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

by Seth Godin

Instead of selfish mass, effective marketing now relies on empathy and service.

You cannot change everyone; therefore, asking, “Who’s it for?” can focus your actions and help you deal with the nonbelievers (in your head and in the outside world).

The simple marketing promise

Instead, begin with dreams and fears, with emotional states, and with the change your customers seek.

product or service works better when I use it with others.

the path of connection, empathy, and change.

We’ve gone from all of us being everyone to all of us being no one. But that’s okay, because the long tail of culture and the media and change doesn’t need everyone any longer. It’s happy with enough.

Or you can be an agent of change, someone who creates tension and then relieves it.

what a professional does for you is design something that other people will like.

If you tell your competition your tactics, they’ll steal them and it will cost you. But if you tell them your strategy, it won’t matter. Because they don’t have the guts or the persistence to turn your strategy into their strategy.

The Google ecosystem is based on a myth.

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

Lowering your price doesn’t make you more trusted. It does the opposite.

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat. Let someone else race around after shiny objects.

Realize that as a marketer, the better you are trying to teach or sell to the right person is worth far more than what you are charging.

If you don’t market the change you’d like to contribute, then you’re stealing.