It’s not that it’s wrong
Most of the small business owners and consultants we work with have, at some point, worked with other marketers before. And they’ll often come with some preconceived ideas about what they feel they should be doing.
It’s never how you wanted it
If there’s one lesson life insists on reminding me of, it’s this: You can get what you want, but it will never be how you wanted it.
You want to be weird
There are only two dependable ways to create a profitable business: By being meaningfully different from your competition in a way that provides greater value to a specific set of customers. Or by being so streamlined, efficient, and operationally effective that you can be the cheapest option.
You can’t bargain over the price
When business owners seek out a new marketing plan, it’s rarely because the last plan didn’t work. It’s because, for one reason or another, the last plan wasn’t worked.
How to build a marketing team you trust
When I work with the leaders of marketing teams, I’ll often hear that their job has slowly mutated into mere oversight.
Will it make the boat go faster?
According to Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan in The Gap and the Gain, the British Olympic rowing team had a simple secret to their success at the 2000 Sydney games. “They developed a one-question filtering response to every single decision they made."
How to cause the effects of marketing
I’ve written before about my love of bad horror movies. In so many cases, it’s clear that the director didn’t want to make a movie. They wanted to have made a movie. And there’s a huge difference between those two desires.
Why you should celebrate every day
Have you ever been stuck in the “arrival fallacy”? That’s the idea that happiness and satisfaction are one big accomplishment away.
Are you DEWing it?
Your marketing needs a “do not pass go” strategy. You need an order of operations to know what to check, and in what order, to make sure you’re doing the right things.
“Tell the truth and make it interesting.”
“Tell the truth and make it interesting.” — David Ogilvy Describing his own writing style as “a silk glove with a brick inside it,” Ogvily believed that the best way to make an impression was with facts and information, well stated.
Nothing ever goes as planned
We don’t need to predict what’s going to happen. We just have to prepare.
Marketing never fails.
Marketing never fails. It just stops. It stops because we ran out of money, enthusiasm, or patience.