Marketing is one of those things that’s insanely hard and incredibly easy at the same time. It’s easy because once you have the right idea, all that you need to do is run with it, and the rest will sort itself out. Coming up with the right idea, though, is the insanely hard part.
Whether you’re trying to make a new company successful or further your own career, there will be times when you’ll feel stuck in a rut, either because business is slow or because you haven’t come up with a really good idea in a while. When that happens, it can be helpful to read the words of people who have been through the same lows as you and have overcome them to reach incredible heights.
Read these five marketing quotes and consider how they might inspire you to think differently.
Steve Jobs
“People think focus means saying ‘yes’ to the thing you’ve got to focus on, but that’s not what it means at all. It means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas that there are.
You have thousands of distinct thoughts every day, and it’s likely that plenty of those thoughts will involve ideas about how to better your business or manage your personal career path. Many of those ideas will be good; the problem is that only a few of them will be great.
Every time you say “yes” to a good idea, you’re committing time and resources toward seeing that idea through – but there are only so many resources to go around and only so much time in a day. Following through with a good opportunity could prevent you from pursuing something even better. Always think carefully before you say “yes.”
Snoop Dogg
“Everything [concerning cannabis] is understood to be a business now. There’s a tech side to it, there’s an agricultural side to it, [and] there’s a health side to it.”
Snoop Dogg is a marketing genius who has put his name on just about every type of product in the cannabis industry from vape batteries to CBD-infused drinks. The fact that people recognize Snoop’s name, though, isn’t the only reason why he’s been so successful in this industry. The main reason for Snoop’s success is his willingness to think in terms of the big picture and understand that the industry as a whole is the result of contributions from many seemingly unrelated sectors.
Put differently, it’s possible to recognize a profitable opportunity and carve a niche for yourself or your business within an industry without being a visible part of that industry at all. The legal cannabis industry is worth tens of billions of dollars per year, but the sale of the actual substance is only a small part of that. The rest of the money is spent on manufacturing, marketing, farming, research and more. It can often be more valuable to find a niche and really own it than to try to be everything to everybody.
Cory Doctorow
“It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”
This quote is particularly interesting when taken in light of the speaker’s own path to fame. Cory Doctorow is a successful, prolific and award-winning author and tech activist with more than two decades of experience. Nevertheless, most people hadn’t heard of him until he invented a term in 2023 – “enshittification” – that perfectly encapsulated all of the problems with the modern Internet. The American Dialect Society made it their word of the year for 2023, and at the time of writing, the word “enshittification” is indexed by Google on at least 282,000 web pages. Doctorow is now quite famous, and he likely has the interview requests and speaking engagements commensurate with that fame.
Think about how this situation might apply to you if you are trying to market a business or advance your own career. When you establish true brand or name recognition, success often follows. Are you doing everything that you can to turn yourself or your company into a brand?
Seth Godin
“Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas.”
When you’re trying to get a new business or brand off the ground, identifying and reaching your audience is one of the biggest challenges. It’s tempting to think of your audience as “anyone who might be interested in buying what I’m offering,” but that’s a trap. Trying to be everything to everyone turns your product into a commodity and locks you into a race to the bottom.
If having the cheapest price is the core of your marketing strategy, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and figure out whether you’ve truly identified your core audience. Once you’ve identified your audience, the next step is to identify the problem that your product or service can solve for them. After that, you simply need to communicate the message.
Guy Kawasaki
“If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.”
It’s worthwhile to pause for a moment and appreciate the simple and straightforward genius in this quote. What Kawasaki is really saying is that the most effective way to market a brand depends largely on the brand’s maturity. True creativity is hard to find. For a brand that’s mature and is already earning plenty of money, it’s much easier to spend that money on outbound marketing – television commercials and online ads, for instance – than it is to find a creative visionary.
If you’re trying to get a new brand off the ground, though, money is probably something that you don’t have in abundance – so why would you waste it on outbound advertising that the vast majority of people will completely ignore? At this stage in your brand’s evolution, it’s much wiser to focus on a marketing strategy that will bring your audience to you. Publishing useful informational content on your website, for instance, can be an excellent way to establish brand recognition and bring potential customers to you. If their first interaction with you is memorable, they’ll be back.
Also Read: 10 Tips for Creating a Marketing Strategy for a Startup
