How to Think Like Seth Godin

Anyone in marketing knows of the genius, Seth Godin. What makes him so amazing is his ability to take a seemingly simple observation and transform it into some sort of brilliant marketing concept.

Example:  The Bad Table (Here’s the short version of his post:) He goes to a restaurant and gets seated at the worst possible seat in the back, near the kitchen… even when there are open seats still available.  The dilemma for the restaurant is:  Who do you put in that bad seat?  The new customers who has never been there and risk not having them return…. Or do you put your loyal customer, who has been there time and time again, and risk them getting angry?

So here is Seth’s formula for thinking…  Observation.  Implication.  Application.

Observing - Creative writers and good comedians know how to observe things.  If you want to consistently come up with material that people want to read, you have to observe things that the average person wouldn’t think twice about.  That’s what makes great content.  Seth’s post started with him getting the crappy seat at a restaurant.

Implication - Considering what you just observed… What does that imply? Getting seated in a crappy table (when other seats are available) implies that the restaurant values some other customer more than they value you.

Application - How does this apply to marketing? Well… Which does the restaurant choose?  Ruin the first experience for a new customer… or for a loyal customer?   The answer is… Neither.  You can’t have a bad table.

Observation.  Implicaiton.  Application.

What do you think?  Make sense?

(BTW - If you want to learn to think like David Armano, the last step is to take what you just learned and create some amazing looking flo-chart for how it is related.)

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