All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works--and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All

People clump together into common worldviews, and your job is to find a previously undiscovered clump and frame a story for those people.

But if you rely on the nearly universal worldview that people like being in sync with their peers, you are likely to find that those who believe your story will work hard to share their lie with their peers.

There are only two things that separate success from failure in most organizations today: 1. Invent stuff worth talking about. 2. Tell stories about what you’ve invented. Make up great stories. That’s the new motto.

And in order to do that, you must aggressively go to the edges and tell a story that no one else could tell.

You succeed by being an extremist in your storytelling, then gracefully moving your product or service to the middle so it becomes more palatable to audiences that are persuaded by their friends, not by you.

This gets metaphysical, so hang on: they’ll pick the Coke can (with the Pepsi inside) as their preferred drink even if they like Coke more. We drink the can, not the beverage. That’s because we’ll do whatever we can to prove our initial assertion right.

Make your story bigger and bigger until it’s important enough to believe.

They bought the story, believed the lie and shared the story with anyone else who would listen to their word of mouth about teaching infants with videotapes.

but no marketing succeeds if it can’t find an audience that already wants to believe the story being told.