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Your career and your communication are predicated on the purpose you define for yourself and the promises you make to your colleagues and company.
My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
Today I'm looking forward to speaking with Seth Godin.
Seth is a bestselling author, entrepreneur, and marketing expert.
His books include Purple Cow, Lynch Pen, and This is Marketing.
His 21st book is This is Strategy, Creating the Conditions for Change.
It is out now. Seth's blog is one of the most popular in the world, and his work has shaped the way we think about communication, branding, and creative work.
Well Seth, welcome.
I am really excited for our conversation today.
Happy to be here. I'd like to start with the basics.
How do you define branding and marketing, and why is it so important for companies and individuals to focus on their own branding and marketing?
Branding is not logoing, and when you hear people talking about the fact that they work on their brand, they probably are confused.
All a brand is, is a promise, an expectation.
So the way to understand this is if Nike announced they were going to open a hotel, I think we would understand what it would be like.
But if Hyatt said they're going to come out with a line of sneakers, we would have no clue, because Nike has a brand and Hyatt has a logo.
Got it. So it's the expectation that has been built around whatever the company does.
Right. And if you're an individual, you have a brand whether you want one or not.
If your brand is that you're invisible and doesn't really add a lot of value, then that's your brand.
That's what I expect.
If you brighten up a room every time you leave it, that's your brand.
If you're the kind of person who regularly under promises and over delivers, that's your brand.
We get to build a personal brand through deliberate action.
How do we make it so that when people encounter us, a promise is implicit and then we keep that promise.
So in some ways, your brand is your reputation, right?
Yes, but it's intentional.
You're not investing money in ads, but you are investing money in all sorts of interactions.
If you're a summer intern and you organize the lunch every Friday without asking anyone's permission, that becomes part of your brand.
So it's the intentionality behind that.
So what branding and marketing advice would you give to, say, a global podcast focusing on communication and careers that's looking to expand and actually reach more people?
So how many people listened to the podcast the first week you didn't met?
We were very few. By 10?
Yeah, 10 to 20. Most of those were related to me.
Exactly. So how did you get from 20 to hundreds of thousands?
It wasn't because you ran a lot of ads and it wasn't because some person put you on a billboard or on the Super Bowl.
It happened because the people who listened felt like their status would go up or their affiliation with others would go up if they shared the podcast with other people.
That story is inherent in the spread of every idea because people care about status and they care about affiliation.
So podcasts that spread aren't necessarily good in the sense that they're well recorded or well edited.
They spread because people benefit from spreading them.
And so the opportunity you have as you think about your podcast growing, how do you use the permission and trust you've earned to create a change for the people who are listening?
So they spread it. And the gold standard in this, which always surprises people, is Alcoholics Anonymous because it's not anonymous.
The thing is no one knows where their headquarters are.
No one knows if they have an ad budget.
They don't need one.
But the first rule of Alcoholics Anonymous is you always talk about Alcoholics Anonymous.
That principle number nine of making amends means you're going over to people you've interacted with and explaining to them why you're an Alcoholics Anonymous.
It's spread the same way podcasts spread because other people want it to spread it.
Excellent. So you have to focus on the value you provide for others and help them and equip them.
Give them something good to be talking about.
Good is fine. You should make work you're proud of.
But what you're trying to do is help them get to where they are going.
They will not talk about you because it's good for you.
They will talk about you because it's good for them.
So I want to pull on this thread of storytelling a little bit more.
I have heard you say that people don't just buy products, they buy stories.
Can you dive a little deeper into the role of storytelling?
And in your perspective, what makes for an effective story beyond the fact that it helps people find value that they can then propagate?
So let's talk about what a story even is.
If you go to an open house of houses for sale, you smell an apple pie baking, that is a story.
The real estate broker put it in the oven, turned on the oven, because they wanted to remind you of your childhood story.
It has no words, but it's still a story.
If your resume has typos in it, you are telling a story because they don't know anything about you other than this little sheet of paper, but that paper just gave you away.
We see story in class, we see it in sophistication, we see it in the language that people use.
So we get to pick the story we tell from the way we shake hands, to the way we hand in our work, to whether we roll our eyes, to yes, our narrative of, well, my story is I grew up in this country, but I was an army brat and I've been to 42 countries.
That's still a narrative and a story that will resonate with some people and not others.
You're associated with my alma mater, the GSB.
Nobody who teaches at the GSB was teaching when I was there.
And yet, we still call it the GSB, because what it means to be at Stanford is there's a story, an expectation, a brand of what it means to be a Stanford graduate, even though there's not one thing about it that's the same.
I find this really, really fascinating that the way you see storytelling is very broad.
It's beyond a narrative, it's the experience, it's what you do and show is part of your story.
The intentionality is clearly important in all of this.
I'd like for you to share a little bit more about this promise perspective, because it implies, you mentioned empathy, the promise implies an understanding of the person or people you're promising to.
Bingo. So in the book, this is strategy, I talk about the smallest viable audience.
We are tempted to want to please everyone and social media has made it worse.
We don't want anyone to give us a thumbs down.
We don't want anyone to unfollow us.
We want to be popular in front of everyone.
And if we're in business, we want every single person to want to buy our brand of this and our brand of that.
What's the biggest possible addressable market?
This is nonsense. This never, ever works.
What we want is the smallest viable audience, the smallest group of people, it might be a lot, but the smallest group of people that if they would miss us, if we were gone, it would be enough.
So Howard Schultz should not call me on the phone and try to persuade me to drink coffee.
I don't drink coffee.
I'm not for Starbucks.
Starbucks isn't for me.
That's fine. Because what he needs to do is please the people who match the persona that they're setting out to please.
So what we seek to do is make a promise to a group of people where we can say for people who believe blank and who want blank, that's what I have.
Implied in that answer is clarity of message.
You can't be waffling or ambiguous.
You have to be very clear.
What have you found helps you and helps others you've worked with to be clear in their messaging?
This is a tricky quest, because language is not emotion.
Language is a step that triggers emotion.
And so Google is famous for asking ridiculous questions in job interviews.
How would you move Mount Fuji?
And they took a lot of criticism because it was shown that someone being able to think on their feet and that sort of thing, wasn't going to help you do your actual job.
I think it was a great idea because it was a message and a signal.
It was, if you're uncomfortable with this sort of nonsense, you shouldn't come here.
Because we do a lot of nonsense around here in the service of our craft.
This isn't an actual useful question.
I know how to figure out how many gas stations are in the United States.
That's how I'm asking you.
I'm asking you because I want to work with people who are okay with that.
In the old days, if you went to visit CAA, the talent agency in Los Angeles, where real estate's very expensive, you walked into a room that was huge.
And there's nobody in it.
You have to walk all the way across to get to the receptionist who will buzz you in.
And it's just like visiting the Wizard of Oz, right?
You're trembling, and there's a fire coming out.
That's a story, right?
It's a story. We have so much money and so much status, we can afford to waste an entire floor here.
And you better be nervous when you get to this absolutely beautiful person right at the front.
And that person just sits there and only works two minutes an hour, pressing a button to let folks in.
But if that kind of status is important to you, that's our story.
So you're basically a Hollywood director.
You're trying to figure out how to use lighting and words and sounds and imagery to communicate to people what genre you're in.
And genre is really important here.
If you go to the cookbook section and your book is in it, it looks wrong and weird that it's in the cookbook section.
We know what a cookbook is supposed to look like.
So what section of the bookstore does your career fit in?
That's the question.
And with that clarity of purpose in mind, you can then orchestrate the story.
And yet again, you remind us that a story has visceral components as well.
And they have to all be congruent to reinforce what it is you're trying to get across.
And I would add that in that congruence, you get clarity.
And if you're not congruent, then it becomes confusing.
I want to turn to your latest book because your latest book focuses on strategy, something I spend a lot of my time doing as somebody who teaches strategic communication.
How do you define strategy?
And can you explain what you mean by the four strategy threads?
So strategy is a philosophy.
It is a philosophy of becoming.
It's not a road map or a set of tactics.
It says, you're going to spend time and money over years to make a change in the world.
Can we be clear about who you seek to change and what's the change you seek to make?
Now you need a strategy to get there.
And strategies have four components.
One of them is empathy.
You are not in control.
You are not in charge.
You need to engage with other people.
And they are not going to do what you want because you tell them to.
You need to realize they don't know what you know.
They don't see what you see.
They don't want what you want.
So you have to go to them with a story and an offer that they will voluntarily embrace.
That is really hard for people.
The second one is games.
Not like Monopoly and Scrabble, but games are any situation where there are constraints and players and feedback loops and outcomes.
And the reason it's worth calling it a game, two reasons.
One, we know a lot about game theory.
So if you learn about game theory, you can apply it.
And two, you won't take yourself so seriously.
Because if you make a move and it doesn't work, it doesn't mean you're a bad person.
It doesn't mean you made a move that didn't work.
Next time you'll make a different move.
And there are moves to be made.
If you're applying for a job that has AI screening, it is a very smart move to either make sure your resume is easily scanned and understood by AI, loaded with all the keywords, or decide that's a game you can't win and refuse to play that game and either apply somewhere else or figure out how to get
around it with a referral.
But arguing about it doesn't help you.
And the other two are time, which is, I remember getting my first job at a business school.
I would not approach it the same way today, because I have 40 years of experience.
Over time, your career starts to become an asset or an impediment to the next thing you want to do.
What seeds are you planting to get there?
And the last one, the biggest one is systems.
They're all around us.
They tend to be invisible.
You are a cog in the educational industrial complex.
The educational industrial complex is 400 years old, and it is deeply buried in so many elements, not just the window stickers on a car, but everywhere we look.
So when we see a system, we should be aware of what that system creates, the nodes in that system, what the people who are nodes in that system want, and have empathy for them.
You've got to acknowledge that the system exists and learn to dance with it.
It seems to me that there's a level of meta -awareness that you're talking about in strategy that many of us don't think about.
This notion of observing the systems, the time variables, seeing using the analogy of a game versus something else, and then being other focused.
So the skills required to be strategic, by your definition, are quite different than I think many people get trained in when it comes to developing strategy.
Where do you advise people to start?
What's the process that you encourage them to take to craft their strategy?
I don't see very many strategies that are made by committee.
I see mission statements and logos that are made by committee, but strategies usually begin with one person articulating a set of assertions and describing a plan.
So Lewis and Clark had a strategy for how they were going to work the maps of the Midwest.
And Steve Jobs didn't really have the words for the strategy, but he stuck with his strategy for a long time.
So you don't have to be the CEO or the founder, but you do have to be able to articulate.
So the example I like to give, I was at Yahoo in 1999.
I was not in the room when this decision was made and I'm glad.
Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for $10 million, not billion, million.
And they declined and put the money into Yahoo Kids instead.
Because their unstated strategy was, the internet is nascent and filled with speed bumps.
We're going to build a place where people come and don't leave.
That we want to turn one click into 10 into a hundred.
We're going to have Yahoo finance, Yahoo weather, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo this, Yahoo that, and put ads on every one of them.
And Google had the strategy of the open web is maturing.
We're going to build a site where people come and then they leave.
We're going to measure how many seconds it takes between the time they come and they go somewhere else.
And so to Yahoo's credit, they get just a little credit.
They were aware that it was a different strategy to their detriment.
They didn't see that the world had changed and they didn't change their strategy.
And that's why no one goes to Yahoo anymore.
So what we get to do as strategists is get smart about understanding how to make these assertions and describing the four threads so that other people can come along with us.
I appreciate the commercial and advertisement that you have done for the type of work that I do because embedded in everything you've said about strategy is assertion and assertion is communication.
We have to be able to define the strategy, but we also have to be able to communicate and assert for that strategy.
Well, Seth, before we end, I'd like to ask you three questions.
This is my way. One I create just for you and another two are similar for everybody I've interviewed.
Are you up for that?
Bring it on. It's my understanding that you studied philosophy and you also got an MBA.
Very curious about that.
How do you apply what you learned in your study of philosophy into the work you do now?
I heard you talk about the philosophy of becoming as a strategy.
How does philosophy and the study of it play out in what you do?
Philosophy is the science of thinking about thinking.
That means you're asking questions.
You're trying to look at the structure of things.
When I was an undergrad, Steve Dennis and I built the largest student -run business in the country.
He ended up going to Harvard.
I went to Stanford and I got there.
I was the second youngest person in the class with Chip Conley.
I was wildly intimidated by the stories that were being told about the fact that I hadn't worked in a consulting firm for two years or wasted two years at a commercial bank and I was never going to be able to do it.
I needed to tell a story about my relationship with the professors.
I knew that if I got called on to do the spreadsheet stuff, I was just going to fail.
I just marketed myself to the professors.
If you want to get someone to contribute, when it's time to talk about the personalities and the stories and how it all fits together, call on me.
But when you get to the spreadsheet and want to embarrass me, I'm not even in the room.
And they found that useful because I had empathy for their problem.
And so that's how I combined understanding business with philosophy and computers.
There's a lesson in that.
Know your strengths.
Be willing to communicate those strengths and help other people solve problems and you can benefit.
Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?
I'm going to pick Murray, my puppy.
I think that Murray, without a narrative, is extraordinarily good at subtly communicating his fear or his urgencies or his desires.
And when we think about how much of a mess we've made hiding what we really think, he gets what he wants a lot.
Where he gets into trouble is when he doesn't get what he wants, he doesn't know what to do.
And I think that people could think a little bit harder about how they will be seen.
Murray has the advantage of being one of the cutest dogs in the world.
You and I might not have that advantage, but there are other things we could create that make it so that people see charisma.
And in my experience, the only thing that people who have charisma have in common is other people are interested in them because they're interested.
And charisma is a choice and charisma is a skill and we can get it if we practice.
A good communicator is a communicator that demonstrates charisma.
And in your answer, it doesn't even have to be a human.
Final question, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
Who's it for? What's it for?
What's the change we seek to make?
Who is it for? Pick the smallest viable audience.
What's it for? What exactly are we offering?
If we're not trying to have anything happen, don't bother.
And the third is very specifically, if this works the way we want, what has changed?
Who's it for? What's it for?
And what has changed?
I think if all of us were to reflect on those three questions, it could really help us focus our communication in general, but certainly what we are marketing and how we are defining our brand.
Seth, this has been a fantastic conversation.
I've taken copious notes.
I appreciate the support for the work that I do in terms of the way you think about strategy and communication.
The notion of us being intentional, making promises, searching for the smallest viable audience.
This is all great advice for helping us to connect with others and to communicate well.
Thank you, sir. Thank you.
Keep making a ruckus.
We need your help. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
To learn more about personal branding, listen to episode 118 with Thori Clark, and to learn more about reputation, listen to episode 64 with Allison Kluger.
This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Michael Riley, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder with thanks to the podium podcast company.
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