🍎 How not to use ChatGPT

Hii 👋

In the last edition of this newsletter, we talked about how innovation is created when you combine sameness with newness. And in a world of ChatGPT, the question becomes how do you stand out when all your competitors are asking the same questions?

Because, at the end of the day, you want to connect and resonate with people. We throw out words like "empathy" and "authenticity" when talking about building connections in our marketing messages.

But this is not enough.

Marketers sometimes forget that people love novelty. And it's when you combine novelty with brutal honesty that gets people to listen.

So how do you win in marketing?

You need a contrarian idea.

Here's an example: conventional wisdom says that you need to talk to your customers. You need to understand their wants, needs, and desires, and then communicate that internally to launch features that serve those desires.

The contrarian view of looking at this is to say no, this is not the right approach.

If you're in a room full of marketers that all say you need to talk to your users, but then you scream out loud "the customer is wrong they don't know what they want, here's why...", everyone in the room will pause to listen to what you have to say.

So how does this relate to ChatGPT?

Next time you're using ChatGPT to help you with content ideas, feed it a contrarian idea first. In this case, we asked GPT-4 to write an intro for this newsletter.

Here's the prompt:

Notice how this prompt doesn't follow all these "10 best prompts for ChatGPT" stuff — that's all nonsense. Just speak directly to ChatGPT as you would a regular human.

In this case, we fed GPT the idea that "people want to be led, and they often don't know what they want to be led about." We gave it a contrarian brain. Then we combined it with another topic about how AI may create sameness.

Next, we asked GPT to create a story weaving these topics together to create something totally new.

The story goes on, and as you can see it's not the best — but it is quite impressive.

So what's the takeaway? If you're going to use ChatGPT to help you with your marketing campaigns, from a content ideation perspective, make sure to feed it with ideas other marketers are not thinking of.

Have a contrarian idea (new-ness) and combine with another widely accepted idea (same-ness), then tell it to combine the ideas together.

Those "lightning strike" moments in your marketing career will come from having a contrarian idea and having it turn out to be right.

So observe all the sameness in the way different brands market themselves. Then think about how the opposite of what everyone is doing may be the better way. And if you use ChatGPT to help you content ideation, feed it those ideas before you start asking it questions to gain inspiration.

With that, let's get into what we have in store this week (lots of good stuff):

• Marketing news from the past week

• A guide to product-market fit

• How the best companies measure content quality

• Rephrasing H2's to improve organic traffic

• How to improve conversion rates during a redesign

• Ad from the past

• Website of the week

• Cool marketing jobs

• And much more

🗞 In the news

• Is Snapchat’s latest ad offerings enough to steal ad dollars?

• Meta previews new AR and shopping ads

• Google launches blue checkmarks for verified brands in Gmail

• The threat and promise of artificial intelligence

• New ChatGPT plugins enable internet browsing and other features

🚀 All things growth & product

How Netflix acquired 200M+ paying customers, 20 acquisition channels, increasing feature adoption right away, why product positioning is so important, and how strategy and a guide to product-market fit.

✍️ Content and emails

How the best companies measure content quality, three science-based rules of writing, how to turn wild opinions into traffic and backlinks, and how DTC brands use email segmentation.

⚙️ SEO

Rephrasing H2's to improve organic traffic, benefits of server-side render for SEO, CTR as a Google ranking factor, and how PPC ads can affect your SEO.

🔮 Psychology and branding

Using behavioral science in marketing, the psychological moment of "wow," and the difference between brand purposes, vision, mission, and values.

🧠 Extra stuff

How to improve conversion rates during a website redesign, the Sandler Pain Funnel, why marketing is everything, and great examples of social media marketing.

📣 Ad from the past

(Kodak ad from the 1967)

Sameness + newness = innovation.

💻 Website of the week

🏝 Cool remote marketing jobs

• Growth Marketing Manager at Guideline

• Email Marketing Manager at Seamless AI

• Senior Affiliate Marketing Manager at Gusto

• Sr. Growth Marketing Product Manager at Gopuff

• Head of Product Marketing at Fellow.app

Okay, that's it for now 💛. See you next Tuesday!

“Fear is the cause of every problem. It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness. If you had no fear, you could be perfectly happy living in this world.” — Michael A. Singer

Riddle answer: They're surrounded by drafts