Why Seth Godin's approach to marketing is wrong for the arts

Godin's right about something. A departure from the marketing mantras of the past half century is overdue. Knowledge workers in creative industries never really had their hearts in a formulaic approach to selling commodified products. There simply wasn't a better marketing vocabulary available to them, despite the fact that many were improvising and customizing approaches of their own.

Not that the four P's weren't adaptable, nor that Godin's five elements don't require a lot of work to actuate in real life, but there was nevertheless a need to think about marketing in a way that connected people in relationships that produced experience-based transactions. And of course the business of the arts is the sale of experiences more than of products or services in the conventional sense.

All well and good, except that Godin indulges himself in some of the same priestly platitudes that allowed the four P's to dominate marketing thought in inappropriate places. This really annoys me, because Godin had an opportunity to usher readers into a new relationship between the business clergy and the cultural laity. But in some ways, his approach is utterly conventional.

Let me get the numbers game out of the way first. Numbers have become part of prescriptive pronouncements for as long as there have been priests, or politicians, self-help gurus, and consultants. There was some validity to the notion that it helped the laity remember all the key points of the scheme being offered to them. Cicero argued that three was the quantity of talking points most easily assimilated in classical rhetoric, hence the lulling rhythms of phrases such as, "blood, sweat, and tears," pepper political speeches still today.

The outright numbering of points raises that limit by putting everyone on notice about how many there are, whether or not there is any thematic or logical coherence to them. It puts the onus on the student to find a way to remember it all, as if there will be a quiz later.

In fact, the numbering of points has become essential to the marketing of these schemes, and often becomes more important than the actual points being numbered. For example we rarely hear mention of AA's recovery program without the "12-step," label. Nor do the 'P's of marketing get mentioned without first stating that there are four of them. And Godin, while sounding as if he's departed from this pattern, gives us five elements. Not four, because that would be too few, and not six, because that would be too many. The Godin prescription is for precisely five because five is the right number of elements for right thinking people when it comes to marketing.

It's not the numbers I object to, it's the way his message is transmitted and received to those who are most in need of hearing it. I agree that his five element scheme is an improvement on the old four element scheme. What I object to is the hackneyed reliance on numbers to create the impression of a coherent whole, to make some disparate ideas and an idiosyncratic perspective seem more systematic and therefore credible.

Godin's five elements accommodate the arts in a way that the four P's and other commercially oriented marketing schemes could not. In fact, one of its virtues is that it delivers a little less than it promises as a prescription for change. Its value cannot be realized until a company is deep into the process of figuring out how each of the elements pertains to them and what they might do to exploit the opportunities it reveals to them. The four P's was more of a checklist that offered structure to the process of creating marketing plans and executing them. The five elements is less confining in terms of structure and process, and therefore more demanding of its users.

I just wish Godin had gone beyond saying that the last borrowed marketing model was inadequate or obsolete, not just because of what it recommended, but also because it borrowed from one economic sector, industry, or enterprise, and tried to transpose it's "wisdom" onto another. Rightly or wrongly, his bold language suggests that he is offering his prescription in the same way.

Godin's approach doesn't work because it's right for all times and all forms of enterprise; it works precisely because it demands adaptation to the specifics of the enterprise to have any value at all. It just seems obvious that, in the same way that product, price, place, and promotion fail to capture all that needs to be considered when marketing certain categories of products at this point in our history, his five elements will meet the same fate in certain categories in the future.

Rather than suffer the same dismissal as the four P's, how much better it would be for him to soften the language of his prescription, acknowledge the category limits of his scheme, and encourage adaptations that are enterprise-specific. Had he done so, his work would be a true departure from the customary treatment of this subject in the realm of cultural enterprise, and I could take fuller satisfaction from the intelligence of his prescription.

But who am I to complain. He is Seth Godin and he has five elements in his conception of marketing. He has laid waste to the four element scheme, so I can only succeed him by promoting six. Like nuclear proliferation or the latest advances in disposable razors, the highest number substantiates the value of the proposition. Even as I accept his recommendation, I recognize that it is limited in its applicability and durability. I suppose you would say that it, like all business theory and practice, is time-bound. But until someone says it, we in the arts will always be susceptible to the misapplication of inappropropriate or obsolete models that we will try to employ long after the end of their useful lives.

Real innovators in this field will invite their readers to modify or reject their recommendations according to the exigencies of their enterprise, rather than rejecting one scheme in favour of another as if a paradigm had shifted, when in fact there was never really a unified paradigm at work in the sectors from which these schemes are imported.


Photo credit: from The Independent Aunties of Ms. Evalyn Parry
Post by Doug.