Page 104 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

Consider the tagline ‘We make great cars through great research.’ It’s not
terribly inspiring. The best companies market from deep within their
development process using their inner why and speaking directly to the heart of
the foundation.”

Sinek refers to Steve Jobs, who once commented that his most hated words
were “branding” and “marketing.” Former Apple marketing vice president
Allison Johnson explained that in the late Apple CEO’s mind, “people associated
brands with television advertising and commercials and artificial things. The
most important thing was people’s relationship to the product. So any time we
said ‘brand’ it was a dirty word.

“Marketing is when you have to sell to somebody,” Johnson said. “If you
aren’t providing value, if you’re not educating them about the product, if you’re
not helping them get the most out of the product, you’re selling. And you
shouldn’t be in that mode.”

Can any person or company become a Heroic Brand?

One of the most progressive and honest commentators in marketing today is Jay
Baer. Although well-known as a consultant, speaker, and author of the best-
selling book Youtility, Jay is also a trusted voice of reason in the digital
cacophony. We had a great debate on this question: Can anyone get to a point
where people share your content just because of who you are? His valuable
insight follows:

“Every time I publish a blog post, approximately 125 people tweet it
instantly using some sort of automation protocol. It’s gratifying to be
so trusted that this group believes it is in their best interest to
automatically redistribute what I write. But I also find it frightening,
and it’s not something I would ever do myself.

“While I certainly try to create appropriate content every time I open
the laptop to write, I know that some content is better than other
content, the same way that not every batch of pulled pork is your
tastiest, and not every workout achieves a personal best. By
automatically sharing all of my content, this group is indirectly saying
that my C game is still meritorious. That’s amazing to me, especially
considering my attitudes could change, I could just be wrong (happens
all the time), my blog could be hacked, and any number of other