This is a basic marketing principle which Seth Godin summarizes very well. Seems obvious, but it is often overlooked!

If an Apple upgrade breaks your phone and you switch to Android, it costs Apple more than $10,000.

If you switch supermarkets because a clerk was snide with you, it removes $50,000 from the store’s ongoing revenue.

If a kid has a lousy first grade teacher or is bullied throughout middle school, it might decrease his productivity for the rest of us by a million dollars.

Torrents are made of drips.

The short-term impact (plus or minus) of our work or our errors is dwarfed by the long-term effects. Compounded over time, little things become big things.

In other words, courtesy and generosity are not only good for business — they are essential for business when you look at things from the long-term perspective.

This is the marketing philosophy that Steve Jobs learned from Mike Markkula in the early days of Apple, as summarized in Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs. It clearly continued to guide Jobs’ thinking through his entire career and very much goes to the core of what sets Apple apart.

First of all, though, a point on business in general: “You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

That is foundational to the next three points, because if you are only doing your business to make money, then it will be impossible to have the genuine passion for meeting customer needs that is essential for creating a long-lasting, effective company that people actually like. The foundation of effective marketing is one thing: to care.

Now, the three points on marketing.

1. Empathy. Have an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”
2. Focus. “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”
3. Impute. “People form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys.” Thus, “if we present [our products] in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.” Hence, even the experience of opening the box is intended to “set the tone for how you perceive the product.”

This is an excellent, insightful, enjoyable, and easy to follow slideshare from Gary Vaynerchuk.

Here are a few key points I took down:

Most marketers simply treat social media as a distribution channel—as another form of mass marketing. Big mistake! You lose all the benefits.

This forgets that what’s unique about social platforms is that they are a two-way conversation, not one-way. That’s what distinguishes them from mass marketing.

Social media is like a cocktail party. And a good cocktail party doesn’t come from talking about yourself the whole time (that’s one-way marketing), but from talking about others and interacting.

You bring value by engaging with users. That means replying to them—not just shooting stuff out there.

The trick is to learn the uniqueness of each platform and tell your story in a way that syncs with why and how people use that platform.

“Those who don’t learn how to tell their stories on today’s platforms are the ones who will go out of business.”

This has taken down some very smart, rich, and well-supported companies (for ex: Blackberry; AOL).

Marketing does not exist to make up for inadequacies in a mediocre product. The first job of marketing is to create an excellent product.

The best marketers have always understood this. Consider two quotes.

Guy Kawasaki: “The best brands never start out with the intent of building a great brand. They focus on building a great — and profitable — product or service and an organization that can sustain it.”

Emmanuel Rosen, in The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing: “The flow of information about a product cannot be separate from the quality of the product itself.”

I would suggest that this is a very Christian view of marketing. We often think of marketing as creating fluff and puffery about a product, trying to get people to think better of a product than it really deserves. Can there be a Christian view of marketing? Certainly not if we call that marketing.

But that’s not real marketing. Real marketing is about telling the truth. And that’s good, because that’s what a Christian view of marketing is, too: tell the truth about a product, and do it in a way that is remarkable, engaging, and that spreads. A Christian view of marketing has truth at it’s center, and makes truth the central and defining point of any marketing strategy.

Can you actually do marketing that way? Yes. In fact, it’s really the only kind of marketing that actually works. For no matter how great of a marketing campaign you create, if customers are disappointed with your product, they will not spread the word. But within the domain of actually telling the truth about a product, there are some amazing things you can do.

In fact, one of the most intriguing things about this perspective is that it means that good marketing has its beginning all the way back in product design.

In other words, marketing is not something “added on,” that you do after you’ve created your product or service. Rather, it begins in the product development phase itself. Good marketing is always organic to the product itself, because good marketing is about spreading the word about excellent products that are truly worth knowing about.

It’s common to hope for new products, books, and marketing initiatives to “generate buzz.” And if something creates a season of buzz early on, that is often looked at as a mark of success.

At first this sounds good. It sounds like it’s in line with one of the core principles of (good) marketing: create things worth talking about. Unleash word of mouth, which is then amplified by the internet as never before.

But it’s actually not. The concept of “buzz” is actually a hold-over from the old methods of interruption marketing where the organization (or marketer) sees themselves as in control. The reason is that there is a difference between buzz and word of mouth.

Buzz is surface level. It is usually based on superficial realities about the product or message. It doesn’t last.

Word of mouth, on the other hand, is substantive. It facilitates meaningful interactions and is based on deeper realities than just surface factors. It stems from a real emotional connection with the product. It is meaningful.

It’s not that buzz is bad. It’s just not enough. Seek for your product, book, message, website, or organization to generate true and valuable word of mouth, not just buzz.

Seth Godin recounts a painful experience filling out a form on the Jet Blue website. Here’s the key point:

The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they’re way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it’s not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.

In other words: Take some of that money you might have spent on advertising (print or online) and make your website more usable. That treats your customers or constituents better and will have more impact because giving your customers a good experience builds your brand far more effectively than any ad could.

Advertising Age has a summary of the biggest media-related stories of the decade. They include:

1. The dot-com bust
2. The rise of Google
3. The marketing of Obama
4. The Great Recession

And more.