Book Review #31
Raise your hand 🙋♂️ if you've ever been assaulted by a pop-up ad or felt that that brands are screaming louder than toddlers at a birthday party, fighting for your attention with flying coupons and dancing mascots or worse if you have seen brands behaving like an awkward friend trying to win you over with bad jokes and forced puns.
Seth Godin (the Dumbledore of Marketing) distils his 30 years of experience in to a neat 250-page book called 'This is Marketing' to help brands avoid this trap. Here are some lessons to get you started
- Marketing is not a battle, or a war, or even a contest. Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Marketing should not involve shouting, hustling, or coercion. It’s a chance to serve
- Effective Marketing means seeing what others see, understanding customer’s worldviews and desires to connect with them. It seeks volunteers, not victims
- Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve the consumer’s problems
- Stop hustling and interrupting, stop spamming & pretending you’re welcome, stop making average stuff for average people hoping you can charge more, stop begging people to become clients, stop feeling bad to charge for work, stop shortcuts and invest on long lasting relationships
- Never forget the existential question "Who is it for?". Be Market-driven rather than being Marketing driven. Logo design, pricing model and Facebook hacks are important but when you are market driven you think more about the hopes and dreams of your customer and that gets you in the business of delivering change
- Start with the smallest viable market worth pursuing. Focus on the early adopters who enjoy the tension of "This might not work" and when it works they will brag about their discovery. This helps you build a story that creates tension to persuade and educate customers to move forward. Then leverage Affiliation (or rarely Dominion) to scale
- Marketing in 5 steps
1> PRODUCT - Invent something worth making with worthy contribution
2> FOCUS - Build it in a way some people will strongly benefit
3> STORY - Tell a story that matches the narratives and dreams of the smallest viable market
4> SPREAD - Get them excited by spreading the word (build your tribe of customers if you can)
5> SHOW UP - Show up and lead the change. Overnight success takes many years of hard work
- Best business plans have the following ingredients - Truth (how the world works today), Assertions (what your offering will do), Alternatives (what will you do if your assertions don't pan out), People (who are the customers and your team) and Money (how much you need and how much you will make)
- Pricing is a critical Marketing tool. Marketing changes pricing and pricing changes marketing!
- Finally, if you see a way to make things better, you have a marketing problem
A book full of quotable quotes
#bookreview #marketing #SethGodin
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