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CHAPTER TWO

The Marketer Learns to See

In 1983, I was a very young and inexperienced brand manager at Spinnaker, the startup software company I joined after business school. Suddenly, I had millions of dollars in my budget, fancy lunches with ad reps that I didn’t ask for, and an urgent need: to get the word out about the software my amazing team had created.

I wasted all that ad money. The ads didn’t work because the ads were ignored. Somehow, though, the software sold.

Over the years, I’ve launched dozens and dozens of projects and sold goods and services to businesses and individuals. I’ve worked with Jay Levinson, the father of Guerrilla Marketing, with Lester Wunderman, the godfather of direct mail, and Bernadette Jiwa, the doyenne of storytelling. My ideas have built billion-dollar companies and raised nearly that much for important charities.

Mostly, the journey has involved noticing what works and trying to understand what doesn’t. It’s been an ongoing experiment of trial and error (mostly error) with projects and organizations I care about.

And now I have a compass for what marketing is today, about the human condition, and about our culture. This approach is simple, but it’s not easy to embrace, because it involves patience, empathy, and respect.

The marketing that has suffused our entire lives is not the marketing that you want to do. The shortcuts using money to buy attention to sell average stuff to average people are an artifact of another time, not the one we live in now.

You can learn to see how human beings dream, decide, and act. And if you help them become better versions of themselves, the ones they seek to be, you’re a marketer.

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 tiny group of people, the smallest viable market.

The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word.

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.

As marketers, we get to consistently do the work to help the idea spread from person to person, engaging a tribe as you make change happen.

This Is Marketing: An executive summary

Ideas that spread, win.

Marketers make change happen: for the smallest viable market, and by delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages that people actually want to get.

Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don’t want what the marketer wants, don’t believe what they believe, and don’t care about what they care about. They probably never will.

At the heart of our culture is our belief in status, in our self-perceived understanding of our role in any interaction, in where we’re going next.

We use status roles and our decisions about affiliation and dominion to decide where to go and how to get there.

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

Direct marketing is not the same as brand marketing, but they are both based on our decision to make the right thing for the right people.

“People like us do things like this” is how each of us understands culture, and marketers engage with this idea every day.

Ideas move through a slope. They skate through the early adopters, leap through a chasm, and slog their way to the masses. Sometimes.

Attention is a precious resource since our brains are cluttered with noise. Smart marketers make it easy for those they seek to work with, by helping position the offering in a way that resonates and is memorable.

Most of all, marketing begins (and often ends) with what we do and how we do it, not in all the stuff that comes after the thing is designed and shipped.

Your tactics can make a difference, but your strategy—your commitment to a way of being and a story to be told and a promise to be made—can change everything.

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.

Things marketers know

Committed, creative people can change the world (in fact, they’re the only ones who do). You can do it right now, and you can make more change than you can possibly imagine.

You cannot change everyone; therefore, asking, “Who’s it for?” can focus your actions and help you deal with the nonbelievers (in your head and in the outside world).

Change is best made with intent. “What’s it for?” is the posture of work that matters.

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.

We can group people into stereotyped groups that often (but not always) tell themselves similar stories, groups that make similar decisions based on their perceived status and other needs.

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