Seth Godin on marketing, storytelling, attention, and the future of work

permission marketing is the idea of delivering anticipated personal and relevant messages that people want to get and as obvious as that sounds in 1996 and 1998 that was a revolutionary statement that marketing and advertising were the same thing then and that people thought that if you had money you could interrupt whoever you wanted and I started an internet company before the world wide web called Yoyodyne and we invented permission marketing the idea of only contacting people who wanted to hear from us and the simple test is would they miss you if you were gone if you didn't show up where people say why didn't you show up and most advertising doesn't meet that test well we were having trouble explaining to big companies our clients were people like American Express and Carter Wallis why this worked it would take us months to make a sale so since I understood how to make books I made a book about it what I have discovered was that a quite a journey occurred first I got kicked out of the Direct Marketing Association because they didn't approve of my heresy and then a few marketers got the idea but then you discovered companies like Groupon and Google being based completely on the idea so it has created literally billions and billions of dollars of value and I'm not responsible for all the email you get in your inbox but the email you want to get I'll take a little bit of credit for that well the good news is there is a direct marketing Hall of Fame and after the Direct Marketing Association kicked me out a few years later they called me back and invited me in so I had a little plaque up there somewhere anyway you know this idea that you can build an entity around it we see it in American politics now far more than it ever was before we see it in companies like blue apron and Dropbox and slack all of which are built on this idea that we can communicate to people in ways that they want to be communicated to it turns out that's more valuable than stuff that Amazon's value isn't based on its warehouse it's based on the fact that 100 million people around the world want to hear from Amazon I think that counts as the case study the you know marketing is fueled by adrenaline it's fueled by urgency and emergency we see it at its worst in political campaigns but we see it everywhere we don't have time to do it right but we always have time to do it over we overcome our fear by creating an emergency but this endless emergency is caused by the fact that we're not patiently drip drip drip working their way to a place of relevance in fact urgent patience not hiding but patiently building an asset is probably the single most overlooked thing that marketers fail to do people only buy from you for two reasons they know you exist and they trust you awareness and trust that's all the thing about awareness is they're not making any more of it the thing about paying attention is if I pay you my attention I don't have it anymore it's gone forever so we're getting more and more focused on keeping our attention to ourselves not giving it to whoever shows up marketers have a history of just taking attention and wasting it but going forward marketers who treasure that who cherish it who grow it and nurture it those marketers do better than the ones are just racing around with an emergency well the biggest mistake marketers make over and over again is the hubris of selfishness the narcissism of I made this it was really hard you should look at me I own and you owe me your attention there's no humility there there's no generosity there there's no connection there so that is that is the big shift that we need to make we need to make this shift away from having a tantrum and acting like a three-year-old to patiently earning the attention of the people we seek to serve well you know there are people who are far better than I to talk to you about stuff like this people like Gary Vee who understand how to do the platform dance I have no interest in it at all I think that it's a trap I think it's a way to avoid the other work which is the work that makes you being someone they will seek out that over and over again the next best seller is a surprise bestseller the ones that no one expected that the movie industry spends a billions of dollars a year using tried-and-true platform techniques and yet the movies that delight and make enough money are the surprises that didn't follow any of those steps that you know it used to be you ran you're coming attractions Thursday night on TV at 8:00 p.m. because that was Rober blah blah blah there's a method I don't think you need a method I think you just need to care reporting and storytelling well some journalists would like us to believe that reporting is different than storytelling but of course it's not there are a thousand ways to report a story is there a true way if four people see a car accident does one person actually see what happened and the other three are wrong or do all four of us process it in our own way that American television covers news differently than Dutch television are they both doing reporting of course they are but what we know is that human beings process incoming information by telling themselves a story a story about what they saw a story about what change it's going to require a story about how it fits into their existing worldview and so there are people who are believing nonsense like they shouldn't get their kids vaccinated which is dangerous are they evil I don't think they're evil I just think they're telling themselves a story that has bad side effects and these stories need ground to grow in fertile ground and that comes from our culture the culture is all around us culture destroys everything culture beats the truth culture beats math culture beats any offer you can make so we have to understand the culture we have to understand the worldview we have to understand the perspective of the person we are talking to that the fascinating thing about science is it has a set of rules that permits it to improve but it not Semmelweis the brilliant scientist who figured out that if doctors would just wash their hands after they delivered a baby many children would not die it took 20 years before other doctors started washing their hands because the story that Semmelweis was telling didn't resonate with those doctors and as a result millions of babies died we see this again and again and again so our job is anyone who wants to make change because that's what marketers do our job is to tell a story that resonates with the people who are hearing it I don't think there's any such thing as authenticity I think that when we are being our authentic self we're wearing diapers and pooping I mean that's what babies do there the last time we ever just did whatever we helped hell we felt like right ever since then we've been faking it we put on an outfit why so when people see us they will judge us differently we comb our hair we brush our teeth we're doing all of these things not because in that moment it's our authentic self but because it's the self we choose to put forward so let's redefine authentic to mean consistent our consistent self is one that if you look at it from the back and look at it from the side it's the same our consistent self is the way we behave in front of our mom and in front of our customer when we're consistent then we can define that as a sort of version of authenticity well I'm pretty good at not carrying regrets around too much because they just don't really work very well but I'll give you a couple business examples in 1993 the story was online services would only work if they made money and I at the time was working with CompuServe AOL and prodigy and this thing came along called the World Wide Web and I believed the story that we were in this static controlled world and if it didn't make money it wasn't real so I ignored the World Wide Web for a year and a half I didn't sign up for all the domains I could have I mean I was halfway done doing it I didn't build the website I should have built I didn't engage in 17 other behaviors because the story my worldview was we were done it was a AOL CompuServe and prodigy no one else was welcome and the world wide web which made no money which was slower clunkier and filled with junk never going to amount to anything now did other people see what was happening differently than I did of course they did right Jerry and David built Yahoo on the basis of them seeing what I saw and interpreting the exactly the same data totally differently I guess the way I interpret it is I cried when I wrote drops and I didn't cry one of our permission marketing that tribes is the first book where I got at the heart of the change I am seeking to make in the world it doesn't matter to me if a Vaughn or harley-davidson sells yet another product it matters to me that human beings step up that they speak their truth that they look other people in the eye that they shake off this industrialized regime and instead choose to take advantage of this moment that we have and I don't know how long we'll have it all of us are more powerful than we think we are all of us have the ability to make things better and that's why I wrote tribes the idea of linchpin is that when we walk away from the fact that factory a is better than Factory being that the way you're going to win is by having a more efficient factory and we have to walk away from that because someone has more robots than you and someone is willing to be cheaper than you then what do you have right what you have is people and the question is do you have compliant people people who do what they're told show up on time get more efficient each day well that's not going to help you very much because that's what you need an inefficient factory or do you have caring people passionate people connected people do you have people who act like they own the place do you have people who can look a customer in the eye and make a difference for that customer because it seems to me that's all you got left because once it's a robot anyone can buy the robot but that person that person works with you not for you but with you and no one else can have them as long as the two of you are dancing together that's where success lies so you don't handle linchpins you welcome them you embrace them you nurture them that the organization of the future doesn't need a lot of people I won the auth NBA the school I run with two full-time people what you need are people who are willing to make a difference we're willing to stand up and say I made this who are restless enough that if you don't keep it great they'll leave because someone else wants them that's the opposite of what most companies want most companies say I want people to be downtrodden I want them to be compliant I don't want to worry about them leaving well isn't it better to have someone so great you would miss them if they were gone than it is to have mediocre people who you're confident have no place better to go I think that this is the frontier we have to go forward and if you're a worker you have to make a new commitment which is you've been brainwashed for so many years you've been tricked you've been hoodwinked and you've been put into debt by complying and if you're just going to comply more you're going to get more that and there's an alternative and the alternative because everyone has a laptop and that laptop is connected to 1.5 billion other people you have the same tool as everybody else how you going to use it you know it's a curse and a blessing that work as we know it which only started 150 years ago is now going away that there was a 150 year parentheses like just like the Gutenberg parenthesis which lasted 500 years I printed books I love them now coming around much longer as a tool of change and that job will you go to a building and you stay there 40 hours and you go home and then you do that again for 40 years and then you retire that's gone it's gone we wish it would come back some people do we want to elect people who promise they will bring it back it's not going to happen so given that that's the case we need to find meaningful work even if that work doesn't involve helping a company make a profit that this is the richest planet the planet has ever seen that there are more people who are overweight now on the planet as a percentage than ever in history there are more people who have what they need to survive as a percentage than ever in history and it's the safest the world has ever been now what we going to do what we better do is figure out how to make it also meaningful we better figure out how to do is take these abundant resources and distribute them ever better because the inequality the inequity between people who are lucky enough to show up in a monopoly on the right day on the right time and those who aren't if that gets worse it's going to be a lot harder to build a culture we're proud of there's a difference between skill and talent skill is something you learn talent is something you're born with I will grant you that dunking a basketball is a talent I will never be able to dunk a basketball but with few exceptions almost everything in our life is a skill showing up on time is a skill learning how to read is a skill being persuasive as a skill being brave enough to speak up and speak the truth it's a skill caring about customers is a skill heart surgery is a skill so the lie of talent is letting yourself off the hook by saying well I wasn't born able to do that because you're not going to get in the NBA I'm not going to get in the NBA so let's leave that off the table for everything else it's about skill and skill is easier to require now and ever before my friend Steve this term the resistance resistance he doesn't put the word in front of it resistance is what gives us writer's block which is a made-up disease resistance is what makes us hesitate change our clothes six times before go on a blind date be nervous before we give a speech it's our Migdal it's the voice in the back of our head saying don't do that you're in trouble well you were in trouble when that alarm went off and there was a saber-toothed tiger or Mastodon around you were in trouble if that alarm went off and the chief was about to throw you out of the village but now when that alarm goes off it's a light telling you you're going in the right direction because that's what it means to be remarkable to be a linchpin to stand out is you're nervous you're afraid because something might not work and if we use it as a compass we can't fight it but we can dance with it if we use it as a compass it almost always points in exactly direction we ought to be going I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how deeply the fork in the river is getting dug into the ground and on this side are the connected people who go ever deeper doing the research looking at what works testing measuring figuring out what's going to pay off for our culture and on this side our emotion driven knee-jerk fear-based reactions of pick-your-own truth and the problem would pick your own truth is that it leads to conspiracy theories which lead to ever more pick your own truth and sooner or later you're just living in Gaga land where there's no real connection to the things you believe in do and what actually works and I saw this behavior from big-time marketers in 1995 who insisted the world would be one way or another I see it often when you talk to boards of directors or people who have something that's succeeding or was and isn't going to succeed anymore but now you also see it with the public you see it with people I just heard this the other day many low income people when they seek out a loan seek out a high interest loan because it's a big number big numbers must be good and you just want to go oh my goodness because you know that silly I know that silly but if you're surrounded by a culture that doesn't teach you that doesn't have expectations that you're going to be able to dig deeper then you're going to suffer and I think we have to figure out how to bridge these gaps early and often to help people realize that the things we take for granted that we can be warm and out of the weather and have enough to eat and all these other things they came from a philosophy of test and measure a philosophy of paying it forward and building a culture and I'm I feel evermore urgency that we need to do that now

Channel: Nordic Business Forum

Views: 194,707

Rating: 4.9313693 out of 5

Keywords: nbforum, nbf, forum, business, nordic, nordic business forum, seth godin marketing, seth godin, ted talks marketing, author seth godin

Id: Ci-dtOFHPhU

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2016