All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works--and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All

Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries is one of the most important marketing books ever.

These superstitious iPod owners, though, had made a decision about what their player liked (and what it didn’t like). They gave the machine a personality.

As bikers aged, their worldview changed and so did the successful stories.

Talented marketers understand that the prospect is ultimately telling himself the lie, so allowing him (and the rest of the target audience) to draw his own conclusions is far more effective than just announcing the punch line.

Marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively.

but no marketing succeeds if it can’t find an audience that already wants to believe the story being told.

but it accurately mimics the way we actually make decisions.

The problem is that once a consumer has bought someone else’s story and believes that lie, persuading the consumer to switch is the same as persuading him to admit he was wrong. And people hate admitting that they’re wrong.

Make your story bigger and bigger until it’s important enough to believe.

Worldview is the term I use to refer to the rules, values, beliefs and biases that an individual consumer brings to a situation.