Sublime

I’m in a constant search for new and better ways to market my own company, and as I run across them, have ideas, read cool things, I’m sharing them with my people. As my friend Rich Schefren once told me, “We get paid a lot to think for other people.”

When you are appointed to head an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send you one of these Russian dolls. Inside the smallest you will find this message: ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs, but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a c

‘Most good copywriters’, says William Maynard of the Bates agency, ‘fall into two categories. Poets. And killers. Poets see an ad as an end. Killers as a means to an end.’ If you are both killer and poet, you get rich.

Good positioning makes you noninterchangeable.

The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what’s already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.

The first step in any positioning program is to look inside the mind of the prospect.

“People are always going to ask you to do more. If you follow them blindly, you can end up being in a different market. Your product can have more features and a bigger footprint and more complexity than it originally had — and lose the focus that made it so valuable in the first place,” says Basecamp product manager Ryan Singer.

Continue creating great work worth talking about. Show up day after day, making promises and delivering on them consistently over time.