Book Notes: This is Marketing

These are my notes on the book from Seth Godin called This is Marketing. I agree with its overall lesson, and it had some great sections and quotes, however, overall, it was a rather basic read and not as insightful as I hoped to.

Key Insights

1. The Smallest Viable Market: Focus on a niche group of customers who are most likely to resonate with and benefit from your product, rather than trying to appeal to everyone.
2. Understanding Your Audience is Key: Start with the audience, and not with the product. Find someone to serve, and serve him better than any other product.
3. Doing Marketing is About Helping and Serving Someone: Marketing is not about selling someone an overpriced product that doesn’t help him. Marketing is about serving people by helping them find the perfect product for their need.
4. Empathy is Core to Marketing: Godin emphasizes understanding the feelings and perspectives of your target audience as the foundation of effective marketing.
5. Storytelling Over Statistics: Effective marketing is about telling a compelling story that connects with the audience’s beliefs and desires, rather than bombarding them with data and features.

3 Steps to High Growth

I read an additional summary provided by Four Minute Books, that summarzied the three key insights, or basically 3 steps, pretty well:

1. Step 1: Focus on the smallest viable market first: Again, it’s way easier to build a product that’s amazing to a small audience, instead of trying to build a product to everyone. Find this audience first.
2. Step 2: Once you have found your audience of people, make them love your product by speaking in a way that relates to how they think and feel. This is the key for step 3, which will then lead to growth in the mass market. Make sure that this small group of users loves your product first, before trying to force growth.
3. Step 3: Reaching the public is about using your initial fan base and their networks. If you have this small group of users who love your product, they will organically start talking and sharing about your product. This will lead to a sustainable growth into the mass market.

My Favorite Quotes:

• “The first step on the path to make things better is to make better things.”
• “The mass market is being replaced by multiple micro-markets and the long tail of choice.”
• “It doesn’t make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open. The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key. It’s easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services.”
• “Find the people worth serving, and then find a change worth making.”
• “People don’t want what you make. They want what it will do for them.”
• “Once you’re clear on who’s it for, then doors begin to open for you.”
• “The engineer’s choice of the best price/performance ratio is rarely the market’s choice.”
• “We bring value to the world when we market.”
• “Marketing done right feels like a service to those you aim to serve.”
• “It’s not about selling more; it’s about helping more.”
• “Because people form assumptions and associations based on your pricing, and your pricing shapes what people believe about your service, it’s important to be clear about how you position yourself. Your price should be aligned with the extremes you claimed as part of your positioning.”
• “Treat different people differently.”