Care. Care more than you need to, more often than expected, more completely than the other guy.
Treat different people differently. Anything else is a compromise.
It’s more important that you be passionate about what you do all day than it is to be passionate about the product that is being sold.
If you measure it, it will improve.
Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it.
The sound of a small bell during a dark night, is louder than the din of traffic outside your window during rush hour. Surprise and differentiation have far more impact than noise does.
Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
What you do for a living is not be creative, what you do for a living is ship.
Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you male, but about the stories you tell.
Copy, not from your industry, from others. You have to go where there is no competition.
The one path that never works is the most common one: doing nothing at all.
We have little choice but to move beyond quality and seek remarkable, connected, and new. Remarkable, as you’ve already figured out, demands initiative.
There’s no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it.
No organization ever created an innovation. People innovate, not companies.
This notion that it is up to each person to innovation in some way flies in the face of the industrial age, but you know what, the industrial age is over.
Our cultural instinct is to wait to get pickedNo one is going to pick you. Pick yourself.
It takes confidence and guts to intentionally create tension.
The goal, then, isn’t to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.
The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends.
Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.