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My Notes About a Speech Given at Google by Seth Godin

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Version 0.1
Copyright © 2009 by Zack Smith.
All rights reserved.

Introduction

Seth Godin is a very perceptive guy whose insights makes people stop and listen. This is just some notes that I assembled after watching a video of his speech at Google.

My notes

Google ads on the righthand side of a page deliver:
  • anticipated
  • personal
  • relevant
... messages.

It's about the consumer, stupid.

Godin points out that

  • He doesn't want to see an ad while driving down the highway.
  • He doesn't want to see an ad while watching the superbowl.
  • He wants to see it when he types in 'espresso machine'.

This is what he calls "permission marketing": the privilege of selling to people who want to be sold to.

Marketing is providing a story that consumers want to tell themselves.

It's getting people to buy things they probably don't need.

  • Bottled water tells a story about freshness, crispness, etc.
  • Cat food tells a story about the cat being civilized, pandered, happy.
Funnel analogy
  • People at top don't know what they want, they fall out.
  • People at the bottom nearly do.
  • People who come out bottom are paying $$$.
Amazon put a lot of money into putting people into the top of the funnel.
Google didn't.
It's getting more expensive to put people into the funnel.

Google turns the funnel into a megaphone:
They are exciting enough that people want to tell other people about new stuff they're going, like gmail.

He says that Google is REMARKABLE because they keep making stuff that is WORTH REMARKING ABOUT.

  • Other people do their marketing for them.

He says "it's at the edges (products that are REMARKABLE) where people will wait in line" to see/touch/buy.

  • BMW hardly spends anything on marketing in the US.
    • They make stuff worth talking about. Therefore their engineering department is effectively the marketing dept.
    • Lincoln Mercury spends a huge amount on marketing to HYPE average cars for average people.

More average product means more marketing hype required.
More remarkable product means less marketing hype required.

People buy a Hummer with Nike-designed tires not to get to point B from A, but to tell a story, to make a statement. [Luxury is always that way?]

What people do online is:

  1. They POKE. They poke here and there. (Not "surf")
  2. They get a clue here and a clue there.
  3. They assemble clues into a picture.
    • However it is hard to make use of 1.2 million search engine hits.
  4. Either:
    • You feel trapped/stuck therefore you GIVE UP.
    • Or you feel/decide you have MEANING (the big picture) enough to act on.

Meaning is the precondition for action.
Without meaning, a person is a deer in the headlights.

Approaches to marketing:

#1. "The TV-Industrial Complex".

  1. The strategy from 20 years ago. It involves:
    1. Pay $$ for ads to INTERRUPT PEOPLE.
    2. Get more distribution.
    3. Sell more stuff.
    4. Take profits & put those into more ads.
  2. The end-problem is finding customers for your products.

And note:

  • Websites that think like this obsess over CPM.
  • Websites that are the SAME FOR ALL THE KEYWORDS THEY BUY (????).
  • This mindset is why Web 1.0 did not work: It led to ever-falling banner ad prices.

#2. "The Fashion-Permission Complex"

  1. Make stuff worth talking about.
  2. Tell it to people who WANT to hear from you.
  3. They will then interrupt their friends and do free "marketing" for you.
  4. Hard part: Get permission from these people to tell them about your next cool thing e.g. via Google Toolbar (?????).
    • The end-problem is finding products for your customers.

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