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This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

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This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We changed the story from “Here’s an opportunity to shop, to look good, to regain your sight, to enjoy the process, to feel ownership from beginning to end” to “Do you want us to take away what you have, or do you want to pay to keep the glasses that are already working for you?” Desire for gain versus avoidance of loss.

Marketing isn’t a race to add more features for less money. 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.

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.

We tell stories. Stories that resonate and hold up over time. Stories that are true, because we made them true with our actions and our products and our services. We make connections. Humans are lonely, and they want to be seen and known. People want to be part of something. It’s safer that way, and often more fun. We create experiences. Using a product, engaging with a service. Making a donation, going to a rally, calling customer service. Each of these actions is part of the story; each builds a little bit of our connection. As marketers, we can offer these experiences with intent, doing them on purpose.

The alternative is to be market-driven—to hear the market, to listen to it, and even more important, to influence it, to bend it, to make it better.

It’s a simple question, but a loaded one, because it implies that you’re responsible. You are an actor with intent, an agent of change, a human being working hard to change other human beings.

Your promise is directly connected to the change you seek to make, and it’s addressed to the people you seek to change.

We don’t care if they all look the same, but it would be really helpful if you had some way to group them together. Do they share a belief? A geography? A demographic, or, more likely, a psychographic? Can you pick them out of a crowd? What makes them different from everyone else and similar to each other?

“I made this” is a very different statement than, “What do you want?”

Everyone has a problem, a desire, and a narrative. Who will you seek to serve?

Choose the people you serve, choose your future. The smallest viable market is the focus that, ironically and delightfully, leads to your growth.

Specific means accountable. It worked or it didn’t. It matched or it didn’t. It spread or it didn’t. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone?

Find a position on the map where you, and you alone, are the perfect answer. Overwhelm this group’s wants and dreams and desires with your care, your attention, and your focus. Make change happen. Change that’s so profound, people can’t help but talk about it.

Are there people in the world who want you to succeed so badly that they’re willing to pay you to produce the change you seek to make? 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.” 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.

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 _________________.

Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not “How can I start a business?” but, “What would matter here?” Focus on the smallest viable market: “How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?” 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. 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. Earn, and keep, the attention and trust of those you serve. Offer ways to go deeper. Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members. At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress in their journeys toward their goals. Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that work.

The purpose of this example isn’t to help you market dog food better. It’s to understand that there’s almost always a disconnect between performance and appeal. That the engineer’s choice of the best price/performance combination is rarely the market’s choice.

A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person. When you show up with a life buoy, if the drowning person understands what’s at stake, you don’t have to run ads to get them to hold on to it.

We’re not so much interested in features as we are in the emotions that those features evoke.

We made the “doing” easier, which is precisely why we need to outsource that part of our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of making change happen.

We’re not faking it. Your customers aren’t faking it. Those who prefer your competition aren’t either. If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to admit that they were wrong. Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add our beliefs to what they hear.

Quality, the quality of meeting specifications, is required but no longer sufficient.

From now on, your customers know more than you do about your competitors. And so your commodity work, no matter how much effort you put into it, is not enough.

Knowing that this is the story your customer tells himself is insufficient. You still have to act on it, open the door to the possibility, and organize the entire experience around that story. This is the work that helps people understand that you are special, and this is the work that makes things better.

Good stories: 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.

Once you claim a story, once you commit to wanting to help people change, to take them on a journey from here to there—then you’re on the hook. On the hook to deliver. On the hook for what happens next.

On the other hand, great marketing is the generous and audacious work of saying, “I see a better alternative; come with me.”

The same is true of your product or service. You may say you’re offering a widget, but don’t believe it. 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.

There are three common confusions that many of us get stuck on. The first is that people confuse wants and needs. What we need is air, water, health, and a roof over our heads. Pretty much everything else is a want. And if we’re privileged enough, we decide that those other things we want are actually needs. The second is that people are intimately aware of their wants (which they think of as needs) but they are absolutely terrible at inventing new ways to address those wants. They often prefer to use a familiar solution to satisfy their wants, even if it’s not working very well. When it comes time to innovate, they get stuck. 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.

Innovative marketers invent new solutions that work with old emotions

Don’t begin with your machines, your inventory, or your tactics. Don’t begin with what you know how to do or some sort of distraction about your mission. Instead, begin with dreams and fears, with emotional states, and with the change your customers seek.

Nobody needs your product It doesn’t make sense to say “people need a white leather wallet,” because: People don’t need a wallet. They might want one, but that’s different. People might decide that they want a white leather wallet, but they don’t want it because it’s white or because it’s leather; they want it because of how it will make them feel. That’s what they’re buying: a feeling, not a wallet. Identify that feeling before you spend time making a wallet.

Like real estate brokers, most of us do our most important work when we traffic in emotions, not commodities.

If you had to charge ten times as much What’s the difference between a thirty-dollar massage and a three hundred-dollar one? What could make a book worth two hundred dollars? Or a hotel room worth fifteen hundred dollars? What could cause someone to give five hundred dollars to charity instead of fifty dollars? “More of the same” is the wrong answer. In order to dramatically increase the size of your audience or the price that you charge, you’ll need to do more than simply work more hours or interrupt more people. We don’t pay ten times extra for more words, a bigger order of French fries, or a louder stereo. Instead, it’s a different extreme, a different story, a different sort of scarcity.

If you run everything through a spreadsheet, you might end up with a rational plan, but the rational plan isn’t what creates energy or magic or memories.

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.

When we seek feedback, we’re doing something brave and foolish. We’re asking to be proven wrong. To have people say “You thought you made something great, but you didn’t.” Ouch. 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?” That’s not criticism. Or feedback. That sort of helpful advice reveals a lot about the person you’re engaging with. It helps us see his or her fears and dreams and wants. It’s a clue on how to get even closer next time.

People are quite likely to make perfectly rational decisions based on what they see, what they believe, and what they want.

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.

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). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it takes tension to change them.

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

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.

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.

If you’re going to market a pattern interrupt, it will require you to provide the kind of tension that can only be released by being willing to change an ingrained pattern. Tension is the force on a stretched rubber band. Pull it at one end and it creates tension at every point.

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.

And the desire to change our status, or to protect it, drives almost everything we do.

The smart marketer begins to realize that some people are open and hungry for a shift in status (up or down), while others will fight like crazy to maintain their roles.

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. 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.

What kind of company do you want to work for? People who align with one worldview often have trouble imagining why someone would choose the alternative.

Dominion is a vertical experience, above or below. Affiliation is a horizontal one: Who’s standing next to me?

Do you see the world in terms of winners and losers? Up and down? Or is it more about insiders and outsiders, being in sync, being part of a movement? The way you see the world isn’t nearly as important as the worldview of those you seek to serve. As we’ve seen, their worldview is always stronger than the story you choose to tell. The people we seek to serve have a noise in their heads that’s different than your noise.

Marketers have the humility to understand that not everyone sees a symbol the same way, the awareness to use the right symbol for the right audience, and the guts to invent new symbols to be placed on top of old ones.

This means that the logo you use, the stories you tell, and the appearance of your work all matter. Your words resonate with us, not only because of what they mean, but because of how they sound and how you use them.

We don’t care about you, or how hard you worked on it. We want to know if it’s for us, and if you’re the real deal.

When we hold a newspaper, it feels different than a tablet, or a comic book, or a Bible. The form changes the way the words sound.

If you remind me of a scam, it will take a long time to undo that initial impression. That’s precisely why so many logos of big companies look the same. It’s not laziness. The designers are trying to remind you of a solid company. That’s the work of “reminds me of.” You can do it with intent.

The people you are seeking to serve are trying to figure out who you are. If you’re going to show up in their world, make it easy for them to know who you are and where you stand.

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 promise is your brand.

If you have true fans, the only reason you do is because this group has engaged with you in a way that signals that they expect something worthwhile from you next time. That expectation isn’t specific; it’s emotional. A commodity, on the other hand, has no brand. If I’m buying wheat by the ton or coffee by the pound or bandwidth by the GB, I don’t have any expectations other than the spec. Get me exactly what I got yesterday, faster and cheaper, and I’ll pay you for it.

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 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.

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.

The lesson: Always be wondering, always be testing, always be willing to treat different people differently. If you don’t, they’ll find someone who will.

When you ask, “Who’s it for?” the answer needs to be, “The kind of customers who are going to show up for us in a way that lets us keep going.” You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few. The whales pay for the minnows.

Amazement and delight go a long way.

Tactics are easy to understand because we can list them. You use a tactic or you don’t. Strategy is more amorphous. It’s the umbrella over your tactics, the work the tactics seek to support.

The way you use stories, status, and connection to create tension and forward motion is a strategy. A strategy, if successful, gets you closer to your goal. You might need to change your strategy if it fails, but you don’t want to do it often.

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. You can change tactics the moment you decide that they’re not helping you achieve your strategy any longer.

It’s not unusual to run an ad in front of a hundred thousand people and get not a single click. It’s not unusual for an entire ad campaign to start, run, and finish without making any impact on the culture. 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. You didn’t pay the recipient to run that ad, but you want the recipient to pay you with their attention. So you’re ignored. 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.

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. That’s it. Every step in the process has a cost (you paid cash at the first step, but along the way, you will lose some of those people who drop out), and every step also leads you closer to the benefit. Assign values to each step. If you can’t, don’t run any direct-response ads until you can. Will some people see your ads without taking action? Definitely. That’s a side effect, a culture-shifting, awareness-building bonus. But if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count.

Or perhaps you should overinvest in the way your team interacts with customers. Or perhaps you should spend a few million dollars on research and development or go back to school to improve your craft.

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.

On the other hand, a smart marketer can build a product or service that’s worth searching for. Not the generic term, but to find you, the thing you built, the specific. When you do that, Google’s on your side. They actually want you to be found when someone searches for you.

Step one is to make a product or service that people care enough to search for specifically. You cannot win in a generic search, but you’ll always win if the search is specific enough. And then step two is easy to understand: to be the one they want to find when they go looking.

Marketing changes your pricing. Pricing changes your marketing.

Of course, the price is more than a signal. It’s also the engine for our project’s growth, because price determines what we stand for, who we’re designing for, and the story we tell. And price creates (or eliminates) margin, and that margin is the money that’s available to spend on our outbound marketing.

Better to apologize for the price once than to have to excuse a hundred small slights again and again. Price is a signal.

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

The race to the bottom is tempting, because nothing is easier to sell than cheaper. It requires no new calculations or deep thinking on the part of your customer. It’s not cultural or emotional. It’s simply cheaper. Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas.

But free is worth considering for other reasons, in other situations. Free is not simply a penny less than a penny, a dollar less than a dollar. It’s an entirely different category of transaction, because like dividing by zero, it scales to infinity.

Free ideas that spread. Expensive expressions of those ideas that are worth paying for.

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.

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.

There’s an alternative. The privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Permission marketing recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went.

Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman.

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.

If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, that’s because it does. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

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.

task. The alternative is to intentionally create a product or service that people decide is worth talking about. I call this a Purple Cow.

done for you. Ideas travel horizontally now: from person to person, not from organization to customer. We begin with the smallest possible core and give them something to talk about and reason to do so.

People aren’t going to spread the word because it’s important to you. They’ll only do it because it’s important to them. Because it furthers their goals, because it permits them to tell a story to themselves that they’re proud of.

The result is a moment in time when more people are connected and fewer are trusted.

If you’re ignored, you can’t accomplish much, because in addition to not earning trust, you haven’t earned attention either. If you’re sneaking around, pretending to be one thing while acting in a different way, you might be able to steal some attention and earn some faux trust, but it won’t last. The third method—trust—is the only one that pays for the investment required. And it’s nice that it’s also the easiest to live with.

A trusted marketer earns enrollment. She can make a promise and keep it, earning more trust. She can tell a story, uninterrupted, because with the trust comes attention. That story earns more enrollment, which leads to more promises and then more trust. And perhaps, if the story is well organized and resonates, that leads to word of mouth, to the peer-to-peer conversations that are at the heart of our culture.

We remember what you did long after we forget what you said.

Marketers spend a lot of time talking, and on working on what we’re going to say. We need to spend far more time doing.

Instead, consider focusing on which steps to shift or eliminate. Explore what happens if people engage in your ideas or your community before you ask them to send you money. Invest in the lifetime value of a customer, building new things for your customers instead of racing around trying to find new customers for your things.

If your product or service makes things better, the customer will stick with you and you’ll generate that lifetime value we spoke of. If you can’t see the funnel, don’t buy the ads. If you can measure the funnel and it costs too much for you to afford ads, don’t buy the ads. Fix the funnel first.

But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.

(Everyone means “everyone like us.”) You’ve probably guessed the strategy: by dividing the market into many curves, not just one, we end up with many short heads and many long tails.

The bridge across the chasm lies in network effects. Most of the fast-growing marketing successes of our lifetime have spread because of ideas that work better when everyone knows them. The early adopters have a huge incentive to bring your idea across the chasm to the masses; it will make their lives better if everyone in their network also uses this idea.

That’s the simple ratchet power of network effects. Connected tribes are more powerful than disconnected ones. Individuals who get in early have an incentive to bring others along, and so they do.

neighborhood, but if lots of people come, there will be better variety for all of us. The peer-to-peer movement of ideas is how we cross the chasm—by giving people a network effect that makes the awkwardness of pitching change worth the effort. The bridge is built on two simple questions: What will I tell my friends? Why will I tell them?

Make things better by making better things—things that have a network effect, a ratchet, a reason for sharing.

The tribe doesn’t belong to you, so you don’t get to tell the members what to do or to use them for your own aims. If you’re fortunate, there’s a tribe that will listen to you and consider what you say. If you’re lucky, they’ll interpret your words in a way that they believe will help them move the mission of the tribe forward, and you’ll get a chance to do it again. And if you invest in them, they’ll show you what they want and what they need. You can gain empathy for them, understand their narrative, and serve them again.

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.

To connect people to one another in an infinite game of possibility.

Don’t say it all, and don’t make it obvious. It’s fine that there are secret handshakes, Easter eggs, and unknown features. It’s fine that commitment and longevity earn an extra edge.

Most of all, the tribe is waiting for you to commit. They know that most marketers are fly-by-night operators, knocking on doors and moving on. But some, some hunker down and commit. And in return, the tribe commits to them. Because once you’re part of a tribe, your success is their success.

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects.

The easy sales aren’t always the important ones.

The hard work of deciding that this is your calling, of showing up for those you seek to change. Do that first.

This audacity is available to more and more organizations as technology shifts from “Could it be done?” to “Do we have the guts?”

Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we’re done, that this is the best we can do. Worse, perfect forbids us to try. To seek perfection and not reach it is a failure.

Better opens the door. Better challenges us to see what’s there and begs us to imagine how we could improve on that. Better invites us in and gives us a chance to seek dramatic improvement on behalf of those we seek to serve.

We’re humans. Our work isn’t us. As humans, we can choose to do the work, and we can choose to improve our work.

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?

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