No Marketing Expert

For thirty years, I helped people sell things. Products, services, ideas, sometimes themselves. I was good at it. I knew the mechanics, the language, the psychology. I knew how to tell a story so that people buy. That was my job, and I had no problem with it.

Then I did.

It didn’t come overnight. It crept in over years. A line in a briefing that wasn’t true. A campaign that invented a problem nobody had. A promise on a website that everyone in the room knew wasn’t sustainable. Each time I thought: That’s normal. That’s how the industry works. Everyone knows this. Nobody takes it literally.

But at some point, I stopped believing that.

Marketing, as most people know it, is based on a silent agreement: We exaggerate, and everyone knows it. The product is never as good as the ad. The testimonials are never as honest as they sound. The numbers are never as clear as the chart suggests. This isn’t fraud in the legal sense. It’s something more subtle. It’s the systematic shifting of the line between what is and what sells better.

I went along with it for a long time. Not out of cynicism, but because I thought it was part of the deal. That professional marketing simply meant polishing reality. That honesty was a nice ideal but not a business model.

Then I started reading my own copy differently. Not as marketing material, but as statements. Is this true? Would I say this to a friend? Would I sign this if someone held me to it? The answer was often: no.

That was the point where I stopped calling myself a marketing expert.

Not because marketing is unnecessary. People need to know that something exists that could help them. That’s an important function. But the function is mediation, not manipulation. The difference is: mediation says what is. Manipulation says what you want to hear.

I sell a glass of water now. If you’re thirsty, you come. If you’re not, you don’t. That sounds naive. In an industry built on artificial thirst, anything based on real need sounds naive. But I have thirty years of experience telling the difference. Between someone who has a problem and someone who was talked into one. Between a product that solves something and one that mainly sells itself.

Most entrepreneurs I know don’t need better marketing. They need a clearer foundation. They need honesty about what they actually offer, for whom, and why. Once that’s in place, marketing becomes simple. Not because you know better tricks. But because you don’t have to make things up anymore.

I’m no longer a marketing expert. I’m someone who has seen enough marketing to know where it stops helping and starts lying. That’s not a step backward. It’s the only thing left after thirty years, if you take honest stock.