Original subtitles

You know what can other brands learn from this particular case study, you know in the you know we stand for this

People like us do stuff like this. So let's talk about the anything a logo and a brand

Alright because companies spend way too much time on their logo. Just like people on YouTube spend way too much time on their hair

I'm told they spend way too much time in there

If Nike owned opened a hotel I think we would be able to guess pretty accurately what it would be like

If Hyatt came out with sneakers

We'd have no clue

Because Hyatt doesn't have a brand they have a logo

if I swap the signs on a hotel at that price point

It couldn't tell if you were to marry it if you were a Hilton or the Hyatt the hallway the room

I don't know. Where am I no brand

So what it means to have a brand is?

You've made a promise to people they have expectations. It's a shorthand

What should I expect the next time and if that is distinct?

You've earned something

If it's not distinct, let's admit you make a commodity and you're trying to charge just a little bit extra for peace of mind

The problem that Hyatt and Hilton and Mary it and the rest have his sort by price

Because if I go online now to find a hotel, it's really simple sort by price

Why would I pay $200 extra to go a block away? I don't

So what's the value of a brand the value of a brand is how much extra am I paying?

It's that time again, it feels like every year we

Had a little you're like Santa Claus but with wisdom and insight

Once a year you show up from like Jimmy and we have a conversation. I was looking forward to this

I'm not gonna ask you how you got this job this time because after

Half a dozen times, I think I know the story, but I do want to know

About this book. I want to know I mean, I've always thought of you as the godfather of

Marketing, you know if if Peter Drucker is you know

old-school

Not outdated but just like, you know, he came before he's the previous generation. I always think of Seth as the new generation

kiss the ring and so

Help me understand this seems to me to be like the quintessential book on marketing

well, what's your take the thing is I don't do any consulting because I don't have the patience for it and

What I love to do is find people I care about who are doing work that I'm proud of it gives them free advice

How can they achieve their goals?

Bringing their work to people who need it and what happened was after the 50th time

I heard myself saying the same things again

And again, I started this seminar the marketing seminar which lives online and it's not inexpensive, but it's really effective

it's a hundred a

seminar with

So far six thousand six hundred people have taken it and what happens inside it is I was watching people interact

With my lessons, but fifty lessons together and seeing how they interpreted them and watching them change and watching their work get better

So it occurred to me, I don't know why I took so long. Oh, I know how to make books. Maybe I'll turn this

Into a book for people who don't necessarily want to commit the time

To being part of a seminar and one thing led to another and the book became the book that it is now

which is yes my version of

If advertising had never existed if David Ogilvy had never existed if the old model which was so magical

Wasn't available because I don't think it is if I could teach marketing to someone what would I teach them?

So there's nothing it I think the word Twitter might appear once in the whole book is not about social media

It is not about growth rating points or even conversion

it's about work that matters for people who care so break it down for me kind of what's

What's the path?

You know

What is the method to the madness of laying out the chapters in the order that you did or?

Does the order or not matter?

So the order we you have to begin by undoing the marketing of marketing you have to undo

This idea that marketing is selfish. That marketing is a scam that marketing is this short-term interruption thing

So I spend a bunch of time on that. I wish I didn't have to but I do

Because I'm saying to you you're a marketer and it's not an insult. It's a compliment because what marketers do is we make change happen

Okay, which change for who?

so the first third of the book is what marketers do is we decide who we are seeking to change who's it for and

What's it for and I'm amazed at how often people don't even consider this they think they're making average stuff for average people

And if they just yell at about it enough then their Kickstarter will hit 19 million dollars

Well, yeah every once in a while I Kickstarter needs to do that

But almost none of them do that the truly successful ones or the truly successful

Online stores are local bakeries or the person is trying to raise money for their charity are specific

They're not general. So the first part and then I get to this idea that culture

Defeats everything if you've got culture at your back what you're doing is easy and you're trying to change the culture

It's difficult. So what is culture culture is people like us do things like this? How do we break that into pieces?

Who are the people like us? What are the things like this?

Then I do

A turn into something that some people think is distracting but is in fact at the core of some of the big ideas here

which are

Human beings make decisions based on status

Not the status of I have a fancier car than you that's part of it

But the status of who eats lunch first and the status of who's moving up and who is not moving up

and what does that even mean to us that informs culture and

then I talk about

Affiliation versus dominance because I see that more and more everywhere. I look

Ok, so now that we've laid that out now we can get into some of the tactics the tactics of are you a brand marketer?

or a direct marketer because they're fundamentally different things and most people were brand marketers before the internet, but the internet

Rings a bell and says if you're a direct marketer, this is here for you

and then I can we round hole circle and I end with a bit of a

Rant about is the work. We do evil. Are we responsible for it?

and if we are responsible for it, what are we doing here with this super powerful tool and

This tool we each have is more powerful than the assembly line was in 1925

Partly because we all have it if you have a keyboard

You can touch the culture. What will you do with that keyboard what we do with that camera

Because we're not victims

We're creators and I care very much about

Helping people take responsibility for the change they seek to make and if it makes you a living, that's fine

It doesn't make you a living that's a choice, but don't do it because you're making a living making a living because you're doing it

Yeah, well said, can we go back just a second and maybe?

delineate or clarify

Brand marketing versus direct marketing. I think I know what you're saying to me. If I were to say it, I would say

brand marketing or advertising

Because to me one is a push

Button, and the other one is a pull lever

You know brand marketing being a pull or it's pulling people in drawing them in with a tint, you know

trying to build attention and Trust while advertising is more about

Getting a return on the investment and getting someone to jump through a hoop, but maybe in your own words

Yeah, I I've that's legit, but I'd do it differently

Yeah, because there are direct marketing ads and their brand ads. It's not the advertising that differentiates them. It's one simple thing you

Can't measure a brand

You can measure direct you must measure direct right Lester Wunderman who was a friend of mine is a friend of mine

The elder statesman invented the term direct marketing was on the board of Yoyodyne

Direct Marketing is measured marketing

If you can measure it, you're gonna act differently because you can see what happened Tuesday and change what you do on Wednesday

Brand marketing is a Cheetos commercial brand marketing is the Airbnb logo

They don't you can't test their Airbnb logo every day. It's the logo

That's part of the way you tell the story of who you are. So

a

Lot of individuals who don't own the company

Like brand marketing cos can't get in trouble for a long time because no one knows if it's working and it's this magic

Alchemy the Absolut Vodka ads in the back of the New Yorker for all those years. They didn't work. They didn't work

They didn't work

They didn't work and then one day you're a genius right so know very few people make an Apple Superbowl commercial that changes everything

Generally what happens is people show up

Put their brand in the world with or without an ad right Brad marketing is where did you put your store?

Is it on the corner or in the middle of the block?

You can't measure that because you can't open two stores one on the corner and one in the middle

Direct Marketing though is the secret of Google and Facebook

Google gets all of its revenue 100%

from people who are buying clicks that they measure and

the reason they make so much money is they sell the clicks for a nickle and

If work they tell your competitors that they could buy it for six cents and so an auction takes place

So you are making a little bit of money and Google's making a lot

But you're still ok with it because it's better than making zero

so as we switch to this world of Direct Marketing we have to realize

The metrics of brand marketing aren't appropriate and vice versa

What does that mean?

It means if you're an individual and you're counting your facebook likes or your YouTube views you're making a big mistake

Because you're doing direct marketing in that sense you're measuring it, but you're measuring the wrong thing

and

That's gonna undermine your brand because we all know

That the best way to get a lot of clicks is to act like a porn site and left to its own devices

If it does nothing, but optimize sooner or later direct marketing on the internet

Races to the bottom because you're just trying to get a few clicks from a few people dumb enough to pay you something

And my argument is we need to race to the top. So we need to use Direct Marketing when we should and

Brand marketing the rest of the time. Yeah. I think it's a really good point, you know when?

Back-to-school timing hits and I hear those ads

Start pinging. Hey, you know you can get jeans that are usually 40 bucks for five bucks just for this week of time

I'm being hit with direct marketing and that's ringing my bell the trouble with direct marketing or advertising like that is

you know, it's can be expensive and sometimes it misses the mark and

We're being trained to ignore it. Oh, yeah

Yeah, I mean Lillian Vernon l.l.bean the reason you've heard of them Lands End because every time they spent 50 cents on stamps

They made a dollar 50 in profit

So they get it to infinity and that's the direct marketers dream get it right turn the dial

But when we think about the marketing that makes our culture better

It might have a little direct marketing piece to it. But mostly it's a brand marketing exercise

It also kind of reminds me of The Tortoise and the hare, right? Yeah

Brand marketing is the tortoises race. The hares is direct marketing or advertising

That's right, you know it can be quick and you know

You could spend five million dollars on a Superbowl ad and read everyone in one day

You know, but how long do we remember that or how's that resonating? What's the risk?

exactly

Can you weigh in on what seems to be the quintessential?

Brand marketing play today as we talk about it the Nike play and Colin Kaepernick

okay, so

There are a few things that need to be understood about Nike

Biggest one you are not a key. I am NOT Nike. Nike is a bit of a special case

Number two the vast majority of Nikes future and its present is overseas sales

So they're showing up and they're saying we're not Puma. We're not a ddos. We are Nike

Well, you don't you can't say that by pointing to your sneakers because in a blind taste test the sneakers are all the same

Right, unless you're an elite elite athlete. It's about something else

Well, Colin Kaepernick is a signal he's a symbol he stands for something and the other sneaker companies have been

Afraid to stand for what Colin Kaepernick stands for so is it risky?

Feeling to go into a divisive area of politics that I don't think should be divisive but has become divisive

Of course, it feels risky, but it was brilliant

It was brilliant because at the level Nike is playing now the number of ways that they can stand for something anything

Is very small and here with just two words

They were able to say us him we stand for something when you talk about Nike you are standing

You're talking about standing for something, right? And

The stock market has reflected that their market share has reflected that it's not easy for a brand to do something that singular

What's interesting is if Seagram's had done it where?

Mattress firm had done it or some other advertise. It wouldn't worked because they didn't have the DNA

To match it. It would have been stopped

This wasn't a stunt that people who knew Nike said, of course, it was very natural for them to do that. Yeah, you're right

They've they've been seeding the market from the beginning, you know from youth sports although an eye

and and they've also been

you know the disrupter if you want to use that buzzy word in their industry trying to do stuff differently and

Shake-up. Yeah when you and I were kids sneakers cost eight dollars, right? So as a

citizen I am thrilled that they've given this brave individual a platform to speak his mind as a

marketer a brand marketer

I look at that and say

If this is what the people at Nike truly believe is this is where they are going and it's a non

Cynical act on their part. I have to applaud it because the kind of person that

is

decrying this

Psychographically

Isn't their core audience. It's not what they look like. How old they are their income?

it's what they believe and they tend to not be an early adopter of fashion that

Person, well Nike is selling to the early adopter of fashion by the time their shoes are at Payless

They're not making any money at that end of the curve

They make money at the front of the curve and the front of the curve the early adopters

There are people who are playing with new ideas in the culture

They're not people who are trying to preserve old ideas in the culture

Let's talk about what could could go wrong or could have gone wrong and maybe if we try this on another brand?

You know what can other brands learn from this particular case study, you know in the you know, we stand for this

People like us do stuff like this. So let's talk about the anything a logo and a brand

Alright because companies spend way too much time on their logo. Just like people on YouTube spend way too much time on their hair

I'm told they spend way too much time in there

If Nike owned opened a hotel I think we would be able to guess pretty accurately what it would be like

If Hyatt came out with sneakers

We'd have no clue

Because Hyatt doesn't have a brand they have a logo

if I swap the signs on a hotel at that price point

It couldn't tell if you were to marry it to Hilton or the Hyatt the hallway the room. I don't know

Where am I no brand?

So what it means to have a brand is?

You've made a promise to people they have

Expectations it's a shorthand. What should I expect the next time and if that is distinct?

You've earned something

If it's not distinct, let's admit you make a commodity and you're trying to charge just a little bit extra for peace of mind

The problem that Hyatt and Hilton and Mary it and the rest have his sort by price

Because if I go online now to find a hotel, it's really simple sort by price

Why would I pay two hundred dollars extra to go a block away? I don't

So what's the value of a brand the value of a brand is how much extra am I paying?

above

the substitute and if I'm not paying extra, you don't have a brand so when we think about

What brands ought to do to move forward the most important thing is to not worry about your slogan your spokesperson

They're wrapping. It's to worry about the substance

work that matters for people who care find the people who care the smallest viable group you can live with

And figure out how to give them work that matters

So if we compare if we're stung the hotel thing there are hotels these new chains of mini boutique hotels

That charge double

What a Hayat might charge for less

But it's only less by the Hyatt measure it's way more

by the measure of someone who

Cares about with the people in the lobby look like who cares about how hip it feels to walk into the bar

They're investing not in. Oh you get a room with three power outlets. They're investing in throwing a party in a place

Where you also can sleep while you're on the road?

Those hotels have a brand and those hotels are some that some people pay extra for but almost no one in the scheme of things

Yeah, can we talk a little bit about?

Demographic versus psychographic. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, okay, so they're only used to be demographics

The only thing a marketer could pay attention

What kind of car do you drive? How old are you? What's your income? You could buy all of those things for mailing this company?

But once the internet showed up particularly Google but mostly Facebook we could say

This is for people who like that

This is for people who dream of that. This is for people who believe this. Those are psychographics

It doesn't matter what your skin color is. It doesn't matter what your income is. It's what's your narrative inside?

So going forward the old-school marketer still talks about demographics

They're wasting their time what we need to understand is in every zip code

There are people of almost every psychographic perception

And what we have to do is brand marketers to say it's for you and it's not for you

I didn't separate you because of who your parents were

I

Separated you because of what you believe and what you dream of if you want to switch what you dream and what you believe of

It might be for you. So I guy walk by the Supreme store. I see these people are idiots

Good because it's not for me. It's for them. Perfect. I like that. I like that a lot. So

You know search engines and social media websites are collecting data on us whether we know it or not whether we like it or not

but if so if I'm a marketer and I've got and I'm trying to build a brand then how do I

how do I find out who my audience is because I think sometimes

We think it's one audience exactly. We might be completely missing the mark exactly. Okay, so let's start with the data collection thing

Every time I go to Amazon

they rearrange the whole store for me and

Every time I go to a regular bookstore, I am frustrated because they don't

It but like what is what are the cat books?

I don't like cats every time you know, I'm coming just take all the cat books out of the store

They don't do that for me Amazon does so when this is done properly

People are happy it's being done because it's being done for them not to them when it's done improperly

It's when you get a phone call from your credit card company and they say we noticed you've been going to

A lot of singles bars and strip clubs. Here's a coupon for free venereal disease testing

You don't want that phone call because you didn't ask for that engagement with them, right? So it's not about privacy

It's about being surprised

Okay. So now we go to serve some people

I'll begin by saying I don't think you have any business being a marketer

Unless you have empathy for the people you are seeking to serve

So what do I mean by empathy? I mean

You don't know what I know. You don't want what I want. You don't believe what I believe

Here I made this it might be for you

now the best way to begin as an amateur marketer is to

Start with people who believe what you believe and want what you want great. Do you know who those people are?

Can you imagine them start there?

You will find some people in that segment because you made it for you, right?

So if you love to surf and to be on social media than inventing the hero camera

Probably a good idea because you knew what it's like to be one of those people

but

Sony should have invented to hear our camera and they didn't

Because there wasn't a professional market around the scene who said I don't surf I don't want to be on social media

but I could imagine what that would be like and

So we begin with that we begin by asserting what a group

Who believes a thing might want to do how do you do that?

Well, you can learn a lot by noticing you can learn a lot by thing. Why is there a line at the supreme store?

Why are people buying pokeballs right why are people doing this? Why are people doing that and those people? Who do that?

They're also doing this which has nothing to do with that

but they're all doing it is because they're all doing it or because there's something those things have in common a feeling and

So what our job is as marketers is to suss out that feeling make an assertion and then present it to those people

Not spend a lot of time in focus groups because people don't know what they want. They just know what they dream

So is your recommendation then you know?

Let's say I am

The GM right and and I'm looking just to create this product. Would you recommend then?

seeking out someone who has expertise in that area and bringing them on the team is like a

Consultant or full-time hire or should we all just eat drink and breathe

that subculture, you know for the next year and figure it out like

You know when I was

Building Yoyodyne. We were hiring a lot of people

So we took out a full-page ad in The New York Times

Which was super fun to do and 500 people showed up and we interviewed them in groups

It was really cool

And we sat around the table the groups of eight and the question I asked the group of eight is working together

There was no Google that no smart phones working together

Figure out how many gas stations there are in the United States?

And what would happen around that table? Every time two people would say I'll take notes

two people would say

Whatever anyone else suggested no, that's wrong. We don't know the answer

Two people would say not much of anything and then two people would lead this conversation

It's really fascinating and you can guess who I hired

But every once in a while

Someone would say I don't know. I don't have a car

And that was really frustrating to me. It wasn't a question of how many guest agents. Have you seen in your life?

it was

Figure out how to be wrong on the way to being right how to make this series of assertions about where to go. So

When you think about the people who built I don't know dropbox dropbox

was built to solve a personal need

That's great as far as it goes, but if you want to be a professional marketer

You got to do it again for somebody else's need

And the way you do that is by gaining the empathy to imagine what it is to be in their shoes

Don't have to be a woman to make pantyhose. You just have to be empathic

Let's shift gears and talk a little bit about mission driven companies. I

mean, it's been a

slow burn so TOMS shoes and Warby Parker and you know

These are some of the standout kind of cliche case studies. We talk about all the time

But mission driven or Purpose Driven or maybe what you're saying work that matters?

Maybe they're one in the same

how do we how do we get there and if we're not thinking about this should we and

If we should then how should we reframe or re?

Configure what we've already got going

well, I

think the words matter so I mean

I've known you for about almost ten years. Now, you are running a mission-driven organization. I know what your mission is and you have

kept - your mission

through thick and thin

That doesn't mean you are giving shoes to kids in Rwanda

It means you seek to make change you are changing

group of people who do work with leverage

You can visualize who those people are and the people who aren't those people you're not trying to change them

you have a mission the medium could change you could stop using video and switch to podcasting, but your mission would be

Consistent and so I begin there which is too often. We get hung up by reverse engineering our mission

We say I'm making money doing X, so I will come up with a phrase that will let me keep doing X

That's not what you or I are talking about

When I think about someone like Blake at TOMS shoes

Blake wanted to have a business that made money

But also cared very much about the footprint that he was leaving behind. No pun intended with Tom's and

So then yes, they can make coffee and they can make sunglasses and they can make the other things that they've tried to make

Because it's not about shoes

It's how do I get an early adopter of fashionista? Who wants a story?

She can tell her friends to be able to buy a product. That's gonna have a better

Positive impact on the world than the one she's currently buying

That's the mission back to psychographic exactly and you know

So Warby Parker, they don't make a big deal of the fact that every time you pair by a pair of glasses

They give one away. That's not why they want you to buy a pair of glasses

what they've said is

For the kind of person who has better taste than they have a bank account right more desire to impress then they have cash

how do we use the Delta between

What luxottica would charge for these glasses and what we would charge for these glasses to create?

convenience and a vibe of fitting in alright because it's interesting if you couple things I could say about war be

Before war be open retail stores

They didn't know a what a retail store would look like that would work for them and be where to put it

So what they did was they bought a school bus and they outfitted the school bus

like a store and

then they would go on social media and say the store will be here and they would park the bus in different places and

Any place the bus did well, that's where they knew a store would do

Well like a food truck right, but it was brewing because it wasn't a food truck just to be a food truck

it was intended to be a test of the store direct marketing thinking there a direct marketing company, but the other thing that's interesting is

the cost to Warby to have 10 times as many glasses as they have would be zero to have every you know,

They don't sell these I'm glad because I'm the only one who has them, but they could sell these why don't they?

because

We'll be saying people like us wear glasses like these

You don't have that many choices and so you can't screw up

There's only 20 or 30 looks to look to choose from that's exactly how many the slightly insecure

fashion-forward glasses shopper wants to look at and

Wore B's bet is that they can sell that person a new pair of glasses every three to six months

Whereas if it was looks odd, okay, you can't afford right. So again, the psychographic is what's baked in

Warby isn't busy running ads of people who live in foreign lands who don't have glasses. That's not their story

That's not the story that resonates with the people they seek to serve

Yeah, and if I can add to that, I think that they use a user experience company exactly

So it's one of the smoothest user experiences I've ever had on the West super-convenient down respect

Yeah, and it's quick and and they have a Zappos Amazon like, you know customer service return policy. There's lots of things going for them

That's awesome

How about the the white space?

I like to talk about the white space, you know things that we're missing in marketing what our marketers missing

I mean if you're a career marketer, you've done it all and

You know, I've been on the client side. I you know, I worked for a big company

we had a big P&L and I did everything radio and TV and

billboards and I took over the internet and spent gobs of money, but like

What what don't I know about right now that I'm missing well, I think the two biggest things are connected number one

Your factor isn't worth much anymore

It used to be worth everything so you had to defend the factory

You got to say this is what we know how to make so this is what we sell

but now

Everything's a click away so you can sell anything you want. So don't come at this as the customers wrong

I have this briefcase full of stuff. This is what I have to sell. It's how can I solve this person's problem?

How can I market with them instead of at them and the second thing is attention used to be cheap. I

Think about it the phrase CPM

Damn doesn't stand for a million. It stands for a thousand

I'm not sure why cause per thousand we're buying people's lives a thousand at a time for pocket change and

Since it's so cheap what the hell put a talking bear up do this interrupt this crazy, Eddy, whatever it's cheap

We'll just try something else tomorrow

and now it's not

Like all of a sudden now, it's not now

It's really expensive a thousand two fans ten thousand true fans

It's enough to build a whole company a hundred thousand, true fans. You're all it's a homerun

100 thousand, that's it

so the mindset of oh

I don't have to just show up arrogantly saying I insist I can show up and listen and assert and

Everyone is not the goal cannot be the goal someone so

How is then that helped you with your marketing channels, you know

You've got these products or services whether it's the LT MBA or the the marketing seminars that what we're calling it

Yes marque semenovka or your podcasts akimbo or your ongoing blog or new books?

So I got super lucky

because I decided I

Didn't want more

I'm looking over your shoulder. And Tom Peters book is on you right over your shoulder

And I talked to Tom he was my hero. I actually met him in 1983 when I was 23 years old and

I

Was on stage he was coming on

After we were doing our tech check

I was holding my three-year-old because he had come down with me for the weekend and

At the time tom was doing between 90 and 105 speeches a year. I

Have a picture of him sleeping on a park bench in Siberia to the Siberian Airport. I said Tom

What how did you like what and he said I used to be able to do a great Tom Peters invitation

I can't do it anymore

He said I had no choice. I have no choice. This is what I do. So it's like a shark

it's like what he does and

I looked at that and I said I don't want more I don't want what Tom's got. I don't want the biggest blog

I don't wanna have the number one best-selling book. I am NOT interested in whatever I would have to do to get more I

Am happy with enough to do it for the people

Who want me to do it with them because I made that decision

I was able to stumble on this idea of the smallest viable audience. So

The all 10 be a which is one of the most successful program of its kind has had three thousand graduates

That's all three thousand

So yes, it's many times bigger than Stanford Business School, but no, it's not three hundred thousand fine

The marking seminar. My blog is read by I guess like a million people six thousand. I've taken the marketing seminar

Could I have goosed it to sixty thousand of course I could but that I wouldn't be me and so my posture has been

Don't level up on staff don't level up on spend

Put all of it into better not more because if you can make better and afford to make better because you have true fans

maybe they'll tell their friends and

maybe you can do this work and

doing this work is my privilege and

So I'm totally fine. If it's not for you great, please don't come I have there's no squeeze play

There's no lowering the price for 12 hours metabolic why I don't need to do that don't want

Well, and that's how you've built your brand. So I guess the follow-up question to that is

How can we use what should be our guiding principles, you know, is it our personal value system as a quality of life?

What can be the compass to know how to build our brand because you've you said you got lucky

I mean, I don't know about that. I mean it seems

Like it was pretty calculated and very strategic, but you went and I've gone down this path

And I'm sure there's been some twists and turns whatnot. But how can then the rest of us?

Create the compass. What is our compass?

Well, I think you got to tell yourself the truth and it's so like author so many authors have been to see me

I love authors. So what's your goal? I want to make change happen

So do you care about being in the New York Times bestseller list?

Well, yeah, I need to because then they'll help me make change ever really

Really because I could tell you how to be on the New York Times bestseller list

but you have to trade this this and this for it and

many of them do

Because they're not actually keeping track of what got them started. They're using other people's metrics to do their work and

That's as bad as having a boss

It's worse because now you're in this cycle so we know how to double your the number of Twitter users

We know how to make sure that there's more of this or more that and you justify but you know

I have to make my editor happy and I have to do this and it no you don't

What you need to do is get clear about who's it for and what's it for and if you are clear

Like Howard Schultz was clear. He said I

Need America to drink better coffee

Well, that's your mission

Then yes, you need 19,000 Starbucks. Yes, you need to serve things throughout the day in the night

Yes, you have to be ok with you know still quest off because you can't figure out how you get the supply chain, right?

That's all comes with I want all of America to drink better coffee

But on the other hand, there's a guy who's got, you know, four coffee shops in New York City

He says I want to make better coffee period for people who want it

He works with people he cares about his cashflow is positive

he does the craft he wants to do and it's not someone else's agenda because he's not a public company and doesn't want to be

So both are available

But be consistent and the mistake that happens is someone has four little coffee shops

They say that that's what they want to do

But then they keep compromising so they can have 18 coffee shops that are now pretty sucky. I don't know why you did that

well zooming out then I mean it sounds like and

I love this idea of business being so personal it sounds like to be

The quintessential brand marketer, it really has to start right here has to start with us

We have to be clear about what we really want. So Phil Knight is saying, you know, we want to be the company

the brand that stands up for

People that is on the right set of history that does the right thing

So I'm sure he knows profits and I'm sure he did some math

I'm sure it's not all altruistic. But those are the types of like value based decisions. We're making right the quality of life

How much time we want to spend at home versus traveling a hundred days out of the year? Yeah, well

Whatever job you do whether you're a brand marketer or an accountant, I hope at some point you said what's in here?

I don't think we need to be altruistic

But I think we need to be some true istic meaning we are true to some people for some people

They can't believe how great this thing

We made is for some people they would cross the street to get it and if I go down the list of modern brands

That is true all of them. So Procter & Gamble

Unilever brands not so much because they own shelf space and they own

Acres of TV the TV's getting too expensive they could probably hold on in the shelf space for a while to come

But that's not most of us

most of us are not seeing they're saying crystal like crystal like Crystal Light because the fact is there aren't that many people who are

bound up in the story of Crystal Light

But if you wanted to build an important new brand if you want to grow the brand

You've got you can't use the old technique because we know it doesn't work anymore

And so what can you do to make a bigger impact which is you can be some twisted you can be obsessed with

some people and

Make them so happy to hear from you that

They open your email that they call you on the phone that they wait in line to see you at the booth that they tell

Their friends and tell their friends and tell their friends that begins with someone

Caring enough to have the grit to say we're gonna make good stuff not lousy stuff

So how is it being back and sort of traditional publishing?

You know back to sort of blocking and tackling making books like you've done in the past. Yeah, so of course, I'm a hypocrite

I have

Repeatedly said it's my last book

I've repeatedly said the publishing industry is so crippled by the shift that I have to

Respect the people in it, but politely decline but here I am back with my friends at penguin portfolio

The first reason is because as the seminar developed I realized I needed a book and I know how to publish my own books

but when I thought about the mechanics of that I realized I needed a team of people who would do it justice and

These were the best people

But I couldn't help myself. So the other thing that we did which we haven't announced at all

Which is we're going to talk about after the book comes out is I actually made

19 extra covers for the book. Okay, and here's a couple of them

Can't show them to you in too much detail because it's sort of a secret but what we're going to do

like my creative director and I did them all ourselves all

18 of these covers. So there's like an alternate cover like in a magazine like you write Sports Illustrated does exactly several different athletes

Right same magazine different cover. So what's gonna happen is if you buy an 8 pack of the book from

800 CEO Reed who I'm working with. They're gonna put in the 8 pack

Eight of these covers. You don't know which 8 you're gonna get collect and trade them kind of thing plus like

800 or $1000 worth of

free slots or discounted slot discounted slots in the videos from the seminar

So you get all this juicy stuff for the cost of the 8 books and I got to tell you after the book was done

Yeah, because you could there's lead times and publishing. So now you like you have all this energy, but the books done

so it was months of work to

Make the envelope and the custom covers and the flip side of the posters and I loved that

I was just such joy because I'm only making 2,000 of them and I knew that only 2,000 people are gonna touch this

but that made it even better because it was like

Okay, we get to roll up our sleeves and be craftsmen to celebrate this other thing we're doing

So we didn't announce it in advance because we don't want people to just wait for it

But it's gonna come out right after the book launches. That's so cool. You are the master of creating scarcity

You you love this idea, right? Yeah, I love it because it creates value

yeah, it does, you know limited time or there's I'm only making 10 of these or

Yeah, it does right so part of it is

Tension, which is what we know is before anyone says, yes, they get like this in any field you

have to as a marketer willingly dance with that tension because you're creating it right and

Then on top of it scarcity creates value

but what it does for me is the Creator is it lets me off the hook from infinity and

Infinity has never been my friend because if you are

Making YouTube videos and you get a million

Visits you say well, why didn't I get two million?

Why didn't I get four million and what I get satisfaction out of the same

Sorry so that cuz now I know I couldn't have gotten any more cuz I don't have anymore. It makes me

Emotionally more connected to the work than having to say, this is for everyone and I need six billion

Somehow that makes a lot of sense

Can I get a little bit personal too and just ask you? You know, I know you always say when I ask you

So what's next you know next is what I'm working on right now. This is what I'm most interested in

You know

I've been there and I've done that that's fine. But like at some point

Share a little bit of the Seth dream with us

Like are you I mean we're out here sort of, you know, upstate, you know up up the traffic halfway to sing-sing prison. Yeah

is

the goal to like retire in Italy at some point or like you're gonna have this, you know,

Seth part two and you're gonna be some gourmet chef or create a chocolate factory like what are some of the

What are some of the dreams and aspirations that you've got?

You know, I won the dream and aspiration Lottery a long time ago

So if I wanted to live in Italy I could live in Italy and the internet makes it even easier

I almost started top elite company. I was four days away from it

when I

Tasted rogue chocolate I met Sean asked a nosy I said, I can't make chocolate better than rogue

And I can't be a better person than Sean

So all it would be as a marketing project and I'm already doing marketing project. Let these guys

sell chocolate

Every once in a while I play with the idea of starting a significant entity a software company or something like that because I see

The niches in the market but more and more

I'll just call somebody up some CEO of the public companies they used to go through this so I don't have to

Have that conversation today, I hope that works, but the

essence of it is this

For someone who's lucky enough to be able to do almost anything. He wants this is what I want to do

I want to be a teacher. I want to be somebody who helps turn on lights and

helps people not everybody some people see things that they can't unsee and

It's always in the service. How do I make this place?

I'd rather live with my kids than it was yesterday

Because if we could all figure out how to do that that positive cycle, I think that's what makes culture matter

So yeah tomorrow morning. I will wake up and I've done what I'm supposed to do for my publisher

I'm off the hook, and I haven't written anything new and I'm not building a new course right now

I've got the courses we run because they work and I want to run them again

And I've got the team of people in 40 countries who worked with me on various projects

And I trust them and I love them and I want to do it again

but

It would be very hard for me to stop doing this right now I

Gave up. The airplanes has been

Hard, but I've mostly done it now. I'm down to one a month

But other than that everything else about what I do is a privilege our true privilege

You