Most “marketing” isn’t marketing.
It’s a religious ritual performed by people who have no idea they’re in a cult.
And I say that as someone who spent years as a devoted member.
I burned the candles. I chanted the mantras. I hired the priests (they called themselves “brand strategists”). I sacrificed budgets to the reach gods and waited for revenue to fall from the sky. It didn’t.
But I kept going, because what else do you do when you’re committed to a ritual? You assume you performed it wrong. So you perform it again. With more feeling this time.
Anyway.
There’s actually a name for this. It predates TikTok, personal branding, and whatever “authentic content” means this week by about 80 years. And every time I look at a business’s marketing setup, I think about it.
Here’s why.
It starts in 1945
World War II. Remote Pacific island. US military rolls in – and the local islanders have never seen anything like this. Men in uniforms march in formations. They talk into metal boxes. They wave wooden paddles at the sky. They bulldoze enormous flat paths through the jungle.
And then…
ENORMOUS METAL BIRDS FALL FROM THE SKY AND VOMIT SUPPLIES.
Food. Medicine. Equipment. More abundance than these islanders had ever seen in their lives. Just… delivered. From the clouds.
Look, if I witnessed that, I’d start a religion too.
The pattern was obvious. Perform the ritual = receive cargo from the gods. Simple. Elegant. Completely wrong.
When the war ended and the soldiers left, the islanders rebuilt everything from scratch. Carved headphones. Control towers. Torch-lined runways through the jungle. Marching formations at dawn. Men sitting in bamboo huts for hours, headsets on, eyes on the horizon, waiting for the planes.
The planes never came.
Anthropologists called it “cargo cult.” And it makes complete sense. The islanders weren’t dumb. They were observant, resourceful, intelligent people who survived in the most dangerous jungle on the planet. They saw cause and effect. They formed a hypothesis. They tested it. They iterated.
They just couldn’t see the whole picture. The radar stations. The logistics networks. The supply chains stretching across an ocean.
They could only copy what was visible. So they copied the exhaust from the engine – not the engine itself.
I want you to hold that image for a second.
Beautiful bamboo airports are still bamboo airports
Go open ten SaaS homepages right now. I’ll wait.
I’m not actually waiting. But you know what you’d find.
Card layouts. White space. Gradient blobs. Clean fonts. Headlines about “transforming your workflow” or “streamlining your process.” Ten businesses. Ten bamboo airports. Ten different chiefs waving the same paddles at the empty sky.
Here’s the deep belief underneath all of it: Leads fall from the internet. Like rain. Like manna. If you perform the ritual correctly – right post, right reel, right rebrand – the traffic gods will deliver.
And when revenue doesn’t materialize? The ritual must have been performed incorrectly. So you adjust. Someone says “brand awareness.” Someone else says “building trust.” Some agency sends a new proposal with the same ideas in a different font.
Fake headsets stay on. Real planes stay away.
The brutal truth: consistent revenue doesn’t come from performing the ritual better. It comes from understanding what’s actually making the planes come.
And the most money is almost always leaking out of three very specific holes.
Hole #1: The bonfire business model
You’ve lived this scene.
You create something. It goes a little viral. Traffic spikes. You refresh your analytics like a slot machine. You get real sales, real money. You feel like a genius for about six days.
Then it stops.
You’re back to baseline. So you make more content. New bonfire. Same spike. Same drop. Repeat until you have low-grade emotional damage.
Here’s what you see: your competitor gets ten times your traffic. Obvious solution – you need ten times more content.
Here’s what you don’t see: their conversion rate is 8% while yours is 2%. That’s why they can afford all that traffic. They’re not generating more leads – they’re just not throwing away the ones they already have.
Doubling your conversion rate on existing traffic is a completely different problem than doubling your traffic. And almost always cheaper to fix.
Because viral content is a bonfire on the beach. Beautiful. Big. Planes flying overhead can see it. They circle closer – curious, interested, drawn in. And then they keep flying. Because a bonfire isn’t a landing strip.
Congratz, you just burned your wood for nothing.
(Quick sidebar: the Easter Islanders cut down every tree on their island to move their famous stone statues. Every. Single. Tree. Jared Diamond wrote about it in Collapse. The statues were impressive. Their civilisation? Gone. Businesses that feed the algorithm instead of their funnel is heading the same direction.)
Brands who look like they’re crushing it don’t have bigger bonfires – they have a landing strip.
A system. A process that catches someone the moment they land and automatically walks them forward. While you’re at dinner. While you’re on vacation. While you’re 3 hours deep into a documentary about competitive cheese aging.
(I watched that documentary. No regrets. Zero.)
Here’s what nobody says out loud: viral content is an event. Conversion is a process. Without the process, every sale requires a new campaign. New content. New spend. New fire. You’re doing manual labor dressed up as strategy. And nobody asks what’s missing – because you can’t see a missing landing strip from the beach.
That’s the most expensive possible way to do marketing.
Hole #2: Vanishing Customers
Sold the thing. Goal achieved. Idol appeased.
That’s the cargo cult approach to sales.
So what actually happens next for your customer?
A receipt. Maybe a “welcome” email that basically says “thanks for buying the thing, here is the thing.” Forgettable within 24 hours. Archived. Deleted. Already gone.
Then… silence.
That buyer opens the box. Or logs into the course. Or downloads the file. And then life happens. Things get busy. They drift. They stop. They never get the result they paid for. And because they never got the result, they never come back, and never refer anyone. They just become a past-tense customer.
Lifetime value: one transaction. One.
Here’s why this is so predictable it should be embarrassing.
The moment the card clears, the brain gets what it actually came for. Not the product. The feeling of a better future. The solved problem. The version of themselves who finally runs faster, cooks better, finally understands their finances.
The purchase delivers that feeling instantly.
What comes after the confirmation screen is just… extra work. And work, without someone guiding you through it, loses to Netflix every single time. Netflix has spent billions making sure of that. You have… a PDF?
And it’s not a product problem.
About 85% of people who buy an online course never finish it. Seven out of ten e-commerce shoppers fill a cart and disappear. Service businesses without follow-up systems almost never see the same face twice.
Different industries. Same empty runway.
But here’s the part that keeps me up at night – and also gives me hope.
This is completely fixable.
A simple reminder sequence raises course completion from 10-15% to over 80%. A recipe booklet shipped with a kitchen appliance means people actually cook with it – and come back for more cookware. A 30-day training plan tucked inside a box of sneakers turns a one-time purchase into a habit, a lifestyle, a reason to buy the next pair.
The product didn’t change. The RESULT changes.
Because someone showed up after the sale and said: here’s what you do next. The difference between a customer who buys once and a customer who buys for life isn’t how good your product is. It’s whether you were still there on day two.
And the third leak? This one’s the quietest.
Hole #3: The warmest leads sitting in silence
Here’s the math that should make every entrepreneur uncomfortable.
Businesses spend about 80% of their marketing budget acquiring strangers. Cold traffic. Paid ads. Content built to earn trust from absolute scratch. It’s slow. It’s exhausting. And it works – eventually, partially, expensively.
You know who’s CHEAP to convert? Someone who already bought from you.
Someone who signed up, loved what they got, and then quietly drifted away when life got busy. That trust you spent months building? Still there. That relationship? Still real. They didn’t stop liking you. They just got busy. Nobody walked them to the gate.
Think about the last person who bought from you 12, 18 months ago. When did you last reach out to them directly? Not a broadcast. Not a newsletter blast. A real message that said: hey, I’ve been thinking about you – here’s something that might help.
If you’re like most business owners, the answer is never.
These people already said yes once. The barrier to saying yes again is a fraction of converting a cold stranger. Your runway exists and their plane already landed. And instead of going to get them, cargo cult marketers light another bonfire.
More ads. More content. More cold outreach. More money spent earning trust they’ve already earned, from people who’ve never heard of them. While the warmest leads in the entire business sit untouched. Quiet. Waiting.
The chief keeps waving the paddle at the sky.
New planes: occasionally.
Past customers: still waiting at the airport.
Revenue from both: way less than it should be.
The simplest reactivation campaign I ever ran was 4 emails. No discounts. No urgency gimmick. Just: here’s who we are, here’s what’s new, here’s what we’ve learned, here’s how we can help. It outperformed our paid ads that month.
Those customers weren’t lost – they were waiting to be asked.
What the islanders were missing
Radar stations. Communication networks. Logistics infrastructure. The invisible, boring, deeply unglamorous system that actually made the planes come.
The equivalent in online business?
Email.
I felt your excitement leave. I felt it leave the room. Come back.
I know. Email is older than half the people reading this. It’s not a “what’s working right now” strategy. It doesn’t make for compelling content. No one’s going to write a LinkedIn post about your nurture sequence.
(And if they do, hi, my name is Andrey, and I have a problem. But I also name my automations, so I’m not the benchmark here.)
But here’s what email actually is: It’s your radio tower.
Your invisible communication channel. The only channel that actually works the way cargo cult marketers think their rituals are supposed to work. No algorithm throttling your reach. No platform that gets bought by someone named Elon and reprices your access overnight.
Only you, and the people who explicitly said: tell me more.
And here’s the beautiful part.
All three holes? ONE working email system fixes all of them.
- Automated sequences catch people after the bonfire fades – so you’re not relighting the fire every single week.
- Post-purchase flows walk customers to actual results – so you stop leaving lifetime value on the table.
- Regular emails keep relationships warm – so when you have something to sell, you’re not a stranger anymore.
Advertising is an Event. The event brings people in.
Email is the process. The process turns them into buyers.
A single welcome sequence typically doubles the likelihood of a second purchase within 90 days. Not because it’s “magic” (I wish). Because it catches people when they’re most interested and keeps them moving towards your offer.
I’ve looked at enough businesses to say this with genuine confidence: the fastest way to find out how much revenue a business is leaving on the table is to look at their email setup.
Is there a signup form? Does anything get sent when someone subscribes? When someone buys? If the answer is “not really” – that’s the biggest revenue leak. Not the brand. Not the content strategy. Not the font. The follow-up that never happens.
(If you want to see what the actual ROI looks like – it’s all here.)
One thing before anything else
If you have no email setup at all: go add a signup form to your landing page. Today. Before the new logo. Before the font change. Before the rebrand.
Yes, even if you’re running some AI-powered, blockchain-integrated, neuro-adaptive SaaS with 20,000 people on the waitlist and a Figma file that would make a designer weep with joy.
Especially then.
That form will produce more buyers than any aesthetic upgrade on your roadmap. The wooden headsets can wait.
If you already have a list you haven’t touched in a while – quick warning.
About 40% of any neglected list is ghosts. People who are never opening anything again. Not coming back. Not buying. But quietly wrecking your deliverability and inflating your email bill every single month.
The fix is a re-engagement sequence. Five days, three emails.
Done right, you’ll wake up 5-10% of those inactive subscribers – real people who just needed a nudge. Everyone else gets a clean exit. Your deliverability recovers. Open rates go up. Monthly bill goes down.
List Wake-Up Plan is exactly that.
Copy-paste templates, automation logic for any ESP, safety protocols so you don’t accidentally remove the wrong people. Takes about 15 minutes to set up. Costs less than what your ESP charges you this month for subscribers who already ghosted you.
>>> Stop paying for a dead list
Now zoom out
Trends are a trap.
Platforms come and go. Algorithms change their mood. The format that crushed it in January is cringe by March. And yet – the basics of turning a stranger into a buyer haven’t changed since someone figured out that a follow-up letter closed more sales than silence did.
That was before the internet. Before email. Before LinkedIn posts about personal brands.
Some things are just true.
Cargo cult marketers will chase every new ritual hoping this one finally summons the planes. New platform. New format. New agency. New gradient.
The real difference isn’t hustle. It’s not a bigger bonfire or a more impressive set of carved headphones. It’s an invisible infrastructure that just keeps working. Quietly. Without you becoming personally invested in whether a post gets 4% more reach.
See, those islanders built perfect airports replicas out of sticks and mud. Fully committed. Incredibly hard-working. Completely devoted to something that was never going to work.
The nation that sent those planes? They built radar stations, logistics networks, and communication systems that spanned an ocean. And kept winning long after the WWII ended. Because they understood what was actually making the planes come.
You already know which side you want to be on.
P.S. Some cargo cultists spent 40 years on those runways. FORTY YEARS. The saddest part isn’t that the planes never came. It’s that nobody ever stopped to ask why.