Recently, I had a chat with a marketing friend about goo-roos.<\/p>\n
And he was telling me about this marketer he knows who’s just really, really (REALLY) arrogant. <\/p>\n
On an “arrogance scale” of 1-10, he’s a solid 17.<\/p>\n
Now, neither of us was judging this guy.<\/p>\n
Frankly, the dude seems to WANT to be seen as arrogant. Probably as part of his positioning or brand or whatever. Which is perfectly fine — I mean, the way I see it, if someone wants to live in sweet, blissful arrogance who am I to stand in their way?<\/p>\n
But here’s the problem:<\/p>\n
There are thousands of brand new marketers popping up on the scene every day. <\/p>\n
And many times all they are seeing is one arrogant goo-roo after another exaggerating<\/em>, hyping<\/em> and even lying<\/em> through their teeth.<\/p>\n Like, for example, about inflated sales letter response rates.<\/p>\n Or how many people are on their list.<\/p>\n Or how much moola they made (funny how they usually only mention gross<\/em> sales, and not net<\/em> profit…)<\/p>\n And so on, and so forth.<\/p>\n My point?<\/p>\n Lots (too many) of people are thinking they need to do the same thing — to brag and be “cool” like the goo-roos so they can impress their customers with their wonderfulness. <\/p>\n But you know what?<\/p>\n The real experts don’t just talk about their successes.<\/p>\n They brag about heir FAILURES, too.<\/strong><\/p>\n In fact, sometimes they brag MORE about their failures<\/em> than their successes. Because usually the bigger the failure, the bigger the discovery they made that lead to their big success in the first place.<\/p>\n So anyhoo, just something to think about.<\/p>\n Next time you see some arrogant goo-roo strutting around like a miserly peacock counting its money, you may want to take what they say with a grain of salt.<\/p>\n This may not be true all<\/em> the time.<\/p>\n But if they’re strutting, they could very well be struggling, too.<\/p>\n Ben Settle<\/p>\n P.S.<\/strong> You can learn from all kinds of non-arrogant, “for real” marketing geniuses in the appendixes inside “The Copywriting Grab Bag”:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n