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Best Sellers | | Home All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World | |
|  | |  | | | All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World | | | | | SKU:
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Usually ships in 1-2 business days | | Only 1 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better-and look cooler-than $20 no-names . . . and believing it makes it true. Successful marketers don't talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story. A story we want to believe. This is a book about doing what consumers demand-painting vivid pictures that they choose to believe. Every organization-from nonprofits to car companies, from political campaigns to wineglass blowers-must understand that the rules have changed (again). In an economy where the richest have an infinite number of choices (and no time to make them), every organization is a marketer and all marketing is about telling stories. Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner or the iPod. But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That's a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers and Marlboro. This is a powerful book for anyone who wants to create things people truly want as opposed to commodities that people merely need. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Seth Godin | | Hardcover: | 208 pages | | Publisher: | Portfolio Hardcover | | Publication Date: | May 19, 2005 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1591841003 | | Product Width: | 153.0 centimeters | | Product Height: | 211.0 centimeters | | Product Weight: | 0.7 pounds | | Package Length: | 8.4 inches | | Package Width: | 5.7 inches | | Package Height: | 0.9 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.55 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 112 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 112 customer reviews )
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34 of 35 found the following review helpful:
 Not Bad - but Not Original Jun 01, 2005
By Kim Moeller
"Marketing Padawan - but the force is strong with this one"
Godin writes: "This is a whole new way of doing business."
Well, if it is such Seth, then surely You aren't the first marketer to spot this. Therefore, Seth Godin shouldn't take credit for revealing some of the powers of storytelling in marketing.
Other authors were there long before him (e.g. Laurence Vincent, John Simmons, Steve Denning, Christopher Locke, Dave Snowden), who managed to go deeper and further. Mind you though that their individual approaches are very different.
Much of what Godin calls storytelling are simply elements of marketing strategy (already well know to marketers) presented here in a new wrapping called "storytelling". But just because you say so, that doesn't make it so!
Where he writes "You can't out-Amazon Amazon" and "Make your story stand out from the competition", he is simply describing the importance of positioning, and similarly it isn't 'Rocket Science' when he says "Cheap is not marketing". Rather it is leaning up against men like Michael Porter who have been discussing the inherent dangers of price competition for decades.
He does however practice what he preaches. He tells a story that his customers want to believe. It is a pleasant though that success can be achieved simply by telling cute little stories. It is however not as simple as this, which is why I suggest you explore other authors too (See above).
A point I fully agree on is that: "You must aggressively go to the edges and tell a story that only you could tell." However, I don't feel that Godin has followed his own gospel in this case. The story he tells in "All Marketers are Liars" has to a wide extent already been told by a number of other skilful authors.
He still gets 3 stars from me, because I welcome any additions to the body of knowledge available about storytelling in marketing. I believe it is a powerful tool, and it deserves wider recognition.
43 of 49 found the following review helpful:
 Why is this guy so popular? Jul 18, 2006
By Book Lover
"H"
I find Seth Godin's books incredibly lightweight. There is really nothing of any substance here. The usual series of marketing anecdotes, normally about quite niche products. I think the whole thing can be summed up in the old advertising cliche: sell the sizzle, not the steak. He's just given it a new word - essentially he's dressing up well-worn concepts in new clothes. The book is poorly organised and repetitive, and I think he succeeds simply because his books are so lightweight - they're easily digestible on a bus ride or plane trip, don't rely on any support for his theories so they're not easily challenged, and essentially say very little. The marketing equivalent of the airport novel.
9 of 9 found the following review helpful:
Author makes a valid point ...but there are better books on the subject Jul 06, 2005
By Rachel Simeone
"Book Marketing Expert"
In this book, Seth Godin discusses the practice of telling compelling, attention grabbing stories about a product and gives examples of products that use this approach and shows that this practice is a compelling ways to market a product. The story that is told is the "lie" that he references in his title most.
Telling stories about a product is a fairly common and accepted practice in most marketing department nowadays. If the idea that telling stories is new to you, than you might find this book an interesting read because throughout the book Godin gives examples of well known brands and their stories.
If you are a marketing professional, you will probably find that this book is a bit fluffy and had little new information in it. For a better book on telling stories, I would recommend The Secrets of Word of Mouth Marketing by George Silverman
12 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 It's all in how you tell the story Aug 28, 2005
By Meryl K. Evans
"Content Maven behind meryl.net"
If the book were titled, All Marketers Are Storytellers, would you consider looking at it? Godin brought up this point in the book and it clearly explained what he means by "liars." Of course, he didn't insult marketers as he belongs in that category. But "storytellers" would be nothing new.
Though he didn't use "storytellers," the book addresses how to use stories to help the business succeed. The book grabbed me at the start, but then it got slow in different parts. What I appreciated most were the examples of storytelling or "fibbing." Godin did point out that fibbing doesn't mean the same thing as fraud. He provided two examples. Can you tell which Godin identifies as a fib and which is fraud?
*A wine glass maker claims wine tastes better in his glasses.
*A company says you can call anytime to hear the president of the company's voice and the voice introduces himself as such. It turns out the voice is an actor as the president died over 50 years ago.
The second would be the fraud. It's a story that turns out not to be true and customers feel tricked when they find out. No one can prove the glasses don't make the wine taste better; therefore it's good storytelling because it leads people to believe the claim might be true and the product is worth trying.
John Stossel of ABC News did a report on bottled water and discovered people are convinced that tap water is bad while bottled water is cleaner, safer, and tastier. The news report conducted a taste test of four brands and tap water. Tap came in third while the most expensive, Evian, came in last. And in first place? The cheapest bottled water, K-mart's brand.
Telling a story doesn't guarantee everyone will be fooled into believing what you hope they'll believe, but the bottled water example proves many bought into that story.
Godin goes deeper because telling any ol' story doesn't equal great results. Other factors come into play even before your product or service comes to life. Have you noticed cereals have new labels such as "100% whole grain" or "15% less sugar than the original"? What do you think drove the cereal manufacturers to change the labeling in some cases and to create a new formula in others? The low-carb craze. It was their way of staying in the game when much of the world changed its view on what foods to eat and what to avoid.
Godin quotes Malcolm Gladwell whose best seller, The Tipping Point, no doubt led the way for his second book, Blink, and even recommends the latter work. Everyone I've talked to who has read both books has little good to say about Blink and some didn't think much of The Tipping Point. This praise is the only quarrel I have with this fine and thought-provoking book, but it makes me leery of the rest of the book recommendations (only 13 in all) because of this point. Technically his praise of the book could be called "fibbing."
The book provides examples of how small businesses, large businesses, and service-oriented businesses succeed with the storytelling approach. Any business can learn from the book's concept. It took little time to read and gave a good overview about how businesses create and sell their stories.
11 of 12 found the following review helpful:
I light shade of purple Feb 10, 2006
By Von Sydow Gustav
"Humist, marketer & geek"
For some unknown reason my copy of Liars had been gathering dust on the shelf for quite some time and I decided to read it on a train ride to Stockholm yesterday. The book is about how (and why) to use stories to further your company's/organization's/your own objectives. The main thesis' of the books are:
1. Competitive advantages are becoming too complex too formulate in a one sentence positioning statement and people need stories to make sense of what a company is all about.
2. Stories are what makes people (irrationally) believe that some products are superior to other products. This is why people sincerely believe that a 80 000 dollar Porsche Cayenne is superior to the 36 000 dollar Volkswagen Touareg, despite the fact that they are basically the same part. We buy stories, not products.
3. Stories are what we tell other people and stories are thus what a savvy WOM enlighted marketer should aim for to maximize marketing (mainly WOM) efficiency.
4. To be effective, stories must fit the existing worldview of the target group. If it doesn't, don't try to change their worldview (because people can't be changed), change target group.
5. To break through the info clutter, one must "frame" the story in a way that makes sense to people.
The first point I buy completely. It is obviously very inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but still worth pointing out in a marketing context (to be fair, Godin does give Gladwell some credit). The second point is nothing new at all. The use of stories is just basic branding, slightly adjusted. Regarding stories increasing the efficiency of WOM I think it's absolutely true. However, it's not like it hasn't been said before, only using different terminology (even Godin himself in "Ideavirus"). Number four and five are quite obvious if you've read some consumer behaviour, however I don't agree. The thing that I remember best from Blink was the case study of Herman Millers Aeron chair. It took a couple of years for it to become the best selling office chair of all time. It didn't do this by meeting people's existing worldview on what an office chair was all about. People hated it at first sight. But Herman Miller believed in Aeron and when people got used to the ground breaking design, it redefined how an office chair should be evaluated. The main point about Blink (for me) wasn't that people make snap judgements and use intution. That's hardly news to anyone. The most interesting part is that you can actually change what people believe. And that's good news, now isn't it?
I understand why Godin writes what he does; a lot of neomarketing lit. is critized for not being practical enough. People want books like "Ten things that guarantee you instant success within (enter industry here)". And it is a realistic goal for most companies to get their story straight, find a group that might believe it and tell it ("frame" it) in a way that they'll understand. But to be honest, it's just a slight improvement over the classic approach: build a decent product, select a target market with a high likelyhood of adoption and communicate in terms that they'll understand. Boring. And actually kind of ironic (or a big conspiracy maybe?) since what he does is finding a new frame (WOM is all the rage now and books about that will break though the clutter) to an existing worldview and communicating the idea to a partially new target. I like the fact that he points out how product development WOM and sales are all interrelated but to give him credit for this is kind of like saying that Newton for "invented" gravity.
From a marketing stand point that Godin wants to buy books it's all very clever, indeed (and hardly a coincidence no?). But I don't like it. I think that the winners of tomorrow are those standing out by making a really, really, really awesome product. The crazy ones. The misfits. The round pegs in the square holes. Those who see a work of art when other people see a blank canvas. Think different. Go for broke. Revolutionize. Re-define. Re-imagine. Remarkabalize. Think it. Test it. Try it. Do it. Impossible is nothing.
See all 112 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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