Honest marketingPositioning & persuasion
8 practices · 4 case practices · 1 free
Connect an offer to a customer’s need and check the claims you make.
Marketing here means connecting an offer to a need someone actually has, and checking that each claim holds up. The scenarios cover describing fit and trade-offs plainly, urgency that is true, testing a message before a redesign, and answering a buyer who asks why they should pay.
Several are case practices: you read the evidence, such as results from four weeks of posts, before deciding what to do.
Situations you can practice
Every practice is a written scenario. Case practices add a file to investigate before you decide what to say.
Selling booking software to an instructor swamped by messages
Noor described her evenings in an interview. Connect your scheduling software to that part of her day without claiming hours saved.
8 minFoundationsFree starter
A customer asks if your notebook paper suits fountain pens
Check what the shop’s ink tests show for Rae’s own pen, then answer honestly, including the drawback, and offer a sample page to try before buying.
12 minStretchCase practiceSoulful
Testing one headline before redesigning a newsletter signup page
Ari wants to change the headline, image and form at once. Plan one fair test from the traffic and your analyst’s note, with a long enough run and a fixed end.
15 minDeep practiceCase practiceSoulful
Selling the last places without false urgency
The organizer wants “last chance” and a countdown. Check each line against the booking sheet, then write a promotion from the real deadline and places.
12 minStretchCase practiceSoulful
A prospect asks why they should pay when free chatbots exist
Explain what a free tool can and can’t do with Rosli’s prices and stock, then restate your $1,500 pilot as an offer he can decline.
10 minStretchSoulful
Posting about an order form you built for a home bakery
Say what you built for Dalia and one thing that went wrong at first, without claiming time savings you haven’t measured.
8 minFoundationsSoulful
Deciding which kind of post to keep after four weeks of posting
Compare four weeks of posts by the buyers they brought, not likes, then tell your cofounder what to keep, what small numbers can’t show and what’s next.
13 minStretchCase practiceSoulful
A seller says another shop offered more for the same laptop
Answer with what your shop really offers, without running down the other shop or pressing for a yes, and let the seller choose.
12 minStretchSoulful
Read more on positioning & persuasion
How to tell a customer your product is not the right fitWhen a buyer’s need goes beyond what your product does, say so early, name what it does well, and point to a way to check before they pay.How to write urgency without fake scarcityA small nursery has limited delivery places and a real cutoff. How to say so without implying the plants are running out, and keep the number true.The research behind these practices
Each practice cites the studies that informed its design and says where they may not apply. These are the sources cited most across the 8 practices on this page; they inform the practices and are not proof that the practices work.
- An integrative model of organizational trust (Academy of Management Review · conceptual model, 1995). Cited by 3 practices here.
Mayer, Davis and Schoorman define trust as willingness to be vulnerable and propose that perceived trustworthiness rests on ability, benevolence and integrity. It is a conceptual model rather than an experiment, and it does not say that any sequence of messages creates trust.
- Simulation-based learning in higher education: a meta-analysis (Meta-analysis · 145 studies, 2020). Cited by 3 practices here.
Chernikova and colleagues pooled 145 studies of simulation-based learning in higher education and found a large overall effect on complex skills, with scaffolding a positive moderator. Learners with little prior knowledge gained more from worked examples and those with more gained more from reflection. Most studies came from medical and teacher education, so applying the results to adult people skills or to this product is an inference.
- An examination of the nature of trust in buyer-seller relationships (Journal of Marketing · survey of purchasing managers, 1997). Cited by 2 practices here.
Doney and Cannon surveyed more than 200 purchasing managers. Trust in the supplier firm and in its salesperson shaped expected future dealings, although after controlling for prior experience and supplier performance neither affected the current supplier choice. It concerns industrial buyers, not small-business owners, and it does not test teaching before selling.
- Dark patterns at scale: findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites (Measurement study · ACM CSCW, 2019). Cited by 2 practices here.
Mathur and colleagues crawled about 11,000 shopping sites and found dark patterns on about one in ten, with outright deceptive ones, such as countdown timers that reset and low-stock messages that were not true, on 183 sites. It documents how common these designs are, not their effect on buyers.
- Practicing versus inventing with contrasting cases (Experiments · Journal of Educational Psychology, 2011). Cited by 2 practices here.
Schwartz, Chase, Oppezzo and Chin taught adolescents physics ideas with a ratio structure, such as density, using sets of cases that differed in the feature that matters. Students who tried to work out the principle from the cases before being told transferred it better than students told first and then practicing on the same cases. Leetsoul gives the guide first and one case per attempt, closer to the told-first group, so this supports building cases that differ in what matters, not the order; applying it to sorting statements against a case file is an inference.
- Advertising content and consumer engagement on social media: evidence from Facebook (Observational study · Management Science, 2018). Cited by 1 practice here.
Lee, Hosanagar and Nair coded 106,316 posts from 782 companies and found that humor and emotion went with more likes and shares, while informative content such as deals went with more click-throughs toward buying. Different content moves different measures; the study did not follow people to purchases.
13 more sources are listed on the research page.
Limits
Research on persuasion and message testing does not give a universal conversion formula, and a result in one study may not hold for your audience. The guidance explains choices; it does not predict sales.
Leetsoul has not shown that these practices improve skill in real life, and the original scenarios have not been independently tested. The sources inform the design of the exercises.
Try one in your own words
Write your response to a fictional conversation, read the guidance, then decide what you would change. Three starter practices are free; Soulful opens the full library.
Written by Leetsoul. Updated . Scenarios are fictional.