hi I'm Seth Godin I'm the founder of the Alton ba and the author of a book called
this is marketing one of the biggest traps that marketers fall into is they
think they want to sell to everyone that Nike and Coke and maybe even Apple sell
to everyone so we should try to sell to everyone you can't you don't have enough
time and you don't have enough money and that's good news and it's good news
because now you can be specific who's it for who's it for means not
demographically 18 year old women it's psychographically what do they believe
what do they dream of what are their fears their desires and you get to pick
the who so you should pick a who that has a problem they know they want to
solve the means to solve it and you are able to keep your promise if those three
things are true marketing is easy it's when they're not true when you're trying
to get SONA doesn't have a dog to buy dog food then you're frustrated and
you're wasting money so we need to stop being megalomaniac narcissists as
marketers and instead say it's only for you people and oh it's not for you I'm
sorry I bothered you it's for you that puts you on the hook and it's scary
so the actionable step is be super clear can you name one person by name
can you name ten people by attribute because if there aren't ten people or a
hundred people who would cross the street against traffic to do business
with you you should make something else so here's the three billion dollar
question how do we know what a little one because if we just knew where people
wanted if they would just tell us then we could make it because we know how to
make things but as we now understand making things isn't the hard
the heart figuring out what people want the hard part is figuring how to earn
trust and attention so you could have asked 10 million people about what they
wanted and not one of them would have said an iPhone not one it took somebody
to show up and say here I made this who had the intuition to say and if I show
this to you you will want so what we have to do to serve the people who want
to serve is find the empathy to understand how they think and then say
if we could make something like this is it likely to resonate but I do know
asking them is not the way to do here's what you don't get to do you don't get
to decide what's important to other people people were the way they were
before you even showed up so when you show up you have to deal with their
world views their biases their fears it's not on you it's on them to have
them before you even in the building and so if you're at a baseball game
someone can probably sell you a stale hot dog you would never buy that stale
hotdog on your way into a business meeting same person but in one case the
hotdog reminds me of going to the ballgame with my grandpa in the other
case the hotdog makes me feel a little sick to my stomach
same person different place different story so this idea of resonating as
marketers we have to make an assertion we have to say if this kind of person
sees what we're making in this sort of setting I bet it's going to remind them
of that and what it does they're gonna want to
so if you're busy making your drug and the people who take the drug drop dead
you have a pharmaceutical problem if you're running the assembly line and it
cost twice as much to make the thing you make as used to you have a manufacturing
problem but if you are having a challenge serving the people you seek to
serve because they don't understand you because they don't see you because they
don't believe you because it'll talk about what you made if you're unable to
make the change you seek to make in the world those are the symptoms of
marketing problem marketing is not about market share marketing is about how we
as humans talk to other humans in a way that burns their trust gains their
excitement and lets us gain enrollment so that they can change the way they
want to change you know let's talk for a minute about authority status power
leverage if you go to work every day and just do what the boss says you need to
do you're a cog in a system that doesn't care about you and the minute they can
find someone cheaper than you to do it they will so you need to make a decision
because you only get today once and that decision is do you want to do work
that's your work that you're responsible for that you are on the hook for or do
you want to settle for being a cog in the system and what I have found is that
when marketers stand up and say to the people they work with I want to make
this they get a standing ovation that more often than not that's exactly what
your boss is waiting for you but yeah if you have a cog job and you're dialing
for dollars and reading a script well that's on you you should quit and go do
something else hi it's Seth Godin and I'm here on the
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