Your organizational culture is your marketing

In the course of working on the Marketing Rebellion book, I had the chance to interview Chris Savage, CEO of Wistia. We had a fantastic conversation and he said something that I thought was incredibly wise and insightful. Instead of explaining it, I’ll let Chris tell the story in his own words:

“When we started out, we didn’t have any deliberate marketing strategy. We were messing around in our office and just shot a video that was behind the scenes of what it was like to work at Wistia. No voice over or anything. It was just shots of the team working to music. And the thing made it to Hacker News and it went viral. People were talking about how cool and interesting it was.

“I thought we were on to something, so we did more of that kind of open video. We basically did it for our own enjoyment — it was essentially something we could send to our parents! It was funny, because these videos were never intended to get us customers. We weren’t selling a thing. And two weeks later … we had a bunch of new customers.

“It was this interesting moment because we had been talking about our product a lot and it wasn’t moving very fast and then we stopped talking about our product and instead showed who we are, and we got a bunch of new customers buying our product!

“I started to learn that our company…