The image of a carrot and a stick comes from the old cartoons.

Someone is sitting on a donkey, dangling a carrot in front of its nose by a stick.

This causes the donkey to move forwards, chasing the carrot it cannot reasonably reach.  A joke that it’s too dumb to realise it’s being exploited for it’s labour.

The thing is, of course.  This could continue infinitum until the labour is no longer required (carrot removed) or until the donkey collapses with exhaustion.

It’s important to avoid being the donkey here and also, well, also not to try this with people. Voluntarily or otherwise.

THE TIMEWASTER SUB

There’s a lot of different time wasting techniques that subs may try that is just that.

“If you talk to me today… I get paid on Friday”
“If you give me a free trial… I might tip”
“If you will talk to me about what we would do in a session… I might book”

So on.  And of course, most people are aware of this – and so if you feel you are in the above, but genuine, it’s important you don’t follow the same tropes.

THE SCAM

There are a whole bunch of common dating scams and this variant comes from it.
So, for example. Someone you’re talking to who ‘seems keen’ and is happy to meet up – but there’s always something.

So they might become sporadic for being online and blame it on phone and/or laptop problems with a view that… IF you paid something towards these problems THEN they would be online more often.

But then there’d be something else going wrong.

Perhaps it is car trouble. Especially if you’re arranging to meet.

The scam often continues to work because the mark feels invested into this and feels they lose everything they’ve put in if they admit they’ve been scammed and walk away – but there’s every chance this meet might happen one day.

It won’t.

Incidentally. The gender of the scammer and mark here don’t matter.

A lot of men will talk up how they were scammed once, but there are more reports of women being scammed.

THE HOOK (SHORT TERM)

This ties in with another point, but isn’t necessarily so bad.
Nearly every Pro-Domme session I’ve had has had a “next time we could…” suggestion.
I’ve also seen many “If you book, we can do this…” conversations.

There’s many reasons for this, everything from building excitement, letting you know what you could expect, rapport building and, of course, making you want to play again (this is true in and out of a professional setting)

Of course. What might happen is that for whatever reason this might not be possible, or they simply forgot.

This obviously is disappointing.  It’s ok to be disappointed and if you are someone who couldn’t fulfil your hook you have to understand the other person will be disappointed.
But, it’s also important to be mature about it.

I don’t feel it’s inappropriate to raise after the effect, “I was hoping we’d do blah as you suggested” and earmark it for a *next* time.

But if this is something that keeps happening you might feel a little led on, especially if this was something important to you.

THE HOOK (LONG TERM)

“I let my trusted subs do this…”, “If you’re good I’ll let you come to an event/filming/photo shoot/etc with me”, “I only meet these who treat me well”, so on.

Now. The thing with the short term hook is that it is very time specific and measurable.
“IF you (re)book – THEN we will” and whilst there’s good reasons this might not be possible it’s very easy to understand.

How do you measure trust?
How do you measure good?
What defines “treat well”?

And it’s difficult because you can’t really give specifics.

This is something where expectations have to be reasonably measured. That it does take time to build trust and a close relationship and that’s not specific.

That, for example, a film/photo day might not be planned and it be unknown when one will be – or one could suddenly be organised at short notice and there’ll be other subs who would also want to be part of this.

So on.

COMMUNICATION

This of course boils down to one golden word – communication.

That it’s communicated what the sub/client is hoping for short/long term and that expectations are fairly managed.

If something is suggested that might or would be possible, this must be reachable.
If something is not going to be possible, or may take a long time to achieve, this should be clear from the outset.

Whilst things change, to deliberately mislead someone in order to gain repeat business is not a good trait.

The carrot should always be achievable (and hey, then you can maybe beat with the stick!)