All Marketers Are Liars

book by Seth Godin, ISBN:1591841003: Marketing used to be about Advertising, now it's about Story Telling.

Because we're a rich world, we buy for wants not needs which means we buy for non-rational criteria: what the buyer is buying is how your product makes her feel

A great story

• is "true": Authentic
• make a bold promise (Wow Branding)
• are trusted (marketer must earn credibility)
• subtle, filled in by the buyer
• fast: create instant Engagement (Attention Economy)
• often appeal to our senses
• rarely aimed at everyone: Focus
• Coherent (Coherence)
• agree with a World View the buyer already has (even if she doesn't know it). You can't change anyone's World View, though you can trigger a new one (the old Positioning point)
  • Positioning in the world of the story is a longer, subtler, more involved process. It's three-dimensional and it goes on forever.
  • Howard Dean failed in Crossing The Chasm

World View: rules, biases, beliefs, values

• each person has a different combination of worldviews
  • (Which to me makes World View a poor word choice, because World View to me implies that's it's bigger, and filters many/all of a person's perceptions, at least within certain realms. For the moment I find Belief as a better word; it also resonates with the "story" model, in thinking of a Belief as a Story we tell ourselves.)
• each worldview is held by a different (combined) set of people
• a group sharing a Belief who talk to each other (about it) make a Community
  • this can put you in Idea Virus leverage territory
• find a neglected Belief
• Framing presents an idea in a way that embraces a buyer's Belief. (Or you could say it manipulates a person into applying a particular Belief they have to what you want them to think/feel/do.)

People only notice differences, surprises

• then they immediately make predictions (Model-s) about what will happen next
  • then they will tend to filter their perceptions to reinforce that Model. (As Robert Anton Wilson says, what the thinker thinks, the prover proves... or maybe that should be what the feeler feels, the seer sees.)

First impressions are key

• but you have no control over which impression/action will be first, because of the heavy Attention filtering
• so every possible impression (TouchPoint, a phrase he doesn't use) has to count
• that's one reason why you have to be Authentic, or else you'll get caught
• It's not just the words of your story, it's how you tell it
  • each dimension/sense of each TouchPoint

Story Telling lets the buyer tell herself a story

• and that story (lie) satisfies her desires
• tell a story, don't give a lecture. Hint at the facts, don't preach them (because the buyer won't believe you - Immune Response)

Your story needs to be "true"

• fibs are OK, frauds are not
• 2 tests
  • If I knew what you know, would I still choose to buy?
  • After I've used/experienced this, will I be glad i believed the story, or will I feel ripped off?

Your story has to be remarkable, therefore so does your product

• the Purple Cow story
  • if you really have a Purple Cow, you won't have any trouble getting the story out
• to get spread, your story has to be practically unbelievable, it must demand to be repeated (one benefit of your product is to give people a story to tell other people)

He notes that the non-rational buying process applies to B2B buying as much as for Consumer products.

• but don't you typically find that
  • there are multiple decision-makers in these processes
  • and they often have different World View-s from each other?
• so how do you tell a remarkable-yet-coherent story?
• You can't count on telling different stories to different people and keeping that a "secret"
  • But maybe it doesn't matter? If someone hears the targeted-for-someone-else message, maybe they just kinda ignore it, rather than say "but that's different from what I heard directly the other day"???