Biography

Seth GODIN

2007 ranking: 43

Seth Godin

Seth Godin is a guru of marketing in the world of the Internet. He is a writer, speaker and most importantly, a practitioner.

Godin has a great knack for coining concepts and ideas that have become embedded in marketing thinking Permission Marketing and the IdeaVirus. He is no mere theoretician of marketing; most of these concepts have been learned in the world of business. He was the joint founder and owner of Yoyodyne an online marketing company. This was bought by Yahoo! In 1998 when Godin became Yahoo!'s vice-president of Permission Marketing.

He has always been obsessed by communication between people. He relates in his biography how he was entranced by the present of a short-wave radio as a child. This enabled him to talk to people at great distances without wires.

The Internet has radically changed the world for marketers. This has caused the end of "the TV-Industrial complex" where marketers felt they owned potential customers. The means used by marketers in traditional advertising was what Godin called "interruption marketing". They tried to market their product or service by interrupting potential customers while they were doing something they liked or found more interesting. This was risky, costly, and in Godin's view, ultimately futile.

There was a need for a new form of marketing, and the Internet provided an opportunity for it. Godin calls this Permission Marketing, which he describes as turning enemies into friends and friends into customers. The marketer finds out whether the potential customer is interested in the product or service; once interest has been shown, say by the would-be customer clicking on a link, they are communicated with.

Success through the Internet and permission marketing cannot be taken for granted. The company website was the new shop-window and in The Big Red Fez (2001)Godin illustrated good and bad websites. A central tenet of Permission Marketing must be respect for the customer. So Godin is an inveterate opponent of Spam. In his words "It's unanticipated, impersonal irrelevant junk that steals from the recipient ... it's not like the plague. It is the plague."

But even with a great website, and respect for the customer, success is still not guaranteed. What is needed is a great product or service, what Godin calls a Purple Cow. It must be really different and innovative and have the power to infect would-be customers. It must be an IdeaVirus.

Godin sees the potential market as a hive. The IdeaVirus is then spread by "Sneezers". There are two types of effective sneezers; the promiscuous sneezers, who can be visualized as those people who, in spite of having a heavy cold, don't care where they sneeze or whom they may infect. They may be motivated to spread an idea by money, but in reality they don't really care who gets the IdeaVirus. Powerful Sneezers are the second type. These are trend-settees; they have a dedicated group of followers who tend to adopt anything they use, as they view the powerful sneezers as "in the know". They cannot be bought and adopt an idea or a product out of genuine love.

IdeaViruses can be spread virally, this is independent of dedicated sneezers. This happens like an epidemic. The effect is cumulative; the IdeaVirus spreads through constant take-up and use.

Godin put his ideas about the IdeaVirus into a pithy little book called Unleashing the IdeaVirus. He then put his words where his ideas were; instead of relying on traditional publishing and distribution methods, he made it available for free downloading on the Internet. What was more he gave everyone who downloaded it complete licence to print it out, e-mail it to friends and colleagues and generally do whatever they liked. As a result it became the most downloaded e-book of all time. It was also published in a more conventional format and translated into 10 languages. Godin benefited from this ideavirus by an increase in speaking engagements.

His most recent book Meatball Sundae examines the fundamental shifts taking place within the world of marketing and how problems arise when the challenges of "old" and "new" marketing collide. Godin states that current businesses must ask is: "'How can we alter our business to become an organization that thrives on new marketing?'

Essential Reading

Meatball Sundae, Piatkus Books (2008).

The Dip: The Extraordinary Benefits of Knowing when to Quit (and when to stick). Piatkus Books (2007)

Small is the New Big: And 183 riffs, rants and other remarkable business ideas, Portfolio (2006)

Free Prize Inside: The Next Big Marketing Idea, Michael Joseph (2005)

All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-trust World. Portfolio (2005)

The Big Red Fez: How to make Any Web Site Better, Free Press (2001)

Unleashing the IdeaVirus is available for download at

http://www.sethgodin.com/ideavirus/downloads/

All Biographies