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

What are you breaking?
Launch a new project and, in addition to serving your audience, you’ll be
breaking something. The very existence of an alternative causes something
else to no longer be true.
When you launch the second hotel in Niagara Falls, the first hotel is no
longer the one and only.
When you launch the telephone, the telegraph is no longer the fastest
way to send a message.
When you host an exclusive party, the people who aren’t invited become
outsiders.
When you launch an extreme (the most efficient, the least expensive, the
most convenient), then whatever you’ve exceeded is no longer the extreme
that its fans sought out.

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When a new network begins to gain traction, bringing in the cool kids,
the powerful early adopters, this traction causes everyone who was part of
the old network you’re supplanting to reconsider their allegiance.
This is what tension feels like. The tension of being left behind.
And marketers who cause change cause tension.
Tension is not the same as fear
If you feel like you’re coercing people, manipulating them or causing them
to be afraid, you’re probably doing it wrong.
But tension is different. Tension is something we can do precisely
because we care about those we seek to serve.
Fear’s a dream killer. It puts people into suspended animation, holding
their breath, paralyzed and unable to move forward.
Fear alone isn’t going to help you make change happen. Tension might,
though.
The tension we face any time we’re about to cross a threshold. The
tension of this might work versus this might not work. The tension of, “If I
learn this, will I like who I become?”
There might be fear, but tension is the promise that we can get through
that fear to the other side.
Tension is the hallmark of a great educational experience—the tension of
not quite knowing where we are in the process, not being sure of the
curriculum, not having a guarantee that the insight we seek is about to
happen.
All effective education creates tension, because just before you learn
something, you’re aware you don’t know it (yet).
As adults, we willingly expose ourselves to the tension of a great jazz
concert, or a baseball game, or a thrilling movie. But, mostly because we’ve
been indoctrinated by fear, we hesitate when we have the opportunity to
learn something new on our way to becoming the person we seek to be.
Fear will paralyze us if we haven’t been taught that forward motion is
possible. Once we see a way out, the tension can be the tool that moves us.
Effective marketers have the courage to create tension. Some actively
seek out this tension, because it works. It pushes those you serve over the

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chasm to the other side.
If you care enough about the change you seek to make, you will care
enough to generously and respectfully create tension on behalf of that
change.