The Seth Godin Encyclopedia

25 min readJul 31, 2020

Seth Godin is an American marketer that I came across in my mid-20’s when I was directionless and unsure of where I wanted to take my business (and life). Seth’s contention is simple, we’re all marketers we just don’t know it. Marketing is the ability to move someone to act, not the sleezy getting someone to buy something they don’t want stereotype of Mad Men.

Marketing is in our DNA. We are constantly being marketed to or marketing to others: Do you want an extra large latte this morning? You gotta take a 10% pay cut to keep your job, what do you want to do? Will you marry me? Can I get an extension on my essay assignment? Seth helps you see marketing from 30,000 feet for what it is and then zooms into the dirt to show you how its done in a digital age.

While it took me over five years to get the most out of Seth Godin’s work, my goal here is to take the insights it took me five years to come to and put it into one spot so you don’t have to. Hence, the article’s title: The Seth Godin Encyclopedia.

Table of Contents:

Why Seth Godin?
Why Marketing?
10.5 Ideas from Seth Godin that Changed My Life
My Top Five Seth Godin Books W/ Notes
Treasure Trove of Videos/Ted Talks/Podcasts/Articles Featuring Seth
101 Assorted Seth Godin Quotes

Why Marketing?

The ability to ethically move others to take action through storytelling is marketing. And, good marketing has helped me experience success as a U.S. Peace Corps Ukraine Volunteer, teacher for over 9 years, build a successful 6-figure private coaching business, helped me meet all my NFL heroes growing up as a kid, talk to interesting people on my podcast and convince my wife to marry me (or take enough pity on me to do so).

Any meaningful thing you seek to do in life will involve people who have the power to say yes or no to your dreams. Knowing how to weave a story that moves them to support your dreams is crucial. Knowing how to create a product that is part of a bigger mission is crucial. Knowing how to convince others of your ability to do what your resume or business says it can do is crucial.

You’ve already been marketing your whole life. The first time you let out a wail as a newborn you were moving others around you to act on your behalf to fulfill your dream of needing to feel safety, security and warmth was marketing. All those times you deflected your parents’ fury onto your brothers instead of yourself was marketing. Persuading your girlfriend to say yes to your proposal was marketing.

The question becomes, do you want to get even better at it?

Seth shows you how. Enjoy.

10.5 Ideas From Seth Godin That Changed My Life

Idea #1: Ship

Shipping is what creators do. At some point, you need to hit post, hit send or click upload to open your work up to be received or be rejected by your market. Rejection stings. We’ve been conditioned by school to avoid rejection at all costs. Yet, if you don’t ship, if you don’t hit send, you’ll never know what the market wants. Instead of seeing shipping as a win-lose binary experiment, you need to see it as a win-win: It’s a win when the market rejects me because now I am wiser at knowing what doesn’t work. It’s a win when the market accepts it because now I know what to do more of. Shipping is really just a different way of seeing risk. You need to take some.

The only thing shipping will cost you is little time and all of your ego.

Idea #2: Wine Glasses

In his book All Marketers Are Liars (Tell Stories) Seth talks about a company that makes glasses shaped especially to bring out the most flavor from Chardonnay versus Merlot and so on. Yet, in double blind taste tests there is no correlation between flavor and the type of glassware used. Did that kill this business? Absolutely not. In fact, they are doing quite well. Their clients only bought more of these glasses. People want to believe stories they have about themselves. In this case, customers want to believe they are sophisticated wine-drinkers and this company’s product helps them believe it (even though it isn’t true scientifically).

People buy products that confirm the story they want to believe about themselves.

Idea #3: Milk Cartons

Attention is economic oxygen and getting it is tricky to catch. That’s why your business needs a purple cow — something remarkable that people cannot help but share with their friends. When Seth’s book Purple Cow came out, the first 5,000 copies of it actually came in a purple milk carton container. People loved this so much that they placed the empty purple milk carton on their desks. Of course, others would ask what this odd thing was and then his book would be shared even more. Seth made no money on the cartons, but he did make a ruckus. Your business would be much better off experimenting with the blurry line between absurd and remarkable to gain people’s attention than paying Facebook for ineffective advertisements.

If your message isn’t remarkable, it won’t be shared.

Idea #4: Not For Everyone

What you offer can’t be for everyone and it shouldn’t be. Mass marketing, mass business and mass production all died with the advent of the internet. No one is going to out-Amazon Amazon at driving prices into the ground, so your best bet is to go in the opposite direction: specializing. All you need is a small nucleus of ten or so clients to determine if what you have to offer is ultimately going to be profitable or not. And, if what you have to offer isn’t for someone that’s OK. Rejection is a win because someone found your business compelling enough that they felt the need to trash it! Did Hillary try to win over conservatives? Did Trump try to win over liberals? No. Both sides highly targeted their campaigning to the 5% of the US population that was undecided and could sway the vote. See We Are All Weird for more of Seth’s take on niche.

A business for everyone is ultimately a business for no one.

Idea #5: Quitting is OK

The Dip was Seth Godin’s look at something society treats as a taboo: quitting. The premise is simple — if you’ can’t be best in the world at something, quit. But, best in world doesn’t mean best out of 8 billion people, it means out of someone’s perceived market. You might not be the best football coach in America, but you are certainly the best one in your town so you receive a steady stream of private clients. You might not be the best tap dancer in the world, but you are the best tap dancer at a certain style of Vaudeville tap that no one else can teach. I think the irony of The Dip is that it’s not really a book about quitting so much as a call imploring people to get hyper focused on the market they are trying to be best in the world at.

Get hyper focused on defining your “best in the world”.

Idea #6: Positioning > Product

This is something I took away from Seth’s The Marketing Seminar on Akimbo, which I highly recommend you check out. Positioning is simply finding a hole in the market and placing your product/service as the thing to fill it. Volvo did this in the car market by finding that there was no company trying to dominate the luxury-safety market. So, Volvo is now positioned as the safest luxury vehicle in the market today. Tesla stayed in the luxury category, but went for electric saying “it’s kinda like an electric Mercedes”. Ford, still occupies the American-made + blue collar + everyday man vehicle market. Find all the various attributes that exist in your market place and see which combinations of these attributes your company can combine to create its own monopoly in a unique market.

Position yourself into a corner of the market where no one else is.

Idea #7: What if you had to charge 10x for your product, how would you justify it?

One of the biggest things I struggled the most with early on with my business was figuring out how to price myself. Most business owners when they begin drastically under price themselves. When you charge higher prices, you raise the stakes for your customers, attract more serious ones, and you also have an opportunity to prove that you are now worth the price you just charged. Price, if it is part of the internal story of your customer that they want to believe about themselves, can be just as much as part of the value proposition of your service or product as the service or product itself. Price, weirdly, can actually make people feel better about themselves.

Price is a story.

Idea #8: Locks Vs. Keys

You can want your business to be so successful so badly that you struggle to even be good. That’s probably because you confused your product’s importance for your customer’s importance. You built a product to solve a very specific problem that you’ve labored day and night over, but now, once you introduce it to the world, no one wants it. Why? You treated your product as more important than your people. You build a key before you found a lock for it. Now you find yourself scrambling to retrofit a person to your product. Reverse your process: find the lock first, find the people try to break it open and then design them a key.

Find the lock. Find the people. Then, create your key.

Idea #9: Who is it for, how did they get here and what do you want them to do?

When creating ask yourself three questions: Who is it for? How did they get here? And, what do you want them to do? The type of person you built your website for will dictate the function of your site. In my coaching business, I knew 98% of my traffic was from busy professional working mothers looking desperately to have their son get better at kicking a football. So, I took everything off my site except the exact steps for who I was, how I worked and how they could schedule a phone call with me to work. When you open SnapChat it is incredibly clear what they want you to do: take a photo, start “snapping”. When you open Twitter there is a reason why the “tweet” button is always visible no matter what page of the app you are on — they want you to tweet.

Start with who, then how and finish with what.

Idea #10: Soon is not as good as now

In Seth’s book Poke The Box he talks about starting before you’re ready. K-12 Education has made you permission-dependent. You are waiting for someone to answer your raised hand, someone to tell you what questions you can ask, someone to tell you what color crayon to use, someone to tell you when you can ask those questions, someone to tell you even how you can ask all those questions. It’s not your fault. It’s not even your teachers’ faults. We were born into a school system that rewards “someday” and compliance “today”. It is much better to ship an unpolished product that the market can respond to that you built for free than wait three years to ship a product that cost $10,000 of your saved dollars to make.

The farmer who waits for perfect weather never plants.

Idea #10.5: Trust is the new oxygen.

You’re not so much creating a business as you are creating a culture. People are desperate to be led and if you can be the person who unites members of a fractured tribe you will build the scarcest resource of all: trust. Trust is by far the single more important currency in the digital economy today because it is so recklessly abused by shameless people who are looking for the fastest purchase possible or make a quick buck. Culture, is a long term game you can only play with long term people (Naval Ravikant reference here) and intentional marketing over time is the only way to build it. Some writers suggest a 5:1 ratio of helpful posts to asks for purchases, but I would argue it’s more like 500:1.

Trust is the single scarcest and most important resource you need to build your business.

My Top Five Favorite Seth Godin Books

Here are my personal notes and outlines from my favorite Seth Godin books

#1 This is Marketing

You won’t find a more comprehensive manifesto out there on modern marketing. And, if you are really into it, you’ll love his course on Akimbo, The Marketing Seminar which I did last year. This puts community and practice to the theories outlined in the book. It is also a heck of a network to gain access to.

“People don’t want what you make.” Seth dives deep into the old adage “the man buying a drill doesn’t want the drill, he wants the hole”. But, what if he doesn’t want the hole? What if he wants his wife to get off his back about that shelf he was supposed to put up months ago? But what if he really doesn’t want his wife to stop bugging him about it but love him more? What if, while it’s nice to be loved more, he just wants to look in the mirror and feel like a better husband? The reasons that your customers buy from you are very different from what you think are the reasons.
Rational Choice is a Myth: Most people aren’t rational when they are making their purchasing decisions. “When in doubt assume that people will act according to their current irrational urges, ignoring information that runs counter to their beliefs, trading long-term for short-term benefits and most of all, being influenced by the culture they identify with.” The myth of rationality runs counter to classic economists who base all of their complex models on a logical human — which we’ve yet to meet.
What’s the promise you’re making? Every product or service is really a promise to deliver a change to your customer. Apple promises that you’ll be more creative. Starbucks promises that you’ll be a more sophisticated coffee drinker. Volvo promises that you’ll never find a safer luxury car than theirs. Tesla promises that you’ll never find a better luxury electric car. 7–11 promises cheap bread, eggs and milk 24/7 for the average joe on the go. So, what exactly is the promise you’re making your customers? And, what is the promise that they see from you? Remember, what your customers see is usually not what you see.
Stop looking for an ocean, find a swimming pool instead: A running theme throughout Godin’s work is that you can’t be for everyone, so you might as well find who you can be for. Instead of trying to build a business for an “ocean” he suggests you just find a small pool instead. This would be your minimum viable market. How many people do you need to reach in order to make whatever it is you’re doing worthwhile? For some, maybe it is a single extremely high paying client a year, for others, maybe it is just 20 or so, and maybe for small businesses it’s less than 1,000 customers. The oceans are all occupied by Amazon, Walmart, Target and mass companies who you won’t beat. But there are plenty of tribes or ponds that are unexplored.
“It’s not for you.” One of the hardest things for me first starting a business was firing clients. Yes, ironic. Why would a business ever deliberately fire a client? Don’t you want to change everyone? Work with everyone? I kept on clients who I knew were bad personality fits for my business because I didn’t know who I was or wasn’t for. I also let competitors trashing my business online get under my skin too believing that we were in the same market. When you accept that most of the world isn’t going like or isn’t going to care about your business you’re now freed up to focus on the meaningful small nucleus of clients who is does matter a great deal to.

#2 All Marketers Are Liars (Tell Stories)

A lie won’t work for long if it’s really a lie. While you can embellish your proof of product, if it’s a dud, people are going to find out. This is kind of like a life insurance salesmen who doesn’t own the policy he is trying to sell. Or, an entrepreneur trying to sell a course on how to quit your day job (been there!) who is too scared to actually have done it themselves.
“Nuclear weapons have killed a tiny fraction of the number of people that unethical marketing has” While Hiroshima and Nagasaki were human tragedies and still the only time nukes have ever been used in war, lousy marketing has killed considerably more people than both combined. The tobacco industry knew nearly a century before the public did that smoking had negative health side effects. The Nazi Party’s rallied disillusioned Germans to their antisemitic platform. Social media companies convinced an entire generation that they can find happiness online. Marketing is more than just a promoted Instagram ad or bumper sticker — it can literally save lives (or lose them).
Your business is a story with a product, not a product with a quota. People like to feel like they are on a mission going somewhere, to change the world, or save it from the forces of evil. If you look at a company like Nike, 98% of the time their ads discuss their mission and only 2% of the time do they ask for a sale. Think about a company like TOMS: people buy the mission, not the product and are more than glad to pay 2–3x the cost of their pair of TOMS shoes. Products are OK, what people really want is a better story.
“People don’t want to change their minds.” It is easy to fall in on yourself as a young business owner when someone trashes you online, or you lose a client. You can’t change people’s minds for them, says Godin. If they’re not going to like your offer, they’re not going to like and there’s nothing you should do about it. It’s a sunken effort to try to do otherwise. Instead, focus on the cries for help — on the people who are reaching out to you, are raving about your product. It’s likely they know more people just like them.
“You cannot succeed if you try to tell your competition’s story better than they can.” Most companies try to emulate their competitors: the branding, the messaging, even the media looks the same. “Train with us because we’re the best. We’re the best because we’re the best.” The problem is that there will be a disconnect between the storyteller and the story: we call that inauthentic. Your story needs to match not only what your business does but who your business is.

#3 Tribes

The world is connected but your tribe isn’t, yet. That’s your job. In 2020 we are all dormant tribal leaders with like-minded people just like us waiting in pockets on the internet to be led. Led by you.

The internet killed geography: If you were born in a small village in Ukraine, you were stuck there for most of your life. Lets say art was your passion in the ex-Soviet village, but there were no other like-minded artists around, no market that would reward your creations. If it was 30 years ago, you’d have to settle working in the local factory. Today, you can hop online and find where other artists just like you are, not only in Ukraine, but around the world. And, within five clicks of a mouse, create an online community.
“Everyone is now a marketer” Whether you are aware of it or not, you are a marketer. Marketers lead people to take action. With the explosion in connectivity, pockets of tribes exist scattered across the internet waiting dormant for someone just like you to round them up and lead them somewhere. Many people feel like they are “the only…” and are secretly begging to be led. Tribes will always exist, but they can be led by default or led somewhere by choice.
Everyone is a leader, and we’re not ready for it: The dominant model of education and the economy has been the factory model. The factory is a disjointed, compliance based soulless concept created to fuel the Industrial Age’s demands for mass production. We didn’t need creativity, we needed obedience. We didn’t need leaders, we needed workers with gnarled hands who would keep their mouths shut. Now, the only thing the economy rewards is leadership and initiative. The fist step is finding “the others” just like you.
Be The King (Or Queen): In a way, having 5 million Instagram followers is like ruling over your own little digital kingdom. You create the rules within that tribe. You can push your followers to positive ends or you can push them to evil ones. It just takes one retweet from nutjobs like Alex Jones to inspire a few hate crimes. It just takes one tweet from the president to incite a riot. One post from an influencer to cause a massive stock tumble on SnapChat. We’re all autocrats now — the question is whether or not you will be a benevolent ruler.

#4 We Are All Weird

The only thing that is scalable in 2020 is weird. Not mass. There is so much fluff in the middle, we are so inundated with endless attention grabbing schemes by marketers that the only thing that stands out now is something different — something weird.

Mass Is Dead: The industrial economy was predicated off of this odd notion that everyone was the same and wanted the same things. Therefore, if we just keep making more and more widgets, faster and cheaper more and more people will buy them. But, mass assumes that people are rational — that they can tell the difference between their wants and their needs. Godin argues that their wants are their needs.
Target the Fanatics: If you think of your clients as a bell curve, the middle third would be where normal and mass would be. But that starting tail is where you’re going to find your weirdos — the people who are probably as irrational as you are about whatever your business is up to. You’ll find 1950s Batman comic fanatics, Russian Kettle Bell Soccer Moms, and American football high school kickers and punters all here. The fanatics already believe what you believe, you just need to connect them.
Ism’s: In the age of weird it is exceptionally easy to create a mass audience by positioning different types of weird or ism’s against each other. Conservativism vs. Liberalism. Nationalism vs. Globalism. Nativisim vs. Internationalism. Racism vs. Colorblindness-ism. The force of weird needs to be used wisely.

#5 The Dip

“The Dip” is probably one of my favorite Godin books. Don’t let its compact size fool you. It packs a punch. It’s all about quitting.

Quitting has a weird connotation in society. You don’t want to be known as a quitter. If you start something and give up on it, somehow you have less moral worth than someone who worked hard their whole life and stuck it out. Godin counters this typically unquestioned societal value by arguing that quitting isn’t so bad. Knowing when to quit and when to stick something out is a dilemma most face on their own with few tools to help.

I found this book fun to couple with Jim Collins’s Hedge Hog Concept. The Hedge Hog Concept helps one decide what they’d like to do with their life. If you hadn’t notice, this is a question I ask myself a lot. There are three overlapping rings each with one question: Do you love it? Does it have an economic model? And, can you be best in the world at it?

Godin’s The Dip covers determining how to become best in the world at something by stopping everything else. “You really can’t try to do everything, especially if you intend to be the best in the world.”

A few key points from The Dip:

Zipf’s Law: “#1 gets 10x the benefit as #10 and 100x the benefit of #100…Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner” On a typical distribution of 10 or so, there is one movie, one business, one actor, one athlete who receives 10x the success as the other 9 members in that same group. When you look at the top 10 QBs in the NFL, Tom Brady sits atop all of them with 10x success of even his closest rival, Peyton Manning (who was excellent in his own right). There’s only so much choice we want to spend any time or energy on, therefore we are going to default to whoever is the perceived #1 in any category. Ask any middle schooler what they want their first cell phone to be and they will all say, iPhone.
Number One Matters: Number one matters because there can be only one. And, getting to the perceived number one position takes a very long time. Apple took almost 20 years to get to number one. Amazon took over 20 years. Harvard took over 400. Positioning yourself as number one is a long term game that few people have the patience for.
Best In The World is Relative: Seth defines “best in the world” as meaning best in a given market place for your potential customer. You might not be the best fitness trainer in the literal world, but you are the most well-known in your suburban Connecticut town and have a steady stream of high-paying clients. That is being best in the world, for you. I think defining what a potential best-in-the-world scenario looks like is a helpful exercise in narrowing your business’s focus.
The World is Getting Larger and Smaller at the Same Time: In an era of infinite connectivity there is infinite variety for a customer to choose from. And, in an era of algorithmic social media that is good at finding you other like-minded people with the same interests as you, its easier than ever to find your small tribe.
Specificity Creates Opportunity: It is only when you narrow your focus to a single, unique niche that opportunities will find you. You, in a way, need to become a monopoly of one.

101 Assorted Seth Godin Quotes

I’ve always dipped back into Seth’s books from time to time to recharge my mind or rediscover an insight of his that might help. I hope you enjoy these as some of my favorite Seth quotes:

If you’re unwilling to have empathy for the narrative of the person you seek to serve, you’re stealing.
The magic question is “Who is it for?” The people you seek to serve — what do they believe? What do they want?
We’re seeking our own little pocket of uniqueness.
A marketer is curious about other people.
A lifeguard doesn’t have to spend much time pitching to the drowning person.
…what would better look like? Not for you, but for the customer?
If we can accept that people have embraced who they have become, it gets a lot easier to dance with them.
…begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve and a change they seek to make.
When you know what you stand for you don’t need to compete.
…Trident [Booksellers and Cafe in Boston] is actually a coffee shop that sells books. The books we just bought are a souvenir of the personal connections we made today.
We sell feelings, status, and connection, not tasks or stuff.
There are three common confusions that many of us get stuck on: (1) …people confuse wants and needs…(2)…people are intimately aware of their wants (which they think of as needs) but they are absolutely terrible at inventing new ways to address those wants…(3)…The third is mistakenly believing that everyone wants the same thing.
Nobody needs your product.
When someone doesn’t act as you expected them to, look for their fear.
Every good customer gets you another.
Your best customers become your new salespeople.
Seek a path, not a miracle.
If you can’t succeed in the small, why do you believe you will succeed in the large?
…you can make a living — if you are content to make living but not a fortune.
…it’s way more productive to matter to a few [clients].
The critic who doesn’t like your work is correct. He doesn’t like your work. This cannot be argued with. The critic who says no one else will like your work is wrong. After all, you like your work. Someone else might like it too.
When we seek feedback we’re doing something brace and foolish. We’re asking to be proven wrong.
Everyone always acts in accordance with their internal narratives.
Do people like me do things like this?
We’ve gone from all us being everyone to all of us being no one.
Exclusive is an internal measure. It’s us versus them, insiders versus outsiders. The Hell’s Angels aren’t elite, but they’re exclusive. Harvard Business School is both elite and exclusive. So are the Navy Seals.
Exclusive organizations survive as long as they wish to belong.
Tension is the hallmark of a great educational experience — the tension of not quite knowing where we are in the process, not being sure of the curriculum, not having a guarantee that the insight we seek is about to happen.
We don’t want to feel left out, left behind, uninformed, or impotent. We want to get ahead. We want to be in sync. We want to do what people like us are doing…And the reason is status.
If all it took to upend the status quo was the truth, we would have changed a long time ago.
…the desire to change out status, or to protect it, drives almost everything we do.
The smart marketer begins to realize that some people are open and hungry for s shift in status (up or down), while others will fight like crazy to maintain their roles.
Status is in the eyes of the beholder.
Shame is the status killer.
When we bring status into our marketing, we are walking on very thin ice. We don’t know if the person we’re engaging with appears to have high status (and doesn’t believe it) or actually believes and wants to increase his standing.
Once you know what you stand for, the rest gets a lot easier.
We scan we don’t study.
A brand is a shorthand for the customer’s expectations…If people care, you’ve got a brand.
If a brand is our mental shorthand for the promise that you make, then a logo is the Post-it reminder of that promise. Without a brand, a logo is meaningless.
There’s no such thing as mandatory education. It’s almost impossible to teach people against their will.
Treat different people differently.
Some customers are worth more than others.
You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few. The whales pay for the minnows.
The Google ecosystem is based on a myth. The myth is that millions and millions of businesses, all grooming themselves for the search engine, will be found by people who seek them.
“Cheap” is another way to say “scared”
Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous ideas.
Lowering your price doesn’t make you more trusted. It does the opposite.
Every publisher, every media company, every author of ideas needs to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middleman.
Too often, impatient marketers resort to stunts. Stunts come from a place of selfishness.
Ideas travel horizontally now: from person to person, not from organization to customer. We begin with the smallest possible core and give them something to talk about and reason to do so.
The internet thrives on affiliation.
…more people are connected and fewer are trusted.
We remember what you did long after we forgot what you said.
Everyone is famous to fifteen hundred people.
Public relations is the art of telling your story to the right people in the right way.
At the top of the [sales] funnel, you pour attention. At the bottom of the funnel, committed loyal customers come out. Between the top and the bottom, most people leak out.
Invest in the lifetime value of a customer, building new things for your customers instead of racing around trying to find new customers for your things.
We like to do what everyone else is doing.
The mass market wants something that works. Something safe.
…in order to satisfy the early adopters, you may just need to annoy the masses.
Connected tribes are more powerful than disconnected ones.
The tribe doesn’t belong to you, so you don’t get to tell the members what to do or to use them for your own aims.
The tribe would probably survive if you want away. The goal is for them to miss you if you did.
The best marketers are farmers, not hunters.
The easy sales aren’t always the important ones.
Tesla understood that no one who bought one of the first 50,000 Teslas actually needed a car.
Perfect closes the door. It asserts that we’re done, that this is the best we can do. Worse, perfect forbids us to try.
Marketing is powerful when it sells a product to someone who discovers more joy or more productivity because he bought it.
Just like every tool, the impact comes from the craftsmen, not the tool.
If you bring your best self to the world, your best work and the world doesn’t receive it, it’s entirely possible that your marketing sucked.
When you identify discomfort, you’ve found the place a leader is needed.
…consumers are complicity in marketing.
Successful marketers are just the providers of stories that consumers choose to believe.
…if you’ve got an idea to spread, you are now a marketer.
…no marketing succeeds if it can’t find an audience that already wants to believe the story being told.
The organizations that succeed realize that offering a remarkable product with a great story is more important and more profitable than doing what everyone else is going just a bit better.
Don’t try to change someone’s worldview is the strategy smart marketers follow.
Don’t try to use facts to prove your case and to insist that people change their biases.
A frame…is a way you hang a story on to a consumer’s existing worldview.
…there is no monolith of want.
…it’s dangerous to assume that they’re [people] are all rational.
A vote is a statement of the voter, not the candidate.
It’s interesting to note that while changing a worldview is fairly glamorous work, it doesn’t often lead to a lot of profit.
Your opportunity lies in finding a neglected worldview, framing your story in a way that this audience will focus on and going from there.
A worldview is not who you are. It’s what you believe. It’s your biases.
If you’re unable to tack your idea onto a person’s worldview, then that idea will be ignored.
Frames are the words and images and interactions that reinforce a bias someone is already feeling.
Speaking respectfully to a person’s worldview is the price of entry to get their attention.
If your message is framed in a way that conflicts with their worldview, you’re invisible.
You’re more likely to succeed as long as you avoid winner-take-all contests.
…humans insist on finding a theory to explain what happens to them.
In the face of random behavior, people make up their own lies.
[On Coke] We drink the can, not the beverage.
Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires. It’s the story, not the good or the service you actually sell, that pleases the consumer.
Proof doesn’t make the sale. Of course you believe the proof, but your audience doesn’t.
In order to be believed, you must present enough of a change that the consumer chooses to notice it. But then you have to tell a story, not give a lecture.
Expectations are the engine of our perception.
Storytelling works when the story actually makes the product or service better.
A fraud is a marketing ptch that once revealed as a story makes a believer angry: it’s deceitful.
Just because people might believe your story doesn’t give you the right to tell it!
People like us do things like this.

Summing Up Seth

Thank you for taking the time to read through all this. I hope in times of uncertainty a nugget of wisdom that you found here from Seth might help you push through to the other side to do work you too, are proud of.

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