All Marketers are Liars (Book Review)
Seth Godin is one of those insightful writers (and entrepeneurs) who tell you a lot of things you recognise instinctively as true but which you could never quite put into cohesive sentences yourself. A combination of life experience and knowledge mixed with the ability to put that into a cohesive vocabulary that explains the world around us. I realise those last two sentences sound like a pitch (a total crock) but its from my worldview. I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World.
Stories are interesting because the more you start thinking in those terms the more you see the underlying currency of communication rather than the overt advertisement or the marketing brochure. Stories are the glue that pull all of those old school marketing aspects together with the real product or service and the business / manufacturer / company selling something. Stories are about understanding that we build a less factual world to make the complicated world around us understandable. And therefore what we believe about something, from a marketing perspective, is more important than what it really is. If that makes sense?
I’m a big believer in authenticity so the authentic story resonates with me very solidly. People are sophisticated enough nowdays and are communicating asynchronously 24 hours a day – they will spot a lie or a mistake or a chink in your story very fast. Social networking has not only changed the way we deal with the world its really changed the world we live in itself. Clay Shirky’s statement comes to mind about how the world before the printing press was a different world than that which came after it. And the same applies to computers, the Internet and social media. Its a different ballgame entirely. Authenticity is what makes you believable and why people might want to voluntarily push that story around their friends.
Reading Seth’s blog for a while you pick up snippets of wisdom we probably all should know already but that we don’t ever put into practice. How many service industries fail dismally at service? Every point of contact may be someones first impression of you. I’d recommend anyone, especially anyone slightly entrepeneureal, to read Seth Godin’s books. Not because he’ll give you the answer but simply because he’ll make you think about how you do business.
