Notes

  • Sharing your path to better is called marketing Location: 144

Chapter One Not Mass, Not Spam, Not Shameful

  • Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Location: 166
  • The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers, not victims. Location: 196
  • 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. Location: 206

Chapter Two The Marketer Learns to See

Chapter Three Marketing Changes People Through Stories, Connections, and Experience

  • 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, and we let everyone down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcomes. Who’s it for and what’s it for are the two questions that guide all of our decisions. Location: 378

Chapter Four The Smallest Viable Market

  • Pioneering technology journalist Clay Shirky understood how community-driven software changes everything: “We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.” Location: 530
  • The simple marketing promise 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 _________. Location: 581

Chapter Five In Search of “Better”

  • Connect us to our purpose and vision for our career or business. Allow us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here. Deepen our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace. Reinforce our core values. Help us to act in alignment and make value-based decisions. Encourage us to respond to customers instead of react to the marketplace. Attract customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values. Build brand loyalty and give customers a story to tell. Attract the kind of like-minded employees we want. Help us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of. Location: 935
  • I’m sure you can come up with some others. Speed Price Performance Ingredients Purity Sustainability Obviousness Maintenance costs Safety Edginess Distribution Network effect Imminence Visibility Trendiness Privacy Professionalism Difficulty Elitism Danger Experimental Limited Incomplete Location: 780
  • Software, perfume, insurance, candidates, authors, devices, coaches, charities, and retailers—there’s a brand everywhere you look. If you could only pick one brand to put next to each of the following emotions, one brand that you’d choose to help you feel a certain way, which brand would you pick?
    • Safe
    • Beautiful
    • Powerful
    • Worthy
    • Responsible
    • Smart
    • Connected
    • Hip Location: 833

Chapter Six Beyond Commodities

Chapter Seven The Canvas of Dreams and Desires

  • Here’s the list, the foundational list, a shared vocabulary that each of us chooses from when expressing our dreams and fears:
    • Adventure
    • Affection
    • Avoiding new things
    • Belonging
    • Community
    • Control
    • Creativity
    • Delight
    • Freedom of expression
    • Freedom of movement
    • Friendship
    • Good looks
    • Health
    • Learning new things
    • Luxury
    • Nostalgia
    • Obedience
    • Participation
    • Peace of mind
    • Physical activity
    • Power
    • Reassurance
    • Reliability
    • Respect
    • Revenge
    • Romance
    • Safety
    • Security
    • Sex
    • Strength
    • Sympathy
    • Tension Location: 1,061

Chapter Eight More of the Who: Seeking the Smallest Viable Market

Chapter Nine People Like Us Do Things Like This

  • 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. Location: 1,332

Chapter Ten Trust and Tension Create Forward Motion

  • 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.Location: 1,567
  • The status quo doesn’t shift because you’re right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status Location: 1,574

Chapter Eleven Status, Dominance, and Affiliation

  • Six things about status:
    • 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. 6 is bigger than 4, but lower than 11. There is no highest number.
    • 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.Location: 1653
    • 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.
    • Status has inertia. We’re more likely to work to maintain our status (high or low) than we are to try to change it.
    • 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.
    • 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. Location: 1657
ch 11 diagrams</sup>
  • Affiliation and Dominion are two ways to measure status
    • Affiliation: The questions that someone who cares about affiliation asks himself and those around him: Who knows you? Who trusts you? Have you made things better? What is your circle like? Where do you stand within the tribe? Can’t we all get along?
    • Dominion: The questions and statements that someone who cares about dominion offers to himself and those around him: This is mine, not yours. Who has more power? I did this myself. My family needs more of what we already have. My side dominating your side means I don’t have to be in charge, as long as my leader is winning. Location: 1,716

Chapter Twelve A Better Business Plan

  • I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections:
    • Truth
    • Assertions
    • Alternatives
    • People
    • Money
    • Location: 1780

Chapter Thirteen Semiotics, Symbols, and Vernacular

Chapter Fourteen Treat Different People Differently

Chapter Fifteen Reaching the Right People

Chapter Sixteen Price Is a Story

Chapter Seventeen Permission and Remarkability in a Virtuous Cycle

Chapter Eighteen Trust Is as Scarce as Attention

Chapter Nineteen The Funnel

  • You can fix your funnel You can make sure that the right people are attracted to it. You can make sure that the promise that brought them in aligns with where you hope they will go. You can remove steps so that fewer decisions are required. You can support those you’re engaging with, reinforcing their dreams and ameliorating their fears as you go. You can use tension to create forward motion. 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. Location: 2504

Chapter Twenty Organizing and Leading a Tribe

  • The tribe would probably survive if you went away. The goal is for them to miss you if you did. Location: 2809
  • 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. Location: 2813
  • 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 . . .” `Location: 2824
  • “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” “Keep the pressure on.” “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” “If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.” “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Location: 2838
  • “Put people to work. It’s even more effective than money.” “Challenge your people to explore, to learn, and to get comfortable with uncertainty.” “Find ways to help others on the path find firm footing.” “Help others write rules that allow them to achieve their goals.” “Treat the others the way you’d want to be treated.” Location: 2856
  • “Don’t criticize for fun. Do it when it helps educate, even if it’s not entertaining.” “Stick with your tactics long after everyone else is bored with them. Only stop when they stop working.” “It’s okay to let the pressure cease now and then. People will pay attention to you and the change you seek when they are unable to consistently ignore it.” “Don’t make threats. Do or don’t do.” “Build a team with the capacity and the patience to do the work that needs doing.” “If you bring your positive ideas to the fore, again and again, you’ll raise the bar for everyone else.” “Solve your own problems before you spend a lot of time finding problems for the others.” Location: 2861

Chapter Twenty-One Some Case Studies Using the Method

Chapter Twenty-Two Marketing Works, and Now It’s Your Turn

Chapter Twenty-Three Marketing to the Most Important Person

  • Just like every powerful tool, the impact comes from the craftsman, not the tool. Location: 3010
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?

References