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The world is changing.

Traditional industries are becoming democratised, opening up access to all of us. The normal ones.

On Wednesday I saw that a company I have long admired, Gumroad, was opening a crowdsourced funding round.

For as little as $100 you could invest in a real tech company and own a part of something that usually only Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists have access to.

It took off, and I snuck in a small investment in time before they reached the $5m max raise.

It made me thing of disruption coming in other industries, which leads me to today’s Idea.

Idea

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Democratisation

What does disruption and democratisation look like in your industry?

Take education. A prime example where the traditions of reputation and location-based learning have long been the status quo.

Platforms like Teachable, Udemy and Gumroad have exploded as individuals seek expert instruction remotely during the pandemic.

These platforms also make education more accessible to a more diverse range of people. You only need internet.

Forward-thinking institutions like the University of Illinois are disrupting the graduate degree market using technology that reduces faculty labor to scale programs to thousands of students at a discounted cost of $22,000 for an entire M.B.A. — leading to the retirement of its traditional residential degree offering. Source

Smart marketers see the future of their industry :

• what happens if the status quo is disrupted?
• what if everyone had access, not a select few?
• what if we had 1,000 competitors flood the market? and,
• what do we do to keep up?

Quote

🤔

“…people don’t buy products because of what those products do, they buy products because of what they can do — or what they imagine they can do — with them.”

-Zander Nethercutt (source)

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“Instead of focusing on content for each phase of the traditional funnel, marketers need to create content at three depths: conceptual, strategic, and tactical. Keep in mind, however, that customers won’t necessarily go through these stages in order.”

-Ashley Faus (source)

Question

😰

Sitting still is going backwards. This is because the world keeps spinning.

Innovation is happening around us whether we can see it or not.

The question is: can you keep up?

The first thing I say to Marketing graduates is that they need to learn marketing again.

Unfortunately, Universities can’t keep up with the trends in the industry.

No marketing textbook will mention NFT’s, and very few will mention TikTok influencers simply because they were printed in January 2021. Too late.

And it’s no easier for those of us with a few years under our belt. We need to keep up.

Though, for me at least, that’s what makes this whole career choice rather interesting.

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This is Marketing.

Cheers,

Sean

P.S. Prioritise

P.P.S. Wistia created this TV-quality series, One, Ten, One Hundred, to discover the relationship between money and creativity. Enjoyable watch for marketers (and awesome brand content).