Marketing Lessons from the US Election

Busker, London, England
Alone | London, England | Jun 2007

Busker and crowd, London, England
Permanent or Temporary? | London, England | Jun 2007

Seth Godin: Marketing lessons from the US election

Marketers are simple people… they make what sells. Our culture has purchased (and voted) itself into the place we are today.

The lessons:

Stories really matter.

TV is over.

Permission matters.

Marketing is tribal.

Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted.

Attack ads don’t always work.

We get what we deserve.

—

My only election-related post. Today should be interesting if nothing else.

Posted November 4th, 2008 in Perspective. Tags: election, marketing.

Hello, I'm Taylor Davidson.

I'm an early-stage VC and a photographer. If you liked this post, please subscribe to this blog. For more like this, check out the archives, and follow me on Twitter @tdavidson.

http://ryanagraves.com/ ryangraves

Taylor – I love your lessons here. I think the one that is spot on is “motivating the committed”. It's very encouraging from a leadership stand point. I love the fact that if you can just get people motivated around something they already believe in it will be so much more valuable than wasting time on the people who just don't get it.

This point also shines the light on the thought that existing customers are more valuable than new ones.

Good work, great point. Talk to ya soon.
http://www.unstructuredventures.com/uv Taylor Davidson

I wish the lessons were mine: but it's all Seth Godin…
http://ryanagraves.com/ ryangraves

Purple Cow is the only one of his that I've read. Can you recommend the next
best 2?
http://www.unstructuredventures.com/uv Taylor Davidson

Honestly, I haven't read his books, just his blog. It's a great place to start, and from there you can get an idea of the various books and the evolutions of thoughts and focus over time. Seth gets some backlash because people think his ideas and points are obvious, not grounded in comprehensive research or overly based on anecdotal tales, but that's the power, in my opinion. Things are only obvious once you've seen them.

He never claims to be god, anyway :)
http://ryanagraves.com/ ryangraves

Will do. Thats one of the things that pissed me off in mgmt or marketing
classes, everything is so damn obvious. But, it took the class for me to
realize that it was obvious.

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