America, The Land of the Free? Do You Really Buy That?

Explicit content warning

05/07/22 • 18 min

Whether you've been in business for 10 years or 10 minutes — and even if you're not — you know that "freedom" is a term used to sell most anything. From online courses to laundry detergent to...the United States of America.

There is a history here.

When America shifted from an agrarian economy to one based around mass production, the capitalists who owned the factories churning out mass produced goods needed all hands on deck, not just on the factory floor, but at the cash register.

Many people believe that worker rights were won solely by dedicated activists but this is not entirely true.

Decades before labor laws were passed, many forward thinking factory owners and CEOs started scaling back work weeks and increasing employee pay. Not because they had big hearts, but because they had big inventory to move. And they knew that a mass public too tired and broke to part with the few dollars they earned would spell catastrophe for their sales.

So, companies increased wages and decreased hours so that people had just enough time and money to buy the widgets they were producing.

And they rolled out widespread advertising campaigns to help people feel more comfortable spending their hard earned money.

Edward Filene deemed this "The School of Freedom," where the public was "trained" in being constant consumers.

Freedom — the same selling point behind The Constitution — was now seen as the freedom to participate in the economy and buy whatever we wanted, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, or credo.

Today, we no longer need "training" in "The School of Freedom."

We see buying as self-care.

Our liberties may be shrinking, but the amount of products fighting for the honor of helping us "treat" ourselves is consistently growing.

In this episode of Marketing Muckraking, we dive into the history of how advertisers helped create a mass buying public and what "freedom" means as it pertains to reproductive rights.

I am publishing this on Mother's Day weekend because this year, parenthood looks different for many people, which is why I'm choosing now to share my story of choice and my own complicated relationship with motherhood.

In the spirit of this episode on consumer culture, I urge you to consume more history. If you're going to buy, buy more books. Learn about this nation's history and traditions.

I recommend A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. This was the first book I read about American history that didn't present our founders as flawless heroes. Start here and then keep reading...

Sources for this episode include:

Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture by Stuart Ewen
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture by William Leach
Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of an American Mass Market by Susan Strasser
The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and The State by Friedrich Engels
Self Care by Leigh Stein

There is a history here.

Many people believe that worker rights were won solely by dedicated activists but this is not entirely true.

So, companies increased wages and decreased hours so that people had just enough time and money to buy the widgets they were producing.

And they rolled out widespread advertising campaigns to help people feel more comfortable spending their hard earned money.

Edward Filene deemed this "The School of Freedom," where the public was "trained" in being constant consumers.

Freedom — the same selling point behind The Constitution — was now seen as the freedom to participate in the economy and buy whatever we wanted, regardless of race, ethnicity, sex, or credo.

Today, we no longer need "training" in "The School of Freedom."

We see buying as self-care.

Our liberties may be shrinking, but the amount of products fighting for the honor of helping us "treat" ourselves is consistently growing.

In this episode of Marketing Muckraking, we dive into the history of how advertisers helped create a mass buying public and what "freedom" means as it pertains to reproductive rights.

In the spirit of this episode on consumer culture, I urge you to consume more history. If you're going to buy, buy more books. Learn about this nation's history and traditions.

Sources for this episode include:

Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture by Stuart Ewen
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture by William Leach
Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of an American Mass Market by Susan Strasser
The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and The State by Friedrich Engels
Self Care by Leigh Stein

Previous Episode

What You Need To Know About The Cult of Online Marketing: Rachel Hollis, Marie Forleo, Tony Robbins, and Russell Brunson

This podcast episode began in FREE SCHOOL. Listen to the full episode for more on what FREE SCHOOL was exactly and why it culminated in this essay and video.

I’ve thought a lot about whether I should include this in the Marketing Muckraking podcast...

This was while I was “burning it all down” and this recording is very fiery, to put it lightly.

But it’s also hilarious. And it’s also true.

Which is why I decided to include it here.

Nothing has changed since I posted this last year, except that time has passed and many people have forgotten that all this ever happened or never knew about it to begin with.

In this recording, I talk a lot about “putting it on the Google record” and that the scary thing about the Internet isn’t fake news, but no news. And I stand by that.

When we’re talking about corporations with human faces in the age of the personal brand, one of the most troubling features is that people with self-professed 7, 8, 9+ figure companies want us to treat them the way we would a girl next door, instead of a corporation.

Many people believe that “women supporting women” don’t publicly say anything when a woman is harming millions of women.

But who exactly are we supporting when we believe this? Are we supporting the women who are harmed and gaslit into believing that they weren’t?

This recording doesn’t go after small businesses, but the folks at the top who are getting rich by making the rest of us believe we’re all just “one funnel away” from sitting at the table with them.

Just a few weeks ago, Rachel Hollis re-entered the speaking circuit — on Russell Brunson’s ClickFunnels stage. You’ll hear me address why he is so incredibly troubling and problematic in this video but let me boil it down to this.

Russell Brunson directly compares building a business to building a cult and he uses examples like Hitler to do it, rewriting history to position Hitler as a "movement builder."

He says this in page 2 of his book, Expert Secrets, which Amy Porterfield still has a live affiliate link to on her own podcast and blog, where she says, “no one knows how to build a movement better than super entrepreneur Russell Brunson.” Later in the show notes she says, “I loved this book so much and I know you will, too.”

This is how I learned about Russell Brunson in the first place. Because I trusted Amy Porterfield and her recommendations.

In a 2017 interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy, recorded at the same time as Porterfield's, Warner says, “You are the Adolf Hitler of ClickFunnels,” and Brunson agrees, while laughing.

Every person I cite in this recording has supported Brunson over the years and continues to support him — including and especially Jenna Kutcher and Rachel Hollis — and have never distanced themselves from him and his harmful approach to business as they did so performatively last year with Hollis when she made her statements disparaging her housekeeper.

So, that is why I’m bringing this recording back.

It’s still true.

It’s still deeply troubling.

And it should not be lost to Instagram history and forgotten simply because time has passed.

As I repeat again and again in this episode, put it on the record.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Cult of Online Marketing Made Easy: the essay this podcast is based on
Why are there no negative B-School reviews?
StoryBrand Scandal: what Donald Miller, Josh Harris, Josh Duggar, and StoryBrand have in common

Next Episode

Think And Grow Rich? The Truth About Napoleon Hill, America's First Thought Leader In The Age of the Personal Brand

I hear it all the time: "How do I build a business without being sleazy about it?"

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.

When people want a “non-sleazy” way of marketing their business, I believe what they are really asking for is a way out of capitalism.

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.

Many of modern business's most influential leaders cite Think And Grow Rich as a book they draw immense inspiration from.

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!

And Think And Grow Rich is snake oil, too.

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.

As I shared in this episode, there is no “do no harm” way of existing within capitalism.

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...