Daily Archive

“Godin reinforces what good marketers know.”
—New York Times
I’m flattered! I wasn’t sure I knew what ever y good marketer
knows. I guess I do now. After all, the paper of record said so.
But, assuming that you’re like me and the rest of the people I
know (which means you haven’t figured out ever ything there
is to know about marketing yet), here’s a list to get you
star ted.
• Anticipated, personal, and relevant adver tising always does
better than unsolicited junk.
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build
a brand.
• Your best customers are wor th far more than your average
customers.
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable, and ultimately
more ef fective a measure of success than share of market.
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
• Adver tising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about
far more than that.
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not
marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the people in your marketplace
happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing
encourages the right sor t of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable inspire conversation.
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone,
the typesetting on your bills, and your returns policy.
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time.
And once they catch you, people talk about the experience.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget,
you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers
realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• What people want is the extra, emotional bonus they get
when they buy something they love.
• Business-to-business marketing is just marketing to
consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for
what they buy.
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade
show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-ef fectiveness.
At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs,
permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs)
are quickly proving how well they work.
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond
to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
• Good marketers tell a stor y.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed, and impatient. Star t
with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose
to notice.
• Ef fective stories match the worldview of the people you
are telling the stor y to.
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hur t your ability
to deliver the right stor y to the others.
• A product for ever yone rarely reaches anyone.
• Living and breathing an authentic stor y is the best way
to sur vive in a conversation-rich world.
• Marketers are also responsible for the side ef fects their
products cause.
• Reminding the consumer of a stor y they know and trust is
a power ful shor tcut.
• Good marketers measure.
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful
exercise that star ted a long time ago and doesn’t end until
you’re done.
• One disappointed customer is wor th as much as ten
delighted ones.
Obviously, knowing what to do is ver y, ver y dif ferent
than actually doing it.
Irony aler t: Since the inspiration for what I’ve written here
has been misinterpreted a couple of times, I want to clarify
that the New York Times wasn’t tr ying to be nice when they
said what they said. Even though it seems nice to you and me,
they didn’t mean it that way. And this list didn’t appear in the
Times, it was inspired by their attempt to be snide.
Thank you.
SethGodin.com • SethGodin.typepad.com • Squidoo.com

From Seth Godin’s new book:

BIG used to matter. Big meant
economies of scale. (You never hear about
“economies of tiny” do you?)
Years ago, people, usually guys, often ex-marines,
wanted to be CEO of a big company. The
Fortune 500 is where people went to make
a fortune, after all.
Big meant power and profit and growth.
Big meant control over supply and control
over markets.
There was a good reason for this. Value was added in ways that suited big
organizations. Value was added with efficient manufacturing, widespread
distribution, and very large R&D staffs. Value came from hundreds of
operators standing by and from nine-figure TV ad budgets. Value came
from a huge sales force.
Of course, it’s not just big organizations that added value. Big planes
were better than small ones, because they were faster and more efficient.
Big buildings were better than small ones because they facilitated
communications and used downtown land quite efficiently. Bigger
computers could handle more simultaneous users.
Get Big Fast was the motto for start-ups, because big companies can go
public and find more access to capital and use that capital to get even
bigger. Big accounting firms were the place to go to get audited if you
were a big company, because a big accounting firm could be trusted. Big
law firms were the place to find the right lawyer, because big law firms
were a one-stop shop.
And then small happened.
Enron (big) got audited by Andersen (big) and failed (big). The
World Trade Center was a terrorist target. Network (big) TV advertising is
collapsing so fast you can hear it. American Airlines (big) is getting
creamed by JetBlue (think small). Boing Boing (four people) has a
readership growing a hundred times faster than the New Yorker
(hundreds of people).
Big computers are silly. They use
lots of power and are not nearly as
efficient as properly networked Dell
PCs (at least that’s what they use at
Yahoo! and Google). Big boom
boxes are replaced by tiny Ipod
Shuffles. (Yeah, I know big-screen
TVs are the big thing. An exception
that proves the rule.)
I’m writing this on a laptop at a
skateboard park that offers free WiFi
for parents to surf the Web while they wait
around for their kids. They offer free WiFi
because the owner wanted to. It took
them a few minutes and $50. No big
meetings, corporate policies, or feasibility
studies. They just did it.
Today, little companies often make
more money than big companies. Little
churches grow faster than worldwide
ones. Little jets are way faster (door to
door) than big ones.
Today, Craigslist (eighteen employees) is the fourth most visited site
according to some measures. They are partly owned by eBay (more than
four thousand employees), which hopes to stay in the same league,
traffic-wise. They’re certainly not growing nearly as fast.
Small means that the founder is involved in a far greater percentage of
customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions
that matter and can make them quickly.
Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change your
business model when your competition changes theirs.
Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.
Small means that you can answer e-mail from your customers.
Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like
manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others while you
keep all the power because you invent something that’s remarkable and
tell your story to people who want to hear it.
A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because
they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart, small companies are
happy to hire them.
A small restaurant has an owner who greets you by name.
A small venture fund doesn’t have to fund big, bad ideas in order to put
their capital to work. They can make
small investments in tiny companies
with good ideas.
A small church has a minister with
the time to visit you in the hospital
when you’re sick.
Is it better to be the head of Craigslist
or the head of UPS?
Small is the new big only when the
person running the small thinks big.
Don’t wait. Get small. Think big.