All marketers are liars
All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that's virtually the same car. We believe that $125 sneakers make our feet feel better——and look cooler——than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true.As Seth Godin showed in this controversial book, great marketers don't talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story——a story we want to believe, whether it's factual or not. In a world where most people have an infinite number of choices and no time to make them, every organization is a marketer, and all marketing is about telling stories.Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Fiji water or the iPod.But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That's a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers, cigarette companies, and sleazy politicians.But for the rest of us, it's time to embrace the power of the story. As Godin writes, "Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn't invent storytelling. They just perfected it."
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- > What should I read, watch or listen to in order to catch up on today's approach to selling, do you have some recommendations?
It really depends on where you are in this journey.
Learning to use online channels, in my opinion, requires a lot of work. Companies like Google have useful material. Frankly, this subject is wide and deep. I got into it starting about twenty years ago.Seth Godin Permission marketing Tribes: We need you to lead us All marketers are liars This is marketing Etc. Ries & Trout Positioning: The battle for your mind The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing Etc. Scientific Advertising - Claude Hopkins https://www.foundingsales.com/ The Little Red Book of Selling - GitomerPerhaps others can suggest books or courses/videos on best practices for online marketing and optimization that are more up to date.
I'll warn you that at some point in my journey I hated the fact that I had more business books by my bed than engineering books. It was frustrating until I reached what I call "cruise altitude" and had enough capabilities and understanding to do well.
- That's hard to answer because there are so many different types of books. E.g. I like this one a lot, it's basically a summary of the most important academic papers about what makes online communities successful:
https://www.amazon.com/Building-Successful-Online-Communitie...
But I also like Seth Godin's books a lot, e.g. All Marketers Are Liars, Free Prize Inside, and Purple Cow.
A lot of my reading on web stuff has been vaguely in those categories though, in terms of either academic research, academic theory, digital ethnography stuff, psychology and sociology, marketing theory/praxis, plus whatever I've read on design and UX.
I would say the single book that founders in the tech industry would benefit from reading the most is probably Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. I feel like every other startup puts themselves out of business by fucking up on the super basic things that book discusses. I end up having to explain it to people all the time.
- Because it’s a lie people tell themselves to get a good feeling, at least 2-3x a day (the author 6x).
You are immune to the lie :-) you gotta have a different lie to feel good.
BTW: I didn’t come up with the stuff. A splendid book about that topic is “All marketers are liars” by Seth Godin
- Seth Godin: "Purple Cow" & "All Marketers Are Liars"
- For what it's worth, Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars also covers the material in your specific example. It probably doesn't cover most of what's in the rest of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, though imho the idea of 'going to the extremes' is so important that it's really worth reading an entire book just on that idea.
- You can look at it a couple of different ways, but my mindset is more from the "competition validates the market" and "if you don't have any competition, that's a warning sign" school of thought.
Anyway, competition is a fact of life for pretty much every company. If you don't have it today, and your idea is good, you'll have it tomorrow, or next week, or whatever. More than likely, if your idea is really good, you have half a dozen competitors working away in their garages (or wherever) right now, that you've never even heard of.
My take? Keep moving forward. Keep a close eye on what your competitors do, and not just in terms of product features and technical stuff. Read Positioning - The Battle For Your Mind by Al Ries & Jack Trout, and All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin, and think about what "lie" your competition are telling, (or what position they're trying to grab) and figure out if you can A. grab that position / lie before them, or B. establish a related but slightly different position, where you can still be the leader and still make a nice profit.
Trout and Ries talk a lot about "Cherchez le Creneau", a French expression that means "search for the hole". It's a great expression in marketing, in terms of "search for the hole in the market" and fill it.
Like you say... if LayerVault is more feature rich and pricier, then maybe you can grab a different chunk of the market. Do be wary of getting caught up competing on price though. That can lead to a "race to the bottom" scenario. See Thull's book Mastering The Complex Sale for a good discussion of that issue. If you go "down market" try to make it more than just "we're cheaper"... more like "Our product is simpler and easier to use" and if it also happens to be a bit cheaper, then so much the better. Better yet, make a simpler and easier to use product and then charge more than the competition! If you can convince people of the value you can provide, they'll pay for it. Again, see Thull for a lot on how to develop and communicate value.
FWIW, we find new competitors all the time... heck, one popped up in our backyard (almost literally) earlier this week, that we had somehow overlooked until a friend of mine interviewed with them. Yikes. But still, we keep moving forward.
I'm reminded too of what Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame) said once... paraphrasing slightly, it was basically "Don't be afraid to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else".
Edit: Oh yeah, one last thing... call this a nitpick if you will, but I'm not really a fan of the name "Sception". "Why not?" you might ask. Well, because it sounds like a made up word, and it reminds me of famous "made up word" names like Inprise which sounded hideous and failed miserably. And it doesn't really fit the pattern of "short, easy to pronounce and easy to spell". Is it pronounced such that the first syllable is the same as the first syllable of "skeptic", or does it sound kinda like "inception"? And if somebody is telling somebody about it over the phone, or you run a radio ad, will it be obvious to somebody hearing the word, how it's spelled? Is it "skeption" or "sception" or something else?
More to the point, it isn't really evocative of anything meaningful (not to me anyway). A point that Trout & Ries emphasize in Positioning is how your names (company and product) should fit with your desired positioning and support the overall theme. Does "Sception" support a useful position ("lie" in Godin terms) that you want to establish?
