This is Day 10 of How To Spot a Female Lifestyle Empowerment Brand (FLEB). ⠀

If you’re a consumer, this crash course can help you make an informed, powerful decision about who you offer your time, money, and attention to.⠀

If you’re an entrepreneur, download this free 10-day class to help you audit your own business practices, so that you can:⠀

  1. Bake justice into your business practices and marketing (and flourish while you do that)⠀
  2. Make sure you’re creating the social and client impact you intended

WHAT NOT TO DO⠀

FLEB Tactic #10:⠀

Use Testimonials as Triggers⠀

Client testimonials on sales pages are there to prove results & establish trust.⠀

But most of us only publish the most exceptional results achieved by a select few of our clients.⠀

Client testimonials like that are not an honest indicator of real outcomes for most people.

And so the social/mental trigger of “social proof” is being subconsciously activated to MANUFACTURE trust.⠀

In a high-risk selling situation, subconsciously-triggered trust undermines a client’s decision-making process — with potentially disastrous results for them.⠀

WHAT TO DO INSTEAD⠀

Culture-Making Business Practice #10⠀

What if we don’t need client testimonials on sales pages?⠀

What if it might be better for our clients if we don’t?

What if we can still achieve & even exceed our revenue goals without them?⠀

⠀

What is the female lifestyle empowerment brand (FLEB)

and why is it a problem?

Female

  • Conform to the cultural demands of Ideal Femininity in order to rise
  • Reinforces gender dualist/binary

Lifestyle

  • Display wealth, privilege & leisure in order to manufacture social authority over other women

Empowerment

  • Use the language of feminism & social change to bait a women into following/buying… while doing (oppressive) business as usual.
  • Conflates individual success with collective empowerment (they are not the same thing)

Brand

  • Teach women how to style themselves as saleable, consumable objects in order to ‘succeed’
  • Asks us to erase ourselves in order to perform a brand character

I hesitated to post this. I do not want anyone to interpret this a wholesale ban on client testimonials.⠀

Let’s navigate this contextually, with nuance.

Dr. Michelle Mazur’s (@drmichellemazur) high-risk/low-risk distinction can help us discern when & where to use testimonials (see Day 9).⠀

High risk selling situation? Maybe testimonials don’t belong on that sales page.⠀

On my high-price offers, I currently do not use client testimony AT ALL…and I always hit my income goals. ⠀

(This year my sales are up 190% compared to all of 2020.)⠀

IT CAN BE DONE. No client testimonials required.⠀

h/t @toimarie for her critique of testimonials

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