All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin

I have no intention of telling you the truth. Instead I'm going to tell you a story. This is a story about why entrepreneurs must forsake any attempt to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and must instead focus on what people believe and then work to tell them stories that fit and enhance their worldview.

Make no mistake: This is not about tactics or hype or little things that might matter. This is a whole new way of doing business. It's a fundamental shift in the paradigm of how ideas spread. Either you're going to tell stories that spread, or you will become irrelevant.

In the beginning, there was the story. Before marketing, before shopping carts, and long before infomercials, people started telling stories to themselves and others. We noticed things. We noticed that the sun rose every morning, and we invented a story about Helios and his chariot. People got sick, and we made up stories about humors and bloodletting and we sent them to the barber to get well.

We tell ourselves stories because we're superstitious. Stories are shortcuts we use because we're too overwhelmed by data. The stories we tell ourselves are lies that make it easier to live in a complicated world. We tell stories about products, services, job seekers, the New York Yankees, and sometimes even the weather.

We tell stories to our spouses, our friends, our employees, and customers. Most of all, we tell stories to ourselves. We tell ourselves stories that can't possibly be true, but believing those stories allows us to function. We know we're not telling ourselves the whole truth, but it works, so we embrace it.

If we tell ourselves lies because these stories make it easier to get by, then marketers are a special kind of liar. Marketers didn't invent storytelling. They just perfected it. Marketers lie to consumers because consumers demand it. It's your prospects who will walk away if you obsess about the last sigma of this or that without bothering to tell an interesting story about it.

Some marketers do it well. Others are pretty bad at it. Sometimes the stories help people get more done, enjoy life more, and even live longer. At other times, when the story isn't sufficiently authentic, it doesn't work for anyone. Humans are too smart to be fooled for long by a Potemkin village, a façade that pretends to be one thing and turns out to be another. Sure, you can fool some people once or twice, but this is the key lesson of the new marketing: Once fooled, a person will never repeat your story to someone else. If you are not authentic, you will get the benefit of only one sale, not 100. The cost of your inauthentic deception is just too high.