MOC : [[MARKETING]] - [[BUSINESS]] Recommandé par : [[Bruno Marion]] Date : 2021-07-20 Auteur : [[Seth Godin]] Tags : #livre #résumé Notes liées : [[Votre empire dans un sac à dos]] - [[Influence et manipulation]] Note : 5/5 *** **Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. It’s a chance to change the culture for the better.** It’s time. Time to get off the social media merry-go-round that goes faster and faster but never gets anywhere. Time to stop hustling and interrupting. Time to stop spamming and pretending you’re welcome. Time to stop making average stuff for average people while hoping you can charge more than a commodity price. Time to stop begging people to become your clients, and time to stop feeling bad about charging for your work. Time to stop looking for shortcuts, and time to start insisting on a long, viable path instead. Marketing in five steps : - The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about. - Interessant l’aspect histoire au même niveau que le produit - The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about. - The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market. - The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word. - The last step is often overlooked: show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years—to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make. To earn permission to follow up and to earn enrollment to teach. As marketers, we get to consistently do the work to help the idea spread from person to person, engaging a tribe as you make change happen. Stories, connections, and experiences: The good news is that we don’t need to rely on the shiniest, latest digital media shortcut—we have even more powerful, nuanced, and timeless tools at our disposal. We tell stories. Stories that resonate and hold up over time. Stories that are true, because we made them true with our actions and our products and our services. We make connections. Humans are lonely, and they want to be seen and known. People want to be part of something. It’s safer that way, and often more fun. We create experiences. Using a product, engaging with a service. Making a donation, going to a rally, calling customer service. Each of these actions is part of the story; each builds a little bit of our connection. As marketers, we can offer these experiences with intent, doing them on purpose. I’m not really interested in helping you become marketing-driven, because it’s a dead end. The alternative is to be market-driven—to hear the market, to listen to it, and even more important, to influence it, to bend it, to make it better. When you’re marketing-driven, you’re focused on the latest Facebook data hacks, the design of your new logo, and your Canadian pricing model. On the other hand, when you’re market-driven, you think a lot about the hopes and dreams of your customers and their friends. You listen to their frustrations and invest in changing the culture. Being market-driven lasts. “When in doubt, assume that people will act according to their current irrational urges, ignoring information that runs counter to their beliefs, trading long-term for short-term benefits and most of all, being influenced by the culture they identify with.” You can make two mistakes here: 1. Assume that the people you’re seeking to serve are well-informed, rational, independent, long-term choice makers. 2. Assume that everyone is like you, knows what you know, wants what you want. If you have to choose a thousand people to become your true fans, who should you choose? Begin by choosing people based on what they dream of, believe, and want, not based on what they look like. In other words, use psychographics instead of demographics. Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on? Once you’ve identified the scale, then find a corner of the market that can’t wait for your attention. Go to their extremes. Find a position on the map where you, and you alone, are the perfect answer. Overwhelm this group’s wants and dreams and desires with your care, your attention, and your focus. Make change happen. Change that’s so profound, people can’t help but talk about it. Now that you see that your work is to make change, and that you can do it by identifying who you want to change, earning enrollment, and educating on the way to that change, let’s transform how you can describe those you’re changing. Perhaps instead of talking about prospects and customers, we could call them your “students” instead. Where are your students? What will they benefit from learning? Are they open to being taught? What will they tell others? This isn’t the student–teacher relationship of testing and compliance. And it’s not the power dynamic of sexism or racism. It’s the student–mentor relationship of enrollment and choice and care. If you had a chance to teach us, what would we learn? If you had a chance to learn, what would you like to be taught? Because it doesn’t matter what people you’re not seeking to serve think. What matters is whether you’ve changed the people who trust you, the people who have connected with you, the people you seek to serve. We know that every best-selling book on Amazon has at least a few one-star reviews. It’s impossible to create work that both matters and pleases everyone. The simple marketing promise: Here’s a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with: **My product is for people who believe _________________. I will focus on people who want _________________. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get _________________.** 1. Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not “How can I start a business?” but, “What would matter here?” 2. Focus on the smallest viable market: “How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?” 3. Match the worldview of the people being served. Show up in the world with a story that they want to hear, told in a language they’re eager to understand. 4. Make it easy to spread. If every member brings in one more member, within a few years, you’ll have more members than you can count. 5. Earn, and keep, the attention and trust of those you serve. 6. Offer ways to go deeper. Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members. 7. At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress in their journeys toward their goals. 8. Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that work. A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person. When you show up with a life buoy, if the drowning person understands what’s at stake, you don’t have to run ads to get them to hold on to it. In politics, there’s a long history of people believing that those on the “other side” don’t really mean what they say. That Barry Goldwater and Jane Fonda were just putting on a show. That atheists really, deep down, believe in God, and that evangelicals are mostly trying to make a point, not express their actual beliefs. The same goes for Mac users versus those who favor the Linux command line, or for math geeks versus those who insist that they can’t do math. We assume that someone can’t possibly believe that they can’t do math. Or they can’t possibly support that insane policy. Or eat food like that on purpose. We’re not faking it. Your customers aren’t faking it. Those who prefer your competition aren’t either. If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to admit that they were wrong. Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add our beliefs to what they hear. We still talk about being very good at our craft as if it’s some sort of bizarre exception. Plenty of people are good at what you do. Very good at it. Perhaps as good at it as you are. Full credit for the work you’ve done and the skill you possess. But it’s not enough. Quality, the quality of meeting specifications, is required but no longer sufficient. Bernadette shares ten things that good stories do; if the story you’re telling yourself (and others) doesn’t do these things for you, you might need to dig deeper and find a better story, one that’s more true and more effective. Good stories: 1. Connect us to our purpose and vision for our career or business 2. Allow us to celebrate our strengths by remembering how we got from there to here 3. Deepen our understanding of our unique value and what differentiates us in the marketplace 4. Reinforce our core values 5. Help us to act in alignment and make value-based decisions 6. Encourage us to respond to customers instead of react to the marketplace 7. Attract customers who want to support businesses that reflect or represent their values 8. Build brand loyalty and give customers a story to tell 9. Attract the kind of like-minded employees we want 10. Help us to stay motivated and continue to do work we’re proud of. We sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff. What do people want? If you ask them, you probably won’t find what you’re looking for. You certainly won’t find a breakthrough. **It’s our job to watch people, figure out what they dream of, and then create a transaction that can deliver that feeling.** The crowd didn’t invent the Model T, the smartphone, or rap. The crowd didn’t invent JetBlue, City Bakery, or charity: water either. Crowdfunding is one thing, but the crowd isn’t that good at inventing a breakthrough. There are three common confusions that many of us get stuck on. The first is that people confuse wants and needs. What we need is air, water, health, and a roof over our heads. Pretty much everything else is a want. And if we’re privileged enough, we decide that those other things we want are actually needs. The second is that people are intimately aware of their wants (which they think of as needs) but they are absolutely terrible at inventing new ways to address those wants. They often prefer to use a familiar solution to satisfy their wants, even if it’s not working very well. When it comes time to innovate, they get stuck. **The third is mistakenly believing that everyone wants the same thing. In fact, we don’t. The early adopters want things that are new; the laggards want things to never change. One part of the population wants chocolate, another vanilla.** *je fais cette erreur avec Atomic Thinking. Il faut que j’arrête de chercher le consensus. Au début j’avais juste une formation complexe pour les créateurs, aujourd’hui je cherche à trop m’éparpiller et me justifier.* **Don’t begin with your machines, your inventory, or your tactics. Don’t begin with what you know how to do or some sort of distraction about your mission. Instead, begin with dreams and fears, with emotional states, and with the change your customers seek.** *commencer par le changement que lès genre veulent voir* Marketers make change. We change people from one emotional state to another. We take people on a journey; we help them become the person they’ve dreamed of becoming, a little bit at a time. The good news is that two extraordinary things have happened, massive shifts in the way everything is sold to everyone: 1. It’s cheaper and faster than ever to create a prototype or a limited run. That’s true for nonprofits, as well as for manufacturers or service businesses. 2. It’s cheaper and faster than ever to find the early adopters, to engage with people who want to hear from you. Every very good customer gets you another one. Dead-end customers aren’t worth the trouble. Silent customers, jealous customers, people who think you need to be kept a secret … you can’t grow your work on a cul de sac. Your best customers become your new salespeople. Your work to change the culture thrives when the word spreads, and if you want the word to spread, you need to build something that works better when it gets spread. This simple network effect is at the heart of every mass movement and every successful culture change. It happens when remarkable is designed right into the story of your change, and more important, when the product or service works better when I use it with others. The alternative is to seek a path, not a miracle. And that path begins with customer traction. Here’s what I want to know about your VC–backed Silicon Valley startup: How many people outside of HQ use it every day? How often are they sending you suggestions to make it better? Here’s what else I want to know: How many people are insisting that their friends and colleagues use it? As in right now. Do they love it? Do they love themselves more because they love you? That restaurant you just opened: How many people come back night after night to eat there, bringing new friends each time? Or that booth at the farmers’ market, or the nonprofit you’re starting, or your local babysitting service. Who would miss it if it were gone? If you can’t succeed in the small, why do you believe you will succeed in the large? For most of us, though, changing our behavior is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it takes tension to change them. Once you see these forces at work, you’ll be able to navigate the culture in a whole new way. It will be as if someone turned on the lights and gave you a map. Because people like us eat things like this. For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our actions are primarily driven by one question: “Do people like me do things like this?” People like me don’t cheat on their taxes. People like me own a car; we don’t take the bus. People like me have a full-time job. People like me want to see the new James Bond movie. Even when we adopt the behavior of an outlier, when we do something the crowd doesn’t often do, we’re still aligning ourselves with the behavior of outliers. Marketers don’t make average stuff for average people. Marketers make change. And they do it by normalizing new behaviors. It shouldn’t be called “the culture” It should be called “a culture” or “this culture,” because there is no universal culture, no “us” that defines all of us. When we’re comfortable realizing that our work is to change “a culture,” then we can begin to do two bits of hard work: 1. Map and understand the worldview of the culture we seek to change. 2. Focus all our energy on this group. Ignore everyone else. Instead, focus on building and living a story that will resonate with the culture we are seeking to change. The essence of political change is almost always cultural change, and the culture changes horizontally. Person to person. Us to us. **If you want someone who has never hired a gardener to hire you to be their gardener, you’re asking for a pattern interrupt. If you are trying to secure a five thousand-dollar donation from a wealthy person who habitually makes hundred-dollar donations to charity, you face the same challenge. The pattern requires undoing before you can earn forward motion. When life interferes, new patterns are established. This is why it’s so profitable to market to new dads, engaged women, and people who have recently moved. They don’t have a pattern to match, so it’s all an interrupt. On the other hand, the purchasing manager at a typical organization has been taught that matching the pattern is the best way to keep a steady job with no surprises. The best time to market a new app is when the platform is brand new.** *il faut que je markette aux nouveaux passionnés de productivité, qui regardent des résumés de deep Work ou autre.* **When you market to someone who doesn’t have a pattern yet, you don’t have to persuade them that their old choices were mistakes.** Slack began by doing a pattern match, offering new software to people who like new software. A new way of doing work for people looking for a new way of doing work. But then came the leap. They gave this group a tool to create a pattern interrupt. Peer to peer. One worker saying to another, “We’re going to try this new tool.” That single horizontal transmission built a multi-billion-dollar software company. Tension is created. And the only way to relieve that tension is with forward motion. When you arrive on the scene with your story, with the solution you have in mind, do you also create tension? If you don’t, the status quo is likely to survive. The dominant narrative, the market share leader, the policies and procedures that rule the day—they all exist for a reason. They’re good at resisting efforts by insurgents like you. If all it took to upend the status quo was the truth, we would have changed a long time ago. If all we were waiting for was a better idea, a simpler solution, or a more efficient procedure, we would have shifted away from the status quo a year or a decade or a century ago. The status quo doesn’t shift because you’re right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status. Six things about status : 1. Status is always relative. Unlike eyesight or strength or your bank balance, it doesn’t matter where you are on the absolute scale. Instead, it’s about perception of status relative to others in the group. 6 is bigger than 4, but lower than 11. There is no highest number 2. Status is in the eyes of the beholder. If you are seen as low status by outsiders but as high status in your own narrative, then both things are true, at different times, to different people 3. Status attended to is the status that matters. Status is most relevant when we try to keep it or change it. For many people, status is upmost in our minds in every interaction. But it only matters when the person we’re engaging with cares about status 4. Status has inertia. We’re more likely to work to maintain our status (high or low) than we are to try to change it 5. Status is learned. Our beliefs about status start early. And yet the cohort we are with can influence our perception of our status in very little time 6. Shame is the status killer. The reason that shame is used as a lever is simple: it works. If we accept the shame someone sends our way, it undermines our entire narrative about relative status. If I want the truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d rather see a more useful document. I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections: Truth Assertions Alternatives People Money If you remind me of a scam, it will take a long time to undo that initial impression. That’s precisely why so many logos of big companies look the same. It’s not laziness. The designers are trying to remind you of a solid company. We ask people to eagerly lend us their attention. The promise is that it’s worth their effort because, in exchange, they’re going to get the insight or forward motion that they want. Enrollment is what you need to earn permission to engage. Enrollment is hands raised, eyes on the board, notes being taken. Enrollment is the first step on a journey where you learn from the customer and she learns from you. Enrollment is mutual, it is consensual, and it often leads to change. Lazy marketers try to buy enrollment with flashy ads. The best marketers earn enrollment by seeking people who want the change being offered. And they do it by connecting people to others who want the change as well. Always be wondering, always be testing, always be willing to treat different people differently. If you don’t, they’ll find someone who will. Some customers are worth more than others. You’ve certainly heard the stories of restaurants that keep a picture of the local restaurant critic on the wall of the kitchen. The thinking is that if you can spot the critic early in the meal, you can raise the quality of the experience and get a better review. If you can pull it off, this might be worth the effort. The thing is, everyone is a restaurant critic now. Everyone can post on Yelp or share the experience with others. And so, the thinking goes, you need to treat everyone better because everyone has more power. The math here doesn’t hold up. Treating everyone better is a bit like treating everyone worse—given your resources, you can’t treat everyone better than you already are. Instead, you can look at the new normal and realize that while everyone has a platform, not everyone is using it. While everyone could be a neophiliac, a sneezer, a power user, a significant contributor, not everyone is taking that opportunity. You can learn a lot about people by watching what they do. And when you find someone who is adopting your cause, adopt them back. When you find someone who is eager to talk about what you do, give him something to talk about. When you find someone who is itching to become a generous leader, give her the resources to lead. We have the technological levers to treat different people differently if we choose to. But we’ll need to watch and listen to be able to figure out what to offer and who to offer it to. There are three elements to the magic of online advertising: 1. You can reach people more precisely online than in any other medium. Not just the demographics of what they look like, but the psychographics of what they believe and what they’re looking for. 2. You can reach people instantly. You can decide to run an ad at 10 a.m. and have it reach people beginning at 10: 01 a.m. 3. You can measure everything. Brand marketing makes magic; direct marketing makes the phone ring Direct marketing is action oriented. And it is measured. Brand marketing is culturally oriented. And it can’t be measured. If you run an ad on Facebook and count your clicks, and then measure how many of them convert, you’re doing direct marketing. If you put a billboard by the side of the highway, hoping that people will remember your funeral parlor the next time someone dies, you’re doing brand marketing. The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: - If you’re buying direct marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count. - If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads. A simple guide to online direct marketing:The ad exists to get a click. The click exists to either make a sale or earn permission. The sale exists to lead to another sale, or to word of mouth. Permission exists to lead to education and to a sale. That’s it. Every step in the process has a cost (you paid cash at the first step, but along the way, you will lose some of those people who drop out), and every step also leads you closer to the benefit. Assign values to each step. If you can’t, don’t run any direct-response ads until you can. Will some people see your ads without taking action? Definitely. That’s a side effect, a culture-shifting, awareness-building bonus. But if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count. The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific. And then, with this knowledge, overdo your brand marketing. Every slice of every interaction ought to reflect the whole. Every time we see any of you, we ought to be able to make a smart guess about all of you. Frequency: People don’t remember what they read, what they hear, or even what they see. If they’re lucky, people remember what they do, but they’re not very good at that either. We remember what we rehearse. We remember the things that we see again and again. That we do over and over. We remember our Uncle Fred, who came to Christmas twenty years in a row, but we don’t remember his date Ethyl, who came just that one time. We remember the events we have photos for in our family scrapbook, but don’t remember the events that weren’t photographed. It has nothing to do with the act of taking a picture and everything to do with rehearsing our story, the one we tell every time we see that picture. Along the way, this has pushed us to associate “trust” with the events and stories that happen again and again. The familiar is normal and the normal is trusted. Marketers forget this daily. Because we get bored with our stuff. Our story, our change. We’ve heard it before. We remember it. But we’re bored. And so we change it. Jay Levinson famously said, “Don’t change your ads when you’re tired of them. Don’t change them when your employees are tired of them. Don’t even change them when your friends are tired of them. Change them when your accountant is tired of them.” We can expand this well beyond ads. All the storytelling you do requires frequency. You’ll try something new, issue a statement, explore a new market … and when it doesn’t work right away, the instinct is to walk away and try something else. But frequency teaches us that there’s a very real dip—a gap between when we get bored and when people get the message. Lots of people start a project. They give a talk a few times, maybe even on the TED stage, and then they go off to do the next thing. They launch a new freelance business, get a few clients, then it sputters and they quit. Or they open a company, raise money and spend it fast, hitting the wall just before the good stuff happens. The market has been trained to associate frequency with trust (there, I just said it again). If you quit right in the middle of building that frequency, it’s no wonder you never got a chance to earn the trust. The Google ecosystem is based on a myth. The myth is that millions and millions of businesses, all grooming themselves for the search engine, will be found by people who seek them. Dating sites offer the same promise. As do the social networks. Simply fit in all the way, follow all the rules, and when we search for “tire store” or “restaurant” or “freelance copy editor” or “fun weekend date,” we will find you. The math can’t support this. There are a thousand pages of results. What delusion we must be under to imagine we will be the first match. **The path isn’t to be found when someone types in a generic term. The path is to have someone care enough about you and what you create that they’ll type in your name. That they’ll be looking for you, not a generic alternative.** Yes, you can find my blog by searching for “blog” in Google. But I’d rather have you search for “Seth” instead. SEO is the practice of ranking high in the search results for a generic term. A locksmith or a hotel or a doctor who wins their generic search will earn a huge profit. But everyone else is left to spend money on consultants and trickery to somehow rank higher. The math can’t support this pyramid scheme. On the other hand, a smart marketer can build a product or service that’s worth searching for. Not the generic term, but to find you, the thing you built, the specific. When you do that, Google’s on your side. They actually want you to be found when someone searches for you. Step one is to make a product or service that people care enough to search for specifically. You cannot win in a generic search, but you’ll always win if the search is specific enough. And then step two is easy to understand: to be the one they want to find when they go looking. A free idea is far more likely to spread, and spread quickly, than an idea that’s tethered to money. If Facebook cost three dollars a month to use, it would have attracted fewer than a million users. If it cost money to listen to the hits on the radio, the Top 40 would disappear. And yet … We don’t know how to make a living if we give everything away. **The road out of this paradox is to combine two offerings, married to each other: 1. Free ideas that spread. 2. Expensive expressions of those ideas that are worth paying for.** The rational thing is to believe that we’re more likely to require trust before we engage in risky transactions. And it’s also rational to expect that people are more likely to want more trust before spending a lot of money (a form of risk). Or committing time and effort. Many times, though, the opposite is true. The fact that the transaction is risky causes cognitive dissonance to kick in. We invent a feeling of trust precisely because we’re spending a lot. “I’m a smart person, and the smart thing to do would be to be sure I trust someone before investing my life savings (or my life), so I must trust this person.” When people are heavily invested (cash or reputation or effort), they often make up a story to justify their commitment. And that story carries trust. Lowering your price doesn’t make you more trusted. It does the opposite. Before paying for ads, then, long before that, begin with the idea of earning this asset. The privilege of talking to people who would miss you if you were gone. Permission marketing recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. Pay attention is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they actually are paying you with something valuable. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted. Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission to use it. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either. **Real permission works like this: If you stop s howing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went.** Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman. In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y, and z; I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then—this is the hard part—that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way internet retailer Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t. Permission doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast medium. The internet means you can treat different people differently, and it demands that you figure out how to let your permission base choose what they hear and in what format. Once you earn permission, you can educate. You have enrollment. You can take your time and tell a story. Day by day, drip by drip, you can engage with people. Don’t just talk at them; communicate the information that they want. When we use a social media platform because it has plenty of users built in, we’re not really building an asset. Sure, for now you can reach your followers on this platform. But over time, the platform makes money by charging you, not by giving away their work. You do people a service when you make better things and make it easy to talk about them. The best reason someone talks about you is because they’re actually talking about themselves: “Look at how good my taste is.” Or perhaps, “Look at how good I am at spotting important ideas.” Ideas travel horizontally now : from person to person , not from organization to customer . We begin with the smallest possible core and give them something to talk about and reason to do so . Evangelism is difficult . Bringing tension to a coworker or friend is fraught with risk . It’s easier to avoid . The hard work of creating the change you seek begins with designing evangelism into the very fabric of what you’re creating . People aren’t going to spread the word because it’s important to you . They’ll only do it because it’s important to them . Because it furthers their goals , because it permits them to tell a story to themselves that they’re proud of . The internet thrives on affiliation . At its core is the magic that comes from peer - to - peer connections . But the forces that prefer dominion instead of affiliation see this as a threat . And they’ve created waves of distrust around the voices and channels that we built our cultural trust around . In addition , alas , the exposed misbehavior and greed of many of the pillars we count on have also destroyed the benefit of the doubt we’d like to give those who we look to for leadership . The result is a moment in time when more people are connected and fewer are trusted . In a world that scans instead of reads , that gossips instead of researching , it turns out that the best way to earn trust is through action . We remember what you did long after we forget what you said . When we asked for a refund for a defective product , what did you do ? When you lost our data , what did you do ? When you had to close the plant and our jobs were on the line , what did you do ? Marketers spend a lot of time talking , and on working on what we’re going to say . We need to spend far more time doing . Everyone is famous to fifteen hundred people . Some people are even famous to three thousand . And that’s a fascinating new phenomenon . When there are three thousand or ten thousand or five hundred thousand people who think you’re famous … it changes things . Not simply because they’ve heard of you , but because people they trust have heard of you as well . If you’re a business consultant , a designer , or an inventor , being famous to the right three thousand people is plenty . The goal isn’t to maximize your social media numbers . The goal is to be known to the smallest viable audience . You can fix your funnel: 1. You can make sure that the right people are attracted to it 2. You can make sure that the promise that brought them in aligns with where you hope they will go 3. You can remove steps so that fewer decisions are required 4. You can support those you’re engaging with , reinforcing their dreams and ameliorating their fears as you go 5. You can use tension to create forward motion 6. You can , most of all , hand those who have successfully engaged in the funnel a megaphone , a tool they can use to tell the others . People like us do things like this . Half of Amazon’s sales are books that are not in the top five thousand . Half of the music consumed on streaming sites isn’t available in stores . Not half the titles , half the volume . These huge marketplaces ( Amazon , Netflix , iTunes , etc . ) depend on the misguided hopes and dreams of individuals way out on the long tail . Separately , each one struggles . Taken together , it’s a good business . This is the false promise of the internet . That you can be happy with a tiny slice of the long tail . That anyone can sing or write or dance or do comedy or coach or freelance , and so anyone will , and so you’ll be fine . Except you won’t be fine , because you can’t live on that . The internet can live on that , Upwork and Fiverr and Netflix and Amazon can live on that , but you can’t . We hear about the outliers , the kids who make millions of dollars a year with their YouTube channel or the fashionista with millions of followers . But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy . It’s a wish . You’ve probably guessed the strategy : by dividing the market into many curves , not just one , we end up with many short heads and many long tails . The early adopters go first ; they buy things because they’re new , interesting , and a little bit risky . They do that because they like things that are new , interesting , and little bit risky . But there’s a problem . There aren’t enough of these neophiliacs to go around . Big organizations , mass movements , and substantial profits often depend on the mass market — they need action from the rest of us . The mass market is where Heinz and Starbucks and JetBlue and The American Heart Association and Amazon and a hundred others live . How do you get there ? The intuitive answer is that the early adopters will bring your idea to the masses and you’ll be done . But often , that’s not what happens . It doesn’t happen because the mass market wants something different from what the early adopters want . The mass market wants something that works . Something safe . A pattern match , not a pattern interrupt . They take “ people like us do things like this ” very seriously . Moore’s point was that few innovations glide from one part of the market to the other . That’s because in order to satisfy the early adopters , you may just need to annoy the masses . The very thing your innovation did ( break things ) is the one thing that the mass market doesn’t want to happen . They don’t want to trade in their DVDs . They don’t want to learn a new software platform . They don’t want to read their news online . To understand how this collision feels , go spend an hour or two at the help desk at the Apple store . Check out who’s there and why . Listen to their questions , and pay attention to their facial expressions . The middle of the curve isn’t eagerly adopting . They’re barely adapting . That’s why they’ve chosen to be in the middle of the curve . **The bridge across the chasm lies in network effects . Most of the fast -growing marketing successes of our lifetime have spread because of ideas that work better when everyone knows them .** The early adopters have a huge incentive to bring your idea across the chasm to the masses ; it will make their lives better if everyone in their network also uses this idea . There’s no reason to talk about a new kind of chocolate you really like . It doesn’t make your life better if others eat it . On the other hand , you spend a lot of time telling people about Snapchat or Instagram or Twitter , because if your friends followed you , your life would improve . The peer - to - peer movement of ideas is how we cross the chasm — by giving people a network effect that makes the awkwardness of pitching change worth the effort . The bridge is built on two simple questions : 1 . What will I tell my friends ? 2 . Why will I tell them ? The one question that every business buyer asks herself is , “ What will I tell my boss ? ”. You’re marketing the answer to that question : “ If you choose this , you can tell your board / investors / boss that you … ” The power of now , not later. Marshall Ganz is the brilliant Harvard professor who has worked both with Cesar Chavez and Barack Obama . **He has articulated a simple three - step narrative for action : the story of self , the story of us , and the story of now .** - The story of self gives you standing , a platform from which to speak . When you talk about your transition — from who you used to be to who you became — you are being generous with us . It’s not about catastrophizing your situation or the faux empathy of online vulnerability . Instead , the story of self is your chance to explain that you are people like us . That you did things like this . That your actions led to a change , one we can hear and see and understand . - The story of us is the kernel of a tribe . Why are we alike ? Why should we care ? Can I find the empathy to imagine that I might be in your shoes ? The story of us is about together , not apart . It explains why your story of self is relevant to us , and how we will benefit when we’re part of people like us . - And the story of now is the critical pivot . The story of now enlists the tribe on your journey . It’s the peer opportunity / peer pressure of the tribe that will provide the tension for all of us to move forward , together . I was like you . I was in the desert . Then I learned something and now I’m here . Of course , I am not alone . I did not do this alone and I see in you the very pain I saw in myself . Together , we can make this better . But if fwe hesitate , or if we leave the others behind , it won’t work . The urgency of now requires that we do it together , without delay , without remorse , without giving in to our fear . Story of self . Story of us . Story of now . Here’s a simple example : “ I used to be fifty pounds overweight . My health was in tatters and my relationships were worse . Then I discovered competitive figure skating . It was tough at first , but thanks to my new friends on the rink , I got to the point where it was fun . Within months , I had lost dozens of pounds , but more important , I felt good about myself . “ The real win for me , though , was the friendships I made . I discovered that not only did I feel terrific physically , but being out on the ice with people — old friends like you , and the new ones I made at the rink — made me feel more alive . “ I’m so glad you were willing to come to the rink today . I called ahead and they’ve reserved some rental skates for you … ” In the first paragraph , we hear the story of our friend , a narrative of going from here to there . In the second , we hear about how it changes our friend’s relationships , including to people like us . And in the third , there’s a call to action , a reason to do something right now. Most of all , the tribe is waiting for you to commit . They know that most marketers are fly - by - night operators , knocking on doors and moving on . But some , some hunker down and commit . And in return , the tribe commits to them . Because once you’re part of a tribe , your success is their success . 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 ?