All marketers lie

All marketers lie, but those who succeed are the ones who can tell us a story we want to believe and share. In this book, Seth Godin poses three fundamental questions to marketers: What is your story? Will the people who want to hear it believe it? And is it true? Every marketer is supposed to tell a story, and if they do it correctly, we are more likely to believe them. We believe that a car worth eighty thousand dollars is better than a car from another brand worth thirty-six thousand dollars, and we believe that our feet in a pair of shoes costing two hundred dollars look better than in cheaper shoes, and this belief makes it true. Seth Godin has taught hundreds of thousands of marketers and students around the world, and he explains in this book that top marketers do not talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story; a story we want to believe, whether it is realistic or not. In a world where most people have an endless number of options and no time to choose, every organization is a marketing entity, and all marketing revolves around storytelling. Therefore, marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story we instinctively adopt and then share with our friends. But there is a point we must beware of: if the story is not true, the marketer has crossed the line from lying to fraud. So, marketers fail when they are selfish and deceitful, and when they misuse their tools and make the world worse. Seth Godin says: "Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way to spread an idea, and accordingly, marketers did not invent storytelling; they are new to mastering it."