This is not for you

???? Change my mind. This is what your audience reads in your email subject:

THIS IS NOT FOR YOU

Whatever your company does, it is not for you. You are not the audience nor the criteria. #ChangeMyMind

Marketing is often represented with a megaphone. The idea is often explained as follows: you put together a great product or service, now it’s time to let the whole world know!

Not to say that the entire world will ignore you. But let’s be honest: the whole world doesn’t need to know. Some very specific people do need to know. They will love what you have to offer, and will champion your brand. Others don’t need to know, but will probably benefit from it. They will find your product or service useful, and if the experience they get from it is good enough, they will buy from you again, and might even tell some of their friends.

The rest of the world will be just fine without knowing about you. And get this: they won’t hate you if you don’t bother them.

Marketing is not about screaming in people’s faces for attention. It’s about finding the others, as Timothy Leary says , and gently letting them know that you get them, you know what they want and you’ve made it come true, and now it’s theirs to have. Because your product is not for you. It’s for them.

Any product that has any sort of chance at success needs to be born out of an understanding that it is not built for the builder. It’s for them.

Who is them? That should be the very first question you ask. Define an audience, a target market that has a problem you can solve. A bunch of people who don’t know each other or what they have in common, but have been inadvertently (or not) waiting for what you have to offer. They are your allies in accomplishing your business goals.

Have you figured out how to align your story with theirs yet?

???? Funny how…

…we think we have to talk, organize and plan, in order to be able to start doing. But, in reality, we have to start doing stuff in order to be able to talk, organize and plan.

Action leads to planning and organizing. Not the other way around.

As our own Victoria Marcó explains:

VALIDATING IDEAS requires doing experiments. The framework is very simple (like all quick experiments), though not simplistic and consists of 4 steps.

1. Think about who your audience is
2. Build that audience (or join a community)
3. Share your idea with the community

• If the answer is “I love it, take my money right now”, you have a brilliant idea.
• If the answer is "Yes, I like it" - better iterate the idea and repeat steps 1, 2 and 3 until they ask for you to take their money.

???? AltDef: /Taxonomy/

A taxonomy is just a prejudice at scale.

The conventional definition of a taxonomy is “the science of naming, describing and classifying organisms and includes all plants, animals and microorganisms of the world.”

If we think about it, that’s what every kind of -ism is: racism, ageism, sexism, you name it. A habit of putting things in boxes to help our minds make sense of them.

The problem with putting things in boxes is mistaken people for things. People do not belong in boxes.

This newsletter was put together with love, dedication, (a bit of) sarcasm and not enough time by the minds behind Sunstone . Do feel invited to share your comments, ideas, suggestions and/or insults with us at [email protected]