THREAD: The top 0.1% of marketing mental models.

Compressing a 6-year career into the best 8 ideas:

1. Contrast Is A Drug

• Rolls Royce stopped exhibiting at car shows

• They started exhibiting at private aircraft shows

• "If you've been looking at jets all afternoon, a £300,000 car is an impulse buy. It's like putting the sweets next to the counter" - @rorysutherland
2. The Best Content Involves A Red Pill

• "If you want to build a good podcast, following, or blog - you've gotta create your red pill"

• Hand society something they're not hearing anywhere

• Society says blue pill. Your content says red pill.

(@finnscave via @ShaanVP)
• The irony is that the red pill metaphor is itself a red pill - once you see it, you can never unsee it.

• The best content creators on the internet all have their own red pill, which makes their content so enticing.

E.g. @jockowillink's red pill:
• Society's Blue Pill: Writing is a boring activity from school

@david_perell's Red Pill: Writing online is the fastest way to accelerate your career
• Society's Blue Pill = Trust the traditional finance system

@APompliano's Red Pill = Blockchain is the future
3. The Law Of Shitty Clickthroughs

• The first banner ad ever had a clickthrough rate of 78%.

• In 2021, the average varies between 0.05%-0.16%.

• "Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates." - @andrewchen
• Most of the rewards of marketing channels go to early adopters

GymShark = Used influencer marketing before the term existed

PayPal = Used "Earn $ for signing up" before the term existed

Go fast. Entropy will occur - and only the wealthy can afford to keep playing.
4. The Most Underrated Marketing Channel

• "Your unboxing experience is the only marketing channel with a 100% open rate." - @TaylorHoliday

• When I first read this, I felt like such a moron.

• I'd spent years neglecting the most important marketing channel.
@TaylorHoliday has a fantastic "3 M framework" for unboxing:

1. Mission - Help customers understand why you exist

2. Magic - Unexpected moment that delights the customer

3. Money - How do we turn them into a repeat purchase or referral
5. Weird > Average

• If you optimize for the mean, you optimize for nobody.

• The average person doesn't exist - it's just a blended mean of 7 billion people.

• If you design an idea for them, you design an idea for nobody.
• In contrast, if you design for the extremes - it can then cross over to the mainstream.

E.g.

TikTok 2016 = Lip Syncing for teenagers
TikTok 2021 = Global short form video platform

GymShark 2012 = Vests for gym bro's
GymShark 2021 = Fitness attire for everyone
6. Costly Signalling Theory

• "The most efficient way to send a wedding invitation would be by email." - @rorysutherland

• A beautiful handwritten invitation by post contains the same message as an email - but the cost and effort signals how serious you are

Contrast below:
7. Linear Commerce - The Merging Of Media and Commerce

• "Brands will develop publishing as a core competency, and publishers will develop retail operations as a core competency". - @web

• This foresight from @web will be looked back upon like "software is eating the world"
You can already see this playing out...

• Nelk Boys + Logan Paul launching 8 figure clothing brands organically.

@balajis idea of a "founding influencer" to enhance distribution.

• Hubspot acquiring The Hustle.
• Paid advertising is just acquiring attention

• If there's an organic media machine that acquires attention for free, they rely less on paid advertising

• And if the organic media machine ever uses paid advertising, it's miles cheaper (I've seen this on so many ad accounts)
8. Simplify

• "The more you simplify, the better people will perform. People cannot understand and keep a track of a long complicated set of initiatives...

Use a framework people can repeat without thinking about." - @rabois

You can change the world through a sentence...
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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
This is NONSENSE. The people who take photos with their books on instagram are known to be voracious readers who graciously take time to review books and recommend them to their followers. Part of their medium is to take elaborate, beautiful photos of books. Die mad, Guardian.


THEY DO READ THEM, YOU JUDGY, RACOON-PICKED TRASH BIN


If you come for Bookstagram, i will fight you.

In appreciation, here are some of my favourite bookstagrams of my books: (photos by lit_nerd37, mybookacademy, bookswrotemystory, and scorpio_books)