Quick.

Good to the store and look at one of the shelf.

Close your eyes and grab a random product. Open your eyes for 1 second, don’t think just use your intuition.

How expensive was that product? How high quality? Who was it for? What problem did it solve? Was it easy to understand?

Some of the best products you can just look at and in one second: you know exactly what the promise is.

Know that’s a powerful tool to have.

Ineffective marketing always starts with egocentrism.

It starts with our message and our goals rather then the customers message and their goals.

It also typically starts with the mind rather then the heart.

If our marketing has any chance of succeeding it must not only pierce the minds but also the hearts of the customers.

When you have heart and the mind connected you then have a chance to enhance their spirit.

When the customer is engaging with a product or service there is something key that’s going on in their mind.

Not only do they have fear and desires but they also have an identity.

They have fundamental beliefs of who they think they are and of what they stand for.

As marketers, we also have to uncover: What are the fundamental pillars of our customers identity? Who do they believe they are now and who do they want to become? 

How does our product or service relate to the customer and how do we want their identity to change or be reinforced when they use our product or service? 

Define the key pillars of their identity. Understand the tensions. Understand the ironys.

Marketing is not about selling. Selling is the byproduct of effective marketing.

Marketing is also not consumer to consumer or business to business.

Marketing is about a person connecting with another person or connecting to some type of an idea.

It’s about causing people to act differently in the world because you change the way they feel, think or look at the world.

So yes marketing causes sales but what marketing really creates is psychological innovation in a persons life.

When marketing to someone you need to know how they arrived at a desire or fear.

It’s great to understand what the story of the customer is, what drives them and what they aspire to be but in someways, it’s even more important to understand what got them to that point.

What information have they been taking in?

How did they interpret that information?

What was their intention?

What do they believe their identity to be?

This all plays a bigger role in the idea who the customer is. It’s important to know your customer but you must also know where they came from.

Marketing begins with clarity about the change we seek to make.

But marketing starts with making the change we seek to make.

We can’t get paralyzed by over thought because then we aren’t marketers anymore, we are philosophers.

Great marketing can only start with clarity.

Its easy to be tempted to hack our way through marketing with tactics and tricks but it never works out in the end.

It never works out because you end up being like everyone else.

Clarity takes time to gain but if you are consistent in the process of searching for it, it will come to you eventually.

We have to be clear what causes people to take action in marketing.

We always think of these “tricks” we are taught but we never think deeply about what actually moves a person to action or inaction.

Someone may feel like they don’t deserve to take action.

Others may feel that they are not capable of taking action: “sure I will buy the course but I’m not going to apply it.” is what they tell themselves.

And some people feel like the process of learning will be to hard, long and difficult.

They may feel if they take action on this, that they may loose something over there.

If these are the fears of the customer you seek to change, how can you speak to them in a way that makes them feel like they can confidently take action? 

To much marketing focuses on the principles already set in marketing and not enough on establishing a benchmark for how the customer really feels at the time.

Can you sum up what the position is of your company in one sentence?

If you don’t have that level of clarity then how do you think your customers will?

Rolex’s positioning statement was very simple: The watch of achievement.

You know you have “made it” when you have a Rolex. Other watch companies positioning was never as clear and so they never were as successful.

Get clear about your place in the customers mind.

Everyone talks about how word of mouth is the best form of marketing that there is.

It’s about having a product or service so good that people talk about it (for free!) and bring their friends.

The thing about word of mouth marketing is that its an outdated term. People talk about it like its a medium in and of itself, when in actuality its a natural byproduct of successful marketing.

It would be like a business saying that their number “form of business” is profit; it may be true but its not really a helpful action item. No profit is actually derived from creating value. And just like profit, word of mouth is a byproduct of marketing.

So when people talking about word of mouth marketing, they are really talking about a product or service that is worth talking about, yet they never actually do anything about it. You make something worth talking about it by being something that people actually care about.