Marketers Are Liars Book Review

¶ … Marketers Are Liars Book Review

All Marketers Tell Stories Book Review and Analysis

The book, All Marketers Tell Stories by Seth Godin is entertaining, educational and very insightful about the nature of marketing according to one of the world's most celebrated gurus of this area of business. He treads a very controversial line about all marketers are liars or tell stories; it is the remarkable and believable ones that are successful. Treading this line of ethicacy and credibility, he takes the majority of the book to provide insights into how entire companies can be re-defined by the stories they tell. His contention is that the difference between a fib and a fraud is one that can be backed up with execution of the company and the ability of the story to resonate and connect with the customer. In essence the book is painting a very controversial and provocative picture of what excellent marketing is: which is the ability to create value propositions and stories that immediately resonate with prospects and customers. The intent of this analysis is to analyze the nature of Seth Godin's key points of analysis and interpret what they mean in the context of 21st century marketing and selling strategies.

People Learn More from Stories than Facts

This is the most prevalent message Mr. Godin so convincingly discusses and proves throughout this book is just how powerful a good story is in revolutionizing and defining the identity of a product, service, company and entire industry. The examples given in the book of excellent stories begin the foundation of strong marketing, compared to those that aren't are used to show through contrast just how effective a story is that resonates and invites a consumer to become part of the story itself (Marketing Week, 2007). One finds themselves reflecting on this core point of the book and its implications to marketers in the 21st century where the experience is being sold as much if not more than the product itself. From the airlines and the unique experiences each offer from the utilitarian and purely price-driven including Southwest Airlines to the high-end and luxurious Singapore Airlines experience, Seth Godin says that each of these airlines must first tell a very convincing, exceptionally strong story so customers' expectations are set. He argues that expectation-setting is not enough however, that prospects and customers must be able to readily identify themselves in these stories and quickly identify their role, their values and most important, their passions within them (Nudo, 2005). This is the impetus of his title that all marketers tell stories (or are liars) as he is stating that for a customer to be able to see themselves in the story, the story itself must resonate with what matters to them.

When one reflects on this message of the book it is clear how masterful the Walt Disney Company is at crafting, creating, designing and telling stories that invite many different demographic and psychographic groups of customers into them. It is no accident that the princess franchise is a $3B business and there is always a role for each person in a family to play, even vicariously. In these stories many of which have a socially redeeming set of values to gain the support of parents in their telling and purchasing, have been the catalyst of the Disney franchise decades. It is remarkable that story telling can launch entire theme parks, but one extrapolates the messages from Seth Godin in this book, it is clear Walt Disney completely understood these dynamics and quickly moved to create a world-class franchise of characters to support them. Seth Godin is in many ways attempting in this book to inspire his readers to pursue the level of story-telling mastery that Walt Disney clearly understood very well and was a master of (Kim, Morris, Swait, 2008). Yet Mr. Godin attempts to be much more provocative and controversial than Disney's pragmatic and very business-like focus to getting his stories created, populated with likeable characters, and translated into franchises launched with movies and rides in the theme parks he built. Mr. Godin would counter based on this book that the millions of ideas Disney had that never made it to the screen or into a ride development program would be those stories that lacked the ability to gain customers completely "owning" them. Seth Godin's unspoken premise is that many of the best stories in the world invite customers to be completely engaged with and participating in them.

Seth Godin makes the point in this continuum between story telling or lying as he calls it provocatively, and fact-based claims that in the end, customers are much more governed by emotion and the persuasive nature of stories first, the logic and structure of them second. The fact that so many companies assume that creating their entire marketing strategies around purely fact-based analysis and a series of quantitative statements will work only to see them fail is often a critical learning point for marketers. Godin explains that in the high tech and engineering-dominated industries the tendency is to build marketing entirely around the most factual, most quantifiable aspects of the products. He also states that the majority of businesses like to talk about themselves in the language they use internally, and this is a huge failure on their part to connect with customers in a real, value-based exchange. He advocates stories being told instead about products that integrate these quantifiable measures of performance, yet do not highlight them as the core part of the story itself. The emotion of the story and the benefits to the customer need to overshadow any of the facts, figures and measures of performance quoted. Seth Godin also says that given a choice, consumers will buy more on emotion and who they feel comfortable with first, and the logic of the measures of performance an quantifiable aspects are secondary. He states that the ability to tell a story that integrates these measurable aspects yet strives to be intuitive will be even more powerful than even the most quantified, logical and highly structured value proposition for a product or services' value. One of the most provocative aspects of this book is the point of not even creating a product unless it can tell a story. Mr. Godin states that an entire company should not really be created unless it can tell a very compelling, differentiated and highly valuable story to attract prospects and turn them into customers (Baek, Kim, Yu, 2010). In example after example, the book shows how the logical and quantitative aspects of a company or business value proposition is not as nearly as powerful as a story that resonates and gains immediate emotional recognition and identification with customers (Erdem, Swait, 2004). Disney in the consumer market has done a remarkable job with the points Seth Godin makes in this book.

Trust and Storytelling

Despite all the excellent insights into storytelling and the many case studies of how powerful they can be in bringing customers into an emotional recognition nd attachment to a brand or product, there is also the issue of trust. Critics of this book contend it plays very loosely with the concept of credibility and trust. The telling of stories, even if they are not true and just seeing to see what resonates with customers or not, is unethical according to Seth Godin's critics. They argue that this type of creative marketing plays too fast and loose with the truth and companies risk losing the trust of their customers and eventually their credibility. After reading this book, their point is well taken, yet it is apparent Mr. Godin did not to endorse an entirely unethical and untrustworthy type of messaging with stories. Rather he is saying that for any business and its products to be successful it must tell a unique, compelling and provocative story that engages prospects to evaluate products and then become customers (Blackshaw, 2008). He is saying that stories are not like facades to be used and then discarded, selectively chosen to position the products or services one way to a customer and another way to someone else. Rather, Seth Godin is saying that a business must define a very compelling, unique and provocative story about how their products deliver value -- and invite prospective customers to be enriched by them. That is the essence of what Seth Godin is talking about in this book.

Contrary to what critics of this book have said, Mr. Godin also addresses the assimilation of the story throughout a business by showing examples of how the entire operations of a company changed over time to support the story. He also shows how companies, who excel at story-telling, like Apple for example, have been able to align their product ideas and strategies to the stories they are saying to customers, from one product generation to the next. This concept of the story becoming the identity of the business is a central one through much of the book. Instead of designing businesses through much analysis and interpretation, Seth Godin describes how the long-term effects of stories can revolutionize the culture of businesses for the better. When an entire business can get galvanized on the core values of their stories, they are capable of becoming much more cohesive, operate much more efficiently and concentrate on the core values of customers (Kim, Morris, Swait, 2008). This is all possible because the story core values and concepts attract only those prospects and customers who have comparable values that align. Mr. Godin alludes to how this strategy is responsible for how fan bases are created and sustain themselves over time, and shows how a brand can become multigenerational as well.

The book also convincingly shows how trust and credibility are the new currency in customer relationships. This is prescient to the exponential growth of social networking and the rise of Facebook, Twitter and the many variations of social media channels marketers rely on today to tell their stories to prospects. Godin says that for a story to resonate with prospects and customers, it must have a very strong level of authenticity, transparency and provide affirmation of shared values through examples. To the extent a story can resonate and be relevant on these levels with customers is the extent to which it will be remembered and acted on. The more credible a story the more it embodies these values, according to Godin.

The trust factor is one that the book has its most paradoxical points on however. While the title practically invites the unethical and unscrupulous nature of marketing to be promoted, in fact the book serves in many parts as a manifesto for completely changing an organization's structure to make it completely consistent with the story being told. This is the greatest dichotomy of the book. On the one hand Godin is saying that the better the story told, the more enticing and alluring to a customer, to more effective marketing is. While this has all the makings of a fraud investigation, Godin is quick to point out that only by translating stories into realities fast within a business can real marketing me made effective. This is a very dangerous strategy in a small business if it is practiced too often. The real message of this is that within the boundaries of trust with customers, there is the opportunity to position products based on their uniqueness and value. In the case of services-business businesses, it is the experience over the basic utilitarian functionality or value of getting on an airplane to go from one point to another (Bigne-Alcaniz, Curras-Perez, Sanchez-Garcia, 2009). Godin touches only the high points of these areas of treading on the boundaries of customers' trust and instead decides to show through example how creative companies can be in constructing stories to entice entirely new audiences and segments.

Godin gets right to the point of defining the value of credibility and trust as a platform building real stories that resonate with passion, yet does not deliver on that potential direction of this book. Instead he keeps this book at the story-telling level and loses out on an opportunity to show the value of authenticity and trust across a company., He makes mention of this but it would have been far more intriguing and interesting to see how Godin perceives entire business models being redefined on this attribute. Instead, he leaves the definition of this platform to the reader, and no doubt there is much confusion about how to translate story strengths into trust and on to purchasing. As part of this framework, which has only been partially defined in the book, Godin could have also defined a more effective approach to managing the upper and lower funnels of a sales strategy for businesses as well.