When everyone in your market sounds the exact same – it creates the golden opportunity for all marketers.

Its a chance not to use buzz words and cliches but to be a meaningful specific, a brand that actually stands for something real.

So when you see everyone doing the exact same thing, it can be your greatest opportunity to actually do something that matters.

When marketers target a segment of an audience, they are of course targeting a worldview: a group of people that believe certain things to be true.

So in other words: marketers target and dance with different types and levels of certainty. Some people have certainty in the quality of school they go too, others in the fact that they aren’t going to school. The thing is what ever the worldview is of the customer, they have some type of certainty that goes along with it.

As marketers we can feed that certainty, question that certainty or do both.

We have to ask what are we doing to the customers certainty? Are we trying to reinforce it or change it?

Marketing makes change happen to a person or a group of people.

Sometimes that change can be small or big.

However, as marketers we have to be clear about exactly what the change is.

We may think that the change we need to make is to stop people from driving their car drunk, when in reality its more effective to change their friends around them (as seen in the “Friends don’t let other friends drive drunk” campaign).

We need to always remember what change we seek to make but we must also think through the change we should to be making.

I thought to be successful in marketing that I had to be rigid. That I had to follow a schedule, that I had to learn how to say no.

I was dead wrong.

I realized that this idea of a work lifestyle that is idealized by most business gurus, is at exact odds with what marketing really is about. Marketing is about empathy and experience. Not experience in the professional sense but life experiences. Life experiences that connect with human culture. That to connect with people, you actually have to learn to be the farthest away from the “marketing rule book” as possible. That comes from just living life. Not living life “flouting through it” or being a hippy. But, living life through a child like curiosity and energy. Now it’s a difficult job. If you are too free flowing you lose focus but if you have just enough, it allows you to open up insights in marketing that you never thought could happen.

Insights come from being a student of life – not from being a student of the marketing doctrine.

Is advertising doomed to keep becoming more and more less effective?

It seems with the continue rise of ad blocker, monthly paid subscriptions and people watching what they want when they want, it leaves advertisers with a situation that is not what it used to be.

Advertising will have to become something different.

Difference between direct marketing and advertising? 

I thought they were the same thing but I was wrong.

I think as marketers, we hear all these terms get thrown around and we start to confuse what words mean what in our field.

Advertising is the voice of your marketing. You can have direct ads or brand ads – the ads part doesn’t change whether its brand or direct.

Direct marketing and or advertising is parts of your marketing or advertising that you can measure with precision. You know the ROI.

You know how many people signed up for a news letter or how many customer service calls you got.

As for your logo (brand marketing); you can’t split test your logo everyday.

So you have to be really clear: What kind of marketing or advertising are you doing right now?

It’s the amateur that doesn’t know the difference and just blends them all into on big mess.

Reviews are a guide post for people that something works. The thinking goes: If no one has ever used the thing I am thinking to buy why would I want to increase the risk of trying it for the first time myself?

There are some people that enjoy the rush of being first and they are what we call early adopters but for all of the other people on the curve, most people have a risk profile towards new things that are much more conservative.

Brand is a way for us to see find consistency and make guesses about the things that work. Reviews is one of the most tangible tools customers use to uncover if they believe something will work or not.

If you sell a hammer that is like everyone else’s – I’m going to start to compare prices. One person may sell their hammer for $5.02, while the other for $6.97. But if I can’t tell the difference in quality, then as the customer, I will pick the cheapest.

You see in most cases, you want to avoid situations where you are pricing in the categories where you have to be compared to alternatives. Being compared to alternatives implies that you are not the one and only and that customers actively have to seek out to find if there are any differences between your hammer and the other guys hammer.

A better situation to be in is one where you customer doesn’t even decide to look at alternatives. Why on earth would they do that? It’s because they believe that you are the one and only person that can solve their problem for them. In other words, you solve a particular need for them in such a way that can’t be compared to alternatives.

This doesn’t come from spinning and hyping something that is not different. People will find out eventually if you have a regular hammer or not. The trick is to set out to do the difficult work of finding a deep human need and filling it in ways that people can’t compare.

Marketing has a history of feeling that they need to be different of have a “USP”.

Just be different and original – then people will seek you out.

Of course being different is important but useless if you are not relevant, add value or make a contribution.

So when setting out to be distinctive or when creating a distinctive thing, ask yourself: Is this going to make the highest level of contribution to the customer? Is this important to them right now?

Being different doesn’t start from the inside – it starts from the outside.

Results and impact happen on the outside.

People talk about balance a lot.

It usually comes up into the topic of the balance between work and life. People preach that you must find some type of balance between the two to be happy and fulfilled.

Not only is this way of thinking about it completely wrong but its hurtful to your overall quality of life.

You see, the word “balance” implies a bunch of misleading things. It creates this vision in the mind of a Teeter Totter with weights on each side; one representing life, the other representing work. This idea of balance is that we want to have the same weight on each side to create this feeling of “balance in our lives”.

The problem is that life doesn’t work like this.

There isn’t a battle between work and life that we need to optimize for because life is work and work is life – they are the same thing or at least part of the same thing. Humans decided to create this imaginary divide.

Saying we need to balance implies that they are siloed off and are in their own categorizes of reality. This makes it hard for people to think about how they can achieve this nirvana of “work life balance”.

A more empowering way to look at them is to think in terms of integration and synergy. Is going for a walk in nature while you listen too an audio book about business – is that about work or life?

‍David Ogilvy apparently asked one young writer how many hours he wrote each day. The young writer proudly said 10 hours a day. David then said: “That’s a shame. You should spend 8 hours looking for what to write and two hours writing it.”

Life and marketing isn’t about putting things into compartments – its about finding out interesting ways to make both work together in an integrated way.

That’s where the magic and innovation of life comes from – in the cross pollination of two seamless opposite things.