One of the best-known marketing authors today is Seth Godin. He has written classics such as The Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars. He is a prolific writer and blogs regularly. His most recent book, Tribes, is already a must-read not only for marketers but also for executives and anyone wanting to lead a change.
Godin defines a tribe as “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea…a group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”
As with his other books, Godin makes you think a great deal with Tribes. He will challenge you and in many ways get in your face, especially when it comes to how you create value and how you communicate with your customers.
For those of us in marketing, we must think not about how to sell something, but rather how to create a tribe of people who will use our products and services. A tribe of people who will listen to what we have to say.
Godin covers topics such as leadership, change, story telling, social media, organizational structure and more. There is something in this book for everyone. But don’t read this book if you want to be comfortable: Godin will push your buttons and challenge you (which is a good thing).
There are several parts of the book that I underlined and were some of my favorite quotes, including:
“It turns out that people who like their jobs the most are also the ones who are doing the best work, making the greatest impact and changing the most."
and
“Today marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread.”
and
“Cynicism is a lousy strategy.”
In fact, his cynicism quote hit me so hard I posted a recent blog on Overcoming Cynicism.
Tribes is not for everyone and certainly isn’t a typical business book. It does not offer a step by step method for how to create a tribe. There is no sequence to Tribes. The book reads like Godin’s blog: random musings from the author. While that is not necessarily a bad thing it does get old after awhile. There were several times I had to put the book down because he kept jumping from point to point.While the dysfunctional organization of the book may cause your head to spin, I still highly recommend reading Tribes. It deserves its place on Seth Godin’s book Hall of Fame.
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