The Wit and Wisdom of Seth Godin - The reason they want you to fit in...
The reason they want you to fit in...
is that once you do, then they can ignore you. - Seth Godin
I'm not a big fan of marketeers I have one exception ( so far anyway) and that is Seth Godin.
Slice it and dice it whichever way you want the guy writes a lot of intelligent stuff.
Choose your customers, choose your future
Marketers rarely think about choosing customers... like a sailor on shore leave, we're not so picky. Huge mistake.
Your customers define what you make, how you make it, where you sell it, what you charge, who you hire and even how you fund your business. If your customer base changes over time but you fail to make changes in the rest of your organization, stress and failure will follow.
Sell to angry cheapskates and your business will reflect that. On the other hand, when you find great customers, they will eagerly co-create with you. They will engage and invent and spread the word.
It takes vision and guts to turn someone down and focus on a different segment, on people who might be more difficult to sell at first, but will lead you where you want to go over time.
Big ideas...
What you buy when you buy a lottery ticket
Hint: you don't buy a future of money.
People who win the lottery are almost always unhappy in the long r un, and most of them continue to buy lottery tickets.
It's not the destination, it's the journey. Same thing with first dates, blog posts, opening presents and answering a phone call from a stranger.
The thrill of possibility, the chance for recognition, the chemical high of anticipation. That's what people pay for.
Help your customers avoid taking responsibility
It's interesting to see that people are much better at putting up with things that happen to them than they are at living with the consequences of a bad choice.
When you can blame someone else (or the gods of spite, chance and bad luck) it's emotionally safer than it is to acknowledge you made a lousy choice.
If the weather is freakishly bad on your vacation, you can embrace pity from your friends, and spend your angst cursing the storms.
On the other hand, if you book a trip in the middle of hurricane season, you've got no one to blame but yourself.
This is a great opportunity for marketers and others that want to engage with the public. If you can figure out how to communicate, "it's not your fault," then people will be grateful, and they'll return. It might not be right, it might not be mature and it might not be the behavior society wants to advance, but it works.
Even better, figure out how to teach your customers to enjoy taking responsibility. It's the long term solution that builds a healthy relationship between customer and vendor... you coach them on good choices and they embrace what happens after they make them.
Is Marketing evil?
Marketing works.
If you spend time and money (with skill) you can tell a story that spreads, that influences people, that changes actions. Marketing can cause people to buy something that they wouldn't have bought without marketing, vote for someone they might not have considered and support an organization that would have been invisible otherwise.
If marketing doesn't work, then a lot of us are wasting a great deal of effort (and cash). But it does.
So, does that make marketing evil? .................
For me, marketing works for society when the marketer and consumer are both aware of what's happening and are both satisfied with the ultimate outcome. I don't think it's evil to make someone happy by selling them cosmetics, because beauty isn't the goal, it's the process that brings joy. On the other hand, swindling someone out of their house in order to make a sales commission...
Just because you can market something doesn't mean you should. You've got the power, so you're responsible, regardless of what your boss tells you to do.
