Ideas that are deceptive are not worth anything.

Ideas that are not relevant or help you achieve your goals are not worth anything.

Beset with such thoughts, today I present a word art that I have written.

Do let me know what you think.

Regards,
the market-editor

I met a marketing yogi once.

High up on some boosted peak of a mountain.

Since it was EOD, and the sun was drowning itself, I sat there on a piece of stone.

The yogi's eyes were closed in a deep meditation.

"What are you meditating for?" I asked, hoping to engage him despite his meditation.

No response.

"Am I audible?" I asked as if I were on a virtual call.

This time the man spoke without opening his eyes-

"I am looking at all the scenarios in which my marketing team achieves its KPIs."

"Oh!" I exclaimed with excitement like a high-five emoji. "And how many of these scenarios have you seen?" I followed up.

"Fourteen million six hundred and five."

"And in how many did your team achieve their KPIs?"

"Only one."

"What!" I couldn't believe this. Could this be so difficult?

"Yes," the yogi replied with a calm that resembled the traffic of a website hit by Google's core updates.

"But if that's so, shouldn't you be out there working?" I circled back.

"I am looking for ideas."

"So, let me get this straight – you know there is only one possibility in the universe that you succeed and still you are not out there, working and figuring it out?"

This time, the yogi opened his eyes, looked at me, and said- "This is work - finding ideas."

I could discern a faint irritation in his voice. This was my cue.

I stood up and started strolling down the mountain.

As the fresh mountain breeze hit me downhill, I suddenly heard the marketing yogi's shrill voice behind me - "Like, Subscribe and Follow for such ideas."

This is a critique as well as a struggle to grasp what driving value really means. And what it should.

Do let me know what you think. (I also shared this piece on LinkedIn and if you wish to follow the post there, here’s the link.)

Regards,
the market-editor

One day, suddenly, all that the brands wanted to provide was 'value'.

No shortcut, no hoops, no fluff. Just pure, immaculate, 16-carat, 100% value.

They ungated all the ebooks after decades of collecting emails.

The emails, anyway, were collecting dust in bell jars on the top shelf of the $1800/month CRM.

'Collecting emails adds friction.' A 21-day expert wrote this post on social media.

So the brands removed all the email fields from their websites.

Overnight, their website traffic soared, phones kept ringing off the hook, and the marketing managers saw confetti in their dreams.

The next day, the CMO of such a brand set up an emergency sync-up.

"The blog is making a direct pitch," he cried in a voice laced with pain.

"Where's the value?" He started sulking.

The team was moved. Other than that, they didn't know what to do.

So, they all edited the blog, re-edited it, revamped it, and sprinkled it with ash and dust from a dormant volcano in the Pacific— until it started generating 1 Million Value/month.

The 21-day expert, who had become an influencer by now, named this strategy 'value marketing'.

"This brand is an overachiever," the influencer shouted out in his latest video. “They provide so much value, I wonder why they haven't replaced the Red Cross or Amnesty yet."

The CMO reposted the video. He didn't add his thoughts like LinkedIn had suggested because the only thing he would ever add was value.

Meanwhile, the market, which was curled up and sleeping on the pavements of Wall Street due to the recession, finally woke up.

There was something to disrupt it - too much value.

With the flood of value created by all such brands, records crashed and the market finally soared. Like an ostrich.

Some obscure journalist wrote how the abundance of values created by the brands might solve world hunger and peace!

A few rebels, though, didn't like this fast value chain. They said that value should be genuine and really help folks, not a disguise for a delayed sales pitch.

They vandalized billboards and spray-painted them with lines like- 'Value marketing is a sincere attitude, not a shiny marketing tactic'.

But that didn't deter brands from continuing to create large-scale value, like the water from the melting glaciers in the Arctic.

Leads and prospects couldn't believe their eyes. They came to the website, filled out the signup form, onboarding form, qualification form, demo form, who-you-didn't-marry form, a bingo card, a horoscope, and finally were able to purchase the product.

For valuable onboarding, the CS team sent them 14 value-filled emails and a Himalayan goat on Day 1.

The customer was glad. He settled in his chair and started using the product.

It was just 4.513 minutes later when he realized it.

His face grew red with anger. And his fist tightened. He picked up his laptop and threw it at the mirror.

It was the most irritating and useless product he'd ever used.

(Add as many sections here as the number of main arguments you have.)

→ Argument n/n - Section n/n
State the next most important of all the arguments.
Example: Another idea (saves time, effort, etc.) to support the proposition.

→ Argument by Statistics - Case studies + Testimonials:
Show them real-life data points and receipts from other users.
Example: How a customer reduced friction using the product to win deals

→ Rebuttals - Objection Handling
Answer objections, cons, market questions.
Example: An FAQ section that clarifies product limitations.

This is a basic and simplistic framework to build an effective landing page without reading much theory. You can add more sections if need be.

There are many other frameworks for creating a landing page which you can use. However, since the fundamental purpose of a landing page is to communicate a specific value proposition or convince an audience about a particular objective, the principles behind this framework are mostly applicable for messaging and copywriting while using any framework or freestyle landing page creation.

Hope this was helpful.

Regards,
the market-editor.

There would be Sarcasm Marketing Managers running campaigns. Essentially sending memes via cold emails.

Chandler would be the Ogilvy of this craft. Surely enough, no one would know what the job really is.

Wodehouse would be the go-to copywriter.
"He had the look of a person who found a lead at the end of the funnel. Isn’t this supposed to be top of the funnel. He scratched his head two times."

Brands would churn out ‘Sarcasm 101 for B2B companies’, ‘Sarcasm marketing for you dummies’, “10 ways you can sarcastic on your website”.

And gate them with a CTA saying- "You thought it's for free?”

Sarcasm marketing influencers' bio would read- "Sarcasm is how I earn my bread but better." or “Say buy-buy to your customers”.

Top-folds would read - “You think you don’t need this product? Neither did that business that just shut down.”

Then some self-proclaimed expert would geek out on socials “Sarcasm is dead.”

Someone would comment below that “Just like your follower count, bud!”

TechCrunch would write an article on it. Google would rank it. Stickers would go out in some conference called Sarcastra 2023 – “Sarcasm isn’t dead. Your pipeline is.”

And then the CEO would ask the Head of Sarcasm for the revenue attribution from sarcasm. The HoS would reply “You really thought you can track revenue from sarcasm?”

The CEO might think it to be a sarcastic quip and ask again.

The HoS would reiterate, “Chief, sarcasm cannot be measured. Only felt.”

And the CEO would feel it then. And would nod in agreement.

This would go on for centuries, till someone would write a whitepaper on how sarcasm influenced 100% of all the deals it indeed influenced to generate dollars. Amazing revenue channel!

Sarcasm agencies would send you cold emails. With cold shoulder sarcastic hooks and subject lines like “I dare you open this email.”

And it would go on. Like some Ishiguro novel or Catch-22 situation.

Where is this universe? Maybe in a galaxy far, far away where all the leads are already cold.

… to be continued.

Wrote this as a rant on my LinkedIn. The core idea behind this was to see marketing ideas as something better than stagnant templates of thumb-rules and formulas. There are many ways to market while making your product interesting in the eyes of your audience. Sarcasm may not be the best, or even, a decent tone for marketing but experimentation and freshness is what works.

Regards,
Yours market-editor.

This phenomena began since the evolution of demand generation or demand gen as a wing or silo of marketing. However, there is a big difference between creating and capturing demand.

Demand Gen vs Demand Capture

Marketers usually do demand capture and call it demand gen. Generating demos from incoming web traffic is not demand generation– it’s demand capture. While priming audiences and engaging them in such a way that they visit your website is demand gen.

Brands that come up with better products or another way of doing 'already done' things are essentially tapping into the existing market. The demand is there. They just have to be present with the right message at the right places. 

This generation of demand that never existed is what makes a brand standout. It is usually fuelled by a ton of creativity, tetra-packs of innovation and, many a times, new technology. But how do you do it?

One of the simplest way of doing this is to recognize pain points nobody thought existed.

Understanding the Art and Science of Demand Generation

On closer inspection, demand generation generally involves one of the following cases

• Creating original demand, or

• Manipulating an existing demand

A thorough understanding of the product and the market is needed to learn which one is more relevant for your brand. Most of the time it is a mixture of both.

Creating original demand

In this case, the audience doesn’t know what the product does or why they need it. If the product or service is solving a pain point, chances may be that the audience doesn’t even know that the pain point exists.

This is usually how most of products enter a market. Salesforce, Figma, washing machines and so on - the hallmark of such products is that they are pioneering a category and are built on highly innovative fundamentals.

An example is MS Excel. When Microsoft started fiddling with spreadsheets, no one knew they would be using one eventually in the future.

At this point, nobody knew that they needed a solution like Excel. They had alternatives and they were comfortable with it. No one was complaining. But then Microsoft started pushing these smart calculating sheets. The first version of Excel for the Macintosh was released in 1985, and the first Windows version in 1987. 1

And alongside they started building a flywheel to push these to the market. What they were essentially doing was creating a demand in the market.

MSExcel helped Microsoft achieve its position as a leading PC software developer. Even in the face of few competing softwares from Lotus, Microsoft maintained its advantage with regular new releases, every two years or so.

Here’s an ad they ran in 1990 to market MSExcel

How to create original demand?

Well the answer is something very simple– educate, educate, educate. 

Creating demand is all about how well you can educate your customers or target group about what your product does. Even the above ad by Microsoft is essentially educating the viewers how Excel can make them fast and smarter at preparing reports. The script of the ad creates a problem or pain-point with time constraint and makes the protagonist solve it with his weapon of choice - MSExcel.

So if you think that your product is a novelty and you need to build demand - start educating your audience. 

But before you put in all your effort in the education process, identify the target group who would eventually become your early adopters. Once you have done this ICP (ideal customer persona) exercise, start building your product education strategies.

How to educate an audience?

Educating an audience is not a simple or quick process. It’s an uphill battle and will need ingenuity from time to time to actually crack it up. Usually this marketing motion is same as product marketing in its acquisition stage.

At this point, your aim is to put the word in your target groups ears that a product like yours exists and it is helping people. 

Some of the ways in which you can achieve this education

• Send out social posts and emails to your audience.

• Run ads with information about your product and its value proposition.

• Work with an influencer that your audience rallies around and siphon product education through them.

• Send out press releases.

• Work with newsletters and affiliates who are popular with your TG.

Find out where your ICP or audience hangs out or spends their time and capture that digital space with relevant, contextual and engaging product marketing content.

Manipulating an existing demand

The next most important way of demand generation is manipulating an existing demand. 

In the case of MSExcel, think of how GoogleDocs built a massive flywheel to manipulate the existing demand for MSExcel. It provided all the features of MSExcel at no cost with a GSuite subscription which many folks were anyways buying.

Demand manipulation might also involve some form of demand capture. Most of the time if you have created a product which isn’t a radical change from the existing ones in the market, you will mostly have to compete with existing players for your share of the demand capture. This entails consuming the existing demand as is. For this, start understanding the existing demands in the market and creating a strategy to tap it. Ear mark various channels which are demand-positive for your brand or product.

SEO is a great example of a channel where you can perform demand manipulation. You can write content on a keyword your audience searches for and connect it with the solution your product offers. The more connected the keyword is to your pain point, the better will be the persuasion.

There is so much more to demand gen and capture. Hope this piece helps you to undertake your own journey into the depths of these concepts and apply them for your brand.

Would request you to add resources in the comment which you think might help other readers.

Regards,
Yours market-editor.

Counter-intuitive but this Paul Graham advice has some real wisdom.

Marketers often get lost in the world of startup hacks and scalable strategies. This usually happens when trying to emulate the success of some other startup.

The core fallacy of this approach is equating all startups and markets as equivalent.

Of course startups have replicated some formula from the past and scaled successfully. But if you actually work out the details of what they implemented for scale, you might discover that they just took the philosophy and customized it in a way that might not even have looked like the idea they started with.

However, the shine of scalable processes is too enchanting. And amongst such a hypnotic room of strategy this quote comes like spell-breaking breath of air.

The problems with scale

One of the best arguments about the disadvantages of doing things that scale I could think of is this:

• If something's scalable, then it's mostly repeatable.

• This means that your competitor or someone else can repeat it.

• The might do it even better in the second iteration.

Think of writing lots of content via AI to usurp the SERPs. (Pun probably intended).

It's highly scalable. But then anyone else can do it as well. So even today, technically the best strategy still would be to write content that stands out rather than just mass producing it.

The idea of doing things that don't scale doesn't at all mean not doing things that do scale. The central idea is to not ignore the things that don't scale.

They are essential. And usually these are forgotten during the hustle and bustle of growth.

The wisdom of things that don’t scale

Coming back to the wisdom of doing things that don't scale. There are so many things

• Building a team, building processes.

• Understanding your product and using it.

• Talking to customers.

• Reading feedback and tickets left by users.

• Understanding your field and concepts in it.

• Building an ops machinery for your team.

• Having non-task talks with your team.

• Living the process of doing all of this.

Some resources-

📜 The Paul Graham article, in case you wanna read

🛤️ A a crowdsourced collection of unscalable startup hacks and stories

You cannot pick it up by looking at 30 examples, 40 tear-downs, and sipping 50 cups of coffee while at that.

Because copywriting is not a T-20 cricket match. It's a series of Test matches – played under immense heat and pressure for months.

Of course, examples, tear-downs, and workshops are of immense help. But there's so much more to learn. So much more to do.

So in this edition of the market-edit, we will take a dip into the realm of copywriting.

Copywriting is like sculpting.

You take a rough shaped body of clay at the start. Just like you do with your drafts. You shape them just like you tinker words. You add the details – the lines, the contours, the jargons, the phrases. It should look real.

Then you take away the words that don't belong on the statue. You chip at them slowly. Till you think the statue resembles what you had in your mind. Just like your draft.

However, copywriting is a kind of sculpting where you don't know what statue you are making.

It's an act of faith. As much as an act of art.

The wind blows over the billboards.

It ravishes everything in its way – trees, plastic bags, sand, and weak hoardings. The desert is real now. It forces everything with a soul into hiding.

It takes 5 minutes or so for the dust storm to settle. The weary travelers come out. They glance at the billboards.

"Thirsty? Paradise to the left." One of the billboard reads.

The travelers suddenly remember they are thirsty.

They all turn left.

Copywriting is a craft.

It's saying relevant, clear words. At the right time. At the right place.

It's not word-plays. It's not adding an action word. It's not using fewer adverbs. But again, it's all of those.

How to start with copywriting

I am sharing some of the very basics of getting started with copywriting. Not a whole lot of technical or advanced stuff, but I will cover the small but critical stuff that can help you understand and navigate copywriting.

Below is a simplistic breakdown of the concepts that can help you write better copies. (This is in no way, a complete picture. There are lots of other advanced frameworks and guidelines that you can find from so many amazing copywriting folks on the internet.)

1. Understand the message

One mistake that many marketers and copywriters make is going straight to the writing stage. They do not struggle or try figuring out the messaging. In fact, this could be one of the easiest reasons for copy failures.

Think about this – messaging is not copy(writing).

The biggest way to simplify copywriting is by differentiating copy from message.

Messaging or message is what you want to say. It’s an idea, a thought. It might be said in a 1000 words novel or in 140 characters of a tweet.

Copy is how you say it. It’s those 1000 words or 140 characters.

Once this difference is established, you can clearly figure out that the first task for a copywriter should be finding out this message.

This is the most daunting step for copywriters. It requires you to understand the audience, market, product/services and the context of the copy (where and how it will be used.)

Research, converse, analyze till you are confident you have grasped what you want to say.

2. Write the first draft

Just write it down. Crude, rough, bad, typos- doesn’t matter - just write the first draft down.

Getting everything right in the first try is gold. But very difficult to achieve. So, don’t pressure yourself into achieving this. Even the best of authors and copywriters have multiple drafts before they finally get it right.

3. Edit like a fervent critic

Once you have got a decent looking draft, now you bring in the editor in you out.

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

I don’t know who said it (there is a bit of confusion to be frank) but it conveys the point - both on writing drafts with ease and editing with all scruples.

Some things to work on while you edit are-

• Cut out words and sentences that don’t help you in communicating what you want to say.

• Replace words with words that make your message more clear.

• Reduce the number of words. A terse, succinct copy is any day better than a long, droning one. Especially if you are writing marketing and ad copies, this is something you should heavily focus on.

• Read it loudly. Does it sound good to you? Reading aloud can help you discover and edit details that the eyes might miss.

• Does your first sentence lead to the second one and that to the third so on? The transition of a sentence into the next one is critical. This is what builds a narrative - a hook to bait the reader into reading the next line. Usually emotional or logical connections do this work. But sometimes, the connections are latent and that also builds a twist that can engage the reader.

• If you have used emotional arguments in your copy, now is the time to verify their validity and expected impact. Does this emotional link sound sincere? Is it forced? These questions can help you figure the congruency of your emotional pointers.

• Check if all your sentences are grammatically correct. Do note that if you are using conversational language, sometimes the sentences will miss out on objects, subjects, etc.

Practicing copywriting as flash fiction

As you might have noticed from the pointers in the editing step that copywriting involves too many things that will only get cultivated through practice. In fact, a fun way to build those copywriting muscles is via flash fictions.

This is because a good copy bears almost all the hallmarks of a flash fiction. It’s saying a story in as few words and as clearly as possible. And many would argue that micro-fiction or flash-fiction is essentially a kind of copywriting.

Below is a flash-fiction or a six-word story, popularly attributed to Ernest Hemmingway, is a great example of a good copywriting.

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

• Notice how terse it is – 6 words.

• There is a good link between phrases. What’s for sale? Baby shoes. What kind of baby shoes? Those that were never worn. There is a beautiful logical sequence running between the words.

• The emotional appeal or presentation is tragic here. And it all comes up as a twist and surprise in the last two words - never worn.
  It also creates a deep mystery. Why were the shoes never worn? Why were they bought in the first place? Did something happen to the baby for which the shoes were bought? An untold mystery of a tragic nature starts looming in the air as soon as you read the last two words.

• In the hindsight, after the next 5 seconds post reading, the mystery bites the reader even stronger. The reader is forced to reverse engineer with the given prompt. Why is the person selling the shoes? What kind of tragedy has befallen the person? Why would they sell something that might be a memory?

There is so much more to copywriting that meets the eye. And what I have stated here are the very basics. As you dive deeper into the field of copywriting you will discover amazing new thoughts and techniques.

Here are some folks you could follow to keep learning about copywriting.

• Eddie Shleyner

• Samar Owais

• Ekaterina Howard

• Joanna Wiebe

Would request you to add more folks in the comment that have helped you with copywriting.

Regards,
Yours market-editor.

How did you feel then? Uncomfortable? Managed? Losing agency?

Well, besides the emotional tug of war consider this - what if the other person said what was incorrect or non-cohesive in your stead? 

It sure sounds like a nightmare.

Now imagine a similar situation where the managed person is your customer. 

In the meeting where you want to understand your customers better, someone else starts speaking up in their stead.

And you soon discover that that person is none other than yourself. 

Well, you get the drift. Right?

So today we will deep dive into the concept of Points of View or POVs and how essential they are for marketing as you know it.

Predicting customer behavior

How your customers behave is very difficult to ascertain. How your customers or audience will react to a piece of content is, again, difficult to gauge.

And so a lot of personal bias and misconceptions start driving in. Very often folks make cloudy judgments about customer behavior. 

The most common one is equating it with one's own point of view. However, how 'you' would behave to a copy or a process might not be how your customer might. Or going one step ahead, even amongst customers there will be plenty of diversity of preferences and reactions to various marketing campaigns. 

And this is where the concept of POV comes into play. 

The concept of Point of View in marketing

We all know what a point of view is. It is exactly the same thing in marketing as well. The important thing here is that POVs differ widely from person to person on a given topic and as a result, their reactions would as well. 

Thus, one of the most critical things in marketing are POVs. Especially, because a marketer's POV may not be equal to a customer's POV. 

In fact, sometimes, the intense knowledge and the confidence a product marketer has around a product creates blind spots.

The most common symptom of this- is someone imposing their own traits, beliefs, and behaviors on their customers. 

Reading preferences, content consumption, and psychological behaviors are all mapped out as if the customer is in a mirror. 

But the fact remains – you are not your customer. 

Your customer might work in an e-commerce company in a European city, may love Moby Dick, like subtle humor, consume long content during subway rides, and hate technical and ops work.

While you might work for a non-e-commerce company, operating from a suburb in India, enjoying Tinkle comics, not caring about humor, believing no one reads in this age and can build macros in MS Excel.

The POVs and the outlook might vary. Quite a lot. Quite soon.

The best way to tackle such subtleties and gross errors of judgment is to try to 'understand' different POVs. 

And that is where great marketing usually starts. 

How to tackle POV biases?

So how do you play out of such bias and build great marketing campaigns-

• Write your hypothesis down. 

  • Write them down to understand their relevance, not to enforce them.

  • Avoid assuming. Assumptions when qualified by experience, common sense, or some data become hypotheses. 

  • Avoid gross generalizations. No, the email is not dead. No, Sans serif is not the font for all. And no, everybody doesn’t like single-column blogs. 

• Talk to your customers

  • Go to your customers with open minds. 

  • Don’t put words of your hypothesis in their mouths. Let them tell you their POV.

• Look at the historical data of what worked out in the past and use that to guide you.

Understanding the customer's POV will help you position your brand with better control. In fact, once you understand this you will know the knowledge, experience, and process gaps that you can fill. This could your own recipe to become a thought leader.

Using POVs to become a thought leader

Most of the time thought leadership is knowing where the gaps in the knowledge, skill, or processes of your audiences are. And understanding their POV goes a long way toward this. 

This brings with it the idea of going against the trend or generally accepted ideas and concepts.

Many times marketers are instructed to -"Say what they want to hear."

Well, DON'T.

Such generic advice could be seen floating all over marketing blogs and socials. The idea promoted here is to write, say or post whatever is in currency with the customer and not swim against the current. 

Well, there is a BIG downside to this! 

If you say only what they want to hear, you won't be able to create a thought-leading brand. You are here to show your customers a new or better way of doing things. And you can't do that without saying things that they don't want to hear or are unknown at that point. 

Stagnant thoughts or ideas can never be a differentiator. It's experiments that build brands.

That’s all, folks

I hope this newsletter edition helps you in understanding customer POVs and building amazing marketing campaigns.

If you have thoughts on this or any ideas to share, let me know in the comments.

Regards, Yours Market-editor

Thanks for staying with me through this newsletter. I would like to confess something today. Lately, I haven’t been finding much time to write regular episodes for ‘Marketedit’, (I know, a tongue-twisted name for a newsletter). 

I believe that the kind of content I want to create for this newsletter needs more commitment which hasn’t been forthcoming from me my calendar. 

I think the road to writing a marketing newsletter (or for that matter, any kind of newsletter) on the sides, passes through the stations of discipline and self-motivation. 

And both these are difficult fruits to find in a wildly enchanting forest of many other capricious ones.

To create or to curate - that’s the question

I have been thinking about newsletters that curate links or story roundups and sometimes feel tempted to go that route. But somehow, I think there are already many of these and maybe these are more on the inspiration side of writing than original and fresh content or opinions.

I mean curation is great. But creating is greater, hopefully. 

One good way to go is to mix both of them up. Create some, curate some. 

Only time will tell. 

The War of the Worlds Words

Google released the Helpful content update. Experts went out saying how this would penalize AI-generated content. 

With this update, Google explicitly asked not to create content for search engines. The irony was that it also said that this ‘judging’ of content for being algorithm-friendly or not would be done by an algorithm. 

To me, that seems like a delightful marketing paradox.

However, a more interesting thing is the comparisons coming up between human and AI-created content. Folks have started to wonder if AI can be a good enough replacement for human writing. In fact, many businesses have leapt up to the task of creating tools to empower AI content writing.

Many claim that AI is just an assistant to the human writer. This seems more reasonable to me. Even in other domains where AIs are claimed to do a fair bit more, often there is a ‘‘human in the loop’.

Brute force vs creativity

This takes me back to the time when I read ‘Deep Thinking’ by the Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. He famously lost to the Chess engine Deep Blue created by IBM. He confesses- 

“Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better.” 
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking

AIs or machines mostly rely on databases and massive infrastructural capability for calculations. A human can only do so much in a minute. A machine is in a way a brute force that can do what humans can only dream of, just like they do in the mechanical side of the world like lifting and moving at speed.

However, these superpowers of machines will not be able to help create a content piece on ‘How your onboarding emails can do better with a more emotion-based copy’. The reason is because the machines lack concept, context and connections. And this is an understatement.

Take the case of a chess engine and a chess grandmaster. The stark difference between them is that the engine doesn’t understand the concepts of win, lose, king or queen, the significance of the rules of chess the way they are laid out, while a grandmaster does all of this and so much more. Of course, you can code the ‘weight’ of some of these concepts into the engine, but it’s not the same kind of comprehension. There is something inherently human in the way we connect our reality with these abstract concepts like win, loss, conversions, revenue and so on which no machine can emulate. 

And this could very well be the human writers’ superpower - the analytical observational understanding of the value of things around and not just their price points or frequencies. 

Kasparov discusses this beautifully in the same book. He says-

“The human mind isn’t a computer; it cannot progress in an orderly fashion down a list of candidate moves and rank them by a score down to the hundredth of a pawn the way a chess machine does. Even the most disciplined human mind wanders in the heat of competition. This is both a weakness and a strength of human cognition. Sometimes these undisciplined wanderings only weaken your analysis. Other times they lead to inspiration, to beautiful or paradoxical moves that were not on your initial list of candidates.” 
― Garry Kasparov, Deep Thinking

Writing for humans vs the neon gods

I won’t go more into the “deets” of this discussion.
But there is another aspect of this algo-infested world important for the content creator and which is what Google’s update was about in the first place - creating content for humans, not algos. 

And this can be extended to almost all content creation platforms - socials, newsletters, podcasts, etc. 

Creating content to game the algo. might look like a validated strategy (think of all the templatized tweets doing well, etc.) in the long run, but all the expert opinions are clear that it might not be the best one. 

In fact, it’s counterintuitive. You have to transact or enagage with humans at the end of the chain. And so focus on those folks. Create content for your ICPs, your audience, and not for your neighborhood algorithm. 

Frankly, there is a huge difference between the two. When you write to appease the neon gods of internet, you may have to 

• compromise your style of communication,

• and sometimes even the actual message,

• you might also start judging the 'truth' of your content by the number of 'likes' or ‘reactions’ 

In the short term, this can help you get some traffic and eyeballs, but in the long run, you will end up losing your style, and if you just started writing, maybe not even discover it.

Validation might be fine, but trend-setting and thought-leading content is, most of the time, fearless, unapologetic, and swims against the current.

Sadly, we don't know how many bright, sunlit ideas are being lost daily to the deities of 'engagement'.

Regards, Yours Market-editor

In case you are wondering why such a simplistic or irreverent question, here’s why I think this might in reality be layered and important — marketing attribution is still a black-box.

And improper attribution means that there might not be any robust and good criteria of measuring marketing methods to separate the good ones from the bad ones. Except maybe by trial and error followed by some statistical juxtaposing of various campaigns with results and signals.

(Marketing attribution is a black box mostly because of technical limitations, or in the larger picture maybe an inherent property of marketing funnels. This could be a bigger discussion requiring us to solve for a polynomial that has too many fluctuating parameters. Maybe, we will come back to this in a later episode of the Market-ed-it.)

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So, what’s good marketing?

Clearly there are a few things that are useful in creating a good marketing stack- a wide tactical knowledge plus strategic experiences. These two are on top of the list along with skills like copywriting, content writing, performance marketing and so on.

Add some awesome marketing tools in the mix from analytics, CDPs, CRMs to data visualization and stitching softwares.

You do this and lo, you are at the cusp of a great marketing stack. You might feel it. And if you run with it, you might see some results. And you would switch and toggle a few of these parameters and try again, till your CAC is few (or many) times lesser than the LTV or your ACV gets a boost. Or you may have a more bottom to top approach using contextual data points for each channel and trying to work out what makes sense in real time. Or you might try a revenue attribution technique and check various statistical models to see what actually makes sense for your business.

All these are scientific ways to measure marketing methods, though almost always empirical. These maybe even effective at times. But at the end of the day, it’s just plain old trial and error.

And if you introspect you will be back to the question we started with ‘What makes a good marketing?’

At this point, let me address this question head on, there is no correct answer to that. Obviously. You know that. But what I am trying to say is that there is a way you can optimize this trial and error formula to create a better marketing stack. There is a secret ingredient, if I may, that you can use to do this. And that secret stuff, could be, possibly, what makes a great marketing stack.

How to optimize trial & error marketing?

Well I will go on and state plainly what I think this ingredient is. It’s ‘understanding’.

And when I say understanding I don’t mean understanding your customers. That’s because it’s fairly difficult to cast your customers as a monolithic ICP. True some of the traits match, but that won’t take us very far except in putting the correct filters in your prospecting tools.

So when I say ‘understanding’ what I mean is understanding your own product, the market (includes competitions, parallel industries, criss-crossing sectors), and maybe, the problem you are solving. Again, just like understanding customers, the problem part may get very complicated very soon, depending upon your product/service.

These three things (product, market & the problem) are the fundamental components of marketing. To throw in an analogy here, if marketing was a Star Wars universe, these three would be the integral elements of the ever elusive and tough-to-master ‘Force’.

And just like one needs to understand and master the Force to become a Jedi, so does a marketer need to understand these three things to create a good marketing stack. And become a Jedi marketer in the process.

How to understand?

Understanding is a thoroughly abstract concept. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as below -

Tricky ain’t it? I would even say these are too simplistic.

But it’s not something as simple as knowing facts or meanings or associations. It’s all that and so much more. And as I said, it’s one of those abstractions that we can ‘understand’ but maybe hard to enunciate. In fact, understanding ‘understanding’ can be a paradoxical adventure at the outer edges of what we think we know.

But one thing is for sure. Understanding is not easy.

In fact, it’s one of the most difficult things to do. But it’s also one of the most human things to do. And that’s why it’s important to ingest this in your marketing strategy. Since you are trying to reach other humans with a proposition at the end of the day.

So I will try to recount some of the existing and opinionated (mine of course) ways of understanding the three things we want to - product or offering, market and the problem.

Let’s dive headlong into it.

Understanding your product/offering

Before you explain your product to your prospects, how well do you understand it yourself? Some pertinent questions here could be-

• Do you use your own product/offering?

• Is your product a cross-section of many ideas?

• A cross section of other products?

• If your product has detailed features, do you know how to use or deploy them?

• Do you know when not to use your product?

• Why is this product important?

• What technology/innovation fires your product?

• If this product wasn’t available, what would change in the area where it applies?

So on and so forth.

These questions are not the definitive questions to ask or answer. But these will provide a kind of opening into a very introspective look at how your product interacts with you and vice versa. And hopefully you will be able to look at your product with far more understanding.

The idea here is to gauge that interface between your product and its users and not just know what its use-cases are.

Understanding the market

Market is a very broad term and there isn’t a specifc way or attitude to understand it. But here are some traditional things that can help understand this ever-dynamic force of the market-

• Learning about competitions and their product/services

• Conducting customer research to understand what problem one is solving

• Conducting large scale primary and secondary market research

A few things that I would like to add here that can help are-

• Understanding horizontal and vertical applications that coincide or graze the envelope of your product’s applications

• Learn what are the alternatives to your product are and not just your competitions. Is there a technology that could replace your product?

• What market or technology changes are upcoming

• What’s the cultural and social impact of your product

• Where do folks who buy your product hangout (digitally speaking)

Again, not a definitive list but a prop to help you start your brainstorm.

Understanding the pain point

Understanding the problem you are solving is not easy. It’s the biggest challenge for the marketer to tame.

The point here is to be brutally honest- are you really solving a problem? If you are, there are chances you might be solving more than one problem. In that case, you need to understand each of those separately.

’What makes the problem you are solving a good problem to solve’ is what will nudge folks to buy your product or offering. So dive a layer deeper into the problems you are tackling.

I have written another piece on this exact topic, with a slightly different angle. You can read that here-

Market-ed-it

The Alleged Art of Eliminating Pain-Points

Every area matures after its jargons are set up. To illustrate let me throw here the word ‘pain-point'. This hyphenated word has recently become popular in the business or marketing world. Businesses proclaim that their main agenda is removing these points that are such a headache for their customers or prospects…

Read more

5 years ago · Zeeshan Akhtar

Closing it out

It’s been a long newsletter. But I hope you found some useful connects on your way to understanding the Force of markets. Maybe a faint touch or a question, but a connection nonetheless.

Once you have a sense of these important parts of the Force, you will be able to understand your hit and trial results better than any software or algorithm can tell you. Why? Well, let’s say that just like mastering the Force gives powers to a Jedi, so does understanding these details to a marketer. And once you have this understanding, the Force will guide you and your campaigns into better places.

Let me know what you think.

And, may the Force be with you.

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“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” ― George Orwell, 1984

The other day a fellow marketer asked me about how I deal with all that is happening around us. Even though the person didn’t specify exactly what, I knew what they were pointing to, given that there are so many issues crowding the social canvas at present - global warming, wars, pandemic, imperialism, and propaganda. However, I realized that when someone asks such a question, it’s not about any of these particular events per se. 

The despair is not triggered by a piece of single news or current affairs. But it’s a kind of cumulative essence of all such events. It’s what filters out of all that we consume - read and watch - on the internet throughout the day. This filtrate is not an event or an objective fact of reality. It’s a sense of unease, a trepidation of mind, and volatility of our identities, that settle in our consciousness at the end of the day. And it's a feeling that is hard to shake off. 

Such feelings are inevitable in such times though. Especially if you are a marketer whose job is to improve business ROI, create brand awareness, and get more folks in the sales pipeline- there is a massive shift in values as one navigates from one’s work to one’s social life. And to feel this, I didn’t have to do much thinking. A scroll through my Twitter feed at different times was enough.

The signs of the times

I have always been conscious of the split personality that my Twitter feed has. At one point it shows the best practices by marketing nerds and experts, the value of content marketing, and how to write copies to convince your audience to buy. At other times, it tells me about state oppression, wars, pandemic deaths, global warming, and heatwaves, not to forget the countless trolls who are spewing propaganda on and on. How does one possibly reconcile these two faces?

At one point, I even felt guilty while posting about something that I learned or discovered while running a marketing tactic. How could I post a marketing hack, when so much is going on. How can I value a ‘framework for lead generation with mid-gating’ over a 'call for justice’?

And then even bigger questions flood in. How can we relegate talking about social issues to ‘activists’ while we sit talking about ‘marketing attribution’ and ‘third-party cookie’? What has happened to our value system? And this is just one little snippet of the argument in my entire system. Every time, I either rationalize or ignore these questions completely. But it doesn’t change their recurrence or the reality of where we are at present.

1984 - 2022

Often in such a situation, my mind goes back to ‘1984’. That is one of the most haunting books I have read. Sample this-

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.” ― George Orwell, 1984

The idea that freedom and happiness coexist is not true all the time. This thought can help us re-evaluate our value systems if we want to. This book helped me see through the mist of doubt and insincerity. But did it answer all my questions? No. Did it answer at least a few? Well, yes and no.

The best gain out of 1984 was the sense of community. That there was someone who wrote and thought about all the questions I am asking right now. And Orwell's not the only one. Countless others have written and spoken about these issues and many continue doing so even today. Some voices are strong with a large following. Some are weak, but they are voices nonetheless. And that's what counts.

Fellowship of ideas

As I navigate these books, tweets, reports, articles, and essays, I become a part of an illusory fellowship. And this fellowship doesn’t ignore the realities of society in lieu of profits. It speaks about them, it chides them. It shouts about these micro and macro injustices in the world from the rooftops.

And this fellowship must go on without fail. Every day. And so must our efforts in marketing, science, mathematics, philosophy, and others. Especially because we cannot forsake all these. These are necessary pursuits to sustain human life and civilization. And doing these doesn't mean we cannot raise our voices at what we think is wrong.

In fact, we need to make an impact wherever we can, while we can. And this shouldn’t limit us from speaking out for things, that go beyond mere profits and food on the plate. Both can be done together.

As pointed out in the below quote by Edward Said, who taught literature at Columbia University, while being one of the foremost spokespeople for Palestine, humanism could be the answer to the split personality of our deep async between social and professional lives.

“Most important, humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.” ― Edward W. Said, Orientalism

The point is simple.

Copywriting, like any other skill, when stripped of values, becomes a tool for profiteering as its end goal, however hard a business might stress that they want to improve customers' lives on their website copies.

Having said this, I realize that as a marketer, we all have a huge responsibility riding on our shoulders.

To write that copy or not. That's the ultimate question.

Reading between readability

Readability is related mostly to the perception of the content by readers. This is one of the concepts that doesn't deal with just the writer. This is where the reader also starts contributing to the formulation and writing of the content. What had been essentially a writer-centered craft till now, starts getting informed by the readers’ perception.

Hemmingway App which measures this ‘Readability’ quantitatively, claims that it builds on the researches in this field that aim to decipher how understandable a piece of writing is.1

Now, when stated that way, the concept of Readability seems to have set itself up for a daunting task, I think.

Because how does one decide how understandable a piece of writing is? How does one understand the prejudices, literary capabilities, contextual knowledge of all the sets of readers, and the various undercurrents of changes that a language or a dialect undergoes from time to time?

On comprehension

But then, we do have these intuitions about whether a content piece will communicate effectively what it’s meant to or not while reading it. But does that say something about the content piece or our own comprehension abilities? Because our assessment of any piece of text is influenced and shaped deeply by our own repertoire of readings, writings, experiences, contextual knowledge, the language that is used around us, even culture, and so on.

So how justified are we in making such claims about a piece of writing?

There is no clear answer to this question, I think. But our own judgments and perceptions of texts have to mean something, or else the entire field of literary criticism, textual exegesis, and the likes will collapse.

There has to be at least a personal truth in our perception of a piece of reading. Also, we need to recognize the fact that our perception and experiences might not be reflected or replicated in someone else reading that same piece.

Measuring the comprehension of a text

So then we are back to square one - is there a way to measure the inherent understanding, or what we call readability, of a text?

This is where tools like Hemmingway, Grammarly, and the likes come up.

These tools basically remove the direct human judge which is almost always informed by the human experience and replace it with an algorithm. Of course, that algorithm has to be influenced by human experience in some way or the other. But that’s remote and is mostly based on syntactical rules of the language as well as numerous so-called thumb rules, like reducing the usage of adverbs.

So when you measure the readability of a text, what you are actually measuring is how compliant your text is with the existing algorithm and the so-called thumb rules. The semantics of the text, which is what contributes to the comprehension portion of the text, are largely un-measured. Semantics for the most part require the comprehension and ability of language which means it will require a human mind.

So what really can readability tell us?

My idea is not to discard the concept of readability. But to understand it and find what it tells us about a text.

If not the semantic comprehension, can it at least say something about the way in which I construct sentences that might be difficult to understand or some rules of language that might make a text un-readable by a certain reading section?

Does it measure the famed un-readability of classic novels and texts by Shakespeare, Dickens, and so on?

To understand this, I did a small experiment.

My experiment with readability

Hemmingway App measures the readability of writing as per US Grade Standards. It basically tells us which U.S. grade level training is required to understand a piece of text. So out of curiosity, I entered a few famous and not-so-famous selections of passages, from different fields and times, into the app to see what readability scores get assigned to these.

I started with the first few sections of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemmingway, the American writer after whom the app is named, and here’s what I got-

I then entered the famous and popular opening paragraph of ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens into the app and here’s the result-

I also entered one of the songs in William Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’-

Next, I entered the first few paragraphs of Wikipedia’s article on the Riemann Hypothesis.

These results, of course, do not represent the analysis of the whole canon of the writing done by these writers or the platform. Also, one has to understand that the next paragraph from the same book or article might be recorded differently on the readability scale by the app. However, these texts can help us understand what we are measuring when we are measuring readability.

So, here’s a summary of this tiny experiment arranged in descending grades:

• Grade 2 - Song from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’

• Grade 4 - Opening paragraphs of Hemmingway’s ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’

• Grade 12 - Opening paragraphs of Wikipedia’s article on the Riemann Hypothesis

• Post Graduate - Dicken’s opening paragraph of Dicken’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’

Now, this is a surprising turn of events. At least for me.

The song from ‘The Tempest’ is laced with old English and has a rich usage of the range of English vocabulary. This is usually considered a challenging text to comprehend. But as per the readability measurement, this could be understood by a Grade 2 person. Either that or there is something off.

On the other hand, Dicken’s opening paragraph, not only establishes the credulity and dichotomy of the time of the French Revolution, using repetition of ideas and explanation, it is considered one of the easiest texts to follow. One can just read it to verify this claim. Again, as per the tool, it is a Post-graduate level read.

Explaining a concept like Riemann Hypothesis, which rattles many mathematicians’ brains, cannot be done without some of the jargon and vocabulary of mathematics. However, this doesn’t render it incomprehensible to a Grade 10 mathematically-trained person or make it easy to understand for a Grade 12 person not trained in mathematics. Being fair to Wikipedia, the usage of words is simple, sentences are short but the context and the ideas inherent in the text are not.

Hemmingway’s storytelling in the opening paragraphs of the text builds on scenery and paints a picture in the reader’s mind. While his text on reading, feels a lot simpler, in my opinion, than Shakespeare’s songs, they are at a higher grade on the readability scale. So there’s that.

Grades of readability

This experiment reaffirms to some degree my earlier argument that readability doesn’t measure the comprehensibility of the text from a semantics lens.

Moreover, the assigned scores are in terms of grades.

This is built on the assumption that as we progress up the grade levels, the readability of the text decreases, that is, the texts become difficult to understand progressively.

So Grade 10 text is difficult to understand than Grade 5 text.

But is this so?

If this was true, it must mean that as we progress the language somehow becomes more cumbersome and the vocabulary more tedious to understand.

And if this is so, does it mean that you can still explain the Riemann hypothesis to a Grade 2 person by using simpler words, lesser adverbs, and tips from all these readability apps?

I am afraid not.

Because to talk about Riemann Hypothesis, you have to prepare the person with progressive mathematical concepts like number theory, the concept of hypothesis, complex numbers, and others. It’s more of a contextual and knowledge-based problem rather than about the mode of expression.

Of course one has to express as simply as possible to be comprehensive to a larger audience. But this might be limited to switching synonyms with alternatives that are perceived as simpler or are more popular.

Also, the wordiness of a sentence affects clarity. But that doesn’t mean that using rich and precise words should be avoided. The cost of meaning is always greater than the cost of expression.

In fact, the way we express a thought in a sentence remains the same even as grades change. ‘I need a glass of water’ doesn’t become something else in terms of how we create sentences just because we cleared Grade 10. Nor do we find anyone at the Post-graduate level saying- ‘I have the desire to consume an edible liquid compound of di-oxygenated hydrogen’.

The idea of words

What actually happens as the grades progress, is an incremental increase in the complexity and depth of the ideas being served to the individual in these grades. What this means, is that our vocabulary has to expand and our understanding of the world has to incorporate a larger picture and jargon from different fields of studies.

And to talk about these ideas one has to consequently enrich the language. And our knowledge of words and expressions.

In fact, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

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Market-ed-it is my effort to understand what drives marketing and what impact it has on the humans of marketing and the ones marketed to. Do subscribe to receive email updates as soon as I publish new posts here.

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So this one’s for the dilemmas and especially for this one particular dilemma.

Since the day, I created this newsletter, which is not very long ago, (I know I am overusing adverbs, dear marketer, thanks for reminding!), I have been having this debate with myself, and sometimes with some friends who share companionship in marketing with me- what precisely is the value of such a content that doesn’t have growth hacks, or guides, or doesn't follow any established rule of marketable content? (I know that I could have said it without using ‘precisely’). Typical marketing questions, you see!

Today as I face this dilemma, I also delve into the depths of content writing and structures.

The reason for content

In marketing, the value of an activity is defined by the outcome. The ends justify the means, most of the time in most of the places. This is almost universally accepted as the thumb rule. By this rule, your content exists to bring subscriptions, increase sales, and be perceived as something that the customer can call insightful and then, more importantly, ‘share’.

In a way, the entire content creation strategy is dominated by a thorough focus on what it is supposed to deliver. It should be able to market ideas and products and be marketable as well while at it.

Even though there are so-called principles like ‘don’t make it a click-bait’, ‘humanize the idea’, and so on - I think even these positive allowances are in a way impositions. The marketer (within or without) is slowly stripping away degrees of freedom from the writer like an onion peel. This goes on till one reaches the bottom of the onion - a content-writer mold that can be found in almost every company. But is this fair or natural or even worth it?

The Divide

Some things should be clarified. There is a clear distinction between sloppy writing and well-crafted content that is universally felt and understood across domains of marketing, literature, science, and so on.

A good piece of writing

• expresses the idea it set itself to in the first place,

• has good grammar and narrative,

• doesn’t confuse or confound the reader (unless that’s what the aim is), and

• can engage the reader till the end.

A bad piece of writing on the other hand fails on one or more of the above counts. This looks like a fairly basic and useful analysis of content writing. The only problem with this analysis is that all of the above pointers except that of the grammar are subjective. This brings to a highly relevant and important content that plagues marketers today- what makes a good quality writing?

Can you measure the goodness (or badness) of a ‘writing’?

I remember this scene from Dead Poet’s Society where John Keating, the character played by Robin Williams, discusses the measurement of the greatness of a poem using a preface of a fictional textbook called "Understanding Poetry" by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard.

To quote the exact words from the movie (same as the video above)-

To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions:

1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and

2) How important is that objective?

Question 1 rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.

If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.

A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry.

From Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. featured in the movie Dead Poet’s Society

The issuing rebuttals from John Keating in the movie provide very clear insights into how not to evaluate poetry, at least. You might be able to measure the rhyme and meter to a certain extent, but the actual worth of the poem is something that cannot be solved using an equation, however many variables you use.

This argument is of course not very complete in the sense that it doesn’t state explicitly why one cannot measure the greatness of poetry. But it accepts that poetry is more than just a form and rules of language and sound. But still, this might be a good enough argument. This argument also supports the idea that in truth you can only understand the greatness of a poem and its poetry by reading it and what it means to you - there is no other way.

What is the quality of content?

So can we make some argument of this form for content writing too?

Well, one thing one should recognize, going forward, is that there are no metrics for quantitative analysis or measurement of what we can safely call the quality of writing.

Quality by definition relates to some inherent virtue or property very much like the Greek philosophers’ idea of logos which suggested that the world manifests the properties it does because that’s the underlying and intrinsic nature of the world. The world is the way it is because that how the world ought to be.

However, I don’t want to use such a philosophy, not for the world and also not for the quality of content. For I believe that the quality of content originates not from the writing or the inherent patterns of words, but through the will and skill of the writer.

So quantifying the goodness or quality of writing is somewhat of a misnomer. In fact, quantifying quality is an irony of sorts.

Tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway Editor indeed provide a quantitative score for a piece of writing. But how much of that is a relevant analysis of the quality of writing, is something that can be pondered upon.

The idea of syntax

A very common writing improvement technique afforded by tools like Grammarly is grammar check and sentence construction improvements.

These as such don’t change the overall essence of the writing but they make the writing acceptably correct as per the prevalent rules of grammar. Such improvements can be understood by the concept of ‘syntax’.

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Syntax as follows-

Syntax is thus rooted in acceptable logic- acceptable because grammar itself is an accumulation of accepted rules of language or dialect over a period of time in a given geography. In fact, this is the reason there are different versions of English throughout the world. However, I do not mean to say that syntax is equal to grammar but a case can be made that syntax has a huge role in defining grammar across languages.

Why am I discussing syntax here?

The syntax of a sentence is something that can be evaluated with some kind of an algorithm. In fact, the idea of syntax is also used in coding where it is used to signify the language structure of statements for writing an algorithm.

Thus, grammar check is valid because grammar is syntactical in nature. The subject-verb agreement can be checked with logic or formulas. Voices, tenses and punctuations can be checked with an algorithm. Sentence constructions can be improved, that is again a syntactical review.

In fact, during my childhood, my father used to inspire me to score full marks in grammar and mathematics because he said both are logic or rule-based. But he always maintained that literature wouldn’t be an ideal subject to get 100 marks out of 100, because they are highly subjective.

Next up: Readability and other demons

So as far as we are correcting the grammar and construction of sentences, such an evaluation makes sense. But what about other factors that are associated with quality of writing these days, like readability, adverb usage, sales-worthiness, copywriting and so on. Are these measurements founded on strong principles or logic because many of these are subjective to the naked eye? Also, do these make sense from a marketing point of view? Does one need to write an article in a template to make it worth it? What should be the goal of a content writer who is writing to dessiminate news about a product or ideas?

These are the questions we will explore in the next issues of Market-ed-it, and tackle all the demons that a content writer must face to write that perfect marketing piece.

P.S. Here’s a small teaser into the next episode of Market-ed-it. The Hemmingway app is named after the American novelist and writer, Ernest Hemmingway. Out of curiosity, I entered the first few sections of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemmingway into the app, and here’s what I got-

Read the next episode here:

Market-ed-it

The Dilemma of a Content Writer 2

This is a continuation of the previous post linked here. Reading between readability Readability is related mostly to the perception of the content by readers. This is one of the concepts that doesn't deal with just the writer. This is where the reader also starts contributing to the formulation and writing of the content. What had been essentially a writ…

Read more

5 years ago · Zeeshan Akhtar

To illustrate let me throw here the word ‘pain-point'. This hyphenated word has recently become popular in the business or marketing world. Businesses proclaim that their main agenda is removing these points that are such a headache for their customers or prospects.

Such topical words are necessary to create the area of marketing. This is similar to the phenomenon of associating ideas and abstract concepts like culture, nation-states, and life with a linguistic formalization of those ideas into jargons to exist as an entity.

And like all the other areas and abstractions, there can be an in-depth analysis of how these jargons connect with the topic or the area in the real world. Let’s get back to the word ‘pain-point’.

Solving problems vs/& Creating profit

Many businesses claim that they are trying to solve pain-points. If you check out the initial pitches of numerous startups and business organizations they lead with the fact that they are out there to resolve a certain pain point. And many of them are frankly and in all honesty conceptualized as a solution to a certain problem in the funnel. But not all!

For so many others, the idea of ‘pain-points’ has become just another gimmick to sell one more product or a feature. This not only leads to a diluted understanding of the market and the pain point, it also leads to a marketing strategy that is built on exploiting people’s vulnerabilities for sales.

Disadvantages of such intentions

The marketing or the GTM strategy that is devised on the premise of solving problems for only problem sake while not truly doing so might have numerous issues.

• The strategies would focus on finding more and more pain points, close enough or remote, that can be associated with the product or service to inflate the probable demand. This not only dilutes the value proposition, it even leads to confusion while developing the product or writing services.

• It puts all the onus on the eliminating of problems or finding an enunciation in terms of pain-point as the must-have for businesses. Products that create beneficial leverages in various workflows, but not necessarily eliminate them, are deemed lower in usability.

Is honesty still the best policy?

What I am trying to say is not that businesses should not say they are solving pain points, but that they shouldn’t be hypocritical about it. It’s a fact that a business is, after all, a business- it’s supposed to market and sell products and services. It is supposed to generate profit for its stakeholders. So, there should be no qualms in accepting this in front of your prospects. What shouldn’t be done is projecting the business idea as a world-saving, altruistic model that needs just ‘some’ money to survive and built the ‘world-saving’ machinery.

Of course, we need such world-saving, altruistic models of businesses. Many such organizations are there not for the profits but for eliminating one or some of humanity’s pain-points. And that is a magnanimous thing to do!

P.S. The next topic that I am working is about the value of content writing for marketing purposes. If you want to collaborate on this with me, feel free to send me a ping or email.