Fundamental Marketing Lessons From The Top 1% Brands

As marketers, we've been brainwashed. We've been brainwashed to look for quick hacks, short term gains, iterative experiments that help to get small returns, and we've forgotten about the timeless marketing principles that help to create iconic legendary brands. This is the episode for you if you want to know what those timeless marketing principles are and actually give you some real examples from renowned marketers who have helped implement them over time, over the last century and helped shape marketing. I'm Kieran Flanagan, the CMO over at Zapier. Let's get into today's show. Okay, everyone, I'm back for another solo show. Calendars are still mismatched. Keep an eye. They're going to be matched again next week. So we will be back as a duo. But I'm excited for this show because I get to talk about one of my favorite topics and that is timeless marketing principles. Now, you all, and me inclusive, have been brainwashed within marketing, within growth, to look for quick hacks, to look for short term gains, to look for all of these iterative ways that we can kind of eke our way to some sort of growth. And you really need to free your mind free from all of those things and really double down, I think, on the timeless marketing principles, the things that truly create legendary brands. And that's what we're going to cover in this episode. I'm going to go through some of my favorite marketers from the past century and some of the people that I have studied and some of our present day marketers and talk to you about some of the real timeless marketing principles that they actually implemented to create legendary brands. Right. I got into marketing and when I got into marketing, I didn't want to be good. I wanted to be world class. And because I wanted to be world class, I spent a lot of time, time studying other marketeers, observing other marketeers. Now, not in a weird, creepy, stockish way. Right. You don't need to worry about that. I'm not gonna like jump out behind someone who I've, you know, been observing me studying. But I take it all in. I have a swipe pad. People probably in conversation with me have shared things that they don't know. By the time they finished, I've already taken a screen grab and put it into my swipe file. So I'm constantly trying to study what people do really well. And that's why I'm gonna give you today is a little extract from my swipe file from my notebook tied under the, in the folder of timeless marketing principles. Let's get into the very first one. This is the timeless principle that transformational messaging sticks better. It resonates better with customers. It sticks better with customers. And what do I mean by that? Right? There's two types of brand story and positioning you can have. If you are a company, you can have a transformational story where you really show someone a journey that they can go on to become a better version of themselves. Or you have like a highly functional story, which is really just like why my product is. Has better features and is a better product than all of these competitors. There's a couple of examples I'll give in here under this kind of really, if you have a transformational message, it will stick better, resonate with customers. The very first one is one of my favorite copywriters. It's a. It's a. It's a person called John Caples. Now, he is a legendary copywriter and he's the author of a book called Testing Advertising Methods. I think it was published sometimes in the 1930s. He's actually widely credited with being one of the pioneers for AB test. So this is way back in 1930. I think it was after Claude C. Hopkins wrote his book that we're going to get into scientific advertising in 1923. So you can see the principles that A, B, testing and all these kind of testing that we think we're really smart and we do today go back over a hundred years. Right. Why is he someone that I really think is incredible? Why is he someone that has always resonated with me? Well, because his journey is somewhat similar in that he started his career as an engineer and I back there, an engineer, I started my career as a computer engineer. He actually graduated from the U.S. naval Academy. And really what his engineer and background brought to the role of marketing for him, and very similar to me as well, is it brought a kind of testing and analysis approach to how we did marketing. And he was one of the first persons to really figure out how to create multiple versions of print ads, each with like slight variations of headlines and copy and layout. And one of my favorite ads of all time and speaks to the power of a transformational message is this, which is they laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play. So you can see this person feeling very sheepish, going to play the piano and this kind of bar restaurant set in. And I really love this for a couple of reasons, right? This was an ad from the 1920s. John Cables was tasked with creating an ad for the US School of Music to sell, home study piano courses, right? This is what this ad was. And he really wanted something that would instantly capture the attention, evoke emotion. And if you actually look at this, the narrative is really transformational in terms of how he actually did this. And this was iconic because it drastically increased the number of the product that was actually sold. The ad storyline showcases a personal journey from being the subject of ridicule to becoming a center of admiration, right? Something that we can all kind of resonates with all people, right? It starts with vulnerability, right? They laughed, right? That is something that most people would fear, that has an emotional connection with us. Hey, we don't want people to laugh with us. And it transitions to something of triumph, right? But when I started to play, and it's really a feeling that everyone can relate to, right? You start off as one thing, you transform into something else, right? You start off in this situation where you're facing doubt or mockery and you really desire respect and admiration. And that really encapsulates that transformational message in one simplistic ad. Now, that's not the only example of this that I have stored in my swipe file. Another really good example comes from a little bit more of a modern marketer and someone that I was fortunate to work with, a woman called Megan Anderson. She's been on the show. She's the CMO over at Jasper. I worked with Megan when she was for a long time in HubSpot. And she's really incredible marketer overall, but really incredible at product marketing. She wrote a course over on Reforge, done a ton of brand work. I don't even know she would remember this meeting, right? We were in a meeting back when I was kind of helping to launch HubSpot's multi product strategy, right? When we launched our second product. That was the thing I was doing then the third and the fourth. But there was a core team still working on the core product, which at that time was the marketing hub. And I think we were in a meeting trying to figure out, well, what is the brand, the product position? And now we've gone from a single product company to a multi product company. And I remember when you think about HubSpot, right, HubSpot actually had a transformational story to begin with. It had this transformational story that you had marketers who wanted to be better than they were. They were doing like outbound, interruptive marketing. They felt kind of shitty about it, but they wanted to create more value. And that's where inbound really spoke to them. It Said the thing. It said the onset in their head, I want to feel more than I am in terms of the work that I do. And Inbound allowed you to create value for customers versus interrupting them. And that was transformational messaging really resonated with HubSpot's customers and really helped to accelerate their growth. And we were trying to figure out, well, what is the transformational story now that we don't just have marketeers, we've launched a CRM. Now we are in the sales space. We're launching a. In a customer success tool. Now we're in the customer success space. Is it. Can we still have a transformational story? And the thing I really loved there was this graph that I think Megan just jotted down and shared. And I swiped it, of course, I swiped all things and put it in my swipe file. And it was really. It really showed the kind of evolution of a transformational story in that if you win your transformational battle, like, if your transformational message really resonates with an audience, then eventually that transformational story becomes a functional one. Because what happens is people say, you are right. Actually, uh, we agree with your percept view of the world. We agree that this is the way marketing should be done or whatever the equivalent is for your company. We. We believe in the transformational story. We are now going to do this thing that you have told us to do, like that you believe is the right way to do things. And that means that transformational story graduates to a best practice story, and that best practice story is a functional one. Okay, we agree with what you're saying now. Can you deliver in all of the features and things that we need for us to be able to actually implement it? Right now, you are probably still a category leader within that category that you have helped sh. Helped define because you were the first one to really create it. But you are likely at some point then to be faced with a lot of competition and get dragged into, like, a functional battle. Battle over a longer time horizon. Right. And that was one of the things that really resonated with me when I was thinking through, like, transformational. How does a brand tell a transformational story? It definitely resonates more with customers. It has a more emotional connection to customers. They believe in it more. They'll think about it more. It will really help them choose your brand over any other brand without even thinking about any other brand. But if eventually that will actually go over time and you will get dragged into more of a functional story, a best practice story, a feature battle, so that's my first one which is transformational messaging sticks better. But there is an an arc to that that it's really hard to maintain that over the long term if you, if you're transformational story, it becomes really successful. Okay. The second one really is personality led brand, right? I have some timeless pieces of advice to give within this category. It's easier to build a legendary brand if you have a personality led brand. Like we see this today in the creator. I think it's why I believe creators have such an advantage in most marketing channels today because most marketing channels reward personality. The first one is David Gerhardt. So David was kind enough to actually be a co host with me whilst I've been on paternity leave. Did an incredible job. He's a seasoned marketer who has, who's helped many brands to become, you know, really incredible brands. And one of those was Drift. He's currently running a B2B community called Exit 5. Go check it out. Join if you want to learn how to do great marketing like, like Dave. What I really want to talk a little bit about is his personality led brand work he did at Drift to help them create a new category around conversational marketing and really own that category, right? There's a lot of great brand work he did there, right? He really nailed the first thing we talked about, which is the transformational story he talked about. He made forms the enemy, he said, not just chat. He turned their story into this kind of running TV show and he broadcast it through content on LinkedIn and he was really one of the first B2B marketers to monetize that platform. Today I use LinkedIn a lot. A lot of other people are using LinkedIn because X and these other platforms have changed a little. And so he kind of benefited from two things, right? He really injected personality into the heart of Drift's brand, right? He gave updates on product releases, he gave updates on the new things that were coming. He gave updates on offers. He had all of these kind of cool behind the scenes video and kind of really documented. We're going to get into something Gary Vee said next, right? Kind of speaks to this with document, not create. He really documented Drift story and that became their content and actually helped their whole kind of community feel much more involved in the story of Drift. Much more kind of connected to the story of Drift. And so that combination of behind the scenes, that transformational messaging, that was like our number one first timeless piece of advice. But that transformational messaging of like make the experience more human Chat versus forums and really being a first mover on the platform really helped to catapult Drift to become a leader within that category that they got shape and then they had a really successful exit and great, great job at that company. There's another person who exemplifies this advice, right? Sophia, the founder and CEO of her own brand called Nasty Girl. It was a fashion brand that started at selling vintage clothes on ebay and then became an e comm store and then got bought by the Boohoo Group. She had a great quote. Your voice is the most important thing you have. Don't try to be anyone else but you. I really think in marketing, a lot of what marketers do is the opposite of this, right? They actually want B2B companies, especially in B2B. They want B2B's to be anyone else but themselves. They want B2B to be the same as everyone else, to sound the same as everyone else, to not alienate anyone by being vanilla to everyone else. And I think this is a really good reminder around this personality led brand that your voice is the most important thing you have. That is the thing that really differentiates you. And it really speaks to how you inject the personality into your personality, your company's personality into your brand in the kind of way that Dave did for Drift. Like David Ogilvy said something really important around this where he said the best ideas come as jokes, right? You want to make your thinking as funny as possible. The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible. We get too serious with all of this. We get too caught up in all of this. We get. We lose all of the humor in all of this. And I think that's again, a great reminder that injecting personality, you know, injecting your point of view, injecting your perspective, injecting your humor really matters. And I'm not surprised that we all don't do it. It's actually the hardest thing to do. It's really hard to nail perspective. It's really hard to nail personality. It's really hard to nail humor. And that's what you see when a company does it. They really do set themselves apart from everyone else because it's so hard to do, right? Gary Vaynerchuk, who again, we're really fortunate, is coming on the show as well. He also speaks to this. Like one of the quotes I love from Gary is document don't create. I used it just a little while ago when I was speaking to Dave Gerhardt did for, for Drift where you instead of trying to create something to be relevant, instead of trying to create something to fill a quota. Documenting means your content has more authenticity, it more personality, more relatable. Like document the things that you truly believe in, document the things that you are truly going through. Document the things that will really resonate to your customers versus trying to be cookie cut and just to fit in with everyone else. So that's the second principle and some of the examples in there, that kind of timeless marketing principle, personality led brand, really important. The third one that I have in my folder is conversational copy. I'm obsessed with conversational copy because anyone who can do this great will make money forever. You will never ever go out of work. Right. Even with AI, I think you will always have a place where you can make money. One of my favorite pieces of advice within this principle comes from Claude C. Hopkins. Right. Claude wrote the book Scientific Advertising really is one of the kind of de facto things you need to read if you are going to become a marketer, Right. He was one of the first people to develop scientific practices around advertising. That book was launched in 1923, I think, and he really wanted to figure out how to make marketing more scientific. Right. One of the things he brought in was measuring the impact of marketing or his ads through coupon codes. One of my favorite stories by Claude Hopkins is that he actually was such an incredible advertiser and marketer that he actually changed the way people brush their teeth in the US Right? That is an incredible thing to actually do. He worked on this advertising campaign for a toothpaste brand called Pepsodent. And prior to that campaign, which again was in the 1920s, people didn't brush their teeth every day, right? People were living their best life. They're like, why would I want to brush my teeth teeth? And it was not a daily ritual. And so it was kind of hard to actually sell a product if that product was not part of your daily habits, right? So he didn't just have to sell you something that you already believed you should do. He had to make you believe you should do this and then position the product to be the. To be the right product for you. Right. And he identified. So what he did is he really did a great job of identifying a problem people didn't know they had. And what he called that was filming your teeth, like rub your tongue on your teeth and you can feel a film. Right. And he spoke to the benefits of using the product. He didn't speak to like the things that were in the product. He spoke to the fact the product could remove the film and give you a wide smile. And then he created a daily habit because he told people every day, run your tongue across your teeth, feel the film, and then you will be reminded that it is time to brush your teeth and you can use Pepsodent to do it right. That actually was credited with actually making brushing your teeth a daily habit over the next decade. Just pretty incredible. One of the lines I love from Claude Hopkins is talk to them in the language they use every day, the language in which they think. Talk to them in the language they use every day, the language in which they think. Simple, but mostly missed across all B2B brands. I think consumer is better than this. But I think definitely in B2B, we love to talk in jargon, we love to talk in industry catchphrases, we love to talk in gobbledygook, we love to make our things sound complex and smart and really hard to understand. Right? We all, we forget these timeless principles. Back in 1920s, they understood that you need to talk to your customer in the language that they use and they were trying to figure this out from split test and ads and print ads and then using coupon codes to see what coupon codes got used. Today we are spoiled with what we can do, right? AI is going to spoil us in terms of how we can speak to our customers. We can truly capture and summarize data like we have never been able to do before, right? With AI. And we've started to look into this. I have started to look into this. You can ingest your customers data across all of your sales calls, all of your customer support tickets, all of your social media channels, all of the external forums and communities that your customers hang out, and you can actually gather enough data to be able to fine tune a small LLM model on your customers own languages and use that for your writers to be able to ensure they check against it to see if this actually will resonate or is how your customers actually speak. So there is no excuse for us not to adhere to that timeless piece of marketing advice from Claude Hopkins. And I think it's a really important one for most marketeers to adopt and really obsess over the fourth time this marketing principle. And we've talked about this repeatedly on the show, so I won't spend as much time on it because it's in my folder forever. I have some examples of it, but we've talked about most of them from the show is think Distribution first. Think distribution first now worked with A really great marketer, Matthew Barbee. He is now a VP of Growth over at Kraken, knows more about crypto than most people and he also been on the show, worked with him at HubSpot. And whenever Matt was pitched a new customer acquisition idea, one of the things he would always ask is, sure, that's cool, but how will you distribute it? What is the mechanism that will make this thing grow? And I want to tell you a quick story that I've told before in the pod that really brought this to life for me. And so when I started my marketing career, this is how I thought, because I had an experience when I was working as a software engineer that opened my eyes to this thing before I ever, ever got into marketing, right. I was working in Australia at a radio brand doing some boring software engineering things and we were launching an E Comm store for the radio station and it cost $7 million to launch a store. And that was like 10, that was like 15 years ago, right? So $7 million in today's, with inflation is probably worth $700 million. So, you know, a bunch, a bunch of money back then to launch this E commerce store. And I was like, that's cool. Like, this E commerce store is cool. It's got some cool product. You know, people are going to love it. How do they find it? And they were like, we haven't thought about that, right? We just want to make sure we create a great store. We want to make sure that we get it online. And then people like this online thing has really taken off. People will figure it out. And six months later, I had actually left because I was contracting and I checked in with some people that I became friendly with and I was like, hey, how did that E commerce story go? They were like, oh, we have to shut that down. No one bought anything because they couldn't find it, right? And that was my very first lesson. And wow, like, don't build anything until you actually understand how you're going to distribute it. Brian Balfour, who's been on the show, CEO and founder over at Reforged, calls that product channel fit, right? You want to make sure that you build products, whether that product could be an app, could be a piece of content, could be a free tool, could be an event, right? You can actually think of an event as a product, right? How do I. There's no point in me having the event unless I can figure out, first of all, how am I going to distribute this event? And so product channel fit means that these marketing channels, whether it's social or search or whatever it may be, they will never bend to fit your product. Right? The rules of those channels are set in stone. How you grow your customer demand on those channels is set in stone. The rules of those channels are not bent for you. Your product has to bend to fit within those rules. Which means you should think about distribution. When you are starting to think about the product that you want to launch again, whether that's an ebook, a template, an app, a whole product, a freemium piece of software, an event, wherever it may be me and Kip have done our entire careers is we start with the end result first, right? We had a time where we were thinking through, wow, how do we quadruple demand, right? What does it look like if HubSpot is able to quadruple the amount of demand? I think it was when we were back at 2 million visits on the blog, maybe at about, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50,000 leads a month. Whatever it was, I can't recall. And we were going through all of these different scenarios and so we said, okay, well let's work back and, and say, well, if we were hitting that number and we just mapped out the forecast, where can that growth potentially come from, right? And so we jotted at a 12 month forecast working back from quadruple the number and then said, wow, when you actually look at all of these channels and what you think is possible in terms of growth in those channels, there's only a couple of places that you can make a meaningful swing to get 4x the amount of demand. And, and again, we didn't invest in anything until we actually worked backwards to figure out what are the distribution channels that could actually hit that goal. We didn't launch anything. We ended up creating a bunch of freemium tools and all of these different things. But we walked back from the goal and started to think through what channels do we have to build within. We knew that we had to grow exponentially on search. We knew that we had to figure out virality. We knew that we had to get more upside from paid. When we figured out those things, then we could work back to say, well, what do we have to build to make these things true? We actually ended up quite quadruple and more than quadruple in demand over two years. So that is think distribution first. The next timeless marketing principle is you just need to show up and build reps, right? Neil Patel has a really great quote on how to scale a content engine that kind of speaks to this, which is create content that teaches you can't give up. You need to be consistently awesome. The thing I want to highlight here is not the first part, right? Create content teacher. Sure you can't keep up. Sure. Perseverance. You need to be consistently awesome. Right? We've talked about this in pod, on the POD forever. You need to show up. You need to build your reps, show up, build your reps, show up, build your reps and get better and better and better each and every time, right? There is no shortcut to becoming great at delivering customer value. You have to do it time and time again and learn what works and what doesn't work. And when I think about this quote, there's one story that really resonates with me. Although it's not a marketing story, it does really highlight perseverance and that kind of want for consistency. Awesome, right? And that's James Dyson. We've talked about it in the show. He's definitely, I think, read the book. Also listened to the founder podcast, all about James Dyson. He's someone that Kip and I truly have a ton of respect for. But his timeline to success is pretty amazing, right? He first had the idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner in 1974. Very first idea, right? Wow. I've got this incredible idea. How many times have you had an incredible idea? Whenever I have an incredible idea. I used to buy domain names. I think it's. It's the real thing that people who came up from search do and had hundreds of domain names never did anything with them. But he's had this idea in 1974. You know what would be kind of cool? A bagless vacuum cleaner. Okay, well, that's great. So between 1978 and. I don't know what he's doing between 1974 and 1978, but 1978 to 1983, he develops. Now, wait for it. He develops 5127 prototypes. 5127 prototypes, right? Imagine that you created blog posts or podcast episodes or social media posts. Are you willing to go through those reps to find excellence? Right. He faced a ton of failures, right? But learn from each one getting a little bit better. Iterative. Consistently awesome. And in 1983, the GeForce was launched. The Dyson's first successful vacuum cleaner was launched in Japan. Man won awards, all of those kind of things. Now that was 1983. In 1993, he was still unable to find a manufacturer willing to take on his design in the uk. And then he decided to open up his own manufacturing facility, launched a new Vacuum cleaner. And by 1995 they were really becoming. That's when he started to take off. So 21 years later. But the thing I really wanted to speak to is that five year period where he was really perfect in his honing his skills, turning up, building the reps. 5001, 5, 5127 prototypes. Are you willing to fail that many times? That doesn't matter. That's not just for entrepreneurs. That's the marketer who's trying to put out a campaign. That's the marketer who's trying to like figure out how to win on TikTok. That's the marketer who's trying to write great copy to try to figure out how to increase their sales. Right? The marketers that show up every day and work to deliver value, they're learning, they're getting better. Like they're the ones that are going to be in the category of best marketers. If you are not doing that, you're not in that category. Like, be really honest with yourself. You're not in that category category. And they are the people who win, right? The people who are building the reps. So that's number five is the show up and build your reps. Right? That, that is a timeless marketing principle. Number six is write copy that sells. And actually more so because of the way that the Internet is evolving. Create video that sells. But I want to start with write copy that sells. Let me tell you about one of the best strap lines of all time. Because I'm a nerd. I love these. I love strap lines. I love kind of nerd night about strap lines and learning about where they came from. So I'll just show you the picture. Right? What a great strap line. I know if you're not a dork, you don't get really excited by these things. But this is the original Eminem ads. Eminem's ad, right? It's called the. And it says the milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not in your hand. What a very, very awesome strap line. So why is it so good? Right? Why did I choose this one? It's from 19. Let me check when. 19, 20, 50. Yeah, it's from a campaign from 1954 and it made this. Eminem is a household name, right? This ad is credited with making this a household name. It was created by an advertising guru called Rosa Reeves, who's famous for his. The thing he was famous for was for advocating for a product to have a usp, a unique selling proposition, really, that helped emphasize a unique quality of the product that sets it apart from its competitors. Right. He was also a huge proponent of something that I. I cannot agree more with. This is what. You know, one of the things he really brought into marketing was repetition of marketing. Right. This strap line has been used since 1950. What did I say? 1954. Right. That's 70 years. Oh, yeah, exactly. 70 years ago. And it's been repeated across multiple channels in multiple ad campaigns. And he is a believer on a repetition. Right. If you have an incredible strap line that doesn't. That. That's not enough. You really need to message your position repeatedly until you are sick of it. You are sick of it. That's fine. Like, most CMOs come in and change a website because they're like, oh, I'm sick of that website. I'll just change it. Their customer's not sick of it. They're just sick of looking at it. They're like, damn, this website. I have to look at this bloody website again. I want to see this website. I don't want to look at all the positioning we've done last year. I want to change it all. Your customer, it's not even registered with your customer. Right. Your customer's seen it a couple of times. They flick through it. They're trying to get to something else. You have to repeat something for it really resonates with your consumer. Once it's starting to become sickening for you is probably when it started to really register for your customers. So the thing that Rosser really demonstrated here, and please feel free to send YouTube comments that I'm pronouncing all these dreams, being able to articulate the benefits of your products, which sticks in the customer's mind, is such a timeless skill to have. Right. Simon Sinek, who's one of my, wrote one of my favorite books, Start with why he says, people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. People don't don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. People really buy the better version of themselves that your product will help create. Right. They buy your transformational story. Wow. Like, I believe you. They're the winners and losers. The people who are going to win and succeed in this thing that I care about are the people who are going to use your product. They're going to become a better version of themselves. Right. I believe those same skills will need to be replicated in video. We're seeing a huge increase in investment in video because more and more platforms are starting to reward video over text. This was really highlighted in HubSpot State of marketing report. It was highlighted the fact that marketers are planning to invest more, invest more in video, specifically short form video, and then closely followed by YouTube than SEO. And the reason is social really is like your, your buyers are steadily moving to like Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials. You're B if you're in B2B. And social is the number one way that millennials and Gen Z discover products, right? YouTube and YouTube itself is just a juggernaut, right? YouTube has over 2.7 billion monthly active users and it's still growing and it's less saturated than other B2B channels, right? It's less saturated with other companies. But why do I love trying to really figure out how to sell? Like take that skillset you've learned in text, like how do I sell in text and actually replicate it in video is because video is so hard. It is so hard to stand out in short form video. It is still hard to make YouTube work for you. And anything that's is incredibly hard to do is an incredible moat. It's worth learning because no one else will put the reps in again. Timeless marketing principle above, you know, show up, put the revs in. James Dyson 5127 prototypes people are just not willing to do the reps. They are not willing to fail at things. They are not willing like they, they, they do something for two, three times and they're like, wow, I, I can't do this. It's too hard. Great. You're never going to catch me because I'm willing to fall on my face time and time again, right? For me, doing thing is the best thing to master. It's your moat. It makes it harder for competitors to follow. The opportunity is getting smaller, right? I just called it out. HubSpot's report, State of Marketing Report shows that in 2024, more marketers said they're going to invest in video than short form video than they're going to invest in search and SEO. And so the amount of competition in the space is actually growing. Now the last principle, timeless marketing principle is a marketer's job is to create value for the customer. Customer marketing's entire job, the reason for them to exist is to create value for the customer. Jay Baer has a great quote on this. He says, make your marketing so useful, people would pay for it. Kip and I have said this before in this podcast. We have always had a first principle that you should aim to create something so valuable for customers that they would actually pay for it. We've called it the 10x rule, where you provide 10x the value for customers than anything else that exists in the market for the thing that you're creating it. And, and I think that's still a timeless piece of advice, right? If you can create real value for your customers, something that marketing can create, things that they would actually pay for, that is going to attract people towards your brand, right? You actually want them to pay for your product, but marketing create all the value around the product now. Things have really changed over the last decade in digital marketing, right? People know all the tactics, right? When I, when I, I remember when I was first building my career in digital, there were so many like, so things that I could figure out and that were unknown and that give you huge amount of leverage and that lasted for a certain period of time before everyone else started doing them. Today I think people know most of the tactics because everyone has posted about them, everyone tells you about them. Everyone is like on here doing podcasts about them, right? People are just better at their jobs. Like there's just a better array of talent in this space. We've all got incredible access to data. The tooling has got better, better. And it's just easier to produce things, it's easier to create things for customers. So providing 10x value 10 years ago is very different from providing 10x value today, right? The bar, the kind of free bar keeps moving up, right? Expectations grow. Humans are like this, right? We get something, we think that's cool for a couple of days and we're like, it's not that great. I want something better. And that is true in terms of marketing having to create more and more value for their customers. So when following this rule, I would really say resist the urge to just do something. I should just get something out, just do, just post something, right? I rarely post on X at the moment because I've focused quite a bit on this podcast on LinkedIn. I just haven't time to go back into X. X has changed a lot. I have to really figure out how to reformat the way that I used to create content on X because it just doesn't resonate anymore and start to really obsess about how I can can deliver a great value in X. And I haven't been had the time to do that. So I haven't really posted that much because I don't want to just say, well, I'll just, I still need to. Five posts out. Just put five posts out. Get them out there, right? You're better off doing nothing than putting that distinctly average work. Right. That's I truly believe that. And if you don't think you can put out good to great work then actually put in the reps to learn what good to great work is and then start doing that. And so I think that is a timeless piece of advice. But also know that I I empathize with people because I do think delivering that value has gotten a lot harder over time. That is it. You will never go out of work as a marketer regardless of what AI does. If you can really adopt these kind of timeless marketing principles like transformational messaging sticks better. If you can really figure out how to tell a transformational story for your brand then you are always going to be needed within the world. Right. If you can really figure out how to turn that into a personality led brand inject personality follow the teachings of people like Dave Gerhardt for you Sophia Amoruso, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Ogilvy like they've all spoken to this the third is conversational copy. Right. We copyright and is still to me the number one skill to learn always. Like I've I've said before, writing is the thing to learn and within and within that really copyright and is like the superpower conversational copy. As Claud C. Hopkins told us, you need to speak to your customers in the language which they speak. There is no excuses not to do this this now that we have access to these incredible AI tools. Think distribution first. Number four, don't just build something and then figure out how to promote it after. As Brian Balfour says, product channel fit doesn't matter if it's an ebook. Whatever it is that you were building doesn't have to be a product. What is the way that you're going to distribute that? Show up build the reps. Neil Patel told us you need to be consistently awesome. Right? James Dyson proved this to us. You need to build those reps show up each and every time to get a little bit better. Number six, you want to write copy that sell sells and then you want to create video that sells because we're more and more shifting the video. Right? You want to be able to figure out something that demonstrates your USP in the way that Rosa Reeves did with M M's melts in your mouth, not in your hands. You know Simon Sinek said it people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And then you want to number the last one is marketer's job is to create value for the customer marketing's job is to create value for the customer. Jay Barr says, create marketing so valuable, people would pay to use it. Me and Kip call that the 10x rule. They're your timeless marketing principles. I really hope that you've enjoyed this episode. I really hope it inspires you to go learn some of those marketing principles. I will see you on the next episode. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago I totally missed HubSpot Grow better.