The great ad man Jack Trout, of Ries & Trout, wrote a book titled: “Differentiate Or Die” back in 2000.
Trout made the argument that in crowded, hyper-competitive markets…
(e.g. supplements.)
You either had to stand out like a sore thumb…
Or die a slow death.
(Or worse, fall into the purgatory of perpetual mediocrity where you have just enough to keep the lights on… but not so little to pull the plug.)
Now…
I could continue this email with several of my neat ways on how to stick out like a nun in a brothel here…
But I will not – you already have a panoply of materials on the matter.
(Blind Spot #3 in my book… and dozens of these emails that I send out every day.)
What I will tell you is something that certainly WON’T help you do it – which, incidentally, most of this industry is in the grip of…
The AI mania.
(Mania, by the way, is a mental illness – marked by periods of unreasoned excitement, euphoria, delusions and dangerous hyperactivity.)
Which is why I think all of you being stampeded into embracing ChatGipity… Claude…Gemini… Anthropic and all the rest of it…
Are fools.
You’re making yourself – and the customers you’re supposed to influence – essentially irrelevant.
Why?
Because that’s what AI is designed to do – to destroy differentiation and thus commoditize everything…
…and equalize everybody.
Their overlords programmed it to make every business, in any given category, look and sound like… well…
ALL the other businesses in that category.
It never ceases to amaze me how it doesn’t occur to the average email marketer – in this space or otherwise – that perhaps (just PERHAPS)…
…his competitors may also be using ChatGipity for their promo emails?
“Hehe i’m so smart, i’ll give it [ChatGipity] a polished prompt, and I’ll get that promo email done in a minute, it’s gonna be so great.”
(Reminds me of this meme.)
Yes Shifty:
No other supplement brand is sending a “🚨FLASH SALE: EXTRA 20% OFF🚨” email besides you.
Actually…
I’m going to copy-paste not one… not two… not three or four…
But TEN “🔥🔥💥FLASH SALE💥🔥🚀” emails from none other than TEN “different” supplement brands:
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🔥 FLASH SALE 🔥 BOGO 75% Off Creatine Supplements
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20% OFF Flash Sale Starts Now! ⚡
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FLASH SALE: Up to 80% off + Extra 10% Off
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🔥 $15 FAT BURNER FLASH SALE
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FLASH SALE: 20% Off—Today Only
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Flash Sale: Top Picks from 11p per Serving
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💥 Flash Sale: Critical Mass 6kg only £35
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24-Hour Flash Sale: 30% OFF 🔥
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🚨FLASH SALE🚨 15% off Creatine!
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FLASH SALE: 20% off Whey protein
===
“So what are you saying here, I’m not supposed to ever run a flash sale again?”
If that’s what you got out of this…
Not I, or anybody else, can probably help you for that matter – perhaps ask Grok to “break it down” for you.
Now I realize I was a bit more churlish – than I usually am – in this email…
But half of 2026 is already over.
I’m fatigued from the wild lust and nearly thoughtless adoption & embrace of AI these past few years…
In email marketing… marketing in general… heck, in everything!
I’ve lost my capacity to dress it up in polite euphemisms.
So that’s probably how I’m gonna handle anything on the matter of AI moving forward.
“G, if you hate it so much why do you talk about it so often?”
I don’t hate it.
I use it as a tool myself every day…
I just don’t accept the blatant lying marketing purported around that same tool.
A person can be both an optimist and a pessimist…
…all at once.
He can be an eager early adopter and skeptic…
…operating somewhere in the middle.
As for why I talk about it so often?
Because it almost always gets me lots of engagement.
And… I mean…
Am I not a (email) marketer?
Am I not supposed to get & keep attention?
Isn’t that part of my job?
(Many a people calling themselves “marketers” seem to have forgotten their job description – case in point, the emails above ^)
So when that stops being the case? I’ll stop talking about it.
Now let’s talk bizneez:
If you, at the very least, just do NOT use blatant AI in your email efforts…
…it’s likely you’ll stand out like a nun in a brothel.
But if you, on top of that, extinguish all of the Blind Spots I’ve covered inside my book…
[Part of this email’s content has been removed from this Email Echoes version of it.]
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