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

Scrapbooking
Being wrong from scratch is exhausting. Radical originality doesn’t have a
high return on investment, and it will wear you out.
Scrapbooking is an efficient alternative.
When designing a website, or an email campaign, or a new product, you
can scrapbook it.
Find the things you think that those you engage with will be attracted to
and will trust. The typefaces, the pricing, the offers, the images, the
interfaces . . . and cut them up, break them down into the original
indivisible memes within. Then rebuild something new on top of these
pieces.
You can do the same thing when you put together your website, your
podcast, or your new project. Find the essential beacons (the extremes) that
matter to you and to your audience, and weave them together in a new
thing.
If you had to charge ten times as much
What’s the difference between a thirty-dollar massage and a three hundred-
dollar one?
What could make a book worth two hundred dollars? Or a hotel room
worth fifteen hundred dollars? What could cause someone to give five
hundred dollars to charity instead of fifty dollars?
“More of the same” is the wrong answer.

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In order to dramatically increase the size of your audience or the price
that you charge, you’ll need to do more than simply work more hours or
interrupt more people.
We don’t pay ten times extra for more words, a bigger order of French
fries, or a louder stereo.
Instead, it’s a different extreme, a different story, a different sort of
scarcity.
Irresistible is rarely easy or rational
There’s often a line out the door of Fiona’s shop.
It’s not surprising. The ice cream is delicious, the portions are enormous,
and a waffle cone costs less than three Canadian dollars. And it’s served
with a smile, almost a grin.
It’s irresistible.
Of course, once you finish the cone, you’ll stroll around, hang out by the
water, and maybe start to make plans about where to spend a week of next
year’s vacation.
The Opinicon, a lovely little resort near Ottawa, could charge a lot more
for an ice cream cone. A team of MBAs doing a market analysis and a
profit and loss report would probably pin the value at about eight dollars.
That’s where the return on investment would be at its peak.
But they’re not in the business of selling ice cream cones. The ice cream
cones are a symbol, a beacon, a chance to engage.
If you run everything through a spreadsheet, you might end up with a
rational plan, but the rational plan isn’t what creates energy or magic or
memories.
Stew Leonard’s was a small supermarket with a big footprint. It was
profiled by Tom Peters and had the highest sales per square foot of any
store of its kind. Stew’s was an experience, almost an amusement park, with
remarkable customer service, clever merchandising, and interesting
products to choose from. As the company grew to a few more stores, a new
generation of owners took over who seemed more intent on short-term
profit and less focused on magic. For a while, profits increased. But now,
year after year, it’s a bit less crowded, a bit less energetic, a bit less

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interesting. So when a new store opens nearby, they lose a few more
customers, then a few more, and finally, people begin to wonder, “Why do I
even bother coming here in the first place?”
It might not be about being cheaper. It’s tricky to define better. But
without a doubt, the heart and soul of a thriving enterprise is the irrational
pursuit of becoming irresistible.

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