Author: Seth Godin
ISBN: 978-1591845331
If you only have time to read one book about marketing, this should be it! I also higly recommend subscribind to Seth's blog and listening to his podcast Akimbo.
EXCERPTS
Don’t just tell me the facts, tell me a story instead.
Be remarkable! Be consistent! Be authentic!
Tell your story to people who are inclined to believe it. Live the lie.
Once we move beyond the simple satisfaction of needs, we move into the complex satisfaction of wants. And wants are hard to measure and difficult to understand.
The thing is, lying doesn’t pay off anymore. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast.
So, go tell a story. If it doesn’t resonate, tell a different one. When you find a story that works, live that story, make it true, authentic, and subject to scrutiny. All marketers are storytellers. Only the losers are liars.
Stories are shortcuts we use because we’re too overwhelmed by data to discover all the details. The stories we tell ourselves are lies that make it far easier to live in a very complicated world. We tell stories about products, services, friends, job seekers, the New York Yankees and sometimes even the weather.
We tell stories to our spouses, our friends, our bosses, our employees and our customers. Most of all, we tell stories to ourselves.
The reason all successful marketers tell stories is that consumers insist on it. Consumers are used to telling stories to themselves and telling stories to each other, and it’s just natural to buy stuff from someone who’s telling us a story. People can’t handle the truth.
No one buys facts. They buy a story.
The facts are irrelevant. In the short run, it doesn’t matter one bit whether something is actually better or faster or more efficient. What matters is what the consumer believes.
A long time ago, there was money to be made in selling people a commodity. Making your product or service better and cheaper was a sure path to growth and profitability. Today, of course, the rules are different. Plenty of people can make something cheaper than you can, and offering a product or service that is measurably better for the same money is a hard edge to sustain. Marketers profit because consumers buy what they want, not what they need. Needs are practical and objective, wants are irrational and subjective. And no matter what you sell — and whether you sell it to businesses or consumers — the path to profitable growth is in satisfying wants, not needs. Of course , your product must really satisfy those wants , not just pretend to !
Stephanie was about to buy a pair of limited edition sneakers from Puma: $ 125 for the pair about what she earns, after tax, after a long day of hard work. Was Stephanie thinking about support or sole material or the durability of the uppers? Of course not. She was imagining how she’d look when she put them on. She was visualizing her dramatically improved life once other people saw how cool she was. She was embracing the idea that she was a grown - up, a professional who could buy a ridiculously priced pair of sneakers if she wanted to. In other words, she was busy lying to herself, telling herself a story. The way Stephanie felt when she bought the Pumas was the product. Not the sneakers (made for $ 3 in China). [Tiffany box!]
A great story is true. Not true because it’s factual, but true because it’s consistent and authentic.
Great stories make a promise. They promise fun or money, safety or a shortcut. The promise is bold and audacious and not just very good — it’s exceptional or it’s not worth listening to.
Great stories are trusted. Trust is the scarcest resource we’ve got left. No one trusts anyone.
As a result, no marketer succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.
Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the less a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that the prospect is ultimately telling himself the lie, so allowing him (and the rest of the target audience) to draw his own conclusions is far more effective than just announcing the punch line.
Great stories don’t appeal to logic , but they often appeal to our senses .
Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. Average people are good at ignoring you. Average people have too many different points of view about life and average people are by and large satisfied. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one. Runaway hits like the LiveStrong fund - raising bracelets take off because they match the worldview of a tiny audience — and then that tiny audience spreads the story. [Crossing the chasm; Innovators]
Great stories don’t contradict themselves. And most of all, great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.
Marketers aren’t liars. They are just storytellers. It’s the consumers who are liars. As consumers, we lie to ourselves every day. We lie to ourselves about what we wear, where we live, how we vote and what we do at work. Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.
The only way your story will be believed, the only way people will tell themselves the lie you are depending on and the only way your idea will spread is if you tell the truth. And you are telling the truth when you live the story you are telling — when it’s authentic.
GOT MARKETING?
Sometimes marketing is so powerful it can actually change the worldview of someone who experiences it , but no marketing succeeds if it can’t find an audience that already wants to believe the story being told .
Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries is one of the most important marketing books ever. And it’s a great start. But it’s only a start.
The right side of the curve, where you take something people may or may not need and turn it into something they definitely want — that’s where the money is.
The organizations that succeed realize that offering a remarkable product with a great story is more important and more profitable than doing what everyone else is doing just a bit better.
STEP 1: - THEIR WORLDVIEW AND FRAMES GOT THERE BEFORE YOU DID
Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy smart marketers follow. Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of that worldview and you win.
But what about changing a worldview? What about creating wholesale changes in the marketplace? Sometimes a marketer is particularly fortunate and skillful and she actually causes a big chunk of the marketplace to change its worldview. Steve Jobs did this with the Macintosh and then with the iPod .
Your opportunity lies in finding a neglected worldview, framing your story in a way that this audience will focus on and going from there.
Marketing succeeds when it taps into an audience of people who share a worldview — a worldview that makes that audience inclined to believe the story the marketer tells. Marketing success stories (Starbucks, Fast Company, the Porsche Cayenne) occur when that shared worldview is discovered for the first time.
Vernacular: consumers care just as much about how something is said as what is said. They care about the choice of media, the tone of voice, the words that are used — even the way things smell. When the story that’s told to the consumer doesn’t match the vernacular the consumer expects, weird things happen. That’s exactly the worldview these brands were framed around. They told a complicated story about origins and health and flavor and brewing, and the previously ignored community woke up and paid attention. They framed the tea story like the detailed stories so many people believe about wine and convinced a substantial portion of the tea and coffee markets to believe the story.
Some of these groups may be small , but they can take your story and run with it. They can turn a small market into a cult, into a movement and then a trend, and finally into a mass market.
Frames are the words and images and interactions that reinforce a bias someone is already feeling.
Speaking respectfully to a person’s worldview is the price of entry to get their attention. If your message is framed in a way that conflicts with their worldview, you’re invisible .
A frame is your first step in telling a persuasive story. I’m not recommending that you only tell people what they want to hear, that you pander to their worldview, that marketing is nothing but repeating what people already know. Far from it. Instead I believe the best marketing stories are told (and sold) with frames but ultimately spread to people who are open to being convinced of something brand new.
Geoffrey Moore talks about in Crossing the Chasm: Whether you’re selling shoes or computers or a candidate , moving your story from one segment of the population to another is the hard part.
It’s so tempting to tell your story to an audience that desperately wants to hear it. The problem is that this audience may embrace your story but might not make you any money (or get you elected) . It’s not enough to find a niche that shares a worldview. That niche has to be ready and able to influence a large group of their friends.
Consumers don’t notice anything until they pay attention and pay is the perfect word.
As a marketer, you can no longer force people to pay attention. Buying television ads or calling people at home is no guarantee that people will listen to what you have to say. This is why permission marketing is so effective — you reach people who have a worldview that the messages you promise to send them are a valuable part of their lives.
People don’t want to change their worldview. They like it, they embrace it and they want it to be reinforced.
Once you’ve presented a story to people who share your worldview and are paying attention, the vernacular you use becomes astonishingly important. The words, colors, typefaces, images, media, packaging, pricing — all the ways you can possibly color your story — become far more important than the story itself. [Branding.]
The coffee and tea (the “products” ostensibly sold here) are identical to that for sale at half the price across the street at the diner. But that’s okay, because no one is here for the product. We’re here for the story and the way believing it makes us feel. This is why copywriting and Web design and photography are so important. Why it matters how your sales force dresses and speaks. When Pat Holt strings together a list of words not to overuse — “Actually, totally, absolutely, completely, continually, constantly, continuously, literally, really, unfortunately, ironically, incredibly, hopefully, finally” — she’s not being a stickler for formality and grammar. Instead she’s reminding us that words matter, that poor word use is just a red flag for someone who wants to ignore you.
The desire to do what the people we admire are doing is the glue that keeps our society together. It’s the secret ingredient in every successful marketing venture as well.
You have no chance of successfully converting large numbers of people to your point of view if you try to do it directly. But if you rely on the nearly universal worldview that people like being in sync with their peers, you are likely to find that those who believe your story will work hard to share their lie with their peers. If your story is easy to spread, and if those you converted believe that it’s worth spreading, it will. [People like us do/ buy things like this.]
In describing the large number of extremely wealthy art collectors at Art Basel Miami Beach, Amy Cappellazzo of Christie’s said, “They’d prefer to spend $ 500,000 here or at auction on something they could buy privately for $ 50,000. These people are traders and they’re incredibly savvy about markets.” Actually, paying ten times as much to show off isn’t savvy, it’s stupid. Until you realize that what they’re buying isn’t the art, it’s the process.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The reason so many effective solutions take forever to get implemented is that the fear of change is greater than the cost of sticking with what you’ve got. In other words, people wait until they have a heart attack or get diabetes before they go on a diet. This is the most frustrating worldview a marketer can face. You believe in your product, you know your product will help people, but people refuse to notice it, never mind purchase it.
“I like working with you.” The reason that permission marketing and 1 : 1 marketing are so effective has nothing to do with the ethics of spam. Instead, these techniques work because they group together people with a similar worldview. The people you’re talking to now are the prospects and customers that have a bias to work with you. When someone opts in to get e - mail from Dailycandy.com, she’s making a clear statement about her worldview. That gives a site a leg up in communicating with their customers, because they’re able to frame their messages in a way that gets it heard.
Step 1: Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard.
STEP 2: - PEOPLE NOTICE ONLY THE NEW AND THEN MAKE A GUESS
Whether you create a product, market a service or run a nonprofit, you win when you spread your ideas. If your idea spreads from person to person, you’ll grow in influence and everything will get easier. I call an idea that spreads an ideavirus. If everyone who matters knows your idea, you win.
STEP 3: - FIRST IMPRESSIONS START THE STORY
Hhumans make decisions on almost no data — and then stick with those decisions regardless of information that might prove them wrong .
The problem with first impressions isn’t that they’re not important (They are important! They’re crucial!) but that we have no idea at all when that first impression is going to occur. Not the first contact, but the first impression. That’s why authenticity matters. It doesn’t really matter whether a story we tell to a consumer is completely factual. If it’s a good story, if that story is framed in terms of his worldview, then he’ll tell himself the story and believe in the lie. The reason authenticity matters is that we don’t know which inputs the consumer will use to invent the story he tells himself. If our sign is cool and our location is cool but our people and our products aren’t, we’re not telling a coherent story. Only when a business or organization (or person) is authentic can we be sure that the story that’s being told is consistent enough to impact the maximum number of people.
So here’s the deal:
1. Snap judgments are incredibly powerful.
2. Humans do everything they can to support those initial judgments.
3. They happen whether you want your prospects to make a quick judgment or not.
4. One of the ways people support snap judgments is by telling other people.
5. You never know which input is going to generate the first impression that matters.
6. Authentic organizations and people are far more likely to discover that the story they wish to tell is heard and believed and repeated.
Superstitions are nothing but incorrect theories based on snap judgments. Bad first impressions lead to stories that aren’t accurate — superstitions we tell ourselves and believe in. People are superstitious about whatever it is you’re marketing. You can ignore that superstition or you can rail against it, but both strategies will cost you. The alternative is the only one that works: use personal interactions that are so extraordinary and so powerful that they cause people to tell themselves a different story instead. If a consumer has a lousy telephone experience with a hotel reservations agent, his impulse will be to hate the service from every person he interacts with when he finally arrives at the hotel. The only solution? It’s not expensive carpeting, lower rates or a better mattress. The only solution is a warm, personal interaction between an authentic and caring individual and your disgruntled customer.
Facts are not the most powerful antidote to superstition. Powerful, authentic personal interaction is. That’s why candidates still need to shake hands and why retail outlets didn’t disappear after the success of Amazon.
STEP 4: - GREAT MARKETERS TELL STORIES WE BELIEVE
Stories only work because consumers buy what they don’t need. When a person really needs something (food, water, shelter) he cares a great deal about the essence of the purchase. If he’s really hungry, the food is more important than the package. But being really hungry in our society is pretty rare.
If consumers have everything they need, there’s nothing left to buy except stuff that they want. And the reason they buy stuff they want is because of the way it makes them feel.
Consumers care a lot about the buying process. They care a lot about packaging and peer approval and the out-of-the-box new product experience.
They care about the provenance of the item and the circumstances under which it was made. Sure, once something is purchased, people care about durability but they care far more about the way the staff at the company treats them when it breaks.
Is there a connection between the utility of a product or service and the way it makes a person feel? Of course! But is the utility of the product the main way people shape their desires? No way!
EXAMPLES: STORIES FRAMED AROUND WORLDVIEWS
If you claim that you have the best prices or the highest scores in one survey or another, they’ll ignore you. Subtlety matters. If you choose to tell a story that’s more subtle, something more interesting and more believable, these people will choose to pay attention. Once you’ve got their attention, there’s your chance.
It’s easy to tout your features, focus on the benefits, give proof that you are, in fact, the best solution to a problem. But proof doesn’t make the sale. Of course, you believe the proof, but your audience doesn’t. The very fact that you presented the proof makes it suspect. If a consumer figures something out or discovers it on her own, she’s a thousand times more likely to believe it than if it’s just something you claim. This is where the art of marketing occurs. For most products and services, skywriting, billboards and telemarketing are precisely the wrong ways to spread a message. Not because they won’t be noticed — they probably will. But because they won’t be believed.
In order to be believed , you must present enough of a change that the consumer chooses to notice it. But then you have to tell a story, not give a lecture. You have to hint at the facts, not announce them. You cannot prove your way into a sale — you gain a customer when the customer proves to herself that you’re a good choice. The process of discovery is more powerful than being told the right answer — because of course there is no right answer, and because even if there were, the consumer wouldn’t believe you!
Expectations are the engine of our perceptions.
IMPORTANT ASIDE: FIBS AND FRAUDS
Storytelling works when the story actually makes the product or service better.
Doing the right thing pays off. Storytellers who trick consumers get caught. They become inconsistent and sooner or later, they get punished.
If you want to grow, make something worth talking about. Not the hype, not the ads, but the thing. If your idea is good, it’ll spread.
I’m proposing a simple test for separating the honest stories from the deceitful ones. It revolves around two questions the consumer should ask the marketer: “ If I knew what you know, would I choose to buy what you sell?” and “After I’ve used this and experienced it, will I be glad I believed the story or will I feel ripped off?”
Belief in the lie must not ultimately harm the consumer because if it does, you’ll run out of consumers and credibility far too soon.
Telling people that they’ve believed a lie for a long time is no way to make friends. If it’s a good lie, a lie that led people to enjoy themselves or to be productive, then taking that lie away is actually hurtful.
If a friend has responded beautifully to a placebo drug, is it right to tell her that she’s taking nothing but sugar pills?
STEP 5: - MARKETERS WITH AUTHENTICITY THRIVE
You don’t get to make up the story. The story happens with or without you. If you’re not happy with the story, the only way to change it is with direct contact between your consumer and a person.
But when a human being works with the consumer and takes independent action on her behalf, something changes. Allowing your employees to post an honest blog or to engage in direct instant - messaging conversations with your customers is a way to promote honest communication. If it makes you nervous to do that, maybe you need to worry about authenticity a little more. Sometimes the interactions are nasty or rushed or even selfish. But when they’re genuine, they have an impact.
The goal of every marketer is to create a purple cow, a product or experience so remarkable that people feel compelled to talk about it. Remarkable goods and services help ideas spread — not hype - filled advertising.
If you’re authentic, then all the details will line up. Your menu will match your food, which will seamlessly integrate with your staff and your decor. If you commit to a story and live that story, the contradictions will disappear. If you want to send a message of friendly service, it helps to hire friendly people. If great design is at the heart of the story you’re telling, you need a designer to run things and a designer to be your accountant as well. [Influencers!]
Once fooled, a person will never repeat your story to someone else.
If you are not authentic, you will get the benefit of just one sale, not a hundred. The cost of your deception is just too high.
Remember, the best stories promise to fulfill the wishes of a consumer’s worldview. They may offer:
• a shortcut
• a miracle
• money
• social success
• safety
• ego
• fun
• pleasure
• belonging
They can also play on fear — by promising to avoid the opposite of all the things above .
Consumers are all different, but ultimately they all want the same outcome. They want to be promoted, to be popular, to be health, wealthy and wise. They want to be pleasantly surprised and honestly flattered.
COMPETING IN THE LYING WORLD
How do you respond to competing stories in the marketplace? The most important principle is this: you cannot succeed if you try to tell your competition’s story better than they can.
It’s almost impossible to out-yell someone with the same story.
The problem is that once a consumer has bought someone else’s story and believes that lie, persuading the consumer to switch is the same as persuading him to admit he was wrong. And people hate admitting that they’re wrong. Instead, you must tell a different story and persuade those listening that your story is more important than the story they currently believe. If your competition is faster, you must be cheaper. If they sell the story of health, you must sell the story of convenience.
What if you’re entering a market where there is already successful competition and they’ve all bought your competition’s story? That means that your competition is already telling a story that’s working. In order to grow, you can’t tell the same story to the same people (even if you tell it louder or with more style). Instead you will find success by telling a different story to part of the community with a particular worldview that’s different from that of the masses.
In Purple Cow, I argued that safe was risky, that in a cluttered world, the only way to grow was to do something remarkable. [The safest way is the most dangerous way.]
Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser did academic research that proves an obvious point: people on the edges are more likely to vote. Not the middle of the curve, but those who are incensed and focused and care deeply about only one issue. This leads to predictable behavior from candidates. Get radical before the election to activate your likely voter base (notice that I didn’t say “to activate the largest base”). Then after the election, move to the center where you can get more done.
Being remarkable, going to the edges, doing something worth talking about—these are all things that are rewarded with action by communities that care deeply. You succeed by being an extremist in your storytelling, then gracefully moving your product or service to the middle so it becomes more palatable to audiences that are persuaded by their friends, not by you.
Your goal should not (must not) be to create a story that is quick, involves no risks and is without controversy. Boredom will not help you grow.
It’s hard to be remarkable when you and your organization insist on not changing the status quo.
The price isn’t the problem. The problem is that the story doesn’t address the needs of the audience, and until it does, no price is low enough.
Cotton creates far more environmental and social side effects than almost any crop grown. At the same time, high-tech fabrics are lighter, cooler, easier to care for and far less damaging to the environment. So why haven’t we all switched? Because old stories die hard. As we saw in the examples of Coke and recycling, people don’t like changing their minds. It’ll be another generation before consumers realize how much damage cotton is doing and start coming to their own conclusions. That’s an important lesson for people who work in public policy, but it’s a useful insight for someone with a new idea to market: hook it up to an old story.
Most of us have a very simple default frame: if it’s not remarkable or exceptional, ignore it. If someone tries to sell you something, decline. Making something a little better doesn’t help you because people won’t bother noticing it.
The thing that makes something remarkable isn’t usually directly related to the original purpose of the product or service. It’s the Free Prize Inside! (published by Portfolio in 2004), the extra stuff, the stylish bonus, the design or the remarkable service or pricing that makes people talk about it and spread the word.
Create mechanisms that allow individuals who believe your story to share it with their friends and colleagues. The way your story will spread is not because you directly market to people with a worldview alien to your story. It will spread when one individual interacts with another and uses the power of the personal interaction to spread your story. [Why do you think are there social media buttons below this summary ?]
