This is Marketing Summary - 7 Animated Ideas (by Seth Godin)
By Improvementor
Summary
## Key takeaways - **Find the Lock First, Then Fashion the Key**: Instead of creating a product and then searching for customers, identify your target audience first and then develop a product tailored to their needs. This approach is significantly more efficient and effective. [00:10] - **Frequency Builds Trust and Sales**: A salesman who stayed in a village for weeks, rather than just a few days, earned the trust of potential buyers and saw his sales skyrocket. Consistent presence builds relationships beyond initial interactions. [01:32] - **Earn Your Audience's Permission**: True permission marketing involves providing useful, consistent information that an audience genuinely misses if it stops. This is built by creating 'permission assets' like newsletters or blogs that readers actively engage with. [02:10] - **Price Reflects Brand Emotion, Not Just Cost**: Higher prices often signal trustworthiness and emotion, while low prices can indicate a lack of marketing ideas. Consumers may choose higher-priced items for perceived quality or status, even if functionally similar to cheaper options. [03:16], [04:07] - **Status is a Primal Driving Force**: People are driven by their social position and will spend significantly to maintain or achieve a desired status. This can influence purchasing decisions, from choosing a car to selecting a restaurant for a business meeting. [04:23], [05:23] - **Focus on the Solution, Not the Product**: Customers don't want a drill bit; they want a hole. Marketing efforts should focus on the problem your product solves or the benefit it provides, rather than just detailing the product's features. [06:13]
Topics Covered
- Always find the lock before you fashion the key.
- Consistent presence builds trust and skyrockets sales.
- True permission means your audience would miss you.
- Your price communicates trustworthiness, not just cost.
- Irrational decisions often reveal hidden status goals.
Full Transcript
One of the most important principles, if not THE most important principle of marketing,
which is repeated in the majority of marketing books, is this: Do not make a key and then
run around looking for a lock for it. Instead, find a lock, and then carefully fashion a key,
meaning, first figure out who your target audience is and then make a product.
Never the other way around, unless you want to make your work a thousand times harder and
unefficient both for you and your audience. Idea number one is: The Lock and The Key.
During a part of his career, Zig Ziglar was a salesman of pans and pots,
a common job at that time. The traditional way of doing this job included the salesmen
loading their cars with as much pans and pots as they could possibly carry, and then
hitting the road one village at a time, selling a few pots to those who are willing to buy, and
after a few days moving on to the next village, but Zig decided to try a different approach.
He decided to hunker down at each village and rent a room for weeks at a time,
and in doing so he didn't just sell to the few who were ready to buy in the first interactions
but also earned the trust of many of the others who were ready to buy only after
they got to know him better, and his sales skyrocketed. Idea number two is: Frequency.
In his book permission marketing that was published in 1999,
Seth explained how permission was the opposite of spam. Instead of running distracting ads
that everyone hates, he promoted the delivery of useful, consistent information
that will educate and will be delivered to readers who showed interest in it.
Two of the common mediums through which it could be done is a blog or a newsletter,
which are also called permission assets. So how do we know that we own a permission asset?
Not by having the legal permission to contact our receivers, or a few lines in our privacy policy,
rather, by knowing that the receivers would miss us
if we were gone. Idea number three is: Earn your permission.
So have you ever asked yourself why do the exact same products by different brands cost
differently? That's because the brands that price themselves higher, give you a different emotion.
You may pay a high price for a brand that you see as trustworthy.
On the contrary, if you don't have emotions for a brand you will only prefer it because of a lower
price. But it also works the other way around if you don't know the brands you will probably
assume that the higher-priced one is more trustworthy and the lower-priced is a commodity.
Low price is a sign of a marketer who ran out of ideas.
That was idea number four: Price is A Part of Your Marketing
Humans are social beings, therefore, it is our primal instinct to care about how we
interact with others. We may sacrifice a lot to be viewed in a certain social position.
That's why one of the first things we should consider when developing a
service is how it is going to benefit the status goals of the potential customer.
Keep in mind that people don't always want to increase their status mostly
they would want to maintain it, or sometimes even decrease it. And so, we may spend extra
tens of thousands of dollars on a car, just because we think it will give us a high status,
or we can avoid taking a free car because we might think it will decrease it.
In another case, at a business meeting at a restaurant,
when we want to avoid challenging someone, we may try to decrease our status by paying for a cheaper
meal. Or we may go with the least known company or most known company because we
perceive ourselves as outliers, or because we want to be like everyone else, accordingly.
If something seems irrational look for status roles at work.
That was idea number five: Status is a Primary Driving Force
Harvard marketing professor Theodore Lewitt
once said: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit they want a quarter-inch
hole", what he means is that if someone is coming in your store, and he wants to install a shelf
don't tell him about how good the drill bit is, rather tell him about which drill bit
is the best for installing a shelf. Idea number six is: Nobody Needs Your Product
In 1967 Lester Wunderman first coined the term "Direct Marketing".
Since then it became a widely used term in modern marketing. In essence, the difference
between Direct Marketing and Brand Marketing is that Direct Marketing is action-oriented
and is measured, and brand marketing is culturally oriented and is not measured. Examples of direct
marketing may be: Direct mail, email, and social media, while Brand Marketing includes: Newspaper,
Roadside, Radio and TV ads. Idea number seven is: The difference Between Direct and Brand marketing.
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