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

Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.

The facts aren’t at issue here; they can’t be. What’s happening is that these theorists are taking comfort in their standing as outliers and they’re searching for a feeling, not a logical truth.

Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don’t want what the marketer wants, don’t believe what they believe, and don’t care about what they care about. They probably never will.

Permission marketing recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

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 lot about the hopes and dreams of your customers and their friends. You listen to their frustrations and invest in changing the culture. Being market-

Your goal is the change you seek to make in the world. It could be the self-focused goal of earning money, but it’s more likely to be the change you seek to make in those you serve. The goal is your shining light, the unwavering destination of your work.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want.

Tension is the hallmark of a great educational experience—the tension of not quite knowing where we are in the process, not being sure of the curriculum, not having a guarantee that the insight we seek is about to happen. All effective education creates tension, because just before you learn something, you’re aware you don’t know it (yet).

Any of these edges and stories and transformations are available to the craftsperson as soon as he decides to make a difference. Knowing that this is the story your customer tells himself is insufficient. You still have to act on it, open the door to the possibility, and organize the entire experience around that story. This is the work that helps