An elephant is long, limber, and slightly tapered. Like a giant roll of cookie dough, but with fewer chocolate chips and a lot more muscles! And an insatiable appetite for peanuts!

Imagine somebody came up to you on the street and announced this proudly to you. 

What would you think of them? Let me take a guess:

First: Wow, ever heard of the Personal Bubble?  

Then: You’re absolutely, flipping, batshit insane. 

Am I right, or am I right?

Elephants are not their trunks. Or their cute little taily-wailies.

Everybody knows an elephant is not its trunk.

That mistake made by the hypothetical crazy person above—thinking that elephant == trunk—is what we call a category error. Specifically a category error of composition. That means taking a part of a thing—say, the trunk of an elephant—and assuming the whole thing is just like it—say, long, tubular, muscly and hungry for goober peas. 

Since we’re all geeks here, you probably knew that already. 

But even if you’ve never even heard of a logical fallacy, no doubt you have heard that charming old saw about the three blind men and the results of their elephant groping. Hint: it didn’t go so well.

And yet.

I can’t begin to tell you the number of  geeks I’ve met who make things, who say proudly that they don’t market, that they’re too pure to ever engage in that sleaze. 

This is not the whole picture. © Anderson Mancini

Maybe this is not you I just described. But maybe it is. 

Maybe it is and you don’t even know it. 

Maybe you’re nodding and smiling along with me here, feeling good about yourself for not making that mistake, but you still aren’t marketing your shit.

Sidebar: You’re probably fooling yourself. You’re probably doing it right now.

Maybe you’re fooling yourself. It’s pretty easy to do. I even think it’s easier to fool a geek—or geek, fool thyself—than other people. 

Geeks are used to being smart and thinking about things, so they assume that if they hold an opinion, there must be a smart and thoughtful reason for it. Everybody on the face of the planet does this little Post-Hoc Justification Dance a million times a day, but geeks are used to being proved right by outside circumstances. So they believe it even more than other people.

Take 1 whole person, subtract their selective smartness, and you’re left with selective dumbness. © CarbonNYC

Another popular geek belief is that, since they have a brain the size of a planet, if something doesn’t come easy to them, that something must be totally illogical and unlearnable—ergo, fruity and suspicious. 

Like design. And marketing. And remembering people’s names. 

Now, take these two false beliefs, mix them together in the same person, add a pinch of denial, and what you have is a recipe for FAIL.

Oh, design? I’m no good at that. I failed Art class because my teacher took exception to me pointing out that her grading formula was calculated incorrectly!

I simply cannot remember names because there’s no room left over in my head for such things, after all my deep thoughts. Please tattoo your name in binary on your forehead. It would make social interaction ever so much more functional.

Marketing? I haven’t got the faintest idea where to start. But only stupid people fall for marketing, and therefore if I marketed, I would only con stupid people. Or make people think I think they’re stupid. Therefore, it’s sleazy, and I’m excused from trying.

Drop that trunk—the real truth about marketing

So, marketing.

Are some kinds of marketing sleazy? Yes. 

Do you see where I’m going with the trunk metaphor and marketing? Yes, of course you do.

An elephant is not its trunk—and marketing is not made up solely of lying, scheming people with too many yellow highlighters and no paucity of exclamation points. 

Marketing is not…

Marketing is not made up of things that promise unachievable beauty, fame, and riches.

Marketing is not made up of snakeoil peddled to desperate people.

Marketing is not made up of sex used to sell the same old crappy vacuums, and social anxiety used to sell the same old crappy soap.

Marketing is not made up of made-up disorders, or Santa Claus.

The famous “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride” ad, with the invented disorder of halitosis

Marketing has those things in it, of course. But marketing is bigger than that. Those are just toes. Marketing is the whole elephant.

Marketing is YOU.

When you market, you get to choose how you do it. Honest marketer isn’t an oxymoron. I’m an honest marketer. 

Marketing doesn’t even have the goal of selling shit. Some marketing just tries to move as many units as possible, to any chump who’ll drop the dollars on it.

But some marketing tries super hard to ensure that the product appeals to people who will love it, and doesn’t appeal at all to people who will not. 

It goes beyond simple honesty, and says “This product is probably not for you.”

Marketing can be SUPPORT.

I create products to help people. To me, marketing is about support.  

I am not a twisted greenback version of The Incredible Hulk. I do not transform from the premise of I like to help people! to the premise of I am going to trick them into giving me money, wah ha ha!! when money is involved.

I firmly believe that I am selling things that will help people make their lives better. Even if it’s just a small part of their lives. Sometimes, making the product itself is an act of marketing, because—like with this article—I am trying to help people make themselves better, and to do that, I must persuade them.

So yes, I believe in marketing.

That doesn’t mean I get all weepy-eyed about it.

Marketing can be HONESTY.

Geeks tend to think that marketing is nothing but deception. I’ve argued here that it’s not, and I’ve explained the way I approach marketing. But I haven’t offered any proof. So here’s some for you.

I may talk about strangling kittens and unicorn tears on the sales site for our JavaScript performance book, but you know what? That’s not a gimmick. That’s how I write.

Honesty is the only policy. If you hate this, you won’t like our book.

I could have made it more palatable to the world at large, if I’d removed those lines from the sales page. Maybe I would have sold a few more copies (along with my soul). But I crafted the prose that way on purpose.

Here’s why:

If people don’t like reading about unicorn tears on the sales site, there’s no way they’re going to like the book. 

So I’m using marketing, and copywriting, as a form of disclosure. It sets up expectations, which will be met. It helps the potential customer decide. Whether they think that’s awesome, or awful, I’m happy. If they think it’s awful, they won’t buy, they won’t be disappointed, and I won’t have to field their angry emails.

Which is why, with about 1200 copies sold, only one person has complained about my ridiculous running jokes. 

Only one person has ever taken advantage of the 30-day refund.

And here I am, able to sit on my butt and wax about marketing to you, because I am so close to being able to make a living off helping other people kick ass.

So get out there & market.

That is the power of marketing.

It’s not a tube of muscly cookie dough. It’s not evil. It’s not deception. It’s not greed. It’s not easily reducible to any potentially hateful thing.

It’s a whole universe of possibility, and you decide what it will be for you.

Just please, for the love of all that is good, and for the love of any thing you might create which could make some little corner of the world better… don’t decide that what marketing is to you, is nothing.

Did this click with you? Then you’d probably enjoy my Year of Hustle Weekend Workshop. It’s gonna be awesome. If you can’t make it, maybe cuz I’m only telling you about it a couple days before, hold tight. This is hopefully the first of many. Or at least several.