How You Get Your Ideas Spend | Seth Godin

How You Get Your Ideas Spend | Seth Godin 

I'll give you four specific examples, and I'll explain to them at the end about how Silk tripled its sales by doing one thing. How artist Jeff Koons managed to go from being a nobody to making a lot of money and having a lot of impacts, to the way Frank Gehry redefined what it means to be an architect. And to one of my failures as a seller in recent years, a trademark I started that had a CD called "Sauce.

But before that, I want to tell you about sliced bread and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. Sliced bread was invented in 1910. Do you know what they said about that? That it's the greatest invention from ... the telegraph, or something. But this guy, Otto Rohwedder, invented sliced bread and focused, like all inventors, on the actual patenting and production. What needs to be said about the invention of sliced bread is that in the first 15 years since sliced bread was available, no one bought it, no one knew about it. It was a total failure. And the reason is that until Wonder appeared and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. So the success of sliced bread like the success of the things we were discussing at this conference is not necessarily about what kind of patent it is or what factory it is about, but about how you can spread your idea, or not. And I think the way you're going to get what you want or make a difference, to make things happen, is to figure out the way to make your ideas known.



And it doesn't matter if you have a cafe or you're an intellectual or a businessman, or you fly hot air balloons. I think this rule applies to everything, regardless of the field of activity. What we are experiencing now is the result of a century of dispersal of ideas. People who can spread ideas, no matter what kind of ideas, are successful. And I usually talk about business because it provides the most eloquent examples that can be inserted into a presentation and because it's the easiest way to keep track. But I would like you to forgive me for these examples because I talk about whatever you decide is useful.



The basic idea of disseminating ideas is a television and things like that. Television and the media help to spread ideas in a certain way. I call this the television-industry complex. The way it works is that you can buy ads, you can interrupt people from what they do, that gives you distribution. And you use this distribution to sell more products. And from the profit obtained in this way you can buy more advertising. And so did the military and industrial complexes that functioned some time ago. As I heard yesterday if we could get to the first page of Google. if we could find a way to be promoted there if we could figure out how to take the man by the neck, and tell him what we wanted to do. If we do that, everyone will be careful and we will win. This television-industry complex informed me of all my childhood, as well as you. All these products were successful precisely because someone realized how to reach people in a surprising way, not necessarily with a repetitive advertisement once and again, until you buy.



What happened is that they silenced the television industry. And in just a few years, anyone who sells something has discovered that marketing doesn't work the way it used to. This picture is a little moving, I'm sorry, I had a cold when I did it. But the product in the blue box in the middle is my work. I'm at the pharmacy, I'm sick, I have to buy some medicine. $ 100 million for TV commercials and magazines or spam and coupons and payments for shelf space and merchandising so that in the end I ignore any message sent. And I ignored them because I don't really need a painkiller. I bought a yellow box because I always took it. And I don't want to spend a minute solving his problem. because I don't care.


This magazine is called "Hydrate". There are 180 pages about water.


Water articles, water commercials. Imagine what it was like 40 years ago when there was only the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. We now have water magazines. A new product from Coca Cola Japan: water salad.