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

by Seth Godin

dream is that with public relations, with hype, with promotion, with distribution, with ad buys, with influence marketing, with content marketing, and with a little bit of spam . . . the dream is that it will become the “it” thing, and everyone will want

it. It will be popular precisely because it’s popular. But you’re...

Here’s what I want to know about your VC–backed Silicon Valley startup: How many people outside of HQ use it every day? How

often are they sending you suggestions to make it better?

How many people are insisting that their friends and colleagues use it? As in right now. Do they love it? Do they love the...

Who would miss it if it were gone? If you can’t succeed in the small, why do you believe you will succeed in the large?

Our hits aren’t hits anymore, not like they used to be. Instead, they are meaningful for a few and invisible to the rest.

Instead of hoping to encourage a large number of people to support them a little, they relied on a small number of true fans who supported them a lot.

Extraordinary talent.

Significant patience.

The guts to be quirky.

The critic who doesn’t like your work is correct. He doesn’t like your work. This cannot be argued with.

The critic who says that no one else will like your work is wrong. After all, you like your work. Someone else might like it too.

When we seek feedback, we’re doing something brave and foolish. We’re asking to be proven wrong. To have people say “You thought you made something great, but you didn’t.” Ouch. What if, instead, we seek advice?

“I made something that I like, that I thought you’d like. How’d I do? What advice do you have for how I could make it fit your worldview more closely?” That’s not criticism. Or feedback. That sort of helpful advice reveals a lot about the person you’re engaging with. It helps us see his or her fears and dreams and wants. It’s a clue on how to get even closer next time.

We’re intimately familiar with the noise in our own heads, and that noise is often expressed as personal and specific criticism. But it might not be about you and it might not be useful. Perhaps you’re hearing about someone’s fears, or their narrative about inadequacy or unfairness.

When people share their negative stories, they often try to broaden the response and universalize it. They talk about how “no one” or “everyone” will feel. But what you’re actually hearing about is a specific sore spot that was touched in a specific moment by a specific piece of work.

That’s what right means in this case. Based on who they are and what they want and what they know, everyone is right. Every time.

When we find the empathy to say, “I’m sorry, this isn’t for you, here’s the phone number of my competitor,” then we also find the freedom to do work that matters.

As marketers and agents of change, we almost always overrate our ability to make change happen. The reason is simple. Everyone always acts in accordance with their internal narratives.

For most of us, though, changing our behavior is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it takes tension to change them. Once you see these forces at work, you’ll be able to navigate the culture in a whole new way. It will be as if someone turned on the lights and gave you a map.

For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our actions are primarily driven by one question: “Do people like me do things like this?”

Even when we adopt the behavior of an outlier, when we do something the crowd doesn’t often do, we’re still aligning ourselves with the behavior of outliers. Nobody is unaware and uncaring of what is going on around him. No one who is wholly original, self-directed, and isolated in every way. A sociopath might do things in opposition to the crowd, but he’s not unaware of the crowd.

Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization. Marketers don’t make average stuff for average people. Marketers make change. And they do it by normalizing new behaviors.

the long tail of culture and the media and change doesn’t need everyone any longer. It’s happy with enough.

When we’re comfortable realizing that our work is to change “a culture,” then we can begin to do two bits of hard work: Map and understand the worldview of the culture we seek to change. Focus all our energy on this group. Ignore everyone else. Instead, focus on building and living a story that will resonate with the culture we are seeking to change.

That’s how we make change—by caring enough to want to change a culture, and by being brave enough to pick just one.

The essence of political change is almost always cultural change, and the culture changes horizontally.

Person to person. Us to us.

We have no control over our elite status, and it can be taken away in an instant.

But exclusive organizations thrive

as long as their members wish to belong, and that work is somet...

Your work is a tree. The roots live in the soil of dreams and desires. Not the dreams and desires of everyone, simply those you seek to serve. If your work is simply a commodity, a quick response to an obvious demand, then your roots don’t run deep. It’s unlikely that your tree will grow, or even if it does, it’s unlikely to be seen as important, useful, or dominant. It will be crowded out by all the similar trees.

It’s a mistake to show up with an acorn and expect a crowd. Work that matters for people who care is the shortest, most direct route to making a difference.

If you want someone who has never hired a gardener to hire you to be their gardener, you’re asking for a pattern interrupt. If you are trying to secure a five thousand-dollar donation from a wealthy person who habitually makes hundred-dollar donations to charity, you face the same challenge. The pattern requires undoing before you can earn forward motion.

Volunteering is a problem for them, because it requires agency and responsibility. But when the teacher applies focused social tension in the form of publicly calling on a student, that student has no problem answering. The tension was sufficient to overcome his or her inertia.

We create tension when we ask someone to contribute to the bake sale or join our book club. We’re using one force (in this case, social engagement) to overcome another force (the status quo).

marketers who cause change cause tension.

Tension is not the same as fear

Tension is something we can do precisely because we care about those we seek to serve. Fear’s a dream killer. It puts people into suspended animation, holding their breath, paralyzed and unable to move forward.

Fear alone isn’t going to help you make change happen. Tension might, though. The tension we face any time we’re about to cross a threshold. The tension of this might work versus this might not work. The tension of, “If I learn this, will I like who I become?”

There might be fear, but tension is the promise that we can get through that ...

All effective education creates tension, because just before you learn something, you’re aware you don’t know it (yet).

None of those feelings existed before a marketer showed up with something that caused them—if there weren’t a new album, you wouldn’t feel left out if you hadn’t heard it yet. We intentionally create these gaps, these little canyons of tension that people find themselves leaping over.

There are two ways to do your work. You can be a cab driver. Show up and ask someone where they want to go. Charge them based on the meter. Be a replaceable cog in the on-demand transport system. You might be a harder-working cabbie, but it won’t change much. Or you can be an agent of change, someone who creates tension and then relieves it.

The dominant narrative, the market share leader, the policies and procedures that rule the day—they all exist for a reason. They’re good at resisting efforts by insurgents like you.

If all it took to upend the status quo was the truth, we would have changed a long time ago.

The status quo doesn’t shift because you’re right. It shifts because the culture changes. And the engine of culture is status.

All the rational arguments in the world aren’t powerful enough to change deeply held cultural beliefs, even in this community.

Now, the Maasai find and name lions, track them, and use radio telemetry to perform a census. Protecting a lion has become as much of a rite of passage as killing one used to be.