Is this bad manipulation or am I just being too negative?
I just attended a Zoom “course” by a random woman on FB who claimed to be a famous entrepreneur coach. The course was fine, there were a lot of problems that prevented it from being good. But one thing that stood out for me was when she talked about how to market your online courses to parents. She told people to reach out to parents personally and ask them if how their kids were doing. She assured that 90% of parents would say something like “My kid plays mobile games too much!” And that would be a great opportunity for you to tell them about your classroom. She also told people to tell parents things like “John is an intelligent child, but he forgets things easily, so you should get them to online class as soon as possible or else he will forget his lessons!” Another advice she gave people was that they should tell parents to watch out for their kids and make sure they went to class as much as possible, because no one wanted their kids to play all day.
To be honest, I find that really manipulative. You would manage to get the parents to pay for your class, but that doesn’t guarantee the kids to be happy with it, because they are going to class under the pressure of their parents. Moreover, the advice also preys on parents’ insecurity about their kids doing worse than other kids, and nothing good has ever come from kids being compared to other kids. I know the goal was to market your classroom, but the advice just sounded… petty to me.
What do you think about the advice?
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Yeah, I quite agree with you. Those sound like annoying manipulation strategies that are trying to take advantage of parents’ fears about their children, and that encourage parents to pester their kids, to me.
A sales pitch tied to an emotional response is a winning sales strategy, so it’s certainly nothing unusual. It’s only manipulative if the course doesn’t help the children succeed.
@KNOWITALL It’s only manipulative if the course doesn’t help the children succeed.
That is something I can’t guarantee, as there are a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs in that meeting and they may not have anything with them other than sheer enthusiasm.
@Mimishu1995 In our country, the saying and laws are generally “Buyer Beware”.
If they (the parents) do their homework and check out the course and references, it’s on them to make sure it’s what their child needs.
Of course if later you learn the courses are worthless and some sort of scam, depending on the situation, you could report them to the authorities as scammers. We have a Better Business Bureau we can report to here, to warn others.
If the parents are concerned about the kid’s gaming activity they need to do something about it. I didn’t see anything in the meeting that was helpful to the parents, just the same old nagging that obviously doesn’t work.
It’s marketing which by its very nature is manipulation. “You need what I am selling.”
As well as knowing how to market a product you should know what the product is. What exactly will the parents get for their money? How popular is the course, what is its content and its success rate? It’s as if she doesn’t care about any of that and her focus is entirely on selling. The best and most effective salesmanship matches the product to the customer so that everyone benefits. I’m not sure your famous entrepreneur coach is interested in that.
Personally, I would be a bit wary of some of these online courses.
@flutherother she did talk about how to operate an online class, but she went over that really fast. She even outright told people to go google some of the things she said without at least giving them a quick overview. But she seemed to drag out the talk about marketing for a really long time. So yeah, she didn’t seem to care very much about quality.
And my friend sent me the link of the course and I hopped in out of curiosity.
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