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SETH'S PHILOSOPHY (SHORT VERSION, VIA HIS BOOKS)

1. For fifty years, advertising (and the pre-packaged, one-way stories that make good advertising] drove our economy. Then media exploded. We went from three channels to 500 hundred, from no web pages to a billion. At the same time, the number of choices mushroomed. There are more than 100 brands of nationally advertised water. There are dozens of car companies, selling thousands of combinations. Starbucks offers 19,000,000 different ways to order a beverage, and Oreo cookies come in more than nineteen flavors. In the face of all this choice and clutter, consumers realized that they have quite a bit of power. So advertising stopped working. (Because you can’t buy Attention!)

2. One insight is that marketing with permission works better than spam. In other words, delivering anticipated, personal and relevant ads to the people who want to get them is always more effective than yelling loudly at strangers. PERMISSION MARKETING addresses this issue.

3. Once an idea is in the hands of people who care about its success, it may be lucky enough to benefit from digitally augmented word of mouth. I call this an ideavirus. Modern ideas spread online and off, and this is faster and more effective than the old-fashioned centralized way of selling. UNLEASHING THE IDEAVIRUS is the most successful ebook of all time and you can buy the paperback for about $10. Feel free to look for the ebook online as well. It's free.

4. It's remarkable products that get remarked on. That seems obvious, but it flies in the face of the way most goods and services and business items are created and marketed. Boring is invisible. PURPLE COW is all about this.

5. The thing that makes something remarkable isn't usually directly related to the original purpose of the product or service. It's the FREE PRIZE INSIDE, the extra stuff, the stylish bonus, the design or the remarkable service or pricing that makes people talk about it and spread the word.

6. The controversial ALL MARKETERS ARE LIARS isn't about lying at all. It's about telling stories that people want to believe. It's about the fact that people want bottled water, not tap, iPod Nanos, not Rios, and politicians who talk straight, regardless of the consequences... But most of all, it's about authenticity.

Most of all, Godin believes that it's possible to enjoy your job, to do the right thing, to be transparent, to give more than you get and to be successful, all at the same time.

Belief

People don't believe what you tell them.

They rarely believe what you show them.

They often believe what their friends tell them.

They always believe what they tell themselves.

-Seth Godin

Reaching the unreachable

Marketing, I think, can be divided into two eras.

The first, the biggest, the baddest and the most impressive was the era in which marketers were able to reach the unreachable. Ads could be used to interrupt people who weren't intending to hear from you. PR could be used to get a story to show up on Oprah or in the paper, reaching people who weren't seeking you out.

Sure, there were exceptions to this model (the Yellow Pages and the classifieds, for example), but generally speaking, the biggest wins for a marketer happened in this arena.

We're watching it die.

The latest is the hand-wringing about the loss of the book review sections from major newspapers. Book publicists love these, because it's a way of putting your book in front of people who weren't looking for it. Oprah is a superstar because she has the power (the right? the expectation?) of regularly putting new ideas in front of people who weren't looking for that particular thing.

Super Bowl ads? Another example of spending big money to reach the unreachable. This is almost irresistible to marketers.

Notice the almost.

In the last few years, this model is being replaced. Call it permission if you want, or turning the world into the Yellow Pages. The web is astonishingly bad at reaching the unreachable. Years ago, the home page banner at Yahoo was the hottest property on the web. That's because lazy marketers could buy it and reach everyone.

Thanks to the Long Tail and to competition and to a billion websites and to busy schedules and selfish consumers, the unreachable are now truly unreachable.

If I want a book review, I'll go read one. If I want to learn about turntables, I'll go do that. Mass is still seductive, but mass is now so expensive, marketers are balking at buying it (notice how thin Time Magazine is these days? Nothing compared to Gourmet.)

And yet. And yet marketers still start every meeting and every memo with ideas about how to reach the unreachable. It's not in our nature to do what actually works: start making products, services and stories that appeal to the reachable. Then do your best to build that group ever larger. Not by yelling at them, but by serving them. Posted by Seth Godin on May 03, 2007

Excerpt from Linchpin, Seth Godin

We can’t profitably get more average.

We can’t get more homogenized, more obedient, or cheaper. We can’t get faster, either.

We’ve gone against our true nature and corporatized, anonymized, and dehumanized as many of our systems as we possibly can. Even health care is a system now, not a human interaction. We could probably go even further, actually, but I’m betting it won’t be a fun or profitable journey.

If all mortgages are the same, of course they can be chopped up and remixed and resold. But that means all bankers and all homes are the same, and so are all homeowners. Which means the cheap ones or the profitable ones are all that matter.

If all online products at all online stores are the same, then of course I’ll use a price-shopping Web site to find the cheapest product.

If all employees are nothing but a résumé, and résumés can be scanned, then why are we surprised that our computers end up finding us anonymous average people to fill our anonymous average jobs?

If every restaurant on the highway will give me precisely the same cheery service from the same robotic staff, at the same prices, then why does it matter where I stop?

Do we need to be flatter and smaller?

It’s our desire to be treated like individuals that will end this cycle. Our passion for contribution and possibility, the passion we’ve drowned out in school and in the corporate world—that’s the only way out.

Every successful organization is built around people. Humans who do art. People who interact with other people. Men and women who don’t merely shuffle money, but interact, give gifts, and connect.

All these interactions are art. Art isn’t only a painting; it’s anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.

REMARKABLE

The Old Rule: Create safe, ordinary products and combine them with great marketing.

The New Rule: Create the right products that the right people seek out.

TV-Industrial Products: Barbie, Prell, Honeywell, United Airlines, McDonald’s, Marlboro, Cap’n Crunch, Excedrin, The Original VW Beetle

Purple Cow Products: Starbucks, SAP, Canon, Pokemon, JetBlue, Outback Steakhouse, Motel 6, Prozac, The New VW Beetle

FREE PRIZE

A Free Prize is the essence of a Purple Cow. It has two characteristics:

-It’s the thing about your organization or product that’s worth remarking on, something worth seeking out and buying.

–It is not about what a person needs. Instead, it satisfies our wants. It is fashionable or fun or surprising or delightful or sad. It delivers something extra.

EDGECRAFT

Edgecraft is a methodical, measurable process that allows individuals and teams to inexorably identify the soft innovations that live on the edges of what already exists.

The process:

1. Find an Edge- a Free Prize that has been shown to make a product or service Remarkable.

2. Go all the way to that Edge- as far from the center as the consumers you are trying to reach dare you to go.

-You must go all the way to the Edge. Accepting second best doesn’t make sense. Running a restaurant where the Free Prize is your slightly attractive waitstaff won’t work- they’ve got to be supermodels or weight lifters or identical twins. You only create a Free Prize when you go all the way to the Edge and create something Remarkable.

Before you learn to do Edgecraft, you must accept the fact that the Edges of a problem aren’t always obvious. Because the Edge you’re seeking is not the primary reason for being, you’ve got to see it out of the corner of your eye. It’s not always clear exactly what would make your product or service significantly more Remarkable, until you embrace the fact that the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t the problem you think you have!

Use Edgecraft to find a Free Prize, not to create Differentiation. Differentiation is the act of making your products different from the competition (and each other) so that people pick you. But Differentiation is selfish. It assumes that people are interested enough in your field to seek you out, to compare the options and make a smart choice.

Differentiation is a zero-sum, advertising-based game. In fact, the only thing that leads to real growth is person-to-person conversation, word of mouth. Or better, an Ideavirus. And- these only come about when you do something truly Remarkable. Differentiation is not, by itself, Remarkable. To be Purple, you have to be more than different. You must be extreme. You must live on the Edge.

*My own addition- It is far easier to see the Edges in someone else’s field than it is to see them in one’s own.

Time to start a newspaper

What should not-so-busy real estate brokers (or dentists) do?

Why not start a local newspaper?

Here's how I would do it. Assume you've got six people in your office. Each person is responsible to do two things each day:

· Interview a local business, a local student or a local political activist. You can do it by phone, it can be very short and it might take you ten minutes.

· Get 20 households to 'subscribe' by giving you their email address and asking for a free subscription. You can use direct contact or flyers or speeches to get your list.

Twice a week, send out the 'newspaper' by email. After one week, it will have more than 500 subscribers and contain more than 20 interesting short articles or quotes about people in the neighborhood. Within a month, (if it's any good) every single person in town who matters will be reading it and forwarding it along to others.

It will cost you nothing. It will become your gift to the community. And it will be a long lasting asset that belongs to you, not to the competition. (And yes, you can do this if you're a plumber or a chiropractor. And yes, you can do this if 'local' isn't geographic for you, but vertical).

Posted on sethgodin/typepad.com 1/10/2009

Marketers agree that this is currently a best-case scenario:

Watch out for the 5% rule

Most new marketing ideas that are any good feel like they might be able to convert 5% of those in the market for what’s being sold.

And of course, only 5% of the population is in the market for what’s being sold.

And only 5% of those in the market are choosing to pay attention.

So, it’s really 5% of 5% of 5%.

Take 10,000 people. That’s 500, which gets you 25, which gets you 1.

1 new customer!

Visceral Business

Quotes and a conversation with Anne McCrossan:

http://www.visceralbusiness.com/

Attention is now a commercial currency

Human beings have fixed capacities. Whilst we often talk about human beings having limitless potential, it’s what we do with the resources and capacities that we have that makes this limitless potential attainable more than the capacities we have themselves, which are rather more fixed.

For example, there are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much food we can comfortably eat and only so many things we can buy. The same is true of attention, we only have so much of it to give to people marketing their services and products. It follows then that just as brands compete for ‘share of wallet’, they also compete for ‘share of mind’, that is to say the amount of time and attention we can give them. This empowers the consumer and makes attention a commercial currency as a trade for products and services bought.