<p>Who is the author of This Is Marketing?</p>

<p>The author of This Is Marketing is Seth Godin.</p>

Marketing & Sales

This Is Marketing Book Summary - This Is Marketing Book explained in key points

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This Is Marketing summary

Name: This Is Marketing
Rating: 4.5 (464 reviews)
Author: Seth Godin

Seth Godin

You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

4.5 (464 ratings)

24 mins

Brief summary

This Is Marketing by Seth Godin is a marketing guide that challenges traditional advertising and offers a new approach to marketing that prioritizes empathy, connection, and emotional resonance with customers, rather than merely promoting products.

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This Is Marketing
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What’s in it for me? Learn a new philosophy of marketing for the internet age.

What’s the first word you think of when you hear the term “marketing?” If you’re like most people, it’s probably “advertising.” The two activities have been so closely associated with each other for so long that they’ve almost become synonymous.

But in today’s world, advertising is increasingly becoming a dead end for many companies – or at least just a side road on the path to success. Now more than ever, we need a much broader, deeper conception of marketing, one that goes far beyond mere advertising and takes a more philosophical approach to the subject.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why one of the most effective marketing strategies involves giving up on trying to persuade most people;
how the Grateful Dead can help you with positioning your product; and
why JCPenney’s sales dropped more than 50 percent when it tried to improve its messaging.

Mass advertising made sense in the heyday of mass media; in the internet age, it no longer does.

Imagine you’re a marketing executive back in the 1960s. Your company has a product, but your sales team has a problem: not enough sales! So how do you solve it?

If you took the traditional approach to marketing, it would boil down to two words: buy ads – preferably lots of ads, and get them seen by as many people as possible.

Call it the “Coca-Cola method.” As the world-famous soft drink company has done year after year, you would flood the airwaves and magazine pages with advertisements.

Your objective? In a word, mass. You use the mass media to achieve mass saturation of the mass market with a mass message aimed at – you guessed it – the masses.

And what’s the message? Mass again. It’s about persuading your mass audience that your product is a part of the mass culture. For Coca-Cola, that meant convincing people that everyone’s drinking Coke – and enjoying it!

Back in the 1960s, when the United States had three main television channels, and nearly everyone was watching the same shows, that was a viable strategy. If you ran an ad on The Beverly Hillbillies, your message would reach millions of people – a large percentage of the television-viewing public.

But those days are long gone. Now the public’s attention is split between thousands of television channels and shows, and many people are watching YouTube and Netflix instead.

The internet is a game changer. On one level, it’s the most massive mass medium ever created, connecting billions of people. But on another level, it’s also the least massive medium. That’s because everyone can curate their own private version of it, with personalized Facebook timelines and Twitter feeds, and tailored YouTube video suggestions and Spotify playlists.

Just as mass media has splintered into numerous smaller media, the mass culture that used to be centered around it has fractured as well. The television show Mad Men, which ran between 2007 and 2015, chronicled this shift, and the show itself provides an example of the change that’s taken place. The show received a great deal of praise, yet on average, only about 1 percent of the US population watched it.

The mass-advertising approach to marketing no longer makes sense. Clearly, a new approach is needed.

Internet advertising has appealing features, but it also has limits.

At first glance, the internet would seem to provide the perfect medium for advertising – far better, in fact, than the three-channel television of yore. Sure, you can no longer reach a mass audience with a single ad on a hit TV show – but you can do something that’s even more effective.

You can precisely target the group of people you want to reach with your ads. Facebook, Google and YouTube offer the ability to do this with just a few clicks of the mouse. As a result, unlike in the olden days of television, you don’t have to broadcast your message to nearly everyone in the hope of reaching a particular demographic.

To build something worth buying, identify an underlying human desire or need and make sure your product fulfills it.

The first step of effective marketing is as easy to say as it is difficult to do: make something worth buying. But wait – isn’t that the task of designers and manufacturers?

Yes, but it’s also a task for marketers. To see why, let’s drill down into what makes something worth buying in the first place. Consider a literal drill, with a quarter-inch bit.

Your target audience should share your definition of the desire that your product solves, and be open to change.

The next step of effective marketing is based on the simple fact that you can’t please everyone, because different people want different things. Indeed, even when some people seem to have the same desire, they often define it in different ways. For instance, to some, adventure means thrill-seeking. To others, it means international travel.

Remember, the product you’re marketing embodies a certain definition of the desire it satisfies, and your target audience consists of the people who share that desire and definition. Everyone else is outside of your product’s scope, at least for now.

You can find your target audience by staking out an unusual position in relation to a set of values.

We know that people’s purchasing decisions are motivated by deep-seated needs and desires. But there’s something else that drives the decision to buy: personal values – in other words, the things people care about when pursuing the things they want.

For example, imagine someone trying to fulfill one of her most fundamental human needs: nutrition. As she looks over the potato chip options in the grocery store, there are different values that can sway her purchasing decision. If she cares about affordability and popularity, she’ll go for the cheapest big name brand. If she appreciates healthiness and sustainability, she’ll choose the organic local brand.

To transform your target audience into a tribe, speak to them in a way that resonates with their shared worldview.

In order to find a core group of fans who will become the smallest viable market for your product, you first need to realize a seemingly paradoxical truth: those fans already exist.

They might not realize it yet, but there are already people who have the desires, needs and values that might inspire them to become your fans. They’re just waiting for you to connect them into a new tribe and lead them to your product.

You can propel the members of your tribe into action by challenging their statuses in a way that creates tension.

Assuming you’ve started to gain a growing group of fans for your product, your next step as a marketer becomes persuading them to actually buy it. And the key to doing this is to create and relieve tension – a sense of uncomfortable pressure to which your product offers the antidote.

One way to do this is to challenge their status – their relationship to a group and their position within its hierarchy. This the ranking system that tells them who has the most respect and power within the group. In this case, the group is the tribe that’s gathered around your product.

Network effects provide a powerful way to build a bridge between your initial fan base and the general public.

Unless you’re marketing a super specialized product that could only appeal to a niche audience, you’ll probably eventually want to move beyond your initial fan base and reach the general public, where a much larger market awaits.

To cross the gap between that fan base and the public, you’ll need to perform the final step of effective marketing: building a bridge that will allow your product to spread.

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What is This Is Marketing about?

This Is Marketing (2018) begins with a provocative premise: the landscape of marketing has dramatically shifted in the past few decades, but we haven’t updated our thinking about it accordingly. Our mental model still places advertising at the center of the marketing universe – but in the age of the internet, that no longer makes sense. A new philosophy is needed.

This Is Marketing Review

This Is Marketing (2018) by Seth Godin is a practical guide that explores effective marketing strategies for the modern age. Here's why this book is worth reading:

Offers insightful perspectives on how to understand and connect with customers in a meaningful way, allowing businesses to thrive in today's competitive market.
Emphasizes the importance of empathy and authenticity in marketing, urging readers to prioritize building relationships and delivering value over traditional sales tactics.
Provides practical strategies and examples that can be applied to any industry, helping readers gain a deeper understanding of their target audience and how to effectively communicate with them.

Who should read This Is Marketing?

Marketing mavens looking for new ideas and inspiration
Marketing skeptics waiting to be won over to the discipline
Marketing opponents wanting to protect themselves against manipulation

About the Author

Seth Godin is a successful entrepreneur, educator, writer and speaker on the topics of marketing and leadership. He has founded two companies, Squidoo and Yoyodyne, and he has written 18 books, which include The Dip, a New York Times best seller, and Purple Cow, which sold more than 150,000 copies and went through 23 printing runs in its first two years. He has led a number of marketing workshops, seminars and courses, and he also maintains Seth’s Blog, which is as popular as it is self-descriptive.

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