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

by Seth Godin

“Who can you help?”

This is marketing Marketing seeks more. More market share, more customers, more work. Marketing is driven by better. Better service, better community, better outcomes. Marketing creates culture. Status, affiliation, and people like us. Most of all, marketing is change. Change the culture, change your world. Marketers make change happen. Each of us is a marketer, and each of us has the ability to make more change than we imagined. Our opportunity and our obligation is to do marketing that we’re proud of.

That’s because the best ideas require significant change. They fly in the face of the status quo, and inertia is a powerful force.

They say that the best way to complain is to make things better.

The first step on the path to make things better is to make better things.

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 true.

Every three hundred thousand years or so, the north pole and the south pole switch places. The magnetic fields of the Earth flip.

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

The magic of ads is a trap that keeps us from building a useful story

It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.

I wasted all that ad money. The ads didn’t work because the ads

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.

The first step is to invent a thing worth making, with a story worth telling, and a contribution worth talking about.

Vizio? I ain’t? Bradshop? TuNana?

The second step is to design and build it in a way that a few people will particularly benefit from and care about. The third step is to tell a story that matches the built-in narrative and dreams of that tiny group of people, the smallest viable market. The fourth step is the one everyone gets excited about: spread the word. The last step is often overlooked: show up—regularly, consistently, and generously, for years and years—to organize and lead and build confidence in the change you seek to make. To earn permission to follow up and to earn enrollment to teach.

Marketers don’t use consumers to solve their company’s problem; they use marketing to solve other people’s problems.

Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.

“People like us do things like this”