The Art of Honest Feedback

In this Marketing Over Coffee:

Seth Godin, Best Selling Author of 21 books in 36 langugages talks with John Wall about Strategy

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Brought to you by our sponsors:NetSuite and Wix Studio

The new book is This Is Strategy

Field Testing it through videos on Purple.Space (that are now a course on Udemy)

Why feedback is often just lies

The strategies behind the book itself – including the game of life

7:30 Wix Studio is the web platform that gives agencies and enterprises the end-to-end efficiency to design, develop and deliver exactly the way they want to!

Culture was invented by systems to defend themselves

Marketing and empathy

How do games fit into strategy?

Luck does not even out in the long run

15:27 NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE platform, and ONE source of truth.

Doing all the extras

Honoring to work of Donella Meadows and Russ Ackoff by explaining systems

Harvard Admissions

Lewis Hyde on The Coyote

Once you have a strategy think about three business plans

Beats Fit Pro are John’s pick, Shokz Headphones change swimming forever for Seth

Join John, Chris and Katie on threads, or on LinkedIn: Chris, John, and Katie

Sign up for the Marketing Over Coffee Newsletter to get early access!

Our theme song is Mellow G by Fonkmasters.

Transcript

John Wall – 00:31

Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I’m John Wall. Today we have—we’ll just say it straight up—my favorite guest. You’ve been on the show a ton of times. You’ve been with us for years, and it’s been book after book. But we’re here to talk about your latest, This Is Strategy. We’re here with Seth Godin.

Seth Godin – 00:47

Well, since we’re running tape for the record, I needed to tell the tens of thousands of Marketing Over Coffee people there are very few podcast hosts who prepare more than John does, who share their insight more clearly, and are more buttoned-down and easier to work with. So it’s always a delight, always.

John Wall – 01:09

Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, so this new book, This Is Strategy. This really got to me in a bunch of different ways. And here we go. Yes, there’s the copy of it. And a follow up to this is Marketing to It. And now I know you’ve done this as a course. This has been part of the program that you have going in the online community. So is that really what drove the book? You were just like, “Hey, this course is working. We want to do a book for this.”

Seth Godin – 01:33

No, first, thanks for having me. Where did the book come from? I like having a daily writing ritual, and in the old days, I needed to have a book because that’s how I made a living. So I would wake up in the morning saying, “What book am I working on?” I stopped doing that about five years ago—ten years ago. And instead, I only write a book if I have no choice. So there was daily writing without a purpose. And after about 30 days of that, I realized I was writing a book without realizing it, and that led to This Is Strategy, which wasn’t designed to be a sequel to This Is Marketing. It had a different title until it was—until after I finished it.

Seth Godin – 02:17

And then I realized that the single best way for me to edit the book would be to make 45 videos, which are now on Udemy. People can take the course and then watch the people in purple space learn together, because I discovered things they were confused by. And if you ask someone, “What are you confused by?” they will lie to you. But if you watch them, you can learn. And this is a great marketing lesson in general. Like, watch what people do. Don’t ask them. And that led to the first revision of the book. And the original title of the book was The Blueprint, and it was inspired by the Reverend King’s speech that’s included in the book. But I decided that I didn’t want to spend a whole bunch of time explaining why it was called The Blueprint.

Seth Godin – 03:05

And if I just call it This Is Strategy, I could use the brand momentum of This Is Marketing and we’re off to the races.

John Wall – 03:13

And so you mentioned when you were asking people about their lying. Tell us more about that. Like, what are people lying about when you’re trying to dig in?

Seth Godin – 03:20

So professional editors have a skill, not a talent. It’s a skill. They learned it over time. I have a big enough ego to realize I’m very good at this. That if you give me a piece of work, I will develop in the moment empathy for who I think it’s for. So if you say, “I’m opening a pizza place, what do you think of the design?” I will not say, “I am a gluten-free person who doesn’t eat dairy.” That’s not helpful to you. What’s helpful to you is for me to imagine that I am the customer you’re seeking to serve and then to honestly tell you how you could do chiropractic on what you’ve got to make it more effective. And when you hand writing to people, particularly people who care about you, they will not do that.

Seth Godin – 04:07

They will either tell you what they think, which you don’t care about, or they will try to protect you from what they think other people will think, but you don’t care about what you want. The way I learned this lesson is someone told me about a focus group that was done for clock radios and they had eight people around the table and they’re getting feedback from these people. All of them love the new clock radio. “I think this is great. They’re great. But maybe do this.” At the end of the session, they said, “This thing is going to cost 80 dollars. Do you think that’s a fair price?” And everyone was very congratulatory and they said, “Thank you for being here. You have a choice. We’ll give you 20 dollars for your time or you can have one of the radios.”

Seth Godin – 04:48

And no one took a radio.

John Wall – 04:51

Right.

Seth Godin – 04:51

That was the only honest feedback they got the whole time.

John Wall – 04:56

Oh, that brings back PTSD for me. I’ve—I’ve seen more than one fight break. Surveys like that, you know, where you have a focus group and people are watching behind the mirror and the truth comes out and it gets ugly. Okay, so I have to ask you about the structure of this book. This was one thing that got to me, and there’s a number of things about it, but one was that it’s broken down into small digestible bits given in sections, and so much so that it’s not even just linear. Like you don’t just come out at the start and say, “This is strategy. Here’s the five things. Let’s go through the five things.” But then as I—as the lessons started to sink in, I started to realize I was like, “Oh, wait, this is built around the way people have time.”

John Wall – 05:36

You know, they—they don’t have time for a 30-page chapter, they want to read in bites. And you talk about games and how they’re involved with strategy, and you see that there’s a game here. So did you have a strategy for the book? Is that what this is?

Seth Godin – 05:48

There’s—there’s a strategy in a whole bunch of things and tactics to support it. There are no page numbers in the book, and that’s because more than half my sales are digital. So you can’t say to someone, “Look up page 37,” because there is no page 37 in the audiobook. So I wanted to signal to people that they should find an essay, a riff, and talk about it with other people. The galley that you have has in the corner little tiny excerpts from Conway’s Game of Life. Those did not make it into the final book. So we can talk about that if you want, but I’m going to leave that aside because it’s confusing right now. But basically, here’s my question to you: when you were growing up, how did you learn about vegetables?

John Wall – 06:30

They showed up on my plate. I guess that was it.

Seth Godin – 06:33

Yes, but I don’t think your parents said, “These are parsnips, this is parsley, this is aubergine,” and worked their way through the Alphabet of vegetables all in one day.

John Wall – 06:43

Yeah, definitely.

Seth Godin – 06:44

What happened is you had peas one day and then a week later you had carrots, and that’s how we learn. We learn by weaving together little signals, not through a taxonomy like Linnaeus would have created. And there are certain things where understanding the taxonomy is critical that gives you the big picture. But what I found is if I’m explaining systems, I have to start explaining games. But if I have to finish my explanation of systems before I can start talking about games, we’re in a mess. So I just kept layering it and layering it like geology. So that—because what I’m trying to give people is a philosophy, I don’t think people understood what marketing was after they read This Is Marketing. I hope they do, and I’m sure people don’t understand what strategy is.

Seth Godin – 07:31

And I’m hoping that after they read this, their philosophy of becoming sinks in.

John Wall – 07:38

Okay, so there’s a bunch of things, especially with systems, that I want to ask you about too, but before we dig into that, we just have to take a second. We want to thank Wix Studio for their support of Marketing Over Coffee digital marketers. This one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio: work in sync with your team one canvas, reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites, create a client kit for seamless handovers, and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults across all your WIX sites. Time’s up, but the list keeps going. Step into Wix Studio to see more.

John Wall – 08:21

Head on over to wixstudio.com to check it out and we thank them for their support of the show. So over the years, you know, when we’re talking with startups, people are asking for advice and I say to them straight out that I’m giving you some advice about what’s going on in the world of startups, but you have to understand that this is still insanely risky. I’m basically lifting your chance of success from 2% to 3%. And you had a quote in the book that says the utility of a strategy is not measured by how many people used it successfully. It’s measured by what percentage of the folks who used it succeeded. And so is that the same idea? Am I on the right? Do I understand that the right way?

Seth Godin – 09:01

I think you are. I think that we have to begin by realizing how indoctrinated we have all been to be cogs in the industrial system and to fit in that. One of the quotes I like from the book a lot is that culture was invented by systems to defend themselves. And so the culture of you got a kid in high school and you need status and you want to feel like a good parent, so you got to send them to a famous college that’s built into our culture. It defends the 400-year-old institution of higher learning and makes it hard to say no, my kid’s going to do online learning at MIT for free and be done with his four years in a year because culture keeps you doing that, right?

Seth Godin – 09:45

And so what we’re seeking to do here is understand that we have choices and we can build assets and we can make decisions. Good decisions don’t always lead to good outcomes, but they’re the best alternative. So if you are crazy enough to start a business, I can’t promise it’s going to work, but I can help you make better decisions along the way.

John Wall – 10:13

Yeah, and it’s interesting, you dug into the human side of a number of things, with empathy being part of your strategy. And yet another line in there about how you have to have humility because accurately predicting the future is impossible. So talk about how the human side moves into strategy.

Seth Godin – 10:31

Okay, so let’s talk about marketers and empathy. All the marketers with empathy in the world listen to this podcast, and all other marketers have not, because what marketers do is they say, “Just doing my job. I got to get the word out, I got to pay the bills. Who can I interrupt? How can I get someone to adopt the frame of mind that we adopted when we decided to sell this?” Right, that you didn’t walk into the store wanting pickles. I need to get you to want pickles. That’s my job. The problem with that is it asserts a power you do not have. And successful marketers have empathy because they realize the person they seek to serve gets to decide, not them. And it doesn’t matter how hard you worked or how much you want to pay the bills.

Seth Godin – 11:19

You need to make it so that they can want what you have without changing their mind, because getting someone to change their mind is very hard. But if you can say to people, “For people who want this, we have this,” that’s very easy, right? Selling water to thirsty people is very straightforward. So empathy, says, “This person I seek to help, what do they dream of? What do they want? What do they fear? What do they believe? Who do they want to be affiliated with? Where do they want their status to go?” If I can offer them those things, that is marketing. And so strategy has to have built into it empathy for the people you are serving. If it’s simply how do I hustle so I can get more of my share, then that’s not strategy, that’s hustle.

John Wall – 12:10

Okay, and now games, you talk about a lot as a component to strategy. How does that fit into and sit besides systems?

Seth Godin – 12:19

Okay, so we can agree that Monopoly is a bad game and Scrabble is a good game, but I’m not talking about board games. I am talking about game theory, and a game is something that has players and moves and rules and outcomes. It has limits, and you can get better at it. If we call it a game, we get to, A, get involved in strategy, B, not take ourselves so seriously. If you make a move and it doesn’t work, you get to say that move was inferior, not I am inferior. And so when we think about the strategy of how do we, with limited resources, increase the sales of Alka-Seltzer? That’s a game because there are other people who are trying to increase the sales of what they sell.

Seth Godin – 13:12

And Mary Lawrence figured out that changing the slogan to “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” would double the sales because she got people to take two instead of one. And so without using resources she didn’t have, she was able to increase sales of her product with a jingle that made people feel better because the placebo effect was very powerful. I could talk about that all day long. Point I’m making is I see everything as a game. I’ve been a game designer since 1976, and it helps me a lot because I realize authenticity isn’t the point. When you’re playing chess with Garry Kasparov, he’s not actually killing your queen, he is simply making a move and your queen is removed from the board. That is a possibility. We can move our pieces to serve our goals and the goals of the people we’re helping.

John Wall – 14:04

Okay. And as you were talking about games, there were a few things that hit me. One was interesting, talking about luck in games and how a lot of games, early access or first-mover advantage destroys the whole game. There’s all these phrases about how luck evens out over the long run and things like that, but that’s not the case.

Seth Godin – 14:22

Right. So my professor at Tufts was Dan Dennett, and he and I knew each other for his whole life, and we disagreed about some things, but not others. I totally disagree with him arguing that luck evens out in the long run. It does not because systems reinforce early head starts. Right. That we can’t count on more luck to undo somebody else’s early luck. So what we want, if we’re playing games in which systems reward early luck, is to over-invest at the beginning to get a head start. That gives us resources to reinvest in assets, that gives us more of a head start, and so we can continue, right? And that idea that we can do small, inexpensive, low-risk experiments until we get lucky and then pile on to expand our head start, that’s a good strategy.

John Wall – 15:23

Okay. Yeah, I’m going to ask you about the game of life, and we have a couple other things to dig into. Before we do, though, we just want to thank NetSuite by Oracle for their support of Marketing Over Coffee. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts, you’ll get ten answers. Rates will rise or fall. Inflation’s up or down. Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle. The number one Cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There’s one source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. With real-time insights and forecasting, you’re peering into the future with actionable data.

John Wall – 16:06

When you’re closing the books in days, not weeks, you’re spending less time looking backwards and more time on what’s next. We have a number of customers who use NetSuite and it is—it’s that one source of truth. It’s just so much easier to take action on your data when it’s all within one system. You’re not having to worry about integration, synchronization, extract, transform, load. You just go and you get answers. You can move forward. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com Coffee. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com Coffee—that’s netsuite.com/coffee—again, netsuite.com Coffee, and we thank NetSuite for their support of the show.

John Wall – 16:58

I got a copy of the galley of the book and in the bottom corner there’s this weird little graphic. And so I had my note at the start, I was like, “What the heck is this?” And then at the end, you did mention that this is—there was an old computer simulation, the Game of Life, that used to just kind of show pixels on a screen moving around. But then you just mentioned that actually that didn’t make the final cut. So this is kind of a collector’s item. I have a unique thing here.

Seth Godin – 17:20

You do.

John Wall – 17:21

So why put that in? And then why did it have to get taken out?

Seth Godin – 17:24

Okay, so first, for those just joining us, a mathematician—brilliant mathematician—in 1972, wrote a short article that was featured by Martin Gardner and Scientific American called The Game of Life. Try to imagine a grid like a piece of graph paper that’s infinite in size, and there are generations. Each move leads to the next generation. If there’s one dot on the grid, it’s lonely and it dies. If there’s a bunch of dots, a tight grid of five or six dots, they’re overcrowded and they die. But if there’s just a couple dots near each other, they reproduce, and the next generation is those dots plus another dot. And there’s a simple algorithm for where the dot goes.

Seth Godin – 18:07

Turns out with just those rules—just the rules I told you—you can create this spectacularly complex world where sometimes you’ll see something called a flyer, where the generations will just go across the graph paper in one direction. Other times you’ll have oscillators that go back and forth and back and forth for a little while, as many as 52 generations, and then they stop doing it. And the—what I loved about this when I was 12 and still to this day is how it shows us games, time, the empathy of reproduction and understanding what’s going to happen next, and systems. It’s all of it in one. So it’s this fascinating thing, if you Google it, you will find there’s a whole website that shows you all the known reproducers and interesting things you can do and how they grow and don’t grow and populations.

Seth Godin – 18:58

So I thought, I don’t have any page numbers. What if I put a little flip book in the corner so as you flipped it by, you could see the generations flying by? That would be a metaphor for what I’m trying to teach. Big problems demand small solutions. What great marketers actually do is create the conditions for the community to change and grow in the direction that it wants to go over time, right? That Starbucks wasn’t Starbucks when it had two stores in Seattle that didn’t sell coffee, right? That we plant these seeds and they grow. So I—I did all that. And then I realized, just as I did when I had Charles Darwin write the foreword for my book Survival Is Not Enough, that I was being too clever by half, that I would like—I love books like Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Seth Godin – 19:48

I love books that have deep surprises and things within them, but those books are very hard to sell in 2024. And so I have committed to honoring my partners and publisher to say, “How do I make this straightforward and simple?” Because I have something to say. And I’ll leave the elegant, weird stuff for the bonuses like the strategy deck, the collectible chocolate bar, the collectible cards, and all the other stuff. That’s where I get to go a—

John Wall – 20:15

Little crazy and do some extra. Yeah. And so I do have to say we picked up that strategy pack and so I’ve got—I think four or five of them are already claimed, but for listeners, definitely ping me if you’re one of the first and you might get a shot at one of the extra copies of the book that we’ve got to give out.

Seth Godin – 20:31

So the strategy deck is very cool. I love cards. And strategy deck has five million combinations of prompts and questions. So you play four cards and depending on the polarity and direction of the cards, it prompts you with four things like the I Ching, and they may juxtapose or they may not, and that will lead to conversations about strategy.

John Wall – 20:58

How much effort was that? We’ve talked like—Ron Plouffe has been a guest on the show with his story How Pitch Deck, and he had just amazing stories about having to go to Italy to get these things made and all kinds of crazy stuff. Was it simple enough to do or how did that all work?

Seth Godin – 21:14

Well, so I’ve been practicing stuff like this for a very long time, so I’m good at it. The making of the cards—the printing of the card is now much easier. There’s a company in Florida they’re delight to work with. I wish the cards had slightly better cardness to them, but it’s pretty close. I spent as much time on the chocolate bar, the collectible cards, and the strategy deck as I did writing the first draft of the book. It—that part, because I had—it was just me, you know, and I got to say, “Oh, what if I did that?” What I did. And so there’s 50 collectible cards. Each collectible card has a photo on it and a little riff on it and things. And—and they fit together. And then there’s a golden ticket.

Seth Godin – 21:56

And the golden ticket gets you this other thing, and I just—why not?

John Wall – 22:01

The book is available now, so I’m going to have links in the show notes, so you can go ahead and check that out. Go ahead and get yourself a copy. And again, go ahead and ping us because we do have a couple to give away. So, all right, we have to dig into the rest of what’s going on in the world. And I had—I pinged the listeners on the text line just to see what, you know, if they had questions specifically for you. And there was one John Blue asked, you know, you’re always working on books and you’ve got new ideas banging around. What do you do for vacation? What do you do in your time off to get away from all this?

Seth Godin – 22:30

Well, I hope anyone who listens to me talk about this, say, will realize this is my vacation. This is when—when I get to do whatever I want. This, other than paddling my canoe and walking with my dog, this is what I want to do. And you know, I have a new game, we haven’t announced it yet, that’s going to be in the Wordle space. Inventing that game, working my way through—it has been a year of delight and, you know, just imagining what systems are. And you know, I can see it resonating with you where we’re talking about opportunity costs and network effects and things being elliptical and how all these pieces dance with each other.

Seth Godin – 23:15

Like, think about the world we live in, that if we were living in France 250 years ago and were members of, you know, the royal court, we would be covered with sores, our teeth would be broken, our kids would be dying in childbirth. No, instead I get to sit here and write about flows and stability and protocols and roles and resilience and feedback loops and—which kinds of feedback loops. This is delightful. Yeah. Come on vacation with me. It’s fun. And then we can paddle our canoes.

John Wall – 23:44

Yeah. The systems things was interesting. I wanted to ask you about that because it’s obvious to me that The Carbon Almanac, there’s a lot of writing about systems and understandings, but—

Seth Godin – 23:56

Yes.

John Wall – 23:56

So did that focus your understanding here or did you kind of bring all that already to the table?

Seth Godin – 24:01

Now, two people have written—maybe more than two, but a few people—Donella Meadows and Russ Ackoff are little-known scholars of systems, and they both had a very hard time explaining what systems are, but I understood it and I saw it as we worked our way through The Carbon Almanac, and I decided as part of my early writing that led to this book, “I need to explain systems to honor the memory of Donella and Russ and to be able to help people see them, right? To see that gravity is invisible, but it keeps the Earth rotating around the sun. To see the things that you think of as normal and appropriate are cultural systems invented and reinforced by companies. There’s a system of the Wedding Industrial Complex.”

Seth Godin – 24:58

The short definition of it is the right amount of money to spend on your wedding is exactly what your best friend spent, plus a little more. And now you understand where there’s the source of gravity we’re dealing with. It’s not that you need these flowers, it’s that the system has reinforced for you a cultural belief.

John Wall – 25:17

Another point that was profound, that totally struck me like lightning, was that when you are going out to deal with the system, you come in touch with someone, that person actually doesn’t care about the whole system, and they probably don’t even understand the whole system. They just have their little list of three things that they’re worried about today, and that changes what you think you can get from them and how they may or may not be able to help you and where to go.

Seth Godin – 25:42

Yeah. I mean, I gave you a very specific example from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book. Half the people who get into Harvard get in because of sports, and the coaches and the admissions people who are hardworking are busy beating the bushes in. You know, for high school women lacrosse players, there are almost none because they’re going to—they need to mount a team, right? So everyone there thinks they’re doing their job. Why does the system work that way? It’s because a hundred years ago, a xenophobic president of Harvard was really worried that there were too many Jews and that got built into the culture, and now too many people of Asian descent.

Seth Godin – 26:24

And the best way to keep the number of people of Jewish or Asian descent from coming is to reward football players or if you want to keep a certain kind of country club ethos, people who grew up playing golf or fencing, right? So none of the people who are busy keeping the industrial complex at Harvard running care about that or even know about it, but that’s what the system is built upon. They’re just, quote, “doing their job.” And we have all these people, thoughtful, hardworking people in B2B or B2C, where we’re trying to get them to buy something.

Seth Godin – 27:03

And their understanding of what is important, what their budget is, why they should buy it, are all informed by systems that were erected for reasons they have no idea of and that they are not in charge of, because people aren’t in charge of systems, they’re just part of them.

John Wall – 27:18

Yeah, and another thing that you talk about in that is now and then we see things where somebody comes in and says, “Hey, just trash the whole system.” And you straight out say, exchanging the system rarely works. Talk more about that.

Seth Godin – 27:33

Yeah, I had a whole section with the writing of Lenin in it and not John Lennon. And again, I was being too clever, so I took it out. But basically, even the Russian Revolution didn’t work out the way that they expected. When people say, “Capitalism is destroying the planet, we must replace capitalism,” or else, whatever you’ve just given up, you’re not going to replace capitalism. The market system is too ingrained for you to do a wholesale replacement of it. Instead, what we need to do when we see a system that isn’t serving our needs is use community action and small shifts to create the scaffolding that lead to bigger cultural change. So that the system says, “Oh, we’re right all along. The thing we wanted is still what we want, but we’re going to get it a different way,” right?

Seth Godin – 28:27

And so when we do it that way, when people say, “Oh, no, I’m not. I don’t care about the climate. I’m just eating this vegan pizza because it’s delicious.” We’ve fed the system that says we eat food because it’s delicious, not because of X, Y, or Z. So what we need to do is be able to go to what is this system working hard to maintain and could it get that a different way?

John Wall – 28:54

That’s interesting. So it’s always redirecting the system, right? You never tear it down.

Seth Godin – 28:58

It’s always, well, but if you redirect it enough, it seems like a different system.

John Wall – 29:03

So as you go through the book, it’s funny, there’s kind of checkpoints, like once you get up to 208 there’s elegant strategies. And that’s kind of for the people that are just looking for cookie-cutter stuff to try and plug and play. You hit those checkpoints. But there was an interesting one in there because you cover low cost, low price, luxury network effect. I mean, those are pretty standard. But then coyote was in there and I had never heard that. What’s the talk about the coyote strategy?

Seth Godin – 29:29

So Lewis Hyde wrote three breakthrough books, and one of them is about the coyote. The coyote coming from indigenous peoples, a tradition of the trickster. The trickster doesn’t win. The trickster just shows up to make a commotion. The trickster shows up to hold up a mirror to our absurdity. The trickster will escape, and that’s why it’s called that’s why the coyote is the emblem of this. It’s very hard to catch a coyote. The coyote isn’t a productive member of the animal ecosystem. They’re the trickster. They’re the ones that are crawling into the hen house, stealing the chickens, right? And so Andy Warhol was a trickster for a while. Miles Davis was a trickster. Somebody who shows up in a place that feels stuck and then does something that breaks a whole bunch of rules.

Seth Godin – 30:31

So I’m not going to get into politics, but you can imagine who I’m talking about. And the thing is, you can be a trickster and you might even be able to make a living being a trickster. Like the folks at Mischief in Brooklyn, they’re tricksters. They keep coming out with marketing gimmicks where they’re like, “Buy Louis Vuitton handbags, cut them into pieces and do something with them,” right? They’re making fun of the system while also making money from the system. And I have spent time in my career being a trickster now and then where I will show up in an industry and say, “This industry doesn’t need to be like this, it could be like that.” And so I would have sold a lot more books if I hadn’t done the partnership with Amazon.

Seth Godin – 31:11

But the partnership I did with Amazon was a trickster thing, which is to show publishing—the world is changing. “Here’s how you could do it,” right? And I just wanted to highlight for people, it’s a valid strategy, but make sure you know what you’re signing up for, because you cannot be a trickster and also be a mass-market success.

John Wall – 31:29

Okay? And then you dig in. You know, you’ll spend time refining a strategy. But ultimately for a lot of businesses, they have to come up with a business plan. And so you spend some time talking about that and what goes wrong there. What’s the general, you know, what are people always doing wrong with a business plan? If they are creating a strategy this way, how should they go with a plan?

Seth Godin – 31:48

Okay, so the typical business plan is designed to cover your ass and just be an excuse to say as little as possible. That’s not helpful. And instead what I argue is answer some very hard strategic questions about people and money, about where the risk is. I don’t want to see a 30-page spreadsheet that’s going to prove that the population is going to age because you’re not going to have everyone as your customer. How are you going to get 5,000 people as your customer? And the other thing I talk about in a different part of the book is you shouldn’t have one business plan when you’re getting started. You should have three, and they should be as different and oppositional to each other as you possibly can. You should exercise not talking yourself into the one thing you came up with.

Seth Godin – 32:36

But in fact, say this or it could be way over here that, or it could be way over here this, because if you can write three business plans that show dramatically different ways that you could enter a market so good that you are willing to do whichever of the three is randomly picked—now, I know you understand the market, but most of the people who stumble by my office have fallen in love with this one thing—this one thing. And when I point out that the strategy might not work, they get very upset because it’s the only one they got. And you don’t want to have just one. You want to be in that ideation phase where you can talk yourself out of that and talk yourself into this.

John Wall – 33:17

That’s great. Okay, what’s going on with music? I have to ask you about, you know, listening and the audiophile stuff. Is there anything new that you’ve added to the rack or that you’ve been enjoying more than normal?

Seth Godin – 33:29

So I think the last time we talked, I mentioned I had built my own speakers and now I’ve amazingly stopped. Like, I—I can’t do better. I’m not. I haven’t bought any new speakers at my—I have these 3-watt, 2 a 3-amps. It just sounds great. It’s just great. So I love listening to it. Who have I been listening to lately? That has really excited me. You know, I went back in time, I went for a deep dive with some Ricky Lee Jones middle of her career stuff, which was lovely to listen to recently because I’ve been working on the book. I’ve been doing a lot of audiobook stuff instead. So my earballs have been filled with people talking instead of music. But now that the book is done, it’s time to fire it up again.

John Wall – 34:14

Time to get back to music. Yeah, it’s been interesting. I’ve been playing around with, you know, some of the different codecs and it’s just been strange to me how there’s no winners in any of these new things. You know, it’s like, okay, you can listen to the Atmos version of this album and it just sounds different. It’s not that it sounds better.

Seth Godin – 34:30

Yeah, yeah. I think that the people in the high-end audio business are discovering there’s a generational shift going on and that their best customers are done, and that’s going to lead to a real challenge. A whole bunch of people—millions and millions of people are now growing up listening to just via headphones. That’s brand new. And there’s also not as much demand for a living room experience as there was for us because you’re either out and about or you’re looking at your phone and neither of those things require a living room that has great sound in it. So that’s gonna be a fascinating shift. I noticed you’re wearing new headphones. Are you happy with the ones you got on right now?

John Wall – 35:18

I’ve come to that point where it’s like a toolkit, right? I have seven or eight different sets. And so this one is great because, yeah, I want to be wired on my interviews. Like, I don’t want to deal with Bluetooth and have something go south and—yeah, and you’re supporting Wired too. And so, yeah, these are good for recording. I don’t know. It is amazing how, yeah, I’ve broken away from the audiophile thing of like Beats Fit Pro are the—the go-to for me because, like, they’re great for running. The connection for Bluetooth is solid. The sound quality is pretty good and so it kind of—it’s the most convenient. You know, it—it doesn’t sound perfect, but they’re the ones that I keep going back to.

Seth Godin – 35:58

And then two, I have two headphone things before we run out of time. One headphone thing is I don’t know if you’re a swimmer, but if you know a swimmer, because I swim many days, I got Shokz underwater bone conduction. It increased the amount of time I can stay in the pool by 20 minutes.

John Wall – 36:14

No kidding.

Seth Godin – 36:15

But that’s a huge increase because they’re not Bluetooth. You load them up with an adapter. I have an hour and a half of music on there. I know exactly what song is coming next. And so if “Love Light” is coming on with Pigpen, I know I got to stay in the water for another 17 minutes. So he’s done. And it’s just a total game changer. For 100 bucks, I cannot strongly enough recommend trying conduction headphones. If you’re out and about, it’s much safer than having something in your ears. Number two, the new breakthroughs from Apple with their earbuds—I believe we are now entering a time when people are going to wear them all the time. It’s going to start with people who could use a hearing boost and then it’s going to be augmented audio.

Seth Godin – 37:01

So if I’m walking down the street and my phone has something to tell me about where I am, it’ll just whisper to me in my ears. And once we’re wearing headphones all the time now, the phone knows everything we’ve heard and everything we’ve said, and AI is just going to go town with that, in a really interesting—

John Wall – 37:20

Yeah. Lauren Dragan from the Wirecutter was at the latest Apple event and she showed a couple shots of the hearing aid functionality that is going to come out of the box for AirPods. It’s just amazing that people will be able to have that without spending an extra nickel. All right. Well that sounds good. Yeah, we’ll have links to all that stuff in the show notes and of course pick up a copy of the book. Seth, thanks for spending some time with us.

Seth Godin – 37:44

Oh, what a pleasure writing these books and publishing them. It’s getting harder and harder because as we get older, but one of the treats is coming and talking to you. So thank you so much.

John Wall – 37:54

All right. Yeah, my pleasure. That’s going to do it for this week. So until next week, enjoy the coffee.

Speaker 3 – 37:59

You’ve been listening to Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher Penn blogs at christopherspenn.com. Read more from John J. Wall at jw5150.com. The Marketing Over Coffee theme song is called Melo G by Funk Masters and you can find it at Musically from Mevio or follow the link in our show notes.

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