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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Seth Godin
Read between
January 17 - January 17, 2019
The principles behind creative storytelling are compelling, but what do you do when you have competition? How do you respond to competing stories in the marketplace?
The most important principle is this: you cannot succeed if you try to tell your competition’s story better than they can.
Woot.com is a modern Internet success story, with tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of dollars in annual sales.
Most often you’re charged with competing with someone who has already succeeded with a story that’s taken hold.
In order to grow, you can’t tell the same story to the same people (even if you tell it louder or with more style).
If you tell the right kind of story, you’ll automatically become purple. All great stories are purple cows for one simple reason: a great story is believed and the lie is retold.
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.
• Small: I think it’s pretty easy to see how telling the right story can really help an individual. A résumé, a job interview, a date: in all of these cases, when the person you’re dealing with has only a few moments to come to a conclusion about you, insisting on telling them just the facts is a sure way to fail. We get involved with people (at all sorts of levels) based on nothing more than a story.
There are no small stories. Only small marketers. If your story is too small, it’s not a story, it’s just an annoying interruption.
A smart marketer in the design department understands that telling a story through the design of the sheet metal is an incredibly cheap way to sell a very expensive car.
published. (Find out more at www.chowhound.com.)
The news on television isn’t “true.” It can’t be. There’s too much to say, too many points of view, too many stories to cover. Television
It’s easy to misunderstand his success if you focus on the fact that he sells identical jewelry for half the price of the gems in the famous blue box. But if cheap is what you want, you can buy cheap cheaper somewhere else. Cheap is not marketing.
Is Blue Nile selling a commodity? No. A commodity is something we need, not want. Nobody needs a diamond. The ironic thing is that jewelry stores that feel they must compete on price are the ones that are creating the end of their industry.
Just because everyone knows your name doesn’t mean everyone knows your story.
Different audiences act differently.
mouth. Music labels correctly focus on college kids, because they’re likely to play their music for others and spread the word.
populations. College students have more friends and talk with one another more than residents of nursing homes, for example.
Remember, the marketer tells a story. The consumer believes it and it becomes a lie.
Changethis.com offered free e-book manifestos by well-known authors. Changethis tracked every download and every document that was forwarded through the system. Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start was excerpted by changethis, and the passalong rate through our servers was about 4.5 percent—almost 5 percent of the people downloading this excerpt went ahead and sent it to at least one friend.
What happens to you when you get admitted to medical school?
It turns out that your biases and expectations change a great deal.
Nothing is static. Nothing stays the way it was. And everything you build or design or market is going to change the marketplace.
When you think about cotton, words like natural, cool, soft and healthy come to mind.
failed: 1. No one noticed it. 2. People noticed it but decided they didn’t want to try it. 3. People tried it but decided not to keep using it. 4. People liked it but didn’t tell their friends.
I get to lie to myself when I make a cup of this tea. I get to promise myself an indulgence, I get to pretend I’m nurturing my inner soul when all I’m really doing is drinking a thirty-cent cup of tea.
countless success stories
