Seth Godin on Becoming a Generous Marketer and Building Trust Again, Again & Again

Seth Godin on Becoming a Generous Marketer and Building Trust Again, Again & Again

We’re all brands now, or at least that’s what it seems like if we want to get our intentions recognized by those around us. Where now in a time where either we take control over how we are perceived in the world or it just happens to us. Or possibly worse, it doesn’t happen at all and we’re just not noticed. No promotion, no raise, and no audience to achieve the goals we’ve imagined for ourselves.

While it may be hard to monetize fame, it’s impossible to monetize obscurity.

Yet, I’m finding that we’re all challenged with the same task, getting down to the business of spreading the word about our brands to achieve some desired goal. It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a personal brand or a business entity, the road to recognition is a necessary part of our collective journey to realization.

If a brand is based on trust, this begs the question, how do we build trust and awareness at scale?

I used to think about branding in the shiny object sense, as a bit of lipstick on a pig. You know, Mad Men stuff where you can sell ice to Eskimos.

Don’t get me wrong, many of those pure “attention getting” branding tactics have real merit, but without the follow though, they just turn into another sucky brand trying to sell stuff that doesn’t make a difference in our lives. We’ve all experienced the “all hype, no substance” brand that makes us want to cringe.

I believe that the big question today is “what does it take to create recognition and trust in a world full of brands just like us?

To dive deeper, I called Seth Godin to chat about what it takes to build a brand today.

If you don’t know Seth Godin, look him up, he’s written 22 books on marketing, many of them best sellers, he coined the term permission marketing decades before it became a buzzword, taught us how to embrace the purple cow of daring to be different, and he’s one of the most direct, honest and endearing people you will ever meet.

Seth has been writing about marketing since the late 90s. Fantastic “how to” marketing books about making an impact in a noisy world. One of the things that I remember early on in my career was reading one of his books called "Permission Marketing." If you read that book today, you’ll find that Seth Godin predicted so much of our current marketing landscape almost 2 decades ago.

The following is the Q&A session that ensued.

Read the post at http://craftofmarketing.com/seth-godin/