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This is marketing
What It’s About
Imagine you are a marketing expert in the 1960s. Your company has a product, but the sales team has a problem: not enough sales! How do you solve it?
Three Key Ideas
Find Your Smallest Audience
Serving the fewest people deeply enough that they cannot live without your work is more powerful than chasing mass reach.
Identity Drives Every Purchase
People buy to confirm who they already are, so effective marketing fits the story a customer tells about themselves.
Permission Beats Interruption
An audience that invites your messages is a durable business asset that no algorithm change or competitor can take away.
Read a Sample
This Is Marketing
By Seth Godin (2018)
The scene that opens the book
Picture a marketer. Not the one in the stock photo with a megaphone and a giant grin. The real one. Late afternoon, half a sandwich on the desk, a quarterly report that says reach is up and revenue is flat. Ten years ago this person could buy attention by the truckload. Run a TV spot, blast an email list, dump money into a banner ad, and sales would move. The math was simple even when it was wasteful. Now the math is broken. People skip ads. They install blockers. They scroll past the cleverest copy without registering a single word. And the marketer keeps doing what worked, only louder, because nobody wants to admit the playbook stopped working.
Seth Godin walks into that scene and says something most marketing books refuse to say. He says the playbook did not just stop working. It was always a little broken, and the cracks have finally widened into a hole you cannot paper over. Mass marketing, he argues, was an accident of mid-century media scarcity. Three TV networks. A few national magazines. A handful of newspapers in every city. If you wanted to reach the average person, you bought average space and put average messages in front of average people, and you measured success by how many of them you interrupted. That world is gone. It is not coming back. And the marketers who keep grieving it are the ones falling behind.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who runs a small business and keeps writing marketing copy that feels too vague to actually land.
- Anyone who wants to build a brand that earns genuine loyalty instead of renting attention from platforms.
- Anyone who leads sales and wants to understand why trust without tension rarely closes a deal.
- Anyone who is launching a product and needs a framework for choosing who to serve before writing a single ad.
About the Author: Seth Godin
Seth Godin is the author of more than twenty business books, including Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, and Tribes, translated into dozens of languages. He studied computer science and philosophy at Tufts and earned an MBA from Stanford. In the early 1990s he founded Yoyodyne, one of the first permission-based internet marketing companies, which Yahoo acquired in 1998.
He has written a daily blog since 2002, consistently ranked among the most widely read in business. This Is Marketing, published in 2018, is his attempt to compress a career's worth of thinking into a single, practical primer on what marketing actually is and who it is for.
