Read It Aloud at Home

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the test at the heart of it takes four seconds and is failed by a great many people who consider themselves honest.

Two sellers write to win the same,
Both sharp, both good, both know the game.
One writes a line he'd not read out
At his own table, past a doubt.
Both fill their books by New Year's Day.
Which one still trades? And why, I say?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Both learned their marketing properly, and both got good at it, which is where this story begins rather than ends.

The first discovered what everybody discovers eventually, which is that certain things work whether or not they are true. A deadline invented for the purpose. Three places left when there were nine. A photograph of somebody else's job. A line about what happens to businesses that leave this too long, written to make a reader's stomach turn over. None of it was quite a lie, in the sense that he could have defended each piece if pressed, and every one of them lifted his figures.

He did not think of himself as a dishonest man, and he was not one in any other part of his life. He thought of it as marketing, which is a word people use to mean a place where the ordinary rules are relaxed a little.

What happened was not dramatic and took about three years.

The customers he won that way arrived braced. They had been rushed, so they were watchful; they had been slightly frightened, so they were resentful before anything had gone wrong. They queried everything, they were the hardest work he had, and they left the moment somebody else rushed them harder.

Meanwhile the deadline that was not real got noticed, as such things do, by a customer who came back three weeks after the last day and found the offer still standing. She did not complain. She simply revised, quietly, her view of everything else he had told her, and she told two other people about it in the ordinary course of conversation.

And there was a private cost he mentioned to nobody. He had stopped showing his own work to his wife. Not by decision, and he could not have said when it started.

The second firm applied a test that took four seconds per sentence, and it was this: would I be content for my daughter to read this, and for the customer to see the truth behind it afterwards.

She lost things by it. Some perfectly effective lines went in the bin, and there were quarters where a manufactured urgency would have filled a gap that stayed empty.

What she got in exchange took longer and was worth more. Her deadlines were real, so people believed them and moved. Her scarcity was actual, so when she said four dates left in April there were four dates left in April, and the customers who had once found that out were the ones who acted fastest thereafter. Her proof was her own work, so nobody ever discovered a photograph belonging to somebody else. And her customers arrived unbraced, which made them cheaper to serve, more pleasant to deal with, and far more likely to send a neighbour.

Ten years on, one of them had a name that did the selling for him and the other was still buying every customer afresh, at rising cost, from an increasingly wary town.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Never write anything you would not be content for your own family to read, and for your customer to see behind afterwards. Both halves of that are needed. The first stops the line you are secretly ashamed of. The second stops the line you could defend in a court and would rather nobody examined, which is where most of the damage in this trade actually lives.

And the argument against dishonest marketing is not only that it is wrong, though it is. It is that it works in a way that costs you more than it pays. Pressure produces a customer who is already suspicious, and a suspicious customer is the most expensive kind: more questions, more reassurance, more disputes, quicker to leave, slower to recommend. You are not choosing between money and virtue. You are choosing between a customer who arrives trusting and one who arrives braced, and the second is worth less from the first day.

Then the part that compounds, which is why this belongs in a letter about marketing rather than a sermon. Every claim you make trades on the credit of every claim you have made before. The invented deadline does not merely fail when it is found out; it retrospectively weakens the guarantee, the testimonial and the price you said was fair, since the customer now has evidence about what your statements are worth. That is the glazier's lesson from the other side: a claim that costs you something to make is believed, and a claim that costs you nothing eventually poisons the ones that did.

None of which forbids urgency, scarcity or fear. Real deadlines exist. Places do run out. Some situations genuinely do get worse and more expensive if left. Say all of it plainly and you will find it works better than the invented version, because it can survive being checked, and the customer who checks becomes your best advocate for the reason that they checked.

Three questions, and do the first honestly rather than generously:

1. Is there anything in your marketing you would not read aloud to the customer's face? Go through what you send out and mark every line that would need explaining if they were sitting opposite you. That mark is the whole of the audit and you already know where most of them are.
2. Are your deadlines and your numbers true? If you say four places, are there four. If the offer ends Friday, does it. One person finding out otherwise costs you more than the offer earned, and somebody always finds out.
3. How do your customers arrive? Watchful and querying, or open and ready. That is your report card, and it is written by the way you won them, not by anything that happened afterwards.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which one still trades?

The one whose customers still believe her, which is the only asset in this business that cannot be bought back once spent. Both filled their books that first year, and the man who invented his deadline had the better quarter and thought himself the sharper trader. What he had actually done was borrow against his own name at a rate he never saw written down anywhere, and the repayments came out of every quarter afterwards, in wariness, in questions, in a town that had quietly adjusted its opinion of him.

The verse:

The line that works and shames you twice
Will pay this year and charge you thrice.
Write nowt you'd hide from those at home,
And let the plain truth do its own.

Until next time. Go and read your own material aloud, as though the customer were sitting opposite, and cut anything you find yourself hurrying past.

P.S. The tell is physical and worth learning to notice. It is the small hurry you feel when a particular line goes past, the wish not to dwell on it, the faint relief when the page is sent. That flinch is better than any policy, and it has never once been wrong.

Also in the archive: The One-Star Reply, Booked Until March and The Hay in the Field.