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Recently I was speaking with one of our Consulting Tycoon students about marketing campaigns for her business.
She brought up the topic of Dan Kennedy and said she was appalled at how aggressive and abrasive he can be, in particular his idea that goes something like this:
"If you haven’t offended anyone by noon, you are not marketing hard enough!"
Now, I understand where she is coming from.
And in a previous (much poorer) life, I felt the same.
What's the point in offending people? Surely if we all play nice everyone will get along and there's no need to offend.
But over the years as I developed and executed more and more marketing campaigns I figured something out.
Old Dan was onto something.
And it's got nothing to do with deliberately offending.
Sure, there is merit in strategically turning off certain type of clients and therefore attracting others. And there are good reasons to use emotional marketing that gets a reaction out of people.
But the concept applies on a more fundamental level than this.
Here's what I mean:
What you'll find is that whether you like it or not the moment you start marketing you ARE going to offend people.
It doesn't what your message is.
It doesn't matter who you send it to.
It doesn't matter what your product is.
It doesn't matter how pure your intentions.
The moment you start marketing you're gonna get haters.
You give away a highly relevant freebie to your list and people unsubscribe.
You put a banner on your blog and people complain you have sold out.
You send a direct mail letter and get an angry phone call from someone wanting to know how you got their name.
(You could be giving away the cure for cancer and someone will be pissed off about something, I guarantee it.)
You will offend people just by the fact you are marketing.
Banner ads piss people off. TV ads drive people crazy. Cold calls ruin dinner. Emails are seen as spam. Direct mail clogs the mailbox.
You name it, it pisses someone off.
So whether you have offended anyone today has more to do with if you have done any marketing than anything else.
The sooner you come to grips with this the better. Realise when you put yourself out there you are going to get people who disagree. Some of them will be offended.
The alternative is to do nothing, offend no one, and make no difference in the world.
I know which path I prefer.
You can learn all the ways I offend people at our next Bootcamp event. It's coming up August 11-12 here in Sydney:
It's 100% focused on marketing to attract high-profit clients.
Talk soon
Kyle
I think a lot of people (including me at one point) take it too personally and get scared to doing any marketing cuz of the tongue lashing they may receive over the phone by a pissed off biz owner who just received your Direct mail letter.
The truth is…
They’re not rejecting you… they’re rejecting your offering!