The business world often tells us to be aggressive. We’re told to project strength and hide weakness. But if there’s one thing that’s clear from my study of high-stakes decision making, strategy, and conflict it’s this: aggression is weakness, and calmness is strength.
The astronaut Chris Hadfield once provided perhaps the most important lesson in all of business, life, and marketing: “No matter how bad a situation is,” he wrote, “you can always make it worse.”
A recent spam message offered me the opportunity to get “10–15 appointments every week” for my business, as if more meetings is the secret to success. These cold emails, messages, or calls are unwelcome because they’re not interested in me.
The job of a marketer is not to make marketing assets, or to implement tactics. Or to just get attention. The job is to get customers. Nobody cares about our ads, our social media posts, our videos, or even our newsletters. They care about their own problems, their own lives, their own jobs.
Knowing ourselves—what we like, what we’re best at, what we value above everything else—is what makes us different.
“The bold move is the right move, except when it’s the wrong move.”
Your marketing position is a core part of the structure of your strategy, and of your business. In short, it’s the answer to these five questions:
What does “strategy” even mean? What’s your definition? Do you see it as just a “synonym for expensive,” as one economist called it?
“Because George believed he was supposed to find a solution, he did.” Whether we believe it or not, our beliefs affect our actions and our abilities.
The hardest part about creating a marketing position that’s right for your ideal customers is that it’s necessarily wrong for your non-ideal customers.
At the age of 49, only a few years before being elevated to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln considered himself a flat failure. And on that evening in 1858, after watching the election results come in at the telegraph office, he walked home defeated.
There’s a tendency for consultants, especially new ones, to take themselves pretty seriously. I certainly did. Knowing, as Benjamin Franklin once said, that “grave men are taken ... as wise men,” I fell into the trap of trying to be overly serious in my conversations, marketing, and day-to-day work.
