Here's another short story that illustrates two recent posts:

• Sales is marketing (and everything is marketing)
• It doesn't matter what you mean, it matters what they think

Again via Morgan Housel.

Again, I'm not going to indent since it's long, so everything between the lines is the quote.

JFK and Jackie Kennedy didn’t have a great relationship. In 1955, two years after their marriage, Jack told his father, Joe Kennedy, he wanted a divorce.

Joe responded: “You’re out of your mind. You’re going to be president someday. This would ruin everything. Divorce is impossible.”

Jack reiterated that he and Jackie weren’t happy.

His father shot back: “Can’t you get it into your head that it’s not important what you really are? The only important thing is what people think you are!”

The marriage endured.

Everything is sales.

This is an extreme example for a specific scenario. But it could also be argued Bud Light didn't take this advice recently (that controversy is still stupid).

The true key is to craft, maintain, and co-create your brand in such a way that what you are and what they think you are is the same thing.

A new podcast ad spend report is out and some big brands are making big moves into the space.

HP leads the Movers category, increasing their $1,226 June spend to $802,531 in July. A modest 65,000% increase. The smallest increase in the top 15 was 480%.

Do these increases indicate early performance returns? Or only one day of ads in June? Or new budgets for a new fiscal year? Or just a dartboard budget number approach?

Is a ‘retail-cession’ slowly brewing as the holidays approach?

Consumers may just be shopped out. How many of us need new stuff after the pandemic years?

“Guests are out at concerts,” [Target CEO Brian Cornell] said. “They’re going to movies. They’ve seen Barbie. They’re enjoying those experiential moments, and they’re shopping very carefully for discretionary goods.”

Making up for lost time.

Actual value is commodification.

Perceived value is differentiation.

via Demand Curve Growth Newsletter 133

A great story on positioning, storytelling, and marketing via Morgan Housel.

Ford had no interest in race cars – his vision was to build a cheap, quality car for the masses.

But knowing that he needed to win over both investors and the public, he built the best race car in the world, and in 1902 it beat the reigning champion.

“That was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read,” Ford wrote. He became known nationwide.

Everything is sales.

(and sales is marketing)

no one person has control of what the brand is

via Growth Daily

The company doesn’t even have full control over what the brand is.

Brands are acts of co-creation with the audience.

A great story on positioning, storytelling, and marketing via Morgan Housel.

I'm not going to indent since it's long, so everything between the lines is the quote.

Henry Ford knew the automobile would change the world. The rest of the world wasn’t so sure. In the early 1900s, cars looked like noisy toys for rich people.

But toys are fun, so the one thing the public was crazy about was car racing.

Ford had no interest in race cars – his vision was to build a cheap, quality car for the masses.

But knowing that he needed to win over both investors and the public, he built the best race car in the world, and in 1902 it beat the reigning champion.

“That was my first race, and it brought advertising of the only kind that people cared to read,” Ford wrote. He became known nationwide.

The attention was enough to raise money from investors, and Ford Motor Company was formed eight months later.

Everything is sales.

And sales is marketing.

The salad days of streaming are over.

29% of US internet households are canceling streaming video services to save money

47% annualized subscriber churn rate for streaming platforms.

This was inevitable. Now we see which companies have the strongest content moats (I am betting on Disney).

Are we primed for the return of the bundle?

Experian fined $650,000 for not letting you opt out of its spammy emails / The US government found the credit reporting agency in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires companies to explicitly provide a means to opt out of marketing emails.

2 takeaways:

• Don’t spam
• Experian is (still) shady

Some rivalries have reached legendary status.

Lakers-Celtics. Tom & Jerry. The Hatfields & the McCoys. Sales & Marketing.

Everyone knows they don’t get along. But why is that? I have a guess.

It's because they’re the same thing.

I know, I know. I know what you’re thinking…blasphemy! But hear me out.

Marketing is sales. Sales is marketing.

Two words. Same goal. Different paths to get there.

They're not arguing about the big stuff. They're arguing about the details that identities get tied to.

Let's go back to Lakers-Celtics. When fans of those teams get to arguing, they’re not arguing about whether or not basketball is a good sport or the NBA is a version of the game worth watching. They’ve already agreed on that to the point that they’re willing to argue about a detail within that conversation. Which team is better? (Answer: Celtics. Duh.)

That is what the identities get tied to. That is where the details are.

The details may be different, but the goal is the same:

Grow customers, grow the business, grow the brand.

Like I said earlier, the two take different paths. Those paths diverge along scale and focus.

Marketing is a one-to-many channel. It's about scale. Reaching as many people as possible in your target market. By focusing on aspirations.

Sales, on the other hand, is one-on-one. It's very specific. The salesperson can know the specific problem and cater the pitch and the solution to that problem and that individual.

Small scale versus large scale. Nothing wrong with either, but it is one of the primary differences between the two.

To be reductive:

• Marketing is about opening the door.
• Sales is about closing the deal.

To do these, they use different messages.

Marketing is selling a vision. It’s what your life could become. It's what it would be like to be part of this group.

Sales is selling a solution. You have a problem. I have the fix for that problem.

At this point, what drives this fake dichotomy is the behaviors and attitudes institutionalized by corporations. Large corporations are dinosaurs. Holdovers from an era where marketing was fuzzy —as John Wanamaker (allegedly) said "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."—and deals had to be done in person. Or at least person-to-person.

The modern internet changed that. To shop on Amazon, you don’t talk to an Amazon salesperson. You don’t sit through a pitch meeting before signing up for Uber. Or Instagram. Or Spotify.

For organizations with well-functioning sales teams, marketing can work to scale that expertise and approach across digital channels.

Because marketing is sales. And sales is marketing.

But in the end, it's all storytelling.

That’s it. It’s stories all the way down.

The story of marketing is a promise of belonging.

This is for people like you. This is Seth Godin stuff. You're selling something larger than the individual. Marketing is about creating a group that your target audience wants to be involved in.

The story of sales is a promise of a solution.

This isn't about group identity. This isn't about making someone feel like they're part of something. This is having a one-to-one relationship, knowing what the problem is, and saying “this will solve your problem”.

In both cases, you are making promises. In both cases, you have to deliver on those promises. Same same.

Promise creation, promise delivery. Expectation creation, expectation delivery.

Over-deliver and you’ve done it right. Under-deliver and you’ve failed.

There’s a lot of overlap between the two functions and distinctions get fuzzier the closer you get to the edges. Marketing is more a numbers game while sales is more focused on relationships. You can truly only sell 1 person at a time. You can market to far more than 1 person at a time.

At their core though, they are both about storytelling, positioning, and answering the audience’s unvoiced concerns.

As Morgan Housel says, Everything is sales. And as I say, sales is marketing. You do the math.

Both X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok are reinforcing the walls around their gardens. The first by stripping most data from link previews and the second by kicking all ecomm partners out in favor of their own Shop.

I’m interested to see what ideas advertisers on X come up with in response (especially since you can longer advertise to get followers).

On the TikTok side, feels like a simple pro-China agenda but interested to see how brands and other partners react and adjust.

On the perils of design by committee:

No one has ever not bought a product because of the font. Or the color of a website element.

These things are important, but we have a tendency to “overthink them to dramatic levels of irrationality.”

Perhaps the money is not to be made in the rivers themselves, but from the men working them.
-The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt 📚

Nvidia is the picks-and-shovels of the AI gold rush (and crypto).

AI skews towards decentralization and will prove to be a tool, not a platform (like search has become).

Models will be like Cloud 2.0, the real value creation is in the hardware and the apps built on top of it.

Software eats the world. Hardware enables the appetite.

Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision — even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone — according to what’s best for your customers.

It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

fromAnything You Want by Derek Sivers 📚

via James Clear

Rebrands: A Cautionary Tale

Changing Its Name Tanked X’s Downloads in App Store and Play Store

So if you don’t know that Twitter changed its name to X, and search for “Twitter”, the top result is a paid ad from a competitor (Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), and the result for X doesn’t look anything like Twitter. It doesn’t have the name, doesn’t say “formerly Twitter”, and isn’t even blue. It’s just the ugly X icon and the insipid slogan “Blaze your glory!”

Gen Z is all about the memes