One Book That Changed My Life

Christopher Lochhead on the Most Impactful Marketing Books of the Last 30 Years

One Book That Changed My Life

Show Notes

From an author’s perspective, there’s no greater achievement than having your ideas become so deeply ingrained and absorbed that people unconsciously implement them. If there are two books that have rightfully earned that status, it would be “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Ries and Trout and “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. These books have made a life changing impact on a marketer I really respect, Christopher Lochhead, so much so that he believes any card-carrying marketer can’t consider themselves one without reading them.

In this episode, master of category design, bestselling author of Play Bigger and host of Follow Your Different, shares how these books have informed his thinking on marketing.

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode

How to turn ideas into unconscious competence Don’t just declare a new discipline or new way of thinking, codify it and introduce new frameworks and lenses so that people can take the framework and do something different with it.

Personal branding is the “modern entrepreneurial herpes” The problem with personal branding is that it’s nothing more than a symptom of the “me disease” that plagues marketing today. In a world of influencers, it’s really easy to think your marketing’s about you, but the truth is no one cares about you outside of the component of you that’s illustrative of something they want.

How to Cross the Chasm The most powerful marketing is word of mouth, but how do you scale it? By building momentum inside of an industry, and letting those verticals influence each other. If we throttle hard on certain demographics and even geographics, we won’t usually need as many people as we think to turn a category.

Guest Bio

Christopher Lochhead is an entrepreneur, master of category design, #1 business podcaster, the 11-time #1 bestselling author of Play Bigger. He’s the host of Follow Your Different and Lochhead on Marketing, and he writes Category Pirates, a top 0.5% paid business newsletter on Substack.

To listen to the podcasts and subscribe to Category Pirates, head to https://lochhead.com/.

“The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Al Ries and Jack Trout

“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore

More from One Book That Changed My Life

Aug 16, 2022

"Psycho-Cybernetics" is one of my personal favorite books, and when I first read it, the underlying idea hit me like a ton of bricks and made a huge impact on my mindset. What if we thought of our subconscious as our own success mechanism? For ghostwriter, book coach, and book editor Deborah Ager, this book came into her life at a time of great personal adversity, and it helped her take steps forward. In this episode, we talk about what we learned from the book and how we put its ideas into practice. Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode Why clarifying our ideas is so important You can have a really powerful idea and one that has a lot of potential, but if it’s buried within a book, even if it’s written very well, it can screw up that whole idea by making it confusing or diluting it.

Aug 2, 2022

“Traction” and its Entrepreneurial Operating System has had a huge impact on entrepreneurs of all types. Most of us are grappling with the question of turning our own unique way of solving problems into a system that has a strong selling proposition. In this episode, consultant and founding partner at Scalto, Gabriela Pulido shares how this book helped her set and reinforce a new strategic direction for her business. Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode

Jul 5, 2022

Daniel Mangena stumbled upon his own success code while trying not to fail at ending his own life, and he has Eckhart Tolle’s "The Power of Now" to thank for it. Dark, but within it, we can learn just how naturally powerful human beings are at changing our own internal programming. It doesn’t matter what we say we want, what matters is what we desire at our deepest unconscious level. What happens when what we want to achieve isn’t in alignment with that internal programming? How do we get our unconscious minds on the side of our desires?

Jun 21, 2022

We don’t get a lot of people on this show who come across a new book that massively impacted them right away, and changed how they’ll do business for the rest of their life. For best selling author, host of top 1% podcast How to Land a Job, and founder of Mastering College to Career, Daniel Botero, "$100M Offers" by Alex Hormozi shifted the marketing of his program, and quadrupled his sales.

Jun 7, 2022

“Think & Grow Rich” has been so impactful to this week’s guest that if she had to choose one book to grow her business, it would be this one. Once you get past the old timey 1930s language, there’s so much entrepreneurs today can gain from applying the lessons and insights of this book.

See all episodes →