Known Well vs Well-Known

Hi 👋

I see marketing diverging in two directions right now, and there’s hope in that.

The first is familiar. Speak to as many people as possible as fast as you can. Cast your net wide and broad. This makes sense for something like a microwave, a product solving a universal problem, where volume is the game.

And Mr Amazon himself, Jeff Bezos, once said, " Go niche with high prices and low costs, or go vast at scale. The middle is where things get difficult.” I think a lot of marketing is blindly following suit.

For mission-driven work, the kind where the service is bound up in who you are and what you believe, the wide net poses many challenges. It costs money, headspace, and time. The ROI is questionable.

But marketing is changing and in our favour.

Through researching financially successful newsletters, I have found that those with small, deeply trusting audiences generate more revenue per reader than a large, shallow one.

And the value goes way beyond the business case,

In building honest relationships that actually help people, the whole thing changes character, with service sitting at the centre. You're building with people, not selling to them.

When we chase likes and numbers, we're reaching for a form of illusory validation. This requires us to always stay relevant, and that has a cost: it tethers us to follow the audience, the algorithm, or the trend. You end up chasing what's ‘hot’ and being relevant has a shelf life. Nobody stays hot forever.

But what has more power and wisdom is creating from your own authority and genuine lived experience to build trust with fewer people, but building meaningfully. In the end, these connections are the ones that will stay strong through an incoming storm.

And what's coming up, as I see it, is a significant shift in how knowledge gets valued.

AI is commodifying information, and because of that, people's attitudes toward learning are adapting quickly. As the machine now handles practical operations, the need to personally absorb and execute on that knowledge has reduced. With that, I see the selling of courses dwindle because knowledge is now instantly available for minimal cost.

Simultaneously, I see communities and in-person relationships rising. In smaller but relevant spaces, people exchange stories whilst seeking a sense of togetherness, meaning, and shared goals. The existence of the machine has sharpened the focus on and desire for fundamentally human traits like experience, talents, and setbacks.