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

If your product (and by extension, your marketing) breaks an existing system, the consumer has no choice but to buy your solution—or at least to notice it and consider it.

But if you rely on the nearly universal worldview that people like being in sync with their peers, you are likely to find that those who believe your story will work hard to share their lie with their peers.

This is why permission marketing is so effective—you reach people who have a worldview that the messages you promise to send them are a valuable part of their lives.

The best worldviews from a marketer’s point of view are those that include a healthy dose of “I gotta share this!”

Companies like Broadview and IBM and Cisco carved up the market by working hard to discover who would believe which story.

A vote is a statement about the voter, not the candidate.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant book Blink, he proves conclusively that humans make decisions on almost no data—and then stick with those decisions regardless of information that might prove them wrong.

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

once fooled, a person will never repeat your story to someone else.