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

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.