My mother is incredibly susceptible to salesmen. You’ve heard the expression “could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo” – she’s the Eskimo.
I puzzled over it for a long time until I realized her willingness to buy anything from anybody is a function of her desire to please people and one of the biggest differences between the baby boomers and those generations that follow. They were raised in a high-trust society; we were not.
My mom grew up in a small city where most people knew each other. Everyone had an industry they were in, and they were selling their product primarily to their neighbors. Hence, buying something from somebody was strengthening a social bond. The salesman needed to offer a good product at a good price, or his social position would be threatened. He could lose his friends and his livelihood by being dishonest.
If Jim down the street sells vacuums, of course, you’ll buy one from him. He’s always been a good, honest man and a good neighbor. You can trust him, and you want him to be successful. He wants business but doesn’t want to upset the neighbors; he needs to do a good job for them with sales and service. This is the backbone of a high-trust society. People know each other. If you meet somebody new, he’s likely to just be a local resident you haven’t met yet or a potential friend.
Contrast this to the post-Gen X experience of sales, where salesmen are viewed more like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: conniving tricksters who will con you out of your money if you aren’t careful.
Seinfeld exhibits the later reality of sales in a low-trust society when Jerry goes to buy a car:
At the 2:30 mark, the entire setup flips when Elaine dumps the salesman. Jerry goes from being an insider to an outsider, and suddenly he’s being screwed in the sale. The obvious deception of charges like “rust proofing” is revealed when the couple gets back together. Of course, residents of large cities are going to be on the leading edge of low-trust society since there are only so many people you can know and many in and out groups in a metropolitan area.
The comedy of this sort of setup is born of reality, even if it is exaggerated. You have to trust the salesman, and the bigger the deal, the more trust is required. Since you don’t have the car, you have to trust it is of high quality and in good working order that the salesman isn’t hiding anything from you. He has all the information required to value the item in question, and you don’t – the balance to that asymmetry is the social matrix. He’d like to sell you something in the future, and your kids are also on the same baseball team. If you don’t know him and will never see him again, the incentives are all misaligned.
I read a book last year called How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins. It’s one of those classic books on sales, and it reads like something out of the 1980s. It’s not a bad book, per se, but if you are younger than about fifty-five, you’ll immediately get a sense that Tom is teaching all the things that you associate with sleazy salesmen trying to rip you off. Things like avoiding naming the price, cold calls, certain sayings like “draw up the paperwork,” etc., signal to a cautious person that he is being deceived. There is also the problem of “skin in the game” – Tom is making his money selling books on sales, not selling things (or presumably he’d just be doing that), but let’s table that because presumably, he made money in sales at one point.
The thing is, the ideas and techniques are not sleazy on their own; they become sleazy when used in our post-trust society. The sucker who gets hosed in a sale is the one who thinks he’s operating in a high-trust society when he’s not. The challenge in 2023 is taking those ideas and adapting them for the low-trust modern society.
You can watch a companion piece of content on YouTube to get a feel, “How to Master the Art of Selling Anything”:
The first thing he talks about is finding common ground. It’s about establishing a relationship with the customer, thus entering into their circle of trust, their community, and signaling that you are a person the customer can trust. Again, this is not bad advice, but in 2023, younger consumers will put up barriers because they smell a fink. You don’t know me. The important idea is establishing a relationship, but the techniques need updating. A modern person used to online shopping is also going to view salespeople as parasitic since they don’t make or distribute the product; they exist to convince people to buy it, which means their incentives are not the customers’ incentives.
Enter the modern parasocial relationship on the internet. Social media creates connections, stepping in and filling the wide gaps between people created by a pluralistic, multi-cultural society by allowing individuals to make their own virtual communities. Through the community-making that occurs on the internet, we have many small-scale societies with in-group trust.
This is a sales strategy, indeed the first replacement for Tom’s sales ideas. You enter into or create a community online by making content that appeals to a group. You then sell products designed to appeal to that group or use your parasocial relationship with viewers/readers to sell a product the audience buys because of their relationship with you rather than because they need the product. The more “out” the group, the more lucrative it is.
This is used in political marketing extensively. Marvel will make a book that is explicitly about lesbian superheroes, and people who view themselves as part of an out-group (LGBT, etc. or adjacent) will buy the book to support the message or the authors whom they like for their politics, not because they think the book will be good. This happens on the conservative side as well, with comics made by conservative pundits and sold to conservative followers as an “out-group” alternative to the mainstream.
So, just like how grandma bought a vacuum cleaner from Jim down the street, modern people buy comics from people who make videos saying things with which they agree—people with whom they have a parasocial relationship.
Keep in mind as I write this, I do have skin in the game. I make YouTube content, and some of it is political. I sell books through my YouTube channel. I don’t try to market my books as alternative books for certain groups. I genuinely want people to buy my books because they are interested in the ideas in them or because they think there will be a good story between covers. Yes, parasocial relationships go with making YouTube content.
I’m revealing a bit of the sausage, but it is a marketing strategy that works. If you don’t have a high-trust society, you have to make one.
And you can guess that when it is possible to make your own in-group, that will be abused like the sleazy salesmen of yore. Chances are you can think of a YouTuber who attracted a cult of personality and used that to sell a sub-par product to people who trusted him. It’s not just political, either. Virtual societies can run along any point of common interest, especially fandom of certain IPs or mediums.
I should lastly mention that parasocial relationships are not necessarily “para” but can become quite real. I met people playing World of Warcraft that became real-life friends! I consider lots of my mutuals on Twitter to be real-life friends. It’s all about how you manage those spaces and how you develop that society, that common ground, and where you take it. A trusting society has to be full of trustworthy people.
I am an independent writer and musician. If you like me, trust me, and enjoy the parasocial relationship we have, you can buy my books and be part of my virtual micro-society, or join my Patreon.
"If Jim down the street sells vacuums, of course, you’ll buy one from him. He’s always been a good, honest man and a good neighbor. You can trust him, and you want him to be successful. He wants business but doesn’t want to upset the neighbors; he needs to do a good job for them with sales and service. This is the backbone of a high-trust society. People know each other. If you meet somebody new, he’s likely to just be a local resident you haven’t met yet or a potential friend."
Reading that was a bit spooky for me, since there was a vacuum sales and repair shop/used bookstore run by a man named Jim in my town. He just died last year, and it was a big blow, because he was one of the best people I've ever known. He looked a bit like Mr. Rogers, and had the same type of gentle, soft-spoken demeanor. I used to love to go to his shop and have conversations with him while I would look through the used books he had in one section of the store and he would work on vacuum cleaners. I knew him from the time I was about 6 years old onward. Everyone knew and loved him, even the Mayor, who came into the shop one day while I was there. He would walk everywhere he needed to go unless it was raining, and, in his 70s, was more fit than many people in their 30s. I never knew that he had been a Vietnam veteran until I read his obituary.
"Contrast this to the post-Gen X experience of sales, where salesmen are viewed more like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice: conniving tricksters who will con you out of your money if you aren’t careful."
That's been the case for quite a while with certain types of salesmen. If you watch a lot of 1930s-1940s movies (as I have), there are a lot of portrayals of door-to-door salesmen being smarmy and conniving, or, even more commonly, annoying pests who don't take no for an answer. There are innumerable scenes of people opening the door, seeing a salesman, and slamming the door after quickly saying "we don't want any."
Some movies featured traveling salesman protagonists, but even those usually had a running gag in which the protagonist would get a bunch of doors slammed in his face because people saw salesman as a nuisance. (This reminds me: I highly recommend the Red Skelton movie "The Fuller Brush Man" (1948). The whole movie is good, but the final act is some of the best slapstick comedy - and best stuntwork - that I have ever seen. There's also a pretty good sequel called "The Fuller Brush Girl" starring Lucille Ball.)
Starting around the 1920s, there also used to be a bunch of dirty jokes about Fuller Brush Men seducing farmer's daughters, the implication being that they were slimy city-slickers that couldn't be trusted.
Used car salesmen have had a reputation for dishonesty for many decades. There was even a 1961 episode of "The Twilight Zone" called "The Whole Truth" that used this archetype to great effect. The hit 1960s song "The Little Old Lady from Pasadena" was inspired by a well-known joke about used car salesmen selling cars with a lot of milage on them by lying that the previous owner was a "little old lady from Pasadena who only drove it to church on Sundays."
I think that the common denominator was that most of these depictions were set in large cities (where people are often not closely connected to people not from their neighborhood), or were about people from big cities going to the country were they were strangers (as in the Fuller Brush Man/farmer's daughter jokes). They generally were not about salesmen in small towns selling things to their fellow townsfolk. Then again, there are exceptions, such as Mr. Haney on "Green Acres" (1965-1971), an extremely conniving salesman who would swindle his fellow residents of the small rural town Hooterville.
All of these are fictional portrayals of course, but trends in fiction tend to reflect beliefs or stereotypes that are held by many people in the culture at large.
"My mother is incredibly susceptible to salesmen. You’ve heard the expression “could sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo” – she’s the Eskimo."
My favorite actress, Glenda Farrell (who was born in 1901 and had her heyday in the 1930s) reportedly owned three vacuum cleaners and several sets of encyclopedias because she couldn’t say no to salespeople. In her case, the reason was that in the 1920s, she was poor and had to work during the day as a saleslady and a night in an artificial flower factory, so she understood firsthand how hard it can be to make a living in sales.
One reason scamers target the elderly is that they grew up in a high trust society. Even in many large cities we used to have the vestiges of a high trust society. I am old enough to recall a time when you could fill up your tank with gas, and go in to pay afterwards. This would be unthinkable today. This slow decades long decline in trust has sped up exponentially in the last two or three years and the costs are much more than just economic. My grocery store has eliminated the convenient hand baskets to carry your items in because they facilitated theft. If my children need to use the restroom I must hunt down one of the staff to give me the code to the lock on the bathroom door. If I want to purchase some items from our Walmart, I must locate someone to unlock the cabinet where they are displayed. I don't live in a bad part of town mind you. Sadly, things are going to get much worse.