Product Branding and Marketing according to Seth Godin:
Understand the Action Theory
Create a plan that follows the four steps of Action Theory Marketing.
Emotion Change Alert Share
Your brain is crowded.
● Find a niche and fill it.
● You cannot force yourself into someone’s brainmost people aren’t going to invent a new
slot just because you want them to.
● Your goal is to find a niche, find a slot in a ‘file’ that already exists.
● What does the marketplace look like to someone who cares? — it’s a very different focus
than the person who’s merely hurrying by…
● Price ought to be based on perceived value, not cost.
● Price is only a hint or a quantified signal. You lose when you race to the bottom, mistaking
cheap for a brand promise… The opportunity for the marketer is to use price as a signal that supports the story and the promise that they intend to make.
Placement
● Invest money to be right next to the people you want to be next to, whether it’s shelf space or ‘life space’. Proximity changes the way people see you.
Promotion
● Trial creates an emotion in the consumer, and enables them to spread the story they want to spread. Carefully choose who to offer this generosity to, and get the leverage to spread your idea.
Purple
Make something worth talking about.
Publicity
● You don’t get to decide if your product or service is remarkable, the consumer does.
● Don’t walk around insisting that you’ve made something remarkable, instead watch to see if
people choose to talk about it.
● The magic of pushing a story to get free media is fading. Too many outlets, too much clutter.
Public relations
● PR is not the same as publicity. PR is the act of telling a story.
Placebo
● If you think something will work, it works better. the placebo effect is responsible for half of efficacy of many drugs.
Pavlov
● Ring a bell?
● Create a Pavlovian reaction: We do this, you get that. This often leads to a placebo effect. Train
people to expect something.
Persistence
Frequency + Consistency.
Place
● Showing up over time builds trust.
● The time to change your marketing is not when your people are bored with it, but it’s when
your accountant tells you to change your marketing.
● A persistent, frequent approach to the market makes us believe you and trust you. You lose
all of that when you cross the line to annoying.
● What is it like to be with you?
● Real estate creates value on top of the service offered.
● When you think about how you’re going to engage with people, what do you want to remind
them of?
Personalization
● Now that you know about your customers, you can treat them differently.
People Like Us
● Do people like us do something like that?
Choose seven (or even just three) of the fourteen “P”s and decide how they will be the backbone of your marketing plan.
These elements are the ones that make you special, that are your ticket to success.
What is your brand’s foundation?