Met a couple of friends for lunch today to chat a little about marketing in the context of their media company. Their broad goal, as with any media org’s, is to grow their readership, get more traffic, get more members (a patronship/subscription type model), have a fundraising / donor pipeline, etc.
Here’s a rough sketch of how I approached thinking about helping them.
What’s your why? The first and most important question I have to ask is, what is the media organization about, really? Why does it exist? The company’s Twitter bio is something like, “member-funded platform for [region]”, which is technically accurate, but doesn’t really give new readers a sense of why they should care about it. So that’s the first question to ask. Why should anybody care? Why would it be sad if they stopped existing?
You likely already know why. The interesting thing, I think, is that the people in the company obviously must have some idea of why the company exists, or they wouldn’t be working for it. They could all be making more money working elsewhere. But there’s some reason that drew them to the company. There’s some sort of vision, some sort of ideal. It already exists. But they aren’t entirely clear about it amongst themselves internally. And as a consequence of that, they can’t be entirely clear about it in their external messaging, either.
You have to talk about it. So the challenge for them, as I see it, is to have those challenging (and powerful) conversations with each other about their purpose, their motivation, their goals. Even as individuals, why do they write? Why do they care? What do they care about? First you have to be honest about this with yourself, then you have to be honest about it with each other, then you can be honest about it with the world – and the sincerity will come through.
Clarity and coherence cuts through the noise. One of my riffs in my personal life is “aesthetic resonance” – this idea that everything you do as an individual can be part of a greater whole. Your clothes, your style, your utterances, your work, all of it can be part of the same “cinematic universe” – and when you do that, anything you do reinforces and amplifies anything else you do. I think this is something to think about in the sphere of marketing, too.
You have to be clear about yourself before others can be clear about you. A great example of a company with great aesthetic resonance is Red Bull. The entire company is a manifestation of the founder (Dietrich Mateschitz)’s aesthetic – an interviewer noted that “his product philosophy is seemingly derived from his own outlook on life”. It isn’t a coincidence that Red Bull organizes extreme sports events and owns F1 teams– Dietrich himself was a ski instructor and has hangars full of private planes that he actually flies. I don’t think there’s any internal doubt within Red Bull about what the company stands for, and so I think that extends into the brand.
It does take courage to choose. Apple under Steve Jobs is another example. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that this sort of marketing requires courage and conviction. It means saying no to everything that you’re not, and taking a stand to assert what you are. In my experience, this often makes people uncomfortable, because it’s a vulnerable thing to do. That’s one of life’s paradoxes: it takes strength to be publicly vulnerable. (Another great example of this is Taylor Swift’s latest Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, which I highly recommend to anybody who’s interested in marketing.)
Tension can be constructive if you manage it artfully. Circling back – one of the things my friends mentioned was that they’re internally conflicted about how they think about the company. One founder thinks about it as a think tank / NGO, while another thinks about it as journalism. The cool thing to me is that they’re both right, and I believe that the tension is actually interesting and productive. I find myself thinking about Taylor Swift again – you can talk about internal conflict from a place of strength, in a way that makes people like you and trust you more.
People care about people. I also found myself talking about human interest stories. I watched a few episodes of Goop Lab on Netflix recently, and I found myself drawn in to the personal stories of individual Goop employees (some of whom I’m now following on Instagram). I then found myself thinking of all of the other people I’ve grown to care about simply from hearing or watching snippets of their life stories. Different people may have different degrees of tolerance for being open about sharing their personal stories, and every person has boundaries and thresholds. That’s healthy, especially when a person’s life is tied up in other people’s.
Your actions reveal your values. It’s theoretically possible to make great products that people love while maintaining an iron grip on your personal life. Steve Jobs and Lee Kuan Yew were both quite secretive about their personal lives, I think. (Though once you get significantly famous, people start digging into your life – there’s a conflation between “what the public is interested in” and “what’s in the public interest” – but that’s a story for another day.) The point though I think is that while you might not have to talk about your families or private lives, you do have to talk about your personal values.
Bullshit can work, sadly. You could use lies and bullshit. I think Donald Trump became POTUS by doing that very effectively. As a showman and reality TV star, he seemed to have developed a pretty good sense of what people like to watch, what people want to hear, and he got good at telling those stories – even if they’re exaggerated, falsified, fake and so on. I personally don’t have the stomach for that, and I discourage it in my friends and peers, and I discourage it in my readers – but I do study it out of intellectual curiosity. I intend to keep my work as bullshit-free as possible, because my long-term goal is to build great relationships with great people, and great people are allergic to bullshit.
What do you want people to think? So… what’s the takeaway, what’s the end goal, what are they supposed to do next? I think the point is to articulate explicit “belief statements”. Or in simple english, literally talk to each other about what you think the company is really about. And what you think it should be about. A company is just a group of people coming together to get some stuff done. Why are you doing it? What do each of you think? What do each of you think other people think? Why do they you think that? Why do they think that? What do you want people to think?
Satisficing is a valid (and sometimes optimal) choice. I know it can seem somewhat ironic that this post itself isn’t perfectly clear or coherent. That wasn’t a priority for me when writing this particular blogpost. My priority was to write it in as little time as possible. I know that this means that not everyone will be interested in reading it, some people will glance at it and be turned off by it. That’s okay with me. I have a lot of work to do, and I don’t know in advance what the important work is. I’m prioritizing the clarity and coherence of the work that resonates most with people. To do that, I think it’s wise to get more work out first.