How to do Marketing

How Brands Grow Part 2

As many of you know I am a huge fan of Byron Sharp’s marketing book, “How Brands Grow”. I have bought copies for all the marketing teams I have led and most of the peers I have worked with who expressed an interest in what I do. I have always said it is the best marketing book. Period. It is the only book that looks at what we actually KNOW about marketing vs the BS that usually dominates the space. It is also the #10,557th most best-selling book on Amazon. It doesn’t rank in the top 100 marketing books on the site (unlike timeless gems like “500 Social Media Marketing Tips” and “Social Media Marketing for Dummies”). It is a prime example of quality not rising to the top.

Earlier this year Byron partnered with Jenni Romaniuk to publish a follow-up to How Brands Grow, titled appropriately (if unoriginally), “How Brands Grow Part 2”. The new book launched with incredible buzz to become the best selling marketing book of all time. Actually no. It’s ranked even worse than the original, #22,268 (#239 in Marketing). But in many ways Part 2 is even better than the original.

How Brands Grow focused on exploding the myths of marketing. It was very effective at helping you avoid activities that were a waste of your time and resources. Skipping the bloodletting and witch-doctoring of marketing to allow you to focus on what works. Unfortunately it was very light on what you SHOULD be doing. Part Two fixes that problem. It is still light on tactics, but it gives some very clear guidance on what your overall strategy should be.

The book is meaty. In addition to the overall strategy piece it covers some specialized findings on marketing in emerging markets, luxury brand marketing and digital marketing. I’m going to skip over the specialized stuff to summarize what I think are the biggest take-aways in terms on general marketing strategy everyone should be following (but hardly anyone does).

Here is the summary:

 

1. Double Jeopardy is real and everywhere

This is a re-hash of How Brands Grow, but is worth mentioning again. Double Jeopardy means that customer penetration and purchase frequency are highly correlated. There are very few (maybe zero) examples of “niche” brands that have low penetration but high average purchase frequency. In addition, the largest brands have much higher penetration and slightly higher frequency. The take-away is that, to a significant digit or two, you should be putting all your effort into customer acquisition and stop worrying about retention. If you are successful on customer acquisition, then you will automatically get retention for free. It’s a very counter-intuitive notion given how much emphasis consultants put on “loyalty”, but it’s extremely obvious when you look at the data. Note this pattern remains true even when you look at what we generally think of as highly “loved” brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson.

 

2. You grow customer penetration by being “available”

There are two types of availability: Physical and Mental. You need to win in both. If you aren’t there when customers are looking for your solution, they will use a competitor who is. This is why Coke wants to be within arm’s reach at all times. This is why Starbucks in on every corner (and in grocery stores and office break rooms). This is why you want to dominate Google Search. This is why you want to be on the end aisle at the grocery store. This is why you want to be sold at Wal-Mart.

Mental availability is why you spend money on advertising and public relations. You want to be top of mind when customers are thinking about your category. If you aren’t in the selection set you likely aren’t going to be chosen (unless your competitors dropped the ball on physical availability). When building mental availability, you want to focus on NON-CUSTOMERS. If you try to increase availability for non-customers, you will get customer impact for free. Customer already know your product, at least a little. When you run an ad and a customer sees it they are far more likely to register seeing the ad than a non-customer would. You need to break through the clutter targeting non-customers. If you are successful, you will automatically reinforce your brand with existing customers for free.

 

3. Make it easy to buy

Understand what all the objections to buying your product are. Understand what the barrier are to buying. Work through them one by one and eliminate them. This means having the right varieties. A customer may want spicy and if your salsa is only mild you will lose that customer. It means having the right prices. If your product only comes in large sizes some poor customers may not have an entry point. It means eliminating break points. If your site doesn’t take American Express, some customers are going to walk away. If your site crashes during the shopping experience, you aren’t going to make a sale. Find barriers and lower them.

 

4. Light category buyers matter more than heavy buyers

What!?!? What about the 80/20 rule? It turns out the 80/20 rule is not so much a rule at all. In most markets it is far closer to the 50/20 rule. Your top 20% of buyers produce about 50% of your sales. But it’s even more complicated than that. Who your top 20% of buyers are will shift from period to period. Some of the top 20% are consistently heavy buyers, some just happened to spike during the period you were looking at (Byron calls these people “heavy by happenstance”). Some of your top customers love your product. Some had their first Superbowl party and had to fill their pantry with potato chips.

Most importantly the Top-20% are already high users who are engaged with your brand. They are the easiest to reach with messages. If you reach them, it doesn’t mean you have any impact with anyone else. But if you reach everyone else then the top-20% will become aware of your message for free – they are just paying attention that much more. It’s a sub-rule of focusing on non-customers. When you do target customers, target the worst ones, not the best ones.

While we are on the topic of targeting: Don’t. Customers don’t actually differ that much. Where there are actual differences it should be obvious (If you only sell in New York State, you should target your marketing to New York State only). If you have a product that only appeals to a small group (say vegetarian meat alternatives) you shouldn’t focus on that group, instead do all you can to widen the appeal (position it as a healthy option rather than a vegetarian option).

 

5. Loyalty programs are bad

Loyalty Programs and the Selection Effect. I agree in general, but I also think that you CAN design good programs that create value. It’s just than most programs are not like that. And even if you can get a program that creates value it will not be your company’s growth engine. It’s a nice to have that could get you a little boost. But don’t let it distract you from customer acquisition.

 

6. Build Mental Availability using “Category Entry Points”

Category entry points are reasons or occasions when someone considers buying a product in your category. It can be broken down into five categories:

  • Why are you buying a product (“I want a refreshing drink”)
  • When are you buying the product (“I need a morning beverage”)
  • Where are you buying the product (“I need a drink when I am on the beach”)
  • With whom are you with when buying the product (“I’m hanging out with my kids”)
  • With what are you buying the product with (“I need a drink that goes with French fries”)

You need to know what all the most common (and less common) entry points are to your product category. Then you need to increase your mental availability for each one. A good example of this is McDonalds running an ad campaign talking about McDonalds’ breakfast. The goal is to increase the mental availability of McDonalds when customers are thinking about the category entry point of “I need breakfast”.

Note that mental availability / category entry point connection direction matters. It doesn’t help if your brand creates a connection with breakfast. You need breakfast to create a connection with your brand.

How many CEPs should your brand attempt to dominate? It depends on how big a brand you want to have. Big brands with high market share link to more CEPs than smaller brands. There is no such thing as a large brand that has niche CEP penetration.

Sometimes marketers talk about “consideration set”. It’s another BS marketing term. It turns out there are LOTS of consideration sets – one for each CEP. Family vacation, bachelorette party weekend, romantic getaway, and business trip all need a hotel. But each has its own CEP consideration set for which hotels (and which booking engines) should be considered. If you want to be a big brand you need to ensure you are mentally available for all of them.

 

7. Smart metrics

Most metrics are a waste of time. We collect them but don’t do anything with them. When they go up we pat ourselves on the back and claim credit. When they go down we point to something external which was outside our control. But some metrics are helpful and actionable:

  • Mental Market Share: The % of CEP associations your brand has as a share of the total CEPS for the category
  • Mental penetration: % of category buyers that link your brand to at least one CEP
  • Network size: Average number of CEPs tied to your brand for customers who are aware of your brand

(Note Mental Market Share is just Mental Penetration x Network Size)

All three metrics should correlate with sales. If they don’t you likely have issues with physical availability (distribution say), marketing mix (i.e., price is too high), or messaging (too narrow targeting). New marketing activities should clearly focus on either penetration or network size. A new CEP (“Breakfast at McDonalds”) should increase network size. A media schedule with extended reach should increase mental penetration in the market. Relative weakness on one vs the other in your category vs competitors is a good place to start for low hanging fruit.

 

8. How to build a marketing campaign

Each marketing campaign needs one clear message. Focus on one CEP at a time. Each new marketing campaign should focus on a different CEP from earlier messages. Every campaign should be tied together so they build on each other and it is clear that it is your brand being advertised (and not another brand or category entirely).

Good questions to ask when you build your campaign:

  • Which CEP will it build mental availability for?
  • How common is this CEP in the market? Have we already nailed the more common CEPs?
  • How long has it been since the last time we focused on this CEP?

When buying media you want to focus on REACH not FREQUENCY. Rule of thumb in marketing has traditionally been you want to have frequency of “three” (in whatever time period you are talking about apparently). The reason is some early research that showed that retention spikes at three repetitions. This research is BS. What actually happens is the impact of seeing an ad decreases with each repetition. So impact of spot #4 is worse than #3. But #3 is worse than #2 which is worse than #1. So you are far better to have reach of 90% with frequency of 1, then reach of 30% and frequency of 3. There is nothing magic about number three.

Getting high reach is difficult. There are a LOT of shows on TV. Maybe you wonder who is watching channel 317 at 3am on a Thursday? I don’t know, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that that is not the only TV show they are watching that week. Low rated shows are watched by heavy TV watchers. If someone only watches an hour of TV a week it is likely a very highly rated show, (it might also be a premium cable show like Breaking Bad, but even Breaking Bad’s viewership is largely made up of people who watch a lot more TV). So if you want to get very high reach on television you need to advertise on highly rated shows. The industry knows this, which is why the cost-per-impression of highly rated shows is much higher than lower rated shows.

But once you advertise on a highly rated show, you need to stop. Too often brands will decide to advertise during the Oscars and then run a  dozen ads during the show. Unless you have some reason to believe that people watching the first half of the Oscars are very different people than those watching the second half, you are far better spending your additional marketing dollars somewhere else. Oscars are a great way to get reach on your first ad, but you are almost guaranteeing limited incremental reach running a second ad during the same show.

 

9. Distinctive Assets

Distinctive assets are important for three reasons:

  • Decrease confusion between your brand and competitors (how many times have you seen an ad and said, “I remember it was for a running shoe company, but I can’t remember which one”?)
  • Increase the number of memory structures that allow recall for your brand
  • Ability to generate a wider variety of creative while maintaining advertising effectiveness at increasing mental availability

Distinctive assets can be many things from logos to taglines to music. At a very minimum your brand should have the following:

  • A color or group of colors that define the brand
  • A logo and/or shape (Nike Swoosh)
  • A face – either a celebrity or a character. Something that humanizes
  • A sound (think Intel)
  • A short phrase (“What’s in your wallet?”, “Expedia… dot commmm!”, “A Place for Answers, A Place For Mom”)

It also includes things like “style” that is harder to define, but should be pretty clear when you see multiple ads lined up.

Note that distinctive assets are about being DISTINCT not DIFFERENCIATED. Differentiation is about what needs are being served (Red Bull = Caffeine), Distinctness is about how a consumer identifies and finds the brand (Red Bull = Red and silver swirl).

All brands should have all five elements at least (and often multiple elements within each of the five types), but what is emphasized depends a lot of the primary media used to advertise. Print ads have little use for sounds. Radio ads can’t use logos or colors. TV ads can obviously use them all (which is another reason why TV is so effective when done correctly).

When executing on distinctive elements you want three things:

  • Reach as many people as possible
  • Co-present your brand with the elements and the elements with each other as much as possible
  • Be consistent. Don’t change the elements unless you absolutely have to

The nice thing about building a stable of elements is it lets you be more creative with advertising and still be effective. There is a debate in advertising on whether you should reveal your brand at the beginning of a spot or wait until the end. The argument for immediate is to build more brand impression. The argument for waiting is to increase audience engagement as they try and figure out what the brand is – and wait to see the entire ad instead of clueing out as soon as the ad starts. If you have strong brand elements, you can get the best of both worlds. You can open a spot with lots of brand elements, but wait until the end to reveal the brand name.

 

10. Smart market research

Most market research is a waste of time. It is done so senior management can feel good about a decision that was already made. It is like when we decide to grow by 20% next year and then ask finance to build a model showing us how we are going to do it (Only a lot more expensive than the FP&A guy’s salary). But there is some market research worth doing if it hasn’t been done already:

  • Competitive analysis: Get data on the customer base demographics of your brand vs competitors. They should be almost the same (even Chili’s and KFC basically have the same demographics). Find out where (or if) they are not the same. If you are under-indexing with a particular group, try and figure out why
  • Category Entry Points: Figure out what the most common category entry points are. Then see how well your product compares to others in the category on each entry point
  • Distinct elements: Test all your brand elements and competitors to see how famous and unique they are. Fame is the % of buyers who tie a specific element to your brand. Unique is the % of buyers that tie an element to your brand that ONLY tie it to your brand. You should end up with all of your elements on a xy graph. You can roughly divide the graph into four quadrants
  Low Unique High Unique
High Fame AVOID these elements USE these elements
Low Fame Irrelevant elements INVEST in these elements

 

 

That’s not all obviously, but if you focus on those ten principles you will be light years ahead of most marketing departments on the planet who are trying to target customer segments, cross sell, increase customer loyalty and build Facebook fan-bases. Even when companies are doing the right things (brand extensions to target different use cases), they are often doing it for the wrong reasons – or at least not thinking through the most important reasons for doing it. This post should be enough to have you understand what matters in marketing. Once you know that you can get creative on the execution.

The HOW is important, but doesn’t matter until you are working on the correct WHAT.

Which is coincidentally a chapter in the book I am writing, Good Enough: Why Good is Better than Excellent. If you found this post valuable, sign-up for my newsletter. I am sharing behind-the-scenes work and book chapters weekly (sometimes for fortnightly) exclusively with that list. Hope to see you there.

Media Mention: Marketing to Boomers

This is an older one. CIO.com published an article on how to market to baby boomers and asked my advice. I told them to focus on the simple stuff. Here was the quote they used:

Don’t discount the power of the telephone, says Edward Nevraumont, CMO, A Place for Mom, which connects families to senior care. “Even Expedia still does 25 percent of its bookings over the phone. The internet is great for a lot of things (including keeping costs down), but it’s almost always worth it to make it easy for someone to pick up the phone and call you to help complete a transaction.”

 Here is the full article: http://www.cio.com/article/2684305/online-marketing/9-digital-marketing-strategies-to-woo-baby-boomers.html

Sketch Comedy with Kevin MacDonald

This is definitely NOT a Marketing post.

Back in March I had the opportunity to take a sketch-writing workshop with Kevin MacDonald (of Kids in the Hall fame). We spent the day learning his techniques, then went up on stage with a random group to do a single improv sketch. We spent the rest of the day workshopping that scene to turn it into a performance-ready sketch. That evening we performed the sketch to a paying audience.

You won’t learn any marketing from the following video:

Efficiency Applications- Part 2 Beyond Getting Things Done

Last month I shared the applications I use to help succeed with the “Getting Things Done” system. In this post I am going share other applications I use on a regular basis to increase my efficiency. As I said last week, these are just the tools I have actually found to work – tools I have incorporated into a system that actually has improved my efficiency. There are many tools out there that I am sure work in theory (Everynote comes to mind) that I haven’t been able to make work in practice. Please feel free to share your successes in the comments below.

The Tools:

Transportation: Uber, Lyft, Flywheel, Tripit

I’m still amazed that everyone isn’t using Uber (or at least everyone who lives in an Uber-allowed city that owns a smartphone). It’s 25% cheaper than taxis and a heck of a lot more convenient. If that wasn’t enough, the cars and nicer and the drivers are more pleasant. Taxis are going the way of the dodo.

When UberX isn’t available I will use Lyft. Lyft is as good a product as Uber, but generally, in my unscientific estimations, their time to pick-up is significantly slower. One advantage of Lyft is they can pick you up at the Seattle airport. UberX can’t do that for some reason.

Rarely I will use Flywheel. Flywheel is a taxi-company’s answer to Uber. It works the same way (almost) but with slightly higher charges – including a $1 flat charge MORE than if you picked up the phone! The $1 Charge goes to the provider of the app obviously and no account was made of the ‘savings’ from avoiding the dispatch costs. Sometimes I will actually pay the $1 because the dispatch experience is so terrible (I’ve seen a 4 minute pick-up time on Flywheel. Then I called the dispatch and was told it would be 30 minutes. I assume they were giving the fare to a friend).

 

The other travel app I have become increasingly reliant on is Tripit. Tripit automatically picks up all travel emails for you and both puts them into the app in a nice summary format, and adds them to your calendar. With one click you can share trips with friends. And if it misses the trip for some reason (it happens sometimes) you just forward the confirmation email to plans@tripit.com and it fixes the itinerary. Fantastic product. There is a paid version but I use the free one and have never looked back.

 

Contact Management:

LinkedIn is getting better and better as a mini-CRM tool. It’s definitely not all the way there, but they are allowing start-ups to link into their APIs and that has created some real innovation in the space. Even with a lot of looking I haven’t found the mini-CRM I think I want (I’ve sketched it out. Maybe I will get it built myself someday). In the meantime, here are the applications I use on a daily basis:

Rapportive

This is a simple chrome extension for Gmail. It pulls in LinkedIn and Facebook information (including pictures) into your gmail account so you can see it at a glance when you are reading or writing messages. A simple, ‘nice to have’.

EasilyDo

EasilyDo is an iPhone app that bills itself as a complete CRM tool. It’s not that, but it does have some really nice intuitive features. Here is what I use it for:

  • It scans your email every day and gives you lists of people that are not in your address book. You can add them with about 3-clicks
  • In that same email scan it will find people who ARE in your address book and find new information to add (phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses). It’s a really smart feature that works. Again: Click three times and the info is added to your existing contact
  • It also goes through your address book on an ad hoc basis and finds duplicate accounts. With a few clicks you can merge those accounts into single accounts. A godsend.
  • The above three options require a fair amount of clicking to do at scale. They also have a paid version that does all three automatically. It’s likely worth paying for, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet
  • Other smaller features include:
  • You can set automatic SMS to go out under specific conditions. I have it SMS my wife if I leave the office after 5pm, letting her know I’ve left (and am ‘likely’ coming home)
  • It feed in local events you can check out or delete with an easy swipe. I’m not a sports fan, but I like that it feeds me the local sports schedule so I know to avoid traffic on specific days/times
  • It feeds in any events you get on facebook and allows you to add them to your calendar
  • It has its own ‘newsfeed’. It shows only the stuff that it thinks you will find most interesting from facebook. It’s like a ‘best of’ to cover friends getting married, giving birth, getting new jobs, etc.
  • It also has a daily facebook picture highlights. It just pulls the top pictures from your facebook graph you can look through very quickly and then swipe away
  • It pulls in your tracking codes for any deliveries. It pulls in travel itineries. It pulls in OpenTable reservations.
  • It gives you the weather and expected travel time from your home to work (if it’s that time of day) or work to home (at the end of the day)
  • It has other features too, but I haven’t fully explored the app beyond those listed above

 

Newsle

This is another simple application. It connects to your LinkedIn account. Then it scourers the web looking for news stories on anyone you are connected to on LinkedIn. It is fun to read about news generated from my friends and acquaintances (and another reason I don’t accept strangers or “Twitter friends” into my LinkedIn network).

Unroll.me

I love this application. When you sign-up (it’s free) it scans your inbox for automated emails. It shows you every mailing list you are on. Then you just scan the list and choose one of three options for each:

  1. Unsubscribe
  2. Stay Subscribed
  3. Roll-up

The first two options alone are fantastic. It’s the easiest way to mass-unsubscribe to all those things you keep meaning to. The third option is added brilliance. There are lots of mailing lists I don’t want clogging my inbox, but I’m not ready to fully unsubscribe. Roll-up is the answer. I get a roll-up email daily (you can choose the frequency). The roll-up email has screenshots of all the mailing lists I have ‘rolled-up’. Instead of getting a dozen emails a day, I get one with 12 emails inside it. If I am interested in that particular ‘inside email’, I can click through and read the entire thing.

That daily roll-up email also tells you if Roll-up has found any new mailing lists you have subscribed to (or more likely have recently sent you something that it did not pick up before). Every week or so I go on and do a mass subscribe/unsiubscribe/roll-up of anything it’s found that week.

 

Navigation:

Even though I have an iPhone and Apple Maps is the default application when I click on an address in my calendar, I use Google Maps almost exclusively. I find it’s significantly more accurate. The only exception is Waze (An Israeli company that has been purchased by Google). Waze crowdsources traffic patterns to give you real-time suggestions to change your route to avoid traffic. It’s great in theory, and my friends in LA love it, but it has issues in Seattle (I think due to not enough people crowdsourcing for it). It will often send you on a 1-block detour that I’m pretty sure saves no time at all. One time in really bad traffic (on a roadtrip to a comedy concert) it started sending us back and forth on the same road. I think it’s best use in a city like Seattle is coming home from a long weekend when you are trying to figure outwhich highway to take, or whether you should hop off the highway to take the back roads.

 

Twitter:

If you haven’t read my Twitter Follow/Followback policy I suggest you do so now (It’s the most popular thing I’ve ever written according to my analytics).

Okay. You are back. Here are applications I use to manage my twitter account.

BufferApp

There are lots of Twitter applications that help you spread your tweets out over time. Buffer is my preference mainly because it’s so easy. I pay for their premium membership which lets me ‘buffer’ up to 199 tweets. It also lets me link a half-dozen or so social media accounts, so I use it for Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

Here is how it works:

You create a posting timeline for each of your social media accounts. I post 3-times per day on Twitter, once a day on Facebook and LinkedIn. I’ve changed that frequency over time. It’s largely based on how much interesting content I find on an average day I want to share. Turns out that’s a little more than 3/day on Twitter, which has let me build up a ‘buffer’ of almost 200 tweets. (I’ve hit the 199 cap twice). On Facebook I restrict it to once a day mainly because I think that’s the most my friends really want to hear from me regarding interesting web content.

Anytime I find something interesting I link to it in a tweet on BufferApp.com (desktop) or on my iPhone app (phone). Sometimes I can do it within an application (Like Feedly – see below). If I think the tweet is not ‘topical’ (i.e., it’s not particularly relevant right now – say I found data on the lineage of Ghengis Khan) then I put it at the end of my queue. If it has something to do with recent news (or say it’s Halloween-related near the end of October) then I put it in the front of the queue. Buffer makes it easy to do both.

I tend to do my reading in clumps. BufferApp allows me to spread out that content over time in my twitter feed rather that throwing it all at my readers at the sametime.

BufferApp has a free option, but it limits you to about a dozen tweets in your feed. I pay them $10 a month or so to get a feed of 199 tweets.

 

ManageFlitter and TribeBoost

I’ve spoken at length about ManageFlitter and Tribeboost in my Twitter post (but you’ve already read that, right?). When I began follow/unfollowing folks in my space I started with ManageFlitter. When I got to scale (~3000 followers) I started working with Tribeboost. At about 10,000 followers, Tribeboost capped out at following 600 people per day. At that point I ramped back up Manageflitter as a supliment. I now follow 600/day with Tribeboost (completely automatic, ~$100/month) and 300/day with Manageflitter (I have to create the lists for them to follow – I do that with their “Power” Tool) (~$60/month). Unfortunately there is no way to automate the unfollowing with ManageFlitter if I continue to use Tribeboost (the systems don’t talk to each other so Manageflitter would end up unfollowing people immediately after they are followed by Triabeboost).

My solution is not ideal. I manually go in about once a week and unfollow the people I have followed with ManageFlitter that have not followed back. It means giving those folks well over a week to follow-back (I generally like to give a week), and clicking about 2000 times a week. Painful, but I’ll do it with two screens open, so I’m multitasking and clicking doesn’t take much brainpower. Given the delays it means I end up following a LOT of people who aren’t following me back – even after a week. I can get away with it because my follower count is high enough now, but this method wasn’t really feasible until I got to about 10-15K followers and had a lot of businesses following me (which I don’t automatically follow-back) which gave me ‘room’ in my account.

 

FollwerFrenzy

I’m not sure this tool is good to use, but I haven’t stopped yet. Basically you give them a a list of hashtags. They automatically favorite tweets for me with those hashtags. It gives me a booked-mark list of a lot of interesting content. It has the added benefit that some people will follow you after you favorite their tweet (a little less than 10%). This is why I only pro-actively follow ~900/day. Since you are capped at 1000/day, the extra 100 gives me room to follow-back any real people who follow me due to the book-marking.

 

Echofon

Because I follow-back I follow a lot of people (18K as of this writing). Since I tend to follow people who are in the marketing and data analytics space, my tweet stream is surprisingly good. But sometimes I want to read a subset of the stream – say people I know in real life, or mass media agencies, etc. For that I create lists. Echofon is what I use to read the streams from these different lists (it amazes me that this is not built into the base Twitter ap!). I’m sure there are better solutions for this and that Echofon could do a lot more for me if I let it, but thisis what I do right now and it seems to work.

 

JustUnfollow

I’m sure this app does a lot too. I use it for one thing. Every day it sends me an email with a list of everyone who has followed or unfollowed me. It gives me some basic metrics on how I’m doing. I can take the two lists and subtract one from the other to see what my net gain is. I can look at my gross gain and see if whatever recent technique I used worked (or whether that tweet I made that went mini-viral had any impact). And I can scan the ‘unfollows’ to see if there were any real people on there to get an idea if I offended anyone (It’s almost always spammers and companies that unfollow me). Handy I guess but hardly necessary.

 

Socialoomph

I use Socialoomph to schedule posts about my blog. Whenever I write something new (like this post), I hop onto my Socialoomph account. I schedule a tweet saying something like, “New Marketing is Easy Post: Applications I Use”. I schedule it for the day after the blog post is scheduled to go live. Then I start scheduling more. Out of my 20K+ Twitter followers on average one of my tweets is seen by about 2000 people. So I Tweet about the same post many times – once a day in fact. I schedule the tweets to go out every 25 hours (so a slightly different time each day). Each tweet is unique. I work my way through the post on one screen and SocialOomph on the other screen. When I read something in the post I think might be interesting to some people, I write a tweet about it. I repeat through the entire article. When I get to the end of the article, I’m done. Sometimes that takes 3 tweets (and 3 days) sometimes it takes 60 (and two months).

 

Content:

I’m often asked how I find the content I tweet about (or talk about to my friends, “How do you know that!?!?” is a common refrain…). Here is how I do it:

AlienBlue/Reddit

Reddit is awesome. Lots of people from around the world crowdsourcing the coolest stuff. I read it almost exclusively on my iPhone with the AlienBlue app. I paid for the premium version ($2 one-time charge) but I am not sure what it gets me. I’m happy to give them the $2. It’s worth it.

If you don’t use Reddit, your first experience can be terrible. You start with their default ‘subReddits’. Some are fine, but they likely aren’t the things you are most interested in. The other issue is the subReddits often get dumbed-down vs the specialized ones with more engaged readership. Sometimes a SubReddit will move from non-default to default and you can actually see the decline in quality (DataIsBeautiful is an example. I shared a LOT of content from that subReddit before it was default, and very little afterwards).

Here are some of the subReddits I subscribe to that I will sometimes pull content from for my Twitter feed:

/dataisbeautiful

/askhistorians

/AskReddit

/Bestof

/Books

/IAmA

/AMA

/News

/WorldNews

/Science

/Technology

/Tech

/HistoryPorn

/Business

For my own personal enjoyment I read:

/MarvelStudios (updates on what Disney is doing with the Marvel properties)

/TheWalkingDead (commentary after each episode)

 

 

Feedly

It took me a long time to get an RSS reader. It’s changed the way I consume content. Feedly is amazing as a desktop application, and even better as an iPhone app. I subscribe to blogs and then swipe through their headlines inside the app. When I see something interesting I click through to read it. If I think it’s worth sharing I can even send it to buffer without leaving Feedly. It is likely my most-used app on my phone (maybe more than email and twitter)

Here are some blogs I subscribe to (only listing the ones that get updated regularly. Others like Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis are subscribed to as well, but they rarely have new content):

FivethirtyEight

Datablog (The Guardian)

Flowing Data

Information is Beautiful

Bryan Caplan

Dan Arierly

Steven Landsburg

Tim Hartford

Freakonomics

HBR

Slate Articles

Techcrunch

The Economist

Wired

The New Yorker

Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)

Altucher Confidential

Dilber Blog (Scott Adams)

Sam Harris

Slate Star Codex (a new favorite!)

Seth Godin

Tim Ferris

Xkcd.com

Occam’s Razor

I also follow about a dozen SEO blogs. Most of the content they share is junk, but I keep it in one folder on my Feedly and scan it from time to time. If anything really important comes up in the SEO space it will be surfaced here and I’d rather not miss it.

 

Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I don’t listen to music when I run, instead I take in podcast content. I run about 6-7 hours a week. That’s enough for me to stay updated on this list:

This American Life

Serial

Tim Ferris Podcast

RadioLab

The Moth

Freakonomics

Startup (New. I’m liking it. By one of the reporters from TAL and Planet Money)

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History (Excellent. But LONG. 3h+ podcasts the come out once every quarter or so)

 

Self-Tracking

I go back and forth on how “into” self-tracking I am. For a while I went in deep. Then I lost a lot of data and got discouraged. I will get back into it in the new year I think. Without going into too much details, here is what I have used

Reporter App

The best way to track things during the day (or at the end of the day, or the start of the day). Simple and easy to use. And very customizable. I created tracking questions like, “How well did you eat today ranking from 1-5”, and “What dreams do you remember from last night” and “What did you eat since your last report”

 

Fitbit

I use the Force (from before it was recalled). It’s my watch and step counter. It’s a slight motivation to walk a littlemore than I otherwise would if I wasn’t tracking.

 

Everyday

iPhone app I used to take a picture of my wife every day as she got more pregnant. Then I lost all the data. I now have a better way to back it all up (i.e., I pay Apple $2/month). Will try again taking a daily picture of my baby girl when she arrives.

 

Automatic

It plugs into your car and tracks everywhere you go – and how good your driving is. It also helps you find your car when you can’t remember where you parked…

 

Swarm/Foursquare

I don’t care about the games, but it’s an easy way to keep track of the restaurants I have eaten at if I want to find them again. It also has some nice food recommendations. More actionable than Yelp when you are already at the restaurant and are trying to figure out what to order.

 

TomTom Watch

I use TomTom for running. It’s not great, but it tracks heart rate better than other things out there (from the wrist). And the GPS is pretty good. Biggest issue I have with it is it sometimes takes a few minutes to find a satellite. Which wouldn’t be too bad, but you can’t even start the timer part until it’s found a safelight. I don’t have the patience to wait, so I start running and then have to estimate how long it took to find a satellite if I want to run a specific length of time (as I often do)

 

Other applications

I’m not sure where these fit in, so I am including them all at the end

 

Postmates

Courier delivery on demand. Love these guys. I pay about $3 for them to deliver Chipotle to my office for lunch. I’ve also used them to buy me a pair of jeans from Banana Republic, and pick up a 2L bottle of Coke from the convenience store for my wife at 2am. It’s like a TaskRabbit that actually works. (Bonus App: Chipotle app lets me pre-order my lunch for pick-up)

 

Dashlane

Took me a while to get on the password protection train, but it was well worth it. I have double authentication on my Gmail and financial accounts. For everything else I use Dashlane. I need to remember my (very complicated) Dashlane password. Then Dashlane manages everything else for me. When I create a new account I click a button and Dashlane creates a ridiculous password (Something like: Fgj33^53ndq@#4T). It is built into my phone and browser, so when I go back to a site, Dashlane automatically populates the password for me. So simple. I pay about $20 a year I think. Bought three years in advance.

 

Kayak and Zillow

These are my go-tos for finding travel options and real estate respectively. Both have done a very good job and (at least for now) stand head and shoulders over the other options in the space.

 

That’s it for now. As I add new Apps I will come back to this post to update the list. Are there apps you like a lot that aren’t here? Please comment below – and describe HOW you use them. The how is as valuable as the what I’ve found with these products.

The History of Marketing

Depending on where you draw the line between sales and marketing, one could say marketing has been around forever. In the interests of brevity, we can start the story of Marketing in the early 20th century. The first real ‘go’ at marketing was the discovery that repetition of a consistent brand was important. Companies like Coke and P&G figured it out early on and used whatever media existed to get their consistent brands in front of consumers to win share of mind.

People had theories on what worked, but mostly they were guessing. The famous quote, “I know 50% of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which half” could easily describe marketing from the very beginning. It was obvious  the consumer goods companies that had extensive advertising campaigns were more successful than the ones that did not, but it was very unclear which specific advertising activities were driving the impact.

The basic problem is that brand advertising impact is so thinly spread out. When you see a TV commercial for Coke you don’t jump up and buy a Coke right away. You likely don’t even jump up and drink a Coke right away. But somewhere in the back of your mind you increase neurological connections to the Coke brand and sometime in the future you may be slightly more influenced to choose Coke over another option. But because that “slight influence” happened “sometime” in the future, it’s practically impossible for the advertiser to figure out that that specific spot caused you to go over the edge that specific time. Even the person being influenced doesn’t know (so surveys are a waste of time).

The obvious impact combined with lack of data and difficulty with any real measurement created demand for people who could explain what was going on. The best of these ‘experts’ were master storytellers who could spin a yarn. They told stories based on psychological experiments or customer surveys or sometimes just anecdotes spun into narratives. With nothing better to go on people took their advice. Maybe marketing got better and maybe it didn’t. It was very hard to tell anyway. But it didn’t matter too much, since overall it was working. People were buying what brands were selling. Who cares if it was fully optimized?

By the 1950s the US had Madison Avenue. The storytelling just kept getting better, even if the science was not. “Better” tools followed. NPS scores were ‘scientific’ measures of customer satisfaction. Media mix models used multiple regression to tell you the relative value of different marketing channels. Conjoint Analysis and Max-Diff helped quantify customer surveys to figure out what customers ‘latent’ values really were. Products started being positioned. Blue Oceans were discovered.

The issue was it was hard, if not impossible, to prove any of this stuff actually improved impact. It definitely made people feel better about their decisions – it was SCIENCE – but it was science without proper A/B testing to measure real results. These new quantitative marketers were just like the ad men of the 1950s – they just had better storytelling tools.

(And the best part is they were generally ‘selling’ to marketers with no quantitative intuition themselves. So it was easy to pull out a black box and ‘reveal’ the final decision.)

Enter Real Science

Within all this hocus-pocus there was one part of marketing that was using real science. It was the least sexy and maybe the least desirable career in marketing: Direct Mail Marketing.

DM Marketing involved sending direct mail to thousands or millions of homes asking people to mail something back, or call a number, and buy something. The response rates you could imagine were terrible: 3% would be a fantastic campaign. But the beauty was the costs were relatively low (at least compared to television) and you could measure changes with (almost) absolute certainty.

You could send out ten different versions of a mailer – different colors, different copy, different envelopes – whatever changes you wanted to make – and send them all to the same group of people (randomly divided into ten sub-groups – one for each version). Then you could measure the response rate for each version. If Version A got a 3% response rate and Version B got a 2% response rate, you know the changes you made from B to A got you an extra 1%. But you don’t need to stop there. You can keep iterating the changes to find out what works and what doesn’t. You can change offers. You can change prices. You can change the gender of the call center person who answers the phone. Anything to want.

And each time you test a change you learn something. Not the learnings that came from the witch-doctor marketing, but real learnings you could replicate. When you tried to replicate it and it failed, you learned something then too and you would add it to your quiver.

Over time people become experts in DM Marketing. They had run so many tests that they had intuition on what worked and what didn’t, so they didn’t need to test everything anymore (but they could). They were the first real marketing scientists.

Taking DM to the Store

The next big advance in marketing was Loyalty Programs. DM Marketing was great, but it only existed in a dark corner of the marketing world. Even when DM Marketing made it to TV (with Infomercials and Direct-response advertising) it was still hidden away in weird time slots in the middle of the day or the middle of the night. But Loyalty let marketers use the techniques of DM Marketing with mainstream businesses.

With Loyalty Programs companies could track individual customers over time. Then they could begin to run experiments on the impact of changing things. What happens when you send someone a coupon? Do they buy more? Do they shift brands? Do they just move spending forward and reduce it later?

Before Loyalty Programs the answers to that question was just guess work. Now retailers could run real A/B tests and figure out the actual drivers of improved sales.

The problem was people forgot what the purpose of Loyalty Programs were. They got caught up on the name and started to think Loyalty Programs were designed to drive Loyalty. They ignored the data analytics and tests they could run, and instead just looked at numbers showing Loyalty Members spend more than non-Loyalty Members (It’s called Selection Effect, which I will expand on in another post). If you believe that getting someone to join a loyalty program gets them to spend more, then just getting people to join on its own creates value. Turns out that was wrong. If you look at all retailers that have Loyalty Programs and compare to those that don’t – the ones that don’t have had significantly better ROI and Market Cap improvement over time. Loyalty Programs on average destroy value.

Except when they don’t.

If you use them correctly – to turn your business into a smart DM-Marketing machine – Loyalty Programs can add a ton of value. It just turns out that most companies don’t use them that way.

Along Comes the Internet

In the early days it was hard to get people to buy on the internet. But the early leaders like the Jeffs Bezos and Skoll worked hard to change that. And then people started buying.

The best thing about the internet:

  • Now every company has DM-Marketing data

The second best thing about the internet:

  • Now DM Mailings are (basically) free.

Now you could run analysis on anything. Now instead of spending $1M to send a million pieces of mail, you could spend $1000 to send a billion emails. The ability to test went through the roof.

It took a while for the tools to do all this testing to be fully developed (Google Analytics didn’t launch until November 2005!), but now they are everywhere. All of a sudden everyone is a Direct Response Marketer whether they know it or not.

In general this is a good thing. A/B testing can teach you an awful lot that the Quantitative BS of the last century couldn’t. And we can measure those A/B tests on all sorts of sub-metrics: impressions, conversion rate, customer flow, multi-session tracking – just about any behavior you can imagine.

All of a sudden data is the easy part.

But with more data comes more responsibility.

We aren’t taking responsibility.

Instead the data-marketers compare their quantitative methods to the qualitative methods that came before and since they are convinced that what they are doing is ‘better’, what they are doing must be ‘right’.

Obviously we don’t need to figure out what color our website should be, all we have to do is A/B test it.

Obviously we don’t need to think about how to segment our customers, we will just do Big Data Analysis and it will spit out the segmentations we could never see with our naked eye.

Obviously this counter-intuitive fact must be right – it was proven in the data.

 

There are two problems with all this.

First, there is a difference between proof and Proof. Significant results are still wrong 5% of the time (and likely not important 50% of the time). When you are running Big-Data sized tests and trying to backward-infer results, this 5% gets really really important.

Second, just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. I’m not talking about ethics, I’m talking about impact. Personalization is great, but sometimes (usually) it is better to create a great product than personalize a crappy one. Data might help you make a better product, but only if you choose to spend your time trying to do that, instead of spending the time with the sexy new personalizing algorythm.

 

It’s great that marketing has moved away from qualitative BS. Now we need to resist the urge to deify anything that has math and algorythms behind it. Quantitative BS exists and it’s all around us.

Marketing without the BS

I started this site in 2013. My intention was to write a book about marketing in real time – like Dickens if instead of caring about Victorian England Orphans he cared about marketing attribution models. But alas, life got in the way. In 2016 I left my role as CMO at A Place For Mom, took the ideas from Marketing is Easy and pivoted to writing a broader book about how being Good Enough was better than Excellent. But my life of leisure as an author did not last long. Before the end of that year I was working again full time at a company called General Assembly – and I had my second child. The book was sidelined again.

In May 2018 General Assembly sold to Adecco for over $400MM. I spent a couple of months wrapping things up and left in August of that year. Then I dove back into book writing. I shifted back to the original plan of a book about marketing. With another half decade under my belt I had more stories and experience. I was also more committed to life not getting in the way. I turned down new opportunities to get this book that had been sitting inside me out of my system. I even hired a team of editors, strategist and designers to help me get it over the line (and keep me honest).

The book started as Marketing is Easy, but through the process of writing it, it changed. The story flipped. Instead of being about how marketing is easy and “don’t get distracted by the shiny objects”, I have changed the emphasis. The book begins with a take-down of all the “BS” that is out there in the marketing space – all the shiny objects that people get distracted with. Only in the second half of the book do I dive into how to do marketing “correctly” – how “Marketing is Easy”.

The title, “Marketing is Easy” did not seem to make sense any more. I changed it to “Marketing BS”.

So I needed a new domain name too. I picked up MarketingBS.com.

The book is being released in mid-2109 and I am very excited about it.

 

Meanwhile this blog is being retired.

Although I have not updated anything here since 2016, it still gets a fair amount of traffic and email subscribers. So I am going to leave it live, but I am duplicating all the “evergreen” content over to MarketingBS.com.

There you can also find details about the book, how to bring me to your organization as a speaker, and a new blog post on marketing BS every week.

I hope to see you there!

Three things I believe: A critical look at data-driven marketing

This was the original introduction on the homepage of the blog. Today I updated it with a new homepage, but I wanted to keep this short introduction on the blog so I could link to it as necessary. 

Three things I believe

  1. If you think marketing is hard, you are likely ignorant (not stupid)
  2. The most fundamental job of a CMO is to understand Customer Lifetime Value, but new customers are far more important than existing customers
  3. Brand marketing is very important but measuring it is mostly a waste of time

I will provide more background on each of those beliefs in the future. When I do I will link to them from this post.

The Best Marketing Book

I have not completed my next ‘book’ chapter this week, so instead I will share this book review (of sorts).

People looking to get into marketing often ask me what books they should read. Unfortunately there are not many I can recommend. Most marketing books seem to actually be books on how to be creative or sometimes just that you should be creative. Thanks.) Creative marketing skills were likely important 30 years ago, but today’s best marketers are closer to 70/30 technical/creative – and that technical side of marketing gets very short shelf space in the bookstore.

I am regularly disappointed when I start on a new marketing book. The best that can be said is that many of them have interesting case studies. In a twitter conversation I had with Tom Peter’s recently he told me that he only reads the case studies of the books he buys and skips all the rest completely. I actually like synthesis and conclusions from my business books. Unfortunately I rarely get what I hope for. This lack of concrete marketing synthesis is a big reason why I’ve decided to start this ‘live writing’ process – to fill the gap with a marketing book that covers what someone really needs to know in the function.

The marketing books that have influenced me the most were generally not marketing books at all: books like Duncan Watt’s Everything is Obvious (Once you know the answer), or Tyler Cowen’s The Average is Over.  Both of those books (and others) will eventually get write-ups here – likely in weeks when I can’t get my act together to write a book chapter.

When it comes to core marketing books – books where the author knew she was talking about marketing when she wrote it – there is one that, for me, stands far above the rest. I have bought this book for my entire marketing team. I recommend it to non-marketer executives who want to get grounding on what’s really important in marketing. And I definitely recommend it any time I talk to a fellow marketer.

For all of my promotion of the book, it’s still not very well known (this may be a hint that having me promote your book is not going to help very much). As of today it’s ranked as the 82,563th bestselling book on Amazon. There doesn’t seem to be a rating on where it ranks on their marketing book list, but the 100th bestselling marketing book is ranked 10,350th overall and the 99th is 10,266th, so we might be able to extrapolate that it’s something like the 860th bestselling marketing book. Basically: It’s not driving the conversation about marketing today. And it should be.

The book is called How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp.

how brands grow

My argument that marketing is like medicine in the 19th century is stolen directly from Mr. Sharp – as are a lot of my beliefs about marketing. He makes some compelling arguments.

First: If you are at all involved in marketing and you haven’t read this book already, you should put an order in at Amazon now. I even provided a link (it’s not even an affiliate link, so I’m not getting paid for this)

Second: Let me try and summarize a few of his concepts from the book, and briefly where I disagree with him.

 

How Brands Grow

Mr. Sharp spends most of his book destroying the generally accepted beliefs of most marketers with data. Some of the concepts he attacks:

  • Most of your sales will come from a small group of loyal customers: Not true. He uses sales data to show that repeat purchases are directly correlated to share. There is no such thing as a small brand with loyal buyers. It just doesn’t exist. You need to focus on growing your overall share and getting more customers, rather than trying to increase loyalty with your existing customers and by doing so will actually increase loyalty as a side-effect.
  • You need to have a differentiated product targeted at a specific customer segment: Not true. Segmentation itself is a fairly artificial exercise (interesting math, and great for storytelling, but not great at actually selling products).  It turns out that being appealing to a lot of people is almost always better than trying to specialize in a niche.
  • Loyalty Programs do not increase loyalty – even a little bit, and definitely cost more money than they could ever drive in increased revenue
  • Brand marketing does not affect your best customers. It increases the frequency of purchase for your occasional customers a very small amount. This means that people always say they are not affected by marketing: “I maybe drink Coke once every 8 months – the ads don’t affect me.” He argues that that ‘unaffected drinker’ would have drunk Coke every 8.1 months without the ads. It’s a subtle effect that is very hard to measure, but has a huge effect over the long term (without anyone knowing they were consciously affected).

There is more, but I won’t spoil all the surprises as you read it (have I mentioned yet you should be buying and reading this book already?). He backs everything up with some pretty compelling data that you  won’t see in the received wisdom spouted by most marketing texts.

 

Where I disagree

Mr. Sharp is an academic who, as far as I know, has not spent time trying to make companies work. His data is very compelling, but it is also generalized. The risk of that generalization is that, in order to make a conclusion, treats all companies and situations the same. This is a mistake. I will dive into one specific example.

Mr. Sharp believes that Loyalty Programs destroy value. I believe that MOST Loyalty Programs destroy value. I even believe that on average Loyalty Program destroy value. If you were to ask me to guess which of two retailers performed better last year and all I knew about the two retailers was that one had a loyalty program and one did not, I would guess the program-less retailer every time. But I also believe that it is possible to create loyalty programs that create value. I even believe there are many (or at least some) loyalty programs out there right now that create value for their companies.

Mr. Sharp shows some very compelling data on specific loyalty programs that are destroying value. But just because I show you a bunch of white swans, it doesn’t mean that black swans cannot exist (with credit to Nassim Taleb). I will go into a significant amount of detail on loyalty programs in a month or two that will hopefully prove this to you.

My second criticism of the book is that while it spends a lot of time tearing down the false-tower of 20th century marketing, it does not spend a great deal of time re-building something to replace it. You are left at the end of the book thinking most of marketing is a waste of time, but unclear how to best spend your time in a new (effective) way.

The good news is you can at least stop wasting your time.

Hopefully over the next few months I can start walking you through how to best spend all the time you have saved. But before I can do that there is an awful lot you need to stop doing. Read Byron Sharp’s fantastic (and under-rated) book and you will know more about what is true in marketing that 90% of the professionals out there right now.

Marketing BS

I started writing “Marketing is Easy” in 2013. In 2018 I radically changed the book’s focus from “how to do marketing” to a take-down of the “marketing industrial complex”. The new book is called “Marketing BS” and you can find all the details at MarketingBS.com/book.

 

About Marketing is easy

NOTE: I have stopped updating this site. For more recent content check out MarketingBS.com/blog

Here was the original plan for the site:

 

A Simple Quantitative Approach to Marketing

Every marketing consultant I speak to tells me how complicated marketing is.

I disagree.

I disagree with a lot of the generally accepted beliefs about marketing.

I’ve found that I am spending increasing amount of time making arguments about those beliefs and/or helping fellow CMOs and PE/VC investors simplify their businesses. It was time to write these conversations down.

This site is about simplifying your marketing strategy by focusing on what works and avoiding the millions of complicated, non-proven, marketing ‘best practices’.

I will generally write as if I am talking to a CMO – someone running all of the marketing for their company. That said, I hope the content will still be useful for others (specifically CEOs looking to give direction to their CMOs and more junior marketers looking to improve on their portion of the business). I’m not going to spend time on how to manage uploads on Google AdWords, but I will spend (a lot) of time on how to direct your team on how to use Google AdWords effectively.

 

 Why this site is unique

People put time and effort into blogs for a reason. For most people it’s just to be heard: They want to share their recent trip to Europe or chronicle the challenges of adding an extension to their house. Most blogs focused on business or marketing have a different purpose: One way or another they are trying to make money. They give away free content to get traffic to their site and then collect leads that they can monetize somehow. The money comes from a few common places:

(1)    Consulting gigs: They use the blog to show expertise and then sell that expertise to companies that need help in the area

(2)    Books/Podcasts/Paid Content/Speeches: Kind of like consulting, but more high level. They generate content and give a lot away on their site. Then they keep some – sometimes specialized content, sometimes specialized formats, sometimes specialized media – and sell it. It’s like the Freemium model used by hundreds of online companies like Pandora and LinkedIn for the content generator.

(3)    Product: This type of blog is usually not run by an individual, but it sometimes is. A company has a product, say “Enterprise SEO Platform” or “Premium WordPress Theme”. They give away lots of information on their blog, and then after drawing you in (and hopefully getting your contact information) try to sell you their product or service. It’s a great B2B marketing strategy that I will talk more about sometime on this site.

What I think is relatively unique about this site is that I am doing it as a hobby. I have a full time job running Marketing for “A Place For Mom”. I like the job and am not going anywhere. I don’t have a product to sell and I definitely don’t have time to do a consulting gig or create a podcast (I do have a book for sale on Amazon but it’s about Improv Comedy and unlikely to appeal to the same demographic I expect to get with this site. I wrote it 15 years ago so it doesn’t even have marketing insights hidden in the margins.).

What this means is I have no incentive (or desire) to write daily blog posts in order to maintain contact. I will try to only share what I think is valuable. When I have finished sharing what I think I can help with I will stop. I hope every piece of content I generate on this site is valuable and relatively unique (or at least counter-intuitive and not widely shared by the marketing zeitgeist) . There will be no posts about how you need to believe in yourself or have a stretch goal or hire people smarter than yourself. There are lots of other places on the internet you can go for that. If it’s not unique and valuable, it’s not worth my time to do it.

The selfish reason I am creating this site (And there better be a selfish reason. If there isn’t you will likely find a blog that stops getting updated at some point and disappears into the internet darkness), is to slowly build my personal brand. Like most branding exercises the immediate payout will be low and the final payout will be unknown, but you have to just believe it’s worth investing in. So I’m following my own advice and just doing it.

None of this site is worth reading if you don’t trust the author. You can read about my background and philosophy here.