Seth Godin Mistakes Custom Soda for a Hybrid Car

Seth Godin is a smart man. Partially out of necessity he has resorted to posting in sound bites: little well-packaged morsels of pop culture references that he can spin out quickly and readers can digest easily.

His blog post “Which comes first, the product or the marketing?” is a prime example of this. Godin bounces from Captain Crunch,  through a YouTube clip of Mad Men,  before stumbling into the Toyota Prius and finally onto Jones Soda. The sound bites he delivers chime like the bumpers in a pinball machine.

The problem is that although the basic concepts Godin covers are correct (you need a product before you can advertise; marketing is not the same as advertising; thinking first about the market is key) his need to wrap things in a tidy sound bite ultimately leads the reader to the wrong conclusion.

It is true when Toyota set out to create a vehicle that was both “fuel efficient and environmentally friendly” that the mission statement of what the car was going to be and thus how to take the product to market were preconceived. The Prius was a product of born from marketing.

Of course rolling out a vehicle based on the pain points of pollution and fuel cost is far different than rolling out a beverage whose focus is brand affinity.

Godin implies that Jones Soda’s products were developed after the final marketing plan was well laid out. He’s wrong. To be fair and as a point of full disclosure Jones Soda is a client of mine. What Godin does overlook in his need to deliver a tidy package is the element of chaos. Sometimes there is no intelligent design to the launch of a great product. Products may start with a plan to fulfill a market need but they often evolve in unexpected directions based on unforeseen market forces.

Rather than the predictive marketing Godin attributes to its evolution the Jones Soda’s brand evolved by happy accident. When Jones Soda was launched by visionary founder Peter van Stolk it was with the idea that if you are open and responsive to consumer input they will feel ownership of the brand. In 1997, before anyone had coined the phrase, Jones Soda was the perfect example of a social media campaign.

Recently that brand affinity passed a participation milestone; over 1 million consumers have submitted photos to be part of the label. Even today some of Jones Soda’s most successful campaigns online, like with ICanHasCheezburger, evolve by happy accident.

Since that inception, consumers associate Jones with the photos on the label. As van Stolk said in his Fast Company interview, “People get fired up about Jones because it’s theirs.”  Allowing the consumer to own your brand is not predictive marketing. Yes the marketing is “smart marketing” that is “thinking first” but by its very nature it is not predictive. The roads that consumers can lead a brand down are chaotic and crowd sourcing directions are not always good for sustainable growth.

The key to developing a great long lasting product: allow room for your product and your marketing to evolve. Be nimble enough to take advantage of unforeseen market forces as they develop. As anyone who has truly turned over their marketing to their audience in a social campaign knows, the results are often not predictable, not controllable, and certainly not tidy.