Seth Godin: Profile of a Marketing Guru

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There's no receptionist, and visitors enter a public area with brightly colored furniture and an open kitchen. One shelf is lined with toys familiar to any Godin reader: the plastic baby figures from the cover of Small Is the New Big; the wooden Pinocchio that inspired All Marketers Are Liars, as well as the Marketing Guru action figure.

A Stanford MBA

Godin has deep roots in marketing. After graduating from Stanford Business School at 23, he worked as a brand manager at a software company, and in 1992 founded Internet marketing outfit Yoyodyne. The company had some big-name clients such as MCI and American Express (AXP), but was spending too long—up to six months—to make a sale. "So I thought, what if I write a book about what we do?" he explains. In his first hit, Permission Marketing, he argues that because attention is increasingly scarce and traditional mass media ads reach thousands, perhaps millions, of people who aren't interested in what's being sold, companies need to engage in more personal conversations with consumers who agree—or give permission—to accept direct communications, including special offers and new product announcements. Considered radical at the time, his notion of "turning strangers into friends and friends into customers," as the book's subtitle promises, is only more relevant today as companies grapple with how to market within social networks.

In late 1998, Yahoo! (YHOO) bought Yoyodyne for $30 million in stock and made Godin its vice-president for direct marketing. "My job was to teach people to think the way we did," he says. He soon decided he preferred writing books, which allowed him to play the change-agent role on a larger scale. Since then, through trial and error, he has developed a winning formula: brief, simple books with eye-catching covers and provocative titles—and no business-speak. Tribes, for example, is a 147-page, anecdote-filled call to readers to become leaders of a movement, or "tribe."

"He's successful in part because of his breezy style," says dean Roger Martin of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. "People want 'edutainment,' not some dry content that reminds them of university."

Learning From Experience

Most of Godin's ideas are based on his own background, from his days running a temp service as an undergraduate at Tufts University through a (failed) subscription-based record label to his years at Yoyodyne. Many of those experiences involve the early use of new technology: He recognized the opportunity of Web-based marketing before most people had even heard of the Internet and launched his blog in January 2002. This hands-on experience makes his insights particularly valuable in a period of tech-driven change.

Godin's ability to synthesize and combine topics helps account for his broad influence. "Some people want a deep dive; they want metrics. But if you want someone to take a complicated topic and boil it down to the core, that's Seth," says John Moore, a brand consultant and former Whole Foods Market (WFMI) marketing director. Godin finds patterns of behavior and general problems that exist in seemingly unrelated fields. He sees Mary Anne Davis, a potter at one of his seminars, grappling with the same problem as executives at Boeing (BA): How do you market effectively when your products aren't the kind people buy based on an ad? And this focus on the general rather than the specific explains part of Godin's wide appeal. "The big win is when I say something that's just vague enough that it's useful, but people think I wrote it just for them," he says.

Not everyone joins in the Godin lovefest, of course. Editors at The Journal of Marketing Research complained that Permission Marketing "overpromised" and didn't adequately explain how marketers should gain permission. Others charge he simply repackages old ideas in colorful language without offering enough substance. And some argue his writing celebrates the obvious. "So he has a concept that you offer something different," strategy consultant Donald Mitchell says of Purple Cow. "Every person who's taken a basic marketing course already knows that. But how do you do that? The devil is in the details."

Godin's fans contend his approach is valid, even if nontraditional. "There is plenty of room for a Clayton Christensen and a Jim Collins and a Seth Godin," says consultant Peters, citing two other marketing mavens. "So Seth doesn't have as many charts and whatnot. So what? He doesn't promise to."

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design on BusinessWeek.com.