gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards"

all marketers are liars

Seth Godin, my favorite marketing writer kindly sent me an advance copy of his new book, All Marketers Are Liars. Just finished reading it.

Well, what can I say? If you like his blog, then you'll like this book.

The thing I like about Seth's writing is his ability to make things appear so obvious that you end up believeing you knew it already.

There's one sentence on Page One:

"Either you're going to tell stories that spread, or you'll become irrelevant."

That single line, in my opinion, is worth the price of the book.

But hey, I just told you the line, so now you can save yourself twenty bucks, right? Wrong. You need to read the whole thing to understand exactly what he's talking about. For it to really sink in.

The point of the book is not that all marketers are all liars, but that they're storytellers. Their job is to make up stories good enough to where the buyers no longer care that they're complicit in believing them- i.e. we believe the lie. We know Apple won't turn us into rock stars, we know Harley Davidson isn't going to free us from our dreary jobs. But we like the story anyway. We believe the lie, and it's the story that gives us permission to do so.

The thing about Seth that some people find quite intimidating is that he offers the reader nowhere to hide. He doesn't write books about "How to sell your crap-ass product for more money." He challenges you. Everything he writes invariably asks the question, "Why waste your time selling crap-ass products?"

Why waste your time trying to sell something you can't tell a good story about?

Posted by hugh macleod at March 17, 2005 9:43 PM | TrackBack