The future doesn't start now or tomorrow. For professional futurists, it starts ten years from today. That is because it is enough time for society, and your own life, to become dramatically different. <ul><li>It's enough time for new technologies to scale up.</li><li>It's enough time for social movements to achieve victories.</li><li>It's enough time for big ideas to take root and gain traction.</li></ul> Thinking on a ten-year timeline will help you open your mind, take in new information, and reduce your blind spots.

When your mind feels stuck, make a ten-year resolution

Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous. It's easy to prepare for futures that are similar to today or make sense as they seem normal and reasonable. But, when a possibility makes us say, "That's ridiculous, that could never happen," or "I can't even imagine it", we have to spend time taking it seriously. We need to prepare our collective imagination for "unimaginable" possibilities. Then, if they do happen, we're not frozen with anxiety or stuck in old ways.

Be ridiculous, at first

Every form of creativity has its own raw material. A sculptor works with clay, a chef with ingredients, a futurist with clues. Futurists collect, combine, and build future scenarios out of clues to how the future might be different. You can find future clues by spotting weird stuff that others overlook. Things that make you say, "That's strange", and "I wonder why that's happening."

Look for clues

If your imagination feels stuck, spend time mentally immersed in “upside-down worlds.” Make a list of about a hundred things that are true today and rewrite them so that the opposite is true. For example, libraries are mostly quiet spaces. To flip it, write ten years from today, libraries are loud, wild spaces. Then envision what makes libraries feel and sound so different.

Turn the world upside down

Urgent optimism consists of three key psychological strengths:<ol><li>Mental flexibility is the ability to recognize that anything can become different in the future, even the impossible ones.</li><li>Realistic hope is knowing which threats you should worry about and which new solutions, technologies and ideas you should be excited about.</li><li>Future power is a feeling of control and agency to directly impact the future by taking action today.</li></ol>

Build urgent optimism

We can be successful at anything through future imagination training.

Jane McGonigal says urgent optimism is not a fixed personality trait. We can purposefully build more of it through future imagination training.


Stashed ideas

This is how to see the future (and 5 ways to be ready for anything)

<ul><li>It falls into four domains: supernatural danger, body violations, violence, and the minds of dangerous people. Serial killers fall within the latter two domains</li><li>Humans have a uniquely impressive ability to imagine events and experience them through mental simulation</li><li>By imagining dangerous situations, humans can generate scenarios where the perceived learning benefit is high, but the cost of learning is low</li></ul>

Our Morbid Curiosity

This cost-benefit shift in learning about dangerous situations lies at the core of our morbid curiosity, our love of violent thrillers, and our fascination with serial killers. We thirst for knowledge about the killer. Why does he behave as he does? How does he act around others when he isn’t hunting? What are his motivations for selecting his victims? Perhaps most importantly, what are the signs that someone might be a killer? Questions like these intrigue us because they strike at something deep in our animal nature—the need to avoid predation.

Learning About Dangerous Situations

We have our imaginative minds and evolutionary history with predators to blame.

Why We Are Fascinated By Serial Killers

Imagination frees us from the confines of our immediate reality. Imagining the future enables us to evaluate alternative paths forward, anticipate how we would feel if they happened, and choose which to pursue. For instance, by simulating a potential event via mental imagery, we can “test out” in the mind potential emotional consequences.

Imagining possible futures

Counterfactual thinking (alternative versions of one’s personal past) refers to the comparison of reality to hypothetical alternatives (“what if I had made different choices”). People create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they imagine how things would have turned out differently. Imagined alternatives may trigger guilt, remorse, and shame. However, thoughts about how things could have turned out differently provide a roadmap for change.

Counterfactual thinking

Imagining events from a distance encourages abstract thinking that boosts creativity. After several years of experience, people start to repeat themselves; it becomes more of the same old approach. They become insiders. One of the most effective ways of cultivating an outsider perspective is to feel distant from the problems. For example, traveling, getting away from the places we spend most of our time. The distance allows one to view problems in a more imaginative way. Suddenly, the mind is aware of those considerations that were previously ignored, and those facts that should be ignored.

Distancing from the problem

Any situation that affects our ability to visualize events and situations may affect our judgments. Visual images are more emotionally salient than words. We recall emotionally charged events far more than mundane ones. However, this emotional partiality impairs our ability to see the big picture. For example, lawyers have known for a long time that the vividness of the testimony offered by a witness can influence the judgments made by a jury.

The vividness effects

Imagination is central to understanding and interpreting figurative language. Metaphors are figures of speech to convey a truth about the real world. They are transferred from another context to give us new ways to think. We can imaginatively see a particular perspective on the focus of the metaphor. For example, the phrase, No man is an island, implies that no one is truly self-sufficient.

Metaphor

Delusions and ordinary cases of self-deception have been characterized as disorders of imagination. Delusions can be characterized as beliefs that are dysfunctional in their content or formation. That is, a delusion is an imagined interpretation that is mistaken by the subject as a belief.

The dark side of imagination

Imagination is deeply connected with reality. What we imagine can affect what we believe and vice versa. The richer the personal experience is, the richer the ingredients for imagining. That is, imagination is nourished by various resources on which the person can draw. Through books, art, discussions with others, and education, we can build our knowledge of events and places that we have never experienced.

How to improve your imagination

A good imagination enables us to transcend present circumstances.

5 Benefits of Imaginative Thinking

It can be described as a torrent of negative thought and associated emotion sparked by relatively innocuous triggers. Much of it is framed by what-if scenarios that give the imagination plenty of room to run free in the wilderness of negativity.This is particularly painful for leaders who are weighed down with a great deal of responsibility, and the duty to make decisions that have ripple effects in people's everyday lives.

Overthinking

Intuition works like a mental pattern matching game. It analyzes situations quickly with extant knowledge and evident context and offers a way forward quickly. Decision-making is based on existing knowledge and experience that isn't bogged down by time-intensive data research or analysis.This also takes away roadblocks we've set up in our minds that keep us from making clear-minded decisions - so it keeps us from overthinking decisions even when they are well-conceived.Intuition-based decision-making can't rule all the time. Use it in moderation, and where you feel it's appropriate.

Leverage the underestimated power of intuition

Sometimes, data-based decision-making can derail you. Maybe it's time to trust your gut.

The Surprising “Disinhibition” Technique Is a Powerful Way to Stop Overthinking, According to Harvard Research

<ul>
<li>If you’re in savannah and you hear rustling in the grass, you don’t want to spend time thinking about the probability that it’s a lion.</li>
<li>When making bets with friends, it’s probably best to not make any bets that can be interpreted as negative, such as betting your friend’s kid won’t get into a certain school, people can interpret that as you think that that’s what’s going to happen.</li>
<li>When betting on sports, sometimes you can hedge the emotional downside with a monetary upside such as betting against your home team because you know they will likely lose.</li>
</ul>

Can Thinking Probabilistically Make Our Decisions Worse Rather Than Better?

People will hedge against disaster with fire insurance but are less likely to hedge against their marriage with a prenup (only about 5% of married couples have a prenup).
We have this idea that if we do hedge against something, somehow if the bad thing happens, we caused it. And this is particularly problematic in situations that do have very high emotional valence.
Books such as The Power of Positive Thinking and and The Secret by Rhonda Byrne teach readers to think positively because their outcome is dependent on their thoughts.

It’s Hard For People To Make Bets That Hedge Against Their Identity

It’s hard to be happy playing poker because the losses hurt much more than the happiness you gain from winning. Instead, focus on the process.There’s this huge asymmetry between how sad people are when they lose versus how happy they are when they win. It’s one of those things that, unless you’re really focused on the process. This is a lesson for all of life, the way to happiness is to focus on the process.Be aware of the self-serving bias: We tend to attribute good things to our own skill, and we tend to attribute bad things that happen to us to luck.

Lessons From Poker

I do think that one of the things that poker teaches you is that you shouldn’t assume that just because people are really skillful in one domain that that’s going to transfer. Because I think that that ability can be very, very domain-specific.

The top 500 poker players tend to be brilliant in game theory and in making real-time, high-stakes decisions.Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean that you can become a great player. you have to be smart in a very particular way.You need to be curious about being wrong and stay open-minded and you have to be so incredibly hungry to collide with corrective information. You have to be open-minded to the corrective information.Open-mindedness is the number one trait of a top poker player.

Traits of Top Poker Players

In order to really succeed at the top levels of the game, you have to be so open-minded. You have to be so willing to ponder on a daily basis the idea that you might be wrong, the idea that the things that you think to be true or what you think about an opponent — that it just might be inaccurate.

For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you’re perfectly well aware that those decision traps exist. And how easy it is for like your mind to slip into those traps.” She’s spent a lot of time studying human cognition at the poker table and off it — her best-known academic article is about psycholinguistics and her forthcoming  book is titled How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices. Annie joined Tyler to explore how payoffs aren’t always monetary, the benefits and costs of probabilistic thinking, the “magical thinking” behind why people buy fire insurance but usually don’t get prenups, the psychology behind betting on shark migrations, how her most famous linguistics paper took on Steven Pinker, how public policy would change if only the top 500 poker players voted, why she wasn’t surprised to lose Celebrity Apprentice to Joan Rivers, whether Trump has a tell, the number one trait of top poker players, and more. Follow us on Twitter and IG: @cowenconvos Email: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Follow Annie on Twitter Follow Tyler on Twitter Facebook Newsletter

Annie Duke on Poker, Probabilities, and How We Make Decisions

When looking at ROI and engagement, email can be a powerhouse addition to your business, especially when you use email send best practices effectively.<ul><li>Emails have 50 to 100 times higher click-through-rates when compared to Facebook and Twitter.</li><li>For every $1 marketers spend on email marketing, they receive $42 in return.</li></ul>Businesses who start using email marketing effectively will keep using it as a key strategy in their toolkit and look for ways to expand their efforts through automation.

Email Is Still Gold

We know it can be exciting to get your first send off the ground, but take two steps back before jumping in. Create a plan of attack for the type of emails you want to send, how often they should be sent, and the type of content that will be in them so that you can start sending at a regular cadence. This will stop you from getting in the trap of sending sporadically or whenever something comes up, which can be bad for your <a href="https://www.addthis.com/academy/email-list-hygiene-tips/">list health</a>.

Email Best Practices: Start with a Basic Strategy

If you have opt-in forms on your site currently and you’re not seeing a good number of signups (and your website traffic is good) it’s time to review and optimize to create a signup form that converts.Make your opt-in forms work for you! They should be unavoidable and, no, we don’t mean a frustrating-to-close pop-up, but if the only way to sign up for the list is through a pop-up then that is not enough. Make sure if a user lands on the site and moves around the site they can still easily see the super awesome mailing list sign up.

Build Your Email List

Every email strategy should include a welcome campaign for new subscribers. How many email lists have you subscribed to only to forget because you didn’t receive a single email until 3 weeks later? Your customers should not be having the same experience.Email is not billboard or ad marketing. Email attempts to build a 1:1 relationship between the brand and the customer. These prospects trusted you enough to hand over the keys to their inbox. Greeting them with a welcome email creates familiarity and trust.

Say Hello to New Subscribers

There are many ways to create segments for targeted marketing based on the data you’ve collected. What did they purchase lately? Where do they live? Which pages on your site they visited most recently? All these touchpoints are opportunities to fine-tune the customer journey and start offering them exactly what they are looking for.Of course, the limits of your segments are based on the data points you are collecting. Using an integrated marketing tool will allow for tracking of more touchpoints and creating more automated campaigns around those.

Segment Your Lists

There are policies around collecting and storing people’s personal information. You may have heard of GDPR or CAN-SPAM, but with Apple Mail’s Privacy update and CCPA in California, ignoring the rules can end up being costly.It’s important to understand what to do in order to be compliant before starting to collect email addresses. Looking at other businesses might not be the best option unless you know they are a reputable sender. Because email, unlike social media channels, is largely managed by individuals on websites, it is very common to see examples of brands not following the rules.

Know the Laws

A/B testing has always been standard practice for optimizing emails once you have a list of a few thousand subscribers or more. Testing is how email marketers know whether one subject line is better than another or which day of the week gets the best engagement. Seasoned email marketers know that testing for content and engagement can be a game-changer. Marketers can test for which button colors get the best clicks, whether customers prefer reading about a topic or clicking through to an explainer video, and even if they respond better to images or copy.

Test and Experiment

Set reporting goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in advance. This will not only help make reporting a breeze once a campaign is over, but it also helps marketers look for optimizations to make along the way.Deciding KPIs in advance gives marketing teams a specific goal to work towards and ultimately push them to create better emails. If marketers understand the goals of the campaigns, whether that’s raising product awareness, clicks to a landing page, or form fills, they can use their tactics and creativity to guide people to taking the desired actions.

Decide on Key Metrics in Advance

High unsubscribe rates don’t necessarily mean that customers hate your business, but they can signal other issues that should be addressed. Rising or higher than average unsubscribe rates can point to customers receiving too many emails or emails they feel are irrelevant to them.Test an adjusted content strategy and watch to see if rates improve. Also, don’t be afraid to ask! Survey your readers on what their ideal frequency would be to gain some real insights.

Don’t Take Unsubs Personally but Don’t Ignore Them Either

We all know that Q4 sneaks up fast and the holiday season can be madness for all types of industries. If you’re just starting to incorporate email into your marketing, make sure that you account for any additional emails or special campaigns that will need to be created for national, local, and business holidays and events.Using automation here can be key to landing huge sales throughout the season. From abandoned cart emails to lead nurture campaigns after a new product release, talk to us to find out how automation has been a powerhouse for businesses.

Create a Holiday/Event Strategy

Email fatigue is real and it’s one of the main things that affect your sender status. If subscribers are getting too much email, they might unsubscribe or worse, they’ll ignore you until you start hitting the spam folder.Start slow and test how your audience responds by watching engagement rates and unsubscribes. Don’t forget to count any automated campaigns that are running. If someone is in the middle of a drip campaign that sends daily updates for 7 days, it’s good practice to keep them off the mailing list until they’ve completed it to avoid mailing them too heavily.

Quality not Quantity

Create segments for your VIP contacts. These can be contacts that interact with your emails the most often, attend the most webinars, or have purchased the most. Special campaigns can be sent to these lists to nurture the relationship. These rewards don’t have to be discounts but they can be. Rewards can be first look at new releases, asking their opinion on a new product offering, or insider content.Bonus points if your email software offers lead scoring. Those scores are an easy way to segment your most die-hard customers.

Reward Your Most Engaged Contacts

Long gone are the days of “Hey [FNAME]!” as an effective way to get opens and clicks. Personalizing data fields is still a tactic smart marketers keep in their toolkit, but personalization has evolved.Besides first name and birthday, marketing teams are using location, behavioral, demographic data to personalize the customer journey. Retail sites thrive off of this type of marketing. As consumers, we’re all familiar with the experience of viewing something at our favorite retailer only to receive an email a day later with the item and others similar to it in our inboxes.

Use Data to Personalize the Customer Journey

Often, marketing channels get treated as disconnected tools when they are all tools meant to work together to build business. Use email as another tool to leverage promotion of social media events or Lives. Social media and other channels can also be used to grow your email list. Your social media followers are not necessarily your email subscribers. Grab them in both places so they’re less likely to miss a message.

Coordinate Cross-Channel Campaigns

If you’ve ever had to send a “Oops, sorry about our last email…” subject line, then you know the pain of missing something before hitting send. The best way to combat send button anxiety is to have an email pre-send checklist handy every time before you hit “send.”

Use an Email Presend Checklist

Put these helpful tips for email send best practices to use for your agency or business and get results in your email marketing campaigns.

Ultimate Guide to Email Send Best Practices - SharpSpring

It is more focused and developed for a specific product or market. A comprehensive Go-To-Market plan will compose of four components:<ul><li>Product strategy: to differentiate the new offering from those of competitors.</li><li>Promotion strategy: pricing promotions and cross-promotions at launch</li><li>Channel strategy: channels utilized not only to sell products but also to educate and support partners and customers</li><li>Marketing and communications strategy: entailing efforts to generate awareness with customers and employees who interact with customers for instruction, purchase, and or support.</li></ul>

The Go-To-Market Plan

<ul><li>New market entry — when extending an existing offering to a new market</li><li>New product development (NPD) — when launching a new offering in an existing market</li><li>Offering diversification — when introducing a new product into new markets. This is rather a high-risk strategy because it entails a lot of unknowns for the company. They need to learn a whole new market and tell a new audience, who it doesn’t know very well, how its new offering will deliver value.</li></ul>

Situations in which a Go-To-Market plan is needed

A Go-To-Market plan should include certain elements of research and action:<ul><li>Customer research: that probes buyer’s interest in your product, or otherwise to perform customer development</li><li>Trend research: such as whether the company is entering into a stable or growing market and how saturated the market is</li><li>Coordinated product development: get intimate with the product by bringing product managers into the research and market testing phases</li><li>Customer targeting: putting together a specific profile of your early adopters and, more importantly, why they would choose it over a competitor’s offering.</li></ul>

Understand the customer

Some goals of a Go-To-Market plan may include:<ul><li>Product brand awareness — high awareness or being easily recognized, helps drive potential prospects and sales.</li><li>Marketing to leads — leads, are qualified people who will be interested in the product.&nbsp;</li><li>Sales targets — this is the portion of the qualified potential prospects who will actually convert to a paying customer</li><li>Product adoption — high adoption rates will mean higher expected sales and economic returns</li><li>Customer satisfaction — the goal would be to decrease the number of defects and dissatisfaction at the launch and post-launch stages.</li></ul>

Set strategic objectives

Defining the customers’ problems and validating the offering that addresses them:<ul><li>Define the pain: customers do not think in terms of solutions, they only know what their pains are.&nbsp;</li><li>The urgency of the pain: Are they looking for an immediate solution?&nbsp;</li><li>The size of the pain — you will also need to think about how deep the problem runs.&nbsp;</li><li>Willingness to pay — you want to be sure customers will pay for the product.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Product-problem fit

<ul><li>Demographic factors — such as age, income, education, religion, marital status, occupation.</li><li>Geographic factors — urban, suburban or rural area</li><li>Behavioral characteristics — how relevant, consistent and frequent their behavior is toward a particular problem</li><li>Psychographic considerations — including activities, interests, the benefits sought, attitudes, and values</li></ul>

Segment the Market

<ul><li>Recorded data — obtained externally in the form of published sources such as competitors’ brochures, promotions, news articles, and annual reports</li><li>Witness or observed data — such as what you see when you go to a trade show and visit a competitor’s booth or the conversations you uncover through social media that customers are having about the competition</li><li>Ability to gather plan data — or efforts to set up opportunities to learn more about the competition.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Pinpoint your competitive advantage

<ul><li>Reduces the time it takes to get to the market</li><li>Lowers risk and the cost that may be associated with failed launches</li><li>Delivers the best experience for the customer</li><li>Invests on the right path with better direction for internal sources and external partners</li></ul>

The benefits of a Go-To-Market plan include

While a company’s marketing plan is a broad document that aligns marketing initiatives to the high level business goals and objectives, a G-2-M plan is more niche, focused, and developed for a product

The Ultimate Guide to the Go-To-Market Plan

Freelancing can seem fantastic and freeing. It allows you to travel whenever you want to. You answer to no-one, except your clients. It makes you feel important.&nbsp;However, it also has pitfalls.<ul><li>It does not carry the benefits of a full-time job such as 401k.</li><li>Not setting professional boundaries can cause clients to demand your time at any moment.</li><li>Without boundaries between yourself and work, you can fall into unhealthy lifestyles that can take their toll.</li></ul> While there are many successful and strong freelancers, it is not for everyone

Wait, isn’t it the other way around?

It was six years ago, when I jumped the 9–5 ship for the bright and shiny freelance life. Like the Titanic, nobody could have warned me of the icebergs I was steering towards, until I was already…

I quit ‘the dream’ of freelancing to return to a 9–5.

It's better to be first than it is to be better.
<ul>
<li>In marketing, the fundamental issue is creating a category you can be first in. It's easier to get into the mind first than to try to change someone's mind that you have a better product.</li>
<li>Not every first will be successful. There will always be first bad ideas that won't work.</li>
<li>When you're introducing a new category, try to use a name that can be used generically.</li>
</ul>

The Law of Leadership

If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in.
When you launch a new product, ask what category is this new product first in. This is contrary to classic marketing thinking, which is about getting people to prefer your brand. Don't think brand. Think categories. Everyone's interest is piqued when there is something new.

The Law of the Category

It's better to be first in the mind than it is to be first in the marketplace. Marketing is the battle of perception, not the product.
Be first in the mind as people don't like to change their minds. Once the mind is made up, it seldom changes.

The Law of the Mind

Marketing is not a battle of products but a battle of perception.
There are no best products. It's all an illusion. What exists are perceptions in the minds of the customer.
The logical way to think is that you'll succeed based on the merits of the product. But it is flawed. A better method is to study how perceptions are created in the mind and focusing your marketing programs on those perceptions. Customers often base their buying decisions on someone else's perception of reality.

The Law of Perception Marketing

The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect's mind.
The word should not be complicated or invented. Simple words are the best. The leader owns the word that stands for the category. 
If you're not a leader, your word must be available in your category. No one else should 'own' it. Once you have narrowed your focus and developed your word, you have to go out of your way to protect it in the marketplace.

The Law of Focus

Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect's mind.
It is futile to try and own the same word as a competitor. Yet, many companies continue to defy the law of exclusivity, thereby often reinforcing the competitor's position.

The Law of Exclusivity

The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder.
It is not all over if you fail to be the first in the prospect's mind. There are also strategies to use for No. 2 and No. 3 brands.
Not all products are equal. Your marketing strategy should focus on how soon you got into the mind of the prospect and which rung of the ladder you are on.
<ul>
<li>High-interest products such as toothpaste, cereal, automobiles, watches, cameras, have many rungs on their ladders.</li>
<li>Low-interest products such as furniture, luggage have fewer rungs.</li>
</ul>

The Law of the Ladder

In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.
A new category may have many rungs in the beginning. But, over time, the ladder has only two.
When you have a long view of marketing, the battle is often the struggle between two major players - the reliable brand and the upstart.
The customer believes that marketing is a battle of products. Their thinking is that the two brands must be the best because they are the leaders. This keeps the two brands on top.

The Law of Duality

If you're shooting for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.
Trying to establish a firm foothold on the second rung means you have to study the firm above you. Where is its strength? Can you turn it into a weakness? Discover the essence of the leader, then show the prospect the opposite. In other words, try to be different, not better.
Don't simply knock the competition. There has to be a ring of truth about the negative. Then present yourself as the alternative.

The Law of the Opposite

Over time, a category will divide and become two or more categories. Categories never combine.
A category starts as a single entity but breaks up into other parts. For example, computers became minicomputers, workstations, laptops, notebooks. Companies may erroneously try to take a well-known brand name in one category and use the same brand name in another category.
Timing is also important. However, it's better to exploit a new category early to get into the prospect's mind while waiting for it to develop.

The Law of Division

Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time.
Marketing moves often show the same phenomenon: Long-term effects are often the direct opposite of short-term ones.
In the short term, a sale increases business, but in the long term, sales educate customers not to buy at "regular" prices. Periodic couponing may keep sales on an even level, but it does not increase sales in the long run.

The Law of Perspective

There's an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of a brand. At one time, a company is deeply focused on a single product that is highly profitable, but the next moment the same company is spread thin over many products and making a loss. <ol><li>Marketing is a battle of perception, not the product. In the mind, the product and the brand name is one and the same.</li><li>Line extensions seldom work in the long run. The leader in any category is the brand that is not line extended. Management may believe that line extensions work, and it does in the short term, but it is a loser in the long run.</li></ol>

The Law of Line Extension

You have to give up something in order to get something.
If you want to be successful, you should sacrifice the following:
<ul>
<li>Product line. Where is it written that the more you have to sell, the more you sell? If you want to be successful, you have to reduce your product line.</li>
<li>Target market. Should you appeal to everybody? The apparent target of your market is not the same as the people who will buy your product.</li>
<li>Constant change. Do you have to change your strategy every year? The best way to maintain a consistent position is not to follow the twists and turns of the market.</li>
</ul>

The Law of Sacrifice

For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute.
It's far better to search for an opposite attribute that will enable you to play off against the leader, instead of being similar to the leader.
Marketing is the battle of ideas. To succeed, you must have your own attribute or idea to focus your efforts on. Try to own the most important attribute. If your competition successfully takes your attribute, find a different attribute and dramatise its value.

The Law of Attributes

When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you the positive.
The most effective way to get into a prospect's mind is to admit a negative, then turn it into a positive.
Honesty works well in the marketing process:
<ul>
<li>Candour is very disarming. It may be necessary to prove a positive statement, but no proof is needed for a negative opinion. If your name is bad, change it or make fun of it, but don't ignore a bad name. </li>
<li>When a company starts to admit a problem, people tend to open their minds. The purpose of candour is then not to apologise but to convince.</li>
</ul>

The Law of Candor

In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results.
The only thing that works in marketing is a single, bold stroke, not the sum total of a lot of small efforts.
In marketing, there is only one place where a competitor is vulnerable. And that place should be the entire focus. Marketing managers have to be involved to find that singular idea, not hang around headquarters.

The Law of Singularity

Unless you write your competitor's plans, you can't predict the future.
Marketing plans based on what will happen in the future are usually wrong. One reason for marketing failure is the failure to forecast competitive reaction. 
<ul>
<li>A short-term plan is to come up with an angle or word that differentiates your product or business. Then build a long-term marketing program that maximises that idea.</li>
<li>Take advantage of change by getting a handle on trends without jumping to conclusions.</li>
<li>Build a huge amount of flexibility into your organisation and be willing to change quickly.</li>
</ul>

The Law of Unpredictability

Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure.
Objectivity is crucial. When organisations become successful, they tend to become less objective and often substitute their judgment for what the market wants.
The ego is helpful as a driving force in building a business, but it becomes problematic when the ego is injected into the marketing process. One way for a CEO to gather objective information is to go in disguise or unannounced to get an honest view of what's really happening.

The Law of Success

Failure is to be expected and accepted. Admitting a mistake and not dealing with it is bad for your career. So instead, recognise failure early and cut your losses.
Too many companies try to save the situation instead of dropping things.

The Law of Failure

The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press.
The only time you need hype is when you're in trouble. The only revolutions you can predict are the ones that have already started.
The front page won't give you clues to the future. For that, you'll have to look in the back of the paper for the harmless stories. Hype is hype. Real revolutions come unannounced when it is least expected.

The Law of Hype

Successful programs are not built on fads, they’re built on trends.
<ul>
<li>A fad is a wave, but a trend is a tide. </li>
<li>A fad is very visible and gets lots of publicity, but a trend is almost invisible and powerful in the long run.</li>
<li>A fad is short-lived, and when it disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock.</li>
</ul>
If your business has all the characteristics of a fad, dampen the fad to stretch it out so that it becomes more like a trend. One way to maintain a long-term demand for your product is never totally to satisfy the demand.

The Law of Acceleration

Without adequate funding an idea won't get off the ground.
Marketing is a game fought in the mind of the prospect. You need money to get into a mind and money to stay in the mind.
Ideas without money are almost worthless. Use your idea to find the money. Marketing should come afterwards.

The Law of Resources

Ries and Trout share their rules for certain successes in the world of marketing. Combining a wide-ranging historical overview with a keen eye for the future, the authors bring to light 22 superlative tools and innovative techniques for the international marketplace.

This is how to see the future (and 5 ways to be ready for anything)

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5 Benefits of Imaginative Thinking

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Annie Duke on Poker, Probabilities, and How We Make Decisions

James Craig