This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Guy Kawasaki: Tell a Story and Plant Many Seeds" from March 7, 2011, featuring Guy Kawasaki discussing the importance of storytelling in technology and marketing, and advocating for planting many seeds rather than focusing on traditional marketing strategies.
Chapters
You need to tell a story. Most people, particularly in technology, are horrible at telling stories. You need to tell a story. Why did you start ebay? Why did you start Google? Why did you start Apple? You can even make up the story after the fact. Okay? One of the great legends of Silicon Valley is that ebay was because Pierre Ahmed Yar's girlfriend wanted to sell PEZ dispensers. Okay? The truth is that he really wanted to create a perfect market where demand and supply cross each other. The perfect market. And to have a perfect market, you need to eliminate geography. The story of the PEZ dispenser is after the fact. Now, I'm not encouraging you to lie, but I am telling you a story is much more powerful. When you launch while you two in a garage knew there was a better way to search, or you wanted to bring personal computers to more people, or you wanted a place where people could upload video of people dropping Mentos into Diet Cokes. You know, whatever it is, tell a story. The next thing is you need to plant many seeds. This is completely contrary to classic marketing. Classic marketing is you plant a few seeds because you know exactly who's going to embrace your product and you water and fertilize just those seeds. You focus. I think that it's completely wrong. In the old days, you would focus on the A listers and the top tier journalists, that is Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes. What you did is you sucked up to them because you hoped that these great oracles of wisdom and knowledge would embrace your product and tell the hoi polloi and the great unwashed masses to embrace your product. Okay? So you sucked up to them. If you didn't have time to suck up to them, you hired a PR firm and paid them 10,000 bucks to suck up for you. Then the PR firm would hire an Oriental art history from Wellesley to do the sucking up for you. Okay? This doesn't work anymore because the world has been inverted. The world has been inverted. And now for you to reach critical mass with a product, it's not because the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times blessed your product. It's because Lonely Boy 15 embraced your product. And Lonely Boy 15 told his 20 friends who told their 20 friends, who eventually told 10, Tiffany, 517 and Lonely Girl to also embrace your product. And what happens? And this is how Twitter and this is how Facebook happened. It's not because the New York Times saw Twitter or Facebook on the first day they launched, it said, aha, we have seen the future we know with total certainty. Someday Facebook will have more members than every other country except China and India. Show me a New York Times, Business Week, Fortune, Forbes article that predicted the success of of Twitter or Facebook or Apple or Yahoo. Pick any of the success stories? None of them. So what you need to do is plant many seeds.
