My wife and I were at the department store last weekend. A salesperson approached us before we even stopped walking.

I get it. They have targets. It’s not personal.

But here’s what I kept thinking — if a product needs that much effort to move, something deeper is broken. No demand. No repeat buyers. No word of mouth pulling people in.

Naval once said something that stuck with me: you do marketing because you’re bad at sales, and you hard sell because you’re bad at marketing. One failure leads to the next.

The real problem is most brands never define who they’re actually for. So they chase everyone. And when you chase everyone, you interrupt strangers at department stores hoping something sticks.

Seth Godin called this out decades ago in Permission Marketing. People want to engage on their own terms. Interruption doesn’t build trust — it burns it.

Keep pushing this way and you don’t just lose a sale. You damage the brand. And you definitely don’t build a business that lasts.