I'm Ant Hodges. This is Less is the Strategy, the podcast that proves doing less is the most powerful business decision you will ever make. Are you ready to find out what becomes possible when you simplify. Then let's dive in. Today's podcast is going to be a little bit different. I want to invite you into my world a moment. Many of you know that I have a faith, and I'm a Christian, and through that faith, one of the things that I try to instill as much as I'm able to, is the highest levels of integrity within my business. What I mean by that is fundamentally, and the way I see it is not lying, not trying to pull the wool over someone's eyes, not trying to manipulate people into decisions, not trying to cut corners, but actually doing business with the highest level of integrity, and I know most people, if you ask them, you know, what are the values that you hold in your business, integrity is going to always come out as quite high on their list, but the challenge that I've seen over the 20 or so years in marketing is that there are many strategies that bend and push against this idea of integrity, you know, the most valuable asset you own in your marketing is trust. When people believe what you say, everything is simpler. Honest deadlines mean that people will always act first time when you're running a promotion, when you're operating from a perspective of wanting to share your life and be human in social media, showing reality rather than fake it till you make it, all of this kind of stuff, you know, it's about building trust, being up and operating from the highest levels of integrity is about building trust, you know. Simple, truthful marketing is the easiest marketing to run. When you run marketing, or you have messaging, there's always something in the back of your mind that you're going to potentially get caught out at some point. Someone's going to call you on it, and that's stressful. So, why add this level of complexity, and why add activity or communication that ultimately could cause you to lose the trust that you've built in your audience? This is what less is the strategy is about. It's about doing things that don't cause more headaches for you and more headaches for your customers. You know, a recent partner promotion that I got involved with with a brand that I know, love and trust, and I wanted to promote because I believe in the product. I got involved with the with the promotion. It was actually crossing over a promotion with my own business, so I could really only run the promotion for the first few days of the promotion. I didn't run it through its entirety, because at the end of the day, I'd rather build my business than somebody else's, but I do run affiliate promotions, and I promote other products that I believe in, that I trust, that I'm aligned with, in terms of value alignment, but this recent partner promotion, we were told it was going to end on a certain date, and everybody was doing their marketing, and messages were going out saying, you know, you've only got a couple of days, you've only got two days, you've only got a day, it closes today, and then, oh, cart closes, and this is scarcity, you add scarcity into your marketing when you have a legitimate calendar date by which an offer is going to close, and this is the open cart closed cart strategy, but what happened when cart closed? The cart quietly reopened. No public fanfare initially, but a message going out to all of the partners to go, look, we've extended this, and then their public messaging went out to say, "Oh, because it was so popular, we've extended it. But do you know what? It may have been a smart financial decision, a business decision to do it. That way, and it may well have worked for them financially to get more people over the line, but the reality is this is the second time they've done this kind of thing, and every future deadline now carries a question mark.
There's going to be doubt in the mind of the audience and the people that are seeing this brand, there's going to be doubt in the minds of partners who are there to promote doubt that will cost more than they really realize. I believe the reality is this happens all the time, and it's a strategy that many people follow. I'm going to run a promotion, I'm going to, you know, build all the hype, then cart is going to open, and then we're going to close cart, but what we'll do is we'll build a whole bunch of scarcity up to that point of cart close, and then we're going to open it again, and then we'll close it, and it will be a definitive close. This is a strategy that is used because there is an element of people going, 'Oh, I missed out. And then the idea is you open cut to capitalize on those people and just go, 'Look, okay, I'm sorry cut did close, but you got one final chance, 48 hours, one final chance. Let's just look at this from a perspective of integrity. Is this the way we should be running our businesses, and our promotions, and our campaigns? You know, a well-known entrepreneur was promoting her program last year, and I've been on her mailing list for years, and I've never really seen her do this, but she closed cart on her annual launch, and normally the closed cart from her perspective is sorry, you've missed out all the scarcity emails ran right up to the deadline, absolutely in the same way that this other brand did it this month, and then the cart was reopened straight away afterwards. I know how important all of this stuff is to people, to other marketers, to other entrepreneurs, because that particular entrepreneur, I wrote a blog post about it, and I called her out on this shady, less than high level of integrity operation that she was running, you know, marketing, for whatever reason, I can't sort my words out, but that's the only way I can describe it, and I got quite a good response from that blog post. There were a lot of marketers and a lot of other entrepreneurs who were basically feeling the same as me. It's, it's lying fundamentally. You're running a campaign and you, you say carts gonna close, and you add all this scarcity to try and manipulate a result, and you can't close, and then you open it again, so all of those people that had bought because you've given them that scarcity message, and then because you've reopened it, what you've effectively done is manipulated all of those people that bought because you told them that the cart was closing. The article that I wrote was obviously well enough written for somebody else to actually rip that article and post it completely on his own blog website, and it's still there today. He's not taking it down, despite requests, but it's irrelevant, because the world knows that I wrote that first, and the reality is that this is a practice that a lot of people don't like, and they don't like it because they're not being truthful. A lot of the partners who promoted this, or this promotion that I've had conversations with, feel the same way that I do. There are others who've just promoted it because they know that they're going to earn some money from anyone who just comes in at the last second, but I think for me it's, it's about what I said at the top of this episode, it's about integrity, and if we're not operating from the highest levels of integrity, then effectively we're going to lose trust. The other marketers and the other partners that I've had conversation with, you know, don't like the way in which this was done with this partner promotion. They didn't go to their list, and we even heard from the organization that it was a business decision that they did. It works well for them, and I even had an email to basically say, "Oh, we respect your views, you know, and all this kind of stuff. You're a trusted partner, all this kind of stuff, and you can just sit this one out if you want to. It's not about me sitting this one out.
It's about the trust that I've built in this brand that has just gone down a few notches now, not because of the leadership or why the company exists in the first place, but simply marketing decisions that had been made that erode that trust. You know, at the end of the day, big brands can lose a slice of their audience. I understand that, and when we, as entrepreneurs who don't run multi million dollar businesses or even billion dollar businesses, we see these brands operating at that level, and with these tactics, the idea is, oh, if that, if that's what they did, should I, should I model that in mine? At the end of the day, a startup or a smaller business copying that can't afford to lose audience because their prime job is to get and keep customers. When you've got a huge business, you can afford fall off and churn rate, because that's just part of business, but at the end of the day, just because they do it doesn't mean you should do it. Saying cart will close, in my opinion, when you've already planned to reopen cart, because that's the strategy, is simply not true. It's not operating from a highest level of integrity that you can, and one broken promise can undo years of goodwill. Every manipulation tactic adds complexity to your marketing, and this is one of those complexity in your message, because people will stop trusting your dates and your promotions, or even any of the messages that you say moving forward. Complexity in the campaign, because now there's more for you to manage, there's more for you to set up, there's more for you to actually make sure works, there's more for you to communicate to partners, and all of that kind of stuff, but there's also complexity in the relationship you're now building with your customers and your other partners, because trust takes real work to rebuild. In my book, Simplify the Funnel, I talk about the hidden cost of complexity. This is a cost that is showing up in plain sight, because big name brands and big name entrepreneurs are modeling something that is adding complexity, you know, fake scarcity with things like countdown timers driven by someone's clicks, it's user-based behavior. It's a tactic that many will use, and there's software out there that enables you to do this, but we know that the FTC in the States, and the Information - not the Information Commission, the Advertising Standards Agency, the SA in the UK - they've been looking at these things. User-based behavior is actually a level of fake scarcity, because you're saying after someone's done something, you've got 48 hours to get this offer. Now, if they then get back into the system, or into the campaign, maybe a week later, maybe on a different device and a different email address, and they see that offer again, or you've only got 48 hours. It's not operating from the highest level of integrity, because you're, you've got a fake countdown timer and a fake offer. The open cart, close cart, then open again is a practice that we need to be careful with, and actually I would say avoid fake scarcity and countdown timers driven by someone's clicks is one practice that we need to avoid. I think the open cart, closed cart, open cart again is the second practice that we need to avoid. The third practice that I see so much in people's marketing, and even when they're planning stuff, are pre-written spaces are almost gone. Emails before you actually know the numbers are at the end of your campaign. A lot of people do this, for instance, within webinars. You write a bunch of emails to get people to sign up. You then get right a bunch of emails to remind people to show up to the webinar, and then you write a bunch of emails in terms of follow up. It's in those follow up emails that people will pre write spaces are almost gone, we're almost at capacity, or whatever it might be, and particularly for things like online products and online programs space isn't necessarily limited unless you're doing kind of one to one work and things, because technology is delivering for you.
You may certainly want to limit spaces on your program because you want to give personal attention to people and you can't give it to everybody, but the other aspect of this. Is that if you're pre-writing those emails and you don't know that the thing's going to actually fly, it may completely flop, and if you don't get anyone buying yet, you say spaces are almost gone again, it's not truthful. The fourth practice is one that I see so often, the whole 'fake it till you make it, showing one polished side on social media, but then in reality it's a completely different story. When we were investigating life, and many big name people and influencers have been caught out like this. There's there's a TV program or documentary series on Netflix that I watched, I think it's called The Liver King, and it basically talks about this guy who was, you know, out there promoting muscle building and eating raw meat, and fundamentally he was caught jacking up, and so whilst his content was authentic out there in the marketplace because he was giving content that would help people genuinely, and it would work if he followed it to the letter, but they might not necessarily get the results, so therefore he wasn't necessarily being genuine because he was doing other things, and this is a difference between authentic and genuine, genuine is about that level of integrity that you can bring. I honestly feel that the partner promotion and the second time that they've now done this open cart close thing has tarnished the trust that I feel in this brand. It's not something that I feel good about it's not something that I feel will easily be recovered, unless there's an admission, you know. We're sorry. What I really want to see this brand do is issue an apology to partners. I want them to issue an apology because partners promoting it and telling their audience carts going to close, and then it reopening damages the trust that the audience of the partner puts in that partner who's promoting it, I myself specifically on this promotion, even though I did not send a single message or email about the open cart, I got called a liar on WhatsApp by somebody in my audience. You said it was closing, you said it was closing, you, you've been part of this, you know, partnership, you've been part of this brand and promoting this brand for such a long time, you clearly knew that it was going to be opening, so why did you say it was closing? I didn't know that they were going to reopen it. It was a surprise to then get the email that partly said they really just hadn't hit their targets, because that's pretty much what the email had kind of said, you know, the partner leaderboard had quotas for people to hit to get certain prizes, and none of them had hit them, apparently. And then they reopen cut, and so as a partner, the messaging that I've put out is called into question. My integrity is in question, and there's a lot of.. there's a.. there's a few other partners that I've spoken to who feel the same, and there's also quite a few partners, and you know, didn't get involved in this promotion for the simple reason that it lacked integrity. We want an open book. We'd love to see an idea of a complete strategy and a complete plan before it would be opened up, so that people can see what's going to happen during the campaign, because then if there are elements of the campaign and the messaging that we're told to put out that we disagree with that could tarnish our own personal brands. We should have the ability to be able to actually say no. Real relationships are built on trust over time.
I honestly feel that when we're getting into technology, when we're getting into strategies that other people are doing just because it's revenue generating, we start to lose that trust, and losing trust with your audience means that you end up losing the relationship, and when there are competitors in the marketplace, they just move the repair job is far harder than the original promise that you put out there and at the heart of it I think this is all about relationship relationship with a brand who has built trust with partners that unfortunately has. Diminish that trust with one simple strategy that they've chosen to run with. We're built to be human and have real relationships with people, not to just look at bank balances and turnover figures and revenue figures of launches. It's not all about the money, it's about the trust and the relationship, and I really, maybe the people from this brand will listen to this podcast. I don't know, maybe someone will forward it to them. You probably know if you're listening to this and you're a partner, and we've had these conversations, you know, it really doesn't matter to me from that perspective, but I honestly feel that what we need to do is ask ourselves that honest question before any campaign. Are we marketing during this campaign with the highest levels of integrity, or are we just chasing a tactic to generate more money. I want people to just really listen to this and simplify, tell the truth, and be an open book. This message of simplification is something that I see a lot of people talking about, but there's still this conflation of marketing where we're putting all kinds of stuff into our campaigns that call into question a lot of things, and the one thing that has been called into question here now is the integrity of this particular brand, like the entrepreneur that I talked about before, if the art of simplification and the way in which I want you to encourage you to bring the human back into the system and build real relationships in your business resonates with you, then I invite you just go over to Simplify the funnel.com and grab a copy of my book, it goes deeper on cutting complexity that will quietly cost you things in your business, and I talk about things like this in the book. It's massively important that we operate from the highest levels of integrity in our business. If we don't, we'll lose trust, we'll lose faith from our audience in us and our brand, and we can't afford to do that in a world where there's so many other people out there vying for our customers' attention and their money. Take them off the market by getting them to buy into you, and you being the only answer, that's the, that's the strategy, but you can lose it in an instant when you operate on anything less than the highest level of integrity. Less really is the strategy, having to be on your guard, and what if people catch us out, and what extra do we need to add when you add in a tactic like this adds the complexity into the marketing, just operate from a truthful stance, don't hide it when you get asked outright whether it was a strategy that you had planned in the first place, be honest, let's put cards on the table with our partners who we trust to market our businesses for us, and that we get involved with. If you find anything in this podcast really resonant for you, then I encourage you just subscribe wherever you're listening to. Please also consider leaving a five star review wherever you listen, just to let other people know, and certainly, if you need to pass this podcast on to somebody else and share it, then please do. This is an important message, and the message fundamentally is that we need to maintain and keep secure that most valuable asset that we have in our marketing, and that's trust. I've been Ant Hodges. Thanks for listening. This is Less is the Strategy. You can subscribe over at Less is the strategy.com or wherever you're listening to it. Please do share this important message with anybody else that may feel that this would resonate with them. Until next time, speak soon.