“The word marketing should mean ‘What do we call it when we make something people want?’ ” he says. Related: The Best Marketing Material Is Something Your Audience Would Miss If They Stopped Receiving It How will marketing continue to change in 2019? The alternative is to be the kind of organization that markets with people instead of at them. When you act in a way that helps the person achieve their dreams and goals and desires, then you don’t have to bully your way in and elbow your way in. But when someone we can trust shows up, people go, “Oh, that person’s different. Entrepreneurs have a lot of tools available to them. Online technologies you have to pay for, like programmatic advertising, snooping on people’s privacy, boosting things, are interactions that were invented to make social media money, not to help people who are making products that would be found anyway. And if it is special, they’ll tell their friends. But if you’re going to make it human, it means you’re going to put yourself out there and say, “I made this,” and someone is going to see it and say, “I don’t want it.” And it’s easy to hear that and say, “You don’t want me. The right answer is “Oh, I didn’t make this for you.
This story appears in the December 2018 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
If anyone knows marketing’s future, it’s Seth Godin. The longtime guru of the subject and author of 19 books — his new one is called This Is Marketing, and he has a new notebook in partnership with MOO — preaches a kind of invisible marketing. “The word marketing should mean ‘What do we call it when we make something people want?’ ” he says. That’ll become increasingly important as 2019 brings more digital noise. His challenge: Be relevant, not loud.
Related: The Best Marketing Material Is Something Your Audience Would Miss If They Stopped Receiving It
How will marketing continue to change in 2019?
Attention and trust are the two most valuable elements of our economy going forward, and big companies have a long history of just burning it, wasting it. The alternative is to be the kind of organization that markets with people instead of at them.
What do you mean?
The mindset of pop-unders, pop-overs, spam, interruption, demographics, targeting — these are all hunting tactics. Like, We have something we want to sell, and gosh darn it, we’re going to find someone to sell it to.
That stuff always makes me feel like the marketer is aware that they’re unwanted….
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