This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

Amazon
Read March 2019

Seth Godin is one of my favorite thinkers. I've read all his books, but this is essentail for every entrepreneur. Seth offers a compassionate and story-driven approach to business that will give you a competitive advantage in a world craving holistic and human-centered leadership.

My Notes

This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

The answer to just about every question about work is really the question, “Who can you help?”

Be a driver of the market, don't simply be market-driven.

The best ideas aren’t instantly embraced. Even the ice cream sundae and the stoplight took years to catch on.

That’s because the best ideas require significant change. They fly in the face of the status quo, and inertia is a powerful force.

Because there’s a lot of noise and a lot of distrust. Change is risky.

Your most generous and insightful work needs help finding the people it’s meant to serve.

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone.

Changed the boss’s mind.

Changed the school system.

Changed demand for your product.

They say that the best way to complain is to make things better.

The first step on the path to make things better is to make better things.

Better is the change we see when the market embraces what we’re offering. Better is what happens when the culture absorbs our work and improves. Better is when we make the dreams of those we serve come true.

The internet is the first mass medium that wasn’t invented to make marketers happy.

It’s the largest medium, but it’s also the smallest one

For a long time, the most efficient way for a commercial enterprise to make large-scale change was simple: buy ads. Ads worked. Ads were a bargain. Ads paid for themselves.

For most of my lifetime, marketing was advertising.

That means seeing what others see. Building tension. Aligning with tribes. Creating ideas that spread.

The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers, not victims.

Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become.

when our ideas spread, we change the culture. We build something that people would miss if it were gone, something that gives them meaning, connection, and possibility.

It’s time:

Time to get off the social media merry-go-round that goes faster and faster but never gets anywhere.

Time to stop hustling and interrupting.

Time to stop spamming and pretending you’re welcome.

Time to stop making average stuff for average people while hoping you can charge more than a commodity price.

Time to stop begging people to become your clients, and time to stop feeling bad about charging for your work.

Time to stop looking for shortcuts, and time to start insisting on a long, viable path instead.

Marketing in five steps

The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about.

The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about.

The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market.

The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word.

The last step is often overlooked: show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years—to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make. To earn permission to follow up and to earn enrollment to teach.

Marketers make change happen: for the smallest viable market, and by delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages that people actually want to get.

Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.

If you want to make change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync.

Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.

What you say isn’t nearly as important as what others say about you.

Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Actually, what they want is how they’ll feel once they see how uncluttered everything is, when they put their stuff on the shelf that went on the wall, now that there’s a quarter-inch hole.

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want to feel safe and respected.”

They want the way it will make them feel.

If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile.

Humans are lonely, and they want to be seen and known. People want to be part of something. It’s safer that way, and often more fun.

“When in doubt, assume that people will act according to their current irrational urges, ignoring information that runs counter to their beliefs, trading long-term for short-term benefits and most of all, being influenced by the culture they identify with.”

The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone. It will lead to compromises and generalizations. Begin instead with the smallest viable market. What’s the minimum number of people you would need to influence to make it worth the effort?

Everyone has a problem, a desire, and a narrative.

Who will you seek to serve?

Your work is not for everyone. It’s only for those who signed up for the journey.

We know that every best-selling book on Amazon has at least a few one-star reviews. It’s impossible to create work that both matters and pleases everyone.

The simple marketing promise

Here’s a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with:

My product is for people who believe _________________.

I will focus on people who want _________________.

I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get _________________.

And you thought that all you were here to do was sell soap.

Start with empathy to see a real need. Not an invented one, not “How can I start a business?” but, “What would matter here?”

Focus on the smallest viable market: “How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?”

Match the worldview of the people being served. Show up in the world with a story that they want to hear, told in a language they’re eager to understand.

Make it easy to spread. If every member brings in one more member, within a few years, you’ll have more members than you can count.

Earn, and keep, the attention and trust of those you serve.

Offer ways to go deeper. Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.

At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress in their journeys toward their goals.

Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that work.

Here are some axes for you to choose from. Because you know your space far better than I do, I’m sure you can come up with some others.

Speed
Price
Performance
Ingredients
Purity
Sustainability
Obviousness
Maintenance costs
Safety
Edginess
Distribution
Network effect
Imminence
Visibility
Trendiness
Privacy
Professionalism
Difficulty
Elitism
Danger
Experimental
Limited
Incomplete

Always be seeking, connecting, solving, asserting, believing, seeing, and yes, testing.

It might not be about being cheaper. It’s tricky to define better. But without a doubt, the heart and soul of a thriving enterprise is the irrational pursuit of becoming irresistible.

Twelve percent of the twenty-one thousand reviews for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone gave it one or two stars.

“I made something that I like, that I thought you’d like. How’d I do? What advice do you have for how I could make it fit your worldview more closely?”

That’s what right means in this case. Based on who they are and what they want and what they know, everyone is right. Every time.

When we find the empathy to say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t for you, here’s the phone number of my competitor,” then we also find the freedom to do work that matters.

It’s all built around the simple question: “Do people like me do things like this?”

Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization.

In the previous era, mass media worked hard to define “us” as “all of us,” as the crowd

We (mostly) all watched Johnny Carson and we (mostly) all wore jeans and we (mostly) all went to school.

Today, though, popular culture isn’t as popular as it used to be. Mad Men, which was hyped by the New York Times in dozens of articles in just one season, was only regularly seen by 1 percent of the U.S. population.

the long tail of culture and the media and change doesn’t need everyone any longer. It’s happy with enough.

When we’re comfortable realizing that our work is to change “a culture,” then we can begin to do two bits of hard work:

Map and understand the worldview of the culture we seek to change.

Focus all our energy on this group. Ignore everyone else. Instead, focus on building and living a story that will resonate with the culture we are seeking to change.

That’s how we make change—by caring enough to want to change a culture, and by being brave enough to pick just one.

That promise is your brand.

Nike doesn’t have a hotel. If it did, you would probably have some good guesses as to what it would be like. That’s Nike’s brand.

About sixty-eight of the hundred people will be close to the average. Another twenty-seven will be significantly further away, and four will be extreme outliers.

But in order to do your best work, you’ll need to seek out and delight the few. And in return, you’ll be rewarded with a cadre of loyal customers who will buy in for all of it.

Advertising is unearned media. It’s bought and paid for. And the people you seek to reach know it. They’re suspicious. They’re inundated. They’re exhausted.

You didn’t pay the recipient to run that ad, but you want the recipient to pay you with their attention.

So you’re ignored.

The approach here is as simple as it is difficult: If you’re buying direct marketing ads, measure everything. Compute how much it costs you to earn attention, to get a click, to turn that attention into an order. Direct marketing is action marketing, and if you’re not able to measure it, it doesn’t count.

If you’re buying brand marketing ads, be patient. Refuse to measure. Engage with the culture. Focus, by all means, but mostly, be consistent and patient. If you can’t afford to be consistent and patient, don’t pay for brand marketing ads.

The two paragraphs above ought to have paid for the time and money you’ve spent on this book. I’m hoping that’s not the only thing that repays your investment, but even the biggest and most successful organizations are failing to see how the shift to online interaction is fundamentally changing their business.

If you could patiently invest more time and money in putting the story of your brand in the world, how would you do it?

The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try.

Be specific.

Be very specific.

And then, with this knowledge, overdo your brand marketing. Every slice of every interaction ought to reflect the whole. Every time we see any of you, we ought to be able to make a smart guess about all of you.

On the other hand, a smart marketer can build a product or service that’s worth searching for. Not the generic term, but to find you, the thing you built, the specific. When you do that, Google’s on your side. They actually want you to be found when someone searches for you.

Perhaps. But how do they value the sparkling clean shop, with plenty of well-paid and helpful staff, a new sign in the window, and a local baseball team with new jerseys with your logo on them? How do they value the handsome shopping bag that comes with every loaf, not to mention the free samples of the little butter cookies you call punitions? How does it make them feel to tell their friends that they’re eating the same bread that’s served at the fancy restaurant down the street?

Better to apologize for the price once than to have to excuse a hundred small slights again and again.

Price is a signal.

When you’re the cheapest, you’re not promising change. You’re promising the same, but cheaper.

The race to the bottom is tempting, because nothing is easier to sell than cheaper. It requires no new calculations or deep thinking on the part of your customer. It’s not cultural or emotional. It’s simply cheaper.

Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas.

The privilege of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went.

Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman.

When Marvel wants to launch a new superhero franchise, they don’t begin with nationwide TV ads. Instead, they go to San Diego Comic-Con.

The Comic-Con has permission. Permission from raving fans, neophiliac fans, to break new ideas, to help them find the next big thing.

It’s almost impossible to spread your word directly. Too expensive, too slow. To find individuals, interrupt them, and enroll them, one by one . . . it’s a daunting task.

If you can’t see the funnel, don’t buy the ads.

If you can measure the funnel and it costs too much for you to afford ads, don’t buy the ads. Fix the funnel first.

The long tail: good products of specialized interest. Each, by itself, doesn’t sell many copies, but taken together, the long tail sells as much as the short head.

Half of Amazon’s sales are books that are not in the top five thousand. Half!

It doesn’t happen because the mass market wants something different from what the early adopters want. The mass market wants something that works. Something safe. A pattern match, not a pattern interrupt. They take “people like us do things like this” very seriously.

That’s because in order to satisfy the early adopters, you may just need to annoy the masses. The very thing your innovation did (break things) is the one thing that the mass market doesn’t want to happen.

The middle of the curve isn’t eagerly adopting. They’re barely adapting. That’s why they’ve chosen to be in the middle of the curve.

Give them a why. And that usually involves changing what you offer. Make things better by making better things—things that have a network effect, a ratchet, a reason for sharing.

For the rest of us, there’s the opportunity to finish that sentence with a narrative about status, fear, affiliation, belonging, dominion, safety, commitment, insight, or any of the other emotions we’ve discussed.

The method isn’t to go out and find an agent. The method is to do work so impossibly magical that agents and producers come looking for you.

Tesla understood that no one who bought one of the first fifty thousand Teslas actually needed a car. They all had perfectly fine cars.

So Elon Musk created a car that changed the story that a specific group told themselves, a story that undid their status as early adopters and as tech geeks and as environmentalists and as those that supported audacity.

The possibility of better

Better opens the door. Better challenges us to see what’s there and begs us to imagine how we could improve on that.

Better invites us in and gives us a chance to seek dramatic improvement on behalf of those we seek to serve.

The tyranny of perfect

Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we’re done, that this is the best we can do.

Worse, perfect forbids us to try. To seek perfection and not reach it is a failure.

Ship your work. It’s good enough. Then make it better.

It is the marketing we do for ourselves, to ourselves, by ourselves, the story we tell ourselves, that can change everything. It’s what’s going to enable you to create value, to be missed if you were gone. I can’t wait to see what you build next.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet:

Who’s it for?

What’s it for?

What is the worldview of the audience you’re seeking to reach?

What are they afraid of?

What story will you tell? Is it true?

What change are you seeking to make?

How will it change their status?

How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?

Why will they tell their friends?

What will they tell their friends?

Where’s the network effect that will propel this forward?

What asset are you building?

Are you proud of it?