All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

Listening to the new

 This is one of the bestselling albums in the world.

Not since it came out, but LAST YEAR.

How is that this album has been a Billboard 100 for decades?

Because of worldview. Some people (most people) want to buy music they've heard before. It makes them happy to hear familiar music. The best new album in the world isn't going to change that worldview. Instead, what happens is that a great new album appeals to people who LIKE new music. Some of those folks work at radio stations or use Grokster. And they spread the song, playing it over and over (for free) to people who don't like new music. After awhile, it's not new to those people, so they buy it.

The lesson isn't on the dark side, folks. You can't change the way people do things. What you can do is enter a population with your idea via an easier route and let the people who want to spread your idea spread it to those willing to listen to a friend.

The Salvation Army

 Have you ever given money to the Salvation Army?

Why?

It's one of the biggest charities in the country. What is it about the way they ask for money (or what they do with it) that makes them so much more successful than other charities? Is it that they are more efficient or helping people in a highly leveraged way? Or is it something else?

Does a story that's irrelevant matter?

When you think of a thumb, do you think of Wendy's?

Does it make you less likely to eat there?

Sales are off as much as 50% in some California Wendy's. Not because there's any chance in the world that you're going to find another thumb. Or even an index finger. In fact, Wendy's is probably the safest fast food place in the world when it comes to appendages just now.

The reason sales are off isn't about the truth. It's about the story we insist on telling ourselves.

Your Coffee Worldview

 At a recent seminar at my office, I had two coffeemakers set up. One had decaffeinated swill in a standard Mr. Coffee carafe type thing, and the other was a fancy Capresso machine.

I noticed that people didn't choose which machined based on caff vs. decaf. Nope, they picked based on a machine.

If your worldview says, "I like gadget, premium, hyped, tweaky coffee" you went for the fancy machine. If your worldview was, "I like to settle, take no risks and be safe and predictable with my coffee" you took the other. It didn't matter which was better. It didn't matter which cost more. It mattered what you had decided before you even got there.

Hershey Foods has changed its name

 Now they want to be called just plain Hershey.

Why?

Well, they've spent years selling off their food divisions, leaving them with mostly junk... candy and stuff.

It turns out that people NEED food, and they WANT candy. So candy is a lot more profitable. Since Hershey no longer sells food, they want to be sure the stock market knows this. Hershey Junk is probably not a good name for a company, so now it's just Hershey.

Let's assume that they're correct, and that the stock market will get the message, giving them a higher PE ratio and stock price because they are in a higher margin business. What this means is that a story about what they do will end up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Just to tell a story to people who have an incentive to be informed about the truth. Of course, it's impossible to tell the truth...

What kind of vacuum do you want?

 Vacuum cleaners are funny. The act of vacuuming is at least as important as the dust removal itself. A freshly vacuumed rug looks different... but in the short run, there's really not a lot of visible difference between a rug vacuumed with a really expensive machine and one that was poorly vacuumed.

As a result, the worldview of the buyer matters a great deal. If you see yourself manhandling some big loud device, then only a big loud device is going to make you feel as though you did what you were supposed to do.

We've done the Dyson story to death, so I won't go into that here. But I got this ad from Francesco Rovati in Italy, and it made me think about the alternatives. Francesco confesses that while this was the most popular vacuum in Italy, it was no better and no cheaper than the alternatives. Clearly, it was the story the ads tell that made the thing sell.

The reason that vacuum cleaner makers tell us lies like this is that we demand it. If they just told us the truth (weight and horsepower) they'd be doing nothing at all to make us feel good while we vacuum. And feeling good is why people spend their hard-earned money on things that they don't actually need.

(PS the ad with Tarzan losing his loincloth was too racy for this family-friendly blog).

Do you have a Home Depot problem?

This is what it looks like as you walk through the parking lot to my Home Depot in Yonkers, New York.

No, it's not a nightclub. It's a hardware store.

Home Depot has a challenge. They're not growing the way they want to. Huge discounts were enough to completely disrupt the local market, wiping out many mom and pop competitors. But low prices all by themselves aren't enough to get a certain part of the population to show up, especially for just one or two (high margin) items like doorknobs, or even worse, stuff like a whole new kitchen.

Walk into the store and you can see which worldview the story is tailored to. It's not for the homemaker or the occasional do it yourselfer. No, the store is clearly designed by, stocked for and organized around people who buy in volume and, even more than that, hardware geeks.

Take a look at this picture and tell me the truth: is it exciting to you? Does it fill you with anticipation to make your way down this aisle, looking at each item and finding an amazing deal? If so, you've got a worldview that matches the story Home Depot tells.

Many people, though, see nothing but dread here. They see a store with no helpful salespeople, a jumble of product, none just quite right, a very very long checkout line and fear. The fear of screwing up. The fear of having to come back and return something. The fear (very real) of something big falling from the top of one of these shelves and squashing them like a bug.

Home Depot is working hard to get new customers. They can't... not as long as they continue to tell a story that only appeals to just one worldview.

Your organization may be just like the Home Depot. You may be good at one story, you may have grown into that story, but now that story can't get you to an audience that doesn't have the same worldview as your existing customers. The common solution is to yell. To yell louder, or more cleverly, or in more targeted media. To insist that you have the solution to this group's problems, that you have proof that you are better, and why oh why won't they switch.

Save your breath. Tell a different story instead.

Do you believe Paris?

 Celebrity endorsements go back to the days of the early British Monarchy, and they still work. People still pay extra for perfume with Paris Hilton's name on it (she's making more than $10 million a year endorsing stuff). Why? Obviously, the perfume isn't any better. Worse, no one else even knows that you're wearing this particular scent (it's not as obvious as, say, Ralph Lauren's polo pony.)

We'd like to believe that we're not swayed by such obvious nonsense. "No, I buy Polo jeans because they fit me better." While it's true that not everyone is easily seduced by Paris, most consumers (including the indigent and extremely poor) can't help themselves when confronted with just the right endorsement--they pay extra for the story.

One of my favorite silly endorsements is Pierce Brosnan endorsing Omega. They're not paying Pierce because they care about Pierce's opinion (or that you care about his opinion). They're paying him because he embodies a fictional character, invented fifty years ago by a now-dead author.

So, otherwise rational and intelligent men spend hundreds or thousands of dollars extra to buy a watch endorsed by a fictional character controlled by anonymous film producers and embodied by an actor. Because it makes them feel good. They buy the story.

Business to Business

Lying to consumers is great fun to talk about, but it's far more challenging and more effective to lie to fellow business people.

This is the headquarters for the CAA, one of the heavyweights in Hollywood. (They represent folks like Pierce Brosnan--yes, him again--and dozens of other big names).

The last time I visited their headquarters, I was stunned by the 57 foot tall atrium lobby, and most especially by the invisible doorman--someone standing across the room with a remote control to let the good folks in and keep the riffraff out.

I mean, just for a second, let's remember what these guys do. They charge millions of dollars to make phone calls, negotiate contracts and have lunch. They could just as easily do their jobs in some trailer park.

If you don't think tone of voice and storytelling matters when selling to business, take a second to check out their entire website (it won't take long): CreativeArtistsAgency.

Anticipation for sale

 When I was a kid, I wanted this product more than anything in the whole world.

Of course, when you got it, you discovered that all the glasses could see through was your right hand. (I'll let you figure out how that worked).

So technically, the ad was "true." Of course, the real deal was:
1. it fit the goals of a pre-adolescent (power, peeping tom, magic)
2. it fit the worldview that great things were available for not a lot of money, usually by mail if you knew what to get
3. when you got it, you felt ripped off, but realized that a) you could fool your friends and b) the wait was great... you were really buying anticipation.

The problem with blind taste tests

I was in the supermarket last week, talking to some journalists about lying. We were talking about the fact that bottled water costs more than gasoline, and that some brands cost two or three times as much as others. They suggested doing a blind taste test--pouring one of each into a glass and seeing if people could tell the difference.

Big mistake! This is the same mistake that the Pepsi Challenge forced the poor shmoes at Coke into making.

The reason it's a mistake is that in real life, there's almost never anything that's really blind. You know what container that beverage came from. You know whether the table has a white linen cloth on it--or whether you're at a luncheonette. You can see the look in the doctor's eyes when she talks to you. You can sense the confidence of the sales rep whens he brings the latest advance in ball bearing technology to your office.

Blind taste tests take the arrogant position that there is some sort of truth. I don't think there is.

No, the right taste test to do is not Brand X vs. Nationally Advertised Brand in unmarked glasses. The right test is to switch the contents but keep the labels.  How does that water taste in this bottle?

Do your products belong in a museum?

This is the new Mercedes Benz museum. If a car is just a car, a utilitarian device to get us from one place to another cheaply, quickly and safely, then why would Mercedes need a museum?

Of course, that's not what a car is. A car is a symbol, a story... yes, it's a lie. It's an amalgamation of the identity of the maker and the purchaser and it says an enormous amount about who we are. The same thing is true about the mp3 player you wear, the cell phone you use and, yes, the insurance company you choose.

The best marketers craft these stories carefully, knowing that this is what people are actually buying. So, if you were trying to make something museum-worthy, what would you do now?

Who's your roommate?

 The brilliant John McWade completely understands my new book, and he hasn't read it yet. In the editor's column of the new issue of Before And After (print only, but check out freebies at (link: Before & After, the magazine for graphic design) he writes,

"Think of it this way. If I ask to see a picture of your dormmate, what are you going to show me? Not a snapshot of Condoleezza Rice. Not a Picasso. Not some visual concept of yours. What you'll show me is a real photo, what she actually looks like.

If she's dressed for a date, she'll be more presentable than if she just yawned her way out of a sleeping bag, but it's still her."

I'd add, "no, of course, it's not her. It's a picture of her. And no picture can ever, ever tell the truth."

The doily lie

Every year, millions of Jews celebrate Passover by cleaning out their food cabinets and buying special "kosher for passover" foods. These are items that are made in a rabbi-inspected facility. They can't contain corn or wheat or various leavening agents (that's why kosher for passover Coke tastes better--no corn syrup).

This leads to one of my favorite seasonal lies. The supermarkets that sell Passover foods (very high margin, by the way) often line their shelves with doilies or white paper. Now, let's think about this for a minute--what contamination exactly is the doily protecting the food from? Here's a sterile, canned item, sitting atop a perforated doily, which is on top of a shelf that is presumably washed every once in a while.

Obviously, it's not the doily. It's the story behind the doily. It's the story of a clean start, of something fresh. The same story that the food itself tells, a story that resonates with the worldview of the person who's shopping for this.

Most existing organizations don't spend nearly enough time worrying about this subtle sort of story.

Supreme nuts?

What's the point of telling a lie to a captive audience... and one that's going to discover the lie in just a moment or two?

Dean Jackson sent me this illustrative chart... the result of a flight on United Airlines. Hey, at least he GOT a bag labeled Supreme Nut Mix. Most travelers just get a glass of Sprite.

Salmon is a lie

 Today's New York Times tested wild salmon, sold for up to $29 a pound, from eight different fish stores in Manhattan. It  reports that less than 25% of all the salmon tested was actually wild. The rest was farm-raised, which goes for half the price when the seller is honest.

That means that the vast majority of people who buy wild salmon in New York get the psychic benefit of believing they are eating something even better than than "ordinary" salmon. But it also means that they're being deceived out of their money.

PS do you know why farm-raised salmon is such a lovely red? It's artificially colored. But the color makes us think it's fresher, and thinking it's fresher makes us thing it tastes better. So it does.

PPS yes, I know that's an Atlantic not a Pacific salmon to the left. Just testing your fish skills.

Quite an LED

 The Brookstone catalog describes the new Panasonic nose cleaner this way:

"Panasonic's trimmer uses bright white LED light to precisely cut unwanted nose and ear hair."

For all the people who have been holding back on hair trimming because they didn't want to deal with blades, this, apparently, is the nose hair trimmer for you.

Of course, LEDs can't cut hair. What the LEDs do, we find out after the headline, is "illuminates grooming area." So this is just like the ordinary $19 trimmers, except for $50, you get to see the hair in your ears better.

What's the point of a gratuitous lie like this? There's no way it's going to make the product experience better. It's even a silly way to trick people. Are there that many people who have a worldview of gadget-lust that they'll grab ahold of this? Even to a neophyte, an LED cutting your hair smells sort of fishy.

Worldview test #1

Is this:
a. someone in real need of help
b. someone you should give money to
c. someone who will take whatever money you give and go buy a substance that makes his problem worse
d. someone you should cross the street to avoid

Hint: there is no right answer.

What's true is this: everyone looks at the world with a different lens. Everyone has had experiences and an upbringing that makes them believe (or disbelieve) the stories they are told. Surprisingly, the worldviews that are out there are lumpy--most people fall into just a few categories for any given story.

The challenge to anyone hoping to spread an idea is this: Are there enough people with the right worldview out there? And can you reach them with your story?

Snap, Crackle, Lie

Have you ever been disappointed with a bowl of cereal? Every been bummed out that every flake wasn't perfect, or that there were no perfect strawberries in the bowl?

They write "serving suggestion" on the picture on the box because they're required to by law, but why primp it at all?

David Paull points us to Right Brain Left Field  were a purported food stylist confesses the secrets of how they take the photos on the box. Here's a juicy tidbit:
1. Dump several boxes of cereal out onto flat baking sheets.
2. Using tweezers so one doesn't damage any pieces, root through finding the most perfectly shaped flakes (about 50-60)
3. Fill the prop bowl about 2/3 with Crisco, creating a dome at the top
4. Again using tweezers, embed the perfect flakes into the Crisco to create a pleasing arrangement and realistic volume of cereal
5. Fill in gaps and edges with Wild Root Hair Tonic to simulate milk.

I for one believe that the great pictures help tell the story of consumer satisfaction, a story that makes me like the cereal even more. And when the "real" cereal doesn't precisely match, I don't give it a second thought. Is that a lie? A fib?

Geeks don't buy expensive wine

Four of us visited a fancy restaurant on Saturday. Imagine our geeky surprise when they brought out a Microsoft tablet instead  of a wine list.

It makes perfect sense, of course. You could sort by year or by price, you could see the inventory and they could remove a wine instantly once it was sold out.

So what could be bad?

What's bad is that the person who's going to spend $100 or $1,000 on a bottle of wine isn't a hyper-rational geek in search of the optimum solution (hint: we bought the cheap stuff but it was still 5x the cost of of the wine in a store). Instead, we're looking for a buying experience (courting the sommelier, sniffing the cork) that adds a huge percentage of the value to the purchase.

In short: a cool story, but told in the wrong place to the wrong people.