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

by Seth Godin

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.

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

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

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

The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.

Ideas travel horizontally now: from person to person, not from organization to customer.

give them something to talk about

If the change you seek to make can’t be talked about, perhaps you should find a different change worth making.

the best way to earn trust is through action.

The goal isn’t to maximize your social media numbers. The goal is to be known to the smallest viable audience.

attempts to build a perpetual motion machine of profit almost always end with bitterness, because they require you to push too hard and too fast to do anything that lasts. The goal is to prime the pump with ads that are aimed at neophiliacs, people looking to find you. Then build trust with frequency. To gain trial. To generate word of mouth. And to make it pay by building a cohort of people, a network that needs your work to be part of who they are and what they do.

becoming an outlier isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish.

There’s no reason to talk about a new kind of chocolate you really like. It doesn’t make your life better if others eat it. On the other hand, you spend a lot of time telling people about Snapchat or Instagram or Twitter, because if your friends followed you, your life would improve.

Connected tribes are more powerful than disconnected ones.

“I’m the last person on earth who’s not using this.”

the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now.

I was like you. I was in the desert. Then I learned something and now I’m here.

People will pay attention to you and the change you seek when they are unable to consistently ignore it.”

“Don’t make threats. Do or don’t do.”

The best marketers are farmers, not hunters. Plant, tend, plow, fertilize, weed, repeat.

Zig had a different strategy.

The easy sales aren’t always the important ones.

Here you are offering more value than you’re charging. It’s a bargain. A gift.

Someone will benefit from your better if you get out of your way and market it. There’s a student who’s ready to sign up. There’s somebody who wants a guide, who wants to go somewhere. If you hesitate to extend yourself with empathy, to hear them, you’re letting us down.

persist with generosity and care.

It is the marketing we do for ourselves, to ourselves, by ourselves, the story we tell ourselves, that can change everything.