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A river, not a lake
New prophets often give a sermon once, see no change, and decide it didn't work. One drop does not make a bucket. The people who heard the message last month need to hear it five more times before it sticks, and new prospects who have never heard it arrive every day.
Marc Benioff pushed the slogan No Software for a decade, and the marketing stunts built around it each look gimmicky when taken in isolation. Stacked across ten years, they compound.
Repeating the message is the job itself, with no separate chore on top of it. Saying it again next week in a fresh way, to employees, investors, and customers alike, is how it reaches the people who were not listening the first time.
Why does a message fade after one hearing?
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus ran memory experiments on himself and published them in 1885. He found that he lost more than half of newly learned nonsense syllables within an hour, and that each repetition slowed the loss. The result is known as the forgetting curve. It is one reason spaced repetition is used in teaching and in advertising.
How did Salesforce turn No Software into a campaign?
Salesforce launched in 1999 with a logo showing the word software inside a red circle with a slash through it. Marc Benioff describes in his book Behind the Cloud how the company staged a mock protest outside a rival's conference in 2000, with actors carrying anti-software signs. The same slogan appeared in advertising and events for years afterward. Salesforce went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004.
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