Seth Godin on marketing

One sign of Seth Godin’s success as a marketing guru is that he comes up number three in a Google search on “Seth”—right after the guy in the Bible and the Canadian cartoonist. Three of the top ten results are currently about him.

Yet as he admits himself, Godin sometimes makes mistakes. The title of his book All Marketers Are Liars was provocative, but surely turned off many potential buyers. (On the new cover, “are liars” is crossed out and “tell stories” written in.) And for me at least, the title and cover image of his 2007 book Meatball Sundae were nauseating enough to keep me from reading it until now.

As usual, though, reading any book by Seth Godin proved worthwhile. I’ve read most of them and reviewed The Dip and Purple Cow (the book I recommend starting with). Read a couple of his books and you see that he has a coherent view of how marketing works, and how it is changing. Each book takes a different piece of the puzzle and looks at it in more detail.

Purple Cow argued that it’s no longer enough to sell average products to average people by interrupting them with TV ads or billboards. The world is too full of noise for you to cut through the clutter that way, and the Internet makes it too easy for your potential customers to find your competitors. The key is to have a story that is so compelling and so authentic that it resonates with a core group out there—and then to let that core group do your advertising for you.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter make it easier than ever for stories to spread and become “viral”—but just having a Facebook page and a Twitter account won’t help you much if you don’t have an unusual story to tell.

More than that, Godin argues, that story won’t take hold unless it reflects who you really are as a company. It’s a hopeful message for start-ups but not so hopeful for big, established companies that have sunk enormous resources into doing things the way they already do them. Putting nifty new-media tools on top of a stodgy organization, he argues, is like putting whipped cream and a cherry on a bowl of meatballs.

“If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea,” Godin writes at the end of this short but challenging book, “it’s this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.”