This Is Marketing summary

At first glance, the internet would seem to provide the perfect medium for advertising – far better, in fact, than the three-channel television of yore. Sure, you can no longer reach a mass audience with a single ad on a hit TV show – but you can do something that’s even more effective.

You can precisely target the group of people you want to reach with your ads. Facebook, Google and YouTube offer the ability to do this with just a few clicks of the mouse. As a result, unlike in the olden days of television, you don’t have to broadcast your message to nearly everyone in the hope of reaching a particular demographic.

The first step of effective marketing is as easy to say as it is difficult to do: make something worth buying. But wait – isn’t that the task of designers and manufacturers?

Yes, but it’s also a task for marketers. To see why, let’s drill down into what makes something worth buying in the first place. Consider a literal drill, with a quarter-inch bit.

The next step of effective marketing is based on the simple fact that you can’t please everyone, because different people want different things. Indeed, even when some people seem to have the same desire, they often define it in different ways. For instance, to some, adventure means thrill-seeking. To others, it means international travel.

Remember, the product you’re marketing embodies a certain definition of the desire it satisfies, and your target audience consists of the people who share that desire and definition. Everyone else is outside of your product’s scope, at least for now.

We know that people’s purchasing decisions are motivated by deep-seated needs and desires. But there’s something else that drives the decision to buy: personal values – in other words, the things people care about when pursuing the things they want.

For example, imagine someone trying to fulfill one of her most fundamental human needs: nutrition. As she looks over the potato chip options in the grocery store, there are different values that can sway her purchasing decision. If she cares about affordability and popularity, she’ll go for the cheapest big name brand. If she appreciates healthiness and sustainability, she’ll choose the organic local brand.

In order to find a core group of fans who will become the smallest viable market for your product, you first need to realize a seemingly paradoxical truth: those fans already exist.

They might not realize it yet, but there are already people who have the desires, needs and values that might inspire them to become your fans. They’re just waiting for you to connect them into a new tribe and lead them to your product.

Assuming you’ve started to gain a growing group of fans for your product, your next step as a marketer becomes persuading them to actually buy it. And the key to doing this is to create and relieve tension – a sense of uncomfortable pressure to which your product offers the antidote.

One way to do this is to challenge their status – their relationship to a group and their position within its hierarchy. This the ranking system that tells them who has the most respect and power within the group. In this case, the group is the tribe that’s gathered around your product.  

Unless you’re marketing a super specialized product that could only appeal to a niche audience, you’ll probably eventually want to move beyond your initial fan base and reach the general public, where a much larger market awaits.

To cross the gap between that fan base and the public, you’ll need to perform the final step of effective marketing: building a bridge that will allow your product to spread.