’m sure you’ve found the same thing.
Mia Fileman 23:02
Yeah, I’ve watched some. They really, really concerned me because, for the ones that I watched, what they were selling was self-help. It was really self-improvement. “You are the problem. It’s your limiting beliefs that are holding you back. This is the work that we need to do on you so that you can rise to the challenge. The reason why you’re not making six, seven, eight figures is because of you.”
It really, really disturbed me because, exactly like you said, you can’t template strategy. They’re not trying. Instead, they’re just selling self-improvement, Anthony Robbins-style guru shit.
Melissa Packham 23:49
Yeah, the questions there are: “Where are the gaps? What are the gaps that are missing to really understand fully how strategy works and can be repeated for your business?” Because that’s a thing. It’s not to conflict. That’s something that isn’t taken into account with these solutions.
The other piece you’ve just touched on is stepping into spaces that you should not be stepping into. What qualifications do they have in dealing with these deep personal issues? I don’t think any of them are qualified in that. That’s very concerning.
Mia Fileman 24:28
Very concerning because they are essentially messing with your brain with zero qualifications in mental health, clinical psychology, psychiatry, and things that I don’t really understand.
I have seen gurus claim, “You can turn what you know into an online course and start teaching people within a couple of years.” That’s really concerning because, yes, I have an online program, and I teach what I’ve been doing at a professional level for 20 years.
I just don’t think that it is ethical to have been doing something for two years and think that you can then go and teach it to other people just because you’ve dabbled in it for the last two years – or even less – and now you can turn that into a course and people are going to invest in education even though you have no qualifications – either industry qualifications or education qualifications.
Melissa Packham 25:37
That’s an interesting point. Going back to everyone having their own values, everyone has their own set of criteria for what constitutes an authority or who they put their trust and place their dollars with. That is so subjective now because of the availability of the tools for us to do that – to make our skills teachable in just a couple of years’ time and playing on the fact that there’s that rags to riches “I was living in my car and now I’m a multimillion-dollar jet-setting, Lamborghini, draping on superstar.” It plays into all of that. Again, it’s tapping into that formula and monetising it.
Mia Fileman 26:24
Yeah.
To actually scale your business – let’s drop some truth bombs and some real talk – it is going to require an investment in either your people, your technology, or for you to substantially change your offer.
Servicing 20 customers is very different to servicing 200, 2,000, and 20,000. You are setting yourself up for some really, really unhappy customers if you try to just shoehorn your current offer for 20 people and make it work at scale.
There have been some notable examples of brand who have tried to do this and have come crashing down. The one that comes to mind is an interior makeover service called Home Polish. It gained huge popularity. It set about scaling their business but without changing their offer. What they did was they started to cut corners on their jobs. In the process, they annoyed some really high-profile influencers. Only within a few months, the company had folded.
Poor customer service seems to be one of the major reasons why premature scaling brings down start-ups. It’s really important, as you said, to do that groundwork. Make sure you go through all the steps of scaling – the validation, the research, the testing, and the gradual scaling – because it can have some really disastrous results if you pushed before you jumped.
Melissa Packham 28:15
Yeah, absolutely.
Again, you don’t have the opportunity to learn from that really fast scaling. I don’t even know how this came about because, in start-up land, there’s still time between an idea and an MVP and an actual thriving multi-million-dollar business.
Canva didn’t start a year ago. They started many, many years ago. They’ve been iterating and improving their product and improving the customer experience and proliferating their offer – all those things over time, using learnings and capitalising on trends and that kind of thing.
Even though we see the headlines – Afterpay sold for 39 billion dollars, Canva just got an amazing injection of cash for their business – this stuff doesn’t happen because they did this overnight. It’s over time and has all those things in place to support that level of scaling and to help them get to that next step without burning the bridges and losing the equity in what they’ve built so far. I’m coming at it from a brand equity perspective as well as financial metrics, but all of that is on the line if you’re flipping your business overnight.
It’s becoming this thing. It’s prevalent in online business, but that doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s just in online business that I’ve seen this kind of language around scaling overnight and getting those seven to eight figures.
Mia Fileman 29:59
Yeah, same.
Looking at Canva, their growth has not been without risk. There have been huge, huge risks that they have taken and had to weather and had to go through. They raised the capital and then they needed to invest it wisely. They’ve built a huge team. Those are all these people that they’ve needed to recruit. They’ve got all of these investors who are saying, “This better return!” and putting pressure on them to hit certain growth milestones. At every stage, it has been risky.
I really take issue with the notion that any of this is easy or straightforward or happens in your sleep.
Melissa Packham 30:53
You can’t manage people in your sleep, can you?
Mia Fileman 30:56
No.
Melissa Packham 30:56
You have to be very awake to manage people.
I think there’s the two things there. The two causes are the customer experience thing that you mentioned but also the management of people. You’ve got a team. You’ve got to coordinate them. You’ve got to create systems and operational foundations that they can work within, policies and rules, managing the actual personal side of HR. It’s a whole thing.
I think that’s another one of the big reasons why start-ups scale. They hire the wrong people, or they don’t know how to manage people. They don’t realise that they have to manage people. Not everyone is in their brain and executing things in the way that they want things to be done. That’s another big challenge and I think it’s a misconception that isn’t talked about – certainly in the online space.
Mia Fileman 31:43
Everyone knows that the hardest thing about running a business is managing staff. You can’t really progress without having to bring on that staff member. There comes a point where you’re like, “Look, I can’t. I have to bring on somebody else,” but from that day on, that becomes your biggest challenge. I have definitely experienced this first-hand.
I ran an agency for seven years. I had a team across three states. It was the biggest challenge in my business – the most expensive. It really determines your success or failure. It’s exactly as you said – recruiting the right people, training them, onboarding them, offboarding them. It is a whole other thing, so we shouldn’t oversimplify it.
I want to just talk about motivation for the gurus. Obviously, it’s motivated by greed, but there seems to really be a tendency for the gurus – but also online business owners and entrepreneurs – to lie. Why do you think that lying is just so commonplace amongst the entrepreneur cohort?
Melissa Packham 33:06
I don’t think they would call it that. I don’t think they either recognise that it is, or they don’t see how harmful it is. I just don’t think there’s enough questioning of those tactics to even prompt that thought. I think, if you asked them, they would say, “We’re not lying.” Until you probe them. Maybe they might wake up to it.
There is more of a culture now to be talking about how ethical people are. They will claim that they’re being ethical but still follow the same tactics but, again, ethics – my ethics are different to your ethics. It might not be on their radar. I think that’s why. It’s because there is so much. It’s so subjective.
In terms of the outright lying, I think it’s almost misleading by omission. I don’t think a lot of people realise that. An example of that is, if you’re standing to gain financially by promoting someone’s business in an affiliate relationship and you don’t disclose that that’s an affiliate relationship, I’m not lying to you.
I’m still promoting the business and getting my money, but I’m not telling you that I stand to gain because that is information that could change someone’s decision about making that purchase. I think there’s a lot of that going on. It’s not lying. It’s just that I’m not telling you all of the information to say whether that’s right or wrong.
Mia Fileman 34:44
It’s not lying; it’s exaggeration. It’s not lying; it’s—
Melissa Packham 34:49
Puffery. Marketing puffery is always the thing.
Mia Fileman 34:52
It’s spin. It’s helping people save themselves from themselves. All of that, absolutely.
I read a really interesting article in the Harvard Business Review about entrepreneurs and the truth. Probably the biggest example of entrepreneur deceit was Elizabeth Holmes who was the founder of Theranos. She lied about her company’s blood testing technology. She’s now facing criminal fraud charges.
Not every entrepreneur is to that degree, but the article really explored around why entrepreneurs take liberties with the truth. One of the things the article explored was the fact that there’s just no accountability. No one is checking them.
When you take a big brand like the ones that we worked for – L'Oréal and Parmalat – these are publicly listed companies. They are accountable to shareholders. They have to release annual company statements and annual company reports. But, in the start-up world, you don’t have to do any of that. There is literally nobody sense checking these promises and these claims. That’s one of the reasons the article said that entrepreneurs just have this casual relationship with the truth.
The other one is high risk. They have borrowed money from family members – their mothers, their sisters – to build their businesses. Now, there’s a lot riding on that success. For them, it is a little bit “live or die,” so they are prone to stretching the truth because the stakes are just so high for them.
Melissa Packham 36:58
Yeah, and we see that play out as well.
An example was one of the Kardashians. I don’t know which one because I can’t tell the difference between them, but they were pushing to create her billionaire status so that she was on the cover of Forbes. That was a big push to be seen on the cover of Forbes, but all the deception that went on behind the scenes to inflate the value of the business and create the perception that she was a billionaire just to be named in the Top 500 and be on the cover of Forbes. We’re seeing it everywhere. I think that’s why it makes us feel like it’s acceptable behaviour or that it is necessary behaviour to do these things and just to follow blindly without questioning.
It all comes back to “What are my values? What is the point of this? What does this lead to? What potential damage or greatness comes from this? What is the impact ultimately?”
The exaggeration and the puffery, the inflation and all of those things all come from that behaviour, so I’m not surprised to hear that those are the reasons that entrepreneurs are lying because you’re right. There is a lot riding on it. A lot of it is ego-driven though. As well as financial risk, there is the risk to reputation and that sense of belonging.
If we’re talking hierarchy of needs, if they’re sitting at the tippy top of that, you don’t want to fall down and have everything ripped out from underneath you. I think it’s just the lies build upon the lies to help maintain that perception.
Mia Fileman 38:50
It’s all a bit sad.
Despite our best efforts, we are going to be competing with the gurus for a long time to come. They’re not going anywhere. What are the best ways of dealing with and sharing that space with the gurus for ethical businesses and ethical marketers? Because it can seem like we’re playing by the rules, but they are not, and it can feel very challenging to try to compete with someone who is not playing by the rules. However, we have some great strategies that we can share. I’m sure I’ve got some!
Melissa Packham 39:38
We’re calling it ethical marketing like it’s a special niche thing, isn’t it?
It should just be the way it is. Just be a decent human.
But I think the way to help challenge this is to do it a different way. Market in a way that makes people feel good. Market in a way that makes people feel like they have all of the information they need because those are the people that will come back again, and more people will come when they hear about these positive experiences.
Imagine if all of those gurus’ courses had 100-percent completion rate and five-star reviews. What a great story to be telling then instead of not caring about completion rates and not caring about customer reviews. Funnily enough, you’ll never see a negative customer review. You’ll never find them. How curious is that?
Mia Fileman 40:37
That is so bizarre, right?
Even you and I are going to have an occasional negative review. You can’t please everyone all the time. It’s quantified. It’s stated that there are going to be a certain percentage of customers who are just not going to be pleased. You just need to accept that as the cost of doing business and that they have zero.
Melissa Packham 41:02
On that, one of the tactics might be to not hide the negative reviews that you’re getting, but to respond to them in a thoughtful, caring way, knowing that the customer is always right because perception is reality. Use those negative reviews to demonstrate that you’re a well-balanced business and that you don’t need a scary legal team to write out the possibility of people sharing their actual thoughts about something. I think owning up to that is completely fine.
Mia Fileman 41:34
Totally.
My approach has obviously been to call out the gurus and say, “This is bad behaviour.” I pulled together an entire campaign that said, “This is what it is, and it’s shit.” I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fighting back. They have taken the piss for so long.
Try to do it in an entertaining and humorous way like I did. I also haven’t named and shamed on purpose. I don’t want to get sued. But raising awareness so that buyers are more aware of what they’re getting and shining a light on some of the unethical tactics.
But then, I think it’s probably time we treated the gurus like proper competitors as opposed to just laughing them off and saying, “Yeah, whatever!” For all their inflated value, demonstrate real value. For all their fake PR – all their Yahoo! Finance top ten lists.
Melissa Packham 42:40
“Top 20! What a surprise! Amazing! Thanks for choosing me!”
Mia Fileman 42:46
“Oh, my god! I just can’t believe I was chosen!”
Melissa Packham 42:49
“This means so much! It didn’t cost me anything more than a couple of thousand dollars to be on the list.” Yeah, exactly. Beat that with actual thoughtful coverage in media and sharing thoughts about how true authority looks – what that really looks like – true expertise.
Help other people evaluate who they’re giving their money to and re-evaluate what qualifications matter and why.
Mia Fileman 43:24
Exactly.
For all their false authority, demonstrate your real authority. Talk about your qualifications and your experiences and your awards and accolades that you’ve actually earned as opposed to bought. Beat them at their own game because, at the end of the day, this is a house of cards. It does come apart quite easily. It won’t take a lot for you to just play the long game and understand that there’s nothing wrong with growing slowly and steadily and letting them come unravel themselves, really.
Melissa Packham 44:04
Absolutely.
As marketers, we imprint on society, so we have to remember that, and we have to remember that that comes with responsibility. Every time we’re marketing, every time we’re writing copy that goes out into the world in front of people, we’re imprinting on society in some way. We get to shape how we do that.
I think that consciousness, being aware of that, being responsible with that, realising the influence that we do have on people, if we’d all started that way, we wouldn’t see this kind of marketing happening because we’d all understand that there are people that are seeing us and listening to us and behaving because of us all over the place that you can’t see all the time.
I think it’s just always being conscious of that and taking it seriously. It’s not a game – well, it is a game, if you play it like a game, but it could mean so much more if we took it seriously.
I think you’re right. We have to call them out when stuff doesn’t seem right so that more people are aware because we get suckered into this. We all do. We all want the successful business. We want what that level of income will give us and allow for our lives and what it does for our families and what it enables us to do, but I think, if we’re starting from “what is the impact that we want to have and what is the change that we want to see in the world?” that’s a much better place to start. You will have organic, beautiful, human-to-human marketing off the back of that – just naturally because it couldn’t happen any other way.
Mia Fileman 45:51
Absolutely.
The most rewarding work that I’ve ever done in my career has been working for government campaigns on projects – like the More Aboriginal Teachers in Classrooms campaign and the Teach the Territory campaign and Responsible Gambling campaigns – where I actually get to help communities and engage with communities and see positive change.
Marketing can be a force for good. It has had the power to start movements. Look at Black Lives Matter. That is a campaign. It is a marketing campaign. I really look forward to a time where marketers aren’t looked upon as snake oil salesmen.
Melissa Packham 46:37
Yes, exactly. That’s certainly not the reason I got into marketing. I know it’s not the reason you got into marketing. I think the more people that are aware that there are alternatives to the way that we’re being sold right now, the better that will be.
Mia Fileman 46:58
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Melissa! That was such a great chat! I absolutely loved it!
Melissa Packham 47:03
I loved it too!
Mia Fileman 47:04
I really appreciate your time!
Melissa Packham 47:06
Thank you so much for having me!
Mia Fileman 47:12
Thank you!
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