Seth Godin’s Rerouted Flight Changed My Outlook on Marketing
By: Pj Howland
Tags: Happiness, Industry, Airports, Marketing, Seth Godin

There’s a lot of ways to help a business grow. You’ve got operations, product, service, financing, business development, and, oh yeah, marketing. Can you guess which one I love the most? Yeah marketing.

Marketing, in my humble opinion, is the most direct way to grow a business. You have many levers you can pull, but marketing — demand — grows the business faster than any of these.

So yeah, marketing makes companies grow. More growth, means more commerce, and hopefully we all do better in that kind of world.

But you know what’s even better than growth and commerce?

Giving people what they want.

At 97th Floor’s 2019 Mastermind conference, I heard Seth Godin verbalize this perfectly.

I may get some details wrong, so if someone who was there remembers the story better, please correct me.

I remember Seth saying that he was flying in to Boston sometime in the winter. He had been traveling a while and was eager to get back home (who wouldn’t be?). The only zinger was that the Boston airport was having some rough weather, too rough for a plane to land. So they were forced to land elsewhere. I wanna say Norwood…? I could be wrong.

As they are landing, the pilot is explaining the situation to the passengers on the plane, saying that they will get back on another plane when the weather dies down. They were thinking that’d be in about four hours or so. Which in airport language really means six or more hours. So as they are landing Seth is faced with the prospect of a six hour wait to get in the air for less than an hour to get less than 50 miles away.

We’ve all had our airport hell story, and the more you travel, the bigger your story is right? Well with how much Seth is traveling, I would bet his story can top yours or mine. BUT he knows who to get around them.

So before they all get off the plane, Seth has booked a rental car from his phone and is going to drive home and beat his entire flight back to Boston. Ha! As he’s grabbing his bags, heading out of the airport it hits him, “Oh yeah, there’s a whole plane of people in my same shoes. I’ve got 3 extra seats (4 if we squish). I know where everyone is trying to go, I’ll get some company for the trip.”

Seth books it back to the waiting room. And starts pacing the rows of seats outside the gate and starts advertising the 3 seats open in his car.

You guessed it.

No takers.

NONE!

Here was a a plane full of people all needing to go to the same place, and all severely delayed, and all of them DENYING a free car ride into the city.

And as good a marketer as Seth Godin is, he got no takers.

So he drove home alone in a warm car and beat the rest of his flight into Boston by many many hours.

That’s marketing! (In this case, failed marketing, but you get the picture.)

We’ve all heard the expression that everyone is looking to buy, but no one wants to be sold, right? Well here it is baby!

Marketing isn’t pushing crap into people’s hands. It’s reminding them what they always wanted in the first place.

There’s nothing slimy or dishonest about convincing the right people that they are looking for a product or service. In fact, I’d argue that there’s a lot of honor in that.

So thank you to Seth Godin and all the marketers out there that take the time to care enough to market with passion.