Seth Godin argues that effective marketing starts with choosing a specific audience defined by beliefs and desires, not age or income. When people don't respond to your product, it's usually a marketing problem, not a product problem. He pushes marketers to do meaningful work and be clear about exactly who they're trying to reach.
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Hi, I'm Seth Godin. I'm the founder of the Alt MBA 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. 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's easy. It's when they're not true. When you're trying to get someone who 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 10 people by attribute? Because if there aren't 10 people or 100 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 people want? Because if we just knew what 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 part. The hard part is figuring out what people want. The hard part is figuring out 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 one. So what we have to do to serve the people we 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 it. 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, with their worldviews, their biases, their fears. It's not on you. It's on them to have them before you're even in the building. And so if you're at a baseball game, someone could probably sell you a stale hot dog. You would never buy that stale hot dog on your way into a business meeting, say, in person. But in one case, the hot dog reminds me of going to the ball game with my grandpa. In the other case, the hot dog makes me feel a little sick to my stomach. Same person, different place. 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 when it does, they're going to want more of it. So if you're busy making a drug and the people who take the drug drop dead, you have a pharmaceutical problem. If you're running the assembly line and it costs twice as much to make the thing you make as it 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 they don't talk about what you make, if you're unable to make the change you seek to make in the world, those are the symptoms of a marketing problem. Problem marketing is not about market share. Marketing is about how we as humans talk to other humans in a way that earns 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, 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're 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 to do. 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 HubSpot Academy Channel. If you're into marketing like I am, subscribe and you'll learn more.
