The 2 Day MBA
Something to Think About
Three meditations: something to think about, a “how-to” resource, and a marketing deep dive. Ommmmmm.
"How To"
I’m excited to share a new mini course.
It’s FREE to Marketing Meditations subscribers.
The 2-Day Marketing MBA
Skilled marketers often spend MONTHS preparing their budgets and plans.
In today’s world, nobody has that kind of time.
This is NOT a quick fix or a substitute for the work you’re going to have to do.
It IS a step-by-step approach containing the distilled wisdom of decades. (The team at CMO Zen has collectively led marketing for over 60 companies.)
Included are 14 templates, models, and frameworks you can use “out of the box.”
This course should take:
- 2 hours to read
- 2 days to organize and execute
When you’re done, you’ll have:
- A clear marketing strategy
- A quarterly marketing planyou can actually execute
- A budget and timeline
- A recipe for scale
A Marketing Deep Dive
Expectation vs. Anticipation
Marketers are used to managing expectations.
You’ve heard the mantra.
“Under promise and over deliver.”
I like that advice.
But there’s a problem.
The only way to consistently exceed expectations is to…
…well set expectations you can exceed.
And sandbagging doesn’t seem like it should be part of the recipe.
So lately I’m focused more on how I manage anticipation than expectation.
The same thing happens in reverse.
If we believe something fun, or good, or enjoyable is going to happen, just thinking about it causes us to have that good feeling.
In How Positive Anticipation Can Make You Happier, Dr. Hayley Hirschmann talks about how anticipating events like a wedding, a vacation, or any happy occasion delivers the same kind of joy—sometimes over a much longer period of time—than the event itself.
I’m experimenting with ways to use this at CMO Zen.
Anything with a future date.
It doesn’t have to be actual events like conferences and trade shows.
It could be appointments on the calendar, content releases, software launches, or new podcast episodes. The gap between now and whenever these events happen are opportunities to increase anticipatory joy and satisfaction.
I’m convinced that endless Zoom calls offer participants the opposite of joyful anticipation.
What if we instead crafted these interactions to deliver anticipatory delight?
If you started every call with a joke, a clever catch phrase, or an anecdote, would people start looking forward to your calls?
I for one am looking forward to June, to summer, and to sunshine.
The more I remind myself about it, the more I look forward to it!
Where in your business could you inject more surprise, delight, and anticipatory joy?
I plan to report back on how these experiments are going.
See?
Just anticipating the results delivers a little hit of joyful anticipation.
Until then… at the very least, I hope that this newsletter gives you something to look forward to!
Namaste,
Chad Jardine, CEO
CMO Zen
