Arbitrage marketers vs real marketers

It’s taken me years to figure out why some creators’ and marketers’ work makes me cringe. I’ll admit: it’s not just the obvious hucksters. Sometimes, they’re just … marketers. But there’s just something about the way the resulting work feels that causes me to dry heave just a little. The type of marketing I’m thinking comes from people who seem as though they’re totally comfortable transacting the world. I never really had a term for them.

Now I realize: they’re arbitrage marketers.

Arbitrage marketers build their work around one idea: get into the things that are cheap and easy for now, drive results quickly, then move on. At their worst, they’re the locusts of the marketing world, swarming a single tactic or channel and stripping it bare before moving elsewhere. These are the folks who ruin a channel or app. They strip-mine its value to their brands, and then they move on. That’s at their worst. But their best isn’t much better: at best, they’re just regular-old marketers who talk more excitedly about “driving mad pipe” (that’s “creating a lot of sales opportunities in the pipeline” for you laypeople out there).

It’s just a lot of puffery. Instead of caring about generosity, teaching, creativity, and serving the audience, they only serve themselves. (What’s so funny is the realization of so many seasoned marketers and indeed professionals of all kinds actually flies in the face of this notion. When we serve others better, we serve ourselves better. Want results? Great. Go help others get what they want, and you’ll get what you want.)

Arbitrage marketers do marketing TO others, instead of creating things FOR others. That’s because saying things that matter or caring about craft don’t apply as fully when you’re early to something, and everyone is just looking to find people to follow or advice that sounds decent. When a social network is new, the loudest shouts get heard. When it tips into the mainstream, you’re just shouting to the wind, so you have to genuinely provide value — or move on.

Arbitrage marketers move on. To their credit, they often realize that when the wave crashes, they’ll get washed out to sea because they haven’t really dug into the important things that give them staying power. So they have to find the next new thing and be all about it for a time — or manufacture it, and tell others they simply MUST know about it.

Their core strategy becomes: annoy the many to convert a few.

And they’re just fine with it. “Look!” they’ll claim. “We closed 100 new signups this quarter.” Yes, and to do so, you annoyed far more — all of whom have networks of even more potential customers. As podcasting and audio researcher Tom Webster (Partner, Sounds Profitable; ex-EVP, Edison Research) once told me, “The concept that separates a whole tier of [marketers] is the knowledge of the effects of non-response bias.”

“Annoy the many to convert a few” is not a good marketing strategy. But should you correct an arbitrage marketer, you’re either a “hater” they love claiming they have or “you just don’t get it.” You’re clearly not advanced or innovative like them.

There’s a better way.

There’s another kind of marketer, someone who doesn’t do marketing TO others so much as FOR and WITH them. They create their work not because it sells stuff on the cheap but because they have something meaningful to say, a change they’d like to see, and a desire to help. And a byproduct of all that extreme value they’ve created for others, and all that emotional resonance they create, is action. Action leads to results. Not action? No results.

We’re all in the business of action. Which means we’re all in the business of resonance. Of genuinely connecting with others in such a way that (A) they sprint into and remain in your corner and (B) excitedly tell others to do the same. (In business parlance, we might say this leads to a higher lifetime value and lower costs of acquisition. But who am I to talk about metrics when I just dragged so many supposed “data-driven” marketers out there?)

The marketers who set aside the temptation of arbitrage and instead focus on affinity give themselves an unfair advantage: a passionate audience that will do anything for them. They pick them, stick with them, and stick up for them, against the odds. These marketers understand that the ends don’t justify the means, and that the means — the craft, the community, the mission, the project itself — will inevitably yield better ends too.

The result of this framing is that they care most about inspiring some kind of change in others. Maybe they want their audience to be better at a job or a task within that job. Maybe they’re trying to shift the culture — of an industry niche or society at large.

The other stuff (like reach or sales) are important to them, yes. But they understand the path to sustainable, healthy growth today means being genuinely useful and enjoyable and emotionally resonant with what they create. They see the first hurdle to successful marketing not as a decision between channels or tactics but rather a need to say something that matters. They develop their mission, their brand story, their value and teaching models first … then they busy themselves with the incremental stuff which arbitrage marketers seem to conflate with all of marketing.

These real marketers do incredible work, not just because it serves others, but because they’ve managed to break from years of schooling that taught them to focus on the ends, not the means. Get the grades. Pass the course. Move on. It’s about optics and end results—substance be damned. So, put in the minimal effort possible to get the best result.

We spend so much time arbitraging our way through school, is it any wonder most marketers continue acting the same way?

But perhaps the goal of education is actually learning something and putting that learning to good use, not just get the certificate. Perhaps the goal of content marketing is to genuinely help others, not just get attention.

Imagine that.

Arbitrage marketers beat their chests. Real marketers are servant leaders. Arbitrage marketers profess to know THE answer. Real marketers ask better questions.

Be a real marketer.

Focus on understanding people, serving them, and making their work or lives better. Dedicate your time to learning the foundational stuff, the “soft” skills (let’s rename them foundational skills, because without those things, you’re building a house that will surely fall).

Focus on foundational skills. The rest will come.

We needn’t be so panicked and reactive. We can step off the endlessly spinning wheel of arbitraging and hyping and hustling. In fact, we can break the wheel entirely.

Don’t be an arbitrage marketer. Instead, build something meaningful, something lasting, something genuinely useful to others.

Something real.