Seth Godin: 13 Hidden Food and Drink Marketing Secrets To Make Your Idea Spread Far and Wide (… God I wish I knew these 4 years ago)

0:00Oh my god, this is big. Seth Godin has single handedly had the biggest impact on my life. in 2016 I was like I had no idea what I was doing with my life I was delivering cheese around London and I read his book Lynchpin Lynchpin got me like what do I want to do with my life and it's like fuck it go go into food without Seth there is no blog there is no podcast he's been a dream guest since day one I spent ages ages on the email like nine hours and he agreed to do it he gave me 40 minutes so I didn't have as long as I'd like but yeah I mean on the day it was I was absolutely shitting myself um I the podcast was at 4 p.m so the whole day I was just pacing around like a mad man did like an ice bath three minutes and it was it was nuts I think you probably don't hear it but I'm absolutely the whole time when you do a podcast your brain is going at like a gazillion miles per hour and you're trying to think do I go down that curiosity path or do I move to the next question it all went in a blur and i was like whoa at the end but the way i wanted to approach i wanted to try and do a different podcast like seth's been on loads of podcasts um that ask kind of similar questions which are all amazing but i wanted to focus specifically on food he's obsessed with cooking he's got a cookbook collection um huge huge cookbook collection so i really wanted to kind of dig into that and the parallels with building brands and ultimately what i came away with is this kind of bulletproof system if you like of how to get any idea to spread you can have the best product in the world but if you can't create a brand and a story and get the idea to spread then it's game set match and we go into this and seth talks about well firstly you need an easy story to spread that is the first thing the second thing is creating a brand and seth says a brand is a promise whoever's listened to this for a long time knows i always ask what is a brand seth's as a brand as a promise once you've done that you need to get attention and trust and you do that for going for the smallest viable audience go for the smallest amount of people 10 people 100 people a thousand people and focus on those people over serve those people and then once you've done that how do you get the idea to spread and he says all ideas spread through three things status affiliation connection and fear and once he taught me this I've literally looked at every brand I was like fucking hell Every brand has a story, is a promise And that story spreads through status And affiliation, sometimes fear And yeah I think I'm really happy with it It was so nerve wracking And yeah This is wild If you've ever got any joy or anything Out of the podcast I'd be so grateful if you could share it And hopefully Pour some gasoline on this bad boy But anyway without further ado can't believe i'm even saying this but yeah seth bloody godin let's go hello there people and listeners of hungry podcast today i'm absolutely thrilled to welcome seth godin onto the podcast seth is the author um in my opinion some of the best marketing books ever written purple cow this is marketing lynchpin uh the dip the practice icarus deception all marketers tell stories um your work seth has had a huge impact on me i think i said on the email Lynchpin really kind of changed that direction of what I was doing and got me on this path to food and now to the podcast Hungry.

3:35So I'm really excited to talk to you about my favorite things in life are food, creativity, cooking, marketing, brands, restaurants, all those things. That jumble of things is my favorite thing to talk about. So thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. Well, we'll do our best. I am in favor of all those things too. In fact, I eat every single day whether I need to or not. So as I said, one of my fascinations is the parallels between creativity, marketing and food. And David Ogilvie opens up Confessions of an Advertising Man with, I think he talks about his time working in a kitchen in Paris in Hotel Majestic.

4:19And 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 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 stands other understands how the recipe works sees patterns and opportunities and changes the recipe to fit the problem to be solved. It'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.

5:02So 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. 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? 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.

5:51And 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. So when you create a meal, whether it's how you make your bakni 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.

6:34And so one of the reasons that I became someone who cooks every single night is I'm a project person. Lots 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.

7:18It 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 logo yeah i think you talk a lot about i think i heard you say somewhere about if if nike created a hotel you'd know what it is but if the hyatt regency created a shoe you wouldn't know what it looks like i thought that's a beautiful way of putting it um in terms of that storytelling and the i with all the all your work i've i've kind of absorbed over the many years is the stories can get ideas to spread if you if you tell the crux of a story your idea can spread and i want to talk about a cookbook i don't know you've heard of it called salt fat acid and heat by um some some in nosrat i hope i've said that right um but why i love that is it's the kind of the four principles you put salt fat acid heat together um in a myriad of different ways and you're going to get a great delicious recipe and i'd love to um explore what kind of the salt fat acid heat principles of storytelling are for brands now Now imagine there's, and I know for a fact, a lot of our listeners say they're a Korean street food truck under London Bridge, for example, do the most wonderfully fantastic Korean burgers, for example, but they can't get that idea to spread.

9:03Last week, I was up in Manchester doing an interview with a young couple who do these outrageously kind of weird lurid culling color Easter eggs. because they look kind of like the Easter eggs based on David Bowie actually is kind of strange. Or maybe say you're like a kombucha brand in Dublin who's trying to get going. There's so many delicious products, but they don't have the story to help the idea spread. So what would you say is the salt, fat, acid, heat to kind of get your idea to spread? That's a cool metaphor. I guess I would divide it into two categories. The first category is accepting that attention is scarce and trust is rare.

9:46You are not entitled to my attention. When you try to steal it, that's spam, it doesn't work. Attention is more scarce than ever before, and most people don't want to offer their attention to someone new. And trust, in a world of hype and scam, most people aren't going to give you the benefit of the doubt. So we begin by saying, if you are bringing something new to the world, it's not for everyone. It has to be for the smallest viable audience. The few people who want something new, not everyone. Because even though everyone eats, everyone doesn't actually want to go to a food truck on a bridge and eat a burger they've never had before.

10:24That's the first two pieces. And that's where permission marketing kicks in. when people are eager to hear from you. And the concept of the Korean food truck blew up in LA. And the way it happened was he built a following. I think it was on Twitter, but maybe by email. And you didn't know what corner he was going to be on unless you were on the list. But once he had the list and he had a group of people who trusted him, who were paying attention, everything else gets easy because he's not making food for everyone he's making food for them and then the second path that i would talk about which is more i don't know amorphous is people are only driven by three things once we have a roof over our heads and decent health we're only driven by three things, fear, affiliation, and status.

11:21Fear is obvious. If an asteroid is about to land on your house, it's very hard for you to focus on taking a drum lesson. You're afraid. Affiliation is who's to my left, who's to my right, what are people like me doing, who am I in sync with. That's one reason why people listen to your podcast, because people like us do things like this. We like to be able to talk to each other about what we heard. And the third one is status. Does this move me up or does this move me down? Did I get a seat at Noma before they closed? That is not about delicious. That is about status. And it doesn't have to be expensive for it to be status.

12:01You gain status by seeing that Easter egg that other people didn't get to see. And it wasn't about the money. It was about the access. So when I put those two things next to each other. What makes the story spread is, is it in my interest as a consumer to tell my friends about it? If it isn't, I won't. It's that simple. And so I tell people about Sean Eskinosi's chocolate all the time. Why do I do that? So I almost started a chocolate company. I'm very drawn to bean-to-bar chocolate. I didn't do it because Sean makes quite delicious chocolate, and he's a better human than me. He has open book management.

12:45He only sells direct. He visits the farmers in the Philippines and Tanzania every year. He brings underprivileged kids with him to visit the farms. He puts the kids in these villages to private school. I mean, he's just a mensch. And so I will every year around Halloween talk about don't buy cheap chocolate, but I will also promote Sean's chocolate. It might not be the single best chocolate bar I ever had. That's not why I'm talking about it. I'm talking about it because it increases my affiliation and my status. My affiliation, because now I'm in sync with people I'm proud to be in sync with, and my status, because I know something other people don't know yet.

13:26My status, because once people do hear the story or read his book or taste his chocolate, they're like, wow, thanks, Seth. I'm really glad that you were a pioneer and introduced me to that. So I'm not doing it selfishly, but it spread because it was easy, useful for me to talk about. I talk about the Poulain Bakery in Paris because Apollonia is a friend, and because it has never failed to increase my affiliation and status when I share it with other people. But there are other things in my food life that are hard for me to talk about, And so I don't because they risk my status or they risk my affiliation.

14:06And it's not generous for me to bring it up because it's awkward. So I don't. So it's essentially the attention, the trust for the smallest viable market to begin with is kind of the path one. Path two, and I suppose getting that part right for people listening to this is kind of point one. and then you can get that that story to spread on fear affiliation status i think yeah the david bowie easter egg example is kind of that because it was like i was looking at these crazy easter eggs like wow and i suppose yeah affiliation status say someone is again whether it's a a food brand who's selling i don't know up in derbyshire selling marmalade for example product is categorically unequivocally the best tasting product and they they know this attention trust smallest viable audience and then fear affiliation status how do you create the emotion to link on to those things do you see what i mean i think the emotion i totally understand so let's do a case study first of all yes it's unlikely that it's unequivocally the best moment because It might be.

15:21Yeah, okay. Because when you make a statement like that, you're saying one of two things. Either in a double-blind taste test, people always say this one is better. That's really hard to do with marmalade. Or you're saying, when I add the story, the jar, what I need to take to get it, for me, that makes it the best marmalade. That is totally achievable for some people, right? And so for me, for years and years, if you went to Henrietta's Pine Bakery, which I believe is now out of business, on the way to Algonquin Park, Canada, between Toronto and the North Pole, you would have these little butter biscuits.

16:02They were the best butter biscuits in the world. What made them the best butter biscuits in the world is because it reminded me of camp, not because they were unequivocally the best ones. They fit into a story, a narrative. him. So if I've got that story, if this marmalade is made by monks who are all over 100 years old, and it comes with this, and it comes with this, and it's this, and then that, now the story, I taste it when I taste the marmalade. Or perhaps they only make 600 jars a year, and they cost $3 ,000 a jar, and I'm on the list, and you can't get on the list because it's all sold out for the next three years, you want to taste some, that's a story.

16:43When we think about the brands in the UK that put the Queen's little emblem on them, what the heck does that mean? The Queen has terrible taste in marmalade. Why do I care that the Queen's status? Because of affiliation. You can see there's a hundred-year-old history here of branding of food products based on status and affiliation, the story, and how it makes us feel. But, and this is the huge but, most small food providers have as their unstated motto, you can pick anyone and wear anyone. If you're looking for marmalade, this is a little better or a little cheaper. Here, have some. That's not a useful story.

17:28That's a race to the bottom. And the problem with the race to the bottom as you might win. And to find that unique thing that isn't going to be a race to the bottom, that's going to be the smallest viable market, is that an inside job or is that an outside job in terms of speaking to consumers or is it a combination of both? How do you find that one thing? You speak and speak and speak and listen and listen and listen to your smallest viable audience, but you don't ask them what they want. You just listen to what they do. You watch what they do. Then internally, you develop the empathy to imagine what would happen.

18:12If I think about the last 15 years in the hot sauce business, there was Tabasco. There were turkey franks. This is in the US. Three or four others. That was it. Now there are hundreds. And what these providers figured out is they had as much fun making this stuff as they did telling a story to a few people. This is the spiciest one of all time. This is this one. This is that one. You couldn't do that unless you hung out in barbecue joints. You couldn't do that unless you could find the empathy for the person who wanted to buy a certain kind of hot sauce. And so Dave's Insanity built a multi, multi-million dollar business.

18:54And then right over there is the Sriracha guy. And his quirkiness, his refusal to trademark the thing, his ability to let people just steal what looks like his brand and idea made his brand actually more valuable to a certain kind of person. And now lots of people in my country think that every restaurant in Vietnam has a jar of it on their table, even though it's not even sold in Vietnam as far as I can tell. But showing up for some people in a certain way repeatedly, that comes from the inside. I want to talk about your tahini cookies or very famous tahini cookies. I've actually seen these. They look.

19:35I had one for breakfast this morning. I can't understand how you've ever seen them. Not from me, you haven't seen them. Yeah, I do quite a bit of research, especially on the food angle but um i i want to talk about i think food can be kind of interesting analogies for creative cultures and creative um organizations like this is a bit of a weird thing so excuse me this is a bit weird but like um i really believe like a bowl of ramen is ramen or ramen it's like analogy analogous for what a great culture is it's like imagine that the egg is your sales department your your noodles are your finance department your um your your um your um your big meat is your whatever your operations department like individually they're okay but as soon as you pour the the the broth on the broth is culture that suddenly everything begins to alchemize and dance and galvanize and i think that that's a kind of an interesting thing for um kind of creative cultures but i'd love to know you've worked with so many businesses and brands like i'd love to know what tahini cookies taught you about creative building creative cultures okay well first thing is i've never done a day of consulting so i don't really work with brands i just notice things um culture for me is more powerful than strategy organizational design or almost anything else.

21:04Culture is the way things are around here. So if you are a chef and you are building a restaurant based on fear, now you have a culture and that culture is going to persist even after you leave. If you are Danny Meyer, you can build a restaurant empire worth billions of dollars on a different culture, a culture that's based on dignity and respect and connection. That if something goes wrong at a Union Square hospitality restaurant, the way it gets fixed is horizontal, not because there's some dictator telling someone they have to fix it, but because everyone else is leveling up everybody else's game.

21:41And so the ramen analogy sort of falls apart a little bit because the departments aren't the point. The culture is the point. And particularly in food service, most people don't have a specific a job as much as they have the desire and assignment to make it better for the person that they're serving. And there's lots of things built into hospitality that do that. So you don't want someone to say, that's not my job. I can't help you. What you want is a culture that says, our job, our job is to figure out how to make things better around you. So onto the tahini cookie. So if someone goes to Seth's blog and types, where is the secret recipes.

22:25They can find all the recipes we're talking about here. Tahini cookies have four ingredients, almonds, sesame seeds, maple syrup, and then salt and baking soda, which I count as one. And that's all there is in them. You puree it, puree it, puree it. The tahini is basically sesame seeds. And then you bake them for 15 minutes in little golf-sized balls, maybe a little smaller. And I'm just hooked on them. I don't eat a lot of food nowadays. There's all these things that aren't on my diet, but these I can eat and I enjoy and they make me smile. I think the magic is you could not eat any one of those ingredients more than a spoonful at a time.

23:14Even a spoonful of maple syrup is probably more than most people can handle. but when i mix these ingredients together and add some heat it's pretty delicious and i suppose and kind of pulling that into the marketing if there's a marketing lesson i like to ask weird questions but i think there is something in those individual ingredients um alchemizing together in terms of you said i i don't do consultancy i notice and i and i watch and i see um i'd love to talk about uh danny mayer um or danny mayer i hope i've said that right um so he he talked on tim ferris's show that uh his favorite his most gifted book of all time is is this is marketing and um i would love to know what what you've you've taught danny a lot about marketing i'd love to know what hanging out with him seeing his his him build shake shack him build Julian Square, what's he taught you?

24:14Oh, Danny has taught me way more about marketing than I taught him. I'm sure of that.

24:21The first thing is that Danny is not manipulative. What does it mean to be manipulative? It's when you get people to do things that later on they regret. And there's a lot of hype and hustle in marketing that is used to manipulate people, to get them to overspend or overbuy or overcommit. And then later, now that they know what you know, they're like, oh, I'm sorry I did that. That's not what Danny does. So when Danny named a loaf of bread after one of my blog posts, he wasn't doing it to manipulate me into spending more money at Union Square. He was doing it because he was trying to send a signal, not just to me, but to the people who worked with him about what things were like around him.

25:08and when I see how hard he worked at implementing a no-tipping policy, and then when I figured out why it didn't work, these were the acts of somebody who understands time is short and our job is to make things better. They were also the acts of someone who understood that if we don't experiment, who will. I'm inspired by watching the path that he's gone down. I wish there was a way I could get hamburgers out of the equation, but he didn't ask me, and that's what people want to buy. You talked about the horizontal versus vertical cultures. What's the difference, and why do horizontal cultures solve problems faster?

25:55So there was a commandant to the U.S. Marines named Kulak, and he coined Kulak's law, which is that in the 40s and 50s and 60s, wars were won by generals, by strategy. but now they're won by privates, by the people on the front line, by the people who are going house to house and door to door. The lowest paid person in your organization is the person who is dealing with the customers. So if you need to monitor them, measure them, and watch them at all times, something isn't going to scale and something's not going to work. But if you create an institution where the people on the front lines are doing what you would do if you were there, now the culture is working and you have something that's resilient.

26:39People like us do things like this. The math is very simple. How's the math simple? Well, because how many people worked at Amazon five years ago and how many people there were named Jeff Bezos, right? There's only one Jeff Bezos, but there's all these people who have never met him who are making decisions. If he has to be present in every one of those meetings, It's not going to scale. The same thing is true with any restaurant that has more than one outlet or any restaurant that's open seven days a week if the owner isn't there all seven days. Sooner or later, the person in charge isn't in the room.

27:17In the case of Starbucks, Howard Schultz took over Starbucks when there were two stores and they didn't sell coffee to drink. They only sold coffee beans. Once a mom and pop place has more than two stores, Mom and pop can't be at the store all the time. There's just, you run out of mom and you run out of pop. So Howard had to build an institution where it's possible for there to be a magical Starbucks experience, even though he's not there and has never been there. That is the act of scaling something. And you can see that the math doesn't work. You can't say, I have to run faster and work harder.

27:54What you have to say is, I have to create a culture, codify the way things are around here so that we get to where we want to go one thing i think you may not know him actually he's as a guy called david hyatt who's got hyatt denim or you may have heard of him he's been on this podcast and um i just love what he's doing creating jeans for creatives he taught me something that i ask a lot of guests is is he said very simply scale kills magic and the bigger you get the more often you can kind of dilute the magic the brand one thing uh daddy what danny may has done with shake shack is he seems to have kept the magic as he scaled could you speak to that like how do people keep the magic as they scale in your opinion yeah so first a uh a small riff on the hyatt i had one on hyatt jeans i had one of the first pair the thing to understand about jeans which also connects to food is this.

28:57No one buys a pair of his jeans who's naked. You're only buying his jeans if you already have a pair of pants. And no one goes to a restaurant when it's the only meal they're ever going to have. They could skip this meal. They could go to a different restaurant. We have to begin by saying, we are not solving a, we are the only choice for this person and this person doesn't have what we sell. That's not what we do when we're in the food business. That's an aside. But scale kills magic. Scale kills magic until the scale becomes part of the magic. In the case of Apple, having the same phone as everybody else actually makes your phone more magic for some people.

29:43In the case of Shake Shack, knowing that this isn't the only Shake Shack in the world, makes Shake Shack more magic for some people. The original Shake Shack had a different magic. The original Shake Shack, which I went to a bunch of times, had a huge line, 200 people, and it was the only one. That's why people were in line. But now, knowing that when your flight lands in Abu Dhabi, there's a Shake Shack, gives you a smile because the scale is part of magic. What would you say somewhere like In-N-Out is the opposite? So In-N-Out only operates in is it in just in california in and out i don't um i've still yet to try one i want they look fantastic there's bug i know you don't eat burgers but they look mouthwateringly delicious um in my opinion what is what would you say their magic is there is that by constraining it to one is it one state i don't actually know but what's the magic i haven't researched it lately there's a few bits of magic at in and out first of all i am certain that you can find a better hamburger without flying to California.

30:44If better means blind taste test, for sure. They're not saying in a blind taste test, this is the best burger. They're saying this is the burger that reminds you of the last time you were in and out. This is the burger that reminds you of the California life you're living. This is the burger that reminds you of the friends you've had these burgers with. They also have a secret menu. The secret menu awards status by offering affiliation. If you know the secret menu, you can order from the secret menu, and that makes you feel like an insider. So all of these things cycle around. I think In-N-Out has made a business decision about scale that, for example, Krispy Kreme did not.

31:25Krispy Kreme had a brand similar to In-N-Out in that there were people who admired its scarcity, and then they decided to grow up big as fast as they could, and they crashed. because they couldn't figure out how to make the scale part of the magic. So in the case of In-N-Out, they're making plenty of money. They don't want to hire 15 more vice presidents, raise all this money, and blah, blah, blah. Why bother? They're doing fine. And so scale isn't the point. Magic is the point. You want to find the right scale to provide the magic that's important to you. Keeping the magic alive in terms of the scale of more people coming into the business, So, um, I used to work, I think I said on the email, like for a peanut butter startup, we were super small and we got bigger and bigger and bigger, the bigger you get kind of just the more stakeholders, the more people at the party, if you want to call it that.

32:18Um, so I get the scale building, building magic into scale and kind of out outwardly, but inwardly in terms of the team, more people decision by committee, you kind of lose that, that speed and spark of startups. is there anything you could speak to on that is like how you get bigger in terms of more people in the business but keeping those little droplets of magic okay well that's a different question so you know um i was i've been thinking in the back of my head a food business where the scale is the magic is heinz ketchup in the u.s because you can safely serve heinz ketchup to almost anybody who comes to your house that's why you're buying heinz ketchup here's an example yes okay so So the mistake organizations make when they scale is they forget that certain kinds of decisions are best made by a very small group of people, and they have to decide which business are they in.

33:19Heinz will not profit by coming out with 42 different kinds of ketchup, because that will undermine their point, that when Tim Cook took over Apple, he took out much of the magic that his predecessor had brought, that the number of new breakthrough products that Apple Computer has launched under Tim's watch is close to zero. But he said, my job is to make the stock price go up. And he did that dramatically. You think about Microsoft, when Steve Ballmer, the worst CEO of a big company on record, was running it, he was not clear about what he was trying to do. But Satya Nadella is very clear. And the magic that says, yeah, we're going all in on chat GPT.

34:06I don't think there were very many people involved in that decision. That doesn't feel like a committee decided that. And that's how they made this huge inroads on Google. So if I'm running a restaurant or a chain of restaurants, what I need to do is say, this part of the menu is not changing for the next three months. Here's a team of people that are going to improve our quality and decrease our prices. And that's their job. But this part of the menu, this part of the menu belongs to the innovation team. And I don't want to hear any complaints about how much something on this part of the menu costs us to make.