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Let’s say you become adept at “marketing to yourself”. Meaning telling yourself the right story. Who is next guy” to market to?

Interesting point made by a reader: how important it is to have people on your team that represent other ‘yous’ to market to”.

I couldn’t agree more – that person on your team is the “next guy” to tell the story to.

As for who makes up your team, well that’s another story. Suffice it to say, we all have a team of some kind, even the soloists. And there’s a way to tell that story to everyone on the team. It’s been like this with us people for at least 4 million years.

It’s easier when the team member built or marketed the thing with you, or was somehow intricate to it.

I experienced that on consulting teams over and over again. You tell the stories of why your solution makes more sense. You practice, critique, prune – and then the narrative hits harder when it shows up in the outside world.

For example, witness the CEO of data-visualization app Tableau ​skillfully discussing data literacy​:

“Data literacy is becoming a basic job skill of the 21st century – so we are really interested in helping people learn how to use data…

Tableau is a canvas for thinking and often when you have a canvas for thinking it is often like reading a good book. It’s not that the book finishes with a how-to list for how to live your life, that’s not the point.

The point was the thoughts that occurred to you while you were reading..

To get that level of storytelling fluency, marketing to your team helps.

Who is the most important person to market to?

You.. well, part of you at least.

This is closely related to “write for yourself”, “make what you like”, “cook what you love to eat”, or “scratch your own itch”.

Marketing is not the same as making but it should proceed from the same impulse

One of the interesting things about making a product is that if you don’t like it, you have a Big Problem.

Especially when you’re doing it by hand. If I invest 45 minutes cooking dinner, I better like it. If invest 450 hours building a product, I better love it.

I want it to speak for me, reflect me, and generally “be delicious”. And I think it will be. I think it’ll offer the right person more value than it costs, in time and money.

So why would I hesitate in giving it to that person? Why would any of us hesitate?

Speaking for myself,  because part of me wants it to be valuable and “perfect” – something it can’t possibly be.

Fortunately, another part of me wants it to be valuable and imperfect, even if lots of people observe its imperfections.

Marketing to the most important person, you, sort of equates to choosing to:

• talk to the part of you that’s ok with the inevitable imperfection of what you’re making
• tell the right story to that person – why what you do/make is more valuable than what it costs
• put the right amount of daily energy and frequency into the above efforts

If you get good at that, you could be great at marketing to the next guy.

Who doesn’t love progressive disclosure  in our long ass multi-step forms, long essays, and Audible books – one easy to understand section at a time. As well as “progress indication” – so we know where we’re at.

Turbotax does this superbly well with its multi-step forms – we aspire to that standard over at Message Maps.

There’s a lost art to breaking something down into lots of palatable pieces – people were better at it in the 1800s judging from the chapter structure of Moby Dick (185 chapters) and many others.

And not just “chapter 1”, “chapter 2” – no, there unique and descriptive titles for each chapter. Just like a well designed LLM prompt, you don’t waste words; each is a chance to provide more context.

Seth Godin’s book This Is Marketing brings back the old style – it has 235 chapters and sections (and they’re on Audible too – which is rare).

The addendum to this post, below, is the chapters themselves of this book – enjoy. (And tell me if you know who the last chapter is about).

 

This Is Marketing

How Tall Is Your Sunflower?

It’s Not Going to Market Itself

Marketing Isn’t Just Selling Soap

The Market Decides

How to Know if You Have a Marketing Problem

The Answer to a Movie

Marketing Your Work Is a Complaint on The Way to Better

Chapter One: Not Mass, Not Spam, Not Shameful . . .

The Compass Points Toward Trust

Marketing Is Not a Battle, and It’s Not a War, or Even a Contest

The Magic of Ads Is a Trap that Keeps Us from Building a Useful Story

On Getting the Word Out (Precisely the Wrong Question)

Shameless Marketers Brought Shame to the Rest of Us

The Lock and the Key

Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Selfish

Case Study: Penguin Magic

You’re Not a Cigar-Smoking Fat Cat

It’s Time

Chapter Two: The Marketer Learns to See

Marketing in Five Steps

This Is Marketing: An Executive Summary

Things Marketers Know

Chapter Three: Marketing Changes People Through Stories, Connections, and Experience

Case Study: Vision Spring—Selling Glasses to People Who Need Them

Consider the SUV

That Riff About the Quarter-Inch Drill Bit

People Don’t Want What You Make

Stories, Connections, and Experiences

Market-Driven: Who’s Driving the Bus?

The Myth of Rational Choice

Chapter Four: The Smallest Viable Market

What Change Are You Trying to Make?

What Promise Are You Making?

Who Are You Seeking to Change?

Worldviews and Personas

Forcing a Focus

Specific Is a Kind of Bravery

Shun the Nonbelievers!

Where Does Love Lie?

“Winner Take All” Rarely Is

A Simple One-Word Transformation

Coloring the Ocean Purple

“It’s Not for You”

The Comedian’s Dilemma

The Simple Marketing Promise

Case Study: The Open Heart Project

Chapter Five: In Search of “Better”

Empathy Is at The Heart of Marketing

A Million-Dollar Bargain

Thinking About “Better”

Better Isn’t up To You

The Marketing of Dog Food

Early Adopters Are Not Adapters: They Crave the New

An Aside About the Reptile People Who Are Secretly Running Things

Humility and Curiosity

Case Study: Be More Chill—More than One Way to Make a Hit

What’s a Car For?

Too Many Choices

Positioning as a Service

Choose Your Axes, Choose Your Future

So Many Choices

People Are Waiting for You

Your Freedom

The Freedom of Better

One Last Thing About Sonder

Chapter Six: Beyond Commodities

Problem First

Does It Work?

The Commodity Suckout

“You Can Choose Anyone, and We’re Anyone”

When You Know What You Stand For, You Don’t Need to Compete

But Your Story Is a Hook

Case Study: Stack Overflow Is Better

Better Is up to the Users, Not up to You

And We Serve Coffee

The Authentic, Vulnerable Hero

Service

Authenticity versus Emotional Labor

Who’s Talking?

Chapter Seven: The Canvas of Dreams and Desires

What Do People Want?

Innovative Marketers Invent New Solutions that Work with Old Emotions

Nobody Needs Your Product

No One Is Happy to Call a Real Estate Broker

Where’s the Angry Bear?

What Do You Want?

Always Be Testing

Scrapbooking

If You Had to Charge Ten Times as Much

Irresistible Is Rarely Easy or Rational

Chapter Eight: More of the Who: Seeking the Smallest Viable Market

The Virtuous Cycle and Network Effects

The Most Effective Remarkability Comes from Design

And Then a Miracle Happens

A Thousand True Fans

But What About Hamilton?

What Would Jerry Do?

Taylor Swift Is Not Your Role Model

All Critics Are Right (All Critics Are Wrong)

Why Don’t People Choose You?

Chapter Nine: People Like Us Do Things Like This

Deep Change Is Difficult, and Worth It

People Like Us (Do Things Like This)

Case Study: The Blue Ribbons

The Internal Narrative

Defining “Us”

Which Us?

It Shouldn’t Be Called “the Culture”

Just Enough Art

Case Study: Gay Marriage in Ireland

Elite and/or Exclusive

Case Study: Robin Hood Foundation

The Standing Ovation

Roots and Shoots

Chapter Ten: Trust and Tension Create Forward Motion

Pattern Match/Pattern Interrupt

Tension Can Change Patterns

What Are You Breaking?

Tension Is Not the Same as Fear

Marketers Create Tension, and Forward Motion Relieves that Tension

Are You Ready to Create Tension?

How the Status Quo Got that Way

Chapter Eleven: Status, Dominance, and Affiliation

Baxter Hates Truman

It’s Not Irrational; Status Makes It the Right Choice

Status Roles: The Godfather and the Undertaker

Status Lets Us

Case Study: Lions and Maasai Warriors

The Status Dynamic Is Always at Work

Status Is Not the Same as Wealth

Six Things About Status

Frank Sinatra Had More than A Cold

Learning to See Status

Different Stories for Different People

Affiliation and Dominion Are Different Ways to Measure Status

Learning from Pro Wrestling

The Alternative to Dominion Is Affiliation

Fashion Is Usually About Affiliation

Sending Dominance Signals

Sending Affiliation Signals

Affiliation or Dominance Is up to the Customer, Not You

Chapter Twelve: A Better Business Plan

Where Are You Going? What’s Holding You Back?

Perhaps You’ve Seen the Shift

A Glib Reverse Engineering of Your Mission Statement Isn’t Helpful

Chapter Thirteen: Semiotics, Symbols, and Vernacular

Can You Hear Me Now?

What Does This Remind You Of?

Hiring a Professional

Imagine that World . . .

Why Is Nigerian Spam so Sloppy?

The Flags on SUVs Are Called Flares

The Flag Is Not for Everyone

The Same and the Different

Case Study: Where’s Keith?

We Add the Flags with Intent

Are Brands for Cattle?

Does Your Logo Matter?

Chapter Fourteen: Treat Different People Differently

In Search of the Neophiliacs

Enrollment

What Do People Want?

The Superuser

The Truth About Customer Contribution

What’s the Purpose of This Interaction?

Chapter Fifteen: Reaching the Right People

Goals, Strategy, and Tactics

Advertising Is a Special Case, an Optional Engine for Growth

More than Ever, but Less than Ever

What Does Attention Cost? What Is It Worth?

Brand Marketing Makes Magic; Direct Marketing Makes the Phone Ring

A Simple Guide to Online Direct Marketing

A Simple Guide to Brand Marketing

Frequency

Search Engine Optimization and the Salt Mines

Chapter Sixteen: Price Is a Story

Pricing Is a Marketing Tool, Not Simply a Way to Get Money

Different Prices (Different People)

“Cheap” Is Another Way to Say “Scared”

And What About Free?

Trust and Risk, Trust and Expense

Be Generous with Change and Brave with Your Business

Case Study: No Tipping at USHG

Chapter Seventeen: Permission and Remarkability in a Virtuous Cycle

Permission Is Anticipated, Personal, and Relevant

Earn Your Own Permission and Own It

Tuma Basa and RapCaviar

Showing Up with Generosity

Transform Your Project by Being Remarkable

Offensive/Juvenile/Urgent/Selfish Is Not the Same Thing as Purple

Suspending Fight Club Rules

Designing for Evangelism

Chapter Eighteen: Trust Is as Scarce as Attention

What’s Fake?

What’s Trusted, Who’s Trusted?

The Trust of Action

Famous to the Tribe

Public Relations and Publicity

Chapter Nineteen: The Funnel

Trust Isn’t Static

You Can Fix Your Funnel

Funnel Math: Casey Neistat

The Sustainable Direct Marketing Funnel

An Aside on Funnel Math

The Truth About Your Funnel

Life on the Long Tail

The April Fools’ Passover Birthday Easter Shirt

There’s a Way Out

Bridging the Chasm

Where’s Your Bridge?

Surviving the Chasm

You Might Not Find the Bridge

Case Study: Facebook and Crossing the Biggest Chasm

Crossing the Local Chasm

Clean Water in a Local Village

An Aside About B2B Marketing

Chapter Twenty: Organizing and Leading a Tribe

It’s Not Your Tribe

The Power of Now, Not Later

Manipulation Is the Tribe Killer

Shared Interests, Shared Goals, Shared Language

It Will Fade if You Let It

Take a Room in Town

Chapter Twenty-One: Some Case Studies Using the Method

How Do I Get an Agent?

Tesla Broke the Other Cars First

The NRA as a Role Model

Getting the Boss to Say Yes

Chapter Twenty-Two: Marketing Works, and Now It’s Your Turn

The Tyranny of Perfect

The Possibility of Better

The Magic of Good Enough

Help!

Chapter Twenty-Three: Marketing to the Most Important Person

Let’s imagine that there are 5 ways to grow a business.

• PLG – Product-led growth
• MLG – Marketing-led growth
• SLG – Sales-led growth
• CSLG – Customer-success led growth
• ELG – Engineering-led growth

Which is best? I’ll cut right to the punchline: instead of picking one, you probably want a blend.

The wealthy of Silicon Valley love PLG and ELG. It lets access to capital, access to amazing product talent, a love of product metrics, and patience. You focus on nothing but building an amazing product, iterate on it not for months but for years, patiently waiting for teams and individuals to adopt it organically, because they love the product – bottom-up marketing.

I like it too – I appreciate the concept of focusing on making the product amazing.

PLG and ELG are the approaches to product growth that will be most enhanced by generative AI, which allow for much more rapid product improvement.

But the two approaches above are expensive and not realistic for most B2B solutions providers.

Those kinds of businesses traditionally relied on SLG, which relies on skillful, intelligent, and socially brave people to sell, one-on-one, day after day. This is the most underappreciated of the three approaches. Like the similarly personality-powered CSLG, which focuses on extreme customer happiness after the sale, this focuses on one-to-one human relationships. Thus both will be slightly less transformed by generative AI than the other approaches.

SLG is the most derided- maybe that because people are secretly too scared to sell. So they default to the go-to: marketing-led growth. Social media, content marketing, digital advertising, SEO. This is the one that will be most disrupted by generative AI, especially SEO.

Anyway – why the rundown? What’s my point?

Most people need to escape the mental trap of assuming that marketing-led growth is the only path forward. There are lots of options!

 

 

In sales and marketing related to technology, what has worked for me over the past couple decades is solutions based on features, products, frameworks, plugins, approaches, concepts, APIs, and platforms that all have two things in common:

• they have an an instantly easy to grasp idea  – that often can  be easily riffed on
• their names themselves have a nice ring to them – that often sounds good shortened

Sometimes more of one than the other – and there’s a non-scientific tradeoff there – but that’s the basic, ridiculous-but-true formula.

There’s an allure that feels like a promise.

Case in point – when I designed and sold custom solutions based on Drupal and Salesforce, I remember introducing a module to a client called “Organic Groups” to counter the problem of Facebook Groups luring away customer from their own platform. The name Organic Groups (a) suggested the strategy of fostering a pleasantly natural evolution of affinity groups and (b) was nice to say, such as during strategy conversations; it was easy to shorten to ‘Groups’ too.

In reality, Organic Groups was fatally flawed and a complete waste of time and money 9 times out of 10 – but its superficial promise kept it alive.

Same with sales and marketing concepts like USP – unique selling proposition.

It’s a crisp idea based on a premise you can easily bullshit on in a sales call – that buyers remember just one thing. And if you shorten it down to a clean 3-consonant acronym, USP rolls off the tongue quite nicely – like IBM, NBA, MVP, etc.

The fact is though, that the person who coined USP, Bill Bernback, never produced any evidence that buyers remember just one thing. He just made it up.

The real challenge is coining a term with the properties discussed – but for something that actually delivers on its promise.

 

 

 

When you’re building a new product, feature or message, “best practices” are often “worst practices”.

It’s different when you’re building an aircraft carrier. At least nowadays it is.

Originally, when the British and US Navies first started building aircraft carriers in the 1920s and 30s, there was constant experimentation. They were even given autonomy to experiment – early attempts at holacracy.

But by the 1960’s, the system was fairly codified and plan-driven.

The first chapter of the PMP book, the sort of “best practices” manual for project management, claimed that the US Navy “invented” project management, by which they meant massively complex, multi-year plan-driven project management.

I highly doubt this claim – I mean, the pyramids of Egypt were built 4,500 year ago.

But the concept of best practices, wedded to project management, has become popular in US business culture and beyond.

For example, it’s central to the design of ChatGPT, to the frustration of users who don’t need constant best-practices-nagging – which make it tedious to extract useful information.

Best practices are also applied to marketing. For example:

• abiding by a “content marketing calendar”
• always putting periods after headlines (which make people stop reading, for many reasons)
• never putting periods after headlines

Look, if you have a sinecure at a massive corporation, then best practices like these might work for you. Because your firm gets business through maintaining its grip on media, government, distribution, etc. Look at Google’s supposedly fruitful 20% policy – it’s produced nothing for 20 years, except for perhaps psychological benefits. And for most people in companies big and small, best practices make sense to cling to. For example, Jacob Nielsen has codified some very useful UX best practices.

But for people making new things based on new ideas, it pays not to accept best practices without serious scrutiny.

 

 

In messaging, boring is something stationary and circular; if it’s not moving an idea or a message from one person to another, or not moving someone to act, it’s boring.

And unfortunately boring is not a very profitable quality.

But boring has another shade of meaning that’s related to personal characteristics.

Just as being interesting is generally related to being interested, being boring is generally related to being bored.

If there’s a takeaway here, it’s to find a way to be very interested, and seldom bored, by whatever it is your messaging applies to.

That’s probably a more sound approach than just trying to write better.

“A set of ideas that inspire a move to a position of advantage over a meaningful period of time.”

To transpose that into bullets:
1-A set of ideas
2-that inspire
3-a move to
4-a position of advantage
5-over a meaningful period of time

• Is this is actually a strategy?
• Is this actually strategic?

• a set of solutions (ideas) to problems that our customers have
• that inspire them, or help them imagine a different reality,
• to move or transform into a different kind of business
• in a way that gives them a competitive advantage
• over a period of time that lets them capitalize on all of the above

 

A strategic solution doesn’t need to do shit for the owners of the solution – it needs to do something  for the people using it.

Generative AI will force products to be hyper-precise about what they do in their marketing.

This is a change from SEO thinking, in which marketing content needed to have the right keyword phrases. An interconnected web of content each laced with inter-related with strategic keyword phrases related to how people search for things.

The idea was, someone might search for “photoshop alternative” in lots of different ways, so include all 13 of them in your online presence. Then measure, adjust, refine, etc.

I think this imprecise “fishing net” approach to optimizing content for SEO affected

• other areas of marketing
• marketing strategy as a whole
• product strategy as a whole

LLMs change this. Already they are far better tools than search engines at finding information. Adoption will grow over time; the major search engines are already incoporating LLMs results into their traditional search results.

But the funny thing is that LLMs will enforce precision in the way you talk about your product. I’m not saying they won’t be gameable, but they won’t care about your cloud of keywords.

What will work instead is a precise and unique description of your product.

Researchers measured the IQ of over 400 farmers in hot Tamil Nadu, southern India, before and after their annual harvest.

For context, this harvest yields them 60% of their annual income, in one swoop.

These farmers are usually poor, but for that one brief period of time, they are flush with cash. They have options.

The researchers found that the farmers’ IQ increases by 10% after their harvest cash comes in.

Then, as in Flowers for Algernon, their IQ plummets as they descend again into poverty. When cash is scarce, the IQ drops.

The same researchers found similar results among a similar-sized group of low-to-middle income shoppers at a mall in New Jersey. One sample group faced a hypothetical $1,500 car repair bill. The other faced a $150 car repair bill.

Those faced with the $1,500 car repair bill lost 14 IQ points – instantly.

One explanation: as the mind races with stress hormones, cognitive capacity shrinks.

So inculcating scarcity into your messaging might work – and as the study’s authors point out, poverty begets poverty. So it might work multiples times over a lifetime engagement.

But here’s a more interesting product messaging challenge: selling to people at their smartest.