This Is Marketing

You Can't Be Seen Until You Learn to See

By: Seth Godin

Narrated by: Seth Godin

Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Number-one Wall Street Journal best-seller.

Instant New York Times best-seller.

A game-changing approach to marketing, sales, and advertising. 

Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and best-selling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas and phrases that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.  

Now, for the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, and timeless package. This Is Marketing shows you how to do work you're proud of, whether you're a tech start-up founder, a small-business owner, or part of a large corporation. 

Great marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. Their tactics rely on empathy, connection, and emotional labor instead of attention-stealing ads and spammy email funnels. 

No matter what your product or service, this audiobook will teach you how to reframe how it's presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with the people who want it. Seth employs his signature blend of insight, observation, and memorable examples to teach you:

• How to build trust and permission with your target market.
• The art of positioning - deciding not only who it's for, but who it's not for.
• Why the best way to achieve your marketing goals is to help others become who they want to be.
• Why the old approaches to advertising and branding no longer work.
• The surprising role of tension in any decision to buy (or not).
• How marketing is at its core about the stories we tell ourselves about our social status.

You can do work that matters for people who care. This audiobook shows you the way.

©2018 Seth Godin (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"This Is Marketing is a very accessible way into Godin's thinking.... Godin writes in pacy, jargon-free prose and this book is interesting and useful for anyone who wants an insight into how, and why, we buy things or change our habits in any way." (The Financial Times)

Series of Anecdotes Without Any Actionable Insight

I disliked this book so much that I stopped working to write this review. In a nutshell:

- This book is a series of disconnected anecdotes that Seth tries to pull together under umbrella themes that he deems correct, like "tension". Example: Tension makes people want to buy your product because they don't want to miss out. Look at Slack. Slack is successful because of tension.
- These anecdotes don't provide any new insight into the successes of those companies. It feels like Seth just checked the news for a year, wrote down a bunch of company names that were successful and slammed them into a book. Example (exaggerated for emphasis): Look at Facebook. Facebook connnects people. They're a billion dollar company. Look at Stack Exchange. They're a multi-million dollar company. Look at how successful they are.
- Seth's vocalization is slow, monotone, and has repetitive cadence. Each paragraph follows the same tonal shifts, and the tonal shifts are all with the effect of, "This is the most important thing ever." This is really, really hard to listen to, so much so that I sped him up 2x and still couldn't get through this.

I very, very much preferred The One Page Marketing Plan. It had good case study examples, and then provided actionable insights for your own business or marketing efforts. If I wanted to read a bunch of anecdotes about successful companies, I would have just read the news.

A Marketing Primer

This book serves two purposes. If you are looking for one book about marketing to read that will help you figure out what to do, this is the one. It will introduce you to the concepts and ideas that you can easily explore in other books.

The second purpose is to provide a picture of marketing as it works right at this moment. Gone are the days of advertising and interrupting consumers to push your product. This book explores how modern marketing start with the concept for the business and extends all the way through to how customers talk to you after they've interacted with you.

Highly recommended.

Not helpful at all

I have a business degree in Marketing and more than 25 years of extensive real-world marketing experience, and I was hoping this book would reveal new marketing insights for today's day and age. Instead the book is a disjointed and shallow discourse based on very basic and general ideas, and provided no actionable insight into effective marketing tactics and techniques. It was actually painful to listen to, and I was sorely disappointed that I purchased the book.

Buy the print version

The information in the book is pretty decent. It gives a good overview for anyone who is not terribly familiar with marketing and wants a general understanding of what goes on in that department.

I highly recommend that you buy the print version of this book. The author narrates his own book and in some cases, that is a good idea. Here though? It isn't. I could barely make it through listening to him talk soooooooooooo slooooooooooooooowly and in a near monotone. If you have trouble sleeping, put this book on at night and you'll be out in no time. If you are one of those people who likes to listen to audio books on your drive to and from work, DON'T DO IT! You'll be a danger on the road because you are likely to fall asleep behind the wheel.

I like Seth, but there's nothing new

I think I have read all or at least most of what Seth has written. He is a good guy with good ideas that resonate with me. I picked up his latest book to hear some more but was disappointed.

I'm not sure if I've heard it all before, or if he's said it all before, but I don't think I got any more out of this book, then from anything else he has written.

Terrible Narrator

This was lighthearted anecdotes all tied together giving off the impression of a completed message. Also he read so slow!!! I was at 2X speed just to make it bearable. I would recommend just going with the print version of this one.

This is not "only" Marketing.

Author is not only talk about "the way" of marketing in 2018. He also talks about moral, ethics, motivation. It is like going to church of new perspective in life. If you are looking for "How to" book, this is not one of them. But if you are looking to explore new approch in business development, this is it.

Absolutely essential reading

I’ve been following Seth for 20 years. And this book is not a repeat of old info or a repackaging of material. It’s probably his most profound work. And it’s absolutely essential reading for anyone wanting to do anything meaningful in life. It’s the most important book I’ve read on “the way” to do business, rather than just another book on how to do business. Every entrepreneur should study (not just read) this book.

Very basic and plain

A long book that basically is a list of different companies and projects.
“The project XX was a success. The project YY was a failure. Work better, you will succeed. Or not. Or you might be lucky and get successful overnight, but most probably you won’t”.
Played on repeat, with same very slow, no emotions reading.
Don’t recommend, waste of time.

Market yourself better by getting a different reader

Seth!! you might have written some good books in the past but please hire somebody to read. Your voice is so monotonous and slow that I had a hard time paying attention to the information, which was also a little boring and slow.