Seth Godin's Blog, page 310

Debt, equity and a third thing that might work better

If your business needs money, it seems as though you have two choices:

Get a loan from a bank

Raise equity from an investor, giving up part of your company in exchange

Banks are everywhere, so the idea that they can loan us money seems obvious. And venture capitalists and the companies they fund are in the news all the time... and making a billion dollars sounds like fun.

Here's the thing: for most businesses, most of the time, neither is a realistic option.

Banks aren't in the...

Learning by analogy

Some people are way better at this than others.

The other day, I was talking to someone about a complex and specialized issue. It's quite possible that this was the first and only time in the history of the world that this precise set of circumstances had ever occurred. He said, "do you have an example of how this has worked before for you?"

I was puzzled. I mean, not only hadn't I ever had this precise problem, but no one in the world had.

It's like the left-handed chiropractor in Berkeley...

Teaching the market a lesson

Some book publishers don't like the Kindle. Either they're afraid of it or they've crunched the numbers and they don't like what they see. (Some days, 95% of the top selling Kindle titles are free... demonstrating that digital goods with zero marginal cost and plentiful substitutes tend to move to zero in price).

Worried about the medium, they hold back, delay or even refuse to support it.

Which is fine if you have market power, but you likely don't. No publisher does, certainly. The Beatles c...

Hammer time

So, if it's true that to a person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, the really useful question is, "what sort of hammer do you have?"

At big TV networks, they have a TV hammer. At a surgeon's office, they have the scalpel hammer. A drug counselor has the talk hammer, while a judge probably has the jail hammer.

Maybe it's time for a new hammer...

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy ...

Can't top this

Getting someone to switch is really difficult.

Getting someone to switch because you offer more of what they were looking for when they choose the one they have now is essentially impossible. For starters, they're probably not looking for more. And beyond that, they'd need to admit that they were wrong for not choosing you in the first place.

So, you don't get someone to switch because you're cheaper than Walmart. You don't get someone to switch because you serve bigger portions than the...

Worldview Neuralgia (don't call your customers liars)

If I had to pick a book of mine to recommend that you haven't read yet, it would probably be All Marketers are Liars.

The reason you haven't read it, I'm guessing, is that it has a terrible title and had a worse cover. Lesson learned. All the details are right here on this little sub-blog.

[Two other book updates: Purple Cow now comes with a new appendix, written by you, my readers. The rest of the book remains the same. And the best of the last three years of this blog are now collected in...

Choose your customers, choose your future

Marketers rarely think about choosing customers... like a sailor on shore leave, we're not so picky. Huge mistake.

Your customers define what you make, how you make it, where you sell it, what you charge, who you hire and even how you fund your business. If your customer base changes over time but you fail to make changes in the rest of your organization, stress and failure will follow.

Sell to angry cheapskates and your business will reflect that. On the other hand, when you find great...

The why imperative

Successful organizations spend a lot of time saying, "that's not what we do."

It's a requirement, because if you do everything, in every way, you're sunk. You got to where you are by standing for something, by approaching markets and situations in a certain way. Sure, Nike could make money in the short run by licensing their name to a line of wines and spirits, but that's not what they do. 

"That's not what we do," is the backbone of strategy, it determines who you are and where you're going.

Ex...

Upside vs. downside

How much of time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences (vs. avoiding bad outcomes)?

At the hospital, it's probably 5% on the upside (the doctor who puts in the stitches, say) and 95% on the downside (all the avoidance of infection or lawsuits, records to keep, forms to sign). Most of the people you interact with in a hospital aren't there to help you get what you came for (to get better) they're there to help you avoid getting worse. At an avant...

Fabulous

This is so cool: because we only look at things we want to look at, only talk about things worth talking about, the amount of fabulous in the world continues to rise exponentially.

Even though we're at the tail end of the great recession, think about all the cool stuff in your life. Not just stuff you can buy, but experiences, works of art, innovations of all kinds... the bar has been raised for what you need to do to be noticed, and the market is responding.

Not only do I notice more...