Marketing in five steps The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about. The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about. The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tin

“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” — Steve Jobs

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.

Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.

The essence of effective marketing is discovering what people already want, then presenting your offer in a way that intersects with that preexisting Desire. The best marketing is similar to Education-Based Selling (discussed later): it shows the prospect how the offer will help them achieve what they desire.

the struggle that so many companies have to differentiate or communicate their true value to the outside world is not a business problem, it’s a biology problem. And just like a person struggling to put her emotions into words, we rely on metaphors, imagery and analogies in an attempt to communicate how we feel. Absent the proper language to share

So the only way I could master marketing was to bury myself in it—to take the customer journey myself, to touch every touchpoint. So nothing was ever presented to me without context—I would always expect to see what came before, what came after. I’d need to know the story we were telling and to whom we were telling it and at what point of the journ