One of my favorite marketing & merchandising case studies is Christian Louboutin.
I write a lot about it in my Markauteur book (not currently available for sale) especially.
But basically:
Stefania (who has a background in fashion, and saw all this first hand) was telling me how this French designer’s shoes are so horrifyingly painful to wear that customers sometimes have to literally get liposuction surgery on their feet to wear them.
This is no joke either.
They even have a name for it:
“Cinderella Surgery”
And yet, these prohibitively expensive (they ain’t cheap), “feet-mangling” shoes sell out the same day they drop — with people even getting depressed if they aren’t invited to the company’s sample sale, shoving matches & fights happening in line over who can buy them first, and thieves routinely stealing these bizarrely designed shoes out of other customers’ shopping bags while on the way to the counter to pay for them. Certain A-list celebrities have even been known to pay through the nose just to put a special kind of Botox on the balls of their feet, so they can more comfortably stand in this brand’s stilettos on the red carpet.
Very strange.
Not being a “shoe” guy, it’s all rather bizarre to me.
But what is not bizarre is all the Chinese factory pirates who take advantage of the demand, ripping off the design, and hawking them in the typical mass produced, shoddy fashion Chinese factory pirates are known for doing — all the way down to finding the same shade of red paint for the bottoms.
And what is also not bizarre is those shoes don’t fetch nearly as much money.
If anything, they are balked at by the high roller customers.
And they don’t make anywhere near the $50 million ol’ CL’s company gets last I checked.
The reason:
Nobody finds rip-offs as valuable as the real thing.
Which brings me to AI:
I have read all about how AI is going to radically change everything in marketing & copywriting — from content to design to marketing to copywriting to emails to everything in between. The broccoli heads on Twitter have been insisting ever since I hopped back on the platform in February that those who don’t use AI (like fapGPT) are “not gonna make it” or whatever.
And it’s all pure, unadulterated nonsense.
Just another “mad dash” as the great Dan Kennedy recently wrote.
The gullible will eat it up (and they are).
While the craftsman at the game will profit immensely from it.
No, the craftsmen will not profit necessarily by using it.
They will profit from it by continuing to be craftsmen at what they do selling the genuine thing instead of the cheap, Chinese pirate factory content that AI can only produce – where even if it looks and behaves in a passable way, it still won’t be the same thing, generate the same engagement, make the same kind of money, or create the same kind of raving fanbase companies like Christian Louboutin do in the fashion world.
I kinda wish AI would hurry up and do what all the AI shills keeps saying it can but clearly can’t.
It’ll only make those of us writing our own copy, our own emails, our own content that much more valuable, that much more of a novelty, and, yes, that much more money.
I’m always amused by the AI bois.
They really do live in an alternate reality — it’s like they literally live on the internet.
And it’s even more than amusing how they are always the ones to tell people to touch grass when they haunt social media 24/7, in echo chambers of other AI bois, all high on their own hopium and copium that AI will liberate them from this dirty, nasty thing called…
Work.
It reminds me of another story about this.
Back in July 2020 when Stefania was pregnant with Willis, we sallied forth down to the DMV. Me to renew my drivers license and her to get her Oregon license. And due to the idiotic covid rules (that, admittedly, worked in my favor as a recluse…) the DMV was appointment-only.
That meant we were the ONLY two people there.
With no lines or having to take a number.
And with the place sparkling clean.
I mean, you could practically eat off the counter, that’s how clean it was.
And the service?
Like I told people after:
The only thing that would have made the DMV more pleasant (again, the DMV!) would be if they had served refreshments. I mean, the employees there were not rushed or stressed, and were so pleasant we almost didn’t even want to leave.
In fact:
Stefania had some trouble with her social security number which they had to change after we got married. And the DMV employee, without being asked, spent over an hour on the phone dealing with the state to help expedite and get the problem sorted that ordinarily would have taken something like 6 weeks or longer, especially at that time when all the state agencies were backed up.
But not for Stefania.
She didn’t wait six weeks — she had her license when we left the DMV that day.
Now, do you really think AI or some automated process could have done that?
Of course not.
It would have coldly dealt with it, with zero humanity, because it’s not human.
It can’t negotiate or do anything it’s not programmed to.
That lack of humanity means there’s no relationship.
The only people who have a relationship with AI are deviants who molest sex robots.
I bring all this up not to cause a fight or piss off the AI bois, although I have no doubt this email will have done that in some cases. No, I bring this up because they are clear examples of how what is not human, what can only copy & mimic humanity, can never really have humanity any more than a sociopath can have a real connection with another human even if they intellectually wish to.
And that means opportunity for the rest of us.
That opportunity being:
Relationships will be an even far more valuable new coin of the realm.
I will happily go on record (not that this is a unique take, it’s not) right now and predict as AI gets more adopted, used, relied upon by businesses for writing ads, content, emails, whatever… the more in-demand, the more valued, and the more money will be made by those who don’t use it for those purposes, and give that human connection that can only be given by someone creating content of any kind with genuine humanity — flaws and all.
There are already agencies now using this to their advantage.
Literally saying they do NOT use AI in their marketing, to stand out.
Something to think about.
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Ben Settle
