Brand Storytelling and Positioning

people don’t buy products when they understand them. they buy products when they feel understood.

Fantastic advice, for software builders:

Headline driven development

Here is a simple process for shipping software projects that works. First, decompose the project into a stream1 of headlines. Then pick an aggressive date to ship the first headline and work like hell to meet that date. Have everyone work only on one headline at a time– the upcomi

Rory Sutherland on Lenny’s Podcast:

• Products like Meta Portal TV, Google Glass, Japanese toilets, and wine boxes were amazing products but something about the timing or the marketing was wrong and the consumer never bit

• Rory on Japanese toilets: “I think it’s barbaric that the Western Hemisphere dry wipes.”

• The reason most people adopt new technology

Sometimes getting the right positioning for your startup is more challenging than getting to the product itself.

“Often it’s not that you don’t know who the customer is, it’s that you’re not picking — you haven’t committed to one hypothesis over the other. That’s what creates the confusion about what the product is, what the feature set looks like,

We’ve gotten so damn good at making products with good physical attributes that the commercial war of the future will be about identity rather than value —Iannaccone

thoughts on the creative tensions of Disneyland: between art and commerce, the child vs. the adult, what you can see vs. what’s hidden, and surrendering vs. control.

In the old world of broadcast communication that Naomi Klein wrote about, promotion was limited to a few channels, so multinationals with massive advertising budgets had the power to sell a brand monoculture. Now every night, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, we scroll and see brands smushed up next to real people in the feed. Branding altogethe