Stupid Is As Stupid Does – How Stupid Do Marketers Think You Are?

“Stupidity” is a movie. It’s a documentary about the “dumbing down” of America – American culture, American society and the evolutionary adaptation which seems to make stupidity a vital factor for survival.

I found the DVD of “Stupidity” in my local DVD store, just after bumping into another movie called ‘Idiocracy”. This one is a feature movie directed by Mike Judge (of “Beavis and Butthead” fame) and starring Luke Wilson, and is based on the premise that Wilson, a not-very-intelligent ‘Average Joe’, accidentally travels through time to 2506, when because of the ‘dumbing down’ of American society, he turns out to be the brightest guy on the planet. Hilarious consequences ensue.

What caught my eye about ‘Idiocracy’ was a comment in the blurb about the ‘dumbing down’ of society being caused by ‘commercialism’. As a marketer, I have to wonder about this. Are marketers in general, and Internet marketers in particular, contributing to the ‘dumbing down’ of society?

There are a couple of books on the subject. And there are some books which offer a contrarian view – that the era of video games and TV shows like “Survivor” have contributed to creating a generation who are more able to hold multiple conflicting points of view in their heads. I recommend Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good For You” if you’re not convinced by the “dumbing down” argument.

As examples from popular culture, Johnson mentions TV series like ’24′, where the viewer can quickly get completely lost among the multiple story lines, with characters and stories being introduced and discarded at a rapid pace.

The Internet is a home for a broad range of wildly differing points of view. I was bemused to read John Carlton’s experience of being slagged off on MetaFilter because his sales page was ‘spammy’. The MetaFilter tread is about whether long sales copy websites actually work or not. The comment that really struck me was this one, from crackingdes, an IAACopywriter:

Yes. They do work.

Just like the 5-page junk mail hard sell letters you get in the mail do work, or they wouldn’t keep spending the thousands of dollars to send them.

They work, but only if you’re selling to stupid customers. As evidenced by the response here, most web savvy people respond with “Yuck!” and navigate away. Just like most marketing savvy people pitch the hard sell junk mail in the trash.

But the people who are not as savvy do read it, and it works on them.

So, it depends what you’re selling. If you’re selling a scammy product that someone would have to be less than bright to buy, then the long page will sucker them in great. If you’re selling a high-quality product that people will buy without having their arm twisted, then RUN DON’T WALK away from the long page, because it will completely send the wrong message about your company and your products.

The anti-marketers at Digg also recently had a field day with John Reese, calling him a ‘smug rich &$$hole’ for publishing a picture on his blog of his fish tank being cleaned.

Are all Internet marketers just out to make a quick buck by exploiting stupid people?

I know that there are plenty of people who would never buy a product based on a sales letter like this one. But I did. I bought John Carlton’s “Kick Ass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” because of a sales letter very similar to that one. Does that make me stupid? Perhaps. But it’s a solid product from a widely respected copywriter, which has greatly improved my understanding of what goes into writing great sales copy.

Fortunately “web-savvy people” aren’t the target market for these “scammy” products. These people know all about web design, and certainly wouldn’t want to soil their hands by actually selling anything.

So? Conclusions?

1. No-one ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of people.
2. People are less stupid than you give them credit for.

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