To Be Differentiated Is Great. To Be Loved Is Better
The best thing you can achieve with marketing isn't differentiation. It's love. Or as Buffett said: Be liked, trusted, and admired.
This is core to the Sharp Pen CEO evangelism playbook. Yes, of course, differentiation is one of the key goals we aspire to help our clients achieve. But with a charismatic and energetic evangelist, you can also win, even in a commoditized category, through the strength of the attention you’re able to generate and the affinity you drive through repeated, positive exposure.
As I mulled over this concept, I thought about the episode of Open Market Eric Franchi and I recorded with Scope3 co-founder and CEO Brian O’Kelley.
Why? Because I didn't remember exactly what Brian had said on the pod. But I remembered thinking from the jump, I like this guy. As a fellow self-identified workaholic and entrepreneur, I relate to him. I'd want to work with/for him.
I opened the pod with an anecdote Brian had told elsewhere about his co-founders at his first company telling him he had to be nicer. I relistened to the pod. Here's exactly what Brian said:
"When I was at la2night, I had just graduated from college a computer scientist. For me, the mission was all-encompassing. I was living in an ant-infested, shared apartment in the bad part of Koreatown. I couldn't afford a car. All I did was work. For me, it was like, 'We're going to run out of money if we don't do all the things. We are competing with Ticketmaster to take tickets online. And — this is it! We have a half million bucks and six weeks to launch. Let's effing do it.' [At this point, as a listener, I was ready to run through a wall with him.]
"So, when my cofounders — one was my best friend in the world and one was his best friend in the world — were like, 'We're going to go out to a club and hang out,' I was like, "... What the fuck?" [tone of genuine bewilderment]. "This is a startup, guys!"
In the podcast, Brian goes on to describe evolving his approach to leadership/collaboration and learning that not everyone can be on all the time. But what he says after that doesn't really matter for my purposes here. The point is that, as an interlocutor and listener, I immediately felt a connection with him. I thought, "I like this guy. I'm rooting for him. I want to be involved in what he's doing."
I'm one person. Now multiply that effect across thousands of podcast listeners, thousands of newsletter subscribers, maybe even hundreds of thousands on social. (Brian is a Sharp Pen client and barely needs my help to crush it at our playbook: leveraging social, email, and audio to capitalize on the CEO evangelism effect.)
People will sometimes describe this sort of awareness and affinity building as the 'soft' part of marketing. There's nothing soft about it. That effect is *money in the bank.* It represents thousands of people, if not more, who want to do business with you, work with you, invest in you — and propel the success of your company.
In the current era of direct founder-to-audience communication enabled by social, this is truer than ever. You can create affinity for a founder and their company that makes people want to work with you, invest in you, and, yes, buy from you.
It's not an even playing field — charisma is required, and an existing audience helps (Brian had both when he started aggressively marketing Scope3). But any CEO or founder can get better at evangelism. Anyone can harness the impact of founder-led communications to grow their company.
In 2025, the CEO is the chief evangelist. If you're not leveraging that effect, your competitors are. And then, even if you're winning the war for the mind, they might be winning the war for the heart.
To be differentiated is great. To be loved is even better.
