Success Quote by Roy H. Williams

Marketing is a three-door hallway, Roy H. Williams argues, and two of the doors are traps. “Boredom” is the safe, corporate default: messaging polished into meaninglessness, optimized for internal approval rather than human attention. “Shouting” is the panic response: louder claims, bigger fonts, more urgency, the attention economy’s blunt instrument. Both are familiar because they’re easy to measure and easy to justify. They also train audiences to tune out.

“Seduction” is the provocative third option, and the word choice is doing heavy lifting. Williams isn’t talking about manipulation so much as magnetism: the craft of making people want to lean in. Seduction implies story, specificity, and restraint. It’s persuasion that respects desire instead of trying to overpower it. The subtext is a rebuke to the performance metrics that reward noise: impressions, reach, frequency. Those numbers can spike with shouting, but they rarely build attachment.

The question “Which do you want?” is a quiet indictment. It exposes marketing as a decision about posture, not just tactics. Brands often behave as if their tone is inevitable - the category is crowded, the quarter is tight, the algorithm is cruel - so they shout. Williams reframes it as agency: you can choose to be interesting.

Contextually, this lands in a late-20th/early-21st century marketplace where audiences are saturated and skepticism is a default setting. Seduction is his shorthand for earning attention rather than renting it.