• Product = Making Intelligent Things
  • Marketing = Making Things Intelligible

For product, this means that the more intelligence you put into it (read: deep knowledge, craft, skill), the better the product.

For marketing, this means the more intelligible it is (read: the more people can understand it, the lower the reading level, the more the appeal to emotion), the better the marketing.

People tend to be inclined towards one or the other.

At the extreme, the most intelligent person can make the best product that no one else can understand.

At the extreme, the most intelligible person can make the best marketing for a product that is practically useless.

Howard Gardner theorized that humans possess multiple intelligences.

For example, a star athlete is not dumber than a star writer. Athletes tend to possess kinesthetic intelligence, while writers tend to possess linguistic intelligence.

I believe that there is more leverage in product-intelligent people learning to be more intelligible than intelligible people learning how to be more product-intelligent.

In other words, smart people should learn to market because it will be of better benefit to everybody.

So, here are 3 steps for intelligent people learning to become more intelligible:

  1. Consider marketing as a different type of intelligence.
  2. Consider that the skill of making things intelligible is another degree of freedom of your intelligence, another intelligence-based skill that you can learn (like chess, or quantum theory).
  3. Realize that if you don’t figure out how to make your intelligent thing intelligible, then no one else will. Because the natural marketers won’t do it for you.