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

by Seth Godin

That’s enough to make a difference. Begin there, with obsessive focus. Once it works, find another swimming pool. Even better, let...

We’re not supposed to say that. We’re certainly not supposed to want to say that. But we must.

“It’s not for you” shows the ability to respect someone enough that you’re not going to waste their time, pander to them, or insist that they change their beliefs. It shows respect for those you seek to serve, to say to them, “I made this for you. Not for the other folks, but for you.”

every best-selling book on Amazon has at least a few one-star reviews. It’s impossible to create work that both matters and pleases everyone.

It’s entirely possible that your work isn’t as good as it needs to be. But it’s also possible that you failed to be clear about who it was for in the first place.

The simple marketing promise

At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress in their journeys toward their goals.

Show up, often. Do it with humility, and focus on the parts that work.

Empathy is at the heart of marketing People don’t believe what you believe. They don’t know what you know. They don’t want what you want. It’s true, but we’d rather not accept this.

Everything that we purchase—every investment, every trinket, every experience—is a bargain. That’s why we bought it. Because it was worth more than what we paid for it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t buy it.

You’re stealing because you’re withholding a valuable option. You’re keeping someone from understanding how much they’ll benefit from what you’ve created . . . such a significant

benefit that it’s a bargain. If they understand what’s on offer and choose not to buy it, then it’s not for them. Not today, not at this price, not with that structure. That’s okay too.

Expense might be easy to measure, but it’s never clear that more of it is always better.

So, how do we process this, remember this, choose a product? We remember the best one. Best for what? And that’s the key question. Best for us.

Your job as a marketer is to find a spot on the map with edges that (some) people want to find.

Because dog food is for dog owners. It’s for the way it makes them feel, the satisfaction of taking care of an animal

that responds with loyalty and affection, the status of buying a luxury good, and the generosity of sharing it.

A marketer for a dog food company might decide that the secret of more dog food sales is to make a food that tastes better. But that requires understanding how a dog thinks, which is awfully difficult.

There are two voices in our heads. There’s the dog’s voice, the one that doesn’t have many words, but knows what it wants. And there’s the owner’s voice, which is nuanced, contradictory, and complex. It’s juggling countless inputs and is easily distracted.

You can’t be perfect in the eyes of an early adopter; the best you can do is be interesting.

The magic question is: Who’s it for?

The people you seek to serve—what do they believe? What do they want?

The facts aren’t at issue here; they can’t be. What’s happening is that these theorists are taking comfort in their standing as outliers and they’re searching for a feeling, not a logical truth.

“Adherence to conspiracy theory might not always be the result of some perceived lack of control, but rather a deep-seated need for uniqueness.”

A marketer is curious about other people. She wonders about what others are struggling with, what makes them tick. She’s fascinated by their dreams and their beliefs.

Instead, we can hope that people might voluntarily trade their attention. Trade it for something they need or want.

Trade it because they’re genuinely interested. Trade it because they trust you to keep your promise. Not everyone will be interested. But if you do your job right, enough people will.

A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to

the drowning person. When you show up with a life buoy, if the drowning person understands what’s at stake, you don’t have to run ads to get them to hold on to it.

What will the neighbors say? What will we tell ourselves about safety? About independence, opportunity, and coddling? All of these changes are at the heart of the car decision. When the designer, the marketer, and the salesperson see these changes at work, they provide more value, because they can design with these issues in mind.

dotted. When the customer has no choice but to listen to you and engage with you, when there are only three TV channels, only one store in town, only a few choices, the race to the bottom is the race worth winning.

Surrounded by this tsunami of choice, most of it offered by folks who are simply selfish, the consumer has made an obvious choice. Walk away.

In a world of choice, where we have too little time, too little space, and too many options, how do we choose?

This is all fine, but it doesn’t hold up over time, not in a hyper-competitive world. Instead, we can think of the quest for the edges as:

Claims that are true, that we continually double down on in all our actions.

Claims that are generous, that exist as a service...

A few blocks away, a different teacher can take a totally different spot on the map.

She can refuse to enter competitions but instead build a practice based on connection and generosity.

Both teachers treat different people differently. They don’t compete; the...

b...

The alternative is to build your own quadrant.

You have the freedom to change your story. You can live a different one, one that’s built around those you seek to serve.

The most frustrated marketers I know are the ones who take it as a given that because they are in industry x, they have no freedom.

access to at least as much information as the broker does. If the goal is to defend the status quo, to be a chokepoint, it’s going to require an exhausting sprint, one that tries to keep ahead of an ever-quickening technology and information flow.

We made the “doing” easier, which is precisely why we need to outsource that part of our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of making change happen.

We’re not faking it. Your customers aren’t faking it. Those who prefer your competition aren’t either.

If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them. Not transform them, not get them to admit that they were wrong.

Simply to dance with them, to have a chance to connect with them, to add our story to what they see and add...

Instead, we begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make.

There’s a gap in the market where your version of better can make a welcome change happen.