Seth Godin on marketing, storytelling, attention, and the future of work

Permission

marketing

is the idea of ​​delivering early, personal and relevant messages that people want to receive and as obvious as it may seem, in 1996 and 1998 it was a revolutionary statement that

marketing

and advertising were the same thing back then and that people thought if you had money you could interrupt whoever you wanted and I started an internet company before the world wide web called Yoyodyne and we invented permission marketing, the idea of ​​only contacting people who wanted to hear from us and the simple test is: would they miss you if you weren't there? you didn't show up where people say why didn't you show up and most advertising doesn't meet that test.

We were having trouble explaining to the big companies that our customers were people like American Express and Carter Wallis why this

work

ed. It took us months to make a sale, so since I understood how to make books, I made a book about it and found out that a great journey happened first. I was expelled from the Direct Marketing Association because they did not approve of my heresy. and then some marketers had the idea, but then you found out that companies like Groupon and Google are completely based on the idea, so they have created literally billions and billions of dollars of value and I'm not responsible for all the emails that you receive in your inbox. but the email you want to receive I will take some credit for that, well the good news is that there is a direct marketing Hall of Fame and after the Direct Marketing Association kicked me out a few years later, they brought me back to call and they invited me.

I, so I had a little plaque somewhere anyway, you know the idea that you can build an entity around it, we see it in American politics now much more than before we saw it in companies like blue Apron, Dropbox and Slack. all of which is based on this idea that we can communicate with people the way they want to be communicated, it turns out that that is more valuable than things where Amazon's value is not based on its warehouse, it is based on the fact that 100 million people around the world want to know about Amazon. I think that counts as a case study.

You know, marketing is driven by adrenaline. It is driven by urgency and emergency. We see it at its worst in political campaigns, but we see it everywhere. We do not have time. do it right, but we always have time to do it again, we overcome our fear by creating an emergency, but this endless emergency is caused by the fact that we are not patiently, drip, drip,

work

ing our way to a place of relevance, in fact, urgent . Patience, not hiding, but building an asset with patience is probably the most overlooked thing that marketers fail to do. People only buy from you for two reasons: they know you exist and they trust you.

The thing about paying

attention

is that if I give you my

attention

, I don't have it anymore, it's gone forever, so we focus more and more on keeping our attention on ourselves and not on giving it to whoever appears, specialists in marketing. They have a history of just getting attention and wasting it, but moving forward, the marketers who treasure that, the ones who appreciate it, the ones who cultivate it and nurture it, those marketers do better than the ones who are just running around. back and forth with an emergency, well, the biggest mistake marketers make over and over again.

It is the arrogance of selfishness the narcissism of I did this it was very difficult you should look at me I own it and you owe me your attention there is no humility there is no generosity there is no connection there so that is the big change we are we must make, we must make this change to stop throwing a tantrum and acting like a three-year-old and patiently earn the attention of the people we seek to serve. Well, you know there are people who are much better to talk to than me. You talk about things like this, people like Gary Vee who understand how to dance on the platform.

I have no interest in it. I think it's a trap. I think it's a way to avoid the other work, which is the work that makes you someone. They will look for time and time again that the next best seller is a surprise best seller, the ones that no one expected, that the film industry spends billions of dollars a year using tried and true platform techniques, and yet the films that delight and make enough money are the surprises that didn't follow any of those steps that you know used to be ran, attractions come Thursday night on TV at 8:00 p.m. because that was Rober, blah, blah, blah, there is a method.

I don't think you need a method. I think you should only worry about reporting and telling stories. Well, some journalists would like us to believe that reporting is different from telling stories, but of course that's not the case. a thousand ways to report a story is there a true way if four people see a car accident one person really sees what happened and the other three are wrong or do the four of us process it our own way that American television covers the news differently? Like Dutch television, they both do reports, of course they do, but what we know is that human beings process incoming information by telling themselves a story, a story about what they saw, a story about what change it will require, a story about how it fits into their current worldview and that's why there are people who believe nonsense like they shouldn't vaccinate their children, which is dangerous, are they evil?

I don't think they are evil, I just think they are telling themselves a story that has a bad side. effects and these stories need soil to grow in fertile soil and that comes from our culture culture is all around us culture destroys everything culture defeats truth culture defeats mathematics culture defeats any offer you can make so we have to understand the culture we have to understand the worldview we have to understand the perspective of the person we are talking to that the fascinating thing about science is that it has a set of rules that allow it to improve, but not Semmelweis, the brilliant scientist who discovered that if doctors simply washed their hands after giving birth to a baby, many children would not die, it was 20 years before other doctors began washing their hands because the story Semmelweis told did not resonate with those doctors and millions of babies died as a result, we see this again and again and again so our job is anyone who wants to make changes because that's what marketers do.

Our job is to tell a story that resonates with the people who hear it. I don't think authenticity exists. I think when we're being ourselves, we wear diapers and we poop, I mean that's what babies do there last time we did whatever we helped, we felt good ever since, we've been pretending, we put on a suit , because? when people see us they will judge us differently, we comb our hair, we brush our teeth, we do all these things, not because in that moment it is our authentic self, but because it is the self we choose to present, so we redefine authentic as meaning . consistent our consistent self is the one that if you look at it from behind and from the side it is the same our consistent self is the way we behave in front of our mom and in front of our client when we are consistent then We can define that as a kind of version of authenticity.

Well, I'm pretty good at not carrying too many regrets because they just don't work very well, but I'll give you a couple of examples of businesses in 1993. The story was online. Services would only work if they made money and I at the time was working with CompuServe AOL and Prodigy and this thing called the World Wide Web came up and I believed the story that we were in this static controlled world and if it didn't work money wasn't real so I ignored the World Wide Web for a year and a half. I didn't register for all the domains I could have.

I mean, I was halfway there. I didn't build the website I should have. built I didn't engage in 17 other behaviors because the story, my worldview, was that we were done, I was an AOL CompuServe and a prodigy, no one else was welcome, and the world wide web that didn't make money, that was slower, clunkier, and full of garbage, never worked. To come to something now, did other people see what was happening differently than I did? Of course, they did it right. Jerry and David built Yahoo on the basis that they saw what I saw and interpreted the exact same data completely differently.

I guess the way I interpret. It's just that I cried when I wrote drops and I didn't cry one of our marketing permissions that Tribes is the first book where I got to the heart of the change I'm looking to make in the world, I don't care if a Vaughn or a Harley-Davidson sells another product more, it matters to me that human beings step forward, that they speak their truth, that they look others in the eyes, that they throw away this industrialized regime and instead choose to take advantage of this moment we have. we have and I don't know how long we will have it we are all more powerful than we think we all have the ability to make things better and that is why I wrote tribes the idea of ​​the axis is that when we walk away from the fact that factory a is better than the factory, the way to win is to have a more efficient factory and we have to move away from that because someone has more robots than you and someone is willing to be cheaper.

So what do you have? What you have is people and the question is: do you have obedient people? People who do what they're told, show up on time, and become more efficient every day. Well, that won't help you much because that's what an inefficient factory needs or does it have attentive people, passionate people, connected people? Do you have people who act like they own the place? Do you have people who can look a customer in the eye and make a difference for that customer because it looks like to me, that's all you have left because once it's a robot, anyone can buy it, but that person, that person, It works with you, not for you, but with you, and no one else can have it as long as the two of you are dancing together, that's where success is. lies so you don't drive the axes you welcome them you hug them you nourish them that the organization of the

future

does not need many people I won the NBA authorization the school I run with two full-time people what you need is people who are willing to make a difference , we are willing to stand up and say "I did this", that they are restless enough that if they don't maintain it well they will leave because someone else wants them, that is the opposite of what most companies want. most companies say I want people to be oppressed I want them to comply I don't want to worry about them leaving well Isn't it better to have someone so good that you would miss them if they left than to have someone mediocre?

The people you trust have no better place to go. I think this is the frontier we have to move forward and if you are a worker you have to make a new commitment that you have been brainwashed for so many years. You've been cheated, you've been cheated and you've been put into debt for compliance and if you're just going to deliver more you're going to get more of that and there's an alternative and the alternative because everyone has a laptop and that laptop is connected to 1.5 billion other people, you have the same tool as everyone else, how you are going to use it, you know it is a curse and a blessing, that work as we know it, which started only 150 years ago, is now disappearing, that there was a 150 year hiatus like Gutenberg's parenthesis that lasted 500 years I printed books, I love them, now they come for much longer as a tool of change and that work, are you going to go to a building and stay there for 40 hours and go home and then do it again? do for 40 years and then you retire, that's gone, gone, we wish it would come back, some people we want to elect people who promise they'll bring it back, that's not going to happen, since that's the case we need. find meaningful work, even if that work doesn't involve helping a company make a profit, that this is the richest planet the planet has ever seen, that there are now more overweight people on the planet as a percentage than ever before in history .

There are more people who have what they need to survive as a percentage than ever before in history and it is the safest the world has ever been. Now what we're going to do, what we'd better do is figure out how to make it meaningful too, we'd better figure out how What we need to do is take these abundant resources and distribute them better and better because the inequality, the inequity between the people who have the luck of showing up at a monopoly on the right day and at the right time and those who don't, if that gets worse, it will be much more difficult to build a culture that we are proud of.

There is a difference between skill and talent. Skill is something that is learned. Talent is something you are born with. I grant you that dunking a basketball is a talent I will never be able to dunk. a basketball, but with few exceptions almosteverything in our life is a skill being on time is a skill learning to read is a skill being persuasive is a skill being brave enough to speak and tell the truth is a skill caring about clients is a skill heart surgery is a skill so the talent lie is to free yourself by saying well, I wasn't born capable of doing that because you're not going to make the NBA, I'm not going to make the NBA, so let's leave that off the table for everything else, it's about skill and skill is easier to demand now and always.

My friend Steve, this term, resistance, resistance, does not put the word in front, resistance is what gives us writer's block. which is an invented disease resistance is what makes us hesitate changing clothes six times before going on a blind date being nervous before giving a speech is our Migdal is the voice in the back of our head saying don't do that you're in trouble well, you were in trouble when the alarm went off and there was a saber-toothed tiger or a mastodon around you you were in trouble if that alarm went off and the chief was about to throw you out of the village, but now, when that alarm goes off, It is a light that tells you that you are going in the right direction because that is what it means to be notable, to be an axis for What you stand out is that you are nervous, you are afraid because something might not work and if we use it as a compass we cannot fight against it, but we can dance with it, if we use it as a compass, it almost always points in the exact direction.

We should go. I spend a lot of time thinking about how deep into the ground the fork of the river is being dug and on this side are the connected people who are going deeper and deeper doing research, looking at what works, testing, measuring, calculating. discovering what is going to bear fruit for our culture and on this side our instinctive fear-based reactions driven by the emotion of choosing your own truth and the problem would be choosing your own truth is that it leads to conspiracy theories that lead to ever More Choose your own truth and sooner or later you'll just live in Gaga land where there's no real connection between the things you believe in and what actually works, and I saw this behavior in big marketers in 1995 , who insisted that the world would be one way or another, I see it often when you talk to boards of directors or people who have something that is succeeding or is no longer going to be successful, but now you also see it with the public, You see it with people.

I just heard this. The other day, a lot of low-income people, when they're looking for a loan, they're looking for a high-interest loan because it's a big number. Big numbers must be good and all you want to do is go, oh my God, because you know it's stupid. I know it's silly, but yes We are surrounded by a culture that doesn't teach you, that doesn't have expectations that you will be able to go deeper and then you will suffer and I think we have to figure out how to close these gaps from the beginning. and often to help people realize that the things that we take for granted, that we can be warm and out of the weather and have enough to eat and all these other things, come from a test and measure philosophy, a philosophy of rewarding and building. a culture and I feel more and more urgency that we have to do that now