Marketing Scumbaggery

By — Category: Rant!

As a marketer, your job is to compel people to take action, whether that is driving people to visit your webpage, opting-in for your list, or buying your products, you are always focused on action as the end goal of every part of your message.

To make that happen, you have several tools of persuasion at your disposal:

  • Reciprocity
  • Social Proof
  • Authority
  • Scarcity

When used properly, these tools are effective at swaying the opinion of your prospect and getting them to reach for their wallet and buy what you’re selling.

But when you fake it, you can really come across like a scumbag marketer and beat your credibility to death.

Scarcity

This is difficult to use with a digital product, because it’s not like you’re going to run out of 1’s and 0’s… Digital products can be duplicated infinitely with next to no cost, so it’s tough to use real scarcity for online products. (Despite hundreds of ebook sales pages claiming there only 500 213 17 left)

One way that scarcity is used in product launches is that  they’re only letting a certain number of people “in” to give them personalized attention and make sure they get the best experience possible from the product.

This is genuine scarcity… if you are really taking the product off the market

But the scumbags, they’re not too worried about being genuine.

Here’s a little gem I found while browsing through the newest offers in the ClickBank marketplace:

oh no!

Oh my!

Only 44 minutes until this download link expires!!!! I guess I better grab myself a copy of Secret Blueprint System Revealed 5000™ RIGHT NOW.

And you know they mean business, because they’re tracking that down to the millisecond.

Unless of course I hit the refresh button, at which time the timer resets to an hour and 5 minutes…

So you're lying to me?So… what you’re really saying is that there’s no real limit, and you’re adding fake scarcity to convince people to take action now.

Now, for the few people you fooled into thinking there was less than an hour left to buy the product, congratulations.

But the person who figures it out and realizes you were faking the whole thing, you come across as a real scumbag.

But Wait, There’s More!

Now I’d be willing to concede that this tactic probably does work to increase sales.

But at the end of the day, you aren’t your conversion statistics or your list size or the number of sales of your $47 clickbank product. Those things come and go. What you’re left with after all is said and done is the knowledge that you were willing to resort to gimmicky tricks and lies to get people to buy your stuff.

You know who else will know that?

Potential partners… (who wants to work with a known liar) and prospective customers (there are lunatics with blogs everywhere)

Everybody will know you’re a big fat phony

[youtube]zSTEqHxh3fI[/youtube]

(and perhaps the worst part is, they didn’t actually disable anything when the stupid timer ran out! The thing just stopped and nothing actually happened. Weak.)

There are many, many more scumbag tricks up the sleeves of shady marketers. What are your “favorite” ones?

Personally, I collect photoshopped earnings claims and horribly-written, obviously-fake testimonials like some people collect baseball cards.

Share your head-shaking marketing scumbaggery stories in the comments below.

Till next time,
Dan!