A simple quiz for smart marketers:

Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.

And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.

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Brands that matter

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Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty

Multiply the population of the US by three. That’s how many people around the world live on about a dollar a day.

Do it again and now you have the number closer to $2. About forty percent of the world lives on $2 or less a day.

What’s that like? What happens to you when you have two dollars a day to live on. It’s almost impossible to imagine. I mean, $2 is the rent on your apartment for about 45 minutes. $2 buys you one bite of lunch at a local restaurant…

And yet, two billion people survive on that sort of income.

The key issue is ‘survive’. Subsistence income means that you have the barest possible cushion, that every penny is spent and you are on the edge at all times. It makes life an emergency.

If every single thing goes perfectly, then you and your family will go to sleep tonight healthy, not too hungry and fairly safe. But of course, every single thing almost never goes perfectly. If you are bitten by a malaria-carrying mosquito, you need to buy medicine and so there’s no money for food. If you need more water, you have to spend two hours walking to and from the nearest half-decent water spot, and those two hours are the two hours you were going to spend harvesting the food your kids need.

From a fundraising point of view, this endless emergency is exactly what a non-profit needs to find and close donors. A dollar donated today will save someone’s life. It will. One dollar, one life. That’s urgent. As urgent as it gets.

The problem, of course, is that it doesn’t save that person’s life forever, it saves it for today. Tomorrow, there’s another emergency, and yesterday’s dollar is gone. So you need another dollar. Two billion people, two billion dollars. Every day. Today, tomorrow, the day after that. It’s an endless emergency, and it never gets better.

That’s where patient capital comes in. It starts with this belief:

The difference between being one penny behind and one penny ahead is profound.

If you’re one penny behind, then every day you fall further back. Every day, the emergencies get worse, the stress gets worse, your ability to survive (never mind thrive) gets worse.

If you’re one penny ahead, though, just a penny, then every day you build a reserve, every day you are able to invest in productivity or peace of mind, and soon you are two pennies or a dollar or five dollars a day ahead. And then you can send your daughter to college. And then you can buy something from the merchant next door. And then you can plant a better crop. And then you have a stake in the community, and then the world changes.

So, how to create this micro surplus? How to prime the pump of the system to improve productivity enough that things get better?

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The talking pad

Zig Ziglar taught me about the most powerful way to use a yellow legal pad. He calls it a “talking pad.”

When you’re in a small meeting (you and one or two other people) it’s awkward to use a laptop or Powerpoint, because it destroys the intimacy of the discussion. Basically, it says, “I’m going to talk to the screen and you can watch, okay?”

The alternative is to use a thick pen or marker and a legal pad.

Whenever you mention a number or make an assertion or promise, write it down. The act of writing is a verb, it’s the process of putting it on the page that underlines what you’ve said, that highlights the moment. You’re also creating a record of what you said, which emphasizes that you’re not a weasel.

Salespeople can use this technique as well. Let’s say you’re trying to sell energy-efficient windows. They cost $800 each, the person needs 30, so you’re trying to make a $24,000 sale. That’s a big deal, right?

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The long tale

(not a typo).

The long tale is the never-ending story you tell your prospects, your customers and your employees.

The hard part is getting a little bit of permission to start telling your tale. The overlooked part, the part that wastes all that permission, is that you forget to keep telling your story.

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Willfully ignorant vs. aggressively skeptical

Challenging the status quo is what I do for a living. Either that or encourage other people to do it.

But there are two ways to do it, and one of them is ineffective, short-sighted and threatens the fabric of the tribe. The other seems to work.

I heard someone screaming about death panels and how the government was not only going to kill his grandmother, but would take out Stephen Hawking himself if it had the chance.

The screaming is a key part, because screaming is often a tool used to balance out the lazy ignorance of someone parroting opposition to an idea that they don’t understand. (If you want to write to me about this post, please write to me about the screaming part, not about whether or not you agree with the facts or the science. That’s what the post is about, the screaming.)

If you want to challenge the conventional wisdom of health care reform, please do! It’ll make the final outcome better. But if you choose to do that, it’s essential that you know more about it than everyone else, not less. Certainly not zero. Be skeptical, but be informed (about everything important, not just this issue, of course). Screaming ignorance gets attention, but it distracts us from the work at hand.

It’s easy to fit in by yelling out, and far more difficult to actually read and consider the facts. Anytime you hear, “I don’t have the time to understand this issue, I’m too busy being upset,” you know that something is wrong.

Brands face this as much or more than politicians do. Read the rest of the article here.

Free work vs. internships

I think internships are overrated. Most of the time, the employer thinks he’s doing the intern a favor, but he doesn’t trust the interns to do any actual thoughtful, intelligent work worth talking about. And to be fair, most of the time the interns are busy hiding, not grabbing responsibility but instead acting like they’re in school, avoiding hard work and trying to get an A.

Charlie Hoehn has written a beautifully designed ebook that may change the way you think about this. His argument is that ‘free work’ is something else entirely. It’s done as a freelancer, remotely, without direct supervision and it creates a measurable output.

Free work isn’t easy to get.  Read the rest of the article here.

Critics that matter

If you invent or launch or market (and you’re human) it’s likely that you have the voice of the critic in the back of your head. It’s natural to fear what they’ll say, and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up redesigning your product to please them before you even launch it.

Imagine the restaurant chef who changes the interior of the restaurant to please the Michelin critic (they insist on a certain quality of cutlery in order to award a three star review). It might be your boss who is the critic. Or consider the B2B manufacturer who alters the product specs in order to meet the standards of the GAO so he can sell to the US Government…

Some critics matter. (Your biggest customer, for example). Some are merely loud. Others are just difficult.

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Lessons from very tiny businesses

1. Go where your customers are.

2. Be micro-focused and the search engines will find you.

3. Outlast the competition.

4. Leverage.

5. Respond.

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Who spreads your word?

In order for an idea to spread, someone has to do the spreading.

In the dark ages (ten years ago), the only way to spread your idea on a large scale was to do it yourself. Lots and lots of ads.

Today, marketers get all sweaty thinking about how this happens magically, virally, for free. If it were only that easy.

What’s interesting to me is that different products and ideas are spread by different groups of people. There isn’t just one professional association of idea spreaders, with everyone else being passive.

If your authentic little Welsh restaurant gets hot, it’s going to be because the chowhounds, the folks who love to talk about the next great place, are buzzing about it. On the other hand, if your blog gets a lot of traffic, it might just be because a few of the digerati are going on about it, spreading the idea.

This is obvious, of course.

But what you are you doing about it?  Read the rest of the article here.

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