What Ryan Holiday’s media arbitrage thinking and Jay Baer’s advocacy research reveal about attention a business does not have to buy.
Every business wants to be talked about without paying for it. Few build the system that makes it likely. Community, partnerships and PR are treated as unpredictable, good luck, a viral moment, a journalist’s mood, when in practice they respond to the same deliberate structure as any other growth channel.
Find the gap nobody else is using
Ryan Holiday’s concept of media arbitrage, identifying attention opportunities that are currently undervalued relative to their reach, before the wider market catches on, has generated outsized press coverage for brands on limited budgets.
The principle transfers directly to partnerships and community work. The channels and collaborators worth pursuing are often the ones not yet crowded with competitors, not the most obvious ones.
Customers are a distribution channel, not just an audience
Jay Baer’s research into word-of-mouth and customer advocacy, detailed in Hug Your Haters, makes the case that a business’s existing customers are one of its most underused acquisition channels, provided their experience is strong enough, and visible enough, to be worth repeating.
Community and referral systems that make it easy for a satisfied customer to talk about the brand consistently outperform paid efforts at the same budget.
What this means in practice
This means treating partnerships and PR as a deliberate pipeline, a list of collaborators, publications and community touchpoints worth pursuing, reviewed on a cadence, rather than a reactive scramble whenever a launch needs a boost. It also means building the systems that make advocacy easy for existing customers, rather than hoping it happens.
| THE PRINCIPLE – Jay Baer, Author, Hug Your Haters A business’s existing customers are one of its most underused acquisition channels, provided the experience is strong and visible enough to be worth repeating. |
Frequently asked questions
How is PR different from paid or organic marketing?
PR earns coverage or attention through relationships, timing and newsworthiness rather than paying for placement or relying solely on owned channels. It is unpredictable only when it is unplanned.
What makes a partnership worth pursuing?
Alignment of audience and credibility, and, per media arbitrage thinking, whether the channel or collaborator is still relatively uncrowded, rather than the most obvious or expensive option available.
How can a business encourage more word-of-mouth without a large budget?
By making the experience worth repeating and then making it easy to repeat, clear referral paths, shareable proof points, and genuine responsiveness to existing customers.
wfc. treats earned attention as a system to be built deliberately, not a result to be hoped for.
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