Heart to Heart #4: The change you wish to see
Hey there. Happy Saturday.
We had Seth Godin keynote at the Sofa Summit 2021 this week at work. In his presentation, he said something that reminded me of something I had once heard: marketers change people. That’s their job.
I had heard someone less known frame the purpose of marketing this way before, but it did not have a strong imprint on me. I had already forgotten to see it that way. Perhaps I never did adopt it to replace my old perspective of marketing, which was that it was mostly to get people to buy shit that they didn’t want in the first place.
What does Seth mean when he said that marketers are trying to change people?
Here’s my interpretation: he wants people who are in charge of getting messages across to an audience about a product or service to think about what kind of change they want their message to instigate.
In other words, what change do you wish to see in the people whom you want in your audience?
For Tesla, it is to get people to make the electric car dream reality.
For Apple, it is to enable people to do unfettered creative work.
For Seth Godin, it is to get people to sell with permission, authenticity, and trust.
For me, I think it is to get people to live life consciously.
What about you? What is the change you wish to see? This question is important because, like it or not, you are at least a bit of a marketer these days.
As usual, I share some noteworthy links below.
Have a good weekend!
Love, Nick
What I was surprised by (long read) —
Still Alive - Astral Codex Ten. “A lot of them had stories like mine - failed an interview they should have aced, and the interviewer mentioned their blog as an issue.” This article showed me what a blog could be, and how big a problem it could become when it takes on a life of its own.
What I was surprised by (short video) —
A safety vest and ladder will get you (almost) everywhere. This social experiment showed that with a vest on and ladder in hand, you can get into almost any ‘secured’ building you want. I took 2 things from this: 1) do not mistake a sense of security for actual security; and 2) true security may be harder to achieve than trust. Maybe we should spend more time building a trusting society than a secure one.
What I said about software engineering careers (long video) —
Q&A session with Rocket Academy bootcamp students. Watch this if you’re thinking about switching careers to tech and have some doubt. In this recorded session, I join my friend’s programming bootcamp students to talk about careers involving software development.
What I published on the blog —
To make a message stick, repeat it. Politicians and marketers know this trick. I see that repeating yourself is also a very effective tool for managers to get an important message across to a team.