The savviest entrepreneurs and the most experienced marketers know something that isn’t obvious.

You wouldn’t know it if you haven’t done it for years.

It just looks easy and effortless when you see it done well.

But great marketing execution is at least 80% structure and less than 20% artful “creativity.”

It’s the same for music, art, movies, or sports. Or creating great software or being great at sales.

– Music is very structured. To get to the magical creative level, you need a lot of practice and discipline with scales and styles.

– Sports is structured with plays and rules that have to be mastered before you can create the magic of the perfectly executed pass to win the game.

– There is artfulness in writing software, but there is far more structure in the architecture and algorithms that have to be right before the artful magic can happen.

– We lose ourselves in a great movie, but we don’t see the explicit structure of the narrative that was painstakingly crafted so we just feel the magic on screen.

You get the idea.

From the outside, great marketing looks like it’s all creative art.

From the inside, all great execution stands on top of a great strategy and mastery of the timeless structures of human communication.

The best entrepreneurs are great marketers.

They understand the underlying structures of storytelling, connection, persuasion, differentiation, positioning, and messaging.