a lazy sunday marketing lesson

Lazy Sunday. I was digging through a stack of old marketing books with the French Open on in the background.

Flavio Cobolli had just gotten crushed by Zverev in the first set. Then he started clawing his way back, point by point, and I lost track of the book for a while. (There's probably a lesson in that comeback too. We'll save it.)

The book in my hands was Visual Hammer by Laura Ries. First chapter, this line got me:

That last sentence is the part everyone skips.

The hammer is the part you can see. So the hammer is the part people try to copy. Geico got famous, so somebody in a conference room decides the brand needs a mascot too. A gecko. A duck. A talking pile of something.

But the gecko didn't make Geico famous. The gecko made one line impossible to forget. 15 minutes, 15%. Take the line away and you've got a lizard hitting air.

The Aflac duck is the cleanest version. Its whole job is to make you remember a word you couldn't pronounce. It quacks the name. The picture exists to drive the word. Nothing else.

Look at the cover of the book up there. A hammer built entirely out of logos you'd know in a heartbeat. Every single one drove a word in first.

So before you spend a dollar on the visual...

Find the word first. The one true thing you want people to remember. THEN go build the thing that makes it unforgettable.

You can't drive a nail you haven't picked.
You can't hammer air.
And you can't skip to the part everyone sees.

Hit reply and tell me your verbal nail. The one word or phrase you actually want to own. I read every one.

Stay Curious,
Max

P.S. Super useful image on the back cover (although Crosby one didn't age well...)
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