The Art of Making Change Happen
If you’d like to learn how businesses can better connect with their audiences, I recommend this bestselling book.
If you’d like to learn how businesses can better connect with their audiences, spread ideas, build tribes, and effect change, I recommend the bestselling book “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin.
Seth Godin is a prolific author, entrepreneur, and marketer who writes insightful and accessible prose on marketing, business, and communication. He has written 21 bestsellers in 39 languages.
What I love about this book is that it distills the core of Seth’s marketing wisdom. He argues that marketing isn't about the stuff you make but the stories you tell, the connection you build, and the change you make.
I took pages of notes from this book. Here are some insightful quotes that resonated with me:
On effective marketing:
Marketing is the art of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven’t made an impact until you’ve changed someone. Instead of asking, “How can I get more people to listen to me?”, you can ask, “What change do I seek to make?”
Effective marketers don’t begin with a solution or with the thing that makes them more clever than everyone else. Instead, we begin with a group we seek to serve, a problem they seek to solve, and a change they seek to make.
People don’t want what you make. They wan’t what it will do for them. They want the way it will make them feel. If you can bring someone peace of mind, belonging, connection, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile. The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve these emotions. And we let every one down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcome.
A marketer’s guide: “Who’s it for?”, “What’s it for?”, “How does their status change?”, and “What will they tell the others?”
The three sentence template for your marketing promise:
My product is for people who believe ________
I will focus on people who want _______
I promise that engaging with what I make will help you get ______
On building tribes:
If you want to make change, begin my making culture. Begin by organizing a tightly knit group. Begin by getting people in sync.
Group people based on psychographics (what they believe) instead of demographics (what they look like). Group people based on the stories they tell themselves; these are their world views.
Make [the story] easy to spread. Offer ways to go deeper. When you find someone who is eager to talk about what you do, give him something to talk about.
On buying:
The one question that every business buyer asks herself is, “What will I tell my boss?”. You are marketing the answer to that question, “If you choose this, you can tell your boss, investor, board that you…”
“New” and “boring” doesn’t easily coexist. And so the people who are happy with boring aren’t looking for you. They’re actively avoiding you, in fact.
