BOOK: This Is Marketing, by Seth Godin

I’ve done it. I’ve read my first book by Seth Godin.  My second book of the summer. I am a bit tardy on it, but I wanted to finally get one under my belt to be conversant in his view of marketing.  My marketing and brand expert friends seem to prefer his Purple Cow effort from years ago, but this was a good summary.  This is Marketing was both interesting to me in some unexpected ways, and I don’t think I need to read another book by him.  At Godin’s core, his own remarkability is that he likes to provoke us, the world of change agents, to something greater.  He agrees that much in marketing can be shameless and shameful attempts at manipulation.  However, he thinks that same comparison can be appended rightly to any or at least many disciplines.  I gave the book away as it is not one that makes the library but here is a bit of what I took from the read.

He confirms Thiel, Buffet and other business thinkers in that a start up or a new product should go after a smaller, most viable focused market.  He fundamentally, views marketers as change agents and reminds them in that regard, that it is the world view of the market you are serving that is more important than the world view of you. This impression fits perfectly with a story telling class I took a few years ago with Matthew Taylor, https://matthewtaylor.com/.   Matthew reminded us how self-absorbed we are.  We like stories because they trigger our own stories that we want to tell or be known for.  So, you need to remember that your story is essentially just a hook into someone’s own story.  That feeds for me back to Godin’s concept “people like us, do things like this.”  The story as a marketer serves to touch a culture and normalize a new behavior.

Last, the book gets caring and personal at times and that, I liked the most about it.  Godin emphasizes the role of “status” and how who we are and what we accept in terms of our assigned role, is so powerful.  I suppose the most human aspect he mentioned that didn’t seem to me to have much to do with status in marketing but in society, is his brief mention of shame.  “Shame is the status killer. If we accept the shame someone sends our way, it undermines our entire narrative about relative status.” I think that aspect is why he is concerned about how destructive we can be in society, or in how we influence.  With that brief aside, he returns to the issue at hand. Tell great stories to get a focused group to buy a great product.  On to my next summer reading book, Robin, the biography of Robin Williams.