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You’ve seen them on your Instagram feed and playing before your YouTube videos. They are loud, start in media res with a testimonial or an aggressive statement. The headline is out of context, but undeniably powerful, and you cannot resist but to click on it. “I did this for ten days and lost 10 pounds.” “Your life is mediocre if you make less than $80,000 a year.” “I could not believe what I was hearing.”
I’ve spoken before about manipulative marketing. Even though that sounds like an oxymoron, because one could argue that all marketing, by its very nature, is manipulative, I will refer here to particular techniques used to support a specific business model: the online coaching industry.
While there have been home-videos and books about how to accomplish any number of goals in life at least as far back as the 1980s, the last ten years have seen a veritable explosion in this market. Social media has become flooded with experts who claim to have done all the work and the research so that you don’t have to. They will sum up their ten or fifteen years of experience, hard work and hard knocks in this four-hour course that will catapult you to wherever you want to go.
It can be anything, because anything can be spun into a story about failure and success — the linchpin of this marketing style. Once they grab you with a hook to the jaw (“You…