Seth Godin presents an unconventionally personal and holistic view of marketing.

He provides lots of useful frameworks to think about how to approach marketing for your own business, and what it takes to market a product well.

The book didn't resonate as much with me on my first read, but when I read it again, I suspect that I'll get more out of it and my rating will increase.

My Notes

We are marketing/selling how people feel when they get our product, not our product itself.

Don't try to change everyone, try to change the smallest possible group of relevant people.

Making a good and well marketed product:

1. Start with empathy and real need
2. Focus on the smallest viable market
3. Match the worldview of those being served
4. Make it easy to spread
5. Earn and keep the attention of those you serve
6. Offer ways to go deeper
7. At every step along the way, create and relieve tension as people progress toward their goals
8. Show up often, with humility, and focus on the parts that work

Everyone is just as complex and nuanced as you, they want to make things better and do good things, etc. You have to think about marketing from this perspective. Everyone is a complex person. Don't try to boil them down to heuristics.

If you don't have empathy for those that you're selling to, you're stealing.

Be authentic in your beliefs, and in your marketing. This is a rule to live by when marketing. Don't try to be slick, just be true to yourself.

Your best customers become your best advertising (and in my opinion this is the form most worth optimizing for).

"People like us do things like this."

• Most people do things to fit in and for status. Both of these forces keep people from making changes to their behavior.
• It's very difficult to change behavior, but very worth it.
• Marketers make change by normalizing new behaviors.

You need to own a permission asset, the privilege of contacting people without a middle man. This is the perfect reason to have an audience/get involved with content creation.

The best way to market is to create a product that people think is worth talking about.

You can fix your funnel

1. You can make sure that the right people are attracted to it.
2. You can make sure that the promise that brought them in aligns with where you hope they will go.
3. You can remove steps so that fewer decisions are required.
4. You can support those you're engaging with, reinforcing their dreams and ameliorating their fears as you go.
5. You can use tension to create forward motion.
6. You can use the people who have successfully engaged with the funnel to get more people into the funnel.

The network effect is the most powerful bridge between bringing your product to the early adopters and to the general public. You need to consider two questions from people's perspective:

• What will I tell my friends?
• Why will I tell them?

As a marketer, you have a huge opportunity to connect members of a tribe, and create artifacts/other things that the tribe can unite around.