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.

You believe things that aren't true.

Let me say that a different way: many things that are true are true because you believe them.

The ideas in this book have elected a president, grown non-profit causes, created billionaires and fueled movements. They've also led to great jobs, fun dates and more than a few interactions that mattered.

I've seen this book in campaign headquarters and carried around at evangelical conferences. I've also gotten email from people who have used it in Japan and the UK and yes, Akron, Ohio. The ideas here work, because they are simple tools to understand what human beings do when they encounter you and your organization.

Here's the first half of the simple summary: We believe what we want to believe, and once we believe something, it becomes a self-fulfilling truth. (Jump ahead a few paragraphs to read the critical second part of this summary)

If you think that (more expensive) wine is better, then it is. If you think your new boss is going to be more effective, then she will be. If you love the way a car handles, then you're going to enjoy driving it.

That sounds so obvious, but if it is, why is it so ignored? Ignored by marketers, ignored by ordinarily rational consumers and ignored by our leaders.

Once we move beyond the simple satisfaction of needs, we move into the complex satisfaction of wants. And wants are hard to measure and difficult to understand. Which makes marketing the fascinating exercise it is.

Here's the second part of the summary: When you are busy telling stories to people who want to hear them, you'll be tempted to tell stories that just don't hold up. Lies. Deceptions.

This sort of storytelling used to work pretty well. Joe McCarthy became famous while lying about the "Communist threat." Bottled water companies made billions while lying about the purity of their product compared to tap water in the developed world.

The thing is, lying doesn't pay off any more. That's because when you fabricate a story that just doesn't hold up to scrutiny, you get caught. Fast.

So, it's tempting to put up a demagogue for Vice President, but it doesn't take long for the reality to catch up with the story. It's tempting to spin a tall tale about a piece of technology or a customer service policy, but once we see it in the wild, we talk about it and you whither away.

That's why I think this book is one of the most important I've ever written. It talks about two sides of a universal truth, one that has built every successful brand, organization and candidate, and one that we rarely have the words to describe.

Here are the questions I hope you'll ask (your boss, your colleagues, your clients) after you've read this book:

"What's your story?"
"Will the people who need to hear this story believe it?"
"Is it true?"

Every day, we see mammoth technology brands fail because they failed to ask and answer these questions. We see worthy candidates gain little attention, and flawed ones bite the dust. There are small businesses that are so focused on what they do that they forget to take the time to describe the story of why they do it. And on and on.

If what you're doing matters, really matters, then I hope you'll take the time to tell a story. A story that resonates and a story that can become true.

The irony is that I did a lousy job of telling a story about this book. The original cover seemed to be about lying and seemed to imply that my readers (marketers) were bad people. For people who bothered to read the book, they could see that this wasn't true, but by the time they opened the cover, it was too late. A story was already told. I had failed.

You don't get a second chance in publishing very often, and I'm thrilled that my publisher let me try a new cover, and triply thrilled that it worked. After all, you're reading this.

So, go tell a story. If it doesn't resonate, tell a different one. When you find a story that works, live that story, make it true, authentic and subject to scrutiny. All marketers are storytellers, only the losers are liars.