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

Sending affiliation signals
Marketers spend an enormous amount of time and money on the simple
task of sending affiliation signals. How busy is the trade show booth? Who
else is at the launch party? Who blurbed the book? Are “people” talking

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about it (which is shorthand for “Are people like us doing something like
this?”)?
Affiliation isn’t as focused on scarcity as dominion is, because affiliation
admires the network effect. More affiliation leads to affiliation for everyone
involved. Abundance is welcome.
The affiliated marketer seeking leverage works to prime the pump by
sending the right signals to the right people, in search of a cascade. For an
investment bank, that means running the tombstone ads with the names of
all the “right” firms at the bottom. For a business-to-business seller, that
means creating referrals. For a local craftsperson, it means hunkering down
in a single neighborhood until a reputation is assured.
Dominion is a vertical experience, above or below. Affiliation is a
horizontal one: Who’s standing next to me?
Affiliation or dominance is up to the customer, not you
Do you see the world in terms of winners and losers? Up and down? Or is it
more about insiders and outsiders, being in sync, being part of a movement?
The way you see the world isn’t nearly as important as the worldview of
those you seek to serve.
As we’ve seen, their worldview is always stronger than the story you
choose to tell. The people we seek to serve have a noise in their heads that’s
different than your noise.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE 
A Better Business Plan
Where are you going? What’s holding you back?
It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re
often misused to obfuscate, bore, and show an ability to comply with
expectations. If I want the truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d
rather see a more useful document. I’d divide the modern business plan into
five sections:
Truth
Assertions
Alternatives
People
Money
The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but
tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that exist, the
competitors in your space, technology standards, and how others have
succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific, the better. The more
ground knowledge, the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The
point of this section is to be sure that you’re clear about how you see the
world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn’t