Seth Godin’s Marketing Secrets to Launching a New Business

so set thank you so much once again for being on the podcast I have some bad news for you we're gonna have to start a business together right now we're gonna have to come up with a sort of a business idea together it's uh bad news because you have to work with me for a bit and I'm not the best at it you are so let me frame that the challenge I want us to go through together right now so we are starting a business we have let's say one grand to spend and we have to be profitable in three months or less right the only thing that I like to set as a condition is that you cannot use your name at all we have to you have to remain anonymous so you can't use the audience right sure so let's start right now let's say we have to create a business together from scratch let's say it's a an online business we have to sell it we can use the medium of Internet to sell it how would you go about creating a product that people would actually like well it's a great way to start let's understand the first thing which is we are going to be marketing with people not at them and that is a fundamental shift from the way most business people think they think they should have a factory it should be up and running they should figure out what they make and then they should do something to people to get those people to notice them and to believe that they need what's being sold and then to buy it and that method made a lot of sense for a hundred years because you could pay money for media and for that money you've got people's attention that was the deal but what we have to do is begin with the following we must begin with something that is so on point for the people who we seek to serve that they once they become aware of it cannot imagine engaging without it so that means we can't pick a giant problem because there is no giant problem that be solved for $1,000 those have all been taken we have to think of not the biggest possible market but the smallest possible market the smallest possible market that can sustain us and figure out how to bring that group of people something that they can't imagine being without so that they will tell other people so the Internet is a symptom of this it's a sidelight of this it's not an internet company it's the Internet that's being used to spread the word about what we did so that's how I would begin the smallest possible audience in a generous way where no one thinks we're interrupting them because they can't believe we have what they need okay so let's get a bit specific do you have anything in the top of your mind something a challenge that you encountered recently or a problem that you've seen recently that is that you think is worth solving for a particular small audience well so if I have 90 days I'm just making this up as we go here yeah what happens if I create a PDF document that is the 150 best air B&B places to stay in Paris okay it's gonna take me you're gonna do this work actually it's going to take you a week of real effort to visit places take pictures do an analysis explain which I remember smallest which one and in this 40 page document you're going to be able to deliver to people real value about where they should stay when they're in Paris and we're gonna give it away and we're gonna give it away we're gonna make it a medium post and we're going to put it in other places so that anybody who searches for where should I stay in Paris is more than not likely to discover it and even better when people do discover it they're gonna tell other people they know because it's so beautifully done that this is something that they need okay over the course of the next month we're going to focus obsessively about earning trust we want to earn trust with the people who are seeking a place to stay we want to earn trust with people who are hoping that people will stay with them and so we're creating a two-sided equation here where the word gets out that we're the person to ask about where to stay in Paris we give great free advice and the word gets out among people who are looking to rent their gara or villa or whatever that this is someone who can find you the customers that you need so there's been a whole nother five weeks doing that engaging with a hundred to a thousand people a day back and forth back and forth for free online until we're the indispensable middleman and once that occurs we'll make more than a thousand dollars maybe even a thousand dollars a day because people on either side will come to us and say I trust you you've never steered me wrong can I give you some money to do X take me on a tour find me get me into a place I can't get into or come visit my villa and write a review of it honestly so that other people will see it that middleman position is not currently filled in Paris it could be filled by someone who has less than a thousand dollars and 90 days from now we have an asset which is people who trust us on both sides and we will be able to turn that asset into your cash flow over time by serving the people we seek to serve so let me break that down first of all the first task would be to actually create sort of a PDF so free content that is actually really valuable and something's nice enough for for people to be interested in I'd like to get deeper than what you just said not only we we should help people to find a great air B&B in Paris but I think we should help Americans to find a greater B&B place in Paris right right because I'm an American I think everyone is an American yes and I know you know you said Paris because you think I'm French and actually I'm French which is a great guess from you know but only missing to start to go back to it I think if we pick the tiniest audience the one that we are the most uncomfortable with like we are almost with almost fear it's too small I think it's a great start so for Americans that might have specific knees right or even we can a dig deeper are we talking about people from California specifically exactly so those people might have needs such as high-speed Internet they want to see monuments from the balcony they want to to discover some food that they've seen in San Francisco but they actually are the real deal in Paris maybe I'm just making that up as well but by niching down that much we are able to exactly understand their problems we create this big list that you make me do and you pay me to do that which is great and so we have that we publish that because you're anonymous you can't use your name how would we go about promoting it this first piece of content so I wrote a blog post a bunch of years ago called first ten and it's still one of my most important posts and what I say is everyone knows ten people and if you don't know ten people you have to start over if you know ten people you give this thing to them if they tell other people it's good if they don't tell other people you need to make something better and so you don't have to put my name on it and we only need ten people we only need ten people in this hyper targeted market and I'm not sure I'd pick California maybe I'd say people with kids between three and seven years old right because they know lots of other people who have kids between three and seven years old that what we're seeking to do another one that's very similar is we all know the documentary jiro Dreams of Sushi that became a sensation and now the waiting list to get in to have dinner with Jiro is enormous well I could imagine a business that does nothing but act as a concierge for people who want to eat dinner at Jiro's that's the entire business that's super targeted but the fact is if you know one person who knows ed Levine at serious eats ed Levine will write about what you just did because it's so hyper targeted and aligns with his audience of people so I picked something that I thought we could do in 90 days but you know what it might take 200 days and that's okay because you can do a bunch of them my point is the marketers that are disliked by humans are just like because they have non remarkable products that cause them to act like selfish jerks so if you begin by asserting that you need something that is remarkable to a unique group of people you're 80% of the way there right so we create this very good content I I might have to like to update it a few times until I know that those ten people I share it to actually really love it so much that they are reading to show it for free so those are the first two steps and then how do we get into this middleman position where people would start to ask us for advice well so what happens is what we want in a low trust world is someone to trust and our problem is not piracy our problem is obscurity and the record industry spent way too long fighting piracy piracy is awareness piracy leads to attention attention leads to trust so if over time you are being able able to become trusted then people who want something extra will reach out to you and they will reach out to you because my pseudonym right Jaco then is right there at the bottom with my email address and I answer all my email and most of the time if I can engage with someone for three minutes it's free but if you want me to get on a plane or you want me to cross the street or you want me to do something special for you then let's agree to charge for it because it's worth it all right so I'm gonna call you Jack for the next few minutes if that's okay so Jack you will really you will so what you expect from this piece of content is that it's so valuable it's so insightful it's so target it's so good that people will tend who want to contact you to ask you more question to dig into the problems little bit more correct and by answering them by being kind by being helpful you hope that they would trust you in return and therefore trust you enough to perhaps pay for something so if you bigger than what they got from the free content yeah and I just so we can get out of the consumer mindset I was looking at learning management software the other day this is like blackboard but the next generation that you can run a course on turns out there's 40 products in the space and there it's really complicated if I had a week I could write a special report about the advantages of each one if I wrote a report on the advantages of each one with no help from Seth Godin I shocked coda would easily be the number one SEO match for which lms software should I buy and once you're in that position again the number of companies where it's not their money who would call you up and say look my boss wants me to buy one of these I don't know which one how much is your consulting fee well I actually charged a thousand dollars an hour so that means that for after one hours worth of work I broke even which is what you said my job was you might not be able to charge one thousand an hour if you'll notice I go down people don't know you know they do know me they trust me because I wrote the definitive 70 40 pieces of software with all I'm just giving people an abundance of confidence by creating an abundance of value and all I'm asking in return is to be trusted fantastic okay so to summarize we create very good piece of content so good that in people in return people start to trust us contact us we start to charge for problems that are adjacent to the problem we solve and should we invest in ads what you know - let's say we need to scale this business let's say that a few people have contacted us we made some money what would you do next where would you invest the money I would invest the money in using the process again and again and again it would be a really long time before I started running ads because the fact is the pie is this big and I've touched this many people so when I go to an advertiser it's to reach this many people I don't need to do yet what I need to do is give the people who trust me a really good reason to tell their friends so if you think about how you heard about Facebook or Twitter you didn't hear about it from advertising you heard about it from people who benefited if you started using it to write so that if you can start creating cycles where it's in their interest not because you're bribing them but in their interest to tell other people they will so here's an example so when I published this book I put it in a milk carton and only 5,000 people got it at the beginning and I made no money zero I broke even but if you got this and you read it you decided that your job would be better if other people you worked with understood what the hell you were talking about and so people put this on their desk because if it's on your desk someone comes in and says what's that and you have a conversation about it so that's got it if you you didn't say you wanted scale when you gave me the assignment but if you want scale you got to pick a solution that works better if my friends are doing it too and one of my favorite examples is Alcoholics Anonymous they're not anonymous in fact the first rule of Alcoholics Anonymous is tell other people about a a because a a will work better if your friends aren't drunks but if instead they are like you in recovery that will make it better for you and so that's how its spread to millions and millions of people well it's fantastic that I think that's a great start for the episode it's gonna give a lot of people some ideas on where to start just to mention to the listeners who are not necessarily watching the video you mentioned your book the purple purple cap oh I forgot all about the fact that we were only on audio yes by both Purple Cow came in a milk carton and I also want to say since we're shifting gears that's the most innovative energizing way anyone has ever started a podcast with me good for you Thanks I'm not definitely not gonna edit that out but let's go back a little bit to you and I've listened to a lot of things from you I've read your books and I'm not gonna repeat what a lot of people will be saying I'm just curious about the type of kid you were where you're very curious where you're questioning your teachers to the point where you know you were allowing them what type of key value before I answer the question I have to put a disclaimer here which is that that question is often asked by people who aren't you as a way of letting themselves off the hook because if we are different than the person who has done that other stuff then it's not our fault because we weren't born that way so I've studied a lot of people who have done creative work and who are artistic and have made change happen and the only thing we have in common is that we have nothing in common so tall and short rich and not rich grew up with great parents grew up with no parents all across the spectrum you know Jeff Bezos loving family took him in but Jeff Bezos did not go up in the same kind of nuclear household that I did right so which is it which one do you want and I'm not in his league in many many areas but I'm just using that as an example of someone I've talked to the point is I was super obnoxious as a high school student I teachers rolled their eyes when they saw me my high school teacher wrote in my yearbook that I was never going to amount to anything anon and I'm not but I don't think that is a requirement to be somebody who learns to look at the world differently I just think it happened to be true in my case I wasn't asking that to know whether you know people like you are more likely to succeed and I'm genuinely interesting in the past because that's usually the best pretty prediction of the future and how people are so let's go back to marketing in a bit more because that's what I want to spend the most time as speaking about and you touched on it to the start but why do you think marketers have such a bad reputation in general there are two reasons the first reason is that most of us deserve it because we're selfish lying short-term thinking scum who believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them but the other reason which is just as big is that people understand that they are culpable that consumers fall for short-term stuff they're not disciplined enough to ask the hard questions they're looking for magic beans and rainbows and pots of gold and we feel terrible when we get tricked partly because we knew better and so you know the reason that buying a car in the United States is so horrible is because customers insist on it being that way and if instead customers just paid the price the way we do with bread that's the way cars would be sold car dealers do it the way they do it because even though we pretend we hate it we do it with them because we want to feel like we could beat the system that's a human failing and we're get punished for it all the time so it's both the marketers are bad and the consumers are bad together so every single consumer every single person would think that they are smarter than the system and try to play the system right yeah or you know we look at all the waterways clogged with bottled water trash well we bought into bottled water hook line & sinker because we wanted to believe that it would make us thinner cooler faster whatever we wanted that feeling we didn't need bottled water right there are countries in the world where they do but not where I live and so consumers are culpable we look at all the trash we go we hate marketers who got us to buy into this trash economy yeah but we bought into the trash economy and so it's both you know in the topic of fast food for example or shitty food that you'd buy in supermarkets you know there are overly processed and fat and full of sugar I to my friends over it sometimes I'm like I don't think it's the people's fault who buy the food that is cheap you know I don't think it's them who are at fault I think it's the big companies that have the big money behind them who are like trying to trick and lie and manipulate into thinking that this is good food it's hundred-percent chicken oh it's hundred-percent whatever so yeah I'm done with this I think I don't I don't think it's 5050 I think it's I think it's big company's fault for us right well I didn't say it was 5050 it's really hard to apportion blame what I'm saying is the thing about responsibility is they don't give it you take it and when a culture says we're not going to stand for it we have this wonderful process in most countries where the government ought to listen to us and make a rule right that their companies are incented by the fact that they're public as public companies they have investors those investors are us the investors are short-term selfish people who want to stock to go up tomorrow and so we push the companies to do the very thing we say we don't want the companies to do and so it's this giant circle where everyone is responsible who is the most responsible the well-paid CEO for sure because the well-paid CEO needs to have the guts to look the market and I say no we're not going to do that we don't stand for that and if you want to sell the stock go ahead yes that is her responsibility but all of the factors at work make it so that she has to make that difficult choice so I refuse to let anybody off the hook I don't let myself off the hook I think that the government is letting us down the CEOs are letting us down the shareholders are letting us down and we are all of those let's get a little bit more detail about the bad marketing that we talked about is there any particular tactics or things that you see happening at the minute in digital marketing and marketing in general that you would consider to be plain wrong like those so-called best practices that are plain wrong well where does it start it begins with the race to the bottom for attention if you say my only job is to get eyeballs and my job is to get eyeballs as cheap as possible then you buy into algorithmic advertising then you buy into sneaking around tracking people's data then you buy into questionable content that you're busy paying for then you buy into the degradation of our culture as we rush to make everything dumber make it more of a click all of that starts with this misguided assumption that all attention is the same and then we don't need to be trusted so that's part of it and then the second part of it is we let ourselves off the hook by making ever crazier promises to people that we know we can't keep because our competition is making these promises so we feel like we have to promise them so that's where the Flat Belly Diet comes from that's where the idea of seducing people into going into debt comes from because we say well it's not me it's my competition another race to the bottom the the reason I'm in this field is because at the same time there's also a race to the top and it turns out that if you on the race to the top you can win more reliably it's just harder so the race to the top is how do I become the most trusted how do I become the most distinctive how do I become the most ethical if you do those things you win just as well but it's not obvious how to get there you need to think hard so you mentioned there is no like not all the eyeballs are created equal you shouldn't really chase any kind of cliques or all type of cliques so how do we convince those marketers that genuinely believe hundred-percent that attention is the only currency available out there what would you say to them well I need to talk to their boss because the boss is said we're gonna make average stuff for average people as soon as you commit to that then the customer wants the cheapest one the cheapest one that they can find and so now you're caught again and how do I interrupt more people how do I make it cheaper how do I sell it cheaper once you buy into that cycle everyone's acting rationally my problem is buying into that cycle in the first place so when you think about you know Sam Walton said the container ship is a miracle how can I build a trillion dollar company 100 million billion dollar company well that's sell average stuff at junk we made at the lowest price I can by eviscerating my communities and bringing it in from a low-wage country right well the game theory there said that that was in his interest because he couldn't build the other kind of company because that spot looked too hard to get to but each community he showed up in whether it was investors or customers let him do it and so what we have to figure out how to do because on the internet no one knows your dog on the internet anyone can show up with anything is we've got to figure out how to create standards so that no you're not going to see an ad like that on a well known website or know this store is not going to sell those items or no I'm not going to do business with advertisers who play this way and if we don't speak up that way or get our government to speak up that way then we're just gonna up with crap here's a challenge for you I'm just thinking about that now it wasn't in the question I was planning to ask you but there are there is an industry I live in Ireland but I know from living in France and in the u.s. it's exact same there's an industry that I that really knows me it's you know the telcos so internet providers phone providers mobile internet that kind of stuff to me that's the summary if I had to choose one industry they are the one that are really racing to the bottom they are always competing on price they are coming up with every every single time the same features right let's say we have a brilliant idea of starting our own Internet company we provide internet just like the others but how would you make it remarkable well so you ask the question exactly the wrong way I don't know if you did that on purpose you can't you you can't begin by saying how do we make it just like the others and make it remarkable you have to say how do we make it different from the others so that it is remarkable and then you say and how do we make it for the smallest possible audience and that part takes discipline but when I think about the magic of an Internet company or a telecom company what do they do for a living they connect us to other people something we desperately want so there are only two ways to do it you can connect us to other people the way everyone else connects us to other people in which case I'd like to cheapest thank you very much or you can connect us to different people in a different way people I can only reach through you this is what Facebook does facebook says anyone could build the software that's Facebook it would take you know ten smart people a month because you're copying it but it wouldn't be worth it because the people you want to reach aren't on your site they're on Facebook so the opportunity for someone is to say where's the minimum sized group of people who desperately want to be connected in a new way if I can connect them using hardware and software they'll want to be connected because they don't want to be left out and from that little circle if what I'm doing actually works the circle will get bigger that is the way it always happens that's yeah I think that's right way to frame it so we wouldn't start by trying to be average and reaching the the same amount of people that they would be reaching out to and the other important thing here that you've just said naturally as if it was so easy but I think a lot of people struggle with that is you you were able to quickly identify the job to be done the actual core first principle of the reason why people use internet for so I think that's a very good lesson for for listeners is that we always have to think about the first principle behind the product or service we use that's the best way to market its ready to think about the core emotions the co feelings the core things that we do with it so I like really much very much like that part of the answers well in 1999 he wrote the book you came up with the term permission marketing and since then a lot of other companies and people have used the term or changes slightly from permission marketing to inbound marketing but basically the same concept right so you're pretty good at spotting trends before anybody else do you have any methodology behind it you have any way to find things before they seem to be mainstream well since this is my main claim to fame I'll let you know that I started doing it in 1990 and I named it in 96 okay so it was thrilling and I was early so one of the things I would say to people is you really don't need to invent any of these trends you just have to be a little earlier than everyone else and the way you can do that is by listening for the crazy people because the crazy people are always going to talk about it before you will so in the case of the internet Kevin Kelley a proud crazy person like me wrote a book in which he outlined all of it the whole thing and it's called you can find out in KK org but he just wrote it he was the founding editor wired I think he wrote it after I did permission marketing so probably 97 and if you read it there was all laid out and what people did was they looked at it and they said I can't see it and the reason they couldn't see it is they were reading it the way they would read Time magazine tell me something I already know but the trick is to get yourself into a mindset where you can say I'm reading this tell me something I don't know and when you come across something you don't know you're gonna have to change your mind because right now your mind is made up that you know what's important that you know what's working if someone says something new you have to change your mind and it begins with oh I didn't know that that's important I knew something I didn't know something that was important and now I do then you act as if well what would this mean and what would this mean and what would this mean how do I take it all the way in one direction and if it feels like there's something there then you can start talking about it like a normal person and maybe other people will want to hear you talk about it and how would you identify a crazy people well I think what we're trying to do is live in as in the grey in the zone between black and white the zone between wrong and right proven and unproven in the zone of possibility that what we do is live in that zone and so we're wrong a lot that's why people think we're crazy wrong a lot and if you realize that being wrong is really cheap if you do it right then you can live there for a long time because it's cheap to be wrong and people don't remember all the times I was wrong they just remember the six times I was right when was the last time you were wrong well there's a reason I don't have any money in the stock market because every time I put money in the stock market I am wrong but you know the biggest one that I talked about was when I was sure that the world wide web was a fraud and was never going to work and that cost me a couple of billion dollars so that was an expensive time to be wrong but it I still got to keep playing the game so your core advice here would be to try to identify people who seem to be wrong quite a lot but at least I think if they are wrong they are taking risk right yeah and so I would say the core advice I'm not trying to rework to reword what you said I'm just trying to simplify it as I understand it is obscure now you're doing great it's trying to to find people who would take risk quite a lot to say stuff as they are who try to you know write quite a lot to probably or record videos on YouTube quite a lot so probably people who would produce a lot of content right as the term is being used quite a lot so people who had would take a lot of risk in that aspect yeah well let me just interrupt for a second I don't think it's I don't think it has to be volume so Eric Raymond wrote a book called the cathedral and the bazaar and it described all crowdfunding all crowdsourcing Wikipedia Linux all of it and this was 20-something years ago I don't think he's ever written anything else so it's not necessarily that it's a lot is that other people who are crazy are referring to it that's sufficient okay that's that makes a lot of sense one thing that I've noticed I'm a marketer myself I know a lot of marketers and is one common challenge amongst marketers and it's like you know that very well you know this challenge very well people seem to be completely overwhelmed with all the options out there all the channels the tactics available so there's growth hacking days you know Facebook and the bots coming you know there is like so many things I can think of right now that would really make me crazy if I had to think to think about it every day so what's your advice for people and marketers in particular who are getting lost in the sea of all the things right marketers in 1966 only how to buy TV and they were done right the TV was the magic bullet so we grew up believing that there was a magic bullet there isn't one what I would say is number one the asset you're building is trust connection direct connection with the end-user whatever method you want is fine as long as it leads to a direct connection with the end-user and number two is being in a lot of places is not nearly as important as being in a place well so I'm not on Facebook I'm not on Twitter it's fine that you just pick something it doesn't matter if you pick the perfect one you just pick something and by picking it by choosing it by saying I'm a podcast or not a blogger by saying I speak at conferences but you can't find me online or not find pick your thing own it build your asset there in a way that others don't have the resolute force of will to sustain because that's what you're trying to do is to be the one and only so you have to build a fort high enough that everyone looks at that so I could never build a fort that high that's what you have to do is over invest in your channel so that the people you engage with feel like they can trust you but I guess that goes back to to one of your core advice from earlier on whereby you was a very hyper local audience I think if you go to a very specific niche the channels or the tools you're going to use are gonna be almost chosen for you right because this particular tribe this particular niche would probably only use Facebook way more than Twitter or only use Pinterest way more than Facebook and therefore it's kind of gonna going to be obvious so I think it's those two are connected on day that's right you nailed it have you had any not even rephrase that what's the best buying experience you ever had oh let's say in the last year or six months quite recently so many that I'd like to talk about all right so penguin magic is a great little company that sells magic tricks to amateur magicians professional magicians don't buy magic tricks because they only need 10 and they just do the same 10 over and over again but amateur magicians need a lot of tricks because we keep doing for the same people and they get tired of them so we have to buy new ones and it's a great site because what they do is they show you a video of the trick but you can't find out how it's done unless you buy it and the tricks costs 10 20 30 bucks alright so when you buy it then they email you a video of them packing your exact item as it gets shipped to you and in the box when you get it comes something you didn't ask for which is a magazine fill beautifully produced with other tricks that teach you how to do this that or the other thing and if you are regular customer you may discover that the CEO just sends you stuff in the mail with a personal note saying I thought of you when I saw this trick how much does it cost them to do all this extra stuff pennies pennies I mean they charged me ten dollars for a trick that they just emailed me the answer there wasn't even a gimmick right so the margins are great no problem so that's that's one example that I'll give you the other example I'll give you right there yeah what's the trick that you vote oh I'm not doing any magic for you right now I'm not prepared no no I don't I don't expect you to trick me you in a fight Jenny I do it what's the trick that you got I do a lot of mentalism mind-reading tricks and the the trick that I'm thinking of now is involves we it's an ordinary deck of cards I hand it to you I don't touch it again and I ask you to put the trick to separate the cards without looking at them into black and red so without true them over red red red black red black blue right so you put 2016 each pile you're guessing I turn the piles over all the black are in one pile all the veteran the other pile I'm not gonna ask you the question it's so good to get the trick you have to pay $10 so it's so good it's so good all right and then the other one is a little more subtle which is Danny Meyer the great New York City restaurant tour has some of the fancy it's nice this restaurants in New York and there is no tipping allowed no I don't know about Ireland but I know in France it's a different thing but the United States people tip 15% or so and all the money goes to them waiter the people in the back who cooked don't get anything Danny thinks that's ridiculous and unfair so he's betting his whole company on creating a new standard and as a buying experience it's extraordinary because your engagement with the staff front of house and back of house is different because the people who were working there feel differently about how and why they are serving you and so that's no gimmick super subtle and the kind of bold responsibility taking that I'm a huge fan of that's something I heard from an episode of freakonomics the podcasts so they were saying that this guy has more than one restaurant and he started to avoid tipping with this one restaurant so let me just think about the benefits that had that happened so this is one thing first of all when you don't expect keeping from as a waiter your relationship with the customer is much more genuine right so don't want one thing that is said the second is I remember if I remember well that in the back of the house those like the cooks and all of those people are we're genuinely paid way less don't remember why it happened but they were paid way less so in this instance because it's against the law to give them tip money that's it so it's against the law so now that everybody is not on tip they were able to increase the pay for for those people if I remember well so that people were happier and they were staying for longer because there was a there was a low retention rate of particular people in the back of the restaurant there's another there's another benefit I don't remember when well actually one of the the big benefit that that happened one of the best thing that happened to him and the restaurant is that this move made him so much publicity that he was booked for months and months and months and months so I guess he was being remarkable this way but it's a very interesting topic in France you don't tip in Ireland you kind of tip sometimes you don't but it's not as far as the US where you can have have to tip it's a very strange place to be at the minute because you have to judge people based on their performance and then you don't tip them if they are bad or if you think they are bad which is not really a good feeling is it right and so but you asked me about the buying experience and what it makes me feel like when I go is someone who is engaging with professionals who care about equity and that feeling is one of the things I want when I go to a restaurant because if I all I want to do is eat I stay home and have a can of beans yeah it's all about the experience more I'm interested to know you flagged you've identified a lot of remarkable companies in the past do you have any example of remarkable companies that used to be remarkable that I'm not remarkable anymore well almost every company I've ever met mentioned is in that category oh that's why I don't mention them as often because it's a curse what happens is competence is something that a lot of people like the feeling of and as an organization gets bigger the people they hire tend to be people who want to feel competent then you join a 500-person company not because you want to be a egg throwing pioneer but because you want to do a quote good job unquote so what happens is when you get after a 100 or 200 or 400 people and you're good at something you want to stay good at it well eventually you start defending your old wind even though the outside world has raised the bar you're afraid to because in order to change you must become incompetent again this change always creates incompetence on the way to a new kind of competence and so we end up with this cycle so we see you know McDonald's was a super remarkable company in 1958 in 1958 if you were driving across the country you only had two choices each lousy food that might make you sick or eat McDonald's that was extraordinary but then they went through a 40-year period of time when they were just defending something that they stood for and over time you can't keep growing over time it Peaks and you know it was interesting to watch my friends at Lululemon stumble last week because same store sales were way down and one reason they were down is the easiest thing to do if you're a Lululemon is to sell what you sold yesterday because if you roll out something new and bold it might not work and so you don't and so again figuring out which areas you're willing to be incompetent at is the only way to grow so how would you advise let's say a company that have quite a lot of employees where they're not really it's not easy for them to be flexible that much at least on paper how would you advise them to to become incompetent again well you know we must begin with what's your asset is it your relationship with suppliers your relationship with the stock market relationship with customers because you don't want your asset to get broken but if you take part of that asset and put it into an experimental mode that's how you can grow with advantage so when I was at Yahoo I sat down with the CEO and co-founder and I said Jerry here's what I want to do I want you to cut my salary by 80% give me two employees and let me go across the street and we will build stuff that will siphon just 1% of Yahoo traffic and keep you from having to buy the next company for 10 billion dollars that we can be a skunkworks to build those things so what assets would Yahoo put on the table 1% of the daily traffic point it to mysterious new stuff right let the core group do what the core group does but what you can do is build a skunkworks across the street this is how Lockheed revolutionized the airplane the Tom Peters has written about this extensively it takes guts to do that and I was amazed that Jerry's answer because it was so honest and what he said to me is while I'd love to do that but if I did that everyone else would want to do that job too and so he was concerned that he'd have to say to his core group of 300 people you have to do the boring work I'm gonna go let Seth do something that's fun what he missed was most of those 300 people wanted to do the boring work because they had stock options they were going up every day they were confident they were having a good time and they were good at it most people don't want to give that up but when you find someone's willing to give that up and you give him a place where they can go explore they will so another example is John Patrick when he was at IBM he invented IBM's entire internet consulting business by himself because the CEO let him have a year and a couple offices and ten people and said go use IBM's name but don't do anything stupid he didn't think that might fail but he didn't do things that would bring shame upon IBM so you're across the street description is actually on purpose you wouldn't advise leaders to to let a group of 10 people just walking the same office just another in another location right he would advise them to get away from the main I think that's essential because here's the asset that's not helpful yes it's that's not helpful as all the people around the water cooler the asset that's not helpful is your instinct to level off and and stand off the edges don't that that's not what makes your company good it's just a byproduct and the fact that your company is good so you got to get away from that and you get away from it by physically leaving the building so as a leader you need to identify people who are winning takes to take risks who are genuinely take matters in their own hands and usually you will have a lot more people who are willing to stay in their comfort zone and be comfortable there and that's perfectly fine as well obviously has a big company you kind of have to keep running the show and make sure everything went smoothly so I really like that I think that's a really good take on innovation that's actually good practical advice as well and I also have a lot of young graduates who ask me I want to get into marketing how should I do that so I know that you mentioned before that people shouldn't have range TVs they should have a reputation that preaches them right so if you if you link that with the companies therefore companies shouldn't hire by CV right how should they hire them to part and so the first part is the best way to learn marketing is to do marketing not to be part of a marketing department so the beauty of it is marketing doesn't cost money anymore so go market a cause you believe in go market a company that doesn't exist go market a political thing just go and market don't ask anyone's permission just begin and then from the company point of view you know I don't hire people unless I've worked with them first and it's so much easier to work with someone now so that's what companies ought to do not say oh he's good at interviewing therefore he should work here they should say oh we worked with him on a project he does exactly the kind of work we like let's get him in and the ability to be in the world doing this work and being seen right don't show me your resume show me your work and in our field that he here than almost any other one that's let's say somebody's kind of is lost or she's lost in the causes that she cares about all the things that that she likes how would you advise briefly somebody to to pick something that she should work on forward by lost you mean they're too caught up they'll just be like there's so much noise they don't really know whether they need right yeah so it doesn't matter make a spinner and spin the wheel don't do a thing you know so my first jobs as a marketer were building a ski club in Buffalo New York and marketing it to high school students then for my dad writing copy for his ski binding division of the company he worked for then starting a coffee shop and travel agency and ticket bureau in college and then marketing computer games for six-year-olds they don't have anything in common right so begin and that's the secret that people who are marketers are marketers because they know the difference between things that might work and things that don't and the only way to learn that is to do marketing so just go on do it well what do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years 20 years 50 years humility and empathy what are the top three resources that you would recommend marketing marketers and digital marketers particular to read or to discover to digest well I've written 18 books for you so I would definitely start there I would read some of the classics of marketing that are now being ignored David Ogilvy the book scientific advertising I would read Steve Pressfield and the war of art I would definitely read the art of possibility by Ben and Lysander these are books about humility and empathy not books about algorithmic advertising said you've been absolutely amazing before I let you go any anything you'd like to add anything you'd like to say to to the listeners well I would just like to remind them that the thing you're doing right now is not easy it's time-consuming it takes a long time and I hope they appreciate it and you so I'm glad you're doing this work thanks that means a lot au revoir

Channel: Everyone Hates Marketers

Views: 214,649

Rating: 4.93291 out of 5

Keywords: marketing, seth godin, startup

Id: RDf_mFlLjrk

Length: 51min 22sec (3082 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 07 2018