This Is Marketing – Seth Godin
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Rating: 4.5 / 5
This Is Marketing – Seth Godin
Date Consumed: June 2022
You Should Read If: you are involved in any sales, marketing, or promoting your own brand or your companies.
ISBN: 978-0525540830
The Book in Three Thoughts
1. Marketing is about being generous to the audience and solving their problems.
2. The goal of our marketing shouldn’t be to spam, lie, or steal attention; it should be to spread a story that resonates with our audience.
3. It is impossible to create work that both matters and pleases everyone.
Key Takeaways
1. Everything we say or do and everything we don’t say and don’t do contributes to the brand and story we are telling. How we price something, package our product, and answer the phone all send a message to our audience about what our business stands for and values.
2. People don’t want a 1/4” drill bit; they don’t even want the 1/4” hole. What they want is the memory of the birdfeeder they made with their grandson. When we buy a product, we are buying a solution to an emotional problem. It is the job of the marketers and the designers to determine which emotional problem their product is solving.
3. The first step in marketing is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling and a contribution worth talking about.
What I Am Going to Implement
1. Spend more time and effort to ensure I portray the brand I want to build.
2. Remember to ask who it is for. It is more important to be specific and build a tribe of true fans than to be generic and grow a group of indifferent people.
3. Play the long game and stay consistent so that the audience knows who I am and what I stand for. That way, if they agree, they can join, and if not, that is okay because it wasn’t for them in the first place.
Top 3 Excerpts
Excerpt 1
If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile. The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions, and we let everyone down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcomes. Who’s it for and what’s it for are the two questions that guide all of our decisions.
Excerpt 2
The most important lesson I can share about brand marketing is this: you definitely, certainly, and surely don’t have enough time and money to build a brand for everyone. You can’t. Don’t try. Be specific. Be very specific.
Excerpt 3
Pricing is a marketing tool, not simply a way to get money
Marketing changes your pricing.
Pricing changes your marketing.
Because people make assumptions and associations based on your pricing, and your pricing shapes what people believe about your service, it’s important to be clear about how you position yourself. Your price should be aligned with the extremes you claimed as part of your positioning.
