This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

by Seth Godin

Like the fish who doesn’t understand water, we fail to see what’s actually happening, and don’t notice how it’s changing us.

To grow your project, sure, but mostly to serve the people you care about.

The answer to just about every question about work is really the question, “Who can you help?”

Marketing creates culture.

Change the culture, change your world.

The best ideas aren’t instantly embraced. Even the ice cream sundae and the stoplight took years to catch on. That’s because the best ideas require significant change. They fly in the face of the status quo, and inertia is a powerful force. Because there’s a lot of noise and a lot of distrust. Change is risky. And because we often want others to go first.

Your most generous and insightful work needs help finding the people it’s meant to serve. And your most successful work will spread because you designed it to.

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone. Changed the boss’s mind. Changed the school system. Changed demand for your product.

How to know if you have a marketing problem

If you see a way to make things better, you now have a marketing problem.

But better isn’t only up to you.

Better can’t happen in a vacuum.

Better is the change we see when the market embraces what we’re offering. Better is what happens when the culture absorbs our work and improves. Better is when we make the dreams of those we serve come tru...

When in doubt, we selfishly shout.

When in a corner, we play small ball, stealing from our competition instead of broadening the market.

When pressed, we assume that everyone is just like us...

And in the world of culture change, it just happened. The true north, the method that works best, has flipped. Instead of selfish mass, effective marketing now relies on empathy and service.

Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem.

It’s a chance to change the culture for the better.

To be really clear: the internet feels like a vast, free media playground, a place where all your ideas deserve to be seen by just about everyone. In fact, it’s a billion tiny whispers, an endless series of selfish conversations that rarely include you or the work you do.

For most of my lifetime, marketing was advertising.

And then it wasn’t true anymore. Which means you’ll need to become a marketer instead.

That means seeing what others see. Bui...

Aligning with tribes. Creating ideas that spread. It means doing the hard work of becoming driven by the market and worki...

We’re going to talk about how you’ll be discovered.

The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers, not victims.

Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become.

The other kind of marketing—the hype, scams, and pressure—thrives on selfishness.

Your emergency is not a license to steal my attention. Your insecurity is not a permit to hustle me or my friends. There’s a more effective way. You can do it. It’s not easy, but the steps are well lit.

It’s time Time to get off the social media merry-go-round that goes faster and faster but never gets anywhere. Time to stop hustling and interrupting. Time to stop spamming and pretending you’re welcome. Time to stop making average stuff for average people while hoping you can charge more than a commodity price. Time to stop begging people to become your clients, and time to stop feeling bad about charging for your work. Time to stop looking for shortcuts, and time to start insisting on a long, viable path instead.

The marketing that has suffused our entire lives is not the marketing that you want to do. The shortcuts using money to buy attention to sell average stuff to average people are an artifact of another time, not the one we live in now.

You can learn to see how human beings dream, decide, and act. And if you help them become better versions of themselves, the ones they seek to be, you’re a marketer.

Marketing in fi...

The last step is often overlooked:

They probably never will. At the heart of our culture is our belief in status, in our self-perceived understanding of our role in any interaction, in where we’re going next.

Direct marketing is not the same as brand marketing,

but they are both based on our decision to make the right thing for the right people.

Most of all, marketing begins (and often ends) with what we do and how we do it, not in all the stuff that comes after the thing is designed and shipped.

If you want to make change, begin by making culture.

Culture beats strategy—so much that culture is strategy.

What you say isn’t nearly as important as what others say about you.

We changed the story from “Here’s an opportunity to shop,

to look good, to regain your sight, to enjoy the process, to feel ownership from beginning to end” to “Do you want us to take away what you have, or do you want to pay to keep the glasses that are already working for you?” Desire for gain versus avoidance of loss.

before. But it’s not helpful to imagine that everyone knows what you know, wants what you want, believes what you believe.

My narrative is simply my narrative, and if it’s not working, it’s arrogant to insist on it.

The way we make things better is by caring enough about those we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear.

We need to be generous enough to share that story, so they can take action th...

Why put a three thousand-dollar stereo in your car if you only listen to a thirty-dollar clock radio at home? Even more puzzling: the most popular color for

cars varies by the kind of car being purchased.

Marketing isn’t a race to add more features for less money. Marketing is our quest to make change on behalf of those we serve, and we do it by understanding the irrational forces that drive each of us.