This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

by Seth Godin

If there’s a hole in the boat, it’s easy to spend all day bailing water with a bucket. Or we can take a moment to pull the boat onto the dock and fix the leak. When we work in the system, all we can do is bail. When we work on the system, we have a chance to make things better.

Bringing Strategy to Marketing There are three steps: • Tell a story, a true story, one that holds up. And tell it only to your smallest viable audience, the tiny group that is actually listening to you, that cares and that is among the early adopters. Create tension and urgency. • Give this group a reason to share the story with others. Something that will increase their status, their affiliation with others, or increase the utility of supporting your product, service or cause. Give them the scaffolding to do this. • Help them, through use or narrative, alter the story to make it theirs.

This means that strategic marketing begins by seeing the path, the way the idea spreads over time and through the community. It requires a specific story, not simply, “You can pick anyone and we’re anyone.” Instead, we seek to be of service to a small group, people who would miss us if we didn’t exist. Once this group finds affiliation and status from engaging with our work, we create the conditions for them to share the story with others—but they won’t tell the story that attracted them in the first place. They’ll tell a different story, also true, and one that will attract their friends.

If we know what people are looking for, it’s easier to find it. Here are a few, many of which are rooted in Western commercial culture. • Reassurance: This is the dominant one. The system wants what the system wants. And one thing it wants is to persist. If there’s a way to spend time and money to ensure that everything will remain okay, to avoid the current emergency, that action relieves tension. • Faster: The race for productivity continues unabated, and faster-moving ideas, devices, and processes often gain traction, usually by people who like moving faster, which means the adoption is faster as well. • More connected: Since 1850, we’ve been wiring the world into a network. Systems are the original networks, and with increasing rapidity, systems are adopting approaches that further enmesh the nodes. • More convenient: Tim Wu has pointed out that the wealthy consumer will trade almost anything for convenience. Dishwashers and one-click shopping are all part of the same spectrum. • Cheaper: If all other things are equal (though they rarely are), people pick the cheap one.

More remarkable: In a market filled with choices, few things are talked about. But remarkable items, by definition, are. • More status: This is a form of reassurance. The system wants insiders and outsiders to profess respect and root for it to succeed.

It’s easier to help someone get to where they’re going than it is to persuade them to go somewhere else.

Feedback loops can either be negative (stabilizing) or positive. Once feedback starts running through a microphone, it gets louder and more annoying, because audio feedback leads to more audio feedback. On the other hand, if someone acts recklessly in an airport, there are countless social and practical forces at work to diminish the interruption and return things to their normal state. Negative feedback loops might be better understood as dampers.

Before we build a strategy toward better, we need to see the systems. Either we’re working the system or the system is working us.

Here are some of the precepts of strategic impact. • Think ahead and reason back: When we know who it’s for, what it’s for, and how we hope to get there, we can start at the end and work backward for where to begin. • The empathy of a mutual win: We can avoid oppositional entanglements when we choose to work with people and systems that want to win something we don’t care so much about, especially when they offer us something we do care about. • Trust and expectation: Follow through on commitments and threats to maintain credibility and influence others’ behavior. Tension is real if we are consistent. • Make the consequences intended: Consider the potential unintended consequences of your strategies, as they may lead to suboptimal outcomes. • Leverage information asymmetry: Use your unique knowledge or information to your advantage, but be aware that others may be doing the same.

Create and shape the rules of the game: If you choose to play in an arena where you have influence over the rules, it’s more likely you will achieve your goals. Don’t count on winning games that are stacked against you. • Manage expectations: Experiences are largely relative. If it’s better than expected, it’s better. • Foster cooperation through repetition: Encourage cooperation by engaging in repeated interactions and building a reputation for reciprocity. • All forward motion involves risk and reward: When you spend time, money, and reputation to create tension, what are you hoping for in return?

Build scaffolding: Demanding that masses of people leap is rarely as effective as creating the conditions for them to simply walk on board. • Require effort and expense from the early adopters: When working with the pioneers, require effort and offer status. It’s not convenient, easy, or free to go first—there’s no tension in that. Embrace the effort. The appearance of risk is actually a benefit for this cohort. • What gets measured: Create simple and useful metrics for status and stick with them. • Create stickin...

Persistence: People become what they do, so reward them for consistently showing up to do the new thing. • Moving forward: Create one-way ratchets where sticking with the new approach is easier than giving up and moving backward. • Reinvest: Use the resources earned from ea...

The agent of change often takes the form of: • Communications • Competition • Community action and regulation • The means of production and access to capital • Easing or creation of constraints • Cultural shifts

Here are some change agents through the ages: • The car opened the door for fast food restaurants. • Craigslist destroyed the business model for many newspapers. Spinoffs created a new communications layer that dramatically decreased public prostitution. • MTV enabled the rise of rap music by decreasing the power of local radio stations.

Home improvement TV shows led to the popularity of the McMansion. • Birth control transformed the workforce and led to the rise of convenience foods. • 800 numbers and the credit card transformed any organization that dealt with customers. • The smart phone surfaced information about travelers and drivers, enabling Uber to transform the taxi industry. • Casual Friday started a cascade that led to a significant shift in the creation and sale of the clothes we wear every day. • The elevator permitted real estate developers to create skyscrapers and remade the idea of downtown, the same way that work from home is undoing much of that density. • Junk bonds, hedge funds, and other financial instruments led to the rise and fall of big box stores, supermarket chains, and other leveraged businesses. • AI is transforming farming. • The coming reset in the price of carbon will transform just about everything.

When we offer utility, status, or affiliation to our users, they’re more likely to use the systems leverage they have to find us more users.

The network effect: If you offer a service or a product that works better when my friends use it, I’m likely to tell my friends. This isn’t an afterthought or a marketing gimmick— it’s at the heart of product design and user experience. People don’t share because they like you. They share because it helps them achieve their objectives. Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t anonymous, and you can’t do it by yourself. That’s the point.

Expertise and status: The hallmark of an elegant strategy is that the more you use it, the better it works. Harvard has been around since before Galileo Galilei was killed, and their head start compounds with each generation. Their status attracts professors seeking status, which attracts students, and funders, and scholarly journals, and discussion, and jobs, all creating a loop that’s hard to break.

Affiliation: The desire to fit in is the fuel for the status quo in fashion, regardless of whether it’s clothing, language, or cultural discourse.

Subscriptions and convenience: A variation of maintaining the status quo, organizations that sell subscriptions are selling peace of mind and convenience.

The Thing About Cheaper Sometimes, people will pick the cheaper option. Cheaper means less expensive, or less complicated, or more convenient. In fact, people will pick the cheaper option any time that there isn’t substitution aversion or a desire for social adhesion. All other things being equal, we always choose the cheaper option. But things are almost never equal. Things are affected by systemic forces. Social adhesion and substitution aversion are almost everywhere we look.

Understanding the 2 x 2 Positioning Grid There are two axes, horizontal and vertical. They represent extremes of something that customers care about. They might be safety versus performance, luxury versus bargain, or sustainable versus convenient. The breakthrough is this: Each end of the axis has to be something that a customer might want. Not what you want, what they want. You can’t identify “overpriced” or “poorly designed” as extremes. That’s not positioning—that’s simply trash talking your competition. In this sample grid, you can see that any of the four extremes could be seen as reasonable.

time. The process is simple but easy to forget: overwhelm the smallest viable audience with a solution that creates the conditions for them to take action. Repeat.