This is Marketing by Seth Godin
I’ve taken all of the wisdom nuggets and key messages from best-selling author Seth Godin and his latest book “This is Marketing — You can’t be seen until you learn to see” and have carefully and thoughtfully synthesised to a 15min easy read.
"Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. They don't just make noise; they make the world better. Truly powerful marketing is grounded in generosity, empathy and emotional labour"
What is marketing?
Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become. It involves creating honest stories - stories that resonate and spread. Marketers offer solutions, opportunities for humans to solve their problems and move forward
Marketing begins (and often ends) with what we do and how we do it, not in all the stuff that comes after the thing is designed and shipped
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
We are all marketers - we all have the ability to make more change than we imagined. Our opportunity and our obligation is to do marketing that we are proud of and learn more about how human beings dream, decide & act and how you can help them become better versions of themselves (the ones they seek to be)
"The purpose of our culture isn't to enable capitalism, even capitalism that pays your bills. The purpose of capitalism is to build culture. Once you adopt a posture of service, of engaging with the culture to make change you're no longer asking "How can I get more people to listen to me, how can I get the word out, how can I find more followers, how can I convert more leads to sales, how can I find more clients, how can I pay my staff? Instead you ask "What would matter to the people I want to serve, what change do I seek to make?"
Society needs good marketers
Marketing is the landscape of our modern lives
Old fashioned traditional marketing is done to the customer, not for him or her
Because marketing has been done to us for so long we take it for granted, we fail to see what's actually happening and don't notice how it's changing us
Marketing is important enough to do right
Marketing doesn't have to be selfish
It's time to do something else with marketing. To make things better, to cause a change you'd like to see in the world and to serve the people you care about
Marketing is change and marketers make change happen
What customers should be saying to marketers
"Your emergency is not a license to steal my attention. Your insecurity is not a permit to hustle me or my friends"
What people want is to be understood and to be served, not merely to witness whatever you feel like doing in a given moment.