Forced Continuity: A Different Perspective

Pre­am­ble: In response to some excel­lent rebut­tals as well as count­less com­ments I’ve received on my pre­vi­ous post, “The Real Sin­is­ter Side of Forced Con­ti­nu­ity,” I believe some peo­ple are miss­ing the point of my argu­ment, and I want to clar­ify a few things.

I’m not a lawyer by any stretch. But as a copy­writer and busi­ness owner, I do know the rules enough to know that there’s a dif­fer­ence between “optional con­ti­nu­ity,” “forced con­ti­nu­ity,” and “hid­den continuity.”

Optional con­ti­nu­ity is self-​​explanatory. Forced con­ti­nu­ity is a very com­mon mar­ket­ing prac­tice (I’m not a fan of it, but I don’t mind it). In fact, there’s noth­ing wrong with forced con­ti­nu­ity in and of itself.

What’s wrong is when it’s used in a wrong way.

The real prob­lem, I believe, is that good mar­keters, includ­ing mar­keters using “forced con­ti­nu­ity” in an eth­i­cal and legit­i­mate way, are get­ting a bad rep­u­ta­tion because some mar­keters unscrupu­lously mis­use forced continuity.

The lack of trans­parency is the real cul­prit — such as hid­ing it or dis­guis­ing it. Espe­cially when it’s done on pur­pose. That annoys me. Because it’s no longer an issue of mis­use. It’s out-​​and-​​out abuse.

But what both­ers me more is how it affects us all. And it affects us all, both cus­tomers and mar­keters alike, in more ways than you think.

Forced con­ti­nu­ity is noth­ing new.

The vit­a­min indus­try uses it all the time. I’m told Anthony Rob­bins uses it, too. Pop­u­lar prod­ucts like Video Pro­fes­sor, Colum­bia House, Time Life, Audi​ble​.com, and tons of oth­ers use forced con­ti­nu­ity in some way.

(One of my stu­dents reported to me that the infa­mous “Girls Gone Wild” videos do it, too. Though, he added, “Believe it or not, I don’t know that from expe­ri­ence.”)

Forced con­ti­nu­ity, done right, can be legal, eth­i­cal, and tremen­dously prof­itable. As long as it’s clear and trans­par­ent. There’s noth­ing wrong with forced continuity.

The fine line is when some mar­keters try to hide the forced con­ti­nu­ity, or use hid­den con­ti­nu­ity. It’s not only bad busi­ness, it’s also illegal.

Worse yet, when mar­keters cross that fine line by using decep­tion (like skill­fully hid­ing it or bury­ing it in tiny print) just enough so their forced con­ti­nu­ity offers are “bor­der­line legal,” is some­thing I per­son­ally despise.

When you’re clear and above board, and you don’t try to hide it, to me that’s fine. I’m speak­ing from a customer’s stand­point, not a marketer.

I love hav­ing choices. And I love mak­ing them when my choices are clear to me.

Some peo­ple buy prod­ucts for the pre­mi­ums alone. Just as some peo­ple will be forced into a con­ti­nu­ity pro­gram to get their hands on the main prod­uct alone. It’s an offer like any other.

You either buy it or you don’t.

But either way, it’s still a choice.

How­ever, when you’re hid­ing or dis­guis­ing a con­ti­nu­ity pro­gram, you’re remov­ing that choice from your cus­tomers. That’s the kicker.

Bor­der­line or not, mis­lead­ing or not, or eth­i­cal or not is not the point I want to focus on. Clar­ity and trans­parency are sim­ply com­mon sense. Period.

What I’m con­cerned with mostly is the bad rep­u­ta­tion the lack of trans­parency cre­ates. It’s hurt­ing the good mar­keters, as well as non-​​hidden, eth­i­cal forced con­ti­nu­ity offers from legit­i­mate marketers.

The bad taste it leaves in people’s mouths cre­ates a neg­a­tive impact on our indus­try that affects us all. That’s the real sin­is­ter side of forced con­ti­nu­ity.

It’s when mar­keters abuse forced continuity.

My point is that poorly done or hid­den con­ti­nu­ity offers affect us in more ways than one. We lose more than just our cred­i­bil­ity. We lose more than just our cus­tomers. We lose life­time cus­tomers.

Let me put this in a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive for you.

Obvi­ously, our cus­tomers lose, too. But they lose more than just in the trans­ac­tion itself. They lose a lot more than you think.

To me, sell­ing is part of serv­ing your cus­tomer. Sell­ing is cus­tomer ser­vice, in other words. You are offer­ing them some­thing that can enrich their lives or their busi­nesses. And so you owe it to them to make that offer.

As copy­writer Brian Keith Voiles says so often, “Remem­ber that you are a bless­ing in their lives.” So you owe it to your cus­tomers to make them offers — prod­ucts, ser­vices and solu­tions that will help them.

On the other hand, not sell­ing them is a disservice.

When you fail to make an offer, you are cheat­ing your client. To that I would add, sell­ing them in the wrong way (or against their will) is just as bad if not worse.

Why? Because you’re not only offer­ing a dis­ser­vice to your cus­tomer, you are also cheat­ing them out of all future offers they will not buy because of the pre­vi­ous bad expe­ri­ence, includ­ing offers by other, legit­i­mate mar­keters sell­ing prod­ucts that are per­fect for them and with which they can enrich their lives.

It’s some­thing to think about.

In defense of some of the mar­keters I men­tioned in my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, let me switch gears for a moment and give you a few extra insights.

Joel Comm posted a well-​​worded apol­ogy. Also, Matt Bacak has removed his offer com­pletely. I spent two hours on the phone with him yes­ter­day, on his way to New Orleans to give a check to Habi­tat for Human­ity. He feels really bad about his mis­take and the back­lash it created.

And I believe him. Here’s why.

As Matt explained, the strange thing about this whole ordeal was, the abil­ity to opt-​​out at the begin­ning was actu­ally a pro­gram­mer glitch. Accord­ing to Matt, it was sup­posed to be eas­ily “opt-​​outable” from the get-​​go.

But Matt said that the pro­gram­mer failed to make the changes (he was actu­ally work­ing on it) before the launch, when some affil­i­ates jumped the gun and started pro­mot­ing it pre­ma­turely before the pro­gram­mer had a chance to fix it.

(Some peo­ple opined that they wouldn’t have apol­o­gized if they didn’t get caught. I’m sure that’s true with some mar­keters out there. And this can be a whole dif­fer­ent debate, I’m sure. But I want refrain from it, as Matt and Joel can defend them­selves. They’re big boys. They can han­dle it.)

Nev­er­the­less, Matt got ham­mered as a result. Nat­u­rally. And he got even more ham­mered because his offer came out at the exact same time Joel Comm did his thing, which com­pounded the entire issue.

But some­thing else made things worse.

When you add to that the fact that Matt mixed his forced con­ti­nu­ity offer with a bunch of upsells one had to lis­ten to and go through before com­plet­ing their order (which can be annoy­ing), it aggra­vated the situation.

This nat­u­rally gave peo­ple more to sink their teeth into.

It’s like the ketchup prin­ci­ple I teach at seminars.

Let’s say a sales pro­fes­sional is meet­ing you, his prospect, over lunch. His attire is pro­fes­sional, top­notch, and impec­ca­ble. His sales and col­lat­eral mate­ri­als are of high qual­ity, impres­sive, and persuasive.

He gives you an absolutely fab­u­lous pre­sen­ta­tion. He did his home­work, asked you the right ques­tions, and said all the right things to close the deal.

But through­out your lunch encounter, you couldn’t help but notice a tiny ketchup stain on his tie. Noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant, but just enough to catch your attention.

Now, tell me, if I were to ask you a few weeks later, “What do you remem­ber most from that pre­sen­ta­tion with that sales­per­son?” The first thing that will pop into your mind will be, you guessed it, the ketchup stain.

Sim­i­larly, Matt or Joel’s mis­takes aside, the upsell offers, which are not real prob­lems in and of them­selves, com­pounded the issue.

In fact, in the flurry of neg­a­tive feed­back I received, what I found was that peo­ple were more upset about being forced to go through the upsell offers than they were about being forced into a con­ti­nu­ity program.

Like the ketchup stain, every­thing hap­pened all at once, which diverted people’s atten­tion to, and mag­ni­fied, the forced con­ti­nu­ity offers — or bet­ter said, mis­takes. The ketchup stain became the ele­phant in the room.

I said to Matt on the phone, “If you’re going to get a $5,000 sem­i­nar for just a buck, putting up with a few ‘com­mer­cials’ ain’t bad… But when you’re mix­ing that with a pro­gram­mer glitch that forces con­ti­nu­ity, you’re bound to freak peo­ple out.” And freak out, they did. Right­fully so.

Back to my orig­i­nal point…

My pre­vi­ous blog post had sev­eral purposes.

For one, I think that peo­ple are con­fus­ing the issue, here, between optional, forced, and hid­den con­ti­nu­ity. I also wanted to express my opin­ions in an effort to expose dif­fer­ent and more impor­tant sides of the issue.

I, too, made a mis­take because I failed to inves­ti­gate the offer before­hand, and didn’t notice the error myself. I still would have pro­moted it, but I would have def­i­nitely warned my sub­scribers about it.

Again, it all comes back down to trans­parency.

So my post was, in some way, try­ing to divert some atten­tion away from the ethics of the prac­tice (which is an entirely dif­fer­ent debate) to the more impor­tant long-​​term effects of doing it wrong…

… And how some real scam­mers, who do hide their forced con­ti­nu­ity offers, on pur­pose, affects us all as mar­keters and cus­tomers as a whole — and how it affects us in more ways than one.

I think that bad mar­ket­ing causes a lot more prob­lems than the back­lash from Matt’s or Joel’s mis­take. When I said in my pre­vi­ous post that “Joel and Matt are the good guys” and that “we’ve seen worse,” I meant it.

Just last week, one of my coach­ing stu­dents bought a pack­age from a com­pany who has a his­tory of deliv­er­ing poor cus­tomer ser­vice. (She didn’t know this.)

After not receiv­ing what she paid for, she asked about the sta­tus of her order. The mar­keter in ques­tion out­right told to her that, if she wasn’t happy, to stop both­er­ing him and to ask for a refund. So she did.

(This alone is enough to make you wince.)

But what dis­mayed her most was, he not only out­right refused to can­cel her order and refund her (accord­ing to the credit card com­pany, he allegedly exploited a loop­hole to pre­vent any chargebacks)…

… But he also had the coy­ones to call her an idiot for want­ing a refund, and even threat­ened legal action if she con­tin­ued asking.

Lit­er­ally! I’m not kidding.

So when peo­ple are forced into con­ti­nu­ity, that’s one thing. It’s per­fectly accept­able to me. I speak as a con­sumer. (As a mar­keter, how­ever, it’s not my cup of tea. I wouldn’t use it myself.)

When peo­ple are forced into con­ti­nu­ity against their will, that’s a whole dif­fer­ent ball game. And it’s wrong. (More­over, when mar­keters out­right refuse to can­cel and refund orders, those are the worst of the bunch.)

To me, those are the real scam­mers. And those are the guys who are giv­ing us a bad name — includ­ing legit­i­mate forced con­ti­nu­ity offers.

It’s no won­der peo­ple are scared to buy into forced con­ti­nu­ity offers. And it’s also no won­der why some unscrupu­lous mar­keters feel the need to hide it and resort to doing so.

Unscrupu­lous and lazy, too.

Why lazy? Because, if you’re will­ing to do it right, be trans­par­ent, and use good copy­writ­ing to eth­i­cally per­suade your cus­tomer on your forced con­ti­nu­ity offer (and, above all, on keep­ing it), you’re going to be a lot more successful.

As Andrew Cavanagh pointed out in the com­ments of my pre­vi­ous post, you need great copy­writ­ing not only to sell the con­ti­nu­ity offer, but also to sell the cus­tomer on keep­ing their sub­scrip­tions active, before they buy.

Oth­er­wise, like it or not, you’re going to be hit with a flood of can­cel­la­tions and refunds.

I’ll fin­ish by repeat­ing some­thing I said before:

Be clear. Be trans­par­ent. Use great copy. Serve your cus­tomers well. And think twice before you make a forced con­ti­nu­ity offer — includ­ing how your offer will affect your rep­u­ta­tion, your sales, and your indus­try as a whole.

And above all, your rela­tion­ships.

That’s the bot­tom line.

About the Author

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