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

Because once you’re part of a tribe, your success is their success.

Which means you’ll need to become a marketer instead. That means seeing what others see. Building tension. Aligning with tribes. Creating ideas that spread.

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.

If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, that’s because it does. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key. It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

Marketing is beautiful when it persuades people to get a polio vaccine or to wash their hands before performing surgery. Marketing is powerful when it sells a product to someone who discovers more joy or more productivity because he bought it. Marketing is magic when it elects someone who changes the community for the better.

This simple network effect is at the heart of every mass movement and every successful culture change. It happens when remarkable is designed right into the story of your change, and more important, when the product or service works better when I use it with others.

The story of self gives you standing, a platform from which to speak. When you talk about your transition—from who you used to be to who you became—you are being generous with us.

There’s an alternative. The privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them.