Sincerity: The antidote to empty promises
The email closing, sincerely, has lost favor in recent years. We more often see empty transactional or cliche phrases like best, thank you, and ciao if we see an email closing at all. I prefer "sincerely" because it says something about your intention.
Speaking of intention, individuals and organizations often send me messages on LinkedIn claiming to boost my business with "innovative strategies."
The volume of these messages is undoubtedly impressive, but if we talk about the quality of matter and impact achieved, such marketing is just a waste of words.
Such emails with empty promises are full of cliches that don't believe in their product/service enough to convince them. Instead, they don't rely on anything more than putting pressure on you to buy something, which entirely discredits their business purpose.?
Your faith in such brands diminishes rapidly as you witness the insincerity with which they handle their marketing. If I were to market my service like this someday, it would only be because I don't believe my efforts can make a difference in the world. And that is quite telling of my sincerity as a brand coach and an entrepreneur.
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People need to understand this: marketing isn't just about promotion and snagging customers. It's an intricate system of elements that form a self-sustaining whole running on human emotions. Marketing speaks to people, attracts their attention, addresses their pain points, and offers a solution without doubting itself for even a millisecond. Marketing is about self-confidence and trust.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Ali Demos says that "without a sincere curiosity about and empathy for the people we hope to reach, we stand no chance of developing a compelling conversation with them." And I completely agree with him; we don't connect unless we converse.?
With the rise of the social media influencer industry, brands have begun using influencers' platforms to give an honest review of what their product experience is like. This allows for the better exchange between a business and its target audience because there's sincerity in how these brands approach potential customers. It allows for a conversation to flow between them. But the dilapidated emails that I receive are NOT a conversation; they're an imposition.
No matter how old-fashioned the argument regarding the superiority of sincere marketing over insincere marketing may sound, nobody can contest its authenticity in terms of success. Unfortunately, however, sincerity is a long-term investment that many brands seem to miss out on the first step, ultimately landing in the spam inbox.
Jay Mandel is Your Brand Coach?and is a marketing and branding consultant and adjunct professor of Marketing. This post expresses my personal views, and my personal are directly connected with my employer because it is me :-)