Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Guy Kawasaki featured by the Canva Blog. To read the complete article and check out other resources, please click here.
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A long time ago I was a revolutionary at Apple. My job title was “software evangelist.” My responsibility was to evangelize Macintosh to software developers. Later my title was “chief evangelist,” and my responsibility was to evangelize Macintosh to anyone who wanted to increase productivity and creativity.
Post Apple, I’ve been many things: author, speaker, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, advisor, and father, but I’ve never used the title “chief evangelist” until today. This is because the title only works if your product can change the world—or at least a significant part of it.
Macintosh changed the world. It democratized computers. Google changed the world. It democratized information. eBay changed the world. It democratized commerce. After a two decades of looking, I found Canva. It can change the world by democratizing design, and that’s why I’m now chief evangelist of Canva.
We’re big believers in “content marketing” at Canva. It means providing information that’s valuable to our readers and customers. We define “valuable” as something that you can make your life better as opposed to increasing our sales or profits. In this spirit, I’d like to explain how to evangelize a product or service.
[Here are the first three of Guy’s 11 points if emphasis]
Make it great.
It’s very hard to evangelize crap. It’s much easier to evangelize great stuff. I learned that the starting point of evangelism is a great product or service. Great stuff embodies five qualities:
o Deep. This means your product or service has lots of features because you’ve anticipated what people need as they come up the power curve.
o Intelligent. When people use your product or service, they see that someone smart understood their problem or pain.
o Complete. A complete product is surrounded with everything you need. For example, great software is not just the downloadable file. It’s also the documentation, support, and string of enhancements.
o Empowering. A product or service empowers people because it makes them better. Great stuff doesn’t fight you—it becomes one with you.
o Elegant. This means that your product or service is not just functional, it’s also well-designed so that people could use it easily and quickly.
Position it as a “cause.”
A product or service, no matter how great, is a collection of parts or snippets of code. A “cause,” by contrast, changes lives. It’s not enough to make a great product or service—you also need to position it and explain it as a way to improve lives. Steve Jobs didn’t position an iPhone as $188 worth of parts. Evangelists need to seize the moral high ground and transcend the exchange of money for goods and services.
Love the cause.
“Evangelist” isn’t a job title. It’s a way of life. It means that evangelists must love what they evangelize. No matter how great the person, if he doesn’t love the cause, he cannot be a good evangelist for it. If you don’t love it, don’t evangelize it. This has hiring implications too: a good education and relevant work experience are not sufficient. It’s just as important that an evangelist loves the product or service.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic design tool. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is also the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and nine other books. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.
To check out my interview of him, please click here.