Seth Godin Marketing Quotations

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

Permission marketing turns strangers into friends and friends into loyal customers. It's not just about entertainment - it's about education. Permission marketing is curriculum marketing.

The future of marketing is leadership

What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.

You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support, and you market every time you send a memo.

Anticipated, personal, and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.

Marketing used to be what you say Now, marketing is what you do. What you make. How you act. The choices you make when you are sure no one is looking.

The essence of marketing today is to tell a story to people who want to hear it, in a way that resonates with them so they are likely to either respond or connect to you, or tell their friends.

Marketing isn't done by computers, it's done by people. And people who sense opportunity and have the confidence to be remarkable will always defeat defensive actions by people who have given up.

Content marketing is the only marketing left

Go for the edges. Challenge yourself and your team to describe what those edges are, and then test which edge is most likely to deliver the marketing results you seek.

If you can't sell to 1 in 1000, why market to a million?

The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.

By all means, fire the customers who aren't worth the time and the trouble. But understand that the moment you insist the customer is wrong, you've just started the firing process.

Products that are remarkable get talked about.

You can't fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.

One way to sell a consumer something in the future is simply to get his or her permission in advance.

Marketing begins before the product is launched.

Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.

Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you male, but about the stories you tell.

You can win with consistent benefits, delivered over time. You win by incrementally earning share, attention and trust.

The reason it seems that price is all your customers care about is that you haven't given them anything else to care about.

The best marketing strategy is to destroy your industry before your competition does.

Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

Marketing management is now tribal leadership.

Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your return policy.

Market-driven design builds the success of the product's marketing into the product itself.

Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That's not marketing though, that's efficiency.

If you're a marketer who doesn't know how to invent, design, influence, adapt, and ultimately discard products, then you're no longer a marketer. You're deadwood.

If you can't make money from attention, you should do something else for a living.

Bullhorns are overrated: having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value.

Authenticy in marketing is telling a story people want to hear.

Real content marketing isn’t repurposed advertising, it is making something worth talking about.

Content Marketing is all the Marketing that's left.

Marketing tells a story that spreads. Sales overcomes the natural resistance to say yes.

If you're remarkable, then it's likely that some people won't like you. That's part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise - ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out. Playing it safe. Following the rules. They seem like the best ways to avoid failure. Alas, that pattern is awfully dangerous. The current marketing “rules” will ultimately lead to failure. In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is failing. In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.

Mass marketing means appealing to the masses which means appealing to the average.

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.

Marketers want to get their messages in front of you. They must get their messages in front of you, just to survive. The only problem is-do you really want more marketing messages?

Permission marketing is marketing without interruptions.

Connect, create meaning, make a difference, matter, be missed.

Marketing is a contest for people's attention.

If you wait until there is another case study in your industry, you will be too late!

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

By definition, remarkable things get remarked upon

Just as we don't spend a lot of time worrying about how all those poets out there are going to monetize their poetry, the same is true for most bloggers.

Not only are bloggers suckers for the remarkable, so are the people who read blogs.

Good marketers measure.

Good marketers tell a story.

Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.

You have brilliance in you, your contribution is valuable, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do, and you must.