This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Below, you’ll see a similar graph showing traffic to websites. If you’re at the circle, or worse, to the right of that circle, you can’t compete for impact or ad dollars, because even though Google profits from every website they search, most of the people out on the edges are huffing and puffing. These huge marketplaces (Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, e

When you launch an extreme (the most efficient, the least expensive, the most convenient), then whatever you’ve exceeded is no longer the extreme that its fans sought out.

The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buying direct marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.

Send a signal that feels like a sign we already trust, then change it enough to let us know that it’s new, and that it’s yours.

maybe, there are underserved customers out there who can’t wait to find you, connect with you, and spread the word.

We don’t care about you, or how hard you worked on it. We want to know if it’s for us, and if you’re the real deal.

No, you shouldn’t phone it in or be careless. No, you shouldn’t choose a logo that offends or distracts people. Yes, you should pick a logo that works in different sizes in different media. But mostly . . . pick a logo, don’t spend a ton of money or have a lot of meetings about it, and keep it for as long as you keep your first name.

What if, instead, we seek advice? Seek it like this: “I made something that I like, that I thought you’d like. How’d I do? What advice do you have for how I could make it fit your worldview more closely?”

When you ask, “Who’s it for?” the answer needs to be, “The kind of customers who are going to show up for us in a way that lets us keep going.”