Marketing needs to recognise the tectonic shift that occurred when we became a digital species and the new risks, costs, and information flows that shift has created.
Just Evil Enough
“Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook” is a marketing battle book. Flipping the standard marketing playbook.
An extensive version of “Killing giants”:
- Thin ice –> go places where big companies can’t follow (too heavy)
- Speed –> while your big competitor is organising a committee meeting, you have moved
- Winning in the last 3 feet –> let the competitor do the work and intercept at the end (when they buy)
- Fight dirty –> Mismatch, change the rules
- Eat the bug –> Do the unthinkable
- Polarise on purpose –> Be very different to the enemy and highlight that difference
- Seize the microphone –> Dominate the conversation
- All the wood behind the arrows –> Win in the key areas
- Show your teeth –> Pursue the competitive advantage with everything you have
Subversiveness
Subversiveness is timeless. It’s how you win—marketing and poker. Great players know the odds, but they also bluff, watch for tells, provoke, and use their chip stack to intimidate and distract. Textbook marketing is like statistical poker: you’re missing the real game, and with it, true advantage.
Only idiots fight fair
If you play the game of your competitors, you cannot win. The big players drew the map. The dimensions your customers use to understand the market were defined by the companies that created it. You need to break the patterns. The winners made the rules, and to take their place, you must defy them. Subversive tactics can yield dramatically different results for otherwise identical competitors. Product-market myopia overlooks the profound impact that the medium has on success in the modern world. Every system has hidden vulnerabilities that can be exploited to gain unfair advantages. Everyone’s already bored of what you’re doing—so do something new. Also, read “Audacious“.
Break the rules
The game is rigged. Break rules. Defy conventions. Don’t wait for a license. Find loopholes. Get scars. Don’t be an evil genius; do learn to think like one. Your survival depends on subversive thinking. The world is full of real, existential problems that will not be solved with the systems that created them. You must think in new ways. Any definition of marketing that ignores the profound weirdness of humans is, at best, outdated and, at worst, dangerously wrong.
Some rules
- Nobody cares about your product
- It is all about attention
- We live online
- Everything’s multiplayer
- Experimentation is cheap.
- Trust is hard
- Impermanence is the default
- Markets are audiences.
- Humans are irrational
- We act first and justify later.
- We love to conform.
- We’re territorial, even when it hurts us.
- We’re motivated by the approval of others.
- Everything is a medium
- Give the medium the respect it deserves
- The meme is more interesting than the message.
- Smaller teams live closer to the data
- Context matters a lot.
- Everything has an algorithm
- Map first principles.
- Understand what gets consumed.
- Value isn’t about the features you have. It’s about the behaviour you can change.
- Always pick a smaller target market than you’re comfortable with.
- Ignore the guardrails
- Embrace absurdity
- Compromise is the enemy.
- Don’t mistake selling for delivery.
- Avoid incrementalism.
- Judo beats punching
- Fast beats slow
- Test the sensitivity
We all deserve better marketing
We all deserve better marketing. We need creative and practical strategies for winning in a noisy, competitive marketplace. Every successful challenger found a crack in the way the world works and turned it into an unfair advantage. Their stories are full of mischief: bluffing, turning bugs into features, subterfuge, using shame to force buying decisions, amplifying polarisation, exploiting arbitrage, etc. Find an exploit. Seek out contradictions—gaps between what is and what’s supposed to be. Discover—or invent—a new way. Care less what others think. Change is seldom popular. Cultivate disagreeability, so you’re free to act in ways others can’t or won’t. Identify new platforms where loopholes might exist. Look for geographic, cultural, or linguistic inconsistencies you can exploit. Novelty works. Zig when others zag. The wider the gap between you and everyone else, the greater your chance for attention.
The topics
Covering worlds 1,2 and 3 (physics, internal and collective), comparative advantage vs differentiated advantages, category definition, platforms, reverse bandwagoning, amygdala, cultural infiltration, social signalling, situational awareness, paradoxical markets, ear-worms, snapping the buyer out of their default behaviour, FOMO, alternate futures, legitimacy, crowdsourcing, (re-) framing, recombination, simplicity, aggregation, data, TRIZ , mental distance, etc. The book uses numerous examples, poses very pertinent questions, and provides all the tactics you need to truly stand out.
Other books
The book is also a mix of “The Impact Equation”, “Different”, and “Paid Attention“. It is a book like “33 strategies of war” (my all time favourite book on strategy), but this time focussed on marketing. Well worth it.
