Appearance Matters
The dystopian way in which “fake it till you make it” has become the way for everything.
Now that life is heavily mediated through screens our perception of the world is limited to only 2 of our 5 senses.
This creates distortions in our perception as we’re now only able to evaluate products, services or interactions on Zoom based on what we see and hear, and we’re left to be disappointed when the reality of the product, service or place is done in person.
We’re told growing up to “Not judge a book by its cover” but that couldn’t be further from the truth in how the world actually operates, especially in this day in age.
Short vs Long & Funnels
There’s an idea in marketing of the funnel. Potential customers go through several stages before making a purchase, and at each stage, some drop off.
A funnel can be applied to pretty much anything from sales & marketing, to getting to know someone (dating or just making friends, or hoping to do business with). The short-term (Attention & Interest) must be satisfied before people can think about the long term (Action).
There’s no point in thinking about the long-term if you can’t get past the short-term.
Improving the appearance of something is about widening the size of the top of the funnel in the hopes that more will make it to the bottom of the funnel. This means if you want to sell more product or service “It’s a numbers game.” more so than “I make the best product”.
Fake it till you make it
Appearance has always mattered and the term “Fake it till you make it” is a good example of it.
The “fake” paparazzi effect to signal importance
Once something is discovered to work, we copy the heck out of it until everyone’s done it and it’s no longer unique. As Gary Vaynerchuk said “Marketers ruin everything”. It’s why all the listings on AirBnB have the same Ikea look, or there are restaurants with tons of positive reviews, good decor, and good looking food, but if you actually taste it, it’s crap. The pictures and reviews on Google supersede the actual substance. It’s not uncommon now to come across places that incentivize Google Reviews by offering a free drink or dessert in exchange for a review…some will even write it for you! Places, like Dubai, or even museums have become Instagram optimized. No longer are models at trade shows enough but the tradeshow itself could exist simply for the purpose of being seen.
SEO
In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) there’s the idea of White Hat vs Black Hat SEO.
White Hat listens to what Google claims they value and writes content based on that. “Write high quality content”.
Black Hat recognizes what Google actually looks for, and games for that. This can include links for “authoritative sources” or creating a private blog network (PBN) to create a paparazzi effect on the site, so Google thinks it’s more authoritative than it actually is.
Gray Hat that’s somewhere in between. Write content “reviewing” products that they certainly did not actually physically review and test out but use keywords that people are searching for, and make sure your article includes it.
The algorithms are constantly being tinkered with to weed out Black Hat SEO but there’s always ways to game it and that’s why the whole industry of SEO even exists. It’s a constant cat and mouse game where Google updates their algorithm to improve the “quality of the results” but then inevitably it opens up another way to be exploited.
Ecommerce
When I lived in China and purchased stuff from Taobao (Chinese Amazon), I basically expected the first 10k reviews to be fake as in China there’s a service known as brushing to help people garner reviews to help them build up momentum for sales of their products. Likewise, those tactics migrated to Amazon whereby if a product has a lot of reviews, and sales, and they’re early enough in a category, Amazon will promote them to the top of their category. I had friends and family help me do the same when I used to sell pizza stones on Amazon, and it’s now made me jaded that the first dozen or so reviews are probably incentivized or fake, but once someone’s started snowballing a bit, Amazon’s traffic volume would take care of the rest.
Products that rank highly on Amazon are not necessarily the best products, merely the products that got in the earliest, gained the most reviews and had the highest quality listing (optimized keywords and images). In essence, pictures matter more for getting a sale than the quality of the product itself, at least in the short-term.
Dating
The old advice of “Just be yourself” may work on the date or when you’re in the relationship, but it doesn’t help you get to the point of being on a date. Women have always known their appearance matters and so that’s why fashion, makeup, plastic surgery and other beauty enhancing techniques are marketed towards them.
It used to be that you’d meet new people in a social setting (bar, hobbies, church, school, work), and through observation and interaction of another person, you’d eventually gain a sense of who you’d be attracted to and then start dating. A long term first approach.
Now that we’re more isolated, and people use apps to meet people, it’s about optimizing for casting the widest net, in the hail mary hopes of getting them further down the funnel, or in the case of single women, making hoops and loops for men to disqualify themselves.
This takes the form of “optimizing your profile” on both the app and Instagram to cultivate a persona that is generally considered attractive for the purposes of attracting prospective suitors (this applies to both men and women). People will do this by choosing good photos, and writing an interesting, thoughtful story under the profile.
My Instagram1
For the long-term success of the relationship, it matters how good of a person you are and the quality of the interaction but for success in even getting to that point, single people are forced to play a game of selling themselves (the short term).
“Faking it till you make it” is really just taking what will appeal to the largest number of people and optimizing for that.
Pandering
Chinatown’s in the US have an interesting story as their distinctive architectural style was an intentional pandering by white American architects' interpretation of what they’d think China would like. This would help preserve the cultural heritage of Chinese in the face of pressure to relocate from city centers.
Likewise on Amazon, it’s increasingly harder for me to discern books that are by reputable authors who have done deep research, and those who have simply learned to game Amazon to produce books that people want that will confirm their beliefs (the business model is called Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)). For example, there’s a whole genre of Children’s books on Amazon for adults who want to raise their children in a certain way.
In Kashgar, Xinjiang, China (the Muslim portion of the country), they tore down the old town to build a new “old city”, essentially Disneyfying the area. This was done to supposedly “preserve” the culture though I’m sure there were some underlying “security” reasons as well.
Old Old City
New “Old City”
In China, there’ll be “5 star hotels” but some basic things will be missing
No u-bend in the pipe to prevent the smell from wafting back
The door will be off kilter and not close properly
Someone has slipped sexual service cards under the doors
Recently a waterfall was discovered to be fed by piped water. Tourists expected a waterfall, and the rains aren’t always consistent enough year round for a waterfall, so install a pipe to grab water from further upstream, and “let there be a waterfall”
Likewise when purchasing corn flour to make tortillas, are you going to trust white American sounding Bob’s Red Mill or Mexican sounding Maseca?
Another example is in Asia there’s a stereotype that black people have really white teeth, which I think comes from the contrast of their skin tone relative to their teeth, not that they actually have whiter teeth. Nonetheless, a company recognized that stereotype and exploited it to great success.
To some extent, we expect and know that some things are fake and accept that. We let ourselves get taken in by story when watching a movie or theater. It’s suspension of disbelief. Nothing better describes this than this quote
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A movie that does a great job of twisting what we want to be real, but we know is a lie, is Blade Runner 2049. In the movie, Ryan Gosling has a holographic girlfriend who he knows is fake but can’t help but feel attached to nonetheless.
We know that appearance matters. They know, that we know that appearance matters. We know that they know that we know appearance matters. Regardless, the fact of that matter is that, appearance matters.
Footnotes
I’m so glad I’m out of the dating market and don’t have to deal with playing the game of using Instagram as a dating app. I understand why my male high school married friends don’t even have social media anymore…they don’t need to.
Sometimes people over optimize for the top of the funnel, and forget that one should be moving down the funnel.