All Marketers are Liars (with a New Preface) by Seth Godin

Author:Seth Godin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-28T01:41:41+00:00

Step 4: Stories let us lie to ourselves. And those lies satisfy our desires. It’s the story, not the good or the service you actually sell, that pleases the consumer.

EXAMPLES: STORIES FRAMED AROUND WORLDVIEWS

There are more worldviews than I count, but here are a few, together with descriptions of how successful marketers told stories to people with these biases.

“I BELIEVE A HOME-COOKED MEAL IS BETTER FOR MY FAMILY”

So how can a marketer possibly grow a supermarket brand?

There are twenty thousand new products introduced to supermarkets every year, struggling for just a few hundred slots on the shelves. The competition spends billions on advertising. Most new products are boring, me-too imitations that aren’t worth a second look. It’s a brutal marketplace for anyone trying to make a safe, standard, traditional offering.

The folks at Banquet decided to tell a story instead. They found an audience with a worldview that matched a product they had the ability to talk about. It turns out that millions of Americans feel guilty about the fact that they no longer cook dinner for their families. They were raised to believe that a home-cooked meal = love = family = healthy and in our modern world, they can’t find the time or the energy to pull it off.

A lot of these people own Crock-Pots, the electric slow-cooking device used for making soups and stews. John Hanson of Banquet introduced Crock-Pot Classics, saying, “Banquet Crock-Pot Classics contain all of the high-quality ingredients needed for a slow-cooked meal—like tender meats, fresh vegetables, hearty potatoes and perfectly seasoned sauces—and are ready to cook with less than five minutes of preparation. At the end of the day, Banquet Crock-Pot Classics welcome home families with the inviting aromas of a slow-cooked meal.” In other words (if Banquet had stated the real deal): “Here’s a bunch of stuff, preserved by chemicals and freezing. Dump it all in the pot, turn it on and you’ll end up with something we could have just as easily precooked for you and sold frozen, ready for the microwave.”

ConAgra, which markets Banquet, has a home run on its hands. Test market sales were 250 percent higher than average. This is a high-profit, high-sales item that will succeed for years and years.

Of course, ConAgra isn’t telling the whole truth, when it claims that there’s no difference between dumping the bag into the Crock-Pot and buying something to go at the local restaurant. Actually, there is a difference because Crock-Pot Classics contains “thiamine mononitrate, modified food starch, yeast extract, salt, hydrolyzed soy protein, sugar, monosodium glutamate, propylene glycol, caramel color, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, soy lecithin, salted California Chablis wine, high fructose corn syrup, anchovies, corn protein, and emuslifier.”

It doesn’t matter. The lie the consumer tells herself is what matters. It’s a lie about the way the house smells when her family walks in, a lie about doing the dishes, about not throwing out piles of to-go boxes. It’s the way the product makes her feel when she sees her family sit down and eat together.

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