This is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn To See

by Seth Godin

The smallest viable market is the focus that, ironically and delightfully, leads to your growth.

Small viable market

Specific is a kind of bravery

Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What’s the smallest market you can survive on?

Find a position on the map where you, and you alone, are the perfect answer.

We are alone in this map Min - sales

Figure out the simplest useful version of your product, engage with the market, and then improve and repeat.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want.

Your work is not for everyone. It’s only for those who signed up for the journey.

The simple marketing promise Here’s a template, a three-sentence marketing promise you can run with: My product is for people who believe _________________. I will focus on people who want _________________. I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get _________________.

Earn, and keep, the attention and trust of those you serve.

“This is better for someone and it might be better for

you.”

Empathy is at the heart o...

Everything that we purchase—every investment, every trinket, every experience—is a bargain.

if you’re unwilling to have empathy for the narrative of the person you seek to serve, you’re stealing.

Your job as a marketer is to find a spot on the map with edges that (some) people want to find.

There are two voices in our heads. There’s the dog’s voice, the one that doesn’t have many words, but knows what it wants. And there’s the owner’s voice, which is nuanced, contradictory, and complex.

neophiliacs—addicted

You can’t be perfect in the eyes of an early adopter; the best you can do is be interesting.

Who’s it for?

The people you seek to serve—what do they believe? What do they want?

A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person.

Old-fashioned industrial marketing is built around the person who pays for the ads.

We’re not so much interested in features as we are in the emotions that those features evoke.

Because better is what our market is waiting for.

But what would better look like? Not for you, but for the customer?

We made the “doing” easier, which is precisely why we need to outsource that part of our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of making change happen.

If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them.