This book challenged the way I think about marketing.
In This is Marketing, Seth Godin lays out his philosophy of marketing and if you’ve read him before, many of the ideas will be familiar. He argues that marketing is not advertising and we need to separate those two ideas in our strategies.
Despite getting his start in direct advertising, he disparages it here, saying the days of direct advertising are over. Instead, he says we should focus on making our minimum viable customer base so happy that they do the marketing work for us – they become our salespeople.
Godin says marketing is about building a community, creating a movement and making tangible changes in the world. Focusing on the smallest number of people who can support your business allows you to create something truly unique and valuable to those people. Those people then bring others into the fold.
Essentially, Godin is advocating for the power of word of mouth.
Word of mouth marketing may sound passive or easy but doing it the way Godin recommends takes energy. You have to show up, listen to your customers, be open-minded and make changes.
It’s not a very long book but it took a while to get through it because I kept having to pause and think and even write down ideas as I read. I borrowed the book from the library but I want to purchase it so that I can spend even more time with it
In a lot of ways, This is Marketing is a workbook. There are exercises scattered throughout that ask you to examine the way you think about your customer base and what you’re saying to them.
In business, it’s too easy to slip into focusing on numbers; This is Marketing is a good reminder that business is really all about the people.
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