Over at Seth Godin’s blog, a recent post describing the philosophy of “new marketing” intrigued me.
Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…
Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three). Repeat.
If they don’t love it, you need a new product. Start over.
This idea seems so simple and obvious and really just the fundamentals of marketing. Yet it is so new, scary, and shocking to those used to the old way of doing things. In the past it was easy for a large corporation to simply buy up alot of airtime, unveil a new product, and tell a certain group of people that they are supposed to like it. Now the feedback is even more important than the unveiling. In fact the unveiling is dead.
Once again you have to start by winning people over, a small group of people. You have to start giving customers your ideas before you can ever start selling them your products.
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