This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See
Last read August 31, 2021
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Highlights
69 highlights.
Marketing involves very little in the way of shouting, hustling, or coercion. It’s a chance to serve, instead.
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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.
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The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about. The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about.
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The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market. The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word. The last step is often overlooked: show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years—to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make. To earn permission to follow up and to earn enrollment to teach.
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Marketers make change happen: for the smallest viable market, and by delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages that people actually want to get.
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Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems.
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Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.
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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.
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“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.” The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes.
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People don’t want what you make They want what it will do for them. They want the way it will make them feel. And there aren’t that many feelings to choose from.
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We tell stories. Stories that resonate and hold up over time. Stories that are true, because we made them true with our actions and our products and our services. We make connections. Humans are lonely, and they want to be seen and known. People want to be part of something. It’s safer that way, and often more fun. We create experiences. Using a product, engaging with a service. Making a donation, going to a rally, calling customer service. Each of these actions is part of the story; each builds a little bit of our connection. As marketers, we can offer these experiences with intent, doing them on purpose.
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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. You listen to their frustrations and invest in changing the culture.
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“When in doubt, assume that people will act according to their current irrational urges, ignoring information that runs counter to their beliefs, trading long-term for short-term benefits and most of all, being influenced by the culture they identify with.”
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When the marketer shows up with his or her message (in whatever medium), it always takes the form of a promise: “If you do X, you will get Y.” That promise is often hidden. It can accidentally be set aside or intentionally camouflaged, but all effective marketing makes a promise.
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Throughout this book, we’ll return to this essential question: “Who’s it for?” It has a subtle but magic power, the ability to shift the product you make, the story you tell, and where you tell it. Once you’re clear on “who it’s for,” then doors begin to open for you.
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The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone.
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find a corner of the market that can’t wait for your attention. Go to their extremes. Find a position on the map where you, and you alone, are the perfect answer. Overwhelm this group’s wants and dreams and desires with your care, your attention, and your focus. Make change happen. Change that’s so profound, people can’t help but talk about it.
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When you seek to share your best work—your best story, your shot at change—it helps if it’s likely to spread. It helps if it’s permanent. But even if it’s extraordinary, it’s not going to make a difference if you drop it in the ocean.
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“It’s not for you” shows the ability to respect someone enough that you’re not going to waste their time, pander to them, or insist that they change their beliefs. It shows respect for those you seek to serve, to say to them, “I made this for you. Not for the other folks, but for you.”
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It’s entirely possible that your work isn’t as good as it needs to be. But it’s also possible that you failed to be clear about who it was for in the first place.
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Dog food might be getting more delicious as it gets more expensive, but we actually have no idea. We have no clue whether dogs enjoy it more, because we’re not dogs. But we can be sure that dog owners like it more. Because dog food is for dog owners.
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there’s almost always a disconnect between performance and appeal. That the engineer’s choice of the best price/performance combination is rarely the market’s choice.
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This is the lock and the key. You’re not running around grabbing every conceivable lock to try out your key. Instead, you’re finding people (the lock), and since you are curious about their dreams and desires, you will create a key just for them, one they’ll happily trade attention for.
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A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person. When you show up with a life buoy, if the drowning person understands what’s at stake, you don’t have to run ads to get them to hold on to it.
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Effective marketers don’t begin with a solution, with the thing that makes them more clever than everyone else. Instead, we begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make.
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A professional plays a role, doing the best possible work, regardless of the day or the patient or the client.
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James Brown and the therapist understand that authenticity in the marketplace is a myth, that what people want is to be understood and to be served, not merely to witness whatever you feel like doing in a given moment.
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We reserve our best version of the work for them, not for us. Just as a three-star chef doesn’t cook herself a twelve-course meal for dinner, you are not expected (or welcome) to bring us every one of your insecurities, innermost fears, and urgent demands.
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If you need to be authentic to do your best work, you’re not a professional, you’re a fortunate amateur.
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Crowdfunding is one thing, but the crowd isn’t that good at inventing a breakthrough.
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What we need is air, water, health, and a roof over our heads. Pretty much everything else is a want. And if we’re privileged enough, we decide that those other things we want are actually needs.
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people are intimately aware of their wants (which they think of as needs) but they are absolutely terrible at inventing new ways to address those wants.
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The third is mistakenly believing that everyone wants the same thing. In fact, we don’t. The early adopters want things that are new; the laggards want things to never change.
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People might decide that they want a white leather wallet, but they don’t want it because it’s white or because it’s leather; they want it because of how it will make them feel. That’s what they’re buying: a feeling, not a wallet. Identify that feeling before you spend time making a wallet.
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Just as no one needs a drill bit, no one needs a real estate broker. What they need and want is how it makes them feel to get what a broker can get them. (And the same thing is true for waiters, for limo drivers, and perhaps for you …)
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- It’s cheaper and faster than ever to create a prototype or a limited run. That’s true for nonprofits, as well as for manufacturers or service businesses. 2. It’s cheaper and faster than ever to find the early adopters, to engage with people who want to hear from you.
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Always be seeking, connecting, solving, asserting, believing, seeing, and yes, testing. The other way to read this is: always be wrong. Well, not always. Sometimes you’ll be right. But most of the time, you’ll be wrong. That’s okay.
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We don’t pay ten times extra for more words, a bigger order of French fries, or a louder stereo. Instead, it’s a different extreme, a different story, a different sort of scarcity.
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If you run everything through a spreadsheet, you might end up with a rational plan, but the rational plan isn’t what creates energy or magic or memories.
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If you can’t succeed in the small, why do you believe you will succeed in the large?
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The challenge for most people who seek to make an impact isn’t winning over the mass market. It’s the micro market. They bend themselves into a pretzel trying to please the anonymous masses before they have fifty or one hundred people who would miss them if they were gone.
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Photography works this way, for example. It’s quite easy to be the photographer who is skilled enough to take yesterday’s pictures. Previous styles are technically easy to mimic. That’s straightforward. But to be the one who establishes the next phase takes a leap. A leap into a new way of doing something, just a bit better and a bit unexpected. Leap too far, though, and the tribe won’t follow.
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When life interferes, new patterns are established. This is why it’s so profitable to market to new dads, engaged women, and people who have recently moved. They don’t have a pattern to match, so it’s all an interrupt. On the other hand, the purchasing manager at a typical organization has been taught that matching the pattern is the best way to keep a steady job with no surprises.
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If you look closely at decisions that don’t initially make sense, you’ll likely see status roles at work.
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The roles we easily adopt at school—the class clown, the big man on campus, the A student—are status roles. And remember how hard we defended those roles, even when we had a chance to change them.
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But a better business plan takes that universal need and makes it specific—describing who and what it’s for. It outlines the tension you seek to create, the status roles you’re engaging with, and the story you’re bringing that will make change happen.
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Busy people (you know, the kind of people you seek to change) don’t care about your work as much as you do. They’re not as up to date as you are, or as aware of the competitive landscape or the drama behind the scenes.
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Why would these sophisticated scammers make such an obvious mistake? Because it’s not for you. Because they’re sending a signal to people who are skeptical, careful, and well-informed: go away.
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Lazy marketers try to buy enrollment with flashy ads. The best marketers earn enrollment by seeking people who want the change being offered. And they do it by connecting people to others who want the change as well.
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You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few. The whales pay for the minnows. It can work out. But in order to do your best work, you’ll need to seek out and delight the few. And in return, you’ll be rewarded with a cadre of loyal customers who will buy in for all of it.
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Their strategy is to redefine the way some people think about environmental impact as well as clothing quality. To give that small group a label and a tool they can use to evangelize their vision to their friends. To create insiders and outsiders.
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Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured. Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured.
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The ad exists to get a click. The click exists to either make a sale or earn permission. The sale exists to lead to another sale, or to word of mouth. Permission exists to lead to education and to a sale. That’s it.
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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.
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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.
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Step one is to make a product or service that people care enough to search for specifically. You cannot win in a generic search, but you’ll always win if the search is specific enough. And then step two is easy to understand: to be the one they want to find when they go looking.
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When you’re the cheapest, you’re not promising change. You’re promising the same, but cheaper.
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Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas.
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The road out of this paradox is to combine two offerings, married to each other: 1. Free ideas that spread. 2. Expensive expressions of those ideas that are worth paying for.
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Every con man knows this. The irony is that marketers who need to be trusted often don’t understand it. Lowering your price doesn’t make you more trusted. It does the opposite.
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If permission is at the heart of your work, earn it and keep it. Communicate only with those who choose to hear from you. The simplest definition of permission is the people who would miss you if you didn’t reach out.
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The result is a moment in time when more people are connected and fewer are trusted.
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In a world that scans instead of reads, that gossips instead of researching, it turns out that the best way to earn trust is through action.
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The goal isn’t to maximize your social media numbers. The goal is to be known to the smallest viable audience.
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We hear about the outliers, the kids who make millions of dollars a year with their YouTube channel or the fashionista with millions of followers. But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.
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In each of these markets, and a million others, there’s a need for a short head, at least once someone has connected the people in that market to one another, so they realize that they exist, so they see each other, and so they understand what the hit is.
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The tribe would probably survive if you went away. The goal is for them to miss you if you did.
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The method isn’t to go out and find an agent. The method is to do work so impossibly magical that agents and producers come looking for you.
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Marketers make things better by making change happen. Sharing your path to better is called marketing, and you can do it. We all can.
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