Making the Case for Change in Financial Marketing
When your buyers are financial institutions, whatever you sell is probably something they already use to do something they already are doing. Much of the time, your “competition” isn’t your competitors. It’s inertia. You have to get buyers to ask, “When is good enough no longer good enough?” As a result, your marketing needs to […]
A Call for Compassion in Marketing
Marketing drifts so quickly into cruel and dehumanizing language. Pain points. Targets. Just try to explain how words like that reflect compassion or a belief in human dignity. For example, no, B2B buyers are not usually in pain. It’s a bit odd to fetishize or hope for pain. Even worse, your offering is not a […]
How Core Questions Lead to Clear Horizons
It’s funny how the four core questions startups need to get traction and grow are the same questions you have to answer in planning a thought leadership strategy. I’ve noticed that startups who can answer them with ease also transition with ease to planning and creating thought leadership. I’ve noticed that startups who can’t answer […]
Crafting Tomorrow: How AI Will Change the Stories We Tell
Imagine you want to see a version of Star Wars where the rebels suffer a definitive and final defeat. Imagine you want to watch Succession but with Shiv coming out on top. Imagine you want to read a version of a company’s marketing material that answers your specific questions and objections or that makes an […]
Claiming Your Space
At one level, you don’t own your thinking if you’re a thought leader within a company. The IP belongs to your employer. But you still build your reputation. You still have the freedom to carve out a space in which you care. The key to that self-sovereignty even within employment is establishing your ownership of […]
How We Misunderstand Language Through Grammar
Here’s why most writing advice is not merely pointless, but corrosive. A lot of the things we think we know or believe are simply grammatical residue. A classic example: “It is raining.” There is no “it.” It only exists grammatically. Yet, we come to believe in an it. And then illusions of agency haunt our […]
The Path Over Points
Goals matter more than metrics. Trajectories matter more than goals. I suppose those statements go against most conventional wisdom. I still stand by them. Goals are more like way stations on a path. Perhaps they have numbers attached to them, but the numbers are not the meaning. Case in point—weightlifting. It’s taken me just under […]
Aligning Marketing Actions with Strategic Insights
“Marketing sometimes has this activity reflex, where they just go and do things without really taking the time to properly align those things with the underpinnings of the problem.” As quoted in an excellent article in The Financial Brand by Sean Allocca Marketing trends like growth marketing and demand generation play a dual role—they are […]
Avoiding Unsavory Marketing Tactics
Don’t adopt tactics that are more ick than tact. At any given moment, there are voices shouting at you trying to get you do the wrong thing. They want you to second-guess your moral instincts. Maybe things really are different in some new world they trick you into imagining. They want you to reject your […]
The Power of Interaction Without Expectation
A more accurate title for Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators would be “How to Use Friends and Get Things From People.” Some of the insights are interesting enough, until you realize they are a guide to straight-up sociopathic behavior. Even if you make it up with the lipstick of “connection,” using vulnerability to obtain an outcome is […]