Marketing

A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. ... it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and fam

Positioning is the act of designing a company’s offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the minds of the target market.

If you want to be the best in the world, don’t start by trying to create the best product or service. Start by figuring out how people want to feel.

But the messaging architecture is only the first step. For every version of the Nest story, we wrote down the most common objections and how we’d overcome them—what stats to use, what pages of the website to send people to, what partnerships to mention or testimonials to point to. We figured out which story we could put on a billboard all the way d

EMOTIONAL BRANDING Many marketing experts believe a brand positioning should have both rational and emotional components. In other words, it should contain points-of-difference and points-of-parity that appeal to both the head and the heart.

you tell a story: you connect with people’s emotions so they’re drawn to your narrative, but you also appeal to their rational side so they can convince themselves it’s the smart move to buy what you’re selling. You balance what they want to hear with what they need to know.

nurturing e-mail is to use an effective formula that offers simple, helpful advice to a customer. I’ve been using this formula for years and customers love it. 1. Talk about a problem. 2. Explain a plan to solve the problem. 3. Describe how life can look for the reader once the problem is solved. I also recommend including a postscript, or the P.S.

The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific. And then, with this knowledge, overdo your brand marketing. Every slice of every interaction ought to reflect the whole.

People almost never buy the process. They buy the result. We really should be selling them what they want to be sold.

A good positioning has one foot in the present and one in the future. It needs to be somewhat aspirational so the brand has room to grow and improve. Positioning on the basis of the current state of the market is not forward looking enough, but at the same time, the positioning cannot be so removed from reality that it is essentially unobtainable.