So, I need to tell you about something that happened last week that’s been living rent-free in my head ever since. I got DM’d on Indagare Beauty Instagram account by a marketing agency from the UK. And here’s the kicker – several of my clients got the exact same message. Same videos. Same promises. Same everything.
Now, I could have just deleted it and moved on. But instead, I decided to engage with this guy. To see how deep the rabbit hole went. And what unfolded was honestly a masterclass in everything you should NOT do when trying to reach premium brands.
But here’s where this gets interesting – and potentially uncomfortable. As I was dissecting why his approach failed so spectacularly, I started thinking…
How many of Ecommerce brand owners are accidentally doing a version of this to our own customers? How many brands are making these same mistakes in their marketing, just in slightly different packaging? And how much would this be hurting their online sales as a consequence?
So today, we’re going to walk through this entire conversation. I’m going to break down exactly why it doesn’t work for innovative, premium brands. And then – and this is the important bit – we’re going to turn the mirror around and look at whether you might be making similar mistakes with your own audience.
Fair warning: this might sting a bit. But if you’re building something genuinely unique and valuable, and looking for information about how to increase online sales, you need to hear this.
Let’s dive in.
The Play By Play
Alright, so this starts with a DM that pops up on my Indagare Beauty Instagram account. The message says:
“Hi, I have a question is this the right place to ask?”
Now, I’m immediately suspicious because I click through to his profile and it’s clearly a digital marketing guy from the UK. But I’m curious where this is going, so I respond:
“Sure you can ask questions here. Are you interested in one of our products?”
And then he sends a video. Not a written response. A pre-recorded selfie video. Let me paraphrase what he says:
“Cool, hope you guys are well. Just wanted to reach out and say that I love what you guys are doing with the business.”
Pause right there. He loves what we’re doing?
Mate, you haven’t asked a single question yet, let alone reference the kind of products we actually sell. You don’t know what we’re doing. But okay, continue…
“I genuinely believe I have an amazing opportunity for you guys as well, but I didn’t want to pitch you without your permission, quite frankly I know it’s pretty rude, I know a lot of people do it.”
Now, here’s the thing – asking permission to pitch is still a pitch. You’ve literally just pitched me on letting you pitch me. It’s like saying “I don’t want to interrupt you” while you’re currently interrupting someone.
“But this opportunity involves us getting you more customers in a brand new way, and it’s a complete pay-on-results basis, so there’s no risk on your side – if you don’t profit, we don’t profit, it’s as simple as that.”
Brand new way. Pay on results. No risk. These are all red flags disguised as benefits, by the way. We’ll come back to this.
“If you’re open to hearing what I have in mind, drop me a thumbs up in the chat and I’ll send over a quick one minute video.”
So I’m intrigued now. How far can I push this?
I respond, avoiding any emojis: “So your question is – can you pitch me an opportunity to get me more customers?”
He responds: “Exactly ?” and “Drop me a thumbs up if you are open to hearing what I have in mind ?”
I write back: “Sure, go for it.”
Now he sends me another pre-recorded video. And this is where it gets really interesting.
He introduces himself (I’ll keep him anonymous here though – I’m not one to name & shame!). He says they can increase my monthly revenue by $20-50k per month on top of my current revenue. Complete pay on results basis.
Then he cuts to some screenshots showing a brand that went from £15,000 per month to over £330,000 per month in sales. Impressive numbers. Big hockey stick graph. Very compelling if you don’t think too hard about it.
But here’s what he doesn’t tell me:
What do they actually DO? How did they achieve those results? What service are they providing? Is it paid advertising? Conversion rate optimisation? Email marketing? Are they literally just pumping money into the business themselves and taking a cut?
No idea. Complete mystery. Secret sauce, remember?
The video ends with him saying to send a thumbs up to book a demo call.
Now, this is where I decide to actually push back. Because everything about this is so generic, so clearly a mass outreach campaign. So I write:
“From that video, which was obviously not shot just for our brand, it’s not clear that you’ve either looked at our marketing or assessed where we might be lacking or how your skills would be beneficial. There’s nothing in your video about your secret sauce or how it would apply to us specifically.
Approaching a brand completely cold, from the other side of the world who has never heard of you before, with this kind of message makes a lot of assumptions about where we are at, how satisfied or unsatisfied with our growth rate we are, and that simply some anonymous stats and a promise of ‘results or you don’t pay’, is a big reach. You’ll need to do a whole lot more than this to pique my interest.”
And then… radio silence from me.
But not from Tom.
A couple days later: “Just checking if you saw my last message, I understand you must be very busy as well”
Then he sends me the “Disaster Girl” meme – you know the one, little girl smiling at the camera with a house on fire behind her – with the text “MY FOLLOWUPS BEING LEFT ON READ” at the top and “YOU” at the bottom.
Then the skeleton sitting at the computer meme: “NEVER GIVE UP NO MATTER HOW LONG IT TAKES.”
And that was it. That’s where the conversation ended.
The Anatomy Of Why This Fails
Okay, so let’s break down why this approach fundamentally doesn’t work for premium, innovative brands. And I mean genuinely doesn’t work, not just “it’s annoying.”
First: Zero Genuine Discovery
Tom never asked me a single question about Indagare Beauty. Not one. He didn’t look at our marketing. Didn’t assess our customer base. Didn’t understand our brand positioning. Didn’t know if we were profitable, struggling, scaling, launching something new, dealing with supply chain issues – nothing.
He showed up with a solution looking for a problem, rather than actually diagnosing whether we had the problem he solves.
Now think about this from a customer perspective. When you’re building a premium brand, you’re attracting customers who are discerning. They’re not impulse buyers. They want to understand what they’re buying and why it’s right for them specifically.
If your marketing doesn’t demonstrate that you understand THEIR specific situation, you’re just noise. You’re Tom. You’re everyone else shouting “I can help you!” without bothering to understand what help actually looks like.
Second: The Service That Dare Not Speak Its Name
This one’s huge. Tom never once told me what he actually does. Not once.
Is he running Meta ads? Google ads? Managing influencer partnerships? Optimising conversion rates? Building email flows? Creating content? Running affiliate programmes? Literally just putting his own money into purchases and taking a cut?
Absolutely no idea.
He showed me graphs going up and to the right. He mentioned “proven and reliable marketing funnels” – which could mean literally anything. He talked about his “secret sauce” – which apparently is so secret he can’t even tell me what category of marketing it falls into.
Think about how bizarre this is. Imagine going to a doctor who says “I can cure what’s wrong with you, and here are the results I got for other patients” but won’t tell you whether they’re prescribing medication, performing surgery, or recommending lifestyle changes. You’d run a mile.
But in marketing, we’re supposed to just trust the numbers and not ask what’s actually happening behind the curtain?
Now, why would someone be this vague? A few possibilities:
One: The service isn’t actually impressive when you name it. “We run Facebook ads” doesn’t sound like a secret sauce. So you dress it up with mystery and urgency.
Two: They want to get you on a call before revealing what they do, because once you know, you might realise you’re already doing it, or you could do it yourself, or it’s not what you need.
Three: They genuinely don’t know how to articulate their value beyond “we get results” – which tells you they probably don’t have a sophisticated understanding of their own process.
None of these are good.
Premium brands don’t operate in mystery. We’re transparent about our ingredients, our process, our values. We expect the same from our partners. If you can’t clearly articulate what you do and how you do it, I don’t trust that you know what you’re doing.
And this connects to those impressive graphs he showed me. £15k to £330k per month sounds incredible, right? But HOW?
If he scaled them through paid ads, what was the customer acquisition cost? What was the return on ad spend? How much of that £330k was actually profit after his fees and ad spend?
If he did it through influencer partnerships, how sustainable is that? Are those customers coming back?
If he optimised their website conversion rate, okay great – but that only works if you’ve already got traffic. Is that my bottleneck?
If he built out their email marketing, brilliant – but again, that requires an existing customer base to market to.
The mechanism matters. The HOW matters. Because the HOW tells me whether this is relevant to MY business, in MY situation, with MY constraints.
Tom showed me an outcome and expected me to work backwards to assume he could replicate it for me. That’s not how sophisticated business owners make decisions. We want to understand the strategy, the tactics, the inputs required from us, the timeline, the risks.
“Trust me, I got someone else these results” is not a business case. It’s a magic trick.
Third: Complete Lack of Personalisation
Premium brands aren’t built on cookie-cutter approaches. When you’re running a unique, innovative business, you need partners who understand what makes you different.
Tom’s pitch could have been sent to a supplements company, a fashion brand, or a freight business. If your pitch works for everyone, it works for no one.
This is actually a huge issue I see with a lot of marketing to Ecommerce brands. Everyone’s using the same playbook. The same “scale to 7 figures” language. The same testimonials that could be from anyone. The same promise that their system works for all product categories. But zero visibility about how.
But here’s the reality: a skincare brand selling $100 serums to women in their 40s needs completely different strategies than a tech accessories brand selling $25 phone cases to men in their 20s.
The customer psychology is different. The buying journey is different. The messaging is different. The channels might even be different.
If you’re marketing something premium and innovative, your customers are choosing you specifically because you’re NOT like everyone else. So why would they respond to marketing that treats them like everyone else?
Fourth: Assuming the Sale
The whole approach assumed I was dissatisfied with our current growth and desperately needed help. Maybe I am, maybe I’m not – but he never bothered to find out.
Innovative brands are run by people who are architects of their own success. We don’t respond well to assumptions. We respond to insight.
There’s this underlying desperation in Tom’s approach. The follow-up messages. The memes about being left on read. It all screams “I need you to say yes.”
But premium brands are bought, not sold. Our customers don’t want to be chased. They want to be understood, respected, and given the space to make their own informed decisions.
Fifth: The Meme Disaster
Can we talk about those memes for a second? When you don’t get the response you want, making jokes about being ignored isn’t charming. It’s desperate. And it completely undermines any authority you were trying to establish.
Imagine if one of your customers enquired about your product, you sent them some information, and then when they didn’t immediately buy, you sent them a meme about how they’re ignoring you. Would that make them more likely to purchase? Of course not. It would make them uncomfortable and probably block you.
Yet somehow, in B2B marketing, people think this is acceptable. It’s not.
The Uncomfortable Mirror
Okay, so here’s where this gets uncomfortable. Because it’s easy to laugh at Tom’s approach. It’s easy to feel superior about how we’d never do something so obviously generic and desperate.
But are you sure you’re not doing a version of this to your own customers?
Let’s walk through some scenarios. Be honest with yourself as we go through these.
Scenario One: The Email Sequence That Assumes Too Much
Someone subscribes to your list. Brilliant. They’re interested. But what do they actually want?
Day one of your sequence, you’re sending them a big discount code. But did they actually indicate they were price-sensitive? Or are you projecting that assumption onto them?
Here’s the thing about premium customers: aggressive discounting can actually be off-putting. It makes them question whether your regular prices were genuine. It makes them wonder if they should just wait for the next sale. It positions your brand as… not premium.
If someone’s engaging with your educational content, maybe what they actually want is more education. More depth. More understanding of why your product is different. Not 25% off.
You’re making assumptions about what they need and assumptions that everyone makes a purchase decision based on price alone, just like Tom made assumptions about what I needed.
Scenario Two: The Social Proof That Isn’t Relevant (Or Real…)
You’ve got testimonials on your website. Great. But who are they from?
If you sell premium skincare to women 35-55 who value natural ingredients and sophisticated formulations, and you’re showing me a product review video of a 23-year-old talking about how affordable your products are… that’s not social proof. That’s anti-proof.
Just like Tom showing me results from a random business I know nothing about, in a different country, in a category I don’t even know about.
Your testimonials need to be from people your ideal customer can see themselves in. Otherwise, you’re just creating noise.
Scenario Three: The Follow-Up That Doesn’t Add Value
Someone abandons their cart. You send three emails. That’s standard practice, right?
But what do those emails actually say? Are they just reminding people they left something behind? That’s the equivalent of Tom’s follow-up: “Just checking if you saw my last message.”
Or are they addressing why someone might have hesitated? Are they providing additional information? Are they deepening the relationship? Are they offering to answer questions?
Premium customers don’t usually abandon carts because they forgot. They abandon because something didn’t feel quite right. Maybe they want to research more. Maybe they’re not sure about the shade or the size. Maybe they’re waiting until payday. Maybe they found the shipping costs surprising.
If your abandoned cart emails are just “you forgot this!” you’re treating your customers like they have no agency. Like they’re the skeleton at the computer, just waiting around for you to remind them again.
Scenario Four: The Generic Value Proposition
Look at your homepage right now. Seriously, pull it up. What does your headline say?
Does it say something specific about what makes your brand unique? Or could it be on any website in your category?
“Premium skincare for radiant skin” – could be anyone. “High-quality products at affordable prices” – could be anyone. “The best [product category] in Australia” – could be anyone.
Tom’s pitch was “we’ll get you more customers in a brand new way.” Generic. Meaningless. Could apply to anyone.
Is your homepage doing the same thing?
Scenario Five: The Unclear Mechanism
This is the big one. Can someone visiting your website or social media clearly understand what your product actually does and why it’s different and better?
Or are you being vague because you think mystery is compelling? Are you using buzzwords instead of clear explanations? Are you talking about benefits without explaining the mechanism?
“Transforms your skin” – how? “Revolutionary formula” – what makes it revolutionary? “Results you can see” – what results, specifically?
Just like Tom never told me what service he actually provides, are you being clear about what your product actually does?
Customers that want things that are new, different and better are thoughtful consumers. They want to understand what they’re buying. Mystery might work for impulse purchases, but it doesn’t work for considered purchases from discerning customers.
What Tom Should Have Done
Alright, enough criticism. Let’s be constructive. What should Tom have done differently? And more importantly, what should YOU be doing differently?
Step One: Proper Research
If Tom had spent 15 minutes – just 15 minutes – looking at Indagare’s Instagram, website, and maybe even signed up for our email list, he could have identified specific, real opportunities.
“I noticed you’re not segmenting your post-purchase flow by product category.” That would have got my attention. That’s specific. That shows he actually looked.
Or “Your Meta ads are all static images when video content is getting significantly better engagement rates in the beauty space right now, particularly for demonstrating product application.”
That’s relevant. That’s actionable. That’s not generic.
For your brand: Before you send any marketing message – whether it’s an email, an ad, a DM – ask yourself: have I demonstrated that I understand this specific person’s situation? Or am I just broadcasting?
Step Two: Relevant Case Studies
Instead of showing me some random brand in the UK hitting £330k per month, show me a beauty brand you’ve worked with. Better yet, show me a beauty brand selling in Australia, dealing with our market conditions, our shipping costs, our customer avatar, our competitive landscape.
And don’t just show me the numbers. Show me the strategy. Walk me through the specific challenges they had and how you solved them. Give me enough detail that I can see parallels to my own situation.
For your brand: Your testimonials and case studies should be specific enough that your ideal customer can see themselves in the story. “This product changed my life” isn’t as powerful as “I’ve struggled with hormonal breakouts since my late 30s, and after trying countless products that either didn’t work or irritated my sensitive skin, this was the first thing that actually cleared my skin without causing redness.”
And for the love of all things holy, do not make up your testimonials or copy them from somewhere else!
Specificity builds trust. Vagueness builds skepticism.
Step Three: Lead With Value
What if instead of asking permission to pitch, Tom had sent me a three-minute Loom video analysing one of our recent campaigns?
“Hey, I noticed your recent launch campaign. Here are three things you did brilliantly: First, your educational content around the hero ingredient was fantastic – clear, credible, compelling. Second, your pre-launch email sequence built genuine anticipation without feeling salesy. Third, your user-generated content strategy created authentic social proof. Now, here’s one area where I think you left money on the table: your retargeting strategy seemed to end after 14 days, but beauty products typically have a longer consideration window, especially at your price point. If you’d extended your retargeting window and segmented your creative by where people dropped off in the journey, you likely could have captured another 15-20% of those warm prospects.”
No pitch. Just value. Just insight. If the analysis was good, I’d be asking HIM if he wanted to chat.
For your brand: Are you leading with value or leading with an ask? Your first touchpoint with a customer shouldn’t be “buy this.” It should be “here’s something useful/interesting/valuable.” Build trust before you ask for the sale, just like you date someone before asking for their hand in marriage.
Step Four: Understand the Buying Journey
Premium brands don’t make snap decisions based on DMs and memes. We evaluate partnerships carefully. We want to understand not just what you’ve done for others, but how you think. What’s your strategic philosophy? How do you approach problem-solving?
Tom’s approach tried to shortcut this entire process. “Here are some numbers, book a call, let’s go.” That might work for desperate businesses, but it doesn’t work for sophisticated ones.
For your brand: Map out your actual customer buying journey. How long does it typically take from first awareness to purchase? What information do they need at each stage? What objections come up? What questions do they ask?
Then make sure your marketing supports that journey, rather than trying to force people to move faster than they’re ready to move. If you do this, you’ll win customers for the long-term (rusted on as I like to say), vs customers who experience buyers’ remorse or who will never be brand loyal.
Step Five: Respect Their Intelligence and Autonomy
This is crucial. Innovative brand owners are smart. We’ve built something from nothing. We’ve solved problems. We’ve made difficult decisions. We’re not sitting around waiting for someone to save us.
Any marketing that positions your customer as helpless or desperate is immediately off-putting.
For your brand: Your messaging should empower your customers, not patronise them. You’re not rescuing them. You’re giving them tools, information, and products that help them achieve what they want to achieve. They’re the hero of the story. You’re the guide.
The Framework
Alright, let’s bring this home with a practical framework you can use. Before you send any marketing message – whether it’s a DM, an email, an ad, whatever – run it through these five questions:
Question One: Can I demonstrate I understand THIS specific audience, not just “people who might buy my product”?
If you can’t point to something specific about their situation, their challenges, or their context, your message is too generic.
Question Two: Am I leading with insight they don’t already have, or just with my credentials?
“We’re the best” is not insight. “Here’s something you might not have considered about your current approach” is insight.
Question Three: Have I earned the right to make an offer, or am I asking for something before giving anything?
Value first. Always. Build trust before you ask for the sale.
Question Four: Would I respond positively to this if I received it?
Be brutally honest. If you’d delete it, archive it, or ignore it, why would your customer respond any differently?
Question Five: Does this communication respect their intelligence and autonomy, or does it assume they’re desperate?
My bet is, they’re discerning, so treat them accordingly.
Need To Do Better?
Look, I don’t want to be too harsh on Tom. He’s probably getting a conversion rate that makes this approach worthwhile for him. If you send 1,000 DMs and get 10 responses and close 2 clients, maybe that’s a viable business model.
But here’s the thing – the brands falling for this aren’t the unique and innovative brands building something remarkable.
They’re the desperate ones. The ignorant ones. The ones who don’t know better. The ones who see big numbers and don’t ask the hard questions.
If you’re reading this, I’m hoping you’re not building that kind of business. I hope you’re building something unique. Something with genuine value. Something that solves real problems for real people in ways that matter.
So don’t market like Tom. And definitely don’t partner with people who market like Tom.
Your customers are sophisticated. They can smell generic a mile away. They want authentic connection, genuine understanding, and partnerships with brands that actually get them.
Every touchpoint matters. Every message either builds trust or erodes it. Every email, every ad, every social post is either demonstrating that you understand your customer, or broadcasting that you don’t.
Be better than the DM bros. Your brand deserves it. Your customers deserve it.
And if you’ve been accidentally doing any of the things we talked about today – and I think we all have at some point – that’s okay. Awareness is the first step. Now you can fix it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic too by the way! I’m actually going to invite you all to hit me up in my DM’s @cathlangman
And don’t forget, my team and I are here to help if you know you need a better way.
Click here to book a free, personalised Brand Growth Strategy Session.
For now, audit your marketing. Be ruthless. Be honest. And build something worth talking about.
