Venture Hacks

Marketing is not the task of telling people about your product. Rather, it is the continuous process of generating knowledge that your customers will clamor for.

Here are some marketing principles I like to keep in mind:

1. Not being real is the one and only cardinal sin in marketing.
2. Show the product, use the product—skip the grandeur.
3. Marketing with a business goal is always junk.
4. If you can’t win on the truth, you don’t deserve to win.
5. Tell the customer what you would want to know if you were in their shoes.
6. Be truthful and positive at the same time.
7. Marketing is the task of creating new knowledge and sharing it.
8. If you’re not creating new knowledge every day, you have bigger problems than marketing.
9. Marketing is a kind of leadership and should be treated as such.
10. If your marketing would work for any company, it’s no good.
11. Corporate marketing is intrinsically evasive and avoids responsibility.
12. Being first to market gets you so much free marketing.
13. You will never be able to market to people better than you.
14. Marketing is recruiting.
15. Don’t dumb it down.
16. Have an enemy.
17. Create knowledge, speak the truth, build great product, don’t be defensive, and put the customer over the company.

Some highlights from Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc. Ed is the President of Pixar.

“If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.

“The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal.

“The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.

“Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent—address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.

“The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.

“An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.”