The Beat: Father Figure

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO, I’m Ian Truscott, CMO and host of Rockstar CMO, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Happy Sunday!

Today is Father's Day here, and I can be pretty confident that wherever you are reading this, it's the same for you as Wikipedia tells me that it's observed on the same day in over 111 countries. And the title of this issue obviously comes from the George Michael classic “Father Figure”.

I am a Dad, and I am fortunate that my Dad is still around, but I thought I'd use this to honour a different kind of father figure or inspirational person, to take a line from George's tune, "I will be your preacher teacher”.

In your career, I bet you can identify a few “preacher teachers”, the people in the pulpit of your industry or craft that have handed down the good word and inspired you, and I am picking Father’s Day to do this, but of course, they don’t need to be Dads, Mums or even parents.

As my career transitioned to marketing, I was blessed with a few “preacher teachers” along the way, including a certain Robert Rose. But the chap that inspired a lot of what I do, including researching and reading beyond what I learned in the pages of his books, and I probably speak for many marketers, is Seth Godin.

This was underlined as I explained permission marketing to someone the other day, something Seth wrote about in 1999 (in his book Permission Marketing). It's still super relevant as we talk about the death of cookies, the need to own our audience, cutting through the noise and the danger of building on the rented land of social media.

I recently dived back into his book This Is Marketing. So on this day, I thought I would steal a leaf from this father figure of my marketing career and share one of its final pages, a worksheet, which you might find helpful as you contemplate whatever marketing you have planned this week.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet

• Who's it for?

• What's it for?

• What is the worldview of the audience you're seeking to reach?

• What are they afraid of?

• What story will you tell? Is it true?

• What change are you seeking to make?

• How will it change their status?

• How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?

• Why will they tell their friends?

• What will they tell their friends?

• Where's the network effect that will propel this forward?

• What asset are you building'?

• Are you proud of it?

Like much of what you get from Godin, deceptively simple and to the point, I hope you have some inspiring preacher teachers that you can reflect on that have helped you.

Thanks for reading this; please take a look at some of the links from around the community below. And I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts or comments on this newsletter, our blog or the podcast.  

Have a great week!

Cheers,

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer | Rockstar CMO

Latest on the podcast

Street Knowledge

Some of the articles from our blog and around the community…

Get your Monday Morning Marketing Mojo Working

Maybe the tempo might not get your Monday morning marketing mojoy going, but maybe a good tune to contemplate your teacher preachers.

The promo image used on the web page was partially created using A.I. through NightCafe Studio