Your first mistake might be assuming that people are rational.
Your second mistake could be assuming that people are eager for change.
And the marketer's third mistake is assuming that once someone knows things the way you know them, they will choose what you chose.

Marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products.

Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.

that is the biggest mistake a startup can make. The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.

Entrepreneurs are always biased to understate the scale of competition, but that is the biggest mistake a startup can make.

The first principle of marketing (okay, it’s not the first, but it doesn’t sound nearly as cool to say it’s the third) is this: Perception is reality. You see, a long time ago, some academic came up with the idea that reality doesn’t actually exist. Or at least, if it does, no one can agree what it is. Because of perception.
Perception is the filter through which we view the world, and most of the time it’s a handy thing to have: it generalizes the world so we can deduce that a man who wears an Armani suit is rich, or that a man who wears an Armani suit and keeps saying “Isn’t this some Armani suit” is a rich asshole. But perception is a faulty mechanism. Perception is unreliable and easily distracted, subject to a thousand miscues and misinformation…like marketing. If anyone found a way to actually distinguish perception from reality, the entire marketing industry would crumble into the sea overnight.

Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.

Because marketing, like war, is a zero-sum game. If you want something you have to take it from someone else. In order for someone to win, someone has to lose.

companies trying to misrepresent the product they sell by playing with our cognitive biases, our unconscious associations, and that’s sneaky. The latter is done by, say, showing a poetic picture of a sunset with a cowboy smoking and forcing an association between great romantic moments and some given product that, logically, has no possible connection to it. You seek a romantic moment and what you get is cancer.

Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.

One of the most common mistakes that start-ups make is not focusing on building a brand starting on day one.

Bad sales sounds like selling.
Bad marketing looks like marketing.
Bad copy looks like bad copy.
Good marketing, sales, and copy only do one thing: it gets you to buy.

When you hear people say that they hate marketing and sales, what they really mean is they hate bad marketing and sales because every other time that you buy it still happened.
It was just good.

Marketing is what you do when your product is no good.

We’d like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.