Author: remap_content_admin

How do you get strategy-on-demand?

Quick sidebar – in front of the A&O Berlin next to the street, there’s a single-square-meter metal box, just taller than the average tall person with a screen attached to it.  It’s a pizzabot. Here’s the workflow:

• On the screen, you pick your pizza
• You swipe your card
• the pizza is then assembled and baked, “from scratch”
• the pizza is placed into a pizza box
• The pizzabox is ejected from the metal pizzabot on a tray.

And it’s not too bad!

It’s similar to print-on-demand, where the product is there but you don’t waste the resources and energy making it until there’s a specific demand for it.

Even closer to true on-demand in terms of timing are education-on-demand such as Masterclass.com or entertainment-on-demand such as Hulu.

But with people-based services-on-demand, TaskRabbit, Handy, Fiverr, the gratifyingly immediacy isn’t there.

That goes for strategy-on-demand too, which usually comes from consulting retainers, perhaps acquired through Toptal or BTG. This might feels rapid compared to a “full” engagement but it’s not really on-demand; it’s contracting.

Generative AI works on the immediacy part; ChatGPT, for example, gets you strategic advice in seconds.

But it doesn’t actually think, let alone think strategically. If you need strategy-on-demand, that can only come from inside your head. So question is how to use gen AI to change what’s in your head – on-demand. That’s what Message Maps works on.

This list applies to marketing as a profession, an organizational unit, a practice, a sector of the economy, and as a business need from an entrepreneurial perspective.

1. Marketing will become less of a science and more of an art; analytics will become less valuable because attribution will become less feasible
2. Google will lose its de facto monopoly on search, though partly in exchange for elevating Bing
3. The overall value of search will decline, though that’ll translate to an increase in the value of social media
4. LLM-index optimization will be become a thing – specificity will be the hack, as opposed to keyword cloud content
5. Thus the value of SEO as both an area of expertise and a growth tool will shrink
6. Also, as documented previously on Art of Message, sites focused on transactional content will lose traffic, whereas those offering human connection won’t
7. Also, gen AI will diminish the value of mediocre or even “pretty good” content, because there will be so much of it in supply; this is also true of consumer software/apps
8. As a converse result, the value of idiosyncratic content that takes skill and ingenuity will rise
9. Consumers of marketing will develop a razor-sharp radar for AI-driven content, but be intuitively forgiving of content better suited to being AI-created, like text created by support chat bots
10. Producing marketing content will be a skilful blend of human creativity and AI; for example, a person who’s obviously a better writer than ChatGPT may write website copy but also use AI to generate things like detailed product FAQs
11. To state the obvious, developing a mastery of multiple kinds of generative AI  will become table stakes for marketing as a professional practice
12. Marketing teams and agencies will shrink in size but not to 1; ideation and decision-making is a team sport
13. Video will become more important than ever, because producing it will become more possible than ever
14. Content will be more customizable and personalized than ever before but garbage-in/garbage-out still applies; sure, you can prompt your own personalized sequel to your favorite book – but only if you input the entire text of the first book, having read and absorbed that book and thoroughly understood, therefore, exactly what you really want from its sequel
15. Advertising will become radically personalized (and this could be creepy, yes – but doesn’t have to be)
16. Leveraging technology in marketing, namely automation and integration, will become even more important- because it will become more feasible
17. Because of many of the above, social and video advertising will see a burst in creativity and value capture
18. Marketing strategy will be produced, altered, and personalized closer-to-instantly than ever before, with the aforementioned Gi/Go principle still in effect. See (Message Maps)
19. For that same reason, and others above, marketing and sales content will also be produced orders of magnitude faster; thus it will be more timely, which sort of makes it more personalized
20. The lean digital agency model will outperform the management/strategy consulting firm model
21. Generalists will finally win out over specialized experts

“If you’ve got the time… we’ve got the beer”

-Miller Lite

There’s a give-and-take in consulting between extracting every possible piece of information and insight possible from a client, yet not completely annoying them while doing so.

It’s the same with Message Maps. It asks for a lot of your time relative to other online tools.

In the Pre-Alpha release, you took a very intensive strategic discovery interview.

In this Alpha release, that’s been refined somewhat and should be slightly easier to use. The navigation flow around it should also make more sense. Not perfect yet, though, and there are a couple of concrete improvements in the works.

Some errors related to download or printing out your discovery interview report have also been fixed.

But the biggest update to Alpha is that it unveils the first glance at the major piece of the ‘Maps’ roadmap: brand analysis and strategy.

Users who complete most of their interview (80% of the questions or more) and “Submit” their interview as complete will now be able to get a strategy, starting with a positioning strategy, the first component of the brand strategy. You can find the button activated on the dashboard and on your interview report.

The 2nd piece of the brand strategy, the detailed brand analysis, won’t be available for another two weeks when we release the first Alpha update. I’m honestly pretty excited and can’t wait to show you (:

But the positioning strategy is here now – if you’ve got the time (to really dive deep on your discovery interview), we’ve got the beer.

And on a serious note – to everyone who tried this thing so far, thank you!! You’re invaluable to me!

“That which provokes significant and lasting emotional, spiritual, and intellectual surprise.”^1

^1 “Art,” in Blue Elephant Dictionary, 2023, accessed June 27, 2023, https://www.rowanprice.com/dictionary/#art.

People like surprise but not too much.

This is according to researchers from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. They published a study: “Creating Effective Marketing Messages Through Moderately Surprising Syntax” (syntax being a fancy word for word structure).

BTW, this is not a new idea. What’s new is creating a mathematical model that can measure surprising word/sentence structure in marketing copy. Then to apply that measurement to a large corpus.

Note that the study is confined to syntax (structure). But surprising semantics (meaning) also works.

The semantically unsurprising slogan for an energy drink would be:

Red Bull gives you tons of energy.

The semantically surprising slogan is the one we all know. Though it’s only moderately surprising, because wings are an allusion to flying, which is a common metaphor for the feeling of having lots of energy.

Red Bull gives you jetpack-brain, on the other hand, might be too surprising a meaning.

Syntactic plus semantic suprise could look like this:

Jet-pack brain,

you,

on Red Bull.

You get the picture. Make sure your messaging isn’t too predictable.

But now for the real surprise..

Why did I look this study up to begin with? Because I have seen people posting about it on LinkedIn for months now. So I got moderately curious whether it was peer-reviewed scientific research (it is). And when I did some poking around, I found several dozen LinkedIn and blog posts referencing it.

Yet it looks from the study publication page as if the supplemental materials document, the only substantive part of it that’s free, has only been downloaded 4 times, and one of those was me.

Surprise, surprise (:

Examples of keystone species include African elephants, beavers, sea otters, and Zapier.

That’s a little broad, so let’s carve out a subset – animals.

What do elephants, sea otters, and beavers have in common? First, they all spend significant time in forested areas, if you count kelp habitats as such.

Second, they diversify. Through physical transformation, they change the ecological landscape in ways that create and support new life.

The African Elephant

An elephant herd carves out pockets of grassland amid forests, opens up water sources by puncturing lake beds, and ports genetic seed data from one sector to another.

It’s an ecosystem integration engineer.

Now let’s widen the lense back out, until technology platforms are in view.

Zapier

Zapier has also engineered its ecosystem (our economy itself) over the past decade. It has rivals but none has so thoroughly spawned new life.

2.2 million companies use Zapier. And for many, it’s essential infrastructure. For dabblers and non-technical entrepreneurs, consultants, and clever employees, it’s the first experience automating the integration of apps.

Zapier makes simple integration hacks economically viable, like this simple Airtable-to-Gmail zap: someone fills out a webform, and boom, you get a draft email ready to send as a follow-up (like after they appear on your podcast).

For the entire 2010s, you did well to at least play with Zapier if not build it into your solutions, as Calendly, Lucidchart, Orchard, and others have done.

That’s still true.

OpenAI

But a bigger elephant than Zapier has come along.

OpenAI’s API by itself is the agent of almost all economic activity related to text-based generative AI and will ultimately create even more economic life. Like Zapier, it spawns new life.

And OpenAI has another parallel to Zapier – the best way to understand it is to build something with it.

Startup people love to trot out the original Airbnb pitch deck (easy to Google) but my new favorite is from Mistral.ai, sort of like Europe’s answer to OpenAI.

Aside from data sovereignty for EU firms, they want to innovate on the LaaM,  language model as a service. For example, AI sustainability innovation could come through small lean models that run on your normal laptop and have utility as assistants.

There are more interesting details, too.

But why am I telling you all this?

Because this “deck” is an impressive example of strategic messaging. It’s really just a word doc, too, and it has no graphics, design, infographics, or charts.

If it “cheats” (ie. uses something other than rhetorical skill to persuade) in any way, it’s by mentioning the list of wealthy and successful co-founders, such a ex-Meta/Llama types.

But you sort of have to do that to make an investment pitch deck work.

It’s also got a:

• good story
• villain
• big idea that’s inspiring
• set of entangled supporting ideas
• long-term plan for a position of advantage

In other words, it’s pure strategy. And without a single hero image.

In fact, nor is there a prototype behind it or even a line of code.

Yet just yesterday Mistral raised over 100 million, based on that text.

They really do need that money to lock in AI compute infrastructure too.

Will it work? No idea.

But here’s the takeaway: if the strategy and messaging is on point, sometimes it’s better to skip the decoration.

It’s not just personalization. That’s the #1 rule is that IS observed.

And it’s not just keeping it short; that’s #2.

And it’s not just communicating something worthwhile.

Those are the more commonly observed rules of outbound marketing. Observing them elevates you above the fray, to the upper 5%.

But how do you elevate above the upper 5%?

It’s very simple – the first time you contact someone, observe the rules above, but with a  twist: never mention or refer to yourself or your product or services in any way.

Keep it about them. If that gets a response, the proceed. Otherwise move on.

Just like at a social event.

Pricing messages focus on the money you pay and don’t mention time.

Perhaps this comes from our simplistic view of transactions, where we pay for a ready-made product or service in the time it takes to pull out our purse. In this simple world, price is virtually equal to the total cost.

Perhaps it also comes from not wanting to scare away potential buyers by presenting the true cost of what’s for sale.

Which can be considerable.

Take a professional conference, for example. You elect to pay the conference fee, plus the premium add-ons, then the conference website tells you: “Total price: $999“.

But isn’t this “total” price misleading?

Attending a conference might cost you time spent:

• researching speakers and attendees, accommodations
• travelling in cars, taxis, planes, and by foot
• finding restaurants and cafes, gyms
• looking at weather
• chatting with a chatbot on the conference website
• scheduling
• making online payments
• and more

Excluding any time at the actual conference itself, you might need 12 hours of time to make it work. Let’s say your hourly rate is $xxx/hr – now what’s the “price you pay“?

When you hire a professional service, it’s a similar story: there’s research, communication, planning, preparation, vetting, payment-making, meetings, meetings, meetings. The hidden price of time is even true of software.

Notion.so, for example – I don’t care what your use case is (except perhaps note-taking), if you don’t spend at least 4 hours in research, practice, and study, Notion won’t work.

Like when you pay for a conference online but then spend 0 time doing 0 other things.

As sellers, there’s an opportunity to (a) gain trust and (b) filter out bad-fit customers by being clearer on pricing.

I like ‘Marketing Against the Grain’, co-hosted by Kieran and Kipp. They’re CMOs and content marketing experts but in recent months, their takes on generative AI have been particularly on point.

A few weeks ago, Kieran made a point about the increasing value of human connection, clipped here.

You might catch Kipp’s rejoinder:

• Human connection
• Point of view
• Opinion

The context here – where this increase in the value of humanness is playing out – is online properties and to an extent, SEO.

The idea is that sites whose value is based in transactional information will be eventually consumed by ChatGPT and other generative AI-enhanced apps.

Stackoverflow, for example, has apparently already lost 20% of its considerable traffic this year; a causal relationship is unproven but a strong possibility. It makes sense – who wants to suffer abuse from an acerbic nerd on Stackoverflow when you could get the same information from a cheerfuly if overly-talkative robot on ChatGPT?

Meanwhile destinations featuring human connection, point of view, and opinion are better positioned.  They cite Reddit, for example.

The same trend will play out on video – and as they point out elsewhere in the video, the value of video in marketing is set to spike in the coming years, because of its potential to deliver a lot of humanity.

Highly robotic LinkedIn Learning Videos about JS frameworks, databases, and AI will cede ground to idiosyncratic channels like Fireship.

Not because LinkedIn doesn’t have the right information but because Fireship has the human point of view that now feels warmer than ever.

The other day, A Smart Bear wrote about leverage thru embracing differentiated, long-term strengths; “do you” was the idea.

What that really means, though, is embracing your business model – including in your messaging. Imagine that your business falls somewhere on this matrix.

Wherever it falls, strengths and weaknesses come with it.

Types of B2B Solutions

             slow     decision-speed    fast

 deep        |    Type A    |    Type B    |
insight      ---------------+---------------

shallow      |    Type X    |    Type Y    |

Well, who wouldn’t want to be Type B: fast decisions plus deep insight?

And who in their right mind would choose Type X, shallow on insight and slow-moving?

A lot of businesses actually; let’s take a quick tour of the matrix.

Type A (examples: R&D teams, strategy consulting) has a lot going for it:

• Develops tailored and innovative solutions
• Long-term profitability based on deep relationships

But… slow decisions can mean missed opportunities, misunderstanding of new trends – plus high cost research and analysis work.

Type B (examples: agile software shop, real-time market analytics product) can respond more quickly to opportunities and stack profits quickly – but they also incur the most risks, for their clients and their own firms.

Type X (examples: a standardized CRM, a bookkeeping package) might not be such a bad deal if you like predictable revenue, an easier selling cycle and lower overall risk, in exchange for lower growth potential.

And Type Y (examples: a rapid prototyping service, datasets-for-sale)  has revenue flexibility and solution agility – the only issue is the solution might fall flat and do little for customers.

I’m guessing you know which quadrant you fall in – if so, you have some clues on what to focus on in your messaging.