131: Seth Godin

Announcer: Welcome to PSM, The Professional Services Marketing Podcast. It’s insight applied.

Josh Miles: Hello and welcome to PSM Show, the podcast for AEC marketers. I’m Josh Miles, and today I’m joined by the one and only Seth Godin. This is a huge privilege to be able to talk to one of the most prolific marketing authors of our time. Seth has released some amazing books, including The Purple Cow, Permission Marketing, Tribes, and his latest book is called This Is Marketing. Now, maybe more so than ever, I think this is a well-timed book and a perfect read for all of us in professional services and AEC marketing. I’ll be talking to Seth about this new book and how some of these concepts apply to you. Thanks again to our title sponsor SMPS, business transformed through marketing leadership. And special thanks to SMPS for making the introduction. Thank you Marci Thompson.

Josh Miles: And without further ado, here is Seth Godin.

Announcer: This is PSM. It’s insight applied.

Josh Miles: Well, Seth, it is an honor and a privilege to have you on today. I just finished listening to the audio book version of This Is Marketing and I absolutely loved it. I found myself tweeting your definition of marketing right out of the gates. So thank you for pulling that together and the way that you’ve done Purple Cow and Tribes in the past, kind of unpacking a certain issue. This one is really more of like a manifesto to me. Did it feel that way as you were writing it?

Seth Godin: Well, I rant all the time. So I’m not sure it felt like more of a rant than usual. It’s personal in the sense that I think I’m trying to speak up, not just for the people who want to make change, but for the culture in which they’re making change. And I think for too long marketers have gotten away … Not all marketers. Some marketers have gotten away with a selfish narrative. And that doesn’t lead to a better place to be.

Josh Miles: Well, as I was preparing for today’s conversation, I reached out to some folks on Facebook and to LinkedIn just to crowdsource some possible questions. And I got I think a pretty good one. This is from Michael Venn, who’s a Canadian theater performer and a photographer. And he said, “Ask Seth about his wife’s gluten-free bakery and how building that … How you were involved in it and how maybe that influenced your view of brand or marketing.”

Seth Godin: My wife runs the biggest gluten-free bakery of its kind in the world. My involvement in it consists of sometimes delivering wedding cakes in the middle of the night. And building the first version of their IT system. It does not involve any of their marketing, their collaterals, any of that. It’s all her. But it’s a great case study, because most people will not go a block out of their way for a gluten-free, dairy-free baked good. But, the people who wanted gluten-free, dairy-free baked good will go 50 blocks out of their way for it. Not only that, but baked goods are shared. Few people happily bake goods by themselves. Which means that when you’re buying baked goods for a family event, you need to think about everyone who’s going to be there.

Seth Godin: And the old strategy was most people get one thing, and everyone else who’s got a restriction gets a banana. But if you buy what she sells, everyone is included. That’s the change she seeks to make. To make this festive engagement inclusive. And so she has grown to be in almost 50 Whole Foods and four retail outlets and more than 60 people by sticking to a very simple idea. Which is, “This isn’t for everyone, but I might be for you.”

Josh Miles: Yeah, that’s certainly a theme that I hear over and over in This Is Marketing and, of course, in your blog, your daily email, and everything. Another really great question that came across from a woman named Jen McGovern … Who’s one of our SMPS members in Washington D.C. … She was talking about how in the professional services and architecture and engineering world, a lot of our technical staff become these reluctant marketers. So I loved how especially at the end of This Is Marketing, you talked about how it really is our responsibility to market. How might you encourage these non-marketers who’ve become sort of accidental marketers?

Seth Godin: Well, let me start with a nonprofit example that’s not quite as close to home, and then go straight to the engineering focus. If someone gives $50,000 to charity, a philanthropist, what do they get? They’re not doing it because they get a tote bag, right? They’re doing it because they get a feeling, a story, a connection, status, all of those things. How much is it worth to them if they give $50,000 to this charity? Well, I would argue it’s worth at least $75,000. ‘Cause if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t do it. What does that mean? It means that if you as a fundraiser aren’t willing to be in the right place with the right story to get/earn that 50,000 dollar donation, you just stole $25,000 from this person. Because the fact that they couldn’t give you the 50,000 means they don’t get all the bonus feeling that’s left over. There’s feeling.

Seth Godin: And so if you make something that’s worthwhile, if you are able to bring a technical solution to the table that will make things better and you don’t market it, you’re stealing. You’re stealing the value from the person you could have helped. If you’re a lifeguard and you don’t rescue a drowning person, you’re killing ’em. And so when I think … You know, I’m a trained engineer, semi-trained. I got a degree in it anyway. And engineers are taught that there is a right answer. And they are taught that the result is the result. And therefore, many engineers are frustrated with the idea of marketing.

Seth Godin: So when I was at Yahoo it was run by a couple of software engineers who said, “We don’t do any marketing at Yahoo.” Which was nonsense. They just didn’t do what they thought of as marketing. But the name, the logo, the way the home page made you feel, the yodel, you go down the list, there was all this marketing about why you should use Yahoo instead of AltaVista. And there was no discussion about did AltaVista come back 10 milliseconds faster or slower.

Seth Godin: So marketer engineers, scientists, who seek to make change should take their own medicine and realize just handing people cold fish on a platter and assuming they’ll eat it ’cause they’ll figure out it’s sushi? No. That are job is to help people see that we can make things better. Because if we can’t help them see that, then things aren’t going to get better.

Josh Miles: Yeah, I really appreciated your example, how you talked about the donation really isn’t for the fundraiser. It’s for the donor. They are getting just as much value, if not more, than what the fundraiser is receiving. So I guess if we take that same principle and apply it to the engineer, if they really believe that they are giving a better service to the world, it’s in their best interest to the universe to market that and tell people about it.

Seth Godin: That’s right. Because we don’t get to market at people anymore. We have to market with them. We have to do it for them. And if you want to figure out how to get people to take their tuberculosis medicine, you don’t do it by making tuberculosis medicine more effective for people who take it, you make it so that people who aren’t taking it tell themselves a different story that causes them to take it.

Josh Miles: You know, switching gears a little bit, I’m a graphic designer by background. And I’d worked with some software startups in a former life. Hearing a lot about MVP and minimally viable product. And I loved your concept of this minimal or minimum viable audience. Can you refund that a little bit for us?

Seth Godin: So what marketers have taught us for so long is that everyone should be your customer. And the goal is mass, the goal is more. And that causes you to make average stuff for average people. It causes you to go to committee meetings and sand down the edges. It causes you to say, “It should come in 82 different languages. And we should have a version for left-handed people and tall people and short people. And how do we make it for everyone?”

Seth Godin: And as soon as you do that you’re making it for no one. Because there’s already something average on the market. That if you instead say, “We seek to serve this specific group of people, if these 1,000 people who we know by name, by psychographic, by identification, this 1,000 people wanted this more than anything in the world, that would be enough.” Because to make that product is scarier and requires a lot more responsibility than to make something that’s average for everyone.

Seth Godin: So once you become a meaningful specific, you’re on the hook. And what you get out of that is the ability to make it better for them. And if you make it irresistible to that group of people, the cool thing that happens next is they tell their friends. And it’s when they tell their friends that the word spreads. Because marketing is not yelling at strangers, marketing is, what story do people use when they talk about you?

Josh Miles: Seth, I would definitely argue that you have become a meaningful specific to the world of marketers. I wonder if you feel a sense of responsibility for helping drive marketing to where it’s going?

Seth Godin: Okay. So let me just dissuade you from what you just said. It was really inclement here the other day. And I live about a mile from my office. And I was driving to the office and I passed this woman who was walking through the puddles on the side of the road to the train. So it’d take her 20 minutes in bad weather to get there. So I pull over and I say, “Hop in, I’ll give you a ride to the train station.” And we’re talking the whole way. “What do you do?” She’s a senior partner, the most senior marketer at a company that has more than $500 million in assets. And she said, “What do you do?” And I said, “Funny you should ask. Here’s my new book. It came out today.” And I handed her one. And she had no idea who I was. And that’s fantastic. It’s fantastic. 99.8% of the people in the world have no idea who I am. And I would say 90% of all marketers have never read a word I’ve written. Fine with me.

Seth Godin: So it’s such a huge gap between what people think of as successful and everyone that I just need to highlight that. So, do I feel a responsibility for the million people out of the seven billion who are kind enough to lend me their ears? Oh, absolutely. Every day. That’s who I write for. I don’t write for me. I write for those people who have chosen to listen. And it’s a privilege and it’s a thrill. But it’s sometimes a burden, ’cause I don’t get to write about what I want today, I get to write about we. And I love doing that, and that’s what I’m trying to keep doing.

Josh Miles: So one of the other themes … You know, people like us do things like this. That kind of occurs throughout this book. Was that a driver for you early on when you were just getting started as an author? Or just starting the blog? Was that something that you were really aware of? Or is this a more recent understanding you’ve created?

Seth Godin: Yeah, that sentence came to me about the time I was writing Tribes. And my friend and provocateur Bernadette Jiwa challenged me to write a whole book with that title. And that was the original title for This Is Marketing, People Like Us Do Things Like This. People Like Us Do Things Like This encapsulates in seven words what it cultures. It encapsulates in seven words what Smallest Viable Audience Marketing is. Because first you have to pick who the people like us are, ’cause it’s not everyone. It’s people like us. Not who look like us, but who act like us, who believe like us, who fear like us. Who dream like us. And things like this is, what do we do that other people can see? And how do we dress? What do we talk about? What do we buy? Where do we go? People like us do things like this.

Seth Godin: So if you do to a nudist colony, you will quickly discover that even though everyone’s not wearing clothes, everyone is acting in a similar way. Because you don’t define a nudist colony by the fact that people aren’t wearing clothes. I’ve never been. You define by the fact that there is a code of how we talk and where we walk and how we look. And all those people like us do things like this things. And on Bizarro World, another planet, they probably have nudist colonies that are totally different than ours. And so that’s our job as marketers is to make the definition of what the things like this are.

Josh Miles: So maybe the paradox or the complement to that is this idea of you’re not necessarily competitors when you’re on the same board. You know, I’ve kind of unpacked perceptual maps before and X-Y axes. But it challenges your logic to think, “If we’re on the same board, how we could not be competitors.” But can you kind of talk through that a little bit?

Seth Godin: Sure. So behind me are all these books. And many of them have blurbs on the back, right? How often do you see Tim Cook writing on the back of a Google Phone, “I like this phone a lot. You should buy it”? People in many industries do not support each other. But authors do it all the time. And in fact, books sell better in bookstores next to their competitors than they sell in hardware stores. And the reason is simple. ‘Cause if you walk into the bookstore, you’ve announced you want to buy a book. But a book on crochet and a book on weightlifting don’t compete. You’re not saying, “Which one should I buy?” You have a problem, it solves it. And that’s where we go with this positioning thing. Which is, positioning is not how do you get more than your fair share. It’s, how do you help your customers become unconfused and find what they wanted all along

Josh Miles: So how would a professional services business be able to position its self in a way that is both meaningfully different, and as you put it in the book, generous and meaningful?

Seth Godin: So tell me … Give me a prototype firm that you have in mind?

Josh Miles: An architect [crosstalk 00:14:09] an architect [crosstalk 00:14:10]-

Seth Godin: An architect, great.

Josh Miles: With 15 employees.

Seth Godin: Architect is a great example. So Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater in 15 minutes on the back of a paper bag. And then he said to the client, “If you wish, I will build this for you.” No focus groups, no meetings, no models to work their way through. If you want a Frank Lloyd Wright building, those are the rules. Right down the street is another architect who says, “The kind of architecture we do is collaborative. And we’re gonna spend a lot of time together. And if you’re not prepared to show up with your dream board and your ideas and with your clippings, please, don’t hire us. That’s not what we do.”

Seth Godin: And right down the street from there is an architect who says, “We only do LEED-certified zero footprint buildings that have no formaldehyde in them. And if you want us to build something other than that, nah, that’s not what we do. Here’s the phone number of the first guy. You can call him.” And each one of them if they’re happy, is happy because of they’re very specific about what they do. Last night one of the architects of the World Trade Center came to my house for dinner. If you want an 80-story glass-clad building, you should call him. But, if you want a super clever little bungalow, he should send you somewhere else.

Seth Godin: So it’s not just what you build, it’s the method that you use to build it, the interaction you have with the client, what you stand for, what story the person will tell after it’s done, right? So if I had to make a living as an architect and I picked something that I knew a little bit about, I would say, “I’m an architect who actually builds the building for you.” Because I think that that service is more easily understood by the typical person I would seek to serve than, “Here’s a bunch of plans. We’ll see you later.”

Seth Godin: And so there is 50, a hundred great positions available for architects that would serve confused people, as opposed to some clever way of differentiation.

Josh Miles: I feel like the stereotype in this industry is that a firm will say, “Well, our people are what make us different.” And the problem is that 50 other firms in this market are saying, “Our people are what make us different.” So I loved what you said about if you know what you stand for, you don’t have to compete. Can you … I know you talked about that a little bit a second ago, but can you unpack that idea of what you stand for?

Seth Godin: Yeah. So that’s a line from Bernadette. And the idea is if you’re competing on price, it’s because you’ve established that what you do is interchangeable with what other people do. You’re not the one and only. It’s really difficult for me to figure out an industry where it’s easier to avoid that than professional services. Because there are no widgets, can’t use a micrometer to measure the tolerance of what you make. You say what sets you apart is your people, but you hire your people the same way everyone else hires their people. You compensate your people the same way. And your turnover is something you fight as opposed to encourage.

Seth Godin: So forgive me, but I don’t believe you. And if you’re not spending 200 hours a year training your people, I don’t believe you. Because basically what you’ve said is, “We’ve got a bunch of people. They got a bunch of people. We’d really like your money.” And that’s not marketing.

Josh Miles: What do you see as the value of training? Or how does that become a differentiator?

Seth Godin: Well, so most training doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because it’s enforced. It’s compulsory and it’s based on command and control and compliance. It’s based on school. It’s boring and there’s a test at the end. And the HR person can brag that people went through it. So the reason we started the Alt MBA is because I abhor all of those things. And I see that technology is opening the door. So our Alt MBA lasts 30 days. It’s two to three hours a day. People do it while they are at work. It’s an intensive workshop with no videos in it. I’m not in it.

Seth Godin: And so we’ve had almost 3,000 grads. Why does it work? It works ’cause project work with no clear answer, work that’s fraught with fear and opportunity, the idea that you can engage with people in 40 countries and go faster than you thought you could go, they don’t teach that at most places. And yet, those are precisely the things we want our people to be able to do. And so I’m not surprised that HR departments aren’t crazy about the Alt MBA, ’cause it doesn’t match what they’re being measured for. But I know that most training dollars are wasted.

Josh Miles: Seth, this is a little bit of a curve ball, but if tomorrow you had to stop writing and speaking and talking about marketing, what else are you passionate enough about that you would want to create a following and to riff on tomorrow?

Seth Godin: Well, okay. So here’s one of two baskets that are in my bookshelf here for bean-to-bar chocolate. I was within two days of starting a bean-to-bar Chocolate company. And then at the last minute didn’t ’cause Shawn Askinosie is such an amazing human. So that’s one thing I might do. The other thing I might do is go back to my roots and work at my old summer camp, because I still go up there every summer 42 years later. What would be the third one? Well, people keep coming after me to start that sober restaurant. So it would be one of those three things, or maybe all three of those things.

Josh Miles: Some combination of the three would be amazing. Well, speaking of food, I think it was in the supermarket example you were talking about … I love this quote … Was, “The irrational pursuit of becoming irresistible.”

Seth Godin: Right. So which part of that do you want me to riff on?

Josh Miles: So, why is it irrational?

Seth Godin: Because in the short run, it’s better to meet spec, right? That in the short run, you can say to your boss, “We did X, Y, or Z because we have to beat the competition. We did X, Y, or D because it’s what people did before us.” And that feels rational. It is not particularly effective, though, because everyone is doing that. And so there’s no room for you. But I was inspired to write that post by my friend who runs The Opinicon, which is a hotel in Canada.

Seth Godin: And it’s unreasonable to get this much ice cream … You can’t see, maybe if you’re listening to this … But a softball’s worth of ice cream for three Canadian dollars. However, it’s irresistible because kids beg for it all year round. Because parents are happy to go out of their way. Because it’s the idyllic, perfect day. And you know what happens? Every once in a while one of those people say, “Why don’t we stay at this hotel next to here for a week when we’re on vacation?” And so The Opinicon is fully booked every night nine months in advance. Because they made something irresistible that was irrational, which is a softball’s worth of ice cream for three Canadian dollars.

Josh Miles: So shifting gears maybe one last time here, I always thought that quote about the people aren’t buying quarter-inch drill bits, they’re buying quarter-inch size holes until you blew a giant hole in that theory. Can you maybe refund that one a little bit, too?

Seth Godin: So Ted Levitt, ’62, ’63, Harvard Business Review says, “Get used to the fact that quarter-inch drill bits are not in demand. What people want are quarter-inch holes.” And I’m thinking about that I go, “Well, actually, no one actually wants a quarter-inch hole. What they want is a place to hold the quarter-inch. But the reason they want that is so they can hang a shelf. But the reason they want that is so they can clean up the bed and put the books on the bed. And the reason they want that is so when their spouse comes home, they will smile and say, ‘Thank you for taking care of our home.'” Because what they really want isn’t a quarter-inch drill bit. What they want is satisfaction and security and safety and freedom from fear. That’s what people want.

Josh Miles: And so it’s really more of a Maslow issue than anything else?

Seth Godin: It always is.

Josh Miles: Well, Seth, it has been a pleasure talking with you today. I wonder before you go if there’s anything you want to share? Especially in light of the woman who is in your car and didn’t know about you and all the things that you are doing? Anything about Alt MBA or anything else coming up that our audience should know about?

Seth Godin: Well, you know, I blog every day. And I figure sooner or later you’ll check out the blog. So I’m in no hurry. It’s gets better. So show up when you want, seths.blog. If you’re interested in the new book, it’s at seths.blog/T-I-M, which stands for This Is Marketing. And the Alt MBA starts again. Next session is in February. And we would love it, if it’s for you, to check it out. But it might not be for you, and that’s okay, too.

Josh Miles: Awesome. Well, Seth, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for making time in your very busy schedule.

Seth Godin: Well, thank you. These were great questions. It was fun.

Josh Miles: Awesome. Thank you.

Seth Godin: You’re fantastic.

Josh Miles: I think that brings us to the end of today’s episode. I probably could have talked to Seth for hours, not that he had hours to give me. But it was pretty amazing. If you have any other questions, comments, or suggestions for future shows or guests, please write to us via psm.show. Scroll down to the “Contact Us” and drop us a line.

Josh Miles: That’s all for today’s episode of PSM Show. From David Lecours and myself, Josh Miles, we’ll see you next time.