This Is Marketing

This Is Marketing compresses thirty years of Godin into one argument: marketing is the generous act of helping a specific someone solve a problem — making change happen, not making noise. Start with the smallest viable market (the few who would miss you), serve their worldview, and let the change spread through 'people like us do things like this' — culture as the engine, status roles as the levers, tension (not fear) as the motive force. Advertising is a tactic you can rent; trust and permission are assets you must earn.

'Who's it for? What's it for?' as the strategy audit; the smallest viable market as courage, not compromise; 'people like us' — buying as identity maintenance; the drill-bit lesson upgraded (no one wants a quarter-inch hole either — they want the shelf, the satisfaction, the safety); and his permission-marketing inheritance — anticipated, personal, relevant messages to people who want them.

Read it as the philosophical layer above Dunford's mechanics and the Pulizzi audience-first school — all three argue the same direction from different floors. Its weakness is its strength: no checklists, all worldview. The mass-market evidence school (Sharp's penetration math) sits in genuine tension with smallest-viable-market thinking — sophisticated readers use Godin to find the beachhead and Sharp to scale past it.

Distilled from Godin's 100-day seminar The Marketing Seminar (2017) and three decades of prior work — Permission Marketing (1999), Purple Cow (2003), Tribes (2008). Portfolio published it November 2018; he called it the book his blog had been writing all along.

Etymology: source.

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