If you're an online marketer and almost everything you consume was made by other online marketers, you're studying people who studied people who studied the same fucking people you did
Which is how you end up with thousands of monkeys selling slightly different versions of the same shit
At some point you have to stop jerking off the same five guys everyone else follows and go study completely different industries
Look at how racehorses are marketed
The racing itself can be a tiny part of the money made around a horse
Once a stallion has won enough, people can pay six figures just to breed a mare with him, and the best ones can do that more than 100 times a year
His offspring can then sell at a premium before they've ever raced because buyers are buying the bloodline
If they start winning too, the father's breeding price goes up again
There are breeding rights, syndicates, auctions and entire businesses built around this shit
Then you have boring industrial businesses selling the most basic products imaginable that have controlled their markets for decades through a handful of key relationships and distribution deals
The same goes for casinos, funeral businesses, private islands, sperm banks, fertility clinics, citizenship by investment programs and engagement rings, all running on completely different models of acquisition, distribution, trust, status and retention
Cults are probably top 3 for me
Ignore the morality of it for the purpose of the analysis
They're obviously fucked, but very few organizations have ever figured out how to package this many human needs into the same system, with some basically covering every level of Maslow's pyramid
At the physiological level, even sex gets covered because cults tend to facilitate relationships between members, giving you a dating pool where everyone already shares the same beliefs, community and social circle
Then comes safety, which can mean housing, money when you're struggling, people around you when shit goes wrong, and a set of rules that removes a huge amount of uncertainty from your life
Belonging is pretty obvious when your friends, family, social life, weekly activities and entire community can all end up concentrated in the same place
Esteem gets built through internal hierarchy, recognition, responsibility, proximity to leadership and whatever signals that particular group uses to define a "good" member
Then self actualization gets absorbed into the ideology itself
The organization gives you the mission, tells you what your life is for, gives you a path to progress along and defines what reaching the highest version of yourself is supposed to mean
So you end up with something that can touch all five layers of the pyramid at once, while also controlling a meaningful percentage of the person's social environment
Leaving can mean losing your partner, friends, community, routines, status and the entire belief system you've spent years building your life around
Some of these organizations are absolute cash machines
Jehovah's Witnesses spent more than a century accumulating real estate in Brooklyn alone, then sold 37 properties between 2004 and 2018, with estimates putting the combined sales at around $2B
You have millions of people spreading the message for free, recruiting new members, repeating the same rituals and using the same language, with internal status systems that reward certain behaviors, physical infrastructure everywhere, and relationships that make the network harder to leave as it grows
These organizations have managed to make themselves part of where people live, who they marry, who their friends are, what they do every week, what they believe and what they spend their money on
There is more marketing to learn from figuring out how a bunch of door to door preachers ended up owning billions of dollars worth of Brooklyn real estate than from watching another monkey explain how he structures his VSL