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

by Seth Godin

Along the way, this has pushed us to associate “trust” with the events and stories that happen again and again. The familiar is normal and the normal is trusted. Marketers forget this daily.

But frequency teaches us that there’s a very real dip—a gap between when we get bored and when people get the message.

SEO is the practice of ranking high in the search results for a generic term.

a smart marketer can build a product or service that’s worth searching for.

Step one is to make a product or service that people care enough to search for specifically. You cannot win in a generic search, but you’ll always win if the search is specific enough. And then step two is easy to understand: to be the one they want to find when they go looking.

While the price tag was originally conceived because Quakers thought it was immoral to charge different prices to different people, it caught on because industrialists and big organizations liked the efficiency.

When you’re the cheapest, you’re not promising change. You’re promising the same, but cheaper.

The race to the bottom is tempting, because nothing is easier to sell than cheaper. It requires no new calculations or deep thinking on the part of your customer. It’s not cultural or emotional. It’s simply cheaper.

Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out...

A free idea is far more likely to spread, and spread quickly, than an idea that’s tethered to money.

We don’t know how to make a living if we give everything away. The road out of this paradox is to combine two offerings, married to each other: Free ideas that spread. Expensive expressions of those ideas that are worth paying for.

The china and the ticket are souvenirs of ideas, and souvenirs are supposed to be expensive.

There are countless ways for you to share your vision, your ideas, your digital expressions, your ability to connect—for free. And each of them builds awareness, permission, and trust, which gives you a platform to sell the thing that’s worth paying for.

On the other hand, showing generosity with your bravery, your empathy, and your respect is generous indeed.

What your customers want from you is for you to care enough to change them. To create tension that leads to forward motion. To exert emotional labor that will open them up to what’s possible. And if you need to charge a lot to pull that off, it’s still a bargain.

What I saw twenty-five years ago was that spam didn’t scale.

Permission marketing recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing.

Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission to use it. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission.

Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either. Real permission works like this: If you stop showing up, people are concerned. They ask where you went.

If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, that’s because it does. That’s why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

You can do your best, but the final decision is up to your user, not you.

If they remark on it, then it’s remarkable. If they remark on it, the word spreads.

You must do it with intent, building it deep into the product or service. That means that effective marketers are also in charge of the experience that the customers have.

Too often, impatient marketers resort to stunts. Stunts come from a place of selfishness.

The hard work of creating the change you seek begins with designing evangelism into the very fabric of what you’re creating.

In addition, alas, the exposed misbehavior and greed of many of the pillars we count on have also destroyed the benefit of the doubt we’d like to give those who we look to for leadership.

The third method—trust—is the only one that pays for the investment required. And it’s nice that it’s also the easiest to live with.

In a world that scans instead of reads, that gossips instead of researching, it turns out that the best way to earn trust is through action. We remember what you did long after we forget what you said.

billion dollars, about half of all the money spent on online advertising worldwide. And just about all of those ads were measured, and all of them involved the funnel. Spend a thousand dollars on online ads that reach a million people. Get twenty clicks. That means that each click cost fifty dollars.

Those clicks go to your website. One out of ten turns into an order. Which means that each order cost you five hundred dollars. If

you’re fortunate, in this business we’re describing, the lifetime value of a customer is more than five hundred dollars, which means you can turn around and buy more ads to get more customers at the same cost. And do it agai...

By all means, work to lower the cost of that first click. But if you do it by making a ridiculous promise in the ad you run, it’ll backfire, because once in the funnel, people will stop trusting you, the tension will evaporate, and your yield will plummet.

If your product or service makes things better, the customer will stick with you and you’ll generate that lifetime value we spoke of. If you can’t see the funnel, don’t buy the ads.

The truth is that most brands that matter, and most organizations that thrive, are primed by advertising but built by good marketing. They grow because users evangelize to their friends.

They grow because they are living entities, offering ever more value to the communities they serve. They grow because they find tribes that coalesce around the cultural change they’re able to produce.

Amazon can do great with this strategy since they sell all the available books. Each author, though, is in pain: selling one or two books a day is no way to make a living.

We hear about the outliers, the kids who make millions of dollars a year with their YouTube channel or the fashionista with millions of followers. But becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.

Yes, the internet is a discovery tool. But no, you’re not going to get discovered that way. Instead, you will make your impact by uniting those you seek to serve.

The middle of the curve isn’t eagerly adopting. They’re barely adapting. That’s why they’ve chosen to be in the middle of the curve.

The peer-to-peer movement of ideas is how we cross the chasm—by giving people a network effect that makes the awkwardness of pitching change worth the effort.

It’s not your tribe That’s the first thing I say to people who talk about the folks they’re lucky enough to work with and lead. The tribe doesn’t belong to you, so you don’t get to tell the members what to do or to use them for your own aims.

The tribe would probably survive if you went away. The goal is for them to miss you if you did.

Instead, the story of self is your chance to explain that you are people like us.

That you did things like this. That your actions led to a change, one we can hear and see and understand.

All thirteen of these principles get to the mission of the marketer. To engage with people and help them create the change they seek.

Most of all, the tribe is waiting for you to commit. They know that most marketers are fly-by-night operators, knocking on doors and moving on. But some, some hunker down and commit. And in return, the tribe commits to them. Because once you’re part of a tribe, your success is their success.

The easy sales aren’t always the important ones.

If it’s electric, if it makes an impact, if the right sort of tension is created, they’ll have to tell someone else. Because telling someone else is what humans do. It’s particularly what we do if we work with ideas. Telling others about how we’ve changed is the only way to relieve our tension.

Your boss is probably not eager to change her worldview. She wants what she’s always wanted. She sees things through the lens of her experience, not yours.

status, safety, and respect.