HerMoney Podcast Episode 184: Building Your Personal Brand With Marketing Guru Seth Godin

Trying to make the most of hermoney podcast episode 184? You are in the right place. Below we break it down in plain English, with practical tips you can actually use.

Key Takeaways

• How good are you at keeping your word?
• Your answer has everything to do with the strength of your personal brand.
• On this week’s episode of the HerMoney podcast, we’re going deep!

How good are you at keeping your word? Your answer has everything to do with the strength of your personal brand.

On this week’s episode of the HerMoney podcast, we’re going deep! We’re diving right in for some introspection, and we’re going to flip the script a little bit by asking you a question:  Are you the kind of person who always follows through? Someone who always , or almost always , keeps their promises?

If you’re feeling guilty already, don’t, because this week’s guest, Seth Godin, has some motivation for all of us that’s going to change the way we think about our word and our personal brand. Seth is the author of an incredible 19 books, including the worldwide best-sellers “Linchpin,” “The Dip” and “This Is Marketing.” He’s the founder of workshops including the ALT-MBA, and ‘The Marketing Seminar,’ which more than 10,000 people have taken, and if that weren’t enough, he’s also an entrepreneur and in 2018 was inducted into the Marketing Hall Of Fame.

Seth says that the strength of your personal brand , and perhaps even your entire career , hinges on a single question: Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Seth says that you tell people who you are every day, at every interaction, without even realizing it. Because your personal brand all comes down to what people expect when they engage with you , and in that way, your brand is nothing but a promise … a promise you’d be wise to keep!

Listen in as Seth tells us all what good marketing looks like, how spam is “in the eye of the beholder” and how we should never (ever) spend money to make short-term pain go away. He also dishes on how our “lizard brains” (the parts of us that still make us wild animals) are influencing our decisions day to day, and how we can tame these parts of ourselves and tune into what’s in our best interest.

In Mailbag, Jean tackles the question of where to invest money once you’ve maxed out your 401(k) and addresses the best way for someone in their early 50s to save for retirement. She also advises a woman who rents out part of her home, is considering getting liability insurance and is looking into refinancing her home loan.

Lastly, in Thrive, Jean takes on the fact that some private colleges are , shockingly , lowering tuition, but there’s more to this story than meets the eye. As these institutions lower their sticker cost, they’re taking away scholarships and other discounts. The big takeaway? Always look at the net cost of what you’re paying for college before you commit. 

Transcript

Jean Chatzky: (00:06) HerMoney is supported by Fidelity Investments. We want you to demand more from your money, so start by knowing what you own and what you owe. We’ll help you take the next step that fidelity.com/demandmorenow. HerMoney comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody, it’s Jean Chatzky. Thank you so much for joining us today and I should warn you that in today’s show we are going deep. We’re diving right in for a little bit of introspection and I am going to flip the script and start by asking all of you a question. Are you the kind of person who always follows through? Are you somebody who always or almost always keeps their promises? If you’re already feeling guilty, don’t hit pause because I am already feeling guilty, but we are going to learn a lot about this and so much more today from our guest, Seth Godin, who is the author of 19 books, numerous of them bestsellers, you’ve heard of them Linchpin, The Dip, This is Marketing. He’s got workshops galore, including me, Alt MBA and the Marketing Seminar and tens of thousands of people have taken those workshops. And in 2018 he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame. Seth, welcome.

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Seth Godin: (01:41) Thank you Jean. It’s good to talk to you.

Jean Chatzky: (01:43) Thank you so much for being here today. You’re actually with me on Skype. You’re closer to my home than I am.

Seth Godin: (01:51) Well, I’m watching out for you, making sure that there’s no intruders or bad weather or anything.

Jean Chatzky: (01:55) I appreciate it. I know you have been at this for a long time. You have to have been at this for a long time to write 19 books, but one of the things that you’re famous for is saying that the strength of your personal brand and maybe even the strength of your entire career hinges on that question. Do you do what you say you’re going to do? Can you talk about where that came from and why it’s so true?

Seth Godin: (02:24) Well, there are two things that are in shortage everywhere we look, even among the wealthiest communities. And those two things are attention and trust. So people are, companies are dealing with the attention problem by spamming everyone they can, calling us at home during dinner, making come-ons and promises. And at the same time that they’re stealing our attention, they are burning our trust. The alternative is to beat one of those voices that when it shows up as welcome, one of those people we look forward to hearing from, someone like you, and then creating trust. And the only way that I know to create trust is to make promises and then keep them. And if someone makes a series of promises to you and then keeps them, you are significantly more likely to trust them next time.

Jean Chatzky: (03:14) I was reading the Wall Street Journal this morning, I don’t know if you saw this same article that I did about how the world of spam calls is now transforming into a world of spam texts. And hearing you talk about these unwelcome intruders in life, it makes me think about some of the texts that I’m getting from marketers lately. And some of them are absolutely unwelcome, but some of them are funnily enough, kind of welcome. My team knows, they’re gonna laugh at this, but I shop at a consignment store frequently called The Rundabout. I like it because they have excellent stuff and I pick up good finds at amazing prices and they text me and I don’t mind. And I guess that’s sort of what you’re talking about here.

Seth Godin: (03:59) Yeah. If they’re texting you and you don’t mind, then it’s not spam. Spam is in the eye of the beholder. If the recipient thinks it’s spam, then it’s spam. And the problem is most marketers are selfish, narcissistic, short-term profit seekers and they don’t care about anything except themselves. So what they will do is send a hundred messages, 97% of the people think they’re spam, 3 people think they’re not. And they consider that a good day. Well, I came up on the other side of the tracks from that. When we invented email marketing all those years ago, we had a 76% open rate and a 33% response rate.

Jean Chatzky: (04:39) Wow.

Seth Godin: (04:39) Which is about a thousand times what a typical marketer has today because we only wrote to people who wanted to hear from us. And it’s simple to think that I’m a fuddy duddy, but it’s, in fact, the secret of just about every successful entity. So if we think about something like Amazon, which is one of the most valuable companies in the world, what do they own exactly? They don’t have super valuable warehouses. They don’t have technology that other people can’t copy. What they own is permission and trust from 60 million people. That’s all you need. Permission and trust.

Jean Chatzky: (05:17) You mentioned your upbringing. Tell me a little bit more about it. How did you get so smart about this?

Seth Godin: (05:23) Well, I’m not sure if I’m smarter if I just make more mistakes than most people.

Jean Chatzky: (05:28) Wait, that can’t be true.

Seth Godin: (05:30) In 1989, 1990 I created one of the first online computer games. Before the internet, even before AOL for a company called Prodigy. And I had a long think around then because I came from the book business, in the media business, so I understood what was about to come. And I realized that there was going to be in a world where you could send people a note for free, a huge amount of spam, and that led to the idea of permission marketing, which led to a book which led to a company and then I became a VP at Yahoo in charge of their direct marketing because I saw that attention wasn’t going to get expanded. We don’t have any more time. All we have is ways to spend the time and the people who steal it from us, they’re not people we trust very much.

Jean Chatzky: (06:23) It’s so funny, God, I have not heard the word Prodigy in that context in such a long time and it tells you how old I am, but Prodigy was before AOL, it was, Oh, there was another one. It began with a C. What was the other?

Seth Godin: (06:39) CompuServe.

Jean Chatzky: (06:39) CompuServe. Oh my God. And it changed my life as a reporter because I was working at that point as a reporter at Smart Money Magazine and then at Money Magazine and all of a sudden we were able to talk to real people. To find real people to talk to for our stories in a way that was so much easier than it ever was before because of AOL and Prodigy and email. And I’m sure we were not always welcome or trusted, but it certainly changed the job and the life that I had at that point. When we talk about these brands that are welcome and that are not welcome and that waste our time and that don’t waste our time, I think as individuals, we want to be the good guys, right? We want to not be the time-wasters. We don’t see ourselves that way, but how do we shape ourselves to be thought of in that way?

Seth Godin: (07:35) Okay. So now we’re budding right into cultural standards and the way different people talk to themselves differently. So there is a misunderstanding, widely held that powerful people talk loudly and frequently that if you’re not exactly sure of what you’re doing, particularly if you’re a woman, you should say nothing. But on the other hand, if what you’re doing is really key, you should stand up and shout it from the hills. And most of this was invented to maintain status roles, to maintain power for people in power. That what we said to people is, you don’t have a microphone, you can’t talk. You don’t have a reputation, you’re not welcome at this table. And as you pointed out, the internet and the bulletin boards before, it changed so numerous rules about geography, about who’s allowed to speak about who we get to talk to. And in the face of all that change, we looked to the social networks into others to tell us what the rules were. So there are people, and you and I both know them, who post an update on Twitter every five minutes who are constantly grooming their Instagram account, who will ask you for a favor every day or two because they can. But just because you can doesn’t mean it’s effective. What’s way more effective is to be part of a tightly woven community that would miss you if you were gone. If you didn’t show up, would people say, where are they? That trust, that dependence because you are a part of something, that’s the longterm asset that leads to the ability to make change happen.

Jean Chatzky: (09:18) You’ve written a number of terrific blogs about money. And in one of them you said profitable is not the same as key. Popular is not the same as worthwhile. Expensive is not the same as well done. And that’s what you’re getting at here, right? I mean, I believe, and I may be misquoting you, but I believe I’ve heard you say you should want to have fewer followers rather than more, but the ones that you really want are the ones that truly care.

Seth Godin: (09:49) We all know that it’s simple to get more followers. A friend of a friend was sad one day and I sa

Final Thoughts

The bottom line: a little research on hermoney podcast episode 184 goes a long way. Compare your options, watch for seasonal offers, and never pay full price when a better deal is one click away.

Originally published at savingswitch.com.