Marketing Muckraking

I'm joined by Lisa Robbin Young as we trace back how we arrived at this moment in internet marketing and online business, and who are the key leaders who brought us here, starting with Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison, all the way to Tony Robbins, Marie Forleo, Jenna Kutcher, Russell Brunson, Brooke Castillo, and Matthew McConaughey? Yeah, he’s a life coach now.

If you don’t know — or care — about these names, never fear. Lisa and I focus on what tactics these leaders popularized and how they’ve invaded nearly every corner of online business.

This series is foundational in understanding the evolution, not only of online business and marketing, but American culture and many of the advertising principles we have come to take for granted as “how it’s done.”

But, as we say on the show, this stuff didn’t start on the Internet — it goes back hundreds of years. To understand marketing history is to understand ourselves and our culture — marketing is the fuel for the engine of capitalism. Let’s take a trip through time, so you can be a more informed consumer and, hopefully, a more ethical marketer.

• Why we're "naming names" and the difference between solopreneurs and corporate entities in girlboss clothing
• How the "American dream" became a sales pitch for individualism at the cost of systemic change
• What muskrats taught Henry Ford and Thomas Edison about making millions
• The surprising secret of how to "think and grow rich"
• Behind the scenes of coaching coaches to coach coaches
• How the Industrial Revolution turned into toxic wellness culture
• Why hating yourself is good for business (online business, that is)

Lisa Robbin Young has 30 years of business experience as a coach and creative entrepreneur: she is an award-winning speaker, best-selling author, and accomplished musician with multiple albums to her credit. You may even recognize her from the Disney+ show “Encore.” She is also the host of the “Creative Freedom” show — I highly recommend her music video parodies. Check out “There are worse things I could do” for a Marie Forleo crossover with Awkward Marketing. She specializes in helping creative entrepreneurs build a business that works for how you’re wired to work.

See MarketingMuckraking.com for the complete transcript and annotated visual guide.

In this installment, we’re time traveling from WWI and WWII all the way to today, where clickbait, ClickFunnels to hell, and faking it ’til you make it have spread across the branches of this rotten business tree, poisoning the fruits that fall to everyone clamoring for their taste of success.

Remember, this stuff didn’t start on the Internet — it goes back hundreds of years. To understand marketing history is to understand ourselves and our culture — marketing is the fuel for the engine of capitalism. Let’s take a trip through time, so you can be a more informed consumer and, hopefully, a more ethical marketer.

• What ex-employees are saying about Brooke Castillo and The Life Coach School
• How a bro marketer gamed the system to launch a chart-topping country music album (by tricking people into buying it)
• The true story of the country's first famous "snake oil salesman" and how he culturally appropriated his way across the country
• Why we can thank Frank Kern for the CAN-SPAM act and how he still brags about building his business illegally
• That Tony Robbins scene in "Shallow Hal" and how he hypnotized his way to the top
• The appalling truth of ClickFunnels and why Russell Brunson thinks Adolf Hilter is a business leader — while the industry co-signs this concept
• What Nazi leaders learned about marketing from American propaganda
• How Christian nationalist preachers built the advertising industry
• What Jenna Kutcher, Amy Porterfield, and Mel Robbins really did on their Napa Valley mastermind and how they leverage parasocial bonds to sell to your sense of loneliness
• Who monetized her friend's death to boost her clickthrough rate
• Why no one can be Gary V, even Gary V, and the problem with corporations masquerading as people
• How "more good millionaires" isn't the answer to systemic problems

Lisa Robbin Young has 30 years of business experience as a coach and creative entrepreneur: she is an award-winning speaker, best-selling author, and accomplished musician with multiple albums to her credit. You may even recognize her from the Disney+ show “Encore.” She is also the host of the “Creative Freedom” show — I highly recommend her music video parodies. Check out “There are worse things I could do” for a Marie Forleo crossover with Awkward Marketing. She specializes in helping creative entrepreneurs build a business that works for how you’re wired to work.

In this installment, we’re diving into six figure masterminds, Marie Forleo’s B-School, the Cult of the Syndicate, and how early Internet marketers like Mark Joyner, Dan Kennedy, Yanik Silver, and Russell Brunson brought mind control and manipulation online.

If you don’t know — or care — about these names, never fear. We focus on what tactics these leaders popularized and how they’ve invaded nearly every celebrity online business course, including Matthew McConaughey’s.

Remember, this stuff didn’t start on the Internet — it goes back hundreds of years. To understand marketing history is to understand ourselves and our culture — marketing is the fuel for the engine of capitalism. Let’s take a trip through time, so you can be a more informed consumer and, hopefully, a more ethical marketer.

• How 6 figure masterminds became a thing (someone please tell me why anyone would pay Amanda Frances $100K to "sit in her energy"?!)
• The rise of joint venture partnerships and affiliate marketing
• Why Marie Forleo's B-School is the bee in my bonnet
• The concerning trend of "business" coaches who are really just teaching the marketing of the self and personal branding through proximity to power
• How celebrity personal brands manipulate refund rates and quash negative reviews through stick strategies and boilerplate non-disparagement clauses
• The boy bosses responsible for bringing junk mail into your inbox
• Where clickbait came from (spoiler alert: Bat Boy!)
• Why easy "ethical marketing" swaps are just more of the same
• The nuance of shame-based or pain point marketing (and my unpopular opinion on speaking to pain — it might surprise you!)

Lisa Robbin Young has 30 years of business experience as a coach and creative entrepreneur: she is an award-winning speaker, best-selling author, and accomplished musician with multiple albums to her credit. You may even recognize her from the Disney+ show “Encore.” She is also the host of the “Creative Freedom” show — I highly recommend her music video parodies. Check out “There are worse things I could do” for a Marie Forleo crossover with Awkward Marketing. She specializes in helping creative entrepreneurs build a business that works for how you’re wired to work.

See MarketingMuckraking.com for the full transcript and visual guide.

The online business world is obsessed with 7-figure launch numbers and "scaling" your business model or, as they would have us believe, we're "leaving money on the table." Small business owners mistakenly believe that once they've polished and validated their offerings, the only way to grow is to take themselves out of the equation, automate, evergreen, and sell to thousands. When those thousands don't come (or they do come and they complain about the value of the program not matching its testimonials), folks feel that they've done something wrong. Maybe it's the ad targeting? Or the copywriting? Or some other "easy" marketing tweakaroo that can launch them into the 7-figure stratosphere? But the "wrong" isn't the business owner or their offer...it's the belief that a 7-figure launch is just "one funnel away." And, ultimately, it comes down to the fact that some businesses have no business being scaled. There's a lot more to a 7-figure launch than crafting a valuable offer and then throwing a few bucks at Zuck in hopes that his ad robots will serve you up to the right willing buyers. In this episode of Marketing Muckraking, I break down the 7 secrets to a 7-figure launch...and why you don't want one. And the beautiful monster at the end of this episode is my alternative to "scaling" that doesn't include you withdrawing from your business and watching the dollars pour in while you smugly sip your $7 marg on tropical shores. What I can tell you is that, yes! There is a way to save time and energy while still offering your customers and clients personal attention. Listen for the full scoop. Read the full transcript here.

I spent many years creating content that spoke to this question in my show, Awkward Marketing, where I tried to help people find "easy" swaps for the unethical practices that had become industry standard.

But, then I realized there was more to the conversation around "sleaze" in business than just switching out the "bad" with the "good."

I wrote about this in my essay, "I Hate Marketing" And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves.

Because after 13 years of running a branding studio and speaking with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I started to notice a pattern.

Becoming a business owner forces you to participate in the system in a different way, no longer as a passive consumer but someone driving your own products and services. And when you do this, you quickly realize all the ways that the game is rigged.

The celebrity personal brands leading the online business industrial complex want us to believe that if we don't like their methods, we have a mindset issue.

This is the same argument Tony Robbins makes when he says that the #MeToo movement is simply a "drug" to make victims feel good. He promotes an ideology that says we shouldn't get angry about systemic injustice, but instead think our way out of it individually.

And this is also the same argument that Napoleon Hill makes in his book, Think And Grow Rich.

In today's episode of Marketing Muckraking, I explore the culture of personal branding and my own quest to understand what branding is doing to us. This led me to explore the history of the personal brand, which took me back in time, stopping in the early 20th century, when Napoleon Hill built his brand and popularized the idea of thought leadership and manifestation in Think And Grow Rich.

Tony Robbins promotes Think And Grow Rich on his website with an affiliate link.

Daymond John of Shark Tank swears by its teachings.

Donald Trump loves Napoleon Hill and cited Think And Grow Rich in some of his own books. The book is prosperity gospel meets snake oil.

And if you know the history of snake oil, which was popularized in the USA in the late 19th and early 20th century by Clark Stanley, self-described "Rattlesnake King," then you also know that muckrakers tested his snake oil liniment and found that 1) it didn't contain any actual snake oil and 2) it didn't cure any of the things it purported to. That's where the term "snake oil salesman" comes from!

Napoleon Hill lied about much of the wisdom he shared in his book, where he claimed to interview the rich and famous, like Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison, on the "secrets to their success."

Not only that, but Hill ran one of the country's early pyramid schemes, led a sex cult, and covered up a murder? For the juicy details, you'll want to listen to this episode of the show.

Hill's success is more a credit to how capitalism rewards abuse than his own genius.

Most of the products we are surrounded by, with the very small exception of things like handmade goods you purchase directly from small creators — make their way through the supply chain, passing through the hands of many workers, with environmental impacts, as well as the implications of packaging and waste.

If you purchase fast fashion or buy your clothes from nearly any major retailer — that clothing has passed through a sweatshop.

If you’re a Midwesterner like me and you buy fruit in the winter — or any food that isn’t local to your region — that food has traveled thousands of miles to arrive at your grocery store. And there were people paid less than they should have been to get that food to you. I could go on and on.

I speak to many people who proudly boycott Amazon, for example, without realizing that Netflix and Disney+ both use Amazon web services.

So does Pinterest, AirBNB, NASA, The Guardian. So if you pin things on a mood board — you are supporting Amazon. If you read The Guardian, you are supporting Amazon. If you stay at an AIRBNB, you are supporting Amazon. An...