Marketing to each other

Let’s say you become adept at “marketing to yourself”. Meaning telling yourself the right story. Who is next guy” to market to? Interesting point made by a reader: how important it is to have people on your team that represent other ‘yous’ to market to”. I couldn’t agree more – that person on your team is the “next guy” to tell the story to. As for who makes up your team, well that’s another story. Suffice it to say, we all have a team of some kind, even the soloists. And there’s a way to tell that story to everyone on the team. It’s been like this with us people for at least 4 million years. It’s easier when the team member built or marketed the thing with you, or was somehow intricate to it. I experienced that on consulting teams over and over again. You tell the stories of why your solution makes more sense. You practice, critique, prune – and then the narrative hits harder when it shows up in the outside world. For example, witness the CEO of data-visualization app Tableau ​skillfully discussing data literacy​: “Data literacy is becoming a basic job skill of the 21st century – so we are really interested in helping people learn how to use data… Tableau is a canvas for thinking and often when you have a canvas for thinking it is often like reading a good book. It’s not that the book finishes with a how-to list for how to live your life, that’s not the point. The point was the thoughts that occurred to you while you were reading.. To get that level of storytelling fluency, marketing to your team helps.