Seth Godin's best tactics for building remarkable products, strategies, brands and more

This podcast features Seth Godin, discussing branding, strategy, and product management. Key takeaways include: building a brand involves making and keeping a remarkable promise; a strong strategy requires tension and careful choices regarding customers, competition, validation, and distribution; and understanding and potentially leveraging existing systems is crucial for success. Godin also shares his experience using AI writing tools and critiques recent branding efforts by Jaguar and Tesla. go there and if you're a barista and you've chosen to be a barista maybe because it's the best thing you could get. well you're not going to get the next hour over again. So what would it be like to be the best barista in the world for an hour Would that be worth it for you Because I've had menial jobs in food service and I got to tell you when the boss forces you to be mediocre and bored, there's no amount of money, they can pay you to do that job. But if you're there and you have a chance to add delight to someone 's day, you're doing that for you, not because you're getting paid and you could totally tell these people in the world when you, you know you go to Barista. that just can tell is just loves her job. Like I know, imagine she knows this is not, you know, her career long term, but she just embraces it and just has fun with it. There's so much power to that. Kind of on a different note you mentioned that you're a product manager which I did not know. That's amazing. So most of the people listening to this podcast are product managers. they either product managers, founders, people that want to be founders and then people that work with product managers. So first of all, I guess, could you just share that part of your life? Because I don't think people know that. All right. so the origin story could take all day, but I'm not going to tell the whole thing. I'm going to tell the part that I thought was normal. That turned out to be the luckiest thing in the world. The summers between the two years of business school are very important to establish your, uh, career arc. I got a job at Spiner software. Spiner invented educational computer games. I was the 30th employee and the summer was spent doing doing assistant brand manager, kind of stuff, going to meetings with the ad agency writing, copy, but at the end of the summer, they had a lovely going away party for me. because I was flying back to California and then at the end, the president of the company, the chairman of the company, and the head of marketing, bring me into this Beside they say we have a secret project, we want you to work for us while you're at Business School and we're going to pay you almost nothing. Okay, what's the secret project? We're going to do computer adventure games with illustrations and music based on science fiction novels. And we've already acquired the work of Ray Bradberry and Arthur C. Clark. Now, I had read every science fiction book in the Clearfield public Library from Azimoff to Zelazny. This was a dream, come true, But they thought my job was going to be make the packaging and run the ads. And what I discovered first of all, is that I couldn't really go back to business School. So I showed up hardly at all at Stanford. And just, you know, took a lot of red eyes. But I discovered that the engineers, the development team, they had a lot of people vying for their time. And if I didn't figure out how to get them to give me way more than my fair share of development, I wasn't going to have any products to make next Christmas. And then I was going to be out of a job. And so I started a newsletter internally. I was one of the first people in the world to have desktop publishing, because I was a beta tester for the Mac. And in it, I would mention anybody in the engineering team who had worked on my project, and I would would say something good about them. And then I would print it out and put it in every single person's inner office mailbox. And within three months, four months, partly because the project was really good, 40 engineers were working for me. And no one was reporting to me. And so I became the de facto product manager. And that is when I learned marketing is the product, you don't make want to start by asking you a question that one of your former colleagues suggested ask you West cow. I imagine you're remember Wes? of course Wes and I sat in the room just the two of us for years. So what she suggested, ask you and this question I love is she asked her, what did you learn most from Seth Goden working with him? And she immediately said, it's uh, helping her build better taste and increase her standards having really high standards. So I want to ask you first of all just how do you know if you have good taste and high standards and then how do you build good taste and higher standards? Great question. Thank you, Wes. Um, I define good taste as knowing what other people want just before they do. So if you're the only person who wants, uh, peanut butter covered licorice, you're entitled to eat peanut butter covered licorice. But you don't have good taste because everyone else thinks that's weird. And people whether they're jazz musicians or fabric designers are seen as having good taste when they bring something to the world that the world didn't necessarily expect but is glad to see what do you find helps. Like so Wes learned from watching you that she real IIZ like, okay, my standards are not nearly as high as as they could be uh, other than working with you, maybe that's the anwers work with people like you that have really high standards. Just what do you find is most helpful in helping people build taste and also just increase their of tension. The importance of tension. You basically talk about how a great strategy has tension at the center of it. Why is tension so important to a good strategy? Okay, so let's agree that tension and stress aren't the same thing. Stress is generally not good. Stress is two things At the same time. I want to leave. I need to stay right. I hate my boss. But I need this job. That's stress. don't look for stress. Tension is at the heart of every art form And every innovation tension is. it might not work. Tension is, and the other person says, because they need to finish the sentence. So what we do when we launch a new product is we say we have have this thing that can do X And now the person is imagining what their life might be. like if that were true, if they fall in love with that possibility. Now there's tension. Did you tell the truth? is it going to work for them? And you know when I was a kid, PF flyers were the sneaker to get. This was before Nike. And the promise of PF flyers was that they would finally make you fast enough to run away from the bully. And I remember 10 years old walking into that shoe store and there was real tension in my head, cuz, I needed to get away from that bully and I was keeping the PF flyers people to their promise and they didn't tell the truth, it comes back to your point about not not, uh, delivering on the promise that you make to the most recurring theme actually had to do with AI, actually the co-founder of Intercom, asked this question And it kind of echoes what many people are wondering. So his question is, how do you think all these new AI companies build brands to distinguish and differentiate themselves in a world that's increasingly filled with AI companies, AI products, AI content? Well, the first question is, what's a brand? Because it's not a logo. A brand is a promise. It's what do I expect from you? It's what I miss you. If you were gone and high hotels has a logo, Nike has a brand. The way we know this is if Nike opened, uh, if Nike opened a hotel, we'd know what it would be like. But if Hayatt decided to make sneakers, we have no clue what they might be comfortable, but that's all we would know. And so if you want to build a brand, you got to stand for something and you got to say what you don't do. And the second thing is AI very soon is going to stop being a feature the same way electricity is not a feature that lots and lots of things run on electricity, but they're not electricity companies, they just happen to use electricity. So what AI companies and all companies need to do is say what's in this for the user? What promise do I want to make a difficult promise, a remarkable promise? And then how do I keep it So making absurd promises might work at the VC level, but it doesn't work when you're talking to consumers because you can only break that promise one time. And so, you know, to wrap up the brand part, Airlines don't have brands and airlines don't have loyalty. And the way we know this is that the only reason people stick with an airline is for the points which is bribery. loyalty is would you pay extra to stick with this? And if you wouldn't pay extra, then the brand has no value. I love this phrase. Make a promise, and keep it And the AI element basically makes it. That raises the bar because many more promises are being made. Fewer promis are probably being kept. So is the advice there continue making an ambitious promise And then the key is actually deliver on that and that's what builds your brand. Yeah. and of in the middle that is what most stuck to stuck out to me that I want to spend a little time on, You kind of have these, this four sequence of advice that I love. So I'm just going to read it real quick. Choose your customers, choose your future, choose your competition, and choose your future, choose the source of validation and you choose your future, choose your distribution. And you're also choosing your future, right? Can you just talk through these kind of four insights, these four steps that basically determine what your product and life is going to be like outside of actually building the product directly? Yeah. And, and for a product person, these are the critical choices and you probably have glossed over them. You have probably assumed it's a given and you've sacrificed your agency over the four most important things you should be choosing. So the first one is picking your customers. If your model is, uh, you can pick anyone and we're anyone If your hope is that you have to win Seo to get anything you're not going to succeed when you choose your smallest viable audience, what language they speak, how much money they have what problem they're trying to solve what their technical facility is whether they're short--tempered whether they're kind whether they're going to stick with you, you have chosen everything that's going to go into the product and what your future is going to be like and so you know the humane pin people whatever it was called made a mistake when they picked their customers because they showed up like they had a finished Apple quality product and they were trying to appeal to the kind of people that would buy on pre-order a finished Apple quality product and when they shipped something that wasn't that and they knew it wasn't that they're doomed right? Whereas if you say here we are in product hunt we're only looking for 400 people. we're looking for people who like the Raspberry Pi who wants to to wonk with this thing. Now you can dance and you can have all these other things happen because you picked a different customer if you decide to be a wedding photographer in the Hamptons well you better expect to have some very spoiled cranky brides and grooms and grooms and grooms and brides and brides that you have to deal with because you picked your customers Okay so then the second one which the things I talk about in the book is that systems are everywhere we look and they're largely invisible, taken for granted. I spend time with high school seniors talking about college. They don't see the college industrial complex, they just think it's normal because that's what it is to go up in the suburbs and what systems do to protect themselves is they invent culture culture is the way things are around here. And so if you think something is scary, that's probably because the system wants you to think that and so you shouldn't do something fool hearty, you shouldn't be fearless. But what you should do is think about why does it scare me to do this? What system will be offended if I do that. Am I trying to work with the system or am I leveraged enough to help change the system? And so the first people who put up downloadable software, all the feedback was, you can't do that. It'll be pirated. You'll never make a penny. Okay, that might happen and I can see why that feels scary but I could also see why the dominant system of software distribution doesn't want me to even experiment with this but I only worked on the software for five months. let's try it because if it doesn't work and it gets pirated I'll just have to make new software. it's okay. it's interesting. the uh, opposite of that was also true with Salesforce. Their whole page was no software. It's all in the cloud once that became the system right? that became the tension and the and the the risky move. Yeah so you have this quite actually a lot. I want to spend more time on the system concept because it's so core to the book and so core to your advice for how to be better. You have this actual quote, what does it mean to be a strategic thinker? It means to see the system, What else can you share about? Just for people that are trying to become better strategically to understand what you mean when you talk about the system, how to see the system, we have to invent systems anytime we engage with other human beings, because interoperability is essential. There's a system for how we greet other people in our culture. Uh, you shake hands right hand to right hand and just show up sometime and give the vulcan salute instead and watch what happens. It's very awkward because we just needed to get this over with. And now that's part of the system. And so, systems serve a valuable function until they don't, because then the system starts doing things to support itself to reinforce itself. So, for example, there is a system that says, we should interview people for jobs. and the most successful interviews are people where they show that they are like us, they look like us, they went to schools like us, they have privilege and background like us that is toxic because it diminishes not just diversity, but our ability to put real talent on the team. And if you don't see that system and name that system, you're going to keep doing what you are doing. And I was talking to someone yesterday who said they had been working with a company And the last four people that they had hired had been captain of their Ivy League tennis team, Right? Well, clearly, there's a pattern here. And it's being reinforced by people who don't want to get in trouble, but the system is not helping them. And so, yes, we need, uh, the metric system and we need the zip code system. Those keep working, really well. But if you're trying to show up in a place where dominant players don't want you to succeed, you're going to have to find something in the system that gives you a chance to change the rules. You know, this metaphor that I love that's kind of along these lines of better waves make better surfers that a lot of your success is driven by choosing the wave versus the skills that you have. Can you just talk about that? Yeah. so um, it's surprisingly profound. I don't know where I came up with it, but when I see people who are great at surfing, they're almost always on good waves. And my son who surfs a lot, I have noticed passes up waves that other people might take, waiting for the right wave because he knows he will be able to surf it better. So when you think about which company you're signing up to bring software from which uh, people you're willing to put on the key roles? Are you willing to wait for the superstar who's going to change things or are you in so much of a hurry to make an imag ary deadline that you're going to ship mediocre work because all mediocre means is average and so if you don't want to be mediocre you better do something different than the other people are doing Otherwise you're going to get what the other people are getting as you talk about this i'm thinking about I don't know if you saw jaguars rebrand in their whole launch and uh, uh feels like it's been rejected by the system. Uh, any thoughts on on that? Maybe what they got wrong or maybe maybe it was genius Okay, so you've you've picked a topic that I really like to talk about Jaguar did not rebrand jaguar rel logoed and the logo might be a sign that they're trying to rebrand and make a different promise and they are switching to all electric which I'm in favor of but they made I think a very significant error which is if you're going to start a car company 100 million or a billion dollars are going to get spent earning trust from people who never heard of you if you're starting with one of the the most iconic and beautiful and beloved car brands that has the luxury of having almost no cars in the world That could undermine what you want to stand for going forward It's Perfect own that that's brilliant and to walk away from that so that you could please some art director I don't understand why you think you're a rebranding when you just put a logo on that undermines many of the awareness assets you already had going for Feels like they got very you know, very controversial, they went against the status quo. Uh, more maybe than they should I don't know what do you what would you have done if you were them? You may recall when the International House of pancakes decided to falsely announce they were changing their name to the International House of burgers and like made a new logo because they wanted buzz. This is a Wendy's Twitter tactic. Buzz does not sell hamburgers that Oros got a lot of buzz when they did that tweet about uh, the Super Bowl blackout. there's no evidence they sold even one more cookie that's they're not in the business of entertaining us. So Jaguar isn't going to sell more cars because people like you and I are talking about their Rel looing what's going to make them sell cars is customer traction. What they need to do is find 50 people who have authority and get them in a car that changes them somehow that transforms them and you know, it's, it's interesting if you think about uh, two things that Tesla did right at the beginning with the model s the first one is according to someone I know who worked there at the time. The number one thing people would talk about when they saw you in the parking lot of the supermarket was the door handles because the door handles popped out, they popped out in a way that's sort of annoying and dangerous, but it was noticeable. so there was a conversation and then what would happen is they'd say, what do you think of it? And you'd say, get in the car and you switch to ludicrous mode and you drive at 0 to 60 in 2.4 seconds and they'd start screaming, This was fun for you and told the story to the passenger, This is how customer traction begins because I can't do that in a different car, actually many people haven't heard it Many people don't truly understand it And it's the thing that I reference most of your piece of advice Could you spend a little time just chatting about this topic of the purple cow? The importance of being remarkable Okay, so let's let's start with Steve Blank I'm sure you've talked about his idea of customer traction The single best way to tell if a startup's got any hope whatsoever is do the people who engage with you stick around do they come back for more? the second piece is do they tell their friends and if they tell their friends what do they say? The word remarkable means worth making a remark about. So i'm not talking about coming up with some viral video that's ridiculous. And it's gimmickry. I'm saying if you make something where the person's life gets better, if they talk about you and you know in advance what you want them to say, then they are more likely to say it. So Marissa Mayer probably created more, uh, uh, stock market value than any other, uh, product manager I can think of. And the way she did it was there weren't very many people at Google, but she was the one who said, no, you can't put another button on the homepage. There only going to be two buttons on the homepage and over and over again. At the time I was at Yahoo. Yaho had the chance to buy Google for $10 million while i was there. that's a whole interesting story. But Yaho had3 links on the homepage and Google had two. And the statement built into that is we are making you a promise. And the promise is we are smart hard enough to take you where you want to go without you spending a lot of time browsing through 183 links Tell us what you want and we'll take you there. And so I was a a tech forward person, and if a friend came to me, lost on the internet, confused about something, I just send them to Google because I knew they wouldn't come back to me for more help because, okay, fine, they're gone. It's going to work. That's what to say about Google. at its launch is, hey, just type in what you want. you'll find it. They built that into the product that makes it remarkable because I wanted to tell other people about that because it would raise my status as a tech innovator And the implication here and you talked about this is that most likely the way you will win is word of mouth. It's hard to win with pid ads. It's hard to win with sales teams unless you're you know building B2B software. What you need to focus on is how to get, build something people tell their friends about And the core of that is being remarkable and I love just the way you break it down. being Choose your customer, choose your future just sitting there waiting to be taken. You can cross the chasm if if you're someone like Tesla and instead they decide to pull a stunt and that's not okay. it's not good. product management. it's not good marketing interesting. So you think cybertruck not going to be a success. Well I think compared to what right? So the Ford F-150 some years has made more than 100% of Ford's profit meaning without the Ford 150 pickup truck there is no Ford that's how big a category that is. You have a car with momentum and a public company where you've earned the trust of a lot of people. Now you have a category. Pickup trucks that are purchased for a very specific reason to show your neighbors you care about utility even if you never used the bed. That's the story of driving a pickup truck. So now if you bring people in that category who are inherently skeptical of change and inherently skeptical of design, trickery, something that is nothing but change and design trickery. No, they're not going to adopt it. You could have sold an enormous number of people who might have bought a Ford 150. Instead that crossing of the chasm is how (Also: Choose your distribution strategy, choose your future) Choose your validation, choose your future Choose your competition, choose your future