-Airbnb
-Twitter
-ChatGPT

The world’s leading brands use a simple psychological insight,

to generate billions of $ in free marketing.

Here’s how you can use it in your business 👇

Summer 2008:

A colleague described a startup with a weird biz model:

“You share your apartment with random strangers for cash”

Me:

“Couch surfing for ppl with no $???”

I laughed in his face:

But there was more:

“Visitors get to the apartment in private cars, with a similar biz model -random drivers/passengers”

Hilarity ensued.

Yet here’s the thing:

I still remember the conversation

=I still remember my 1st encounter with those brands.

=The highest form of marketing you can do

Uber/Airbnb show us the secret:

A great new category:

➡️Once seen
➡️Cannot be unseen

And used the right way, this is worth billions.

Consider:

-5 Hour Energy
-Pixar
-MTV
-Punk music
-Skype
-Swatch
-Abstract art

Note that those things were

-categorically new
-categorically unique
-new use cases
-with new value

=They stood out from anything else in their fields

And were so different

they *burned themselves into the minds of the public*

Psychology:

Your customers *organize the world* into categories
-not brands or products.

=It wasn't those brands that stood out, made an impression, got remembered:

It was the categories:

When perceiving and organizing information

The brain thinks category 1st

Every time.

When the brain doesn’t have a mental category for the new information

=It *creates a new category* and slots it in

Automatically

=Your new category will be:

-Distinctive
-Memorable

A category of one in the minds of your target audience.

Aka, marketing power.

On auto.

So, use that to solve a huge part of the marketing problem:

Create something

-unexpected
-unheard of.

Build something that never existed before.

-No copying
-No imitation
-No attempt to be a little better than anyone else

Instead:

Categorically new and different.

When you start with a category,

you're thinking like your customers.

And aligning with the way the human brain works.

Psychology > Marketing

Categories > Brands

= A hyper-efficient way to get into the minds if your customers

And stay there.

The bottom line:

Think about your 1st encounter with ChatGPT recently

I think it almost certainly demonstrates how:

You cannot unsee a great category

Thanks so much for reading

If you learned something from this, pls follow
@KenPaulCarroll