[Off-Topic] All Marketers Are Liars
Like everything Seth Godin writes, this 2005 book is fun to read (in my case, to listen to). Old as it is, it still lays out a marketing model that holds up.
There are two ideas here I like. The first is his beef with marketing built on feature lists and bullet-point checklists. The worst kind is the feature comparison: “lower prices,” “surveys show consumers prefer us,” “we have more performance,” “we have more security,” “we have item X that the other guy doesn’t.” Almost always, that’s bad marketing.
The best marketing tells a story. A consumer doesn’t pick a product because it beats the competition on 8 out of 10 line items; he buys a story. In our IT world, that’s exactly why so many people buy Apple. Apple sells a lifestyle, and price, market share and the rest of the small stuff fall into the background.
The Apple world has its Cult of the Mac. Does that make us fanboys? It does. The same way anyone who buys a Mercedes SUV is a fanboy: if the goal is just getting a passenger from point A to point B, a Mercedes does it no better than a Volkswagen. And if the goal is killing your hunger, a good steak at Rubaiyat feeds you no better than a burger at McDonald’s.
None of this works unless there’s a good product first, sold with a good story instead of a laundry list. Why isn’t that obvious? On a checklist, the iPhone is one of the worst smartphones on the market, more so in its first version. A measly 2MP camera, no Bluetooth audio, no FM radio or digital TV, no dual SIM cards, no swappable battery. On paper, a loser.
Even so, it was already threatening to squeeze the market share of the mighty Nokia. The reason is that the product is excellent at what it sets out to do, and the story behind Apple’s and the Mac’s DNA is very strong.
And let nobody read this as “similar” products at different “prices.” You need, as Seth likes to say, a purple cow: a genuinely great product. That’s the prerequisite. Without it, don’t even bother selling; it’s a waste of time.
The book’s other point should also be obvious: never try to beat the competition by improving on the very same features they have. Losing marketing is the kind that copies what the other guy has and shouts “we’re cheaper,” “we’re faster,” “we have this item they don’t.” Your only shot is being different and telling a story the others don’t have.
That brings me to a small case of my own I don’t think I’ve ever told. When 37signals put Getting Real online for free, I was sure it should be the first piece of material for the Brazilian Rails community. Back then there was barely any Ruby or Rails content in Portuguese, and plenty of people figured I should start with reference guides and tutorials, to help beginners get going.
I bet the other way. I wanted to translate Getting Real precisely because it would set the community’s “tone”: its philosophy, values and pragmatism. That was my wishful thinking. On November 13, 2006 I put out the first call-to-arms and, after great collective work from the community, we wrapped up on March 26, 2007. Not everyone read the book, but I believe it helped inspire Brazil’s first Rails entrepreneurs.
A lot of people don’t get why we choose Ruby on Rails. They waste time building comparison lists to prove anything else is better. And on the facts they’re not wrong: Ruby is one of the slowest interpreters around, Rails is missing plenty of features others have, and it doesn’t support half the commercial databases the competition does.
The thing is, a factual list isn’t enough. Rails is good enough, and excellent where it counts. It sells itself through a story: the community’s luminaries, the startups that grew up on it, the Agile and Pragmatic philosophy that came along for the ride.
Good ideas spread fast. All of us who try to spread ideas are, deep down, marketers. And to close, I’ll hand the floor to Seth Godin on why marketing is too important to be left only to the marketing department: