A Testimonial about Testimonials...

"Most testimonials are garbage," says person

Hello Gobbledeers,

I’m curious about something.

Let’s say you’re in the market for a new job. (Or maybe the market decided you were in the market for a new job when they fired you. Probably because “Our CEO doesn’t think we need marketing, so he’s going to double-down on TikTok influencers” or whatever).

But good news - you get an email from a recruiter and that email mentions a CMO job at a company, and describes it thusly:

Maropost is a global leader in unified commerce enabling mid-market companies the ability to grow their business with digital marketing and commerce solutions. Their solutions empower their clients through their ecommerce, retail, marketing and customer service clouds bringing true ease to the challenge of building, growing and monetizing customer relationships online.

Do you think to yourself:

a) WTF do they do?
or
b) I certainly can’t make their marketing any worse, so sure I’ll have a conversation!

(Note: The headhunting firm wrote that, it’s not on Maropost’s website.)

I’m genuinely curious, marketing folks - when you’re approached about a job, and the description is gobbledy, does it have any impact on whether you’d want the job? (You can comment in the comment section! Because I thought you were a moron and had to tell you that!)

(Ed. note: don’t call your readers morons.)

(Response to Ed.: remember to delete the note about not calling readers morons before you send out the newsletter.)

(Ed.: I’m sorry, I’m out of the office at an off-site until January 27th. If this is an urgent matter, please call Jen.)

(Response to Ed.: Goddamit, nobody named Jen works here.)

(Ed.: I’m sorry, I’m out of the office at an off-site until January 27th. If this is an urgent matter, please call Jen.)

---

My Favorite Testimonial

Fondue is a clever little tool that lets online retailers offer cashback for a purchase instead of offering a coupon. In other words, it’ll allow you to say “give us your email and you’ll get 20% cash back on your first purchase” instead of “give us your email and you’ll get 20% off.” For whatever reason, “cashback” drives a higher conversion than “20% off.” Go figure.

They have the best testimonial I’ve ever seen:

Hard to argue with future me.

I hear a lot from early-stage companies that they struggle with case studies and testimonials. That’s certainly true, but it’s also certainly an excuse.

Here’s how Fondue handles testimonials:

TL; DR and then 5 stars is super clever, too. (They mention elsewhere that they have 100 5-star reviews, but let’s put that aside). There are lots of ways to show that people like your product - Fondue came up with a couple of smart ones.

---

And a Terrible Testimonial

I will bet the CEO of Customer Data Platform Treasure Data $100 million GobbleDollars (my crypto tokens) that they made up this quote, which they plastered on a not-inexpensive booth at NRF (and then shared with me by reader Emily L., for which I am extremely grateful):

ChatGPT: Write a testimonial that will make everyone who reads it think we are full of shit.

---

It’s Easy to Forget Sears Wasn’t Always Terrible

Given what’s become of Sears, it’s hard to imagine that they were - in the late 1800s and early 1900s - the Amazon of its day (or rather, Amazon is the Sears of its day). Through a combination of the expanding railroad system and the Rural Free Delivery program that brought mail service to nearly every address in the US, the Sears catalog made products readily available to communities where there was basically no other way to purchase many of the thousands of items available in the catalog.

Sears built a 3 million square foot distribution facility in Chicago in 1906, the largest such facility in the world at the time, to handle its orders. As incredible as Amazon’s growth has been, Sears was perhaps even more remarkable because there was simply no existing infrastructure to grow from.

I will stop boring you with Sears history, even though it’s fascinating and it very much parallels the growth of modern retail, and they were innovative beyond belief and so far ahead of their time.

Except for one more - they sold 70,000 kit homes in the first half of the 20th century. Their catalog offered more than 300 varieties of homes that you could build, and apparently 50,000 or so are still standing. (If you are an architecture dork, the Wikipedia page on Sears Modern Homes is worth your time).

OK I’m done.

I’m bringing this up here because the copy in their catalog was absolutely brilliant, and reflected everything I’ve spent the past year blabbering about in this newsletter.

I first saw an example years ago where there was a description of a shirt in an early catalog, and it mentioned how the shirt was made with fine materials, and that they negotiated the cost of those materials to keep the price low, and now they were only adding on a small markup to ensure they made a small profit and that the customer paid a fair price.

Somewhere between that shirt in 1900 or so and Everlane in 2015, nobody ever talked about price transparency in their copy. But Sears’ slogan was “The Cheapest Supply House on Earth,” and one way they proved that to customers was by talking about cost and markup. I’d never seen a company talk about making a profit in their marketing materials. It struck me as jarring. But it made sense - if the profit is small, then they’re selling it as cheaply as they can.

Similarly, this image from an early Sears catalog was posted on LinkedIn recently:

Organ-ic products from the 1800s. (Dad joke!)

It’s hard to read, but here’s a bit of the copy:

"In putting this design on the market, we do so to fill the demand of people who cannot afford to pay for our more elaborately designed organs, and yet insist on an organ with our superior action at a low price."

I write a lot about positioning, because I’ve come to believe that it’s the foundation of great marketing; we read so much gobbledy because companies skip the hard work of positioning.

And even when companies do positioning work, they often struggle to turn that into copy that reflects the positioning.

Sears showed that the best way to incorporate positioning into messaging is to be as straightfoward as possible. Who’s this organ for? It’s for people who cannot afford a more expensive organ and are willing to trade off design for better action on the keyboard. Who are they competing against? Themselves, funny enough. Amazingly, they sell a bunch of different organs. But each one has a place in the market and a reason for being.

I really love the specificity - I think today someone might write, “the best organ for its price.” But what is “best”? For some “best” might mean “most elaborately designed.” Or “lightweight and movable.” Or whatever. This organ is for people who care about great keyboard action. It’s so specific, and specific always works.

If you’re a copywriter, it’s worth spending a few dollars on a reprint of one of the old catalogs - the techniques they used are inspiring.

(Thanks to Rishi Rawat, the Shopify Product Page Guy for posting this image. If you have an ecommerce site, Rishi does fanastic work optimizing product pages. You should hire him. Or at least follow him on LinkedIn where he gives incredibly thoughtful advice about product pages.)

---

So We Beat On…

On an un-related note, I just re-read The Great Gatsby. If you haven’t read it since high school, you should take 3 hours and read it. That will be my last homework assignment I give you.

As always, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you reading this. And sharing it with people. And hiring me to work with you on your positioning and messaging.