‘This is Marketing’ by Seth Godin: Marketing at its Best

I might not read as many marketing books as I should be, but ‘This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See’ by Seth Godin is definitely the best marketing book that I’ve read so far. It’s simply straight forward and easy to read book that explain marketing at its best, the act of making change happen and create (positive) impact. In my line of work as an HR professional, I do want to make some changes such as elevating my function into a more added-value strategic business partner; creating a learning culture where everyone has the desire to learn anything, anytime and anywhere in order to exponentially grow; developing transcendent leaders who work beyond themselves for the greater goods of the organization, the country, and even for humankind; and other changes that I believe will brings positive impacts. I, therefore, do need to master marketing to make those changes happen.

The following statements are some that I directly quote from the book that I found the most essential for me to better understand marketing: 

Marketing is not a battle, and it’s not a war, or even a contest. Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.

Marketing 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. It involves creating honest stories-strifes that resonate and spread. Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward. 

Marketing in five steps are:

1. Invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling and a contribution worth talking about.
2. Design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about.
3. Tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market (the minimum number of people that need to be influenced that make it worth the effort).
4. Spread the word to make everyone gets excited about.
5. 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.

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

If you want to make change, begins by making culture. Being by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync. Culture bests strategy-so much that culture is strategy.

Marketing changes people through stories, connections and experience. 

Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us. 

Tell stories that resonate and hold up over time. Stories that are true, because we made them true with our actions and our products and our services.

Make connections to enable others to be seen and known. People want to be part of something. It’s safer that way, and often more fun.

Create experiences using a product or engaging with a service. Making a donation, going to a rally, calling customer service. Each of these actions is part of the story; each builds a little bit of connection. Offer these experiences with intent, doing them on purpose.

Be market-driven: hear the market, listen to it, and even more important, influence it, bend it, make it better.

Your job as a marketer is to find a spot on the map with edges that (some) people want to find, Not selfish, uniques selling proposition, done to maximize your market share, but a generous beacon, signal flare sent up so that people who are looking for you can easily find you. We’re this, not that.

Effective marketers don’t begin with a solution. Instead, begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make. Change someone on an emotional level. 

Sell feelings, status and connection, not tasks or stuff.

Marketers make change. We change people from one emotional state to another. We take people on a journey; we help them become the person they’ve dreamed of becoming, a little bit at a time.

Find the people Worth serving, and then find a change worth making.

On telling the story: everyone always acts in accordance with their internal narratives which usually driven by the desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and the perception of status (affiliation and dominance). Create stories around that. 

People also tend to act according to their pattern. If the story we created match with that pattern, then it is business as usual. When we want to make a change that interrupt that pattern, we need create a sufficient tension to overcome the inertia. Tension is the promise that we can get through that fear to the other side. If we care enough about the change we seek to make, we will care enough to generously and respectfully create tension on behalf that change.

Treat different people differently. Always be wondering, always be testing, always be willing to treat different people differently. If you don’t. they’ll find someone who will. 

Permission is anticipated, personal and relevant. Permission marketing recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. Pay attention is the key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they actually are paying you with something valuable. Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went. If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, that’s because it does. 

Last but not least, a trusted marketer earns enrollment. She can make a promise and keep it, earning more trust. She can tell a story, uninterrupted, because with the trust comes attention. The story earns more enrollment, which lead to more promises and then more trust. And perhaps, if the story is well organized and resonates, that leads to word of mouth, to the peer-to-peer conversations that are at the heart of our culture.

Please do read the whole book to learn more details on how to implement those things above and gaining some insights form the case studies. 

Well, it’s a good thing that I don’t read a lot of reference of marketing before reading this book. Now I only know to how to do marketing this way: marketing at its best.