Marketing today is under siege. Everyone claims it's broken, and no longer functional. Chained to the past. Some even say the only fix is to kill it off.
On top of that, it's open season on marketers. With the help of social media, ragging on
marketers has been elevated to a high art form – one of
This is indeed a new Age of Rant. Even this post is one.
"We don't need no stinkin' marketing" seems to sum it up pretty nicely.
Against this backdrop it's easier to comprehend why the world's most popular and widely respected marketing guru has decided leave the field, more or less. I refer of course to Seth Godin. Seth is a very, very smart man who's had an enormous influence on the field of marketing. And deservedly so – even if he’d done nothing after Permission Marketing. I'm among his biggest fans.
But Seth Godin, world's leading marketing guru, no
longer exists. He has vanished. Welcome to Seth 2.0. He's transforming
himself into some sort of combination of Suze
Orman, Tony Robbins
and Deepak Chopra. His posts of the past six months have
increasingly questioned whether or not
anything marketers do works or matters anymore. Seth 1.0 might have countered, "Oh really?"
In his post In
Between Frames, he maintains overt acts of marketers have no impact,
and that only inaction, pause, transparency and reaction by the customer are
“marketing.” No one can argue with the role of the customer—but of the rest, what
are we to think? That it’s no longer possible to “commit
marketing”? If so, that’s pretty extreme.
Although more outspoken than ever, he may be too polite (or savvy) to
state outright what he strongly implies,
which is that marketing
is futile if not dead. Is that his intent or is he trying to articulate
some other obtuse notion?
In his new book Linchpin, he offers some new extensions of earlier themes, but which have only the remotest connection to marketing:
- The industrial age is over
- Don’t be a compliant cog in the corporate machine
- Don’t be afraid to stand out and make an ass of yourself (“remarkable”?) since you need to get noticed
- Ignore your lizard brain (aka “the resistance”) that tells you not to take chances
- Be creative, be original, create art
- Try to be indispensable
He's also been espousing some fairly radical views about business and society that have included swipes at public education, librarians and even the whole concept of employment (which he nearly equates to slavery). Although puzzling, in the context of his 2.0 self these views don’t bother me so much as his abandonment of marketing.
I don't begrudge Seth the right to go in whatever direction he wants. But as a marketer, I care very much if we lose the top authority in our field—and continue to take his advice AS IF it were still relevant to and about marketing.
Yes there are plenty of other leaders out there to fill the marketing
void. But this is like (forgetting his
other problems) Tiger Woods
quitting golf forever to join the pro tennis circuit. Unthinkable.
If we’re going to lose Seth Godin to new pastures, can we at least notice? Have a proper mourning period? Start a search committee? I'm serious.
“Passion” is the new performance-enhancing drug of choice for marketers, and there’s no shortage of pushers out there. But marketers today need a lot more help than they can get from the motivational speakers, change-mongers, self-referential gurus, pseudo start-up experts and torqued-up self-actualizers who might like to be the new Seth. This is a helluva time for marketing to be without a leader, and it's both shocking and ironic that the author of Tribes who reminded us so convincingly why we need leaders looks like he’s taking himself out of the running.
I’ll hardly be the only one who will continue to follow Seth’s work, and learn from it whenever I can. But whatever his new work is, it’ll no longer be filed under “marketing” and for those of us who do marketing for a living, that’s a great loss.
Seth Godin doesn't have to market. He doesn't have to work. He is now an official lotus-eater, lounging and 'reflecting', but no longer part of the workforce as the rest of us -- mere mortals -- know it.
Shame on me for not having written a best-seller, but that doesn't mean I don't know a bucketful about marketing, by which I mean real work to get real customers and keep them happy.
Maybe it's time Godin moved on from marketing to another arena where he can be relevant because he now has dubious usefulness to those of us earning a living in marketing.
Posted by: Barbara Weyand | 01/28/2010 at 03:41 AM