Consumers with otaku are the sneezers you seek. They’re the ones who will take the time to learn about your product, take the risk to try your product, and take their friends’ time to tell them about it. The flash of insight is that some markets have more otaku-stricken consumers than others. The task of the remarkable marketer is to identify these markets and focus on them to the exclusion of lesser markets – regardless of relative size.
There are “only two choices” in life: being criticized or “being ignored”.
Tearing others down is never as helpful to a movement as building your followers up.
Whatever the status quo is, changing it gives you the opportunity to be remarkable.
Simple: If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.
People yearn for change, they relish being part of a movement, and they talk about things that are remarkable, not boring.
Bullet points are not the point.
You weren’t born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog. There’s an alternative available to you.
The biggest secret of the Internet is that it is inherently a direct marketing medium. In fact, the Internet is the greatest direct marketing medium of all time.
If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip – a barrier between those who try and those who succeed.
When our responses turn into reactions and we set out to teach people a lesson, we lose. We lose because the act of teaching someone a lesson rarely succeeds at changing them, and always fails at making our day better, or our work more useful.
A slogan that accurately conveys the essence of your Purple Cow is a script. A script for the sneezer to use when she talks with her friends. The slogan reminds the user, “Here’s why it’s worth recommending us; here’s why your friends and colleagues will be glad you told them about us.” And best of all, the script guarantees that the word of mouth is passed on properly – that the prospect is coming to you for the right reason.
Tiffany’s blue box is a slogan without words. It stands for elegance and packaging and quality and “price is no object.
We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference.
Trying to appeal to everyone is almost sure to fail, for the simple reason that everyone wants something different!
Quitting the projects that don’t go anywhere is essential if you want to stick out the right ones. You don’t have the time or the passion or the resources to be the best in the world at both. Quitting.
If you seek to become indispensable, a similar question is worth asking: “Where do you put the fear?” What separates a linchpin from an ordinary person is the answer to this question.
I can do this forever. It’s like adjusting a pair.
If you’re able to look at what’s happening in your world and say, “There’s the pattern,” or “Wow, that’s interesting, I wonder why,” then you’re far more likely to respond productively than if your reaction is “How dare he!
College started as universitas magistrorum et scholarium – a community of masters and scholars. It was a refuge; it was a place you went to get lost in ideas, to discover and wander, and to plot a course as an academic. Today it’s a place you go to exchange a lifetime of debt for credit hours, a degree, and maybe a good job.