Great marketers create TED, Bad marketers create FUD
NN Taleb, Naval & Seth Godin are top thinkers of our time. What distinguishes Seth from others is his ability to take original difficult ideas and visualize it for a commoner. He is careful to remove the overtone of intellectual sound in what he says and does not scoff at those who don’t get it even after simplifying.
He is amongst rare few who can straddle across the different levels of first principle, mental model and metaphorical thinking. Seth explains new ideas in a way that even a kid can understand and be moved enough to act.
In his latest book #ThisIsMarketing he crescendos through all his previous marketing work, Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, Tribe, Knock Knock, Marketers are Liars, MarketingSeminar and many more.
With “ThisIsMarketing” Seth has resisted the temptation to create a how-to guide and insisted on providing a compass on how to do great marketing. Marketing that leaves a marketer fulfilled and turns marketing a calling of duty.
Novice that has misunderstood or relegated grandfathers of marketing that have not caught with changes in Marketing and everyone within that spectrum need ThisIsMarketing.
Seth poses bold questions that are bound to change anyone's attitude towards marketing.
These questions are also going to create a lot of ruckus to the current ace practitioners of marketing.
For instance, he exposes that long tail is a scam pulled over the independent artist. And that authenticity is one of the biggest myth that is peddled by marketers. I have been shaken on my own belief about “Authenticity”
The entire book can be summarized as Seths Revised Marketing Manifesto. Last section of the second chapter can be used word by word to describe this manifesto he gives to the world.
Ideas that spread win
Marketers make change happen, for the #SmallestViableMarket
By delivering, anticipated, personal and relevant messages that people want to get
Marketers don’t solve company’s problem, they use marketing to solve other people’s problem
They have empathy to know that those who they seek to serve don’t want what the marketers want, don’t believe what they believe, don’t care about what they care about. They probably never will.
At the heart of our culture is the belief in status. In our self-perceived understanding of our role in any interaction, in where we are going next.
We use status roles and our decision about affiliation and dominion to decide where to go and how to get there.
Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.
Direct marketing is not the same as brand marketing but they are both based on our decision to make the right thing of the right people.
“People like us do things like this” is how each one of us understands culture, and marketers engage with this idea every day.
Ideas move through a slope. They skate through the early adopters, leap through a chasm, slog their way to the masses. Sometimes.
Attention is a precious resource since our brains are cluttered with noise. Smart marketers make it easy for those they seek to work with, by helping position the offering in a way that resonates and is memorable.
Most of all, 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.
Your tactics can make a difference, but your strategy — your commitment to a way of being and a story to be told and a promise to be made — can change everything.
If you want to make a change, begin by making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group.
Begin by getting people in sync.
Culture beats strategy — so much that culture is strategy.
Finally
Visualized notes for the entire book in a slideshare here
Entire book chunked into key principles that marketers must do captured in a tweetstorm here.
