"All Marketers R Liars": Telling Authentic Stories In A LowTrust World

Seth Godin is the author of six bestsellers, including Permission Marketing, an Amazon Top 100 bestseller for a year and a Fortune Best Business Book. His more recent book, All Marketers Are Liars also made the Amazon Top 100 and has inspired its own blog. Seth is also a renowned speaker, and was recently chosen as one of “21 Speakers for the Next Century” by Successful Meetings Magazine and is consistently rated among the best speakers by the audiences he addresses. Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998. He holds an MBA from Stanford and is a contributing editor to Fast Company magazine.

In his inimitable way, Seth reminds us of one of the immutable laws of marketing that “it’s all about them and not about you” and that marketing is about building relationships through serving the self-interest of those to whom you market.

A core concept in Seth’s presentation is that the digital age provides marketers with the opportunity to choose between “interruption marketing” which was the way of marketing for most of the last century to “permission marketing” where marketers gain increased permission to market based on the value- and trust-based relationship that building between the marketer and its market.

Seth takes one of the most powerful analogies that has been used in businesses – the sales funnel (at the wide top of which you load many suspects or prospects and at the narrow bottom of which customers flow out having purchased your products and services) – and flips it onto its side and renames it the sales megaphone. The sales megaphone is the instrument that your customers use to announce (through the narrow end of that megaphone) to their communities – their family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues – that they should also look at your products and services.

To have a product or service that people tell others about, it must be remarkable.

If you’re going to build a business or a product or a service, what about it is or can be truly remarkable – in other words, worthy of people remarking about it and talking about it with their friends, associates and colleagues?

Being remarkable in a sustainable way should be a goal for all businesses that want to grow. Every business should be making things these days that people would want to talk about. Being average is now akin to being dead. Businesses need to look at the fringes and stay away from the (ordinary/average) middle ground. Build something that is remarkable and that people want to talk about, then present it to those people who, in-turn, will talk about it to others and, along the way, get their permission to talk with them in the future about other products and services that might be under development.

Using this approach will transition a business from looking for customers to buy their products and services to a business that looks for new products and services to recommend to their customers.

In his summary, Seth says “Build remarkable stuff with a compass: that people hear about what you have in the way that they want to hear about it, they’ll want to continue interacting with you.”

Back when Seth delivered this presentation he believed that there were only three businesses that did this well – Amazon.com, eBay and Google.

Now, enjoy the video presentation below delivered to Google staff by Seth in 2006 (it’s certainly worth watching) …