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

The freedom of better
After the refrigerator was popularized, there wasn’t a good reason to
continue hiring the ice delivery man. It wasn’t better worth paying for.
After the supermarket took off, it got harder to justify the work of the
milkman.
And now we can all take advantage of the huge shifts in what it takes to
do what we used to do (it’s all at our fingertips now, right?) and use that
leverage to redefine better.
Because better is what our market is waiting for.
Consider the real estate broker. He used to hoard data. If you didn’t hire
a broker, you had no information about what you were looking for. Today,
in a world where Zillow has 110 million homes listed, the home shopper is
likely to have access to at least as much information as the broker does.
If the goal is to defend the status quo, to be a chokepoint, it’s going to
require an exhausting sprint, one that tries to keep ahead of an ever-
quickening technology and information flow.
But what would better look like? Not for you, but for the customer?
This shift is true for many of us. So much of the work is networked,
automated, and reliable now. I needed a team of eight engineers and a
budget of millions of dollars to send emails to a million people in 1994.
Today, anyone can do it for nine dollars a month using Feedblitz.

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A decade ago, it took a dedicated team of publishers, print brokers, and
sales reps to get a book to be available nationwide. Now a Kindle book can
be published by one smart person with a digital file.
We made the “doing” easier, which is precisely why we need to
outsource that part of our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of
making change happen.
One last thing about sonder
We’re not faking our points of view, our dreams, and our fears. And neither
are you.
In politics, there’s a long history of people believing that those on the
“other side” don’t really mean what they say. That Barry Goldwater and
Jane Fonda were just putting on a show. That atheists really, deep down,
believe in God, and that evangelicals are mostly trying to make a point, not
express their actual beliefs.
The same goes for Mac users versus those who favor the Linux
command line, or for math geeks versus those who insist that they can’t do
math.
We assume that someone can’t possibly believe that they can’t do math.
Or they can’t possibly support that insane policy. Or eat food like that on
purpose.
We’re not faking it. Your customers aren’t faking it. Those who prefer
your competition aren’t either.
If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it
gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to
admit that they were wrong. Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to
connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add our beliefs to
what they hear.

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