Seth Godin at Advertising Week
The entrepreneur, blogger, best-selling author and marketing “wizard” Seth Godin brought his lecture “Getting In Touch With The Work That Matters” to NYC Advertising Week. He talked about the barriers preventing marketers today from achieving true greatness and creativity.
Seth begins by acknowledging how the business of Marketing and Advertising has changed dramatically in the past few years and that, much like the music industry, no one saw it coming. He points out that in the good old days a marketer’s job was to push the brand’s message as loud and as many times as possible, and that was enough to get consumer’s attention. Companies and brands got used to always ask the same thing from their agencies: More market share, more shelf space, more share of mind, more exposure. This push for “more, more, more” also led to a push for mass, and the problem is that if a brand wants to appeal to the masses it has to become average. So most brands end up doing average things for average people. When everybody is average, lower prices are the only type of competition - it's a race to the bottom.
On top of that, as markets and industries grew bigger, we ended up in a world of clutter where there is no more shortage of anything, except people willing to buy things. In order to stay in business, most companies want are pushing to people a solution to problems they don't have. So brands have become louder and louder trying to reach consumers that have the attention span of a goldfish. This led to work in advertising that is increasingly simplistic and straight-up dumbed down. “You branded yourselves to death” he jokes.
Many marketers out there believe the solution to this problem will come from big-data and technology, they believe if we are able to find out everything about our consumer’s past shopping behavior maybe we learn how to convince them to buy our brand in the future. But Seth strongly disagrees with this concept: “We can’t force people to get excited, what we can do is find little threads among some people and connect them and amplify them.” He also doesn't believe CRM is the solution, since the very term - Consumer Relationship Management - sounds too paternalistic, “as if customers would like to be managed by brands”.
The solution, he believes, begins with empathy - understanding where consumers are coming from an emotional and cultural level. “Fancy feast gourmet cat good is not made for cats” he remembers, it was made to cat owners who love their animals and want to give them the best experience possible, cats couldn't care less. It’s all about getting people excited and engaged. With those concepts in mind, Seth begins to list the new rules to create work that matters:
1- Brands have to be relevant to consumers’ lifestyle, they also have to be personal and anticipated - “If you don’t send out that email blast tomorrow, will consumers call you to know what’s going on?”.
2- Don’t get discouraged by the overload of choices, if you give people an original choice - something that matters - they will take it. More and more people are choosing to be “weird”, and as a consequence, all the great brands from the last few years are niche, not trying to appeal to the masses but only to people that care.
3- The only chance you have is to be remarkable, the only option is to be the one that will be missed when gone, everything else is being a part of the race to the bottom, "and the problem with this race is that you may win..."
At the end of the lecture, he talked about the personal barriers marketers usually face that are preventing them to achieve greater creative work. The first thing is that people believe they need to be ready to take on new challenges, but there is no such thing - you can only be prepared - “It’s probably not going to work the first time you try - always keep this mindset - you’re going to experience failure, so do it anyway, because you can only adjust something that has already been made”. Seth believes one of the roots of this behavior is that we were all brainwashed by traditional education to not to aim high enough. He does an experiment:
“Everybody raise your hands as high as possible…Ok, now raise it even higher… Wait, what was that about? Everybody hold back, everybody was afraid to give more… That’s what we were taught to do in life since we were kids.”
He also addresses the fallacy of creative’s block, suggesting that people should not only embrace bad ideas but have tons of them, and once your guard is down better ideas will come. “Creative's block is a combination of bad habits and an inability of dancing with fear - Everyone is capable of acts of genius”.
Seth begins by acknowledging how the business of Marketing and Advertising has changed dramatically in the past few years and that, much like the music industry, no one saw it coming. He points out that in the good old days a marketer’s job was to push the brand’s message as loud and as many times as possible, and that was enough to get consumer’s attention. Companies and brands got used to always ask the same thing from their agencies: More market share, more shelf space, more share of mind, more exposure. This push for “more, more, more” also led to a push for mass, and the problem is that if a brand wants to appeal to the masses it has to become average. So most brands end up doing average things for average people. When everybody is average, lower prices are the only type of competition - it's a race to the bottom.
On top of that, as markets and industries grew bigger, we ended up in a world of clutter where there is no more shortage of anything, except people willing to buy things. In order to stay in business, most companies want are pushing to people a solution to problems they don't have. So brands have become louder and louder trying to reach consumers that have the attention span of a goldfish. This led to work in advertising that is increasingly simplistic and straight-up dumbed down. “You branded yourselves to death” he jokes.
Many marketers out there believe the solution to this problem will come from big-data and technology, they believe if we are able to find out everything about our consumer’s past shopping behavior maybe we learn how to convince them to buy our brand in the future. But Seth strongly disagrees with this concept: “We can’t force people to get excited, what we can do is find little threads among some people and connect them and amplify them.” He also doesn't believe CRM is the solution, since the very term - Consumer Relationship Management - sounds too paternalistic, “as if customers would like to be managed by brands”.
The solution, he believes, begins with empathy - understanding where consumers are coming from an emotional and cultural level. “Fancy feast gourmet cat good is not made for cats” he remembers, it was made to cat owners who love their animals and want to give them the best experience possible, cats couldn't care less. It’s all about getting people excited and engaged. With those concepts in mind, Seth begins to list the new rules to create work that matters:
1- Brands have to be relevant to consumers’ lifestyle, they also have to be personal and anticipated - “If you don’t send out that email blast tomorrow, will consumers call you to know what’s going on?”.
2- Don’t get discouraged by the overload of choices, if you give people an original choice - something that matters - they will take it. More and more people are choosing to be “weird”, and as a consequence, all the great brands from the last few years are niche, not trying to appeal to the masses but only to people that care.
3- The only chance you have is to be remarkable, the only option is to be the one that will be missed when gone, everything else is being a part of the race to the bottom, "and the problem with this race is that you may win..."
At the end of the lecture, he talked about the personal barriers marketers usually face that are preventing them to achieve greater creative work. The first thing is that people believe they need to be ready to take on new challenges, but there is no such thing - you can only be prepared - “It’s probably not going to work the first time you try - always keep this mindset - you’re going to experience failure, so do it anyway, because you can only adjust something that has already been made”. Seth believes one of the roots of this behavior is that we were all brainwashed by traditional education to not to aim high enough. He does an experiment:
“Everybody raise your hands as high as possible…Ok, now raise it even higher… Wait, what was that about? Everybody hold back, everybody was afraid to give more… That’s what we were taught to do in life since we were kids.”
He also addresses the fallacy of creative’s block, suggesting that people should not only embrace bad ideas but have tons of them, and once your guard is down better ideas will come. “Creative's block is a combination of bad habits and an inability of dancing with fear - Everyone is capable of acts of genius”.
