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

by Seth Godin

it’s some sort of bizarre exception. Plenty of people are good at what you do. Very good at it. Perhaps as good at it as you are.

Quality, the quality of meeting specifications, is required but no longer sufficient.

If you can’t deliver quality yet, this book isn’t much help to you. If you can, great, congratulations. Now, let’s set that aside for a minute and remember that nearly everyone else can too.

If you make something that others make, if it’s something we can find on Upwork, on Amazon, or Alibaba, you’ve got pain. It’s the pain of knowing that if you raise your price enough to earn a decent return on the effort you’re putting into your work, we’ll just go somewhere else and buy it cheaper.

When you know what you stand for, you don’t need to compete

Bernadette shares ten things that good stories do; if the story you’re telling yourself (and others) doesn’t do these things for you, you might need to dig deeper and find a better story, one that’s more true and more effective. Good stories:

Experts Exchange created profit via frustration.

For programmers in a hurry, he made it easy to find a question and the best answer for it. The answers are ranked by quality, so programmers don’t waste time.

Joel didn’t want to put his personal stamp on a personal site. He set out to be of service, to make things more efficient, to tell people a story that they wanted and needed to hear. He built something better, and he let the core audience not only spread the word but do the thing that an outsider might have thought of as

work.

Better is up to the users, no...

“And we serve coffee”

This is a myth.

It’s a dangerous myth.

what’s true is that we need people willing to be of service. Service to the change they seek to make.

Willing to tell a story that resonates with a group that they care enough to serve.

When James Brown fell on his knees on stage, exhausted, needing to be resuscitated by his attendants, it was brilliant stagecraft, not an authentic performance. After all, it happened every night.

When a therapist changes lives all day long by listening patiently, he actually might be patient, but it’s more likely he’s simply doing his job.

When the barista at Starbucks smiles at you and wishes you a great day, he’s pr...

That’s fine, because revealing isn’t what better looks like. Revealing is reserved for your family and your close...

Protect yourself. You’ll be need...

James Brown and the therapist understand that authenticity in the marketplace is a myth, that what people want is to be understood and to be served, not merely to witness whatever you feel like doing in a given moment.

when we do the best version of our best work, our responsibility isn’t to make it for ourselves . . . it’s to bring it to the person we seek to serve.

Emotional labor is the work of doing what we don’t feel like doing. It’s about showing up with a smile when we’re wincing inside, or resisting the urge to chew someone out because you know that engaging with him will make a bigger difference.

It takes a small amount of energy and guts to be authentic.

If you need to be authentic to do your best work, you’re not a professional, you’re a fortunate amateur.

Fortunate, because you have a gig where being the person you feel like being in the moment actually helps you move forward.

We sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff.

The first is that people confuse wants and needs. What we

need is air, water, health, and a roof over our heads. Pretty much everything else is a want. And if we’re privileged enough, we decide that those other things we want are actually needs.

innovate, they get stuck. The third is mistakenly believing that everyone wants the same thing. In fact, we don’t.

And this is where we begin: with assertions. Assertions about what our audience, the folks we need to serve, want and need.

The broker is a speed bump on the way to their future. And most of what he or she says is merely noise, a palliative, because it all costs the same anyway.

When someone doesn’t act as you expected them to, look for their fear.

Let me guess. You’d like to be respected, successful, independent, appropriately busy, and maybe a little famous. You’d like to do work you’re proud of and do it for people you care about.

If you want to be proud of your work, you probably need to avoid racing to the bottom and denigrating the culture along the way.

Within that framework, though, there’s plenty of room. Room for you to dig in deep and decide what change you want to make, and how (and who) you seek to serve.

Find the people worth serving, and then find a change worth making.

New and boring don’t easily coexist, and so the people who are happy with boring aren’t looking for you. They’re actively avoiding you, in fact.

The real life of engaging with what’s possible, and of working with people who want to make a change.

The other way to read this is: always be wrong.

But most of the time, you’ll be wrong. That’s okay.

You can do the same thing when you put together your website, your podcast, or your new project. Find the essential beacons (the extremes) that matter to you and to your audience, and weave them together in a new thing.

In order to dramatically increase the size of your audience or the price that you charge, you’ll need to do more than simply work more hours or interrupt more people.

But they’re not in the business of selling ice cream cones. The ice cream cones are a symbol, a beacon, a chance to engage. If you run everything through a spreadsheet, you might end up with a rational plan, but the rational plan isn’t what creates energy or magic or memories.

It might not be about being cheaper. It’s tricky to define better. But without a doubt, the heart and soul of a thriving enterprise is the irrational pursuit of becoming irresistible.

Your work to change the culture thrives when the word spreads, and if you want the word to spread, you need to build something that works better when it gets spread. That creates the positive cycle you’re seeking. The one that makes change happen.

This simple network effect is at the heart of every mass movement and every successful culture change.

The conversation I’m motivated to have with my peers becomes the engine of growth. Growth creates more value, which leads to more growth.

Here’s the truth about customer traction: a miracle isn’t going to happen. The old-school marketer’s dream revolves around transforming a product, this normal, average, “it’s fine” product or service . . . the one that’s sitting there, with nothing much happening. Transform it into a hit. The