Profile of a Marketing Guru

This week BusinessWeek ran a profile of our friend Seth Godin.

Godin's ability to synthesize and combine topics helps account for his broad influence. "Some people want a deep dive; they want metrics. But if you want someone to take a complicated topic and boil it down to the core, that's Seth," says John Moore, a brand consultant and former Whole Foods Market (WFMI) marketing director. Godin finds patterns of behavior and general problems that exist in seemingly unrelated fields. He sees Mary Anne Davis, a potter at one of his seminars, grappling with the same problem as executives at Boeing (BA): How do you market effectively when your products aren't the kind people buy based on an ad? And this focus on the general rather than the specific explains part of Godin's wide appeal. "The big win is when I say something that's just vague enough that it's useful, but people think I wrote it just for them," he says.

Seth mentions the article on his blog, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/.