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

Are you ready to create tension?
It’s not a rhetorical question.
There are two ways to do your work.
You can be a cab driver. Show up and ask someone where they want to
go. Charge them based on the meter. Be a replaceable cog in the on-demand
transport system. You might be a harder-working cabbie, but it won’t
change much.
Or you can be an agent of change, someone who creates tension and then
relieves it.
When they started building fancy casinos in Las Vegas, it created tension
for countless travelers. Visitors who just a year earlier were happy in Reno
or in downtown Las Vegas now felt like second-class citizens. They asked,
“Am I the sort of person who goes to a casino this run-down?” The very
existence of a fancier alternative degraded their experience at their former
favorite.
Tension is created. And the only way to relieve that tension is with
forward motion.
When you arrive on the scene with your story, with the solution you have
in mind, do you also create tension? If you don’t, the status quo is likely to
survive.
How the status quo got that way
The dominant narrative, the market share leader, the policies and
procedures that rule the day—they all exist for a reason.
They’re good at resisting efforts by insurgents like you.

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If all it took to upend the status quo was the truth, we would have
changed a long time ago.
If all we were waiting for was a better idea, a simpler solution, or a more
efficient procedure, we would have shifted away from the status quo a year
or a decade or a century ago.
The status quo doesn’t shift because you’re right. It shifts because the
culture changes.
And the engine of culture is status.

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