This Is Marketing: You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See Hardcover – November 13, 2018

This book outlines the way forward for businesses in the world today. A must read.

Speaks truth. It's hard not to agree with the theory, worldview, and advice of this book. The evidence is all around us, in today's digital age of internet and smartphones.The central thesis is starting local with a small, diehard group of neophiliacs -- people who like trying new things so they can talk about it with their friends -- and leveraging their evangelism and word of mouth to spread to a wider market.Much of the book surrounds this advice with case studies (Facebook, concert tours, radio shows, the author's own business Yoyodyne, VisionSpring selling glasses in India, clean water jugs in 3rd world countries, etc.) and commentary on why some succeed, and some don't. The case studies were the best part! Even if they were short and somewhat simplified, they showed a careful thought process that focused on key bottlenecks for how something spread, and how the marketers overcame resistance, like the water purifiers did going to schools and having children bring samples from home to study under a microscope. I found some truly novel techniques here that are worth trying.The biggest issue I had with the book was not the storytelling or the applicability, because the more specific it got, the more actionable the advice became. The problem is when Seth stepped back from the specific and started pontificating about general strategies, like measuring the cost of a click in direct marketing, the value of attention and permission, long tail theory, raising price to support a better shopping experience ("fair wages", "plenty of well-paid and helpful staff, a new sign in the window, and a local baseball team with new jerseys with your logo"), branding, affiliation, mission statements, and questions like "who are you helping?"Sure, this sounds good: "To engage with people in a way that benefits both sides. To be respected, seen, and appreciated. To make enough of a profit to do it again... a better business plan takes that universal need and makes it specific--describing who and what it's for." (144)"The method isn't to go out and find an agent. The method is to do work so impossibly magical that agents and producers come looking for you." (239)"Give them a why. And that usually involves changing what you offer. Make things better by making better things--things that have a network effect, a ratchet, a reason for sharing." (219)"The hard work of creating the change you seek begins with designing evangelism into the very fabric of what you're creating. People aren't going to spread the word because it's important to you. They'll only do it because it's important to them." (198)"The best work will create an imbalance in the viewer, one that can only be remedied by spreading the word, by experiencing this with someone else. The tension this imbalance creates forces the word to spread. It means that asking, 'Have you seen...?' raises the status of the asker, and the champions multiply." (240)Excellent! So we create some aspect of the product or service that tempts a telling or sharing, either to make the experience even better with friends/family, or a social badge for thrill-seeking, surprised neophiliacs.While these broad statements all ring true and provide levers for marketing, they fail to address the cold start problem i.e. reaching that first neophiliac, then a second, then a third...., repeatably.The problem is all neophiliacs don't just auto-share. Sometimes they try something and like it enough to keep using it, ... themselves. Or they tell one person, and they use it amongst themselves. Or they pretend to like it to your face but stop using it over time in private. The theory often breaks down if the spread isn't viral enough, or the initial resistance too strong, or you approach the wrong beta user. Oftentimes, a mission statement and willing user aren't enough. The book would have benefited from more focus and guerilla tactics to combat this resistance, maybe even more case studies like the water example, shining a light on how some clever marketer overcame the resistance.Steady state is fine. Most of the theories in the book work if you're in steady state, and you have some finite mass of momentum or evangelism or data that you can prime the pump. It's much hazier in the creation stage, when we're designing those features that will encourage sharing. There aren't enough examples of this early-stage cold-start icebreaking in the book, unless discussing network effects like Facebook or restaurant reviews. Those examples are easy to understand in retrospect. We need more detail -- individual customer-level detail or scrappy marketing tactics when those first Facebook users showed resistance or hesitance -- to help overcome those cases where simply championing some "change" isn't enough.We need more specific examples of action across different categories, especially ones that are less obvious sells from a cold start state: games, childhood toys, collectibles, stuffed animals, indie films, productivity apps, school supplies, even fiction books.