This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See

Specific is a kind of bravery Specific means accountable. It worked or it didn’t. It matched or it didn’t. It spread or it didn’t. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone? You’ll never be able to serve everyone, which is comforting, since you’re less likely to be disappointed when it doesn’t happen. But what if you committed to the smallest viable

If you have to choose a thousand people to become your true fans, who should you choose? Begin by choosing people based on what they dream of, believe, and want, not based on what they look like. In other words, use psychographics instead of demographics. Just as you can group people by the color of their eyes or the length of their ring fingers, y

Regardless of what the specifics are, if you’re a marketer, you’re in the business of making change happen. Denying this is a form of hiding; it’s more productive to own it instead. Stumble 1: It’s tempting to pick a grandiose, nearly impossible change: “I want to change the face of music education and make it a top priority across the country.” We

You are an actor with intent, an agent of change, a human being working hard to change other human beings.

The alternative is to be market-driven—to hear the market, to listen to it, and even more important, to influence it, to bend it, to make it better. 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 l

Stories, connections, and experiences The good news is that we don’t need to rely on the shiniest, latest digital media shortcut—we have even more powerful, nuanced, and timeless tools at our disposal. 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

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.

Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “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. But that doesn’t go nearly far enough. No one wants a hole. What people want is the s

Marketing isn’t a race to add more features for less money. Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us.