Growing your brand or business doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive.
You don’t need a multi-million dollar budget, celebrity endorsement or technological prowess.
You just need some great ideas.
1. Contrast gets attention
Rolls Royce stopped exhibiting at car shows. They started exhibiting at private aircraft shows. If you’ve been looking at jets all afternoon, a £300,000 car is an impulse buy.
2. Best content delivers a red pill
If you want to build a good website, following, blog - you’ve got to create your red pill. Hand society something they’re not hearing anywhere. Society says blue pill. Your content says red pill.
3. Law of shitty clickthroughs
The first banner ad ever had a clickthrough rate of 78 percent. Now the average is less than 0.001 percent. Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates. Most of the rewards of marketing channels go to early adopters. GymShark used influencer marketing before the term existed. PayPal used ‘Earn $ for signing up’ before the term existed. Go early or go home. Entropy is inevitable - only the wealthy/stupid can afford to keep playing.
4. Most underrated marketing channel
Your unboxing experience is the only marketing channel with a 100 percent open rate. Don’t spend years neglecting your most hands-on, most touching and most important marketing channel.
5. Weird is more rewarding than average
If you optimize for the mean, you optimize for nobody. The average person doesn’t exist - it’s just a blended mean of 7 billion people. If you design an idea for them, you design an idea for nobody. But if you design for the extremes, it can then cross over to the mainstream. TikTok 2016 = Lip Syncing for teenagers, TikTok 2021 = Global short-form video platform.
6. Costly signaling theory
The most efficient way to send a wedding invitation would be by email. A beautiful handwritten invitation by post contains the same message as an email - but the cost and effort signal how serious you are.
7. Linear commerce
Brands will develop publishing as a core competency, and publishers will develop retail operations as a core competency. You can already see this playing out. YouTuber Logan Paul launching a $40 million clothing brand, Hubspot acquiring The Hustle.
8. Simplify
The more you simplify, the better people will perform. People cannot understand and keep track of a long complicated set of initiatives. Use a framework people can repeat without thinking about. You can change the world through a sentence - iPod puts 1,000 songs in your pocket.