Democracy is a marketing problem.
Health is a marketing problem.
Climate change is a marketing problem.
Growing your organization, spreading the word, doing work you’re proud of–these aren’t engineering problems or economics problems. They’re marketing problems.
That’s because humans make choices. If we live in a culture where people are free to choose, we’ve offered control over our future to others.
When humans make choices–that’s marketing. Marketing is the difficult work of telling a story that resonates, of bringing a consistent set of promises to people who want to hear them.
If you want to change things, it helps to understand how humans make choices. And if you’ve got a change in mind, I hope you’ll spend the time and effort it takes to get better at bringing your story to the people who need to hear it.
I’m thrilled that we’re launching the eighth edition of The Marketing Seminar today. My bestselling book This is Marketing (more than 250,000 copies sold worldwide in less than a year) is based on this workshop. Every time we run the seminar, it gets better and our participants find what they’re looking for. If you want to join the 8,000 people who have found a path forward, today’s the best day. Look for the purple circle to find a discount.
Marketing isn’t about shortcuts, hustle or deception. Marketing is the art (and the science) of serving the people you seek to serve, to do better work by finding and satisfying needs. Marketing is the practice of making things better by making better things.
Click here to find out more.
September 24, 2019
Supposedly, going against the grain is really difficult.
It turns out, though, that it’s far more dangerous to cut with a rip saw, a blade that goes along the grain. It often leads to a botched project. When you’re cutting across the grain, you know exactly what to expect and won’t get surprised by a patch of resistance you didn’t expect.
The same thing goes for sailing. It’s way easier to sail diagonally across the wind than it is to run with it.
The story we tell ourselves about cutting across expectations is probably more difficult than the actual work.
September 23, 2019
It’s pretty easy to know what you’re doing when you’re doing something that you’ve done before.
Follow the path.
It’s a lot more difficult when the task ahead is not quite the same as what you’ve done before. When wayfinding is required.
That’s a different skill. That’s the skill of finding the common threads, seeing the analogies and leaping over the crevices. Knowing how to do something you haven’t quite done before.
Which sort of knowing is more scarce?
Which is more valuable?
September 22, 2019
It’s absurd to trim trees like this.
There are high power lines.
There’s a helicopter.
There are cables.
Do the math.
It turns out, apparently, that a swinging chainsaw is far safer than having men and women climbing through trees with ropes and saws. We don’t notice someone falling out of a tree and breaking an arm (or worse) because it doesn’t make good TV. And if you assign 100 people to go out into the dense forest and expose themselves to this risk, it doesn’t feel nearly as fraught as the crazy helicopter option, even if it turns out to be safer.
Often, that’s our instinct. To pay the persistent, consistent, significant price of deniable small dangers and avoid even the feeling of the big loss, even if it’s actually less dangerous.
HT Tariq
September 21, 2019
The optimists who got excited about the ‘everyone has a microphone’ promise of the Net 20 years ago overlooked two flaws in human nature:
First, given sufficient reward (money, attention, fame, notoriety) some people will show up and say and do things that they know are wrong.
Second, if enough people are in the first group of bottom fishers, many other people may decide that those behaviors aren’t as wrong as they thought they were. The internet ends up normalizing bad behavior, because bad behavior captures our attention and gets noticed. We multiply the outliers in our imagination and come to the erroneous conclusion that their behavior is common, when it actually isn’t.
There are two ways forward, and both are up to us: First, we can start paying more attention (rewarding) good behavior. And second, we can start modeling precisely the sort of discourse and contributions we hope to see from others.
The best antidote to a culture shifting to bad behavior is to re-normalize good behavior.
September 20, 2019
There’s just one way to become one:
Do something creative.
It’s a little bit like leaders. What they have in common is that they lead.
Simply begin.
September 19, 2019
It’s tempting to claim the role of artist. Once you’re an artist, you’re free.
Free to work your own hours, free to make what you want to make, free to express yourself.
Except not really.
Because it comes with a hook. The hook of, “here, I made this.”
Responsibility for the work.
It’s a privilege, and we trade our freedom for it. The responsibility to own what we make.
September 18, 2019
Going faster increases the chances that you’ll find a landmark and become unlost.
This rule has a corollary though: If you’re going the wrong direction, turn around.
[And one clarification: sometimes going faster looks a lot like going slower in the short run. Because taking the time to read a map, get your bearings and understand the system you’re in ultimately gets you there more quickly.]
PS on the topic of turning around (or going faster), we’re now accepting applications for the next session of the altMBA. Today’s the last day for First Priority applications for our January session. 75 countries, thousands of alumni, people who care, making a difference and leveling up. Please consider joining us.
I’ll be answering your questions live today, Tuesday at 11 am ET on Facebook and Instagram.
September 17, 2019
If you’ve ever bought a mattress online, or a private label product from Amazon, you’ve experienced the value created by the last step.
That mattress company didn’t make the mattress.
And Amazon doesn’t make light bulbs.
There are countless factories vying to sell generic products to the companies that own the customer relationship. Perhaps 90% (sometimes 100%) of the profit goes to companies that make the sale, not the ones who actually made the product.
That’s because while they make the thing, they don’t do the work. The hard part is earning attention and trust. The hard part is helping someone make the choice. (There’s a difference between the hard part and the important part. Without the factory, there’s nothing to sell. Making it is important. But increasingly, it’s not the hard part.)
The Broadway producer makes a profit, the chorus member ekes out a living. Fair pay is related to the scarce work of engaging with the customer.
Either you’re doing the hard part or you’re left out of the transaction.
September 16, 2019
You can go to work offended by the idea that you might traffic in placebos. You can be certain that your aromatherapy, jewelry store, engineering consulting, stereo gear or home improvement practice is 100% performance-based, completely driven by specs, immune to a double-blind study.
Or, you can embrace the fact that human beings are 94% irrational, making decisions based on feelings, expectations and culture. That none of us are double-blind in real life. That the placebo is the most highly leveraged and efficient way you’ve got to help people get to where they’re going.
Ignoring the placebo effect won’t make it go away. Embracing it will help you do much better work, work that quite possibly is based on those skills and practices you’ve worked so hard to be good at. If it’s worth doing your work, it’s worth doing it in a way where placebos will help you do it better.
September 15, 2019
