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Seth's Blog

Seth Godin's riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.

Interviews (radio, irony and a bonus)Yesterday

Mark and I talk about radio.

Archie and I pretend to talk about action figures.

And a church interview with Milan.

Making vs. TakingYesterday

Consider two cereals:

Honey Bunches of Oats, a category creator, a big brand with spin offs and profits and growth.

Fruit Harvest, a generically named cereal that leverages the marketing department's ability to run coupons, grab shelf space and take share.

That's the choice most of us make when we launch a product or service. We can make a market or we can take share from a market.

"This is just like the Gillette razor, but cheaper."

"This has a touch screen, too, but you can get it from Verizon."

"I'm a shiatsu massage therapist, the only one on this block."

Those are 'taking' statements. They break a larger market into smaller bits. Compare to:

"This is a sugared cereal for adults."

"Our software enables you to find data and trends that no one else can find."

"By combining protein and chocolate, we've developed a new food that's both dessert and dinner."

These are 'making' statements. Riskier, sure, but they stand for something, they don't just steal share. The Dummies guides made a market, the Idiot's guides took from that market.

You need to be clear with yourself and your team about which one you're after, because they bring different costs, different benefits and different time frames.

The seed, the pit and the cherryDecember 2

Here's a ten minute video presentation I did for Acumen. I hope you'll discover that the idea of forming a nucleus applies to what you're working on as well.

Gravity is just a theoryDecember 2

Are you marketing gravity or evolution?

Newton gets all kinds of credit. They call it the Law of Gravity. They put his picture on pages that profile geniuses. They say he discovered gravity. Nonsense. He just named it.

Everyone 'believes' in gravity. And yet, we know virtually nothing about it. We don't know how gravity waves (if there are any) are transmitted. We can't block them (anti gravity boots!) and we can't amplify them and we have no idea how fast they travel. There are very few people doing serious gravity research and development, either. But it's apparently a law.

Evolution (and one's confidence or lack of belief thereof), on the other hand, is enough to sway a school board election or get you nominated for federal office. I've never met an informed person who doubted the general facts about evolution unless they had an alternative view of the origin of species that they felt emotionally connected to. There are evolution skeptics who would prefer a different story, but no gravity skeptics, even though there's a lot less science there.

What's up with that?

There are two reasons that gravity has had so much better marketing than evolution, and both may impact the way you market your product or service as well.

1. If the story of your marketing requires the prospect to abandon a previously believed story, you

If you could change your lifeDecember 1

...would you?

Getting into Stanford Business School changed my life. In college, I trained to be a mediocre engineer (I didn't set out to be mediocre at it, but I sure was). I was on track to become Dilbert.

Getting into Stanford meant jumping the track. Going from one path to another in one fell swoop.

I didn't learn much of substance at business school, but that's fine, because the school allowed me to make a graceful transition. I had permission to reinvent and a platform to do it.

Which leads to this post, this track and this opportunity. (Please read all the details at this link before jumping up and down).

I'm offering an apprenticeship/not-internship/graduate school/charm school track-changing opportunity to a few people this winter. It's free, it's fairly audacious and I hope you'll check it out. It might not be for you (in fact, it probably isn't) but I have no doubt that you know people who might be interested.

I'm convinced that there are people out there who--given the right teaching, encouragement and opportunity--can change the world. I'm hoping you can prove me right. You don't have much time and there are only a few slots, so if you're even flirting with this idea, check out the lens here.

Two years at business school is a lot of time (and money) to spend to change paths these days. Most people ove