The Marketer's Job
Why Blair Warren's famous sentence is really about empathy.
"Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem." - Seth Godin
In 2005, direct-response copywriter named Blair Warren released a 13-page report called The One Sentence Persuasion Course.
As the title suggests, the entire 8,500-word report revolves around a single sentence:
“People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies.”
One well-known marketing company even promises that mastering Warren’s ideas will get people to “do your bidding.”
C.S. Lewis once observed that, “what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
I think that’s exactly what’s happening here.
Some people have come to think of marketing as something that is done to our audience. It’s a manipulation, a shortcut, a theft of attention.
I don’t think Warren was describing how to manipulate people.
I think he was describing what empathy looks like.
The things that his sentence describe got there before you did. We all have dreams, failures, fears, suspicions, and yes, even enemies.
The job of the marketer isn’t to create them. It’s to notice them.
We often imagine persuasion as arm-twisting or casting a spell on someone long enough to pick their pocket.
But persuasion isn’t something we do to people at all. It’s something people experience when they feel understood. It is the result of alignment.
And long-term customer relationships aren’t coerced from an audience, they emerge from trust.
Effective marketing in agriculture hinges on empathy and service.
The best marketers have stopped asking, “How do I get people to buy this?”
But instead, they are posing the question, “Who does my customer want to become?”
The best marketers don’t manufacture desire; they recognize it. They don’t invent problems, they give language to them. They don’t interrupt people’s stories, they enter them.
Because the goal of marketing was never to get people to do your bidding. Yuck.
The goal is to understand people well enough to build something they’re grateful exists.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.