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Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. It’s a chance to change the culture for the better.
It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.
Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories—stories that resonate and spread. Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward.
If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.
We changed the story from “Here’s an opportunity to shop, to look good, to regain your sight, to enjoy the process, to feel ownership from beginning to end” to “Do you want us to take away what you have, or do you want to pay to keep the glasses that are already working for you?” Desire for gain versus avoidance of loss.
They want the way it will make them feel.
The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions,
Stories, connections, and experiences
When you’re marketing-driven, you’re focused on the latest Facebook data hacks, the design of your new logo, and your Canadian pricing model. On the other hand, when you’re market-driven, you think a lot about the hopes and dreams of your customers and their friends.
I’m not rational and neither are you.
You are an actor with intent, an agent of change, a human being working hard to change other human beings.
if you’re a marketer, you’re in the business of making change happen.
My product is for people who believe _________________. I will focus on people who want _________________. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get _________________.
We’re this, not that.
We’re not so much interested in features as we are in the emotions that those features evoke.
DuckDuckGo is better. Because it isn’t part of a big company. Because it doesn’t track you. Because it’s different.
Trident managed to do pretty well. Because they do something Amazon can’t. They serve coffee.
A professional plays a role, doing the best possible work, regardless of the day or the patient or the client.
You’re here to serve.
the only people we can serve are curious, dissatisfied, or bored.
Choose your extremes, find the people you seek to change, and show up with your offer.
Find the essential beacons (the extremes)
If you can’t succeed in the small, why do you believe you will succeed in the large?
Here are the key elements of the Dead’s marketing success:
Based on who they are and what they want and what they know, everyone is right. Every time. When we find the empathy to say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t for you, here’s the phone number of my competitor,” then we also find the freedom to do work that matters.
“Do people like me do things like this?”
people like us do things like this.
Fear alone isn’t going to help you make change happen. Tension might, though.
We don’t want to feel left out, left behind, uninformed, or impotent.
Dominion is a vertical experience, above or below. Affiliation is a horizontal one: Who’s standing next to me?
The people we seek to serve have a noise in their heads that’s different than your noise.
They’d rather lose you at the beginning than invest in you and lose you at the end.
Apple’s ad team only needed a million people to care. And so they sent a signal to them, and ignored everyone else.
The people you are seeking to serve are trying to figure out who you are. If you’re going to show up in their world, make it easy for them to know who you are and where you stand.
If people care, you’ve got a brand.
Standard deviations:
Good marketers have the humility to understand that you shouldn’t waste a minute (not of your time or of their time) on anyone who isn’t on the left part of the curve.
If someone is satisfied with what they have, you’re unlikely to have the time or the money to reach out to them directly and cause them to become dissatisfied—that
It’s the neophiliacs, the folks with a problem that you can solve right now (novelty and tension and the endless search for better), that you can begin with.
You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few. The whales pay for the minnows.
A noticed ad is noticed by some people, not everyone. And, if it’s noticed by the right people, it creates tension. The tension of not knowing and needing to know more. The tension of being left behind. The tension that things might get better (or worse).
advertising is faster, cheaper, and more measurable than ever before,
People seeking to make change happen are often in a hurry, and advertising feels like a shortcut. But without persistence and focus, the investment is wasted.
Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured. Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured.
If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure.
The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific.
People don’t remember what they read, what they hear, or even what they see. If they’re lucky, people remember what they do, but they’re not very good at that either. We remember what we rehearse. We remember the things that we see again and again. That we do over and over.
“Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.”
The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (there, I just said it again). If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency, it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust.
The path isn’t to be found when someone types in a generic term. The path is to have someone care enough about you and what you create that they’ll type in your name. That they’ll be looking for you, not a generic alternative.
