This Is Marketing summary
Book Summary & Synopsis
What's it about?
This book explains marketing as the practice of seeing a specific audience and finding a meaningful way to serve them. It argues that mass advertising has lost its former effectiveness and that successful marketing begins with understanding people's needs, desires, values, and worldviews.
Who is it for?
- Readers who want to understand marketing beyond advertising and online promotion.
- People interested in building products, finding a smallest viable market, creating tribes, and moving from early adopters toward a broader audience.
Meet the author
Seth Godin is the named author of this audiobook. The supplied summary focuses on his marketing ideas rather than providing additional biographical information.
From the Introduction & First Chapter
Introduction
This is Marketing by Seth Godin. Marketing is about seeing a specific audience and finding a meaningful way to serve them. When you hear the word marketing, what comes to mind? Do you think of advertising?
For many companies, advertising has become a dead end. Marketing requires a deeper understanding than that. It goes far beyond simply buying ads.
the end of mass advertising
The End of Mass Advertising. Mass advertising made sense during the heyday of mass media. In the internet age, it no longer does. Imagine you are a marketing executive in the 1960s.
Your company has a product, but your sales team has a problem. There are not enough sales. So how do you solve it? The traditional answer boiled down to two words: buy ads.
Preferably, buy lots of them. And make sure as many people as possible see them. Call it the Coca-Cola method. The company followed this strategy year after year.
It flooded the airwaves and magazine pages with advertisements. Your objective, in a word, was mass. You used mass media to achieve mass saturation of the mass market. You did this with a mass message aimed at the masses.
And what was the message? The message was mass again. You wanted to persuade your audience that your product belonged to mass culture. For Coca-Cola, that meant convincing people that everyone was drinking Coke.
And everyone was enjoying it. Back in the 1960s, the United States had three main television channels. Nearly everyone was watching the same shows. Under those conditions, mass advertising was a viable strategy.
An advertisement during The Beverly Hillbillies could reach millions of people. That was a substantial portion of the television viewing public. But those days are gone. Public attention is now scattered among thousands of television channels and shows.
Many people watch YouTube and Netflix instead. The internet changed the game. On one level, it is the most massive medium ever created. It connects billions of people.
On another level, it is the least massive. Everyone can curate a private version of it. People have personalized Facebook timelines. They have Twitter feeds.
They have tailored YouTube recommendations. They have Spotify playlists. Mass media has splintered into countless smaller media. The mass culture that once gathered around it has fractured as well.
The television show Mad Men ran between 2007 and 2015. It chronicled this shift. The show itself also demonstrates it. It received widespread praise.
Yet only about 1% of the U. S. population watched it on average. The old mass advertising approach no longer makes sense.
A different approach is needed.
Table of Contents
- 1 Introduction 0:29
- 2 the end of mass advertising 2:44
- 3 the limits of internet advertising 2:44
- 4 building something worth buying 2:58
- 5 finding the smallest viable market 2:38
- 6 positioning around distinctive values 2:58
- 7 turning an audience into a tribe 2:57
- 8 using tension and status 2:47
- 9 crossing into the mainstream 4:14
