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We often cast our brands as the hero – but what if we’ve been playing the villain all along? In this refreshingly contrarian conversation, Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences makes the case for embracing your inner antagonist to clarify your message, repel poor-fit customers, and change the world (just a little).
Why Your Brand Should Stop Being the Hero (And Start Being the Villain)
You’re scrolling through LinkedIn, and every post sounds exactly the same. “We help you succeed!” “We’re here to solve your problems!” “Let us be your trusted partner!”
Everyone’s fighting to be the hero in their customer’s story. But what if that’s exactly the problem?
Conversion optimization expert Brian Massey has a radical suggestion: Stop trying to be the hero. Embrace your inner villain instead. (Insert maniacal laughter here.)
Before you start plotting world domination, let’s be clear about what kind of villain we’re talking about: we’re not discussing the mustache-twirling, “I’ll destroy the world” variety. We’re talking about the purposeful antagonist—the one who looks at the status quo and says, “This is broken, and I’m going to fix it.”
The Hero’s Journey Has a Villain Problem
Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey has become marketing gospel. The farm boy gets called to adventure, faces trials, finds inner strength, defeats the dragon, and returns home transformed. It’s a powerful framework, but here’s what most marketers miss: the villain is often the real agent of change.
Think about it. In Star Wars, Darth Vader’s actions set everything in motion. In Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham’s oppression calls the hero to adventure. In the MCU and in the original comics, Loki’s actions lead to the formation of the Avengers. The villain doesn’t wait around hoping someone will notice them—they actively work to change the world.
This applies perfectly to business. You didn’t start your company because everything was fine. You saw something wrong with your industry and decided to fix it. That’s not hero behavior—that’s classic villain motivation.
Why Ferris Bueller Is Actually the Villain
Consider one of cinema’s most beloved characters: Ferris Bueller. Everyone loves Ferris, right? Save Ferris! But if you analyze the story structure, Ferris exhibits classic villain behavior.
He manipulates his hypochondriac friend Cameron into skipping school. He steals his dad’s prized Ferrari. He tricks school officials and impersonates the “Sausage King of Chicago.” Meanwhile, Cameron goes through the actual hero’s journey—facing trials, experiencing a metaphorical death (literally falling into a pool), and emerging transformed with the courage to confront his father.
The person we love is actually the villain driving the story forward. And that’s exactly what successful brands do.
The Dark Side of Marketing (That Actually Works)
Let’s talk about some “villainous” marketing practices you probably use without realizing it:
Advertising manipulation: You show the most appetizing photos of your product. You run ads repeatedly because you know repeated exposure makes people think something is better. You’re literally using psychological tricks to influence behavior.
Pricing games: You quote a base price knowing there will be taxes, shipping, and fees added later. You do this because everyone else does it, and showing the full price upfront would hurt conversions.
Conversion optimization: You use urgency tactics (“Only 3 left!”), social proof (“Trusted by 10,000+ customers”), and carefully crafted copy designed to move people toward a purchase.
Here’s the key question: Does this make you evil? Not if you’re truly trying to change the world for the better.
The Line Between Strategic and Manipulative
There’s a crucial difference between being a strategic villain and being outright manipulative. The distinction comes down to clarity and intent.
Evil villains use tricks because they can’t sell their product honestly. They create fake scarcity, hide important information, and use cognitive dissonance tactics (like exit-intent popups that say “No, I don’t want to save money”).
Strategic villains are crystal clear about who they serve and what they stand for. They don’t need tricks because they’re selling to the right people with honest messaging about real value.
Take Patagonia’s famous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign. They essentially said: “If you’re the type of person who buys fast fashion without thinking about environmental impact, we don’t want your business.” Villainous? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.
The Power of Repelling the Wrong Customers
The best marketing doesn’t just attract ideal customers—it actively repels the wrong customers. This may seem counterintuitive, especially for small businesses worried about limiting their market. But consider the alternative: trying to serve everyone means you’ll excel at serving no one.
An HVAC contractor who positions themselves as the premium, uniformed, professional option will cost more than competitors. They’ll lose price-sensitive customers. But they’ll dominate the market of homeowners who value safety and professionalism when strangers enter their homes.
A B2B software company that only works with companies of 75+ employees will turn away smaller prospects. But they’ll avoid the headache of serving customers who can’t afford their true value or properly implement their solution.
Write Your Villain Monologue
Here’s a practical (if slightly insane) exercise: Write your brand’s villain monologue. Not the sanitized marketing version where you cherry-pick positives, but the full truth.
Start with: “You fools! You’re doing this all wrong. Here’s what needs to change…”
Include everything: your advantages, your disadvantages, what you’re expensive, what you’re not good at, and what frustrates you about your industry. When Buckley’s Cough Syrup wrote “It tastes awful, and it works,” they turned their biggest disadvantage into their strongest differentiator.
This exercise forces you to confront the reality that some people will never be your customers—and that’s perfectly fine. In fact, it’s necessary.
The Storytelling Advantage
Humans are wired for stories, not feature lists. Yet B2B marketing especially tends toward rational presentations: “Here are our capabilities, here are our benefits, now make a logical decision.”
But villains understand narrative power. They create compelling stories about what’s wrong with the world and how they’re going to fix it. They wear lab coats to conferences (like Brian Massey does) because they understand the psychological impact of symbols and stories.
The lab coat isn’t just about looking authoritative—though studies show people in lab coats score 17% higher on cognitive tests. It’s about creating a memorable character that audiences can attach impressions to.
Embracing the Dark Side…Ethically
If you truly believe your product or service makes people’s lives better, then using psychological principles to guide them toward a purchase isn’t evil—it’s helpful. You’re manipulating them toward a positive outcome.
The key is being genuine about your mission to change the world. Are you really trying to solve a problem, or are you just trying to make money? Villains who are only motivated by self-interest eventually reveal themselves as frauds.
But villains who genuinely want to change the world? They become legends. They build movements. They create customers who become evangelists because they share the villain’s vision for a better future.
Your Villain Origin Story
Every great villain has an origin story—the moment they decided the world needed to change. What’s yours? What made you start your business? What industry practice infuriates you? What status quo are you trying to overthrow?
That frustration, that righteous anger, that certainty that you have a better way—that’s your villain energy. Don’t hide from it. Channel it into marketing that cuts through the noise and attracts people who share your vision.
The world doesn’t need another brand playing it safe, trying to appeal to everyone, and being the generic hero. The world needs more brands with the courage to be the villain—to call out what’s wrong, to demand better, and to lead the charge toward change.
After all, if you’re not making some people uncomfortable, you’re probably not changing anything at all.
So go ahead. Embrace your inner villain. Write that monologue. Draw those lines in the sand. Repel the wrong customers so you can serve the right ones better than anyone else.
The world is waiting for you to stop being the hero and start being the agent of change it actually needs.
Why Playing the Villain in Marketing Actually Works Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the founder of Conversion Sciences LLC, and the author of the book, Your Custom Creation Equation. Since 2007, he has worked with hundreds of companies to improve their online business.
He’s a sought-after speaker presenting at IBM, Inbound Leads Con, Content Marketing World, Affiliate Summit, and others. He has written for online publications including Qlik Z, Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. He’s also the host of Intended Consequences podcast.
Today we’re going to be talking about being the villain in your customer’s journey with Brian Massey. Brian, welcome to the podcast.
Brian: I’m so glad that I found a place to talk about this a little bit.
Rich: This is going to be exciting. But before we get into the whole hero verse villain, good versus evil, bit of the show, what led you to conversion optimization and the behavior side of marketing?
Brian: Oh, I was trained as a computer scientist, but I had enough social skills and didn’t see myself sitting in a cubicle day-to-day coding, that when I got out of college, I went into sales for Texas Instruments, selling semiconductors.
And I rose to my highest level of incompetence in that role and moved back to Austin. I got back involved in a little software company here and had enough opinions that they decided I should be doing their marketing.
And then in the nineties, I ran my own business. The .com bubble burst and took out some of our clients, and took us out as well. But then I spent the early decade of the century building websites and generating leads primarily for business technology companies. And when I realized that I’m just not a very good employee, I have some authority issues, I didn’t really have any other choice. So programming, sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, I really had to start my own thing.
And I had attended a seminar, but Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg, I don’t know if you know them, but at this amazing little business school here called, The Wizard Academy. And they gave the words to what I was going to be able to do to combine all of those things. That was in 2006.
And in 2006 there really wasn’t a conversion rate optimization industry. There was no CRO. So I started tilting at windmills and howling at the wind about this new way of doing things. And a short four years later, people started to get it. And conversion, I started Conversion Sciences in 2007, blogged and taught and did consulting. But it was in 2010, 2011 that we really started doing things like A/B testing and deep customer research and things like that.
Rich: Awesome. And you and I met recently in person at Andy Crestodina’s conference, Content Jam. And I saw you present, and I was really motivated. I came up to you, I said I’d love to get you on this podcast, and you I told you it was Agents of Change. And you said, “Oh, do you only have contrarians on your podcast?” or something to that effect. I’m like, no, but why not? At least I should be asking people contrarian questions.
And then when we started talking some more, we started talking about the whole idea of the hero’s journey versus the villain’s journey and all that sort of stuff, which is how we arrived at today’s conversation. Normally we talk about being the hero in our customer stories. But today we’re going to be talking about how brands accidentally or intentionally become the villain. And so how do brands become the villain in the customer journey?
Brian: It might be helpful for those that aren’t familiar with the Hero’s Journey defined by Joseph Campbell. And what he did was he went out and studied myth and stories from different cultures and different times and different places in time. And he found that in these stories there were these common themes.
And he was like, there’s always this situation where the farm boy is called to adventure by something terrible or magnificent that happens in his world, and he resists and he is like oh, I’m just going to, then he crosses over and begins getting trials and tests and usually has a terrible failure. But that’s when he awakens some strength inside of him and then he charges forward, defeats the dragon, and then comes back home the victor. But also wiser and a better person so that he can contribute to his world.
And so these themes were seen over and over again. And for me, it was interesting and helpful because I was applying it to my life. When my company in the nineties blew up, I was like, oh, here’s the call to adventure. Something terrible is happening and now I’m going to charge forward. And tests and trials of trying to be an employee when I wanted to build things. And they were just like, oh, the marketing’s working really well, just put quarters in it.
And then the magical help is another part of the Heroes’ Journey, and the Eisenberg brothers provided that. So I was applying this to my life. But then I begin to wonder, there are times where I don’t feel very heroic. It’s not that I’m evil per se, but self-serving. And I began to wonder, there’s a villain in so many hero stories that actually creates all of the events. They’re the ones that, the Sheriff of Nottingham is oppressing the peasants, and that calls Robin Hood to adventure. And then the Sheriff of Nottingham is providing all of the tests and trials and stealing the girl and all of the things.
And it was just like, oh, there’s this other element there. And I began to really analyze it. And so the hero needs an internal change, they need to find this new strength. In the Hero’s Journal there’s literally a death, both either metaphorical or literal, and then a rebirth as their better self. So the hero wants this internal change. The villain is someone who says, “Something needs to change in this world, and I’m the one to do it.” So they’re more, they have a little bit more agency.
And I began to realize, if you apply this to a nonprofit that’s drilling water wells in Africa, they’ve decided that they’re going to go and make this change in the world, and they’re having to come up against NGOs and local governments and who are resisting because it’s new and it’s changed. And they’re just like, no, we’re trying to make things better. And I thought, that’s really the villain’s role.
I began to realize there’s this role where you’re not waiting around as a farm boy for the Obi-wan Kenobi to come along and bring the Storm Troopers and change your life and take you on this adventure. The villain is an agent of change. The cause of the change will often be the one that is bringing heroes to light.
So if you expand that even more, we think about our brands, we want to help our customer. We have this amazing product that has a better price, and we think everyone should be using this, or at least the people that we’re targeting. That’s more of a villainous direction. We want to see something change in the world. We want our solution to be out there. And if you think about what’s motivating these businesses, yes, we want to provide a great product and everybody be happy. But profit margins, if we’re not making a profit on this, we’re going to stop doing that thing. So it’s villainous.
So I took this all the way down the rabbit hole, and I began looking for the things that brands do that map onto this hero/villain dance. And that’s where this really came out.
Rich: I want to get to that. But just as a side note, thinking about the role of the villain and the best villains – and they do this all the time in the MCU – totally think they’re in the right. Like their worldview is, I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do.
Now, sometimes they might be a little skewed. Loki is the cause of the Avengers coming together, and he basically wanted to rule the world. But the bottom line is, very often these villains do not see themselves as villains. They see themselves as, like you said, agents of change.
And before we get into kind of the nuts and bolts, I did go through one of your slide decks. And in there you’ve got one of everybody’s favorite movies, Ferris Bueller, a few slides dedicated to that. And you say Ferris is the villain of that story and Cameron is the hero. So can you just give us a couple minutes on why Ferris plays the role of the villain, when everybody loves Ferris?
Brian: Save Ferris. Yes. If you step back and look at the symbols and see how they map. And by the way, the director John Hughes actually acknowledged that Cameron is the hero. So if you step back and look at it, everybody that loves Ferris is freewheeling, willing to just have fun. They were raising money for Ferris at school because he was home sick and “Save Ferris” and all that stuff.
But if you look at his behavior, it’s very sociopathic. He’s worried about his time, so he cajoles his hypochondriac friend, Cameron, into going on this adventure with him. And they steal his dad’s prized Ferrari and drive it around Chicago. They’re calling in and tricking the school into thinking that it’s their parents calling.
Rich: They’re stealing the identity of Abe Froman, sausage king of Chicago.
Brian: Exactly. And so while Ferris is driving the story forward in this very unsettling, if you step back and look at it, unsettling way, poor Cameron is having all these tests and trials. And the symbolism is even there.
So I talked about, there’s a death to your old self and a rebirth. There’s literally a scene where Cameron, after realizing he is going to get caught by his dad because there’s too many miles on the Ferrari and he’s just broken so many of the rules that he had to keep his little life together, falls into a pool and is drowning. And they pull him out and they think he’s dead. And then he reemerges. And after that you get the catharsis in the scene where Cameron says, you know what, I’m going to have to have a conversation with my dad rather than being afraid of him for my whole life.
So it’s a beautiful vision, because the person we love is actually the villain. It follows all of the steps of the hero’s journey on Cameron’s part. And at the end, the villain has the moment. Ferris realizes, oh shoot, there are consequences to my actions. Because they end up wrecking the Ferrari, and Cameron is going to just have to have a really hard conversation with his demons.
Rich: Yeah, it’s interesting because I just remembered something I’d forgotten. My grandmother saw that movie when it came out of the theaters like I did, and she actually was rooting against Ferris. She thought that he should have gotten busted, and I always thought that was crazy. But now I realize she recognized him as the villain.
Alright, let’s take all these ideas and apply them to our business, to our marketing. What are some common villainous practices in marketing that businesses might not realize they’re doing?
Brian: We were very focused on websites, so I’m going to use that as my touchstone. It really happens in all areas. And it’s things like advertising. I’m going to make you want my thing by showing you sexy pictures or glossed over pictures. The hamburgers always look so delicious in the ads to get your interest and get your attention. And I’m going to do something even more villainous. I’m going to run those ads over and over again to increase the frequency. Because I know that your brain is wired that something is better if I’ve seen it multiple times. So they’re going to play those games.
Then let’s say we’re going to come to a website and I’m going to tell you all the wonderful things about the product. I’m going to leave out the negative things. We’ll take care of you, just buy the thing and I think you’ll be happy.
And so we come through, we present pricing and all of this stuff, and we’re going to check out, and there are new surprises. There are taxes and there is shipping. So the price we were quoting them is not necessarily the best one. But we’re like, we can’t put the right price on there because our competitors are putting their basic price on there as well, so we’ll lose business.
So we talk the game of wanting to help or to make our customers the heroes, but we’re doing some very villainous things to push them along in their path. We’re asking them to trust us and make some discoveries that are going to be, in some cases, shocking to them. We’re doing upsells after that. We’re asking them to subscribe so they can save 15% or get free shipping. It is a little bit self-serving, actually completely self-serving.
Rich: I’m sure there are people listening though, that are like, yeah, I do all of those things, but I’m not evil. I’m not the villain. Where does the line get drawn between what is strategic marketing and what is manipulative tactics?
Brian: Yeah, I think you have to ask yourself that question. So again, there are villains that are just evil, self-centered, and those are not the villains we’re talking about. We’re talking about the villain that says, “Something’s wrong in the world, and I’m the one that’s going to change it. The world needs my product.” It is less of a world without my product, so I’m going to be putting this in people’s hands.
And it very well may be true. Absolutely. But we are going to use a certain amount of trickery to get our heroes on their path, making decisions and discovering themselves as they’re deciding if they should buy our thing or not.
Rich: So what are some specific ways that a brand might do… like you mentioned a few things. Is there a way that we know we’re on the side… It seems to me that there’s good, there’s evil, and then there’s maybe the anti-hero. Or they’re the hero of the villain and the anti-hero, and I think people would hate to see themselves as the villain. They might be willing to pose themselves as the anti-hero, though. Obviously a sliding scale outside of your own internal mechanism. How do you know if you’re on the right or the wrong side of this? Or is there no way to really be sure?
Brian: No, I think there is a way to be sure. And so if you’re very clear about who you are marketing to, which means you have to be very clear about who you’re not marketing to, then you don’t need to do things like creating cognitive dissonance.
You ever have a pop-up that says, “Hey, get 10% off, give us your email address”, and to close it, there’s a line that says, “No, I don’t want delicious ice cream” or, “I don’t like to save money”. If you’re selling your product to the right people and you’re doing a good job of expressing your value, you don’t have to do things like that. But you will find out that you can get an incrementally higher completion rate on that form because no one wants to click on something that is counter to what they believe.
I do want to save money, why am I not giving them my email address? Brands that are very clear about who their customers are, and I think this is the hardest thing when we see brand as how we best present our company and our products. But it is more of a razor, a slicing of things like, okay, who are we going to walk away from? Because when you try to sell it to everyone, you end up having to play these sorts of tricks. So I think that’s the most important thing.
And the best way to really understand what your brand position is, is write your own villain monologue. I think of customers like Patagonia. So Patagonia was very clear that if you have no qualms about buying fast fashion that is wasteful and filling our landfills and using too many resources, you don’t buy our jacket. I think was their slogan. They were very clear about who they were and who they wanted to do business with.
Hermés is a luxury brand, and they create scarcity. They don’t make as many of the things so they can charge exorbitant prices. But they know they’re not just selling the bag; they’re selling the story and certain assumptions that go with those brands. So they’re very clear about who they’re selling to. And I think those are the evil, not the evil geniuses, the genius villains who have a plan and know how they’re going to change the world.
Rich: Okay, so it’s fine if we want to change the world. But what we should be doing is staying away from some of the underhanded, manipulative challenges.
And of course it does seem like there’s a sliding scale. I remember when I used to do presentations based around the seven weapons of influence, you know, the book Persuasion. I would often have this kind of half joke. You can obviously see that these techniques could be used for good or evil, but I look around the room, I only see good people, so ‘I’m willing to share it with you’ kind of approach.
Obviously, these techniques could be used for good and evil. And maybe your brand voice is that you are sarcastic, which is why you have, “No, I don’t want to save 10%.” And if that’s your brand voice, then maybe you can get away with that with a little twinkle in your eye.
Brian: There’s no brand guideline that says, “we’re the sarcastic brand”.
Rich: So if you are finding yourself, like you said, we should be specific to our audience. So what are some of the ways that we can put ourselves out there, either through our marketing and our advertising, branding, whatever, so that we’re not only attracting the right type of clients, but we’re also pushing away people who wouldn’t be a good fit for us and vice versa?
Brian: Yeah, so I think the knowledge of what that is, and this seems obvious, like every brand should know this thing. But you would be surprised that by the time the vision gets boiled down to implementing campaigns and ads and landing pages, we’re writing for everybody. Here we have our value proposition is very focused on this segment. But wait a minute, there’ll be some people that will be turned off by this thing. Or, we left something out that would appeal to a few of these people. And the idea is, if we don’t have to, why wouldn’t we potentially get some of those people?
And that’s when you start to have to use trickery and things like that. As another example, I looked up some other brands in here and there’s one called, Buckley’s Mixture. I’d never heard of this before, but it’s a cough syrup. It’s a Canadian company and it tastes bad. Their motto was, “It tastes awful, and it works”. So those people that just can’t have awful things in their mouth are going to shy away from you. But it becomes a story that those people that do swear by the effectiveness of it, they’re going to tell those stories.
So I think that if you don’t have a story, you can’t tell a story. So you’ve got to be able to tell that story and know that certain people are going to hear that story, and they’re going to go, “That’s not for me”. And so you’ve got to be ready to do that.
We’re talking about myths and fairytales, and they’re all stories. And especially in the B2B world, storytelling seems to be very difficult. I’m just going to tell you the rational features and benefits, and then you are going to make a rational decision. But our brains really are the bailing wire. What keeps them together is stories that unite something with another thing.
A villainous thing I’ve always done is I wear the lab coat when I’m on a podcast, when I’m on stage. And I know that it gives me a certain advantage because a person in a lab coat, you tend to believe them more. You tend to follow their directions. They’ve studied this. It’s potent. There’s also the world of enclothed cognition, which they studied the lab coat and they found out when you put a group of people in a lab coat and give them a cognitive test, they’re going to score about 17% higher than a similar group of people in street clothes.
Rich: Crazy.
Brian: So not only am I influencing folks watching me by wearing the lab coat, I actually think I’m smarter than I really am. Villainous.
But for my brand, it has been a just a fantastic element that my audience can hang impressions on. And I just need to make sure that the impressions they’re hanging on the lab coat are not that I’m a lunatic or that I don’t know my business. So I have to show up and be smart and be helpful. And I think once a brand says this is who we are, they’ve really got to show up and make sure for those people that they are living true to that character. And if you can’t live true to that character, then you’ve got to place some tricks to cover your bases.
Rich: So for businesses that want to market based on their values, like B Corps, how can they effectively communicate this while understanding that it might drive away some potential customers who either don’t know what a B Corp is, or don’t care about you being a B Corp, or just looking for the cheapest prices out there?
Brian: Yeah, so they’re going to walk away from those things. So there are some landmines with the B Corp. Number one, you’re going to tell them the charities that you’re giving to. And people who have a political affiliation that doesn’t support those are going to be like, I’m not doing this.
It is not easy to be a B Corp. So I assume that B Corp are more expensive than regular old corporations that are just doing their thing. And so yes, it’s a very brave thing. And I have a good friend who runs an agency here in Austin, he got his B Corp certification, and he is very clear-eyed about what the business is about. And if people are not in line, we don’t want them as customers. Yeah, it requires those kinds of decisions.
Rich: I know one of the kind of psychological or behavioral tendencies out there is the whole us versus them mentality. And both politicians and businesses have definitely made hay by saying, “You and I, we’re this group. And we’re on the right side, and then everybody else is in the wrong side.” You can use that for anything from Coke and Pepsi to Red versus Blue State. So it can be a very effective and also difficult road to tow, because you may be scaring away people.
And they’re obviously people who are listening who are small business owners or marketers, and they’re trying to figure out what the balance is. Do you have any recommendations on how they can balance that, targeting the right audience without losing too many prospects? That’s the fear that there’s just not enough business out there if we do go in with that kind of anti-hero or villain approach and us versus them mentality.
Brian: That’s probably a bigger problem than what we have time for. But I would say that you need to understand what the trade-offs are. So if with small business, let’s say HVAC contractor, you’re going to be showing up at people’s houses and fixing their A/C. You are going to show up in a painted van. Your employees are going to be wearing uniforms. They’re going to put little booties on their shoes, and this helps make people feel safer.
It’s also more expensive to run a business with all of these recruitments. It’s hard to find people that are professional and can sell. You can’t put someone who’s not good at their job in a uniform and it’s not going to work. You lean into that, and you know you’re going to be losing people who are just looking at the price. So you might be a little higher than the other guys. But for those people who, when a stranger shows up to their door and comes into their house and starts crawling around in the attic, that they’re going to feel safe. That’s the audience you’re going for, and you know that’s the audience that will pay more for what you’re offering.
Most of our websites, we just list that we have pretty good customer service, and our guys are clean, and we really know what we’re doing. We’re doing this for 30 years. And you list them all. But then you don’t look any different from anybody else. The villain says we are going to make people safe when we’re working for them and we’re going to charge some more money for that. That is what they want to see in the world. And you got to lean into it and your marketers are going to be like, “Couldn’t we also appeal to…? And that’s when you have to start, this is the journey to the dark side.
Rich: So do you have any suggestions for language choices or messaging tactics that could help a business filter out poor fit customers? Have you worked with people and worked up some of the messaging that kind of immediately takes those poor fit people and basically self-selects them out of the process?
Brian: So like in a lead generation format, we worked with a company who only wanted to talk to people with 75 or more employees. So on the form we asked for how many employees do you have? And if they answered 75, we took them on a different journey, but we made it clear that’s probably not a good fit for us. So it’d be something as simple as that.
But if you’re talking to your audience very clearly and building value with them, you really don’t have to worry too much about the others dropping off. Because they’re going to see, “Oh, this sounds expensive, this isn’t for me”. Or, “They offer too many features, that’s not for me”. Or, “They require me to get on a phone call with them, and I don’t want to do that. Gimme a form and let me do it myself”.
By being clear about who you are talking to, the rest generally will take care of itself.
Rich: And we’ve definitely seen that as we’ve worked with different clients and different types of businesses. That you set up certain hurdles that some people are just not willing to jump over, or they recognize that this is not for them early on.
Even with us, I have some follow up questions when people reach out to me and I ask them budget questions and I put a number in there, is it greater than this? And when they come back and they say, no, I save both of us a lot of time by saying, “Here’s some free resources. We’re not in a position to help you, but I wish you the best.”
So I think all of us could do a better job, save more time, and be able to spend more time with the customers and clients that we can really make a difference for. Even if we’re playing the villain in that particular role.
Brian: Yeah. And you can play it the other way. So if you’re looking for those cost sensitive folks, we call them ‘transactional buyers’, they want to jump through. In other words, if you give them a way to get a discount code and they’re in your cart deciding whether they’re going to check out, and they know they’ve got this discount code, they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to save so much”. And so psychologically, it is a very powerful way to get them to not abandon your product.
So knowing your customers, even at that level. It might sound a little manipulative, but you know that they get joy from the shopping process and you’re providing a little game for them.
Rich: Absolutely. And ‘manipulation’ is one of those words that definitely has a lot of negative baggage, but you can also manipulate people towards positive behaviors. And if you do believe that you have a product that’s going to make their life better, you can manipulate them to do this so that they can have more money, they can have more time, they can have the life they’ve always dreamed about, or whatever it may be.
And some people may still call that manipulative in a bad way. But we can manipulate people to get them to take actions that are actually good for them and society if we want to.
Brian: Don’t be afraid. If you’re changing the world, do what you got to do.
Rich: Yeah. The villain whose name escapes me right now from The Incredibles, he thought he was doing the right thing.
Brian: Syndrome.
Rich: Syndrome. I was like, I want to say Sinestro, but no, that’s Green Lantern’s enemy. But I was like, yeah, in his worldview he was making everybody special. And that meant nobody would have to be special and we could all be at the same level. And in his worldview, that was exactly the way things should be.
Brian: Yeah. And they did a great job of calling out some of the components of the villain’s journey. One of which is monologuing. There’s one scene where he is like, “Oh my God, you’ve got me monologuing.”
Rich: Yes, great scene. And now I got to go back and watch that, and the second one. If our listeners wanted to take one step towards being more intentional about who they attract and who they repel with their marketing, how would you recommend they get started?
Brian: I would have them write their monologue. So what this is I’m going to write about my brand, but I’m not going to write it from a marketer standpoint where I’m just cherry picking the positives. I’m going to write about good stuff. I’m going to write about the stuff we’re just not good at.
And there are plenty of examples of businesses taking a disadvantage and turning it into an advantage, like the Buckley’s example. Where it just tastes bad. It tastes terrible. Like people are going to have this moment of what did I just put in my mouth? And they were able to, because they embraced it, they were able to turn it into an effective marketing campaign.
So write your monologues. Here’s what we want to change in the world. I would even start it like, “You fools! This is the worst way of doing things. We have a better product, and we can do it faster. And here are the things that you’re going to challenge us because we’re very expensive.” So you want to get all of the negative and the positive out. And when you step back and read that, you can be like, oh, we got some issues here. Some of which you can turn into an advantage, some of which are naturally going to parse out the people that aren’t a good fit for you.
But it’s a great way to get above the noise. I’m not saying you should go in and then take this copy and put it on your website, but your approach will change fundamentally once you realize yeah, there’s a whole bunch of people that are not going to like this about us, and we’re not going to change it because it’s part of us.
Rich: Sounds great. Alright, for people who want to learn more about you and learn more about conversion sciences, Brian, where can we send them?
Brian: All the stuff we’re learning, we publish at the Conversion Sciences blog. Go check us out at conversionsciences.com. Got a little CRO course there with some choice posts that I think will get folks that maybe aren’t familiar with conversion optimization along on their way.
Rich: That sounds awesome. We’ll have those links in the show notes. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show, being the contrarian, being the villain we needed you to be, and teaching us something new.
Brian: I hope to hear some stories about your listeners who try this.
Show Notes:
Brian Massey, known for his lab coat and love of data, founded Conversion Sciences to help businesses grow by turning curious visitors into loyal customers. Find helpful insights at his blog, and check out his book.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.