Seth Godin: Ideas that spread, win

I'm working up a long-form piece for the media blog and it required going back and transcribing portions of Seth Godin's 2003 talk at TED. His topic: Sliced Bread and Other Marketing Delights. It should say something that a 17-minute, 5-year-old lecture still comes across as fresh -- if not radical -- but that's kind of Godin's point. Sliced bread wasn't popular for the first 15 years after it was introduced.

I've included a partial transcript after the jump...

Seth Godin @ TED, February 2003, talking about "idea diffusion," the TV-Industrial Complex and the notion that "Ideas that spread, win" (emphasis added):

TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it “The TV-Industrial Complex," and the way the TV-Industrial Complex works is you buy some ads, interrupt some people (and) that gets you distribution. Use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes around and around… 

This TV-Industrial Complex informed my entire childhood, and probably yours as well. All of these products succeeded because somebody figured out how to touch people in ways they probably weren’t expecting and didn’t necessarily want, with an ad, over and over and over. 

And what’s happened is that they canceled the TV-Industrial Complex. In just the last few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it’s not working the way that it used to…

Consumers… just don’t care about you (and the product, idea, etc., that you're pushing) at all. They just don’t care. Part of the reason is that they have way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have way too many choices and way too little time, the obvious solution is to just ignore stuff.

And my parallel is, you’re driving down the road, and you see a cow, and you just keep driving. Because cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who’s going to stop and pull over and say “Oh. Look. A Cow.” Nobody.

But if the cow was purple ... you’d notice it -- for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple, you’d get bored with those too.

The thing that’s going to decide what gets talked about, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is, “Is it remarkable?” And "remarkable" is a really cool word, because we think it just means “neat.” But it also means “worthy of making a remark about.” And that’s the essence of where idea diffusion is going...

We’re now in the fashion business. No matter what we do for a living, we’re in the fashion business. And the thing is people in the fashion business know what it’s like to be in the fashion business. They’re used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it’s not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people, but a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread and which ideas don’t.

What marketers used to do was make average products for average people. That’s what mass-marketing is. Smooth out the edges. Go for the center. That’s the big market. They would ignore the geeks, and – God forbid – the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world in which the TV-Industrial Complex is broken, I don’t think that’s the strategy we want to use anymore.

I think the strategy we ought to use is not to market to these people (the center), because they’re really good at ignoring you, but to market to these people (innovators and early adopters), because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with something, and when you talk to them they’ll listen, because they like listening, because it’s about them. And if you’re lucky, they’ll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it will spread… 

They have something I like to call otaku. It's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who’s obsessed to, say, drive across Tokyo to try a new Ramen noodle place, because that’s what they do. They get obsessed with it.

To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn’t have a constituency with an otaku is almost impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really desperately cares about what it is you have to say, talk to them, and then hope they talk to their friends. 

There’s a hot sauce otaku, but not a mustard otaku. That’s why there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of kinds of hot sauce and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it’s hard to make interesting mustard. You can make interesting mustard. But people don’t, because no one’s obsessed with it, so no one tells their friends about it...

It’s really simple: You sell to people who are listening, and maybe – just maybe – those people tell their friends… 

The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this. The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is about average products for average people. That’s risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, to be remarkable...

The idea is five years old, but it's the concept old media will have to grasp to survive.