Marketing is Everything That Touches The Market

When you are in the roles that we’ve been talking about today, sometimes you’re gonna surf and sometimes you’re gonna play golf. And you need to be very clear about which people are on which team and what you’re measuring. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by Six Cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. So, Saima, I was gonna make a comment about sequels or trilogies, though I think you probably beat that into quite a bit over a couple episodes. But we’re back for our part two of our interview with I still can’t believe I’m saying this, Seth Godin, like, that we did this and we had this conversation. But it was so good and it was so comprehensive we had to break it in two. Yeah. Because in typical revenue makers fashion, Adam, you and I can’t stick to a script. Nope. And we talked a whole lot about his new book, This is Strategy, but we also talked about his previous books. We talked about competitive landscapes and how to continue to be the market leader, which is something near and dear to us, and also AI, and also just, again, how to keep your eye on the prize. And so I hope our listeners enjoy part two. Let’s do it. You’re talking about spreadsheeting yourself to success and sort of, like, you wanna commit to something. Right? So, like, here’s the numbers. Here’s our plan. Talked about the importance of being strategic over how are we gonna get to the week or the month and so forth. But at the same time, you gotta keep that level of flexibility. Right? You have to be able to like, you talked a little bit earlier about, you know, making shifts. How do you balance? We are in it. This is our plan, and we’re gonna go. But at the same time, woah, something just happened. We have to be flexible and we have to shift. But sometimes it feels like if we shift off the plan, everything is gonna go awry because the plan is based on so much work and so much data and so much thought. Like, what’s the middle ground? The strategy should be built by the smallest possible number of humans. The tactics should be evolved and refined by the largest possible number of humans. So if you’re gonna build a luxury hotel and your strategy is ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen, your strategy is people are gonna eagerly wanna pay more because this is a luxury good where they find dignity and respect that they think is missing from their lives. That’s a strategy. But then when you hire somebody who they’re an entry level person who’s cleaning the rooms, and you say to that person, here’s a two hundred fifty dollar budget. You can use it anytime you want to solve any customer problem, and you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. You’ve now empowered that person to put out fires, to use new tactics, to find meaning in their work by being your frontline ambassador. So in a situation like that, if the hotel is on fire, you have an emergency. But if bookings are down this week, you don’t have an emergency. You have a curve that you have to bend in another direction. You’re not gonna solve that problem by running into the parking lot with a sign and a discount and right? You’re gonna solve that problem because the hotel’s not on fire. You’re not gonna go out of business tomorrow. You’re just getting signals that you’re not executing something well. So now given your existing strategy, give some people the authority and means to execute tactics. Every once in a while, you need a new strategy. And, you know, since I’ve been saying nice things about Google, Google completely flat footed on AI. They invented it, but they didn’t wanna launch it because they didn’t know how to replace the business they were gonna destroy. They arrogantly thought if they didn’t do it, no one would do it. They were wrong. So now Google’s gonna need a new strategy. But it’s the first time they’ve needed a new strategy in twenty years. That’s okay. Every decade or two, you probably need a new strategy. But the tactics? I would go to the fire department and say, you’re the tactics people. You go have emergencies. My job is to make sure the tactics add up to a strategy that’s resilient. Let’s talk about AI since Claude is your best friend. He’s not my best. He’s one of my best friends. One of your best friends. To offend my real best friend. No. Of course not. Marketers in particular and marketing leaders in particular seem to be the ones really carrying the gauntlet of incorporating AI into organizations. Right? We’re all being given this mandate, drive efficiency, see how AI can help, and there’s some very clear immediate wins around content creation and whatnot. But in a sea where everything is sort of moving towards the sameness that AI helps create, how should marketers be thinking about this? If you’re gonna use AI to create the gray goo that lowers cough, Please understand that’s a race to the bottom. Either you work for AI or AI works for you. And if you’re gonna sign up to work for AI, I don’t think you’re gonna like the way it works out. The alternative is to say, how do we use AI not to cost reduce our way into higher productivity? How do we use AI to value increase our way into more indispensability? How do we use it to help customers actually achieve what they dream of, not how do we use it to fire people to make our p and l look better? And AI is the biggest change in our world since electricity, and almost nobody understands how profound the possibilities are. We’re just saying it’ll be just like it is now except more widespread. Yet that’s not the case. The same way when we looked at electricity in eighteen ninety five. It wasn’t just like eighteen ninety five, but more people have a little tiny glowing lamp in front of their house. Electricity changed everything. So if as a marketer, I have never once used AI to save me time or money. I use it to help me spend time and money to make a bigger impact. That’s a totally different thing you’re hiring it to do. Staying on AI for a second. Like, if you were to go back and write a new chapter for permission marketing because I feel like now we have AI products. They do outreach and email and all that. We talk about like, there’s questions of if an AI is actually doing the outreach, are we disclosing, hey. This is from George or your friendly neighborhood AI or you know? And I think some of the tenants of permission marketing, if you’ve now got AIs doing this outreach, does that go out the window? What would that chapter look like in terms of a world where now it’s not people that are sending emails or it’s machines? There would be a new chapter, but there would also be a big warning on the front page that would say stop being a selfish short term narcissistic hustler that steals attention and trust from the people you said you want to serve. Stop looking for shortcuts and using my words against me. That’s not why I wrote this book, and that’s not what it’s about. I would have said that twenty five years ago, but I didn’t because I just assumed, you know, better angels of our nature that people would understand. But they’ve been crimping away so much that the amount of spam I get from noted brands is off the charts. So the new chapter would have only just a few words in it, which is make better promises and keep them. And so if you are promising people that interactions with you are going to feel different than the gray goo of AI interactions with everybody else, that’s a better promise, but you better keep it. It. Right? That one person who read the book a few years ago sent me a note. He had a business to business insurance agency in the Pacific Northwest, and it it cost them two million dollars in training and tech and everything else to rip out their phone system and make it so that anybody who called anytime the phone got answered on the first ring by someone who would help you. There was no IVR. There was no phone trees. It was just, hey. And you could see from the caller ID, it was one of your clients. Hey, Tracy. Yeah. I see your records right in front of me. I can have one ring. He said it paid for itself in three months because nobody else had the guts to do that. Everyone else is like, how do I decrease the costs of dealing with customers? Which is absurd because the reason we’re here is to deal with customers. And when you we make better promises and keep them, we create a new system. It’s generative. It’s resilient, and it gets better every day. And when I think of the brands that have faded away and the ones that are struggling, every single one of them cost reduced their way into mediocrity. And in the short run, the stock market loves that. And in the long run, the stock market’s an idiot. On this sort of theme now of competitive advantage, competitiveness, we’re in tech, highly competitive. I would argue we are the market leader in in the space that we’re in. And one of the things you had written in the book was, how do I know if I’m doing a good job? Are other people stealing my ideas? Right? And I loved that so much because we just came off of a trade show, and our playbook is being run by all of our competitors. And the messaging is starting to all sound the same. Given that people wanna buy from the market leader, giving that leader even more of an advantage. Right? That’s something you talk about. How should we be thinking about this? Is it continuing to innovate and continuing to double down on on the things we are doing? Is that a hallmark of a great strategy, or is it just a lack of imagination of everyone else? People who are listening know about Rogers’ product adoption life cycle, they’ve probably read Crossing the Chasm. It’s classic. I think it depends where you are in the curve. So if you are the Hoover vacuum cleaner company and you are all the way at the end of the curve, there are no innovators left, there’s no mass market left, you’re left with the last laggards, then you have a different opportunity slash obligation than if you’re at the beginning of the curve. If you’re at the beginning of the curve, what we know from chasm thinking is you have to productize and double down to make it so that you are the obvious market leader. You don’t change your policies, your approach, your slogans, or your logo because you’re bored with it. You don’t change it because your boss is bored with it. You change it because your accountant is bored with it. That you stick with it and stick with it all the way through because you’re paying way more attention to your competitors than anybody else, and that’s how you end up in the the mass market. But if you’ve already moved through as the market leader, then someone like Dyson comes along. And it’s interesting if you watch, none of the other market leaders did anything in response. And the same thing’s true for the car industry. When electric cars started showing up, the market leaders who had been around for eighty, ninety years did zero in response, even though they could have won instantly. My very, very first job was to be the assistant to the president of Activision, the fastest growing company in the world at the time. And I went in for my job interview, and I pitched Jim, the CEO, on why he should hire me as an assistant for the summer. And I said, you have made it through the curve for Nintendo games. You win. And you’re just sitting there letting all these other people start computer game companies. I said, I wanna spend three months putting together a report for you to show that you could do things your competitors won’t do. And he stood up to throw me out of his office because I was so arrogant at twenty two to pitch this idea to him. And he got distracted and went down the hall to celebrate some bestseller list, and he came back half an hour later, and I was still sitting there waiting for him. He had forgotten that he was annoyed at me, so he offered me the job. I ended up not taking the job, but I’ve remembered this for a very long time. So what I would say is the way you stay the market leader in a situation like that is you do things that the others won’t do, can’t do, don’t have the guts to do. Because that’s the only advantage of being the market leader is that you will veer in a direction that the people who want to be you can’t possibly pull off, and that’s how you become the market leader again. So, again, we need to see strategically which one of those games you’re playing. You know, like, to get the Dyson example is a good one. Of course, they obviously became who they are and huge disruptor. But how do you avoid a situation? And maybe the answer is you can’t always avoid it because you’re not going to know you don’t have powers. But crystal ball, at least not a good enough one. But where there are competitors that could be nipping at you, they’re nothing more and they’re going to nip and they’re going to go away And you run the risk of giving them more oxygen if you start to do something and not a direct response, but maybe you’re you’re gonna do one of those things only that you can do when ultimately it was just an ankle biter that that went away. You’re paying attention to your competition. Is the market paying attention to the competition? Is the competition teaching you something about what the market actually wants? So what we’re not seeking to do is react to competition. What we’re seeking to do is respond to opportunity because we just got taught something really useful and steal the ideas. Go for it. There’s no pride of ownership here. If you can serve the market better because you have a useful thing, the fact that you took it from a competitor, you should take pride in that, not be embarrassed by it. I love how you keep bringing it back to the empathy, the long term nature of what we’re doing, and keeping your eye on the prize. So I guess one more maybe tangent back to balancing flexibility and commitment related to all of this. Right? How can strategists balance the need for a flexible approach for knowing that your strategy needs to evolve, but also balance it with the commitment needed to pursue long term vision? Let’s try to visualize the difference between golf and surfing. So golf, if they change the location of a hole at a tournament, it’s a big deal. There’s a lot of discussion about this. Golf is asymptotic. Golf is how do I shave one stroke from exactly the same course I played yesterday? And it’s brittle that golf is easily disrupted. Surfing, on the other hand, is not fun if the wave is the same every single time. That that is what surfers sign up for. When you are in the roles that we’ve been talking about today, sometimes you’re gonna surf and sometimes you’re gonna play golf. And you need to be very clear about which people are on which team and what you’re measuring. And I have been in rooms where I showed up to surf and they took me aside and said, you know, this is a golfing room and you’re not making anything better. The opposite is also often true. So let’s first decide what the problem in front of us is. And there are lots of ways to serve the market better with efficiency, with reliability. I don’t want a pacemaker company to be trying half baked ideas. I want the pacemaker to be perfect every time. That’s golf. On the other hand, when I look at the incremental timidity that we’re seeing in so much of AI given how fast it’s moving, Very few people who are playing that high stakes game are doing something different than the other ones because they’ve all bought into a system, and this is the moment to surf. This is the moment to grab huge swaths of what the market wants, but it’s not happening because the system power is pushing everyone into more of a golf mindset. The market at the same time is telling you what sport you need to be playing. I guess. I mean, what do people really want? They want status. They want affiliation. They want convenience. They want the freedom from fear. What that leads to, I think it depends on existing systems and the change in those systems. Right? So what the market told famous colleges is money is no object as long as you keep doing things to make yourself rank higher. So that’s not really what the market wants. This is what the market said in that moment given what they thought their choices were. And now the market’s about to change for a whole bunch of reasons, a whole bunch of colleges who can go out of business, and it’s all gonna shift. But consumers still want the same five or six things. Let’s think practicality here for a second. As I was going through the book, I’m like, alright. I’m gonna I wanna apply some of these strategies, you know, to my personal life, professional life. But if someone’s out there thinking, okay, like, I wanna take this approach in my work, in my personal life, where would they start to say, like, let’s take some of this and and put it into action? Try to imagine meeting yourself in five years. What would that self say thank you for that you did this week or this month? You know? I’ve been meaning to tell you, Adam. Thank you so much for I know it wasn’t easy when you did x. Thanks. And what we do is we day trade ourselves out of that conversation because we say, under the circumstances, I did my best. Well, yeah, but you are the circumstances. And we hesitate to ignore sunk costs, which is a huge mistake. You know? So if you went to law school fifteen years ago and it cost you a lot of time and money, and now you hate being a lawyer, and you see the future of the kind of law you do, and you’re gonna live fifty more years, and you can’t imagine how that could be fun, you don’t have to be a lawyer. The degree you got from that law school is a gift from your former self. Your former self paid a lot for it. Here’s a gift. You don’t have to take it. You can say, oh, thanks for that, but, no, I don’t want it anymore, and you can move on. Or you can say, under the circumstances, I did the best I could at work today because I have a mortgage to pay. So what you’ve done is you’ve surrendered that person of you, the future, for a mortgage. Don’t do that. Right? You don’t get it over again. And the same thing is true for companies. You know, I talked about Yahoo not buying Google. I talked about Western Union not buying AT and T. Nintendo saw that playing cards probably didn’t have a lot of growth, so they shifted from being a playing card company to a video game company. That wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t easy. I think the owners of Nintendo are grateful to the person who had the guts to do that all those years ago. So what we have every day is an opportunity. And if your business is burning down and you’re nearly bankrupt, just let it go bankrupt and start over. But if you have any resources at all, I don’t think your job is to do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper. We got people who aren’t as smart as you who can do that. Your job is to say, given the resources I have and the market and its needs and wants and desires, How can I create value for them over time in a way that’s resilient and built on connection and fairness and dignity? If I can do those things, I probably have a better strategy. Seth, right on the cover of the book, right under the title, this is strategy, it says make better plans. Are there any specific frameworks that you have used that, you know, help you make those better plans or help you document them or communicate them more effectively, like, really getting down to sort of brass tacks? What works for you, or have you seen work elsewhere? The most important thing which we’ve touched on is taking a deep breath and forcing yourself to ignore false proxies. So my life got so much better when I stopped reading my Amazon reviews and took comments off my blog. Because I can find professional feedback from people I trust without using anonymous yelling from the hallway to inform my 6AI, not trying to be on the New York Times bestseller list. These fundamental choices that almost no one in my industry is willing to do were transformative in terms of me saying, oh, now that I understand that, I can go do this. Right? So this deck of cards was so fun to make, and it would never have happened if I was measuring the other stuff. That’s the first thing. And then in terms of communicating the plans, everything that we talk about to anybody else is marketing because we’re dealing with the market. And we have to think very hard about what noise do they have in their heads, and what do they already want before we even begin. So if I need Penguin to put up a bunch of time and money to acquire a book, I shouldn’t go in and talk about the AI component of it that I’m gonna build that’s outside of their world because that’s not the way they think. I have to go to where they are to tell them a story about status and affiliation and the freedom from fear, and what story will they tell their boss. And so part of what it is to market a strategy to somebody else is to understand what are the magic words that other people want? Are they looking for magic means? Are they looking for convenience? Are they looking for something they care about and believe in? And when I watch leaders, like my friend, Jacqueline Novogratz, who has helped lift a quarter of a billion people out of poverty, she understands how to do that. She understands how to be in the room with the people she’s in the room with to tell them a true story, a resilient story that resonates with who they are and where they wanna go, not what her particular plan is. I think the book was a great jumping off point and a lot of different places to go. We honestly, we could probably talk to you all day long. I’m sure you’ve got other places to go. Yeah. You probably don’t wanna do that, but we would love to. I’m having a blast, and thank you for looking inside my weird brain and not flinching. So happy to share. I don’t know. I think we all we we all move in for a while to see what else we can learn. But, we’ll we’ll spare you that. One thing that we do on the show, we ask the question, what is the most ridiculous thing you’ve been asked to do in your career? It could be ridiculous good or it could be ridiculous bad. I’ll do a few really quick ones. My first job was cleaning the dried dough out of a fifty pound bagel dough mixer. And when I put my hand in to slow down the blade, it got caught and I was gonna be sucked into the mixer and turned into pulp. And I broke my finger, and if I hadn’t broken my finger, I would have died. Fast forward to a speaking event in New York City in a warehouse on the, Hudson River. It was a hundred and ten degrees outside, a hundred and twenty degrees inside the warehouse, and it was filled with classic cars. I was on one end. There wasn’t even a stage. I had a little microphone, and there was an open bar in the back. So I 6AI, like, six people standing there, and then way in the back were forty people getting hammered at the open bar. And I was like, this is glamorous most of the time, but they didn’t think this through. Then there was a time I gave a speech at Walmart and in Bentonville, Arkansas, they had lost my reservation. So I was about to go speak to all the senior leaders at Walmart, but first 6AI had to sleep on the floor of the Motel six lobby. So there’s, like, been all these adventures. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. If I had thought about it, I would probably have a more picturesque story to tell you, but I signed up for all of it. The the weirder, the better. Love it. Seth, this has been a remarkable conversation. Thank you so much for spending the time with us, for sharing, not just kind of, you know, the strategy of what we should be following, but really tangible examples and making it real and making it so fun. We really appreciate your time today. Well, thank you. Thanks for making a ruckus and for doing the work. I appreciate you guys. You’ve been listening to Revenue Makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.