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Friday 4: All marketers are liars

In 2005, Seth Godin published a book called All Marketers Are Liars.

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Then he spent the rest of his career walking back the title.

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Later printings show the words "Are Liars" crossed out right on the cover, with "Tell Stories" scrawled over them. In the introduction, Godin admits he wasn't being truthful when he named the book. Marketers aren't liars, he wrote. They're storytellers. Only the losers are liars.

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I keep thinking about that crossed-out cover, because I meet entrepreneurs living under the fear of the original title all the time. They are good people with real offers who are afraid to be good marketers because they're afraid that's the same thing as being a liar.

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So they play it safe. They list the features. They soften the promise. They describe their work like a court transcript and wonder why nobody's moved.

Hiding from the story doesn't make you honest. It just makes you quiet.

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This week: where the actual line between marketing and lying sits. Because the line you're drawing now is costing you, and it might be costing your customers too.

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1. The $90 wine really does taste better.

If you're afraid of being a liar, your instinct might be to strip the story out of your marketing. Just the facts. The features. The deliverables. The price. That feels like the honest version.

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But there is no story-free version of your product.

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In 2008, researchers at Stanford and Caltech put people in an fMRI scanner and fed them wine through a tube. The same wine, served twice. Once labeled $90 a bottle. Once labeled $10.

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People said the $90 wine tasted better. No surprise. But the scanner caught something deeper. The brain's pleasure center actually lit up more when they believed they were drinking the expensive bottle.

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They weren't being polite. They weren't fooled into saying the wrong thing. Their experience of the wine genuinely improved because of the story attached to it.

Now ask the question the fearful marketer never asks: which tasting was the true one?

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The $10 version wasn't more honest. It was just a different story. And it delivered a worse glass of wine.

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That's what the plain facts actually do. They don't remove the story. They swap your story for a weaker one, and your customer has a worse experience of the exact same product.

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Wine isn't the only place this happens. If you pay $100 for a haircut, you might leave with the same hair as the person with the $30 cut four blocks away. But you feel better. So you walk differently down the street. The story delivered value the scissors alone never could.

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And notice: you can't announce this placebo to your clients. It will immediately lose its effect. The sommelier can't say "believing this bottle is expensive will make you enjoy it more." Said out loud, it collapses. The story only creates value when it's told with conviction.

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Telling the story well isn't lying. It's part of what your customer is paying for.

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2. Regret is the line. Not the story.

So if there's no story-free version of your product, and the plain facts are just a weaker story, the fear needs a better question. Not "am I telling a story?" You are. Anyone selling anything is. The real question is: which stories make you a liar?

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Godin draws the line clearly. A story can make the experience genuinely better for the buyer. The $90 price tag that makes the wine taste richer. The packaging that makes a product feel like a gift. A lie serves only the marketer. The buyer gets nothing from believing it except a lighter wallet.

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Manipulation is getting someone to buy something they’ll regret later. Marketing is getting someone to buy something they'll be glad they bought.

That's the whole test. Regret.

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Not whether you used persuasion or emotion. Not whether you charged a premium. Not whether you told your story with conviction. The test is what your customer feels six months later. If they look back and think, "I'm so glad I did that," you told the truth in a way that matters. If they feel played, no amount of technically accurate writing saves you.

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This is why the sommelier's little show isn't a con. The ceremony is part of what the diner paid for. They leave the table glad. Test passed.

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If you've been afraid of being a liar, this should feel like a door opening. You don't have to mute your story to stay honest. You have to make sure the person on the other side of it ends up glad. Draw that line once, and you can tell your story without apology.

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3. Your timid story is hurting your customer.

Here's where this stops being philosophical.

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The wine study has a sequel. Some of the same researchers ran a second experiment, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. They gave people a placebo pill described as a new painkiller, then administered mild electric shocks. Half were told the pill cost $2.50. Half were told it had been discounted to 10 cents.

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Same sugar pill. The full-price version relieved significantly more pain.

Read that again. The story didn't just change how people described the experience. It changed the outcome. The discounted pill worked worse because the story around it was weaker.

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Now connect that to the fear. You've been hedging because you thought a modest story was the ethical choice. But your customer's results are partly built on the story you hand them.

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Picture a personal trainer. She tells her client a story about the athlete he's becoming. He believes it. The belief gets him to the gym on the days he'd normally skip. The showing up creates real results, the results deepen the belief, and a year later he's the guy his friends ask for fitness advice. The story came true because she told it well and then delivered on her end.

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Flip it, and you get what I see with coaches and consultants who price low to stay "accessible." Their intentions are generous. But they're handing their clients the 10-cent pill. The client shows up with less commitment, does less of the work, gets less of the result. Not because the coaching changed. Because the story did.

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The fear has it exactly backwards. Telling your story with conviction isn't the risk to your customer. Withholding it is.

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4. Put it to work

Two assignments this week. Do them in order.

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First, the regret test. Ask yourself honestly: has anyone ever bought from me and regretted it? Not complained. Regretted.

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If the answer is yes, you don't have a marketing problem. You have an offer problem, and no story survives a product that won't hold up its end. Fix that before you write another word of copy.

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If the answer is no, then here's the second assignment. Write down the story your best customer tells themselves after they buy. Not your pitch. Their after-story. "I finally have a system." "I can actually do this." "I'm the kind of person who invests in my business now." Use their actual words if you have them from an email or a call.

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Then open your homepage and check: does it tell that story with full conviction? Or is it hedging, qualifying, and quietly discounting itself?

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The story is part of the product. Tell it like it's true. Then do the work that makes it come true.

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That's the whole distinction. Godin crossed out his own title because it was the wrong kind of lie. Marketers aren't liars.

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The good ones tell a story that comes true.

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Go move someone.

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- Darrell from Copyblogger

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P.S. There are 3 ways Copyblogger can help you build your content business:
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