Seth Godin: evaluation

Transcript context

…To what extent is being good at marketing the same as being good at telling very short stories? What’s a story? A story isn’t always The Princess Bride. A story isn’t always once upon a time. A story is the way it smells when you walk into your mother’s house and you smell apple pie, because you have a Proustian connection to how that felt a long time ago. A story involves status and affiliation. It’s very complicated. I’m not ready to say that marketing is a short story. I think that marketing is a complicated story. We know the difference from a thousand clues between a $500-a-night hotel and a $40-a-night hotel, even though both rooms are dark and quiet in the middle of the night. We want those things. Those stories inform our lives. They are why we bought the eyeglasses we bought and why we drive the car we drive. There are people who believe that a utilitarian sort of Soviet mindset is better, but even that person is driving their 25-year-old Pontiac because the story they tell themselves about that car makes them feel better. How do you think about the cross-sectional variation between very short stories — Coke, “the real thing” — and then very long stories? A piece of direct mail might be very long. The later Harry Potter novels — they’re very long. They’re, in a sense, ads for the sequel in addition to everything else. When do you go long and when do you go short?…

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