The other day, my family and I spent half an hour in a room made of salt. It was lovely! I'd caught a cold and my nose was completely blocked, but I can tell you, that salt room had me breathing better. (You should try it.)
On the way out, my husband asked about a membership.
"You can have 30% off," the man said, "but only if you decide in the next 24 hours." Then he wrote the packages out by hand on a scrap of paper and slid it across the desk.
We didn't buy. And after that generous offer, we trusted them less than when we'd walked in.
These tactics tell you exactly what the seller thinks of you: "We think you're the kind of person who moves faster if we start a timer."
In today's newsletter:
You know the type. The ones who make the decline button on a popup say "No thanks, I don't want to grow my business," insulting you for saying no. And then there are the marketers at Patagonia, who built a whole campaign around telling customers "Don't buy this jacket."
The man at the salt cave was the first kind. Here are two more from my week.
My husband had signed up for a coffee magazine. It seemed a nice one, with a bag of specialty coffee beans delivered once a month. He thought he'd be able to try it once and then decide whether to keep it. Turns out, he'd signed up for a year. It wasn't obvious that there was no option to test the service before committing, so he tried to cancel.
Fifteen pages of clicks to get out!
He told me all of this on our way out of the salt cave: "This looks like fraud. A serious company, Figma, say, would never make leaving this hard."
If you sell subscriptions, why would you ever make cancelling this exhausting? Here's the thinking: "The only way to keep you is to wear you down until you give up… or to let you believe you've cancelled when you actually haven't."
Do they really think that's how you build a business?
A founder pitched me his company this week, and somewhere in the first thirty seconds he mentioned this: "Some companies build legal tech. We build attorney-led legal software."
I asked what he meant.
Well, he said, one of his engineers did a year of law school before switching to code.
That was the whole thing. The phrase sounds like a moat. There's nothing behind it. The motive: we'll say something impressive and hope you don't ask.
The moment a buyer realises one claim means nothing, they go back and reread everything else you told them with suspicion.
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These were my three stories about marketers who have been taught that selling means pushing. That you close at any cost. That a hack is called “a hack” because it works suspiciously well.
Which brings me to a podcast I was listening to this week.
The guest of the podcast was the owner of Da Vittorio. It's a historic three-Michelin-star restaurant in Bergamo, Italy, family-run since 1966. He was talking about the early days, when the place first opened and there'd be people waiting outside for a table.
His father, he said, would take a tray and carry glasses of prosecco out to the people standing in line.
Today we'd file that under "marketing."
But he wasn't even thinking about marketing or trying to convert the queue. He was taking care of it. To him, people standing outside his restaurant were guests.
That's where trust comes from.
The salt cave looked at us and saw a sale to close before we cooled off. The restaurant owner looked at a line of strangers and saw people to look after.
One of those "tactics” kills any desire to deal with you. The other one built 60 years of a restaurant people now fly across the world to eat at.
The prosecco, not the timer.
If the salt cave struck a nerve, we wrote a longer piece for Zmist & Copy on why so many content agencies leave you trusting marketing less.
Kateryna
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