Marketing vs. Serving

Most marketing is engaged in telling you about how someone is going to be able to help you.

There’s a lot of stories talking about how they helped other people in the past, and a lot of promises made about how they’ll be able to help you in the future.

At the end of the day, that’s mostly what marketing is.

From the lens of service, the idea of marketing is “It’s a service to inform you about an opportunity you may not know of.”

So the service being provided is largely information. And because marketing is rarely consent-based (you don’t sign up for advertisements, or people reaching out to you on social media), the information isn’t even something you’ve asked for. More often than not, it’s spam.

All of this is distinct from actively serving someone.

When you put your focus on service first, the only question that matters is “How can I serve this person right now?”

You stop worrying about how you can convince them that you can help them in the future, and instead put your focus on providing them value right here.

For example, I, probably like you, get a ton of messages from ForEx and Crypto traders. They’ve always got the hottest new info, and the best deals for me, and if I’ll just listen to them and hire them, then they can share it with me, and then things will be amazing for me.

That’s a lot of promises about what will happen after I fork over my money.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they genuinely have something on offer (just… stick with me here ), instead of making me promises about the future, they could provide me service right now.

“Adam, I’m a trader, and I think you might be interested in my work. Follow this stock — I’m pretty certain it’s going to increase 200% in the next three days. Check it out if you like.”

That’s a way better proposition, and far more generous, than trying to get my money first.

This is the heart of service. Not waiting until someone signs on with us before we provide them the gift we have to offer.

Doing so means a commitment on my part to come from abundance. I have to trust that I have more than enough value to go around, rather than falling prey to the fear that if I give them the good stuff up front, I’ll have nothing left to offer once they’ve hired me.

How do you serve people?