The Most Important Thinking Is Thinking About Thinking

For the second episode of Lochhead on Marketing, Christopher Lochhead dives into what makes Legendary Marketing, legendary. He discusses the 10 attributes of legendary marketing ⁠— which range from creating demand, dominating a niche market to leveraging technologies and changing the world. 1. Creates Demand Rather Than Capturing Demand In all imaginable areas⁠—books, conversations, podcasts or discussions⁠—marketing is described as “having a market and capturing the demand to increase revenue and growth for your company.” Legendary marketing, though, is more interested in creating new demand. They are focused on setting that agenda. 2. Designs and Dominates a Giant Category That Matters Legendary marketing design and dominate their own categories. On creating this demand, they position themselves as unique and distinct. They may also opt to create a new category or sub-category of an existing market category. “When you’re the first in a new category, people are drawn towards you.” - Christopher  Lochhead 3. Creates a “Before” and “After” Legendary marketing creates a distinct before and after. When a customer experiences legendary marketing for the first time, the expected initial reaction is “Wow, I just saw something! That's incredible!” That is Legendary Marketing. “Remember the first time you heard Netflix, it presented a provocative idea which is: why do you have to go to a video store if you could go to a website?” - Christopher Lochhead 4. Mobilizes People to Think and Act in New and Different Ways Legendary marketing is not just about evangelizing a product. It is about mobilizing people into action and getting them to change their actions. This would mean hundreds of people for small enterprises or even millions of people, for big multinational corporations. 5. Causes Competition to Have Emergency Board Meetings Rick Bennett, the marketing assassin of Silicon Valley says that his advertising campaigns aim to freak out the competition and manage the psychology of the bad guys. This is one of the attributes of a legendary marketing campaign. “When the competition sees this, how are they going to react and will they have an emergency board meeting?” - Christopher Lochhead 6. Makes You Think “I Wish I Had Done That!” Millions of businesses fail because they are undifferentiated. Christopher says legendary marketing focuses on finding their own niche and dominating it, regardless of how simple or basic their product or service is. “There is a bakery that scaled to 250 locations and sells franchises because they niched down. Its called Nothing but Bundt Cake. You’d say, that is such a simple idea, they niched down. Instead of being a generic bakery that fails, they dominated its niche market that they created.” - Christopher Lochhead  7. Creates New, Enduring Value Over-Time It is a must for any CMO, C-level executive or anybody in Marketing—as well as entrepreneurs—to create enduring value, which is measured by employees, customers, and investors, partners and even the ecosystem. 8. Leverages New Technologies Technology today allows marketers to know, in real-time, what’s resonating to the customers and what's not. A lot of data is now readily available for companies to ensure we attract the right customers and build relationships with them, in a measurable way. “If you’re a marketer, you would want to be a technology genius ⁠— understanding these technologies and specifically how they can impact, attract and retain and build long term relationships with customers.” - Christopher Lochhead 9. Makes a Giant Impact Outside and Inside Legendary marketing creates an impact both internally and externally. Legendary marketers believe to inspire both customers and employees. “The most important thing marketing does is inspire your own employees to do legendary work, to build legendary products and services and take care of customers.” - Christopher Lochhead 10. Changes The World The greatest marketing inspires.