Seth Godin: belief

Transcript context

…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? I think there’s a confusion here between the surface of a jingle or the noise we hear and what marketing actually is. Coke’s story is not a jingle. It is not “the real thing.” Coke’s story is so complicated and so expensive that when they changed the formula of Coke, it cost them billions of dollars, even though testing in a blind test showed almost everyone thought it tasted better. The thing is, we don’t live in a double-blind world. We live with a narrative that informs us. When someone shows up to tell a story — and it’s not just someone who’s trying to sell you a soft drink; it’s someone who’s trying to run for office or an economist who’s trying to get people to adopt her ideas — they are telling a very complicated story that involves everything from how is the typeface kerned to what institution is this person part of, to what do my friends think of them? For me, marketing is humanity. They’re right next to each other. It is the stories we tell each other about who we are and where we belong. I have some case studies to ask you about. Feel free to pass if you don’t know anything about them. To start, what has Trader Joe’s gotten right?…

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