52 Bicycles

Purple Cow by Seth Godin (Buy from Amazon) discusses the value of being remarkable, and how it is necessary to be remarkable to get attention in an increasingly splintered mediascape. But when listening to a recent podcast of TalkCrunch, I heard the America-Destroyer, Michael Arrington, use this principle to explain why he thought that paid marketing was essentially unnecessary. He posited that if you were really worth talking about, people would talk about you. For free. Because that’s the magical world Arrington lives in.

In fact, Godin would not advocate the end of marketing, or the idea that one should put the product “out there” and hope Michael Arrington profiles you. He wouldn’t even advocate the end of “traditional” promotions and media. Instead, he points to the panaply panoply of alternative media as providing more ways to conveying that message, and he later goes on to write about the importance of telling authentic stories to get the message through the noise. And the quiality of the stories, while important, does not magically reduce the cost of conveying these stories to zero.

Put another way: being remarkable is necessary for success, but it is not sufficient. Success in market is about both being remarkable (product, positioning) and conveying (promotion) and delivering (packaging, pricing) that remarkability to the target audience.

 And that’s not free.

(Like any quick post, I can see on a quick re-read that I have taken some liberties with what Godin actually says, and he’s well-worth reading. But I hope the core point, that marketing is still a necessity, remains with the reader - and with me!)

 Edited because I can’t keep staring at a misspelled word.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Technology Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. Reddit This