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

Here’s the first half of the simple summary: We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth.

Here’s the second part of the summary: When you are busy telling stories to people who want to hear them, you’ll be tempted to tell stories that just don’t hold up. Lies. Deceptions.

The thing is, lying doesn’t pay off anymore. That’s because when you fabricate a story that just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast.

“What’s your story?” “Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?” “Is it true?”

Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea.

We tell ourselves stories that can’t possibly be true, but believing those stories allows us to function.

Marketers profit because consumers buy what they want, not what they need. Needs are practical and objective, wants are irrational and subjective. And no matter what you sell—and whether you sell it to businesses or consumers—the path to profitable growth is in satisfying wants, not needs. (Of course, your product must really satisfy those wants, not just pretend to!)

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. This is a book about the psychology of satisfaction. I believe that people tell themselves stories and then work hard to make them true. I call a story that a consumer believes a lie. I think that once people find a remarkable lie that will benefit them if it spreads, they selfishly tell the lie to others, embellishing it along the way.

(Note: when I write company, feel free to insert church, nonprofit, campaign, PTA, job seeker or whatever other entity is relevant to you. We all tell stories, every day, and this book is about your story too.)

STEP 1: THEIR WORLDVIEW AND FRAMES GOT THERE BEFORE YOU DID

STEP 2: PEOPLE ONLY NOTICE THE NEW AND THEN MAKE A GUESS

STEP 3: FIRST IMPRESSIONS START THE STORY

STEP 4: GREAT MARKETERS TELL STORIES WE BELIEVE

STEP 5: MARKETERS WITH AUTHENTICITY THRIVE

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.

The making isn’t hard or special or differentiating any longer. And the end of the curve, the place where you actually tell your stories and authentically live up to what you say you’re going to do—that’s where the leverage is now. The right side of the curve, where you take something people may or may not need and turn it into something they definitely want—that’s where the money is. There are only two things that separate success from failure in most organizations today: 1. Invent stuff worth talking about. 2. Tell stories about what you’ve invented. Make up great stories. That’s the new motto.

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.

We all want to be safe, healthy, successful, loved, respected, happy and fit. We all want to have enough money to buy whatever we want. We all want friends and fun and a clean world to enjoy them in. But if we all want the same thing, why do we take so many opposite tacks to get there?

The great failure of marketing theory is its inability to explain variety. No marketer can tell you in advance if an advertisement is going to work or if a new product is going to be successful. As a result, the whole thing feels like a crapshoot. 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!

Worldview is the term I use to refer to the rules, values, beliefs and biases that an individual consumer brings to a situation.

Different people, different worldviews. People can see the same data and make a totally different decision.

Frames are elements of a story painted to leverage the worldview a consumer already has. George Lakoff popularized this term in his writing about political discourse, but it applies to anything that’s marketed to anyone.

A frame, in other words, is a way you hang a story on to a consumer’s existing worldview.

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.

Taste is another word for a person’s worldview.

A vote is a statement about the voter, not the candidate.

Marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively.

It’s interesting to note that while changing a worldview is fairly glamorous work, it doesn’t often lead to a lot of profit.

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.

We are not all the same. The mass market is dead. Instead we are faced with collections of individuals. We may all be created equal, but our worldviews are different. Long before a person is exposed to a particular marketing message, she’s already begun to tell herself a story.

To go to market without understanding your audience’s various worldviews is like trying to pick a lock without bothering to notice whether it uses a key or a combination.

The story a consumer tells himself about a new product or service is primarily influenced by the worldview that consumer had before he even knew about the new thing. That worldview affects three things: 1. 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. 2. Bias: everyone carries around a list of grudges and wishes. When a new product or service appears on your horizon, those predispositions instantly color all the information that comes in. 3. Vernacular: consumers care just as much about how something is said as what is said. They care about the choice of media, the tone of voice, the words that are used—even the way things smell. When the story that’s told to the consumer doesn’t match the vernacular the consumer expects, weird things happen.

People clump together into common worldviews, and your job is to find a previously undiscovered clump and frame a story for those people.

It turns out that worldview thinking offers you a much bigger opportunity: the ability to find overlooked big markets by clumping together people with complementary worldviews.

Frames are the words and images and interactions that reinforce a bias someone is already feeling.

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.

It’s tempting to be a crusading marketer. To set out to turn coffee drinkers into tea drinkers, vodka drinkers into teetotalers, Republicans into Democrats. And every once in a while, you get lucky and succeed. But this is a difficult and challenging path. People don’t want to change their worldview. They like it, they embrace it and they want it to be reinforced.

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.

Here’s what Tom did. He: found a shared worldview; framed a story around that view; made it easy for the story to spread; created a new market, which he owns.

The desire to do what the people we admire are doing is the glue that keeps our society together. It’s the secret ingredient in every successful marketing venture as well.

The best worldviews from a marketer’s point of view are those that include a healthy dose of “I gotta share this!”

1. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The reason so many effective solutions take forever to get implemented is that the fear of change is greater than the cost of sticking with what you’ve got. In other words, people wait until they have a heart attack or get diabetes before they go on a diet. This is the most frustrating worldview a marketer can face. You believe in your product, you know your product will help people, but people refuse to notice it, never mind purchase it. One solution is to reconfigure your offering so that it’s easier to start using.

The other solution is to “break it.”

2. “I like working with you.” The reason that permission marketing and 1:1 marketing are so effective has nothing to do with the ethics of spam. Instead, these techniques work because they group together people with a similar worldview. The people you’re talking to now are the prospects and customers that have a bias to work with you.

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.

We need to see explanations where there are none because our brains are too restless to live with randomness. In the face of random behavior, people make up their own lies.

Step 2: People only notice stuff that’s new and different. And the moment they notice something new, they start making guesses about what to expect next.

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.

So here’s the deal: 1. Snap judgments are incredibly powerful. 2. Humans do everything they can to support those initial judgments. 3. They happen whether you want your prospects to make a quick judgment or not. 4. One of the ways people support snap judgments is by telling other people. 5. You never know which input is going to generate the first impression that matters. 6. Authentic organizations and people are far more likely to discover that the story they wish to tell is heard and believed and repeated.

Step 3: Humans are able to make extremely sophisticated judgments in a fraction of a second. And once they’ve drawn that conclusion, they resist changing it.