Marketing Insight – Self Promotion

Many business owners and marketers find it infinitely easier to market someone’s else product than their own.

But have you ever wondered why?

Marketing someone else’s product, service or business is much easier to be viewed objectively. Marketing your own products comes with some interesting psychological patterns that can be easily distinguished when studying successful people versus those still struggling to get traction.

Self promotion contains emotion.

There is the ever present element of rejection that always feels that much more personal when marketing your own product.

It is for this reason that there will always be a market for marketing consultants. We need people who can separate the emotion and look strategically and objectively at what really needs to be done to ensure success and accurate positioning of an ad or a business.

The emotion is powerful though. And success via self promotion is possible. We’ve seen it with Anthony Robbins and many others. Once an entrepreneur can “get over” the fear of criticism, the marketing of one’s own products becomes more objective.

But if the fear of criticism lingers, people who aim to self promote can constantly self sabotage their efforts as they don’t put enough of themselves out there in the marketplace, to get the amount of rejection required for feedback that leads to statistical analysis that allows objectively to light the path for success.

It’s like the salesperson who succeeds selling someone else’s product. They decide to leave and go it alone. They create their own business but the business is now their “baby”. The emotion of this kills their objectivity and the marketing is affected.

The biggest criticism of all is when people do go it alone, and appear to fail. They cannot get the success they got when working for someone else or marketing or selling someone else’s products or services. This is all too common and now you know why. It’s not a bad thing. And you haven’t failed until you quit. Not even when you go broke. There is a lesson to learn here.

Some people recognise this trait within themselves. Others don’t. But if you are prone to the emotion of criticism, it’s okay. It just means hire someone to do the work for you. Pay for the objectivity and protect your emotions. All celebrities use agents. All top athletes use sports management. It’s not that they’re too busy or too dumb to do it – some are extremely bright, business minded people. But when the brand is themselves, and fear of criticism is real, and the objectivity is thrown out like the baby with the bath water.