Author: Seth Godin

ISBN: 978-0241370148

Another great marketing book by Seth Godin. It is a mix of ideas from all of Seth's books until 2018. However, if you only had time to read one of his books I'd recommend the All marketers are storytellers.

EXCERPTS

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

For most of my lifetime, marketing was advertising. And then it wasn’t true anymore. Which means you’ll need to become a marketer instead. That means seeing what others see. Building tension. Aligning with tribes. Creating ideas that spread. It means doing the hard work of becoming driven by the market and working with (your part of) that market.

It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories—stories that resonate and spread. Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward. And when our ideas spread, we change the culture. We build something that people would miss if it were gone, something that gives them meaning, connection, and possibility.

Marketing in five steps

1. The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about.
2. The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about.
3. The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market.
4. The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word.
5. The last step is often overlooked: show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years—to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make. To earn permission to follow up and to earn enrollment to teach.

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

If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.

Human beings tell themselves stories. Those stories, as far as each of us is concerned, are completely and totally true, and it’s foolish to try to persuade them (or us) otherwise.

What you say isn’t nearly as important as what others say about you.

Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us.

People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them. They want the way it will make them feel.

If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile. The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions.

“When in doubt, assume that people will act according to their current irrational urges, ignoring information that runs counter to their beliefs, trading long-term for short-term benefits and most of all, being influenced by the culture they identify with.” You can make two mistakes here:

1. Assume that the people you’re seeking to serve are well-informed, rational, independent, long-term choice makers.
2. Assume that everyone is like you, knows what you know, wants what you want. I’m not rational and neither are you.

If you have to choose a thousand people to become your true fans, who should you choose? Begin by choosing people based on what they dream of, believe, and want, not based on what they look like. In other words, use psychographics instead of demographics.

Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on? Once you’ve identified the scale, then find a corner of the market that can’t wait for your attention. Go to their extremes.

Lean entrepreneurship is built around the idea of the minimal viable product. Figure out the simplest useful version of your product, engage with the market, and then improve and repeat.

Everything gets easier when you walk away from the hubris of everyone. Your work is not for everyone. It’s only for those who signed up for the journey.

“It’s not for you” shows the ability to respect someone enough that you’re not going to waste their time, pander to them, or insist that they change their beliefs. It shows respect for those you seek to serve, to say to them, “I made this for you. Not for the other folks, but for you.”

We know that every best-selling book on Amazon has at least a few one-star reviews. It’s impossible to create work that both matters and pleases everyone.

It’s entirely possible that your work isn’t as good as it needs to be. But it’s also possible that you failed to be clear about who it was for in the first place.

Here’s a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with: My product is for people who believe _________________. I will focus on people who want _________________. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get _________________.

1. Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not “How can I start a business?” but, “What would matter here?”
2. Focus on the smallest viable market: “How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?” [Read the Kevin Kelly's article "1000 True Fans"]
3. Match the worldview of the people being served. Show up in the world with a story that they want to hear, told in a language they’re eager to understand.
4. Make it easy to spread. If every member brings in one more member, within a few years, you’ll have more members than you can count. [Read the book Contagious]
5. Earn, and keep, the attention and trust of those you serve.
6. Offer ways to go deeper. Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.
7. At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress in their journeys toward their goals.
8. Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that work.

When a marketer arrives and says, “This is better,” he’s wrong. He actually means, “This is better for someone and it might be better for you.”

You’re stealing because you’re withholding a valuable option. You’re keeping someone from understanding how much they’ll benefit from what you’ve created … such a significant benefit that it’s a bargain. If they understand what’s on offer and choose not to buy it, then it’s not for them. Not today, not at this price, not with that structure. That’s okay too.

Better isn’t up to you.

We remember the best one. Best for what? And that’s the key question. Best for us.

The early adopters are different. They are neophiliacs—addicted to the new. They get a thrill from discovery, they enjoy the tension of “This might not work,” and they get pleasure from bragging about their discoveries. [Every person is a neophiliacs in some domain!]

The magic question is: Who’s it for? The people you seek to serve—what do they believe? What do they want?

A marketer is curious about other people. She wonders about what others are struggling with, what makes them tick. She’s fascinated by their dreams and their beliefs.

The alternative is to build your own quadrant. To find two axes that have been overlooked. To build a story, a true story, that keeps your promise, that puts you in a position where you are the clear and obvious choice.

The quality of meeting specifications is required but no longer sufficient.

Good stories:

1.  Connect us to our purpose and vision for our career or business.
2. Allow us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here.
3. Deepen our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace.
4. Reinforce our core values.
5. Help us to act in alignment and make value-based decisions.
6. Encourage us to respond to customers instead of react to the marketplace.
7. Attract customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values.
8. Build brand loyalty and give customers a story to tell.
9. Attract the kind of like-minded employees we want.
10. Help us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of.

We don’t do this work because we feel like it in the moment. We do this work, this draining emotional labor, because we’re professionals, and because we want to make change happen.

When you get an email from a faceless corporation, speaking in the second person, someone is hiding. It’s slick, but it’s not real. We don’t feel a connection, merely the shadow of a bureaucrat. On the other hand, when a human being extends emotional labor to take responsibility—“Here, I made this”—then the door is open to connection and growth. The most effective organizations don’t always have a famous leader or a signature on every email. But they act like they do. “Here, I made this.” The goal isn’t to personalize the work. It’s to make it personal.

When you’re marketing change, you’re offering a new emotional state, a step closer to the dreams and desires of your customers, not a widget. We sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff.

What do people want? If you ask them, you probably won’t find what you’re looking for. You certainly won’t find a breakthrough. It’s our job to watch people, figure out what they dream of, and then create a transaction that can deliver that feeling.

The third is mistakenly believing that everyone wants the same thing. In fact, we don’t. The early adopters want things that are new; the laggards want things to never change. One part of the population wants chocolate, another vanilla.

And this is where we begin: with assertions. Assertions about what our audience, the folks we need to serve, want and need. Assertions about what’s on their minds when they wake up, what they talk about when no one is eavesdropping, what they remember at the end of the day.

Marketers make change. We change people from one emotional state to another. We take people on a journey; we help them become the person they’ve dreamed of becoming, a little bit at a time.

It’s tempting to make a boring product or service for everyone. The people who are happy with boring aren’t looking for you. They’re actively avoiding you, in fact. The only people we can serve are curious, dissatisfied, or bored.

Every very good customer gets you another one. Dead-end customers aren’t worth the trouble.

Your work to change the culture thrives when the word spreads, and if you want the word to spread, you need to build something that works better when it gets spread. That creates the positive cycle you’re seeking. The one that makes change happen. This simple network effect is at the heart of every mass movement and every successful culture change. It happens when remarkable is designed right into the story of your change, and more important, when the product or service works better when I use it with others. The conversation I’m motivated to have with my peers becomes the engine of growth. Growth creates more value, which leads to more growth.

For the independent creator of intellectual property (a singer, perhaps, or a writer), it turns out that a thousand true fans might be sufficient to live a better-than-decent life. To quote Kevin, “A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive two hundred miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and Audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the ‘best-of’ DVD version of your free YouTube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living—if you are content to make a living but not a fortune.” That’s one thousand people who will support you on Patreon, or one thousand people who will buy your new project on Kickstarter the day you launch it. It’s one thousand people who not only care about your work but also spread the word to those around them.

Our hits aren’t hits anymore, not like they used to be. Instead, they are meaningful for a few and invisible to the rest.

The critic who doesn’t like your work is correct. He doesn’t like your work. This cannot be argued with. The critic who says that no one else will like your work is wrong. After all, you like your work. Someone else might like it too. This is the only way to understand the one-star and five-star reviews that every bestselling book on Amazon receives. How could one book possibly get both? Either it’s good or it’s not. Not true.

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 we find the empathy to say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t for you, here’s the phone number of my competitor,” then we also find the freedom to do work that matters.

As marketers and agents of change, we almost always overrate our ability to make change happen. The reason is simple. Everyone always acts in accordance with their internal narratives. You can’t get someone to do something that they don’t want to do, and most of the time, what people want to do is take action (or not take action) that reinforces their internal narratives. The real question, then, is where does the internal narrative come from, and how does it get changed? Or, more likely, how do we use the internal narrative to change the actions that people take?

For most of us, though, changing our behavior is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance).

Marketers don’t make average stuff for average people. Marketers make change. And they do it by normalizing new behaviors.

It should be called “a culture” or “this culture,” because there is no universal culture, no “us” that defines all of us. When we’re comfortable realizing that our work is to change “a culture,” then we can begin to do two bits of hard work:

1. Map and understand the worldview of the culture we seek to change.
2. Focus all our energy on this group. Ignore everyone else.

That’s how we make change—by caring enough to want to change a culture, and by being brave enough to pick just one.

But to be the one who establishes the next phase takes a leap. A leap into a new way of doing something, just a bit better and a bit unexpected. Leap too far, though, and the tribe won’t follow.

[Elite vs. Exclusive] Malcolm Gladwell pointed out that there’s a difference between an elite institution and an exclusive one. They can coexist, but often don’t. The Rhodes Scholarship is an elite award. It goes to few people, and it’s respected by other elite individuals and institutions. Elite is an external measure. Does the world you care about respect this badge? But the Rhodes Scholarship isn’t exclusive. It’s not a tribe, a group of well-connected individuals with their own culture. Exclusive is an internal measure. It’s us versus them, insiders versus outsiders.

Harvard Business School is both elite and exclusive. So are the Navy Seals.

In fact, though, it’s exclusive institutions that change things. We have no control over our elite status, and it can be taken away in an instant. But exclusive organizations thrive as long as their members wish to belong, and that work is something we can control. At the heart of the exclusive organization is a simple truth: every member is “people like us.” Sign up for that and you gain status. Walk away and you lose it. [Facebook!]

Work that matters for people who care is the shortest, most direct route to making a difference.

When life interferes, new patterns are established. This is why it’s so profitable to market to new dads, engaged women, and people who have recently moved. They don’t have a pattern to match, so it’s all an interrupt.

The best time to market a new app is when the platform is brand new. When you market to someone who doesn’t have a pattern yet, you don’t have to persuade them that their old choices were mistakes.

Simple: a colleague says, “You’re missing out.” Every day you’re not on Slack, people at work are talking about you behind your back, working on projects without you, having conversations you’re excluded from. You can release that tension, right now, simply by signing in …

We don’t want to feel left out, left behind, uninformed, or impotent. We want to get ahead. We want to be in sync. We want to do what people like us are doing.

When you arrive on the scene with your story, with the solution you have in mind, do you also create tension? If you don’t, the status quo is likely to survive.

The status quo doesn’t shift because you’re right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status.

If you look closely at decisions that don’t initially make sense, you’ll likely see status roles at work. The decision didn’t make sense to you, but it made perfect sense to the person who made it. We spend a lot of time paying attention to status.

Status is not the same as wealth.

In the last few decades, we’ve gotten lazier in our nuance of awarding status, preferring it to be related to either the dollars in a bank account or the number of followers online. But status continues to take many forms.

Six things about status

1. Status is always relative. Unlike eyesight or strength or your bank balance, it doesn’t matter where you are on the absolute scale. Instead, it’s about perception of status relative to others in the group. There is no highest number.
2. Status is in the eyes of the beholder. If you are seen as low status by outsiders but as high status in your own narrative, then both things are true, at different times, to different people.
3. Status attended to is the status that matters. Status is most relevant when we try to keep it or change it. For many people, status is upmost in our minds in every interaction. But it only matters when the person we’re engaging with cares about status.
4. Status has inertia. We’re more likely to work to maintain our status (high or low) than we are to try to change it.
5. Status is learned. Our beliefs about status start early. And yet the cohort we are with can influence our perception of our status in very little time.
6. Shame is the status killer. The reason that shame is used as a lever is simple: it works. If we accept the shame someone sends our way, it undermines our entire narrative about relative status.

The people you’re seeking to serve in this moment: What are they measuring? If you want to market to someone who measures dominion or affiliation, you’ll need to be aware of what’s being measured and why. “Who eats first” and “who sits closest to the emperor” are questions that persist to this day. Both are status questions. One involves dominion; the other involves affiliation.

Affiliation or dominance is up to the customer, not you.

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.

You’re not people like us if you don’t talk (talk means typefaces, photo styles, copy) the way we expect you to.

The lesson: Apple’s ad team only needed a million people to care. And so they sent a signal to them, and ignored everyone else. It took thirty years for the idea to spread from the million to everyone, thirty years to build hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. But it happened because of the brilliant use of semiotics, not technology.

A brand is a shorthand for the customer’s expectations. What promise do they think you’re making? What do they expect when they buy from you or meet with you or hire you? That expectation isn’t specific; it’s emotional.

How do we know that brands like Verizon and AT&T are essentially worthless? Because if we switched someone from one to the other, they wouldn’t care. If you want to build a marketing asset, you need to invest in connection and other nontransferable properties. If people care, you’ve got a brand.

If a brand is our mental shorthand for the promise that you make, then a logo is the Post-it reminder of that promise. Without a brand, a logo is meaningless.

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.

Good marketers have the humility to understand that you shouldn’t waste a minute (not of your time or of their time) on anyone who isn’t on the left part of the curve. If someone is satisfied with what they have, you’re unlikely to have the time or the money to reach out to them directly and cause them to become dissatisfied—that is, interested enough and open enough to changing and becoming a customer. It’s not for them. Not right now. With persistence and smarts, you’ll get to them, perhaps. One day. Horizontally. Person to person. Through earned media. But not right now. It’s the neophiliacs, the folks with a problem that you can solve right now (novelty and tension and the endless search for better), that you can begin with.

There’s no such thing as mandatory education. It’s almost impossible to teach people against their will. The alternative is voluntary education: gaining enrollment. We ask people to eagerly lend us their attention. The promise is that it’s worth their effort because, in exchange, they’re going to get the insight or forward motion that they want. Enrollment is what you need to earn permission to engage. Enrollment is hands raised, eyes on the board, notes being taken. Enrollment is the first step on a journey where you learn from the customer and she learns from you. Enrollment is mutual, it is consensual, and it often leads to change. Lazy marketers try to buy enrollment with flashy ads. The best marketers earn enrollment by seeking people who want the change being offered. And they do it by connecting people to others who want the change as well. And that change is precisely what marketers seek.

Different people want different things. Neophiliacs want to go first. They want hope and possibility and magic. They want the thrill of it working and the risk that it might not. They want the pleasure of showing their innovation to the rest of the crew. [Status!] And they want the satisfaction of doing better work faster, as well as the anticipation of being rewarded for their innovation and productivity.

In that moment, then, when the phone lights up, what’s the interaction for? If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny responsibility, read the script, use words like “as stated” and “our policy,” then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you’re doing and watch it all fall apart. On the other hand, the cost of being human in this situation is easily covered by the upside of delighting an extraordinary customer. Get in your car, drive across town, and show up. Talk about it face to face. Run down to FedEx and get that shipment in the last pickup of the day. Amazement and delight go a long way. Have the CEO pick up the phone and call that customer that you accidentally triple-charged. It’ll take a few minutes and it will be worth it.

If you tell your competition your tactics, they’ll steal them and it will cost you. But if you tell them your strategy, it won’t matter. Because they don’t have the guts or the persistence to turn your strategy into their strategy.

Your strategy is the long-lasting way you’re investing in reaching that goal. Your strategy sits above the tactics. A strategy might be to earn trust and attention. A strategy might be to be seen as the best and maybe only alternative. A strategy might be to have alliances and partnerships that enable you and your message to reach exactly the right people. The way you use stories, status, and connection to create tension and forward motion is a strategy.

And the tactics? The tactics are the dozens or hundreds of steps you’ll take on behalf of your strategy. If a tactic fails, that’s okay, because another one can take its place and support the strategy you have in mind.

Advertising is a special case, an optional engine for growth. You can buy an ad in a magazine, in an online network, or with a stamp. In all three cases, you’ll be able to reach/interrupt/educate/engage with all the people the intermediary promised. You don’t have to earn this attention, since you can buy it. You’re no longer the outsider; now you’re the customer. You have cash and you can use it to buy attention, whenever you want, in as much quantity as you can afford. Here’s the good news: when you find an ad approach that works, you can scale it. You can scale it quickly and precisely. And you’ve probably guessed the bad news: it’s not easy to find an ad approach that works.

There are three elements to the magic of online advertising:

1. You can reach people more precisely online than in any other medium. Not just the demographics of what they look like, but the psychographics of what they believe and what they’re looking for.
2. You can reach people instantly. You can decide to run an ad at 10 a.m. and have it reach people beginning at 10:01 a.m.
3. You can measure everything.

Advertising is unearned media. It’s bought and paid for. And the people you seek to reach know it. They’re suspicious. They’re inundated. They’re exhausted.

It’s not that advertising can’t work. It’s simply that it’s not the right answer for everyone, at least in this moment.

Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured. Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured. If you run an ad on Facebook and count your clicks, and then measure how many of them convert, you’re doing direct marketing. If you put a billboard by the side of the highway, hoping that people will remember your funeral parlor the next time someone dies, you’re doing brand marketing.

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. If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads.

A simple guide to online direct marketing. The ad exists to get a click. The click exists to either make a sale or earn permission. The sale exists to lead to another sale, or to word of mouth. Permission exists to lead to education and to a sale.

A simple guide to brand marketing. Everything you do, from the way you answer the phone to the design of your packaging, from your location to the downstream effects of your work, from the hold music to the behavior of your executives, and even the kind of packing peanuts you use—all of it is a form of marketing your brand. You can’t measure it. You might not even notice it. But it still matters. You’re already spending money on brand marketing. No doubt about it. The question is: What would happen if you spent a bit more? What if you spent it with intention?

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.

We remember the things that we see again and again. That we do over and over.

Along the way, this has pushed us to associate “trust” with the events and stories that happen again and again. The familiar is normal and the normal is trusted. Marketers forget this daily. Because we get bored with our stuff. Our story, our change. We’ve heard it before. We remember it. But we’re bored. And so we change it. Jay Levinson famously said, “Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.” We can expand this well beyond ads. All the storytelling you do requires frequency. You’ll try something new, issue a statement, explore a new market … and when it doesn’t work right away, the instinct is to walk away and try something else. But frequency teaches us that there’s a very real dip—a gap between when we get bored and when people get the message.

The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (there, I just said it again). If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency, it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust.

The path is to have someone care enough about you and what you create that they’ll type in your name. That they’ll be looking for you, not a generic alternative. Yes, you can find my blog by searching for “blog” in Google. But I’d rather have you search for “Seth” instead. SEO is the practice of ranking high in the search results for a generic term.

Pricing is a marketing tool, not simply a way to get money.

There are two key things to keep in mind about pricing: Marketing changes your pricing. Pricing changes your marketing. Because people form assumptions and associations based on your pricing, and your pricing shapes what people believe about your service, it’s important to be clear about how you position yourself. Your price should be aligned with the extremes you claimed as part of your positioning.

For most organizations, particularly small ones, the hard part isn’t the mechanics of charging different amounts. It’s the storytelling. I bring this up because it’s a powerful way to understand the story of your price (and the price of your story). How do you feel when you find out that you got a discount that no one else got? What if you deserved it? How do you feel if other people got that discount and you didn’t? What about the scarcity and pricing built into Kickstarter? Does the fear of missing out on a level that’s almost full push you to act?

When you’re the cheapest, you’re not promising change. You’re promising the same, but cheaper.

Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas.

The road out of this paradox is to combine two offerings, married to each other: 1. Free ideas that spread. 2. Expensive expressions of those ideas that are worth paying for. When a chef gives away her recipes, or appears on a podcast, or leads an online seminar, she’s giving her ideas away for free. It’s easy to find them, engage with them with frequency, and share them. But, if you want to eat that pasta served on china on a white tablecloth at her restaurant, it’s going to cost you twenty-four dollars. When a song on the radio is free, but the concert ticket costs eighty-four dollars, the artist can be compensated. The china and the ticket are souvenirs of ideas, and souvenirs are supposed to be expensive.

There are countless ways for you to share your vision, your ideas, your digital expressions, your ability to connect—for free. And each of them builds awareness, permission, and trust, which gives you a platform to sell the thing that’s worth paying for.

The rational thing is to believe that we’re more likely to require trust before we engage in risky transactions. And it’s also rational to expect that people are more likely to want more trust before spending a lot of money (a form of risk). Or committing time and effort. Many times, though, the opposite is true. The fact that the transaction is risky causes cognitive dissonance to kick in. We invent a feeling of trust precisely because we’re spending a lot.

When people are heavily invested (cash or reputation or effort), they often make up a story to justify their commitment. And that story carries trust.

Lowering your price doesn’t make you more trusted. It does the opposite.

Generosity in terms of free work, constant discounts, and plenty of uncompensated overtime isn’t really generous. Because you can’t sustain it. Because soon you’ll be breaking the promises you made. On the other hand, showing generosity with your bravery, your empathy, and your respect is generous indeed. What your customers want from you is for you to care enough to change them. To create tension that leads to forward motion. To exert emotional labor that will open them up to what’s possible. And if you need to charge a lot to pull that off, it’s still a bargain.

Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission to use it. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either. Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went. Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.

In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y, and z; I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then—this is the hard part—that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention.

Once you earn permission, you can educate. You have enrollment. You can take your time and tell a story. Day by day, drip by drip, you can engage with people. Don’t just talk at them; communicate the information that they want.

Protect it. It’s more valuable than the laptops or chairs in your office. If someone walked out the door with those, you’d fire them. Act the same way if someone on your team spams the list just to make a metric go up.

If permission is at the heart of your work, earn it and keep it. Communicate only with those who choose to hear from you. The simplest definition of permission is the people who would miss you if you didn’t reach out. You should own that, not rent it.

How do you get permission in the first place? How do you connect with people who want to hear more from you? The worldview of those who care about new things (the neophiliacs) drives them to seek out new voices, new ideas, and new options. There aren’t a lot of these folks in your market, but there may be enough of them.

Transform your project by being remarkable. It’s almost impossible to spread your word directly. Too expensive, too slow. To find individuals, interrupt them, and enroll them, one by one … it’s a daunting task. The alternative is to intentionally create a product or service that people decide is worth talking about. I call this a Purple Cow. It’s worth noting that whether something is remarkable isn’t up to you, the creator. You can do your best, but the final decision is up to your user, not you. If they remark on it, then it’s remarkable. If they remark on it, the word spreads.

You do people a service when you make better things and make it easy to talk about them. The best reason someone talks about you is because they’re actually talking about themselves: “Look at how good my taste is.” Or perhaps, “Look at how good I am at spotting important ideas.”

You can fix your funnel

1. You can make sure that the right people are attracted to it.
2. You can make sure that the promise that brought them in aligns with where you hope they will go.
3. You can remove steps so that fewer decisions are required.
4. You can support those you’re engaging with, reinforcing their dreams and ameliorating their fears as you go.
5. You can use tension to create forward motion.
6. You can, most of all, hand those who have successfully engaged in the funnel a megaphone, a tool they can use to tell the others. People like us do things like this.

Spend a thousand dollars on online ads that reach a million people. Get twenty clicks. That means that each click cost fifty dollars. Those clicks go to your website. One out of ten turns into an order. Which means that each order cost you five hundred dollars. If you’re fortunate, in this business we’re describing, the lifetime value of a customer is more than five hundred dollars, which means you can turn around and buy more ads to get more customers at the same cost.

Every click between the first and the last makes your funnel more expensive, but if you get rid of too many clicks then no one will trust you enough to buy from you. If your product or service makes things better, the customer will stick with you and you’ll generate that lifetime value we spoke of.

The goal is to prime the pump with ads that are aimed at neophiliacs, people looking to find you. Then build trust with frequency. To gain trial. To generate word of mouth. And to make it pay by building a cohort of people, a network that needs your work to be part of who they are and what they do. It’s easy to skip the last part, the stuff that happens after the first click. And if you only do the easy, expensive part, you’ll almost certainly be unhappy with the outcome.

We hear about the outliers, the kids who make millions of dollars a year with their YouTube channel or the fashionista with millions of followers. But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.

The intuitive answer is that the early adopters will bring your idea to the masses and you’ll be done. But often, that’s not what happens. It doesn’t happen because the mass market wants something different from what the early adopters want. The mass market wants something that works. Something safe. A pattern match, not a pattern interrupt.

Moore’s point was that few innovations glide from one part of the market to the other. That’s because in order to satisfy the early adopters, you may just need to annoy the masses. The very thing your innovation did (break things) is the one thing that the mass market doesn’t want to happen.

The middle of the curve isn’t eagerly adopting. They’re barely adapting. That’s why they’ve chosen to be in the middle of the curve.

The story of self gives you standing, a platform from which to speak. When you talk about your transition—from who you used to be to who you became—you are being generous with us. It’s not about catastrophizing your situation or the faux empathy of online vulnerability. Instead, the story of self is your chance to explain that you are people like us. That you did things like this. That your actions led to a change, one we can hear and see and understand. The story of us is the kernel of a tribe. Why are we alike? Why should we care? Can I find the empathy to imagine that I might be in your shoes? The story of us is about together, not apart. It explains why your story of self is relevant to us, and how we will benefit when we’re part of people like us. And the story of now is the critical pivot. The story of now enlists the tribe on your journey. It’s the peer opportunity/peer pressure of the tribe that will provide the tension for all of us to move forward, together. I was like you. I was in the desert. Then I learned something and now I’m here. Of course, I am not alone. I did not do this alone and I see in you the very pain I saw in myself. Together, we can make this better. But if we hesitate, or if we leave the others behind, it won’t work. The urgency of now requires that we do it together, without delay, without remorse, without giving in to our fear. Story of self. Story of us. Story of now. Here’s a simple example: “I used to be fifty pounds overweight. My health was in tatters and my relationships were worse. Then I discovered competitive figure skating. It was tough at first, but thanks to my new friends on the rink, I got to the point where it was fun. Within months, I had lost dozens of pounds, but more important, I felt good about myself. “The real win for me, though, was the friendships I made. I discovered that not only did I feel terrific physically, but being out on the ice with people—old friends like you, and the new ones I made at the rink—made me feel more alive. “I’m so glad you were willing to come to the rink today. I called ahead and they’ve reserved some rental skates for you …” In the first paragraph, we hear the story of our friend, a narrative of going from here to there. In the second, we hear about how it changes our friend’s relationships, including to people like us. And in the third, there’s a call to action, a reason to do something right now.

A tribe doesn’t have to have a leader, but it often is populated with people who share interests, goals, and language. Your opportunity as a marketer is the chance to connect the members of the tribe. They’re lonely and disconnected, they fear being unseen, and you, as the agent of change, can make connection happen.

Zig did the math. He understood that while most salespeople would flee when they hit the chasm, he could build a human bridge. There’d be days with no sales at all, but that’s okay, because after crossing the local chasm, the volume would more than make up for the time invested. The easy sales aren’t always the important ones.

Ship your work. It’s good enough. Then make it better.

Realize that as a marketer, the better you are trying to teach or sell to the right person is worth far more than what you are charging.

We bring value to the world when we market. That’s why people engage with us. If you don’t market the change you’d like to contribute, then you’re stealing. Here you are offering more value than you’re charging. It’s a bargain. A gift.

Someone will benefit from your better if you get out of your way and market it. There’s a student who’s ready to sign up. There’s somebody who wants a guide, who wants to go somewhere. If you hesitate to extend yourself with empathy, to hear them, you’re letting us down.

The best ideas aren’t instantly embraced. Even the ice cream sundae and the stoplight took years to catch on. That’s because the best ideas require significant change. They fly in the face of the status quo, and inertia is a powerful force. Because there’s a lot of noise and a lot of distrust. Change is risky. And because we often want others to go first. Your most generous and insightful work needs help finding the people it’s meant to serve. And your most successful work will spread because you designed it to.

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.

Story of your marketing. It has to resonate with the listener, to tell them something they’ve been waiting to hear, something they’re open to believing. It has to invite them on a journey where a change might happen. And then, if you’ve opened all those doors, it has to solve the problem, to deliver on the promise.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet

• Who’s it for?
• What’s it for?
• What is the worldview of the audience you’re seeking to reach?
• What are they afraid of?
• What story will you tell?
• Is it true?
• What change are you seeking to make?
• How will it change their status?
• How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?
• Why will they tell their friends?
• What will they tell their friends?
• Where’s the network effect that will propel this forward?
• What asset are you building?
• Are you proud of it?