All Marketers are Liars: Seth Godin – 2/5

Image via Wikipedia

Having joined a core marketing role post my MBA, I thought I should read some ‘real’ marketing books to understand how marketing works in the ‘real’ world. Get over Kotler, I thought – and lets get down to how marketing ‘happens’ on the ground. It is hard to browse the internet on marketing content and not get recommendations or linkbacks to Seth Godin’s blog, videos or his popular Ted Talk on ”    ”.

On a recent visit to a Crossword (and I have started frequenting bookstores more often since my own book started hitting the stores!), I came across a series of books by Seth Godin – Tribes, Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars. The title of the 3rd book seemed interesting, obviously since this is something that my non-marketing-specialization friends would keep mocking me about at B-school. Anyway, so I picked it up – hoping that reading the book will be an “experience” from the master-marketer that Seth Godin is often said to be.

Like all good movies(and India-Pakistan cricket matches!) that a fan ardently waits for, the book disappointed me through and through. There are 3 problems with the book:

1. The book is unstructured
2. The book just tends to paraphrase already well-known marketing concepts and ‘rename’ them into more layman terms which a casual reader would find funny
3. Too much of content on the book is redundant – Godin keeps saying them same thing again and again and again (… and again… and again!) in ways that begins to amuse the reader into saying – “Ok FINE – I get it .. Relax!”

And trust me – that’s not the feeling one would like to get – certainly not one that a marketer would like to get.. (Marketers anyway tend to think they are a smart lot!)

-

So whether marketers lie or not (according to Seth Godin) is not something I will delve into in this post (No spoilers!) – but what I can tell you is that the funny side of Godin certainly beleives in Proof by Assertation (“A lie told often enough becomes the truth”).

-

Amen.