All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

Why bother?

This is a very popular brand of "soy sauce" for take out chinese restaurants in New York. It's made not far from my house in White Plains, NY.

The thing is, there's no soy sauce in it. The ingredients state that it contains water and salt and coloring and "hydrolyzed soy protein." That, ladies and gentlemen, isn't soy sauce.

So, why, after paying rent, importing chefs, going shopping, putting up the signs, printing all those menus, cutting all those vegetables, cooking everything and then serving it in clever but expensive take out containers would a restaurant decide to save a penny (and the savings can't be more than a penny) serving fake soy sauce?

Does the brown color make diners feel like they're eating something more Chinese than ordinary table salt would? Undoubtedly.

Numbers and pictures

The only kind of lie that's easier than a numbers lie is a lie with pictures. Here's an ad that manages to do both.

Read about it here:


Automaker vs. the People: UCS ad response to Automakers 

So you're going clothes shopping!

 So, you've decided to go spend a few thousand dollars on clothes. You're a little heavier than you were last year (it was a rough Christmas) but you'd rather not be reminded of that.

No problem!

One would think that clothes sizing would be a fairly standard system. It's not. Over the years, as our population has --ahem-- expanded, sizes have as well. A women's size 6 is a lot bigger than it used to be (and a Junior Women's 3x is hardly junior).

As a result, the shopper can tell herself a lie... a story about both looking good and feeling good. And that's the whole point of clothes shopping, isn't it? We don't need a new outfit, we want one. And shopping for expensive clothes is all about changing the way the shopper feels.

My story is better than your story

Why are we spending so much time and money in Congress focusing on a private bill addressed at just one person's tragic story? It's certainly not about saving lives--in the same amount of time, Congress could save thousands of lives, not just one. Those lives, however, don't make good TV.

Congresspeople from both sides of the aisle are falling over themselves to see who can get the most airtime talking about the case of Terri Schiavo. Not because it's a legislative priority or because the medical facts support their efforts. They're doing it because it's a compelling story, a story with a simple, vivid, powerful argument on one side and a more subtle, fact-based analysis on the other.

Because we're people, not computers, the first kind of story usually wins.

Regardless of your point of view about the issue, the marketer in us has to acknowledge that this is all about the story. It usually is.

What's up with minivans?

Why do so many people (especially some of the suburban moms I know) hate minivans?

A minivan gets better mileage, is safer and is easier to manage for shlepping a bunch of humans. And dollar for dollar, a minivan is actually cheaper than an SUV of the same size.

So if it's better and safer and cheaper... why hate em?

Because of the story, of course. Somewhere along the way, we believed a lie about the personality of the person who chooses to drive a minivan. The soccer mom lie. A simple story that cost Detroit billions of dollars--and our economy billions in lost gas mileage.

Chocolate Bunnies

It wasn't until 1,600 years after Jesus that the Bunny became associated with Easter. If you think about it, it's pretty weird (bunnies don't lay eggs), but it's part of a long standing pattern of new religions stealing symbols and stories from older religions.

Bunnies are pretty prolific creatures, and thousands of years ago pagans picked them as a symbol of new life. Spring being the season of new life, bunnies were a sign of celebration and good luck. The story is a good one, and it spread.

Just like Christmas trees and lights in the window for the winter holidays, the marketers responsible for spreading the word about Christianity appropriated the symbol to help them market the new holiday.

Have I mentioned that Godiva is owned by Campbell's Soup? Godiva

Hijacking a story

As we saw in the Easter Bunny example, new ideas can travel with old stories.

Congress succeeded brilliantly with the Easter Bunny technique just this week. By calling Mark McGwire and other baseball players to testify about steroid use (and doing it during spring training), they instantly escalated the profile of the issue of drug abuse by teen athletes.

Now, whenever someone talks about McGwire, they will automatically be talking about steroid use. The two stories get intertwined and are more likely to get noticed.

Yes, smart Congressmen are marketers too (you already knew they were liars).

Jackson who?

If this painting were for sale, you'd have to pay millions to acquire it.

And yet, when it first painted, you could have paid just a few thousand dollars to own it.

What happened? Did the painting change? Is it a better painting today than it was?

What about the Shelby Cobra knock offs you can buy on eBay for $50,000? These are totally awesome cars, insanely fast and in many ways better built than the real Cobras, which are worth five or ten times as much.

Obviously, we're tweaking on the words "real" and "value" here. If all you're buying is a car, or excitement or the jealousy of your neighbors, the knock off is just fine. But that's not all that people buy. Mostly, they buy a story.

Lies = Death

Yes, we all "know" that smoking causes death, that it contributes to more illness-related deaths than anything else we choose to do, that it also degrades the quality of life of those that are addicted.

Marketers know (and always knew) that the combination of its addictive properties and the young age at which people choose to smoke make it a home run in the ROI department.

And yet, deep down, all of us "know" that it's cool.

How did it get cool? Why do intelligent adults imagine that artfully lighting a cigarette is more James Bond than bowery bum? That puffing is more Marlene Dietrich than emphysema victim?

Because cigarette marketers were genius storytellers. Of course they lied to us. They told us a story we wanted to believe, a story about the wild west and freedom and sexuality and youth and hipness.

This was an astonishingly expensive story to tell, I grant you that. But once told, the meme entered our vocabulary and it's going to be around for generations.

As you can see, this lying thing is a double-edged sword. More on that soon.

All Hat, No Cattle

Damian Jennings points us to Huhcorp, a brilliant site that demonstrates what happens when there's all lies, and no time for an actual product.

My favorite part are the stock photos. Perfect. Check out the site: We do stuff.