The Beat: Oxford Comma

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a 3xCMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. 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.

Hello rock star :-)

Happy Sunday, I hope you’ve had a great week, and thanks for opening this email.

I am writing a book! OK, not quite true, I am writing a book proposal, as I signed up for a 10-day business book course with Alison Jones after a tip-off from one of my podcasting chums, Keith Smith, and I’ve completed the first five days this week. 

I wasn’t sure what I was letting myself in for. I booked the course on a whim before Christmas, but the interesting thing is that most of the course is not really about the book's content, how to write or whether one should use the Oxford comma - it’s mostly about marketing. 

For example, day two encouraged us to think about the needs of the reader, and day three to think about who the book is for, what does it do for them, why it matters, and why they would want to hear this from you.

Words to live by as a marketer right? 

Whether we are writing a book, a blog post, a sales presentation, a product flyer, a web page, or even deciding on our product strategy, we need to stop and think:

Who, what, so what, and, why you?

It sounds simple, and today I was listening to the Marketing Book Podcast, a show I am a huge fan of, and in this episode, the host, Douglas Burdett, interviewed Allyson Letteri, the author of Standout Startup. 

Douglas really digs into these books during these extended interviews, and Allyson shares the models she uses to help startups position themselves to take their first steps into marketing. It’s a really good listen, and her book is in my Amazon basket (it’s not available on bookshop.org - which I am trying to use more). 

Throughout the conversation, and while Allyson didn’t use the same words, I could hear the words from my writing course: who, what, so what, and why you? 

A reminder that marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. This is a thread that I hope to pull on in the book I am proposing, as I want to turn the work we’re doing on Rockstar CMO around the “Five F’in’ Marketing Fundamentals” into a book. 

BTW - I would love your opinion on something - Alison (the course tutor) doesn’t like the two apostrophes in f’in’. and, we use this a lot in our content. Should we go with “f’ing” for these things or keep the apostrophes?

Back to the Oxford comma, if this is the first of these newsletters you’ve read (thank you!), I use song titles for the subject line, which, of course, goes against any advice you might get on email marketing, but today’s inspiration is The Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend who ask  “who gives a f**k about the Oxford comma?” 

As I embark on the start of this huge project, I probably should.

Thanks for reading. Please take a look at the links below, and have a great week. 

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Now on Threads, be great to connect there, if you are on - https://www.threads.net/@iantruscott

Street Knowledge

The good stuff from Rockstar CMO, our community and other stuff I’ve liked…

From the Band

From the interwebs

I’ve spun the dial on the interwebs, a couple of things that caught my eye:

Get your Monday Morning Marketing Mojo Working

Some fun this week, for the writers, at the expense of the Oxford comma….

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