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“I feel like a fraud”

A friend is having an identity crisis over his Chat-GPT usage.

Last week he started using it for his company’s social posts. He put a post screenshot in the group chat this week, with words that opened with “I do struggle with Chat-GPT at times”. Words to the effect of “I feel like a fraud”.

It goes to the heart of the Chat-GPT problem: for marketing, it delivers the average of what everyone else does. And my god it is average.

But let’s leave his AI issues aside for a moment. Let’s talk about self-praise marketing.

The self-praise arms race

A majority of business people think marketing is about talking it up. About saying how great your product or service is.

Ask any business owner or sales rep what sets them apart from their competitors, a question I’ve asked hundreds of times in strategy sessions.

“Oh that’s easy,” they’ll say. “It’s our quality. And our service.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say above 90% give that exact answer. It varies a bit. Sometimes they’ll say service, then quality.

From that generic starting point, the only way they can beat their competitor is a Niagara Falls torrent of self-basting adjectives.

Telling customers how ultimate, leading, premium, renowned, best-in-class or unparalleled their quality and service is.

Thinking: if I can just find that ultimate superlative, customers gonna buy.

Welcome to idyllic paradise

Here’s what Chat GPT served up for a picture of my friend’s staff working on a project:

“From the initial assessment to the final touches, our team spared no effort in transforming this once-dilapidated site into a reliable and visually appealing thoroughfare seamlessly blending functionality with aesthetic charm in this idyllic paradise setting.”

Let’s unpack that.

It opens with the ancient “from this, to that” gambit. The hack opening every SME person loves for their website and credentials PDF. They feel it highlights how vast their offering is. Bakers will write “from dinner rolls to loaves, from tarts to cakes, all your baked product needs.”

Whenever you see it, you know that not far away is “our team has a combined 89 years experience.”

Then try-hard long words. Try to read “visually appealing thoroughfare seamlessly blending functionality with aesthetic charm”. It’s like chugging a pint of dry rolled oats.

The whole thing is built from grand exaggerations. It’s from the same school as estate agent copy*. “Snugly nestled in secluded tranquility this is your dream forever home offering enviable sought-after lifestyle.”

Words that mean either nothing, or worse than nothing. Like snug being code for “a phone booth”.

“Idyllic paradise”. You’re picturing crystal waterfalls, sugar gliders flitting through the lush forest canopy, sweet birdsong echoing across the landscape.

Whatever the reality of the location, it will feel like a let-down.

Customers are immune to this bullshit

Nobody reads this stuff. They’re just looking at the pictures. Because their copy scepticism is set in stone by a lifetime’s bombardment with boast-marketing.

They know the brands and people who talk it up the most are the ones most likely to let them down. Cheap, P.T Barnum-style words to get customers inside the tent. Where they’ll be let down, but hey you got some money off them that one time.

Now Chat-GPT has digested the entire world history of this carny talk, everyone can apply it to their own marketing at the touch of a button.

An infinite supply of words nobody wants or believes. Just to fill up the space.

Ironically, my friend has a very successful business because he’s smart and a natural clear-speaking leader. His staff work hard and would die for him.

His clients like him for his clarity, reality and entertaining yarns. He is the opposite of everything in that Chat-GPT post.

You don’t need lots of words for a social post, or in most applications. The fewer, the better. Keep to the facts.

Too much pressure

I know it’s easy for Mr Writer Guy to say “write your own material”.

I know a keyboard and a blank screen is so forbidding for most people.

Particularly when you bring the expectation of creating a genius sales pitch that will make everyone buy your product right now.

Chill out, no set of words is going to do that, no matter how good the writing. The sale comes from hundreds of other factors, exposures and instincts the buyer themself doesn’t understand.

But each bit of writing is a little building block in that process.

If it’s about them, rather than you and how great you are, it’s a small but real step toward them buying from you.

A ten-storey building built on a swamp

With writing, getting started is the hard part. I know lots of people who use Chat-GPT for that, then edit.

The problem is AI builds an instant ten-storey building on top of a swamp. Doesn’t matter how good the build is when it starts in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons.

Think about the customer. Ask yourself: how would your customer describe what they get out of your product?

Try using voice to text like you’re talking to a friend while you’re driving. Let it run for a while. Say whatever’s on your mind. Then edit from there. There’ll be insights there that Chat-GPT will never uncover.

And the words will feel like you and your brand.

Standard disclaimer: this is not an AI is bad piece. It’s about the right tools for the right application. If you want to use it for a wedding speech or assemble your PowerPoint, go for it.

Your business doesn’t depend on your wedding speech being more compelling than a hundred other wedding speeches your customers saw that week.

We use AI in applications that save repetitive hack work, where uniformity is a virtue. It’s great.

Uniformity is not a virtue in marketing.

The good news is it’s about to become easier to stand out, as everyone else lets the machines grind out their uniform templated cliches.

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After I recorded the audio version of this story, I read this Melbourne real estate story in the Australian Financial Review.

A shining gem of humanity amid the formula dullness of media releases.

Ms Nido, I salute your work here, and I’m not a bit surprised you won that award.

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