This is marketing

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.

Godin does not write this with bitterness. He writes it with a kind of patient delight, the way a teacher feels when a student finally puts down the wrong tool and reaches for the right one. The right tool, he says, is empathy. Not empathy as a poster on the wall. Empathy as the daily discipline of seeing the world through the eyes of a specific human being and asking what change you can help that person make. Marketing, in his definition, is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Not yours. And once you accept that, every other tactical question gets easier.