Seth Godin @ SuperNova Conference 2018

our next speaker is Seth Godin Seth Godin is an entrepreneur a best-selling author and a legendary speaker he has a very popular blog if you want to read it and find it just type sat's into google that's all yes 18 best-selling books he has widely popular online workshops Seth Godin focuses on marketing and leadership on the spread of ideas and on changing everything ladies and gentlemen Seth Godin thank you thank you so much thank you for being here you've been here for a long day in this room I came to Belgium because something urgent needs to be discussed which is golf is spreading to this fine country that according to the statistics I just looked up there are more than 90 golf courses in Belgium and we need to talk about that can we agree that golf is the worst spectator sport in the world for two reasons first nothing good ever happens second if something good does happen you're not allowed to wildly cheer and applaud you have to do that measly little whiny golf applause can you help me out do the worst little applause you can golf applause that was terrible can you double it double it again and one more time okay beautiful thank you that is what you do for a living if you are trying to make things better if you are trying to change the world if you're trying to grow your organization that is what you do for a living and what I want to talk about today is something pretty simple it's what I talk about in my new book but it goes like this that what we get the chance to do now is work that matters for people who care and each of those two sentences has a lot of meaning to it and we're going to take them apart bit by bit but before I do that let's take a look at this actual footage from a bike race some in Europe his guys in the last place and he does what most people in last place do it she pedals as hard as he can but then he realizes that there might be a different way to do it that there might be a different approach that could bring aerodynamics of the situation and change the outcome and what I do if I do a good job is I help you see things differently so if you think this is a picture of a bat you would be right but if I take the picture of the bat and I turn him upside down he's not a bad anymore he's just a badass or if I take these three bats who are getting ready for bed and I turn them upside down what you'll see is that they're actually getting ready for a cocktail party so learning how to see is the first step and that's why an event like supernova is so important because it will help you see the things that are going on around you and save you a lot of time and trouble I learned this the hard way in the early 1990s I had something you didn't have which was a high speed connection to the Internet and I saw the internet coming but I didn't get it because I said how do I make what I already know how to do a book and I published a book about the internet that sold 1900 copies even in the metric system that's not a lot during that same period of time two guys in Yahoo named David and Jerry saw what I saw but they had a blank slate they said what could I make if I could make anything so they built a company called Yahoo and at one point my half if I invented it would have been worth I don't know 50 billion u.s. dollars but my problem was I was hooked on what do I know how to do and they were focusing on what's possible so where does that leave you well most of you have an idea you want to sell a product you need to grow something you want to bring to the world and the problem is the the clutter the noise it's all around us this picture is really fuzzy I had a bad cold when I took it but I'm showing it to you because of that blue box in the upper middle Center the brand manager for that product spent a hundred million euros interrupting us a hundred million euros on coupons and shelving allowances TV ads magazine ads radio ads why so we would buy the stuff in the blue box but I don't have a pain reliever problem and neither do you I buy what I always buy the cheap one or the generic or the yellow box and if you are trying to build the future if you are trying to sell change let's acknowledge you're busy trying to solve a problem that most people don't think they have which means you're gonna have to spend a lot of time yelling we also get in trouble because we get obsessed with how hard it is to make stuff this idea of being in the factory now if we get the factory right we do fine and so the idea of the factory spread do what you're told make the factory go faster and faster and faster and so now we have this factory mindset everywhere we look of people trying to build factories of one sort or another that just churn it out and once we get the factory working we're surrounded by people who say the same four letter word to us over and over again more get me more sales get me more market share get me more impact and all this more adds up it pushes us to make average products for average people all of these average except for pop-tarts but the idea is simple if you want to reach everyone the committee will push you to dumb it down to make it average because average and everyone are the same thing I'm almost done with the bad news this is room 328 at the Julianne no I wasn't didn't take this last night this is a hotel I maybe it's a Hyatt at 3 o'clock in the morning it's dark all hotels look like this at 3 o'clock in the morning and because they're all the same we just buy the cheap one sort by price Oh komm just give me a good enough hotel where I'll take the cheap one so is that your dream is that your dream to create the cheap one I think there's something else at work here so I don't know if any of you recognize this this is called a record album sorry in 30 years ago the record industry was perfect if I had a record and I listened to it a lot I'd wear it out and have to buy another one if I liked it I loaned it to you I wouldn't have it anymore I'd have to buy another one where would I go to buy another one a record store there were buildings that did nothing but sell records and we all know what happened it only took a couple years now you get every record ever recorded for free on your smartphone anytime you want that's impossible the industry went from perfect to impossible and that's what revolutions do they destroy the perfect before they enable things that are impossible and right now we are living through something impossible what is it everyone on earth is now your customer everyone now that's really good news because you're living in a little corner of the world and everyone on earth is now your customer but it comes with bad news which is that everyone on earth is now your competitor and so that changes everything we are not going to buy from you because you're down the street we're not going to buy from you because you're a local maybe we will if it's just a big bag of corn but everything else it better be better than that or we're not gonna find you and the last bit of this is all of that yelling to all of those people has created a big problem and attention they say that the average person on the Internet has the attention span of a goldfish and that is not being kind to the goldfish and so what you're doing if you're on social media what you're doing if you're a marketer is you keep making your messages shorter you make videos that don't need sound to be heard you figure out how to make more and more snippets the problem is your customers aren't goldfish they're people and people who are yelled at by billboards running down the road are not more likely to trust you and listen to you and buy from you they're not more likely to change their mind so the old model of let's upon't find some poor Schmo and go after them over and over and over again until one day they buy from us has been broken it's broken because consumers are saying I got a remote control and I am not afraid to use it Belgium like the rest of the world you have branded yourselves to death there is too much noise too much clutter all right near where I live in New York on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 20th Street is the epicenter of the yoga pant district there are six different stores within one block where you can buy a pair of yoga pants the dreaded yoga pant shortage is finally over and what that means is if you own a yoga pant Factory Moore is not an option then if you finally figured out how to get your supply chain working it doesn't matter well so what it says yoga pants except right next door is a store that sells more than 600 kinds of cameras and right next door to that is a store that sells every Android phone ever made and when you buy one of those Android phones you can go online and buy insurance from more than 10,000 companies so if you work for an organization when they say bring us a chart that goes up and to the right you have a challenge because the old way of going up into the right doesn't work so you can be upset with me you could say this is not fair it is not my fault that the revolution happened you can be upset and wonder who designed this problem and who didn't read the instructions and I will agree with you the news is not so good so let's take one second to be sad and then we can go on to the good news okay so the good news is this it begins with your sunflower everyone wants to make their sunflower bigger and taller how do we get more known how do we get more change to happen how do we make more sales but what we forget is that in every healthy sunflower the root system goes down at least as far as this flowers go up now what we are doing is yes building a tree making an impact but it doesn't work unless we focus on the non glamorous stuff instead so we can think about this the way we think about bowling in bowling if you move all the pins just one inch closer to each other you will roll a strike every time and if you move all the pins one inch further from each other you will never roll a strike now what we know in our new economy is it's the proximity the connection the trust that are the roots of what we are building that and our ability to tell a story so in the US we have this cat food called Fancy Feast gourmet cat food I'm here to tell you it's not for cats if it were for cats it would come in Mouse flavor no it's for cat owners because the cat owners buy it because the story makes them feel good about what they did or consider dog food the market in the u.s. for dog food is tripled in the last 10 years he's both costs $45 a pound but the last time I checked the dogs are not happier that's because dogs don't buy dog food people do and the stories that we are telling them are getting better and there's nothing wrong with that because it's making the people who buy the dog food happier and that is in fact the customer or consider that ring on your finger if you go 30 blocks uptown from Tiffany from the yoga pant district you can buy a ring at Tiffany's for $6,000 well that's fine you can take that brand new ring untouched two blocks away to the diamond district here in Belgium or New York and sell it for $1,000 so where did the 5000 dollars go what's the difference between the ring you bought at Tiffany's in the ring you just sold the difference is the story the box the legend the way it made your spouse feel when you got engaged in that process so when you go to a meeting and some wise guy says you know we need to do we need to lower our price because that will get us more market share that will get us more sales you need to say that my friend is a race to the bottom and the problem of the race to the bottom is we might win or worse come in second so some other wise guy stands up and says oh we should raise our price but that assumes your customers are stupid because if you're selling exactly what everyone else is selling but yours costs more hey Internet sort by price we're out of here the only option is to be the only one when you are the one and only when the thing you make and the story you tell about it the true story is that you are the one and only then people will wait in line to pay for it iPhone anyone that's the idea so I look at the internet they're sort by prices washing computers sort by price ears coffins sort by price sort by prices everywhere it is not your friend and it will come to your industry and it will come to your town it will come to Belgium because sort by price is what consumers do when marketers say to them it's all the same by us there's got to be another way around this okay so Ted Leavitt in 1962 famously wrote about drill bits he the Harvard professor said no one buys a quarter inch drill bit what they buy is a quarter inch hole but the thing is no one needs a quarter-inch hole what they buy is a hole to put the lag nuts in but they don't need to do that either what they need is a way to put the shelf on the wall but they don't really even need that either what they need is a way to get the books off the floor but they don't really need that what they really need is the satisfaction they get from the smile on their spouses and friends face when their apartment isn't cluttered anymore what they want when they buy a quarter inch drill bit is satisfaction and belonging and safety so when you go home and someone or you go to a cocktail party and someone says what do you do what do you make I would like to argue what each of us do whether we're running for Parliament or making breath mints is we make stories we make a difference but mostly we make change that's what marketers do no change no marketing marketers make change happen but we cannot change everyone so what we've got to do is choose the smallest viable market that we can live with and obsess with them because we can no longer do marketing at people the only choice we have is to do marketing with them and for them but we can't do it for everyone so he must ask who is it for this marketing we're doing what is it for and if you're not asking that question the change are making who am i trying to change what am i trying to change what will I do when I it's working then don't bother showing up in the morning cuz that's our mission that's what we do okay shifting gears just a little bit two ways to get married well there are more than two ways to get married actually but I'm gonna talk about two ways to get married first way to get married go on tinder swipe right and propose marriage to every person you meet over and over again this is a stupid way to get married the other way to get married is to go on a date if it goes well go on another date wait till the third date before you tell him you're out on parole from prison and then you meet their parents they meet your parents you get engaged you get married right that is a sensible way to get married so why aren't you dating your prospects why haven't you identified the smallest viable market and earn permission the privilege of talking to people who want to be talked to again and again instead of spamming the world right then what any direct marketer will tell you his three percent response rate used to be good but with email it's like zero is good because everyone's sending it and no one's writing back spam is out of control we don't need you to interrupt more people we don't need you to yell at more people that's not how you make change happen next big idea for the first time in history we have the chance to treat different people differently you never used to be able to do that you're still not doing it treating different people differently recognizes that we're not all the same you may recognize this this is the normal distribution what it shows you is that 88% of the people are in the middle of the bell curve they're normal and all the people outside are weird but there's only 12 percent don't worry about them worry about the people in the middle except except the curve is melting bit by bit day by day the curve is melting because if you give people a choice they will make a choice if this event had been held 20 years ago almost all the Menier would have been wearing exactly the same clothes if you give people a choice they will make a choice and if we look on the iTunes Store if you want Jamaican polka music you can buy Jamaican polka music the middle the average that people who aren't that interested sucked out they don't exist it's the edges where we get to sell so look at this list of companies every one of them worth more than a billion dollars every one was built for weird people and this is one of the hardest lessons for European organizations to learn is that we have to be comfortable catering to the weird to the fringes to people who aren't the average because if your model is hey you can choose any one and wear any one you're doomed because sort by price because there's no room for you in the middle okay so why is this still so hard it's so hard even though it's obvious and logical because we got trained to fit in we got trained to do what we were told the thing that so many people are afraid of hearing is you know what you're not as good as you think you are and so we hold back and so we try to fit in because we don't want to get uppity cuz we don't want to show you bris shifting gears again then to Facebook to Twitter to insta to snapchat social media is not a tactic to grow your organization it is a symptom that your organization is growing then if you do things right you might get social media as a result but if you get good at social media it doesn't mean you're doing anything right and to put it really clearly you are not the customer you're the product you're being manipulated you are being talked about behind your back as a way to make you stressed so you will use it more and I think we need to think very hard as leaders and has changed makers about what we're using and why ok next question first person with the fax machine what exactly did he do with it because you can't use a fax machine by yourself so the first thing you did was you told other people to go get a fax machine because it works better if other people have one too Bob Metcalfe he's not shy calls his Metcalfe's law and Metcalfe pointed out that the value of a network goes up way faster when you add people to it that's how you found out about Facebook that's how you found out about Twitter that's how you found out about this conference it works better when other people are using it so many of you are busy doing a funnel analysis how do I get people at the top so I get a few customers out at the bottom I'd like you to think really hard about taking that funnel handing it to your customers and having them turn it into a megaphone because when your customers talk about what you were doing it's not spam when your customers talk about what's doing what you're doing it works next big idea no one cares about cows no one talks about cows cows are boring if you see one cow five cows 100 cows they're all the same even cow farmers don't care about cows but if you saw a purple cow she saw a purple cow you would tell other people because a purple cow is remarkable and remarkable means worth making a remark about that's all worth making a remark about so if what you built is worth talking about I will talk about it if I talk about it you've given me a megaphone and my status and self-esteem goes up cuz I get to brag about what you did so please understand marketing isn't what you do after you make something marketing is what you make marketing is the change you seek to make and if you don't get that part right don't bother doing the rest and I get again how hard this is you may have heard the Greek myth of Icarus and Daedalus and they're put on the desert island and Icarus says the Daedalus here we're gonna fly away with these wings but fly too high my son cuz the wax will melt and you will perish an Icarus does not listen to his father does not obey does not respect authority flies too high he dies the end except that's not what the myth said for three thousand years it said something else until they changed it a hundred and fifty years ago what it used to say was all of that plus the punchline and don't fly too low because if you fly too low the mist will weigh down your feathers and you will surely perish and all of us including me all of us are guilty of flying too low we have this extraordinary tool on our phone which is an extraordinary device in our pocket and we're using it to play words with friends and look at cat videos because after all this is a real sign who else's risk are you supposed to play at exactly and what I'm begging you for is grit the grit to say no we're not gonna ship that lousy product no you can't be our customer because you don't believe in where we're going no we're not gonna have another committee meeting we're gonna make something worth it instead that we have to have the grit to fall down and skinned our knee and get back up and do it again to build something alive and bubbling something real the Japanese have a great expression commie Wazza commie waz it means God like myth like the way the gods would do it which also means human because we're the only ones who know how to do that to make it more human to have the guts to say here I made this not some anonymous committee for which I'm not responsible I made this Frank Lloyd Wright designed this house one of those famous houses in the world in 15 minutes on a paper bag and then he handed it to the client and he said if you wish I will build this for you he didn't say let's have some meetings and do some focus groups and decide exactly how to make this the house of your dreams he said I made this if you wish I will build it for you he owned that work and yeah so I'm pitching you something pretty scary here if you're afraid of flying please don't look at this these are 767s coming into the belgian airport sped up and what you'll see is that they're dangerously and dramatically off course so they quickly turn around and fly home and start over nope that's actually not what they do what they do is they adjust they're off course from the minute they take off and the whole way the pilot is adjusting because that's what pilots do and it is cheaper to adjust now than ever before it is cheaper to put something into the world find out if you got it right adjust and do it again and we've got to figure out how to dance with that because this is our revolution three words that I'd like to highlight the first one is this one salla bana if you're talking to someone from the Zulu people you might hear the word Sala bana it means I see you not like I see your face I see your presence I see your parents and your grandparents I see who you are I see your dreams Sara anything your customers want more than to be seen than to be part of something why is it so hard for us to acknowledge that we can give them that dignity second word enrollment no such thing is mandatory education but if someone is enrolled in the journey you want to take them on you can say follow me and the third word goes with that which is tension the tension someone feels before they raise their hand the tension of this might not work the tension of uh-oh if you're going to make change happen it means you are willingly inflicting tension on people you care about you have to be open to that in order to do this so this economy this economy isn't based on making truffles faster and faster it's based on who sees you who trusts you who believes you those are the scarce resources as men Ridley famously said no one knows how to make a mouse no one on earth knows plastics and hardware and software and metals and supply chain to make a mouse we need teams groups of connected individuals so this economy what's it's based on one coordination all of you are here today none of you will be in this building last week value was created by coordination - is trust there's someone sitting right in front of you who's never met you before but who trusts you enough to talk to you permission the privilege of talking to people want to hear from you and the fourth one the exchange of ideas because all of us are smarter than any of us but there's two words that are underneath this that surprise people every time none of this works without generosity and art generosity because why would you connect to a selfish person someone is always taking you wouldn't an art because art is what we call it when we do something that makes things better something original something new something for someone specific so yes we have to figure out what to do with the box if I have not that much and I come to you and I said I don't have that much I can't give you any we're being selfish but if I say I don't have that much but if I give it to you we'll both have it then the idea spreads and value is created the old model of scarcity I only have a little the new model when it comes to ideas is abundance an unlimited number of people to follow on 9 an unlimited number of ideas which leads us to this next idea 5,000 years ago Charlton Heston pioneered the idea of tribes tribes groups of people who are connected by a culture by a leader by a goal by a way of being we only used to have three tribes in our lives in the old days a spiritual tribe a work tribe and a community tribe but now they're everywhere so you got the readout ladies in Antwerp and Bangalore getting together for a few martinis you got the readout guys who pay $15,000 to fly to Hawaii to enter a race they know they're gonna lose why they don't have water and Antwerp that's not why they go they go cuz the other Red Hat guys are there or these Red Hat guys who train all year round for the big day or the white hot guys you know I cried when Leonard Nimoy died and so did a lot of other people because they were part of something so I'm gonna challenge you here all time you ready go excellent stop that was excellent eight seconds that's the new European Union record eight seconds one group I did it with took 28 seconds I was sweating bullets but every group has figured it out every group and every group has a different cadence some are slow clappers some are faster I make no eye contact how did you figure it out it turns out people like doing what other people like them are doing and it turns out you each have the ability to connect them to invent a culture to challenge them to where they're going be clear about it commit to it and communicate it again and again someone needs to organize the applause someone needs to say this is what we're gonna do next The Beatles didn't invent teenagers they just showed up to lead them Bob Marley did not invent the Rastafarians he just showed up to lead them so I could give my entire marketing talk with one slide if I had to it's this one people like us do things like this you got to figure out who the people like us are you got to figure out what the things like this are and then you got to make enough tension for the right people that it happens an example you say you want almost no one gets the Suzuki tattoo because the harley-davidson people understand that they don't make motorcycles they make change they change outsiders to insiders or that nonprofit that had a walkathon they didn't do it to raise money they did it to raise connection so in the u.s. until recently four million dogs and cats were killed every year four million by the Humane Society and the SPCA take it off the street and killed my friend Nathan Winograd went to work at the San Francisco SPCA he was not in charge he was not an authority he had no budget he saw this happen he said I will change this within 100 days he had raised enough money from weird people in San Francisco but more important enough volunteers that San Francisco became the first no-kill shelter in America one city where not one healthy dog or cat has been killed since that day well Nathan left there anyone - Tompkins County New York and did it again then they went to Raleigh Durham North Carolina he did it again they went to Reno Nevada and he did it again not because he could tell people what to do but because he could organize them he could undo the schooling thing that says that our job is to do what we are told to fit in the reason they want you to fit in is so they can ignore you but you see it now and now that you see it you understand this is between management and leadership management is telling people what to do leadership is saying I don't know how to get there let's figure it out and so this is my long argument to push you to become artists so what is art right Marcel Duchamp art Rene Magritte for sure art but Jackson Pollock art yes even if you don't like it especially if you don't like it and the thing that's worth noting is that Jackson Pollock had a brother and his brother's name was Charles and Charles Pollock was a painter not an artist Charles Pollock painted just like his teacher Thomas Hart Benton you never heard of Charles Pollock because we don't need more painters we don't need people who are gonna copy who want to know best practices you are gonna fit in we need people we'll work with felt or with words or with steel to make something remarkable so when the Baroness had this put into an art exhibit it changed the world of contemporary art the second person who put a urinal into an art museum was a plumber and that's the distinction so a few years ago I went to Shenzhen where they made your phone and right next to Shenzhen is villages often where they paint one third of all the oil paintings in the world as fast as they can you buy the Mona Lisa for $29 was now worth $29 cuz it's a copy cuz it's a copy and I gotta tell you copies that come from Belgium aren't worth very much because the duties are too high so your best work what is it for I wanna argue it's to make change and change has an ugly little brother it's to make tension so please don't ask me for a map don't ask me for step-by-step instructions I can't give you a map I can't even give you a fictional map because if I did you'd be a plumber you can go out and buy a book right this is a book about how to raise invisible sheep without making a mistake but we don't need your competence because competence is overrated if I can write down the spec I'll find a computer to do it or someone cheaper than you and so the internet shows up with it's silly Free Hugs movement yeah but this guy hates it cuz he worked hard to be in the expensive hugs business they don't care out of the bottled water guys freaking out cuz sales are down cuz just everything's the same what are they supposed to do make it wetter they tried this but it didn't work no the answer is not more purity the answer is kryptonite what makes Superman interesting kryptonite it might not work we have to as Vonnegut wrote find a cliff throw ourselves off and grow wings on the way down the internet said here's your keyboard here's your microphone speak up if you got to share share because if you're busy saying failure is not an option you've just announced you don't care about success either if you want a vivid way to remember the person who invented the ship also invented the shipwreck you don't have to get on board but if you get on board know what you're getting into so as I wrap this up Italian phrase of the day salto more tali the dangerous leap the leap into the void that feeling inside that it might be too soon like when Gutenberg launched the printing press and 94% of the people in Europe didn't know how to read he should have waited war when Karl Benz launched the car it was against the law to drive a car there were no roads no gas stations no all-night drive-through liquor stores so yes there's a really big difference between being ready and prepared every single person in this room is prepared but none of you can be ready you can't be ready because to be ready means you're sure it's gonna work and any visit to the internet shows you that you're never sure it's gonna work then all that happens if you ride a bicycle online as you fall and so I confess I didn't show you the end of that video the video about the bike race so here it is the end of it it worked you figured out the method your art was a breakthrough you're in first place and so now you say I can go back to business as usual I can just win and win except this is what always happens you're gonna have to go invent the next thing isn't that great thanks for your attention don't make a ruckus [Applause] thank you thank you very much you

Channel: SuperNova

Views: 17,666

Rating: 4.9509201 out of 5

Keywords: SuperNova18, SuperNovaConference, Techfair, Seth Godin, Seth's Blog, Purple Cow, Entrepeneurship, Marketing, Leadership, Tribes Marketing, Flanders DC, Conference, Tech festival, supernova18, supernova, Scale ups, Start ups, keynote speaker, creativity, Ted talk, ted x, tech conference, sxsw

Id: aUHjKtBdJXA

Length: 40min 36sec (2436 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018