Seth Godin says marketing has shifted from a side effect of production to the center of how organizations work. Modern marketing means choosing narrow audiences, earning attention through trust and connection instead of buying interruption, and taking responsibility for what you make and promote.
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Seth Godin
Founder of the Alt MBA; author of the book This Is Marketing
HubSpot Academy channel
Chapters
Hi, I'm Seth Godin. I'm the founder of the Alt MBA and the author of a book called this is Marketing. Marketing used to be a side effect. We had a factory, it was busy. We said to the marketing team, here's some money, go sell average stuff to average people. Not true anymore. Marketing is at the core of what we do. And unless you make coal or oil, marketing is the story you tell, who you're telling it to, why people are going to buy it. It's the center of the universe. And what that means is that you're responsible. You're responsible for what you make, how you make it, how you bring it to the world, what the side effects are, who you're talking to. Everyone works for you. Because what we know is that a product well marketed is a product that people want to engage in. And an amazing product that no one knows about or cares about isn't amazing because we don't get to use it. So I coined this term modern marketer to identify somebody who isn't beholden to buying mass media TV ads to be in front of average people with their average product. That's old school marketing. That's Mad Men. It's faded away. It's almost gone. The idea that you can buy enough gross rating points to interrupt enough people to make enough money to do it again, gone. And so what we're seeing on the Internet is a whole bunch of companies tried to simulate tv. They tried to come up with viral stuff, they tried to come up with scams and hikes just to get a lot of eyeballs. It doesn't work. The fact is that TV was a mass medium and the Internet is a micro medium. You can't buy Facebook, you can't even buy Yahoo. You can't buy all the ads. It's lots and lots of tiny slices. So pick your slice and measure when you need to measure. Don't measure when measuring doesn't make any sense. And realize that what we are seeking as an asset is connection, attention, trust and connection. Not spam or interruption. Simon is brilliant as always, and understanding your why is critical, but it's also usually awfully general. My why is because I need to make a living. My why is because the beach is too full. My why is I want to feel fulfilled by doing this work. Which leads to the next question. Well, what am I going to do now? Which is how do I know if I'm doing a good job? Which is, what is this all for? And so for me, it begins with seeing who we seek to serve and figuring out how to make things better for them. Not for me, but for them. Because if I can make things better for them, then I'll get a chance to do it again. And if I can keep doing it and doing it, making things better, weaving things together, earning trust, turning attention into a promise and that promise into a brand that matters, then regardless of what I do for a living, regardless of what my why is, my practice is a professional one. Because I'm not leaving behind victims. Instead, I'm opening the door for people to do better. Everything we do as a marketer has an effect. I'm not even going to say side effect, just an effect. And you have to own the effect that if you sell a product that's going to cause people to get lung cancer, that's on you. You didn't have to sell it, they didn't have to buy it either. But if marketing works, you're on the hook because marketing works and you did the marketing. So what we get the chance to do is make stuff we're proud of and do it in a way that causes the effects to be things that we are proud of. So yes, you could build a social network that pits people against each other and gets them at each other's throats. That's on you. Each one of us has all these levers available to us. Little known fact that the person who invented the gas, Freon gas that put a hole in the ozone layer, also invented leaded gasoline. Same guy. Not a good run for him. It was on him, those two inventions. What are we going to invent? Can we invent things that will make things better? Because that's how we change the world for the better. Make things better by making better things. 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.
