Gustav von Sydow on digital advertising, online media and tech start-ups

Seth Godin is an interesting guy who has written countless very important marketing books. For some unknown reason my copy of All Marketes are liars by Seth Godin had been gathering dust on the shelf for quite some time and I decided to read it on a train ride to Stockholm yesterday. The book is about how (and why) to use stories to further your company’s/organization’s/your own objectives. The main thesis’ of the books are:

1. Competitive advantages are becoming too complex too formulate in a one sentence positioning statement and people need stories to make sense of what a company is all about.
2. Stories are what makes people (irrationally) believe that some products are superior to other products. This is why people sincerely believe that a 80 000 dollar Porsche Cayenne is superior to the 36 000 dollar Volkswagen Touareg, despite the fact that they are basically the same part. We buy stories, not products.
3. Stories are what we tell other people and stories are thus what a savvy WOM enlighted marketer should aim for to maximize marketing (mainly WOM) efficiency.
4. To be effective, stories must fit the existing worldview of the target group. If it doesn’t, don’t try to change their worldview (because people can’t be changed), change target group.
5. To break through the info clutter, one must “frame” the story in a way that makes sense to people.

The first point I buy completely. It is obviously very inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, but still worth pointing out in a marketing context (to be fair, Godin does give Gladwell some credit in the prologue). The second point is nothing new at all. The use of stories is just basic branding, slightly adjusted. Regarding stories increasing the efficiency of WOM I think it’s absolutely true. However, it’s not like it hasn’t been said before, only using different terminology (even Godin himself in “Ideavirus”). Number four and five are quite obvious if you’ve read some consumer behaviour, however I don’t agree. The thing that I remember best from Blink was the case study of Herman Millers Aeron chair. It took a couple of years for it to become the best selling office chair of all time. It didn’t do this by meeting people’s existing worldview on what an office chair was all about. People hated it at first sight. But Herman Miller believed in Aeron and when people got used to the ground breaking design, it redefined how an office chair should be evaluated. The main point about Blink (for me) wasn’t that people make snap judgements and use intution. That’s hardly news to anyone. The most interesting part is that you can actually change what people believe. And that’s good news, now isn’t it?

I understand why Godin writes what he does; a lot of neomarketing lit. is critized for not being practical enough. People want books like “Ten things that guarantee you instant success within (enter industry here)”. And it is a realistic goal for most companies to get their story straight, find a group that might believe it and tell it (“frame” it) in a way that they’ll understand. A crowd pleaser. Instead of saying what he did in purple cow “create something remarkable, meaning something semirevolutionary” he’s saying “I didn’t mean that remarkable. You could just tweak a little, adjust your communications strategy and you’re good to go”. I like the fact that he points out how product development, WOM and sales are all interrelated but to give him credit for this is kind of like saying that Newton for “invented” gravity. To be honest, it’s just a slight improvement over the classic approach: build a decent product, select a target market with a high likelyhood of adoption and communicate in a sensible way. Boring. And actually kind of ironic (or a big conspiracy maybe?) since what he does is finding a new frame to an existing worldview (WOM, classic communication theory and product dev. ignorance). But hey… at least he’s living by his word. Which is more than you could say for most marketing writers.

From the marketing stand point that Godin wants us to buy books it’s all very clever, indeed (and hardly a coincidence no?). But I don’t like it. I think that the winners of tomorrow are those standing out by making a really, really, really awesome product. The crazy ones. The misfits. The round pegs in the square holes. Those who see a work of art when other people see a blank canvas. Think different. Go for broke. Revolutionize. Re-define. Re-imagine. Remarkabalize. Think it. Test it. Try it. Do it. Impossible is nothing.