What's going on in Seth Godin's world

Seth Godin coined the term 'Ideavirus' some time back, and demonstrated how ideas can spread, and spread rapidly. I got infected with the Ideavirus and I'm following his latest since. Here is the collection of my thoughts on the subject of Ideas, customers, business, marketing, and Seth's riffs on anything he chooses to riff on.... including other powerful sneezers in the entire Ideavirus chain!!

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

What is Weirdness: Seth Godin asks mere mortals

A recent post on Seth Godin's blog happens to be on the subject of Weirdness (It's not weird when it's your weirdness).

Seth asks the rest of the world whether there is any science behind the phenomenon of $78000 record players, and very sophisticated golf clubs et al. And many (including marketers) actually answered in the negative!!!

Besides looking at the 'marketer' angle, the keyword according to me is "believe" (Seth does not play golf.., and I suspect either he does not like music, or else prefers his iPod).

My argument is that being weird is a matter of perspective, it's all in the belief. It's about doing what makes sense to you, whether or not it appears as madness to the non-believers. And I also think that most of the time Seth's 'weirdness' (I mean weirdness as referred to by Seth...!!) stems from the overzealous 'increase the specialization at any cost' syndrome.

Marketers want to be one up, they want to differentiate, they want a punchline in their promo - never mind whether the customers want it or not. To that extent it definitely is not a science! It is a mere reaction, a reaction to what competitors are offering.

But if you do what you do, because it makes sense to you, with a clear reasoning - then of course it is a science.... or maybe not! Maybe it's an art as well as a science.

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