BUSINESS

The leadership series: An exclusive interview with Seth Godin

April 18, 2007

Whether your organization needs a small prod, a friendly whack, or a few good ideas there's no better source than Seth Godin. Seth is one of today's most influential and fiercely original business thinkers.

He is the author of seven books that have been bestsellers around the world including Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Free Prize Inside!, Survival is Not Enough, and others.

His smash bestseller, Permission Marketing, was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a year, a Fortune Best Business Book and spent four months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list.

Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry's leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998. He holds an MBA from Stanford, and was called "the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age" by BusinessWeek.

Here Kelsey Howarth, Senior Writer for Cognos, an IBM company, shares ideas with the bestselling author, entrepreneur, and agent of change on what marketing needs to do to rise above mediocrity.

Qualities of an effective marketer

KH: What would you say are the essential qualities of an effective leader in marketing?

SG: "The biggest thing today is to push the entire organization to realize that the product and the process are now part of the marketing."

What CMOs should focus on

"The problem is that organizations rarely if ever have the guts to promote and reward people who will champion remarkability and permission marketing. That's because both start with the (correct) assumption that they are not omnipotent.

CMOs need to keep redefining quality. At the beginning, quality means remarkable. Over time, quality comes to mean boring, within boundaries, to spec. I'd redefine quality at your organization to mean "new, fresh, Purple Cow stuff that clients and users want to talk about."

KH: At Cognos we help companies find sweet spots of information amidst their data – insight amidst endless information. What sweet spots or metrics would you recommend that CMOs focus on?

SG: "I care a lot about what percentage of people interact with you and choose to sign up to hear more. What percentage tell friends? The rate of growth of your ideas and how they spread."

Where CMOs should invest

KH: We view Marketing's role as investment advisor to the business. Where do you feel marketing should be investing its money?

SG: "Marketing runs the business, not advises it. I honestly believe this is critical."

"Think big, act small"

KH: You challenge your blog readers to "think big and act small." Can you explain this concept?

SG: "Acting small means being authentic and not anonymous. It means treating people with respect and not hiding behind policies. It means moving fast and leaving a small footprint."

KH: Every company loves a viral marketing campaign but few achieve it. What is the traditional challenge to unleashing an ideavirus?

SG: "Making something worth talking about!"

Marketing in the age of Web 2.0

KH: The internet was a game changer in the four Ps of marketing – product, price, place/proximity, and promotion. How should marketers prepare for the changes Web 2.0 will bring?

SG: "The key step is to acknowledge that the organization serves the marketing that works, not the other way around."

Not enough "guts"

KH: At Cognos it is our mission to put the right information, into the right hands, at the right time. Do you feel that people generally are given enough information to do their jobs properly? With the wonders of technology are they given too much?

"What marketing really needs to do is figure out how to get every employee to understand that they are the marketing department."

SG: "I don't think there's a scarcity of information. I think there's a scarcity of guts. The guts to use the information to actually do something."

A sneak peek into "The Dip"

KH: You have a new book coming out in May called The Dip. Can we get a sneak peek into your key messages?

SG: "Organizations and products and businesses and careers succeed when what's on offer is the best in the world. But the only way to be the best in the world is to get through the Dip that stops everyone else.

That dip is actually your ally – without it, everyone is the best, and it's worthless. So the book is about seeing that dip, understanding it, and getting through it."