A Simple Marketing Worksheet

• Who's it for?
• What's it for?
• What is the worldview of the audience you're seeking to reach?
• What are they afraid of?
• What story will you tell? Is it true?
• What change are you seeking to make?
• How will it change their status?
• How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?
• Why will they tell their friends?
• What will they tell their friends?
• Where's the network effect that will propel this forward?
• What asset are you building?
• Are you proud of it?

[Trusted marketers earn enrollment because they make a promise and keep it. With trust comes attention that lets them tell a story uninterrupted. The story can lead to more enrollment, more promises, more trust.]

[Everyone is famous to 1500 people. In our culture, fame breeds trust.]

[It takes more (stress) for a customer to say yes than to walk away.]

[Make sure your most loyal customers have a megaphone to tell others: people like us do things like this.]

[Building new things for your customers (instead of finding new customers for your things) implies investing in their lifetime value.]

[A supermarket might expect the lifetime value of their regulars to be thousands of dollars, so they would do well to 1. sponsor events for new residents in the area and 2. do right when a local complains about the fruit not being ripe.]

[People won't tell their friends because you wanted or asked. You need to make your offer worth sharing.]

[Facebook during their initial growth was well-positioned as a status signal for insecure and high-status students who craved to move up in some invisible hierarchy.]

[One kid brings a yo-yo to school but it doesn't create much traction. A charismatic fifth-grader who is good but not intimidating opens the Yo-yo Union club to all with three spare yo-yos to share; then there's three early adopters leading the way and soon there's thirty kids with yo-yos on the playground.]

[We only notice ideas that cross the chasm beyond neophiliacs.]

[You serve many but profit from few; whales pay for minnows.]

If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny responsibility, read the script, use words like "as stated" and "our policy," then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you're doing and watch it all fall apart.

['Cheap' can mean 'scared', a last refuge when there are no other ideas.]

[Status is an omnipresent layer in how people make decisions. It's always relative but what is perceived by others can differ from is believed internally. Some people want to hold on, and some want to move up; some even want to move down because it may mean safety and less competition.]

[Consider what the person you're serving measures with respect to their status before they make decisions.]

"Who eats first" and "who sits closest to the emperor" are questions that persist to this day. Both are status questions. One involves dominion; the other involves affiliation.

[Amateurs create what they like, whereas professionals create what other people will like.]

[Spam scams are poorly worded to filter you out quick. They seek people who are dominated by greed and avoid wasting time on the careful and well-informed.]

[A brand is not your logo: it's a shorthand for the customer's expectations when they buy from or meet with you. Your brand is the promise they think they're making.]

If people care, you've got a brand.

[Start not with solutions but with people you seek to serve and a problem they want solved.]

[Commodity work isn't lucrative when other options are a click away.]

[Charging ten times more isn't about quantity: it's for a different story.]

[Grateful Dead favoured extremes on the XY axis (live recordings over polished albums, long jams for their fans over short radio hits) and owned them.]

[Beside the intended audience, there's also an accidental audience who ends up getting more satisfaction from tearing down the work.]

["For those who want A and believe B, choosing C is perfect." Based on who they are and what they want and know, everyone is always right.]

[Launching an extreme (fastest, cheapest, most convenient) means breaking the former extreme's status.]

"I made this" is a very different statement than, "What do you want?"

[Specific is kind of brave as it's accountable: it either worked, matched, spread, or it didn't. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone?]

[Find a corner of the market that can't wait for your attention, where you are the perfect answer.]

["How can I start a business?" is contrived, whereas "What would matter here?" relates to real needs of others.]

Focus on the smallest viable market: "How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?"

Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.

Everyone is lonely, insecure, and a bit of a fraud. And everyone cares about something.

[Pet food caters to the owner; humans don't even know what it tastes like.]

[Conspiracy theories might attract out of a desire for uniqueness or belonging in a small group.]

[When you show up with a flotation device to help someone drowning, they don't need ads to understand or be persuaded.]

[Old-fashioned marketing centers the one buying ads, and is done to the customer rather than for them.]

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone.

[Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve their problem.]

Marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don't want what the marketer wants, don't believe what they believe, and don't care about what they care about. They probably never will.

[Humans tell themselves stories. We should consider those as indisputably true and not persuade otherwise.]

[Not the drill bit, not the quarter-inch hole, not the shelf, but rather the satisfaction of doing it themselves or the admiration from a spouse or a room free of clutter. Understand how the utility of an object is to serve their real wish: to feel safe and respected.]

[We buy how it makes us feel, and there aren't so many feelings to choose from. To deliver belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or other desirable emotions likely means something worthwhile.]