This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

There’s a way out
The math of a hit is about more than the benefit of selling a lot of copies.
Actually, hits are hits because people like hits.
We like to do what everyone else is doing.
(Everyone means “everyone like us.”)

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You’ve probably guessed the strategy: by dividing the market into many
curves, not just one, we end up with many short heads and many long tails.
There’s the market for literary fiction aimed at teenagers. The market for
books on chip carving. The market for video courses on using a GH5
camera to make movies. And the market for performing improv.
There’s even the market for drone music played so loudly that the
audience needs to wear ear protection.
In each of these markets, and a million others, there’s a need for a short
head, at least once someone has connected the people in that market to one
another, so they realize that they exist, so they see each other, and so they
understand what the hit is.
Because it’s the hit that connects them.
Once they see it, they’ll probably want it.
This means that living on the long tail has two essential elements:
1. Creates the definitive, the most essential, the extraordinary
contribution to the field.
2. Connects the market you’ve designed it for, and helps them see that
you belong in the short head. That this hit is the glue that holds
them together.
Rocky Horror is in the short head. So is the DeWalt 20V Max XR
lithium ion brushless hammer drill.
It’s the hit that unites us. The one that makes it clear that you are people
like us.
Yes, the internet is a discovery tool. But no, you’re not going to get
discovered that way.
Instead, you will make your impact by uniting those you seek to serve.
Bridging the chasm
We have no idea who discovered the pothole, or who named the Grand
Canyon, but Geoff Moore discovered the chasm. It’s the overlooked but
often fatal gap in the Rogers curve, the curve of how ideas spread through
the culture.

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The early adopters go first; they buy things because they’re new,
interesting, and a little bit risky.
They do that because they like things that are new, interesting, and little
bit risky.
But there’s a problem. There aren’t enough of these neophiliacs to go
around. Big organizations, mass movements, and substantial profits often
depend on the mass market—they need action from the rest of us.
The mass market is where Heinz and Starbucks and JetBlue and The
American Heart Association and Amazon and a hundred others live.
How do you get there?
The intuitive answer is that the early adopters will bring your idea to the
masses and you’ll be done.
But often, that’s not what happens.
It doesn’t happen because the mass market wants something different
from what the early adopters want. The mass market wants something that
works. Something safe. A pattern match, not a pattern interrupt. They take
“people like us do things like this” very seriously.
Moore’s point was that few innovations glide from one part of the market
to the other. That’s because in order to satisfy the early adopters, you may
just need to annoy the masses. The very thing your innovation did (break
things) is the one thing that the mass market doesn’t want to happen.
They don’t want to trade in their DVDs. They don’t want to learn a new
software platform. They don’t want to read their news online.
To understand how this collision feels, go spend an hour or two at the
help desk at the Apple store. Check out who’s there and why. Listen to their
questions, and pay attention to their facial expressions.
The middle of the curve isn’t eagerly adopting. They’re barely adapting.
That’s why they’ve chosen to be in the middle of the curve.