Big Business Growth: Strategy Marketing with Seth Godin (a.k.a. Willy Wonka)

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0:32I can't wait to see you there. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show, a place where we get to talk about business mindset. And y 'all know I love marketing, but I love marketing when I am batting outside of my league, when I get to watch the man, the myth, the legend, talk, ideate, and share everything he knows about marketing. I couldn't be more honored and excited to welcome back for the second time, Seth Godin to the Jasmine Star Podcast. Seth, thank you so much for being here. You are not out of your league. You are the whole league. Hey, okay. You know what? I will not deny that compliment. You know, as a deep, deep reader and lover of your books and your blog, one of the things that I have to admire so deeply is the deep empathy that you share with the people.

1:19And when you create, you're coming from a very empathetic place. And I feel it in your reading and writing. And so as we talk about marketing, and as the landscape in marketing has changed so wildly since you began marketing and what it looks like today, it feels like, and I haven't been doing it as long as you have, but it feels like with each progressive iteration of marketing, it seems like empathy has a tendency to get a little bit less and a little bit less and a little bit less. As we talk about marketing, as we talk about strategy, this is a zone I love. How do we first and foremost keep empathy at the forefront of our marketing, but right now our conversation as well?

1:53You know, cookies are food and so is tofu. But if we can keep confusing them back and forth, we're never going to get anywhere. So marketing doesn't mean what some people think it means. Some people think that marketing is hustle and hype, that it's clicks and views, that it's interrupting people and come-ons. I don't think that's what marketing is. And my 25 or 30 years of writing about this has gone to great pains to point out that marketing and advertising used to be the same thing. And they're not anymore. And so the people who are stressed are stressed because they are running faster in the wrong direction.

2:37They're stressed because they think they have a marketing problem when actually they have a strategy problem, an empathy problem, a problem of lack of clarity. So there's never been a better time to contribute. There's never been a better time to show up. but and there's never been a worse time to try to get people's attention. We're going to get into this deeply, but one of the things I would love to do is I have always learned by way of example and by way of storytelling. And so please feel free on this show because I know you're doing a lot of shows in preparation of this amazing book. And please know that I do not have people who come on my podcast talking about a new book that I have not read myself.

3:18I'm fascinated with the whole thing about it. I think it's brilliantly written. I specifically love the short paragraphs, these ideas that I actually went back to your blog, Seth, and I said, did I miss some blogs that somehow ended up in the book? And so I was cross-referencing. I was plotting out this interview and I thought to myself, brilliant. I absolutely love it. But if you would allow me, there was a book that you had written called Song of Significance. And to the best of my recollection, I was listening to an interview years ago and you had said that at the end of recording the audio book of Song of Significance, you had cried.

3:52And you had cried because it had come from such a deep place that you felt like this was just an act of love to the world. And now I have to ask from a strategic perspective, from a book that meant and weighed so much to recording the audio version of this book, what did you feel? What was it different? How does the strategy of each book play differently? What a juicy place to talk about. Halfway through the book, I severely injured my vocal cords. And so I didn't cry, but I ended up in the doctor's office. And I haven't been able to finish it. I had to take a month off and hopefully we'll get there.

4:27This is a book about tools. It's a book that says, here's dozens or hundreds of questions that will help you get where you seek to go. And so it's not personal about me. It's personal about you. And the people it has resonated with have said, you didn't tell me what to do, but you did tell me how to do it in a way that lines up with what I want. So if your goal is to get more people to recycle cardboard, you need a strategy. If your goal is to sell more bicycles, you need a strategy. So a lot of people who want to be Jasmine Starr say, what I need is millions of people to watch me and trust me on podcasts and YouTube.

5:19But it's too late for them because we already have a Jasmine Starr. They need a different strategy to accomplish their goal, but they don't need to copy your tactics because the tactics keep changing faster and faster and faster. And if all we're going to do is find some guru and do exactly what they say, we're always going to be two years behind. So when we think about this in the context of strategy, and the first book was about you, and this book is about me, it's about all of us. I will say, as a side note, I would add to the description of the book is that it didn't teach me a tactic. It taught me how to think.

5:56It taught me how to question. And I believe that one of my strengths is being a highly strategic person, but I had to ask myself very different questions. I felt very exposed. I felt very weak. I felt very challenged. And I was in the right place. Like I'm reading this book and I'm like, no, no, this hurts. This hurts too deep in all of the best ways. So before we talk about marketing and strategy, there was also this story. You had spoken about how you wore a Google T-shirt. So I want you, if you remember, about somebody who spotted you wearing a Google T-shirt. And I want to use that as a foundation to kind of string through the remainder of this conversation to go back to what this idea is.

6:30Okay, cool. Thank you. Well, I think I last told that story about eight years ago. Oh, we're bringing it back. It's an oldie but goodie. So right at the beginning, after Google was founded, I was a VP at Yahoo. Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for$10 million altogether. And someone other than me said that was a bad idea. A couple of years later, I gave a talk at Google and instead of paying me an appropriate fee, they gave me a damn t-shirt. So I'm wearing the t-shirt in Union Square in New York City. And this attractive woman from about a hundred yards away sees me and she runs straight at me and she says, Google, do you work at Google?

7:10I love Google. Google's my best friend. And that really struck me because that is what it is to have a brand. Not a logo, not an ad campaign. Google had no ads. It was simply, what change are you making in the world? What does it stand for? Would we miss you if you were gone? When we talk to our friends, what do we tell them? And yeah, it helps to develop a groundbreaking, world-changing technology. and then it helps to generate billions of dollars. But you can have a brand without those two things. Fact is, when people tune in to this show, they haven't heard our conversation because we're just having it for the first time about this.

7:57But they have expectation. What does this remind me of? What am I looking forward to? That's your brand. Not that great little autograph with the J and the star on the top. your brand is my expectations for what I expect from the next time we interact. Might I say, and I can't tell this is just wizardry on another level, the fact that you've made very specific references to doing your homework is a definition and an extension of the Seth Godin brand. Seth Godin, I believe, I've been made to feel, and this is important part, fact or not fact, how do I feel? I've been made to feel that this is not a book tour.

8:35I've been made to feel that this is going to be a customized conversation that's going to serve your audience, even making a reference to the J and star, like a little asterisk logo that it is. And so as we talk about that, I always want to anchor anytime I have a marketing conversation, deeply rooted in marketing works far better when it's rooted in brand. And so thank you for your brand. Thank you for sharing that story. And then as we sit here and we talk about the extension that is the Seth Godin brand, I want to use you as a case study. So the book focuses on systems and strategies. I was definitely more attuned to the strategies because I love it and they deeply challenge me so when you look at this as a marketer you've written so many books and so I have like a two-part question first question is what did the strategy look like and I'm not going to ask for the first book because any author's first book is always like this like my first child is out in the world I don't know how it works let's go to book number three right kind of like all right I kind of got the game the strategy for marketing book number three the strategy for marketing your second most recent book and the strategy for marketing your current book.

9:34What I want to know is how are they different? What has changed? And how does your strategy change along with the times? Well, I want to clarify just one thing. I never liked doing homework and I still don't. Spending time figuring out just how interesting you are is not homework. That is a privilege. And if I treated it like homework, it wouldn't have been fun. So that's the first thing I'll say. What we need to begin with is understand that every important brand from Patagonia to Saddleback to Apple to a local bakery does not become an important brand because they spend a lot of money on advertising.

10:16They become an important brand because other people talk about it. And this matters the most in books because the book industry is fundamentally broken. It will never be fixed, but no book publisher has a clue how to get the word out. Their job is to sell the first bunch of copies and then the book sells the rest. The way the book sells itself is someone who reads it can't go to bed until they tell somebody else about it. Why would they do that? Because it increases their connection, their status, and helps them get to where they want to go. so my first real bestseller was called permission marketing and the strategy that i used to bring it to the world is what the book is about i said if you send an email to free at permission.com i'll send you a quarter of the book no questions asked instantly i was the first person who ever did that millions of people send me an email because other people told people to send an email.

11:17It's like a magic trick. And some of those people ended up buying the book. Then I did a couple other books that are relevant to this conversation. And then I did Purple Cow. And Purple Cow is about how do you make an idea spread? How do you make an idea worth talking about? And I'd been kicked out of the book industry because the book before that, which had been about Charles Darwin, didn't sell very well. So I had no publisher. So I published it myself, just 5 ,000, 10 ,000 copies. And it came in a milk carton. I usually have the milk carton right here, but I don't know if someone moved it. So if you bought the book, it didn't come in an envelope.

11:57It came in a milk carton. And a lot of people who got it put it on their desk. They didn't put it on their desk because they wanted to help me. They put it on their desk because if their boss or their coworkers said, what's that? They could talk about the fact that their dream was to make a remarkable product. And so I helped them by giving them something to talk about. And fast forward through a bunch of other books, what we really do is we build scaffolding. Scaffolding helps someone who's a little into it become more into it. Someone who feels like a novice become more of an expert. That when we offer people scaffolding, they can learn something and then go on to the next thing.

12:43So if we're going to think about Apple, when Steve Jobs came out with the iPod, it had white headphones. Now, if you're at the gym and you're working out, the device is in your pocket. No one can see it. But because you're the only company that makes white headphones, people at the gym who were thinking about getting a headset, an MP3 player, would see that all the cool people are the ones with the white headphones. So they gave the people who sought status a flag that they could wave that would help them gain what they're looking for by telling other people about this new device. And so even though there were MP3 players that were much cheaper, the iPod won because it stood for something.

13:31So when you look at this in the context of, let's say, the milk curtain, and this most likely predates, if I'm doing my math right, the big push of influencer marketing. So had you sent out a proverbial milk curtain now, you weren't just having somebody put it on a desk to talk about it. You were having them take a photo and share it to their networks. So when you look at the book launch through those terms, how are you strategically thinking about getting people to talk about the book? Okay, so then anybody who has gained traction has to make a choice, which is, are you looking for new people or are you serving the people you already have?

14:07Oh, it's so good. Oh, it's so good. It's so good. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It's so good. Are you trying to get the word out? I'm not trying to get the word out. That's when you know you made it. You made it when you said, people are going to talk for me and they're going to talk about me. No, that's not what I said. I know. I know. I know. But this is what I, you know, it's funny. It's what you say and then what I hear. And what I hear is, this guy's got it like that. This guy's got it like that. I know. So say it again. Say it again. You're right. You're right. So let me be very clear. So I am super fortunate.

14:39I'm fortunate in where I was born and how I was born and what I look like and the benefit of the doubt I've gotten in so many ways. And I was also fortunate because I started one of the first internet companies. So I'm not writing a book because I need to sell four more copies to pay the mortgage. I'm writing a book to make a difference. And there was a fork in the road about 15 years ago. And it's, look, if you want to get the word out, you got to go on Twitter. You got to do provocative things. You got to do this transparency, authenticity, have a fight with people thing. You got to do all the stuff that influencers did if you want to be the next Kardashian.

15:19Get the word out, get the word out. And I said, but when I look at their work, that's not work I would be proud of. And I don't want to be more popular. I want to be more useful. And the way to be more useful is to say, I'm not looking for anybody other than the people I have. If I can make a difference for them, it'll take care of itself or it won't. But I'm not keeping track of that. I'm keeping track of, did I change the person in the smallest viable audience, the person who cares? And one of the places I learned that was in my first job. I did a series of science fiction adventure games, Michael Crichton with Ray Bradbury with Arthur C.

16:03Clarke. I was 23 years old. And the games are fantastic. And the team did a great job. And so we were trying to find people who weren't into computer games and weren't into science fiction who would give it a try. And we wasted a lot of time and money doing that. And then I said, why don't we just sell it to people who are into science fiction and into computer games? It's for them. It's not for anybody else. And because we changed them, they told other people. But it wasn't a gimmick on our part. We just wanted them. That's enough. Speaking of that, it's like you teed me up because you just mentioned a game.

16:42and then about seven minutes ago you mentioned that you don't like doing homework and so getting to me wasn't homework it was a privilege and there is section 28 there are games in every strategy and this one if i may just read a tiny bit here are a few things about games that are generally true you don't have to enjoy the game for it to be a game you're playing a game whether you realize it or not and seeing the game helps you play better the outcome of the game has little to do with how much you want to win. Some games are easy to quit. Other games are forever. No game stays the same for long because playing the game changes the game.

17:25There were a lot of other things about the game itself. And Simon Sinek said it best, when you're in business, it's an infinite game. And I just think that I sat and I actually, I was reading an early copy of the book on a PDF on my laptop. And I realized that I can access the PDF on my phone as well. So I started taking just screenshot and screenshot and screenshot. So this one right here, and it was really like calling a project a game gives us the chance to depersonalize our work. And I just felt probably in the last couple of years, the work became highly personal. And I realized that too much was hinging on it.

18:01So reading this empowered me to look at so many things. I'm like, it's a game. I don't have homework. I can't win. This is a game and I want to play the game. So people are talking and when they hear this, they're like, rousing call to arms, I too want to play. And then when they look at marketing and they look at the daily tasks they have to do and it feels heavy and content is here. What advice do you have for somebody to look at this and how might we start looking at this like a game? Well, first, thank you for the kind words. I haven't talked to many people who have read the book closely and it means a lot to me.

18:31A game is simple. It's multiple players, rules, outcomes. that when we're in a situation where we have to make a decision, we want Taylor Swift tickets, that's a game, right? That it's not a matter of life or death, but a strategy will help you get tickets better than somebody else. When we think about marketing, we tend to default to average stuff for average people, which is a race to the bottom. Simon says, follow the leader, the rest of that. Let's think about the Supreme T-shirt company. So here's a t-shirt that costs$80 that you could buy one just like it for 12. Here's a store with a line of 75 people out the door waiting to buy one.

19:16Clearly, they're playing a game. They know they could lower the price of the t-shirt. They know they could hire more clerks. They know they could be in the t-shirt business. They're not in the t-shirt business. There's a game where the souvenir is you get a t-shirt. And in our privileged world, most people who are playing, they have enough food, they have a roof over their head. So they're looking for a way to play. And the game can be deadly serious. You know, the fact is I had a relative who needed a kidney and there's, I don't know, a dozen districts around the country, each with its own waiting list for a kidney donation.

19:56And if you move from Denver to Buffalo or Buffalo to Denver, you might move up the list. Well, it's life or death, but it's still a game. Because allocating our resources to engage in a system where we might get where we want is easier to understand and play if we don't have to make everything authentic and personal. What people actually want is consistency and transparency. That if someone says, hey, Jasmine, I hated your podcast. They're not saying I hate you. They're saying the role you play when you do your podcast is not a role that I want to engage with. You're like, great, fine, that's fine.

20:40You didn't like Death of a Salesman either. I get it. But that doesn't mean it's a bad play. It just means you didn't like what was on offer. It's a game. So how does one gamify something that they don't like, but feel like they need? Many times what people feel or say is the cost of running a business is to have marketing and they don't like it. How might they gamify it? Well, they don't like hustling people, but they love marketing because marketing is the human act of telling a story to people who want to hear it and doing it in a way that they tell the others about building a reputation for what you stand for.

21:16So if you go to a hotel for breakfast and you order herbal tea, an herbal tea bag costs the hotel eight cents. Everything that happens between the eight cents that cost them to buy the teabag and the$4 you paid for that cup of tea is marketing. Does that cup of tea feel special, or are they simply in the tea delivery business? Did a human being engage with you at eight o 'clock in the morning in a strange town to make you feel welcome? Did you leave that place feeling better than when you got there. These are all generous acts that are fun. But if all you're doing is like pulling a crank over and over again, yeah, I could see why you don't like that.

21:59But that's not marketing. So when we think about this, it's storytelling. And we think about this, this is strategy. And we think about this as people sharing a piece of value, what they like, they help you sell the book. When you look back at your career, is there a book that rises to the top of saying this was a book that a lot of people spoke about in a very different way? Well, there are a bunch of books that changed my life, but the book of mine, that was the transformation was Purple Cow. And I will tell you the day that it happened. I get an email about three months after the book comes out and a guy says, I want to tell you a story.

22:38I work at a company with matrix management, which means I have two bosses. and one of the bosses comes to me and says, the big boss is really excited. We're going to have to think hard about this purple cow thing. Get your ideas together. And the next day, the other boss said to him, are you aware of this whole purple cow phenomenon? Blah, blah, blah. So this guy who's writing to me says, he's an eager beaver. He goes and reads the book and he goes back to the first boss with some ideas. And he says, I got these ideas from the book. And the guy says, there's a book? That's how I knew it worked.

23:11Because I am not in the business of selling books. It's fine if someone doesn't buy my book. But if they have a conversation about the idea, that's why I wrote it. Oh, so good. Okay. They have a conversation. We know there's an ROI on a conversation, but is that conversation measurable? If so, how have you been able to measure outside of these people telling you their story? Do you have a way of a pulse? I think that's very encouraging for people to say, I might not have an ROI, but I could feel it. I can sense it. What should we be looking for? So do you know what phrenology was? No. It was a very big deal, bigger than astrology in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

23:50And they would read the bumps on people's heads and use it to tell what their character was like. And it was sort of misogynistic and racist, but it was also very, very common. If you type it into Google Image Search, you'll see these pictures, you'll recognize them. Okay. Okay. And we can laugh at phrenology because it's a false proxy. Having a bump right here does not mean you are creative. It's a mistake to think that this bump has anything to do with creativity. Well, let me tell you something. Getting 10 million views on TikTok is a measure of only one thing. Did you get 10 million views on TikTok?

24:28That we measure false proxies all the time. And part of the work is to willfully ignore them. Do not read your reviews on Amazon. Do not count how many YouTube views you got. It does not matter. It is a trap. Your job is not to make YouTube happy. Your job is to do your job, which is to change the people who trust you. So I have no hard metrics on purpose. Because if there were some, yeah, I'd pay attention, but there aren't any. And I refuse to waste my time looking for false proxies. Oh, I love this so much. I love this so much. Okay, so speaking of false proxies, speaking of really not wanting the marketing that we do to be heavy, we're focusing on story and transformation and empowering.

25:19And one of the things that you had said was the hard work of developing a better, more resilient strategy begins with letting go of the one you might be holding onto right now. Simplify, then add lightness. Can we dive in? I mean, there's a whole book on this, but for somebody who's just listening and our desire is to create impact, how do we do this? So most people don't know this, but when AT &T developed the telephone, Western Union dominated communications. They did all the telegrams. They had the chance to buy AT &T and they refused and instead decided to make better telegrams. And that happens all the time.

26:01There are all these big car companies that are saying, ah, that electric thing probably isn't going to happen. We'll just make some more pickup trucks. We protect what we think we do instead of getting to the first principles of what we actually do. And so, you know, I am arrogant in that I still blog instead of putting my content into something that people want to consume today. I have the privilege of doing that, but most people don't. What we have to do instead is say, how do I go to where people are to offer them a path to get to where they want to go in a way that I am proud of? and so we're not chasing the trend we're leading but we understand that the world changes and when a change agent arises there's an opportunity so you might want ai to go away ai is not going to go away so if ai is not going to go away what are you going to do about it that's right how are you going to bring your desire for change to this new tool so that you can amplify your work as opposed to having somebody else do it for you?

27:18Are there any key indications of when it's time to let go? I mean, obviously we look back with rose-tinted glasses or 2020 vision and we say, oh, Western Union and AT &T and electric cars. Are there common trends that we're saying it's just like, okay, now is the time? So there's an expression that I would love to teach people that I say out loud at least twice a day, which is, this might not work. This might not work. And if you can say before you do something, this might not work, it makes it easier to do it. And if you're not doing things that might not work, well, you might as well go get a job at an insurance agency because it's steady work.