10 Things I Believe About Good Marketing

I've been doing this a while now. Started in entertainment (Universal, Xbox, PlayStation, Microsoft, Huawei), then a decade in fintech, scaling Bitpanda from 100k to over a million users, and now Relai. Somewhere along the way I stopped collecting tactics and started collecting beliefs. Mainly because the tactics kept expiring on me. Every "growth hack" has a shelf life of about one algorithm update.

Almost none of what follows is original. Here are the ten ideas I keep coming back to, and who I stole them from.

1The customer is not a moron

Ogilvy said it best: the consumer isn't a moron, she's your wife. Condescend to someone and you've lost them, full stop.

Crypto is genuinely bad at this. One half of the industry talks down to normal people, the other half drowns them in jargon nobody outside a Discord server understands, and both are the same sin wearing different outfits. People aren't confused because they're dumb. They're confused because the products are confusing. That's on us to fix, not them.

2The goal of marketing is to make selling unnecessary

Drucker's line: know the customer so well the product sells itself. Least sexy idea on this list. Probably the most important one.

Marketing done right is the whole business viewed from the customer's chair, not a department that puts a bow on the product at the end. Whenever I catch myself grinding hard to sell something, I ask myself an uncomfortable question: does the product actually get the customer, or is my budget just papering over the fact that it doesn't?

3Positioning happens in the mind, not in the market

Ries and Trout: the fight happens inside someone's head, not on a shelf or in an app store ranking. And that head has room for about one idea per brand. A word, maybe two, and definitely not a paragraph.

This is brutal in practice. Every extra feature you cram into the message dilutes the one thing that matters. Which is why the hardest part of my job isn't writing the copy, it's deleting it. Usually over someone's objections. Frequently my own.

4Tell the truth, and make the truth interesting

Bill Bernbach sold a strange-looking German car to postwar America by just admitting what it was. "Think Small." "Lemon." He led with the weaknesses, and the honesty was so disarming the campaign is still taught sixty-plus years later. His deeper point: the truth isn't the truth until people believe you. And nobody believes what they never bothered to listen to.

I work in a category soaked in hype, so honesty might be the sharpest weapon I've got. What the product costs. What it can't do yet. Where the real trade-offs sit. Done with craft, that builds more trust than any superlative ever will.

5You're not selling the product. You're selling the feeling.

Yes, Don Draper is fictional. Doesn't matter. The Carousel pitch is still the best three minutes of marketing education ever put on film. Kodak walks in wanting to talk about a slide projector and its wheel. Draper barely mentions the tech. He loads it with photos of his own family, dims the lights, and reframes the whole thing: this isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It takes you back to a place you ache to return to. He sold nostalgia and an old wound, and the room went silent when the lights came back up.

Nobody sets up a savings plan because of the cryptography underneath it. They do it because they want calm. The sense that future-them is being looked after. Find the feeling first; the product is just the delivery mechanism.

6Marketing is about values, not speeds and feeds

Steve Jobs, launching Think Different: marketing is about values, and no company gets remembered for its gigabytes. Nike doesn't talk about shoes. Apple honored people who changed the world and let the computers ride along in the background.

Specs are what you talk about when you've got nothing to actually believe in. The brands people love stand for something first and sell something second, and the selling works because of the standing, not instead of it.

7Be remarkable or be invisible

Seth Godin's Purple Cow: the market isn't short on messages, it's short on attention. A brown cow gets ignored no matter how loudly you point at it. The only reliable way to get noticed is to build something worth talking about, which makes remarkability a product decision, not a marketing one.

My test: if the honest answer to "why would anyone tell a friend about this" is silence, no campaign is going to save you. I've sat through a lot of campaign kickoffs where nobody ever asked that question out loud.

8Growth comes from reach, not from squeezing your fans harder

Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow is the most uncomfortable marketing book of the last twenty years, because it swaps romance for evidence. Brands grow by picking up lots of light, occasional buyers rather than by squeezing more loyalty out of the people who already love you. You need mental availability (easy to think of) and physical availability (easy to buy), built on distinctive assets people recognize without trying.

Every niche flatters itself that its superfans will carry it. They won't. The enthusiasts are already customers. Growth lives with the millions who think about your category twice a year, and they'll only find you if you were already sitting in their head before the moment showed up. I reread Sharp every time I catch myself planning yet another campaign aimed at people who already love us.

9Brand and performance aren't enemies. Starve either one and both die.

Binet and Field ran the numbers on decades of campaign data and landed on the line I now quote in basically every budget meeting: brand building and activation do different jobs on different timelines, and the best results come from funding both, tilted roughly 60/40 toward brand.

Performance harvests the demand that brand already created. Cut brand spend and your dashboards look great for a couple of quarters, then the well runs dry and everyone acts shocked. I've watched this exact movie before. I know precisely how it ends, and I still have to fight the sequel every single year.

10The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea

Rory Sutherland's Alchemy is my favorite permission slip. Humans don't run on logic, they run on what Sutherland calls psycho-logic, and value lives as much in perception as in the spreadsheet. The Uber map didn't make the car arrive any faster. It just made the waiting bearable. Same trip, completely different experience.

This one keeps me honest. Every time I'm convinced something is irrational and therefore wrong, I try to remember how much of the best marketing in history looked irrational right up until it worked.

What holds it together

Read back-to-back, these ten collapse into something simpler: respect people, understand them better than the competition bothers to, say one true thing memorably, and check the numbers so you're not just fooling yourself.

Everything else is fashion. I'd rather build on ten old beliefs that have survived decades of getting tested than on whatever growth hack is trending this quarter.