This is Marketing

This is Marketing

You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

By Seth Godin

Notes mentioning this book

Crossing the Chasm
The classic guide to bringing cutting-edge products to market and bridging the gap between early adopters and the mainstream.

Description

If there’s one author synonymous with marketing, it’s Seth Godin. Too many marketing books, articles and resources bury their learnings in fluff. Godin’s style has always been to go deep. Not by adding superfluous context or detail, but by eliminating any potential distraction to his message. And that’s what I appreciate most about his latest book, This is Marketing. It’s to the point, concise and bulletproof.

Here’s how Seth himself describes it:

“It builds a bridge between the old way of marketing, something we do at people and to people, to a modern way of thinking about marketing – as something we do for people.

That the purpose of marketing isn’t to sell your stuff. The purpose of marketing is to help your people get to where they want to go.”

– Seth Godin on This is Marketing

Notes and Highlights

  • Chapter 1 – Not Mass, Not Spam, Not Shameful…

    • In this book, we’re working together to solve a set of related problems. How to spread your ideas. How to make the impact you seek. How to improve the culture. (Location 167)
    • Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. (Location 175)
    • The internet is the first mass medium that wasn’t invented to make marketers happy. (Location 178)
    • 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 202)
    • 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. (Location 207)
    • [[ Marketing ]] is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become. (Location 210)

  • Chapter 2 – The Marketer Learns to See

    • 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. (Location 260)
    • 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. (Location 262)
    • Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action. (Location 276)
    • 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. (Location 280)
    • 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. (Location 284)
    • What you say isn’t nearly as important as what others say about you. (Location 294)

  • Chapter 3 – Marketing Changes People Through Stories, Connections and Experience

    • Desire for gain versus avoidance of loss. (Location 330)
    • The way we make things better is by caring enough about those we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear. We need to be generous enough to share that story, so they can take action that they’ll be proud of. (Location 341)
    • 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. (Location 350)
    • Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said… (Location 352)
      • “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.” – [[ Theodore Levitt ]] #quote
    • People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them. They want the way it will make them feel. And there aren’t that many feelings to choose from. (Location 360)
    • when you’re market-driven, you think a lot about the hopes and dreams of your customers and their friends. You listen to their frustrations and invest in changing the culture. Being market-driven lasts. (Location 382)

  • Chapter 4 – The Smallest Viable Market

    • The promise isn’t the same as a guarantee. It’s more like, “If this works for you, you’re going to discover …” (Location 420)
    • Your promise is directly connected to the change you seek to make, and it’s addressed to the people you seek to change. (Location 427)
    • 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. (Location 443)
    • Just as you can group people by the color of their eyes or the length of their ring fingers, you can group them based on the stories they tell themselves. Cognitive linguist [[ George Lakoff ]] calls these clumps worldviews. (Location 444)
    • we must begin with a [[ worldview ]], and invite people who share that worldview to join us. “I made this” is a very different statement than, “What do you want?” (Location 449)
    • 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. (Location 491)
    • The goal of the [[ smallest viable audience ]] is to find people who will understand you and will fall in love with where you hope to take them. Loving you is a way of expressing themselves. Becoming part of your movement is an expression of who they are. (Location 502)
    • a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with: My product is for people who believe x. I will focus on people who want y. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get z. (Location 543)

  • Chapter 5 – In Search of “Better”

    • Your job as a marketer is to find a spot on the map with edges that (some) people want to find. Not a selfish, unique selling proposition, done to maximize your market share, but a generous beacon, a signal flare sent up so that people who are looking for you can easily find you. We’re this, not that. (Location 610)
    • Neophiliacs are not adapters: They crave the new (Location 629) Note: What is the Total Addressable Market of Early Adopters? If your product strategy is to continually launch new features and functionality that (potentially) redefine interaction with the product on an ongoing basis, is it reasonable to define your smallest viable market as Early Adopters?
    • People aren’t eager to pay you with their attention. The fact that you bought an ad doesn’t earn you something that priceless. Instead, we can hope that people might voluntarily trade their attention. Trade it for something they need or want. Trade it because they’re genuinely interested. Trade it because they trust you to keep your promise. (Location 660)
    • 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. (Location 666)
    • We’re not so much interested in features as we are in the emotions that those features evoke. (Location 715)
    • we can think of the quest for the edges as: Claims that are true, that we continually double down on in all our actions. Claims that are generous, that exist as a service to the customer. (Location 741) #Positioning
    • 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 [[ Brand Promise ]], that puts you in a position where you are the clear and obvious choice. (Location 758) Note: In the context of browsers, the obvious axes to choose would be speed, privacy and stability. What if, in the case of Positioning of Vivaldi, you chose customizability and depth of functionality?
    • 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. (Location 803)

  • Chapter 6 – Beyond Commodities

    • Effective marketers don’t begin with a solution, with the thing that makes them more clever than everyone else. Instead, we begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make. (Location 810) Note: This line of thinking is very much aligned with the premise of Building a Story Brand, wherein you define a “Hero” (your [[ smallest viable audience ]]), address a problem that is threatening their worldview.
    • Now that you’ve chosen your audience, where do you want to take them? (Location 850)
    • great marketing is the generous and audacious work of saying, “I see a better alternative; come with me.” (Location 866)
    • The goal isn’t to personalize the work. It’s to make it personal. (Location 935)

  • Chapter 7 – 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: (Location 966)
      • 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
    • 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. (Location 994)

  • Chapter 8 – More of the Who: Seeking the Smallest Viable Market

    • The challenge for most people who seek to make an impact isn’t winning over the mass market. It’s the micro market. They bend themselves into a pretzel trying to please the anonymous masses before they have fifty or one hundred people who would miss them if they were gone. (Location 1111)
    • Our hits aren’t hits anymore, not like they used to be. Instead, they are meaningful for a few and invisible to the rest. (Location 1121)
    • The Dead are an almost perfect example of the power of marketing for the smallest viable market. (Location 1125)
    • Here are the key elements of the Dead’s marketing success: They appealed to a relatively tiny audience and focused all their energy on them. They didn’t use radio to spread their ideas to the masses. Instead, they relied on fans to share the word, hand to hand, by encouraging them to tape their shows. (Location 1134)
    • Instead of hoping to encourage a large number of people to support them a little, they relied on a small number of true fans who supported them a lot. (Location 1137)
    • They picked the extremes on the XY axis (live concerts vs. polished records, long jams for the fan family vs. short hits for the radio) and owned them both. They gave the fans plenty to talk about and stand for. Insiders and outsiders. (Location 1138)
    • 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. (Location 1193)

  • Chapter 9 – People Like Us Do Things Like This

    • 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. (Location 1206)
    • For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our actions are primarily driven by one question: “Do people like me do things like this?” People like me don’t cheat on their taxes. People like me own a car; we don’t take the bus. People like me have a full-time job. (Location 1215)
    • Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization. Marketers don’t make average stuff for average people. Marketers make change. And they do it by normalizing new behaviors. (Location 1240)
    • We’ve gone from all of us being everyone to all of us being no one. But that’s okay, because the long tail of culture and the media and change doesn’t need everyone any longer. It’s happy with enough. (Location 1251)
    • Here’s an analogy that helps bring to life the ideas we’ve covered so far: (Location 1313)
    • Your work is a tree. The roots live in the soil of dreams and desires. Not the dreams and desires of everyone, simply those you seek to serve. (Location 1313)
    • If your work is simply a commodity, a quick response to an obvious demand, then your roots don’t run deep. It’s unlikely that your tree will grow, or even if it does, it’s unlikely to be seen as important, useful, or dominant. It will be crowded out by all the similar trees. As your tree grows, it creates a beacon for the community. The Early Adopters among the people you seek to serve can engage with the tree, climb it, use it for shade, and, eventually, eat the fruits. And they attract the others. If you have planned well, the tree will quickly grow taller, because the sun isn’t being blocked—there are few other trees in the same area. As the tree grows, it not only attracts other people, but its height (as the dominant choice in the neighborhood) blocks out the futile efforts of other, similar trees. The market likes a winner. (Location 1314)

  • Chapter 10 – Trust and Tension Create Forward Motion

    • The pattern match is business as usual. When the offering you bring matches the story we tell ourselves, the way we tell it, the pace we’re used to, the expense and the risk … it’s an easy choice to add you to the mix. (Location 1326)
    • A pattern interrupt, on the other hand, requires some sort of jolt. Tension is created, and energy is diverted to consider this new input. Is it something worth considering? Most of the time, for most of those you seek to reach, the answer is no. (Location 1331)
    • The pattern requires undoing before you can earn forward motion. (Location 1336)
    • 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. (Location 1340)
    • What pattern are you interrupting? (Location 1360)
    • Tension is the hallmark of a great educational experience—the tension of not quite knowing where we are in the process, not being sure of the curriculum, not having a guarantee that the insight we seek is about to happen. (Location 1375) Note: Akin to the tension created by a new paradigm of interacting with your browser. “What? A browser I can customise? What don’t I know yet that other people are doing with that?”
    • Marketers create tension, and forward motion relieves that tension (Location 1383)
    • 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. (Location 1394)
    • We intentionally create these gaps, these little canyons of tension that people find themselves leaping over. And the reason is status. Where do we stand? What does the tribe think of us? Who’s up, and who’s down? (Location 1397)
    • Tension is created. And the only way to relieve that tension is with forward motion. (Location 1405) - Note: How does Vivaldi create tension? #Revisit
    • The status quo doesn’t shift because you’re right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status. (Location 1412)

  • Chapter 11 – Status, Dominance and Affiliation

    • the desire to change our status, or to protect it, drives almost everything we do. (Location 1449)
    • 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. (Location 1475)
    • Six things about status
      1. Status is always relative. (Location 1481)
      2. Status is in the eyes of the beholder. (Location 1484)
      3. Status attended to is the status that matters. (Location 1486)
      4. Status has inertia. (Location 1488)
      5. Status is learned. (Location 1489)
      6. Shame is the status killer. (Location 1491)
    • Consider, for those you seek to serve, their external status (how they are seen by their chosen community) and their internal status (who they see when they look in the mirror). (Location 1502)
    • Next, work through how they maintain or seek to change that status. Do they belittle others? Seek approval? Help in selfless ways? Drive themselves to achieve more? What sort of wins and losses do they track? Consider the following two XY grids. (Location 1503)
    • The people you’re seeking to serve in this moment: What are they measuring? (Location 1553) Note: In a sense, I think Vivaldi users err on the side of dominion. They want to protect their own interests. Then again, there is also an element of affiliation; making choices based on what they feel is for the greater good of the web (and, perhaps, society as a whole).
    • Modern society, urban society, the society of the internet, the arts, and innovation are all built primarily on [[ Affiliation]], not [[Dominion ]]. (Location 1566)
    • [[ Dominion]] is a vertical experience, above or below. [[Affiliation ]] is a horizontal one: Who’s standing next to me? (Location 1585)

  • Chapter 12 – A Better Business Plan

    • Divide the modern [[ Business Plan ]] into five sections: (Location 1596)
      • Truth
      • Assertions
      • Alternatives
      • People
      • Money
    • The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, and how others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific, the better. The more ground knowledge, the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The point of this section is to be sure that you’re clear about how you see the world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn’t partisan—it takes no positions; it just states how things are. Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include spreadsheets, market share analysis, and anything else I need to know about how the world works. (Location 1600)
    • The assertions section is your chance to describe how you’re going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market, and the market will respond by taking this action. You’re creating tension by telling stories. You’re serving a specific market. You’re expecting something to happen because of your arrival. What? This is the heart of the modern business plan. (Location 1605)
    • the alternatives section (Location 1610)
    • How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don’t pan out, is it over? (Location 1611)
    • The people section rightly highlights the key element: Who is on your team, and who is going to join your team. (Location 1612)
    • Who are the people you’re serving? Who are the champions? What do they believe about status? What worldview do they have? (Location 1614)
    • money. How much you need, how you will spend it, what cash flow looks like, profit and loss, balance sheets, margins, and exit strategies. (Location 1615)

  • Chapter 13 – Semiotics, Symbols and Vernacular

    • [[ Semiotics ]]. Flags and symbols, shortcuts and shorthand. (Location 1652)
    • That’s the work of “reminds me of.” You can do it with intent. (Location 1661)
    • [[ Semiotics ]] doesn’t care who made the symbol. The symbol is in the mind of the person looking at it. (Location 1672)
    • the smallest viable market gives you the freedom to pick those you seek to serve. (Location 1694)
    • 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. (Location 1698)
    • The foolish thing to do is pretend your features are so good that nothing else matters. Something else always matters. (Location 1725)
    • 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. (Location 1730)
    • 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. (Location 1737)

  • Chapter 14 – Treat Different People Differently

    • 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. (Location 1766)
    • 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. (Location 1770)

  • Chapter 15 – Reaching the Right People

    • 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. (Location 1836)
    • Your [[ Goal ]] is the change you seek to make in the world. It could be the self-focused goal of earning money, but it’s more likely to be the change you seek to make in those you serve. (Location 1838)
    • Your strategy is the long-lasting way you’re investing in reaching that goal. (Location 1840)
    • A noticed ad is noticed by some people, not everyone. And, if it’s noticed by the right people, it creates tension. The tension of not knowing and needing to know more. The tension of being left behind. The tension that things might get better (or worse). (Location 1864)
    • [[ Lester Wunderman ]] was the father of direct marketing. (Location 1893)
    • Lester was first in describing the differences between Brand Marketing and Direct Marketing, but his ideas have never been more relevant. Thanks to the rise of Google and Facebook, there’s now more direct marketing than ever before in history. The difference is about what happens after the ad runs:
    • The approach here is as simple as it is difficult:
      • If you’re buying direct marketing ads, measure everything. (Location 1910)
        • Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count. (Location 1911)
      • If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture.(Location 1912)
    • 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. (Location 1913)
    • 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. (Location 1939)
    • We remember what we rehearse. (Location 1944)
    • We remember the things that we see again and again. That we do over and over. (Location 1945)
    • Along the way, this has pushed us to associate “trust” with the events and stories that happen again and again. (Location 1949)
    • The familiar is normal and the normal is trusted. (Location 1950)
    • [[ 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.” (Location 1952) #quote #Brand Marketing
    • The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (Location 1959)
    • If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency, it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust. (Location 1960)
    • The path isn’t to be found when someone types in a generic term. 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. (Location 1966)

  • Chapter 16 – Price is a Story

    • There are two key things to keep in mind about pricing: Marketing changes your pricing. Pricing changes your marketing. (Location 1980)

  • Chapter 17 – Permission and Remarkability in a Virtuous Cycle

    • Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman. (Location 2104)
    • Basa took over the RapCaviar playlist and within months, it had grown to more than three million subscribers. Those are listeners who have given permission to Spotify (and Basa) to share new music with them. (Location 2133)
    • Every Friday morning, the playlist is updated, and by the end of the day, the landscape of hit music has changed. Spotify doesn’t need to own radio spectrum, or a magazine. They own a permission asset instead. Permission, attention, and enrollment drive commerce. (Location 2136)
    • [[ Metcalfe’s Law ]] (Location 2168)
    • 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. (Location 2171)

  • Chapter 18 – Trust is as Scarce as Attention

    • If you’re a business consultant, a designer, or an inventor, being famous to the right three thousand people is plenty. (Location 2213)
    • The goal isn’t to maximize your social media numbers. The goal is to be known to the smallest viable audience. (Location 2214)

  • Chapter 19 – The Funnel

    • 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. (Location 2233)
    • This is the direct marketer’s dream. It’s advertising that clearly pays for itself. It lets you scale. You can measure what’s working, do it again and again, and grow. (Location 2261)
    • But if you’re careful and alert, you can begin to understand what putting attention into the top of the funnel costs you, and you can work to improve not only the quality of your leads but the efficiency of the process. By all means, work to lower the cost of that first click. But if you do it by making a ridiculous promise in the ad you run, it’ll backfire, because once in the funnel, people will stop trusting you, the tension will evaporate, and your yield will plummet. (Location 2263)
    • Invest in the [[ LTV ]] of a customer, building new things for your customers instead of racing around trying to find new customers for your things. (Location 2268)
    • While there are plenty of people happy to sell you a miracle—a self-running, passive funnel of income—these magical funnels are rare. That’s because the [[ LTV ]] of a new customer rarely exceeds the cost of running the ads necessary to get a new customer. (Location 2303)
    • The truth is that most brands that matter, and most organizations that thrive, are primed by advertising but built by good marketing. They grow because users evangelize to their friends. They grow because they are living entities, offering ever more value to the communities they serve. They grow because they find tribes that coalesce around the cultural change they’re able to produce. (Location 2306)
    • 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. (Location 2311)
    • becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish. (Location 2342)
    • We like to do what everyone else is doing. (Everyone means “everyone like us.”) (Location 2344)
    • [[ Geoffrey A. Moore]] discovered the chasm. It’s the overlooked but often fatal gap in the [[Everett M. Rogers]]’ curve, the curve of how ideas spread through the culture. (Location 2359) See Crossing the Chasm and [[Diffusion of Innovation ]]
    • The middle of the curve isn’t eagerly adopting. They’re barely adapting. (Location 2372)
    • 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. (Location 2374)
    • There’s no reason to talk about a new kind of chocolate you really like. It doesn’t make your life better if others eat it. On the other hand, you spend a lot of time telling people about Snapchat or Instagram or Twitter, because if your friends followed you, your life would improve. (Location 2377)
    • The bridge is built on two simple questions: 1. What will I tell my friends? 2. Why will I tell them? (Location 2386)
    • Give them a why. And that usually involves changing what you offer. Make things better by making better things—things that have a network effect, a ratchet, a reason for sharing. (Location 2389)
    • The [[ Gartner Hype Cycle ]] is a brilliant meta-analysis of how the culture changes. (Location 2391)
    • when the Neophiliacs are bored with you and the mass market disdains you, that you will most likely lose momentum. This is the moment when you need a bridge, a new way to step through the culture with stories that match the worldviews of this new, more conservative market. (Location 2395)
    • We only notice the ones that cross a local chasm, but the Early Adopters are always experimenting around the edges. It’s when the combination of adoption and network effects creates enough tension for the idea to cross the local chasm that we notice it. (Location 2447)

  • Chapter 20 – 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 2497)
    • [[ Marshall Ganz ]] is the brilliant Harvard professor who has worked both with Cesar Chavez and Barack Obama. He has articulated a simple three-step narrative for action: the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now. (Location 2498)
    • 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. (Location 2502)
    • 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? (Location 2504)
    • It explains why your story of self is relevant to us, and how we will benefit when we’re part of people like us. (Location 2505)
    • The story of now enlists the tribe on your journey. (Location 2506)
    • What happens if we reverse the rules?
      • “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.”
      • “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.”
      • “Celebrate your people, free them to do even more, make it about the cohort, and invite everyone along. Disagree with institutions, not with people.”
      • All thirteen of these principles get to the mission of the marketer. To engage with people and help them create the change they seek. To understand their worldviews and talk and act in ways that align with who they are and what they want. To connect people to one another in an infinite game of possibility. (Location 2537)
    • 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. (Location 2558)
    • Most of all, the tribe is waiting for you to commit. (Location 2565)
    • 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. (Location 2566)
    • It will fade if you let it (Location 2568)
      • There are always new ideas beckoning the early adopters. They’re on the prowl, and they’ll be the first to leave. (Location 2570)
      • But those who admire the status quo might leave as well, once the tension is gone. (Location 2571)
      • The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects. (Location 2577)

  • Chapter 21 – Some Case Studies Using the Method

  • Chapter 22 – Marketing Works, and Now It’s Your Turn

  • Chapter 23 – Marketing to the Most Important Person

    • For me, marketing works for society when the marketer and consumer are both aware of what’s happening and are both satisfied with the ultimate outcome. (Location 2678)
    • If you bring your best self to the world, your best work, and the world doesn’t receive it, it’s entirely possible that your marketing sucked. It’s entirely possible that you have empathy for what people were feeling. It’s entirely possible that you chose the wrong axes, and that you failed to go to the edges. It’s entirely possible you were telling the wrong story to the wrong person in the wrong way on the right day, or even on the wrong day. Fine, but that’s not about you. That’s about your work as a marketer. And you can get better at that craft. (Location 2691)
    • It is the marketing we do for ourselves, to ourselves, by ourselves, the story we tell ourselves, that can change everything. It’s what’s going to enable you to create value, to be missed if you were gone. (Location 2723)
    • This is marketing Marketing seeks more. More market share, more customers, more work. Marketing is driven by better. Better service, better community, better outcomes. Marketing creates culture. Status, affiliation, and people like us. Most of all, marketing is change. Change the culture, change your world. Marketers make change happen. Each of us is a marketer, and each of us has the ability to make more change than we imagined. Our opportunity and our obligation is to do marketing that we’re proud of. (Location 2732)
    • This is a book about roots. About anchoring your work deeply in the dreams, desires, and communities of those you seek to serve. It’s about changing people for the better, creating work you can be proud of. And it’s about being a driver of the market, not simply being market-driven. (Location 2742)
    • 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. (Location 2749)
    • Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone. (Location 2759)
    • You can do this by creating and then relieving tension. By establishing cultural norms. By seeing status roles and helping to change them (or maintain them). (Location 2761)
    • How to know if you have a marketing problem: (Location 2763)
      • You aren’t busy enough.
      • Your ideas aren’t spreading.
      • The community around you isn’t what it could be.
      • The people you care about aren’t achieving everything they hoped.
    • If you see a way to make things better, you now have a marketing problem. (Location 2766)
    • The first step on the path to make things better is to make better things. But better isn’t only up to you. Better can’t happen in a vacuum. Better is the change we see when the market embraces what we’re offering. Better is what happens when the culture absorbs our work and improves. Better is when we make the dreams of those we serve come true. (Location 2776)