This Is Marketing: Summary Review
This is a summary review of This Is Marketing containing key details about the book.
What is This Is Marketing About?
"This Is Marketing" by Seth Godin is a book that teaches readers how to create and deliver value through marketing strategies that resonate with their target audience.
For the first time Seth Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you're proud of, whether you're a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation. No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it's presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.
Summary Points & Takeaways from This Is Marketing
Some key summary points and takeaways from the book includes:
* Marketing is about creating change, not selling products.
* To be effective, marketing must address people's deepest desires, fears, and aspirations.
* The job of marketing is to find the people who want what you have and bring them to you.
* Understanding the customer's journey is critical to successful marketing.
* To build trust, marketers must be honest, empathetic, and generous.
* The most important tool for marketers is storytelling.
* The best marketing campaigns are those that are consistent over time and across channels.
* Authenticity is the most important factor in building a strong brand.
* Marketing success requires collaboration between teams and departments.
* To be successful in marketing, you must continually evolve and adapt to changes in technology and consumer behavior.
Who is the author of This Is Marketing?
Seth W. Godin is an American author and former dot com business executive.
This Is Marketing Summary Notes
The Evolution of Marketing in the Digital Age
Mass advertising was the norm during the heyday of mass media, when everyone watched the same TV channels and read the same newspapers and magazines. Companies would buy as many ads as possible to saturate the market with their message. The goal was to convince people that their product was a part of the mass culture, and to create a mass audience for it. However, the internet has changed everything. The public's attention is now split between thousands of channels and shows, and people can curate their own private version of the internet, with personalized feeds and suggestions. The mass culture has fractured as well, and the old approach to marketing no longer makes sense. Companies need a new approach that is tailored to the digital age. They need to create personalized messages that speak directly to individual consumers, and they need to use social media and other digital channels to reach their audience. In short, they need to focus on building relationships with their customers, rather than simply bombarding them with mass messages. This is the new era of marketing, and companies that want to succeed need to adapt to it.
The Pros and Cons of Internet Advertising
The internet has revolutionized advertising, providing precise targeting, ubiquitous reach, and detailed measurement. Internet advertising allows companies to bypass the old mass media approach and directly target their desired audience anywhere and anytime. Search engine optimization offers another approach to online marketing where companies aim to appear among the top Google search results. However, the abundance of ads, even precisely targeted, has led to an oversaturation of ads and makes it challenging for companies to get noticed. Additionally, appearing on the first page of search results is a challenge in itself.
The internet provides appealing features for advertising, but it also has limits. Companies need to take new approaches to marketing to make it more effective. In the following ideas, we will explore these approaches to help companies to approach marketing more effectively.
Understanding the Importance of Fulfilling Human Needs in Marketing
Marketing is not just about selling a product, it is about fulfilling a human desire or need. The key to building something worth buying is to identify what people truly desire and provide a compelling solution that fulfills it. A drill bit, for example, is not purchased for the sake of owning it, but for the hole it creates, which is a means to install a shelf, ultimately fulfilling the human desire for tidiness, control, and admiration.
Effective marketing begins by understanding people's underlying needs and aspirations such as adventure, belonging, connection, freedom, strength, and tranquility. A product becomes worth buying if it can provide a compelling answer to one or more of these aspirations. For instance, when a man purchases an SUV, it is not just for its off-roading capabilities, but because it fulfills his desire for adventure, which speaks to his emotional needs.
Marketing is not a standalone activity that is performed once a product is made, it is an integral part of the design and manufacturing process. By identifying human needs, marketers can guide the process of building products that fulfill these needs, making them worth buying. The key is to create a deliverable promise of fulfillment, making the product stand out and meet the emotional needs of the customer.
Understanding the emotional needs of customers is crucial in creating a successful marketing strategy. It is not just about highlighting the product features, but about showcasing how the product can fulfill the deep-seated aspirations of the customer. A successful marketing strategy will provide a solution that goes beyond the product and satisfies the customer’s emotional needs.
Your Target Audience: Shared Definition and Willingness to Change
In the book, the author emphasizes the importance of defining the target audience for effective marketing. The target audience is the group of people who share the desire that the product satisfies and the definition of that desire. By dividing the target audience into adopters and adapters, the author suggests that it is crucial to focus on the adopters who are willing to try out new things, rather than the adapters who are resistant to change. The product represents a new way of fulfilling their desire, which they are already fulfilling in other ways. Thus, the goal is to persuade the adopters to try out the product first. If there are enough adopters, they can constitute the smallest viable market that can make the product profitable. By identifying and focusing on the right target audience, marketers can ensure that their efforts are well-targeted and effective.
Find Your Target Audience Through Unusual Positioning with Values
Marketing is all about fulfilling people's needs and desires, but it's important to understand that personal values also play a crucial role in their purchasing decisions. By identifying the values that matter to your target audience, you can stake out an unusual position that sets you apart from the competition. Instead of playing it safe and targeting the most popular values, move to the extremes that haven't been overcrowded yet. The Grateful Dead succeeded in this approach by embracing opposite musical values and creating a unique combination of them, resulting in a die-hard fan base that propelled them to commercial success. By identifying your smallest viable market and staking out a unique position with values, you can cultivate your own core group of fans for your company and its product.
Building a Tribe through Storytelling
To effectively market a product, it is not enough to simply identify your target audience. You must also turn them into a tribe - a group of people who share a similar worldview and desire to engage with your product. The key to building a tribe is through effective storytelling that speaks to your audience in a way that resonates with their values and beliefs.
By telling stories that promise fulfillment of desires in a way that aligns with their worldview, marketers can lead their target audience to become a part of their tribe. This involves using language and symbols that make the promise feel believable and appealing.
JCPenney is an example of a company that successfully built a tribe by appealing to the desires of bargain hunters. Their promise was that their stores were a rewarding place to search for deals, and they used symbols such as coupons and discounts to make that promise feel believable. By doing so, they sent an implicit message to their fans: "This is how people like us do things."
However, when JCPenney's CEO Ron Johnson ignored the importance of these symbols and got rid of them in favor of a more high-end approach, their bargain-hunting fans left and sales dropped by over 50%.
To build a tribe, marketers must speak to their audience in a way that resonates with their shared worldview and use symbols that make the promise feel believable. By doing so, they can lead their target audience to become a core group of fans and create a successful marketing strategy.
Challenge the Status Quo of Your Tribe to Create Tension and Drive Action
After building a tribe of fans around your product, the next step is to persuade them to take action and actually buy it. The key to doing this is to create and relieve tension - a sense of discomfort that your product offers the antidote for. One way to create tension is to challenge the status of your tribe members.
Status refers to the hierarchy within the group and the level of respect and power that each member holds. By raising the prospect of separation from the tribe, you create tension and motivate people to take action to maintain their status. This can be achieved by making your product one of the variables in the statement "people like us do X, Y, and Z."
To create tension, you need to understand the type of people who belong to your tribe and the way they approach their status relationships. There are two basic approaches: affiliation and domination. People seeking affiliation want to feel kinship with other group members and reassurance about their position in the hierarchy. To create tension among these people, you should send signals of popularity, such as having busy trade show booths or getting celebrities to attend your product launch party.
In contrast, people seeking domination want to climb the ranks of their own group's hierarchy, see their group outrank others, or achieve a bit of both. To create tension among these people, you should send signals of dominance. This could involve taking bold actions to challenge competitors, governments, or even your own employees.
Building Bridges with Network Effects: How to Expand Your Product's Appeal
Marketing isn't just about gaining a loyal fan base, it's about crossing the bridge between that base and the larger public. But how do you get people who are resistant to change to try your product? One powerful solution lies in network effects, which happen when a product becomes more valuable as more people use it.
The challenge is that your initial fan base consists of adopters who embraced your product for disrupting the old way of doing things. Meanwhile, the general public primarily consists of adapters who are often resistant to change. This is where network effects come in.
For example, Slack's online collaboration platform was embraced by a small fan base of people who were willing to learn a new program. Once they had learned it, they worked on converting their coworkers into Slack users because the more people using the platform, the more useful it became. This led to a positive feedback loop where more people using the platform made it even more useful, making it even more attractive to others.
The key to harnessing network effects is to get your initial fan base to lead the way in converting others to your product. This can be accomplished through targeted marketing campaigns and by emphasizing the value of the network effect. Once people start using your product and experiencing its benefits, they'll be more likely to continue using it and spreading the word to others.
In sum, network effects can be a powerful tool to help your product go mainstream and bridge the gap between your initial fan base and the larger public. By leveraging the power of the network effect and getting your initial fans to lead the way, you can expand your product's appeal and reach a wider audience.
Book Details
- Print length: 271 pages
- Genre: Business, Nonfiction, Audiobook
What is a good quote from This Is Marketing?
Top Quote: “Persistent, consistent, and frequent stories, delivered to an aligned audience, will earn attention, trust, and action.” - This Is Marketing Quotes, Seth Godin
What do critics say?
Here's what one of the prominent reviewers had to say about the book: "This Is Marketing is a very accessible way into Godin's thinking.... Godin writes in pacy, jargon-free prose and this book is interesting and useful for anyone who wants an insight into how, and why, we buy things or change our habits in any way." — The Financial Times
* The editor of this summary review made every effort to maintain information accuracy, including any published quotes, chapters, or takeaways. If you're interested in enhancing your personal growth, I suggest checking out my list of favorite self-development books. These books have been instrumental in my own personal development and I'm confident they can help you too.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
