“We’re not walking around like chameleons copying everything. If you’re on a busy street with dozens of people in view, you’re not copying everything everybody does — just the ones that have the same goal as you.”
Psychological Science, January 2012
Your customers are smarter than you. Treat them that way.
They spent decades being smacked in the face with an unrelenting one-way stream of advertising. With a little brute force the right ad would sell a product regardless of quality, stopping just short of blatant lying, and there wasn’t much recourse for those who felt frustrated or scammed.
But then came the internet. And Yelp reviews. Amazon ratings. Google local pages. Google search rankings. Complaint sites. Spam filters. More sites, blogs, communities and networks than you could ever visit. Entire generations of would-be consumers jaded by broken promises and broken products. They see how they’ve been treated and they’ve ganged up, or rather, unionized. Their trust can’t be bought. They can’t be forced. They can’t be lied to (for long). They can’t be tricked. They can’t be scammed. They can’t be infiltrated. They spot your phony accounts. They don’t like payola and they don’t like that you try. They know they’re not the 1,000,000th visitor and that the iPod isn’t free. They know a trustworthy site from a bad one, and judge you for your aesthetic sense and technical savvy. They see how your business stacks up against your competitors and they see no reason to go with the 2nd best.
This, understandably, is incredibly frustrating for people who expect exceptional results from traditional strategies. It’s never going to happen. That might sting a little, but accepting that reality is the first step towards progress.
The good news is that if you know where you need to set up your presence online and off, are ready to offer real value, and can keep an open dialogue, people are ready to trust you, and they’re ready to follow you. When you move, they move. You lead, they mimic. We show you how.