Seth Godin Speaks Out to Promotional Products Industry

Mark Graham, co-founder of commonSKU and PromoKitchen, along with Identity Marketing columnist and PromoKitchen "chef" Kirby Hasseman, president of Conshocton, OH-based Hasseman Marketing, sat down earlier this week with Seth Godin, world-renowned author of 17 bestsellers, entrepreneur and speaker. The podcast covered a wide range of topics – from marketing, sales, the promotional products industry, his new book, and more. Here are some excerpts from the event.

On the present state of marketing...

I think we are living in a revolution, the biggest change of our lifetime…

This is a magical moment in time. Anyone with a laptop can reach over a billion people. The number of resources that are available to support projects that can elevate us is huge, and yet we decide to establish our agenda for the day and the month by what is important to someone else and we race to the bottom…

When it comes to content, when it comes to getting a new client, when it comes to making a living, I'd really like to believe we can make a difference, at least as much as we have the opportunity.

Marketing used to be the same as advertising. What started happening in the 1990s is that advertising stopped working – because we can ignore it ever more easily. The mass market stopped being a mass market and splintered into little pieces. The internet fundamentally changed our ability to connect.

So if marketing is no longer advertising, what is marketing?

I believe marketing is the promise that we make when we tell someone the story about what we do. And that means that everything we do is marketing.

And if everything we do is marketing, and the mass market is gone, average people buying average things is no longer a way to make a living. People in your industry completely understand this… that the generic water bottle with a logo on the side [alone] isn't going to make anybody any money, because the minute you have a client that's going to buy a lot of them, they're going to buy them from someone cheaper than you.

...it's not about how can I be cheaper than the competition and sell average stuff to average people – marketing becomes something more human, something more real. What it comes to is the human act of saying, "I made this. I made this for you." And, the human ability to say, "This might not work."

This is the core of my [new] book... to live with "it might not work" and "it might work" in our head at the same time. We have enormous trouble doing this because we were raised to be obedient students and be successful cogs in the industrial system. When you are a cog in the system, you are not allowed to say this might not work. That's reckless. But if we are going to do something that will connect us, something that people are going to talk about, that people will pay extra for, we have no choice but to do something real and artistic. But what it means to do something artistic is to do something that might not work.

On niche marketing...

The word niche has built in it the dismissive tone of, "That's merely a specialty side show, that the real meat belongs to the people who can figure out how to get a customer en masse."

The argument I'm making is that mass has left the boat.

The people who want average stuff don't care that much and if they don't care, they're just going to sort by price. So if you are one of those people who justifies racing to the bottom and figuring out how to get a customer at any price, you are fooling yourself if you believe that that particular customer is going to stop being a bottom feeder and start being someone who is choosing to do important work.

That's not what happens.

What happens is, [you need to find] people whose world view is... "I am the kind of person who cares about this. I am the kind of person who wants to be known for this. I am the kind of person who will pay extra to get extra…" That's one kind of person and they're over here on the right while everyone on the left is the undifferentiated, bottom feeding mass.

It feels like a short cut to start with those people but it's not. It's a dead end. Someone needs to be the 99-cent store and someone needs to be the person selling junk to people, but it doesn't have to be you.

On working in a commodity-based business, like promotional products...

I think the way to approach this is to say that you're actually charging for expertise and trust and insight, and "the stuff" just comes along with that. When you think about advisors, whether it's a Morgan Stanley, or a BBD&O, or the other kinds of institutions that big businesses hire, they're not paying for accounting services or someone to set type. They're paying for the fact that someone of significance will work for them, bring to them the confidence, expertise, and insight that changes the organization itself…

There are people in any industry, where the CMO knows that, in one phone call, she can call someone like this and describe the upcoming event, describe the problem, describe the impact she wants to make on the industry, and this person – this trusted confidential advisor – will be back with a fair, honest and insightful marketable suggestion – and they're done. It's not, "Okay, thank you. Now I'm going to submit this to 20 people who do what you do and buy it from the cheapest," because if she does, she's not going to get that confidential advice again.

This posture is not available to everyone but it is to the people who are listening here. In order to do it, you must reject serving the other customer the same way… It's your insights [that are] really for sale, not your ability to close the sale.

In my book, I talk a lot about tension and the tension comes from starting a conversation with a customer by saying, "Here are the phone numbers and the websites of three people who are cheaper than me. By all means, if that's what you want. If you want a Gildan T-shirt and a pen, or whatever, if they are better than I am at letting you upload an image, get it for cheap and track it as it's coming. Please, call me when you want my help." If you're not prepared to talk that way, then don't be surprised that you're left with people who are cheap and too stupid to use a website.