The key ideas

This Is Marketing

Seth Godin, 2018

Ads, spam and chasing everyone's attention at once work worse every year. Seth Godin, the author of Purple Cow, offers another way: serve a small group of people so well that they tell others about you themselves. This book is about finding your people, understanding what they really want, and offering them a change they will accept.

Who it is for

For anyone who makes something useful and wants people to know about it: founders, writers, organizers and everyone who has to persuade others.

People don't want what you make. They want what it will do for them.

The marketing everyone does

You ask your boss for a raise. You get the neighbors together to fix up the playground. You walk on stage with a talk you have prepared for a month. Seth Godin is sure that in all three cases you are doing marketing. If you see how to make something better, and the people around you don't see it yet, you already have a marketing problem.

Godin has written about marketing for more than twenty years. He wrote Purple Cow and Tribes, and many of his ideas have long since become part of how business talks. In this book he gathered the heart of his experience in one place for the first time. And he began by throwing out the familiar picture: ads, spam and chasing everyone's attention at once work worse every year.

Marketing, as Godin sees it, looks different. It is generous work: helping people solve their problem and become who they want to become. Before every decision he asks two questions. Who is it for? And what is it for?

Ahead are the stories the book stands on. A campaign team that didn't need every voter. A rock band that radio barely played. Blue ribbons on a tree in front of a school. Three-dollar glasses in an Indian village. And lions that stopped being killed once young men were offered another path to respect.

Nobody wants a drill

Harvard professor Theodore Levitt once said something that has been repeated in every marketing course since. People don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. The drill is only a tool. What people buy is the result.

Godin thinks Levitt stopped too soon. Nobody wants the hole either. They want the shelf that will hang on the wall. Or, more precisely, the feeling when things are finally put away and the room is in order. And the pleasure of having done it with their own hands. And the respect in their partner's eyes when the partner sees it. Godin's conclusion is simple: people buy a feeling, not a thing.

There aren't that many of these feelings. Godin lists about thirty: belonging, safety, peace of mind, status, adventure and others. Almost every seller offers the same feelings. They just get there in different ways and for different people. If your work gives someone belonging, peace of mind or status, Godin says it is already worth doing.

The mistake begins when we fall in love with our own product and talk about its features. The buyer doesn't care how hard the drill was for us to make. What they care about is what will change in their life.

Read in Livria

About the author

Seth Godin is an American entrepreneur and the author of more than twenty books on marketing and work, among them Purple Cow and Tribes. He was Yahoo!'s vice president of direct marketing, and for many years he has written a post on his blog every single day.

All books by this author: Seth Godin

Terms from the book

  • Kelly
  • Positioning
  • Levinson
  • Marketing
  • Levitt
  • Primaries: Elections inside a party in the United States, where the party decides who will be its candidate in the general election.
  • Smallest viable market: Godin's idea: the smallest group of people for whom the work still makes sense, and who can spread the word about it to others on their own.
  • Wired: An American magazine about technology and its effect on culture, published since 1993.
  • Grateful Dead: An American rock band that played from 1965 to 1995. Famous for long live shows and devoted fans.
  • Blue Ribbon School: An honor the US Department of Education gives to schools for high student achievement.
  • Gladwell: Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian journalist and the author of popular books about how society works and how ideas spread.
  • Rhodes Scholarship: One of the most prestigious international scholarships. It gives students the chance to study at the University of Oxford.
  • Hells Angels: One of the best-known motorcycle clubs in the world, founded in the United States in 1948. You can join only if its members decide to let you in.
  • VisionSpring: A social enterprise that sells low-cost glasses to people with low incomes in poor countries.
  • Tension: Godin's idea: the feeling that you could stay as you are, but then you would miss out on something. It is not fear but a promise that you can get through the fear.
  • Maasai: A people of cattle herders living in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.
  • Hazzah: Leela Hazzah, a biologist from Egypt who works in Kenya and Tanzania. She founded Lion Guardians, an organization that hires Maasai warriors to protect lions.
  • Status: A person's place among others, in their own eyes and in the eyes of their group. For Godin, status is always relative.
  • Dominance: In Godin's model, one of the two status games: who is stronger, who is higher, who is in charge of whom.
  • Affiliation: The feeling of being among your own people. In Godin's model, the second status game: who is with us, whom we trust, whether we get along.
  • Permission: Godin's idea: the privilege of talking to people who chose to listen to you and would notice if you disappeared. It is earned, not taken.

All terms

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