Is Marketing more needed when the product is bad? Seth Godin answers (me personally)

“Is Marketing more needed when the product is bad?”

When I asked that question to Seth Godin during his keynote at Digital Summit Atlanta, it got a lot of laughter. But behind the overall laugh, you could hear some comments in the crowd: “It’s actually a good question”.

We can all pretend this is more of a funny question than a genuine one, but I did ask it in all seriousness because it’s unfortunately relevant. For a lot of companies, marketing is still an afterthought. I was super excited to hear Seth’s answer, which did provide me and the crowd with some elements of response, but left a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

Let’s explore his thoughts.

Seth Godin’s vision of Marketing

Before I break down Seth’s answer and what it means to us marketers, let me share the rough version I transcripted from my personal recording. Because the recording was made on my cell phone, some of the part where inaudible so I apologize for that.

Before we break down his answer, let me say I would never be able to produce such a great answer on the spot. However, I don’t agree with everything he said, and not sure I understand it all.

Marketing is the wallpaper over a decayed wall

This concept of marketing as wallpaper is what happens when the product IS bad, or at least not as good as promoted. It’s the marketing that creates taglines with overused buzzwords like “best-in-class”, “cutting-edge” or “world-leading”.

A lot of companies still think about marketing that way.

Let’s say a startup company, cloud solution provider, got enough clients to grow and decides to hire a couple of salespeople. Eventually, the sales reps weren’t trained well enough on what the product could do and not do, and started saying yes to everything because the only thing that matters is selling.

The big downside is the amount of product customization needed to satisfy each and every client. The product is moving away from its core functions in all directions. It’s becoming hard to sell and to market.

The CEO, who’s also the founder and engineer who created the solution, decided to hire marketers to help him redefine the value proposition. By now, the solution does everything and nothing at the same time and is hard to position. The marketers try to create a compelling message but the CEO insists it’s important to use the buzzwords mentioned above to make sure the company looks bigger than it is. He’s sure that will help them against bigger competitors.

Here are a few takeaways that relate to Godin’s answer:

• That company missed the point by thinking about marketing too late in the process instead of making it a part of the product.
• Focusing on their core strengths might have been a better way to go to market and target a specific niche. Once the company becomes profitable, you could eventually expand your offers around your core.
• Being a smaller company actually was a competitive advantage. This could have allowed them to be more personal and casual in their communication while taking good care of their existing customer base, due to their human size. Instead, they chose to look bigger and position themselves with a message that wasn’t applicable in reality. They trapped themselves into looking like everyone else.

Inventing a product that is THE marketing

This idea of the product “being” the marketing is a fairly new but growing idea that relates to Growth Hacking.

With thought leaders like Ryan Holiday and his book Growth Hacker Marketing, or more recently Sean Ellis with Hacking Growth, Growth Hacking is a data-oriented approach to modern marketing in which marketing is at the core of building solutions that will find product-market fit through testing and iterations.

One of the best examples is DropBox which grew rapidly in a competitive market using a simple mantra, “Learn early, learn often”.

All of that sounds great, but can all great marketers work for companies like DropBox? The answer is no.

Seth tells us “that’s what it means to be a great marketer, to invent a product that is the marketing”. But not all great marketers are great inventors and vice-versa. Should all marketers be inventors/entrepreneurs to be good at their jobs? Can all marketers be involved that early in a company and impact the product from the start?

Marketers make change happen

When Seth starts talking about larger and vague concepts like change, this might be the limit of my understanding. This type of advice is less practical and hard to interpret and apply. The best way to illustrate Seth’s thinking is to confront it to someone with a very different mindset, Gary Vaynerchuk, the practitioner guru. In this video, you can see how both marketing masterminds have a hard time agreeing on a lot of things besides their apparent friendship.

I’ve read a few of Godin’s books including All Marketers are Liars in which he talks about change, but in a different way. Seth actually mentions multiple times that “People don’t want to change their minds”. According to his book, a great marketer’s job should be to grow by reaching out to communities that will choose to pay attention, to individuals who have a worldview that will embrace the story you’re trying to tell. You should frame your story in a way that matches that worldview.

According to him, storytelling is the essence of great marketing, but I’m not sure that’s how you make “true” change happen since your story should be aligned with your audience current core beliefs and not the other way around.

Takeaways

Seth Godin is a legend and one of the greatest marketing minds. However, I think his answer is a bit utopic. Not every solution can have marketing embedded within it. A lot of great marketers still have to work for companies that need to change the wallpaper to sell the house.

As for change, what is your view on Seth Godin’s take? Feel free to let me know @romugaboriau on Twitter or in the comment section!

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