As a startup, you’re an insurgent. Innovation, like revolution, is about replacement. You’re upending the status quo and disrupting incumbents because it’s the only way forward. You have a better solution. But the odds are against you.

As a founder, you’re facing an occupying power with more resources than you. Even if you’ve discovered a “blue ocean” or have a positive-sum offer, you’re up against switching costs, behavioral inertia, and trust issues. You’re up against Goliath.

Fortunately, there’s a playbook for that.

This is Phase 1 of Go-to-Market as Unconventional Warfare. Unconventional Warfare (UW) is about supporting a resistance movement or insurgency to win against an occupying power. Last week I published the setup—Phase 0. Now we’ll get the ball rolling with Phase 1: Preparation.

You need to understand the arena before you get into it. Doctrinally, this would be intelligence preparation of the battlefield.

To gather that foundational intelligence, you need to study the population, the adversary, and the resistance. Study the conditions, the area, the people, and who holds power. Study potential supporters, strengths, weaknesses, agendas, and relationships.

For your startup, preparation is about deep customer research, competitive analysis, and identifying your asymmetric advantage. You need to understand if the landscape is setting you up for success or failure. Richard Rumelt calls this diagnosis “an explanation of the nature of the challenge,” where a good one identifies “certain aspects of the situation as being the critical ones.” Understanding these things helps you determine what you’re going to focus on.

Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky use these questions to open their Foundation Sprint:

1. “Who, precisely, is your customer?”

2. “What problem are you solving for them?”

3. “What’s your advantage?”

4. “Who or what are you up against?”

Let’s address each of them. Then we’ll cover four more things you need before making Initial Contact: price, supporters, conditions, and what winning looks like.

Your customer

Which customers come first? Start with intensity over quantity. Start with people who really need what you’re making. People who need it badly. Paul Graham says you should choose “something a small number of people want a large amount.” For products that get better the more people use them, in The Cold Start Problem, Andrew Chen suggests finding your Atomic Network, the smallest network that can stand on its own; it’s “probably smaller and more specific than you think.”

In Disciplined Entrepreneurship, Bill Aulet suggests you define your segment by making sure:

1. Everyone in it uses the same product.

2. You sell to all of them in the same way.

3. They all talk to each other.
   If you need different products or pitches, then the segment is too broad.

Their problem

Trying something new costs your customers time, energy, money, and even their reputation. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky suggest you start with “What problem causes enough pain to justify that cost?” Like I mention in Random Acts of Marketing, focus on people in the high-pain quadrants. Make precise, timely offers when urgency demands taking action now. Use low urgency opportunities for branding to stay top of mind.

Paul Graham warns that “by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve a problem no one has.”

Your advantage

April Dunford asks you to consider what you have that the other alternatives are missing. Her approach is at the core of UW. You want to focus on asymmetric leverage to find your competitive power. To do that, Richard Rumelt, author of Good Strategy Bad Strategy, suggests answering:

1. What do you know that other people don’t?

2. What do you have that other people don’t?

Richard advises that, as a startup, you might need to narrow your field before you can pinpoint where that power is. You want to be able to pre-bunk your customer’s doubts by having explanations and evidence staged and ready.

What differentiates you only makes you special when you compare it to the alternatives.

What you’re up against

You are competing against opportunity cost and what customers would do without you.

Michael Porter, known for his approach to competitive strategy, asks you to consider the opportunity cost—how choosing your product also means giving up the next-best use of your customer’s money and time.

In Obviously Awesome, April Dunford asks you to consider what your customers would do if your product didn’t exist. She notes that Its worth acknowledging how sometimes they’d do nothing at all—that’s behavioral inertia.

These four basics get you started with who you’ll target, what you’ll offer, and why customers might choose you. But we still need to consider how you’ll reach your customers and what you’ll charge. You’ll figure out how to sell in the Infiltration phase.

You also have to consider pricing. With competitive strategy, Michael notes that your customers will judge price based on how they’re handling the problem right now. Those potential substitutes limit your addressable market’s profit potential “by placing a ceiling on prices.” The juice needs to be worth the squeeze. Your solution needs to be worth the price AND the trouble of switching (and taking the leap of faith).

Your price also needs to (at least eventually) cover the costs of serving your customers so you can stay in business.

Your price needs to pass both those tests, or the market you’ve chosen will drag you down with it. In $100M Offers, Alex Hormozi give us the analogy of the market being either neutral, growing as your tailwind, or shrinking as a headwind.

Paul Graham says that if you have to choose between people who will sign up now and those who will pay most, “it’s usually best to pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters.” Targeting your early adopters is where you start layering your efforts like I describe in Random Acts of Marketing. It’s also how you might...

Identify your supporters

Identifying your potential supporters is what will define your route to influence. These people, organizations, and channels are the gateway to getting discovered, making sales, and getting more users.

Analyze your first customers and partners the way an operator might analyze a resistance force. Learn what they do well, what they’re missing, what they want, and how they relate in their social spheres. Who makes decisions? Who do people listen to? Who gets the job done?

Seth Godin warns against starting at the top. People seek social proof when they’re unsure. If you pitch the CEO and she asks her team and they don’t know you, you just lost your shot. Seth suggests the alternative is to start in the middle.

You want to map out the org chart and the task org to understand how your customer really makes decisions. Even families have them. Bill Aulet calls the people surrounding the sale the decision-making unit. You need to know “who makes the ultimate decision to purchase, as well as who influences that decision.” According to Bill, there are three:

1. The champion

2. The end user

3. The economic buyer

You want to aim for the people responsible for profit and loss, or at least revenue, because they make the most important decisions.

Seth notes how the buyer you first connect with might not even be your customer. The buyer might be spending someone else’s money, and they only care about pleasing the boss.

Those intermediate customers, who might buy your product but don’t actually use it, have leverage. Intermediate buyers are powerful brokers that can strong-arm you on pricing, demand more than you could profitably offer at a given price point, and play you against competitors to get a better deal.

Melody Wilding identified three groups of people you should keep in mind:

1. Decision makers who control resources and opportunities

2. Power peers who are rising stars across the organization

3. Behind-the-scenes operators who make everything actually happen

Read the room

UW analyzes things like living conditions, government services, political, military, economic conditions, and so on. Your customers have budgets, rules, buying cycles, and tools they already use with plenty of procurement friction and switching costs to keep them using those tools.

These conditions are the variables that affect what your customer can realistically do. In The 7-Step Influence Process, this analysis focuses on understanding your supporter’s effectiveness.

1. Do your supporters have the power, control, and authority to influence the outcome you seek?

2. Do their conditions prohibit them from saying yes even if they like you?

Define winning

Unconventional Warfare starts planning the final transition phase during this preparation phase. For you, that means planning for what comes after the launch now.

1. What should your customers gain?

2. What does your business need to achieve?

Make these two specific, measurable, and observable so it’s crystal clear that you’ve hit your target and know when to begin moving towards the next stage of your venture.

Defining your objective is the first Step in The 7-Step Influence Process where you use Objectives & Key Results (OKR) framework along with other tools to figure out what your goals should be.

Success also comes with obligations you may be overlooking right now. What could they be? How can you set yourself up to manage growth now while it’s easy rather than later while it’s hard?

Once you can:

1. Describe what winning means.

2. Name your first segment.

3. Explain why your improvement is worth it.

4. Define your advantage over the competition.

5. Name your supporters.

6. Define a price people will pay that covers the cost of surviving.

It’ll be time for...

Phase 2: Initial Contact

As a startup, you’re an insurgent. Innovation, like revolution, is about replacement. You’re upending the status quo and disrupting incumbents because it’s the only way forward. You have a better solution. But the odds are against you.

As a founder, you’re facing an occupying power with more resources than you. Even if you’ve discovered a “blue ocean” or have a positive-sum offer, you’re up against switching costs, behavioral inertia, and trust issues. You’re up against Goliath.

Fortunately, there’s a playbook for that.

Unconventional Warfare (UW) is about supporting a resistance movement or insurgency to win against an occupying power. Sound familiar? It’s at the heart of my career working in Special Operations Forces.

To win, your go-to-market strategy needs to be unconventional. You need to turn your constraints and limitations into advantages an incumbent can’t or won’t use.

“In organizing, the major negative in the situation has to be converted into the leading positive.”
— Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Paul Graham describes one of these tactics as doing things that don’t scale. Early on, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia at Airbnb dedicated 30 days to doing what nobody else would do, “30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure.”

To win, you need to win the hearts and minds of your customers when they have no idea who you are or why they should care.

Alexa Mateen Abdi at Tinder won over their first customers by throwing a party where everyone had to download the app to get in. She had a simple pitch: Rejection sucks. You’ll only get a match if both people swipe right.

For startups, funded or bootstrapped, Go-to-Market as Unconventional Warfare is how you’ll win.

Special Operations defines UW in seven phases:

1. Preparation:
   You start by studying the terrain; your market, who the incumbents are, the gaps.

2. Initial contact:
   Your entry to the market and connection with your first supporters; deeply rather than at scale.

3. Infiltration:
   You secure your beachhead—a specific geography, use case, or segment where you can secure your foothold and establish a forward operating base (FOB); and you’ll optimize for Product Market Fit.

4. Organization:
   This is team and network development; your atomic network, your auxiliary, cadre, core, referral strategies, and audience.

5. Build up:
   Develop capability, capacity, and reach to hit critical mass; make sure you can deliver on your promise and be mindful of the temptation for go-to-market to get ahead of product.

6. Employment:
   Deliver and scale.

7. Transition:
   Turn your wins into systems, failures into lessons learned, and grow into the next phase of your venture.

This approach is your playbook for engineering the right conditions and building the necessary infrastructure to scale your business.

Every week you’ll get the in depth guide on each subsequent phase. Subscribe below to make sure you get them straight to your inbox.

Get started with Phase 1: Preparation

You can mislead people without lying. At scale, that’s what makes media dangerous.

Based on my experience in Psychological Operations, I want to share a few things you should look out for. Specifically, I’ll show you how Fox News manipulates you (and CNN too), and how they keep you watching but fail to serve you.

Then we’ll talk about how you can design your own narratives. How you can share your story in a way that truly serves both you and your audience.

The first thing you should look out for is information asymmetry. That’s why you check the news, after all. You want to know what’s going on, and the media is the gatekeeper. But as we all know, first impressions carry weight. And that makes headlines particularly problematic.

Headlines (and captions) are first impressions that capture and direct your attention. Their brevity excuses omission. And omission distorts reality.

Every decision on what to include and what to leave out gives an impression. Sometimes false impressions. Even if what you say is technically true. And that distortion is the space where exploitation lives.

There’s a name for misleading people with true statements: Paltering. In 2017 there was a study noting how people tend to find paltering more ethical than lying. But on the receiving end, they found it to be just as unethical and ended up trusting the palterer much less than a regular lier.

Let’s look at this CNN example: “What it will take to save American democracy”

Notice how Fareed built in the assumption that American democracy is in shambles. It never gives you the space to consider the matter. The notion has already taken root before you’ve had a chance to process anything.

These authoritative headlines often use curiosity gaps to get you to click. These are statements engineered to say something emotionally charged but leave enough unsaid so you’re compelled to look into it.

The catch is, our brain gets blinded with emotion and is so caught up in the curiosity gap, the assumptions behind the gap tends to bypass our critical thinking. And that’s how a narrative takes hold.

When you plant the seed of an idea, and repeat it often enough, it becomes truth. Every exposure blurs the line between narrative and truth.

Now let’s layer that effect with a potent force multiplier: Information overload.

Algorithmic feeds and the 24-hour news cycle are plagued by a demand for content. That demand excuses noise. The overwhelming kind that distracts you from what matters. When everything is bolded, nothing is.

In Psychological Operations, we’d refer to this as the information environment. We live in the noisiest one our species has ever known. One beyond what any of us can keep up with.

Look at how Fox takes advantage of this dynamic:

Fox works their magic by labeling. They exploit terms like “Dems” and “Libs,” repeating them until they’ve become a meme.

When you’re overwhelmed by vicious amounts of information and entertainment, who has the bandwidth to really look into any of it? So we take most of it at face value.

Fox uses those labels to force people into tribes, then instigate a compelling “us” vs “them” dichotomy.

Then they go one step further, naming and shaming them as “fanatics” or “deranged.” They reduce them to a group that is too far gone to be reasoned with.

Before I worked in Psychological Operations, I was in the infantry. When I see Fox News, their tactics remind me of the book On Killing. Dave Grossman’s book was one of the few available when I trained to be an infantryman.

Grossman discusses how propaganda reduces resistance to killing by depicting opponents as subhuman. He notes that “often the enemy’s humanity is denied by referring to him as a ‘gook,’ ‘Kraut,’ or ‘Nip.’”

Grossman goes further, saying you must “believe that not only is this atrocity right, but it is proof that [you are] morally, socially, and culturally superior to those whom [you have] killed. It is the ultimate act of denial of their humanity. It is the ultimate act of affirmation of [your] superiority.” — [brackets have my edits]

When you’re trying to win anyone over, it’s worth remembering how social scientist Arthur Brooks, author of Love Your Enemies, notes that “nobody in history has ever been insulted into agreement.”

Narratives are powerful. Sometimes they’re engineered. Sometimes they’re accidental. In our information age, you need to be able to manage both. Especially with AI in the mix.

I could go on and on with examples... And in my first draft I did. But that’s not the point of this piece. I want to move on to how you can share your story, serve your audience rather than exploit them, and win people over.

With narrative management, you need to treasure your first impressions.

Sure, you may not always get to tell the story first, but you still get your first impression: It’s your reaction (or lack of reaction) to the story.

Oddly, the most manipulative thing you can do is be honest. Tell the whole story. Tell it personally.

You know how it goes: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”

Vulnerability is a gateway to connection. We’re all human. We all struggle. To pretend otherwise is presumptuous at best, a superiority complex at worst, and bad storytelling all the way through.

Our feeds full of other peoples highlights can make anyone feel behind. The algorithm can really put people down. But you bring your audience closer to you when you give them the sort of humanity they crave in our ever-connected but isolated lives.

Open with the hard part. It’s one thing to admit fault. It’s another to admit struggle. Then wrap it up with the message you’d like your audience to remember. Win their hearts first. Then their minds.

And when it comes to information asymmetry, nothing will make your audience sour like errors of omission. They’re the easiest to get away with at first, because your audience doesn’t know what they don’t know. It’s tempting to think you’ll get away with it.

Until you get caught. Then your audience feels it like a stab in the back. People might forget what you said, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.

And that’s not what you want them to feel. If I could suggest one thing, it’d be that you figure out what you do want them to feel before you build your narrative and share your story.

I’ll propose two pillars, actually:

1. What do you want your audience to feel and think? Like psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it, Our minds are better lawyers than judges, so focus on what you want them to feel. Their thinking will catch up later.

2. What specific action or behavior do you want them to take?
   I suspect this is where my PSYOP experience differs from traditional communications. A story without a strategic ask guiding it is a waste.

Once you’ve defined those two, use this rough framework to build the story:

1. Where we are and how we got here.

2. Name the problem in a way the audience can identify with, and why it’s a problem.

   • Doing this right lets the audience know you hear them. And people need to feel heard before they’ll listen.

3. What will happen when you solve the problem.

4. How you’re going to do it.

5. Paint the happy ending and what they need to do to join your cause.

Andy Raskin coaches startup CEOs on their pitches and he teaches founders to start with a shift in the world before naming the problem. His favorite example is how Marc Benioff from Salesforce opened by saying that the old way of buying software was over and the cloud was the new way to win.

This sequence gives your audience a reason to care and motivates them to join your cause. Once they do, you have a promise to keep and their trust to steward.

Thank you for reading!

I care about how we tell our stories. The stories we tell ourselves about the world are how we see the world. But we don’t always have a choice in the quality of stories we get. Now I hope you have a better idea of how to see through them.

You can mislead people with the truth, but you don’t have to. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Your feedback means the world to me, and it’s the only way I can improve. Comment below or send me an email. I have thick skin, so please, be candid.

I’ll help you get the influence your work deserves.

You can also reach me on X.

NEXT:

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

—George Bernard Shaw

I’ve spent a career doing Psychological Operations where we had one job: Influence behavior change.

Working as part of Special Operations Forces (SOF) we had a catchphrase for when we thought a team was just doing “stuff” but not really going anywhere with it.

We called it “random acts of SOF.”

It’s doing operations for the sake of doing operations. Haphazard. Purposeless.

Does your growth team choose a channel, develop a message, and launch a campaign before they ever consider the living, breathing human being on the other end?

Then they’re just doing random acts of marketing.

Measuring performance and getting results are two different beasts. You need a strategy.

Roger Martin defines strategy as “an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.”

Let’s dig into that a little:

• Integrated, meaning that the choices must reinforce one another.

• Choices, meaning that strategy requires commitments and tradeoffs.

• Desired customer action, meaning the strategy must produce a specified behavior distinct from transactional outcomes.

• Compels, meaning the combined choices must influence the behavior to take place.

Martin’s definition gives us a useful test. Do our growth choices reinforce one another, and do they lead toward a clearly defined customer action?

In PSYOP, we’d call this a Desired Behavior, which is derived from a larger Psychological Objective.

It’s easy for growth teams to gloss over these nitty-gritty details to focus on shiny objects like awareness, pipeline, revenue, or growth. It’s all so abstract.

It’s hard to imagine how a customer “does” revenue. But it’s easy to imagine how a customer might subscribe, attend, donate, buy, refer, renew, or leave.

I’ve had the privilege to advise and work with some phenomenal teams outside of the military. Everything from pre-seed Y Combinator startups, to early stage startups, to mainstream apps, and even large non-profit communities.

Nobody defines their objectives in terms of customer behaviors that lead to the sale.

Yet, every single one of those outcomes depends on specific thoughts and behaviors they gloss over. They’re all hyper-fixated on the transaction (and colors).

To address that, we’re going to take a PSYOP perspective to cover exactly how you can build around real customer behaviors.

Building with the behavior in mind is how you can use influence to dominate your market.

1. Start by defining your observable behaviors. How to layer them. How to measure them.

2. Then, you’ve got to balance impact with volume.

3. And last, but far from least, going below the waterline to understand what truly drives your prospects.

Let’s dive in.

1. Develop an operational approach.

All influence is a leap of faith. There are no Jedi mind tricks. But by layering your efforts, through an accumulation of influence operations, you’ll eventually get what you want.

To steal the analogy from Alex Hormozi: Imagine your prospect’s resistance as a rubber band. Every coordinated layer stretches that resistance thin, until eventually it snaps, and they do the thing.

Let’s say you’re a nonprofit that wants more recurring donors.

PSYOP starts by defining the behaviors upfront before you build the campaign. We’d collect a baseline, identify observable signs of change, and assess how the behavior changes over time. Counting posts, ads, or messages only tells you what you’ve produced. But you already knew that.

Our objective might be something like turning someone interested in attending an event for the first-time into recurring donations.

A good desired behavior to support that objective might be for those fresh attendees to start a monthly donation within 30 days. It’s Specific, Measurable, and Time-Bound.

“More recurring donors” describes the result you want. “Start a monthly donation within 30 days” gives your team an observable behavior they can compare with a baseline.

In the world of software startups, these are activation metrics. For Figma, this means two people editing or commenting in the same file within 24 hours. Figma figured out that that people who hit that activation metric were much more likely to keep using the product and become customers.

Outside of PSYOP, the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework is the perfect civilian equivalent for breaking this down. The approach works by first defining your objective. Then you list out all the supporting key results that lead to accomplishing that objective.

For a given outcome, you’d start by listing out the chain of events, behaviors, thoughts, and/or emotions that lead to that outcome.

To get that recurring donor, your key results might count how many people:

• Subscribe to your newsletter ;)

• Attend a free in-person event.

• Refer 3 friends to your webinar.

• Commit in writing to your petition on Change.org and share it on their social media.

• Buy some of your swag (bonus points if they get some for their family). Now they’ve got their “foot in the door” of the identity as a supporter committing real funds to your cause.

No single activity or key result will make the objective happen in isolation. It is only through the coordinated sum of their effects that these actions are able to influence your prospect to take the desired action.

Repetition is an insidious thing. It soothes people into being comfortable with an idea, then instills an identity to uphold. By the time you get someone to go through this series of events, there will only be one answer to your ask: Yes. It’s who they are now.

2. Use the effective influence curve.

Any influence effort has two interdependent variables: Impact and Volume.

A relevant, timely, and specific message is a strong, precise message. Weaker messages are useful, too. They just need more repetition to brand the idea into your propsect’s hearts and minds. But remember, repetition won’t save an irrelevant message. Marketing is targeting, after all.

Branding and Precision approaches should be used together. Not this Or that, but this AND that. We don’t do dichotomies here. We leave those to the mass media trying to influence you. More on that in my post on how “How Fox News Manipulates You (and CNN, Too).”

So what determines Impact and how can you engineer it?

Impact comes from Pain and its mirror image Desire, along with Urgency and Specificity.

• The more painful (or intensely desirable) a scenario is perceived to be, the more impactful it will be.

• The more urgent you can make it seem, the more impactful it will be.

• The more specific the case is to your prospect, the more impactful it will be.

• High pain, high urgency will get someone to act now.

• High pain, low urgency will get someone to act eventually.

• Low pain, high urgency is just a nuisance.

• Low pain, low urgency is useless.

Precision influence efforts want to get someone to act now, so it focuses on the high pain, high urgency sector of the quadrant.

Branding is about instilling associations. It’s about creating emotional value about what your offer means to your prospect(s). It’s about blurring the line between their identity and your brand’s.

I like how Seth Godin defines a brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.” He adds that if people don’t pay a premium, choose you, or spread the word, then you know value is missing. That’s the point of measuring behavior.

You brand your message in the prospect’s mind through repetition and omnipresence.

Branding should target the high pain, low urgency quadrant using the analysis in the next section. It’s the foundation that makes building the house so much easier.

3. Go below the waterline.

Marketing is targeting. Changing someone’s mind can be a superhuman effort. Doable, but rarely worth it.

Instead, you’ll aim for the people who are already open to your offer. The people who already want to do what you want them to do, but haven’t yet.

Find them and help them do what they already want to do. If you do it right, they’ll do the hard work for you and invite their friends, who would otherwise ignore you.

But how? You find them by going below the waterline.

Demographics might help you get a fix on your audience. But rarely do demographics alone predict behavior the way you’d need them to.

Everything you need is below the waterline: attitudes, motives, beliefs, values, barriers, perceptions, social pressure, access, timing, and their environment.

The Fogg Behavior Model gives us a simple way to work through all that. You get a desired behavior when their motivation, ability, and a timely trigger come together at the right moment.

Your job is to target based on motivation and ability. Then craft a message to trigger the response. It’s that simple. But simple ain’t always easy.

Then, there’s Ol’ Reliable: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

I’ll avoid plagiarizing from my 7-Step Influence Process (free when you subscribe). But I will say that the neat thing about the Hierarchy is how it illuminates what’s at the root of everything humans do.

We all have needs. We all want to satisfy those needs.

What are your target’s needs?

How can you be their saving grace?

The answer to those questions can be profound and creative. At the risk of getting overly philosophical here, I encourage you to dig into the depths of human experience.

Let’s go back to the nonprofit case.

You got some fresh first-time attendees that have shown their motivation by attending your event. But they haven’t donated yet. Why?

Your team needs to understand what might prevent the donation, the desired behavior.

• Motivation: Your attendee might support the cause in spirit, but can’t see how donating will fulfill their needs. Humans are the most selfish selfless creatures there are. Notice, it’s not just about how the donation will support the cause. It’s about how the donation will satisfy their needs.

• Ability: Maybe there’s too much friction. The best way to achieve a behavior is to make it easy. The donation form could be too long or complicated. The app or website is glitchy and slow. The commitment seems risky. Without an easy way to opt out, they’d rather not opt-in.

• Trigger: Sometimes you just need to ask. When Salvation Army bell ringers starting asking out loud when they were outside grocery stores, 65% more shoppers donated. People need a cue. Make the ask.

Once you identify the chokepoint, your team can develop a way to break through it.

If ability is the issue, simplify the form and explain the recurring commitment in plain language. If the trigger is missing, make a specific ask at the end of the event and send a direct link right after while they’re still eager. If they’re lacking motivation, show how this donation will make them a hero.

EXSUM

Ask these five questions before your next campaign:

1. What specific, measurable, and observable behavior do you want to change?

2. Who has the power, control, and authority to do it?

3. What prevents them from doing it now?

4. How will you layer operations to snap the rubber band resisting your call to action?

5. How will you measure the effect?

Put this together and you have a strategy, not just random acts of marketing.

Now What?

Thank you for reading!

Psychological Operations are meant to dig deeper. We’ve gone fairly in depth with three integrated steps that help you avoid jumping the gun by hyper-fixating on the transaction.

With what we’ve covered, you can escape from the rat race of random acts of marketing and truly dominate your market with influence like you’ve never done before.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Your feedback means the world to me, and it’s the only way I can improve. Comment below or send me an email. I have thick skin, so please, be candid.

I’ll help you get the influence your work deserves.

You can also reach me on X.

NEXT:

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”

—George Bernard Shaw

* Thank you Ari, Jonatan, and Helen for your feedback. This article is better now because of you.