How to Be a Market Maker

ICROSSING POV:

HOW TO BE A MARKET MAKER Written by David Deal, Vice President, Marketing, iCrossing  February 2013 

Do you aspire to be a successful marketer, or do you want to be a market maker ? You can be a successful marketer by executing all the marketing fundamentals professionally – launching websites that reflect your brand, responding to your customers, and being present on all the right social spaces. Market makers do all those activities, but they strive to do something else: inspire people to act, to believe, and to live their lives differently. Marketers sell things; market makers change the world. One type of market maker, known as a creator , inspires action by developing products and services that reflect a personal vision, as Steve Jobs and Body Shop founder Anita Roddick did. A second type, known as a catalyst , inspires by curating and sharing ideas of other people, as exemplified by the careers of author Guy Kawasaki and Ahmet Ertegun, who founded Atlantic Records. But you don't need to unleash the iPad or be a best-selling author to be a market maker. You just need to develop traits such as having passion and a willingness to take some risk in your life. This point of view discusses inspirational market makers and shows you how you can act like one.

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Artists Who Inspire I found the inspiration to be a market maker from an unlikely source: Cornflakes with John Lennon , an episodic memoir written in 2009 by acclaimed rock critic Robert Hilburn. As he reflects on his career rubbing elbows with the likes of John Lennon and Bob Dylan, Hilburn explores the difference between a professional rock star and a true artist. Here is how Hilburn makes the distinction between professionals and artists: Much of what we call popular music, whatever the specic genre,  results from hollow profess ionalism – the sound of musici ans and record   producers pretty much working within the conventional boundaries of the day, recycling whatever ideas and styles are most likely to sell records ... The most extreme pretend pop is the whole American Idol phenomenon. The memorable artists help us explore our emotions, either through their   intense originality or by looking bravely at their own deepest fears and   grandest dreams. To be a true artist, he writes, "You need enormous talent, erce ambition,  an original vis ion, and an unyie lding toughne ss."

"I found the inspiration to be a market maker  from an unlikely source: Cornfakes with John Lennon..." 

Substitute the phrase “market maker” for artist, and you get what I’m driving at. I believe marketers can elevate themselves to the role of market maker by bringing our own personal imprints to what we do. Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki,  Anita Roddick, and Ahmet Ertegun are four shining examples.

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Creator: Steve Jobs Steve Jobs is the kind of market maker we might call a creator. Creators are directly involved in the development of products and services for a company. Creators have a vision for how the world should work and are bold enough to impose that vision on those around them through the products and services they develop. By now Jobs's life is so well known it plays like the plot of a movie we've all seen hundreds of times (and, of course, we'll soon be able to see a real movie about him): his explosive early years at Apple, when his company introduced a new vision for fusing design, user experience, and computing; the exile from Apple, when he founded the revolutionary Pixar Animation; and his glorious second act as CEO of Apple, when the company completely disrupted industries ranging from music to telecommunications by introducing wave upon wave of innovative mobile devices that changed how we consume content. Throughout his storied career, Jobs, more than anyone, humanized technology. So great was his impact on popular culture, that upon his death, his image graced the covers of publications ranging from The New Yorker  to Rolling Stone. Macs came along when personal computers were widely perceived as the province of a nerdy few. Apple did something that still seems astounding: turned an impersonal computing device into something warm and desirable. (My family still owns our clamshell iMac from the late 1990s – even though we don't use it anymore, we just love having it around because with its sleek cover and aqua green nish, it looks like a piece of art. With the iPad, Apple essentially made a

computing device a natural extension of our sense of touch. The iPhone transformed the mobile phone from a boring utility to a playful toy that we can't do without. In fact, half of all Americans now say we sleep next to our mobile phones.  And of course Apple helped disrupt the entire music industry through iTunes and the iPod – liberating music from the limits of analog and empowering consumers to make music part of their mobile lifestyles. As Randy Lewis of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "With Apple's iTunes and iPod, [Steve Jobs] revived the

single, put music libraries in fans' pockets and posed a challenge to brick-and-mortar record stores and radio." Record companies, betting on the long-term success of the compact disc, failed to respond to how Apple was helping to turn consumers from album acionados to snackers

of individual digital downloads. The music industry is still trying to catch up. Jobs’s legacy at Apple is so astonishing that it's easy to overlook what he accomplished by founding and developing Pixar. Pixar would eventually do far more than create highquality blockbuster entertainment. Pixar changed movie making. Pixar movies taught Hollywood how to gracefully fuse technology,

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humanity, and storytelling. The Pixar team created movies that somehow turned animated objects like toy cowboys into fully realized charact ers injected with humanity . In doing so, Pixar made it cool for anyone to enjoy a family lm : single gay

male urbanites, suburban parents, children, teens too self-consciously hip for Bambi – to name but a few demographics. Pixar has touched. Pixar launched animated movies that children can enjoy again as fully-grown adults – and that adults can enjoy for the rst time without children in tow. By contrast, even Disney classics like Snow White and Pinocchio are

forever remembered as animated family movies that children appreciate the most.  As Brent Schlender wrote in a Fast Company  recollection of Steve Jobs, Pixar upended the entire business model of animation. Although Jobs's contributions to Pixar were more nancial than creative, the company

succeeded because Jobs recognized that at its core, Pixar is a content company, not a creator of computer animation. But market makers don't always bankroll visionary companies or launch new products. As a onetime Apple employee named Guy Kawasaki demonstrates, you can also inuence behavior by acting as a catalyst for someone else's

creations.

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Watch Steve Jobs deliver the 2005 Stanford commencement address >

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Catalyst: Guy Kawasaki Guy Kawasaki is the market maker as catalyst. Catalysts make their mark by unearthing original ideas that someone else created and using their influence to expose those ideas to a broader audience. Kawasaki taught everyday people how to become marketers. And now he's acting as a sort of Stephen Covey or Dale Carnegie for the digital era by showing marketers how to inuence others by injecting everyday values

into their work. If you've ever Liked a Facebook page to support a brand, contributed to a program like My Starbucks Idea, or given a shout-out to your favorite restaurant on Yelp out of your sheer love for the place, you're practicing the kind of consumer evangelism that Kawasaki helped popularize. Kawasaki cut his teeth in the business world working for a jewelry company "counting diamonds and schlepping gold  jewelry around the world," as he told the New York Times. In the jewelry industry, he learned how to sell and "how to take care of your customers." He would really make his mark from 1983 to 1987 when he joined Apple and became chief evangelist for the Macintosh computer, a role that entailed him convincing technologists to write software for Mac products and to convince others to start using Macs. His mandate from Steve Jobs was, "Get me the best collection of software in the personal computer business," as he would write in Selling the Dream: How to Promote Your Product, Company, or  Ideas – and Make a Difference – Using Everyday Evangelism in 1991.

 After Apple introduced the Macintosh via an iconic Super Bowl ad in January 1984, "Initially many people condemned Macintosh and  Apple as losers," he wrote. "Macintosh didn't have software. It was cute and easy to use but accid. It was a joke computer from a joke

company." Kawasaki's job (and that of the evangelists who preceded him) was to popularize the Macintosh. Here's how he did it: The software evangelists did more than convince developers to write Macintosh software. They sold the Macintosh Dream. The software developers who bought into the Dream (and only some did) created products that changed  Macintosh's principal weakness – a lack of software – into its greatest strength – the best collection of software for   any personal com puter. When IBM attempted to unseat Apple with its PCjr personal computer, IBM failed miserably. According to Kawasaki, IBM

failed because it sold a product, whereas Apple "evangelized a dream of improving people's productivity and creativity."

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 As Kawasaki is the rst to tell you, he did not create the title of marketing evangelist. (The title existed before he joined  Apple.) But he certainly dened evangelism through practical application, and in doing so he learned the difference between

evangelism and sales. He would later make the distinction this way: "Sales is rooted in what's good for me. Evangelism is rooted in what's good for you." And Apple's success, rooted in a loyal following among passionate user groups, was a testament to his work. Kawasaki became a public gure after he started teaching others about the art of evangelism by speaking, and writing

best-selling books such as the aforementioned Selling the Dream, in which he put a stake in the ground by dening evangelism in ambitious terms: Evangelism is the process of convincing people to believe in your   product or idea as much as you do. It means selling your dream by  using fervor, zeal, guts, and cunning.

He was an early adopter of digital, using a popular blog, How to Change the World, as a launching pad to build a brand via social media (alt hough he would

later turn his attention away from blogging and focus on using platforms like Google Plus and Twitter to share content via social media). Throughout his career, Kawasaki has epitomized the role of idea curator. As a founding member of Garage Ventures, he's seeded start-ups. He launched

Watch Guy Kawasaki discuss the art  of enchantment >

 Alltop, an online newsstand that curates best social media and news on the web. If idea curators are "the new superheros of the Web " in the words of Fast  Company , then surely he's the rst of the great superheroes. Here's how he

describes his role in his ebook, What the Plus: Google+ for the Rest of Us : By necessity I became a curator, which means that I nd good stuff   and po int people to it. Curating is a valuable skill because there is an  abundance of good content but many people don’t have the time to nd it. The best curators nd things before anyone else does.

This is not to say that as a curator, Kawasaki lacks a personal vision. In his latest book, Enchantment , he articulates a clear vision for how marketers can build enduring relationships through our personal values and behavior.  As I wrote when I reviewed Enchantment  in 2011, Guy wants marketers and entrepreneurs to aspire for something more ambitious: changing the world one person at a time through behavioral attributes such as trustworthiness and likability. In other words, being a marketing evangelist starts with building personal trust and treating other people with respect. Focus on values and the great marketing and communication skills will follow. For instance, communicating with clarity and brevity is not just good marketing but also reects deeper values of respecting other people and their time.

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Guy's personal appeal even inuences his two most recent books What the Plus

and APE: How to Publish a Book . What the Plus is ostensibly an in-depth

look at the Google Plus social media platform, but he really offers a manifesto for people to treat each other with respect on social media. He urges people to treat their social sites as their homes and respect the sites of others as well.  APE , published in December 2012, is a guide to self-publishing, and as you might expect, the book contains in-depth tips for how to write, edit, design, and market a book. But whereas some pundits might focus on the mechanics of self-publishing and marketing, Kawasaki also discusses the importance of an author's personal behavior as a factor in helping a book succeed. In a chapter that describes how to build a personal brand, he and co-author Shawn Welch write, "Likeability is the second pillar of a personal

brand. Jerks seldom build great brands." He goes on to write, "If you want people to like you, you have to like them rst. This means accepting people no matter their race, creed, net worth,

religion, gender, politics, sexual orientation, or your perception of their level of intelligence. It means not imposing your values on others." Kawasaki is like a Trojan Horse: you read his ideas expecting to become a better marketer, and then he slips in thoughtful advice about how to be a better person. He does so with credibility because he links personal likeability and values to successful marketing. By celebrating and promoting the talents of those around him, Guy Kawasaki is an evangelist in more ways than one.

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A Creator as Crusader: Anita Roddick Whenever I buy a package of Archer Farms Fair Trade Tierra Del Sol at Target, I sense Anita Roddick smiling from above. Like Steve Jobs, the founder of the Body Shop falls in the creator category of market making because she was directly involved in the development of a product. But it's not her products that changed us – it was the way she inspired consumers to buy with a conscience. With her staunch support of fair trade and opposition to animal testing on cosmetics, she showed the world that a business could do good and make money at the same time. When she died of Hepatitis C in 2007, Michael McCarthy of The Independent wrote, "She did, indeed, change profoundly the way we look at the world, by changing the way we looked at business, and seeing the scale of what that could do." Roddick was born in a bomb shelter in England during World War II, and before

founding the Body Shop lived a free-spirited life of social activism and world travel. She originally trained as a teacher at Bath College of Higher Education until she "hit the hippie trail" of world travel, where she got exposure to Third World

economies and living conditions. She considered herself a social activist when she met and married Gordon Roddick, a Scottish poet, who became her business partner on ventures including the shaky operation of a restaurant. Her life changed dramatically in 1976 when her husband decided to take a few years off to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. Watch Anita Roddick tell her 

She launched the Body Shop

 inspirational stor y >

in London to help support her family while her husband was on his quixotic adventure. Her cosmetics store was launched on a shoestring budget with zero advertising. Her vision was to sell quality skin-care products made out of natural ingredients and packaged in rellable containers – without the condescending hype that

characterized cosmetics (especially for women). From the start, she embedded social responsibility into the Body Shop's business charter. She refused to sell products that were tested on animals, going against a standard practice of animal testing in the 1970s. And here's where she demonstrated a stroke of marketing genius: because she lacked a marketing budget, she used her anti-animal testing stance as a way to generate PR for her store. In doing so, she quickly developed a base of customers who agreed with her views. "Her cruelty-free cosmetics sold like hot cakes," wrote McCarthy in The Independent . "She may have stumbled upon the notion of ethical consumerism, but she made two discoveries about it: it was great for business, and it could enable business to change society."

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 As the Body Shop grew in popularity – expanding to 20 locations in Europe and Asia by 1984 – so did the scale of her social campaigning. In 1985, she used shop windows of her stores to promote the Greenpeace Save the Whales movement – "the rst explicit tie-in between products and causes," according to The Guardian. She and the Body Shop actively lobbied

against animal testing in other businesses, which led to the banning of testing of cosmetics on animals in Britain in 1997 (and across Europe after her death). Her adoption of fair trade practices was nothing short of revolutionary. Instead of buying her cosmetics ingredients at the lowest prices possible from the commodities markets, she sourced raw products from exporters from developing countries in order to promote their economic growth. For instance, after visiting local farms in Nicaragua in 1998, she started importing sesame seed oil from 130 farmers in Achupa, Nicaragua, which helped the town rebuild from Hurricane Mitch. After she learned about Amazonian tribes protesting against a hydroelectric project that would have ooded their lands, she agreed to buy Brazil nuts (used

to make moisturizers and conditioners), which created revenue that the tribes needed to protect their lands. Had Roddick been performing pure acts of charity in her trade practices, the Body Shop would have become a charming story about doing good but nothing more. The reason her fair trade practices spread to other businesses is that the Body Shop ourished  because of them. Because Roddick cleverly and loudly drew attention to her practices, she attracted

consumers who felt that buying her products contributed to a greater good. Owning a Body Shop skin moisturizer meant helping to protect a rainforest in Brazil. Eventually, so many businesses would become interested in fair trade practices that a Fairtrade International Organization would arise in order to secure better deals for farmers and workers and certify businesses that follow fair trade practices. What's more, Roddick

made it not just acceptable but desirable for companies ranging from Ben & Jerry's to Starbucks to espouse practices of corporate social responsibility as part of their business growth models. Today her spirit lives on through the growth of the B Corps movement in the United States, through which corporations such as Patagonia are certied for adhering to best practices in corporate accountability.

For instance, one of the reasons Ben & Jerry's was certied as a B Corp member is that the company devotes nearly half of its cost of goods sold to helping smaller suppliers. The Body Shop would eventually expand to more than 2,600 locations globally and generate about $1 billion in annual revenue, and Roddick remained a passionate activist to her last days. After being diagnosed with hepatitis C in 2004, she became an active lobbyist for public funding to stop the disease – which was just one of many causes she championed. Guy Kawasaki would characterize her as "the quintessential evangelist" – selling not just a product, but also a dream for making the world better.

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The Catalyst as Taste Maker: Ahmet Ertegun What do you have on your Spotify playlist right now? Chances are that Ahmet Ertegun had a hand influencing the music you've chosen. As founder and president of Atlantic Records, Ertegun signed and nurtured musicians who shaped the sound of modern popular music, ranging from Ray Charles to Led Zeppelin. I initially thought of him as a catalyst when I began researching this white paper. But in fact, He is a most fascinating mix of catalyst and creator. He had enough musical talent to write one of the first hits recorded by Ray Charles, "Mess Around," which was important to the development of modern soul, and he was in the studio singing and helping to produce the song "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," an enormously important song that helped launch modern rock. But he himself understood that his real talent was not being a musician but finding and developing them. The son of the Republic of Turkey's rst ambassador to the United States, Ertegun

developed a passion for jazz early on, assembling a huge collection of jazz records and traveling to Harlem and New Orleans (something sons of ambassadors in the 1940s just did not do) to nd musicians he discovered on wax. In 1947, he founded Atlantic Records

with Herb Abramson. He had zero business experience but possessed passion and determination to uncover great music. Robert Greeneld's eminently readable biography of

Ertegun, The Last Sultan, recounts how in the early days of Atlantic Records, Ertegun and his business partner borrowed a car and crisscrossed the "crowded, smoke-lled juke joints and roadside honky-tonks in the Deep South where the smell of spilled whiskey and beer and the overwhelming funk of sweating bodies on the dance oor made it hard even to breathe." They trudged through muddy elds to segregated sections of town to uncover musicians like Blind Willie McTell, Professor Longhair, and Ruth

Brown. They developed a network of scouts in clubs and concert halls in major cities, too. One of his artists was Ray Charles, who, under Ertegun's tutelage in 1953, launched the genre of music we now know as soul through his song, "I Got a Woman." During that pivotal year, Ertegun and Jerry Wexler helped an artist named Big Joe Turner cut

a song, "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," that is generally regarded as the precursor of rock. Writes Greeneld, "In the short space of six months, Atlantic had released two songs that would dene the future of the record business in America. 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' helped begin rock and roll. 'I Got a Woman' established soul.” Atlantic, under Ertegun's

leadership, played a phenomenal role in desegregating American popular music.

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Throughout his career, Ertegun would have an active hand in developing and promoting the careers of musical giants across several genres. In the 1970s, Atlantic rescued the Rolling Stones from the brink of nancial bankruptcy and

elevated the band to mainstream cultural icons. His personal commitment to Led Zeppelin – not only signing them to  Atlantic but hanging out with the band all night amid post-concert backstage debauchery – helped propel a band that dominated and inuenced modern hard rock. When he died after tripping and hitting his head backstage at a Rolling

Stones concert in 2006, his loss was so widely felt in the music world that Led Zeppelin eventually reunited after 25 years to play a benet concert in his honor.

 Ahmet Ertegun's greatest gift to music was his eye for talent and the will to mold that talent into wildly popular music that broke through different genres. He and legendary Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler "could hear the

talent in its rawest form before even the talent knew what it wanted to do." But he did more than nd talent – he shape d it. He played the music of Bessie

Smith and Ma Rainey for Ruth Brown to teach her blues and develop her singing style. He actively collaborated with Ray Charles in the studio in 1953 and pushed him until Charles found his break-through with "I Got a Woman."

 An important distinction needs to be made: he was not a tastemaker or molder of talent just because he loved music and he wanted to make a ton of money (although music and the creature comforts that come with wealth

Watch Ahmet Ertegun's  induction into the Rock a nd Roll   Hall of Fame in 1987 >

were important to him): he loved his  artists. As Neil Young said at a tribute to Ertegun held in 2007: "Ahmet was our man. I just hope today's musicians have someone like Ahmet taking care of them."

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The Five Traits of Market Makers A Turkish jazz freak who launched the world's most memorable recording artists. A globe-trotting hippie who taught big business how to do good for the world. A visionary who humanized technology. And a passionate venture capitalist who has energized everyday people to become evangelists. What do they all have in common? Five traits stand out – traits that any of us can cultivate: passion, having a personal north star, an ability to surround themselves with talent, personal eclecticism, and risk taking.

Passion  Steve Jobs best exemplies a trait common to all market marketers: a burning passion.

Steve Jobs "put passion into products," noted James B. Stewart in one of the many heart-felt tributes to Jobs written in the aftermath of his death in 2011. In his acclaimed biography, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes the moment when Jobs unveiled iTunes to jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who turned out to be an indifferent audience: "Watch what it can do!" Jobs kept insisting when Mar salis's attention would wander. "See  how the interface works." Marsalis later recalled, "I don't care much about computers,  and kept telling him so, but he goes on for two hours. He was a man possessed. After a while, I started looking at him and not the computer, because I was so fascinated with  his passion."

Isaacson also recounts the time Jobs decided to make a major overhaul to the design of the iPhone as the project neared completion, telling designer Jonathan Ive that "'I didn't sleep last night because I realized that I just don't love it' ... Ive, to his dismay, instantly realized Jobs was right." In fact, Jobs expressed his passion for design in every aspect of his life. He personally supervised the construction of an oldfashioned brick factory-style building for Pixar, and according to Brent Schlender, if the colors of the custom-made bricks were not distributed evenly enough, Jobs made the bricklayers tear apart the bricks and start over. (But those exacting standards also had a down side. When people failed to live up to what he wanted, he could be brutal and insufferable, as you

can read in Ben Austin's Wired August 2012 cover piece, "Do You Really Want to Be Like Steve Jobs ?".)  All the market makers proled in this white paper demonstrate passion. Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, was

passionate about human rights, and, in particular, women's rights. The entire premise behind the Body Shop was selling cosmetics without sexism and eschewing the cult of youth. Guy Kawasaki is passionate about injecting enchanting values and practices in the work place – and if you've ever worked with him, you know he has an equally strong zeal for clear, simple communication. Ahmet Ertegun, co-founder of Atlantic Records, was so passionate about music that he sometimes lived in the studio with the artists on his label.

A Strong North Star   All market makers possess a strong north star – a raison d'être, or a reason for being. In other words, they all stand for something. Steve Jobs stands for brilliant design and innovation. Guy Kawasaki stands for consumer evangelism. Anita Roddick symbolizes ethical consumerism. Ahmet Ertegun is the consummate music man (by contrast, music impresario David Geffen was renown more for his business acumen when he created Asylum Records and Geffen Records in the 1970s).

Sometimes the raison d'être takes time to reveal itself, which was certainly true of Guy Kawasaki. "I was never told, 'OK, you © ICROSSING, INC., A HEARST COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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go get XYZ to write software, and they in turn will get more customers to buy your software and buy Macs'," he said in an interview with Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell. "We never thought it through that much. That's what happened, but that was not the plan." Similarly, Anita Roddick once famously said about the early days of the Body Shop, "We recycled everything, not because we were environmentally friendly but because we didn't have enough bottles. It was a good idea. What was

unique about it, with no intent at all, no marketing nous, was that it translated across cultures, across geographical barriers and social structures. It wasn't a sophisticated plan, it just happened like that." By contrast, Jobs and Ertegun seemingly revealed from Day One, long before they even became famous. But all four of our

market makers have made their marks.

An Ability to Surround Yourself with Talent  Guy Kawasaki exemplies another trait common to market makers: they surround themselves with talent. Consider Enchantment : in each chapter, he invites guest

authors to provide their own personal stories of enchanted marketing, which makes his book more collaborative and genuine. Similarly, What the Plus! relies on guest authors for some key chapters. Similarly, Steve Jobs was surrounded by enormous talent, people who became famous in their own right – superstars like John Lasseter at Pixar, Jonathan Ive at Apple, and Guy Kawasaki himself. Atlantic Records succeeded not because of Ahmet Ertegun alone, but because of Ertegun and visionaries like Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd, and Herb Abramson. Anita Roddick might have been the face of the Body Shop, but the brand would not have

succeeded without the talents of its anonymous network of franchise operators.

Living an Eclectic Life   Anita Roddick personies a third major characteristic of market makers: they are eclectic people with many interests beyond their careers. She was a world traveler,

environmentalist, and activist long before the Body Shop came along, and she remained actively involved in many causes such as Children on the Edge, an organization she founded. Guy Kawasaki is a successful writer, speaker, and venture capitalist – oh, and an active family man and a self-described hockey addict. The clean and simple design of  Apple's legendary products reected Steve Jobs's personal interests in Buddhism, and iTunes was a direct reection of his love of music. Ahmet Ertegun was one of the founders of the New York Cosmos soccer team when he wasn't busy running Atlantic Records. The success of market makers in business reects a natural curiosity to

learn and experience the world around them.

Taking Risks   Ahmet Ertegun was a market maker in the truest sense of the word. He was also a risk taker – and a willingness to take risks is the fourth major attribute of market makers. Market makers are willing to try and fail. Founding a pop record company in the 1940s was in fact an enormous risk: there were no rules, no best practice s, and no mentors from which to learn. When Erteg un and his

business partners attempted to get the business off the ground in its early days, Ertegun nearly went broke, and Atlantic nearly went out of business. And we all know about the risks that Steve Jobs took, not all of which worked, such as the NeXT. The Body Shop had no reason to succeed:  Anita Roddick had zero business experience and was taking on a well-entrenched industry. Guy Kawasaki left the comforts of Apple to essentially create his own brand. Their willingness to risk reects their ability to dream.

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How You Can Be a Market Maker You can inject the spirit of the market maker in your own job, every day, by finding ways to challenge people to think differently and, as Guy Kawasaki implores, make their lives better. Here are four ways:

1. Get involved in product development  Inserting yourself in product (or service) development means more than creating the right message or marketing program to execute. I mean actually getting involved in the process of developing the product or service: doing the research into the wants and needs of the customer and asking bold questions such as, How can we truly make a difference in our customer's life? Tools exist to help you do so – for instance, user personas, popularized by Forrester Research to help you create customer proles, or linguistic proles, created by iCrossing to understand consumer wants and needs based on their search needs.

Becoming the owner of audience insight inside your organization (or business unit, or department) is key. It does not matter whether you sell ice cream cones or professional services: you can nd a way to inuence people – to really have an impact on their lives – starting with understanding your audience and guring out how to make their lives better.

2. Be a thought leader   Another effective way to be a marketer maker is to become a publisher of your own vision, which is what thought leadership is all about. The explosion of social publishing platforms – Wordpress and Tumblr, to name a few – make it possible for you to create your

own imprint with practically zero barrier to entry. ( Blogging is the route I've chosen.) If you don't fancy yourself a writer, then express your vision with sight and sound – that's why Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube exist. You can also work through your employer's own social media and thought leadership programs – and I assume any enlightened company has one now. Contribute to your company blog and let your community manager handle the heavy lifting. Nominate yourself as a speaker for SXSW and other events.

Embracing the role of thought leader means being bold enough to leave a personal imprint on everything you do through your vision and ideas, even when you are not publishing white papers or delivering speeches. For instance, years ago, I was in charge of creating the agenda and managing a meeting of creative account teams for a services rm. Running an event is a hard job, but you can wield enormous inuence through the role. For me, exerting inuence meant shaking up the agenda by bringing in successful producer and musician Dave Stewart to appear. The choice of Dave Stewart reected my personal belief that creativity and fresh ideas were shaping the future of digital advertising. In

a session that was jarring, shocking, and never boring, Stewart showed everyone in the audience what the creative process looks like from the inside out and challenged everyone in the room to think differently about their jobs. Dave Stewart was the kind of speaker who creates discomfort. The staid marketers and even the more forward-thinking creative types listened in stunned silence at times as Dave shared with us some of the more controversial work he's done. I knew I was on to something with Dave after the presentation when attendees walked up to me and almost unanimously said,

"He made me think." A market maker should provide an experience that makes you think.

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3. Be a social catalyst  If you at-out lack the time and energy to be a thought leader,

then you can still play the role of catalyst by empowering other people – your fellow employees – to inject fresh ideas in your company. Social media has given rise to a new era of employee empowerment. You can become a powerful catalyst by helping your employees to unleash their ideas as Guy Kawasaki does. Even with the advent of social media, most major companies view branding as the province of the top executives and the marketing team, never to be really trusted in the hands of rank-and-le

employees. But as Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research wrote in his book Empowered, companies like Best Buy are waking up to the power of their own employees to represent their brands and are giving them tools to do it. Among the best corporate social catalysts are Intel's Ekaterina Walter and Ford's Scott Monty, who have used their positions as social evangelists to open up the cultures of the companies they represent. (That's exactly what I've been asked to do at iCrossing, and as I explained to PSFK in 2011, I'm excited and energized to be playing a role in the change occurring across many industries.) Being a social catalyst is not a mysterious process. Again, tools exist to help you – such as social media guidelines and strategies (which you should assign yourself to create). Many of those tools can be found for free across the social world. For instance, here is a link to iCrossing's. And here are 200 more from other organizations. Go ahead. Download and adapt them for your needs.

4. Have a north star  What do you stand for – better yet, what do you want to stand for personally? Great

leadership? Innovation? The most creative idea person anyone has ever seen? Having a north star is often known as personal branding. My personal brand comes down to the power of writing. My job has many facets – developing relationships with inuencers, social media, managing a relationship with one

of the world's great music moguls, and creating thought leadership among them – but when I die, I want to be remembered for being passionate about writing. I live for writing like no other part of my job. And I make it a priority to help everyone I work with become better writers. If I can help you be a better writer, I'm having an impact on you that goes beyond selling a product or service. Having a personal north star is not the same as being a social catalyst or thought leader. Steve Jobs believed in the power of elegant, simple design. He imposed his beliefs by building and running companies, not by publishing books or writing social media guidelines. But not everyone is Steve Jobs. You and I can make our north stars shine more brightly when we embrace thought leadership and empower others to unleash their ideas. Your personal brand can be aligned with your corporate brand. iCrossing CMO Tari Haro embraces "connectedness" (developing close relationships with others) as both her personal mission and iCrossing's. "I believe in the power of connectedness," she states simply on the iCrossing website. What is your north star?

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Market Makers Hall of Fame

Jeff Bezos

Sir Richard Branson

Walt Disney

Has completely disrupted industries ranging from retailing to publishing

Anyone who can make flying on an airplane sexy belongs on this list

Invented family entertainment

Ahmet Ertegun

Steve Jobs

Guy Kawasaki

Influenced the face of popular music

Embedded technology in just about every aspect of our lives

Helped turn consumers into marketers

Phil Knight

Madonna

Jim Murphy

"Just Do It" made personal achievement cool for everyone; helped launch modern-day cult of sports celebrity

Shaped the look and style of the MTV Generation – and constantly reinvents herself

Made technology sexy to CMOs

Anita Roddick

Oprah Winfrey

Mark Zuckerberg

Launched capitalism with a conscience

Her Book Club was the ultimate taste maker

Has helped redefined how we socialize

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Find Your Gods I encourage you read Corn Flakes with John Lennon, but if you lack the time, at least review the section, "Some of the Supercial Artists," where Hilburn discusses Bob Dylan's three ways of categorizing artists: "the natural performer, who does the best they can within their limits onstage; the supercial performer, who shouldn't be on stage in the rst place because

they've got nothing original to tell you; and the supernatural artist, who, in Bob's words, 'is the kind that digs deep and the deeper they go, the more gods they'll nd.'" You can be an outstanding professional and remain squarely in the realm of the supercial for the rest of your life. Or you can

develop a personal vision and commitment to change other people. You can be a market maker. The choice is yours.

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