This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

And so we get on the Facebook merry-go-round, boosting our posts, counting our
followers, and creating ever more content in the hope of being noticed. There are so many
other ways to make an impact and earn trust.
Much of what we take for granted in our marketing toolbox was considered a risky
innovation just a few generations ago. It’s worth discarding the cruft that we built and
replacing it with more generous tools.
The freedom of better
After the refrigerator was popularized, there wasn’t a good reason to continue hiring the
ice delivery man. It wasn’t better worth paying for.
After the supermarket took off, it got harder to justify the work of the milkman.
And now we can all take advantage of the huge shifts in what it takes to do what we
used to do (it’s all at our fingertips now, right?) and use that leverage to redefine better.
Because better is what our market is waiting for.
Consider the real estate broker. He used to hoard data. If you didn’t hire a broker, you
had no information about what you were looking for. Today, in a world where Zillow has
110 million homes listed, the home shopper is likely to have access to at least as much
information as the broker does.
If the goal is to defend the status quo, to be a chokepoint, it’s going to require an
exhausting sprint, one that tries to keep ahead of an ever-quickening technology and
information flow.
But what would better look like? Not for you, but for the customer?
This shift is true for many of us. So much of the work is networked, automated, and
reliable now. I needed a team of eight engineers and a budget of millions of dollars to
send emails to a million people in 1994. Today, anyone can do it for nine dollars a month
using Feedblitz.
A decade ago, it took a dedicated team of publishers, print brokers, and sales reps to get
a book to be available nationwide. Now a Kindle book can be published by one smart
person with a digital file.
We made the “doing” easier, which is precisely why we need to outsource that part of
our job and focus all our energy onto the hard work of making change happen.
One last thing about sonder
We’re not faking our points of view, our dreams, and our fears. And neither are you.
In politics, there’s a long history of people believing that those on the “other side” don’t
really mean what they say. That Barry Goldwater and Jane Fonda were just putting on a
show. That atheists really, deep down, believe in God, and that evangelicals are mostly
trying to make a point, not express their actual beliefs.
The same goes for Mac users versus those who favor the Linux command line, or for
math geeks versus those who insist that they can’t do math.