Marketing Principles for the AI Age

I took over Marketing at Intercom a couple of months ago. One of the first things I did was publish our belief that we need a New Way. The trusted ways of Marketing that have existed for the last decade won’t work for the next. Another early thing I did was write and publish a set of Principles: Guidelines that we use to execute. Below are the Principles, unedited from our internal version. I hope you find them useful!

Marketing Principles

Principles serve as the foundations for behaviours to get you what you want. They are like rules of thumb that can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals. To learn more about principles, I highly recommend reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio.

FOUNDATIONS

Deeply understand our customer.

Great marketing drills right into how people truly feel deep down. It understands them, sometimes better than they understand themselves. People are notoriously bad at describing what they really need.

We read as much research as we can about our customers. We have never ending curiosity about how they think, what they say, and what they do, knowing that these things are not always consistent. That is why we do our own synthesis.

Understand our product.

You can’t market a product you don’t understand. We take pride in understanding and using our product, and the latest AI technology. 

This is a technical time, a time for builders, and we lean into that. We channel Einstein: make it as simple as possible, but no simpler. To do that we must embrace details, and understand what we’re leaving out. 

We know the winners will be those who think of new ideas because they understand the cutting edge of what the technology can do.

WHAT WE MAKE

Keep things simple.

Marketing is effective communication: we have something we want other people to think or say, and marketing is how we persuade them to think or say it.

Simple ideas are easier to understand. Ideas that get shared are simple ideas. We therefore work to make things simpler, and we don’t add unnecessary detail because we know it makes comprehension harder. 

Shorter is simpler. We work extra to make things shorter.

The best marketing in history has a clear pattern: a small number of simple ideas, executed with creative excellence. That is what we do.

Ideas must have extreme clarity.

Our ideas must be clear, and they must make sense. When looking at our work, we must always be able to easily answer this question: what single idea are we trying to communicate?

We don’t conflate ideas. We keep ideas singular because that makes them easier to communicate. If we bundle two or more ideas, there must be a higher level idea that binds them.

We don’t unnecessarily change the details of ideas because we’re bored of looking at the same thing. The best marketing is clear and consistent. 

We know that the fewer number of discreet ideas we have, the more likely people will remember what we’re about.

Every word matters.

Words mean things. When we write, we deliberately choose every word. We can write quickly, but we always edit to only say what we mean. 

We don’t casually change adjectives to ‘sound interesting’. We don’t casually invent new phrases that don’t exist elsewhere. We consistently use the same set of adjectives to describe our ideas, because repetition is required for recall.

We write how we would normally write. We don’t believe in marketing speak: abstraction, vagueness, jargon, filler words, over-polished language. 

We follow the laws of science. For example, if we say accelerate, then an object’s velocity must be changing over time. If we say fast, it must be clear what we mean. At 60km/h, a Hare is fast. But a 60km/h Porsche isn’t fast.

Before we share our work, we read our words aloud to learn if they make sense, because that is how our reader will process them.

HOW WE WORK

Ship fast, ship early, ship often, be proud

Marketing is changing. It is unclear what will work. Not just to us, but to anyone. We can only learn by shipping, and shipping fast. So we optimise for that.

We do not learn much from being slower internally. Make fast decisions. Take extreme ownership. Do not wait for others if it slows things down. Involve fewer people. Ship.

We do not learn much from internal docs. Have fewer meetings. Make fewer docs. Ship.

We put our name to our work. So we do not ship crap that doesn’t meet our quality standards. We ship because we’re proud of what went out.

Reject the status quo. 

The inconvenient truth is, no one cares about us as much as we wish they did. Over 90% of marketing is ignored.

So to break through we must be very creative. We need simple ideas that capture people’s imagination. We need new methods to reach people, and we must surprise them with content they don’t expect. A beautiful printed story at a tradeshow, a short real life movie before a YouTube video.

It might sound unusual. And they might not work. But every successful idea is new and unusual at first.  

Embrace the grind.

Technology changes fast, but humans change slowly. The human psychology behind ideas that stick are the same as when David Ogilvy was doing it. Yes, you need a clear and creative idea. And after that: reach and frequency. A brand is built one small interaction at a time, time after time.

History shows us that deliberately driving word of mouth can be relentless, and feel like a grind. It is a game won inch by inch. Post after post. Dinner after dinner. There is no silver bullet. That is the nature of it, and we must do it, because there is no other way. So let’s lean into that and enjoy it.