As I have mentioned, I get a lot of marketing emails, sometimes regrettably but mostly intentionally. Over time, I have begun collecting screenshots of certain tropes that they overuse. By noticing and collating those, I am hopefully immunizing myself against doing similarly dumb shit. I will post a few examples here to illustrate:
Please believe I could continue.
In any case, I mention this simply because the overuse of certain phrases merely illustrates that folks are incessantly talking while they have nothing of value to say. And why even be mad at the individual players? Yeah, they should know better. I agree. However, they clearly don’t.
It recently occurred to me that my revulsion to the low-quality, low-grade manipulation I see all around me is actually useful, as it reminds me that I am so repelled as I maintain taste even when countless others have elected to abandon taste and elect to attempt to manipulate others as a sales strategy.
I read [part of] Daniel Pink’s book “To Sell is Human,” and I am quite intrigued by the notion. Setting aside neoliberalism and economies predicated on keeping people hungry and always rolling the boulder up the hill, I find it quite compelling that sales as persuasion is hugely important in contemporary economies. However, I strongly suspect the “sales” he describes in the book is very different than the “sales” conveyed in the emails I get.
Ultimately, I believe that, like Daniel Pink writes, selling is essentially storytelling. An ability to garner sales in this case is not simply offering a product that addresses five out of five stated customer needs directly, for example. Rather, the product is presented in a particular way, shown to have particular attributes, and is available at a certain price. When the product becomes part of a story, the nature of the product itself changes. This type of selling seems to be very out-of-fashion now, in our era of fast fashion, overnight delivery, and automatic subscription refills.
”I can’t stop thinking about this.” Actually, more specifically, I keep repeatedly thinking of, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in which the main character (the author, I think) states that he theorizes that quality is an essential property in everything, and I agree with that. For intentional or accidental reasons, humans seem to be acting inadequate and/or wounded, such that initiative should and must be taken by others. From my perspective, this is corrosive for adults, children, and future generations.
So what is the new hope?!
You know when like…. Ok, here’s an example: you wake up and it’s a little cloudy. As the day goes on, the sky fills with clouds, which themselves get progressively darker. Then – bam! – the rain begins to fall. For hours, as day turns tonight, the rain continues to fall. However, right around the time it’s dark, the rain stops. Within a couple hours, you start to see a few stars. The sun rises in the morning, and it’s a clear day.
I think what we have all been witnessing amid the relentless sales (which is honestly a charitable descriptor) is similar to this. It’s not like a hurricane that can do real damage to structures. Rather, it’s a low-grade annoyance that you encounter much more often than you’d like — like stubbing a toe.
The essential realization here is that we must resurrect quality, not only to sales and copywriting, but to all aspects of life and society. The very notion that we can simply automate the essence of quality — or get “AI to do it” is extremely misguided to the point that it misses the point entirely. Quality is not an item on a list — it’s a property of every list element.