Seth Godin: Marketers Market, and Who Needs a Job?
I’m not sure I have the nerve to disagree with Seth Godin, but…
Nathan asks Seth how to get a marketing job with no marketing background. Seth says, in essence, forget the job, just market.
Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc.
Is this brilliant advice? Or only advice for the brilliant? In other words, has Seth forgotten that not everybody is Seth?
There are many kinds of marketers, but the ones who succeed at all fall into two classes. There are the capable marketers, and there are the brilliant marketers. The latter are precisely the ones Seth is speaking to. These are the entrepreneurial ones, who have no need for the comfort of a big company, who just market because they love it, and who take to it like fish to water.
They are also the ones who tend toward Seth’s brand of brilliance, who figure out the world around them by native ability, not by having it explained to them. They do, as Seth implies everybody can, learn far faster by unaided experience than by classes or apprenticeships. They will, as Seth promises, have folks beating down doors to hire them.
There is a vast need, though, for capable marketers. They aren’t out in the long skinny tail of the bell curve. They learn by being taught. They they aren’t necessarily consumed by the hankering to market. They need a job while they learn to market, and so they find marketing jobs, as Nathan was hoping to do.
And they have one advantage even over Seth: they can empathize with the non-brilliant, who make up the vast bulk of most markets.
Notice that Seth prefaces the advice to start an eBay store with “Even if you’re 12 years old.” Better to have said, “If you’re lucky enough to be 12 years old.” Because a twelve-year-old is far better placed to follow Seth’s advice than a twenty-something or beyond. At twelve years old, you don’t have school loans to pay, a spouse to please, kids underfoot or on the way. Some folks need a job, and if they want to market, it should be a marketing job.
So, aren’t I disagreeing with Seth?
Not really. Because for someone who has the potential to be one of the brilliant marketers, Seth’s path is the quicker way to demonstrate it. And of course, if you’re passionate and single-minded, you should get a marketing job and start your own business.
March 12th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Max,
Thanks for reading. But is that really the best someone can do? To be capable? To do average marketing of average products? To push paper? Fill out forms? Show up on time, most of the time?
I don’t buy it. The best marketers I know have only one thing in common–they market. They aren’t great writers or super risk-takers or particularly insightful about politics. They just figured out how to market. And they did it through hard work and a lot of failure. Most organizations forbid failure, so they breed lousy marketers.
Again, thanks for the riff. Seth
March 12th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Seth,
Point 1:
Thanks for stopping by. I’m honored. No, really. Because you’re a star.
No kidding, Seth, I want you to hear this.
You. are. a. star!
The foregoing sentences are not off-point at all. One of the reasons I enjoy reading and listening to you is that you are so unselfconsciously brilliant.
But there’s a downside to this. To wit, maybe you don’t understand how freakishly, preternaturally smart and clever you are.
In the three classes I went through MIT Sloan with, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a single marketer there as clever as you. Yet large numbers of them are doing fine work, capable work, mostly for organizations, not as individual entrepreneurs. And most of them would, correctly, deny being paper-pushers, form-fillers, show-uppers. They are not average. They are good marketers helping good products succeed.
Life’s choices do not consist only of supremacy and mediocrity. The distance between good and best is greater than that between mediocre and good, and yet good is good.
So much for that point.
Point 2:
After posting, I came to think that I’d taken a pretty superficial view of your post. Here’s what I missed.
Organizations need marketers. But the best companies have long since learned that marketers who live in an isolated marketing department are of limited value (even if they are brilliant).
Why?
Because marketing needs to be built into the product, and the product needs to be built into marketing. In other words, marketers need to help design the product they market, giving it features which themselves market. And they need to run, not a brilliant marketing campaign, but a campaign that’s brilliant for just that product.
(Clearly I’m not just addressing Seth now. That would be preaching not to the choir but to Karl Barth. I learned much of what I’m saying from Seth Godin.)
My point is simply that there’s a place for organizations in the lives of even the greatest marketers. Because in the best organizations, the brilliance of marketers is what will make great products.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
[...] had a bit of a controversy with Seth on this blog once before. Twice, actually; here’s the second [...]