All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

The promised book list

At the end of LIARS, I give you a list of further reading.

Thanks to Todd, I don't have to type it in!


Link: 800-CEO-READ Blog: More Reading from All Marketers Are Liars

Five page free excerpt

No registration required, either.

Link: Small Business - Be a Better Liar - FORTUNE SMALL BUSINESS - Page.

"One Lucky Store!"

What, do they think we're idiots?

Oh, that's right. We are.


From Convenience Store News, from Darren:

Same Store Sells Winning Lotto Ticket for Third Time

ST. LOUIS -- A south St. Louis QuikTrip store is proving lucky for Missouri Lotto players.

For the third time, the store at 8205 Gravois has sold a winning Lotto jackpot ticket, the Missouri Lottery said Monday. The most recent winning ticket sold for the April 9 Lotto drawing matched winning numbers 13, 14, 15, 17, 39 and 42, and is worth $1.3 million.

"This is one lucky location," said Gary Gonder, spokesman for the Missouri Lottery.

Same Store Sells Winning Lotto Ticket for Third Time.

Of course, in order to believe this lie, you've got to have a worldview that says that there's some sort of skill or some sort of actual, real luck involved in winning the lottery. If you've got this worldview, then the story is perfect. Get in line, buddy.

Next thing you know, Gary Gonder will start telling us that people with certain Zodiac signs are likely to do better at video poker machines.

Organic cigarettes?

Not just organic, but "all natural" and not tested on animals and certified "cruelty free" by PETA. Did I mention that there's a native American on the box?

This is brilliant niche storytelling. There's a percentage of smokers who are able to get by the internal inconsistency (I won't say oxymoron because the word police say I'm misusing the term) of the term "organic cigarettes" and love the story. No, the Marlboro man isn't going to switch. But there's no way this little company would ever get him to switch... not enough money, not enough time.

But for smokers with the worldview that they want to be careful what they smoke, that they want a gourmet product, this is a great flash of insight.

No, I'd never be a tobacco marketer. I won't even do speaking gigs for them. But once a little company has decided to take that moral leap, the idea of upselling affluent smokers with this story is both hysterically funny and apparently quite effective.

A story is never enough

"It tasted like a canned seafood candy bar, so odd and unappealing..."

That's part of today's New York Times review of Koi, a new restaurant in Manhattan.

Koi has the story down pat. The supermodels at the bar, the imposing maitre d at the front desk, the celebrity heritage from LA and the fusion Japanese menu. It lets the diner lie to himself about how special he is to be permitted to eat here.

It doesn't matter. Not one bit. If the food is this bad, people won't come back.

And that's what a lot of people miss about marketing and lying. Your story is worthless if it's not authentic. Your story won't spread if the facts don't back it up.

All (successful) politicians are liars

And that's because citizens demand that they lie. And we're getting what we deserve.

I listened to a debate on the radio yesterday between David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union and Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way. It was about the upcoming US Senate vote about filibusters. Ostensibly, this was a thoughtful, public-radio exposition of the facts and thoughts behind each side of the debate. It was nothing of the sort.

BRILLIANT
That's the only word to describe David's approach. He told a story about fairness. He used phrases like, "up or down vote" and "nominees who have been held hostage for four years" and "what's in the Constitution." He spoke calmly and reasonably and never wavered from the story he wanted to tell. If you were inclined to believe his story, it was easy to believe. More important, it was easy to spread.

INCOMPETENT
Ralph Neas approached it like a Moot Court debater. He talked about how Robert Byrd's previous motions (fifteen years ago) were fundamentally different. Who exactly cares about Robert Byrd? He talked about how the Republicans had filibustered forty (forty!) years ago with Abe Fortas. Ralph may very well have been right about the facts, but it doesn't matter, does it?

[When marketers talk about politics (and when politicians talk about marketing) it almost always ends up as a degraded conversation because people get emotional over their points of view. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about is the consistent bungling of the Democratic Party as they fail to tell stories that people want to hear.]

John Kerry lost to an unpopular incumbent seeking reelection for just one reason: he insisted on focusing on facts, on issues, on position papers and on nuance. He acted like an intellectual bully, refusing to worry about the story he told. George W. Bush, on the other hand, was absolutely masterful in the way he told a story that a portion of the electorate wanted to hear.

It may be, that like me, you wish that all issues were decided on facts and reliable data. They never are. We're people, not machines, and we believe stories, not facts.

Ralph Neas doesn't appear to understand this. If I had been him, I would have repeated the mantra, Antonin Scalia over and over again. I would have talked about what will happen if the court has three more Scalia's on it. I'd tell that story calmly and carefully and repeatedly. Not everyone dislikes Scalia. That's okay. You're never going to persuade everyone of anything. What you can do, though, is persuade the persuadable, persuade the people who are choosing to listen and are open to believing the story you want to tell.

Broken link

It always seems to break when you least want it to. If you're trying to get to my book on Amazon, the red box on the top left might not work so well. You can try this instead:
Link: Amazon.com: Books: All Marketers Are Liars : The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World.

Sorry for the hassle... trained teams are working around the clock to fix it. Actually, it's one hard working guy in North Carolina, but still.

Geek makeovers

Edmundo Ruiz points us to: Geek on Stun: HD Allard.

What happens when a nerd tries to tell a different story? Here's HD Allard, from Microsoft, transforming himself into a media mogul.

Yes, it's just a story. Same guy, different hair. And there's no doubt in my mind that the new look gets a very different response than the old one would have.

With too little facts

...people make up a story. They have to. We have no choice.

Consider this story courtesy of Boing Boing:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A lazy worker, not a satanic cult, was responsible for severed goat heads that caused a scare at a Vancouver-area school, Canadian police said on Monday.

Police were called in after goat heads were twice found on a bench outside a school in nearby Chilliwack, British Columbia, prompting fears in the suburban community that it had been targeted by a satanic animal killing.

A 19-year-old worker at a local slaughterhouse has admitted he took the two heads with the intention of having them mounted, but then changed his mind and left them at the school in hopes a janitor would dispose of them.

"(Police) want to reassure the community that there were no satanic intentions in relation to these incidents," the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said, adding that the man "should have known better."

Indecency

So, the reporter from the LA Times started with this question, "Why do you think the cable TV people are using the Internet to fight the government's attempts to expand their crackdown on broadcast indency to cable?"

That's when you know which side has already won the debate.

How can you be against indency? How can you argue against a crackdown?

Would the question have been just as accurate if it had been, "Why do you think the cable TV people are using the Internet to fight the government's assault on the first amendment as it tries to censor and control what adults choose to watch on paid TV in the privacy of their homes?"

It's easy to assume that I'm just playing with words here. I'm not. The words that are used in any debate are at the heart of the story we tell ourselves.

One side often tries to rely on facts, on the truth, on what's right. The other side tells a story that fits our worldview. Who wins?

The storytellers will win every time.

Try for a moment to divorce the way you feel about this issue (personally, I'm sort of ambivalent) and take a look at the tactics. They are precisely the tactics that a wi-fi router manufacturer needs to use, or someone searching for a job.

Yes, it feels Orwellian. It doesn't seem fair that it's not just good enough to be correct or qualified or the best value. That's not even close to what it takes to succeed in today's marketplace of ideas. Instead, you must frame your message in a way that gives people a story that matches their worldview.

I heard a spokesperson for the governor of Missouri on the radio today. She was supporting the governor's claim that eliminating Medicaid in Missouri was a moral, socially acceptable act of generosity. She explained how unfair it was for taxpayers to subsidize health care for the poor, and that in fact, eliminating health care for the poor might be quite positive because it would encourage people to go out and get a job. She did this in a calm and reasonable manner, and you could hear the foundation being built. After all, how can you be against people going out and getting a job? How can you be against people keeping their own money... If this story fits your worldview, I'm sure it sounds reasonable and believable. If it doesn't, the story won't persuade you. That's the way marketing works--you don't persuade people with your story, you just give people who already agree with you the tools they need to persaude their friends.