How will Seth Godin, Derek Sivers and Others answer this marketing question?

5 min readOct 18, 2015

You can spend years as a marketing professional and still end up clueless when your inner 4th grader asks what your job role means.

Wait, are you struggling with defining what marketing means to you? Are you gonna tell me since you know the HOW you are now eligible to ignore the essence of your job?

Do this exercise: Define marketing on your own in a sentence within 5 minutes. NOW. I promise you’ll come up with a statement that will distill your experience and demonstrate your philosophy towards the marketing profession.

Let’s compare the philosophy of Ryan Holiday’s “Anything that gets done the job done” approach with that of Chris Guillebeau’s “ building relationships” approach. We know that Ryan has taken this approach to catapult his clients like American Apparel’s growth in the past while Chris has been keen on building a community for promoting his products through his AONC blog. Both are quite good at what they do, even though their approaches differ. At the end, we are all judged by the results we deliver.

About the “Define Marketing” Project

I woke up one day and decided to get my head straight on what marketing meant to me. And I came up with “Marketing is what creates a craving need for the product or service”. But I wanted to know the point of view of people who really get marketing too. In fact from the best of them.

How I did It

Barriers to access don't exist anymore if you’re willing to respect the time of the people you reach out to. That’s what I found out when I did a mail outreach and got feedback from the brilliant people below who are making a dent in the marketing universe (cliche, but most cliches are true anyway!)

Thanks to Noah Kagan for teaching me this. The lost art of cold email.

This is the question I asked :

If you were to define “marketing” within 140 characters, what would that be?

I crafted a mail that I could use as a template and personalized it for the recipients.

Out of 12 sent,10 of them responded.

What they had to say

These are the people I admire and respect for what they do. The Insights I gained from their words were tremendous and hope you, the reader, can share the same experience.

1. Seth Godin, Author of the Purple Cow

“telling true stories that spread and making the products and services that make those stories true.”

Follow Seth on twitter

2. Chris Guillebeau, Author of The $100 Startup

“essentially the art of building relationships.”

Follow Chris on Twitter

3. David Meerman Scott, Author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

“the art and science of reaching your audiences with information they are interested in consuming and eager to share”

Follow David on twitter

4. Srinivas Rao, Author of The Art of Being Unmistakable

“all about how much you care for the people you’re communicating with”

Follow Srinivas on twitter

5. Ryan Holiday, Author of Trust Me, I’m Lying

“Anything that gets or keeps customers.”

Follow Ryan on twitter

6. Tony Hsieh, Author of Delivering Happiness

Marketing is customer experience.

Note : The quote was prepared with the help of Tony’s Happiness Sidekicks team member Jay Morton ,who responded gracefully to my request . He shared these words from Tony and I condensed it.

“We stumbled into it accidentally. In the early days of the company (we were founded in 1999), we were unable to raise funding so we weren’t able to spend a lot of money on expensive marketing campaigns. As a result, we were forced to focus more on our existing customers. What we found was that the more we invested into customer service and the customer experience, the more loyal they were, and the more we grew from word of mouth. Today, we take most of the money we would have spent on paid marketing or advertising and invest it into the customer experience instead.”