George Kao argues that fear-based marketing tactics like fake scarcity damage relationships for short-term sales. He uses a popcorn analogy: aggressive promotion burns the pot, creating a burst of sales but ruining potential customers. His shift to authentic, love-centered marketing in 2014 filled his client roster by 2016 and stayed sustainable.
Have you ever seen a marketing message that says there are only two spots left? Sign up. Now. When I see those messages and I've seen that, I've been in marketing full time for 13 years helping coaches and other solopreneurs. When I see that kind of message, I ask myself, how many people are getting that message? If you have two spots left and it's being sent out to hundreds of people or thousands of people, how are all the other people supposed to feel who can't get your two spots? The answer is fomo. They're supposed to feel the fear of missing out. And this is the problem of most marketing today is that the business owner or the marketer is not considering the feelings of the audience and they just want to make a sale. This has been the problem of marketing all along. This is why most of us dislike marketing. Because we feel like we have to do stuff that doesn't make us feel good, let alone the audience we're going to do this to. So that's why we recoil at the need to do marketing. It doesn't have to be that way. Now, I think of this analogy that a lot of people like when I talk about this. It's like cooking popcorn, okay? So when you cook popcorn, you turn on the heat and you have to wait a little while and then the kernels start to pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. There's like a big rhythm of popping and then pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And then it slows down, right? What happens is you pop a few more kernels, you get a few more sales, but then you burn many other kernels. You burn more kernels than you got the sales. And this is what most marketing is teaching you, to burn the pot. Because they want you to get the sales, sure. But they don't think about the feelings of the. They don't think about the long term relationship that you have with your audience. This is why I think it's dangerous to listen to most marketing advice. Because they're using things like sales funnels and artificial stuff like that. That's very contrived and forced, not authentic and not human. Right? Not friendly, like you're making a new friend, but it's more manipulative. And in other words, most marketing is teaching you to act out of fear and to create fear in your audience. And I am saying, why do we have to do that to the world, to others, to our own psyche? Instead, we can market from love. Imagine that, an overabundance of Joy that pours forth about our product or service or our message and a genuine sense of caring and compassion and concern for the audience and sensitivity to how they are receiving these messages. And when we have that overabundance of love come out and that is our marketing, it feels so different. And the audience pays attention and says, oh, I want to be in this person's presence more. And this is essentially what I've been experimenting with and trying because I used to. When I first started marketing, I learned from the big boys. They're usually boys, you know, big. Now nowadays I would say toxic masculinity type of boys, loud and you know, high heat marketing that burns the pot. I did that for the first couple years and sure it makes money in the short term, but it doesn't build an audience for the long term. And marketing always kept being hard for me, difficult for me because I always have to kept persuading, persuading, persuading, making them do this, making them do that. And one day I said, I can't do this anymore. So I stopped it all and I started over in 2014. Excuse me. So then when I started over, I said, I'm going to be human and authentic and try to be loving in my marketing. And it took me a couple years to experiment and to build up the relationship with that audience. But I noticed after two or three years my marketing got so easy, became easier. Like by within three years, my client roster was full and I no longer had to do individual outreach to get clients. They were all coming to me because of more love based marketing. And since 2016 when my client roster has been full, it's been full ever since. And it's gotten easier every single year as I continue to embody or try or, or figure out what does it mean for me to really follow my heart in my marketing and to be sensitive to the audiences, not burning the pot, but to be gentle in my calls to action and to not burn the pot. Like I said, if I promote something, I notice the sales are pop up for a little while and then start slowing down and I stop, I turn off the heat. I don't do any more promotion because it's done. You know, the most of the people who are going to buy have already bought. So I guess that's all I want to say in this video is that be careful of burning the pot in your marketing, doing too much promotion and be careful of marketing trainings and marketing actions that are led by fear and instead see what it means to you to market from a place of love and trust in a long term relationship with your audience. I hope this is helpful. Thank you for joining me.
