All Marketers are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works--and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All

by Seth Godin

Make no mistake. This is not about tactics or spin or little things that might matter. This is a whole new way of doing business. It’s a fundamental shift in the paradigm of how ideas spread. Either you’re going to tell stories that spread, or you will become irrelevant.

Everyone is a liar. We tell ourselves stories because we’re superstitious. Stories are shortcuts we use because we’re too overwhelmed by data to discover all the details. The stories we tell ourselves are lies that make it far easier to live in a very complicated world. We tell stories about products, services, friends, job seekers, the New York Yankees and sometimes even the weather.

So what’s going on? Why do wine experts insist that the wine tastes better in a Riedel glass at the same time that scientists can easily prove it doesn’t? The flaw in the experiment, as outlined by Daniel Zwerdling in Gourmet magazine, is that the reason the wine tastes better is that people believe it should. This makes sense, of course. Taste is subjective. If you think the pancakes at the IHOP taste better, then they do. Because you want them to.

So what do real estate, graphic design and wine glasses have in common? Not a lot. Not price point or frequency of purchase or advertising channels or even consumer sales. The only thing they have in common is that no one buys facts. They buy a story.

A great story is true. Not true because it’s factual, but true because it’s consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that’s just slapped on. When the Longaberger Corporation built its headquarters to look like a giant basket, it was living its obsession with the product—a key part of its story.

Great stories make a promise. They promise fun or money, safety or a shortcut. The promise is bold and audacious and not just very good—it’s exceptional or it’s not worth listening to. Phish offered its legions of fans a completely different concert experience. The promise of a transcendental evening of live music allowed the group to reach millions of listeners who easily ignored the pablum pouring out of their radios. Phish made a promise, and even better, kept that promise.

Great stories happen fast. They engage the consumer the moment the story clicks into place. First impressions are far more powerful than we give them credit for. Great stories don’t always need eight-page color brochures or a face-to-face meeting. Great stories match the voice the consumer’s worldview was seeking, and they sync right up with her expectations. Either you are ready to listen to what a Prius delivers or you aren’t.

Great stories don’t appeal to logic, but they often appeal to our senses. Pheromones aren’t a myth. People decide if they like someone after just a sniff. And the design of an Alessi teapot talks to consumers in a way that a fact sheet about boiling water never could.

And most of all, great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don’t teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

I wasn’t being completely truthful with you when I named this book. Marketers aren’t liars. They are just storytellers. It’s the consumers who are liars. As consumers, we lie to ourselves every day. We lie to ourselves about what we wear, where we live, how we vote and what we do at work. Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.

I believe marketing is the most powerful force available to people who want to make change. And with that power comes responsibility. We (anyone with the ability to tell a story—online, in print or to the people in our communities) have the ability to change things more dramatically than ever before in history. Marketers have the leverage to generate huge impact in less time—and with less money—than ever before.

Marketing is about spreading ideas, and spreading ideas is the single most important output of our civilization. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese have died because of bad marketing. Religions thrive or fade away because of the marketing choices they make. Children are educated, companies are built, jobs are gained or lost—all because of what we know (and don’t know) about spreading ideas.

Positioning by Jack Trout and Al Ries is one of the most important marketing books ever. And it’s a great start. But it’s only a start. Positioning, as practiced by most people, is one dimensional. If they are cheap, we’re expensive. They are fast, we are slow, and so on.

This is urgent. The transformation of our organizations has been under way for a while, but now, thanks to outsourcing and computers and increasing manufacturing quality, it’s easier than it’s ever been to get something made, shipped and stocked. Easier than ever to ensure quality and durability. What’s difficult—really difficult—is figuring out what’s worth making and then telling a story about it.

The reason most of the people who sell services and products to business are struggling with profit margins is that they see themselves as peddling a commodity. Because they focus on the center of the curve, on making a better widget a little cheaper, they’re stuck. The organizations that succeed realize that offering a remarkable product with a great story is more important and more profitable than doing what everyone else is doing just a bit better.

The explanation for this variety lies in the worldview all consumers carry around. It turns out that we don’t all want the same things! Each person has a different set of biases and values and assumptions, and those worldviews are influenced by their parents, their schools, the places they live and the experiences they’ve had to date. Their worldview is the lens they use to determine whether or not they’re going to believe a story. As the great Red Maxwell said, “Lenses distort things.” The lens your consumers use shows them a different version of reality than it shows you or your colleagues or your other customers.

Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy smart marketers follow. Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases. You don’t have enough time and you don’t have enough money. Instead, identify a population with a certain worldview, frame your story in terms of that worldview and you win.

Marketers don’t hesitate to run different ads for men and women, for the rich and the poor, for those that travel and those that don’t. The mistake is that we don’t go far enough. There isn’t one market. There are a million markets, each filled with people who share a worldview. The most successful, fastest-moving examples are those where the marketer used a frame to leverage an existing worldview, not to change one. Your opportunity lies in finding a neglected worldview, framing your story in a way that this audience will focus on and going from there.

Attention: the consumer’s worldview determines whether she even bothers to pay attention. If she doesn’t think she needs a new brand of aspirin or a faster computer, she’s far less likely to notice a new one when it appears.

Frames aren’t just a tactic. Frames go to the heart of what marketing is today. If you’re unable to tack your idea onto a person’s worldview, then that idea will be ignored. File sharing is different from stealing. A picture of Houston’s polluted waters and dead birds is just as accurate as one of Houston’s skyscrapers and busy shopping malls, but they tell very different stories to very different people. Firearm safety is different from banning handguns, but both phrases are used to advance political agendas.

Frames are the words and images and interactions that reinforce a bias someone is already feeling. The media uses frames all the time when telling us stories. When the newspaper calls someone a “UFO buff” or a “conspiracy theorist,” they’re making it easy for the rest of us to believe that this group is marginal. Politicians are becoming masters of using frames to tell their stories. You pick: “fanatical right-wing fundamentalists” or “people of deeply held beliefs.” Each phrase is easy to embrace for a community that shares a worldview.

It’s so tempting to tell your story to an audience that desperately wants to hear it. The problem is that this audience may embrace your story but might not make you any money (or get you elected). It’s not enough to find a niche that shares a worldview. That niche has to be ready and able to influence a large group of their friends.

I worry about using the term worldview. It implies that a consumer’s bias affects the way he thinks about big things—world-sized issues. In fact, more often than not, worldview affects the way we approach tiny issues. It affects the way consumers think about chocolate bars or résumés or a commercial on the radio. A worldview is the lens used to look at every decision a person is asked to make.

Step 1: Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of that worldview, and it will be heard.

I’m amazed to find myself writing this, but the purpose of this book is to persuade you to be less rational. Stop trying to find the formula that will instantly make your idea into a winner. Instead of being scientists, the best marketers are artists. They realize that whatever is being sold (a religion, a candidate, a widget, a service) is being purchased because it creates an emotional want, not because it fills a simple need. Marketers win when they understand the common threads that all successful stories share.

In order to survive the onslaught of choices, consumers make snap judgments. In a heartbeat, people take in the way a person looks and talks and smells and stands and dresses. They examine packaging and pricing and uniforms and lighting and location and the Muzak in the background and instantly come to a conclusion. Of course, there’s data that contradicts this conclusion. That data is ignored.

It doesn’t really matter whether a story we tell to a consumer is completely factual. If it’s a good story, if that story is framed in terms of his worldview, then he’ll tell himself the story and believe in the lie. The reason authenticity matters is that we don’t know which inputs the consumer will use to invent the story he tells himself.

Spending an inordinate amount of time and money on your sign or your jingle or your Web site is beside the point. It’s every point of contact that matters. If you’re not consistent and authentic, the timing of that first impression is too hard to predict to make it worth the journey. On the other hand, if you can cover all the possible impressions and allow the consumer to make them into a coherent story, you win.

Facts are not the most powerful antidote to superstition. Powerful, authentic personal interaction is. That’s why candidates still need to shake hands and why retail outlets didn’t disappear after the success of Amazon.

But is the utility of the product the main way people shape their desires? No way! And that, in two words, is why you need the ideas in this book. In almost every meeting I go to, people are desperate to understand why their product or service isn’t selling better. They always begin by pointing out how good their product is, how much better/faster/more durable it is. They are obsessed with the utility and they can’t understand why the market isn’t responding to their microanalysis of the difference between their offering and that of their competitor.

This is a hard lesson for a lot of marketers to learn. It’s easy to tout your features, focus on the benefits, give proof that you are, in fact, the best solution to a problem. But proof doesn’t make the sale. Of course, you believe the proof, but your audience doesn’t. The very fact that you presented the proof makes it suspect. If a consumer figures something out or discovers it on her own, she’s a thousand times more likely to believe it than if it’s just something you claim.

In order to be believed, you must present enough of a change that the consumer chooses to notice it. But then you have to tell a story, not give a lecture. You have to hint at the facts, not announce them. You cannot prove your way into a sale—you gain a customer when the customer proves to herself that you’re a good choice.

The psychic impact of a nasty flight attendant is more important than a plane arriving ten minutes early at its destination. The enthusiasm a company’s staff has when they install new robots on the factory floor can be just as important as the work those robots actually do. In other words, irrational beliefs aren’t a distraction—they are an intrinsic part of the quality of the product.

Because the story wasn’t accurate, because it was actually the opposite of the reality of the situation for most moms, the effect of a consumer lying to herself was devastating. Marketing is now so powerful that caveat emptor is no longer a valid defense. Nestlé learned a hard lesson and backed off, but the point applies to all marketers. Just because people might believe your story doesn’t give you a right to tell it!

The good news is that even though marketing is far more powerful, it’s now harder than ever to get away with a fraud for long. The millions on the Internet are watching the reactions people have to your stories. Google is tracking your behavior. It’s almost impossible to keep a tangled story straight. The only robust, predictable strategy is a simple one: to be authentic. To do what you say you’re going to do. To live the lie, fully and completely.

I was clear about this in Purple Cow and I’ll repeat myself here: if you want to grow, make something worth talking about. Not the hype, not the ads, but the thing. If your idea is good, it’ll spread.

The good news is clear: authentic marketing, from one human to another, is extremely powerful. Telling a story authentically, creating a product or service that actually does what you say it will leads to a different sort of endgame. The marketer wins and so do her customers. A story that works combined with authenticity and minimized side effects builds a brand (and a business) for the ages.

I don’t care what your politics are—if you’re a talented marketer, you can see the problems here. The story a marketer uses must be a good one, a story based on some version of reality. Belief in the lie must not ultimately harm the consumer because if it does, you’ll run out of consumers and credibility far too soon.

Early on in this book, I told you that marketing has become an art. The essence of that art is your ability to use nonverbal techniques to make me a series of promises (promises you intend to keep). Some people are fortunate in that they’re able to generate these signals without realizing it. Most of us, though, need to do it on purpose. We need to work hard to understand what the biases of our prospects are and which totems we can use to tell a story to these people.

Instead, you must tell a different story and persuade those listening that your story is more important than the story they currently believe. If your competition is faster, you must be cheaper. If they sell the story of health, you must sell the story of convenience. Not just the positioning x/y axis sort of “we are cheaper” claim, but a real story that is completely different from the story that’s already being told.

Then a number of American companies (like Trek) started telling a different story to the same audience. It was a story about comfort. The comfort story persuaded people to spend $1,000 or $5,000 on a mountain bike or a hybrid bike that had a racing heritage (they were the original sponsor of Lance Armstrong) but was actually a pleasure to ride. It wasn’t until 1990, fourteen years after they started selling racing bikes, that Trek took off. They did it by focusing on telling a story to the underserved worldview in the community of bike buyers. Today most of the successful companies in this market succeed by selling comfortable bikes to aging baby boomers. As bikers aged, their worldview changed and so did the successful stories. By relying on a story that was easier to tell and easier to take action on, they activated more people in the market.

The only stories that work, the only stories with impact, the only stories that spread are the “I can’t believe that!” stories. These are the stories that aren’t just repeatable: these are the stories that demand to be repeated.

The same thing is true for selling hot sauce or laser beams. Being remarkable, going to the edges, doing something worth talking about—these are all things that are rewarded with action by communities that care deeply. You succeed by being an extremist in your storytelling, then gracefully moving your product or service to the middle so it becomes more palatable to audiences that are persuaded by their friends, not by you.

A talented marketer is someone who takes a story and expands it and sharpens it until it’s not true anymore (yet). Your goal should not (must not) be to create a story that is quick, involves no risks and is without controversy. Boredom will not help you grow.

Why didn’t anyone notice it? Because they weren’t looking. They weren’t looking because there’s too much to look at and not enough time to take it all in, so our default setting is to ignore everything. We walk a supermarket or a tradeshow or skim a stack of résumés and we actually notice very little.

Why didn’t those who noticed it try it? In most markets, for most products, the frame often carried around says “I’m just looking.” Even when we haul ourselves all the way to the mall, that’s the answer we give to a prodding salesperson. It’s also the way we surf the net—rarely clicking on anything, rarely staying on a Web site for long.

Same answer. Worldview. Long before a marketer showed up and asked (insisted, actually) that a consumer forward some note to all her friends, she figured out her comfort level. A goofy Internet video is fine for some people, but you feel really weird talking about gun control. That may not be an intentional delineation on your part, but it’s a fact the marketer has to deal with.

You’ve probably figured out that those books are about the story you tell to other people. But before you can tell a story to someone else, you’ve got to tell one to yourself. The lie a consumer tells himself is the nucleus at the center of any successful marketing effort.

If they start with the facts instead of the story, Acumen will be stuck between a rock and a hard place. They have a powerful vision and amazing successes in the works, but the hardest part of their project is here at home—telling the right story to the right people. Big philanthropies hesitate to give because it challenges their model, and big investors hesitate to invest because it doesn’t meet their threshold of monetary success.

Step one is to offer a thrilling story to the people at the edges who want to hear it. Step two is to back that story up with authentic action and proof that it works. Then the bet is that the worldview of “I want to be like my more successful colleagues” will enable the believers to overcome the desire among their peers to take no risk. As Acumen’s idea infects these communities, it ought to be able to grow by spreading a new story to people who want to hear it.