The Selfish Way to do Good Marketing
Find a way how you can give away value
So, tell me what you think...
Are marketers good people?
.
.
.
Let’s be honest here: we haven’t always got the best reputation.
The telemarketing industry, the sales people, and us.
But you know what, I have an optimistic message to convey:
Marketing can actually be a Force of Good in the world!
In fact, there’s two ways marketing can be good:
Marketers can help get good products in the hands of the right people (... and thus create win-wins that otherwise wouldn’t have happened)
Marketing itself can help people change how they think, for the better
The first one is rather obvious, and a bit boring.
So today, I want to focus on the second one.
Here’s a short-ish video (8:28 min) from Alex Hormozi:
Alex isn’t getting paid to reveal the secrets of ultra-profitable service businesses here.
It helps Alex sell his books, sell his brand, sell his corporate consulting…
But it’s also helpful.
“The goal is to be so different from everyone that people have to consider you on your own…so that you can have monopoly prices ”
It’s a perspective.
It’s a reframe.
It’s how you choose to see business, and by proxy, the world.
By doing that, Alex is frontloading the value: you don’t even need to pay anything, to already get valuable perspectives from him.
Gary Vaynerchuk has a similar attitude: he’s giving out his best advice for free, and builds goodwill with people.
Seth Godin has the same approach.
And so does Warren Buffett.
And Elon Musk.
And Marc Andreessen.
And Mr Beast.
They’re pushing value out into the world, and in all sorts of intractable ways… it comes back to them.
Old mindset: never give away value, without getting something in return
New mindset: feed the world, and the world will feed you
Now, here’s the crazy thing:
All these people do this selfishly.
They don’t have to do it from the goodness of their heart.
They do it for financial gain… and it works.
Every freemium product is front-loading the value — think Slack, Google Docs, Figma, etc.
Every influencer is front-loading the value.
In the physical world, it’s harder to front-load the value, because the marginal costs of each product is significant. Apple can’t endlessly give out Macbooks for free, without going bankrupt. It costs real money to make each Macbook.
But in the digital world, most products have marginal costs that are close to zero. It still costs money to write the code or shoot a good quality video, but almost all the costs of creating software, content or ideas is to create it for the 1st person. After that, you only need to distribute it.
The costs to produce a piece of software or content for 1 person, is practically the same as the costs to produce that same software for millions of people.
Once you’ve made it, you might as well distribute it as widely as you can.
That’s the mindset change.
Find a way how you can give away value.
And then don’t hide it.
Don’t put it behind a paywall.
Front-load it.
Best,
—Pieter