Greg Satell

Great marketers have great guts. Leo Burnett didn’t need a legion of focus groups to come up with the Marlboro Man. Steve Jobs, arguably the greatest marketing mind ever, famously eschewed market research because he didn’t think customers knew what they wanted until he showed it to them.

In Silicon Valley, the PayPal Mafia reigns supreme. So much so that it is hard to think of any successful technology startup in the last ten years—from Facebookand LinkedIn to YouTube and Yelp—that hasn’t been touched by it in some way.

1989 was a revolutionary year. From Berlin, Warsaw and Prague to Tiananmen Square and South Africa, the world order was completely overturned. Yet probably the most consequential event happened in a quiet lab in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Southwest Airlines is an unusual company. In an industry notorious for losing money, it has achieved over forty consecutive years of profitability. No one else comes close to matching that record. It makes you wonder why everybody doesn’t just copy their model.

Henry Ford famously said that his customers could a car painted in any color so long as it was black. Many people misunderstand that quote. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about his customers needs, but that manufacturing efficiency trumped style.

“Fail fast, fail cheap, fail often,” has become a mantra for the digital age. Stodgy old dinosaurs may be afraid of failure, but it doesn’t bother the new breed of entrepreneurs. They can start-up, shut down and start-up again. Venture investors, for their part, are looking for just one or two big wins out of ten.

Marketing is often confused with promotion, but it’s more than that. As Peter Drucker put it, “the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” In truth, marketing is about insights more than anything else.

Education has long played an important role in the success of the United States. From some of the world’s first public schools to the land grant universities which spurred innovation in agriculture, our development as long been tied to how we educate future generations.

If you want to produce content, you need to think like a publisher. After all, content isn’t an extension of marketing, it’s an extension of publishing. I constantly stress that point to my consulting clients and in articles like this one in Harvard Business Review.

Wells Fargo is an unusual bank. In the first place, it is headquartered in San Francisco, not in a typical financial center like New York. It is also unusually socially conscious, earning high marks for its environmental record and setting records for financing green projects.