- Start with the heart. Marketing is most powerful when it’s inspired by a company’s authentic beliefs and personality, instead of being simply a layer of beauty or a list of empty features added as an afterthought.
- Identify your core values. Your marketing efforts should be derived from a few simple principles that reflect the beliefs at the core of your company. They embody what’s truly important to your business and provide consistency and clarity across all customer experiences.
- Make a statement. If you want to be talked about, you can’t just copy what you’ve seen before. Do something different that’ll get people talking about YOU.
- Speak human. Regardless of what you’re selling, your customers are humans with emotions, desires, and fears. People are drawn to companies who aren’t afraid to ditch the superficial jargon and speak their language.
- Focus on basic motivations. Our purchasing decisions are driven primarily by our needs for affiliation, aspiration, and identity. Create meaningful and emotional experiences for your customers first, and justify them with benefits and specifics later.
- Beware of metric-lust. The quest for “proof” often drives companies to overemphasize short-sighted, easy-to-measure solutions, when what really matters (and what performs best in the long run) are the subtle things that are hardest to quantify.
- Push past the obvious. To create a compelling and unique customer experience, you have to push beyond the initial solutions that come to mind and create new ones instead. Dig deep to find those powerful ideas hidden deep, where few people look.
- Speak openly and often. Nearly all project problems are really communication problems. They’re swiftly resolved if everyone involved speaks openly, candidly, and frequently.
- Inspire action. The goal of design and marketing is to inspire action. It’s not about opinions, preferences, or trends; it’s about what’ll make things happen.
- Ask, “Why?” The most important question in business is “why?” When you get the answer, ask the question again and again until you get to the true roots of the issue.
- Justify your decisions. A good business or creative mind can explain the reasoning behind their choices. Without justification, it’s hard to know whether your decision comes from habit, fear, opinion, or random choices.
- Know when to go with your gut. Though you should always strive to understand and justify your decisions, sometimes you just know. When you just know, there’s no point in pretending you don’t.
- Abolish “us vs. them.” Your imagined enemies are often people who are a lot like you, trying to do their best with what they’ve got. You may not always agree with them, but nobody will make much progress if you’re just throwing rocks.
- Skip the middleman. Effective teams are self-organizing and don’t need a project manager to manage them or filter communication. Our own process is built around a company’s primary decision makers interacting directly with their team at Forty, eliminating middlemen and red tape.
- Work happy. Productivity doesn’t come from demands, fear, or manipulation. It’s the natural outcome of loving what you do, organization, mutual interest, clear communication, and work-life balance.
- Treat it like your own money. A client’s money is sacred and should never be spent liberally or accepted unethically. Spending money on branding and marketing is an investment, and it’s one we don’t take lightly.
- Use failure wisely. Even the best ideas sometimes fail, but that it doesn’t mean it was wrong to try. Failing quickly is often the most efficient path to the right answer (while your competitors are still worrying about how to start without making any mistakes).
- Share responsibility. Finger-pointing is destructive to the creative process. When a team fails, they fail together. They share responsibility as a team for the problem and their response to it.
- Activate your customers. Your customer is your most powerful marketing tool. A company’s first marketing priority is to ensure its customers have an experience worth talking about. Then, give them the tools to talk about it.
- Believe it, or skip it. People naturally underperform (consciously or unconsciously) when working for clients they don’t believe in. Stick to your ethics, only work on projects that align with your beliefs and ideals.
- Abolish the chain of command. The people dealing directly with an issue are best equipped to make intelligent decisions about it. Those on the front lines should be empowered to make the call, instead of waiting for a less-informed answer from higher up.
- Carry a big toolbox. Every project is unique and requires flexibility in strategy, tactics, process, and approach. Assembly lines are great for churning out identical results, but the complexities of marketing require a deep toolbox and an agile mind.
- Do what’s right, and accept the consequences. Do the right thing every time, regardless of the short-term consequences. In time, doing right will always work in your favor.
- Embrace awkwardness. The greatest things in life happen in awkward situations. Don’t run from awkwardness; take it as a sign you’re doing something significant, and throw yourself into it.
- Make frequent course corrections. All projects evolve, so it’s important to have a system that embraces that evolution and encourages showing rough work. Saving it all for the big reveal may make it more exciting, but it also causes missed opportunities for valuable corrections and increases the risk of a big disappointment.
- When in doubt, do something. If you can’t decide between action and inaction, choose action. You’ll make progress faster, gather relevant information sooner, and gain experience that helps you improve your plan for the future.
- Be the steak and the sizzle. Functional solutions and sexy solutions aren’t mutually exclusive. The right answer is usually both at the same time.
- Stay small. Smaller companies will dominate the new economy, as large corporations continue to struggle with office politics, slow decision-making, lack of genuine interaction with customers, and overall disconnection from reality. Focus on improving efficiencies and relationships before adding bodies.
- Insist on healthy relationships. Hurtful communication and negative behavior should never be tolerated. Fostering a positive work environment can make a huge difference in your team’s happiness and productivity, as well as your company’s overall success.
- Be a creator. Creativity is a mental process, not a genetic trait. We’re all inherently innovative, so encourage everyone to participate in the creative process, not just those who have the job title.
- Explore ideas (even when you disagree). Writing off an idea based on first reactions is short-sighted and could mean missing out on a golden opportunity. Be open to exploring lots of options (even the ones you disagree with) before determining the best one.
- Speak up. When the time comes to discuss and decide, don’t be afraid to make your beliefs known. You have the right to be heard, and your viewpoint may be the one that ensures the right decision is made.
- Support the consensus. Debate and dissent are healthy parts of the decision making process. Once the team comes to a general agreement, be a team player. It’s counterproductive to grumble or hinder progress on a good solution just because you don’t see it as the best solution.
- Find the real purpose. Companies that only exist to make money will come and go. The world will remember and sustain those that provide value far beyond dollars.
- Stay nimble. Overcommitting to grand schemes is a common and devastating business blunder. Keep your company and your marketing flexible so you can change course quickly when the need arises.
- Pick up the phone already. Conversations beat presentations. Before throwing a slide deck at someone, ask yourself if you should really just sit down and talk to them.
- Be an expert. Confidence is a key to success. Instead of “faking it ’til you make it,” commit to mastering new skills, learning from mistakes, and becoming the expert you want to be.
- Be bold and focused. Companies avoid bold statements and specific targeting because they want to please everyone, but that’s actually a sure way to bore everyone. Find a niche you can own and build a tribe around it.
- Avoid rushing. Although it can seem like rushing is the right choice, cutting corners actually causes more problems and ultimately slows everything down. Set realistic expectations, plan ahead, and take “emergencies” in stride.
- Put strategy before execution. It’s easy to shoot from the hip or try out hot, new tactics just to “see how they work.” However, long-term success comes from having a deep strategy and the discipline to stick to it, and avoiding the urge to skip ahead to the next fun thing.
