Hi friends, thanks for clicking in.

This week, we’re talking about marketing for good people who are uncomfortable with the concept, or unsure how to approach it. At the very bottom, you’ll find a bittersweet video you should watch until the end.

But first, these messages (because we’re very comfortable with the concept).

We had so much fun with How to Talk to Strangers and How to Start a Newsletter. Total sellouts. Thanks, friends.

Remember, the key is listening, just like Disclosure Day taught us (I guess). More scintillating and practical classes coming up:

August 28 @ 10am PDT |  How to Make Books with special guest, adventure cartoonist Lucy Bellwood. Once you have material and an audience, where do you go from there? Many fun options!

September 4 @ 10am PDT | How to Just Do Things because there’s no secret to making your idea a reality. You just have to do it. Who’s stopping you? Probably you.

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August 27 @ 4pm PDT | Let’s Do Design Research Right! at a very special time convenient for Pacific Rim friends. It’s Friday morning the 28th, if you’re over the date line. Spread the word! Critical thinking for everyone.

How to Market Nothing

We had a very dear friend named Jeff Tidwell. I met him a very long time ago, when he was hired to be my manager, among other — possibly less annoying — things.

“Ride the wave!” he used to say to me. “Ride the wave!”

This is a thing I’ve since started saying to other people.

I was born a couple miles from the Pacific Ocean. Some of my earliest, best memories are of being in the water getting bashed by waves. I got into the ocean before I knew how to swim (and yet, somehow, I still draw breath). The Pacific Ocean is cold and the waves can get pretty big, but it was my favorite place to be, messing around in the breakers.

When you’re bobbing around in the water and a wave comes, you have three choices. You let it pass by while you go up and over, you try to bodysurf to shore, or you dive underneath. OK, the 4th choice is getting tossed around and slammed face first into the sand. This choice is made for you by Poseidon.

Never turn your back on the ocean. Ne-ver.

Jeff was an entrepreneur, an online community and marketing guy, and an artist. He was also really keen on the ocean, and the mountains.

We worked together at a start-up that spun out of a tech publishing company to try some interesting, but ultimately doomed, early experiments with commercial online community. I got direct experience of the sort of close relationships that could form among strangers in a chat nominally about Resident Evil, and among co-workers at an ultimately doomed low-stakes start-up.

Jeff is the reason I got into design consulting, because he introduced me to another friend, Karen Wickre (read her book). If you’re waiting for me to tell you it’s the friends you meet along the way, yes, it’s the friends you meet along the way.

A start-up crashes into the ground. Go back out there and find the next wave. Jeff did and he ended up living in Hawaii for a while.

Severance is such a great show because it takes the way so many people with computer jobs think about (or are compelled to think about) work to an absurd extreme. The computer work assumes existential importance even if the true goals are unclear or undisclosed. The organization has strange rituals and incentives. The work self has neither leisure time nor access to the full range of human knowledge and experience.

This comes up in my research workshop so often. Most people already know how to do the right research to make an informed life decision. And collaboratively, and on a tight timeline, if necessary. Put those same people in a corporate environment with a status hierarchy and manufactured urgency, and everyone is having weird fights over quantitative and qualitative data, decision-makers have secret agendas, and millions of dollars get spent on what truly, shockingly, boils down to a whim or a grudge.

Marketing is the same. Are you trying to do a thing? Is it a worthwhile thing? Do you need people to know about it? Which people? What are the barriers? What do you want them to do when they find out? A stunning amount of cognitive dissonance is what makes common sense so uncommon.

Corporate marketers often forget that their audience is human beings, with relationships, communities, and full, meaningful lives. (Segments. Contemplate that word for a minute. Segments.) Corporate culture can be so dehumanizing, for no good reason. Wow did NPS ever ruin our collective understanding of word-of-mouth recommendations.

And human beings get stuck because they have such (understandably) bad associations with bad marketing.

Making things and exchanging things and helping people do things is a HUGE part of life, and it should be an enjoyable part to the extent possible. And we live in society where we use money. So, exchanging goods and services and information for money is necessary and not inherently bad. Offering a public good can be even better. And it really helps if people who might benefit from what you have to offer find out about it. Knowing who those people are and how to get their attention, that’s really all marketing is.

Most people suck at it.

Most people suck at marketing for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or importance of what they have to offer. And everything to do with, again, forgetting that we’re all just humans trying to communicate with other humans.

Some people are very good at marketing, because they know how to take advantage of various deep-seated fears and biases. It’s essential to be aware of that stuff, but not use it for evil, OK?

Yeah, we’re back on our theme of taking a rational approach to dealing with the fact that we humans are irrational. That’s really all we do around here.

Why nothing?

I’m thinking foremost of those of you who don’t have a traditional product, but still want to reach an audience and get them to take an action. Especially, when the action is complicated, inconvenient, or uncomfortable in the short-term, or requires reading. Ugh.

Products are straightforward because the action is straightforward: buy a thing. We all love to buy a thing. The background radiation of consumer culture compels us.

And we all undervalue anything that seems abundant.

Keep in mind that there’s no special path that takes you directly to a separate cool, rational, critical-thinking zone in the minds of your audience. So many people with important things to say communicate as though this is the case. Booooring. Ineffectual. Sorry.

To varying degrees in various contexts, everyone makes emotional decisions about everything. Whatever you put out there is going to compete for attention and credibility and money and memorability with something simple, something exciting, something shiny, something familiar, something new. Of course, it’s more popular to buy a thing or find a reason not to do a thing than to commit to putting in the work to do what actually works.

I see evidence-based policies and recommendations lose out again and again. Not just because their advocates are outspent, but because those spokespeople are overconfident in the self-evidence of the benefits. Or they lose the courage of their convictions because they struggle to meet people where they are. It’s very frustrating.

Some of the worst products have the biggest marketing budgets. That’s just how it is. The hype cycles will keep coming. Ride the wave.

It’s not easy. I’m not saying it’s easy. There’s no one weird trick. It’s you and your team and your skills against a continuous onslaught of Next Big Things.

There is one essential requirement, though. You have to get over yourself. I never hear con artists talk about how uncomfortable they are with marketing or promotion, only the good people with useful ideas.

There are no points in heaven for hiding out and waiting to be discovered. In fact, I distinctly remember a story about how silly it is to light a lamp only to stick it under a basket.

There are many possible approaches. Learn from what other people are doing, but pick what works for you. Best practices often aren’t. You don’t (necessarily) need to make a TikTok dance video.

Maybe the following recommendations require skills that you or your organization don’t currently have. There are definitely people out there you can hire and books you can read. And just try things. Everyone is far too afraid of trying things.

Take a deep breath and…

Get used to it

Build a practice. Or, do the reps, as Arnold would say. No matter how good or important or useful your work is, if you need people to pay attention to it, there is no point at which you get to stop doing marketing and float.

It’s a conversation

Too many organizations take this to mean you need to metaphorically shout yourself hoarse. No one wants that. Relax and take the long view, or people will tune you out.

And remember, this is a conversation you’re having in front of people, in the middle of other conversations (even if you don’t realize it, because copy-and-paste exists). Figure out where the people you need to talk to tend to gather. And read the room.

Listen and observe, before inserting yourself

You have to learn as much as possible about your audience and what matters to them before you’ll know what’s useful and relevant. If I had a nickel for every time a client talked about an “exclusive offering” that wasn’t, I’d have a lot of nickels.

And observe how you, yourself and your organization, are being marketed to. You can spot the bad moves right away, I bet.

Always ask yourself what you’re assuming your audience already knows or cares about.

Don’t be boring

You have to understand your audience to know what’s interesting and intelligible to them, but it never hurts to be concise and quotable. You cannot predict where your words are going to show up.

One of the worst things about the text that comes out of LLMs is its verbosity. Researchers call this “verbosity compensation”. Logorrhea if you’re fancy (or talking about a clinical condition). LLMs were not optimized to write well. Most human writing is bad, too verbose and generic. Expressing a thought with concision is valuable. Summaries are not distillations.

And you have to know yourself and your relative position to figure out how to be interesting without “How do you do, fellow kids”ing it.

Being interesting requires you to have a clear point of view.

And have fun with it, because you’re going to have to…

Repeat, repeat, repeat

It’s a good thing you have a lot of enthusiasm for your subject matter, because you’ll be repeating yourself so so much. You really have to keep at it. Do you know how much I say “Just listen to people”? And, yet.

Say the same thing over and over in different ways. See what sticks and say more of that.

Remember the habits

All of us are lazy, forgetful creatures of habit. Our brains want to shove things into procedural memory as quickly as possible to stay ready for new threats.

Forget “nudges”. Think more deeply about daily life, background beliefs, barriers, and relationships to make whatever you’re offering more memorable and easier to do. Not easier for you, easier for them.

Re-introduce yourself

Always be answering the question “Why should I care about you anyway?” Try to weave it into your message so that you aren’t overloading the exposition.

Ditch the zero-sum mindset

Look, these are tough times, to be heard, to be hired, to find trustworthy information. These are the times to be generous with your own referrals and recommendations. There is plenty of work that needs doing. There are plenty of problems that need attention. A sense of possibility is scarce. Long-term thinking is scarce.

Build relationships with other people in your field and promote each other. Marketing is that thing that helps your audience put their own situation into words and realize what they need.

Anyone who buys a book on a topic that interests them is going to buy more than one.

Address yourself to the recommender

The problem with overindexing on analytics is that they don’t capture the conversations people are having about you (or not) in venues and channels beyond your perception.

There are 10,000 backchannels. Some researchers theorize that human language evolved for gossip. People are talking behind each other’s backs all the time. Be worth mentioning, in a good way. (No one is recommending enterprise software or credit cards in the group chat, though.)

Understand how much the source matters

Yes source blindness is a thing, and yes everything is getting mushed up in the mediocrity engine. But when people do stumble on your work, they’re going assess your credibility in a flash (in a very imperfect way). Put in the work to establish yourself as credible to your particular audience. The source has to have credibility before the message gets through.

The data doesn’t make you trust the source (except to the extent it confirms existing beliefs). But the source makes it more likely you’ll trust the data (or not).

Keep reciprocity in mind

You need to offer your audience something before you ask for something in return. What are you giving them in exchange for their attention? Is it something they want? Is it really?

Give more than you ask. Give 5x more than you ask, at least.

And finally…

If something isn’t working, stop doing it.

When you take a moment to step back and look around you (which you should do at least once a day), you’ll see how many of our interactions with each other are bids for attention and calls to adventure. And that’s OK, or it can be, if you know what you’re asking for.

If you enjoy feelings, get on into the time machine, and watch other episodes of It Might Get Personal.

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