Marketing
How do you catch fish? You don't chase them. You create conditions where fish want to be.
Marketing is berley — the trail that attracts before you sell. The fish come to you.
| Fishing Concept | Marketing Application |
|---|---|
| Berley trail | Content that attracts before you sell — calibration-free aggregation |
| Platform | Bait + gear + technique for the circumstances |
| Fish psychology | Psycho-logic not logic-logic |
| Fish-ball effect | Small fish gather → big fish follow → network effects |
| Forward thinking | Where fish will be, not where they are |
This is the hive-mind applied to sales. Many weak signals, one binding rule, emergent results.
The Method
Start from pain, not product. Every piece of marketing content begins with a validated pain point — something you felt before you framed it.
| Step | What You Do | What It Produces |
|---|---|---|
| Embrace | Capture the pain — one true sentence | A pain primitive with empathy, specificity, proof |
| Map | Picture the bridge — See, Dream, Build | Fear gets coordinates. Hope gets a picture worth building |
| Frame | Match rhetoric to channel | Ethos, Logos, Pathos, Kairos, Topos — each pain has a voice |
| Ship | Execute through protocols | Content that resonates because it started with truth |
Fear without a map is paralysis. Hope without a map is delusion. The bridge between them is the content.
Master memes to resonate with people's fears and desires — go beyond simply selling products to shaping behaviour by coaching people along their hero's journey.
Playbook
| Priorities | Question | What's There |
|---|---|---|
| Principles | What guides us? | Values, ethics, fundamentals |
| Performance | Is it working? | Metrics, targets, signals |
| Protocols | How do we do it? | 25 jobs mapped |
| Platform | What tools? | Tech stack, AI integration |
| Players | Team balance? | Human + AI roles |
Context
- Pain Primitives — Five voyage pains as reusable content
- Persuasion — Rhetoric framework: Dreams, Failures, Fears, Suspicions, Enemy
- Customer Journey — The path from stranger to crew member
- Pictures — See, Dream, Build: the bridge from fear to hope
- Ventures — Every venture is a voyage — the marketing destination
Links
- Trending Narratives
- X List of Marketers
- Marketing Tech
- Marketing Against The Grain
- Boring Marketer
- Luca Netz
- Seth Godin
- TPan
Questions
How do you turn validated pain into content that compounds — without losing the empathy that made it resonate?
- Which of the five voyage pains does your audience feel most — and does your content lead with that pain or your solution?
- What's the difference between marketing that performs empathy and marketing that embodies it?
- If every piece of content started from a pain primitive instead of a product feature, what would your editorial calendar look like?