Why Marketing’s Obsession With “Why” Is No Longer Working Cover

Why Marketing’s Obsession With “Why” Is No Longer Working

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

In 2009, Simon Sinek unleashed one of the most powerful ideas in marketing. This idea would become the defining theme in marketing for the next decade, and Sinek managed to capture it not just in many pithy one-liners but also in the simple, three-word title of his book: Start With Why.

In Sinek’s TED talk — at 50 million views the third-most viewed of all time — he explains that the greatest, most inspiring companies and individuals communicate from the inside out. Rather than telling us what they do and how they do it, they first tell us why they do what they do.

And just like that, the cat was out of the bag.

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A Dangerous Marketing Fallacy Cover

A Dangerous Marketing Fallacy

There’s a difference between inventing yourself in public and drawing the public to an invented cause: one is generous, the other a scam.

Blurring the line between the two leads to one of the most common, misdirected tropes in marketing: “Get the attention while you can.”

The idea is to jump on any and every latest trend while it’s hot. Scoop up some eyeballs. Don’t even think about where you’ll direct them. You can figure that out later. For now, just dance, and make sure people keep watching.

This is not only pointless and exhausting, when it comes to your reputation, it’s damaging. But the arguments sound so convincing, don’t they?

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What’s the Point of Online Courses? Cover

What’s the Point of Online Courses?

There are two schools of thought on teaching: One is that, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” The other is, “Teach everything you know.”

As impressively as the Joker demonstrated the first in The Dark Knight, burning his $6 billion reward seemed a little excessive.

Meanwhile, Nathan Barry can think of 89,697 reasons to share your knowledge freely — that’s the amount of dollars collected by his friend Chris in a Kickstarter after teaching CSS for five years.

Both philosophies come with their own set of benefits and problems. If you always hold back a little, you’ll never find out how good you actually are, but if you teach everything you learn in real-time, your expertise will build slowly and can never quite ripen in your mind.

Today, we’re facing an epidemic of fake teachers. For every time I go, “I wish this person gave a class,” there are a hundred where I think, “I wish this person didn’t.”

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How To Identify a Smart Person in 3 Minutes Cover

How To Identify a Smart Person in 3 Minutes

The fastest way to identify intelligent people is to ask an easy question, followed by a more complex one.

Let’s say you’re in a Zoom call with your marketing team. You need ideas on how to spend the last, unallocated $5,000 of your budget. That’s a lot of money, so the ideas better be good. Whose ideas can you trust?

According to Shailesh Panthee, asking a very easy question in a group setting will reveal who’s eager — maybe too eager — to prove themselves.

For example, you could ask a basic question about marketing lingo. “Remind me again, what’s CTR stand for?” CTR means click-through-rate. It’s the percentage of people who click on an element after viewing it.

Most people in marketing know the term, and your team might think it’s a bit weird that you’re asking such a simple question in the first place. That’s okay, however, because what’s important is what happens next: Who shouts the answer the fastest and the loudest? Are multiple people on the call blurting out the answer? Do they talk over one another?

If you ask Panthee, people who engage in shouting matches over simple-to-answer questions are so desperate for brownie points that they a.) forget to consider how valuable the answer is and b.) skip fact-checking and thinking through their response. He says:

Smart people are smart enough to know that answering that question will not make them unique. They answer questions which require analytical and critical thinking rather than just recall or memory.

I’m neither a genius nor did I think a lot about positioning in high school, but as someone who raised his hand a lot, I can point to another reason why smart folks might hesitate to answer obvious questions: They suspect it’s a trap.

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How To Get Any Job You Want Cover

How To Get Any Job You Want

Gabriel needed a job. Fast. He had applied to a work-and-study program, and the people there had failed to do theirs: match him with an employer.

After months of follow-ups and empty promises, the fall college term had begun — no company to support his studies in sight.

Gabriel is my sister’s boyfriend. We brainstormed ideas and decided to scratch college for now: Get the job first, then ask for the money.

Gabriel likes marketing. He’s funny, creative, and a good thinker. We knew people would love him once he got his foot in the door, but there were only so many roles in his area. How could he stand out to get an internship?

Thinking back to the hundreds of pitches and failed applications in my life, to the frustration of waiting and ultimately being disappointed, a hammering thought roared louder than all the others in my brain: Do it. Don’t ask for permission. Do it. Just do it.

This idea is the only one that has ever worked for me in finding meaningful, satisfying work: You can get any job you want if you do it without asking. Don’t wait for permission. Do the job, and it’s yours.

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The First Successful Rebrand in History Cover

The First Successful Rebrand in History

If you were to visit the grave of Frederick the Great in Germany, chances are, you’d find some fresh potatoes on it:

Image via Reddit

For most of his record 46-year-rule of Prussia, Frederick was known as “the potato king” — a reputation that lasts until this day.

That’s a pretty strong brand for someone from the 18th century — no phones, no internet, most people couldn’t even read! So how come?

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Content Means Nothing Without Context Cover

Content Means Nothing Without Context

In the Middle Ages, there was only one killer argument, and only one person could use it: Whenever the king wanted something done — for whatever irrational reason — all he had to say was: “I have been instated by God. Therefore, y’all shall do as I say!”

Now I don’t know if any kings had Texan accents, but if you ask me, that’s a pretty frustrating doctrine to live under — no matter if you believe in God or not.

Ironically, even today, long after democracy has made its way into (most of) our nations and homes, we often live by the same mantra. We just word it differently: “Because I said so.”

As children, we like to play “the Why game,” much to the frustration of our parents. As we keep badgering them in our endless curiosity, they run out of patience and knowledge, until they — and we — hit the ground floor: “Because I said so.”

Why is the banana yellow? Because I said so.

Why do we have to get a shopping cart? Because I said so.

Why do I need to be quiet in school? Because I said so.

By the time we’re grown up and go to work, we’ve become so accustomed to the “because I said so” argument that we don’t question it anymore, and we painfully have to rediscover that — in the long run — accepting it at face value will not get us where we want to go.

If you do creative work of any kind, “because I said so” will be the death of you.

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The 4 Kinds of Well-Earning Writers Cover

The 4 Kinds of Well-Earning Writers

In the 21st century, there is no such thing as “a writer.” Everyone is a writer. Everyone knows how to write — but that doesn’t make them a professional.

It’s easy to lump word jugglers together under the generic, catch-all term — and, often, we do — but it makes it hard to answer what should be a simple question: How do writers make money?

Professional writers use their skills to achieve certain outcomes, outcomes desired by others, and that’s why they get paid.

It could be creating a feeling, making a sale, providing information, or one of a million other things, but it’s always a specific activity. Therefore, the term “writer” always breaks down into a more exact description.

There are, however, many of those descriptions, and we usually have to look hard at any one person’s profile in order to come up with it.

Blogger, author, journalist, creator, reporter, essayist, freelancer, marketer, artist, copywriter, the list goes on and on. Where should you begin?

You begin by doing what humans do best when facing the chaos of the world: You look for patterns.

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How Nintendo Got Us To Advertise Them for Free Cover

How Nintendo Got Us To Advertise Them for Free

It started with a few Youtube comments.

“I think it needs music, honestly.”

“This would be perfect with Titanic music in the background.”

“No music…You know what to do :)”

And then all hell broke loose.


On November 11th, 2018, Nintendo released the trailer for their new game, Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. Since its original launch in 1999, the fighting crossover series has sold 60 million copies worldwide.

Fans always complain about whichever famous character is missing, but this time, the award for “most notable absence” went neither to Mario nor to Pikachu but to the music. Of course, that didn’t last long.

A few hours after the trailer was posted, a Twitter user added the music from Smash Bros. Melee, a prior installment in the series. The tweet got over 1,000 retweets and 3,000 likes. An hour later, another tweeter added a DMX rap song and racked up even more shares.

Less than halfway through the day, a gamer named “Mythical Mew” broke the social media jackpot. He synced Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now to the one-minute clip, and, well, it’s literally music to your ears.

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How To Lose a Customer of 8 Years in 20 Minutes Cover

How To Lose a Customer of 8 Years in 20 Minutes

Yesterday, I wanted to book a Zipcar. Correction: I wanted to see how much booking a Zipcar costs. All I wanted to do was look at a map, see where the nearest car is, and learn how much it would cost to rent it for a day.

Unfortunately, the company made this simple demand impossible, and, after 20 minutes of trying to see what Uber shows me in 20 seconds, I gave up — and I won’t try again any time soon.

Here’s the kicker: I have been a Zipcar customer for about eight years. They managed to lose a customer they already, completely won over almost a decade ago in less than half an hour.

Here’s the story.

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