I’ve mentioned before my attempts to suss out a philosophy of marketing. I’ve got plenty of sussing left to do, but some central principles are becoming relatively clear.

Central principle number one? Be remarkable. Be worthy of remark.

Easy enough to say, I know. But I’m not so sure it’s actually that hard to do. Because all it really means is that you are doing something that is not ordinary. That’s actually pretty easy.

I mean, not everything extraordinary is easy. Creating an extraordinary product is, I admit, not usually easy. Why? Well, usually because everyone else is trying to do it too. You say you’re in a band? Great, everyone is in a band, and they’re all trying to rock. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to rock. You absolutely should. Striving for exceptional quality at your core is going to be the basis of everything else you do. Accept no substitute for core quality.

I’m not saying you can take a shortcut past doing a good job. I’m just saying that once you do a good job, there are ten million ways to not be ordinary, and a bunch of them are easy.

Seriously. Just pick something about your company. Anything. Pick something boring. Pick the most boring thing you can think of. Then flip the creativity switch, and find some way to make that thing less ordinary. And if it seems hard? Pick something else! Somewhere in your company is an opportunity to not be ordinary. An opportunity that’s stupid easy.

Yes of Course I was Leading Up to an Example And Here We Are

This summer I bought a bike. I needed one to get back and forth from rehearsals.

I went in to the shop and came home with a SWOBO Baxter. She’s a beauty:

Now, SWOBO makes great bikes. They no doubt work hard to make them. All that hard work convinced me to walk out of the shop owning a much more expensive bike than I had expected to own when I walked in. Good on them: a hard-earned sale.

But the story doesn’t end there. I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry if the story ended there. I love my bike, but frankly I am not enough of a bike nerd to blog about it just because it has disc brakes and a sick retro/modern design and some kind of fancy self-contained ten gear shifting mechanism that I don’t really understand.

What makes me write about my Baxter—what, in this specific case, makes it remarkable—is something I just found while recycling a bunch of waste paper from my office.

Sorting through a pile of junk, I found the manual for my bike. Just to be sure I wasn’t about to recycle something important, I flipped through it. You know: scanned a page here and there. As I expected, it was nothing I cared about. Nothing I couldn’t get more directly from the friendly folks at Baltimore Bicycle Works.

But right on the last page, the very last page, right before I tossed the whole thing in the bin, my eye caught a single sentence:

Uh, wha?

That’s certainly out of the ordinary. Okay, well, I can’t throw it in the bin until I’ve looked closer.

Page 1

You can click to enlarge this image if you want, but don’t bother. It’s just what you’d expect from the legal guys:

Page 2

This one? This one you should click to enlarge:

That there? That there is remarkable. I mean: the warranty. Seriously. Can you pick a more boring piece of your company? Doubtful. But instead of making it a throw-away piece of crud on the last page of their manual, they turned it in to a surprising, funny, vulnerable, remarkable bit of prose. So remarkable that I actually, you know, remarked on it. And it wasn’t hard for them. It was already the way they were running their company, they were just brave enough and creative enough to write it down. That was it. Not hard. With one page of copy, they A) transformed my sense of them as a company, B) cemented my feeling of loyalty, and C) got me blabbing about how cool they are on my blog.

Just a little creativity and one page of copy. Remarkable.