Seth Godin’s Marketing Secrets to Launching a New Business

So there you go, thank you very much once again for being on the podcast. I have bad news for you. We'll have to start a

business

together right now. We'll have to come up with some kind of

business

idea together. It's uh. Bad news because you have to work with me for a while and I'm not the best at that, so let me frame the challenge that I want us to go through together right now, so we're starting a business, we have, let's say, one. big to spend and we have to be profitable in three months or less, right, the only thing I like to put as a condition is that you can't use your name at all, we have to remain anonymous so you can't use the audience, of course, so let's start right now, let's say we have to create a business together from scratch, let's say it's an online business, we have to sell it, we can use the internet to sell it, how would you create a product that people would really like, well , is a great way to start, let's understand the first thing: we are going to market to people, not them, and that is a fundamental change from the way most entrepreneurs think they should run a factory. they should be up and running, they should find out what they make and then they should do something with people to make them notice them and believe they need what is being sold and then buy it, and that method made a lot of sense for a hundred years because you could pay money for it. the means and for that money you had people's attention, that was the deal, but what we have to do is start with the next thing, we have to start with something that is so suitable for the people who seek to serve that once it is They realize that they can't imagine participating without it, which means we can't pick a giant problem because there is no giant problem that can be solved for $1,000, they've all been taken, we have to think about not the largest possible market. , but the smallest possible market, the smallest possible market, that can sustain us and figure out how to give that group of people something that they can't imagine without, so that they can tell other people about it, so the Internet is a symptom from this. it's a side aspect of this, it's not an internet company, it's the internet that's used to spread what we did, so that's how I would start with the smallest audience possible in a generous way where no one thinks we're interrupting them because they can.

I don't think we have what you need, okay, so let's be a little specific. Do you have something in mind? A challenge you've recently encountered or a problem you've recently seen that you think is worth solving. a small audience in particular, well, so if I have 90 days, I'm just making this up as we go. Yes, what happens if I create a PDF document containing the 150 best Air B&B places to stay in Paris? Okay, he'll take me. Actually, you are going to do this job, it will take you a week of real effort to visit places, take photographs, do an analysis, explain which one, I remember, which one is the smallest, which one and in this 40 page document you will be able to give people a real value. about where they should stay when they are in Paris and we are going to give it away and we are going to give it away, we will do it in a medium publication and we will put it in other places so that anyone who searches for where should I stay in Paris is very likely to discover it and, even Better yet, when people discover it, they'll tell other people they know because it's so beautifully made that it's something they'll need along the way. next month we are going to focus obsessively on earning trust, we want to earn the trust of people who are looking for a place to stay, we want to earn the trust of people who expect people to stay with them and that's why we are going to create here a two-sided equation where the word gets out that we are the person to ask where to stay in Paris, we give great free advice and the word gets out to people looking to rent their gara or villa or whatever.

This is someone who can find you the clients you need, so we've spent another five weeks doing it by interacting with between a hundred and a thousand people a day, round trip, for free online until we are the indispensable intermediary and once that happens , we will make more than a thousand dollars, maybe even a thousand dollars a day, because people on both sides will come to us and say: I trust you. You have never guided me wrong. Can I give you some money to do? X, take me. on a tour, find me, take me somewhere I can't get in or come visit my villa and write an honest review for other people to see.

The position of intermediary is not currently filled in Paris, it could be filled by someone. who has less than a thousand dollars and within 90 days we will have an asset that is people who trust us on both sides and we will be able to convert that asset into their cash flow over time serving the people that we seek to serve, so let's First of all, I analyze that. The first task would be to create some sort of free PDF content that is really valuable and something nice enough to get people interested. I would like to go deeper into what you just said.

Not only should we help people find a great looking B&B in Paris, but I think we should help Americans find a bigger B&B place in Paris. Because I'm American. I think everyone is American. Yes, and I know you know it. You said Paris because you think I'm French and I'm actually French, which is a big assumption, you know, but we just need to get back to it. I think if we choose the smallest audience, the one we feel most uncomfortable with. almost afraid it's too small, I think it's a great start for Americans who might have specific knees or we can even go deeper.

Are we talking about people from California specifically exactly so those people can have needs like high speed internet They want to see monuments from the balcony They want to discover some food that they have seen in San Francisco but are actually the real deal in Paris Maybe it I'm making it up too, but I'm restricting myself To that point we can understand exactly your problems, we create this big list that you make me do and you pay me to do that, which is great, that's why we publish that because you're anonymous you can't use your name .

How would we go about promoting this first content? So I wrote a blog post several years ago called First Ten and it's still one of my biggest posts and what I'm saying is everyone knows ten people and if you don't know ten people you have to start over if you know ten people you give them this if they tell other people it's good if they don't tell other people you need to do something better and so you don't have to put my name on it and we only need ten people, we only need ten people in this very specific market and we don't I'm sure I would choose California, maybe I would say people with children between three and seven years old, because they know a lot of things. other people who have children between three and seven years old, what we are looking to do another one that is very similar is that we all know Jiro's documentary Dreams of Sushi that became a sensation and now the waiting list to get dinner with Jiro is enormous, Well, I could imagine a business that does nothing more than act as a concierge for people who want to dine at Jiro's, that's all the business is super run, but the fact is that if you know one person who knows Ed Levine at Serious Eats, Levine will write about what you just did because it's very specific and it aligns with their audience of people, so I chose something that I thought we could do in 90 days, but you know what it might take 200 days and that's okay because you can do a group of them, my point is that marketers that humans don't like are simply because they have unremarkable products that make them act like selfish idiots, so if you start out by stating that you need something that is extraordinary to a unique group of people, We are 80% of the way right, so we created this very good content.

I may have to update it a few times until I know that those ten people I'm sharing it with actually love it so much that they're reading it to prove it. free, so those are the first two steps and then how do we get to this intermediary position where people would start asking us for advice? So what happens is what we want in a low trust world is someone to trust and our problem is not piracy, our problem is darkness and the record industry spent too much time fighting piracy, piracy is awareness , hacking leads to attention, attention leads to trust, so if over time you get people to trust you, people who want something extra will come to you. and they will contact you because my pseudonym, Jaco, is there at the bottom with my email address and I answer all my emails and most of the time, if I can communicate with someone for three minutes, it's free, but if I want. get on a plane or you want me to cross the street or you want me to do something special for you, then let's agree to charge for it because it's worth it, so I'll call you Jack for the next few minutes if it's okay, Jack, you really will, so What you expect from this content is that it be so valuable, so revealing, so specific, so good, that people who want to contact you will tend to ask you more questions to delve deeper into the topic.

The problems are a little more correct and by answering them by being kind and helpful you hope that in return they trust you and therefore trust you enough to maybe pay for something, so if you are bigger than what they got from free content, yes, and I just so we can get out of the consumer mentality. The other day I was looking at some learning management software. This is like a whiteboard, but the next generation that you can teach a course on turns out there are 40 products in the space and it's really complicated if you had.

In a week I could write a special report on the advantages of each if I wrote a report on the advantages of each without the help of Seth Godin. I was surprised that Coda would easily be the number one SEO match for what film software I should buy and once you're in that position again, how many companies where it's not their money will call you and say look, my boss wants me to buy one. of this. I don't know what your consulting fee is. Well, actually, I was charging a thousand dollars an hour, which means that after an hour of work I broke even, which is what you said my job was, you might not be able to charge a thousand an hour if you notice that under , the people no.

You don't know, they do know me, they trust me because I wrote the definitive 70 40 pieces of software with everything. I'm just giving people a lot of trust by creating a lot of value and all I ask in return is to be trustworthy, fantastic, okay, long story short, we create very good content, so good that in return, the people start trusting us, contact us, we start charging for problems adjacent to the problem we solve and we should invest in ads, what you know. - let's say we need to scale this business let's say some people have contacted us we make some money what would you do next where would you invest the money I would invest the money in using the process again and again and again it would be a long time ago that I started running ads because the fact is the pie is that big and I've reached so many people, so when I go to an advertiser it's to reach that many people, I don't need to do what I need to do yet.

What I have to do is give the people who trust me a very good reason to tell their friends, so if you think about how you found out about Facebook or Twitter, you didn't find out about it from advertising, but from people who benefited if you started using them. It's writing it so that if you can start creating cycles, it's in their interest, not because you're bribing them, but because it's in their best interest to tell other people that they're going to do it, so here's an example. When I published this book, I put it on a milk carton. and only 5,000 people got it at first and I made zero money.

I even came out, but if you got this and you read it, you decided that your job would be better if other people you worked with understood what the hell you were talking about and So people put this on their desk because if it's on your desk, someone comes up and says what is that and you have a conversation about it so that's it if you didn't say you wanted scale when you gave me the task but if you want scale you have to choose a solution that works best if my friends do too and one of my favorite examples is Alcoholics Anonymous.

They are not anonymous. In fact, the first rule of Alcoholics Anonymous is to tell other people about an a because an a will work. better if your friends are not drunks, but if instead they are like you in recovery, that will make everything better for you and that's how it spreads to millions and millions of people, well that's fantastic, I think it's a great start for the episode. I'll give a lot of people some ideas on where to start, just to mention thelisteners who are not necessarily watching the video. You mentioned your book, The Violet Cap.

Oh, I forgot about the fact that we were only on audio, yes, both of us. The cow came in a milk carton and I also want to say that since we're shifting gears, that's the most innovative and energizing way anyone has ever started a podcast with me. Good for you. Thank you. I'm definitely not going to edit that, but let's get back to it. a little bit to you and I have heard many things from you. I've read your books and I'm not going to repeat what a lot of people will say. I'm just curious what kind of kid you were and you're very curious to ask your teachers to the point of knowing that you were allowing them what kind of key value before to answer the question.

I have to put a disclaimer here is that that question is often asked by people other than you as a way to free yourself because if we are different from the person who has done those other things then it is not our fault because we were not . I was born that way, so I've studied a lot of people who have done creative work and who are artistic and who have made change happen and the only thing we have in common is that we have nothing in common. So high and low, rich and not rich they grew.

I grew up with great parents I grew up without parents across the spectrum, you know, Jeff Bezos' loving family took him in, but Jeff Bezos didn't grow up in the same kind of nuclear home that I did well, so which is which do you want? I'm not in his league in many areas, but I'm just using him as an example of someone I've talked to. The point is, I was super obnoxious when I was a high school student. The teachers rolled their eyes when they saw me. A high school teacher wrote in my yearbook that I was never going to amount to anything in the future and I'm not, but I don't think that's a requirement to be someone who learns to look at the world differently, I just think that's how it was. right, in my case I wasn't asking that to find out if you know that people like you are more likely to be successful and I'm really interesting in the past because it's usually the best prediction of the future and what people are like, so let's go back.

I spend a little more time on

marketing

because it's what I want to talk about the most and you mentioned it at the beginning, but why do you think marketers have such a bad reputation in general? There are two reasons: the first reason is that most of us deserve it because we are selfish, lying scum who think short term and believe that our job is to manipulate people while we market to them, but the other reason, which is just as important , is that people understand that they are to blame for consumers falling in love. short-term stuff, they're not disciplined enough to ask the hard questions, they're looking for magic beans, rainbows, and pots of gold, and we feel terrible when we get fooled, in part because we knew better and therefore know the reason why.

The reason buying a car in the United States is so horrible is because customers insist on it being that way and if instead customers just paid the price like we do with bread, that's how cars would be sold, car dealers They do it the way they do it because even though we pretend we hate it, we do it to them because we want to feel like we can beat the system, which is a human failing and we get punished for it all the time, which is why both marketers like consumers are bad together, so every consumer, every person, would think they are smarter than the system and would try to use the system correctly, yeah, or you know, we look at all the canals clogged with bottled water, garbage and we buy bottled water, hook and sinker line because we wanted to. believe that it would make us thinner, cool us down faster, whatever we wanted, that feeling that we didn't need bottled water, there are countries in the world where we do, but where I live, no, and that's why consumers are guilty, we look at all the rubbish we go.

We hate the marketers who forced us to buy into this junk economy, yes, but we buy into the junk economy, so it's both the issue of fast food, for example, and the shitty food you'd buy in supermarkets. , you know they are too processed. and fat and full of sugar. Sometimes I tell my friends that I don't think it's the fault of the people who buy cheap food. You know, I don't think they're the ones to blame. I think it's the big companies that have a lot of money behind them and that try to deceive, lie and manipulate so that you think this is good food, it's one hundred percent chicken, oh it's one hundred percent whatever, so yeah, I'm done With this, I think not.

I don't think it's 5050. I think it's a big company's fault for us. Well, I didn't say it was 5050. It's very difficult to apportion blame. What I'm saying is that the thing about accountability is that they don't do it. Give it, take it and when a culture says we are not going to tolerate it, we have this wonderful process in most countries where the government should listen to us and establish a correct rule so that their companies feel incentivized by the fact that they are public companies, As public companies, they have investors, those investors are us, investors are short-term selfish people who want stocks to go up tomorrow, so we pressure companies to do exactly what we say we don't want them to do. do and then it's this giant circle where everyone is responsible, who is the most responsible, the well-paid CEO, for sure, because the well-paid CEO needs to have the guts to look at the market and I say no, we're not going to do that. .

We don't tolerate that and if she wants to sell the stock go ahead, yes it's his responsibility but all the factors at play mean she has to make that difficult decision so I refuse to let anyone get away with it. don't let me off the hook, I think the government is letting us down, the CEOs are letting us down, the shareholders are letting us down and we're all those, let's get a little more details on the bad

marketing

we're talking about. Are there any particular tactics or things that you see happening right now in digital marketing and marketing in general that you would consider to be completely wrong, like these so-called best practices that are completely wrong?

Well, where does it begin? Start with the race. all the way to the bottom to get attention, if you say my only job is to catch eyeballs and my job is to get eyeballs as cheaply as possible, then you buy algorithmic advertising, then you buy stealthy tracking of people's data, then you buy the questionable content that We are busy paying for and then accept the degradation of our culture while we rush to make everything dumber, make it easier. That all starts with this mistaken assumption that all attention is the same and then they don't need to trust us.

So that's part of it and then the second part is that we free ourselves by making crazier and crazier promises to people that we know we can't keep because our competition is making these promises, so we feel like we have to promise them. So that's where the Flat Belly Diet comes from, that's where the idea of ​​seducing people into debt comes from because we say well, it's not me, it's my competition, another race to the bottom, the reason I'm in This field is because at the same time, there is also a race to the top and it turns out that if you are in the race to the top you can win more reliably, it's just harder, so the race to the top is how I can become the most trustworthy, how can I become the most trustworthy. distinctive, how can I become the most ethical?

If you do those things, you win just as well, but it's not obvious how to get there. You have to think a lot, so you mentioned that there is nothing like not all eyeballs are the same. You really shouldn't do it. go after any type of clique or all types of cliques, so how do we convince marketers who really believe one hundred percent that attention is the only currency available? What would I say to them? Well, I need to talk to your boss because the boss is said we're going to make average things for average people, as soon as you commit to that, then the customer wants the cheapest, the cheapest they can find, and now you're stuck. again and how can I interrupt more people? make it cheaper how do I sell it cheaper once you accept that cycle?

Everyone is acting rationally. My problem is accepting that cycle in the first place. So when you think about it, you know that Sam Walton said the container ship is a miracle. How can I build a a billion dollar company a 100 million billion dollar company well that sells average things at junk prices that we make at the lowest price I can by gutting my communities and bringing them in from one country low wages, well, game theory said that was in their interest. because you couldn't build the other type of company because it seemed too difficult to get to that place, but every community that you showed up in, whether it was investors or customers, allowed you to do it and so what do we have to figure out how to do it?

On the Internet, no one knows your dog on the Internet, anyone can show up with anything. We have to figure out how to create standards so that you don't see an ad like that on a well-known website and know this. The store is not going to sell those items or not, I'm not going to do business with advertisers that play this way and if we don't talk that way or we don't get our government to talk that way, then we're just going to go up. with trash, here's a challenge for you. I'm just thinking about it now that it wasn't in the question I was planning to ask you, but there is an industry that I live in Ireland, but I know from living in France and in the US it's exactly the same, there is an industry that really You know me, it's telecommunications companies, Internet providers, phone providers, mobile Internet, that type of thing for me, that's the summary.

If I had to pick an industry, they are the ones that are really running to the bottom, they always compete on price, they come up with the same features every time, right, let's say we have a brilliant idea to start our own Internet company, we provide Internet like the others, but how would you make it extraordinary so that you can Ask the question exactly the wrong way I don't know if you did it on purpose, you can't, you can't start by saying how we do it like everyone else and we do it extraordinary, you have to say how we do it we make. making it different from everyone else so that it's notable and then you say how do we do it for the smallest possible audience and that part takes discipline, but when I think about the magic of an Internet company or a telecom company, what do they do? to make a living we connect with other people, something we desperately want, so there are only two ways to do it: you can connect us with other people the same way everyone else connects us with other people, in which case I would like to be more cheap, thank you very much. a lot or you can connect us with different people in a different way people I can only reach through you this is what Facebook does Facebook says that anyone could create the software that is Facebook, it would take you ten smart people a month because you are copying but it wouldn't be worth it because the people you want to reach are not on your site, they are on Facebook, so the opportunity for someone is to say where is the minimum group of people who desperately want to connect in a new way. , if I can connect them using hardware and software, they will want to be connected because they don't want to be left out and from that small circle, if what I'm doing really works, the circle will get bigger, that's how it works. it always happens, yeah, I think that's the right way to put it, so let's not start by trying to be average and reach the same number of people that they would reach out to and the other important thing here that you just said.

Naturally, like it's that easy, but I think a lot of people struggle with that. You were able to quickly identify the work to be done, the real first principle of why people use the Internet, so I think that's a very good lesson for the listeners is that we always have to think about the first principle behind the product. or service that we use, that's the best way to market, it's ready to think about the core emotions, the feelings, the core things that we do with it, so I like it. really very very similar to that part of the answers, well in 1999 he wrote the book where he came up with the term permission marketing and since then many other companies and people have used the term or changed slightly from permission marketing to inbound marketing, but basically the same concept, so you're pretty good at spotting trends before anyone else.

Do you have any methodology behind it? You have a way of finding things before they seem to be popular. Well, since this is my main claim to fame, I'll leave you to it. Know that I started doing it in 1990 and I named it in 96. Well, it was exciting and I was early, so one of the things I would tell people is that it's not really necessaryinvent any of these trends, you just have to do it. It gets there a little earlier than everyone else and the way to do it is to listen to the crazy people because the crazy people are always going to talk about it before you, so in the case of the Internet, Kevin Kelley, a proud crazy person like me. wrote a book that summed it all up and it's called, you can find it on KK org, but he just wrote it, he was the founding editor of Wired, I think he wrote it after I did permission marketing, so probably 97 and Yes I read it, it was all laid out and what people did was look at it and say, I can't see it and the reason they couldn't see it is because they were reading it the same way they would read Time magazine.

Tell me something that I already know, but the trick is to adopt a mindset where you can say I'm reading this, tell me something that I don't know and when you come across something that you don't know, you will have to change your mind because at this moment your decision is determined you know what's important you know what's working if someone says something new you have to change your mind and start with oh I didn't know that's important I knew something I didn't know something that was important and now I'm doing it so you act like it well what would this mean and what would this mean and what would this mean how do I take it in one direction and if it feels like that there is something there then you can start talking about it like a normal person and maybe other people will want to hear you talk about it And how would you identify a crazy town?

Well, I think what we're trying to do is live like in the gray in the zone between black and white the zone between good and evil tested and unproven in the zone of possibility that what we do is live in that area and that's why we make a lot of mistakes that's why people think that we are very wrong and if you realize that making mistakes is really cheap, if you do it right then you can live there for a long time because it's cheap to make mistakes and people don't remember all of them. the times I was wrong, they only remember the six times I was wrong.

Right, when was the last time you made a mistake? Well, there's a reason I don't have money in the stock market because every time I put money in the stock market I make a mistake, but you know, the biggest one I talked about was when I was sure the World Wide Web was It was a scam and it was never going to work and it cost me a couple of billion dollars so it was a costly time to get it wrong but I still have to keep playing so your main advice here would be to try to identify the people who seem to be wrong frequently, but at least I think if they're wrong, they're taking risks, yeah, so I would say the main advice is I'm not trying to rework to rephrase what you said.

I'm just trying to simplify it as I understand it's obscure. Now you are doing very well. I'm trying to find people who take a lot of risks to say things like they are, who try to, you know, write a lot to probably or record videos on YouTube quite frequently, so probably people who would produce a lot of content, already Since the term is used quite a bit, the people who made it would take a big risk in that regard. Yeah, well, let me interrupt for a second. I don't think it's, I don't think it needs to be a volume, so Eric Raymond wrote a book called The Cathedral and the Bazaar and it described all the crowdfunding, all the crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, Linux, everything, and this was over 20 years ago. years.

I don't think he wrote anything else, so it's not necessarily that it's a lot, it's that other people who are crazy refer to it, that's enough, okay, that makes a lot of sense. One thing I have noticed. I am a marketing specialist. I know a lot of marketers and it's a common challenge among marketers and it's like you know this challenge very well, people seem to be completely overwhelmed with all the options out there, all the channels, the tactics available. , so there are Growth Hacking days. I know Facebook and the bots that come. You know, there are so many things I can think about right now that would really drive me crazy if I had to think about it every day.

So what's your advice to people and marketers in particular who are getting lost in the sea of ​​all things, right marketers in 1966 just how to buy television and they did it right, television was the solution magic, so we grew up believing that there was a magic solution, there isn't one, what I would say is the number. One of the assets you are building is a trusted connection, a direct connection with the end user. Any method you want is fine as long as it leads to a direct connection with the end user and number two is being in a lot of places, it's not. as important as being in a place, so I'm not on Facebook, I'm not on Twitter, it's okay to choose something, it doesn't matter if you choose the perfect one, you just choose something and by choosing it, you choose it. saying I'm a podcast or not a blogger saying I speak at conferences but you can't find me online or you can't find it choose your thing, build your asset there in a way that others don't have the resolute willpower to sustain because that's what you're trying to do is be the only one, so you have to build a fort high enough for everyone to see, so I could never build a fort that high, that's what you have to do. invest in your channel so that the people you interact with feel like they can trust you, but I guess that goes back to one of your main tips from earlier, which was that you were a very hyperlocal audience, I think if you go to a channel very specific niche, the channels or the tools that you are going to use are almost going to be chosen correctly because this particular tribe, this particular niche would probably only use Facebook a lot more than Twitter or would only use Pinterest a lot more than Facebook and therefore it goes to be obvious, so I think those two are connected the day, that's right, you've done it.

I'd like to talk about everything, so Penguin Magic is a great little company that sells magic tricks to amateur magicians. Professional magicians don't buy magic tricks because they only need 10 and they just do the same 10 over and over again, but they are amateurs. Magicians need a lot of tricks because we keep doing them for the same people and they get tired of them so we have to buy new ones and it's a great site because what they do is show you a video of the trick but you can't. find out how it's made unless you buy it and the tricks cost 10 20 30 dollars so when you buy it they email you a video of them packing the exact item when they ship it to you and in the box when you receive it. something you didn't ask for, which is a beautifully produced magazine with other tricks that teach you how to do this or that and, if you're a regular customer, you may find that the CEO just mails you stuff with a personal note that says: I thought of you when I saw this trick.

How much did it cost you to do all these extra things? Cents cents I mean, they charged me ten dollars for a trick and sent me an email with the response. There wasn't even a trick. Okay, so the margins are great, no problem, so that's one example I'll give you, the other example I'll give you right there, yeah, what's the trick to getting you to vote? Oh, I'm not doing any magic for you right now. I'm not ready no no no I don't expect you to trick me into a fight Jenny I do what's the trick you got?

I do a lot of mentalism tricks for mind reading and the trick I'm Thinking About now implies is a normal deck of cards. I give it to you, I don't touch it again and I ask you to do the trick to separate the cards without looking at them in black and red, so without seeing them on red. red red black red black blue right, so you put 2016 in each pile you're guessing. I turn the batteries over. all the black ones are in a pile. all the veterans in the other pile. I'm not going to ask you the question, it's so good to get the trick you have to pay $10 so it's so good, it's so good, okay, and then the other one is a little more subtle, which is Danny Meyer, the great tour of New York City restaurants have something elegant about them, it's nice, these restaurants in New York and there are no tips allowed.

No, I don't know about Ireland, but I know it's a different thing in France, but people in America tip 15% or so and all the money goes to the waiter. The people in the back who cooked don't receive it. anything Danny thinks is ridiculous and unfair, so he's betting his entire company on creating a new standard, and as a shopping experience, it's extraordinary because his commitment to the front-of-house and back-of-house staff is different because the people who worked there feel differently about how and why they're serving you and that's not a super subtle trick and the kind of bold accountability that I'm a big fan of is something I heard on an episode of the freakonomics podcasts, so They were saying this guy owns more than one restaurant and he started avoiding tipping at this restaurant, so let me think about the benefits that had, so this is something first of all when you don't expect that, as a waiter, your relationship with the client is much older. more genuine, so I don't want one thing to be said, the second is, I remember, if I remember correctly, that in the back of the house, those who like cooks and all those people, they really pay us much less, I do not remember. why it happened, but they got paid a lot less in this case because it's against the law to give them tip money, that's all, it's against the law, so now that not everyone gets tips, they were able to increase those people's pay if I remember correctly that people were happier and stayed longer because there was a low retention rate of certain people in the back of the restaurant there is another there is another benefit I don't remember when well actually one of the Great benefit that that happened.

One of the best things that happened to him and the restaurant is that this move generated so much publicity for him that he was hired for months and months and months and months, so I guess he was behaving remarkably this way, but it's a very interesting topic in France you don't tip in Ireland sometimes you don't tip but it's not as far as in the US where you might have to tip it's a very strange place to be at the moment because you have to judge people based on their performance and then you don't tip them if they're bad or if you think they're bad, which is not really a good feeling, is that right?

But you asked me about the shopping experience and what it does to me. I feel like when I go there it's someone who is interacting with professionals who care about equity and that feeling is one of the things I want when I go to a restaurant because if all I want to do is eat, I stay home and have a can. of beans, yes, it's more about the experience. I'm interested to know what you scored. He has identified many notable companies in the past. Do you have any examples of notable companies that used to be notable that are no longer notable?

Well almost. all the companies I've ever met mentioned are in that category, oh that's why I don't mention them that often because it's a curse, it's just that competition is something that a lot of people like and as an organization becomes gets bigger, the people they hire tend to be people who want to feel competent, so you join a company of 500 people not because you want to be a pioneer in throwing eggs but because you want to do a good job in quotes, so what happens is when you're looking for a 100 or 200 or 400 people and you're good at something you want to stay good at, you eventually start defending your old self even though the outside world has raised the bar and you're afraid because to change you have to become incompetent.

Again, this change always creates incompetence on the way to a new type of competition, so we end up with this cycle, so we see that McDonald's was a super notable company in 1958. In 1958, if you drove across the country , you only had two options. every lousy food that could make you sick or eat McDonald's was extraordinary, but then they went through a 40 year period where they were just defending something they stood for and over time you can't keep growing. You know, it was interesting to see my friends at Lululemon stumble last week because same-store sales went down a lot and one of the reasons they went down is because the easiest thing to do if you're a Lululemon is to sell what you sold yesterday because If you throw away if you discover something new and bold, it may not work and therefore you don't do it, and again, finding out in which areas you are willing to be incompetent is the only way to grow.

So how would you advise, say, a company that has quite a bit? of employees where they are not really it is not easy for them to be so flexible, at least on paper, how would you advise them to go back to being incompetent? Well, you know, we need to start with what your asset is, is it your relationship with suppliers? their relation. with the stock market relationship with customers because you don't want your asset to break down, but if you take some of that asset and put it in experimental mode, that's how you can grow with advantage, so when I was at Yahoo I sat down with the CEO and co-founder and I said Jerry, this is whatI want to do.

I want you to cut my salary by 80%, give me two employees and let me cross the street and we'll build things that will divert just 1% from Yahoo. traffic and prevent you from having to buy the next company for 10 billion dollars that we can be a factory to build those things, so what assets would Yahoo put on the table? 1% of daily traffic will point you to new and mysterious things, let the core group do what the core group does, but what you can do is build a factory across the street. This is how Lockheed revolutionized the airplane.

Tom Peters has written extensively about this. It takes guts to do it and I was surprised by Jerry's response because he was very honest and what he told me was that I would love to do that, but if I did it, everyone else would want to do that job too and that's why he was worried about having to tell its main group of 300 people. you have to do the boring work. I'm going to let Seth do something fun. What was lost was that most of those 300 people wanted to do the boring job because they had stock options that went up every day and they were confident they had them.

They had a good time and were good at it, most people don't want to give that up, but when you find someone who is willing to give that up and you give them a place where they can go explore, they will. Another example is John Patrick when he was at IBM, he invented the whole IBM Internet consulting business by himself because the CEO let him have a year and a couple of offices and ten people and told him: "Use the IBM name but don't do anything stupid. He didn't think that could fail, but I didn't do things that would bringIt's an embarrassment to IBM, so it's across the street The description is actually on purpose.

I wouldn't recommend leaders let a. group of 10 people walk through the same office and another in another place. He would advise them to stay away from the main office. I think that is essential because here is the asset that is not useful, yes, that is not useful, since. all the people around the water cooler, the asset that is not useful is your instinct to level off and stay away from the edges, isn't that what makes your The good company is just a byproduct and the fact that your company be good, so you have to get away from that and you get away from it by physically leaving the building, so as a leader, you need to identify the people who are winning and take risks that really take matters into their own hands and so Generally, there will be a lot more people willing to stay in their comfort zone and feel comfortable there, and that's perfectly fine, plus obviously, you have a big company and you have to continue running the show. and making sure everything went well, so I really like it.

I think it's a very good insight into innovation, and it's actually good practical advice as well. I also have many young graduates asking me: I want to go into marketing, how should I do that? So I know you mentioned before that people shouldn't have top of the range TVs, they should have a reputation that stands for them correctly, so if you link that to companies, companies shouldn't hire by CV, how should they hire them to separate? So the first part is that the best way to learn marketing is to do marketing, not be part of a marketing department, so the good thing is that marketing doesn't cost money anymore, so market a cause you believe in, market a company that doesn't exist, go to the market, it's a political thing, just go to the market, don't ask anyone's permission, just start and then from the company's point of view, you know, I don't hire people unless I have worked with them first and it is much easier. work with someone now so that's what companies shouldn't say oh he's good at interviewing therefore he should work here they should say oh we worked with him on a project he does exactly the kind of work that we like it, let's involve him and the ability to be in the world doing this work and be seen well, don't show me your resume, show me your work and in our field, he is here more than anyone else, let's say someone is lost or is lost in the causes. that she cares about all the things that she likes, how would you briefly advise someone to choose something that he should work on?

Do you mean they are too caught up? They'll just be like there's so much noise that they don't really know if they need it, yeah, so it doesn't matter, make a roulette and spin the wheel, don't do anything, you know, so my first jobs as a marketer were building a ski club in Buffalo, New York, and market it at a high level. Then school students for my father, they wrote texts for his ski bindings division of the company he worked for, then they opened a cafe, a travel agency and a ticket office at the university and then they marketed ski games. computer for six year olds, they have nothing in common, so start and that's the secret that people who are marketers are marketers because they know the difference between things that might work and things that might not, and the only way to learn that is by doing marketing, so go ahead, do it right.

Do you think marketers should learn today that will help them in the next 10 years 20 years 50 years humility and empathy what are the top three resources you would recommend marketers and digital marketers in particular to read or discover for digest well? I wrote 18 books for you, so I would definitely start there. I would read some of the marketing classics that are now ignored. David Ogilvy, the book Scientific Advertising. I would read Steve Pressfield and the Art War. I would definitely read The Art of Possibility by Ben and Lysander, these are books about humility and empathy, not books about algorithmic advertising, they said you've been absolutely amazing before I let you go, anything you want to add, anything you want to say to the people. listeners, well, I would just like to remind you that what you are doing now is not easy, it takes a lot of time and I hope they appreciate it and you, so I'm glad you're doing this work, thank you, that means a lot. stir