Seth Godin's Blog, page 279

Train your customers

Yes, you can train them. By rewarding some behaviors over others, by keeping some promises not others, by having some expectations instead of others, you get the audience you deserve. Some things you can train customers to do:

Be respectful

Be patient

Keep their satisfaction to themselves

Be selfish

Be focused on a superstar

Demand personal service

Be calm

Never settle for the current iteration

Be cheap

Embrace acceptance

Spread the word

Expect pampering

Demand free

Be eager to...

Accept all substitutes

Commerce is about pricing, and pricing is about scarcity. Scarcity, of course, demands no easy substitutes.

Some news websites are foolishly putting up paywalls, requiring readers to pay by the day or the year to see what's there. This is foolish because substitutes are so easy to find. If I can't get to the Times of London or Time magazine, no problem, I'll find the same news (or almost the same news) somewhere else.

This is the mistake that book publishers are making on the Kindle. I was...

A post-industrial A to Z digital battledore

New times demand new words, because the old words don't help us see the world differently.

Along the way, I've invented a few, and it occurs to me that sometimes I use them as if you know what I'm talking about. Here, with plenty of links, are 26 of my favorite neologisms (the longest post of the year, probably):

A is for Artist: An artist is someone who brings humanity to a problem, who changes someone else for the better, who does work that can't be written down in a manual. Art is not about ...

Intolerance and xenophobia as a (short-term) marketing strategy

Possibly the oldest human worldview is fear of strangers. And right next to that is anger as a byproduct of fear.

If a candidate wants to gain attention and possibly votes, then, it makes short-term sense to stir up fear of strangers and turn it into anger. It might even work (once). But it makes it virtually impossible to govern. It's a short-term strategy that eats itself, because sooner or later, everyone is a stranger, and fear is no foundation for work that matters.

It seems as though...

"I thought you'd be taller"

The chances that you and your brand will first be encountered digitally grow every day.

The only question is what sort of reputation and anticipation you create before they actually encounter you in real life. I think it's a conscious choice.

Sabotage!

Just about all sabotage is self-sabotage.

We don't get forced to eat that cookie, we choose to. And so the diet is ended.

Marketing self-sabotage is fascinating to watch and understand. Consider the college application: it's primarily an opportunity for teenagers who aren't sure of where they want to go to undercut their chances by exposing their uncertainty. The lizard brain, the voice in the back of the head that wants security and safety--it's not eager to go to a college that might be 'too ...

Every monster has a big shadow

That's what makes it a monster.

In fact, when you look the monster in the eye, when you calmly and carefully inspect the actual monster, you discover that he's not so bad after all. It's just the shadow that's scary.

When in doubt, ignore the shadow.

A few books for summer reading

Paco Underhill on women and retail.

Nancy Lublin on learning from causes.

Noah Boyd with an FBI thriller beach read. Better than the last Reacher novel, imho.

And stunningly elegant (and lovely to hold) pottery inspired by some of my work from Lori Koop.

The power of sync

100 people doing something at the same time has far more power than 300 people doing it over time.

We unconsciously amplify the power of coordination when we consider the impact of actions. If there's a thousand people waiting outside of a store, we instantly believe we're seeing a phenomenon.

While the internet makes it easier than ever to spread ideas, it makes it far more compelling to coordinate actions.

If everyone in your weekly meeting drops a pencil at precisely 12:03, you'll notice.

Here comes the paperback Kindle... as promised

The wifi Kindle, $139. Drop the first digit and you're on to something. And it only took them six weeks!