Give away the useful thing

Every brand in this region is selling, all the time, and most of them are selling the same thing to the same people on the same day. So the feed is a market, and a market is a place people walk through quickly with their hands in their pockets.

The exception is the stall that gives something away. Not a sample. Something useful.

The kitchen supplier that publishes what a proper walk-in fridge costs, with the numbers. The skincare brand that explains, honestly, which of its products a person with your skin does not need. The bank that tells a small business how to read its own cash flow, without a product at the end of the paragraph. The person who answers the question in the comments properly, in the language it was asked in.

What they get in return is not a sale. It is permission. The reader stops walking. They have received something, and a person who has received something will listen to the next thing you say, which is more than almost any ad can claim.

The cost is that you have to actually know something. That is the whole reason so few brands do it. Generosity in a market is not a tone of voice. It is having a thing worth giving, which means someone in the building has to know the category well enough to teach it, and the company has to be confident enough to let them.

Most marketing departments cannot do this, not because they are mean, but because the useful thing is in the operations team's head and nobody has asked them for it.

The brands that do it well have found the person in the building who knows the most, and put them in front of the customer with nothing to sell. The permission is worth more than the secret ever was.