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    F!!CK Your Formula
    F!!CK Your Formula
    F!!CK Your Formula
    Ebook140 pages1 hour

    F!!CK Your Formula

    By Brian Cross, Aaron Perlut and Dominic Vaiana

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    You've seen the headlines before:


    10 tips guaranteed to boost your conversion rate!

    The only branding blueprint you'll ever need!

    5 steps to hacking Facebook's algorithm!


    The marketing industry is

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElasticity, LLC
    Release dateOct 28, 2020
    ISBN9781733492621
    F!!CK Your Formula

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      Book preview

      F!!CK Your Formula - Brian Cross

      F!!K Your Formula

      Why Following Rules Is the Worst Marketing Decision You’ll Ever Make Aaron Perlut and Brian Cross with Dominic Vaiana

      Elastic Media

      Published by Elastic Media, St. Louis, MO

      Copyright ©2020 Aaron Perlut & Brian Cross

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the Publisher. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Permissions Department, Elastic Media, [email protected].

      Limit of Liability/ Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

      Editor: Bill Motchan

      Cover Design: Elasticity

      Illustrations: Elasticity

      Interior Design: Davis Creative Publishing Partners, DavisCreative.com

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2019916526

      Aaron Perlut and Brian Cross with Dominic Vaiana

      F!!K Your Formula: Why Following Rules Is the Worst Marketing Decision You’ll Ever Make

      ISBN: 978-1-7334926-0-7 (Hardback)

      978-1-7334926-1-4 (Paperback)

      978-1-7334926-2-1 (eBook)

      Library of Congress subject headings:

      1. Business / Marketing / General-BUS043000 2. Business / Public Relations-BUS052000 3. Business / Advertising & Promotion-BUS002000

      2020

      Random quote inserted to appear thoughtful or as to having great depth of personality.

      Contents

      Introduction(s)

      Why Are We Suckers For Formulas?

      The Super Secret Success Recipe (Hint: It Doesn’t Exist)

      The Worst Part About Best Practices

      Shiny Objects Don’t Always Fit

      Risky Business

      Getting Un-F!!cked

      Conclusion: There’s a Better Way

      Acknowledgments

      About the Authors

      Introduction(s)

      Given the title of this book, we owe you a good answer to the looming, ironic question bubbling up in your head: Why would two founders of a marketing agency write a book telling you to avoid marketing formulas like the plague (and call bullshit on people who peddle them)?

      To answer that question, let’s pay a visit to the business aisle of your local bookstore or Amazon’s vast library of business books. Look closely at the marketing best-sellers and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them are written in a how-to format: step-by-step guides, processes, and blueprints. The authors trumpet their accomplishments and exclusive insights in a few hundred pages that are front-loaded with a few cool stories and padded with useless fluff. We even know an author (he shall remain nameless) who admitted his ideas could be condensed into a single page.

      But the formulas don’t end with books. Google will give you more than a quarter billion (with a b) results when you type marketing formula into your search bar. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are all littered with step-by-step marketing guides and quick tips that are almost always taken out of context. The podcast industry is laden with marketing fortune-tellers, prophets, soothsayers, and hucksters who are desperate to bestow their brilliant marketing strategies to audiences of eager listeners.

      The formulaic cycle typically goes something like this:

      1.Propagate a concept through a series of blogs and social media posts

      2.Aggregate said content into a book with boring cover

      3.Leverage said book into speaking engagements

      4.Materialize $100 bills used for high quality plastic surgery and a 2,500-square-foot addition on second home on the Maryland Eastern Shore

      Excuse us while we engage in synchronized vomiting.

      By fall of 2019, we’d lost our collective shit and had enough of the empty promises and salespeople masquerading as marketing experts, which have unleashed a slew of disastrous consequences (not to mention costing gullible senior managers money, time and quite possibly their jobs). Eager entrepreneurs are being taken advantage of by slick marketing consultants. Universities are breeding herds of automatons who shy away from challenging their textbooks. Even C-suites are being seduced by the finely-crafted bullshit that’s pumped out on a daily basis.

      We felt obliged to put our feet down, draw a line in the sand, and a variety of other euphemisms suggesting that we wanted to end the madness once and for all, even at the risk of delegitimizing the marketing industry that’s worth upwards of a trillion dollars. If there’s one thing we’ve learned after half a century of combined experience, it’s that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. There can’t be. If marketing, by its very nature, is about differentiation, how can anybody expect to stand out by sharing the same cookie cutters with everyone else?

      It’s never been easier to be average. If you can’t muster up the patience, energy, or desire to come up with customized solutions, you can simply copy and paste from your favorite book, blog, Ted Talk, or podcast. And so can everyone else—like a standup comic who rips off other routines and pimps them as their own. Few marketers acknowledge this, and fewer (perhaps none) have written a book about it—until now.

      Is it a contradiction to write a marketing book explaining why many marketers are full of shit? That will be up to you to decide. But before we dive in, we need to introduce ourselves so you know who the hell is saying what as we move forward.

      Greetings, upright mammals. I’m Aaron Perlut: baconist, fist-bump inventor, and indeed, my hair and beard are that luscious in real life. For some 25 years (damn I’m old) I’ve cobbled together a range of experiences in journalism, public relations and digital marketing. My career started in television but that really, really sucked. Hence, I fell into brand reputation, working for agencies and large corporations. All the while I’ve maintained a foothold in journalism with digital footprints at HuffingtonPost (under my maiden name), Forbes, ESPN, TechCrunch, AdWeek, BroBible, the American Mustache Institute (uh, yep) and now, this thing you’re holding in your hands (considering throwing out) or viewing on a tablet. There are obviously a lot more lucrative and easier things I could’ve done besides tackling this book project. But alas, here we are, so let me give you the gist of F*** Your Formula.

      Throughout the annals of history, fear has driven more destructive behavior than historians can keep up with. Racism stems from fear. Intolerance stems from fear. Unwillingness to pick up a guitar despite loving it until age 47—yes, fear. And of course, stagnation is more often than not driven by the fear of change—just ask Kodak!

      Humans are also, oftentimes, lazy. Many of us are wired to find any shortcut, pattern or formula that can minimize the amount of effort required to accomplish an objective. This mindset is great for grocery shopping and unclogging toilets, but when it bleeds into creative endeavors like building a brand, the results are overwhelmingly underwhelming at best.

      You’ve seen the headlines before:

      10 tips guaranteed to boost your conversion rate by 10 percent!

      5 steps to a content marketing plan that works wonders!

      We found the formula to go viral on YouTube!

      Sweet merciful Chuck Norris’ Armpit Muscles people! These promises are as seductive as Trey Songz, but much like his music career, they aren’t sustainable. Think about it: The sheer volume of how-to marketing advice is proof in itself that they don’t work. If they did, we’d all use them and move on with the rest of our days. Truthfully, these formulas are excuses for not doing the hard work of paving your own path.

      And yet, nearly all marketing experts, influencers or gurus have one thing in common: They peddle formulas. These might work wonders for them or a small subset of people—but they’re not universally applicable by a long shot. After more than two decades of navigating the marketing biz, I’ve discovered a nice, juicy factoid: Formulas don’t work. They suck. In fact, brands often thrive the most when they work up the courage to throw out their old rule books.

      There are two kinds of people in this world—those who adapt and those who fail. As technology continues to disrupt what we once thought to be the status quo, the future of marketing will belong to those who have the courage to take off their blinders, unplug their ears, and admit that their patterns of thinking are flawed.

      We could beat on our rippling pectorals or talk until we’re

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