One of the ways to make your brand very successful is to create content that communicates a very strong
point of view, particularly on something that is somewhat polarizing.
Companies do this all the time, so HubSpot, for example, has written the story of inbound marketing
is the hero and outbound marketing is the disruptive.
And this is this strong point of view that they've taken.
And they basically kind of created this heroic story around it.
And that's one of the reasons they were so successful with their marketing become a public.
It was the company at the personal level.
I want to highlight a few examples.
So there is this person who did a very good job of self promoting on this woman, and she sent out a
poll asking a polarizing question, which was, is micromanagement good, yes or no?
And of course, ninety five plus percent of people are going to say micromanagement bad.
And that's what you would expect, and often people, when they want their information to go viral through
channels, they will ask silly questions like that where they know how most people will answer, and
that's kind of how you trigger them to respond.
But then she does the unexpected.
She says in the comments, actually, micromanagement is good.
A lot of these personal branding growth hackers will often just say the opposite of what most people
believe to get attention.
So, for example, there's a really popular influencer in the marketing world right now who does exactly
this.
His name is Simon Sinek.
And he's kind of mastered this art.
He says things like leaders should last.
And you should you shouldn't hire people based on their skills.
You should hire them and train them.
So he takes these polarizing points of view to kind of get publicity.
Now, the thing is, a lot of the stuff he says is just completely wrong.
We have empirical evidence that what he says is wrong, but it doesn't it doesn't really matter.
The guys in advertising communications genius.
So just he does what it takes to sell his books, et cetera.
So that's what that's what a lot of these personal branding people do, is to take these kind of counterintuitive,
strong points of view and then they catapult themselves into awareness that way, which this woman did.
I mean, she never would have showed up in my feet if she didn't do something like that.
So her point of view is micromanagement is good, and then she's probably selling some sort of consulting
or something around how to help you with catering to your employees.
Something like that, I'm not really sure.
We also looked at the example earlier of the Nomen Capitalist and Andrew Henderson, and their point
of view is articulated quite clearly in their slogan doesn't that doesn't have to be the case when I'm
talking about communicating a strong point of view and thinking more in terms of maybe PR.
So what kinds of content you're going to get published or video marketing, but it could show up in
your slogan as well, which we see here, go where you're treated best.
So that's a strong point of view, is that you shouldn't just settle where you are.
You should go instead of trying to change the world that you're in and be fed up with the politics,
you just go somewhere else where you're treated better.
So that's a strong point of view.
So excellent job of branding right there.
Now, the message that I've been communicating because I focus a lot on sales companies is that they
need to either go big or they should just go back to selling services.
So one of the central arguments I'm making is that fast companies.
So the software companies have been built for scale.
It's very different from custom software development, which is very labor intensive.
So you basically have two choices.
Either either you scale up, which not enough SaaS companies do, they're very focused on very minute
changes and the kinds of marketing tactics that only grow little bits, things like AB testing with
inbound marketing, instead of focusing on big scale marketing, things like brand building videos,
things like giant outbound lists, targeting that sort of stuff.
So you either go big and scale up or you can go home and just say, I give up, I'm going to go back
to custom software, go back to being an employee instead of running, being an entrepreneur or something
like that.
So that's a very strong point of view, right?
It's not it's not kind of a soft o marketing is good or.
Oh, being a digital nomad is good.
No, it's it's more polarizing than that.
And that's that's the kind of brand messaging that gets broadcasted more strongly.