Are you a marketer or a straight up liar?

no you don't need to be deceiving to make money.

In my opinion marketers do provide quality Info; Its the student that does not follow through with consistency. therefore fails.

The job of a marketer is to emphasis the good points of the product they are selling. That is marketing. I agree that there is a thin line between embellishing and lying but it is a line that you don't have to cross in order to be a good marketer.

Marketer of good products, not a liar.

The thing is, liars get found out pretty quickly. So any kind of moral issue aside, it's just not a sustainable business model. Sure, you can make a few quick bucks, but word will get out almost instantly, and then you're sunk. Might as well put the effort into making something good and providing value for people instead.

Deceiving people, manipulating people.. Or knowing which buttons to push due to a psychological ethical education.

Let me ask you... what's the difference?

Know how the human mind works and it's a smooth and easy ride from there after.

.. Identify Pain
.. Agitate Pain
.. Provide Solution
.. Provide CTA

It's only deceiving when your product is CRAP. If you stand behind your product, you get people to purchase your stuff with some extra psychological stimuli, and people end up to be a happy camper.. where's the deceiving in that?

No, not at all.

I think there some "huge ironies" around this subject.

In my opinion, most of the "deceptive" tactics that you see online marketers using so widely are actually counter-productive. These tend to be used by marketers who have "decided" that they "must" work, their "logic" being that so many people wouldn't be using them, if they didn't.

Genuine split-testing of these things (like fake urgency, fake scarcity, phony discounts, and so on) is really rare - I suspect they often actually do more harm than good.

There are huge markets/demographics "out there" who respond very favorably to marketers going to great lengths to avoid all that, to comment on it adversely, and so on.

None of my niches has anything to do with "IM markets" or "making money online" at all, so I'm dealing with "normal/ordinary/other customers" only, but I've always found that the more I discuss marketing and marketing tactics with them, and the more open I am about affiliate marketing and discussing why I promote what I promote, and what I won't promote, and why, the more sales I make and the more I "become the affiliate through whose links people choose to buy" (which is very often where the money is).

No, I think it's actually a great handicap.

I shudder (frequently!) at the naivety of marketers who imagine that "only available for five more days" and "only 9 copies remaining" (when they're not true) are good things to have on sales pages/in autoresponder emails. Do all these people really imagine that their customers don't know that the marketer's trying to deceive them? Do they really not understand that when you're trying to sell something to someone, the last thing you want the person thinking is that you might be being deceptive?

You want to talk about marketers who lie?

Let's mention Colgate-Palmolive.

On a bottle of Irish Spring it says "There's something about the freshness of Ireland that brings out the lasses." You know what else? "All the freshness of Ireland bottled"

You know what else it says? Made in New Jersey.

I think that some marketers are really good at deceiving people. I believe that it's important for the buyer to do some critical research before getting a product and look at reviews and see what others are saying about the product.

I have to admit that many marketers are very good at making sales through deceptions. Look at most sales pages and look at their products when you bought them. Most are not tally.

I personally do not condone this practice. However, as a marketer, I have come up with a way to be a smart manipulator but all in a legal way and it is not in any way manipulating my customers at all but rather to manipulate a certain platform to my marketing advantage.


Zul

High priced products and deception seem to go hand-in-hand, but less so with low-end sales.

Not at all. Those who think that they have to be deceptive don't have a grasp of the business fundamentals, you know, the things that make any business great; OR..... they simply don't care.

I've run into hundreds of marketers over the years, both online and at seminars. And some of them only care about making money, without any regard to ethics. The hyperbole they use tends to be over-the-top and sometimes it's flat out ridiculous.

I've also had the great joy of working with and knowing marketers who "get it". And by that, I mean they really focus on building a company that will serve / solve a real need, provides value, gives back to their community or some charity, and yes, they are good marketers because they don't have to be deceptive in order to sell their products or services.

There's been a civil war of sorts going on in the online world that goes back to the BBS board days in the late 1970s when entrepreneurial folks use to sell stuff directly to people when there was no eBay, browsers, websites or blogs.

You've got the charlatan, quick-buck artists whose main focus is to create "money-makers" (quoting John Reese there) and not real businesses. These people generally have horrible customer service and have a knack for changing their corporate identities. Sadly, the FTC cannot keep up these type of hacks.

On the other side of that coin, you've got marketers who do a ton of market research before they enter a market, find very specific wants and needs of that market, and set up an organization to solve them. They think long-term and they put a strong emphasis on quality products, quality service, and being a productive member of their community.

And you've gotten just about everything inbetween those two extremes.

The civil war rages on and it's gotten nastier over the years. I remember when I jumped into a very specialized niche that was dominated by this one player over at a very popular network. When I launced my product I received a threatening email from him stating that he was going to sue me for copyright infringement.

Well, I knew my product was 100% original, so I sent him a reply email back with a CC: to my attorney basically telling him to back off and to knock off his threatening tactics. To make a long story short it got pretty ugly, but ultimately he backed off. But what he had been doing for years was bullying anyone who tried to enter his market.

It would have been better business sense if he would have approached me so we could work together as JV partners and build one another's lists. Some people just don't get it.

I don't blame newbies for being super cautious these days; there's probably 100x more information today on how to make money online than even 5 years ago. It's simply mind-blowing, especially when I compare it back to when I first got started in the late 1990s.

RoD

To answer the question, I personally pride myself on honesty, integrity, and providing value in all my marketing efforts/practices. For the record, If I am guilty of anything...it would be embellishing some minor (harmless details) - never as serious as stealing, misleading, or to take advantage of, or gain much benefit other than that of keeping a persons attention through written content.

Ultimately, the psychology in being a great salesman/woman or marketer is to; "understand the art of persuasion" - look closer at Copywriters... they 'understand' the 'triggers' that compel others, and if they are successful at writing copy... they are generally able to influence a prospects decision to purchase the item being advertised. -To me this is both an art and a science.

Not unlike the Irish Spring example mentioned above, when's the last time a fast food burger advertisement looked anything like the 'pictures' they use to 'embellish' the reality... those pictures are enhanced and the burger itself is 'far from' the plumb and juicy perfection displayed. Same applies for models, actors, etc... embellishing (fluffing up the truth) is not an uncommon marketing practice.

I agree, there are tons of marketers (especially online) who mislead, abuse, and flat out lie... as with anything, there are two forces at work amongst us: positive charges and negative charges - as is so with all matter(s) of life.

Be it a personal choice to gravitate my efforts to support positive influences ( the greater good) when it comes to everything I do, marketing included... unfortunately, the results are not always positive in themselves, as negative influences have their place, and can be great teachers in understanding the scales we use to weigh and balance our ethics and perceptions of morality.

Smart people see a product trough their eyes, they judge with anything readable, and buy something in the spur of moment. This little spur of moment is definitely not comes from deceiving personality, it is because you are honest about your product, and you know that the product will help your customer. I used to sell a high ticket item on Amazon, but I still don't have a skill to be a true honest man to promote the big product. So I move on and train my ability to write honesty and add value more to my client.

The problem with internet marketing is that people who buy products from you very often have no idea who you are in the first place. The internet is so huge that, unlike traditional businesses, you can deceive thousands of different people and it wouldn't really hurt your business.

However, if you want to have a real long-term business then you have to provide value to your customers. The problem is that since it's very easy to deceive people and make money consistently, a lot of people are doing it, which hurts all internet marketers in the long run.