Seth Godin is prolific. He’s written quite a few books in his 58 years.
He initially came onto my radar in 2002, after the book Purple Cow was released. I saw it as a modern day version of Reality in Advertising, the classic by Rosser Reeves. Reeves, who helped Dwight D. Eisenhower with his presidential campaign, astutely pointed out that products and services, in order to be embraced by the general public, needed to have a Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. If people understood what was different about it, and they agreed it was important to them, they would buy it. People that don’t really understand marketing might say a product has to have some kind of “secret sauce.” They’re only partially right.
Reeves, a copywriter, was a regular guy who would try out the household products that he would write about. He felt it was his obligation to determine what set it apart from all the other “me, too” products out there.
Al Ries and Jack Trout called the concept Positioning. They wrote a book with that title. Their thought was the product had to stand out “in the mind of the consumer.” Godin, you might say, repackaged the concept, calling his rendition, or book Purple Cow.
The notion of the book Purple Cow is that if you were driving down the road and saw a herd of cows grazing in the grass – and one of them was purple – most likely you would pull over to the side of the road. Or stop and get out, depending on how safe the road was, or whether you would be trespassing or not. In fact, you might even jam on the brakes and insist on a closer look at this unusual animal.
The Milkman
The book Purple Cow sold over 150,000 copies in over 23 print runs in its first two years.
Other books by Godin include:
This is Marketing (his latest, which went to #1 on the WSJ list only months after it came out)
Linchpin (named by Business Week among its “20 of the best books by the most influential thinkers in business in 2015”)
Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers (published by Simon & Schuster)
All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low Trust World (updated to All Marketers Tell Stories: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works – And Why Authenticity is the Best Marketing of All)
The Dip (a New York Times and Business Week bestseller)
Free Prize Inside (a Forbes Business Book of the Year in 2004)
And many others (18 total, which have been translated into 35 languages)
In addition, his blog was named by Time among its 25 best blogs of 2009.
Recent Accolades
This past year he was inducted, along with Lee Clow and Esther Lee, into the American Marketing Association’s Marketing Hall of Fame. He’s also in the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame and may be the only person in both. Therefore, there’s no denying that the book Purple Cow, was his breakthrough.
Personal Life
He graduated from Stanford in 1984 and also went to Tufts. He was a former dot com executive and worked for Spinnaker. He and his wife, Helene, live in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY with their two sons.
Godin’s appearance is also unique. He obviously practices what he preaches by setting himself apart from the competition. I don’t think he would be successful in Japan, where the philosophy is “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”
Godin is a phenomenal storyteller and a good writer. Most importantly, though, he is a savvy marketer. Therefore, his books sell briskly. He knows how to get his material to the top in record time.
He founded Seth Godin Productions with $20,000 in 1986. It was primarily a book packaging business. He’s a big believer in “shipping.” In other words, don’t spend time trying to make something perfect – send it out!
He sold Seth Godin Productions and focused on permission marketing. In March, 2006, he founded the company that he called Squidoo. He also launched Yoyodyne, which was later acquired by Yahoo.
Getting Buy-In
In 2010, he got rid of his longtime publisher Portfolio in favor of selling his books directly to his readers. A few years later, he returned to Portfolio with a Kickstarter campaign and three new books, The Icarus Deception, V is for Vulnerable and We Are All Weird.
He tested online the viability of his books before they actually hit the shelves. He felt this approach minimized risk.
At that time, he was quoted as saying, “The pressure on the bookstore and the publisher is to pick stuff that will work… I’m saying, ‘Hey, Mr. Bookstore Owner, the world has spoken. There are lots of people talking about these books.’”
The reality is it’s hard to convince traditional publishers to take on some authors unless you can prove you have a solid fan base. “The future of publishing,” he is known to have said, “is about having connections to readers and the knowledge of what those readers want.”
He sought pledges on Kickstarter with this approach:
For $4 or more, pledgers got a digital preview edition of The Icarus Deception.
For $49 or more, they got four copies of Icarus, plus access to the preview digital edition.
$111 or more got pledgers eight hardcover copies of Icarus, two signed copies of V is for Vulnerable, a limited edition essay collection and a digital preview.
And, for $1150 or more, Godin would interview each participant and write a brief account of an artistic accomplishment that would be included in Icarus. Pledgers also got eight hardcover copies of Icarus, two signed copies of V is for Vulnerable, an essay collection and the digital preview.
If I were pledging, I would’ve held out for a partridge in a pear tree as well.
About the Author
Frank Felsburg is a writer, publisher and marketer in Western North Carolina. However, he lived outside of Philadelphia for six decades.
