the hughtrain mkii

THE HUGHTRAIN MkII

1. The mar­ket for something to believe in is infi­nite. We are here to find mea­ning. We are here to help other peo­ple do the same. Everything else is secon­dary. We humans want to believe in our own spe­cies. And we want peo­ple, com­pa­nies and pro­ducts in our lives that make it easier to do so. That is human nature.

2. The most impor­tant word in mar­ke­ting is “com­pli­city”. It’s not enough for the cus­to­mer to love your pro­duct. They have to love your pro­cess as well.

3. Your cus­to­mers are beco­ming smar­ter about your mar­ket a lot fas­ter than you are. Thanks to the inter­net, your cus­to­mers are able to talk to each other. They are able to find bet­ter infor­ma­tion about your pro­duct than you are able of willing to give them, much quic­ker than you are capa­ble of giving them. The con­ver­sa­tion will hap­pen with or without you, you’re bet­ter off joi­ning in.

4. The pri­mary job of an adver­ti­ser is not to com­mu­ni­cate bene­fit, but to com­mu­ni­cate con­vic­tion. It’s not about what you have; it’s about why it matters.

5. A company’s pri­mary role is to func­tion as an “idea ampli­fier”. A company’s pri­mary role is not to make or do stuff. Making and doing are mere subsets.

6. The future of adver­ti­sing is inter­nal. The har­dest part of a CEO’s job is sha­ring his enthu­siasm with his collea­gues, espe­cially when a lot of them are making one-fiftieth of what he is. Selling the com­pany to the gene­ral public is a piece of cake com­pa­red to selling it to the actual peo­ple who work for it.

7. Your job is no lon­ger about selling. Your job is about firing off as many synap­ses in your customer’s brain as pos­si­ble. The more synap­ses that are fired off, the more dopa­mi­nes are relea­sed. Dopa­mi­nes are seriously addic­tive. The more dopa­mi­nes you release, the more the cus­to­mer will come back for more. Your cus­to­mer thinks he is coming back to you for sane, ratio­nal, value-driven rea­sons. He is wrong. He is coming back to feed.

8. Good-bye, Mes­sa­ges. Hello, Social Ges­ture. A well-executed mar­ke­ting cam­paign is an act of love.

9. Con­trol the con­ver­sa­tion by impro­ving the con­ver­sa­tion. Choo­sing to have a “smar­ter con­ver­sa­tion” with the mar­ket is not a mar­ke­ting deci­sion; it’s a moral decision.

10. The more porous the mem­brane that sepa­ra­tes your busi­ness from your mar­ket, the easier it is for both par­ties to be in align­ment. And the more porous the mem­brane, the easier it is to fix non-alignment.

[Ori­gi­nally published Novem­ber, 2006]