Imagine this: You’re casually scrolling through your Facebook feed, checking what you’re friends are up to.
Among the pictures of familiar faces, something catches your eye. It’s clearly an ad, but you’re still intrigued. There’s a free webinar promising to deliver the solution to one of your nagging problems.
You click through to the web page and are met with a big bright smile of a guy you’ve never heard of. But the testimonials below tout him as “THE guru” in his field. Seems legit.
Signing up for the webinar is a no brainer. Oh wow, it’s starting in 15 minutes. Perfect timing!
You hop on, and there are already 287 other attendees. The host asks the obligatory “where’s everyone from” question. People are going wild in the chat: Ohio, Washington D.C., India, LA, Australia, France, South Africa. It’s an international crowd.
You’re liking the content, and it’s encouraging that so many people are actively participating in the chat. The host even does a poll to gauge everybody’s opinion on the subject matter.
As you expected, the webinar eventually turns into a sales pitch for an online course. But at that point, you’re actually considering joining. The chat is exploding with comments, saying they’re enrolling right now. You’re getting a good feeling about this.
Oh, and you should act fast. There’s a discount for everyone who signs up within the next hour. So lucky that you were in the right spot at the right time. Let’s do this.
But, wait a sec! Not so fast.
What if I told you that this webinar wasn’t live, but pre-recorded.
The people in the chat: all fake.
The comments: all prewritten.
The poll results: made up.
How would you feel about that? Would you still sign up for this online course? I guess not.
The rise of deceptive marketing
Scenarios like the one above are all too common nowadays. The software to put pre-recorded webinars on autopilot, together with fake attendees and comments, is available to anyone.
It’s all part of the growth hacking and FOMO marketing movement that promises fast results (aka $$$) for businesses by exploiting our innate fears and behavioral tendencies.
Robert Cialdini famously wrote about the six principles of persuasion. And cunning marketers developed a range of tools and tricks to hit these weak spots. For example:
Recent purchases pop-ups: These little messages typically show up on the bottom left corner of your screen, telling you that Amanda from Salt Lake City just signed up for the SaaS you’re considering. This is tapping into our desire for consensus. When in doubt, we look to the actions and behaviors of others to determine our own.
Countdown timers: You’ve probably seen them in sales email sequences that wield subject lines such as “You don’t want to miss this!” But when you still don’t hit the buy button after the “Last chance” email, you suddenly receive yet another message, subject line “Oh no, I goofed!” Lucky you, the creator has “made a mistake” and misconfigured the cart closing time, so you have another day to buy. It was all just a false sense of urgency.
Testimonials: This type of social proof used to be a reliable way to tell if someone was for real. But as businesses started to hire freelancers on Upwork to write testimonials for them, it’s becoming more difficult to trust what’s written. Not to mention that most testimonials make success seem just a little too easy. They conveniently forget to mention the backstory and what was really involved in achieving the results.
So, why do creators and entrepreneurs resort to these tactics to sell? Most are driven by the ambition to scale their business as fast as possible. And everyone in their mastermind group is doing it, so why shouldn’t they?
How you can spot deceptive marketing and avoid it
As Daniel Kahneman explains in his bestseller, “Thinking, fast and slow,” we all mostly operate on autopilot. Driven by our fast thinking, we respond to cues in our environment to make quick decisions. But often, these aren’t in our best interest.
The “secret” is to activate our slow, deliberate thinking, even if it takes more effort in the moment. So before punching in your credit card information, pause and notice what you’re feeling. What is really driving this decision? Are you being pushed to act quickly? Take the time to think through what you’re doing.
Besides, other red flags can alert you when something is off:
Illusory pricing: An online course offering material “worth $15,000 in value,” which sells for $499 with a fast-action price of $199, isn’t likely to deliver on its promise.
Silver bullet solutions: I’m talking about the “secret hacks” that will make all of your problems disappear “even if you’re a complete beginner.” If this was true, everyone would be doing it already.
Too-good-to-be-true results: Six-pack abs in 2 weeks with only 10 minutes of exercise per day. $1,000 of extra revenue per month with only 1 hour of work per week. Not going to happen, and you know it.
Teaching deceptive marketers a lesson
Deceptive marketing tactics only work as long as they’re profitable. So, the best way to disincentivize marketers from using them is not to buy when you’re coming across a scammy offer.
Don’t be afraid to utilize the refund policies when you think that what you’ve received doesn’t fulfill what was promised.
Only by starving them of the money, they hope to make, marketers will eventually learn their lesson.
