Until I started doing marketing for my startups.
I always like helping the little guy. Screw the monopolies in the world like Amazon who use their status to crush other companies and get ridiculous city tax breaks. I figured everyone else felt the same. Always root for the earnest underdog.
So many people online assume we are scammers or have ill intentions all the time.
A really good strategy for marketing is offering something for free temporarily to get new users and see what happens. Whether I was offering a free security tool for people’s numbers or free shipping to Hong Kong, some people always assumed the deal was too good to be true and questioned our motives.
No matter how calmly I would try to explain what we were doing. Despite putting our office address and faces and names all over the website. They never seemed to trust us.
I figured if they knew the individuals behind the product and knew they could annoy or sue me if anything goes wrong, they would see why that’s different from a shady website where you have no information at all.
Maybe brand loyalty is dead, but at the very least brand distrust is alive and well.