Jedi Marketing
Funnels, cheat codes, and manipulation.
There’s this lie about marketing that is pervasive.
There’s this belief that if you use the right combination of words, with the right landing page, and the right follow-up email, everything will work. Buyers will appear and they’ll do as you say.
It feels like cheat codes in a video game.
When you do this and you observe it work for the first time, you start to believe that each buyer is really just a non-conscious mouse clicker, just floating around on the internet, waiting to be converted.
Of course, we don’t consciously think of people that way, but that’s how we end up setting up our marketing funnels.
Just to be clear, it’s not the funnel that’s bad. It’s not even the cheat codes.
The issue is the mindset, which is where these tools tend to lead us. The idea that people are out there, just waiting to be convinced they should buy what you’re selling.
Most marketers seek the Jedi mind trick—that magic phrase or combination of button presses that will convince a consumer to do as they wish.
Like any good philosophical debate, the first thing we should do is define our terms.
Marketing = helps people learn about something they need or want. In the end, people are glad they bought it.
Manipulation = convinces people they need or want something. In the end, people realize they didn’t need or want it.
I hope this makes sense. The more we can disambiguate these two terms, the more likely we are to stay the course.
What’s crazy about this is how many marketers don’t even want to know if their customers loved their product or service. I’ve been in this position, so I know how easy it is to get sucked into the singular focus of sales goals and lose sight of the big picture.
In case you’ve fallen into this trap before, too: the purpose of a business is to solve problems for others.
Once the priority becomes about sales, we’ve lost sight of the mission.
Jedi marketing is for people who don’t have the customer’s best interest at heart.