Espresso: Seth Godin, What is a brand in ONE sentence?

0:06One of my fascinations is the parallels between creativity, marketing and food. David Ogilvy opens up um confessions of an advertising man with i think he talks about his time working in the kitchen in paris in hotel majestic and he says my time there taught me how to run an advertising agency so i think the parallels between the two are super interesting but what i want to open up with is a blog post um the date you wrote has actually escaped me so my apologies but it's called two kinds of good cooks. One is very skilled at the following recipe, quality control, consistency, and diligence. The other understands how the recipe works, sees patterns and opportunities, and changes the recipe to fit the problem to be solved.

0:57It's about metaphor in addition to process. Both are useful. If you think this is a post about cooking, you might be the first kind of cook. So I think the opening gambit is, I know you're a diehard cook. I know you've got a huge cookbook collection. What has cooking taught you about marketing? Okay. So just for people who are just joining us, marketing is not advertising. Marketing is not hype. When David Ogilvie was an ad person, that's what marketing was. If you bought enough ads, you made enough money to buy more ads. That stopped working 20 years ago. So the marketing that I write about, the marketing that I do is how do we show up in the world with a true story that touches people, that changes people, that spreads?

1:45And sometimes that story takes the form of a jingle, but usually it takes the form of an experience, a product, the way it changes us. And cooking is this fascinating shortcut because everybody, everybody needs to eat. And our taste buds have several functions. One of them is to keep us from eating poison. But another one is to shortcut straight through our conscious brain directly to our amygdala and excite us and please us and set us. Quick one, guys. Espresso's got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands i bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins no way stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trip always it religiously.

2:50Look, there's a link in the show notes. Please feel free to book a call with Josh and his wonderful sales team at Unleashed. They're amazing. Even nothing comes of it. And even better news, you'll get your first month free if you reference Hungary. Thank you. So when you create a meal, whether it's how you make your Bacchny dal, but more than that, how you serve it, what the room is like, who else is sitting at the table, what the lighting is like, All of that is a project, and it is there to change someone, at least for a little while. And then the meal is over. And so one of the reasons that I became someone who cooks every single night is I'm a project person.

3:29Lots of my projects last a long time. The idea that I can do a two or three hour project and be done, that's nice too. You said change for a little while. I think that's fascinating. I think when you go and have a meal and you stay present and you're in that moment, there's a visceral change for that small moment in time. In terms of brands, what's the role brands play in kind of changing people's small moment for a little while in their every day? Well, a brand is not a logo. A brand is a promise. It is the shortcut that we have to an experience. so if we have felt a certain thing about you know this chef's jacket or nike shoes or the way pop tarts smell and then it comes back we get to feel it again instantly so what a brand does is it makes the experience you're paying for worth more if it's not worth more then it's not a brand it's just a look thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me.

4:41I hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day. Let's be having you. If you want the full episode, it will be in the show notes. A link will be in the show notes, the full episode. Thank you so much. Please leave friends as well. It means the world to me.