9 beliefs that influence how I view work:

1. Everyone is a beginner at something, it will take time
2. Long term growth requires sweat, blood and tears
3. Moving from amateur to professional is a choice
4. Desiring something is different to taking action
5. If not “hell, yeah!”, it should probably be “no.”
6. Very few people know how to listen deeply
7. You must speak up to be heard
8. Momentum is a beast, ride it
9. Be irreplaceable

What would you add?

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Be a small part of something big.

Ambition is admirable but it can lead to disappointment.

We compare ourselves to the high achievers and wonder why we are stuck in the minor leagues.

The truth is that most people are average.

We only ever hear about the top 0.1% of companies, marketers, athletes and celebrities.

Based on probability alone, it’s hard to expect we’ll ever get that good.

What we do have control over is where we hitch a ride.

Do we go all-in on an industry like oil and gas that everyone expects to decline? (please don’t)

Or do we attach our story to the proven winners. Do we look forwards or backwards?

It’s ok to be a small part of something bigger.

Like a barnacle attached to a whale, there are now hundreds of businesses globally that hitch a ride alongside a bigger behemoth. And that strategic decision is their reason for success.

Microsoft, Xero, Atlassian, Github… there are a lot of whales.

You don’t have to be the top 0.1%. You can also be a barnacle. (inspiring imagery… I know)

Idea

🪨

Be the barnacle

On all of the sports team I follow the players are now significantly younger than me.

After a quick cry, it’s time to accept that I will never make it to the NBA.

What next?

We can still achieve great things, but it’s really hard forging a path from 0 to 100.

Instead of starting from scratch, think about the alternative options:

• in what world am I not starting at 0
• where do I have an unnatural advantage
• where am I already above average
• who is someone in my network who is closer to 100
• how can I ‘be the barnacle’ to their whale

Hiten Shah @hnshah

Quote

🤔

It’s a big quote, but worth reading through to the end:

“To win, your company has to be the best at something. There’s just no way around it. Being “okay” is just not cutting it. The customer has too much choice. You need to be the best at creating winning customer value for a particular set of customers, or you are destined to be overtaken by a competitor who is.
Strategy is about choice: deciding where to play, and plotting a pathway to win in that game. You can’t win without being the best. You need to focus your resources on constantly improving your customer value and refining your customer targeting. Choose your customers, and build “the best” for them. The “best” doesn’t mean the highest quality. The reason for hiring you can vary a lot. It might be to save costs, so best is cheapest. It’s whatever that group of customers you sell to cares a lot about. It’s about being the best for a particular use case for a specific set of customers.
The ability to innovate on customer value at high speed must be a core capability of your company. It’s impossible to do so if your company is targeting all revenues indiscriminately. If you treat all revenues as equally desirable, you don’t have a strategy. This is what separates the winners from the losers.”

-Pep Laja

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“Van Gogh averaged one painting every 4 days in addition to his 1100 drawings and sketches on the side. Talent is a gift, but the best pair it with consistent execution.”

-Bri Kimmel (source)

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“You can have the greatest product in the world, but if people don’t understand your why or what your product is being hired to do, you aren’t going to go far. The number one skill every entrepreneur needs to learn is how to be a strong storyteller.”

-Harvey Finklestein (source)

Question

🚀

Early employees with equity at startup successes like Google, Facebook and Apple are now multi-millionaires. They attached their barnacle to the right whale.

It’s not all about money. You might choose to attach your story to a cause or a community. (electric vehicles, nutrition, solar)

The questions we need to ask are:

• what trends are emerging
• what trends are sustainable
• how can I attach myself

When I asked myself these questions I realised I needed to work for a software company in the tech industry. It might be different for you.

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This is Marketing.

Cheers,

Sean

You can subscribe to my email newsletter, Trending in Marketing, right here:

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

⏰

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).

In 2003 Amazon noticed that some of their customers forgot what they had ordered.

Without realising, customers were accidentally ordering the same product a second time.

There weren’t many complaints, but for Amazon, this wasn’t good enough.

Amazon are obsessed with the customer experience and wanted to fix it.

In 2003, Amazon introduced ‘Instant Order Update’, a simple notification banner that would alert customers when they had already purchased something.

This feature cost Amazon money and sales dropped, because customers didn’t buy as much by mistake.

Amazon doesn’t win design awards for the prettiest website.

Instead, they focus on being genuinely helpful.

They prioritise long term customer relationships over short term revenue.

They prioritise what’s right for the customer rather than turning a blind eye.

They prioritise the experience over the latest design trends.

This feature is not the reason Amazon is a successful company.

However, the decision to prioritise features like this reflects the attitude that has made Amazon successful.

Customer first.

Do we have the guts to do the right thing, obsessing over customer problems – even if it costs us time and might even cost us money?

You can subscribe to my email newsletter, Trending in Marketing, right here:

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Before you read any further I wanted to say thank you for subscribing to Trending in Marketing in 2020.

This newsletter started as an experiment and a way to share some of the best content out there to make us all better marketers.

I really appreciate you opening this email and sharing it with your friends and colleagues.

I’m going to be simplifying the format of this email going forward to make it easier to read.

Idea

⏰

Time Anxiety

According to Anne-Laure Le Cunff, time anxiety is the fear of wasting your time.

Wasted time leads to a wasted potential. Wasted potential is a wasted opportunity to make an impact.

How can you combat time anxiety?

• define your mission
• focused prioritisation
• defend your time ruthlessly
• get 1% better every day

Read more about Time Anxiety.

Quote

🤔

“If it’s easy it isn’t worth doing. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”

-Nick Huber

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“Product Market Fit isn’t a thing. I’m not even sure it’s a useful concept for startups.”

-April Dunford (source)

Question

😰

What are the hard things you’ve been putting off?

There are pieces missing that would make you a better marketer.

How are you going to tackle those this year? How will you resist the distractions?

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Your potential is too valuable to waste.

This is Marketing.

Cheers,

Sean

P.S. Optimise or Build