I Could Never Sell

If I scream at you over the phone, you don’t hear me better. If I shine a bright light in your eyes, you don’t see better. This could be Seth Godin explaining Permission Marketing, and why you can’t just outshout all the messages people get in this cell phone and Internet era. But this is [...]

Men selling to women, women selling to men, here’s a question like the ones Belsky and Gilovich explore (Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics): What Percent of Our Ancestors Were Women? “It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%” says Roy Baumeister, addressing the American [...]

Now it gets good. Let’s flip buy to sell here: When you buy, you buy a story to tell about yourself. Whether vacuum cleaner, fish rub, cell phone, or president. Whatever. You buy the story, not the whatever. If you tell the story to no one else, you tell it to yourself. The story is [...]

A friend writes: Yes, the Seth Godin stuff explains a lot to me. I started to say I could only talk about Sales on the receiving end, as a shopper, since I don’t do Sales. But I’m my own one-woman company, except for occasional partners on a project and contractors. So if I’m not doing [...]

When you buy, you buy a story to tell about yourself. Whether vacuum cleaner, fish rub, cell phone, or president. Whatever. You buy the story, not the whatever. If you tell the story to no one else, you tell it to yourself. The story is about you, not the whatever. Now maybe you prefer the [...]

When you buy, you buy a story to tell about yourself. Whether vacuum cleaner, fish rub, cell phone, or president. Whatever. You buy the story, not the whatever. If you tell the story to no one else, you tell it to yourself. The story is about you, not the whatever. My words, after reading Seth [...]

A novelist could tell us why people hold losing stocks and sell winners. No, not regret or fear of regret. If you’re the regretting type (as the odds would indicate), you feel regret either way, and in your own way. You feel regret for you and your story, perhaps, not just for your money. You [...]

The investors depicted in these stories are fabricated from my collective experiences with numerous individuals and through anecdotes I have heard from others. Any resemblance to real persons is completely co-incidental. This is from the Preface to The Power of Mind Over Money: Inside the Investor’s Brain by Dr Richard Peterson, which begins: This book [...]

Why can’t Econ predict people? You know the great stories where Econ gets people wrong. Where people know the all right numbers but still choose wrong. The best-studied example: in buying and selling their stocks, people leave their winners and cling to their losers. The best new stories are collected by Gary Belsky and Thomas [...]

Why is selling such a dirty word? Writes Kathy Sierra at Passionate: Creating Passionate Users: I am a marketer. And so are you. If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other [...]

About those big-name authors I use as categories here… The usual line goes like this: when I’m wrong, blame me, not them when I’m right, thank them, not me That’s still not good enough, is it? Sometimes you can sniff out the character of a book and author just from the dedication. For example, if [...]

When you buy you are telling your story. Above all, telling the story of you. Whether you buy toiletpaper, a car, a wastebasket, a house, a pill for your headache, a watch, a cell phone, a coffee, or a candidate for president, you buy for what your purchase says of you. You are what you [...]